by Zack Archer
Sadie flanked me as we moved down an entryway fitted with keycard-activated doors, followed by additional entry doors with biometric scanners.
Raven made quick work of the first few doors until we gathered before a final door that had no handholds or markings of any kind aside from a sign marked “Authorized Personnel Only!” and a faded biohazard symbol.
“This is it,” Sadie said.
“How do we know what’s on the other side?” I asked.
“We don’t.”
We turned to Raven, who fired two rounds into the door. Smoke filled the hall as she placed two more shots into the door, which finally buckled. Sadie and I placed our shoulders against the door and ripped it from its hinges.
Batting away smoke and dust, we looked into the space on the other side. It was filled with workstations enclosed by thick, triple-paned glass. Inside the workstations were cabinets, lockers, and metal tables laden with scientific and medical equipment, everything overseen by dozens of CCTV cameras hanging from the ceilings.
“How do we know what to look for?” Scarlett asked.
Lucy pulled out a portable device that resembled a cellphone. She slid her finger across the screen and brought up an image, what looked like a biohazard symbol mixed with Greek lettering.
“That’s what we’re looking for,” she answered, flashing the image to us.
Raven stood watch as the rest of us began sifting through the workstations. I worked alongside Hollis, the two of us acting as a team. She slid trays from a cabinet out and gently placed the contents on the metal tables and then I went to work, scanning everything, looking for the telltale symbol. This continued for a good ten minutes, but nobody had any luck.
“What if it’s not here,” Hollis said. “What if we came down here for nothing?”
“Least I got to work on my tan.”
“I’m serious here, Nick.”
“So am I.”
She rolled her eyes. Somebody whistled. Our gaze wandered over to Lucy, who was on her knees. She was pointing at a thin bar of light that was visible under a locked cabinet door.
“Light,” she said.
“No fooling you, Lucy,” Layla said.
Lucy looked back and glared. “Don’t you think it’s the least bit odd that the only thing that’s still functioning in this godforsaken building is right here?”
“Open it,” I said.
She tried. It was locked. Layla fired one of her Yojimbo blades into the wall, then pried the blade loose and handed it to Lucy. who began working on the cabinet door. After fussing with it for several minutes, she was able to pop the latch.
There was a whiff of ozone and a flash of bluish light as the cabinet sprang open to reveal a still-functioning refrigerator, no larger than one you might see in a college dorm.
“Bingo,” Sadie said.
The refrigerator glass was fogged, but Lucy used her elbow to wipe it away. There were several trays inside the refrigerator that contained a half-dozen vials.
Lucy reached for the refrigerator door and that’s when we heard the muffled rumble of a boat engine coming from somewhere just outside.
Raven disappeared through the main door and then sprinted back, chest heaving. “One boat outside,” she said, trying to catch her breath.
“How many?” Sadie asked.
“Five bad guys.”
Lucy opened the refrigerator and sirens positioned somewhere inside the refrigerator went off.
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“Shut the damn things down!” Sadie screamed.
Lucy reached in and grabbed something, yanking it out. That stopped the sirens, but the damage had been done. Anybody within a mile of the place had undoubtedly heard them. With trembling hands, Lucy pulled the tray out. She set it carefully on the ground and began inspecting each vial.
“Got it!” she said, pointing to a vial with the correct symbol. She held it up as if it were an object of unparalleled beauty.
Sadie opened the Yeti cooler and removed three items: a small plastic attaché case and two ice packs. She opened the case and cracked the two ice packs to activate the cooling chemicals. The packs turned so cold so quickly that Lucy’s breath was visible in the air as she slotted the vial into a foam holder inside the case and wedged it between the two ice packs and a single syringe. Then she shut the case.
We retraced our steps down the corridor, planning on slipping down the staircase again when a crashing noise sounded below us. The bad guys were inside the building.
“What’s Plan B?” I asked Sadie.
“Try to outrun them,” she replied.
