by C. E. Martin
He turned and looked back at the warehouse. All one hundred Gr33ng34r employees had stopped what they were doing, and were looking at him.
"Colonel!" Kenji screamed over the comm channel of the tactical visors. "They're already infected!"
The worker nearest Kenslir, who had been walking away, his back to the van, was now turned around, looking in Kenslir's direction. He looked down at the mix of powder and confetti pouring from the open canister. He watched as the stream of material fell over Kenslir's left hand, causing the hand to glow a bright green.
The worker tilted his head to one side in confusion.
"They're all infected! Get out of there!" Kenji screamed.
Kenslir muted the comm channel and dropped the canister.
"Mind telling me what you folks are doing?" he asked.
The worker watching him began to tremble. His arms hung limply by his sides as the trembling increased to a spasm. He staggered back a step, then fell to the ground. All of the other Gr33ng34r workers began to do the same—collapsing then thrashing around on the floor.
Kenslir walked over to the spasming man nearest him. He knelt and placed a hand on the man's chest, holding him steady. He tried to pin the man's head down, to check his pupils, but the seizure was too violent.
Then it abruptly stopped.
Kenslir peeled back an eyelid and saw that every blood vessel in the man's eyes had burst. Blood was trickling out of his ears and his nose.
The man's body jerked suddenly, his eyes snapping open and fixing on Kenslir. He tried to sit up and his arms grabbed at the Colonel.
His strength was surprising—beyond that of a normal man's. But no match for the Colonel. He held him calmly in place with one hand, the man clawing at him and trying to bite him.
"Command?" Kenslir asked, watching as the other workers in the warehouse began leaping to their feet. Their faces twisted in rage. Many began to shriek.
"Nakayama claims he just returned from another vision!" Major Campbell yelled over the comm channel. "He says these are all infected subjects."
"I hope he's right," Kenslir said, standing. He transferred his left foot to the chest of the infected next to him, keeping it pinned down. Then he drew the OA-93 machine pistol strapped to his leg.
The mass of screaming, reanimated workers were closing on Kenslir, murder in their eyes, bloody spittle flying from their mouths. They didn't look entirely human.
Kenslir opened fire with the machine pistol, raking rounds across the front of the approaching mob. His bullets splintered thigh bones and blew out knee caps. The first rank of the charging mob collapsed, tripping over their own broken legs.
The mob continued on, stampeding over the first of their number felled.
Kenslir shifted his aim and let fly a head-level burst of full automatic fire. At least eight of the undead were toppled, tangling up the feet of their charging comrades. Then the mob was on him.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
When he awoke, Kenji had a splitting headache and it was hard to breathe. He pushed away from the airbag in the SUV and leaned back in his seat. Blood trickled down a cut on the side of his head. He'd couldn't believe he hadn't been knocked unconscious in the crash.
"Colonel! They're already infected!" He yelled over the comm channel. "They're all infected! Get out of there!"
The tactical glasses flashed and pulsed, but Kenji's blurred vision couldn't make out the graphics being displayed.
"Nakayama!" a new voice called out over the channel. "What the hell are you doing?"
"I had a vision," Kenji said, still trying to focus. "They're all infected—all the workers inside the warehouse."
"Hold on," the exasperated voice said.
A loud thump to his left made Kenji jump in his seat. He turned toward the sound, squinting and trying to focus. His head was throbbing—he probably had a concussion.
He was finally able to make out the sound of the tapping on his window. It was a zombie, teeth opening and closing, over and over as it beat on the window of the driver's door window—which had miraculously remained intact in the crash.
Kenji's head was slowly clearing as he looked around to get his bearings. He pulled off the tactical glasses—they were cracked, the displays no longer working. The engine of the SUV was dead—all the warning lights on the dashboard were lit up. He'd killed it by crashing it into the warehouse. But at least the mystery woman he'd glimpsed in last vision wasn't going to get away again.
