The Dead Walk The Earth II (24 page)

“Oh God, no,” he muttered.

It was not the fact that he had messed himself that caused him to pray to God. It was the hopelessness of his situation. At that moment, he really wished that Tina were there to help him. He began crying louder, calling for his sister to save him from the monsters outside. He wanted her to come bursting in through the door, swinging her crowbar and beating at the heads of the infected and rescuing him from the hideous creatures.

The door leading into the reception area from the small row of offices suddenly flew open and crashed against the wall with a juddering clang. Christopher spun around, believing for a moment that his prayers had been answered and expecting to see his sister come charging to his rescue.

His hopes were quickly dashed as a sea of rotted faces rushed into the foyer. He screamed as the dead poured in, piling through the door and crashing into one another as more of them pushed from behind. At the sound of the high-pitched wail of the large meaty flesh standing in the open space before them, the multitude of walking corpses paused and stared back at Christopher, their pale flat eyes scrutinising him.

The first to recognise the man as their prey let out a gargling moan and the bodies behind quickly joined in with the lamenting chorus. As one, the crowd surged forward and ploughed through the doorway towards Christopher.

He was unable to move, frozen to the spot by the horror of what was happening to him. The army of reanimated corpses advanced on him, groaning and snapping their jaws as they reached out in front of them. Christopher began to step back, almost slipping in the pool of urine beneath his feet. He retreated further and raised his pistol in his shaking hands, aiming it at the lead creature as he began squeezing the trigger.

Nothing happened. The round did not explode from the barrel and the trigger did not click. It merely refused to work. He frantically pulled the trigger again and again but with no result. Tears were running down his face and his vision was quickly blurring as he continued to step backwards towards the stairs.

“Fuck, fuck,” he exclaimed in a high-pitched, faltering voice.

He realised that he had not chambered a round. Reaching out with a trembling hand and numbed fingers, he gripped the top-slide and pulled back hard. The bolt scooped up the brass case and threw it into the breach with a metallic crunch and Christopher instantly snatched at the trigger. The round cracked loudly in the confined space and the flash of the muzzle blinded him for a second, as the bullet sprang from the barrel and sailed through the air at lightning speed where it smashed harmlessly into the wall above the doorframe.

With the last of his ammunition spent, Christopher turned and leapt onto the bottom step and began to race upwards towards the offices. He covered the distance quicker than he had ever done during his training sessions with Tina, and within just a few short seconds, he had reached the landing and was in the office again. He slammed the door shut and began dragging the large heavy couch over towards the entrance.

The footfalls of the dead and their incessant moans drifted up from the stairway and along the corridor and seemed to deliberately head for the office he was hiding in, filtering their way through the gap at the bottom of the door. He piled more office furniture on top of the couch, desperately hoping that it would be enough to stop them from getting in. Soon, the corridor outside was filled with the dark figures of the infected. Their hands and faces pressed up against the windows as they beat and gnawed at the glass, staring at him hungrily as he stood crying uncontrollably in the centre of the room.

He looked down at the empty pistol in his hands. The top-slide was locked to the rear, showing him an empty chamber and magazine. He began to cry all the more when he realised that he had wasted his last hope of denying the dead the satisfaction of being able to tear him apart while he was still alive.

“Tina,” he yelled up at the ceiling in despair.

The dead beyond the window howled back at him, excited at the sight and sound of a living human being.

On the far side of the car park, a lone figure stood watching the events unfold. She had seen the large plump form at the window staring out at the sight of hundreds of bodies filling the parking area. She imagined the familiar sound of his whining voice as he realised that he had no way out and that the infected were in the building with him. She pictured him struggling to save himself and building pathetic barricades that would be nothing more than a small obstacle to the mass of corpses pushing against them. She heard the shot of the pistol and when no more followed, she surmised that the gun must have been empty. When she saw him moving within the upstairs office again, a faint smile creased her lips at the thought of him throwing away his last opportunity of a painless death.

