Undead

by Ryan W. Aslesen

  The rooms past the elevators proved equally barren, filled mostly with computers and lab equipment considered obsolete by Western standards. Halfway through a search of the largest lab they’d run across, Max spotted the first sign of recent human habitation: a single yellow legal sheet upon which was scrawled an abstruse equation written in a meticulous hand. A slide rule, its lines and numbers faded from decades of use, lay next to the yellow paper.

  Max picked up the page and turned to Juno. “What do you make—”

  She snatched the paper from his hand and examined it. After a few moments she said, “Park’s work for certain.”

  Despite the familial connection, Max still asked, “How do you know?”

  “Look at all the computers. A young man wouldn’t work like this.”

  Max nodded. He’d gotten a C-minus in college chemistry and couldn’t understand why anyone, young or old, would choose to work in such fashion. “True. But is he the only older man working here?”

  “I don’t know. But this is his.”

  Something in her unflinching certainty triggered suspicion in Max. She’d left her father behind at the age of eight. Could she possibly remember—reliably—his style of handwriting? She’s holding back something, maybe a lot of things. Max caught West staring at him and knew he suspected something was up. How many people know Park is her father? I can’t be the only one.

  No one spoke for several moments. Then Heinz asked, “Does it provide any clues to his whereabouts?”

  “He’s not anywhere on this floor,” Delorn said.

  “You’re probably right,” Max agreed. “But we clear the rest anyway.”

  A search of the final five rooms produced no more evidence. Had the place not been so spotless, Max would have assumed it hadn’t been inhabited for years.

  He checked his watch: 0155. We’re burning moonlight. He wanted to be away and headed for the coast long before sunup. “Let’s move. We have an elevator to catch.”

  As they packed into the elevator, Delorn pointed to the lone button on the control panel. “Déjà vu.”

  “No, it says logistics and personnel,” Juno said.

  “No sense having one elevator that stops at every floor,” West said.

  “You’re point out of the door, Zuckerberg,” Max said. “Choose your targets carefully. Delorn, stick by Koontz and defend the bomb.”

  “Save your speeches for the boots, Ahlgren,” Zuckerberg said. “I’m not a rookie.”

  “So you say. I hope to hell you prove it.”

  “When haven’t—” She cut herself off.

  Max didn’t respond. Leave it right there. Give her something more to prove. The cowboys always performed at their best when gloating before an audience. He pressed the button and the doors closed. They hurtled downward to meet Dr. Park, his vile creations, and the shitload of soldiers no doubt awaiting them. The latter concerned him the most. Those zombies aren’t likely to be running around loose. But like the words possibly, maybe, and almost, and likely did not inspire confidence before a fight. Oh well. If you wanted to deal in absolutes you should have become a scientist.

  13

  Zuckerberg stood in the doorway as the elevator came to a halt. No one spoke, though Max heard some nervous breathing, probably from Koontz. A mixed bag of body odor—half sweat, half adrenaline—befouled the air in the cramped elevator. Delorn, packed in next to Max, smelled particularly noisome. Like a wet retriever after a duck hunt.

  The doors slid open. Zuckerberg swept the SAW’s barrel quickly left and right. “Clear,” she said, sounding bored as she moved from the elevator.

  Max followed her out. The corridor looked as though it had been conceived by Satan’s interior decorator. Colors exerted an undeniable influence on human emotions, and the designers of this facility utilized them to great effect. Vermillion walls with three parallel scarlet stripes ran into the distance, while harsh lights, recessed into the mustard-yellow ceiling, glared down every ten feet to reflect from a floor of the same color. The bright lighting and garish, irritating colors instantly annoyed Max, who donned polarized combat goggles and stowed his NVGs when he knew the hallway was clear. He normally didn’t like to wear goggles but decided it was worth the precaution due to the pathogenic way the virus could spread.

  “Stay on point, Trish,” Juno said. “We’re right behind.”

