by D. J. Molles
“We’re with you, Captain,” the man with the AK-47 said.
Lee didn’t respond to him but turned and made for the stairwell, where he could see LaRouche with his back braced up against the filing cabinet and George struggling to push another, slightly smaller one into place to bolster the first. The first cabinet covered the edges of the door with room to spare but left about a two-foot gap on top. The whole thing was shaking back and forth as the infected on the other side pounded and tried to climb over. A pair of greasy, gray hands gripped the top of the filing cabinet, pulling desperately, and a horrific visage squirmed out of the murky darkness of the stairwell, all sinews and gnashing teeth.
Lee stamped his feet to a stop about twenty feet from the creature on top of the filing cabinet and raised his rifle. Behind him, the two tagalongs skidded up short to avoid running into him. It would be an uncomfortably narrow shot: LaRouche’s head was only a foot from the infected’s gaping maw.
“Heads up!” Lee yelled.
The little red dot settled, and Lee fired three times in rapid succession.
The infected jerked a bit, then lay still atop the cabinet with its toothy jaw still working like a fish out of water. After a second or two, its grip on the cabinet faded and it fell back into the stairwell. LaRouche stared indifferently at a bullet hole in the side of the cabinet, not six inches from his head.
Lee slapped his shoulder as he took position next to the sergeant. “You’ll be all right.” He planted his feet and pressed his back against the cabinet, mimicking LaRouche’s position. “I got this. Cover the top.”
LaRouche bounced off the cabinet, drawing his sidearm again and pointing it over Lee’s head at the gap. The other three men slammed into the second cabinet, breaking the inertia and shoving the thing into place with a heavy metallic crunch. The two cabinets were now perpendicular to each other, forming a T shape, the smaller bracing the larger.
Lee pulled himself upright. “That’s not gonna hold forever, but it’ll give us some time.”
LaRouche breathed hard. “Any more of those filing cabinets?”
“Yeah.” George pointed to a room behind him with the door hanging open. “There’re two more in—”
George’s right eye exploded.
Lee heard the zzzip-snap of a bullet passing close to him.
Salty warmth on his lips and tongue.
George pitched forward, dead before he hit the ground.
Lee reached out and grabbed the person nearest him, who happened to be the man with the bat. He hooked his arm around the man’s chest and dove sideways. As Lee flew sideways, he saw LaRouche and the man with the AK-47, their eyes following George’s lifeless descent, their faces plain and unamazed, not having realized what was happening.
Lee would never know if that bullet was meant for him or if Milo’s men had decided to kill everyone for the sake of simplicity. He would wonder about it later, but he didn’t have time for it now. He hit the ground and scooted up against the wall.
He registered rapid gunfire.
The unmistakable chatter of an M249 Squad Automatic Weapon erupted from down the hall—Fuck, he should have remembered that Milo’s crew had one! It chewed the floor and walls, sending drywall and chunks of tile into the air. A cluster of holes suddenly appeared in the filing cabinets, but LaRouche dove out of the way.
The man with the AK-47 wasn’t as quick.
He tried to leap, but a few rounds zipped him through the legs, spinning him around. He flopped to the floor, his legs limp and useless behind him. He looked down, suddenly aware that something irreversible had just happened to him. His mouth opened but he had no words so he just started screaming. Another blast of 5.56mm projectiles silenced him.
The guy with the bat was yelling. “Dale, get up! Dale! Hurry!” He tried to stand and go to his dead friend.
Lee grabbed him by the shoulder and pushed him against the wall. “He’s fucking dead, man! Leave it!”
The M249 fell silent and in its place was only the ringing in their ears.
LaRouche was up on his feet but crouched down low, with one hand on the ground, like a sprinter on the starting blocks. Lee followed the sergeant’s gaze to where it was fixated on the AK-47 lying between its owner and George, just out of their reach.
Lee edged up to the corner and grabbed a handful of LaRouche’s sleeve to get his attention. When he had it, he said, “On me,” and got a single, curt nod by way of response.
