Ghosts: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (30 page)

The scene behind
Back in the Saddle Rehab
wasn’t
quite as bad as Brook had envisioned prior to stepping out the back door.
Immediately she learned Wilson couldn’t count—at least not from the shotgun
seat of the Raptor.

There were dozens of rotters advancing from three points of
the compass: north, east and south—not hundreds. And she learned another
thing—Wilson had grown a pair as she’d recommended and was standing alongside
Taryn in the Raptor’s bed bludgeoning the creatures crowding the truck with his
Louisville Slugger.

Black Beretta pistol in hand, Taryn was crouched low and firing
point blank into the dead.

Then more gunfire rang out and Sasha was shooting at the Zs
with her .22 caliber rifle from her usual perch right behind the driver’s seat.

Before Brook could react, Chief was down the stairs to the
left, rifle leveled at the Zs and running and firing.

So she turned right, ran down the shallow ramp and at the
sidewalk came face-to-face with a putrefying first turn. Without breaking
stride she swept it out of her way with the M4’s buttstock, skidded to a stop,
tracked the stubby rifle around, and put two bullets into its brain before it
could rise up off the ground. She stepped over the mess of blood and brains and
cleared the corner of the building unchallenged. She looked right toward the
State Highway and saw a handful of dead a dozen yards away. Sweeping her gaze
to her left, she spotted three more Zs blocking her path. Beyond the trio of
first turns, near the rear of the F-650, another ten to fifteen walking corpses
were angling straight for her in little clusters of twos and threes.

Feeling his ponytail thump against his back with each
stride, Chief peeled left around the Raptor at a slow trot. Rounding the
bumper, he saw the clutch of zombies reaching up towards Wilson and Taryn and
began pumping round after round into their heads at near point-blank range.

Suddenly the sporadic gunfire coming from the Raptor’s cab
ceased and in his peripheral Chief saw Taryn holster her pistol and dive head
first into the open slider. He saw her feet kicking the air and watched her
dark form disappear inside. A tick later the big V8 throbbed to life and
Chief’s eye was drawn to Wilson, who had stopped swinging the bat and seemed to
be focusing on something out of sight. Recognizing this for what it was, Chief
made his way by the idling Raptor’s rear bumper, stepped through the fallen
corpses, and rounded the F-650’s towering tailgate.

Simultaneously two things happened. Chief heard a clunk and
roar as the Raptor’s transmission engaged behind him and the motor revved. In
the next instant, with exhaust fumes mingling with the stench of the dead, he
rounded the F-650’s bumper and saw Brook in danger of being surrounded near the
truck’s left front fender.

Ignoring a still-writhing corpse nearby, he took a knee and
peered through his rifle’s holographic sight. He put the red pip on the back of
the head of the flesh-eater closest to Brook and caressed the trigger. Bone and
brain went airborne, and without verifying the kill he repeated the process,
walking his fire to the left away from her.

When Brook saw the rotters start crumpling to the ground
right in front of her, she immediately went into a crouch and crabbed left
towards the tiny Z blocking her path to the truck. Judging by the way the skin
had tightened around its eyes and mouth, and taking into consideration the
condition of the clothes hanging off its emaciated frame, she guessed the
undead pre-adolescent had turned near the very beginning of it all.

Fearful of a stray round finding one of the truck’s gas
tanks, she lashed out with the M4’s buttstock and connected solidly, sending
shards of yellowed teeth into the air and the little monster on a one-way trip
to the blacktop. Coming around on the follow-through she saw a lone rotter trip
over the yellow wheel chock under the Ford’s front tire and come stumbling at
her, head down, arms flailing, and on the verge of a major face plant. Never
one to look a gift horse in the mouth, she stepped back, shouldered the M4 and,
with an arm’s length to spare, stilled the floundering creature with a quick
double-tap to the top of its head.

However, her gift horse turned Trojan the second she spun
back towards the truck and saw that the juvenile Z was already up and facing
her with a sneering mouthful of jagged teeth.

Brook felt a cold shiver rack her body and time seemed to
come to a screeching halt as two things happened simultaneously. First off the
undead kid found another gear and closed the distance and had the front of her
cotton shirt wrapped up in a two-handed death grip. Then Max came flying out of
nowhere, clamped his teeth around the thing’s thin neck and took it down to the
pavement all in one fluid movement.

