War of the Undead (Day One): The Apocalypse Crusade (A Zombie Tale) (43 page)

The zombie Von Braun greeted them and was immediately smacked in the face with Burke's mop and, when Wilson and Chuck stabbed him with their makeshift spears, he went right over. The other passengers were so eager to escape they poured out of the elevator and like water, swept all around the struggling zombie, some trampling him in the process. They didn't care. They figured their nightmare would be over as soon as they got out of the building.

In fifteen seconds they were out in the cool, wet night. Only Stephanie remained with the men and it was not by choice. She had been one of those who had fainted on the fourth floor, her tumored lungs unable to handle the smoke. On the elevator ride down had she regained consciousness and now she could only stand by leaning against a wall.

"Run," Chuck yelled to her. She took one step before dropping to the ground.

"Go, get her out of here," Wilson said to Chuck. "We got this."

Burke, who was struggling to keep Von Braun pinned with the mop didn't think they
had
anything. As far as he could tell they were only pissing the zombie off. He kept wondering what would happen when it got to its feet? What would he and Wilson do then? A mop and a sharp stick simply weren't real weapons and they weren't much in the way of warriors. Besides this wasn't a part of his plan. Burke still had Jaimee to consider. She was the only thing that really mattered to him.

Chuck went to Steph and hoisted her in his arms and then swayed, nearly fainting as well. Blinking like a drunk, he waited until his head cleared before heading for the lobby doors.

"They made it out," Wilson said of Chuck and Stephanie. "We should go, too."

The two men stepped back from the zombie who struggled to his feet, swearing in a weird staccato of mismatched curse words. John was sure it was going to attack them and he honestly felt bad for Wilson, because he planned on running if it did and he was fairly certain he could out run the middle-aged doctor. He was amazed when Von Braun did not attack the two and headed for the elevator instead.

Wilson and Burke looked at each other, both thinking the same thing: Deckard and Thuy were going to die. Deckard was weaponless and Thuy was barely surviving the heat. Neither of them gave Riggs a thought. In their minds he was already dead; he was just waiting for his body to turn into one of
them
to make it official.

"Ain't nothin' we cun do," Burke said, with a shrug, before he headed for the front doors. For a few seconds Wilson spluttered angrily at Burke's callousness; then an almighty crash occurred somewhere high up in the building causing the very foundation to tremble. Part of the structure had given way. The doctor, realizing that Burke's assessment was spot on, hurried after him, afraid that if he waited any longer he'd be buried alive.

He found that being outside was only a little bit safer. Everywhere there were screams.

The scientists had rushed out into the rain, rejoicing over their liberation and smiling up into the falling rain. With the light of the building behind them, they were all too human appearing and the remaining zombies in the area, about sixty in number, came swarming to feast.

The defenseless scientists ran in every direction. Some made a dash for the cars in the employee parking lot, others ran for the supposed safety of the little cottages, and some just ran off into the night. With Stephanie so weak, Chuck hoisted her as far up as he could into one of the low cherry trees and then climbed up himself. Like a pack of dogs treeing a cat, five zombies sat below, staring up hungrily.

John Burke paused in the middle of the mayhem to get his bearings and to catch his breath. His cancer wasn't as far along as Stephanie's, still, the smoke had done a number on him and he was unable to take a full breath. Wilson came up behind him and took his arm. "I have a car in the lot. We can..."

"Get off," Burke snapped. "I gotta find my girl." An ambulance was pulling away from the largest of the cottages. John hurried as fast as he could to intercept it before it drove through the gates. With his lungs clogged with ashy mucous he was too slow to get in front of it. The best he could do was hammer on the side as it drove by.

He tried to scream, "Jaimee? You in there?" only his lung capacity was that of an infant's and the words came out soft and wet. He hacked up something black and for a moment he thought he'd been infected, but then he remembered he was immune. "Jes the smoke," he said to himself.

