Resistant Box Set

by Perrin Briar

  Raaaaaaw!

  The sound echoed down the corridor. The undead had gotten free of the vent and were beginning to filter down the maze-like corridors.

  “They’re coming,” Hugo said. “Oh my God! They’re coming!”

  “Shut up!” Dana said. “There’s got to be a way out of here. Or somewhere to hide. Somewhere without locks on the doors. Somewhere…”

  Her eyes lit up.

  “I’ve got it,” she said. “Follow me.”

  She ran down a corridor, certain she saw something unnatural out the corner of her eye, but didn’t stop to check it out. She turned a final corner and there it was.

  The room least often used in the entire building.

  “The library?” Hugo said.

  “No use putting a lock on this door,” Dana said. “They wanted us to come in here as often as we wanted.”

  It was not a large library. Half a dozen book shelves lined the walls at regular intervals. There were basic tables for studying. They looked unused.

  Dana checked every nook and cranny for a hiding place. They just needed somewhere safe for a while, to think and plan what they were going to do next.

  Raaaaaaw!

  Louder this time. They were getting closer to their position, filtering down every corridor they came across.

  Hugo whined and shut his eyes, looking up at the heavens. Dana would have to lose him the first moment she could. She didn’t want to take his self-pitying demoralizing whining for any longer than she had to.

  “Do you want to give me a hand looking for somewhere safe for us to hole up for a while?” Dana said.

  “The roof,” Hugo said.

  “What?” Dana said.

  “The roof,” Hugo repeated.

  “What about the roof?” Dana said, growing agitated. “We’ll never get to it.”

  “No,” Hugo said, pointing up. “Our roof.”

  He was gesturing to the white square panels located in the ceiling. They were merely decoration to hide the ugly concrete and wires they would otherwise have seen.

  Dana leapt onto a table and reached up. She was too short. She couldn’t reach the ceiling. Hugo was already on his feet and handing her a chair. Perhaps he wasn’t totally useless after all.

  She placed the chair and climbed onto it, bending her knees to keep balanced. She pushed the giant square tile aside and grabbed one of the metal crisscrossing struts. She jumped, grabbed the strut and pulled herself up.

  She turned on her stomach, lying down flat. Through the door she could see an undead walking this way and that, seemingly lost.

  Hugo was already on the table and stepped up onto the chair. He jumped and grabbed the strut. He swung, his hefty weight pulling him down, his weak arms giving him retribution for abusing them in his past life. Now he would die for it.

  Dana reached down and grabbed his podgy arms. Hugo looked as surprised as Dana did. His expression took on one of confidence, and he hauled himself up with strength even he didn’t know he had.

  “Thanks,” Hugo said, though he wasn’t totally home and dry yet.

  He kicked out with his legs to shift his weight, and struck something below. Hugo pulled himself up and swung himself around so he was lying on his front, like Dana.

  “Oh no,” Dana said, turning pale.

  “What?” Hugo said.

  He followed her line of sight.

  The object he’d struck with his foot, what had allowed him to climb up, was the backrest of the chair. It toppled over the side of the table and fell to the floor with a loud heavy clack!

  Dana and Hugo shared a horrified look. The sound reverberated throughout the entire compound, and in response to it, the haunted rise of the chorus from hell.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  THE UNDEAD pressed into the library, spilling forth like a tide. And that was what they were, Dana supposed. A flood of evil and foulness and death. Chairs clattered, knocked over, and tables screeched as they were accidentally pushed across the room.

  The creatures hissed, growled and snarled at the results of their own efforts. Then they fell quiet as they shuffled into every corner of the room. None of them looked up, nor appeared to have the ability to do so.

  Dana and Hugo had slowly slid back under cover of the roof tiles they were currently lying on.

  “They’re inside,” Hugo mouthed.

  Hugo had the remarkable ability to always say the obvious. They were close, their panting loud in their ears, sharing one another’s breath.

  “What do we do now?” Hugo mouthed.

  “Stay here,” Dana mouthed back.

  Eventually the undead had to go, had to head somewhere else. Surely their attention would be distracted by other noises? They wouldn’t stay here forever based on the single sound of the chair, would they?

  Dana ran through a dozen different plans on how she might get them to move on to somewhere else, but they all carried the risk of being discovered, and she didn’t yet know how intelligent these creatures were.

  By the way they moved the obvious conclusion was they were dumb creatures. The same could be said for Hugo. But appearances could be deceptive. She was impressed with his speed in coming up with hiding in the roof. Not many people could think that clearly under pressure.

  Was she wrong about him? Did he have secret depths of survival abilities she didn’t know about?

  They could have ended up having to wait all night for another sound of adequate volume to distract the damned creatures, but they were in luck.

  Rat-a-tat-tat! Rat-a-tat-tat!

  Boom!

  It caught the undead’s attention as much as it had Dana and Hugo’s. The monsters turned on the spot and began to file toward the door. They had a new target now, one that did not play games and hide, but met them face to face, confrontational, aggressive. Deadly.

  Solid thunk noises, that Dana could only imagine were bullets, struck the twin entrance doors. A monster wanted to come in and say hello. It was the U.S. military. There were few monsters who could stand against it. If anything could bring these undead beasts down surely it was the heavily bloated U.S. military.

