A claw-like hand gripped his arm. Blindly, the Belgian elbowed someone—or something—hard and he fired blindly into another bulky shape coming at him. At that moment, he felt something grab his knee and then a burning pain shot up his calf.
The Belgian turned and fired twice at the Undead that had circled the table and ambushed him. Sweat poured down his face. It felt like a million degrees inside that damn hazmat suit. Through his blood-streaked visor, he could only see a narrow wedge right in front of him. That’s how the bastard had gotten the jump on him.
A piercing howl made his blood run cold. Backed into a corner and unarmed, Basilio faced two Undead at once. His eyes bloodshot, the sailor threw a right uppercut at the Undead that would’ve brought down an ox. The Undead didn’t dodge Basilio’s fist, and that sledgehammer punch didn’t even slow him down. The creature’s jaws snapped together like a rusty trap and broken teeth flew through the air. The other Undead seized that moment to sink its teeth into Basilio’s outstretched forearm, its fangs easily piercing the plastic hazmat suit and the thin cotton uniform underneath.
Basilio spun around like a tornado and let fly devastating kicks that would’ve made Chuck Norris proud. The creature dropped onto his back like a turtle, then struggled to stand up, chewing on that hunk of Basilio’s arm.
“Eric!” Basilio cried out in a ragged voice. “Fucking help me!
The Belgian’s face drained of all emotion as he shot the Undead on the ground. The creature died instantly, with Basilio’s flesh sticking out of his mouth, like a playful, little pink tongue. A sadistic smile spread across Eric’s face, even in that grisly situation.
The last two Undead had piled on top of Basilio. One of them had ripped off his headgear. The Belgian fired twice at one of them, who collapsed like a rag doll, but the other one was faster and clamped down on Basilio’s neck. With a muffled roar, Basilio made a last ditch effort and launched his assailant’s body over the table, sending test tubes, beakers, and microscopes crashing to the floor.
Eric fired his last two bullets into the Undead’s twisted body. He whipped around like a cobra, but he was the last man standing. Six Undead lay on the ground, their heads blown off.
Basilio Irisarri had slid to the floor and sat propped up against the wall. Eric watched in fascination as blood pulsed out of the wound in Basilio’s neck in time to the beat of his heart.
“Eric…” Basilio’s voice sounded strangely waterlogged. A clot of blood slid out the corner of his mouth, then down his neck and joined the river flowing between his clenched fingers. “Eric, help me the fuck up. Eric, I can’t…”
The Belgian pointed to his headgear and gestured that he couldn’t hear him. Then he shook his head and waved good-bye.
“No… you bastard…” Basilio gurgled. “Get me out of here…”
“Can’t hear you, Basilio. I don’t know if you can hear me, but this isn’t fun anymore. I’m hot and tired and I want a cold beer. I’d be willing to bet those beasts devoured your little slut. And in case you haven’t noticed, you’re dying.”
The burly sailor stared up at him, speechless. With each heartbeat, a little bit of life slipped away, out the terrible wound on his neck.
Eric pursed his lips and shook his head. “Gotta go, buddy.” He chattered away happily as he bent down and placed the empty beretta in Basilio’s free hand. “I don’t want you to think I’m deserting you or that I don’t care about you. I really do. So here’s a little souvenir. The authorities’ll think you’re responsible for this mess, not me.”
He looked around, with the pained look of someone whose yard was torn up in a night of crazy partying.
“Say hello to Satan for me, old pal,” he said. He looked at Basilio one last time, then headed back to the airlock. As he pressed the button to open the door, he heard the click of the beretta’s hammer. He turned and saw Basilio pointing it at him with his last ounce of strength. The old boatswain looked at the empty pistol in defeat, realizing he’d been scammed.
“We’re rabid beasts, Basilio,” Eric muttered, knowing the dying sailor couldn’t hear him. “We turn on each other every chance we get. We can’t help ourselves! Take these shitty islands. What’s the first thing the survivors did? Kill each other! We’re on the brink of goddamn civil war, if you believe the media! Those monsters took away the little humanity we had left. At least die with some fucking dignity!”
