Degeneration (37 page)

             
“They’re catching up!” Richard screamed.

             
“Just keep running!” Mathis yelled back, sweating profusely inside his bulky white-suit.

             
Richard glanced over at a black sedan, spotting movement.

             
Two small infected children flung themselves at the rear window in the back seat, snarling. They scratched frantically at the glass, screaming. Their bullet-riddled parents sat slouched over in the front seat, still wearing their seatbelts. The windshield was peppered with bullet holes.

             
Richard leapt away from the car and knocked into a Toyota Tundra.

The Tundra’s alarm blared loudly and made him leap away.

             
“Keep running! Don’t slow down!” Mathis shouted.

             
The horde was closing fast.

An infected soldier broke ahead of the pack and sprinted towards Richard with both arms outstretched. The flesh around the soldier’s mouth had receded and his cheeks were torn to meaty shreds, exposing muscle and his blood-stained teeth. Blood caked the front of his National Guard uniform and urine soaked the front of his pants. He gave guttural cries as he ran with focused intensity.

             
Richard quickly opened one of the Tundra’s doors, turned, and chased after Mathis.

             
The infected soldier slammed against the door and snapped it off of its hinges, shattering the glass. The soldier, his newly mangled arm hanging limply at his side, continued sprinting after Richard with the rest of the horde following closely behind.

             
A city bus was parked lengthwise across the street, riddled with artillery holes and the inside of the bus had been torched. Blacked skeletons sat in the seats, staring up at the ceiling with their jawbones hung down to their ribcage. At the driver’s seat, a skeleton sat slouched over the steering wheel with his bullet-fractured skull resting against the melted dashboard.

             
Mathis and Richard maneuvered around the bus and immediately froze; they had arrived at the Glenwood-Five Points checkpoint.

             
Both of them squinted, blinded by the harsh halogen lights against the setting sun.

             
Slowly, their eyes adjusted–

Whatever hopes Mathis had about the checkpoint quickly dissipated.

21

             
I
t
was dusk and Glenwood-Five Points was in complete disarray.

Razor-wire had been spun across the front of the blockade. It had been flattened-out in some places and had lacerated corpses tangled in its snare. Humvees were parked behind the razor-wire and had their windows shattered. Behind the Humvees, tanks blocked off the street with their cannons turned in different directions. At the end of the barricade, behind the tanks, a row of lopsided halogen floodlights shone brightly, operating off of struggling diesel-powered generators. Bullet-riddled corpses, toppled aluminum crowd control barriers, spent rifles, riot shields, and dead soldiers littered the street in all directions.

             
Richard started to run towards the tanks when Mathis grabbed his shoulder and pulled him back, forcefully.

             
“We’ll never outrun them on foot,” Mathis shouted. He pointed at a bar on the side of the avenue.

             
Richard threw a panicked glance towards the building.

             
It was an ominous one-story brick building with thick steel shutters sloppily bolted over its shattered windows with a vertically-striped tattered plastic awning hung over them. Sandbags had been dumped around the base of the building and the bar’s signage had been stripped from the structure. The reinforced entry doors were open and it was dark inside. A red sign had been attached to both entry doors and read in bold white lettering:

Restricted Area

Use of Deadly Force is authorized

             
“Are you insane?! Those things will surround us and we’ll be trapped in there!” Richard shouted.

             
The infected emerged from around the bus while another larger group closed in from in-between the tanks and Humvees from the other direction; the whole city seemed to be converging on one spot.

             
“Look up!” Mathis pointed towards the roof and ran towards the bar as the infected closed in.

Richard followed after him. He glanced up at the roof and spotted the tail of a black apache helicopter, barely visible, peaking off the edge of the roof.

             
Mathis and Richard ran into the building and slammed the steel-reinforced doors shut behind them.

Waves of infected bodies hammered against the doors and caused the doors to fling
–

Mathis quickly shoved the steel doors shut once again and slid the locking bar into place.

Infected slammed against the doors and the battered on the steel shutters covering the windows, surrounding the building on all sides.

Mathis leaned against the doors and closed his eyes, breathing frantically. Condensation coated his facemask and sweat made his urine-soaked uniform cling against his flushed skin underneath his white-suit.

Richard stared at the door and backed away from it, trembling. He slowly turned and surveyed the dark, dismal bar.

The pub tables and bar stools were stacked against the rear wall and covered under a plastic tarp. All of the wine and beer behind the bar had been liberated. Rifles and pistols lay scattered everywhere. The entire room was filled with toppled army cots and thick with flies. The foul stench of rot mixed with defecation hung in the air.

             
Mathis unslung his rifle, dropped it to the floor, and picked up a fresh rifle off of the floor. He ejected the magazine and was satisfied to see that it was full. Holding the rifle with one hand, he knelt down and removed the magazines from two other two rifles and slid them into the cargo pockets on his white-suit.

