Fall of Man | Book 3 | Firebase:

by Sisavath, Sam

  Zoe’s daughter, Ashley, saluted Emily.

  Emily smiled at the kid before turning to Dante. “I need you to go over everything in the offices. Try to figure out a way down to the facility. There has to be a way. Maybe someone left a blueprint lying around that we can use. Anything.”

  “I already did,” Dante said. “We already did.”

  “Do it again.”

  “But—”

  “Do it again,” Emily said.

  Dante swallowed a bit and nodded.

  “What about us?” Savannah said, indicating herself and Fiona.

  “Help Dante,” Emily said.

  “What else?” Fiona asked.

  “That’s it for now.”

  “I can do more.”

  Can you? Emily wanted to ask but said out loud instead, “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  She turned to Zoe again and nodded. The older woman returned it. Emily was expecting some kind of resistance and was glad she didn’t get any. Then again, after everything Cole had told her about the single mother, maybe Emily shouldn’t have been so surprised. Zoe knew exactly where her priorities lay—keeping Ashley alive at all costs. Emily couldn’t exactly say that she blamed the other woman; she would do the same thing in her shoes.

  And she would, once Cole’s child was outside of her.

  They watched the women and Dante head back to the bigger of the two offices. No one said anything for a while, and the only sounds were Tommy shifting his boots back and forth. He was either nervous or afraid. Probably both.

  Finally, she turned to Greg, before directing his eyes to the elevator nearby. “Can you do anything about that?”

  “Like what?” Greg asked.

  “Open the paneling up and see if you can get it working?”

  Greg didn’t even think about it. “I’d need tools, which I don’t have. Even if I did…” He shook his head. “I could wire a house for you, but I wouldn’t know a thing about computers. Hell, I’d probably just end up damaging it, and I’m not sure you’d want that.”

  “I don’t.”

  “That’s what I figured.”

  Emily didn’t bother asking Tommy if he had any skills to assist them. She wasn’t sure the idiot knew how to do much of anything except make very bad decisions, like driving a semi-truck into a warehouse at full speed.

  “It could be worse,” Bolton said.

  “How so?” Greg asked him.

  “We could be out there instead of in here.”

  Greg chuckled. “There’s that, I guess.”

  “I should have drove away,” Tommy was saying mostly to himself.

  “Yeah, you should have, kid,” Bolton said. “It’d have saved us all this hassle—”

  A scream from outside pierced the afternoon air and seemed to shake the walls around them. They all turned toward the semi at the same time, even as the scream faded. A man, in pain. It’d been one long sound, then nothing.

  “Another one bites the dust,” Greg said.

  “As long as it’s one of them and not one of us,” Bolton said.

  “That’s the trick, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, that’s definitely the trick.”

  “Maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ll keep killing each other until no one’s left,” Tommy said.

  Bolton snorted. “You really think that’s going to happen?”

  “Why not? They were doing a pretty good job of it back in town. After they took out all the other infected people, they concentrated on each other. You should see them, like kids playing hide-and-seek. Except when they found someone, it was blood and guts and death.” Tommy might have shivered unwittingly. “It was fucking crazy.”

  “How’d you managed to stay alive through all that?” Greg asked.

  “Luck,” Tommy said. “And I guess I’ve always been good at staying out of people’s way.”

  The thoom! of something striking metal echoed. Unlike the scream earlier, this one had come from—

  Emily glanced all the way toward the other side of the warehouse. She knew from earlier recon that there was another side door back there. The only other way in, besides the two massive hangar doors and the smaller entry next to them. Like the one up front, the side door was made of a half-inch slab of galvanized steel. Tough but not invincible, which she already knew after the psycho punched his spear through the other one earlier. The Welcome Room wasn’t exactly designed with maximum security in mind. That was what the facility ten floors underneath it was for.

  Another echoing thoom!, this one seemingly louder than the first.

