by Ben Reeder
“I’ve been out in the shit all night, and I started with next to nothing,” I said. “Come back when you can make a real threat.” From my right came the wheezing laughter I’d heard earlier.
“How about I come in there and work your god damn kneecaps over with a ballpeen hammer?” he said with an impotent snarl. “How’s that for a threat?”
“Come on in,” I said. “I’d hold the door for you, but I’m kind of tied up right now.” His eyes went to the door, then back to me. Behind him, Adams shook his head.
“Talk to me or I’ll find your girlfriend and splatter her brains on the wall while you watch. Maybe we’ll do her little girl, too. She’ll die screaming for you to help her.” My eyes narrowed as he said that. They didn’t need my phone. They had been monitoring it all day. My conversation with Amy hadn’t been in my texts, but he knew she looked to me for help. The animosity I’d been feeling for the thing in the cell next to me had no trouble switching targets.
“Give it up, Keyes,” Adams said. “He’s getting more intel out of you than you’re getting out of him.”
“Fuck you, Adams,” Keyes said. “When you have my permission to have an opinion, I’ll tell you what it is in a memo. I’ll conduct my interrogations any way I see fit.”
“Tell him,” Adams said to me.
“You’re afraid to come into these cells. You’ve been monitoring my cell phone all day. The walking cadaver over there is your primary target, Nate Reid’s family is the secondary, and I’m the tertiary target because of my association with them. That tells me that you think he knows something, and that you need leverage on him to keep him quiet or under control, which tells me you’re probably to blame for the zombie clusterfuck going on out there or you know who is. You’re carrying a chromed Desert Eagle on your hip instead of a Sig Sauer or a Browning, so you’re not military, and I’m pretty sure you’re not even really government. That makes you either a mercenary or private security with a tendency to over-compensate. Did I miss anything?” I asked Adams. He turned to Keyes, who gave him a glare and stalked out of the room.
“Your story checked out,” Adams said after a door slammed nearby. “The detachment at Kickapoo reported a Nissan truck showing up and drawing the bulk of the infected away from the front barrier before they evac’d.”
“Don’t expect me to roll over now that you’re going all good-cop on me,” I said. Adams shrugged.
“Whatever Keyes wants to know, he can get on his own. I don’t know who he really works for, but it sure as hell ain’t Homeland Security. What I do know is that I served with Nate Reid when we were both Rangers, back in oh-four. He’s a good man, and any man he trusts his family with is okay in my book. My team is on the next chopper out of here. I just wanted to say thanks for the help. And sorry about punching you.”
“You were doing your job, man,” I shrugged. “You have one hell of a right hook.”
“Aw, isn’t that sweet,” the thing in the cage next to me croaked. “You two got a regular little bro-mance goin’ on.”
“What the hell is that thing, anyway?” I asked, tilting my head toward the next cell.
“Mike Deacon, Springfield’s version of Patient Zero. First case reported. At first they thought it was some guy on bathsalts or something like that. Got arrested after he tore his girlfriend’s throat out with his teeth. Best guess is he’s the primary carrier, and she woke up in the morgue at St John’s, then infected the rest of the city through the people she attacked. This shit spread’s so damn quick, though, it’s hard to say what really happened.”
“But he can still talk…and think?” I asked.
“Yeah, ain’t that fucked up?” Adams said. I looked back over at Deacon, and fought the urge to try to kill him. “He’s the tenth one we’ve captured. The folks at the CDC figure every city has one.”
“Where did he get it from?” I asked as I turned back to Adams. He gave me a perplexed look, and opened his mouth to say something. A second later, he closed it, then looked back at Deacon. The living zombie started to laugh again as a door opened off to my left.
“Captain Adams!” a soldier in full combat gear called out with a note of panic in his voice. “They’re hitting the fences!” From outside, the harsh buzz of a klaxon sounded, and I heard a tinny voice calling for all personnel to report to their posts. Adams cursed and sprinted for the door, unslinging his M4 as he went. He gestured to two of the men standing guard and told them to stay put, and the rest followed him to the door.