The door opened behind him. He gave a mock salute and stepped into the little room. Although clouded by death, Basilio’s eyes followed him, his vision growing more and more blurred. His brain was dying, but coursing through his veins were thousands of tiny beings that were multiplying like crazy in his warm body. In a few hours, a new Basilio would arise. But Eric Desauss wouldn’t be around to see that.
The Belgian pressed the button and immediately the jet of disinfectant enveloped him. The liquid burned as it washed over the gash in his calf. He was shocked to see a large, bloody hole in the pant leg of the suit. His fingers clumsy in the hazmat gloves, he lifted up the torn fabric and inspected a string of evenly spaced puncture wounds.
The sweat on his skin froze. He muttered to himself, “One of those fucking beakers must’ve cut me. Yeah, that’s gotta be it. When that last SOB flew across the table, a million glass tubes broke. One of them must’ve sliced my leg. Yeah, that’s it.” His voice didn’t sound as confident as he’d like, but it made him relax a bit.
Breathing easier, Eric waited patiently for the disinfectant shower to end. When the red light went off, the Belgian pushed the outer door open and headed back into the hallway. Still wearing the suit, he slipped through the security door that Basilio had blown to pieces and walked calmly out of the demolished lab.
A few feet before he reached the guard post, he met up with a ragtag crew of civilians and military guards racing down the hall.
“In the lab! A guy with a gun! And a girl! They shot up the place! I got away but there’re still people inside!”
“Shit, not the Zoo! Hope they didn’t reach the Zoo!” The highest ranking soldier turned pale. “Are you all right, Doctor?”
“A bullet grazed the back of my leg,” Eric lied convincingly, pointing to his bloody leg. “It’s just a scratch. I’ll get one of the other doctors to take a look at it.”
“Of course, Doctor. They’ll patch you up on the next floor. The Froilists made a real mess, but everything’s calmer now.” The officer turned to his men. “Let’s go, but be careful. If the doors to the Zoo are open, shoot first and ask questions later. Got it?”
The group trotted off to the lab. With a smirk, Eric took off his hazmat suit, leaned it against the guard post, brushed his sweat-soaked hair off his face, then hobbled through the metal detector. The throbbing pain in his leg grew worse with every step.
Two minutes later, Eric went through the hospital doors. The place was in complete chaos. Dozens of soldiers rushed in and out, and long lines of patients in pajamas were crowded together on the sidewalk. Whistling through his teeth, he walked downtown, limping slightly.
Maybe I should disinfect it when I get home. What the hell, it’s just a fucking cut.
You know perfectly well it’s not a cut, asshole, howled the reasonable, logical part of his mind. It’s a fucking bite. And you know you should shoot yourself in the head right now, motherfucker.
No, I’m sure it’s just a cut. I clearly remember—some flying glass cut me.
You’re lying to yourself! yelled the little voice, but weaker this time.
Eric had heard voices since he was fourteen and had learned to tune them out. It can wait.
Eric realized he desperately needed a drink. What a fucking great idea! It was the Mother of All Brilliant Ideas. A couple of drinks would numb the pain in his leg. Maybe they’d even warm up his balls, which fear had turned to ice. And stop the voice in his head that wouldn’t fucking let him think straight, that was screaming about the millions of little shepherd’s crooks multiplying in his leg. Hell, i
t was worth a try.
For want of a nail, the kingdom was lost.
For want of a single, fucking nail.
41
MADRID
The lower floors of that hospital were in shambles in contrast to the deathly serene bunker and command center the first floor had been transformed into. As Prit and I walked silently, side by side, I figured his mind—like mine—was crowded with memories of the day we ventured into Meixoeiro Hospital, exhausted and half-dead. It felt like we were returning to the scene of a crime.
Our dwindling group made its way quickly, only stopping for Tank to glance at his map. Occasionally we came across some Undead, but the soldiers on point mowed them down with lethal efficiency. From the center of the group, Prit and I didn’t have to fire our weapons once.
