by Bobby Adair
That wouldn’t last much longer.
Null Spot the Destroyer still had an imagination full of bad ideas and a pocket full of stupid to spend.
Far up the street, closer to the arena than the hospital, I spied a Humvee sitting on the grass. Its doors were swung open and a big machine gun was mounted on the top. With that, I could sweep my soul clean of the painful clutter and put it back into stark order.
Chapter 4
A crust of blood covered the seats and floors of the Humvee, gluing down shreds of uniforms and bits of bone. Pieces of equipment and empty boots littered the ground around the vehicle. Keeping a wary eye on the infected still frittering near the parking garage entrance, I spent a few minutes looking for full magazines to top off the ammo for my M4. Nothing for the Glock but I even found a grenade. Those were rare, but very handy to have around.
Back inside the Humvee, I climbed up through the roof hatch and familiarized myself with the mechanisms for opening, closing, and latching it. That was the kind of thing a careful, smart person would do, the kind of person who had a chance to live through the day, the kind of person I aspired to be, though the morning’s activities might have suggested otherwise.
I took my time fumbling around with the big machine gun while images gelled in my mind of dead Whites, all with Mark’s pious whack-job face piled high in the dirt.
A big rectangular box for fifty-caliber rounds was attached to the side of the gun. It was empty, but a glance down into the Humvee confirmed what I’d noticed on the way up: another half-dozen boxes. I slipped down through the hatch and checked each box. Two were empty and four were full of big brass cartridges stuffed with cordite and plugged with fat lead slugs, each nearly the length of my hand from wrist to fingertips. Some had colored tips, most didn’t.
I hefted a canister up to the roof as quietly as I could manage and replaced the empty one mounted on the side of the gun. My heart started to pound with morbid excitement over the power that was coming together in my hands.
There was a gap on the side of the gun that looked like the place where an ammo belt might feed into it. I played around with every moving piece I could find. I found the safety. I figured out how to load it and guessed that the curved lever on the back of the gun, perfectly positioned for a thumb to press while holding the two handles, had to be the trigger.
Satisfied that I had it right, I scanned the hospital grounds. Perhaps twenty infected were close enough to make a dash for me when the shooting started. Eight or nine were grouped in a dense shadow under an oak. They presented a nice, big target. They would die first.
A staircase attached to the side of the hospital caught my attention. It was encased in walls of glass filled to bursting with squirming white bodies. I had no idea what the effective range of the machine gun might be, but I was going to fire on the stairwell a block to the south and find out.
I crawled back down and took a moment to pull up the handles on the Humvee’s combat locks. I thought about putting a second ammunition canister on the roof beside the machine gun so that I could reload faster, but a look back at the infected spreading out as they exited the parking garage convinced me that wasn’t a good idea. I’d be lucky to empty the gun’s first belt before those infected were on me.
Back up through the top hatch, I pulled back on a big crank handle on the right side of the gun, guessing that was the first step to firing the weapon. I pointed the gun at the pod of infected under the tree.
The Ogre and the Harpy.
I pressed the trigger.
The gun bucked more than expected and half of the rounds went wild. But enough of them didn’t.
A head exploded. Gouts of blood burst from bodies. Limbs were severed. Bodies crumpled to the ground. Red mist hung in the air.
“Holy shit.”
It was loud, though nothing like I expected. It did command the attention of every infected in sight, and that was expected, as was what followed. They were all running directly at me.
With the power of leaden lightning in my hands and the Ogre and the Harpy to calm my breathing, I let loose again with the big machine gun and shot down all of the infected nearby, clearing a zone that stretched for a couple hundred rapidly shrinking yards.
A great host of Whites flowed out of the parking garage, running through the exits and tumbling over the waist-high walls. Their wails drove the wind before them, wavering my resolve. But fear was no newcomer to me. I measured my chances and pointed the gun at the glass stairwell, sending a stream of big bullets down range.
