by J. L. Bourne
Spent brass blanketed the entire platform, rattling around underfoot. I reached down and examined one of the casings: M855 “green tip.”
Military-issue.
They were trying to ban this shit before the dead walked.
I raised my NOD and panned my gun light around the platform. A terrible fight took place here long ago. The brass casings were dull from tarnish and dust. Dried blood splattered the nearby walls, and smeared handprints tracked along the bottom edge of a jagged, broken window. What appeared to be intestines were draped over the window shards like garland over a bannister. I peered out the opening to the ground below and saw a pile of body parts, bones, clothing, and other unrecognizable filth. There must have been hundreds below. It was difficult to imagine what exactly took place here, but it was a safe bet that a military unit tried to hold the capitol building. They were up against untold hordes, enough to form a human staircase up the destroyed stairs and onto this floor. I don’t see how anyone could have made it out alive.
I pulled another industrial zip tie from my pack and secured the bullet-ridden sixth-floor access door before continuing my ascent. The stairs remained littered with brass all the way up to sixteen, about the same time I ran out of heavy-duty zip ties. Transiting up to floor seventeen, I saw a rifle on the stairs and picked it up. Its action was locked back, magazine gone. Peering into the action, I could see that the gas tube was melted to the point of failure. Either the gun ran dry or the shooter was doing mag dumps and the gun’s gas system failed from heat fatigue. On the end of the gun was a blown-out suppressor; nothing remained but the can that held the baffle stack. This gun fought hard before its master abandoned it. I disconnected the upper receiver from the lower and placed the lower in my pack, along with the bolt carrier assembly. Could come in handy.
I arrived at the twentieth floor and noticed the door was propped open by a long-dead corpse. It was dressed in multi-cam and wore a flat dark earth-colored climbing helmet. Most of its neck was gone, probably torn out by one of the creatures. A look of terror was somehow preserved on its mostly decomposed face; its jaws gaped and its dried eyelids were slit open. A shriveled tongue hung out of its mouth. Peering into the dark hallway beyond the corpse, I could see no signs of undead, so I dragged the body into the stairwell for examination.
A large, scoped AR-10 rifle was slung across the soldier’s chest. I popped the mag and verified the caliber: .308. The mag felt about half full. Reluctantly, I slung the heavy AR-10 over my shoulder and continued up the stairs.
As I rounded the stairwell, leaving the twenty-first floor, the scene of a last stand was before me. Sandbags covered the top of the stairs and shell casings once again littered the area—this time larger-caliber 7.62mm brass. As I crunched through the casings, the silhouette of twin crew-served machine guns came into view. The barrels were bent and shot out from extreme heat, reminiscent of Elmer Fudd’s hunting rifle after Bugs plugged it with a carrot. The windows on the stair platform were gone. It appeared as if the soldiers gunned down the undead in waves and tossed the corpses out the window. I noticed that explosives (sans detonators) were attached to the stairs leading up to the sandbag pillbox on the twenty-second floor, where the stairs stopped.
I climbed over the sandbags into the pillbox and stepped on a female corpse dressed in full battle rattle. An M9 was stuffed into her mouth, locked to the rear from expending the magazine’s final round. The 9mm exit wound was hidden by the Kevlar helmet, still chin-strapped on her skull. Sadly, both ammo cans feeding the machine guns had quite a few rounds remaining. The guns failed from high rate of fire, and the poor soldier must have pulled a service pistol, using the last round. A new barrel was sitting on the ground near the gun, but who could have possibly had time to change it out when hundreds of undead were advancing up the stairs?
I felt pity for her. She courageously held her line as long as she could. A picture of a middle-aged man hung halfway out from the shirt pocket on her camo blouse. She was the last gatekeeper to the twenty-second and final floor. The metal door behind her firing position was damaged from the unimaginable force but remained solidly locked. I checked the corpse for keys and found none, but did find four detonators and put them in my pack along with the explosives.
Drill, baby, drill.
