Sarah fired off the rest of her shots at the killer, knowing they likely wouldn't do anything, but she had to try. She pulled out the empty magazine from the assault rifle and put in a fresh one that she took off a clip on her uniform.
As she turned and fled, the killer picked up a forty-five-pound steel plate and hurled it through the air at her like it was a frisbee.
It struck her square in the spine, and even despite the body armor she wore, the force was incredible and sent her careening to the ground. Pain shot through her whole body in an unending and incredible wave, and her limbs were locked in a rigid and numb state, preventing her from moving right away as the killer approached her.
When she finally regained some of her motor functions and was able to push herself up to her feet, she screamed out in pain and it felt like her back was broken. She cried in the helmet as she stumbled forward for the other end of the gym while the killer dementedly smiled and chased her with his big bulging eyes.
Sarah made it to the entrance and shoved her way through the door just as another soldier came up from the hallway behind her and pushed past her. She stumbled outside, her back in agony as she fell to her knees.
The crowd outside, in addition to worrying about gunfire in their midst near the shooting ranges, also heard the gunfire and screams from inside the building. Now all of their attention was on the door that Sarah had just spilled through, and some of them built up some great and unknowable monster in their minds to explain this level of panic.
And right on cue, that monster came out the door.
General confusion ran through the crowd and they all began to mutter to each other in terror and back away. They didn't know what was going on, but they were scared.
Sarah used this opportunity to her advantage, turning around and firing at the killer. She missed most of her shots, but it didn't even matter; the important thing was that she got the crowd to perceive that the killer was the reason why the siren had went off in the first place. And it worked like a charm.
The crowd began yelling as half of them near the front began to open fire on the maniac. But their bullets didn't do anything except shallowly soak up into him like a pincushion.
Then there was further discord in the crowd when someone from the back near the shooting ranges shouted, "No! The intruder is Wayne! Black and gray hair with no eyes! He's blind!"
This caused some of the soldiers on that end of the crowd to spin around and argue amongst themselves as distrust ran through them.
"No, there was an intruder in the building dressed like one of us!" someone else yelled. "They could be out here with us right now!"
The rumors and the chaos reached a fever pitch, and all it took was one of the soldiers to fire on his fellow man for the whole thing to devolve into insanity. The entire front yard of the training base lit up with gunfire as the soldiers alternated between fighting the killer and fighting each other.
Sarah kept low, trying to work her way through the crowd and find Wayne. She glanced over her shoulder periodically to see where the killer was and if he was still coming for her.
But the killer seemed distracted in the moment, taking his time to slaughter the soldiers near him who attacked him. He ripped helmets off, slashed throats, tore body armor, and chewed as much of their flesh as he could. The whole place became a slaughterhouse as bodies littered the asphalt and the stench of blood and gunpowder rose high into the air.
Sarah searched the mess of the crowd. Most of the soldiers who weren't fighting each other were simply trying to flee, some of them inadvertently getting gunned down in the process or running right into the killer's rampage. But Sarah could tell who had all his senses about him, and who was distinctly missing one.
She saw a soldier up ahead that similarly kept low to the ground like her, but he repeatedly bumped into the legs of soldiers around him, like he couldn't see where he was going.
Sarah pushed through the crowd, her heart hammering in her chest as she made her way toward him. They'd climbed over bodies and fleeing soldiers as the gunfire remained heavy but started to wind down. She got to him and clamped a hand down on his wrist. He turned to attack her.
"Wayne, it's me!"
"Sarah!" he said, exasperated. "Did you get it?"
"Yes. Let's go!" She pulled him along through the crowd like a fish on a line, and they made their way toward the front gate, which was still closed.
"There!" a soldier yelled, pointing them out and aiming at them.
Sarah swiveled on her knee and put four rounds in the soldier's chest before he could fire on them. She quickened her pace, and Wayne still couldn't help but bump into things in the frenzy as they went.
The victims that the killer had bitten now started to rise again as the same intelligent, bulletproof zombies that he was. At this point, nearly all the remaining human soldiers fled after they realized that their bullets did no good.
Sarah and Wayne reached the guard station which housed the controls for the gate. Sarah left Wayne for a moment and stepped inside. She jumped back in shock when she saw a soldier huddled down in a ball. He screamed at her and fired a pistol, the standard bullets being absorbed into her body armor. Sarah returned fire and killed him, using the armor-piercing rounds to punch through. His body slowly flattened out with gravity as she stepped over him and smacked the controls that opened the gate.
The gate slid open and Sarah grabbed Wayne's arm again. Just as she pulled him, she staggered to the ground.
"Are you all right?" Wayne asked her, worried. "What's wrong?"
"My back," she said. "I think it's broken..."
"Come on," he said. He lifted her arm up and slung it over his shoulders, then he hoisted them both up and they stumbled out through the gate as some of the chaos inside the base spilled out with them.
But they managed to slip out, underneath the notice of everyone else still fighting inside. Sarah winced and huffed and puffed, having a hard time breathing, as Wayne carried them away from the base. Sarah would still give him some important directions or information in between sharp breaths, but he did most of the work despite his own injuries and carried her. They made it a little ways from the gate and climbed up a hill toward the tree line at the edge of the woods.
