by Ben Reeder
“Where did you get that?” she demanded.
“Found it right where you left it, I’m guessing. Next to the zombie you’d flayed to the waist and hooked machines to its brain.”
“Please, Mr. Stewart,” she whispered in a shaky voice. “You can’t tell anyone! If you’ve been in that room, you know what happened to my colleagues.”
“Yeah. I’m just curious how you got out of there. Because we barely made it with four heavily armed people.” I felt like I’d just kicked a puppy when her lower lip started to tremble.
“I was outside the lab when it all started. I hid when I heard them start shooting the others,” she said. “Then the soldiers came, and I ran. We had a private elevator and stairwell to avoid too much interaction with the rest of the hospital staff. I just ran after that.” I reached out a hand and touched her arm.
“Don’t worry. I won’t say anything. But you and I are going to have a serious talk later on about your research.” She nodded and I slowly got up and crouch walked out of the vehicle. Straightening up took a moment, and my body delivered mixed messages from my feet to my head. Most of the other civilians were around the cars they’d slept in. Phil and Mark Nguyen, the man who had backed Beth down last night, were at the barricade. Off to my left and behind me I could hear Hernandez and Amy talking, and I figured Kaplan would be there, too. I waved to Phil and Mark, then limped over toward the Humvee. Hernandez had a pistol broken down and was showing Amy how to reassemble it.
“Out in the field like this you always keep one gun ready,” Hernandez said. She patted the M9 on her hip for emphasis. “Truth is, when you’re working on your own gear, you don’t want to have but one weapon field stripped at a time anyway.”
“Are you gonna make me put this back together blindfolded or something?” Amy asked as she started to reassemble the gun.
“No, but by the time we’re done, you’ll be able to do it without thinking about it. That blindfolded thing is just macho bullshit.” I mouthed a silent “Thank you” to Hernandez as I hobbled past. Kaplan was sitting in the passenger seat of the vehicle with the door open and a pair of headphones on. He pushed one back from his ear when he saw me and shook his head.
“You look like six different kinds of Hell,” he said.
“Good morning to you, too,” I said. “What’s playing?” I nodded toward the SINCGARS.
“At the moment, not much. The Prophet’s been pretty tight lipped about what we took, and he hasn’t said a word about having any military vehicles.”
“I can’t blame him. Keyes showed him last night that he can hit him any time he wants to. If he’s got anyone in that compound who’s been in the military, he’s going to have a good idea of what a drone can do.”
“He’s already pulled back all his vehicles. They’re in civilian vehicles and on foot patrols only from what I can tell,” he said with a grim smile. “We need to limit ourselves to foot traffic as well. Can you walk?” he asked. He gave a pointed look at my foot, but I nodded. Even the short distance I’d covered so far was helping.
“I’ll wrap it,” I said. “Though I’d be better on the radio.”
Kaplan shook his head. “Not today. Garza and Nguyen both came to me this morning to let me know that Beth has been working on some of the men. Between you pulling a gun her and Chris Tate last night, and turning her down, she’s got a pretty big grudge going on.”
“I’m not sure the whole ‘out of sight, out of mind’ thing is going to work so well,” I told him. “If nothing else, it’ll give her time to do more networking.”
“Don’t worry, I have that covered,” he said with a smile. “Civilian office politics versus a Marine is a sucker bet. I need you and Hernandez to take a couple of people with you to go out looking for food, water and supplies today.” I shrugged, conceding the point without a word. A privileged one-per-center trying to yell down a Marine was something I would have loved to see, but my entertainment was going to have to take second place to the stuff that would keep us alive.
“We’ll take Chris with us, let him get a taste of life outside the wire,” I said with a smile. Kaplan nodded.
“Take Mark with you, too. He’s local; he should know where to find some of the places you need.”
I grabbed an M4 and swapped out the M39’s mags of 7.62 rounds for the lighter 5.56 magazines. The new M4 was still pretty shiny, and it was decked out with a tactical light, an AimPoint red dot sight and a foregrip. It had “KCPD” engraved over a serial number on the receiver. I broke it down and checked it over before I slung it and went back to get my body armor on. Once I slipped the Deuce in place, I went and found Hernandez, and we rounded up Mark and Chris.
