A World Reborn: The First Outbreak (14 page)

As the door wasn’t a viable option, she
decided carry on up the stairs to the third floor, where she would at least be
able to view the remains of her antagonist via the window, unless he had
bounced off the roof somehow. But she didn’t want to think about that; she
wanted to remain optimistic. Once on the third floor, she opened the door and
stepped out onto what was the first floor of the guest rooms. These were smaller
and less luxurious than the ones higher up, but the layout was pretty much the
same. She hurried over to the window and saw below her the rooftop of the
second floor, where she could just make out a bloody, broken body in the
ambient Las Vegas lighting. Melissa took a step back and inspected the window.
It was large, practically the width of the corridor, and went from her waist to
about five inches from the ceiling. Knowing this was her best bet to reach the
dead Reborn soldier, Melissa resolved to break through it, but first she wanted
to make sure she was completely alone, so she moved around the corridors for a
minute or two, listening and looking for any Reborn or infected. Eventually,
Melissa decided she was as safe as she could be under the circumstances, and so
returned once more to the window. She held the bat tight in her hands and
turned her face away before swinging it as hard as she could against the glass.
There was no immediate shattering, but there was a mark on the glass where she
had struck it. It was undoubtedly some kind of reinforced safety glass, but she
didn’t have any other option other than to get through the window, one way or
another. If the bat didn’t work, then in the worse-case scenario she would have
to fashion a silencer from the pillows and cushions from the rooms and shoot
out it out. She struck it again and again, grunting with exertion until a crack
splintered across the glass. Breathing hard and with her arms, especially the arm
where she’d been clipped by the bullet, aching from the physical effort,
Melissa took a few deep, rallying breaths then roared at the glass as she
struck it again. The window broke open where she hit it near the lower left
corner, and the glass shattered outwards onto the rooftop. Relieved she’d made
some progress, Melissa took a moment and then continued her assault to remove
the remaining broken shards until the enough of the glass was gone to enable
her to climb out and drop onto the rooftop below safely.

Retreating to the closest room, its door
open after being ransacked by the Reborn, Melissa tossed the bat towards the
window and approached the bed. Quickly, she gathered the sheets and measured
them out. Realizing she’d need more, she plundered the next couple of rooms for
their bed linen too. Back at the broken window, Melissa set to work fashioning
a rope out of the sheets as fast as she could, then secured one end of it to a
door handle nearby. She wasn’t the heaviest woman in the world, so she hoped
this would be enough to keep the make-do rope secure. After a final tug on the
knots to make sure they were fixed firmly, she threw the free end out of the
window where, as it fell, it began to gently flutter in the breeze. Somehow,
she managed to convince herself it would be fine once her weight was on it. She
then covered the windowsill with a thick wad of cotton sheets, ensuring her
safety from any remaining pieces of broken glass. With the gun secured and the
radio clipped tightly, Melissa took one deep breath before grabbing the windowsill
and lifting herself onto it. She immediately felt a little of her former
apprehension return so, after snatching hold of the rope, she gingerly tested
it before letting it take her full weight. Then, feeling as positive about the
venture as she could, she began to climb down. It wasn’t a long journey, only
one floor, but with her arms already aching from smashing through the window,
it felt infinitely longer. Once down, Melissa took a couple of seconds to rest
before taking a look at the broken body of the man she’d shot earlier in the
night.

He hadn’t been completely obliterated by
the fall as he was still recognizably human. However, his limbs were broken and
distended in ways they shouldn’t have been, and he lay in a pool of blood from
lacerations caused by the bones puncturing his skin. His head seemed less
damaged, so Melissa hoped this meant his collar was unbroken. She walked over
to him and glanced around but couldn’t see his assault rifle, so she simply
assumed in his flailing as he fell he’d inadvertently thrown it far enough to
go over the edge of the building. Kneeling down beside him, she began patting
his pockets looking for ammunition. Finding some clips that matched the ones
for the pistol in her belt, she quickly stashed them away in the pockets of her
jacket. She felt around for anything else of use and found a knife that had
been sheathed in the top of his body armour, which she took, sheath and all,
and clipped to her belt. Next, she tried to see if there was anything
resembling a collar attached to his neck. She could see a red light glowing
under his chin, and the shape of a square-ish object, but some of it was tucked
under the armoured vest he was wearing. Although there was definitely something
there, which could possibly be the collar, she couldn’t see it clearly, so she
reached towards his head to move it so she could get a better look – when he
suddenly stirred. Melissa gasped and fell onto her rear, looking in horror as
the man tried to move.

