Its lifeless body slumped over and was still, and Sarah climbed onto Wayne and started gently tapping his cheek, trying to wake him up. More groans and footsteps came from the doorway toward the jail cells and Sarah looked over at it in fear.
Wayne was out cold, and he gave no indication of waking up anytime soon. Sarah grunted and stood up, wedging the rifle hung around his neck under her arm and using the strap to pull on his body and drag him toward the doorway next to them. His head rolled around as his body started to move, but the strap slipped off and his head clunked down on the hard concrete. She sighed in frustration, nervously staring again at the door where the groans were coming from. Sarah hung the rifle over her own neck and then reached down and grabbed Wayne by the wrist, pulling with all her strength. He wasn't light, but thankfully all her physical conditioning paid off and he began to slide across the floor. When they were through the door, she let go of him and shut it, then she pressed her back to it and observed the room she had dragged them to.
They were in a huge hangar bay. Military trucks of all different sizes and types were lined up in neat rows throughout the colossal room, and Sarah shuddered when she even saw a few tanks. A large elevator big enough to house a vehicle or two sat to their right. But the hangar itself seemed just as lifeless as the rest of the base as the eerie reds from the strobe lights splashed around it.
Sarah looked around, trying to see if there was a way that led toward the train. She determined which direction was which, and then she spotted a doorway far away at the left side of the hangar. If it led to anything other than a dead end, they were probably in business. But she wouldn't be able to drag Wayne the rest of the way; he would have to wake up.
The blood flow from his nose seemed to be abating, but he still showed no signs of consciousness. She tugged on his arm, she patted his cheek again, she tried holding his chin and gently wiggling his head, but none of it worked.
"Come on, wake up..." she said.
Then she looked up and her heart sank.
A scratcher had wandered into the hangar from a hallway directly in front of them. Then a few more filed in behind it. They stumbled around for a few seconds before spotting her and Wayne, then their eyes lit up and their jaws slung open. Then they ran.
Sarah moved away from Wayne and propped her rifle on her knee. She held her breath as the four scratchers came for her. They worked themselves into somewhat of a tidy line, and Sarah aimed for the one nearest to her. She waited for them to get a little closer to make her shots count, then she opened fire, squeezing off one shot at a time.
The first bullet was right on target and dropped the scratcher in the front of the pack to the ground. She carefully aimed for the next one and dropped it just like the first. But then her nerves started to get the better of her as the last two closed in. Her aim got jumpy and she started to miss, and when she ran out of time, it turned into spray and pray.
Despite her franticness, a bullet sank into the mushy brains of the third scratcher, leaving only the fourth.
Sarah stood up now, backing away. The zombie was only a few paces from her, and Sarah let out a primal scream as she held down the trigger and sprayed bullets at its face. Then her gun clicked and told her she was out of ammo. But the bullets sailing through the air drilled into the top of its chest, its shoulders, its neck, and finally its head. A mess of blood and sinew sprayed everywhere as the zombie twisted and fell to the ground, its face hitting with a dull and sticky splat.
She slowly lowered the rifle, her arm shaking. She caught her breath, but before she could even turn her attention back to Wayne, more scratchers came through the door across the hangar, wondering what all the noise was about. Four came out at first, then four more, then nine. Before long, an entire congregation of the dead had wandered into the hangar and Sarah didn't have enough bullets, or even a single prayer, to fight them.
But before they saw her, suddenly all the lights came back on as full power was restored to the base. The siren and strobe lights stopped, and then a loud sound echoed throughout the hangar as something shook from the right.
The scratchers stopped wandering and all stared toward the elevator at the curious noises coming from it.
Then the elevator door opened. Row upon row of soldiers dressed in full gear, each one holding a large riot shield in front of him, marched out. The men in front saw the congregation of scratchers and one of them yelled something. A man at the front of their formation, closest to Sarah and Wayne, raised a grenade launcher and fired a shot off at the undead. The projectile sailed through the air, now highlighted by the stark white of the lighting filling the room. It exploded on impact with the floor and sprayed white phosphorus around. The scratchers around the impact immediately went up in flames. But they charged at the soldiers, even the ones covered in fire before it burned them to the bone, and the soldiers hunkered down and engaged them with assault rifles.
Sarah crawled on top of Wayne again, frantically shaking him. "Wake up!" she cried under the raucous din of gunfire. She glanced over at the chaos that was breaking out not far from them and knew that if a single one from either side spotted them, they would be dead. "Wake up!" She raised her arm and slapped him across the face as hard as she could.
His eyelids instinctively shot open as if to look around and see what had roused him, though there was nothing behind them. This made it even more confusing for Wayne as he struggled to understand what was going on.
Sarah leaned in close to his ear. "Get up! We have to go!"
She stood up and yanked him to his feet and he threw his arm over her shoulders again. They ducked away from the chaos going on as the scratchers battered up against the soldiers' riot shields. The rows of military vehicles gave them cover as they slowly made their way to the left side of the hangar and through the door that Sarah had spotted earlier.
When they reached it, they found themselves in a long, curving tunnel, very similar to the first ones she'd seen when they got off the train.
