Since The Sirens Box Set | Books 1-7

by Isherwood, E. E.

  He was in an empty parking lot behind another brick building. A law firm name graced the one intact window on the entryway to the little office; papers were strewn about inside, and some had been tossed out the door, too.

  Not knowing what else to do, he went inside. In the failing light, he could view the reception area with no problem, but a pair of hallways led away into the darkness.

  The place had been ransacked, as he expected, but he was sure there had to be something he could use as a weapon. The reception desk was a coven of destruction, but he did find a sharp pair of scissors.

  Better than my fists.

  Feeling the smallest bit more self-assured, he tried to get deeper into the place. The nearest hallway turned out to be the restrooms. Nothing useful would be there; he didn't even have to go.

  The other hallway went to the offices, and he intended to try the nearest when he remembered a zombie movie where something like this came up.

  “Hey, any of you jerks hiding in here?” He said it loud enough to be heard in the hallway and attached offices.

  The seconds counted by. He was beginning to think the coast was going to be clear, but the ugly moan of a zombie started from somewhere at the end of the hallway.

  Then a soft pounding on a door, like someone with mittens was hitting it.

  A minute went by with the same constant sound before he was willing to chance walking into the hall. Much like his earlier experience up in the Arch, it was sometimes safer to go with the direction where you know there was a zombie, than the one where you aren't sure. If the zombie wasn't on him already, it might be stuck behind a door.

  The first office had an open door. Like the front of the establishment, everything had been tossed carelessly within the room. Even the desk had been put on its side. The computer looked new and fancy, and very broken. The only thing that was remotely of use was a coat rack with a suit jacket tangled up in its arms. Everything was on the floor, but he got busy unhooking the jacket and put it on. It was very tight, and he was almost ready to take it back off, but he figured it would be better than nothing right now. To be mistaken for a bloody zombie would be far worse than an ill-fitting suit coat.

  I don't even know how to tie a tie.

  Fortunately, there wasn't a tie.

  The coat rack almost had the right length and heft to fashion a crude spear, but he quickly deduced it would be way too heavy. That got him thinking, though, and he searched the room for alternatives.

  He settled on a stout wooden chair that probably had been used by clients anxious to sue for luxuries of the Old World. It took him three tries to swing the chair over his head and break it. When he finally managed that feat, he pulled out a leg. It felt about right, but it wouldn't make a very good spear. It still had some of the seat attached. It did make a fair club he could swing.

  The scissors went into his pants pocket, then he picked up the club and swung it around the room to test it. He discounted his prior failures of swinging weapons and made himself believe this time would be different.

  He walked back out into the night, with mismatched clothes and weapons.

  “I'm coming home, Victoria,” he said with quiet certainty.

  He ran some more.

  3

  Each building on the avenue had a small parking lot behind it, complete with dumpsters, abandoned cars, and the occasional zombie. Things were spread out so he could see what was coming up. That's how he saw the helicopter drone emerge from a building up ahead and shoot a tag at a couple of zombies loitering nearby.

  Then it vectored for him.

  Once more, he turned to the left. He ran to an abandoned pickup truck and slid underneath.

  He listened for the drone to arrive. Gunshots were constant, though most of them were far away.

  I need someone to shoot this drone.

  The whirl of the blades sent air under the truck. The drone was somewhere above. He moved as far to the other side of the undercarriage as he dared. In the twilight, he expected to see the flash of aircraft lights, but the drone didn't seem to need them.

  The wind shifted, and he sensed the drone was on the move. He returned to the center of the truck, waiting for what he'd need to do next. His club was useless. The scissors were a joke.

  After a few moments, he felt the air blowing up through the legs of his jeans. He angled his head so he could see behind the truck, and the drone had nearly landed on the pavement behind him. A small tube on its underside pointed at him.

  “Oh, crap!”

  He slid out the left side, pushing his club with him. The machine lifted off, and he felt it get close to him as he crouch-ran to the front of the truck. The old Ford was in the middle of an empty lot. He had nowhere to go.

  Maybe I could get inside the cab?

  Before he could finish his thought, the drone jumped upward so it was on top of the cab, about ten feet off the ground. The little gun tube swiveled to him.

  Almost without planning it, he hefted the wooden club and let it go toward the copter. It impacted the underside of the rotors with a loud crack. Pieces of wood flew back at him, and the drone tipped backward. He ducked himself down to the front bumper, worried it would tip over on top of him and catch him with one of the deadly blades. That would be a horrible way to die.

  The truck lurched as the drone banged loudly in the bed of the truck. The blades weren't stopping, but they clanged over and over on the metal.

  Rather than gawk at it, he ran.

  As he rounded the corner of a building onto the next street over, he heard the drone begin to emit a high-pitched siren. It sounded a lot like a cry for help. He found a dark nook and squatted down to catch his breath, again—needing the break. The sprinting was more than he could handle.

  While he waited, another drone flew by. It came from across the street and passed near enough he felt the wash of its blades. It went in the direction of its fallen friend.

