“Well,” Phil said. “We know there are a bunch in that one.” He pointed to the left. “So I guess we take a chance on the other.”
As they headed to the right in the dim light filtering through the tinted windows, Lacy reached out and pushed the call button for the elevator. Nothing happened. No light ring lit up. No ding of an elevator arriving. No doors sliding open. She sighed and readjusted her spikes, making sure they were comfortable in her grip.
The stairs were empty. They slid in one by one, being as quiet as possible. Lacy had told them about what Johnny called Battle Rattle, and they had all made sure they didn’t have anything clinking and clanging around on them. They didn’t have weapons and gear they had to use black tape on, but they had each eliminated anything that could make unwanted noise.
They padded down the stairs quickly, the lights from the emergency signs weak after two days of being constantly on. By the time they hit the twelfth floor, they could smell the undead and by the time they got to the eighth, they could hear them. They hadn’t run into any on the stairs, and it seemed the dead only went down, they didn’t like to climb up unless they had a reason. Like six savory bodies to gnash on. They could hear them below, quietly milling around and making small noises.
Lacy held up a fist to indicate for the rest of them to stay put, and she slipped down a few more flights until she could see over the railing to the mob below. They were packed tight, shoulder to shoulder in the faint green glow of the lights, from about the fifth floor down. Hundreds. How did so many wind up in the stairwells? Had a bunch of people tried to hide in here and all of them turned? Had the stairwell doors been jammed closed by survivors? She had no idea why they wouldn’t push open to the garage. She knew from fire codes they were supposed to open outward to the ground levels. This side was blocked, maybe the other was open.
She crept back up and motioned for them to climb. They went back up four more floors before they thought it was safe to whisper, and she told them what she’d seen. They agreed, they had to try the other side. They were all nervous now, sweating in the uncirculated heat of the building. The fire doors had no windows, so they didn’t know what they would find when they were opened.
They couldn’t risk tapping and bringing whatever was there screaming out at them and getting the horde from down below flying up the stairs. Their only choice was to chance it here on the twelfth floor, or climb so far up they could deal with any problem before the dead below could reach them. They decided to go up to the twentieth, that way there should be plenty of time to deal with any threats and get inside the hallway. They got to the sixteenth and said screw it.
This is good enough. They were all winded. Phil said this was the insurance agency’s floor and none of them ever came in early. Better than even chance it would be deserted. They sat down to rest, all of them breathing heavy in the Georgia heat and from the long climb up they had just done. It wasn’t just the climb, it was the tension, the humidity, the stale air that seemed thick and hard to breathe.
After a few minutes they were ready and as quietly as they could, opened the door just enough to see in. Clear. Phil pulled it a little wider. Still clear. They all slipped in and made sure it was latched behind them. Lacy hustled down the hallway to the big glass doors of the agency and tried them. Still locked. They were good, this floor was empty. They continued to the other stairwell and followed the same procedures, slipping down quietly until they ran into masses of them, packed in tight, around the fourth floor. Why didn’t they push open the door and go out! It was frustrating. In a hurried conference, with barely audible whispers, they decided to return to the sixteenth floor. They would have to regroup and figure out something else.
Not all of the undead had wandered their way down. As the crew was silently making their way back up the stairs, they heard a snuffling keen above them. Then the sound of hurrying footsteps coming down. They all froze. Eric had been at the tail end of the procession going down, so he was at the front of the line going up. “Go!” Lacy stage whispered. “Get to the next floor!”
The creature above them heard the sudden sound of hurrying feet and let out a howling scream as it started racing toward them. It was running so fast its feet got tangled up and it started tumbling face-first down the stairs. All they had to do was stay to one side as it bounced down in a series of arm flailing, bone-breaking falls.
The damage was done, though. From three stories below they heard the roar of a hundred voices scream up at them, and the trembling of the stairs as they pounded toward the warm blood they now sensed nearby. Eric made it to the landing on the ninth floor and ripped the door open, only to have a snarling she-demon attack him with out-stretched arms and gnashing teeth.
He fell backward as she landed on top of him, deaf to his screams of pain and horror, slashing deep gouges across his nose with her pretty white teeth. She bounded up again as soon as she had drawn blood, instantly searching for the next host to carry the seething viral nanobots. She took a sharpened golf club straight through her blackened eye and into her seething brain. More of the undead were starting to come out of the ninth-floor corridor, stumbling over the falling body of the woman and the screaming, kicking, bloody mess of Eric. Phil slammed into the door with his 260 pounds and forced it closed on them, snapping bones of the dead and the screaming Eric. He held it against the writhing creatures and bellowed at them to get to the next level.
He couldn’t get the door to latch, too much flesh and broken bone poking out against the frame. Below, only two flights down and closing fast, the tumbling, racing mass of screaming undead were trampling each other in their haste to repopulate, to infect, to taste blood. As Lacy raced past him, the last of them, Phil let the door fly open from the undead pressing against it. He shoved the first three that came out as hard as he could down the stairs and into the path of the horde, before he turned and ran for his life. He could see them now, only one landing below.
