Lopez shook his head and released the breath trapped in his chest. He initiated a quick comms check and, as the replies came in, he saw the rest of the team lowering their night vision devices in front of their eyes. Seeing the faint eerie green ovals reflecting off the others’ eyes, he pulled his own down and said, “Weapons hot.”
A series of soft clicks followed as safeties were thrown and lasers were powered on.
Assuming tacit approval, Cade stepped past Lopez. Without looking back he crossed the threshold and, with the wavering green laser beam probing the well ahead of him, started up the stairs.
The cat was nowhere to be found, and inside the roomy stairwell the stench of death was heavy on the cool air. Rendered in light green, the stairs were much wider than most he’d seen. In fact, three grown men could stand comfortably on the same tread. For ease of moving larger pieces of furniture in-and-out, Cade guessed. There were traction strips on the edges of all seventeen stairs between landings. Sturdy handrails were bolted into the walls on the left. On the right, the inner rail was bolted to the floor and followed the run up and bent around the blind corner at the mid-floor landing.
Taking the stairs slowly, one at a time, Cade made the landing and cut the corner by degrees. Held a hand up, craned his head around the inner rail, and simultaneously walked his gaze and laser beam up the run to the next rise.
“Clear,” he whispered into the comms.
***
Ten minutes after entering the garage, the team was gathered together on the landing between floors two and three and, thankfully, since decimating the walkers in the garage, hadn’t had to discharge their weapons since.
However, peering down on a sight that made him want to puke, Cade’s finger was itching to pull the trigger. What he saw in front of his face rendered in a dozen shades of green made his heart skip a beat. He wasn’t ready for it to end this way. But it was closure. Of that he was certain. Until he extracted his tactical flashlight, flipped up his NVGs, and looked at the scene from a different perspective and in a more revealing light.
Illuminated there on the landing was the fat tabby. And splayed out in a pool of dried blood, surrounded by dozens of crimson paw prints and an abundance of wilted flowers—their aromatic properties long dormant—was a young woman’s corpse. Like Nadia, the blonde looked to have been in her early twenties. She had died on her back and, judging from the look of surprise frozen on her pallid face, she had been alive and free of the Omega virus when she passed.
Looking closer, Cade noticed that her neck was bent unnaturally, nearly ninety-degrees from vertical, and her face was turned in a direction contrary to the rest of her body. Nearly lost in the bright cone of light, and scattered about the landing in a wide arc radiating out from her gaping mouth, were numerous shiny white jagged shards of what Cade presumed were teeth that used to reside in her mouth.
Like a Slinky race halted mid-descent, clumps of clothing still on hangars littered the run of stairs from where the body had come to rest to the landing below. And clutched in the cadaver’s right arm was more of the same, mainly blouses and tanks, also still on their plastic hangers.
Still suppressing the urge to blast all nine lives out of the opportunist feline, Cade barked, “Git,” and nudged the fat tabby away from the decaying corpse with the business end of his carbine.
As the tabby scooted past his boots and up the stairs, Cross, who was standing over the corpse, said matter-of-factly, “Looks like this one died moving out.”
“At least she didn’t forget to feed the cat,” said Griffin.
Lopez bowed his head.
Even Cross shot his SEAL brother a look that said: Really?
“That’s uncalled for,” Cade said as he went to a knee on the top stair. He removed the photo of Nadia from a pocket and compared it with the corpse. Same build. Same hair. Grateful he’d initially been mistaken, he took a fistful of blonde locks and craned the head around. Close, but no cigar. He let the head down to the cement easy then looked the body over from head-to-toe. The corpse’s once bare midriff was now just a mass of flayed flesh, and snaking from a tear near the navel was a short length of intestine, glistening white and still wet with dark splotches of congealed blood.
The dead co-ed’s eyes, earlobes, and lips were gone. Hence the fat ass cat, Cade thought morbidly.
But the nose was intact. So, to be certain, Cade compared it with the photo. Concluded that it was hooked a little. Not a cute button like Nadia’s and Nash’s.
