The Smell

by Damon Hunter

  When Dino didn’t answer right away, Deke said, “Time to man up, kid. Imagine the video you’ll get fighting through the streets.”

  “I guess…”

  “You wanted to kill some zombies and it sounds like you’re in what we liked to call a target-rich environment.”

  Dino lowered the radio, looking at the others. “I guess this is what we trained for.”

  They didn’t look so sure.

  “If they got Trey, what chance do we have?” Lumpy asked. “He was a legit marine, we’re just kids with guns.”

  “I’m here to edit video,” Jo told them.

  “You trained with the rest of us,” Ana said.

  “That was fun. This is, like, real.”

  Dino held up the radio. “I can tell Deke to come here. The hotel is defensible and we have plenty of weapons. We can get some video here if we want. Hell, we have some already. Maybe the smart move is to wait for a rescue.”

  Lumpy nodded. “If we hold them off we can get an airlift off the roof. We can go up and make some kind of S.O.S out of sheets or something. Let them know we’re here.”

  “Will Deke listen to you?” Ana asked.

  Dino shrugged.

  “Doesn’t matter if he does or not,” Lumpy said. “It would be better if he was here, but if he wants to go it alone that’s his call.”

  They were all surprised when the door to the adjoining suite burst open and Donna came through, holding her phone.

  “Hey, can you go back in the other room? We’re still having a meeting,” Dino told her.

  Donna looked at the television where a loop of Lumpy and Ana in the lobby was playing and then back to Dino.

  “I have information vital to your meeting.”

  “Were you listening to us?”

  “Damn right I was.”

  “Considering we saved your ass, you aren’t being very appreciative,” Dino said.

  “You didn’t save shit,” Donna said, “Lumpy and Ana did. If you would quit whining about my audacity to want to know what the fuck you’re planning to do, since my life and my daughter’s is on the line, and let me talk, maybe you could learn something.”

  “Look, I don’t—” Dino began, but Ana stopped him.

  “Let’s hear what she has to say.”

  “There will be no rescue,” Donna said.

  “You don’t know that.”

  “My ex-husband does. He made it clear no one is coming. Once they put on a quarantine, no one is going in. They’ve decided the risk is too great. If we’re still here after the first twenty-four hours, we are considered infected.”

  “What makes your husband an expert?”

  “Ex-husband. He is on the Tactical Medical Response Team. The last one to break quarantine. Trust me, he knows.”

  “I don’t know,” Jo said. “Still feels safer here.”

  “You think he would recommend doing something that would put his only child in danger if he didn’t feel it was necessary?”

  “Maybe he doesn’t understand how brutal it is out there,” Ana said.

  “He’s behind the line right now up north and he has been in the TMRT from the get-go. If anyone understands, it’s him.”

  “So what does he think we should do?” Lumpy asked.

  “He said if we had a way out, to take it. Sounds to me like there’s a vehicle waiting for us just a few blocks away. Outside the traffic jam. Sounds to me like we have a way to get out.”

  “We didn’t come here to get out of quarantine, we came to go in,” Dino said.

  “Sounds to me like you were all having some second thoughts,” Donna said. “Besides, getting to the car should get you some great footage.”

  “She has a point there,” Lumpy said. “I don’t see video of us hanging out in the hotel getting a lot of hits.”

  “We were going to leave sometime anyway. What’s the matter with the present?” Ana added.

  Katelin stepped in the room. “What good is having a viral video if you’re dead anyway?”

  “Kid has a point,” Lumpy said.

  “Okay, but we’re ignoring one big problem,” Dino said. “This is going to be hard enough as it is without having to babysit a couple of civilians.”

  Dino looked at Donna. “Even if we go, you two are staying. We’ve trained for this, you haven’t. Bringing you along could get us all killed.”

  Donna stepped past him and picked up an AR-15. She found the right magazine, slapped it in and chambered a round before anyone could say a word.

  “Who are you calling a civilian, college boy?”

