Get out of here or you’re screwed, she told herself as she gritted her teeth and crawled toward a side door. A nurse she didn’t know was slumped on his side, his head blown wide open. The air smelled of gunpowder, blood, and shit. The groans of the wounded mingled with the hysterical screams of those hit by an explosion.
A disheveled officer in the Civil Guard came out of God-knows-where, shouting himself hoarse trying to bring order to the chaos.
“Hold your fire! We’re shooting at each other, dammit!” His words convinced a few of the confused shooters to stop firing.
Lucia felt relieved. Finally someone was taking control of the situation. She started crawling in his direction, but stopped midway when she saw that smiling redheaded creep who killed Maite come up behind the officer.
With a flourish, like a barber removing his customer’s cape after a haircut, Eric Desauss raised his gun and shot less than an inch from the neck of the unsuspecting officer. The soldier dropped to the ground, a red fountain gushing from his neck. Security guards took aim at the gunman, but before they could fire, a machine gun at the other end of the hall took out three or four of them.
Chaos erupted again. The guards completely forgot the lone gunman and concentrated on the group that had fired on them. Basilio took advantage of the situation to grab one of the HKs on the floor.
“Over there! She went out that door!” Basilio yelled.
Humming a little tune, Eric the Belgian stepped over the soldier’s bloody corpse and headed for the door, looking down the barrel of his gun, with Basilio following close behind. His fly felt like it was about to explode as intense pleasure spread through his body. As he sprinted through the crossfire, he pictured himself jacking off over that slut’s corpse and a huge smile lit up his face.
31
MADRID
For a very long second, I stood there, frozen like a store dummy, staring at the Glock in my hand. What had happened didn’t sink in. The fucking gun hadn’t fired, but I didn’t have time to ponder the situation. With a murderous roar, one of the half-charred Undead launched himself at Prit as he loaded his HK, grabbed him by the shoulder and hurled himself on top of the small Ukrainian.
Instinctively, Pritchenko raised his rifle and drove its muzzle into the Undead’s chest like a stake, which sent both of them careening backward. The Undead stopped in his tracks. The blow probably broke his ribs. Caught off balance, Prit stumbled and fell backward onto the ground, totally helpless.
That was all the Undead needed. He dropped to his knees and slumped over my friend who was struggling to get free from that deadly embrace. Everything was moving in slow motion. I peered at the monster’s rotten teeth through his lips that’d been reduced to a thin grimace by the fire. He snapped his jaws like a bear trap, just inches from the Slav’s face that was pale with terror.
“Get him off me! Dabai, dabai!” Prit shouted.
Getting a running start, I kicked the Undead’s ribs as hard as I could. That kick would’ve knocked the life out of a normal person, but those creatures were made of sterner stuff. Wobbling from my kick, the Undead guy dropped Prit, who crawled away.
Then the monster focused all its attention on me. I took a couple of steps back as the Undead struggled to his feet. Prit stood silently behind him, holding his huge hunting knife, poised to hack off the thing’s neck.
Before the Slav could make a single cut, the Undead’s temple erupted in a miniature volcano. Bits of the guy’s brain splattered everywhere and his body collapsed in a heap. Prit and I looked at each other, stunned but relieved.
“What kind of fucking game are you two playing?” Pauli’s shrill, sarcastic voice was the most wonderful sound on the earth. She was down one knee, blue smoke wafting out the barrel of her HK. She’d come along just in time.
“Looks like you boys prefer hand-to-hand combat,” she said mockingly. “You know better than anyone that wrestling with monsters is a really bad idea. You could catch something really bad.” She slowly got to her feet and brushed off her knees.
“Prit’s fucking gun jammed,” I protested, pointing to his HK. “My pistol didn’t fire either.” I waved the Glock under her nose. “So don’t give me any shit, dammit!”
“For starters, that’s a rifle, not a gun,” Marcelo corrected me, rubbing his shoulder that was sore from shooting the MG3. “You guys jammed two weapons? That’s a first.”
