by Joe McKinney
Ed raised an eyebrow as they advanced. He had worked crowd control in the wake of the L.A. riots back in 1992 and he knew that a unit didn’t just fall into a fighting echelon position. It took lots of practice, lots of dress rehearsals. And even then it was hard to get right.
But Barnes and his team moved out silently, effortlessly. Barnes himself did most of the shooting. They advanced into the knot of zombies coming through the gate, their shots measured and precise. They made it look easy, and a moment later they had cleared the gate and were standing outside it, shooting at their leisure at every zombie that came within range.
Less than ten minutes later, with the echo of gunfire still sounding across the prairie, Barnes stepped back in through the gate. His AR-15 was slung over his shoulder again. There was a look of unflappable calm on his face.
Jasper was clapping, and a moment later, he was leading the crowd in cheers as he slapped Barnes on the back.
Ed watched it all with a growing sense of unease. Things were definitely not right. Not at all.
CHAPTER 50
Later that afternoon, after lunch, Billy Kline was making his way through a crowd of people returning to their work when he saw Kyra Talbot slipping around the corner of the office building. He hustled after her.
But when he rounded the corner, she was gone.
He stood there, confused, looking around.
He saw her again as she came around the far side of the office. She was wearing a red blouse and blue jeans, her hair down over her face, not her usual ponytail. It looked like she was in a hurry not to be seen.
“Kyra,” he called after her.
She ducked her head and walked faster, feeling the wall with her fingertips for guidance.
“Kyra?”
Their last conversation had left him eager for more, and he broke into a trot and went after her.
“Kyra, wait up,” he said. He was coming up behind her now. “It’s me, Billy.”
She wouldn’t let him see her face.
“Kyra?”
He put a hand on her shoulder and she flinched.
“Sorry,” he said, pulling his hand away. “Kyra, it’s me, Billy. I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“I’ve got to go, Billy.”
“Hey, wait,” he said. He put his hand on her shoulder, and though she flinched again, he left it there. He turned her gently around to face him. “What’s wrong?”
But he could see what was wrong. She had her hair down over her left eye and cheek, but he could still the shiner and the busted lip. The wounds stood out on her pale and slender face.
“What happened?”
“Nothing,” she said. She touched the wall and turned away.
“Wait,” he said. “Who did this to you?”
“Nobody. I fell.”
“Bullshit,” he said. She flinched again, this time at the anger in his voice. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Kyra, please, who did this to you?”
Then it came to him.
“It was Colin, wasn’t it?”
She didn’t speak, but she gave a quick, almost imperceptible nod of her head.
“That bastard. Where is he?”
“Billy, please, you’ve done enough.”
“Me?”
“He heard us talking. I told him it wasn’t nothing, but he got so mad. The more I tried to make him understand, the madder he got.”
“Oh, God,” Billy said. “When did this happen?”
“This morning.”
He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. When he opened them again, Kyra’s sightless eyes were pointed right at him. They were shining, but no tears had fallen.
She was scared. He could tell that. Surviving Van Horn had brought her out of her shell. That was what he had seen in her that first night in Emporia, Kansas, and that had attracted him to her. But her first attempt to trust somebody had gotten her this, and the injustice of it made him want to kick something.
“I think your eye’s gonna be okay,” he said. “But we need to put something on that lip. If I go get some ice, will you let me help you?”
She nodded her head slightly, and her hair fell down over her face again.
“I’ll be right back,” he said. “Will you wait for me here? I promise I’ll be right back.”
She nodded.
Kyra listened to his footsteps fading away in the grass and thought of running. She could probably make it back to her dormitory before he caught up with her, and she could spend the rest of the day in bed. If Aaron came looking for her, she could tell him she wasn’t feeling well. She had a stomachache. Her eyes were hurting. Hell, she could tell him any damn thing, just so long as they would leave her alone.
