Now panting and shaking slightly from the adrenaline, a sweat was breaking out across his brow. He pulled his machete out and went up the short hall to see why they had not seen the thriller the first time they’d gone by. The door at the end to the right was open, and it looked like a guy had been in there with his roommates when he’d turned. Blood and body parts were scattered about. Bill deduced that it had heard them walk by and come out to find fresh food. Now armed with the knowledge that the doors didn’t have closers on them, Bill made a mental note to relay the info to Q when he caught back up with him. He went from offshoot hall to offshoot hall more cautiously now, ensuring he wouldn’t be caught off guard again. He pressed the elevator button and waited for it to arrive on the ground floor. According to the readout, it was coming down from the fourth floor.
Well, that’s curious. What are the chances? About eighteen percent, I guess, since there are six floors in this building.
The elevator doors opened to reveal a thriller staring at the back wall. Apparently, it had gone in and couldn’t figure out how to leave. Bill swung the machete down through the back of its skull, and it slumped to the floor, machete and all.
Damnit. I really need to get a handle on this thing.
Grabbing the machete on his way out, he pressed the fourth-floor button and sent it back to whence it came. When he met back up with Q, he informed him about the doors not closing automatically.
They pulled the stairwell door open slowly to test how noisy it would be, trying to gauge what they would be dealing with upstairs. The stairwell was well illuminated, negating the need for their NVGs. On the whitewashed cinderblock walls were bloody handprints and streaks all the way up as far as they could see from their current location. On the steps, they could see a fair amount of blood splattered about.
“Looks like they were all heading down.”
“Yea, probably scared shitless, running for their lives.”
“I would agree by the bloody footprints next to the exterior door right here.”
“Should we open it and see what’s out there?”
“Fuck that shit, man. We can on the way back, maybe. As long as the door is secure, we know that nothing can trap us from behind.”
“You’re right. We need to find what we came for.”
“Keep in mind all the doors are going to open into the stairwell because it’s easier to escape that way in case of a fire.”
Their footsteps were nearly silent on the concrete steps as they headed up. Both had been avid hunters in their youth, and they knew how to step lightly. As they made their way up, Bill looked through the windows of the second- and third-floor doors to see a few thrillers meandering about, along with stripped-clean bones and shredded clothing scattered around. Bill pointed at his eyes with his index and middle fingers and then pointed though the windows. Q nodded in acknowledgement. At the fourth-floor door they heard one of the doors on a lower level open. Q motioned Bill to look through the window while he peered over the railing. Q saw two Thrillers stumbling out onto the second-floor landing. The leader lifted its chin into the air and began to sniff. Then it let out a moan.
“ARGHGHGRHGHRGHRGHRGHRGH!”
The second began to look around for the meal the first had called out. Bill and Q swapped places in time for Bill to see a couple come through the third-floor emergency exit door.
“This is just swell,” Bill whispered to Q.
They heard the slap of flesh against concrete, and both looked back over the railing again. The two pairs of thrillers had triangulated the location of supper but were struggling to climb the stairs.
“The hall looks clear. We need to get in now and hope they can’t pull the door open.”
From down the hall towards the elevator, they could hear gurgling and shuffling.
“Good thinking with the distraction, Bill.”
“Thanks.”
“Looks like 415 is going to be on the other side of the elevator, how do you want to handle this?”
“I count about fifteen thrillers here. We each have full magazines of thirty rounds, so no worries there. The wild card is how many can get out of their rooms like dipshit downstairs?”
“We will just have to be on our toes and watch our backs till we get out of here. Once we start shooting, every thriller in the place is going to know were here.”
“Yup. Let’s get this over with.”
Each man started on his respective side and worked towards the middle with head shots. Bill used twelve rounds to bring down seven, and Q used only ten to bring down the other eight. Once the last thriller fell, both men looked around, on high alert. Suppressed weapons didn’t mean silent weapons, and the thrillers in the other rooms had heard the gunfire. Now the hungry moans of the dead were coming from behind many of the doors around them. Both men were using the M4s they’d picked up, because they hadn’t taken the time to swap suppressors to their personal weapons yet.
