by Amber Wyatt
“Time to go.” Dwayne grunted, barreling past her, and she yelped as he scooped her up effortlessly in one arm and leapt down the stairwell with her as if she were weightless.
Hugh was waiting at the door at the bottom, and as soon as they were through it, he slammed it shut and put a finger over his lips, holding the door firmly shut. Gina fought down a scream of panic and clutched at Dwayne’s neck as if she were drowning, feeling his arm encircling her waist like a band of iron. At that moment she could not have cared if he were a convict or not. There was a horde of zombies on the other side of that door and she was delighted to have a killer next to her, with muscles carved out of bronze, gripping a stout metal club.
Footsteps thudded down the stairs on the other side of the door and then stopped. The door creaked slightly as something pushed against it, and then that stopped too. Hugh looked at the others and, after a few seconds, gently took his hand off the door handle. There was no need for him to explain. Once out of sight, and without any noise, the zombies would soon forget that they had chased prey down the stairs. They would just stand there, motionless, potentially for years, until they were disturbed again.
Hana looked around at her little group, catching her breath and trying to let the crazy pounding of her heart slow down. There were just five of them now, all looking at her. She put a finger to her lips, to remind them to be silent, and then turned to pad silently down the hall. Where are we now? We need to find a way out of this place. As she got to the corner she peeped around and then almost immediately jerked back with a sharp intake of breath. She held up a clenched fist, to tell the others to stop. Then she carefully took out her phone, started filming video, and pushed the camera around the edge of the corner.
After a few seconds, she brought it back and waved the others over to watch the screen. They all crowded close together and Hana pressed play. The screen showed that the basement opened up into a large, airy two-story atrium. In the middle was a pretty garden with a small clump of trees, and a second level balcony ran around the sides. Then they saw what was in the giant hall waiting for them.
A ripple of tension ran through the group. Gina clutched her empty pistol tightly in a suddenly sweaty hand, and glanced backward involuntarily at the door behind her. There was no way out behind them. It was impossible to know how many zombies were waiting just behind it. She looked back at the phone. The atrium was not empty. The screen showed a squad of black uniformed soldiers walking spread out across the wide hall, their machine guns scanning left and right. They looked professional and deadly, and they were heading straight towards the narrow corridor in which the group was hiding.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Fidelis
Hana gripped a Farpunch dagger in each hand and slowly took three deep breaths, one after the other, flooding her body with as much oxygen as possible. They did not stand a chance of course. The soldiers coming towards them would not make any mistakes. They would not let her get within arm’s reach. But before they shot her down, she would be able to take out at least two of them. Maybe even three, she smiled, thinking of the small axe tucked into the back of her belt. In any event, a quick, painless death by bullet was infinitely preferable to being ripped apart by the horde of undead monsters waiting in the stairwell just behind her.
Beside her Hugh shifted, gripping his metal pole, ready to move on her signal. An unexpected pang of grief struck her then, knowing that in the next few minutes he would probably die next to her. I’m sorry Hugh. You’re a good man. I would have liked the chance to get to know you better.
Then adrenaline spiked through her veins as suddenly from around the corner there was shouting and gunfire. Puzzled, despite her racing heart, she tried to calm herself and think it through logically. They aren’t shooting at us. Zombies? Maybe we have a chance to surprise them while they are distracted. Conscious of Hugh’s breath almost on her neck, she risked a quick peek around the corner.
The soldiers were all aiming at something she could not see, high up to the side on the balcony above them. Then Hana heard a familiar voice shouting out in the hall, and knew what it was that had caught their attention. She whirled around to face the rest of the group.
“It’s Behnke and Thomas up on the balcony, those soldiers are distracted by them,” she hissed urgently. “Follow me and keep to the right-hand side.”
Then she saw that Dwayne was holding on to the door handle, bracing it with his shoulder. The gunfire, she realized. The zombies on the other side can hear all the noise out here. A dull, almost tentative thudding shook the door slightly.
