by Dana Fredsti
A thin haze was definitely visible on our floor by the time I got to the room I shared with Lil. I opened the door to find her already dressed and frantically trying to bundle the cats into their carrier. Neither feline was cooperating, with Binkey holed up under my bed and Doodle doing the classic stiff-legged claw against the doorframe of the carrier. It would have been funny, if the situation weren’t so serious.
Lil looked up at my entrance, her tense expression relaxing into relief when she saw me.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” she said. “I can smell smoke, Ash. I could smell it before the alarm went off.”
“Me, too,” I said, giving her a quick one-armed hug.
“Were you with Gabriel?”
I nodded, figuring there was no point in being coy.
“There’s a fire somewhere in the building, on one of the lower levels,” I said, helping her lever Doodle into the carrier. “Let’s get the kids out of here, and then we can help with evacuation. Grab some food for them, and I’ll see if I can get Binkey.”
Lil nodded, grabbing a bag of dry cat food and her childhood toy Lambie-Pie, a threadbare stuffed lamb. She crammed them into a duffle bag along with her favorite pickaxe and M4, while I wriggled under my bed and tried to grab the cat.
Binkey, normally a mellow marshmallow, swatted me with an angry paw. I hissed with the unexpected pain of five sharp claws ripping bloody furrows in my hand.
“Son of a.”
I narrowed my eyes and grabbed the little bugger by his scruff, dragging him out from under the bed as he howled in outrage. Ungrateful furball.
“Ready?” I asked Lil. She nodded and opened the door to the carrier just wide enough for me to stuff him inside. Lil slammed the door shut and latched it securely as both cats started up a chorus of the damned. They’d done the same thing when we’d liberated them from Lil’s old apartment in Redwood Grove, and the sound had attracted the attention of every zombie in a five-mile radius. At least tonight we didn’t have to worry about the Z factor.
“Here.” I handed Lil the duffle bag, helping her sling it over her shoulder. “You take the kids outside, and stash them someplace safe.”
“What about you?”
“I’m going to help with the evacuation,” I said, retrieving my own M4 and swords from the closet.
“You’ll be careful, right?” Lil’s eyes were wide and worried as Binkey and Doodle continued to howl.
“I will totally be careful,” I replied, rooting around in the closet for my ammo pouch and extra cartridges.
“Promise?”
I stopped what I was doing, my attention caught by the naked vulnerability in Lil’s voice. Gone was the slightly crazed zombie-killing goddess of death. In her place was just a frightened girl who didn’t want to lose anyone else she cared about. Dropping my weapons, I crossed the room and gave her a fiercely protective hug.
“I promise.”
“Okay.” She hugged me back, her face pressed against my shoulder. When she stepped away, her expression was suddenly fierce. “Don’t you leave me, Ashley.”
I grinned at her.
“No way am I leaving you on your own with the banshee twins. Now get the hell out of here!”
She slung the duffle bag over her shoulder, hefted the cat carrier filled with at least thirty pounds of feline, and dashed out the door. I heaved a sigh of relief, knowing I’d be able to focus much better with Lil and the kids out of danger.
Stepping out into the hallway, I waited until I saw her vanish up the stairs, then went back into our room to retrieve my weapons and change into fighting gear. As I did so, I formed a mental picture of the lower floors. If the fire had started in the labs, it meant the research subjects could be loose. And by “research subjects” I wasn’t talking lab rats. I was talking zombies. I’d been down there once when Colonel Paxton’s predecessor had tried to blackmail me into joining the wild cards by showing me my ex-boyfriend turned zombie.
There’d been around a dozen ghouls in cages, with more strapped to tables. There were also a number of lab techs. Hopefully they’d already made it out, but if they hadn’t... if their subjects had gotten loose, I needed to be ready for battle.
I ran back into the hallway toward the stairwell, passing Mack and a group of civilians he was leading out of the building.
