They underestimated her, and that was not good for Mr. Feely, who kept taking the opportunity to rub the side of her breast while he frog marched her. She locked her arm against his hand and dropped like she couldn’t walk anymore. He reached for her with his other hand, but she batted it aside and delivered a stunning blow with the back of her fist to his temple. He was about four inches taller than she and had her by at least thirty pounds, but he was not prepared for the strike. Before he could react, she whipped her other hand up and smashed his nose just like she had done to the other guy not so long ago. He went down, and she moved away. Then it was just a matter of will over matter as she shouldered through the crowd. She moved with confidence, with intent, and some must have sensed it. Those who did not were moved forcibly.
They had taken her sword at the entrance, and she doubted she would ever see it again. She needed a new weapon, and Anders had just the thing. Like the other guards, like Mark, she had seen him use a blade that was razor sharp, about a foot long and serrated on one side. She planned to take it from him, cut his fucking throat and watch him flop on the ground like the dead little piggy that he was.
The hall was immense. She thought this was where they had occasional concerts, and it looked to be big enough. There was a huge barrel filled with water bottles. She grabbed several and sucked them down as she walked. The water was warm, but it was heaven. When was the last time she’d even had something to drink? She wanted to down a few more, but she didn’t want to go back for them.
Gunfire rippled around her, and she found herself ducking and looking for a place to hide, but a quick look to the rear confirmed that the shots were not in her direction.
She got a glimpse of him as he shouldered through the press. She followed in his wake, but now with a gentle touch. A hand there, a leg sliding between people. She muttered “excuse me,” but most of the time, the words were lost in the crowd.
At the end of the room, she saw several doors. Anders slid something against a plate, flung the door open and strode inside with a confident step. She rushed to follow and just got her fingertips between the door and the frame.
Screams filled the room as something happened behind her. At the sound of glass shattering, she shoved the door open and slipped through. If anyone else was lucky enough to see her, they were more than welcome to follow, as long as they didn’t get in the way.
The door led to a hallway filled with medical equipment. She caught a flash of green at the end of the hallway and followed. Her skin felt sticky, and her clothes clung to her, thanks to the blood. Like she had bathed in crimson, wasn’t that what one of the men had said about her? The one who had touched her, jabbed her, acted like he could put his hands on her body. She had played dead, but he learned the hard way that it was wrong to underestimate her.
She followed, moving lightly from foot to foot. Exhaustion dogged her, but she was on the hunt, and such things took a back seat. She would have time to rest later. She had trained for so many years to be stronger, faster, to have more endurance. She had trained with weapons and with her fists. It was now, at the height of this deadly infection, that she would be able to put her formidable skills to work.
She worked her way down the hallway, checking doors as she went, but none yielded to her questing hand. The walls were white, but when she got close, she noticed discolorations. In the bright fluorescence, it was obvious that stains had been removed.
The door she had entered at the other end of the hall opened, and with it came a rush of noise. Screams and hollers. Gunshots and heavy objects crashing. She looked back and caught a glimpse of an older man. His image tugged at her memory and then was gone. Had he been a friend? She considered killing him. She could just walk up to him and crush his throat with the edge of her hand. If he knew her, it would be that much easier. Hi, remember me? Then a quick blow, and he would be out of her hair. But someone might see his body and raise all kinds of hell. Besides, she might lose Anders if she doubled back.
She chose to follow the piece of shit who had left her to the rapist. Nothing else mattered now. She reached the end of a second hallway, and the white coverings on the walls disappeared. There were doorways along the long passageway, but she didn’t bother trying them. The man she was after had run to the end of the hall with that girl in tow. Worm? No, Bug. They called her Bug, and she put up with it. Her name started with an A or maybe an E; Kate was sure of that much.
Something slammed closed up ahead. She came around another sharp turn and caught sight of a door popping open. Someone was in a hurry and didn’t close it properly. She noticed numbers and letters spray-painted on the doors, covering whatever had been painted on them before.
CONT A. FURN C2. What they meant, she couldn’t even begin to puzzle out. Probably made up by some pencil pusher who didn’t have to find his way around down here.
A map fluttered as she passed, but it was a mish-mash of sticky notes and scribbles. She didn’t have time to stop and check them out; she just ran on. When she reached the doorway, she burst inside.
She was already on edge, ready to strike, but the sudden starkness of the room into which she had walked stopped her in her tracks.
Cells had been constructed and attached to walls like giant white pods. People stood around desks, making notes or throwing papers into a large plastic bin on wheels. Men and women in white suits moved quickly to file the papers as others tossed them. There were at least fifteen people who looked to be scientists or doctors, and all seemed near panic. A pair of guys in green with automatic rifles over their shoulders stood at the end of the room.
Anders stopped and talked to one of the men. He gestured back at her, and that was not good at all.
She knew when it was a losing battle, so she decided to forego a frontal assault that would probably see her guts splattered all over the wall, and ducked into a side room. As she passed one of the pods, she saw something that stopped her cold. One of the deaders was trussed up like a turkey dinner. Every inch of his body was secured to something, and he had a massive ball gag shoved in his mouth. She was pretty sure that somewhere, some fucker would pay to be bound like that. These monsters didn’t have a choice.
