“What happened?” Bannon knelt close to the soldier. The man’s M4 was gone, and so was his KaBar. The Beretta was still in its holster.
“Undead, just outside the door,” the special forces man rasped. “I tried to use the knife,” and then the words were wrenched from his throat in a clotted rasp as Paul’s face seized suddenly into a terrifying spasm of ghastly pain. He panted, gasping for air, his mouth open wide and his tongue swollen between his teeth.
“Tried to lead them away…”
Bannon gnawed on his lip. He touched his fingertips to the soldier’s forehead and the skin there was blazing hot. He fumbled the flashlight from a pocket of his chest rig and played the narrow white beam across the wound.
The flesh along the soldier’s arm was turning grey, as though the skin there was covered in a thick layer of dust. As Bannon watched, horrified, the infection spread to the clenched fingers of the soldier’s fist, and crept up, beneath the thick camouflaged fabric of his uniform.
The soldier’s eyes became clear and focused for an instant. He gazed up into Bannon’s face. “Finish the job,” he gasped in a whisper.
Bannon got to his feet. The soldier’s head lolled to one side and he lay quite still. Bannon picked up the Beretta and thumbed the safety off. He took a deep breath, and then started to tremble. Panic and fear beat black wings against his thoughts.
He aimed the Beretta at a space between the soldier’s eyes.
Chapter 6
“Wait!” Sully snapped suddenly. He got to his feet, but stayed in the corner of the cubicle.
Bannon was standing over the dying soldier with his arm extended, the pistol just inches from the man’s forehead.
“The moment you pull that trigger, whatever was outside – whatever attacked him – is going to come charging through that door downstairs. Every undead ghoul for a mile is going to be drawn to this place.”
Bannon nodded and swallowed hard. Paul’s breathing was shallow, sawing across his throat as though each gasp was a painful effort. The soldier’s hand fluttered by his side, twitching with nerves as his life began to fade. His eyes were screwed tightly shut, his mouth agape. He licked spittle across his parched lips and one of his legs trembled.
“I know,” Bannon said heavily.
“Well before you kill him, let me go. Cut me loose, because I’m your only chance of getting out of here alive.”
Bannon shook his head. “Sully, I can’t do that,” he muttered. “There’s a rescue helicopter coming. It will be here in a few hours. I need you to be on that chopper.”
Sully’s expression became grim and the look on his face was filled with veiled menace and foreboding.
“That’s not going to happen,” he said slowly.
The two men locked eyes, and for long moments there was no sound but the soldier’s dying gasps for breath.
“What makes you so sure?” Bannon responded to Sully’s warning with his own challenge.
“I’m not going back,” Sully said flatly. “I’m not going to be cut into little pieces. I’d rather be dead… and without my help, there’s no way you’re going to survive until that helicopter comes. No way in the world.”
Bannon shrugged. “You make it sound like I care,” Bannon grinned, but it was an unconvincing effort that fixed on his face. He bared his teeth and narrowed his eyes to slits. “I don’t,” he said flatly. “I don’t care whether I make it back or not. I only came here to find Maddie. Now…,” his voice trailed away into silence.
Sully took a step closer. “Maddie is alive,” he said.
Bannon’s eyes snapped with shock. “What?”
“Maddie is alive,” Sully said again.
“I don’t believe you.”
“It’s true,” Sully said fervently. “I’ve seen her.”
Bannon’s gaze narrowed suspiciously. “Where?”
Sully gritted his teeth. “She’s on my boat at the end of the marina,” he sighed. “She’s been there since before the outbreak.”
“What?” Despite himself Bannon felt a sudden surge of hopeful relief. He stepped closer to Sully and stared into the big man’s virulent eyes.
“She’s been there all along,” Sully confessed. The tension seemed to go out of his body. He glanced away for a moment, like he was searching for words, and then stared hard at Bannon. “I have a concealed compartment below the cabin deck. She was hiding there.”
Bannon shook his head. This made no sense. He raised the pistol until it was pointing at Sully’s chest.
“You’re lying.”
