Zombie Team Alpha: Lost City Of Z

by Steve R. Yeager

“You’ve heard the legends,” Moray said with a hint of pride in his voice. “Now you know that they are true because you are seeing it with your own eyes—we are seeing it. Remarkable, is it not?”

  “Then who is the—guy?” she asked. “Whoever he is, he looks a lot like a white guy. So if this city was built a thousand or more years ago—why is he…white?”

  She had a point, Cutter thought. He examined the man on the platform again. It appeared the figure was wearing clothing that could have been from the beginning of the last century, or slightly thereafter.

  “You think that’s Fawcett, don’t you?” Cutter asked.

  “Very good, Mr. Cutter,” Moray said. “Yes, that man is indeed Fawcett. But it is not Colonel Percy Fawcett. That is his son, Jack Fawcett.”

  “Jack?” Cutter repeated. Then he recalled what he had read about the adventure. It made sense, he guessed. But if that was Percy Fawcett’s son, then—

  “It is truly his son, Mr. Cutter,” Moray said. “Percy Fawcett always believed that his son was destine for greatness. He was told this by a woman named Madame Blavatsky—a spiritualist, a fortune-teller of the times.” He paused and took a deep breath. “El Dorado, can you believe it? Even I am having trouble with the reality of our discovery. But this prophecy about Percy’s son was the primary reason he brought him along on the search. One might think he needed his son’s help to find the city. But that wasn’t it. He brought him here to elevate him to this exalted position. Jack Fawcett is—literally—The Golden Man.”

  “But he’s dead,” Morgan stated.

  Cutter glanced at her, then Moray. “She’s right. What good is it to be the ‘Golden Man’ if you are dead?”

  “Is he, in fact, dead, Mr. Cutter?” Moray asked, taking a step toward the stairs leading into the temple.

  Cutter hesitated for a moment, and in that moment, he looked at his feet. Then he crouched down and touched the gritty dirt on top of the fitted stones. There were marks. A footprint? His eyes traced from that single print to a series of disturbances in the soft earth to his left.

  A wave of unease washed over him, causing him to freeze. He took a deep breath. Let it out. Then he shot to his feet and thrust an arm out to stop Morgan and Gauge, who had started to move toward the statue. They hitched their steps and followed Cutter’s gaze. They too stopped in their tracks.

  “Stop!” Cutter said in a half-whisper, half-shout in Moray’s direction. The man didn’t even pause. He strode onto the first row of steps.

  Cutter raised his MP-5K and indicated with a hand gesture to Gauge, signaling him to fan out to the right, while he planned to go left. He glanced down at the tracks again, then back over his shoulder.

  He saw nothing but sensed something lurking nearby.

  They were not alone.

  - 33 -

  RUN AND GUN

  From off to Cutter’s left, dark, shadowy figures emerged from the crumbling structures. More appeared to his right. A third group spilled out from the collapsed buildings straight ahead of where Morgan was standing. It was as if the creatures had just bubbled up from the ground, or had been lying in wait. Cutter sniffed the air. It didn’t smell of danger, nor did he sense any rotten flesh as he had half-expected.

  But the creatures were there. He saw them clearly. They were similar to the zombies he’d encountered in Russia. Most, though, were the size of the natives in the area—short, dark, and wiry. And there was no decay he could see on their naked skin. They looked as if they were among the living—except for their eyes. The eyes were pinpricks of satanic red surrounded by pools of blackness so dark that they caught the scant rays of light from above and absorbed every photon of it.

  They began to move toward him with the agility of forest predators, eyes speaking of evil intent.

  Cutter scanned the immediate area for an avenue of escape. The only clear path would take them through the temple. Since he could not see the other side from where he was, he had to hope there were no more of the zombies lurking inside.

  Backpedaling, he unhooked a pair of flash-bang grenades from his belt, gripping one in each hand. He hooked his fingers through the safety rings and yanked out the pins.

  “Go!” he yelled.

  Morgan, Reyna, and Moray scrambled up the steps behind him, converging at the entrance and weaving their way inside the temple.

