by Casey Herzog
Callum crossed the street and pinned himself flat against the fence that led to the garbage disposal alley. True enough, the guards stopped here, their interest more on enemies who came from the outside than intruders who were already within.
A big mistake, Dante thought. Even at the community they were wise enough to have an eye open even during the most peaceful periods of the week. Callum jumped up onto the ladder and climbed up and over it like some sort of cat. Dante rolled out from under the car and sprinted across the street as his teacher opened the small chain-link door, catching the strong stench of trash as he arrived at the place where they needed to be. He lifted his gun and they both fanned out as they flanked the gangsters and kicked the large black bags around in case anyone was hiding inside or underneath them.
Looking up, he saw the ladder and smiled. It wouldn’t be as easy to reach as it looked, though.
“How can we get up there?” he asked Callum, his eyes darting around to look for any sign of a ladder he could prop up against the one above them.
“Gonna have to use the trash; give me a hand,” Callum replied.
The man looked around nervously and began to push a dumpster under the ladder. Its wheels creaked slightly and Dante’s heart pounded in his chest like a drum. He helped by carrying the large black bags and piling them on top of the dumpster as Callum did the same. A voice was approaching from nearby, outside the fence.
“Oh no. Come on Dante,” Callum breathed as they continued to pile the garbage. It still wasn’t enough. There were two voices, men who were coming slowly, but surely, towards the alleyway. The healer threw another bag at Callum, and he placed it onto the top of the container. “We need to go. Now.”
The soldier leapt on top of the dumpster, helping the boy pull himself up. He then climbed the bags and jumped. And didn’t reach the ladder. Again he jumped, but to no avail. The ladder was still too far. The chain-link door opened. The men were literally just around the corner now, only a few feet from seeing them. Dante knew what to do.
Before Callum could react, he ran up the bags and leapt up on his back like a cat, climbing onto his head and shoulders. The soldier understood and lifted the child up.
“Got it!” Dante hissed and began to pull the ladder down slowly until it stopped.
“…so she fired through the car’s door like ten times. It was enough to stop those guys from riding away for good,” a man chuckled as he appeared on the scene, another man accompanying him. They both had shotguns and cruel smiles on their faces, but their expressions changed as they looked up and saw the dumpster sitting in the middle of the yard like it was. “What’s this?” the man who’d been telling the tale asked out loud. He saw the garbage bags and lifted his view to the stair above it.
Dante cowered as they crouched in the darkness. They had successfully climbed the ladder onto the first landing of the fire stairs and were hugging the building to avoid being seen from below.
The man on the yard lifted his gun and pointed straight at them…
…but then he lowered it and shook his head.
“Some idiot probably forgot his key and didn’t want to tell anyone. Help me move this, will you? I can’t believe this is the second time this month somebody has done this.”
With a sigh, the man and the child sprinted down the walkway they were standing on and found an open window, which they slid through, landing on the dusty floor of an abandoned storage room filled with all sorts of odd bits and pieces.
They were inside. There were hundreds of enemies all around, their friends had been taken hostage and they were just a man and a kid, but they were inside. It was all that mattered.
“Good, that was the easy part,” Callum whispered, “Now, now comes the tough one.”
He opened the door and the two of them stepped out into the unknown.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Spectres
Johanna was fighting hard to keep her breathing level, her mind forming horrible images as she rose floor by floor on the elevator. She imagined her neck being snapped by Russell’s metal hand; she imagined him running her through with a hot blade. Dozens of terrible scenarios were created in her mind in an instant as her feeling of security self-destructed, and she felt like a little girl on her first day at school again.
The guy to one side of her shifted uncomfortably towards her as the elevator lurched, and she began to wonder if they were going find a way to soften her up before she arrived. By the time the elevator doors opened, relieved to have arrived or not, she realized that sometimes the promise of violence was worse than the violent act itself.
They hadn’t arrived on the floor where Russell’s throne room was, but instead on the one below. This one was different, a sort of training floor with target practice, practice dummies and sparring rings. She saw a few of the leader’s elite practicing with their weapons and began to wonder if she was going to be turned into a dummy for somebody’s swordsmanship class.
“Johanna!” the man said as he entered the room from a side door. Clearly, the guard had relayed information to his boss through an internal communication link. He was wearing a thin vest and his powerful muscles and shining bionic parts were visible. “Welcome, welcome.”
She looked at him with contempt, studying the weapon in his hands. It was a very expensive-looking machete that shone in the light of the lamps above them.
He caught her looking and shook his head.
