Killing The Dead (Book 18): Sacrifice

by Murray, Richard

  “You won’t be able to turn them. At best, you will merely stop them reanimating so I suggest you just slaughter as many as you can.”

  “And you? What will you do?”

  “Bring an end to this.”

  “How the hell are we gonna do that, mate? The whole bloody place will be on lockdown…” he glanced up as the lights in the ceiling began to flash and an obnoxious siren began to sound. “See!”

  “There’s stairs and the elevators. Make use of them.”

  “We don’t even know where the hell we’re going?”

  “Then we ask someone,” I said with a smile that made him shiver.

  Ignoring them, I stalked along the corridor one way, while Briony led her infected minions the other. Ignoring the cries of the wounded and dying, I stepped over the blood that pooled on the floor, making it slick. I passed an office and then another, before I stopped, poking my head through the doorway.

  “Hello,” I said, cheerfully to the two men cowering beneath the desks. “Can you help me?”

  “W-what do you want?” the first asked.

  “Where will Smythe be?”

  “W-what-“

  His voice abruptly cut off as I shot him. He gurgled a little as he clawed at the hole in his throat, blood spurting from between his fingers. His companion stared at him in shock before looking at me, terror filling his face.

  “Do, I need to repeat myself?”

  “Twelfth floor, command centre.”

  “Thank you,” I replied and shot him too.

  I hummed softly to myself as I carried on along the corridor, gun held before me. I felt at ease, as though a burden had been lifted from me. I’d had no idea how heavy that promise to Lily had been. Without it, I was free to kill as I pleased.

  And kill I did.

  Men and women both, I was a believer in equality after all. I cared not how they begged or pleaded, I gunned them all down, firing until my bullets ran out. Then I lifted the gun in both hands, gripping the barrel tight and raising it over my head before bringing it down on the skull of a middle-aged woman who really should have run faster.

  I threw aside the gun, smeared and stained with blood, and pulled out my knives. I didn’t acknowledge the look that Gregg gave me as I pulled open the door to the stairwell.

  “Grab that fire extinguisher,” I said with a nod to the red cylinder attached to the wall.

  “Why? Gonna beat me to death with it too?”

  “Don’t be absurd. You’re my friend.”

  “Then what the fuck’re you gonna do with it?”

  “Prop open the door,” I said, stepping past him and pulling the extinguisher from its mount.

  “But that will let the zombies through…”

  “Exactly.” I pushed open the door and placed the heavy extinguisher on the floor resting against it. Removing my hands, I stood back and waited. “Ah, see it holds.”

  “It’s not enough to fight bloody Genpact. No, we have to fight their zombie corpses too.”

  “We don’t, but the security troops will,” I said as I grabbed his arm and pulled him back towards the nearest office.

  He squawked and grumbled but did as instructed. Crouching down below the office window as I closed the door. I knelt beside him, waiting and wasn’t disappointed as I heard the first moans of the undead filling the corridor outside.

  If the security were anything like those at the Scottish base, they would post people outside the elevators and the majority would use the stairwells to get about. Those that did, would face the undead and while they might be soldiers, they hadn’t been out in the world when the apocalypse began.

  They just weren’t prepared.

  I pressed myself back against the wall as I listened to the moans of the undead. In the distance, machine gun fire could be heard. I grinned to myself as I wondered just how they would fare against the Infected.

  A scream came from the direction of the stairwell and I raised myself a little to look over the window ledge. The corridor seemed to be clear, and that was good enough for me. Anything out there would be dealt with.

  We had a good number of stairs to climb and not a lot of time to do it. Smythe was a petty, petty, man and he would have no hesitation in nuking the island in retaliation for my betrayal. I just had to ensure he couldn’t do that.

  The first corpse was found on the landing just one flight of stairs down. An older man in a lab coat that had clearly been climbing the stairs between floors. The zombies had torn chunks out of his flesh, and I had no doubt he would soon rise.

