“It shouldn’t be possible, unless…”
“Unless?”
“Unless whatever’s happening out there is worse than we thought, and affecting more things than just people.”
“Like technology?”
“Maybe.”
“What could do something like that?”
He could think of plenty of things, some more likely than others. The world he used to tread in was full of maniacs with insane ideas about how to kill people or topple civilizations that they didn’t agree with.
“I don’t know,” Cole said instead. “Let’s focus on what we do know.”
“And what’s that?” Zoe asked.
“The here and now. Getting through today.”
“Then tomorrow…”
He nodded. “Then tomorrow.”
And the day after that, and the one after that, he thought but didn’t add. He assumed Zoe already knew it, too. She didn’t look like a dumb woman. If anything, she’d shown herself to be capable. Or at least, not a huge burden on him.
“So what’s our next move?” Zoe asked.
He looked toward the rear hallway behind them. “Let’s look for a phone. Maybe a landline that’s still working.”
“You want to call someone?”
“I want to call anyone that’s still out there. Cells are down, but maybe the old-fashioned way still works.” He picked up the baseball bat leaning against the desk. “Same rules apply. Stay close, and don’t stray.”
Zoe nodded, while Ashley, once again, saluted him for some reason.
“Why does she keep doing that?” he asked Zoe.
Zoe smiled. “Her dad was in the Army.”
Cole nodded. He didn’t ask Zoe where Ashley’s dad was now, or if he was even still alive. Mostly because he didn’t want to know too much about mother and daughter.
“Good call,” the Voice said. “It’ll make having to leave them behind much easier.”
That’s not going to happen.
“Are you sure about that?”
Cole didn’t answer the Voice quite as quickly this time.
“I thought so,” the Voice said, before it started cackling again.
Chapter 12
He didn’t like leaving the front double doors unguarded, but he didn’t have a choice. It wasn’t like Zoe or her daughter could do anything if one of the crazies tried to come in anyway. (Okay, maybe Zoe, but for how long, against an adrenaline-charged maniac that didn’t seem to feel pain?) He was also somewhat comforted (“Really? Comforted?” the Voice asked, the mocking tone very much obvious) by the fact that he would hear any attempted entry all the way back in the building.
He hoped, anyway.
“We’re doing a lot of that these days,” the Voice said. “Hoping, I mean.”
I don’t have any choice.
“Don’t you?”
No.
“Don’t you?”
He didn’t answer the second time.
“That’s what I thought,” the Voice said.
Cole led Zoe and Ashley into the back hallway with him. There were two offices, both on the left side and a third door on the right marked staff. The first one on the left was marked super, while the one after that didn’t have anything to indicate what it was being used for. Cole guessed either a supply room or something similar.
There was a rear entrance into the building at the end of the hallway, but fortunately for them it was a metal door that was locked in place by a pair of locks. Cole sidestepped an old puddle of blood to get to it, to make sure the door was sealed tight. There was blood on the push bar, but as far as he could tell the door was solid. That was a good thing, because he hadn’t known it existed until now.
“Lucky for you, it was secured,” the Voice said.
Yeah, lucky for me.
He backtracked up the hallway to rejoin the women, but first sneaked a peek into the unmarked room. It turned out to be a laundry room, but one with OUT OF ORDER signs written in big, blocky markers on all the machines.
Cole continued on into the super’s office with Zoe and Ashley, where they found a mess. There was blood on the floor, and more sprayed across two of the four walls. A window that looked out into an alley next door was smashed, but there were burglar bars over it, so Cole didn’t feel immediately threatened by the opening.
“Look around, but be careful. Watch your step,” he said.
He left the door open behind them so he could keep one ear on the lobby. Mother and daughter went to the desk and began opening drawers, while Cole went into the bathroom in the back.
He opened the door and leaned in. It was surprisingly pristine inside and no signs that a fight had occurred, unlike the rest of the room. The office was just that—a place to work, with no extra spaces for sleeping.
When Cole came back, Zoe and Ashley had given up on the desk.
“Nothing?” he asked.
Zoe shook her head. “No phones.”
“I guess it was a long shot. Who uses landlines anymore?”
“What about that?” Zoe said, pointing to an old CRT TV sitting on a flimsy-looking nightstand in one corner.
“Try it,” Cole said.
Ashley walked over and gave the bulky square box a quick look. Cole was wondering if she’d ever seen something that old in her life. The girl pressed the power button, but the TV didn’t turn on. Ashley glanced back at them and shrugged.
“The power’s still out,” Zoe said. She looked over at Cole. “You think it’ll come back anytime soon?”
“Someone has to fix the poles first,” Cole said. “Just like the cell towers. Someone has to go out there and get them working again, fix whatever took them out.”
“Which could be anything…”
“Yeah. It could be anything.”
“What about the boy, Mommy?” Ashley asked. She’d wandered over to an ugly pink sofa and sat down.
“What boy?” Zoe said.
“The one in the window.”
Zoe apparently had forgotten all about the black kid that had warned them about the crazies. Cole didn’t blame her. He had, too.