  “You should put that down. It’s a dangerous weapon.”

  “You talk down to me again, college boy, and you may find out just how dangerous it is.”

  Ana and Lumpy took a step toward the bed.

  “Take another step and you find out too. I’m liking being the only armed person in the room at the moment. I was married to a special forces Marine who had seen the worst the world had to offer before this crap went down. He made sure I knew how to handle a gun and then some.”

  “She seems to know what she’s doing,” Lumpy said.

  “Might be an asset,” Ana added.

  Dino was getting ready to point at Katelin and ask, ‘What about her?’ but she had already stepped to a bed and picked up a Glock. Like her mom, she had it loaded and a round chambered before anyone could say anything.

  “This the Glock Seventeen?”

  “Yeah,” Dino said.

  “I like the twenty-one better. I have a shitty dad, but he did teach me how to shoot. It’s about the only thing he ever did. My mom is no slouch either. We may not be much with swords and ninja stuff, but we know our guns.”

  “Frankly, listening to you, Dino, I should be the one concerned about you getting me killed.” Donna said. She was happy to see her daughter did not seem smitten with him anymore.

  “Harsh,” Lumpy said.

  “I’ve seen you in action,” Donna told him. “It’s not you or Ana I’m worried about.”

  “Dino is okay,” Ana said. “I’ve known him since we were in grade school. He may complain a lot, but when shit hits the fan he will be solid.”

  “It’s true,” Lumpy said.

  “Then gear up kids,” Donna told them, “and let your pal know we’re on the way.”

  Dino was making the call when the lights went out.

  CHAPTER 6

  Bakersfield, CA

  Harvey Simmons had been flashing the S.O.S with his flashlight from his sixth-floor apartment every hour throughout the night since he had to kill his wife two weeks ago.

  He was considering giving it up. All the signal seemed to do was get more infected, especially the nasty ones with the sharp teeth and occasional tusks, hanging out around his building. The elevator wasn’t running and all the stairs had been blocked off, so he was safe as long as he stayed in his room. The problem was the food and water he had scrounged from the abandoned units on his floor were starting to get dangerously low.

  He was thinking he may have to risk going down to find some food. He knew, unlike everyone else who had lived in his building, he could survive getting bit. The rot didn’t take to him for whatever reason. Didn’t mean he wanted to get bit again. He couldn’t be sure the next time one of them sunk their teeth into him the rot wouldn’t get into his system.

  He was thinking about how to do it, planning a route to the nearest grocery store, when he heard the rumble and felt the floor shake. Harvey thought it might be an earthquake; he actually laughed to himself thinking about dying under a pile of rubble after avoiding death by rot for so long. As much as he didn’t want to be crushed, it was preferable to starving to death or being torn apart by vampire rotters.

  He looked out the window and saw the shaking was not a seismic event, but a convoy of large vehicles. The lead one looked like an oversized locomotive, complete with a vee-shaped cow catcher on the front.

  He saw the cow catcher was built to clear the
road as it drove right through abandoned cars on the street leading to his apartment. The locomotive on wheels was clearing the way for the two trail vehicles, both armored trucks. The second one looked like an elongated ambulance. The third was more like a tank with twin gun turrets on top with men in head-to-toe body armor manning them.

  Harvey waved, hoping they would see him, and was glad to see them stop right under his window.

  A hatch opened on top of the locomotive and a man with the biggest machine gun Harvey had ever seen climbed out.

  Harvey wanted to yell look out when he saw some of the vampire rotters moving quickly toward the convoy. Between the man with the machine gun and the huge guns on top of the third vehicle, they didn’t last long. The barrage left piles of body parts floating in puddles of blood where the vampers used to be. For good measure, they did the same to every ambler within their sight.

  A voice came from a loudspeaker on the second vehicle, “Are you the man flashing the S.O.S.?”

  “Yes,” Harvey yelled back.

  “Have you been bitten?”

  “Yes,” Harvey said, “but it didn’t take.”

