by Jack Hamlyn
NECROPHOBIA #2
DEADWORLD
By
Jack Hamlyn
CDC OUTBREAK WARNING
Report the following immediately!
1. High Fever
2. Aching Joints
3. Runny Nose
4. Muscle Aches
5. Persistent Headache
6. Nausea
7. Delusional Behavior
8. Irrational Terror or Paranoia
9. Seizures or Fits
10. Coma
This is to protect you and your squad! Be alert!
Failure to report symptoms is a punishable offense!
INTO THE DARK
When we stepped down the back ramp of the Stryker vehicle, the CDC posting was the first thing I saw. It was stuck to the wall of the National Guard armory outside White Plains. As we explored the complex which was like a dark, waiting tomb, I saw a dozen others, some tattered, some faded, one used as a dartboard, but all promoting the same grim message.
“This place has probably already been looted,” Sabelia said.
But Tuck wasn’t having that. “Well, there’s only one way to find out, ain’t there?”
She gave me a look, which pretty much said, why do I bother disagreeing with our token alpha male? And Tuck was that, all right. A hardcore ex-Marine Vietnam War hero, he was badass to his core and he came on very strong. But I knew him better than she did. As tough, gruff, stubborn and aggressive as he was on the outside, I knew on the inside he was a softy with extreme loyalty to us and one overriding passion in life: to keep us alive.
Yet, as much as he grew on you, when he was in combat mode he could really get on your nerves.
Tuck led the way through a garage door and into a long concrete corridor. “If there’s food or ammo here, we gotta take it,” he said, his voice not much above a whisper. “We’re scavengers now. We gotta survive.”
The darkness was waiting for us in there. The shadows had grown long like claws and I was just waiting for one of them to tear out our throats. I was with Sabelia 100%. I wanted nothing better than to get back in the Stryker and make for the ANG (Air National Guard) base in Pelham where the others were. I didn’t like being out after dark like this. It was taking unnecessary chances…just try and convince Tuck of the same.
We had been out on a sweep putting down zombies, scavenging, and getting the lay of things. What it amounted to was a mounted patrol like we’d done when I was in Iraq—driving around and seeing what you could see and finding what you could find, trying to draw out unfriendlies so you could waste ‘em. And we’d been successful on that part of it. We had dropped a dozen of the walking dead and drew fire from various survivalist factions in White Plains that spent their time fighting zombies and each other. They probably saw us as a pleasant diversion.
I knew when we spotted the Guard armory that there was no way in hell Tuck would let us just drive on by.
And so, here we were, clutching CAR-15 carbines in sweaty fists and probing the shadows with tactical flashlights mounted on the barrels.
“Ten minutes,” I said. “No more.”
“No more,” Tuck agreed even though we both knew he was full of shit.
I was in no mood for taking chances.
The past three months had been hard, really hard since The Awakening when Necrophage/Necrovirus, or “Zombpox” if you prefer, had brought the dead up out of their graves with some very scary culinary instincts. I had seen ugliness and tragedy that made me bleed inside. I didn’t want anymore; my plate was full.
Again, try and convince Tuck of that.
So put your foot down and refuse. If you state your case rationally, he’ll listen, I thought. He might even agree. He’ll listen, agree, then do what he wants anyway.
Wasn’t that the truth?
This was needless hero shit, the way I was seeing it and I didn’t need hero shit. I had a son who needed me back at the ANG base and I couldn’t afford to let him down. His mother was dead, and he had seen it happen. What he sure as hell didn’t need was for Tuck to roll back in with my corpse, spouting some jarhead bullshit from a bad movie about me dying a hero’s death.
Tuck came to a steel fire door. “It’s open,” he said, trying the knob.
“Well, then, we better go in,” Sabelia said with all due sarcasm.
I got on the walkie-talkie and raised Riley out in the Stryker. “Anything?”
“Nothing. All’s quiet on the western front.”
“Cute,” I said.
“I raised ANG Pelham,” she said, as we referred to our current home base. “I told ‘em we’d be late. Jimmy said he’d leave a candle in the window.”
“Quit jabbering on that thing,” Tuck told me. “We need noise suppression here.”
“Just let me know if you need Tuck,” I said over the walkie-talkie. “I’ll let you have him cheap.”
Sabelia smiled at that one. I didn’t see Tuck’s face, but I’m pretty sure he didn’t appreciate it.
NOTHING BUT BONES
He opened the door and we filed into what looked to be a mess hall. Tables were lined up in orderly rows and there was a thick covering of dust over them. Nobody had used this place in some time. It was a big room and we fanned out, probing into the darkness with our lights. At some point, the mess hall had been turned into some type of a storage room and there were cardboard boxes, and olive drab Army footlockers stacked around. Tuck and Sabelia started pawing around, looking for anything of worth, but they were all empty.
“Like I said, looted,” Sabelia told him.
“Don’t hurt to look,” he said.
I didn’t join them. I had a very unpleasant feeling at the base of my spine, and it was spreading out. I knew the feeling well, because I’d felt it plenty of times during the war and plenty of times since Necrophage spread its dark wings: danger.
I didn’t know where it was.
But it was there.
