Steele eyed all the armed men. The many. The Chosen. Steele was but one man. Unarmed. His only ally nearby, a scrawny unarmed woman. She would never submit, and as her comrade, neither could he. As much as he would suffer for his decisions, he could not submit. Submitting to this man was antithetical to what they believed in.
“I’m sorry, Pastor, you ask too much. We want there to continue to be peace between our groups, but we cannot join you by coercion.”
The pastor ran a finger along his temple, dragging down his cheek. “This is unfortunate.” He stared Steele in the eyes. The pastor’s eyes promised bullets sent for Steele and his friends. Steele knew he’d seen worse.
“I will pray for Peter’s soul,” the pastor said. The pastor waved his hand. A man bent low near Pagan. Pagan’s eyes met Steele’s, fear embodying them. Acknowledgment of his fate. Smoke plumed up from his feet. Pagan’s feet stamped up and down. Little yellow and orange embers grew into flames around his feet. His mouth opened, and he screamed.
JOSEPH
Cheyenne Mountain Complex, CO
Sirens blared in the hallway, the sound running along the walls. Awoogha. Awoogha. Worried, Joseph looked back at the door. They had been inside Byrnes’s office for hours.
“What’s going on?” Joseph said, covering his ears.
Byrnes’s face went sour like he’d eaten only lemons for weeks. “Lockdown.” He ripped open the top drawer of his desk and pulled out an M9 Beretta 9mm. He slammed a magazine inside and racked the slide back. He held the weapon pointed at the ceiling.
“Come on,” Byrnes said, standing. Joseph stood hesitantly. The lean colonel rounded his desk and pushed Joseph in the back until he was in the hallway. The sirens screamed even louder there. Joseph reached up and covered his ears.
Yellow lights spun overhead, hanging from the ceiling. Soldiers in black gear, MP5s strapped to their bodies, barreled down the hall.
“What’s happening?” Byrnes growled, reaching for one and grabbing him by his shirt.
The soldier stopped, eyes angry behind his black mask before realizing Byrnes was a colonel. His eyes cooled quickly. “Outbreak. Corridor Three.” Byrnes released him and he sprinted off. Byrnes turned to Joseph, but Joseph already knew.
“That’s where Rebecca’s room is,” Joseph said.
Byrnes’s thin jaw clenched. “You should head back to your room and lock the door.”
“I will not,” Joseph said. His voice bordered on more of a squeak, but determination was there too.
Byrnes nodded at him with a slight dip of his chin. “Fair enough.” He turned and chased the soldiers down the hall. Joseph followed behind him. They jogged, the pounding of feet echoing from the floor to the walls and back. White walls zipped by them in a blur.
They rounded a corner, and a squad of black-clad soldiers blocked their path. The man in the rear raised his MP5 9mm submachine gun, his masked eyes watching them. He lowered it a second later when he realized they weren’t infected. Joseph thanked God that his training allowed him to identify the threats before he unloaded a magazine into himself and Byrnes. The three other soldiers pointed guns down the corridor, poised and ready to shoot, but held their point of reference. Byrnes and Joseph stepped behind them.
“How many infected?” Byrnes asked.
“Only one, sir. The sensors in room C-3EB were tripped a minute and fifteen seconds ago.”
“Good response time, Sergeant.” Byrnes nodded to him.
Joseph stepped up on his tiptoes. A lone female stood down the hall and his heart sank in his chest.
His fears took his breath away, tightening his chest like a vise.
Her light blue medical gown hung limply around her. It was twisted lopsided as if she had gotten into a fight and hadn’t bothered to fix her clothes. Her dark auburn hair stuck to her neck as if she had succumbed to the disease in a feverish sweat. Her surgical mask hung to one side. Her chin dropped and she stared at them through her eyebrows.
“Background is clear. You are approved to engage,” Byrnes commanded. She chomped her jaws together at her former colleague, blood oozing from her mouth in response.
“No!” Joseph shouted. He brushed past them, stepping in front of their guns. The soldiers looked at him, dumbfounded by his actions. One reached for Joseph and he dodged him.
