INFECTED (Click Your Poison) (85 page)

As you pry apart your carefully assembled barrier, Deleon speaks into his recorder one last time: “So, if you find this, good luck. And help yourself to what’s left in the cupboard.” He pops the tape out of his handheld, then inserts it into a desk recorder on a table with a note, “Listen to me.” After claiming a new blank tape, Deleon turns to you and nods. It’s time to head out. You’ve got your hammer, he’s got his club.

You open the window, a burst of cool air comes in, refreshing and crisp against your face. Then the stench registers. The fire escape is one of the old-fashioned wrought-iron staircases with a deployable ladder. From your perch on the fourth floor, you can see that the world outside is completely devastated. The cityscape is bathed in evidence of a former chaos—now smoldering and calm. Flipped cars. Ammo casings adorn the street. Windows broken. Blood stains. Eerie silence. Motionless, save for tatters flapping in the wind.

There’re no zombies immediately visible in the streets below. It’s possible they were all destroyed, but that’s doubtful. The ghouls must have moved on in search of other prey, but there’s most likely pockets still lurking within the city. No sign of living humans either.

The ladder screeches down with a maddening howl. If there are undead nearby, they’re on their way now. Best get moving. Down the escape and onto the concrete below, you see a crashed fire engine around the corner of the building. This accident is surely the source of the lost power to Deleon’s apartment.

On the ground rests a fireman’s axe; long, red, and heavy. The axe head is encrusted with dried blood so thick it’s almost black. You pick up the weapon. It was designed to break down doors, which means a zombie skull shouldn’t be a problem.

“Where to?” you ask, handing off the hammer to the doctor.

“We need to find some niacin,” he replies. “It’s not uncommon, but I need a lot of it. So a supermarket with a pharmacy or a hospital is probably our best bet. What do you think?”

•
 
“Hospital. The supermarket’s probably been raided already.”

•
 
“Supermarket. Hospitals scare me; especially when the sick try to eat you.”

•
 
“Why not just a local drugstore?”

MAKE YOUR CHOICE

T
his is it. You’re tired but fueled by adrenaline, afraid yet furious. Too long have you been the victim; it’s time to take matters into your own hands. You’ve done nothing but run since this great calamity, and that ends now.

“Form a line!” you shout, barely recognizing the intensity in your own voice. “They can only come through in twos and threes, so make your kills count and then recover at the end of the line!”

Cooper looks at you with fierce eyes, the kind she uses when she thinks her authority is being questioned. “You’re up, boss!” You say to her. “Show us how it’s done.”

She lets out her homemade flail, the business end clinking against the linoleum floor. It’s fashioned from a section of climbing rope, with a bundle of crampons and sharp mountaineering implements on the other side. She swings the thing around, the rope stretching from the weight at the dangerous end, and with full-body momentum connects the spike bundle to the first zombie’s head. The blow sticks in and connects with such power that it lifts the ghoul off its feet. As the body slams against a sale rack, Cooper has her crowbar out and engages the second zombie, slamming the straight end through an eye socket.

As she holds her boot against the twice-dead corpse’s neck to wrench her crowbar free, a new batch of zombies flows in. Guillermo runs forward with his shovel and nearly decapitates the first one, the head dropping back to barely hang from a tendon. Flipping the weapon around, he further pops this fiend in the chest, sending it the ground. With two more expertly placed blows to the foreheads of the victims, the pair of undead collapses. He finishes the first off, then calmly walks to the back of the line.

The glass in the entry breaks further, and now the zombies enter the store four abreast. Without a cue, Tyberius and Hefty move forward together. Hefty looses arrows with absurd accuracy, the strong hunting bow easily puncturing skulls at the forehead, but reload speed does pose a problem. That’s where Tyberius comes in. He’s got his tiny dumbbells at the ready and swings them with enough stopping power to put bone fragment into soft brain. He’s deadly with the things.

A moan comes at you from the side. The undead have breached the service entrance and already a dozen are rushing toward you. “Newbie, Doc, come with me!” Sims shouts. Then to the other group members, “You guys cover this entrance.”