  The undead inside the library joined the river of undead that flowed toward the main entrance. Directly into the line of fire. There was no sense to it. These creatures were idiots. They pressed against the doors.

  The doors were strong, but not bullet proof, and after a few duds, the bullets began to fly.

  They were devastatingly effective.

  They slammed into the door, pierced it, and then slammed through the first three or four bodies of the undead. Perhaps more. It was difficult to gauge how effective each bullet was as they sawed through the rotting corpses.

  Their blood spurted and their bodies slumped to the floor. It was a shooting gallery. The infantry units knew what they were doing. They knew the corridors were long and straight from the main entrance, allowing their ammunition to sail through them all, striking and destroying everything in their path.

  And then Dana was aware of more firing, a little farther from their position, and she realized it must have been the military firing at the other entrances at the same time. There were four in total. But surely they couldn’t be laying waste to them all?

  Then she noticed something else.

  Despite all the shooting, all the firing, all the bodies slumping to the floor, a large number of them were getting back up onto their feet. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Many had lost limbs, missing their jaws and large parts of their heads. And yet they continued on, pushing forward harder and harder, the doors bending and buckling outward.

  They reached through the gaps with their arms, waving and reaching. It must have been disheartening to any army personnel watching that, inflicting this relentless damage on their enemy, only to find that no matter how many bullets they put in them, they kept coming. And coming.

  It was hypnotic. It was gruesome. It was terrific.

  After being the prey to these mo
nsters for so long it was a relief to Dana that she could finally sit back and watch them getting a taste of their own medicine, a taste of their own horror. But her excitement quickly diminished.

  Getting revenge on someone was only good when they knew they were being avenged upon. She didn’t think these creatures had any such cognitive ability. They were here to get shot and that was all. They were target practice. Fish in a barrel. A crap shoot.

  And it wasn’t working.

  Dana could see that. But the military didn’t seem to be altering its strategy.

  The constant barrage of bullets had weakened the doors, filled with holes like Swiss cheese. The undead pressed against them, slipping and sliding on their comrades’ blood. There was a snap, like a tendon giving way to pressure.

  The doors split open and the creatures fell forward, their bodies cascading and spilling down the steps. A river of blood eased the undead bodies out, splaying across the front car park.

  The rest of the undead pushed through the door toward the military entrenched position.

  Hugo had his eyes clenched shut tight, hands clamped to his ears. Heart of a lion, this one, Dana thought.

  Boom!

  Dana felt the vibrations from their hiding place. The building shook to its foundations. Evidently the military had decided to bring out the big guns.

  Dana couldn’t see their impact from where she was, but she doubted they were much more effective than the bullets they’d used earlier. Brute force alone wouldn’t work against these monsters.

  Psychological warfare depended on the enemy reacting in a way that was predictable, and it was predictable because it was humans you were contending with.

  But these things… They might have been humans once, but whatever yardstick impulse they had for survival had clearly been redefined.

  Boom! Boom!

  The military were giving it their all.

  Dana was transfixed, unable to speak, listening to the sounds like they were the lottery results and she had the winning ticket. Even Hugo was silent, fascinated by what was taking place outside.

  The retort of the rifles and explosions came less frequently, and the groans and roars from the torn human throats grew louder, filling the empty spaces.

  Men’s voices, shouts, orders, came like a duet, growing louder and more urgent. Then they turned to screams. Dana swallowed hard.

  The blast of gunfire slowed to a crawl, dropping off a cliff, and then, all of a sudden, stopped completely. The screams became more intense and pain-filled.

  Dana didn’t think she had ever heard anything so horrific, her mind painting pictures of what was taking place. The mind was apt to dream up extreme scenarios, but it was hard to believe they could be much more extreme considering the yells.

  Then even the screaming stopped. There was only the groaning of the infected, swelling into a roar. It was a moan of victory.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  SILENCE.

  Neither Dana nor Hugo could quite believe what had just taken place. This was their home, their city. Nothing remotely interesting had ever happened here. Now, it was the front doormat of the apocalypse.

  “Are they dead?” Hugo finally asked.

  “I don’t know,” Dana said.

  But she had a strong suspicion what the answer would turn out to be. The silence was too condemning to mean anything else.

  “Do you think if we didn’t come through the tunnel they would still be alive?” Hugo said.

  “Would we be if we didn’t?” Dana said. “We’re here and they’re not. Learn from it.”

  She pulled herself forward and lowered herself onto the table.

  “Are the infected all gone?” Hugo said.

  “They’re outside,” Dana said. “We’re no longer in a prison. We’re free, but we can’t spend the rest of our lives in here.”

  Hugo pressed his lips together. He looked like he wouldn’t have minded that situation. Frankly, neither would Dana. She didn’t need his deadweight, and that was what Hugo was. A lot of deadweight. But no one reacted well to being told that. For once, Dana decided to be diplomatic.

  “You ought to stay here,” Dana said. “There are vending machines in the cafeteria. And there will be a lot of food in the refrigerators for you to eat. You could probably hang out here for a long time before you’d need to leave.”

