Gnash

by Brian Parker

  How much time had passed? Five minutes, twenty? She didn’t know how she hadn’t gone insane yet. Then a loud, throbbing noise echoed inside the cabinet. It was louder than anything she could ever remember hearing, but it gave her hope. The sound was mechanical, That meant it was manmade, she reasoned with herself. Just as suddenly as it had started, the sound ceased.

  Her thoughts that the throbbing noise was human were confirmed when the helicopters flew overhead. Her body shook as their 20mm cannons fired thousands of rounds a minute into God only knew what. The brass cartridge casings jingled as they fell from the birds overhead and bounced onto the canvas ceiling of the tent. She thought the noise of the helicopters and the cartridges falling were the most beautiful sounds she’d ever heard.

  Slowly, she began to realize that the moans of the dead were gone and the helicopters had stopped firing their big guns. The smaller, more distinct pops of individual weapons replaced the brrrp sound of the 20mms while the helicopters continued to swoop and dive overhead.

  ***

  She didn’t know how long she’d been in the cabinet, but it was long enough to have drank the entire bottle of water she’d stashed in the satchel and she had to pee, but she wasn’t about to go outside. Once the camp was secure, they’d announce over the speakers that it was safe to come out of hiding. The urge to relieve herself became too great so she took her pants off and went inside the closet. The smell of warm urine trapped inside the close space made her gag, but she fought it back and put her clothes back on, thankful that she had the bucket to sit on instead of sitting in her own puddle.

  She wished she had a watch, but everything she’d owned when the blast hit was either melted or had been taken from her and burned when she was brought here. There was no way to tell what time it was or how long she’d been here. The gunfire continued in sporadic bursts outside her hiding place. Sometimes they were very near, and then they would be far away. She fancied that the men pulling the trigger were trying to get to her.

  Emory admitted to herself that her mind was playing tricks on her. The stress of the attack and hiding in a fairly flimsy structure while she listened to an unaccountable number of people die a horrible death, people she knew and had interacted with on a daily basis in the camp. The gunfire had came closer, she was sure of that, but rationally, she knew they were simply clearing the zombies from the camp. However, her mind clung to the idea that she was going to be saved.

  ***

  She startled awake. The shooting was definitely closer, it sounded like it was right next to the cabinet. Emory had dozed off for a little while. How long? It was pointless; there was no way to know. An inhuman scream reverberated inside the metal walls of her sanctuary. The sound was so close! Again, she covered her mouth to keep from exposing herself to this new horror.

  The side of the cabinet dented in as something huge smashed into it. This time she couldn’t help herself and screamed out, “Oh God, please help me!” The thing on the outside screamed again and began to beat on the metal cabinet in earnest. In frustration, or by design, it shoved the entire cabinet backwards.

  Emory’s stomach started to flip and she scrambled for some type of balance, but there was nothing inside to grab onto as the cabinet fell. She landed hard on the small of her back and cried out in pain. Hands beat and tore at the cabinet trying to get to her. Her eyes filled with tears, this was it, she’d never see Hank again.

  It was too much to bear. In the final moments of her life, her cracked mind had betrayed her. Even if she hadn’t thought him dead, she didn’t wish to see her fiancé Grayson. The person she wanted to be there for her was Hank, a man she barely knew. This time, the tears flowed even more freely, both because of the actual loss of Grayson and the feeling that she’d somehow betrayed his memory.

  Light showed through what would have been the bottom of the cabinet if it was still upright. The riveted seems were stretched and breaking under the relentless beating by the creature outside. The metal gave way with a shriek as the rivets separated and a hole the size of a football appeared.

  The pounding stopped abruptly and an arm appeared in the opening, fingers grasping at whatever it came into contact with. Emory scrambled towards the top of the cabinet as far away as she could get from the creature’s reach. The smell of rotten flesh filled the small space as the arm withdrew and the thing outside began to pull on the partially separated floor of the storage locker.

  The entire cabinet moved with every inhuman jerk on the metal. She screamed and began to fumble with her makeshift lock. Maybe she could get out and get past it. Her mind grasped at that one thought. She visualized the layout of the room and in seconds determined her only chance of survival was to escape from the wall locker and get out into the open where she could run. Hank had said that he thought that was your best bet against these things if hiding didn’t work.

  Suddenly, the bottom half of the cabinet gave way and folded outward. She could clearly see the creature as it dove in towards her. This thing wasn’t like the others she’d seen in the hospital. Those men and women had weird sores and the color of their skin looked almost like they’d been suffocated or frozen or something, this thing was the color of old parchment. The only thing that saved her was the small size of the hole the creature had created. It wedged itself in the breach and continued to pull towards her, flesh along either side of its shoulders tearing away on the jagged metal.

  This was her opportunity. Emory wrapped her hand through her satchel and pulled the chemlight out of the eyelet. She kicked upwards with everything she had and sprang up. The creature screamed at her with both hatred and the recognition of her escape. She stepped over the door of the cabinet to the tent’s floor and raced towards the doorway.

