Undead

by Ryan W. Aslesen

  Juno reached the door, pulled it open, and fled into the hallway. She then turned to close the door even though she knew it wouldn’t stop the freakish gorilla for long.

  Trisha’s howling face appeared demonic, cast in dull red and black shadow by the eerie emergency light. The beast followed perhaps two strides behind her and bellowed a roar of sheer primeval bloodlust as it swiped at her head with its huge hand, barely missing. Juno knew it wouldn’t miss again.

  And then it would be her turn.

  “No!” Trisha cried when she saw Juno pulling the door shut.

  Juno Rey had ditched her conscience many years before, yet the look of terror and disbelief on Trisha’s face in that instant tore at something deep in her psyche. By design she had no friends, only allies and enemies—feelings got in the way of business. Still, something in her brain—an infinitesimal scrap of her soul, perhaps the only one she had left—died in that instant.

  But business was business. Juno pulled the door shut and ran. An instant later Trisha slammed into the door, and Juno imagined her reaching frantically for the handle to pull it open and escape as the beast tore at her with its fearsome appendages. It had best succeed. She didn’t want to ponder Trisha’s imminent revenge if she somehow escaped the room.

  “Bitch!” Zuckerberg cried, the word muffled by the steel door.

  Juno lowered her head and ran a little faster. The sound of her heart thumping in her ears nearly drowned out the pounding fists and horrified screams of her most devoted ally.

  18

  Max listened to the lone pair of measured footsteps moving toward him unseen down a crossing hallway. From the right. He stepped quickly to the corner and turned right with his rifle raised, fully conscious that he would be silhouetted by the floodlights burning brightly above the four-way intersection. But they hadn’t time nor reason to hide and lie in wait, hoping to stealthily kill or dodge their enemies. Those tactics had gone out the window when the zombies were unleashed.

  The red dot of his reflex sight lighted on the chest of a shadowy figure in full battle gear carrying a pistol, which he raised too slowly. Max’s two shots blew the man’s torso wide open and sent him reeling ten feet backward before he crashed to the yellow floor.

  Seeing no one else down the two hallways, Max jogged to the corpse and quickly examined it. Beneath the collar of his body armor, a green flak jacket similar to those worn by US troops until a few years before, Max spotted a red-and-gold collar tab that identified him as an officer in the North Korean army.

  Max had no idea why he would be walking alone in a subterranean compound full of ferocious beasts. Rounding up the troops, directing traffic? Prudence dictated that Moon withdraw his men after releasing the creatures. He should have withdrawn them sooner.

  “You’re making all sorts of friends,” West observed from over his shoulder. “Which way?”

  “Not that way.” Max jerked his head toward the hallway past the dead officer. Two choices remained. “Straight ahead. Let’s see where this guy might have been going.”

  They moved out. Noise came from everywhere and nowhere, mostly shouts in Korean and the occasional shriek of man or beast, along with sporadic spurts of gunfire. Max paid little attention to the ruckus unless it sounded close.

  Then a burst of distant machine gun fire slowed him nearly to a halt. Zuckerberg’s SAW. She’d fired so many rounds through the SAW that its noise suppressor had blown. They couldn’t be more than a couple hundred feet away. And if Zuckerberg lived, Juno did as well. But as much as he wished to even the score with his team leader, they had a different job to do. He pressed on, again assuming a hurried pace.

  West smirked. “They sound alive and well.”

  “Juno had better hope she dies down here,” Max said. She became an endangered species when she slammed the door on me.

  They traveled on, Max making snap decisions on which hallways to take, navigating by signs of where the creatures had been. He turned right at the sight of bodies and body parts strewn across a hallway. Three North Korean soldiers—eviscerated, various limbs plucked from their bodies—lay in a lake of congealing blood next to the creature they had died fighting: eight feet tall, gangly limbed with sickeningly bulbous joints and a stunted third arm growing from its side. Filthy yellow nails over an inch long tipped all its fourteen fingers. Its tongue, double the normal length, lolled from its mouth between a pair of truly dog-like canines. A single bullet to the forehead had taken it down.

