TAGGED: THE APOCALYPSE

by Chiron, Joseph M

  “We’ll take care of it,” Jackie nodded. “It was a mistake letting them go the first time. No good deed goes unpunished.”

  “He raped me.” Alexis stood behind Candy, speaking barely above a whisper to Jackie, her face a mask of pain, tears flowing. Jackie turned away. Alexis immediately turned toward Sven, “He raped me.”

  “Who?”

  “Thompson.” Alexis appeared terrified as she pried her eyes from her feet to look across the gap between the buildings, but didn’t point and showed only defeat and pain, not anger.

  “Tell Candy,” Sven said, and began pulling again at the net filled with terrified chickens. Alexis took it like a slap in the face, her mouth hung open with the shock of the latest blow. Sven saw her reaction and regretted blowing her off, “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Lock it up!” Jackie boomed the moment they entered the door of the tower. “No one goes in or out.”

  “I’ll put the chickens in my area with the plants. They’ll like that.” Sven was good at growing things. Plants and animals liked him and thrived around his energy. Jackie waved his hand at him dismissively. Alexis stumbled around behind Sven in his wake, weeping and confused.

  The lower tower was crammed full of men and families, refugees from Building 3. Babies fussed, mothers sang lullabies, people ate. “You, you, you, you…come with me now.” Jackie waded through the crowd, tapping men on the shoulder. “You also, yes, you and you.” He made a circle, ending at the stairs to the upper tower. Men hurried to fall into his wake. The door to the upper tower opened and Jeb peeked his head out. “Report.” Jackie was the general in full command, walking with his troops into the stronghold of the upper tower.

  CHAPTER 32: November 1, 4:30 p.m.

  “Hey, Dennis...” Rusty’s hands and face were covered in chicken grease as he chewed on more chicken. Every time Brit had seen him in the past two days, he and the other guards had been eating chicken. The smell of cooking chicken now permeated every corner of the three level guardhouse. “It’s getting dark. Shouldn’t we turn the lights on?”

  Dennis jumped up from the chair where he had been dozing. He grabbed Brit as he did, pulling him along. Since the conflict started Dennis would not let Brit out of his sight for a moment, in case he decided to run for the other side. Dennis flicked the light switch on the wall up and down, up and down. “Are the lights working downstairs?” He asked Rusty, who just shrugged.

  “Is there a breaker box or something maybe downstairs in the basement?” Rusty took an enormous bite of breast meat, adding more grease to his already greasy, reddish brown, patchy beard.

  Dennis peered out of the window from the third floor of the guardhouse. “The tower is lit up like a Christmas tree.” He rushed into the room they had just left and looked through the window at Building 3. “3 is dark too.”

  Brit could see shapes moving in the shadows of Building 3. “Who is that?” Immediately, as if it had heard Brit, the thing in the shadows threw its head back and a long, mournful howl pierced the growing darkness. Brit could clearly see the silhouette of its shaggy mane and sharp teeth. He noticed movement next to it. He could make out six or seven more in that shadowy place waiting for full darkness. Two more threw their heads back and joined the first one howling. Brit heard snapping and snarling as others jostled and fought, and the low, ever-present moaning sound, like wind through the trees.

  “Come on!” Rusty put down his half-eaten plate of chicken and wiped his greasy hands on his pants as he began running. Dennis was close behind, dragging Brit along with him. They found the breaker box with their flashlights in the basement. Dennis frantically clicked the tumblers on and off. Next to it was a larger power switch to the entire building. He clicked that up and down while Rusty tried his hand, frantically flipping the breaker tumblers on and off, to no effect.

  “I guess that’s why they call it the control tower,” Dennis said quietly under his breath. His shoulders were slumped and he looked defeated.

  “What?” Rusty stopped flipping breakers, which he seemed to believe would work by sheer determined willpower, and turned wild-eyed toward Dennis.

  “They have controls to operate the entire plant in the tower. I guess they figured out how to turn off the power to the rest of the plant.”

  “We’re in for a rough night,” Brit said.

  “The lights are out. Get everyone into defensive positions,” Rusty spoke into his radio.