I searched around with my light, but I couldn’t see anything and I couldn’t hear anything, but that only made the feeling get worse. It was like ants crawling up my spine. There was something, but I couldn’t locate it. Then again, there was so much junk piled in there; so many places to hide. I kept searching and found a dusty collection of bones in one corner behind some boxes. The bones wore the well-chewed fatigues of a soldier.
“Got a dead one over here,” I said.
“How dead?” Tuck said, tensing.
“Just bones.”
He went back to sorting through the boxes. He was not gentle or quiet about it, tossing one box or crate aside after he was done with it, and making enough noise to wake the…well, that was a saying I didn’t care much for anymore. Regardless, so much for noise suppression.
I kept staring at the bones in my light, thinking this guy or gal was one of the lucky ones. That sounds cliché and I suppose it is. Nobody wants death, but there are worse things. Much worse things. And that’s what I was afraid of. Those infected with Zombpox that rose from the dead to wander endlessly, driven by an insatiable appetite for human flesh. If there could conceivably be such a thing as Hell in the religious sense, then that was it.
“I smell something,” Sabelia said. I could detect a note of alarm just beneath her voice.
“Well, it ain’t me,” Tuck said.
Why I hadn’t smelled it before, I don’t know. Nevertheless, suddenly it was there in my face, and up my nose; a death-smell. A gaseous stink of rot.
At that precise moment, something came out of the dark at me from behind a stack of footlockers. I had time to whirl around, gasp, and get my finger on the trigger of my CAR-15. I jerked it and let off a three-round burst that drilled right into the ceiling, because as I whirled around I tripped over a metal amm
o box, and went backwards and down.
It was sheer clumsiness.
However, I think it saved my life.
My flashlight illuminated a twisted visage of a face that was gray and green with mold, a huge mouth of bared teeth. As those sticklike fingers reached out for me, I went down.
The zombie—a woman, naked and moldering with autopsy stitching running from crotch to throat—reached down for me, globs of drool hanging from her mouth. At about the same time that I put my light in the dead woman’s face and pulled the trigger, I heard Sabelia cry out and Tuck swear. Another three-round burst. The slugs chewed into her face, shattering teeth, knocking out a clod of flesh the size of my fist, and penetrating her brain. It was that last one that got her, of course. It blew out the back of her head, spraying something vile and oozing against the boxes. She stayed upright, though. She turned around, stumbled five or six feet until she struck the concrete wall, sliding down it with her face and leaving a smear of gore.
Sabelia was there by then. “You okay, Steve?”
Breathing hard, I said, “I’ve been better.”
She helped me up and hugged me, holding me tightly a little longer than I was comfortable with. I could feel the heat of her body through her DPM fatigues, how curvy and finely muscled she was. Swallowing, I pulled away. My wife had only been dead less than two months. I couldn’t and didn’t want to get involved again. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
“You didn’t get bit, did you?” Tuck said.
“No, I didn’t get fucking bit.”
“I have to ask, Booky. I mean, hell.”
I smiled at that. It was an old thing between us. It went way back to when we’d both been union masons working construction sites. I spent my lunch hour reading as I ate, hence the name. But we all had our quirks. I read and Tuck played the fiddle…much to the annoyance of the other guys.
“Yes, he had to ask,” Sabelia said. “He wouldn’t be Tuck if he hadn’t. Nobody fears the Zombpox like he does. The germ freaks him out. He’s like the Howard Hughes of Necrophage. There’s a word for it, Tuck: Necrophobia. Fear of the dead.”
Tuck bristled. “Steve, you wanna tell your girlfriend her pop psychology sucks?”
Sabelia: “Tell Tucker that being stupid is not his fault. When the head’s no good, the body suffers.”
Tuck: “Tell your girlfriend that when there’s a slit at the bottom, the brain always falls out.”
Sabelia: “Please tell Tucker that he’s a moron.”
Tuck: “Tell your girlfriend to kiss my ass.”
Sabelia: “Semper I…because it’s all about you.”
“All right,” I said finally. “Enough.”
They tended to get on each other’s nerves and when that happened, they steadily got on mine, because they liked to refer to each other in the third person with me as interpreter.
“Enough is right,” Tuck said. “Tell the bitch to go bake some cookies.”
At this point, of course, I had to restrain Sabelia physically. Sabelia Cortez, you see, was raised up in the wrong neighborhood and spent her teenage years in and out of juvie for everything from shoplifting, to grand theft auto, to assault. She had been a member of a tough, all-girl street gang known as the Spanish SheWolves who enforced their drug territory with straight razors. Sabelia had reformed herself; spending two years in the Army, getting a degree in Political Science from Columbia, and working three years in the Peace Corps in Central Africa. She was an amazing person and an amazing success story, but when her hot Latin blood started boiling, look out.
Not that Tuck would back down.
He had pulled three tours with the Force Recon Marines in Vietnam, and even though he was sixty years old, he was solid concrete, 250 pounds without a scrap of fat. A rugged old spec ops type that knew ways of hurting and killing people you didn’t want to know about.
And who was always stuck in the middle of those two? Me.
