Gabriel had stopped listening to me, he seemed much more interested in what was on the road a few feet ahead of us. He pulled out five flares from his pack without looking, cracked the tops and scattered them around the street.
We’d finally made it to where I’d foolishly left Greg to fight for himself. There was one of my pistols on the side of the road, one dead alien, a very dead alien, lying on her face with her arms stretched out and gripping one of their bizarre guns. To me though, it was the blue blood that was the much more interesting element.
It was everywhere, and I mean every-fucking-where. Splattered on the walls, pooled on the ground, sprayed across the body, the only body.
It was a disproportional mess for the one prostrate figure in the scene, and it looked like most of it had been washed away by the rain.
“What do you think happened here after you left?” Gabe said as he made his way over to the body and rolled it over.
I shrugged while looking around, “I reckon he got out of here, had a few of them tail him and the rest zombified, well, except for that one.”
The cause of death became apparent with the corpse moved to its back, the chest piece was completely caved in along with her mask, a small amount of blue blood leaking through some of the tiny cracks.
“I think you’re wrong.” He said bluntly and without emotion while maintaining his crouched position next to the body.
“Oh yeah? Walk me through it then, what do you think happened?” I said indignantly, which he ignored.
“Check this out, the gun’s blade has got some red blood, fresh too. Means at least someone human… ish got shanked. And check out the spray patterns, this is a few dozen people’s worth of carnage, means they’ve got a healing factor at least as good as yours.”
He paused for a little while and looked up at me, expecting me to give him a response of some sorts probably, but I was enjoying watching his process too much to even begin to suggest an idea.
He shook his head in disappointment, “You should really consider thinking some time, it’d do you good. I think what we’re seeing is the result of Greg losing out, but there’s nowhere near enough blood for him to be dead, at least not here.”
He stood up and started acting out the scenario, “I reckon he’s gone to take a shot on that dead one there and then bam, someone’s come up behind him, knocking the gun over there, then grabbed him from behind, holding him in place so that one can shank him.”
A smile played along Gabe’s face as he played through the scenario in his head. “But they just don’t know how much Greg can take, he waits until she stabs him then head-butts her, denting her helmet, but he’s not done. He throws his head back and dazes the one who’s grabbed him, jumps up, using the grappler as a support, then kicks in the now dead one’s chest-piece.”
Gabe practically leapt over to the body and pointed to several parts of the dented mask, “That’s when he made his mistake, he’s pissed off that he’s been cut. He stomps he big Russian ass over here and stomps on the back of her head a couple of times before someone even bigger than him manages to get to him, smashes him over the head, see the small spray right there?” He said while pointing at nothing I could see before continuing on with his dramatic retelling.
“Only way to get that is big fella hitting small fella, in this case bloody big fella hitting slightly-smaller-but-still-pretty-damn-big fella. Then, based off of the bits of cloth and that blood trail, they dragged him off.”
I was impressed, very impressed, and I’m sure he could tell, “Very nice, detailed. So, we just follow the trail then?”
“Ha, God no, trail goes dead less than ten feet down the road. No, the best thing to do now is to get you back to your gaggle.”
Now I was confused, very confused, “What? What about all that stuff you said before to convince me to come out here? How Greg wouldn’t leave me to die and I shouldn’t leave him either?”
Gabe smiled as he walked over and grabbed my pistol, “You are really impressionable, you know that? And I didn’t say we’re giving up on him. I’m just saying that we’ve been wandering around for at least an hour now and we haven’t exactly been in the best of communication with the others. Plus, Greg’s now in the custody of several big and angry women, they’ll make sure he doesn’t get eaten.”
He tossed me my pistol, which I tucked into the back of my pants, and then my walkie-talkie, “Give ‘em a call, tell them we’re coming.”
I was hesitant, calling them back after an hour of uncertainty, especially seeing as we hadn’t found Greg, the whole reason that we’d been disagreeing in the first place. Being wrong didn’t suit me all that well, but I knew it was the right thing to do, I turned it back on and prepared to let them know I’d failed.
“-ohn! Where the fuck are you!? I need your help!” it was Harry.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, slow down. What is it?”
“Thank fuck, where have you been!? Never mind, doesn’t matter. Dude, you have to get back here, like now! Those survivors? At least three of them have been bitten, and now the rest are talking about bailing, Kate and Wolfgang too. I don’t think I can keep them at bay for much longer.” His voice sounded like it was about to give out at the end of his speedy run-down.
Yet another person I’d let down by leaving behind.
“You’re doing great, Gabe and I are coming back right now. Just hold on.” I didn’t wait for a response, didn’t get one either. I stuffed the walkie-talkie into my pocket and tucked the knife between my belt loop and my belt, “Can you run?”
Gabriel shrugged, waggled his right leg for a second, “Yeah, sure. Where’d they say were again?”
“Sub-station, not sure which one, but it shouldn’t be hard to find one, not many’d be close to the park.”
He scratched his jaw and made a face like he was doing math. Probably had something to do with survival odds.
“What is it?” I blurted out impatiently.
