Wheels and Zombies (Book 2): Brooklyn, Wheels and Zombies

by M. Van

  “Take her,” Mars said as he released Ash without further warning. He swung around, lifted his rifle, and fired several rounds at the zombie onslaught.

  Used to carrying Ash on my back, the distribution of her weight to my side caught me off guard. Struggling, I dragged us both toward the end of the white hall. The mask that Mars had made us wear felt awkward. It distorted my vision.

  Like before, Mars took zombies out with keen precision, dropping them one by one, but there seemed so many. He hurried past me to a door with an exit sign and yanked it open. He ducked under the arm that clawed at him from the door opening, but he was quick to pull the trigger. Without pause, he stepped over the body, out of sight.

  Gunfire echoed out from the staircase when I reached it. The way down was blocked, but Mars kept them at bay for us to pass him. He ushered us up the stairs.

  “Go, go, go,” he shouted between rounds. Ash hung in an odd position by my side, but I held her firmly at the waist. The air seemed stale, and it felt uncomfortable as hell.

  Over my shoulder, I saw we had managed to get some distance between the masses and us. I forced myself to keep going when Ash screamed, “Look up!”

  In the same instance my head tilted up, I jumped to the side, slamming my shoulders into the wall. A body tumbled down the staircase and crashed onto the railing. Blood splattered at my feet as the body continued on its way down. I called out to Mars, but he had no trouble dodging the body.

  When I regained my step, my legs felt twice as heavy. Quick, heavy footsteps followed us up the stairs. Mars held my pace as he glanced at me. I felt his hand brush along mine.

  “You managing?” he asked.

  I nodded. I would have to manage. I knew we needed him to clear a path. He shouldn’t have to worry about me. As if he could read my mind, he sprinted up the stairs. The sight of him made me feel old. Sweat trickled down my back. I breathed as if I had run a marathon. I refused to think of what Dr. David must have done to us, and I blamed it on the lack of food. Ash’s head swung around nervously, which didn’t help climbing the stairs.

  I must have been moving at an old lady’s pace when I felt Ash pull me down. She cried out as she angled her head. I grabbed the railing with my free hand and kept the other tightly around her waist. I stumbled, turning in the process, when I saw a well-manicured hand with bright pink fingernails on Ash’s ankle. Lipstick was smeared across the woman’s face beneath her foggy eyes. The white lab coat made me unable to feel sorry for her. I jerked at Ash’s waist to get her out of the woman’s grasp. Another zombie with a familiar shaven haircut came to her aid while others flailed their arms to get past them. I struggled to hold on, stumbled, and landed painfully on my butt. I used the railing to haul us up several steps.

  Their moans gave me the chills. Mars was right. I could see it in their eyes. Even past the fogged-up mask, I could tell some of them didn’t bear the same soulless eyes I had seen with Emily and the countless other zombies. Terror hid inside these eyes as if part of them knew what they were doing, but they couldn’t stop themselves.

  Her foot still stuck, Ash screamed and pulled on the railing with me as we edged backward. I climbed another step and then reached for my gun. The shaved head stretched its jaw and sank its teeth into Ash’s boot. She groaned in frustration, but the teeth would never penetrate the sturdy boots.

  “Mars,” I cried out as I drew the gun.

  “Don’t let them bite me again,” Ash yelled when I pointed the barrel at the zombie mass below us. I pulled the trigger, only to hit a zombie at the back of the pack. Wrapped around the bars that held up the railing, my arm shook. It threw off my aim. I fired again and missed the woman and Ash’s foot by a hair but managed to hit the shaved head. Ash pulled her mask off and hurled it at the woman.

  “Don’t shoot me! Shoot them!” she yelled. She nearly knocked the gun out of my hand when her hands grabbed the railing.

  “Goddammit, Ash!” I yelled as I started to stomp the woman with my boot. “Not … helping … me … here.” The words formed with every stomp on the woman’s head.