  Emily began half-walking and half-running toward the source of the attack. “Bolton, Tommy! Get to the front! Don’t let any of them in!”

  “What are you gonna do?” Bolton said.

  Tommy, standing next to him, looked too flabbergasted to say anything.

  “Keep whoever’s knocking out!” she said. Then, turning to Greg, “Come on!”

  Greg didn’t say anything and instead just ran after her. She almost smiled; apparently the contractor was getting used to her bossing him around.

  She broke out into a fast run. They were already in the middle of the warehouse when the impacts began (Thoom! again, as metal struck metal) so there were only forty feet left for them to run. Close enough that Emily could see the steel door trembling against its frame as—

  Thoom!

  Then Greg was next to her, his longer legs allowing him to catch up. He was breathing hard, the spear/sword going up and down in his left hand. He didn’t say anything and instead kept pace beside her. She glanced over at him anyway and got something that almost looked like a wink back. Emily couldn’t help herself and smiled.

  A final thoom! and the door swung open and crashed into the wall.

  A hulking figure, like something out of a bad nightmare, appeared on the other side. A long, matted black object—some kind of battering ram—was hanging in front of him. The man was wearing dark black clothes and a trench coat, the fabric covered in splatters of red and brown. (The red was blood; the brown was the dust of the surrounding land.) It was an unusual getup; not to mention extremely uncomfortable for the sunny conditions outside.

  But it was the man’s face that caught her off guard and made her slide to a stop and lift the Glock to aim. Or what little of the man’s face that she could see, anyway, because she couldn’t see very much: He was wearing a gas mask, the breathing apparatus jutting out from underneath from his chin like twin horns. The sight was made more confusing because the man’s coat came with a hood that he had thrown over his head, covering almost the entire top.

  She searched for bloody eyes behind the lens of the gas mask, but it was an impossible task. The man was standing in the open doorway, bright sunlight silhouetting his massive frame so dramatically that she wondered if he had planned his entry for this exact reaction. If so, did he know that she was armed? That she was about to shoot him?

  Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t. All she knew was that she couldn’t take any chances. Besides, the man didn’t just knock, he’d battered his way in, and that was all the confirmation she needed of his hostile intentions.

  “What the fuck is this?” Greg said. Or whispered. Or gasped. It was one of those.

  Emily didn’t answer. She was too busy taking aim from less than ten yards away.

  She shot the man in the chest. Twice. It was easy from this distance.

  The man stumbled backwards, then seemed to fall out of the open doorway, almost disappearing from view before she could put another round into him at about the same general vicinity of her first shot.

  “The door!” Greg said just before he ran forward.

  Emily opened her mouth to shout his name, to tell him to get back and wait for her, but it was too late. The contractor was already halfway to the open door. She ran after him, but he had a good head start—

  Greg slid to an abrupt stop in front of her. She nearly collided with him but stopped just in time.

  “Gre
g, what—”

  Whispery metallic clank-clank! sounds from in front of Greg cut her off.

  She looked past Greg’s frame as a green can of some sort rolled toward them, having sailed through the open doorway.

  It was a canister.

  Yellow— No, not yellow. Olive drab colored.

  She’d seen it before.

  She’d seen it a lot before.

  Emily grabbed Greg’s left arm from behind and shouted, “Get back! Get back!”

  Greg turned, the shock and confusion on his face as clear as day. She was dragging him back with her even as the can stopped rolling behind him and she heard the whoosh! as the first plumes of smoke began discharging. Soon, the entire warehouse would be covered in whatever color—

  Green. It was green smoke.

  A lot of it, too.

  That single can of smoke grenade would continue to spew clouds of thick green for 50 to 90 seconds. But if they could outrun it, they could avoid its effects.

  More metallic clank-clank noises as another one landed in front, then skipped right past her. Whoever had thrown it had done a hell of a good job. Maybe the kind of throw that would have made a Major League Baseball pitcher proud.

