He sucked air through his teeth and my relief vanished, “Yeah, you see, I said I thought one saw me, but I know one saw me. I handled it though, seriously no problem there.” He seemed to be trying to build himself up for what came after the emphasized ‘there’, “But there may have been three or four.”
“Still, that’s not a-”
“Twenty seven.” He mumbled.
“What was that?”
He cleared his throat and looked around for a second before answering, “Twenty seven, there are twenty seven corpses on their way down those stairs right now.”
“Right… Well… I do suppose that that does put rather a damper on things.” I rubbed my eyes and a yawn escaped me. The sleepy thing was quite pathetic if I do say so myself.
“I’m sorry, does the idea of all these people probably dying very shortly bore you? I get that you can rip a person apart with your bare hands, which isn’t at all disturbing, but none of the rest of us can.” There we go, pissed off, that one suited Gabe.
I went to respond but was rudely cut off by a shrill scream. Honestly, I swear they time their screaming fits to coincide with my conversations.
We got to the source of screaming, I went to start shooting but Gabe stopped me, pointing up the stairs, “You start shooting again it’ll bring in very damn corpse from miles around! Harry and I will draw the people into the tunnel, you take point with the others, make sure it’s clear when we get in there, GO!”
Without saying a word I followed his orders, shouting at the others to follow me to the edge of the station, “Come on you useless prats! We’re making a path! Warren! You and your men take the rear! Clara, you’re on Mark duty! Wolf, Kate and I will be leading the pack, you hear any of us make a call you stick to it! Cease-fire environment from this point unless you all want to be havin’ brains for brekkie!” They all silently agreed in their own way and we started our move.
I brandished my knife, my new favourite tool and moved as low and fast as I could without losing my back-up.
My vision had gotten slightly better, perhaps due to the blood that I’d accidently rubbed into my eyes, perhaps it was that I’d entered that second stage of exhaustion.
You know the one? Where you become so tired that you sort of wake up again? Didn’t matter though.
Whatever the cause, I was a more efficient, well, functioning killer and that’s what we needed.
There was a single zed wandering around in the tunnel, just ahead of us and, for the briefest moment I froze. It hadn’t noticed us and I didn’t know if drawing its attention would be wise. Mainly because of the fact that I wasn’t sure of what could be just out of view.
Eventually the moment passed and I was free to use my body again, I shot forward, leaving my gang behind, and drove the blade through the zed’s waiting temple, a weak groan seeping from its dead lips as it twitched one last time and went limp.
I don’t know why I froze, it was like I wasn’t processing properly, although I’d gained some of my abilities back, it seemed that I wasn’t thinking as clearly or as fast, which was something that I found almost completely unbearable.
After that one zed, and I’d waited for the others to catch up, we didn’t find a single trace of another… anything. The tracks were almost completely deserted, which started to make me somewhat sceptical of there even being another point of entry further in the tunnel. I wasn’t exactly paying attention to the construction of the thing before the apocalypse and the only station I knew about was the Queen Street one.
I think that’s around the time that I decided that we’d reached a good stopping point. We were maybe a hundred or so metres from where we’d started and neither a snarl nor growl could be heard coming from either direction.
Five minutes of complete silence passed by with us all sitting on the tracks, some of us bounced loose stones off the walls and listened for the echoes while the rest of sat in quiet thought.
Then Warren got bored, “What are we even doing here? Shouldn’t we keep moving make sure the entire tunnel is clear?”
“Yeah,” Kate said, piling on, “Gabe’s a pretty smart bloke, I’m sure he could figure out that we just went ahead a bit?”
I shook my head, an action that only Wolf and Kate could see, “We can’t assume, that’s how people end up dead. Gabe wanted us to wait and that’s what we’re going to do. Besides, do you really think Clara can drag Mark’s arse any further?”
We all had a brief chuckle at his expense, except for him of course. I was actually starting to get worried about him, his breathing had become laboured and heavy and he hadn’t said a single thing since we started that whole escapade. “Hey, Mark? You doing alright?”
He lolled from side-to-side after an attempted shrug, “I think so… I think… I think I just need some sleep…”
“Oi! No, none of that. If you sleep you might not wake up, just stay awake for a little while longer.”
The wounded scientist winced and shook his head, “No, no… I’ll be fine… Just a few hours… If you can carry me… I’ll be fine… Will explain…” and he was out like a light.
I went into panic mode, but Clara held her hand up to me and placed her fingers on his neck, “Hold on… Yeah, he’s fine, his pulse is actually… Yeah, it’s definitely stronger. Weird.”
Indeed it was weird, solidly, but it was a question that would have to wait until later, when he was conscious.
Another few minutes passed and I was starting to become concerned. I stood up and dusted myself off, gesturing for everyone else to stay while I went to check up on Gabe. I wasn’t given the opportunity though, I’d barely moved five feet in their direction when the sound of distant footsteps filled the tunnel.
Figures started to come into view, the first clearly being Gabe, he had a body slung over his shoulder which appeared to have another person’s torso attached to it. “Gabe?” I counted nearly twenty people behind him which, in turn, had another dozen behind them.