“Not her,” Cade said, total confidence in his voice. He rose up and pocketed the photo. Thumbed the light off and put it with the photo.
“Cat’s a survivor, though,” said Cross.
“In here it is,” said Cade, drawing his NVGs back down over his eyes.
“Out there—” added Lopez, his voice soft and distant “—with the demonios ... it’d be nothing but gnawed-on bones before day’s end.”
“My money is on the cat,” stated Griffin, adjusting his NVGs.
Already on the move, Cade said over the comms, “Couple of hundred stairs to go and a length of hall and we’ll probably know one way or the other how Nadia fared.”
Silently the others fell in behind and, after tackling the next several flights as cautiously as the first, they were on the top landing in front of a door identical to all of the others from the parking garage on up. It was wide and windowless and the dents and scratches marring the skin dispelled any notion that they were inside a hotel as the building’s clean facade and swimming pool might suggest.
Cade put his ear to the door. Listened hard and detected what he thought were soft footfalls. Many of them in fact. And they were coming and going and seemingly stopping and starting at random.
Zs.
Lots of them.
Cade relayed his suspicions to the team in a hushed voice and called them into a huddle, and together they formed a semblance of a plan.
When the brief strategy session concluded, Cade turned away and retrieved the pick gun from his pocket. Without another word he took a knee by the door next to the bold tabby cat and attacked the lock.
Chapter 56
Three miles north of Woodruff, Brook hailed the Kids on the radio. Thirty seconds later the two trucks were pulled over tight on the shoulder, bumper to bumper, on a straight uphill stretch of 16, the Raptor still in the lead. Grasslands dominated on the right and there were no Zs or cars or dwellings for as far as the eye could see. A good distance away to the east some unnamed mountains rose up from the already high elevation of central Rich County. To the left, close in, hardscrabble foothills of another small range rose gently up and away from the road. Hardy ground-hugging plants dotted the ochre soil from the road to where the muted tan of the hills began.
Brook threw the transmission into Park and said, “Let’s get this over with.” She opened her door and jumped down to the road. Stalked the length of the truck, approached the idling Raptor and held a brief conversation with Taryn, informing her why they had stopped. When Brook walked away and looped around back of the Raptor, all three of its passengers were picking their jaws off the floorboards and a heated argument was underway—the topic: whether any of the businesses in Randolph would bear fruit. With Sasha the major proponent of them continuing on.
“No matter what,” she said, both arms hanging over the seats, her red hair unruly and moving proportionately with her arms and hands, which were going in all directions as she pled her case. “It was my fault Raven got hurt in the first place. I should have known better ... I’m two and a half years older than her. And now Chief is hurt too.”
“Don’t beat yourself up,” said Taryn. “Chief is an adult. He knew what he was getting himself into. And Raven ... she rides that bike like the devil whether she’s in competition or not. Hell, she’s Cade’s daughter.”
Wilson flicked his eyes to the rearview mirror. Said, “Brook’s no slouch herself. I’ve seen her mad.”
“What we’re saying, Sash
...” Taryn glanced over her shoulder and saw the F-650’s slab of a passenger door hinge open, Chief emerge, sans pants, and assume a stance against the front fender that looked more like something from an episode of Cops than a cursory inspection for zombie bites.
Wilson said, “I think what Taryn was trying to say is that the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. Raven is going to be just fine when all is said and done.”
Sasha shot him a glance that seemed to say: What the hell does this have to do with fruit and gravity?
Eyes still on Brook and Chief, Taryn added, “Wilson has a point, Sash. She’ll probably kick your butt in the same race tomorrow with one hand tied behind her back. Let’s all just pray that Brook is right about Chief and he’s only got a few scratches and all he needs is a little antibiotic ointment.”
Sasha said nothing. With the fate of two people resting on her shoulders, she melted back into her seat.
***
A full minute passed and not a word was spoken in the Raptor.
