by Jack Hamlyn
“I ain’t liking it much, Steve,” she said. “You better get your asses out of there.”
“The voice of wisdom,” Sabelia said.
I expected some smartass reply from Tuck, but he had other things on his mind. Two zombies came shambling out of the smoke and settling debris. They made no sound. They were silent and relentless. Nothing mattered to them, but the feeding. Before I could even think of bringing up my weapon, Tuck was in a firing stance and he dropped both of them, obliterating their heads with some fine shooting that I would never have been able to execute.
“Come on out!” he called out to the others that we all knew were out there. “Come and get some!”
None of them took him up on the offer, though.
DEAD END
As we waited, a weird, almost eerie silence fell over the garage. There was nothing from outside; no incoming, no nothing. And inside, only the sound of things burning and popping with heat. I could hear the labored breathing of the three of us, bits of rubble falling from the blasted wall. That was it.
“Let’s get gone,” Tuck said.
We stood up and were about to re-trace our steps when six or seven of the dead came out of the corridor that we had just vacated. Tuck saw them first, as Tuck always seemed to see them first.
“Get to cover!” he said, shoving me into Sabelia.
We both saw him pull a white phosphorus grenade from his pack and that meant business. He jogged a short way over to the cover of one of the trucks. He pulled the pin, counted it off, and threw the grenade. I saw the zombies pressing in. I saw Tuck dive to the floor, and then—
WHOOOOM!!
The WP went up with a resounding explosion, the flash nearly blinding me, the burning phosphorus engulfing the zombies and spreading up the far wall where it continued to burn. Three or four of them were incinerated to blackened things that went down in burning heaps, but the others stumbled about, pawing at themselves, lit up like sparklers. One by one, they dropped into the raging fire that was spreading fast now.
Together, we moved across the garage, our eyes burning from the smoke.
As we got close to the obliterated wall, which seemed the logical exit under the circumstances, we saw dark, shambling forms moving around out there. The only thing that was keeping them at bay was that the outside of the armory was burning and the yellow grass that fronted it had been lit up.
We had no choice but to move deeper into the armory complex itself, which would not have been my first choice.
We cut into another corridor and I knew that Tuck was still thinking he might find something to scavenge. Our supply situation was pretty good, but what we needed was ammo for the .50 cals on the Strykers—we had “liberated” four of them from the Bronx—because we were getting down. With all the zombie action in the past few weeks and the shootout at the Catholic school before that (it’s a long story), we were down to one box for each vehicle. And when the .50 starts talking, that wouldn’t last too long.
Regardless, I knew Tuck would not give up the ghost easily.
One way or another, he would snoop into every room.
These were the things going through my mind as we jogged down that corridor. Maybe I should have been concentrating on the here and now, because we had almost made it to the steel fire door at the end when Sabelia, who was right in front of me, cried out and I saw her knocked off her feet. She hit the wall and then something hit me.
I went down, too, and brought my CAR-15 and flashlight up just in time to see a giant standing there, reaching toward Sabelia. It was the biggest zombie I had ever seen. A huge, naked white guy whose flesh was gray going on white, and speckled purple in places by blood lividity. There were maybe six or seven round holes in his chest and I figured he had been killed in a shootout, but Necrophage wouldn’t let him lay still. A black slime running from his mouth, he reached for Sabelia.
She was dazed and nearly helpless.
I brought up my rifle, and that distracted the zombie.
He looked over at me with blank white dead eyes. He was seeing me; I was sure of it. His mouth was hooked in a silent snarl, more of that fetid black goo hanging from his jaws in snotty tangles. His teeth looked long and sharp jutting from the gums but that was mainly because he had no lips. Those infected by Necrophage went through a horrible degradation before they died and rose to feed. And one of those degradations was that they often chewed their own lips off, sometimes biting off their tongue and swallowing it.
I heard Tuck—who was behind the zombie—call out, HEADS DOWN, a split second before I opened up. Then he opened up on full-auto. Bullets ripped through the giant, making him jerk and thrash, gore spraying from wounds, and splashing against the walls in gruesome Rorschach blots. He had been as silent as the others, but now he raised his massive arms, threw back his head and let out a piercing, chilling wail.
Tuck fired again.
More slugs popped through the hulking thing. He staggered this way, and then that, snapping his teeth and gagging out more of that slime. He clawed at his body, then clawed at the air. Then Tuck finished him with a three-round burst to the head. The zombie stumbled toward me and if I wouldn’t have moved, I would have been crushed beneath his bulk.
“Are you okay?” I asked Sabelia.
“Yeah,” she mumbled. “Yes.”
I pulled her to her feet but she was still dazed so she leaned against me and we followed Tuck down the corridor and past a darkened doorway where that monstrous thing must have come from.
I hadn’t heard any more mortar rounds hit and I was hoping that was because Riley had driven them off. As we came to the fire door, I saw that it had taken some serious abuse. Small arms fire had dented and pocked it. It was scratched up badly, the paint peeled free. My guess was that not only had some force tried to get through there, but a lot of zombies as well.