I worked the lock, cringing at the reverberating noise it created. Taking a break, I went down the steps and looked through the smashed-out window.
The undead were getting agitated in the street below.
I hoped for more gunshots to pull them away but heard none, when the lock cylinder gave and fell out of the metal door on the other side with a thunk. I put the weight of my body against the door and listened.
Nothing.
Reluctantly, I kicked the door open and went in, gun leveled in front of my NOD. The bright moonlight beamed into the penthouse floor through the near-360-degree view it offered.
It didn’t take long to quickly scan the floor for threats and find the roof access stairs in the back office area near a cargo elevator. Burdened by the extra AR-10 and my heavy pack, I dropped them near the welcome desk and went back outside the door to collect a few sandbags. Using about fifteen, I stacked them in front of the access door, effectively blocking any undead from approaching the floor I was on. A heavy desk was an extra reinforcement to the sandbags. The unsettling evidence of the fight outside the door indicated that hundreds if not thousands put this place under siege some time ago.
With the area fairly secure, I began a more thorough examination of the twenty-second floor. I walked the windowed perimeter, taking in the dark skyline outside. At the far end of the floor, I felt a gust of wind before nearly walking off the floor through a missing glass window. A rope made of sheets and tablecloths flapped under the open window outside. I got on my chest and looked down through the missing window panel. Adjusting my NOD, I saw that the rope only made it halfway down the building. I thought the other half of the rope was wrapped around a light pole in the street below but couldn’t be certain. When the clouds shifted, I could see another pile of corpses on the ground far below the missing window in the street.
I carefully slid back, away from the window, and pushed myself onto my feet. Heading back for my pack, I noticed a pad of paper covered with writing sitting on a leather chair. The letterhead on the paper indicated that its owner was the Office of the Governor of the State of Florida.
The night sky had not given quarter to the rising sun when I started reading the account of what took place here. I was well into the early-morning hours before I looked up from those words.
January 15 . . .
I’ve been directed by the Governor to document our efforts in Tallahassee in light of recent tragic events.
-The National Guard is still on the streets below. We can hear their gunshots. Five security guards remain on the ground floor. The Governor has requested that the police fall back to the capitol building and form a defensive perimeter.
-We still have running water in the city, but our radio contact with the power company has gone dark. We are seeing rolling blackouts, presumably caused by fires inside infected homes taking out transformers.
-We have not actually seen the President on TV in a few days. The Governor has been in touch with other state leadership via satellite phone and will not tell me what is being discussed. I know the man and I’ve never seen him this shaken.
January 18
As the scribe, as well as the only medic in the upper floors, I’ve been patching up our security contingent for thirty-six hours straight. One of ours has been shot by one of the people outside the building. Yay guns. Only three of our ground force contingent remain. The others are missing or have abandoned the building. The streets are filled with them now. In the beginning, I could count them; I could differentiate between them and the SWAT police bashing their skulls with nightsticks.
January 19
There are rumors of a special operations force coming to help. The Govern
or has received word that all the capital cities are receiving aid in the next twenty-four hours.
January 21
Help has arrived. Army EOD. They’ve flown in a lot of explosives and guns and they’ve requested copies of schematics for the capitol building. Something is strange; they’re not answering the governor’s questions.
January 22
The Governor has asked me to document specifically that the US Army has wired the entire capitol building for demolition and that they’re going to fill the building with infected and blow it. They aren’t letting anyone leave. I’ve made somewhat of a “friendship” with one of the EOD soldiers. She doesn’t agree with what’s going on.
January 25
The helicopter pilots are dead. The Army SF contingent isn’t going anywhere. They’re trapped here along with the rest of us mortals. The Black Hawk on the roof is a paperweight.
January 27
I’ve learned that the assistance the federal government sent us was nothing more than one last ditch covert fucking operation. They’re going to nuke the goddamned cities! Tallahassee didn’t make the target list, so the Pentagon assigned a secondary cleanup operation. Codename: Benchwarmer.