Still not one to look a gift horse in the mouth—even after
the last surprise—Brook leaped over the prostrate Z and lunged for the F-650’s
door handle.

Still crouched in the Raptor’s bed and unable to see Brook,
Wilson witnessed Max squirm from the cab through the slider, leap from the
truck bed to the compact car’s roof and, in one final bound, clear the F-650’s
bed and disappear from sight. And before his brain could process what he was
seeing, the Raptor lurched backwards at tremendous speed and he was flat on his
back and rocketing towards the cab. A fraction of a second later when the truck
finally jammed to an abrupt stop, he sat upright, stomach reeling from the
unexpected spin cycle, and saw Chief prying a twice-dead rotter off of his leg.
Then, to his relief, Wilson saw the stocky Native American reach the other
truck’s passenger door, open it unaccosted, and climb up on the running board.
But before he made it inside, Max had slinked out from under the truck and
wormed his way past the man’s legs and inside the cab. Then again, without any
kind of warning, tires were screeching, the Raptor was moving forward, and
Wilson was sliding uncontrollably towards the tailgate. Like a kid in a bouncy
house, he found himself being thrown up and down along with his bloody
Louisville Slugger and a couple dozen loose shell casings.

The F-650’s cab smelled of gunpowder and dog and sweat laced
with fear when Brook finally slid her petite frame into the driver’s seat and
slammed the door. She glanced at Max as she started the motor and said, “You
saved me, boy. I owe you a venison steak ... or three.”

“I think we spent a little too much time upstairs,” said
Chief, his hands visibly shaking.

“No comment,” replied Brook, breathlessly, as she slapped
the transmission into reverse. “But I bet that was you who saved my ass, wasn’t
it? None of the Kids can shoot like that.”

Chief said nothing. He had kicked off his boots, loosened
his wide leather belt, and was busy stripping off his denim jeans.

Sensing Brook’s eyes on him, Chief said, “Avert your eyes,
please. And get us away from here.”

And she did. Following Taryn’s lead, Brook reversed hard and
left the compact car and dead rotters alone in the shadow of the two-story. The
F-650’s big knobby tires pulped the corpses and spewed meat out the back as she
pinned the accelerator and, ignoring the driveway entrance, drove over the
sidewalk and grass parking strip. Threatening to get away from her, the Ford
lurched and bounced and skittered sideways before she reined it in.

At the junction with 16, Brook let off the gas, braked hard
and, with the tinny pinging sounds of dead hands striking the sheet metal,
jerked the wheel hard right, putting the rig into an unintentional power slide.
Once she got the truck tracking straight again and was closing the distance to
the Raptor’s white tailgate, Wilson rose up from the bed. Instantly the
slipstream grabbed his boonie hat, ripping it off his head. But he didn’t lose
it entirely. The camouflage number was arrested by its thin leather chinstrap,
which was now wound around his neck and chafing his Adam’s apple. As he worked
his way toward the cab, the hat spun wildly to and fro, battering his back and
head like a parachute deployed behind a dragster.

Taking her eyes from the road for a beat, Brook said, “Are
you OK?”

“I don’t know yet,” replied Chief. “You have a mirror?”
Then, sitting there in his boxers, he stripped off his socks.

As Brook watched Wilson squeeze his lanky frame through the
back window, she said, “I’ll pull over in a minute and check you for bites.
Once I declare you
good to go
, we’ll pull Randolph up on the navigation
system and see how far they made it into the twenty first century before Omega
slapped them back into the dark ages.”

Chief said nothing. He was contorting his body trying to see
the back of his calves. There were deep red welts running vertically up and
down his right leg from mid-calf to just below his groin. “At the least these
wounds are going to need some antibiotic.”

Brook didn’t even want to think about the worst case because
Cade was hours—at least—from returning with the antiserum. And that was
assuming Nash had come through and given Cade some in the first place.

