They each kept a hand free to feel around the environment so they could safely move around and keep cover between them and Curt as he slowly corralled them back toward the lobby of the police station. Between their shots, they were left in the darkness and often would have no idea where each other was, making their gunfire all the more dangerous.
Sarah slipped around a desk and bumped into a chair, setting off Curt and causing him to charge at her. He couldn't see in the darkness either, and he tripped over and slammed into a multitude of furniture. As he went for Sarah, he fell over the desk and scrambled on top of it, sending reams of paper and old office supplies in every direction, creating a terrible racket.
They fired off more shots, but only managed to hit his torso and his legs. He scrambled back to his feet and lurched through the darkness in a few directions before calming down a little and emitting a rough grunt with every breath.
Wayne squeezed off a round toward the sound of his breathing but hit a wall partition that he didn't know was between the two of them. Curt charged again, and Wayne and Sarah scrambled to reposition themselves.
Then there was silence aside from Curt's raspy breathing.
Sarah aimed carefully then fired.
The muzzle flash painted a horrifying image in front of her eyes: Curt was indeed in front of her, but Wayne was standing between them.
The bullet hit Wayne in the top of his chest and he went down. He lay on the floor grunting in the darkness as Sarah stood on the spot and gasped, horrified.
Curt's head snapped toward Wayne and went after him.
"No!" Sarah shouted and blindly fired the rest of her magazine at him. She didn't injure him, but it was enough.
Curt changed direction at the last moment, turning toward her and charging.
She tried to fire again but only heard the empty click of the gun. Then she ran. She still didn't know where she was, but she was pretty sure she was heading back in the right direction toward the lobby. She collided into the wall at the edge of the bullpen and bounced off it, her breath seizing in her lungs. She felt around frantically and managed to find the hallway leading past the offices. She could hear Curt stalking behind her and she fled toward the lobby. There were some extra magazines in her pocket and she clumsily pulled one out as she ejected the empty magazine out of the gun.
Ron and Carly were in the lobby huddled against the doors leading outside. It was a horrifying sight to watch as they heard grisly sounds coming from the darkness in front of them and then saw Sarah emerge, trying to fit a fresh magazine into her gun as a zombified Curt bounded after her.
Sarah was so focused in her own world that when she heard Curt right behind her about to tackle her, she dove to the side to get out of his way, not realizing she had been the only thing between him and the others.
Carly shot up to her feet, ready to flee, but there was no time. Curt rushed her and lifted her off the ground like a football tackle, sending her through the glass in the door. They collided on the ground outside in the rain and Carly screamed as Curt tried to thrash her.
Sarah slid the magazine into the gun and racked the slide, then rolled over and fired at Curt. She didn't take much care to aim, because she knew there was no time.
Two bullets hit Curt near the kidneys and he paused his attempts to eat Carly momentarily. In the next moment he shoved himself off of her and spun around, growling at Sarah.
Sarah kept firing as he came at her in a flash. She retreated backward toward the elevator that was still clean and brightly-lit and waiting for someone to operate it. She was running out of space, now in the threshold, and Curt hit her, slamming her into the back wall of the elevator and causing her pistol to fly up in the air. It hit the ceiling before falling down and clattering on the floor.
He pinned her down and chomped his teeth at her, and she used every muscle in her body to fend him off. She reached out for his neck to push him away and he whipped his head to the side and tried to bite off her fingers, but she recoiled quickly enough that only one of his teeth scraped against one of her fingernails.
Sarah desperately reached for the gun that was just out of her grasp as she tried to hold him off with her other arm. His ferocity made him slippery and she had to be in tune with his movements and use her hips to buck him appropriately. He gave another thrust of his body at her to go for the kill, and she twisted her hips at the right time, causing him to hurtle into the wall away from the gun. She utilized the split second of opportunity that she had and snatched the pistol just as he righted himself and clambered back on top of her. She wedged her arm under what was left of his chin and pointed the gun up at his face.
Seven shots were fired as she held him in place and his brains painted the ceiling of the elevator and then the walls as blood and bone showered over the entire interior along with it.
When she tossed him off of her, his face was nothing but a mangled mess and completely unrecognizable from the man he used to be. Sarah lay on her back for a long while, panting and trying to wipe the blood off her face without getting any in her eyes or mouth. She climbed up to her feet and stumbled out of the elevator, glancing over and seeing Ron helping Carly back inside.
"Are you all right?" Sarah asked her.
"Yeah, are you okay?" Carly choked out between sobs.
"I'm fine," Sarah replied. "Did he bite you?"
Carly shook her head and pulled back her coat and shirt around the neck to show her. "You?"
"No," Sarah said.
Just then, another figure came out of the dark hallway, slow and lumbering.
"Nice shot," Wayne said, pressing his hand to his chest.
"Oh my God, I thought you were dead!" Sarah cried, finally having a moment to process the events that just transpired.
"Maybe if you had better aim," he teased. "Let's get this over with."
"You still want to go?" Sarah asked, surprised.
