Like all of the doors that they had opened and unlocked as they made their way deeper into the fortress, it was still unlocked and partially ajar. Raising her submachine gun, Jun nudged the bottom of the door with her foot and then peered through the open gap into the stairway beyond. The steps leading up appeared to be clear of the Dead, though she could hear movement from somewhere above.
“Come on, this way!” Jun shouted back down the hallway, slinging her submachine gun over her shoulder and switching to her T-99 instead. She took careful aim through the rifle’s scope, and then began squeezing off shots and picking off the Dead menacing the rest of the squad one by one. “Door’s open and the stairs are clear!”
Sibyl and Curtis reached the stairs first, with the young American leaning heavily on the Englishwoman for support, his shoulder and left side stained darkly with his own blood. Josiah and Werner followed close behind, walking backwards down the hallway as they fired their weapons back the way that they’d come, keeping the pursuing Dead from overtaking them.
Jun held the door open as first Sibyl and Curtis and then Werner and Josiah passed through. When the whole squad was in the stairway, Jun slammed the door shut, and then looked in vain for a way to bar or bolt the door.
“Can you make this locked again, Sibyl?” Jun asked urgently, as she could hear the Dead approaching from the other side.
“I learned the trick to unlocking doors, dear,” Sibyl replied with weary humor, straining slightly under the weight of the injured Curtis, “but never tried my hand at using my picks to lock one. It’s possible, I suppose, but…”
“We don’t have that kind of time,” Josiah cut in, already starting up the steps to the next floor. “Our concern is what’s ahead, remember, not what’s behind.”
And as the squad trooped up the brightly-lit steps to the next level, it felt to Jun as though they were climbing up out of the tomb, leaving behind the stale air and gloomy unease of the lower level for the light and stillness of the levels above. But she was mindful that many of the Dead had already left the tomb ahead of them, and that the stillness and light that they’d passed through on the squad’s way down might not be there to greet them on the way back out…
Chapter 23
THERE WERE ALREADY a number of the Dead roaming the next level up when they exited the stairwell, and by that point Jun could already hear the sounds of more of them coming up the stairs from below.
“Damn, it didn’t take them long to get that open,” Josiah said, casting a quick glance over his shoulder back down the way they’d come. “Hopefully the stairs’ll slow ’em down a little.”
Curtis was in a bad way, able to maintain his footing with Sibyl’s help but not much more than that. His left arm hung useless at his side, while his right hand was occupied trying to stem the flow of blood from the gaping wound in his shoulder. Sibyl was unable to work the bolt on her Lee Enfield with one arm helping to keep Curtis on his feet, and so was limited to using her revolver to keep the Dead ahead at bay. So the squad had to adapt to a new marching order. With Josiah in the lead and Werner and Jun at his flanks, they began to drive down the hallway towards the final set of stairs at the far end, with Sibyl and Curtis following close behind.
Most of the Dead who had reached this level ahead of them and hadn’t already moved on to the top level were crowded at the far end of the hallway, jostling against one another as they attempted to make their way through the stairway to the upper level and the hangar beyond. A half-dozen or so stragglers had noted the arrival of the squad from the floor beneath them, and turned back to shamble in their direction.
Jun didn’t need to wait for orders this time, and she raised her T-99 as both the sergeant and Werner leveled their own rifles and took aim.
Three shots sounded out like peals of thunder, as the rearmost of the shambling Dead ahead of them toppled to the floor, rotten grey matter and ichor-like blood geysering up from their exploding skulls. Then three more shots a split second later after they’d chambered another round, and another trio of the Dead were collapsing to the floor in motionless heaps.
Having taken account of the six zombies who were already shambling back in their direction, the sergeant motioned the squad to advance. And so he, Jun, and Werner took two paces forward, took aim and fired, then another two paces as they chambered another round in their rifles, then drew a bead and fired again, and so on as they continued down the corridor.