For a while longer, she stood watching the big windows above the main entrance to the supermarket supply depot. She could see movement in the room but was unable to distinguish exactly who or what it was due to the reflection of the sun. Soon, however, she saw the large body of Christopher crash against the glass. His back was pressed up against the window and his arms were raised out in front of him. Eventually, he sank to the floor and curled himself into a ball as a multitude of other, darker figures piled in around him.

“What goes around, comes around, Chris,” she grunted after a while and turned away.

Slowly, limping heavily on her damaged leg, Tina headed for the gateway and the access road leading into the industrial complex.

14

“For Christ’s sake, you’re not making a flower arrangement, Bobby,” Bull whispered impatiently to the man crouching at the curb side beneath him. “Get it secured and let’s get the fuck out of here.”

“Nearly done,” Bobby replied.

Bull remained standing, turning his body in a continuous three-hundred and sixty degree arc as he scanned the street and provided protection for the both of them. He held his Minimi close into his shoulder with his finger resting lightly against the trigger and his eyes peering over the sights as he kept a watch on their surroundings.

It had just gone midnight and Bull was beginning to feel uncomfortable and over exposed. They had been out on the ground for over three hours, slowly snaking their way through the maze of streets and avenues, avoiding the wandering infected and darting from one shadow to the next. They remained on high alert throughout, listening into the night and checking every patch of road through their night vision before exposing themselves from their hiding places. They would move just a few metres, stop and listen, and then begin the whole process of observing and examining their surroundings over again. By now, the constant vigilance, mixed with the suppressive night and the haunting wails of the dead that echoed through the streets had begun to claw at Bull’s nerves.

They were far from their operating base in the apartment block, with no support but what they provided for each other. They had hidden in doorways and behind cars, holding their breath while hordes of the dead trampled by just metres away from them as they made their way to their target area. On three occasions they had needed to deal with individual corpses that stumbled too closely, dispatching them with their knives and doing all they could to remain undetected. It was not an easy task to do whilst out in the open and the strain was beginning to show.

Now, Bobby and Bull was situated at the most southern junction that they had earmarked for the final noise box. They were roughly one kilometre away from the factory and on the most extreme point of their operational boundaries. Behind them, headed north in a straight line and leading up to the apartments, two more of the reinforced waste paper baskets containing iPods had been planted at their respective junctions by other members of the team.

Each intersection covered a large expanse of ground. The roads were wide and the pavements were broader still, leaving plenty of open space to be filled by the infected once the operation moved into its next phase. Each noise box had been set at the base of a street light and secured with cable ties and a heavy-duty chain to stop them from being moved once Stan triggered them remotely. With the amount of infected that they expected to converge on the area and begin swarming around the source of the noise, the music boxes needed to remain secure and static. Initially, the team had considered placing them higher up so that they were out of reach but there were too many possibilities of something going wrong and noise being made while setting them up and placing the men in unnecessary danger.

“That’s it, done,” Bobby said as he raised himself to his feet and unslung his rifle from over his shoulder. “That thing’s going nowhere. I don’t care how many of those bags of shit pull on it. You good to go?”

“I was good to go the minute we got here,” Bull scoffed under his breath. “Let’s get moving, Bobby. I’ve had enough of playing chicken for one night.”

The pair of them paused for a moment and checked the sprawling streets around them. Four major roads fed into the area along with a number of smaller avenues, all merging into the centre of the junction from different directions. In the luminescent glow of their NVGs they could see dark shapes, disfigured and lurching, ambling through the shadows and wandering along close to the sides of the buildings. The nearest of the dead were fifty metres away. A small group of them had gathered and clambered around a wrecked truck which lay on its side in the middle of the road. The vehicle had spilled its contents of boxes and steel barrels over a wide area of the street, creating obstacles that the clumsy bodies of the reanimated dead would bump into and tumble over as they blindly shuffled about. The cluster of infected feebly beat their hands against the vehicle’s sides, showing no real effort in their attempts to get inside.

