by Bryan James
Almost.
“Okay, it’s your call,” I said. “We can’t go through that many.”
“Yes, my phone call,” he said, motioning for the rest to turn around.
“Your… That’s not the…” Kate frowned and motioned to me to shut up.
Someone needed to tell this kooky immigrant how to speak.
Later.
We flowed back into the field, and Artan immediately banked to the left, softly opening one of the small gates between the field and the stands and beginning to mount the steps to the next level.
“Does he know where he’s going?” asked Ky, voice slightly concerned. Romeo ranged ahead, tail up, eyes alert. “‘Cause sometimes, I don’t understand what he says.”
I grunted once, tilting my head briefly to the side and back again.
“Yeah, kid. You’re not the only one. But he’s the last cab driver left in the city, so if he doesn’t know where we’re going, we’re out of luck.”
Artan was already veering right, Rhodes following closely behind along the railed walkway that ringed the first level of the stadium. Smaller doorways into the stadium were set at intervals along the walkway, and more steps led up into the thousands of bleachers every twenty feet.
As Kate stepped up to the walkway, I stopped, frozen in place. The stairwell we had used to climb up led to a wide doorway leading to the interior of the building, where the concessions and restrooms and shops were located. The far side of the building, where the windows led to the outside, was visible from where I stood. And outlined against the faint moonlight outside was a group of nearly a dozen creatures.
“Kate, turn slowly. I don’t know if they’ve seen us yet,” I whispered into my microphone, and Rhodes and Artan automatically swiveled, well out of view of the doorway. Kate stopped, and slowly turned on one heel, eyes finding the movement and stopping cold. Ky and Romeo, already up, were frozen near Rhodes, and he stopped where he was.
“How many?” he asked, gun up and ready.
“Almost a dozen, maybe more inside,” I whispered, eyes locked on the milling bodies inside.
“They spotted to you?” Artan’s voice rasped on the network.
“Stand. By.” I said slowly, annoyed at the traffic.
They bounced against one another, their outlines stark against the somewhat dirty glass of the building. A large stuffed bird of some sort wilted against its ropes in a large display, the remnants of souvenirs strewn at its feet. They didn’t seem to have picked up on my presence and I stayed still, hoping I’d have a chance to move.
“Uh, Mike?” Ky’s voice was worried, and I responded quickly.
“Don’t worry kid, I’m just going to stay here until they move on.”
She was quiet for a minute, then spoke again.
“Yeah, well… I think we don’t have time for that,” she said, and I looked up as she pointed toward an entrance to our right only two hundred feet away. A long, straggling line of corpses was emerging, seemingly at random, but I cursed a I realized that they must have heard the chopper, and they were only now making their way out. I turned back, staring at the ones inside again.
Several of them were now staring back.
Shit.
“Time to leave,” I said loudly. Waiting with his finger on the trigger, Rhodes started firing at the group approaching from our right. I pushed Ky back away from the doorway, and hefted the Pathfinder. Kate stepped in beside me. There were too many on the right, cutting us off. We’d have to go inside.
The shotguns tore into the line of undead in front of us, taking away limbs and ripping through torsos and skulls, explosive rounds tearing through flesh and igniting skin and hair.
There were dozens coming from inside toward us, and Rhodes and Artan backed into position behind us, Ky and Romeo in the middle. The polished concrete walls echoed fiercely as the guns crashed and the bodies exploded. We moved forward slowly, relishing the impact of the explosive rounds.
I fired into the torso of a skinny creature, still wearing the ball cap with the Seattle logo, jaw unhinged and bloody, eyes wide and staring. The explosive rounds cut him in half, sending the top of the torso careening into the wall with the sound of a cantaloupe falling from a table.
The pellets spread out, some of them traveling through the skinny man and into two more creatures, both young women, both wearing summer dresses that hung from skinny, rotting shoulder blades. One still clutched a cell phone in her emaciated hand. They were thrown back into the hallway behind, skidding to a stop in a bloody, black smear.
