by Dave Jeffery
Alpha Team began their retreat, torch lights swinging frantically, footfalls big in the small space, and the vile vermin in hot pursuit.
Connors risked a brief look behind him and baulked in fear. Several of the rats were mere metres from his boots. He kicked out, catching one dead centre, punting it back down the tunnel, but his action was too ballistic and he lost his balance. He landed heavily, rolling several times in the muddy water lying on the tunnel floor. His weapon discharged sending a round through his foot and removing his toes.
He screamed in pain and fear and the knowledge that his time on this Good Earth was to end in a brief, savage period of Hell.
Then they were on him, biting and tearing at his fatigues, his cries suddenly loud as his biochem mask was ripped from his face.
Honeyman turned briefly and saw the writhing mass in the tunnel, a bloodied arm rising weakly clawing ineffectually at the air; all but the middle finger missing as though Connors were offering one last gesture of defiance.
“Fuck it,” Honeyman whispered and launched another grenade from the M208 strapped to the underside of his carbine. The high explosive pellet detonated upon impact, chewing into the flesh of both man and rodent, scattering it throughout the tunnel with a bright, loud roar.
Honeyman turned to continue his escape and he found himself looking into the face of Shipman. The Major looked briefly over Honeyman’s shoulder and then back at him; their eyes locking for a moment.
Then Shipman nodded; admonishment in a simple bob of the head. You did the right thing. I would have done the same.
They both began to run. Unlike Connors, the grenade had given them only token, temporary respite from the zombie rodents, who were now heading down the tunnel; now discernable - no longer a mass but still determined and deadly.
As Honeyman followed his Major, he thought briefly of that moment they shared; that instant of communicative twilight where right and wrong hung in the balance, and breathed a sigh of relief at the outcome.
It could’ve gone the other way and that would have meant killing the rest of Alpha Team ahead of schedule. And Honeyman was under instruction that such action was strictly a last resort.
He ran on.
***
“I gather you two were real pals?” Clarke said in the uneasy silence.
O’Connell didn’t respond immediately. He gazed down at Stu Kunaka’s bloodied body and fought back wave after wave of violent emotion. Anger? Sure, there was plenty of that. And grief too had turned up to the party. But there was also blame, that old devil forever haunting his steps. He’d lost someone he cared for, another person had been snatched away from him, right in front of his eyes.
“Yes,” he said; his voice weak and watery. “I guess you could say that.”
“Then you really ain’t gonna like what I’m gonna say next,” Clarke muttered.
“Just say it,” O’Connell said glancing up at him.
“You’ve got to put a bullet in his head, man,” Clarke said quietly. “Otherwise he’s gonna be up and walking around like the rest of them.”
There was a long silence as O’Connell considered this. “That’s going to be difficult,” he admitted.
“I get that,” Clarke said. “But this isn’t Dawn of the Dead, O’Connell. And these aren’t the products of Tom Savini and a box of make up.”
“You think I don’t know that?” O’Connell rounded on him.
“I'm just saying,” Clarke said looking away and leaving O’Connell to come to his own conclusions. His thoughts were mud: thick and wieldy. A small noise came from the stairway and he span round, his torch turning the corridor to milky white.
“Hey, guys, it’s Suzie! Don't shoot!”
O’Connell sighed and lowered his weapon. “Shit, Suzie,” he said. “Am I glad you’re here?”
“I heard shots,” she said. “What’s -?” She stopped; her eyes alighting on Kunaka’s slumped and bloody body.
“Oh, no,” she breathed. She went to O’Connell, putting a hand on his chest. “Are you okay, baby?”
“No,” he said turning away. “But we have to do this another time.”
“Okay,” she said cautiously.
“Some things can’t wait,” Clarke said quietly.
“What’s he mean?” Suzie asked O’Connell.
“What I mean is: Kunaka has been bitten and he’s gonna come back,” Clarke snapped, indignant at being ignored. “And when he does he isn’t gonna be wanting a group hug.”
