Heroes of the Undead | Book 1 | The Culling

by Meredith, Peter

  Maddy snorted and Griff scoffed, saying, “That ain’t happening.”

  “Unarmed,” Wilkes said. “You guys are an investment. I need you alive and let’s face it, officer, with these two backing you up, you probably won’t make it five blocks without my help.”

  Bryce thought there was safety in numbers, but as Griff and Maddy refused to hear it, so he kept silent. Griff handcuffed the two men together, linking their arms before he barricaded them in a supply closet. When they began to whine, he said, “Stop your crying, one of your men will come for you.”

  “If this fire gets worse, they’ll be here any minute,” Maddy noted.

  “More like any second, “ Griff said and took off down the hall, racing for the stairwell door with Maddy and Bryce hobbling after, grimacing and groaning from the pain. Along the way, they passed room after room of infected people. They screamed and screeched, and if they hadn’t been tied to their beds, they would’ve chased the three down with ease. No one asked what was going to happen to them if the fire grew worse. Some things were best left unasked.

  The stairwell was grey with smoke. People—normal people—were going in both directions, gagging and coughing. Others were huddled in the smoke, covering their faces and crying. Some were sprawled, unmoving. Even with the little blue masks, the trio sucked down smoke. It shriveled their lungs. Bryce went light-headed and fell into Maddy, who fell into Griff.

  He shouldered them off of him and squinted through teary eyes downwards where the smoke was thicker. There were more limp bodies. He wanted to go to them. He had a duty to go to them and save them if he could. But he also had a duty to the city.

  “Has anyone tried the north stairwell?” he asked an older man with a graying military-style brush cut.

  “Check it yourself, shit-breath.”

  Griff couldn’t tell if he was in the initial angry stages of the infection or if he was just a bitter old man. He glared but said nothing as Brush-cut pushed ahead of the others.

  “Anyone else? The north stairwell?” No one around them had tried it yet, so Griff turned and ran back onto the floor, followed by Bryce, Maddy, and a half dozen others. They kept to the middle of the hallway, assaulted by furious screams on every side. Bryce and Maddy were the last to make it to the north stairs. Even a man on crutches passed them by.

  Bryce was nearly crippled with pain. On top of that, he was famished beyond the point of simply being hungry. He felt weak as if he hadn’t eaten anything in days. Maddy was even worse off. Sweat trickled from her pores in tiny rivers and her heart thudded a million miles an hour. When they stopped, she dropped and lay gasping.

  This had Griff muttering into his blue mask in disgust.

  “It’s the drugs,” Bryce said, his eyes going in and out of focus. “We need a car or…or…a taxi.”

  “You need to walk it off,” Griff shot back. “Get up. Come on, Maddy.” He helped her up and then opened the door to the sound of screams echoing up through a grey haze. Again, people were pushing up towards them.

  One man saw the guns in their hands. He pointed down and hissed, “It’s them. The ones from the TV.”

  Someone else saw their masks and grew excited. “Do the masks work? Do they keep you safe?”

  Griff had no idea. “Maybe, I don’t know. Look out. Stand aside, please. Grandma, you too.” He started down and was at the next landing when he realized Maddy and Bryce weren’t with him. “Get your asses down here!”

  Reluctantly they followed. The screams bouncing off the walls were terrible. They went on and on, drilling into their ears. They had to endure two stories of it before they found the screamer.

  Chapter 8

  Janine O’Neil was a big woman, standing over six foot, with thick, tree-trunk thighs. At thirty, she was in her prime. On the rare occasions that someone tested her patience, they discovered, to their dismay, that she could swing her hands like meaty sledgehammers. At nine o’clock on that Thanksgiving night, those big fists had proven useless. The people attacking her were fast and she was no sprinter. They had caught her as she ran into the stairwell, where she turned and fought, but they were jackals and she was the wildebeest. In a frontal attack she held every advantage and she pounded each to the floor with mighty swings of her sledgehammer fists.

  But, like a bad dream, they kept getting up.

