A Shrouded World (Book 2): Atlantis (25 page)

I also remember what happened to him. The staples contain some kind of nerve agent to incapacitate the victim. Mike went down after a bit, even with his fancy regenerative capability. I don’t have that nifty ability, so I know that my time is running out. I can’t imagine the toxin takes long to set in, as that would kind of defeat the purpose. It’s time to relocate and regroup—quickly.

The only thing I can think of is to get back to the operations room. There, I will be able to defend a single, narrow entry, providing they don’t come through the ceiling. Besides, I don’t have much time and it’s my best choice—really, my only one. I’ll hold out as long as I can before my body goes numb. Then, well, shit, I just hope that it’s quick and clean.

Scrambling to my feet, I find my 9mm and holster it. Holding my M-4 at the ready, with pieces of fiberboard falling out of my hair, I open the door and race out. There’s no time for checking, no time for stealthy maneuvers. This is one of those “get the fuck out of Dodge” moments.

The two bodies I took down lie nearby at the hallway junction. The dust on the floor is much more disturbed, and it’s through this that I speed down the hall. My back sends a jolt of pain though my body with each step, but that’s also a good sign. Any feeling at this point is desirable.

Nearing the glass doors, I hear a solid thunk and see visible cracks appear on the right hand door pane. More come in rapid succession, sending cracks branching rapidly across its surface. The glass panel suddenly goes opaque with thousands of miniature fractures before it explodes inward. I dive through the pieces of falling glass. I’ve seen what one staple can do, and I definitely don’t want a second helping—especially in the back.

Rolling shoulder-first, I hit the floor amidst the showering and scattered fragments of glass. Feeling the particles scratch and tear through my sleeve, I end up on my back and am instantly reminded that perhaps that wasn’t the best maneuver. Grimacing and ignoring the pain, I quickly roll to the side to get out of the path of inbound staples. Solid thunks against the front desk attest to a well-made decision.

On my stomach, I reverse position so that I’m facing toward the entrance, and bring my M-4 to bear. Multiple staples are embedded into the wooden desk near me, but I didn’t feel any new hits. If the toxin works the same way as it did on Mike, I’ll lose the feeling in my legs first. I remember his grimaces of pain, so I know it isn’t such a clean numbing process. Perhaps the pain I feel in my back is the start of that progression. Oddly, though, I don’t feel the staple itself. Maybe it’s a local anesthetic thing, as I don’t remember Mike complaining much about his shoulder wound. Well, other than when I ripped it out. He said something then. But, I should be feeling…
something
.

Aiming out through the doorway, part of the main hallway is visible and I see several tall figures standing in it. Their hands flick upward in strange motions as they fire.

My turn
.

I line up my red dot on the nearest figure and pull the trigger. The carbine kicks against my shoulder as three rounds streak out of the broken door and down the hall. The room strobes momentarily and I hear fleshy thumps. It sounds more like rocks hitting a pool of Jello than high-speed projectiles hitting flesh and bone. I am, however, rewarded by the sight of the first figure dropping to the tile. Quickly shifting my aim, I take a second under fire and it drops straight down. Before I can fire on a third, they all vanish from my field of view.

I’ve gained a little reprieve. How long that will last is anyone’s guess. I can’t imagine they’ll just give up. After all, they still have eight in the building with an equal number outside. They may be reformulating their plan. There’s a slight chance that they’re not used to being met with firepower and will just retreat, but I highly doubt it. More than likely, they’ll wait for the nerve agent to take effect and just come scoop me up. Provided they know that they’ve hit me.

It’s not the time for me to think about what they might do. Even though I’ve gained a reprieve, I’m still not in a good position. With a last check down the corridor, I rise to a crouch and backpedal into the operations office, closing the door behind. My heart is beating rapidly, my breath coming in short pants. Particles grind like sandpaper against my neck where my collar rubs them in, and I feel fiberboard inside my shirt. Setting my M-4 on the table, ready to bring it up in an instant should they burst in, I move the desk, one edge at a time, and place it against the door.

Thank goodness it opens inward
, I think, taking my carbine and settling into the far corner.

