by Jack Hamlyn
As she made to bite me, I jerked the trigger just once and the round drilled through her chin and right up through her palate into her brain. A hole blew open in the top of her head and there was a spout of gore. She knew she was dead and she looked cheated that the taste of my flesh had been robbed from her. She made a slight sighing sound, her eyes fell back into their sockets, and she tipped right over.
She did not move again.
“What the hell do you think you were doing?” Sabelia said, nearly foaming at the mouth.
“I was saying goodbye,” I told her.
RATRAP
We nearly flew up the stairs, because the firing was still going on up there. I don’t claim to know what almost hypnotic influence Mia had over me or I had over myself, but when she was dead, I shook it off and remembered the others up there. Remembered that my son’s life was in peril, and I could almost hear Ricki screaming in my head, or maybe it was just me, but the words were clear enough: Just what in the fuck are you doing, dumbass? Why the hell are you wasting so much time? Good question without good answers.
When I reached the door, it was closed.
More so, it was locked from the other side.
“Shit,” Phil said.
“Shit is right,” Riley said.
Jimmy jiggled it himself. “There was no lock on this door. There’s no way it can be locked.”
He was right. The knob turned but the door would not open.
“They must have barricaded it from the other side,” Jimmy said.
“Which proves that even ARM boys aren’t as stupid as they look,” Sabelia said, her eyes on Phil.
Sure. What suckers we were and how easily they had played us.
They blew the door, got inside and disabled the genny. Phase #1. Then they overpowered Sabelia, Riley, and Mia, forcing the former two into the genny cage and locking them in there…probably planning to come back later for a little fun. Mia was tossed to the dead who by then were coming down the stairs and filling the lower level. Phase #2. Phase #3 would have been a quick escape, but the dead got them. So their buddies upstairs barricaded the door from above. Divide and conquer. Set a trap using the girls as bait. Spring it and lock us down there with them.
Regardless, it had worked.
And we were trapped.
We were facing a steel fire door. I could bust some rounds in it, but it would do little good. In those close confines of the stairwell, there was a good risk of somebody being plugged by a ricochet. No, without a heavy caliber weapon or some explosives we were not going to blast our way through that door.
“What the hell we gonna do?” Phil asked.
This was the place in a movie where there would be some convenient man-sized air duct we could crawl through and escape. But outside of Hollywood’s tired imagination, you didn’t see much of that in the real world.
Jimmy said, “What we’re going to do is go down to the tool crib and get something to cut our way out with.”
Sabelia took off at a run to do just that, and Riley went with her. Using their heads, they came back with the best possible things: a crowbar and an iron-headed sledgehammer. We all put our backs to it, pushing and thumping against the door until something on the other side gave maybe a half an inch but no more.
It was enough, though, to get the tip of the crowbar into the seam between the door and its frame. While Jimmy and I held it in place, Sabelia swung the sledge and drove the tip in further until we had some real leverage. Then we all went to work. The crowbar was a big five-foot one so we all took hold of it and pried as hard as we could. The door opened nearly an inch. All busting a sweat and Jimmy bitching that he was too damn old for that sort of thing, we hit it again and again, pulling with everything we had, popping sweat on our faces, groaning and grunting.
Then the door went.
It swung open and we literally went flying out into the corridor in a jumbled heap. We got our weapons and made our way down toward the bunkroom. I still heard an occasional exchange of gunfire. As I came around the L of the corridor, there was a burst of rifle fire and rounds chewed into the wall bare inches from my head.
“HEY!” I called out. “WHO’S DOWN THERE?”
“It’s your mother, you prick,” came the reply along with a couple automatics opening up and scathing the walls with bullets.
It was ARM, I was guessing.
I killed the light on my carbine. Jimmy did the same. Now, we were on an equal footing; none of us could see a damn thing. I toyed with the idea of sending Jimmy and Sabelia back to see if they could get the genny going again, but I figured it wasn’t good idea. I didn’t want us separating and I didn’t want to turn the lights on so they could see Tuck and the others.
There was only one thing to do since we lacked grenades: make them waste as much ammo as possible. My only worry was that while we played cat-and-mouse with the ARM troopers, that their main force unit might be coming in for the kill. I threw the crowbar down the hallway and three weapons opened up, shooting up the corridor. I did the same with the hammer and got a like response. Then whoever was in charge—the guy who claimed to be my mother—yelled at the others to quit wasting bullets.
I thumped the wall with my rifle.
I kicked it.
I taunted them.
Nothing worked. They would not shoot at me. They were certain I was trying to get them to waste ammo. So what I did next was, I peered around the corner, then brought my rifle around and fired a three-round burst in their direction. That got their attention. They fired back until my mother told them to knock it off. And about that time, somebody from the bunk room opened up on them. They returned fire. As they were so engaged, I gave them another three-round burst that got them shooting and angry. As I did so, the shooter from the bunkroom door laid down some more fire and one of the ARM guys started screaming. I’m hit! I’m hit! I’m fucking hit!” he shouted out, moaning and groaning.
