Necrophobia - 02 Read online

  As I made to enter, Sonny Boy came over the Icom with inspirational messages as conceived by a disturbed brain. He was blessing the souls of his warriors, proclaiming us to be things wise and wonderful, bright and beautiful, and that the survivalists were now going to learn to fear the Lord. That being the beginning of wisdom and all that kind and clever shit.

  It was black inside and especially after coming in from the daylight. I pulled down my NODs and I could see a long hallway before me in the green field. It was empty. I was trying to orient myself as to where that shooter might have been. I moved slowly forward, waiting for motion and especially another grenade. In the close confines of the hallway, it would be devastating and I knew it.

  I stopped.

  For a second there I thought I heard whispering voices.

  “Anything?” Peel said over the com, still waiting out on the fire escape with Bobo. Brave boys, those two.

  “Why don’t you come in and see?” I said. “Or stay out there while a sniper draws a bead on you.”

  They came in. By then, I was already moving toward the end of the hallway. There were two doors. I went through both and found nothing. One was piled with junk and the other was a little one-room apartment with a metal-framed bed and not much else. Empty, too. I jogged down to the end of the hall. I thought I heard that whispering again when I stopped. The hallway split. I figured our shooter had been in one of the rooms on the left wing. Bobo and Peel caught up with me.

  “We’re not alone up here,” I whispered to them. “I heard somebody talking. I’m going to the left. You guys check out the right.”

  “And who put you in charge?” Peel said.

  “Then come with me and I can watch you die,” I told him.

  He went off to the right with Bobo.

  Good. I would rather face what I had to face alone. I didn’t like the idea of those morons behind me with loaded guns.

  Outside, I could hear Sonny Boy preaching on the loudspeaker that he had rigged to the Desert Warrior. He was an absolute loon.

  I got about half way down the corridor when I found the shooter. Or should I say, parts of him. The chain gun had pasted him, blown him into pieces…parts of him were scattered out the door and into the hallway. I stepped over a hand and part of a skull and peered in the room. I slid my NODS back up onto my CVC helmet. It was broad daylight in the room. The short burst from the chain gun had torn apart the room and the shooter had literally exploded. His gore painted the walls and dripped from the ceiling.

  Sonny Boy’s voice was echoing through the streets, only adding to the surreal/demented nature of the entire episode: “THEY THAT HAVE TURNED FROM THE PATH OF RIGHTEOUSNESS WILL NOT BE ALLOWED TO CONFESS OF THEIR SINS AND WITHOUT CONFESSION HOW CAN THERE BE ABSOLUTION, MY BROTHER? I ASK YOU: HOW CAN THERE BE ABSOLUTION?” When he didn’t get an answer, he cried out: “COME UNTO ME, MY BROTHERS! FOR I AM HERE NOW! I AM IN THE STREETS! BEHOLD, I STAND AT THE DOOR AND KNOCK! WOULDST THOU RECEIVE ME? I AM A JEALOUS GOD; SURELY! AND A VENGEFUL ONE! BUT NOT UNFORGIVING!”

  It was hard to tell whether that crazy bastard was talking about himself or God above, and maybe there was no longer any distinction in his mind.

  Panacek,” I said over the Icom. “That shooter is waxed, but I think we got others up here.”

  Whether he heard me or not, I didn’t know because downstairs I heard rifles open up and men shouting. It was hard to say whether they found more shooters or zombies got at them. They weren’t saying.

  “Something’s going on down there,” Peel said over the com in a shaky voice.

  “No shit?” I said.

  “We should go down there.”

  “Go ahead. I’m clearing this corridor.”

  Slipping my NODs back over my eyes, I went back down the corridor and I heard something. Not the whispering, but footsteps. I came around another bend and there was a set of stairs leading to the third floor.

  A zombie came walking down.

  A naked guy whose chest was punctured with bullet holes. It wasn’t slowing him down much. He had something in his hand, some kind of club. It took me a moment to realize it was a human bone, a femur that had been cleaned of meat. He came down the stairs, brandishing it.

