Necrophobia 4 Read online

  I heard the chopper again and knew I had to keep going.

  What happened next was pure luck, absolutely pure luck. You sometimes run across it in combat and, later, when you think about it, it scares the shit out of you because you realize how easily it could have gone wrong. I moved into the doorway of the building my adversary had been waiting in. I didn’t know if there were more fighters waiting in there, but I didn’t have a choice. I had to get off the streets before the KIA team arrived or some guerrillas drew a bead on me.

  “We got shitheads hiding in those ruins,” I heard Mongol say over the Icom. “Deadheads massing beyond. We ain’t got no choice but to go right through.”

  “Roger that,” Doc said.

  Hiding in the gutter had cost me. The KIA boys were on the opposite side of the street and they were going to come right at me once Doc cut the order. And from what they said, zombies were massing on the other side.

  “No bullshit now,” Doc said. “We go right through those motherfuckers. Anybody gets hit, leave ‘em and keep pushing forward. Move!”

  I heard boots running in the street.

  I had to find a place to hide because I was about to get in a shootout with my old friends. I was in the remains of a store of some type, I saw. I ducked behind a counter, trying to get out of harm’s way and I tripped over a man crouched there, waiting for me. He was an insurgent and he stabbed out at me with a knife and he would have had me except that in his excitement to kill, he smashed his hand against the counter and lost his knife. I brought my weapon around and cracked him in the face with it. He fell back, grabbing the counter and trying to bring his boot around to kick me.

  A volley of bullets ripped through him.

  KIA had arrived. I heard one of them charge in and I saw it was Scales. He didn’t see me. Not until it was too late and I had him in my sights.

  “Joined the other side, did you?” he said, smiling, real cool and easy.

  It probably would have won over just about anyone, that smile of his. But I knew better. I knew how Scales operated. I knew how fast he could move and, true to form, he threw himself back and tried to bring his M4 around and I pumped three rounds right into his face. He made a weird screaming sort of sound and crashed into the wall, leaving most of his face smeared there and hit the floor a corpse. I was up and shooting when another guy—I didn’t recognize him—came through the doorway. I dropped him before he made it two feet. He hit the floor, moaning, making a gurgling sound from his ripped-open throat.

  I got out while the getting was good.

  I went through an archway in the back and out a door which I thought must lead into an alley. I was right it did.

  But it also led into the clutches of a dozen zombies bearing right down on me.

  DOG FIGHT

  Two of them were on me before I could even raise my weapon. I bashed one of them in the face with the butt of my M4 and gave the other a good kick that drove him back. I brought up my rifle to fire.

  It jammed.

  I tried to clear it.

  No time.

  The one I had kicked pushed in and I pulled my Beretta 9mm and shot him in the head. I punched and kicked and shot but there were so damn many, I was fighting a losing battle. What I thought was a dozen was quickly becoming four times that many. They pulled at me, pushed at me, grabbed me from behind and from the front. Again and again, I slipped from their clutches only to be faced with a new swarm. I used all my usually tactics—shoving them into each other, using my body as a human battering ram, shooting with my 9mm and slashing with my knife. But they kept coming and when the Beretta clicked on an empty chamber, I knew it was all over with.

  And it was at that moment—as dozens of hands reached for me and moldering faces pressed in—that something went in my head with a dizzying, almost popping sort of sound and I thought I had been shot. But it was nothing physical. It was something bigger. All the questions and confusion, the taunting voices and mysterious faces suddenly just exploded and…I remembered. It came in a frenetic rush: Yonkers and Ricki, Tuck and Jimmy, Paul and Diane, Tuck and Sabelia and Robin and who I was and what I was and how I had been turned into a mindless zombie by Dr. Cripps at the bunker.

