Cities of the Dead: Stories From The Zombie Apocalypse (18 page)

A roll-down protective metal screen over the front doors had been exploded and peeled open. Grecich sagged inside: someone had already gotten in. He motioned to his team to enter the building, and Garbo and Quacker made their way quickly to the breach point, paused at the opening, and then disappeared inside.

Grecich turned to King. “Let’s go.”

Inside, Grecich turned on  his night vision goggles and led the team into the lobby of the deserted building: a half-dozen bodies moldered on the floor, dead for maybe a week or two. Nearby, two more bodies with headshots lay in heaps, the corpses desiccated, the flesh flaking off their faces. Whoever had blown their way in here hadn’t made it any further than the lobby. The SEALs cleared the first floor room-by-room and then made their way back to the lobby. Grecich flipped his NVG goggles up and looked at his teammates in the half-light gloom, ignoring the bodies on the floor. He knew they were dead.

"Alright, King and I will head downstairs and clear each floor, you two go up and do the same. There's not going to be any people in here, but there might be an infected, so don't get complacent. Report in every ten minutes with a location update and scoop up anything and everything the higher-ups might think is useful intel," Grecich said. “We don’t want to miss something and have command send another team into this place.”

Going down, Grecich could tell the building had been abandoned, not evacuated. Files, paperwork, everything was still in place. Work stations were at rest, still with work to be done. The labs they checked were undamaged. Nobody had run rampant through them, or looted them. They were just ... empty. Whatever work had been done here had just ended.

"Sandman, I think you better check this," King said.

King was standing by a door in a hallway with rooms for patients. Or cells for subjects. Grecich couldn't know which.

"What is it?"

"There's a person in this room," King said. "Or a something."

Grecich walked over and looked through the window, his NVGs showing him a gaunt man standing in the far corner of the room, facing away from the door.

Grecich flipped up his goggles and toggled on a flashlight. The person in the room reacted to the light and turned and moved toward them, bouncing off the furniture on the way to the door. The infected man pressed his face against the reinforced glass and snarled. King gave Grecich a confused look about the person on the other side of the door. Grecich shrugged, looked around, and found the medical folder in the sleeve next to the door. He pulled it out and read the cover page.

PATIENT: HRISTO GRUEV

And beneath that: Preserve Patient At All Costs

Grecich shined the light in through the window. An emaciated man covered in blood and mucus swayed drunkenly, trying to maintain his balance, his skin taut and deathly gray, flaking in points where it bent around bone. Grecich read the cover page inside the folder and shook his head.

"Holy shit," Grecich said softly.

"What?" King asked.

Grecich laughed. It was a short, bitter laugh of disbelief. "The fucking government actually had the guy who started this whole plague in custody before this all started ...  and it all started anyway."

"That guy?" King said, shining his own flashlight through the window of the door onto Gruev's face. He turned the beam through the room and saw that it had been totally upended, that nobody lived in the room in any normal sense. "Should we put him down?"

Grecich closed the folder and looked through the window. "No. Somebody somewhere probably needs him alive for tests or something. There has to be somebody on this planet working on curing this."

"Yeah, well, this was the place for that," King said. "And there's nobody doing anything here. Or in Europe or Asia, so far as we know."

"Yeah: so far as we know. And we already know nobody higher up really knows anything concrete, which is why we're here in the first place."

"So, what's the call?"

Grecich shrugged. "We take this folder, mark this location, and set up a passive defense line inside the hole in the exterior wall upstairs, marked so nobody gets curious and anybody who does gets dead. Someone up the chain gets to figure this problem out."

Just then there was a bang against the door. The two turned and shined their flashlights through the window and saw Gruev shoving his face against the door, a thin line of blood-tinged mucus dribbling out the right corner of his mouth. Gruev banged into the door again.

King smirked. "I think he wants a piece of us."

Topside, Grecich was glad to be in the sun. Dark didn't frighten or unnerve him. He spent so much of his professional life operating in it that it was always a welcome relief to be able to operate in the light of day. It was, almost, unnatural to be working in broad daylight and out in the open. Grecich updated Motherlode with the information he had gained and was told to move to the extraction point.

"Contact! Thirty-plus zulus on our right, 100 meters and moving toward us," Quacker said.

They all looked at the same time while also moving into new positions, each man finding a defensive location.  Where had the zulus come from? How did they know Grecich and his team were there? He lifted his rifle and looked through the scope, moving it from zombie to zombie, barely pausing to notice the undead faces of the infected. He had long ago learned to turn off any feelings for the targets in his sight, he was just trying to see if he could sense something of the group dynamic, get a feeling for what three-dozen undead might be up to.

"Weapons free, but only shoot if you need to. We're moving to the extraction point, bounding overwatch," Grecich said. "I don't want to get bogged down plunking infecteds and wasting rounds we might need later.

"Quacker, King, move!"

Grecich lifted the rifle back up and looked through the scope again and wondered how zombies had managed to take over the world. And not just any world, but the modern world. Ethiopia, North Korea, anyplace in Central America, sure, zombies could take those places over with ease. But America? Europe? Places with advanced medical systems, omnipresent police forces and first-rate militaries? Afghanistan hadn’t had any zombies when he’d left it.

One of the zombies moved out from the group and turned its attention toward him and Garbo, its head lolling as if it were suddenly thinking while scanning them, figuring out something. Grecich looked through the scope and squeezed the trigger on his M-4. The head of the fortyish man dressed in pajamas spouted blood, his body collapsed in a heap just like any jihadi he'd taken down. Everything dies, even the dead.

"Garbo, let's move!"

