by M. Lorrox
Riley studies Charlie’s face before responding, then he smiles. “I’m listening.”
As Charlie jogs across the large parking lot toward the Pentagon, at first one, then a dozen, then a hundred dogs run behind him. One runs up alongside him, and he looks down. He smiles. “Rusty!”
-Bark!-
Charlie glances over his shoulder. HOLY SHITBALLS!
A mass of fur strides behind him. There are dogs of all sizes and breeds, some with manicured coats and fancy collars, and some that look wild, mangy, and hungry.
Charlie looks back at Rusty. “I see you’ve made some friends.”
-Bark!-
A camerawoman recording the scene from an overpass loses it when the man and the dogs following him enter her frame. “Mark, turn around! Do you fucking see this?”
Mark turns and looks, careful not to block the camera. “Tell me we’re still rolling!”
“Totally dude! What the shit, man!”
“I don’t have a fuckin’ clue.”
Over their earpieces, they hear: “Hey! We’re live, stop fucking swearing and start reporting!”
Mark whips around to face the camera. “An amazing development is unfolding before our eyes…”
When he reaches the building, Charlie stops and turns to Rusty. “Stay.”
Rusty sits down and tilts his head. The dogs behind him sit down, too.
Charlie jogs along the side of the building, away from his huge entourage of amazingly well-behaved dogs, looking in the windows to offices until he finds the extra-large one he’s supposed to find. He pulls a flare from his pocket, ignites it, and slams it into the ground between the two windows of the larger room. Then, he runs back to Rusty.
Two squads of mixed military forces run toward the flare. When they’re twenty-five yards from the site, most of the soldiers drop to their knees and take firing positions with their M4 carbines. Others set up M249 light machine guns and assemble ammunition stockpiles. Two Humvees with roof mounted, Gatling-style M134 miniguns drive up and flank the groups of the soldiers, and a M1-Abrams tank rolls into the middle.
Charlie scans the faces of the soldiers. All human. All tough. All ready. He slides a pair of goggles over his eyes, holds his arm high into the air, and gives a thumbs-up.
When Riley sees Charlie’s signal through his binoculars, he lowers them and clears his throat. “Mrs. Riggs, correct?”
“Miss Riggs. Yes?”
“Everybody rolling?”
She turns around to the collection of cameras trained on the scene outside the Pentagon’s wall. “Oh yeah, everybody’s rolling.”
Riley picks up a radio and presses the button. “Fire.”
The M1-Abrams fires a 120mm round out of its main gun at the wall marked by the flare. The wall explodes into a cloud of dust and debris.
Charlie starts running and is soon enveloped by the cloud. He can’t see much through the dust, but he can see the flare.
Rusty and the dogs follow him.
Wren watches a video feed and rubs her hands together. She clears her throat. “General?”
Riley is watching through binoculars. “Yes, Miss Riggs?”
“Are we about to broadcast, um, the zombie-a-fied Pentagon personnel being cut down by machine guns?”
He drops his binoculars and turns to her with a slight bit of concern in his eyes. “You might want to warn your audience.”
Wren jumps up and yells out to the camera operators and reporters. “Graphic images! Get CG’s up warning viewers, NOW!”
When the Pentagon’s outer wall is breached, alarms sound throughout the gigantic building. Eddy turns to his mom. “What now?”
She shrugs. “I don’t know. Maybe your dad just joined the party.”
Eddy nods. “Took him long enough. Alright, so where should we go?” This place is a maze.
For the last few minutes, they’ve explored one hall of the massive, secret facility. Although they haven’t found Dr. Melgaard, they’ve found other disturbing and surprising things. One large room had two dozen different zombies in cages—in various states of health, decay, or dissection. Another room was filled with racks of computers and databanks. Another had high-tech medical equipment. And against one edge of the facility, they found what appeared to be an underground rail station.
They took special note of where that was before continuing their hunt.
With a sigh, Sadie points to the next intersecting hallway to the left. “Let’s head down that way. If we’re not methodical, we might not ever find them.”
