by Phil Maxey
He stepped out of the elevator.
A burst of sparks from electrical cabling that was hanging from a wall made him flinch and throw a hand out.
Then he heard a familiar sound. Images of the stranger leaning over his wife, and the glug-glug of a thick liquid being sucked from her was something he recognized instantly. He scoured the overturned tables and broken machinery until he spotted two heat signatures. In a flash, he weaved his way through the maze, and, without stopping, grabbed a foot-long piece of metal from a table, and plunged it into the back of the vamp’s head. It slumped forward on top of Rachel Frost.
Joel pushed the former soldier off her. Her eyes were wide, and she started flailing. Her arms and legs crashing into the debris around her. Then her eyes started to grow heavy.
Joel pulled the jacket off the dead soldier, ripping a part into a long strip, and then wrapped it securely around her neck.
He shook her gently. “You have lost a lot of blood, but you need to stay awake. I’ll get you out of here, okay?”
She sluggishly nodded.
“Where’s the tablet?”
“In… lab five…” she lifted a heavy arm and pointed it to the door that Bill had been curious about.
Joel looked around the large domed area. He went to get to his feet, when she went to grab his shirt.
“Lab… dangerous… that’s where… it is…”
He got to his feet, grabbed a large piece of a table top and lowered it over her, balancing it on the lower half of what was left of a heap of server boxes. He knelt again. “Stay under this. Do not move. I’ll be back.”
She nodded.
He stood and scoured the area around him once again for any movement. There wasn’t any.
Whatever was down here seems to have moved up to the other levels. Trying to get out…
He moved quickly, jumping over obstacles and pushing others out of the way until he was confronted by an opening to a long corridor. On the floor to his right sat the secure-looking door, buckled and distorted.
“Yeah, that’s not good,” he said under his breath.
He stepped over a seal, as if he was walking onto the gantry of a ship. Lights flickered ahead of him, momentarily revealing four doors, two opposite each other, and ahead, a large area of shattered glass partitions and benches covered in scientific equipment.
There was also a smell, unlike anything he had ever sensed before. A twisted combination of human detritus and something rotting. Something dead.
A deathly cold blue light seemed to illuminate everything, even when the main lights blinked out.
He listened into the stuttering darkness ahead and picked up the sound of something. He wasn’t sure what, but there was a ‘thing’ moving inside the large area, thirty feet in front of him in the lab.
He cautiously stepped forward, trying to be ready for any eventuality.
His ears started to pick up a pulsing throbbing sound coming from the room ahead and slowed almost to a stop when he got to its entrance.
The air was thick with the odor he picked up earlier, so much so that it felt as if it was trying to force its way into his pores and smother him.
What the fuck…
Bodies of soldiers laid in a clump on the right side of the lab. Each one neatly placed side by side. But that wasn’t what had Joel frozen, not wanting to move any further forward, for also attached to their skulls were tentacle-like arms extending from another human, a large muscular man, whose clothes were mere shreds hanging from him.
The stench was coming from this thing that was feeding on the soldiers.
Hasn’t seen me.
Questions kept rolling through Joel’s mind of what the thing with five, long, snakelike appendages was, but he immediately pushed them away.
He scoured the rest of the lab looking for the tablet. From where he stood it couldn’t be seen. If he knew where it was, he could blur across the room, get it, and be out before the thing even knew he had been there. But, as it was, he was going to have to go slow. He needed to search. That meant he might be seen.
He took a step forward, his eyes fixed on the back of the creature that was feeding. Then another step. Then another.
A soldier screamed.
Joel’s eyes switched to the man that was now flailing.
Shit, he’s alive! How is he alive?
The soldier’s hands were struggling to get the thing that was attached to the top of his head away from him.
Have to help!
Joel went to run forward when one of the creature’s trunk-like arms whipped around, bringing the soldier attached to it as well. It slammed into Joel, knocking him across the room until he hit up against a medical cabinet, smashing the glass door.
Joel fell to the ground, a little dazed, then knelt peering over the counter top. The thing was standing looking directly at him. Three of its arms were still feeding, but the other two were holding soldiers aloft as if they were puppets. The thing’s face had long forgotten to be human, and now was beyond even the distortions of vamps faces. Dark, soulless, beady eyes rested above a mouth which seemed to take up the entirety of the lower half of it’s head.
“What the hell are you…”
Then Joel saw it. Behind the creature. The tablet being held by two robotic arms, and a multitude of cables attached to it. To his surprise he could see symbols dancing over its surface.
He stood square, facing the mutated thing fifteen feet in front of him. “Here… kitty, kitty… come to me…”
A roar emanated from the creature’s expanding mouth and, with it, came an even greater stench.
The soldiers flew through the air at Joel as the thing burst forward, not bothering to move around the counters, but instead uprooted them from their holdings and tossed them to the side.
Joel zipped to one side, faster than the monster could react, and then slid along the smooth floor under its flailing arms, emerging behind it. He smashed his fist into the machinery gripping the tablet, and the glow coming from the tablet immediately went dark.