“Adams!” I called out. He turned at the door and looked back at me. “Where the hell are we?”
“Missouri State University!” he said, then bolted out.
“You’re about to die, and you ask where you are?” Deacon asked. “You should have asked him to let you out. You would have lived a little longer.” He looked down at the straps that held him down and flexed his arm. There was a groaning sound as metal strained against the force applied to it, and the two guards stepped forward, gun butts to their shoulders.
“I have that covered,” I told him. My fingers curled up and I touched the bonds on my wrist. A narrow plastic band encircled my wrists, and I felt the nub of the head on the outside of my right wrist. Nate had showed me how he’d escaped from zip ties in Iraq, and he’d showed me how easy it could actually be…if you knew what you were doing. When he’d taught me to do it, it was supposedly to make the story more authentic, though he swore it would come in handy if I was ever abducted. Either way, the principles were the same, and at the moment, who I was going to be escaping from was likely to be changing. The groan of metal came again, and I heard one of the soldiers call out.
“Stand down or I will open fire!” he barked. There was a snap of leather when Deacon pulled his arm free of the table. I tried to ignore his efforts and focused on getting the fastener of the zip tie worked around until it was in the middle of the gap between my wrists and away from my body. The rounded edge of the chair back made that harder, but I finally managed to work it most of the way there. Deacon laughed and I heard another snap, then the staccato explosion of gunfire in a large, bare room.
“Is he dead?” the other guard asked. I looked over to see Deacon laying back against the table with three closely spaced holes in the center of his chest. Black blood trickled from each one, but not enough to make me believe he’d been alive when he’d been shot.
“Fucker took three to the chest, man,” his buddy said confidently. “He ain’t gettin’ up from that.”
“They get up,” I said. “Put one through his forehead to make sure.”
“Shut the fuck up,” the shooter said. “Call it in,” he told his partner.
“Mr. Sikes is gonna be pissed,” his partner said as he thumbed his mic. From outside, the sound of gunfire erupted, at first sporadic cracks from assault rifles, then longer bursts from the bigger guns punctuating the radio chatter between the guards and whoever they were talking to. When the slower thump-thump-thump-thump! of heavy machine guns started up, the two men looked at each other with the first signs of concern on their faces. I’d only heard one gun that sounded like that, the M2 or “Ma Deuce”, a fifty caliber machine gun that had been in the US military armory since World War I. Even an Air Force Communications Signals Intelligence specialist picked up a basic knowledge of firearms, and a tour in Iraq made sure I got to see and hear them a lot closer than most people, even if I’d barely left the Green Zone in Baghdad. I could just imagine the amount of damage the heavy gun was doing, but some part of me knew it wasn’t nearly enough. There were more than a hundred and fifty thousand people in Springfield, and no matter how many rounds the military had, I was guessing they didn’t have more than a few hundred men and women crammed onto the containable areas of Missouri State University. And I was most likely in one of the larger defensible places, McDonald Arena. There was a tunnel that connected McDonald to the football stadium, which would make a decent landing field or staging area, if not an ideal one. With the heavy iro
n fence that circled the field, zombies and ghouls would have a hard time getting in if they had fortified the choke points, but it was far from impregnable if they all decided to rush it at the same time. The problem was that zombies didn’t think. Even ghouls were outsmarted by door handles. What had made them all rush the fence now? I turned my head and looked over at Deacon. Instead of feeling happy that he was dead, I felt a pressure behind my eyes, like I needed to dismember him and burn the parts. Some deep instinct told me he was part of what was going on.
The sound of feet on the hardwood of the court’s floor drew my attention away from Deacon. Four men in green scrubs followed a woman in a white lab coat. Two of them wheeled a gurney while the third and fourth carried bulky cases. The doctor looked at the two guards when she got to the door of the cage, and the shooter pulled a set of keys from his belt and unlocked it for her.
“Keep that door open, gentlemen. We won’t be a moment,” she ordered as the four men hustled inside. “I want tissue samples, blood and saliva as well as mucus. Get me a sample of brain tissue, too.” she said. One of the orderlies carrying a case nodded, and they went to the body with cold efficiency. As they unstrapped Deacon’s body, I felt my muscles tense slightly. If I was going to try to make an escape…and if I could survive a gaping chest wound…this would be the moment when I’d make my move. Something told me Deacon could.
