INFECTED (Click Your Poison) (44 page)

A
fter the oil lamps are divided, you spread out over the writhing corpses, drenching their swaddling clothes with fuel. Guillermo joins in as always, despite missing the argument. Cooper must’ve proven herself a capable leader in the past, you realize. His faith in her is too strong.

“Don’t use too much,” Deleon says. “We want a small, contained blaze.”

One of the fiends slams its face against your leg, still trying to bite you through the linens. You fall back onto the pew in response. Everyone looks over at you, and you’re embarrassed, but luckily you didn’t get any oil on yourself.

“Aren’t we worried about all this wood going up?” Tyberius asks.

“Nah,” Sims replies. “All this is thick and finished. It’d take a much bigger fire than we’re making, so…”

“The house of God doesn’t burn easily,” Cooper says, looking at Angelica.

“Too much stone and glass,” Deleon agrees. “Not enough kindling.”

Finished dousing the undead, the group heads back into the hallway. Sims finds an acolyte’s candle-lighter and ignites the wick. He looks to Cooper and she nods. From the far end of the cathedral, he touches each cluster of bodies as he backs his way toward the hall. It’s nothing short of some cultish, morbid ceremony.

Finished, Sims rejoins the group in the hall. You all watch as the ghouls burn. Everything’s ablaze—and much bigger than anticipated. You all take a step back in unison in response to the heat. The Cathedral is engulfed in flame. You watch, transfixed, through the doorway.

“That’s a lot of fire,” Tyberius comments.

“Don’t worry, this is all stone, so the flames shouldn’t move past the doorway,” Deleon assures himself as much as the group.

The moans grow louder, then stop all at once. Just the fire is crackling. “Are they… dead?” Angelica asks.

“Not yet. There’s no more oxygen in the room, that’s why they’re silent,” Deleon answers.

Angelica kisses her large, bead-chained crucifix.

From the blaze a flaming zombie bursts out—arms extended forward. Before anyone can react, it grabs the crucifix and pulls Angelica toward the fiery room. She screams. It bites into her.

The first to move is Guillermo, who smashes the thing in the head with his frying pan. It’s knocked off of her; Guillermo brings his meat cleaver down on its neck. The flaming head rolls away. Then Guillermo turns to Angela.

“No, wait!” Deleon shouts.

In one quick swipe, he slits her throat with the meat cleaver. You’re all powerless to do anything but stare, terrified and shocked. Particularly Deleon.

“
Mordido
,” Guillermo says. He chomps his teeth twice in quick succession to drive the point home.

Several other burning zombies step out from the flames and the group screams unintelligible expressions of dismay. You sprint away from the fireball undead, the rest of the group just barely behind your heels.

Zombies stumble-run down the hall, catching everything they touch ablaze as they crash into flammable decor: curtains, wall posters, and faux plants. They leave molten, flaming skin wherever they pass—in effect, canvassing the walls with napalm and setting them on fire. The group stays one step ahead of the fiends, pausing occasionally to bash one that gets too close in the head.

Back in the cathedral annex, you burst into the room, the flaming zombies right behind you. The undead cut you off from your supplies. Deleon looks at his backpack with determination. Two of the monsters burn right next to it, almost as if on guard. “I can get it,” Deleon whispers.

“No way, Doc. Not worth it,” Cooper answers with a hand against his chest.

“You don’t understand—my work, my life, everything!”

By now, the fiends are on top of you. The group backs out of the annex as the flaming undead approach. Except for Deleon, who instead brandishes his hammer and moves forward. He has a short, but emotional killing rampage, cracking molten skull after skull, but there’s too many.

“Doc, come on!” you shout from the doorway.

Somehow that was enough to bring him back to reality and he runs outside to join the group. Tyberius and Guillermo slam the door shut. You all step back and watch. Now the place is really ablaze.

A flaming hand crashes through the glass of the window. Pieces of incinerating flesh fall from its arm. Then, it slumps lifelessly and falls back into the annex; nothing left to burn.

“Let’s go,” you say. “Something like this will surely draw them in.”

“Sorry, kids, naptime is cancelled!” Hefty shouts with a wry smile.

•
 
Continue your exhausted march through the city.

MAKE YOUR CHOICE

“Y
our choice,” he shrugs. He aims down and blows off your kneecap. You fall to the floor with excruciating pain. “Scream a little
louder
, will you? I want them all on top of you.

“I guess it’s only fair if I tell you the truth—I might as well confess to somebody, you know? I’m no cop. I killed one of those
pendejo
guards and took his uniform when we broke out. These gang-bangers walking around in here? They’re
mi hermanos
. Later, homie!”