“I got something for ‘em,” one of the others said.
I distinctly heard the pin being pulled from a grenade and I got the others down flat. It bounced down the corridor and went off. Thankfully, it didn’t roll near us. We were protected by the wall.
“My leg! My leg! Oh God, my fucking leg!” Phil shouted out.
“Easy,” Riley whispered to him. “Where’d you get hit?”
“I didn’t,” he whispered under his breath. “But the rest of you are dead so act like it.” He scrambled around a bit, making all kinds of noise like a mortally injured man. “Oh shit…oh hell…I’m bleeding to fucking death!”
Then Tuck shouted out: “THAT YOU, PHIL?”
ARM opened up and Tuck fired back.
“Take ‘em out already!” my mother told his boys.
There were a few moments of silence and then I heard a bunch of them charging toward the bunkroom. They never made it. There was an explosion and the corridor down there erupted with white phosphorus. It was lit up brighter than day. I saw two ARM troopers stumbling around on fire. A third that was screaming tried to rise and run. There was gunfire, a perfect three-round burst, and he went down.
That left Mother.
As he tried to retreat in my direction, I opened up on him, but I missed. It drove him back and he ran through the phosphorus smoke, firing as he went. I heard a clattering and a silenced cry and that was it.
“HEY, BOOKY! GET YOUR ASS DOWN HERE!” Tuck called out.
We ran down there, and by then everyone was evacuating the bunkroom, covering their heads and charging through the phosphorus smoke and fire. I saw Paul and Diane, and they both hugged me, which made me feel better than I had in days. We all grabbed up nylon bags and canvas sacks that held our food, water, medical and survival equipment, and lugged them down the corridor.
I saw my mother.
He was laying there near the door, his throat cut ear to ear.
Tuck winked at me and slid his K-Bar knife back in its sheath.
THE TUNNELS
Ten minutes
later we were climbing down into the access passages that connected up the hangars and main outbuildings with the central complex/tower. As you can imagine it was dark and dank down there. The tunnels were not round like sewers, but square gray concrete with arrows spray-painted on the walls and electric lights bolted to the ceiling that, of course, were not working.
Tuck led from the front with an unarmed and unhappy Phil at his side and I was just behind him a bit. Riley and Jimmy took up the back door, and Sabelia and the other girls were in the middle guarding the children. Something which Maria and Jilly were just fine with, but disturbed Paul in many ways.
We weren’t out of danger and I knew it.
As we slipped down into the passages, I could hear the zombies in the complex and we were just lucky that somehow we managed to avoid them. The tunnel we were in that would lead us to the Stryker hangar was long and low, set with an occasional electrical junction box. Our lights showed us what was ahead, but the batteries were weakening a bit after the long workout and we could only see so far. It would have been the perfect place for ARM to be lying in wait. And if not them, the zombies.
Which brought up an interesting point in my mind.
How was ARM managing it?
How were they doing it?
This was the second time they had breeched our gates, dismantling our tripwires and cutting our chains. Both times they had allowed zombies to get in, and not by accident I was guessing. The first time, I believed their express purpose was to let the zombies in to overwhelm us, distract us, and weaken us. The second time, it had been partly the same, but with a crew of hardcore troopers backing them up, it seemed, to exploit the situation.
What was that all about?
Why weren’t the zombies feeding on them?
Other than the two dead ones below, I had seen no half-devoured ARM troopers and no animate corpses wearing ARM fatigues. Wasn’t it all a bit beyond the realm of chance? But if they were directing and controlling the dead…how the hell were they pulling it off?
As we walked I put this to Phil. “Do they control them? Do they have some trick, some technology?”
“Not that I know of.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
I didn’t believe him. Something was going on here and I wanted to know what.
“Let’s just get our asses out of here,” Tuck said. “Later on, if you want, I’ll interrogate Phil properly. I guarantee before I’m done, he’ll tell the truth.”
“If he knows something and he really wants us to trust him, he should tell us right now,” Riley said.
Phil shook his head. “You guys seem to forget that I was at the bottom of the food chain. If they have something like that I would be the last idiot they would have trusted with it.”
“I agree with that part,” Tuck said.
“Let’s worry about it later, man,” Diane told us.
Tuck stopped then. He lit a cigarette and put his light on Phil. “Still…we never had these sorts of problems before you showed up. Who’s to say you didn’t contact your friends and tell ‘em when to attack us or set the zombies loose on us?”
“And how the hell could I do that?” Phil asked him.
“Maybe with a radio. Maybe with some kind of prearranged code.”
“A radio? Okay, Tuck, you got me. I keep the transmitter shoved up my ass. Here. Let me turn it on. Now just speak clearly into my butt crack.”
The kids started laughing and so did Diane. In fact, just about everyone started laughing and despite the situation, we couldn’t seem to help ourselves. It wasn’t just what Phil had said, but the image of him—bent over, sticking his ass out at Tuck—that was just more than we could handle.