We tore down the staircase, praying that the Turk’s men were on the other side of the building.
Moving into the winding corridor, we circumvented the obstacles until we were near the window where we’d climbed in. Shouts and screams could be heard in the distance as the Turk’s men tore apart the other section of the building, hunting for us.
“We should ambush them,” Raven said.
“We make that kind of ruckus, and every zombie in the area’s gonna come to see what’s going on,” Lexie said.
I nodded. “We have to hold our fire as long as we can.”
Sadie was the first one out the window, then Deb, Hollis, and the others. I was the last one to go, keeping watch, cannon moving back and forth. A form emerged out of the darkness at the eastern end of the winding corridor.
The outline of a tall, gangly man.
I didn’t want to open fire for fear of outing our position, so I moved to exit. Gangly Man opened fire. A burst of orange split the murk and bullets stitched the wall over my head, causing me to fall out the window.
I fell on top of Sadie, taking her down with me. We splashed into the water, which tasted like salty gruel. Rolling over, I spat out the water and looked up to see the gangly man in the window, bringing his gun around.
Sadie leveled her crossbow and shot the gangly man in the neck. There was a red spray and the man dropped his gun and staggered back out of sight.
Sadie grabbed my arm and helped me back onto the jib of the tower crane. We’d taken ten or twelve paces when gunfire rang out. The Turk’s men were visible in the other broken windows, firing at us.
Bullets hissed and snapped.
We fired back at the building as our attackers climbed out the windows. I counted five men and two women. Our return fire drove them back and we climbed up onto the tower crane.
“RUN!” Deb shouted. “KEEP RUNNING!”
I reeled after the others as the Turk’s goons continued to lay down a wall of lead. We scampered across the jib. Out in the distance, I spotted zombies reacting to the noise we made. They waded through the water, coming to pay us a visit.
Bullets ricocheted off the metal. One whined past my ear and thudded into a body ten feet ahead of me. A woman screamed.
It was Scarlett. The bullet had passed through the flesh above her hip. A tiny cord of blood leaped from the wound as she clutched it—and promptly lost her balance.
I screamed for her as she plunged down toward the water before hands grabbed her ankles. I stood, rooted in place, watching Raven and Layla holding her ankles as she swung back and forth over the water.
The Turk’s men didn’t let up, continuing to fire as the others moved across the jib.
“Don’t let her go!” I shouted.
Braving the incoming fire, I shuffled ahead, struggling to help Scarlett whose wound was dripping blood into the water as things moved toward her. A quartet of alligators were circling under her.
“Hurry, Nick!” Raven said.
I fired a burst of metal darts back at our pursuers, cutting one down and driving the others back. Then I slid across the jib, reached down and wrapped my good hand around Scarlett’s leg just as Layla’s grip gave out.
“Don’t you dare drop me, Nick Dekko!” Scarlett shouted.
“I had other thoughts!” I replied.
“Like what?”
“Spoiling a meal for th
e gators!”
She looked down as the four alligators arrived. Hollis screamed. I pulled back with everything I had.
Scarlett’s head swung up as the alligators jumped at her, jaws open, snapping closed on nothing but air as we pulled her up.
Raven and Layla returned fire at the Turk’s goons as we helped Scarlett across the remainder of the tower crane.
We entered the other building and patched up Scarlett’s wound, which didn’t appear life-threatening. Still, it was bleeding profusely. We headed through the cubicles, edging across the bullpen and past the bodies of the fallen until we were at the shattered windows that looked down on the catwalk.
Climbing down, we ran across the catwalk and that’s when I spotted something shimmering into life below us. Scarlett’s blood had splashed the catwalk and dropped into the pit of bodies below us, and it caused a reaction.
There was something down in the semi-darkness, in the vast expanse of bodies and body parts. Something was alive in the well of death.
An arm jutted up. The others saw it, too, because Lexie gasped. Then a head popped free and opened a pair of black eyes and looked around.