“Dr. Jackowski, what in the hell are you doing? Get back here,” Byrnes shouted.
Joseph held up a hand in the air. “Hold your fire,” he said. Joseph took a hesitant step forward. Rebecca saw him. She took a shaky step for him. A pale bare foot stepped his way.
“Rebecca,” he said, his voice almost a whisper.
A low growl grew in her throat. She lifted her arm up. Blood dripped from the point where she had ripped away her IV. Her fingers curled into a hooked claw. Joseph took another cautious step closer. “If you’re still there, please go back to your room,” Joseph said, but he already knew.
She shambled down the hall. Her shoulders swayed unnaturally as if she had hurt both her legs. As she neared, he could see her eyes. Pale white orbs, as sure a sign as any that the infection had claimed victory over her body. Nothing remained of Rebecca, the doctor that he had fallen for. The doctor who had worked until her last breath to find a vaccine to save mankind. It had stolen her body, but never her soul. Now this husk hobbled down the hall, hoping to reach him to infect him as well. Kill. Reproduce. Kill. Reproduce. Killing was part of its reproduction cycle, and it wouldn’t stop until it completed its mission.
“Please go back,” Joseph sobbed. The wetness of the warm tears on his cheeks was distant. “We need more time,” he whispered. The living cadaver of Rebecca continued on for him, ignoring him like a jilted lover.
Out of the corner of his right eye, a black gun filled his vision. Boom. Fire burst from its barrel and Rebecca’s body became erect, almost as if she were suspended in the air. Her eyes met his, and for a brief second, he thought she was there again. It was like a flash of sadness had shone through the infection, longing for more time. Then it was gone.
A circular dime-sized black hole leaked a trickle of blood out from her eyebrow. The blood dripped down the ridge of her eye socket and around the curve of her mouth. Then she collapsed.
Her body folded onto the floor. She was a forgotten toy tossed away by a child. Her knees bent back and her arms flung to her sides like those of a tormented Shakespearian actor.
Joseph faced Byrnes. Joseph had known she was gone, but he had let himself hope. Hope is what torments the soul.
“Check out the rest of the corridor,” Byrnes ordered. He holstered his sidearm and the metal slid over the hard plastic. Black-clad soldiers ran past them, stepping around Rebecca’s body.
The colonel’s brow furrowed. “There was nothing we could do. Her fate was sealed when she was bitten.”
Joseph looked away from the colonel’s eyes. He knew Byrnes was right, but the sting didn’t leave him. He pushed away from the colonel and ran down the hallway to where she lay. Blood pooled around her head, dark red and almost black. He fell to his knees and took up her hand in his. It was cool inside his warm living hands. Her white eyes stared up at the ceiling, vacant.
Byrnes called to him. “Careful, Dr. Jackowski. Her blood is extremely contagious.”
“You think I don’t know that?” Joseph snipped at him.
Byrnes’s mouth flattened and he sighed. “I cared for her too. She was the last colleague I had and an amazing doctor. I don’t want to lose two of my doctors today.”
Joseph reluctantly released her hand, setting it gently on the floor. He turned to find Byrnes offering his hand in her place. Joseph glared at him but placed his hand in his.
“For her,” Joseph said. They had differences, but this fight was bigger than those.
Byrnes helped him up from the floor. “For her.” He sighed and looked out over the mess in the hallway. “I’ll get some biohazard technicians to clean this up. I’m going to check on the other doctors.”
“I’ll dig through her notes and see if she left us anything of value,” Joseph said.
Byrnes nodded at him and walked away.
The door to Rebecca’s room was only partially open. He rested a hand on it, letting the weight of his arm slowly swing it all the way open. It was dark. Her heart rate monitor was tipped over, and her bed looked like someone had used it as a wrestling mat. IV tubing was strewn on the floor. Her sheets hung off the bed along with a blood-smeared pillow where she had hemorrhaged out of her ears and nose.
Papers lay strewn about the entire room as if she were placing them to potty train a dog. He bent down and began shuffling them together in a pile. Most were his notes. Underneath a pile, he found her tablet. He picked it up and turned it over.