The reanimated guard now began beating against the window of the door with his flashlight. It made a loud noise with each impact, and Kenji flinched at each blow. Somehow, the glass held. But it wouldn't for long.
He climbed into the backseat, looking around the SUV for something he could use. The Colonel had gotten his beef jerky and water bottles from a duffel bag in the SUV—maybe there was something in it.
Kenji unzipped the bag and began to dig around in it. The window of the driver's door finally shattered.
The guard began shrieking now. It reached in, trying to get Kenji, but he was too far from the window. It clawed at the door, trying to pull it open, but could not budge it. The impact had twisted the body of the SUV. The door was stuck.
Kenji's hand felt something cold and metal in the bag. He pulled it out and was relieved to see a handgun in a holster. He pulled the semi-automatic from the holster and aimed it at the enraged, screaming zombie trying to climb into the SUV.
Kenji felt for a safety, looking the pistol over. There seemed to only be one possible button—on the grip. When he pushed it, the magazine fell out of the weapon. It bounced off Kenji's lap and fell onto the floor board.
The guard pulled back out of the window, then ran around the SUV. It began beating at the rear door of the vehicle, driving its flashlight into the glass over and over.
Kenji scooped up the magazine and slammed it into the pistol. He hoped his luck would hold— the throbbing in his head would keep him from ending this vision himself. The only way out now was to die—and he never wanted to do that again.
The glass in the rear door shattered, and the reanimated guard immediately thrust its body in, grabbing at the door. It would pull itself inside in seconds.
Kenji sighted the gun and squeezed the trigger.
***
Colonel Kenslir was covered in blood and guts—most of it dripping from the two bowie knives he held in each hand. All around him, the undead lay in pieces that had finally stopped moving. Most of them anyways.
"Command, you seeing this?" Kenslir asked, panning his Tactical Visor around the room. Some of the infected were still struggling, ignoring fatal wounds that would have killed normal people—like missing limbs.
"The team is on the way!" Major Campbell declared over the comm channel. "We can have that building quarantined in just under two hours."
"Roger that," Kenslir said. He bent over and wiped his knives clean on the back of a dead infected, then holstered them. Then he started looking around for his OA-93. He'd dropped it in the melee.
"Who the hell are you?" a woman demanded.
Kenslir turned and saw a small, barely five-foot tall blond walking towards him. She had pale skin, sparkling blue eyes and a child-like face. She was wearing a Gr33ng34r uniform—tan slacks and green polo shirt.
"I'm guessing these were your people?" Kenslir asked, sizing the woman up. He stomped the hand of a nearby undead that was reaching for him, splintering the bones in the hand and turning it to pulp.
The tiny blonde glared at him, stopping a good twenty feet away. "They are my people." Unlike her physical appearance, her voice sounded old, or rather, mature—despite the youthful tone.
"I'll ask once more—who are you?" the woman demanded.
"You first."
"Don't play games with me!" the woman snapped. Her tiny fists were tightly balled by her sides, and her body trembled with rage.
"Well, aren't you the bossy little thing," Kenslir said, reaching over to his backup pis
tol holstered under his left armpit.
"Your weapons will do you no good," the woman said. "You cannot kill mother nature."
***
The pistol barked once—much to Kenji's relief. Astoundingly, the bullet leapt from the barrel and slammed right into the forehead of the reanimated guard. Almost immediately, his screaming stopped, the body going limp, slumping down, then falling backwards out of the back of the SUV.
Kenji let out a sigh, breathing again. He turned and tried the door he had been leaning against. It opened slowly and he almost fell out of the SUV. His legs were wobbly, but he was able to walk to the rear of the vehicle, aiming his found pistol with a shaky hand.
The riser was sprawled in a heap behind the SUV, unmoving. But Kenji remembered all too well what had happened last time. He watched it intently for several moments.
Sure enough, he could see the body begin shrinking in on itself. The skin was turning yellow-green, fuzzy black splotches forming at random. The eyes slowly sank back into their sockets, drying up as the moisture was sucked from them.