“Any more of them?” I asked.
“Tony’s got another group,” Mack replied. “I think we’ve pretty much cleared this floor, and the military is handling the med ward below.”
“Have you seen Simone?”
Mack shook his head.
“You get everyone you can off this floor,” I said.
“What about Lil?”
I gave him a reassuring pat on one shoulder.
“She’s out, along with the cats,” I said. “I’m going to make sure Simone is safe.”
Mack nodded. “Be careful.”
I laughed. “It’s my job, right?”
“Right.” He gave me a quick one-armed hug.
* * *
We hit the stairwell. Mack and his group headed up, and I ran down the cement stairs into a slowly thickening cloud of ominously dark, acrid smoke, the smell noxious and chemical. It left an oily residue on my skin, making me wonder what kind of toxic cocktail was burning in the lab.
Could the infection be transmitted via the remnants of cremated zombies, à la O’Bannon’s Return of the Living Dead? I shuddered at the thought, and not just because that movie started the whole “braaaa-i-nsss” craze. It’d been wrong about that part, so hopefully it hadn’t gotten the whole infected rainfall thing right, either.
That would suck.
I coughed as I got another good whiff of the nasty-ass smoke when I reached the landing above the labs. The smoke further down was even thicker, and remembering that most people died of smoke inhalation, I knew I couldn’t risk going down another flight of stairs without any protection, even if it was just a damp cloth to drape over my head. Besides, I doubted this stairwell would get me where I wanted to go. Access to the labs required following a path of labyrinthine complexity through the med ward.
I shuddered at the thought. Last time I’d been in the med ward had been to watch a bunch of soldiers— including Gabriel—try to subdue my boyfriend-turned-zombie amid a bunch of people who were tied to cots and dying from a hideously painful disease involving lots of blood and black fluids oozing from various orifices. You know, the kind of memories that lead to major PTSD. I’d managed to avoid the nightmares so far, most likely because I’d been too busy training and fighting to give them a chance to take root.
Either that, or I was amazingly resilient.
Or shallow as hell.
Whichever it was, I still didn’t want to go back into that particular circle of hell. But if there was even a chance that Simone was down there, maybe injured or trapped... Well, I didn’t see that I had much of a choice.
A quick hand on the stairwell door told me it was safe to open. Stepping through, I found myself in the middle of a chaotic rush of military and medical personnel, dashing in and out of the med ward, some with arms full of medical equipment and supplies, others pushing wheeled dollies to the elevator at the far end of the corridor. I’d seen Towering Inferno so I wouldn’t want to trust an elevator in the middle of a fire, but since they were going up instead of down, the risk of it stopping on the wrong floor probably wasn’t an issue.
Smoke drifted lazily through the hallway, the acrid chemical smell becoming stronger by the minute. I looked for a familiar face, hoping to see Simone, but most of the people dashing back and forth were wearing protective gear, some with full-on Level 4 biohazard suits, and others just in protective face masks and hoods with breathing apparatus.
As I’d hoped, they were evacuating the civilians. I recognized Judy from the trailer park, huddling against a soldier in protective face gear, her eyes rolling, showing the whites like a crazed horse. Guess she hadn’t been infected, but her sanity levels clear
ly still needed a refill.
There were other folks with what looked like minor injuries—broken limbs and such—being helped out, but I didn’t see anyone with Walker’s symptoms, which made me wonder what was happening to the patients in the med ward. Some of the men and women there had been bitten, and were under observation to see if they were immune to the infection. Like me.
I grabbed one of the med techs as she ran past with an armful of syringes and bags of IV fluid.
“Have you seen Professor Fraser?” I asked. She shook her head, frantic to get out of the building.
Tough shit, lady.
“Are you sure?” I grabbed the front of her hazmat suit.
“I... she... she was in the lab, I think.” She nodded back over her shoulder.
“How long ago?” I demanded. “When did she go there?”