  Oh God…oh my God…

  And with the return of my mind, my faculties and my memories, I screamed full out and I was filled with a fighting rage like I’d never, ever experienced before. All I had were some grenades and my knife. Splattered with zombie remains and being pushed up against the alley wall by dozens of them, I just lost it and went hog fucking wild. Crying out, I ran at them with everything I had, bringing my strength and weight and sheer mental intensity to bear. I crashed through them, knocking them aside and underfoot, tripping over them, jumping and crawling and kicking until I was free from the mob. One of them clung to my back and I flipped him into the brick wall with such velocity I heard something crack inside of him. A blonde girl with maggots in her eye sockets seized my arm and I slashed her face to ribbons. A big biker dude still wearing his colors took hold of me and hoisted me into the air and I buried my knife in his throat, sawing frantically until his head dropped off to the side, hanging from a knob of bone. He dropped me and I shoved him right into a hungry mass of the dead.

  Then, I pulled a thermite grenade and let it fly at them as I ran and dove for cover. There was a blinding flash behind me and a wave of heat that singed the hair on the back of my neck. Behind me was a firestorm of burning zombies. Some staggered forward like human torches only to drop from the blazing heat that burned like a welding arc. The flaming thermite not only engulfed them, but it was melting them right down to the bones beneath.

  But there were more.

  Many more.

  Some were only singed. Some had holes burned through them. Some shambled from the conflagration with their hair on fire or flames licking up their clothes. And dozens and dozens more were fighting right through the flaming remains of their brothers and sisters to get at me.

  That’s when I heard the chopper.

  It was coming in fast.

  I saw it coming out of the sky like a hunting wasp.

  Shit.

  I ran towards the end of the alley, then sighted a missing wall and dove through the chasm seconds before the .50-cal on the Kiowa opened up and strafed the alley, slugs blowing chunks of concrete into the air, punching right through brick walls, and blowing zombies into fragments. The chopper passed and right away I heard it circling and coming in again. It would be rockets this time and I knew it.

  Practically out of my mind with fear, feeling much as my enemies on the battlefield must have felt when I called a fire mission down on them, I crawled through the rubble of the building, over a broken wall, and slid down into a flooded cellar. As I hit the standing water, I heard the Hydra 70 rockets hit. WHUMP! WHUMP! WHUMP-WHUMP-WHUMP! The building I was in, or the broken shell of it, shook with each impact, bricks falling and dust raining down, scraps and fragments dropping into the water around me.

  I knew there would be no more zombies out there.

  I moved through the water in the gloom until I found the steps leading up and out. As I reached for them, I must have stepped in a hole and I went under into the black depths, fighting my way back to the surface of the chill water and brushing wet leaves from my face. I dog-paddled over to the stairs, breathing hard from exertion, fear, and the shock of the icy water.

  Drenched, feeling like I weighed three-hundred pounds, I began to pull myself up the steps. I made it maybe four or five of them when I heard something come up out of the water behind me.

  I turned in time to see an absolute monster coming for me.

  It was a nightcrawler.

  It had to be a nightcrawler, one that had mutated into some hulking thing with a face that reminded me of Ghostface from the Scream movies. But if Ghostface was in the middle ground between being scary and comical, this thing was completely in the former category. Like the movie villain, its face was unnaturally long and drawn ou
t like it was made of putty, the eye sockets immense ellipses with bulging yellow eyes, the mouth a cavern of rodentlike teeth jutting from purple-black gums. As it breathed, water ran from its nostrils and trickled from the corners of its mouth.

  It clawed out at me with a scaly hand and I kicked it, driving it back into the water.

  I climbed up the steps and kept moving through the rubble until I was free of it, my heart hammering in my chest. I only had my knife and a few grenades as I squatted there next to a dumpster. I could see a few stray zombies.

  Then something else.

  I saw Doc, Mongol, and Mad Mike. I wasn’t picking up any chatter from them so I assumed they had lost their Icoms or they weren’t working anymore. I was looking out at them from a narrow aperture between two buildings. I crawled closer until I could get a good view of the street and see where they were going.

  They started shooting.