Tracers drew a fiery thin line of destruction through the shattering walls and disintegrating bodies. Razor sharp crystal shards and pieces of what used to be people rained down on the infected below. Blood and agony filled the air.
Then, with an anticlimactic click, the ammunition belt came to its end.
The raging horde from the garage was frighteningly close.
I let gravity pull me down into the Humvee, closing the top hatch as I fell through. I latched it just as the first infected hit the Humvee in a mad rush. I jumped into the driver’s seat as a second and third pounced on the vehicle. I needed to get moving. If the Humvee got swarmed, I was sure I’d die.
Realizing that I’d assumed that the Humvee had gas in it, knowing I should have checked, knowing it with that sinking feeling in my stomach that tardy knowledge always brings, I pushed the ignition button with a prayer on my lips.
The engine rumbled to life.
Thank God.
I slammed the vehicle into gear and mashed the accelerator to the floor and the Humvee started to roll. These damned things never seemed to have enough pep. Infected hands grabbed onto the Humvee where they could and dragged their owners on the ground as I lumbered away. A White was on the hood. More were on the roof.
Trundling toward the arena, I checked over my shoulder to make sure the mob was giving chase. But not wanting them to give up, I kept my speed controlled.
It worked once. Why not again?
Down to five miles per hour, the mass of infected quickly closed the gap. Others who had been lurking around the arena saw the slow-moving Humvee and came at me. I felt their impacts on the vehicle as they tried to tackle it or jump on.
At the north end of the arena, I sped up a little. A few infected fell off of the Humvee. Those on the roof might become a problem if I didn’t get rid of them.
Rounding the west side of the arena, I headed back south toward the parking garage and coaxed some more speed out of the Humvee. There was still a trickle of infected coming out of the parking garage, but not enough to bring the five thousand pound vehicle to a stop when I ran them down.
I swayed the Humvee left and right and lost a few of the Whites that had been clinging to the roof. I jumped a curb without slowing and bounced a few more Whites to the ground, breaking their bones and bloodying their skin as they skipped across the ground like stones on water.
Then I was in the trickle of infected coming out of the garage, and the Humvee’s heavy steel brush guard mowed them down with little effect on my momentum.
With many dead in my wake and way too much blood on the hood, I turned into the parking garage just as another of my potentially foolish assumptions occurred to me. Was the garage tall enough to accommodate the Humvee and its roof-mounted machine gun?
I clenched my teeth as I passed under the first concrete support beam.
Nothing.
The height in the garage had apparently been designed to accommodate those big four-wheel drive pickups so popular in Texas. Good for me.
Goddamn good for me.
Following the ramps back up one after another, I converted a dozen more infected from toothy hazards into slippery speed bumps. I reached the end of the ramp on the top level and brought the Humvee to a skidding halt near the waiting motorcycle and the stairwell door: my escape route.
The top level of the garage was once again empty.
Fantastic.
I jumped into the
back of the truck and popped open the top hatch. As quickly as I could, I shoved three canisters of fifty-caliber ammunition up on the roof.
Enraged screeching welled up from the lower levels, confirming that my plan was working. The infected were pouring back into the garage.
I fumbled, trying to load a belt into the machine gun as fast as my one practice session allowed. But my luck held. Everything clicked into place and I pointed the utilitarian weapon down the ramp.
The infected would arrive any moment. And on cue, they did. First a few, then a few dozen, then a solid, riotous mass of white flowed around the corner and onto the ramp fifty yards down.
I depressed the firing lever.
Nothing.
“Shit.”
I looked down at the gun as though my anxious expression would admonish the weapon into proper performance.
“Shit.”
Aside from wishing I were elsewhere, the thing I wanted in that moment more than anything else was to kick Arnold Schwarzenegger in the balls. This kind of shit always worked in the movies.
Options?
The horde was too thick to drive through.
The door to the stairwell was just a dozen feet behind me.
It was time to bail.