Then another head. Then five more.
This was followed by a chorus of gurgled grunts as a steady tide of bodies began pushing themselves up out of the muck.
We fired down at the zombies even as the Turk’s fighters arrived and fired at us. In seconds, there were bullets flying in every direction as the Turk’s men dropped through the building’s shattered windows to attack us.
Before that could happen, a teenage zombie with a thatch of black hair who was missing his right eye crawled onto the catwalk. The fiend lurched toward me and then its head exploded, a bullet fired by one of our pursuers blasting its cranium into a dozen pieces.
The zombie fell, and I squared up on a tall, thin man with pipe-cleaner arms who was wrapped in body armor. The man raised a machine-pistol, and I fired a dart that shattered his left arm.
He dropped his gun without getting off a shot and I placed another dart in his solar plexus. The man clutched at his wound and fell into the zombie pit, where the flesh-eaters swarmed over him like sharks at a feeding frenzy. The man tried to pull himself up, but the zombies plunged their talon-like fingers into the soft flesh near his neck, picking the man apart as I turned away.
“Get back, Nick!” Raven shouted.
I retreated slowly, measuring my steps, wary of moving too quickly for fear that I’d wind up as zombie food.
The Turk’s men advanced as we reached the other end of the catwalk where Raven was aiming her rifle. She fired two shots and the explosive bullets vaporized the leaders holding up the catwalk.
The Turk’s remaining fighters crashed into the zombie pit. They fought valiantly but sank into the lagoon of death, vanishing in a blur of snapping teeth and clawed hands.
The zombies had climbed onto the other end of the catwalk. Sadie and the ladies were busy fending them off. I took up a position next to the ladies, firing at the zombies as they pulled themselves out of the water.
A young man pawed at my feet. I grabbed a handful of his lank hair and kicked his forehead with everything I had. A woman vaulted at Hollis, who used her tomahawk to shatter the thing’s neck so that its head flopped to one side like a newborn child’s.
Hollis kicked the woman, trying to knock her back, but the thing’s floppy head snapped and bit at her ankle. Hollis cried out.
I blew the woman’s head off, but the damage was done. Hollis had been bitten.
“Typical woman,” Hollis said. “Couldn’t keep her goddamn mouth shut.”
The bite mark wasn’t particularly large. It looked like two of the zombie’s teeth had broken the flesh, but that was generally all it took.
“How bad?” she asked.
“Not very.”
“You think I’m infected?”
“Impossible to tell. How ‘bout you let me know the minute you start viewing me as a
meal instead of a man?”
“You’re assuming that I view you as a man,” she replied with a dark smile, trying to hide the fact that she was scared.
We spun and loped after the others, dodging bodies, blasting and chopping at the
zombies. Blood and gore bubbled and burbled everywhere.
Climbing up onto the overpass, we braved the incoming fire as we ducked and ran, moving as quickly as we could back toward the island. I heard the sounds of engines in the distance and at the top of the overpass, I spotted more boats approaching. They were barely visible but it was obvious that they were moving in to intercept us.
“They’re coming!” Scarlett shouted, hand over her wound.
We dropped from the overpass and streaked across the island, moving toward our boat when—
BOOM!
An explosion mushroomed water and debris into the air ahead of us. The Turk’s fighters had fired an explosive projectile.
BOOM!
Another explosive landed, the backwash from the blast knocking us back and to the ground. I rolled over and looked back at the overpass, where one of the Turk’s men held a smoking grenade launcher.
I fired.
So did the man holding the grenade launcher.
My metal dart struck him in the upper chest, but not before his grenade whistled through the air and landed in the belly of Sadie’s boat, blasting a hole in it. I was gut-punched to see Ephraim, the man who’d helped me back at the jungle camp, blown apart by the explosion.
Sadie rose and ran to her boat. I watched her look down at the craft and what was left of Ephraim and the rest of her crew, her hands on her head.
