by Rand, Thonas
“Let’s just calm down and think it through,” Hayward said.
Briggs’ friends stopped what they were doing and stood by him.
“Calm down?” Briggs said. “And then what? We’ll make some food and water appear out of thin fucking air? And after that, what, let’s make some chopper fuel from piss!”
“Relax, Briggs,” John said. “Let’s try to think of a better way to leave.”
“What do you think we’ve been doing all morning?” Lee said. “We’re taking that truck and we’re leaving, with or without you guys.” She looked at John and tried to read his eyes.
“That’s my truck,” said the tenant with the revolver.
Lee flipped the safety off on her M-4, along with Briggs and the other soldier. “Oh yeah, you gonna stop me with your grandpa’s wheel gun?” she said defiantly.
“Okay, let’s take it easy, everyone,” Hayward cautioned.
“Just go then,” John said to them.
“As if there were any doubt of that,” Briggs spat.
“What’re you doing?” the older tenant asked John.
“Let them go, it’s not worth getting killed over,” John told him.
The three rogue soldiers finished gathering the gasoline they wanted and jumped into their stolen truck. Briggs started its engine.
Lee locked eyes with John and mouthed, come with us?
John shook his head, no.
“You sure you don’t wanna come with us?” Briggs said from behind the wheel.
“Send us a postcard from Mexico,” John answered.
Briggs smirked. “Okay then, asshole.” he drove away.
The truck stopped at the exit and entrance of the parking structure because both solid-steel rollup doors were closed. One of the soldiers jumped out of the truck and pulled on the chain to open it and it made a loud clack-click-clack as it rolled up. Once it was fully open, it revealed the corkscrew driveway that led down to the outer exit gate. The soldier got back in the truck, and they slowly drove down. They didn’t bother closing the gate.
“Fucking idiots,” the tenant with the revolver said.
“Look, we’re gonna follow them down to make sure that everything goes well and close the outer gate,” John said to the tenants.
“Okay, thanks,” the older man said.
“Don’t close this gate until we get back,” Hayward said.
John and Hayward jogged down after the truck; they had five levels of corkscrew to descend, when they got to the third, they heard them opening the garage exit gate, the loud clack-clack echoed throughout the concrete. By the time they got down to the last turn of the corkscrew—they could see the truck waiting at the gate just below them and the soldier that was pulling the chain to raise the mesh-paneled door. The noise had already attracted several slow dead movers. Once the dead saw the soldier pulling the chain, they moved as fast as they could to get to him and the gate wasn’t even three feet up yet. Several of the dead were already at the gate, they would get in the moment it was high enough, and the soldiers knew it.
That’s when Lee exited the truck and readied her weapon—she quickly took aim at the first walking corpse. “No, use your bayonet!” John yelled.
It was too late; she fired through the gate and killed the walker. Her weapon echoed loudly, and it alerted every dead thing in the area. Many of them came out from nearby alleys, stores, some sitting in cars, the dead rose from all over and headed for the gate, including a lot of fast movers. Before they could react, dozens were suddenly banging on the gate in a rage.
“Close the gate! Close it!” John shouted down.
The soldier at the chain reversed his pull to close it, but it was no use, the gate didn’t close fast enough as the rabid fast movers clawed their way under and got in. The two soldiers began to fire at the dead, and then Briggs, who was still behind the truck’s wheel, put it in reverse and backed up. Before they knew it, dozens of the dead were there and fighting to get in. The gate buckled from the force of the dead cramming under it and it gave way and fell off its tracks.
All of them rushed into the building freely.
“Oh fuck!” Hayward cursed.
“Run!” John shouted to Lee.
The two soldiers were overtaken and torn to shreds.
“Lee! No!” John shouted in anger, and he fired down at the stenches attacking her, but she was beyond saving.
The dead saw John and Hayward above them…
Briggs floored the accelerator and backed up the driveway at full speed. The truck violently banged back and forth against the concrete walls with dozens of the dead chasing after it. John and Hayward could do nothing but watch as the dead overran the truck, they broke through all the windows to get at Briggs, who was firing his weapon at them, but it didn’t help. They grabbed him from both sides of the truck and ripped pieces of him out.
John grabbed a grenade off his belt, pulled the pin and chucked it down the driveway, and then he tossed a second one. The grenades rolled down as the dead ran up and they passed each other. The first one reached the truck and went off, the explosion ripped the truck’s gas tank and added to the fiery blast, thus blocking the driveway with fire. The second one went off and destroyed five of the undead. The corpses didn’t care about the fire as they ran through it to get in.
“Let’s go!” John shouted.
They ran back up for their lives.
Hayward tossed back two grenades himself as they ran—they reached the running stenches and blew many apart, but dozens more kept running up after them. They were only one level behind John and Hayward. They reached the top of the corkscrew to see the solid-steel door rolling down a hundred feet ahead of them—the tenants were closing it, including the woman.
“Wait!” Hayward shouted.
The tenants saw them but didn’t care—they closed the gate and locked it tight.
