Valkyrie: Rat in the Dumpster (2 page)

“I know,” Rat said as she stared at the claw. “Always hurts less if you’re not expecting it.”

“No. It didn’t,” Carter said and they both started laughing. “How much blood?”

Rat leaned down and looked at his leg. “Not a lot. It’s not spraying out or anything.”

“Thank God for small favors. Hand me my backpack behind you.”

Rat pulled the navy blue backpack around and unzipped it.

“Look for some little pink plastic tubes. The tops twist off.”

Rat held up a rectangular pink plastic bottle, “This?”

“Perfect,” he said as he took the bottle from her hand and twisted off the top. He held the bottle near the wound and squeezed clear liquid out in a stream. “This is saline. It’ll clean the wound. I hope. Now, get me some gauze. Little square pack.”

Rat found it and Carter winced as he wiped away the blood and saline from the wound. “I need stitches, but we don’t have time. Look for a bottle in there called Derma Flex.”

She held up the bottle, “What is this stuff?”

“Basically, it’s super glue.”

Twenty minutes later, Carter and Rat were walking down the sidewalk into downtown Little Rock. Carter pushed a stretcher piled high with all the medical supplies he could salvage from his ambulance.

Rat watched the wheels clatter across the joints in the concrete, “Did we have to bring all this?”

“Sweetie, I’d have brought everything in the ambulance if I could.”

Several buildings were burning downtown. They’d seen no one moving – human or monster.

Rat frowned at him, “Don’t call me sweetie. I’m not a kid.”

“When you get to my age, everybody looks like a kid. You’ll understand one day.”

Rat looked at him in the meager light. His temples were going grey, but his age was impossible to tell from his face.

“How old are you anyway?” Carter asked. “Thirteen, fourteen?”

Rat’s mouth dropped open, “I’m almost seventeen, you jerk.”

Carter laughed, “I’m sorry, sweetie. Be happy you don’t look your age.”

Rat rolled her eyes.

Carter sighed, “I said it again, didn’t I? I’ll only call you Rat from now on, I promise. What the hell kind of name is that, anyway?”

“Better than the original, take my word for it.”

“You’ve been living on the street, haven’t you?” Carter asked.

Rat nodded, “I was just passing through.”

“Yeah, you got that look.”

Rat frowned, “What look?”

“That ‘I’m going somewhere but I don’t know where’ look.”

She ran ahead and leaned into the open door of a police cruiser, “Jackpot!”

Carter caught up to her with the stretcher, “Don’t run ahead of me like that.”

Rat stood up holding a gun belt, “It’s a Glock 17. I know Glocks.” She wrapped the belt around her waist.

Carter stared at her, “What could you possibly know…”

“Glock 17. Nine millimeter,” she dropped the clip into her hand. “Seventeen shot standard magazine. Three safeties: trigger, firing pin, and drop. All deactivated by the trigger safety.”

Carter shook his head.

“Sister Mathilda at the orphanage was a gun nut. She used to take me to Manassas to the gun range on Saturdays. Man, she would have been in deep shit if they’d known,” she popped the magazine back in place and put the Glock in its holster. She leaned back in, “There’s a pump action Mossberg in here if you want it.”

“I don’t know anything about guns,” Carter said. He leaned over her shoulder. The inside of the cruiser was a charnel house. The officer had not gone quietly, but he had gone. His dismembered body was lying across the front seats. “Oh, my God.”

“Sorry, should have warned you,” Rat said as she handed him the shotgun. She picked up a box of shells from the floorboard and handed them to him.

Carter looked into her eyes, “The man’s dead, doesn’t that…”

“Bother me? Yeah. It does. He was probably a decent guy. But, he’s dead now. He’s moved on. We haven’t,” she didn’t mean it to sound cold. It was the way things were, nothing more.

Carter looked around at the growing shadows, “We need to get off the street.”

“It’s your city, where are we going?”

“Safest place I can think of – hopefully, it isn’t burning.”

“Cats? Seriously?” Rat asked. They were standing in front of an enormous theater with massive Greek columns in front. A banner waved in the breeze off the lake: The Robinson Center presents its Grand Reopening Performance of Cats.

“The walls are thick concrete,” Carter said as he maneuvered the stretcher onto a handicapped ramp.

Rat threw her hands up, “The entry is made of glass.”