Bull turned and began to lead the way. They opted to follow the same path that they had taken on their way out, sticking to the proven route. They walked slowly, keeping their movements unhurried and deliberate to avoid attracting any attention to themselves from the thousands of watching eyes that surrounded them. All around, the streets reverberated with the ghostly moans of the dead and the clangs of objects being overturned or struck as the infected crashed about through the darkness.

Both men could not wait to be back in the relative safety of their base on the top floor apartment, but they refrained from allowing their eagerness to dictate their pace. The last phase of any mission was always the most perilous. Soldiers throughout history had often had a habit of letting their guard down when the end was in sight and it was then, regardless of how proficiently they had performed their task, that they became unstuck.

The two men turned into a street where the night seemed to turn darker still. The shadows of the tall buildings merged into one and blanketed the road that ran between them and rendered everything invisible to their watchful eyes. Even through their NVGs it was almost impossible to penetrate the blackness. The lack of ambient light that could be magnified by their goggles forced them to rely more upon their other senses.

Bull trusted his guts more than any other intuit. Over the years there had been very few occasions when his sixth sense, emanating from the pit of his stomach, had proven him wrong. Now his instincts were screaming at him to find somewhere to hide. He stopped and raised his hand, showing Bobby the flat of his palm while he kept the barrel of his machinegun pointed along the darkened street. A few seconds later, he swept his arm to the side, indicating for them to move into cover.

Bobby did not hesitate. He stepped to the side and took up position beside a low wall that jutted out from one of the buildings on his right. Bull quickly joined him and hunkered down in the shadows behind him.

“What is it?” Bobby whispered over his shoulder but keeping his attention and the barrel of his weapon focussed on the street.

“Not sure,” Bull replied. “There’s something moving up ahead and coming this way. I didn’t see what or how many but they’re definitely closing.”

Bobby nodded and sunk deeper into the shadows, clutching his rifle tightly and readying himself for a fight. If it were a herd of the infected, they would just have to sit it out and hope that they were not seen. If it were just a few stragglers wandering aimlessly, then the knives of the two men would come into play. They listened intently, waiting for the distinct sounds of scraping feet and low grunts that always announced the arrival of the dead, but there was nothing happening close by. The usual night sounds of the lifeless city could be heard in the adjacent streets and over the buildings as the infected cried out into the darkness but there was nothing in close proximity to the two men crouching behind the small wall.

“You sure you saw something?” Bobby whispered after a minute of silence and beginning to wonder whether Bull was becoming a little too jittery.

“I didn’t
see
anything,” Bull snorted angrily. “I heard something and just got a feeling that there was something there.”

“Oh right, so you were using your Jedi powers and now we’re sitting here like a couple of wankers because you felt a disturbance in ‘the force’?”

“Fuck off, Bobby. I’m just as keen to get back as…”

The pair of them instantly fell silent as their radios began to hiss in their ears. They could hear a voice but it was distorted and unrecognisable through waves of static. They looked at one another questioningly but neither of them had an answer.

“Unknown call sign, say again,” Bobby whispered as he pressed the send button and spoke into the microphone attached to his assault vest.

There was no reply except for the familiar hiss in his ear of an empty carrier wave. Bobby stood up and cautiously looked in both directions, straining to see through the gloom. The street appeared empty, even though his field of vision stretched no further than a few metres. He nodded to Bull and then stepped back out onto the pavement in the hope of getting a clearer signal through his antenna.

“Stan, this is Bobby, radio check.”

The radio crackled again but as before, the voice was indistinguishable. Bobby stepped further out into the open and stood beside the slowly decaying hulk of a large silver people carrier. He turned and hunched his shoulders and began speaking quietly into his mouthpiece as he slowly stepped back into the shadow of the broken down vehicle.

