The Zone (19 page)

Despite the blood pounding in my ears I forced myself to my feet and got pain from both my knees; Miguel was kneeling a couple feet away firing the Taurus revolver, Charlie was kneeling over Bob pressing a white bar towel to his face, a towel rapidly turning dark. The long table was on its back and people were crawling around, and at least one was screaming.

The station wagon’s front end was junk clear to the firewall and a woman hung out the hole where the windshield had been, but it had made it into the building far enough that the second set of doors were completely inside the building. The driver was a testament to air bags and seat belts: he was not only alive, but had gotten out of the vehicle and was trying to get the rear driver’s side door open with single-minded intensity, completely ignoring the growing number of infected that were ripping down the edges of the shattered wall just feet away.

Suddenly hands were clutching at him, and he was jerked bodily out the hole.

My breathing was too labored for really accurate shooting, but the range was barely twenty feet and the laser sight helped; I hit arms and torsos as they dug at the wall, and somebody opened up with a shotgun behind and to my right as Charlie got Bob onto our collapsed table and started to drag him to the back, helped by a girl who came from somewhere.

Miguel was stuffing rounds into the Taurus’ cylinder  and my breathing was steadying a bit when a six-foot length of wall slid out and crashed into the sidewalk outside; it caught at least one infected in its kinetic embrace, but there were plenty more to go around. They came in like a mudslide, slow because of the footing, the fact that they all go at once and jam each other up, and the incoming fire, but coming regardless.

The daze helped with focusing as my breathing steadied; I had the stock pulled tight and my head up, using the red dot, bursting skulls, getting a two-fer once or twice, and then a bar of red connected me with my latest shot. Tracer, five to go.

It jolted me a bit, the synapses clicked along a few new paths and I realized Miguel was gone, the infected were a dozen feet away, and somebody was yelling my name behind me. Tactical stepping sideways I popped off four fast ones into the crowd and changed mags. The bar was behind me and to my left Mick and Miguel were blazing away with shotguns; someone on the far side of the room was firing a pistol.

I heaved myself onto the bar and rolled over, gasping when I landed and my knee snarled at me. Good thing I had the prescription support on it.

Bracing my elbows on the bar I opened up again, but the infected were inside; they surged over the pistol-shooter and the rest of the survivors at the long table and then turned for us.

The mob of infected was akin to a single creature: you shot individual heads and they dropped, but the gaps filled as fast as you could shoot and the rest ignored the deaths with a single-minded ferocity that was terrifying.

The twin mags went into the dump pouch and I shoved a fresh thirty rounds home, then jumped from a slap on the back. “Come on!” Charlie screamed, pulling me towards a door. I ducked through as he opened up with a fire extinguisher, backing up as he did so. We were in a storeroom that had cases of beer and kegs in it; a blinking light caught my eye and I ripped a smoke detector down and stomped on it, silencing its wail as Miguel slammed the door and locked it.

“That door won’t hold shit,” Charlie dropped the extinguisher as a hand punched through. “Get in the office.” He pulled the Berretta from his belt and put six rounds through the door at around head height. I followed Miguel into a small, cluttered office with no exits. Charlie backed in, still firing through the far door, which was being literally torn apart by the infected, and Mick pulled shut a security door of strap iron and wrought iron bars and shot the bolts. A metal hollow-core door with a deadbolt closed us off from view; I doubted they could breach that combination with bare hands. I was also sure that they were going to give it a determined try, though.

I slumped against the wall and pulled a cylume from my vest-stripping the plastic tube out of the wrapper I bent it until I heard the capsule pop; a few hard shakes and it glowed with a soft green light illuminating a beat-up desk and two battered file cabinets, all grey government-surplus, a couple mismatched chairs on their way to end of service, stacks of paperwork, a lot of beer posters, and no way out.

There were six of us: me, Charlie, Mick, Miguel, a short thin blond woman in jeans and a tee shirt with blood to her elbows and liberally smeared across her front who was crying, and a husky blond guy I didn’t know who was wearing gray pants  and a Cowboys football jersey.

