Necrophobia - 01 Page 19

  “But something got them.”

  The closer we looked we could see that they had been horribly chewed upon. Their throats and bellies were hollowed out. One of them was missing an arm. Some of that would have been the rats, but not all of it. I was trying to put together a scenario in my mind where these men had come after the women and been killed by zombies. But if that was the case…where were the zombies?

  Riley looked tense. “You notice something?” she said, panning her light around. “No weapons. I can’t believe they came in here unarmed. Somebody must have taken them.”

  I hoped it was the women, I dearly hoped so.

  We moved on down the tunnel, our lights bobbing, fingers sweaty on the triggers of our CAR-15s. Side by side, pushing a wall of light before us we moved closer to our destination. Scenarios of what might have happened played through my mind again and again. I hoped we were not going to find something particularly ugly ahead. I didn’t want all our efforts to end in disappointment or disaster. I hoped those women were all well…or as well as they could be locked in a cellar without food for all these days. The possibility of a grim discovery was very real and we both feared it as I think we had right from the beginning.

  Our light found eyes.

  Dozens and dozens of glittering pink-red eyes. Rats. There had to have been three or four dozen of them and they watched us coming on. They had no fear of us. Not immediately. The sight of all of them made my skin crawl. I began entertaining thoughts of them all attacking at once like in a paperback book by James Herbert or one of those guys.

  But if I felt fear of them, Riley did not.

  She was an inner city cop and to her rats were no more alarming than squirrels or horseflies were to a country boy. “Rats!” she said. “Skit! Skit!”

  I don’t know if it was the tone of her voice or her motions, but they took off squeaking at a good pace, running off somewhere in the depths of the network. We saw soon enough why they hadn’t been so willing to leave: more corpses. I had a feeling these were the zombies that got the militia boys. The interesting thing was that they’d all been put down with heavy blows to their skulls. Their heads were split right open and pounded to hamburger. I counted six of them. They had been dead for weeks, I was guessing, but only recently had they stopped moving.

  I had a new and optimistic scenario in my head.

  The militia boys came down here to retrieve “their” women and some zombies followed. There was a battle. The militia lost. The dead fed upon them. The women beat the zombies to death with pipes or clubs. They took the guns with them and retreated to the cellar.

  I was guessing that Riley was thinking the same thing because she grabbed me by the hand and towed me along at a pretty good clip. Either way, I figured she wanted this done with. If those ladies were dying or in rough shape we needed to get to them; if they were dead, we needed closure on this whole thing because we still had to fight our way free of the city.

  “There it is,” she said.

  If this had been a steam tunnel back in the day then what we should have found was a grill or a mesh but what we were looking at was a circular iron hatch rusted just as orange as the trapdoor. Riley approached it carefully and I was right at her side, one ear perked up for sounds of life from the other side and the other ear listening for any unfriendlies behind us. I thought I heard something back there but I couldn’t be sure.

  “Help me,” Riley said.

  We gripped the edge of the hatch and tried to pull it but it wasn’t moving. All we got for our efforts was orange dust on our fingers.

  “There’s a latch on the inside,” she told me. “Somebody must have locked it.”

  Which made perfect sense, I suppose. Why leave it wide open?

  Using the barrel of her CAR-15, Riley tapped on the door. Boom, boom, boom, it echoed through the tunnels like a metallic beating heart. “Hey! In there! It’s me! It’s Riley!” she called out, her mouth very close to the hatch. “I’ve come to get your asses out of there! Hey! Hey!” She pounded again and again and the noise echoed through the tunnels. She kept at it for over five minutes and with each passing second my heart sank. Even if the women were simply too weak to open the hatch, there was no way we could get to them. Just no way. We’d never get the damn thing open and we sure as hell couldn’t shoot through it with 5.56mm.

  “I hate to say it, but—”

  “Listen,” Riley said.

  I listened…and, yes, I could hear something on the other side. I was almost sure it was the whispering of several voices.

