Zombie Team Alpha (12 page)

~26~

CULLING

“About time you showed up,” Dr. Martinez said as she closed the door behind them all and shined her flashlight on the floor in front of them.

Cutter breathed a sigh of relief. “How in the hell?” he asked her as he backed away, head cocked sideways.

“You were hired to protect me, Mr. Cutter. And yet you abandoned me with those stupid Russian children.”

A loud boom sounded behind them. The zombies had reached the door. Gauge was already working with Morgan to roll a large spool of coiled wire up against the doorframe. She had lit a small hand-held lantern that gave off just enough light to see by, which she had strapped to her arm.

Cutter stared at the nearby door with a single thought on his mind. Those things had ripped the heads off two men. They had to be immensely strong to have done that. A simple steel door wouldn’t stop them for long.

Not much I can do about it now.
Shaking his head to clear it, he turned. Dr. Martinez was staring at him. In the light spill of her flashlight, he saw that her brows were scrunched behind her glasses and her lips were drawn up tight. She was pissed—
probably for abandoning her. Couldn’t be helped.
He ignored her silent protest and turned a bit further toward the sprawling interior that unfolded behind her.

Huge machines filled most of the empty space, along with man-sized ceramic insulators and metal conduits and connector junctions tucked neatly inside of steel cages. The room smelled of ozone and old grease. All the signs hanging on chain-link dividers were written in big bold Cyrillic lettering, which he couldn’t read. But also present on the signs were the familiar lightning bolt symbols, which themselves were a fairly universal marking for “touch this when you don’t know what the hell you are doing, and you will die.”

Dr. Martinez blocked his path. “Have you been listening to me, Mr. Cutter? Do you understand your responsibility here?”

“Yeah,” he said absently.

“Then you should know—”

“Shhh,” he warned, finger on lips.

“What?”

He stood there for a moment listening to the booming echoes from the door Morgan and Gauge had barricaded.
Can those things get through? If they—? Could they even—?
He was drawing a blank.

Do what’s important first.

“Morgan, do you think you can get the power back on? Find a way to fire up these—generators. That’s what they are, right?”

She nodded an affirmative and grabbed Gauge by the sleeve and led him away.

“I do not appreciate you shushing me, Mr. Cutter,” Dr. Martinez said.

“Call me Jack.”

“Mr. Cutter,” she said with emphasis, “I do not appreciate the very fact that you abandoned me so easily. That was very unprofessional. You were hired to—”

He held a hand up to interrupt her. “Yeah, I know about that. Neither do I. Not happy about it either. I’m sorry.”

His answer seemed to stop her in her tracks before she could build up any kind of steam. She gave him a puzzled look of reappraisal and folded her arms across her chest. “You still shouldn’t have left me with them.”

“No, I shouldn’t have,” he said with conviction. “How did you get in here?”

“Long story,” she said. “We have to do what’s important first.”

He nodded. His appraisal of her clicked a notch into the positive direction.

She continued, “We need to find the artifact, and we don’t have much time to do it.”

One click negative.
He stared at her for a long moment. At first, he wanted to ask her why it was so damn important when compared to the flesh-eating monsters pounding away right outside the door.

Then he changed his mind.

Then he changed it again. “Are you shitting me? What we need to do right this very minute is find a goddamned way to get the hell out of here and away from those…those zombie things.”

She backed away a step. “I am indeed not ‘shitting’ you, Mr. Cutter. You were hired to help me retrieve the device—the artifact. And I plan to locate it, with or without your help. But you were paid to help me get to it, so I expect you to do everything in your powers to assist me short of dying.”

Short of dying?
He said nothing more. She had also said, “device,” letting something slip by that.
What the hell did she mean?
He opened his mouth to ask, but she continued to talk.

“You do realize just how important it is that we find it, don’t you?”

“No, I don’t understand. Why don’t you enlighten me.”

She puffed air out through her tight lips. “You wouldn’t be able to understand it if I did tell you the truth.”

“Try me.”

“We just need to find it.” She nodded her head up and down.

Cutter said nothing again in return. He folded his arms over his chest.

