Healers

by Munson, Brad

  Five minutes ago I took two handfuls of his infected blood and spread it all over my own gunshot wounds. When I’m gone, in just a few minutes, I’ll turn. And I hope to God the first person back through that door, after I turn, is Agent fucking Sawyer so I can kill him once and for all.

  Just be sure to shoot him in the head as soon as I do. In fact, shoot him twice, just for good measure. And because he deserves it.

  You’ve been a good friend, Doc. A good partner. Keep fighting the good fight. Don’t forget me.

  God bless.

  The last few lines trailed off badly. She could only imagine the pain he had been feeling by then, how the life had literally been draining out of him as he formed those final letters. She hoped there was something, somewhere, after this life, so Mason could know that his crazy plan had worked: Sawyer had been the first one back in that room, and the transformed hero had taken him down, once and for all.

  It had been her pleasure to put those shots – more than two, actually – into Sawyer’s traitorous brain.

  I owe you, Mason, she told his ghost. I always will.

  She sighed and put the note back in its hiding place, careful not to fold it or crease it any more than it had been already. She knew she would be pulling it out to read it again the next morning, and for every morning after that until it dissolved in her hands.

  The man had saved the world. Without his sacrifice, she might have died. Certainly Sawyer and the RSA would have taken the Fac and the vaccine, and God knows what that would have meant. It all started here, right in this room, in the instant that Mason lunged through that–

  The locks on every door went CHUNK CHUNK CHUNK, one after another it. Anna knew that sound. She’d heard it in her nightmares almost every night. But this time it was real.

  This time the locks on the labs really had opened.

  Her mind raced. The dormant shamblers she had been monitoring, three doors down the corridor, were probably still dormant. They were behind two sets of closed (if now unlocked) doors, at the far end of a makeshift airlock, insulated from any sight, sound, or smell that would reactivate them. A quick glance at the monitors linked to the security cameras that Duncan Boyd, their new tech geek, had installed confirmed that: No motion.

  But that was only part of the problem.

  She had also taken the standard restraints off her subject in the inner examination room. She’d done it weeks earlier, only because she’d been forced to. The creature had been struggling so violently against them, and it was so fragile at its advanced age, that there was risk of permanent damage, and she wanted him – needed him – unharmed. So she had relied on tranquilizer darts since then, letting it move around the padded cell at will, and so far that had worked perfectly well. But now ...

  She turned towards the door to the inner examination room as it burst open and Dr. Karl Meyer, the world’s oldest sprinter, shrieked as he lunged into the room, arms up, fingers like claws, teeth bared. He came straight for Anna. She took one long step back and kicked a lab table loaded with equipment into his way, blocking him as she backed up, groping for a weapon, any kind of weapon.

  The sprinter swept the table aside with a single convulsive stroke. A distant, icy part of Anna’s mind wondered how his wasted musculature could summon that kind of strength and speed, but it didn’t matter. All she knew for sure was that the sprinter was screaming. It was hungry.

  And it was coming for her.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Mark Stiles almost smiled as the breach alarms – the loud, continuous clang-clang-clang that could be heard in every corner of recovering Omaha – finally sounded. Way too little, he told himself as one hand reached over the opposite shoulder. Way too late.

  In perfect unison, as if they had rehearsed it, every other member of his group, from battle-hardened Rebecca Hall to round-bodied William Tomlinson – reached for their hips, their shoulders, the small of their backs, and pulled out their fully loaded and ready-to-fire weapons of choice. Stiles suddenly realized this would be an entirely unintended test of their community’s new policy: Every citizen must be armed and complete three days of weapons training before being granted free access to recovering Omaha. It didn’t matter if they had single-handedly fought their way through armies of the infected to get here; they had to learn how to defend themselves the proper way, with and without firearms … and frequently unlearn all the bad habits they’d acquired during the desperate times.