  Cutter waited behind with Gauge for a couple of beats. After a knowing nod, he pitched the twin grenades, spun, and they both ran like hell.

  Seconds later, the grenades went off with back-to-back thunderous booms that rocked the air behind him. He and Gauge raced to gain precious distance from the zombies before the stunning effects wore off.

  Willing his muscles to move faster, Cutter raced shoulder to shoulder into the temple with Gauge at his side. They weaved past chunks of fallen stone as they circled around the massive platform in the center containing the golden statue. When Cutter emerged through a tall archway on the opposite side, he skidded on his heels to change directions, and flew down the stairs.

  Moray, Reyna, and Morgan were already heading hard and fast for an empty street in the near distance. Cutter and Gauge followed, gaining on them with each step.

  Another sound split the air behind him. Cutter instinctively ducked, but no pressure wave hit him. He slowed and spun. He slowed further. His mind was screaming in alarm, but he was too stunned by what he saw emerging from the temple to take heed of the warning.

  El Dorado—the Golden Man. The statue had come alive.

  Swallowing hard, he raised his weapon. Gauge beat him to the punch and let fly a burst of rounds. Every single one hit right where they were supposed to.

  The golden figure staggered backward a few feet. It then reasserted itself and came marching forward. This time, it was encompassed and swallowed whole by the horde of zombies pouring from the temple.

  “Jack!” Morgan yelled from afar. She was beckoning him to follow.

  With a troubled glance at a confused-looking Gauge, Cutter turned to follow the rest of the party. “Come on. Let’s go. We’ll figure it out later.”

  Legs pumping, Cutter reached the first of the collapsed houses. He began scanning for one that was intact, or a wall, or some sort of structure that would allow them to form a chokepoint. But nothing appeared solid enough, or narrow enough. Not yet. He ran harder and pulled past the others, darting left and right, leaping over fallen stones from crumbling walls. He was in his element now.

  Chancing a peek over his shoulder at the zombie pursuers, he paused to let the others catch up and pass him.

  The zombies were hot on their trail—and gaining. The Golden Man followed behind the mass as if shepherding them all forward.

  “Run. Keep going,” he told Gauge, who had been the last one to catch up to where he had paused. He slapped him on the shoulder and encouraged him to follow the group.

  Cutter swung around and opened fire to slow the horde’s progress. He let out a series of controlled bursts that took down the fastest of the zombies, collapsing them into heaps that formed obstructions the others had to navigate past.

  With a growing understanding, he realized these zombies were not at all like the ones in Russia. These, who wore the bodies of the natives of the area, were coming at him much faster. Too fast for him to handle on his own. He was about to be overwhelmed.

  Facing a no-win situation, he sacrificed a few bullets for time as he caught up on his breathing, then went sprinting after Gauge. The big man had pulled alongside the others and was driving them forward. Cutter encouraged the big man onward, wanting to make sure Gauge was the one out front to confront any trouble they might run into.

  Whirling on his heel, Cutter fired again before taking off from his exposed position. He followed the others as they rounded the corner of a toppled structure and disappeared behind it. He wasn’t at all sure if they even knew where they were going, but Morgan seemed to be leading the way now, and he trusted her instincts to find somewhere safe.

/>   While he’d thought there should have been a good place to make a stand along the way, nothing so far had suited. The ground rose and fell as he weaved and bobbed and leapt over scores of pitted stones covered in green lichen. His boots smacked first against the sandy stones then slid across the slimy growth.

  Less than a minute later, he slowed when the group slowed. They drew up together and took a hard left and ran for a clearing in the far distance. At the end of the clearing was a solitary structure covered with large slabs of dark gray stone. The crumbling structure was far more intact than the others they’d passed so far. It might just work.

  Cutter ran backward and blipped off a burst of lead at the closest of the zombies. They had been gaining on him and were no more than forty or fifty paces from him now. He kept firing. One more down. Two more down. Then he started getting jittery and began missing. He ceased fire and focused on moving again quickly, feet pounding against the hard-packed dirt and fitted stone of the roadbed, heart going into overdrive.

