“I’d agree with you,” Dr. Carson said. “Phillip Mercer is the guy pulling the strings right now and we must do things his way. But I’m telling you that, if you want to ever see your wife---”
The sound of a vehicle’s horn, something high, tight, and Toyota, came from up ahead and to the left.
“My wife is dead!” Phoenix screamed. He stepped forward and grabbed Dr. Carson by the front of his shirt. He looked into his eyes and said, “Don’t you think I’d do anything to turn back the clock? Or do you think I’m happy about it? Answer me!”
Dr. Carson jerked himself away and pushed Phoenix so hard he hit the truck and lost his balance, falling down to the ground. Dr. Carson bent over and pulled him up to his feet. He slammed him against the truck one more time for good measure.
The sound of the car horn, whimping away at itself as inoffensively as it could, was getting closer.
“You can’t turn back the clock, Detective Malone!” Dr. Carson yelled. “But you can sure as hell do something to make sure it keeps ticking after midnight, after zero – and you’re the only one who can do it! If you want to see your wife again, you’re going to have to man up and get this damned show on the road!”
“Why am I the one---?”
“There is no time!” Dr. Carson yelled. He turned to Alaia and yelled for her to get back into the Jeep. “Once we’re inside, you’ll be part of the picture. Phillip Mercer – and he will pay for his crimes – has made it so that, without you in the system, my system, it will never run. Without you, everyone expires permanently – all of mankind. If you care to know, Chief Cobb came to get you, like I took Darkeem, and plug you in – you were getting too close and we couldn’t have that.”
“My wife. She’s---?”
Dr. Carson nodded and smiled. “Yes. Alive and so is Darkeem, June Buckner, and Albin Demachi – not to mention all of the kids I’ve found homes for and---”
They could hear the sound of a car sliding in gravel, speeding along the road, coming closer.
“Just get this done before Phillip Mercer lights the match,” Dr. Carson said, and he hurried back to the Jeep.
A white Toyota Camry came speeding around the corner just as Phoenix climbed up into the driver’s seat. It took the turn wide, sliding off the road and taking out a few small cedars like they were needles in a pin cushion. Two armed men, both in fatigues, sped by so fast that they barely seemed to notice the truck.
Phoenix felt for the parking brake. All he had to do was release it, put the truck into first, and drive. A conscious decision, a will to move forward, not only with the program, but with his life – and the lives of whoever was waiting in Carson Research Labs – was what he needed to make. Tracy was there. He knew there’d be no guarantees, no surety that what he was about to do wouldn’t end in his own death. He could die now or die at midnight. Or he could live.
Phoenix Malone, with no thought to himself, thought only of his wife. He released the brake, put the truck into first, and stepped on the gas.
Chapter 36
Phoenix, sitting behind the wheel of the truck, was struck by the beauty of the Tennessee countryside in March. He rolled down the windows and breathed deeply, appreciating the scents and fragrances that seemed to fill the air around him.
Everything would be okay.
He smiled. He could feel for the first time in however many months. Anger and rage first and foremost; but those gave way to a sense of duty and love, both of them shot through with sorrow and a strong desire to make things right. And Phoenix, here at the end of all things, had no intention of embracing anything remotely like the end.
He checked the rearview mirror. Alaia followed behind him at a distance. She’d stop just before the turn, wait for Phoenix’s signal – the truck’s horn would be hard to miss – and then she’d make a mad dash towards the entrance to the lab. Hopefully, he’d plow her a path to it. But nothing ever worked out right: not on stakeouts, not on stings, not on anything. Heck, even NPD’s payroll messed up sometimes.
Phoenix looked out through the rearview mirror and he saw Alaia. She saw his face in the mirror and she waved. He watched her drop back slowly as his rig approached the turn, and he reached over and felt for his shotgun. Alaia had loaded up the sixteen-round drum magazine with what was left of the double-aught buck, or with the lawnmower blades, as she called them, telling him he’d be able to mow down anything stupid enough to step in front of him.
