Primus Unleashed

by Amber Wyatt

  “I’m scared,” stuttered Sammy, almost too terrified to move. Thomas suddenly stiffened and gripped the wall, muscles standing out all across his back and shoulders. The pole scraped across the metal panel and nearly fell.

  “For God’s sake, just hold the pole or we are going to die.” Behnke snapped urgently. “Quickly, man! I have a plan. Just come hold this pole in place.”

  With an almost superhuman effort of will, Sammy gritted his teeth and forced himself to step across the elevator behind Thomas and hold the pole up, braced between the big man’s back and the opposite wall. It was taking everything he had not to run screaming out of the elevator, but he knew that if he ran, Thomas would be on them before they could run a dozen paces. Then Thomas turned his head to look down at Sammy, and there was nothing in the huge man’s eyes but death and hunger. The small Hispanic convict felt his legs shaking.

  “Behnke what’s the plan?” he felt as if he was going to faint. Only pure terror was giving him the strength to hold the steel pole in place as the thing that had been Thomas writhed against the pole, trying to reach around and grab him. “Mr. Behnke?”

  Sammy turned his head and his blood turned to ice, as he saw that Behnke had silently stepped outside the elevator. He also saw that the ‘B1’ button was illuminated. The billionaire must have pressed the button before stepping out.

  “Sorry, Sammy,” Behnke said in a quiet voice. And then the doors closed on the expression of disbelief on Sammy’s white, wide-eyed face. Behnke looked up at the display which showed the elevator moving down to B1. There was a muffled clank of metal, and then he could hear Sammy’s screams echoing up the elevator shaft. Goodbye Thomas, he bowed his head. And thank you for everything.

  There was a noise behind him, as someone cleared their throat politely to get his attention. Behnke turned around and his jaw dropped as he saw that Indika was standing only a few feet behind him, with a squad of black-clad commandos at his back. Behnke was mesmerized by the half dozen machine gun muzzles pointed directly at his face.

  “Puh-please don’t kill me,” he stammered, slowly raising his hands.

  “Oh no, please don’t worry Mr. Behnke,” Indika said in his rich, calming voice. “You are much too valuable. In fact, I am very glad I found you. I recognize you of course, but perhaps I should introduce myself. I am Doctor Romesh Indika, the director of the IDRC and head of Lyssavirus Research.”

  “I know you!” Behnke exclaimed, lowering his hands slowly. “Of course, I know who you are, Doctor. Is it okay if I put my hands down? I have to say, it is so great to meet you, because I have many, many ideas about commercializing your research that I would love to talk to you about.” Behnke smiled as his confidence blossomed again. “Your brains? Combined with my money? It’s gonna be a huge success!”

  “Yes indeed, Mr. Behnke. Your resources could provide invaluable funding for my research. Particularly since my contractual relationship with DARPA is about to come to an end.” Indika beamed back at Behnke, whose own smile broadened into a wide grin. The two of them stood there, smiling at each other for a long moment. Behnke’s smile faltered a little. He wondered if it was his imagination, or did Indika’s smile have too many teeth?

  Down in the sub-basement, Hana and Hugh probed forward through the depths of the research labs with their weapons tracking every potential hiding place where a zombie might be lurking. Dwayne and Gina were doing the same, covering the rear, and in the middle of the group Rob struggled along, half-carrying Wilkins, with the wounded man’s uninjured arm over his shoulders.

  Evidence of panicked flight by the research staff lay everywhere. In some rooms, where experiments had been hastily abandoned, massive machines hummed, and control screens chirped repetitive queries that would never be answered. In others, overturned furniture, broken glass and smears of blood showed where the scientists had not evacuated fast enough and had been caught by the zombies flooding through the lower levels.

  Hana’s eyes flickered over the wealth of information in each room, wondering if she was walking past some vital clue that could spell the difference between life and death for them later on. Laptops left open, still logged in, could have emails containing security codes or clues to routes to safety. Changing room lockers might hold tools or accessories that would help them past future obstacles. But there was simply no time to stop and get bogged down in examining every possible drawer or storage container. An overriding urgency filled every member of the group with the need to keep moving. Instinctively, they all understood that if they wanted to live, they needed to find a way to the surface as fast as possible.

