Zompoc Survivor: Inferno (5 page)

“Because you’re standing on top of it?” she said. I looked down. Sticking out from under the black desk was the corner of a black laptop case. Red faced, I grabbed it and unzipped it. My fingers felt several hard objects in the pockets, and a few seconds later I had fished out a thumb drive and two disks in plastic sleeves.

“You’re a genius,” I told her as I tucked them away and headed for the door. As we came back into the security room, my eye fell on a familiar looking white board beside the security desk. Designed to make it easy to see who was on at any given point in time, the roster board had each staffer’s name and status on it. Eight of the nine names had the “In” square filled. The ninth name didn’t have either box filled in. I looked at the white clad bodies and did a quick count. Only eight. Where was number nine? I filed the question away and headed for the door.

“Aren’t you out of uniform, lieutenant?” Hernandez asked when she saw Kaplan. He’d donned the shoulder and arm protection from one of the Monos security guys and had Amy halfway buckled into another set.

“Uniform of the apocalypse, corporal,” he said. “There’s a set for you and Stewart, too. I had to guess at your sizes.” My respect for Kaplan went up a few notches. He knew a good idea when he saw it, and he wasn’t too proud to use it if it wasn’t his. I grabbed one of the sets and put the gorget on, then slipped my arms through the elbow pieces. Beside me, Hernandez pulled her forearm guards off.

“Start with the neck piece,” I told Hernandez as she looked it over. “Then put your arms through the elbow cops and strap it on from there.”

“Did you find an instruction manual for these things or something?” she asked. She grabbed the gorget and lifted it over her head.

“Nah, I tried on some medieval armor while I was researching my first book,” I said while I snapped the fasteners into place around my biceps. “Basic concepts are the same. But modern snaps are a lot easier to use than leather straps and buckles.”

“Come on, you two,” Kaplan said from by the nurses’ station. “We’re burning daylight.” He led us to the stairwell and pushed the door open slowly. Silence greeted us, and he carefully moved forward. A window was set in the far wall and ran down the wall all the way to the ground floor. Through it, I could see the vague shapes of the Kansas City skyline. The sunset was turned red by the smoke, making what we could see look like it was drenched in blood. Kaplan leaned over the railing and looked down, then shook his head. I followed suit.

Infected wandered a few stories below us, strangely silent. He started moving forward slowly, careful to keep any sound to a minimum. The first flight of steps took us halfway to the next floor, and as we started down the next flight, I heard the sound of a shoe hitting tile hard, then the slap of a hand against metal. I looked over my shoulder to see Amy holding herself up on the railing, her face stricken. Below us we heard a moan and feet shuffling. I held up a hand to forestall any more movement, and she froze. Below us, Kaplan moved to the landing and aimed his gun down the stairs. The shuffling continued, then stopped, followed by a moan. When it started again, it didn’t seem to be getting any closer. Kaplan leaned forward and looked over the rail, then pulled back. A few seconds later, he leaned forward again and took a longer look. A perplexed grin had spread across his face when he finally gestured for us to move again. When I drew even with him I looked down to see what he’d seen.

A zombie was staring at the steps, just a few feet away from me. It shuffled forward until its feet hit the first step and then it stopped and looked down. When its head came back up again, it turned and walked away from the steps. I looked at Kaplan and shrugged. Evidently steps confused it. He returned the gesture in eloquent silence and made his way slowly across the landing. We got to the door, and he peered through the safety glass, then opened it and waved us past him. The door clicked shut the second Hernandez was through.

Like the floor above us, this one had three hallways. I swept my pistol right to cover the hallway while Hernandez came in with her gun up. I checked the mirrors at the middle, but the image was too small to get a good look much beyond the corner. At least I knew no one was lying in wait there. I moved forward until I was next to the middle hallway and stuck my head around the corner. Two infected wandered the hall further down, but they seemed blissfully unaware of me, so I backed up and turned to Kaplan and Amy, holding up two fingers. He nodded and tapped his finger to his forehead, then pointed at my pistol. With a sinking feeling, I nodded and put my finger on the trigger.

