by mike Evans
The disgusting sounds of Garrett busily projectile vomiting drew some attention from the blood covered attackers. Before the tall programmer had time to wipe his mouth with the back of his hand, one of the pack separated itself from the others to stalk closer. No words, not even grunts were exchanged, as the predator stalked off in search of fresh prey.
Throat burning with bile, Garrett stepped back once, twice, as Tiffani, the blonde and normally perky receptionist, stumbled closer. On any other day a bright and cheerful young lady in her early twenties, Tiffani now looked like an extra in one of those teen slasher movies. Tacky streaks of blood splashed over her bandaged arms as she lurched forward, and her full lips were pulled back in an aggressive snarl. The worst thing, though, were her eyes. Glassy, vacant, and dull, they reminded Garrett of the eyes of a doll. Or a shark.
“Oh, fuck this,” Garrett husked out, and he fell back another step until his heel struck the wooden bulk of the reception desk. He was still in shock, dealing with the horrors unfolding. Some part of his brain suddenly seemed to click onlike a dormant program called up on the menu. That part of his brain knew, instinctively, that if he failed to act, he would die. Right here.
Too scared to turn his head, Garrett stuck his hands behind him and scrambled blindly about on the surface of Tiffani’s desk, urgently searching for something he could use as a weapon. If Kenny and Zach’s poor showings were any kind of sign, with only his bare hands, he was looking at a losing struggle to seal off the attack by this rabid group of their coworkers.
Rabid? Like rabies, Garrett wondered, and then he was out of time as Tiffani threw herself at him in a way he would never have imagined before today. Fingers curled into claws, impossibly wide mouth gaping open, and bloody red lips drawn back into a snarl, Tiffani sprang forward with a growl.
Garrett, desperate and running out of options, grabbed the first solid item his hands close around on the desk. At the last second, he stepped to the side and allowed the desk to absorb the impact from the crazed receptionist. Unfortunately, Tiffany seemed barely fazed by the bone jarring strike and twisted her body in preparation for another try at Garrett.
The lamp was a reproduction, not the real thing, but still the brass was solid enough to do some damage.
Garrett almost lost the fight right there, before it even really started. Paul Garrett was normally a peaceable man, not prone to engaging in fistfights even as far back as middle school. This was way outside his comfort zone, and he wished he’d let Robbie come with him after all.
Jabbing tentatively with the angled brass lamp, leading with the glass globed end, barely slowed Tiffani as she bore in for the kill. The habits of a lifetime, to de-escalate a violent scene, worked against Garrett as it had with Kenny Kushner. Tiffani didn’t seem to notice the glass globe pressing against her chest even as the multi-hued globe began to splinter and crack.
Another shriek distracted Garrett, and a glance told him another of his former coworkers was now being swarmed over by their sickened counterparts. Zach Orbach went down under the weight of three attackers, and they continued to bite and maul the blood drenched man as he now lay sprawled on the gore slickened tile.
“Oh, shit,” Garrett whimpered in sympathy and as if sensing the distraction, Tiffani shifted once again, slipping to the side and lunging, bloody nails extended as claws as she moved. Gone was the perky and attractive young woman who Garrett once thought too hot to ask out, and the demon who replaced her was now wild for his blood.
Garrett reacted without thinking. Nine times out of ten, such a reaction would result in disaster. Ah, but that tenth time, such a mindless reaction might save your life. Sensing the monster’s move, Garrett spun the lamp on its long axis, swapping ends so the heavy metal base rose up in a blurred arc.
The brass and cement base caught Tiffani’s chin with bone breaking force. Garrett felt the mandible give way with a sickening crunch. The underhand blow rocked her head back explosively, and for one sweet second, Garrett thought the fight was over.
Such a catastrophic blow should have laid Tiffani out like a sledgehammer to the head of a steer. For the thing that used to be Tiffani, though, the shot might have stunned her for a moment. Then she seemed to shake off the force of the impact and begin to stumble forward yet again. Worse, Garrett noticed that another of the blood-coated monsters, undoubtedly drawn by the commotion, was edging in their direction.
