by R. J. Spears
“Why the hell did the soldiers send us on this shitty mission?” Maggie asked in her southern twang.
“Maybe it’s because the roof is about to collapse on us and the floor is about to buckle underneath,” Russell said while carefully stepping over a charred piece of furniture.
“Maybe it’s because we’re expendable,” Maggie said.
They were in the front building of the Manor complex. It had been intended to be a stately entrance into a posh country retirement home for the more affluent. The place had never opened due to the zombie apocalypse, but had served as a safe haven for their small group of survivors after the world turned upside down and the dead started walking around and eating people.
The poshness and stately elegance was all gone, burnt out by the fire that had ravaged the place as result of an all-out firefight between the people of the Manor and the so-named Lord of the Dead. He has sent his undead army at them, and there had been human confederates, too. The dead had the numbers, coming in wave and after wave. The living had the weapons, rocking the front building again and again with RPGs and mortars. The damage was devastating, both in terms of the structure and people.
Russell and Maggie had been given the unenviable task of finding any salvageable items and bringing them back for the soldiers to determine if they were useful or not. It wasn’t the first mission they have been drafted into. Truth be told, they took the assignment to see if there were any weak points in the soldier’s perimeter. They had tested the boundaries several times and found some weak points, but nothing ironclad enough to risk your life over.
“There’s nothing but shit back here,” Maggie said as she poked her toe at something black and charred.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, you’ve said that twenty times already,” Russell replied. “This is a crap job. I know it, but it’s probably do it or get shot.”
Maggie was quiet for a moment, but then said, “You think they’d really shoot us if we didn’t do it?”
It was Russell’s turn to be contemplative. “No, probably not, but that Colonel seems off-balanced,” he said as he leaned under a large piece of cracked and burned hanging drywall.
Maggie stopped and studied something on the ground, reached down and picked it up. It looked like the tip of a spear, but it was blackened and bent on the end. A broken piece of wood protruded out its back end.
“That looks like the one of Brandon’s pikes,” Russell said.
“A what?”
“A pike. It’s like a spear. Brandon used them to fight the zombies.”
“Like hand-to-hand?”
“Yeah. He did it.” Russell had seen Brandon and Joel face off a small herd of zombies with pikes. It had been an amazing sight, but he could understand how crazy it must sound. He also saw Brandon die at the hands of the attackers and it still haunted his dreams just like the thousand other atrocities that had befallen him since the world fell to the dead.
“And you’re saying that that Colonel is crazy,” she replied. “What do I do with this?” She held up the pike’s point.
Russell looked over his shoulder back from the way they had come and considered what to say. Maggie had come into their midst after being a part of the Lord of the Dead’s army, fighting against the people in the Manor. She had explained that she had no choice and that the Lord of the Dead had threatened to kill her with the electronic shock collar he forced his thralls to wear. If she and his other human allies didn’t comply, he would zap them. That she was on the side that tried to kill them was hard to overcome and more than a few of the survivors didn’t trust her. Russell had his doubts.
Still, instead of breaking and running when she and Russell were surrounded by the undead, she had stayed with him, using her electronic control to keep the zombies at bay. She also came back to save him in their chaotic run back to the safety of the Manor. To him, she seemed to have sided with the people of the Manor. It was hard to know where her allegiances went and he didn’t doubt that she was a lifetime opportunist, but he got a sense he could trust her. At least a little.
“I’m sure they’ll inspect us when we come back through, but hold onto it for now. Maybe we can hide it someplace before we get out.” He hoped that this didn’t come back to bite him.
She took a moment to find a way to tuck the pike point into the waistband of her jeans without poking a hole in her abdomen and finally got it in.
They pushed forward, moving down a long corridor with the walls and ceiling blackened from smoke damage until they made it to an intersecting hallway. The ceiling to the left had collapsed completely and electrical wiring hung over the debris like tentacles. This forced them to the right and towards the front of the building.
Getting closer to the foyer was like a bad trip down memory lane for Russell. The memory of the recent battle echoed in his mind. He could see the approaching zombie horde again and felt the impacts of the RPGs against the front wall of the building. He smelled the stench of the undead and he heard the screams of people, his friends, dying. He paused in place, almost overwhelmed by it.
“What’s up, asshole?” Maggie asked, looking back at him. “We got work to do.”
Russell’s breaths came in shallow gasps and he felt his heart pounding in his chest.
Maggie finally realized that Russell wasn’t dogging it, he was paralyzed in place. She came back to him and put a hand on his shoulder.
“We can turn back and say we didn’t find anything,” she said.
He stared down the hallway past a drooping ceiling and flamed blackened walls and saw the front foyer. Large sections of the front wall were missing, a product of the missile attacks. The floor listed downward toward the front wall, looking as if it were the deck of a ship about to capsize.
“No,” he said, “this is where the big attack happened. You were there, but on the other side.”
“I didn’t want to be, but he had made us,” she said, looking down at her feet. “I would do…”
He put up a hand and cut her off. “I know. You’d do anything to take it back, but you can’t.” He paused, breathing hard. “Now, let’s go.” He started down the hall, moving quickly, and ignoring the fact that it looked like the walls could fall in on them at any time.