Kenji panicked and fired the gun again. And again—over and over, putting as many bullets in the zombie as he could. Many of his shots missed, but several managed to find their targets—right in the legs of the monster.
If he couldn't kill it, maybe he could slow it down enough for him to get away.
The creature twitched, several times as the bullets hit it. Then it stretched out its arm and legs, rolling onto one side. It pushed off from the pavement and slowly began to rise.
The pistol was empty now—and Kenji was seeing that his shots to the creature's legs hadn't stopped it. Despite broken bones, it was slowly standing.
Kenji looked around in a panic. This was an industrial area of the city, overlooking the river. Most of the buildings were warehouses. He wasn't sure where he was going to go, but wherever it was, he'd better decide fast.
The undead turned its eyeless face to Kenji and opened its mouth slowly, hissing. That was the one good part of all this. These Stage Threes were slow, shuffling monsters. They couldn't run.
The monster took a step toward Kenji, arms raising as if to grab him. Then it exploded in a brilliant flash of blue-white light.
***
So far, the tiny blonde had been right. Bullets weren't working. At least not on the zombies.
All around him, the shattered, broken, severed undead had begun moving as the tiny blonde gloated. They were shriveling up and turning a pale white, with green and yellow sprouting on their skin, like mold. Limbs reattached themselves—drawn back to bodies by powdery-green tendrils that reached out then retracted like living roots.
The creatures were slow, but abundant in number. They rose up all around Kenslir while the tiny blonde watched, a smirk on her face. Kenslir had decided to test his handgun on these new targets.
The moldy undead in the warehouse seemed unphased by bullets. Kenslir quickly emptied his backup Desert Eagle handgun into them—exploding heads to little effect and boring fist sized holes through bodies that kept on coming.
"This is taking recycling a little too far, don't you think?" Kenslir asked, ejecting the magnum's empty magazine then slamming in a fresh one.
"Joke all you want," the blonde said. "But you can't kill them now."
"How about you?" Kenslir asked, snapping the pistol out straight and firing.
It was a perfect shot—right between the tiny blonde's eyes. Not that hitting a stationary target at twenty feet was that difficult for him. Her head jerked back from the impact and the hair on the back of her head billowed out briefly as the .50 caliber round punched out the back of her skull.
Where a normal person would have dropped to the floor, a corpse, the little blonde merely smiled.
"Nice try," she said, reaching up to her face and wiping off a trickle of blood that had seeped out of the bullet hole. The wound was already closing up, healing far more rapidly than should be natural.
Kenslir fired twice more, barely moving the pistol. Two more holes appeared in the blonde's chest, one over her heart, the other on the opposite side of her chest—just in case.
"Really?" the blonde asked. She held a hand up to her mouth and coughed. Then she opened her hand and let the two bullets fired into her chest fall to the ground.
Kenslir swung his left fist back, behind him, catching a Stage Three in the chest as it was reaching for him. Bone shattered loudly and the monster was sent flying backwards as though it had been struck by a freight train.
"I told you your guns would do you no g-" the woman started to taunt Kenslir. Her smirk turned to one of annoyment. "Why are you smiling?"
"Reinforcements just arrived," Kenslir said, holstering his pistol. He waved around at the undead slowly shuffling toward him. "They'll take care of my light work for me."
Then he sprinted forward, fists balled tightly.
***
"Atlas?" Kenji asked, still rubbing his eyes from the bright blast of electricity that had exploded the reanimated guard and momentarily blinded him.
A strong hand rested on his shoulder—a heavy one. "He's here," a voice Kenji didn't recognize said.
He was finally able to make out the newcomer—another man of stone, but this one bearing the name tag ZEUS.
"You okay, kid?" Colonel Phillips asked.
"Fine."
"I can't read this!" Victor Hornbeck exclaimed, rising from a crouch in the center of smoking debris that been the undead security guard. Only charred bits and pieces remained.
