by Munson, Brad
She would leave the tree behind and get all this stuff to the loading dock. She wouldn’t think about anything else.
She just wasn’t sure she could make herself come back to the second floor, not even for the precious light tree.
Maybe not for anything.
*****
Danny Piper frowned to himself as he and Ernie Kline emerged from the staircase and entered the third floor corridor. The light was impossibly dim, so faint they weren’t even sure where it was coming from. They were absolutely silent as they turned and groped their way down the deserted hallway, not even daring a whisper, moving more by feel than sight until they reached the end of the corridor and encountered a firmly locked door. Kline had lost the coin-toss, so he was the one towing the light tree. Its heavily oiled wheels barely whispered against the linoleum.
Piper hefted his M4 and faced the closed door. “Light it up,” he whispered. Kline gripped his own rifle and popped his heel against the base-mounted switch.
A shambler was there – right there, staring straight at them through a huge glass window, twelve inches in front of them.
“Gah!” Piper fell back a step, gripped his weapon and started to fire—
“STOP!” Kline shouted. “WAIT!”
It was too late. Training, instincts, and pure panic had taken over, and Piper fired four rounds in rapid succession, point-blank into the face of the infected former human. The single pane of glass, a high, wide observation window, shattered into a million tiny shards and blew into the locked room. The infected’s head exploded into a thick black-and-red mist in the same instant. A heartbeat later, the rest of its body fell back and hit the floor with a meaty thud.
Five more of the infected, waiting in the next room, rushed the window. They moved with astonishing speed. They thrust their arms and heads through the new opening, hissing and grunting at the sight of fresh meat. Thankfully, the window was high enough that they couldn’t climb through. They were still trapped in the other room, but fully exposed.
Both the scavengers took another step back, safely out of range, and gaped.
“Not shamblers,” Piper said. “Sprinters.”
He was right. The infected creatures on the other side of the broken window moved with the unmistakable, twitchy speed of a human in the first phase of Morningstar: still technically alive, but beyond help, psychotically violent, possessed of massive hysterical strength and speed, and irredeemably insane.
“That’s impossible,” Kline said. His voice broke on the second word, and Piper was reminded that his partner, despite his size, was barely twenty-one. “It’s been months. They should have died and turned to shamblers a long time ago. How—”
One sprinter, half-through the window, yowled as if in response – a sound of sheer, mad hatred and hunger.
Kline shot the thing in the head. It slumped forward, bent over the broken glass, stopped moving. Nice shot, Piper thought. At least the fucker won’t rise.
“Let’s get ‘em all,” Piper said. The two scavengers instinctively moved away from each other to get better angles and began firing. Every new head, every gaping, distorted face that appeared in the observation window was shattered by one or more rounds. Like a fuckin’ shooting gallery, Piper thought as the tenth, fifteen, twentieth face showed up.
Finally, they stopped. There was no noise, no further movement from the room. Just a wave of horrible stench, rolling out in a cloud so thick you could almost see it.
“We have to go in there?” Kline said, sounding nauseated even at the thought.
“Gotta make sure it’s clear,” Piper said, hating the idea just as much as his partner did. “Might take a couple more head shots.”
Kline sighed deeply. “Yeah,” he admitted. “You’re right.”
The sign on the door said CANCER TREATMENT AND RECOVERY. It was firmly closed, but not locked. Kline positioned himself, M4 up and ready, as Piper stepped to the side and swept the door open. They were both ready to shoot at a moment’s notice.
No need. Nothing moved.
They stepped into the carnage, holding their breath against the stink. Sprinter bodies were everywhere: flat on the ground, hunched over furniture, blown back and propped against the filthy walls by the force of the gunfire.
It only took a few shots from a carbine to make double-sure none of the infected would rise again. There were no shamblers in the ward at all. Just sprinters – now permanently dead sprinters. Piper still didn’t understand how it was even possible, until Kline called out to him from the far side of the room.
He was standing in front of a mound of flesh. Arms, legs, torsos, heads – body parts, all chewed down to the bone and discarded. Clearly, horribly, eaten, with the leftovers tossed into a pile so high the top of it reached Kline’s formidable shoulders.
It took Piper a moment to figure it out. Then the realization made him queasy.
There had been a lot of debate and a great deal of field research out of Omaha regarding the behavior of sprinters versus shamblers. The newly infected were far more dangerous than the risen, so … how long could they live? What did they eat? How much reasoning remained in the infected mind?
Here was at least part of the answer. What happens when sprinters run out of food? Piper asked himself. They don’t eat shamblers. That’s rotting meat. But they’ll clearly eat other sprinters if they have to, if there’s nothing else around. Happy little cannibals. It’s the strong eating the weak, to survive one more day. Until new food comes calling ...
“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Piper said.
They left the cancer ward and closed the door behind them. He would try not to think of that room and that pile of flesh ever again, but it would visit him in his sleep for the rest of his life.
*****
Angela Castillo stared at the double doors in front of her. She didn’t want to open them. Not now, not ever. But the floor plan was forcing her.
