by A. P. Fuchs
“That way,” she said.
August pulled her toward the doors.
From far down the other hallway, she picked up on the dead’s sliding feet, a few growls and a couple moans. They sounded maybe a hundred feet off, give or take.
They approached the doors and August pressed against the push-bar. They went through, Billie taking the weight of the door off August as he went into the next hallway. She slowed the door’s closing, but just at the end of its swing its weight seemed to double and the door slipped from her fingers. It closed with a loud cluumm.
August shot her a nasty look.
“Sorry,” she said.
“They heard us.”
* * * *
Joe, along with the heating duct, slid off the roof. Aside from where the duct pressed against his shoulder blades, there was nothing but air beneath him. Screaming on instinct, he braced himself to smack right into the ground and for every bone in his body to shatter—right before his body exploded in a brilliant display of torn skin and hamburger meat.
Instead, the metal of the duct folded a bit around him, the suddenly-created jagged edges of its metal poking into his arms, elbows and thighs, partly wrapping itself around him like a cocoon. He drew his knees into his chest, encasing himself further. All was steady for a moment, before a sudden rock sent the metal cocoon in motion, first a swing forward, then a swing back. The partly-demolished rooftop he was just on came into view, then quickly disappeared as he was rocked backward like on some out-of-control Ferris wheel.
Something big and gray came into view on his left.
It was the tip of a thumb.
He glanced to the right. Another fleshy, gray mass held the other side of the metal cocoon.
“You got to be kidding me,” he said. The cocoon swung forward again, then back. He thought he heard Tracy scream his name from somewhere on the roof. The cocoon suddenly lurched to the side, down and low. Far above, the zombie’s face was partly blown away, the side of its cheek completely gone along with a piece of its tongue.
He knew what Tracy had thrown at the creature: a grenade.
Hopefully she waits until it puts me down before she throws another one, he thought. To the zombie, “Hey! Put me down.” He wiggled in the metal cocoon, testing to see how much movement he really had. There was enough for him to squeeze the top half of his body through if he had to. He just had to wait until he was close enough to the ground to do it.
The zombie didn’t appear to have heard him. Just as well. If the creature knew that the heating duct it held in its hand like a baby rattle had him in it, he’d become food right away.
The zombie held him low now, and from where he was, Joe couldn’t even see the roofline anymore never mind Tracy. The most he could see of the top of the building were the ragged edges where the zombie had earlier pressed its weight.
She’s smart. She’ll get down, he thought.
The zombie brought its hand—along with Joe—to its side. Joe looked to the ground. It was a good fifty feet below. There was no way he’d make the jump. He glanced around and briefly wondered if it’d be possible to loosen himself from the heating duct, somehow jump over to the zombie’s pants, then slide down the fabric like a giant curtain. No. If he did jump, he probably wouldn’t be able to get purchase on the fabric and would instead just ride it down like a waterslide to the ground, the sheer speed of doing so sending him into the pavement like a bullet.
A brilliant yellow light lit up above. Joe looked up. The zombie’s face was on fire.
“Tracy,” he said.
The zombie growled and reached up to cradle its face with its other hand. A moment after doing so, a tidal wave of black blood gushed out over its fingers and came down on Joe like an avalanche.
He squeezed his eyes and mouth shut and waited for the creature to drop him. Suddenly, he did drop, a good twenty feet. He shook the blood off his face then carefully opened his eyes. The ground was much closer. In his peripheral he noticed the zombie was now on one knee.
Not waiting any longer, he thought and squirmed against the heating duct. Whatever give was around his body before was now gone, and he could only assume the zombie squeezed the duct when that latest grenade hit him. Tracy!
Another flash of yellow and what was left of the zombie’s hair went up in flames at the same time a huge chunk of its skull was blasted away, bone, blood and flesh bursting out like a meat-laced firework.
Gravity stepped in and Joe’s stomach clung to his spine as the ground suddenly came forward.
A loud crash followed by brick and concrete crumbling resounded overhead. Dust and debris came down in a violent cloud.
The zombie let go of the heating duct, Joe along with it.
* * * *
August hoped he could lead Billie to safety. His shoulder still pulsed with pain from the bullet wound. His insides hurt from the excitement. Never having been prone to anxiety, the arresting feeling of tightness in his chest accompanied by a sharp pain to his heart caused him great concern. His left arm was okay: no numbness, and there was no pressure on his chest, as if someone was sitting on it, the sign of a heart attack. This was pure adrenaline-charged anxiety, one fueled by fear, fatigue and utter terror for losing one’s life. And if he failed now, if the undead took him down—beneath the discomfort running throughout his body, there was the sense of oncoming guilt of letting his family down, of not properly bringing them justice. Worse, this was no longer merely about surviving the undead. This was about something having gone wrong in the heavenly realms, the earth having been caught in the crossfire.
August wondered about the angel and if the man in the white coat—Nathaniel—would surface once again. The angel’s visit surely couldn’t have just been a one-off thing. August had seen demons. Had seen them rise from the earth and storm into the sky with unholy vigor and rage. To just see such a thing for no reason other than to just see it—it didn’t make sense.
