Three “almost” zombies began to push through the cluttered basement, heading for Stephanie at the bottom of the stairs, while behind them at the top stood Gil and Cliff, both black-eyed and foul-smelling.
Gil loomed above Deckard, the pistol in his hand aimed at the back of Deckard’s head. Above Gil, at the very top of the stairs stood Cliff, his long Mossberg 590 shotgun held loosely and somewhat forgotten in his hands. The dead body that Mitt stood over drew most of Cliff’s attention. The clean coppery smelling blood rising up from it was a heady perfume that had him drunk with a sudden nasty hunger. That sensation vied with a piercing jealousy—the others had begun to feed!
The urge for clean blood was so great that he wanted to cast aside the gun and launch himself down the stairs at one of these new people. They smelled good and clean and their promises of helping with the terrible ache in his head were all but forgotten.
Stuck in the middle of everything, Chuck found himself in, what his grandma on his mama’s side, would have called a “gen-u-wine pickle.” He could go neither up nor down. He couldn’t fight or run away. He had no gun, no knife, no nothing.
All he had on him was a twenty-five-year old Zippo lighter, the very thing that had got him into the mess in the first place. The first time he had seen a Zippo was ages ago, or so it seemed. He had been a skinny seventh grader standing in line at the Norman Multiplex waiting to see The Silence of the Lambs when up walked Randle Bush, smacking a Zippo open and closed, producing flame with a practiced hand and making a show of lighting up a Lucky Strike. Randall wore a denim jacket and leather gloves with the fingers cut off. In Norman, Oklahoma he was the height of cool, and at that moment, seventh grade Chuck knew he had to have a Zippo and a cigarette.
The cigarettes had been a death sentence. Now, he just had the lighter, a chest full of tumors and a sudden desire for more life. Stephanie was the reason for that desire. She smelled of gin and fear as she backed into Max Fowler.
“Steph, get back!” Chuck yelled, pushing past Dr. Wilson, who was retreating up the stairs despite Chuck’s mad scramble to get to Stephanie and despite the fact that what was up the stairs was as dangerous as what was down them.
Only Max Fowler was really in a position to do anything productive and he didn’t hesitate. He pushed Stephanie behind him and reached down to snatch the bottle of 151 rum that had been thrown. Then, in an oddly childish move, he stepped quickly back up on the last stair as if the basement floor was lava and he didn’t want to burn his boots.
The bottle was basically the only weapon in reach and Max brandished it above his head, threatening the three “almost” zombies, who still had enough working brain cells to see the bottle as a threat. They stopped, but Chuck knew that it wouldn’t be for long.
Their hunger would overcome their fear of being bashed with the bottle, and although Max was young and strong, they would eventually drag him down and eat him—if they weren’t all shot before that.
“We can help you!” bellowed Dr. Wilson to the sick men. “We can help you!”
One of the three “almost” zombies could be seen attempting to think through what that meant, while the other two ignored it altogether. Their eyes were on the man holding the bottle and their black, dank mouths were open and dripping dark saliva. It would be seconds before they attacked.
Chuck knew they needed to do something. They needed a weapon, but all they had was the bottle of rum and a lighter. “Well, shit,” he drawled and dug out the lighter and, just like ‘Ol Randal Bush from twenty-five years ago, he made a show of snapping it open.
“Max!” Chuck hissed, holding up the lighter. “Molotov!”
The soldier blinked before understanding widened his eyes. He now lifted the bottle high and sent it crashing down at the foot of the stairs, where the rum mingled with the gin in a highly flammable pool.
Chuck tossed the lighter and in an instant, flames leapt up enveloping the floor in front of the stairs. Max, Stephanie, and Chuck stepped back. Deckard did not. With the gun at his head, Deckard had nowhere to go and no time to get there. Besides, he knew people. He knew their reactions in pressure situations.
Most normal people would back up and continue to make threats. They would be averse to killing, they would be slow to pull the triggers on their guns. But these weren’t “most” people. They were on the verge of becoming monsters and it wouldn’t take much to push them over the edge. The fire was that little push.
