by K. H. Graham
“What I promise,” he said, looking at her with a love that only exists between a father and his daughter, “is that I’m going to do everything I can to make sure all three of us get to where need to go. We’ll get there together and we’ll be safe. I promise.”
Mary nodded and took his hand. “Then I’m ready. But Daddy, can you stay close to me the whole time?”
“Of course, baby.”
They walked out of the room, Nick grabbing two of Mary’s three bags as they went and Mary taking the third. They made it two steps down the hall towards the living room when Valerie’s scream tore through the apartment.
Nick looked down to Mary and saw that her lips were trembling. She could see a lump in her throat, surely a rising cry for her mother. He knelt down in front of her and looked into her eyes once more.
“Go back to your closet,” he told her. “Stay there until you hear from me.”
“But Mom—”
“Mary, please…just go. I’ll make sure Mommy is okay, but you need to stay safe.”
He stood up and gave her a loving push back towards her room. She stutter-stepped once and then dashed back to her room.
Nick started forward again and made it no further than the living room before the gunshots started. Valerie screamed again, followed by a cry from Ames.
Shit, Nick thought. We were in such a damned hurry, we left the door unlocked…probably even standing wide open…
The weight of what this meant didn’t dawn on him fully until he saw Ames and Valerie backing down the hall towards the living room. Steve was ahead of them, firing his rifle. Several feet ahead of them, two ramblers were coming in through the doorway. Another pair was filing in behind these.
“Get into Mary’s room,” Nick told Valerie. “Then wait for me and—”
Then he saw the gaping bite mark along her forearm. It was dripping with blood, the flesh torn down to almost the bone.
“She’s been bitten,” Ames said.
Fury boiled in Nick’s insides, rampaging through him in a wild heat. His brain tried to lock down and bring up the only thing he knew to do when he got angry: seek vengeance. He raced to where Steve was doing a moderate job of holding his ground and took aim from behind Steve’s shoulder. In the time he had turned his back to the doorway, another rambler had come in. Steve had downed two of them but three remained.
Nick took down two with successive shots directly in the center of their foreheads. He leaned into Steve and patted his back. “Are you good here?”
“No. I might have five more shots.”
“Here,” Nick said, handing him the extra Sig he had taken from one of the guards he and Ames had put down. “I’ll be back to help as soon as I can. I’m going to try to clean Valerie’s wound before it’s too late.”
Steve nodded, but the look in his eyes told Nick that he was pretty sure it was already too late. The hell of it was that Nick was pretty certain of this, too. He handed Steve his Sig for extra firepower and then returned to the living room.
Ames had placed Valerie on the floor, elevating her arm with a pillow and doing what he could to stop the bleeding with his own jacket. Nick knelt down to her and kissed her on the cheek. She moaned in pain and the moan escalated into a scream.
“Hang in there,” Nick said. “God, I’m so sorry but please, hang in there. We can try to fix it, we can…”
“No…already gone,” Valerie said. Her brown hair streamed out along the floor, the ends of it getting bloody as they lay in the pool that had collected from her bitten arm.
“No,” Nick said defiantly. He got up and raced to the bathroom across from Mary’s bedroom. He grabbed everything he could find: peroxide, rubbing alcohol, gauze pads. He felt infinitely useless as he gathered it all up. He raced back to the living room to the soft explosions of more gunfire from Steve in the hallway.
How many other buildings is this happening in across the country? Nick wondered. Where else have the ramblers wised up and realized that there’s more food to be had in the buildings they absently pass by in every city?
It was a tormenting thought that made his head feel heavy. He felt it like a loose marble rolling around in his head as he knelt by Valerie, dumping the bottles and gauze by her. She let out another scream of pain that coincided with another series of gunshots.
“Out of ammo for the first gun,” Steve called out.
“Shit,” Nick said. He realized then that he was on the verge of crying.
He looked down at Valerie and saw that her eyes looked sleepy. She was in a daze and he was almost glad. Maybe, he hoped, it dulled the pain. This hope was erased when her eyes grew wide and she let out a scream of agony. She writhed under the floor and Nick held her as steady as he could.
He caressed her face and kissed her mouth softly. “I’ll be right back,” he said.
He then looked to Ames desperately. “Please…see what you can do.”
“I will,” Ames said, but the look on his face was very much like the one Steve had just given him.
Nick grabbed the MP5 Ames had taken from the back of the Humvee and walked back to the hallway. The rifle felt like something alive in his hand for a moment, but then he froze. The shock of what he saw in the hallway was almost too much.
There were eight ramblers in the doorway and more walking by outside. Screams filled the building now. The soft sound of gunshots from overhead and below started sounding out and they all seemed to ring out in Nick’s head.
He shook all of that away and took his first shot. He watched the left side of a rambler’s head disintegrate and for half a second, it made him feel more grounded. It almost made him feel like he was in control.
Then Steve ran out of ammo again.
He looked dumbly at the Sig that Nick had given him moments ago. Nick barely noticed this. He was too busy taking aim at the next rambler in line. They were getting closer now; the nearest one was three feet away from Steve and Steve didn’t seem to realize it.