“I don’t know, maybe a few hours?” She tried to push past me, but I held onto the suit, ready to rip a hole in it if need be.
“Did you see her come back up? This is important.” I gave her a little shake for emphasis. “She’s the one trying to come up with a cure for this shit, remember?”
“I—I don’t think so. No, I haven’t seen her.”
“What about Dr. Albert?”
She shook her head again, clearly frantic to get the hell out of Dodge. I let go of her suit and she scurried past me toward the elevator.
Shoving my way through the hallway, I ignored the attempts by several soldiers and medical personnel who were trying to corral me toward the elevator, and elbowed my way through to the med ward doors. Pushing through, I was met with a Dante-esque vision of hell.
Trying to steady myself, I took a deep breath—and instantly regretted it, as I took in another lungful of smoke mixed with the thick, rich stench of blood, shit, and rotting flesh, overlaid with the smell of burning chemicals, plastic, wood and who knows what else. There was another set of double doors at the far end of the room, and I saw black smoke pouring through the cracks between, under and over them. They were the ones leading into the lab. I needed to find something to cut the amount of crap I was inhaling, or I’d end up with shriveled raisins for lungs.
Patients in varying stages of the zombie infection were still strapped to their cots, some unconscious, others in too much agony to notice the chaos and smoke. But a few, those still in the earlier stages, were all too aware of what was happening. They screamed for help, for release from the straps that held them to their beds, even as they hacked up gouts of black fluid and blood, their throats even more irritated by the smoke. But no one paid any attention to their screams. The techs and soldiers were busily piling supplies onto carts and wheeling them out of the room.
No one stopped to help the patients.
They couldn’t just leave them to die... could they?
I grabbed a passing soldier by the arm.
“What’s being done to evacuate these people?” He tried to shrug my hand off, but I easily maintained my kung-fu grip, pulling him closer. “Answer the question!”
I could tell he was young, even under his mask, and totally terrified.
Tough shit, dude. It was becoming a litany.
“W—we can’t take them w—with us,” he stammered. “They’re infected.”
“So you’re leaving them here to burn?”
He shook his head. “No, w—we...”
Before he could answer, a shout went up from the far end of the room. The doors burst open and smoke poured in, along with several zombies in advanced stages of decay. Slices of flesh were missing from various parts of their bodies, cut away with surgical precision instead of being ripped out with teeth. The test subjects had gotten loose, which meant god-knows-what for the people who’d been working in the lab.
Like Simone.
* * *
Panic broke out. Most of the soldiers and civilians ran for the exit, dropping whatever they were carrying. One soldier gestured toward the forms still strapped to the cots, and two others immediately started up the rows, systematically putting bullets in the heads of each of the infected patients, moving down the line with a calm efficiency a robot would envy.
Two others held their positions and began shooting at the approaching zombies.
My grip loosened as I stared in horrified disbelief. The soldier took advantage of my lapse in attention and pulled away, dashing out the doors before I could stop him.
Two more bullets, two more dead patients. The lucky ones were too far gone to realize what was happening, but those close to me strained against the straps holding them to the cots, shrieking as they realized what was being done.
I couldn’t let this happen. It was murder—a cold, calculated death squad in action. I started to unsling my M4, only to have someone grab my wrist from behind in a grip stronger than my own. I turned, ready to go medieval on the person’s ass.
“Don’t,” Nathan said. “You can’t stop it.”
His voice was oddly muffled, and I stopped fighting. He was wearing one of the fire-evac hoods or masks or whatever they were called, the upper half of his face visible through clear plastic. He had a bulging duffle bag slung over one shoulder.
“It’s wrong.”
“I know,” he replied. “But it’s either that, or leave them here to burn to death. They’re going to die no matter what. You know that.”
“But these ones.” I gestured to the three patients closest to us. A little boy no more than six years old, a girl barely into her teens, and a heavy-set man in his forties, all hellishly aware of the situation. “They might make it. They could be wild cards, right?”