“Just go,” Dwayne muttered. He looked directly at Gina and said it again, fiercely. “Just go! I’ll follow on, when you are all clear.”
Hana looked back around the corner. All five of the soldiers had their backs to her and were firing up at two different parts of the balcony. She nodded at Hugh and, crouching, moved quickly out into the big hall. She headed straight towards the two soldiers closest to her, Farpunch daggers held out with arms braced, ready to fire. They were stood well back from the other three, aiming up at something to her right. Hana did not dare take her eyes off them to see what it was they were shooting at. If she was lucky, she could kill them before the others realized that their comrades behind them had been taken down.
Then there was a flash of movement and Hana nearly leapt out of her skin with fright as a zombie dropped from the balcony above and hit the floor with a sickening smack just in front of her. The two soldiers turned around to deal with it and their eyes widened in surprise to see the small group of civilians creeping up behind them.
Hana fired her first Farpunch straight into the gawping mouth of the soldier on the right and he went down. The second soldier lowered his head to aim his weapon at her just as she fired, and her second dagger ricocheted off the front of his helmet, spinning crazily high in the air.
Shit! Hugh started charging forward but he was too far away. He would not be able to close the distance before the soldier shot him. Hana whipped out the hatchet from behind her back and, grateful for all the practice she had had back in the shop, sent it flying directly at the soldier’s head with a blurred flick of her arm.
But there was a world of difference between throwing an axe at a stationary rubber target, and throwing it at an alert, enemy soldier. The soldier ducked, avoiding the axe easily and came straight back up, aiming his weapon directly at Hugh. Hugh was only three steps away and moving fast towards him, but he might as well have been on the other side of the world. He had no chance. The soldier knew it too, and grinned evilly as he started to pull the trigger.
Out of nowhere a huge snack vending machine came down directly on top of him, smashing bones and flattening him underneath, scattering broken glass everywhere. Hugh could not stop in time and tumbled over the top of the bulky, black metal box, the pole in his hand dropping and clanging across the floor.
Hana risked a glance up at the balcony to see if there were any more surprises about to come down and saw Thomas’s bald head at the rail. The big German flashed her a smile and then he disappeared. From the sounds of it he was involved in a desperate fight of his own up there.
She was still moving fast towards the first man she had shot with the Farpunch dagger. Adrenaline crackled through her veins, pumping up her muscles. Gina was right next to her, matching her stride for stride. She had no idea where Wilkins and Rob were. The two women slid to a stop on their knees next to the body. The man’s legs were still quivering as the last, dying neurons in his brains fired, but his eyes were closed. The tip of the dagger’s hilt protruded from his mouth, as if he was sprouting a metallic, cylindrical tongue. Part of Hana’s mind was impressed at how far it had penetrated, but she barely paid it any attention. She was after the MP7 submachine gun, still attached by its sling to the dead man’s neck.
She grabbed the gun and threw herself prone behind the man’s body without bothering to unhook the sling from his body. While she took aim at the ot
her soldiers, who were still shooting at the zombies up on the far balcony, Gina knelt next to her, scrabbling at the dead man’s pistol on his belt. The smaller woman cursed as she fiddled with the unfamiliar holster, until she finally found the right direction to push the catch, releasing the pistol.
Quick as a flash Gina was lying next to her, aiming over the top of the soldier’s corpse.
“You take the one on the left, I’ll take the one on the right. Whoever finishes first, shoots the guy in the middle,” Hana said softly. She gripped the submachine gun more firmly, realizing that her hands were shaking. “You ready?”
“Ready,” replied Gina.
“Fire.”
None of the Lazarus troops was wearing body armor. Their anticipated mission scope had them operating against unarmed zombies, or at the very worst, unarmed civilians. Their chest rigs held no armor plates, and the first volley of shots tore straight through them. Hana put two long bursts into the torso of the man on the right, shredding his internal organs as if they had been dropped into a mincing machine. Gina fired three hollow-point bullets directly into the upper spine of her target. They tore catastrophic wound channels through his lungs and heart, severing his aorta, and exploded out of the man’s chest, spraying gobbets of flesh and bone out of enormous exit wounds. Both soldiers dropped immediately, dead before they hit the floor.
