All of them had empty backpacks on their backs to fill them with food. Except for Valera, who had a whole backpack full of stakes.
They stood in front of the door leading to the fire staircase. Andy felt he knew what commanders feel when they send their soldiers into battle. Marcel, Ingvar, Zhang Wei, Viktor, Ivan, Sergei, Valera, Kirill. A small bunch of poorly armed men against a horde of flesh-eaters. Danger waited for them around every corner, roaming in the corridors and lurking in the dark. Andy looked his men in the eyes, feeling that he would probably never see them again.
Mimi cried on Zhang Wei’s shoulder. He hugged her and said something quietly to her. Mimi started sobbing, and he asked Ksenia to take the girl away.
Then he joined the group and stood beside them, holding his pool cue in front of him like a bo staff. He was calm.
“Ready?” Andy said.
“Let’s do it,” Valera said and spat on the expensive carpet flooring.
In other circumstances, Andy would explode with fury but now he didn’t even blink. He nodded, and Marcel slowly opened the door. Andy gripped the yellow handle of the fire ax tighter. Its red-colored blade glittered dully.
Marcel stepped over the threshold and looked around. The sun shone through the window and flooded the staircase with light. The landing was empty. Nothing doing in the close vicinity. The horizon was clear. There was a dull noise below them but it seemed so far away.
They sneaked out one after another. The air was cold and reeked of foul meat.
Andy turned to Ksenia and Alyona and other women who crowded in the doorway behind them.
“Stay in touch,” Andy whispered.
Ksenia nodded and patted the walkie-talkie clipped to her belt. “We will.”
The door closed shut behind them. There were muffled noises coming from the inside—the furniture was being moved back into place to block the door.
The company stood and listened. It was quiet. The undead needed some kind of stimulation to activate what little was left of their rotting brains, and when they saw no walking breakfasts, they seemed to stay dormant. But alert.
Andy felt fear creeping in on him. He thought this was a grave mistake, and he was leading all these people to certain death. He wanted to turn around and knock on the door and ask Ksenia and the others to let them in. But what would he tell the people? That he was a coward? That he wanted to wait out two more days till they were rescued by the government? Till they ran out of food and wood in two days? They would start soon tearing off the linoleum to feed it to the fireplace. They had already burned most of the furniture on the fourteenth floor.
He thought about the rest of their company—Goran, Ramses, Steve, and Erkan. They were tough guys. Where were they now? Were they killed during the bombardment? Too many questions were whirling in his head, and he tried to focus on the issue in hand. Their main task now was to get the building back, level after level. Because nobody would come to rescue them. Their lives were in their own hands.
Andy leaned over the rail and looked down the stairwell. No movement on the thirteenth floor. Like many Englishmen, Andy was superstitious of the number thirteen. But when the building was being designed, this was not taken into consideration. Hence, there was the thirteenth floor in this building.
Quietly, he began going down the stairs. Marcel followed him, his snub-nosed Kalashnikov ready.
They went down two flights of stairs and stood in front of a door. It was a plain door. Black painted wood. A silver handle.
Marcel raised his gun. Everyone was tense. Sergei licked his dry lips and gripped the chair leg tighter. Clouds of vapor filled the landing. Ingvar was looking intensely in the viewfinder of his camera.
Andy reached out his hand and turned the handle. Before he finished doing it, the door jerked open under the weight of the multiple bodies leaning against it. Living dead bodies. Andy staggered and the fire ax went flying out of his hand.
They were coming like an avalanche. They had piled up behind the door, blocking it. Now there was no blocking the door, and the way was free as if an abscess was punctured, and the pus was squirting out.
A male zombie crawled from under the mass of bodies forward and grabbed Andy’s boot.
Marcel started shooting at the creature. Single shots. Ingvar squinted his eyes because of the loud shooting, but he kept on filling the memory card with megabytes of hardcore video.
Marcel’s bullets punctured two holes in the undead’s head, and the ghoul crashed down but did not go of Andy’s ankle. The muscle spasm clenched the zombie’s hand like a vice.
