Hero for Hire (8 page)

I swallowed hard. Nodded. “I can do this.”

“Yeah,” he said, but didn’t sound as confident as I’d hoped.

“No really, I will do this.” I nodded to convince myself as much as Doc.

He grunted. “You’re stalling.” He glanced at me, his voice gaining urgency. “You do have the keys to the stairwell, right?”

I slid my hand to the console between us and held the keys up for him to see. My hand wasn’t quite steady, so the keys clinked until I dropped them back into the plastic receptacle between us.

“Good. So park. Let’s do this. We won’t have a lot of time.”

I pulled into the carport of my building as Doc grabbed the shotguns from the back. “Okay. These are loaded, safety off, so handle them accordingly.”

I took mine by the stock, and stepped out of the car into the deep shade from the carport, clearing the area with the barrel of my gun. “It’s clear.”

“So far,” Doc said. Using the barrel of his shotgun, he indicated the steel double doors. “It’s cracked open, so we probably have bogies inside. I’ll clear, you come up behind. If you have to shoot, aim high so you don’t blow me away.”

“Aim high. Okay. I’m ready.”

I stepped behind him as he strode toward the door and kicked it open with one short leg, swiveling the gun to clear the reception area. It was dark inside after the bright sunshine. While my eyes adjusted a loud crack filled the room before echoing off down the hallway. It took a moment for me to realize it wasn’t just my thudding heartbeat, but that Doc had shot an Infected. I struggled to get my head around it. In all the time I’d lived here, an Infected had never gotten in. Now they were here. We were going to have to go through them.

I heard the rattle of another Infected and panicked, squeezing my eyes shut while I pulled the trigger.

“Open your eyes!” Doc roared at me after I’d taken my shot.

My eyes popped open. He was next to me, same as he had been before I closed my eyes, but my throat closed up just the same. I couldn’t afford to make mistakes in here, not without risking the only person who could get me out in one piece. His muttered grumbles did as much to reassure me as finding him with my eyes. He was fine.

We both spun when more rattling filled the room. There were two of them just entering from the hallway. The noise of guns had probably attracted them, drawing them from the labs down the hallway and into the reception.

“I’ll take left, you take right,” Doc said.

This time I took a breath, aimed and squeezed the trigger just like I’d practiced. My breakfast rose in my throat, threatening to come all the way up, but I swallowed it down. I’d hit my Infected square in the head, but it kept coming for another three steps before it keeled over face first on the floor, right on top of Doc’s kill. I shuddered, but didn’t have time to even think about what I’d done because when I swiveled again, another Infected lurched in from the hallway.

“Doc, are we going to be in trouble here?”

He shot again, taking out another Infected. “We’re drawing more in with all this noise. Who knows how many are in here? If the group comes in from the street, they’ll trap us–then we’ll be in deep shit. We need to get back to the SUV and regroup.”

I didn’t want to retreat, but there was no way I wanted to get trapped in here with that bloodthirsty group from the street, so I backed toward the double door we’d just come through. Doc followed suit. We hadn’t made it to the basement stairwell–we hadn’t even made it to the hallway. It seemed that we would be lucky to get out of the building at all. Doc had been right. Again.

“Reload and cover us from anything that follows us from this room,” Doc said, his fingers already slipping two new shells into his gun.

I fumbled with my own shells, but had only managed to insert a single shell when I saw another Infected coming down the hallway toward us. Slamming the gun shut, I aimed and shot. There went another person I’d never be able to cure. I hurried to reload.

“Now,” Doc growled. He swiveled, leaving me to cover the reception as he kicked open the door. I glanced over my shoulder at him. Doc swore, and shot into a group of Infected lumbering from the street toward our SUV. Several of them were covered with gore, marking them as part of the group from the street. They stumbled a bit, but just kept coming. I squealed, slamming the door shut behind us, hoping to slow down anything coming at us from inside. Odds were, we hadn’t killed everything inside the building, but the Infected outside the building were a more urgent concern at this point. We needed to go. Quickly.

Doc chambered another shell and shot again. We both sprinted for the car. I got there first, threw open the door and climbed inside, starting the engine as fast as I could. When Doc jumped in the other side I threw it into reverse. Glancing in the rearview mirror, I realized Infected now blocked the driveway in droves.

“Hold on!” I screamed. I stomped on the gas. The Rover shot backward, tires shrieking, mowing down Infected as we went. If we didn’t get out now, we’d never leave this place.

Chapter 4

Twilight lengthened the shadows of trees, structures, and zombies, as I studied Building Twenty-One from the roof of Building Twenty-Three. Paragon Pharmaceuticals, the gargantuan drug company in Thousand Oaks, was a maze of over fifty concrete structures. Building Twenty-One seemed to be the center of activity for the entire complex. Unfortunately, it was also the place where Gwyn’s old lab was located. I’d spent the day studying all angles of Twenty-One from the rooftops of the surrounding structures.

I watched zombies shuffle around the courtyard in front of the building. Some climbed the steps, waiting patiently in line to be let inside. But in the three hours I’d been on the roof watching, no zombies ever came out. There was, however, a chimney through which issued a steady stream of brownish gray smoke. Maybe that was the only way zombies ever left the building.

“When are we going in?” Randy whispered.

Rufus and I both lowered our binoculars. We turned to Randy, who lay on his back using my backpack as a pillow.

“When I’m good and ready,” I answered.

