Ground Zero: A Zombie Apocalypse (10 page)

Cutter pulled Glenda aside,
and thrust a small water bottle into her hand. Then he nodded at Jillian and two of the other younger bookstore employees. “You’re coming with me,” he said grimly. “Now.”

Waiting even another minute would give
him time to think, and time to re-consider. Cutter knew he couldn’t afford the luxury. He simply wasn’t brave enough. Now his mind was made up, he needed to move quickly, before second thoughts and fear debilitated them. He snatched up one of the broom-handle spears, and the four women followed him from the lunchroom in single file.

Three.

Ground Zero.

Cutter pushed at the big steel door with his foot and it swung back silently on massive steel hinges.

He stood in the breech, every muscle in his body tensed, every nerve strained to breaking point.
He had the spear held at waist height, clutched in both hands, and his knuckles were white.

He blinked, eyes adjusting to the dull natural light, and all his senses were enhanced. He could smell a sweet putrid odor, and he could smell smoke, lingering in the air. He felt a breath of
breeze on his face, and then a trickle of nervous sweat ran down his back. He forced himself to take a step into the bookstore, his stomach tripping with an instinctive animal sense of danger that warned him something lurked nearby.

He took another step, and then another. Then he paused, frozen, as his eyes swept
past the gloomy bookshelves around him.

He turned back to the open door. Nodded. Glenda and the other women came from the landing, huddled in a tight
knot. One of the women was sobbing softly. She had her hand to her mouth to stifle the sound. Behind the group, John Grainger stood at the steel door. Cutter made eye contact with the man over the shoulders of the women. Cutter nodded. Grainger nodded back, and then without another word, he pulled the steel door slowly closed and locked it from the inside.

The sound of the door
shutting was nothing more than a faint ‘snick’, yet to Cutter it sounded like the tolling bell of doom. The finality of it shocked him as he realized that now there was no turning back – no possible means of escape. The only way left was forward into a world he was unprepared for.

The bookstore was eerily quiet. Cutter led the women down the long passage towards the front door, his eyes never resting, never focusing on one point. His head swept across every shelf and every display stand, and the tension rose with each step that drew them closer to the street until he could smell their
rising fear.

They crept past the cashier’s counter, and paused. Ahead of them, Cutter could see piled
tangles of furniture and overturned bookshelves that had formed part of the barricade the day earlier. The store’s display window had been shattered, and jagged shards of glass and crumpled paperbacks lay like litter on the floor. He stepped carefully, his eyes sweeping the street beyond.

It was a clear sunny day. He could see burned and crumpled cars choking all three lanes of the road. Further away – on the opposite side of the street – he saw a tall black pyre of smoke billowing from the smashed windows
of a women’s dress store. And dead on the ground were dozens of broken, lifeless bodies, and grotesque streaks of blood that were spattered across the pavement like outraged graffiti.

Cutter turned back to the women and pointed to a breach in the barricade where a desk had been overturned and one of the destroyed bookcases had fallen across the walkway. “Throug
h there,” he whispered. When the women nodded, he went forward slowly, measuring each and every step, his body crouched and alert.

He reached the broken furniture and paused, his sense of alarm suddenly heightened. From somewhere close by he heard soft scrabbling sounds. He froze for long seconds. The sound stopped,
and then came again. Cutter held his breath. The stench of death was stronger now that they were approaching the doors of the store, carried in the smoky haze that drifted across the street. But with it was another smell – an odor that was somehow familiar. Cutter stepped cautiously into the narrow gap and stared towards the entrance of the bookstore.

And froze in cold stomach-churning shock.

Hos was lying dead on the floor, his arms flung wide, his upper body twisted at an angle by the bug-out bag that was still strapped to his back.

Crouched on the dead man’s chest were two large rats.

Cutter felt an icy pall of dread wash over him as the blood drained away from his face. His head filled with a roar of noise, and for just a moment his vision blurred and he felt himself swaying. Behind him he heard Glenda gasp and whisper, “Oh, God!”