Sully grinned coldly. “We were having an affair,” he said. There was a split second of stunned silence, and then it all poured out in a torrent of tortured words.
“Maddie and I have been sleeping together for over a year,” Sully breathed. “Every time you put to sea, she would come and stay on the boat with me. When I sailed with you, she would stay aboard the boat. That’s where she is. That’s why I knew you were never going to find her in the fucking apartment complex. We’re in love.”
Bannon flinched and shrank away, feeling the monstrous enormity of his shock as a series of tremors that turned his legs to jelly. The gun dropped to his side. He glared at Sully, slowly shaking his head in denial, and yet somehow sensing deep within himself the sudden truth.
He felt himself reeling. The world seemed to tilt off its axis. He clutched for the desk to steady himself and as he did, the anger came surging through him – a sudden red mist of rage that clouded his mind and eyes.
“You were sleeping with Maddie?” he croaked.
Turmoil swirled within him, bubbling as hissing like the brew of a witch’s cauldron – a fusion of poisons and toxic emotions that left him gasping.
Sully nodded, and his expression slowly became smug and triumphant. “Every day you were at sea,” he taunted softly. He licked his lips lasciviously, as though the taste of Bannon’s wife was a delicious flavor he could still savor.
“She was hot for it,” Sully goaded. “She couldn’t get enough of my cock. Your wife begged me to fuck her, y’know?” He stopped talking suddenly, and his expression became a thoughtful mockery. “No…” he said at last. “… I guess you don’t know.”
Bannon’s face twisted into an ugly snarl. “You’re full of shit!” he said defiantly. “You just want me to fucking kill you. You’re trying to get me to blow your good-for-nothing brains out the back of your hideous fucking head!”
“Maybe…” Sully’s voice was unnaturally calm, coarsened by the infection that swirled in his veins so that each word was a gravelly rasp. “And maybe I’m just telling you the truth.”
“No!” Bannon hissed. “You’re fucking lying!” The gun came up again, steady as a rock, and aimed between the big man’s wide open eyes. “If Maddie was on your boat, you would have brought her with you to the sports field,” he hissed, his words laced with venom.
Sully looked bored. “I couldn’t,” he said. “The entire waterfront is crawling with undead. The only way to get Maddie to the pick up point would have been for her to swim across the marina. And as you know…”
“… Maddie doesn’t swim,” grunted Bannon heavily, the realization like a sickening punch to his guts.
It was true!
Bannon felt himself imploding, shriveling. He felt his eyes mist over. Suddenly he felt a hundred years old – worn down by the strain and tension, the fear and the sudden devastation. He had sensed all along that once the mission was over, he would need time to mourn the death of his wife. Now – suddenly – he was confronted with the gut-wrenching shock of her monstrous betrayal.
And her survival.
He lifted his head and stared into the implacable eyes of John Sully. “You betrayed me,” he said softly.
Sully nodded. “Yes, I did. So did Madeline.”
Behind Bannon, the special forces soldier gave a sudden gasp of ragged breath, and then his back arched horribly as though his entire body was racked by seizure. The man’s heels j
uddered, tapping out a macabre tattoo on the ground. Bannon watched in ghastly fascination. The soldier turned his head and his eyes came open for an instant. He saw Bannon, tried to form words but his mouth was twisted with pain. He sighed, and then went limp with the slow softening relaxation of death.
Bannon went to the body and thrust the barrel of the Beretta between the dead man’s eyes. His face was screwed up into a grim, remorseless expression, suddenly devoid of compassion and hesitation… and fear. He shot the soldier, and then turned his baleful eyes back to Sully.
“Take me to my wife.”
Chapter 7.
Bannon snatched the pocket knife from out of the chest rig and cut the cable ties around Sully’s wrists. The echo of the gunshot had faded into the night, but the reverberation of the deafening sound had drawn the undead. They swarmed towards the downstairs foyer. Bannon heard the door crash back against its hinges, and then there was a rising shrill of demented voices, filling the air in the darkness below where he stood.