Deleon rushes in and connects his pickaxe to the head of the lead ghoul. He peels the thing’s arms off him as it falls to the ground. You deal real damage with your axe, slamming a skull with a leftward blow using the bladed side, then reversing and burying the pike end in a fiend on your right. And yet, it’s not enough.

The fire outside must be drawing them in from all over the city, where they fall in line toward the store like craven lemmings. Sims flings a shot with his slingshot, but it’s a miss. He tries again and gets very, very close… but still misses. In frustration, he unsheathes the sword he’s sharpened and rushes in to attack.

He gets a kill, but the replica shatters upon impact, leaving him weaponless. Two zombies grapple him, and you and the doctor double back to help him out. You kill the undead attackers, but not before Sims screams out under the pressure of a bite.

“I hope you’ve got more of that cure, Doc!” he says, forcing pressure on the bite wound on his neck. Deleon merely grimaces and the three of you are forced closer and closer to the front entrance.

“Could use some help here!” you shout.

“Where’s the fallback position?” Deleon asks.

“You’re standing on it, asshole. So man up,” Hefty says, loosing an arrow into a zombie behind the doctor.

Sims staggers backward, leans against a shelving unit, then slowly sits down. “I just need a minute,” he says. Blood pours down over his knuckles, trickling in thick streams down his forearm. Guillermo pants heavily, his arms at their limit from thrashing the shovel with enough power to deal a killing blow. Combined with the blade dulling after each kill, his effectiveness is sharply dropping off. His next swing only batters the zombie away, peeling off some of its scalp.

Hefty runs out of arrows and turns to his machete. His arms are fresh, unlike Cooper, who has taken her muscles to their limit with the crowbar. You’re feeling the strain with your axe as well. Everyone’s just getting exhausted, and yet the flow of undead is relentless.

Sims loses consciousness. A zombie that was only wounded grabs Tyberius around the legs and trips him down from the floor. The gang frees him from the ghoul, but with each setback like this, the horde comes closer.

Then it happens all at once. There’re five zombies for each human, and the numbers don’t add up to your favor. Deleon goes down with a terrible scream, and everyone’s too preoccupied to help. But that adds one more zombie for the rest of you to deal with while taking away a good fighter.

Then Cooper is taken, unable to effectively combat so many foes with merely a crowbar. A zombie whose bony, fragmented fingers have been sharpened to points reaches into her abdomen and
rips
her innards out, spilling them to the floor in a sickening display of violence.

You swing the aluminum bat with frenzy, and it’s effective, but not enough—you can’t save everyone. Even as Tyberius slaughters the ghouls, they engulf him. It’s like trying to punch away a tidal wave—even though he’s an effective fighter, there are others he can’t get to. He goes down hard, unable to fight them off from the floor. The building is swarming now, and you don’t even have room to walk.

Next you lose Guillermo. A gargantuan body builder of a zombie bursts in from the front and knocks the shovel out of his hands before actually
picking him up
to eat him. The man doesn’t have a chance.

Then there were two; it’s just you and Hefty, and now you have to fight a dozen zombies each. It’s impossible, there are too many of them. Hefty shoots through the open mouth of one of the fiends, the arrow continuing right through the back of her neck, not stopping her assault. A dozen bloody hands—whose blood you couldn’t say—grab onto him and pull him apart as they force him to the ground.

You hear his screams just as you let out your own. Your arms are all exhausted sinew, taxed to their maximum, but you still swing away with desperation. Even though the spirit is willing, the flesh is weak. Very weak. You smash your axe against the head of the nearest ghoul, but with your lack of strength you only succeed in scalping him. He moves in on you, and as the last remaining human, fifty hungry zombies all come in to get a piece as well.

It was a valiant effort, but a foolhardy one in the end. You took quite a few of them down with you, and you won’t add to their ranks either—there’s enough undead eating you alive that there won’t be anything left to rise again.

THE END