Zompoc Survivor: Inferno

by Ben S Reeder

  “Thank you, Dave,” she said with something like her old smile. She stepped up and kissed me on the cheek, then grabbed the case and headed back toward the Stryker.

  “Most girls like teddy bears or security blankets,” Ruth’s voice came from behind us.

  “I’m very progressive,” I said as I turned to face her. “I’m going for the world’s deadliest dad award this year.” Ruth’s laugh was short, not much more than a courtesy to acknowledge that she knew it was supposed to be a joke.

  “You’re up late,” Phil said. “Figured you would have been either sleeping or letting off a little steam.”

  “Hardly,” she said with a grim smile. “After what I’ve seen the past few days, I think my libido is as dead as most of this city right now. And I’m too restless to sleep. Not unlike the young lady there.” I turned to look over my shoulder, and that was where things started to go horribly wrong.

  I caught a glimpse of movement out of the corner of my eye, but before I could even glance that way, something had streaked across the ramp. It flew into the air in a shallow arc and landed on our level inches from Amy. She barely had time to turn toward it before it grabbed her and jumped back down to the ramp. In the time it took all of that to happen, I wasn’t able to do more than grab the M39. Whatever it was scampered around the corner with Amy over one shoulder as I brought the rifle up.

  “Amy!” I yelled as I vaulted the makeshift barricade.

  “Go get the others!” I heard Ruth say as my feet hit the ground. I heard gunshots below us, followed by a scream of primal fury and pain. More shots followed as I sprinted to the bottom of the ramp, and I heard a gurgling scream that was punctuated by a single shot. Behind me, I could hear the sound of someone else running, their bare feet slapping against the concrete as I rounded the first corner. Whatever had grabbed Amy had been faster than anything I’d ever seen before, and I couldn’t see her on the next ramp. My brain shifted gears as I realized I didn’t have the speed to catch up to her, but I did have a way to make up for lost time. Step for step, there was no way to catch up to whatever had grabbed Amy, but I didn’t have to run down the ramps. I turned toward the edge of the ramp and jumped the railing, letting my momentum carry me between the two levels to land on the next ramp going down. There was a twinge in my ankle as I tried to stop my momentum and reverse course, then I was dropping down onto the next level. Having learned my lesson, I turned my inertia into a roll and surged back to my feet to do the same thing again. This time, when I rolled to my feet on the next ramp, I found Amy standing over the corpse of whatever had grabbed her. It looked human, but its skin was bright red, and steam was rising from its flesh. Bright red blood was pooled around its emaciated looking body as it lay with its disjointed looking limbs in total disarray. Amy’s face was slack in shock as she watched the thing before her twitch, and she didn’t seem to know what was right behind her.

  “Reload!” I yelled as I ran toward her. “On your six!” Automatically, she dropped the mag from her pistol, slammed another into place as she turned…and froze when she saw the solid wall of infected less than ten feet away.

  Time slowed down to a microsecond crawl as I raced toward her. A ghoul broke from the ranks and leaped toward her, its mouth open impossibly wide, arms stretched out for her as it closed the distance between them so much faster than I could make my feet move. It reached the apex of its jump and started to descend toward her, yards of separation becoming feet, then inches.

  I was still yards away when the ghoul flipped in midair, its forward motion arrested as if it had hit an iron bar. Then the sound of a gunshot hammered against my eardrums, and I watched the ghoul do a horizontal face-plant a foot away from Amy’s feet. I made it to her side as she raised the still smoking pistol and pointed it at the nearest zombie’s face and pulled the trigger again. It dropped and she adjusted her aim, fired and repeated, slowly going through her magazine a shot at a time. The slide locked back on the thirteenth shot, and for a moment, she stopped cold.

  “Reload,” I told her as I stepped up beside her and brought the M39 up. At that range, I didn’t really bother with the scope picture. If I covered a zombie’s head with the scope, I pulled the trigger, and nine times out of ten, it went down. I backed up as I shot, and before I was halfway through the mag, Amy stepped up beside me with her new pistol up.