“Your wife, Mr. Cutter, would have understood why it is so important that we locate it quickly. She comprehended the importance of such a discovery and what it could mean for the world.”

He growled a little. “With a hundred of those goddamned zombie things just outside the door knocking to come in and eat us?” He sucked a whistling breath through his teeth. “No, my
dead wife
would have been smart enough to have recognized the reality of our situation and been recommending already that we should be working together to get the hell out of here. And that’s what I intend to do, Doc.”

“So you would just abandon me again?” Her hands raised in the air and she shook them and backed away.

She’s faking it.
He knew it. He’d seen it before. But he didn’t care. He didn’t have the time right now to argue. He stepped past her.

“
Morgan!
” he bellowed over the pounding coming from the door behind him.

He found her next to a control panel filled with colored buttons that made little sense to him when he examined it. She was running her hands up and down the buttons and switches as if she were searching for something specific. Gauge stood behind her, holding his penlight steady and moving his lips as he tried to sound out the Cyrillic writing on the panel. He wasn’t having much luck.

“Have you met your match, Jack?” Morgan asked, not looking back at him.

He shook his head. “How long?”

“I only need to find—”

“You walked away from me, Mr. Cutter.” It was Dr. Martinez. She had followed him. “Don’t do that again. You will lead me to the artifact, or your team will forfeit all payment for this assignment. That’s four million dollars, might I remind you.”

“Is that so?” he asked.

She held out the satellite phone he’d given her earlier. “Yeah. Go ahead, call home and find out.”

Cutter took the phone and clipped it to his belt. “We didn’t sign up to fight zombies.”

“You are being paid extremely well, Mr. Cutter. We are going after it, and that’s the final word on the matter.” She turned and walked away.

He watched her go, then let go of a held breath.
Damn woman.
She had almost made the short list of women he just could not get along with.

“That went well,” Morgan quipped. Gauge grunted a laugh.

Cutter fondled the phone he’d clipped to his hip. “Just get the damn power on, Morgan. We’ll figure something out from there.”

“We bugging out then, boss?”

“Yeah,” Cutter said.
No amount of money is worth this much bullshit.
He couldn’t lose Morgan or Gauge—not after losing Sharon in an all-too-similar situation. His own life didn’t matter so much, but their lives did. He’d gotten them into this by agreeing to take the gig, but he’d also find a way to somehow get them out. He only had to persuade Dr. Martinez to see things his way as well.

For her own damn good.

“Dr. Martinez?” Cutter had just about returned to where he thought she had disappeared to. He heard a noise just behind him and started to turn and—

A heavy weight slammed into him from behind, driving him to the ground and knocking the wind from his lungs. Something had landed on top of him, snarling in his ear like a rabid dog. He felt hot saliva trickle down his neck. He tried to turn.

Can’t—

Then fear took over, and his right hand came free. His shoulders bunched and rolled forward an inch, two inches. Somehow, he broke loose and rolled onto his back. Both hands shot up and grabbed at the blurry shape that had jumped him.

As the shape came into focus, red, satanic eyes filled with bloodlust stared down at him. Fetid breath expelled in his face and washed over him. He cringed and tried not to inhale. Slavering, pulled-back teeth clacked together and came for his throat, meaning to tear out a meaty chunk. The zombie on top of him was immensely powerful, much stronger than he was.

Twisting, rolling, he grappled with it, back and forth. It may have had more brute strength than he had, but it lacked the dexterity to use its strength. The thing shifted and went for his throat again, and he was suddenly free and able to get his left arm up and under the zombie’s chin before the slashing, carnivorous teeth could bite into his flesh.

Shrieking, the zombie redoubled its efforts, ripping at him with flailing arms and snapping at him as it struggled to get closer. The creature’s thrashing legs came up, knees first, narrowly missing his groin. He pushed with everything the sudden onset of fear had given him and gripped it by the throat and raised the thing’s head and—

The top of its head exploded like a rotten pumpkin.

The report of Gauge’s gunshot echoed from the distant walls in the cavernous building. Panting with relief, Cutter continued to hold the thing by the neck as he rolled out from underneath the dripping gore. He shoved what little he was still holding onto to his right side. He stared back at the thing as he lay next to it on the cold concrete floor, breathing hard, recovering.