  “Fall back!” he shouted to them. “Just a few yards! Get some space!” He pulled up his beloved Winchester, sighted carefully down the barrel, and put a round straight into the skull of one of the closest of the shamblers. The creature went down like a load of potatoes in a dirty canvas bag.

  The gunfire was slow and careful as the new citizens slowly spread apart – exactly as they had been trained to do – making the shamblers choose a target, pause in confusion. Stiles saw Rebecca take down a relatively fast-moving former female, blowing away the side of its head with a single shot from her H&K. Once it was done, she swung her stiffened arm swiftly to the right to catch a former male – an older one, bald and badly damaged already – directly in its open, hissing mouth.

  The others weren’t quite as lucky or as smooth. Stiles wasn’t surprised. Rebecca had gotten a lot of practice, far too much of it, in fact. The rest of his group were beginners by comparison. Shots missed. Bullets plowed through arms and shoulders, buried themselves in the center mass, but those shamblers kept coming. Stiles knew the ugly truth: Head-shots were hard, even for the best shooters, and the farther away the target, the lower the odds for a clean kill. Or in this case, he told himself, a re-kill.

  He backed away from the closest targets as he carefully took down two more. The frozen expanse of No Man’s Land was filled with the infected. It was as if the news of the open gates had passed from one diseased creature to the next, and the crowd stumbling out of the forest was growing thicker by the minute. “Got to get those gates closed!” he shouted to Rebecca.

  “Tell me about it!” she shouted back.

  He quickly, coolly assessed the dozen men and women in his group. A few were handling it well; the rest were already in trouble. He was glad he’d taken the time to learn everyone’s name the night before. “Cameron! Del Amo! Jameson! Taylor! Fall back! There’s a safe house right behind you, off to the left! Go!”

  They didn’t argue. Two of them even nodded gratefully as they turned and ran for the house they had passed just a few minutes before – the one with a big red cross inside a big white circle. These were literally “safe houses,” with double locks on the reinforced doors, double-thick windows, and newly installed gunports, not to mention small but significant caches of ammunition, food, and medical supplies. They would be okay in there, Stiles knew, but he didn’t take the time to follow their progress. They would either make it or they wouldn’t, and if they didn’t ... maybe they didn’t deserve to.

  Barrington and the other future Watch member, Keller – a broad-shouldered Latino with hair slicked back and the beginnings of a mustache – were holding their own, systematically taking down shambler after shambler. Still, Stiles knew, they hadn’t been prepared for a full-on battle quite yet. Worse, their ammunition had to be limited. They weren’t fully outfitted yet. Tomlinson, bless him, was ten feet from either of them, and making every shot count. He waited until a shambler got within a few feet, when he was sure he could hit them, then he fired his Remington directly into its face without so much as a tremble in his hand. Meanwhile, Rebecca took down every infected corpse that approached her with a grim efficiency and relentless speed that impressed even Stiles.

  Not enough, he knew. They were as good as he could expect – better – but not nearly enough. As long as a never-ending supply of creatures continued to get past the fence, they were doomed. “Pull to the left!” he shouted to his team. “All of you now, move left and keep a
t it!”

  All but one obeyed, side-stepping to their left, closer to the fence, forcing their fire to move with them, now shooting almost parallel to the chain-link.

  Perfect, he thought, then corrected himself. Well, not perfect, but as good as it’s going to get.

  Only one of his people hadn’t moved as he had commanded: The Dentist. The statuesque woman had a Smith & Wesson that was doing serious damage to oncoming shamblers, and she had no intention of pulling back or away. She just fired, shifted aim, fired, shifted aim, fired, shifted aim …

  … and ran out of bullets.

  Stiles couldn’t help her. There was no time. He broke even farther to the left and ran flat-out, heading for the fence at an acute angle, moving more quickly than any shambler and reloading as he ran. For the first time that day, but not the last, he silently thanked Anna Demilio for healing his bite-wounds and giving him back the use of both legs. Don’t fail me now, he thought as he ran.