I held out my Glock, with a scowl. The Porteño took out the magazine and examined it carefully. He raised his eyes with a look of disbelief.
“Did you chamber the first bullet, asshole?”
“Uhhhh…” The blood rushed to my face. Fuck. Despite the training in Tenerife, I’d never gotten over my fear of accidentally shooting myself as I drew the gun. I’d decided to take the first bullet out of the magazine, so there was no bullet in the chamber.
I knew perfectly well I had to cock the gun before I shot it, but in the confusion, I’d forgotten. The Glock hadn’t fired on account of my own negligence. I was mortified. I wished that that Undead lying at my feet had killed me.
“Who’d they send us? Rookies wet behind the ears!” one of the younger legionnaires shouted, spitting on the ground in disgust.
“Careful what you call me, you sniveling brat.” Prit turned on the legionnaire, a homicidal gleam in his blue eyes. “When you were still running around on the playground, I’d already slit a bunch of Mujahideen’s throats in Chechnya.” The Ukrainian’s voice was icy and controlled. He’d rip the guy’s guts out right then and there if the loud-mouthed kid gave him the slightest excuse. Prit pointed at me. “This guy’s been through more than you can imagine. He’s survived tight spots that would’ve scared you shitless. So shut the fuck up!”
The legionnaire glanced around for support, but the rest of his team was out of earshot. He swallowed, raised his hands and backed off. “Take it easy, pal! Just watch your ass, because I’m not going to lift a finger to help you. Got it?” He turned and walked back to the warehouse door with his tail between his legs.
“What happened to your HK, Prit?” Pauli asked, unfazed. “Did it jam?”
Not saying a word, the Ukrainian took the magazine out and pulled the hammer. A shiny bullet flew out and hit the ground with a clink. Prit scooped it up and handed it to Pauli.
“Oh, shit! It’s a series forty-eight!” The Catalan frowned and handed it to Marcelo.
He examined the shell and winced. “The motherfucker’s calibrated wrong!”
“What is it, Marcelo?” Clearly something was wrong, but I couldn’t figure out what.
“We’ve used up a shitload of ammunition fighting the Undead,” Pauli said, as she checked her own gun’s magazine. “Each incursion consumes hundreds of rounds. Six months ago our supply of bullets reached a critical low. We had to start making our own. The problem was there were no machines on the Canary Islands to produce the shells with the necessary precision, so we had to build the machines from scratch.”
“But that’s good, right?”
“Not really,” Pauli said with a weary shake of her head. “Not all that ammunition met quality standards. Occasionally some defective ammunition can slip in. We lost a couple of teams before we figured out what was going on. We assumed the ammunition for this mission had been tested several times. Guess we assumed wrong.”
“A mistake?” David Broto asked, wide-eyed. All in all, the computer guy had survived his first contact with the Undead pretty well.
“Or sabotage,” one of the sergeants glumly interjected, as he checked one of his magazines. “This one’s defective too! Son of a bitch!”
“Froilists?” Broto asked.
“Could be.” Marcelo stretched like a cat and started walking toward his MG3. “All I know is, Tank’s not going to like this.”
Sabotage? My head was spinning. What was that all about? Before I had time to ask, Tank landed like a mortar round in the middle of our group, barking orders.
“What the hell’re you do
ing standing around? Get the lead out, dammit! We don’t have all day!” He pulled one of the legionnaires by his backpack toward the building.
Wrestling with my backpack, I followed the rest of the group toward the warehouse’s rusty fire escape a few feet away. Thinking about that defective ammunition sent chills up my spine. It could be the death sentence for a lot of our group.
32
TENERIFE
Lucia ran down a hallway in an unfamiliar wing of the cavernous hospital. Unlike the rest of the building, it was deserted and was lit up by flickering fluorescent lights. There wasn’t a single bed or wheelchair… and not a damn thing to hide behind. She rubbed her throbbing hip where the gurney ran into her. She’d have one helluva bruise, but she wasn’t concerned about that.
She could hear the muffled sound of gunfire through a heavy double door she’d just slipped through and her pursuers’ excited voices. Dripping with sweat, she ran faster, hoping that the corridor led someplace safe or, better yet, outside.