“Where’s Bob?” Charlie asked the woman, who shook her head, sobbing.

“Stopped…bleeding.”

“Shit.” He slapped the desk, then rummaged in a file cabinet and found a plastic tube of wipes and a new black tee shirt with a beer logo on it. “Here, sit down. Its going to be OK, Jo.”

“This is Jo, my waitress who was waiting for her guy,” he took off his glasses and wiped them. “The Cowboy fan is Chuck, right? If he’s got a brain in his head Ted is still on the roof. That’s all we got.”

The infected were rattling the security door for all they were worth, but it was holding. The sound was banging on the back of my head like fingernails on a chalkboard.

Between the file cabinets were three shotguns sitting on the open case of shells I had found in the RV. “How are we for weapons?” I asked, removing my ear plugs.

Charlie had the Beretta I had given him yesterday, two full magazines, plus most of a box of rounds; Mick had his shotgun and Desert Eagle, Miguel a shotgun and his .38, having lost the Taurus in the confusion outside, and Chuck had a .380 automatic but was out of ammunition. Jo, who cleaned off the blood and changed shirts, couldn’t shoot. So, overall, not bad.

I got the bracket out of the dump pouch and set up the M-4 while Charlie rummaged in drawers. I did it out of reflex, feeling pretty numb. One moment eating ribs, a matter of seconds later cornered like a rat. This sucked.

“We’re going to die in here,” Jo whispered hollowly. Looking around at the exit-less walls, the door rattling under the impact of feet and hands, you couldn’t blame her pessimism.

“Not too likely,” Charlie grunted as he dragged a cardboard shoebox out. “They can’t get through the door.”

“We can’t either,” Chuck pointed out. I recognized him as one of the six who had arrived last night; he was holding up pretty well, all things considered. Miguel passed around a bag of cheap peppermints which at least cut the taste of dust and sheetrock and got the saliva going.

Charlie dumped the shoebox on the desk, spilling a collection of battered hand tools. “We go out through the roof.”

A small pry bar and a hammer and the age of the building made it easier going than it sounded; we had a screwdriver pounded through to open air in no time, and small hole a few minutes later. Charlie was concerned about Ted’s absence; when we had a hole the size of a soccer ball he had Chuck and Miguel boost Jo up to look, but the roof was empty.

When we got it big enough Jo went out and kicked the edges, helping knock boards loose; Mick followed, and then Miguel. We handed up the ammunition and weapons next.

“You want to go next?” Charlie asked as the guys double-teamed a stubborn plank.

I shook my head, staring at the door. “No, I think I’ll stay here a bit.”

“What?”

“The roof just means clean air-we still have to get away. You have the keys to the bus?”

“Yeah, and the keys are in the welding truck.”

“This is my idea: you guys get on the roof and get set, Jo tells me when, and I open the inside door and stand just out of reach from the bars. They’ll go berserk, and I bet it draws the others in. Somebody fast gets to a vehicle and gets it alongside the building and we’re golden.”

Charlie shook his head. “That security door ain’t a vault. They put enough muscle on it, and you won’t make it out.”

“I can drop a couple at the door, impede them. If it starts to go I’ll shut the inside door, which ought to buy enough time to get on the roof. It doesn’t have to be a long time-once a vehicle cranks some will head outside. We don’t get a vehicle we’re dead, damn sure nobody’s going to come rescue us.”

He sighed. “Lemme take a look outside.”

I got the chair and desk positioned just so while I waited; if I had to get out quick I didn’t want anything to go wrong.

Charlie appeared in the hole. “Nearly all are inside, so it might work.”

“You find Ted?”

“Yeah.” His expression said it all. “Its going to be a bit, we need to sort out our end.”

“I’m in no rush.”