The truck, loaded up with angry, snarling, Psyke Virus-infected walking corpses, roared coming out of the turn. Phoenix shifted again and again, bringing the big rig up to speed, hitting forty miles per hour on the straight drive leading into Carson Research Labs. The engine roared, deep and throbbing. Black smoke poured through the smoke stacks leaving a greasy, trailing cloud behind him.
Up ahead, Phoenix could see the CDC vans, maybe five or six, and a number of smaller vehicles – pickup trucks, cars, and a few motorcycles. No perimeter had been set up. There were no barricades and not so much as a single truck had been set up to block access to the parking lot.
Phoenix couldn’t count the number of CDC personnel he saw, but none of them had their weapons ready. All they did was turn and look, surprises on their faces, when the huge Kenworth came roaring into the lot. Phoenix smiled because he’d surprised them, and he drove straight for them, hitting a pickup truck first, and then a group of five men who flew into the air like rag dolls being carried along in a hurricane.
Phoenix turned the truck hard to the right, felt it sliding and roaring on the asphalt, and braced himself for impact.
The truck, almost in slow motion, and in a squeal of smoking rubber and groaning metal, tipped over.
Phoenix was strapped tightly into the seat. He felt his body being thrown to the left with a force he couldn’t overcome. His hand gripped the steering wheel as tightly as was humanly possible. His head jerked to the left, and he felt himself being slammed against the driver’s side door; and he could hear the grinding of metal, bright and shiny, full of sparks, and he could hear the sizzle of heat and abrasion. He closed his eyes, still holding onto the wheel, and he listened to the terrifying screech as the truck slid across the asphalt. Then a crash, hard and loud, and then another, jolted and shook him as the truck slammed into parked vehicles.
The truck must have stopped; but Phoenix knew nothing of it. His head rang and he felt a sharp pain, like a hot knife, piercing his left shoulder. He could taste his own blood, salty and thick, filling his mouth. His body felt weak and shaky as he fumbled for the seatbelt release.
Phoenix looked around the cab with the world spinning wildly around him. The front windshield hadn’t shattered, a plus when he thought about the infected now filling the parking lot, and the truck hadn’t caught fire. He found his shotgun jammed under the passenger seat and he worked it free.
His hearing, muddled by the roaring in his head, began to clear; and he could hear shouting and gun fire. He struggled upwards as quickly as he could, using the steering wheel and dashboard like rungs on a ladder. He stuck his head out through the passenger window above him.
He turned towards the front of the lab. The bed of the truck, now missing most of its panels, had come within twenty feet of the front entrance of Carson Research Labs. A car, bent and twisted, had come within inches of breaking through the glass. A number of infected littered the area, some of them missing arms and legs, and their bodies squirmed and moved in one large, shimmering pool of blood. Phoenix saw some of the soldiers mixed into the mess, guessing they had been killed by the impact of the truck.
Phoenix turned when he heard a large volume of gunfire followed by an exploding grenade coming from the left rear of the toppled truck. He lifted himself up and looked out across the parking lot, now a lake of damaged vehicles. Some of the cars burned, and the place looked little more than a zoo filled with wild animals. Though it seemed to him that fewer of the infected had survived the truck’s landing, it also struck him that what remained
of the CDC was an equal match. He could see the soldiers with their backs up against the underside of the flat bed, firing point blank into the swarming masses of infected.
Phoenix crawled back into the cab and sounded the horn. The deep, ear-splitting, monotone note rang out in five long blasts and seemed to shake the fillings right out Phoenix’s teeth.
Alaia and Dr. Carson would be arriving in little under a minute, and Phoenix would have to be on the ground, in between the trailer bed and the front entrance to protect them. He crawled up and out of the cab with his shotgun in his hand, and carefully climbed down onto the asphalt. So far, the soldiers, CDC, and Psykes were on the other side of the truck, both engaged in battle, tooth and nail, locked and loaded. Phoenix, now on the ground – or was it ground beef? – was up to his ankles in blood and gore.