  Koontz isn’t the only nervous one. Juno had been twitchy since finding her father’s research paraphernalia upstairs. Max dreaded having to remind her that rescuing Dr. Park was only a secondary objective. He hoped she could keep it together, whether they located him or not. His assistant is the leak behind this trap. Chances are they’re both dead already. That harsh reality didn’t require utterance. By this point she surely realized her father’s probable fate. Besides, we are probably next.

  “Shit, who turned up the heat?” Delorn asked. The kid had a point; Max had already started sweating in his heavy undergarments.

  “Radio silence,” Max ordered, halting all other verbal observations of the disquieting logistics and personnel level.

  They first came to a vacant mess hall, the large room with its orderly rows of tables and chairs bolted to the floor visible through floor-to-ceiling Plexiglas windows. Juno motioned them past the glass double doors. Max would have preferred to enter and clear the kitchen—it would be spacious enough to hold many troops—but continued to march beside Juno as Zuckerberg stalked forward with the SAW. West took the rear again as they moved through this innocuous-seeming area.

  They passed other closed doors, Juno translating the labels affixed to them: maintenance, janitorial, commissary department. “Pick it up, Trisha,” she said. “We need to find stairs or another elevator.”

  Zuckerberg negotiated several turns and intersections as they moved on, always taking a cautious glance around the corners before proceeding. Juno called a halt just as Zuckerberg prepared to peer around a left turn in the hallway about ten feet ahead. “Barracks Area 1,” she whispered, glancing toward a closed pair of steel double doors on the right wall. “Get back here, Trish.”

  Zuckerberg joined them and posted directly before the doors. Max flanked her on the right, Juno on the left. He figured they would find only rows of empty bunks within, but the barracks nevertheless required investigation. Perhaps the North Koreans believed in the old maxim of hiding in plain sight. Max tried the doors, found them locked, and began entering the security code on the keypad.

  A wheezing whoosh of air from the left startled him. He looked over his shoulder and saw an older woman dressed all in white. She had rounded the corner and now stood there, mouth agape as she sucked in air to unleash a scream.

  Max darted around Zuckerberg and lunged for the woman, ready to preempt her scream with a butt stroke from his rifle. Her head exploded an instant before his attack. Blood, gray matter, and pieces of scalp trailing streamers of silver hair splattered Max and the hallway walls, the gore blending well into the riotous color scheme.

  Juno had her rifle raised, smoke curling from the suppressor. She glanced at him a moment before they inspected the body. The dead woman, every bit of sixty judging from her wizened skin, had been a support worker of some sort, a custodian perhaps. Her white uniform showed a dingy gray up close where not stained with gore.

  “Not necessary,” Max said. “I had it under control.” He wiped a gob of dark blood from his combat goggles. It wouldn’t have mattered if she screamed, we’re already compromised.

  Juno looked up from the body. “It’s no matter. Clear the barracks.”

  “Delorn, Koontz, cover this corner,” Max said. He blamed himself for not ordering it covered in the first place. She’s moving heedlessly. Step up and keep her in line.

  Max finished entering the code once the team was set. He and Juno pulled the steel doors open, and Zuckerberg swept the SAW’s barrel from one side of
the room to the other. Two rows of twelve double-tiered bunks, each fronted by two wooden footlockers, lined both blood-red walls. Max had lived in enough barracks to know the head lay behind the door at the far end of the room. Zuckerberg walked in ahead of Max and Juno.

  After traveling a few feet Max said, “There’s nobody here, the platoon isn’t hiding in the john.”

  “Safe enough wager,” Heinz said.

  “Agreed, let’s move on,” Juno said.

  Troops needed weapons, and the next door they ran across secured an armory. The lock on the heavy steel door did not click open when Max entered the code.

  “Yeah, they knew we were coming,” Delorn said.

  Heinz glared at the keypad. “Could just be extra security, it’s an armory, after all.”

  “We could blow the door,” West said.

  “No time,” Max responded. “And I’m thinking all we’ll find are a lot of empty racks.”

  “Good point.” Juno motioned ahead. “Let’s move on.”

