Once Nelly, Chuck, Rich and James have joined us, Zeke presses his flashlight to the glass. To our right is a single loading door and a small office built into the corner. He turns the beam left, to where the remainder of the warehouse stretches for hundreds of feet. The loading area in front of the first few doors is cleared and past that are the pallet rooms Terry mentioned, as well as jumbles of debris too shadowed to make out. It looks like all hell broke loose.
The five foot high fence is made of strips of metal and runs from the wall to our right into the darkness. It looks secure enough to hold back the hundreds of zombies behind it. In places, boxes are piled against the fence. In the places where they aren’t, Lexers strain against the metal, arms groping through the wide spaces. It’s taken us thirty seconds to get the lay of the land, which is also enough time for everything in here to have noticed us. The ones on this side of the fence lurch toward the office with dumb, ravenous faces.
“You ready?” Zeke asks. “Head to the first two doors after the fireworks.”
Nelly and I lob our lit Zombie Zingers to the right, away from the main area. The tiny flames arc into the dark. A few moments later, when the groans have reached a crescendo, the room is filled with loud cracks. The Lexers turn toward them, lit by the flashes of light.
We jump the ramp and make for the loading doors. I flick on my headlamp—there’s no choice in the matter if we want to avoid tripping. Nelly tosses more fireworks well away from the first. The last thing we need is to start a fire or make zombie torches. Using fireworks indoors is already risky enough.
Peter and I stand sentry while Chuck and Rich get to work. Nelly and James guard Liz and Zeke. I hand Nelly more fireworks to throw. He played football in high school. I flunked softball. He’s the obvious choice.
Daylight shoots across the floor when our door rises two inches, but it goes no higher. Chuck yanks on something with a curse, and Zeke and Liz aren’t having any better luck. Three Lexers approach, skin bleached and blood black in my LED light. James hits one with his machete and then lunges for another. He didn’t have much practice on the farm, and he kills them as if he’s been waiting a year to do it. Peter gets the other and returns to my side.
More Lexers limp toward us. The rattling and light have attracted them, and Nelly’s added fireworks do nothing to dissuade them. The door cranks up another few inches, although not enough to escape. I try to focus on what’s in front of me and not panic that more Lexers have cut off our route to the office. At this point, it’s either into the fray or out the door. Rattling comes from behind, and then the front of the warehouse is light enough to see that every Lexer this side of the fence is on its way.
“Cassie!” Peter yells.
I turn, heart hammering, to see the door not much farther from the floor than when I last looked. The smallest of us—me and Liz—might be able to fit through. Liz flattens herself to the floor and slides out feet first. Peter motions for me to do the same. I want to be sure they’re safe. I want to get out of here. It feels wrong to leave and stupid to stay.
Nelly shoves me to my stomach when I hesitate, waits for me to feed my feet through the opening, and hacks at the oncoming bodies. Peter pushes at my shoulders while someone pulls my ankles from outside. I wince as the edge of the door scrapes along my back. Peter looks the same as he did a year ago when he thought he was as good as dead—black eyes and pale skin and resigned expression. I won’t let it end this way, with him saving my life one last time. I kick the hands off my feet and try to gain purchase on the floor, but he gives me a final shove that sends me to the concrete outside.
I peer through the opening, my eyes adjusted to the dark enough to see Peter fighting his way deeper into the building, toward the shelves, with the others just ahead of him.
“We’ll come back in!” I yell. Too many people have been left behind, too many people are a mystery, and I will not tell Bits I’ve left her father behind unless I have no other choice. And I promised Adam and Penny I’d do my best.
Peter lifts a hand. I watch him disappear into the dark until a putrid face sinks to the opening and forces me to back away.
Liz’s chest heaves. “The doors should lift by the chain once you’ve pulled a release cord on the electric controls, but someone’s fixed them so they won’t go up. It looks like wire’s threaded through the links. We need something to cut them. We can’t force them any higher.”
Ben runs to the truck for our bolt cutter and a pair of wire cutters and meets us at the office door. “Stay out here,” he says to Mikayla. She shakes her head stiffly, terrified but unyielding. I don’t know what she had to do on the way here, but at the farm she was always in the kitchen and never at the fence.
