I shoved a teenage zombie over. A zombie with a ragged scar across its forehead grabbed my jacket as though it was trying to rip out my heart. As it leaned in for the kill, I backhanded it across its jaw. It staggered sideways, and I slipped past.
The lever was gone, lost somewhere during the slaughter. It didn’t matter. I called out for the shadow, begging it to give me the strength to find a way through this. My pleas were met with silence. No rush of energy, no lifesaving intuition.
The roar of the zombies grew ever louder until it was so overwhelming, I was almost drowning in it. Two more zombies reached for me. I ducked beneath one’s outstretched arms. The second caught me around the neck. It pulled me back with unexpected strength. I struggled to get myself free. Hot breath rolled over my neck. With one last desperate burst of effort, I elbowed the zombie in the face.
The back of its skull exploded.
I staggered back, confusion rushing through my head. Two more zombies went down, their heads turned to scarlet clouds of blood, bone, and brain.
Someone shouted, “Get down!”
I threw myself to the ground and covered my head as another zombie fell. It landed beside me, half its face missing.
Leaves and branches peppered me and the wind pulled at my clothes. The sound of a helicopter sweeping overhead drowned out the droning of the zombies. I looked up in time to see a pair of soldiers crouched in the doorway, then covered my face as more debris battered me.
The roar of the chopper faded. They were leaving. There were still dozens of zombies converging on my location. Why had they saved me, only to abandon me to the rest of the swarm?
Then the chatter of gunfire cut through the trees. The sound was close. Three soldiers were advancing down the road, picking off the zombies with ruthless efficiency.
Pop. Thud.
Pop. Thud.
Behind the soldiers, the chopper was circling around to come back for another pass. It came in low then slowed until it was hovering just above the road. The open side of the aircraft was pointing in my direction, and I realized the soldiers were clearing a path for themselves.
Bullets whined overhead. I ducked and kept my head down until a pair of black boots appeared beside my head. I looked up into the face of a young woman in a helmet that looked three sizes too big for her. There was a grim determination in her eyes, though. When she told me to stand, I obeyed.
The three soldiers formed a triangle around me, their rifles raised to their shoulders. We made our way along the road. The pain in my leg had lessened. Each step I took seemed to be accompanied by the sharp report of a rifle.
My foot landed on some of the debris the helicopter had dislodged. I stumbled and knocked into one of the soldiers, sending a shot wide. He glared at me and pushed me upright.
Despite the soldiers’ efforts, the swarm wasn’t getting any smaller. If anything, all the noise was attracting more of them, but the soldiers kept firing.
I recognized the helicopter as soon as we got near. There was a design painted on the nose—a cartoon caricature of a zombie with the words “Aim for the Brain” written beneath it. It was not a welcome sight.
The last time I’d seen this particular helicopter, it had been taking off from a place called Camp Redfern, saving two of the people I’d been living there with and leaving me behind, presumed bitten. If someone on the chopper recognized me, it might lead to some uncomfortable questions.
The soldiers hurried me toward the door. The swarm was closing in. There were too many of them, and we’d be overwhelmed within seconds. I ducked my head as we passed under the rotors. Backwash buffeted me, almost making me lose my footing.
A man leaned out of the side of the chopper and offered me his hand. I grabbed it, and he hauled me up. I stumbled across the cabin and dropped into a hard, plastic seat. Two of the other soldiers clambered on board. The whine of the chopper’s engine increased, and it lifted off as the woman who’d spoken to me on the road threw herself through the door. I pulled a canvas seatbelt across my lap and locked it in place with shaking hands.
The helicopter rose, tipping away from the zombies. I peered out of the open door. The road and the forest around it were filled with the dead. They stretched as far as I could see. Apparently, I’d just been plucked from the middle of the largest swarm I’d ever seen.
Chapter 3
Flying Home
The helicopter’s door slid shut, blocking my view of the forest below and cutting down on some of the noise.