  I left him there and moved on. Gunfire echoed below us, and I gripped my knives a little tighter, sure that I would need them soon enough.

  “Fucking noise,” Gregg grumbled as the gunfire didn’t stop.

  Two more flights down and the door hung open, a body lying before it. Security woman by the looks. Bullet casings littered the floor around her along with several dead zombies. I shook my head and continued on.

  The upper levels meant little to me. I just needed Smythe. Once I killed him, I could sit back and watch the undead rush through the base slaughtering everyone in sight. True, getting out might be a bitch, but I’d accepted that wasn’t going to happen anyway.

  A guard backed out of a doorway on the landing below us as we descended. He was firing wildly into the corridor beyond. He didn’t even hear me approach him, nor note my presence until my knife slid into his flesh.

  I wrapped an arm around his neck to hold him in place as I pulled my knife from his ribs and stabbed again, twisting the knife as he screamed. In the corridor beyond, several bodies lay on the floor, but more were rising and turning our way.

  With a hard shove, I sent the man stumbling into the corridor and slammed shut the door behind him. I giggled a little as I listened to his screams.

  Gregg shook his head but didn’t say anything as he brushed past me, moving further down the stairs. I could have laughed at the idiocy of whoever had designed the base.

  They had clearly just built a survival shelter. A place for people to live and do whatever it is they were going to do while waiting for the world to return to normalcy. They had clearly not designed it with attack in mind.

  The stairwell, for example, led all the way from the highest level to the lowest. Steel stairs connected to bare walls of concrete. Doors on every level without even locks. They had not expected there to be any need for them.

  Or, I thought darkly, perhaps they had expected any resistance to come from their own people and had ensured the design was such that their own security forces could move from level to level with ease.

  Which made sense. No matter the reason though, it suited my purpose. We went from level to level, occasionally stopping to kill an errant zombie or a random Genpact employee seeking safety.

  The security forces had found themselves seriously outmanned. The majority had been on the upper levels and I suspected they were being handled nicely by Briony. The lower levels had a minimal presence at best.

  “This is it,” Gregg muttered as we reached the twelfth floor down. “You sure about this?”

  “It’s them or us,” I said with a half-shrug.

  “Okay,” he said, heaving a sigh.

  I understood his concern. Which was strange for me, admittedly. He had never been a fan of violence and it couldn’t sit well with him, the casual way in which I slaughtered the people he likely considered not entirely guilty.

  He would be disappointed in me, I was sure of that, but in the end. I didn’t care.

  Chapter 26

  I dropped to my knees, arms hammering out to the sides and my blades sinking deep into the legs of the security guards. I was up and on my feet in an instant, spinning as I slashed at their unarmoured arms.

  Gregg ran in, kicking out the legs of the first and pulling his gun from unresisting hands as I turned my full attention on the other faceless minion. I grinned as I spun and cut, slicing into his flesh and watching the blood spray across the co
rridor.

  A gunshot ended my fun and I glared at Gregg as he lowered the smoking weapon and fired once into the body of the other guard.

  “Kill them if you must but try not to have so much fucking fun doing it,” he snarled.

  I glanced back at the rest of the squad, sprawled across the floor where I had left them, and I grinned. How could I stop when it was just so much, damned, fun?

  “It’s up ahead,” Gregg said when I didn’t reply. “At least I think so.”

  The likelihood of him being right was low. If the upper levels had been a rabbit’s warren of corridors, the lower ones were like a labyrinth. I half expected someone to offer me a ball of string and warn me of a minotaur at the centre.

  “Lead on,” I said, sucking in a deep gulp of air.

  My shoulder ached and my chest heaved. Adrenaline could only get me so far and the sheen of sweat on my skin and the way my legs trembled as I started to walk, were not a good sign.

  He reached the corner and pressed his back against the wall, looking around the corner before jerking his head back, a contented smile on his face. I rolled my eyes. I hated it when he was right, and I was wrong.