“Motherfuckers!” Hayward shouted and fired a few rounds at the door.
The bullets pierced it, but didn’t hit any of them; they heard the tenants run off.
“Cover me, John!” Hayward said.
John turned around, checked his weapon to make sure it was ready and waited for the dead to reach them; they were running up fast and would be there in moments…
Hayward grabbed a sawed-off shotgun that was strapped to his back and fired two shells into the door—it blasted a basketball-sized hole in the steel and then he got one grenade from his pocket. “John, gimme a grenade!”
John tossed him another one and Hayward pulled the pins on both of them, dropped them into the hole in the gate and ran away.
“Fire in the hole!” he yelled.
A moment later—the grenades exploded and blasted the gate open, large enough for them to get through.
“Let’s go!” Hayward yelled to John.
They squeezed through the opening, just as the undead reached them. John turned back and sprayed the hole with automatic gunfire—it killed three of them, and the bodies blocked the hole, but only temporarily as the dead tore their way through the bodies to get in.
John and Hayward ran like bats out of Hell, and seconds later—the dead got through the hole and dozens chased after them.
The two soldiers were breathing like wild animals as they sprinted up the circular parking levels and not far behind them—the dead were coming for them—dozens that grew into a couple hundred; like the teeth of a ravenous animal, they were rising to bite them. John and Hayward ran to a stairwell door that had a ROOF ACCESS sign on it. They closed the door behind them, but it had no lock, and they had nothing to brace it with. The only luck they had with the door is that it opened outward from the inside, so it would hold the dead out for a while, but just how long, was unknown.
They didn’t wait to find out as the dead banged up against the door and pounded on it fiercely to get in, the door definitely wouldn’t last long. They had another twenty floors to go up. Hayward fell behind, he was exhausted, and it got to the point where he stopped and
sat on the stairs to catch his breath. John came back down for him. “Come on, man!” John urged him.
“I need a break,” Hayward said in between breaths. “Just a minute.”
“We don’t have a minute, Hayward, let’s go!”
“Just a minute.”
“Come on, man, you’re black, you should be able to outrun me!”
“Fuck you.”
“I’m not leaving without you, get up!”
“You can’t leave without me, you don’t know how to fly the black bird,” Hayward smiled.
“Exactly, now come on!”
“Bullshit, I know damn well that you can fly a helicopter.”
“I can’t, Hayward, now please, get up.”
About a dozen floors down, they heard the crash of the door being busted in by the stenches, they were in the stairwell and coming up after them.
Fast…
John sat down next to his friend. “If you wanna quit, man, then we will. We can just sit here until the rest of the party gets here.” John told him calmly.
Hayward thought for a moment as he listened to the dead that were ascending. “Fuck that, let’s go!” he said and got up.
They pushed on and ran up the stairs as fast as they could…
A dozen floors later, they reached the roof access door and the dead were only a couple floors below them. They entered and sunlight poured down the single flight of stairs that led to the roof and they closed the door behind them. Hayward took some duct tape out from his pack and tore off a one-foot piece; he looked for something else on his person but didn’t find it.
“John, gimme a grenade.”
John tossed him one.
Hayward pulled the grenade’s pin and then placed the explosive against the door seam with the detonation lever facing in, and then he taped the grenade in place. Once it was secure, they both ran up.
The Black Hawk was waiting for them, but it wasn’t alone—several of the building tenants were standing around the helicopter, they watched someone in the pilot’s seat as he tried to start the machine, but it was dead. The older man and the woman that John and Hayward talked to in the parking structure were there, too; the other three people were new. The younger man with the revolver was the one in the helicopter trying to start it. The older man saw John and Hayward coming. “Rick?” the old man said to the wannabe pilot.
He was unaware of the two soldiers that approached. “Gimme a moment, I almost have it figured out,” he answered with his head ducked under the instrument panel.
John pointed his rifle at the tenants and they quietly stepped away from the chopper.
Hayward stepped up to the pilot. “Looking for these?”
The man sat up to see Hayward holding the instrument panel’s missing fuses and pointing his weapon at him. “Get out of my helicopter.”
“Look, man, we’re sorry, but you left us no choice,” Rick said while holding his hands up.
Hayward opened the pilot’s door. “I said, get out.”
He got out, Hayward pushed him back with the others, and John kept an eye on them while Hayward got into the chopper. He reinserted the fuses, powered up the instrument panel, and started the engines—the blades began to slowly turn as the engines spooled up.
“You’re not just gonna leave us here to die, are you?” the older tenant said to John.
“Why not? You left us down there to die!” Hayward answered.
“We didn’t mean to!” the woman said.
“Sure you didn’t,” Hayward said bitterly.
The engines were at full power, and the rotor blades spun at a blur with a loud buzz sound.
“John, let’s go!” Hayward yelled.
But he didn’t get in. Instead, he walked up to Hayward at the pilot’s door window.
“What’re you doing, man? Get in!” Hayward told him.
“We can’t leave them here like this,” John said.
