This Rotten World (Book 2): We All Fall Down (20 page)

The room was filled with all
sorts of weaponry, guns, knives, even a couple of swords that had been
confiscated from refugees. The group of people that they had followed were
gearing up, picking up weapons, scrounging for ammunition, and shoving whatever
they could in their pockets.

"Hell yeah," Blake said
as he strolled over to a table and lifted up a gunny sack full of weapons and
peered inside. To Mort, he looked like a redneck Santa Claus. The bag was full
of the weapons the soldiers had confiscated from Mort as soon as they had
loaded Blake onto the helicopter. Blake set the bag on the floor and rooted
through it. He smiled for the first time since he had lost his hearing as he
held up his hunting rifle. He admired it as if he had just discovered the Holy
Grail, and then he held it up to his lips and kissed it. Mort watched as he first
loaded it  and then flung the rifle over his shoulder. "Grab that bag, and
pick out a gun, man," Blake said to him.

Mort did as he was told,
although he knew next to nothing about guns. A tall white man spoke to him as
he attempted to load some bullets into a handgun. "You guys looking to get
out of here?"

Mort looked at the man, smiled,
and said, "You show me the way, and I'm right there with you."

"You know how to use that
thing?" the man asked him.

"Not really," Mort
said.

"Here," the man held
out his hand, and Mort handed him the gun. He cocked the slide, showed Mort
where the safety was, and then handed the gun back to him. "Just aim and
squeeze."

Blake stood guard at the door,
his rifle in his hands. Mort was loaded down with a bag full of guns and ammo,
and the gun in his hands felt like a living thing. He looked around the room
and saw that everyone else was armed as well. Adrenaline shot through him, and
Mort understood that this was the way out. This was how he was going to
survive. He smiled in the gloomy room.

"Let's go," the white
man said.

****

They followed him, weapons in
their hands.

On the main concourse, hell had
erupted. Zeke and his group emerged from the lower level of the concourse to
find it overrun with the dead. Outside, helicopters were firing into a seething
mass of the dead. Inside, the dead were advancing. Soldiers who had spent all
of their ammo were swinging their rifles like baseball bats. Refugees were
pushing and shoving with their hands, trying to keep the dead off of them. Some
of them were successful, most of them were not.

The group attempted to head out
of the main doors, but the mass of people there was too confusing, too mixed up
with the dead. They couldn't even fire their weapons among all of the confusion.
The emergency lights created shadows that made it hard to tell who was alive
and who wasn't. They retreated in the other direction, heading to the backside
of the Coliseum. Refugees and soldiers flooded around them, but the dead were
not there yet.

Zeke looked for an emergency
exit sign. All thoughts of hopping in a Stryker went out the window the moment
he saw the wall of dead that were coming their way.
How many were there?
He
had no time to ponder the odds they were facing, as an emergency exit loomed
ahead of them, its lights glowing red in the gloom of the concourse.

"Hey!" a voice yelled
as Zeke reached the door. Zeke spun around, the automatic rifle he had
confiscated at the ready. It was Private Bryant. "Where are you
going?"

Zeke smiled at the man.
"Away from here. If you were smart, you'd come with us."

Private Bryant thought about it,
but Zeke could see the duty in his heart tugging at the logic in his mind.
"I can't," he said.

"Suit yourself. Good
luck," Zeke said as he kicked open the door to the emergency exit. With
that, the group turned their back on Private Bryant, and pounded down a
stairwell. Lou gave the Private a lone wave of thanks, and then the door
clanged shut behind them.

 Zeke felt sorry for Private
Bryant. He was, like a lot of the soldiers dying in the Coliseum, a good man.
He would have been useful. But that was life in the military. He had his
orders, and he was going to follow through on them. Zeke's only order was to
keep himself alive. If he could save some others in the process, well, then
that was good too.

Private Bryant's last moments
were a nightmare. He watched as the group disappeared through the door, taking
with them his last best chance for survival. Other refugees fled through the
door, but the majority ran wide-eyed into the arena. He knew that staying in
the Coliseum was a death sentence, but he chose it anyway.

Standing on the concourse, he
pulled his M4 up to ready position as refugees flowed around him like a river.
He called to soldiers as they ran past, and flicked the selector on his rifle
to semi-automatic. Bryant looked down the sight of his rifle, and lined the red
dot up with the forehead of an Annie. He squeezed the trigger, and its brains
exploded on the concrete wall of the Coliseum. Another one took its place, and
he fired again. Some running soldiers skidded to a stop next to him, and they
did the same, his calm spreading to the soldiers around him.