By the time the squad closed the distance between them and the stairway leading to the top level, all of the zombies in the corridor were down, rotting corpses strewn all over the floor in their wake. Jun allowed herself to entertain the notion that the worst of it might be behind them. Then they stepped into the stairway and that notion was long gone.
The zombies were slower going up steps that they were shambling across a level floor, and so even as slow as their forward progress typically was there had been a gradual buildup as the Dead entering the stairs run up against those who were already making their slow way up the steps. And so, now that the squad had caught up, they found a veritable unbroken wall of undead flesh before them, with dozens upon dozens of the Dead crammed into the dozen or so steps from where they now stood to the next landing up ahead.
“Forget this nonsense,” the sergeant snarled as he raised the barrel of his 12-gauge shotgun and let off a blast into the nearest of the Dead.
Jun switched to her submachine gun and Werner to his MP40 as the two of them squeezed into the stairwell on either side of the sergeant and unloaded their clips into the wall of unliving bodies on the steps above. There was no time now for careful aim and precision. This was wholesale slaughter, mechanized death with an unending hail of gunfire, the Dead being mown down like wheat before the scythe.
She reloaded her Thompson as she climbed over the lower rows of the fallen, and continued firing on the Dead above. The bodies of the fallen Dead were so thick that her feet didn’t even touch the floor, and instead she was scrambling over their rotting corpses like a mountain goat over unsteady terrain.
“Make haste, friends!” Sibyl called from a short distance behind, and Jun glanced back to see the Englishwoman aiming her Lee Enfield and firing back down the hallway the way they’d come, while Curtis leaned against the wall, all color drained from his cheeks and his eyes half-lidded.
From her vantage halfway up to the next landing, Jun could see that the zombies who had followed them from the floor below were beginning to catch up, and had almost reached the bottom of the stairs. Unless the squad speeded their advance up the stairs, they ran the risk of being pincered between the Dead before them and behind.
But Curtis seemed unlikely to climb the mound of bodies that littered the stairs without assistance, and Sibyl was too busy fending off the Dead who were approaching down the hallway to help him up.
“Curtis!” Jun shouted as she turned and hopped over the bodies on the steps to reach the bottom of the stairs. She put one arm around Curtis’s back and pulled him towards her. “Let’s go!”
Then with Jun practically shouldering Curtis’s entire weight, the two of them slowly made their way up the bottom steps, climbing over the fallen Dead while Sibyl fired round after round from her Lee Enfield at the zombies closing in on them from behind.
“Come on!” the sergeant shouted from the landing above. “The rest of the way is clear!”
Jun had almost helped Curtis all the way to the landing where Werner was now standing when she heard a deafening scream from behind. She turned back, and saw that Sibyl was staggering backwards. One of the Dead had barreled into her, wrapping its bony arms around her legs, and was in the process of taking an enormous bite out of her thigh.
“Sibyl!” Jun shouted as she immediately raised her Thompson and fired it one handed without even having a chance to aim. Her bullets tore into the back of the zombie that had knocked Sibyl down, but it continued gnawing on her thigh.
Werner rushed past Jun, diving down the stairs and p
ulling a combat knife from a sheath at his belt. In one fluid motion he brought the point of the blade down and buried it in the side of the zombie’s skull, then wrenched its now-motionless jaws off of Sibyl’s leg.
“Here, Frau Beaton, allow me,” Werner said, taking hold of Sibyl’s hand and helping her to her feet. She was unable to put any weight on her injured leg, and Werner as much as held her up. For her part, Sibyl was so stricken by pain and shock that she could do little but mutter an unending series of curses beneath her breath, displaying a breadth and scope of vulgarity that Jun was shocked to learn the Englishwoman possessed.
With the sergeant and Jun providing cover fire from above, Werner half-carried, half-helped Sibyl up the pile of bodies to the landing, and then up the stairs to the upper level. Then the sergeant assisted Curtis up to the top while Jun laid down suppressing fire on any pursuers.
