Brink of Extinction

by Nicholas Ryan

  The second pursuer loosed off a flurry of panicked shots and then doused the beam of his flashlight. The man lay perfectly still for several seconds. He could hear nothing – no movement for a very long time. Then, at last, came the crunch and vibration through the snow of footfalls… going slowly and gradually diminishing. The man let out a long breath of shaky relief and got slowly to his feet. He went to where the dead body of the first pursuer lay and snatched up the flashlight he had been carrying. The dead man was on his back with his arms flung wide. He had been shot in the mouth; white bone fragments showed in the ruined face where the jaw had been torn away, and warm blood still spilled and softly steamed from the gruesome wound into the snow. The man stared down at the body and his features hardened, his eyes narrowed to slits. A cramping iciness settled in the pit of the man’s guts and the only sound he could hear was the hoarse rasp of his own breathing, loud in his ears.

  The boy appeared from behind the veil of the dark trees. The man turned on him.

  “I thought I told you to get to the museum.”

  The boy nodded. “I was worried.”

  The man said nothing. The remorse of killing and the physical tension drained out of him at last until only the coldness remained. Side-by-side they ran on into the night.

  * * *

  The thug sat slumped in the back seat of the truck, snow melting from his boots. He had a lump of blood-stained ice pressed against a deep gash across his forehead. In the warmth of the vehicle his damp clothes steamed softly.

  “Are you sure?” Gideon Silver stared at the man’s filthy reflection in the rear view mirror.

  “Yeah,” the thug nodded. “I heard one of ‘em. He said something about the museum. I reckon that’s where they’re hiding.”

  Gideon became silent and thoughtful. “Why didn’t you stop them?” The tone of his voice was eerily innocent and yet the thug in the back seat felt himself stiffen, his instincts shouting a menaced warning.

  “We tried,” the voice became plaintive. “Jed got shot. He’s dead.”

  “You tried…” Gideon rolled the word around on his tongue like it was a tender morsel. “You tried and failed.”

  In the back seat the thug felt his skin crawl as though a thousand biting insects were burrowed beneath his flesh.

  “I hit one of them,” the thug lied desperately. “Hit him in the arm I think. But they both had some kind of heavy weapons – machine guns. I was lucky to hold them off long enough until they ran out of ammo. Then I came straight back here because I knew you would want to know right away, Mr. Silver. I knew it was real important news.”

  Gideon’s cruel slash of a mouth twisted. “It’s only important because you failed,” he reminded the thug with an oily voice. “If you had killed them, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, would we?”

  “No, sir.”

  “No indeed,” Now, suddenly, Gideon’s voice lashed like a whip. “Because their bleeding carcasses would be draped and tied like deer over the hood of the truck.” He glared out through the passenger-side window for a long moment, his eyes cunning, his mind distracted. He wasn’t looking at the men, armed and assembled, waiting around the vehicle. He was visualizing the stronghold of the museum.

  He sighed, heavy with disappointment. “So now we have to go and hunt them out of the sewer like rats… because you failed.”

  Gideon turned and stared over his shoulder at the thug in the corner of the back seat. There was the ugly black shape of a gun in his fist. He shot the thug at point blank range, the sound unholy and deafening in the confined space. The contents of the man’s skull splattered in a dribbling custard color down over the leather upholstery.

  Gideon set aside the weapon and turned to the Asian featured man sitting quietly in the driver’s seat. He sighed again. “I want to be at the museum at dawn, Mr. Chong. Have everyone prepared and ready.”

  The driver’s long moustache twitched around a dangerous smile.

  “And in the meantime,” Gideon gestured over his shoulder dismissively to the head-shot corpse, “have someone clean up that mess.”

  * * *

  By the time the man and the boy finally reached the museum, the cloud cover had cleared revealing a slice of pale moon and a handful of stars low in the night sky. They skirted around the edges of the building. Warm light was spilling through the tempered glass of the museum’s front doors, and in the shadow of an internal doorway, the man could see a figure.