  “Got one over here,” I said into the mic.

  I didn’t screw around.

  When the dead guy was maybe six or seven steps from the bottom, I opened up. No fancy shooting; I drilled him with a six-round burst that split him right open, his intestines spilling out along with a copious amount of blood and body fluid. One of my rounds shattered his jaw and the other punched through his cheekbone and out the top of his head. He was done for, but by sheer will or determination he made it two more steps before he fell over face-first at my feet. His skull came apart with the impact.

  I kicked some brain off the toe of my boot and moved toward the next room, scanning the partially-open doorway as I did so. This was called the Fatal Funnel in Army slang. And although maybe it sounded like one of those books in A Series of Unfortunate Events that my son compulsively read, in house-to-house fighting, coming through the doorway is where the majority of troopers died because it was a perfect killzone. So I approached it carefully, my heart fluttering in my chest.

  I got close to it, still hearing gunfire downstairs and quite a bit of it out in the street. As I made to get into position to kick it open, it opened by itself and a woman stepped out. Her face was white, her mouth like a vibrant blossom of blood from what she had been feeding on which I saw on the floor just behind her…the body of a child with most of his face eaten away.

  I fired at her, point blank, blasting her head into strings of gore. She tumbled out into the hallway. I slid back my NODs, because there was light coming in through the window.

  The child began to tremble.

  It began to stir.

  It was waking up. As horrible as it was, I had to wonder, What happens when one of them wakes up and another is feeding on it? Is there a zombie fight? Do they go at it like a couple wild starving dogs? Or do they just shove away the eater and go on their merry way?

  The boy woke up. He sat up and put his hungry eyes upon me. His face looked like an illustration from an anatomy manual, chewed down to red muscle. He licked where his lips might have been and gnashed his teeth. It did not escape me that he was around the age of Paul. And I had a real panic-stricken, sweaty moment when I noticed that he wore the exact same red-soled basketball shoes as my son.

  But it wasn’t Paul.

  There was a tattoo on his arm. Gang-related, I figured. This had been a tough street kid. No matter. I put a single round through his head and put him back to sleep.

  In a situation like that, you do not hesitate. You do not let memories or emotions cloud your judgment or distract you and I had done both. When I turned to step out of the room, there was a zombie standing right there reaching for me. No time to shoot. I smashed the butt of my TR-15 into his face, driving him back. Then I kicked him in the hip, slamming him into the opposite wall. He made a grunting sound and went down.

  Two more.

  A man and a woman. Looked like they were a young couple before they died and woke back up. The man was Hispanic with a pencil-thin mustache and the same tattoo on his forearm that the boy had. The woman wore a blood-encrusted basketball jersey and a low-slung pair of jeans that showed me part of her thatch. I opened up and killed both of them.

  Then something seized my ankle.

  The zombie I had kicked.

  He had my ankle and his mouth was moving in to bite. I shot him in the back, not daring to go for his head for fear of shooting myself. It stopped his forward progress, but he wasn’t letting go. I tried to kick him loose and somewhere during the process, I lost my balance. I fell over and he wasted no time. Before I could get up, he was on top of me, his hands going for my face, his mouth wide open and spilling drool that was rancid-smelling.

  Again, no time.

  Gripping my rifle like a pugil stick, I jammed
it into his mouth. It kept his teeth away from me as they tried to bite into it, but his hands found my throat and began to squeeze, shutting off my air. It was a Mexican standoff. His teeth weren’t getting at me and I wasn’t getting free. I knew that in the end, he would win because I would tire out but he could keep on fighting and fighting like some mindless worker ant. He increased the pressure and I was gasping. I relaxed my pressure on the rifle, let him get his mouth in closer, then I shoved with everything I had and threw him off me.

  I crawled away into the doorway with the dead boy in it.

  When my nemesis came again, I drilled him in the head.

