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

by Meredith, Peter

  He stepped closer and let the creatures tear their throats to ribbons trying to get at him. Although he looked brave, there were sharpshooters covering the zombies. They’d be dead in a blink if their chains failed.

  “If these monsters and the others down below are allowed to live, there is no telling what could happen. It’s why I have authorized the most drastic of measures. As I speak, a nuclear bomb is being readied in the Pit.” He had expected gasps and he got them. Putting out his hands to quiet the whispers, he went on. “It’s a low-yield bomb. It will end the threat forever but won’t effect the rest of the city in any way. I am so confident, that I will be detonating it from across the street. You are all invited to watch. Although there won’t be much to see on the outside of the building, we have access to the indoor cameras. It should be quite a show.”

  More whispering. This time he let it go on. Turning to an assistant, he received a set of ear protectors and shiny new shotgun. He was going to take all the accolades for destroying the dead, starting with Hagy, McGuigan and Campana.

  “Nestle it right up to your shoulder and make sure you pump it between shots,” the man said.

  Hamilton stepped back. Cole did as well, and he took another and another before a hand grabbed him. It was another of the governor’s assistants, this one a pretty redhead in blue. “Where are you going? When he’s done, the governor will be announcing you as head of a special zombie hunting squad.”

  “I’ll be back in a few minutes. I’m not feeling well.” The woman stepped back just as the shotgun went off with a thundering crash. Cole saw the sudden fear in her eyes. She was afraid of him. “It’s not that. I’m not infected. I just don’t like crowds.”

  “You better start liking them,” the woman said as applause broke out. “If you blow him off he won’t be happy and when he’s not happy, you won’t be happy. You won’t get the job, that’s for sure.”

  Cole felt a pain deep inside. McGuigan had one of the cushiest jobs in the city. It was all money and no risk. But taking it would mean leaving Corrina to die.

  The gun went off again. “I can’t,” he said, backing away. No one noticed. The governor was just lining up his last shot. Hagy died in a shower of black blood. Her death reminded Cole of his promise to her.

  “That’s well down the list,” he muttered through clenched teeth. His leg was barely holding him up and he had a long way to go. Five stories down then out to the Pit, then all the way to the bottom. He was the only one hurrying toward the bomb. The building had been evacuated prior to the inspection and the only people he passed were the soldiers who had planted the bomb. They were racing up the stairs.

  Seeing them sent a shock through Cole’s guts—the bomb was ready to go!

  “What the fuck are you doing,” one asked. “There’s a nuke down there!”

  “Yep,” he answered, a quiver in his voice. How long before it went off? How long would it take the governor to acknowledge Hamilton and announce his promotion? Thirty seconds at the most. The governor did not like the spotlight on someone other than himself. It would take another minute for the group to leave the building and cross the street—he was sure everyone would be subconsciously hurrying. Another minute to reach whatever viewpoint he’d have for the detonation. A minute for a quick speech and then blam!

  That was three minutes and thirty seconds.

  “Fuuuuck!” he cried, taking the stairs three at a time, his leg burning. Down he went, taking a full minute on the stairs. Then he was on the level where the slags heaved the trash down. It was eerily empty, but not as quiet as he figured it would be. The mountain of trash groaned and moaned like an immense creature. A soon to be dead immense creature.

  Far down, almost out of sight, was the platform where he’d be able to lower himself into the depths. It was at least three hundred yards away. He ran, lurching badly, his leg spouting blood he could ill-afford to lose. Far too quickly his breath started to burn within his heaving chest. He couldn’t afford to slow down either. Soon it wouldn’t just be his chest burning.

  Everything would be burning: his hair, the shimmying rickety platform, maybe even the rusting metal girders. He had read somewhere that everything burned at a high enough temperature.

  It took more than a minute to get to the platform, which left him maybe a minute and a half to get all the way down to Corrina—ninety seconds—it was impossible. Gasping, he staggered onto the platform. The same winch rope was there from before. It was thin and nasty and would burn the flesh from his palms when he went down. Next to it, and anchored into the wall were two much thicker lengths of rope. These were the ropes that had been used to lower the bomb—and there it was, fifty feet beneath him, dark and silent.

