A World on Fire: Secret Apocalypse Book 6 (Secret Apocalypse Series)

by James Harden

  “No,” I say.

  She gives me a weird look. “Why are you wearing it?”

  “Long story,” I say, staring at the watch. Remembering the pinching sensation of being shot with a dart gun, of having my bloodstream filled with a time release nana-swarm. I didn’t realize the watch was broken.

  Kenji steps forward. “Here, take my watch. Still works.”

  “No. It’s fine. I’m good. I’ll be back before you know it.”

  “Just stay close to me,” Sarah says, bringing me back to reality, back to the present situation. “Really close. I’ll keep an eye on your oxygen levels, your air filter. I’ll sync my watch.”

  I nod my head. Not fully understanding what she was saying.

  Because what she is saying is, my air filters are nearly gone. Once they run out, they’ll cut off the air flow. And if I don’t switch them over, I will suffocate.

  Sarah will keep an eye on this for me.

  My life is in her hands.

  I don’t know how I feel about this. But I don’t have a choice.

  It is time to go.

  I take a few deep breaths, and I convince myself that I am not suffering from dehydration and malnutrition and the hangover effects of the sedatives.

  I am not hung over. I am ready.

  I turn to the others. I take a page out of Sarah’s book and I don’t say anything, or do anything. I keep my cool. I keep my distance.

  My heart races. My hands sweat. I nod my head and we go out the door, back into the long maintenance hall way.

  Chapter 18

  I follow Sarah. I copy her movements. The way she walks. The way she breathes. We haven’t put our masks on yet, but I am holding mine tight. I am ready.

  The maintenance hallway runs alongside the subway tunnel. It is actually wide enough so that a golf cart or a small car could fit through.

  We pass a door that reads:

  Subway Station - Commercial Sector 1.

  She points to the sign. It has a red X on it. It is written in permanent ink.

  She puts her finger up to her lips. She doesn’t tell me why, she doesn’t need to. I know exactly what is on the other side.

  This station is overrun with infected.

  We creep on by. Walking without making a sound, controlling our breathing.

  She places her weight on the balls of her feet, and carefully transfers the weight from one foot to the next. She makes no sound, moving like a ghost. I try my best to copy her. I try my best to not make a sound.

  About fifteen minutes later we come to the next door.

  Commercial Sector 2.

  This sign has a red tick next to it.

  Sarah turns to me. “Commercial Sector 2 is the only station on this side of the residential area that is not completely overrun.”

  “How many stations are there?” I ask, trying to mimic the level of her voice.

  “Ten,” she answers.

  “Ten? How big is this place?”

  “It’s big. Very big. The commercial sector is divided up into three parts. Same with the housing sector.”

  She opens the door slightly, turning the handle super slowly. She opens it a crack. She peeks out.

  She stays calm. She turns her head to the side. And we both listen for the familiar sound of the infected. But there are none of those god-awful noises. There is nothing at all.

  She opens the door wider and we step into the second commercial subway station. She holds the door as I step through. Initially I think she is doing this to be polite, but she’s not. She’s doing it because she doesn’t trust me to close the door.

  Once I am through, she closes the door.

  Slowly.

  Quietly.

  Like a ghost.

  “So when do we need to put our gas masks on?” I ask.

  Sarah explains to me which sections are contaminated, which as it turns out, is basically almost all of them.

  Only a few areas are safe.

  In the residential area, Sector A is contaminated. And so is sector B.

  Sector C is the only one that is safe. She explains to me that Sector C was home to the higher ups. “Don’t know if that had anything to do with it. Maybe they were better prepared. Maybe they had better containment and quarantine procedures. I’m not sure. But I do know this, Sector C is where I found all these gas masks and air filters.”

  “So what about the Commercial District,” I ask.

  “The Commercial District is also divided up into three parts. You’ve got the Food and Dining area. The Entertainment and Sports area. And the Shopping area. The mall.”

  I can’t get over the size and sophistication of this underground facility. It was basically an underground, self-contained, self-sustaining city.

  ‘Was’, being the operative word.

  “Beyond these sections are the storage warehouses,” Sarah continues. “The warehouses are…”

  She trails off.

  “I know what happened here,” I say. “I know they herded all the people inside. Locked them up. I know they starved them. I know they turned the warehouses into killing fields.”

  She nods, thankful that she didn’t have to describe the scene for me. She is quiet for a few moments. If I had to guess, I’d say she was maybe trying to forget all about it.

  “The only safe area in the commercial area is the Shopping district,” she continues. “And it’s not really all that safe.”

  We walk through the empty subway station. We arrive at a set of stairs that lead up to the shopping mall.

  “Food and Dining is contaminated with the airborne strain,” she says. “So is the Entertainment area. This is the reason a lot of the survivors starved to death and died of thirst. They sealed off the warehouses, and the food district was toxic. So no one could get to the food. Those who tried, turned. They became infected. No bite. No nothing. They just turned. This is how we knew the Oz virus had gone airborne.”