  “Wait for it!” I said between shots. A few rounds later, the firing pin fell on an empty chamber, and I stepped back and grabbed a fresh mag from my vest. “Reloading! Go!” I yelled. Her gun came up again, this time less steady, and she opened fire again. I hit the magazine release and caught the empty mag, dumped it in an empty pouch and slammed the fresh one in. Amy’s gun went silent as I pulled the charging handle back, and I barely got the rifle up as she stepped back and dropped her second mag. I fired as fast as I could, but the sheer number of them made it impossible to stop the tide. This time, when the well ran dry, I didn’t reload. Instead, I wrapped my right arm around the sling and let go of the stock, letting gravity and momentum bring the rifle around to my shoulder as I drew the Colt from its holster on my vest with my left hand. Amy stepped back up beside me and we both started firing, dropping zombies at ever closer and closer ranges. The Colt ran out first, and I drew the SOCOM with my right hand, thankful the LAM helped me keep rounds on target even with my off hand. As Amy’s automatic ran dry, she drew her revolver, this time picking off targets on our right flank. To my left, I heard a deep boom and a pair of zombies dropped. Another followed and the head of a zombie on my left just evaporated under the impact of double ought buckshot. Ruth stepped up on my left and blew another zombie’s head and shoulders into oblivion as I put the last three rounds into a trio of zombies right in front of me. As they hit the ground, I saw that there was a little distance between them now, and that the nearest one was more than five feet away. As I holstered the SOCOM, I guessed maybe twenty zombies were inside the garage itself.

  It was twenty too many.

  My hand reached over my shoulder and I grabbed the handle of the Deuce. As it slid free of the sheath, I saw my course of action laid out in front of me clearly. Each zombie was its own target, and I just had to keep moving a little faster than they did to walk my way through them. As an afterthought, I grabbed the pair of shooting glasses tucked in the pocket of my vest and slipped them on. Things were about to get messy, and I didn’t want zombie splat getting in my eyes.

  The feel of the first skull splitting under the Deuce’s edge was exhilarating, and I couldn’t wait to feel it again. I pulled the blade free and twisted it in midair to slam into the top of another skull, then yanked back on the blade so I could spin and hit the next nearest infected in the temple. The front of its skull sheered away, and I reversed field to take a couple of steps toward the next one. The Deuce caved in the side of its head, and I had to yank the blade free and step back from a zombie on my right. I ducked under its grasping hands and spun around, slicing it across the knee. It dropped to the floor, not dead but a lot less mobile. I sidestepped to the left and brought the blade up and at an angle, shearing off another zombie’s cranium above the jawline. Another one got inside my swing, and I hit it with an open palm, sending it staggering back several steps. Suddenly surrounded, I brought my right elbow up into the teeth of one while I brought the sword down on the top of the head of one right in front of me. I felt hands on my shoulders and heard the click of teeth on the gorget. My right hand dropped to my belt and I drew the Tainto, then slammed it into the eye of the zombie on my back. It came free with a wet slurp and I stepped forward, furious that these things would dare attack me, and euphoric that I’d already killed so many. I went back to my right and slammed the Tainto into the head of the zombie I’d hamstrung, then grabbed the sword in both hands again and brought it down on another skull with a primal scream. Again and again, I moved, struck, moved again. Suddenly, there was nothing left in front of me to hit, but the rage felt stronger than ever.

  “Oh,
bravo,” a dry voice rasped. “Bravo indeed.” I turned to see a corpse in an expensive suit standing in the opening of the garage. Behind it stood another horde, and I smiled as my rage found a target. The rest could have me as long as I could kill the one in the suit.

  “Aw, fuck,” I growled as realization struck. “Another Patient Zero.”

  My footsteps faltered as I realized what was happening, and a healthy dose of fear crawled down my spine, taking the anger I was feeling down to red hot instead of white hot. I’d faced something like this before in Springfield. Even being within a mile of one in Nevada had affected me similarly. Suddenly the adrenaline surge I’d been riding ebbed, and I could feel the twinge in my ankle flare into outright agony. I limped forward. Amy and Ruth stepped up to join me as I stopped in the opening, and I could hear voices above and behind us.

