The Zombie Chronicles - Book 6 - Revelation (Apocalypse Infection Unleashed Series)

by Peebles, Chrissy

  “We’ve gotta help Louise,” a man said, wrapping his shirt around a woman’s arm tightly. “She’s been bitten!”

  “Am I going to die?” the woman asked, weeping.

  “The bite is from an animal, not a zombie,” said a redheaded man.

  “But look at them, Hank! They’re infected with the virus.” She sniffled. “I’m a goner, aren’t I?”

  Monkeys squealed and scampered into a group of women, attacking viciously. One particularly challenging chimp leapt onto a woman’s back. Just as it began to sink its teeth into her skin, I aimed my gun and fired. When the monkey fell, the woman screamed and jumped into my arms, thanking me.

  “Ah! I’ve been scratched,” somebody yelled. “That little sucker drew blood!”

  “Scratched? Oh, you poor baby! That’s the least of our worries right now!” someone retorted angrily. “Don’t you hear that?”

  Asia peered down the hall. “Dean, we’ve got big trouble,” she said, pointing.

  The sound of moans and feet and worn shoes shambling across the linoleum made the hair on my neck stand on end, and a shudder shot through me. I shot Asia and Kate a look. “When that man tinkered around with the wires, I think he opened all the doors on all the cages and pods! The hybrids are loose!”

  Realization flickered in Asia’s eyes. “What!? What an idiot. Let’s feed him to a zombified ape!”

  “Better yet, I saw a two-headed shark in one of those lab rooms!” I yelled.

  Kate sighed and held both of us back. “Calm down, you two! Fighting amongst ourselves won’t help us one bit. We humans have to stick together, like it or not.”

  “Do it!” a man screamed. “Feed him to the sharks. He just sentenced us to death!”

  “He didn’t do it on purpose,” a blonde woman pleaded. “Rodney’s just a lousy electrician. He was only trying to help.”

  “Those scientists won’t come down here with all the infected running around,” Rodney said, sticking up for himself. “It just buys us a little time to find an escape route.”

  “Yeah, if we don’t get bitten first,” a woman shouted, kicking a big rat that was foaming at the mouth. Two more angry, growling rats staggered toward her, as if they’d set their eyes on their prize. I stomped on one rat with my boot, and two other men killed the others.

  “Some of these people are too weak to fight,” a man said.

  “Besides, we don’t have weapons,” another shouted.

  “There’s has to be another way outta here,” I said.

  “I think there’s an exit at the end of A block,” a frail-looking man said, wheezing as if the mere act of speaking had worn him out.

  I nodded. “Follow me, people.”

  I ran down the corridor with the crowd behind me, fueled by the horrible shrieks and moans behind me. The sirens and flashing lights suddenly stopped and I couldn’t be more thankful for that. At the end of the twisting, turning corridor, we reached a steel door with a neon “EXIT” sign above it, but before I could even get to the door, the crowd swooped in. A man with a crowbar struggled to pry the door open, but it was difficult to get anywhere near the door with the panicking swarm of people fighting to be the first ones out.

  “Back up. I’ll shoot it open,” I said.

  Suddenly, pain exploded across my back, and I crumbled to the ground. A man kicked me hard in the gut and swiped the gun out of my hand. Another one grabbed my rifle. Asia and Kate tried to fight them off, but the others just threw them to the ground like ragdolls. The guns meant the difference between life and death, and those thugs knew it.

  “Dean!” Asia said, scrambling up.

  I moaned as I ambled to my feet and saw that zombies were coming from behind us. Our only option was to fight or flee, and the latter was going to be difficult because the door wouldn’t budge. I glanced down the corridor and could make out shifting shadows limping toward us.

  Asia wrapped her arm around me. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m good,” I gasped between heaving breaths. “You?”

  “Just peachy,” Asia lied.

  “We’re clearly not in their clique,” Kate said, breathing hard. “They pushed us all the way to the back, like zombie food. Those things will be here any minute, and we’ll be the first to fall.”