“Oh, I’m not going to use this on you or anything.” He handed it over to one of the guards and took her hand in his own of flesh and blood. “I’m sorry we got off on the wrong foot.” He kissed the back of her hand and began to walk, prompting her to do the same. “I’ll be brief and sincere, my dear Johanna — I need that boy. More than you do.”
She looked away, her mouth twisting in annoyance.
“Johanna,” he said again, stressing the sound of her name. “Are you sure you want to make me beg?”
“Don’t bother begging. I’m not giving him to you. This isn’t a negotiation; accept that we’re not giving him away.” She cared little for what the man could do, and her mind was set. The man’s real eye contracted with emotion — either disappointment or rage — but he didn’t react violently.
“I understand. I respect your loyalty and your strength. You don’t know if I will hurt you or punish your people for this, and yet you don’t give up the location. Even with everything against you. I admire you, Johanna.” He paused and coughed, “The thing is…I will find out how to get him one way or another. I hope you remember that when one of your people doesn’t return from these interviews.” He smiled at his men and they began to approach, but then he lifted a finger at them. “Nevertheless, it shouldn’t be this easy to reject me should it?”
Johanna didn’t understand until she saw him turn to grab his machete; she tried to bolt as he lifted it above his head. She was too slow.
The blade fell and she screamed.
They pushed through a door just as a pair of laughing men came around the corner. Dante breathed heavily as he looked at Callum. The soldier had thrown his rifle on his back and held his knife in hand with a firm grip. The soldier had pushed away all traces of his role as a teacher and caregiver and adopted his previous persona with ease.
This is what he really is, Dante knew.
The men walked past the room and continued their jokes, their laughter echoing down the corridors until only silence remained.
“Very well, keep going.”
They had entered the building on the third floor; they were now on the seventh and with no sign of much-needed weapons or their friends. Very few of the gang members up here carried weapons, and it was becoming a useless trek up the building. Dante began to wonder what would happen if they came across a well-armed unit. Would they even have a chance, with only a rifle, a pistol and a knife?
His mind brought back a memory and he shivered in the cool draft of the lonely hallway.
He had faced uglier odd
s before and survived.
Two and a half years ago
“Look, it’s just a matter of in and out; we grab our things and we leave. Simple.”
The speaker was Janssen, a teen too smart for his own good. He was also the ‘leader’ of the small group that Dante had joined a few months ago, after he’d been separated from the others during a Coalition raid on their hideout and the surrounding communities. If only I’d known our leaders were Outsider informants, Dante had thought regularly with regret.
Janssen — or Jan, as many knew him — had found a weapons cache on the outskirts of Labile, a city hit hard by the Outsiders and whose people had been used for experiments more than any other in the region. He hadn’t been able to bring them back due to a lack of manpower, but he promised that if they could grab the boxes, they would have enough guns to sell so they could eat for two years.
“Or…we could eat for ten if we began to train and used them on the roads…” he offered with a grin. The others remained silent. Life was hard enough without imagining themselves going out and robbing people. The world was slowly forcing its population into making a choice: evolve or die. Many decent people had lost hope and turned into thugs and criminals, the lawless lands forcing them into activities they’d never even dreamed of doing previously, like stealing and killing. Dante prayed every day he never had to take a life, but he was aware it was likely unavoidable. Life isn’t worth a damn anymore, he knew. “What? You suddenly find your conscious?” Jan cackled. The group didn’t look convinced.
Either way, he was getting what he wanted, as he always did. It took him two days, but his wish came true. Food was running low, and Cherry’s little daughter was getting worse from her asthma. Dante had offered to heal her, but the girl’s mother was very superstitious and kept her as far away from the healer as possible. They were going to have to go out, no matter what. The typical dilemma that had plagued humanity since its origins reared its ugly head. Them or us. Eat or be eaten.
Janssen smiled when he called for the votes, and only a handful refrained from lifting their hands. After all, to him it was an adventure. Everything always seemed like a game to the tall, handsome boy.
He was the first to die when the subhumans awoke.
Labile had seemed so empty on the first run they’d made, the gun cache sitting in the back of a military truck as if nobody in the world cared about it at all. The story changed when the group went there in numbers, however. It had always been a mistake to take so many.
Dante carried a baseball bat, the best thing he’d found in their armory that didn’t require him to shoot. He wasn’t a good marksman yet, but he had certainly learned how to bat in his free time.
At first, the healer had felt confident as they scurried along the streets like rats, not making any sound and keeping their weapons up and primed. It all ended when Cherry’s daughter had fallen into a coughing fit as they approached the truck. In his defense, Janssen had tried to get the young woman to leave her child behind, but she had reminded him of the fate of another small girl at a camp they’d entered and the young man had been forced to accept reluctantly.
