by Gareth Wood
I blinked at that last one, and then laughed. “Seriously?”
“Those are just the tame ones. There’s worse, and weirder.”
Then I told her about the job offer that Couper had given me. She was on it right away.
“Take it! Go and see him as soon as you are off the line with me!” She seemed excited about it, which made a certain amount of sense.
“What about the rest of the team?” I said.
“Get them assigned to train teams,” she said. “You’ll be the boss, you can do that. That keeps them safer, and all of us together in case anything happens.”
The idea was a good one. Sanji, Amanda and Darren could easily train others how to react and survive outside of the fences. Nathan would probably be a good administrator, useful in an office environment. I could have all of them working in Cold Lake building more Salvage Teams. We would be needing more teams all the time. Maybe I could pull that off. Maybe there was a little bright spot in the future that I could help grow into something better.
“Alright, I’ll go see him and tell him I’ll do it.”
“Good. It’ll be good to have you here safe and at home more.”
“You didn’t seem to mind the risks when you were on the team, Jess,” I said.
“That was then. Having a baby changes your priorities a little, you know?”
I did know. The baby and the job offer had been on my mind a lot.
Officer Kearns came over and said, “You have about half a minute left,” and then went away again.
“I have to go now, Jess. There’s a line of people waiting to use the phone.”
“I know. Same at this end. Listen, honey, good luck tomorrow. Come home safely.”
“I will, I promise! Love you!”
“I love you too. See you soon, I hope.”
* * *
Just after dawn the next day we all gathered on the field beside two CH-146 Griffon helicopters. John Daniels met us on the tarmac and introduced us to Ashley Singer, the pilot of the other Griffon.
“How are you?” Ashley asked, smiling at me. She was a short woman with dark curly hair peeking out from under her bright green woollen toque. It was a clear and nearly windless day, around nineteen degrees below freezing.
“Cold, but good,” I said to her. “This is Amanda, Sanji, Nathan and Darren.”
Handshakes were exchanged all around.
“Listen,” Ashley said, “I’ve been over that area, and it’s standing room only in some places, but if you get in a pinch head for the mall over the other side of Crowchild Trail. There’s enough room in the parking lot for us to pick you up.”
“We’ll keep that in mind,” Amanda said.
We waited a few minutes for Corporal Jacobson and his squad to show up. They came out of the hangar and walked over to us with Major Couper. A few military staff followed. We shook hands with Jacobson and his squad, and then stowed our gear aboard our helicopter. Our gear for this expedition was simple; everyone carried their handgun of choice, a great big knife, and plenty of ammo. A few people brought along larger guns, like Sanji and Amanda, both of whom carried Winchester Defender pistol grip 12 gauge pump action shotguns. Two of the soldiers had brought along C7A1’s, but both Hannigan and Jacobson seemed happy with handguns.
For an hour last night we had all gone over our objectives and plans, but since we didn’t have plans of the building most of this would be winging it. We knew what floor Doctor Bradley’s office was on, and we had our way in on the roof.
We had dressed carefully for today, knowing that the bitter cold was going to be a problem. We wore mostly layered tight-fitting clothes under our parkas. At -19 Celsius it was far too cold to be without those. For better peripheral vision we had removed the hoods and all wore warm black woollen toques with face masks, making us look like a commando unit, I thought.
Major Couper and a few of his staff had come down to wish us luck, so there had been some salutes for the military folks, some handshaking for the civilians. They all retreated to the warmth of the offices as we climbed into the Griffons and took to the air, only the Major himself watching until we lifted away and passed over the fence line.
Flying a few hundred feet above the necropolis on the way over, Jon explained how we would get onto the roof. We paid close attention, since one misstep would see us dropping eight floors into the arms of the hungry dead. It seemed simple enough, but we went over and over the procedure all the way there.
“It’s easy,” he said, “I’ll hover about two or three feet above the edge of the building, and you step down onto the strut, then off the strut onto the roof. I’ll be over the roof a little bit, so you shouldn’t fall off the building unless something really bad happens. Still, do not linger near the bird.”