Bull remained in position and covering his friend while he attempted to make contact with the rest of the team but as he moved further away, Bull could see less of him. Bobby was soon nothing more than a faint dark shape, barely distinguishable from the blanket of darkness that had begun to swallow him up as he increased the distance between himself and the protection of the wall.

“Stan, this is…” Bobby began trying again.

He felt himself abruptly falling backwards towards the vehicle and was unable to stop. Something was pulling at his harness, catching him off balance and drawing him closer towards the door of the people carrier. His back and shoulders slammed against the frame of the rear window and he felt the cold bony hands of an infected person grasping at the bare skin on the back of his neck from inside the vehicle. He pulled and twisted, trying to break free but he could not get his feet into a position where he could grip against the ground. One of his legs slipped from underneath him and his weight dragged him downwards but the clutching hands refused to relinquish their grip upon him.

Bobby reached for his machete but before he could draw it, another figure shot out from around the other side of the car and pounced upon him. Instinctively, he drove the long blade up through the creature’s abdomen but it did not slow his attacker down in the slightest. The sharp steel pierced organs and scraped over bone but the ghastly face in front of him did not seem to notice. Its teeth snapped together loudly as it lunged downwards towards Bobby’s face. Bobby snapped his head to the side, the dead man’s jaws gnashing on thin air just centimetres away from his cheek. Again, he pushed back on his machete with all his strength, hoping to keep the thing at a distance while he tried to regain his footing and break free from the corpse holding him in place from behind. The hilt of the machete slipped through the weakened flesh of the cadaver with a soft popping sound and Bobby found himself wrist deep in the putrid intestines that began to spill out from the gaping wound. The teeth snapped shut again, just millimetres from his face.

Bull saw a shadow flicker across in front of where he had seen Bobby disappear into the darkness. He heard a dull thud as something crashed against the steel frame of a car and it was quickly followed by the scuffing of feet mixed with the grunts and gasps of a struggle. He jumped from his cover position and drew his long blade, bounding across the pavement and into the road in just a few rapid steps.

Bobby was wedged against the window, being tugged from inside the vehicle while the weight of a reanimated corpse pressed against him from the outside. His hands were pinned in front of him and he was unable to reach for his pistol because it would risk allowing the snapping jaws to gain ground on him.

Bull reached over and grabbing the thing by the collar of its jacket, wrenched the infected away from Bobby. With a mighty heave, Bull tossed the corpse away to the side where it crashed into the wall that he and Bobby had taken cover behind just a few moments before. Its head thumped against the brick barrier with a heavy crunch that snapped its spinal column and split its skull wide open. The body slumped to the ground, dead.

Next, Bull turned his attention to the clawing hands that held Bobby stuck to the window frame of the people carrier. He grabbed his partner by the straps on the front of his harness and pulled him up from the ground and forward towards him. The cold dead hands came with him, refusing to let go of Bobby. The skeletal face of a woman appeared through the opening as she was dragged out from the car’s rear passenger seat. As her head and shoulders came free, Bull raised his knife and thrust it down into the top of the woman’s head, driving the point of the blade deep into her brain.

They had to pry the fingers free from Bobby’s harness as the creature maintained a stubborn death grip upon him. The bones snapped and Bobby was finally free. He stood for a short moment with his hands upon his knees and panting for breath and then moved towards the curb side. Crouching down, he began washing his hands in a puddle to remove the gunk and stench of the rotten corpse’s innards.

“Cheers, mate,” he grunted up at the big man standing close by.

He was shaken and confused about how he had found himself in such a predicament. He wiped his hands on his trousers and stood back up, turning to face Bull. He could vaguely see the scrutinising expression on his friend’s face and swiftly realised that he could virtually read his thoughts.

“No, neither of them managed to get me,” Bobby assured him as he rubbed his hands over the back of his neck and his arms, checking for any wounds sustained in the struggle that he had failed to notice.