They were just showing the location of the traffic cam when a louder scream jerked Shannon around in her chair. The scream had been high and piercing. It was a scream of fear the like of which Shannon had never heard in her life. The sound froze her in place as she listened as more screams joined the first.
Instinctively, she knew that zombies were in the building and yet, in a moment of pure stupidity, she went to the door to peek out. There were dozens of black-eyed people going in every direction all with their mouths hanging open and their black gums looking slick with oil.
She hauled her door closed but not before she locked eyes with a man in scrubs. It was Dr. Reynolds, or, at least it had been. Now, it was a zombie with fine, white teeth in a dank mouth. It attacked the door, trying to tear it down with its clawed fingers. Shannon backed away, crying fat tears of terror, her heart suddenly racing so fast that it felt as though it would speed right out of her chest.
“Oh God,” she whimpered, her hands fluttering uselessly in front of her face. “Oh God…I gotta get out of here.” She spun in a circle, looking around for some sort of salvation. The window was the only way out and she ran to it.
It offered a straight drop of at least sixty feet to the concrete parking lot below. A narrow ledge of brick, three inches in width, just below the window was the only path to safety. It ran the length of the building and the only hope it offered was an insane path to the other windows that sat along it. It was a fool’s hope.
No one could shimmy around the building on that thin of a ledge and even if they could, how would they get into any of the other windows?
Shannon turned from the window and her tears came harder than before. The door thrummed and shook under the blows of what had once been Dr. Reynolds. The door wouldn’t last. The knob was already loose, going up and down instead of just turning.
Shannon began to blubber, but all the same she went to her desk and heaved her weight into it. She strained against it, finding just enough strength to push it against the door.
Two minutes later, the door knob popped off and its clang rattled in Shannon’s heart. The door was thrust back and the desk along with it. Grey hands and arms reached through the gap of the door as she pushed against her side of the desk with all of her feeble strength.
The door banged suddenly and the desk slammed back into her, knocking her onto her butt. More tears rained down from her eyes as she scrambled to her feet and threw her weight into the desk. It barely budged.
Shannon realized right then that she was going to die. She had seen the videos on the internet of the zombies feasting on living people. It was a horrible way to die.
“They’re going to eat me,” she said, out loud. The thought sent her into hysterics and she screamed and shoved uselessly against the desk as the door opened inch by inch.
When a grey head pushed through the opening, its glasses askew, she knew that anymore struggling would be useless. She looked over her shoulder at the window and thought about the narrow ledge. It was narrow but then so were her feet; her shoes were size 6.
“I can make it,” she whispered.
There was no way she could; however, the only other option was so ghastly that she turned to the window and saw the first obstacle she would have to overcome: the window didn’t open. It had no latch or mechanism to lift or cant it.
“Then I’ll break it,” she said, forcibly. She wasn’t a weak person. Mentally she had overcome a great deal in her life and now she told herself over and over again: “I can make it. I can make it.” On some level deep inside of her, she knew she could scrape and claw her way to safety. First, the window had to come down.
She released her hold on her side of the desk and hurried across the room to a planter she had picked out the year before. With the sound of her blood rushing in her ears, she hefted it up and ran at the window, throwing it full force at the glass.
A hundred lines erupted in the glass, springing out from the point of impact. The fact that it hadn’t blown straight out with the first strike wasn’t a disappointment to her. It was strong glass; she knew that. She knew it had to be to keep the crazier patients in.
And that was okay because another strike or two would do it…but not with the planter. The pot had exploded on the first strike. “The chair,” she whispered, her frightened eyes falling on the chair she had used for the last three years. It was a heavy hunk of furniture that normally would have caused her back to give out if she had tried to pick it up.
Now, she hefted it up in one move. It almost overbalanced her, but she recovered, tottering slightly before she ran at the window. She struck it with the sound of a gong and rebounded, falling on her ass with the chair on her chest, practically pinning her down. And that was okay, too.
There was a gaping hole in the glass now.
“One more,” she whispered getting to her feet and lifting the big chair once again. She spared a moment to glance back at the door where two of the monsters were fighting each other to get into the room.
“One more,” she repeated and then charged a second time. She willed herself through the glass and so strong was her charge that she almost willed herself and the chair all the way onto the pavement below.
The glass blasted out in a shower of crystal rain and the chair hung up in the falling glass long enough for her to disentangle herself from it and let it drop. Cut and bleeding, Shannon knelt on the edge of the window where the carpet met the glass and watched the chair fall. It seemed to take a long time before it crashed onto the face of the parking lot far below.
“Oh, God,” she said, staring at the chair. If she fell from that height, she would splat onto the pavement with her internal organs shooting out of her ass and her eyes literally popping out of her head. She dragged her eyes from the chair and turned to the tiny ledge. It was so small that her heart began aching just looking at it. Shannon was no longer tough and confident. She was weak and cringing, afraid to stay where she was and afraid to risk the ledge.