  A couple hundred feet of hallway and three more turns brought them to another elevator with only one button, this time labeled Biogenetic Research. One level lower, they followed the same procedure upon exiting. Again, no one waited to greet them. Hot colors still painted the place, though long stretches of floor-to-ceiling windows now separated the swaths of vermillion and scarlet. The level gave a new meaning to the term transparency. Security cameras monitored every inch of the subterranean levels, but the glass walls here allowed officials to observe the scientists in person while they worked. Max’s suspicions were confirmed when they cleared the first empty lab: the windows were two-way mirrors.

  How many more levels do we have to drop before we kill someone who can fight back? A rhetorical question for Max, who figured the ambush would come any minute now judging by the labs they passed. This level was all business with no support or recreational activities. They passed a room with an MRI machine from 1990 or so, and then a chemistry lab full of glassware that might once have belonged to Dr. Frankenstein.

  “A cryogenics lab,” Juno said as they passed a few feet of windows. A bank of twelve freezers, similar in construction to morgue refrigerators, lined the wall at the back of the lab. Each had its own control panel, eight of which glowed a ghostly green.

  “Let’s check it out,” Delorn said.

  “No,” Max responded.

  Delorn whispered something along the lines of party pooper, but Max couldn’t make it out and didn’t care. They pressed on. His watch read 0238. Too slow. But it can’t be helped. Every intersection had to be negotiated with great care, especially now.

  A hallway opened ahead on the left wall. The hall they were in continued past that opening for another fifty feet before terminating at a left-right intersection. At the opening on the left, Zuckerberg poked her head and her SAW around the corner. Fully automatic small arms fire greeted her glance, sounding from a distance like a string of firecrackers. Zuckerberg pulled back; the team collectively hit the deck. Bullets tore into the vermillion wall and unleashed a sandstorm of gypsum grit that hung in the air and slowly began to settle.

  “Distance?” Max shouted.

  “Fuck, I don’t know, sixty feet?” Zuckerberg said. “They’re behind a barrier, some kinda tank-looking thing.”

  Shit. “Metal, glass? How many?”

  “I don’t fucking know!”

  “Assault through on my signal.” Max stood, crouched slightly. Throw a smoke grenade first. But he decided against that; he wanted to be able to see them. Also, a cover of smoke would convince the enemy they were being charged, which would increase their rate of fire.

  The rest of the team now stood. Max sprinted the ten feet across the intersection, attempting to catch a glimpse of the enemy as he went. The soldiers responded with expected gunfire. He felt the phosphorescent burn of a tracer round as it whizzed past an inch from his face. He reached the other side but failed to get a good look at the enemy defenses. Their fire had nearly destroyed the drywall, exposing large sections of concrete beneath.

  Max dug around in the admin pouch on his plate carrier until he located a tool specifically built for such situations: a small mirror affixed to a telescoping metal rod. He stuck the mirror around the corner for a glance, and the soldiers responded with more gunfire. Some of their bullets now ricocheted off the concrete to buzz about like enraged mosquitoes. His glance, however, proved beneficial. He’d sighted enough of the enemy to formulate a plan.

  Four men were stationed behind what appeared to be a four-foot defensive mantlet that spanned the hallway. Max tossed aside Zuckerberg’s estimate of sixty feet and put them at ninety or so, though it was difficult to judge distance with the mirror. The mantlet appeared to be homemade from plate steel, to Max’s disappointment. Their explosive bullets might well have shattered bulletproof glass, but not steel. Leave it to these backwards sons of bitches to build the better mousetrap.

  The gunfire died, and several metallic clanks echoed in the hallway. Max didn’t think twice. “Grenade!” He jumped back and threw himself to the deck facedown as the thrown grenade bounced into the back wall and detonated. The concussion rang his ears and rattled his bones. Shrapnel pinged off the concrete or embedded in the drywall. He rolled over and found his mirror lying cracked and useless on the floor, shattered by either the grenade or his taking cover.

  “Dammit!” Zuckerberg cried. Blood oozed from just above her right knee, but she nevertheless waited around the cover of the corner for Max’s order. He caught her eye and tapped the M203 grenade launcher mounted beneath his rifle barrel.