“You shouldn’t have survived that fall.”
Melissa told him, as though the man needed to hear it. “You’re dead. You have
to be. With those injuries you just have to be dead.” She informed him, but now
her voice held a puzzled tone. The man growled in response, the sound of which
appeared to trigger the muscles of his hand to flex as if he was trying to
reach for her, but with no bones unbroken, he was unable to make any movement
in her direction.

Melissa got to her knees and moved a little
closer to him.

“Why aren’t you dead?” She questioned. As
he wasn’t going to answer, and couldn’t do anything to stop her examining him,
she undid the zip on his body armour and opened it. His chest was a bloody
mess, but there seemed to be two things under his shirt, one around his chest
and one around his neck. Not wanting to touch his blood if possible, Melissa
used the knife to cut open his shirt and reveal his chest. There was some kind
of apparatus bound to him. A small vial of something connected to a box by
little pads, like those used for an ECG. It had been placed roughly where his
heart was. The vial was attached directly to a needle, which had punctured his
skin.

“Is this a heart rate monitor?” She asked
pensively, but the shattered remains of the man simply moaned in a gurgling,
disgusting manner.

Melissa considered what she was seeing. She
remembered what Roy said about them injecting something into themselves which
triggered the change, transforming them into the infected. Could these soldiers
have some kind of heart rate monitor which injected the same substance into
them when they died, to turn them into one of the infected? And if this was the
case, and this man was dead when he was changed, did that mean the others who
had been infected with whatever it was, were also dead? It made a crazy kind of
sense, which made Melissa even more confused. Some of the infected she’d seen
were missing chunks of their necks, a wound that people didn’t usually survive
without immediate medical attention, and then it was still touch and go. Could
these infected, these people, really be the reanimated dead? Had the notion of
zombies she’d tried to dismiss earlier actually been the correct line of
thought? It also tracked with what she knew about killing them, by destroying
the brain. Without a brain, nobody could do anything. However, if the infection
allowed a certain amount of autonomy to be retained after a bizarre form of
reanimation, then this would allow the infected to operate with basic impulses:
to move, hunt, and dare she say it, eat, thus spreading the infection. So, the
half crazy thought she’d had about these creatures being zombies was looking a
lot more accurate than she could’ve imagined.

“This is crazy.” Melissa said to the dead
man in front of her. He didn’t disagree.

