by D. J. Molles
“Okay.”
Lee stepped forward, and Jake moved with him, close enough for their shoulders to brush. Lee held his knife over handed and flexed his fingers on the grip, squeezing in as tight as he could go. If the old infected made a move for them, he would lunge forward, seize it by the throat, jerk it back, and plant the knife wherever he could get it into the brain—either through the temple, the palette, or the base of the skull.
It can’t make a sound, Lee told himself. Not a sound.
CHAPTER 16: GOING UP
Standing before it, Lee tensed and drew his hand back, ready to strike out. Jake stood directly beside him, and to either side the others trained their rifles on the form and held their breaths.
“He’s not breathing,” Jake mumbled.
Lee stared at the man, at the bib of crusted blood around his neck and chest. Dark, almost black-stained skin. The blood was not smeared, as though the old man had been feeding, but instead was caked as though it had poured from his own nose and mouth. Now standing closer to him, Lee could see the malformation of his head, caused by the explosive compression and decompression of a high-powered bullet.
Lee bent down to look closer. “He’s been shot in the head…”
A thunder clap obliterated the silence.
The sound was so sudden and overwhelming that Lee felt every muscle in his body jerk simultaneously like he’d stuck his finger in a light socket. Strangely, nonsensically, he thought that the body of the old man had been booby-trapped and it had exploded. But it still sat before him, crumpled and motionless against the door.
He looked up at Jake, to see what the noise had been.
The younger man leaned over, one hand on his knees and the other steadying himself against the wall. He looked right at Lee, dumbfounded, confused, terrified.
Then he coughed, and blood spewed out.
Lee watched a thick gobbet of red as it flew through the air. It seemed slow and lazy as it arced its way down to the ground. He could hear the sharp intake of his teammates’ breaths, the shuffling of feet, the movement of fabric. He could feel his gut tightening, forcing the words out of his mouth.
“Get inside!” Lee shouted.
The sensation of time-warp dissipated.
He reached up and snatched a handful of Jake’s sleeve as the kid’s knees buckled and his body sank against the wall.
LaRouche began to fire his weapon rapidly. The sound of his rifle was like an explosion that set off an avalanche. Lee was suddenly surrounded by a ring of fire and noise as everyone opened up, the muzzle flashes like tongues of flame licking out into the darkness, everyone aiming for the rooftops.
Lee pulled roughly at Jake’s arm, forcing him to flop onto his back. His eyes were wide and pale, the blood like tar around his mouth. His chest rose and fell, and Lee could see the gaping wound in the glitter of the muzzle flashes, like dozens of cameras going off. He jammed both of his hands under the kid, the concrete rasping away the skin of his knuckles, and hooked his fingers into Jake’s armpits. He jerked the kid partially upright.
“Open the door!” Lee screamed behind him. “Open the fucking door!”
Someone—Lee couldn’t tell who it was—stepped around and kicked the dead body out of the way of the door and then yanked it open. Lee didn’t wait for an invitation. He immediately began backpedaling, trying to maintain his grip on Jake, but the guy had begun to squirm around and claw at his chest. In the back of his mind, Lee registered the sound of Jake’s breathing—ragged, gurgling, wheezing.
The sound of air passing by a wet valve.
Lee hauled himself into the doorway, pulling with everything he had. The stench of the rotting corpse enveloped him again like a soggy, putrid blanket. He pulled Jake just inside the door and then collapsed with one giant last effort that landed them both on the ground.
Lee twisted up and onto his knees and leaned over the wounded form beside him. The sheer surprise of the moment was giving way to the pain, and Jake’s body was beginning to shake, his throat beginning to find the ragged threads of a voice and issue those horrible noises of the wounded.
Lee ripped Jake’s parka open, exposing the hooded sweatshirt beneath. All of it was drenched in blood. Quickly, he traced his fingers over the glistening red fabric and found the hole and the torn flesh under it. The wound was on the right side of Jake’s chest, maybe three inches from his sternum. If the bullet hadn’t clipped the heart, it had come damn close. It was welling up, deep and fast. Too fast to just be capillaries. Lee pressed his palm to the open wound and bore down on it with all of his weight.
