by Amber Wyatt
“Fuck! I think it’s my ACL. The ligament’s gone. Shit.”
Hana knelt down next to him, her face stricken. A crippling injury like this would be a death sentence for him if they had to run for their lives.
“Don’t worry, we’re going to get you out of here okay? I won’t leave you.”
“Sure thing,” he looked up at her and cracked a smile through the pain. “I know you won’t.”
Then there was the biggest explosion yet. All the lights went out and the thunderous detonation threw everyone to the ground. Fragments of shattered concrete rained down all around them, followed by the scream of tearing metal. It sounded as if the whole building was falling down on top of them. Hana got up on all fours and groped around in the pitch black, looking for Hugh. There was broken rubble and paneling all around her and she realized that a stretch of ceiling must have fallen in. She found his arm in the darkness and gripped on to it tightly.
“You okay?” her eyes stung, and she coughed through the dust that was floating all around.
“Yeah, you?”
Then there was a slow creaking of breaking concrete directly above them, and they scrabbled across the floor just as an enormous section of ceiling crashed down, raising a thick, choking cloud of dust. Hana blinked up through the blinding light pouring in from above, and saw that she and Hugh were on one side of the fall, and Gina and the others were on the other side. They were coughing on the dust floating in the air, and blinking through stinging eyes, but otherwise they all seemed to be uninjured. She smiled, looking up at the huge hole above her. From the furniture that had fallen into their hallway from above, it looked as if it opened up into more offices on the ground floor.
“That’s our way out,” she pointed triumphantly.
“Are you sure that’s where you want to go?” Hugh looked upwards dubiously. The room above them had been wrecked by the explosion, and its contents were still clearly on fire, burning merrily away. “What the fuck is going on up there?”
Up on the mezzanine level, Vockler fired out a last burst across the main foyer, down into the National Guard troops taking cover amongst the rubble of the reception area. Then he turned and ran back to where his men were setting up ambush positions on the second floor. Return fire from the soldiers below smacked harmlessly into the balcony behind him and ricocheted up into the air.
The first contact between the Lazarus troops and the National Guard had been an unpleasant surprise for the both of them. The Lazarus soldiers were not equipped for war-fighting, and they had not anticipated any need at all for heavy weapons. Their current mission in the quarantine zone had only ever envisaged them having to defend themselves against the infected. Consequently, they found themselves woefully unprepared for a full-scale assault by a several platoons of mechanized infantry.
For their part, the National Guard had assumed that this was just another clean-up operation. Nobody had briefed them that there would be a hostile, special forces team waiting to ambush the first squad to enter the building. They reacted quickly though, laying down covering fire and withdrew in good order, dragging their dead and wounded with them. Then they called up fire support from an M1 Abrams main battle tank, to blow down the front doors. The tank gunner had followed up with several more high-explosive shells, which had penetrated far into the depths of the IDRC before exploding, until the company commander had given the order to cease fire. Too much structural damage to the building might prove dangerous to his soldiers who would soon have to enter and clear the IDRC room by room.
The M1 had moved forward, grinding its snout through the front doors, and sending glass flying across the lobby. With the hatches still firmly battened down, the gunner traversed the turret, sweeping the entire foyer from left to right with an extended burst from the co-axial machine gun. Hundreds of bullets shredded plants, furniture, walls and windows, before the main battle tank revved its engine loudly and withdrew, leaving behind a huge hole in the front of the building.
Then, under covering fire from the tank’s machine guns, the infantry squads had crawled forward to the front entrance with their 40mm grenade launchers and AT4s to fire high explosive rockets and grenades into every possible piece of cover that the Lazarus soldiers might be hiding behind. They were taking no chances, and their veteran squad leaders made sure that every potential enemy firing position was comprehensively destroyed.