The flight was uneventful, short, and cold. We had brought along a few portable stereos to distract and attract the undead to other areas, and enough ammo to hopefully deal with whatever we found inside the building.
Looking down from the north side of the helicopter I realised I should be able to see my old home. I looked, and sure enough there it was, the condo complex where I used to live. It was a few kilometers north of us, but plainly visible. I felt a wave of longing to go back and see how the place was now, and maybe recover a few things. It was right in the heart of the infested area and likely crawling with zombies, so I quickly abandoned that idea. Something must have showed on my face, since Amanda looked at me from the opposite seat.
“Whatcha thinking about, boss?” Amanda asked me.
“Shh,” I replied, “you’re spoiling my Zen moment.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Darren asked from beside Amanda. I just shook my head.
The helicopter banked around and we found ourselves looking down at the roof of the biology building, still covered in clean snow and mercifully free on the undead. Dozens were in sight on the ground below, all around the building, but I had more important things to think about. The flight engineer, Dan Sherman, came on the headsets, his voice pitched to carry over the roar of the engines and blades.
“Everyone ready?”
“Oh, hell no,” Darren said, grinning. There was some nervous laughter from all of us. Dan waited for our thumbs up, clipped his safety line into the hook on the side of the door frame, then slid the door open. Freezing cold air blew in and I reached up to pull my toque further down.
Dan pointed at me. I was first off the helicopter. I stood as much as I could, and stepped to the edge of the door as the helicopter hovered a few feet above and about a foot to the right of the building roof. Dan grabbed my hand, said “Good luck!” and helped me stay steady as I stepped down onto the landing skid. One more step down and I was on the roof, quickly moving away through snow higher than my shins. I stopped near the roof access door and looked back. Sanji was already moving towards me, and Amanda was stepping off the skid. Sanji joined me at the door, and I could see the other helicopter circling the building as Darren stepped off the skid and onto the roof, followed closely by Nathan. Dan waved at us as his helicopter moved away to drop distractions, and the one carrying the troops approached. It hovered in about the same place, and the soldiers all stepped clear, wading one by one through the snow towards us. Once they were all with us, the helicopters both moved off to drop distracting noisemakers (stereos playing loud music) to draw the swarm below the building away, and then to go refuel and stay nearby in case we called to be extracted.
Sanji had the bolt cutters, and while he readied them the rest of us checked our firearms one last time. My Browning was ready and I had a round in the chamber. I took the safety off and aimed at the door. There were three steps up to the access door, a windowless brown metal barrier, patched with small areas of rust. The chain and padlock secured the door to a railing next to the steps, allowing it to open perhaps an inch if someone pushed it from inside. It was securely shut.
“Is everyone ready for this?” Sanji asked as the helicopter noise faded
to a dull roar.
“Ready,” every one of them replied.
“Ready,” I said. Sanji stepped up and cut the chain that was looped around the door handle and the railing. It snapped quietly and fell apart, and Sanji reached over and pulled the chain free. He dropped it in the snow and pulled his shotgun off his shoulder. I stepped forward and grabbed the door handle, counted to three, and twisted it. It turned stiffly and finally I heard a click, and the door popped open a little. I pulled, staying behind the door just in case, and held it open as everyone else aimed into the opening.
“Clear!” called Jacobson, and immediately Williams and Lee moved forward into the small mechanical area behind the door. Hannigan and Jacobson followed, and then it was my team. The tiny room was full of pipes and long dead elevator parts. It was also completely dark until several flashlights snapped on. Williams was already heading down a concrete and steel stairwell, C7 raised and pointing ahead of her. Lee followed, flashlight aimed down the steps. We descended single file as quietly as possible, stopping on the stairs when Williams found the door to the top floor of offices. She listened at the door for a full minute then signalled something with her hands that I couldn’t see.