  “Feet, I need you,” he whispered.

  There were no other—obvious—threats on the street, so he got back to it. Now he was without his chair-club. He only had what jiggled in his pocket.

  I'm breaking the cardinal rule of life: running with scissors!

  He giggled to himself and enjoyed the distraction as he notched another couple of blocks. That's when he tripped—again.

  This time, it was more of a slip. He saw dirt or something on the street, but the low light was tricky. He didn't count on banana-peeling the underlying layer of fluid. He was back on his feet in a flash, pants soaked in god-knows-what, looking for the inevitable attacker, like the previous trap.

  But nothing came at him.

  The debris on the ground was horrifying. And he'd seen something like it before. Two wide swathes of crushed bodies lay upon the ground right there in the street. The Tiger tanks made the same horrific tracks when they crushed all the zombies between the warehouses earlier that day. But these tracks looked to be weeks old. They'd intermingled with dust, trash, and foliage. But here and there he could watch a lone hand move or the remains of a head with an ever-moving mouth. Where there were no bodies, such as where he slipped, the tanks had left slick tracks of blood and other gore. Crushed and compacted.

  He tuned it out.

  This isn't happening!

  His stomach rebelled, but he didn't throw up. He ignored that he'd slipped on the effluence of the remains of things that had been pulverized days or weeks ago by heavy-treaded army tanks.

  The scissors mocked him from his pocket. He was carrying a useless weapon in a world where rocket-propelled grenades were the order of the day.

  Where the tank had gone was not his concern.

  Whose side it was on was not his concern.

  His concern was ahead. He stepped over the tracks and picked up the pace.

  Running at night wasn't his thing.

  4

  He ran for about ten minutes while the darkness fell. There were no street lights or other electrical sources. He though
t the darkness would be an advantage against the crazy people who might shoot at him, but it turned out to be a big liability for fending off zombies.

  Almost without realizing it, he'd picked up a handful of runners. Among all the other noises of the city, and his own footfalls, he almost missed the sound of feet behind him. He kept to the middle of the street, hoping to avoid tripwires or piles of human remains, but a quick look back while running across an intersection let him make out at least three or four people chasing him.

  “I don't suppose you're alive, huh?”

  No response.

  Damn.

  He steadied himself. Forest Park was still miles away, and now he had a fan club. The risk of falling or getting delayed in any way had just become instantly deadly.

  For a little while, he tried to tune them out. Just like any number of track and cross country meets he'd endured. He wasn't a contender in most of them, but he was a finisher. That was all that mattered, most times.

  A large search light peered down from a helicopter to his right, as he cruised through the night.

  Two jets flew very low, almost directly above his head. He absently thought about bombs—he was on their flight path—but resolved that if he was ever given time to think about bombs, he probably wasn't being bombed.

  Blocks ahead he watched as someone fired a machine gun—an honest-to-god machine gun—as they sent the tracers skipping across an intersection. The rounds danced from his left to his right. A big spotlight at ground level illuminated the intersection for a few seconds, then turned off.

  He considered slowing down so he could avoid that cross street until the shots were gone, but slow wasn't in his vocabulary. He continued ahead, though it didn't look like the bullets were letting up.

  At the last intersection before the dangerous one, the attack stopped. He picked up his pace, intending to get across in the lull.

  Did they stop, or are they reloading?

  That was the most important question on Earth.

  When he arrived at the road, he looked both ways as he would on any other run. A pair of Humvees were far down the road on his left. Shockingly, both sat under powerful spotlights, almost like they wanted to be seen. Each also aimed searchlights where they fired their guns. They were two intersections down, and they each fired down different roads. At that moment they weren't firing his way.

  He sprinted. The cross street was huge—it felt like a superhighway—and it took him an eternity to cross it. The entire time he imagined the gunners changing their aim, so the bullets came his way.

  A tracer flashed in front of him.

  He'd made it a little over half way, but the rounds started passing in front of him.

  The searchlight caught him in full view.

  He threw himself down and lined himself up so his head faced the guns. He didn't know if that was a bigger risk than spreading himself out lengthwise, but it seemed to make sense. His head was turned so he could see the runners behind him.

  Five or six had tagged along. They were closer than he figured they'd be.

  Unlike him, they made no effort to get low. As the gunners up the street noticed their rounds were making contact with something, both gunners focused efforts on Liam's intersection. The runners stood out in the glare of light.

  The first zombie was halved, and he fell with a disgusting splash to the pavement. He'd only made it a short ways across.

  Liam used the distraction to claw his way toward a body that had been shot earlier. It put something between him and the gun trucks, though it would offer no protection if the bullets wanted him.

  One gunner stopped, but the other swept the entire road again. It brought down a second zombie, and when it hit, the tracers spun off in odd directions. In the uneven light, Liam saw the woman get shredded.

  The second gunner started up again. His shots were short, so the rounds hit the road between Liam and the Humvees, and the rounds skipped over his intersection. Several skipped right over his head. Some made funny sounds as they went by.

  One of the runners made it all the way to Liam and tripped over him as he lay there.

