Rotting to the Core (Keep Your Crowbar Handy Book 2)

by Durnin, S. P.

  He stared at her.

  “I mean, if there are zombies all around, they'd get in too, right?” She put one hand to her lips. “Uncle George, how do Laurel and the others get back in?”

  Foster looked like he'd just crapped his shorts.

  “Oh shit.”

  * * *

  Making it out of the generator building had been easy.

  After emptying the M134 into the cafeteria's face, Jake and Kat left the cumbersome weapon and ammunition pack, then hurried down four flights of metal steps to ground level. The writer was a little light-headed by then, but that was understandable. He'd had a pretty stressful day so far. Besides, he hadn't eaten anything since the previous evening, and he needed a cigarette. It couldn't have been because Poole's men had worked him over when they'd caught him attempting to strangle Nichole. Or the deep knife wound in his shoulder, which was already beginning to seep through the bandages.

  Moving quickly through the structure, the two came to the exterior door. It opened to the building's leeward side and afforded them cover as they carefully opened the solid, seven-foot plate, before creeping to the corner closest to the office block.

  Even though he wasn't at one-hundred percent, Jake insisted on being in the lead. Kat did try to argue him out of it, citing that she should be the one on point since he was hurt.

  “It's a guy thing,” he'd replied, leaning against the cinder-block wall and peeking cautiously around the corner. The ninja-girl bit her lip when she saw the smear of crimson he left along its surface. “They're still inside. If we move next to the patio slab they won't have a clear line of sight, and we might be able to circle around to the Hummer. Then we can—”

  The sound of an incredible explosion echoed off the surrounding walls. Taking advantage of the moment, Jake grabbed Cho's free hand and they sprinted across the gap. Once they stood panting against the outer wall of the offices, weapons trained on the nearby stairs, he had time to worry about what had caused it.

  “That would be the sound of shit hitting the fan. At least for these assholes,” Kat told him with a knowing smile. “I'm pretty sure George won't have left much in the way of a door on the front of their little clubhouse.”

  His head snapped around. “The others are here?”

  “You didn't think I shot off that flare to amuse myself did you? Mind, I always did like the fireworks on the fourth of July. And once, I accidentally burned down—”

  “Moving on,” he said firmly. “Was there something resembling a plan? Or are we just winging it?”

  Cho gave him an amused look. “Because that worked out so well for you? No. I set it up with George, just after they took you to meet the Grand Poo-bah.”

  “Shithead-in-Charge is a more accurate description.”

  Kat rolled her eyes. “What-ever. That’s why I brought your vest. Tracker, you know?”

  Jake considered that for a moment. “The gate is on the other side of this building.”

  “So?”

  “So, the others will come through it,” he replied, and checked his pistol to insure a round was in the chamber. “The Purifiers have cover in the cafeteria and they know the layout. They'll tear our people to shreds.”

  Kat thought about that. “Let me see up on the patio for a sec.”

  Jake let her slide by to scan the concrete slab.

  “Thought so.” Cho reached out, pulled an AR-15 back over the edge and handed it to him. “Here. I'll take the pistols. You're better with a machine gun than I am.”

  As he inspected the weapon, she turned back, hopped up, and pushed her upper body over the lip of the patio. Jake dropped the carbine, ignoring the awful pain in his shoulder, grabbed Kat by her hips, and pulled her back off the slab into his arms.

  “Dammit! Do! Not! Do that!” O'Connor exclaimed through clenched teeth.

  She gave him a quizzical look. “I was just—”

  He was in no mood to listen just then. “No! You step up there, stroll around the corner, the Purifiers blow your head off, and I end up a basket case! What the hell were you thinking??”