“There are AC’s behind the door, but I don’t think they know we’re here,” Jacobson told me, and I nodded. An AC was an Animated Casualty, the way the military referred to the undead. This was probably going to be one of the messiest parts, getting onto the floor when we didn’t know how many of the walking dead were waiting for us. Our plan was to kill all the undead on this floor, reach the stairwells as fast as possible and kill every zombie that tried to come up them, and then proceed down to the fourth floor, killing everything we came across until we found Dr Bradley’s office on the fourth floor and recovered the software. We had wooden wedges to slide under the stairwell doors on the other floors to prevent them from opening.
Williams grabbed the door handle while Lee and Jacobson took aim, and then she pulled hard. It gave after a moment with a loud squealing noise, and she pulled it as far open as she could, back to the concrete wall. We all aimed flashlights through the opening, even though only Jacobson and Lee were in position to see anything. Lee started shooting after a few moments, careful single shots. No one used fully automatic shot selection anymore. After his first three shots he said “Three, two more left,” and Jacobson started shooting. He fired three shots as well, deafening in the stairwell, and then he and Lee stepped forward into the offices. Hannigan followed them, and Williams waved my team through. We followed Hannigan and stepped out into the hallway. Jacobson had gone right, and Lee to the left. Three corpses with shattered skulls lay in permanent death at our feet, and three more were scattered along the hallway to the right. There was dim light from the windows, and it felt colder inside that it had outside. I noticed that there was frost on everything.
“Why is it so damned cold in here?” Amanda asked.
“Concrete building,” Sanji replied. “It holds the cold in. The insulation works both ways.”
Suddenly there was gunfire from behind me. Three fast shots from a Browning, and I heard something heavy fall. Already Jacobson and Williams were moving forward, and I followed with Nathan and Sanji. Amanda and Darren went to the left with Lee and Hannigan, following the hallway through the offices to a stairwell. We didn’t know if there was more than one stairwell that led to the main floor.
I heard Jacobson call, “One!” There was more shooting, Jacobson firing into an office at something that I couldn’t see. I heard glass shatter, and then Sanji was turning away from me and pointing his shotgun through the doorway next to him. He fired and I saw a dead thing in a lab coat knocked back, gore spraying the wall behind it. There were offices to the right and left of us all the way along this hall, and several of them had obviously had inhabitants. There was also a pile of dark and frozen bones in the hallway, which crunched under my boots as I followed the team down the hall.
Jacobson paused to reload, and I stepped forward to take the lead. The hallway bore to the right ahead, and I could see through into a corner office. It had a pretty good view of the campus grounds, and a great big oak table surrounded by a dozen chairs, with laptop computers in front of each. If we had the time we should grab them on our way out.
I turned the corner, and five feet away was a dead woman in a University of Calgary sweatshirt, facing the other way. She started to turn towards me just as I pulled the trigger, and the bullet slammed into her temple. She fell to the ground, and I put another one into her forehead just to be sure. I looked up and saw a stairwell sign on the right side, and four more of the undead. Williams came up beside me and raised her C7, sighting down the barrel.
“Four,” she said. She fired five times, slow and steady, and the four corpses fell. I realised I was sweating. I looked at my hands holding the Browning and they were steady, but I really doubted they would be after this was all over. We hadn’t been inside for more than a few minutes and already had killed at least a dozen of the walking things. This was only the top floor, probably the least occupied floor in the building. I avoided looking at the bodies as I moved to the stairs. I found the door, a grey metal slab marked with an emergency exit sign that had a crash bar on our side.
There was more gunfire from the other group, several shots. I stopped in front of the stairwell door and shone my flashlight through the small glass window. There was a very old bloodstain on the inside of the glass, but nothing moving beyond it.
There had been silence for several seconds when the radio Jacobson carried squawked.
“Found a stairwell. All clear this side. Six contacts.” It was Hannigan’s voice. Jacobson replied, “We found a stairwell too. Proceed with caution. See you on four.”
