Dead Storm: The Global Zombie Apocalypse

by Nicholas Ryan

  Hazelwood sprang to his feet and ran to alert the rest of the squad. Hilderbrandt dashed to the southern corner where the remaining five men of 2nd squad were all firing. The infected had pushed within fifty yards of the guns, still lurching forward relentlessly despite the rising drifts of shattered broken bodies that cluttered the narrow street. Hilderbrandt watched on in wide-eyed disbelief as a woman in the crowd was struck by a flurry of machinegun fire that tore open her chest. The woman staggered backwards and then – unbelievingly – righted herself and shuddered like a dog shaking off rain. She snarled at the soldiers and her eyes were wild and insane.

  “We’re falling back!” the big sergeant knelt beside the men at the guns and shouted over the noise.

  “Hooah!” Private Marco Gonzalez grunted. He stopped firing and a second later the rest of the guns fell silent. Hilderbrandt repeated the order to the rest of the squad. Their faces were grimy, powdered with dust and ash.

  Without the relentless clatter of automatic fire, the street seemed ominously quiet. The infected shouted wild frenzied growls of savage triumph. They broke into a furious charge.

  “Stay together!” Sergeant Hilderbrandt gathered the men about him. “If anyone goes down, keep running. Do not render aid. It doesn’t matter what you hear or what you see. Don’t look back. Don’t stop for anything. Don’t stop to fire, just run your fuckin’ legs off until we get to the Mexican restaurant across the intersection. That’s where we’re gonna make our stand.”

  “Hooah!” the soldiers around the sergeant responded. Their eyes were wild and showed signs of panic. The infected tide surged forward, closing at a run. Hilderbrandt led the men, sprinting across the road, their boots pounding, their weapons held high and ready. As he ran, the big sergeant’s eyes were on the restaurant’s windows and rooftop. He was panting. He heard the breath sawing in the throats of the men around him. They sprinted past the retreating Bradley, their gear rattling and bouncing. The sergeant saw private Hazelwood in the doorway, covering their retreat. He was firing into the fringes of the closing horde. Hilderbrandt stopped outside the Mexican restaurant’s front door and opened fire until the rest of the squad filed past him into the building. He smacked each man on the helmet as they ducked into the darkened shadows, counting them off.

  “Keep covering!” Hilderbrandt ordered Hazelwood. The intersection was unobstructed. The young private opened fire on the closest infected ghouls, the blood pounding in his ears and his heart beating like a drum with pure exhilaration.

  Hilderbrandt went storming through the restaurant like a bull in a china shop, kicking aside tables and chairs. “Upstairs! Upstairs!” he bellowed. “We’ll defend the first floor.”

  “There ain’t no fuckin’ stairs, Sarge,” Danno Drake said. He was normally a quiet, reserved man with a thick Bronx accent. Now his voice was ragged with panic.

  “You’re fuckin’ shittin’ me!”

  “No, Sarge.”

  “Jesus!” Hilderbrandt looked around wildly. How could a two-story restaurant not have a fucking staircase? “Are you fuckin’ certain?”

  “We’ve already turned the place upside down.” Panic turned to cold fear. They were trapped. Through the windows they could see the infected were swarming towards the intersection and spilling into the side streets with a sound like a river in flash-flood.

  Hilderbrandt snarled his frustration. The air filled with a rank, putrid stench. It was the unmistakable taint of death.

  “Sarge!” Hazelwood shouted through the front door of the restaurant. “Sarge, come quick!”

  Hilderbrandt stalked to the doorway. The young private was standing at the corner of the building, firing at the undead with his body propped against the cement-rendered wall. Hilderbrandt’s face was agitated.

  “What?”

  “There’s a staircase in the alley behind me. It’s like a fuckin’ fire escape. It leads up to the first floor and the rooftop.”

  Hilderbrandt’s heart thumped in his chest. His body dripped wet with sweat. His mouth fell open.

  “You sure, Hazelwood?”

  “Fuckin’ hooah, sergeant.”

  Hilderbrandt leaned back inside the door and raised his voice to a frantic shout. “Everybody outside. Now! Now! Now! There’s a staircase in the alley. Get your asses up on the roof.”