“Yeah, what about him?” Zoe asked, turning over to Cole. “He’s in the building with us.” She glanced up at the ceiling. “I think he was on the fourth floor.”
“Fifth,” Cole said.
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
“I thought it was the fourth floor.”
Cole headed for the door. “Come on. Let’s go find the kid. Maybe he knows what the hell’s going on.”
“That’s a long shot,” the Voice.
Maybe, but it was a shot. It wasn’t like they had anything to lose by asking.
Zoe and Ashley followed Cole out of the super’s office and back into the lobby, where they moved the large desk and sofa over to reinforce the front doors. Or he and Zoe did, while Ashley did her best to hold up her end. The girl was a trooper and was actually sweating by the time they’d carried the sofa over and sat it in front of the desk, which they pinned against the door. Fortunately, the windows that flanked the doors had burglar bars over them, so he didn’t have to worry too much about them keeping unwanted entry out.
The combination of desk and sofa made a decent barrier, but it wouldn’t completely stop someone who was determined to get in from doing just that. But even if that were to happen, they would at least give him an early warning system when the crazies tried to batter their way inside. He wasn’t sure what he’d do after that, but he’d cross that bridge when he got to it.
“You think it’ll hold?” Zoe asked when they were done.
“Yeah, sure,” Cole said.
“You don’t sound very confident.”
“It’ll do.”
“There’s the desk inside the super’s office. We can use that, too.”
“It’s too big. And it’ll take too long. Besides, I don’t think they’ll expose themselves so readily.”
“What do you mean?”
“You saw what happened out there? With the butcher and the other one?”
Zoe nodded. “Yes…”
“They don’t care who they attack, as long as it’s someone. Us, or each other. If one of them wants to get in here, he’ll have to spend a lot of time trying to batter the doors in. That’ll leave him open to attack by the others.”
“How sure are you about that?” Zoe asked.
I’m guessing—about that, and about everything else today, Cole thought, but he said, “Pretty sure.”
“I hope you’re right.”
Me too, Cole thought.
He started crossing the lobby and the women followed. “Same strategy,” Cole said. “Stay close, and don’t stray.”
They passed the bank of elevators and headed for the staircase next to it. Without electricity, the elevators would be useless. Besides, he didn’t feel like letting whoever was up there know they were coming up anyway. Elevators, especially when the entire apartment building was currently giving off the vibe of a tomb, would make a hell of a lot of noise.
“It’s a kid,” the Voice said. “What are you so worried about?”
The problem was that it might not just be a kid up there. All of this could have been a trick. One elaborate setup to get him in here with the women, and then… What?
“It’s just a kid. Relax.”
Yeah, right. Relax.
There was blood inside the stairwell and on the first couple of steps when Cole opened the door, but by this point he’d become so used to the sight that he didn’t even flinch. Neither did Zoe and her daughter, the two women keeping their distance behind him. Zoe had purposefully kept Ashley and herself far back enough from him that if he needed to, Cole could use the bat without fear of hitting them accidentally. He hadn’t told her to do that, but she’d figured it out all on her own.
He glanced over his shoulder at them and caught Zoe staring back at him, waiting patiently. She gave him a pursed smile, as if to say, “Whenever you’re ready.”
He nodded before turning forward again. Cole didn’t bother to reiterate the “stay close, don’t stray” mantra. At this point he was pretty sure both mother and daughter knew it by heart and had no plans to do anything else.
Cole entered the stairwell, then went up the stairs. He maneuvered around the blood splatters, obvious even with just natural lighting to see with inside the claustrophobic room. Cole stopped for a moment and glanced up, expecting a pair of faces to stare down at him.
Instead, he saw ten floors of empty stairs, and the only sounds were his own breathing and that of the women behind him. Their breathing was slightly accelerated, but he didn’t blame them one bit for that. His own chest was more active than usual.
“This isn’t your first rodeo, buddy,” the Voice said.
No, it wasn’t, as much as Cole wished that it were.
He continued up, choking up on the bat so he could swing it without worrying about striking the railing on his right or the wall on his left. He was used to close quarters combat, but usually he had more than just a bat to play with.
What he wouldn’t give for a gun right now…
It took them a while to reach the second floor, mostly because Cole kept expecting a crazy to pop up like something out of a horror movie and race down the steps toward him and the women. But it never happened, even when he purposefully made a lot of noise. He wasn’t sure if he was glad for that or disappointed. It’d been a while since he’d smashed someone’s head in with the bat.
“Getting a little bloodthirsty, aren’t we?” the Voice asked.
No, he wasn’t.
“Are you sure?”
Yes, he was.
He thought so, anyway.
When they finally reached the second-floor landing, Cole leaned into the stairwell door and used the security glass along the side to look out. A long hallway, just barely lit by an open window at the very end. A curtain fluttered against the breeze, but there was enough natural lighting for him to see that there were no threats out there. There were also no signs of people, though he could easily make out blood against the carpeted floor and along the walls. And there, an open door about three apartments down. A body lay half-in and half-outside the hallway, with just the legs visible.