  I heard it before I saw it: Doc and Mongol with their M4s on full auto and Mad Mike’s SAW blazing away, spent cartridges bouncing off the pavement. Then I could see what was going on. They were caught in the pincers between two zombie armies pushing in from either direction. And it only got worse because more zombies came out of the ruins of the buildings to either side of the street.

  They were trapped.

  It looked like a classic military encirclement, only, of course, it was purely accidental. Regardless, it was going to have the same ending and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. Even though I hated what Doc, Mongol, and Mad Mike were and what I had been, I knew it was not their fault anymore than it was mine. They were to be pitied, despite their savagery and genocidal tactics. They were nothing but pawns. Hell, I would have fought with them if I had anything to fight with.

  The way things were, I could only watch them die.

  They fought to the bitter end, let their tombstones record that, but they never had a chance. They threw grenades and blew away dozens of zombies, but the mob pressed in ever closer.

  Doc went down first. A pack of them took hold of him and he screamed as they tore him apart and fed on him.

  Mongol kept firing, dropping the dead very methodically, emptying magazine after magazine. There were so many maggot-eaters out there that they absorbed everything he threw at them. Their bodies piled up, but the others steamrolled right over the top of them in their maniacal lust to feed. By that point, of course, Mongol knew he was going to die so he planned on going out in a blaze of glory. He drew his machetes and brought the fight right to the zombies like some demented, kill-happy samurai. He slashed and hacked and cut. His moves were lethal and impressive as the dead dropped around him, but he was simply outnumbered by a hundred to one and he disappeared in the thrashing sea of the undead with a last cry of rage.

  Mad Mike was the last man standing.

  Even when he was out of shot for the SAW, he used it like a club, casting aside one zombie after the other. And when he lost that, he used his fists. That’s something I’ll always see, a testament to human ferocity and survivability—Mad Mike going under as a wave of them attacked him and still fighting, still knocking them aside and throwing them and lifting them up into the air with his powerful arms and smashing them down on their brethren.

  It was amazing.

  Simply amazing.

  But, eventually, he was inundated and all was silent save for the sound of the wind skirting broken rooftops and the sound of the zombies eating, stuffing themselves in the streets. I had to get away or I’d be next. I looked down the street and there were none down there. I slipped from my hide, turned a corner, and tripped over a corpse in the street. He was a KIA member. The top of his head was blown off. I helped myself to his M4, ammo bag, and everything else I could lay my hands on.

  Then I ran.

  I had to put some distance between myself and the hordes of the dead, then maybe I could figure my bearings. I spent the next thirty minutes picking my way through the wreckage of Baneberry. By then, I was free of the Main Street sector and things began to look familiar. I realized I was in the same part of town we had originally entered from, Tuck and I and the others. It took some careful navigating but I finally found the brick house we had hid out in. It looked real quiet over there, but at least it was still standing. That was something.

  I was hoping against hope my friends were still there.

  I lowered my weapon and walked over there. I saw no signs of life. The door was open, not a good sign, and I went in, looking around. I went from room to room and found nothing. The game room we had camped out in was empty. I remembered that night when Sabelia, Jimmy, and I went out in search of Seppy, Scott, and Sandy. How long ago was that? I thought about Jimmy and had to choke back a tear because he had been such a good friend.

  Then I thought about Zulu. I wondered about her. Who had she been before Cripps initiated her into his killing squad? How about Doc and Scales and Mongol? Who the hell were these people before?

  That was something I’d never, ever know.

  I left the house and sat on the steps. Autumn leaves were blowing up the street and I could feel the chill of winter coming. Just a suggestion of it, but I knew it was there.

  I dug through the stuff I had taken from the dead KIA guy, who I realized now were just part of ARM in the first place. Some MREs, cigarettes, a half-eaten Snickers bar, a deck of cards, and a well-worn photograph of a woman standing beneath a tree in the summertime with her arm around a little boy in a baseball uniform. Jesus. He hung onto that, the last fragment of a life he no longer remembered thanks to Dr. Cripps. My guess was that it was a picture of him and his mother taken on some warm, wonderful green day in July when he was heading off to Little League. Cripps must never have known about the picture or he would have confiscated it. I could just imagine the poor guy with no memories, clutching the photo like some talisman, knowing it was important but not remembering why. Like I said, it was pretty worn and I bet he looked at it a lot.

