A man crawled through the door next. White, broken bones jutted through the skin on his legs and his left arm had been torn off at the elbow. David fired a single bullet through his skull.
That left the two boys. No one wanted to finish them but what choice did they have? Bea pierced the eye socket of the older boy with her iron bar. He was already so rotten that his skull fell apart like an over-ripe melon. David kicked the last child into the bedroom and closed the door firmly.
No one spoke for several minutes. Sylvie wept briefly then abruptly stopped, knelt beside the body of the teen and began unlacing his tennis shoes. Brian, who had stood back from the killing, stooped to help her. The shoes turned out to be a good fit.
“Ok then, I think it’s time to leave.” They all followed Mac down the hallway, to the brass elevator.
Bea’s knees were weak and she held onto Brian’s shoulder as they descended. The smell of the dead children clung to her and she felt she was still breathing it in, coating her nostrils and throat with an oily miasma.
Sylvie walked confidently into the lobby only to stop at the sight of the seething crowd of corpses filling Dupont Circle. They couldn’t go out this way. Turning around and going down a short flight of stairs took them to a service entrance in the back. There was no way to know what was waiting for them outside the metal door. Bea pulled Brian close and held her bar ready.
David looked amused. “What are you now? Samurai zombie killer?”
“It works better for me at close quarters than a gun. Again, it’s quieter too.” Bea stepped in front of Brian as Mac put his hand on the bar handle and turned around to look at everyone.
“Ready? Good, here we go.”
Except for a dumpster the brief alley was empty and they picked their path carefully across the ice-covered pavement, Brian limping a little. On a normal day they were about a thirty to forty minute walk from the Mall. Today was not a normal day, not even close and Bea estimated they had about three hours until sunset. She wanted to be inside somewhere high up with four walls and a strong door long before that. The Gallery was not secure, she already knew, and wondered how many of them they would have to fight through to get to Sylvie’s office.
Mounting a slight rise they looked behind them at the plaza. The afternoon sun broke through the clouds and shone briefly on the sparkling center fountain, the ice-sheathed caryatids holding their ice-filled basin as solemnly as ever, staring blindly at the hideous, dragging figures circling them. Then snow began to fall again.
The loud beat of a helicopter blade pulsed somewhere in the gray clouds hanging low above them, quickly fading to silence as it passed. Bea strained to see it but it never dropped below the clouds.
Progress was slow. They had to detour when they came upon groups of infected. Fires burning throughout the city gave off a strong smell of smoke and gray ash floated through the air and lay like dark feathers on the snow. Some house and car alarms were still going off and this invariably attracted the dead and they gibbered excitedly even when no humans were present. If asked, Bea would have assigned them an IQ level close to that of a jellyfish. They obviously still had a strong instinctive hunger but little else. They didn’t even seem to be aware of each other in any recognizable way.
Brian’s purloined tennis shoes were already soaked through although he didn’t complain. They both kept an eye out for a clothing or shoe store but this area was heavily residential with only an occasional corner market that was usually already looted. They didn’t come across anyone else alive out on the streets but Brian pointed out faces at windows from time to time. The faces looked either frightened or infected. To Bea the city felt dead.
She knew David planned to peel off once they made it to the Gallery in order to make his helicopter rendezvous. He had checked his phone twice and nodded to himself before putting it away and moving on. She desperately wanted out of the city and knew that the only way now was by air but David wasn’t offering and she wouldn’t ask. She knew they only had so much room and she and Brian were unimportant to anyone but each other. Focusing on getting the docs Sylvie wanted so badly was as far ahead as she could think right now. Once they found out what they could do for Mac they would figure out the rest of their plan. If Evan would call her back maybe he could join them. There was definitely strength in numbers, especially if everyone was armed. Brian surreptitiously patted his coat pocket from time to time, seeming reassured by the deadly weight of the revolver resting there. They reached the corner of Constitution Avenue and stopped.
Hordes of the infected littered the white grounds, stretching into the distance. An incredibly strong taint of rot and smoke filled the air and swirled with the falling snow. Something, a small plane or a helicopter, wreckage still smoking, had crashed into the Washington Monument, causing it to break off at mid-point, toppling the pointed tip to the ground. The fire-blasted, severed base loomed over the landscape, accentuating the total collapse of the city around it. Several creatures still fed on someone partially inside the wreckage.
Mac said, “We need a distraction, something to draw them off so we can make a run for it.” He leaned forward, hands on his knees and his breathing was labored. His color was worse and Bea wondered if he would even be able to run.
David un-shouldered his rifle. “Consider it done. I can’t promise I’ll draw all of them but I'll give it my best shot.”
“Which way?” Bea asked, a little surprised he was leaving before they got to the Gallery.
“The helicopter leaves from the south lawn of the White House. I’ll be early but I have a few things I need to do anyway before I leave.”
“I thought the White House was overrun.”
“It was but they’ve re-secured sections.”
“Oh, good bye then and thanks, David. Good luck.”