Finally all five members of the squad were on the upper level of the fortress, albeit a little worse for wear. It seemed to Jun that Sibyl’s injuries might even be worse than the ones that Curtis had sustained, and it was clear that neither of them would be able simply to tie a bandana around their wounds and soldier on, as she herself had, what seemed like a lifetime ago. The cut that she had gotten climbing out of the electrical conduit had been the barest of scratches compared to the gaping, freely-bleeding holes in her two squad mates.
But they didn’t have any time to pause and tend to their wounds. The zombies from below were still at their heels, and they still had to make their way to the hangar and close the main doors.
“Remember, our concern is what’s ahead of us, y’all,” the sergeant reiterated, sounding even wearier than before, “not what’s behind. Let’s keep moving.”
There were only a bare handful of the Dead roaming this upper level, and it was a matter of relative ease to pot them with headshots from a distance, clearing the squad’s way to the entrance to the hangar at the far end of the corridor. If not for the fact that two of her squad mates were in the process of bleeding to death and a horde of ravenous zombies were following close behind, Jun would have been tempted to think that things were working out in their favor.
Then they reached the hangar. And if reaching the stairway crammed with the Dead moments before had put paid to the notion that the worst of it was behind them, seeing what lay before them in the hangar demolished the idea that anything at all might be working out in their favor.
The hangar was overrun with the Dead.
“Aw, hell,” Josiah said, shoulders slumping.
From wall to wall the space was crawling with zombies, that ebbed and flowed like the tides. On the far side of the hangar Jun could see them streaming out beneath the open hangar door in dribs and drabs, into the bright early morning light beyond. But there were still more of the Dead milling around the midst of the hangar than they had encountered so far in the fortress put together. One of the barracks that they’d opened up on their initial descent into the fortress must have housed more of the Dead than they’d realized, and the damned things had been streaming their way up here to the hangar nearly the entire time that the squad had been downstairs.
Jun’s eyes scouted the way ahead, and through the milling horde she saw the doorway to the control room on the far right wall, where she had found the controls that opened the main rolling hangar door. Thankfully, she had closed the control room door behind her, and through the leaded windows she could see that there were no zombies inside the small space. But to reach the control room they would have to carve their way through the horde before them.
“Over there!” she shouted, grabbing hold of the sergeant’s elbow to get his attention, and pointed in the direction of the control room door. “We need to get in there!”
“Copy that,” Josiah answered, immediately regaining his focus. “Lead the way, kid.”
It was a distance that, without obstruction or obstacle, they could cover in the span of a dozen or so paces. But with the milling Dead blocking their way, the going was considerably more time-consuming and arduous. Jun was conscious of the fact that she only had one more full drum magazine on her, and so was more judicious with her shots from the Thompson than she had been back in the stairwell. But still she fired almost constantly, aiming for the heads of the zombies that milled in their path, dropping them like flies one after another.
“Keep at it!” the sergeant urged from behind her. Jun didn’t turn around or even acknowledge the encouragement, but rammed the last magazine into place and continued firing into the crowd.
But so focused was she on the obstacles directly before her that she was hardly aware of the progress they were making, and as a result she was surprised when one of the Dead toppled in front of her and she saw the control room door immediately behind where it had fallen.
“Cover me!” she called back over her shoulder, then stepped over the fallen Dead and took hold of the door handle. It turned easily in her grip, and she stepped aside to provide cover fire while the sergeant helped Curtis stumble through, and then came Werner carrying Sibyl. Jun fired the last rounds from her submachine gun, clearing just enough of a space around the control room door to give her time to slip inside and close the door behind her.
Jun was catching her breath as she heard the clanking of the chain-and-pulley system grinding to life and beginning to winch the rolling door shut, but then the sound ceased almost before it had begun.
“God DAMN it,” she could hear the sergeant muttering.
“What?” Jun turned away from the door and looked over to the bank of controls where the sergeant and Werner were standing, while Sibyl and Curtis leaned limply against the back wall.