Gil cursed and thumbed back the hammer on his black pistol, while Cliff cried out, yelling gibberish and hauling his shotgun up. Deckard leaned back into the barrel of Gil’s gun. He had to keep contact with it long enough to make his move. In fact, it helped that Gil had it pushed into his head as hard as he did. It made things easier when Deckard suddenly jerked to the side and grabbed the gun. Gil did the expected and pulled the trigger, sending a slug into the wall.
Now Deckard made a fatal mistake. Against two opponents like this the thing to do was to use Gil as a shield against Cliff by holding him close. Next, Deckard would twist the gun out of Gil’s hands and then, still with Gil draped over him, he would put five holes into Cliff and that would be that.
Except, these weren’t normal men.
Gil was no longer able to process a fight in terms of attack and defend. All he cared about was getting his teeth into Deckard’s skin. Gil abandoned the gun and tried to take a chomp out of Deckard’s shoulder, but only got a mouthful of shirt.
Cliff did the unexpected as well. He fired the Mossberg without regard for the fact that he had friends below him. In fact, he fired simply as a reaction to Gil firing. There was an explosion of light and sound just above Deckard followed by a hot blast of air and a thudding sound.
Deckard had never heard someone get shot before, but he was close enough to Dr. Wilson that the odd noise, similar to someone smacking a punching bag with a baseball bat, cut through the rush of the flames and the sound of people struggling on the stairs.
And he couldn’t miss it when Wilson let out a cry: “Oh, God, no!”
In desperation, Deckard twisted his body, spilling Gil off his shoulder so that he fell into Dr. Wilson’s legs, knocking him back into Chuck.
At that moment, Cliff could have shot them all down, one at a time. There was nowhere to hide and nowhere to run. Cliff had been rocked by the force of the twelve gauge, the gun almost leaping right out of his hands, and now, like a drunk who couldn’t quite catch up with what was going on around him, he was just bringing the weapon to bear on Deckard who was equally unprepared.
Gil had given up his pistol so easily that Deckard had fumbled it and was just picking it up when Cliff pulled the trigger on the Mossberg…on the pump action Mossberg. The trigger was stiff beneath his finger because, with the Com-cells covering his brain in black hate, he had forgotten to chamber another round.
Just as he started to pump the gun, Deckard shot him, the bullet blasting up into his right cheekbone, through the rear of his right eye socket and then up through the lower floor of the cranium and into the brain—a perfect shot for someone who didn’t want to spray blood everywhere.
Cliff’s left arm shot straight out as if giving a Nazi salute and then he fell back. Deckard didn’t watch. He spun and took careful aim at Gil, who was lower down and turned away as he struggled to get to his feet. Deckard aimed for the back of the head and could only hope that the bullet didn’t fly out and spray everyone below with diseased blood. The 9mm bullet went in through the brain stem, killing Gil in an instant. Where the bullet went from there is anyone’s guess, but it didn’t come blasting out and that was all that mattered.
“There’s one more,” Fowler cried, pointing over the flames and deeper in the basement.
Deckard hadn’t forgotten Cliff and if he had, the two bullets that came flying from the basement a half-second later would have clued him in. Both were misses. One bullet grazed the wall next to Stephanie’s head and the other went nowhere near the stairwell.
Mitt still had a c
hunk of working grey matter left between his ears, meaning he was still human enough to fear for his own safety. He had fired as he ran for cover and his shots weren’t aimed. Worse than his lack of aiming was his selection of cover. The cardboard box that he hid behind contained only a few old mailbags and when Deckard fired three times into it, all three slugs went right through the box to punch holes into Mitt.
“Up! Everyone Up!” Deckard cried the moment Mitt flopped over. He didn’t bother wasting any bullets on the three “almost” zombies. They were staring at the flames and probably would continue to stare until the place burned down around them or they died of smoke inhalation.
Getting up was not so easy. Dr. Wilson, the heaviest of the five of them had been shot high up on the right side of his chest. His clavicle and three ribs had been shot through so that he couldn’t use his right arm. Worse, his lung had been punctured by a single ricocheting pellet, and now blood leaked down into his lung, making him wheeze and cough.
