by Ben Reeder
“Yeah, she’s good. They never got close. Man, I’ve gotta get me one of those,” she said before she turned and went back around the corner. I wiped the Deuce clean on the zombie’s hospital gown and sheathed it, then picked up the SOCOM. The empty mag dropped into my hand smooth as you please, and the next full one slid into place. Nothing sounded off when the slide clicked forward, and I counted my blessings that the SOCOM was a tough weapon.
When Kaplan and the others came back to join me, Amy was practically vibrating. She wrapped me up in a quick, tight hug before she started talking. “Oh, God, Dave, I was so scared! I shot like you taught me, slow and smooth, but I missed some. But I got one like ten feet away!”
“She’s a good shot,” Hernandez said. “Better than Lieutenant Gung-Ho here, that’s for sure.”
“She is,” Kaplan agreed. “A good shot, I mean. Better than me, that’s hard to say, but yeah, she killed her fair share of them.”
“Did you reload?” I asked Amy. She nodded quickly. “The pistol too?” Her face went blank for a moment, then she shook her head. “Go ahead and do that now. Don’t worry, you did good.” She pulled back and started to reload the revolver as I looked into the room the ghoul had come from. Lights were showing from the building across the way as twilight settled over the city. I turned away and looked up at the glowing fluorescent bulbs over my head.
“You look like a man with something on his mind,” Kaplan said.
“Yeah. You notice anything odd right now?” He looked around, then down at the bodies before he looked back at me.
“No, but I’m guessing you do,” he said.
“Yeah. The lights are on. Most of Missouri is powered by coal fired plants. Best case scenario would have had KC in the dark by Tuesday morning. And I’m guessing that these folks didn’t get the best case scenario. Hospitals usually have a generator that can run for at least a week.”
“So, this is important how?” he asked as I moved further into the room to look at the building we had just come from.
“The buildings across the way are lit up like a Christmas tree. So is this one. All of the hospitals are. But the rest of the city…” I left the sentence unfinished.
“Is going to be dark as a coal miner’s ass. This whole area is a giant zombie beacon come nightfall.” The sound of brass hitting the floor reached my ears, and I heard Amy talking to Hernandez.
“We’ve still got a little light, though. I want to check on the other side.”
“How do you know all this stuff?” Kaplan asked me as we left the room.
“Dave’s rule of survival number eighteen,” I said over my shoulder as we walked through the nurse’s station. “Know how shit works. My survival plans took into account a twelve hour window before power went out.” Kaplan put his hand on my shoulder and stopped me before I could cross the hallway that ran down the middle of the building. I turned to follow his gaze and saw that we weren’t the first bunch that had shot a lot of zombies. The circular nurse’s station that sat in the middle of the hallway had hidden the bodies from us when we’d first come in, but from where we were, it was much easier to see. I counted an easy dozen bodies and lots of brass on the floor. Most were in scrubs or gowns, but one was wearing digital camo. Kaplan and I came around the side of the desk and converged on the lone soldier’s body. Like the man on the roof, he was wearing scaled down body armor and a bowl helmet with a lens over one eye and some small cases on a band around the back of the helmet. He was carrying another thick barreled SMG like the one Kaplan had appropriated, and the front of his uniform was stained with dried blood.
“Corporal!” the lieutenant called out. Seconds later, Hernandez came trotting up with her pistol out and Amy two steps behind her. As soon as she saw the soldier, she gestured for Amy to watch to one side of the hallway and took up a position herself facing the opposite way. “Looks like he took a round to the neck,” Kaplan said as he pulled the man’s helmet off and flipped it over. As he fiddled with that, I went to the set of metal doors that stood open at the end of the hallway. The plaque by the door labeled it the Sikes Neurological Research Unit. More bodies lay on the floor of the room, some in black, some in white lab coats and suits. Doors led to other sections, but this room looked like a war zone. The two doors in front of me were missing about a foot from the point where they would have met if they could close, and bullet holes pock marked the walls. It was floored in white tile and was white walled, with a security desk on the right, a clear door directly across from the entry, and another on the left. Both of the doors out of the entry room were starred with bullet impacts, and the glass that I figured once protected the security desk was all over the floor.