  “Well, turn them back on,” Thompson replied through the radio.

  “Meet me at the third floor, gate side.” Rusty, Dennis and Brit ran up the eight flights of stairs. Rusty took them two at a time. Dennis followed for half a flight, then switched to one stair at a time. Dennis was beet red and sweating. He looked like he was about to have a heart attack. The howling was getting louder and seemed to be coming from all around the building. Brit looked out of the front windows at a crowd gathering at the gate.

  Thompson looked through the scope on his rifle, “Infected at the gate.” Brit estimated that there must be at least thirty already. As if to erase any lingering doubt, several threw their heads back and howled. Their shaggy manes could be seen clearly in the fading light. Thompson and Rusty began shooting out of the windows. Normally this entire area was flooded with lights for almost one hundred yards. Tonight it was dark. Between them, they downed five or six, but twenty replaced them before the last went down. He could hear them snapping, snarling, and moaning.

  “Hopefully, the fences will keep most of them out,” Rusty said. As if in answer, many of them started scratching the road and the dirt alongside the fence with their long sharp claws. And then, the first one squeezed under the fence on the right side of the road just west of the gate.

  “Hit them with your lights,” Rusty said, as he pulled his large Mag light off his belt and shined it at the fifty or so infected now crowding the main gate. Immediately, many of them shielded their eyes from the very dim, distant light source, but didn’t move or stop digging. It only seemed to antagonize them and the snarls, howls, and moans increased. The five or so under the fence on the right side shielded their weird, red eyes from the dim pinpoint of light and sprinted the few feet to the door of the guardhouse.

  “Turn it off! You’re giving away our position!” Thompson grabbed Rusty’s light and pulled it down.

  “If we don’t have lights, then the tower shouldn’t have lights either!” Rusty screamed maniacally and ran to the north side windows. He broke out the windows with the butt of his rifle and took aim at the big spotlight. It exploded instantly in a dramatic shower of sparks. Thompson joined and shot out a smaller fixed light beside it. They laughed and high-fived each other. Then the two windows they stood in erupted in a hail of gunfire from the tower. Brit and Dennis jumped back and hid behind a doorway. Rusty and Thompson dropped flat to the floor. Rusty was cut by flying glass on the back of his hand. Neither had been hit directly. Brit could see the other remaining spotlight on this side moving away. He knew they couldn’t risk having more shot out.

  There was a loud scratching sound below. They ran to the third floor windows and looked down. Below were a hundred or more infected at the door. A steady stream of infected was coming under the fence on both sides of the gate. There were now several hundred at the gate. “The windows have bars on the first floor and the door is bolted shut. We should be all right,” Dennis said. As he said that, two began climbing with their sharp claws right up the sides of the bricked-in windows, toward the second floor. More followed. There were no bars on the second or third floor windows.

  “What do we do?” Thompson turned white as a sheet and looked like he’d just taken a crap in his pants. Brit grabbed his nose as the stench reached him.

  “Shitfire and Assnation!” Rusty glared at Thompson.

  “Take all the guns and ammo and lock ourselves in the holding cells. They won’t be able to get to us.” Dennis took off at a sprint toward the cells in the basement.

  As they passed th
e second floor, there was a loud shattering of glass, and an infected climbed in through the window, oblivious to the deep cuts it received from the broken glass. With unwavering focus, it snarled and advanced toward them at lightning speed. Rusty and Thompson took it down after five shots. Three more infected poked their shaggy heads through the same broken window. Rusty and Thompson fired wildly at them not hitting anything. Dennis kept running, dragging Brit along behind him. “Come on! Stop wasting bullets!” Dennis screamed.

  Rusty and Thompson reached the basement just behind them, slamming the steel door and bolting it behind them as they reached the dark and dank cell area. Heavy scratching of claws on the metal door told them the infected had arrived. They flicked their flashlights on. The cells were below ground and the only windows were tiny six-inch-thick “4x4”s at the top of each cell. “Put all the guns and ammo in the cells,” Dennis ordered.

