9.0 - Sanctum (11 page)

With no clue as to where the scientists might be in the building and no riot of White noise to guide us, Murphy and I settled into the systematic method.  We worked our way down a long hall, looking inside rooms where the Whites preceded us, opening doors when they were closed.  On that first floor of the first building, we found five or six Whites and we sent them to monster Valhalla.  At the end of the corridor, instead of going through an oddly angled passage into the addition next door, we went upstairs and started on the second floor of the first building.  We found more Whites and convinced them to become dead.  The third floor was more of the same.

By the time we were done, we’d killed nearly thirty—slaughtered them in ones, twos, and threes.  It wasn’t defensive, it was straight up extermination.  It wasn’t an adventure.  It was a job, tiring work.

When we felt confident that we’d cleared all the Whites out of the first building, Murphy sat down at a table in what used to be a break area, at the corner of the third floor, with tall windows on two walls, giving us a good view of nearby university buildings and green spaces—brown by then and likely to stay that way until native plants took over.

I walked along a back wall lined with vending machines, swinging the broken doors open, looking for goodies that might have been missed when they’d been ransacked.

“Anything?” Murphy asked.

I shook my head as I shoved aside wrappers and empty cans with the tip of my machete blade.

“Be nice if we had something to eat.”  Murphy put a hand on his lean belly.  “Killing Whites like this sucks.  I know I’m gonna sound like a dick, but its boring.”

“Yeah.”  Having finished my unenthusiastic search of the vending machines, I cross through the upturned tables and chairs, picked one off the floor and sat it at the table across from Murphy.  “Only like five more buildings to go.”

Murphy stared out the window for a minute, watching the campus, and watching Whites wander aimlessly now that the commotion at the drill field had been over for an hour or two.  He chuckled, sat up straight in the chair, and leaned on the table, drilling me with a serious look.

“What?”

“Mister Zane, we need to talk about your quarterly evaluation.”  Murphy busted out in a big laugh.

I laughed too.  We laughed longer than the joke merited, but we needed it.  The day had been tiring and demoralizing.  We’d seen better days.  But we’d seen so many that were worse.

Murphy sat back when his laughter lost its steam.  “You ever think that maybe we should just pack up our shit and head west?”

“To Balmorhea?”

Murphy nodded.  “But I’m afraid when I think about it now.”

“Why?”

Murphy pointed out at the campus.  “Until yesterday, this place was…was…”

“Sanctuary?” I guessed.  “Hope?”

Murphy stared out the window.  “Home for people who thought they were going to live through this.”

He was right about that.  Now nearly all of them were dead, if what we’d seen at the outpost across the street was any indication.  “You’re afraid that maybe Rachel, Dalhover, and the others might not have made it.”

“They probably made it out there,” said Murphy.  “You don’t know my sister when she gets an idea in her head.  She runs people over.”

“I’ll bet.”  I slouched in my chair and let Murphy go at his pace.

He took a bit before he spoke up again.  “Truth is, I’m afraid if we go all the way the hell out to West Texas, we’ll find more of this.”  Murphy pointed out at the campus again.  “One more pot of gold at the end of the rainbow spilled over and full of shit.  Everybody dead.”

“With hope in their hearts,” I said, “thinking they were going to live happily ever after.”

“That’s how every safe place has been so far.”  Murphy seemed sadder than I’d seen him since Mandi died.  “They all turn to shit.”

I didn’t mean to nod, but I did anyway.  The truth of what Murphy was saying overwhelmed any effort I could have put into denying it.

“I think a lot about going out there, but I don’t want to,” said Murphy.  “I think I’d rather not know.  I like it when I can think that they’re all out there sitting on a beach beside the lake, sunning themselves, and thinking about what they’re going to have for dinner.  Like that’s the biggest problem they have to deal with.  I want to think they’re gossiping about the neighbors and being envious because some dude likes some girl and all that shit that used to be important before that shitty virus came and fucked up the whole goddamned world.”

Murphy sat back and stretched a pained smile.  “You’re starting to rub off on me, man, with all your dark-hearted shit.  I spent too much time being afraid they’re all dead and it’s getting too hard to pretend that they aren’t.”

“You want to go out there and see?” I asked, ready to go outside, find a running vehicle, and start the drive.  “I’m in.  Fuck all this shit.  We can do it.  Or get Martin to drop us off.”

“Can’t,” said Murphy.  “It’d be like going to the North Pole when you’re twelve and proving to yourself there’s no Santa even though you already knew there wasn’t one.”

“Because you’d lose hope?”

“Can’t live without hope, man.”  Murphy looked into the distance.  “Can’t do it.”

The second building was built like a cube with two stairwells at opposite corners and a hallway on each floor that traced a square track around the shape of the building.  Inside rooms and outside rooms all opened on the halls on each floor.  Besides that, going through building two was no different that going through building number one: check a room, kill some Whites, move on.  Things got different on the second floor.  It looked like a battle had been fought.  We didn’t find any living Whites, but the halls were littered with corpses of both infected and normal humans.

Weapons lay on the floor amidst the dead.  Murphy knelt down and checked nearly every weapon we saw but found none that had more than a bullet or two.  The bodies had been stripped of extra magazines.  It looked like Fritz’s people had come to the veterinary science building to protect the scientists from the naked horde.  They fought in the halls until they had nothing left to fight with except their fists.

Fists were nothing against the horde. 

I looked up and down the hall at all the dead and reaffirmed another lesson that didn’t stick with most people.  Bullets weren’t much better than fists.

Murphy and I worked our way around the third floor, checking each room, each office, each lab.  We saw the remains of people I thought might be scientists, but it was hard to tell.  And everywhere, Whites were dead, all of them.  There weren’t even any cannibalizing the corpses. 

