Dead Eye Hunt (Book 2): Into The Rad Lands

by Meredith, Peter

  “She has the code…”

  “I’ll give it to you,” she said to Cole.

  Hamilton grinned and clapped Cole on the back. “See? She’ll give us the code. And moving them zombies ain’t nothing. Once they’re hooded, they follow your voice. We don’t need her.”

  Cole needed her. He had done everything for her and given everything for her, and somewhere along the line he had fallen in love with Corrina as if she were his own daughter. And now…he didn’t know what to do. She had been turned and had become one of the things he hunted.

  She had also become stronger and, moment by moment, was becoming less afraid. For most of her life, and especially the last few days, fear had been driving her, but now, slowly, she was discovering there was nothing to be afraid of. She certainly wasn’t afraid of Hamilton. He was weak and though his cuts were mostly scabbed over, they still bled enough to make her head light with hunger. The hunger itself was unnerving and wrong—and yet, right and wrong seemed like fluid concepts just then.

  “I said I’d give Cole the codes,” she said to Hamilton, her voice icy. “I’m not givin’ you nothing.” She got up and stretched, grimaced slightly, then beckoned Cole outside.

  “You don’t need to do this,” he said in a hushed voice. “I can…”

  “Shut up.” She grinned at him. Her teeth seemed extra white and was it his imagination that they looked sharper? “I can finally do something for you. You been doing stuff for me all this time and I never really say thank you like I should. So, now I get to.” She leaned up and for an odd, awkward moment, he thought she was going to kiss him on the cheek. Instead she whispered three numbers into his ear.

  “Shit,” he muttered. He hadn’t wanted to know the code. It made her leaving seem permanent. “Make your distraction and then get to the tunnel. We won’t go through the door until you get there.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” she laughed and then limped off.

  It was only when she was out of sight that he realized she had run off with just the dart gun as a weapon. In any emergency it was the worst.

  Squatting down on the steps, he asked Hamilton, “How many rounds do you have?”

  “Seven. What about you?”

  Hamilton leaned in close, already jealous. Cole hadn’t really given Campana’s pistol a glance, now he saw that it was an ugly old Maltese. When he went to drop the magazine, it remained stuck up in the grip and he had to pry it out with his thumb nail. “Eight,” he said after a quick count. “Want to trade?” Hamilton laughed at the suggestion. Cole glared as he struggled the magazine back in place. “Maybe Campana’s got another mag.”

  Cole pushed Campana against the wall and held him there as Hamilton searched his many pockets. “Uh, I got a lighter and what is this? Ugh. I hope that’s jerky, because if it’s…” There was a crash from a block away. It was Corrina’s distraction, or so Cole hoped. They sat in silence waiting and soon there came a gonging sound as if she had found a large bell and was throwing rocks at it.

  Immediately, all the zombies in sight began to flock toward the sound. Hamilton was eager to move, but Cole guessed there were more out there and held their three Dead-eyes back. As they waited, a dark breeze blew ash over them. They both withdrew into their rags until their radiation meters began to buzz. It wasn’t a steady buzz; it came and went with the wind.

  “Not now!” Cole seethed. If a CAT storm came up just then, it would be their death.

  “We gotta go,” Hamilton said, grabbing Hagy and shoving her out into the swirling ash. McGuigan came next, then Campana. Cole came last and Hamilton pushed him in front. “Go on, Cole, lead the way. Don’t give me that look! I got stabbed like six times. I’m not a hundred percent.”

  Cole continued to stare. “And I got shot twice and got left behind by a pussy.”

  “Blah, blah, blah. Just get going. We both know you will.” Cole balled an impotent fist. They also both knew he wasn’t going to punch anyone. Instead he growled and started pulling Hagy along.

  The wind was ten times worse away from the shelter. It blew the ash into great swirling spirals that spun up into a dead black sky that seemed to crush down in anger. Their meters buzzed off and on as if the radiation couldn’t make up its mind. There was nothing they could do about it and so they pressed on towards the tunnel. In the mad swirls of ash, they were practically blind. The roaming Dead-eyes were even more so, and with their nostrils caked with ash, any threat from them was completely incidental.