  “Oh God! Don’t go off. Don’t go off,” he whispered as he went to one of the heavier ropes, hooked his legs around it and began sliding down as fast as he dared. Seconds later, his booted feet thudded heavily onto the bomb itself.

  With his heart in his throat, he whispered a third time, “Don’t go off.” Just then the radiation meter buzzed in his pocket and he felt his heart stop. “Jesus Christ!”

  This was all too much for his wounded leg and it buckled beneath him. He didn’t exactly fall from the bomb, it was more of a sagging slide. Kneeling beside it, a thought came to him, and he made a quick search for anything that resembled an off switch. The bomb was buttoned up tight and there was nothing in the way of switches, dials, or even plugs. There was an access plate that was screwed down, but he had nothing to open it with.

  It was going to explode any second and there was nothing he could do except run. Could a man outrun a nuke in thirty seconds? The answer was an obvious no. It didn’t matter now. Panic had him by the balls and he ran down the same trail he’d come up an hour before. With adrenaline pumping into his system, the pain in his leg became only a distant nagging ache, one that would soon be behind him.

  The thirty seconds ticked down and yet there was no detonation. He glanced up and back, thinking he’d see smoke rising from the bomb as some sort of prelude to the explosion. The bomb, hidden by layers of trash, was out of sight.

  Too late, he turned his attention back to the uneven trail of debris and found it tipping. He had strayed to the side of a cargo container that had been balancing on two others. Before he knew it, it tipped all the way on its side and he was falling. Metal and glass tore at him as he plunged downward. Something caught the back of his overalls; it jerked him back and spun him sideways. Then he was falling again. He landed with a crunch on the remains of a street-sweeper with enough force to knock it from its own precarious perch.

  It dropped, crashing through the wreckage. It was a beast of a machine and it plowed a two-hundred foot path through the mountain until it impaled itself on a girder that nearly took Cole’s head off as it blasted through the guts of the vehicle.

  Gasping and spluttering frightened curses, Cole crawled to the edge of the street-cleaner and saw that he was suspended within some sort of deep crag located in the heart of the mountain. Some fifty feet below him was a trail that ran along a narrow ledge. It pointed more or less in the direction he needed to go. The only problem was getting to it. The walls of the crag were made of trash with nothing more sturdy-appearing in it beyond a jutting car fender. There was nothing to leap to or to climb down on.

  Trying to climb around the outside of the street-cleaner to the girder was a possibility. It would be slow, and a fall was almost guaranteed, but he didn’t think he had any other choice. Cole started to reach for the edge of a rusted tire rim when the nuke exploded.

  He was three-hundred and eighteen feet away, with more than ten-thousand tons of trash between him and it. The shockwave knocked him on his back and he had a perfect view of a searing golden light sweeping through the trash. It flowed like water. It might have been the most beautiful sight he had ever seen and he was almost pissing himself in fear.

  He jumped to his feet and leapt across the chasm. It was twenty feet to the ot
her side and he fell at least that far before he struck the trash, hitting squarely on an old dresser. The wood disintegrated under his weight and he fell down the face of the trash wall until his fingers hooked onto an old chain-link fence. The rusted rings broke two at a time and he and the end of the fence came peeling from the trash like an immense tongue.

  The other end of the fence was curled beneath a chunk of sidewalk and when the tongue was protruding as far as it could, Cole was bounced off of it. Thirty feet above the ledge, he lost his grip and fell.

  Halfway down a howling hurricane-force wind swept down the trail and slammed him against the wall of trash. It pinned him in place but only for a few seconds. The source of the hurricane-force wind was cut off as the mountain began to implode. Cole fell to the trail and picked himself up as the trash all around him took on a fluid quality. It came rushing at him like a river.