  “Fine, it’s there. Now what?”

  Even Smythe would know to keep it locked up tight. From my time in the Scottish base, I knew that the control centre had a lockable door thick enough it would take a whole hell of a lot more firepower to get through than we had.

  “Keycard,” Gregg said, pointing at the dead guards. “One must have a card, yeah?”

  “Maybe.”

  I checked the closest, hands moving over the body as I searched pockets. Nothing that I could find. So, I moved on to the next. Again, I came up short.

  “Hah!” Gregg said, holding up a card with such a look of delight that I scowled at him.

  “Great. It’ll need a code though, probably.”

  Once again, he trotted over to the corner and peeked around. When he looked back, my shoulders slumped. I wouldn’t hear the end of it.

  “No code.”

  “So, what’s the bad news?”

  “Guards standing outside.”

  “How far?”

  “A hundred metres.”

  I picked up one of the guns and checked the safety. It was off and the clip was likely full as we’d taken the guards by surprise. Of course, Gregg had fired a couple of shots, so they had likely heard. They might think it was their people killing zombies though.

  One way to find out.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  I stepped out from around the corner and squeezed the trigger. The gun bucked in my hand as I peppered the guards with bullets. As soon as the last bullet was fired, I cast it aside and set off running, pulling free my knives.

  My ears rang as I slammed into the closest of the guards, knives sinking into the places he wasn’t wearing armour. Immediately, I spun away, hammering my knife into the neck of another. A third raised his gun and fell forward, as a salvo of bullets hit him from behind.

  “Fuck me,” Gregg muttered as he jogged up. “You really are hard to bloody kill.”

  “Just lucky,” I grinned as I looked down at the dead men.

  No one seemed alive enough to object as I took the keycard from Gregg and pressed it to the locking plate. The doors began to slide open and I flashed one last grin at my friend.

  The first bullet hit my upper thigh, the second my gut, and the third my arm. I staggered back, staring with utter amazement at the broad-shouldered man in a dark suit that had a handgun pointed right at me, smoke rising lazily from the barrel.

  I hit the floor, not quite sure what was happening, and then the pain washed over me.

  “Finish him!” Smythe snapped. “Then get this base back under control!”

  “Yes sir, I’ll-“

  Gregg’s volley hit him solidly in the chest and he fell back without another word. Smythe stared at him open-mouthed as Gregg approached, gun pointed directly at him.

  “Get up, mate.”

  I wasn’t sure if I could. A moment later, Gregg realised that and reached down with one arm to grab mine and pull me to my feet, all the while, keeping his gun aimed at the older man.

  The pain was more than I’d experienced for quite some time and I staggered as I reached out to hold on to my friend. It seemed that I’d been right, after all. I wasn’t going to make it.

  “Anyone else in here?” Gregg demanded.

  Smythe, still scowling, shook his head and stepped back as Gregg moved forward, hitting a control switch by the door with his elbow. It slid shut behind us.

  He lowered me into a chair in front of a console and gripped the gun tight. He risked a quick look at me as if to ask what next and I managed a small smile. One that faded as I saw the large yellow numbers counting down on the screen beside Smythe.

  “Is that what I think it is?” I asked, a little dazed as my vision began to darken.

  “Fuck, oh fuck! Stop it! Now, fucking stop it now!” Gregg demanded pointing the gun at the man.

  “No.”

  Just that. I could almost admire him for that. There was no fear in his moment of defeat, just a calm demeanour over an extreme fury. The kind of man that would nuke my home in retaliation for my destroying his.

  I watched the screens behind him. Each showed a different scene, many of them of the base itself. In one, Briony was tearing into a group of security guards that were panicking as they realised they couldn’t kill her.

  In another, there was a room full of cowering people, a hundred or more if I were to guess in a great hall. A group of them were trying to barricade the doors as something pushed against them from the other side.