He whispered something to me, but it was impossible to hear him over the distance.
“What?”
“Corpses!” He shouted as quietly as he could.
That’s when I saw why.
It was an ‘only partly there’ Harry over his shoulder, the duffle slung over his while his scabbard banged against his thigh. The people behind them were the civies that were lucky enough to make it, and the ones behind them?
They were the unlucky ones.
Tunnels
Harry shuffled off of Gabe’s shoulder and kept running with him while I ran back to the others, grabbed Marcus by the scruff of his jumper and dragged him along behind me. The rest of my group got the picture and scrambled to their feet and caught up with ease.
For a little while I went slow and steady, so Gabe and the others could catch up with the rest of us, but then I set the pace. I wanted to stop, start up another firing line, but we were fresh out of ear muffs and the last thing we needed was to be running deaf and blind.
Shortly after, I noticed that the rabid growls were starting to fall under the hushed orders and muffled sobs which filled the endless darkness that we were forced to move through. We were losing the zeds, that, or Steven had called them back again, either way, I saw it as a win.
And then Warren had to go and ruin my good mood, “Where does this end?”
Don’t get me wrong, the question was justified, we’d just reached a point where there weren’t any more tracks and the whole thing was starting to feel a bit more construction-site-y, “I honestly don’t know, another station, a worksite, or it could just be a dead end. All I know is that back there couldn’t be any better.”
He wasn’t impressed with my answer, he seemed to have my attitude though in the way that an answer is an answer and it’s best to just take what you can get.
By some miracle of God there was another station, zero light though, but it was a place to stop and breathe, something that everyone but we few vampires needed. Gabriel clearly neede
d the break the most though, seeing as the time that he hadn’t spent carrying Harry was time that he’d been tugging him along like a brick through concrete.
I clearly wasn’t getting anything from my soaking wet hipster friend, whose new favourite hobby appeared to be staring at the ground.
So I plopped the remarkably still unconscious Marcus on the ground and walked over to my heaving and puffing sniper. “What’s wrong with Har? What happened back there?”
“Just a sec.” He groaned between breaths, “There was some- Corpses!” He hissed while looking over my shoulder.
I turned around to see what he meant and, sure enough, a platform full of zeds all staring at their meal on rails. All it took was for one of them to move and I involuntarily bellowed “Run!” and grabbed Marcus again, restarting our blind delve into darkness, “Don’t stop! Whatever you do, don’t stop!”
No one there needed to be told twice, we ran like cattle from lightning while the sea that was the fresh batch of zeds charged after us.
There wasn’t a doubt in my mind that it was Steve’s doing. Push us forward a bit with his small amount of ‘troops’ and then put as many of them as possible just far enough ahead of us that we run straight into them without so much as a second thought. He was a clever sod, I had to give him that.
“John!” Wolf shouted as he met up with me at the front of the pack.
“Yeah?”
He pointed at the floppy scientist that I was dragging along, his legs bouncing off the ground like a ragdoll’s, “You seem like you’re having some trouble.”
“Nah, he’s right. Just keep up.” I said as jokingly as I could while still running.
The group was starting to get exhausted and we had started losing people. They were getting pulled back into the sea and I was in short supply of life rafts.
That’s when I saw it. Pale, early morning light, around three if I had to guess. The light wasn’t coming from an exit though, no, it didn’t become clear that it was in fact a massive shard of the fallen ship until we were within a few metres of it.
It was at least twenty metres long, most of it glowed a faint blue while some parts still had small flashing red lights, as if the news that the ship had already crashed hadn’t reached it yet. I noticed something else odd, not about it, exactly, it was the zeds.
They’d stopped.
When I looked back for them it was clear that they’d stopped well before us as we reached the shard. They were still shuffling though, leaning from foot to foot and occasionally glancing at the shard, they were treating it with a sort of fearful reverence while I, the heathen that I am, proceeded to drop Mark and climb it to see what awaited us in the big scary outdoors.
Everyone else in the tunnel was waiting, none of them wanted to move for fear of what the other would do while I started my alien rock-climbing project.
An ear-piercing yowl ripped through the pre-dawn air and into the tunnel to interrupt our moment of pause though, and I tumbled back into the tunnel.
It was the little black things, maybe eight of them, crawling their way down the side of the shard. I grabbed Mark by the jumper and pulled away as I scooted backward.
“John… What are those things?” Warren whispered.
I tried to get back on my feet a few time before finally succeeding, “Nothing good.”
The rest of the live people had started to back up with me toward the less terrifying zombie horde. Yeah, those things were really that scary, “No shit Sherlock!” Warren growled through a closed mouth, “What’s worse though? Corpses or… them.”
I shook my head, that’s all I could do as the beasts finally reached the ground.
I did not like them.
I really did not like them.
The others who were with me had started going up against the walls, an idea that seemed as good as any at that point. With a bit of work I managed to get Mark propped up against the wall in an upright position with my arm.
The creatures weren’t really taking much notice in us, they seemed much more interested in the zeds for some reason.
In fact, I got to test that theory…
Because I’m a terrible friend.