A second later Wilson was at his side. He was wide-eyed and frightfully scared. There was a woman in a white lab coat being eaten twenty feet away. With so many zombies on her, Wilson didn't know who she was. "We should get out of here," he whispered to Burke.

"Not yet," Burke replied. He started heading for the rich man's house where he had eaten dinner the night before. On the way a zombie tried to eat him. It wasn't much of a zombie. It had been one of the CDC agents and had been partially devoured with great chunks of flesh missing from its neck and face. One of its arms hung by a strap of tendon and it was missing a foot. Burke used his mop to topple it.

Wilson walked around it, staring as if it were a circus freak, his medically trained eye trying to make sense of it. How had it not bled out? How could it stand to walk on the root of its tibia? The pain of that must be excruciating, worse than almost any torture.

It was a horrible puzzle that he hoped he would never have to contemplate a second time, however, not a minute later, as they were approaching the big house, they encountered another poor creature that defied logic and sound medical reasoning.

It was a little girl.

"Is that your daughter?" Wilson asked, hoping to God it wasn't. There wasn't a lot left to the girl's face. One eye missing and nothing but a hole in its head where it had been; both ears, most of the nose and its bottom lip had been chewed off.

"Elp eee. Oooh elp eee," she said.

"That ain't her," Burke said, his face twisted in disgust. "Jaimee got legs on her like a ger-aff. That one's too small."

"It sounds like she's trying to talk," Wilson said, bending low to look at the girl. He saw she was missing her tongue on top of everything else. The sight made him shudder. "I wonder why some of them can talk and others can't."

"Cain't say as I give much of a shit 'bout that," John replied. He held the girl back with the business end of the mop and glanced up at the house. It was altogether quiet. "Ah'm goin' in. Y'all can stay here iffin you wanna."

Wilson didn't want to be alone; even though he thought John wasn't much more than a hillbilly, he was a better companion than the grotesque little girl zombie. They went in and knew right away that the house was empty. The air didn't feel right. It was stagnant and dead.

"Jaimee?" John called out softly. "Jaimee?"

He went room to room searching, fearing he would come across more bodies, afraid that he would find his little girl's among them. On the third floor he found Jaimee's little traveling case. "Oh, no, that ain't right," he said, fighting back tears that wanted to jump on out of his eyes.

A girl traveling needs her traveling case, he figured. For some reason he flipped it open; sitting on top was a pair of her worn underwear, looking as though a family of mice had got at them. John began to cry.

Without Jaimee, he had absolutely nothing in this world and no reason to live.

"Mr. Burke?" Wilson asked from the doorway. He hesitated stepping in; it seemed wrong to step over the threshold and into the man's misery. "We can't stay here. We really should go."

"To where?" John didn't know where he fit in or where he could go that would matter.

"Anywhere away from here," Wilson said. At that particular second he didn't have a destination in mind. The idea of going home appealed to him, but he couldn't chance it. How the Com-cells were transmitted was still a mystery and he wasn't going to risk infecting his family.

Anywhere
wasn't much of a draw for Burke. Nowhere might have been a better answer. He glanced out the window, wondering if she was out there walking around with all the rest, trying to eat people. Or had she been in that ambulance?

"Would they have tooken her in that am-ba-lance?" he asked Wilson. "She don't got no money for no am-ba-lance."

"Of course they'd take her," Wilson replied. "She's probably on her way to the nearest hospital even as we speak."

Burke's initial reaction to this was one of suspicion. After the last day, a hospital was the last place he wanted her to go. "Could we go find her?"

Wilson jumped at the chance to get the man moving. "Yes, of course."

Imbued with a new purpose, Burke led the way, running down the stairs and out the front door, only to freeze just outside. The grounds were thick with roving bands of zombies.

“Shee-it,” John swore. There was no getting through all of them and there was no staying in the house neither. Already many of the closer ones were turning to stare at the two men. They'd be charging next and the house, with its large windows wasn’t going to be much of a refuge.