Lee stuck the barrel of his M4 around the corner and started cranking off rounds blindly in the general direction of their attackers. He knew he wasn’t going to hit anything but walls, but he hoped it would keep their heads down long enough.
LaRouche didn’t need to be told to move. As soon as Lee started firing, he darted out into the hall, snatched up the AK-47, and then launched himself back into cover. Not a second after he had cleared the corner, the hall flared up with automatic fire once again. It inaccurately sprayed the walls on the far side of the hall and Lee figured their attacker was blind firing, just like he was.
LaRouche scooted himself between Lee and the man who clutched his baseball bat. He checked the ammunition level on the AK-47 while the man with the bat began to whimper. The magazine was full. LaRouche pointed down the hallway. “The hallway wraps all the way around. I’ll keep ’em busy; you flank ’em.”
Lee made a circle out of his thumb and forefinger and then hauled himself up to his feet. He felt exposed going into a gunfight without his vest. It wasn’t the first time, but that didn’t make him feel any more comfortable. It just made him feel like eventually my luck will run out.
He flew quickly down the hall to the nurses’ station and turned the corner. The hallway there would cut through to the western side of the building, where he could come in from the side of their attackers. But when he turned the corner, a man was standing in the middle of the hall, hunched over and holding a big black shotgun. The man turned just as Lee brought up his rifle and their eyes met.
The man didn’t react. He just stood there.
Lee pulled his finger off the trigger at the last second, realizing it was one of the survivors. He further realized with a sharp feeling of anxiety that he would never be able to tell the difference between one of Milo’s men and one of the survivors. They were all just tired, skinny, dirty-looking people with guns.
Lee glared as he passed, though he knew the man had done nothing wrong.
“What’s going on?” the man asked dumbly.
“Just sit,” Lee commanded and moved on.
Past the nurses’ station, another jumble of unused medical equipment had been shoved to one side of the hallway. At the end of the hall, Lee could see the western-facing bank of windows. Through those windows he could see the edge of the parking garage, and to the left of those, the stretch of trees and housetops that comprised the small town of Smithfield. All he had to do was turn left at the end of the hall and he would have those bastards dead to rights.
Behind him, echoing up the eastern hall, he could hear the heavy bark of the AK-47 shooting slow and steady. LaRouche was smartly pacing himself to stretch his ammunition. You didn’t need to throw a thousand rounds downrange to keep an enemy’s head down. One round every second or so would usually do the trick.
Lee reached the corner and started slicing the pie, dividing up the 90-degree turn into small, manageable portions. There at the end of the hall, he could see two men huddled at the corner; one was standing, and one was prone. They both cringed from the corner each time the AK-47’s big 7.62mm bullets tore another chunk out of the wall they hid behind. Lee approximated their distance at twenty yards.
Callously, Lee thought that with the men bunched so close together, he might be able to take both of them out with fewer rounds. He braced his hand on the wall and rested his rifle’s quad-rail on it to steady his aim. Then it was five quick shots, punching neat holes in the back of the one standing up. He lurched and toppled forward onto the one lying prone, who
began to shout and panic, attempting to scramble away from the noise of Lee’s gunfire while his buddy smothered and bled on him. In his panic to escape Lee, he squirmed himself right into LaRouche’s line of fire. Lee heard the old soviet rifle report twice. He could see where one of the rounds went low and kicked up bits of tile just inches short of the target, but the second round smacked into the top of the man’s head and, Lee thought, probably all the way down through his body.
“Moving to you!” Lee shouted as he raced down the hall.
“I hear you,” came the response from around the corner.
Lee slid to a stop on the floor, which was already slick with blood. The man LaRouche had caught on the top of the head was hemorrhaging badly, his facial features swollen and deformed by the shockwave of the heavy projectile that had passed through him. LaRouche came around the corner and looked at his handiwork with a wrinkled nose, as though he’d just gotten a whiff of garbage.
