by Phil Maxey
She walked to the door. “I intend to be.”
She looked through the small pane of glass to the corridor. There was one light which flickered intermittently. Through a similar door at the opposite end she could only see darkness. She was sure there had been a light switched on in that room.
She looked back at Lee, gave a thankless smile then opened the door.
She listened into the gap, but heard nothing of any note in the corridor.
Slipping inside, she closed the door quietly behind her, and stepped forward over the large squares which made up the floor.
Straining her hearing as she went, she also squinted to try to make out any sign of movement inside the operating theatre.
Nothing’s in there, Anna, stop being stupid. I’m the monster now, no need to be fearful.
She stepped up to the door and looked through the glass.
A warped, pale green face slapped up against the other side. Its bulging eyes were black and purple veins ran across its face.
She jumped back in fright.
“Just come back!” said Lee, peering at her from the other end of the corridor.
Anna looked back at him then the door in front of her shuddered. The vampire on the other side was crashing into it.
She looked up at the hinges. They were already twisted.
Not going to hold.
She still couldn’t hear the vamp, but then chastised herself for not realizing that the operating room door would have an airtight seal.
The hinges shook again.
She moved back to the door and looked inside once again. The room was full of vamps. All snarling. A faint green glow coming from where their eyes should had been. All looking at her.
She turned and started to run when the hinges flew into the air.
She was halfway along the corridor when she heard the door hit the smooth floor and then the growls and scurrying of feet coming after her.
“Dear god…” said Lee, looking past her.
He staggered back as she pushed open the door, instantly turning, closing, and locking it. She looked around the ward for anything heavy. A large medical cabinet stood out.
“The cabinet! We need it over here!”
She looked through the window to the corridor. A horde of vamps were about to crash into the door she was standing behind.
Lee struggled to move the cabinet by himself.
She looked towards the double doors which were the exit. “There should be two guards out there, get them to—” The door vibrated, throwing her back. She quickly moved forward and leaned into the door.
Lee was already outside in the other corridor. He came back, his face one of confusion. “There’s no one there!”
Bodies of hungry vamps piled up on the other side of the door.
Anna turned, pushing her back up against the door, her shoes sliding across the floor.
“I can’t hold it, Lee, you got to get them beds out of here!”
He ran forward grabbing the end of the nearest bed, the one that Donald was in. The young boy had his knees up to his chest and was shaking.
“It’s okay, Donald, we just need to move—”
The door to the theatre room corridor started to creak.
Lee pulled the bed through the double doors, and immediately ran back in to grab the second. He glanced at Anna, her eyes were dark and her hands were clawed, but he could tell she was about to lose the battle to keep the vamps out.
He grabbed the radio which sat on the window ledge. It’s volume had been turned down, so what was coming through the speaker would not scare any of the patients.
He turned it back up.
“This is Doctor Kemp in the medical ward. We need help! The vamps are almost in here! We can’t keep them out! Come—”
A boom came from the door and the top hinge flew onto the ground.
Anna’s features were vampiric, but her expression was entirely human, and it was one of finality.
Lee knew he wouldn’t get the other four beds outside, so he ran to Anna’s side and leant what weight he could on the door.
The creaking now was non-stop as the door bowed and contorted, the screws on the single hinge almost clear of the wooden frame they once sat within.
Anna looked at Lee, and despite her black eyes, he knew she thanked him for being with her.
The double doors flew open and a huge man stood in the doorway.
“You the ones that needed help?” said Dalton.
Lee nodded, thinking it was obvious because of the door they were both trying to stop from breaking apart.
“Get out of the way!” he shouted.
Lee went to question the man in front of him, but Anna pushed him to one side and moved out of the way herself.
The door flew forwards, but not before being caught midair, a foot from the doorway, by Dalton.
He walked forward through the doorway, holding the door on both sides and pushing the grasping creatures backwards.
As he crossed the threshold, he rotated the door so it filled the width of the corridor and slowly walked forward.
The vamps hissed and screeched, but they couldn’t do anything but fall backwards, fighting the obstruction that was relentlessly moving against them.
Anna watched amazed from the other end of the corridor wondering if she should help but feeling she would just get in the way.
“Yeah, he’s not the kind of guy you want to make angry.”
Anna looked to her side. Kizzy rested her elbow on Anna’s shoulder.
“Me and him fought once—”
Dalton decapitated three vamps at the same time with the door. The others fell backwards into the operating room.
“—I like to think that if Amos hadn’t done his—” Her eyes circled around their sockets. “Mind thing on us, then I think I could have taken him.”
Anna looked at the athletic but relatively slight girl and thought she must have been joking.
The theatre room filled with roars. These were not vamp roars, but more guttural. These were the sounds of an animal.
They both watched as parts of vamps flew past the doorway, and a large shadow moved around in the dark.
After a few moments, there was only the sound of a single being. Dalton appeared, walking down the corridor covered in blood.
Kizzy walked forward putting her palm up in the air. “Way to go, big guy!”
