The Gathering Dead (19 page)

Behind them, the grenade went off outside the lobby with a loud report that was followed immediately by the sound of a river of glass cascading to the floor. And after that, the moaning rush of zombies picking their way across the debris filled the stairwell.

“Terminator Six, the lobby’s been breached!” Rittenour reported as they bolted up the stairs. “OMEN team dropped a grenade outside and took out the windows. We have zeds in the lobby!”

McDaniels came back immediately. “Can you detonate the charges from the fifth floor? If you blow them while you’re in the stairwell, you could get zeroed. Over.”

“Roger that, Terminator, we’ll give it a shot, over.” Racing up to the third floor landing, Rittenour stopped and turned. Leary came up the steps behind him, and Rittenour waved him on.

“Get to five,” he said. “Open the fire door and wait for me, I’ll be right up.”

“What are you waiting for?” Leary asked.

“Don’t fuck around asking questions, move your ass! Go!”

Leary hesitated for a moment longer, then charged up the stairs.

Rittenour turned away and looked down the stairwell as he heard the door open. The zombies boiled in then, moaning, hissing. Looking down the gap between the handrails, he caught glimpses of them as they mounted the stairs as fast as their dead legs could carry them.

He didn’t see any uniforms, and that bothered him. Where were the military zeds? Why weren’t they in the lead?

Can zeds practice force protection?
he wondered as he pounded up the steps.

Fourth floor. Leary bounded up the stairs for the fifth floor, with Rittenour right behind him. As he climbed, Rittenour pulled the remote detonator from its pouch on his side and flipped open the covered safety switch. The charges were armed now.

“Six, the charges are armed, will be setting them off in less than fifteen seconds!” he screamed into his headset microphone as Leary made it to the fifth floor landing. He darted toward the fire door, ripped it open, and dove inside. Rittenour hurried after him; right behind him, he heard the zombies bolting up the stairs, moving faster than he had thought possible. There was only a landing separating them.

Then when he felt something grab onto his back pack, he realized there wasn’t even that. Rittenour stumbled on the steps, and that was enough. The zombie shrieked as it flailed at his back pack, firming its grip, then hauled itself onto it. The added weight made Rittenour stumble again, and this time he went down on the fifth floor landing.

Leary knelt in the still open doorway, his M4 shouldered and ready to fire. And fire he did, one round that made a loud
snap!
as it hurtled past Rittenour’s head at almost 900 miles per hour. The zed clinging to Rittenour’s back pack fell off suddenly, and he kicked at it as he scrambled back to his feet. He looked at Leary as he headed for the door. He heard more zeds rolling up the stairs.

“Going for it now, bro,” he told Leary. His thumb moved to the remote detonator’s trigger.

Leary threw himself back into the office area as hell exploded into being behind Rittenour.

McDaniels was just closing the fire escape door on the 27th floor when the building shook. Gartrell spun around to face him as a whistling sound reached McDaniels’ ears; it was the explosion’s over-pressure wave, rushing up the stairwell. It hit full force and slammed the door closed, knocking McDaniels off balance. Gartrell grabbed him and steadied him on his feet.

“What was that?” Safire said. There was panic in his voice. He held Regina close to him, and she clung to her father’s narrow shoulders, eyes wide with fear. Earl had his arms around both of his daughters, and his youngest had her face pressed against his chest. Her shoulders shook. She was weeping.

McDaniels ignored the question and kicked open the fire door. He and Gartrell stepped into the stairwell and peered down between the hand rails. A cloud of dust was visible far below them.

“Ground, this is Six! Ritt, Leary, give me a SITREP, over!” McDaniels checked his M4 while waiting for a reply. The weapon was still cocked and locked, and he flipped off the safety. Wet wind swirled about in them, spilling in through the still-open roof door. It banged back and forth on its hinges, batted about by the wind.

“Rittenour, Leary, give me your status, over!” McDaniels said after several seconds had passed.

He heard gunshots from below, and a single shout.

“Watch over the Safires,” McDaniels said, then bolted down the stairs. Gartrell caught up to him on the next landing and grabbed the collar of his uniform, yanking McDaniels to a halt.