Against my better judgment, I’d brought them both with me. I’d taken Rufus on plenty of other missions, so I knew despite being the youngest of the boys, he’d proven himself to be tough and resourceful. When Rufus had argued we should bring Randy along too, since Doc was on a mission to clear out Gwyn’s old place, I considered his request. Randy was the oldest of the boys, bigger than the rest and we might need the muscle. I wasn’t so sure Randy was ready for this kind of a mission, but I’d trained him the same as the rest, so we’d just have to see how he handled it.

“I think we should wait for full dark,” Rufus said. “Won’t make much difference to the zombies, but the humans inside might be asleep, at least.”

I patted his shoulder. “Good thinking, Rufus. We’ll go in a window in the west alley since the doors are too dangerous.”

* * * *

We ate granola bars and beef jerky for dinner, and rotated rounds of paper-scissor-rock to kill the time. At midnight, the majority of lights in Building Twenty-One finally went out, so we decided to make our move.

Hurrying down and out the back door of Building Twenty-Three, we took off jogging down the street. We ended up behind Building Twenty, which was next door to twenty-one.

“Why do they need so many fucking buildings just to make drugs?” Randy whispered. “My uncle used to do it in his garage.”

I grinned in the dark. I really liked Randy.

I gestured for the boys to follow as I hurried through the narrow alley. There were no zombies in the alleyway–they were all out front in the courtyard, or in the back, milling around the doors. I peered inside the first dark ground-level basement window letting my eyes adjust to the darkness of the room. It appeared to be empty, so I kicked at the glass, wincing at the noise it made when it shattered.

“Subtle,” Randy said.

“You have any better suggestions?”

When he didn’t offer any, I pulled a pistol from my waistband. Using the toe of my boot I cleared the sharp bits left in the window frame.

I slithered in the window, coming to rest on one knee, holding the gun ready to kill anything that came at me. The room was empty so I whispered for the boys to join me.

Inside, I oriented myself to the front of the building, before slipping out into the hallway, pausing to listen. What I heard gave me chills.

A chorus of rattling breath, along with what sounded like fingernails on a blackboard echoed from the end of the hall. As much as I didn’t want to, I tiptoed in that direction until we reached a window looking in on a space lit by dim fluorescent bulbs. The room was filled with snarling, slobbering, lumbering zombies. These were far beyond even the worst I’d seen on the streets.

“What are those things?” Rufus asked.

“No idea,” I said. “Maybe experiments gone bad.”

When they saw us, they threw themselves at the window, hissing and scratching the glass with long, black nails.

“Come on,” I said, heading for the exit sign at the other end of the hall. Through the door we found the stairs. Randy followed me, while Rufus brought up the rear, pistol in hand, his expression all business.

We hurried up to the third floor. Gwyn had said all the offices were up there. The last lights in the building had gone out on the third floor over an hour ago. I figured as head of the whole shebang, Miriam was likely to be the last to go to bed, thus the last to turn out the lights. I could have been totally wrong, but it was a place to start.

We spilled out of the stairwell into the third floor hallway. It was deathly silent, so I risked pulling out a glow stick for illumination. When I cracked it, the pale green glow was enough to read the names on the windows of each door as we crept down the hallway.

The last door on the right read
313 Miriam Armstrong, Director of Biogenetic Research
.

“Bingo,” I whispered, but when I tried the knob it was locked. “Seriously? Who’s going to break into a pharmaceutical company overrun with zombies?”

Rufus giggled.

“Okay, fine,” I said.

Breaking an exterior window was not ideal, but breaking an interior window would probably bring whoever was in the building running. I wanted to avoid that. So I’d come prepared for any eventuality.

Opening my pack, I pulled out a glass cutter and a flashlight. I cut a square at the bottom corner of the window on the doorknob side, then tapped the cut lines with the other end of the cutter to loosen the glass. The square tipped, falling inward to the floor. It made only a faint tinkling sound when it broke. I reached into the hole I’d made so I could unlock the door from the inside. Stepping in, I swung the flashlight side to side to orient myself. The office was surprisingly utilitarian. From the way Gwyn talked about Miriam, I’d expected extravagance.

“Okay, boys. You know what we’re looking for. Spread out and see what you can find.”

They both flicked on their own flashlights. Randy took the bookshelf, pawing through all the books without regard to whether they stayed on the shelf or tumbled to the floor. Rufus went for some cabinets and I checked the desk. The top was relatively clear, at least I didn’t see any of Gwyn’s journals, so I opened drawers, rifling through the contents. I came up with a big fat nothing on the right side of the desk, so moved to the drawers on the left side, where I hit pay dirt in the top drawer.

“Found one!” I said, waving a black and white journal labeled,
Gwyn Snow, Book 4
.

“Where’s the rest of them?” Rufus asked.

I looked back in the top drawer, but it was empty. I checked the rest of the drawers. Nothing.

The boys came up empty handed, too.

“Shit,” I said. “Where would Miriam put the rest of them?”

“How about Gwyn’s office?” Randy asked.

“Maybe,” I said.

“How about the lab?” Rufus asked.

“I guess we’ll have to check both,” I said, stuffing book four into my backpack.

Back in the hall we checked all the office doors but didn’t see Gwyn’s until we found a door with the original name blacked out with violent permanent marker slashes. Underneath was hand-written,
Pain in the Ass. Good riddance
.

“Found it,” I whispered.

Gwyn’s door was locked too, so I repeated the glass cutting procedure. Inside, her office was a cobwebby mess. I picked up a paper from the desk and blew the dust off, noticing the date on the two-year-old memo. Nothing looked like it had been disturbed since after the zombie apocalypse.