Primus Unleashed

by Amber Wyatt

  “Quick, find something to lift him up,” as soon as her feet touched down on the ledge Hana whirled around, searching for something to lower to Hugh. “Don’t worry Hugh! We are going to get you out of there.” She looked around frantically at the burning remains of the room, and her voice became shrill with desperation. “There’s nothing up here!”

  Keeping his weapon aimed at the darkness in front of him, Hugh glanced upwards quickly, catching her tearful gaze with his own.

  “I’m not coming with you, babe. Take care of yourself, okay?” He smiled bravely up at her, but his eyes were filled with a lifetime of regret for what might have been. With a shock, Hana realized that from the moment he had lifted her up on to his shoulders, he had known that he was not coming out of that hole. He had known, but he had still been determined to save her, even at the expense of his own life.

  Then his eyes flickered back down towards a scraping noise coming from the pitch black in front of him, and the infected came in a rush out of the darkness. Hugh opened fire at head height, fanning a thunderous burst of bullets from left to right straight into the faces of the undead lunging towards him. Their momentum still carried them forward even as they died, and he went down under a heap of bodies. Three more zombies charged from the darkness and leapt on top of the pile, yanking frenziedly at the heavy corpses of their brethren to get to the human prey underneath.

  Up above, the others aimed their weapons, anxiously seeking a clear shot. But they had to hold their fire, frustrated, aware that from their angle, their bullets would go straight through the zombies and kill Hugh as well.

  For a split second a kaleidoscope of images flashed through Hana’s head: Hugh next to her at the car park in Darwin’s Farm, fighting side by side during the carnage of that first zombie attack, and then the breath-taking feel of his stubble on her cheek as he kissed her afterwards. Him shoulder to shoulder with her in the wreckage of Columbus 754 in the swamp, and again in the hangar at the aviation museum, always by her side, always covering her back, always shielding her from danger. She remembered him laughing as they ate their takeaway food off the counter at the back of her shop, and him talking to her quietly in the cell, trying to keep her spirits up. And last of all she remembered the warmth radiating from his chest and the fire in his eyes as he stood close to her in the museum office, and asked in his deep, quiet voice for her to give him a chance.

  Something exploded in her heart. Before she knew it, she had jumped out into the center of the hole and was dropping like an avenging angel towards the writhing pile of bodies below, only distantly aware of Dwayne’s shout of alarm and Gina’s mouth open in a wide ‘O’ of shock. Then her boots smacked into the head of the first infected underneath her and she was rolling across their backs to tumble on to the hard concrete.

  As the first zombie turned towards her, she shoved her gun into its snarling face and pulled the trigger. The MP7’s high rate of fire burped out half the magazine in one hysterical burst, shredding the zombie’s face and shaving off the top of its skull. She pulled herself up off the floor into a crouch and fired at the next one, pointing the muzzle at its chest and letting the recoil stitch her burst upwards through its throat and head.

  As she tried taking aim at the last one on top of Hugh, another zombie ran out of the darkness behind her and hit her hard, knocking her to the floor. Hana screamed and squirmed around like an eel as she felt its teeth graze her neck, but its aim was off, its bite lost in the mass of her dark hair.

  Standing around the edge of the hole above them, Gina, Dwayne and Rob looked down, powerless to intervene in the life and death struggle taking place in the small circle of light below. Their fingers were poised on the trigger as they tracked back and forth, but they simply could not get a clear shot amongst the thrashing bodies below them.

  Hana was on her back underneath the zombie now, clamping its struggling body between her thighs in a grotesque parody of love-making, and she cursed herself as she struggled to keep its face and teeth away from her. She was not a professional soldier and she was making mistakes that were probably going to kill her. She had totally missed her last few shots at her opponent, despite being at such point-blank range that the muzzle flash had literally scorched the zombie’s face. Then, weapon empty and discarded, she had drawn the knife she had taken from the dead Lazarus trooper and, in a moment of unthinking reflex, wasted her one valuable opportunity to strike, slashing the infected across the throat instead of trying to stab it in the head.