Fortunately for them, General Collins’ helicopter came swooping in from the north. All the zombies stopped what they were doing, even the ones eating the screaming scientists, and canted their heads up at it. Burke was staring up as well, but not Wilson. He saw that the helicopter represented a moment frozen in time. It was a chance to get away. A hundred and twenty yards to the parking lot where his Lexus sat beading rain on its newly waxed metal hide and if the copter would hang around for just a minute he could get to it.

“Come on,” he said, taking John’s arm and pulling him down the porch stairs and running. They ran among the mindless and mesmerized zombies, over the pretty lawns in front of the cottages, and across the front of the hospital which burned with a white noise that was like radio static turned up to an ungodly volume. Lastly, they ran past the cherry tree where Chuck and Stephanie were stranded in its thin branches.

Chuck yelled, “Burke! Hey, Burke!”

It was then that Collins’ copter swung overhead on its way to scout out Poughkeepsie and neither Burke nor Wilson heard the cries. And even if they had there wasn’t much they could’ve done, they were now the focus of every zombie in sight.

When Wilson saw this he let out a breathy, “Oh…man!” Both men were already winded and they still had forty yards to go. The zombies gave chase and for some reason Wilson began laughing. It made no sense whatsoever, still the giggles came bubbling up out of him and there was no stopping them. Next to him, Burke was coughing himself into a fit and looking at him as if he were crazy.

With the laughing and the coughing, both men were barely at a jog now and only just made it to the car ahead of the first zombies. They climbed in and the pounding on the glass followed immediately. It wasn’t like someone thumping with the soft part of their hand below the pinky, these were full on punches; the back window cracked after three blows.

“Go, go, go!” Burke cried, slapping the dash with the flat of his hand.

A little touch of Burke’s
good ole boy Dixie
rubbed off on the normally staid Wilson. He gunned the Lexus, letting the wheels scream, not caring that he clipped a stray zombie or two or that he bounced the car over a couple of curbs. He was even going to let out a rebel yell as the gates came up, but then he happened to glance back and caught the full extent of the death all around the hospital.

Bodies were everywhere. Most were very dead, but some of the scientists were still alive and screaming as zombies ate their fill. There was nothing Wilson could do. He pointed the car through the gates and left the grounds, turning south at the first intersection.

“Is this the way to the hospital?” Burke asked.

It was the way home for Wilson. The image of his wife: tall, stunning, and statuesque, drew him on. He knew he couldn’t go home but he wanted to be close. He needed to be close because he knew this wasn't over, not by a long shot. “Yes,” he lied to Burke. “I’m sure it is.”

Deckard had long before shed his jacket, now he draped it across his and Thuy’s faces. The heat had become torturous and anything that could come between exposed flesh and the inferno was a blessing.

Thuy rested her forehead on his chest, her normally large doe-eyes were heavily lidded; she was fighting to stay conscious but losing.

“Another minute,” Deckard whispered. “Hold on, the elevator will be right back.” The elevator had slowly dropped away, leaving the three of them alone and in pain. It felt like ages ago. She nodded, her eyes drooping further closed.

“You’ll let me get on, too?” Riggs asked. He was a miserable creature. The Com-cells were barely into his system, nevertheless he looked more than half zombie already. He seemed to be shedding his humanity at quick rate.

Regardless, Deckard answered, “Of course. We won’t leave you behind.”

Thuy pulled the coat away. “I’m sorry," she said to Riggs. "I'm so sorry.”

“Not your fault,” Riggs said. “Someone messed it up. I don’t blame you at…”

He stopped as the sound of the elevator could be heard grinding it’s way upward. Their excitement peaked with the light
ding!
And then vanished altogether as Von Braun emerged, resembling a fiend from the lowest planes of hell. The unbelievable heat was making him into a mad thing. He was in such a rage that he forgot completely his desire to have his revenge on Thuy and flew directly at the first person in his way.