“What the hell is this place?” Amy asked from behind me.
“I don’t know,” I said as I stepped into the room and squatted next to one of the bodies in black. “But it was awful damn important to someone.” A round had caught him in the face and tore a hole in his cheek. A hospital ID badge was clipped to his vest. “Mike Jones” was printed under a picture of a more intact version of the face in front of me. Another ID was clipped below it with only numbers on it. The blue hexagon with a stylized gold DNA helix leaf inside it made me pause for a second. These men worked for Monos, Incorporated. The last conversation Karl and I had shared in the processing center only hours ago ran through my head. Monos had built the processing center in Springfield; it made sense that they’d have contracts for others. Especially in Missouri. The train of thought branched in my head as I went to the dedication plaque by the door. If Monos was working for the government, then maybe they’d known what was going to happen. If some of the conspiracy theorists I followed were right, then it would make sense that Monos would try to find a way to profit from the virus that made people zombies. Maybe not a cure, but a vaccine sold to the highest bidder or used as leverage to keep people dependent on them afterward. The possibilities were nearly endless.
The dedication plaque was marred with more bullet holes, but one line was still legible. …in honor of Preston G. Sikes, President of Bio-Research for Monos, Inc., for his continued support of medical… Someone named Sikes had also been in Springfield the night the world went to hell. Agent Keyes had been very concerned about getting him away from Missouri State University when it fell to the zombie hordes. And here was another place with his name on it. A place important enough that someone had sent a group of tier one operators to assault it.
“You have that look. What is it, Stewart?” Kaplan asked me.
“What look?” I asked as I refocused on the present.
“That look you had a few minutes ago, when you see something no one else does.”
“Well, this isn’t something anyone else could see,” I said, stalling for a few seconds to get my thoughts together. “This is a Monos facility. Monos also built some of the processing centers. Makes sense they might have known something was going to happen. And I guess someone really wanted to find out what they had going on here. So I want to know, too.” Kaplan stared at me for a few seconds, then nodded.
“You have fifteen minutes. Hernandez, stay with him. Miss Weiss, please stay with me.” Amy glanced at me, and I gave her a minute nod before I stepped back through the doorway. Boots clomped behind me as I knelt beside another black clad Monos security guy. “Bill Smith” was on his ID. A small, boxy looking gun was lying just out of arm’s reach of his body. His assault vest had something new on it, as well. Forearm guards similar to the ones we had found on the operator’s body were connected to an articulated elbow pad that was in turn strapped to another solid piece that covered the biceps. A set of shoulder protectors that also covered the neck were attached to that. My research on the Mage Wars series reminded me that they were called paldrons, and the neck protector was called a gorget.
“I’ll be damned,” I said when I picked one of the guns up. “These boys might have been expecting zombies and the military.”
“Why do you say that?” Hernandez asked
from where she squatted next to one of the bodies in a lab coat.
“They have body armor covering the parts a zombie is likely to get to first, and they were packing FN P90s,” I said, hefting the little SMG. “These things fire a round that’s made to penetrate body armor. Seems like overkill for a hospital. What’s so funny?” I asked as she gave a short laugh.
“You know the weirdest shit. The DHS and the Secret Service use those, and maybe one other agency, and you just ID their weapon like you use it every day.”
“So does Stargate Command,” I said. “Starting in season four.”
“That explains a lot. These guys in lab coats were shot from behind. What about yours?”
“All the holes in mine are in front,” I said as I pulled magazines from the dead guy’s vest.
“Don’t go fucking around with that. You don’t know how to…use…it,” she started. Her protest trailed off as I popped the magazine from the top of the gun and laid a new one in place. “Where the hell did you learn how to use one of those?”
