Allegiance (41 page)

Outbreak - Day 16

National Microbiology
Laboratory

Winnipeg, Manitoba
Canada

As Cade picked his way
along the blood-slickened layer of rotting corpses, every step he made forward
caused the bodies to shift and slide atop one another. He paused equidistant to
both landings with one boot grinding into a dead woman’s neck and the other
planted firmly on a first turn’s bloated stomach. He glanced over his shoulder
and saw Lopez enter the stairway behind the group. The stocky operator pulled
his NVGs over his eyes and eased the door shut, enclosing them all in the
tomb-like stairwell.

The civilians’ frightened
luminous eyes stared back at Cade, and one by one green beams lanced the air as
Cross, Tice, and Lopez toggled on their lasers. And as Cade stood in the dark,
tamping down his own rising fear, he toggled on his own laser and regarded the
dead Zs underneath his boots.

Rendered in green by the
NVGs, slack masks of death stared up at him like nightmares from a Boris
Karloff flick. Hands frozen in death, skeletal and grotesque, seemed to be
clawing at him from under the mass. And the stench, a thousand times worse now
that the dead had been draining onto the stairs for several minutes, set his
salivary glands off. With acidic fluids assaulting his throat and nose he
swallowed, fighting off the urge to puke. Then a hand clapped his shoulder,
mercifully returning his runaway mind to the task at hand.

Cade switched the M4 to
his right hand and used the wall to steady himself as he leaped to the landing.
He hit the cement like he’d been taught in basic training, letting his knees
compress to absorb the energy of his hundred and eighty pounds, but when his
boots made contact with the accumulated slurry of blood and bile his forward
momentum brought him down to all fours.

With fluids dripping
from his knee pads and the off hand which he had used to arrest his fall slickened
with who knows what, he finally regained his balance and scrambled to his feet.
One more flight,
he told himself wearily as the footfalls from below
grew louder and closer. Keeping his head near to the floor, he craned his neck
around the handrail and eyeballed the next flight down, where he spotted a
large number of zombies clambering towards him.

He turned and used hand
signals to silently warn Cross, who in turn signaled Tice and Lopez of the
impending contact.

With the possibility of
having to scramble over another mound of rotting Zs looking more and more
certain, Cade was determined to drop as many of them as he could as far down
the stairs as possible. He picked the closest one of the Zs and painted its
forehead with the laser. He calmed his breath and sent two 5.56 rounds tumbling
into the monster’s brain, which in turn pitched it heels over head into the
undead mass below. He shifted his aim right and punched out a flesh eater’s
eyes with one impressive double-tap.

The mournful moans and
hissing started a heartbeat later, and then increased in intensity after the
second staccato volley from his M4.

Determined to get
everyone out of the stairwell alive, Cade pushed forward, firing as he went.
Over the constant softened reports of his suppressed carbine, he started to
hear new sounds that let him know the strobe light effect of his muzzle flash,
combined with the darkened claustrophobic confines of the stairwell, had begun
to take a toll on the survivors. There was crying and whimpering and he could
clearly make out more than one voice praying openly and loudly.

Standing three stairs up
and to the right of Cade, Cross had leaned over the railing and was engaging
the rear echelon of the undead throng. White-hot flashes lanced from his MP7 as
he swept its laser overtop of the Zs, raking them right to left with 4.6x30mm
dome shredders.

Cade looked up and right
as he changed magazines and thought:
Good shooting, Agent Cross
. In the
green glow he could also see the three scientists arm in arm and kneeling on
the stairs behind the big-boned Secret Service agent. He shifted his gaze
behind them and noticed that Tice and Lopez had successfully kept the civilians
moving, and they too were nearing the landing.

“Let’s move,” Cade
bellowed as he seated a new magazine, let the bolt fly forward, and worked his
way further downstairs. When he made the final landing it was littered with
spent brass and dead Zs. The door in front of him had a plastic sign embossed
with a big letter M, and protruding below it were a series of bumps that he
presumed spelled out mezzanine in braille.