Sitting with my back to the corner, I take all of my mags out of my vest and pockets and stack them on the floor next to me. My 9mm goes in my lap. I’ll fight until I can’t move. My main concern is the ceiling, so I keep my concentration centered on the white tiles overhead.

Now to examine the extent of my injury. So far, I don’t feel any differently, other than my back screaming when I move, breathe, or blink. I unzip and open my vest as much as possible. The rather large staple has embedded itself on both sides of the zipper, so I can’t take it fully off. It’s the same with my shirt. Underneath, I notice the file folders I tucked inside. They are now pinned to my chest.

Damn, what now?

I need the staple out of me, so I tug on the thick mess of folders, surprised that they pull away so easily. I look to the backside and can barely make out the faint edge of the staple ends. Looking to my chest, there are only two faint red marks that will most likely turn into bruises. I’m so deliriously happy that I almost jump up and dance for joy. I can actually feel my shoulders sag as a small part of the tension that I had been holding sails away. I work the staple out of the folders, setting it and them to the side before buttoning my shirt and zipping my vest.

The small amount of sunlight streaming in between the slats covering the windows takes on a decidedly orangish cast. The day is progressing, completely oblivious to what is going on below. The world doesn’t stop rotating to watch events unfold, doesn’t stop to allow limitless time. It has its life, others have their own. For me, it means that I’ll have a new set of problems to deal with in short order. I settle back to rethink my situation.

Plan A didn’t go very well. I only managed to successfully accomplish one out of three stages. If I was a batter, I’d be good to go with that average, but accomplishing one-third of a plan is the same as managing zero. Well, so much for planning. I was never very good at it anyway. I am, however, sticking with the third part of the plan—not getting eaten by night runners. As a matter of fact, I can still accomplish all three parts; I just have to alter the order. Oh, and add a part. Keep the whistlers at bay, not get eaten by night runners, then get out of the building. So, don’t get shot and don’t get eaten. Okay, good to go, then. Plan A is still a viable solution.

While I seem to have time, I think about what just happened. With hindsight being perfect, I should have waited in this room longer. I may have jumped the gun somewhat in my haste to get out. And, I should have continued past the ambush, transitioning to the pipes running the length of the hallway without taking a peek. Stopping to look sparked this entire mess. Move past the entrapment and emerge on a safer side. I could have descended on the other side into one of the farther offices, emerged quietly, and made my way to the stairs. But, hindsight is exactly that. There isn’t an exact formula. There are procedures and processes once choices are made, but those are fluid within the options themselves. Each situation is unique and calls for different actions; this one just didn’t work out.

The first enemies I encountered were different than the others I’ve run across. They seemed like patient night runners, but with a more limited set of sensory abilities. Their skin is a darker shade and I didn’t notice the silvery gleam to their eyes. They are able to tolerate sunlight, having come into the building from the brightly lit streets.

There are similarities, though. They can see in the dark and share a mental connection with each other. And there’s the pack-like mentality. The rage in these creatures is more subdued, replaced with a stalking patience. Could it be that I had encountered night runners who had been bitten by zombies? Could the process of dying and reanimating have altered their genetic makeup? If I get out of here, I’d sure like a chance to examine one of them.

For that matter, there are a couple of whistlers out there that I’d like to take a look at as well. They also have a cunning nature. Look at how they waited until both parties were engaged before entering the scene. Good strategy.

So, they know that one
.

That means they were able to discern that there were two parties involved. They either knew that at the outset, which indicates a particularly keen tracking ability, or they discovered that the zombie runners, night zombies, or what the fuck ever, were lying in wait and were thus able to deduce the two-party scenario from that. At any rate, it shows a high level of intelligence.

They can’t shoot for shit, though. That wrist cannon staple thingy doesn’t seem very accurate and I can’t help but think that it doesn’t have great range. But, how accurate do you have to be when your ammo is equipped with a nerve agent? One hit anywhere and down. Still, it does seem to limit them to close-range combat, so that’s one advantage. I still don’t get the bike thing, though. It just doesn’t make sense.

