Gravewalkers: Dying Time

by Richard T. Schrader

  Carmen stood in the room with an outstretched one-arm stranglehold on an infected. What had once been a nine-year-old girl dangled and kicked from her hand like a snatched stray cat. As small as it was, the creature had no chance to escape her. The thing could casually persist without fresh oxygen, but Carmen’s grip that crushed its windpipe did prevent it from uttering any feeding call to attract more of its kind. Carmen gazed on Critias with pride over his accomplishment, “I knew you had it in you,” then she whipped her arm to snap the ghoul’s neck. Carmen put the limp body quietly to the ground.

  Critias checked his thermal imager to give him some wall penetration and perhaps see other ghouls before they detected him first. His quick glance about the area revealed nothing but birds and rats. The room had once been the office of some sort of paper-pusher. Rain and bird droppings had laid the interior to waste.

  She drew her teslaflux pistol so that she could dial the projectile velocity down. “Three-hundred-thirty meters-per-second should be silent,” she said. “You go first and act as if you’re a zombie and I’ll follow you to see if you can fool them at least from a distance.”

  Critias reset his pistol to the same velocity so the rounds would not sonic boom. That sharp crack would give them away if they shot any infected, which would call in even more ghouls. He holstered his tuned sidearm, “Explain to me what act like a zombie entails.”

  She offered him her logic, “According to Bob, the ghouls are using their human brains and senses to find food. Just like every other creature, ghouls find infected meat to be inedible. My whole body and your mechsuit are not tasty to them, so the only thing that sets them off into violence must be that they see that we’re not ghouls. The infected never show fear and don’t have any interest in one another. If you don’t talk, show fear, or move like a human, I think they’ll believe you’re just another ghoul, at least until they get close enough to see otherwise. If they don’t howl, no more ghouls will come to investigate. It’s simple as that.”

  He was skeptical but willing to indulge her, “Where are we going?”

  She grinned having fun, “We can go down and search for something to take, or we can go up a couple floors so we will be high enough to jump back.”

  He asked non-rhetorically, “You have any idea how many infected are prowling around in this building?”

  Carmen estimated, “Some are creeping around here and there, chasing rats and birds, stealing eggs from nests, things like that, not enough food for many of them. On the other hand, if we go to the basement, we might get lucky and find a nest with a watcher.”

  He rolled his eyes at that, “We’re not going to the basement with two pistols.” Critias did his best shamble as he left the office to explore a bit. The kinetic processor translated a ghoulish movement to his suit; such that combined with the paintjob, he felt confident enough to test her conjecture on passing himself off as one of them.

  The reception area beyond that room had open doors that led to similar offices. Carmen went to a punctured fire extinguisher that still hung on the wall. “Helicopter gunship,” she whispered after she examined the bullet-hole that went clean through the pressure tank and then the wall behind it.

  The not too distant sound of what seemed like a door that banged into a wall alerted them to danger. Having guessed the source, Carmen pointed out to the main hallway and then to the right. Critias lumbered out into the hall then looked that way. At the far end of the hall, he saw a runner ghoul on all fours that was just outside an open metal fire door that probably led into a stairwell.

  The creature ignored him as it sniffed at the ground even after having glanced in his direction. The first rays of dawn were on the rise outside, which produced just enough ambient light in the dim hallway for them to be able to see one another. Carmen and Critias had thumped hard on the floor when they landed from their jumps. That noise had lured the predator to come up to identify the source of the noise; no doubt, it had hoped to find something edible.

  The knowledge that Carmen was with him filled Critias with a twinge of choler. The ghoul had really come up the stairs with the desire to hunt them down then kill them, or so at least he told himself it was that personal. He advanced with kicks through the trash that littered the hallway. Critias intended to scatter it to draw the attention of the ghoul, but the creature still just ignored him. He kept on with increased rancor until his boot-shuffle of the debris sent a rat to flight down the hallway.

  The ghoul zeroed in on the rodent then dashed after it low to the ground. So pursued, the terrified rat reversed its course to run right between Critias’ legs with the ghoul close behind. When the infected was right at Critias’ feet, it stared up at him through his visor then realized its previous error, which caused the thing’s face to twist into a bared-teeth snarl.

  As he slapped his open gauntlet down onto the ghoul’s head, Critias had a genuine need to see the creature suffer for affronting him with its wretched existence. His enhanced strength fortified the blow that shattered the creature’s skull like a glass jar inside a leather sack, which left the ghoul crumpled motionless at his feet. He didn’t check to see if Carmen still followed. Critias just headed for the stairwell the ghoul came from then proceeded down to see how far they could get before having to turn back.

  Four floors down, they paused at a landing to examine a skeleton with a rusty pistol between the leg bones and a bullet-hole through its skull. Carmen made a forensic paleontological evaluation of the skeleton as she nudged the ruined pistol with her foot, “This is a Caucasian male, approximately thirty-five years of age with one self-inflicted thirty-two caliber gunshot wound to the head.”

