Heroes of the Undead | Book 1 | The Culling

by Meredith, Peter

  “Hundreds.” And yet there were only two fire trucks visible and no ambulances. None. Looking down, Griff saw there were still over a dozen on the street below. “This is all wrong. This isn’t a terrorist attack. It would’ve taken hundreds, if not thousands of men…suicidal men and women, to do this.”

  “And it’s not mind control,” Maddy noted. “That thing on the TV didn’t have a mind. So, is it a plague unleashed by Daniel Magnus?”

  “He said he wanted to create a utopia,” Bryce muttered. “Did he screw up, or is this all on purpose? And where do we fit in? He did this to us but…but I think we’re different from all of them out there going crazy. If a thousand people in New York had been suffering like us, it would’ve been news. Someone would’ve noticed a bunch of full ICUs. Right?”

  Before answering, Griff glanced up at the TV—for the last hour, his eyes had been constantly drawn to it. “Yeah, someone would’ve noticed. We get alerts when things are strange and I didn’t get anything about ICUs. At five, we had alerts of ERs being targeted in California, but that’s it. Two hours later, everything is fucked. I think we need to see if this quarantine is legit.”

  He pulled his cell phone and was greeted with the message: All Circuits Are Busy. Please Try Again Later. “Shit. Do either of you have your phones?”

  Bryce looked around and found that he didn’t have his phone, his wallet, or his clothes. He also saw that his IV had run dry. He pressed the call nurse button. “Maybe the nurse can tell us something.” The nurse took twenty minutes to answer the ringing chime, and when she came in, her eyes were dark with anger.

  “What?” she demanded, staring straight at Bryce without blinking. “What is it? What the fuck is everyone calling and calling about? Huh? What? What do you want!”

  Her voice was a high screech that had him instantly regretting calling her. With a shaking hand, he pointed up at his IV bag, which sagged, completely deflated. “It’s empty. I didn’t know if that was bad.” It seemed bad, especially as his bright red blood was beginning to seep up into the tube. Her eyes latched onto the blood.

  “It ain’t nothing,” she said, quieter now. She seemed mesmerized by the blood. “None of it. This is all nothing. None of it matters. Not the money. Not the job. Not my pounding head. My head is the worst of all.” As she spoke, she walked to the edge of Bryce’s bed, the whole time, staring at the tube. “There’s only one thing that matters now.”

  Bryce eased back and covered the lower end of the tube with a pillow. “Hey, it’s okay. The IV is okay the way it was.”

  She finally blinked and for a few seconds, a normal person stood in front of him. “They’re watching you, but I guess that don’t matter now either.” She sighed then grimaced as if even breathing hurt. Just before she turned away, she grabbed the exposed tube and yanked it out of his arm. “There. All fixed.”

  It stung like a wasp sting and he hissed in a breath. The nurse didn’t notice. She walked from the room and shut the door behind her.

  “She’s the one that needs to be quarantined,” Bryce snapped. He was bleeding from where the catheter had been ripped from his skin. “The good news is at least we know we weren’t on drugs. Magnus wouldn’t bother watching a pair of druggies.”

  “But he did something to us,” Maddy said. She looked down at her own IV and then frantically began to tear at the tape holding it in place. When the catheter was exposed, she ripped it out and rushed to the sink, where she furiously scrubbed her arm until it was red. As she was rinsing off, she paused, her face going pale. “Maybe we should be quarantined. It only makes sense if we’re going to be like them.”

  They all looked up at the TV.

  Griff backed away a few steps. Bryce snapped at him, “Stop. You’re supposed to be the tough one. And we’re not like those people on TV. Is Magnus watching them? No. At least, not like this he isn’t. He did something…special to us. Maybe in the end, we’ll be like them. Or maybe he’s using us to test a vaccine against whatever all that is. I don’t know. If we are special, we need to escape and find a real hospital.”

  “This is a real hospital,” Griff said.

  “You know what I mean. One that doesn’t have goons.”

  “And one far away from here,” Maddy added.

  “How do we escape?” Griff asked.

  Bryce shrugged and Maddy frowned. “You’re the gun expert,” she stated, as if this alone meant he should be able to formulate plans in a blink.