“Who has the radio?” Kyle asks.
Liz unclips the radio from her belt and holds it up without a word. We stare at the only link to those inside. But if they’ve made it to the shelves, they’ll be safe for a while.
“Wait out here,” Kyle says to the Talkeetnans. “We’ll get the door open. You start on them after they’re out.”
They nod, either completely willing or too frightened by the snarl on his face not to heed his command. Liz and I lead the others inside to the office windows. A couple of shadowy figures stand on the second tier of shelves behind the fence. I wish I could tell who they are, but I’m also afraid to know.
The Lexers are so focused on the shelves that they don’t notice when Kyle runs his Maglite along the glass. A light flashes from the shelves. Three short bursts, three long bursts, three short bursts. Then again. We all know the Morse code SOS signal. Kyle answers with three short, one long, one short. Understood.
“I’m at the door with Liz,” Kyle says. “The rest of you keep them away as long as you can.”
We hop over the ramp and to the floor, retracing our earlier route. Kyle boosts Liz to his shoulders to work on the chain while the rest of us fan out. There’s not many to kill because whoever is on the shelves is purposely making enough noise to keep their attention.
Light floods in behind me, illuminating garbage, discarded clothing, bodies, five gallon buckets-turned-toilets that spilled their contents long ago, and Lexers that have begun the short shuffle toward us.
We hop off the ledge and run to the pickup while Lexers drop off the loading dock. It’s a parade of open sores and exposed bones and ragged clothing, and when they hit the truck it rocks hard enough that I grip the side. I hack into brains and eyes and anything else I can reach. The faster this is finished, the sooner I’ll know who’s alive. The Talkeetnans hang out the back of the semi’s trailer and kill their fair share.
Peter. Nelly. James. Zeke. My axe beats with every name. I don’t know Chuck and Rich, but Peter loves them and that’s enough for me. The bodies pile around the pickup until they become a wall too high for the next ones to climb. I sight down my pistol. The .22 scrambles their brains just like John said.
And then it’s done. We jump to the ground in the sudden quiet. It’s impossible to avoid stepping on the bodies, and I destroy all of Peter’s boot-scrubbing when I sink ankle-deep into what I think is empty space but is actually a torso under two corpses. We move the trucks so we have space to kill the remaining Lexers before we take down that fence and lead them outside.
Inside, the quiet is swapped for moaning. The fence rattles at our approach. There must be two hundred, maybe more.
Liz swings a flashlight and yells, “Who’s up there?”
“All of us,” Zeke’s deep drawl rings out. “You gonna let them out the door or what?”
I droop in relief while Liz whoops and yells, “Simmer down, Z.K. You’ll be out in a few.”
We mull over killing them while standing on the boxes along the fence, but the stacks look too unstable to hold our weight. The fence is bolted and welded, with a gate near the open loading bay door.
“Let’s check the fence line to make sure this gate will let them all out,” Kyle says. “Then we’ll do it.”
&nb
sp; Half of us follow the metal toward the rooms of pallets. The fence sways but holds, although I wouldn’t spend too long teasing the Lexers behind it. We turn to make our way back and see Frank stabbing through the fence down in the light of the open bay. In the few seconds that it takes me to wonder what he’s up to, he steps on a lower rail and leans over, dragging a Lexer up and over the top.
“What the f—” Kyle begins before we take off in Frank’s direction.
Between zombies pushing and Frank yanking, the fence gives way with a loud pop. We stop dead; we’ll never make it to the exit now that Lexers pour into our safe area, killing our surefire plan. I will them to head for the light, but they don’t. They head for us.
We scatter. I race between two pallets and find myself in one of the makeshift rooms. I turn for the entrance, where a preteen girl with long hair and an eyeball that’s oozed from its socket knocks me to the floor and comes down after me. Her mouth opens in slow motion, teeth gleaming in my headlamp. I scramble to my feet, but more are in the entry, and I back away until I hit the rear wall of boxes almost as tall as me. Preteen zombie is on her feet. Five Lexers are closing in. I’m fucked.