So with the grain of salt accompanying Nash’s word growing
boulder-sized the more Brook thought about the antiserum’s very existence, she
snared the radio from the console and, though she had a good idea who was
responsible for the transgression, keyed
Talk
and said, “I don’t know
who
laid on the horn back there ... but it
cannot
happen again. Shoot the
bastards for Christ’s sake.
Do not
invite them to dinner.” She chucked
the radio back where she got it and listened as the apologies poured in over
the open channel.

Cade hung from the lip for thirty long seconds while the
gate traveled the advertised ninety-six inches from ceiling to floor. By the
time the metallic clang signaling his task’s completion was echoing through the
subterranean garage, the rest of the team’s weapons had gone silent and the Zs
were slamming their decayed torsos against the gate and thrusting their pale
arms through its horizontally aligned metal links.

With fingers grasping at air inches from Cade’s chest, the
dozen hissing first turns strained mightily against the gate, bowing it inward.

Ignoring the gathering crowd, Cade turned and faced Lopez,
Cross, and Griffin. He proceeded to swap out magazines and then asked Lopez
what he knew about the stairs.

Letting his carbine dangle from its tactical nylon sling,
Lopez spread his arms like he was preparing to fly. He answered, “One in each
corner. I heard movement behind the door to the west wing. It was closed but
unlocked like someone might be coming back. I left it the way I found it.”

Cade nodded. “And the east?”

Shaking his head, Lopez said, “Locked.”

Cross held up a small leather pouch. He said, “That’s why I
brought these.”

Cade reached into a cargo pocket. Tossed Cross the
lock-picking gun. “Use that. It’ll save us all a lot of time.”

“And headache,” conceded Cross, holding up his gloved left
hand. “I’ve got these big ol’ mitts. Not very conducive to doing the old
pick
and
tensioner
two-step.”

Now that he was out of the sun and not running for his life,
Cade noticed that the temperature twelve feet underground was a good ten
degrees cooler than topside. For that he was grateful, but as the adrenaline
surge of a few minutes ago ebbed he felt his body cooling off a touch and the
damp shirt under his armor making his skin go clammy.

While Lopez and the SEALs swapped magazines and readied
their weapons for the next push, Cade formed a three-dimensional image of the
building above them in his head. He saw the inverted V-shaped structure from the
front. Two glass-enclosed elevators ran up the outside of the building, and on
the first flyby he’d noticed that both were parked on the bottom floor. He saw
the wide sidewalk leading to a metal mesh security gate and the barricaded
front entry beyond. To the right of the gate, behind a high wall paralleling
the entry walk, was a pool ringed by palms and a sea of stark white cement on
which all kinds of outdoor furniture was arranged. And though it was far from
Olympic size, when viewed from the air, the rectangular-shaped pool area
dominated the front two-thirds of the property. And like most of the oddities
he’d seen so far in Southern California, the need for an amenity like that at
off-campus student housing totally escaped all reason.

Thanks to the rudimentary floor plan Nash had beamed via
satellite to his laptop, Cade had a decent grasp of the building’s layout. For
instance, he knew that the first five floors had twenty-four units each, mostly
efficiencies that were divided among the front and back of the V and separated
by a central hall with the elevators located where the east and west wings met.
And according to the architectural plans the sixth floor where Nadia’s
apartment was located housed eighteen two-bedroom units, nine to a side. He figured
whoever designed the place numbered the rooms like every high-rise building
he’d been in. Conditioning from the way we read or dictated by some universal
building code, he hadn’t a clue. However, the numbers invariably started lowest
on the left and counted higher to the right. So Cade figured, if past
experience held true within the Four Palms, the rooms on the ground floor would
be numbered 101-124 with the apartments of the identical floor above numbered
201-224. On the
penthouse
level, Nadia’s floor, the two-bedrooms would
also be numbered, presumably, left to right, 601-618. And if that assumption
was correct, Nadia’s room, 610, should be near the elevators. Cade thought:
Only
the best view for a fourth year student and daughter of a major in the United
States Air Force. A bigwig in the 50th Space Satellite Warfare, to be more
specific.

Once he’d finished with his preps, Lopez called Ari with a
brief situation report, letting him know they were about to ascend the stairs
and that their comms might be compromised by the inches-thick steel-reinforced
concrete walls once they entered the well.