Kate was working her way forward, cursing loudly every time she fired the large weapon. The creatures in front of us were thinning out, and I heard Rhodes on the comms from behind.
“Must. Go. Faster.” He said, and I heard the whisper of his silenced weapon, shots repeating in precise cadence.
“Yeah, got it,” I said. More than a dozen still stood before us, and I pulled my trigger once more. Click.
Time to have some fun.
I drew the machete with my right hand, transferring the bayonet to my left. The balance was somehow better that way.
Beside me, Kate fired two more rounds, and I heard her machete leave the scabbard.
“Come in,” I said calmly over the microphone. My blood was pounding in my head and my chest heaved. “It’s clear.”
“You have not finished…” Artan began. But then he understood.
I waded into the undead.
I took the first with a forearm to the jaw, using the plates of metal in the jacket as a weapon, and followed with a stiff thrust from the machete through the skull, taking the creature in the soft skin below the chin. I swiveled quickly, pulling the body with me by the still-impaled head, using it to block the next two creatures as I grasped the shotgun by the end, extending its reach, and turned, spinning on one leg and releasing the impaled creature. I allowed my weight to carry me through the pivot, and two heads fell neatly to the floor as I ended in a half squat.
Kate was pulling her bayonet from the chest of an old man, who had somehow lost his shirt and pants, but not his large foam hat. She kicked the body backward into another creature and then moved in with her machete. The foam hat stayed with the head as it fell to the ground, bouncing absurdly with the message “We’re Number One!” emblazoned in the blue plastic.
I whirled again, vaulting the counter of the nearest food stand and waiting for the last three creatures to line up at the counter, arms outstretched and leaning in for me.
Three little piggies, all in a row.
Their heads burst open easily, and I stepped back from the blackened brains that fell to the counter, a humorous, if disgusting, statement about the establishment behind me.
Kate and Ky came around the corner, and Artan spoke in a muted whisper.
“They’re coming from the walkway. Too many. Must upstairs to go. Come.”
I followed Rhodes, who was reloading as he walked, reminding me to do the same. Fishing into my pocket, I ejected the spent magazine and threw in another—non-explosive this time. I had a feeling I’d need those later, and I only had one left—the Seattle folks hadn’t been introduced to that toy yet, so our special ammo was scarce.
Our footsteps echoed loudly in the cavernous stairwell, designed for hundreds of people every hour. Emerging on the next floor up, I exhaled loudly. The path was clear to the left, where we needed to go. But the doorways into the stadium itself were closed and chained.
We ran past the mixture of stores and concessions, past several dead and devoured bodies, noticeable as human only from the protrusion of spines and femurs from the mass of black, bloody pulp on the dirty floor. Candy wrappers and old paper towels from the restaurants mixed with the refuse of the bodies, and the smell almost plowed us under.
I grabbed Ky by the back of the jacket and carried her twenty feet while she vomited loudly, Romeo whimpering softly next to her, a tongue lashing out for her gloved hands.
“Around corner, to walkway,” Artan brea
thed into his comms, and I heard Rhodes’ gun whisper once, taking a shambler in the face as it slowly pushed its head out from under the counter of a wings restaurant, sending it pin wheeling clumsily into a soda fountain.
Behind us, they started to stream out of the stairwell we had used, drawn to the gunfire from below, their feet slapping mindlessly on the polished cement.
Artan slowed as we reached a pair of double glass doors with a chain wrapped around the metal handles. On the other side, a long glass-enclosed tunnel ran over the street below and to a series of commercial buildings and a parking lot on the other side. On the road below, there were no creatures visible.
“We have to shoot,” said Artan, gesturing at the doors and raising his pistol. I turned away from the shattering glass, as the sound ripped through the empty area, carrying behind us to our friends, and across the building.