  It didn’t seem to matter that she was breaking noses and crushing eye sockets. It slowly dawned on her that these weren’t people high on some strange drug compound. She didn’t want to admit what they were, but she knew deep down what the greying skin, the dank red mouths, and the black eyes meant. These weren’t people anymore.

  This realization sapped her strength and quickly she began to flag, her breath growing ragged and harsh in her throat. She tried to flee up the stairs, but prey is always weakest when they run. They caught her from behind and dragged her down. From then on, she fought to save her face and throat, but she did so at the expense of her legs and belly. They tore into her and she bled.

  Twice, Janine was able to push to her feet and scramble a few stairs higher. Twice they caught her. By the time Griff reached her, the fight in her was gone. Blood loss and exhaustion made her lethargic and like an animal, her eyes rolled in their sockets. She was now only waiting to die.

  Griff took aim at the closest of the creatures—center mass, like he’d been taught. Then the word zombies ghosted through his head and he lifted his sights. When he fired in the narrow concrete stairwell, the gunshot was like a canon.

  Both Bryce and Maddy flinched in pain as it felt like spikes had been driven into their ears.

  The other two zombies, teenage girls with bits of flesh in their braces and blood dripping from their chins, turned mad eyes to Griff. He shot one of them before she could move. She toppled backwards and went tumbling down the stairs, her head making a sickening knocking sound each time it struck cement. The second girl charged up at him, leading with her red mouth. Griff fired from a range of three feet. Her black brains exploded out the back of her head and covered the wall.

  Bryce, his hands over his ears, moaned in disgust at the sight. Maddy’s stomach flipped and she felt her gorge rising. Clamping a hand over her mouth, she turned and hid her face behind Bryce.

  Griff stared down, wishing he wasn’t seeing this. He had witnessed some serious shit in his time, but nothing compared to what lay before him. Janine was the fountainhead of a red river. Great, insane amounts of blood, seemed to flow from her. It cascaded down the stairs with each of the creatures adding to it until it was too much; until it was impossible to look at and remain sane.

  But pulling his eyes away from the red river, meant that he had to mentally deal with Janine. She lay mewling and gasping with one of the creatures draped across her legs. Its mouth was stuffed with a link of her intestine.

  “Kill me,” she whispered.

  Griff drew back at the request; his gun hand dropping to his side. He wanted to hide the 9mm. Her demand was insane. It would be murder. There’d be an investigation, and at best he’d be arrested and stripped of his badge. At worst, he’d fry, or rot in prison for the rest of his life. It went against everything he had been working the last ten years for.

  And what about their ammo situation? They probably had only sixty rounds between them and there was no telling how many more zombies they’d run into before they made it to the Federal Building.

  But how could he say no? The woman was clearly in terrible pain and with the hospital on fire, her chances were slim. Slim didn’t mean zero, however.

  “Let me see if I can find a doctor,” he told her, clinging desperately to the idea. “Just…just hold on.”

  “Don’t leave me.” She reached out for his leg, but he quickly stepped around her. Without looking at her, Maddy, then Bryce followed after. There were other people on the stairs, however they stayed back, some even retreating back the way they had come. Most were too afraid of catching the “zombie virus” as everyone instinctively thou
ght of it. Some were too disgusted by Janine. They couldn’t handle seeing her stomach torn open, turned into a sickening bowl of soup and gnawed intestines.

  Griff really meant to find a doctor or a nurse, one who wasn’t infected, that is. Sure, the ER and the ICU were hotbeds for the inflicted, but what about oncology or radiology? Hell, even an obgyn doc would work.

  On the next floor down was a sign for pediatrics, in-patient surgery, and the cafeteria. All this could be found behind a door that was venting plumes of dark smoke around its edges. The fire was worse than he thought. He had figured it was a small thing, more smoke than flames.