  “Looks like he got himself chomped on back in the day,” Critias reasoned, “then he elected for suicide rather than turning.”

  "That is essentially the truth of it," Carmen agreed with only small reservations. "I notice that the skeleton's hand is missing the tip of its left index finger. Close examination suggests to me that this maiming is the result of a bullet from his gun rather than from the bite of a ghoul."

  Critias extended one arm in a motion that pretended to push away an angry ghoul by having his hand in its gnashing face. At the same time, he went through the motion of his other hand to fire an imaginary pistol into the ghoul's skull. Critias commented on the man's hapless fate, "He could have easily acquired some other bites and scratches when wrestling around with an angry ghoul. If he did shoot his own finger off, he followed up by plunging the newly trimmed stub into a ghoul's facial bullet wound."

  Carmen nodded to that reasoning, "He never turned, so he must have killed himself quite soon after the event that would have infected him had he lived."

  As they continued down the concrete steps, they encountered a badly dehydrated female corpse sprawled out where it had fallen headshot some years past only to remain ghoulishly free of decomposition. Even though it was obvious to both of them, Critias took the time to say, “This must be the one that ended up with that guy’s finger in her brains.”

  Critias and Carmen eventually descended down so many stairs that they reached street level, all without ghoulish opposition, to then exit out of the stairwell through an already-open fire door. That ground floor was the entry lobby for the office building as a whole. In addition to multiple sets of main doors that connected directly out to the sidewalk, there were some small stores and a sandwich shop as obvious locations of interest.

  As Critias zombie-walked to the food service area to check for canned food, he noticed the freshly slain half-eaten carcass of a mature whitetail deer that lay in the middle of the hall near the south doors to the outside. Those doors not only stood wide open, they were missing entirely. Critias knew enough about predators and their kills to realize that whatever had feasted on the deer wouldn’t be far away, so he just stood still and listened quietly.

  Carmen whispered through her internal transmitter to radio his helmet, “Be careful. There was a zoological park in this city and tha
t carcass seems as though it was predated by a large mammal to me.”

  He asked, “You mean like lions, tigers, and bears?”

  “That’s exactly what I mean,” she confirmed the warning, “and I don’t think we want to test your armor against a four-hundred kilogram tiger.”

  Her logic seemed reasonable enough to Critias in that he never heard of infected abandoning a freshly killed carcass before. While it was possible that the ghoul that had killed the animal had already eaten to the point of losing interest, that didn’t explain why other ghouls hadn’t moved in to scavenge on the remainder.

  A scraping sound alerted them to a crawler before they saw the creature drag itself in from the street a moment later. It audibly sniffed as it tracked the stench of the deer’s spilled entrails that were strong on the air. When the creature saw the carcass, the crawler impressively accelerated its legless torso to set upon the deer corpse to begin tearing at the raw flesh with its feeble teeth that no amount of savagery could make efficient for such a task better suited to less unnatural carnivores.

  Critias kept still as he watched and waited to see if some greater predator would appear to defend its food. The thing that came didn’t disappoint him. With the agility of the tiger that Carmen first feared, the largest hunter that Critias had ever seen leaped out from a nearby stationery store. The fearsome giant bellowed rage as it pounced on the interloping crawler. Critias imagined that in some former life, the hunter had been a showman like a strongman in a circus, for he could think of no other explanation for how the man could have grown into such a colossus even with an infected’s healing-factor run wild. If the thing ever stood fully erect, the hunter would have been more than a full meter taller than Critias. Also unlike any other hunter that Critias had ever encountered, the beast remained a perfectly proportioned Hercules as though having never suffered any catastrophic injury at all to trigger the regenerative condition. The monstrosity had simply grown bigger and more mesomorphic with the passage of time. The thing was awe-inspiring, a paragon of flawless flesh devoid of scar or blemish, a veritable titan bestride the Earth. Goliath himself would have gazed up to tremble in the face of a true biblical demigod of destruction, a super hunter only rumored about in disbelieved Forager legend, a destroyer.

  That ultimate hunter casually snatched up the puny crawler, snapped its spine like it had wringed a towel, and then flung it out the door to bounce and skip before it ended up in the middle of the street where it squealed and twitched. Having reclaimed his food, the destroyer glanced about to see if any other ghouls were foolish enough to challenge him for the meal; that is when the destroyer spotted Critias who stood silently across the lobby.

  “Grendel,” Carmen named her dread to him by radio. “Run, Critias! If you die here, everything that is our future will be undone!”

  That king among hunters charged with another of its angry roars that was clear in any language. Grendel wasn’t interested in food or in defending it. It only cared about crushing a trespassing rival and that mammoth beast moved at least as fast as they could plus it was fantastically stronger.

  Critias already sensed that Carmen would sacrifice herself so that he might escape. If they both ran together, Grendel would catch them. If they outran him, the hunter would follow them and then easily make the same jump back to the Customs House. Critias had often desired to catch Carmen making a mistake, but that long awaited victory was ashes in his mouth. It was his own decision to lead them down the building rather than up, as he had known was the wiser course of action. The fault for their blunder in judgment was entirely his own.

