by Maxey, Phil
By the time he had finished, Anna was drinking down the blood as fast as she could draw it from the hole in the bag.
“Good. I don’t like it in here anyway,” said Shannon.
Anna placed the bag down. “Does everyone know?” she said breathlessly.
“Lee, Mary, and Hardin don’t.”
“I don’t trust Hardin,” said Shannon.
“He has that effect on people…”
Joel heard the footsteps before the door opened and held his hand up so nobody else would speak.
Bill walked in sheepishly. “Hmm, I thought it was the old that didn’t need much sleep.” He continued walking towards the coffee machine.
“They know…” said Joel.
Bill kept on walking. “Good.” He switched the machine on and pulled a plastic cup from a rack of them. “I’ve been thinking. We need to get the tablet and bring it with us. It can’t stay here, or be allowed to fall into the wrong hands.”
“That’s going to be some task. They’re going to have it battened down as if it were a crate of uranium…” He thought for a moment. “I’ll see if I can track down where they take it for storage, maybe I can vamp in, grab it, and vamp out.”
“When we first went to the Dome, I noticed a door which was heavily guarded. Perhaps they keep it in there?”
“When you and Evan come with me in a few hours time, maybe Evan can take a look.”
Bill nodded, while pouring himself some coffee. He then looked closer at the coffee machine. “Hmm.. I wonder if they will miss this.”
“What about the vials?” said Anna. “Who knows what was in them.”
“It’s going to be hard enough getting the tablet. If we get a chance to grab them we will, but…”
Shannon smiled at the others. “So, how we getting out?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Joel sheepishly walked along the corridor. It was the same one he had walked the day before. By his side was Evan and Bill, and in front was a soldier leading the way.
They arrived at the elevator and all walked inside. Joel paid close attention to the panel of lights indicating the levels. They were on the twelfth, and were quickly heading deeper.
The door opened at the eighteenth level, and after a short walk they were confronted by the chaos that was the Dome.
Evan leaned closer to his grandfather. “Is it just me, or do they seem even more agitated than normal?”
Bill nodded.
Rachel walked up to them. A few strands of hair were stuck to her forehead, which she flicked away. “Umm… We have to cancel today’s session.” She nodded to the soldier who opened the elevator door again.
“What’s going on? Is there something wrong?” said Joel.
Scientists ran between the long tables, running up to others and handing them pieces of paper, or showing them what was on flat display screens.
“No, no. Everything’s under control. We just need you to go back to your rooms. We will call upon you if we need you.”
A group of soldiers ran past and through the doorway Bill noticed the day before.
“What’s in there?” he said.
Rachel walked forward, trying to physically pressure them to move back into the elevator. She looked again at the soldier, who pressed on Evan’s shoulder. “I’m sure we will contact you again later today.”
Soon, they were inside the elevator which was rapidly rising. Joel could hear the soldier’s heart rate booming in his chest. He looked up at him. “You know what’s happening down there?”
“Sorry, sir, I cannot answer those kinds of questions.”
“Maybe I can help?”
“Yeah, me too!” said Evan.
The elevator door opened. “Please go back to your rooms.”
They all stepped out.
Joel looked back at the face of a scared young man as the elevator doors closed.
Bill looked at Joel. “I think what you saw, it’s happening now!”
Joel started moving off towards the dorm room. “Yeah, so much for having three days.”
“But I’m not ready. I need more time to change our ID cards!” said Evan.
Joel briefly stopped and held up a card. It was not his own. “No need, I got this.”
Hardin, Lee, and Mary were inside the dorm, and all looked at Joel as he entered.
“Get your stuff packed, we’re leaving.”
Hardin’s face contorted into one of disapproval. “They are kicking us out already? I only just got here! Is it because something you and your ‘friends’ did?”
Mary was more perceptive. “Is there something wrong? Why do they want—”
Joel shook his head. “Something’s happened on the lower floors. Something bad. We need to leave, now.”
Mary started packing what few things she had into a small plastic bag.
Hardin got to his feet and walked to Joel, who was packing his own things. “Let me talk to that… general guy. He’ll respect that I was a mayor. I’ll put in a good word for all of you as well, and—”
Joel angrily stuffed a sheet into his bag and stood a few inches from Hardin. “This place is going to be destroyed. All of it. Stay if you want. But the rest of us are leaving.”
The color flushed from Hardin’s cheeks, and he turned and started packing what he could.
Marina appeared at the door, Jess and Jasper behind her. Flint barked at all the commotion.
“Is it happening now?” said Marina.
Joel walked up to her at the entrance. “Yup.”
She went to talk again, but he held up the young soldier’s ID card and that gave her her answer.
Shannon appeared with Anna. Both rushed inside and picked up pre-packed bags.
“Everyone ready?” said Joel.
They all acknowledged they were, and he led them to the elevator. The lights in the hallway flickered.
“What the hell?” said Hardin.
The elevator doors opened and everyone bundled in. Joel held the ID card to the box beneath the keypad, then selected the ground floor.