A slow, bubbling anger formed in my gut, replacing the fear I’d felt as I’d run from the swarm. I’d let my preoccupation with getting my scalpels back distract me. It had almost cost me my life. If the helicopter hadn’t been passing, my insides would be strewn across the highway by now.
One of the soldiers who had stayed in the helicopter handed me a set of headphones with a microphone attached to the side. A sniper rifle rested across her lap. The mystery of the exploding zombie heads had been solved.
I nodded my thanks and slipped on the headphones, pulling the mic down in front of my mouth.
The sniper spoke and a tinny voice filled my ears. “Welcome aboard.” A hint of a Scandinavian accent tinged the words.
I forced a smile. “Thank you. For saving me.”
The words sounded insincere, even to me. I was grateful for the intervention, of course, but the “Aim for the Brain” marking had me spooked.
Could there be more than one helicopter with the same logo on it? It seemed doubtful. If this was the chopper that had rescued Alex and Lucy from Camp Redfern, was there anyone on it who remembered me?
“What’s your name?” the sniper said.
My reply caught in my throat. I’d grown used to using the name I’d stolen from a dead man, but whoever had been in my cave knew my real identity. Should I use that now I was trying to find them? The chance of meeting anyone who knew Edward Taylor was a killer was remote, but I’d spent over half of my life hiding my true self. It felt wrong to stop now.
After a moment’s indecision, I said, “Marcus Black.”
The sniper nodded. “I’m Nilsson.”
The helicopter shuddered and dropped a few feet. My heart leapt. I grabbed a canvas strap hanging from the ceiling to steady myself.
One of the other soldiers, a bulky, muscular man with a quarterback’s square jaw watched me, his eyes cold. I didn’t recognize him, and he seemed just as clueless as to who I was, but it had been a while since the rescue attempt. I wasn’t sure I could remember everyone I’d seen, or even how many soldiers had been at the camp.
I looked around the cabin, trying to look natural as I studied their faces.
The woman who’d helped me to my feet back on the ground was young. Her helmet wasn’t the only thing that seemed too big. She was small, and her fatigues were loose. A patch on her chest read Browne. I caught her gaze, and her eyes were filled with a sharp intensity that belied her age. I looked away almost immediately, but I didn’t think I recognized her.
A man—Weber, according to his name patch—sat beside Browne. Beyond a severe haircut that was barely one step above bald, he was remarkably unremarkable. Had I passed him on the street, I wouldn’t have paid him the slightest bit of attention. He had the sort of bland face that was instantly forgotten, and that made me nervous.
I dug through the clutter of my memories, trying to remember if he’d been one of the soldiers at the camp.
He wasn’t the captain, that much I was sure of, but there’d been other men there. Two maybe? Was he one of them? He wasn’t paying me the slightest bit of attention so far, but maybe he had recognized me and was hiding it.
Frustration gnawed at me. Again, I wished I could draw on the shadow. It might be able to sense who on board would be a threat.
Shaking my head, I turned back to Nilsson. Like Browne, she was young—in her late teens at most—but she was probably the tallest person there. A lock of blonde hair peeked from beneath her helmet. Her skin was p
ale and smooth, and the idea she was a startlingly accurate sniper seemed at odds with her schoolgirl features.
There’d been no sniper fire at Camp Redfern, but that didn’t preclude her having been there in some other capacity.
I was staring at Nilsson when her eyes caught mine.
“Are you okay?” she said.
“Yes, sorry, still a little dazed.”
“It looks like you’ve been through the wars. You were on that bike we saw trashed by the side of the road?”
“Yes.”
“You hurt?”
I shrugged. “Not badly.”
“We’ll get you back to the city as soon as we can, and you can rest up.”
I smiled and nodded.
The city. Exactly where I wanted to be. The idea that the same person who had written the message in my cave might also have sent the helicopter popped into my head. I dismissed it. It was too far-fetched.