“Yes we can!” Hayward shouted. “In case you’ve forgotten, they left us to die!”
“I know, but I don’t want to stoop to their level.”
“John, we don’t enough fuel to be righteous! With just you and me, we have about twenty minutes of fuel left. If we take all of them, then we have about five! Do you understand?”
At that moment, an explosion went off in the roof door stairwell—
The dead were in…
“Yeah, I do understand, we can drop them off at another building,” he said to Hayward and turned to the tenants. “Come on, get in, hurry!”
The scared tenants got in the chopper, just as dozens of the dead appeared at the top of the stairs and charged at them. After the people were aboard, John climbed in and Hayward lifted the aircraft off the helipad. They moved away and many of the corpses followed them off the roof and plunged forty stories down.
The helicopter flew to the next structure and Hayward landed on a shorter office building, the landing wheels touched down and Hayward turned to the tenants with his machine gun.
“Get out!” he shouted over the noise of the chopper blades.
“Please, don’t leave us here!” the old man begged.
“Get the fuck out, now!” Hayward repeated.
The tenants looked at John, but he realized the truth of their fuel situation and that he may have put his life and Hayward’s at risk for some people that didn’t deserve it.
“Get out,” John said as he raised his rifle at them.
The all got out and then Hayward took off, the tenants covered their faces and eyes from the dust storm that blew around them, except the older woman. She stood there with her hair whipping in the wind as she looked up at John with squinted eyes and reached out to him with both arms.
She said something, but John couldn’t hear her over the helicopter. He didn’t need to, he understood the one word that she said as they lifted away:
“Please!”
The helicopter left, and John watched as the people stood on the roof without knowing what to do and then it didn’t matter anymore—the roof door busted open and dozens of the undead rushed and fanned out like talons to attack them. Rick tried to use his revolver to defend his group, but his little gun was nothing against them, and they overpowered him. They tore into his flesh, and then they attacked the rest of them; there was no escape, except for the old woman. Before they got to her, she walked to the edge of the roof and jumped to her death.
Hayward glanced back and saw their fate. “Fuck’em!” he said bitterly. “They tried to kill us, so fuck’em.”
John looked away and sat next to Hayward quietly.
“Down the coast, right, John?”
He didn’t answer.
“John?”
“Yeah, whatever.”
“Yeah, whatever? Which way should I go, man?”
John was upset. “Does it matter, Hayward? The whole fucking world is dead, and they’re not gonna stop until they kill us!”
“Be that as it may, I still wanna live. I’m still gonna fight, so which way, goddamnit?”
“Yeah, down the coast, as far away from here as possible.”
“That’s not gonna be very far, anyway.” Hayward answered.
John didn’t say anything.
The helicopter headed south and John looked at the sun shimmering off the distant ocean, lost in his thoughts…
Please!
Bear was at the back gate of the hospital and had just finished rigging it with plastic explosives; he attached six different packages at the four corners of the gate and two in the center.
He looked at his handiwork. “Ka-boom,” he said aloud.
“How’s that coming, Commander?” Ardent said to him while he worked on the boat motor.
“I’m done, and it’s looking good, sir.”
“Good, I need you back on the motor detail.”
“On my way,” Bear said and gathered up his equipment, including the remote detonator for the gate.
As Bear walked over to Ardent—he thought h
e heard something beyond the hospital walls, something besides the constant noise of the wandering dead—he paid attention but didn’t hear anything else, so he dismissed it. Then he heard it again and this time, he knew what it was—
A helicopter.
Ardent heard it, too. Distant, but it was definitely a helicopter.
They looked toward the sky, but they couldn’t see anything. They heard the helicopter’s blades chop the air, but the echoes in the sky and off the buildings made it difficult to pinpoint it.
Bear pointed toward the front of the hospital. “I think it’s coming from the north.”
Both of them headed toward the front…
Hayward was staring at a particular light in his instrument panel—
The low fuel indicator light.
It was very bright and an audible alarm wailed with it.
“How long we got?” John asked.
“Not long, minutes,” Hayward answered.
And then another alarm went off.
“Now what?” John asked.
His answer came in the form of a sputter as one of the helicopter’s two engines began to moan and die from fuel loss.
“We’ve lost one of the engines,” Hayward stated. “We have to land.”
“Where?” John asked. “Everything’s gutted down there.”
“I don’t know, but we need to do it soon.”
“Over there!” John said and pointed to a group of buildings that were about five miles away.
One of the buildings was the hospital…
“Over there!” Anthony said as he pointed in the sky.
Everyone was out in the front courtyard of the hospital and they looked in the sky for the source of the helicopter noise. They looked where Anthony pointed and they saw it—
The black speck of the helicopter a couple miles out.
And heading in their direction…
“I don’t know if we can make it there,” Hayward said.
“We have to try, Hayward, if we land in this area, we’ll be out in the open. We need to find some kind of cover.”
“Okay, say a prayer.”
“Try to land on the tallest building, the one that looks like a hospital.”
