A Place Called Hope (Z-Day Book 2)

by Daniel Humphreys

  The boy snorted. “I’m twelve years old, mister. I read comic books. I know what zombies are.”

  “They’re not—” Sandy started to say, then shrugged to himself. Who was he to tell the kid what they were? Zombies it is. “Where the zombies can’t get to, then.”

  Will cocked his head and gave Sandy an appraising look. “You think we’re going to be okay?”

  “Yeah, Will, I think we are.”

  Chapter 27

  April 3, 2026

  Lockheed Skunkworks

  Z-Day + 3,089

  Charlie led the way with the barrel of his lever action as he descended the stairs at a measured pace. Agent Guglik had given him an extra pair of night vision goggles before they’d opened the door for their descent into darkness. He’d never used them before, but he was grateful for them now. Sometimes a flashlight was the equivalent of ringing a dinner bell, and he hadn’t been looking forward to having to use one in a building with an unknown number of occupants.

  The landing at the bottom was empty and far too small for the four of them to stand comfortably together, though Foraker maintained his position in the rear, a few steps up and out of the way. Charlie glanced back to Ross, who gave him an approving nod. With one ear pressed to the cool steel of the door, Charlie slung the Marlin over his shoulder and screwed the suppressor onto the end of his pistol. He considered the brief moment of deja vu and shook his head.

  A month ago, he’d stood on the porch of one the last homes he’d scavenged for his community, with this very pistol. The more things changed, the more they remained the same—only this time, the building was bigger and the stakes were much higher.

  All seemed still on the other side. He took the door handle in one hand and raised the pistol into firing position. It was awkward, keeping it in front of the goggles, but the luminescent night sights showed up well in the NVGs.

  The metal stairwell door whispered open on well-oiled hinges. He kept the travel slow, in case they did begin to squeak, but he needn’t have bothered. All he could hear over his own quiet breaths was the accelerating thump of his own heartbeat.

  Ross stepped up behind him and took the door from his hand. The SEAL crouched and slid something under the bottom with a gentle scrape of metal on concrete. If they needed to come back in a hurry, they wouldn’t have to fuss with the door—they could concern themselves with getting inside, then closing it in the face of any infected.

  There ain’t all that many cars in the lot but this is California. Every one of them could have been in a carpool for all you know.

  He eased his head out to the left, then pulled it back and repeated the process on the right. The upper end of the staircase started on the northern third of the building’s west wall and descended to the north. The landing sat in the northwestern corner of the building.

  The view was much the same to either side. On the left side of the door, a corridor stretched along the northern wall of the building, ending at a heavy steel door. A placard on the barrier read ‘Authorized Personnel Only’. Charlie assumed that was the entrance to the warehouse. There were a few doors on the right side of that corridor—all closed, but that pathway was otherwise clear.

  The corridor that paralleled the staircase along the west wall was not, however. A body lay crumpled on the floor, ten feet or so away from the stairwell. The corpse lay half-out of a room on the left side of the wall, holding the door open.

  Charlie eased out of the room, keeping his right shoulder to the wall as he moved. He had to keep moving his head up and down to keep his bearings as he watched the body on the floor for signs of life, slowing him even more. He drew close to the corpse, hesitated, then nudged its head with the toe of his boot. It flopped lifelessly.

  He peered inside the shadowed room, making out the dusty hulks of refrigerators and soda machines. Large tables with the accompanying corona of chairs filled in the space between the door and the appliances. He reached out and tapped the side of the silencer softly against the door jamb, then waited. Nothing responded to the sound inside of the cafeteria or break room, and he nodded to himself. He’d still want to do a full clearance, but he was comfortable enough for the moment to kneel and take a closer look at the body propping the door open. Something about it looked off, though it was hard to get enough detail through the goggles.

  On impulse, Charlie pushed the NVGs up onto his forehead. He carried flashlights the way some people had carried pens before Z-Day, and he clicked one of his smaller ones on now. Ignoring the stifled curses of Ross and the rest, he played the beam over the withered corpse.