  As was common with the zombies, it struck the ground with great force, without using its arms to catch itself. The hollow slap of its skull on the asphalt would have been funny in any other situation. Now, not so much.

  The zombie seemed to notice him as it struggled to get up. Instead of finding its feet, it crawled toward Liam. It wore shorts and a white tank top with bloody accents.

  He struggled to get out the scissors.

  Several more rounds whizzed right over the zombie.

  “Just a little lower,” he shouted, knowing he wouldn't be heard.

  The gunfire stopped completely.

  He propped himself up on his elbow, intending to prepare to fight the crawler, and the gunfire resumed. Both guns angrily pounded the intersection like it had killed the gunners' pet cat.

  The zombie was unafraid. It closed the distance. The scissors felt miserable in his hand, but he readied them.

  At the last second, he gambled on another tactic.

  Using his experience with squats, he got to his feet and then sprang up.

  The tracer rounds bounced and skipped wildly further down the street, but he ignored the danger. As expected, the zombie got to his feet as well.

  All the better to grab my prey...

  He dropped back down and tried to continue drag-crawling himself across the street. His black suit jacket would be harder to see than the man's white shirt. Or, he hoped that would be the case.

  A repetitive thumping noise sounded from the zombie. It had been struck several times in succession, but it stumbled after Liam. He moved as fast as he could on his hands and knees, but figured if the zombie caught him—it would bring the angry thumps with it.

  More impacts.

  He imagined a tracer flew underneath his chest as he was on his hands and knees. Maybe it was the fear.

  He picked up the speed like he was doing exercises with his track team.

  “Who can cross the intersection the fastest, without standing and running? Go!”

  In ten seconds he was across and had another corner of a building between himself and the gunners. He got to his feet and looked back.

  The pursuit had been wiped out. The zombie closest to him had huge chunks removed from his chest, and one of his arms had been taken clean off. His white shirt had turned sickly black, and blood poured from a large hole in its head. It had taken the full force of an untold number of machine gun rounds. And, it had almost made it.

  The lights flicked off.

  Liam waited for fifteen seconds and then peeked around the corner. The Humvees were aiming their lights down other roads now.

  Behind him, a couple of runner zombies came into the intersection, saw the lights, then headed that direction. It was as if they'd been following him but now had juicier targets.

  Since they had lights on themselves, along with powerful weapons, he allowed that he was glad the zombies were targeting someone else for a change. If he wanted to get safe, getting to those guns might be the right choice to survive the night, but that wasn't the direction he was heading.

  His journey westward continued.

  5

  He tried to guess how far he'd come since he'd left the Polar Bears. With all the distractions and changes in directions, he estimated he'd gone three or four miles. That left at least two to go.

  A twenty-minute run under ideal conditions.

  He felt the dead weight of fatigue hit him hard. The combination of the drain of adrenaline and the fall of night had him wishing he could get off his feet and rest.

  Push on!

  The zombies were out there, but he kept moving fast enough they couldn't see him. He thought there could be runners behind him, but he couldn't be sure. His footfalls were stealthy compared to the zombies, and if they were back there—he'd never assume they weren't—they were very quiet.

  More gunfire f
rom every direction in the city. The chatter of the machine guns was distinctive, but a thousand other guns were being discharged over the urban landscape. Rarely, someone would shoot close enough to worry him.

  This city has lost its mind.

  If he looked down the cross streets to his left, he'd often see the tracers of the Humvees two blocks over. They skipped or arced to the west in the same direction he was going. But they couldn't reach him.

  When he was only a couple blocks outside Forest Park, he saw the dim lights of the medical towers ahead. They still used generators to keep the places lit and functioning. They called to him.

  “I'm here, Liam.”

  “I'm coming, girlfriend,” he said to the darkness. The reply was the ricochet of a bullet. It snapped somewhere close. That got him to move from the middle of the road and approach more cautiously.

  As he closed the distance to the park, he became aware of where all the gunfire was originating. It wasn't just all over the city. It was a very specific point in the city. A perimeter, actually.

  The boundary of the park was a combination of derelict cars, parking barriers, and whatever junk people could stack in piles. They'd filled the gap between buildings. It presented a formidable barrier to keep the zombies out, assuming the defenders had sufficient ammo and that the military wasn't instructed to bomb the place to oblivion.

  But the larger problem was that he was now on the outside, looking in. Those gunshots were coming in his direction. The far side of a big intersection was blocked by city buses, dump trucks, and other large vehicles. A few men with spotlights walked on top, illuminating the zombies in the street outside their position. Gunners would then dispatch them. A ton of bodies littered the intersection.

  They appeared to be using a similar tactic as the military down the road. They were drawing in the zombies by using light, which gave them clear shots at the easy targets. The biggest difference was the caliber being used. No machine guns or tracer rounds, here.

  Liam heard men and women yelling from across the street, but they sounded as if they were on the other side of a wide river. The zombies in the “river” between them kept him from yelling out to them. In the darkness of night, anything could happen.