  Of course, it had had no effect at all on the zombie. Now the wound in its throat gaped like a second, red mouth, dripping blood on to her own face and chest, and making her grip on its thrashing neck slippery and even more difficult to grip. Her knife and gun were lost somewhere on the floor around her, and she realized that the remainder of her life could be measured in only a few seconds. Her hands were slipping and the muscles in her arms were screaming with effort. It was only a matter of time before this monster overcame her.

  All of a sudden Hugh was there, towering above them, one hand firmly clenching the creature’s hair, wrenching its head backwards. With his other hand, he placed the barrel of his rifle against its temple and blew its brains out across the shattered debris and rubble on the floor.

  “That was the last of them,” he grunted, pulling the corpse off her. Then he helped her to her feet and she clung to him panting with exertion, pressing herself against the hard muscles of his chest and feeling his thudding heartbeat matching her own. Despite the acrid bite of the dust and the smoke, she could still smell the faint scent of his skin, and as she savored it for just a moment. It helped to calm her jangled nerves.

  Eventually she started to regain control of her breathing and realized that he was still aiming his weapon over her shoulder out down the dark hallway, covering her back.

  “Okay, right… still in danger… we should get out of here.” Hana detached herself awkwardly and patted him on the chest.

  “Finally,” grumbled Dwayne good-naturedly from above. “I thought you two lovebirds were going to be cuddling there all day. Move to the side, I’m going to drop this down for you to climb up on.”

  They looked up to see the huge Hawaiian leaning a large desk over the edge of the hole above them. Once they were clear, he let it drop and it crashed down, raising another cloud of dust motes which sparkled in the beams of light coming from above. Hugh quickly pulled the table over to the spot that looked to provide the easiest access to the ledge and, with Hana’s help, clambered painfully up on to it, favoring his injured knee.

  He reached back and grabbed her hand to help her climb up next to him, and they both froze, like two statues carved from marble. They had both seen it at the same time. As she had reached up and clasped his hand, her sleeve had drawn back, exposing the bite mark on her wrist.

  Hana exhaled slowly, trembling, and relaxed her grip. But Hugh did not let go. In fact, he did the opposite, and he tightened his grasp on her so that she could not release him. She looked up into his stricken eyes, and forced a smile that she did not feel on to suddenly cold lips.

  “Let me go,” she said simply.

  Hugh shook his head, unable to speak. Even if he had been able to say anything, he did not have the words to express the emotions that he was feeling. Up above, there were gasps and sharp intakes of breath as the others saw the bite on her arm. Hana could see the look of horror on Dwayne’s face, and Gina covering her mouth with her hand. Then she saw the look in Hugh’s eyes and felt sorrow. Not for herself, but for him.

  “Looks as if I’m going to have to take a rain check on that dinner, Hugh,” she smiled at him kindly, but this time a tear escaped from one eye and trickled a path through the blood and dust on her cheek. “And, there’s a favor I want you to do for me. When you get out of here, I want you to go release my husband from the bunker. He’s suffered enough.”

  How strange, Hana thought. I am not scared. Indeed, in some strange way she felt a sense of relief. As
if a great burden had been lifted from her shoulders. She smiled wryly to herself. My mother always used to tell me that falling in love would be the end of me. I guess she was right.

  “Now I want you to shoot me,” Hana said, tears trickling down from both eyes now.

  “What!” Hugh choked out, horrified. It was a rhetorical question though. He knew exactly what she meant and why. Finally, he released her hand and she took a step backwards to look up at him.

  “Please,” she begged. “It has to be done. And I want it to be you. Please. Do it now before I change. While I am still me, and not one of those things!”

  “No, don’t ask me to do this. I can’t. Please, I can’t do it.” Hugh shook his head, face twisted in agony, his mouth working soundlessly as tears flowed down his cheeks.

  “You have to do it… now.” The black taint oozed through her veins. She could feel it. Hana gritted her teeth and her eyes glittered dangerously.