Nearby, Cross and Griffin stood facing the rectangle of
daylight. Scrutinizing the mass of Zs and going over options of egress aloud
and wondering how, if they had to leave the way they had entered, they were
going to get past the crowd with Nadia Nash in tow.

Suddenly remembering Raven’s situation, Cade faced Lopez,
raised his hands, and stated the obvious, “Time to make a call ...
east
or
west?
We need to get a move on.”

Lopez didn’t immediately speak. Instead, he looked to the
SEALs for input.

Holding his suppressed carbine at a low ready, and shifting
his weight from foot to foot unconsciously, Griffin said, “I’m thinking east
wing first.”

“I concur,” said Cross. “We pick the lock and back away. See
what comes out.”

Nodding his approval, Cade glanced at the hollow-eyed
corpses gathered at the gate. He said, “And if there are a hundred of those
things in the stairway?”

Smiling and patting the half-dozen magazines Velcroed snugly
in their sleeves on his chest, Lopez said, “I’ve got a hundred rounds of five
... five ... six for the demonios, right here.”

With the metal gate rattling discordantly at their backs,
the team powered on their night-vision devices. Leaving them flipped up, for
now, they zippered single-file through the fallen corpses at a fast trot while
taking care to avoid slipping on the pooled blood and detritus covering the
already oil-stained cement.

Running point, Lopez ignored the elevator, hooked a right,
and led the team through the gloom to the scratched and dented fireproof metal
door.

“Opens outward,” said Cross.

The door was labeled:
Stairs East to Floors 1-6
.
Below that, most likely to alert emergency personnel, a warning—
NO ROOF
ACCESS—
was emblazoned in large raised white lettering. And just outside the
door, rising vertically from the cement floor, was a waist-high concrete pole
sheathed with thin steel. About as wide around as Cade’s arm, he figured it was
placed there to protect a tenant who might happen to be emerging from the
stairwell into the path of a moving vehicle. Or to spare the door from careless
backing.

While Cross worked on the lock, Cade checked the sat-phone
for any new messages. Finding nothing recent on the screen, he stowed it away
in a thigh pocket.

Seconds later Cross had the lock defeated, passed the pick
gun back to Cade, and was striking the door lightly with his open palm.

“Dinner bell for the dead,” he said, looking back at the
assembled team. But there was no immediate reaction from within. However, ten
seconds later, when Cross reached out for the knob, a slight shuffling noise
sounded from the other side of the windowless door. As the men brandishing guns
and wrapped in body armor looked questions at one another, a repetitious
scratching sound started up. Faint but determined. Like a woodworker finishing
a prized piece with the finest grit paper.

“There’s
something
in there,” said Lopez, swallowing
hard. “Wish Tice was here with his high-tech periscope thingy.” Then, seeing a
brief flash of the stairwell of death at the National Microbiology Laboratory
in Winnipeg in his mind’s eye, he shivered and performed the sign of the cross
on himself and prayed to God that he wasn’t about to relive that foray through
Hell all over again.

“I just wish the Spook was still with us,
period
,”
stated Cade. “
Let’s do this
.”

With the other three operators standing a few feet back, in
a semicircle a shoulder’s width apart, and training their weapons on the door,
Cross hauled it open and crouched down and crabbed sideways out of the line of
fire.

But the rifle fire never came.

However, the something that was on the other side of the
door, a dirty orange tabby cat—easily fifteen pounds of purring, fur-covered
fat—strutted past Lopez and into the garage. Green luminescent eyes sized up
the team. Then the feline eyeballed the flesh-eaters rattling the gate. After a
few seconds spent licking futilely at its fur and paws, the cat turned a circle
and trotted nonchalantly back into the darkened stairwell.

Lopez shook his head and released the breath trapped in his
chest. He initiated a quick comms check and, as the replies came in, he saw the
rest of the team lowering their night vision devices in front of their eyes.
Seeing the faint eerie green ovals reflecting off the others’ eyes, he pulled
his own down and said, “Weapons hot.”

A series of soft clicks followed as safeties were thrown and
lasers were powered on.

Assuming tacit approval, Cade stepped past Lopez. Without
looking back he crossed the threshold and, with the wavering green laser beam
probing the well ahead of him, started up the stairs.