“We can barricade it, Rat. Trust me. It’s either this or we hike across the bridge to the FEMA office – and I sure as hell don’t want to walk through there at night, do you?”

Rat shook her head and put her hand on the Glock’s grip. The gun comforted her. “Carter, we can stay the night – but this place is a death trap. Promise me we’ll book out of here at dawn, please?”

Carter started to say something.

“Stop right there! Don’t come any closer!” a woman’s voice called from the glass door to the Robinson Center.

Rat pulled the Glock and took aim.

Carter stepped into her line of fire, “Wait! Don’t shoot, Rat.”

“Dude, never block my shot. Are you nuts?” Rat complained.

“Carter? Is that you?” the woman asked.

Rat could see her now: a blonde woman wearing a blue police uniform.

“Yeah, Katy, it’s me,” Carter called toward the door. He turned back to Rat, “Put it down.”

“Hey, you tell her to put hers down first.”

“Rat, I know her. She’s a cop. Put the gun down.”

“Behind you!” the blonde cop yelled.

Rat spun on her heel toward the street.

A dark shape was running toward them from across the road. Even at this range, she could hear the raspy breathing of one of the black ink zombies.

Rat fired twice.

The creature jerked backward as both bullets hit it square in the heart.

It stopped running in the middle of the street, looking down at the black stains on its shirt. Then it screamed and ran straight at Rat.

She fired again. This time the bullet rocked the monster’s head back as its forehead exploded.

Head shot,
Rat thought.
Of course it would take a…

The creature staggered to the left and shook its head. Then it screamed and ran toward her again.

“No fucking way,” Rat whispered as she fired round after round toward it.

Carter raised the twelve gauge and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.

He ran toward Rat and shoved the shotgun into her hand, “Here. Make this work.”

Rat racked a shell and fired.

Five feet away, the monster’s head exploded in a spray of black and gray. He tumbled onto the steps at Rat’s feet.

Rat pumped another shell just to make sure. “I shot it in the head. Nine-millimeter. Head shot didn’t kill it. That’s not possible.”

“Well, the shotgun took care of it.”

She looked at him, her eyes wide, “Because I blew its head off completely. How many shells you got?”

“Fifteen.”

“Oh, man. We’re going to need more shotguns, Carter.”

The blonde cop stepped up beside them, “You two better get inside. These things have been prowling around here for hours.”

We’re all going to die
, Rat thought.

The marble atrium had windows floor to ceiling thirty feet high. The few occupants of the Robinson Center had piled whatever they could find against the bottom six feet of the glass. Hand carts, tables, and chairs had been stacked haphazardly across the atrium.

“They don’t seem to pay much attention unless they can see you,” the policewoman said as she came in beside them and chained the front door shut. She held out her hand to Rat, “Katy Ingraham.”

She nodded, “Rat.”

Katy looked at Carter who just smiled and shook his head.

“Nice to meet you…”

“Carter, we need to get out of here,” Rat said. “It isn’t safe.”

“Katy, anybody hurt?” Carter asked.

“Scrapes and bruises. We had one get bit,” Katy said as she looked at the floor. “He didn’t make it.”

Carter pushed the stretcher of supplies toward the open door to the theater, “I’ll check everyone over.”

Rat stepped in front of the stretcher, “Hey, man. I’m serious. We need to get out of here. We’re sitting ducks in here.”

“Rat,” Carter said. “You need to calm down. We’re safer in here than we are out there.”

“No, Carter. We’re not. Out there, we can see what’s coming. If they storm this place, we’re toast.”

“It’s not so bad. It’s more secure than it looks,” Katy said. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

Carter smiled, “Go on with Katy. I need to go help these people.”

“They just finished renovating this place,” Katy said as they walked. She pointed at the emergency exits. “Those doors only open from the inside. As you can see, we’ve barricaded them.”

They reached the end of the hallway. She pointed to a glass doorway. It was also barricaded. “That’s the entrance to the parking garage. We blocked it completely. We even pushed a couple of tons of junk into the stairwell. Nothing can come up into the center.”

“Look, you’ve done a good job, it’s just… Boxes are meant to be opened. Sooner or later, something will.”

Katy smiled and Rat found herself warming up to the cop, “Okay, Rat. What do you suggest we do?”

