The Spread

by Damon Hunter

  Once out of the field with a little bit of distance between them and the horde, Dr. Talbot ordered them to stop.

  “What are we doing?” Novak asked.

  “Have the spotlights hit that area. I think we will have somewhat of a view of the bottom of the hill from here.”

  “Shouldn’t we be getting out of here? Losing one of the transports was bad enough. It’s time to get out of QZ before we screw this up and make all we’ve done and endured out here worthless.”

  “Fine, but first shine the lights.”

  “Confidence in you is already very low. We are one small incident away from total mutiny.”

  “Tell them we are looking for the gunner—what was his name?”

  “Clay.”

  “Yes, Clay. I think they will approve.”

  “They will. Is that what we are doing?”

  “No, he is not down there. Vance is, though. If he makes it out, I do not want him to escape.”

  Novak watched the flames begin to rise.

  “I don’t think he is coming out of that.”

  Dr. Talbot nodded as he watched the fire grow. “I suppose not.”

  “Even if he does, the area is still filled with the infected. Fire or no fire, no one is getting through that. Even Vance.”

  “I agree, but what will a few more minutes hurt?”

  “What will it help?”

  “I suppose you have a point.”

  Dr. Talbot still watched a few more minutes before he gave the order to move on, saying, “Set our destination for the nearest TMRT checkpoint on the right side of the Quarantine Zone. It is time to go home.”

  Through the monitors he watched the fire growing in front of and inside Vance’s hideout. Despite the rising flames, amblers were still trying to get inside, burning to death not deterring them at all from their quest to get at whoever was on the inside.

  As the fire faded from view, Dr. Talbot was confident no one was getting out alive. He would have liked it better if Vance had been drained of blood, turned to gelatin, and stored in the large refrigerator, but this would have to do.

  Chapter 40

  Corrigan’s Bunker - Fallbrook, CA

  Donna was reloading her rifle, and Ana was loading a new rifle for herself when they saw Holiday pass the doorway.

  Katelin stopped him. “Did you find Bar?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “No, but he is alive and he is not infected. What happened out front?”

  “There is a big fire and a big horde. We can’t stay in here, so we are getting ready to fight our way out.”

  “No.”

  “We don’t have much choice.”

  “The hell we don’t. Bar found the back door.”

  “There is another way out?”

  “Damn right. Where’s Vance?”

  “Kitchen—his leg is pretty torn up.”

  “I’ll get him. You guys head for the back. You can’t miss it.”

  Donna and Ana had heard the whole thing. Donna said, “Go get him. I’m still grabbing as much ammo and guns as I can carry.”

  “Me too,” Ana added as she stuffed another box of nine-millimeter shells in the pillowcase she was carrying.

  Holiday hustled to Vance, finding him leaning against the counter, holding his sick-slaying stick and watching the door.

  Holiday looked at the door just as the arm of a vampire rotter burst through. He raised his gun and fired. The weapon was louder than he expected, and it felt like it was trying to jump out of his hand. He fired twice just as Katelin had told him to and then paused. The arm was now a shoulder and a distorted face coming into the kitchen. Its mouth was open wide, giving them a good view of two rows of teeth stained in blood and drooling something thick, syrupy, and green. All Holiday had done was put two big holes in the top left corner of the door.

  Vance shuffled forward, keeping as much weight off his bad leg as he could, and jammed the blade end of his SSS into the rotter’s forehead. He twisted the blade and yanked it to the side, taking a bit of the rotter’s face with him as he pulled the blade away.

  “Can you walk?” Holiday asked.

  “Kind of. Better than you can shoot.”

  Holiday stepped up and let Vance use him as balance.

  “You’ll never fight through the horde holding me up,” Vance told him. “I’ll clear as many as I can, and you and the girls try to run for it.”

  “Fuck that,” Holiday said. “I can’t carry you through the horde, but I can get you to the back door.”

  “Back door?” Vance asked as Holiday guided him toward the door hidden in the pantry. They heard the sound of the door cracking into splinters and looked back to see a flaming ambler stumble into the room, spreading fire as he careened across the kitchen.

  They stepped through the hidden door as another vampire rotter came into the kitchen and leaped at them. Holiday slammed it shut just as the rotter got half of its deformed face inside.

  Vance dropped the SSS and joined Holiday in grabbing the handle and keeping the rotter trapped by the door.

  “I’ve got it pinned,” Vance said, motioning with his chin to the gun in Holiday’s hand. “You do the rest.”

  Holiday put the gun to the beast’s head and didn’t miss this time. Vance let the door open just enough to push it back into the kitchen. In the brief moment the door was open more than rotter head width, they saw the kitchen had filled with flames and amblers. Vance slammed the door shut as Ana joined them in the hallway.

  Ana moved so she was under Vance’s other shoulder, and they started limping down the hall together.

  “Is that a flamethrower on your back?” Vance asked Holiday.

  “Yeah. Hopefully it has a lower margin of error than the gun. I can’t believe I missed the first one.”

  “Me neither.” He looked to Ana. “Where’s Donna and Katelin?”