It was clear: There was a broad single room on the other side of those doors; it made up almost half the fourth floor of the complex. The natural light here was already adequate; they were at the top of the building, and there were skylights all along the hallways and, she knew, in the room beyond. No light trees necessary. And still the floor plan called to her: It showed them that there was a second, smaller room at the far side of the big room she didn’t want to go into, a room marked SUPPLIES & EQUIPMENT, and that’s what they needed more than anything.
But she couldn’t stop staring at the sign over the door. The one that was painted in crooked rainbow colors, to look like a banner from an elementary school.
It read CHILDREN’S WARD.
And she didn’t want to go in.
Kiley cleared his throat, trying to sound delicate. “Uh … we got a problem?”
She shook it off. “No,” she said. “Just … be careful, that’s all. Like always.”
“Like always,” she agreed.
She had listened carefully to the reports Piper and Lassiter had made over her comm unit. She knew she’d already lost a second team member. She wasn’t ready to lose a third.
She squared her shoulders. “Open it,” she said, and Kiley gripped the lever-like handles, turned them simultaneously, and opened the doors wide.
Nearly fifty shamblers jolted out of hibernation in the same instant, driven to consciousness by the light and sounds and smells of the living. They all turned to face the door simultaneously, as if on cue.
They all came for the scavengers.
The youngest one was less than three. It hobbled forward on stiff legs that had never fully learned to walk. Now it was naked except for a diaper so limp and filthy it looked like a black loincloth. Its round little jaw worked up and down, up and down, as it hungered for human flesh.
The oldest was no more than ten, a creature who had once been a painfully thin little g
irl with huge blue eyes turned foggy and blank by the infection. Her fingers were crusted with long-dried gore. Two of them had broken off and disappeared.
“I can’t do this,” Castillo said. She heard the words from a distance, as if someone else had spoken them.
“You don’t have to,” Kiley said. He stepped directly in front of Castillo, so fast and hard it actually made her flinch, then swept wide with his bladed pike. Tiny bodies fell before him, some literally split in half. The scavenger used the suddenly cleared space to reverse his grip and lunge forward, sweeping even more of the dead but deadly children out of the way, creating a path deep into the room that led directly to the far door with a sign that said SUPPLIES – STAFF ONLY.
“Run,” he said, his voice deep and rough. “I’ll hold them off.”
Castillo ran.
She nearly tripped twice on the wrecked remains of children’s toys that were strewn across the room. In each case, she caught herself, staggered, and moved on so quickly that the tiny grasping hands of the infected could find no purchase.
Behind her, Kiley had unlimbered his M4 and was mowing through the little bodies, tearing them down as fast as he could. She didn’t want to look – she couldn’t. She just bent her head down, led with one shoulder, and rammed directly into the supply room door with all the speed and force she could muster.
It collapsed inward without an ounce of resistance, as if it had never been fully latched at all. The unexpected shock of it actually made Castillo stumble forward, and she had to curl into a ball and roll as she fell into the room, banging hard against the far wall and the steel shelving that was bolted there.
She was badly shaken for all sorts of reasons. It took her a moment to find her bearings in the gloom, and as her eyes focused she saw two nine-year-olds trying to fit through the shattered door at the same time. They were exactly the same height and looked so similar they could have been brother and sister. Long, stringy hair so light it was almost silver. Sharp chins slathered with identical amounts of gore. Identical bites on their slim, fragile shoulders from the same shambler who had come through here and bitten them all, one after another, on and on and over and –
There was a sharp, metallic schick, a single deadly sound, and the heads of the two nine-year-olds lifted away as if by magic, flying free and out of sight. The bodies dropped straight down and Kiley’s silhouette filled the rectangle of misty light, his back to her.
“Pack it up,” he said urgently. “We have to get out of here.”
She packed.
Just as they had hoped, the room’s supplies were virtually untouched. They had heard on the radio broadcasts that the children’s ward was one of the first to go, that the survivors had been forced to simply abandon it. Later those last survivors – the ones she had seen in the break room, three floors below – had neither the weaponry or the will to get past the dead babies. Now recovering Omaha would reap the benefits.
Castillo scooped the medications, syringes, bandages, scalpels, blood packs, clamps, catheters and more into the wide-mouthed packs they had prepared exactly for this purpose. She knew the other teams were doing the same in the supply rooms they found on the other floors, but she hoped none of them were being forced to move as quickly and indiscriminately as she.
Three minutes later, she had filled four bags. One was across her back, one was one each shoulder, the last was strapped across her chest. Two smaller packs hung from loops at waist-height. She was a walking supply station, armed with a fully loaded M4, and if there had been time, Kiley could have done the same.
But no time remained. As she staggered to the door she could see the strokes of his bladed pike were not nearly as wide or strong; she could hear him grunting with each new sweep. He had run out of ammo minutes earlier; it was all he could do to keep back the tide of infected children. At this moment, from this angle, they looked unstoppable and endless.
“We gotta go,” she said to his back as she pushed into the room.
“Hell yes we gotta go,” he said, and took another stroke.