I took a deep breath and stepped around the corner. The gun came up in slow motion, and I traced the green dot up the body of the one closest to me until it came to rest on her ear. The SOCOM coughed and bucked in my hand, and she went down. The other one turned his head, either following the movement or the sound of the gun, and I moved the gun to cover his nose. A trigger stroke later he was on the floor, and I let out the breath I’d been holding. Before I turned to signal Kaplan the coast was clear, something made me look to my right. Movement in the corner mirror caught my attention and gave me a split second warning before the ghoul in purple scrubs came barreling around the corner. My finger tightened on the trigger the second I got the barrel on him, and before I knew it I’d fired three more rounds at him. I must have hit him with at least one shot because it’s body slid to a stop a few feet from me, and I kept the gun up. No movement in the mirror, so I put a round in the ghoul’s head and walked up to the far corner. When I stuck my head around the corner the coast looked pretty clear.

Only then did I look back. Hernandez and Kaplan had their guns up and were firing. I ran back toward them, but before I made it halfway, the guns were coming down.

“Clear,” Hernandez said.

“So, what’s the plan now?” I asked when I got to the corner.

“Why don’t we just take out the infected in the stairwells,” Hernandez said.

“We don’t have enough ammo,” Kaplan said. “There are four floors between us and the ground. If some of them hear us, we’d have to shoot them all. I say we check the other stairwell. Maybe it’s clear.”

“Too bad we can’t just take the elevator down,” Amy said. Kaplan rolled his eyes and Hernandez muttered a heartfelt “I wish.” The discussion continued around me, but my brain was already somewhere else.

“I need a wire coat hanger,” I said after a little thinking. All three looked at me like I’d just asked for a ham sandwich at a kosher deli. “Amy’s right, we should take the elevator.”

“The elevators would’ve been the first thing they shut down when they started losing the building,” Hernandez said.

“Good,” I said as I headed for the nurses station. Hernandez started to say something but Kaplan put a hand on her arm to stop her.

“I know that look,” he said. “Let’s see where he’s going with this.” By the nurses station I found what I was looking for: the locker room where the floor nurses stored their stuff when they were on duty. The door was open, the inside dark. Kaplan brought his gun up and nodded to me. Warily, I reached around the corner and felt for the light switch. As soon as the lights came on we heard a whimper inside. I raised the SOCOM as Hernandez swept into the room behind the lieutenant, both of their gun barrels moving. Kaplan moved past the lockers in the middle of the room and brought his weapon to bear on something I couldn’t see. He gestured to Hernandez, and she moved to the left, out of my line of sight.

“Ma’am,” I heard her say. “Shit!” she cried a second later. On the heels of her exclamation I heard a split second of noise scrape across the inside of my head before the harsh pops of their weapons cut it off.

“You okay?” Kaplan called out. I came in to the room to find them in opposite corners, guns pointing at the corner opposite the one I was in.

“I’m good, sir,” she responded. “God I hate screamers. Wake up the goddamn neighbors.”

“Not asking, corporal,” Kaplan said with a shaky looking grin.

“Not telling, sir,” she said as she gave me a wink. I nodded to the hanger rack beside Kaplan and reached for the paper wrapped wire hanger dangling at the far end. With my prize in hand, I headed for the nurses station.

“So, what do you need a wire coat hanger for?” Kaplan asked as I pulled my multi-tool from my belt. “Rule eighteen?”

“Rule eighteen,” I said as I bent a piece of the hanger back and forth. “Back when I worked security for the university, we had a group of kids who would sneak out onto the roof of one of the dorms during baseball season to watch the fireworks at the end of the Cardinals games.” The wire snapped, and I went to work on a shorter piece. “We tried everything to catch them in the act. We set guys on the stairs, turned off the elevators, everything. Finally, we set someone up on the roof and caught them when they came out. Turns out, they were elevator surfing. They’d get into the elevator shaft, get up on top of one of the cars and use the maintenance controls up there to ride the elevator to the top of the shaft so they could crawl out a maintenance hatch.” The shorter piece broke off, and I bent a small loop in it, then stuck the longer piece through it and bent it tight around the loop in the smaller piece before I bent the longer piece into an L shape. “They used one of these to get into the elevator shaft.” I held my little creation up. The shorter end dangled loosely until I turned the whole thing ninety degrees. Then it caught on the loop and turned with it. Satisfied it would work, I headed for the elevators on the far side of the nurses station.