  “Well, you are a surprise,” the thing in front of me said. “You’ve seen one like me before. And survived; even more surprising. I felt you the moment you fell into my city, but I thought it was the girl. I kept seeing her dreams when she slept. All this time, it was you.”

  “What do you mean you felt me?” I asked as I took a step forward. Behind it I could see another horde of infected standing across the street. As much as I wanted to set myself on frappe’ and go to town on this guy, I knew that would get Amy killed. It would get a lot of other people killed too, namely myself, but Amy was my first concern. And since he was feeling chatty, indulging him would buy me some time.

  “That rage you feel right now, that burning desire to kill me that’s lighting your brain on fire? That’s your soul’s reaction to my presence. It goes both ways. But the question is, which one are you? You’re too small to be the Knight. Too male to be the Angel. Not competent enough to be the Soldier.”

  “What do you mean, which one?” I asked, not liking some of the comparisons he was making and feeling less than brilliant for all the questions I seemed to be asking.

  “You aren’t the only one of your kind, just as I am not the only one of mine. You are as different from the good doctor there as I am from those behind me.”

  “I’m just another survivor. No different than anyone else.”

  “Your results tell a different story, Survivor” he said with a gesture to the carnage behind me. I could hear the capitol he’d put on the word survivor, as if he’d just put a label on me.

  “Are you saying he’s somehow like you? Are you different from the rest of the infected?” Ruth asked, stepping up beside me.

  “The good doctor should curb her curiosity,” he said. He didn’t acknowledge her directly, or even glance her way, and his tone sounded to me like he was impatient at being interrupted.

  “I’m kinda curious myself,” I said. I was already not liking where this conversation was going, but he’d described what I was feeling, what I’d also felt around Deacon and the other PZ in Nevada, to perfection.

  “There are some things in the dark places that were put there for a reason,” he said. “Things that should never have been brought into the light. The Asura is one of them.”

  “Yeah, I think we got that,” I said. “So, now what?”

  “Now nothing,” Zero said as it tilted its head back and forth. “I got what I came for. We’ll see each other again soon enough.” It turned and started to walk out of the garage.

  “You’re just gonna walk away?” I said. Some rational part of my brain was screaming about examining the dentistry of a gift horse, but mostly I was just…irritated. Offended, even. He stopped, and my rational brain ran and hid in a corner as he turned to face me with an expression that might have been a smile.

  “There’s no return on killing you right now, Survivor. I’ll come back when that changes.” He turned again and began walking.

  “If you plan on trying to kill me, you’re gonna have to get in line,” I said to his retreating back.

  Journal of Maya Weiss

  Friday, October 18, 2013

  Mitchell Hodges showed back up this morning. He killed the Marine on watch and his own wife before I killed him again. I shot him in the head this time. I also made sure his victims wouldn’t be getting back up again. I feel like it’s my fault, even though Major Lynch and Porsche have both tried to tell me I couldn’t have known he’d turn. It’s a mistake I won’t make again.

  I talked to Nate last night. He said we should bring the rest of the people with us along. “Safety in numbers,” he told me. He asked about Dave. All I could tell him was that I didn’t know if he was okay or not. At least I could give him better news about Cassie and Bryce. Strange that he asked about Dave first.

  Today will be our first full day of travel. Major Lynch has made contact with a group of survivors at Fort Riley, so that will be our first stop, assuming we can make it to them. Then we have to figure out how to get to Nate’s place in Wyoming. He gave me the coordinates over the radio last night. I wrote them down on the first piece of paper I could find…one of Dave’s copies of his survival rules. I wish I could say that I keep it folded up in my pocket to keep it safe. It’s a little piece of him that I can keep with me, and something that I pray every night is keeping Amy alive.

  Almost time to get started. Now comes the hard part: convincing a bunch of scared people to come with us to an undisclosed remote location to survive the zombie apocalypse.