  Bloody boot prints of several fleeing soldiers marked the yellow floor, moving off in the direction Max had come from.

  “Straight ahead,” Max ordered as he marched through the pool of blood surrounding the bodies, confident they would soon find a stairway or elevator back down to the confinement level.

  That West had sent them up two floors to the biogenetics level had concerned him at first, but instead of taking the elevator back down to the observation level, he had opted to find another route down from biogenetics. He figured the creatures would be frantic to escape the confinement level and would quickly find their way up to observation. Better to fight North Koreans on this level while attempting to find a route than to engage the zombies one floor down. Unfortunately, the beasts had moved upward through the complex faster than he’d expected, so in the end it made little difference. They had yet to encounter a zombie on the biogenetics level, but the creatures were certainly running amok up here.

  They came to a long hallway lined with doors that bore unreadable placards. From a doorway at the far end emerged a figure that shuffled along seemingly confused. Its spine bent to the right as if the weight of its right arm, a foot longer than the left, were pulling it to one side. It saw them and shuffled forward at a speed that belied its spavined appearance, the spade claw tipping its left leg clacking on the tiles as it went.

  Max and West fired on it from fifty feet away. Hitting its head, turning it to fine red mist due to the explosive rounds, the thing dropped dead before it had run ten feet. Max moved them forward double-time toward the doorway it had emerged from.

  “We meet again,” Max said, when they reached the dead creature—test subject six.

  “Poor fucking guy.” West shook his head as he stepped around him.

  That they had witnessed his transformation from normal man to hideous beast reminded them that these creatures were once men and animals, none of whom had volunteered to be injected with the virus. Max wondered who he was and what sort of life had been stolen from him by his government. Political dissident probably or maybe just an average criminal. Whatever the case, being turned into a monster seemed like the epitome of cruel and unusual punishment. At least he’s at peace now, whoever he was.

  The doorway, unmarked by any placard, opened at the top of a metal stairway in a cramped concrete stairwell. Max led them down without hesitation. They dropped one floor to observation, bypassed the door, and continued down to the confinement level where the stairway terminated.

  No window penetrated the steel door to the confinement level. West moved abreast with Max, who flung open the door on an empty hallway that ran straight for a long distance. They moved to an intersection about thirty feet away where an emergency spotlight burned. The hallway continued straight, far past another spotlight fifty feet further down its length. Another passage split off to the left. Emergency power had cut the ventilation to the lower levels as well, and the hot, stifling air in confinement smelled of diesel fuel and pungent road kill festering on a warm spring day.

  Max heard a loud crack from straight ahead, though he saw no creatures in that direction.

  He led them left. Once past the first pair of emergency lights he made out objects strewn about the floor fifty feet away beneath the next set of lights, where the hallway turned right. Juno was here, he thought as he jogged toward the carnage and found exactly what he expected: Delorn’s headless, mutilated corpse
burnt to a crisp. He saw no cooked zombies and could only surmise that they had somehow taken out Delorn and then, in their rage, destroyed his soot-blackened flamethrower, which lay discarded a few feet away, its nitrogen and fuel tanks crumpled and punctured.

  “Why?” West asked.

  “Hard to say with him looking like this,” Max answered. “Maybe he got hit and Juno left him behind.”

  Koontz snorted. “Or maybe she just left him behind.”

  “That’s entirely possible.” Max hoped Delorn had died before the zombies mangled him. Not the best man for this job, but he didn’t deserve to die like this.

  Koontz had moved ahead to peer down the right hallway. “Max, I think this is the hall that runs right beneath the windows of the observation lab.”

  “So it is,” Max agreed when he moved up and saw the sterile white hallway behind an empty glass guard station. Cell doors standing wide open lined the hallway past the booth. He couldn’t see the two-way mirrors mounted high in the left wall and figured they started some ways down the hall. Not a single creature or soldier for as far as he could see. What are the odds? “Let’s go. I’m thinking this hall can get us back to the testing lab.”