“How the hell are we going to survive out there?” said Hardin.
“Same way we always have,” said Marina.
The elevator jolted and the doors opened. Fresher air rushed into the confined space. They stepped out into a much larger space than the floors below.
Signs and large painted arrows pointed to the entrance on rock walls that were twenty feet high.
Everyone stepped out apart from Joel.
“What are you doing?” said Marina.
“I have to try and get the tablet.”
“Are you crazy. It’s not worth it. Who knows what’s going on in the lower levels!” She went to step forward, but he threw her his small bag and punched in the eighteenth floor on the keypad.
“Give me fifteen minutes. If I’m not back, leave!”
“But—”
The elevator doors closed and the number on the LED screen above them started increasing.
Joel calmed his beating heart, and allowed his senses to absorb what was about him. With each level he passed, for a brief moment he heard gunfire and screams. Someone or something had brought hell to the mountain. He watched the floor numbers change.
‘9… 13… 16… 18’
The doors slid open to silence.
The usual rush of confused noise had been replaced with a lack of sound that was even louder.
He stepped out of the elevator.
A burst of sparks from electrical cabling that was hanging from a wall made him flinch and throw a hand out.
Then he heard a familiar sound. Images of the stranger leaning over his wife, and the glug-glug of a thick liquid being sucked from her was something he recognized instantly. He scoured the overturned tables and broken machinery until he spotted two heat signatures. In a flash, he weaved his way through the maze, and, without stopping, grabbed a foot-long piece of metal from a table, and plunged it into the back of the vamp’s head. It slumped for
ward on top of Rachel Frost.
Joel pushed the former soldier off her. Her eyes were wide, and she started flailing, her arms and legs crashing into the debris around her. Then her eyes started to grow heavy.
Joel pulled the jacket off the dead soldier, ripping a part into a long strip, and then wrapped it securely around her neck.
He shook her gently. “You have lost a lot of blood, but you need to stay awake. I’ll get you out of here, okay?”
She sluggishly nodded.
“Where’s the tablet?”
“In… lab five…” she lifted a heavy arm and pointed it to the door that Bill had been curious about.
Joel looked around the large domed area. He went to get to his feet, but she grabbed his shirt.
“Lab… dangerous… that’s where… it is…”
He grabbed a large piece of a table top and lowered it over her, balancing it on the lower half of what was left of a heap of server boxes. He kneeled again. “Stay under this. Do not move. I’ll be back.”
She nodded.
He stood and scoured the area around him once again for any movement. There wasn’t any.
Whatever was down here seems to have moved up to the other levels. Trying to get out…
He moved quickly, jumping over obstacles and pushing others out of the way until he was confronted by an opening to a long corridor. On the floor to his right sat the secure-looking door, buckled and distorted.
“Yeah, that’s not good,” he said under his breath.
He stepped over a seal, as if he was walking onto the gantry of a ship. Lights flickered ahead of him, momentarily revealing four doors, two opposite each other, and ahead, a large area of shattered glass partitions and benches covered in scientific equipment.
There was also a smell, unlike anything he had ever sensed before. A twisted combination of human detritus and something rotting. Something dead.
A deathly cold blue light seemed to illuminate everything, even when the main lights blinked out.
He listened into the stuttering darkness ahead and picked up the sound of something. He wasn’t sure what, but there was a ‘thing’ moving inside the large area, thirty feet in front of him in the lab.
He cautiously stepped forward, trying to be ready for any eventuality.
His ears started to pick up a pulsing throbbing sound coming from the room ahead and slowed almost to a stop when he got to its entrance.
The air was thick with the odor he picked up earlier, so much so that it felt as if it was trying to force its way into his pores and smother him.
What the fuck…
Bodies of soldiers laid in a clump on the right side of the lab. Each one neatly placed side by side. But that wasn’t what had Joel frozen, not wanting to move any further forward, for also attached to their skulls were tentacle-like arms extending from another human, a large muscular man, whose clothes were mere shreds hanging from him.
The stench was coming from this thing that was feeding on the soldiers.
Hasn’t seen me.
Questions kept rolling through Joel’s mind of what the thing with five, long, snakelike appendages was, but he immediately pushed them away.
He scoured the rest of the lab looking for the tablet. From where he stood it couldn’t be seen. If he knew where it was, he could blur across the room, get it, and be out before the thing even knew he had been there. But, as it was, he was going to have to go slow. He needed to search. That meant he might be seen.
He took a step forward, his eyes fixed on the back of the creature that was feeding. Then another step. Then another.
A soldier screamed.
Joel’s eyes switched to the man that was now flailing.
Shit, he’s alive! How is he alive?
The soldier’s hands were struggling to get the thing that was attached to the top of his head away from him.
Have to help!
Joel went to run forward when one of the creature’s trunk-like arms whipped around, bringing the soldier attached to it as well. It slammed into Joel, knocking him across the room until he hit up against a medical cabinet, smashing the glass door.