“Friend of mine let me fire a semi-auto model a year or so ago as part of the research for one of my books. The loading works pretty much the same. This one has a suppressor on it, so I figured it’d be good while we’re inside. Just keep it on semi,” I told her as I handed it to her.
“Bite me,” she said as she slung it, then stood and gestured for me to follow her. At the door, she swiped a card at the black box mounted on the wall beside the handle. A red LED on the box turned green and there was a solid sounding thunk. She pushed the door open and went in with me right on her tail.
“What in the…” Hernandez stopped. I struggled to keep my own stomach under control, and for a second I thought she was going to puke where she stood, but aside from a single choked off gag, she managed to keep it together.
“Holy shit. It’s like Jack the Ripper and Jeffrey Dahmer had a fucking playdate in here,” I said as we looked around the room. Three headless bodies were laid open on metal tables along the far wall, with most of their internal organs not so internal any more. More body parts were in metal trays that lined the counters on three of the walls. It was what was in the center of the room that really closed the deal on nightmare fuel, though. On the metal table was a human body with the skin cut away from the top half and pulled down to its waist like an apron. A bluish-black tracery ran through the muscles and covered the exposed skull like a road map.
“Did that head just move?” Hernandez said as she brought the SMG up. I followed the barrel of her gun to a head set in one of the trays. Sure enough, the jaw moved slightly.
“Yes, it did. Shoot it if you want, but I don’t think it’s going anywhere,” I said as calmly as I could. Then the one on the table twitched. I had the SOCOM out and up by the time her first three rounds slammed into its chest. My first round blew a hole in its temple a split second before she sent another burst into its lower jaw and blew brain matter across the far wall.
“It moved,” she said shakily after a few seconds of silence.
“I saw it. Believe me, I saw it,” I said. “Good shot.”
“You, too. Is it dead?”
“Very,” I said as I walked up on it. In spite of my assurance, I didn’t lower my pistol. From beside the body I could see the network of black strands more clearly, and I could also see that the top of the zombie’s skull was lying in a pan next to its shoulder. Wire leads dangled from the table, some of them still attached to bits of gray tissue. The other end of the wires was attached to some kind of monitor. With the screen blank, I couldn’t tell what it was for, though if I had to give a guess, I would have said it was an EKG machine. I wished Maya was with me, probably not for the last time. She was the one with the medical background. I stepped over the mess Hernandez’s shots had made to look at the machine. It, of course, was covered in the mess my one shot had made. She had moved to the side and was looking at the trays on the counters.
“Whaddya got?” I asked after she made a disgusted sound.
“Putrefaction tests,” she said. “What about you?”
“Someone hooked Mister Zombie to the machine to see what made his brain tick,” I said as I pulled out the tray beneath the machine. A keyboard and mouse slid into view, along with something that was not like the others. “And they left their MP3 player.” I picked up the slim black device and held it up. It was thicker than Amy’s, and it had more controls, including one I had never seen on her little player: a record button. Without a word, I slipped it into my vest and nodded to Hernandez. We headed for the door, neither of us wanting to spend a single second more than we had to in this chamber of horrors.
“Eleven minutes,” Kaplan reminded us when we stepped out of the door. The door beside the one we had just entered opened onto a hall with offices on the left and labs on the right. The next lab looked like a bomb went off, and I was guessing that wasn’t far from the truth. Broken microscopes, shattered Petri dishes, and lots of expensive looking junk covered the floor of the room. There was a pair of radiating blast marks on the tile surrounding two jagged holes that left the crawl space under the floors exposed.
“Looks like someone sanitized the crap out of this room,” I said. “Used the same protocols we had in Iraq. Dump it all in the middle and drop a demolition charge on it.”
“Nothing says clean like high explosives,” Hernandez answered. An open door waited at the second lab, this one showing a very similar approach.
The last room looked like it had been a clean room once upon a time, but someone had gone to great lengths to fix that. A pile of blackened ash lay in the middle of the room. On either side of it lay the metal legs of the table it had probably been on, twisted and melted from a super-heated source. My guess was a thermite charge.