Cutter went forward. The rats were huge black
beasts, their fur stiff dark bristles. They were feasting on Hos’s guts, tearing and gnawing at the wet flesh of his entrails with razor sharp teeth as Cutter watched on in horror. One of the rats sensed Cutter and stared with evil yellow eyes. Its mouth was sticky with fresh blood, it’s body hunched as though it might leap at him.

Cutter lunged forward with the spear and
the rat snarled at him, baring wicked incisors. Cutter changed his grip on the spear and hefted it over his head, swinging down hard and smashing the huge growling rodent’s spine. The rat squealed, and the sound was a high-pitched piercing wail. Cutter swung the spear again, this time side-armed, but missed. He raised the spear over his head once more and lunged down. The point drove through the rat’s back and killed it in a gout of spraying warm blood as the rodent twisted and writhed like a fish on the end of a line.

Cutter swung the spear and flung the rat’s body across the bookstore. The second rat defiantly burrowed it’s
snout deep into Hos’s stomach cavity and ripped a long shred of flesh from the body’s intestines. Its head came up covered in thick slimy gore. Then it scampered away into the shadows.

Cutter went down on one knee beside
Hos’s body. He was trembling. He felt a surge of nausea scald the back of his throat and had to bite down on the urge to gag. He covered his mouth with one hand to mask the overpowering stench.

Hos’s
features had been eaten away. Both of his eyes were gone. So were his lips and nose, leaving his face a bloody ruin. Cutter could see deep claw and bite marks, still welling and oozing blood.

“Why hasn’t he turned into one of them?” one of the women asked. She was a plain-looking girl in her early twenties. She had big dark eyes and stringy brown hair.

Cutter looked up at her. “Because he wasn’t bitten,” he said heavily. “He was shot.”

There was a single bullet hole in
Hos’s forehead; a seeping hideous wound surrounded by tiny fragments of bone and grey ooze.

The semi-automatic rifle was lying close beside the body.
Hos’s fingers had been gnawed down to ragged stumps of flesh. Cutter picked up the weapon and handed it to Glenda. Then he felt for the nylon straps of the bug-out bag. He turned his head away. He could feel his fingers touch the wet oozing mush of the ravaged body, making his grip slick and slippery, but he persisted until the buckles were unfastened. He rolled the body onto its side and dragged the bag free. He handed the bag to Jillian, and then dug into the dead man’s jeans and found his wallet. There were some bank notes, a credit card and a driver’s license. Cutter stuffed the wallet into his pocket and then let the body roll onto its back again. He wiped his hands on the carpet, but the abattoir stench clung to him like a repulsive odor that seemed to permeate his clothes and the pores of his skin.

He stood slowly.
“Can you use that thing?” Cutter asked Glenda. She was holding the rifle comfortably on her hip. She nodded. “It’s an AR-15,” she said. “And I can use it.”

As if to demonstrate the point,
she checked to see if the gun was on safe then turned the weapon and glanced into the chamber.  Cutter watched, fascinated. “What are you doing?”

“I’m unlocking the bolt and pulling it out of battery so I can check the chamber for a round,” Glenda said, her hand working with small deft movements. She released the magazine to check it was full before seating it back into place. “Do I have time for a function check?”

Cutter frowned. “I don’t know what that is – but you don’t have time. We don’t have time for anything.

Cutter unzipped the nylon bag
and rummaged through the contents. He saw a flashlight, matches, two bottles of water a knife and more. Then his fingers found the Glock that Hos had given him for sentry duty the evening before. He pulled back on the slide to chamber a round and then handed the bag back to Jillian. “The bag is your responsibility,” Cutter said. “Guard it with your life.”