In the sharp-angled shadows of the penlight Gauge held on the scene, Cutter saw that the thing next to him had once been human, but it was no longer human. It wore the gray overalls of a worker, but they were little more than shredded rags, and the flesh underneath was ravaged and torn as if it had been clawed and bitten many times. And after Gauge’s timely shot, it was nearly headless as well.

“Thanks,” Cutter breathed up at the man, his friend. Probably his best friend at the moment.

Gauge lowered Betty and the flashlight and nodded once.

“Where the hell did that thing come from?” Cutter asked, sucking in a final breath of recovery and expelling it languidly. Sitting up, he shook his arms to fling away some of the blood and gore that now covered him from head to toe and had added to his already damp shirt and tactical pants.
Am I ever going to be clean again?

Gauge smiled a thin smile and held out his left hand. Just as the big man was pulling him up, a new scream split the air, echoing from the far end of the expansive interior space.

The post-fight-or-flight shakes that had just started to effect Cutter fled in an instant, and he again came to total and complete alertness.

~27~

FINDING MORE

Only a fraction of a second passed before Cutter had finished reloading and was moving toward the new sound, the new danger. Gauge was with him, elbow to elbow, making just enough room to operate their weapons without jamming each other up. They spread out as they raced past Morgan, who had just come to help them with the creature that had attacked Cutter.

“Eyes open,” Cutter said as they passed by her. “Protect her.”

She nodded an okay.

He raised his Glock with the mounted flashlight and swept the space in front of them with the fat beam. There were three paths they could take, left, right, and up the middle—the old Monty Hall problem.
Which door has the prize?
He didn’t know, and there was no game show host to open the door with the goat behind it and alter the odds.

“Where did that thing come from, do you think?” Cutter asked. Gauge indicated to the left. Cutter sighed and went with his gut. It was all he really had to go on. They approached the massive generators and split up when they reached them. He took the middle path between them while Gauge went to the right.

Cutter figured that there was still a good chance he’d guessed wrong, but he didn’t have much of a choice, either. He had to be correct, he thought as he glanced over his shoulder, worrying a bit about the two women he’d left behind, virtually unprotected. Morgan was sharp, though. She’d sort it out. Dr. Martinez, he was still unsure of how she would react to any true threats, but she’d survived well enough so far.

Half-a-second later, he heard Betty’s powerful bark, but no second, follow-up shot. One target dispatched, certainly. Gauge required only a single round to neutralize anything smaller than an elephant. 

No sooner than he had processed the gunshot and what it meant when his own light was falling on a moving shape in front of him. He zeroed in with the Glock, instantly spotlighting the new target and identifying it as a threat, closing quickly. He fired twice, a double-tap. He was a crack shot, but given the relatively small size of a 9-millimeter Parabellum, he needed to be certain that what he wanted to shoot dead, stayed dead.

Both his bullets slammed home less than an inch apart, causing the creature to fall sideways and drop into a convulsive fit as it bounced off the series of leg-sized pipes running alongside the massive generator to his right. As the thing died, it sprayed blood like a busted fountainhead then slumped into death.

He dropped a step, almost tripping over his own feet.
Why do they bleed?
It didn’t make any sense at the moment. All the zombies he’d seen on TV were just dead bodies filled with brownish goo, which was supposed to be some kind of putrid, rotting bodily fluids. These still sprayed oxygen-rich lifeblood, which meant they still had a heartbeat.

And that means—

He didn’t even want to consider the implications now as he prepared for more that might attack, but nothing else came at him.

Working his jaw back and forth to clear the lingering effects of the loud report, he skipped to make up his missing step and quickened his pace past the crumpled form of the dead zombie. He arrived at the end of the row the same time that Gauge did. They converged to cover each other and worked their way to the back of the building. Offices were to either side of them and were separated by painted walls and hip-high glass windows. Running down the center of them was a darkened hallway.

The terrible scream sounded again.

“You first.” Cutter gestured with his Glock.