  With the storm howling around them the need for a distraction had vanished as had the gonging sound which had faded to nothing. And yet she hadn’t caught up. “She might be lost,” Cole said, squinting back through the blowing ash. Sending Corrina out alone had been a mistake, he realized. She was a clever girl in the city and the dark tunnels beneath it, but she was no longer a girl, and this was not the city.

  “She’ll catch up!” Hamilton yelled over the wind. “She didn’t go far. Now keep your head on right or you’ll get us lost, too.”

  Because of the storm and the darkness, getting lost was a distinct possibility. The mounds of rubble took on a same grayness and the trails that wound through it were all unmarked and crossed back and forth over each other. Seen from above, they were like the scribbles from a child’s crayon. Cole kept his eye on a partially crumbled building that he remembered being just a city block north of the tunnel entrance.

  With that landmark guiding him, he limped and staggered through the storm until the Holland Tunnel opened up before them, a gaping black wound in the earth.

  Grinning, Hamilton pumped a fist in the air and cried, “Yes! We’re finally here! God, I didn’t think we would make it. Come on. Time’s ticking. One more push and we’ll be there.” He gave McGuigan a hard shove and followed him down into the darkness. His wounds—his shallow wounds—were apparently no longer bothering him so much.

  “Not without Corrina,” Cole said. He was still on the threshold of the tunnel, ash collecting at his feet.

  “You stupid son of a bitch!” Hamilton roared, his voice echoing throughout the darkness. When Cole only stood unmoving, Hamilton rushed back to him. “She knows the way, Cole. She’s smart, okay? I know I’ve given her crap, but she’s smart and she’s a survivor. She’ll be here any minute and when she doesn’t find us, you know what she’ll do? She’ll see all these prints in the ash and realize that we’ve gone ahead because we’re up against the fucking clock. And then she’ll walk right down that tunnel and through the door and everything’ll be fine.”

  Cole wasn’t convinced. “She used to be smart. Maybe she still is or maybe she’s become…”

  “One of them? Then all the more reason to leave her behind. She’s a fucking zombie, Cole. I know that’s some tough shit to swallow but we all knew that could happen when we started this.”

  The fact that he wasn’t wrong was the only reason Cole hesitated before putting out his hand. “Give me your gun.”

  Hamilton took a step back, saying, “Hell no. If you want to kill yourself, go right ahead, but leave me out of it. I need the gun and you ain’t getting it.”

  “I’m going out there and if I die, then you’ll never get through the door. If you want me to have a chance, give me the gun. Oh, and the lighter.” Hamilton made angry noises, looked furious and even pointed the gun at Cole for a few seconds, perhaps thinking that a threat would work. It wouldn’t. Cole ignored the gun and went to Campana and threw him down. While the zombie squirmed, Cole tore the clothes off his back and his legs.

  After a moment’s hesitation, he did the same for the other two, though he was gentler about it.

  Stuffing the rags down the front of his sweater, he turned back to Hamilton and saw he was a changed man. He practically begged Cole, “Give me the numbers and I’ll give you the gun. Or the other way around. Look Cole, it’s not like I can lock you out. And we both know it’ll take me all the time we have left to get these fuckers up there. It’s the least you can do.”

&nb
sp; Cole could’ve got the gun from him just by refusing to budge. Time was Hamilton’s enemy while love was Cole’s. Love, and a good streak that he frequently despised. “Fine.” He held out his hand until Hamilton gave up the Riker. “The numbers are 31, 44, 37.”

  “31, 44, 37,” Hamilton repeated. “Okay, got it. Now get going.”

  They split up, going in opposite directions. Cole ran/limped to the building that had been his landmark. As he ran, he passed wandering Dead-eyes, but not as many as there had been, which did nothing to alleviate his fear. He could imagine Corrina running from a thousand-strong mob. If she was running in the wrong direction, she was doomed. Then again, if she was running at him with a thousand zombies in tow, then he was doomed.