  “But—”

  “You can't rip me for coming here on my own, and then take a risk like that!” He shook her firmly, determined to make her see reason. That was how Kat knew Jake was actually terrified. “You want me to go crazy? Do you think I could handle watching you die? I couldn't, alright? It would—”

  Kat raised her hand. An ammunition bag holding seven full magazines of 5.56 by 45 rounds hung from her palm. It was covered in blood and bone fragments from one of the Purifiers that she'd cut in half with the Minigun. She smiled as Jake stuffed his pistol in the waistband of his khakis, then passed the bag's strap over his head and wounded arm. After he retrieved the AR-15 from the ground, he ejected the mag and swapped it for a fresh one.

  “Uh. Sorry about that,” he said lamely.

  The pretty ninja-girl's smile widened. She reached down and carefully extracted the Glock from the front of his pants. “Let's not keep projectile weapons anywhere near that particular area, shall we? Who knows? You might need that later.”

  The thought of that conversation made his pulse jump a bit.

  “OK,” he said, “here's what we'll do…”

  * * *

  Rae tossed a pair of grenades into the cafeteria.

  Poole and his men were concentrated on her friends outside, so the buxom fixer decided to start the party.

  She wasn't that surprised their pair of missing friends had managed not only to escape the Purifiers—a bunch of wanna-be, weekend warriors if she'd ever seen any—but also to launch a fairly successful attack against them. Kat was a deadly, deadly woman. The little Rae had seen of her martial arts skills alone put her at a threat level far above that of an average person. Stick a sword or a gun in Cho's hand, and you had a smiling, Smurf-haired, Angel of the Apocalypse. She'd have to watch Kat closely in the future.

  Jake was a force to be reckoned with in his own right. The intense, younger man was usually still a bit soft spoken, as if he were afraid to voice his thoughts. Probably why he'd become a journalist and not an actor. But with a body like that, and those eyes? Hubba-hubba. He was in good shape, had obviously been put through some more-than-decent Special Forces training (both hand-to-hand and with weaponry) and had a quick—if somewhat odd—mind. Underneath it all, even though he didn't seem to realize it himself, the unruly-haired writer was made of industrial-tooled steel.

  The pair had begun sniping at the Purifiers from outside, just after Rae and the others had entered the power plant. Kat, from shelter behind a large, concrete planter at the edge of the patio and Jake, from beside the cinder-block door-jam at the cafeteria entrance on the opposite side.

  Smart. They set up a crossfire. Rae thought. She waved the Barbie Duo back and pulled a pair of explosives from the bandolier angled between her impressive breasts. A Purifier comes up to shoot at one and the other pops him, or at least gets a shot close enough to send the bastard diving for the floor again.

  Pulling the pins, Rae let the spoons fall to the floor, counted to two, and then forcefully bowled the murderous spheres towards the Nazi's clustered behind some overturned tables.

  Three... Four...

  “Fire in the hole!!” She yelled, slammed the cafeteria door shut, and spun behind the shelter of the wall with Donna and Gwen.

  As explosions went, it was quite satisfying.

  The windows facing the patio (that had survived Kat's assault with the Minigun) blew out in a cloud of knife-sharp glitter, and about half the tables were turned into flying chunks. The twelve-foot wide, steel, roll-down shutter over the lunch counter window blew into the main floor and—more importantly—out of the three dozen or so remaining Purifiers, only thirteen of them actually survived the blast.

  M67 fragmentation grenades were designed to produce very specific results. The body of such a device is most commonly made of steel, and the case itself provides the shrapnel fragments that are thrown out in a fifteen
meter radius by the explosive charge within. The weapon, in layman's terms, causes catastrophic damage to a given structural or human target.

  Basically, anything inside the area of detonation gets dead.

  Which is exactly what happened to most of Poole's, goose stepping droogies.

  Rae and the Barbies began firing through the interior door, which killed three more outright and sent the others running for the patio entrance.

  Jake and Kat opened up on them again.

  The cement slab became a killing ground. Purifiers fired their weapons at the pair outside, only to catch rounds in the back from the three women in the turbine room. When one would turn back to shoot at Rae or one of the Barbies, Jake's AR-15 would pepper the man, sending him to the ground. Or Kat would take awful glee in shooting them in the groin, which the others—Jake especially—thought was just, plain mean.

