Necropolis Rising (17 page)

Movement.

It happened fast, the present closing off his past in an instant. From the places where dark shadows pooled like India ink people loomed; a few at first but followed very quickly by others until Amir saw a wall of shambling, shuffling shapes. There was only the Mastiff separating the NCIDD building from the tide of undead now washing over the plaza. What drew these creatures he didn’t know. They may have been able to sense their prey, the way a predator fox stalks the wily rabbit; or were they drawn by something far more sinister, far more primordial?

Watching their relentless march it was hard not to think that Hell had somehow found its way to Earth. And no sooner had Amir come up with this analogy, the ground in the plaza buckled and groaned and opened into a yawning chasm; as though purgatory really had come to welcome home its prodigal children.

***

15

From the moment that Alpha Team discharged their lethal salvo of grenades it wasn’t only the surviving zombie rats that had pursued them through the tunnel.

Streaking ahead, and unseen, was a structural crack that split the tunnel roof the way a chef taps at an egg shell until it gives in, the fissure splitting apart with the sudden crushing pressure of thousands of tons of earth and city above.

Credit to the engineering that served the city, it had saved the lives of the men in the tunnel, holding off the force overhead for several minutes, but it was always doomed to relent at some point. It simply wasn’t designed to suffer such damage.

It was a surreal and awful site that met Shipman, Keene and Honeyman on the platform. They watched as six hundred metres of tunnel roof collapsed bringing with it earth and rocks; glass and concrete.

And bodies.

They rained in from above; men, women and children; arms and legs tangled and groping, hands pawing at the air; the platform buffeted as the ever expanding avalanche ploughed into its supportive struts.

Keene lost his footing on the exit ladder and landed heavily on his back. Shipman used the wall to steady himself and then they saw an unlikely sight.

Three hundred metres away a Mastiff truck slipped, grill first, into the ground. It smashed into the floor and teetered comically on its devastated cab for a few seconds, and toppled over.

Then, without warning, it exploded.

***

The world is a writhing mass of bodies and flame; the horizon a blazing white line as the rain drifts lazily down from ditch dark clouds.

Thom Everett hasn’t seen anything like it, and guesses that neither has anyone else. The world is dead, but it still lives. The throng below stare back at him with lifeless eyes; but their minds - oh, sweet dear Lord - their minds are far from empty. He cannot explain it, he cannot begin to say that he has the slightest notion of how it came to pass, but he can see into those minds, feel the turmoil within them, the consummate jumble of primordial lust and yearning pain at what has been lost.

They are rudderless; destined to drift aimless and without reason, but those dead eyes have seen something.

Something in him
.

And as he stares down at the congregation of corpses, he realizes there is something else rising from the dark pool of this collective consciousness; something that has been lost for some time. What the mass can see and what they think is the same thing and it has been born from Thom Everett.

As one, the crowds below begin to point, each misshapen finger and twisted arm staying in the air. The resounding, unified moan stretching out across the blackened, blighted landscape and the impact of what came next had Thom suddenly sitting upright; the dream thrown away from him like some repugnant thing found in an old coat pocket. Yet whilst he could discard the image of his dream; shrugging off the implication of its meaning wasn’t as easy.

The dream had implied one thing, and one thing alone: The Risen had found hope. For, after months in the unearthly wilderness, they had found someone to lead them.

***

“
Okay, the Mimic Virus has been planted into the system,” Clarke said sitting smugly back in his chair and watching the computer screen where nothing appeared to be happening.

And that was the whole point wasn’t it; that no one suspected anything? Inauspiciousness had become their camouflage; their meal ticket on the gravy train taking them to heavenly pastures.

Or a beach in the Cayman’s.

“
Clarke! Get your ass out here,” Suzie hissed; spoiling his moment. “We got company.”

“
I have to take care of the hard drive from this terminal to prevent us being traced,” he protested.

Suzie stepped into the room and brought her gun to bear. Clarke dived aside as she sprayed the computer housing with bullets, the black carcass erupting in a sizzling display of sparks and flame.

“
There,” she sniffed before turning back into the corridor. “I’d say that pretty much takes care of it.”

“
Mental,” Clarke muttered as he climbed to his feet.

He joined her in the corridor as O’Connell ran at them from the shadows.

“
Seven of those things will be crawling up our ass in about thirty seconds,” O’Connell panted. “Find us a way out of here, Clarkey.”

Clarke yanked his notebook from his pocket and roused it from its hibernation setting where the screen still retained the building schematics. Frenetically searching the blue prints Clarke felt sweat trickling down his neck.
The heat is so fuckin’ on
, he thought.

“
Come on, Clarkey!” O’Connell insisted.

“
Got it!” Clarke said. “Fire escape at the other end of this floor.”

“
O’Connell,” Suzie yelled as a male zombie dressed in a pin striped suit lunged out of the shadows. O’Connell ducked and Suzie tore the groping figure to pieces with automatic fire; several rounds punching through its skull.

“
Okay,” O’Connell yelled. “Let’s move!”

The three of them turned away from the undead entourage and charged in the opposite direction. Clarke ended up picking up the rear and was spurred on as he envisaged groping hands at his neck.

Taking point, Suzie reached the fire exit first; a solid door with a single slab of glass three quarters of the way up. She peered through it before turning back to the others.

“
Looks clear,” she said.

“
It’s better than back here!” Clarke shouted as the zombies staggered into view. He lifted his SA80 and discharged a volley into the corridor, succeeding in punching holes in the walls and ceiling.