She hadn’t felt this helpless in a long time. It was worse than walking the highway after escaping Van Horn. Even, in a way, worse than losing Uncle Reggie. Since coming to the Grasslands, the world had grown brighter. She was contributing to the effort. She was making a difference. And then this, two hard slaps from someone she had trusted, from someone she had given her virginity to, and suddenly she was that scared and isolated four-year-old little girl all over again, alone in her head and alone in the world.
“It went smoothly,” she heard a man say. “Just like I said it would.”
The voice came from around the corner to her right. As quickly as she could, she ducked back around the corner to her left and pressed her back into the wall.
“That’s good, Michael. Very good. You did good work, getting the bodies out of here.”
Jasper’s voice! Kyra sucked in a breath.
“It wasn’t hard. We put ‘em with the zombies we shot this morning and burned them.”
“Good.”
“But Jasper, our house isn’t clean yet.”
“Yes, I know. Those men had help.”
“That seems pretty plain, yeah.”
“Do you know who?” Jasper asked.
“Not yet.”
“But you’ll find them out.”
“Yes.”
“I cannot abide a traitor, Michael. Even that man who sins in his mind against me has betrayed me, and I will not abide a traitor.”
“No, of course not.”
“You’ll begin searching the village for the missing radios?”
“Immediately.”
“Very good,” Jasper said. “I’ll see you this afternoon then.”
Kyra heard the door to the office creak open, then slam shut. The second man’s footsteps faded away in the opposite direction. She stood absolutely still against the wall, listening, unable to catch her breath. She felt like the ground beneath her feet was shaking.
The whole world, it seemed, was shaking.
CHAPTER 51
“Nate.”
A distant gunshot, somewhere down the hall.
“Nate, damn it, get up.”
More gunfire, three or four shots. Closer now.
From Nate, a mutter: “Get off me.”
Kellogg gave him a hard shake. He pulled the blankets away and saw the blood pooled under Nate’s thighs and under his buttocks. He saw the deep, ragged cuts up Nate’s left wrist.
“Nate, Jesus. Oh, Jesus. What did you do?”
“Fuck off. Lemme die.”
“Oh, crap, Nate.”
Kellogg threw the covers off the bed and scooped up one of the sheets. He tried to tear it with his fingers and couldn’t. He used his teeth until he felt the fabric give, and then he tore it into strips. “Here, give me your hand,” he said, and yanked Nate’s wrist into his lap. Working fast, he wrapped the strips around the wound, keeping up the pressure.
“Christ, you lost a lot of blood. What the hell were you thinking, Nate?”
“Lemme alone.” Nate was listless, his voice slurred and faraway. He resisted, but he was as weak as a kitten, and Kellogg was able to pull him off the bed without any trouble.
“You’re gonna have to stand on your own, Nate. Can you do that?”
“Lemme alone. I don’t wa
nt to go with you.”
“You have to, Nate. They’re inside the hospital. Christ, they’re everywhere.”
“Huh? Lemme go.”
“Not on your life.”
Kellogg got his shoulder under Nate’s uninjured arm and hoisted him upward. Outside in the hall, he could hear a woman screaming and the sound of something heavy being dragged along the linoleum floor.
“I don’t know how they got inside, but they’re everywhere. Nate, can you walk?”
A mutter. A grunt.
Kellogg pulled his pistol at the door. As they stepped into the hallway, a soldier with a big chunk of his face missing shambled forward, a moan gurgling up from his throat.
Kellogg raised his pistol and fired, laying the soldier out on his back.
“Come on,” he said. “This way.”
“Where are you taking me? Lemme go.”
The main lights were down, and only the dim red glow of the emergency lights lit the hallway. In the shadows ahead, Kellogg saw an infected soldier kneeling over a civilian. The body was twitching as the soldier tore into it with his teeth. There was a long, gory trail of blood on the ground, and it looked like the civilian had been dragged to her current spot from a side hallway.
The zombie rose to his feet as Kellogg and Nate approached. Kellogg shot him without even looking at his face, then turned down a side hallway and started to pick up speed.