Ducking, a tentacle swept through the air where his head was and crashed into the robotic arms, but not before Joel threw his hand out and grabbed the tablet. The arms crashed up against the wall behind.
Joel scurried across the floor, the tablet in one hand, as the thing’s arms scythed through the air around him. He made it to the soldier that a moment before was pleading for help, but he could see he had passed. He burst forward and threw himself into the corridor. The sound of destruction was at his neck as he sprinted forward, not daring to look back.
Without stopping, he scrambled across the main room of the Dome and threw the table top to one side.
Gone.
Rachel was not there.
He looked around, desperately trying to gain any sense of her, but there was nothing alive down there apart from the thing that was about to emerge from the corridor.
He sprinted forward, diving over the broken things which were humanity’s best chance of survival, and frantically pressed the buttons on the wall for the elevator to come back from wherever it was.
The multi-limbed thing crashed out into the Dome room, shunting furniture and equipment out of the way, and then picked up the same items.
A server stack, still within it’s metal frame, flew through the air and smashed into the floor, just where Joel was standing.
Joel laid on the elevator floor, then swiveled around, swept his ID card and hit ‘0’ for the ground floor.
*****
The elevator doors slid open and Joel staggered out.
“You’re hurt!” said Marina and Anna at the same time. Anna went to move forward but Joel waved her off.
“It’s been eighteen minutes!” said Hardin.
Joel realized there were four more people.
Rachel, Josh, Max, and Sergeant Hickman stood in their own group, a few feet away.
“You’re here!” said Joel to the sandy-haired woman.
She smile
d. “Thanks to you.”
Hickman waved them forward. “Come on, we’re leaving.”
Rattling and clanging came from the elevator behind Joel.
He’s coming.
“We gotta go. Everyone follow the sergeant.”
Joel turned, quickly running back inside the elevator and hit the highest numbered floor on the keypad, then jumped back out as the doors closed.
Should slow him down.
“Come on!” shouted Hickman, now twenty yards away near a large secure door.
Joel covered the distance in a few seconds, just as the door began to slowly swing back. When the gap was big enough, everyone ran through.
“What’s the plan?” said Marina to Joel under her breath. “We going with them?” she gestured towards those from the base.
“See how it plays out.”
Soon light from the outside world appeared at the end of a long tunnel. As they all ran along it, they passed bodies. Joel could smell from the blood that they had been killed by vamps. Vamps that were once their colleagues.
Max lagged behind, mostly limping, his breath an effort to expel from his lungs.
Anna slowed and placed her arm under his shoulder and helped him along.
The air increasingly smelt damp, and the blanket of gray above their heads when they emerged from the tunnel confirmed it had been raining. Outside, the world seemed dead.
The chaos of helicopters and soldiers guarding buildings had been replaced by solitude.
Hickman’s horror was obvious. “I don’t get it…”
“Looks like everyone’s deserted us,” said Max.
They all walked forward, moving past a guard station and down a sloped road.
Shannon spotted a single truck parked at the back of the large hospital tents.
Joel got to it before anyone else and jumped up, looking in the cabin. A young female soldier laid slumped across the two front seats, her neck a tapestry of puncture wounds.
The keys were still in the ignition.
The others arrived at the back.
Hickman pulled his M4 and jumped up, pulling the flaps back. There were a few crates of medical supplies, but apart from that it was empty.
“Everyone inside,” said the sergeant.
Anna helped Mary, Lee, and Max up, while the sergeant walked to the front.
“I’m driving,” he said to Joel who was pulling the soldier out of the cabin.
“That’s a negative, soldier. I’m driving, at least the first shift.”
Hickman raised his rifle at Joel’s chest. “You got no authority here!”
Joel could hear the thump of the man’s heart. He raised his hands.
“Your kind killed… everyone! This place was how we were going to turn it all around! Then you and your freaks arrived! I oughta just kill you now, do us all a favor!”
From behind, Marina knocked the rifle upwards. A few shots clattered out as she pulled it from him and pinned him against the side of the truck. He struggled but was unable to get free.
The look of hate in his eyes shocked Marina, but she still held him.
“Let him go,” said Joel.
Marina frowned then released her grip.
“Whatever this is? It wasn’t us. If you want answers, go talk to your scientist friends in the back. But right now. I’m getting us the hell out of here.”
The sergeant looked away, then walked to the back and climbed up.
Joel looked at Marina. “Guess you get second shift then.”
He climbed up to the driver’s seat while she got in alongside.
“Where we heading?” she said.
“East.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
They had been driving for an hour. Anna had seen the anxious looks pass between the four from the mountain complex, but none of them had spoken. She had had enough.
“So, what the hell happened down there?” she looked between them, happy for any answer.
Max shifted in his seat, while Hickman looked frustrated. Josh remained passive while Rachel looked as if she was still in shock.
“You guys fucked-up, right?” said Shannon to them.
“We can’t talk about it. It’s classified,” said Rachel.
Shannon scoffed.
A look of bemusement came to Bill. “Classified?”