  “Now!” He stuck the grenade launcher around the corner and fired its single shot as Zuckerberg unleashed the SAW down the hallway. Roughly ten feet high, the ceiling made Max’s shot rather difficult. The 40mm grenade would arm itself after exiting the barrel and revolving a certain number of times. If he aimed too high the grenade would hit the ceiling or fly right over the mantlet and explode far behind the troops.

  The grenade stuck the mantlet dead center. Combined with the onslaught of explosive bullets, the explosion drove the wheeled metal barrier backward down the hallway, disorienting the troops hiding behind it.

  “Move, move!” Max ordered. He ran down the hallway firing as he went, hugging the right wall while Zuckerberg took the left. Running between them and a few steps behind came Heinz and Juno, who added their own storm of explosive fire. The concussive power of the exploding rounds continued to force the mantlet backward until it crashed into the T-intersection at the hallway’s far end.

  One soldier’s arm flopped over onto the floor beside the mantlet, seemingly lifeless. Shaky and dazed, two of the other three stood when Zuckerberg and Max got about ten feet away. They didn’t stand for long. Once again the destructive force of the explosive bullets astounded Max. He fired a couple of rounds into one of the soldiers and watched his chest cavity open and bloom into a shower of gore and bone fragments. Bloody mist and acrid powder smoke fouled the air, but Max could see that three of the men behind the mantlet now lay dead. The SAW had turned the man at the extreme left into a pile of burning uniform and broken bones lying in a reservoir of blood; the top half of his head lay in his upturned helmet a few feet away. The last soldier, uninjured but knocked unconscious, Max finished off with a single shot to the heart. All had been firing Type 58 assault rifles, a North Korean knockoff of the AK-47.

  Max issued orders: “Delorn, guard the right hall. Zuckerberg, take the left.” Ordinarily Max wouldn’t have dallied at the intersection; he would have quickly ascertained the best route through obvious or instinctual clues processed with lightning calculation. But it wasn’t his call, and he couldn’t decipher the most important clue: the directory sign on the wall above the sundered mantlet and dead troops.

  A prolonged, insane yell came from the right, followed by the throaty bellow of Delorn’s flamethrower as he op
ened up on four more troops dropping to the floor via ropes from a ceiling duct overhead. They got a handful of shots off at the team as they descended, before the napalm flames engulfed their bodies. Three stopped in midair and burned for half a heartbeat before their ropes incinerated. They dropped the last couple of feet to the floor with a clatter of rifles and gear. The intense heat triggered the fire alarm. Burning bodies steamed and hissed when the sprinkler system engaged.

  Max squinted through the pall of smoke and steam that choked the hallway, his reflex sight pointed in the enemy’s general direction. The fourth man—screaming, steaming, engulfed in flames—fired wildly and ran at the team in one final banzai charge. Delorn finished him off with another cone of flame.

  “All clear!” said Heinz, who had joined Zuckerberg to watch the left hallway. No troops had descended in that direction.

  “Clear!” Max responded. He looked to Juno. “Well?”

  “Right. Those troops dropped down for a reason.”

  “What’s down there?”

  “The elevator to the medical and observation levels.”

  Max nodded. “Bingo. Let’s move out.”

  They stepped around the steaming bodies of the roasted troops, now extinguished courtesy of the sprinklers. Someone behind Max gagged from the stench of burnt meat and singed hair. They weren’t expecting the flamethrower. They would have fired straight down on us if they’d known.

  The team’s efforts so far pleased Max, though he acknowledged that they owed nearly all of their success to the special weapons and ammo provided by the CIA. They might be clear of the complex in another hour if their luck held out—if only North Korean soldiers stood in their way.

  Let’s hope they don’t get desperate and do something rash. They might make many rash decisions, but the most obvious would be freeing the zombies if all appeared lost. And he knew it could be done in an instant, perhaps by General Moon, who probably watched them even now from upstairs. Max moved faster, wondering how a man could possibly outrun a mere push of a button.