The third man was quick. He spun and dropped to one knee, managing to trigger off a burst in their direction before both women switched aim and opened fire, striking him in the throat and face. Hana kept the trigger down until her magazine clicked empty. Everything above his collar-bone was instantly transformed into a red ruin with white bone fragments poking out through it. The man slumped to his knees, then slowly toppled over onto his front.
“Get their guns,” Hana gasped to Hugh, picking herself up slowly from the floor. She looked down at the man she had been lying behind and unhooked the submachine gun from his neck. Then she unclipped the buckles on his chest rig and dragged it out from under him, before quickly putting it on herself, and looking around to check for other threats while she did the buckles back up.
There were no zombies up on the balcony, nor any sign of Thomas and Behnke. Gina and Hugh were over by the other bodies, stripping them of weapons and equipment.
Hana looked behind her and her heart sank. Oh no. Rob was kneeling next to Wilkins who was lying on the ground a few yards behind her. She remembered that the last soldier had managed to fire a burst at her, and she had thought that he had missed. He had not been aiming at her.
“Is he dead?” she asked.
“No,” Rob replied. “Just hit in the arm. Does one of those pouches hold a first aid kit?”
One of the pouches on her harness did indeed have a comprehensive, if compact trauma kit, and Rob turned out to be an above averagely skilled medic. With Hana assisting, he quickly considered, then discarded a tourniquet, then expertly applied a field dressing with clotting agent on both the entry and exit wound in Wilkins’s arm.
“Part of Tristan’s insurance policy small print,” Rob explained. “He needed a trained medic with him on all of his shoots, so it seemed simpler for me to just go off and do the course.” As he finished speaking, Rob’s face abruptly crumpled with grief. “Ah shit. I’d managed not to think about him all this time, and now I just go and say his name.” Rob gulped a great lungful of air, and tried to control his shaking hands. Tears streaked down his cheeks and he dashed them away, leaving streaks of blood on his face, that he had picked up on his hands while dressing Wilkins’s wound.
“Come on, Rob,” Hana gripped his arm sympathetically. “We need to move. Help me get him up.” Wilkins’s face was white and taut with pain, but with the help of the other two, he managed to stagger to his feet.
Hana left him in Rob’s care and looked around to see that Gina and Hugh were also wearing chest rigs stripped from the dead soldiers, and were checking their new weapons. The first two soldiers they had killed had been armed with MP7 submachine guns. The other three had been carrying Heckler and Koch assault rifles. As the others familiarized themselves with the layout of the controls on their new weapons, she saw that Dwayne was next to them, lengthening the straps on a looted chest rig so that it would fit his large frame. Dwayne? She was suddenly struck by a thought. If he’s here, then who is blocking the door against the zombies?
Dwayne saw her face and correctly interpreted her look of alarm.
“Don’t worry,” he whispered. “After the shooting stopped, they quickly calmed down again.” He jerked a thumb back towards the entrance to the hall. “They’ve stopped pushing at the door and gone back into waiting mode. As long as we stay quiet, we’re okay.”
Dwayne walked over and lifted the vending machine up off the remaining soldier so that they could take his ammunition. Gina gagged and turned away when she saw what had happened to the body. Hana did not blame her. His torso had been compacted vertically into an almost flat disc, with his head crushed down between his shoulders, and his limbs were bent outwards into eye-watering shapes. Shit and blood leaked out from his uniform, puddling on the floor. They gingerly took the magazines out of his pouches, touching him as little as possible.
“Okay, everyone ready?” Hana looked around at the circle of serious faces. There was a ripple of nods. “Let’s head out of here and find a way up to ground level.” She looked up and around at the balcony surrounding the big hall, wondering where Behnke and his group had gone, but there was no sign of them.