  Even before Carmen had finished speaking, Critias instinctively drew his pistol then fired a shot. Because he had dialed down the power of his weapon, the bullet exited his pistol with almost complete silence, which proved to be yet another item on his growing list of miscalculations. The tungsten projectile struck the hunter square in the forehead only to bounce off thick bone to leave only an insignificant flesh wound.

  Grendel was too fast to suffer another bullet as he loped forward in only two bounds. He added that momentum into an openhanded pankration slap that caught Critias in the chest to send him whirling airborne across the lobby.

  Critias crashed uncontrollably into a marble wall that was more than solid enough to take the impact without a quiver and then he had to fall two meters just to hit the floor, mostly with his head. The initial contact with the wall had already knocked him senseless so that the crash to the floor actually served to bring him back to consciousness. His first breath felt like he inhaled flame and to top it all off, his pistol had flown from his hand to he knew not where.

  Carmen spun the velocity setting of her teslaflux pistol up to its maximum then gripped it in both hands on braced legs to unleash its wrath. The recoil was so fierce that it launched her backward to plow through a man-sized decorative ceramic vase. Her bullet struck Grendel through the thick muscle near his shoulder just as he leaped to finish off Critias. The hypersonic projectile transferred so much kinetic energy on impact that it tore off the whole arm at the socket and knocked Grendel flat. The round then continued through walls for another half kilometer.

  Sight of the panga-bowie sword that Carmen had strapped to his right shin brought Critias back to his senses. She had added the sheath to his armor so that she could camouflage paint them together. He heard her pistol report go off like a bomb and then watched the destroyer collapse from a brutal blood fountain of a wound. Critias pulled his sword as the motion-processor Kevin upgraded hopped him from his back to his feet with acrobatic agility, much to Critias’ amazed gratitude.

  Carmen tossed aside her uselessly overheated handgun then dashed over to stomp out the hunter’s brains before he could recover. As she came down from a jump to plant both feet on the back of his neck, Grendel sprang up to administer a punishing backhand with his remaining arm that batted her from the air like a shuttlecock. The blow sent Carmen flying far down the lobby to then slide even further along the dusty floor.

  Critias saw his pistol nearby so he leaped for it while he threw his sword to slide down the floor to Carmen who could undoubtedly make better use of it than he could. He reached the handgun just as the hunter reached him. The ogreish infected seized Critias by an ankle then used that grip to whip him headlong into the stationery store to crash through several layers of shelving displays that then collapsed on top of him.

  The feeding shrieks of ghouls chorused outside in the street in answer to Carmen’s loud gunshot. The sounds meant that lesser infected were on their way to join the fight.

  Critias shoved his way out of the storefront wreckage with pistol in hand set for firepower. He absently headshot the first three runners as they came in through the doorway then he ran to join up with Carmen who faced down their real nemesis.

  She taunted, slashed, and stabbed at Grendel like a clever matador in a daring duel with an enraged bull. Grendel soaked up the trifling picador wounds with furious resilience while he retaliated with clubbing blows from his single arm that hoped she would fail in one of her artful dodges.

  Critias pumped slugs into Grendel's hunched-over back on the off chance that one of them would pass through far enough to hit something vital, preferably the destroyer’s enormous head. Desperate hope was not enough to get Critias a killing injury and as it was, the damage he inflicted was not even sufficient to interrupt the brute's interest to smash Carmen.

  When her sword finally snagged in Grendel’s sinewy tissue, the hunter caught Carmen by the calf then twirled his whole mass to lash her bodily across a major support pillar. The impact shattered ceramic tile to bits and caused dust to fall down from the high ceiling. That wasn't enough, so Grendel reversed his swing to fling her across the lobby where she smashed badly into the marble wall that had previously shown so little mercy to Critias.

  Desperate to survive, Critias loaded a fresh clip then promptly emptied it into a new wave of runners as they streamed in from the street by two dif
ferent entrances. He masterfully cut them down like so many clay pigeons. His next clip after that was for the destroyer-class hunter, but when Critias turned around to engage him, he discovered that Grendel was already gone. The giant had inexplicably fled the confrontation that he had been well on the way to winning.

  With sword in hand, Carmen tragically struggled to regain her feet on a crippled leg. She moved like a dog hit by a car. The rest of her seemed merely badly battered since her sturdy titanium bones had taken the abuse while remaining unbroken.

  Ever more ghouls poured in from the street. They howled up a tremendous racket as they chased after Critias who sprinted over to Carmen, lifted her over his shoulder, and then carried her away toward the door to the stairs.

  “Give me your pistol,” she demanded, “and grab mine from over there!” Once she had his gun, Carmen blasted the brains from ghouls while Critias ran as he carried her. He scooped up her overheated weapon on the way to dashing into the stairwell. As soon as he was through the door, Carmen instructed, “Hold the door closed while I lock it!”

  He put her down so he could grab the door handle with both hands and keep it shut tight.