The cat was nowhere to be found, and inside the roomy
stairwell the stench of death was heavy on the cool air. Rendered in light
green, the stairs were much wider than most he’d seen. In fact, three grown men
could stand comfortably on the same tread.
For ease of moving larger pieces
of furniture in-and-out
, Cade guessed. There were traction strips on the
edges of all seventeen stairs between landings. Sturdy handrails were bolted
into the walls on the left. On the right, the inner rail was bolted to the
floor and followed the run up and bent around the blind corner at the mid-floor
landing.

Taking the stairs slowly, one at a time, Cade made the
landing and cut the corner by degrees. Held a hand up, craned his head around
the inner rail, and simultaneously walked his gaze and laser beam up the run to
the next rise.

“Clear,” he whispered into the comms.

***

Ten minutes after entering the garage, the team was gathered
together on the landing between floors two and three and, thankfully, since
decimating the walkers in the garage, hadn’t had to discharge their weapons
since.

However, peering down on a sight that made him want to puke,
Cade’s finger was itching to pull the trigger. What he saw in front of his face
rendered in a dozen shades of green made his heart skip a beat. He wasn’t ready
for it to end this way. But it was closure. Of that he was certain. Until he
extracted his tactical flashlight, flipped up his NVGs, and looked at the scene
from a different perspective and in a more revealing light.

Illuminated there on the landing was the fat tabby. And
splayed out in a pool of dried blood, surrounded by dozens of crimson paw
prints and an abundance of wilted flowers—their aromatic properties long
dormant—was a young woman’s corpse. Like Nadia, the blonde looked to have been
in her early twenties. She had died on her back and, judging from the look of
surprise frozen on her pallid face, she had been alive and free of the Omega
virus when she passed.

Looking closer, Cade noticed that her neck was bent
unnaturally, nearly ninety-degrees from vertical, and her face was turned in a
direction contrary to the rest of her body. Nearly lost in the bright cone of
light, and scattered about the landing in a wide arc radiating out from her
gaping mouth, were numerous shiny white jagged shards of what Cade presumed
were teeth that used to reside in her mouth.

Like a Slinky race halted mid-descent, clumps of clothing
still on hangars littered the run of stairs from where the body had come to
rest to the landing below. And clutched in the cadaver’s right arm was more of
the same, mainly blouses and tanks, also still on their plastic hangers.

Still suppressing the urge to blast all nine lives out of
the opportunist feline, Cade barked, “
Git
,” and nudged the fat tabby
away from the decaying corpse with the business end of his carbine.

As the tabby scooted past his boots and up the stairs,
Cross, who was standing over the corpse, said matter-of-factly, “Looks like
this one died moving out.”

“At least she didn’t forget to
feed
the cat,” said
Griffin.

Lopez bowed his head.

Even Cross shot his SEAL brother a look that said:
Really?

“That’s uncalled for,” Cade said as he went to a knee on the
top stair. He removed the photo of Nadia from a pocket and compared it with the
corpse.
Same build
.
Same hair
. Grateful he’d initially been
mistaken, he took a fistful of blonde locks and craned the head around.
Close,
but no cigar
. He let the head down to the cement easy then looked the body
over from head-to-toe. The corpse’s once bare midriff was now just a mass of
flayed flesh, and snaking from a tear near the navel was a short length of
intestine, glistening white and still wet with dark splotches of congealed
blood.

The dead co-ed’s eyes, earlobes, and lips were gone.
Hence
the fat ass cat
, Cade thought morbidly.

But the nose was intact. So, to be certain, Cade compared it
with the photo. Concluded that it was hooked a little. Not a cute button like
Nadia’s and Nash’s.

“Not her,” Cade said, total confidence in his voice. He rose
up and pocketed the photo. Thumbed the light off and put it with the photo.

“Cat’s a survivor, though,” said Cross.

“In here it is,” said Cade, drawing his NVGs back down over
his eyes.

“Out there—” added Lopez, his voice soft and distant “—with
the
demonios
... it’d be nothing but gnawed-on bones before day’s end.”

“My money is on the cat,” stated Griffin, adjusting his
NVGs.