  He wished he had a camera. Under the light, something off turned out to be a strange series of wounds. Something had torn the flesh open along the long bones of the extremities, including through the remaining clothing. He dipped the light deeper into one of the gashes. The channels were dusty, but they were the dull off-white of uninfected bone. Moving the light around more, he found twin wounds in the back, angling along the shoulder blades down to the pelvis, and another, singular wound that traced up the neck and over the crown of the skull.

  Charlie probed one of the wounds over a shoulder blade with his suppressor and leaned in closer. The edges of the flesh at the bottom of the cuts looked strange, as though they’d been chewed. At the top layer of skin, though, the cuts were straight and even. What kind of blade does that?

  At once, he rocked back on his heels. It hadn’t been a blade at all. He visualized it for a moment and shuddered as he realized that they were exit wounds. Something had torn its way out of the body at his feet and gone—where?

  He stared into the shadows of the break room, willing something to move. When Ross clasped his shoulder, he jumped in surprise but managed to keep an instinctive yelp behind clenched teeth.

  The SEAL brought his lips close to Charlie’s ear. “Move forward to the next room, the clock’s ticking. We’ve got your back, and we’ll verify this room is clear.”

  He wanted to argue, but he pushed the desire down. He had no way of knowing how long ago the body at his feet had fallen, or if there was anything left of it. He nodded and rose.

  The NVG’s banished the shadows that his flashlight had brought to life, and he felt the tension in his neck easing ever so slightly as he saw that the hallway remained clear. He felt rather than saw the other person at his back as he advanced, but he didn’t take the time to check and see who it was. Either way, he was questioning Pete’s logic in enlisting him for the mission. Sure, in one respect it made sense to stick an immune guy on point, even if it was making him a Polish mine detector. Charlie also knew that despite his own bravado and confidence, the three behind him had even more experience in not getting bit than he did. It was, in the end, a sad commentary on how stretched they were for people.

  By the time he’d reached the second door, Charlie had fallen into his old familiar rhythm, the hard-earned instincts of creeping through enemy territory overcoming any lingering doubts. This door was already open, and he swung around the jamb. He scanned the interior with his eyes, his pistol hand moving along with it.

  There were a few desks and chairs inside, but massive cabinets lined the walls. Bundles of cabling from the walls and ceiling plugged into them, and as he studied the rest of the room, he recognized various piles here and there as computer equipment.

  Some sort of storage or network server room, then, he reasoned. He took a step inside and froze as he saw the bodies.

  It took Charlie a moment to sort them out from the clutter. They lay on the floor in a massive, interwoven heap, and it wasn’t until he started counting the soles of their shoes that he determined there were at least a dozen of them. Most of them had fallen forward, which meant—

  He took another step forward. The final body sat at the back of the room, leaning against the wall. Great gouges and bites of flesh pockmarked its body. As Charlie moved closer, decrepit neck muscles tried to bring its head around to see the source of the noise.

  A pistol
lay on the ground next to the zulu, locked open on an empty chamber. As Charlie took another step forward, the scattering of brass casings around the body became more visible in his goggles. He thought he had the framework of it, now, and he nudged the legs of the fallen to see if any would stir.

  Picked a bad place for your last stand, brother.

  The zulu on the wall—a security guard, perhaps—had taken down thirteen attackers, but there’d been enough left after that to consume enough of his musculature to leave him here immobile for almost a decade.

  Charlie stepped through the cluster of fallen bodies despite a warning hiss from behind him. He waved a hand in annoyance. Yeah, the guard was immobile. But he never left a room behind unless it was clear. If it came to it, and they needed to seek their own refuge in here, best not risk the chance that someone would stumble too close and suffer a bite.

  Before he’d found this scene, Charlie had been hoping that they’d get lucky and the building would be mostly clear. If there were this many in this one room, who knew how many were in the rest of the place? He wasn’t about to risk a gunshot, even a suppressed one—who knew what hell that might bring down on them?