  “Hey! In there!” Riley said, pounding on the door. “It’s me Riley! Open up! I got a way out!”

  “Riley?” said a voice through the hatch.

  “Yes!”

  There were voices from the other side and I felt relief sweep through me. As the latch was worked from within, and by the grunting and creaking I heard it was no easy bit, I began to hear other sounds. They were distant but echoing. I thought it was the .50-cal firing nonstop punctuated by the booming of grenades.

  I got on the walkie-talkie. “Hell’s going on?” I said.

  The connection was rough, filled with static. I could barely hear Tuck: “They’re all over the damn place,” he said. “Hundreds…I mean fucking hundreds of ‘em…”

  “Hang tight,” I said. “They can’t get inside the Stryker. Don’t waste ammo.”

  “You take…all the fun out of life,” came the reply.

  Then Diane got on the box: “They’re everywhere in the alley,” she said. “We must…we must have dropped sixty or seventy of them and they’re still coming. Don’t try coming out yet…let me know when you do…they’re fucking everywhere…”

  “Let ‘em be everywhere,” I told her. “Don’t waste ammo.”

  The women were having trouble on the other side and whether that was from their weakened condition or just a real peckerwood of a bolt I did not know. But I did not like the idea of waiting in that tunnel. I just had the worst feeling about it.

  And then:

  “Watch it down there!” I heard Diane say over the walkie-talkie. “They’re tearing that trapdoor off. We’re dropping ‘em but they keep coming.”

  “Just sit still and wait it out,” I told her. “We’ll be okay.”

  If they ran out of ammo, they’d have to go topside on the Stryker to reload the fifty and I didn’t want either of them to attempt something like that. Tuck would know how to do it quickly, but it wasn’t worth the risk. When the Strykers are closed up you could beat yourself bloody against the hatches and they still wouldn’t open. It’s how they were designed.

  But we had our own trouble.

  Diane came over the box and told me they were coming down, but I already heard the tell-tale clanging of the trapdoor. Within minutes and probably less, they would be swarming down here.

  “If they don’t get that fucking hatch open,” I told Riley, “we’re toast.”

  “They’re doing their best!”

  The seconds ticked by. I was tense from my toes to my scalp. I got down in a firing position behind Riley and waited. Sweat ran down my temples. I could hear them coming. At first it was the dragging footsteps of one or two but then it became the sound of an advancing army. I would see them anytime now, I knew.

  Then I did.

  The first few were men. One of them was a militia puke whose fatigues were black and brown with some kind of morbid drainage. The second was a barefoot man in a business suit with some kind of fungus on his face that was eating it away. I clicked the CAR-15 on semi-auto and put both of them down with nice economical headshots. They fell on top of each other twitching. Four more showed, then a pack of a dozen or more behind them. Their mouths were open, teeth gnashing, eyes the lusterless white of the bellies of dead fish.

  I stood up.

  No fancy trick shooting now.

  Full auto rock ‘n’ roll. I fired three-round bursts in the directions of their heads and skulls came apart like rotting pumpkins. T
he dead fell over each other, but they still poured forward, greedy for flesh, driven by that most basic of primal instincts: the need to feed. I must have dropped ten of them when the hatch opened and then Riley was pulling me in while I kept dropping them. Then a tidal wave of the dead surged forward with a sharp, gagging stench of putrescence. They would have buried me alive in their numbers.

  Inside, we swung the hatch closed just as countless bodies hit it from the other side. It swung back. Riley, me, and three or four other women threw everything we had against it while another lady tried to get the bolt through the latch. It was a battle. The door would swing in and then we would push it back. We gave inches and we took them. Dead white hands clawed around the edge of the hatch. We hit it with everything we had and those hands were smashed to paste, fingers severed and the door shut. The bolt was slid in place and not a fraction of a second before they hit it again with such force it shook on its hinges and brick dust fell from the ceiling.