He fired half a
magazine—fifteen shells—blindly down the stairs into the dead, hoping that a
few found their mark.

He heard Brook’s voice
in his head saying, “
Lift with your knees
,” as he reached down and
hauled a cold corpse from in front of the door and sent it tumbling into the
moaning Zs below. He tried the door handle.
Locked
.

“Back up a few stairs,”
he called out to Cross, who was swapping out for a fresh magazine.

There was no time to
bring Tice forward to scope the door, he reasoned. Nor was there time to pick
the lock. So he improvised. He backed up so that he was at an oblique angle to
the door. He put the laser dot an inch to the right of the brushed metal handle
and then fired a single round where he presumed the locking mechanism engaged
the jamb. He tried the handle.
Still locked
. The single shot had had no
effect. So he took a step back and quickly squeezed off two more shots and was
rewarded with a few slivers of light and a quarter-inch of give to the door
near the bolt.

A guttural moan drew his
attention away from the door to the flesh eaters on the stairs. A rowdy mop of
black hair appeared first, and then a pallid forehead bobbed to and fro as its
eerie green eyes darted about in the dark searching in vain for some sort of
prey.

The laser sliced the air
and the dot wavered between the Zs eyes for a tick before Cade caressed the
trigger and sealed the deal. The thing’s head snapped back from the impact and
green flecks of bone and liquefied brain erupted rearward, peppering the wall
behind it. Cade drained his magazine at more bobbing heads, slammed a new one
in the well and charged a round, all in seemingly the same motion. Then, with a
buffer of fallen Zs slowing down the column, he reared back and delivered a
powerful kick to the door. With the resulting vibration still shivering his
bones, the door flew open and he burst from the dark and into the wide open
mezzanine full of windows and glorious sunshine. He recovered his balance,
flipped his NVGs up, and took in the full scope of the loft built within an
atrium.

Fifty yards to the fore,
quad escalators that he guessed normally brought people up from the ground
level were unmoving. As he watched, two Zs filed between the closely-spaced
rubber handholds and stepped clumsily from the metal treads and onto the cement
mezzanine level terrace. Seeing this, and fearing more were on the way, likely
drawn by the gunfire and his door kicking, Cade looked around for the sky
bridge.

Tice emerged from the
stairway, followed closely by Cross and his charges. As soon as Lopez exited,
he turned and planted his back against the gunshot door, slid down onto his
haunches, and wedged his combat dagger between the door’s bottom and the floor,
effectively locking the creatures inside—he hoped.

As Cade moved forward,
he studied the entrance to the glass sky bridge which branched off to the right
thirty feet from him. There didn’t seem to be a gate or anything else that
would keep them from crossing over to the parking lot side. Whether the other
end was locked or not would remain to be seen.
And if it was locked, and
couldn’t be picked, no problem
, Cade thought. That’s what he’d brought det
cord for.

Behind him, a semicircle
of walking dead, likely drawn by the door banging open and then slamming shut
again, had rounded the corner and flanked the group on the left, catching them
unaware.

One of the civilians, a
mousy-looking redhead who looked to be in her late twenties, was caught in
their clutches before anyone had a chance to react.

Tice brought his rifle
to bear first, but not before he witnessed, simultaneously, the woman’s throat
being torn out and Andy bravely and inexplicably inserting himself into the
melee.

Tice fired a dozen
rounds into the Zs that were feeding on her supine body and then ended her
suffering with one shot to her temple. Blood, ten shades brighter than her
hair, instantly began to pool around her head as the rest of the dead largely
ignored the living and pounced on her still-twitching body.

Andy unleashed a war cry
and delivered a kick to the nearest of the creatures that did nothing but draw
its interest. In seconds he was taken down by a handful of the snarling beasts.
His shrill screams resonated off the glass ceiling above him as Lopez emptied a
full magazine into the pig pile, making sure to walk a few into the would-be
hero’s clean-shaven head.