  He slammed his palm against the door and the figure came into the light. It was a man in his late forties or early fifties. He looked like a night watchman. He wore a baggy ill-fitting pair of brown overalls and carried a long black flashlight clipped to his belt. The stranger’s eyes were suspicious, his posture wary. He had a slim, wiry frame and the shadow of stubble across his jaw above dark Mediterranean features.

  The watchman came to the glass and reached for his flashlight. He shone the beam into the face of the man and held it there for several seconds. Then he studied the face of the boy in the stark blinding light.

  The man blinked, temporarily blinded, his night vision destroyed. When his sight returned, the watchman was unchaining the door, jingling a fat ring of keys from his pocket. In the background stood Bill, the tour guide.

  The man and the boy stood in the middle of the foyer, ragged and weary and shivering with the cold. Behind them the watchman re-secured the heavy glass doors.

  The tour guide smiled his relief.

  The man did not smile.

  “We’ve got a problem,” he said in understatement. “We ran into trouble tonight and I’m afraid it’s going to be heading this way if the boy and I don’t get out of here and take our mess with us.”

  “Problem?” Bill frowned. “What kind of trouble are you talking about?”

  “The very worst kind,” the man admitted. “We’ve locked horns with a local gang operating a slavery operation. I figure there are maybe fifteen or twenty men. They were auctioning off captured prisoners at an old department store building a few miles from here.”

  “And?”

  “And I burned their building down, killed a few of the assembled crowd and then killed one of the gang members who came after us once we had escaped. It’s safe to say that they are going to be pissed. And sooner or later they’re going to come here looking for us.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I told the boy to head this way when we were being chased. They would have heard me,” he shrugged his shoulders and said. “It’s just a matter of time. Either tonight, or tomorrow, you’re going to be dealing with an angry gang, heavily armed. That’s why we’ve got to get away right now. You don’t need to get yourself involved in our fight. We’ll handle it.”

  Bill arched his eyebrow, the gesture cynical or maybe incredulous. He stared into the man’s eyes and his gaze became steely with resolve. “The military is a brotherhood – it’s your family for life,” he said. “If one of us is fighting the good fight, then we’re all in it together.”

  Behind the tour guide’s shoulder the woman and the black man they had met earlier stepped into the foyer from a side door. They stood silently in the background.

  The boy spoke at last. His tone was not derisive, but tempered by reason.

  “There’s three of us,” he said. “and your three helpers. One of them is a lady.” He started to shake his head. “The gang has close to twenty men. I saw them, and they’re armed with machine guns and shotguns.”

  Bill gave a smile as cold as winter. “What you see around me is a receptionist, a janitor and a watchman,” he indicated the people standing quietly and grim-faced in the background. “But what I see are three former U.S. Army veterans.”

  Bill turned on his heel and gestured to them in turn. “That lady you saw only as a receptionist is retired Army National Guard Sergeant Colleen McGraw… and that janitor who changed a light fitting in one of the exhibition rooms earlier? Well he is former US Army Specialist Kirk Simkin
s, who was with the 82nd Dustoff MEDIVAC.” Finally Bill gestured to the man they hadn’t met before – the one who had come to the glass doors. “And this is retired Staff Sergeant Walter Penn, 178th Military Police. They’re all veterans of the war against the zombies. They all saw real-life combat.”

  The boy’s expression transformed with surprise and slow dawning respect. He nodded to each of the people around him and then lowered his voice so that his words would not reach. “Even so, he whispered. “They have twenty men.”

  “Yes,” Bill nodded his head gravely. “So let’s hope this doesn’t escalate into a firefight. It would be a shame for all those men to die, gangsters or not.”

  The boy said nothing.

  * * *

  With the first insipid watery light of sunrise, four trucks appeared in convoy behind the growling engine of the snowplow. The vehicles parked together as a tight cluster in the parking lot. They were huge intimidating trucks, covered with dirt and grime and snow. From the back of each vehicle men leaped to the icy ground carrying weapons; dark padded shapes hunched into heavy coats against the chill of the new day.