There were still two more people in the helicopter: the pilot and another soldier sitting beside him. Surely, the pilot was most likely to have seen me at the camp? This was certainly the same helicopter. Didn’t pilots get assigned to a specific aircraft? Either way, I hadn’t seen the pilot’s face at Camp Redfern, so there was no way to know whether it was the same person unless he reacted in some way.
That left the man sitting beside the pilot. We had our backs to each other. I tried to twist around to see his face, but the seatbelt made it hard to do casually. Nilsson kept glancing up, not saying anything but clearly keeping an eye on me. I stared at the forest sweeping by outside and tried to look like a relieved refugee.
I forced myself to look on the bright side. Not only was I alive, but once I got to the city, I’d be able to start looking for whoever had stolen my scalpels. True, I had no clue where to start, but, clearly, they wanted me there. They might even approach me. I pushed aside the thought that whoever it was must know something of my old life in order to know my real name. The shadow would deal with them once I had my scalpels back.
The helicopter banked, revealing the view to the west. A column of thick black smoke rose from a cluster of buildings nestled in the forest.
Nilsson touched a black button on the side of her headset. “Looks like another camp.”
I tensed at the words. Was she talking about Camp Redfern?
The buildings on the ground were partly obscured by the smoke, and it took me a few seconds to make them out. There were eight. There had only been five cabins at Camp Redfern, six if you included my workshop. I let out a slow breath.
“I don’t see any zees,” Nilsson said.
The view of the burning buildings rolled out of sight. Browne pulled a thick notebook from a pocket attached to the side of the cabin and wrote something in it.
I waited for Nilsson to look at me, then said, “What are you doing out here?”
Browne replied. “We’re zombie spotters.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“You know, like bird spotters. We make notes on the types of zombies we see. Stumblers, groaners, stinkers, that sort of thing.”
Weber smirked.
I was about to respond when another voice cut in over the headset, this one male. “What Private Browne is trying to say is that we’re tracking zombie movements.”
The soldier sitting beside the pilot looked over his shoulder. I turned and looked straight into the face of the last person in the world I wanted to see.
Chapter 4
The Three
Captain Faraday had been leading the team that landed at Camp Redfern. He’d helped Lucy and Alex onto the helicopter, then watched a zombie bite me. With my blessing, he’d left me behind to die. Now, I was sitting in his helicopter, alive and well.
That in itself wasn’t a problem. I could explain my survival easily enough. I didn’t even need to lie. The bite hadn’t gotten through my jacket, so I hadn’t been infected. By the time I realized, the helicopter was gone. After that, I’d spent the night in the cabin and then a cleanup crew, led by Sergeant Campbell, had arrived. We’d been caught by another swarm, and I’d been the only survivor.
It was all true. My survival wasn’t the problem. It was the time Faraday had spent alone with Lucy and Alex that had my heart racing. They’d both seen my true self, part of it anyway. Alex had taken it in his stride, but Lucy had seen through my mask. She knew about the shadow; not literally, maybe, but certainly on an instinctive level. If she’d told Faraday what I was, he’d consider me dangerous. The last thing he’d want was a killer roaming free.
I looked away, feigning interest in the outside world again as I scrambled to think of what to do.
“You’re lucky we came along,” Faraday said. “What were you doing out there?”
I cringed inwardly. “Just trying to survive, really.”
“In the forest, on your own?”
“Yes… No, not on my own. I was part of a community—Sanctuary.”
“Sanctuary? The place that got swallowed up by the sinkholes?” Nilsson said.
They’d heard of Sanctuary. A nest of snakes writhed in my stomach.
“Yes, before that we were at a camp. Parker, a schoolteacher, set it up. But it got overrun, and we had to make a run for it. In a bus.” I was rambling. I closed my mouth.
“From what I heard,” Faraday said, “everyone at Sanctuary was killed.”