  She leads me up the stairs, to the shopping mall. We crouch down and survey the area, looking for any signs of the infected.

  “This place is huge,” I say. “It has everything.”

  “Yeah. It really does. Blew my mind when I first saw it. When you’re down here, you forget that you’re underground. You forget that you’re inside.”

  She points to the ceiling, high above, to the faint emergency lights. These lights are very dim. They run along the ground and the ceiling. These lights act like a beacon, a pathway to follow. I’m assuming these were designed to guide people to safe zones in case of emergencies or power outages. Or zombie apocalypses.

  I wonder how many people followed these lights to their deaths.

  “See the ceiling?” Sarah asks. “They painted the ceiling a sky blue. They even painted clouds on. And when it’s lit up, the ceiling looks like the sky. It looks so damn real. This place has everything. All you could ever want. Well, it did. Have you ever been to Vegas?”

  “Me? No. Never.”

  “I have. I went a couple of years ago with my family. We went to Disneyland and then to Las Vegas. I was fourteen, my sister was twelve. So we were too young to really enjoy ourselves. I tried some vodka from the minibar one night. I’ve never been so sick in my life. But anyway, we spent most of our time shopping. Most of the bigger casinos have these massive indoor shopping centers. And they have everything you could ever want. I guess they have them so people don’t ever have to leave the casino, they don’t ever have to go outside. On the one hand it’s amazing. But I guess it’s also kind of sick and demented.”

  Now that we have moved away from the others, now that we are on our own, Sarah has started opening up to me. She’s talking to me like she’s my friend. Like we’ve know each other for years.

  We continue crouching at the top of the stairs. We were sort of out in the open. I am looking up and down the open space of the mall, looking up at the ceiling. I couldn’t really see the painted on sky, the fake sky. It is too dark.

  Suddenly moveme
nt catches my eye.

  Sarah sees it before I do.

  An infected man stumbles aimlessly down the center of the mall.

  Sarah moves us back into the stairway of the subway station.

  We kneel down, out of sight.

  “I thought you said this area was safe?” I ask.

  “Safe, as in no airborne strain,” she explains.

  “So there’s still infected people in here?”

  She nods. “A lot.”

  “How many?”

  “Thousands.”

  “Where are they all?”

  “They move in groups. In really large crowds. At the moment, they’re up the other end of the mall.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “Because I put them there.”

  “You put them there? What does that mean?”

  “They follow noise. I made noise, up the other end of the mall. As a distraction.”

  I nod my head. “Smart.”

  “But I don’t know what this guy is doing.”

  We move up a few steps and take a peek. The infected man is looking right at us. It knows we are there.

  It has locked on to us. And as soon as it sees us, it charges.

  I grab Sarah. “We have to go. Come on.”

  She brushes me off. “No. Let go of me. Stay down.”

  She takes the knife out of her belt. And a baton, a telescopic, collapsible black baton. She flicks it out, so that it extends to a length of about three feet.

  She waits. She waits patiently. She makes sure I stay down. She pushes me against the wall of the stairwell.

  I can’t believe she is doing this.

  I can’t believe I am allowing her to do this. I am unarmed. I am defenseless. I am helpless.

  I hear the running footsteps of the infected man.

  It is running fast. Inhumanely fast.

  Sarah closes her eyes. Listening, picturing in her mind’s eye what she can’t physically see.

  The infected man. His speed. His size. His weight. The distance to us…

  She opens her eyes.

  I press myself against the wall, wishing that I could disappear into the wall, wishing I could melt into the wall.

  Sarah stands up, launching herself up from her crouching position.

  The infected man has arrived. He… it… is moving fast.

  Sarah trips its legs with the baton, and the thing, the infected man goes flying down the stairs.

  As it falls down the concrete stairway, we hear bones crack.

  A lot of bones.

  Sarah wastes exactly no time.

  Not one second.

  She jumps down the stairs after the infected man and drives her knife into the back of its skull before it has a chance to get to its broken feet, before it can stand on its broken legs.

  She twists the knife and slides it out and wipes the blade on the infected man’s clothes. She then drags the body out of the way.

  “Come on,” she whispers. “We have to hurry. There will be more soon.”

  She doesn’t have to tell me twice.

  Chapter 19

  We move quickly and quietly into the mall. Sarah scans ahead, looking for more infected. There are none in the immediate area. But the mall is not straight. So we can’t see around the bend. Sarah tells me it forms a kind of ‘S’ shape.

  “So where to now?” I ask.

  “Sporting goods,” she answers. “I’ve got a stack of supplies there. It’s just up ahead.”

  She points.

  I see it.

  The store is simply called ‘Sporting Goods’.

  No points for imagination.

  We crouch down behind a water feature. It is full of water, but the fountain has been deactivated. And as a result the water has turned green.

  “The store looks clear,” Sarah says.

  It’s a large store. There is a row of mannequins in the front window. They are displaying everything from gym wear, to tennis outfits.

  “Can you see the mannequins?” she asks.