“So what do we do?”
She took Clarke unawares by addressing him directly.
He told her how these things went and she nodded grimly.
“O’Connell?” she said. “You or me, that’s what it comes down to, right?”
He said nothing for a long while. Just when Suzie thought he was unable to make the decision he turned to face her.
“I’ll do it,” he replied. “He’s my responsibility.”
“You’re not to blame for this, O’Connell. Just like you weren’t to blame for -” The look on his face made her abort the sentence.
For Chris, she’d been about say. But his eyes told her to quit it. Quit it right now.
She bobbed her head in understanding. “I’ll go with Clarke and we’ll get this thing done,” she said simply. “You catch up when you’ve finished up here.”
Suzie withdrew, heading off down the corridor. She’d taken several steps before turning to Clarke who remained gawping at her.
“You coming, or what?” she said briskly.
“Yeah,” he said in resignation and followed her, thinking that in the grand scheme of things his day couldn’t possibly get any worse.
How wrong he was.
***
Another person perhaps not having a particularly good day was none other than Thom Everett, who having wiped tears and snot on the smoke blackened sleeve of his Charvet shirt, had begun his descent to the lobby of Hilton Towers only to find a few more obstacles in his way.
On the plus side, he’d spotted the group of zombies before they had been aware of him. He didn’t know what had made him peer over the balustrade but peer he did and managed to spot the bloodied hand on the stair rail several floors below. And that bloodied hand was sliding up the banister, leaving a smear of gore in its wake, as its owner slowly climbed the stairs. And behind the hand came another and another and another; all moving at a snail’s pace, all leaving that hideous splattered smear on the hand rail.
There wasn’t any going down tonight. Not with Wei Li and sure as hell not with the stairway. He checked the hand rail on the floor above him and it appeared clear.
“Up it is then,” he muttered and began the slow ascent to the roof, desperately trying to avoid the gnawing reality that once he was up there, he had nowhere else to go.
***
14
From his position Amir kept watch on the plaza. He’d seen little but there were enough sounds in the air to indicate that things were far from conventional.
The evening was punctuated by explosions, some nearby, some dulled by distance, the bright tinkle of glass as windows succumbed to abuse; a car horn howling endlessly in the darkness and all of this accompanied by the bacon-sizzling hiss of the rain on the cobbles and the mournful groans of The Risen.
Things were grim but there was always hope. This was Abinaash’s philosophy. His mother. Amir embraced the warm flow of love that besieged his heart at the thought of her. Her dark silken hair and blackest of eyes, offset by the brightest smile he’d ever known.
Amir was the son of over seven generations of Sikhs; his mother’s parents moving to England from The Punjab, Pakistan, in the early sixties. Fatehpal Singh, Amir’s father, was a sedate man who pondered more than he spoke. Mrs. Singh had enough zest for both of them, often prompting Mr. Singh to jest, “Why do I need a tongue when I have my wife?”
Fatehpal Singh’s mother and father were born in England and contested any insinuations that they were anything ot
her than British. As a family they weathered the storms of ignorance and prejudice prevalent in the sixties and seventies; standing staunch in the face of racial adversity. And then there was final irony in that Fatehpal and Abinaash, doctors of repute, should both die in the same year that racially aggravated assault became a crime in its own right. This wasn’t lost on any of the remaining family.
Injustice and ignorance and hatred robbed Amir of his parents, kicked to death by a group of alleged National Front members in a Bradford city street. They were pronounced dead on arrival in the Accident and Emergency department where Abinaash worked as a specialist registrar; her colleagues weeping as they tried to work on her; tried to bring her back to them.
No CCTV, no evidence, no one brought to justice. A local magistrate suggested that perhaps the attack was not politically motivated after all, that maybe it was a mere robbery gone wrong, a tragedy never to be repeated. He denied allegations that he was a National Front member, of course.
Amir’s family rallied after him, supported him, trying to explain why such things happened. But from this point on he remained bitter and vulnerable and receptive to the poorer influences of life.