  “It is what it is,” he muttered as he stepped over a pile of broken furniture that had been piled in the doorway at the front of the building. Someone had tried to barricade themselves inside. It had done them no good. Like so many of the buildings around the tunnel, it was little more than a shell and one that wasn’t going to last much longer.

  One of the walls was swaying outrageously and was slowly peeling back away from the other three with each gust. In the closest corner was a part of a stairwell. Its walls were shattered and there were gaping crags that had to be leapt. It would be insanity to tempt it. Cole’s desperation overthrew his grasp on sanity, and he climbed through the ruins and up the stairs. They crumbled around him as he went up.

  Just past the fourth floor, his foot dislodged a hunk of cement that went bouncing down. With each bounce, it smashed off a new hunk of rock which smashed off more. To Cole’s horror, he saw that the entire staircase was crumbling away and the disaster didn’t end when the lower two flights disappeared in an explosion of dust. The cracks that ran up the walls began to etch upward.

  Cole could think of nothing better to do than to race the cracks to the top of the stairs. These gave out at the sixth floor, as did most of the rest of the building. The sixth floor was not a floor at all. It consisted of a jagged bit of linoleum and rotted wood that ran in a ring along the inner edge of the broken walls.

  With the stairs falling away, Cole was forced to chance edging out onto the narrow ring. As usual with Cole’s luck, that didn’t hold either. It groaned beneath him. Backing to the exterior wall did nothing since that was vibrating as well. He knew that it was going to come down about thirty seconds before it did.

  He had just enough forewarning to race for the next section of wall—which, of course, was the wall that had been swaying back and forth. Into the fire, he thought, however, he did not make it to the “fire.” The section of wall he was on collapsed around him when he was only twenty feet away. It started with the floor, which fell beneath his scrambling feet. Everything collapsed onto the fifth floor, which was also crumbling. The sound was immense and angry. He could do nothing but cling to his section of floor.

  Uselessly, his fingers dug into the soft wood as the fifth floor fell into the fourth, and that went crashing down as well.

  Chapter 36

  The drop had been jarring, but not crushing as Cole had expected. He lifted his head and saw that he was still fifty feet in the air. It had been only the center portion of the wall that had fallen, creating an immense pile of rubble that reached right up to his little perch.

  “Holy fuck,” he muttered, pushing himself to his feet. A tremendous groan off to his left jerked him around. He expected it to be some sort of giant zombie, but it was only the south-facing wall tipping ever-more precariously as it swayed back and forth.

  Trembling, Cole picked himself up. There was no time to worry about the building falling, or how he was going to get back down again. Knowing his luck, he would climb down the pile of rubble only to have the wall fall on him.

  “We’ll worry about it when the time comes,” he said as he dragged out the strips of shirts and sweaters. Covered in dirt and with his tattoos, he had looked like a filthy biker version of Santa Claus.

  There were enough rags to make two bundles. One he stuffed in a crack in the wall and set alight. The rest he made into a torch using a twisted hunk of piping. At first, he waved it in the air, but when he saw the exposed rotted wood all around him he shrugged and set a pile of it on fire; it burned beautifully.

  “Finally something going right.” He watched the fire, enjoying what felt like the only natural thing on this side of the river. When he was sure it wasn’t going to go out with the next gust of wind, he turned to the problem of getting down. The fire that was bright enough to light his way had also attracted a hundred zombies. They emerged from the shadows and were flocking towards the building. Two dozen were already at the base and climbing upward. “Jeeze, Cor, what kind of bullshit distraction was that?”

  He tried to get down as fast as he could, hoping to slip between the zombies who were not great climbers. This failed when a second and third wave of them swarmed up the rubble. He was trapped with only two choices: retreat to the top of the rubble or cast his luck with the swaying wall.

  Time was against him, so he climbed toward the wall, hoping to see some sort of way down, besides falling that is. Behind him the beasts scaled the mound with terrifying speed. They had his scent. Nothing was going to stop them.

  Cole timed the sway of the wall and jumped across to a small ledge and then clung to it for dear life as the wall seemed to swing even further out. Pebbles rolled past him and fell, and all he had to grab onto was the rough edge of a brick. The wall swung back and he should have jumped up and moved further on while gravity was on his side.

