“You have my word.” And then some. I wasn’t getting out of here without a pristine Holly in tow, and I was getting out of here.
Whatever the chief saw in my eyes was enough for him to give me a solemn nod and point towards the door. “She went that way.”
The sound of automatic weapons fire sounded from the direction he pointed. “Tell me that’s one of your men firing?”
The man looked offended. “Cortez is out there with her, I’ll get him on the radio and find out what in the hell is happening.”
Holly came running around the corner waving her arms over her head and shouting the word “Firesale!” When she saw me she almost froze but kept on moving. One of the guards opened the door for her, and she charged into the lab.
“We have to get out of here,” she declared looking at the chief.
The chief gingerly slipped the gun from Holly’s hand. “Director sent this strapping young lad down here to do exactly that. You need to go with him immediately.” The chief’s words rang with concern.
“Chief, we’ve got a problem.” One of the agents said, pointing towards the door Holly had just entered.
We all looked through the glass as fifteen of the zombies came lumbering around the corner, and started their inexorable pursuit of dinner.
The chief turned toward his men and started barking orders. “Get that door sealed and barricaded. We make a stand here and then follow the doc.” The men didn’t look too happy about it, but they follow his orders. “Get out of here.” The chief nudged Holly toward the door.
“But I can’t leave without my people. I’m supposed to protect them,” Holly pleaded.
The chief smiled at her in a way that was distinctly grandfatherly. “No Holly, it isn’t. Protecting your team is my job, and one I take very seriously. Your job is to get out of here and make sure this thing doesn’t spread. Now go.” The chief pulled her into a fierce hug and then turned and started barking orders to his men.
I grabbed Holly’s arm and started pulling her to the stairs. “Come on, we’ve got to get out of here.”
“I’m perfectly capable of keeping up on my own,” she grunted shaking her arm free from my grasp. “And I’m not going anywhere without a gun.”
I turned back toward the lab and shouted, “Chief, can I get that pistol back for Holly.”
The chief glared at me.
“She’s insisting.” I shrugged. Outside of knocking her out and trying to carry her up six flights of stairs, I didn’t know what to do.
The chief picked the gun up and looked at it before barking, “Douglas, give your sidearm to the doctor.”
“But Chief,” Douglas whined.
“Did I give you the impression that it was a question,” the chief snapped back.
Douglas pulled out his nine millimeter and reluctantly handed it to Holly. Holly snatched the weapon free before Douglas could pull it back. She looked it over, checked the chamber, and then held out her free hand. “And your extra mags.”
The man pulled out two full magazines from the belt of his pants and handed them to Holly. “Not like they’ll do me a lot of good without a gun.” He took Cortez’s pistol from the chief and headed back to his post.
“He’s a good kid,” the chief said as Douglas walked away. “I hope I don’t lose him tonight.”
It felt like the chief was trying to ask if I knew something, and I didn’t know what to say. Telling him would mean the end to my ride out of this hell hole. Our eyes met, and I hoped he could see the truth in them when I said, “We’re going to lose a lot of good people tonight.”
I broke eye contact with him and started for the stairs. I could feel Holly trailing reluctantly along behind me. She didn’t know what our little exchange was about, but she was smart, and it wouldn’t take her long to figure it out. By then I wanted to be on the roof with the chopper in sight.
All we had to do was make it up six flights of stairs, with a horde of undead chasing us. Easiest mission ever, I doubted we’d even break a sweat. I snorted as we entered the stairwell. Leaving Holly perplexed as I closed the door behind her. Before heading to the stairs, I broke the glass case holding a fire axe and hose. As quickly as I could, I unraveled the hose and then used the axe to cut the nozzle off. I slipped the end through the door handles and then back through the metal spool the hose was attached to.
The thick canvas wouldn’t tear easily. Someone would have to saw through it with a knife, and without a lot of room to work. Yes what I was doing was fucked up, but the easiest way to stay safe from zombies is to put as many tasty snacks between them and you as possible.
Holly tried to undo the knot, but I pushed her toward the stairs. “Get moving, Chen’s about to bring this building down on top of us.”
She shot me a disgusted look. “And you’re ok with that? God, I was so wrong about you.”
Holly was right to feel the way she did. I felt it to my core. What I was doing didn’t sit well with me, but neither did being dead. Sometimes you had to do what you needed to, to survive. The good people, the rule followers, they were all going to die today, and I wanted to live. Did it make me feel good trapping those agents inside, of course not, but it was necessary. Maybe one day Holly would be able to forgive me.
I grabbed Holly’s arm again, stopping her and spinning her toward me all at once. “I’m not ok with any of this, but as soon as those things got loose, everything changed.”
“Survival of the fittest?” Holly spat. “You’re no better than Chen!” Her eyes burned with fire. “Those are people down there, and we’re leaving them to die.”
“Garfield was a person, and you were more than happy to cut him up. Ramirez was just doing his job, and I had to blow his fucking head off. So don’t ask me what I’m willing to do to get out of here alive, I’ve already killed two of my friends.”