The sergeant had his hand hovering above the lever marked with the German words for “door” and “open,” a scowl on his face. He pressed the lever, and the door mechanism ground to life once more, but the second he lifted his hand the lever snapped back into the off position and the door stopped moving.
“The system is manual, it only works when someone is turning the key,” Josiah said, eyes low to the ground. “If we’re going to get out of here, someone is going to have to stay behind and close the door behind us.”
Chapter 24
“WELL, STOP PLAYING silly buggers,” Sibyl said, her voice strained and breathless. “It’s obvious who needs to stick around, isn’t it?”
Jun and the others turned and glanced over to where the Englishwoman was leaning against the wall of the control room, looking even more pale and unsteady than she had just a moment before.
“I mean, how am I meant to climb down a bloody mountain with this?” Sibyl asked, gesturing to the generous wound on her thigh. “I can barely stand up as it is. So stick me in a chair, point me at the lever, and let’s get on with it already.”
Before Jun or any of the others could react, Curtis cut in.
“I’m in a bad way, folks,” the young American said, sounding like he was having trouble maintaining consciousness, much less focus or alertness, “and I’ve been bleeding out a whole lot longer than Missus Beaton here. You should take her with you down the mountain, and leave me to take care of this.”
“Stuff and nonsense,” Sibyl shot back, starting to gesture in Curtis’ direction and then almost losing her balance entirely. Werner rushed to her side and took hold of her arm just before she fell backwards onto the floor.
“Damn it, y’all,” the sergeant muttered under his breath. Jun could see that he was struggling with the choice, and deeply unhappy that any of them had to be left behind, and even less so that ultimately the decision of who it was to be fell to him.
“I think that…” Werner began, but then was cut off when the interior of the control room was filled with the sound of shattering glass.
Jun spun around, and saw that the zombies on the other side of the door had smashed through one of the windows, despite the wires reinforcing the leaded glass. And while they were so far just reaching cadaverous arms through the gap, bony hands grasping and s
crambling like skeletal spiders, rotting flesh torn away by the jagged edges of broken glass, it would only be a matter of time before one of them crawled bodily through all the way.
“We don’t have time for this,” Curtis said, and raised his semi-automatic pistol in a blood-slicked fist, firing a round at one of the Dead flailing through the broken window. “Mrs. Beaton, get on that lever, and I’ll keep them off your back. The rest of you get out of here!”
There was no more time for debate or delay. If they didn’t move quickly, they would be trapped in the control room.
The sergeant nodded once in Curtis’s direction, and then moved a rolling chair into place in front of the lever while Werner helped Sibyl cross the floor. Then Jun and the sergeant helped Sibyl lower herself down onto the seat of the chair, wincing in pain and discomfort as she did.
“Good luck,” the sergeant said simply, laying a hand on Sibyl’s shoulder, and then moved to the door, firing a shotgun blast through the broken window as he went.
Jun lingered for a moment by Sibyl’s side. She could not help remembering the moment when she had been forced to watch her friends swallowed up by a ravening horde in Moscow, and now she felt like she was back in the exact same position once again.
Sibyl looked up and met Jun’s gaze, and blinked slowly before answering.
“Make it… count,” the Englishwoman managed to get out with some difficulty. There were flecks of blood at the corners of her mouth, and Jun realized that the extent of Sibyl’s injuries were even greater than she had realized.
Jun squeezed Sibyl’s hand once, lips pressed tightly together, and then rushed over to join Josiah and Werner by the door.
“Y’all ready?” Josiah asked them both, his hand on the door knob.
“Give the word, Herr Sergeant,” Werner replied.
Jun chanced a quick glance over to Sibyl in the chair, her hand poised over the door control lever, with Curtis standing directly behind her, bracing himself against the wall and firing round after round at the zombies attempting to claw their way through the broken window and into the control room.
Fortress of the Dead Page 18
