Truly Deadly: The Complete Series: (YA Spy Thriller Books 1-5)

by Rob Aspinall

  Infecteds is a word, right? Yeah, I’ll go with infecteds. Zombies had to be dead first. These were just crazy freak mo-fos who’d stood too close to a dirty bomb.

  The elevator was around halfway down. We needed it to be closer. Nine minutes to the big meltdown, Siri told us. We kept firing. Head-shots only. Trying to stay calm. They were getting closer but we were winning the war. Only three left.

  Philippe took two out in one shot. I hit another in the neck. I hit him again in the same spot and his head rolled back off his shoulders, hanging on by a gnarly sliver of tendon. His body staggered in a circle and collapsed.

  Resident Evil had banged his head so hard, it was now through the glass. I spun and shot him full in the face. Splat. Horrific. He dropped, leaving a really good view down the corridor beyond the doors. Crawling with infecteds. They screamed en masse and ran at the doors, some slipping on the blood trails, most charging hard towards us. The steel doors warped under the strain, ready to burst open any second.

  The elevator hit our floor and opened up. It was packed with escaping JPAC employees. Busier than a rush-hour tube train, with no one giving an inch. The elevator creaked under the weight.

  I turned to Philippe. “We’re not gonna fit—”

  “One of us will,” he said, pushing me into the crowded elevator. The people inside pushed back, protesting there was no room, but Philippe was having none of it. Wedged in with a centimetre to spare, I managed to turn and face the corridor.

  “No fair,” I said. “I’m coming back out.”

  Suddenly, the good folks trying to keep me out were now holding me in, hands clutching me by the shoulders. A big hairy arm around my waist.

  “We need to let the doors close,” a woman said.

  I tried to squirm out of various grips. But there were too many hands on me.

  “Let me go!” I shouted.

  A short barrel of a woman stuck an arm out across my chest. Someone else hammered on the button that makes the doors close. There was a metallic groan, a snap and a roar. The sound of the infecteds bursting through the doors. Shrieks of terror from inside the elevator.

  Philippe backed away. He nodded at me. I nodded back. The elevator doors closed just as a wall of infecteds charged towards him.

  Well, they almost closed. A stray crazy wedged in a rotting hand at the last moment and prised them open. I rammed my rifle in his face and pulled the trigger.

  It blew his head back off his shoulders and the elevator doors wedged shut, met by a chorus of disgusted groans from the JPAC crowd. Everything went quiet as we made our way down to hangar level. Only the creak and whir of the elevator left. Sounds crazy, but Philippe was the closest thing to family or friends I had left. The world got a whole lot quieter when you lost someone close.

  35

  Killr1

  As soon as the elevator doors opened, it was stampede o’clock. I was almost crushed in the rush across the hangar, where trucks, Humvees and people carriers were loading up and hauling out. Some poor young soldier had drawn the short straw and was left to direct human traffic into vehicles.

  “Are there any more left up there?” he yelled at the group.

  “No, we’re the last ones,” I heard a guy shout.

  “Okay, move, move, move!” the soldier yelled desperately.

  SEVEN MINUTES TO CRITICAL MASS.

  Everyone piled on to the last remaining truck, including the soldier. But I hung back.

  The soldier leaned out of the back, holding out a hand. “Come on, get on!” he said, not realising I was JPAC enemy number one.

  I looked around the hangar.

  “Come on, we’ve got room!”

  “Leave her!” I heard a woman shout.

  “Go without me,” I said.

  “What?” said the soldier.

  “Go,” I said. “I’m not done yet.”

  The soldier banged on the side of the truck. “Okay, let’s go!”

  In a cloud of diesel fumes, the truck trundled off into the tunnel.

  I ran over to the one remaining drivable vehicle. A jeep. It had a roof. It had doors. That was important. There were a handful of tanks too. But too big. Too slow. I found the driver’s door of the jeep unlocked, but I didn’t have a key to start the damn thing.

  I checked both sun visors, but came up empty. Okay, I knew I knew how to do this; Philippe had taught me during training.

