Jax pulled back from me with a little smile, and turned to face Sam. “What’s wrong with you?”
“This is some fucked-up shit, man. I don’t want to die here.”
Doctor Colbert spoke up. “I thought you people were fighters. I’d never seen a more motivated group of survivors. I was barely surviving here, thinking I was going to die, but you convinced me to try to live again. You showed me that the zombies have a weakness, and told me that there are still scientists at Alpha One working on a solution to the problem we face. You gave me hope. Now you’re giving up? You have twenty-four hours left; are you going to spend them doing nothing but waiting to die?”
“She’s right,” Jax said, wiping tears from her face. “I don’t want to sit here doing nothing while time ticks away. There must be something we can do, something we can try.”
I asked Colbert, “Is there any way we can communicate with Alpha One from this facility?”
“No, we tried that. When they didn’t answer our calls, we assumed the island had been taken over by the zombies. We had problems of our own, so contacting Alpha One wasn’t exactly a priority.”
“And there’s no other way to speak with them?”
She shook her head. “No. We kept in contact via telephone, email, and video calls, but it all stopped suddenly. Our network went down.”
So, communication with Alpha One seemed to be out of the question.
“How far is it to the coast?” I asked.
“About seventy miles.”
“We can get there by car,” I said.
“This is bullshit,” Sam said. “When we get to the coast, then what? Do you think we’re just going to find a boat to take us to Apocalypse Island?”
“I’ll row there in a dingy if it means saving our lives,” I replied.
“Don’t be stupid, man. We’d get to the coast and we’d be stuck there. And don’t forget that there are soldiers crawling all over the coast. We’d get captured before we even reached the beach.”
“We’ll have to come up with a plan,” I said, “but first let’s get out of this building and back to the guard station. Tanya and Johnny deserve to know the situation, and maybe they’ll have some ideas on what we can do about it.”
Sam continued pacing back and forth. “We’re all fucked.”
“When did you become such a pessimist?” I asked him. I wasn’t sure what had happened to Sam lately, but he had changed from the easy-going, levelheaded man I had once known. He had always been impetuous and brave, but there had been an underlying calm in his nature. And as a cameraman for survivalist Vigo Johnson, he had surely been in some harrowing situations, yet he seemed not to be affected by them or anything we had encountered together. But since being injected with the virus, the calmness had been replaced with anger. Maybe he had only fooled us into believing he’d had his shit together, and the facade was now slipping.
“When did you become such an optimist?” he threw back at me. “When we met you, you were whining about everything. Now you’re all ‘fuck yeah, let’s do it.’ You’ve changed, man.”
I wasn’t sure he meant it as a compliment, but I took it as one. I remembered complaining about everything all the time. I wasn’t sure what had changed inside me, but now I hardly saw any point in griping about the little things that annoyed me. The things I used to complain about paled in comparison to the big problems I had to deal with now. Maybe, like Jax, I had realized that life was precious.
I didn’t want to waste any of that precious time, even if I only had twenty-four hours of it left. Especially if I only had twenty-four hours of it left.
Maybe I could at least get the H1NZ1 to the helipad where Hart would be landing in a couple of days’ time. Doctor Colbert could tell him what had happened, and fly to Apocalypse Island with the chemical to do some good. Maybe she would be a part of the team that would finally figure out how to deal with the zombies for good.
Jax leaned against the lab table as if she had suddenly lost all her strength. I put a hand on her shoulder. “Are you okay?”
She clutched her right arm, pain etched across her ashen face as she shook her head. “No,” she said through gritted teeth. She doubled over, falling to the floor, moaning in agony.
“What’s wrong with her?” I asked Doctor Colbert desperately.
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe she’s reacting badly to the virus.”
“I’m okay,” Jax said. “Help me up.”
She took my hand and I helped her get to her feet. She leaned on the table, breathing deeply. Beads of sweat had broken out across her forehead.
I put an arm around her, but she shook it off. “I’m fine,” she said.
I didn’t know what was happening to her, but I decided that we should get out of here as soon as possible and regroup with Tanya and Johnny in the security-guard station.
I went to the door and looked out at the corridor. It seemed deserted. I pressed the button on the walkie-talkie.
“How does the fourth floor look from the cameras?” If this floor was clear, all we had to do was ride the elevator down to the reception area and get the hell out of the building.
There was no answer other than static.
I tried again. “Tanya? Johnny?”
Nothing.
Then Tanya’s voice came over the airwaves, sounding worried. “Alex, there’s something…we don’t know what it is…but it just ran past one of the cameras on your floor.”
“What? Where?” I looked out at the corridor again. “I can’t see anything.”
“It was by the elevators,” Tanya said. “I’m panning the camera around but I can’t see it anywhere. It moved too fast.”
I turned to the others. “What do you think? Should we wait, or go now?”
“Let’s go,” Sam said, “I’m sick of this place. There’s too much science everywhere.” He looked at Colbert. “No offense, lady.”
Jax nodded. “I want to get out of here, too.”
Doctor Colbert said, “I’ll go along with whatever you decide.”