  “And you two are geniuses,” he shot back. After another glance at the screen where stalled cars on a Santa Monica freeway were being attacked, he muttered, “For now, at least.” He eased around Maddy and went to the little sink. In the cubby beneath it, he found a box of masks and another of latex gloves. He donned a mask and a pair of gloves, then tossed some to the other two. “Just in case you don’t have what they have.”

  Maddy slipped the mask over her face only to reverse the move a second later. “Do you smell that? Is that smoke?”

  Bryce breathed deep until he caught just a slight tang of something acrid. “It is.”

  Griff pulled his mask far enough back to take a few whiffs. “I don’t smell anything.” He went to the door and sniffed there as well. He was just putting his mask back in place when an alarm began to ring somewhere deep in the building. “Shit. This day just keeps getting better and…”

  He was interrupted by gunfire from two floors down. Bryce drew his feet off the floor and sucked his hands to his chest, while Maddy stepped closer to the bed. They acted as if it were some sort of magical island of normalcy that could protect them.

  “Don’t mo…” Griff started to say, but stopped at the sight of them. They clearly weren’t going anywhere. He pulled his pistol and slowly opened the door, keeping the gun hidden.

  One of the orderlies stood against the far wall, a hand beneath his white jacket. He had military cut brown hair, cold grey eyes and was a twitch away from pulling a gun. The second orderly was behind the nurses’ desk, his hands out of sight.

  Other than the two men and a few empty gurneys, the hallway was empty.

  Griff nodded to the orderly across from him. The man made no move. He only stared. “There’s a fire.” Griff said this calmly, in the same way he might comment on the weather.

  “It’s a drill.”

  Cold silence.

  Griff tried again, “The quarantine has failed. Have you looked out the window? Do you see what’s happening out there?”

  “No. My business is right here and only right here. Your business is getting back in that room.” When Griff didn’t move, the man added, “I don’t know if you’ve guessed this or not, but you are extraneous. Unneeded. Try not to become unwanted.”

  The two men eyed each other, while to the side, the presence of the other orderly loomed. Griff wouldn’t be able to get them both. All three knew it.

  Griff slowly shut the door. The room was so quiet, that when he tried his phone again, they could all hear the same message play. “Okay, we’re fucked,” he told them. “We can wait until my partner gets back, or we can hope the hospital staff comes for us, or we shoot our way out. That’s it. Those are our choices.”

  They were awful choices. Griff didn’t think they could afford to wait with a fire in the building. And what would happen if Bryce or Maddy turned raving mad? And shooting their way out was suicide. Maybe he could get the orderly guarding the door, but there was no way he’d be able to take down the second one. And where were the other two he had seen earlier?

  It was a given that they weren’t real either. Magnus could afford an entire battalion of fake orderlies.

  “There’s got to be another way out,” Maddy said. Her tone suggested that this was a fact, and that if it wasn’t, she was going to need to speak to a manager. She waddled around, grunting in pain, checking drawers, the security of the windows, the width of the air vents—all were too small to fit her girth. Increasingly wild, hair-brained ideas flashed into her mind; each came w
ith the whisper of the old movie line: That’s so crazy it just might work!

  In the end, they waited, listening to the horns and the sirens, the guns and the screams, the volume of which swelled with each passing minute. They made escaping seem even more deadly than simply staying put.

  But that was an illusion. The fire in the building grew and grey smoke began to fill the halls. Someone on their floor began to beg to be untied. Then the person began to scream in madness.

  She was still screaming when the elevator opened with a plume of smoke. The doors were barely open before a violent fight spilled out into the hallway. Two black-eyed men were attacking three women, punching, biting, tearing their hair out by the roots. One of the women was screeching in terror, but the other two were in the pain-maddened phase of turning, and were fighting back, ripping open faces with their long, salon-toughened claws.

  The orderly at the desk, Don Boggs, stood, Sig Sauer in hand, and waited. They were killing each other; he figured there was no reason to waste bullets. He and the other mercs had received a quick briefing three hours before and when he heard the type of “altered” humans they’d have to deal with: hyper-aggressive, immune to pain, cannibalistic, reduced cognitive ability, he had simply said, “You mean zombies, right?”