  The woman seemed to hesitate. She stopped pulling Ash’s ankle. She raised her crushed and bloodied nose into the air, the usual sign, explaining they weren’t impressed with us. The mask must prevent them from smelling us with all this gear. I didn’t wait for her to back off. I hit her several times, square in the face, until her grip relented. I couldn’t breathe, ripped the mask off my face, and chucked it at another brainless corpse. It bounced off one of the heads that looked cross-eyed for a second. I lifted my butt off the steps to get to my feet.

  “You can step in at any time, you know,” I yelled at Ash. With the dawn of realization, she pulled her gun from her holster.

  I climbed the steps out of the grasp of the zombie pile, steadied Ash, and raised my gun. We fired simultaneously. The staircase filled with the thunder of gunshots and strained moans. Most zombies went down, including the woman, and then Mars’s boots came down the steps.

  “Great timing, Mars,” I said, panting as I moved past him. I felt his glare from behind the mask.

  I had figured we’d been heading for the roof, but I guess I should have known that the experiments performed at this place were the basement kind. When the exit door to the ground floor swung open, I stumbled out with Ash. Mars closed the door behind us, and I dropped to the floor. My shoulders heaved, straining for air. My legs felt laced with acid. Ash lay on her stomach and looked around. I couldn’t have cared less. I was ready to die from exhaustion.

  “Now what?” Ash said. She wasn’t talking to me, which was fine.

  “The building is quarantined. We have to try to get outside without getting shot,” Mars said. “That’s what the masks were for.”

  His voice went from muffled to normal when he ripped the mask off his face. I prodded myself up on my elbows and found him sitting with his back pressed to the door, a red fire axe wedged between the handle and the wall to keep it shut. Next to the door, a red casing hung on the wall with smashed-in glass. I hadn’t even heard the glass shatter. The creases between Mars’s brows betrayed his worries.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked. Sweat trickled down his face. This time, there was no smile.

  On cue, a voice boomed over the speakers, “Final lockdown complete. Garden Hose protocol will initiate, repeat.”

  I eyed Mars with suspicion when the voice repeated its message.

  “Yeah, they’re ready to blow the building,” he said.

  I sighed. I was getting tired of these threats of certain death. Ash shifted her gaze between us when she asked, “Meaning?”

  “Barbecue,” Mars said. Ash’s eyes widened.

  “Fuck that,” she said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  I rolled to my stomach to glance around the room. It was a foyer of some kind with a reception desk. A green, laminated floor edged over into a darkened hallway to my left. Another hallway let to our right with a bright green door at the end. The entrance’s large glass doors looked out over a vast field of concrete. In the dark, streetlights formed a path toward a barricade of green army trucks in the distance. A fence separated the convoy of trucks from the field of concrete and the building we were in.

  A soldier came running at the door followed by another. The first one hammered on the glass of the locked door. Mars sprang to his knees as the soldier beat desperate fists against the glass. When the second one arrived, it smacked into the first one. The first soldier’s mouth morphed into a scream. Blood spilled onto the glass when the zombie soldier sank his teeth into the man’s flesh. The soldier flailed his arms against the glass, smearing the blood with his palms while the zombie soldier tore chunks of flesh from his neck.

  “I’d put getting shot at number three on our problem list,” I said still panting, oddly not that disconcerted by the human being who had gotten his neck shredded to pieces.

  Mars cursed. He looked us over for a second. Beyond the door, the soldier’s body had slumped t
o the ground. Behind him, about a dozen lumbering soldiers came our way.

  “Fuck,” Mars said underneath his breath. I knew his plan had failed. “If the base is compromised beyond this building, we’re in some deep shit.”

  I managed to get to my knees and placed a hand on Ash’s shoulder.

  “You okay?” I asked. She nodded but remained silent. She didn’t look okay at all. Mars came over, but kept his movements to a minimum so as not to distract the zombies at the door.

  “You’re with me,” he said to Ash and then helped her onto his back.

  “You remember how to fire that thing?”

  I faced him and then the automatic strapped to my chest.

  “Point and shoot?” I said with a sheepish grin.

  He frowned without amusement. “That’s an M4A1, and it has a lot more firepower than a handgun, so be careful with it.”

  I changed my face to serious and clicked the safety.

  “Ready,” I said with a nod. Out of Mars’s sight, Ash replied with a look that had me bite the inside of my cheek to resist laughing.