“Okay, let’s do it.” I opened the lab door and we went out into the corridor. The sprinklers had stopped, but the walls were dripping with water, and there was at least an inch of it covering the floor. I went ahead, moving as quickly as I could while still being alert and wary. I wanted to get out of here as much as everyone else, but I didn’t want to go rushing into trouble.
We got halfway along the corridor, the elevators in sight ahead, when a crashing sound made me turn around. The grille of the air vent in the corridor had hit the wall and fallen to the floor. A shape leaped out of the hole and landed in the corridor.
It was obviously Doctor Marcus Vess. His face was lined with dark veins, his eyes yellow, but I recognized him from the videos. He was naked, his entire body’s vascularity prominent and dark beneath his skin. He was covered with blood, some of it dried, some fresh. He grinned at us.
“Run!” I shouted. I turned and splashed toward the elevators as fast as I could.
When I reached the elevators, I took a left turn toward the main stairs. If I had turned right, I would have hit the locked access door, and I wasn’t sure if I would have time to swipe my card through the lock before Vess caught up with us.
But when I barged through the swing doors, I realized my mistake; the stairs were swarming with zombies, probably the ones that had been driven here by the sprinklers. I tried to halt my forward momentum but barreled into an undead woman dressed in a lab coat. She snarled at me and tried to bite my face. I pushed her away with my bat, wincing at the fetid smell that seeped from her decaying flesh.
Sam came through the door and started swinging his bat. I heard the dense wood make contact with rotten flesh as zombies began falling onto the stairs.
There were too many zombies for us to fight our way through, and Vess must be right behind us. I backed out through the doors into the corridor and turned to face Vess. He wasn’t there. He was running toward the access d
oor, where Jax was desperately sliding her card through the lock, her blue eyes wide as she watched Vess get closer.
For some reason, she had turned right where we had turned left.
The doors mercifully opened. Jax ran through. The doors closed before Vess reached them.
Through the glass, I could see Jax look over her shoulder, slowing her pace as she realized Vess hadn’t made it through the door. She made it to the end of the corridor before she winced, grabbing her right arm and doubling over just as she had in the lab. She leaned against the wall, grimacing.
I was sure Vess was going to come back this way. We had no chance to get to Jax, but the emergency stairs door was on her side of the access door. If Johnny or Tanya could come up those stairs, they could get Jax to safety.
I hit the button on the walkie-talkie. “Jax is in trouble.”
“Johnny is already on his way,” Tanya replied. “As soon as he saw her heading for that door, he was out of here and running into the building.”
The doors behind us swung open and the zombies came shuffling through, moaning and reaching for us. We backed away toward the elevators. I shot a glance over my shoulder, preparing myself for when Vess finally turned around and came for us.
But he didn’t do that. After watching Jax for a moment, he climbed up into an air vent.
“Oh, fuck,” I said, “he’s going to come out on the other side of the door.”
Jax was still leaning against the wall in obvious pain. She slid down the wall, clutching her stomach. She was helpless.
An air vent on the other side of the access door smashed open and Vess jumped down into the corridor, his feet splashing the water on the floor.
Seeing that he was on the same side of the door as her, Jax tried to crawl away.
Vess walked forward toward her as if he had all the time in the world.
The emergency stairs door burst open between them and Johnny appeared, Desert Eagle in his hands. He pointed it at Vess and shot.
Vess went down, falling backward into the water and lying still.
As the zombies advanced, we backed up past the elevators and into the corridor Jax had taken when I had stupidly headed for the zombie-infested main stairs.
“We might as well go this way,” I told Sam and Doctor Colbert. “The zombies are blocking the elevators now.” The threat from Vess seemed to be over. Now all we had to do was get to those emergency stairs and out of the building. We could figure out later how to get to Apocalypse Island.
We turned and started heading for the access door. Through the glass in the door, I could see Johnny carefully approaching Vess’s unmoving body, the Desert Eagle shaking a little in his hands. Beyond him, Jax was sitting in the water on the floor, her face ghostly white. Her eyes were shut tight, her features twisted with pain. If her pain was brought on by the virus in her system, I wasn’t sure she had even the twenty-four hours Doctor Colbert had promised us.
As Johnny got close to Vess, he bent over to look at the creature’s face.
Vess shot his arm up and grabbed Johnny around the throat, lifting him into the air. He got to his feet, still holding Johnny up above his head. I ran for the access door, pulling my Desert Eagle from its holster. My other hand dug the door card out of my pocket.
Despite her pain, Jax had managed to get her gun into her hands. She lifted it and aimed at Vess, who moved a struggling Johnny into her line of fire. Jax hesitated.
Vess thrust his hand into the back of Johnny’s neck before pulling down viciously. Johnny’s eyes went wide, his mouth falling open as Vess tore his spine from his body. Tossing Johnny’s dead body aside, Vess advanced on Jax.
Obviously realizing that shooting at Vess was pointless after he had dodged Johnny’s bullet at close range, Jax scrambled to her feet and ran, almost slipping over on the wet floor as she turned a corner at the end of the corridor. Vess followed.