“He’s not dead,” I said as they laid him out on the floor. One of the orderlies put his hand to Deacon’s neck, then looked at me with a smile.
“He doesn’t have a pulse. Seems pretty dead to me.” He chuckled as another orderly laid out a body bag next to the corpse. “If he was gonna go zombie on us, he would have by now.”
“He was already a zombie. No pulse doesn’t mean-” I got out before Deacon’s hand shot up and grabbed the orderly by the neck. The guy’s scream ended in a wet gurgle as his throat was ripped out. The second orderly jumped back long enough to buy himself one more second of life before Deacon’s teeth were on his neck as well. Blood sprayed across my cell as Deacon let his second victim fall to the floor with a gurgling sound. He ignored the other two guys to grab the doctor by the throat and squeeze hard. An ugly, wet crunching sound filled the arena before he let her go and turned to face the remaining four men. She staggered back with her hands to her throat and her mouth gaping, trying to draw a breath that wouldn’t come.
I clenched my teeth and turned away from the slaughter going on in the next cage. I had priorities of my own. Surviving was big on that list. It took an effort of will to ignore the screams as I stood up and pulled my arms over the top of the chair back, but I managed it. Once I was upright, I bent at the waist and pulled my arms back away from my butt as far as I could and clenched my fists, then brought my hands back down against my butt as I pulled my elbows out, away from each other. A line of fire wrapped itself around the outside of my wrists, but I brought my hands back again. This time, I remembered to turn my wrists at the same time as my hands hit my back and I tried to chicken-wing my arms. All of the force of the blow centered on the hasp of the zip-tie, the single weakest point on the whole device, and it popped free, releasing my arms. I turned back to the carnage in the cell next to mine.
One of the guards was crumpled against the bars of my cage, his head twisted around so that he was looking over his shoulders at me. The other was on his knees in front of Deacon, who had his hands on either side of the man’s skull. With a barely visible effort, Deacon brought his hands together, and the man’s skull deformed. I was never so glad to be looking at a man’s back as I was just then. Deacon looked at me and gave a bloody smile, then he turned back to face the doctor, who was wide eyed and gurgling on her bottom, leaning up against the far wall of his cage. He walked to her with a deliberate care, his head tilted to one side as he squatted down to watch her choke to death. With his attention on her, I went to the first guard and pulled his body around so that his belt was closer to me and grabbed the keys from his belt, then grabbed his pistol from the shoulder holster under his left arm.
“You know how you can tell if they’re dead?” Deacon asked as I looked the gun over. My head came up, but he was still watching the doctor. I palmed the keys and got to my feet.
“They stop moving?” I asked as I moved away from the bars.
“No. Shot a guy in the head once. He kept kicking for a few minutes, but that’s the thing with a head shot. You know they’re dead right like that. First thing he did was piss himself. See, her eyes are all glassy, but…ah, there it is. She’s gone.” He stood with a satisfied look on his face and walked over to the wall of iron bars that stood between us.
“So, now what?” I asked him. He reached down and pulled the dead guard’s body away from the bars before he answered.
“Now I walk out of here like a free man and you die in a cage. Kinda fitting, don’t you think?” He walked to the body of the other guard and started undressing him.
“Not really,” I said. He ignored me as he pulled the guard’s clothes on, then stood with his hat in one gray hand.
“You’re going to listen to the people around you dying, and you’re going to know that your turn will come soon. And I’m going to come back in here to watch you panic as my zombies surround your cage and tear it apart. I wonder…are you the kind of guy who thinks he can take on a thousand zombies with a single magazine and survive, or will you save the last bullet for yourself? For that one, last act of cowardice.”
“I’m full of surprises,” I said, and instantly damned my big mouth. He looked at me, and again, he tilted his head to one side, giving me a calculating look.