Technically Holly killed Garfield, but I’d given her the ok. In the end, it hadn’t mattered at all. They didn’t have a cure, and we were minutes away from being turned to dust. It wasn’t like either of us deserved the lofty moral high ground. More like both of us were standing on a patch of loose gravel by the edge of a cliff. One wrong move and we’d both end up at the bottom of the ravine.
Holly turned away from me and started marching up the stairs. I tried to turn the conversation in a different direction. I wanted to make sure if it came down to it Holly could fire that gun, and mean it. “You can’t think of them as people anymore. The slow ones don’t talk, they don’t think, all they do is feed.”
“Max, there were close to three hundred patients down there, and our staff. They couldn’t all be infected could they?”
You could tippy-toe around a question like that, or you could just answer it. Sugar coating the truth wasn’t going to help us get out of here. “Yes, I think they are.” She paused in her ascent to look at me with disbelief. I shouldered past her and kept moving up. “You didn’t see what Ramirez did to those people. It was something I wouldn’t have conceived in my worst nightmares. If just one of those people turned into what Garfield and Ramirez were, then it would have been a slaughterhouse.”
Holly was taking deep breaths but didn’t slow her pace. Four more floors to go and this would all be over. All we had to do now was keep our wits about us, and we’d be flying to a secure location for debriefing. Then I was done and out, and life would go back to normal for me. With the hospital gone and the infection neutralized, there wouldn’t be anything to worry about. I could enjoy my retirement. There was the distinct possibility that I would spend the next forty years eating pizza and playing video games. Man, my dog Basil was going to love having me at home all the time.
Still, I couldn’t help wondering how I ended up here. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Not to guys like me. I never aspired to be great. In fact, I was completely happy being mediocre. Give me fifty large a year, a Netflix account, and a house that rested neatly inside of a Whole Foods delivery area, and that was all I needed. Life could get
really simple when you wanted it to be.
Holly snapped me back into the moment by asking. “How bad was it?” The curiosity in her voice was clearly evident.
I kept my feet moving, but I wanted to slow down. I wanted to stand there and scream in frustration. No one would understand, not unless they had seen it. I wasn’t planning on taking Holly on a sightseeing tour so she’d just have to keep wondering. “It wasn’t good. The worst part was seeing those things stuck to the wall still moaning, still trying to take a bite out of me as I put them out of their misery.”
“Why do you call them things? They’re still people, aren’t they? Even though they’ve changed.” Now Holly sounded thoughtful.
I didn’t think they were people anymore. I’d seen enough to know I wasn’t dealing with a rational human being when encountering one of the infected. “Mostly, because calling them zombies makes me feel crazy.” It was true. Seeing one and admitting to yourself was one thing. Saying you were being chased by a zombie out loud to someone else was something entirely different.
Holly moved up a step or two so we were walking up the stairs together. She flashed the faintest of smiles and continued. “I started calling them necrotics. They aren’t exactly like traditional zombies are they? I mean in most of the movies they’re slow, right?”
“Not in all the movies, but in most of the good ones. I can tell you without reservation that I’d rather deal with five of the slow ones before another Ramirez. Not that the slow ones are much better. They are more like a slow moving tidal wave. It’s not the necrotics themselves that are scary, it’s the inevitability. When that wave crashes, it wipes everything out, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.”
“Then let’s make sure the wave doesn’t crash,” Holly said with complete belief that we could accomplish that very thing.
Part of me wished that I felt the same level of optimism that she did. Maybe it was because Holly hadn’t watched as many zombie movies as I had. Whatever the difference in our opinions was it was hard for me to imagine things getting better.
“Whatever you say, Holly.” We rounded the last set of steps on our way to the eighth floor, and the stairwell ended. Just like that, nothing but a brick wall. They do that sometimes in older buildings. It can save them in construction costs, not to mention it helps control access to the building and to certain floors. Seemed crazy to me, and right now the simple feat of architecture was starting to piss me off.
Pulling my Desert Eagle free, I moved in front of the door leading to the only option we had left. It was time to go back into the hospital and pray that we ran up the stairs fast enough to make it to the other stairwell before the necrotics. As slowly as I could, I inched the door open. The hallway was clear, but that wouldn’t last. Screams echoed up from the bottom of the stairwell. My little trick with the door wouldn’t last for long, not when the agents had knives and who knew what else at their disposal. That was ok, the door didn’t have to hold for long, just long enough for us to get away. We needed to keep moving. The last thing I wanted to explain to the chief was why he didn’t get a ride off the roof.
Holly looked down at the sound of the screams. “It’s empty,” she stated in a disapproving voice as she slipped into the hallway.
I didn’t bother to double check if the stairs were clear, it didn’t matter one iota. Entering the hallway I pulled the door closed behind us. There wasn’t a simple solution to keep the door wedged shut, so I just left it and started jogging. Holly held her weapon like she had some training, but I doubted it would hold up under a real threat. It’s one thing to shoot paper targets at the range and another to try and hit someone trying to kill you.
“Try and stay quiet, we don’t want to attract any unwanted attention.” I moved in front of Holly and quickly scanned the open rooms all while moving toward the other end of the floor.