Uncle Esharveer was one of those poor influences.
Amir had first met his estranged Uncle at his parent’s wake. Amongst the grief he discovered the mystery of family dynamics; this Uncle who appeared to pay his respects yet received only furtive glances and muted whispers from those present. He sought no discourse with anyone, choosing to stand on the periphery and whenever Amir glanced over to Esharveer; his Uncle was watching him with ebony eyes.
Amir should have felt uncomfortable but he did not. He saw only strength in those eyes and drew comfort from their gaze. So much so, and against his family’s wishes, he approached Uncle Esharveer at the end of the wake and thanked him for coming.
“You have the presence of a good child,” Esharveer had said. “Goodness is a gift - a means to cajole and placate the unwitting and unwary.”
“I don’t understand,” Amir had said, his face scrunched in confusion.
“If you wish to know then call me on the one day when all seems hopeless,” Esharveer said, pressing a small black business card - daubed in gold writing - into Amir’s hand when he shook it farewell.
Amir kept the card for several months before he picked up the phone and called the gilt-edged number. It was after another row with his grandmother, another argument about his future. He didn’t want to be a doctor like his parents. He wanted to be an actor. He had a natural flair – that’s what his drama teacher had said. He wanted to go to stage school and follow in the footsteps of his hero Ben Kingsley.
A bone of contention leading to consistent consternation from his grand parents who were still grieving for their own loss; wanting to keep the memory of their children alive in him. He had to be a doctor, in honour of his mother and father. The weight of expectation was suffocating and he fought to be free of it. From nowhere Uncle Esharveer’s words come to him, “Call me on the one day when all seems hopeless.”
And that day had come all too easily. Esharveer’s voice had poured from the receiver, velvet and mellow. His words were comforting to the young, grieving Amir and within several short minutes Amir had decided that his fate lay not in hospitals or GP surgeries; it lay instead in the hands of clandestine Uncle Esharveer and his tantalizing words of fame and fortune.
So Amir left home and the expectations of his family behind. He went to stay with his Uncle Esharveer and from that point onwards Amir discovered that his aptitude to play roles would indeed find him fortune, yet his fame would have to wait until Interpol actually caught up with him.
***
“There’s the tributary,” Keene said into his mic. “We need to take the left artery.”
Shipman spied a triad of adjacent archways ten metres high, lit with a series of dull bulbs encased behind a thick mesh and snaking off into the distance.
The muted sounds of the zombie rats behind them kept Alpha Team’s pace constant and rapid. The creatures were only metres away, impervious to fatigue or fear; a relentless, focused enemy the like of which none of the men had ever known.
“We need that high ground, Keene,” Shipman said. “We can’t outrun these things forever.”
“We should see a gallery in twenty metres, Sir,” Keene assured him. “It’s ladder access, not so easy for the hostiles to climb.”
Honeyman fixed his eyes on the two men in front of him, though his mind was flitting between his mission and the lethal enemy at his heels. If his time in the army had taught him anything then the need to take the mission one stage at a time was perhaps the most useful; that and knowing your enemy of course.
And Honeyman was very up to speed on his enemies; those in front of him and those behind. The remaining members of Alpha Team were a means to an end. Sure, they were men he’d known for many years, men he knew well. But they never knew him, not really, deep down and dirty, beneath the pseudo honour - membrane thick - lay the kind of self-serving soul that a conglomerate such as Phoenix Industries could easily succumb with a bankers draft and an off-shore account.
Even with their dead tiny incisors nipping at the air, Honeyman couldn’t truly see the vermin chasing them down as enemies, they were to be after all his ultimate saviours; his meal ticket out of the army.
At best he figured he had another five years left. Then he was destined to relent to an obligatory period of readjustment in civvy-street, the limbo that often claimed so many ex-servicemen. But not Honeyman, oh no. It was time to bring his retirement forwards; time to secure his future. He’d served. And now it was time for his reward. But it wouldn’t be left to chance; he wanted it sure fire. And Phoenix Industries were about to make that happen.