Melissa experimented by moving her hand
closer to where his mouth would be beneath the balaclava and heard a biting
sound and saw the rough movements of someone with a broken jaw trying to bite
it. His eyes, pale, cloudy and dead looking, were focused on her extended hand
and she knew that if he had been able to, he would have taken a chunk out of
her. Melissa decided to focus on what she was looking for. Using the tip of the
knife to move his head, she was able to see what she was after: the device
around his neck, what she assumed the Reborn were calling the collar. It was
plain, metal, and definitely square-ish. There was a red LED light roughly
under the chin beside a smooth line down the centre, indicating a separation,
and a kind of very fine mesh around the edges of the left and right sides.
Melissa took it in her hands and wondered how to get it off as it was too small
to lift off the soldier’s head; in the end, she tried prying it apart. It was
difficult, as it appeared stuck, but eventually it broke into two halves.
Melissa feared she’d broken it at first, but upon inspection, she realized
there were clear connectors that allowed it to be separated in this manner. She
noticed the red light had gone off, and thought this meant it deactivated when
it wasn’t connected. Presumably, this meant it had some kind of battery that
only worked when the two parts were united. She moved it away from the still
active remains of the soldier and wiped his blood off the device onto her
jacket, and then wiped off the blood that had smeared on her hands too. Melissa
checked it would fit around her neck, but didn’t put it on yet. Instead, she
clipped it together and hung it around her left wrist. The light came back, but
it was green this time, indicating it was working again, at least, it seemed
likely it was. It made Melissa suspect the red light meant it was connected but
not working. Did that mean, as it appeared to be undamaged, it only worked when
around the neck of an uninfected? That would certainly make sense. Her mental
debate prompted Melissa to test her theory, so she carefully extended her right
hand towards the mouth of the dead soldier and, as she hoped, there was no
reaction. No biting sounds, no movements, he didn’t even seem to be looking at
it. Her supposition was apparently correct, so Melissa disconnected the collar
and pocketed it. She decided then that she wanted to get a look at the street
below to see if any police had shown up yet. There was a lot of noise,
including the sound of another approaching helicopter, but she’d been burnt
before thinking it was the police, so she resolved to take a good look at what
was going on at the hotel entrance and then climb back into the hotel quickly
before the helicopter arrived.

Melissa stood up and walked over to the
edge of the rooftop, standing with her hands on a waist high concrete banister
that was designed to prevent people from accidentally falling. Before she
looked down, she scanned the Las Vegas horizon, momentarily awestruck that
despite the inhuman, unholy violence taking place within the hotel and casino,
it still looked relatively peaceful and normal out there; the dark sky clashing
with the bright illuminations of the city beneath it. The sight was beautiful.
And then Melissa looked down, and saw a mass of scrambling people, flashing
lights and a rush to erect a makeshift barricade. Closer inspection revealed it
to be the police. Large black vans were parked off to one side, plus an even
larger one further back, which was presumably their command centre, while
special weapons teams were preparing in case they were needed to breach the building.
Uniformed officers stood a distance away, placating a crowd of reporters who where
firing questions at them and, Melissa assumed, demanding answers. They got here
fast, Melissa thought, feeling a vague sense of pride at the speed with which
her fellow journalists had responded to the broadcast from within the hotel.
She knew what questions she’d be asking:

“Was the video real? Who released it and
how were they able to broadcast it so widely? Have the police been able to make
contact with anyone within the hotel?” Although she wouldn’t have been asking,
she would’ve been yelling, with a camera operator over her shoulder recording
the grim faces of the police maintaining the perimeter.

Melissa looked down towards the entrance of
the hotel and saw a heavy steel barrier had been dropped over the entrance;
presumably the security gate Roy had mentioned earlier. Briefly, Melissa
considered trying to attract attention to see if they would send a helicopter
to rescue her. She could try, but then, Roy would die. The people in the
theatre would also die. There was no way the police could breach and secure the
hotel before the Reborn soldiers executed everyone. Moreover, could the police
even make a successful breach with thousands of the infected standing in their
way? The noise: the lights and the movement would rile the infected up. The
suppression effect of the collars wouldn’t be holding them as the Reborn
soldiers would have retreated, probably to the roof to be airlifted out, and
then the infected would tear into the police, and then... well, there’d be a
lot more infected. No, it seemed to Melissa in that moment that the best chance
for everyone was for her to be as stealthy as possible, use the collar to
bypass the infected and avoid the Reborn if at all possible.

With a sigh, Melissa returned the way she
had come and awkwardly climbed back up and into the hotel, moments before a
police helicopter flew overhead and shone a bright light onto the body there.
Melissa left the sheet rope where it was, thinking if they noticed it then
perhaps the police could use it to gain entry into the hotel in a covert
manner. Still, it wouldn’t matter all that much where they gained entry. All
the hostages were on the ground floor, and there were thousands of the infected
in the way. No, as had happened once before for Melissa, she was the only one
who could do something positive at this present moment in time. She retrieved
her bat, and then with the collar and the ammunition secured, Melissa returned
to the staircase and began her descent back to the second floor.