Fortunately, Vockler had withdrawn his men a moment before, and while he had remained in place to observe the enemy advance, he ordered his sergeant to set up an ambush to cover the bottleneck approach to the executive offices of the IDRC. The National Guard troops at the loading bay at the rear of the building seemed to be only a blocking force. It was the soldiers coming in through the front lobby that concerned him. As he ran back to where his men were waiting, he called General White to update him that the IDRC was under attack and that he was taking steps to secure the research data. To his surprise the General was not concerned at all about the valuable research that the IDRC had been collecting.
“Don’t worry, Lieutenant,” the general was breathing heavily and his voice echoed as if he were walking down a hallway somewhere. Vockler inferred that White was on the move himself. “Much of the data is already securely backed up here, and I am in communication with Doctor Indika now about recovering the rest.”
“Understood. So, we don’t have to worry about securing the data. Sir, the National Guard is here in strength, there is a good chance we will lose this facility. Shall I initiate the sanitation protocol?”
“Yes. I formally order you to execute the full sanitation protocol for Project Lazarus. We were never there. After that has been completed, there is only one task that I want you to focus on, one which is of the utmost importance.”
“Yes sir, go ahead.” Vockler replied.
“Those civilian prisoners, Vockler. They know about our involvement right from the beginning. If word were to get out that the US military brought the Lyssavirus to Fort Lauderdale, the fallout from that would be catastrophic.” White spat the words out. “They must be eliminated with extreme prejudice. All of them. I do not want you to rest until you have confirmed with your own eyes, that every single one of them is dead. Do you understand?”
“Roger that, sir. I’ll take care of it personally.”
“Excellent, Lieutenant. I will wait for your next update.”
Vockler slowed down as he thought his options through. He would have to leave his first team in place to delay the National Guard while he looked for the civilians himself. Lima Two had called him to say that they had safely secured Doctor Indika, but then they had gone radio silent, and were not responding to any calls. Lima Three had gone quiet some time previously, after their last report that they were in sub-level two, engaging both infected specimens and the civilian prisoners. Since that was where the civilians were last sighted, he would head down to B2 and start his search for them there.
But first things first, he thought to himself. Sanitation. I need to erase all evidence that we were ever here. Vockler flipped out his command tablet and scanned his fingerprints. He flipped quickly through the menu to the sanitation protocol which required a second fingerprint confirmation as well as a retinal scan. All the Lazarus team’s computer servers and paper documentation were located separately in the team office for security purposes. They were also placed there for ease of destruction, in case the site needed to be abandoned in a hurry.
A thought suddenly occurred to Vockler. Taylor is locked in the team office. With the IDRC security systems offline, the Lazarus office had been the only place with a lockable door to secure the treacherous tub of lard. He was presently plasti-cuffed to a sturdy steel pipe in the corner of the room. Vockler shrugged his shoulders. Tough luck. Sucks to be you, Taylor. He clicked on the final confirmation, closed his tablet and slipped it back into his chest pouch. In the old days, the CIA and other agencies running black ops, would have destroyed their records with fire. But the d
amage caused by incendiary systems had proven to be inconsistent, not to mention inefficient. It often left behind evidence in the form of paper fragments and hard drives still containing recoverable data.
Nowadays, they used acid.
Lying on the floor of the team office, near the rear of the building, Taylor stiffened as tiny, clicking sounds echoed around the room. Blindfolded, he craned his neck left and right, trying to work out where the sounds were coming from.
“Lieutenant Vockler, is that you? Hello? Is anyone there?” He started shivering in fear, wondering if an infected had somehow gotten into the room with him. A second later he jumped slightly as the acid tanks fitted to the ceiling began to spray the entire room with concentrated hydrochloric acid, and he was soaked with the cold, wet mist. Then his skin began to melt, and he started screaming.
The screams echoed distantly through the ground floor offices, and down the long, deserted corridors until it reached the burning rubble where the M1 Abrams’s 120mm shells had destroyed the biosafety airlock, shower and sterilization annex.
Gina and Dwayne turned towards the faint noise, still clearly audible despite the crackling flames around them, and then looked at each other curiously.