"We came this far, didn't we?"
They all looked at each other in their battered and bruised state, and there was a silent agreement between them as no one raised any objections. They turned their heads toward Curt's undeniably lifeless body and the mess that had turned the pristinely-clean elevator into a horror show.
They approached him and Sarah knelt down, pulling out the keycard Curt had slipped into his pocket. She held it up and appraised it, and there was a bullet hole right through the center of it, causing some of them to gasp.
"It's okay," Sarah said. "The magnetic strip is intact."
They all piled into the elevator uneasily, trying to stay away from Curt, but also trying not to touch any of the walls.
"Can't we take him out of here first?" Carly asked, looking down at the disgusting corpse.
"Be my guest," Sarah replied.
Carly stayed quiet.
Sarah held the keycard in front of the card reader. "Here goes nothing."
"Wouldn't it be funny if it wasn't even the right card?" Ron asked, chuckling.
They all glared at him and his smile immediately disappeared as he stared down at his hands.
Sarah lined up the card with the reader and swiped it through.
A green light came on and the reader beeped. The elevator doors shut and they felt themselves start to descend. The icons over top of the doors lit up as they passed each basement floor, first B1 and then B2. But then they kept descending and the light highlighting B2 disappeared. They traveled down so far that if there had been as many floors, they must have been to at least B8 by now.
"I don't have a good feeling about this," Wayne uttered.
"I never did," Sarah said morosely.
17
Discovery
By the time the elevator stopped they thought the doors would open up to Hell. This certainly wasn't standard construction for a police station and all of them wondered if this secret basement had been built before the zombie apocalypse or after, and why here? Wayne ticked through the reasons in his head, supposing that if certain high-level p
eople were obviously in on it, there wouldn't be a safer place for it besides maybe a military installation. Sarah, on the other hand, had only one thing on her mind: Amanda.
When the doors of the elevator finally did open, giving an inappropriately-cheery ding announcing their arrival, they found a completely state-of-the-art and almost spotless lab. They stepped into the space and looked around in awe at their surroundings, which were in sharp contrast to the mess they had left in the elevator.
The lights were all on, giving a brilliant white sheen to everything, and just about everything seemed to be a shiny steel surface. Wide windows spanned just about every wall, giving them a preview of the entire laboratory. Work surfaces were filled with instruments and tools. Experiment tables and computer workstations large and small filled the various rooms in the large area that seemed to be just as big as the station above them. There was also a bevy of security cameras and motion detectors that still had blinking lights on them, indicating that not only was everything automated, but it was all still functioning, too. The only thing that seemed out of place was the fact that the lab was completely empty, even from any dead bodies like they saw upstairs.
"Do you think they're watching us?" Sarah asked, staring up at a security camera that had a little red light on the front.
"I don't know," Wayne said. "It's possible."
Sarah turned her attention to Ron and stared at him pointedly, a look that was obviously a demand for answers.
"I don't think it's a good idea to stay here very long," he said simply. And even he seemed to be genuinely worried now, with visible sweat rolling down his mostly bald head.
They passed through from room to room, each door sliding open by motion detection. The rooms differed in size, but most seemed to be approximately ten-by-twelve feet or so. It seemed to be somewhat of the labyrinth, with one room leading into the next, which led into the next, and only occasionally having some that branched off into multiple rooms, connecting the lab as a whole.
Although there was still a lot of equipment around, there were also spots that seemed emptier than they should have been, and there were some random notes and other sheets of paper strewn on work surfaces or the ground, lending to the idea (along with the missing scientists) that whoever had been running this lab and police station had made a hasty exit, grabbing what they could and leaving the rest. Since there were no dead scientists, it seemed plausible that they weren't expendable, but the grunts upstairs were.
"She has to be here somewhere," Sarah muttered to herself, but even she knew that the odds of that were becoming slimmer by the minute. The only good news that seemed to come to them was the fact that the entire area was brightly lit and they couldn't see a single zombie or soldier in sight. So if nothing else, they were safe.
They passed a room that had a row of computer terminals against the back wall and a set of large vertical columns extending from the floor to the ceiling, each one made of steel. They seemed to be rather odd and out of place compared to everything else they had seen, and Sarah figured they must have been power conduits or something similar.
They continued along the labyrinthine layout and arrived at a rather nondescript room in the very back corner. This one seemed like a filing room, filled with steel cabinets lining the walls. If there was one final hope of finding Amanda, it was in this room.
But she wasn't here. No one was here.
"Where is she?" Sarah asked. She looked around the room, then strode back into the previous one and peered through the windows, taking a look at the rest of the lab. She did a mental checklist in her head, making sure they had been everywhere, and now she came crashing up against the reality that the place was truly abandoned, and that wherever Amanda was—if she was even still alive—she certainly wasn't here.
"I'm so sorry," Carly said, giving her a sympathetic hug from behind and resting her head on her shoulder.
"Get off me!" Sarah yelled, stepping away from her.
Carly shrunk back, scared.