Tuck tried it and it was locked from the other side.
Which put us in a real predicament because the dead were massing again and they were entering the other end of the corridor, backlit by the fires in the garage.
We had to get through that door.
One way or another.
MR. FUNGI
Tuck didn’t take it lying down, of course.
He swore and kicked the door a few times, and then he got down to work. The door, as I said, had taken some real abuse. It was locked from the other side, but that lock was barely holding. All it needed was a good kick. Tuck pulled a frag grenade from his pack and duct-taped it to the door while we retreated into the room the zombie had come from.
The others were steadily moving in our direction.
Then Tuck pulled the pin and dove to the floor. There was a jarring boom! When we got out there, the door was nearly blown open. I say nearly because the lock was still hanging on. A few kicks and we were through.
We found ourselves in another room that looked like an infirmary, but was crowded with junk like the mess hall. We didn’t have the time to scope out every crack and crevice, so while Sabelia kept watch, Tuck and I dragged a big heavy desk in front of the door that would keep the zombies away from us for a time.
When we were done, we were both panting.
I got on the walkie-talkie and told Riley to swing the Stryker around to the north end of the building, because that’s where we’d be coming from. A door, a window, anything, as long as we got out of that damn place.
What I was wondering about besides our freedom and getting back to the others at ANG Pelham was who had been mortaring us. My first thought, of course, was ARM—the American Resistance Movement. They were a paramilitary survivalist group with numbers and the know-how to pull off something like that. They were the best armed, organized, and motivated of all the survivalist groups I had seen. Most weren’t soldiers, just thugs, but some of them knew their shit. I figured ARM was the most likely candidate to have brought that barrage down on us.
But why?
That was the question. There was bad blood between ou
r little group and ARM. We had been in some firefights with them and had always come out on top. But they had numerical superiority and sooner or later they were going to come at us with a vengeance and I knew it.
“We better be real careful now,” I told Tuck. “If that was ARM that dropped the mortars on us, they might be waiting out there.”
“If they were out there, the zombies would be munching on them,” Sabelia said.
I shrugged. It made perfect sense, yet I wasn’t convinced.
Neither was Tuck. “The point of the barrage might have been to draw us out. They might be lying low out there with armed bands, just waiting for us to show so they can grease us.”
“And take the Stryker,” I said.
“Exactly.”
“Well, we can’t wait here.”
Outside the walls, I heard the Stryker moving, circling around the building as Riley got it into position. I waited for more mortars or a peal of small-arms fire, maybe the whine of an RPG, but there was nothing. We stood there, just sweeping the room with our lights.
“Okay,” Tuck said. “This is what we’re going to do. You two wait here, no sense in all of us risking our asses. I’ll check that corridor ahead, scope it out, and then I’ll come back for you.”
“Tuck—”
“It’s logical and you know it.”
It was; of course, it was. Tuck was nothing if not logical and methodical. He had spent a lot of time as point man on night patrols in Vietnam. It was something he was as good at at sixty as he had been at twenty. The purpose of a point man was to scope out the danger ahead and find a safe path forward, save the platoon from stumbling into an enemy main force unit or ambush. It made sense, even if Sabelia and I were somewhat small to be a platoon.
When he was gone, Sabelia said, “You’ll forgive me, Steve, for saying what I have to say and saying it in the way I say it. I have no other way. I’m not a person to beat around the bush.”
She came over to me, very close, and took my hand in hers. I felt her long fingers interlock with mine. I knew it was going to heavy stuff. Sabelia was a very intense person with a tough demeanor. Yet, up close like that, there was always tenderness to her the others never got to see. Her fingers were very soft and smooth and I had trouble believing that such a hand could have wielded a razor as a SheWolf.
“I’m sorry about your wife. I’m sorry for what you and Paul have gone through. I wish I could tell you the worst is over and the future is bright, but I’m no bull shitter and you wouldn’t believe me anyway. We’ve all suffered and some more than others. But all we have is what we have right now. As far as we know, there’ll never be anymore.”
“Agreed,” I said.
“The point is, I worry about you.”
“You don’t have to.”
“But I do. I can feel the pain inside you. Maybe you pretend it’s not there, but it is and I can feel it. No. Let me finish,” she said. “There’s a void inside you from the death of Ricki. You’re a guy who is used to having a woman take care of you, watch over you and make sure you’re okay. That’s what Ricki did. And without her doing that, you can’t find your center, because she was always there to hold onto.”
I wanted to tell her she didn’t know what she was talking about, but the truth was she knew exactly what she was talking about. A marriage should be about love, friendship, and mutual respect, but it’s more than that. It’s also about dependency whether we like to admit it or not. You and your wife, your husband, whatever, depend on one another in ways that are not even apparent until they’re gone and you’re alone against the world. Then you see it. Then you recognize it for what it was and realize what you’ve lost.
“Ricki would not want you to be alone,” Sabelia said. “If she loved you at all, she wouldn’t want that.”