“Well, they definitely know we’re here now.”
“Yea, let’s not dilly dally, shall we?”
Moving in tandem, they cleared the halls as they went, till they reached 415. The door was closed and locked. Bill knocked on it loudly. They heard a thump and moaning on the other side, and Bill’s heart sank a bit.
“Terry? You in there?”
No answer.
“Terry! If you can hear the sound of my voice, lay on the floor, ’cause I’m about to shoot through this motherfucking door!” Bill yelled.
He heard Q’s rifle bark one time, and his head snapped to his left. Q had been watching their six when a thriller had come down from one of the offshoot halls to find out what all the yelling was about. Bill stepped back from the door and, at about knee level, fired seven rounds through the door from right to left and heard the satisfying thump of a body falling over. He knew he wouldn’t have been able to kill it, but he hoped to keep it from walking. He then shot the door knob a couple of times and swapped magazines while Q kicked the door in with that strength of a linebacker that he possessed. Q was the first though the door, and he looked at the face of the thriller. It was trying to get up, and Q quickly dispatched it with a round placed right between the eyes.
“That’s not him.”
“Thank God. So far, so good.”
Looking around the room, they could see that it was a common area, with a couch, TV hooked up to a couple of game systems, and a small dining room table with four matching chairs. On the left side of the room was the kitchenette, with sink, fridge, and microwave. Along the far wall were four doors that led into each person’s private bedroom. During the summer, Terry had been staying with one of his frat brothers, and he’d hoped to get this dorm room, saying how nice it would be to have a private space again. Bill hadn’t been to this dorm yet because the semester had only started a few weeks ago.
“I’ll open doors, and you cover me.”
“Sounds good to me.”
Bill opened the first door on the left, and Q’s rifle swept from left to right. The room was empty.
“Must have belonged to this dude we already found,” Bill said flatly.
Behind the next door were two thrillers, male and female, both naked. The female had eaten the male’s face and dick off, and his small intestines were strung about the room. Q took care of both of them. Whatever was behind door number three had fists banging against the door, frantic about the sounds it was hearing.
“What’s your name, dude?” Bill hollered at the door.
“AGHRGHRGHRGHRGH!”
“Nice to meet you. Stand back! We’re coming in now!” and with that, Bill kicked the door open, knocking the thriller back onto its butt. He quickly deduced it was not Terry and shot it unceremoniously in the face.
There was a crash at the door to the hallway, and Bill whipped around to find Q holding the wrists of a thriller that had come over for social hour. Bill pulled out his knife and rammed through the temple of Q’s assailant, rendering it re-dead.
�
��Thanks.”
“No worries. I guess the last room is Terry’s. I don’t recognize any of the personal items in the others.”
“Well, there’s only one way to find out, so let’s do this.”
Bill walked up to the door, knocked on it twice, and then opened it.
D, Andre, and Charity were all armed with suppressed M4s, pistols in drop-leg holsters, and Charity had her bow. Andre was standing with his back to the rear of Bill’s trailer, facing his dad’s truck. He felt this was the best position to see both ways without something sneaking up on him. D would walk down one side of the trailer to check on him and then up the other side. Charity remained posted at the hood of Bill’s 4Runner since she barely knew the other two, only having met them a couple of hours ago. The sun had set more than an hour ago, but the street lights were doing a fairly good job of illuminating the campus. After Bill and Q disappeared into the dorm’s main lobby the night had been eerily quiet: no cicadas in the trees, no breeze, nothing.
Charity saw a flash of movement between the street lamps on the other side of the parking lot about a 150 yards away. Trying to see it again, she kept her gaze fixated on that spot. Then she saw it again in her peripheral vision: three lights to her left. Not wanting to call out to the others for fear of attracting whatever it was, she slowly crept down the side of the rig to where Andre was standing.