  We were safe.

  For a time.

  I turned and looked at who we’d come to rescue and I saw maybe a dozen women standing there by the light of a lantern. They wore ragged, filthy clothes. Their faces were dirty and bruised, seamed with scratches and cuts, their eyes huge and empty, cheeks hollow.

  Riley said, “Steve, meet the girls.”

  And they swept forward.

  THE BARRICADED

  I hate to say it, but when those poor creatures came at me I pulled back because I was honestly afraid. They did not smile. They did not emote. They came at me like mannequins. They looked barely human. I was looking into faces that were a catalog of human suffering. Their eyes were stark and fixed and I thought for one crazy moment that I had been led into some kind of crazy trap. Those faces…dear God…they took my breath away and made me feel weak in the knees. These were the faces you saw peering through chainlink fences during World War II at places like Auschwitz and Mauthausen. That’s how they looked: like survivors from a death camp.

  Then they took hold of me and Riley as she explained we were there to get them out. They took hold of us and held onto us and would not let go. Many of them were sobbing. It was singularly the most touching and despairing moment of my life.

  ARM.

  The American Resistance Movement.

  They’d done this.

  They’d kept these women like animals.

  They’d caged them and abused them, violated and degraded them. I swore to myself at that moment they would fucking pay for this. That I would not distinguish between the walking dead and those animals who pretended to be human beings. I would slaughter them all. At least the zombies had an excuse.

  That fucking militia had none.

  Rounds of introductions were made. There were so many names and faces it became a blur in my mind. Some of them were as old as forty and others were only twelve or thirteen. Only eleven of them were still alive. The others had died from disease and infection and were buried beneath the dirt floor of the next room. The disgust and anger and horror I felt was limitless and the pity I felt for these poor ladies was boundless. The one woman who really stood out was a tough scrappy Latino named Sabelia Cortez. She had choppy black hair and huge dark eyes. She had a beautiful face that was marred by nicks and contusions and what looked like a knife scar that ran across the bridge of her nose to one cheekbone.

  She walked right up to me when the others had parted. She had not been part of the welcoming committee. She got in so close I thought she was going to hug me, but instead she took my hands in her own and said, “You are a soldier that has come to fight. I will fight with you. I will die by your side.”

  Then she pulled back, but after that she never really did leave my side. For some reason, she connected with me immediately and had adopted me and she was Robin to my Batman or the other way around.

  The zombies continued to beat on the hatch, but it was holding.

  We opened our packs of MREs and fed the girls and gave them water. I had never seen anyone in my life enjoy food as much as those ladies did. At first they chewed and swallowed without tasting, but after a few minutes they slowed down and savored every bite. And I swear by the time they were done—and they ate every scrap we’d brought with us—they all looked better. Something human came back into their faces and their eyes softened.

  One of them, a tall blonde whose face was dark with ground-in dirt, scraped and swollen, came up to me and threw herself on me. I wasn’t sure if she was attacking me or being romantic. When she tried to get her tongue in my mouth I knew it was the latter. The others pulled her away and she broke down crying.

  “Stop it,” Sabelia told her.

  Katherine, a tall regal-looking redhead who seemed to be the leader, said, “That’s Anna. She’s not right since…since what they did to her. They broke her in so many ways. I don’t know if she’ll ever be right again.”

  “She thinks you’ll take care of her and protect her if she…you know,” Sabelia said.

  It was heartbreaking. There was no other word to describe the defilement of Anna and the others. It made me sick to my stomach. I wanted to go to each and every one of them and tell them that it would be okay now, that I would never let them be hurt again…but I couldn’t. I couldn’t promise them anything like that much as I wanted to. I mean, who was I kidding here? We were in a real fix, a real bind. We were stuck smack dab in the center of the mother of all clusterfucks. We couldn’t slip out through the tunnel. And from what I had seen of the school courtyard, there was just no way we’d make it through hundreds of those dead things.