  He turned and fled down the trail, his wounds forgotten, his exhaustion overshadowed by his terror of being buried alive. The ledge did not extend far before the trail pointed down into the side of the mountain. The darkness here was amazingly deep compared to the golden light above and Cole did not see that the trail was gone. His feet ran in the air for a few seconds before he realized that he was falling again—falling and tumbling down a steep incline that spat him out far below, practically against the wall of the Infinity Pit.

  The golden light swept over him and his pocket meter screamed in response, but only for a second and then the light slowly faded. Amazingly, he knew where he was. The ambulance was in sight. Jumping up, he ran with the mountain seizing all around him. There were more deafening explosions that threw him down or sucked the air from his lungs. “Corrina! Corrina!” He was trying to scream her name, but it was muffled in his own ears; it was as if there was heavy static coming from every rock and hunk of rusted metal.

  She didn’t show at first, and it wasn’t until he screamed a third time that she popped her head from the back of the ambulance. Cole had never seen her so pale and wide-eyed. Her mouth formed a scream: Cole! but he only heard it as a whisper. She screamed his name a second time and pointed up behind him.

  He was almost too afraid to look. His head turned against his will and saw why the light was dimming. The once golden light was now pea green and riding down on a green mist. “Oh God,” he muttered and tried to shuffle his feet faster and faster. It was the bug-bomb part of the nuke. It was made chiefly of radioactive mercury chloride. Cole had no idea what that was and frankly didn’t care. All he knew was that the mist would kill him. His feet picked up speed and soon he was racing for the ambulance, his head still twisted around. The gas coated every surface as it slowly settled and it hissed as it did.

  “Cole!” Corrina screamed again. She was frantically waving when she should’ve been frantically trying to get the door into the tunnel open.

  “Get inside, damn it!”

  Like a cat, she darted through the ambulance door and slid through to the back. The round portal-like door was there. There had been a handle on the tunnel side that had locked it—there was no corresponding handle on this side. Regardless, she scraped at the metal, her nails bending and snapping off. She didn’t even notice.

  Cole was inside two seconds later. “Get out of the way!” he bellowed. “Find something to cover the front window. The gas’ll kill us.”

  She knew that much already. There wasn’t much in the ambulance except moldy seat cushions and a plastic backboard. She did what she could. While she was busy with that, Cole was attacking the circular door. Although the ambulance was a hunk of rust on crumbled rubber tires, the door was new-ish, probably not more than half a century. It withstood his fists and then when they were bleeding, he spun around and began to kick it, without any results other than bruising the bottom of his feet.

  “Cole,” Corrina whispered, a few seconds later. She was holding her breath as the mist settled onto the ambulance with an insidious hiss. It sounded like eggs were being fried on the hood of the vehicle. “Are we going to die?” she asked, her voice barely above the sound of the hiss. “Did we do all this for nothing?”

  “No,” he lied. The lie fell flat as her dark eyes began to fill with tears. They filled him with rage and he slammed his foot into the door one last time. The pain in his bruised heel made him groan, while the fact that the door was still perfectly intact made him furious. In a rage he punched the side of the ambulance and put his fist through the corroded metal.

  Immediately his radiation meter began buzzing. He sat back in wonder as Corrina ripped off her shirt and used it to plug the hole. It didn’t matter, the meter was still buzzing. They were breathing in radiation. How much was impossible to know. Each breath could be enough to kill them ten times over. And yet Cole was smiling. The new metal door in the back of the ambulance was an unmovable object.

  The walls around it were another story. They were as old and as decrepit as the ambulance. Without regard to his flesh, he punched the wall next the door and sure enough his fist went right through and into cool dirt. He attacked it as well until his hand felt the damp air beyond.

  Sticking his arm into the hole he found the handle to the door, and with a grin at Corrina, he turned it.

  Epilogue

  The creature was hulking and hideous. Corrina had caught sight of its face in the gleam of the fire and for the life of her she couldn’t tell whether it was a man, a woman, or some sort of gorilla monster. She was confused because although she knew that “G” was for gorilla, she didn’t know what a gorilla was exactly.