  All Emily knew was that the can was in front of her one second and then behind her. She glanced after it, spotting Bolton and Tommy at the open hangar door running back toward her and Greg.

  “Don’t!” she shouted. “Stay where you are! Cover the door! Cover the door!”

  She wasn’t sure if they understood or if they could even hear her, because the can in front of her sparked and made a whoosh! sound just before smoke flooded out of it.

  Yellow smoke this time.

  Emily turned to keep from running headfirst into the thickening clouds. It was a mistake, because she’d forgotten all about Greg. She’d let go of his arm, but he was still chasing after her from behind. For a second, anyway, until he crashed into her and they both went down. Emily landed on his chest and chin, but even as she dealt with the pain, all she could think was, Don’t lose the gun! Don’t you dare lose the gun!

  She didn’t, and managed to roll over onto her back.

  Not that it did any good, because all she could see was…smoke.

  There was smoke everywhere.

  Green and yellow smoke, merging to form orange clouds.

  Somewhere nearby someone was coughing.

  Her. It was her.

  Or maybe Greg.

  Both of them?

  Emily forced herself up into a sitting position, her left hand tugging at her shirt collar to get the fabric around her mouth and nose for protection. It didn’t help. Her eyes stung, tears falling down her cheeks in streams.

  And she was coughing, choking on the smoke.

  So was Greg, somewhere else in the thick fog.

  It wasn’t just smoke, but there was something in it. Something that was making her choke on her own tongue.

  She blinked through the tears as figures emerged out of the smoke in front of her. Dark figures—no, not the figures themselves, but their clothes. Like the one that had knocked open the door. They were wearing…

  BDUs?

  Were they wearing BDUs?

  Why were crazies wearing BDUs?

  No, not crazies, she thought because they didn’t move like infected people. The fact that they seemed to be in some kind of formation was proof they weren’t crazies, because crazies didn’t cooperate. And she was definitely looking—even if it took every ounce of concentration she had—at people that were clearly working as a team.

  “I’ll take that,” a voice said just before a gloved hand appeared from somewhere behind her (How’d he get behind me?) and wrestled the Glock from her trembling hand.

  The person had taken the gun so easily from her.

  How? How?

  Maybe she could have figured out the answer if she wasn’t too busy falling to the concrete floor and simultaneously trying not to cough her lungs and every other bodily organ out through her mouth.

  Chapter 11. Cole

  “Dead man walking.”

  You’re not helping.

  “You always say that.”

  It’s always true.

  “I beg to differ.”

  Beg all you want; you’re still not helping.

  “You’re just not listening to me, that’s all. Big difference.”

  Be quiet. I need to concentrate.

  “Then you should probably stop talking to yourself,” the Voice said before breaking out into one of those annoying spurts of laughter that made Cole’s blood boil.

  But the Voice was right. He was just talking to himself—or thinking to himself, if he really wanted to be pedantic about it—because there was nothing in front, behind, or around him.

  No, that wasn’t entirely true.

  There were plenty of things—most notably, psychos—in front, behind, and around him. It was just that he couldn’t see them right now. They were hiding, waiting for the right moment to jump out and gut him like a fish.

  “Now that’s going to hurt,” the Voice said.

  The ones still roaming the underground facility had survived the first four days of whatever had befallen the earth. The weak ones were dead and gone. Cole could see two of those in front of him right now.

  Two men, both dead for days now. If flies and insects could have invaded the airtight hallways of LARS, they would have been all over the bodies. Instead, there was just the inevitable stench of death in the air, pricking at Cole’s exposed skin as he weaved his way around the puddles of dried blood.

  Both bodies belonged to LARS’s service team. He knew that by their gray overalls and name tags. One had suffered a massive blow to the head, the weapon that had killed him shattering the skull and allowing chunks of the man’s brain to fall out. He was gripping a Phillips head screwdriver in one hand. His victim—and also killer—was on the floor in front of him barely a few feet away. A ball-peen hammer lay just beyond his grasp. His stomach was covered in dried red wetness.