Well, Jack, you’ve certainly painted yourself into a corner with this one
.

W
e had been traveling
down the center of a main road, skyscrapers lining both sides. I couldn’t help but feel as though we were being watched. Potentially could have been humans—had a feeling it was runners, though. The buildings on our left were safely shaded, and they could easily be at the windows. It was a disconcerting feeling. We needed wheels, with the hope we put as much distance between us and them as possible. The city held answers, that I knew, but where and could I discern them even if by chance I found them? Somewhere off to the east we heard the loud reverberations of motorcycles, for a few heart pounding minutes it seemed they were approaching, thankfully at some point something else caught their attention as they moved away.

“We need to find a ride.” I told Trip.

“Wish I had my van.”

“Yeah me too.” I said referring to his VW hippie van that we’d been riding in before we flipped into this place. The more we walked, the better my ankle began to feel. Strange, I know, but I certainly wasn’t going to complain about my body’s ability to heal thyself. There were drawbacks to my condition, that wasn’t one of them.

“There’s an airport.” Trip pointed to a sign that read “Atlantis Multi-Continental Flightport.”

“Jack’s the pilot, not me,” I told him, but it got me wondering: How hard could it be to fly? Then I remembered being inside the train engine and thinking how even something on a track was beyond my ability to conduct.

“Who’s Jack?”

“You remember the guy we’ve been traveling with for the last couple of days? About yay tall? Good with weapons? Nothing? For fuck’s sake, Trip, you were riding a motorcycle with him for fifty damn miles.”

“Oh, you mean Yack! Yeah I remember him, now that you mention it. Is he coming back with the nachos soon?”

“That would be nice, but I’m going to say no.” The more I thought on the airport, the better it sounded. I wouldn’t be able to take a crash-course in pilot training on the walk out there, but people visiting this fair city would have needed transportation, namely in the form of rental cars. Odds were good that there would be four or five companies vying to rent patrons a vehicle as they came in. According to the sign, it was an eight-mile trek out there. We should be able to beat the runners. One less enemy to be concerned with.

We had some success with finding water in some abandoned non-working cars. Good thing, too, because I think Trip was a little worse off than I’d known. He easily chugged a half-gallon of the stuff.

“You up for a little walking?” I asked. Trip nodded, the only time during the two and a half hours we walked that he didn’t talk incessantly. I knew more about the man and his philosophies on the insane than I had ever wanted to know. For fuck’s sake, at one point he was talking about the nutritional benefits of swallowing pebbles. I’d tuned him out to the best of my ability. Wasn’t necessarily an easy thing to do though, kind of like that bastard mosquito that buzzes around your ear as you try to sleep at night. But only on that night where it’s really important that you get a good rest because you have a big job interview the next morning.

“Fucking finally,” I said once I saw the sign for Bertz Rental Car Agency, next exit. Of course, all good news in this world seemed to be immediately followed up with bad, as if yin and yang had to be played out immediately with no gaps in between. The sound of motorcycles that were unmistakably heading our way, considering we were on a lonely stretch of highway with no other place to go. It was a quarter mile to the exit we needed. The whistlers were still a ways off—the world had gotten much quieter with the lack of civilization, thus when sound was actually made, it traveled a lot further than ever before. Still didn’t mean we could stop and smell the dandelions. I only threw that in because it was exactly what Trip was doing at the moment.

“We need to run, Trip!” He tossed his flower and started booking it, I mean hands pumping and everything. I was amazed enough that he had actually gotten about twenty yards ahead of me before I followed. My ankle began to throb once we hit the down part of the ramp, I cared little; the sound of the approaching motorcycles had gotten much louder, soon enough we would be able to see them crest the nearest rise.

“A little further, buddy,” I told Trip, who had bent over, his hands on his knees.

“Gotta puke; all that water is sloshing in my belly like used bath water.”