  By the creature’s size, she guessed that it had once been a man. It wasn’t a man any longer. Had it been, her stomach would’ve been growling and her mouth would’ve sprung enough saliva to have her drooling—something Cole found disconcerting. Foolishly, he believed that she was trapped in some sort of halfway state, caught somewhere between human and zombie. She knew better.

  She had changed; she was one of them now. She no longer needed to sleep, and pain was only a vague nuisance. Her broken bones had mended in hours, and she had to be reminded not to put her hand in boiling water. Emotionally she had changed as well. Fear had become a concept that she couldn’t quite grasp. Why should she be afraid of people? That was like being afraid of a ham sandwich. Her idea of love had changed as well. It had become selfish. To her, love was to be hoarded and jealously guarded.

  When other people made the transition, they found that their capacity to hate had exploded and would gradually eclipse everything else. Corrina was different. For very good reasons, she had always carried around a great deal of hate and suspicion inside her. Being hooked on mule and flying high all the time had helped to hide it, but it had been there nonetheless. Now the hate was her drug. It warmed her and gave her a purpose, when she wasn’t dying of hunger, that is.

  Her hunger made the hate seem like nothing. It was an endless ache that made her feel old, as if she had inherited a hundred and fifty years of evil desire. On some level she knew she should be grossed out at the idea of eating man-flesh, only it just seemed so natural, so perfectly right. This was especially true of rich people. They were so soft. They were like walking blocks of cream cheese that she could just sink her teeth into. And they smelled, not just clean, but flavored.

  The nurse who had helped with Cole’s surgery had smelled of coconut! It was as if she had basted herself.

  It had taken all of Corrina’s willpower not to launch herself onto the woman. No, it was the one thing she couldn’t do. No. No. No. If she did, she would be hunted and killed, perhaps even by Cole. He had hinted that he might have to, if she gave in to her need. She didn’t know if she believed him. He was a sucker. She hadn’t known exactly how much of a sucker until a few hours before.

  “Why isn’t your gun out?” she demanded, eyeing the big creature.

  He put his hand on the grip of the new gun jabbed down in the shoulder holster beneath his jacket, but didn’t draw it. “Not yet,” he muttered. The gun felt strange
to him. It flapped under his loose jacket. After the long painful surgery on his leg, he’d been laid up for two weeks and had lost ten pounds. Now his suits felt as though they were draped on him.

  In all that time, he’d only had two visitors, besides Corrina, that is. The first was a bounty hunter named Justin DeMott who arrived, long-faced and sad, though he grew more sad when he found that Cole was not on death’s door. “Look at you,” Justin said, shaking his head. “We all thought you were done after the trial. You know with the execution and everything. And then arrested again! That must’ve been a horror. I bet that after everything you’ve gone through you gotta be thinking about hanging up the guns, right?”

  “Go fuck yourself,” Cole had answered and then stared at the bounty hunter in a cold silence that lasted a full minute. It was only when Justin walked to the door that Cole added, “And Justin? If I catch you in Manhattan again, I’ll put a bullet in your knee.”

  Justin’s visit wasn’t all bad. The fact that he was even there at all meant Cole still had a job, though clearly the offer to head the unit had been rescinded.

  The second visitor was Bruce Hamilton, his gold captain bars shining on the collar of his black uniform. Unlike Cole, Hamilton seemed even bigger and stronger than ever.

  “You look like warmed-over shit,” Hamilton said as he strode into the grungy room. “It looks like the kid’s been draining you.” He cast a glance at Corrina who sat in the corner doing up the spikes of her mohawk with rubberbands.

  “Nah,” Cole whispered. He had just received pain meds not long before and was fighting sleep. “Not all of us get city docs. Mine was something of a hack.” He had been an expensive hack as well. After crawling through the tunnels and passing out in the street, Cole hadn’t been strong enough to get to his bank. Since there was risk involved, the doctor had taken his case, but at triple the normal price. The only risk had been to the doctor’s pocketbook—if Cole had died on the operating table, the doctor wouldn’t have gotten paid at all.