The sirens stopped outside her room. At least the outbreak was over quick. He pressed a button on the edge of the tablet and it powered up. The battery bar was still in the green, so it had enough power for him to study what she had last worked on.
He scrolled through her notes. Most of her notes were things they had discussed while she was coherent. He ran his finger along the right side of the screen. Her notes became more short and terse near the end of her page. Single phrases. The cat only has three legs. Can’t play unless it has four. Cat needs a leg. What does that mean? Her words became more singular down the page.
Cat missing leg. Cat need leg. The satellite virus was behind those incoherent words. A fevered hallucination going back to a childhood memory. Her typing became nothing but a mishmash of letters together and turned into pure gibberish.
Joseph suppressed a tiny chuckle. “You must have had a three-legged cat as a kid,” he said to the empty room.
He heard the technicians in the hallway haul her body up and drop her on a gurney.
He studied the phrases again. “The cat only has three legs. The cat needs a new leg to play,” he said under his breath. He looked around the room as if she would have left him another clue as to her meaning. Nothing stuck out in the trashed room.
Clutching her tablet he stepped into the hallway. He walked around the puddle of blood that was once Dr. Weinroth and hurried to his room.
KINNICK
Eisenhower Tunnel, CO
From the depths of the dark tunnel, fire leapt with scorching fury for the entrance. It was as if the tunnel were about to spit its inferno back out at the soldiers and cars along the highway. The flames came for them, step by hindered step.
Kinnick watched in horror as the first flaming bodies emerged from the tunnel. Clothes were aflame. Hair singed and burnt from the tops of their skulls. Flesh melted like burning plastic. Their skin was brown and black from the fire but cracked pink below the surface. Regardless of what horrible trauma had befallen the corpses, they still came onward, unwilling to give in to death. Second squad unleashed into the new infected, finishing them off.
“They’re coming,” Stark breathed through the radio.
“How many?” Hunter asked quickly into his radio.
“Too many. We have to fall back,” Stark replied between gasps for air.
“A thousand? Two thousand?” Kinnick said loud into his radio. Angry, he clicked off his radio, waiting for his officer’s response.
The microphone popped. Gunfire echoed over the line. “As far…as…we could see.”
Hunter and Kinnick locked eyes. Kinnick held his breath as if he would never be able to take another. Jesus Christ.
“We need to fall back, Master Sergeant,” Kinnick managed to get out.
“Second squad,” Hunter started. An infected stumbled through the flames, its clothes alight with flickering fire. Its exposed flesh blackened crisp. It was impossible to tell the infected’s gender. It stamped through burning fuel and around the burning wreckage of a car.
One infected turned into three and three into too many as the dead multiplied in the darkness of the earth. It was as if the tormented souls marched from the fiery bowels of hell itself.
“Fire!” Hunter screamed. His SCAR was to his shoulder, cracking rounds quickly. As he moved to the side off the highway, hundreds pushed their way from out of the tunnel. Arms and legs were alight and the infected continued onward as if nothing was wrong. Bullets ripped through organs and flesh, pieces of flesh blown straight off their bodies.
The infected poured out faster than 1st and 2nd squads could shoot. The dead surged around the cars, flooding onto the road. No gunfire could slow them down enough to make a difference. A private was bulldozed to the ground, screaming as the burning infected scorched his skin with their scalding hands. They immediately tore into his flesh with mouths afire.
“Up the hills,” Kinnick screamed. He sprayed rounds out of his M4 in their direction. They weaved in and out of the highway debris, racing for the rocky terrain. Kinnick cut through the cars, running for the mountainous hills that made the Eisenhower Tunnel a necessity. From behind him, he could hear Elwood’s entrenched hillside squad firing from the other flank. He knew they wouldn’t be firing close to 2nd squad, leaving the most threatening of enemies unhindered in their pursuit.
The screams of Stark’s 2nd squad sounded off as they were caught from behind. They had no clear path to safety, trucks and cars blocking them. A smoky haze filled the air clouding everyone’s vision. Visibility low, Kinnick found himself zigzagging and banging into cars as he followed close behind Hunter.