“Where are you taking me?”
“Cafeteria on two. Gotta take the back stairs, though. The whole first floor is overrun.”
“Just lemme die here, doc. I don’t want to go.”
Kellogg looked Nate in the face. His skin was ashen, the lips tinged blue. There was a dull, glassy torpor in his eyes.
“You’re not gonna die, Nate. I won’t let that happen.”
To his left, Kellogg saw a stairwell. It was dark, but in the darkness he could see a faint red glow and tendrils of smoke rising up to the landing. From somewhere down below, he could hear the sound of fighting mixed with the moans of the infected. Off to his right was a long, empty hallway, also dark, and as he stared down its length he had a sudden flash-back to San Antonio and the five days he’d spent wandering the hallways of Brooke Army Medical Center, fighting the infected and praying for rescue.
Their first cases had come in late in the afternoon by EMS. Kellogg’s specialty was blood-borne pathogens, and he had no idea why they were calling him into the ER. The scant description they gave him made it sound like the San Antonio Police Department had beat the shit out of a handful of meth freaks, and now they expected him to…do what exactly? Triage wasn’t his thing.
And then he stepped into the ER, and everything changed. There were bodies everywhere. People were screaming. Doctors and nurses were moving from bed to bed like ants on a mound. Nobody seemed to have any idea what was going on. Kellogg saw terrible wounds on every bed he passed. He saw firefighters and cops with blood all over their uniforms, some of them slumped on their butts on the floor, heads hanging in exhaustion. A woman was tied down to an EMS gurney. Her lips had been torn off. She was straining against her bonds to reach him, her face bright with fever, eyes milky and bloodshot, every vein and piece of connective tissue in her neck standing out like electrical cords beneath her skin. Kellogg stared at her in shock. A nurse pushed by him and nearly knocked him down. “Excuse me,” he said angrily. But the nurse didn’t even pause to acknowledge the contact. Kellogg turned back to the woman on the gurney, and only then did he see the blackened necrotic tissue in the wounds around her mouth. Only then did he smell the unmistakable odor of rotting flesh. In that moment, he knew this was no typical San Antonio Saturday-night street brawl gone bad. This was something else entirely.
He turned to find the officer in charge. He wasn’t sure what they had yet, but he was already sure they were dealing with something highly virulent, and in his head, Kellogg was running down his list of containment options. It was difficult to pick apart the exact moment that things got out of hand. Perhaps it was already too late before Kellogg even stepped foot in the ER. But what he remembered of that first afternoon was the shooting. Three shots, high and hollow-sounding pops. He turned to see a wounded cop shooting at two men in a hallway to his left. Everyone hit the deck. Then they watched as the men lumbered forward, one of them already shot twice in the abdomen, and collapsed on the cop.
It was chaos after that. Any pretense at organized triage broke down. The infected—though at the time he still wasn’t thinking of them as such—rose more or less en masse and fell on the staff. People were yanked off their feet. Kellogg watched a friend of his get his throat torn out by an overweight woman in a bloodstained black miniskirt. A man with deep, infected scratches along the side of his face grabbed Kellogg by the shoulders and tried to throw him to the ground. Kellogg twisted in the man’s arms and swept his legs out from under him. The man went down easily, clumsily, like a drunk, and though he hit his head on a corner of the wall, he rolled over and got back to his feet without acknowledging the pain. He stumbled forward, and for the first time, Kellogg heard the moaning that would forever afterward haunt his sleep. “Back off,” he said to the man. But the man kept coming. Kellogg backed up and hit a chair. He pulled it around and raised it between him and the man. When the man held out his hands to grab, Kellogg caught him up in the legs of the chair and twisted, throwing him to the ground once more.