Wilson sat back tight against the seat and felt a rising tide of embarrassment for what Brook was having to do. Then he saw Chief’s features. The tightly drawn lips and clenched jaw. Then Chief shifted, stretched out and put his palms up on the side of the hood. Empathizing wholly with the man for the indignation he was likely feeling from having to drop trou in front of God and nature while Cade’s wife stooped near his dangling junk, Wilson tried his best to look away. But just like happening upon the broken glass and torn metal and yellow tarps of a fatal car wreck, he just couldn’t tear his eyes from the life and death measures taking place.
When all was said and done and Chief was cinching his belt tight, Wilson didn’t know any more about his status than when Brook had dropped the bombshell in their collective laps and turned and walked away without fielding questions.
All three Kids craned and watched Brook and Chief get back into the big truck. Then three heads swiveled forward and down and stared at the two-way radio in the console. Which remained silent even as the black Ford F-650 pulled onto the road and passed them by on the left.
Chapter 57
The band of light painting the first quarter-inch of chipped concrete in front of the sixth floor doors was proof enough the team would not be needing their night vision goggles from here on out. So each man took a second to flip them out of the way and then stacked up in a tight bunch next to the inward-swinging door. Each operator had his weapon at a low ready position and his free hand resting on the shooter’s shoulder to his fore. A tactic employed for situational awareness, mainly. But also to keep the target four soldiers in bulky gear represented as small as possible. A vertical rectangle, two feet wide by four tall, ideally.
But a small target was the least of their problems. The dead wouldn’t be shooting at them when they flowed through the doorway in a move rehearsed by each man hundreds of times over their varied careers. The flesh-eaters would, however, be onto them at once, ‘Like stink on shit,’ as Desantos would have so eloquently put it if he were here.
Cade looked at the strip of light on the floor and waited for the shadow to transit past, then ticked off thirty seconds in his head to give whatever it was plenty of time to move off to the west, away from the stairwell door.
Having volunteered for point—or first man through the door—Cade counted down quietly from five and upon arriving at one hauled the door toward him, letting it skim close to his nose and chest before releasing the handle and creeping over the threshold, full of barely harnessed adrenaline and a healthy dose of fear.
He saw a sliver of threadbare mustard yellow carpet first. Saw that swirls and dots in a light turquoise were staggered here and there. Paisley, he had heard it called. Then he saw the blood trail. Or to be precise, blood trails. Plural. And that they were almost black and stood out starkly, like the paisley pattern, against the awful base color, told him that whatever had caused them was over and done.
Halfway through the door and moving, Cade tightened his grip on his carbine and swung the stubby suppressor right. He took a quick snap shot in his mind of everything there and saw only a door with a plastic sign featuring white stairs and next to them someone’s stylized representation of licking flames—universal semaphore for fire escape. With no immediate threat in the short hall right, and seeing that the door opposite the stairwell labeled 601 was closed, Cade ducked low and craned his head left.
In the split second he spent assessing the danger in the hall, the gloved hand on his shoulder belonging to Cross never moved. In his peripheral Cade saw the four-inch suppressor attached to the pig snout of a barrel on the SEAL’s MP7 holding steady. Cool as ice, thought Cade as he took a step left and swept his weapon with his line of sight, his situational awareness ratcheting up ten notches and everything in his cone of vision sharpening and seemingly slowing to a crawl. A fifth of a second later additional training kicked in and he said, “Right clear. Contact, left. Numerous Zulus ... three yards. Engaging,” into the comms and a steady stream of brass began spewing from his carbine’s ejection port.