  Fear kept him pinned in place.

  Having already been involved with a collapsing building that day he didn’t want to go through that again. The zombies had no fear of the building or of falling. The first to reach the juncture between the two walls, flung itself at Cole. Its long fingers clawed the brick, trying to find a hold. It fell fifty feet with an ugly wet thud.

  “Son of a…” Cole began, only to swallow the curse as a second zombie came down almost on his legs. It fell as well, but not before pulling Cole from his ledge. His nails bent back as he fought to hold on. He looked down and saw the long drop between his feet, and then the wall began to swing through the vertical.

  He fell when the wall was partially beneath him. He hit another of the ledges that had survived, and smashed through it to land on what was left of the second floor. It held against his weight and that of the debris that came down with him. It wouldn’t hold much longer.

  Zombies were throwing themselves from the fifth floor. Their horrid black bodies splatted too close for comfort so he began to crawl again. They did as well. Most had survived the fall and although their bodies were mangled, bones jutting up out of their scaly flesh, they came on unrelenting.

  More came down. A dozen, two dozen…so many that the ledge took on a cant and then a lean, and then an incline that was little more than a slide. Cole’s grip on a hunk of tile was stronger than the tile itself and when it broke he went tumbling down into the mass of squirming bodies.

  He supposed this was better than having a building fall on him.

  It felt like a hundred hands were reaching for him, tearing at his clothes, trying to suck him into the mess. He stepped on throats and faces—one of them bit his boot—and had the top layer of rags torn from his body before he managed to free himself.

  Cole staggered away from the building a second before the wall came thundering down. Huge chunks of rock bounced and rolled at him, but he was too tired to even try to run. For once he got lucky and the momentum of the avalanche stopped almost at his feet.

  “Okay,” he whispered. “That’s all I got.” He turned away from the wreckage. With his twice-hurt leg, his rags falling off his body, and the dust coating him, he looked remarkably like one of the dead. So much so that zombies passing him going in the opposite direction didn’t give him a second glance. He limped toward the tunnel entrance, hoping to find Corrina already there waiting for him. What he would do if
she wasn’t, he didn’t know. He couldn’t leave her alone in the Rad Lands. At the same time, it would be suicide to stay.

  He was mired in confusion and not a small amount of depression as he made his way through the debris field outside the tunnel. There were more zombies here. Most milled without purpose, though some seemed to be seeing through his disguise and were beginning to get curious.

  As much as he wanted to hurry, he feared calling any more attention to himself. One zombie crossed his path. It picked its blackened head up and groaned at Cole. The only thing to do was to keep going with his face pointed at the ground. This first one ignored him. The second fell in behind him and was coming up fast when it tripped and face-planted. It sat up and peered at him with ash-filled eyes. The third angled toward him, moving closer until Cole couldn’t wait any longer. Just as he ripped out the Maltese, it attacked. He pulled the trigger, but the striker spring took that moment to fail and the firing pin only tapped the primer lightly.

  Too late he went for the Riker he had stuffed down in his cargo pocket. The creature was on him—sobbing and clutching him in a shaking hug. “Oh, God Cole. It’s you! I was so scared. The ash…I couldn’t see anything. It was everywhere. Everywhere.”

  Unbelievably, it was Corrina. As much as he wanted to hug her, zombies were zeroing in on the sound of her voice. He undid her clinging arms, ripped out the Riker and fired twice, killing the closest two Dead-eyes and bringing the rest charging. Corrina’s first impulse was to scream the beasts into submission, only there were too many. Cole yanked her around and began pelting towards the tunnel entrance. The broken ground made it difficult for the creatures to keep up. Cole knew that once in the tunnel they’d catch up fast.

  Their lead on the closest was twenty yards when the darkness enveloped them. “I need my hand!” he cried. He shook her loose and pulled out the lighter. In its golden light they could see the mounds of bones piled high and the trail that led through them. Cole committed the next twenty feet to memory and released the switch on the old lighter.