“There, up ahead!” Keene said in his ear. “The platform.”
Their tunnel opened out into a large space. There, rising from a pool of stagnant water, a framework of steel threw skeletal shadows against the walls.
“Access ladder to the right, Sir!” Keene observed; his breathing heavy.
“Go! Go! Go!” Shipman ordered as he noted the ladder, a simple yet welcome salvation.
Keene had clambered to a midway point by the time Shipman launched himself at the rungs; the vibration of his landing jarring the structure. He scaled the ladder, keeping his eyes averted and watching Keene’s legs disappear over the metal summit and within mere seconds was listening to the staccato sound of a Heckler and Koch as Keene laid down suppressing fire upon the rats below. The bullets sheared many in half, scattering the shattered bodies this way and that; thinning out Honeyman’s furry entourage, but not stopping them, not daunting them.
Shipman rolled onto the platform, and came up shooting, the mesh mezzanine floor cutting into his knees. Honeyman launched himself onto the ladder, his bulk large enough to instill a shudder in the structure. Several rats came up with him, a salvo of furry missiles aimed at his back. The creatures were hewn from the air, their trajectory colliding with a wall of bullets from Shipman and Keene.
Impeded only by the incompatibility of the design of their bodies and the design of the ladder the rats struggled to keep their relentless pursuit; Alpha Team now easily picking them off as they tried to scale the platform.
“Looks as though the threat is neutralized,” Shipman said as the last blast of gunfire faded about him. “Honeyman, cover us whilst we do a recce.”
“Sir,” Honeyman acknowledged, keeping his gun aimed at the tunnel.
Shipman and Keene headed to the other end of the gallery, where there was a wide open space with another ladder at the far end. The rungs had been secured to the wall and after twelve metres disappeared into a dark hole in the ceiling.
“According to COM this is where we get off,” Keene said after rechecking his PDA.
“Great work, soldier,” Shipman said patting Keene on the shoulder. “Let’s see what we can see.”
It was when Keene began to climb the ladder th
at the world above them suddenly fell through the ceiling.
***
Smoke and heat met Thom Everett as he made it to the next landing. He stayed low; sucking in what little oxygen remained available to him as he battled with the aftermath of the blast that had ripped through Whittington’s penthouse.
His eyes watered and his throat ached, and instinct begged him to stop; telling him to go back down the stairs, for fuck’s sake. But his mind told him otherwise; his mind told him that there were many friends of Dennis what’s-his-name waiting to say “Hi” to him; maybe give a small token of their affection: a huge bite out of his burning throat for example.
So he moved on, mounting the stairs, keeping his hands away from the bubbling walls to his right; trying to focus upon the way ahead through eyes that wept for fresh air.
Through the gloom he saw a fire door and the words emblazoned upon the cracking paint almost made him whoop with delight.
Roof: Authorized Access Only!
He crawled towards it, his movements stiff as dehydration pulled his muscles taut; the last few agonizing moments seeming to last forever. He came up onto his knees, pushed a shoulder against the horizontal bar spanning the door frame and fell out onto the roof.
The air whipped into his face, instantly reviving him; his lungs screaming with physiological joy. He got to his feet and walked for three or four paces before crumpling onto his knees.
After the cramped, choked stairwell the roof space seemed infinite; Thom taking in the sights as well as a huge lungful of air. And the images before him filled him at once with wonder and despair for he could see the beauty of the stars, the storm having finally relinquished its hold on the skies; but he could also see the destruction leveled upon the city below where familiar structures were sheathed in flame and distant explosions sent soundless plumes of flame into the shimmering star spangled sky.
He felt suddenly woozy, and the horizon of this contradictory world upon which he cast his gaze did a three sixty before Thom hit the asphalt; sprawled and unaware that the door to the Hell he’d left behind was standing wide open.