  They padded silently down an eerily deserted hall, lined with cargo pallets covered in tarpaulins. Hana and Hugh eyed the doors to the left and right, and with unspoken nods to each other, ignored them and carried on moving past. The signs above each door implied that they would only lead to dead ends, and they needed to find a stairwell or an elevator leading up. They passed Radiation Storage, Utilities and Engineering, Medical Bay and a storeroom full of maintenance lockers.

  Finally, thought Hana. There. An opening on the left lead to a wide stairwell and an arrow pointed upwards above a sign that read ‘B1 Administration Block and Executive Offices’. She pointed towards at the stairs, expecting Hugh to move forwards with her, but suddenly realized that he was not by her side. She looked around, and saw to her annoyance that he was not paying any attention to her. Instead he was crouched next to a glass door on the other side of the hall, peering through the stencils that covered the glass. Hugh glanced around, saw her frowning at him and gestured for her to come over, waving urgently.

  Containment Complex, Hana read on the door, perplexed. What on earth does he want me to look at in there? She knelt next to him and looked through the clear section of the door. On the other side was an unremarkable hallway, virtually identical to the one they were already in, although it was significantly wider. The hallway ended in a wide, circular foyer with a glass chamber in the middle and a handful of doors spaced evenly around its circumference.

  “What?” She whispered. There was nobody in sight, and Hana could not see anything that would have attracted his interest. “The stairs are over there. Come on, let’s keep moving.”

  “Wait,” Hugh gripped her shoulder gently, as she moved to turn away. “Look at that glass chamber in the middle of the hall. Can you see what’s inside it?”

  Hana looked again and felt a jolt of surprise. Oh shit. How could I have missed that? I had totally forgotten about it. On a perspex platform in the center of the chamber, sat the dark wooden chest, lit up by a circle of spotlights.

  “What should we do?” Hugh asked her.

  “We destroy it!” They both flinched in surprise as Gina’s voice came from only inches behind their ears. The petite singer had knelt down behind the two of them and was glaring at the chest with burning eyes.

  “We go in there and destroy that fucking thing once and for all.”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Amore

  Sat in his truck outside the loading bay, Michaels ended the call on his phone. The National Guard had just turned up in force. He had just finished asking the emergency dispatch operator to tell the troops that he was parked there right in front of them. He did not want to get to shot after all. Moments before the military convoy arrived, there had been a flurry of gunshots and the group of zombies standing in the loading area had started dropping, shot at long range by snipers he realized. Now their corpses lay scattered around the decontamination area next to his truck.

  A few of the bullets had cracked just past his windscreen, prompting his 911 call. But the dispatcher had simply told him to stay in the vehicle where he was, so he sat there and watched through his side mirrors as the soldiers deployed their vehicles in a perimeter about fifty yards behind him. He frowned as he watched the machine-gunner in the turret of one Humvee open up box after box of ammunition, and carefully lay out the belts of gleaming bullets for easy access nex
t to himself on the roof of the vehicle. Michaels was no military expert, but that did seem like an awful lot of ammunition.

  Then when all the soldiers were ready, they braced themselves behind their weapons and a Humvee with the speakers on the roof started playing music. Loudly.

  “What the hell is going on out there?” Arlene’s voice crackled over the radio.

  “Just stay where you are, the Guard just arrived and I think they are trying to lure out any zombies. They’ve got a Humvee out here with speakers, playing music.”

  At that moment the first zombies emerged from the loading bay doors into the pale sunlight, and were immediately cut down by machine gun fire. Michaels had never seen the effect of a prolonged burst of high-velocity bullets on a human body before, and he cringed as the first wave of zombies died in front of him. And they died slowly. Unlike normal humans, the undead were not killed by dozens of bullets ripping through their chests and exploding out of their backs. They kept advancing, even as their bodies disintegrated, with limbs being shot off, organs falling out of gaping exit wounds, their blood soaking the concrete underneath them. They only stopped when they were either hit in the head, or their leg bones shattered under concentrated fire, knocking them down to the ground.

