Necrophobia - 02 Page 11
Still, how would they know me from an ARM trooper?
I decided not to take any chances.
I got on the box. “You better find somewhere to lay low,” I told Tuck. “We got an Apache over here and it means fucking business.”
“Shit. Roger that,” Tuck said.
The Apache had made its pass north of me and I could hear the exploding rockets and sweeping chain guns. I figured nothing could clear out the dead and ARM quite like one of those birds.
Feeling pretty secure from air attack, I ran across the roof and jumped onto the one next door. My timing was good, because the trapdoor was thrown open and the undead crawled out like graveworms. I found a doorway leading down into the building, but it was locked. I blew it open with my 9 mil and started down the steps to the second floor. I came out in a hallway that was quiet and nicely paneled in dark woods. I was in some kind of medical office park—dentists, chiropractors, pediatricians, optometrists. It was so peaceful in there I was half-tempted to stretch out on the leather couch in the waiting room of an orthodontist.
But I knew my friends would be coming.
At that particular moment, what concerned me most was not the zombies, but who they might attract by congregating up on the roof. If the Apache crew saw them, they might rain hell down on their heads…and mine. I found a stairway leading downstairs and located the door that led to the street. It was a mess out there. I saw no zombies around, but the buildings on the other side of the street had taken a devastating barrage. Most of them were down, fallen right into the streets. Those that still stood were blackened frameworks. The street itself, what I could see of it, was ripped open with bomb craters. Some of them were big enough to drive a bus into. The street had collapsed down into the sewers below, the craters filled with stagnant, murky water. Leaves and dead rats floated on the surface of these ponds.
I started picking my way carefully down the street, climbing over huge heaps of rubble and skirting bomb craters. I was heading north (I hoped) if my sense of direction was still working and I figured I’d hit 236th Street before long. I had to make it north-west to get out to the college where Tuck and the others were. Back in the old days, I could have made short work of it but the complexion of the Bronx had changed considerably. So many neighborhoods had been razed and burned flat it was hard to get a real good sense of where exactly I was.
And it was a warzone.
An absolute warzone.
The living dead prowled in flesh-eating gangs through the gutters of the urban graveyard. I had to watch for them, for the Army and militias, crazies and packs of wild dogs that I knew would attack and eat anything. Mosul had nothing on this place. I figured I had fourteen rounds left in my Sig-Sauer, but if things got hot that was nothing. I burn through the clip in minutes.
I figured there wouldn’t be too many zombies. The Army in their pursuit of ARM had wiped out the majority. But that didn’t mean there wouldn’t be a few scattered packs out scavenging. I was hoping I wouldn’t run into anymore than a few isolated bands or stragglers. That I could handle.
I climbed a few heaps of rubble, but for every one I gained, there were two or three before me which rose higher and higher. I began to see bones mixed in with the smashed concrete, pulverized bricks, and staffs of twisted rebar. There was nothing quiet about my progress and once I lay flat as the Apache again passed overhead. The rubble mountains were dangerous, jagged beams and shards of glass rising up. I moved slowly over them, even though I knew I was in incredible danger being out in the open like that.
When I came to the biggest rubble mountain—it rose up high as a two-story building—I found an entire section of concrete stairs that led halfway up it through the debris as if they had been placed there for that very reason. It was a break. But what wasn’t a break were all the bones I started to see. They were all well gnawed by rodents and dogs and I just hoped their owners had been dead when it happened. By the time I clawed my way to the top, I could see 236th Street in the distance and I could also see I had quite a few obstructions in my path.
I crouched there and a shot rang out.
I threw myself down as a second and third shot rang out. Whoever it was, I knew they weren’t shooting at me. The sound of a slug drilling into the rubble would have been very apparent. I peered up carefully over the remains of an old cylindrical chimney. Down below in a valley, between a few low mounds of wreckage, I saw a guy with a hunting rifle running. Now and again, he would stop, drop to one knee, and fire.
That’s when I heard the dogs.