Then I remembered…
With seconds that could have been used for escape dwindling away, I instead bet my life on the big handle on the right side of the gun. I yanked it back with all the strength that panic could bring to bear and pointed the weapon at the closest of the infected.
I pushed down on the firing lever with both thumbs and Null Spot was instantly transformed from frightened pants-pisser into fiery god of thunder.
Slaughter.
A heavy lead torrent ripped through packed bodies. Each bullet shredded two, three, and four deep among them. Instantly, a hundred surrogate Marks died most satisfyingly with agonized grimaces on their pinched faces.
The vanguard became a slippery, bleeding, red and white wall. The mass behind surged and stalled, but then flowed up and over, a river of rage and tearing fingers.
In a ridiculously small number of seconds, the first ammo belt ran dry and as I looked down the throat of a million gnashing teeth, I knew my plan was fucked.
In my imagination, I’d been able to kill so many Whites that they’d clogged the ramp with their bodies. I’d been able to bide my time as I sprayed the glass stairwell and hospital grounds across the street, clearing an escape path for everyone trapped inside. Then I’d walk leisurely down the stairs to my hero’s welcome.
Oops.
There was no time to load another belt and still kill the new vanguard of bloody runners sprinting to tear my lungs out.
It was time for me to run.
I wriggled up through the hatch and jumped off the roof of the Humvee, falling through the air with my eyes on the salvation of the stairwell door. With adrenaline pumping at full tilt and my heart banging out a fierce rhythm, I saw, but didn’t register, the absence of the stairwell’s light through the door’s window.
I hit the concrete running, closed the gap to the door in a flash, and grasped the handle. As I turned it, the crazed face of an infected woman smashed itself harshly against the glass. The door burst open, knocking me back. I tried to catch my balance as a mass of infected fell over one another, roiling through the gap.
“Oh fuck.”
Breathe.
Breathe.
My hands were instantly on my M4. My fingers, now practiced and intimate with the gun, sprayed a dozen rounds into the pile and bought me a few seconds of life in which I tried to think of a way out.
But there was none.
I ran toward a corner of the parking structure, not with a plan, but because that was the only direction that wasn’t already crawling with infected monsters bent on killing me.
I made it to the corner and emptied a magazine at the running Whites closest to me.
Out of some primal instinct, I climbed up on the top edge of the six-inch wide wall, trying to get above my pursuers and completely ignoring the five-story drop to the ground below. A large square support pillar on the corner offered me another two feet of height. A few fast, precarious steps ended with a teetering jump. I landed on a square of concrete, at face level with a thousand Whites and their grasping hands.
But what was a kick in the face to a beast that felt no pain?
They were going to tear my skin and shred my flesh. My heart would pump its last between the teeth of a virus-tainted horror.
With a million simultaneous thoughts of death and desperate deliverance blazing through my synapses, my hands automatically pushed another magazine into my rifle. Before the trigger sent the bullets flying, I caught sight of movement down to my right, on the side of the parking garage, where abso-fuckin’-lutely no movement should have been.
It took a few nanoseconds of full attention to process what I saw. But with only seconds left to live, that was an immeasurable investment.
It was a banner.
An enormous, nylon mesh banner fifteen feet wide and forty feet long hung from the top edge of the wall and reached down to somewhere around the second floor. That bottom edge was still too far off the ground to risk a jump, but that was thinking too far ahead. I’d likely be dead before that became a problem.
Was that it? Was that my only miniscule chance?
I glanced back up to the oncoming mob, emptied my magazine to clear the closest of them and jumped off the concrete corner support. Two seconds later, I had the top edge of the banner in my grasp with my boots slipping off of the wall’s gritty edge.
The Ogre and the Harpy. The Ogre and the Harpy.
Going off the side of the building was a terrible, shitty, awful choice, with an infinitesimally small chance of being alive at the bottom. But no matter how fast my brain spun, there was no other way. Once those clutching white fingers caught my clothes, my chances of continuing life would hit absolute zero.
Infinitesimally small looked good.
