Dark Days (Apocalypse Z) (24 page)

“Goddamn it! I can’t see that bitch!” Basilio peered through the window, trying to make out his prey. “Where the hell’d she go?” he snapped, his mind racing. He was furious that his careful plan was falling apart.

They hadn’t heard any shots fired on the upper floors for a few minutes. Someone must’ve finally brought order to the chaos and calmed nervous trigger fingers. You didn’t have to be a genius to realize that it was just a matter of time before guards came down to take a look, and then they’d be trapped. The light above the door turned green, accompanied by a long beep. Basilio grabbed one of the hazmat suits hanging beside the door and threw one to Eric.

“Here, put this on and help me fasten mine. Let’s go after her.”

“Do we really need these?” Eric eyed them suspiciously. “What the hell’s in there?”

“Flu vaccines and shit like that,” ventured Basilio, as he stuck his legs into his suit. “This is where they make drugs and hazardous chemicals. Acids and shit like that.”

“That little hottie went in without one and she didn’t keel over,” challenged Eric, still not convinced.

“Suit yourself,” Basilio shrugged. “But if your dick falls off, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

That finally convinced the Belgian. He sighed and picked up the suit. Not saying another word, the gunmen struggled into the bulky suits. The narrow visors of their headgear reduced the field of vision and muffled sounds. The suits had a breast pocket for battery-operated walkie-talkies, but there weren’t any in sight. Basilio gave an impatient wave. They couldn’t waste any more time looking for them.

Once inside the airlock, he hit the red button on the wall. In seconds, the disinfectant enveloped them in a dense fog. Eric nervously fiddled with his beretta; Basilio kicked himself for not bringing more weapons.

When the door opened, the two gunmen walked in back to back. The room was deserted. A long table covered with beakers and microscopes stretched from one end of the room to the other. In one corner, a flickering monitor gave off a soft light. At the far end, a centrifuge was running with low hum. There was no sign of the girl.

With a nod, Basilio told Eric to check out one corner of the laboratory, while he made his way to the other. His gut told him the girl was still there.

Warning voices in his head that had saved his life more than once were shouting themselves hoarse that something wasn’t right in that lab.

37

MADRID

In groups of three or four, we filtered through the armored door into the building’s dark interior. The beam from our flashlights danced nervously in every direction.

“We’re an elite unit, so why the hell don’t we have night vision goggles?” Pauli grumbled, as she peered into the darkness. “We’re blinder than moles in a tunnel.”

“Pipe down and keep your eyes open,” Marcelo snapped. “Drill any asshole you see full of lead.”

Everyone was alert, watching for the slightest movement of Undead lurking in the shadows. Someone tripped over a metal trash can and sent it rolling to the other end of the room. It careened off a filing cabinet with a clang that echoed all the way to the top floor of that God-forsaken building. Tank let out a furious hiss and lunged at the poor jerk with the speed of a cobra.
Glad I’m not in that guy’s shoes
, I thought. My gut told me Tank had just chosen the next “volunteer” to be point man.

The strong, musty smell of rotting garbage was making me light-headed. To take my mind off it, I examined the rooms we walked past. Most had been turned into offices. A thick layer of dust covered the empty desks, dark computers, and piles of paper.

One of the offices was particularly disturbing. Its desk, chair, and filing cabinet were piled high with paper birds, too many to count, maybe three or four thousand, all colors and sizes. At first I was amused at the thought of some government official, sitting idly at his desk, folding paper birds all day. Then a chill went down my spine. That was the work of an obsessed maniac, not a bored bureaucrat passing the time. I could almost picture the guy, hunched over his desk in the dark, folding sheet after sheet into birds, his mind sinking deeper and deeper into a dark hole.

With a shiver I backed out of that room and looked around for the beam of Prit’s flashlight, but I couldn’t see a thing. My stomach clenched when I realized I’d wandered away from the group. I was all alone.

I traced my steps back into the hallway, as I tried to get a grip on the panic rising from the pit of my stomach. I’d come from the right, but that hallway branched off in two directions. My sense of direction had never been very good. I confess, I’d let Prit and the legionnaires choose a route through the building while I admired the view.

Cursing under my breath, I stood in the intersection of the two hallways. I thought I heard a faint noise coming from the hallway to my right; it sounded like whispered commands. I checked my Glock, then headed for those voices.

Along the way, I’d stepped over piles of empty army rations. There’d been a lot of them back at the armored door, but the number tapered off the farther I headed into the building.

Turning a corner I stumbled upon the first body—a rail-thin guy, dressed in military trousers and a black T-shirt bearing his unit’s insignia: a fist clutching a sheaf of lightning bolts with the words
FIERI POTEST
written below it. Bracing myself, I bent down to check out the body. The guy’d been dead for months, judging from how decomposed his body was. In his right hand, he clutched a crumpled paper cup. I couldn’t make out what was in his left. I took a deep breath, trying not to throw up, and wrenched the object out of his desiccated hand. It was a picture of two kids, about five or six years old, smiling into the camera, their hair blowing in the wind on a sunny day at the beach.

I looked up from the photograph and studied that decayed corpse again. There were no bullet wounds or visible injuries, although I
could’ve missed them in my hasty examination. I was sure of one thing: That man’s last thoughts weren’t about a dark hallway. In his mind he’d been running along a beach on a bright summer day.