Just as they were about to slip into the trees and disappear, gunfire closer to them rang out and Sarah screamed and immediately went down.
Wayne stumbled onto his knees from the pull of her bodyweight, and knew from the timing of the shots and the way she screamed and went down that she'd been shot in the back with armor-piercing rounds. Wayne spun around and sprayed the assault rifle around his neck in a tight circle, approximating his aim based off of where he heard the shots.
One of his bullets clipped the soldier in his ribs, and the other one took off his jaw, making him collapse on the ground and leaving him to be zombie food.
Wayne turned his attention back to Sarah and pulled on her body. "Come on!" he yelled.
Sarah groaned, the life quickly fading out of her. With great and labored effort, he got her back to her feet and he carried her away from the training base. But her bodyweight quickly got heavier and heavier, and he knew she wouldn't last much longer.
14
In Her Darkest Hour
Wayne felt the wound on his midsection where he impaled himself on the branch tear open as he dragged Sarah through the forest. She made herself pretty heavy, not contributing much in pulling her own weight, and at certain points her feet completely dragged along the ground. He would have to put her down and let her rest once in a while, urging her to continue on. He worried terribly about her, and though he couldn't see how pale her skin was or the look in her eyes, he could hear how labored her breath had become and feel the clamminess of her skin. He'd heard death rattles in people not as far gone as her before, but he was never one to count her out for a second, and he wouldn't start now.
He fatigued himself as he dragged her, moving them to the other side of the woods
and trying to get away from the training facility and the chaos that was spilling out of it. It sounded like any remaining stragglers inside had already been turned to the undead, and Wayne could hear a distant rumble behind them beginning to grow. It seemed like it never went away, and he knew the dead were coming for them. If they couldn't find somewhere to hide soon, they would be overrun.
"Which way?" he asked her. "Are we almost to the other side?"
Her eyelids drifted up for a second then closed. Her mouth fell open and she mumbled an unintelligible phrase, then he felt her weight slump again.
"Come on, Sarah," he urged. "How far!"
He gave her a little shake and she seemed to perk up, raising her head and opening her eyes. She saw that they were indeed coming to the edge of the woods and while she wasn't familiar with the area on the other side, she saw that there was a road leading to a strip mall and a few other stores in the distance.
Then as they made their way to the edge of the tree line, Wayne could feel the ground tremble. He really started to sweat, and he pulled off his helmet so he could breathe better, having already pulled off Sarah's after they fled. He tossed their guns away, knowing that neither one of them could adequately operate one, and they were only weighing them down. He wanted to take the rest of their armored uniforms off, but he knew they didn't have time.
Now he could hear the incessant rabble of the undead horde closing in as their mouths flapped and chattered.
"I think they're behind us..." Sarah muttered.
"Tell me about it."
Wayne and Sarah came out of the woods and crossed a stretch of weedy grass that was difficult to navigate through. Wayne hiked his legs up, though they were becoming exhausted, and Sarah's just dragged all the way through, her feet catching on tangles of grass that pulled her back. Wayne muscled her across, but his arms, his back, and every other part of him was becoming fatigued. His face held an increasingly pained look on it as his injuries piled up and intensified with each step.
"How close are they?" Wayne asked, pausing a moment to spin them around so Sarah could see behind them. "How close?!" But Sarah's eyelids stayed heavy, and she only muttered something too quiet for him to hear.
He grunted and then turned them back around, holding his free arm out in front of him to make sure he didn't run them into anything as they made it onto the road. When he felt the asphalt under his feet, he turned to the right and ran along it.
Wayne became extremely nervous as he heard the dead's cries behind them. He knew they had been seen, and they needed an answer now if there was any hope of surviving.
"Where, Sarah? Where do we go?"
He shook her again, and she said, "There," weakly lifting her arm and pointing.
"I can't see, Sarah!" he barked.
"SUV," she muttered faintly. "Eleven o'clock."
Wayne put all the energy he had into running and dragging her along, knowing that it was their only option; he wanted something better, but he knew that Sarah probably wouldn't be able to respond anymore, and they would have to take the chance. He didn't know if the dead still had eyes on them, or if they had only suspected that they'd come this way, but they would find out.
Eventually his outstretched hand ran into the back of the SUV that Sarah had talked about, twisting some of his fingers on impact, but he didn't have time to think about that. He pulled Sarah down onto the ground and dragged her underneath the vehicle toward the front end of it, so when the dead came up from behind, they wouldn't be able to see them. Wayne considered trying one of the doors and hoping it was unlocked, but he knew these freakish intelligent zombies were more likely to look inside the vehicle rather than underneath it as they searched the area, maybe even open the door, and if they ended up trapped inside with the dead surrounding them and trying to break their way in, they would have no recourse, anyway.
Wayne tried to shake Sarah and get some more information out of her as the loud and hungry cries came from behind, but she didn't respond. He noticed her breathing get even slower, and he feared that even if he made it out from underneath this position, she wouldn't.