He looked around him wildly. The desk was the closest. He dragged it across the top of the stairs. Sully had his arms wrapped around one of the filing cabinets like an embrace. The muscles in his shoulders flexed and he dead-lifted the heavy metal. The drawers flew open, spilling files and papers across the floor. Bannon set fire to the litter while Sully heaved the second filing cabinet across to the makeshift barricade.
“The massage tables!” Bannon snapped.
Sully went into the closest cubicle. The table was on castors, each wheel locked to prevent it rolling. He kicked the brakes off and pushed the table ahead of him. Together they upended the heavy piece and sent it clattering and crashing down the narrow staircase.
“Want the other one?” Sully asked
Bannon shook his head. “No time,” he said.
The flames had caught quickly. The thick sheaths of paper blackened and curled, then burst alight. Smoke began to fill the office. Bannon tugged the Beretta from the dead soldier’s holster. He had a pistol in each hand. The fire crept up the wooden door frame and cast leaping demented shadows across the walls. Bannon fired six shots down the stairs, aiming blindly into the smoke as the snarling growl of inhuman voices became feverish.
“We’ve got to get out of here – now! The bathroom window!” Bannon spat. “Go!” There was enough light from the fire to show the darkened passageway and the closed door. Sully went lumbering along the hallway. Bannon stood at the top of the stairs for a moment longer. He drew the flashlight and sucked in a deep quivering breath. The beam sliced down through the blackness of the stairwell.
The top of the stairs formed a rectangular frame for the ghastly image that burned across his eyes. Writhing bodies, struggling over each other, reached out for him, thrusting through the fire. Yellow blazing eyes, demented faces snarled. One of the ghouls lunged at the barricade and went tumbling backwards down the narrow steps, shrieking as fire swept over his flailing body. The rags he wore caught ablaze and he staggered like a human torch while other insane ghouls knocked the creature to the ground and clambered over it.
Bannon fired three shots into the head of the closest zombie. It was a woman, her wiry hair fizzing and smoldering to her skull as she hurled herself through the blaze. She gnashed her teeth, leaping at Bannon. He felt the kick of the gun’s recoil pulse up through the muscles of his arm, and the woman’s face disappeared, snapped back into the darkness by the brutal impact of the point-blank rounds. The shrieking sound of her voice was cut off abruptly.
Bannon turned and fled down the hallway just as bright flickering flames danced across the office floor and began to lick at the flesh of the dead special forces soldier.
The bathroom door was swinging open. Bannon crashed into the room, bouncing off a wall. Sully put his fist through the glass louvers of the narrow window and they exploded outward in a shower of glittering shards. Bannon thrust his head through the opening. Cold night air overwhelmed his senses. He could smell the salt of the ocean, and hear the faint distant rumble of surf on rocks.
And he could smell smoke.
The end of the alleyway backed onto a side street that was bright with the light of new fires. Dark silhouettes drifted before the leaping flames as the undead wandered the streets. They moved in restless packs, staggering and lunging in aimless chaos as they scoured the remains of Grey Stone for living flesh.
“Good God.” Bannon tried to guess their numbers but it was impossible. The undead moved in and out of buildings, prowled on the edges of the light, and ghosted in the shadows. A house suddenly erupted in flames at the far end of the street and two ghouls came reeling from within, both of them on fire so that the pungent stench of burning flesh carried on the breeze and overwhelmed him. Bannon tasted the wretched nausea of it in the back of his throat and gagged.
“We have to jump into the trash bin,” Bannon choked out the words. He spat the taste of death out of his mouth and then jammed the two pistols inside the chest rig. Flames had taken hold along the walls of the office. Billows of writhing smoke swirled into the tiny bathroom. Bannon could hear the undead clawing at the makeshift barricade. He went out through the window, clinging to the narrow wooden frame…
… and then let go.
He fell awkwardly into a muffled explosion of cardboard boxes, and the slimy refuse of rotting vegetables. The commercial waste bin was filled to overflowing. He landed on his back, felt the wind punched out of him by the shock of the impact, but got to his feet with a stunned grunt. He looked up. Sully was wriggling himself out through the window, the big man’s legs dangling in mid air as he held himself steady. Bannon clambered out of the big steel bin and crouched in the shadows. His eyes swept the alleyway. He filled his fist with one of the Beretta’s and waited.