Clutching the photo, I could almost smell the ocean and hear the seagulls. On an impulse, I stuck it in my pocket and carefully stepped over him, trying not to disturb his dreams.

Twenty feet away, I found two more bodies sitting at a table. One guy had on a T-shirt with the same insignia and was also clutching a paper cup. The other guy was wearing a colonel’s dress uniform. On his chest gleamed three medals, like ancient jewels looted from a pharaoh’s tomb. In his right hand, he held a service pistol, the muzzle stained with the blood that had splattered when he blew his brains out.

Voices in the distance drew me out of my stupor. I backed away from that macabre scene and followed lights reflecting off the ducts in the building’s massive ventilation system. With a sigh of relief, I realized I’d only taken one wrong turn. I was walking parallel to the group, but on the opposite side of the duct. All I had to do was follow that wall and turn right where it dead-ended and I’d run into my group.

Obsessed with that thought, I started to walk faster. Wandering around alone in the dark wasn’t my idea of fun. Feeling abandoned in a building full of corpses was a thousand times worse, like walking through a haunted house.

My imagination started to play tricks on me. A couple of times I almost shot at my own shadow reflected on the walls. Then I heard whispers or shuffling footsteps following me. In my fevered mind, I saw the colonel stand up and come after me, his medals clinking softly as he stretched out his fleshless hands to grab my neck and drag me back to that room and force me to stay there forever.

Panic washed over me. I wasn’t walking anymore—I was running. Up till then, I’d controlled my fear, as a matter of pride. I didn’t want to look like a fool in front of the whole group. (
What an asshole. He got lost the minute we entered the building. He’s so clueless he can’t take ten steps without screwing up. He was shaking in fear when we found him.
) But by then, I didn’t care if I looked like a coward. I was calling Pritchenko, Tank, Broto, and every other name I could remember. I didn’t want to be alone in that darkness that smelled of despair, fear, and death.

If I’d been paying attention, I could’ve avoided the body, but I was in a daze and I ran right over him. My left boot sank into something soft with a faint
choooofff
. There are no words to describe the nauseating smell that burned my nose. I got the wind knocked out of me when I fell on my side. My flashlight flew out of my hands, slid five feet, then came to rest upside down next to some clothes piled on the floor.

For a few seconds I lay there, trying to catch my breath. Finally, I got up on all fours and dragged myself over to the flashlight, which cast a faint, ghostly glow. I grabbed it and shook it, muttering a prayer to all the gods that it wasn’t broken.

To my relief, the beam glowed bright and steady. I shined it on the body I’d stepped on. It was the corpse of a woman in civilian clothes, bloated by gasses. My left boot had punctured her abdomen allowing all the fluids to drain. The body looked like a grotesque, inflatable doll. Disgusted, I looked away. When I passed the beam of light around the rest of the room, the horrified scream I’d held in flew out of my throat.

38

TENERIFE

Lucia couldn’t see a thing. The chemicals had irritated her unprotected eyes so badly she could barely open them.
What if my corneas are burned? As if I didn’t have enough to worry about.

The first thing she noticed was a faint smell of ozone and the hum of the air conditioner. She felt her way along a wall until she came to a sink where she splashed her eyes with lots of water. When the burning subsided, Lucia convinced herself she wasn’t going to go blind, but she’d have a bad case of conjunctivitis for a few days.

With water streaming down her face, she looked up. The airlock was closed again and the red light above the door was back on. Through the disinfectant steam, Lucia could make out two figures. Those bastards just wouldn’t give up.

The disinfection process only lasted a couple of minutes. Lucia had spent half that time flushing out her eyes. That left very little time to decide her next move. In desperation, she reached for the phone on the wall. It didn’t have any buttons but she got a line out the second she picked up the receiver. Wherever the terminal was, no one was at the other end, so she hung up in frustration. Her eyes fell on a tray of surgical supplies. She grabbed a small scalpel the size of a butter knife. It wasn’t much of a weapon, but it was better than nothing.

A door at the back of the room caught her eye. When she opened it, she felt a gentle stream of air. A lab technician could have told her that it was an osmotic pressure lock and that the difference in the pressure in the rooms caused the air to circulate inward to prevent leakage. But Lucia didn’t know a thing about airlocks or osmotic pressure. She mistakenly thought there was a window that opened to the outside and that she could get out that way.

Feeling confident, she strode through the door. Ultraviolet lamps lit up a corridor that led to a line of rooms with large windows. In the first room, someone who wasn’t wearing a hazmat suit was bent over a table, moving clumsily around something hidden by his body.

“Hey! You! I need help!” Lucia pounded on the glass to get the technician’s attention. “Hey! Can you hear me?”

When the man turned, the smile on Lucia’s face froze. The guy’s face was covered by the burst veins and had the vacant look Lucia knew all too well. He was an Undead.

With a groan, the Undead guy pounced on the glass with such force, he shook the entire structure. Terrified, Lucia stepped back, braced for the glass to give way, but whoever designed that cubicle had done a good job. The window withstood the barrage of punches.

A siren wailed nearby. The entry lock had just opened and her two stalkers were in the next room. Lucia fled down the corridor past more rooms. She was mesmerized by what she saw: Each cubicle held Undead in different states of decay. In one room, an Undead’s head and torso were strapped to a gurney. In another, a half dozen heads floated in formaldehyde in jars arranged on a shelf. To her horror, the heads opened their eyes and glared at her, snapping their jaws as she passed by.