  The thought made my stomach clench. I peered through the gang, my heart racing. They were screaming, cursing, and shouting at one another as they fumbled with the lock. I then looked behind me at the zombies; they were about twenty feet away, so close I could smell their rancid stench. “Hurry!” I shouted.

  “Got it!” someone finally shouted, sounding relieved.

  As the door opened, zombies flooded in, instantly attacking and biting the first line of people who’d shoved their way up to the door. I was sure the scientists had something to do with that; they knew we’d head for the next exit, so the trap had been set, and we’d fallen for it, hook, line, and sinker.

  Zombies attacked from the front, and the undead behind us were anxious to join in on the feast. We fought off the first few who reached us. I kicked one in the gut, then smashed its head with my boot. One of the gang members lay on the ground next to me with a pipe in his hands. Since he was dead and could no longer use it, his neck lined with crude bite marks, I pulled the pipe from his fingers.

  “We’re trapped,” Kate said after trying all the doors with the keycard.

  “We can’t get in any of those rooms!” Asia yelled. “Quit wasting time.”

  “Fine,” Kate said, “but I had to try.”

  Something pulled my hair. I whacked at a group of birds flying overhead, trying to peck me. Two of them crashed to the ground when I bashed their heads in with my pipe. The others flew off startled. A zombie walked by, dragging a convulsing, screaming woman by the hair, like some kind of decaying Neanderthal. Her feet kicked violently as she thrashed in its grasp. I kicked the zombie, forcing it to loosen its grip on the woman, and the thing actually cursed at me as I bashed its head in. Finally, it fell lifelessly to the ground, and the terrified woman took off down the hall.

  I picked up a dead zombie and flung it over my shoulder. I motioned to members from the gang, telling them to follow me, but they shook their heads. Their eyes were wide, their mouths agape.

  “You’re crazy!” a woman shouted.

  “No, crazy is staying here,” I retorted. “Now come on.”

  They darted off in all directions as panic ensued.

  “Dean, what are you doing?” Kate asked over the screams echoing throughout the halls.

  “We’ll smell like them if we’re carrying corpses. It might buy us some time,” I explained.

  “I’ll go first,” Asia said. “If they bite me, I won’t turn.”

  I nodded.

  She grabbed the fire extinguisher from the wall. “We’ll blind them, confuse them temporarily.”

  “There’s a hall we can turn down,” Kate said.

  “Where?” I asked.

  “About halfway down,” she answered.

  “Good…if we make it that far,” I said, swallowing hard.

  It was a risky plan, but we really didn’t have any other choice. We couldn’t stay there because we were sorely outnumbered, especially without guns.

  Asia took the lead. Carrying her dead zombie, she squirted white foam straight into the dead faces of anything that stood in our path. We kicked and fought with everything we had. The monkeys were the worst because there were so many of them, and they’d jump and bite onto anything they could latch onto. A wave of nausea overcame me when I glanced down. Two zombies and a handful of monkeys feasted on one of the men lying flat on his back.

  The zombie on my shoulder was light, only about 100 pounds, and its vile stench kept the stumbling zombies from recognizing me as human. They shambled right past me, anxious to get to the end of the corridor where a meal was waiting for them.

  With its arms outstretched, one walked toward me. It had the greenest face I’d ever seen. It hissed in
my ear, which was a little too close for comfort, so I slammed the pipe into its skull. Its head whacked into the wall, and then the creature slumped down to the ground, tripping three of its slimy cohorts in the process.

  I kept moving, adjusting the weight on my shoulder every now and then. Zombies moaned, and human screams pierced the air. I wished the others had chosen to come with us, because the sounds coming from them as they met their demise were heart-wrenching.

  Asia kept spraying the fire extinguisher, and the white foam disoriented the tangle of zombies, clearing a path for us. The smell of decaying flesh still turned my stomach, but we all kept going. When we saw a pack of vicious dogs snarling, growling, and tearing a man to bits, Kate gasped.

  “He’s dead,” Asia said in her ear. “There’s nothing we can do to help him. Just walk around! And don’t make eye contact with the dogs.”