  “I’m right behind you,” Katelin said. He glanced back to see his kid holding the freshly reloaded machine pistols in each hand. She was walking backward so she could keep an eye on the door. Smoke had begun to creep into the hallway, and something was banging against it with some force.

  “Where is your mom?”

  “She went ahead to check on Bar. He’s hurt.”

  “So is the only guy left unscathed the one who can’t shoot for shit?” Holiday asked as they headed down the first staircase.

  “Looks that way,” Ana said. “Lucky for you guys all the girls here are kind of badass.”

  “Kind of nothing,” Katelin said as she put a burst of nine-millimeter slugs into the face of a rotter who had knocked out the top half of the hidden door. She shut the doorway to the stairs as she went through, saying, “We are totally badass.”

  They found Donna had Bar on his feet and his arm in a sling made out of his shirt. In addition to weapons, her bag had some medical supplies including the best over-the-counter pain medications the members of SWARC could find and some bottled water.

  She did not have anything to really treat a compound fracture, but she had enough to get Bar on his feet.

  Bar pointed with a hand holding a shotgun to the staircase. “Door at the top goes outside. I saw for myself.”

  “I saw it too,” Holiday added.

  “Then what are we waiting for?” Ana asked.

  Bar and Donna started up the staircase, but Vance said, “Wait.”

  Donna turned and looked at her ex-husband while Bar kept moving.

  “I can’t see Corrigan not booby-trapping the hidden back door. He couldn’t sleep at night knowing someone could find it without getting blown to shit. Did anyone actually open the door?”

  “I did,” Holiday told him. “I opened it and looked out into the night. We are in the avocado grove—not a rotter in sight.”

  Bar stopped and turned to face them. “I did too. If it was rigged to blow, I’d have a lot worse than a broken arm.”

  Vance did not look convinced, but he knew they co
uld not stay where they were. He saw Bar moving back up the stairway and said, “Be careful.”

  “Careful is my middle name.”

  Ana and Donna started to follow. The stairway was not wide enough for Holiday and Vance to go up side by side, so Holiday went up without him.

  “Go,” Vance told Katelin.

  “I’ve got your back. You go,” she told him as she slapped fresh magazines into her machine pistols.

  “I’m slow with this leg.”

  “Then you’d better get going.”

  Vance decided there was no use fighting with her, and by the time he got his way they might both be surrounded by rotters. He used the railing Corrigan had installed to pull himself up while he used the sick-slaying stick like a cane and made good time going up. He glanced back to see his kid backpedaling up behind him with a gun in each hand. He wasn’t sure if it was the right thing to feel, but he couldn’t help feel some pride watching her. The kid was a born warrior.

  “Stay close until I get there. Just because the door isn’t wired doesn’t mean there isn’t something else,” Vance said as he saw the open door ahead of him.

  Holiday, who was still inside, passed the message along, saying, “Stay close.”

  Vance could see Donna look back through the doorway. She started to say something, but her voice was drowned out by the explosion.

  Donna and Holiday were flung backward, barreling into Vance, who fell into Katelin, sending all four tumbling to the bottom of the stairs.

  Donna rolled over the top of everybody and ended up at the bottom first. She kept rolling so she did not end up underneath the other three. She was getting to her feet as the others reached the bottom. She looked back to see the door leading into the hallway fall under the weight of the amblers leaning against it.

  The first amblers through were barely alive. Their flaming bodies hit the stairs, and a group of them rolled down. They hit the floor and did not look like they were capable of standing up, let alone attacking.

  The vampire rotter who came in next was more than capable of an attack. It bounded over the smoldering bodies and leaped for Donna. Holiday pushed her aside before it could pounce.

  Instead of Donna, Holiday was slammed to the dirt floor with the rotter on top of him.

  Vance was up with the sick-slaying stick in hand. As the rotter took Holiday to the floor, Vance lunged forward, but his bad leg was slowing him up too much. The rotter dug its razor-like teeth into Holiday’s neck before Vance could ram the blade end of the SSS through the top of the rotter’s skull.

  Vance twisted the blade and pulled the weapon free, splattering the wall with pink rotter brain. He kicked it off Holiday and went to help him up.

  “Lucky for me I’m immune,” Holiday said as he put his hand to the wound in his neck and felt the blood pumping out of his severed vein.

  Vance didn’t say anything.

  “It’s not going to matter, is it?” Holiday asked as the last of his blood drained out of him.

  Katelin had let go of her machine pistols as they tumbled down the stairs, thinking with them in hand she could shoot herself or someone else. She still had the pair of Glocks, though, and she drew them and made a pile of dead amblers by the doorway as they tried to crawl over each other to get to them.

  “We still need to go,” Donna said as she unslung the rifle on her shoulder and dropped the next infected through the door while her daughter reloaded.

  Vance nodded but did not move toward the stairs. He flipped Holiday over instead.

  “Get going,” he said. He looked at Katelin. “This is not up for debate.”

  The two females started up the stairway as Vance turned on the flamethrower. He did not bother taking it off Holiday’s back as he pressed the trigger, sparking the gas into a stream of flame.

