For just an instant he found its pull dragging him down, too.
He hiked up his mental drawers. “Time to get this over with,” he thought.
The walk to the back didn't take long. Once he'd weaved through the front rows of cars, he walked along the line of bucket trucks until he reached one in the final row. Beyond it was a low metal wire which served as the wholly inadequate warning marker for what was behind it.
A massive hole.
It was approximately fifty feet across, and mostly circular. He could imagine some huge driller making the cut downward, but there was nothing above it. No machinery. No infrastructure that could support any drilling equipment. Unless it had all been ripped out, which seemed unlikely. The hole continued above them, though it was as dark as the pit below.
He whistled in respect. The pit backed up to the rear section of the larger room, making it so there was no way to walk around the outside of it. It reminded him of a drain hole for a large bath tub.
The wire was easy to step over. The compulsion to look over the edge would not be denied. He handed Jeep to Kevin, who seemed the least interested in getting close to the void. Mary and Ross were already on their stomachs, at the edge, looking down.
The ring of lights around the room threw off just enough light to see fifty or sixty feet down, but he couldn't see a bottom. A childish part of him really wanted to snap open a road flare and toss it down there, but the lawman side of him said that was wasteful and fruitless. A hundred feet or a thousand feet would make no impact on his survival up top.
Tracy remained near the last truck in the line. He figured she'd already seen the hole many times by now. “Officer, you have to help us. My kids are done. I'm done. I don't know what to do.”
She wasn't looking at him as he got back up. She was staring at the darkness of the hole. When he got close to her, she refocused on him. The longing look served as her final plea.
He sighed deeply. Then looked at Jeep. The dog was lying at her feet, happy as could be. He supposed a fast dog could run away and avoid all those zombies on his way out. Unless they ate dogs, too.
James felt ashamed for thinking such horrible thoughts, but for reasons he couldn't explain, it upset him to think of the zombies cutting into the little dog. That such a precious and innocent life could be desecrated by those sick sumbitches…
He figured he and the women and children nearby would suffer the same fate as the dog. But somehow it would all be all right if the damned dog could escape.
“Someone needs to get out of this hell hole.”
“What?”
He didn't mean to speak it out loud, but it was already out. And, once out, it was as good a mantra as any. Fight until the end—get someone to safety.
It was what he was born to do.
Take my dog
James only had a few minutes to prepare for the first skirmish at the opening to the shaft room, as he was calling it. As in we're all getting the shaft. Though they weren't obvious upon first entering, there were more people in the room. They mostly sat inside the utility trucks because it was warmer than the cavernous underground. A few men came out when the first zombies arrived. A couple had rifles, while others had various tools, rebar, and other crude weapons.
The ideal plan would involve blocking off the front entrance of the room so no more zombies could get in. But there were so many cars in the space; that wasn't possible. With enough time they might have been able to drag some of the sirens over and stack them up to block the sides of the cars, but they had no time for that.
More zombies came through the entryway. One, a woman, screamed noisily back to her friends. It looked like she was calling for help, though that was stupid. He admitted he had no idea what the zombies were capable of, other than surging endlessly at living people. Or ripping into chest cavities. Or pretending to be dead. Or...
One of the men screamed in pain, swamped by the rising tide of attackers.
Tracy and the kids had run deeper into the room, back toward the pit.
A few more men emerged from the shadows. He pointed them to the front door.
On a whim, he opened the door of one of the utility trucks. A small woman and her baby were in the front seat. Music softly cooed out of the speakers as the baby slept on the woman's bosom. With the door open, the noise outside was amplified, but the baby didn't rouse.
“Hmm, these things have power,” he told himself.
He considered using the trucks to ram through the cars and make a pile of vehicles at the front. The keys were even in the ignition. But five or six cars blocked his way. He'd never make it.
Climbing back down from the cab, he looked at the articulating arm that held the bucket. Could everyone get in a bucket, lift themselves to the ceiling, and survive that way?
“Yes, until the zombies piled so high they reached the buckets. Or, we'd all die in the buckets while we waited for help.”
His options were limited. The solution was to do something, and then they would run out the front door and escape. Hiding in buckets would only solve half that equation.
He studied the room. After drawing in the zombies…
“That's it,” he shouted.
The noise in the front of the room was now a cacophony. The men who had guns used them liberally. The screams of the living told him how the battle was going to end. He ran backward, momentarily aware of how it might look to a bystander.
When he arrived back at the pit, and the waiting families, he was just in time to see a woman he hadn't met jump over the side.
“No!” he yelled as she sailed over. Too late.
“Wait, guys. We have a chance here. I need you to get into the trucks. Inside the cabs. All except this one.” He pointed to the one closest to the edge.
Tracy looked at him but said nothing.
“I've got a plan,” he said to her. “But I need you to take my dog.”