Behind her, the desk was thrust back and the door opened even further. Four creatures—four zombies, scrambled over each other to get at her. One was the foul Dr. Reynolds, who was no longer handsome, one was a nurse in blue scrubs, her dark eyes empty of life, and two were children, who had been overcome by the virus in the ER—their eyes were sharp with cunning and their faces, hungry and feral, were nothing short of nasty.
One of the children moved left and the other went right, while the two adults clambered over the desk, coming right for her. They were like lions hunting and she was going to be like the buffalo who was pulled down and feasted upon.
It would take a long time to die. Humans did not have the jaws and teeth of the larger beasts of prey. They took smaller bites—many, many smaller bites. Each one a torture.
These thoughts had Shannon rooted in place, paralyzed by fear. She might have stayed right where she was until Dr. Reynolds fell on her, but then she caught one of the children signaling to the other. That wasn’t right. They were supposed to be brain-dead monsters. They weren’t supposed to be able to signal or communicate in any way.
For reasons unknown to her the idea that the zombies could think made everything that much more heinous.
But it also got her moving. She went to the hole in the window and without looking down stepped through and onto the narrow lip of brick. With no other handhold available, she clung to the razor edges of the glass with her right hand; it cut her flesh to ribbons and her blood ran like water, but she didn’t notice. She was focused. She would make it and she would live.
The ledge was tiny and her feet, although narrow, were big compared to it. She could just grip the brick with the very tips of her toes and thankfully, she was barefoot, having come into her office to give her aching feet a rest. Had she been in her no-nonsense black wedges, she would have been forced to try to slide across the ledge with her feet pointing in opposite directions and her center of balance too far back. The slightest bit of wind would have plucke
d her right off the ledge.
Not that her current stance was all that much better. With her arms thrown out and her cheek pressed against the glass, she looked somewhat like a gecko on the side of an aquarium. She also looked like easy pickings for Dr. Reynolds.
He proved to be a true zombie by ignoring the hole in the glass altogether and launching himself at the window. He struck face first, cracking his fine white teeth and making a noise like a dropped bag of potatoes. The impact sent him flying back and caused the sturdy glass to vibrate beneath Shannon’s cheek.
The nurse in the blue scrubs tried her luck next and threw herself against the glass as well. She was smaller and weaker and still Shannon could feel the vibrations which threatened to shake her off her narrow perch.
In spite of the pain, she gripped the edge of the hole harder and, had it not been for the two devil children, she might have been able to stay on the ledge long enough to frustrate the two adult zombies into leaving.
The children weren’t fooled by the glass. They went right for the hole, forcing Shannon to let go of her only handhold and shuffle to her left a few feet. Now the only thing keeping her from falling was the blood leaking from her many cuts. Where her skin touched the glass, the drying blood formed a tacky bond—it was the weakest of bonds and felt to Shannon to have all the adhering strength of a dozen sticky-notes.
“You fall,” one of the child zombies croaked as it stuck its head through the gaping hole Shannon had made.
The other zombie came to stand next to the first. With their lank brown hair and the deep circles beneath their dark eyes, they might have been brother and sister. Both were utterly fearless, standing with their toes hanging off a sixty foot drop as if they were balancing on a curb.
“You fall,” the girl child agreed. She then flapped her hands at Shannon as if impatient and wanted Shannon to fall right then.
“Go away,” Shannon begged. “Please, go away. I didn’t do anything to you, I swear.”
“You fall,” the girl child said again and then nodded and pointed down. When Shannon didn’t fall, the girl reached out towards her with fingers stained red. “You fall!” she cried, scratching at Shannon’s outstretched hand.
With a whimper, Shannon took another two steps to her left, sliding across the glass, leaving a smear of blood and tears behind. She was crying freely, now.
“Please go away.” She had been on the ledge for less than a minute and no longer felt so sure that she was going to make it. The two adult zombies were pounding on the glass for all they were worth, making the window vibrate. Her calves were already beginning to burn and her breath was so ragged that she feared that she would accidentally blow herself off.
Amazingly, the girl ducked back through the hole and disappeared inside Shannon’s office. “You too,” she said to the zombie boy. “You go away also. Please.” The boy grunted something that seemed like a laugh and smiled an evil grin until the girl came back.
She held an armful of items: Shannon’s stapler and her day planner and her keyboard. Seeing the items sent a shiver up Shannon’s spine. “W-What are you going to do with that stuff?”
The girl answered with a demonstration: she threw the keyboard at Shannon, and even though it missed, Shannon screeched and nearly fell. Her hands came off the glass first, and then her cheek peeled away. For a moment she was perfectly balanced. Then a slight puff of wind pressed her back to the glass.
Foolishly, she sobbed against it.
With a flick of her wrist, the girl brought her to her senses. The day planner smacked against Shannon’s face. This time, she didn’t waiver or slip. Doggedly she clung to the glass and began to ease to her left inch by inch.
The stapler struck her in the head with a sharp thunk and still she kept herself moving, slowly shuffling to the corner of the building. Pens were thrown next, and an old rolodex she hadn’t used in years. A desk lamp missed as did file folders.