Jake cried out and his eyes went wide.
Lee looked up. “Julia! I need some help here!”
Outside the door, the rifle fire slowed. LaRouche held the door open with his foot and screamed at the others to get inside as he took evenly spaced shots, putting suppressive fire down on something, though Lee wasn’t sure what it was.
“Get in! Get in!” LaRouche shouted.
The members of the team tumbled through the door, tripping over themselves to get inside. Were they still taking fire? Lee couldn’t hear over the sound of LaRouche’s shots, but he didn’t think so. There had only been one shot.
Lee kept watching the faces come through the door, looking for Julia, but not finding her. His stomach suddenly dropped inside of his body cavity and for a brief moment he forgot that his hands were pressed tight against the warm, wet flesh of Jake’s chest wound.
“Where the fuck is Julia?” he barked, trading fear for anger.
LaRouche lowered his weapon and looked at someone that was still outside the door. “Julia! Get the fuck inside!” He reached out and grabbed her, pulling her into the doorframe and then shoving her inside. He followed quickly, letting the door close behind them.
It had seemed dark in the pre-dawn light, but with the door closed to the outside world, the blackness inside the apartment building was absolute. It was only the sound of footsteps, heavy breathing, and Jakes tortured groans.
In the palm of his hand, Lee could feel the pulse, rapid and still strong, but he could also feel the blood seeping through his fingers, warm and steady. It pushed through his fingers with the insistent rhythm of Jake’s heart.
Arterial bleeding…
Lee pulled his right hand off and began searching his tactical vest for the flashlight he kept clipped there. Underneath his other hand, he could feel Jake writhing and his groans were beginning to become screams. He found the flashlight and clicked it on. The tiny spear of light suddenly illuminated Jake’s face and his eyes were shut tight, his teeth clenched and red.
“Hey buddy,” Lee tried to sound calm. “I need you to hang on. This is gonna hurt like a motherfucker.” He pulled his other hand off the wound and probed it with two fingers. “You ready?”
“No!” Jake gasped. “Don’t hurt me!”
“Just hang on…” Lee grit his teeth and pushed his fingers into the wound.
The breath caught in Jake’s throat. He jerked away from the touch, and Lee could feel the muscles in Jake’s chest contract around his two fingers. The breath came out of him in a shriek.
“Hold on!” Lee shouted over the cries and tried to concentrate. He could feel the blood squishing past his fingers. He just had to find where it was coming from. He had to find it, and clamp it off. Three other flashlights came on, bathing everyone in harsh white light that blanched their features into pale, haggard masks.
Julia appeared, kneeling down at Jake’s other side and ripping her medical pack open. She pulled out a pair of shears and went to work on the hooded sweatshirt. “Gimme some light!” she ordered. “On the wound!”
The flashlights all shifted to focus on Jake’s chest, the different angles casting the shadow of Lee’s hands off in separate directions. “He’s got a clipped artery, I think.” Lee looked at Julia. “Maybe a collapsed lung.”
She nodded quickly, hair flying in her face as she delved into her pack.
“Hey, Cap
!” LaRouche hollered. “We gotta move it upstairs! There’s no way the infected didn’t hear that shit!”
Lee looked at Julia again to see what she thought. She had one hand touching Jake’s femoral artery, and the other on his carotid. After a brief moment of concentration, she made eye-contact with Lee and shook her head quickly.
“BP’s already too low.” As she spoke, she began rifling through the contents of her pack, withdrawing sterile dressings, hemostats, scalpels, and some sterile-packaged items that Lee didn’t know the name of. “He’s bleeding out too fast. We gotta stabilize it right now, or we’re gonna lose him.”
“OH JESUS!” Jake suddenly screamed. “FUCK!” He tried to say something else, but dissolved into a coughing fit. He thrashed around as he coughed and swatted at Lee’s fingers, still inside the wound.
“Jim!” Lee called out. “Hold him down!” He could feel the pressure of the blood stream on the tip of his finger. “I almost got it…almost got it...”