  I smashed off the steering-column cover with the butt of my rifle. There were wires. A whole bunch of them. Three bunches to be exact. Which bunch was it again?

  I pulled aside one of the bundles and separated the wires. I used my teeth to strip the ends off two of the wires, spat out the rubber and wound them together. I heard a man howling. Friday night in Manchester: nothing unusual. Cannibal-infested army base: the worst sound a girl can hear.

  It was, of course, an infected running right at me. Heading straight for the passenger door. And now another one from the driver’s side. A third scrambling onto the roof of the jeep, its feet thumping heavy on the metal.

  I stripped the starter wire down carefully. It was live, so I needed to keep my fingers off the end.

  Both infecteds hit the driver and passenger-side doors at the same time. I jumped out of my skin and nearly sparked myself out with the end of the wire. Meanwhile, the third infected popped his head through a hatch in the roof. I put the starter wire between my teeth, the live end sticking out the side of my mouth. I picked up the rifle and blew the sucker back to where he’d come from.

  I shot the other trying to grab me through the driver’s-side window but clicked empty at the one trying to climb in through the passenger side.

  I took the live wire and sparked it against the other two I’d prepared earlier. Plenty of spark, but no ignition. I tried again … and again. The remaining infected was halfway in the cabin, grasping frantically at me. I leaned as far away as I could get and sparked the wires one more time. Finally, the lights on the dash flickered on and the engine rumbled into life. I planted my foot on the accelerator and smoked the wheels.

  Mmm, burning rubber.

  Best. Smell. Ever.

  I drove hard towards one of the giant steel girders supporting the hangar, with an inch or two to spare passenger side. It cut the infected in half, sending the legs spinning into the air. He made a gurgling noise as his eyes rolled back in his head. I used the rifle to push the remaining head and torso out of the window. But I didn’t see the other girder coming.

  The front of the jeep collapsed inwards as it hit the girder full-on. I rocked forward against the wheel, taking a hit, ribs and shoulder crunching with pain. But I was okay. Just.

  The jeep was another story – steam pouring out of the mangled bonnet, the engine dead. I pushed the driver-side door open. It creaked and fell off. I staggered across the hangar floor, thinking I was going to die in an underground carpark. The most unglamorous exit ever. If the exploding mountain didn’t crush me to death, another infected would eat me alive. I stood and stretched out the crash from my muscles and bones.

  FIVE MINUTES TO CRITICAL MASS.

  Something bright and blinging caught the corner of my eye. Dead ahead. Behind the red rope. Mobutu’s gleaming ego machine, KILLR1. And inside the promotional glass raffle stand, the key fob. Of bloody bleeding course!

  I put my weight behind the stand and tipped it over. Sifted through the smashed glass and picked up the fob. The Hummer blipped. The headlights flashed. The engine thundered alive, like a dragon waking up. I rammed the gold-plated gear lever into DRIVE and steered it over to the lifts. I got out, pushed the button. Hopped back in and waited. While I sat there, fingers drumming on the wheel, I noticed a (yes, also gold) joystick on the central panel between the handbrake and gear lever. It had a flick-switch next to it, with a sticker beneath that said Get Sum Bitches.

  36

  Critical Mass

  The elevator opened on Zone Five. I steered the Hummer out into the corridor. The exhaust roared a
nd boomed off the hard rock walls and the Hummer fishtailed on the slippery blood floor as I weaved around dead infecteds. I just about held it together. The corridors were loooong, so I could get up to speed fast, yanking on the handbrake and sliding it sideways into the turn. I stopped the Hummer and listened out over the chugging engine. I heard screams coming from the far end of a corridor: the Mountain View Restaurant. I floored it, all those horses pinning me back into the tan leather seat. I punched the nose straight through the swinging doors to the restaurant, annihilating both. It was more like a gigantic bistro canteen than a restaurant, full of upturned tables, spilled meal trays and infecteds. Lots and lots of infecteds. Yet, my heart leapt.