  No one moved. Brit jumped at a shadow in the corner. He thought he saw the shaggy form of an infected, but it was a mop standing on its end, business side up. “All we have is what’s on us,” Rusty drawled. “All the rest is up on the third floor.”

  “Maybe we can make it back to the third floor,” Thompson said hopefully.

  A pack of infected howled at the door so loud they had to cover their ears. There was more scratching, snarling and loud moaning at the door. Brit estimated there were at least five infected at the door now and they were howling, calling more to come. ‘Fresh meat,’ they howled. “We’ll never make it past that door,” Brit said quietly. “All the food is up there, too.”

  “We just have to make it through the night. Help me find the keys to the cells!” Dennis searched through the metal desk. The infected were punching large dings in the metal door as they struggled to get in.

  “There, on the wall.” Brit pointed to a large key ring on a nail pounded into the cement wall.

  Dennis snatched them off the wall, then tried them on the cell doors. “These are the ones!”

  Not a moment too soon. They all turned their heads in horror as the top corner of the metal door bent back like a tin can and an infected poked its head through. Rusty put his rifle right up to its face and pulled the trigger, blowing it back through the hole. “Into the cells!”

  CHAPTER 33: November 2, 9:45 a.m.

  It was morning, finally.

  Dennis unlocked the cell as quietly as he could, but it still made a loud click as the tumblers turned. It took all four of them to push the pile of dead infected from in front of the cell door. The infected had peeled back the metal door like it was a cheap can of coke, and then they were inside, slashing, snarling, spitting, moaning and howling. Dinner! If not for the bars of the cells, they would have been dead for certain. After the initial panicked shots, Rusty and Thompson had decided only to shoot the infected that came right up to the bars of the cells trying to slash and bite them.

  Brit could hear the infected moaning all around him. From the sound of it, there was a large murder of them directly above, hibernating during the daylight hours on the first floor of the guardhouse. They crept quietly out of the guardhouse, into the dim sunlight.

  “Stop! Right there!” Sven had rounded the corner and saw Brit, Dennis, Rusty and Thompson. Rusty and Thompson were in front. Sven was alone and didn’t appear to have a weapon on him.

  Rusty smiled and began to lift his rifle, “Ohhh, I’m a gonna enjoy this, I am.”

  “Freeze! Drop your guns! Sven, get back!” It was Jackie on the catwalk on top of the tower. Jeb and Mack immediately joined him, sighting their weapons on the men. Mack was a crack shot and could down any of them from there.

  “I surrender!” Brit yelled; anything as long as he didn’t have to make it through another night of the infected. “I’m unarmed.”

  “Down on your faces. Now!” Jackie ordered. Jackie and Zeb stayed sighted on the men from the tower catwalk, while he sent Mack and Tiny down to join Sven.

  “If we surrender, you’re not going to kill us, right?” Dennis asked.

  They laid down their weapons and then went to their knees in the dirt. All the fight had gone out of them from the previous night. Mack and Tiny appeared with their weapons. They all put their hands on top of their heads.

  “Oh hold on now…” Rusty said, as Candy appeared in the doorway.

  “Stay down! Don’t move or I will shoot you!” Jackie shouted from the catwalk, a cruel smile playing briefly about his lips.

  Rusty didn’t know what to do. He wanted to run, but he knew Jackie wasn’t bluffing. Candy walked fast toward him, holding something behind her back. When she pulled the handgun out from behind her back and pointed it directly at Rusty’s head, Rusty only had time to make a terrified “O” face before she fired once into his head at point blank range, dropping him like a sack of potatoes, then moved forward to stand directly over him before firing her second shot. Brit jumped up with his hands in the air and backed away, ready to run. In the confusion, Dennis and Thompson ran for it. Mack grabbed the gun away from her before she could shoot someone else.

  Sven put his body between Brit and Candy. “It’s okay.”

  “I told you MOTHERFUCKER! What did I say?” Candy screamed at Rusty’s dying body.

  Brit hugged Sven, grateful to be alive, and wept.

  CHAPTER 34: November 2, 10 a.m.