“No!” I shouted as I reached the door. My hand was shaking so much that my first attempt to swipe my card through the lock failed. I tried again, looking at Johnny’s lifeless body through the glass. The water around him was stained red. The look of shock and agony on his face remained even in death.
The door opened.
I ran through, past Johnny to the end of the corridor. Jax had turned right, so I did the same, expecting to come upon her body around the corner. She wasn’t fast enough to outrun Vess. Unless she had found a locked room to hole up in, she must be dead.
She was there, but she was alive. Kneeling in the water, tears streaming from her face, she held the gun in her hand up in the air in front of her, but her hand was shaking so badly that the muzzle of the Desert Eagle swung wildly left and right.
Vess was gone, his exit route marked by a broken air vent in the wall.
Why had he left Jax alive?
I went to her, putting my arm around her and helping her to stand. Her entire body was trembling like a leaf held to a branch by such a fragile connection that the slightest breeze would blow it away.
She leaned against me as if she had lost the strength to stand.
“We need to get out of here,” I told Sam.
He nodded, eyeing the broken air vent warily. We took Jax between us, moving back along the corridor as fast as we could. Doctor Colbert led the way, her own body trembling almost as much as Jax’s. I imagined that she must have seen some grisly sights since the outbreak, but seeing a living man’s spine being ripped out wasn’t one of them. I tried not to think about it but the image of Johnny’s face kept flashing into my mind.
We reached the emergency stairs and began to descend. Jax found her strength by the time we reached the second floor. She murmured, “I’m okay,” and supported herself on the metal railing as we went down to the first floor.
The door opened onto a first-floor corridor that led to an access door. We went through it and into the reception area, which was still deserted.
As we went through the main doors and out into the rainy night, I breathed the cool, fresh air thankfully. I had wondered, before entering the building, if I would ever leave. I had made it out alive, but we had lost Johnny Drake.
His voice had lifted my spirits so many times in the past, and now I would never hear it again.
15
The rain was still coming down in force, blown into our faces by a cold wind that whistled along the edge of the building. The stars and moon were blotted out by storm clouds. As we crossed the parking lot, a flash of lightning illuminated the distant hills. A couple of seconds later, thunder rolled over the compound.
Tanya opened the door to the guard station as we approached. The pool of light coming from within the little building looked warm and welcoming. After we had piled into the room, I sat by the radiator, shivering wetly in its heat.
Jax dropped into one of the chairs, leaning heavily against the desk. She looked better than she had earlier, but I could see she was still fighting against some sort of pain.
“I should have come to help you,” Tanya said to Jax, “But Johnny was determined. He ran across to the building as soon as he knew you were in trouble. His last act was a heroic one.”
Jax nodded. “He tried to save my life but lost his instead. I’ll never forget that.” Her voice was low, her eyes locked on the floor at her feet. I wondered if she was in shock.
Hell, after what we had just been through, we were all in shock.
An air of solemnity descended over the room. Even Sam was quiet.
I hadn’t known Johnny for long, but his voice on the radio had lifted my spirits many times. Some of my best memories were of dancing to some tune or other that Johnny was playing. His rich voice, floating over the airwaves like silk, had been calm and comforting at a time when everyday living was full of stress. With the passing of Johnny Drake, we had lost a man who had done more good for the survivors of the apocalypse than anyone, simply by being there when we needed to hear a familiar voice or lose ourselves to music.
I closed my eyes
and leaned against the radiator, letting the heat seep into my damp clothes and hair.
While Jax and Doctor Colbert brought Tanya up to date with exactly what had happened inside the building, I checked the time on my watch and put it into countdown mode, beginning at twenty-three hours. I wasn’t sure why I did it except that I wanted to know when my final seconds were approaching.
Sam came over and sat next to me. “Hey, Alex, don’t hog all the heat, man.”
I gave him a flat smile but said nothing. We’d had some disagreements since coming here, and I felt uneasy when he was around me. I didn’t want to say the wrong thing and be on the receiving end of another gut punch.
As if reading my mind, he said, “How’s your stomach?”
“I’ll live,” I said. The truth was, my stomach muscles were still sore where he had hit me.
“I’m sorry about that,” Sam said.
I raised an eyebrow. “You’re sorry that I’ll live?”
He grinned, and I saw the old Sam return. “Nah, I’m sorry I hit you, man.”
“Don’t worry about it.” Then I decided to risk another punch and said, “We’re all pissed off with this virus situation but you seemed more pissed off than anyone. What’s got you so mad?”
“I can’t stand having my freedom taken away from me, man. Before the shit hit the fan, when I was working as a cameraman with Vigo in the jungle, or in the desert, I felt so free. Like I didn’t have to answer to anyone, you know? My old man used to work for a big corporation, and his whole life revolved around his job. He was the original corporate yes man, and the company came before anything, even his wife and his sons.”
“Sons,” I said. “You have a brother?”
He nodded. “I have two. One of them, my older brother, is in the army, stationed in the Middle East, so he’s probably safe.” He laughed. “That shows how bad things are here when being in a warzone in the Middle East is safer than being in Britain. My younger brother is a corporate man just like dear old dad. He works in New York and he probably treats his family just as badly as our dad treated us.
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