A wild, slavering pack of them came running out after the guy. He turned and shot two of them that rolled on the ground, spilling blood and whining. He ran and the five remaining dogs—probably somebody’s pets at one time—came bounding after him. In the distance, I heard him fire a couple more times at the yelping pack. Then all was quiet and I started my descent. I slid more than climbed my way down and wasted no more time in ascending the next mound. As I did so, I became aware of a roiling stench of carrion and I expected the zombies to show at any moment.
Only they didn’t.
When I climbed over the final mound, I saw what the stench was coming from: a body dump. There before me, clogging up the street was an immense collection of corpses. I figured there were hundreds and the stink was unbelievable. It looked like a scene from a death camp you see on those old newsreels from World War II, just an endless panorama of corpses in every conceivable state of decay. Though many had been stripped down to skeletons, most were green and bloated, rotting and fuming with corpse gas. Many of them were so riddled with worms they were moving. Flocks of carrion birds—ravens and crows and buzzards—were down there spreading their wings and cawing, taking to the air when any of the slat-thin dogs came after them. I counted over two dozen dogs down there, and twice that many zombies picking away at cadavers, yanking things from bellies and gnawing on limbs. I saw a little girl sitting cross-legged atop a heap of wormy remains, casually chewing on a head.
So this was it.
Either I went down there and crossed the graveyard below or I went back, tried to circle around. I figured I was in trouble either way. Crawling up and down those ramparts of rubble was not something my tired muscles wanted to do, but cutting through the charnel yards below was something my stomach wanted no part of.
I decided to chance it.
As quietly as possible, I moved down the rubble hill, triggering an avalanche of bricks by accident. What I wanted was a bandanna or something to cover my nose and mouth. Not only because of the putrescent, boiling stink, but also because I honestly had no idea what kind of contaminants I might be breathing in.
My 9 mil in hand, I began my journey.
A couple of dogs took notice of me right away. A setter barked. A Doberman snarled. Neither came after me. They were merely warning me away from their territory. Duly warned, I gave them a wide berth. As I moved amongst the corpses, it appeared to me that they had been dumped here and then bulldozed into great heaps. I was able to slip around these, but I still had to walk over the dead. They made squishing and popping sounds as I stepped on them, letting out hissing plumes of gagging grave-odors. Birds winged just over my head and dogs barked. All was silent save for the sound of dogs chewing, birds pecking, and zombies slurping and biting. The flies were everywhere, of course, rising and falling in great buzzing black clouds. I waved them away, but it was hopeless. They covered my bare forearms and face, nipped at my neck and crawled through my hair.
I passed several zombies, but they were disinterested.
One of them, a naked woman, was chewing on some unrecognizable mass and when I passed, she held it out to me. I declined her kindness and she went back to eating it. That was a new one: I had never had one of them offer to share with me. But who really knew what went on inside their dead minds, what sort of memories they might have been reliving?
Ten minutes into it, I was halfway through and unchallenged.
As disgusting as
it was, I thought it was better than having to fight through packs of ghoul which I had done many, many times.
Then my luck ended.
I heard a mucky, slopping sound and looked back. Two male zombies—teenagers, I think—were sliding down a moist heap of the dead. They had seen me and they were following me. I figured it would happen sooner or later. They moved through the corpses, drunken, staggering, and stiff-limbed. I cut around another heap of the dead and that brought me within feet of the little girl who was eating the head. She looked at me as I passed, her face was gone, just eaten into some black ulcerous channel in her face. Her eyes were gone, too. There was only that mouth, the barred teeth, the gore dropping from her lips.
Like the others, she had very little interest in me.
Those other two were still coming, though, and I could hear them. I started moving a little faster, but trying to step lightly and carefully so I didn’t trip and fall into the putrid masses under my boots. I came around another heap that was infested with feeding rats and a dog came bounding out to meet me. It was a big bloodhound, its muzzle stained with blood and grue, its eyes black and savage looking. Its bore the marks of battle—half an ear gone, scars threaded into its flanks, poorly healed punctures in its side—and was ready to take me on. I’m not sure if dogs can go crazy in the human sense, maybe they just degenerate into wild animals. Regardless, this one was a blood-hungry primal beast, the Baskerville hound, and it wanted me.