I squeezed my hands and tried to bunch the taut nylon into something easier to hang on to as my legs flailed out over the drop. Before I had time to hope for the best, gravity seized me and pulled me madly toward the sidewalk far below.
I held on to the banner as tightly as I could, but the nylon slipped rapidly through my grasp, friction heating and tearing my skin. To put a damper on my acceleration, I pulled my feet in to squeeze the mesh between the rubber soles of my boots.
I started to slow. I had half a thought that I might live.
My boots hit something solid and kicked my feet out to the sides. Before I could shit my pants at that surprise, my hands caught onto a round metal rod sewn into the bottom edge of the banner, and I came to a joint-rending halt, hanging twenty feet above the ground.
“Holy shit.”
I was alive?
Frustrated shrieks cascaded down.
I looked up. “Oh no.”
One was climbing over the wall.
Like a fish on a line, I wriggled my body to swing the banner and out it went. Then back. Not far enough.
A White fell past me, grabbing at my boots, screaming not out of fear, but out of frustration for my being beyond her grasp. She hit the sidewalk in a sickening combination of a thump and a splat. The banner swung out further, then back.
Trying to time the rhythm of my bodily gyrations to the slow rhythm of the banner’s swing, I went way out over the sidewalk just as another infected woman came sliding down the center of the sloping banner. Her weight helped push it back toward the garage. She missed me by five feet when she slipped past with just enough of an arc to drop her past the sidewalk and into the grass with a sound of breaking bones wrapped in tearing flesh.
On the backswing, I flew into the gap between the second and third floors. Suddenly, with concrete just four or five feet below me, I let go. I landed roughly, bruising knees and scraping elbows. My weapons clattered on the floor as I rolled but my sling didn’t slip off. My
Glock stayed in its holder. Only my machete slipped away.
The few infected running through the second level looked at me but didn’t slow. The party was upstairs. Any White with ears could hear that.
With bloody, jittery hands, I gathered my machete and crawled to a shaded corner where my breath wheezed out in a nervous rattle. The coolness of the concrete offered what comfort it could while I assimilated the fact that due to little more than luck, I’d just lived through that ordeal. My heart started to slow and my nerves began the long process of winding back down.
I ventured a look down at my torn, blistered hands and thanked the virus that most sensations of pain were in my past. The hands were still functional, but they’d need attention, and soon. Such was the latest price I paid for my life.
Camouflaged in gleaming white skin, crusty bloodstains, and body odor, in that moment I exhibited none of the noisy behaviors of the tasty immune. The infected continuing through the second floor ignored me. I leaned my head against the wall, and for a moment, closed my eyes. Exhaustion was knocking at the door.
I was emotionally drained, empty, as lost as I’d felt before I tried to fill the hole in my heart with the murder of Mark’s proxies. After so many years of being the dog that Dan kicked, couldn’t violence cure my rage, salve my sadness just once?
Residual adrenaline coursed through my veins. My hands were unsteady. I needed time to regroup. I breathed in hot, smoky air. I smelled blood and cordite.
The angry yowls of the infected mixed with the shrieks of the dying.
I tried to clear my mind and disappear, even for just a second, but images of dead faces haunted me: Jerome, Wilkins, Earl, the Ogre, the Harpy, Felicity, Marcy, and a thousand white faces that used to be human. No, were human. Just unfortunate, diseased humans.
Amber was in that procession. Steph’s dead face would join soon. The virus was very effectively killing off every person to which I had even the tiniest connection.
The virus was binging on humanity, one overflowing spoonful after another, and with each death, human civilization ticked inexorably toward its end. And what the virus didn’t destroy, the natural entropy of the universe would. Long held at bay by human arrogance, it would soon crumble the fragile foundations of the world. Fires burned in east Austin. Blazing refineries in Houston disgorged untold tons of toxicity. The reactors would eventually melt down, and our failing dams would wash the reactors’ Chernobyl waste into the oceans, killing everything in the marine world as well.