  I gave a short bark of laughter as those doors burst open and the zombies poured inside. I was dying and my family would soon be dead, but I could rest knowing that I had killed Smythe first. Shame I couldn’t kill Briony too, but I could live with that.

  Or die with it, at least.

  “The fuck are those?” Gregg asked, staring at a screen.

  “A new breed,” Smythe said, a little bit of pride in his voice. “One that not even you could kill.”

  In my current state, he was right. I kept a hand pressed against the wound in my gut and pushed myself to my feet with a shaking hand. I staggered, almost falling, as I crossed the room to better look at the screen.

  A great many zombies were in a darkened room. Unlike any I had seen before and something truly disturbing, even to me. There was nothing of humanity left to them at all and I felt something close to a shudder run through me.

  I dropped into another chair and looked at the screen with the numbers. Not long.

  “What now, mate?”

  “I have an idea, but you won’t like it.”

  There was a taste of copper in my mouth and I managed a grin as I looked over at Smythe. “Hold him for me.”

  Chapter 27

  The fleet made its crippled journey home. What was left of it anyway; seven ships, one of them the destroyer I had seized from the raiders. It wasn’t much, but it held the remnants of the near thousand people that had sailed out with me.

  Far too few had returned.

  A crowd met us on the docks when I disembarked. Men and women, searching for those they loved, the ones that wouldn’t return. I couldn’t meet their gaze, couldn’t bear to see their hate for my returning when their families hadn’t.

  “Lily,” Cass said, gripping my arm as I moved past her. “What happened?”

  “We won,” I said, and burst into tears.

  She pulled me into an embrace and held me close, letting me weep for all that we had lost. I desperately wanted to see my children, to hold them in my arms and grieve in private, but that wasn’t to be.

  “Ma’am,” a CDF soldier said as he came running up.

  Cass glared at him, and his cheeks heated but I wiped my eyes and looked up, fearing what I would hear.

  “There is a message. You are needed at the command centre.”

&n
bsp; “My Lady,” Lisa said, voice quiet. “Allow us to escort you.”

  I nodded, not trusting myself to respond as I squared my shoulders and set off on the short walk to the command centre. It was the last thing I wanted to do, but I had sworn to do a duty and I would do it no matter the personal cost.

  There was no way I could have been prepared though. No one could.

  As I walked through the door, Cass leant in close and said, “Samuel is alive.”

  My head whipped around as I stared at her in shock and surprise. “How?”

  “Him and three others managed to make it to a boat. He was wounded by the mercenaries, but he’s alive. A survivor group found them and radioed us.”

  “A little bit of good news,” I whispered, though my heart still ached.

  The mood in the command centre was sombre and as I entered, not one technician would meet my eyes. I guessed they had heard of the Admirals death. His ship had ripped through the Cruiser and they had both sunk beneath the waves.

  Despite our frantic searches for survivors that went on long after any would have succumbed to the cold, we had not found him. He had finally reunited with his family. Or so I hoped.

  The soldier directed us to a bank of terminals where Charlie sat, her fingers moving across the keyboard before her and her gaze fixed on the screen as she spoke quietly into a headset.

  “Charlie?” I asked. “There’s a message.”

  “Christ!” she said, noticing me. “Here, take this.”

  I took the headset and lifted it to my head, positioning it over my ear as I looked at her in confusion.

  “Hello?” I said, voice soft and heart hammering in my chest.

  There came a soft sigh, and a weary laugh before a voice I knew said, “Hello, Lily.”

  “Ryan! You’re alive! Oh my God! Thank you, than-“

  “Hush, my love.” His voice was quiet, and I heard the pain there. It silenced me immediately. “We have little time.”

  “What’s going on?”

  Cass looked at me blankly and I reached across to flick the switch that would allow his voice to come through the speakers so that she too could hear.

  “Genpact is about to launch their nuke,” Ryan said, and my heart seemed to stop.