  In the passenger seat of the lead vehicle, Gideon Silver peered through the windshield at the heavy brick façade of the Apocalypse Museum across the street.

  Beside him, the Asian man made a small, nervous sound in the back of his throat. Gideon shot him a withering glare, the cruel slash of his mouth hardening and his eyes, black as coal, gleaming dangerously.

  “Do you have a problem, Mr. Chong?”

  Chong hesitated. Gideon’s bland eyes were turning murderous. “It’s the museum…” he faltered. “It’s like a protected place…”

  Gideon’s mouth twitched cruelly. “Did you serve, Mr. Chong? Did you fight for this country against the zombie hordes during those years of the apocalypse?”

  Chong shook his head and Gideon’s voice cracked like the lash of a bullwhip. “Then shut the fuck up!”

  Chong flinched as though he had been physically struck, and felt himself cringe. A peculiar expression filled Gideon Silver’s hideous face. It was a scowling look of merciless cruelty and malevolent evil; blazing from the eyes of an unhinged mind. The glowering look was so terrifying to Chong that he felt the blood drain away from his face and the hairs along his forearm bristled through a chilled sweat.

  Gideon got out of the car and stood in the snow for a moment, feeling the bite of the ice cold air deep in his lungs. He was wearing a long black trench coat. He bunched his fists and thrust them deep into the pockets, then crunched across the ice and stood brooding on the sidewalk. The museum rose before him dark and somber. Directly across from where he stood, at the top of a few steps, was a closed door with an exit sign over the lintel. High above the doorway were a series of narrow barred windows, and beside the steps was another brick-built block, shaped like a small square house, with a flat roof heaped in snow. From within its walls Gideon could hear the muffled grumble of a generator.

  He glanced over his shoulder and saw his men in a tight knot. Behind them the sun was just rising, casting a dull uncertain light across the morning.

  Gideon sighed. And then a sharp sudden sound made him turn and look back across the street.

  The door to the museum was opening.

  * * *

  Bill stepped out through the Museum’s exit door and went slowly, unhurriedly, down the steps.

  Across the road stood a man with a hideously scarred and mutilated face, watching him carefully. Bill reached the sidewalk curb and stopped.

  The two figures stared at each other with the stretch of road separating them, like Cold War spies on opposite sides of the Berlin Wall during a tense prisoner exchange. For long moments neither of them spoke. Bill watched with narrowed eyes, silently counting and assessing the armed men who were gathered sullenly around the trucks.

  “Nineteen. But only six look like they know how to handle themselves,” he noted silently.

  “Who are you?” the disfigured man called out at last, his voice pitched at a tone that sounded imperious in the tense silence.

  “I’m the museum curator,” Bill said. “Who are you?”

  Gideon paused for dramatic effect, cast a significant glance back over his shoulder to where his armed men waited, then turned back and glared meaningfully at the man in front of the Museum.

  “I’m your worst nightmare,” he said, pausing briefly to measure the impact of his words.

  Bill said nothing. His face remained impassive but for a small lift of his bushy eyebrows. Gideon went on.

  “Last night two fugitives came here seeking refuge. Are they still inside the museum?”

  “Yes.”

  “I want them.”

  “Why?”

  “Because one of them is my property,” Gideon’s temper simmered on the verge of erupting. He was in a truculent and malicious mood. “And I want the other one because he destroyed my premises and is responsible for the death of eight people.”

  “What people?” Bill stood his ground and asked defiantly.

  “None of your fucking business!” Gideon snapped, his fury blazing suddenly. Bubbles of spittle sprayed from the open slash of his mouth. “I want them. Both of them.”

  “And if I refuse?” Bill stayed impossibly calm, maddening Gideon even further. He was used to being obeyed – immediately.

  “Then I’ll fucking take them,” Gideon seethed. “And I’ll kill everybody who gets in the way, then raze your precious museum to the ground.”

  “You won’t do that without a fight…” Bill’s voice became edged with warning, and for a long moment Gideon fell silent as though in the emptiness there was a battle of wills between the two men that stretched across the space that divided them.