Sarah broke down crying. Her pistol dropped out of her hand and she sunk to her knees. None of the others watching her could quite understand why she had become so attached to this girl she had just met, but Sarah understood; at first she had felt bad for Amanda, but then the idea came to her that it would fall upon her to take care of the girl. From there it was only a matter of time before her brain drew correlations between protecting Amanda and her failure to protect David. In a way it almost felt like a second chance, a chance to redeem herself.
The others stood around nervously for a moment, giving Sarah her space. Carly was more than ready to leave, and Ron still seemed a little nervous, but curiosity got the best of Wayne and he moved back into the previous room where the tall metal columns stood and sat himself down in front of one of the computer terminals. He went to work, his fingers flying across the keyboard and periodically pausing to move the mouse and click on various things.
Carly and Ron slowly turned their heads, curious and surprised to see what he was doing. They sauntered over to him, feeling awkward about leaving Sarah on her own, but on the other hand they felt that it would probably be for the best until she was ready to rejoin them.
A smile crept across Ron's face as he leaned over Wayne's shoulder. "You look like you've done this before."
"You might not guess it to look at me," Wayne said, "but I did eight years with the Marines in cyber warfare in their PSYOPS program, two as a commander."
"Well I'll be..." Ron said. "What do you see?"
"They left everything open," Wayne replied. "I guess they didn't expect anyone to come down here. It looks like they deleted a lot of stuff, considering how sparse it is, but they left a few things."
He began to open up some files, most of them PDFs, spreadsheets and word processor documents. Occasionally he found some files that had strange extensions and wouldn't open with any known program on the system. He came across a lot of mundane things like financials, listing payments to and from places he never heard of, making it even stranger since there were no more currencies or trading being done anywhere in the world as far as he could tell. But then again, Wayne saw these people driving vehicles with his own two eyes, something that should have been impossible in this day and age. There was certainly no question that they were well-equipped and probably well-connected, as frightening a thought as it was to think that this web was even bigger than they realized.
Sarah walked into the room, her eyes beet-red. She had stopped crying and held a steely resolve on her face. Without mentioning anything more about Amanda, she leaned over Wayne's shoulder. "I want to know everything you can find."
"Let's take a look at what we have here," Wayne said, opening a PDF file. His eyes scanned across the words of what looked to be a report of some kind. It spoke about lab experiments to do with zombies and growth rates, but he couldn't make heads or tails out of it.
"Oh my," Ron said. He leaned in close and adjusted his glasses. "Scroll back up for a second."
"What is it?" Sarah asked.
"This is it right here," Ron said, "this is the answer."
"Well?"
"Metastatic progression through tissue," Ron said, reading off the screen, "ATP levels, strengthening tumor cells through genetic splicing, advanced gluconeogenesis... don't you see?"
"English," Sarah said.
"This is the zombie virus they're talking about here," Ron replied, stepping back and pointing at the screen like an excited kid.
"I still don't understand any of the jargon you just said."
"That's just it," he replied, "everything I just read has to do with cancer."
"Cancer? What's that got to do with the zombie virus?"
Ron laughed, stunned that he was the only one making the connection. "Sarah, don't you get it? The zombie virus is cancer."
Everyone was shocked.
"What are you talking about?" Sarah asked. "My aunt died of cancer, and it wasn't anything like these things."
&nbs
p; "This file is incomplete, but it has enough information to give an idea," he said. "This wasn't just any old type of cancer that you're used to; we're talking heavy, heavy modification. And purposeful, too. By the looks of it, these people created an extremely aggressive type of cancer that spread through the entire body very quickly. It doesn't look like it's mentioned in here, but I'm guessing it can be spread through the blood or the saliva. That's why getting bitten transfers the cancer cells to you, which starts the action of rapid metastasis in the target." He looked back at the screen and told Wayne to scroll down. "They've tweaked the cancer's reliance on amino acids and glucose, creating an extreme hunger for protein in the person. Hence the, uh... flesh eating."
The others stood around in stunned silence. Some of them tried to open their mouths and form a sentence, but they all failed.
"Huh," Ron said with a smile, "I just realized that's why you never see a fat zombie, unless someone has just turned... the cachexia immediately kicks in and causes the victim to waste away, just like any cancer patient you're used to, except they've modified it so that they keep the zombies in that hungry state, damaging certain parts of the brain as well to keep them stupid and focused only on their primal needs like appetite. But they've also adapted it to include safeguards that keep certain body parts and organs functioning even with the lack of food and protect the person from actually starving to death, despite the severe breakdown of many of the body's cells, causing that gray corpse look. Maybe with enough time and too little food they'd starve, but it's hard to say."
"But... but why?" Sarah choked out at last.
"Isn't it obvious?" Ron said. "They've weaponized cancer. What better way to wipe out humanity?"
"That's sick," she said.
"How do you know so much about this?" Carly asked him.
"I have some experience in oncology," he admitted.
Zombie Apocalypse Box Set 2 Page 17