  One insane shriek echoed for several seconds, followed by something that sounded like a raspy rooster’s crow. Max took off at a jog, and within a minute they were running beneath the windows of the observation lab.

  Holy shit, we might actually get there. Then he recalled that optimism was a rare and often deadly commodity in his business. Look sharp. There are a few down here still. He kept running, somewhat confident that any remaining creatures would avoid the cellblock where they’d been confined.

  The hallway turned sharp right at the end of the cellblock. Fifty feet later Max led them left down a crossing hallway. Hoping to hell he was leading them in the right direction, he ran on through the near darkness, past numerous closed doors and a couple of crossing hallways. He knew they’d arrived when he saw a flipped animal cage and an upset lab table looming a few feet past the hallway’s end. He stopped, donned his NVGs, and examined the room, paying particular attention to the roadmap of ducts and piping on the ceiling.

  “I don’t see shit.” West also scanned through NVGs.

  “Heinz is still here, anyway,” Max said. Well, most of him. Ironically, this was a good thing; he hadn’t become infected with the virus. And you won’t have to kill him for the second time today.

  They found no living creatures when they moved in and swept the room. The short hallway leading to the elevator was clear. The bomb remained in the exact place Koontz had left it.

  “You’re on, Koontz,” Max said. “Watch those halls, West; I’ve got these two.”

  Koontz kneeled and went to work, electronic beeps marking his progress as he entered the necessary codes. Down one hallway, Max saw a dark, pear-shaped thing about three feet tall running awkwardly on squat, spindly legs. He opened fire on it, but the thing evaded his bullets by darting nimbly side-to-side as it ran. Then something bipedal and darker appeared about fifty feet behind the test animal. Max kept up his fire, but the small creature weaved chaotically yet effectively as it ran on. Then, to his astonishment, it took to awkward flight.

  I don’t fucking believe this. He slung his rifle and grabbed his combat shotgun as the thing flew for him. It dove to evade his first shot; flew upward and dodged his second. His third shot dropped the bird about twenty feet from where he stood. The lab had experimented on a myriad of test animals; it only made sense that one—hopefully just one—would be a chicken.

  The time Max had spent on farms throughout his life could be measured in hours, but he believed this was once a rooster. Aside from its massive size, exposure to the virus had regrown its clipped wings, each now tipped with a greenish claw about two inches long. Its beak had elongated to half a foot, as had the razor talons on its feet. Too bad. I could have made a fortune at the cockfights.

  A couple of pellets to the head had killed the rooster. Max switched back to his rifle and began firing at the next approaching creature.

  “More company!” West shouted as he fired a burst. With the sound suppressors blown from overuse, every crack of every round punched at Max’s eardrums until a steady ringing drowned out nearly all other sounds.

  Max dropped another zombie, once human, with a single shot to the head. But the rooster and the human appeared to be the vanguard of an enormous attack. A writhing mass of shadow steadily approached, still about one hundred feet away. Though he couldn’t be sure, Max thought he saw more approaching darkness far distant down the other hallway in his charge. One shadow emerged from the pack and charged forth at tremendous speed—the twisted, mutated housecat he’d shot before. He fired twice at the thing, missed both times, and then ran out of ammo.

  The cat closed rapidly as Max hastily slapped in a new magazine.

  “Biometric!” Koontz shouted faintly from behind him.

  This is it. Max sprayed the hallway with explosive rounds; one finally connected, blowing off one of the cat’s forelegs at the shoulder. It writhed on the floor as it began to regenerate, yellow eyes gleaming with the promise of vengeance as soon as it could run again.

  Something slapped him on the back. Max whirled. Koontz pointed at the bomb while West blasted away at creatures down another hallway.

  “Fingerprint!” Koontz shouted as he pointed to the small red screen of the fingerprint reader atop the bomb.