He turns, leaving you for dead. You watch as the traitor runs across the warehouse, a box of chips under one arm, toward the front entrance. But his gunshot attracted the ghouls that were congregating by the front and now his
brothers
are here to turn on him as well.

The fake cop shoots these attackers, but there’re more of them than he has bullets. The commotion brings other zombies from the warehouse behind the man who shot you, surrounding and taking him down. Don’t worry; the crowd from the break room didn’t forget about you, either.

You hear him scream out from the pain of being eaten just before your own screams drown him out.

THE END

W
ith enough firepower to conquer most drug cartels, you ride toward civilization. There’s constant rubble and roadblocks, and the trip takes several hours. Daylight is waning, but it would be dark inside the station even at high noon. Lucas flips on the jeep’s headlights. You stare out at the sunset, the wind whipping through the open-topped vehicle, tousling your hair and causing you to squint as grit pelts against your skin.

One of Salvation’s engineers rides with you, a bespectacled man who informs the group he works in Salvation’s power room. Small and wormy enough to satisfy any cliché, he’s balding in the friar’s pattern. As equipped as you are for wholesale slaughter, the real mission is to keep this guy alive and escort him through the radio station, to where he can activate the relay. Oh, and don’t blow up the tower. That would be bad.

“So, what’s the plan?” you ask.

The engineer studies a manual on commercial radio stations; there’s a prison library sticker on the spine, but it looks like it wasn’t checked out much over the years. He lowers the book and pushes his glasses up his nose in the prototypical move of a scientist.

“The plan is three-tiered,” he begins. “First, is to get the power on. There’s no standard blueprint, so we’ll have to follow the power lines to determine where this room lies.”

“Like in
Jurassic Park
!” Rosie exclaims.

The engineer nods, then continues, “Next is the control room, where I’ll have to attach a receiver for our broadcast. There should be some kind of digital-analog converter that drops our signal onto the carrier wave.”

He catches himself going too deep into technical specs, smiles, then finishes explaining the plan: “Finally, we’ll go back out to the tower itself, to power up the whole array and activate the relay.”

“That doesn’t sound too bad,” Lucas Tesshu adds, optimistically.

The engineer scoffs. “That’s because I failed to mention the two most important details. When we start up the diesel generator, it’ll make enough noise to bring in the zombs from miles away. And when we activate the antenna tower, it’ll produce a shock with thousands of amps of current—great enough to kill anyone touching it.”

“That sounds lovely,” you say.

“But if we succeed—we’ll be able to communicate with any survivors left in the whole city. We go from being just a pocket of resistance to the region’s central hub in the war for continued existence.”

Well, he sure makes it sound grandiose. And yet you briefly wish you were sitting in your prison bed with a mug of warm soup and a good book. You shake that thought and breathe in the cool night air, inspecting your weapon once more.

“If you can, resist the urge to go in guns blazing,” the engineer says to you. “The less attention we have at the start, the better.”

You arrive at the radio station. It’s high up on a ridge, so hopefully that’ll buy you some time once the shit goes down. The building itself is larger than you expected, and the tower sticks up from the rear—right along the ridgeline.

Lucas parks the jeep out front and, true to form, the undead already start to trickle out of the surrounding woodline. Tenacious bastards. Lucas unsheathes his sword, but doesn’t stray from a direct path to the station. Rosie pops off a few shots from her rifle, which most certainly calls in a few more, but the weapon is no louder than the jeep engine, so it’s a wash.

The front door is locked, but that doesn’t matter. Lucas Tesshu smashes the door’s glass face in with the pommel of his sword, then reaches inside to unlock it. The engineer powers up a massive flashlight and stays only a step behind Lucas. The inside of the building is pitch black, but the flashlight washes the halls in light. There’s a main hall straight ahead and turns to both left and right.

The engineer looks to the ceiling and finds several thick black cables running to the left. Just like in
Jurassic Park
! “This way,” he says.

The four of you move down the corridor, scanning for undead. You keep looking over your shoulder, but the ghouls haven’t followed you in… yet. The door at the end of the hall, clearly marked as the power room, is locked with multiple bolts. Lucas delivers a powerful kick—but the door holds firm. “Barricaded on the other side,” he announces.

“Allow me,” you say, leveling your AA-12 to waist-level. The three others back away and you hesitate only a moment to prepare for the next four seconds. With a deep breath, you depress the trigger, holding it down, and spray the door with metal—unloading the twenty shells of buckshot across the porthole with explosive fury. There’s surprisingly little recoil, and you easily paint the door with empty space.