Every move was a misery and with each breath, he sucked in more blood. It was a struggle to get the doctor out into the daylight.
“I’m going to need you to get any sort of medkit you can find,” Deckard told Fowler, after they had lain Wilson on the sidewalk just down from the post office. “And some more bleach. We need to clean ourselves up if we are to stand any chance.”
“Don’t bother…with me,” Wilson choked out. “How…can I…get away…like this?” His right arm hung limply, blood drained from his wound in rivers, and he couldn’t stop coughing. He would be a magnet for the undead.
Deckard gave him his warmest smile. “I’ve got some ideas how we’ll escape the zone. Don’t you worry about a thing.” Deckard worried enough for both of them. Stray beasts, only shadows at the moment, were already headed their way.
2—The Connecticut Bubble
“In public!” Thuy pleaded, her eyes on the long bloody blade of the knife. “You wanted it public. M-my punishment. You wanted it in public so no one could blame you, remember?” She had gone from a confident, take charge woman to a weeping, begging child in the span of seconds.
Colonel O’Brian had his fingers entwined in her hair and the knife inched ever closer as he tried to recall exactly what he had said only a minute before. “Yes, right, now I remember. A real punishment, one that everyone can see and maybe even partake in.”
He blinked the black from his eyes and then stared around, ignoring the body of the dead captain and the hot blood, but only with difficulty. O’Brian was disgusted with this new lust for blood. He didn’t understand it and was embarrassed by it, so he pretended not to see the body or hear the blood calling to him. He pulled his gaze from it and centered it on the two lieutenants who had accompanied the captain into the tent.
“You,” he said, pointing at the closer of the two. “Get me rope or chains or better yet, handcuffs. There were MPs around, go get them and…and a truck we can tie her to it. We can’t let her get away. She did this to us.”
“I won’t run, I promise,” Thuy said.
O’Brian threw her down and pointed a finger at her. “Shut up! Don’t say another word.” He turned back to the lieutenant. “And you? What are you still doing here? Go get the damn MPs like I said. Do I have to explain what a fucking order is?”
“No sir,” the lieutenant answered and then backed to the door with Thuy pleading silently with her eyes for him not to leave.
The colonel’s mental state was unraveling quickly. He stomped around Thuy and she followed him with just her eyes. Really, it was the knife she watched as it circled her, a single bloody horse on a deadly carousel. She huddled in a ball, doing her best to appear tiny and weak, something too unimportant to be bothered over.
One of the shadowy figures in the corner of the tent groused, “We need more pills. They are gone, the bottle’s fucking empty.”
“Maybe she took them,” another said, bringing his gun up and pointing it at her. She began to tremble and it wasn’t just a little tremor, either. Her muscles shook with such violence that it felt like she could shake apart.
“Th-they have s-some m-more in the m-med tent,” Thuy stuttered. “I c-could g-go get them for you.”
Suddenly, O’Brian stopped his pacing and the bloody knife was right up next to her eye, its point so close that it was a red blur. He laughed, a strange connection of running letters: “Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah! You would like that. You say that you’ll get some more morphine but then you’ll run. I know it.”
“I could go get some for you, sir,” the other lieutenant said. “I can zip over to the med tent and I’ll be back in a jiffy.”
“A jiffy? I hate that word.” O’Brian stood, looking at the lieutenant closely, his dark eyes narrowed, a gleam of light shining off his bald head. “I don’t think so. I don’t think so at all. Who are you?”
“Lieutenant David Schmidt. I’m with the…” Schmidt’s tongue froze as the colonel brought the knife right up to his belly and poked him with it.
There was a queer light in O’Brian’s eyes as he said: “I don’t know any Lieutenant Schmidt. What about you guys? Do you know any Schmidts?” The others in the tent shook their heads. “That’s what I thought. You came with her didn’t you? You all came together. You’re all in league…and that other lieutenant, he is as well.”
