War of the Undead (Day One): The Apocalypse Crusade (A Zombie Tale) (17 page)

Those infected had no construction of reality beyond the need to vent their hate. They swarmed her, stomping her and punching her until her suit was little more than a bag holding blood and meat. They then tore into the plastic and, as Wilson watched in paralytic shock, they began eating her like a pack of jackals.

He turned and fled up the stairs, his face behind the plastic twisted with mental agony. Despite the horror he had witnessed, he was dreadfully slow. Terror and a middle-aged, sedentary life had robbed him of his strength, leaving him without either of the classic options: fight or flight. The best he could manage was a dull trudge and had he been followed closely by any of the infected people they certainly would've dragged him down, too.

Reeling like a drunk he stumbled onto the fourth floor. “We... need...help!” he yelled.

To the left of the elevators and the central stairs was the south “wing” where the BSL-3 labs were; to the right were the BSL-4 labs where only two people were in view: Chuck and Stephanie. They hadn't seemed to have heard Wilson's cry.

Wilson tugged off his hood, gulped down two huge breaths of air and cried, “Singleton! We...need to...barricade this door. Ms. Glowitz, help him with that table. Come on!”

The earlier gunshots and the urgency in Wilson’s voice got them up and moving and while they struggled the table through the doors, Wilson gripped the stairway door handle with both hands. Seconds later his strength was tested. The metal handle was almost pulled out of his grip, but with his arms shaking and cords rising from his neck he held on, but barely.

“Open up!” a woman screamed. “Give me the fucking cure!”

Wilson was shocked to realize that this was one of the nurses, Jill Sams, all one-hundred and thirty pounds of her. She was practically ripping the door from his grip. “Jill, it’s me, Dr. Wilson. There’s no cure just yet. But…”

“Liar!” she raged. The door slid inward three inches before he was able to stop it. “We know you have it. We know you’re just playing tricks on us. Now give it.”

“I’m not lying, Jill,” he said desperately. His gloved hands were slippery and it was only a matter of time before the door was pulled from his grasp. “Listen, all this was just as much a shock to us as it was to you. Remember this morning, how we had coffee together? We talked about your son?”

“Is that when you poisoned me you motherfucker?” She grunted and heaved; the door slid further back. The strength in his arms was ebbing.

“Jill, please! I didn’t poison you. There is no cure. You have to believe me.” He glanced back at Chuck and the others but they were so absorbed in trying to move the table they didn’t see his predicament.

Now the door was far enough back that Jill was able to jab her foot in the crack of the door. Her face appeared next--her jaw was smeared with Dr. Sinha's blood. “If you don't have the cure, you can at least make me clean.” She was staring at his neck where he could feel his pulse pounding—it was an obscene, hungry look that seemed to feed into her mania, lending her strength.

Jill pulled harder and the door opened relentlessly, bringing Wilson into the stairwell with it. Suddenly, he let go, hoping she'd go flying, but she grabbed the arm of his suit and started pulling him into her embrace. Her mouth gaped and from it came a smell like death, like rotting flesh, like an old grave.

Compared to her, Wilson was kitten-weak and despite the size difference between them, Jill flung him down.

“Don’t,” Wilson begged.

She had him pinned and for just a second she gloated and leered over him, before slashing in with her hell mouth gaping open. He would’ve been ripped open from ear-to-ear except there came a smart “crack” sound and she sat up looking confused.

There was a man on the stairs. He had come slinking up quietly and in his hands was a length of a 2x4. He cocked it over his shoulder like it was a baseball bat and swung for the fences, striking her across the cheek. Jill fell off Wilson and stared up at the ceiling.

“Come on, hoss,” the man said. His face was twisted in disgust as he nudged Jill down the stairs with the beam. “Get up, Doc. I done knocked a few of them out, but there’s a more headin’ up, lookin’ to raise cain.”

Lying on his back in his bio-suit, Wilson was like a turtle and was slow to get to his feet. “Mr. Burke?” he asked as he realized who the man was. “Where have you been? I thought you ran away.”

John didn’t like the way that came out, like he was yellow or something. “I never ran. I have a daughter to look after. I jes opened that door downstairs to make them think I was runnin’. I done reckoned I’d get caught in the daylight and so I jes found a spot to burrow down in. Then I saw these…whatever they is. They don’t barely look like human beans.”

“How come you’re not like them? You’re…you’re normal. If you had the same treatment you should’ve…Look,” Wilson said, pointing down the stairs. It was another one of
them
.

Burke grunted at it and then cast a glance at Wilson’s sweating face and his trembling hands and said, “I’ll hold the door, y'all go scoot them along with that barricade.”

Wilson hurried away, the plastic of his suit making a friendly swishing noise. John set his length of wood aside and confidently took hold of the door handle. Holding the door shut against one of them was not so easy as John had assumed it would be. The infected man, and John used the term loosely as these things didn’t seem all that human to him, was incredibly strong.

Very soon John found himself weakening and, just as it had with Wilson, the door began to slide inward once again.

Chuck Singleton arrived when John's arms were beginning to tremble. “Leggo,” he ordered. John released his failing grip and a split second later Chuck slammed his shit-kicking cowboy boot into the door, sending the diseased man flying down the stairs. His head fetched up hard against the cement, making a grisly
crack!
sound that suggested his skull had caved in. Regardless, the infected man scrambled to his feet and made to climb back up.

"What the hell?" Chuck whispered.

"Don't let them touch you," Wilson yelled from the hallway.

"You don't have to worry 'bout that none," Chuck murmured. He had no intention of letting any of them freaks get close. He and Stephanie had hauled a conference table to the stairwell and now he heaved it down the stairs at the infected man. It struck him square and drove him back against the wall.

“Much obliged for the hep,” Burke said, calmly, in his Arkansas twang.