  Finally Gideon took a step back, shuffled his feet in the crusted snow. “You have one hour to bring them to me,” his voice had altered completely, it was flat and toneless, lacking any emotion at all. He made an irritable gesture of dismissal and then turned on his heel and stalked back to the truck.

  * * *

  “He has given me sixty minutes to hand you and the boy over to him,” Bill told the man and the others who were waiting just inside the Museum’s exit door.

  The man nodded. “Is there any way this won’t lead to a fight?”

  Bill shook his head. “I doubt that.”

  “I presume you have weapons.”

  “Yes,” Bill nodded. “M4’s and plenty of ammunition. They’re locked away in a weapons chest beyond the alcove near the entrance.”

  “And what about ways in? Is there anything I don’t know about or haven’t seen yet?”

  Bill shook his head. “There’s only this door, and the front glass doors. No other way in, and no other way out.”

  “What about the windows?” the boy pointed to the narrow slits of pale frosted glass high above where they were standing. “Is there anywhere in the museum they can be accessed from?”

  “To shoot through?”

  “Yes.”

  Bill shook his head. “No.”

  “The roof?” the man interrupted. “Can I get up there?”

  “Yes,” It was the black man, Kirk Simkins, who answered, his voice a bass like rumble that seemed to resonate from somewhere deep within his broad chest. “There’s an internal stairwell. It’s located near the weapons chest.”

  The man grunted, frowning deep in thought.

  Without a word being spoken, the group had deferred instinctively to the man. They were all staring at him now, watching his expression, waiting for their orders. He looked up at last.

  “Break out the weapons,” he told Simkins. “We’ll need you, my boy and you, Sergeant,” he pointed at Colleen McGraw, “to cover the front glass doors. They are our weak point.”

  “And us?” Bill indicated himself and the watchman who had let them into the building, Walter Penn.

  “I want you and the Staff Sergeant to hold this door,” the man said. “It will be the first place they atta
ck. They’ll try to rush the door in numbers. You two need to dissuade them.”

  “Shoot to kill?”

  “With absolute prejudice,” the man said.

  “And what about you?” the boy asked.

  “I’m going up on the roof,” the man explained. “And I’ll cover both doorways from there.”

  Bill caught his arm as an afterthought. “We have walkie-talkies with the weapons. They were for the Museum’s guides to communicate when we had several tour groups visiting at once,” he shrugged,” but we were never that busy. They should still work. You just have to thumb the switch to talk.”

  * * *

  The man took his jacket from the boy and followed Kirk Simkins. He snatched an M4 carbine from the weapons chest and tested a walkie-talkie. It was just a small palm-held unit, with a raised switch on the side and a speaker. He couldn’t imagine the quality or range would be good, and he hoped that wouldn’t matter. He checked the unit with Simkins. “Make sure everyone is carrying one.”

  The man thrust the walkie-talkie into his jacket pocket and then cast an urgent glance around the small alcove. “Do you have a white sheet… a white towel… anything like that?”

  Simkins thought for a moment and then shook his head.

  “Give me your shirt.”

  “What?”

  “Your shirt, man. Give it to me.”

  Simkins peeled off his white shirt and stood bare chested. He handed the shirt to the man. He tore off one of the sleeves and ran through the alcove.

  The man found the stairwell up to the roof concealed behind a black door. He went up the steel steps two-at-a-time, and he was sweating with exertion when at last he reached the rooftop. He came out onto a flat concrete level with a waist-high surrounding wall. The man checked the M4 thoroughly and then adjusted the mechanical zero on the weapon, taking the unused carbine and re-setting the M4’s sights to neutral. It had been a long time since he had handled an M4 but some things were never forgotten: he lowered the front sight five turns to elevate the strike of the bullets and then input three turns clockwise on the carbine’s windage knob to move the strike of his shots slightly to the right. They were his own settings for a 25 meter zero – compensations for his own personal peculiarities in shooting style. It changed the unfamiliar weapon in his hands into something he would be lethally accurate with, and he crept closer to the wall that overlooked the parking lot with cold confidence.