Cade shook his head in
disbelief. He couldn’t believe, how, in just a handful of seconds he had
witnessed Mister Murphy—of Murphy’s Law fame—throw a ninety-five mile-per-hour
fastball at his chin. “We’re about to be surrounded,” he warned his team. Then
he called for exfil. “Jedi One-One, how copy?”

“Gaines here,” the
general calmly replied.

“I need air support on
station,” Cade said. He let his M4 hang from its sling and drew the Glock 17,
then dropped a number of Zs that had angled between the group and the sky
bridge.

“Roger that. One-Two is
two mikes out.”

Somewhat relieved at the
much needed good news, Cade waved to get Cross’s attention, called him and the
others forward, and then started off at a slow trot towards the sky bridge.
Keeping his head on a swivel, he reestablished comms with Gaines. “We are going
to shoot our way out of here, cross the road via the sky bridge, and somehow
get to the entryway. The road running between the guard shack and the sky
bridge, I believe, is the safest place for the exfil,” said Cade as he dropped
a couple more Zs at the top of the escalator.

“I concur,” stated
Gaines. Then Ari’s voice crackled in Cade’s earpiece. “Anvil Actual. This is
Ari in One-One.
I
will have no problem putting my bird down there. But
with those trees lining the drive there’s no way One-Two can pull it off right
there. Those two rotors give the Osprey a helluva wingspan. How copy?”

“Roger that,” said Cade.
“I’ll take care of the trees. Just give me a couple of mikes to get down there,
then watch our flanks with the mini-gun. I’ll pop purple smoke when the LZ is
prepped.”

“Copy that,” Ari replied
as he wondered what the hell the brash operator had up his sleeve.

Gaines’s voice edged in
over the comms. “Anvil Actual, do you have the HVTs with you?”

“Yes Sir. We have three
high value targets and sixteen others.”

“Sixteen others?” Gaines
said incredulously. “If you can’t clear an LZ big enough for One-Two, then you
must
be prepared to leave them.”

Glancing over his
shoulder, Cade saw that Tice was handling the monsters to his left flank, and
Cross and Lopez were busy ushering the civilians away from the feeding frenzy
and towards the sky bridge.

“I’m not leaving them
behind,” Cade said sharply. He went into a combat crouch and rounded the corner
with the Glock held in a two-handed grip. He stared down the triangular-shaped
glass walkway—except for two Zs about twenty feet in front of him, it was clear
the rest of the way to the elevator on the far end.

Wishing his cardio was a
little better, Cade broke into a sprint, quickly closed the distance, and fired
twice into the back of the first ghoul’s head. He kept moving silently and double
tapped walker number two at the mid-point of the bridge. Taking a knee, he
turned and waited for the rest to form up. As he watched the three operators
hustling the survivors towards him, Lopez suddenly stopped in place, raised his
M4 and began shooting at the undead herd flowing up the nearby escalator. When
all of the survivors reached his position, the woman named Mary broke ranks and
stepped to him in a huff. “How the hell do you think we are
all
going to
get out of here?” she barked. “Megan and Pete are dead back there. Shot up by
your
guys,” she added, palming away some newly formed tears.

“Couldn’t be helped,”
Cade replied quietly. “They got bit and those are the new rules. You worked
with the Omega virus. You should know the score by now.”

Mary harrumphed and
crossed her arms.

A few seconds passed and
Cade pointed skyward at the approaching Osprey. Then the glass above their
heads flexed and began vibrating under the buffeting rotor wash as the craft
cut a lazy circle overhead. “
That,
lady, is how you are getting out of
here,” he stated. “Time to go,” he called to the Delta team. “Our chariots
await.”

Cade called Lopez off,
and when he returned to the group Cade led them to the east end of the sky
bridge and stopped in front of the elevator doors. He punched the down arrow
and nothing happened. He turned towards Cross, arched an eyebrow, and shrugged
his shoulders. “Worth a try,” he said.