“If y’all could hold the table in place, I’d be mighty pleased,” Chuck drawled right back. The weight and the leverage of the table allowed John to pin the man in place as Wilson, Chuck and Stephanie brought more furniture. Chairs and tables were stacked high into the stairwell creating an effective barricade against the single infected man.

Unfortunately, there were many more of
them
. Half a dozen infected people came up and began tugging down the makeshift barricade, working tirelessly. Soon, Wilson began to panic.

"Stephanie, go check the north stairs. Run!"

She was back in thirty seconds, coughing and gasping. "There are more of them. They're...they're growling. What's wrong with them?"

"I don't know. But they're dangerous. Go find Dr. Lee. Tell her we have lost containment on the second and third floors...and tell her that all three stairwells have to be blocked up. And tell her that they're killing people now.”

Deck and his second in command, Ray, entered the south stairwell half a minute after Lacy Freeman's second gunshot. They advanced with guns drawn, making their way to the flight of stairs just above the third floor. It was there they encountered nearly the entire medical staff, looking crazed out of their minds. Just behind them was Rory Vickers.

“Rory, where’s the shooter?” Deck asked. His eyes roved over the fifteen or so people, looking for the gun, sensing the danger in the little crowd and not quite understanding it. The group was primarily made up of women; nurses and a few cafeteria workers. They were leering up at the two security men in a way that made Deck's stomach uneasy.

“Why are you with the scientists?” Rory demanded. His face was tortured by a combination of rage and confusion. It turned him ugly. “You should be with us. Come down and be with us.”

Deck and Ray glanced at each other uneasily and took a step back. “What are you talking about?” Deck asked. “There is no
us
just at the moment. We’re all in a quarantine situation. There’s nothing up here that you can’t find down there. So, please stop, all of you, before someone gets hurt.”

The ones in front kept coming and both Ray and Deckard had to give up more ground, reaching the landing midway between the third and fourth floors. “I said stop!” Deck bellowed, not quite knowing what he was going to do if they ignored him. 

“Then give us the cure,” Rory demanded. “We know there’s a cure.”

"Yes, the cure! The cure!" The group began to shriek, demanding a cure that Deckard was pretty certain didn't exist.

"There is no cure," he said. The crowd was only four steps below him. They weren't stopping. He raised his gun. "I said stop! Go back..."

Just then Lacy Freeman fired the pistol she had taken from Rory, earlier. In the enclosed space it cracked the air so loudly that it stung the ears. The bullet missed wide--Deck’s double tap did not. He fired twice in the space of a fraction of a second, shooting through a six-inch window between Rory’s shoulder and the left ear of one of the cafeteria workers. The first bullet holed Lacy above the heart, the second passed through the hollow of her throat and out the back of her neck carrying blood and bone in a spray that spattered the wall behind her.

She dropped, but before she hit the ground there was a fourth shot from right beside Deckard. Ray had fired his weapon, which made no sense to Deck. Their assailant was down and the others were unarmed. To shoot like that was so out of character for Ray that Deck immediately knew something wasn’t right.

As if in slow motion, he turned to his friend of eleven years only to see him crumpling forward, falling down the stairs, his muscles, after the final convulsive jerk that had caused him to shoot his pistol, had gone flaccid. Too late, Deckard reached for him, but his hand slid off Ray’s suit coat without gaining any purchase and the man fell down the stairs into the greedy hands of the crowd below.

That Ray was ex-military was obvious in a number of ways: his trim build, the way he carried himself and his weapon, the fact that he always backed into parking spots, and how he always wore his hair high and tight. Deck could see the hole in the back of his head through his razored hair.

Confused, Deck turned halfway around to see who had shot him, but there was no one behind them. There was, however, a gouge in the concrete of the stairwell wall where Lacy’s shot had missed. Ray had been hit by a ricocheting bullet.

“Fuck!” Deckard cried in a mixture of anger, sadness, and shock that once again death had reached out its long, bony finger to touch those around him while leaving him inexplicably alive. Hot misery wanted to come boiling up out of him, but there was no time for it.

A hand scrabbled at his dress shoes, marring the shine he had worked so diligently on. He took another step up the stairs, moving just out of reach, giving himself time to analyze the situation. He came to the very quick conclusion: that these people were crazy!

The ones in front had launched themselves at Ray’s corpse and were tearing at his flesh. They were all over Ray, and as Deck stood there dumbfounded, he saw a small white hand with fingernails painted pink, reach out and dig into his friend’s face, gouging the flesh as though he was made of cream cheese.

Deck raised his gun for half a second and then lowered it. They were clearly dangerous and crazy and yet they were still human. They were suffering from some sort of mold-induced mania, which, in the eyes of the law, was not sufficient justification for killing them outright.

Felling he had only one option left to him, he turned to run back up the stairs, but stopped and stared in horror--Lacy Freeman was pulling herself off the ground.

"Fuck," he said again, this time in a whisper. It was impossible that she was still alive and even more impossible that she could still move. The holes in her chest oozed a thick, black blood, the exit wounds in back looked like he could put his fist into them.

He stared without understanding until another one of the nurses, a slim little number he had chatted up twice the day before with the idea of asking her out, made it to the landing. There was murder in her eyes. Without hesitation she attacked. His reaction was not instinctual. Again the idea of being legally responsible for every death entered into his calculations—when all was said and done, who would believe that this young lady was a true danger to a man of his size? Instead of shooting her, he snapped a front kick into her sternum, sending her flying back into the rest, bowling them over.

Deck left them scrabbling over themselves and ran back upstairs. At the top he found a gaggle of scientists staring at him. There was fear gathered in the air around them and they cringed at his stern look.

“What did you do?” Milner asked

“Only what I had to. The med staff on the second floor have all been infected.”