  There was a deafening crack as the bullet punched into the top of her skull. Hugh was looking straight at her face and saw Hana’s eyes bulge outwards from the pressure wave as the bullet pulverized her brain, ripped out an exit wound under her mouth in a splash of bright red blood, and re-entered her body just above the collar-bone. In a fraction of a second the woman he loved disappeared, to be replaced by a mask of dead meat and skin.

  Hana’s body dropped to its knees with a painful thump, then slumped slowly over to the side as if someone had dropped a bundle of dusty, old clothes on the floor. Unable to understand what had just happened, Hugh looked up dumbly at the ledge above him, to see Gina’s face, white as bone, over the smoking pistol she was aiming with both hands.

  “What did you do?” he asked her. Then he screamed the question again. “What did you do!”

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Survive

  The Lazarus troops waiting in their fortified, ambush positions had been filled with the high morale and confidence in their skills characteristic of elite special forces units. They were experts in close-quarter fighting and had set their ambush in such a way that the attacking soldiers would find it virtually impossible to break through. However, they had not expected the National Guard to use flamethrowers.

  The fight was over almost before it even began. It took only a few seconds to spray hellfire across the hidden Lazarus commandos. The high-pressure jet of burning petroleum jelly bounced off walls and around corners, splashing flame into every nook and cranny of the Lazarus positions. They died screaming and choking, clawing at their own skin. The lucky ones staggered out into the open where they were quickly shot dead by waiting guardsmen.

  With all armed resistance eliminated, the National Guard commander started to feed his platoons into the IDRC from the front and the rear, to clear out the complex room by room. Each squad leader had a combat tablet with a map of the floorplans of the building and had been assigned mutually overlapping sectors.

  Dressed in full MOPP gear, the first squad advancing through into the ground floor soon came across a horrifying sight. A previously unknown type of infected, undoubtedly an escapee from some horrific lab experiment, was crawling down the corridor towards them, leaving a trail of bloody slime behind it. The fleshy mound was bright, arterial red, glistening with a sheen of blood, through which large patches of yellow fat bulged and melted, oozing on to the floor.

  Taylor was blind and in unbearable agony. The acid that had melted his eyes and clothes had also finally eaten through his plastic bindings, freeing him, and so he had crawled out through the terrible, burning puddles of acid on the floor, driven through the crippling pain by a visceral instinct for survival. Only his thick layer of fat had acted as a buffer, preventing the acid from reaching through to his vital organs. But his skin had melted away and as he dragged himself across the floor, large flaps of skin sloughed off in slimy segments. His eyes were gone, but one of Taylor’s ear canals was still open and he thought he could hear voices. Is someone there? Can they help me? Please, help me!

  The first soldier in the squad gaped in horror inside his gas mask at the repulsive blob in front of him, as it raised its gory, skinless head, seeking blindly left and right. The head craned towards him and a bloody, shapeless hole opened in the front, croaking and moaning.

  “What… what is that thing?” the soldier choked out, his voice muffled by the gas mask.

  “The fuck you waiting for, Duane?” Sergeant Brown leaned out from behind his lead man, inspecting the creature curiously through the eyepiece of his own gas mask. “Flame it.”

  “Roger that, Sergeant.” The soldier’s eyes tightened and he brought up the glowing muzzle of the flamethrower. The whole squad squinted against the bright flare in the hallway, as the jet of burning petrol roared down the hallway, coating not just the monster, but the walls and floor around it. He hit the trigger one more time, hitting the writhing infected square in the face with a short burst, before his Sergeant tapped him on the shoulder.

  “Check fire, check fire,” ordered Brown. “Okay squad, fall back and let the hallway oxygenate for a couple of minutes. Then we’ll carry on moving forward.” They had discovered the hard way, two days earlier in the prison, that using the flamethrowers in enclosed spaces used up all the oxygen, and advancing troops had to wait until the airflow had replenished itself, or risk asphyxiating themselves. He looked at the burning mound of flesh in front of them as it flopped listlessly, its first desperate struggles rapidly becoming weaker and weaker. Besides which it will give that thing time to die. Brown grimaced inside his gas mask. The respirator might keep out dangerous particles, but it did nothing about the terrible smell. The flames had also noticeably raised the temperature in the corridor, and the first trickle of sweat rolled down his back. He checked his squad’s location on the map of the IDRC on his tablet and sighed. The tablet informed him that his squad had completed five percent of its assigned route. It was going to be another long day.