An hour later, we were closing in on Messino’s Downtown Market. It was only a few blocks away, but getting there had been a slow process, made slower by navigating through unfamiliar streets clogged with rubble, abandoned cars, and the occasional zombie, as well as handling two new people. Hernandez and I looked down the street in opposite directions while Chris stood there looking dumbfounded, and Mark kept his eye on the front of the store. Fire raged in the upper floor, and the inside of the market was too dark to tell if it had been gutted or not.
“What are we waiting for?” Chris asked. “There’s obviously no one there. Just go in, get what we want, and go back.” He grabbed the neck opening of his borrowed armor and tugged it down.
“Not that simple,” Hernandez said. “Could be infected in there, might be other survivors like the Disciples. You want to volunteer to get shot, be my guest.”
“I’m not volunteering for a damn thing!” he said. “That’s your job.”
“Then shut up and let us do it,” she said. She turned to me. “I’m thinking we hit the back doors.” I nodded and followed her as we headed around the side of the building. The back door turned out to be a loading dock. All of the loading doors were open, and we could see the inside was pretty much burned out. Rubble covered the floor, and a single trailer was backed up to the raised concrete dock. One of its doors squeaked as it swung slowly around in the breeze. The trucking company’s logo showed the gold and green Monos leaf in a blue hexagon as it came around, then the breeze shifted and it started to close again.
“Doesn’t look like anything could’ve survived in there,” Mark said softly.
“You all are chickenshit,” Chris said as he strode forward. Hernandez and I called out for him to come back but he turned and flipped us off. “Chicken-SHIT!” he called out as he skipped backward. Behind him, the door stopped moving as if it had hit something, then started to open again. The breeze was to our backs, so I knew the wind hadn’t shifted again. Hernandez looked at me with wide eyes and pointed to the left, even as she stepped right. I took a few steps to my left and brought the M4 up as the door opened the rest of the way, revealing blood splatter and smeared handprints across the surface of the other side. Chris has turned around in time to see that, and froze in place as he saw a bloody limb push the door open. A hand that looked like a ham adorned with five plump sausages on the end of a sagging forearm was pressed against the door, and behind it came the rest of the infected. It waddled more than walked, and reminded me of a walking marshmallow. Pale flesh strained against a bloodstained t-shirt that had long ago been filled to capacity. Below it, rolls of flesh hung from under the thing’s torso and hung in lumps from its arms and legs. I couldn’t tell if it even had pants on under its belly, though I could see the remains of a pair of shoes clinging to the football shaped blobs where feet would usually go. Even its head seemed to be covered in cellulose, its face a tiny, gore streaked part of the oblong protrusion where things like heads and necks might go on most bipeds. As it looked at Chris, it brought something bloody to its mouth and tore a chunk away from it. As it gobbled its grisly snack down, we could hear it smacking as it chewed with its mouth open.
“Oh God!” Mark said with a choked gasp as it threw its current meal aside with a splat, revealing a shoe on the end it hadn�
��t been gnawing on. I heard him gag and start to retch as the massive infected looked at Chris with undisguised glee and let out a high pitched giggle. It waddled toward us, and I heard a ripping sound as I brought the M4 up.
“Shoot it!” I yelled at Tate as it jumped off the dock. My own first shot went high as it dropped out of my sight picture. I tried to lead it as it bore down on Chris, but my second and third shots went wide, too. Hernandez’s P90 spat rounds at it, but they just chewed up its right shoulder. Chris didn’t move as it covered the few yards separating them, and I dropped my aim point to its body. I couldn’t miss that big of a target, and if it was a ghoul I’d at least slow it down while it reanimated. I put a round in its chest, and that seemed to break the hold on Chris who finally did the smart thing: he turned and ran. The massive infected stopped and looked back and forth at Hernandez and me, then turned my way and let out its weird giggle again as it started lumbering my direction. I brought my optic back up to its head, but even running straight at me its head moved too much for me to get a good shot in. I put another round into its chest, then three more, but that only seemed to make him giggle more. With Chris’s example in mind, I turned and headed for the dock. My only hope was that Jumbo the Giant wasn’t as agile as he was big. The raised concrete section was too high to just leap onto feet first, so I threw myself into the air sideways so that I hit and rolled. With my right hand, I pushed myself to my feet about the same time as Jumbo hit the dock and bounced back. Still I felt the impact through the dock itself. He staggered back a couple of steps and went down on his ass. Hernandez was moving out of his six, side stepping back to her left, and my right. I moved right to mirror her and brought the gun to bear on the infected, trying to get the red dot centered on its face as it struggled to get to its feet. As it rocked back and forth, my eyes went to the bullet holes I’d put in its chest. Five-five-six rounds didn’t make a very big hole going in. It was the high velocity wobbling and tumbling they did after they got into the body cavity that did most of the damage. But Jumbo’s front was sporting holes that looked like I’d shot him with a fifty caliber round instead of a five-five-six. Long, red lines stretched down his belly as well, and I knew I hadn’t done those, unless my M4 suddenly sprouted a bayonet launcher or something. I brought the gun down a little and took a closer look. Sure enough, the long tears in his stomach were slowly getting wider, and the holes I’d put in him were spreading. The entire right side of his shoulder was covered in red, and I could see a good sized piece of it was actually gone.