Gauge nodded once professionally and led the way with Cutter holding his Glock up as well, scanning the way ahead over the large man’s shoulder and covering where Gauge was not. The floor changed to thin, industrial carpeting. At the far end of the office row was another sturdy door with a push bar on it. It was shut tight. There was a body resting against it—a soldier’s body. The guy was slumped in a heap on the floor, not moving.

As they approached, the guy resolved into one of Suvorov young conscripts. The kid was missing a large section of his upper arm, and his shoulder had almost been torn completely off by something. The limb was dangling uselessly at his side, held there by overly stretched tendons and skin and fabric. Blood trickled from the wounds and was congealing like paste.

Suddenly, the motionless body stirred and the kid raised his eyes to the heavens and screamed a hideous throat warbling cry that sent shivers racing up and down Cutter’s spine. Both he and Gauge raised their guns and approached the soldier with caution, holding their fire.

The kid tried to stand. He did so jerkily, bouncing his head against the closed door and clambering to his feet like a marionette whose strings were being pulled from above. He made it to his feet and stumbled forward a shuffling step, dangling arm flopping uselessly against his body. Ribbons of fresh blood ran freely down his side and leaked onto the carpet.

“What the hell?” Cutter said as he watched the suffering thing in horror. If it had been alive, there was no way it could have moved like that. The pain would have been excruciating.

The young soldier began to move faster, as if he were learning how to walk. He bumped into the walls to either side of him, which caused him to spin and shift sideways, but he kept coming.

Is this how it happens—? Is this how they turn into zombies?
Cutter’s revulsion turned to fear. More than anything, he did not want to turn into one of those things.

He watched the thing learning to walk.
That’s what it had to be doing, right? Learning?
Even so, he had a hard time seeing the zombie as anything other than a sick pimply-faced teenager. He did not see him as a monster. Not yet. But as the young soldier drew closer,
it
became the prominent identifier in his mind. Whatever the kid had become,
it
was no longer a peaceful human being, and tragically,
it
had to die.

The new-born zombie bared its teeth and snapped at Cutter. It shrieked and fell into a slow, clumsy run, making it an imminent threat that needed to be neutralized.

“I got this,” he said. A strange, sinking feeling overcame him—like he wasn’t supposed to shoot and kill the kid. He would have much rather restrained the thing until figuring out what the hell had gone wrong. Maybe whatever was afflicting it could be cured. He knew if he shot it there was no turning back. He’d be ending a life with his next trigger pull.
Is there even a chance the kid can be saved?
A remote one? What if I trapped it—didn’t kill it?

In his moment of indecision, the thing crossed much of the distance between them and was preparing to attack. There was no denying it. His lizard brain reacted, and his deepest animal instinct took over. He had to kill it before it killed him.

He raised his gun to fire. “Sorry.” Turning away slightly, he pulled the trigger, already instinctively correcting for the recoil so the next shot would complete the familiar double-tap.

Nothing happened.

He squeezed the trigger again.

Nothing?

He reached up to draw the slide back. His gun had jammed. A well-maintained Glock almost never jams.

Almost never.

The thing was upon him in a flash. Cutter’s arms shot up protectively, but they were bent, and he was off-balance. The zombie had the advantage. It came for his face, and he drew back in horror, not wanting the thing to take a bite from the exposed flesh of his cheek.

Then Gauge was there, kicking the thing away with a booted foot, driving the thing back against the opposite wall. The big man kicked it again, knocking the zombie to the ground. Gauge hovered over his fallen adversary for a beat and then fired a single shot from Betty downward into the thing’s skull. The zombie’s head cratered and the skull pan emptied onto the carpeted floor beneath it as the booming echo from Gauge’s hand cannon died away into nothingness.

Cutter stuck a finger in his ear and shook it to clear the ringing pain. As his hearing returned somewhat, he heard another short series of gunshots.
Small caliber.
They had come from where Morgan and Dr. Martinez were working to restore power—
at the opposite end of the building.
Morgan was shooting at something. She was trained in basic marksmanship, but she hated guns.

Shit!

“Go!” he urged Gauge, hoping the man could reach the women in time.