Lucia turned a corner, then stopped suddenly at an abandoned checkpoint with a metal detector. There wasn’t a soul in sight. A newspaper lay on a table. Beside it was a cup of steaming coffee. A radio resting on a pile of folders softly played some music. The guards must have run down the main hallway when the alarms went off and were probably shooting on the other side of the door.
She searched the table for a weapon, tossing a pile of papers on the floor in her rush. All she found was a gun-lovers magazine and a penknife.
She jiggled the drawers but they were locked. Damn! Think fast or you’re fucked. Really fucked.
Her gaze fell on a colorful poster of smiling soldiers passing rations down from an army truck. The caption read “The Third Spanish Republic is looking out for you.” Below the poster was a file cabinet, its top drawer standing wide open. The guards had left in such a hurry they’d forgotten to lock the drawer.
Lucia rifled through it but all she found was a handful of magnetic cards and papers on a clipboard where someone had scrawled some names and hours. Lucia assumed it was a record of who’d been given the cards. Her heart sank. Just as she was about to toss the clipboard aside, she spotted something written across the top in bold: 71410NK.
She ripped off the sheet of paper, stuffed it in her pocket, and took off running. She could hear footsteps getting closer.
After a few feet, she hesitated at the top of a staircase, panting, swallowed hard. She’d been so sure that that hallway led outside, and yet here she was, at the top of some stairs headed down to the basement.
No, fuck no! What’re the odds I’d have to hide in a fucking hospital basement twice in a row? It’s almost funny.
About the same as winning the lottery or being struck by lightning. But one thing was certain, if she didn’t go down there, those maniacs would corner her. The look in that red-haired guy’s eyes had made her feel really scared—and dirty. She wasn’t going to stick around and argue with him.
She sighed and started down that long flight of stairs. It was well lit and meticulously clean with the faint smell of disinfectant. If it weren’t for the lack of windows—and people—those stairs would’ve seemed completely harmless.
Lucia ran all the way to the bottom. The ugly, light green tiles on the floor and walls were different from the upper hallways, but otherwise it looked the same. Red arrows and a symbol she couldn’t identify set it apart from the rest of the hospital.
Lucia stopped for a few seconds to catch her breath. She felt as if her heart would explode and the bruise on her hip was throbbing. The sound of footsteps flying down the stairs spurred her on. She followed the red arrows without hesitating, as a voice in her head screamed, What the hell will you do if it’s a dead end!
The hallway led to a square room. A heavy steel door with the same unfamiliar symbol took up an entire wall. She was sure she’d seen that symbol before, but she was so scared, she couldn’t think where.
Beside the door was a panel with numbers, buttons, and a slot. It was an alphanumeric keyboard, like on a cell phone; each key corresponded to letters and numbers. She grabbed the magnetic card from her pocket and inserted it into the slot. A screen lit up with a welcome message, along with a digitized photo of a confused-looking, gray-haired doctor wearing glasses.
GOOD AFTERNOON, DR. JURADO. PLEASE ENTER YOUR PASSCODE.
Lucia froze. Then she remembered the code scribbled on the piece of paper. With trembling fingers, she pulled the paper from her pocket and punched the code into the keyboard. The screen went blank for a millisecond and then a new message appeared.
WRONG PASSCODE. YOU HAVE TWO (2) TRIES LEFT. PLEASE ENTER YOUR PASSCODE.
Lucia brushed a sweaty lock of hair out of her eyes. “You idiot, you can’t even type a damn code right!”
She typed it in again, as calmly as she could, making sure it was correct. She pressed ENTER and the screen went blank.
WRONG PASSCODE. YOU HAVE ONE (1) TRY LEFT. PLEASE ENTER THE PASSCODE.
She felt her stomach clench into an icy fist. If this wasn’t the passcode, she was done for. She wouldn’t get another chance. Plus, those footsteps sounded really close now. She beat her fist against the door. That was stupid. The second to the last character of the code was not the letter O but a zero. She typed it in a third time, this time her fingers flew over the keyboard, as Basilio appeared around the corner, breathing like a bellows. The screen flashed a third time and a new message appeared.