David clasped Mac’s good hand. “Same to all of you. Hang in there, Mac. Better days are coming.”
David took aim at a parked limo near the Metro. The windshield shattered and the car alarm shrieked to life. The dead turned slowly and appeared to listen. David shot the window out of a red Mini farther down the street but the alarm didn’t sound. The next car he hit, an enormous Armada, gave off an ear-splitting, continuous blast. The dead, not all but most, began a slow shuffle down the street. David ran ahead of them, dodging and weaving his way through and finally breaking free of the crowd, sprinting in the direction of the White House.
With the ghouls’ attention drawn away the little group ventured around the corner. They had no cover now and had to rely on their own speed and the dead’s slow clumsiness. Mac was dragging and Sylvie stayed with him, holding a Glock from his collection. Soon the dead sensed living flesh moving in their midst and began to coalesce around them, making awkward grabs. One of them managed to grasp Mac’s arm and Sylvie screamed but shot it full in the face. They limped on.
Brian was faster than any of them and Bea called to him to slow down. They were too far apart and the dead began to fill in and cut them off from each other. She saw him pull the revolver from his pocket and then the infected blocked her view just as she heard the gun fire.
Forgetting completely about Sylvie and Mac for the moment, she ran, dodging and ducking the dead to get to Brian. He was down, yanked off his feet by a crawling, mostly skinned woman still holding a dog lead in one hand. She held his ankle fast and slowly but inexorably pulled him toward her open mouth. Bea stomped her wrist and arm but it had no effect. She had to smash the gore-filled skull before the woman stopped writhing and lay still.
“I tried to shoot her, Bea. I missed and then I dropped the gun when she pulled me down.” Brian searched the ground frantically for the revolver, finally finding it under the corpse. The snow picked up and Bea couldn’t see Sylvie and Mac anymore.
She turned him around to face across the Mall. “Do you see the Gallery? That side right there is the piazza entrance. The doors and windows are broken out and you can get in with no problem. There will probably be some
infected in there, definitely don’t go in the basement. Find an empty room and close the door and wait for me.”
He was hesitant. “Bea, you have to-”
She cut him off. “Brian, I’ll be right behind you, I swear.”
He ran, easily evading the reaching hands of the dead. Doubling back, she found Sylvie stomping an infected man down. She still had one arm around Mac, who was struggling to stay on his feet. Together the two women half carried him the rest of the way to the piazza entrance, the dead following.
Surprisingly there were no infected inside. They must have wandered back out. Looking behind her at their grisly entourage she knew they didn’t have a lot of time. Snow had blown in through the broken glass and Brian’s footprints were visible. They tracked him to the cloakroom.
“Brian, we’re here.” Bea tapped the closed door and Brian emerged, looking very small and frightened.
“Mac, can you make the stairs? We’ll be safer up there I think.” Bea looked around nervously.
The following dead were invading the lobby, stumbling and moaning as they advanced. Sylvie led the way to the set of back steps that accessed the administrative part of the building. They made their way slowly up, supporting Mac as they went. The dead had difficulty with the steps and kept falling back. The door at the top of the stairs was closed and wouldn’t open without a key card. Frantically Bea searched her pockets and pulled out her card. She ran it through the wrong way and the door wouldn’t open.
“Slow down, Bea.” Sylvie said.
Looking down she saw that a dead policeman was halfway up the steps, dragging his intestines along behind him. She took a deep breath and ran it through again, the right way. This time the locked door clicked open and all four of them fell inside and shut the door.
The hallway was quiet up here. The normalcy of it gave Bea a surreal feeling and she swayed a little and had to lean against a wall for just a second. Brian took her hand and they walked on, passing darkened offices until they came to Sylvie’s brightly lit one. The battered metal box was where Bea had last seen it, on the middle of the desk, and the door was still locked.
Mac used the butt of his rifle to smash the door glass and reached inside to unlock the door. Sylvie made him sit in her desk chair before opening the old box and pulling out an aged manila envelope. She unwound the string tab securing it then turned the scanner on and went through her desk drawer.
“This is just great. I don’t have my flash drive,” she exclaimed but continued to sort through the desk.
Bea fished around in her pocket and pulled hers out. “Put it all on this.”
They loaded the scanned documents then Sylvie ran off extra copies. Although there were no windows in here, Bea knew it would soon be dark outside. She wondered if David’s helicopter had taken off yet. The little tiles she had seen before were still stacked along the table and Bea now saw what was missing in the second embalming process detailed. The brain removal step had been omitted and that was why the corpse rose from the embalming table. The tiles were a reminder and a warning for the embalmers.
“So what do we do now? How long do we stay here?” Brian wanted to know.
Sylvie shushed him but didn’t look up from the documents on the screen. Bea leaned over her shoulder and began to read.
