Slow Burn (Book 3): Destroyer (8 page)

The glass-walled stairwell that I’d shot up had refilled with infected from the streets below. So Dalhover and I were in a short stub of a hall, just long enough for the bank of four elevators, with two doors on one wall behind us and two in front. Dalhover said, “This is where I was going to get out after everybody died.”

“Was?” I asked.

“They won’t all die. Some of them will be immune like me and the colonel.”

“So you’ll stay with the group, then?”

Dalhover nodded and grunted an affirmation.

I told him, “I’ll try and round up some radios or something and get you one so we can keep in contact.”

“Yeah.” Dalhover’s listless tone of voice verged on pissing me off, until it occurred to me that his complete lack of non-verbal communication made his words something of a Rorschach test, and I might be reading too many of my own emotions into it.  Which begged the question, why was I pissed off? Steph was alive and probably immune. I knew I was happy about that. The situation in the hospital was deteriorating, but stable enough for the time being. Could it be jealousy over Steph and Jeff? I had to ask myself if I really was that immature.

I didn’t bother to answer.

I put a hand on the seam between the sliding elevator doors for no reason other than to turn my attention away from Dalhover.

He hefted a long crowbar that he’d gotten from who knew where and said, “The last time I had the doors open, the elevators were all down around the first or second floor. So the shafts were clear. There’s a maintenance ladder over here on the right-hand wall of the shaft. You’ll have to hold on to the conduit and metal supports on the wall and climb around to it.”

“Too far to reach, huh?”

“It’s a six- or seven-foot gap over a hundred-and-twenty foot drop. You could jump it if you wanted to.” The barest smidgen of a smile crossed Dalhover’s face.

“My balls aren’t that big,” I responded. “I was always good on the monkey bars as a kid. I’ll climb it.”

Dalhover slipped the business end of the crowbar in the seam between the elevator doors and pried back and forth to create a gap.

I stepped back to give him room to work.

He got his fingers in the gap, handed me the crowbar, then used both hands to pull the doors open.

As the narrow gap expanded from one inch to two, then suddenly a dozen, several sets of white fingers wrapped around the doors’ edges from the inside out. That took us both by surprise.

Dalhover lost his balance and fell back.

Infected howls poured through the gap as hands pushed the doors all the way open. The dark interior walls of the shaft were crawling with Whites.

“Shit!” I drew my machete as a white face popped out past the door and looked down at Dalhover.

I jumped over and hacked, cutting a diagonal chasm across its face. Blood erupted from the wound along with an enraged scream that followed the White as it fell back into the shaft.

Dalhover yelled something, but my focus was on another White trying to climb out on the far side of the doorway. I swung the machete in an arc to the right and cleaved the infected’s hand between the fingers. The hand lost its grip and gravity pulled him down the shaft.

Howling swelled up the shaft. The frenzy was on.

A pair of feet dangled down from the top edge of the elevator doorway. I hacked across the ankle and blood poured out.

Two heads came up from below. Neither survived long enough to get more than an arm through the door. I felt confident for about two seconds, believing that I could hold them off with the machete while Dalhover figured out how to fix the problem we’d just created. Movement to my left snuffed the life out of that line of thinking.

After seeing the first elevator door slide open, I guessed that the infected had enough brain capacity to apply that same solution to opening the second set of doors in the two-elevator wide shaft. Machete time was over.

“God damned Smart Ones,” Dalhover groused. He fired the first shots, hitting the Whites squirming through the gap between the other set of doors.

“They’ll be coming through all of the elevator doors on these shafts now!” Dalhover shouted with the decisive authority of a man who’d been listened to his whole life. “The two floors above will get ambushed!”

I grabbed my last hand grenade, pulled the pin, got as close to the elevator door as I dared, and tossed it underhand up into the shaft above.

Sergeant Dalhover understood immediately my intent and the risk of it. He was already scampering away from the elevator bank when I turned to follow. I had nothing by which to gauge where in the shaft the grenade would detonate. I only knew that I didn’t want to be standing in front of the open elevator door if it happened there on its fall back down. I ran after Dalhover and just made it around the corner when the blast reverberated through the halls. Sergeant Dalhover and I immediately spun on our heels to go back.

“I’ll hold them at the elevators as long as I can!” he shouted at me before we started to move. “You need to warn them upstairs! The Smart Ones will be coming through the elevators.”

I sprinted back toward the nurse’s station. The halls seemed to narrow and enhance my sensation of speed. I felt like I was flying, which was exactly what I needed to be doing.

Behind me, Dalhover’s rifle fired.