  FLIGHT 553

  INCHEON to LOS ANGELES

  OVER THE NORTH PACIFIC OCEAN

  Jascinda Poole woke up under the tangle of blankets, her senses reeling, her face on fire from fever. She could feel sweat breaking out in beads across her brow and trickle down the alabaster of her bloodless cheeks. Her whole body gripped in a spasm of shivering. Her eyes came open, vision blurred and unfocussed. She groaned, but the voice didn’t seem her own. Her throat was raw, and there was an odd coppery tang in the back of her throat. She gagged, felt the sudden urge to retch but fought it down. The man in the seat next to her looked up from his Kindle and glanced at her. He smiled briefly, politely.

  “How are you feeling?” he was a low-level attaché from the Seoul Embassy, dressed in an expensive grey suit. Jascinda clawed frantically at the lap sash of her seatbelt and lurched to her feet. Nausea gripped her. She clutched at the headrest of the seat in front of her and doubled over. A cramp like a clenching fist knotted in the pit of her guts so that she cried out in fierce pain.

  The man beside her reached a concerned hand out to lend assistance. Jascinda reeled away from the man’s grasp and staggered into the narrow aisle. Her jaw clenched. She bit down on her lip. Blood filled her mouth. For a single heartbeat nothing else happened… and then her head seemed to turn… and keep on turning, until the muscles down her spine strained and the veins in her neck bulged obscenely.

  Suddenly Jascinda’s body began to arch, her back bending like a drawn bow. Bones cracked and her face began to distort. A thumping vein at her temple pulsed, and her nostrils began to stream mucus. It choked in her throat and drooled from her nose until long silver strands dripped from her chin. She screamed at the top of her voice, the sound gurgling from between her shredded lips.

  A spasm threw her forward against a seat across the aisle. She swayed for a dreadful moment of vertigo and then a mouthful of blood and vomit heaved from her gasping, choking mouth. It spattered two of the passengers. People began to shout and cringe away, mortified and aghast. Jascinda looked about her in a wide-eyed frenzy of terror.

  “What’s happening to me?” she cried out. Her voice didn’t sound her own. She retched again, and this time there was more blood. Her bladder voided in a pungent liquid spray down her legs and her eyes grew impossibly wide, turning bloodshot.

  Jascinda fell to the floor in a wretched stinking puddle of her own vomit. Her back arched like a bridge, and the crowd of passengers heard her bones crack with a sound like snapping twigs. Her bowels voided in a hot reeking mess. Jascinda’s face stretched and swelled, contorting as the cords in her throat bulged from the skin like thick ropes. She drew one final breath, held it for long seconds while her hand reached out in a final desperate plea for help, or maybe salvation.

  Then she slumped, dead. The air wheezed from her lungs, and she lay perfectly still.

  The crowd gasped in shock, the sound of their breathless horror undulating as they watched on, drawn by macabre fascination. One of the flight attendants came running down the aisle from the galley. She went down onto one knee and reached tentatively towards the dead girl’s body.

  “Sue!” she screamed to another approaching flight attendant. “Call the cockpit.”

  The flight attendant felt under the young woman’s jaw for a pulse and found nothing. Her fingers were slippery with the dead girl’s mucus and vomit. Her face scrunched up into a mask of putrid revulsion. She wiped her hand on the carpet flooring and looked over her shoulder into the faces of the other passengers.

  “Please stay in your seats!” she shouted. “Everyone fasten your seatbelts and remain seated. Do not stand up.”

  The
people turned away reluctantly, still fixed by gruesome fascination. Then a woman in the opposite row of seats screamed a shrill cry of utter horror. The flight attendant narrowed her eyes, searching for the sound. She saw a young woman clutching a baby. The passenger was pointing a trembling finger back at her, and her eyes were enormous.

  The flight attendant didn’t see the dead body of Jascinda Poole sit upright. She didn’t feel the clutch of the woman’s clawed hand around her throat. By the time the corpse had come up onto her knees and sunk her teeth into the flight attendant’s shoulder, the passengers in the aircraft were scrambling out of their seats, fleeing in screaming panic down the aisle towards first class.

  The flight attendant fell onto her back, dead, and the thing that had been Jascinda Poole crouched over the corpse almost protectively. Loathsome yellow eyes rolled demented within the sockets of the skull. It looked around the aircraft and saw a hundred screaming people fleeing from it in a wild panicked crush. Food trays were overturned as the terrified press of bodies fled.