Lee hefted the M249 off the ground with something akin to reverence. While it was no .50-caliber ass-beater, it still held plenty of ammunition and a high rate of fire. It was fed from a plastic box underneath the chamber that held up to a two-hundred-round belt of 5.56mm ammunition. Great for suppressive fire. Or raking hordes of infected. The downside was that the damn thing weighed about twenty pounds. A quick glance revealed that it had about half of its original two-hundred-round belt still sitting in the ammunition box.
“That’s a fuckin’ game changer,” LaRouche said eagerly.
Lee nodded and held the weapon out to him. “Trade up.”
LaRouche happily accepted the trade. “Probably about fifteen rounds left for the AK.”
Lee swung his M4 around so it was resting against the back of his leg and held the clunky-feeling soviet rifle. “It’ll work. Let’s move back.”
At the eastern side, the man with the baseball bat stood, dividing his attention between trying to see what Lee and LaRouche were doing and watching the barricade at the door. The screeching had died down as the infected beyond had lost the fervor of the chase, but it was clear they weren’t giving up just yet. Even from down the hall, Lee could still hear dozens of them growling and muttering senselessly and occasionally striking out at the filing cabinet with a loud metallic BANG.
“Will!” LaRouche hollered at him. “Move back to the nurses’ station!”
The man with the baseball bat—aka Will—nodded, clearly scared out of his mind, and began backing away.
They jogged back to the corner. Lee pointed to the ground for LaRouche’s benefit. “You post up right here with that SAW. Anything comes through that door, you let ’em have it.”
“Roger that.” LaRouche went prone and propped the M249 up on its bipod. Only the gun and the side of his head were peeking around the corner; the rest of him remained in cover.
Beyond the nurses’ station, pandemonium had broken out. The shooting and the infected trying to get through had sent almost everyone into a panic, and they were taking the lull in the shooting as an opportunity to bolt from their rooms. They carried children over their shoulders and clutched what little things they owned, stuffed into backpacks, but sometimes just loose, like a blanket or a bottle of water. They were all heading away from the fighting, toward the back of the hospital where the elevator shaft was located.
Julia came around the corner as Lee fished the radio out of his back pocket where he’d stuck it earlier. “Did you get in contact with them?”
Lee shook his head sternly. “About to try again. Did you get your contraption set up?”
Julia wiped sweat from her forehead and closed her eyes shakily. “I tied some ropes and soft restraints to the backboards so we can lower the sick and injured and anyone who can’t climb down on their own. I don’t know if we have enough rope to get to the bottom of the elevator shaft, but we’ll try.” She opened her eyes and there were tears. “You were right. We can’t stay here. Whether your friends come or not, we can’t stay here.”
“Just get the healthy ones down first.” Lee tried to sound encouraging but felt like he failed. “They can help the sick and injured through the maintenance tunnels. Just tell them not to go outside until we know it’s clear.”
“Okay.” She seemed like she wanted to say something else but turned instead and disappeared into the crowd of panicked survivors.
Lee keyed his radio and tried to make contact again but got nothing. He could feel that heavy dead weight in the pit of his gut, the suffocating feeling that all of his efforts, all of his trying, no matter how hard, no matter how desperate, were all going to count for nothing in the end. The situation seemed insurmountable, with infected below and Milo’s thugs above.
But you gotta do it.
You gotta compartmentalize.
Step one: get the survivors off of this floor.
Fighting back those edges of fear and doubt trying to creep into his mind like a dark wolf slinking through the forest, Lee keyed the radio again and spoke, perhaps a little louder than he needed to. “This is Captain Harden. Does anyone copy me? We need help. Right now.” And then, with a bit of frustration, “Does anyone fucking copy me?”
Will was suddenly standing next to him. “What do you want me to do about the stairwell?”
Lee shot him an angry look. “Keep a goddamn eye on it!”
The man jumped and scooted over to the corner opposite LaRouche so he could watch the eastern stairwell. The creatures inside had managed to create a few inches of give between the two filing cabinets by their constant smashing and rocking the barricade back and forth. Their excited calls had died down, but they were being replaced by the loud crash of the two cabinets banging together.
