by Zack Archer
“Just as well,” I offered. “If they had, we wouldn’t be here.”
Sharla shook her head. “You might not be, but we would. This place was designed to survive a direct strike.”
Everyone exited the Suburban and my nostrils immediately curled, due to the odor of curdled milk which tanged the air.
Lawless breathed deeply and laughed. “I love the smell of feces in the evening.”
“Our treatment plant was overrun two days ago, so we’ve been forced to store the waste inside,” Sharla said, reading our looks.
“What are you doing about water?”
Lawless raised his hand. “We’ve got three spring-fed reservoirs directly beneath us. One for waste, one for drinking and industrial use, and a final one that me and some of the boys stocked with bass for fishing and fun.”
“You guys have thought of everything,” Lexie said.
Sharla swept her hands, gesturing at everything. “We’ve got nine hundred thousand square feet of usable space including offices, a move theater, grocery store, bowling alley, and a small medical clinic.”
Deb raised her hand. “Speaking of which…”
“We’ll get you patched up as quickly as possible,” Sharla said, leading us past a circle of unnaturally green synthetic turf where two kids, including a racoon-eyed boy with a shag of brown hair, were tossing a football around. The ball landed at my feet and I picked it up and motioned for the brown-haired boy to go long as I rifled a pass to him. I smiled and waved at the kids, then pivoted to see Sharla favoring me with a look.
“I’ve heard this place can hold over fourteen hundred people,” I said.
She nodded. “You heard right.”
“So where is everyone?”
Her face fell. “We started out with two hundred and seventy-six.”
“And now?”
“We’re down to thirty-three,” Lawless blurted out.
I swallowed hard as Sharla signaled for everyone to head toward the largest of the buildings, a silver-skinned, vault-like structure. Scarlett waited behind for me.
“How’s your fear-meter?” I asked her.
“Holding steady at Defcon 3,” Scarlett replied. “Can’t say the same for the delightful Miss Frost.”
“No?”
“That chick is crazy scared.”
“I didn’t pick up on that.”
“Because you’re not a woman, Nick. We sense those things. It’s one of our super-powers.”
Lexie nodded. “I was studying her micro-expressions the whole time.”
“And?”
“She’s as nervous as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs.”
Scarlett smiled and tapped her forehead. “See what I mean. Just one of many super-powers.”
“What are the other ones?”
“Reading the minds of men,” she said, inching closer.
“Is that so?”
She nodded.
“What am I thinking now, Scarlett?” I asked.
“NC-17 thoughts,” she purred, smiling.
She made sure the others weren’t looking, then leaned into me, kissed my neck, and squeezed my ass.
“I’m sure you’ve all suffered greatly the last few months,” Sharla said, leading us past security and down a hallway inside the vault-like building.
“You have no idea,” Deb replied.
“Your bodies are sore, your muscles fatigued. It’s time to restore them.”
We entered a spa-like room inside the building that was filled with long metal tables and clear vessels filled with multi-hued liquids and gels and an assortment of electronic machines and chairs that were overseen by a man and a woman in scrubs.
“Welcome to the reconditioning room,” Sharla said with a smile, gesturing to the man and woman. “That’s Trish and Will.”
“What do they do?” Hollis asked.
“They’re going to check everyone out.”
“Nobody does this shit out of the goodness of their heart,” Deb whispered to me out of earshot of the others. “They’re buttering us up for a reason.”
“Maybe they were just impressed with what we did back in D.C.”
Deb nibbled on her lip. “Yeah, maybe…”
“At some point you’re gonna have to learn to trust again, Deb. I mean, you learned to trust me, didn’t you?”
“That’s just because I needed to get laid.”
We shared a faint smile and she softly punched me in the shoulder. “I’ll play along and give it a chance,” she said softly. “At least for a while.”
Trish and Will worked on us over the next thirty minutes. They examined, poked, prodded, and assessed every bump, bruise, and cut. Deb’s lacerated shoulder and Scarlett’s forehead were disinfected and sewn up, Lexie’s leg and Raven’s busted lip were given ice packs, and I was handed a few aspirin after Will checked out the busted cannons on my arms and my stump, mystified by the filaments that were barely visible under the skin.
“What in God’s name happened to you?” he asked, removing the broken cannons.
I offered him a very weary smile. “How long have you got?”
Once everyone was patched up, Sharla led us into another room that contained a single item: a long, recumbent chair. Positioned across the chair was a black compression suit in the shape of a human body. The suit was studded with flexible pads that covered the major muscle areas: limbs, hips and trunk, etc.
“What is that?” Raven asked.
“Our EMS machine,” Sharla replied.
“Emergency medical shit?” asked Layla.
Sharla shook her head. “Electrical muscle stimulation. That suit will give you the best workout you’ve ever had in your life. Get the blood flowing again and speed up the healing process.”
“Yeah, no offense, ma’am,” Raven said. “But I seriously doubt some chair is going to work these muscles.”
She held up her arms and flexed.
Sharla chuckled. “See if you can last ten seconds.” She misted the pads on the suit with a spray bottle.