Garrett freaked at the sight, and did the only thing he could think of. Choking up on the lamp, he swung for the seats and delivered another crashing blow to the Tiffani-thing’s skull. The edge of the lamp bit into Tiffani’s temple at an angle, and the brass sank in a good two inches as the side of the woman’s head caved in with the sound of a punted watermelon.
Tiffani froze, and Garrett, now nearly beyond reason, shoved with the brain-spattered end of slightly ungainly weapon. Toppling over backward, Tiffani managed to clip the other sickened individual, a man from the licensing department Garrett only knew as Mel. Taking advantage of the tangle, Garrett advanced one step, then another, and once again delivered an overhand blow that made his forearms ache from the impact as he crushed Mel’s left shoulder. The suit hit the floor in a sprawl, but before Garrett could fully recover from the follow through, his opponent managed to regain his knees and attempted to rise once again.
Garrett knew the man’s shoulder was shattered, much like he’d broken Tiffani’s jaw, to little effect. Time for an assessment, he thought even as he retreated once more to catch a breath. One quick peek at the conference room door revealed the desperate fight to keep the door closed was still playing out. While Zach and Kenny were being consumed, an ill-organized effort to barricade the door with chairs was being directed by a wildly gesticulating Kyle Stovall. In the jumble of workers, Garrett saw Traci hefting chairs that looked to outweigh her, but the young woman did it anyway. Jerking his eyes away, he focused on the immediate concern.
Okay, he reasoned coldly, these thing don’t seem to feel pain. They also somehow manage to shrug off debilitating injuries. Whether the source was from some mutated strain of rabies or something even more insidious, whatever these folks were exposed to must be hijacking their bodies. Whatever. Cracking Tiffani’s walnut appeared to put her out of the fight, though. Time to take out the central processing unit. Thinking back on his computer gaming experience, Garrett remembered a term from Tank Commander. Mobility kills. Yes, that might work, too.
By the time Mel was back on his feet, Garrett had some inkling of a plan. First, he bashed poor Mel in the side of the head so hard the lamp bent around the creature’s ruptured skull. As he’d hoped, Garrett saw Mel topple over much the same way Tiffani went down, and he didn’t so much as twitch.
Cocking the lamp back over his shoulder like a short, curved baseball bat, Garrett stalked closer to the mass of bodies piled up around the door to the conference room. To his horror, he saw Harvey was standing in the way this time, his considerable bulk helping stem the tide for the moment. In doing so, though, he was standing perilously close to the grasping claws of another of the bloody handed gang. Garrett felt himself stumble as he realized the monster trying to sink his fingers into Harvey was none other than Kenny Kushner.
Kenny, who Garrett saw go down with a torn out throat just minutes ago. Yep, this was Kenny and he was also missing chunks from his back, buttocks and most of his left hand. Eaten away. Oh, and he was obviously dead. The gaping wound where his throat used to be made this obvious.
“This is so bad,” Garrett muttered to himself as he examined the wounds on the other blood covered individuals, and he couldn’t look away.
Jim from Accounting reached out for Garrett, and the taller man dodged the hand and swung the lamp low. The battered base of the lamp struck the man hard across the knee, and Garrett thought he could hear the patella shatter. Yep, Garrett thought with morbid satisfaction as Jim fell, crabbing around on the floor in a fruitless effort to rise once again. Mobility kill. Then he lifted t
he brass lamp again and brought it down with all his strength, splattering Jim’s skull into white and red chunks.
As he approached the conference room, Garrett felt his shoes slip on the tacky tile, and he tried to watch his step while not paying too much attention to the clumps of hair, scalp and other things stuck to the once white flooring.
Some things you can never unsee, he realized, and Garrett knew that if he survived he would never be the same.
Another noise intruded on his thoughts and at first the sound made no sense. Springtime, and ice sheets breaking up in the river? Then he made the connection. Not ice, but glass. He saw it then, a jagged crack forming in the glass pane of the door. No doubt caused by the flex and pressure as the bloody Top Shelf employees fought to join their uninfected brethren.
No matter what Harvey or the others did, that door was going to break. And soon.
“Robbie!” Garrett called out. “Need some help here!”