He ignored her attempt of a ‘high-five’ and walked to Anna.
“You can’t stay here, they broke in through the roof. We need to get everyone to a safer spot.”
*****
Marina stood in the main hall of cellblock C. Part of her wanted to go out into the corridors, to the other blocks to help. But she wasn’t going to move more than ten feet from her daughter and Jasper.
She had checked on them a few moments ago. They were both scared, but keeping each other busy by playing cards together. Jasper looked up at her as she left the cell, and said the word. “Many.”
She nodded then closed and relocked the cell door. In her hand was Flint’s leash with the German Shepard on the end of it panting. He was also looking at the entrance to the cellblock as if he was waiting for something, or someone, to appear.
Now, both her and the dog were in the main hall, and she and everyone else had joined the dog watching the main entrance. If the vamps were going to come from any direction, it was going to be from there.
Outside, they could all hear the chaos. Roars, with the occasional clatter of gunfire.
Her ears picked up a repeating tapping in the corridor beyond the iron bar entrance gate. It was growing louder.
Footsteps? Vamps…? No, not vamps, too organized.
She looked down at Flint.
He’s not too concerned. Must be humans.
She ran forward, glancing at a few of the men sitting on the ground. “Come with me.’
They frowned then got to their feet.
She unlocked the gate then slid it to o
ne side and ran out into the corridor.
In the distance, just visible through a series of security doors, a large man was pulling a convoy of five hospital beds, all seemingly linked together, and each one occupied. Alongside him were other people, but she couldn’t make out who.
She ran forward along the corridor stopping at each gate and quickly pulling it open.
“Shouldn’t they remain closed?” said a young man just behind her.
“Help me get them open!” she shouted at him.
It wasn’t long before both groups met.
The large man looked down at Marina. “These people are ill. Yours was the closest cellblock.”
Marina stood to one side, waving them through. “Yes, quick, we need to get them inside.”
The large man continued pulling them. “I’m Dalton,” he said as he passed Marina. The other men from the cellblock stepped back slightly as they saw the blood-soaked leviathan of a man stride past.
Anna and Lee passed as well.
“Hey, I’m Kizzy! Nice to meet you!” said Kizzy, holding her hand out to Marina.
Marina frowned then quickly walked past her and pulled the security gate closed.
They were soon all back inside the main hall. The beds lined up in two rows which Lee moved between.
“They got into the operating room. If Dalton and Kizzy hadn’t got to us when they did…”
Marina held Anna’s arm. “Nothing’s getting inside this cellblock, trust me.”
“Do you know what’s happening elsewhere?”
Dalton walked to them while Kizzy was playing with Flint.
“Me and Kizz been moving around the prison, doing what we can, but there’s too many vamps. They in—”
Another sound echoed along the corridor outside.
Flint jumped down from Kizzy’s grasp and moved to the block’s security gate. He let out a small bark.
Marina walked forward, facing the armed people around her. “This is it! They’re going to be at this cellblock soon. You shoot, you stab, you slay as many of those fuckers as you can. You get that?”
“Yeah!” came the reply.
A chorus of scratching and shuffling came from the corridor outside.
Some stood pointing their guns at the iron bars which separated the block from the corridor, others knelt looking down their sights.
Flint started barking, his fur bristling, and his eyes turning black.
Marina looked at the patients. “We need to get them into the cells.” She walked to the nearest bed. “Leave the beds, just lift the mattress with the person on it, we’ll carry them inside.”
Anna helped while Kizzy and Dalton did the same to the other patients. They moved as quickly as they could into nearby cells.
The sound of the cascading vamps now filled the entirety of the space around them. Flint was jumping up at the bars.
With the patients safely locked away, Marina, Anna, Kizzy, and Dalton moved back to the main hall.
Each one gritted their teeth and secured their footing.
Vamps flowed around the corner, slamming up against the iron bars which rattled but held.
Booms and cracks rang out as the air filled with bullets and shrapnel. A blanket of creatures fell to the ground but were soon replaced by others.
The iron bars rattled once more as countless claws strained through the bars to get to the other side.
The metal poles holding the bars in place started to bow.
In Tower A, Joel watched as the walls began to crumble. Holes from thousands of razor-sharp claws were combining to remove huge pieces of masonry which crashed to the ground.
He looked back to the almost complete darkness in the fields beyond. An infinity of green glows looked back at him.
There’s no end…
He thought the walls would hold. He thought if they made it to daybreak; they might have a chance.
As thousands more vamps flowed through the gaps in the wall, he realized he had been wrong.
A hundred yards away near Tower C, Carla looked back at her colleagues. They had been firing constantly at the things just feet away on the opposite side of the metal shielding. They were now all out of ammo.
“I’m out!” said Bishop.
The APC rocked and swayed by the constant battering from the raging creatures outside.
Carla pulled her handgun from the back of her pants and passed it back into the cabin. “Here, this is all I got left. Do what you can with it.”