  Corrigan’s bunker was going up in flames anyway, so Vance figured speeding up the process would be fine if it slowed the horde bearing down on them. He kept his finger on the trigger, turning the rotters at the top of the first staircase to piles of ash.

  Satisfied the first wave of rotters were cooked to a point where they were not a threat, Vance dropped the flamethrower and picked up his sick-slaying stick. He considered staying put and fighting off any infected who pushed through the burned remains of their fellow rotters but decided any time he bought them would not be worth enough to sacrifice himself for. All they would be is outside anyway, where Vance’s skills could still be helpful.

  Using the sick-slaying stick like a cane, he moved as fast as he could up the stairway. He slipped near the top and fell face-first. He pushed himself back to his feet when he looked back to see another vampire rotter, this one with a pair of bloody tusks jutting from his neck, loping quickly up the stairway.

  Bar’s shotgun cut it in half as Ana reached down to pull him up. Bar flipped the shotgun around in his hand so he could pump in another shell and kept it trained on the bottom of the stairs as Ana managed to pull Vance to his feet.

  “I thought Corrigan’s trap got you?”

  “No, it was a rotter,” Ana told him. “The thing probably saved our lives, though. If it had not set the trap off, we would have walked right into it.”

  They stepped into the moonlight and Ana shut the door behind them.

  “Where is Donna and Kate?” Vance asked as they moved toward the road.

  “They went to get the car.”

  “Why? We should stay together. The blast is going to have the infected headed this way.”

  “I agree, but if they didn’t go we might not have a vehicle at all.”

  Vance was about to ask what she meant, but they emerged from the avocado grove and he saw someone other than them had turned on the lights in the Urban Assault Wagon.

  “We waited to help you while they went to make sure our ride didn’t leave,” Ana told him.

  “Thanks, but you should have left me. I’ll just slow you up.”

  “They would have never left if we did not agree to stay,” Ana said.

  Bar gave Vance one of the Desert Eagles and said, “Between us we are one full person. Hang on to me, and I think we can make it.”

  Vance put the SSS behind his back. His uniform had a holster for the long weapon, and he held on to the shoulder above Bar’s broken arm with one hand and the massive handgun with the other.

  “Don’t wait for us,” he said to Ana.

  “We’re in this together,” she told him as she looked down the barrel of her rifle. She walked forward as she fired, leaving dead bodies for them to move through.

  While she cleared the way in front, Bar eliminated approaching amblers to their left with the shotgun. Vance covered the right flank with the Desert Eagle, nearly removing the head of an ambler who came at them. If something came from behind they were screwed, but hopefully they would make it to the Urban Assault Wagon before that could happen.

  Vance took out another two, and beside him Bar’s shotgun roared. With the area around him clear, he risked a look back and saw the door to the bunker come down as flaming amblers began to stumble out. He started to say something, but they were already moving as fast as they could. He stayed quiet and kept looking for targets.

  Ana ran out of ammunition as the armored Suburban started to move. She slapped in a new magazine hoping Donna and Katelin made it, and that she was not watching their only hope for survival pulling away.

  Chapter 41

  The SWARC Urban Assault Wagon - Fallbrook, CA

  “They’re gone. Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Bo said. He turned to Gavin and said, “Sorry about the cursing, but it has been that kind of day.”

  “So I can say the F word too?”

  “No.”

  Bo turned to Clay, who was using his flashlight to mess with some wires under the dash.

  “You know what you’re doing?” Bo asked.

  “Yeah, kind of. It’s been a while, and I was more of a hobbyist than a pro when it came to grand theft auto.”

 
“They didn’t teach you this in the military?”

  “Hell no. This is from the school of misspent youth. It would help if I could see what I was doing.”

  Gavin stood up on the seat and pushed on a lever for the overhead light, illuminating the cab.

  Clay sat up quickly, saying, “I don’t think we should do that. Turn it off.”

  “You said you needed light.”

  “Turn it off.”

  Bo pointed down the road. “They aren’t turning around. If this helps you get this done faster, then leave it on.”

  Clay thought about that a second. “Fine. If someone saw it, the damage is done anyway.” He looked back at Gavin. “Next time you think about doing anything, and I mean anything except blinking and breathing, you ask me first. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Gavin said. “I’m sorry.”

  “No worries, kid,” Clay said as he got back to trying to get the Urban Assault Wagon started. It took a few minutes, but there was a spark and then the engine turned over.

  “I still got the touch. Good thing—I’m guessing I just lost my job at the TMRT.”

  Bo looked out the window as Clay gave the SUV some gas to make sure it kept running while putting on his seat belt. He could see the fire had grown, and the infected were heading into the field, moving toward the avocado grove. He worried they may see them and decided to head for the road instead.

  “Just in time too—they’re on the move,” Bo said.

  Clay turned to Gavin. “Seat belt, kid. It could be a wild ride.”

  Gavin got in his seat and buckled up.

  “You too,” Clay said to Bo as he put the Suburban into drive.

  He had just put the SUV into gear when a flashlight beam shone through his window and somebody knocked on the glass.

  He turned to see a woman looking at him. She was a bit old for his taste but not bad-looking. She did not look infected.