He ran up the stairs three at a time, breathing like a great bellows, knowing he couldn’t outpace them for more than one more flight, maybe not even that. He rounded the turn in the stairs, using the banister in his hand to propel him onto the landing and through the door Lacy was holding open.
She pulled it shut fast, but not fast enough that the lead zom didn’t see her face as the door clicked closed. He slammed into it, raging and howling his fury, and was joined by the rest of the hundreds forcing their way up the stairs. “Other side,” Phil gasped. “We need to get a few more floors up. Got to get above them.”
As they neared the other door, though, they heard the screams of the undead coming from this stairwell also. The infected knew where they were. By the time they reached it, the mindless pounding had started. They all stared around at each other, panting hard, and eyes wide. They had lost Eric to the dead hunger, but everyone else seemed unscathed.
“The doors will hold,” Phil panted. “Fire doors… Steel frames... They’re too dumb to open them… and too many bodies crammed against them anyway.”
Lacy leaned against the wall, hands on knees. She laughed humorlessly and shook her head. “We’re in the same situation we were in before. Phil, who’s on this floor? Couldn’t get lucky and it’s a freeze dried food company could we?”
“Tenth floor. This is the Williams & Williams floor. The law firm.”
Robert started toward the doors that opened into the suites and offices of the attorneys. “Shall we see if they have better food than you guys did?” he asked pragmatically, a determined look on his face.
It turned out that the lawyers did have better food than the electronics firm. Their refrigerator was well stocked, but two days without electricity and some of it had gone bad. The few things in the freezer were thawed, but hadn’t spoiled. They shared a half dozen frozen dinners, cooked over a fire built in the hallway in front of the elevator doors.
They had pried one set of them open and the smoke flowed upward in the pitch-black cavern and out of the roof vents
, thirty-eight stories above them. The pounding on the stairwell doors was muted, but still present. They didn’t have much hope of them giving up and going away for a long time. Days maybe. And that’s if they kept quiet and didn’t get them riled up again.
Lacy stared out of the windows of the corner office that looked out over Centennial Park, the Ferris wheel, and water fountains built for the 1996 Olympics. Like most places in the South, Atlanta was a gun-friendly city. At the giant SkyView Ferris wheel, that was now a permanent downtown fixture, there is a sign that prohibits guns in the gondolas. However, they provide a storage locker for your weapon so you can ride legally. They discovered this when they took a ride one day when Gunny picked her up for lunch. With this in the back of her mind, Lacy started methodically going through every desk drawer, starting in the executive's offices. The others joined her and they tore the place apart, finding nothing. Maybe there were pistols in some of the safes, but no one had any idea how to open them.
Later, as they watched the moon rise over Atlanta in the conference room of Williams & Williams, Esquires, and sipping on some of their fine Louis XIII Cognac, the remaining survivors tried to come up with a plan that didn’t entail them either being killed by the walking dead, or slowly starving to death.
“What about the roof?” Carla asked. “I’ve been zip lining before, maybe we can rig up something so we can slide over to the next building on the electric line or something.”
“No lines up there,” Phil said. “All the power and phone lines are underground, come up through the basement.”
“Make a parachute?” Alex asked, but that was instantly shot down. Who would try it first?
“Perhaps we can strip enough cables out of the ceilings, make a strong rope and climb down, if we can get back to the lower floors,” Mr. Sato suggested. They pondered that for a while, but with all the undead milling around on the streets, they would be hard pressed to get down, get off the rope, and get into the garage to find a suitable vehicle before they were overwhelmed. Those things were fast and no one present had a car even remotely rugged enough to go smashing through the city.
“Can we go through the heating vents to get to different floors?” Robert asked. “Maybe we can get down to the garage that way.”
“Naw, too small,” Phil answered. “But we can use the maintenance ladder in the elevator shafts.”
There was a quiet uproar and everyone got excited. They hadn’t even considered it, hadn’t known there were ladders in the shafts. Phil smacked himself in the head, wondering why he hadn’t thought of it before and Lacy reached over and lightly smacked him again, just for good measure.
“Okay,” he said enthusiastically. “This is something we can work with. All the elevator cars are on the bottom floor, in the lower parking area. They automatically go down if there is a loss of power.”
“Yes!” Lacy chimed in. “And they have access panels on the ceilings, right? We can climb down, open the panels, get in the elevator, then pry the doors open. Voilà! We’re in the garage!” she beamed at them, the fine French Brandy already making her a little tipsy.
There were smiles and glasses held up in a toast all around the table.
“But what if the garage is still full of them?” Mr. Sato asked.
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” Alex from accounting said, and downed his snifter of 100-year-old spirits like it was bottom shelf, sour mash whiskey.
They slept comfortably that night. They had full bellies and a soft glow from the $3,000 dollar bottle of Cognac that most of them couldn’t afford. The lawyer's offices had soft leather couches and there were plenty of spare golf clothes and tailored suits hanging in the closets to use as blankets or pillows.
They had a plan that held promise, and now they had a way to easily move between floors.
Tomorrow they would get out of here.