The only civilized place anywhere near the front of the lab happened to be the pile of truck bed panels. From there he’d be able to flag down Alaia who, at just that moment, came speeding into the parking lot.
The Jeep slowed down as it neared. Alaia dodged a few bloodied infected and a few smashed cars. The gun battle roared on, hot and heavy, but not a shot had been aimed at the Jeep. Phoenix popped off a few rounds at a couple of malformed heads, and then he held the gun up, waving it like the flag at Iwo Jima.
Alaia saw him and drove towards him, crushing a few scattered bodies. She hit the brakes and the Jeep slid when it rolled over a dead soldier, coming to a stop within a few feet of Phoenix. Alaia jumped out, swinging her AK out in front of her. Dr. Carson, seeing that several infected staggering towards his side of the car, slid across the front seats and climbed out through the driver’s side door. Alaia raised her weapon and, without skipping a beat, surgically implanted bullets into the heads of each of three infected.
Dr. Carson hurried over the debris and the dead, holding a card in his hands. Alaia watched his back, telling him to hurry. The gun battle on the other side of the truck began losing its intensity. Either the shooters were running out of ammunition or the infected were winning. None of that mattered now.
“Has the door been damaged?” Dr. Carson asked, as he held his card up to the reader.
Phoenix turned around. Two infected, one with a shattered arm that looked more squashed than shattered, slid their way towards him through the wet, sticky pudding covering the walk. He raised his shotgun and fired, taking down the two ex-citizens. “Any day now!”
Alaia swung right and rattled off another three rounds.
“I … I don’t understand,” Dr. Carson cried. “Maybe the CDC was trying to hack it!” He waved his access card in front of the small, black reader over and over again. “There’s … this is the only way to get in!”
“Can we shoot the glass?” Phoenix asked.
“Bullet-proof.”
More infected, coming faster than before, came around at either side of the truck.
“Alaia!” Phoenix shouted. “Can you hold it together over there? Maybe for a few seconds?”
“No!” She shouted.
“Good! Give me thirty seconds!” Phoenix took out three more infected, popping them one right after the other, and ran back through the blood towards the truck cab. He’d heard a grenade, hadn’t he? One of the soldiers, or maybe all of them, must have been carrying them on their web gear. He ran past the cab and looked to his right – more infected, lots of them – and he shot another two. The rest of them, preoccupied by a soldier holding himself up off the ground, barely out of their reach, weren’t moving from their places.
Phoenix waded into the crowd – heck, he was bit already – and he used his shotgun butt on the backs of the infected. He screamed at the top of his lungs and then pulled away. A few turned around and glanced at him with their blood-red eyes as if they were sizing him up. But they didn’t take the bait, didn’t come for him. He called up to the soldier, a young girl, with long red hair tied back into a ponytail. “Hey! Do you have grenades?”
“I … I’ve got two,” she yelled. “But I can’t get to them.”
Phoenix raised his shotgun. Thirty or forty infected, maybe more, stood between him and the girl – the others, for some reason disinterested, wandered aimlessly in the parking lot behind him. He slung his shotgun and grabbed an infected person, turning it around, looking at it, yelling in its face, but it showed no interest. He ran back to the cab, climbed up on the passenger’s side, and made his way up and onto the edge of the trailer. He sat down, straddling it, and hurried towards the rear of the trailer as quickly as he could, tearing his pants open at the crotch.
“We don’t have much time!” Alaia shouted.
Phoenix heard more gunfire coming from behind him, and he could see and smell the smoke from Alaia’s gun barrel. When he reached the girl, he leaned out and over the edge. “Can you take my hand?”
“I don’t know!” the girl yelled. “I’m slipping – grab me, mister!”
Phoenix let go of his shotgun and it hit the asphalt behind him. He could see the grenades on the girl’s shirt, hanging right there in front of him within arm’s reach. He could just take them and let the girl fall. She was CDC, wasn’t she? It would be easy.
But this girl was someone’s girl.