Blood-red eyes met hers, and if the deader could snarl, she might have seen it, but she didn’t stick around long enough for further analysis. Kate made for one of the numerous doors that lined the side of the room, opened the first one while glancing behind her at the looks of shock and dismay on the faces of the workers inside. The soldiers were on their way, so she walked through the door, slammed it shut and spun a tiny push lock into place, knowing it wouldn’t hold them for very long.
She looked for something with which to block the door and found more than a few items.
The room was probably used for storage at one time. It might have held concession supplies: bags of popcorn, drums of soda, and all the fixings that hot dogs required.
Now it was filled with gray bins on wheels, the kind they used to cart around refuse and recyclables. The carts were no longer filled with such innocuous things.
It was rank in the room, smelled like festering meat. Most of the bodies had been shot in the head, but some had parts removed. A couple of corpses had the remains of heads at the ends of necks. She tried to understand what could have caused this kind of damage. Then she spotted the sledgehammer in the corner of the room.
“Fucking animals,” she snarled.
Mike
The maelstrom behind us, I tried to catch my breath, but it wasn’t there. I panicked as I gulped in air, and I couldn’t seem to get enough. My heart pounded in my chest and felt like it was going to rip free. I saw stars as I reached for a wall that also wasn’t there. Then the room seemed to narrow as I sank to my knees. I leaned forward and felt the cold tile beneath my hands. I wanted to curl up and pass out.
This had happened once before, and I’d spent a few months on antidepressants. I was having a panic attack, and this was just about the worst time imaginable. N
elson reached down and hauled me to my feet.
“Breathe, goddammit!” he yelled. “Not deep breaths, just normal. Nice and steady. Don’t make me slap the shit out of you.”
“Trying,” I mumbled. He stuck a hand under my arm and draped it across his shoulder, then staggered away from the door. Hands beat at the portal we had just entered. They pulsed against it in a steady tattoo that sounded just like my heart, like their panicked hands were controlling my pulse. I shuddered and wondered if this was a heart attack.
We made it to the end of a hallway, where another door met us. There was no lock, probably no time to install them, my rattled mind said. Just doors everywhere, open to the touch. We went through and then followed a winding passageway until we came to another door that required not only a card but also a code. It took Nelson a few tries to get the button order correct.
“Doubt she’s in here, but it’s the only way I know.”
Back the way we came in, a hallway had gone in both directions, but there was no way to tell which Kate had taken. Did it matter that much? Our relationship had been all of a few hours spent together. Still, I felt a need to offer some kind of protection to her. Not that she needed it. Even if I’d had an assault rifle, I still felt like she was more dangerous.
My head smacked into the frame as Nelson maneuvered us into the doorway. I saw stars and nearly went over, but his grip on me was strong.
“Sorry,” he muttered.
The door slammed shut behind us, then clicked as a lock engaged.
“It’s all right; I was already dizzy,” I mumbled back.
Eyes on us. I looked up and saw at least three sets. Their owners were dressed in white, the kind of suits I’d seen on doctors who’d worked with viruses in just about every horror movie I had ever watched where the military brought in scientists to evaluate a situation. That made sense, of course, since we were all living in that movie.
“This man had a panic attack. Any of you docs got something for him?”
“Panic attack?” one of the men said. He was in his fifties and sported a brown-and-gray beard that made “unkempt” look desirable in comparison. He had on the requisite Coke-bottle glasses and actually squinted at me as if the massive lenses weren’t thick enough.
“I’m fine,” I said, but the words came out slurred.
Nelson hobbled to a chair and dumped me in it. It was an old plastic thing that would have been at home in a hospital waiting room fifteen years ago. I slouched down and tried not to make another journey to the floor. Once was enough today. The room wavered around me as I shook my head. The faces peered at me with intent, like I was some kind of lab specimen.
A loud banging drew my eyes from the others in the room. It was then that I noticed my surroundings.
There were at least half a dozen cages in the room, each with a set of thick bars making up a doorway. They were nearly man height, but I had seen similar things in documentaries and was reasonably sure they had held simians before. That would explain how strong they looked. No one would make a cage like that to hold a person; it would be inhumane. But put a monkey in one, and it didn’t seem so bad. Now that I saw them up close, I knew better. These were pathetic affairs designed for misery, and as I came to shaky feet, it was misery that I faced.
The first cage lay less than ten feet from me. I angled toward it, even though one of the men put up a hand to stop me. I brushed past him, so the others came at me. Three against one, and me as weak as a baby. Still, I kept on going, hoping to at least get a glimpse before they tossed Nelson and me out of the room.
She was barely twenty, if that, and she looked like she had seen hell.
The eyes drew me first, so familiar, so well known to any who had been in the city for the last few days. Blood-red, like someone had punctured every blood vessel. They were wet, though, and up close, I noticed for the first time that they had a yellow pussy substance leaking from them.