The first of the creatures looked out of a window, its wild eyes darting among the intruders and its teeth bared in a feral grimace. There were frightened whispers among those who saw it, but the braver of the men and women lifted their weapons defiantly while others unloaded the boxes and quickly carried them away.
It wasn’t one mutant that burst out of the building, though. It wasn’t even ten.
It started as a soft, distant slapping sound that echoed from the insides of the building, like a child running along a hallway towards the smell of baking cookies. It soon turned into the charging rush of scores of creatures that had once been human, and ended with the rusty metal gate of the apartment building smashing open violently and a horde of the monsters throwing themselves straight at the group.
Dante screamed as he saw them and the signs of horrible alterations to their features: some with their insides exposed; others with parts of their skulls missing; finally there were a number of them with additional eyes and limbs.
They moved as one, rushing to attack this life-form that was unknown to them. The subhumans acted like territorial animals and their minds were too far gone to care. Janssen stepped out of the truck and challenged them with fury, the machine-gun in his hands spitting death at each of the things as they roared and sprinted towards the group. Others grabbed weapons and loaded them as quickly as they could, adding their fire to his. The creatures died by the dozens.
But the noise brought more. There were always more.
Jan never saw the one that killed him until it was too late; a subhuman with a spider-like hunch bowling him over and ramming a long claw through his eye. Dante saw it all. He watched as Cherry’s girl was torn from her arms and one of the creatures bit her throat until she stopped moving. He caught the precise moment when the group’s already-poor formation was broken and everybody began to flee. Dante had never felt so useless.
One of the others grabbed him and they ran out into the suburbs of the city. Somehow, the men he was escaping with had managed to grab two boxes and were looking for a place to hole up until they could get out. Some of the others turned to fire at the approaching subhumans. Dante was pulled forward and ordered not to turn as he heard the screams.
“In here!” a woman said, as she waved them into a small building with a gated fence. It looked like some kind of rich person’s home. The healer was called over to tend to the wounded, but everyone who had made it to the home seemed to be okay.
The monsters threw themselves against the fence all night, their mouths emitting horrible noises as they challenged the people within to come out. Dante counted eighteen of the forty-three members of the small community who had left the apartment to look for the weapons. More than half of them were dead, he knew.
The plan took hours to materialize; the group dividing into smaller sections each with their own approaches to getting out of Labile safely and without casualties. None of them were that good though, the boy thought.
There were enough guns for all of them, their close combat weapons tied to their backs or held in their off-hands as Darren, the man who had taken the lead when they needed it the most, opened the door to the house as quietly as he could.
It wasn’t quietly enough.
The creatures turned or stood from where they lay and began to slam their fists against the gate again. Dante lifted the revolver that had been given to him and watched as Darren walked over to the gate with a long pole and turned back to them.
“Don’t waste your ammo; shoot the monster in front of you and run, shoot and run. Don’t look to the sides — just keep running until we’re out of here.”
The gate opened and there was a single roar from the men and women as the two sides charged into one another.
The battle that ensued was one of the greatest. This battle would unfortunately never make it to the annals of history; it would be remembered only in the minds of those who survived it.
An hour later, eight brave souls emerged from the streets of Labile, their firearms mostly empty and their melee weapons bloody.
A group of survivors; a group of heroes.
Of the people who fought that day, all but he and Alex were dead. Dante recalled that the boy had been left behind to take care of the community.
He’s sleeping safe at home, and I’m out here. What a crazy thing I did by tagging along on this mission, Dante thought.
Callum was standing on the edge of an inner balcony, looking up at the many floors still above them.
“Look, we could keep going up this way — the dangerous way — or we could return to the fire stairs. I’m not sure what to do. We need weapons, but we also need to free our friends before we do anything else.”
“Sir, I think we should keep going the same way. We might discover a few things that the fire stairs won’t reveal to us.”
Callum st
ared at him with respect.
“Have you always been this fearless?” He smiled and patted the boy’s head. “Very well, let’s—”
The sound was sudden and deafening. It started as a low-pitched wail, but rose into a screeching whine followed by silence. But then it began again. An alarm.
Loud shouts came from outside the building and Dante jumped as a voice erupted from powerful speakers all around them. It was a familiar voice speaking.
“Enemies are among us! A man and a boy have infiltrated the building. Be wary, be smart. Keep them alive. Our leader has ordered it — move out, search and capture!”