“Did you see anything over there?” Charity asked as she pointed to the last place she’d seen movement.
“No, what did you see?”
“I don’t know. Could have been anything. It was moving from there to over there.”
“All right, I’ll keep an eye out.”
Charity was walking back up to the front when she heard D call out.
“Guys, I think we’re going to have problems here. I’m going to need a little assist.”
Jogging over to D, Charity saw what she was talking about. There were about two hundred thrillers headed their way, drawn by the sound the trucks had made as they’d come through town. Most of these looked like they’d been college students this morning. Some had bloody faces and bloodstains all down the front of their clothes. Others were still fairly clean.
“Andre, you take middle. Stay calm and remember to breathe. Line up your shot and squeeze the trigger like Dad taught you.”
“Yea, Mom, I know how to shoot a gun.”
“I know, but you’ve never shot a gun while scared and hopped up on adrenaline before. It changes how you handle your weapon.”
“I’m not scared.”
“Yea. OK. Like I was saying, Andre, you take middle. Charity and I will start on the outer edges and work our way in.”
The shooting began: line up and fire, line up and fire. Thirty seconds later, Andre called out, “Reloading.”
D scolded him, “You need to slow down just a bit. Make sure you have a good sight picture before you squeeze the trigger.”
After both the ladies had reloaded one time and spent all the rounds in those magazines too, the horde that had been coming at them was completely dispatched. The next problem was the new thrillers who’d been drawn from out of the trees and buildings all around them by the sound of gunfire.
“Shit-shit-shit!” Charity exclaimed. “We’re completely surrounded now. I hope the guys hurry up! This is about to get bad!”
“Yea, no kidding,” replied D. She looked around and said,
“Charity, get on top of Bill’s 4Runner. The roof rack that he and Q installed will hold you just fine. It will get you up out of arm’s reach from the meat sacks. Andre and I will be up on top of our camper. GO NOW!”
Charity ran to the rear driver-side door of the 4Runner and grabbed a couple of loaded magazines Bill had in a duffle bag. She shoved them into her pockets and then climbed the ladder on the rear lift gate to get onto the roof rack. When she was standing on top of the vehicle, she looked over and saw D and Andre were already on top of their camper. Charity took a seat on a storage case Bill had bolted to the rack and began picking off the closest thrillers as they approached. She heard gunfire behind her and knew the other two were doing the same.
After she had spent ninety rounds from three magazines, she realized that the horde was not really getting any smaller and that it was starting to close in around the vehicles. As she would shoot one down, the five behind it would trip over the body, sometimes not getting back up because they were being trampled by those behind them. It was a never ending cycle. She took stock of her ammo situation and realized she only had about a 115 rounds remaining. The two guns behind her continued to bark in a rhythmic pattern.
Hundreds of bodies were scattered all across the parking lot by the time Charity ran out of ammo. Only one gun behind her continued to wreak havoc on thriller craniums. She stood up to survey the damage just as several walked up to the 4Runner and surrounded her. The smell that permeated off them was awful with them so close. The cordite that had hung in the air, and covered up the stink had dissipated. She could no longer hold in the contents of her stomach and spewed all over the four Thrillers that reached for her by the rear passenger-side door. The convulsions of her abdominal muscles forced her down on her knees. She felt the quiver of bows on her back shift for the first time in a while, and she got an idea. She pulled one out and held it in her fist, close to the fletching. The thrillers were tightly packed in around the 4Runner, so it was easy to reach down and pierce them through the eye and into the brain. The arrow was just long enough that she only had to come within a few inches of the outstretched hands dying for her tasty flesh.
“How you doing down there?” D called out to her.
“Just great, real fucking great!”
“Keep doing what you’re doing. It seems to be working!”
