by M. Lorrox
Skip shakes his head. “Not till Jambavan!”
Korina turns and sees Jambavan hauling ass down the hall behind her. She steps toward the South Tower, and Frank helps her up the stairs.
Jambavan tears around the corner, straight to Skip. He throws himself at the barricade. “Go with them! I’ll hold!”
Instead of arguing with a vampire who’s been trained to kill and wears pistols in shoulder harnesses, Skip sprints for the South Tower.
When he reaches it, Jambavan follows him.
As the squire passes the hallway that leads down the side, back to the Wilson Library, he glances down it. He sees the zombies from the third floor already running down that hallway and toward him. DAMN! He reaches the short hall to the South Tower, jumps the four steps up and into the room, and skids to a stop. On his left is a spiral staircase leading up to the office, and he can see Skip’s legs bounding upwards. There’s no door. WHY IS THERE NO DOOR?
He glances behind him; the zombies are in the wider hall now. He bolts up the stairs and is pleased to see not only that there is a door at the exit from the spiral staircase to the office, but also that Harold and Lance are waiting with a desk to push down the stairs. Jambavan dives out of the way. “They’re right behind me!”
Harold and Lance push the desk over, and it tumbles down the narrow spiral staircase. It jams near the bottom, but it leaves gaps on top and below that zombies could crawl through. “We need some medium sized things!”
Adults in the large but cramped office scramble and pass various objects overhead, hand to hand, to throw down the staircase. At first, Harold tries to intercept them to make sure the items don’t hold historic value, but he can’t keep up, so he just gets out of the way. In short order, everything of a substantial size—or small and in the way—is tossed and piled in the spiral stairwell.
Harold closes the door and stares at the doorknob. He sighs and rotates the little metal tab on the handle to lock it.
Katlyn places her hand on Skip’s shoulder and shakes her head. “That. Was. Intense.”
Skip nods. “Yeah.”
Below, zombies tear at the debris. They pull some of the objects out, then they pull at others.
Jules arrives at the hospital with her hair somewhat disheveled; the bun she keeps her hair in is loose, and rogue strands hug her face. When she walks into the ER’s entrance, the lobby is in chaos, and she isn’t intercepted as she walks straight past the check-in desk and into the hospital. Staff are running in the halls and shouting, but Jules just briskly walks straight toward her destination. When she opens the doors to the wing that holds all the vampires, Deina greets her. “It’s nice to see you, Jules.”
“It’s nice to see you as well. I need to speak with Ms. Wollstone, can you—”
Deina shakes her head. “She’s currently missing. She never arrived here.”
Jules takes a breath while she thinks. “I see. Have Sadie Costanza or Charlie Costanza arrived yet? Do you know where I might find them?”
Deina nods, then checks the copy of the roster that Eddy and Enrique put together. “Try room 1412, around the corner, on the left.”
Jules bows her head at an angle. “Thank you.”
Deina smiles. “Of course. By the way, I like the look. Rough-and-tumble looks good on you.”
Jules considers showing a bit of her hand, but she decides against it. “It was a rough ride getting here.” She walks away, toward room 1412.
She knocks, and after a little bit of commotion inside, she is welcomed in.
Charlie, Eddy, and Enrique stand shoulder to shoulder in front of a table.
Jules closes the door behind her and stands near it, not approaching whatever they are obviously hiding. “Mr. Costanza, I have some information for you, would you like to speak in private?”
He shakes his head and waves her in. “No, these boys can hear whatever you have to say.”
“After you left, I witnessed some concerning behavior by one of the hotels bell-staff. He got paid off.” She pulls the wad of cash out of her pocket. “He confessed to giving a group access to your room, and to informing his contact, Lorenzo Bernardi, of your current whereabouts.” She extends the money to Charlie.
“Hmm, so they know we’re here. That answers that.” He takes the cash and fans through it. “How much is this?”
“Twelve hundred dollars. I do not know exactly what information was given to Bernardi.”
Eddy clears his throat. “Wait, you said group. Do you know who it was?”