Rat was used to adults patronizing her. They all did it. But, she didn’t sense this in the woman’s tone. She bit her lower lip and looked back down the hall to the entrance. “The weakest spot is the front entrance. That’s where they’ll break through. Chain all the inner doors to the theater except one. Setup barricades there.”

Katy smiled, “A kill zone?”

“We’ll take a few out with us. Of course, if those flying things come back it won’t matter.”

“Come on,” Katy said. “Time you met everyone else.”

The Robinson Center Theater was cavernous. Thousands of people could sit in the main area or in the balcony above and watch the play or listen to the orchestra below. But tonight, only a handful of people sat near the stage.

“This is everyone?” Rat whispered as they walked down the aisle.

“Yes,” Katy said. “Eight, counting you and Carter.”

“Ow! Damn, that hurt worse than the claw did in the first place,” an old man yelled from his seat on the edge of the stage.

“Sorry, Mr. Turner,” Carter said as he wiped at the wound on the man’s upper arm with a piece of gauze.

“Call me Clint, Doc.”

“You were lucky. Any deeper it might have cut something important.”

“Rat, this is Clint Turner,” Katy said.

The old man squinted at her with sharp blue eyes above his long white beard, “Rat? What the hell kind of name is that?”

“Mine.”

The old man smiled and laughed, “I like her.”

“Clint, Rat here thinks we need a kill zone at the theater entrance,” Katy said as she pointed back at the door at the top of the aisle. “What do you think?”

“What do I think? What kind of damned fool question is that? That’s what I told you when we first barricaded the doors.”

Katy looked at Rat and smiled, “Well, I’m going to leave it to you two tactical geniuses.”

“We’re going to need more of those tables like you stacked against the windows out front,” Rat said.

“There’s a ton of them back stage,” Clint said. He stared at her hip. “You know how to shoot that Glock?”

“Yeah, but we need shotguns. You have to take their heads off.”

“No, you don’t. You need to hit the brainstem. Aim just below the chin or in the mouth. With that nine-millimeter piece of crap you’d best try for the throat – less bone to get in the way.”

Rat shook her head, “How do you know that?”

The old man reached down and picked up an AR-15, “Because I stood up on the roof and shot the bastards till I figured it out.”

As Rat and Clint stacked tables against the open door at the top of the theater, Clint told her he had come into Little Rock for supplies that morning. His home was thirty-five miles northwest of the city.

“You some kind of hermit or something?” Rat asked.

Clint scratched at his beard, “What makes you say that?”

“I don’t know, you just seem like a hermit.”

“Yeah, well, just ‘cause a man chooses to live by himself in the woods and prepare for the breakdown of western civilization don’t necessarily make him a hermit. Makes him a visionary. In this case, makes me look damn near like a genius, huh?” Clint said as he steadied a wooden table across the doorway. “’Course, I was expecting government black helicopters, the new world order, or terrorists. I wasn’t expecting space aliens and zombies.”

“You think they were aliens?” Rat asked.

“Well, they sure weren’t terrorists.”

“Los demonios,” a woman said. She looked to be in her mid-thirties. She was carrying two bottles of water and pressed one into Rat’s hand.

“Gracias, Consuela,” Clint said as he took the second bottle of water from her. “Rat, Consuela Munoz.”

“Los Demonios?” Rat repeated.

“Demons. From the Bible. The winged creatures were demons,” she reached out and touched the crucifix around Rat’s neck. “A good Catholic girl like you should know that.”

“Oh, I’m not Catholic. The nuns at the home gave me this.”

“Mama! I have something on the radio,” a boy called out from the front of the stage.

Rat looked at Clint.

He smiled at her, “Go on, Rat. I’ll take first watch on the barricade.”

“This is the Global News Network broadcasting on shortwave from Los Angeles, California. The demon cloud is now eight hours from Los Angeles. We have lost contact with our affiliates in Denver, Saint Louis, and Chicago, in addition to the entire east coast,” the announcer’s voice said over the small battery powered radio in Luis Munoz’s hands.

“The phenomenon evidently began in Charlottesville, Virginia twenty hours ago. As the cloud reaches an area, all communication is lost from the region. People who have managed to leave the cloud shrouded area are telling stories of winged creatures killing indiscriminately. There are also uncomfirmed reports of creatures who infect people with a rabies like illness. The press is referring to these creatures as ghouls because they have been observed consuming the bodies of the dead.”