“Aim for the body!” I said as I flipped the selector to burst and pointed at his jiggling belly. I put the first three rounds center mass then started aiming around it. It started flailing and screeching, and that was all it took to get Hernandez to go full auto on it. We ran dry at about the same time, and as we both called out “Reloading!”, Jumbo got back on its feet. It turned its attention from me toward Hernandez, and started its slow, waddling run. That lasted all of two steps, which was when Mark got into the fight. There was a loud boom as the shotgun went off, and Jumbo toppled onto its face.
“That’s not right!” I called out in disgust as Jumbo showed me in no uncertain terms that he was going commando. His right leg was missing halfway down the shin as well, and Mark stepped forward to put another round into his side. I tried not to look too closely at where I was firing as I put three bursts into my massive target. Mark put another two loads of double-aught buckshot into him as well, taking a step forward with each shot. He stepped forward again and racked another shell into the chamber. I tried to call out to him before he pulled the trigger, but it was too late. Fortunately, he had changed targets, and his last shot sprayed Jumbo’s misshapen head across thirty feet of asphalt. Still, there was back-splatter, and I jumped off the dock.
“Yeah!” he yelled as I ran to him.
“Get your shirt off!” I called as I approached. He looked down for a brief second, then let the shotgun go as he scrambled to get his sweatshirt away from his skin. Three smoking droplets had landed inches from the edge of his collar. He pulled it over his head and threw it at Jumbo’s smoking remains, then stepped back.
“What the f..” he cried as he watched the shirt start to smoke and dissolve as soon as it hit the body, which was doing the same thing only with a lot more bubbles and goo.
“Anyone have an antacid?” I asked as I bent down and picked up his shotgun.
“Talk about heartburn,” Hernandez said as she came up. Mark had his t-shirt up and was checking his skin for burns, but his sweatshirt seemed to have stopped the acidic splatter. “What the hell made it do that?”
“Not sure,” I said.
“What’s that smell?” Chris asked as he walked back up. “It’s like…sugar or soda or something.” I sniffed experimentally and sure enough, an almost sickly sweet smell filled my nostrils.
“Smells like my suite mate in college,” Mark said. “Kinda looks like him, too.” We all looked at him. “He had a thyroid condition or something, and he was diabetic,” he said off our looks.
“So…he’s digesting himself,” Hernandez said with a grimace.
“What a world…” I quoted.
“And you!” Hernandez turned on Chris. “You just about got yourself killed, and you put our asses in the same damn sling. We do things the way we do for a reason, and if you think that’s chicken shit, you can kill the next fucking zombie yourself!”
“Geez, sorry,” Chris sneered. “Don’t get your panties in a twist.”
“You think this is a fucking game?” she said as she stepped up close to him. He took a step back but she didn’t relent. “You’re not playing paintball with your buddies from the office, pendejo. This is real fucking life and death. You brought that damn thing down on us and then you ran like a bitch. If I didn’t need your pansy ass to help carry shit back to the garage, I’d leave you right here with a bullet in your skull. So don’t you tell me not to get my fucking panties in a twist! You almost got someone killed.” By the time she’d finished, she’d backed him up to the loading dock and had him leaning away from her. She turned away from him muttering under her breath.
“I don’t have to take this shit,” he said as he started after her. Mark stepped in front of him and shook his head while I regarded him with disdain. “I should kick both your asses,” he said.
