After the End (14 page)

They squatted beside a parked truck. Ari was about to lead them to the door, when a group of people came from around a corner on the opposite side of the street. The first living people outside of their group he'd seen close up since the Korean family yesterday. The urge to connect with other survivors was strong and he wanted to call out to them, but felt in his gut it wasn't safe. Not here. Not now. Their mission was the prime imperative; retrieving the data and returning safely to their own group. Taking the time to explain their agenda to strangers and discuss their plans wasn't practical.

The others seemed to understand this as well. They huddled close together, watching silently as six men and two women, one with a baby in her arms, ran down the street in the same erratic pattern as themselves—like wild animals running from cover to cover. How many others were out there? There couldn't possibly have been enough zombies to take down the majority of the living—not in one thirty-hour period. Impossible to believe only a little over a day had passed since this thing had begun. It seemed like a lifetime ago.

At last the people disappeared around another corner. Ari waited only a few minutes longer then led the way into the laboratory. The reception area was a shambles and, as Deb had said, the door to the area beyond was torn half off its hinges. Ari realized with a jolt that it was broken as if something had burst through it coming
out
, rather than going in. He remembered what Carl had said about recognizing a couple of the human test subjects among the zombies.

With all the personnel devoured, the creatures were probably long gone now.

Probably.

Julie led them down the silent, stifling corridor to the office where Carl's computer was. The hallway was lit by eerie emergency lights that frosted everything in white and turned the red bloodstains on the carpet and walls to black. Julie turned on her flashlight and the beam played over all sorts of things they'd rather have not seen. The farther they moved into the building, the more the sense of oppression grew. Ari hated being this far from an easy exit, not knowing what might loom around the next corner. He held his rifle ready and his knife was at easy access by his side.

"In here." Julie reached for the knob of a door.

"Wait!" Ari stopped her with a hand to her wrist. "Let me open it."

She moved back and let Ari go first. He turned the knob and pushed the door open with his rifle. The room was darker than the hallway, one light serving to illuminate the room in case of power outage. There was only one way in and the room was strewn with body parts.

"Deb, watch the hallway," Ari ordered. He stepped over a lab-coated torso—headless and limbless—and entered the room.

Julie gulped and put a hand to her mouth as she fought to suppress her retching. Ari took her arm and led her around the corpse, glancing back to make sure Derrick was still with them. The boy kept his gaze raised, refusing to look at the mess on the floor that slid beneath his feet. Smart boy.

"Over here," Julie whispered, gesturing to the right with her flashlight. "The cubicle with the fractal art. Carl loves fractals."

All the cubicles made Ari nervous. He felt certain any minute something would pop out from one of them, but forced his paranoia down and concentrated on reaching Carl's office space. It was an eight by eight foot square, but what it lacked in space it made up for in technology. Carl's monitor was huge. Derrick practically wet himself when he saw the set up.

"Sweet!" He dove to his knees and popped the top off the tower. "Can you hold that light down here?" he asked Julie. She shone the beam while he unscrewed the hard drive.

Ari let Derrick do his thing with the computer and stood at the entrance of the cubicle. After a glance at the colorful pictures of fractals decorating Carl's space, Ari scanned the room, trying to figure out how Carl had escaped alive. The zombies would have entered by the same door they did. There was no other way out. Ari noticed a pile of corpse pieces in a back corner of the room and thought he understood. The flesh-eaters had chased most of the personnel there and feasted. Carl must have taken one look at them when they'd entered and dove underneath his desk. Only after they'd passed by him, had he slipped out and escaped, leaving his co-workers to their fate.

Ari didn't fault him for it, nor for blurring facts to make himself feel better about what he'd done. It was hard to be heroic in a situation in which you were weaponless, helpless and terrified. Maybe Carl could've tried to fight the zombies and help his friends, but then he'd be part of that pile in the corner instead of alive and with a plan in his mind that might save the world.

"Almost finished?" Ari asked.