-The street’s completely overrun.
-The Governor is dead, suicide. Shot himself in the head.
-The special ops guys cut the fuel lines on the chopper and left the building. No one has seen them since.
My friend, Sergeant Amanda Perez, didn’t leave. She’s set up outside the door with the heavy machine guns and ammo the special ops guys left behind. I’ve offered to stand “duty” for a few hours so she can sleep, but she refuses to let me.
January 28
A loud explosion has shaken the building. Amanda told me to shut the door. I have repeatedly refused. I can’t leave her alone in there, abandon her to those things. The sound of ear-piercing machine gun fire randomly erupts from the stairwell. Outside our windows, I can see what looks like a million of them converge on our building from all directions. The only ones left on the twenty-second floor are the state treasurer (acting governor), Terry the janitor, Sergeant Perez, and myself. Everyone else already tried their luck on the streets below. I don’t see how on earth they could have made it through that wall of things.
January 29
I have shut the door.
I placed the notepad back on the chair where I found it. The sun is coming up very soon.
• • •
I allowed sleep to take over for an hour and awoke to the bright morning sun beaming in through the large windows of the observation floor. The story of the scribe’s last stand still lingered in my head. If they’d only known the metal door would hold.
I groggily walked up the stairs with my pack to the roof access and swung the door open. Sunlight flooded in and cold rainwater dripped from the doorjamb onto my head. The roof was covered in small puddles coalescing in the low parts. I walked around the roof access structure and was surprised to see a Black Hawk helicopter sitting on the helo pad. Yeah, I read in the scribe’s entries that it would be here, but it’s different seeing it in person. The aircraft profile brought me back to that day I’d crashed and barely made it out alive. I still remembered waking up inside the cockpit, the pilot reaching for me from the left seat, still strapped in and very undead.
I splashed through the puddles and approached the chopper from its open-door side, careful to check for anything that might be waiting. I went in gun first and was startled back by two birds that had claimed the helicopter for their own. The passenger compartment contained a large GAU machine gun hanging out the door, nearly over the edge of the building on the aircraft’s starboard side. I hadn’t noticed it at first, as I’d approached from port. I grabbed the gun and swung it on its turret. Loud creaks echoed weakly off the nearby buildings. I pulled back the action halfway, scratching flecks of rust off the slide as I did so. Half a can of belt-fed ammo remained in reserve and the barrel was still good, unlike the twin crew-served guns with blown-out barrels in the stairwell down below. I’d kill to have this GAU mounted to Solitude’s decks with my other machine gun.
I rummaged through the chopper’s kit, finding nothing of interest but a flare gun and three shells. I pushed aside two white aircrew helmets and stepped into the cockpit. Unfamiliar with the start-up sequence, I looked for a checklist before giving my best shot at starting the engines. I turned on the electrical system and was surprised when I heard clicks and saw a Christmas tree of master caution lights illuminate. Flipping the hydraulics to auto, I could hear pumps whine to move fluid into and out of their voids. I attempted to start the auxiliary power unit, resulting in a loud screech of grinding metal and then silence. The APU’s demise sent echoes bouncing off every building around me; the moans of the undead responded even louder than this man-made flying machine’s dead generator unit. When you’re working with something that has seventy thousand moving parts, it’s not gonna be nice without its aircraft maintenance spa treatments.
The flying machine’s rotor remained fossilized in place above my head, probably forever. The undead protested again with a boom from the streets, and I risked a glance over the edge. Hundreds of feet below, the undead were flowing out all around the building. Their increasing concentration invoked the scribe’s writings, causing my legs to shake. As I stepped out of the gray helicopter onto the rooftop, I caught a flash coming from one of the buildings.
The cockpit glass splintered as a round tore through it as well as the aluminum fuselage. I instinctively hit the deck as the shot boomed and the sonic crack split the ozone above my head.