“Sabelia—”
“Don’t let your male ego get inflated, Steve. I’m not coming onto you, and if I was, I’d choose a better location. I’m just saying that I like you and you know I like you. I liked you the first time I saw you when you and Riley came to free us from the ARM camp at the school. I looked at you and something in me moved and it’s been moving ever since.”
I was speechless. I knew she had feelings for me just as I knew I had feelings for her. But my wife had only been dead a few months. True, that amount of time in this brutal new world of ours was like a year in the old world, if not a decade, but it was still too soon. I was tangled up in my own emotions, my own grief, and my own guilt. I wasn’t ready for anything even as simple as a one-night stand. And this is a hell of a thing for a guy to admit, but I’ll admit it: I felt fragile. That probably sounds pretty sissified, but that’s the way it was. I had watched my wife die and I knew if I had made a few different decisions that might not have happened. The self-recrimination was eating a hole through me and I felt like I was holding myself together with spit and determination, knowing I could not fold-up because I had a son to think about.
“I want to be part of your life and fill that void in you,” Sabelia said, as straightforward as only Sabelia could be.
“It can’t be yet. Not just yet.”
“That’s what I like about you,” she admitted. “You do the right thing. I know you want me. But you’re willing to wait and do it the right way.”
“Maybe you know me too well.”
She shrugged. “Maybe. But there’s going to come a time when you want someone to take care of you and I hope that will be me.”
“I don’t think it could be anyone else.”
“Good. I don’t know what’s going to happen to us, but I want you to know that I’m here. And how I feel. If you’re ever alone or scared or confused and you need someone, I want you to come to me. I mean that. Come to me first.”
“I will.”
“Is that a promise?”
“It is.”
I’m not sure if I kissed her or she kissed me, but it was only a light kiss and one devoid of passion or anything like it. Our promise, you might say, was sealed with a kiss.
“You two done sucking tongue yet?” Tuck said with his usual sensitivity.
“Well?” Sabelia finally said.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” he said. “I found the armory.”
He led us on out of there.
The smell of smoke was getting stronger all the time and I figured the whole place was going up. Tuck led us down the corridor. There were lots of rooms that must have been offices. The armory was like a big garage, but it was picked clean. My guess was that maybe ARM or a like group had looted it just like Sabelia thought. And maybe, just maybe, the very one that had lobbed the mortars down on us.
Regardless, we searched it very thoroughly and there was nothing but lots of empty ammo boxes, olive-drab crates, cardboard boxes, and some blankets and boots tossed around. We found some 9mm shells scattered on the floor but nothing else of any worth. The doors leading in looked like they had been blown open with charges and there were bullet holes in the walls. I wandered if someone had held up in there and fought to the death.
No matter.
The only thing of interest we found was a jawless human skull set atop a crate like it was some kind of sentry. Skulls were hardly a novelty these days, yet this one was different. It had some sort of weird yellow fungus growing all over it that almost looked like fur. Threads of it were attached to the wall behind it and grown right into the crate like fibers of wood rot. An awful dank, buried sort of smell came from it.
With his light on it, Tuck said, “Poor Mr. Fungi, I knew him well.”
Maybe it was meant to be funny, but none of us was laughing. There was something morbid and strange about that shit growing all over it.
“What the hell is that stuff?” Sabelia said.
“Just mold or fungus or something,” Tuck told her. “Like the stuff that grows on a dead tree.”
“But it’s different,” she said.
It sure was.
But we didn’t know how differe
nt until Tuck went over there and jabbed it with the barrel of his CAR-15. The barrel sank right into it. The skull was soft and spongy. A gray juice ran from it and the stink of that made us all turn away.
“That’s abnormal,” Sabelia said.
“Gives me the creeps,” Tuck put in.
“Let’s just go,” I told them. “Let’s just get the hell out of here.”
I got no arguments.
Out in the corridor, I kept listening for the sound of the Stryker.
It was so quiet outside that I could just make out the low rumbling of its idle. I kept moving us in that general direction. We came into a barracks finally with iron-framed beds lined up in rows just like in boot camp. The blankets had been stripped free and the lockers emptied, but we barely even noticed that because of the corpses.
White Plains Armory Complex
SLAUGHTERHOUSE
I counted seven of them.
Like cattle in a slaughterhouse, they were hung upside down by the feet. Rope was looped around their ankles and tied off on the beam overhead. Their fingertips just brushed the floor. They all had dirty, bloodied fatigues on and they could have been National Guard or even ARM for that matter. It was really hard to say. What I did notice in the beam of my light was that each had their throats slit wide open and each had been shot in the head.
It was grisly work examining them, but we were pretty toughened by that point.
“Maybe we should just get out of here,” Sabelia said, the voice of practicality as always.
However, Tuck and I were too intrigued by what we were seeing. I had seen bodies in every state of dismemberment and mutilation in the war and since the fall of civilization, but this was different. These guys hadn’t been hung up by zombies or fed upon. No, they were, quiet efficiently and orderly, hung by the feet while they were alive or at the point of death. Their faces were bruised and I figured they had been handled pretty roughly before they were strung up. There was some blood and brain matter on the floor from when they had been shot, but not enough of the former to really explain what I was seeing.