  Then two more zombies were coming. I was just glad I was not still pinned on the floor. I pulled the pin from a grenade and let it fly at them as I dove into the room. I heard the grenade sizzle. BOOM! It was like thunder in the confines of the corridor. I jumped back out there and pieces of the zombies were everywhere. Some of them were still moving I saw through the smoky haze. One of them, its legs blown to jelly, was pulling itself forward like some kind of human slug, leaving a trail of slime behind it.

  I shot him…or her…whatever it had been.

  Through it all, I could hear shooting coming down from the other end of the corridor, which must have been Bobo and Peel. I could hear them shouting. But I had my own problems. There was a lot of shooting in the streets now. I could hear the machine gun on the Bradley barking, the chain gun firing. Lots of explosions and men crying out. Sonny Boy was on the com demanding a SITREP, a Situation Report, from Panacek and getting nothing.

  Things were getting interesting.

  My plan for escape revolved around the BUs getting their asses handed to them by the living dead and the survivalists/militias. With dying, destruction, and confusion on all fronts, I figured I could slip away and just be counted as one of the dead and particularly if Brightwater’s Brigade was in full retreat.

  Over the com, crazy-ass Sonny was shouting: “THEY HAVE MOUTHS, BUT THEY SPEAK NOT! GLORY TO GOD IN THE HIGHEST!”

  I decided to go see what Peel and Bobo had stepped in when I heard someone running. I figured it was a shooter. I dropped down to one knee and waited for it. I slipped my NODs on and waited in the dark amongst the zombie remains.

  I heard those footsteps getting closer.

  I heard Panacek on the Icom ordering survivors to call in.

  But I never connected the two.

  When I saw a form come running around the corner up ahead with a rifle in its hands, I instinctively opened up. The form screamed as a barrage of rounds punched into it. It went down. I ran down there. I clicked on the mounted SureFire flashlight on my TR-15. Pancek was laying there. I had just killed him. Maybe if he’d have called out his position over the com, it wouldn’t have happened. Maybe I was too trigger happy. Regardless, he made a mistake and so did I and this was how it tended to work in friendly fire incidents.

  Sorry, Panacek.

  I decided I wouldn’t call this in to Sonny Boy. He could live without this particular SITREP.

  I’m not going to pretend I was holding back the tears. I saw Panacek and all the others as obstacles between me and my people, and I didn’t care honestly if I had to kill them or watch them die. I just wanted them out of my goddamn way.

  Seeing no more action, I started back down the corridor toward Bobo and Peel. At the far end, I could see the muzzle flashes of firing and the reports were coming hot and heavy. I moved down there slowly, not sure what the hell I was getting into. As I moved into the right wing, I started to see bodies. Most of them had their heads blasted apart, but a couple were just killed with chest shots. Militiamen. Probably the ones I heard whispering. Bobo and Peel found ‘em and made contact and were still making it by the sound of things.

  “IT’S ME!” I called out so they didn’t waste me. “IT’S NILES!”

  “Get your ass down here!” I heard Peel call out.

  When I got down there, I saw half a dozen figures doing the slow zombie shuffle at him. But I wasn’t worried about that. What caught my attention was Bobo. Two zombies had him and they were tearing at him. They were stumbling around in front of an open elevator shaft. Bobo was bloody and I knew they had already infected him with bites.

  I had no choice.

  I opened up, my rounds tearing into the zombies. The three of them went careening down the elevator shaft. I heard a wet splat echo up from far below.

  I turned, bullets ripping into the walls around me. Going on pure reflexive action, I hit the floor and covered my head. It was Peel. He was out of his head with panic as the zombies closed in on him. He was expending ammo like crazy, emptying his weapon and splashing the woodwork with zombie gore. I flipped my NODs away from my eyes and clicked on the SureFire flashlight on my TR-15 when I dared raise my head.

  Peel was screaming.

  There were dead zombies all around him, but one of them—a woman lacking a left arm and with so many bullet holes in her torso that I could almost see through her—was on him as he slashed at her with his knife.

