Mancini saw the big fat guy in the blue shorts go down a few yards from his position. He stood with his back against the front door of the house and fired the shotgun at a topless redheaded woman, who launched an attack over the top of the line of vehicles. The shot caught the woman as she closed in, stopping her in her tracks and obliterating half her face.
Trey fired another couple of rounds, dispatching another two infected people but they were rapidly surrounding Mancini. Worried looking faces appeared at the second floor window but they didn’t seem willing to assist in the dilemma.
“Come on, man,” Trey yelled. “Get the hell away from the front wall. You’re going to get yourself trapped, dude.”
Mancini heard Trey shouting but couldn’t make out his exact words above the grunting and wailing he was confronted with. He had to move quickly from his position or he’d be set upon by the closing infected crowd.
Chapter Seventy-Three
Mancini reloaded and racked the shotgun after firing another killing round. He took a couple of steps to his right and spun around to face the nearest first floor window. Glass and wood crumpled from the window frame when Mancini squeezed the shotgun trigger. He felt a hand from behind grab at his shoulder before he bolted for the obliterated window. Mancini dived headfirst through the wreckage of the window frame and rolled over on his back when he hit the wooden floor inside the room. He didn’t have time to take in his surroundings as the infected leading the pack followed him through the busted window.
Mancini hurriedly reloaded, racked the shotgun and fired on an approaching man wearing a pair of skimpy orange swim trunks. The cartridge blew out the man’s guts, sending a splattering of gore across the room and up the walls beside the window. The infected guy was projected backwards with the shotgun blast and crashed into a woman climbing through the window behind him. The pair fell to the floor, squirming in the pool of blood pouring from the guy’s guts and trying to rise to their feet.
More snarling infected toppled through the window and Mancini scrambled to his feet. He caught sight of an open doorway behind him and headed towards it, knocking over a table and a large lamp in the process.
The pursuing infected crossed the floor space, skidding and stumbling through the blood pool. Mancini headed through the arched entryway and slammed the door shut behind him. He knew the infected would either tear the door down or accidently engage the handle but at least it gave him a few seconds respite before they came after him.
Mancini hardly had time to catch his breath before the infected guy in the Hawaiian shirt he’d seen earlier, came charging towards him through the corridor. The man raised his arms above his head and growled like a pissed off bear as he approached. Mancini heard the shrieks and scraping of nails on the wooden door behind him as he raised the shotgun. He squeezed the trigger but nothing happened.
“Shit,” he hissed, fumbling in his pocket for more cartridges. He realized he wasn’t going to have time to reload so he turned the shotgun over in his hands.
The big guy closed the ground between them and Mancini drew back the shotgun stock and slammed the bottom of the butt fully into his attacker’s face. The man in the brightly colored shirt went down on the seat of his pants but Mancini didn’t stop there. He rounded on the felled man and clubbed at the top of his head with the shotgun butt.
The guy’s skull gave way after the fifth strike from the weapon’s solid frame. Blood and brains splashed up Mancini’s shoes and legs but squeamishness wasn’t in his agenda. He hurried through the corridor, searching for the staircase to the second floor. The screams and yells from the infected elsewhere inside the house caused Mancini to stop in his tracks. He couldn’t work out where the hell the raging creatures were but they sounded close.
Mancini continued on through the house, stepping cautiously as he reloaded the shotgun. He moved through another arched door frame and found himself in the hallway facing the front door. A wide staircase stood to his right but a young teenage girl, with long black hair and wearing a blood stained nightgown sat on the steps, half way up. She looked at him with harrowing black eyeballs, before emitting a low rumble.
Mancini took a few tentative steps up the staircase, aiming the shotgun at the infected girl. It pained him to see somebody so young with their whole life ahead of them reduced to such a wreck of a human being. With no cure for the disease readily available, there could only be one outcome for the girl’s predicament.
The girl scowled and rose to her feet as Mancini approached.