“What the hell happened here?” Hernandez asked.
“Somebody really didn’t want their security deposit back?” I asked in mock innocence. I turned and opened the door to the office nearest me. It hadn’t fared any better than the labs. Bullet holes ran in a jagged line across the desk and through the screens of the computers. I stepped inside and looked behind one of the desks to find only a pair of clipped cables and a power cord.
“Eight minutes!” I heard Kaplan call out.
The next two offices told the same story: desks shot to shit, computer tower missing. The fourth office only had one difference: a shattered laptop on the single large desk at the back of the room. Just like the other offices, the tower was gone with only clipped cables to show it had ever been there. I stopped for a moment and looked around the room. Something was nagging at me as I looked down at the desk. My brain was telling me I was missing something.
“Stewart, we only have a couple minutes,” Hernandez said from the doorway.
“I’m missing something,” I said.
“Yeah, your ass if you don’t hurry up!”
“The guys in lab coats…they were shot from behind. Does that strike you as something a tier one operator might do?”
“Not really.”
“Someone shot the crap out of the offices, but someone also grabbed the computer towers. If it was one team doing both, kinda schizophrenic, right? But if one team did the shooting, and the other did the grabbing, it makes more sense.” I stepped around the back of the desk and looked down. “Back in the sandbox, special ops teams brought back gear for intel to analyze. Laptops, computer towers, hard drives. So…” I stopped and let my imagination complete the scenario in my head. “Our operators show up and try to take the center. The boys in black hold them off while some of them grab the doctors, take them into the front room, and shoot them. They go through and destroy everything they can in case they lose…which they do. Our boys sweep through and grab anything they can: laptops, towers, thumb drives, disks, whatever. But my gut tells me they missed something. One little thing.” I walked around beside the desk and looked at the office. “Why can’t I see it?”
“Because you’re standing on top of it?” she said. I
looked down. Sticking out from under the black desk was the corner of a black laptop case. Red faced, I grabbed it and unzipped it. My fingers felt several hard objects in the pockets, and a few seconds later I had fished out a thumb drive and two disks in plastic sleeves.
“You’re a genius,” I told her as I tucked them away and headed for the door. As we came back into the security room, my eye fell on a familiar looking white board beside the security desk. Designed to make it easy to see who was on at any given point in time, the roster board had each staffer’s name and status on it. Eight of the nine names had the “In” square filled. The ninth name didn’t have either box filled in. I looked at the white clad bodies and did a quick count. Only eight. Where was number nine? I filed the question away and headed for the door.
“Aren’t you out of uniform, lieutenant?” Hernandez asked when she saw Kaplan. He’d donned the shoulder and arm protection from one of the Monos security guys and had Amy halfway buckled into another set.
“Uniform of the apocalypse, corporal,” he said. “There’s a set for you and Stewart, too. I had to guess at your sizes.” My respect for Kaplan went up a few notches. He knew a good idea when he saw it, and he wasn’t too proud to use it if it wasn’t his. I grabbed one of the sets and put the gorget on, then slipped my arms through the elbow pieces. Beside me, Hernandez pulled her forearm guards off.
“Start with the neck piece,” I told Hernandez as she looked it over. “Then put your arms through the elbow cops and strap it on from there.”
“Did you find an instruction manual for these things or something?” she asked. She grabbed the gorget and lifted it over her head.
“Nah, I tried on some medieval armor while I was researching my first book,” I said while I snapped the fasteners into place around my biceps. “Basic concepts are the same. But modern snaps are a lot easier to use than leather straps and buckles.”
“Come on, you two,” Kaplan said from by the nurses’ station. “We’re burning daylight.” He led us to the stairwell and pushed the door open slowly. Silence greeted us, and he carefully moved forward. A window was set in the far wall and ran down the wall all the way to the ground floor. Through it, I could see the vague shapes of the Kansas City skyline. The sunset was turned red by the smoke, making what we could see look like it was drenched in blood. Kaplan leaned over the railing and looked down, then shook his head. I followed suit.