  Not far ahead of Brown’s squad in the next section of the IDRC, Gina stumbled along in a daze down an empty hall. Behind her Dwayne carried an unconscious Wilkins across his shoulders in a fireman’s carry, and next to him Rob carried the chest. Using a mop as a makeshift crutch, Hugh hobbled painfully along at the rear of the group, as far away from Gina as he could get.

  She did not mind. In fact, she preferred it that way. Her own feelings swirled in a chaotic, uncontrollable maelstrom inside her head. Hana had been her friend. More than a friend, she had been her closest confidante. The keeper of her most intimate secret. And she had grown to like and respect the modest, beautiful, Japanese lady in the short time that she had known her.

  She told me at the farm, that’s what she would have wanted, she wanted to say to the others. It’s almost like she knew it was going to happen. She practically told me to do it. And I saved Hugh a lifetime of guilt and trauma. But she could not find the right words with which to say it. She doubted that she ever would.

  Ever since they had left the farm, Gina had been brooding on her daughter’s death, and the consequent hatred she felt towards the virus, towards the ignorant hunters who had murdered her daughter and, although she admitted that it might have been unjustified, the hatred she felt towards Hugh for driving the hunters to the farm.

  But after she had shot Hana, Hugh had looked up at her, and the pain and loss that she saw in his eyes were like nothing she could describe. The closest thing to that raw emotion she had ever seen had been in the mirror, looking into her own eyes after she learned that her daughter had died. At that moment, any hatred Gina felt towards Hugh had simply vanished. She wondered if now, he wanted to kill her.

  Lost in her thoughts, Gina led them mechanically around exposed electrical cables, burning fire hazards and other obstacles. Twice she had nearly fallen down holes in the floor to the level below. The IDRC had taken significant battle damage in this hallway from the initial shelling by the tank, and she started to think that maybe they should climb up another level to see if the w
ay forward was any clearer up there.

  She stopped and looked upwards at a section of the ceiling that had fallen in, exposing the hallway running along the one they were already in, wondering how they could climb up. Without any warning a figure stepped out of the doorway in front of her, holding its hands up. It was a young woman, dressed in practical coveralls.

  “Don’t shoot,” said Arlene as calmly as possible, watching the petite Asian woman in front of her jump backwards in surprise. Arlene was not thrilled about exposing herself to the group, but hiding out in a burning building from hostile soldiers and roaming zombies had not been on the schedule either. These characters did not seem to be with the National Guard, and she figured that her chances of survival were higher as part of a group rather than running around on her own.

  Gina swore under her breath as she jerked her MP7 up into a firing position. She had not been paying attention to her surroundings, and was lucky that it had not been a zombie that had stepped out in front of her. She had been so distracted that she would have walked straight into it, and then Hugh really would have a good excuse to put a bullet in my brain.

  “Who are you? Do you work here?” Gina asked suspiciously, keeping her weapon trained on the other woman.

  “No, I work in waste management for Broward county. You need to turn back. There’s soldiers coming in through the back of the building, and they’re shooting anything that moves. I think they killed my colleagues and I’m on the run.”

  “There are soldiers behind us too.” Gina thought for a moment. “But you know the way out to the back of the building, right?”

  “Yeah, but you didn’t hear me. There’s soldiers coming in from there. In squads. And they have some kind of perimeter set up around the back too.” Arlene replied. Her eyes flicked past Gina’s shoulder at someone stepping up.

  “What’s going on?” Hugh asked.

  Gina’s breath caught as she looked up at him, standing only a few inches away from her, and he looked back unflinching. The flood of words she wanted to say to him bubbled up and she could not hold them back.