They did their yowl again and I jumped, my knife got knocked loose and was going to fall so I went to grab it and… well…
You know what? The good news is that even though I let Mark fall flat on his face onto some exposed wood for the railway, I was able to prove when they scuttled over him, smashing his face a few more times, that the little black things were much less interested in us than we were in them.
What they were interested in though, was tearing some zombie ass to pieces… In a totally violent and not at all homoerotic way. Or maybe a little bit homoerotic?
I don’t know and I don’t judge.
The last of the eight shot past us and started ripping into the zeds and we took that as our cue to leave. We all ran for the shard, climbing it as fast as we could, everyone helping everyone.
Then I realised I forgot someone, I quickly shot back over to Marcus and, with one final look at the foreign carnage in the tunnel, dragged him to safety, tossing him up to the others who handled him delicately before lying him down.
I leapt up onto the upper level and breathed in the first fresh air I’d had in what felt like days. I had no idea where we were, didn’t much care either.
We were in a park, brown and burnt grass surrounding the shard’s entry point.
Ah, the blessed outdoors.
Three Simple Mistakes
A few people had taken to simply collapsing on the grass while a few of the gun-toting ones ran a perimeter check with Wolf and Kate, something I should’ve probably been doing.
I started to map the place out, trying to pin-point our location. Somehow we’d made it to the other side of the river, there was an exploded helicopter, a crashed bus and a few scattered corpses, some seemed semi-fresh, covered in burns and thrown around a bit, while some seemed old, quite old.
Gabe didn’t seem to be all that alright with where we were, like something about it held a bad memory. My brain could be so slow with these sorts of things.
We were where they’d made touchdown.
Gabriel, despite the dozen or so feet between us, must’ve felt my eyes on him.
He turned to face me and immediately understood what I was thinking and, though it took a long time, nodded solemnly, confirming what I already knew.
Meanwhile Harry was looking up into the sky a few feet from the majority of the relaxing survivors and letting the rain wash some of the thick blood off of him, providing a new topic of conversation.
It seemed high-time to change the subject anyway.
I walked over to Gabe and started speaking about what I hoped would be a half-way decent distraction, “What’s up with Harry? You never did finish.”
Gabe looked stunned at my blatant disregard for him, never did understand that, is it more courteous to pretend someone isn’t there by whispering? It all seems the same to me.
Anyway, he got past his discomfort with the subject and started to speak quietly while moving his lips as little as possible, “We were a quarter of the way through the crowd, telling them to move, but it turned out that a few of the people we told that to were bit and… well, you know how it goes from there.”
He paused when I reached him and looked over to our friend who’d taken to lying down on the grass with the duffel beside him with the scabbard atop it, “Harry had to… He stepped in, without hesitation John.” He said, trying to convey the seriousness of it as well as trying to talk him up, like he was defending him from what he was about to say.
“Seriously, nothing. He went blank, starting with amputations with that big ol’ sword of his but he was too late. Had to start carving them up, he tried to get me to leave but I managed to knock some sense into him, that’s how he ended up over my shoulder.”
‘The ‘knocking’ was literal then.’ I thought to myself as Warren’s huge and t
attooed sharpshooter showed up with a scoff before thumping onto the ground and pulling out his knife, “Don’t know why ya care so much, pack of whores anyway.” He said loud enough for everyone to hear while carving up the ground.
That was his first mistake, drawing Harry’s attention, who was standing up and dusting himself off. Diffusing the situation was going to be difficult, but I figured that the guy would be willing to retract his statement, “They’re people mate, something that’s in short supply these days.”
I was wrong, poor decision on his part, “Sure mate, you go on believin’ that. Fact is they’re holes, all they’re good for. Only reason we kept ‘em around this long.” By the time he finished his disgusting monologue Harry had made his way behind him, his face completely devoid of emotion.
“Get up.” He said flatly, he still didn’t look like he was right to be standing.
“Hm?” the bandit asked, like he was giving Har the option to stand down.
Second mistake, making Harry impatient.
“Get. Up. Two words. Two syllables. Don’t make me ask again.”
He drove his knife into the grassy ground, stood, turning as he did so, and faced Harry, who was a half foot shorter than him and probably half his weight, “Alright then, you wanna go? Go ahead, you can have the first hi-”
Third mistake.
Harry kneed the bandit in the groin and followed it up with a weighty right-hook as he doubled over. That’s when Warren decided to get involved, striding toward Harry from the other side of the grass, “Ok, that’s enough, let’s-”
“Any more steps toward me and you’ll be next.” Harry said without facing him. Perhaps I should’ve tried to contain the situation instead of just watching, but it seemed to be good therapy for him.
Warren ignored him, figuring he could handle the hipster I suppose, which Harry proved was a rather shitty choice.
He waited for the exact moment that Warren put a hand on his shoulder to use him as a weapon. He grabbed his wrist, pulled him forward onto his shoulder, used the momentum to flip him onto the tattooed bandit who was still trying to catch his breath, and, after the two fell to the ground, delivered a swift and powerful blow to his forehead, knocking him out instantly.
The Mulligan Planet 2 (The Mulligan Planet Trilogy) Page 12