“Steve,” Nick said. “Fall back. Take the gun out of the waist of my pants. Move it, man.”
But Steve was locked up. His eyes were blank and his legs were unmoving, He was frozen in terror.
“Steve!”
This managed to break through, but it was too late. Nick managed to take down the nearest rambler but as it fell to the floor like a sack of garbage, the one behind it lunged at Steve and bit him directly on the shoulder.
Steve didn’t even scream. He just let out a whimper and fell back against the wall. Nick turned the rifle in that direction and when he pulled the trigger, the barrel was less than three inches from the rambler’s head. Its skull seemed to explode from inside. The wall, as well as Nick’s clothes and much of his face and arms, was coated in blood and gore. He felt something solid strike his forehead—a chunk of skull, most likely.
Nick felt a hand clamp down on his own shoulder and he wheeled around, catching the rambler in the chin with the stock of his rifle. He then took aim and fired. He turned back to Steve—seeing, as he did, that two new ramblers had spilled in from the hallway—but it was too late. There were now two ramblers feeding on him. From what Nick could tell, Steve was no longer moving.
Nick lifted his foot and kicked one of the ramblers squarely in the side of the head. He shot the other one in the back of the head and blood splattered on the floor and Steve’s motionless body.
He then turned the gun towards the doorway and took out the two coming at him with clean shots. Another was coming in but Nick raced to the door, nearly slipping in the blood from the now headless rambler he had taken out at close range, and slammed the door shut. He locked it and then turned back to the hallway. Blood was everywhere and the one remaining rambler that he had only kicked in the head was getting to its knees.
Nick stomped over to it, letting his rage come to the surface. He let out a wail of frustration and hatred as he brought the stock of the rifle down on its head. When the rambler hit the floor again, Nick wasted no time.
He lifted his foot and brought it down hard on the side of the rambler’s face. Then he lifted his foot and did it again.
And again and again.
He felt and heard a series of crunching sounds. Blood flowed from the rambler’s ears and mouth, slowly channeling out onto his floor to collect with the growing pool of crimson that was already there.
Nick lost count of how many times he stomped it. Six? Seven? Its face looked like a rubber mask without anyone to wear it. He would have likely added several more blows if he hadn’t heard Mary.
“Mommy?”
Her voice was broken, filled with tears and fear.
Nick ran back into the living room and saw that his daughter had apparently been lured from her room by her mother’s wails of agony. Valerie was now almost howling like some wounded animal. Her throat was raspy now, each cry like something that had been filtered through broken glass.
Nick looked to her arm and saw that it was going a deep color of purple around the area where she had been bitten. The purple was tinged with grey and a color that had no proper name but spoke of decay.
“Mary,” Nick said. “Baby…please get back into your room.”
Her eyes went from her father and then back to her mother. Ames watched it all helplessly. He held the open bottle of peroxide and it was then that Nick realized how stupid he had been. Ames looked like a war doctor that was trying to replace a mangled limb with play dough.
“Ames, we have to get her out.”
“There’s no time,” Ames said. “If we take her, she’ll turn before we get to safety. That is, if we can even get out of here.”
“Get on your phone and call someone. Get a helicopter.”
“I can try, but it won’t do any good. Every single resource we have is scrambled today.”
“There has to be something—,”
“Nick,” Ames said. “The codes. The passwords. She just gave them to me. She told me.”
Nick went to Valerie’s side and put his face to hers, nose to nose. “You’re not going to become one of them,” he said. “You won’t. I’ll get you help. We just have to get out of here.”
But her eyes were hazy again, fluttering half-closed. Nick was pretty sure she wasn’t even hearing him.
Nick then looked to Mary. She was now looking at the rifle that he was still holding in his right hand. She gave it a look of distrust that broke Nick’s heart. He sat it down and went to her. He took her face in his hands and kissed her on each cheek.
“Mommy will be okay, but listen…I need you to be brave. We’re going to leave here and there are some…some bad people on the other side of our door. Don’t look at them. Okay? You look at me. You keep your eyes on me and—”
A stifled “Nick,” came from behind him. Not Valerie, but Ames.
Nick turned just as a sound like dry, cracking wood sounded out. Fully turned around, he saw Ames hitting the floor while Valerie raised herself into a half-sitting posture. What she was doing made no sense and it took Nick half a second to realize what she was doing.
It was that half a second that made all of the difference.
She had the rifle in her hands by the time he fully understood. By the time he lunged for her, screaming in despair so deep that it came from his heart, she was turning the barrel towards her head.
Nick hit the stock at the same moment Valerie pulled the trigger. Instead of a shot to the center of her head as she had intended, it took her just to the right of her left eye. Still, it did the job. She did a little jump back, her head rocking hard in an almost comical fashion, as her blood painted the floor behind her.
Mary shrieked. It coupled with the rifle blast to make a noise that Nick would hear in his nightmares for years to come.
Nick crumpled up on the floor, still shrieking. He pulled the Sig from the waist of his pants and instantly wanted to go outside and kill as many of those fucking ramblers as he could. But as he pulled it out, he saw Mary. Her eyes were wide and something inside of her was broken now. He could tell by the slack expression of her mouth as she shrieked.