Joel fell to the ground, a little dazed, then kneeled peering over the counter top. The thing was looking directly at him. Three of its arms were still feeding, but the other two were holding soldiers aloft as if they were puppets. Its face had long forgotten to be human, and now was beyond even the distortions of vamp’s faces. Dark, soulless, beady eyes rested above a mouth which seemed to take up the entirety of the lower half of it’s head.
“What the hell are you…”
Then Joel saw it. Behind the creature. The tablet being held by two robotic arms and a multitude of cables attached to it. To his surprise he could see symbols dancing over its surface.
He stood square, facing the mutated thing fifteen feet in front of him. “Here… kitty, kitty… come to me…”
A roar emanated from the creature’s expanding mouth and, with it, came an even greater stench.
The soldiers flew through the air at Joel as the thing burst forward, not bothering to move around the counters, but instead uprooted them from their holdings and tossed them to the side.
Joel zipped to one side, faster than the monster could react, and then slid along the smooth floor under its flailing arms, emerging behind it. He smashed his fist into the machinery gripping the tablet, and the glow coming from the tablet immediately went dark.
Ducking, a tentacle swept through the air where his head was and crashed into the robotic arms, but not before Joel threw his hand out and grabbed the tablet. The arms crashed up against the wall behind.
Joel scurried across the floor, the tablet in one hand, as the thing’s arms scythed through the air around him. He made it to the soldier that a moment before was pleading for help, but he could see he had passed. He burst forward and threw himself into the corridor. The sound of destruction was at his neck as he sprinted forward, not daring to look back.
Without stopping, he scrambled across the main room of the Dome and threw the table top to one side.
Gone.
Rachel was not there.
He looked around, desperately trying to gain any sense of her, but there was nothing alive down there apart from the thing that was about to emerge from the corridor.
He sprinted forward, diving over the broken things which were humanity’s best chance of survival, and frantically pressed the buttons on the wall for the elevator to come back from wherever it was.
The multi-limbed thing crashed out into the Dome room, shunting furniture and equipment out of the way, and then picked up the same items.
A server stack, still within it’s metal frame, flew through the air and smashed into the floor, just where Joel had been standing.
Joel laid on the elevator floor, then swiveled around, swept his ID card and hit ‘0’ for the ground floor.
*****
The elevator doors slid open and Joel staggered out.
“You’re hurt!” said Marina and Anna at the same time. Anna went to move forward but Joel waved her off.
“It’s been eighteen minutes!” said Hardin.
Joel realized there were four more people.
Rachel, Josh, Max, and Sergeant Hickman stood in their own group, a few feet away.
“You’re here!” said Joel to the sandy-haired woman.
She smiled. “Thanks to you.”
Hickman waved them forward. “Come on, we’re leaving.”
Rattling and clanging came from the elevator behind Joel.
He’s coming.
“We gotta go. Everyone follow the sergeant.”
Joel turned, quickly running back inside the elevator and hit the highest numbered floor on the keypad, then jumped back out as the doors closed.
Should slow him down.
“Come on!” shouted Hickman, now twenty yards away near a large secure door.
Joel covered the distance in a few seconds, just as the door began to slowly
swing back. When the gap was big enough, everyone ran through.
“What’s the plan?” said Marina to Joel under her breath. “We going with them?” she gestured towards those from the base.
“See how it plays out.”
Soon light from the outside world appeared at the end of a long tunnel. As they all ran along it, they passed bodies. Joel could smell from the blood that they had been killed by vamps. Vamps that were once their colleagues.
Max lagged behind, mostly limping, his breath an effort to expel from his lungs.
Anna slowed and placed her arm under his shoulder and helped him along.
The air increasingly smelt damp, and the blanket of gray above their heads when they emerged from the tunnel confirmed it had been raining. Outside, the world seemed dead.
The chaos of helicopters and soldiers guarding buildings had been replaced by solitude.
Hickman’s horror was obvious. “I don’t get it…”
“Looks like everyone’s deserted us,” said Max.
They all walked forward, moving past a guard station and down a sloped road.
Shannon spotted a single truck parked at the back of the large hospital tents.
Joel got to it before anyone else and jumped up, looking in the cabin. A young female soldier laid slumped across the two front seats, her neck a tapestry of puncture wounds.
The keys were still in the ignition.
The others arrived at the back.
Hickman pulled his M4 and jumped up, pulling the flaps back. There were a few crates of medical supplies, but apart from that it was empty.
“Everyone inside,” said the sergeant.
Anna helped Mary, Lee, and Max up, while the sergeant walked to the front.
“I’m driving,” he said to Joel who was pulling the soldier out of the cabin.
“That’s a negative, soldier. I’m driving, at least the first shift.”
Hickman raised his rifle at Joel’s chest. “You got no authority here!”
Joel could hear the thump of the man’s heart. He raised his hands.
“Your kind killed… everyone! This place was how we were going to turn it all around! Then you and your freaks arrived! I oughta just kill you now, do us all a favor!”