My brother climbed mountains. Eric always said there was nothing better than the rush of reaching a peak, that he thought no drug could come close. Why he would want to climb to somewhere cold—to risk his life for a thrill—was beyond me, but I’d listen to his stories with awe. And one always stuck out in my mind.
He’d been on the top of some mountain or other, making his way up the ice, when he’d started to slide. Not just a little slide, but one that took him over the edge of a cliff of ice. Eric didn’t panic, although the story alone, told by the woodstove in my parents’ cabin, was enough to make my heart race and mouth go dry. He said the scene played out in slow motion. That he felt as if he had all the time in the world to think about his next move. Just in time, he sank the spike of his axe into the sheet of ice as far back as he could reach and used the handle to pull himself up and over.
And that’s what I hope will save me now. I kick at the first two zombies and slam my axe into the top of the pallet wall. I pull to check it’s secure and use the handle to climb, my feet scrambling on the side. When I reach the top, I sink to my knees and struggle to breathe through the muck in my lungs.
There’s so much noise that I can’t think, but I’m grateful to still be breathing, such as it is. I wave in the blinding beam of a flashlight from the shelves before it moves to search for others and then turn off my headlamp so it doesn’t act as a zombie beacon. I rise to my feet and stumble when a hand catches my boot from behind. They’re on both sides now, and I don’t have enough clearance to escape a two-sided attack.
The boxes shake and shift. The cardboard beneath my feet sinks an inch, then another. It’s going to collapse. I leap for the pallets that make up the side wall of the room and know instantly that I’ve overshot the distance. I teeter on the edge before plummeting hand-first to the concrete floor. I’ll feel this in my wrists tomorrow, but right now I don’t feel anything but sheer terror mixed with relief that I’ve landed on the other side instead of into their waiting arms. An empty can skitters past, kicked by something coming my way, and I raise my hand. My axe-less hand.
This is how it happens: one small mistake, one tiny stroke of bad luck—they grow exponentially and then you’re dead. I unsnap my knife. Something moves through my path of escape. Whoever created this labyrinth of boxes may have been thinking in terms of privacy for the occupants, but it’s what’s going to kill me now. I press on my headlamp to better see my target and grunt with the effort of bringing knife through bone. I use both hands, but it won’t come out no matter how I tug.
A sharp pain blossoms in my calf. My throat clenches in agony when I scream at the sight of the one-legged zombie with its jaw practically unhinged, teeth grinding on my leg. I fire my pistol point blank and turn to flee, in what direction I have no idea. The shelves. I’ll go to the shelves.
I’m no longer thinking straight, consumed as I am by the fear I’ve been bitten. Either Ana’s leather pants have saved my life or they haven’t. I think it’s sweat that courses down my leg in warm streams, but it could just as easily be blood. My foot hits something and my axe spins on the concrete before it thuds into a dark corner. Maybe I shouldn’t take the time to stop, but I need more than just my gun. My ammo will run out sooner or later. All of our ammo will. The boxes we traded for fuel were a large chunk of what we had.
I retrieve my axe, hack my way to the fence and practically fly over the top. Nothing can catch me in my wild state.
“Cassie!” Peter’s light switches on ten feet up and two aisles over. I ignore the closer shelves and run for him. I don’t want to die alone. I don’t want to have to do what Dan did. And then Peter’s on the floor in front of me, tossing a body out of the way and boosting me up the diagonal metal braces on the end of each aisle.
He follows me onto the shelf. I stumble on open boxes of cans and send them crashing to the floor. I hear his voice, but the roar of dread in my head drowns out his words as I rip off my light and shine it on my calf. I check again and again to be sure, but there’s no rip, no tear. I sink to the open boxes and for a moment forget what surrounds us. I’m by no means safe, but there’s still a chance I’ll live.
Peter crouches. “What’s wrong?”
“I thought one bit through.”
Peter looks over the wet, gory leather and pulls me close. The Lexers bang and the shelving vibrates, but these shelves are bolted to the floor, made to hold a lot more than us. I want to stay up here forever, but I let Peter go and take out my pistol. We can’t reach their heads from this shelf without longer blades. Guns are going to be loud and messy, but I’ll take loud and messy over dead.