  It had begun in the third floor kitchens as a half-dozen infected had stormed through the cafeteria, chasing an unarmed hospital guard. When Pappy Martinez, a line cook with thick tattooed arms and more scars than he could count, heard the commotion, he had picked up a knife in one hand and a hot skillet in the other, and charged out into the fray. Almost gleefully, he had laid about with his makeshift weapons.

  But the weirdos causing all the ruckus wouldn’t stop no matter how many times he stabbed them or smacked them with the skillet. Pappy was strong, but he had the endurance of a line cook not a boxer, and within a minute he was winded. After two minutes, he was gasping. He fled into his kitchen where a second cook waited, holding knives in both hands.

  Everyone else had run off.

  “Those won’t work!” Pappy cried, meaning the knives. They both looked around and came to the same conclusion: if there was one thing that killed everything, it was fire. And it did. They grabbed mops, dunked them into the grease pit and set them ablaze using the stove burners. A quick smack in the face with the heavy mops was all it took.

  It took much more to witness the death they had created and both men were sickened seeing humans coated in old bacon grease burning like torches.

  Not only were the deaths sickening, they were also stupid. The human torches didn’t die right away. They set the kitchen on fire first as they blundered about with their eyes burned out of their sockets. The other cook ran off, leaving Pappy alone to deal with the fire. He grabbed an extinguisher and did what he could; however his mop had left a trail of grease drippings that wound back to the grease pit, and when that caught fire there was nothing he could do. The heat was so fantastic that the hair on Pappy’s arm curled and turned to ash before he could get close.

  Even the automatic fire suppression sprinklers couldn’t tame the fire. Not that it mattered. One of the human torches had wandered into the dining room and had fallen against a wall, setting the carpet on fire. Soon the entire room was ablaze.

  Pappy called 911—along with over thirteen hundred other people in Manhattan alone. There were a hundred fires and a thousand murders, and the city was coming apart at the seams. It wouldn’t have mattered if any of the calls had gotten through. The streets were packed solid with traffic and what cops that were left were already up to their throats in undead.

  The fire went unconfined and although it had started slowly, it was now eating the building from the inside out. The heat was so intense, it radiated through the cinderblock walls, making Griff cringe and he threw up an arm to shield his eyes which felt like they were shrivling. As bad as it was, he would rather face it than having to deal with Janine. “I’ll get help,” he yelled back to her… It was a lie and he knew it was a lie the second the words slipped from his mouth. No help was coming. Not the fire department and not the police. Even if there were doctors left in the building, they would be working on the patients who actually had a chance.

  Janine was not one of these.

  Maddy, who was thinking the same thing, couldn’t look at her. She was a pacifist at heart and the idea of hurting an innocent person, even in mercy, was too much. She kept her eyes hard away from the big woman as she tiptoed by her.

  This left Bryce, and he knew it. He could sense Maddy’s weakness, and he could see how Griff’s adherence to the law was stopping him. The only thing stopping Bryce from doing the right thing was his natural squeamishness, something he realized he could no longer fall back on to hide from difficult choices.

  He didn’t want to look at Janine, but his eyes were drawn to her and caught her staring at him. There were great fat tears building in her eyes. Her jaw was quivering. Her hands were shaking as they fought to keep her innards from slithering out onto the stairs. Bryce took all this in and his resolve weakened to the point that he took another step down.

  “Please,” she whispered.

  Her pain was like the heat sweeping up the stairs. It was a force that could only be denied by running away. But there was no running left in Bryce just then. Below him the heat was a wall he would have to burst through and above was a slow death from smoke inhalation. He hesitated long enough for his guilt to overcome his squeamishness.

  “Close your eyes,” he said. She looked away, which was even better. He tried to aim the gun from where he was, but his hands were shaking so badly he knew he would only end up blowing her face off, if he hit her at all. He had to get closer. Those three steps were the hardest of his life, and when he got close, he had to use two hands to hold the gun still.

  Bryce wasn’t strong enough to watch as he pulled the trigger. This time the sound of the gun was strangely muffled in his ears. Had it worked right? he wondered. Chancing a peek at Janine, he saw brains, pink and grey, spattered across the stairs. “God,” he said, shuddering. Maddy looked him in the eye for all of a second before turning back to the heat and the smoke—these were easier to deal with.