  As we got to our feet, I followed Mars’s lead, avoiding the main door into the hallway on our right. Lights flickered on the ceiling, giving it a haunted feel. Despite Ash clinging to his back, Mars moved swiftly. My shoulders slid along the white plaster as I followed him like a puppy. He ignored the red doors on either side of the hall and headed straight for the green one at the end. His reasoning seemed logical to me—red is bad; green is good—but Mars probably knew where he was going. He opened the green door. It swung open with a loud clank. I jumped like a kid. Beyond the door, darkness loomed over us. Some light filtered in from a distance.

  “What is this place?” I asked. My voice did a weird hollow thing. It confirmed my image of a big, creepy dark room.

  “It’s a hangar. We’ll find a vehicle here,” Mars replied. Blinking, I stared inside, trying to adjust to the dark. My mind filled with all the things that could be lurking in that darkness when that stupid intercom voice made me jump all over again.

  “Garden Hose protocol will initiate, twenty minutes remaining, repeat.” The message repeated as I placed my hand on the cool concrete wall to steady myself. Ash had the same my-heart-just-jump-started look that I must have had. Mars eyed me with patience, as if we hadn’t been given the official twenty minutes left to live. I nodded and then followed him into the darkness.

  The drumming of my heart grew faster with every step. I could barely see the M4 in my hands, let alone Mars and Ash. With careful steps, I held the M4 ready at a low angle. The thought of shooting Ash or Mars by accident stood at the top of my scare list, one notch above running around in the dark with a potential zombie threat. Something squashed under the sole of my boot. I hoped to God that it was oil when I bumped into a rack stocked with boxes.

  High above my head, something fell over. I heard the sound of metal rolling on metal. This simple sound echoed so loudly in this place it made my teeth grind.

  I followed the sound above as it passed me. As annoying as the noise seemed, the eeriness that followed when it stopped felt worse. It was followed by a metal clank as it hit the ground. My heart stopped as I sank to the ground. All I could see was darkness. A bead of sweat trickled down my temple. My breathing had gone up a notch when, to make things worse, a dark figure loomed toward me. I checked beside me where I’d last seen Mars with Ash, but they were gone. Shit, I wanted to curse myself for having the attention span of a four-year-old. How could I let a rolling piece of metal distract me?

  “Mars, is that you?” I said in a loud whisper. No answer came. “Mars,” I said, louder this time.

  “Over here,” I heard over my shoulder, which came from the opposite side from where I was pointing my gun. Hesitation gone, I pulled the trigger. Bullets sprayed from the weapon with a heavy kick that jerked my aim up. I released the trigger when the body fell to the ground and jumped when a hand touched my shoulder.

  “Easy,” a female voice said.

  “Angie,” I said, out of breath, “you scared the shit out of me.”

  Panting, I peered into the darkness. It was too dark to see. I hoped it was one of the zombies and not some poor unlucky bastard I had shot.

  Angie reached for the gun. She had a hold on it before I could register. Her hands slid over something that clicked. She said, “Three-round burst.”

  “Where’s Mars?” she asked.

  “In here, somewhere,” I said. “We got separated. He should be up ahead with Ash.” Before I could ask, Angie told me that Mars had prepared a car and that we should find that. She knew which one.

  “Follow me.”

  She maneuvered us past the storage racks as we tread deep into the bowels of the hangar until we hit a wall. Light filtered through some of the skylights. It looked artificial and probably came from the streetlights outside. Bouncing off the polished concrete floor in intervals, they gave a decent indication of the hangar’s actual size. It had the size of a football field—or was it a soccer field?

  The murmur of voices echoed inside the large hall where they bounced off the walls.

  “The car is on the other side, behind that barrier,” Angie said in a whisper.

  “We have to hurry,” I said. “This place is ready to explode.” I didn’t know whether it was nerves or plain exasperation I heard in my voice. It made Angie look up. The artificial light reflected a moon-like glow on her face that made her lips look redder in contrast to her pale skin.