  There was no time for ceremony or delicacy. He switched his pistol into his left hand, unsheathed his knife, and slammed the blade into one of the zulu’s staring eyes. He pulled it, wiped what little mess there was on the dead man’s shirt, and replaced the knife in its sheath.

  As he headed back toward the front of the room, he saw that Guglik was the one covering his back, and he imitated Ross’ position from earlier, bringing his mouth close to her ear.

  “No shooting unless we can help it. He took down a dozen or more, but there had to be some left to munch on him.”

  Even in the green glow of the night-vision goggles, her smirk was evident, and she touched a forefinger to her head in mock salute. Trying not to roll his eyes, he moved out of the room. Ross and Foraker had positions in the direction of the stairwell, holding up between the break room and the room Charlie had just left. He waved the SEALs forward and crouched down.

  “Breakroom was clear,” Ross mouthed, lower than a whisper. “One more door, led to the opposite hallway. Our six is clear. That warehouse door is secure.”

  “They’re here,” Charlie said. “Don’t know how many, but they’re here.”

  The SEAL’s face was blank, calm. “Draw them out, make our stand here? Good kill zone.”

  He thought about it and shrugged. “Don’t know. Might not be that many, but do we want to make the noise? There’s nothing close, but the sound will carry, even through the walls.”

  “They’re going to be here at some point.”

  Charlie grinned. “Rather have a few more guns on our side when that happens, myself.”

  “Agreed. You’re on point, it’s your call.”

  He stared down the hallway and waited for something to happen. They hadn’t made all that much noise, but nothing seemed to be reacting. When the zulus had still been dumb, he wouldn’t have worried about it, assuming they were too lame to attack or hadn’t heard. Now, he found himself jumping at shadows, waiting for a flood of spear-carriers to appear out of the darkness.

  Screw it.

  He straightened and continued down the hall. There were two facing doors at the end of the hall before the hall ended on the southern half of the building. A thin crack of light was visible under the door to his right. He assumed, based on the position, that it led to the office area. Lots of windows—he’d have to ditch the goggles before he went in. He kept them on and went left.

  The small vestibule off the hallway held lockers and coat hooks on the side walls. A pair of doors with a water fountain centered between stood before him.

  Guglik appeared at his side. “Pit stop?”

  He resisted the urge to grin and shook his head. “Checking to see if they have any extra toilet paper.”

  “Like gold,” she agreed. “Shall we?”

  He crooked a finger at the right door. He’d had a good sense for the proportions of buildings even before Z-Day. In the trades, you had to be able to walk the site and compare it to the blueprints. Even with explicit measurements, stuff got put in the wrong place, though his guys were better than most. Charlie’s spatial judgment had come in handy more than a few times over the years, searching through empty homes and picking up on hidden closets or panic rooms.

  Given the depth of the coat room, the bathrooms were small, probably single-occupancy. The room they stood in was half as deep as the break room and the computer room.

  Charlie moved to one side of the right door—both had unisex badging—and signaled Agent Guglik. She took hold of the handle and eased the door open.

  He swung inside, pistol leading the way. He’d been correct. There wasn’t even a stall in the restroom, just a toilet, sink, and a low cabinet with a pile of magazines on top. He’d seen better-appointed restrooms in his time, but not many.

  He backed out of the room and moved to the next door. Charlie braced himself as Guglik grabbed the other handle, and—nothing. The handle twisted a bit but didn’t unlatch. Locked.

  He pressed an ear against the door and rattled the handle a bit. Nothing reacted inside. Charlie rubbed his fingers along the unmarred surface of the door. If someone had taken refuge inside, they’d done so quietly enough that none of the other infected in the building had taken notice, else there’d be scratches. As for the person or persons inside—infected, or not?