  Most of the shamblers were farther into the street now, moving towards the living and their second inevitable death. By the time they sensed Stiles approach and refocused their attention, he was past them, moving swiftly towards the open gate and the next wave of shamblers that were still shoving through.

  He skidded to a stop as close to the breach as he dared, brought up the Winchester, and started firing. A shambler went down. Another. As he blew the head off a third with a wet, splattering explosion, three more turned towards him, slowly realizing the threat. He braced himself for the worst: Killing another half-dozen in quick succession before he could get close enough to close the fucking gate and block it with–

  A metal staff – a five-foot length of sharpened pipe, really – whizzed into his field of vision and crushed the head of the nearest shambler. It actually made Stiles pause for an instant and look.

  The Dentist, her empty Smith and Wesson holstered, was swinging that staff like a fucking ninja assassin, whirling to gain momentum and striking a second shambler squarely in its neck, shattering the vertebrae with a thick pop, swinging her foot into its spavined chest so it fell back, collapsed, stopped struggling.

  Stiles took out another and moved three steps forward. The Dentist, her hair coming loose from its tie, lunged forward on one long leg and ran her sharpened staff up and forward, piercing the underside of a groaning shambler’s decaying jaw. The weapon moved upwards, too fast to see. Its lethal point emerged from the top of the shambler’s head, black brain-matter flying into the air, then disappeared again, pulled free by the warrior woman before the collapsing corpse could take her down with it as it fell.

  Then, just for an instant, the gate was free. The next wave of shamblers was ten feet away, wobbling towards the fence, and wouldn’t arrive for a few seconds at least. The rest were either motionless or moving away from the breach, into the city. Stiles moved, fast as he could. He put his shoulder against the gate and slammed it shut, felt the stout frame bang against the lock assembly and attempt to bounce back, but he held it there, held it tight, and fumbled at the mechanism, trying to lock it manually, desperate to make it secure ...

  Nothing. The handle flopped uselessly. The latch wouldn’t move. The lock seemed permanently, stubbornly, jammed in the OPEN position.

  The shamblers were less than five feet away. He couldn’t hope to hold them out if they started to push at the gate, and he knew they would. Any second now ...

  “The bodies!”

  He turned his head but not his shoulder. It still pressed hard against the gate, anticipating the counter-pressure of the infected. The Dentist was ten feet away, her back to the shamblers that were moving farther into Omaha, looking him up and down. “The bodies!”

  She jumped for him. He almost flinched as she landed right next to him ... then threw out one foot and kicked the nearest fallen shambler with all her considerable strength. She rolled it over so its devastated face looked blindly into the winter sky, then kicked it again, so it rolled one more time–

  –and wedged itself against the base of the gate, blocking it shut.

  “Shit!” he said. “Perfect!”

  She bent down and clutched at the ankles of a second shambler, the first one she had felled, dragging it over, pulling it on top of the other motionless shambler even as Stiles felt the first impact of the infected on the far side of the gate. He bounced away from the force, suddenly mindful of their grasping hands and snaggled teeth, even though he knew he was the one man in the world they couldn’t infect. They can still kill me, he thought as he staggered back. The jaws that bite, the claws that catch.

  But there was no time to waste. He checked the progress of the other team members, just for an instant, then joined The Dentist in dragging and piling bodies. Three, four, five – seven of them, a wall of dead shamblers, barricading the gate, holding it shut no matter how many of their moving brethren pushed at the broken lock.

  “Brilliant,” he panted to The Dentist, straightening up for the first time. “Gotta tell the others about that, great way to—”

  The scream cut through him like a newly sharpened knife. He and The Dentist both whirled, almost in unison, to follow the nearby shriek of pure agony:

  Barrington. He had gotten too close; his last shot had missed, or the shambler had moved faster than he’d anticipated, or both: it had snagged his left arm and buried its brown teeth in his shoulder.

  He was as good as dead.