Sully dropped like a stone, plummeting feet first into the overflowing pile of rotting trash. He landed heavily and the sound seemed to jar the night air. Bannon cringed, and tried to melt against the cold brick wall. Sully climbed out of the trash bin and pressed his face close.
“Get rid of the vest,” Sully whispered.
“Why?”
“Because the only way you’re going to reach Maddie is to swim across the marina,” Sully’s tone became harsh, “and you ain’t gonna do that with a heavy harness weighing you down.”
A twisted, tottering shadow suddenly appeared at the end of the alleyway, the undead ghoul’s features shrouded in darkness, but its outline backlit by the burning flames along the distant street. Bannon cringed and held his breath. The zombie stood, perfectly still for several seconds, and then its body took on the posture of a stalking animal, suddenly alert and aware. It took three paces down the alley towards were Bannon and Sully crouched, and then it stopped again. Bannon saw the ghoul slowly turn its head and he stared, appalled and fascinated. His heart skipped a beat. He trickled air from his nostrils, not daring to move. The ghoul came a step closer, so that he was poised just a few feet away from where Bannon hid, the zombie craning forward as though trying to see shape within the dark shadows.
In one of its bloodied gnarled hands, the zombie carried the limb of a small child. It was a leg, severed at the knee, the foot still covered by a shiny black shoe. The flesh had been gnawed away, back to the bone. The zombie dipped its head and gnawed at the gristle of cartilage and stringy muscle that still hung in shreds.
Bannon gaped in fascinated skin-crawling horror.
Suddenly Sully got to his feet. Bannon’s mind went white with pure fear. Sully stepped out of the darkness, moving in ungainly shuffling strides. He brushed against the ghoul. The undead growled. Sully nudged the zombie again, and the creature turned and lumbered from the alley. Bannon’s mouth was dry. He stifled an uneasy qualm of fear. He watched Sully teeter to the end of the alley and stand there, his head turning both ways before he turned back to where Bannon was hiding. Sully waved his hand and Bannon rose cautiously to his feet.
He could hear glass breaking in the upstairs office and the trampling sou
nd of stomping feet. He shrugged off the chest rig and then rummaged around in the trash bin. He wrapped the small emergency beacon in several plastic bags and stuffed it down inside his shirt.
He still had both Beretta’s. He thrust one into the waistband of his jeans, and came creeping along the dark shadowed wall of the alley with the other pistol held out in front of him.
Sully was waiting impatiently. He saw that Bannon had cast off the vest but he said nothing. He pointed.
“We double around,” he said. “We follow the rear of these buildings along the street to the next intersection. Then we cross the road and make our way back to the waterfront, following the headland. We’ve got a better chance once we get into the trees around the lookout.”
“Then what?”
“Then – if you’re still alive – I’ll take you down the ridge to the marina.”
Chapter 8.
They hugged the fence line and the walls of the buildings, keeping to the shadows with their eyes moving restlessly, breathing sharp and shallow, Bannon’s nerves screwed up tight as they worked their way in starts and pauses towards the corner of the block.
The air was cold, the night inky black. There was no moon, and clouds of swirling smoke obscured the pinpricks of starlight. They ducked into a narrow alcove of deep shadow and Bannon saw his breath softly misting before his face.
Across the street, the fire was leaping from one building to the next. Most of the structures were houses. Their roofs smoldered and then burst into bright little tongues of flame. Bannon heard glass shattering. He leaned forward, beyond the veil of shadow and stared along the sidewalk.
“Another fifty feet,” he said. “Maybe a bit more before we reach the corner.”
Sully nodded, said nothing. The big man was staring directly across the street where one of the undead had suddenly appeared in the doorway of a house. The ghoul stood swaying on the porch, its head tilted in an attitude of concentration. It seemed to be feeling the air, its body twitching. Sully clasped Bannon’s shoulder and pointed.
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