  She burst through the door and turned back the direction she’d originally entered the tent from. Behind her, she could hear the creature thrashing wildly as it attempted to free itself from the cabinet. Dozens of mangled bodies lay scattered everywhere in the hallway. The flickering light showed they were in various stages of reanimation and gave her a sense of vertigo as she stumbled along the hallway. She rushed past several grasping hands and burst into an even bigger nightmare. Body parts were scattered everywhere and gore was splattered against every surface. The helicopters had absolutely destroyed the zombie horde that had attacked the camp.

  She wasn’t sure where to run, but she knew she needed to escape the camp’s fences if she had any chance of surviving. Distance, that’s what she needed. Who knew how many of these things there were that the pilots hadn’t been able to shoot. She ran towards the gates, several hundred yards away. Out of the moans coming from the hospital behind her, one of the creatures’ bellows rose above the rest. She recognized it as the same creature that’d been so intent on reaching her inside the cabinet.

  She dodged dismembered bodies as she continued to run, but slipped on a particularly gore-filled puddle in the deadened grass. She risked a glance back towards the hospital as she pushed herself up. The thing from inside was coming towards her in a brisk walk. It gestured towards some of the zombies milling around and they turned towards her and began their slow shuffle in her direction. She pushed herself up and raced towards the gate.

  She slowed down and then stopped when she was probably two football fields away from the gate. Crowded around the front, there were hundreds, possibly thousands of zombies. They all seemed to be pushing forward trying to make it back outside through the gates but there was a line of soldiers beyond in the field steadily shooting into the crowd.

  She started to think that it was hopeless again. The horde in front of her kept her from leaving out of the gates, the fence had triple-strand concertina wire along the top so there was no way that she could climb over and the strange-looking, stranger-looking she corrected herself, creature was pursuing her from somewhere back within the compound. She looked everywhere for some type of weapon and her eyes landed on a discarded M16 near a dead soldier.

  She pic
ked it up and prayed that there were rounds left but she didn’t know how to check to see if there were. Growing up in a suburb of San Diego hadn’t afforded her many opportunities to fire a gun, but she’d seen plenty of movies so she had a pretty good idea of how to aim the rifle. Her immediate threat was the thing that was coming after her. That guy seemed different than the others, almost like it knew what it was doing and had a plan to get her.

  Then, she remembered her conversation from a few days ago at the dining facility with Hank and Bryce. That thing must be one of the originals, one of the zombies infected at the initial Pentagon outbreak. Hank said they were the leaders of the groups of zombies and looked different than the others. Did this thing intentionally target the camp? Why was it so determined to come after her?

  Her mind raced as questions with no answers buzzed around her head, but immediately went blank as the creature walked around the corner of the cafeteria. When it saw her, it increased its pace from a walk to what could be considered a trot. God, she swore it was grinning at her.

  She raised the rifle and aimed down the iron sights. She was only fifty feet from him, surely she’d hit the goddamned thing. She jerked the trigger and saw dirt fly up behind and to the right of it. Emory ignored the explosion of pain in her shoulder and adjusted her aim to the left and fired again. She was rewarded with a small hole in the thing’s stomach and a slight stutter in its step, but it continued towards her. She did her hokey aim to the left thing and pulled the trigger again.

  The weapon clicked as the firing pin fell on an empty chamber. “Fuck!” she screamed in frustration. She looked around frantically for another weapon, but nothing was in her line of sight. She didn’t have any other choice so she flipped the rifle around and grasped the barrel, intent to defend herself with the M16 club.

  It reached for her and she swung the rifle with every ounce of strength in her five eight frame. The butt of the weapon hit the outstretched arm and she heard the bones break but it meant nothing to the creature. She shoved her club up under the thing’s chin and pushed as hard as she could. It was as useless as pushing against a brick wall, it was just too strong. She was able to hold the head away from her, but it reached out again with its one remaining arm and grabbed onto her hand. Her fingers felt as if they were being crushed as it pulled her towards itself.

  Then she was splattered with some type of wet substance and the pressure on her hand relented and then gave way all together. She fell forward on top of it as her momentum carried her in the direction she’d been pushing against at the sudden loss of resistance. Emory pushed herself quickly backwards from the creature, but there was nothing to fear anymore. The entire top half of its head was missing.

  She didn’t have time to think about what that meant, several of the zombies from the back of the mob at the gate had turned and started toward her when they heard her fire the rifle moments earlier and the first of the zombies from the hospital had rounded the corner of the school, she was caught between the two groups. She snatched up the rifle and ran towards the fence. She’d rather take her chances getting stuck in the wire at the top of the fence than end up being a meal.

  The pulsing sound echoed through the camp again. The noise made her drop to her knees in pain and disorientation. She attempted to block it out by covering her ears, but it was no use. The noise was so incredibly loud that she could feel her teeth rattling in her jaw. Oh God. Oh God. Oh God, she repeated over and over to herself. She didn’t know what was happening to her, but she realized that she’d pissed herself as she fell over onto her side.

  Time stretched to nothingness and became meaningless to her. Slowly, she began to realize that the sound had stopped and that someone was carrying her. Her head was jerked sideways as her hair caught on something. “Shit, sorry Emory,” a semi-familiar voice said out of the fog in her brain.