  Barrington flung his weapon away, drew his Ka-Bar from its sheath, and plunged it into the shambler’s temple, but it was too late, at least for him. Even then, the shambler’s body pressed against him, its jaws locked against the human’s gushing wound even in its second death, and they danced together, not yet fallen, still struggling.

  “No!” Keller shouted. “No no NO!” He turned on his soon-to-be partner, thumbed his M-6 to full automatic, and sprayed Barrington and the dead shambler both with a stream of bullets, over and over, shredding them as the two bodies merged into a single mass of blood and torn flesh and sank, too slowly, to the ground.

  Tomlinson was the one who made him stop. He put his hand on Keller’s shoulder, squeezed hard, and spoke directly into his ear – words that only the two of them could hear over the roar of the gunfire and the breach alarm. Stiles, many yards away, was suddenly aware that the clang-clang-clang of the alarm had never ended; he had simply stopped hearing it. He knew it wouldn’t cease until the last breach had been sealed and the last shambler inside the perimeter had been put down.

  Keller stopped firing. He lowered his weapon in spite of the shamblers that were still nearby and simply looked down at the bloodied body of the partner he would never have. Tomlinson, showing greater wisdom than ever, backed away from him without another sound. Stiles, The Dentist, and Rebecca joined him, all of them breathing heavily, wiping sweat and gore from their faces.

  “How many got through?” Stiles asked the nurse at his side.

  “Seven,” she said and swallowed hard. “I counted.”

  “I’m sure you did.”

  He thumbed at the walkie-talkie still mounted on his shoulder – the one he had been using so calmly, just an hour before. “General,” he said – knowing that Sherman hated the title, since he was no longer a member of the armed forces, but unable to break the habit. “We’re at Northwest Gate 32. It’s secured. We used shambler bodies to hold it shut. Might work elsewhere.”

  The radio spit out a growl of static. “Good thought. I’ll pass it along.”

  “We’re secure?”

  “Getting there. Teams en route to the other gates. Any threats?”

  Stiles looked at Rebecca, who hefted her weapon and blinked very slowly as she nodded her head. There was a streak of black infected blood in her hair. She couldn’t have cared less. “Seven,” he said.

  “We’ll handle the gates,” Sherman told him. “Take care of the runners.”

 
; “Done,” he said, and cut the connection.

  He looked at his team of five: The Dentist, standing tall and almost glowing with energy, the surprising Tomlinson, calmly reloading his weapon and readying himself for the worst, Rebecca, looking dead calm and carved out of iron as she waited for instructions, and Keller, still shaking with an impossible-to-stop combination of rage, fear, and grief.

  Stiles looked at him closely. “You good to go?” he asked the young Latino.

  Keller gave him a short, tight nod. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m okay.”

  “Then come on.”

  He turned south to face down the open street, where the shamblers had moved a scant few minutes earlier. They started to move, and as they passed the tidy little cottage with the red cross on the door, he saw the dim reflection of the other group members inside, watching them go. He raised his hand, palm out and pressing at the air, in the universal sign that mean Stay there. Wait.

  They had seven targets.

  They would bring them all down.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Krueger hated that fucking breach alarm. But he had to admit, at least this once, it just might have saved the world.

  The first clang popped him out of a warm bed, jerking him up like a puppet on a thick rubber band. He was the polar opposite of his old buddy Stone when it came to preparing himself for battle: He had no difficulty lunging straight into the corridor outside his quarters wearing nothing but his pajama pants, a sleeveless tee, and yesterday’s socks. As far as he was concerned, he had everything that mattered in his right hand: The best damn sniper rifle in this man’s army, and the time-tested skill to use it.

  As he pounded down the Fac’s main hallway, he patted the pocket of his jammies just to make sure: Yes. He had remembered to slip a walkie-talkie into his pocket so he wouldn’t be completely out of the loop. A moment later he was in the maintenance closet and hauling himself up the metal ladder to the roof in a painful but familiar hand-over-hand climb. He was halfway past the second floor, grunting with every rung, when the radio quacked at him: “Status.”