  The creature that had been Jascinda Poole went hunting for fresh blood.

  It was the Apocalypse at 39,000 feet…

  ITAEWON DISTRICT

  SEOUL

  SOUTH KOREA

  Sergeant Hilderbrandt and Private Wayne Hazelwood stood shoulder-to-shoulder at the foot of the steel staircase and fired into the surging crowd of undead as the rest of the squad swarmed up the steps to the rooftop of the Mexican restaurant. The infected were so close the air in the alley became suffocating with the putrid stench of decay. Hazelwood shot three ghouls at point-blank range. He screamed as he fired, venting his fear and terror as a reckless killing rage, his face wrenched into a macabre mask and his eyes filled with frenzy. Hilderbrandt shot his M4 from the hip, not bothering to aim, but simply trying to hold back the surging tide of bodies with a hail of chattering fire until the rest of the squad reached the safety of the rooftop.

  At the last possible second, Hilderbrandt grabbed Hazelwood by the shoulder and shoved the private down the dark alley. Hilderbrandt held his ground for two heartbeats. Over the sounds of the snarling, shrieking horde he could hear the men urging Hazelwood to run faster and calling out in his direction. He started to back away from the undead, taking one measured step at a time, still firing at the hideous faces pressed close around him, until he became cloaked in the shadows of the alley.

  Hilderbrandt turned and ran.

  As if let off a leash, the undead surged; a solid growling wall of fury. They clawed at the fleeing figure and broke into maddened pursuit.

  “Fuckin’ run!”

  “Faster, sergeant! They’re right behind you!”

  Hilderbrandt kept his eyes focused on the first three steps of the staircase. On the first level landing he could see one of the guys with a SAW. Hilderbrandt dodged close to the wall, hurdled a cardboard box full of stinking rubbish, and landed on the ground heavily. The men on the rooftop saw him stagger.

  “Move your ass!”

  “Dude! Keep goin’!”

  The SAW on the first level landing suddenly erupted. Hilderbrandt felt the hot air of flailing bullets as they zinged past his face. From above him, men were leaning over the waist high parapet that surrounded the rooftop, firing down into the crush of undead bodies. Hilderbrandt heard the loud clap of an explosion and felt the ground beneath his boots rumble as one of the men hurled a frag grenade into the melee.

  Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!

  Hilderbrandt reached the steel stairwell and leaped. He landed on the third step and kept climbing. He was drenched in sweat, his thighs trembling underneath him. He reached for the wrought-iron railing and heaved himself up two more steps with the superhuman strength of a body pumped to the brim by adrenaline and fear. The SAW ripped the night apart, throwing down a solid curtain of fire that piled a dozen undead bodies in the alley.

  “Keep fuckin’ firing!” Hilderbrandt shouted as he stumbled up the steps.

  He reached the rooftop and bent double, sagging at the knees and sucking in huge gulps of oxygen. He could feel his body trembling; his hands shook, and every breath sawed painfully across his throat. Hazelwood lay flat on his back, his chest heaving like he had just run a marathon.

  Hilderbrandt reeled against the parapet for support and then spun himself around, his eyes wide and appalled. From the rooftop he could see over the surrounding streets. All of Itaewon District seemed ablaze. Two high-rise buildings at the end of the block were billowing black smoke from upper-floor windows while the surrounding streets were choked by a seething tide of undead ghouls, pressed together as they swept like a tsunami flood through the darkened lanes and alleys. The rooftops on the opposite side of the intersection were packed with huddled pale-faced survivors, clinging together in wretched fear.

  Hilderbrandt knew his squad was doomed.

  Christ! The infected are all around us. There’s no way off this roof without support or a chopper. We can’t hold them off the stairwell forever. Sooner or later we’re going to run dry of ammo…

  His eyes swept the faces of the men gathered around him. They were stricken and wild-eyed with fear. Hilderbrandt got angry.

  “Fuckin’ listen to me!” he snarled, fixing each man with a ferocious, defiant glare until they seemed to calm. “This is it, right here. This is it, man. It’s where we make our fucking stand. This is our little Alamo, okay? We’re not gonna cry about the shitty situation, and we’re not gonna die like fuckin’ sheep. Were’ Army, yeah! We’re the baddest god-damned mothers, and we’re gonna prove it.”

  “Hooah!”