Behnke, Thomas and Sammy were in an elevator laughing with relief. Running out of the chamber through the airlock door, they had found themselves up on a balcony which ran all the way around the second level of a vast hall, with what looked like a small park down in the middle of the level below. Almost immediately they saw the troops below, and Behnke was struck with inspiration.
“Run around the balcony. The soldiers will shoot at the zombies,” he had called over his shoulder as, suiting actions to words, he took off down the balcony himself.
Before running, Thomas paused to slow down the first group of zombies chasing them from the airlock, by picking up a couch and throwing it at them, knocking down the entire front row like nine-pins. Then, with that giving them a little breathing space, Behnke’s plan had worked perfectly. As the three of them ran around the balcony, the soldiers below had opened fire, killing zombie after zombie. What was unexpected, was that they also started shooting at Behnke, Thomas and Sammy as well.
Ducking and avoiding the incoming fire slowed them down considerably, and Thomas had to use his improvised club and a few forceful kicks to keep the faster zombies back. One of them latched onto his arm and he flung it over the balcony railing to fall to the floor below. Braining two more zombies with his metal pole, he glanced over the side to see what had happened to it, and was shocked to see Hana and the rest of the group fighting the soldiers on the level below him. One of them was just about to shoot at them and Thomas saw Hana throw her axe at the man’s head, but the soldier dodged it easily. Without hesitation Thomas had grabbed a large vending machine and hurled it over the railing, where it plummeted downwards, hammering the Lazarus trooper flat into the ground.
Hana looked up with a dumbfounded expression on her face that made him smile. Then it was time to carry on running and fighting. There were still a few zombies left. Two last bursts of machine gun fire from below took out all but one, and that last one Thomas back-handed with his pole, crushing the skull and hurling the lifeless body to the side.
“Finally!” Behnke grunted in relief. He had never been that keen on doing any cardio exercise, and so the running had been harder on him than the others. “There’s an elevator over there, let’s get out of here.”
They had piled into the elevator and Behnke pushed the button for the ground floor. The doors had closed, and the elevator started to climb. They all looked at each other, grinning in relief and burst into laughter.
“Why the hell did you
throw the vending machine over the side?” Sammy laughed. “I’m hungry, man. I could have used some of those snacks.” Then his laughter choked off and he paled as he looked at Thomas’s wrist. “Oh no,” he whispered hoarsely.
There was a clear, circular bite mark that had penetrated the skin, and blood oozed lazily from the puncture wounds. Thomas and Behnke looked down and their laughter stopped dead as well. Thomas looked up at Behnke, a stricken look on his face.
“Philip. I’m sorry. You must run.” Thomas felt a hopeless torment inside his heart, even as he felt the first, burning changes in his blood that signaled his imminent transformation into a zombie. He had devoted his entire life to fulfilling his promise to his father, to protect his childhood friend. But how can I protect Behnke from myself?
Behnke looked into Thomas’s eyes and felt a stab of grief. For the first time in a long, long time, he felt vulnerable and human. Ever since he had been a child, he had never felt emotionally close to another human being. Thomas was different though. The huge man was a fundamental part of his life. Thomas had always been there for him, for as long as he could remember. But as quickly as it came, the feeling went, and Behnke was all business once again.
“Stand facing the back wall, Thomas, quickly. And give me your pole.”
The big man nodded, understanding, and gave Behnke a sad smile before quickly turning around and standing with his chest against the rear wall of the elevator. As they arrived at the ground floor and the doors opened, Behnke placed the base of the stand against Thomas’s back and jammed the pole horizontally across the elevator so that it pinned the bigger man against the back wall. The other end of the pole was wedged solidly against the door frame, but it was not secure. As soon as Behnke let go of it, it would fall.
“Sammy get over here and hold the pole up like this. Keep it braced against the metal panel here,” he ordered quickly.