Julia held out a pair of hemostats. “When you find it, clamp it.”
Jake’s breathing became rapid and shallow.
“He’s hyperventilating,” Julia said with a note of detachment. “Try to breathe deep, hon. Slow, deep breaths.”
Jim knelt down at Jake’s head and took both of the kid’s hands in his. “That’s it, Jake. You’re doing great. Slow down your breathing for me, okay? Slow it down. All the way in, all the way out.”
Jake gaped up at Jim, tears streaming down his face. “It hurts…it really hurts.”
“I know, buddy,” Jim said soothingly. “You gotta hang on for just a little longer, okay?”
“Okay.”
“I think I got it,” Lee said. He closed his eyes. In the slick moving parts of Jake’s chest cavity, the blood spewing from that artery was pressing at his fingers, but the pulse was growing weaker by the second. Lee realized that he was kneeling in a puddle of Jake’s blood. He pushed deeper.
A faint cry and a groan. Jake was close to passing out.
“Cap!” LaRouche’s voice sounded out. “I’ve got contact!”
Lee’s eyes snapped open and he looked up. LaRouche was leaning partially out of the door, the barrel of his rifle nosed out of the crack. “You gotta give me some time!”
“Fuck!” LaRouche’s stance tightened up. “I got five infected comin’ around the corner…”
There. The firm, fleshy tube of a large artery.
“I got it!” He grabbed the hemostat from Julia’s fingers. “Everyone get ready to grab Jake and haul ass up these stairs!” Lee put his flashlight in his mouth and tasted the sharp coppery tang of Jake’s blood.
“We gotta move!” LaRouche bellowed and started pulling the trigger.
The confined space shook as the rounds blasted out.
Lee hooked his finger around the throbbing artery and fed the tip of the hemostat down along his index finger until he could feel its tiny jaws around the bloodway, and then he clamped it down. If he’d been in a hospital, or any other setting, he would have checked to see if he’d stopped the bleeding, but they just didn’t have the time.
He pulled his fingers out of the wound, leaving the hemostat dangling out, trembling with each of Jake’s hitching breaths. “It’s clamped! Go!”
Hands shot forward in a flash, seizing Jake’s arms and legs, and the bore him up so quickly that it seemed to Lee that Jake simply disappeared from beneath him. By the time Lee grabbed his rifle from where it lay in the coagulating red pool, they’d already hauled him up the first section of stairs, Julia following beside with a rifle in one hand and her medical pack in the other, shouting at them not to knock the hemostat loose.
The clatter of a magazine across the floor.
“Reloading!” LaRouche called.
Lee surged toward the door as LaRouche slammed a fresh magazine into his rifle. He shouldered past him and pulled the door shut. Immediately the door lurched under his grasp, a live thing trying to get away from him. Angry fists pounded the other side, nails scratching in panicked desperation at the door. The infected on the other side made short, sharp barking calls, excited, signaling to the others that they had found live prey.
“Get the crowbar out of my pack!”
LaRouche looked around blindly for a moment. With the rest of the team retreating up the stairs, they were taking their flashlights with them and the room was falling into darkness again. Then, at the base of the stairs, another light appeared and it was Jim holding it.
“What are you doing?” he yelled at them.
“We’re gonna block the door,” LaRouche shouted back with a little anger. “Gimme some light here!”
Something hard hit the door and it jerked outwards so hard that it almost pulled Lee off his feet. The door cleared the jam for a second and through that tiny crack, Lee saw a flash of what waited on the other side. Dozens of faces with wide eyes and bloody maws leered in at him and pressed themselves forward. Behind them, he could see the corner of the building that led to the alleyway, and more of them were coming around the corner.
He heaved and managed to close the door again. “Hurry the fuck up!”
“Got it…” LaRouche yanked the crowbar out of the pack and rushed to Lee’s side with it. He worked it around Lee’s white-knuckled hands and into the door handle, then jammed it all the way through. “Move!”