  Poole, along with his last two surviving underlings, dropped their weapons and threw their hands to the sky. Rae and the Barbies held further fire and moved through the mess inside toward them, stepping over bodies and around growing pools of blood.

  “Don't you move, asshole!” Jake sidestepped away from where he'd sheltered on the wall, carbine level and locked on the Nazi leader.

  “Well. Isn't it odd, how circumstances can reverse themselves so quickly?” Poole said, as Kat moved from behind her planter to stand beside the writer.

  O'Connor's eyes were venomous. “Did you enjoy it? What your people did to Karen?”

  Poole spread his arms. “Not as such, but it was unavoidable, really. I required your vehicle for our journey to safety, and I needed you to gain access to it. The little kike was just a means to—”

  Jake emptied his weapon into Poole from fifteen feet away. The man's immaculate gray suit front turned brown as rounds from the AR-15 tore through the Purifier leader's flesh and internal organs. He danced like a sick marionette as they penetrated his torso for a few moments, then he fell lifeless to the patio surface. Standing over the man's body, Jake felt nothing. No anger, no sorrow, no remorse. Poole and Milo were dead, but so was Karen. No matter how many Purifiers had died at his hands, nothing could change the fact he'd failed the young woman Maggie had charged him with saving.

  But that didn't mean the men who'd killed her should be allowed to live.

  Turning his back on the inert sack of shit, Jake moved close to Cho and took one of the Glocks from her left hand.

  “I can do it. If you want,” she said softly.

  Jake shook his head. “It should be me.”

  He double-tapped both men quickly, not wanting to listen to either of them beg for their miserable lives. Afterwards, he stared at the gun in his hand for a long time.

  “Glad you guys are alive!” Gwen said as she stepped around the unmoving body of a bearded Purifier Kat had shot in the neck.

  “They were a bunch of bitches,” Kat replied, pausing to reload her pistol after taking it from the writer's unfeeling hand.

  “Well, regardless,” Rae said, and nudged a corpse with her boot, “we need to get moving. George took the gate out with that monstrosity of his, so we shouldn't dawdle. Our smelly friends outside will be coming soon, and they're still darned hungry.”

  When Jake didn't respond, Kat glanced at him worriedly.

  “Rae, could you go let George know we're on the way?” she asked.

  “Sure. Oh. There weren't any of these assholes left inside, were there?” she asked, pointing at one of the corpses that had been killed by one of her grenades. His top half anyway.

  “No. They were all outside watching the show,” he told them, eyes unfocused.

  “Good. Laurel and Penny went to check the upstairs and hunt around for you. I'll send Donna to find her, and have George get ready to roll.”

  Jake continued to stare at the dead Purifiers on the patio as the trio headed back through the cafeteria. Kat knew his shoulder had to be killing him after the firefight. It had already bled through his bandages, slowly allowing crimson to drip down his arm, and he was very pale. Shock was beginning to look like a real possibility, as she moved to take his face between her hands.

  “Hey. Come on, hero. We need to go.”

  “What's the point?” he asked numbly. “It's all like this. Everyone in the whole damn world is trying to feed on someone else, one way or another. Poole, Nichole, the zombies. They're no different. And they're trying to turn me into one of them.”

  She pulled him into her arms, ignoring the blood that coated her right shoulder and upper torso, as he wrapped his good arm around her. “You're not like them,” Cho said firmly, willing him to believe it.

  “I murdered those men laying right there.” Jake was trembling. “I'll do it again, if I think it might be necessary. I should feel bad about that, but I don't. I don't. Why can't I feel anything?”

  Kat held him tighter. “You've got a strong heart, Jake. A good heart. It's not in you to be cruel. I'd no more believe you'd turn into a monster than I would that George could start dancing around in a pink tutu, singing 'It's Raining Men'. You could never be like these bastards. It's not in you.”

  She pulled back enough to look in his fear-filled eyes. “And even if it were, I wouldn't let that happen.”