We made our way down one hallway after another until we came to the medical supply room. I figured it would have a heavy, armored door since those medications were valuable and scarce, but there was just a double wooden door with a simple lock that looked like it would fall open if you just looked at it. The soldier in the lead kicked that door wide open to reveal a vast room with rows and rows of shelves, and thousands of neatly arranged boxes of medicines.
“This is huge! There must be tons of medicines. We can’t take it all!” I protested.
“We don’t want to take it all,” Pauli replied as she rushed past me. “Just what’s on the commander’s list.”
Marcelo added, “Just the reagents.” His gaze flew down a shelf, then he tossed me a plastic bottle that I caught in midair. “They’re the most important.”
“Why?” I asked, cramming those boxes and bottles into my backpack.
“We need them to make our own medicines. If we take back a lot of reagents, we won’t have to come back here.”
“I’m all for that!” Prit’s mustache flapped up and down as he nodded and stuffed box after box into his backpack.
It took just fifteen minutes to fill our backpacks with medicines and the reagents. The list had a bit of everything on it: antibiotics, opiates, stimulants. I didn’t have a clue what most of those things were. To save space, we took the medicines out of their boxes and tossed them on the floor. The mountain of empties grew. Sitting on one of those mountains like a Buddha, Broto took bottles out of a bin, examined them, then pitched them over his shoulder. When he found what he was looking for, he shouted for joy.
“Great! I was afraid I wasn’t going to find these.” He leapt to his feet and came over to us, unscrewing the lid of a bottle. He popped a couple of nondescript, white pills into his mouth, looking very pleased with himself, then handed me the bottle.
“Want some? You’ll be glad you did.”
“What are they?” I asked suspiciously.
“Methamphetamines, my friend,” Broto said with a wink. “It’s the best buzz. You’re not sleepy or hungry or thirsty, and you’re more alert than an Indian scout.”
I didn’t want any drugs in my body, so I shook my head, but Prit eagerly took a couple of the pills. He swallowed one and held the other out to me.
“Don’t be stupid. Take it,” he said sternly. “If it helps right now, it’s a good thing, even if it’s speed. We don’t know what we’ll face in the next few hours.”
I understood the Ukrainian’s logic and swallowed the pill. I didn’t feel anything, but I assumed it would take a while to feel the effects.
I stood up, strapped on my backpack, and groaned—it weighed a lot more than I thought. Prit handed me the flashlight and the Glock I’d carelessly left on the floor.
“This thing weighs a ton. I’ll be sweating like a pig in five minutes.”
“Don’t be a baby,” Prit said cheerfully and slung his equally heavy backpack over his shoulder. “Every week, my Aunt Ludmila lifted fifty sacks of potatoes that size at the kolkhoz, that collective farm the Soviets forced on us Slavs. Of course, my Aunt Ludmila weighed three hundred pounds, had a glass eye, and was ugly as sin.” Then he launched into a wild story about his aunt, a burning barn, and a dairy cow trapped in a mud pit.
Listening to Prit ramble on about his family, I wondered if the speed was kicking in. If he kept on chattering like that, I was going to strangle him.
“Then my cousin Sergei, who was still naked, jumped out the window with a hoe in his hand and—” Prit was still talking when two shots rang out on the other side of the shelves. In a split second, the Ukrainian’s cheerful chatter ceased. He cocked his HK and crept over to where the shots had come from. I struggled to keep up with him, half-buried under my backpack. Marcelo threw off his pack so he could man his MG3.
We reached the door as more shots rang out and I heard warning shouts. Three legionnaires were trying to hold back a group of Undead amassed at the door to the supply room. We’d run out of time—our presence was no longer a secret. The building rumbled as hundreds of creatures howled, beating the walls or clumsily climbing the stairs, heading right for us. In a moment the place would be swarming with them.
“We gotta get out of here!” one of the sergeants screamed.
“Head for the ground floor!” Tank yelled over the rattle of guns. “In the satellite photos, I saw some tanks in the parking lot behind the building. We gotta get outta here fast! Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!”