With that we opened the stair door and waited. Nothing moved, but there were sounds, and the stench was terrible. From below there were shuffling and thumping noises, as well as a strange squeak that repeated every handful of breaths. It was far too quiet to identify, and after a minute we started downwards. The stairs were open in the center, so I could see down to the next landing. There was a litter of papers and an open three-ringed binder lying there, but no blood or bodies.
I pulled out a wedge and slid it under the door to the seventh floor, and Williams hit it three times with a rubber mallet. With that door firmly shut we started downwards again, now with Nathan and Sanji in the lead. Five steps down from the second landing we stopped as the door of the sixth floor opened and a corpse stepped in. It looked like a student, a young man with blonde hair and a t-shirt with Albert Einstein’s face all over the front. Nathan shot him twice in the face, and he toppled backwards just as three more of the dead pushed into the stairwell from below. A brief eruption of gunfire in the stairwell finished them, and Nathan jumped down the remaining steps to shove the door to the sixth floor closed. Behind us on the seventh floor there was thumping on the door, and I shone my flashlight up at the window. A ghastly face, rotten and eaten away, stared back at me, and the pounding on the door redoubled. The wedge held, and I took a deep breath and turned away. By the time I got to the landing of the sixth floor it was wedged shut and our group was descending to the fifth. More of the undead were clawing at the window and door as I passed, but the wedge was secure.
Jacobson and Williams led the way to the next floor and wedged the door shut just as the undead reached it. Sanji added his weight to the door with Jacobson to hold it shut as Williams pounded two wedges under it. As they were doing this Nathan and I pushed past them and started down to the fourth floor, only to discover the stairwell blocked between the fourth and fifth floors. Office furniture and assorted debris were piled up until there was no way through. It would take hours to clear it all away.
“Shit, we’re going to have to go through five to the other side.”
Nathan shook his head and climbed back up to the fifth floor. I joined him and we pried the wooden wedge out with our knives, keeping our weight on the door to hold it closed.
“What’s going on?” Jacobson asked.
“Take a look,” I said, and shone my flashlight down towards the fourth floor.
“Shit.” He looked annoyed. “This is not going to be fun.”
I stood up again and took hold of the door latch. It felt icy cold even through my gloves. Sanji moved closer to me and lifted his shotgun. “What now?”
“We open this door, cross the floor to the other stairs, and go down there.”
“You make it sound so simple,” he said. I just shrugged.
Jacobson pulled the radio out and called the other team, letting them know we were crossing over on the fifth floor to their stairwell. They would meet us. He put the radio away and lifted his Browning.
“You ready?” Jacobson asked, as Williams stepped a few stairs down towards the fourth floor and waited.
“No,” I said, and pulled open the door. There was immediate gunfire from several people, and the four undead who had been trying to push the wedged door open all fell with broken skulls.
Things happened very fast after that.
Sanji and I stepped through, and I turned to face left as he faced right. There were a dozen of the walking dead in the hall ahead of me, and I felt my blood chill as they moved towards us. My Browning was already raised, and Nathan stepped out of the stairwell just as I opened fire. I felt Sanji back into me, and we leaned on each other and both started shooting.
“Sie sind überall!” said Nathan in a shocked voice, and I heard him start shooting too. He was facing the direction Sanji was shooting, so I can only imagine how bad it was to the right. I shot the closest three with single rounds, and as they fell I shifted aim to the next ones. They started forward, arms out and mouths open, stepping over the fallen ones clumsily. I quickly shot four more and then had to change clips. That took precious seconds, and I had nowhere to back up. I ejected the empty magazine and dropped it, slammed the new one in and worked the action. As I was doing this a dead man with his intestines spilling out was climbing over the bodies of the others, staggering a little as he slipped on the gore and tangled limbs. He reached my side of the bodies and lurched towards me, literally three feet away when I aimed at his head. I really did not want to die here, but fear was making me sweat. There was no end to them! More were coming from down the hallway.