Maggie followed along, but stayed a safe distance behind him. Russell was forced to slow down as he reached a section of the wall that had collapsed. He grunted and swore at least once as he made his way over of a mound of broken splintered boards and soggy, cracked drywall. Maggie remained silent as she climbed over and they found themselves at the edge of the large entry foyer. Light streamed in through several large holes and a portion of the wall had collapsed in toward the building. Bricks and other debris littered the floor. The walls were charred in places and buckled from flames and explosions.
Through the holes in the wall, Russell and Maggie could see the bodies of zombies lying along the sloping driveway, stacked beside it like cord wood. In the distance, a jeep filled with soldiers cruised down the driveway, headed somewhere.
Running out one of the holes was always a possibility, but Kilgore had stationed snipers on the third floor with orders to shoot anyone, living or dead, outside the building. It was a minor miracle that they hadn’t shot Henry when he tried to escape. They only guessed that it was because he was still young that they didn’t shoot him.
“This floor is seriously fucked up,” Maggie said.
The right side of the floor tilted at a fifteen degree angle, sloping from the back of the room towards the front. A portion of the front wall had smashed into the floor, leaving a gaping incision looking like a black hole sucking in bricks and portions of the wall into the fissure.
They stood at a decision point; whether to enter the room or turn back.
“This looks too dangerous,” he said. “I don’t see anything worth salvaging and we know the snipers are placed in our old guard posts on the third floor, so there’s no going outside.”
“Do we?” she said. “In the b
urnt out third floor?”
“They said they’re there,” he replied.
“But do we know?” she asked as she stepped out onto the floor.
“Wait a second,” he said.
Cracking sounds came from beneath the floor. She stopped, tested her footing by shifting her feet around, and found it satisfactory enough to continue on, but moved forward cautiously.
Russell hung back, unsure as to whether to move forward with her or not. He watched Maggie move forward in a fearless way he envied. She went a few more feet, but then stopped and stood still as if lost in concentration.
From Russell’s perspective, she leaned down and cupped a hand over her ear, bending toward the front of the building.
“What is it?” he asked.
She put up a hand to tell him to be quiet as she listened more intently. After twenty seconds, she stood up and turned back to him. “You don’t hear that?”
“Hear what?” he asked.
“Deaders.”
“What?” You’re crazy.”
“No, I hear ‘em. Come on out here and take a listen.”
Sure the floor held her, but would it hold the two of them? She saw the indecision in his face and she said, “It’s safe enough. Trust me.”
That was the $64,000 question. Did he trust her?
“You’ll never know if you don’t come out,” she said.
“The soldiers killed them all,” he said.
“They killed the ones on the outside, but could some have made it inside?”
“The place burned. They’d have been roasted.”
“Then what am I hearing?”
“I don’t know. The wind?”
“I know the difference between deaders and the wind, dumbass.”
She started forward, heading toward the large hole in the floor.
“Wait!” he said.
“There’s only one way to find out,” she said.
Against his better judgment he stepped out onto the floor the way someone without skates stepped onto ice, feeling shaky and unsure. He felt the slightest of shudders beneath his feet and wanted to draw back, but he watched Maggie moving forward.
He inched out a little bit at a time and made it to just a few feet from where Maggie had stopped and listened. That’s when he heard them. The moans and groans of the dead.
“What the hell?” he said as the hairs went up on the back of his neck.
“You hear them, too,” Maggie said. “See I told ya’.”
Russell scanned outside the building through the broken wall and saw no zombies shambling along towards them. The field was clear, and nothing was coming down the driveway. Just because he had been trained to do it, he turned around and looked behind them, but saw nothing.
The moans had a muffled quality with a little bit of an echo and he closed his eyes and strained to try to figure out where the noise was coming from.
“Hey genius,” Maggie said, getting his attention, “I think they’re down there.” She pointed her finger at the floor.
“In the basement?” he asked.
“They sure as hell aren’t ghosts. Unless you believe in that sort of thing.”
“Well, how’d they get there?”
“Who the hell knows? They’re sure as shit there, mastermind.” She took a few more steps toward the hole in the floor, stepping over bricks and other debris.
“Stay back from that,” he said with some alarm.
“How are we going to know how many are down there?” She asked, still moving forward, but slowing down, carrying the shovel in her hands like someone on a high wire using it for balance. With each step she took, small shudders rippled through the floor back to Russell.
“Wait,” he pleaded.
“It’s going to be fine. You’re such a nervous Nellie,” she said and took two more steps.
That’s when the small shudders amplified to a full on rumble accompanied by a frightening cracking noise. The floor started to tip precariously where Russell stood and he stepped back quickly looking down at the floor. A fault line-like fissure appeared just in front of him, spreading out across the room.
Maggie whirled around, partially off-balance, and started back toward Russell, but the floor rippled under her feet, making traction challenging. She made two long, but shaky steps toward Russell when the floor cracked again and fell another ten degrees pitching Maggie onto her face.