At the T-intersection with the main hall, I looked right and left. The guards that had been at each end were running at full speed toward me and were close.

“The infected are in the elevator shafts!” I shouted. “They’ve figured out how to open the doors!” I pointed at one of them, “You, run upstairs and warn them!”  I pointed at the other, “You, go help Dalhover!”

“What about them?” he asked, pointing at the volunteers as he moved.

“Go!” I commanded.

Both soldiers ran.

Up and down the hall, the volunteers that still had the mental capacity for it understood that danger was on the way and they were squirming against their bonds. The experiment was over. I ran at full speed down to Steph.

“What’s happening?” Jeff asked, conscious again.

“Zed?” Steph’s eyes were wide with terror.

I drew my knife and quickly cut her loose. I jumped over and proceeded to cut Jeff loose. As soon as his hands were free, I gave him the knife and told him, “Go cut loose anyone who’s not symptomatic.”

I turned and pushed my Glock into Steph’s hand. “Can you use this?”

“Yes.”

I pulled out four magazines and put them in her lap as I very urgently told her, “They’re coming in the through the elevator shafts. Take everybody upstairs to twelve.” Without another word, I ran back toward the sound of gunfire.

“Zed!” I heard Steph’s voice behind me. “Zed!”

I ran on. There was nothing more to say.

I rounded the nurse’s station and slid to a stop as the gunfire suddenly ceased. A half-second later, Sergeant Dalhover ran out of the short hall between the elevators. Five steps behind him, an infected man rounded the corner, screaming and grasping.

I dropped to a knee and aimed my M-4.

Two more infected followed.

Dalhover ran right at me, and in his face I finally saw emotion. Fear.

Pointing my rifle at his chest, I yelled, “Duck!”

He took two steps to comprehend, then chose to trust me. He hit the floor like he was sliding into second base.

As soon as his body fell out of my sights, I fired a three-round burst at the infected man who’d been on his heels. His chest exploded in red and he lurched to the side. I fired again and again at the other two, and enough of my bullets hit flesh. Faster than I thought possible, Dalhover was back on his feet and hugging the wall as he ran toward me.

More infected ran out of the elevator bank. Five, seven, ten…

Oh, shit!

Dalhover took up a position on the opposite side of the hall and brought his weapon to bear. “The elevator shafts were full of ‘em!” He fired his weapon. “We won’t be able to hold ’em!”

There were at least a dozen dead or dying in the hall and another ten or twelve stumbling over the bodies of the fallen. They were coming around the corner faster than Dalhover and I could kill them.

“We need to retreat to twelve!” Dalhover yelled to me.

I leaned back and peeked up and down the hall full of volunteers. Five or six people were on their feet, two helping Steph to get someone free, the others running for the stairwell.

“Not yet! We need a few minutes!”

“
What?
” Dalhover was livid. He jumped to his feet and stepped back into the main hall. He looked up and down then paused, red-faced with rage or urgency, I didn’t know. But without another word, he returned to his kneeling position and fired.

We were killing and killing and killing, but the infected were advancing. I wished I still had those two other grenades. We didn’t have a few minutes. I yelled back up the hall, “Steph! Jeff! You’re almost out of time!”

Dalhover dropped a magazine to the floor and reloaded with enviable speed. “Last mag!”

I ran a hand across my vest, pulled out a few, and flung them across to him.

He gave me a nod. I emptied another magazine, filling the hall with screams, before I paused to reload. As soon as the magazine clicked in, I looked back around the corner. Steph and five others were running toward me. The stairwell was just to my right around the corner. I yelled, “Dalhover, they’re coming! Go when you’re ready.”

Dalhover jumped across the hall and got right in my ear. “Go into the stairwell and yell. I’ve got two men manning the barricade five floors down. Make ‘em run! We have to hold the stairwell door until they get upstairs or they’re dead.”

I was around the corner in half a second and through the door. I screamed down the stairwell. “Hey! Hey!”

“Almost there,” an out-of-breath voice called from a floor below.

Steph and the other volunteers poured through the door, and I directed them upstairs before stepping back out into the hall to support Sergeant Dalhover. The infected were less than twenty feet away. I fired rounds as fast as they would pour out of the rifle, then dropped my magazine and started on another as soon as I loaded it.

There were only three full magazines left in my vest.
One hundred and twenty rounds total, less those flying from my barrel. I was on the verge of panic.

The Ogre and the Harpy!