Ivan and Viktor shot their pistols, little red fountains emerging from the creatures’ head wounds.
Andy retrieved his ax and struck with it at the purple-gray arm, which was gripping his leg. The dull red blade of the ax became bright red, and specks of blood cropped on its yellow handle. He cut off the arm, shook it off his leg and hurried to get up.
The ghouls kept coming. The crowd separated Valera from the group. Valera punched the cranium of the nearest zombie with his stake, and it got stuck there. The monster fell down. Valera pulled another stake from the backpack over his shoulder and retreated upstairs.
The rest of the group had to stampede downstairs. Otherwise, they would have been engulfed by the horde of the dead. Andy spared his rounds and used his ax instead. His every-third-hit was lethal if one could say so about zombies. Anyway, the automatons collapsed under his blows with broken skulls and stopped functioning.
Andy was face to face with a dead female who was about to lunge at him. He recognized his former assistant bookkeeper in the filthy thing with short blonde hair and red eyes. Its half-eaten breasts fell out of the confines of the business suit. The woman had been one of the few workers he had not hired himself, some distant relative of the owner. She had been on a probation period so her salary had not been high. She had always bitched about it. Andy didn’t like her for spending too much time around the coffee maker and making big mistakes in her reports and moaning about her salary at that.
Now he disliked her even more. He lost his footing and tumbled down the stairs. The monster went after him and rolled down the stairs, too. Andy grabbed it by the throat, snatched out his gun and pressed its muzzle under its chin. The creature moaned, yellow ooze dripping down on its chest. He fired in its throat, and bloody chunks of bones and marrow ejected from the back of the blonde head. He pushed the corpse aside and rolled away to avoid the droplets of contagious blood.
“Always wanted to fire you,” he said, rising to his feet. “I hate moaners.”
He got up and shot three things, which had crowded Sergei. He looked at the doorway and saw more walking dead staggering out of the corridor.
“Everybody down the stairs!” Andy shouted.
Valera ran out of stakes. The zombies were going at him, steadily. Andy threw him his gun. Valera failed to catch it, and the handgun slipped and was swamped in the midst of the crowd. He retreated further upstairs, kicking at the heads of the advancing monsters.
“Fuck!” Andy shouted. “I’m going to ask Ksenia to remove the barricade!”
He raised the walkie-talkie to give the order.
“No!” Valera yelled. “Don’t! They won’t be able to restrain them. Too many of them.”
Marcel shot the dead people who were surrounding Valera. The bodies fell down in a pile preventing the other undead from coming up.
Marcel spent one mag in his Kalashnikov and one clip in his pistol. He swore under his breath, reloading the AK-47.
Valera gave a couple of heavy blows with his strong workman’s hands. Then the ghouls crowded him, and he pressed his back to the door. His face crumpled in agony as a dozen sets of teeth dug in his flesh. He howled, his eyes rolling wildly in his eye sockets. His ribcage crushed, and the air was knocked out of his bleeding lungs. After a short cry, he went silent being swallowed by the bloodthirsty mob, which started tearing his flesh.
Andy clenched his teeth in despera
tion.
The rest of the ghouls were forcing the people to go downstairs.
“Let’s go!” Andy shouted, his voice trembling. “To the lower floors!”
He spoke Russian, but Ingvar and Zhang Wei got the drift of what he was saying. They jumped over the steps. The camera was shaking in Ingvar’s hands.
With his cleaver, Kirill cleared the way to the landing on the twelfth floor. As he opened the door, he saw a man with a thin mustache in the doorway, brandishing a big kitchen knife. The man slashed Kirill across the throat. Blood spurted in a wide arc. Kirill went down on the floor, his legs thrashing and his hands pressed to the wound. Zhang Wei lunged at the attacker with his pool cue. The man stepped back, diverted the blow and drove the knife through Zhang Wei’s right shoulder. Zhang Wei screamed, and the cue dropped out of his right hand.
Viktor shot the attacker with his gun. The man collapsed on top of Kirill. His knife clanged on the floor.