  “Live on my own in the new world order?” Hugo said. “No thanks. So what do we do now?”

  Dana pressed her lips together. No matter. She would simply slip away one day. There was more than one way to escape.

  “Find Max,” Dana said.

  “Max?” Hugo said.

  “My sister,” Dana said.

  “All you have to do is sneak past a few hundred undead cannibals and you’re home and dry,” Hugo said.

  “Piece of cake,” Dana said. “What about you? Where are you going to go?”

  Hugo shrugged.

  “Family?” Dana said. “To your parents’ maybe?”

  “No,” Hugo said. “I can’t go back there.”

  She looked at him for a moment. His smile had gone and for the first time his eyes were cold, distant, like he had known real difficulty in his life, and not just the silver spoon fed Dana expected. Dana knew better than to ask for details.

  Hugo hooked his leg over the roof tile. He landed, bending his legs and holding out his hands to balance himself. He smiled in triumph at Dana, wanting her approval. The table creaked under his weight and a leg snapped, spilling Hugo across the floor.

  Incompetent. Stupid. Dangerous.

  “I’m okay!” Hugo said. “I’m okay!”

  “Yes, but we might not be,” Dana said. “You could have alerted the whole horde to our location.”

  Dana would ditch him the first chance she got. Or, better yet, she might just use him as a sacrifice. She didn’t need to outrun the undead, only Hugo. And with his girth, that wouldn’t be difficult.

  But if he invited too much danger onto her, she would be sure to get shot of him. No amount of use as a shield would be worth taking on that much risk. And she most certainly would not put Max in greater danger for Hugo’s benefit. She knew where her loyalties lay. They were always skewed in Max’s favor.

  In the past he was probably the easy going type, the kind who took things in stride, letting someone else do his duties. He probably never held grudges, laughed at insults, no matter how vicious they were, and shrugged off problems like water. In the old world you could get away with that kind of behavior, but not anymore.

  Dana wondered how long he would survive on his own. Her money would be on not long at all. But she wouldn’t let thoughts of him interfere with her goal in locating Max. Dana had always been practical, but this was a new level for her.

  Dana moved to the door to peer up and down the corridor to check Hugo’s fall hadn’t attracted attention.

  She was already too late.

  They were at the door. Their stench filled her nostrils and stung her eyes as their grotesque masks turned to face her, staring her down.

  Dana’s eyes widened in surprise, at her impending doom. The undead flooded inside as Dana skittered back on her hands and feet. Hugo covered his face with his hands and shied away, his body’s natural reaction to a threat.

  Some help he turned out to be. He’d just doomed them both. Dana accidentally smacked into the tables and chairs, making a loud metallic noise, drawing the attention of the undead further.

  The undead grunted, falling forward and approaching the teenagers.

  Dana’s back met a wall, nowhere else to go. She turned her head to the side, as if in an attempt to sink further into the background, but the natural laws of physics did not bend.

  The undead pressed their noses to her skin, sniffing and snorting in an attempt to breathe all of her in. She heard Hugo whimpering. She supposed they were doing the same to him.

  They did that for what felt like hours, and then, suddenly, Dana wasn’t sure when, why or how
, but the stench retreated. She opened her eyes and watched as the last of the undead filtered through the door and into the corridor.

  Dana found she was panting. Her sweat ran into her eyes and stung. She was thankful for it. It meant she was still alive. Hugo was the same, frozen stiff, staring at the empty doorway, as if the undead were going to come back through at any moment.

  Dana blinked, waking up. She shook her head. She was alive. That was all that mattered. She just needed to get out of there, find Max, and get her somewhere safe. Dana got to her feet. Her legs still felt heavy, like jelly.

  “I guess… that’s what they call… a close encounter,” Hugo said between breaths.

  It was no funnier the second time he said it. Dana remembered thinking how the undead would have consumed them once they had made the complete transition to fully undead. Clearly hunger wasn’t everything.

  “Thanks for that,” Dana said. “I would have hated to have passed through the apocalypse and not experienced it.”

  “Everything happens for a reason,” Hugo said.

  “Sure,” Dana said. “Sometimes it’s because you messed up. Just be careful in future, will you?”

  She offered him her hand and pulled him onto his feet. He was too heavy and she couldn’t lift him with a single pull.

  “At least we learned something important,” Hugo said.

  “That they don’t like us as much as we thought they did?” Dana said, rolling her eyes. “Well worth almost losing our lives for.”

  “Do you think it’s because we’re Resistant?” Hugo said.

  “What else could it be?” Dana said.

  Frankly, she didn’t care. There were more important things on her mind, like getting the hell away from there.

  The corridor was strewn with broken glass that crunched beneath their feet. Dana had never been so conscious of noise before. The world was a beehive of noise and distraction. Their chief concern would be learning how to reduce their noise footprint as much as possible, to pass through the world silently, like ghosts. It would be the only way for them to survive.

  Bullet holes and black charred flames decorated the corridors of the battle. They stopped in the corridor leading to the entrance. The blood was already beginning to dry and turn thick and sticky. A pair of undead, bloodied around the mouth, looked up from their meal.