“What the hell is that?” Gina wondered out loud, tapping her trigger finger nervously on the trigger guard of her submachine gun.
“Some poor bastard,” Dwayne grunted, pulling Wilkins up out of the hole in the floor with Rob’s help, and seating him gently to the side, with his back against a toppled metal locker. “Okay, we’re all up on this side. I’ll come over and help you two. Hang on just a second while I walk around,” he called down to Hana and Hugh who were watching from the level below, on the other side of where the floor had broken through into the basement.
Gina and Dwayne had had a small slope of shattered concrete which they had managed to climb up. But on Hana’s side of the cave-in there was just a sheer wall nine feet high, leading up to the jagged edge of the floor above them. Hana had already tried to climb it, boosted by Hugh, but there was too much sharp debris poking out for her to climb past safely, so they had decided to wait until Dwayne could help.
“Dwayne, wait. Did you hear that?” Gina turned, aiming her weapon down a hallway. Am I imagining it, or did I hear a door open down there?
“No, it’s coming from below,” said Rob, kneeling at the edge of the hole and poking his weapon back down where they had just come from. A heartbeat later a zombie stepped out of the darkness into the circle of light coming from the floor above. It was a woman in her mid-fifties, wearing a stained floral dress. She was missing half of her hair and a flap of bloody scalp hung over one ear. Someone had rammed a pencil into the side of her neck and it wobbled as she worked her jaws. The zombie looked around quizzically, searching for the source of the human voices, before looking up and seeing Rob above. Just as her lips pulled back, baring her teeth in a snarl, he shot her in the head and she dropped to the floor with a thump.
“Don’t worry, I got it…” Rob managed to say, before a flood of other zombies swarmed out of the darkness and started scrambling up the slope towards him. Gina and Dwayne quickly joined him and poured fire down into the zombies climbing up towards them. On the other side of the hole, Hana and Hugh crouched down, hiding behind the concrete beams and shredded wiring hanging down in the middle.
The infected slipped on loose rocks and lurched erratically as they moved from side to side, seeking a path up the broken rubble, making accurate aiming all but impossible. Gina and the others were firing their weapons on full automatic and were simply hosing the general area of each zombie’s head until a lucky shot connected. The only factor in their favor was that as the infected corpses fell, they rolled down the slope and became tangled up in the legs of their companions still trying to climb up the rubble.
Hana and Hugh shrank as tight as they could behind the central pile of debris, as the deafening bullet storm wreaked carnage on the other side of the cave-in. Then they both heard a more terrifying sound, almost lost beneath the noisy pandemonium of the firefight. From somewhere in the darkness over their shoulders, came the soft tinkle of breaking glass. Their eyes met in horrified understanding. The sound of gunfire was attracting the infected trapped in the basement offices behind them.
“I’m out!” shouted Gina from up above them, letting her submachine gun drop by her side, and drawing her pistol. “Switching to pistol.”
“Me too,” Dwayne called out as his rifle clicked empty on his last magazine. He glanced over at Gina as he reached for his pistol, then his eyes widened in shock and he lunged forwards, knocking her to the side. She had been right. The first zombie she had heard was up on the same level as them. It had crept up behind them while they were distracted by the zombies below, and was diving towards her back.
It twisted in mid-air, hissing in frustration as its first target was pushed out of the way, and hit Dwayne with its full weight on his chest, driving him into the ground. It was an older, heavy set man wearing a white, blood-stained lab coat and black, thick-framed spectacles. Dwayne landed flat on his back and only just managed to get his hands up around the zombie’s throat in time. Muscles stood out under the bronzed skin of his arms as he struggled to keep its snapping teeth away from his face. Now he faced a deadly quandary. There was no point strangling the creature, it was already dead. But if he tried to take one hand away to reach for a weapon, it would just crane its neck around and bite his remaining arm on the wrist.
“Help!” he yelled, as the zombie went crazy, clawing at his forearms and trying to drive its jaws closer to his face.