Hunter jumped the hood of a car, firing both left and then right as he ran. Kinnick started to lag behind. He dodged the open door of a GMC Yukon, his shoulder catching it painfully on the way by. When he looked back up, Hunter was gone. Smoke, infected, and fire took his place. Kinnick’s heart felt like it was going to explode in his chest.
Glancing to his left, and only a car away, an infected closed in on one of his men. Kinnick squeezed the trigger of his carbine. His first round exploded in its shoulder, causing its arm to flinch backwards and dangle like a Christmas stocking as it hung by only loose flesh and shredded ligaments. Kinnick rushed his next shot. His second round caught it in the collarbone, denting it inward. Following up his first two shots, his third hit its open mouth. The back of the infected’s skull blew out, causing the top half to dip in front, its mouth snapping closed.
“Hunter,” he called out. Black smoke sat low in the air blanketing rock, man, and concrete alike. Kinnick scanned left and right, peering through car windows and over car rooftops. He coughed and spit on the ground. “Where the fuck are you?” he yelled. Stinking, flaming flesh rounded a car. Kinnick instinctually point shot his M4. It was more muscle memory than actionable thought. The infected’s head popped as a round went into its temporal lobe. His mind discarded his action as reaction before the infected rolled forward into a pile of bones and skin on the concrete.
Finding himself holding his breath, he spit the smoky taste from his mouth. He wheezed as he ran for large jagged rocks on the hillside. His body was only beginning to realize how exhausted it already was. His feet hardly obeyed as he attempted to make it up the incline.
Slinging his M4 behind him, he clambered up on all fours, reaching for a rock and then another. His men fought for survival up the rocky pine-filled slope, slowly being pursued by infected.
“To the top,” he choked out. Infected were the only ones to hear him. Dozens followed his voice, struggling up the hill much as he had done. Kinnick leaned upright. He shuffled his feet using a rock as a stepping stone to propel himself farther up the hill. The only way to go was farther up the slopes.
Tall spire-like pine trees coated the hillside like a thick toupee leaping up before him. He clambered on up the slope, making for the trees, crawling part of the way on all fours like a dog. Sucking in wind, he peered over his shoulder. Infected were still on the hunt behind him.
Twisting back around, he fell onto his backside. His legs thanked him. His mind screamed danger. He jammed his palm down onto his Beretta M9 9mm pistol. He wrapped his fingers around it, feeling the coarseness of the grip. He p
ulled it free of its holster and fired into the oncoming pack.
Kinnick’s heart’s rhythm exploded in his chest. The tension coursing through his veins caused him to jerk the trigger too fast, causing most of his shots to go low left. Two infected dropped to the ground before his mag ran dry. He crawled upright and ran into a cluster of trees more closely pressed together.
His feet dug into the loose gravelly rock. The ground seemed to chew up his steps, sucking him down into the earth. The infected walked as far as they could; some fell and clawed the earth trying to reach him. He scrambled around a tree and put his back against its solid coarse trunk. His heavy breathing rubbed the bark as he caught his breath. He could hear the infected’s hasty pursuit. He looked to his left, and a man in camouflage hit the ground with a grunt.
“Sir, help.” The soldier crawled toward Kinnick’s spot. Kinnick recognized the short corporal, named Davis, from Stark’s 2nd squad. Shadowy forms closed in on the soldier from behind.
“Behind you,” Kinnick yelled. He raised his sidearm, slipping over the loose sloped ground for the soldier. Click. Click. Kinnick’s finger worked the trigger but nothing happened. In his panic, he had forgotten the reload. Almost numb fingers reached for a new magazine on his hip. Davis rolled over onto his back and sprayed bullets into the infected, but they were too close and he was aiming instinctively center mass. They fell upon Davis before Kinnick could get his magazine seated and the gun operational.
Davis screamed as their teeth tore off his nose and part of his cheek. Kinnick stopped and steadied himself, shooting three rounds. Two for the infected, one for their newest indoctrinated infected. Moans flowed up the alpine mountainside and hundreds of forms walked through the trees.
The End Time Saga Box Set [Books 1-3] Page 102