  I put it back in the bag.

  I smoked one of his cigarettes and looked out into the empty street. No zombies, no insurgents or KIA killers to be found. There was nothing but the shattered corpse of an empty town blown by wind and memory.

  I felt remarkably calm.

  I knew who I was now and there was no longer the odd questions or headaches or sense of confusion. My original aim had been reestablished: I had to get to the Silo and see my son. But before I made the journey, I was going to find Sabelia and Tuck and the others if that was even possible.

  I crushed out my cigarette, knowing I had to start somewhere.

  It was time to go back to the bunker.

  THE BUNKER

  I waited at the perimeter of the razorwire entanglements.

  I had to be careful now.

  I had to remember where the landmines were. One false step…I had come too far and through too much shit to die that foolishly. I had thought for sure as I climbed over the crash barriers and concrete berms that somebody would take a shot at me, but it didn’t happen. All was silent over at the firing ports of the bunker. A flock of blackbirds were picking in the grass over there. Other than that, there was no life.

  When I was with KIA-9, we used to call over our Icoms that we were coming in, give the password, and enter without any fear of being gunned down. I knew there was no way in hell that I hadn’t been seen coming in. If there was anyone behind the firing ports then I had been spotted long ago. I didn’t have my Icom. I think I lost it in my plunge into the flooded cellar, so I was going to have to take my chances.

  I knew the path through the razorwire.

  It was like a maze.

  I picked through it carefully, amongst the bird-picked corpses of zombies and sets of white gleaming bones that were tangled in the wire. When I was almost clear of it, I paused. I crouched down and watched the bunker. Cat and mouse. Was somebody drawing me in for a kill? But why? They had M107 sniper rifles with scopes. They could have easily popped me when I first climbed over the cra
sh barriers or at any moment since.

  I stepped free of the razorwire, waiting for the impact of the round that would toss me into eternal blackness.

  None came.

  The inner perimeter was mined. I had to think now. The mines were laid out in a very precise way and I had reverse that because I was facing it in the other direction. Okay. I think I had it. One step, two, then three. So far, so good. A few more careful steps as sweat boiled from my pores. Another fifteen feet and I was free.

  Still no activity from the firing ports.

  Curious.

  I was still trying to see the barrels of rifles, but there was nothing. As if to show me how safe it was, a blackbird landed in one of the ports and waited there casually a moment or two before flying off. Either it was scared away by someone inside or it had other matters to attend to. It hadn’t looked like it was spooked.

  Fuck it.

  I strolled right over to the nearest gun port. I brought up my rifle and poked it through the slot and capped off a few rounds. Nothing. No scrambling. No return fire. The ports were big enough to squeeze through with my equipment. I tossed my ammo bags in there and worked my way in. There was no one in there. When I stepped out into the corridor, the lights were off which meant the generator was probably down. I went from one firing port room to the next, but they were all empty.

  What the hell was this all about?

  Had the bunker been abandoned? It seemed unlikely, but there was no other reason the power would be out and the firing ports left unmanned. I took the stairway to the next level. This was where most everyone lived and worked and ate.

  But there was no one.

  Rooms were empty. There was no one in the kitchen or cafeteria, supply rooms or armory. The machine shops were empty as was the greenhouse. I checked every inch of it and there was not a soul to be found.

  I went to the lower level.

  Same and same.

  No people. Where had they all gone? Had they evacuated? Had there been some exodus in my absence? What had Cripps done to them? I didn’t know…at least until I reached the iron blast door that Pratt had told me led down to a subterranean passage that had once linked the bunker to Baneberry, but was now flooded.