Phoenix grabbed one of her arms using both of his hands, digging his nails into her soft flesh, and he dragged her up to the side of the trailer bed. The girl raised her other hand up and gripped the edge of the trailer. With Phoenix’s help, she pulled herself up, lost her balance at the top, and fell down to safety on the other side. She crashed down onto the trailer panels and struggled to get up.
Four of five infected closed in on the girl, but Alaia was ready. She fired her gun, taking out the infected with the last rounds she had. Then, in a fit of rage, she threw her weapon at the others that now began to appear.
Phoenix slid down to the ground. He threw Alaia his shotgun and grabbed the girl.
Alaia swung into action, her weapon spewing hot fire and ball bearings point blank into the seething masses of inhumanity. “We ain’t gonna last here, Phoenix – so get on with it!”
Phoenix looked at the girl closely. “We need into this building, and I mean right now. You have grenades – time to use them, got it?”
The girl, shaken up, with tears in her eyes, sniffled. She looked back at Alaia and then she removed a grenade. “Everybody back!”
Alaia backed up, reserving her shots, stepping carefully over the bodies and debris.
The young girl pulled the pin on the grenade, holding the spoon in place as everyone hurried towards the cab of the truck. She released the handle, placed the grenade against the base of the window nearest the door, and ran. Just as fifteen, maybe twenty infected neared the door, the grenade popped. The glass shattered into a hurricane gust of glittering ice. The infected, half of which were killed outright, were either dazed or lying on the ground.
Phoenix led the way, hurrying through the body-strewn battle zone. Dr. Carson, Alaia, and the young girl followed him into the building. They looked back as they ran, hoping the infected had not followed them.
Dr. Carson, trying to catch his breath, stopped everyone when they reached the end of a long hall. He opened a door, the door leading to the break room, and he led them inside. He locked the door behind him and walked over to the drink and snack machines. “We’ve got a minute or two now,” he said. “So dinner is on me.”
Chapter 37
Phoenix and Dr. Carson sat down on two softly upholstered chairs inside the small breakroom. They faced each other, looking across a small wooden table, both guzzling from their plastic Coke bottles. Alaia and the young girl sat on a long blue sofa, whispering softly to one another.
With the door safely locked behind them, and another door at the opposite end of the room also locked, everyone ate something and rested, hoping to catch their breaths and lasso their wits. Phoenix looked over at the girls, and he watched as the young girl leaned forward suddenly and vomited all over the light brown rug.
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br /> The walls of the break room, papered up in twisting tan and beige stripes – something exquisite, he thought, only to some elitist scumbag decorator who’d probably stared at it long enough – reminded him of candy canes he’d seen in sepia-colored photographs.
Dr. Carson was preoccupied with the last drop of cola stuck to the bottom of his bottle. He didn’t seem content to leave that last drop behind, which he finally ended up doing, because he must have remembered he could get another.
“We’re in,” Phoenix said. “Now what?”
Dr. Carson got up, walked over to the soda machine, and waved his card in front of the reader. A robotic arm whirred and clicked, and another plastic bottle dropped noisily into the chute. Dr. Carson watched the whole event without saying a word, took the Coke out of the machine, and said, “Now it gets hard, my friend.”
Alaia, trying to comfort the young girl, must have been listening. “Like all of this has been easy?”
Dr. Carson bobbled his head, but with dignity. “Relatively speaking, yes.” He popped the lid off the bottle and sat down. He took a long sip and set the bottle on the table while reaching for a Moon Pie. “We have roughly three hours to turn on the reactors before the place goes down.”
“And we’re sitting here sipping soda?” Phoenix asked.
“There are about thirty employees who work in this lab,” Dr. Carson said, ignoring Phoenix’s last remark, “and another sixty who are family members of the thirty.”
“That’s good, right?” Alaia asked, looking at Dr. Carson and then at Phoenix. “Why is that a problem?”
“That is precisely the problem, Detective Jenkins. Every single one of them are, shall we say, intellectually incapacitated and roaming the lower levels of this lab – levels through which we need to travel in order to reach the reactor and the switch boards below.”
Time Clock Hero Page 25