“You think you’d be able to keep quiet? And I mean like a mouse crossing through a field of pillows while wearing socks five kilometres away kind of quiet.”
I glossed over his incredibly specific example and went straight to “Yeah, probably.”
“No. Probably isn’t gonna cut it John, you have to be certain. There’s a couple hundred corpses down there at least and if you aren’t silent they will fuck us up so quickly it’ll make your head spin as they rip it off. Close quarters and corpses is a recipe for disaster.”
‘Clearly wasn’t watching when we had the elevator incident.’ I bragged…
To myself.
Shut up.
“Alright, I promise I’ll be quiet. Now, what are you on about?” I said as I shook the alien’s gun from her grip and checked the sights. It was no bigger than a standard M4 rifle, had no obvious clip or magazine, glowed in a few places and, despite its sleek white design, weighed about the same amount as a super model.
Gabriel gestured back from the direction we came from, “We can take a route under Queen Street, it’ll lead us through all the stops toward the park and beyond. Problem is there’s fuck-all lights, most of its unfinished, and there’s a cubic shit-ton of corpses who wandered down there once they were done in the shops. And that ain’t even the worst of it.” As he finished the sentence it was clear that he really had zero interest in telling me what the worst part was.
Unfortunately for him, I’m a curious little blighter, “Come on then, spit it up. What’s so bad that we have to-”
“Steven’s down there.”
Creeping Darkness
Steven. I knew he was still kicking around, but I’d figured, I’d hoped, that I’d at least seen the last of him. The deeper we went into the department store the worse the feeling we were being watched got. “You’re sure that this place is clear?” I whispered to my leader.
“Yes. Now would you shut the fuck up? You’re going to draw ‘em in.”
It was at that moment that I realised that I was the char
acter that I hated in almost every single horror film I’d ever seen, I couldn’t help it though.
Everything was so… creepy. I was convinced that I was a few seconds from having my flesh ripped to pieces if not by a zombie, by the ever increasing darkness.
Decreasing light? Increasing darkness? I don’t know, it was fucking dark and my eyes were refusing to adjust after the explosion and the dust and the flares.
Take care of your eyes boys and girls.
It’ll come back to haunt you otherwise.
There was movement a few feet to the left of Gabe, “Hey, did you see that?”
“Oh my- What?” He groaned while looking around, “I don’t see shit man, what are you babbling about?”
Disappointment and doubt in myself overtook my mouth, “I… Nothing, just keep going.”
“No, you need to tell me, is there something that you see that I don’t? I don’t need to be chomped on by something when you could’ve warned me.”
‘Ah, so he watches horror films as well.’ “I thought I saw something moving, but it’s stopped now, if it were a problem we’d know.” I said gullibly.
Gabe didn’t respond, he just peered around the darkness of the store, shrugged, and kept leading the way, “Alright, if you say so, we’re almost there anyway.”
I think that the ‘being watched’ feeling had contaminated both of us as we had our heads on swivels. No matter how much I tried to force the idea out of my head I just couldn’t calm down, it was like something just out of view was calling out to us, trying to throw us off.
“There!” I yelled just a little too loud as I saw more movement.
Gabe didn’t complain that time, no, instead he pulled out the torch that he’d clearly had on hand and illuminated the darkness, and a single twitching figure with downcast eyes, “St… Steven?”
Instantly the figure looked up and darted his eyes between us and... smiled? That was right before he twitched again, bellowing an inhuman command into the air before disappearing toward the exit.
“Something tells me we should g- Gabe!”
He didn’t have time to turn as a creature from the darkness leapt onto his waiting backpack, causing them both to tumble to the ground and the torch to clatter and roll away.
I couldn’t see the zed that was trying its best to take a chomp into Gabe’s waiting neck, but that didn’t stop me, I pulled out my pistol, closed my eyes, and fired three times.
There was a long pause before I got my relief, “Did you seriously just shoot at me with your eyes closed!?”
It seemed an unimportant question at the present time, I stuffed the pistol back into my pocket and, while running past him, lifted up Gabe into a standing position and dragged him along, “My torch!”
“I’ll get you a new one! Which way now!?” I growled while looking around at the waiting figures as the light flashed past them, like they were waiting for the right moment to follow us.
It was still hard wrapping my head around the idea that these things could strategize let alone follow orders.
“Just keep going straight! There’s a few curtains that lead to the site!” Gabe yelled over the sound of the steady growling of the stationary zeds as he got his own footing and struggled to keep up with me.
I wanted to stop and find out what the zeds were waiting for, it seemed like an insanely poor decision though, especially as it became clear that they were taking small steps toward us as we got further away.
I should’ve figured it out sooner, but I was too busy running to realise that they were waiting for us to lead them somewhere.
I hit the first curtain and felt panic as the unseen predator of thin blue plastic wrapped around my unsuspecting face and the blade of the alien gun that I’d foolishly run with pointing forward.
I flailed.
It was pathetic.