  There was Philippe, on top of the serving counter with an electric meat knife and a frying pan, carving and beating off a horde of crazies. Except the horde was winning. Some infecteds were trying to climb up the blood-slippy glass of the counter. A couple more had hold of Philippe’s legs, dragging him down into the rabid pit. I smacked my way through the chairs and tables and drove as fast as I could into the crowd of infecteds. It was zombie skittle time – bodies bouncing off the grille or getting mashed to bits under the enormous wheels.

  I pulled up alongside Philippe. Wound down the window.

  “Are you crazy?” he said, shirt covered in fleshy bits. “What are you doing?”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “Something stupid.”

  Philippe slid down the counter, ran around the front of the Hummer and jumped in the passenger seat.

  THREE MINUTES TO CRITICAL MASS.

  As the infected horde regrouped, I stuck the Hummer in reverse and spun it around one-eighty. We were met with the sight of another mass of screaming, mangled ex-humans. Too many to get through, surely. I flicked the switch alongside the joystick. A pair of forward-facing guns rose out of panels in the bonnet. Big, heavy-duty things that looked like they could lay waste to a small town. Oh yeah. Mobutu, you beautiful, sweet maniac.

  “You drive, I’ll shoot,” Philippe said, wrapping his left hand around the joystick. I pressed the accelerator. Philippe pushed the red button on top of the joystick. The guns sounded like helicopter rotors. They opened up and blazed away, swinging from side to side, cutting the scrambling pack apart. A gazillion rounds a minute. Any bodies the guns didn’t get, the Hummer bounced out of the way. We flew out of the restaurant and along the surrounding corridors, Philippe blasting any stray infecteds drawn to the noise.

  I looked Philippe up and down. His eyes seemed normal. “Are you sure you’re not, you know …?”

  “Infected? No,” he said, the Hummer guns clunking empty. “I don’t think the toxin’s airborne any more. Must be spreading through blood or saliva.”

  I planted my foot on the brake and leaned out of the window to push the elevator button.

  “So we’re okay?” I asked, steering the Hummer into the elevator.

  “Depends on your definition of okay,” said Philippe.

  TWO MINUTES TO CRITICAL MASS.

  A brief elevator ride later, we screeched our way out of the hangar and into the tunnel, the speedo reaching one hundred in a handful of seconds. Damn, this thing was quick.

  One-twenty.

  One-forty.

  One-sixty.

  The Hummer sounded like Godzilla. Supercharged to fuck.

  “This is going to be tight,” Philippe shouted over the ear-smashing sound.

  ONE MINUTE TO CRITICAL MASS.

  One-seventy.

  One-eighty.

  Here came traffic. We flew past the truck I was supposed to be on and slalomed at breakneck speed through a three-lane convoy of heavy-duty vehicles that simply weren’t built to go much over seventy or eighty.

  I could see a speck of bright, Alaskan daylight at the end of the tunnel, just up the rise. My foot was all the way down, my hands welded to the wheel, Philippe fiercely gripping the dash.

  ZERO MINUTES TO CRITICAL MASS.

  For a second or two, it seemed like nothing would happen. It had all been a big hoax. Then came an explosion violent enough to rock the world. The whole mountain seemed to shake and I had to fight extra hard to keep the Hummer in a straight line.

  Maybe that was it. We were safe.

  Silly Lorna.

  All around us, the tunnel walls crumbled and caved. Huge chunks of rock fell from above, crushing some of the vehicles behind us. One fell directly in front. I swerved around it. The Hummer snaked and slid on me, but just about held. I glanced in the rear view … Here came a fireball the size of the sun, gobbling up everything in its path, gaining on us with every split second.

  Philippe looked over his shoulder. “Now would be a good time to go faster.”

  “Now would be a good time to shut the hell up,” I said, hands so tight around the wheel, they hurt.

  The fireball was almost on us, the tunnel shaking itself to pieces and the mouth closing fast like it belonged to a giant snake. There was nothing we could do but scream.

  It was so close, I didn’t think we’d made it.

  The Hummer roared into the open air just as the tunnel mouth collapsed on itself. An eye-blink later, a ball of dust, concrete, rocks and fire blew out of the base of the mountain, swallowing us up and pelting the roof with debris. We punched out of that, too, into the clear Alaskan air. A mile or two up the road, the vehicles that had bugged out earlier had stopped and pooled together in a carpark area just off the airstrip.