“What do you see, Cole?” Zoe asked.
“Nothing,” he said, and continued up the steps.
On the third floor, Cole did the same thing, peering out at the hallway beyond the stairwell door. More blood on the walls and floor, and what looked like a stray boot resting just a few feet from the stairs. The door of an apartment two doors up was open, but beyond that there were no signs of occupancy. But he had to remind himself that he hadn’t seen people on the streets either, until those maniacs came out of the buildings and attacked.
He changed up his grip on the bat for the ninth time in as many minutes and continued up.
The fourth floor was uneventful, with nothing visible beyond the stairwell door.
By the time they reached the fifth, they were already moving faster, and both women seemed to have relaxed noticeably behind him. They weren’t breathing nearly as hard as when they’d began the trek, at least. It was the same with him.
On the fifth-floor landing, Cole exchanged a quick look with Zoe.
She nodded back at him, as if to say, “We’re ready.”
He returned it, then turned around and opened the door, and stepped outside.
He hugged the wall, doing his best to ignore the stale air around him. But stale was better than blood, which he couldn’t detect despite his best efforts. That was a good sign. There was, though, something that didn’t belong: a knife buried in the wall across from him. Cole briefly considered grabbing the knife and dropping the bat, but decided the bat was a better weapon—it was longer, stronger, and had proven reliable in the streets.
Zoe and Ashley followed behind him, and he thought Zoe would go for the knife, but she didn’t. Either the blood that covered the handle turned her off, or something else did. Either way, they moved past the knife without looking back at it. In his mind, Cole wondered how the blade had gotten there, and where the person who had put it there in the first place had gone.
“Focus!” the Voice said.
Cole did, concentrating on the long hallway in front of him.
There were five doors on both sides—10 in all—numbering from 501 to 510. The even numbers were to his left and the odd ones to his right. When they finally reached 501 after some careful tiptoeing, Cole paused and pressed his ear against the closed door and listened.
Silence.
Absolute silence.
He pulled his head back and moved on to the next one: Apartment 503.
The door was open, bright sunlight from inside washing out and splashing against the closed door of apartment 504 across the hallway from it. His destination was the door after 503. He’d worked out the layout of the building in his mind and knew that the kid that had warned them about the crazies would be in apartment 505.
Cole stopped and glanced back at Zoe and her daughter. He held his palm toward them (“Stay put”) and got an acknowledging nod back from Zoe.
He took the next five steps toward 503 alone, before leaning into the open door and peeking inside. Overturned chairs, broken furniture, and a smashed TV on the floor. All of it visible against sunlight coming in through an open window and a torn white curtain. It looked as if a hurricane had gone through the place. Except there were no bodies, and when Cole sniffed the air, he couldn’t detect the lingering scent of blood.
Cole pulled his head back and glanced over his shoulder at Zoe. She was looking at him, waiting patiently with Ashley just a little farther down the hallway. He shook his head and wasn’t sure what flashed across her face. Relief or concern—
The creak of a door opening, just before a dark and bespectacled head peered out of apartment 505 up the hallway.
Cole spun, raising the bat to strike.
“Well?” the kid said. He w
as low to the floor, and at first Cole thought the kid was kneeling, but that wasn’t it at all: He was sitting in a wheelchair. “You guys going to skulk around out here all day, or are you going to come in already?”
Chapter 13
“It started on the East Coast,” the kid in the wheelchair said. “They said it came from the Atlantic Ocean, maybe even all the way from Europe, but I don’t know about that. I just know that it started as a handful of wildings in places like New York and quickly spread like some kind of virus. New Jersey got it next, then the rest of the East Coast. By the end of the day, it was here, in our city, and the shit hit the fan.”
“Who is ‘they?’” Zoe asked. “How do they know all this?”
“I don’t know. I first saw posts about it in the morning on forums that I frequent.”
“What kind of forums?”
“Um, let’s just say, the kind that you probably have never heard of. Anyway, from what I could gather, it happened fast. Really, really fast. By the time noon came around…” He shook his head. “It happened really fast. I mean, lightning fast. I don’t think anyone was prepared for it. Not the cities, not the states, not even the government.”
Cole didn’t interrupt the kid. He was too busy replaying the conversation with Donnie not more than twenty-four hours ago in his mind.
“It’s about what happened in New York, sir,” Donnie had said.
“What happened in New York?” he had asked, because he didn’t know. He had bypassed the news in the morning and had been too busy in the afternoon to pay any attention to the outside world as he prepared to leave the company he’d built from the ground up one last time.
“You don’t know?”
“No. I was a little busy today. What’s happening in New York?”
“People going a little crazy. Some guy drove his truck into a mall in the morning and killed a bunch of people. Then some young kids beating people up in Central Park. All kinds of crazy shit—Oops, sorry, sir. Crazy stuff going on out there.”
No shit, Donnie. No shit.
“But you don’t have any idea what really happened,” Zoe was saying.
Fall of Man (Book 1): The Break Page 9