“I’m busy!” Rob shouted back. He was the only one still firing down into the hole and he was losing the battle to keep the infected from getting up the ramp. “Gina, help him!”
Gina’s pistol had gone clattering off into the ruined chaos of the destroyed room, and as she picked herself up off the ground, she looked for it quickly, glaring around in frustration. It was nowhere to be seen. Shit. Hammer time. She pulled the hammer from her belt, but before she could go to help Dwayne, she had to drop to the ground again to take cover. A nine-millimeter bullet cracked through the air where she had just been standing.
“Sorry,” slurred Wilkins. He was faint from loss of blood, and the pistol in his hand seemed to weigh a thousand pounds. He sat slumped against the fallen cabinet and his arm swayed alarmingly as he tried to take aim at the zombie on top of Dwayne.
“Shoot it! Shoot it!” Dwayne yelled. Then his eyes nearly popped out as the muzzle of Wilkins’s pistol tracked directly across his face. “No! Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”
Wilkins jerked the trigger twice, sending one bullet into the zombie’s leg and a second one up into the ceiling of the room. Dwayne screamed in fear, more scared of Wilkins than the zombie.
“Fucks sake, stop shooting!” Gina snarled as she crawled grimly across the floor towards Dwayne.
Further effort was too much for Wilkins anyway and his arm dropped limply to the floor. Gina leapt up into a crouch and quickly smashed her hammer into the back of the zombie’s skull. The former scientist went limp immediately, and Dwayne shuddered in disgust as he sat up and flung the corpse to one side. He drew his pistol and fired a bullet into its head, just to make sure.
“Did I get it?” Wilkins mumbled, with his eyes half-closed.
“Yeah, buddy, you got him.” Gina grabbed the pistol out of Wilkins’s unresisting fingers and ran over to join Rob at the edge of the hole. She was just in time. Rob’s weapon clicked empty and as he reloaded, the last two zombies managed to claw their way up the mound of broken debris, and poked their heads up into the still smoldering room.
Gina aimed and pulled the trigger, but nothing happened. Fuck! She was too close to them to sort out the problem with the pistol, and she was blocking Dwayne’s line of fire. She snapped a roundhouse kick into the first zombie’s head as they climbed out in front of her, and immediately spun into a hook kick, slamming her heel with bone-
crushing force into the side of the other one’s skull. Six years of taekwondo during high school had given her a lifetime of muscle memory, and the decades of intense dance training since then, had left her with muscular legs still capable of kicking through wooden boards with ease. Both of the undead went down as if struck in the head with a baseball bat.
She smacked the bottom of her pistol magazine with the heel of her hand, racked the slide ejecting an unfired round, then aimed and fired at the first zombie she had kicked. This time the pistol fired without any problem, punching a neat hole into the back of its head with a satisfactory red splash.
Rob finished reloading and both he and Gina shot the head of the second zombie at the same time. The empty cartridges bounced on the floor, then there was silence, broken only by the faint crackling of flames in the room around them. The slope of broken rubble below them was carpeted with corpses. The room stank of burning plastics mingled with the thick metallic scent of blood and Gina gagged slightly, wishing she had some water to wash her mouth out with. She noticed her hands were starting to shake, and blew out a breath that she did not know she had been holding. Dwayne squeezed past and started edging around the edge of the hole in the floor to the other side, where Hana was stood on Hugh’s shoulders, trying to climb up past the shredded ends of pipes and ducting protruding out from under the floor.
“Fancy kicks,” Dwayne said to Gina as he passed. “You know kung-fu?”
“It’s taekwondo, asshole,” she replied indignantly.
Reaching the other side of the hole, Dwayne reached down and lifted Hana up, swinging her carefully clear of the sharp metal and concrete edges jutting out. As soon as she lifted off his shoulders Hugh turned to face the darkness, gun ready. He could already hear the shuffling footsteps and the clink of broken glass that revealed the presence of approaching infected. Grimacing with pain he hopped backwards as far as he could, until he was pressed up against the wall of shattered debris behind him.