  Sharpshooters fired into the writhing, crimson mess on the loading dock, aiming for the zombies’ heads, until the bloody chunks of meat finally stopped moving. Damn, that is some nasty shit. Michaels swallowed his rising gorge and tried to look down at his lap instead, and he almost missed what happened next.

  A flicker in his peripheral vision caught his eye, and he looked up to see one of the side doors open. A small huddle of scientists came out, waving frantically at the soldiers. One of them, a lady in her fifties, had taken off her white coat and was waving it back and forth as a flag. The expressions on their faces were a mixture of relief and trepidation. Michaels could well imagine how thankful they felt. God knows what ordeals they had just survived inside the IDRC.

  He looked in his side mirror to see if the soldiers had seen them too. But then the hair stood up on the back of his neck as the officer behind him shouted orders and the machine-gunner on his vehicle swiveled his weapon to take aim at the unarmed civilians. The scientists had just started to scream when the muzzle erupted with fire, sending a merciless fusillade of bullets straight through their protesting hands and into their disbelieving faces. Blood sprayed across the wall behind them and their bodies jerked as they were hit, before they crumpled to the floor.

  Oh shit, Michaels felt a cold lump of pure horror congeal in his stomach. He slowly grasped why there had been so many dead at the prison, and so few survivors. In fact, now he looked back on it, he could not recall there being any survivors. A sudden understanding struck him. That’s why most of the corpses in prison guard uniforms were outside the front gate. They hadn’t been killed by being shot in the head neither, because they weren’t infected. They’d just been shot, period. Poor bastards probably thought they were about to be rescued.

  “Arlene,” he keyed his radio. “We are in deep shit. The soldiers are not taking prisoners, you hear me? They are killing everyone, and I mean everyone, not just the infected.”

  “What should I do? Should I just stay in here?”

  Michaels looked over at the decontamination block where she was hiding, and his face tightened as he saw a squad of soldiers approach the small building. They stacked up next to the door to the men’s changing room and the front man pulled a grenade from his pouch.

  “No, you need to get out. You got soldiers about to enter the decon block. Get out of there now!”

  Arlene stuffed the radio into a pocket, cursing, then pulled out her pistol and carefully opened the back door from the female changing room. A thunderclap behind her shook the whole building and made her jump, as a grenade exploded in the men’s changing room next door. Shit! Time to go.

  Michaels watched as the soldiers stormed into the decontamination block through the shattered doorway, disappearing into the smoke and dust from the explosion, firing their rifles left and right. On the other side of the block he saw the back-door pop open, and Arlene sprint out of it straight to the main building where she yanked open a side door and disappeared inside. Good luck, Arlene, he thought. Then he slipped down on to the floor of the cab and prayed that it would not occur to any of the soldiers to come and search his truck.

  Down in the basement administration office level, Hana and Hugh moved quickly past an abandoned security booth, with their weapons braced in their shoulders, ready to fire. Behind them stumbled Rob and Wilkins, the latter white-faced with pain, now that the adrenalin had worn off. Gina kept watch on the hallway to their rear, and next to her Dwayne carried the chest.

  They had found it tightly sealed in plastic sheeting and after a brief discussion, bearing in mind that something inside the chest turned people into goddamned zombies, they unanimously decided to leave it sealed up, and to take it with them to dispose of after they had escaped. Dwayne had suggested just simply burning it, but had been quickly voted down by the others. There was no way they could know if the smoke from the fire would contain some form of deadly contamination that would first kill them, and then spread across the entire state.

  “We’ll just take it out to sea and dump it deep in the ocean,” Hana had suggested.

  “That didn’t work too well last time,” Wilkins smiled wryly, teeth gritted against the pain.

  “That’s because it looks like a freaking treasure chest,” replied Hana. “This time we’ll cover it in cement and make it look like a big rock.”