“No way, major. This is my territory.
You
watch after the Safires. I’ll see to the men.” Gartrell’s expression was flat and emotionless—his war face. Movement above and behind the men made him look past Gartrell’s shoulder. Finelly and Derwitz stood on the landing. Both of them appeared utterly shell-shocked, still down and out after the MV-22 crash and the sudden explosion in the stairwell. Finelly bled from an open cut on his cheek, which he apparently sustained when he had been blown across the roof. One of Derwitz’s eyes was swollen, probably a prize from falling headlong down the stairs.

“What’s the op, major?” It was Derwitz who spoke, not Finelly. A surprising turn of events, McDaniels thought.

“You two are going to stay here with the major and keep watch over the civilians,” Gartrell said. “I’m headed down to see what’s going on with Ritt and Leary.” As he spoke, Gartrell stared straight into McDaniels’ eyes, as if daring him to counter. McDaniels outranked Gartrell by miles, but the senior NCO was much closer to where the rubber met the road, and his battlefield skills were beyond redoubt.

“I’m not so sure you should be going alone, first sergeant,” McDaniels said.

“I’ll be good. Make sure the aviators don’t do anything stupid, like have a food fight or something. I have a feeling that any eggs we have in the kitchen are all we’re going to have for a good long time.”

And with that, Gartrell pushed past McDaniels and bolted down the stairs, his big AA-12 automatic shotgun held before him like a shield. McDaniels watched him go, then turned and trudged back up the stairs.

“Let’s get this floor secure,” he told Finelly and Derwitz.

###

First Sergeant David Gartrell pushed himself down the stairs as fast as he could go without slipping and breaking his ass. The stairwell was filled with an acrid odor that grew stronger the farther he descended: the remains of the explosives, cordite from gunfire, and unless he was wrong, the odious reek of the dead. He wondered how many had made it up the stairs before the first few flights were destroyed, and decided it could be anywhere from one or two to a dozen or more. At any rate, he’d find out pretty soon.

“Ritt, Leary, this is Gartrell. I’m on my way down to you guys now. Passing the 20
^th
floor, over.”

There was no reply, and that was worrisome. Gartrell had no idea what he was walking into, but he did hear sporadic gunfire from below. The thing is, it didn’t seem to be coming from the stairwell, but from inside the building itself. Which very likely meant Rittenour and Leary were trapped on a floor and had been engaged by the stenches.

He heard something above his own footfalls and stopped on the next landing. Stumbling footsteps echoed in the stairway below him, growing steadily louder. Gartrell checked his NVGs, still on the mount attached to his helmet, then took a moment to pull his light cotton gloves tight on his hands. Peering over the edge of the handrail, he saw flashes of movement down below. Whoever they were,
whatever
they were, they had climbed above the slowly-settling cloud of dust below.

Gartrell whistled loudly. The figures climbing up the stairs moved even faster, and one of them looked up the center of the stairwell. A pale, gaunt face with shrunken eyes and scraggly hair turned toward Gartrell. When it saw him, it opened its mouth and released a lingering moan that continued even after it had pushed away from the handrail and took off up the stairs again.

Zombies. Of course, they have to be fucking zombies.

Gartrell radio switch. “Major, this is Gartrell. I’m on eighteen, have zeds coming up the stairs toward me. Don’t know how many, but if it’s more than fifty or so, I think we can elevate our condition from ‘definitely screwed’ to ‘absolutely fucked’, over.”

“How long until they reach you? Can you fall back? Over.”

Gartrell peered over the railing again. “Contact in less than ten seconds. I can still hear gunfire below me. Ritt and Leary are still kicking. Will report my progress to you as soon as I can
—
if the shooting stops and you don’t hear from me, that’s probably not an awesome sign. Five out,” he said, as the first zombie mounted the landing below the one he stood on and charged up the stairs. Gartrell hadn’t expected it to be a child, but there it was, a little girl in her pink pajamas, her neck a ravaged mass of torn flesh that was turning black as the fluids there dried into a crust. Its eyes remained focused on him, and did not blink; when Gartrell raised the AA-12, the zombie accelerated toward him, as if eager to face the weapon and be released from the hell it was confined to. Gartrell obliged, and the tungsten-core round destroyed the zombie’s skull. As it sank to the stairs, another zed appeared, and another, and another. These were adults now, not children, and Gartrell dispatched them with an almost mechanical precision. The AA-12 rounds didn’t just destroy their heads
—
it absolutely obliterated them. In a matter of moments, Gartrell had dispatched four zombies without even breaking a sweat. It was much easier engaging them in the stairwell than outside on the street. He pressed on, stepping over the bodies, grimacing in disgust. Not only were they smelly, the shotgun blasts had left pulped viscera all over the place.