  “I’m not too eager to get shot or eaten either,” she said without a hint of emotion. I glanced at her body armor, the position of her rifle accompanied by the perfect soldier pose. She even had a pair of those shooting glasses resting on the brim of her nose. It told me to shut up and follow.

  “Right,” I said when loud clanks made me jump again. I had to get that under control.

  As if someone had hit several massive switches, added lights flooded the room with every clank, clank, clank. Angie grabbed my arm and yanked me down to my knees. I lifted a hand, but I couldn’t help my eyes from watering as they adjusted to the light.

  Tires screeched on the smooth concrete before they stopped. Doors slammed as I watched several figures step out of two black sedans when Angie grabbed my shoulder, and half dragged me behind a stack of boxes. I tried to appear unfazed, but the massive drumming inside my chest was on the verge of becoming painful.

  “Miss Margje Vissers,” a voice I knew annoyingly well called, “come out, come out, wherever you are.”

  | 33

  The sound of Dr. David’s voice sent shivers down my spine. Angie gave me a “Huh?” shrug and mouthed, “Who?”

  I lifted a finger in the air. The bastard must have finally found an ID or credit cards in my backpack.

  “I thought your name was …,” she whispered with a frown before her words drifted off. “Never mind, come on.”

  On hands and feet, we moved along a row of boxes and crates until there weren’t any left, when Dr. David decided to announce his presence again.

  “Margggje,” he said, pronouncing the g with a hurl, “or should I say Mags? I think your friend is getting a little nervous.”

  My heart stopped along with the rest of me. Without thinking, I jerked my head up over a box.

  In the middle of the hanger stood two black sedans surrounded by four men with guns. Sitting on the hood of one of the sedans was Ash. Her scrawny figure was unmistakable. Dr. David pointed a gun at her head.

  Angie jerked me down by the collar. I hit the ground with a thud.

  “There you are,” Dr. David said. I stared at Angie in shock. She shook her head but had the sense not to scrutinize me.

  “He’s not there. He left her,” I said, dazed. Then I scowled at Angie. “Where the fuck is Mars?”

  I scrambled to my feet, but Angie pulled me down. “He left her,” I said as I shoved her. Not the slightest bit impressed, she grabbed me by the shoulders. “We have to go get her. She’s just a
kid. Can’t you do some heroic shit or something? You train for this, right?”

  “Get a grip,” Angie said through gritted teeth. For a second, it seemed she wanted to slap me in the face. I relented, sinking to my butt.

  “If they don’t have him, it means he’s out there. We have a chance,” she said. I tried to understand, but it was damn hard with the image of Ash’s lone, scrawny figure on the hood of that sedan with a gun pointed at her head.

  And if I weren’t distraught enough, that damned voice came over the speakers. “Attention, Garden Hose protocol will activate in ten minutes, repeat.”

  Footsteps clacked our way. They gave the distinct impression of dress shoes instead of boots. Angie peeked around the corner of the box and lifted two fingers in the air. I lifted my shoulders in a ‘Now what?’ gesture. Ignoring me, she scoped the room as if she’d be able to MacGyver a way out of this. Her search ended with a hard glare in my direction. I swallowed, pretty sure where this was going, and then nodded in silent understanding.

  With a click, I unhooked the assault rifle from my chest and handed it to Angie along with the handgun from my holster. Her lips pressed into a tight smile when she squeezed my shoulder.

  “Don’t worry. I’ve got your back,” she said. Not fully reassured, because why the hell would she risk her life for me, I nodded.

  “I’m coming out,” I said, standing up from behind the box. I hurried to distance myself from Angie and lifted my hands in the air. They either hadn’t heard us, which seemed unlikely, or didn’t care. The speaker voice might have had them a little antsy. Two clean-cut soldier-boy types in gray suits combined with black dress shoes each took an arm. Even though I had a couple of inches in height on them, they half-dragged me toward the two sedans, Dr. David, and Ash.

  “No hurries,” Dr. David said in a cynical tone. The men increased their pace.

  I forced a steady breath in an effort to keep my calm, but my attempts faded into nothingness as Ash’s features came into view. Her jaw twitched from the strain, and her hands, balled into fists, trembled. Of course, she would refuse to go quietly into the night.