  “If that’s how you want to classify them, that’s fine with me,” their captain answered. “Just as long as you realize that they’re not people.”

  Boggs was an ex-soldier, an ex-cop and a full-time asshole; he didn’t care one way or another, as long as the check cleared at the end of the day.

  Chapter 7

  The little battle in front of Boggs ended as the men eventually prevailed, killing the one uninfected woman and breaking the neck of one of the others. It was then that the remaining three saw him standing there.

  Ignoring the gun in his hands, they charged over and through the front desk, knocking it down. Generally, center mass was Boggs’ way of thinking, but if these were zombies, he had to go for the head. At this range—almost within arm’s reach—he couldn’t miss. The first man went down with a hole, neat as you please, in the center of his forehead.

  The next took one in the eye, and the third shifted slightly at the last moment and had his ear blown clean off. Boggs followed it up by putting a nine-millimeter hole between his eyes.

  The man fell but did not die. Bullets did strange things sometimes. They spun, tumbled, and ricocheted in the oddest manners. After striking the very lower edge of the frontal bone, the bullet took an immediate dive and blasted down through the nasal cavity, passed through the mouth and exploded out the bottom of the jaw. The man dropped.

  In line with Boggs’ training, he was just ejecting his old magazine to replace it with a full one, when the man lurched upward in a clumsy attack. Clumsy or not, the two fell backwards over the chair Boggs had been sitting in. They went down in a twist of arms and legs. The magazine fell away and his second was still on his belt, pinned behind him.

  Boggs was a brute of a man and very strong. He was able to lift his attacker off of him, but it cost him his right thumb, which was bitten off.

  “Christ!” The pain was like nothing he’d ever felt before. Even though his thumb was the problem, his entire right arm seemed to go flaccid and the creature fell onto him. “Wilkes! Get him off of me!”

  Wilkes, the cold-eyed orderly, abandoned his watch on the door and ran to help his comrade. A single shot was all it took, but by then Griff was in the hall, his pistol aimed at the back of Wilkes’ head.

  Griff had heard the commotion and had been waiting for something like this to happen. “Don’t you fucking move!” he barked at Wilkes. “Slowly, get those hands up. Come on. I will shoot you.” Cursing under his breath, Wilkes raised his hands. When he did, Griff said, “Bryce, get out here. Get his gun.”

  “Me?”

  Maddy, who was in the doorway next to Bryce, elbowed him and they both grimaced. Their intense pain was only slowly fading and any quick movement brought it right back. “Fine,” Bryce grumbled. He was barefoot and squeamish about stepping in any of the blood; he had no idea what was contaminated and what wasn’t. The floor wasn’t just dappled, it was a gory mess.

  He tiptoed through it as if he were walking through a minefield. Then, when he got close to Wilkes, he was struck numb with fear. This was a trained killer. In every movie he had ever seen, they were fast as lightning and always seemed able to turn the tables on someone as meek as Bryce.

  Stretching out his arm from ridiculously far away, he snatched the pistol and grabbed it in both hands.

  “Careful,” Wilkes said, looking back over his shoulder. “That thing’s ready to go. Maybe put the safety on?”

  “Maybe he doesn’t,” Maddy replied. She would’ve been a lot happier if she had the gun. Even though she had never fired one before, she was sure she would be better than Bryce.

  “Yeah, don’t,” Griff said. He nudged Bryce back, grabbed Wilkes by the collar and shoved him against the wall. In a matter of seconds, he was expertly frisked. Bryce pointed his gun at Wilkes as Griff searched Boggs. He found the gun and the magazines. All three were bloody. He kicked them over to Maddy. “Use alcohol to clean those.”

  “No shit,” Maddy said, rolling her eyes. “Did you think I was going to lick them clean?”

  Griff growled, “Just clean them.”

  Wilkes was watching them, his head kinked far around on his neck. “I have cars coming. I’m supposed to escort the geek and the woman back to Magnus Plaza. We have room for one more.”

