Rooster (Road To Babylon, Book 3)

by Sam Sisavath

  Either/or.

  He almost ran into a wall more than once, but managed to see the grayness coming up just in time to avoid each collision. He didn’t know where he was going, and the turns seemed to pop up at random intervals. How many times had he gone right or left? He only slowed down when he reached an intersection—three times now—but it was easy to choose which direction to go: All he had to do was listen to the pounding and head right toward it.

  Another corridor, and another turn.

  Thump-thump.

  Still loud, still insistent…and getting closer.

  Gee, I wonder what Pressley is doing right now?

  He didn’t get very far up this new corridor before he began making out a metal door at the very end. The metallic color slowly came into focus, standing out against the drab colors of the concrete that surrounded it.

  And there it is. There it is…

  The door was ajar, a sign that someone had abandoned the room in a rush.

  Well, that’s not ominous at all.

  So why are you still walking toward it instead of running in the other direction like a sane individual?

  Because he had to know. He had to know.

  Thump-thump.

  It was definitely coming from inside the room, and it was so much louder now that Keo’s chest actually started moving in sync to the pounding. He wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not, though.

  He walked toward it, the shotgun in front of him.

  Thump-thump.

  His mind spun with a hundred possibilities. A vent? Was there something trying to break its (their) way through a vent? Or another door inside the room? Was it some kind of office? It couldn’t have been Winston’s. He would have crossed bodies in the hallway if it were, instead of the nothingness he’d passed on the way over here.

  Thump-thump.

  He moved faster, the door in front of him seeming to glow like an eerie welcome sign. He was pretty sure that was just his imagination playing tricks with him, though, because doors didn’t glow.

  Right?

  Keo finally stopped at the slightly open door and eased the shotgun’s barrel through the small opening, before widening it an inch at a time.

  Thump-thump.

  …another inch…

  Thump-thump.

  …another…

  Thump-thump.

  There. Wide enough now that he didn’t have any more excuses. Keo leaned forward and looked into the room.

  Thump-thump.

  His night eyes had adjusted enough for him to make out some kind of armory, with stacks of long items (rifles? shotguns? Hell, they could have been swords or spears, for all he knew) hanging off racks along the walls. There were metal shelves covered in boxes of various shapes and sizes. Ammo, probably, and whatever else Winston’s people thought was important enough to store down here.

  Thump-thump.

  There, the pounding he’d been listening to for the last—what? Five minutes? Ten? No, it had to be longer than that. Twenty minutes? Did it really matter?

  Thump-thump.

  It was coming from the wall directly across the room from him, behind an empty rack. Empty, because most of its contents—it was still too dark for him to really make out what those were—had come loose and were scattered along the floor in small piles. Every time the thump echoed, the rack would quiver dangerously, threatening to fall. Any second now—

  Thump!

  Keo jumped as the rack finally gave, toppling almost in slow motion until the thunderous crash! as it hit the hard floor.

  Thump-thump-thump!

  Faster, stronger, and somehow more intense.

  Is that possible?

  Yeah, that’s possible, because it’s happening right now in front of you.

  The entire back wall of the room was trembling, as if they would come unglued at any moment. A house of cards, ready to burst at the seams.

  Thump-thump-thump!

  What was back there? What was causing the pounding?

  He had to know. He had to know.

  Keo leaned farther into the room to get a better look. He didn’t want to do it, but he had to.

  Thump-thump-thump!

  Keo raised the shotgun and took another step inside.

  Thump-thump-thump!

  A section of the wall finally gave with a loud grinding noise, and something fell loose and smacked against the floor and exploded into a few hundred tiny pieces.

  The pounding stopped—the external one, anyway. The one inside Keo’s chest was still going, even more harried than before. His ears were filled with his own heartbeat, and he didn’t think he could hear anything else through them, but he was very much wrong.

  THOOM!

  Keo ducked instinctively as the center of the wall exploded, sending chunks of concrete at him like missiles. But none of them came close enough to hurt him, and instead it pelted the floor between him and where the wall used to be.

  When he looked last time, the far wall was a monotonous dull gray from end to end, but that had changed. There was now a solid black somewhere in the middle, as if a portal had opened up to another universe. Twin blue orbs pushed through the blackness, pouring forth from the opening, and found him all the way across the room even as Keo slowly raised himself back up.

  No way.

  Keo stopped breathing entirely and took a step back. He prayed that Winston’s people put silver in everything, including the buckshot that was loaded inside the Remington he was gripping right now as if his life depended on it, because it did. Oh, did it ever.

  No goddamn way.

  The eyes shifted and locked in on him. What might have been lips appeared underneath the two slits, arcing to form something that could reasonably be mistaken for a smile if one had never seen the facial expression before.

  Keo shouldn’t have been able to see any of it with so much darkness around him and no light to speak of, but the eyes were so intense that they emanated a light source of their own. It was unnatural. Supernatural. And impossible.

  And yet there it was.

  A blue-eyed ghoul.

