Death and Biker Gangs (5 page)

I looked back again. Some of them were pretty ripe, like they’d been rotting a few weeks. Skin hung in ropes from their arms and faces, except where chunks were missing entirely. The stench of ruined flesh and decaying tissues boiled on ahead of them. I still didn’t know which was worse—smelling them or seeing them. “Are they all from the pit? Those soldiers he sent earlier—”

“Lambs to the slaughter.” He forced me to quicken my pace. “We tried to clean it up too late. Really too fucking late.”

“The medical staff—”

“—should have embraced firearms.” Tony began running. “Come 
on
.”

I kept looking over my shoulder, even after we turned another corner and left the budding carnage behind us. Screams rang out—what the hell about the undead makes people so eager to scream, anyway?—and sporadic gunfire erupted from further back. 
Someone 
had come in with a weapon. “Hammond’s sending soldiers, right?”

“Maybe. He’s trying to get the fence back up.”

I stopped moving. “What happened to the fence?”

Tony nearly yanked me off my feet. “Will you hurry up? Looks like our local biker gangs did a little sabotage. Keep 
moving
, dammit.”

“Are they in the camp, too?” This was all happening too fast.

“Who do you think left the door open?” We reached the lobby-turned-triage center when the lights went out. 

Well, this is most definitely not good. 

Tony sucked in a breath. “Oh, shit.”

“Are you kidding me?” I turned sharply, banging my hip into the front desk. “Ow!”

“Some idiot probably blew out the generator.” He quickly regained his bearings and dragged me toward the sliding double doors. Bright orange light radiated inward through the glass, which gave me a little bit of comfort. At least the outside lights were still on. “Some idiot 
always
 blows out the generator…”

We managed to wedge the sliding doors far enough apart to slip out. They hung open, and as I stepped outside into a wall of heat, I realized we 
weren’t 
being lit up by the outside lights. Nor was the haze in the air just the ash we’d all grown used to breathing. 

Fully half of Elderwood Refugee Camp was ablaze.

Brilliant orange-red flames leaped from buildings to the tent cities that had sprung up around them, dousing the area in the same hellish glow I’d seen in Astra. 

I almost dropped my gun. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

“Hammond sounded the alarm three hours ago,” Tony said. “Or tried to. Turns out the alarm sirens on this campus were just for show.” He managed a sharp, thin laugh. “What are the odds?”

My fingers tightened around the pistol. “This isn’t happening. The camp’s fenced off. We have 
walls
…”

“We have shitty chain-link fence, and someone cut a bunch of fucking holes in the middle of it.” He tugged on me again, forcing me to follow him down the steps. “By the time Hammond’s soldiers realized the pit was a lost cause and came back, the place was overrun.”

A handful of soldiers raced past us, machine guns at the ready. “Yes, General,” one blabbed into a walkie-talkie, “they seem to be in Sector Five, too.”

“They’re in the medical facility,” Tony called after them.

The one in the lead stopped and swung around, staring at the building we’d just left. “McKnight says they’re in the medical facility,” he said. “Fresh?”

Tony’s fingers dug into my jacket as he said, “They’re from the damn pit.”

“Pit,” the soldier repeated. His radio crackled in response, though I couldn’t hear Hammond’s voice over the screams and gunshots assaulting my eardrums. “Right, we’ll go in.”

“There’s a mob of them at the back door,” Tony objected. “You’ll get munched.”

One of the soldiers lifted her machine gun and patted the magazine. “I think we’ll be all right.”

They hustled up the stairs and through the doors we’d left open.

“God help ’em.” Tony pulled me along again, dodging around the civilians that seemed to have lost the ability to do anything besides run around screaming. “People are going apeshit. You really didn’t hear anything?”

“No, those walls are damned thick…three 
hours
?”

“At least.” He let go of my bicep and clapped his arm around me. “Aren’t you glad I came to rescue you?”

“Not really.”

He pulled me to the right, past a blazing, stumbling 
thing 
that might have been alive or dead. I lifted the pistol, only to be jerked away through the makeshift gate that separated the medical plaza from Sector Seven. “Hammond’s got the science building locked down. I’ll drop you there.”

That made sense; the place had a cafeteria and food stores, along with a separate generator. I assumed it was stout enough to hold up through a protracted siege. “And then what?”

“Then you hang out behind cement walls and big guns, and I go find out what the fuck happened to Hastings. Hopefully it’s just busted equipment.” His grip on my shoulder tightened enough to cut off the circulation, making my elbow tingle. “We’re gonna need a shitload of help after this.”

Elderwood didn’t have any sort of evacuation plan, and its layout had grown increasingly jumbled as Hammond took in more and more survivors. Sector Seven had once been a courtyard of some sort, and save a few tents, it was largely bereft of any signs of human habitation. Tony switched on a flashlight and navigated through the maze, and I did my best to ignore the screams from behind us—Sector Five, I thought. Where we kept the families.

We passed into Sector Fourteen, my particular tent city. “Wait,” I said, trying to sprint off to the left. “I want my gun.”

“You have a gun.”

“I want my 
big 
gun.” Before we’d bugged out of Astra, I’d inadvertently shot a member of the Ventra gang with what Tony told me was a restored assault rifle from World War II. I had clung to the old gun since then, even taking it with me when processing split up our sad little trio. I couldn’t bring it into the medical facility with me on a daily basis, but I for damn sure wasn’t going to leave it in my tent while the undead rampaged through camp.

Tony swore and changed direction, following me through smoke and floating bits of debris. The air quality in the Midlands Cluster was crappy on a good day; how we hadn’t all keeled over from lung disease or simple suffocation remained a mystery to everyone. The fires made it all the worse, and I breathed shallowly, trying not to wheeze.