It could work as my end wasn’t too risky provided the security door held for the initial couple seconds until I could screw up the front rank. I doubted I would ever get the inside door closed again, so it was an all or nothing proposition. But I couldn’t see any other scheme; the full mass of the infected weren’t going to get lured outside into our field of fire-they would pull back after losing a few. They were patient and in the shade, while we were stuck on a roof with no water in Texas.

This was a lot different than my John Wayne optimism setting off on foot on Sunday, or the do-or-die gung-ho attitude of the truck run on Monday morning: the stakes kept getting higher, the odds leaner, the victory smaller. But the tougher it gets, the tougher you had to get. Anybody can be a Ranger when its dress greens, berets, and spit-shined jump boots, but you found out who the Rangers are and who just went to a school when the mud got deep, the ammo got low, and the dark was closing in. High spirits and cool circumstances and being bad-ass fade fast when it gets ugly, but pride will drive you until your feet bleed and your life ends. The mind always quits before the body, unless you are trained and motivated.

That was what had been pounded into me, anyway. I believed it, although another part of me knew that I could have just slept in today.

Jo appeared at the hole. “Charlie says in a minute.”

“Got it.”

Seconds dragged by; waiting is always the worst. Tension without purpose, stress that called for release. I wanted to do it, I dreaded the start. Mostly I just wanted to do it.

“Charlie says when you are ready.”

I put in my ear plugs, flipped the safety off, wiped the lens clean on the holo-sight, twisted the door knob and pulled, all crisply, methodically, unthinkingly.

An infected was gripping the bars and shaking the security door when the interior door swung open, a chunky Asian male in a one-piece jumpsuit and patent loafers that were grimy and blood-splattered, his skin gray and greasy and splotched with sores. The door frame was working, the anchoring bolts coming loose from the constant assault, but it was holding. For the moment.

He let go with that howling wail that rattles around inside your spinal column talking to nerve clusters that still think in terms of clubs and flint axes, and then I put two into his belly to make sure everybody knew I was here; I didn’t want him dead since he was blocking a lot of access to the door. I stepped up on the chair, blew up a skull behind him, the flashlight confirming that the room was filling up fast. Some blackish blood was flecking his lips but my Asian buddy was still straining at the bars, along with a couple arms reaching past him, so I put one through his left elbow, shot two of the arms reaching around him, and nailed another head in the crowd. I wanted them working on the door, but not too efficiently.

Jumpsuit may have had only one arm to work with, but he was straining hard to overcome the resistance of bolts and latch, with some blood leaking out the entry wounds in his gut but not nearly as much as should be. I nailed another head shot and then carefully tagged jumpsuit in the right lung. The blood at his mouth got a bit frothy, but not much; he was still attacking the door with complete absorption, if only one arm. The look in his milky eyes reminded me of a shark’s: no emotion, no passion, just bone-deep programming. Whoever used to live in that skull was long gone.

Gunfire erupted up above and I quit with my research and starting shooting heads, leaving jumpsuit in place, allowing more to press forward, hopefully giving the rest the impression of meaningful activity and holding everyone’s attention. It wasn’t fast shooting but it was steady; I was trying to kill enough to keep up forward movement without killing so many that they started backing out of the field of fire.

Jo yelling finally caught my attention; she was making a ‘come-on’ gesture so I put one through jumpsuit’s forehead and stepped from chair to desk to file cabinet and then a clumsy scramble onto the roof where Charlie was blasting away with a shotgun and Chuck was helping Jo step over the roof’s edge onto the roof of the bus. He tossed the case of shotgun shells after her and hopped off himself.

The bus was alongside the building, amidst a heavy scattering of dead infected; a shotgun thumped from inside the bus, firing out. Charlie was thumbing shells into his weapon, tears on his cheeks. “You OK?”

“They got Mick. Miguel made it to the bus the second try.”

It took the air out of me. The others were strangers, but Mick…shit. I got four infected before I saw the tracer, and three more afterward. By the time I had the second mag in there weren’t any more in sight-they learned eventually.

I thumped Charlie’s shoulder. “I need to get the truck. I’ll get on the roof, and if Miguel can back it up a bit I’ll get it.”