Gabe reached me and managed to calm me down enough to get me through the first layer, then the second and then the third. Gabe was the first to notice, “They’re following us…”
“What was that?” I asked as we finally came out of the labyrinth of plastic sheeting. We were standing at the top of a set of stairs next to an escalator which had not yet been completed.
“They’re following us John, look.” He said while pointing at the sheeting.
The sheets fluttered and moved as something pushed through them, several somethings.
It was undeniable that we were being followed and not chased, “What do we do then?” The question answered itself as Gabe darted down the stairs and I quickly started my pursuit.
Zed feet slammed after us, the sound of bodies falling down stairs behind us getting louder as they stepped over each other in an attempt to keep up with us.
Still though, they maintained their distance, slowing down as we reached the bottom of the stairs and Gabriel looked from left to right, trying to decide which hall was the right way.
“Come on Gabe…” I whispered under my breath while keeping an eye and my new gun on them.
“I’m trying, alright! If I pick the wrong one we end up on a completely different set of tracks and circle back to the inner city, you know, the wrong way!” I was initially concerned about his yelling attracting even more of them, but they seemed indifferent to what volume we chose to talk at.
One of the zeds fell down the stairs, undoubtedly knocked over by another shuffling behind him, and landed right at my feet. I pointed my gun at it and pulled the obvious trigger and… nothing happened.
I tried it again, figuring I’d just somehow messed up the process of moving a trigger, but, again, nothing.
The zed, doing nothing but looking at me and occasionally twitching, laid there completely devoid of its normal anger filled hungry self.
It took me a moment but I started to become severely freaked by it and drove the blade through its forehead, spraying the floor around it in a splatter of deep red.
“This way!”
I followed the sound of Gabe’s escaping footsteps, continuing in my watching of our pursuers who seemed to only run after us if they lost sight of us in the darkness.
There was a resounding clang throughout the hall after less than ten seconds of running followed by a passive and embarrassed groan and I stopped, “Gabe! Are you alright?” I shouted out while keeping an eye on the zeds. “Gabe?”
He coughed once and I felt relief wash over me, “I ran into the gate, now quit your hollering while I work on picking this padlock without my torch because someone thought it’d be a good idea to leave it behind.” His coarseness was subverted by relief that he hadn’t just been hit over the head with a pipe.
There was some clinking and clanging as Gabe went to work on the door. Something was off though, something with the zeds in the way that they were being more zed-y. They hadn’t stopped dead like they had before, instead they were shuffling toward us slowly. I only realised what was going on as Gabe let out a triumphant “Got it!”
“Don’t open the gate.” I murmured, watching the curious group inch toward us from ten or so feet away.
“What was that?” Slipped under the sound of creaking metal.
“Go!” I cried as the zeds started their dash.
Gabe was only just getting up and putting his pack on when I shoved him through the metal bar door and slammed it behind me. I ignored the sounds of clattering under the roars and dropped my weapon to the floor before planting my hands on the bars.
I held the gate shut against the chomping zeds, shifting my hands just enough to avoid their hungry mouths more than a few times.
“Where’s the Goddamn padlock!” I growled into the darkness as I patted around blindly near the zeds feet. Then I found it, that is, right before a zed tool-bag kicked it under the door and let it skip its way down what I didn’t know were stairs.
I stood up, still holding the gate but wanting to let them in so I could find the bastard with the beige slip-ons and tear his skull out and beat him to death with it. Luckily though, san
ity prevailed and instead I used my anger, bending and warping the metal to a point that it could no longer be opened, and stood back.
They snarled and growled away while I admired my handiwork. I took another step backward and nearly slipped down the stairs, smiling when I caught myself, but then stopping when I remembered something very important.
“Gabe…?” I asked the dark depths, and, after a few seconds, got a groan in response. “Oh shit, I’m sorry buddy! I’m coming!” I called out as I started my rapid descent, turning and running back up to grab the gun halfway down.
My priorities are weird...
The Run-Down
“You threw me down a flight of stairs you gumby!” Gabriel was upset, understandably, but it was like the fourth time he’d brought it up as we found our way to the tracks.
“I said I was sorry! And I’m the only reason you can complain at the moment!”
“Sorry ain’t gonna cut it, gumby.”
“Stop calling me gumby! What the fuck does that even mean!?”
“It means…” he was stuck, it was funny, “Shut up! Fine, fuck it, are you sure they didn’t follow us?”
“For the millionth time, yes. They’d need a fair bit in order to break that down.”
Our collective calming soothed the tension that had been building up, although I was pretty sure that he was playing up the limp that he’d adopted. He’d only fallen down a few stairs and when I got to him he was already getting up.
I was just glad we could leave it behind us, yelling in that amplifier seemed like a bad idea in hindsight.
Luckily nothing had suddenly appeared to eat us while we had our pissing contest, it seemed like a good idea to keep quiet from that point on though.
It took less than five minutes of wandering through the mostly pitch-black tunnel before we saw the bright shining of construction lights. I was actually pretty shocked that we’d made it that far after the trouble we had just getting onto the damned tracks.
The Mulligan Planet 2 (The Mulligan Planet Trilogy) Page 9