  If not, the room wasn’t a concern. And, he had to admit to himself, even if a zulu remained inside like the world’s worst party surprise, it would have walked itself into the literal ground over the last eight years. He’d seen it before.

  Charlie pulled a marker out of his pocket and wrote ‘not clear’ on the door in big, block letters. They’d need to check at some point, but it would be loud, and if it had to keep, he didn’t want one of the Marines to step inside.

  He followed Guglik back out into the hallway. Ross and Foraker crouched on either side of the door to the office. Ross held a small tablet in one hand while he fished a flexible line underneath the door. The image on the screen was grainy and distorted through the goggles. Charlie tipped them up and leaned over.

  The office was a wreck of tipped-over chairs, spilled stacks of paper, and smashed monitors and computer towers. Ross twisted the line, and the image panned across the room until he found what he was looking for.

  A trio of zulus stood in a line, facing the parking lot through the windows at the front of the office building. Dried smears of blood and other unidentifiable viscera painted the stretch of glass, marking the long vigil they’d stood.

  Charlie rolled the situation over in his head, trying to look at all the angles. “If that’s it, who bit the security guard?”

  “One of the zulus he shot?” Guglik’s voice was low and thoughtful.

  “Maybe,” Charlie admitted. This was the problem with walking into these time capsules of horror. Anything you overlooked had the tendency to literally bite you in the ass, but if you stood around debating it too long, you had the chance into falling into paralysis by analysis.

  “Door has a spring return,” Foraker pointed out. “They gnaw on the security guard for a bit, get their fill, then wander back out here?”

  “What drew them this way?” Ross asked.

  The chief snorted. “The overall chaos and calamity of the world ending?”

  Guglik flashed a white-toothed grin in the darkness. Ross just shook his head. He looked at Charlie. “You two check out that bathroom, we’ll clear this and radio in. While we’re waiting for the choppers, we clear the warehouse.”

  Charlie wasn’t so sure about the logic of that, especially if the warehouse portion of the building was overrun, but the lieutenant had a point—the longer they were out here in the Wild, the greater the chance that they’d pique interest. The fences around the building were tall, but he’d seen them fail before. And if it came to that, the entire fron
t of the building was a pane of shattered glass away from being wide open. “You got it,” he agreed.

  April 3, 2026

  En route to Palmdale, California

  Z-Day + 3,089

  The seating was tight, but it wasn’t as bad as the clown car ride they’d taken back in Indiana. Of course, back then, they’d fled the approaching hordes. California’s potential waves of infected made the situation they’d faced in the valley look like a walk in the park.

  McFarlane craned his neck and tried to get a better look at the forested ground blurring past the landing wheels of the Sea Hawk. Intermittent gaps in the canopy revealed small clumps of zulus, and their jerky, delayed reaction to the passage of the helicopters overhead would have been funny if there weren’t so damn many of them.

  Unconsciously, McFarlane’s fingers danced across his magazine pouches to make sure he hadn’t lost any. They were bringing literal tons of ammunition to bear, but unless he missed his guess, they were going to need every bit of it, no matter how clear the situation was at the LZ. The last time he’d had the same nervous twitch, they’d almost lost the beachhead they’d established at Camp Perry.

  He glanced around the interior of the chopper to gauge the mood of his men. Echo Team hadn’t deployed on their last mission, so he’d made a point of bringing them along with his own Alpha Team. That killed two birds with one stone because he had a particular interest in two of the Echo Marines.

  McFarlane yelled over the sound of the engine. “Hansen, Olsen, you two tight on the mission?”

  The two Marines could have been brothers, they looked so alike—tall and muscular, with blond hair and blue eyes. Back in the day McFarlane might have said they’d walked right off a recruiting poster if they weren’t such pains in his ass.

  Over the last eight years, most of the original enlisted Marines had moved up several ranks, with civilian volunteers filling in the lower slots. The situation was a bit less fluid for officers. Their numbers were proportionally so much smaller that rate of advance had actually slowed except on rare occasions.