“You’re right,” he said and turned to walk toward the open door of his cell. He walked to the door of mine and a slow smile spread across his desiccated features. “I should just kill you now.” He pulled a set of keys from his belt, sorted through them until he found the right one and inserted it into the lock. I bolted for the door, and he grabbed me by the hair. Instantly, I planted the barrel of my pistol in the crook of his elbow and pulled the trigger twice. The room seemed to explode as the report hammered my eardrums, but he pulled his mangled arm back. Dried lips peeled back from bloody teeth, and he backed up a step. All I could do was throw my shoulder into the door when he did the same from the other side. The door gave a few inches, but I pushed it shut. Undaunted, he stepped back again, his mouth moving. When he launched himself forward again, I stepped to the side, and he met no resistance when he hit the door. His momentum carried him halfway across the cell and he tripped over the chair I’d been sitting in. The door swung open behind him, hit the wall of the cage and rebounded back. I grabbed it, stepped outside, swung it the rest of the way closed and turned the key until the bolt clicked home, then pulled it half way out and snapped it off.
“Told you I was full of surprises,” I said from a few steps away from the door. Even through the ringing in my ears, I heard his screams. It was my turn to go to a dead guard and get dressed. In my case, however, I grabbed his black t-shirt but left the blouse, and put the tactical vest on. I also picked up the man’s assault rifle. It looked a lot like an M16, and the receiver group matched exactly, but it didn’t have the carrying handle over the receiver. The telescoping buttstock looked different too, and it had Picatinny rails all the way around the barrel. It had the H&K brand on the left side of the magazine well, and I guessed it was one of the H&K Mk 416s Nate had spoken highly of. Once I was dressed, I had my choice of handguns. The guard Deacon had stripped carried a Colt Python on his hip, while the one I’d stripped had carried a SIG with the Blackwater logo on it. When I checked the magazines, I counted twenty rounds, which meant the SIG won hands down.
“I’m going to kill you!” Deacon screeched as I pulled the magazines for the rifle from the other man’s tactical vest and stuffed them into my cargo pockets. My hearing was starting to return, but I wasn’t going to be writing any music reviews for a few days. “I’ll eat your heart, I’ll rip your balls off and shove
them down your throat!” The sounds of gunfire were now punctuated by the sounds of men screaming. I stood and put the earpiece from the vest’s radio in my ear, then picked up the Python from the gurney.
“Do you hear me?” Deacon screamed.
“I hear you,” I told him as I walked to the door. “I just don’t care.”
“I’m your new god, you stupid little fuck! This is my world now, and you’re just a walking piece of meat! I am gonna rule the fucking world!” He stood at the bars and raved at me, and if he’d been alive, I imagined spit would have been frothing on his lips. I stopped at the corner of the cage and turned to face the abomination that had once been a man, then brought the revolver up and shot him through the kneecap. He howled in pain as he collapsed onto the floor, then started laughing again.
“You can’t kill me with that,” he said gleefully.
“Not trying to,” I said flatly as I shifted my aim. I turned the other knee into paste and raised the barrel to his hips. The gun roared twice, and his pelvis was a bloody ruin. The fifth shot went through the ball socket of his left shoulder. “I figure you’re going to live no matter what I do. I can’t kill you, but I can damn sure fuck you up hard. But that…that isn’t the worst thing. See, for all your power, you’re no match for a good man with a little knowledge. You have to live … or whatever…with knowing that.” I grabbed my cell phone and my sweatshirt off the table then turned and walked toward the door, one ear on the radio chatter, and less than half my attention on Deacon.
“I’ll have the last laugh, mother fu-” he got out before I turned and put the last round in the Python round through his face.
“Not today.”
Chapter 10
A Good Man…
It is the task of a good man to help those in misfortune
~ Sophocles ~
There were steam tunnels running under the southern half of the MSU campus. One came up near the locker rooms in McDonald Arena, in a utility room. When I’d worked campus security two years before, we used them during the winter to check various buildings or get around campus without being seen. Right now, they were my route to freedom and survival. Outside, I could hear gunfire as a near constant white noise. I turned the volume up on the radio as I headed down the hallway toward the locker rooms.