Because with or without Robbie, Garrett was about to try something heroic. Heroic and probably dumb, since by his count, the rabid pack still had nearly a dozen members gathered near the entryway to the conference room. The glass door was spider webbed with cracks, and Harvey and a few others crowded into the space were all that kept the hungry mass of diseased flesh at bay. Whatever the numbers, Garrett was going to wade into that orgy of grasping hands and sharp teeth.
Garrett didn’t have many friends in this world, and he would risk a lot to help the ones he had. Garrett was no stranger to sacrifice, but never at this level, or for these stakes. Taking a second, Garrett carefully stripped off the last few shards of multi-colored glass from the shattered lampshade and readied himself for battle. Wishing he had a pistol instead of a two-foot long brass club, Garrett brought the lamp cocked behind his ear and prepared to charge into the melee.
CHAPTER FIVE
“Gar, hold up,” the call came at the last second, and Garrett instinctively brought the club around as he spun. Robbie held up a frightened hand and gave the older man a disbelieving stare. Then he took in the rest of the grisly scene and Garrett watched as Robbie McEntyre’s knees nearly buckled at the sight.
“What the fuck?” he managed to blurt out over lips suddenly gone numb with the shock of what he was seeing.
“Short version? Because we don’t have time for more,” Garrett replied. At that moment, he noticed Robbie appeared bearing gifts.
A pair of three-foot long, flat metal bars, to be exact. Chrome, if he guessed correctly, and approximately two inches thick. Solid.
“Are those…?”
“Short version? Yeah, these are the support bars on those stupid high barstools Marla convinced Stovall to buy for the breakroom. No free coffee, but six hundred bucks each for a set of four fucking barstools that no one can bear to sit on. I heard all the screaming and thought, hey, if terrorists got into the building with box cutters, then these should do the trick. But…those aren’t terrorists, are they?”
Robbie was teetering on the edge of freak-out, and Garrett knew Harvey and the rest of the folks trapped in the conference room just didn’t have the time. Dropping the bent and abused chunk of brass that used to be a Tiffany lamp, Garrett stuck out a hand in silent demand.
“No, and I just used that fake Tiffany lamp to kill the real Tiffani, Mel from Licensing, and Jim from Accounting.”
“Wait,” Robbie said, still trying to get his head around what he was seeing. “Jim? He was all torn up from lunch. No way he was in any shape to do this. And Tiffani? She just had a few scratches, and that girl can’t weight more than a hundred pounds.”
“Well, Jim was apparently still hungry, since he took several bites out of Kenny, and Zach. And now Kenny is also playing for their team. Whatever Jim picked up downstairs, it seems to be catching.”
At the sound of more splintering glass, Garrett knew story time was over. Snatching one of the metal bars from Robbie, he gave it an experimental swing and offered the other man a grin that was just this side of maniacal.
“This’ll do nicely,” he pronounced, and turned the reenter the battle.
“Hey, what about me?” Robbie asked plaintively. “What do you want me to do?”
“You can come with me and bash skulls, or you can go back around the corner and start trying to build a barricade out of those fucking pods. If we can get these people out of the conference room, then these rabid ones will likely give chase. Think defensive works, Robbie.”
Garrett then continued, softly, “I don’t think I can put them all down before they get me. Give the others a chance to survive this.”
With that, Garrett turned and stalked up to the bloody figure nearest the now-broken frosted glass paneled door. Under the ghoulish layer of blood and tissue, he recognized Joe Christopher. Joe was another of the traveling salesmen, a short fireplug of a man with an irritating laugh and an obvious crop of hair plugs. Now Joe looked half hollowed out, with strands of exposed intestine brushing the floor as he pressed his greedy hands against the crumbling safety glass.
The metal bar bit into the back of Joe’s neck as Garrett slightly mistimed his strike. A foul ball, rather than a base hit, but still did the job. Joe’s head fell over at an impossible angle, still attached to the body but with the bones in his upper spine shattered. Slumping forward, the dead weight crashed through the remaining pieces of glass. Now Harvey was fully exposed, with only Garrett now standing between him and the grasping hands.