They made the dash past Quacker and King and took up positions. Grecich scanned the area around them, waiting for the other two to bound past. He looked back at the pack of zombies following them and noticed they'd changed from a mob to a skirmish line, ragged and barely formed. He lifted his rifle and looked through the sight, panning it up and down the new formation.

"Sandman! We got two fast-movers running at us from two-o'clock," Garbo said loudly.

Grecich turned and took his eye out of the scope, finding the two skip-hopping undead coming at them from an oblique angle from the group. Weird. "Take 'em down, Garbo."

A moment later the two zombies collapsed in cart-wheeling tumbles. Quacker and King zipped by them seconds later. Grecich scanned the area, looking for some sense to the scenario. Sprinting zombies? Zombies that lay in wait? Zombies that moved in a large group that changed formation? There was a pattern in there, somewhere, he was sure of it.

He heard the arrhythmic poofing of a pair silenced M-4s and turned to look: Quacker and King were laying down fire on a small mob of undead, knocking them down one-by-one, each man as calm as if he were spending a day at the range. At least the infected didn't shoot back, Grecich thought as he watched.

A shadow suddenly covered Grecich and he turned quickly to see an undead woman in a restaurant waitress outfit looming over him, bubbly saliva foaming over her lower lip, a clump of her brown hair torn from above her mangled left ear, exposing lacerated flesh that had dried into leather. Grecich swung the butt of his rifle up quickly, cracking the woman's jaw and sending her stumbling back several steps. He knew he should have just busted her jaw to bits and caused her to collapse to the ground in pain, but she recovered quickly, the foam on her lips now filled with blood.

He raised the rifle quickly and put a round through the middle of her forehead. She took a step forward, a last signal from her brain to her body, and fell on her face with a dull thud on the pavement.

"Where'd she come from?" Garbo asked.

"I dunno, but we gotta get out of this place before it turns into zombie Mogadishu," Grecich said. "Let's get going."

They bounded past Quacker and King, and the SEAL team kept at it for twenty minutes to the Chappel Park baseball field. All the while, Grecich was trying to figure out what the pattern with the zombies was, guessing their next move, convinced they weren't just ambling around uncertainly. The sound of aircraft engines began to fill the silence, and Grecich let his eyes roam up to the sky and track the Osprey as it made its way down toward them, the propellers switching the aircraft from fixed-wing to rotor-craft.

"These aren't your daddy's zombies," King said.

They took up position around the pitching mound, each man focused outward. Hundreds of undead were stacking up behind the fences that encapsulated the field, spreading out and lining it on the other side, probing for a way through it.

"They seem almost like they're up to something," King said loudly, the roar of the Osprey’s engines rising as the aircraft settled onto the grass in center field.

Grecich nodded. "Yeah, I get that impression, too."

The loading ramp let down and Grecich motioned for the team to move to extract. He turned to King after watching Garbo and Quacker make it to the aircraft.

“Whatever it is we’re up against, it isn’t just your normal zombie flick zombies. This infection has changed the people with it. I think we’re up against a whole new predator species.”

King looked at him. “Species?”

Grecich nodded and turned for a last look at the mass of undead piling up against the fences all around them.

“They aren’t humans, not anymore,” Grecich said. “They’re preying on us.”

Detroit Motor City

Detroit, Michigan - Day 397

Keyshawn Merriwether watched through the scope of his police-issue Remington M24 sniper rifle as several rage-runners tore into a pair of the living on the street below him, the dead running out from an alley and tackling the living to the ground, biting into them and breaking their arms. He had his finger on the trigger and considered pulling it, maybe putting a round into the skull of a soon-to-be-dead living person, saving them the last moments of horror of being eaten alive. But bullets were hard to come by; fools, not so much. It would only be a matter of time until the walkers showed up to finish eating the couple, leaving behind another pile of humanity that would freeze into a lump until spring.

The zombie apocalypse had come as a complete surprise to Keyshawn. He had never followed the news on television nor read newspapers. He hadn’t lived the kind of life that needed to know what went on in the world outside of his Osborne neighborhood. He had always just assumed that what he saw on television shows or movies reflected accurately on the state of the world in general, and the things he knew from zombie movies had never caused him to think there might someday be zombies.

Of course, the movies had gotten the part about the head shots right, so they had to be based on something real. He wondered if maybe something had gone wrong in some voodoo ritual somewhere, with some priestess casting the wrong hex and instead of creating just one zombie, had made it so everyone could become a zombie. It was either that or something had gone wrong in a laboratory somewhere, and a monkey with some genetic-enhancement-gone-wrong had escaped and started biting people. He figured he would never find out what had caused it all to happen, and he wondered if there was anybody working on trying to fix it. There were still lots of living people in the world; one of them had to be a scientist. Of course, there were two fewer people in the Detroit than there had been just minutes ago, so the odds seemed to be shifting in favor of zombie domination.

“You gonna find us somethin’ to eat or jes sit there and stare out the winda all day?”

He rolled his head backwards and stared at the ceiling for a moment before turning it over his right shoulder. Shacelia was standing in the doorway, arms akimbo, mouth puckered. She wasn’t going to take no shit.

“You ain’t the only one hungry,” Keyshawn said flatly, “but I seem to be the only one who gets food. That bein’ the case, I’ll go when the fuck I’m ready to.”

Shacelia had been Burdo’s girlfriend, but Burdo had gone out to pick through the Wal-Mart Supercenter in the Fairlane North Shopping Center five months ago and never returned. Two months later she had turned into his girlfriend, and since then she had gone from adoring him as her savior to hectoring him over their situation and his duty to keep them fed.