  It couldn’t get to Keo through the blast door, so it had made its own entrance. It had found a way in because they always did. It was why he had risked everything in order to draw the blue-eyed ghoul away from Gaby back in Axton. Because the blue eyes were too smart, and they always found a way. Sooner or later, they always found a way in.

  Keo turned and ran.

  Behind him, there was silence…for about two seconds, before the rest of the wall caved in with a monstrous THOOM! and the world was filled with the stampede of hundreds (thousands?) of bare feet against the hard floor…

  Twenty

  It was the same one from the woods outside Jonah’s. The same bastard that had followed him to the cabin outside Winding Creek. And definitely the same blue-eyed prick that had stalked him all the way to Axton—and now, beyond.

  He didn’t know how he knew it with a hundred percent absolute certainty—especially when all he’d seen was a pair of blue eyes, and damn if they didn’t all look the same anyway (That’s so racist)—but he did.

  It followed me from Winding Creek.

  To Axton.

  And now, to Cordine City.

  Sonofabitch really, really has a hard-on for me!

  Greengrass’s words echoed in his head even as he fled down the corridor, doing his very best not to run right into a wall:

  “It’s out there right now, with that horde, looking for you. Whether we’re still in Cordine City or not, it’ll find you. It wants you alive. I don’t know why.”

  The Bucky didn’t know why, but Keo did. It had told him why, outside of Jonah’s:

  “…you were there. With the others. You were close enough, at the end. I’ll find them, too, and I’ll make them all pay. Every last one of them, no matter how long it takes.”

  “Every last one of them” was him, Gaby, and Danny. Who else had been down there that day? Hanson had also been dow
n there. Who else?

  The intersection appeared just as something that sounded like a wild beast letting out a mad shriek echoed from behind him.

  What the hell was that? he thought, even as he tried to remember whether to turn right or left.

  Right. Turn right!

  He rounded the corner and sneaked a look back, waiting for the inevitable—for the wave of pruned black flesh to pour down the hallway behind him. It was coming. He knew it was coming. He’d seen the wall inside the armory disintegrating even as he ran away. Without the wall, there was now nothing to stop the horde from coming through. It was bad enough he was going to have to deal with a blue-eyed bastard, but all of its creepy crawlers, too.

  What was that saying? When it rains, it pours?

  More like when it rains, you’re shit out of luck, pal!

  He felt them before he actually saw them. It was in the way the air shifted, the sudden stink of death piling up all around him. He shouldn’t have wasted the second it took to glance back, but he had to be sure. He knew they were coming, that they were so close, but he just had to be sure.

  I could be wrong. I’ve been wrong before.

  He wasn’t wrong.

  They vomited into the intersection, their black flesh so tightly packed into the corridor that they looked like one sentient blob. Except this “blob” had eyes and mouths and teeth, and they swallowed up any semblance of color that the darkened hallway had managed to yield until there was just an endless sea of soulless black.

  Keo spun, and still backpedaling, fired up the hallway.

  Fire licked from the shotgun’s barrel like dragon’s breath, lighting up the corridor for just a split second as buckshot ripped through the skeletal forms and an entire wall of them collapsed before his eyes. Not that it did anything to stop the rest, because the ones behind the fallen ghouls simply leapt over the dead and kept coming.

  He racked the shotgun and fired again, and this time didn’t wait to see how many he had felled with the second shot before he turned back around and continued running at full speed.

  Faster, faster, faster!

  He was running as fast as he could, but even so, the hairs on the back of his neck spiked as they closed in.

  Jesus, they’re fast. When did they get so fast?

  But maybe they weren’t fast. Maybe he was just tired, his body finally giving in to all the abuse it had taken in the last few days. Even the Tramadol seemed to be fading. How else to explain why he was moving so slowly and only getting slower?

  Keo glanced over his shoulder and looked right into the hollow black eyes of a ghoul. It was barely a foot behind him and reaching out with bony fingers that looked more like twigs—

  Boom! as the shotgun tore through the creature’s paper-thin chest, ripping its right arm off at the shoulder blade. Buckshot dropped three more of the monsters behind it and they spilled to the floor, tripping those that were too close as they went down. It would have been comical if Keo’s life weren’t on the line.

  Nothing like a slip-and-slide comedy routine to remind you you’re about to die!

  Laugh, everyone. Let’s all get a little LOL going!

  He might have actually laughed. He wasn’t sure. It was hard to do much of anything other than open his mouth and let out a series of desperate wheezing sounds as he struggled to catch his breath. His lungs were already burning (My God, am I out of shape? Is that it?), and his legs were starting to turn rubbery underneath him.

  Just a little farther! Just a little farther!

  He fired again, the brief flash of light allowing him to witness a half dozen ghouls eviscerated in a sea of buckshot.

  That was four shots.

  Four strikes and you’re out!

  He tossed the shotgun and pulled the Glock from his hip holster, deciding to save the AR slung over his shoulder until he needed it.

  What, you don’t need it now? a voice somewhere in the back of his mind laughed.

  He stuck his hand behind him and pulled the trigger. He didn’t even look back to aim, because he didn’t have to. He could have closed his eyes completely and still hit one, two, maybe even more with every shot.