"Working on it," came Derrick's muffled reply, and a moment later, "Got it."

Ari opened Mrs. Scheider's purse, which she'd emptied it of all her contents. The purse was hard-sided so it would protect the drive which had no case. Derrick wrapped the memory storage unit in a clean piece of fabric and laid it in the purse as gently as if it were a newborn.

 "Hey," Deb called softly from the doorway. "I hear something coming. Hurry up."

Ari's stomach dropped. His worst nightmare had featured being interrupted in the middle of their retrieval operation by a zombie attack. He gave Julie the bag to carry and the three of them moved quickly from the room.

Deb's gaze was riveted on the corridor leading toward the back of the building. She gave a terse report. "Footsteps coming from that way. Let's go."

They ran toward the front of the building as the distant sound of footsteps grew louder. Around a corner and through the clerical offices and they'd be back to the reception area. At the corner, Ari motioned the others back and flattened himself against the wall. He peered around the corner to check that the way was clear and his blood turned to ice. Three zombies loitered in by the water cooler like office drones.

He drew back. "Three of them."

"We can't go back. More are coming," Deb whispered.

"We're going to have to kill these three. Are you ready?" He looked into all their terrified eyes, but there was no time to wait for answers. They would have to be ready. "Knives only so we don't alert the ones behind us. Slash at the face and when they're blinded, pull your target around and chop through the back of the neck."

Ari plunged around the corner, blood roaring through his veins like a freight train. He went for the largest of the zombies—a big black man wearing a blue suit and a paisley tie. His dress shirt was stained dark red with blood. One of the original zombies must have taken a lethal bite from his throat before he'd gotten away. Ari wondered how the man had escaped being eaten to crawl off, die and resurrect. Then Ari spared no more thought for his opponent's history as he flew at the man and slashed his blade across the blank eyes.

The zombie bellowed, so maybe they could feel pain or at least surprise, but he didn't respond with the normal human reaction of putting his hands to his face. Instead, the creature immediately reached for Ari, grabbing his shoulders in two big fists with a grip like a vise. Ari struggled to pull free. The revenant opened his mouth and the rancid smell of rotten meat wafted toward Ari. Then the zombie lunged for his face and Ari actually heard the thing's teeth click as it just missed him.

Over the creature's shoulder, he saw Derrick's wild-eyed face. The boy raised his skinning knife and brought it down on the back of the zombie's neck just above his shirt collar. Derrick grunted as he hit the solid bone of the spinal column and tried to slice through it.

The zombie's grip on Ari loosened. Ari jerked away, then spun around to check on the others.

Deb had a man in a coverall pinned to the floor. She'd straddled him and was swearing as she tried to avoid the zombie's clawing hands while cutting his throat. Meanwhile, Julie was backed against a desk, using a chair on casters as a barrier. She rolled it this way and that to keep her opponent at bay. Instead of simply tearing the chair out of her hands, the zombie kept trying to go around the obstacle like a windup toy bumping against a wall.

Ari attacked the zombie from behind, grabbed her and sliced hard across the back of her neck. Blood gushed in a warm fountain that blinded his eyes. He wiped them clear, momentarily panicked that infected blood may have entered him through his tear ducts. The fact Carl didn't believe it worked that way didn't comfort him right now.

In the seconds it took for him to clear his eyes, the zombie woman turned on him and attacked. She clawed at him with press-on nails that broke off as she tried to tear through his shirt. Ari wrestled her to the ground and sawed at her neck. This time the big blade shredded her spinal column, ending the flow of energy through her nervous system. She switched off like a robot and lay on the floor, truly dead at last.

Ari gasped for air as he scrambled to his feet and looked around.

Derrick had finished off his zombie and stood over the body with his chest heaving, too. He met Ari's eyes, his expression grim but triumphant.

"Die, damn you, just fucking die!" Deb yelled as she sawed away at her opponent. She'd taken the harder route of cutting all the way through the neck from the throat. She couldn't quite get through the last bit of bone, though her knife was buried deep in the thing.

