Not that you’d expect them to understand, so it’s best to find somewhere to hide. There isn’t much inside the C-17, which is kind of the point. It’s a big, empty cargo container, and most of the space is filled by men, gear, or air.
Up, that’s the only place to hide; you’ll have to climb into the “rafters.” You hoist yourself up and nestle amongst the wires and pipes in the ceiling, hoping the men will be too busy checking out their gear to notice you’ve disappeared.
Looking around for a decent spot to lie down, you’re caught completely off-guard when you’re suddenly brought down by your ankle. It’s at least a ten-foot drop, and all the air leaves your lungs when you slam onto your back. Your joints crack and you wheeze for breath. It takes effort to sit up, cut short when a boot presses against your neck.
“The fuck do you think you’re doing?” asks Lt. Dosa, the Marine Corps mission commander.
“Checking…electrical…?” you manage.
“Like hell. We both know you were hiding.”
You say nothing. He takes his boot from your throat and offers you a hand. You take it and he brings you to your feet.
“Goddamn coward. We’ll deal with you once we get stateside. In the meantime, stay here. I don’t need you fucking up my operation.”
The LT turns and walks away, leaving you with the entire combat unit starting at you with cold disdain. A Navy SEAL steps forward, and before you can react, cracks you in the jaw with a haymaker. After an explosion of white, everything goes black.
• Click here to regain consciousness.
MAKE YOUR CHOICE
Journeyman
The Ferris wheel isn’t stopping, so you’ll have to jump. You psych yourself up for it, but all you see in your mind’s eye are images of your fat ass flopping out against the pavement, providing an all-you-can-eat Sims buffet for the trio of fleshies. Then a better idea flashes through your mind.
“Come on, grab my hand!” you shout.
She gets what you’re saying and picks up her frantic pace. Amazing how hope of escape trumps general fear. She makes it to the steps leading to the Ferris wheel loading area, bounding up the stairs with hands raised, but you’re just out of reach. You’ll have to lunge forward and grab her.
Though your inner-action star is roaring to come out, you’re aware of yourself enough to know that you can’t pull her up on strength alone. When was the last time you did a pull-up? Instead, you jam your left wrist up between two bars, making a fist and anchoring yourself in the chair, then lean out to grab her with your right arm.
She grabs hold, her manicured nails clawing into your uniform. The extra weight pulls you from the chair, but your left arm pins you in place. It feels like you’re being ripped apart.
“Climb…up!” you shout through gritted teeth.
Then the pain really starts. One of the ghouls grabs onto the woman’s dangling leg, literally ripping your left arm from its socket. You scream out bloody murder, but somehow keep your fists clenched tight—the one keeping you in the chair, while the other is mutually locked on the woman in the middle.
She struggles to kick at the fiend as the wheel takes you up for another trip around. Blinding motherfucking pain! You always assumed that was a figure of speech, but no, it’s true. Your vision goes pure white.
Finally, with a handful of torn panty-hose, the fleshie falls from the ride and hits the pavement like a water balloon with a crunchy shell. The woman climbs your body to get inside the carriage, then helps settle in. You struggle for breath, color returning to the world, while blazing pain ripples along your left arm. Wriggling your fingers, you still have motor control, but barely.
“You saved my life,” the blonde says. Then she kisses your gasmask, leaving a perfect lipstick print on the plexiglass.
The Ferris wheel shifts momentum, and you remember the other two ghouls down below. You unsheathe Isabelle and mentally steady yourself, but as you come around, you see a pair of men run up. A black guy in tattered business casual holds a sledgehammer and a thin redneck-type holds a formidable length of lead pipe.
They hit the landing hard, dispatching the remaining undead with practiced moves. Slim approaches the Ferris wheel controls and stops the ride when your carriage reaches the bottom.
“Enjoyin’ the view?” he asks in a thick Southern accent.
The big guy extends a hand to help the blonde off the ride; she gingerly accepts it.
“What the hell were you thinking, running off like that?” he says.
“I wanted to get the soldier’s attention. Besides, he handled it.”
They all look to you. “Yeah…no big deal,” you say, stepping out of the carriage and playing it cool.
“Well, regular Last Action Hero,” Slim says, before playfully slugging you in your injured shoulder. You roar in pain, and your vision goes white once more like a lightning strike. “That’s what I thought. Brave, but fuckin’ stupid.”
“Well, I’m glad he did it,” the blonde says with a glare.
“I’m sure you are!” the big guy says with a laugh. “I’m Tyberius, you just saved Angelica, and my man here is Hefty. So what’s your deal, Darth Vader?”
“Sergeant Sims. US Air Force electrical maintenance specialist.”
“Are you working with the guys doing all the roadblocks?”
“I don’t…I don’t think that’s a thing anymore, but no.”
“Then what are you doin’?” Hefty asks.
Your head swims. All you can think to say is, “I’m going to signal rescue, at all costs. So…”
“You should come meet our, well, our leader,” Angelica says with a smile. “Fair warning, she can be a real bitch.”