  “Are you alone? Are there any living infected inside?”

  “It’s just me.”

  “Do you have a way down?”

  “Not really.”

  “Stand back please.”

  Henry did as the voice said. A second later he heard something thump against the wall outside his window.

  He went to look and saw a ladder leaning against the wall just below his window. A man in body armor was below, holding it still. The locomotive was open in the back and Harvey figured the ladder must have been in there. Another heavily armored man emerged from the wheeled locomotive and started ascending the ladder

  “Wait where you are. Our man will assist you.”

  Harvey waited.

  “Climb out, please,” the man said as he reached the window and held out a hand to help Harvey out the window.

  Once Harvey had two feet on a rung and his hands holding the top, the soldier, who was nearly on top of Harvey, asked, “Can you climb down?”

  Harvey nodded.

  “Take your time and concentrate on descending the ladder. Don’t worry about what’s going on below you; whatever it is, we can handle it. If you get tired, rest,” he said before starting down himself.

  Harvey started moving. The machine guns below roared, but Harvey took the soldier’s advice and ignored them. Six floors was a lot, but Harvey did not stop and was soon on the ground.

  The man holding the ladder pressed a button on the ladder’s side and each section folded over. Soon, the once-tall ladder was folded up and fairly small.

  While the one soldier put away the ladder, the man who had helped him down retrieved one of the big machine guns and told Harvey, “You’re riding with Dr. Talbot in the rolling lab. Come with me.”

  Harvey followed the faceless soldier to the back of the second vehicle. The back opened and another man covered from head to toe helped Harvey inside. The interior was bigger than Harvey would have thought, and it fit the description of a lab.

  There was some more machine gun fire outside as a man came through a door on the far end of the mobile lab. Unlike everyone else, he was wearing a lab coat instead of body armor, and Harvey could see his face.

  He stuck out his right hand, which Harvey shook. “They call me Dr. Talbot. I’m out here to solve this crisis and I hope you want to help me.”

  “I’m Harvey and anything I can do to fix this mess, I’m going to do.”

  “Good to hear,” Dr. Talbot said as the vehicle started moving. “That kind of attitude is what I like to hear.”

  The moving vehicle had Harvey struggling to keep his feet, even though the ride was smoother than he would have imagined. Dr. Talbot and the soldier must have been used to it; the motion did not seem to bother them at all.

  Dr. Talbot took Harvey’s arm. “Let me get you strapped in.”

  He motioned to a comfortable-looking chair in the middle of the room. Harvey let him guide him there and took a seat. They strapped him in with a harness like a race car driver would wear.

  For the first time, Harvey noticed one of the vampire rotters was also strapped in a chair. Unlike Harvey, this one had a muzzle on his face.

  “Is that…” Harvey started to ask.

  “A vampire rotter, as they are popularly called?” Dr. Talbot interrupted. “Yes, it is. We call him Mikey.”

  “Is that a good idea? Keeping him around?”

  “Research is the name of game, and some things require a living sample. Besides, Mikey would tell you becoming a vampire rotter was the best thing that ever happened to him.”

  “It talks?”

  “No, not exactly. Even if he could, we’d keep the muzzle on him. Not all of us can take a bite like you can.”

  Harvey did not like being tied down next to it. “Can I sit somewhere else?”

  “Sure, but do you mind if I get some of your blood first?” Dr. Talbot asked. When Harvey did not answer right away, he added, “You’re immune, it’s important we find out why so we can make others immune as well.”

  Helping others avoid the rot seemed important enough. Harvey figured he could wait a few minutes before moving. The vampire rotter seemed strapped in pretty well, and there were two heavily armed men in the room.

  Harvey nodded and held out his arm.

  Dr. Talbot pulled a tube with a needle at its end from a hidden compartment in the back of the chair. He quickly found a vein and had the needle inserted. While the blood started to flow, Dr. Talbot went over to his work table, opened a drawer and took out a syringe.