Jules looks back and forth between Eddy and Charlie. “It seems that the bellman mostly dealt with Lorenzo Bernardi—a man I’ve had the displeasure of dealing with in the past—but the bellman said that the group with him were some, quote, punk kids wearing black.”
Eddy jolts. “A tall Asian guy, a girl, and a dopey-looking husky dude?”
She shakes her head. “I have no idea. He just said there were three punk kids wearing black with him.”
Eddy points with his finger. “It’s probably these troublemakers I met. I told you about them, Dad, they go by the name Blood Fangs or something.”
Jules tilts her head. “Could they be the Red Fangs? I’ve heard that name before, but because I don’t know anything else about them, I assume they’re minor leaguers.”
Charlie smiles at her. “I never pegged you as a baseball fan.”
“I’m not, but I’m trying to connect with you on a more personal level by using colloquialisms… I’m not great at making friends.”
Charlie laughs. “You’re right up there in my book.”
She smiles. “Thanks, that’s welcome to hear. Anyway, after I dealt with the bellman, Rod, I’m not sure if you met him—”
Charlie nods. “He was…walking our dog for us...”
“Anyway, after I dealt with him, I left. I don’t plan on going back. I’ll be around the hospital for another hour or so, saying farewell to some of the elders. If I don’t see you all before I leave, I’ll add that it was a pleasure being your concierge.”
Charlie steps over to her and gives her a hug.
At first, she’s instinctively horrified that a man would embrace her without her consent, but then she realizes that he is a friend, and that she’s glad he’s making the gesture. “Thank you.”
Charlie lets go, and she waves at Eddy and Enrique before walking back out the door.
Eddy watches her leave. That’s a strange one, that Jules. He whispers, barely loud enough for Charlie to hear over the television, “Anyway, okay, so Dad, did you decode it yet? Then we have to…code a fake set of info, right? Dad?”
Charlie scowls as he walks back to the table. “Eddy, we should assume that Lorenzo or those Fangs punks are headed this way, so we don’t have a lot of time.” He picks up a paper that he copied the original set of markings to. “I’ll let you know when I figure this out, but until then, please just shut up.”
Between the Pentagon and Rosslyn Metro stations, a section of the Blue Line travels above ground. Luckily, its sides are fenced, and no zombies could have escaped. At the Arlington National Cemetery Metro station, Hecate, her two knights, and their squads arrive and find that the only exit is secured closed.
The team quickly dispatches the zombies trapped in the small station. Then, Hecate leads her platoon on, back into the tunnel toward Rosslyn’s station, and she is pleased that they are making great time. She jumps and spins, stretching her arms out and striking with the twenty-four blades of her urumi, whipping the thin steel so fast that they shred through zombies more than they slice them.
After a strike, she recoils the blades toward her, stepping into the body of the blades and letting them curl around her. Then, she strikes again, unwinding the blades and exploding them outward into a cloud of slashing steel.
Half of the zombies fall to the ground, dead, after a single pass of her blades. The other zombies that don’t immediately die, still fall. Each is surprised that it no longer has those handy things calle
d muscles, tendons, and ligaments connected together.
The two vampire knight squad leaders flank her, giving her plenty of space. Coach leads a squad of four Green Berets on her right—and back twenty feet—and Ghost with her squad is back on the left. Zombies out of Hecate’s range on either side are picked off by the soldiers, and the squad leaders clean up anything still moving in the middle.
During a brief pause, Ghost lifts one of her boots. Gross... At least these Z are fresh. Rotting ones are so much worse. She notices an adjoining tunnel on her side of the group, and she calls out to her squad. “Ramirez, Smith, take point on Hecate. Jones, Miller, come with me.”
With that, she darts into the maintenance offshoot. It’s dark, and although that’s ideal for her, it isn’t for the two Green Berets that follow her; both with normal, albeit good, vision. They’ve seen Ghost fight and how she wields her extra-long, black-epoxy-coated double katars, whose blades extend straight out from her fists a full eighteen inches. Her strikes are almost faster than they can see, and they don’t intend to get too close to her in the dark.