“Not yet. Let’s get under the roadway first.” Well, that worked about as well as if I’d told an infant to not shit his diaper just yet. A yellowy gruel-looking substance erupted forth from Trip’s mouth; it was all I could do to jump back as fast as I could to avoid the splash of it. He retched a few more times, his back arching as he did so. Vomiting or not, we had to go. The whistlers were nearly on top of us; I grabbed the stumbling Trip and pulled him a little farther down the ramp to a place we could hide underneath. I made sure we were tucked firmly away from view as we kept moving down. Trip didn’t look good and I wished I could let him rest—but he’d look worse dead, I forced him on. The rental car place was another quarter-mile from the bottom of the ramp and away to the left. That was where we had to go. If the whistlers came down the ramp, we’d have no place to hide; our only defense right now was flight.

“I’m really starting to dislike this place.”

“Dislike? That’s the best you can do?” I was pulling him further along toward a stand of low bushes some hundred yards away. They’d offer some cover if we could get to them. Trip was stumbling as I pulled him along, his legs reluctant to keep moving him forward.

“Just a little further.” The motorcycles were so loud I was having a hard time believing they weren’t trying to run us down. It happened simultaneously: the instant I pulled Trip behind a bush, the whistlers came into view. I dragged him down—well, drag is a strong word; he more or less folded in on himself. He’d pitched over to his side and was looking down the road in the direction we needed to go, whereas I had got into position to spy on the enemy. I got a shiver of fear as I stared upon them, I could not get rid of the sense that they were some sort of humanoid spider and it just freaked me out.

I at least know why we weren’t caught—they weren’t going more than ten miles an hour. They were looking for something, or somebody. Jack was my immediate thought. Or, possibly they were trawling for zombies. Go slow enough and you were sure to attract a crowd of them; since the zombies were on the menu, that made sense.

“Go past the exit, go past the damn exit,” I hissed. They didn’t listen. They stopped at the junction and one of the whistlers extracted himself from his ride. A Russian bear looked more natural on a bicycle than this thing did on its ride. It seemed like they had to stretch and strain their joints in even more unnatural angles to be able to fit astride it. This was somewhat important in that it let me know that they’d come here and adapted to their surroundings: they, like me, were strangers in a strange land. Trip was just a strange stranger, so he might have canceled out his oddness. I’d have to find a philosopher to find out for sure.

The whistler was going right for the damn vomit. My heart sank. There was still steam rising off the mess. It would have to know we were close, real close. And since cover was at a premium, this was one of about four spots that could hide anything bigger than a hamster. There comes a point in your life where you feel like you’ve seen just about everything there possibly is to see, but then you have monsters of epic proportions thrown at you and you have to reevaluate. Once you accept them, you really feel like there is nothing else left to shock you—that is of course until one of the ugly fuckers partially removes its gas mask helmet and leans all the way over at the waist so that it can now stare at its own feet.

Sure, you can wonder at the sheer flexibility of this feat; even in my youth this had not been a strong suit of mine, and I was fine with that. Let the cheerleaders of the world wrap their arms behind their legs and touch their foreheads to their knees. I was impressed then, and I was impressed now. It wasn’t until a tongue the size and length of a garter snake shot out and began licking the asphalt that I thought I was going to be sick. And it wasn’t just any asphalt—it was lapping up Trip’s belly-butter-coated asphalt. Yellow coils of bile dripped off the side of its mouth, which it greedily slurped up; I could hear his ministrations from our hiding spot. If there weren’t six of them, I would have left the relative security of the bush and just began shooting: anything to stop the slurping sounds it made as it ate puke off the roadway.

The damned thing didn’t just take a sampling, either; it spent nearly five minutes sucking up every last savory thread. I wanted to be sick, but just the thought that it would find that and eat it deterred me from doing so, even if thinking about that made me want to puke even more. It was a vicious cycle and I needed to get off that merry-go-round. The rest of the whistlers seemed to be watching their companion rather intently, and why not? He was attempting to guide them to a food source. I was a tick away from stirring a slumbering Trip so we could get out of there when Lapping Larry stood up and began to look around. If I could have embedded myself into the grass, I would have done so. I berated myself for wasting the opportunity to get the hell out of there when we had a chance. I’d been too horrified to think of doing anything else while Larry was enjoying himself. I think maybe the only thing that could gross me out worse would be watching a whistler pleasuring himself. Probably involves an eye socket being pierced with a steel rod.