  I stepped over a dead zombie and walked cautiously past the dogs hoping they wouldn’t set their sights on us. Luckily, they didn’t pay us any attention. When we turned the bend, Kate motioned us down a different hall.

  “It’s open!” she screamed.

  I stopped to see what she was talking about, but without a second thought, the girls dumped their zombie bodies and bolted through the open door. I didn’t like the idea of being so trapped, but I knew we couldn’t defeat the army of corpses that was rapidly approaching. I dumped my zombie luggage next to the others and hurried through the door. As soon as I was safely inside, Kate slammed the door and locked it.

  The room was furnished with tables, a coffeemaker, and a microwave, like some sort of break room. When I gazed out the window, I could see zombies shuffling past. A scream froze in my throat. “There are so many of them,” I muttered, then sucked in a silent breath. I rushed over to the blinds and shut them.

  Asia turned off the lights, then reached for my hand. “We’ll get through this,” she whispered. “Look how far we’ve come and all we’ve been through. We’re survivors.”

  I gripped her hand, then glanced down at the floor. I had no idea how we were going to get out of that underground lab. The scientists had blocked the main entrance and sent mutants to guard the other exit. I was sure they’d murder us the second they found us, especially because they were armed and we weren’t.

  We all sat along the wall on the ground and didn’t say a thing as we tried to catch our breath and regain our composure. I’d never thought of the scientists as scary before and had just considered them geeks and bookworms, yet in reality, they were hosting an underground lair of evil. When that gang joined Larry and Sam to overtake the lab, they had no idea what they were up against. None of us did. We’d all been completely kept in the dark.

  “Why didn’t they just come down and shoot us?” Kate asked. “Why let more zombies in?”

  “They want us dead,” I said, “but they’re too scared to come down here. They’re afraid they’ll be contaminated, so they’re letting the zombies and hybrids do their dirty work for them. I think that guy was right. Had he not accidently released the animals, they would’ve just come down here and disposed of us with poisonous gas or something.”

  “They’ll wait it out until they’re sure we’re all dead.” Asia leaned back. “Then they’ll come down and shoot the zombies, clean up, and start all over again.”

  “Human and zombie subjects aren’t exactly hard to come by, you know,” Kate said. “They won’t stop until they come up with a cure. I think they’re trying to go down in the history books as heroes, as ironic as it sounds.”

  “Heroes? How about barbarians?” Asia said.

  A droplet of sweat rolled down Kate’s pale face. “Should we just wait it out here a little longer or what?”

  I shook my head. “No. It’s not gonna change anything.”

  “I agree,” Asia said. “We can’t wait here like sitting ducks. I say we go look for weapons. Then, when they come down here, we attack ‘em with everything we’ve got.”

  “There has to be another way out,” I said. After I thought about it for a moment, an idea struck me. “There’s an elevator in the front lobby. Of course it’s out of order, so I never gave it much thought, but I’m sure it functioned once upon a time.”

  “Yeah, before all of this,” Kate said. “I bet the scientists took the elevator down to the ground floor.”

  Asia met my gaze. “The elevator may be out of order, but that doesn’t mean we can’t pry those doors open and climb up the cables.”

  “I like it,” I said. “They’ll never expect us to do something so…crazy.”

  “But how do we get to the elevator without getting eaten?” Kate said.

  “Via F Block,” Asia answered.

  Kate stood. “Maybe we can help the others while we’re there!”

  “Wait…there are more people?” I asked.

  “Yep. Rumor has it that they actually cured some zombies,” she said.

  “They separated the ones who turned into hybrids,” Asia said.

  “But there are so many hybrids,” I said. “They must have cured a lot of people. Where are they?”

  “Dead,” Asia answered bluntly.

  I shook my head in utter disbelief. It was absolutely heartless and horrifying, like something out of a horror movie. I didn’t want to stay another minute in that murderous lab, where people were killed in the name of finding a cure. “If they’re all about finding a cure,” I said, “then what’s up with the hybrids?”

  “They’re studying them,” Kate said.

  I thought about that for a moment, but it still didn’t make sense. “Why not just try to figure out how to fix the problem so it never happens? Why create so many dangerous creatures? I mean, one or two would have been more than enough.”