“I’m sorry I have to do this,” Mancini muttered. He squeezed the shotgun trigger and the girl’s body jerked sideways as the blast ripped through her skull.
Mancini stepped over the prone body, trying to concentrate on the job at hand and not allow the creeping sense of guilt overwhelm him. He continued on, cautiously climbing the staircase. Crimson smears and bloody handprints marked the wall paper running down the side of the staircase to the left. Mancini wondered what type of horrors had occurred in the property before he arrived.
The staircase gave way to a long corridor with a dark wooden floor and flanked by a series of closed, white painted doors. Mancini remembered the room he wanted was at the end of the house so he followed the path after orientating himself with the second floor layout.
Shuffling sounds from a room to his left caused Mancini to turn sharply. He braced himself for an attack but the noise receded and then ceased, so he carried on padding nervously through the corridor. He stopped outside the furthest door on the left of the corridor and rapped his knuckles on the wooden surface.
“Hey, are you still alive in there?” Mancini hissed.
He heard muffled voices then a scraping noise from the room inside.
“Hey, I’ve come to try and get you guys out of here. Are you going to open the door, or what?” Mancini decided to leave the real reason for his appearance a secret for now. First he had to gain the men’s trust before he could spring Luiz out of the place.
Mancini heard grunts and growls echo through the corridor, then the noise of the wooden stairs creaking. The infected were heading his way and sounded as though they were bunched into a blood thirsty mob. Mancini frantically rattled the door handle.
“Hey, come on guys. Let me in, will you?”
The first few infected leading the crowd reached the top of the staircase. They stood shoulder to shoulder, hunched and growling while sniffing the air. Mancini felt his heart hammering in his chest as he banged his shoulder into the door. More infected bunched behind the leaders and jostled in a pack across the landing.
Mancini rifled through his pockets and counted he had three more shotgun cartridges and one in the chamber. The infected caught sight of Mancini and let out shrieks that sounded like wild whoops of excitement. The contaminated crowd, numbering at least fifteen, surged through the corridor towards their intended prey.
Mancini had a total of four shotgun shells plus the ammunition in his handgun. He decided when it came to crunch time, he’d save the last round to use on himself.
Chapter Seventy-Four
Mancini raised the shotgun, pulling the butt tightly into his shoulder and aiming the barrel at the onrushing infected horde. Every round was going to have to count as a kill shot. There was no time or breathing space for wounding or totally missing the targets. He aimed slightly between the two leading attacker’s heads, hoping one shot would equal two kills. Mancini fired and saw the two advancing creatures fall. The boom of the shotgun reverberated around the corridor and a spray of blood spattered over the walls. The onrushing pack stumbled over the felled bodies and continued on in their unrelenting pursuit.
Mancini inserted another cartridge, racked the shotgun, preparing to fire another round when the door to his right banged open and he felt the pull of a firm hand. He stumbled into the room and the door was rapidly slammed shut behind him. The guy in the black shirt and matching black pants bolted the door and slid a heavy wooden cabinet in front of the entran
ceway. The guy in the light blue shirt tried to snatch the shotgun from Mancini’s grasp.
Although he was still in a state of anxiety, the adrenalin still pumped through Mancini’s veins and he was a highly trained combat veteran. Nobody disarms you in the heat of battle. He pulled back the shotgun and swung the butt at the man in front of him. A meaty thud echoed through the room and the guy in the light blue shirt went down under the blow. Mancini backed up a couple of paces, aiming the shotgun into the center of the room and taking in his surroundings. The room was small with a dark wooden floor, burgundy painted walls and two large wingback chairs in front of the big desk. Several portraits of men dressed in old fashioned Mexican army clothing adorned the walls.
The guy Mancini assumed was Logrono stood behind the wooden desk with an astonished expression on his face. Luiz cowered against the wall to the right and the guy dressed in black raised his hands while he edged away from the door. The guy in the blue shirt groaned and held his jaw as he sat up from the floor.