  Katherine filled us in on a few things. As far as she knew the militia pukes were all dead. Most had been slaughtered out in the courtyard (she figured) but she had heard a helicopter so some of them might have been plucked off the roof. A few tried to get in the other day but the zombies got them. They heard them screaming in the tunnel. Katherine, Sabelia, and a few others went out and found the militia men dead and the zombies feeding on them. They broke their heads open with pipes and chair legs. They had their guns now—three bolt-action Rugers and a pair of AK-47s, a couple .45s—but they hadn’t tried to get upstairs. Not yet. That had been next on the agenda for they were in a position by the time we arrived that they simply couldn’t afford to wait anymore, zombies or no zombies.

  “Are the dead up there?” I said. “Are they inside?”

  “We can hear them walking around now and again.”

  I heard Tuck on the walkie-talkie. “We’re okay,” I told him. “We found the women and they’re alive—” I hesitated to say they’re fine because I knew better “—but there’s no way we can get back through the tunnel.”

  “Roger that. What’s your plan?”

  “Not sure yet. What’s your situation?”

  There was silence for a moment. Then a crackle of static. “We got shit-eaters thick as flies. They can’t get at us but I don’t think we can get at you either. I’m open to suggestions.”

  “I’ll get back to you,” I told him.

  I pulled Riley over with Katherine, Sabelia, and a couple others. I told them that the only thing we could do was try to get up there. Go through the school, kill the deadheads, and see if we could get ourselves in some room maybe up on the second floor where we could do some shooting. Maybe thin the herds and then call in the Stryker, evac our asses out the back door.

  I saw no other alternatives.

  We then shared the plan with the others. They were all for it. Anna didn’t really understand, but that was okay. A couple others were out of their heads, too, but we’d just point them in the right direction. First off, it was a matter of which girls would be armed. Sabelia and another woman named Carrie took the AKs. I had the feeling they were both urban girls who’d come up hard in the wrong neighborhoods. Katherine took one of the .45s and a plucky teenager named Ginny took the other. They’d both used guns before. The bolt-action Rugers were given to three others—Susan, Mia, and Dorian. The latter had grown up on a fa
rm and hunted with her brothers, the other two were country girls and rifles were nothing new to them. The problems were that while the .45s had full clips, only one of the Rugers had a full magazine of five rounds. One of them had three and the other only had two. Not good. The AKs had thirty rounds in their mags when they were full, but both only had half that. I instructed the girls to fire only on semi-auto. Headshots.

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s do this.”

  The women made ready and I don’t think I ever saw a more determined squad. I led them up the stairs to the door. We all got real quiet then, listening. We couldn’t hear a thing, but the stink of the dead was heavy.

  I pulled out my Sig-Sauer and blew the lock and faceplate off the door.

  I looked back and Sabelia was grinning. She was ready for a good fight.

  I didn’t think she was going to be disappointed.

  BREAKOUT

  It was calm when we got upstairs. I saw nothing or no one. We found a few cadavers that were nearly stripped to skeletons. They had been militia pukes. There were bulletholes in the walls and doors. We found another AK but it had been used to beat off attackers and was pretty mangled. The good thing was we found three full magazines in an ammo pouch.

  I led the girls down the corridor that Katherine told me led to the entrance hall and the old office wing. The school had closed down about five years before Necrophage and had sat empty all that time. As we walked I could hear pigeons cooing somewhere above us and I saw little piles of rat droppings in corners. What we were facing I knew was pretty much insurmountable but we had little choice. The dead had the numbers and all we had was reasoning. It would have to do.

  I came to the end of the corridor and Riley told everyone not to bunch-up together too much. We might need fighting room. I was in the front with Sabelia and Katherine, Riley was in the back with the other armed women. Those who were too out of it to fight or didn’t have weapons other than pipes or chair legs were in the middle: Anna and Leslie, Kasey and Brittany.