At the end of a hallway off the end of a hallway that Sadie and Eddy haven’t even seen yet, a white cloth is draped over June’s face. Dr. Melgaard and Michael Turner are leaning over June’s body, but they both jolt upright when they hear the alarm.
Lars sets down his scalpel, looks at his watch, and grimaces. “This is much sooner than I expected. How much material have you collected?”
Michael yanks the plunger back on the bone marrow extractor, sucking thick pinkish-red goo into the tube. He disengages the tube from the needle, then sets it on a pile of other collection tubes on the table they’ve set by their side. “Three-point-five liters of blood and about fourteen hundred milliliters of red marrow.”
“That will have to suffice. We need to prepare for evacuation.”
Michael rips the needle out of the bone in June’s left upper arm and moves it down an inch toward her elbow. He positions the needle a few inches to the side as well, in line with the previous extraction sites that travel up her arm to her shoulder—forming a spiral pattern on her arm. “Just another hundred milliliters.”
Lars picks up a set of forceps. “Never mind the bone marrow. Is the oxygenator running in the cooler?”
Michael connects another tube to the needle, then stabs the needle through June’s arm’s muscle and into her humerus. He lets go of it, leaving the large syringe-like device jutting out from her arm while he bends down to the floor. He flips a switch next to a microcontroller attached to a personal-sized picnic cooler, and a pump and fan start running. Blood cycles up a tube on one side of the device and flows back into the cooler on the other. “Running.” He hits another button and a series of digits flash on a tiny LCD screen wired to the microcontroller. “Temperature is good, blood O2 levels low but acceptable, CO2 filter at 100%, battery at 99%.”
Michael stands and bumps the needle, torqueing the thin stainless-steel tube that is jabbed into June’s strapped-down arm. The needle snaps and the empty sample tube falls to the floor. “Oops.”
“Never mind. Bring the cooler up here. I’m ready to extract the ovaries.”
Michael lifts the cooler onto the table and opens the lid a crack. Inside, half of the cooler is sectioned off and filled with ice. The other section has June’s blood spraying down from one tube near the top, while other blood is drawn up into the oxygenator from a pool at the bottom.
Lars snips a piece of tissue in June’s abdomen and lifts out her left ovary.
He drops it into the cooler. It makes a little splash when it hits the pool of her blood, and a few drops make it out of the cracked-open lid. Lars then adds her right ovary to share the space with another little splash. Michael closes the lid of the cooler and slides a little latch to secure it closed.
Lars takes off his gloves and chuckles at Michael’s homemade organ preserver and transporter. “Well done, Michael, well done.”
“Thank you, sir.” Michael tears the broken needle out from June’s arm.
Lars wipes his forehead and looks at the body on the gurney for a moment, then he grabs a backpack from the floor near the counter and starts dropping the bags of additional blood and bone marrow tubes inside. “Arm the detonator. I’ll fire up the incinerator, and then the evac vehicle. You dispose of the specimen, then meet me at the tunnel.”
“Yeah, yeah, I will, but I’m going to get another hundred milliliters of marrow first.” Michael stabs a new needle into the same hole.
Lar
s shoulders the backpack and glares at his assistant. “Don’t be a fool. We have enough for most our needs.”
Michael glares back. “My experiments need more material, and you know damn well that your work will take priority over mine. I’ll ready the explosives and then finish up. Take the first EV and fire up the second. I’ll toss her in the incinerator, and I’ll be right behind you.”
Lars glances at his watch again. Stubborn fool. He picks up the homemade organ transporter and walks toward the door. “Trigger the explosions as soon as you’re in the tunnel; we can’t let our activities be discovered.” He walks out without waiting for a reply.
In the Costanza/Tubman suite, Madeline strolls across the living room to the kitchen where Li Chen and Lorenzo look annoyed. “Not much in that bedroom, a really old looking staff-weapon-thing of some kind, but that’s about it.” She slides into a chair at the table. “Any luck here?”
Lorenzo slams the freezer door closed. “None.” His eyes smolder at Li Chen, who is just leaning against the counter, watching him. “You could be helping, you know.”