“Why are you doing that?” Raven asked as she shrugged the suit on.
“It helps to better conduct the high voltage,” Sharla replied.
Raven’s eyes went wide. “High what?”
Sharla moved over, past the wires that snaked from the pads to a standing console overflowing with knobs and levers. She flipped a switch and floated one of the dials and Raven reacted as if she’d been electrocuted.
“What the fuck?” she screamed.
“I haven’t even turned it on, yet,” Sharla said.
The others laughed as Sharla spun the dial and the muscles in Raven’s body visibly contracted and expanded as her face turned red.
She lasted exactly seven seconds.
“OFF…TAKE IT OFF!”
Sharla powered the machine down, then moved over and peered down at Raven who lay limply on the ground at her feet. “You’ve just experienced the equivalent of two weeks of heavy lifting and recovery in seven seconds. In short, your body has undergone a profound burst of muscle hypertrophy. You can expect a rapid gain in lean muscle mass within a matter of twenty-four hours.”
“So…I’m gonna get bigger?” Raven asked weakly.
“Everything one of those pads touches will grow larger,” Sharla replied with a nod.
Lexie grabbed one of the pads and held it against my penis as the ladies laughed and Sharla indicated that it was time to continue the tour.
A half hour later, we stopped at the site’s Granite Cove Dining Facility, a two hundred-seat cafeteria to grab some grub that was mostly creative dishes made from powdered eggs, rejiggered MREs, canned fruits and vegetables, and several squirrels that the guards had snared and which were simmering over four canisters of canned heat. It doesn’t sound like much but since I hadn’t had a hot meal in ages, it was heavenly.
I stood in line next to Lexie, placing food on my plastic tray. Lexie loaded up almost entirely on squirrel, including chunks that she dropped
to the ground for Stevens the cat.
“I’m still on my Paleo diet,” she said.
“So are the zombies.”
She elbowed me in the side. “I’m serious, Nick. I’ve done a lot of diets and it’s scientifically the best.”
“According to whom?”
“Scientists, cavemen, people on the internet.”
“If you can’t trust random people on the internet, who can you trust?”
She beamed. I patted her on the head.
Sharla showed us to a long table as Lawless carried over a large cooler that was filled with ice and beer.
“If I’m dreaming, please don’t wake me up,” Lexie said, grabbing a beer and holding it up as Stevens purred.
“It’s just a bottle of beer,” Raven said.
“I’ll pretend you didn’t say that,” Lexie replied, tilting her chin. “This is a little more than just a bottle of beer. This here is Lonestar beer, which is the official nectar of the Texas gods.”
“Texas was the last state to fall,” Sharla said.
Lexie hooted and made a University of Texas at Austin ‘Hook ‘em Horns’ hand signal.
“And it was the last state producing beer,” added Lawless. “We got our hands on twenty cases of suds ‘fore the zombies brought production to a halt.”
Deb held up her beer. “This is a helluva nice spread.”
“It’s all in honor of you,” Sharla said, holding up her beer to tap against Deb’s. “To new friends.”
Deb didn’t return the gesture.
Sharla’s smile slipped away. “What’s the matter?”
Deb looked from us to Sharla. “What’s the matter is, I’m dying to know what you want, Miss Frost.”
“Why can’t we just enjoy the moment?”
“Because we’ve been brought down into a friggin’ bunker that’s been locked behind us.”
“Don’t you want to be in a safe place?”
“Nothing is safe anymore.”
“That’s not true at all,” Sharla replied with a chuckle. “This is quite literally one of the two or three safest places in the country.”
I desperately wanted to believe this was true, but then it happened.
The lights suddenly went out and the screaming started.
3
This likely won’t come as a surprise, but the darkness inside an underground space is profound. I’m talking deepest space, bottom of the ocean, dark. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face and to make matters worse, the sound of klaxons muffled a cacophony of shrieks, disorienting all of us.
I stood and fumbled into somebody and then another figure fell on top of me. A generator rumbled to life and a single emergency bulb flickered overhead, casting everything in an eerie red light. I was sprawled on my back and Lexie and Hollis were on top of me.
“Could be worse,” I said.
Hollis’s gaze narrowed as Lexie stood, hands on her hips. “How so?”
“I could be on top.”
Lexie fluttered her eyelashes and Hollis groaned as gunfire ripped the air. We rose together and listened to several more shots and the unmistakable grunt-shriek of the zombies echoing in the distance.
“Slade, you copying this?”
“Affirmative.”
“What’s going on?”
“The entrance was breached.”
“How many bad guys?”
“Unclear.”
“How close?”
“You’re going to be seeing them very soon.”
“I can’t see much.”
“Now you can,” he answered. “Just rebooted your nightvision.”
My nightvision sprang to life. I panned left to right and spotted four forms, seventy or eighty feet away, gimp-running toward us. “THEY’RE COMING!” I screamed.
There was an armed guard up near the door, but he was beyond the spillage of light from the emergency bulb and evidently couldn’t see much. He reacted to the incoming zombies a fraction of a second too late. By the time he brought his rifle around, they were already on him. Two of the monsters tackled the poor sap and began pulling him apart like a chicken wing.