“Quien diablos es usted?” the older guy behind the desk barked.
“Senor Logrono, I presume?” Mancini asked, breathing heavily. “Speak to me in fucking English.”
The guy nodded. “Si, I am Fernando Logrono, but who the fuck are you?”
“I know you,” Luiz stammered, pointing a finger at Mancini. “You’re one of Oreilles’s guys.”
“At the moment, I’m not anybody’s guy,” Mancini snorted. “Number one on our agenda is getting the fuck out of here in one piece and number two is finding where you hid the rest of that green ice stash, Luiz. Do you know what the hell you’ve done?”
Luiz flapped his arms and shrugged. “I didn’t have any clue the product was going to be this powerful. I added an extra kick but I had no idea it was going to create monsters.”
“Well, you fucking did, Luiz,” Mancini spat. “I had to just execute a young girl, who’d probably have never touched that shit if it wasn’t for you.”
“No, no, not my daughter,” Logrono gasped. His face screwed up with anguish and he thumped the desk with his fist. “What did she look like? Please tell me.”
Mancini sighed. “She looked in pretty bad shape. I did the kindest thing I could. I’m sorry but it’s not my fault.”
Logrono visibly sagged as he hunched over his desk with his head bowed. Tears rolled down his cheeks and he made a series of whimpering noises as his body convulsed in refrained sobs.
“We’ve been locked in this fucking room for days with no food or water and we’ve had to piss and shit out of the window,” Logrono wailed. “And all the time my family was being…savaged by those creatures.”
“Well, we need to get out of here and we need to return that green ice stash so it can be destroyed,” Mancini said. “And don’t any of you guys get any ideas of stopping me. Have a little compassion and think about what this so called product has done. Fuck the money. We’re talking about a shit load of wasted lives here. The whole of the Baja Peninsula is in total fucking chaos because of that crap and I’ve been to hell and back trying to make it all the way out here.”
The room fell silent apart from the sound of the infected people’s hands banging and scraping on the opposite side of the door. Logrono, Luiz and the two other guys looked suitably shocked and ashamed, firstly casting accusing glances at each other and then to the floor.
Logrono wiped his eyes and gazed to the door then across the room. “So…do you have an escape plan in mind, Senor…?”
“My name is Mancini and I’m flying my way through this shit without much of a clue what the hell I’m doing.” He moved across the room towards the window, still covering the four men with the shotgun. “The way I see it, our only way out is through this window. Any of you got any keys to those vehicles down there?”
“My car is the blue Lexus at the back of the line,” Luiz stammered. “I have the keys in my pocket. We won’t make it to the car in time. Those crazy people are all over the place out there.”
“We’re going to have to try, Luiz,” Mancini growled. “So, what the hell happened here anyhow?”
“We gave a sample to a guy, Ruben his name was,” the guy in the black shirt said in accented English. “He went ape shit a few minutes later and we tried to take him downstairs but he bit a few people and they too turned crazy ape shit. The whole place go crazy ape shit after that.”
“Okay, so that’s how it started, huh?” Mancini said, nodding. “What about any weapons? You guys packing any hardware?”
Logrono shook his head. “We had one handgun between us but used up all the ammo.” He nodded at the guy in the black shirt. “Victor, over there was too quick to fire off the remaining bullets out of the window. He was too trigger happy and the idiot threw the firearm at those infected people, once his magazine was empty.”
Victor, the guy in the black shirt looked suitably embarrassed by his hasty actions.
“We have a whole armory locked away downstairs, with all kinds of firearms,” Logrono continued. “But as you see, we are cut off and not able to get down there to arm ourselves.”
Mancini huffed and turned his attention back to Luiz. “Next question – where the hell is the rest of that green shit you and your pals concocted?”
A guilty expression crossed Luiz’s face. “I have the remaining twenty pounds of product in the trunk of my car. It is all there apart from a few samples I sold on the way down from LA.”