Together, August and Billie rounded a corner at the end of another hallway, the footfalls of the dead growing louder behind them.
“Come on, you got to run,” Billie said to him, pulling on his arm.
August was suddenly aware of the sweat on his brow and the thin layer of heat that seemed to hover just above his skin. “I am running.” When he spoke, the words were labored and the breaths in between thick and heavy.
“You’re dragging your feet. I know you’re in pain. You need to fight through it.”
“I am . . . I am fighting through it,” he said, now aware she had her arm around him and was pulling him along, helping take some of the weight off his feet. Confused, he asked, “What’s happening, Billie?”
“I don’t know, but you suddenly slowed down. You can do this, August. We’ve been in worse. We just need to run.”
“Okay,” he said, nearly gasping. “Okay.” He focused all his energy into his legs and imagined them as a couple of pistons pumping rapidly in a motor. Push. Push. Push. Dig. Dig. Dig. The mantra intensified his resolve even more and seemed to get his legs moving at a better pace.
A door lay just ahead. Large. Was this the same one they had entered when they first got here? Not the outside one, but the one that ran off that great big room? He hoped so. This place was a maze in the dark.
“I think this is it,” Billie said, pointing ahead.
Growls echoed off the hallway walls.
“Stop!” Del shouted from behind them, rage coating his voice.
“Don’t listen to him,” August told her. “No fear. Keep us going. Keep me going.” There was a hard tug against his shoulders as she pulled on him more, urging him to pick up his step.
Raspy moans floated on the air. August didn’t want to look back to see how close the dead were upon them.
The two made it to the door. Billie withdrew her hands from him then felt around the door with her palms, searching for a handle.
“Here,” August said, putting his fingers on a flat handle that nearly blended in wit
h the door. He pulled on it. The handle moved slowly, as if the hinge was coated in half-dried glue.
Billie put her hand over his and pulled with him. Slowly, the handle moved all the way and the door opened.
They went through the door and before it closed completely, undead hands reached around it and pushed it all the way open.
* * * *
Joe braced for impact as he sped through the cloud of dust. He smashed face first into chalky fabric and mushy flesh underneath, before bouncing off it and falling backward to the ground. Another spin in the air and he bounced off the zombie’s calf; with a slam he landed on his side with the duct, on the pavement.
The metal squished beneath him, one of the sharp edges plowing into his left arm. Screaming, he toppled out of the metal cocoon and lay face first on the ground.
Dust obscured most of what was around. Heart racing, he didn’t want to stay down any longer than he had to, so he slowly got to his feet, his left arm numb with pain. He touched it with his right hand. The moment he made contact to the side of his arm, a spike of pain drove him to his knees with a violent cry.
It can’t be broken, he thought. You just fell off a building. No, you didn’t. You fell out of a zombie’s . . . hand. “Uh . . . yeah.”
Shaking, he got to his feet and stumbled away from where the giant zombie was now slumped on its knees, forehead crashing into the building, the back of its head missing.
Joe knew he needed to hide. He just didn’t know where. There was too much dust.
A low moan came up from up ahead. He reached inside his jacket and pulled out the X-09.
The moment the first zombie showed its decaying face, Joe pulled the trigger and removed its ugly mug from its body. Another zombie appeared, the young dead girl a mere toddler. He wasn’t in the mood for sympathy. He cracked that head like a melon.
There had to be something around here he could use for a hiding spot. Right now, with the dead on the streets, alleyways, behind corners, even dumpsters wouldn’t do the trick. He needed something enclosed, an environment he had control over. But where . . .
Joe had an idea.
His left arm pounded deep pulses of pain right from his shoulder down to his fingertips. It hung limp at his side, but from what he could tell, it seemed intact. Could be a fracture as opposed to a clean break.
Growling, he spun around when he heard footsteps approaching from behind. An old man, undead, stared at him with wide white eyes. The dude had an Adam’s apple sticking out so profusely from beneath decaying prickly skin that it was a wonder the old man had ever managed to swallow anything back when he was alive. Joe shot that Adam’s apple clean off, making a nice big hole in the old fella’s neck. Another blast and the remainder of the neck was severed and the old timer’s decayed head fell to the pavement, cracking open when it did.
Pissed from the pain in his shoulder, Joe ran up to it and booted it like a soccer ball, not caring what he hit.
It felt good. Real good.
“I hate you all,” he said, then turned around and got away from the dust settling around the building with the giant zombie leaning up against it.
Tracy, he thought. Then he shook his head. No, she’s a big girl. She can handle herself.
Joe marched on; the sounds of the dead got louder on the air.
17
The Rubble Heap
The Winnipeg Convention Centre used to be a place of business, social gatherings, proms, comic book conventions, and pretty much anything else provided you had the money for it. Now, the place was a wreck. Half the building was gone thanks to an undead giant’s tantrum a few months back. What was left of the structure—a single escalator, a few levels you could see from the street, a handful of intact rooms—was home to any regular-sized zombie to rummage through for the leftovers of any human that had been caught in the building’s upheaval.