  His legs were moving faster than he could ever remember them moving before. It didn’t seem possible he could be running so fast, but he was.

  Just before reaching the building, one by one, they sprinted past a bright sunbeam filtering down through a hole in the canopy far above. Dust motes seemed to dance before Cutter’s eyes like tiny flecks of gold as he sprinted through it.

  Then those flecks disappeared and darkness descended as he ducked inside the still-standing structure. Inside, Morgan drew to a halt, and Cutter and Gauge took up defensive positions on either side of the entranceway.

  For a brief moment, he reconsidered and went back outside. He quickly looked for a way to climb onto the roof, but nothing seemed possible, so he rejoined the others inside, huffing air.

  The zombies kept coming. Off in the distance, just clearing the last of the crumbling buildings, was the golden statue come to life. It proceeded as if it didn’t have to hurry. The implications of that sent new shivers of fear racing up and down Cutter’s spine.

  When the first zombie reached the sunbeam, Gauge opened fire. Heads began to explode as each pull of the trigger sent well-placed shots that created pockets of pink mist as each zombie entered the beam of sunlight. The mist lingered there for only a moment as the bodies dropped away like saplings cut down by the swing of a giant ax.

  Cutter sank to one knee and fired, using the stone-ringed doorway they had entered to steady himself. His precision shooting started dropping even more from the horde.

  But the zombies kept coming.

  More and more and more and more.

  - 34 -

  LEADER OF THE CITY

  “Is there a back door out of this place?” Cutter barked over his shoulder before firing again.

  “Maybe,” came the shouted response from Morgan.

  Cutter fired again. His ears were ringing from the reports. Brass pinged off the stones and bounced wildly. Zombies crumpled and ceased to move.

  Still, they came.

  Time seemed to slow to a crawl. Cutter could see everything with a renewed clarity as a sudden euphoria swept over him. The sensation was unlike anything he had experienced before, in and out of combat. It was as if something was assisting him and keeping him going. No longer did he feel the various pains that had been constant companions. His head was buzzing with conflicting ideas as his mind raced a mile a minute to calculate which zombie to drop next to be most effective. That made it almost effortless to target and drop zombie after zombie before they got too close.

  He’d become a bringer of death—or peace. He wasn’t sure. But he was experiencing it all between the span of a few heartbeats.

  His mind spun even harder while he chose each of his targets. It bifurcated, and he saw himself firing while also attempting to calculate where they were all coming from, and what he could do to stop them, or where they could go to escape them. Up the stairs on the cliff? Would they be trapped? Was there another way out? Could they kill them all?

  So many questions flooded his mind all at once that they became no more than a blur.

  Oddly, the steady barrage of stray thoughts didn’t alter his ability to aim in any way. He squeezed the trigger, again and again, taking single shots with each pull and creating an even larger pile of zombies in the clearing where the sunbeam was striking the valley floor.

  Then his next trigger pull resulted in nothing more than a mechanical click.

  Out of ammo.

  He had more—three or four full magazines at least—but it was in his pack and would require time to retrieve it. He reached for the Glock at his hip and drew it—

  A dull thud sounded behind him. Any other day he would have missed the sound amid the racket he and Gauge were making. But not today.

  He turned toward the sound instinctively.

  Reyna, Morgan, and Moray had shoved over a stone block at the back of the structure. They were about to squeeze through the gap they had created. Cutter resumed his covering fire, using his Glock, counting off how long it might take for them to all escape out the back. It seemed to take an eternity between each shot.

  Then time sped up again.

  “Jack!” Reyna yelled. She had gone through the gap they’d made and had reached back through it, dangling her fingers and beckoning him to follow.

  “Go,” Cutter told Gauge.

  But Gauge didn’t go; he circled behind Cutter and pulled out another magazine. While Cutter fired, Gauge swapped magazines.

  “Get out,” Cutter said. “Now.”

  “Not yet.” Gauge pulled the pin on a grenade and tossed it outside. “You first,” he said.