Pulling its lips away from its huge, gore-stained teeth, it charged.
I aimed the Sig-Sauer at it, sweat rolling down the back of my neck. When it was ten feet away, I jerked the trigger and my shot was dead on. It caught the beast right between the eyes and split its skull like a melon. It went down, skidding on its forepaws, howling and yelping and growing, making wild squealing noises. I put another in its head and it stopped moving.
By then, the other two zombies were closing in.
I didn’t bother shooting at them. I rounded two corpse hills and came to an absolute barrier: a mound of putrefying dead. It spread across the street and right up to the buildings on either side like a sea of carrion. On the other side, I could see 236th Street and it looked to be open.
Behind me, the zombies moved in closer.
Gritting my teeth and willing my stomach to stay in place, I jumped up on the hill of bodies and began scrambling up it. It was no easy bit. They shifted and rolled, decompressing when the gas was forced from them. They mashed beneath me, oozing corpse-jelly and black drainage, and when I reached the top, I began to sink into them, boots sliding through pulpy bellies. I fought and clawed, up to my hips in them, fighting my way free and rolling down the other side, stained with drainage and goo and gray foulness.
I came up on my knees and threw up.
It was more than the stink—which was colossal and vile—but the feel of the bodies going to gelatinous slime beneath me, fluids splashing from them and maggots expelled from mouths as my weight pressed down on them, flies blanketing me. For one crazy moment there, on my knees, I started tearing at myself to get pieces of them off me, just sickened and repulsed and out of my head.
What slapped me back into reality were the three zombies coming across 236th at me.
Despite the awful stench I carried, they knew I wasn’t one of them.
I got to my feet and shot one of them in the head and another in the throat. He spun around in a circle, some yellow fluid gushing from the hole in his neck. I ran across the street, grabbing hold of a fire hydrant and trying to breathe with that god-awful smell coming from me. I heard the Apache coming again and knew I had better get to cover. It was flying over the avenue I had just escaped from. I heard its chain guns, rounds drilling into the rubble and dead, dogs whining as they were hit and torn apart. The two zombies coming after me were targeted.
They never had a chance.
The 30mm chain gun on an Apache can lay down like 700 rounds in a minute. They hosed down the zombies with easily fifty or sixty rounds that chewed holes in the pavement and blew apart a parked car on the other side of the street. The zombies themselves literally exploded, bits of them flying in every direction. There was nothing but a grisly stain in the street to mark their passing.
I heard the Apache bank and come around again.
I ran up the block, found a building whose face had been blown off by artillery fire, and climbed through the rubble as I heard the Apache firing rockets. The neighborhood shook with the impacts, the glass falling out of a display window across the street. Seemingly within seconds, two desert-camo Guardians came rolling down the street, the gunners opening up with .50 cals at targets I could not see.
I was in a nest of action here and I didn’t care for it much.
But what was worse was that I had lost my walkie-talkie, probably fighting my way over the corpse-hill.
I was in trouble and I knew it.
Guardian ASV
Type: Armored Vehicle
Weight: 14 tons
Length: 19 feet
Operational Range: 400 miles
Armor: Modular
DARKNESS AT THE EDGE OF TOWN
For the next few hours the entire neighborhood was alive with patrolling APCs, machine gun fire, the sounds of troops moving through the streets, shooting and shooting. I knew these guys weren’t ARM. I figured they were the Army, or what was left of them, still trying to take back the city. Then again, I had no evidence of that other than the very coordinated air and ground assaults. It could have been some militia or private paramilitary force that was especially well armed and well-trained.
I was in a spot and I knew it.