Nathan shook his head.
“They’re past that point.” He handed me a smoke hood. “Here, put this on.” I didn’t ask where he got it. Nathan and his seemingly endless bag of tricks and supplies were like Mary Poppins and her carpetbag.
I took the hood and put it over my head. Nathan made a few adjustments and suddenly I could breathe freely again.
“Come on,” he said.
I hesitated as through the clear plastic of the hood, I locked eyes with the little boy lying on the cot. His expression was pleading with me to do something.
“I—”
I heard a loud crack and a small hole punctured the boy’s forehead. His eyes glazed over even as his expression still begged me to save him.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, even though he could no longer hear me. A sob wrenched through me, and my eyes burned with unshed tears and residual smoke. I looked up and saw the soldier who’d fired the shot, walking slowly toward the little boy he’d just killed. He lifted his head, and even through the protective mask I could see horror and grief in his eyes. I wondered if he’d ever be able to come back from this night as a sane and functional human being.
I knew I’d never forget, and I wasn’t the one who’d had to pull the trigger.
“Come on.” Nathan grabbed my arm and pulled me toward the far door. With his other hand he hefted some fancy handgun from his personal armory. Part of me appreciated the fact that he didn’t ask what I was doing there, or tell me to evacuate. He knew why I was there, because he was on the same mission—find Simone and get her to safety.
As we walked, he coolly shot at the oncoming zombies, each shot finding its way into the skull of a walking corpse. I followed, happy to have someone else take the lead about now. I unsheathed my katana, reasoning that I could clean up anything Nathan missed.
Not that Nathan missed much.
Charred, blackened corpses continued to stumble through the door as he and I reached it, dodging the last few fleeing civilians as we did so. The smell of burnt flesh mixed with decay, as if someone had tossed rotting meat onto a BBQ. Cooking didn’t make zombies smell any better, and not even the chemical stench in the air could mask it.
Nathan capped the two lead zombies in their heads. They fell to the ground, creating a stumbling block for the ones behind them. I could see more through the gap in the door, at least half a dozen in the hallwa
y beyond. I wondered how many had been in the lab when the fire broke out, and how many of those had managed to make their way up a level, much less any further.
“How the hell did they get out of the lab?” Nathan growled, echoing my line of thought. We didn’t have time for speculation, though, as an extra crispy zombie pushed its way through the door. Nathan didn’t waste a round on it, instead bashing in its Kentucky Fried head with the stock of his rifle.
I dodged past him into the hallway and decapitated another smoked ghoul, so charred that its original sex was unidentifiable. Several more trailed behind it, each one more burned than the last. Nathan and I dispatched them quickly, heading down the hallway toward a door on the left that should have been shut, but was now standing wide open.
What the fuck? I thought. The door’s been wedged open. Sure enough, a small piece of metal kept it from swinging shut on its own.
Smoke poured out of the stairwell that led to the floor below. Flames were visible now, far below, moving up the stairs—along with more zombies, each one looking sorrier than the one before it. All I could think was that if the zombies were this badly damaged, could any humans have survived?
“We have to hurry,” Nathan said, and he pushed past me, bashing another zombie’s skull in with one thwack of his rifle stock. “If anyone’s still alive down there, they don’t have much time left.”
I nodded, and the two of us transformed into whirlwinds of zombie destruction, making our way down the stairwell. I hoped Nathan had an access badge or the security code for the door that led into the lab. Otherwise we were shit out of luck.
The formerly sterile antechamber was filled with smoke, its white walls smeared with blood and bits of flesh. Several lab techs sprawled on the floor, their HAZMAT suits shredded along with their bodies. A discarded fire extinguisher lay next to one of them. Nathan scooped it up just as that particular corpse started to stir. Without missing a beat, he smashed the tech in the head, but the force of the blow was cushioned by the HAZMAT hood.