  Jake could tell she meant it. Kat didn't show that side of her personality often. Usually she was the bubbly—if slightly vapid—good natured sex-kitten. When the steel began to show in her eyes though, watch out.

  “How do you do that?” he mumbled.

  Confused, she asked, “How do I do what?”

  “Make me want to kick myself for introducing you to Allen.” Jake said quietly, and finally looking her in the eye. “Make me wish I'd taken you out of that pharmacy and flown us to a beach in Aruba the day we met.”

  “I used to read a lot of romance novels.”

  “You?” He gaped at her incredulously.

  “Hey, sex and romance aren’t the same thing,” Kat said defensively. “You can have sex with anybody. But romance? You need to care about a person. You need to have a connection.”

  The thoughtful way he looked at her made Kat's heart speed up. “You know something?”

  She was feeling a little out of breath under his gaze. “What?”

  He leaned forward and his eyes never wavered from hers. Jake whispered to her, his lips a hair's width from her own. “I've always said the same thing.”

  Kat was trembling in the circle of his arm now. “So...um. So what do we—”

  A high scream rang out from inside the building. Breaking apart, they bolted into the office block, weapons ready, dashed through the cafeteria and into the echoing room housing the plant’s massive turbines.

  Rae and Gwen were backing towards them from the far wall, their own weapons pulled tightly to their shoulders and aimed towards the door leading outside.

  The Mimi wasn't out there.

  The infected were.

  “Oh. Shit,” O'Connor whispered.

  There were, quite literally, a river of the dead flowing by outside. The rotting conga line stretched all the way back to the gate, three-hundred yards distant. Many of the creatures had spread out a bit as they entered the facility, but the majority simply remained true to form and continued to shuffle towards any stimuli.

  In this case, the high volume of noise generated by their parties battle with the Purifiers.

  The nearest creatures noticed the open door, and then the humans standing within. Yellow eyes locked on them in almost palatable hunger, and gray skinned jaws dropped open with gurgling moans. Then the first of them stepped though the doorway, and the whole damn horde began moving towards the survivors.

  “Shoot!” Jake yelled.

  They began fighting for their lives. Brains, long-congealed blood, and fetid fluids spattered across the far wall. It coated the faces of the infected behind the first rank, but they kept coming.

  They aimed for the heads, realizing any other hit was useless and that their ammo supply was finite.
They fired carefully, calmly, hitting seven of ten head-shots, trying to block the door with the fallen and deny the creatures entry. The dead stumbled over the prone bodies of their predecessors and kept coming.

  Jake shot over and over, nailing the awful things through their eyes with rounds from the AR-15. Kat hit the bulls eye, striking them through the center of their brows with bullets from both Glocks, but the dead kept coming.

  Gwen pulped their frontal lobes with shots from the barrel of her own AR-15. Rae vaporized entire heads with blasts from her XM-8, sending rotting bodies flying back to impact lifelessly against the faces of the ghouls behind.

  The dead... kept... coming.

  Their party was slowly pushed back among the turbines as more and more infected filtered through the opening. Dozens lay truly dead all over the building's floor, but hundreds more were still on the way. The creatures filled half the room now and still more pushed in behind, hungry for the life behind slowly heating, blued-steel barrels.

  At that point, Donna rushed from the stairwell. She was talking over her shoulder with Penny and Laurel, so she hadn't paid much attention to where she was going. The turbine house was well soundproofed, due to the excessive noise the huge machines made when in use, so neither of the other women had heard the single-sided firefight either, until they were in the middle of it.

  “…so Kat said to come get you and… YIPE!”

  The blonde had run headlong into one of the creatures, knocking it over against other members of the terrible horde. She stumbled to regain her balance as Penny cursed loudly and brought her weapon to bear. Laurel's eyes went wide and locked on to where the unruly-haired writer stood, throwing hollow-pointed death before him.

  “Jake!”

  “Laurel! Get back in the stairwell!” he yelled, and tried to clear a path to her through the mass to no effect. “Get back inside!”

  Many of the dead oriented on the two women and started forward.