  “Geek?” Bryce waggled the gun at him. “I think you should be a little more careful who you’re calling a geek. And Maddy and I aren’t going anywhere with you.” Bryce glanced over at Maddy, who was at the nurses’ sink scrubbing the gun. She nodded defiantly.

  “It’s the only way you’ll be safe,” Wilkes explained. “We have a pair of big-ass Yukon Denalis on their way, and you’ll have an eight-man security team. Seven, now. You need any help, Boggs?”

  Boggs was red-faced, rocking back and forth, clutching his wounded hand. “I need a fucking doctor who can stitch my damned thumb back on.”

  Griff shook his head. “First, tell me where the others are? Where’s the rest of your crew?”

  Wilkes held up a finger and cocked his head. There was gunfire below them. “That’s them. They’re keeping a lane open for us. I think the shit’s coming unglued faster than Magnus thought it would.”

  “What shit is that?” Griff asked.

  “Dunno.” Wilkes’ eyes dropped. He suddenly seemed lost and uncertain. “Whatever it is, I’m starting to wonder if we’re a part of his big picture.” He and Boggs shared a look. “Magnus is way over-paying us. We’re getting a million each for this. At first, I was jacked, because, you know, it’s a million fucking dollars. That’s like a hundred times what we should get, but now I wonder if it’s worth it.”

  Bryce lowered the gun. “A million dollars? It really is like money’s no longer worth anything to him.” He glanced over at Maddy, who had stopped in the middle of cleaning one of the magazines. “He said soon, I just didn’t think it would be this soon. God.”

  “How can money not mean anything?” Boggs demanded. “I better get paid for fuck’s sake.” He was no longer as fearsome as he had been. Bryce saw that he had crooked teeth and a lazy eye. He was sweating in fear.

  Maddy put the magazine down and stared at her hands. “He has a different vision for the future of humanity,” she mumbled, echoing Magnus’ words. “He’s creating a utopia. That’s what he said. No more money. No more murder. No more war.”

  “Then he’s fucked up,” Wilkes spat. “Because if you look out the fucking window, all you got is murder and war.”

  “He’s making it the last war,” Bryce said. His lips were pursed as if he found the words sour. “He’s done something to…to make us kill each other, and all that’ll be left is his little group of cultists.”

  Groaning, Boggs sat up, putting his back to
the upended desk. “We’re not killing each other. He made zombies. Christ, look at them.” The pile of corpses at his feet barely appeared human. Even in death they looked like monsters, twisted into human shapes.

  Maddy went back to scrubbing. “There’s no such thing as zombies. Those poor people were clearly subjected to some sort of chemical compound that affected the limbic system.”

  Wilkes turned and dropped his hands to his sides. They seemed suddenly heavy. Either that, or he was suddenly weak. “What’s the fucking difference? If it walks like a fish and talks like a fish, it’s probably a fish. Either way, this is all the more reason to get back to Magnus’ compound. If he knew this was coming; if he planned it, then he’s probably got it all worked out how to survive. Right?”

  Griff shook his head. “No. We’re going to head down to the Federal Plaza. There’s an FBI station there. We’ll be safe there until we can get word to Washington about what’s going on.”

  “The Federal Plaza!” Wilkes cried. “That’s like thirty or forty blocks. It’s all the way downtown. Jeeze. You’ll never make it.”

  Bryce held up a hand. “We can if we take one of those Yukon SUV things, right?”

  Wilkes sneered, “That ain’t happening. You ain’t touching my ride. You see, we only get paid if we deliver you to Magnus, not to the FBI. But hey, if you got the cash, I’ll sell one to you.”

  “Weren’t you listening?” Maddy said, looking up from the gun again. She’d been trying to figure out how to get the bullet out of the gun’s chamber so she could clean the barrel without blowing her hand off. “Money is worthless.”

  “Not yet it isn’t.” He grinned, which turned his eyes to dark slivers. “Money is still money, at least for a little while. A million fucking dollars might get me a boat, and I can see myself living the pirate life if this all goes down like you think.” The grin slowly faded; with his gun sitting in Bryce’s hands, the million dollars seemed to be slipping away. “How about this: I come with you.”