He went to her and hugged her but it was like holding a limp doll. All he could feel were the tiny screams pushing out from her lungs and tearing through her body.
He never knew how much time passed after that. His daughter’s screams rang in his ears for an unaccounted for period of time as he wept against her small body. Sometime during the fugue, Ames put a hand on his shoulder and shook him hard.
“Nick, we have to go. I think it’s safe outside.”
Nick blinked and realized that Mary wasn’t screaming anymore. She was looking at her mother with dull eyes. Nick cupped her face and turned it away, facing her eyes towards the hallway (which, given the number of dead ramblers and Steve wasn’t much better).
“Where?” Nick said. His voice was still coming out in cries of grief.
“I called for a chopper. It’s going to be a while, but they’re coming. Two hours, maybe. They’ll be landing on the roof.”
Nick only nodded. He wanted to look back at Valerie but would not allow himself to do it. What was the point? He didn’t want to remember her like that and God knew that if he let himself look, it would be impossible to look away.
“Is the hall clear?” Nick asked, trying to find the core of himself where he was able to shut out emotion like he had been trained to do.
“It seems to be. I…um, I checked the rifle. There are seven rounds left.”
“And my Sig is nearly full,” he said, trying occupy himself with courting ammunition rather than thinking of his dead wife lying less than three feet from him, with portions of her brown hair splayed out in a pool of maroon.
“Mary,” Nick said. “Can you hear me?”
She gave a small nod, but her eyes were still expressionless. She was in some sort of shock and Nick realized that he probably was, too. Nevertheless, he had to push past it to make sure he could at least get his daughter out of this alive.
“We’re going now. If we get into danger, I’m going to tell you to either close your eyes or look at the floor. Do you understand?”
Again, another nod.
He hugged her again, tighter this time. Behind him, he was vaguely aware that Ames was covering Valerie with a quilt from the couch.
“I love you,” he told his daughter.
“I love you, too, Daddy,” she said, her voice robotic.
His heart beamed softly at this, a stark contrast to what it had been ambushed by in the last fifteen minutes or so.
He decided then and there that he would do whatever he could to save her, even if it meant sacrificing himself.
He had already failed his wife and the pain of that had not yet properly settled in.
He wasn’t sure he would even want to know the man he would become if he failed to save his daughter, too.
He wondered, as he hugged his daughter, what that sort of darkness might feel like.
Sadly, he thought it might suit him well.
25
Ogden was stepping off the elevator on the first floor just as Nick, Katherine, and James were heading for it. Griffith looked pale, which made the splatter of blood on his forehead look darker than it should have.
He also looked very pissed to see Nick.
“What in the hell have you told him?” Ogden asked.
“What are you talking about?”
“Sergeant Griffith is seething with rage. He’s on a fucking killing spree and says he’ll keep killing unless he talks to you.”
“That makes no sense,” Nick said.
“You’re damned right it doesn’t. But that’s the way of things.”
“You couldn’t take him down?” James asked. “With all the guards and firearms around here?”
“Don’t scrutinize my job,” Ogden said in a near scream. “Just come with me down to the med wing and do what you can to stop this. If you can get a clear shot for my men, we’ll take him out.”
“If he’s acting hostile, I’ll ne
ed a firearm,” Nick said.
“Dream on,” Ogden said.
Nick didn’t feel like arguing and was frankly too concerned and curious about what was going on with Griffith to put up a fight. So he played the good little boy and followed Ogden onto the elevator. James and Katherine followed behind and the four of them took the elevator down to the medical wing.
When the doors slid open, Nick found himself slipping so naturally into his old skin that it was uncanny. He took in the room with an investigator’s eye and was very much aware that he was going into a battle-like scene unarmed.
He turned to Katherine and James as they stepped out of the elevator, still taking in the scene as he did so. “You guys stay three steps behind me. Ogden, you stay behind them.”
“I’m not taking orders from you,” Ogden snapped.
“No, but you are taking orders from Griffith at the moment. And he asked to speak to me. So do this or I can make this process very difficult for you.”
Ogden sneered but did as he asked. Nick supposed he felt safe regardless because of the five armed guards that were waiting in the hallway. They all had their guns drawn, all carrying carbine rifles. He heard the guards fall in behind Ogden as they made their way down the hallway.
Nick could smell the scent of fired rounds in the air as he stepped forward. Three steps further along, Nick saw the first traces of blood on the floor. There were just a few drops at first, but then a huge splatter of it.
As he slowly rounded the corner to the left, headed for the clear room they had visited Griffith in less than ten hours ago, the blood was immense. It covered the floor wall to wall.
Then Nick saw the source of the blood. A medic lay on the floor, his head bashed in to the point of looking like a rotted melon. Further up the hall, another body was strewn along the floor. This was a female soldier, her right arm broken and her throat torn out. Her dead eyes were looking directly at Nick.
“My God,” Katherine said from behind him. Oddly enough, a memory of her removing her shirt in the bathroom five minutes ago flashed through Nick’s head. He willed it away and focused on the carnage in front of him.