O’Brian pressed the knife deeper, almost cutting through the young man’s shirt. Schmidt sucked in a breath. “You need to be punished as well,” O’Brian said and now the point dimpled the man’s flesh. “But not yet. We’ll do it all at once. We’ll cleanse the camp of you and your type. Watch him,” O’Brian barked and then stormed out of the tent, pausing only long enough to pick up a discarded M4.
The other infected soldiers came forward with their guns pointed, all save one who came up behind the lieutenant and thudded the butt of his weapon square into the back of Schmidt’s head. He crumpled to the dirt floor of the tent, moaning loudly enough to be heard through the thin canvas.
“Shut up,” hissed one of the men. “Shut up right now or else.” He followed up the threat by demonstrating the “or else” with a swift kick to the face. This unnecessary violence sparked more and soon all five of them were stomping the lieutenant into a bloody mess.
Her guts churning in fear, Thuy retreated to the corner of the tent and huddled there in a ball, desperate not to appear threatening in any manner. In fact, she tried to appear like nothing more than a bundle of clothes. Her green-on-green camouflage worked so well that the infected, with their limited vision, didn’t see her at first glance.
Still, it took all of two seconds to find her and then they advanced with murder in their blackened eyes and that was when a gunshot rang out, cutting through the air. Lieutenant Colonel O’Brian had just caught up with the lieutenant.
“He’s nothing but a traitor, and a deserter, and a spy,” O’Brian mumbled.
The lieutenant stood in front of a group of soldiers and was pointing back when he saw O’Brian, with his rifle up and pointed. “Wait,” the lieutenant said. “I was just…” The colonel did not wait; he shot the lieutenant without so much as blinking.
“That man was a deserter and a traitor!” he cried, marching up to the body which now pumped out fine blood into the dirt, wasting it. The colonel shook his bald head to clear the sudden need that had come over him. Some of the soldiers backed away from him—they were going to run!
“No one can leave this camp! Our orders are to stay put and hold the line. Anyone who tries to leave will be considered to have broken the quarantine and will be shot. Is that clear?”
The exhausted and stressed-out soldiers who had witnessed the scene began nodding and mumbling: “Yes, sir.” Quite a few of them had been involved in firefights the day before with civilians and all of them knew that the rules of society had changed for the worse. People…and soldiers could be killed almost out of hand.
“Good, now get back to your posts and if you don’t know where that is, get out to the line and find
a spot.” O’Brian watched the men leave, each casting only one glance back.
Normally, the men might have confided in a supervisor or a friend about what they had just seen; however, the group of soldiers were from a mish-mash of different units and they rarely knew anyone around them. What also kept them from saying anything was the fact that they believed the colonel was right, not just within the bounds of military justice, but also morally. They had seen the zombies up close and they knew that drastic measures were the only way to keep the situation in hand.
O’Brian’s head was beginning to pound and all he could think about was cleansing the camp—and clean blood. “No, the camp first. We get rid of all the traitors and then we can have something to…” He swallowed loudly, unable to bring himself to say what he truly wanted.
Cleansing the camp wouldn’t be easy. All around him in a great circle were men and women, most of whom were likely traitors and spies. Luckily, he could smell those loyal to him. The fight the night before had been very close in certain sectors and black blood had pooled, and in some instances, it had run into the camp. Soldiers had tracked the blood here and there and gradually some were becoming infected.
The ones with the spores eating into their brains had a dank, earthy, pungent smell that would have repelled the colonel the day before.
He went around collecting these men—they were the ones hiding from the sun, popping pills, chugging quarts of alcohol or shooting up morphine stolen from the med kits that had been stacked behind the med tent. They were the ones who tried to hide the fact that they were in severe pain. They were the ones who had become paranoid of their fellow soldiers and they were the ones who were quite ready to kill.
The colonel found nearly a hundred. He pulled them off the line and sent them to loiter in what shade they could find outside of the command post. By the time he made it back himself, his head was thumping hard and the world had begun to swim. The dark in the tent helped a great deal although he was confused by the two bodies lying in pools of blood. For some minutes he stared until he recalled he had killed the captain with a knife…and hadn’t there been a girl with him?
The Apocalypse Crusade 3: War of the Undead Day 3 Page 12