Realizing I was the only one who could see in the dark, I grabbed a bottle of beer with my good hand and smashed it against the table. Satisfied that the shattered end was sufficiently jagged, I looked up to see a long-necked zombie appraising me from the doorway.
I advanced on him, and he swung forward to greet me. He moaned, and I shouted.
He threw his hands to wrap me up and I ducked and stabbed him in the throat with one of the bottles, exposing his trachea. The zombie began choking on its own blood as I withdrew the bottle and plunged it into his right eye.
Another zombie threw a haymaker at me. I dipped under the beast’s clawed hand and punted it in the chest. My boot got stuck in its ribcage and when it tried to bite me, I slammed my fist into the thing’s nose, shattering bone into its brain, extinguishing the demonic light glowing inside its withered eye sockets.
Four more zombies appeared, and I reached for the fallen guard’s rifle as one of the zombies grabbed it first. The creature screeched, looking from the gun in its hands to me when—
WHAM!
One of the cannisters of canned heat smacked into its face, setting it ablaze. I snatched away the rifle as the ladies went on the attack.
Lexie flew by me, holding a couple of dinner forks that she quickly planted in the forehead of a female zombie. Scarlett was close behind, leaping across the cafeteria tables, tossing another container of canned heat like a grenade as one more zombie went up like a Roman candle.
Another figure was fighting alongside them—it was Lawless. He’d gone into a rage and was battering a pair of zombies with his fists before karate-chopping them. They fell, and he stomped their skulls to mush.
I hesitated, waiting for events to unfold. As if sensing my reticence, Slade asked: “What thing can you do that the zombies can’t?”
“Hold a tune?”
“Besides that,” Slade said. “See in the dark?”
“Bingo. You need to be the tip of the spear, Dekko. You need to take the fight to the bad guys.”
Guided by my nightvision, I slipped past the ladies, headed outside, and the icons on my internal HUD started blinking like the lights on a Christmas tree.
Targets were popping up in every direction, including a tall, narrow-shouldered monster who was missing a portion of his skull. He reared up in front of me and swiped his clawed hand—
WHUNK!
A blade slammed into the zombie’s head.
My gaze ratcheted to the right as a figure, a woman with a long pony tail whose features were obscured, ghosted past me. She glanced at me and then went on the attack, somersaulting forward, using a staff with long blades bolted on either side. She executed some impressive martial arts moves, slicing open the throat of a female zombie before scything the weapon sideways to take the thing’s head clean off.
Two zombies sprang at me and I shattered their heads with the end of my gun which wasn’t easy given that I only had one hand. Another lowered his shoulder to hit me and I stepped aside like a matador. When he swiveled around, I balanced the rifle over my stump and shot the thing through the mouth.
Turning back, I saw that the mysterious woman was gone but something else arrested my attention.
The high-pitched screams of children.
Charging forward, the targeting reticle on my internal HUD popped up and I used it to focus on two trembling forms crouching in the nothingness—the two kids who’d been tossing the football around before. They were cornered by a quartet of flesh-eaters, just seconds away from being snacked on.
“HEY, A-HOLES!” I shouted.
The zombies turned. I blinked as my reticle hopped and hovered over each one. I didn’t have my cannons anymore, but I could still use it to track potential targets. “I’m going to need you to step away from the children!”
The ghouls howled their displeasure and hitched
toward me and I shot them down. I moved toward the two boys, one of whom was facing me, the other facing away.
“It’s okay,” I said, holding up my hands. “Everything’s okay.”
One of the kids stood and streaked past me. I reached for the other kid and he turned. It was the one I’d thrown the football to. The racoon-eyed tyke with the shag of brown hair. He was crying.
“It’s okay,” I said softly. “They’re all gone.”
He nodded and reached out a hand toward me, and there it was. The thinnest little black line, a nearly imperceptible tributary running down the boy’s arm. Even in the darkness I knew what it was. Blood.
My eyes roamed from the end of tributary up the boy’s arm to the spot where one of the zombies had nicked him. It was a small little gash, likely made by one of the ghoul’s fingernails. Sometimes that’s all it took, however.
The kid vomited and then his body began bucking as if he were being electrocuted. His tongue snapped back and forth like a snake’s and his eyes glowed yellow.
“No…Jesus God…no,” I muttered, backing up.
The young boy stood, tottering like a drunk.
His whole body was wracked by convulsions, but he managed to plant one foot, then the other. A guttural growl sprang from his open mouth and he clawed at the air and struck out toward me. The internal HUD starting blinking, the targeting reticle hovering over the kid’s forehead.
“Shoot him,” Slade said.
“I’m not shooting a fucking kid.”
“He’s not human anymore.”
“No!”
“SHOOT!”
I brought my gun up, aiming at the boy’s head, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t pull the trigger. The boy shrieked and lunged and—
BAM! BAM!
Two bullets hammered into the back of his skull, splitting it open like an overripe melon. Red-hot viscera misted me as the kid’s body collapsed to the ground at my feet. I looked up to see a bevy of red laser beams dancing in the darkness.