The undead went wild as the shot reverberated off the glass buildings. Low crawling, I eventually made it to the chopper’s tail rotor section. I was on the roof of the tallest building in Tallahassee, so unless the shooter mortared the rounds, I was okay. I couldn’t be hit unless I stood up like a fucking idiot.
Another shot impacted the helo, penetrating its fragile fuselage. The hole in the aircraft was fucking huge, definitely a large-bore rifle. I was lucky there was a morning wind or I might be sporting a fist-sized hole in my chest as well.
I low crawled back to the roof access and slinked down the stairs. With nothing but bare windows between the shooter and me, I had to be careful. As I passed the sandbagged door access, I put my ear to the door and listened.
Nothing.
I grabbed the AR-10 gun and my pack and headed back up the stairs to the roof. Dropping the pack, I slung the scoped .308 across my back and crawled again to the chopper. Carefully and quickly, I grabbed one of the helmets and dove back down to the ground. I scurried under the chopper and sat the helmet down next to me as I set up a firing position. Finally comfortable, I nudged the helmet out away from me with the muzzle of the AR-10.
Straining, and stretching my upper torso, I was able to get the helmet to the edge of the precipice of the building, in clear visibility of the shooter. At first nothing happened. The wind blew, howling against the building’s angles and broken windows. My heartbeat began to slow and I craned my neck out to look at the cluster of buildings a hundred yards away.
The helmet launched into the chopper with a loud thwack as the high-caliber round impacted. I caught a glimpse of movement and pointed the rifle. Adjusting the focus, a group of three came into view. One shooter, one spotter, and one rear security. The shooter looked like he was prone behind a Barret or other large-bore sniper rifle with a huge muzzle device. The spotter was scanning the roof with what looked like a telescope, and the security, a woman, had her rifle at the ready watching their backs at the roof access.
Wasting no time, I took the shot.
The unsuppressed .308 rocked my eardrums and thundered through the valleys of the urban structures. The undead responded again. Through the scope, I saw my round impact just in front of the spotter, launching debris, knocking over the telescope, and peppering the spotter with rocks and bullet fragments. With no time to fuck with mil dots or finicky scope reticle
s, I applied a hold-over and started pulling the semi autotrigger as fast as I could.
My punished ears throbbed with pain.
Settling the scope back on the adjacent rooftop, I assessed the carnage. The spotter and the sniper were hit and bleeding out. The woman took aim in my direction with her rifle and began firing wildly. Some of the rounds impacted the helicopter and others flew over my head. Through my magnified eye, I could see the panic on her face as she dropped her empty gun and waved her hands in the air.
Surrender.
I calmly took my finger off the trigger. It didn’t matter, as my bolt was locked back, gun empty. The woman dropped to her knees next to the sniper and started tending to his wounds. The spotter was probably dead. I could hear muffled screams and sounds of desperation coming from the other rooftop. The woman was covered in blood and applying pressure to the sniper’s injuries, when the roof access door on her building flew open and the undead began to file out into the sunlight.
I broke cover and ran for my carbine.
Instinctively, I opened fire on the undead that were about to tear the woman and the injured sniper apart. The rounds struck the ground in front of the undead; I couldn’t get a kill shot from this height and distance to the other rooftop. I thought I’d be forced to watch the whole thing play out right in front of me and was about to scream out across the void how fucking sorry I was when I remembered the GAU.
I bolted over to the chopper, jumped in, and charged the machine gun. I let her rip on the advancing horde, throwing body parts and torsos from the roof in a hailstorm of armor-piercing rounds. The woman hit the deck as I slewed the barrel, cutting through the creatures. I worked the gun like a fire hose and watched the destruction play out.
I could see my bullet holes tear through the metal roof access door. Chunks of cinder blocks exploded around the door. Knowing that my ammo can was running out, I began short, controlled bursts at every corpse that emerged through the damaged door.
I pulled the trigger for the last time with a click I couldn’t actually hear; my ears felt as if they were bleeding.