The once beige walls and white ceiling instantly received a makeover as Cade took a knee near door 601 and walked accurate fire into the phalanx of Zs angling his way. He dropped three in quick succession. All co-eds. The brains and blood once contained inside the skulls of a pair of twenty-something males struck door 602 with a wet smack and instantly began a slow slide towards the carpeted floor. The third monster, a once darkly tanned bleached blonde with a large pair of paid-for boobs crammed into a blood-smeared tank, stumbled over the recently fallen and fell face first into a rectangle of light spilling from a nearby open door. Cade aimed for the crown of her head where a stripe of black roots presented a perfect vertical target amidst the peroxide affected tangle of hair. As he drew up the last couple of pounds of trigger pull the tabby cat bounced off his leg, took two long, stretched-out strides, and used the flailing undead student as a springboard. Tail big as a feather duster, the cat bounded down the hall, passed through a half-dozen similar bars of light streaming in through still more doors that had been left ajar, and disappeared through an inches-wide fissure at the base of a makeshift wall of furniture.
A half beat after the tabby made its escape, the rest of the team was in the hallway and a quick three-round burst from Cross’s weapon stilled the Barbie-doll-looking Z.
Lopez and Griffin checked fire and watched as Cade and Cross dumped the rest of their ammo into the advancing dead.
Sticking to the plan, the first two through the door fell back to change mags and Lopez and Griffin filed ahead and engaged the remaining rotting corpses, leaving another half-dozen human shells leaking brains and body fluids on the soiled carpet.
While the Delta boys covered the hall, the SEALs cleared the four rooms on the left, starting at the nearest door which was labeled 602 and hanging wide open.
The pair was inside for a hard two-count before one of them bellowed clear and they were both exiting, weapons at a low ready, Cross in the lead, with Griff leaving the door hanging open to take advantage of the added light.
The door to 604 was locked so Cross picked it with Cade’s tool. Inside he found the lone occupant in the bathtub. Cause of death: one jagged vertical wound starting at the left wrist and ending mid-inner forearm. Imperfect in its execution. But deadly just the same, resulting in a tub full of crimson water that contrasted sharply with the young male’s alabaster pallor.
Rivulets of colorful melted wax from a handful of burned-out candles ringing the tub streaked its sides to the water line. The blade used to seal the deal was nowhere to be found. Cross guessed it had to be in with the wrinkled, decomposing corpse.
“Clear,” Cross said into the comms. Then, taking a page from Lopez’s book, performed the sign of the cross and said a prayer for the kid, both uncharacteristic moves for the laid-back operator.
The doors to rooms 606 and 608 were open. Once again Cross and Griff did the honors. Both rooms showed signs of being lived i
n after the outbreak. And, like the two apartments they’d already cleared, the toilet tanks here were bone dry and empty water bottles and junk food wrappers littered the floor.
Both rooms also showed signs of some kind of struggle. There were bloody handprints on the carpet and crimson black smears on the walls. Dirty clothing was strewn about and most of the inexpensive fiberboard furniture was overturned and in splinters.
In the hall Cross said to no one in particular, “Someone rode it out for quite a while in zero six and zero eight.”
Lopez said, “And?”
“They bought it ... of course. Signs of a struggle. Blood. Same old same old.”
“The domino effect,” said Griff. “Seen it a hundred times. One turns and nobody has the stomach to do it in ...”
Cade said, “Eventually that one gets another, and another, and so on.”
“Rinse and repeat,” said Lopez, shaking his head. “Four down, five to go. Know what that means?”
Across the hall with his ear pressed to 603, Cade answered, “610 is on the other side of the elevator banks.”
“Correct,” said Lopez. He let his carbine hang from its tactical sling and sipped from his hydration pack. Clipped the tube to his shoulder, craned his head at the bend sixty feet in front of them. And finally, in a low voice tinged with impending doom, added. “To get to the west wing we’re going to have to go through that.”
Chapter 58
Looking directly at Chief while keeping the F-650’s monstrous tires tracking true, Brook flat-out lied, “Yes ... really. I don’t think any of them look like bites or even puncture wounds for that matter. Those are gouges made by fingernails. Hell, if I had a phone I’d take a picture and show you. Short of me tearing one of the mirrors off this beast ... as if I even had the strength to accomplish a feat like that ... you’re going to have to take my word for it.”
Ghosts: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse Page 31