“That’ll do,” Tuck said, trying not to smile. “Smartass.”
“If you’re nice, I’ll show you how to change the batteries,” Phil said.
More laughter.
“All right,” I said. “Let’s move along.”
It took us about twenty minutes to reach the end of the tunnel. A set of iron steps led up to a trapdoor and into the far end of the bunker. We had already decided on a plan. We had three operational Strykers and the armored Jeep. Tuck, Riley, Diane, and I would make a run for them and bring them back down here and everyone could load up. It wasn’t much of a plan and we had no idea what we were going to do after that, but it was a start.
Tuck went up first.
I watched him open the trapdoor and prayed I would not hear rounds punching into him from ARM pukes. But he got up there and made a quick sweep around. I heard his footfalls returning.
“Okay,” he said. “I’m not seeing anything.”
The rest of us went up, scanning around with our lights. It was just as black in the hangar as it had been down in the tunnels. But what made it worse was that the hangar was immense, designed to handle huge military aircraft. It was nearly a city block long and half that size in width. An entire army of the living or the dead could have been hiding in there amongst the hoists and lathes and tool cribs.
But we had little choice.
We fanned out and hustled our way down to the far end, our footfalls slapping and echoing and coming right back at us. We sounded like we were marching at company strength. I’m exaggerating, of course, but we sure did make an awful lot of noise. If somebody wanted to open up on us, it would have been real, real easy.
About the time our beams of light pinpointed the hulking shapes of the vehicles, the first shots rang out. We were expecting an ambush, so we hit the floor, killed our lights, and returned fire with incredible volume. The fire was not returned. We waited and waited; nothing.
“There’s two shooters,” Tuck whispered. “Probably a security element. We weren’t supposed to make it this far.”
“The firing will bring others,” Riley said.
We knew that to be true.
There was only one thing to do and that was to spread ourselves thin. We couldn’t let ourselves be pinned down out there in the middle, which is what our adversaries probably had in mind. As soon as we started moving, the shooters opened up, just putting out rounds in our general direction, which told me that they lacked any sort of night vision devices, which was good because otherwise it would have been a turkey shoot.
Tuck was right on there being two of them.
As soon as we started moving, automatic weapons opened up from two locations. We raked those areas with fire, the four of us spread out, zigzagging and firing at random. We had to get them one way or another. If we didn’t, they’d simply pick us off when we tried to get in the vehicles.
I ran, and bullets zinged around me, throwing sparks as they ricocheted off the concrete floor. I returned fire, darting to the left, then the right. The shooter fired. I returned it and this time I got a shout of pain. Not a lethal hit by any means, because whoever it was started firing out of pain and anger, emptying their clip in my general direction.
The good thing was the shooter was no longer changing his position.
I figured I had gotten him good enough that moving wasn’t an option. I heard him slamming a fresh magazine home and I fired in that direction. Another cry and I heard him drop his weapon. I heard him moaning and gagging. I put another three-round burst out at him. I heard him grunt and then…nothing.
He was either dead or playing possum.
Meanwhile, Tuck and Diane were keeping their shooter pinned down. Riley went to join them, figuring I had things well under control. Tuck brought them together and positioned them so they could cut their shooter down in interlocking fields of fire.
They open up and the other shooter screamed.
They put their lights on him and finished him off.
I turned on my light and found the other guy easily enough. He was laying there in a pool of blood. An ARM puke, all right. Judging from the pattern of his wounds, it looked as if I had gotten him in the leg originally, then the belly, finally the head.
It was, as I was looking at th
e body, that the worst case scenario raised its ugly head. There was a third shooter. He opened up from the shadows, slugs ripping through Riley and dropping her. Tuck cried out and returned fire, but already the guy had retreated. I heard a door slam as he ran off into the night. Whether he had been lying in wait and letting the other two do the dirty work, or had just arrived on the scene, I didn’t know.
All I knew is that Riley was hit bad, and the fact that Tuck was running off. “I’M GOING TO BAG THAT MOTHERFUCKER!”
“Tuck—”
Too late, he was gone.
Diane’s face looked very grim in the light and I imagined mine looked pretty much the same. Riley was curled up on the floor. There was blood everywhere; her fatigues were red with it, her face twisted up in an agonized mask. She kept trying to say something, but the pain was too intense. She was gut-shot and there wasn’t a damn thing we could do for her. She needed a surgeon and medical facilities, but we had neither.
She was dying.
I got on the box. “Jimmy? We need a medical bag up here. We need it fast. Send somebody. Tell them to come alone, you got me?”
He did. He kept trying to interrupt me for details, but I wasn’t going there. Not yet. I didn’t want the kids knowing. I didn’t want Jilly coming unglued until she was safely in a Stryker vehicle. In less than a minute, Sabelia came running at full clip.
I didn’t need to tell her what had happened; she saw.
Riley was still trying to talk, but her mouth was filled with blood. Before we could do anything, she shook with spasms and then went still. She had just bled out and there hadn’t been a damn thing we could do about it.