“Major, Gartrell. I’m through the first wave, making my way down to seventeen. Break. Rittenour, Leary, come in.” Now that he knew that zeds had managed to make it past the stairways rigged with charges, he had to press on with more care. He didn’t want to run headlong into a group of stenches because he wasn’t paying enough attention.

Just the same, it almost happened. Gartrell came around the corner on the tenth floor landing, and there was a tall, reedy stench with a shining bald head and pale blue eyes advancing up the opposite stairway. When it saw him, it lurched toward him with thin, outstretched arms. It was dressed in a filthy white dress shirt and khaki pants that would have been too baggy and ill-fitting even if the corpse had been a living man. Its bald head was surrounded by a fringe of long, greasy hair, and most of its nose was missing. So was its entire lower jaw, which made Gartrell laugh as he backpedaled from the stench and raised his shotgun.

“Dude, you don’t have a jaw! How the hell are you gonna be able to eat me?” he asked. As if in answer, the zed groaned and stumbled across the last step and fell face-first to the landing. It grabbed at Gartrell’s boot with one hand.

The AA-12 roared once again, and the dead zed count went to five.

Gartrell resumed his descent, trying to reach Rittenour and Leary on the radio after he cleared every landing. Still no response, and the gunfire had stopped. As he pushed past the seventh floor landing, the dust had mostly cleared. He felt a cool breeze whisper up the stairwell. Gartrell moved more slowly now, more stealthily, as most of the lights had been broken by the blast. Chunks of concrete became more numerous on the steps the closer he got to the fifth floor. When he descended to just above the fifth floor landing, he saw three stenches lying where they had been gunned down. Black ichor leaked from their ravaged skulls. Gartrell leaned over the edge of the hand rail and looked down. All he saw was mostly blackness, broken sporadically by a light here, a light there. The charges had apparently done their job
—
the stairs were completely
gone
, nothing more than a pile of rubble near the lobby floor. Gartrell straightened and looked toward the fifth floor fire door. It had buckled inward from the blast and the attendant shock wave, and hung in the mangled doorframe by one hinge. He saw several hashes of blood on the door, and more on the doorframe. Zeds had pushed their way inside. That explained the gunfire.

Gartrell slowly moved toward the door and peered inside the office. The lights were dimmed, but he could still see part of the floor. A stench lay face down on the carpet, a wide furrow blasted through its head. A distance away, another one
—
an obese woman in a loud flowery dress
—
reclined in similar repose, its chubby-cheeked face turned toward Gartrell, its eyes gazing off in different directions below the ravaged skull. Gartrell was about to push through the door when a slow movement caught his eye to the left. Whatever it was, it moved among the shadows on the far side of the office floor. Gartrell reached up and dropped his NVGs in front of his eyes. They automatically flipped out of standby mode, and the light amplification tubes powered up.

Walking along the offices on the far side of the floor was a zed. Its mouth was wide open, and a flap of skin hung across one eye, bobbing as the corpse shuffled along the carpet. It seemed that Rittenour or Leary had shot at this one, but hadn’t scored a kill. Gartrell could rectify that, but he would want to get closer. The first sergeant slowly eased himself onto the office floor, looking to his left and right to ensure nothing lay in wait. The zombie didn’t see him, because the flap of skin hung across its right eye. But if it had the common sense to turn its head, it would be able to zero in on him clearly.

And just as he thought it, the stench did just that. It moaned loudly when it saw Gartrell, and immediately charged down the aisle toward him.

Three other zeds moaned as well, and Gartrell was surprised to see them emerge from several cubes. One of them was fast, real fast. Before Gartrell could turn the AA-12 on it, it sprinted toward him, covering the twenty or so feet separating them in what seemed to be a blink of an eye. Gartrell couldn’t step back into the stairway, as the opening he had crawled through was too small, he’d have to turn his back on the zeds and go out headfirst. That just wasn’t going to play.