He concentrated on his breathing.
Though his heart was trying to beat its way out of his chest, he breathed in
through his nose and out through his mouth, squeezing the trigger on the
exhale. Still the tide advanced. The line of soldiers shuffled backwards now,
the sound of rifle fire smacking off of the concrete walls, and he could hear
nothing.

He saw the emergency exit slide
by on his right as he moved backwards. He should have gone with them; he saw
that now. His rifle was empty, so he pulled the magazine out and slapped
another one home.

Private Bryant screamed and spun
as he bumped into something behind him. It was another soldier. The dead had
encircled the entire arena. The soldiers looked at each other, resignation in
their eyes. On the other side of the soldier, another wall of the dead was
approaching. They were going to be sandwiched between two masses of the dead.
The soldiers funneled backwards through an entrance to the arena floor, their
rifles firing away. They shuffled backwards down the stairs as the Annies
advanced.

If they had managed to kill with
every single bullet they had, they might have had a chance, but they missed
quite often. Bryant counted himself a fair shot, but he was only taking one
down for every two shots fired.

He looked over his shoulder as
he backed down the concrete steps that led to the floor of the arena. He
imagined that this was what hell looked like. The refugees, what few there were
left, huddled in the center of the arena with no place left to go. All around
the arena, the dead streamed in from the entrances. In the distance, they
looked like trains of slow moving ants.

Bryant and the other soldiers
backed up, firing and killing as many of them as they could, but he could see
that it wasn't going to be enough. His fears were confirmed when he pulled the
trigger and nothing happened. He felt his pockets for a fresh magazine, but he
had used them all up.

The soldier next to him, tapped
him on the shoulder and handed him a magazine. He dropped the spent one and
slammed the last one home. The dead were hungry. They wanted him. They wanted
them all. Bryant looked to the sky, begging for help from someone, anyone.
God... the devil... a giant space peanut, he would take assistance from anyone
or anything. There was no answer.

Bryant spun on his heel, the
rifle in hand, and he approached the refugees, leaving his brethren behind.
"Who wants to die?" he yelled.

The refugees looked at him, fear
on their faces. Tears ran down their faces.  A child clung to his mother's
jeans. Then it dawned on the refugees exactly what he was offering. A woman
raised her hand, and Bryant did what he had to do. He did what he was sworn to
do. He protected the woman from becoming one of them. One squeeze of the
trigger and she was saved. The refugees crowded around him, volunteering for the
easy way out, volunteering to go to the afterlife with no blood on their hands,
and without having experienced the painful sensation of human teeth tearing at
their flesh.

"You're a saint," they
said as they lined up in front of the muzzle of his rifle.

The line went quick, and when
his rifle clicked empty he shrugged in apology at the remaining refugees. He
looked around the arena and saw that they were surrounded. There was no way
out. He flipped his rifle around, and swung at the first Annie that approached
him. He connected solidly with the rifle, but the creature still came. He swung
again, knocking it to the ground. His arms and hands stung from the impact.

All around him, the people
fought for their lives. He stumbled over one of the bodies he had executed, and
went to the ground. The dead lay on top of him, grasping and squeezing at his
body. He grit his teeth as they crushed his arms and legs in their fervor.
Screams filled the arena floor, and then the lights went out for good as the
emergency lights of the Coliseum died.

Private Bryant heaved one last time,
freeing himself from the Annie that was on his chest. He rose, kicking and
punching. He didn't know if he was punching the living or the dead. None of it
mattered. He walked over soft chunks of flesh, unmoving beneath his feet,
pushing and shoving his way through the nightmare. Screaming among the screams.
Grunting, heaving, fighting for every last breath. In the darkness a rifle
exploded, and he moved toward the source of light. Someone was still alive.
Someone was still fighting, just like him. Arms groped around him as he swam
through the sea of the dead, towards the source of the rifle fire.

"Fire in the hole!" a
voice yelled, and there was a clank to his left. The world lit with a brilliant
white light. He had no time to blink as shrapnel tore through his body. It was
over quick. When he rose again, he felt no pain. He stumbled about in the
darkness, hungry.

Katie was in the middle of the
pack. Behind her, she could hear Brian's labored breathing as they pounded down
the stairwell. When they reached the bottom, they readied themselves, with Zeke
taking the lead. Katie watched him, desire in her heart, as he pushed open the
door.

The door opened onto the loading
docks underneath the backside of the Coliseum, and the sight was anything but
calming. While not completely jammed full of the dead, it was going to be a
tough slog to get out of there. They moved through the door, their feet shuffling
them over the concrete. Zeke was the first to fire, and she saw one of the dead
drop to the ground. As if he had given the order, the rest of the group opened
fire as well. Katie brought up her handgun, the one that Fred Walker had given
her, and she lined the sight up with the head of a hulking white man, his eye
hanging by a scrap of flesh. Her shot missed the eye, but buried itself neatly
in his forehead.