Marcel helped Zhang Wei to step into the safety of the corridor. Andy and Viktor took Kirill and the attacker’s body by the armpits and dragged them inside. Everyone rushed into the corridor. Sergei shut the door behind them. Hands of the walking corpses hit the door outside like hammers.
Kirill’s throat gurgled with blood. His hands and chest and the floor all around him were covered in blood. His eyes were blank. In a moment he stopped twitching his legs and heaved a deep sigh.
Ivan leaned over the dead killer. “Damn! It’s Mikhail, our driver. Not infected. He thought we were fucking zombies.”
“Must have been under stress,” Andy muttered. Right now, he was under much stress himself. Tension welled up inside, and his knees were weak with fear.
Zhang Wei howled with pain.
“Come on,” Sergei said. “Zhang Wei needs help.”
Zhang Wei sat by the wall under a watercolor painting of a lighthouse. He was dizzy. The big knife was still stuck in the shoulder. The cut was deep as the Mariana Trench. The bleeding had to be stopped, or the man would bleed out to death.
***
Ksenia sat at the table in the middle of the corridor. Her gun was beside her on the desktop. She could see both the fire exit and the camp from her point of view. She stopped calling it a ballroom many days ago. She looked across the room at the dirty cups and plates. There was a mountain of them piled on the table. She hated dirty dishes. Ludmila, Alyona, and two other women were washing up. Ksenia wished she could help them, but she could not leave her post.
Palchikov slept in his DIY tent, made of chairs and tables put together and covered by sheets and blankets. He snored like a pig. Ksenia turned away from him. She hated his guts. Except for Dr. Brodde who was too old for adventures, Palchikov was the only man left in the camp.
Mimi stepped into the corridor and called, “Ksenia?’
“I’m here, Mimi,” Ksenia said.
Mimi walked in the direction of Ksenia’s voice and stopped right in front of her.
Mimi said, “I was worried about you when you were about to go with the rest of them. Now I’m worried about my dad.”
“Your father is a brave man,” Ksenia said. “He traded with me over going down there.”
“Brave?” Mimi said. “He-he! He’s a fraidy cat. But he’s kind. He’s like a big Teddy bear.”
The girl tried to be cheerful but her face betrayed worry and sadness deep in her.
Ksenia smiled a sad smile and thought about her own father. Her grief about him was coming back in waves.
“Your dad’s going to be okay,” she said.
***
They pulled out the knife, stopped the bleeding and bandaged Zhang Wei’s shoulder with torn sheets as best as they could but he was not a fighter anymore. He could hardly move his arm and shoulder. At least he could stand on his feet. But not for long. He needed medical treatment and rest.
Marcel went along the corridor to check if it was safe there. In a couple minutes, he came back. “The floor is clear, but the barricades are thin. They can go down any minute.”
“We move on,” Ivan said. “Keep your eyes peeled. There may be other pockets of survivors somewhere. Crazy as bats.”
“What about Zhang Wei?” Andy said. “He can’t go on.”
Ivan chewed his lips. Then he said, “But we need those supplies, too. We may split.”
Andy shook his head. “No more splitting.”
“Quiet, guys!” Marcel said. He lay down and pressed his ear to the floor. He listened intently.
“What?” Viktor said. “Is it quiet there?”
Marcel hushed him and listened some more. He rose tiredly and shook his head. “The lower level is taken, too.”
“We can’t go on,” Andy said. “We won’t be able to clean this place, not without much firepower. We’re running out of ammo, too. I’m down to two rounds myself. Sorry, guys, but we fucking lost it. The quest has failed, Sam.”
“Who is Sam?” Zhang Wei asked feebly.
“Never mind,” Andy said.
He went to the window and looked out at the narrow steel fire ladder clinging to the wall. “We have to go back and use the outside fire ladder to climb down.”
“Damn risky,” Ingvar said. “With the sick kids and the blind girl.”
He turned off the camera and put it on the windowsill. He looked at Zhang Wei and added, “And with a wounded man on our hands.” He shook his head. “We’ll never make it.”