The overpass was tiled in a bright white commercial porcelain, and it reflected the meager light streaming in from the glass walls from the thin moon that had emerged from the cloud cover. In the distance, I could see the waterfront of the city, water covering the street that sat parallel to the sound. One lane of the roadway was submerged, and the bay had almost reached the flooded avenue.
Finnigan had warned us about the water.
The city of Seattle, much like D.C., faced water intrusion and retention problems. Massive series of pumps helped keep the intense volume of water that constantly dropped on the concrete jungle from accumulating at sea level, and instead helped funnel all the moisture to the sea. When the power went out, the pumps went out. Now, the water was doing what water did. It was flowing downhill, and collecting. Soon, the bay would connect with the roadway, where the runoff was gathering. Then, the waves would slowly start working against the line of tall buildings along the waterfront, eventually beating them into submission, and reclaiming the land that had been stolen from it when the sound was dredged to make more room for city.
Circle of life, baby.
In the building behind us, they had reached the tunnel, and began to pour clumsily into the glass tube. We reached the end of the walkway, and Artan cursed loudly, in what I could only assume was angry Albanian.
“Share, please.” Rhodes was focused on the angry herd behind us, only seventy feet away.
“Lock again. Doors very thick for now. We need to explode.”
“I have a grenade, let’s do it,” said Rhodes, pulling the small explosive from his pocket.
“Problem is too much bang. We go out there, or we get injury.” Artan pointed at the creatures, advancing quickly.
“Rhodes, take her,” I said, pushing Ky towards the large man and pulling the shotgun to my shoulder. “We’ll hold them off, follow us.”
Kate and I moved into the breach again, and I heard the footfalls behind us. My pulse quickened again, and the adrenaline surged. There was no fun in shooting. The action was up close. It was personal.
Their stench reached my nostrils and I closed my eyes.
It was no longer the smell of the undead. It was the smell of battle. Of living.
Kate screamed and I opened my eyes.
A creature took me by the throat, hands scrabbling for more purchase on my jacket.
Beside me, her Pathfinder spoke right before a roar that drowned out the shotgun. Chunks of glass and metal shattered into the walls, glass falling.
I grabbed the arms at my throat, and pulled them to the sides. I felt the bone and sinew pull from the shoulders with a tearing sensation rippling through my arms. The arms dropped to the floor, and I raised the gun. The thick metal pellets tore through three bodies, tightly packed against one another. I turned slightly, taking two more, both at head level. Blackened brain sprayed into the bodies behind, some of them slowing to taste the effluent smeared on the bright tile.
Kate’s gun spoke again, and I followed. She screamed, whether in fright or joy, I didn’t know. But I smiled as I fired again, watching the heads explode and the torsos shatter. I suspected the latter.
“Mike!” Rhodes voice wasn’t in my ear bud, it was in my ear. “We are leaving!” he yelled, and I shook my head slightly, looking behind us.
Artan and Ky were perched at the top of a set of stairs leading down into the commercial buildings below. Kate was stowing the shotgun and turning away. My hand twitched on the weapon before turning and following, begrudgingly leaving more bodies behind.
That’s when I felt it.
The first hiccup.
My chest shuddered briefly, and, like the fluttering wings of a scared bird, my heart twitched. Quickly, and then gone.
Shit.
I took a deep breath as we moved toward the stairs and followed Ky and Artan into a broad gallery of shops, the doorway to the street level propped open with a paint can under a large sign marked “Construction Under Way.”
THIRTY-TWO
The city was a ghost town. I had never noticed how much noise you come to expect from a large collection of buildings and roads—that you seem to expect the very concrete itself to hum with life and energy. That the cars that so annoy you when you are trying to cross the street or get directions, really are like the blood in the arteries of a living, breathing metropolis.
Without it all, without the power and the lights and the cars and the raised voices and the panhandling and the street musicians—without all of these marks of humanity, our cities are merely our tombs, waiting to be filled by the dead.
Seattle had become a tomb.