“Stop, Mike; just stop,” I begged my consciousness to let me off the hook from its spiral of disgusting thoughts. “Maybe its tongue is its sexual organ and its reaching bliss as it eats Trip’s vomit. Ugh,” I groaned. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“Who are you talking to?” Trip asked, finally sitting up.

“Forget it,” I mumbled, happy to have a distraction from my thoughts. Fucking damn shame when Trip becomes the most rational one.

“Who are they?” Trip had stuck his hand all the way through the bush to point. I yanked him back. I’d no sooner got his arm back in than Larry looked right at our location in his scan of the area. He walked over to his bike, got into position, and got it rolling. He was coming down the ramp, his five friends following. When they got to the bottom, they miraculously took a right. I was not going to waste another chance to escape.

“You okay to move?”

“Why wouldn’t I be? Did I break my leg?” Trip started feeling his thighs. “Oh God, I did, didn’t I! I was wondering why I was in so much pain.”

“Trip, you didn’t break your leg. We need to go.” I waited until the whistlers faded into the distance; I didn’t want to be visible in their rear view mirrors and have them turn around. Although how they could see anything with any clarity through their masks was a mystery. I’d had to use those when I was in the Marines, and they’d completely wiped out my peripheral vision, allowing me to only see straight ahead, much like a horse with blinders on.

Trip did all right for most of the walk/trot. When we finally saw the rental cars, he sort of let go, like we’d made it and he didn’t need to go any further.

“Come on man, it’s right there,” I was pointing.

“How about you go get a car and I’ll wait here?”

I didn’t like the idea. People disappeared even while I was looking at them in this world. Trip sat and I thought about joining him. Let him get his five minutes and then we would proceed together; that changed when I heard the rev of engines. The whistlers must have decided we hadn’t gone that way.

“Trip?”

“Get a car and come back, it will be faster.”

“When the fuck did you start making sense?” I asked as I started running. I got to the giant parking lot housing the cars. A ten-foot fence topped with some form of barbed wire enclosed the whole thing. I considered climbing it but decided against it. I could not afford getting stuck, and there had to be a way in. Probably much closer to the small building a few hundred yards up. The further I got from Trip, the more concerned I got that I wouldn’t make it back in time. I grabbed the fence pole at the gate and swung in, heading straight for the blue rental building. A small white van was in front, either in the process of being returned or being rented when the transaction had ended violently, if the bullet holes and broken windows in the building were any indication.

I smacked into the side of the van, not quite stopping myself. The keys were sitting on the driver’s seat. Gotta admit, I was a bit saddened; there were some incredibly cool sports cars in the lot and I only had time to get the Budge-O Van, and yes that was the name. According to the plastic decal, it had a raging Y-3 engine. I really hoped that didn’t mean cylinders. I hopped in, frantically looking for the ignition, which ended up being in the center of the steering wheel. I hoped the stupid thing didn’t have air bags; if they deployed, I’d have a key shoved straight into my forehead.
Most likely wouldn’t hit anything of significance
, I grinned at my thought. The engine turned over; I’d heard more muscle come from a bike’s spokes with a baseball card taped to the fender.

The drive column was marked with an I, S, and T. I put the van in S only because that was where I expected to find the D for drive. The van did not move as I revved the engine, took me about five seconds to figure out I had it in neutral. Shoved the column into I and went forward—I’d like to use the adjectives “shot ahead” or possibly even “rocketed,” but that wasn’t even remotely the case. Lurched? That might be a better descriptor. Crept? Crawled? They all worked. I had the pedal slammed all the way to the floor, and by the time I got to the gate I’m pretty sure I was going about seven whole miles an hour. Horror hit me hard once I could see the whistlers approaching. This gave way to Trip, who was standing with his left thumb extended like he was hitching for a ride, and was pulling up on his pant leg with the other hand in a “come hither” gesture.

“Where ya headed, sailor?” Trip asked, coming up to the passenger window.