33
The Three Flags Truck Stop
Day 4
Everyone was up early the next morning, coffee and breakfast being served at six, people grabbing last minute items off of the mostly bare store shelves, the truckers making one final load check to ensure everything was tight and secure. They weren’t sure what to expect, but no one was planning on smooth sailing.
Every vehicle had the best radios Wire Bender could tune for them, fuel tanks were filled to the brim. When breakfast was finished, Martha and Cookie washed the dishes and tidied up, much to the annoyance of Cobb, who wanted every hand to help with the final loading.
“I not leave this mess for people to see,” she had told him. “What kind of pig you think I am?”
He knew not to argue, though, and stomped around in a mood, barking at everyone else to hurry up and get situated. “We’re rolling at zero eight hundred,” he kept snapping. “If you’re not in the convoy, you’re getting left behind.”
The nervousness was in the air, some taking it better than others. As it grew closer to departure time, Gunny noticed a few people make a hurried dash for the bathrooms, suddenly having to go in the worst way.
Some of the non-drivers were teaming up with the truckers to ride with them, and all of the ladies had been asked more than once. Most of the truckers that had seen real combat, had fired shots in anger, and were laughing the pre-trip jitters away. They were cracking jokes and doing their best to appear unconcerned.
Gunny had the paper maps spread out on the big table and was going over the route again with Sara, making sure their GPS’s were all taking them on the same roads. Cobb had given her one of the big truck GPS units out of the store and Tommy had welded up a bracket for it on her handlebars.
The problem with them, though, is those units didn’t like to route on the small roads and kept trying to direct them back to approved truck routes. That was part of Sara’s job as scout. She was watching out for major road blockages from accidents, and making sure there were no low bridges they couldn’t get under. They didn’t need that kind of surprise along the way, and then have to back fourteen trucks and a tour bus down a little, windy road until they found a turnaround spot.
Firecracker and Jellybean were the only two drivers who wanted to head to their own houses to see if they could find family members. Firecracker had been lucky on the telephone when this all started and had actually gotten to speak to his wife. He had told her to stay inside, he would be coming to get her.
Everyone else was single or from a big city east of the Mississippi. Boston, Cincinnati, Orlando or the like. They didn’t mention wanting to try to get home, and Gunny knew they had seen the videos and knew it was probably impossible. Maybe once they got to where they were going, they could get rescue parties together.
They had decided to take the northern route to Lakota, it wound through a part of the country that was much less populated. They were passing through Salt Lake City, so they could check on Firecracker’s family. It was only five hundred miles, and once they wormed their way past Reno and Sparks on the back roads, they hoped the interstate would be passable all the way to the Salty.
“This just doesn’t seem real,” Scratch said. “I mean, it’s supposed to be the end of the world and we’re still eating home cooking, taking hot showers, playing video games' and watching movies. The kids are still bugging everybody for change for the vet’s box.”
Gunny glanced up at the train tracks with their semi-trucks making their never-ending rounds. He hadn’t really noticed, they were part of the background noise, like the jukebox that never stopped since Cobb had put it on free play. He was gathering his road atlas and GPS, along with the other supplies he had on the table and before he could answer, the lights flickered once and went out. The Hank Williams that had been playing quietly in the background stopped mid-sentence.
“It just got real,” he said. “Countdown starts now until the nukes start blowing, if the General is wrong and the Hajji’s don’t get them shut down.”
The ambient light wasn’t much with the trucks still blocking the windows,
but it was enough to get everyone moving toward the junkyard area. Gunny’s truck was lead, he’d been out in the new world twice now, and his Peterbilt was a little stouter than some of the rest. Griz had the only other heavy haul truck with a double frame, but he had a low boy trailer. Not so good for clearing a path because it was only a few inches off of the ground.
He’d had a single piece of huge steel pipe over nine feet tall on it, going to a construction site, but he’d simply unchained the load and turned the wheel sharply when he was bringing it around to the junkyard. The giant pipe rolled harmlessly out of the parking lot and stopped at the edge when it hit the soft sand, much to the disappointment of everyone who hoped he would crush zombies with it. They had discussed leaving the trailer, but decided if they came across a good bulldozer or earthmover, it would be nice to be able to take it with them. Might come in handy. Sara had pointed out that it was low enough so she could bounce her motorcycle up on it, if they had to plow through a big horde.
She could pass through the crowd without being stripped off of her bike. Most of the guys had reservations about riding a motorcycle into this brave new world, and had tried to talk her out of it, but she was adamant. She pointed out that it was infinitely more maneuverable than their trucks or a car, and fast enough to get away from any danger.
She readily agreed that if things got too hairy, she would load it up on Griz’s low boy, but she wanted to ride. It was her decision, and they needed to back off and stop telling her what she could and couldn’t do. They finally did.
Gunny climbed into the cab and started when he saw Bunny sitting in the passenger seat. She was smiling, wearing a T-shirt from the children’s rack she had taken a pair of scissors to, looking good and drinking a beer. “Hi,” she said, bubbly as ever. “Can I ride with you?”
The Zombie Road Omnibus Page 27