The herds that had been here had taken no prisoners and given no quarter. There may be survivors in the large, looming buildings, their profiles blacking out the slim hope of moonlight in the canyon-like streets, but they did not own the city. Street corners and intersections were macabre reminders of the brutality of thousands of undead, parked cars and storefronts with broken glass and skeletal remains were reminders of the hopelessness of being stranded, alone and defenseless.
We moved north, carefully and quietly, taking the narrower streets that moved in the right direction, heeding Artan as he stopped carefully behind cover, at specific landmarks, and at seemingly random intervals.
“I park here once with woman,” he said as we passed a small park in the center of a several large office buildings.
“In your cab?” asked Kate, glancing around the spectral park, untended trees dipping long branches toward a series of fountains.
“I work in cab,” he said dismissively, as if insulted. “I go on date with car of me.”
“Uh-huh,” she said, markedly disinterested. I smiled, watching Ky shadow Rhodes across the street, dodging between a stopped bus and a t-boned car at the crosswalk.
We were crossing parallel to the park and moving along the line of broken and shattered windows of an old hotel when Romeo disappeared around a corner, nose twitching. I grabbed Artan’s shoulder before he followed the dog into the next street. I shook my head and held my hand up to my mouth, warning him against speech, noticing the dog’s hunting mode.
Rhodes knew the drill, and he stopped, crouching out of instinct. I edged forward, peering through the shattered window of the hotel’s display, watching for the animal’s return.
“He knows the beasts?” Artan whispered softly, and I picked up the coffee and cigarette smell of his breath.
“Yeah, he can smell ‘em or something. He’s good at giving us warning.”
“Mike,” Ky’s voice was quiet, and I barely heard it.
“He comes back?” Artan asked, apparently annoyed at the slow-down.
“Yes, but sometimes it takes a—”
“Mike,” Ky said, interrupting, this time louder.
I looked at her, and she didn’t look back. She was staring at the shattered glass in front of me. I turned, at first not seeing the target of her anxiety.
“Balls,” said Kate, pulling her weapon around and whipping her head from side to side.
“What the…?” I muttered, turning away from the hotel.
The glass plating was vibrating.
I turned in place, eyes scanning in the dark.
The roads were clear.
I looked up, searching the sky for a helicopter that might account for a low vibration.
Nothing.
Looking through the shattered window once more, I watched as the broken panes vibrated stronger, turning from a slight shake to an audible rattle.
Something was coming.
“Mike, we need to—”
“We don’t know where it’s coming from,” I interrupted her, and Kate looked around, head turning in place.
Rhodes looked up sharply, his night vision goggles glowing softly and flashing red.
“What?” I asked quickly.
He shook his head, as if confused.
“Nothing. I just… thought I heard something.”
Shit.
The streets were clear.
The skies were clear.
They were in the goddamned buildings.
“Get away from the hotel,” I said, grabbing Ky by the jacket and pulling her away from the window.
I knew where Romeo went. He went in the front door of the hotel. That’s what he smelled. That’s where they were.
“Move! Down the street! They’re in the building!”
Glass showered down on us as I finished yelling, and I hunched over Ky as she screamed in surprise. Artan cursed loudly over the comms, and dove for cover behind a parked truck. A body landed heavily near the wall, and instantly twitched and rolled toward us.
Kate and Rhodes barreled past, Kate leaning her arm out and grabbing Ky’s other arm as Romeo darted back out into the street, his loud bark confirming what we now knew.
More glass shattered, and more bodies fell to the ground. I looked up long enough to see the outline of a piano and several tables—they must be coming through a ballroom or a restaurant.
I pushed Ky in front of me and then folded over, the massive weight of a body slamming me to the ground. Another sharp pain and then another bore me to the ground as I rolled to the side with my momentum.
“Go!” I shouted to Ky, hoping she could hear me. Thrown free, she rolled away and scrambled to her feet.