Russell stumbled forward, leaving him at the fault line of the new crack, teetering back and forth, his arms splayed out from his sides, trying to maintain his balance.
Maggie clutched at the floor with her free hand, trying to stop her descent toward the hole just fifteen feet away, but gravity worked against her as she continued her slide. Feeling hopeless, she tried to dig her shovel into the floor and while it didn’t stop her, it did slow her down.
“Hey, hey, hey,” Maggie shouted in a panic.
“Stop!” Russell shouted.
“What the hell do you think I’m trying to do, you idiot?” she yelled back, drifting toward the hole and the moans of the dead.
Panic rose in Russell’s chest as he tried to think of some way to keep Maggie from ending up in the hole. He was terrified to take another step in her direction for fear the floor would break off completely and dump both of them in the basement with the zombies that they now knew were there.
“Do something, limp dick,” Maggie yelled at him slowly sliding toward the opening. She scrabbled with her hands and feet slowing her process some, but only staved off the inevitable -- she was going in the hole.
He looked down at the floor and inspected the crack at his feet. It looked solid beneath them, so he dug his toes into the crack and fell forward. He tried to fall gently, but the situation required he not be too delicate. As he fell, he shot out his shovel towards the sliding Maggie, extending it as far as he could.
“Grab my shovel!”
Maggie stretched her hand for the head of his shovel, but it was out of reach. He extended his arms as far as he could, but still it was still inches away.
“Use your shovel,” he said.
She shot her shovel upward, and her first jab clanged off the head of his shovel and she slid further down the canted floor. She calmed herself and manipulated the end of her shovel and angled it so that the head of her shovel locked with Russell’s. It stopped her slide, but it was tenuous safety, at best.
“Pull me up,” she said.
Russell’s toes strained to maintain a solid hold on the edge of the crack and his arm muscles stretched to hold Maggie in place. He feared that the floor beneath his body would just give up the ghost and dump them both in the basement. The fall would either killed them or the zombies would.
He pulled with all his might and Maggie dug her feet into the floor, pushing her body upward an inch at a time. Russell felt like his arms were about to pull loose from their sockets.
“Now, that’s more like it,” she said.
Just when she finished the sentence, another large cracking noise sounded and she felt the floor below her lower torso drop away.
“Shiiiiitttt!” she yelled. She looked downward and saw the eyes, gaping mouths, and clutching hands of a dozen zombies below her. Her legs dangled over the open hole, kicking in the air.
The zombies below intensified their guttural moans, seemingly excited at the possibility to get a meal delivered from above. For the majority of the crowd below, Maggie’s legs were out of reach, but one particularly tall zombie shambled up upon chunks of the floor and stretched its long bony fingers upward toward Maggie’s feet, brushing against the soles of her boots. It grabbed again and clutched onto to her ankle.
Maggie felt the pressure of its fingers as it tugged her downward and the panic started to rise inside her again.
She kicked at the zombie’s hands, and it worked for a moment, as she snapped the finger’s in its left hand as she heard them crack, but it latched onto her ankle with its other hand, pulling even harder this ti
me, the promise of juicy living flesh was just another hard tug away. The dead thing had a death grip on her ankle.
Her shovelhead nearly broke loose from Russell’s, but he made a fast adjustment. It was so close, with only millimeters of contact between the two shovelheads. Russell knew if he let it slip an inch, Maggie would be pulled below.
“Ahhhhhh,” she yelled as she felt herself being pulled down into the hole.
“Hold on,” Russell shouted as he pulled hard on his shovel.
The zombie gave a big yank, and Maggie grunted, knowing the damned thing would never let go. The other zombies below seemed to cheer their brother on with their grunts and groans as they too reached upwards, trying to get a piece of Maggie.
She let go of the shovel with one hand and reached into her waistband, grabbing the pike point in her hand.
“What are you doing?” Russell asked, breathing hard as he strained to keep Maggie aloft.
“Getting this dead fucker off me,” she said. She took a second to aim carefully, knowing this was a near-impossible task, but she pulled her free arm back and whipped it forward, tossing pike point at the zombie. It struck home, hitting the zombie right between the eyes. They might not feel pain, but they can be distracted, and that was just enough for it to let go of Maggie’s ankle.
Maggie drew up her legs and yelled up at Russell, “It’s now or never, Russell.”
He reached down into some reserves and felt his old injured shoulder protest, but he pulled as hard as he could. Maggie slid up the floor just far enough for her to shoot out her free hand to grab the crack. She let her shovel go and it clattered down the floor and into the hole. She hoped it hit the big zombie in the face, but knew her luck wasn’t that good.
Russell let go of his shovel, too and grabbed at Maggie’s waist. His hand caught onto her jeans, even though his fingers felt like they were going to fall off from the exertion of pulling her up. He gave a hard yank. She came upward a couple of feet and they both let out a collective breath.
“Grab hold of me and pull yourself up,” he said as his toes felt like they might disconnect from his foot at any moment.