  They’d been there for a while. Days. Maybe even the very first day.

  Unlike last time, Cole didn’t just assume both men were really dead. He made sure by prodding them, the muzzle of the shotgun ready to blast should they open their eyes or do anything other than lie there.

  They were both truly dead, so he moved on.

  “You sure they’re dead?” the Voice asked. “Really, really dead?”

  Yes.

  “Sure?”

  Yes.

  “Sure, sure?”

  You’re really not helping now.

  The Voice laughed, but Cole tuned it out.

  Another three-way intersection was coming up, this one with signs indicating CONTROL ROOM to the right and MAINTENANCE on the left.

  Cole turned right, replaying his conversation with Sal in his head.

  “How many were down here when everything went down?” he’d asked her.

  “Twenty-one,” she had said. “That’s counting the staff and residents.”

  “‘Residents?’”

  “The rich assholes that were here when it all went down.”

  “How many of those?”

  “A dozen. Anton was throwing a big bash to introduce them to the facility. They came by helicopters and were supposed to stay for a few days. His goal was to show them what LARS had to offer. All the comforts and luxuries of aboveground, minus all the bad stuff.”

  “‘Bad stuff?’”

  “You know. Poverty. Poor people. Et cetera.”

  Cole had laughed. “He said that?”

  “Just my interpretation. He was a little more diplomatic about it. I think the words he used were ‘general masses.’ LARS was supposed to be Rich Boy Floyd’s escape when the shit hit the fan, and he couldn’t count on the police or government to protect him anymore. I’m pretty sure that’s even in the brochures. Minus the ‘shit’ and ‘fan’ part. Probably.”

  What Sal had said and what Emily had told him made s
ense. The one thing Cole had learned about the affluent and privileged was that they didn’t like being forced to conform to the majority mob. Which was always almost the middle class and poorer. The wealthy, in every country he’d ever been in, was always the minority. And they knew it, too.

  “And to think, you would have joined their ranks after selling RistWorks,” the Voice said.

  That wasn’t entirely true. His bank account would have grown substantially, but Cole wouldn’t have considered himself “rich” by any stretch. Well off, yes, with more than enough for Emily and himself and their kids.

  “Kids?” the Voice said. “Let’s try to focus on keeping the one still inside Emily alive first, shall we?”

  Yeah, that was a good idea.

  “Of course. I’m full of good ideas.”

  Since when?

  “Since forever.”

  Cole snorted out loud. He hadn’t done it on purpose and immediately regretted it.

  It was the first noise other than the soft taps of his shoes against the polished tiles and the forever present hum of the facility’s power source in the background. It wasn’t really that loud, but it seemed so anyway in his mind.

  He waited for Sal to chastise him through one of the wall’s many hidden speakers, but she didn’t. Either she hadn’t heard it or she was aware of how tenuous his position was. Which was to say, any conversation that he could hear could also be heard by them.

  “Twenty-one,” Sal had said. “That’s counting the staff and residents.”

  Cole hadn’t bothered to ask her how big LARS was in order to accommodate so many psychos without them having already finished each other off in four days. The answer was obvious: LARS was big.

  And it had to be, so the rich investors could bide their time down here in luxury while the rest of the world went to shit. Cole couldn’t exactly blame them; it was the same reason he and the others had made their way here, after all. LARS was a sanctuary from the outside world; the refuge that they needed as they regrouped and tried to figure out what had happened.

  “It’s an attack,” Emily had said to him. “It has to be. I can’t believe it’s anything but that.”

  “Why?” he’d asked her.

  “The way it was coordinated. And it was coordinated. The power grid went down the same day. Communications went dead. Just like that,” she’d added, snapping her fingers. “That doesn’t happen by accident. Not with all the cell towers out there and all the satellites orbiting in space. No, this was an attack, Cole. A highly coordinated one.”