"I think we're getting close," she said.
At the end of the tunnel, it merged with another one, and suddenly she realized where they were and that they'd simply come from the other branch than the one Bill had chosen when they infiltrated the base.
The rocky walls were still painted in the blood and viscera of the fallen and mutilated soldiers, and the floors were still lined with the bodies of men that had been cut down by friendly fire.
"This is it!" Sarah cried. "We're almost there!"
As the gunfire raged on from the tunnel branch they came from, the sound of groans and footsteps came from the other one. Lurching shadows stretched across the floor and up the wall from around the curve in the tunnel. Sarah reached for the rifle hanging around her neck, but she remembered it was out of ammo and she wouldn't have time to reload.
"Run," she said quietly.
"What?"
"Run!"
She pulled Wayne along the tunnel as fast as she could, heading for the train. He practically turned into a spring as he hopped along, almost putting all of his weight down on her shoulders to support himself. She tried to navigate him through the bodies in their path, but she also continually threw glances over her shoulder to see how quickly the dead were approaching.
The scratchers came into view behind them, and they were already running, deftly navigating through the bodies. Sarah could only see the first few in the crowd, but it looked like there were a lot of them.
Just as Sarah turned her head back toward the train, she inadvertently tugged Wayne to the side and his foot caught on a body beneath him. They both spilled onto the floor as the dead neared. Sarah's knees struck the ground hard and crippling pain shot into them and radiated through her body. She snapped her head up and looked down the tunnel in front of them.
She could see the train. They had gone around the final curve in the tunnel and it was in front of them, far away, but there. And the engine was still running. A sudden rush of determination, more incr
edible than ever before, coursed through her veins and she shot up to her feet almost like a kangaroo as she hoisted Wayne up.
"The train's there!" Sarah yelled over the chaotic noise behind them.
This time she didn't look back. She believed they were going to make it, and that had to be good enough. She guided Wayne through the remainder of the bodies in their way, also avoiding the slippery pools of blood splashed everywhere.
The tunnel ahead of them shrank and shrank as the train grew and grew. When they got onto the platform, Sarah continued to only focus on the train as they ran for the cab at the back of it. She helped Wayne up the steps and pulled open the door, practically tossing him inside.
The dead swarmed onto the platform behind them and began jumping at the train. They still didn't have the intelligence to navigate complex obstacles or perform simplistic actions like climbing, but some of them managed to get onto the walkway on the outside of the train.
Sarah slammed the door of the cab shut next to her and began poring over the control panel and trying to remember which switches and dials she had to hit to get the train moving. But then the answer cut through all the noise in her head and she disengaged the handbrake.
The howling groans of the undead were right outside the window and she pulled out a pistol just as the first one came through. Its hips caught on the bottom of the window as it extended its arms out for her. Sarah leaned back across Wayne's lap and fired the gun at its head, coating the inside edges of the window in the corpse's blood. It slumped loosely in the opening as more scratchers tried to pile over it. Sarah killed the next one, and now she was creating a wall, blocking the window from any more getting in.
Just as she turned her attention back to the train controls and put her hand on the throttle, gunfire erupted on the platform. She poked her head up and looked over the bodies slumped halfway up the window and saw a line of soldiers taking out the last remnants of the scratchers that had chased her and Wayne.
Then they began to yell and one of them ran up the platform as she started to push the throttle forward. He began firing at the cab and Sarah ducked and pulled Wayne down with her as the train slowly crept forward.
Some bullets sailed over the bodies and struck the interior of the cab. The sounds of the chaos were confusing and it seemed like the bullets were bouncing around inside. The only thing Sarah could focus on in that instant was the pressure that her hand applied to the throttle. She squeezed the rest of her body into some kind of limbo or lockdown, just waiting to feel a hot piece of lead tear into her.
But the train started to pick up speed, and soon enough it was out of the station. The gunfire became a distant echo behind them as the locomotive sped down the tunnel. And now they were met with a wall of silence that seemed almost like the void of space itself compared to the bedlam they escaped.
Sarah shoved the lifeless bodies of the scratchers out of the window and they tumbled onto the tracks below. She leaned back in her seat and let out a long, loud sigh. The whole operation had turned into a bungled mess and she didn't accomplish even half of her objectives. She vastly underestimated her enemy, and though she and Wayne both came out of it alive, a heavy price was paid.
As the train sped down the tunnel, she thought about what was next.
22
Debriefing
The train's headlights stretched down the tunnel and the tracks in front of them flew by hypnotically. The two of them stared at this for a while, not saying anything to each other and just taking the moment to unwind from what they had just been through. They both had a lot to process. They both had a lot of healing to do.
Wayne periodically turned his head toward Sarah and opened his mouth in the relative darkness of the cab before closing it and turning away. When she finally noticed this, she asked him what it was. "I just wanted to say... thanks," he said.
"You don't need to say anything," she said. "You would have done the same for me."
But he needed to do this. "No. Thank you for everything." He became choked up, and tears dripped past his eyelids and rolled down his cheeks. "I thought I was going to die in there. I can't believe you actually came to get me."