We lean over the shelf’s edge. The Lexers follow our every move, hands lifted and bodies bent our way like ardent lovers—sick, twisted lovers who’ll swallow you whole if given the chance. We’re not the only ones who’ve opened fire. The reports are so loud that I tilt my ear to my shoulder to save at least one eardrum. Even this close, we miss when the Lexers shift and fall. I have another fifteen rounds and I blow through them quickly, saving a few for an emergency.
Peter and I are farthest away from the majority of Lexers, who’ve gathered in the daylight that illuminates the others on the shelves and where Jamie, Kyle, Mikayla, Ben and the Talkeetnans stand on a long row of pallets along the fence.
“I think we can get them out the door,” Peter says.
I nod. We’ve thinned out the nearby Lexers to the point where we might make it to the loading door if we keep low. We climb to the floor and are over the fence and halfway there when we have to duck behind a pile of garbage to avoid a passing group.
A shout comes from the row of pallets by the fence. One end has crumpled to the floor, and Jamie, Kyle and the others kick at the Lexers’ hands on what remains. They can’t let down their guard for a second, and they stab and jab, out of ammo by now. What was supposed to be the easiest part has turned into a complete and total fuckshow.
Ben stands at a gap leading to a wider grouping of pallets that would keep them out of reach of groping hands. He pushes Mikayla behind him and takes three quick steps before he’s airborne. I’m certain he has it until a Lexer bumps him in midair and sends him crashing to the floor, Lexers following.
Ben’s frenzied screaming is pain and despair rolled into one. It mixes with Mikayla’s wails to pierce through the dullness in my ears. Mikayla drops to hang off the pallets when his shouting grows hoarse, her shoulder-length curls loose of her ponytail, and I want to drag her to her feet. I know I tend to be overcautious—hair tightly wound, gloves on, mouth closed against splatter—but it’s because any tiny thing can, and often does, go wrong.
Mikayla rips at the hands that tangle in her curls with high-pitched shrieks. She’s dragged forward a few inches. Jamie and Kyle yank at her legs and fight to keep her out of the zombies’ reach. A cor
ner of their platform crumples, her torso slides into contact with waiting teeth, and they finally allow her to slide headfirst off the boxes. The shrieking ends, which chills me more than the shrieking itself.
The group of Lexers that forced us to stop has moved for the pallets. Peter and I could run to the door, but we wait, needing no discussion to agree that we’ll detour from our original plan in order to help Jamie and the others if necessary. Jamie leaps across the gap while the Lexers are busy with Mikayla. She’s followed by everyone but Tara and Philip, who are last in line and trapped by a new wave drawn by the blood and screaming.
The boxes under their feet bend. Tara’s knife plunges viciously, but the skull isn’t easy to crack. And from her vantage point, with a knife, all she has to work with are the tops of skulls—the hardest spot as well as the spot most likely to be intact. She dances like a boxer to keep out of the Lexers’ reach until her feet are yanked out from under her and she goes down. Philip struggles to rise from his knees.
I look to the loading bay. There aren’t many Lexers in the way. We could make it. Tara and Philip are closer to where we crouch, yet in the opposite direction. But I can’t watch them die—I can’t listen to them die—like Mikayla and Ben, and there’s no way those Lexers will leave them behind to come for the door. I nod when Peter tilts his head their way. We run and climb up the collapsed end of the pallets. I leap over Philip because I know Peter has him, and Tara is in worse shape. Lexers hang from her ankles that jut over the pallet’s edge. Her mouth is open with the effort of bucking to keep her skin out of the reach of teeth. Hands are twisted in her hair.
I start with the Lexers at her feet. Black sludge flies when I slice through wrists, and the stumps continue to wave wildly when the hands loosen and drop. Tara brings her legs under her, head still pinned to the cardboard. I stand astride her and bring down my axe. I don’t care what I hit as long as they let go, and when they have, I yank her to her feet. My arm aches and my lungs are on fire, but I pound away until we can push through the remainder and make it to the door.
Until the End of the World Box Set Page 106