“We need a crowbar, not a little piece of wire,” Hernandez said. At the reflective steel door I put the end of my improvised tool up to the small hole mounted near the top of the door and pushed it in until I heard the short end fall against the other side of the door. Then I slowly turned it until I felt resistance. Another ounce of pressure, and the door slid to one side, revealing the darkness of an open elevator shaft. Kaplan leaned in and shone his flashlight down into it.

“The elevator is on the ground floor. We can probably get into it from the access hatch on the roof. But once we get down to the first floor, we still have to get past all the infected and the cordon.”

“What cordon?” Amy asked.

“It’s easier to show you,” Kaplan said as he headed for the east side of the building. He led us into one of the patient rooms and checked to make sure there were no infected waiting. Once he was sure the room was clear, he went to the window and pulled the blinds up. Below, we could see prefab barriers set up near one of the hospital entrances. Infected were shuffling around inside it, while even more were wandering in the street outside. “When we lost a facility, the entrances were blocked off like that to try to slow the spread of the outbreak.”

“It didn’t work,” Amy said. “So, how do we get out?”

“Through that,” I said as I pointed. A catwalk stretched from the building to an elevated landing pad about sixty yards away in the middle of a parking lot. “We only have to get to the second floor. And it takes us out past the worst of the crowd trying to get in.”

“Looks good. There’s only one problem,” Kaplan said. “Hernandez has a wounded arm. There’s no way she’s going to be able to climb down that shaft safely.”

“We’re in a hospital, duh,” Amy said as she grabbed one of the sheets from the overturned bed. “There’s whole closets marked ‘linen’ on every floor. Tie a few sheets together and lower her down. Seriously, have
none
of you ever had to sneak out of a second story window before?” She grabbed another sheet and tied the two ends together and held them out, somehow adding a shrug and head tilt to up the difficulty level.

“I’m just trying to ignore the fact that you know how,” I said as I took the sheets from her.

“Just add it to the list of things you’re never telling Mom.” We left the room with the Marines in tow.

“When did I lose control of this situation?” Kaplan asked Hernandez when we opened the door of the linen closet down the hallway.

“Right about the time they got on your boat, sir,” she said.

“That sounds about right. Okay then, let’s get you down to the second floor so we can get our asses out of this hell hole.” We added a few sheets to the line, and Kaplan tied the end in a bowline hitch that made a loop big enough to fit over Hernandez.

“For the record, sir, I hate this idea,” she said as we went back to the elevator shaft.

“Duly noted, corporal. Now stop your bitching and get your ass down that shaft.” She stepped into the improvised harness and pulled it up to her chest, then backed up to the elevator shaft. Kaplan and I grabbed the other end and pulled it tight, then let it out until she was leaning back into the opening. We let the cloth slide through our hands slowly as she descended into the hoistway, until finally the line went slack.

“Okay, now, if I remember right, most elevators have a ladder in the hoistway,” I said as I leaned inside. Sure enough, there was a ladder that ran between the two doors. I went first, then Kaplan sent Amy down before he followed her. Once my boots hit the top of the elevator car, I pulled out my flashlight and played it on the door in front of us. From this side, the latch to open the door was easier to find. With Kaplan and Hernandez covering the door, I released the latch and let the two doors part about an inch. The sight of unmoving bodies on the floor greeted me, which was a damn site better than the all too plentiful kind that were up and walking around. The low moan coming from outside the doors was a little less comforting. I let the doors open a little further and saw that the area in front of them was pretty clear. The door we needed was to our right, though, and there were dozens of infected between us and it. There were only a couple on the left. Moving slowly, I leaned out into the hallway and looked at the wall between the two elevator doors. Just like I’d seen on the floor above, there was an evacuation map in a clear plastic frame that was nothing more than two layers sandwiched together. The knife blade on my multi-tool fit into the open space and nudged the map out far enough to get ahold of it. Agonizing seconds later, I had it free. I let the doors slide back together and turned back to face everyone else.