Sergei looked sourly at the ceiling. “First, we have to find a way back to the others.”
His glasses fogged up and started getting frozen. He took them off and warmed them with his breath. He wiped them on his pants and put them on.
Ivan said, “I’m telling you we have to split.”
Andy raised his hand and sighed. “Here’s the deal. We go fetch the others, go together down the ladder to the second floor. Make supplies there. Then we’ll get out of here. We’ll get to the rescue camp in half a day if we’re lucky. Maybe in a day. They have food there. They have medical supplies. It’s our only chance. This place is a tomb now.”
There was a soda water machine in the corridor. Marcel smashed the glass with his boot and took out a can of Dr. Pepper. He popped it open and gave it to Zhang Wei. The Chinese drank and panted, a cold sweat trickling down his forehead.
“Poor guys,” Viktor said. “Valera, Kirill … They should have lived to see another day. Damn!”
Andy picked up the radio, clicked it on and said, “Ksenia. This is Andy. Do you read me? Over.”
He released the button and heard static hissing.
Then a familiar voice, “Hey, Andy. This is Ksenia. Yes, we can hear you loud and clear. Go ahead. Over.”
“We’re coming back,” Andy said with a sigh. “There are too many of the infected ones down here.”
“Are there any casualties?”
“Yes, we lost Valera. And Kirill, too. Zhang Wei is wounded.” He looked at Zhang Wei’s worried face and went on, “But tell Mimi he’s going to be all right.”
There was a pause. Then Ksenia said, “Oh, God.” After another little pause, she said, “Where are you now?”
“On the twelfth floor. It’s clear here. But the right-wing staircase is overrun. The thirteenth floor is overridden, too. We’ll try to come back through the left-wing staircase. Expect us there.”
“Okay,” Ksenia said. “It would take us about five minutes to remove the barricade and open the door. Save the battery now. Over.”
“We’re coming,” Andy said. “Andy out.”
He clicked off the walkie-talkie and hung it on his belt.
***
The sun was shining brightly through a high window in the corridor of the left wing. Andy spotted specks of dust floating in the air. It was something he would usually not tolerate. But now he didn’t care.
They heard wild howling behind the door. It was half open. The piled up furniture prevented the door from being opened ajar and blocked the access for the undead. But the barricade was slim a
nd would collapse any minute. Dozens of hands were groping through the holes. Andy saw a company watch on one of the wrists. Every year, he gave a special watch to the personnel for excellent work.
Sergei sat down on the floor and stretched out his legs. He threw his rolling pin and stakes aside.
“It’s all useless,” he said. “We’re all going to die here.”
Everybody looked at him but nobody said a word.
The guy started whining. “I don’t want any of this. I never wanted any of this! I just want to go home. I’m tired of this shit. I don’t want to die!”
“No one wants to die,” Andy said. “And everyone wants to go home.”
“I want to go home right now!” the man cried. He jerked his legs hysterically. “Let me go home!”
“Shut up,” Ivan said.
“I don’t want to die!” Sergei cried. Tears rolled down his cheeks, and his glasses fogged up again.
Ivan slapped the man across the face with the back of his hand. Sergei’s head snapped back, and he got quiet.
“I’m going to stay here,” Sergei said. He looked up at the men. “Can you leave me a gun?”
Silence fell. Sergei looked at Marcel. The latter shook his head, meaning “over my dead body”.
Viktor handed the man his gun. “Here. Six bullets left. Spare them. You wait for us at that window. We’ll get you on our way down the ladder.”
The man stopped crying. He looked at the gun like a kid who had been given a new toy. He grabbed the weapon, got off the floor and sprinted along the corridor. He skirted the corner and disappeared.
“Fucking deserter,” Ivan said.
Viktor drew a kitchen knife. His only weapon now. But at least it didn’t need reloading.
They took a quarter of an hour and a half of their ammunition to kill all the zombies at the fire exit door, shooting through the holes between the furniture pieces.
The Living & The Dead (Book 1): Zombiegrad Page 31