“How much of that shit did you sell already, Luiz?” Mancini barked. “A whole load of people have died because of those few samples.”
Luiz shook his head. “Not much, maybe a few baggies to some hustlers. You know how it is? I needed some cash for gas and stuff.”
“A few baggies, huh?” Mancini repeated, nodding incredulously. “Those few baggies have wiped out a great deal of the population between here and LA, you asshole. And you had a whole stack of cash that Oreilles gave you back in Ensenada. Why didn’t you just use a bit from that?”
“Jorge and Ernesto would not let me touch the cash,” Luiz replied. “They said it was to use for setting up our own infrastructure. They said they needed it all.”
“F.Y.I. motherfucker, Ernesto is now dead and Jorge is out front with a possible broken ankle,” Mancini said. “Your little scam is over, Luiz. It’s time to wake up and smell the steaming stack of shit you’ve created. It’s time to put an end to this whole damn thing.”
Luiz shook his head again. “You have to believe me. I didn’t know this was going to happen. But I also have worked on a formula to flush the effects of the green ice from your system. I think I can develop a product which will cure the symptoms.”
“You say that now?” Logrono roared. “After my daughter is dead. Only now you say you have a cure for this disease, you idiot. I should have killed you with my own hands.”
“I’m not sure if it will work,” Luiz stammered. “It may not but I think it will flush the body of all the toxins included in the Cristal Verde.”
“Where is this cure?” Mancini snapped. “Have you actually produced any of it?”
“Yes,” Luiz said, nodding. “I have made up a batch. I was going to call it…”
Mancini didn’t hear the rest of Luiz’s words. The door almost gave way as an almighty bang echoed through the room. The cabinet blocking the entrance rocked on its feet and Victor rushed to steady it.
“They will break their way through any moment,” Luiz stammered. “What are we going to do?”
“Like I said, we go out through the window,” Mancini said. “It’s our only choice.”
“It’s a long way down,” Luiz moaned. “What happens if one of us breaks our leg or ankle?”
“Just hope it isn’t you,” Mancini growled, glancing at the driveway through the window.
“So, even if we do get to Luiz’s car, what then?” Logrono asked. “We still have to get out through the gates. There is no power. We can’t open them unless we manually use the crank inside the gatehous
e.”
Mancini sighed and gazed down at the floor. Yet another problem had reared its ugly head.
Chapter Seventy-Five
Mancini tried his best to keep himself composed. “Okay, so we can manually open the gates from the gatehouse, which is where?”
Logrono flashed him an incredulous glance and pointed to the window. “Right beside the gates, of course.”
Mancini hadn’t seen any sort of building outside the grounds so he presumed the gatehouse was on the inside of the perimeter fence. “Please don’t tell me the gatehouse is locked up and you don’t have a key for it?”
Logrono shook his head. “No, it is open, as far as I know. It was manned twenty-four hours a day before all this shit started.” He waved his hand in the air and flashed a stern glare at Luiz. “I had armed guards and cameras on every wall. Now they are all gone and I’m stuck inside my own house like a prisoner.”
“Okay, enough already,” Mancini barked. “Let’s just concentrate on getting the hell out of here. We can save all the gripes and accusations until later.”
Another loud bang came from the doorway and the cabinet teetered once again.
“We don’t have much time,” Luiz wailed.
“I know, there’s a whole bunch of them massing right outside this room,” Mancini said. “You left me sweating out there for a while, remember?”
Mancini glanced down through the window again and saw several infected roaming around by the cars and outside the shattered downstairs window he’d entered the house through. Some more infected had returned to the swimming pool area to finish off chomping on the mangled body parts.
“It’s going to be tight to make it to the car, let alone cranking open that fucking gate,” Mancini sighed, reaching for his cell phone. “We may need a little help right now.”
“Who are you calling?” Logrono snapped. “The police? I’m afraid they won’t help us.”
Green Ice: A Deadly High Page 34