  I brought the Hummer to a stop at the back of the pile of abandoned vehicles. We peeled ourselves out of our bucket seats and climbed down shakily onto the tarmac.

  The Hummer was pristine when I first climbed inside. Now it was caked in dust and ash. Craters in the roof. Bodywork smoking from the heat. We looked back at the mountain. Still standing, of course, but entire sections were breaking off and bouncing down to the bottom. Even the snow cap came tumbling down. Thick black smoke mushroomed up into the sky over the mountain’s edge. The Spider’s Web was toast. We’d stopped a tsunami and started an avalanche. Gigantic dust clouds drifted their way over on the breeze.

  I sighed in relief, removed my pretend glasses and ditched them on the tarmac. “All in all, I think that went well.”

  Philippe patted a film of dust off his navy-blue tie. “I’ve had worse.”

  “So how do we get home?” I asked.

  The pair of us turned to face the airstrip, where a small army of Chinooks rose up off their helipads and made their way over the trees, while a cargo plane took off from the far end of the runway, climbing steeply into the smoky black sky, following in the vapour trails of a departing Learjet. That left just one remaining cargo plane on the runway, its turbine engines spinning, but its ramp still down. Philippe and I looked at each other, no words needed. We ran. Full steam.

  We got to the ramp just as it was rising off the ground, the last plane out of Dodge already rolling, courtesy of desperate pilots. Philippe was faster than me and jumped on first. As the ramp winched up away from me, he reached down and pulled me up by the arms as I ran. After a mad scramble, I was on. The ramp closed and we found ourselves in the belly of the beast. We stood up and dusted ourselves off, just as the ramp clunked shut and the engines kicked in, full thrust.

  “Phew, made it,” I said.

  Me and my big mouth. There was a mass clicking of rifles. A dozen or so pointed right at us. Our special-ops escort from the plane ride in. Seriously miffed. Oh, and they’d found themselves a new boss. Dear, sweet Colonel Buzzcut.

  37

  The Wrong Flight

  The cargo plane left the tarmac and climbed steeply into the sky, rocking us all back on our feet. The angry mob steadied themselves. They kept their assault rifles pointed squarely at us.

  “I think we got on the wrong flight,” I said, raising my hands in surrender.

  Philippe left his arms down by his sides.

  “Come on,” he said to the unblinking special-ops unit. “You’re not going to fire live rounds in an airborne trans
porter.”

  “Keep testing me, bitch,” said a Hispanic guy chewing violently on a stick of gum.

  “We’re not that important to you,” Philippe said.

  “Hell, he’s right,” Buzzcut said with a sigh, stepping to the front of the pack. “Stand down, people.”

  The men and women let their weapons down.

  “You know, sir, there are other ways we can put a hurting on ’em,” the guy with the chewing gum said, cracking his knuckles inside his black gloves.

  A long, low, unsettling groan came from the front of the cargo hold. Three special-ops guys lay on stretchers while the designated medic tried to put them back together. I didn’t like the sounds they were making one itty-bitty bit.

  The special-ops guys pushed and shoved us into the middle of a large human circle in the centre of the cargo-bay floor. Didn’t they know what was going on here?

  “I guess a little R&R wouldn’t go amiss,” Buzzcut said, stepping out of the way.

  “What are they talking about?” I whispered to Philippe.

  “Get ready to fight,” he whispered back.

  “Before we do this,” I said, “has anyone got any water? I’m really thirsty.”

  Buzzcut laughed. “You heard her, sergeant. Give the girl a drink.”

  A big guy with a ginger beard and neck tatts opened a fat green flask of water and handed it over.

  I gave it to Philippe first, then took a swig myself.

  The guys on the stretchers were thrashing around under their restraints and screaming.

  “Um, are you guys okay with him foaming at the mouth like that?” I asked.

  “A little help here!” the medic shouted, trying to calm them down.

  One of the soldiers peeled off the group to help. I would have pointed out the symptoms of an infected, but we had more pressing concerns.