             
We need a gun too. Think, before you give him the upper-hand again!

             
“We need a gun, too,” Richard obediently said.

             
Mathis spun towards Richard and glared at him through his foggy facemask.

             
“Who’s ‘we’? You mean me
and
you? That’s not happening.”

             
“I can help hold them back. I can shoot.”

             
Mathis hesitated a moment. He didn’t like the idea of giving someone he didn’t trust a weapon, but he was dangerously low on backup at the moment. He looked down and spotted a pistol lying on the floor in a dried pool of blood. He picked it up and handed it to Richard.

             
Richard took the pistol. The weight of it felt good in his hand.

             
“Are you familiar with them?”  Mathis asked.

             
“I’ve had experience,” Richard muttered. He checked the clip and saw that it was nearly full. He slid the clip back into the gun, switched off the safety, and chambered a round.

             
Mathis watched him with hesitant suspicion.

             
“What did you do, before this? Were you a security guard or something?” Mathis asked, watching Richard handle the gun. “How did you survive inside that overran hospital all by yourself?”

             
You weren’t by yourself.

             
Richard hadn’t been alone
for a
very
long time.

“I just… remembered what my brother showed me,” Richard said. “He was good at it.”

             
Don’t lie. I never showed you how to kill. You were just a natural.

You owe me.

You owe me Butner.

I went through a lot for you. The least you can do is save me.

Before Mathis could respond, the kitchen door behind the bar swung open and four infected soldiers bolted into the room.
They leapt over the bar and sent empty bottles shattering against the floor.

             
Mathis switched the rifle’s firing mode to ‘full-auto’ and held down the trigger, stepping backwards, sweeping the rifle side-to-side.

             
Automatic gunfire swept across the besieging soldiers, ripping through their chest and abdomen.

The soldiers jolted with each bullet but continued unabated.

             
Mathis ejected the empty cartridge from the rifle and slapped in a fully-loaded one.

             
Richard thrust the pistol out and fired four rounds in rapid succession, closing his eyes, terrified.

The rounds went errant and didn’t hit a target.

Mathis glanced over at Richard for a fleeting second and saw how shaken and novice the man was a gun. He was not surprised.

Mathis focused back on the targets and fired another burst of automatic fire and swept the rifle across the soldiers, higher.

             
The rounds struck through the heads of two of the soldiers and blew out the back of their skulls. They both collapsed against the floor.

The remaining two bounded over the corpses of their fallen brethren and continued sprinting.

Focus, Richie!

             
Richard opened his eyes at the sound of Andy’s voice, held his breath, and sighted-in on one of the soldiers.

             
The forehead of the first soldier caved-in and a geyser of blood and bone erupted out the back of his head as it snapped back. He tumbled to the ground.

             
Richard sighted-in on the second soldier and fired.

             
The soldier’s head snapped backwards and he flung backwards against the ground.

             
Mathis looked over at Richard, mouth agape. He felt as if he was looking at a different person all of a sudden.

             
Richard lowered the gun, slowly letting out his bated breath.

             
There’s the killer I know…

             
Mathis studied Richard, trying to figure out what sort of man casually goes from one extreme to another in the blink of an eye. In truth, Richard frightened him, but a good shooter was definitely hard to come by at the moment.

After a few seconds, Mathis walked towards the kitchen door.

             
“Come on,” he said, “we have to get to the roof and get on that helicopter.”

             
“And fly where?”

“What’s your name?”

“Richard.”

             
“Richard, we have more pressing issues at the moment,” he said as he checked his suit’s oxygen canister; it was running dangerously low. “There is a communications center in the break room behind the kitchen. Hopefully, the equipment is still operational and we can let the Air Force know not to shoot us down.”

             
“And then what?” Richard asked.

             
“There is a roof access hatch in there as well,” he said, checking the ammo in his rifle. “We’ll get to the helicopter and we’ll fly out of the quarantine.”

             
“What about Butner?” Richard quickly asked.

             
“Butner? There’s no point in that,” Mathis said casually. “It’s inside the hot zone.”

He reached for the kitchen door.

             
Richard grabbed Mathis by the shoulder and spun him around towards him.

             
“I already told you that my brother is there. I need to get him out!” Richard yelled.

             
Mathis brushed Richard’s hand off of his shoulder.

             
“The National Guard refugee center is overrun,” Mathis said.

             
Richard shook his head side-to-side animatedly.

             
“No! He is safe! He is locked away in the federal prison! The infection couldn’t have gotten into the prison!”

             
“How did you come to that estimation? It was probably brought inside by sick guards. Jesus... you really have no idea, do you?” he said with a tone of disbelief.

             
“About what?” Richard asked, glaring.

             
Mathis gave an exasperated sigh.

             
“You have absolutely no idea about the scope of this infection. Panic started setting in across the state well before the virus even escaped the downtown quarantine.