  Chapter 8

  History Redux

  ~To reminisce with my old friends, a chance to share some memories, and play our songs again. ~ ~ Ricky Nelson ~

  Morning snuck up on me and dropped an anvil on my foot. I woke up to pain. Lots and lots of pain. My right ankle hurt from the aforementioned anvil, and the rest of me felt like someone had also emptied a bucket of hammers on me for good measure. I let out a moan as I tried to move my arm. My elbow hurt. How in the hell did my damn elbow hurt? Oh yeah. I’d bashed a zombie’s teeth in with it last night.

  “Good morning,” I heard Ruth say from beside me.

  “No such thing,” I groaned.

  “You took quite a beating last night. And you sprained your ankle. I can’t even count the number of bruises and abrasions you have.”

  “Just the one,” I said as I opened my eyes. I was still in the Stryker. What little light we had came in through the open rear hatch. “All over my body.” Slowly I sat up, and aches and pains flared up all across my chest and stomach. When I looked across the floor at her, Ruth’s eyebrows were raised in a slightly surprised look.

  “You move like you’ve done this before,” she said. “Do you get beat up like this a lot?”

  “Not as often as I used to,” I told her. “I was in the SCA when I was in the Air Force. Did some heavy fighting, but mostly I liked light weapons and archery. I used to feel like this after I came home from a war.”

  “Oddly enough, Mr. Stewart, I didn’t understand a word of that,” she said.

  “Sorry. I haven’t had to explain it for a while. Society for Creative Anachronism. Historical recreation of the Middle Ages. Arts, sciences, combat; if it was done between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance, you can bet someone in the SCA knows how to do it. A buddy of mine used to call it the original old school.” I rolled my shoulders and slowly started to stretch my arms up over my head. It had been so long since I’d even thought about the SCA that I’d all but forgotten about it. I’d mostly done it as a way to spend time after my shifts and a good way to blow the occasional weekend. After I’d been deployed, I had been reassigned a long way from my original shire, and I never got back in.

  “Were you any good at it?” Ruth asked with a skeptical look on her face.

  “I was decent, I guess,” I said. “Usually woke up with my fair share of bruises. I take it we haven’t been completely overrun while I was asleep?”

  “I think you ran them off last night. The lieutenant wants to see you, though.”

  “Great,” I muttered. “So, what’s the prognosis, doc?”

  “I’m afraid I’m not that ki
nd of doctor,” she said ruefully. “And I’d appreciate it if you’d keep that under your hat.” I nodded and reached for my backpack. Every movement woke new flares of pain across my ribs and arms. Ruth went pale as I pulled the MP3 recorder into view.

  “I have a couple of guesses about what kind of doctor you really are,” I told her.

  “Where did you get that?” she demanded.

  “Found it right where you left it, I’m guessing. Next to the zombie you’d flayed to the waist and hooked machines to its brain.”

  “Please, Mr. Stewart,” she whispered in a shaky voice. “You can’t tell anyone! If you’ve been in that room, you know what happened to my colleagues.”

  “Yeah. I’m just curious how you got out of there. Because we barely made it with four heavily armed people.” I felt like I’d just kicked a puppy when her lower lip started to tremble.

  “I was outside the lab when it all started. I hid when I heard them start shooting the others,” she said. “Then the soldiers came, and I ran. We had a private elevator and stairwell to avoid too much interaction with the rest of the hospital staff. I just ran after that.” I reached out a hand and touched her arm.

  “Don’t worry. I won’t say anything. But you and I are going to have a serious talk later on about your research.” She nodded and I slowly got up and crouch walked out of the vehicle. Straightening up took a moment, and my body delivered mixed messages from my feet to my head. Most of the other civilians were around the cars they’d slept in. Phil and Mark Nguyen, the man who had backed Beth down last night, were at the barricade. Off to my left and behind me I could hear Hernandez and Amy talking, and I figured Kaplan would be there, too. I waved to Phil and Mark, then limped over toward the Humvee. Hernandez had a pistol broken down and was showing Amy how to reassemble it.