“Let’s just get this job done,” I told them in the tone I usually reserved for my son when he was being bratty. “We don’t have time to play games here.”
They both silently agreed, and Tuck led the way off across the mess hall to a door on the far side. Riley had been calling, hearing the gunfire, and I told her everything was cool. After a quick sweep around to make sure there were no more surprises, Tuck found another doorway and we went through it.
Right away, the feeling of imminent danger rose inside me like bile.
RED ZONE
We cut down another corridor with Tuck taking the point and me in the backdoor position. Sabelia was right behind him with a fully loaded CAR-15 and I’m sure he was very much aware of it…as was she. We came into the bay of a big, very big, maintenance garage with Hummers, camo-ed front-end loaders, and a few deuce-and-a-half trucks that were lined up or, I should say, had been lined up for service before the world crapped its pants.
I didn’t like it in there. There were too many places to hide, too many dark corners, and little ells and parts cages for my liking. As we moved through, I felt myself physically bracing for some kind of impact. It was a habit left over from the war, I guess. When you were engaging the enemy—Hajjis, ragheads, dune coons, the list of derogatory terms for the enemy went on and on as it does in any war—and the lead was flying, peppering your Stryker like tossed rice, you tensed up because you were waiting for an RPG to slam into you.
And that’s what I was doing.
I was tense right down to my toes, just waiting for it. I knew it was coming. I was absolutely sure of it. My stomach was knotted up and my spine was tingling. It sounds like something from an old dime novel, but that’s exactly what I was feeling. There were too many places to hide in there. Too much territory for our meager three sets of eyes to take in, especially in the dark.
Then it happened.
I was expecting was three or four deadheads to come out after us like the dinner bell had been rang, but that’s not what I got at all. I heard a weird whistling sort of noise that took me right back to the war.
BAAAMMM!
There was an explosion and a thundering impact. Both Tuck and I, being war vets, hit the floor immediately. Sabelia joined us a split-second later. We heard another explosion outside the building, followed by two or three others, and then yet another struck the roof of the garage. This one was more close and personal. Ceiling tiles, brickwork, and plaster dust came raining down along with a piece of sheet metal that was on fire.
I got on the walkie-talkie. If the Stryker had been hit or disabled, not only was Riley probably dead but we were trapped a long way from home. But Riley answered right away. “Explosions,” she said. “I don’t know where they’re coming from! Like shellfire! They’re landing all over the place!”
Two more went off and the floor of the garage trembled.
That’s when the dead arrived.
One of them came shambling out of the darkness, bringing a grave-stink with him. Just like the woman earlier, this one was so silent it was chilling. It was a big guy, maybe a black guy. One thing was for sure; he was black now…black and bloated and flyblown. Most of his face had been eaten away as if something had been chewing on it.
He got within ten feet of us and then Tuck dropped him with a perfect headshot and he hit the floor a corpse.
There were other sounds then.
I knew them very well, and they were coming from the shadows all around us—that grisly sucking, smacking sound the zombies would make as they chewed on their own lips or gnawed on their own fingers. The drive to feed was tantamount with them. It was relentless, insatiable.
We formed ourselves into a loose semi-circle, chose our sectors, and just started shooting into the shadows where we heard the noises. In the flashlight beams and muzzle flashes, I saw dead faces leering out at me, and that’s where I concentrated my fire, aiming high for head shots. It was looking like we were boxed-in, which wasn’t a good thing, but what was worse were the explosions. They were mortar rounds; I had no doubt of i
t. But who in the hell would be targeting us with mortars? Good question and with all the crazies running around out there, no good answers.
In the next five minutes, we dropped ten or twelve zombies and that bought us time, because they were now feeding on the remains of their fallen brothers and sisters. The sound of that was appalling—chewing, tearing, slobbering and sucking sounds—and it was almost more than I could handle. The sound of those mouths sucking on flesh and teeth gnashing against bones went right through me until I just cried out, jumped up, and started shooting blindly, wasting ammo. I was out of my head, but needed to purge that awfulness from inside me.
What put me back down to my knees was not Tuck yelling at me, or Sabelia trying to pull me down, but another mortar barrage, and this one far worse than anything we had experienced thus far. Whump! Whump! WHUMP! WHUMP! The explosions tore through the garage and we all covered our heads. Our flashlight beams were clotted with dust and smoke, but they showed us the destruction around us. More of the roof had fallen in and the far wall was simply obliterated. It had been blown apart and collapsed onto a Hummer, covering it in bricks and burning timbers.
It was then I heard the .50 caliber machine gun on the Stryker outside begin to engage. Its staccato bursts were unmistakable. I knew Riley wasn’t the sort to panic. She had been an inner city cop and that was only the beginning of the shit she had waded through. No, if she was firing, then she had targets. She wasn’t the sort to light up shadows.
“Riley? Riley?” I said over the walkie-talkie. “What have you got?”
For a moment, she didn’t respond and my heart dropped down into my chest. Then the .50 cal engaged again. Finally, her voice came over the Motorola: “Targets out here! About a dozen!” she told me. “Right after that last barrage, they tried to run at the building! I cut most of them down and drove the others off…”
“Good job,” I told her.