  As they moved past the offices on both sides, faces looked out at them from behind the glass frontage. Some were staff members peeking out between blinds, individuals who had waited too long to escape and who had now sought refuge behind locked doors. Others were dead-eyed zombies who pawed and bit at the windows as the group passed by. Hana guessed that they had been bitten before locking themselves in and succumbing to the infection.

  At the far end of the hallway was a glass door, and the closer they approached it there seemed to be something on the other side. She held up her hand to signal a halt and squinted, trying to make out what it was.

  Gina crept up and paused beside her, also puzzling over the strange shape through narrowed eyes. What is that, is that an elbow? And somebody’s back? But then the guy would have to be really huge? Then her face cleared in delighted recognition at the familiar silhouette.

  “It’s Thomas!” she blurted out and started to move forward, a wide smile breaking across her face.

  She let loose a muffled squeal of surprise as Dwayne grabbed her unexpectedly from behind, clamping one hand over her mouth. She froze against him, puzzled. His hands were gentle but held her firmly. He leaned forward so that she could see his face, and shook his head slightly, his eyes filled with pity.

  That was when she realized why he had stopped her. It’s not Thomas anymore. She went limp in his arms and hot tears trickled down her cheeks onto his hand. Seeing that she understood, he gave her a comforting squeeze and then let her go, to pick the chest back up again. Jesus Christ. Thomas is gone. I can’t believe it. He was so strong. Gina choked back the huge lump in her throat. When she had first joined the group in Miami, she had had no idea that the path she had chosen would lead her through all these ordeals. Nor had she imagined that any of them would actually die.

  Without warning, the building was rocked by a huge explosion. Several ceiling panels fell down and the lights flickered. They all looked up in shock. Another two explosions shook the walls in quick succession. The entire, vast structure groaned, and half the lights went out in the hallway.

  Behind them was the sound of breaking glass and then a scream that was quickly stifled. Alarmed, Hana looked around. Many of the office windows had cracked and one had completely shattered, shedding broken glass into the corridor. Urgent whispers from behind the blinds in that room, indicated that the occupants were survivors, probab
ly discussing what to do.

  “We need to move, right now.” Hana said firmly, facing the others. “Any more explosions like that and all the lights could go. We don’t want to be stuck down here in the dark.”

  “Hey, are you okay?” Hugh was right next to Gina, and the young woman looked badly shaken up after seeing Thomas. Hana had explained her reaction to the news that he had been with the hunters that cleared the farm, and told him what had happened to Gina’s daughter. Hugh understood why she felt so hostile towards him, and if possible, he wanted to reach out to extend an offer of friendship once again.

  Gina looked up at him tearfully, then as their eyes met, her face went cold and her submachine gun snapped up to point directly at his face.

  “Wait a second… no!” he shouted and ducked just as she pulled the trigger, firing a short burst. The muzzle flash exploded next to his face, singeing his hair and deafening him, and the bullets whipped past his head missing by only a few inches. But Gina had not been aiming at him. While they had been distracted by the broken glass, Thomas had run silently up the hallway behind them, attracted by the earlier scream. Gina’s bullets hit him dead center in the forehead, removing the top of his skull, but the huge man kept running for another two steps, hitting Hugh like a train and knocking him flat. A red-hot knife of pain stabbed through Hugh’s knee as his leg bent underneath him and the enormous bulk of the German bodyguard smashed him to the ground.

  Hana whirled, just in time to see the thing that had been Sammy, following at full speed behind Thomas. She opened fire at the same time as Dwayne, and Sammy’s face disappeared into red ruin, his slim body bouncing sideways off the wall before dropping and skidding to a stop, leaving a smear of blood on the floor.

  Hugh shouted with pain as he tried to move out from under Thomas’s dead weight. Rob leaned Wilkins against the wall, and together with Dwayne, they rolled the heavy corpse off him. Hugh yelled out again as he tried to stand. His injured leg clearly could not take any weight at all.