  “Hooah, god-dammit!” Hilderbrandt roared back. “Now empty your pouches. I want all the SAW ammo at the top of the stairs. Line the mags up so they’re easy to get to. Gonzalez, you’re here, man. You stay right between the two SAW’s. I want ‘em both at the top of these steps and firing down into the fuckers to keep them clear. Your job is to service both weapons and keep em’ going. Okay?”

  “Hooah, Sarge.”

  “And you – Hazelwood. Get off your back. Rest time is over, boy. This ain’t the fuckin’ Air Force. I want you and Hill to go around gathering everyone’s frag grenades. We’re going to give these fuckers a party like they ain’t ever seen before.”

  With bluster and bravado the big brawny Sergeant marshaled his men around the perimeter of the parapet and told them to open fire while he walked behind them barking orders.

  “Drake, this is it, dude! This is the fight you always wanted. You’re knee deep in the shit now. We all are. So use that fear, man. This is the fight of your life.”

  “Hooah, Sarge!”

  “Hazelwood! Throw those fucking frags, man! Spread some lethal death down amongst those ugly fuckers!”

  In the midst of the firefight, Hilderbrandt had the sudden startling realization that all these young men were just minutes away from death. The thought made him unaccountably sad, and then fiercely proud. They were soldiers, fighting like men. It was a fitting way to check out.

  Better to die on your feet than live on your knees.

  There was a sudden brief lull in the deafening noise as men replaced empty mags. The last of the frag grenades had been thrown. The torn and shredded bodies of the undead were piled waist deep around the stairwell.

  Hilderbrandt keyed the mike on his radio. “Black Heart. Black Heart. This is Razor Two. How do you copy? Over.”

  The radio hissed with flat static.

  “Black Heart. Black Heart. This is Razor Two. How do you copy? Over.”

  The silence was ominous. Hilderbrandt turned in a slow circle of the rooftop. The night was filled with the rumble of far away explosions, sounding like distant thunder. Flashes of bright orange flame split the night and then faded just as quickly. The sounds of alarms and wailing sirens seemed to be moving away from where they were trapped – as if the fight had swept past and left them stranded.

  Out of desperation, Hilderbrandt made one last call for help.

  “Any station
this net. Need emergency extraction. Repeat any station this net. Bravo Two One requests emergency extraction from rooftop of restaurant at TRP 7.”

  He listened, tense and despairing.

  The crackling silence sounded their death knell.

  “No one’s coming for us, are they, Sarge?” Hazelwood heard the harsh hiss of empty radio static and understood what it meant.

  Hilderbrandt scowled. “No,” he said, and then snarled. “So we’re just going to have to kill every one of these fuckers and then march ourselves out of here.”

  A desperate cry from the top of the stairs signaled the beginning of the end.

  “Sarge! The SAWs are almost out of ammo.”

  The two specialists on the weapons threw the useless machine guns down into the crowd of undead and retreated to the rooftop. Some of the squad still had mags for their M4’s. The men shrank back from the parapets and formed a tight knot back-to-back in the center of the roof. Hilderbrandt drew his sidearm.

  The undead came charging up the steps. They came in a solid phalanx, three wide, snarling and insane with their mindless rage and spilled across the rooftop.

  “Fire!” Hilderbrandt aimed at the closest ghoul and shot it clean between the eyes. It had been a woman, her face a bloody slash, her hair tangled and matted with gore. The Sergeant’s bullet snapped the ghoul’s head back and body-slammed it down on its back like a punch from an invisible fist. “Now kill them!”

  The soldiers broke apart and charged. Men grunted and kicked out. They swung their weapons like axes. Hilderbrandt could smell their sweat, their fear. He could smell the rancid stench of the rotting corpses that pressed close about him. He stepped back two paces to give himself space and shot an infected man in the mouth. The back of the ghoul’s head exploded in a thick gout of bone and grey pulp. Hilderbrandt screamed a war cry of defiance and then heard one of his men shout out in dreadful agony. He saw Drake buckle to his knees clutching at a gaping wound in his guts. Incensed by the smell of fresh blood, a dozen of the infected overwhelmed the wounded man. Drake went down to the ground screaming and thrashing his feet. Another soldier ducked under the charging attack of a ghoul and when he came upright again the man pivoted and swung his M4 like an axe that cracked the back of the rotting beast’s skull open like a ripe piece of fruit.