“Thanks, but they are starting to stand on top of the re-dead, and they’re getting closer!”
“Think you could jump onto the trailer there next to you?”
“Looks like I can. Let me try.”
Charity stood and judged the distance to the trailer. Its front was rounded for aerodynamics, and it was a couple of feet taller than where she stood. If it had been the same height as the 4Runner, the distance wouldn’t have been an issue—it was maybe five feet across. She backed up a few feet to give herself some sort of running start. Moving towards the trailer, at the last second, her left foot slipped, and she lost some of her momentum. Enough of her body was up over the curve of the trailer to pull herself the rest of the way up. As she started to pull herself up, she felt a hand grip her ankle and pull her back down. As she thrashed her leg against the resistance because she was trying to free herself, she started losing purchase of the rubberized roofing material on the trailer. After the longest three seconds of furious fighting for her life she’d ever experienced, she fell.
“Charity!” D screamed, in full panic. She had only known Charity for a few hours, but the woman was obviously a fighter, and you never want to see another person die before your eyes. D was only partially thankful she couldn’t see Charity between the 4Runner and the trailer. She looked around just in time to see Bill and Q heading toward them at full tilt.
D then looked the other way to see another couple of people headed toward them. With swords raised over their heads, the newcomers began hacking and slashing through the horde surrounding the vehicles.
Q was the first into the fray from the direction of the dorms. He was picking thrillers up by the shoulders and throwing them behind him while Bill stabbed them in the face with his machete. D looked back at the newcomers. She could now see that it was three people. They were working fast and efficiently, but a couple of them were beginning to tire already.
Just then, one looked up and said, “D? Andre? Where’s Q and my dad?”
D just stood there speechless. She looked back at Q and Bill to see if they were faring well.
“They are on the other side of the camper, fighting their way towards you!”
Another forty-five seconds of full o
ut everything you got hacking and slashing on both sides of the convoy, bodies and pieces lay scattered everywhere. D and Andre had climbed down from their perch and joined in the final hooray of the battle.
“Everyone watch for still-animated heads. Those fuckers will still bite you unless you have ruined the brain.”
Bill got down on all fours between his 4Runner and trailer, where Charity had fallen. He expected to find scraps of her clothing and little else, and he could not believe it when their eyes locked. She had tears welling up in hers, but she was alive.
“Charity! Q, she’s under here!” He reached a hand out to her. “Can you crawl back out? Are you injured?”
As she started to move towards him, she said, “I think I’m ok. We will see when the shock wears off.”
With a huge sigh of relief, he jumped up and grabbed Terry, who was now standing next to him, into a bear hug.
“I’m so glad you’re alive. When we found your room empty, I thought you were a part of the bloodbath in the lobby.”
“Nah, we were over at Kathrin’s place when the shit went down this morning.”
“I tried to get ahold of you repeatedly.”
“Sorry. We were at the pool of her apartment complex, and as soon as people started turning, I was knocked into the pool by the rush of people. Phone included. Kathrin and Jake were in the pool already. The weird thing is those sumbitches can’t swim and seem to know it. As long as we stayed in the pool, we were safe. In plain sight. So we stayed there for a few hours until it was clear, and we made our way up to her apartment. We watched TV to see if this was the real deal and ate as much food as we could. We packed her a bag of essentials, and I knew you would be coming to get us, so we headed to Jake’s apartment to collect his crap. We ran into a few problems along the way, but we managed to collect these super-badass swords from a guy who won’t be needing them anymore. He was Jake’s next-door neighbor. From there, we were heading towards my room when I saw the 4Runner. But I saw her”—he pointed at Charity—“and didn’t know her. We didn’t want to walk into a trap. We were circling around to get a better visual when all hell broke loose. It was when I heard D screaming after”-he pointed to Charity again-“she fell off the trailer that I recognized D’s voice and knew that was Q’s truck.”
Beginning of the New Beginning, Vol 1 Page 4