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ve hooked them up to ropes and pulleys. So when you pull on the rope, the mannequins start moving, they bang up against the glass.”

  “What the hell for?”

  “To distract the infected when I need to.”

  “Does it work?”

  “Yeah, for a little while. It gets their attention all right. Weird thing is, they actually figure it out pretty quick. Once the mannequins stop moving. It’s almost like they know that they’re just dummies. That there’s no life.”

  I’m starting to realize Sarah has more than a few tricks up her sleeve. She is smart and cunning.

  We move ahead, but to my surprise, we move past the store. We aim for the fire escape door that leads into the maintenance passageway. Sarah tells me that the maintenance passageway runs behind all the stores. It’s a good way to move around the mall without having to move around in the open.

  “And from here,” she says. “We can enter the store from the rear, like a manager opening up for business in the morning.”

  “Does the maintenance passageway run right around the mall?” I ask.

  “Yeah. We can actually enter this maintenance hallway near the subway station.”

  “Why don’t we? Seems like it would be safer.”

  “It sort of is. But it’s not. The main drawback is you can’t see where the infected are. You could come out, you could open the door right in the middle of the horde. And then you’re screwed. It’s better to move through the open so I know where the infected are. You have to find them before they find you.”

  This is good advice. And again, survival came down to risk and reward.

  Risk moving around in the open. Or risk being blind.

  What was better? What was worse?

  “So the front entrance to the sporting goods store is locked?” I ask.

  “Yeah. Locked and barricaded. Gotta keep the infected out.”

  We’re standing at the back of the store. And I can’t believe how big it is. There’s row after row of equipment for every sport imaginable.

  Sarah tells me that in the entertainment area they have a whole range of sporting facilities. Tennis courts. Basketball courts. Football fields. Running tracks. Swimming pools. Everything.

  We move into the office of the store. In a locker we find Sarah’s stash of supplies.

  More food.

  More water.

  Four gas masks.

  A stack of air filters.

  She picks up two gas masks and puts them in her backpack. She leaves two behind. “I want to leave two here. Just in case.”

  She picks up another backpack that was lying next to the locker. “Here, put this on.”

  I sling the backpack over my shoulders. Sarah puts two cans of baked beans and two bottles of water in it. And at least four air filters.

  “OK,” she says. “Now for the hard part.”

  “The hard part?”

  “Yeah. We’re going into the entertainment district. Into the contaminated areas, into the airborne strain.”

  Chapter 20

  We now had two extra gas masks. We could’ve had all four that we needed, but Sarah wanted to leave two in the sporting goods store as an emergency backup.

  Either way, we needed two more.

  To get these two extra gas masks, we needed to head into the entertainment area of the commercial district.

  Into the contaminated area.

  Into the toxic, poisonous air.

  “You can kind of see it,” Sarah says. “We didn’t realize at first. Because it’s so dark in here with only the emergency lighting. And we had no idea what we were looking at. But if you look hard enough you can see it. It hangs around, like a weird mist or fog. It’s not like a normal airborne virus which needs to be coughed or sneezed into the air. Once this thing got in the air, once it was released into the air, it stayed in the air.”

  “Released?” I ask. “Do you think
it was sprayed into the air? Like a poison, or a pesticide?”

  “Yeah,” Sarah says. “I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what happened.”

  For a second I think, who in their right mind would do such a thing? But I already know the answer to this question. The man in the gas mask. Somehow he had developed an airborne strain. And then somehow he had released it into the air.

  Another biological weapon of mass destruction.

  I wonder if he got a chance to release it over any major cities.

  He probably did.

  I suddenly feel sick. I suddenly feel helpless.

  “Does it get on your skin?” I ask. “Does it get on your clothes?”

  “No. Well, it does. But it’s only deadly if you breathe it in, and only if it’s concentrated enough. And once you leave the area, it loses its potency. Don’t know how. Don’t know why.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Me neither. The best I can tell you, is that fresh air kills it. But there is no fresh air down here. Not anymore. Especially in these areas. It’s stagnate. The air is thick and still. Perfect breeding grounds for an airborne virus. An airborne toxin.”

  We both put our gas masks on. Sarah syncs her watch.

  A five minute countdown.

  We will need to move quickly.

  But before we go anywhere, Sarah checks my mask. She makes sure it’s attached and fitted properly.

  She gives me a thumbs up and then waves me forward.

  “It’s important to have some hidden in these areas,” she says quietly. “Because this is the exact place you don’t want to run out of fresh air filters.”

  Sarah is so calm. She is completely, totally, absolutely fine with all of this. She is surrounded by the infected. She is surrounded by killing fields and poisonous, toxic air. And she is fine.

  She has adapted.

  And I am blown away.

  We are about to make our way back into the maintenance corridor. But Sarah looks out the front of the sporting goods store, through the window, past the mannequins. We see a couple of infected people stumble by. And then more. And more. Pretty soon an entire horde walks on by. A massive crowd.

  Sarah grabs me and pulls me to the back of the store. We crouch down.