Two tents down, we came across a corpse feasting on a motionless body. Tony let go of my hand long enough to lean over it. “Shit, that’s Luh. He was on gate duty when I left.”

And now Luh was a zombie. Things change fast these days.

Tony sighed. “Go get your gun. I’ll take care of him.”

After stuffing my pistol into its holster, I fumbled through the blackness of my tent, yelping as I banged my knees on the side of my bed. I grabbed the frame and felt underneath it. My hands closed around the stock, and I slid the heavy gun out. 
Thank God.

Something moved behind me.

I froze. It was probably too much to hope it was my roommate. 

“Gussie?”

Something heavy smashed into my back, and I let out an inadvertent screech as I toppled forward onto the bed. Cold fingers plucked at my hair, jerking my head back to expose my neck and shirt. I heard the distinctive 
snap
 sound of a ghoul’s jaw shutting. My shirt collar briefly tightened around my neck, then tore away. 

I dove to the left, waiting for pain that never came.
No blood. Did it get me? No blood. Zombie in my tent. Freakin’ A.

The ghoul batted at me, long fingers grazing my cheekbone. I couldn’t see much in the poor light; just a dim shape outlined by long, ragged hair. 
Shit. 
“Augusta?”

She made chewing noises. Was she chewing on a chunk of my shirt? I shifted the rifle to my right hand and felt along my neck with the left. No bites, no blood.
Phew.
A little bit of luck.

Granted, I was still standing in the darkness with a ravenous fiend from some hitherto unknown layer of hell, but I was pretty sure I could deal with that.

She kept chewing on the bit of fabric. I reached down beside the bed and found my flashlight, then flicked it on.

Augusta cringed away from the light in one of those freakishly human motions the doctors hadn’t figured out. No one was sure whether there was still some vague pupil reaction we just couldn’t see, or if the ghouls held on to some sort of memory that prompted the flinch.

“Augusta,” I whispered. 
Fuck. This isn’t fair
. I liked Augusta. We’d always talked about getting nachos once this whole apocalypse finally wound down. “Oh, Augusta…”

I stuck the butt of the flashlight under my arm, keeping it trained on her face. 
Move. Move. Move before you freeze up. 
There’s no time to process things when you’re faced with someone you knew—that’s when they get you, while you’re standing there mourning. 

I switched off the rifle’s safety and lined her up, my elbows starting to quiver. I had to do this fast, before I lost my nerve. “Gussie, I’m so damn sorry about this,” I whispered, trying not to see the woman I’d known. “I’m sorry the boys kept crashing in here. No manners.”

She lurched forward, hands outstretched.

I unloaded a round into her head.

Tony burst in, pistol at the ready. “What happened?”

“I took care of it.” I stared down at her, trying to figure out how she’d died in the first place. Her thermal shirt and trousers had a fair amount of blood on them, but it could have belonged to anyone. “Hammond shouldn’t have sent her to the fence. She couldn’t shoot for shit…”

My eyes stung. I wiped my face against my sleeve.

Tony squeezed my shoulder. “C’mon, Vibby.”

There really isn’t a good time to cry once the dead get up and walk. I picked up my backpack and began shoving in my belongings, which really only amounted to a second thermal shirt, a tank top, clean socks, pistol magazines, gas mask, and a handful of granola bars. I threw on my leather riding jacket, then reached under my pillow for the two boxes of ammo Tony had procured for my rifle.

We hustled out of my tent and got back on the narrow walkway that led between the camp sectors. I felt a hell of a lot better with my big, heavy assault rifle clenched in my hands, though I jumped when anything raced past me. 
Running is good. Running means they’re alive…I think. 
Soldiers shouted into walkie-talkies, and civilians who still had their heads on straight were fanning out, taking down what they could.

The overhead lighting flickered. I stopped dead in my tracks and stared up at the military-issued lamps that had kept the lights on during the increasingly cold nights. Tony looked up as well, and his grip on my wrist tightened when the lights dimmed again. “Shit. I hope those stay on.”

Fighting the undead when you can see them is one thing. Fighting them in the darkness is a whole new kind of hell. “Me too,” I said. “Let’s go.”

THREE

We found Hammond and at least two hundred of his soldiers gathered outside what had once been the school science building. The doctors had holed up in here to study the plague, the ash, and everything else in our unsettling new world, leaving nurses and former EMTs like me to function as the primary caregivers. I’d never actually been inside the building; for all I knew, they’d given up on pinpointing treatments and were boozing it up while they still could. I wouldn’t put it past Doctor Long, the lone gynecologist on staff.

“McKnight, what the hell are you doing here?” Hammond shouted over the steady roar of machine guns. “Get your ass to Hastings!”

“Just came here to drop off the little miss, sir.”

The general turned to me. I’d been hoping for a reassuring smile, but with blood smeared down the front of his uniform and hundreds of spent shells scattered around the area, he looked more like an extra in a bad zombie movie than an authoritative officer.

Oh, wait. We were 
living
 the bad zombie movie.

The general beckoned to me. “Vibeke, you get inside. We’re laying down fire, and in the morning we’re going to—” The lights dimmed dramatically, and we all looked up.

The lights flared back on, illuminating a crescent-shaped gash along the general’s neck.
Oh, shit. 
All other thoughts flew out of my head, and I reached for him. “General, you’re bit—”

He struck my hand aside. “I’m aware. I’ll slap some Neosporin on it once we clean this up.”

Neosporin’s effectiveness is greatly diminished when the wound in question is a jagged chunk of missing flesh, but he already knew that. “Better make that hydrogen peroxide,” I said.