Cutter went forward to the entrance of the bookstore at a low crouch and knelt behind the cover of a steel trolley that had been upended. The women filed forward and dropped to the ground behind him. Cutter scanned the sidewalk and the street carefully.
He felt Glenda’s shoulder press hard against his. She was on one knee close beside him, with the barrel of the AR-15 propped on the trolley’s thick steel frame. Cutter glanced down and saw the long length of her thigh where the skirt had rucked up high around her waist.

She saw the fleeting dir
ection of his eyes and she stared at him for a second in open invitation. “The offer still stands,” she said softly. “Just take me with you, Jack.”

Cutter said nothing. He tore his eyes from
Glenda’s and looked at the horror spread before him.

It
was like a nightmare made real: a terrible, terrifying illusion turned into grotesque reality.

On the sidewalk
, just beyond the shade of the bookstore’s doorway, was the body of a woman. She was lying on her back, her body bloated and swollen. Her legs were askew, her arms out flung, and her head turned to the side so that she stared at Cutter with open, vacant eyes. Flies buzzed around the body in a thick angry swarm, laying eggs in the open wounds and crawling across her stricken face before disappeared inside the cavity of her mouth.

The woman’s chest had been ripped open, and the soft flesh of her breasts ravaged and ripped from the corpse.

Beyond the woman’s body was another, and another, appearing ghost-like and ethereal in the drifting haze of thick smoke that swirled on the gentle morning breeze.

Cutter tore his eyes away. The street appeared deserted. He searched the area
again carefully, his eyes hunting through the scattered abandoned cars, looking for danger. But all he could see were more bodies. Some of them were slumped dead over the steering wheels of their vehicles. One man lay hanging out through the driver-side door of a grey hatchback, as though killed as he tried to flee the vehicle and make it to safety. The man’s skull has been ripped away so that his face and the grey oozing contents of his head lay spattered on the tarmac.

And through the gore and smoke moved the scavenging dark shapes of rats and
hulking awkward birds, picking at the pieces with macabre ravenous delight.

The bookstore was hemmed in on either side by other buildings. Cutter turned his head and looked towards either end of the street. Cars were crumpled ruined shapes across all three lanes of the blacktop. He saw sedans and SUV’s flipped onto their sides. He saw other vehicles burned out. He saw cars with their doors open and others with their windows shattered
, left skewed across the road during the last frantic moments before the world had been plunged into chaos.

He followed the road
with his eyes towards the intersection – maybe sixty yards away – and through the smoke he saw the dark shadowed shapes of a couple of SUV’s. The vehicles had been stopped at the traffic lights when the helicopters had appeared overhead, and the teeming mass of undead had stormed along the street.

He turned to the women and pointed. “We’re going to head towards the traffic lights,” he explained in a hush. “There’s no way we’ll get one of these closer cars through the wreckage. But if we can find a car close to the lights, we’ll have a good chance of being able to shoulder our way through to open road. Then we’ll head east and get as far out of the city as possible.”

Cutter knew it wouldn’t be as easy as he said. Between them and the safety of the city’s outlying suburbs was a dozen arterial roads, and each of them would be jammed with the same choking chaos. But he plowed on, forcing the faintest hint of hope into his voice and noticing how the women responded, as though optimism was infectious. “Once we’re out on the street, we go hard,” he said. “Don’t stop for anything. Just get to one of the cars and get the engine running.”

He grabbed Glenda’s shoulder. “You’re in the lead,” he said. “I’ll be right behind you. If you see anything or anyone, shoot to kill. Don’t think. Don’t hesitate. Aim for the head and put them down. Understand?”

Glenda nodded. She swallowed hard – a convulsive nervous reaction – and then clenched her jaw grimly.

The clock in Cutter’s head was ticking. He figured they had been in the bookstore for ten minutes. He knew he had no more time for caution. “We go on three,” he said. He saw the women jostling and preparing themselves, getting up onto their haunches and bracing themselves.

“One.”

Glenda hefted the AR-15 and got slowly to her feet. She
settled the weapon into her shoulder and curled her finger around the trigger. Made sure the safety was off and ready to fire.