He bent down to Jeep. “You go with Miss Tracy. She'll take care of you for a little bit.” He rubbed its scruff and then got up and opened the door to the nearest utility truck. It too had its key in it, and the truck started right up. From the cab, he rolled the window and looked down.
“When the zombie's all pass, you get out of the trucks and make a run for the front. It's your only hope.”
She started off, seemingly content to accept him at his word, but then seemed to think twice. “Hey, what about you? What are you going to do?”
He was prepared for the question. “My job, ma'am. Now go!”
It wasn't what he wanted to do, but it was what needed doing. No one else was going to step in and take the burden from him. He put the truck in reverse and backed it toward the hole.
The wire fence crumpled without effort. He hung out his door so he could get the truck to the exact point he wanted. The rear tires were inches from the edge when he put it in park and turned off the motor.
“What you got going there?” Kevin had found him. Mary and Ross were nowhere to be seen.
“Just saving the world, as usual.” He wondered if Kevin would finally assist him, but the man remained consistent until the end.
“All right then. I'll keep an eye on the women and children and the two kids back there. Good luck.” He saluted—though James wasn't military—and trotted off. In the end, he expected no help, which was exactly what he'd gotten.
As he stepped out, he was aware of his weight and girth for the first time since he escaped the fallen dump truck. He wondered if he was too large to fit inside the bucket of the lift. They were made, he hoped, to lift the big sirens lying nearby. In that case, he would be OK.
With a look at the line of trucks in front of him, he no longer saw any open doors. He was just about to jump up into the truck bed so he could operate the lift when something illuminated a key problem with his plan.
“Damn.”
He went along the narrow channel between the trucks, cussing the whole way.
He arrived at the stopped cars a
nd looked ahead to the scrum near the front. There were at least ten zombies fighting pretty much hand to hand with an equal number of men and women. Tracy's guidance must not have reached everyone. For once, he was glad his instructions weren't followed, though his survivor count just went down by ten.
He saw his target. The only one that would matter if he had any hope of succeeding with his desperate plan.
“Time to use Helena.”
He didn't think anyone heard him. He no longer cared if anyone knew he named his Glock after his daughter. She hadn't been with him in more than two decades, but he remembered her as a tough-as-nails young teenager who took after her late mother. He carried her picture everywhere, which always bolstered his spirits, and dampened them...
Naming the gun, though. That kept him in control of the bad guys.
His target was only a few feet away when a zombie interrupted his intricate, if haphazard, plan.
Single bullet
The zombie was a big man, which was fitting given James' size. How he got through the other defenders was a mystery, but he pounced on him as he rounded the backside of an old minivan. The attacker wasted no time in baring his teeth and aiming for James' neck. It was, as best he could tell, the traditional way the infected tried to pass the disease. They drank the blood of the victim, leaving the rest of their body intact. The victim would then get up, seeking to replenish their missing blood. Somehow it was an elegant method that someone decided was more zombie than vampire.
Together they bounced off the glass of the backside of the van, and they did a little dance together in the space between the cars. James had Helena in his hand already, but he was off balance. He couldn't bring it to bear.
More shots near the front.
More screams.
Time slowed down as he saw his window of opportunity closing.
The zombie was powerful. Much stronger than he looked.
Instead of wrestling with the man, James pulled the zombie over and stepped out of its way, so they fell next to each other. He was prepared for the fall and was able to brace himself and then bound back to his feet. The zombie had no such foreknowledge, so fell clumsily to the rocks and let go of its prey in the process. It did reach out again, but by then it was too late.
The single bullet to the brain did its job.
Slightly woozy from the motion of falling and then standing, he made his way the final few yards to the very front of the room. Several of the zombies were upon their victims in their little patch of battlefield among the cars, but he didn't stop for them. Once more, a small compartment of his brain knew he was leaving them to die, but the rest of his brain stayed on task. He was saving all the people in the trucks. These brave souls gave him the chance to make that happen.
He walked to the point where the tunnel met the cavernous room. He didn't know for sure if what he needed was there, but he assumed it would be.
And, this time, his gamble paid off.
He aimed Helena. He fired shot after shot at his coiled target. On his fifth shot, the lights in the room went out.
Then he ran for his life.
He was a big man, but fleet. He grabbed his flashlight in the dim light still coming from the tunnel, flicked it on, and ran between the aisle of trucks. He ignored the curses and screams coming from the front. Any hopes those people might have had to survive had been pitched into the darkness.
It wasn't fair, but neither was dying here in this subterranean nightmare. And his death was arriving with the delicacy of a runaway freight train.
It was completely dark in the back of the room. He found the last truck again, scrambled into the rear, and then made his way into the bucket. A lone zombie emerged from the darkness, surprisingly close to catching him.
“What the? How did you do that?”
The zombie had trouble getting into the cramped compartment, and when it did he had his Glock ready. A single round ended that problem.