The soldiers are lucky though, because for this mission, she strayed from her usual garb: black on black on black with a ski mask. For their benefit, she wears a plethora of rave-style snap-and-glow bracelets and necklaces tied along the handles of her blades and along the various black, tactical ballistic clips, sheaths, and pouches strapped to her. The soldiers can always find her, even if their helmet mounted LED flashlights don’t light her up.
With the glow sticks, Ghost looks like a crazy video animation of colors swirling and spinning as she attacks the zombies. Without the glow sticks, the soldiers can imagine how fitting her name is.
The three warriors blast down the offshoot, picking off any zombies that are present there. Further down, a bullet misses its zombie target and ricochets off a rail-based utility vehicle’s frame, hitting Miller in the quadricep.
He drops. “Hit!”
Ghost spins to face him. That’s why blades are better. “Jones, stay with him, no zombies pass you! I’ll be back!” She continues down the tunnel, dispatching any zombies there. The goal is to cleanse the metro system of zombies, so every connecting tunnel the knights pass must also be searched and cleared.
Ghost reaches the end of the tunnel. A lone zombie in an air force uniform stares back at her, but it doesn’t attack. Instead, it pulls back, away from the neon-striped knight.
Is it scared? I suppose it doesn’t matter... She decapitates it and runs back to the soldiers. “Jones, get a tourniquet on him?”
“Yes. It just nicked the side, tore up muscle but missed major vessels.”
“Glad to hear it.” She drops onto a knee next to Miller. “You want to go back or keep going?”
“I’m not sure I can walk.”
“Answer the question.”
“Keep going.”
“Good. I’ll carry you. Try not to fire that thing too close to my ear.”
“Sir?”
Ghost grabs him and stands, lifting the two hundred pounds of Miller and sixty pounds of his gear into the air.
Miller floats onto her shoulders as lightly as his five-year-old son would float onto his. “Whoa! Alright, thanks.”
“Got a decent firing position?”
“Uh, yes, sir.”
“Just keep it away from my ears.” She turns with the soldier spanning her back. “Jones, ready?”
“Yes!”
“Try and keep up.” She bends and shifts Miller’s weight on her shoulders, and then she runs.
Jones sprints to keep up. When they rejoin the group, Coach laughs. “Is that your way of modernizing? Won’t shoot a gun yourself, so you just carry someone to do it for you?”
She smiles. “I wish I’d thought of it sooner.”
Inside the quarantined zone, people are dying. Most die by the mouth of a zombie or by eating a bullet from a LAZoR unit’s gun, but not all. As a woman tackles a pair of zombies that were headed for her daughter, she flies with them off the top of an office building. Seconds later, the day’s combined death toll hits 48,821.
Felipe Santos successfully bypasses the quarantine blockade with impressive parkour and free-climbing skills. He jumps off the building onto 7th Street NW, and now that he’s out of danger from the LAZoRS and zombies, he pauses just long enough to catch his breath.
He sprints again, but this time he cuts across streets, parking lots, and a baseball field on his way to the space he and some friends run on R Street NW. Before the outbreak, he and his partner, Kevin, ran a very popular hacker space out of what used to be a carriage house in the 1800’s. Hacker movements have only grown in popularity since the zombie threat, and with the new interest came new funding. Instead of being filled with horses and carriages like it would have been in the heyday of the building’s creation—or poor and drunk artists in the 80’s and 90’s or tech startups in the 00’s—the space is filled with pneumatic hammers, stick welders, plasma cutters, CNC machines, drill presses, lathes, and a slew of 3D printers hand-built from scrap materials.
Before the outbreak, the space focused on making fun little trinkets and granting the community access to the equipment. Today, it specializes in something very, very different, something Felipe and the other members have kept secret.
It’s time to roll. He reaches the space and is pleased to see a motorcycle and a car parked illegally in front of the building—parking can be tough in DC—but the vehicles aren’t blocking the big, roll-up bay door. At the front door, Felipe enters his keycode, and the relay clicks open the lock.