“Yes. There are rules, and—”
Anna’s eyes widened. “You used what was inside the vials on people… on soldiers, didn’t you?”
Most opposite her looked down.
“It was the general…”
Rachel angrily looked at Josh. “It’s not our place to—”
Josh continued, ignoring his colleague. “He liked the idea of using Joel’s blood. Injecting it into the soldiers to ‘give them a fighting chance,’ but when he learned that we had the pure elixir in the vials from the Copeland Corporation, he ordered it to be used.”
Anna looked shocked and angry. “You forced that stuff on people?”
Josh shook his head. “Didn’t have to. The soldiers were willing to do it.”
“That’s what happened today?” said Evan.
Rachel looked up. “No. The trials started yesterday. At first there was no reaction whatsoever. We couldn’t even detect the scourge virus in their systems. We began to think that the vials were a hoax, that they contained a few base compounds but nothing interesting.” She took a moment then continued. “We had no idea that the virus was somehow dormant, masking itself, but still in their bodies. When the soldiers changed, it happened so suddenly, we weren’t prepared…”
She wiped away a tear. Max held her hand to stop it from shaking.
Anna wanted to question more, but bit her lip.
The old physicist sighed. “Alas, we have lost it all. The vials, the tablet…” He noticed a few eyes looked away when he mentioned the ‘tablet.’ “You have it, don’t you? That is why you were all waiting for Joel?”
“We ain’t got shit,” said Shannon, crossing her arms.
Max leaned forward. “No, but don’t you see? If we have the tablet, then we still have a chance of stopping this thing, or at least—”
“Giving us a fighting chance?” said Anna incredulously, parroting the general’s words.
Max sat back. “Well yes, if that’s how you want to state it.”
The hours passed and they moved into Kansas.
Up front in the cabin, Joel watched as they drove through a flat, yellow-beige landscape of dying crops, peppered with the occasional barn and ranch building.
“You know. I knew the head guy, the one you met. Not personally, but I had heard of him,” said Marina.
“Hal McClure?” said Joel.
“He was a Brigadier General when I was doing my tour. Heard good things about him.”
Images of the general with the whiskey in his hand jumped into Joel’s mind. “Did he like to drink?”
“Umm… I don’t know. Why?”
“No reason. He gave me the whole ‘your blood can save humanity’ speech.”
“Maybe it can.”
“He liked the idea of a hybrid army.”
“Oh…”
“Yeah… like that was going to work out for anyone.”
A few miles in the distance, outside the range of a human’s vision, Marina noticed a cluster of buildings and vertical structures scattered between.
She pointed to the north-east. “There’s a town coming up on our left.”
Joel wanted to keep going. The highway was relatively clear. They had only seen a handful of abandoned vehicles, and they still had at least five hours of sun left, but every part of him ached and he needed to rest.
He nodded. “We’re in the middle of nowhere out here. Vamps should be on the low side, if any.”
“There’s always some…”
“We’ll check any buildings before we make use of them.”
He turned the wheel to the left slightly and they moved onto the exit.
Soon, they
were moving along a wide, four-lane road with gas stations and drive-throughs on both sides. As they progressed, the sandy colors of the plains gave way to rich greens and reds of a town populated by autumn trees.
Someone banged on the small window between the cabin and the bed behind. “What we doing?” said Hickman through the glass.
Joel briefly held his hand up then turned onto a main road which dissected the town.
“What about that place?” said Marina, pointing to the left.
A large mock Tudor house sat near the edge of the road. A sign outside proudly announced ‘Potters Inn’, and that they still had vacancies.
“Perfect,” said Joel as he pulled onto a small parking lot. It was empty apart from an RV. It reminded Joel of the one he drove a few days earlier.
He rubbed his eyes then, with Marina, got out and walked around to the back. Hickman, Shannon, and Evan were already standing. Evan helped Bill and then the others down.
“Stay here, me, Marina, and Evan will check the building out. We shouldn’t be longer than a few minutes. If you see anything out of place, honk the horn.”
“I’ll go with you,” said Hickman.
Briefly, Joel thought about disagreeing but was too tired to do so. He nodded.
Marina knelt near Jess, who was having trouble holding onto Flint’s leash, whose tail was wagging. “I think he might want a restroom break,” said Marina.
“Yeah,” said Jess.
Marina pointed to a nearby patch of grass. “Take him over there, but don’t wander off!”
“Yeah, yeah,” said her daughter, taking the dog away. Jasper quietly followed.
Joel approached the back of the large house cautiously, despite not picking up any heartbeats within.
“Not hearing anything,” said Marina.
Images of the multi-limbed thing in the lab flashed in Joel’s mind.
That thing didn’t have a heartbeat either.
He held the handle to a back room, and pulled. The door opened to a kitchen.
A few silver and copper pans sat on the chessboard-patterned floor, but, apart from that, there was no sign that anything was wrong.
He walked inside, not stopping, and moved straight through a small hallway to the front where the lobby was. A high counter stood near the front door. Behind, all the room keys were still hanging on the wall apart from one.