  “Shit!” Thompson screamed inside his own mind as he ran. He was not in the best of shape. He was 6’-1” 280 pounds. He wasn’t going to be able to run more than a quarter of a mile before stopping. He looked at Dennis, who closely resembled a giant bowl of jiggling jelly, in front of him. He could outrun Dennis. They rounded the guardhouse and kept going. They made a bee line for Cooling Tower 1. “What are we going to do?”

  Just then, the power switched on in the rest of the plant. They could hear the screams of the infected, where they had been hibernating in the darkened rooms, that were now suddenly flooded with artificial light. They heard screams, snarls and glass breaking as the bulbs were hastily shattered. “Come on. I know a place.”

  Dennis ran for the cooling tower. “We have to hurry, before they come looking for us.” Thompson lagged behind. They probably didn’t want to kill him. Rusty had raped Candy, but she was a whore. She had sex with men for a living, and she was a porn star. How can that be rape? He had sex with Alexis. She didn’t seem to like it very much, but that’s just because he didn’t pay her anything. It was more like petty theft in Thompson’s mind, but it wasn’t rape. He didn’t need to rape a woman to get what he wanted. He could get it for free. They wouldn’t kill him, would they? Candy might. That bitch was crazy. He saw what she did to Rusty, and no one did anything to stop her. She could do whatever she wanted.

  Dennis led them into the cooling tower, left, right, left, right, right. He led them to a small control room and slammed the door shut behind them. There were large pipes with handles and written warnings. Luckily there were no infected there. “This is the safest place. No one comes back here.” Dennis was red faced and sweating. He was panting heavily as he sat down on the largest pipe. The lights went out again. Apparently, they had turned the power back on in the control tower and then turned it off again immediately to prevent them from going into the buildings. “They turned the power off. The badges don’t work. We can get out but they can’t get in unless they turn the power back on.”

  Thompson was also panting heavily, and his shirt was soaked with sweat. His feet felt like lead. He found himself hyperventilating a little from the fear. No, he would have to stick with Dennis. There was a good chance they would just kill him if he went back. “That was fucked up! Can you believe that shit? The bitch just shot his face off! Nobody did anything to stop her.”

  “Keep your voice down.” Dennis was calm, trying to slow his breathing. His eyes were half closed and he seemed deep in thought, or meditating, or maybe about to nod off for a nap. “There’s some pry bars over there,” he pointed toward a corner with some tools. “We can’t use our guns unl
ess absolutely necessary. They will give away our position.”

  “I say we get the fuck out of here. We can’t stay. We’re going to have to take our chances out there.” Thompson pointed in the general direction of the front gate. “We can’t travel at night. We have to leave now.” Thompson jumped up.

  “Sit down. We can’t go outside. They’re looking for us out there right now.” Dennis got up himself and picked up two pry bars and two large screw drivers. He handed one pry bar and screw driver to Thompson.

  Thompson sat down, his adrenaline slowly ebbing. “How come there’s no infected in here?”

  Dennis shrugged, “Luck maybe. They’re in all the other buildings except the control tower. Or maybe the infected are drawn to the smell of humans and no one has been in here since this all started. I came into the cooling towers once in the very beginning, then haven’t been back since.”

  “So you stayed away on purpose?” Thompson asked. Maybe Dennis was thinking ahead.

  “Something like that. I wanted there to be a safe place in case I had to get away for a few hours; besides, there’s nothing in here but the water pipes and the backup generators to cool the reactor. As long as the pumps keep working and the water keeps flowing into the reactor, there’s really no reason to come in here.”

  “So what do we do now?” Thompson asked.

  “When they turned off the power to the other buildings, they turned off the pumps…which would cause the reactor to overheat. However, these pumps are so important that they are all hooked up to a bank of backup batteries and generators that automatically kick in when the charge on the batteries dips down below a certain level.” The loud sound of generators turning on shook the building. Dennis got up.

  “Where are you going?” Thompson asked.

  “To take a look at the backup generators.” Thompson followed him. Dennis seemed to have forgotten that he was there. He was engrossed in tracing the wiring from the backup generators to the batteries.