Gauge did not hesitate. He took off at a run. Cutter shook his head as he sprinted down the narrow hallway looking for any other entrances to the building, then checked to make sure the sturdy outside door was secure. He found it was slightly ajar. Anyone could have come through it if they had wanted to. A cold fear ran through him, and his heart rattled in his ribcage.
Is Gauge about to walk into a whole group of those things?
Were Morgan and Dr. Martinez already dead? Did I just send them all to their deaths?
Can I shoot them if they turn into one of those things—?

He pulled the door closed and felt it catch. He tested it to make sure it was locked. It didn’t seem sturdy enough. Nothing seemed sturdy enough right now. He’d just have to hope that it would hold. Spinning on his heel, he raced back through the narrow hallway and out into the expanse of the generator room. He took the middle path and ran as fast as his legs would take him.

And then on the other side came to a skidding halt and doubled over, panting, wheezing. All three were there—Gauge, Morgan, and Dr. Martinez.

Alive.
They were all alive and well. He wanted to throw his arms around them all—
but that would be weird.

Dr. Martinez had a small pistol cradled loosely in her hand. It was a Walther PPK, the kind James Bond might use. The gun had very little firepower, but it had been enough to get the job done.
Where did she get it?
It was nothing they had brought along with them.
One of the soldiers, maybe?
Something that small would definitely not be Gauge-approved.

And what worried him even more was that it hadn’t been Morgan who’d fired the shot. He spared her a quick glance. She’d remained completely defenseless. She didn’t even have her sidearm out. It was still strapped in its holster on her hip. He’d have to speak with her about that.
Guns are tools that keep you alive,
he would tell her for the umpteenth time. While she’d so often been so damn stubborn about that particular fact, she wasn’t a complete moron.

On the floor at her feet was another one of those things. A shot had entered the creature’s head through the left eye socket. Another had bored its way through the nasal cavity. Two shots, well placed. That was a surprise.
I’ve underestimated you.
She
could
take care of herself when pressed. She’d also saved a defenseless Morgan, which made him doubly mad. He should have been there, or Morgan should have done something. But mostly he was pissed off at himself. He’d guessed wrong earlier, and one of those goddamned things had gotten past him. His hand clenched on his gun, and he worked to clear the jam in his Glock, yanking perhaps a bit too hard on the slide.

He turned to Morgan. “I thought I told you to get the goddamn power back on.
So do it!
”

She flashed him a grim look, as if to say, “Back off!”

Cutter cleared the jam and holstered his weapon. He tossed the chewed-up round from his gun and bent over the corpse of the zombie on the concrete floor. He shivered a little as he went to touch the thing and then pulled his hand back with a jerk. A slick pool of blood was forming around its head and had matted its short, curly hair. The thing’s teeth were exposed, and the torn lips were stretched as if someone had grabbed it by the hair and pulled all the loose skin taut from behind. Cutter ran his light up and down the body. There were bite marks and chunks of missing skin and shredded clothing. It was basically just a big, bloody mess.

“How the hell is this happening?” he asked, looking up at Dr. Martinez. “You need to tell me right here and right now. We just witnessed one of these things turning. One minute it was a human—the next? I don’t know what the hell it became. Can we save them from this?”

She nodded slowly, and as she did, emergency lights clicked on, bathing the room in shades of red.

“Almost got it,” Morgan said from a short distance away. She gave Cutter a quick nod and disappeared behind a wall next to the control panel. Mechanical noises started—deep rumbling vibrations that shook Cutter to his core. One of the massive engines behind him came to life like a demon rising from hell. The noise level grew as the generator came fully online and finished with a whine that sounded like a thousand electric motors all spinning up at once.

The lights all about him began to flicker and strike.

Morgan returned. “One of these generators should be enough to get the lights on throughout the complex,” she said with a hint of pride in her voice. “Probably down inside the mine too. Pumps, air circulation. We can go down there now—if we are still going.”

“Don’t know if we are,” Cutter said. “But fire everything up anyway.”

“It’s all computer controlled, Jack. I’m sure of that. I suspect there are terminals around here somewhere to operate everything.”