Your brain is still trying to process your shoulder injury, so you simply nod. These people seem nice enough and you’re better off getting on their good side while you wait for rescue to arrive. Not much of a choice here:
• Follow the group to meet their leader.
MAKE YOUR CHOICE
Jumped
You sprint towards Craig, unable to keep the “Sonofabitch!” from escaping your lips. Still, you catch him by surprise, and he turns just as you clobber the man with the wrench. He’s down for the count.
With a hard slap, you hit the reverse button on the garage door.
“It’s closing!” a man shouts, just before gunfire erupts.
Several shots ping off the metal insides of the garage, and several more find homes in your flesh. You fall to the floor, body going numb as your lifeblood drains out.
“Goddammit!” the leader shouts. “I wanted her for breeding stock!”
With any luck, you’ll bleed out. If not, the rest of your life won’t be pleasant.
THE END
Jumpstart
As you slip the keys for the first car out of the plastic document protector, you eye the motorcycles in the corner. Just gotta get past this shift before you can get back out on the track again…
Best to keep busy, you remind yourself. A watched pot never boils, and a workday spent thinking about tomorrow never passes. You head out to the parking lot to find the silver Volvo from the after-hours lot, turn the engine over and bring it in.
The radio blares to life. A man is saying, “…it’s all unsubstantiated right now, but I what I can say—what I know for sure—is that downtown is in a state of chaos. Steer clear of St. Mary’s Hospital. There was some kind of incident—”
“It’s waaaayyy too early for that kind of bullshit,” you say aloud, flipping off the dial.
You bring the car into the garage, your back singing in pain as you step out. You stifle a groan of pain when you see Craig reviewing the files at his station.
“Hey, what’s up, Kay?” Craig says.
“Another day, another terror attack.”
“Oh shit, really?” Brian chimes in from the other side. “It isn’t kids, is it? I hate when it’s kids.”
“Hospital, I think.”
“What happened?” S
tephen asks from the lobby doorway.
“Somebody shot up a buncha kids in a hospital,” Craig says.
“Damn….”
“Brown and foreign? Or white and domestic?” Josh asks, coming from the bathroom.
They all look to you, and the Oxy still hasn’t kicked in yet, so you say, “I only listened for a second. If you want to know what’s up, turn on the goddamned radio yourself.”
They all look away, and at length, Craig says, “Nah, that stuff’s just depressing.” The rest nod in agreement and you all get to work. The Volvo’s writeup shows:
OWNER: Mr. Tesshu, L.
MAKE: Volvo
MOD: S60
MIL: 115,612
NOTE(s): Regular service interval. Oil change. Check shocks.
* * *
Three cars up, three cars down, ticking the hours by. You go to look at who’s next on the pile, but a glance to the clock shows it’s already past noon. Better start thinking about lunch, but might as well call that last owner for pickup before you check with the boss.
When you pick up the receiver, the phone at your station is oddly silent. Almost as if the thing is unplugged, but a quick check shows it’s connected just fine. Plus, it was working this morning. That’s weird, you think, reaching over to give Josh’s phone a try—same results.
Huh. Better let the boss know. When you open the door to the admin area, you find Owen watching the lobby TV. It’s footage from the local news chopper, showing a big convoy of military vehicles going through town. Traffic is intense and it takes a while for everyone to pull over so the convoy can pass.
“You see this?” Owen asks. “Some kind of large-scale military exercise, they’re saying.”
“Boss, phones are dead.”
Owen frowns, then turns back to the check-in desk to try the line there. From the look on his face, you can tell he’s not even hearing static. Owen then takes out his cell phone and dials.
After a minute, he hangs up and says, “It’s not just us. Something’s wrong with the phone company.”
“Great. I was about to ask if we should order some lunch, but sounds like we’ll have to get carryout with the phone problems.”
“I’ll go,” Josh offers.
You didn’t even notice him in the doorway behind you.
• “No, I’ll go.” I could use some fresh air.
• “Yeah, okay. Just don’t take too long, the guys are already getting hungry.”
MAKE YOUR CHOICE
Just Ourselves and Immortality
Someone up ahead tries to use his Dodge Ram as a battering ram, but it’s not happening. Traffic is gridlocked. Several figures wander up ahead, trying to assess the problem, but when one man raises his hand to block the light from all the headlights, you realize just how strange it is that the rest aren’t. They’re just wandering, like they’re bored. That is, until the man with his hand raised calls out.
The group turns in unison on the man and brings him to the ground. You can’t see what’s happening, but you can hear the man’s screams echo off the concrete walls. A palpable wave of panic flows through the tunnel, suffocating drivers until some snap and abandon their vehicles. It’s total chaos as the dozen or so wanderers catch those trying to escape.
“Don’t look,” you tell Jason. But he doesn’t shy away, and you don’t force him. “We’re safe in here, right, Dad?”
When you turn back, you find he’s just looking out the window. His skin is pale and slick with sweat.
“Dad?” Slowly, tentatively, you reach back and put a hand on his shoulder, gently shaking him. In an unnaturally smooth and deliberate turn, his head comes around to look at your hand. His eyes rise up to meet your own. He opens his mouth. You pull back your hand—
—and the stranger reaches out and bites down on your forearm! You scream out in pain and try to pull away, but he’s latched on like a pit bull. Jason shoves the man away, but all it does is help him rend and tear your flesh.