“How bad is it?” I asked, catching up with the others.
She appeared catatonic, on the verge of a mental meltdown. Then she pointed, and I saw the bodies and the hole in the deck. Water was bubbling up.
“We’re going to have to swim for it,” Lucy said.
“We’ll let you lead the way,” Layla replied, pointing to the water where dark forms were visible, slicing past.
“Sharks, gators, choose your madness,” Scarlett said.
A horn sounded, and we spotted something flashing across the top of the water. It was the boat driven by Dixie. She was coming to the rescue!
We cheered as the boat drew up alongside us.
“GET ABOARD!” Dixie screamed.
We used Sadie’s stricken boat to board Dixie’s boat. I was the last one aboard as Sadie’s boat began sinking into the water.
“Perfect timing,” Sadie said.
Dixie smiled and adjusted her black wraparounds before easing the throttle up. The boat took off, motoring away from the island as the Turk’s men continued to pour fire at us. We shot off down one of the canals as grenades dropped to the left and right, blasting spirals of water twenty feet into the air.
I turned back and cheered, pumping a fist as Lexie offered a middle finger to the Turk’s fighters who were bunched near the overpass’s summit.
My joy was tempered by the fact that Scarlett was wounded and Hollis had been bitten. But then, I remembered what we had in the small case.
“Where is it?” Dixie asked, letting one of her crew take over the controls. “Where’s the antidote?”
Lucy held up the small attaché case. Dixie removed her glasses, perused the case and seemed pleased.
Then she went back to the controls as I moved closer to the ladies. Everyone was stooped over Scarlett and Hollis, who were slumped on the seats at the back of the boat. Scarlett’s wound had stopped pumping red, which was good, but the color had drained from Hollis’s cheeks.
“She was bitten,” I said.
The others nodded. They could see that.
“It’s minor,” Deb said, “so she has some time before she changes. Maybe four or five hours.”
“We don’t need to wait that long,” Lexie offered, pointing at the case. “We already have the antidote.”
“We have to try it,” Scarlett said.
&nb
sp; I chewed on my lips. “Do we know whether it will work?”
“We have to take the chance,” Deb answered.
Hollis raised her hand. “I’m willing to be a guinea pig.”
I felt a change in the boat. We were drifting to the left, and the engine had been throttled down to idling. I looked up and saw that we were floating through a channel that led directly between a row of buildings.
There were men and women on top of the buildings. Snipers.
We’d been double-crossed!
I shot to my feet and moved toward Dixie.
“What the hell is going on?!”
“What’s going on is, I want that case,” Dixie said, pivoting, gun in one hand, black metal rod in the other.
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Dixie moved toward me and I held my hand up.
“The case isn’t yours,” I said.
The ladies aimed their weapons at Dixie. She held up her hand as more snipers appeared on the buildings. We were badly outnumbered and outgunned.
I made a quick study of her and saw nothing in her eyes—no life, no hint of empathy, no nothing.
She reached for the case. I head-butted her, breaking her nose. I moved sideways, and she growled and tackled me onto the controls.
Our weight forced the throttle forward and I grabbed at the wheel as Dixie spat blood at me. She clawed at my eyes and face as I steered the boat away from the snipers who’d opened fire. The boat’s RPMs spiked as the vessel slingshotted down the canal toward a partially-submerged building made almost entirely of glass.
We smashed through the glass and rammed into a concrete pillar inside what had once been a foyer. The boat crumpled, the impact sending everyone flying in different directions.
I crashed into a few feet of water with Hollis on top of me. The attaché case spiraled through the air and landed on a couch covered in green mold. Hollis grabbed the case and I followed after her. Smoke from the wrecked boat clouded the air, making it impossible to see what had happened to the others. We cried out for them, but the only thing that answered was gunshots. We didn’t know who was firing, but the bullets were lapping up the water near us and so we dashed back, running down a dry hallway.