As he walks in through the space’s front hall, he takes a moment to glance at the floor-to-ceiling inspirational posters that canvas the walls. None of them are the lame workplace-inspired, black bordered, white text in all-caps underneath an image, TEAMWORK / LEADERSHIP / WHATEVER-CRAPPERS. No, these posters are all kickass-awesome cranked to eleven thousand.
Samurai Jack with a robotic arm gritting his teeth. Goku going Super Saiyan. Eren Yaeger as the big-mouthed, pointy-eared titan. Edward and Alphonse—the Elric brothers—sparring. Kaneda walking toward his motorcycle. Sarah Kerrigan as the Queen of Blades. Optimus Prime—from the cartoons—with his rifle. An Evangelion running through Tokyo. Rainbow Dash kicking a storm cloud in the face. Lion Force Voltron in space, over Arus.
And guarding the entry to the main space like a sentry, stands a human-sized model of a Mobile Suit Gundam—the one and only, RX-0 Unicorn Gundam 02 Banshee, “Final Battle” version. Felipe pauses as he smiles at the model’s dark, blue-and-gray face. Wish us luck.
He opens the door, and his nostrils are filled with the scents of ionized air, motor oil, and solvents. He smiles as he hears Kevin and Rosie talking.
“Kev, what do you think, pink camo stripes? Or orange?”
“For you? I say go with pink camo, but only if it’s convincing. Otherwise, it’s just pink shit, which doesn’t work for me.”
Felipe clears his throat. “Glad to see you can make decisions without me.”
Kevin rolls the mechanic’s creeper out from under the shiny, steel contraption he was working on, pulls off a pair of goggles, then jumps up and kisses Felipe. “I knew you’d be okay... I knew you’d make it, but I was still really worried.”
Felipe rubs the back of Kevin’s neck. “Nothing. No-thing, could have stopped me.” He turns to Rosie. “I’m sorry to tell you, but the color isn’t going to matter. It’ll be covered with blood before this night is over.”
She studies his face. “It’s that bad? Should we strap in?”
He looks at Kevin and sighs. “A lot of people… Well, zombies and people are being killed by these…things. Military gun machines, I don’t know what to call them. But we cannot wait. I climbed out, but others cannot. We must go in and help them.”
The first time Kevin met Felipe, he was floored by the foreigner’s dedication to helping others, even if it risked his own interests. He worries that Felipe is pushing only a half-hatched pl
an. “These military things, that you said are killing people—”
“Yes, they are shooting them.”
“How do we get past them?”
“I don’t know, but we have to. The bodies…” Felipe shakes his head and sighs. “There were so many. And so many others trapped—in trees and buildings and... We have to find a way.”
“Okay… We go in.” Kevin reaches over and turns off the arc welder he was using. “Well, which do you want?”
Rosie throws her hand up. “I got Lynxie-Lou. You know that I got Lynxie-Lou.”
“Yeah we know.” Both men roll their eyes. Kevin holds out his hand. “Rock paper scissors for Tiny Tim?”
Felipe grins. “Am I that easy to read?”
Kevin waves his hand. “I know you’ve been waiting to take Tiny Tim out. I just finished welding the foot reinforcements.”
Felipe holds out his hand. “On three: One... Two... Three!” He throws rock, and Kevin throws scissors.
“Damn! Alright, you take Tiny Tim, I’ll take The Edward.” Kevin smiles. You always pick rock.
Felipe nods. Thank you, Kevin.
Within minutes, Felipe, Kevin, and Rosie put on biohazard suits, fire up their radios, realize that something is jamming the signals, then turn them off. Felipe shrugs. “I guess we won’t be able to chat… I’ll lead the way to the gun-machines. Once we get past them, we will stay together and help the uninfected.” He secures his biohazard suit’s facemask.
Kevin and Rosie agree, then they continue the power-up procedures for their creations.
Many of the objects in the South Tower’s fifth-floor office were tossed down the spiral stairs, which gives more room for the nearly fifty people that take refuge inside. After a brief sense of security washes over everyone for escaping the zombies, it’s soon apparent the situation is far from ideal.