  Cutter didn’t hesitate. He lunged for the gap in the wall behind him and twisted through it, holding his MP-5K out front. He climbed out on the other side and rolled over on his shoulder as the grenade went off.

  Gauge came next. But as he tried to get through, his shoulders wedged in the gap. He was too big. He wasn’t going to get through.

  “Help me,” Cutter barked.

  Moray, Morgan, Reyna, and Cutter grabbed Gauge by the arms and pulled. Straining, Cutter redoubled his efforts.

  But it was no use. Gauge did not budge.

  “Step back,” Cutter said. Somehow, the answer had come to him. He didn’t know why or how, but he squeezed an arm past Gauge and pulled for all he was worth.

  A stone block shifted. He kept pulling and it shifted a little more.

  Gauge scrambled, twisted, and with a final grunt, fell through the hole.

  “Gonna have to lay off the honeypots there, Pooh-bear,” Cutter breathed.

  Gauge looked at him funny as he brushed himself off. “What’d you mean by that…?”

  “Look out!” Morgan said.

  Hands reached through the gap. The zombies had made it inside the structure and were all trying to get through the hole at once. Cutter slammed his elbow down on the first of them climbing through. Gauge pulled his Desert Eagle .50 and fired at the next one, killing it.

  That seemed to stop them for the moment.

  Then the zombies that had tried to come through the gap were all pulled back inside the structure. Cutter caught a hint of gold.

  The Golden Man tried to shove his way through the gap.

  Gauge fired. The big .50 caliber handgun barked loudly, and the bullets slammed into the living statue. Each bullet caused the Golden Man to buck and shake, but it was having no more effect than if someone had been hitting it with their fists. After each shot, it simply shook it off and resumed its efforts to crawl through the gap.

  Cutter raised his booted foot to kick the thing back inside. Gauge stopped firing and Cutter slammed his boot down hard on the thing’s face. That drove it back inside the gap.

  He felt Morgan behind him. She put a grenade in his hand. He pulled the pin and tossed it inside the structure.

  “Run!” Cutter shouted.

  They all separated and sprinted away from the building. The grenade went off behind him, but he didn’t sto
p to check on the results. He resumed following the others, with Morgan leading the way. Gauge jogged forward and joined him at his side. The big man swapped magazine in his own MP-5K by stealing one from Cutter’s pack, then Cutter did the same while Gauge covered for him.

  “Like the Terminator,” Gauge said.

  “Yeah,” Cutter replied, “like the goddamned Terminator. Think we can kill it?”

  “We might have already.”

  “Don’t count on it,” Cutter growled.

  “Then we’ll need more firepower. Betty only seemed to dent it. I told you we should have brought something bigger.”

  “Yeah, bigger. Hey, Morgan.”

  “What, Jack?” she said, slowing.

  “Can you make us a big bomb? Use up everything we have?”

  “Sure, but I’ll need a little time.”

  “Keep going, we’ll find somewhere to stop.”

  “I know just the place,” she said.

  Instead of continuing forward, she went left onto another street that narrowed until the walls on each side scraped against Cutter’s shoulders. He had taken the rear-guard position and could not see anything in front of him. Gauge blocked the way and was struggling again to make it through the passage.

  When they filed out of the narrow alleyway into a large open space, the central plaza stood before them, then the temple in the center of it. They had returned right to the place they had started.

  “We can’t stop to admire this now,” Cutter said. “Let’s go.”

  “No,” Moray stated.

  “He’s right, Jack,” Morgan said. “Inside the temple. If you and Gauge can cover the entrances, I can build you that bomb.”

  Cutter sighed. “Okay. Lead the way.”

  Inside the temple, they stopped next to the platform where the Golden Man had been. The base of the platform was adorned with strange artwork drawn in intersecting lines. Some white lines, some black. The marks looked almost like tick-marks used for counting.

  “Hurry up or we’ll be trapped,” Cutter said to Morgan. “Get that bomb made so we can get the hell out of here.”