Li Chen motions over his shoulder. “I am. I brought them.”
Lorenzo walks out of the kitchen and toward the Costanzas’ bedroom. “Any luck in here? Find anything?”
Steve is by the window with his head in Sadie’s trunk. “Well, I didn’t find the ring, but there’s a lot of weird stuff in here.” He notices a pouch tucked underneath part of an old, weird-looking helmet, and he pulls it out.
Lorenzo sighs and walks over. “We need that ring! I don’t care about anything—”
Steve dumps the pouch onto the disheveled pile of things in the trunk, then he smiles. He turns to see Lorenzo’s eyes gleaming. “These any good?”
Lorenzo pushes Steve aside and drops onto his knees in front of the trunk. The contents have been rifled through and jumbled into a mess, but now laying on top of the mess are two pieces of reddish gold that Lorenzo never thought he’d ever see with his own eyes.
He blinks and shakes his head. This cannot be! He grabs them gently and turns them over, then squeals with delight. It is! It is! They weren’t destroyed! He places them back into the pouch, then shifts some of the other items in the trunk and looks underneath them. He nods, stands, and turns to face Li Chen and Madeline, who followed him into the room.
“Quick, finish searching for the ring, but we’re taking this trunk. I’ll pay you the triple price I promised, and I’ll pay another triple if you find that ring!”
Madeline rushes past Li Chen toward the bathroom and pauses at the mirror. “Uh, guys, there’s a message on the mirror.”
Li Chen is searching the bedside tables. “Does it say where the ring is?” He flips through a bible and looks for any carved out hiding places in the pages.
“Umm, no. Never mind, it doesn’t matter.” She starts looking through the jewelry and makeup on the counter. Oooh, those emeralds are sparkly…
As Charlie cleaves through the sternum on one zombie and continues to slice its heart in half with Ketsueki Seishin, an ankle-biter grabs onto his leg.
He glances down at it long enough to aim his blade straight through its temple. It goes limp and twitches. Charlie pulls the blade out as the dogs catch up to him, running and jumping over corpses and rubble.
Charlie turns just in time to see a huge zombie launching itself at him with the goal of taking him to the ground.
Before being a zombie, it must have played football in college, because the massive zombie’s form in the tackle is nearly perfect—it strikes Charlie hard, just an inch above his waist. Charlie slips a foot backward to brace himself, and the zombie crunches into Charlie’s chest—but it doesn’t succeed in pushing Charlie back.
Charlie looks down at the struggling zombie. A young Labrador Retriever has taken hold of one of the zombie’s legs and bites it while jerking its head back and forth, growling. Charlie grits his teeth, and with his left hand, he grabs the zombie by the neck and squeezes. His fingers pierce the skin near a jugular vein and carotid artery, and he keeps squeezing.
Another zombie runs toward him, and a Weimaraner launches at the zombie, snapping its teeth around the zombie’s throat. The zombie grabs the dog and tears it off, throwing it to the side and successfully tearing its own throat out in the process. As another dog runs toward it, it looks at Charlie and tries to hiss. Blood splatters out from its wound as raspy air rushes out of its lungs.
Charlie cuts it from its crotch to its gaping, blood-spurting neck-hole with a quick swipe of his sword, and it drops. He does this while still squeezing the shit out of the ex-football-playing zombie’s neck. Its arms flail punches at Charlie, but he ignores them. When his fingers meet inside the neck, he twists his wrist to the side, tearing the windpipe and ripping the blood vessels, but also snapping the vertebrae in its neck from the sudden force.
It drops with a thud to his feet.
Charlie notices his reflection in a piece of glass on the far wall of the large room. While he pauses, more dogs emerge from the dust cloud behind him, and blood drips from his hand and from his sword. He blinks and realizes his reflection is on the glazing over a large framed photograph. A split second later, when he registers what the image is of, Charlie shudders, then he sneers.
It’s a photo of an immense man in a Navy uniform—a high-ranking officer by the many gold stripes on the sleeves of his Service Dress Blues—who is shaking hands with the president. They’re standing behind an enormous football trophy. A crowd behind them—all in military uniforms—clap and are frozen in their cheers.