“Do you really think they use sound to track us? Kind of sounds like a bad cliché.”
It did sound kind of hokey. It wasn’t like these were the cave people from Descent, but I was pretty sure that I was right. “The dead ones, their eyes are clouded over, but they tilt their heads almost like a dog or a bird when they hear something. The necrotics might have limited vision, but they’re using sound to track us. I’d bet my life on it.”
“But the ones like Garfield and Ramirez?” Holly asked in a hushed whisper almost as if she wondered if she crossed some kind of line.
“Oh, Ramirez could see just fine.” I checked the next two doorways and then moved forward and repeated the pattern. “Any idea what makes the necrotics so different?”
“Has to be the living tissue, but we haven’t isolated it yet. The only way to do that would be to infect living people and watch the virus progress. I didn’t sign up for that kind of Gestapo science.”
“Thank God for that. I’m under the distinct impression that Director Chen would authorize you to do just about anything.”
“Only if it will make Hilltop a pile of money so he can climb another rung on the ladder.”
That seemed a tad harsh. The guy did get my parents out of the hot zone. Although since then he’d showed a much darker side. On top of that, the chief and his men obviously hated him. Maybe I was looking at this all wrong, but whatever he did to me, I had to be thankful he got my parents out.
“You know, for a guy that everyone thinks is such a prick, he isn’t all bad. Chen evacuated my family to Flagstaff when all of this started.”
Holly stopped cold right in the middle of the hallway. “Max, your family is in Phoenix?”
“No, Chen got them out,” I replied feeling that gnawing seed of doubt in my belly starting to grow.
“I hope you’re right, Max. I really do.”
If the director didn’t get my family out, chances were they were fine right now, and I still had time to get to them. It might not be true, but it was what I had to believe. I could worry about getting my parents out of town as soon as I got the two of us out of this building. The look of sympathy on Holly’s face as I turned away all but confirmed what she thought Chen was capable of. What kind of asshole does that? Tells you your parents are safe, and then just leaves them in the middle of what might become a quarantine zone.
The rooms were all clear so far, but the training Garfield had beaten into me over hours on the practice course forced me to check each of the open doorways instead of just running past them. All of that caution didn’t mean shit when a man stepped into the hallway. Why did everything always turn to shit right before the big payoff? We were so close to the lobby and the stairs to salvation I could almost taste it.
The man blocking the end of the corridor was just watching us. His head moved slightly as he swayed almost rhythmically. Then he shattered the silence by leaning back and howling into the air. His arms came back to his sides, and he focused on us again. It took me a moment to place what was throwing me off. It was his eyes, they were completely black.
As he watched us, the man began scratching at his chest leaving deep gouges in the flesh with his nails. Blood tinged with black leaked from the wounds, but his eyes never left us. When his hands were slick and covered in blood he wiped them down the opposite arms, before dipping his fingers in and painting two dripping lines under each eye. Black fluid dribbled from the corners of his mouth almost like when my dog Basil knew I was eating something delicious and started to drool.
“Max,” Holly barely whispered, almost as if she were afraid the slightest noise would trigger the man.
“It’s fine, I’ve got this.”
The necrotic in front of us started to smile. The black fluid continued to drip from his lips, and now I could see that the same fluid had already darkened his teeth. What in the hell was happening to him? I was about to fire off a few rounds so I could close the distance and put the guy down when he took a step back. The smile never left his face, and I knew we were in for a world of hurt.
Three necrotics shambled into the hallway, filling it from
end to end. The man paced behind them waiting for an opening to strike. Was he directing them? Was that kind of coordination with the undead even possible? If there was one thing I could say about today, it just kept getting worse by the minute.
“Still feeling confident, Max?” Holly sounded as if she might have been smirking.
Was she really trying to shame me right now, or was she just pulling my leg? If I wasn’t able to back up my confidence, then it wasn’t just me that was going to die. There was no way back down, so Holly would turn into a necrotic snack right next to me.
“I was just wondering how good you are with a weapon. A man likes to know these things.”
Holly took one step forward to make sure the tip of her muzzle was clear of my body and fired three quick shots. The necrotics all dropped to the ground and didn’t move. Three perfect headshots. Didn’t she say she only had a little time in on the range? There was more to Doctor Holly Bowmont than she was letting on.
Now she was hitting me with a wholehearted smirk. “I can hold my own.” She flashed me a disarming smile and started walking toward the remaining man.
There was no way I was letting her put herself in that kind of danger. No Holly. No ride. It was as simple as that. I also knew from my encounter with Ramirez that these things were smart. Not smart enough to avoid a bullet but smart enough to almost cut me in half with an axe. We couldn’t just charge towards him, it could be a trap.
The man cleared the wide hallway in a single leap and headed in the direction of the stairs. Just great. Now there was no way to know if he was setting up an ambush for us. Plus we’d never be able to tell if he went up or down the stairs until we ran into him again. Seeing him again was at the top of my things I never hoped to do again, but I had the feeling it was inevitable. All we could do was get in the stairwell and hope we made it out before the necrotics rising through the building made it to us.
Rise of the Necrotics (Books 1-4) Page 11