Lee didn’t wait to see if the barricade would hold. He spun on the balls of his feet and sprinted for the stairs, scooping up his pack as he ran. Ahead of him, Jim stood at the base of the stairs waving them on, his rifle held at a low ready. Lee shoved him as he ran by, encouraging him to follow them as he and LaRouche pounded up the stairs two at a time.
Behind them, the door rattled violently. Lee’s legs felt frail and wobbly, his muscles soft and his blood diluted and watery. He couldn’t take the stairs fast enough, had only cleared the first landing…
The sound of metal clanking on the ground.
The door burst open.
Screeches and roars and the tumble of bare feet.
It was over. They wouldn’t be able to outrun them, so now they had to fight. He dipped his head into the loop of his rifle’s sling, letting it hang on his neck like a gigantic pendant, and then slung into his pack—it contained everything, including his GPS, and he could not leave it behind. Then he turned and looked down the stairs as the first of the mad creatures came scurrying around the corner, one filthy set of claws clutching the banister and the other reaching for him, its mouth agape.
A well-placed double tap sent the thing sprawling backwards into its denmates where it fell to the stairs and was trampled under their feet.
As Lee swung his muzzle towards the next and nearest target, he began backpedaling, up the stairs. He moved his feet blindly, feeling the edge of the step with his toes and then launching himself backwards until he pulled his foot behind him and it caught.
He felt his balance leave him.
Only a few steps down from him, an infected loped towards him on all fours, its mouth spread grotesquely wide, its tongue hanging out.
Lee fell backwards, clinging to his rifle.
This was it.
But then he felt a hand grab the drag-strap of his tactical vest and he felt himself get a little lighter. Someone had a hold of him and they were dragging him backwards up the stairwell. In his right peripheral he could see the muzzle of an M4 resting against his shoulder. It blossomed a white-hot rose of fire, and Lee felt the heat on his face, but he didn’t hear the noise, didn’t seem to hear anything outside of his own breath and blood.
The face of the infected on all fours seemed to suddenly flatten in on itself as though it had run headlong into an invisible wall. It fell instantly, spread eagle upon the steps.
Lee shouldered his rifle again.
Targets popped up.
Flashing thunder knocked them down.
Just like the reactive steel targets in basic.
Reload.
Keep shooting.
Keep backpedaling.
Reality seemed warped. In the strange darkness of the stairwell, lit by the strobing of their muzzle flashes, each section of stairs looked the same as the last, with dark, hollow eyes and snarling teeth below them. His legs burned as he thrust himself up each riser and he could not remember how many flights of stairs he had ascended.
It seemed without end.
He reloaded his rifle for a third time and when he brought the muzzle up and slapped the slide release, feeling the bolt clunk forward, chambering that next round, there was nothing below him to target. The stairs were a hollow well beneath his feet that hung heavy with swirling clouds of cordite.
“Did we get ‘em all?” Jim’s voice wavered breathlessly.
“I dunno,” Lee turned. “Keep going.”
From the dimness below them, crawling up the bloody flight of stairs, a wounded infected appeared, gibbering as it clawed past the bodies of its denmates, the concept of its impending death lost behind the urging of its own blood lust. Its dark eyes fixed them with a blank stare, devoid of emotion, and it reached for them, eyes dark and alien.
“I shot that thing in the head!” Jim said shakily. “How’s it…?”
Lee put two in its chest and it collapsed backward.
“Why didn’t it die?” Jim demanded, his voice on the edge of panic.
“Just go!” Lee shouted and hauled himself up the last flight.
As they reached the top of the stairs and stumbled into the muted light of dawn, Lee could no longer hear the thing clinging to life. On the rooftop, they found the other members of the team huddled in the center of the roof. Julia was bent over Jake, working feverishly at starting an IV. The others crowded around her and between their bodies Lee caught glimpses of Jake. His mouth was open and his eyes stared vacantly at Julia. The only evidence that he was still alive was the rapid rise and fall of his chest.
No one watched the stairwell door that he and LaRouche and Jim had just emerged from. They were all watching Jake and mumbling encouragement to him, leaving their backs exposed.
“Hey!” Lee barked. “Someone gonna watch the fucking stairs?”