So Wayne just waited and listened. He heard the dead suddenly become silent as they made it onto the road. They must have known that they were closing in on their prey, and they quieted themselves down in order to better sneak up on them. But Wayne still heard the footsteps slap against the pavement. They seemed to grow louder as they also faded away, and he guessed that they had split up, meaning they didn't know exactly where he and Sarah had gone.
He heard the slow and careful footfalls come up to the SUV and skirt around on either side of it. One zombie came right up to the driver's side where he was, and he could hear the soft footsteps fall a couple feet away from him. He braced himself, not able to hear whether the zombie was simply peering through the glass, or bending down to look underneath. The seconds ticked by, but they felt like decades. At the same time more footsteps carried by on the right side of them, some close and some far.
The zombie that had come up to the car made a little grunt and then turned and walked away. The footfalls seemed to meander around, but they never went away completely, and Wayne was suddenly left in the dark again with no information on what to do next. He didn't know what his options were, so he tried to poke it out of Sarah. He gave her a little shake and a little prod in her ribs with his finger, and eventually she stirred. He almost gasped, he was so relieved, fearing that she might have died. When she roused, he pressed a finger to his lips, hoping she would see it and know to be quiet.
"Where are we?" she whispered.
But even her whisper was too audible and Wayne spoke even quieter.
"Shh," he said. "Can you see where we are? Are there any exits?"
Sarah tried to answer, but instead she felt all the pain swirl up inside her at once, and she suddenly got the unbearable urge to cough. She instinctively brought her hand up to her mouth and roughly coughed into it. And it wasn't a quiet cough either, but a full-throated, bronchial cough.
Wayne tensed up as he heard some of the footsteps around them suddenly stop. "Shit," he muttered. In the next moment, he was yanking her out from underneath the vehicle as hard as he could as he heard the dead run for them. Sarah seemed almost comatose on the way out, and when he dragged her up to her feet, seeming to have a burst of strength from the adrenaline, he shook her as hard as he could. "Where, Sarah?! WHERE?!"
Her eyes snapped open and she briefly looked around. "To your left," she said.
Wayne took a general leftward direction and pulled her along. He heard a pair of footsteps coming from this new direction, and he adjusted their angle to the right a little. "Where?!" he barked.
"Two o'clock... ladder..." was all she could get out before her head slumped back down.
Wayne held out his arm and soon enough they ran into a wall. He frantically slapped his hand along it, running the length of it as the dead's growls intensified behind them. He could almost feel their arms snapping at the back of their collars, ready to yank them both down and finish them off. Wayne was desperate, and he was about to bark at Sarah again, but she lifted her arm and guided his hand to one of the rungs on the steel ladder extending up from the ground to the roof of the strip mall.
"Hold on tight," he told her. "Don't let go!" He reached across his neck and grabbed hold of her arm by the wrist that was wrapped around his shoulders, clamping onto it tightly. Then with his free hand and his feet, he navigated up the ladder as quickly as possible. He had to go slower than he usually would to make sure that her weight didn't pry them off since he only had one hand to use. He could hear the zombies below nipping at their heels. He felt a hand slap against his boot, but he shook it off. Another one grabbed Sarah's ankle, but as he climbed, he inadvertently stepped on its wrist and pulled it off. He felt Sarah become heavier and heavier, and he knew that she had just about passed out again, making it extraordinarily difficult to continue up the rest of the way. It seemed like they climbed up to Hea
ven from the length of it, and he was ready to pass out himself by the time they reached the top. He clutched onto the brick and pulled them over the edge.
He could hear the undead climbing the ladder, and he reached his arm out for the lever to retract the ladder. When his hand found it, he gripped the rusted steel and wrenched it. The metal grated on itself, having fallen into disuse for so many years, but it still used the leverage of the mechanism to pull the ladder up into the air and prevent more zombies from climbing after them.
Wayne heard the grunts and groans of a zombie pulling itself over the brick that had grabbed the ladder before he could hoist it up. He blindly kicked at it, sometimes connecting, sometimes missing, and he felt the zombie grab at his ankles. He kicked again and hit the zombie in the shoulder, but he knew he hadn't knocked it off. In the next moment, the zombie wrapped its hand around the neck of his boot and he suddenly felt a squeezing on his toes. More adrenaline shot through him, realizing that the zombie had managed to get its mouth around the toe of his boot and was trying to bite him. But its teeth couldn't break through the hard leather, and he managed to give it a quick roundhouse with his other toe, followed up by a strong sidekick which caught it right in the jaw. The zombie tipped back, losing its grip and it fell off the ladder, landing on a second one that was climbing up and knocking it off. He heard the heavy thuds as they hit the ground below, then he heard no more sounds of skin slapping against the hollow rungs.
He joined Sarah in splaying out on the roof and regaining his breath. All of his muscles ached, and now he was faced with a new challenge, but it was one he didn't want to think about for the moment.
Zombie Apocalypse Series Box Set, Vol. 2 [Books 4-7] Page 74