  “How much blood are you taking?” Harvey asked.

  “All of it,” Dr. Talbot said as he plunged the syringe into Harvey’s neck and depressed the plunger.

  Harvey was getting ready to protest, but whatever Dr. Talbot had just put in him had him asleep before he could form any words.

  “You did say you would do anything,” Dr. Talbot said as the chair sucked the life out of Harvey.

  Dr. Talbot got on the intercom and contacted the driver. “Any more before we reach the TMRT trapped in San Francisco?”

  “One in Salinas, two more in Monterey. Depending on how long they take, we could be there by tonight.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Sea Shell Hotel, Oceanside, CA

  Donna was glad she dressed sensibly, going with jeans and tennis shoes for the evacuation, which was never going to happen. She wished her daughter had chosen running shoes instead of flip flops, and the cut-off shorts and shirt that ended just above the belly button weren’t doing much to get Dino to quit staring at her. Donna wasn’t sure if the Glock she had in each fist made her underage daughter more or less attractive to the older SWARC leader.

  The AR-15 Donna was holding kept Dino’s focus off her daughter as they moved into the darkened hall, guided by the flashlights mounted on the top of the machine guns they were carrying.

  Lumpy pushed the buttons on the elevator and as they all feared, the elevator was as dead as everything else.

  “Shouldn’t there be an emergency generator or something so people aren’t trapped on the upper floors?” Dino asked.

  “Yeah,” Donna said. “It’s called the stairs.”

  Even in the dark, she could see their faces drop.

  “Is there something wrong with the stairs?”

  Lumpy pointed at Dino.

  “While Lump and Ana went to check out the situation in the lobby, I booby trapped the stairs. Our research showed the infected wouldn’t use the elevator, but they would come up the stairs. Made sense from a defensive standpoint.”

  “Can we disable the traps?”

  Dino shook his head.

  “They went off minutes after he installed them,” Jo said. “I don’t know if he got anything or just set them wrong.”

  “I got something.”

  “Camera I set up didn’t see anything.”
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br />   “Doesn’t matter,” Donna said. “Can we get down?”

  “Not without a rope,” Dino told her. “I may have overdone the dynamite.”

  Donna shook her head.

  “The idea was to keep any infected from getting up. We had the elevator.”

  “Had being the operative word,” Katelin said.

  Lumpy pointed in the direction of the stairs. “We might as well take a look, maybe it’s not as bad as we think.”

  The stairway was on the opposite end of the hall from the elevator. There was a window on that end. The curtain was pulled shut in an effort to keep the upper floor cooler by blocking the sun. Before they opened the door, Ana opened the curtain, allowing everyone to shut off the flashlights.

  Everyone took a turn peering out. The window looked out into an alley. Unlike the street outside, it looked pretty much the same as it did before things went batshit crazy.

  Lumpy opened the door to the stairs and shined his light. Dino was right. The entire flight leading up to the fourth floor was gone. All that was left was the door on the wall. At least half the next flight was missing as well. The way the stairs turned, it was difficult to tell how much more was gone.

  “You have a lot of gear. Anyone bring a rope?” Donna asked.

  “Yeah,” Dino said, “of course.”

  “Except it’s in the car,” Ana said.

  “Maybe Deke could bring them to us,” Lumpy suggested.

  “I have a feeling he won’t like that idea. One thing for all of us to shoot through the horde; he’s only one man,” Dino said.

  “If anyone could do it, Deke is the one,” Ana said.

  “Your weird crush on him aside, my feeling is he will say no,” Dino told her.

  “I don’t have a crush on him. Maybe we should ask.”

  “What about bedsheets?” Katelin asked.

  “What about them?”

  “It was in a movie, they tied together bedsheets to make a rope and escaped from, like, jail.”

  “This isn’t a movie,” Dino said.

  “Doesn’t mean it wouldn’t work,” Jo said. “I think I read about some real prisoners doing it to get out of a real prison.”