The girl was running out of things to throw! “Fuck you,” Shannon spat as she kept edging further and further away. She had developed a rhythm, one that she felt would take her around the building twice if she needed.
In ten minutes she made it to the corner of the building, where there was nothing but brick. She couldn’t stick to the brick. In fact, the brick seemed to repel her flesh and now she wavered once again, but she pressed on until she got to the very edge and saw that the next section of the building was long. At least seventy yards of flat glass, sitting on a tiny ledge of brick.
But she didn’t have to go all the way. She just had to go far enough to find an office with people in it. They would let her in. With her calves burning, she set off on her narrow path and luck was on her side again as she only had to take twenty-two shuffling steps before she peered through the glass into an office where three peopled were huddled behind a desk.
“Hey!” Shannon yelled, as loudly as she dared. She maintained her balance by a strict control of her body and yelling forcefully undermined that. The one word was enough to get their attention. All three stared in amazement for a few seconds before they shocked Shannon by waving her on, dismissively, as if she were a panhandler.
“Hey! God damn it, break the window!” she cried. Two of them lifted fingers to their lips to shush her, while the third waved at her with frantic gestures to “keep going.”
“Fuck you! Open the window or I’ll scream.”
One crawled out from the desk and going to the window spoke at her ear level: “We can’t. They’re right down the hall.”
“Please let me in,” Shannon begged. The man mouthed the word: S-o-r-r-y, before crawling back under the desk. Shannon was all set to lash out when she felt a sudden pain lance up the back of her right calf. It was like someone had stabbed her in the leg and was now twisting the knife.
“Cramp,” she hissed, tapping frantically with her right hand on the glass. The three people in the room did nothing and gradually Shannon came to realize that she was going to fall. Nothing could stop it now. Her right leg couldn’t hold her weight and her left was beginning to weaken. In a second she lost her balance. She tried pin wheeling her arms, to no avail. Near absolute terror seized her, but so too did a sudden savage maliciousness.
Her heart turned to stone. She was going to die because of them! She filled her lungs and let out a piercing note that could be heard for a mile as her calf spasmed and the wall seemed to fall away from her.
Desperately, she clutched at it, but gravity had her and sucked her down—sixty feet straight down to concrete.
Chapter 14
1—12:49 p.m.
Hartford, Connecticut
The moment they cleared the line, Thuy had them turn course, heading northeast, hoping that if there were any pursuers they’d be thrown off by the move. Unlike Jerome, who thought that a thousand men would come rushing to blanket the area, Thuy didn’t think that anyone would follow them.
Who would they be looking for exactly? No one had seen their faces, after all. And it sounded as though the 82nd had their hands full enough as it was. There were gun battles stretching up and down the line.
These generally weren’t intense or sustained but Thuy figured they would hold the soldier’s attention long enough for the three of them to make their getaway.
“How long before we’re safe?” Courtney asked as she trudged along, her back bent under the weight of the radio. After she had used it to save them, she wouldn’t think about leaving it behind no matter how tired she became.
Jerome squinted up at the sky before he answered: “Another couple of miles, I would say.”
Thuy guessed that he had pulled that number out of thin air since he hadn’t added any facts to back it up. She let it go, happy to finally be free, though in truth, she found this new freedom to be a tad oppressive. Everything was quiet on this side of the line. Quiet and dead.
Nothing moved on the streets or in the fields or in the air. They walked through Terryville just east of Bristol, surrounded by thousa
nds of homes each one empty and dead.
“Hello?” Thuy called out, her voice rolling down the streets. There was no answer, but an echo.
Courtney got a case of the shivers and Jerome looked ill. “Don’t do that anymore, okay?” he asked, his eyes darting around nervously. “It’s not right…sorta like yelling in a cemetery if you know what I mean.”
Having never yelled in a cemetery, she didn’t know what he meant. Nonetheless, she noted her companions distress and agreed not to call out without cause. “I would like to find a change of clothes, some food and a vehicle,” she declared.
“Find?” Courtney asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Okay, steal. Normally, I would be dead set against stealing, but I believe this is an emergency situation. And besides, I’m wanted by the FBI on terrorism charges. I don’t think a petty little larceny will effect my prison sentence all that much.”
Jerome stepped back, his face screwed up in puzzlement. “You are wanted for terrorism? You? What could you have possibly done to be on the FBI’s radar?”
Courtney and Thuy shared a look. Courtney’s came with a brief head shake but Thuy answered, regardless, her sense of guilt heavy on her shoulders. “This…” she waved her hands around indicating the entire town of Terryville. “This is all my fault. I started this. My work was sabotaged but I began it and…”
“It’s not your fault, Dr. Lee,” Courtney said, interrupting. “Like you said, your work was sabotaged. You’re not to blame, but that reminds me that we need to alert the authorities concerning that one lady who has the virus. There’s been so much going on that it just slipped my mind.”
Thuy put both hands in her hair and pulled. “I forgot as well. And I also need to find John Burke. I left him behind. Damn it!”
The Apocalypse Crusade 3: War of the Undead Day 3 Page 20