A tiny little boy with a wild shock of black hair slipped under the stroke of his blade. The infected creature skinned back rotting lips and bared teeth no larger than snowflakes, but Castillo could see it falling forward, mere inches from Kiley’s exposed upper arm that was swinging past him–
Castillo exploded the infected child’s head with three fast rounds, tap tap tap. The force of it threw the small body back and knocked another three attackers to the ground. It gave them a small, momentary gap in the mob, and they both simultaneously barreled through it, bellowing as they ran.
They made it to the door, more out of sheer force than finesse. Somehow Castillo got through first; Kiley was one step behind her and pulled the doors shut as he ran, locking them inside again, stopping for just a moment to make sure the door would hold as the tiny fists and faces battered against the wood, groaning and snarling to be set free.
“I’m done,” he said. “Let the next guys finish this one.”
“I’m with you there,” she said. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Please.”
They stumbled towards the stairwell, almost too exhausted to move.
*****
Castillo and Kiley encountered Lassiter in the stairwell two stories down, still struggling with the portable x-ray machine. The three of them wrestled it down the one remaining flight of stairs; Kline and Piper were already waiting at the back door, looking nervous and impatient. No one asked where McCartney was. No one needed to; they had all heard Lassiter’s report.
“Roll it up,” Castillo ordered. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Kline and Kiley did it together, one on each side of the huge ribbed rolling door. It rattled as it rose on its track, as smooth as the day it was installed.
The sound of the infected that were waiting outside for them hit the scavengers like a physical slap to the face. Hissing, groaning, choking, retching, every sound of violent hatred and uncontrollable hunger knotted together into the most hideous sound Castillo had ever heard.
They were surrounding the truck, thirty deep. She didn’t even bother to count them, there was no need. The barrier they had wedged between the back of the truck and the wall of the hospital still held, though it shuddered ominously from the sheer weight of the infected bodies pushing against it.
“Ignore them,” she said. “Get the truck loaded.”
They moved as quickly as they could, first getting the portable x-ray machine on board, then the pallet of linens and each of the cartons, boxes, bags, and carryalls they had gathered from each floor. In terms of cargo alone, the mission had been a striking success. This would not only serve to swell their inventories, they were actually bringing home medications and technology they simple didn’t have at the Fac or the clinics or the civil defense installations they’d already recovered. This was a major step up. A real win …
… except for the men who had died. And the nightmares they would all suffer for the rest of their lives.
It took ten minutes, with the infected yowling just inches away beyond the stout wooden barriers. Soon the flatbed was crowded; there was barely space for the four of them. They’d have to wedge themselves between the pallets and packages for the short trip back behind the perimeter fences.
Castillo clambered onto the limited space of the flatbed, then reached down and back to lend Piper a hand. “Come on up,” she said. “Get situated.” Kiley made his own way up, then reached down and virtually picked up Lassiter, physically the smallest of them, by the scruff of the neck and deposited her on the pallet of linens. “Ride ‘em high, woman,” he said. She scowled at him, but it was clear she didn’t mind one bit.
Castillo called down to Kline, the last man to board. “Get on up,” she called, having to raise her voice over the growing howl of the infected. “The window to the cab is open,
you’ll have to fit—”
The wooden panel to Kline’s right exploded inward without warning, reduced to splinter and spikes of wood. Shambler arms thrust out and seized him by the shoulders, the arms, the hands and pulled, pulled all two hundred and fifty pounds of him into the mass of the infected.
He didn’t have time to scream. Castillo watched helplessly as broken teeth drove into his shoulder, bicep, forearm, thigh.
“Kline!” Lassiter shouted. “Fuck, help him! HELP HIM!”
Only his left arm was visible now. It flailed at them, grabbed at the air, pawed for help, help.
Piper moved to jump down to help him. Castillo didn’t give him the chance. She steeled herself, threw out an arm, and clothes-lined the scavenger before he could jump. He fell back into the truck, bounced against a packing grate and bellowed, “What the fuck!?”
“He’s gone,” she said, but she didn’t take her eyes off Kline. She watched as the infected dragged him deeper, bit him repeatedly, chewed on his exposed and bleeding flesh. “He’s gone.”
She stared at the writhing scavenger as the infected took him completely. She watched as he was eaten alive.
Then she turned away.
“Kiley,” she said, “Get that last panel in place. Lassiter, lay down suppressing fire. I’ll drive.”
She wedged her way through between the cartons and crates to the open window that led to the cab. She heard the gunfire and groaning behind her as the scavengers held the undead attackers at bay, and pushed her shoulders through the opening, wriggled in, rolled and fell and dragged herself into the flatbed’s driver’s seat.
The shamblers outside the truck pushed their rotting faces against the windows, thrust their gray tongues against the glass, and moaned with uncontrollable hunger. Castillo didn’t care. The keys to the truck were still in the ignition, right where Kline had left them. She looked up as she turned the key and a heavy-set shambler, looking big as a wrestler, rolled over the hood of the truck and rammed into the glass directly in front of her. Their faces were inches apart when a crack appeared in the windshield as if by magic, a hot silver bolt of lightning.