Charlie’s lip curls as he charges for a group of zombies before him.
Melgaard. You did this, I know it.
Charlie cuts the heads off two zombies.
I’m going to kill you.
He stabs through one zombie and slices the sword out from its belly, spraying blood along the wall.
And if you hurt June—
With his other hand, he grabs a zombie by its collar and launches it into a group of dogs nearby.
I’ll flay you alive.
Korina steps out of the medical tent set up outside the Pentagon, then leans against the side of a truck. What a day, and it’s not over. She stands back up and turns to find Flying Eagle and Jambavan walking her way.
“Anything to report on Zaman? Or Wollstone?”
Flying Eagle half shrugs. “Prime Minister Zaman should be okay, but he’s unconscious, and he’s lost some blood. Wollstone has vitals, but they’re extremely weak.” He puts his hands in his pockets. “They’ve called for a helicopter for Wollstone, and an ambulance for Zaman. They’re going to INOVA Fairfax. The others?”
Korina motions over her shoulder and nods. “They’re all going to INOVA Fairfax, the other elders will take a commuter bus. They’re banged up—some worse than others—but they’ll all live.”
Jambavan steps alongside his knight and places his arm on her shoulder. “You helped save them. Everyone is very grateful for you having come.”
She looks at her tall squire. “With help.” She turns and smiles at Flying Eagle. “With a lot of help, and we’re not done yet.”
Flying Eagle and Jambavan snap into an attention stance.
“Eagle, I’ve got guards looking after the hotel and the other elders, but I need you to stay here with the injured until they’re all treated and moved. I’m tasking you with their safety.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“If other knights arrive here, take command. Without further instructions, if possible, give aid to the military.
Command? “Uhh-nderstood.”
She turns to Jambavan. “Gather some medical supplies and blood and meet me at the car in two minutes.”
He frowns. “I’m not sure what I can get that fast without getting permission and—”
“You’ll get nowhere standing there! Now go!”
He turns and dashes into the medical tent.
Eagle raises an eyebrow. “Everything alright?”
Korina walks past him toward her SUV. “As long as things don’t get worse.”
When she reaches her vehicle, she starts it and tunes her CB. She holds down the button on the transceiver. “This is Captain Sarkis to Adventure Bus V, come in. Over.”
She waits for a response to play through the SUVs speakers.
“Hey Captain, this is Frank on the Ad-ven BV, what can I do for you? Over.”
“What’s your status? Have you left DC yet? Over.”
“Well, our status is that the tour group is inside the building, and I’m sitting here at the wheel with a PB and J. What’s this about leaving DC? Over.”
Goddamn it! She looks in her rearview mirror and sees Jambavan running toward the SUV with some bags over his shoulders and additional supplies in his forearms.
“Oh, hold on there, Captain. Looks like somebody’s coming now. I guess we’re leaving early? Over.”
She exhales. “Frank, get everyone on the bus and radio when you’re DRIVING. Over.”
“Copy that. Out.”
When Eddy and Sadie turn a corner and see someone sitting in a chair, they ignore the rooms to either side and jog over. When they get closer, they realize that the person isn’t exactly sitting in the chair, but is slumped. When Eddy recognizes who it is, he runs the last few steps to her.
He gently shakes her shoulder. Her head flops loosely forward, bending way too far. She’s…dead.
Sadie looks around and whispers, “We must be close. Who was that?”
Eddy whispers back, “A friend of June’s. Her name was Beatrice.”
Sadie grabs Eddy’s shoulder and pulls him back up to stand. Her brow is furrowed. She whispers, “Can you hear anything?”
Eddy closes his eyes and focuses. Yes, he can hear what sounds like wheels clicking on tiles. Down and to the right.
He opens his eyes and motions in the sound’s direction. Sadie nods, and they jog to the intersection of the next hallway as quietly as they can. As they peek around the corner, they see a set of impact-traffic doors—the kinds in warehouses that are pushed open by carts—swing back into the hallway, then shut.