"Of course," Sarah said, reaching over and squeezing his wrist.
Wayne leaned over and wrapped his arms around her, embracing her in a tight hug. He continued to sob, and for the first time Sarah actually saw him in a moment of weakness.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I don't mean to be like this."
"That's okay. It does feel a little different with the shoe on the other foot. Remember how it used to be back at Noah's Ark when you had to look out for me?"
He seemed to cheer up a little at this. "I remember."
He let go of their embrace and both of them smiled a little.
"So why didn't Glass kill you?" Sarah asked. "Did he really want to torture you that much?"
"Partly. But mostly he was just using me to get to you."
"Get to me how?"
"He mentioned something about you being important, but he didn't say what he meant. I think he was just trying to lure you to the base so he could get his hands on you. I guess you one-upped him on that one."
"Yeah," she replied, proud of the fact that she did actually defeat him in at least one way, "I guess I did."
"Are you going to tell me what happened to your arm?" he asked.
"It happened outside the base, actually. Right after they took you away, I tried to shoot Glass, but a sniper got me. I think he was aiming to kill, but thankfully he was a little off. Carly changed her mind and followed us to the base, and she found me. At least that's what she said; I don't really remember much about it."
Wayne frowned. "I know Carly and me had some differences," he said. "I don't think she liked me much, anyway. Did you two ever make amends?"
Sarah remembered when she, Wayne and Ron initially journeyed out to the base and Carly chose to turn away and leave their group, tired of the danger Sarah willingly and repeatedly tried to chase. "Yeah, we did. But..."
"But...?"
"Carly's no longer with us."
The silence in the train was deafening. It highlighted how much Sarah had lost. How much they all had lost. But no one's death stung worse for her than Carly's; Carly had always been faithful, she helped her through thick and thin, and the worst part of it all was she died trusting Sarah to be a good leader and know what she was doing, and it turned out that it had all been in vain anyway. She traded Carly's life for Wayne's, and now she felt that old guilt creep back in when Wayne first showed up again and began to inadvertently encroach on her friendship with Carly. And in her final moments of life, Sarah had painfully rejected her, like a cold slap to the face. It was a wound that she knew would take a very long time to heal if it would at all.
"I'm sorry," he said. He reached over and patted her on the thigh.
A shiver ran up her body at his touch, like her animal instincts had forgotten what it was like to have a man touch her in any way at all, especially one whose hand felt so rough and warm.
"So what was the deal between you, Bill and Glass?" she asked, changing the subject.
"I thought he was dead," Wayne said. "For the longest time, I thought he was dead."
"Who, Glass?"
"Yeah. He was always Jack to me. The two of us and Bill... we used to be close friends. We met each other in MARSOC and became pretty tight. I used to consider both of those guys my brothers. And Jack always stood out. People used to call him the Brick Shithouse because he was so big and tall. But he took it in stride, and even seemed like he was a good person back then, believe it or not. I have no idea what happened to him, and I was shocked to find out that he was still alive. The size should've been a dead giveaway, but for the longest time I was so sure that he was dead that I didn't even put two and two together."
"Why did you think he was dead? What happened?"
"After MARSOC, the three of us branched off in different directions in the Marine Corps. We all had
our personal callings, nothing wrong with that. But we kind of lost touch. We were all busy, but it was more than that, too. Jack and Bill started to become distant, but only with me. At first I didn't think too much of it, just friends drifting apart, you know? It had been years and I lost touch with them completely. When I was a commander in PSYOPS, I had someone come to me internally in the department, asking me to run down a lead as a friend. He suspected that someone in another department was embezzling funds. After a little bit of investigation, I discovered not only embezzling and other odd diversions of funds, but I also uncovered a smuggling ring dealing in illegal materials. Jack and Bill were at the core of it. At first I was too shocked to believe it, but when I looked back on everything that transpired over the years, it started to make more and more sense.
"I brought it to my boss in the department," Wayne continued, "and they made me advisor to a raid to catch them in the act. They smuggled materials a number of different ways to different locations, but that night they were in a small warehouse out in the boonies when we made the bust. As it turns out, we got word just before that Bill and Jack had a falling out. I think Jack tried to edge Bill out of their arrangement, and Bill didn't appreciate it. He was at the warehouse to confront Jack, and that's when we showed up. But they were tipped off to us as we tried to enter the building and they barricaded themselves inside. They must've had some heavy munitions shipments to that location, because they were well-stocked that night. They refused to go down and elected to start all-out warfare instead. We called for backup, and by the time it came, something went wrong inside. A stack of munitions went off accidentally and started a fire. The whole building went up in a blaze, and I could hear Jack screaming from inside. He kept shouting my name. He knew I was there that night, and he kept cursing me, saying that I did that to him. The fire burned for hours and reduced the warehouse to just about nothing. When it was finally all put out, they pulled Jack's body out of the wreckage, but Bill managed to escape. They think he went down a sewer pipe, and after that, he disappeared. No one saw him again. I couldn't believe Jack was still alive until I saw it with my own two eyes. I don't know how he survived, but here he is."
Zombie Apocalypse Box Set 2 Page 41