“She’s a Marine, buddy,” I told him as I tossed Mark the shotgun. “She wouldn’t even break a sweat.” I turned my back on him and started to walk away.
“You’re not,” he said from behind me.
“Hell no. I’m not nearly as good in a fist fight as she is. I’ll just shoot you.” For a moment I only heard one set of footsteps behind me. “Where to now?” I asked Mark.
“Let’s try Hillside Market,” he said. It’s a couple of blocks down and to the north.”
Not quite fifteen minutes later, we stood in front of an empty building. The shelves were bare, and there was not a shopping cart to be seen, or even a basket. I turned and looked up at a sign that advertised a special on pumpkins, then turned back to face the others.
“Did anyone else notice the green X on the door when we came in?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Hernandez said. “Looters welcome.”
“This wasn’t your run of the mill looters,” I said as I looked around. “See that sign in the window for the special on pumpkins?”
“Yeah…kinda creepy, huh?” she said.
“If this place was looted by your average person, we’d be walking on that glass, not looking at it. This place would be a disaster area. But look at it. Shelves are bare, but the cash registers are closed. Come on, let’s check the deli.” We led the way, and our two civilians were quiet as we stalked down the aisles. We reached the end and each checked our flanks, then swept a slow arc, each cutting our half of the pie. The deli looked bare except for the big slicer. I slung the M4 and drew the SOCOM. Its smaller tactical light showed me bare counters and empty drawers. I stepped back into the
storeroom and found myself drawing down on an empty room.
“Anything?” she asked.
“Dust bunnies,” I said. “With big, sharp teeth,” I crooked my index and middle finger and put them in front of my face. “It’s okay, though. I challenged the leader to a fight to the death, and now they’ve accepted me as one of the tribe.”
“What the hell were you expecting to find?” Chris said.
“Knives, cooking tools, pots, pans. Industrial size bags of flour, yeast, eggs. All the stuff that goes into making bread and tasty menu items that most people looting a store don’t think about because it isn’t on the shelves. This place wasn’t ransacked or looted. It was stripped bare all the way to the stockroom, exactly the way I would have done it. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear we’d already been here.” I turned and started for the front of the store.
“Well, this was a total waste of our time,” Chris said. “Way to go.”
“Any other stores you know of?” I asked Mark.
“There are a couple of places most people wouldn’t know about unless they shopped for ethnic food,” he said. “Closest one is a few blocks north of here.”
“Let’s give it a shot,” Hernandez said with a sigh. Mark led the way north, heading east through a side street for a while before turning back north again until we found ourselves standing under the dubious cover of an empty fountain between two burning buildings, facing our second biggest fear: open space. Ahead of us was an open parking lot on the right with a ten story building that was still spewing black smoke from its upper floors, and a glass sided building on our left with its parking lot on the far side. On our right was another parking garage, but this one sported four levels of burning offices. On the left was a building that seemed to be the headquarters for the color beige, at least where it wasn’t on fire. The fountain we were crouched behind was of a woman with a net behind her and fish around her legs. A Lexus had lost to a panel van and its nose covered the plaque that gave the name, but I could make out “Muse of…” before the writing was obscured by forty-five thousand dollars’ worth of luxury scrap metal. Beyond that it was asphalt and concrete. But what suddenly held my attention was what was above that: sky. Clouds that ran in strips across pale blue high above us suddenly made me ache to be as far away from this hellhole as I could get. The first cool breeze I’d felt in days touched my cheeks, and I took a breath in through my nose…and smelled death. My new formed instincts buzzed as I closed my eyes and took another experimental sniff. I’d smelled zombies outside this strongly before, though at the time, it was decidedly fresher than it was now, and not as noticeable. That had been on Tuesday morning on my way to Sherwood, the ten acre plot I’d bought outside of Springfield with help from my grandfather’s inheritance. Then I’d faced a horde of about fifty stage two infected near Highway 65. I did a mental calendar check and realized today was Friday. Whatever I was smelling had been dead from five to seven days. The fact that I wasn’t gagging on the stench made me think we had to be a couple of hundred yards away from a lot of undead. The road angled left about a hundred yards ahead of us and then gently sloped up, and I realized exactly where we were.
