INFECTED (Click Your Poison) (45 page)

After the deafening barrage, the weapon whirs its finish and you release the trigger. The door is now little more than a few splinters, and what’s left falls off the hinges in a delayed reaction. The barricade collapses as well. Your hands are shaking, and there’s a dull throb in your loins.

You slide a shoulder strap off your ammo backpack and replace the first spent drum while your team enters the room. Your shots have pockmarked the far wall, but the room itself cascades out to the left side, and luckily you’ve done no damage to the generator.

Still, there’s a gruesome sight within. A man is mangled and dead on the floor, his innards missing, and the area around him is covered with evidence of a struggle. A circuit box in the back is all smashed in. The engineer inspects it and glumly announces, “This might take a while.”

The dead man was planning on sticking it out in the power room for the long haul. A dozen office-cooler-style water jugs and boxes of foodstuffs are piled at the ready. Evidently, he didn’t get the chance to make use of them.

Rosie reloads her rifle, then slings it, opting instead for the pistol in such close quarters. Then a look of concern washes over her face. “Wait a sec. This guy’s torn apart, right? But there was a barricade up… so how did Zulu get in?”

Right on cue, a zombie emerges from behind the furnace unit, snarling and rushing in for you. With lightning reflexes, Rosie sends a .22 bullet straight into his forehead and Lucas imbeds a shuriken only a millimeter to the side at the same instant. “Whoa,” you utter, still holding your shotgun loosely at the waist.

“Remind me to thank Eastwood for this,” Rosie says, holding up the pistol.

The generator growls to life, clanking and rumbling as it spins up to full operation. The sound is so loud, you’re forced to yell above the noise. There are plenty of safety warnings on the walls about proper ear protection, but without any equipment, you can only cup your hands over your ears.

“Are we good?” Lucas yells.

“No, goddammit! I still need to isolate the damage!” The engineer works in overdrive, knowing as well as you that every wasted moment will be filled with the arrival of more undead. That realization is made certain by a low moan, accompanied by scuffling feet on broken glass. They’ve most certainly breached the front door now.

“I’ll hold the hall,” you announce. Two undead file down the corridor toward you, and the glow from the flashlight is just enough to catch their eyes. You fill the hall with daylight, using a well-aimed blast of your shotgun. The spray is enough to put lead into both brains, and they fall to the ground.

But those two were only the beginning. Moaning permeates the building, deep and fearsome, and soon they arrive in droves. “Scoot over!” Rosie shouts, and you gladly share the burden of slaying the oncoming crowd. You blast away, counting down from twenty to keep track of your ammunition.

“Stand aside!” Lucas announces, holding high one of the MK3 grenades. You do exactly that. He pulls the ring atop the canister and throws it down the hall, intentionally rebounding the weapon off the far wall and sending it around the corner.

“Hit the deck!” Rosie yells. You tumble into the corner off to the side of the door, close your eyes, grit your teeth, and press your forefingers against the tragus of your ears to block out the oncoming concussion.

The whole building vibrates from the blast; dust cascades from the ceiling as part of the structure’s resettling. Despite being two corners away from the explosion, you’re struck with an instant headache. You can’t hear your team’s screams over your own, and the resonant damage is a feeling of dull pressure and a slight ringing in your ears.

The engineer rises from the floor, and you can barely make out his shouts—
don’t do that again.
You’re able to push through the pain and rise to a defensive position. Through the hallway dust cloud, figures are already emerging. These ghouls have blood leaking from their ears and noses, their eyes crimson from burst blood vessels. The concussion blast must have artificially pumped their hearts and gotten the fluid moving again. What would have incapacitated a man only adds a devilish appearance to the undead.

You crack off shotgun blast after shotgun blast in a calm nirvana of killing. Only a hand on your shoulder takes you out of the moment. You turn around, ready to kill again, but stop short when you recognize Lucas Tesshu.
We are good—time to go,
he mouths to you. You look to the engineer, who gives you the thumbs-up. Rosie points for you to proceed down the hall.

Leaving the generator room, you’re forced to step over the corpses of the zombies you took down, which is unnerving, to say the least. Every time you see a still body, you expect it to rise again, despite the fact that these bodies no longer have heads.

Around the corner, past the dismembered soup of body parts at the grenade blast site, you make it back to the entrance. As your hearing returns, you pick up on a blasting from the parking lot. When you look out, you see that the CROWS system is operational and the remote turret is firing away at the oncoming crowd of undead.

What was next again? The control room, right? To your left is a long hall, while straight ahead is a hall leading to a clearly marked bathroom.

•
 
“Left!”

•
 
“I have to go to the bathroom…”

MAKE YOUR CHOICE

N
o more shadows playing tricks at the entrance, no more dank dripping driving you insane, no more cave spiders trying to infiltrate your sleeping bag; but no more protection from the living dead, either.

You move out into the blinding sun, all your belongings packed and strapped to your back—except your trusty hammer and knife. As your eyes adjust to the light, you move further away from the protective mouth of your cave home.

Your car is still parked nearby where you left it, but the windows are busted out—and there’s a large man reaching into the cabin. He hears you approach and turns around: he’s muscle-bound, Hispanic, wears a police uniform, and is covered in tattoos. The short sleeves of the uniform expose myriad ink designs, which escape north from the shirt’s collar as well. Three tear tattoos drip down from under his right eye. His hair is short-cropped; he must have been shaved bald before the world ended.

“You alive, esse?” he asks. He holds a policeman’s combat shotgun.

You say that you are, looking at your car.

“I was trying to umm,
commandeer
this vehicle, you know?”

You toss him the keys. He notices your eyes on the blood spatter across his uniform. “I had some trouble with my… prisoner. Listen—you got any food?”

You shake your head. “I’m out looking too,” you say.

He rubs the Christian cross tattooed on his chin in contemplation. “Listen… You wanna team up? We can find some food together and watch each other’s back, you know? I gotta take this car either way, but you can come with me.”

•
 
“I think we’ll have better chances alone. Probably not too much food out there.”

•
 
“Sure thing, Officer. How many rounds you got? Maybe I can cover you with that pistol?”

MAKE YOUR CHOICE