The mantra calmed me. I thought clearly. The situation appeared to have only one end, but that wasn’t true. I was
not
going to die in this fucking hospital! With seventy people still tied to chairs in some state of fever or infection, the mass of our pursuers was likely to take pause on the tenth floor to gorge themselves on the unlucky before refocusing on us.

I felt no emotional attachment to the seventy lives I’d just clicked off. The infected volunteers were going to die anyway. At least their lives could be traded for time.

“Give me twenty seconds and get your ass in the stairwell!” I shouted, not out of fear now, but out of necessity.

In the blink of an eye, I was out of my firing position and bounding to the other end to the nurse’s station. I grasped the cold steel end of a gurney and wheeled it toward the stairway door.

The gurney smashed into the door, and Dalhover gave me a glance. I ran around, turned the handle and wrestled the wide gurney through the door.

Twenty seconds had passed. Dalhover was still firing. The gurney was heavier and more unwieldy than I’d hoped. But having pushed it through the door, I shouted to Dalhover to come as I manhandled it up the stairs to clear the swing of the door.

A second later, Dalhover squeezed past the door into the stairwell and I slammed the gurney back into it, turning it over, jamming it between the door and second step up. A second later, the infected hit the door from the other side. The door rattled. The gurney jiggled, but only slid far enough for the door to open an inch or two.

Dalhover climbed up over the gurney to the stairs beside me. “Good thinking.”

A different kind of whooping and yelling came through the door as the Whites noticed the bounty of living flesh tied to the chairs in the hall.

Seventy lives traded for time.

I felt shame, but shoved it into a dark place for later, guilty rumination.

The Ogre and the Harpy.

Dalhover peeked down the stairwell between the rails. “Anybody else down there?”

No human answer came, but the infected below were screaming and tearing at the barricade five floors down.

“Let’s go!” Dalhover ran up the steps and I followed. “If things are this bad on twelve, we’re done!”

At the last flight of stairs, we passed two soldiers with grim looks on their faces and their weapons pointed down. Several of the hospital staff were starting to build a new barricade at the top of the stairs using chairs, beds, and pieces of equipment I couldn’t identify.

As soon as we exited the stairwell and stepped into the hall, I heard the gunfire blasting up from down near the elevators.

The battle for twelve was already on!

Dr. Evans was standing at the nurse’s station where he had a view of all three wings. He was pointing to a couple of the staff and giving them instructions.

Dalhover and I ran up beside him as the two staff members hustled off. To Dr. Evans, Dalhover said, “Colonel, ten is overrun. Zed cut the staff loose that weren’t symptomatic yet.”

Like a meth addict, my adrenaline rush had my attention blazing on overload and I couldn’t stand still. I noticed Jeff Aubrey, pale and unconscious again in a chair behind the nurse’s station. When he next awoke, he’d be one of the infected. We would need to deal with that.

Dr. Evans told Dalhover, “We’ve got everyone off of eleven. We’ve got six men at the elevator bank keeping them back, but all four doors are open. There’s no activity on the exterior stairway yet, but that will change with all of the commotion. You saw that we’re trying to seal off this stairway.  I think there are twenty-six of us now, but I’m not positive on the count. Half military, half infected hospital staff.”

Already bored with Evans’ status report, having deduced that much two seconds after I came out of the stairwell, I was watching the nurses and other doctors running in and out of rooms, gathering equipment. It was urgent, but organized, controlled. I didn’t see Steph among them.

“We’re setting up a fallback barricade on the north wing,” Dr. Evans said.

Fallback, fallback, fallback?

“No.” I didn’t shout it. I just said it.

Dalhover and Evans stopped, surprised, and looked at me.

“No?” Evans asked.

I spoke quickly, but not in panic. “Dalhover’s right about the Smart Ones. Some of them are trying to work cooperatively. The fact that the other elevator shaft is now open proves that. They must have opened it. They’re able to find the weaknesses in your defenses. It’s obvious that hiding here won’t end well. If we don’t escape, we’ll die.”

“Escape is suicide,” Dr. Evans disagreed.

Without a moment of hesitation, Dalhover nodded his head at me and said, “He’s right.”

Dr. Evans shrank and sagged back into the man I’d first met two hours before. That’s what despair looked like. Weakly, he asked, “How?”

Dalhover said, “We’ve probably got some time while the infected are on ten. We’ll have to figure something out and then take a chance. Some of us are bound to make it.”

Dr. Evans shook his head, not at us, but more at himself and some internal dialogue.

“We’ll go with Dalhover’s escape plan,” I said. “We’re going down the elevator shafts!”

Dalhover’s droopy, apathetic eyes found another new expression when they looked at me. The expression said, “Dumbass!”