Chapter Nine
27 April 1945
We had been getting good and pissed every night since we opened up Bergen-Belsen. I’d never been much of a drinker before or since but it was the only way we could face what we had to deal with during the day. Dear God, how can these Germans tell us they knew nothing about what was going on here? We smelled the rot and excrement two miles before we even got to the camp. Making them help with the clean-up and the burials was good for these complacent gits because it gave them a chance to see what their beloved Fuehrer had been up to for all these years. I must say I enjoyed the sight of them, sick and retching as they dragged the emaciated bodies from the piles.
We started to hear from the locals, bloody gits, that there was another camp close by. Of course none of them had anything to do with it, they were just good little Deutsch, but they had noticed trucks coming in and out of a heavily forested section of the mountain. Nazi officers from there sometimes came into the local bierhaus, flirted a little with the bier fraus, but never spoke about what they did at the camp.
I requisitioned a jeep that Thursday and got a group of lads along with some medics then followed the directions from the townspeople up into the forest. We found a decent road, mostly dirt and gravel. After about two kilometres we stopped at a strongly fortified fence. Although there were guard towers, no one manned them and after Smythe scaled the wall and opened the gate, we drove through.
The camp appeared to be abandoned. One building had burnt to the ground. What evidence remained indicated it had been an office. Emptied metal filing cabinets and partially burned file folders lay on the muddy ground. A few intact papers had blown against the fence and I secured them. My German is quite sketchy but I did make out the words Unaufhaltsam Soldate but little else. There was the expected smell of rotting bodies but we saw nothing, no piles of dead, none of those make-shift, shallow gravesites that left them half sticking out of the ground. Even though it was late April it was still cold here and we stood in the freezing wind, wondering where the hell the bodies were meant to be? They had to be here. The smell was that strong.
Smythe shouted from somewhere up ahead and we followed the sound, finding him standing next to a cement block building with a metal roof and a padlocked, thick metal door. As we drew closer the smell intensified and I knew we’d found the poor bastards. Or their remains anyway. Finding an ax near a wood pile we attacked the heavy lock, opened the door and stood back.
The smell rolled out of there like a putrid wave. Lancaster reached some bushes before he vomited up his breakfast and several others looked a little green. I knew I didn’t want to see what was in there and wondered if we couldn’t just get some equipment out, dig a hole, then bulldoze the whole building into it, bodies and all, even if it was against regulations but of course I didn’t. There were people desperate for news of their loved ones and they would want to know if they had been found, dead or alive. We had to go through the bodies and try to identify them.
A groan, very faint, drifted out the door. I told Lancaster to go back and tell the medics we’d found survivors. There was no way to know if they were friend or foe at this point and we went in, bayonets at the ready.
The light coming in through the doorway revealed a throng of standing, shuffling bodies. Some wore German uniforms, some hospital gowns and others wore nothing at all. Although most were adult males, there were several women and four children among them. They turned as one at our entrance and attacked and though they carried no weapons they used their teeth and nails to great advantage. I bayonetted the closest one through the stomach. He stopped but, astoundingly, he kept standing with arms outstretched toward me. He made biting motions with his mouth and I heard his teeth clack. Shaken, I looked around. The lads were having similar problems, almost everyone had a German stuck on the end of his Lee-Enfield.
I backed up and pulled the blade out, whereupon my attacker came at me again. This time I used the butt of my rifle on his head and he went down. His head cracked like a melon and black, viscous chunks spilled from his skull.
More shaken than I cared to admit, I called for a retreat. As my men backed out into the light, the Germans poured out after them. We fired but they kept coming. Three of them took Oswald down. I managed to knock them off, giving him enough time to get to his feet before they closed in again. He was pouring blood from bites in his neck and hands and soon collapsed. Once again I managed to bludgeon his attackers and they stayed down this time but Oswald was already dead.
At this point I realized that they only stayed down if you knocked them in the head and I shouted, “The heads, lads, get them in the head!”
This put us to rights again and we
soon had all of them down when, shockingly, Oswald sat up. Smythe reached down to give him a hand up and Oswald bit him, tearing away the flesh like a dog would. Smythe screamed and staggered backward but Oswald kept coming after him. I took aim and shot the poor chap in the head. Black tissue flew everywhere and Smythe abruptly sat down on the ground and wiped his face. A medic soon had Smythe’s hand cleaned and bandaged and we left this camp of nightmares.
The bodies were never completely identified. Some were definitely Germans but others might have been prisoners of war and/or Jews. The papers we found, though incomplete, indicated that at least some of them were victims of wounds sustained while serving under Rommel in Egypt. Others were probably Polish prisoners brought in specifically for medical experimentation.
-personal letter from Leftenant Royce McDonald intercepted and confiscated by military censors.
Researchers note: It is believed that this was the beginning of the Bergen-Belsen “typhus” outbreak in which an additional 13,000 died after the camp was liberated. The origin of the illness that devastated that camp remains a closely guarded secret within British intelligence files to this day. For more information from this time frame see vault # 32, Whitehall sub-basement 4. See recovered documents from un-named camp near Bergen-Belsen below.
The Living Dead Series (Book 2): World Without End Page 11