“Gar?”
“Get out, Harvey,” he shouted at his stunned friend, “Get out of the way and go help Robbie.”
When Harvey seemed to lock up, Garrett repeated his commend with a bellow that exploded from deep inside his chest.
“Fucking run, Harvey! Get out of the way!”
While Garrett stood distracted, the bloody crowd closed ranks and continued forward with relentless determination. Now numbering more than fifteen, even after Garrett had managed to take down four of the infected, the group surged ahead even as Harvey slipped past. The club-wielding man sensed the presence of the others and spun, bringing his metal bar around in a flashing arc.
The bar snapped a questing arm at the elbow, and the sound was like that of snapping celery sticks. The impact barely slowed down the monster, so Garrett followed up with a slashing blow at the blood-drenched man’s knee that sent him tumbling to the floor. This also knocked down the creature behind, but now the rabid office workers were approaching two abreast. Garrett had another attacker closing with him almost immediately.
Taking an extra half-second to center himself, Garrett managed to deliver a two handed, crashing overhand strike to the balding man’s skull that sent the victim to his knees. Down, but surprisingly not out of the fight despite the gross deformity of his head. Vaguely aware of motion behind him, Garrett took a step forward and hoped what he felt brushing by were his previously trapped former coworkers. He didn’t have the strength, or ability, to fight this battle on two fronts.
And this was a battle, Garrett knew. These transformed people, these rabid animals, seemed incapable of reason or logic. Whatever infected their system not only took their thoughts and their sense of pain or self-preservation, it also seemed to lock their focus in on one goal. Feeding on the uninfected.
The primitive part of his brain knew this first, but rational Garrett quickly concluded this was a fight for survival. From what he’d seen happen to Kenny, the other side was busy trying to eat, and coincidentally convert, the remaining healthy Top Shelf employees.
A scuffle at his back forced Garrett to look away, and he caught a glimpse of Brad Downing tangled up with a smaller, petite form as they both tried to exit at the same time. With a jolt, Garrett realized the other person being pushed aside and in danger of being trampled was Traci. Brad stepped on Traci’s back, slipped and sprawled out on the slick floor before rising to a knee, panting. The golden boy’s face twisted up in a combination of terror and disgust, and he stayed frozen for a moment.
A
fresh surge of anger gave Garrett renewed strength, but he was forced to take his aggressions out on the next infected man who stumbled into arm’s reach. He now faced three foes, and he hacked savagely at the first two, desperate to protect the fallen woman just behind his heels. The first attacker went down with a single strike, the blunt end of the heavy metal bar nonetheless driving deep into the older lady’s forehead like a sword. Garrett couldn’t remember her name, having seen her around the office but having no idea of her job title or duties.
The second infected absorbed a savage blow to his temple but didn’t go down immediately, though he did act stunned. Garrett knew as soon as he hit the second man that he wasn’t going to have enough time to club down the resurrected Zach before his snapping jaws closed around his flesh. The angle was wrong, and he was out of time.
Strangely, Zach veered off at the last second and practically leapt to Garrett’s left, and a high, girlish scream pieced the air as Zach struck someone just visible in his peripheral vision. Traci? Shit, he’d never even had a chance to ask her out and now she was dead. He dreaded knowing, but he still flicked his eyes to the left for a split second. No, not Traci, he thought with relief. Brad.
“Nom nom, motherfucker,” Garrett muttered through dry lips as he scanned for his next customer. Seeing he had a few seconds while the screwed-up thing that used to be Max from payroll tottered up, Garrett turned slightly to see Traci now back on her feet and pressed close to the wall. A few more tardy office workers brushed by Garrett and hustled past the conjoined pair of Brad and Zach as they rolled back and forth on the now bloody patch of tile underneath their bodies.
“Garrett, what are you doing?”
Stovall. Standing right behind him and yelling in his ear. Great.
“Looks like I’m saving what’s left the of the office.”
“But, you can’t do that! Those are innocent men and women. They are just sick. We don’t punish people for being different, or sick! Put down your weapon and leave the area immediately. This is supposedly to be a weapon free workplace, mister!”