  “There’s no use turning back,” Griff said over his shoulder; he didn’t want to look back at what was essentially a murder scene. None of them did. “We just have to get past the door. It’ll be better below this floor.”

  “I think we understand thermodynamics, thank you very much,” Maddy snipped. “But what if you’re wrong? What if the fire started further down?”

  Griff shrugged. “Then we deal. This is the third floor. It can’t go too much further.” When it came to fire, this wasn’t logical. They had no idea where the fire had started. As far as they knew, the basement could be on fire and they could be rushing down into a veritable oven. Griff swallowed thick spittle. “I’ll go first.” He pulled his jacket in front of his face and, without another word, sped down the stairs, taking them three at a time. He disappeared into the thick haze.

  Maddy and Bryce waited, their faces, stretched in fear, were a perfect match. Maddy wanted to cling to Bryce, but it was Bryce and her dignity wouldn’t let her. “You okay?” she called out to Griff after a few seconds.

  “Yeah… It’s okay… down here,” Griff said between coughing fits.

  The two PhDs looked at each other. “After you,” Bryce said. “Ladies first.” Maddy wanted to shove his faux gallantry down his throat. She knew that he just didn’t want to go first…at the same time, she didn’t want to go last. If something happened to her, who would come back for her?

  She took a deep breath and went jiggling down the stairs. After five steps, the heat was too much. The skin of her face felt like it was stretching and peeling back from the bone. But it was her bare feet that had her screaming, “Fuck me!” The concrete was, literally, blistering hot. She stumbled and her arm came down on the metal railing, which was even hotter.

  The swinging flesh of her arm sizzled when it hit the railing. She screamed again and then sucked in a great lungful of black smoke. Even with the blue mask, her head went instantly light and the next thing she knew, she was falling.

  Then Bryce was there, straining against her weight, his eyes at slits, his useless hospital gown sliding open. The pain in his feet was so intense that it leant him strength. He had to get away from it. Taking as fierce a grip as he could on Maddy’s gown, he hauled her to her feet and together they stumbled past the door.

  With every step down the heat dropped away and in seconds, Griff was there, helping to take some of Maddy’s weight. The three of them lurched down and down, each slowl
y regaining their senses as the air cleared.

  Finally, they were at a door marked: Ground Floor.

  Griff reached for the handle but Bryce stopped him. “Just a second, please. Please. I just need a second.” Huffing and feeling like he could faint at any second, he collapsed back down onto the stairs and looked at the soles of his feet which were vibrantly red and covered in blisters . Maddy did as well, gingerly touching the bubbles that were forming and making a whining noise deep in her throat.

  “Shit. Your feet,” Griff whispered. He hadn’t considered their lack of clothing. All they had on were the flimsiest of sheer blue hospital gowns. Griff yanked off his suit coat and gave it to Maddy, who had to struggle her fleshy arms into it.

  She snugged it across her heavy chest. “Thanks, but I don’t know how far I can get like this. Maybe we should wait here until things calm down a bit.”

  “Maybe,” Griff said. They were safe, at least for a little while and he really didn’t know how they’d be able to go on. “Maybe for a little while.”

  Bryce surprised him, saying, “No. This, whatever this is, was done by Daniel Magnus. It’s not going to end until he decides to end it. It’s only going to get worse and our feet aren’t going to get any better any time soon. We need to push on.”

  “What about you?” Griff asked, looking at Maddy. He was sure she would say no, but she surprised him as well, agreeing with a quick nod. “Okay, we’ll go on. It may not be that bad if we can commandeer a taxi or some other vehicle. And there’s still the subway.” He put out a hand and helped Maddy to her feet. “The FDR is two blocks east. We’ll snatch a cab and…” He shoved the door open as he spoke, but his words stumbled at what he saw.

  The gates of Hell had opened and its demons were swarming over New York City.