WELCOME TO THE ZOO, DR. JURADO. HAVE A NICE DAY.
The door opened with a hiss. Lucia had just enough time to slip in before a blast from an HK kicked up splinters of plaster from the wall she’d been leaning on. Another bullet hit the control panel. It exploded with fireworks and gave off a faint singed smell. Lucia tried to close the door, but the system had been fried when the panel blew up. With death at her heels, Lucia headed into that room. As she did, she recalled the meaning of the biohazard symbol emblazoned on the door.
Then an alarm went off.
33
MADRID
The spiral staircase creaked and shook beneath our feet. Flakes of rust showered down as we climbed flight after flight. That staircase was in such bad shape, it mustn’t have been used before the Apocalypse. A thick layer of ash and dust rose up in white clouds making us sneeze and giving the stairs an unworldly, sinister look. Someone behind me whistled through his teeth nervously.
When we finally reached the third floor, an emergency door, crisscrossed by a thick chain, cut us off. I collapsed onto one of the last steps, like most of the group, gasping for breath. The bone-dry air, the heat generated by the napalm, and the dust swirling around us made us desperately thirsty.
With clumsy hands, I unscrewed my canteen and took a couple of long gulps. I passed the canteen to Broto, who’d flopped down next to me, his two-hundred-plus pounds shaking the staircase. The computer geek took a very long drink. I couldn’t take my eyes off his Adam’s apple, bobbing up and down as he gulped down half the canteen. Finally he took a deep breath and handed it back to me, with a loud belch.
“How’re we gonna get that damn door open?” he asked, after a long silence.
“No idea, but I’ll bet Tank has thought of something,” I said, rummaging around in my backpack for a cigarette. Then I remembered I’d left my last pack on the SuperPuma.
“Everybody get back!” One of the legionnaires was unrolling a cable away from a plastic substance that one of his team had stuck around the frame of the door. The cable was connected to a metal box the size of a cigarette pack with a button on top.
“Shit! That’s going to make a lot of noise. Let’s go, pal,” Prit muttered as he pulled Broto to his feet. Our computer whiz had gotten his backpack stuck between two rungs in the staircase. He looked like a huge snail as he struggled to get free. Prit and I jerked him free and got the hell off the landing.
We stood behind the legionnaire with the detonator. When he was sure no one was on the upper floor, he fl
ipped up the lock on the button. I opened my mouth to keep my eardrums from bursting in the explosion, the way I’d been taught back on the island.
Just then machine-gun fire and excited shouts rang out from the bottom of the stairs. The Undead had started up the stairs and the guys in the rear were taking them out. Their position gave them an advantage, but with so little ammo, they couldn’t hold them long.
The same thought must have occurred to the soldier with the detonator. With a flick of his wrist, he pressed the button. A muffled explosion and a cloud of chemical smoke wafted down over us. A large piece of concrete shot over the railing and landed on the crowd of Undead below, but that was as much as we could see.
“Get climbing!” Tank roared. “You guys in front, move your fucking asses!”
Prit and I looked at each other. We’d been the last to get off the staircase so now we were at the front of the line, along with the explosives expert and the sweaty computer guy. The rest had known what was coming and had “allowed” us to take the lead. They got a good laugh as we wrestled Broto to his feet.
“We’re fucked, aren’t we, pal?” I asked as I pulled on the top of my wetsuit.
The Ukrainian gave me a wry smile, as he checked the clip in his HK for the umpteenth time. “Who knows… but stay close, got it?” And with that, he scrambled up the last flight of stairs, ready to enter the building.
Remembering all the dead Tank had left in his wake on previous missions, I climbed the last flight of stairs on Prit’s heels. The door on the landing looked like a giant hand had ripped it off the wall. It lay twisted against the railing where we’d been sitting. A fine rain of concrete and pulverized brick trickled out the holes where the hinges had been.
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