  “Seal up that fence before they come to and try to make it out of the hole,” the familiar voice ordered the other shadowy forms.

  Rough fingers pressed against her neck and a bright, light passed in front her eyes. Then a bottle was placed against her lips and she swallowed out of reflex. The water seemed to help clear her mind a little. She coughed and held up a hand to tell the person holding the bottle to stop.

  “Why can’t I see anything,” she asked.

  “The sonic pulse cannon burst most of the capillaries in your eyes, so that’s why you’re having difficulty seeing, it’ll clear up in a few days, but until then, everything will have a foggy red tint to it,” a new voice said to her. “And you’ll be sore as hell tomorrow from the beating your body took from all those sound waves.”

  “She’s lucky we picked her up on thermals,” another voice said.

  Someone else moved close to her and placed a hand on her cheek. She flinched away from it. “Emory, it’s Hank. We saw your fight with one of the freaks. You did an amazing job. You’re safe now.”

  She smiled and then passed out it as the pain flooded into her.

  ***

  14 May, 0322 hrs local

  Aboard Air Force One

  26,000 feet above Hays, Kansas

  The president was livid. “How the fuck did this happen? How the fuck did this happen?” he repeated as he slammed his hand down on the table.

  “Sir,” General Thompson started to respond.

  “Don’t bullshit me Pete. Tell me what the fuck happened,” the president said as he pointed angrily at the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

  The general cleared his throat and said, “Sir, we didn’t get them all in our initial cordon. The way this disease spreads, if even one of those fuckers slips past us, it could infect the entire country. We think they used the same tactic that they did in the Pentagon. They attacked all along our perimeter, allowing themselves to be killed, and during the fighting, they snuck some zombies past us to infect civilians behind the lines.”

  “Are you kidding me? They’re zombies, they didn’t sneak past us,” the White House Chief of Staff said as he threw up his hands in exasperation.

  “Frankly, we don’t know what we’re dealing with John,” the General Thompson said as he glared at him. “We do know that there are least two kinds of them, there’s the secondary infections: They’re dumb as shit and easy to handle as long as we don’t let them overwhelm us with numbers, which has happened a few times unfortunately. We’re calling them the Type Two zombies. And then there’s the original group, the Type Ones. Those ones are the smart little fuckers that we’ve heard about before. Based on the numbers of them we’ve killed, we think there has to be less than a thousand of them left, but with the chaotic nature of the Pentagon incident and the 24 April attack, our analysts are giving us an over under of about a thousand.

  “Anyways,” he continued, “according to camera footage, several thousand zombies attacked three different refugee centers, including our research facility, nearly simultaneously. They don’t show up on thermal scans so the only way to see them was visually, and they came in right after full darkness fell. Another thing, there were one or two of the original Pentagon zombies with each group. They must have created their force in secret, kept them hidden, and then attacked at some pre-arranged time, which shows an extremely high level of sophistication. They overwhelmed the guards with numbers and then once they were inside it was a slaughter.

  “Based on those attacks, we chose to abandon Mount Weather sir. The consensus with the Secret Service was that you were too close to where these things are operating. Hell, they were within thirty miles of the installation, and we don’t know if those three groups were the only ones.”

  “How many people did we lose?” the president asked.

  The general looked at his notes, “Each camp had approximately 1,200 or so residents, plus about 100 guards and workers. Camp 3 had the hospital, so that added another 300 patients and a medical staff of about 150. That, in addition to the thirty or so thousand Soldiers and Marines we’ve lost in the front line battles and the Pentagon atta
ck,” he paused as he scribbled some figures in the margin of his paper. “That puts our current losses at almost sixty thousand, plus the four or five million dead from the blast. And we’re still trying to figure out how many zombies were made in the attack on the camps, we can probably add another two or three thousand, but where those individuals came from is anyone’s guess.”

  “You said the research facility was overrun too?” the president asked. “Did our scientists escape? What’s the status of the cure?”

  “The research facility was attacked and the perimeter was breached, but we retook the camp sir. It looks like most of the research that Doctor Collins was working on survived and he’d uploaded several documents to the servers beforehand, so we think we’re ok. He was involved directly in the attack, but it appears that he’ll be fine. He told me that he’s identified the final part of the virus that has been eluding him so now he’s ready to begin working on vaccination trials.

  “I asked him your question about a cure. He said that however the zombies are moving around, it’s not because they are alive. The human part of them is dead. His estimation is that there is no cure, but he’s still hopeful about a vaccination. Whatever those terrorist fucks put together, it’s a very advanced, self-replicating super-virus/bacteria hybrid. He also said that he named it. He’s calling the bug Alexandria-Collins, Alex-C for short.”

  “Shit, that sounds horrible. Let me guess, he’s already contacted the scientific community and it will be known by that now, won’t it?” John Biagi said.

  “I don’t know about that part, but it’s better than just calling it the ‘Zombie Virus’ isn’t it?” the general said, annoyed at being interrupted.

  “Well thank God we still have him and he wasn’t killed in the attack,” President Holmes stated.