Kenji counted seven of the stone soldiers, all fanned out in a wide circle, wearing black combat fatigues and assault vests, most carrying bulky machineguns. The one called Zeus carried a short Army rifle in his left hand as he checked Kenji over.
"The Colonel needs help!" Kenji said suddenly, remembering the many undead in the warehouse.
"On it!" Johnson said, moving to the rear of the crashed SUV. He grabbed the bumper of the vehicle and lifted. The rear wheels cleared the ground, and the stone soldier pulled the mangled vehicle free, dragging it backwards several feet with no effort.
Two more stone soldiers moved to the roll up door. They grabbed at the metal and tore it free, ripping it loose of the tracks. The metal parted like paper as they stepped aside.
Atlas and another stone soldier charged through the opening, weapons tucked against their shoulders.
"Maybe you should stay out here," Colonel Phillips told Kenji.
Behind him, Victor and the remaining stone soldiers charged into the warehouse as well.
Kenji opened his mouth to answer, but was cut off by the sound of machinegun fire coming from the warehouse.
"Stay here!" Philips said, switching his rifle back to his right hand. He turned and sprinted in the warehouse after his men.
"Like hell!" Kenji said, running after him.
Past the two vans that had been damaged when Kenji had crashed into the warehouse, the stone soldiers were spread out in a line, firing short bursts into the crowd of Stage Three zombies.
The 7.62mm rounds tore through the monsters, spreading spores into the air and causing the bodies to jerk and spasm with each hit. But the zombies weren't going down. They ignored the holes tunneled through bodies now filled with green spongy material.
Phillips pushed himself to the front of the formation.
"Any one see Mark?" he asked, aiming his M4 rifle and firing.
A zombie's head exploded, but the body continued walking forward. Phillips noticed there were many of the undead crawling toward them—their legs either removed or broken.
"They ain't going down!" Dean Johnson said, sounding a little worried.
A blue-white bolt of electricity launched from Phillips' fingertips, exploding another of the creatures in a bright, fiery flash.
"Then try something different!" Phillips yelled out.
The stone soldiers all looked at each, considering. Atlas pulled his bowie knife from the sheath on his left thigh. "Knives!" he yelle
d.
The other men slung their rifles behind their backs and drew their oversized knives as well.
"Go for the legs!" Phillips said, firing another blast of electricity.
***
Mark Kenslir burst through the wall of the office, drywall and wood exploding around him. He crashed into a desk and fell to the ground, but quickly recovered.
As he climbed back to his feet, the small blonde walked through the hole in the wall she had just thrown Kenslir through.
"You're tougher than you look," Kenslir said, swinging a roundhouse at her.
His knuckles connected squarely on the blonde's head. Vertebrae exploded audibly and her head turned forcefully to one side. She countered by slashing at Kenslir with her left hand—long nails raking across his face, cutting deep gouges in his skin.
Kenslir ignored the deep, bone-scratching cuts and spun in place, launching a sidekick into the tiny woman. It landed square in her stomach and propelled her back through the hole in the wall as if she'd been shot out of a cannon.
Then he walked out after her.
"Almost impressive," the woman taunted as she twisted her head back into place. She was already back on her feet, ready for another go-round. She glanced to her right, in the direction where the sounds of machinegun fire were coming from the other end of the warehouse.
"Your men aren't faring as well, I'm afraid."
Kenslir smiled. The cuts in his face, now turned to gray stone, had already closed up. In another few seconds they would revert back to flesh. "I can keep this up all night."
The tiny woman suddenly extended both her hands, holding them close together, as though pushing something in front of her.
Wind pushed against the Colonel and a bright green light flared all around him. He heard the plaster and wood wall of the warehouse office behind him explode from the force of the air blast.
"Sorry," he said, shaking his head. "That crap doesn't work on me."
>>>LIGHTS OUT, MAX<<< he sent out over the TTV.
"Come and get it then, little man," the Gr33ng34r woman taunted.