  “NILES! NILES! NILES!” he screeched. “HELP ME! HELP ME! HELP ME!”

  But it was too late and I saw that.

  The zombie bitch was cheating me of my opportunity to get some payback from the guy who liked to bounce water bottles off my head. But that, of course, was the farthest thing from my mind. I went over there and planted a kick to the side of her head that flipped her off him and when she turned her snarling face at me, I put my last three rounds right in her skull.

  “Oh Jesus, oh God,” Peel was muttering in a wounded voice. “She got me…oh that fucking bitch bit me…”

  I ejected the magazine from my carbine and inserted another.

  I knew what had to happen now and so did Peel. He fumbled in his chest rack, pulled out another mag for his TR-15, and slapped it in place. Then he pointed the barrel at me. His face was sweaty and spattered with blood, I saw in the beam of my light. “I know what you’re thinking, Niles…but no sir, you ain’t gonna do it. No fucking way.”

  “Take it easy, Peel. We have to get you out of here.”

  “I been bit.”

  “Sure.”

  “You know what happens now.”

  I nodded. “I can end it for you, man, before…before you get like them.”

  “Get the fuck away from me! I’ll kill you! I swear I’ll fucking kill you!” He was panting and sobbing now, tears rolling down his dark face. “Get the fuck away from me!”

  “Peel…be reasonable…”

  “GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM MEEEE!”

  He capped a couple rounds into the ceiling over my head. He was out of it, confused with fear and anxiety and the knowledge of what was coursing through his veins even then.

  “Okay, man,” I said. “It’s cool.”

  I backed away from him, keeping my weapon low and carefully stepping over the zombie remains. I backed away and when I was a good distance from him, I clicked off my light and slid my NODs back on. There was nothing I could do for him, so I had to do for myself. I ran back down the corridor to the far end where Panacek’s corpse was. I stepped over it, went around the bend, and found the stairs leading to the first floor.

  The stairwell was like a black mouth opening before me.

  Looking through my NODs, it was only slightly less intimidating.

  I didn’t know what was going to be down there, but I decided it was time to find out. I went down a few steps when I heard a gunshot. It was Peel and he had done the right thing, I guessed.

  THE FEASTING DEAD

  At the bottom of the stairs, I found the corpse of a woman.

  It was not moving.

  I sighed. My nerves were wrecked and my hands were shaking on my TR-15. I kept telling myself that this, all of this, was the shit I needed to wade through to get back to my friends and my son. There was no hell on earth that could turn me back from my goal. I would reach it. I would be victorious in the end. These are the things I kept telling myself and though it ma
y sound ridiculous, I’m almost certain that it was this frame of mind combined with my own stubbornness that kept me alive.

  My plan at that point was simple: I was going to get out of that building.

  I didn’t care what it took.

  Outside, things were really heating up. I could hear the Bradley much farther down the street opening up with its chain gun and machine gun. Men were shouting both near and far. I could hear the distant concussions of grenades and the popping of rifles. Sonny Boy had ten of his Biocon Units out. They had each taken a street with an armored vehicle for direct support. And it sounded like street by street, they were all engaged in fighting for their lives.

  I looked down at the woman.

  There was one neat, almost surgical bullet hole in her forehead. She lay there, naked and spread-eagled, a petite sort of woman like my wife had been. She looked nothing like her, but there was a similarity in size and general body shape that made something clench in my chest.

  “Oh, Ricki,” I heard my voice whisper. “How did it all fucking come to this?”

  I went over to the fire door.

  Through my NODs, I could see some dirty smears on it that looked like blood. I edged my way up to it. There was a little square of window set into it and I scanned the hallway on the other side. I saw a bank of elevators with some graffiti painted on them. Gang shit, it looked like. I saw nothing else out there, except that there was light to see by.

  I heard something behind me.

  A trickle of fear in my guts, I turned but the dead woman was still dead.

  I knew she was incapable of movement, but I could have sworn that she had moved. It was my imagination. It was working overtime. I had to keep it in check.