Her mouth was a mess, lips torn, lower one hanging by a strand. She had a gag, one with a massive ball, something you would see in S and M play. I was horrified, and yet the image made me snort back a grim laugh.
One cheek was raw hamburger. It looked as if she had been dragged across the road. There were even black flakes and bits of gravel or dirt embedded in her flesh. She was tightly bound from the chest down. Thick yellow strapping material held her in place tighter.
“Do they even breathe?” I asked whichever of them was closest.
“Who are you guys?” one of the men asked. I kept my eyes on the wretch, couldn’t look away if I wanted to. She snarled around her gag but didn’t get any further with the death threats. What was she even thinking in there?
“I’m military; he’s a civilian contractor brought in to assess certain aspects of Lazarus Black. We ran into some hassles out there. Just let us go without any trouble, and we’ll return the favor. Leave you to your work.”
“I need to see some ID. You look legit, but he looks like he just walked in off the streets.”
If he only knew how right he was.
“Lost it in the ruckus. Look, man, those things are breaching the perimeter. They’re coming from all corners of the city. This place don’t stand a chance, even if the men with big fucking guns stick around and don’t skedaddle out of town on the first military transport they come across.”
One of them drew up alongside me. She was in her sixties and had a tight brown-and-gray-streaked bun. Her glasses rode far down on her hawkish nose. She had weather-beaten features, like she spent a lot of time outside. Probably a climber, if I didn’t miss my guess. Folks in the Northwest just loved to climb stuff, no matter how old the climbers got.
“They do breathe, but not that often. Like their hearts. They beat, but sometimes only once a minute. There are electrical impulses that still fire, but we can’t figure out how.”
“So they aren’t dead?”
“Close. The term ‘deaders’ is a good one, just like ‘zombie’ would be if anyone had the balls to admit it.”
“Zombies, what next? Is Bigfoot going to show up and demand the keys to the city?”
“A week ago, I would have said zombies were bullshit. Bigfoot? Still bullshit, but I’m changing my mind on the first one. Besides, what city? This place is going to be cleansed by morning.”
I stared at her with my mouth open for a good fifteen seconds before I shut my trap. She didn’t mean it; she couldn’t. The idea of destroying the city was ridiculous. People were safe, and rescue missions were ongoing.
“I knew you weren’t one of the contractors. You don’t know a damn thing.” I noticed that she had a slight Southern accent from the way she rolled out the ‘a’ in “damn.”
“I lost my badge,” I mumbled.
“And I lost my virginity. Just stick with tall and well-armed over there, and you’ll be all right.”
I didn’t say anything. My mind whirled, which didn’t help my dizziness. I wondered if it would be cool to ask the scientist if they had any Ativan lying around. The last time I went in for a minor procedure, they had me pop one to calm the nerves. I could do with a half-dozen of those babies, washed back with a couple of stiff shots.
If I didn’t get it together, I was pretty sure the fragments of my mind were going to just give up and call it a day.
“We don’t know how it works, not exactly. I mean I can give you the civilian version if you want. Or I can say a bunch of stuff that will make you scratch your head.”
“Are you always this condescending? Besides, you don’t really know who I work for,” I said and tried to add a hint of menace.
“You look like you work at the sanitation department and you got left in a dumpster. I can also tell that you wouldn’t know a branch-chain amino acid if it slapped you upside the head.”
I didn’t enjoy being spoken to like a twelve year old, but okay, I let her have her fun at my expense. If it was going to get me answers, I supposed it was worth the aggravation. Still, I wanted to slap the
hell out of her. Did she know what it was like out there? Did she even care that the things she studied were once people?
The woman in the cage drew back her lips and snarled at us around the gag. She didn’t care for the scientist too much either.
“The rabies virus. I heard about it.”
She turned to consider me.
“Impressive. Not many know about that. I knew Dr. Stein, you know. He was a brilliant man, but he loved his wife like a sickness. Everything he did was for her. He had his own little lab tucked away in that tiny house, down in the basement. Nobody knew. He was doing experiments on animals, infecting them with rabies, trying to create tumors. Some people called him a genius. I called him an asshole.”
I didn’t say anything, but I did wish I had my phone out to record this.
“He took some of our research money and squandered it on her. Just look at what he’s accomplished. A disease more virulent than any in the history of man and with a ninety-eight percent mortality rate.”
“Not everyone dies?”
She got a schoolteacher look on her face.
“That’s the crazy part. As I said, they don’t really die. Their bodies go into a sort of vegetative state. They seemed to have no fine motor skills at first, but that changed. The earliest version of the virus made them look like something resembling zombies. But the virus has gotten meaner and faster. And the deaders are like that now. Meaner and faster. They hunt in packs, and some are inhumanly strong.”
“Is there a cure?” I asked. If she had told me this tale a week ago, I would have called the whole thing bullshit, but I had lived in this nightmare for days.
“That’s why we’re here. To find a cure. They sent in a few of Stein’s fellow research scientists and enough money and supplies to find a cure for AIDS. But it’s no good. We need years, not days, to fix this. It’s too late now anyway.”
Among the Dead Book 2 (Among the Living) Page 23