I wanted nothing better than to call Tuck on the walkie-talkie and tell him to get that damn Stryker back to Yonkers, but I couldn’t even do that. I just hoped he wasn’t reckless enough to try and come for me. I didn’t think he would for at his core, Tuck is a very practical man and particularly where combat is concerned. Sabelia, I thought, might turn into a real handful. But I figured Tuck and Diane could keep her under control. At least I hoped so.
I had crawled deep into the bowels of the building to hide. I found a nice little hidey-hole beneath a set of stairs that led up to the second floor, most of which had fallen into the first. I sat there with my 9 mil in hand and waited for what might come next. If soldiers came in I already decided I would surrender to them. Better captured and alive than a dead hero. I had to keep Paul in mind. He didn’t need to lose his old man, too.
From my hole under the stairs, I could see very little of the street beyond. There was rubble everywhere, girders and beams tangled up with sections of walls and tiled flooring that had fallen from above. I figured it wouldn’t take too much to knock that building down but I had no choice. I was a rat now and I had to hide like one.
I was exhausted so it was no real surprise when I drifted off.
It was nearly sundown when I opened my eyes. The first thing I heard was the silence, which was punctuated only by the sounds of rats squealing, bits of mortar falling from the upper floor of the building like sand. Nothing else. The troops had moved on. Though my back was cramped from sleeping sitting up, and my ass was sore from squatting on a concrete slab, I did not move.
I listened.
There was nothing out there. I heard a dog bark far in the distance but that was about it. Just as I was thinking how miserable and angry about the situation I was, how Tuck would have to roll the Stryker back to Yonkers, thinking I was dead, and report that to my son, I saw that I wasn’t alone.
When I craned my neck a bit, I saw that there were feet hanging over the stairs. It could have been a corpse, I figured, but if it was it was a recent one because it hadn’t been there before.
Yet…they were like no other feet I had seen before and they were very corpse-like: they looked bloated and spongy, threaded with some weird sort of fungus that had turned them a pale yellow color. The first thing I thought of was that skull we had seen at the armory, the one that was sof
t and infested by fungi. These feet looked similar, only being that they were fleshy, it was even worse.
The stairs above creaked.
A trickle of dust drifted down.
I saw the toes move like their owner was flexing them. Then the feet themselves, which had been pressed together, separated…and when they separated I saw strings of that weird growth just like the stuff that had been growing from that skull. When the feet pulled apart, they made a wet tearing sound as fibers of fungi that had webbed them together were torn. It sounded like roots being torn from the ground.
I brought the Sig-Sauer up.
I shifted.
The sound of which seemed very loud in the hollow silence of the building.
The feet began to swing back and forth like those of a kid sitting on a bridge and fishing.
“You awake down there, Slim?” a voice said, only it was gurgling and wet. “You sure got nice boots. I’d sure like those boots.”
“Get your own fucking boots,” I said, a chill passing through me as I realized that this…individual…had been appraising my footwear as I slept. I noticed there was a yellow powdery stain like a thumbprint on the toe of my left combat boot.
“You’re not very friendly,” the voice said.
I said nothing.
There was more creaking up there and the feet stopped swinging. I heard a moist, slopping sound like oatmeal stirred in a bowl and a yellow face peered between the legs over the edge of the steps. Calling it a face was being gracious, believe me. It was yellow and loose, puffy and shivering…like some kind of amebal thing crawling over the skull beneath. I saw one eye that was huge and gummy, the other was gone. As he—because I thought it was a man—leaned over farther, a hole opened up just below the good eye and a trickle of some black juice dripped out.
I scrambled out of there, putting some distance between myself and whatever in the Christ that thing was. And it followed. As I stumbled free of the building, I saw a white and pulpous hand grip a girder and that was enough. I got out in the street and I ran west. As the sun set, the buildings were hung with a dark lace of shadows. Dogs chased rats. Dozens of cars rusted at curbs. Everywhere there was rubble and broken glass. There were skeletons in the cars, behind the windows, sprawled on porches. Hollow-socketed eyes studied me as I fled.