  Kate sighed. “They are running thousands of experiments, Dean. We oughtta know. We’ve been through far too many of them.”

  “The city is surrounded by zombies,” I said. I then went on to explain the entire story, from the very beginning to Jackie and leaving and coming back to save Claire. “I wonder if the hybrids have something to do with the herd? Maybe they’re summoning them.”

  “I bet you’re right,” Kate said.

  “If that’s the case, we need to take those hybrids out,” Asia said.

  “And how do you propose we do that? We can’t even get out the door alive,” Kate argued.

  “We’ve gotten this far, haven’t we?” Asia sternly retorted.

  “Barely,” Kate muttered.

  “Let’s give it some time to die down,” I said. “This is a big underground facility. They’re bound to spread out eventually.”

  Kate placed her hands on her hips. “Right, and when they do, we need to get our butts to the elevators. We don’t need anyone playing hero,” she said, scowling at Asia.

  “I see your point, Kate, but Asia’s right about the hybrids. We’ve gotta kill them, or the zombies will just keep coming toward the city.”

  “Exactly,” Asia said. “This city is nothing but a big, giant homing beacon. We need to take the hybrids out of the equation.”

  Kate looked out between the blinds. “No way. First, we make it to safety. We can get Nick and the others for backup, maybe even some of the men and women from the apartment complex you told me about. Then we can come back and blow this place to smithereens.”

  “What if they move the hybrids to a different location before we get back?” I asked. “We have to neutralize the threat immediately. I say we leave nothing to risk.”

  “They’re not gonna move them,” Kate said. “It’d be impossible, not to mention risky, and we already know they’re wimps.”

  Asia paced the room. “The only good hybrid is a dead one.”

  “I know,” Kate said, “but we have to think about our safety first. We have no weapons. We need to get the heck outta Dodge, then arm ourselves, gather up reinforcements, and come back and finish off the freaky army. We’ve gotta be logical about this. The three of us, unarmed, are going to be f
ar less effective than a larger group with weapons, and if we get ourselves killed or infected, we’ll be of no help to anyone.”

  “Kate has a good point,” I said. “Maneuvering through the halls is gonna be tricky enough. Our main focus should be getting to the elevator.”

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t agree,” Asia said.

  “If the zombies don’t kill us, those scientists are liable to come down here with machineguns and radiation suits and take us out,” I reasoned.

  Asia shook her head. “They’re just that crazy. They could try that.”

  “Exactly. Or, even worse, they might even try to take you alive for more experimentation. I can’t bear to see you go through that all over again. Our first priority has to be getting out.”

  “You’re right, Dean,” she said, caving in.

  Kate peeked through the shades. “It’s clearing out. We should make a run for it.”

  Asia walked over to the stove and grabbed a frying pan. “Guess this is my weapon of choice.”

  “I’ll take this,” Kate said, grabbing a pot.

  The cooking utensils weren’t exactly the best weapons in the world, but a hard, well-placed hit could nail a zombie in one swing. I took a last look through cupboards and drawers, only to find useless items such as plastic forks, paper plates, napkins, salt, pepper, and ketchup.

  Holding my breath, I held my pipe tightly and slowly opened the door. The air was stale and musty, I noticed as I glanced to the left and right. “Clear,” I whispered.

  We stepped into the eerie corridor and picked up our dead, smelly zombies, then slung them over our shoulders like sacks of potatoes. We frantically headed up the hall, determined and anxious to find a way out of the nightmarish lab.

  “Hear that?” Asia whispered.

  “It sounds like a chainsaw,” I said, as the noise conjured up some pretty disturbing images.

  “Or a drill,” Asia said, “like…for brain surgery.”

  Kate gasped. “Let’s move it!”

  I couldn’t find any comfort in the darkness because I knew we were not alone, and hybrids wielding bloody chainsaws didn’t work any wonders for my already frazzled nerves. Dust swirled in the path of my flashlight beam, and I half-expected something to jump from the ceiling and sink its fangs into me or slither past my feet.