“
Try hitting something that wants to eat us, Clarke,” Suzie said joining him as O’Connell worked on the door.

“
Fuck you, Hanks!” Clarke spat, opening fire again; the head of a fat zombie turning into the shape of a rugby ball by the impact.

Suzie smiled grimly. The kid was stepping up to the mark after all.

“
Okay, we’ve got the door!” O’Connell yelled having kicked it hard enough to remove it from one of its hinges. “Let’s go!”

O’Connell stepped aside to allow Suzie and Clarke to exit out onto a metal platform leading to a set of steps.

“
What about Amir?” Suzie shouted as the three of them fled down the steps. “He’s still out front.”

“
We’ll hail him once we get clear. He’ll have to come to us,” O’Connell said as they hit the tarmac of a small, private car park. It was walled with mesh fencing.

It was as he said this that the ground beneath them began to tremble and there was the dreadful sound of something collapsing nearby.

Then an explosion knocked them off of their feet.

***

The fissure opened and swallowed the huge crowd crossing the plaza. To Amir’s surprise those who had ample time to stop continued walking until they simply fell into the chasm.

The ground continued to churn, sending cobble stones in every direction, forcing Amir to duck back inside the doorway.

It was this mere action that saved his life. Because this was the very moment that the fissure claimed the Mastiff; sucking it into the bowels of the city, the groan of metal marking its demise.

And then the magazine exploded and for a moment the underworld was sent skywards in a blinding flash and the shockwave slammed into the buildings flanking the plaza, blowing glass and window frames and doorways inwards. A steel slab of armoured plating took out the reception desk behind Amir, a cobblestone-turned-missile punched into the ceiling showering his balled up body with polystyrene snow.

After the explosion came the thudding sound of all that was airborne falling back to earth; a blizzard of debris slapping onto what was left of the plaza. Only when he was sure that the deadly storm of debris had passed did Amir risk a look.

The cobblestone square was gone. All that remained was a huge maw in the earth, glowing with the ethereal light from multiple fires below ground. Just beyond the far rim of the crater, the crowd of zombies continued their lemming-like advance into the pit.

He was startled by a burst of static from his radio. Then O’Connell’s voice was on the air.

“
Amir, are you there?”

“
I’m here.”

“
What just blew up?”

“
Our ride home,” Amir said carefully.

***

Shipman was blown into the wall with such force it shattered the face plate on his biochem mask.

A wall of heat seared his face, tightening his skin and forcing his eyes to close. He bent double before falling to his belly.

Winded, he tried to drag in the hot, stinking purulent air emanating from both the waste pipe and the hundreds of bodies tumbling in from above.

He gagged and then vomited onto the platform, the sound of it lost in the rushing noise of fire and flame.

Suddenly hands were on him, strong hands, powerful hands, hands that closed over his shoulders; clutching mercilessly at the material of his vomit-splattered fatigues. Shipman fought against them for a moment, dragging in another mouthful of repugnant, stagnant air but gagged again; rendering him defenseless.

The hands pulled him upwards, first to his knees then he was on his feet and an arm snaked around his waist to support him so that he didn’t topple over.

“
I got you Major.”

It was Honeyman’s voice in his ear, loud despite the cacophony now drifting up the tunnel.

Shipman made to say something but Honeyman shook his head behind the faceplate. “Save it for topside, Sir. We’re outta here.”

Shipman’s head was beginning to clear and hell filled his vision once more. Bodies and flames writhed as one; the mangled remnants of the Mastiff were lying hot and twisted all about them. Then Shipman saw Keene. He lay spread-eagled on the platform a few meters away, a square of corrugated armour plating embedded in the chest and his mouth open to the vile underworld about him.

“
Keene,” the Major said weakly.

“
He’s gone, Sir,” Honeyman said as though it weren’t obvious to all. “There’s just us. And the mission!”

Shipman was spurred by this, it blasted away the fog and he felt strength returning to him as his professional instincts began to override his injuries.

“
Let’s get out of here,” Shipman said pulling away from Honeyman and reaching for the ladder.

Shipman looked back at the devastation behind them. “It’s going to take a miracle to get the kid out of this,’ he said. “If he’s still alive.”

“
I’m still confident, Major,” Honeyman said.

“
You’re right to be confident, soldier,” Shipman nodded earnestly. “It’s that kind of thinking that will get the job done.”

“
Of course, Sir,” Honeyman said.

But the marine was confident because he had the advantage of insider knowledge. One of the perks of being on the payroll. He knew that getting the kid didn’t need a miracle at all.

All it needed was Phoenix Industries.

***

Amir abandoned his post as soon as he’d re-established contact with O’Connell. Clarke had checked out the schematics, guiding him through the downstairs corridors towards a fire escape located on the east side if the NICDD building. After edging through scattered office equipment and the occasional piece of human debris, he located the fire door and kicked it open with several blows.

No, things probably hadn’t gone the way his parent’s would have wanted but Amir was going to put things right once all this was done; he was going to make amends.

As he stepped through the door and out into the compound, a hand grabbed him from the shadows and Amir found himself screaming instinctively for his parents.

***

On the roof of Hilton Towers reality and fantasy were becoming pretty indistinguishable for Thom Everett. He fought his way to his knees shortly before he was aware that he no longer had the roof space to himself.

Thom thought that he could count eight zombies in total, though it was all pretty immaterial in the grand scheme, wasn't it? One would’ve been enough to stretch anyone’s sense of sanity.