She hit the gas pedal, but the truck just rocked forward. She pushed down harder, the engine roaring, but the wheels refused to give any forward motion.
“What the fuck! Come on!” she shouted at the dashboard.
“Err… Ma’am, we got a problem back here…”
She looked back into the cabin. One of the small window slits was now a foot wider, the metal to the side of it having been torn away.
A loud creak made them all look up. A piece of the roof was missing, replaced with an arm and a claw at the end of it, trying to reach what it could inside.
Bishop stepped forward, pointed the handgun into the gap, and fired. A squeal filled the cabin and the hand went limp.
Another creak. Another piece of the vehicle’s roof was missing. This time, a vamp’s head was visible, its enlarged incisors visible in the cabin’s light. Its claws scythed just above everyone’s head. Carla took a knife from beneath her feet and hacked away at the creature. Spraying blood across them all. More claws surged into the enlarged window.
In cellblock C, the main gate’s iron bars snapped and flew inwards. Dalton plucked it from the air then roared forward with it.
Vamps poured into the main hall, immediately slicing through three defenders.
Dalton swung the twelve-foot-wide piece of gate around, smashing into vamps, sending them spiraling into the air.
Anna and Marina’s eyes were dark, their hands becoming claws, both thrusting their nails into the creatures in front of them, slicing them apart, dropping them to the ground. But more hateful things replaced those. An overwhelming tide that was streaming into the hall.
In the workshop, Bill attached another bandage with Joel’s blood to the tablet and looked at the laptop’s screen.
The double doors shook and rattled.
Josh and Rachel were holding one of the milling machines against it.
“Is it working?” shouted Josh back to Bill and Max who was standing nearby.
“I don’t know, give me a minute!” said Bill, trying to see any change in the graph on his screen. It scrolled by with barely a bump in the dotted line.
Bill sighed.
A piece of wood in one of the double workshop doors splintered and a claw pushed through, waving just inches from Josh’s head.
“Try again!” shouted Josh.
The hole widened, and the vamp pushed its head and other arm through, a claw slashed across Josh’s cheek.
In cellblock C, Marina was fighting three vamps simultaneously. Anna was trying to get to her, but vamp’s claws and teeth kept flailing at her from every direction.
Most of the humans outside the cells were dead or dying.
Flint snapped and bit at the creatures that were falling on him, trying to bring the dog to the ground.
Kizzy and Dalton fought side by side. A huge werewolf, that despite cutting down swathes of vamps, was slowly waning as hundreds more flooded through where the metal gate once stood. Kizzy, now twice her usual mass, had multiple limbs with hands that were claws. Vamps flew away from her as she flung them like rag dolls, but others sliced at her skin.
Jess and Jasper sat huddled together at the back of the lower bunk bed, pushed up against the back corner.
Mary stood near the bed, in her hand a baseball bat. The cell door rattled as claws scratched along the outside.
In the workshop, the old wooden doors were almost completely disintegrated. Arms and claws fought to get inside. The milling machine started to slide backwards.
“We can’t hold them back!” shouted Josh, blood pouring from the wound on his face.
Bill looked at the fury that was about to be upon them and then at Max.
He looked down at the few remaining drops of Joel’s blood in the small glass bottle.
“Oh, to hell with this!” He grabbed it, unscrewed the lid, and shook the viscous crimson liquid onto the tablet surface.
Immediately it lit up, the symbols glowing and changing across its surface.
The graph on the laptop screen suddenly burst into peaks and troughs.
Snapping vicious things were almost inside. The heavy piece of metal machinery slid backwards into the room.
Symbols and data flowed across Bill’s screen, his tired eyes trying to catch what he could of it, something that would help. Then he saw it.
He lunged over the worktop, bringing two fingers down on the tablet’s surface at the same time.
The tablet burned intensely bright, so much that Bill and Max threw their hands up to shield their faces.
Just when the furnace in front of them seemed it could not get any brighter, a pulse of energy exploded outwards knocking the two old men back against the walls as well as throwing Josh and Rachel to one side.
The vamps, desperately trying to gain entry, froze, shuddered, then disintegrated.
The mysterious wave expanded outwards, dissolving vamps as it progressed.
Carla, Bishop, and the others watched as the claws and arms that were inches from them froze then fell apart, breaking into dry ashes.
In cellblock C, everyone who was still breathing was equally frozen. The few hundred vamps that filled the hall, stairs, and inside some cells were gone, replaced by darkened clumps on the floor.
Marina fell back against her daughter’s cell.
Sixteen hundred miles to the southwest, everyone in the main operations room of the Copeland Corporation was also speechless. The drone that was hovering thousands of feet above the prison had just shown them a scene they couldn’t believe.
Tens of thousands of vamps had just disintegrated in front of their eyes as if an invisible wave had swept out from somewhere deep inside the prison.
One by one they started to slowly turn back towards the demonic figure standing at the back of the room.
Copeland’s fist slammed down on the operations table, smashing through it and sending glass shards into the air. Those inside the room scrambled away.