Impressed wasn’t quite the right word, but Lee had to admit that the infected were persistent. Perhaps they lacked the ability to reason, but like any animal, they could recognize cause and effect, and their efforts seemed to be reinvigorated by their small victory of inches.
LaRouche called out, straining to be heard. “Contact right!”
A clipped, three-round burst belched out of the M249, the brass casings and metal couplings that made up the links of the ammunition belt went tumbling across the ground, and in the same instant the tile floor to LaRouche’s right shattered.
LaRouche yelped and jerked back into cover, his hands over his eyes, blood seeping between the fingers. “Fuck! I think they shot me!”
Lee was on his knees in an instant, blindly sending a burst down the hallway to keep them occupied for a brief moment. “Calm down! Calm down!” He pulled LaRouche’s hand off of his face. The right side was streaked with three deep cuts from his cheekbone all the way back through his shredded ear. Speckled in with the lacerations were tiny red pockmarks that oozed a steady trickle of blood, but nothing looked like a gunshot wound. “I think it was just the shrapnel from the tile. Can you see?”
LaRouche tried to open his eyes, but his right eyelid was already swelling shut disobediently. “Ah… I can’t see out of my right eye…”
“Fuckin’ A…” LaRouche would do no good covering the hall if he couldn’t see. Lee rolled the sergeant out of the way and shoved the AK-47 and the radio into his arms. “Keep trying to make radio contact.” Then Lee sprawled out on his belly, making sure that his tidbits were behind cover, and pulled up tight with the M249.
Down the hall and to the right, the western emergency stairwell was open and a man in a black T-shirt was hanging his ass out in the wind, trying to get a look at Lee. Purely out of reaction, Lee squeezed the trigger, letting off a few rounds that tracked high over the man’s head but forced him to jump back into the stairwell under a shower of drywall dust.
Short, controlled bursts, Lee reminded himself.
That was how you shot an M249, or any automatic weapon for that matter: short, controlled bursts. Ammunition—even a two-hundred-round belt—went very fast if you didn’t take your finger off the trigger.
To his left, LaRouche spoke into the radio, loudly and clearly,
but got nothing back. Lee heard a gasp of surprise and shot a quick glance over his shoulder only to find Julia kneeling down next to LaRouche.
“Oh my God.” Her hands hovered around his face, seemingly unsure whether touching him would make it worse. “What happened?”
“Just some shrapnel from the floor,” LaRouche mumbled.
“We don’t have a whole lot of time,” Lee warned, refocusing on the stairwell. The door still stood open, but he couldn’t see anybody. “How we comin’ with getting people down the shaft?”
“Uh…” She blinked rapidly. “I’ve got eight people left to lower down. They’re working on that right now. Almost everyone else is already down in the maintenance tunnel.”
Lee was about to respond when the guy in the black shirt leaned out of cover again and fired rapidly from an M4. Lee felt the rounds pass uncomfortably close and gritted his teeth, letting out a burst from the M249, but not before another man darted out of the stairwell and around the far corner where the two bodies of his comrades lay.
He heard someone screaming from down the hall.
Had he landed a hit on one of them?
“One might be tryin’ to flank left!” Lee called out.
LaRouche handed the radio to Julia, who was crouched with her hands over her head and covering her ears against the assault of noise that poked mercilessly at their eardrums. He tucked the AK-47 into his left shoulder, though he was right-handed, since he would not be able to sight with his dominant right eye.
“I got it.” The sergeant moved to the corner, taking watch directly over the huddled form of Will, who was pressed so tightly against the wall that he looked less like a man and more like a child clutching his mother’s bosom.
Whether he was hit or not, the man in the black shirt dipped into view, slightly lower than Lee expected, and began firing. Lee felt Julia smack him in the shoulder, trying to get his attention, but he focused through the sights and pulled the trigger, giving the man in the black shirt two heavy bursts to think about. The man jerked and flopped, clutching at his neck, his rifle clattering to the floor. Lee felt Julia pressing a finger against his right shoulder, and she was really digging it in deep.