The creature hit a hard blow to the side of Deb's head, knocking her off him. He twisted out from under her and went after her, his head lolling on the stalk of a neck like a broken flower. His head was literally falling off, hanging down his back and still he grasped for Deb.

Before Ari or Derrick could help, Julie stepped in. She'd set down the purse with the hard drive in it, and hefted her knife. While the injured zombie flailed around, blindly, mindlessly seeking his adversary, she moved in close and sliced at the last bit of bone and tendon protecting the fragile bundle of nerves. She severed it and the flesh-eater dropped like a stone.

There was no time to rest or recover as the footsteps of more zombies echoed from down the hall. Ari grabbed the precious bag with the data and ran past the desks and through the door to the reception area with Deb, Derrick and Julie right behind him. They raced through reception heading for the outdoors. Ari opened the front door and ushered each of them through; Derrick first, then Julie, but he thrust the purse at Deb. "Take this. Get them back safely."

Deb looked hard into his eyes and nodded, understanding what he was saying and accepting the responsibility. "Good luck." Then she was gone, out the door after the others.

Derrick turned to face the incoming zombies, raising his rifle. He'd mow them down with a few rounds to buy some time for the others. If he aimed at their throats, the bullets might tear right through the critical spot and take some of them out. He felt like a block of ice, like steel, beyond fear, running completely on adrenalin and nerves. He'd fight until the others had a good head start, then slam out that door and lead the zombies in the opposite direction. If he was smart and lucky, he'd be able to get away and double back to the theater.

He listened to the approaching footsteps, wondering how many there were. And then there was no more wondering as his pursuers stormed into the room.

* * * * *

Chapter Nine

Lila paced the lobby. She'd volunteered to take first watch because there was no way she could relax right now, not with Ari and the others out there. At first Joe had been reluctant to let her. What was it about men thinking only they could keep watch? But he'd finally surrendered the position to her and gone in back to take a much needed rest. He'd gotten less sleep than any of them, since he'd been up most of last night.

So, while the others rested, Lila restlessly wandered the lobby of the theater until she felt she knew every square inch of carpet, had memorized every line of the Zombie Prom poster, and even knew the precise location of each crack in the ceiling plaster. She knew the color, make and model of all the vehicles in the street outside, and the number of windows in the building across the street. She'd seen a flicker of movement in one of the upstairs windows and had continued to stare at it for five minutes straight, but the curtain never moved again. How many people were waiting out the storm behind windows like that one? How many survivors throughout the city and beyond?

She didn't even want to think of the larger scale of this thing. Escaping Manhattan was all she could wrap her mind around. Worrying about the rest of the country, especially her parents in Ohio, was too much. And she
really
didn't want to consider why there'd been little military presence in the city. It spoke volumes about how bad things had gotten in the outside world.

Her anxiety climbed. Ari, Deb Julie and Derrick had been gone too long. They weren't ever coming back. They were all dead. She checked her watch and two more minutes had slipped past. The strike team had only been gone about an hour. It was far too soon to start writing them off.

Lila forced herself to count the diamond shapes on the carpet and breathe in and out to the count of twenty. In a little bit, she felt her heart rate slow and her mind clear of some of her fears. She scanned outside again. No sign of death on this quiet, tree-shaded side street. Except for the lack of cars going past it could be a normal day.

And then she saw a darting movement from the corner of her eye. She looked up sharply and caught another glimpse of a moving figure—three. They were far down the street. Lila stared harder. They ran and paused, ran and paused, and she could definitely tell they were living human beings. A few yards closer and she could make out their shapes and the color of their clothing, hunter camouflage which they'd all picked up at the sport shop. It was Deb, Derrick and Julie, but where was Ari? Her stomach did a roller coaster drop.

Lila hurried to the theater to call for help in moving the concession stand away from the door. Carl and Joe moved it, while the others clustered in the lobby. Seconds later, the returning strike force came in the door, breathless from running and red-faced.