They advanced through the
covered area, mowing the dead down as if it were a walk in the park. Behind
her, Katie could hear Brian's snot-nosed whelp shrieking in terror. She glanced
over her shoulder to see Brian's sweaty face, shining in the moonlight, his
child's face buried in his shoulder. The sound grated on her ears, and she
wanted nothing more than to turn around and put a bullet through the brat's
head. This wasn't a world for children. It wasn't a world for family either.
She bit her lower lip and fired again, as the group stepped out from underneath
the overhang of the loading dock's roof.

The sky was clear, lit by a
sliver of moon, which was good because the streetlights were out, and the city
was a mass of darkness, seething with the dead. She shivered, as they shot
their way through the throng of the dead surrounding the Coliseum.

They were almost on the other
side of the mass when disaster struck. The worried wailing and whimpering of
Brian's child had changed; it was now more of a shriek. She turned around to
see Brian gnawing on the child's neck. Blood flowed from her wound, and his beard
was turning a true red color. Without thinking, she aimed her pistol at his
head and shot him dead. His long lanky body collapsed to the pavement, and the
girl rolled from his arms.

Blood shone black in the
moonlight as Katie stood over the injured girl. Her teenage sister was there,
placing her hands over the wound in her neck, and putting up a fuss. Katie
looked around to see the others gathered in a circle, the dead approaching
them. Their weapons were at their sides, and they all seemed lost. Katie did
what she thought was right, what the cold-hearted presence that had taken root
in her chest told her to do. She shoved the older girl to the side with her
shoe, and then fired a bullet through the brain of her sister.

"Let's move," she
yelled, as if she had just stopped to tie her shoelace. The looks from the
others in the group bothered her, but not enough to stand there and become a
meal for the dead that were encircling them.

****

Lou picked up Jane, pulling her
away from all that remained of her family. Now they were just two more slabs of
meat lying in the road. If he had been inclined, he could have left her there,
and let the entire family tree turn brown and die right there. Yet, he didn't.
He never wanted to see people hurt, and he had seen so much of it over the last
couple of days. He grabbed the girl and threw her over his shoulder, where she
lay like a dead fish sobbing her sister's name.

He tapped Zeke on the chest as
he ran by, and they moved through the crowd, firing into the dead. They were
wandering, spun off from the Coliseum like a spark looking to take hold in the
night sky, trying to find a place to light before it turned dark forever.

Katie ran ahead of them, in the
front, her revolver blazing away. After every six shots, she would drop back
and refill the revolver with bullets from her pocket, quick, efficient, and
heartless, the way she had been back at the road next to the Coliseum.
Where
were they going?

They moved east, away from the
river, sticking to the middle of the road. There were cars abandoned
everywhere, but the dead thinned out ahead of them. They could move around them
now without firing, but there was no way that they would be able to stop. The
girl over his shoulder was heavy, and he knew that she would have to run with
them sooner or later. They had gone three blocks, uphill, and he wasn't yet
recovered from his flight from two days before, when they had escaped the
tenement. The muscles in his thighs already burned.

He could see that some of the
others were in much the same shape. The other black man in the group, the one
that had the telltale signs of homelessness about him, was hop-limping up the
road, a heavy bag of guns thrown over his shoulder. The white cowboy stuck
close to his side, his head constantly scanning from side to side. Zeke moved
forward calmly, he seemed indestructible.

To his right, he saw Rudy
huffing and puffing, digging in his bag for something, and Lou thought,
He
isn't long for this world
. Except for Clara, Joan's somewhat hobbled friend,
the women of the group seemed to be in much better condition than the men.
Funny how that worked.

"Hey!" he yelled to
the girl slung over his shoulder. Her sobbing had lessened, and her arms hung
slack. "Hey!" he yelled again. "You think you can walk? We're
never going to make it if I have to carry you the whole way." The others
looked over at him, the small bit of conversation seeming out of place among
their mostly silent group as they weaved around the dead.

The girl said nothing. "I
need you to wake up, girl. This is life or death now; we ain't got time to be
sad."

"Shhh," Katie yelled
at him from the front of the group. Lou didn't appreciate the command to be
quiet. He was about to say something, when a sudden noise shut him up. It was
the sound of engines. They held their ground as the sound became louder, and
that's when they saw it, the vehicle that had destroyed the fences, rounding
the corner, its headlights shining directly on them. There was a line of cars
following the vehicle, less than there had been at the Coliseum. Lou hoped that
they had lost a good amount of people.

Lou set the girl down on the
ground, and said, "Playtime's over, girl."

"Be ready," Zeke
hissed.