Finally, your brother manages to bring up his shotgun. Though it’s an awkward move inside the Jeep, he swings the barrel round to point at the guy’s face.
“Let her go!” he screams, blasting the ghoulish man with the 16-gauge.
For a moment, your ears ring with deafening silence. Adrenaline keeps the pain at bay until you look at the grotesque carving that was once your forearm and now is only so much meat.
“Tourniquet!” Jason cries.
But it doesn’t really matter, does it?
You’re INFECTED!
Keep Calm, Carry On
You’re sweating like crazy, but you force your face into a mask of calm. Once the fighting is done, the soldiers’ weapons find you as their focus. They’re clearly panicked; either not trained for something like this, or freaking out, now that a drill has become reality.
When you look to the bodies of the attackers, your own sense of panic swells in your chest. Time crawls by, and an odd detail sticks out: the blood doesn’t spread further than the size of the wounds. Nothing drips or spurts out.
“I just want to go home!” you shout, realizing the truth.
“This area is under strict quarantine,” the leader calls, his shouts muffled by a gasmask.
“My mom, she—”
“It’s shut up or die, get it?!” one of the younger soldiers shouts.
“Stow that, Private,” the leader snaps. “Take this man to quarantine.”
The man points down the street to a large, green canvas tent. It’s situated in the parking lot of a grocery store surrounded by a hardware store, a pawn shop, and a shop labeled “Dojo.” You swallow hard at the sight of the quarantine tent and you’ve got a death grip on the police baton, a fact not lost on the soldiers.
“Drop the weapon! Don’t make us do this the hard way.”
Not much of a choice here:
• Looks like you’re now property of the US Army.
MAKE YOUR CHOICE
Keep on Turning
She continues hobbling towards you, screaming, begging for help, but you offer only cold indifference from behind the plexiglass visor of your gasmask. As she makes it to the steps leading to the Ferris wheel loading area, the trio of fleshies finally catch up with her and tackle the woman onto the landing.
One of the ghouls bumps against your carriage when you pass over the landing, and you tuck your feet inside to avoid it. Luckily, they’re far too interested in the current feast, and her cries slowly die out as you make your way higher.
Soon, you’ll come around for another pass, and you might have to deal with the fiends then. You unsheathe Isabelle and mentally steady yourself.
But as you come around, you see a pair of men run up. A black guy in tattered business casual holds a sledgehammer and a thin redneck-type holds a formidable length of lead pipe.
They hit the landing hard, dispatching the trio of undead with practiced moves. Slim approaches the Ferris wheel controls and stops the ride when your carriage reaches the bottom.
“Enjoyin’ the view?” he asks in a thick Southern accent.
The big guy steps up and yanks you out of the carriage.
“Hey, listen!” you say, hands raised. “There was nothing I could do. Everybody has to take care of themselves these days, yeah? But you guys seem like survivors, like me, so…”
“What do you think, Hef?” the big guy says. “Are we like him?”
“I ain’t one to leave a woman for dead.”
“Me neither.”
He shifts the weight of his sledgehammer, and you go for your knife. The man rushes forward and slams his enormous sledgehammer into your forehead.
THE END
Kicking Yourself
I think we’ve established that you’re not a very big guy. Still, given enough motivation (like, say, flesh-hungry ghouls closing in while you’re trapped outside after an all-night march, for example), the doors stand no chance.
You grab the locked door-bar for balance and kick the glass doors again
and again. At first the glass holds, but you eventually smash through. It comes as a bit of a shock as your foot goes through, knee-deep in glass.
Bright red arterial blood sprays out on the glass and a stabbing pain shoots through you. When you pull your leg back through the glass, that only makes things worse. Your shoe quickly pools with blood, and you’re still no closer to getting in.
“Hell was I thinkin’!?” you scream out in rage, before hobbling away from the mall.
Eventually, you lose so much blood that the exhaustion cannot be ignored. You sit “just for a minute” and lose consciousness. When you awake, it’s because the nutters have found you.
THE END
Kick the Bucket
You help bucket-lady to her feet, and she rises in response to your touch so easily there’s a twinge of regret when you push her into the path of the oncoming ghoul. Her cot tips over, and with it, the bucket of human squick that dumps out across the concrete floor of the tent.
The ghoulish woman takes your gift and bites into the sick lady, evidently unconcerned with spreading her own infection into an unhealthy host. Other people in the tent are awake now, and a few are screaming. You go back to your cot.
The screams bring in the guard from outside, and he stands with his rifle at the ready. “Another Turned,” he says into a chest-radio. “Go for a transfer to aggressor tent.”
Two more soldiers come in, looking interchangeable in their gasmasks. The guard says, “Don’t let her bite you.”
The pair grab the woman, one putting her in a headlock while the second binds her wrists together. They drag her from the tent.
PATHOGENS: Who Will Survive the Zombie Apocalypse? (Click Your Poison Book 4) Page 21