A vision of Melissa being dragged into the caves beneath the town flashed through my mind.
I nodded and pressed my lips tight, hoping it might kill the conversation.
Faraday shifted in his seat, as though he was turning to get a better look at me. “But you made it out?” His words were laden with suspicion.
I swallowed and went with the truth. “I was lucky and got to a motorcycle and escaped.” Another image, this time of a man inside a house screaming for help. “I couldn’t save anyone else.”
I looked down at the floor, feigning emotions I couldn’t feel and shielding my face from Captain Faraday.
There was a pause where I hoped Faraday had given up interrogating me, then he said, “You look famil—”
He stopped speaking.
I risked a glance.
The pilot was pointing out the side of the aircraft.
“Looks like there’s another pack,” Nilsson said.
“And it’s close to the walls,” Browne said.
The helicopter tilted, and I got a view of the city. We were above False Creek, an inlet that formed the eastern edge of the downtown core. The skyscrapers that comprised the bulk of the city stood out against the gray sky. Most of them were dark, but there were a few lights scattered here and there. A white van drove down one of the main streets.
It took me a few seconds to find the zombie swarm. It was on the opposite side of the inlet to the city and was small, maybe twenty zombies. They were all clustered around a rectangular hut. The reason they were there was obvious: there were three people standing on top of it, waving at the helicopter.
Faraday pointed toward the building. “Parish, bring us in over the hut.”
The pilot swung the helicopter around and swept low over the city.
The square-jawed soldier sighed. “All these heroics are getting rather tiresome.” His accent was British, each word clearly enunciated. He sounded like someone from a period drama.
“Scared, Adley?” Browne said.
Adley sneered at her like a five-year-old reacting to an older sister’s teasing.
“Cut it out, you two,” Faraday said. “Where there’s one pack, there’s more. The bridge’s defenses aren’t in place yet, and nobody wants these things wandering over and making things more difficult than they already are.”
“Yeah, and it’s, like, a two-minute ride home,” Browne said. “Even you can put up with a few peasants for that long.”
Adley shook his head, a dark look on his face.
Browne leaned in toward me, conspiratorially. “Lord Adley there comes from money. He’s not used to sl
umming it with plebs like us.”
Adley gave her a withering look. I briefly wondered how he’d ended up in the military, then realized I didn’t care.
The helicopter slowed. Nilsson unlatched the door and slid it open. Beneath us, a row of trees swayed under the blast from the rotors. A wave of leaves tumbled across the ground. Most of the zombies looked up, intrigued by this noisy new arrival.
Two men and a woman huddled together on top of the hut. They wore the clothes of people who’d been surviving in the wild for too long, and there was fear on their faces. Even this close to rescue, they were too afraid for hope.
Nilsson raised her rifle to her shoulder. Following a loud crack, one of the zombies went down, thick gray brain matter oozing from its skull.
Weber was sitting beside the door with his own rifle out. It chattered and barked. One of the zombies bucked and twisted but stayed on its feet. He adjusted the rifle against his shoulder and fired another stream of bullets. The top of the zombie’s head exploded in a mass of blood.
Nilsson took out another zombie with a carefully placed round. “You’re a thug, Weber.”
Weber grinned. “Still got a higher kill count than you.”
I tried to summon some emotion as the two soldiers worked their way through the swarm—Nilsson’s precision pitted against Weber’s brute force. There’d been a time when every zombie was an opportunity for me to indulge the shadow’s basest desires. I’d have seen the execution of so many potential subjects as a tremendous waste.
Now, I felt nothing.
Nilsson took out the last zombie, a young woman in a torn dress that had taken no interest in the helicopter. The sniper allowed herself a slight smile, the first I’d seen from her, and pulled away from the door. The helicopter dropped to the ground, settling neatly on an open patch of concrete thirty feet away from the hut.
“Browne, Adley, you’re up,” Faraday said.
Serial Killer Z: Shadows Page 2