  Max turned from Koontz. The tenebrous wave of creatures came quickly now, and the cat had already regrown three inches of its leg. He put one final shot into its head before he turned and ran for the bomb.

  Max pressed his thumb onto the fingerprint scanner, and three seconds later a green light next to it illuminated. “Is that it?” he shouted at Koontz, who’d gone immediately back to work on the bomb.

  “About a minute more!”

  West stopped firing to change magazines. Zombies had nearly reached the testing lab from the hallways Max had been watching. He fired again, knocked down one and blasted another to smithereens. Yet still more came.

  “Can’t hold ’em much longer!” West shouted.

  “Retreat to the elevator!”

  “Not done yet!” Koontz said.

  “West, go!”

  Max didn’t need to say it twice. West had again emptied a magazine and had not inserted another. Might be out of ammo. Max himself had only one full mag remaining. West vaulted over smashed equipment in his haste to retreat.

  Max fired on a hairless human, mottled white and dark green that had just entered the room. Its teeth had outgrown its mouth, and its oversized tongue lolled pendulously over its lower lip as it awkwardly ran at him. Something quivered and darted around its head—a spiky tentacle tipped with a stinger that had grown out of its back. Max shot it twice in its misshapen face and brought it down.

  Another zombie emerged from another entrance: grotesquely fat, a pale sphere trudging on elephantine legs with only a lump for a head and spindly arms ending in a bony hook and a lobster claw, respectively. It bellowed rage through a wide mouth of stubby teeth surrounded by barbels that waved about, perhaps tasting the air. Another test animal zombie, perhaps a baboon, darted around the plodding beast.

  “Come on, let’s go!” West shouted from the hallway leading to the elevator.

  “Move it, Koontz!” Max ordered.

  Koontz still fiddled with the bomb. He glanced up at the zombies pouring into the room and shook his head. “About twenty more seconds.” He returned to his work.

  “We’ll never make it!”

  “Go on then, I got this!”

  “No fucking way—”

  “Now!”

  Despite their dire situation, Max was a bit taken aback by Koontz’s order. Jesus, not again. He remembered abandoning Red in a hallway on the spaceship, a sacrificial lamb with a bomb in eac
h hand. But Koontz would be sacrificed to zombies long before his bomb exploded... if he could even finish arming it.

  “Get going! I got this!” Koontz reiterated. His content, peaceful smile belonged on any man who was great at his job and performing at the highest level of his ability. He’s accepted his fate. Further argument would be fruitless.

  Max turned from Koontz and ran for the elevator while West laid down covering fire with his pistol. “Fuck you!” West shouted, and Max assumed he’d taken down a zombie.

  “Yes!” Koontz cried from back in the lab.

  He followed his proclamation with a whoop of triumph that turned into a scream. At the hallway to the elevator, Max looked back. The baboon zombie had bit into Koontz’s knee. Koontz pulled his pistol, prepared to go down fighting, but then the fat zombie reached him. It cleaved open his neck with one slice of its murderous hooked claw. A geyser of blood sprayed the zombie in the face, and it responded with a roar that might have been anger or ecstasy—Max didn’t care to know which.

  “It’s armed now,” West said. “We gotta go; we can’t save him!”

  That was obvious but didn’t make it any easier to stomach. Finished with Koontz, the fat zombie picked up the bomb by the carry handles on the sack and flung it across the room to smash into a wall.

  Too late, asshole. T-minus thirty minutes and counting.

  19

  Max and West waited for the elevator door to open on the biogenetics level. Having exhausted his supply of 5.56mm explosive rounds, West had ditched his rifle and now carried his pistol. A Type 58 rifle taken from a dead soldier was slung across his back as a meager last line of defense.

  The door opened on an aberration. A student of war history, Max knew well that children were often victims of the most heinous atrocities. Reading of the Nazi experiments on children in concentration camps never failed to anger and sicken him—and now the North Koreans had picked up where the Nazis left off.