A mental check of bullets. Something told him to leave at least one…
A physical check for the rest of his plan. He still had the flares tucked into his belt.
The last piece was the bucket itself. Fortunately, it wasn't complicated. He managed to figure out how to raise the lift, then with a little effort he extended the arm backward and sideways. The bucket was hanging out over the pit by a good ten or fifteen feet, but he positioned it so it was low. To any onlooker in the darkness, he would appear to be standing on the ground.
“If I have to be bait, I'm gonna be bright-ass bait!”
He snapped open the road flare and lit it. With the thrill of a firework, it came to life in his hand, nearly blinding him. The smile on his face was the last, sure, sign his plan was going to work.
No more gunshots.
No more screams.
Only the moans and howls of the undead as they crept forward toward the small sun.
“Hey, suckas! I'm over here,” he shouted. He waved the flare over his head to be sure.
The first zombie came out of the darkness into the sphere of light thrown out by the flare. It gave the thing a ghostly red pallor. The man wore hospital scrubs.
He ran for James and then fell into the pit, screaming and reaching upward to him until it was lost in the darkness. He bent over to watch it fall with some satisfaction.
Then one more fell over.
Then ten more fell over.
The numbers swelled, as did the smile on his face.
“Come on! Plenty of room for all of you!”
He laughed maniacally.
“Wahoo! Put that in your fish tacos!” He let himself go as he reveled in the destruction.
Riding high, he was almost content with the fact he would die in the bucket. Until he heard the screams of a child.
“Help me!”
“Oh please, no,” was all he could say.
Screams of women from the darkness
A lone little girl—maybe six or seven—was on the back of his bucket truck. He thought she might have been the daughter of one of the two sisters, but he couldn't be sure. She was alone, and the zombies were ignoring her as long as they saw the flare. But the flare was getting low. He had two more, but that only meant a handful of minutes before the party was over for good.
Maybe he would do her a favor by not getting her. Could she hide there until help came?
“Not likely.”
Could he move the bucket over there and pick her up?
“Only if you want the zombies to follow you to her.”
Could she climb the arm of the bucket, and drop inside with him?
His heart said no. She looked so tiny and frightened. She'd never make it.
He had the second flare out as the first one expired.
“I'M RIGHT HERE!” he shouted for all he was worth. Then, slightly quieter—as if the zombies understood the nuance—he spoke to the girl. “Sweetie you have to climb the arm. Come to me.”
The girl heard him. He could tell. But she was thinking about it.
“HERE HERE HERE!” he kept screaming. He wanted to get as many into the hole as he could before the prank was over.
“I'm scared.” The girl didn't yell, but he could still hear her.
“Not me!” he shouted back. “It's totally safe in this bucket. You should try it.”
The girl looked around. The zombies were running in groups toward James, and then from her perspective, they probably just seemed to disappear.
“Really?” He could barely hear her.
“Oh yeah, it's not a big deal. Just like a playground. You climb on the playground, don't you?”
She nodded.
“Let's pretend. You can be the strong princess. You have to climb up into my tower and rescue me. Just climb right up those wires on my, uh, tree. Then you'll be right here.”
His palms were already sweating thinking of her climbing over the chasm. The arms of the bucket were like a human arm. A single elbow joint linked the two pieces. He'd lined it up so the f
irst leg was slightly up, while the second was turned at 90 degrees, and was slightly down.
“Will you come and get me?” she suggested hopefully.
For a young girl in this situation, it was a perfectly reasonable request. The odds of a 300-pound man climbing the arms of the lift were somewhat less, though. If he fell off while trying to rescue her, she would die anyway. His odds of getting her and coming back was probably nil. A girl climbing on playground equipment might stand a chance.
“No, I have to stay in my bucket. My...my feet are glued in. That's why I need your help.”
“You do?”
He carried the lie as far as she'd take it.
“Yeah, that's why I need you to hurry. It's burning through my sneakers.” Then, to add some drama, he jumped a little and pretended to be burned. “It's starting to make it through. Please hurry—what's your name?”
“Bella.”
“Well, Bella. All you have to do is climb.”
A dark part of his brain complained. “She's dead already. Just let her go.”
He heard screams of women from the darkness. Broken glass. More screams.
The presence of the girl suddenly made sense. The zombies found people in those trucks. She had somehow escaped. She was a fighter.
“Come on Bella! Now. You have to help me.”
Bella seemed to shake her head in the affirmative, and she made her way to the base of the lift and started to climb as if she intended to do so all along.
“Great job, girl. You're doing great.”
Out of the corner of his eye he sensed something different. One of the runners coming out of the darkness was alive—a human. The man had on shorts and a wife-beater undershirt. James didn't recall seeing him earlier. But he was fast. He turned just as the man reached the cliff's edge. The man didn't realize James was above an abyss. At the very last second, he recognized the trap for what it was. Unlike all the other runners, he jumped.
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