He was left on his feet, staring across the confusion on the ER floor, looking at the open exterior doors. Outside, dusk was just starting to settle over the parking lot. The sky was pink, and the lights of San Antonio’s skyline were just visible in the distance above the thicket of oak trees that lined the southern perimeter of the base. That had been his moment. He could have run for it right then and made it outside. Maybe escaped into the city itself and saved himself five days of hell. But he didn’t take it. He waited just a moment too long, and a moment later the gap closed and the daylight was gone. Only the nightmare remained.
Behind him, he heard the sound of a body hitting the floor, and it roused him from his thoughts. Kellogg looked around him, at the damaged hospital and Nate Royal hanging on his arm, his breath sour and rancid against his cheeks, and Kellogg’s head felt clearer than it had in days. He turned and saw the infected coming up the stairs. Four of them. Now six, then nine more. He could hear more on the stairs below.
“Nate,” he said.
A weak mutter.
“Come on, buddy, time to go.”
So the back stairs were out. Ahead of them, at the end of the hallway, was a waiting room that overlooked the lobby. There might be a way down to the second floor from there, but Kellogg wasn’t sure.
With the infected behind them, filling up the hallway with their moans, Kellogg pulled Nate toward the doors on their right. Nate wasn’t resisting, but he was nearly deadweight on Kellogg’s shoulder and it made moving difficult. By the time they reached the end of the hallway, three of the infected had managed to close the gap between them. Kellogg turned and shot the lead zombie in the chin, blowing the bottom of the zombie’s face off in two large bloody chunks. The zombie went down and flailed against the ground, trying to get back up, but Kellogg didn’t bother with a follow-up shot. There wasn’t time. Another zombie was on him. Kellogg fired and managed only a glancing blow to the thing’s shoulder. The bullet’s impact spun the zombie around but didn’t put it down.
Kellogg reached for the door and tried to push it open, realizing too late that it was controlled by a panel button along the wall of the hallway.
There was another zombie between him and the panel button, and more coming down the hall. He threw his shoulder into the door, but couldn’t get any leverage against it while still holding Nate’s weight.
Nate groaned, then slipped off Kellogg’s arm.
At first, Kellogg thought Nate was falling and he tried to catch him, but Nate pushed him away. “I’m okay,” he said. “Get the door open.”
Kellogg thr
ew his shoulder into the door and felt it give a little, but it still wouldn’t open.
“The button on the wall,” he said to Nate.
Kellogg raised his pistol and shot the zombie in front of the button, this time landing a solid head shot. The zombie fell back against the wall and sagged to the ground, spreading a smeared line of gore down to the floor.
But before Kellogg could step into the gap to hit the button, Nate was there. A zombie lunged at him from his left and took a bite of Nate’s forearm, causing Nate to erupt in a scream so raw it seemed almost feral. The two of them wrestled awkwardly as Kellogg, momentarily frozen, stood there watching.
“Hit the fucking button,” Nate said.
Kellogg shook himself. He jumped forward and slapped the button on the wall. Behind him, the doors swung open, revealing a wide, carpeted, comfortable-looking waiting room with couches and chairs arranged around a TV set mounted on the far wall. Beyond the furniture was a row of cubicles separated by thick round columns that rose to a height of about ten feet off the floor but didn’t go all the way to the ceiling, the tops festooned with ferns.
He grabbed the back of Nate’s shirt and pulled him away from the zombie. A moment later, they were rushing across the waiting room toward the cubicles and climbing up the walls to the top of the nearest column. Kellogg pushed Nate onto the column, then scrambled up after him. He dropped down next to Nate and kicked the plants down on top of the zombies reaching up for him.
“That was close,” he said.
Beside him, Nate was clutching his arm, his eyes tightly shut against the pain.
Below them, the room filled up with zombies.
“They sure got on us fast enough.”
Kellogg pulled his knees up to his chest. He was breathing hard from the climb up the column, and sweat had dampened his scrubs so that they stuck to his chest. He glanced over the side, into a ring of snarling, mangled faces, and said, “Yeah, they tend to do that. You hear that in every survivor’s description, how fast they swarm. We still haven’t figured out how they do that.”