His words spurred us on. We closed ranks and headed for the stairwell. Every few feet, a group of Undead appeared out of nowhere, but the soldiers were well trained and they hit their marks every time. Yet it was slow going, just a few feet at a time. If they’d caught us in a larger space, we wouldn’t have had a chance, but being inside the building worked in our favor. The narrow stairs were our greatest ally. Those creatures could only attack us from the front or back, no more than two or three at a time.
Nestled in the center of the group, I focused on not getting out of step or tripping on the trail of bodies as we were leaving.
The deafening clack of the guns bounced off the narrow hallway. When a soldier in front needed ammunition, he’d turn and tap the shoulder of the man behind him. Broto and I grabbed those empty magazines and passed them to the soldiers behind us. Like magic, they filled those empties with ammo they carried in a backpack and kept walking. Gunshots tinged the darkness with a spectral orange glow. Flashlight beams swung wildly from side to side. The smell of gunpowder, blood, and sweat filled the air.
The soldier in front of me turned for a magazine. Just then an Undead came around a corner, wrapped his arms around the soldier’s neck and dragged him out of the group. I heard the guy’s desperate cry, but before anyone could do anything, the creature dug his teeth into the unfortunate soldier’s arm. Without slowing down, Tank raised his pistol and fired at the Undead that fell at his feet. Then he turned his gun on the wounded soldier.
“NO!” was all the poor devil had time to yell before Tank blew his brains out.
I froze. I knew the guy was doomed; it was the only humane thing Tank could do, but I wasn’t prepared for his brutal reaction. I felt the blood drain from my face.
Tank leaned toward me and said something, but deafened by gunfire I couldn’t make out a word he said. All I heard was a high, steady whine in my ears. Even the gunshots sounded muffled, as my ears were packed with cotton. Someone pushed me from behind and before I knew it, I’d taken the fallen soldier’s place at the front.
Three Undead swayed a few feet from us. On my right, Marcelo carried the MG3 on his back. The shooter would have to be a real Hercules to fire that gun without resting it on something. He coolly fired his pistol at everything that crossed his path. On my other side, the veteran sergeant with a scar on his neck leaned toward me and shouted something. I didn’t need to hear him to know what he meant.
Gritting my teeth, I raised my HK and started shooting.
42
MADRID
I don’t know at what point things started to turn around. It’s hard to calculate time when you’re on dark stairs shooting at everything that moves. To be honest, I don
’t think I contributed a lot to the team. Most of the time Marcelo and the veteran sergeant had already cleared out the Undead before I even aimed. However, once we made it to those stairs, we made better time and came across fewer creatures. Maybe the cacophony of gunfire bouncing around all the recesses on the stairs and in hallways made it hard for the Undead to locate us.
Whatever it was, it was a blessing. In just a few minutes, we’d used up almost all the ammunition that wasn’t defective. Once the magazines were empty, the soldiers threw down their rifles and grabbed their handguns with desperation in their eyes.
“Magazines! A fucking magazine, dammit!” Marcelo yelled.
“Here!” Broto said, sweating profusely. In a trembling voice, he added, “It’s the last one!”
To make sure the Argentine had understood him, he held out his empty hands. I turned to him in disbelief. We still had to go down a flight of stairs, cross the ground floor, go out the exit and head to the lot where supposedly the tanks were parked. Without any more ammo, we wouldn’t make it to the exit.
My eyes met Tank’s. He was in the right column near the back. The other sergeant and Prit covered our retreat, holding off any Undead that showed up. The German shot me a grim look and shook his head. There’s nothing we can do, his eyes said.
Just then, as if the gods took pity on us (or prolonged our suffering a bit more), we came to a landing with a window. It was tall and grimy and let in only a small square of dim light, but it was a window nevertheless. I pointed it out to Tank.
“We’re on the first floor. We can get out through that window! It can’t be very high!”
The German herded our group like a sheepdog to that window and stood in the most exposed position to protect the last men as they reached the landing. When we were all leaning against the wall, I breathed a sigh of relief. All we had to do was protect our flank, but our situation was still terribly compromised. There were only eleven survivors and we had less than half of our ammunition left.
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