  Bang-bang-bang!

  He turned another corner—the third one? Or was it the fourth? He’d lost count, but he was about sixty percent sure he was moving in the right direction.

  Sixty percent? My, aren’t we being optimistic!

  More like forty percent, pal!

  And they were still coming. Of course they were still coming. Did he actually think blowing away a dozen or more of them would make them change their minds? Did the bastards even still have minds to change?

  He kept pulling the trigger on the Glock even as he ran, the bang-bang-bang fading slightly against his runaway heartbeat echoing in his ears. Christ, it sounded like he was about to have a stroke.

  Bang-bang-bang!

  The smell caught up to him, wrapping around his head like a cloud of garbage.

  Bang-bang-bang!

  He almost gagged on the stink but somehow kept from doing so as another corner came up. He reached up and grabbed it with his free fingers to slingshot himself around it.

  “Keo?” a voice said in front of him.

  Pressley!

  She was standing in the middle of the hallway, one hand holding onto her wounded arm. He was surprised to see her there. He was pretty sure he had at least two more turns to go.

  I guess not! Maybe I’m faster than I thought!

  He couldn’t see her eyes in the darkness, but Keo could make out her pale white face, and she was definitely looking in his direction as he rushed toward her.

  “What—” she began, but he cut her off.

  “Run!” he shouted. “Run, run, run!”

  But she didn’t run. Either she didn’t hear him (which was impossible; he was screaming at the top of his lungs) or was having trouble understanding what he was saying, because she continued to stand perfectly still.

  “Run!” he shouted again. “Run run run run for God’s sake!”

  He could just barely make out her eyes now as they looked past him. Keo didn’t have to follow her stare to know what she was seeing. He could hear them, he could feel them, he could smell them.

  “Pressley!” he shouted. “Goddammit, run!”

  Finally, Pressley snapped out of it, and turned and ran.

  Or she tried to, anyway. She couldn’t really run in her current condition. The best she could manage was to hobble down the corridor, the way Greengrass had earlier.

  She’ll never make it. Shit, she’ll never make it!

  He was already running parallel to her when he shoved the dry Glock back into the holster and stopped, spun around, and unslung the AR all in one fluid motion. The thirty rounds in the rifle was a better option than wasting the few seconds it would have taken to reload the handgun. His fingers found the fire selector on the carbine, and he flicked it, and even as it clicked into place Keo lifted the rifle and shouted, “Go! Don’t stop! Go go go!”

  Keo squeezed the trigger, and the rifle jumped in his hands as it unleashed everything it had on full-auto. He oscillated his fire left and right, then had to lift it toward the ceiling when a couple of the damned things leapt into the air using the ghouls in front of them as literal stepping stones.

  They dropped like flies, and for every one he killed, two—sometimes three—more fell behind them as the silver-tipped rounds punched through their weak and sunken chests like they were little more than sheets of paper. The rifle’s muzzle flash lit up the hallway in a mesmerizing staccato effect, giving him half-second glimpses of the dead and dying and still coming.

  Even as he watched them topple forward and sideways and backward, Keo knew it wasn’t going to be enough. It wasn’t even close to being enough. He could already feel the carbine getting lighter as he kept the trigger pulled and the magazine emptied—

  Click!

  He grabbed the spare from behind his back pocket and was reloading when a f
igure appeared next to him and the pop-pop-pop of another AR firing filled his eardrums.

  Pressley!

  Instead of fleeing like a smart human being (Unlike you!), she had come back and was shooting at the oncoming horde. Unlike his, her rifle was only capable of three-round bursts, and she squeezed the trigger over and over again, swinging left and right, then up to catch the ones trying to leap over the corpses that had begun to pile up in the narrow hallway.

  Pressley didn’t look at him and didn’t waste time talking as she poured it on, but she began retreating just as he did. Keo opened up with the new magazine, once again not wasting time aiming or picking his targets and simply firing into the teeming mass of squirming black flesh, while Pressley continued sending round after round in the same direction beside him.

  The clink-clink-clink of rounds pelting the hard concrete joined the thump-thump-thump of his heartbeat in his ears, with the pop-pop-pop of rifle fire threatening to overwhelm both noises. A trio of melodies fighting for his attention, but they were all losing because Keo’s senses were singularly focused on the swarm of undead surging across the hallway toward him and Pressley.

  He kept the trigger pulled even as the rifle began to get light again. Once that happened, he would have to go back to the Glock because he hadn’t been forward thinking enough to carry more than just one spare when he went to check on the noise (Stupid. You’re such an idiot!).

  It was going to happen soon. Five seconds soon.

  Four seconds…

  Three…

  Despite both he and Pressley emptying everything they had into the advancing forms, it did nothing to stop their progress or cut down their numbers. It was easier now to see just how many there were (Too many. Always too friggin’ many.) with each flash from Pressley’s rifle and his own, but seeing only made the situation more depressing. Keo felt that slowly growing, grinding sickness in the pit of his stomach, that undeniable presence of the inevitable.

  Of the end, approaching fast…

  You’re a real Captain Optimism right now, pal!