The parkade that was part of the building that ran alongside it was intact. Earlier venturers from the Hub made their way through the sea of cars within, the roads going in and out of the place packed with vehicles that had been on the escape the day the Rain hit. Body parts littered the floor, the walls coated in dry blood. A few cars, once gone up in flames, sat there, their melted and warped carcasses black and covered in soot.
Zombies roamed the place; some seeming to be stumbling in there for the first time; others seeming to be lost in the maze of cars and unable to find their way out.
It was a dead zone, and none from the Hub had gone in there since first stripping the abandoned vehicles of any valuable supplies. Michelle had been part of that original party and even now remembered narrowly surviving an attack of eight undead that had surrounded her in an effort to satisfy their hunger for human flesh.
It was that demonstration of survival skill that helped her cement her place as a Black Lady worth her salt.
Michelle and the others approached the Convention Centre with caution.
“Seems quiet,” Rhonda said.
“Too quiet,” Andrew added with a grin.
Michelle just rolled her eyes. She shouldn’t have let the guy tag along. It was one thing to do your job and get something done; another to do it in front of a total stranger.
The ground rumbled.
“Feel that?” Mark asked.
“Yeah,” Michelle said.
“Getting closer?”
“Hard to tell. Hope not. They sometimes just stand there and shift side-to-side, not going anywhere.”
“Sheesh, what a mess,” Mark said, pointing out the mass of upturned concrete, underground piping, gravel and clay.
“Must’ve brought it down hard,” Andrew said. “Look at this.”
Michelle followed him up a slanted chunk of cement, across a steel girder and to the top of a Toyota’s roof.
The ground was decimated, the breaks in the concrete not perfect footprints by any means, but the general shape of it running narrow to wide suggested that’s what they were.
“It’s all around here,” she said. “Look.” She pointed to St. Mary’s Cathedral. The old church was nothing more than a pile of brick and cement, the only thing remaining of its once-prominent stature was the giant steeple sticking up from the wreckage.
“Maybe the thing threw a fit when Dillon got away?” Andrew said.
Michelle squinted her eyes. “Not cool.”
She dropped down to the hood of the car then to the ground. She pressed the button on the walkie-talkie. “Dillon, you read me?” A voice cut in, then was quickly replaced by static. “Dillon, it’s Michelle. You copy?”
Static, then, “Copy.”
“Does the Convention Centre ring any bells?”
“No. No sign that I saw, anyway.”
Michelle quickly surveyed the building. The giant black letters that used to be on the Convention Centre’s side were gone, just their faded outlines remaining. “The parkade was beside a building, yeah?”
“Yeah. Oh no.” He shrieked and was cut off.
“Dillon!”
Michelle ran as close to the wreckage as she could, hopping over broken slabs of concrete when needed. She was near the parkade entrance. Its mouth was almost choked closed; chunks of cement, rebar, gravel and dust lined the place. Twisted sheets of metal intertwined with the cement. Upon further inspection, Michelle realized they were car doors, hoods, roofs.
“How—?” she started, when Mark and the others came up beside her.
“This is crazy,” Mark said, then shouted, “Dillon!”
“Quiet,” Rhonda said. “So far there hasn’t been any trouble. Don’t bring it upon us.”
“Dillon, come in,” Michelle said into the walkie-talkie. No reply. “Dillon, please, get back to me. We were cut off. Dillon!”
“What happened?” Rhonda asked.
Michelle turned to her. “We were talking, then he said ‘Oh no,’ and screamed. There was nothing after that.”
Mark started to sniffle. Rhonda put her arm around him. Andrew was near the p
ile of rubble leading into one of the few small openings at the mouth of the parkade. He was on his tiptoes, as if looking for something.
Michelle could tell by the way Rhonda looked at her that she was questioning if their search was over and they should presume the worst had happened. Seeing Mark, his eyes wet with tears, made Michelle’s heart ache despite how hard a time she had being around the kid and how much it ignited her own pain.
“He’s not dead, is he, Michelle?” Mark asked, eyes pleading for her to tell him it was all right.
Rhonda’s eyes pleaded with her to be gentle. “Honestly, I don’t know, Mark. Let’s hope not.”
Mark pointed to the parkade. “Is he in there? Looks like a dark place to me. I see metal. Cars have pine fresheners. Yeah, see? I figured it out. I figured it out!”
“Mark, honey,” Rhonda said.
“Yeah, Mom, I did!” The boy’s solemn faced suddenly went bright. He ran toward the rubble heap leading into the parkade.
“Hey, kid,” Andrew called after him as the boy ran past and began ascending the heap.
“Mark, get back here!” Rhonda shouted.
“Yeah. He’s in here. He has to be!” Mark said.
Rhonda ran after him. Michelle turned around and scanned the area, checking to see if anything out there heard them. The coast was clear, so far as she could tell, and she had a pretty good sense about when the undead were about to descend.
She turned around again, this time to see Rhonda trying to climb the rubble heap.