When we made our circuit around the square hall in the square-shaped building and stopped before going up the stairs.  I asked, “What do you think? You ready for another floor?”

“Seems like we’re getting warmer,” said Murphy, “but this place is starting to creep me out.  I don’t see why we’re not finding any more live Whites.  Makes me think they’re all ganging up somewhere to fuck with us.”

“Maybe the scientists killed them.”

“They’re all smart professors and stuff.  Maybe they figured out how to kill all the Whites in this building and save their asses.”  Murphy shrugged.  “Maybe it pays to be smart.”  Murphy made a point of looking at me.  “Doesn’t seem to have helped you, though.”

I feigned offense.  “Fuck you.”

Murphy swung the stairwell door open, and I jogged up the stairs, avoiding the corpses. 

At the fourth floor, the double doors leading to the hall were each open, held on each side by the dead on the floor.  The walls were scarred from shrapnel and burns.  Grenades had been put to use.  The gore of shredded bodies on the floor attested to the certainty my guess was right.

We stopped on the landing and saw down a hallway that stretched straight down one side of the building.  The slaughter on this floor was worse than the ones below.  We also saw live Whites, seven or eight of them, with faces buried in the bloody remains on the floor.  One of them looked up at us but went right back to feeding.

I leaned close to Murphy and whispered, “Back to work?”

Murphy put a restraining hand on my shoulder.

“What?”

He pointed first at one body, and then a second laying on the floor in the hall that led off to our left. 

“That one’s still bleeding.”  Murphy wagged his finger to emphasize.  “That other one doesn’t look like it’s been dead long.  Look at his mouth.  It’s still drooling.”

I knelt down but stayed inside the stairwell, content for the moment to keep myself somewhat concealed.  “Doesn’t look like a bullet wound.”  I looked up at Murphy for confirmation.

He shook his head. 

“I’ll bet it was an alpha White.  Maybe this one got knifed in a squabble over food.  Better yet, maybe one of them turned serial killer and is walking the halls doing our work for us.”

“See, that’s what I mean,” said Murphy.

“What?”

“Sometimes being smart doesn’t do you any good at all.”

I peeked around the corner and saw no movement. 

Murphy stayed in the stairwell.  “I got a bad feeling about this one.”

I stepped over to the bleeding White out in the hall, thinking that a closer look at the wound would answer some questions, and thinking that I really should be paying more attention to Murphy.  His intuitions in these matters were seldom wrong.  But I was there, by the body, and nothing bad had happened.  I nudged it none too gently with the tip of my machete, puncturing another wound, and draining more blood out of a body that wasn’t all the way dead yet.

I knelt down, and the sound of something whooshing through the air startled me as I saw a dark streak.

Something thunked.

Murphy shouted, “Shit.”

I rolled away as I fell over, not taking time to understand the threat, just trusting Murphy’s reaction.  Trying to get my balance, I scrambled across the hall and tumbled toward the corner. 

In the milliseconds after I pulled myself around the corner, an arrow swished, hit the corner of the wall and ricocheted away just inches from my face.

“What the fuck?” I looked at Murphy.

He was still surprised, but he had dropped to a knee and peeked around the corner.  “Hey!”  he called.  “Stop that.”

I didn’t hear a response, but I did hear the Whites down the hall behind me—the same hall that had been my refuge from the arrows that just flew up the length of the other hall.  It was now a trap.  I jumped to my feet as I raised my machete.

The Whites weren’t running, at least not fast, as they were having trouble finding footing with all the dead and debris on the floor. 

I stepped into the first one’s charge, and dealt a mortal wound that didn’t kill him instantly but would prevent him from ever getting off the floor again.  Thank God for all the crap.  It was keeping the Whites from massing and charging me, that and their inherent greed.  They all wanted to have the first bite of warm flesh.  They all wanted to taste hot blood pumping onto their tongues.  I killed the second one, dead before his knees buckled.

Behind me, Murphy was shouting, but I didn’t give a thought to what he was saying or what he was doing.  I saw more Whites coming down the hall toward me and if I didn’t take them all out, I’d be dead.  Either Murphy would handle his end of the problem or he wouldn’t.

That’s just the way it goes.

I sloughed off the fucked-up emotions that had been bothering me all day, calmed myself, and solved my problems, one at a time, clinically, efficiently, letting the Whites do the work with their zealous momentum and greed.  I only had to make sure one of my blades was in the right place, held steady in a firm hand or swung with just enough force to get the job done.

And then it was. 

All were dead.  Too soon.

I stood in the hall twenty feet down from the stairwell, unaware I’d even worked my way so far.  Immersed in the Zen of heartless slaughter, I lost track of other things. 

It was all I wanted.  All I needed. 

“Hey ninja boy.”

I drew in one last breath of demon peace, felt one more moment of warm blood running over my skin, and turned to look at Murphy, who was out of the stairwell, standing in the hall and grinning like a little kid at a birthday party.

“What the fuck, dude?”

He waved me over and pointed up the other hall.

I worked my way over the bodies.

“You’re not gonna believe this.”

I rounded the corner and looked.  Down at the other end of the hall, two Whites stood naked but armed, one with knives in each hand, the other generously tattooed and carrying a bow.  They looked familiar, but I couldn’t immediately make the connection as to why.

Murphy punched me in the shoulder.  “Grace and Jazz, that’s them, dumbass.”

My mouth fell open.  “Holy shit.”

“Wow,” said Grace.  “I thought you’d be dead.”

Jazz pulled an arrow back in her bow.  “If you don’t stop looking at me that way, Zed, I’m going to put this arrow right through your pervert eyeball.”