LZR-1143 (Book 4): Desolation (24 page)

The kids must have freaked out and jumped ship, Kate thought. If I were a kid, I’d do the same thing. Head to a building. And what’s the nearest building? That one.

She bolted to her feet and sprinted across the empty yard, heedless of the creatures that saw her move and turned to follow. She was focused on the dozen or so that had a big lead on her, and were pursuing the children.
 

So focused, in fact, that she didn’t see the group of fifty creatures break free of a small barrier of rubble in the back of the courtyard that had slowed them from joining the fray.
 

Until now.

They shambled forward, following the fast-moving food they could see in front of them, and ignoring the cacophony of gunshots on the road.

***

The large warehouse was a part of the winery itself, with massive metal vats and storage containers, housing mash and grapes and other vintner’s supplies in a huge corrugated steel building. Rust wept from the large plates of welded steel overhead as Kate bolted to the side of the building.
 

The children had made a beeline for the stairwell on the side of the rusty walls leading to the second story, and the dozen creatures ahead of her were ambling toward the steps, several of them having already begun their climb up.
 

She debated using her gun for several moments before simply wading into the back of the crowd. The first creature she came upon heard her footfalls moments before her machete took its head from its shoulders in one blow. Without flinching, she reversed her stroke and backhanded a woman in coveralls and a baseball cap through the face, taking the top of her head off. The cap fluttered to the ground as Kate kicked the bodies to the side and grabbed the next creature in a balled up fist of shirt and jacket. The older man had been a fan of the local Seattle baseball team, and she noted that somehow the emblem of the team was still visible under layers of grime and gore.
 

Pushing the creature in front of her, its teeth gnashing in frustrated hunger, she threw the corpse into the narrow confines of the stairwell, tumbling the next few creatures over one another. They fell to the ground, confused but angry and writhing.
 

Behind Kate, the gunshots were all automatic, and the screaming had started. Screams of rage, and surprise. Engines revving and motors churning. In the lead humvee, Shonda Fray had managed to make an awkward and difficult three point turn on the narrow road, as hundreds of the creatures were merely slowed by the hale of automatic weapons fire, spurred on by and attracted to the noise of humans fighting for their lives.
 

The thick-treaded tires had taken out multiple bodies as the vehicle pushed up the street, past the winery, and made a turn back toward the column, turning the rotting flesh into a carpet of blood and viscera. But it was merely a drop in the bucket.

In their radio, Starr was calling for a retreat.
 

But Kate didn’t know that. And if she had known, she wouldn’t have cared. She couldn’t leave those children to this fate. She had always harbored doubts in her mind about the quality of her parenting. She had always hated herself for being so far from her daughter for such long periods of time. She knew that this was no redemption, this isolated act of protection. But it was something.
 

In a world awash with death and loss and uncertainty and utter fucking powerlessness, it was something she could do. Now.

Making a flash decision, she pulled her rifle forward as the creatures struggled in disarray on the ground. Further beyond them, the several zombies on the stairwell had paused, their oafish, diseased faces masked with confusion and bewilderment, as if wondering which meal to pursue.
 

Kate didn’t give them much time to decide.
 

Flipping the selector switch on her carbine to full automatic, she shredded the pile of corpses on the ground and brought the weapon up, moving her fire back and up the stairs. The bullets tore into soft, decaying flesh, spitting pieces of meat and bone into the air. Not even bothering to make sure the bodies in front of her were dead—immobile was just fine by her—she pulled her machete to finish the last of the stragglers. Her rifle had clicked empty as she took out the second to last creature, and she vaulted its body as she bolted up the metal stairs, one hand on the handrail, and the other bringing the blade forward.
 

With a sickening thump, the blow landed on the creature’s head, lodging itself in the thick skull. Kate grimaced. She hated it when that happened. It reminded her of a very poorly executed autopsy she had witnessed during school—the doctor had lodged his scalpel in a man’s breastbone by mistake, and as he had tried to pretend that he hadn’t made an error by talking excessively through the example, the blade had protruded obscenely from the chest of a middle aged man lying nude on the steel table, as if mocking the man’s life and death.
 

Kate had irrationally hated that doctor for the rest of her course—the rest of her life, really.
 

The irony wasn’t lost on her. She had hated the man for making a mockery of death. And here she was grunting in effort as she pulled a large blade from some former minimum-wage worker’s skull.
 

Her attention wandered as the sound of battle and the throbbing flow of blood in her ears deafened her, and as she fought with her weapon; that small diversion almost killed her. In fact, it was only the lull in the firefight behind her that saved her life.

The gunfire ebbed slightly while the women dove into their vehicles and followed the Rhino, which had taken the lead and was pushing forward through the creatures that had massed on the narrow road, using its large plow attachment to clear a path. In the brief silence, Kate heard the familiar sound of rustling footfalls.

Many, many rustling footfalls.
 

She turned in time to see the first row of zombies emerge from the falling ash, rounding the corner and fixating on her immediately, even as several of the downed creatures behind her twitched with renewed energy. The lead zombie—a man of middle years and advanced weight, his clothing stained red with either wine or blood—shambled forward with a low moan, his teeth bared and his arms out.

Cursing, she pulled back on the blade one more time, managing to free only the handle, as the metal snapped free of its housing.
 

Kate yelled in frustration, slamming her hand against the metal railing before running up the last ten steps, finding the handle of the door and turning to take in the scene behind her in the space of two seconds.
 

The ash-fall had left a mid-winter’s coat of gray as far as Kate could see. On the road below, the convoy had re-boarded the vehicles, and were moving slowly forward behind the cover of the Rhino. Several cars were left behind, their doors open and zombies clustered around spots on the road—Kate knew they were bodies. She frantically scanned for Starr’s truck, and saw it pulling close behind the Rhino. She hoped to God that the insufferably stupid and willful child had stayed put. She would have to find her later, but at least she’d be out of harm’s way now.
 

Kate could see that the column would break free of the herd in moments—they were halfway through already, and there were enough bodies on the ground below to distract many of the creatures from pursuit. They would continue north, leaving Kate to fend for the children herself.
 

She reached for her hip and found her pistol, laying her other hand on the long, dagger-length knife strapped to her thigh. She was down to these weapons. And after that … She would have to see. She had been on her own before.
 

In a mental asylum with deranged lunatics and an undercover spy.
 

She had survived, and she could survive again.

She
would
survive. For her daughter.

***

The thin metal door crashed inward and Kate didn’t bother to pull it shut behind her. It wouldn’t hold against the numbers of creatures coming up, and she didn’t need it to.
 

She wasn’t staying.

She needed to find the kids and keep moving.
 

The doorway led onto a thin metal walkway that led past several cheap offices. Basic metal office furniture, particleboard filing cabinets, and some dusty computers met her gaze as she scanned the offices for the kids, knowing they had kept moving. They would have known enough to not feel safe here.
 

She sure didn’t.

The walkway led to crossing pathways ahead, dead-ending in a T intersection which was open to the factory floor below. She hit the railing and looked over the edge, seeing large steel vats lining the walls—at least eight of them—on the ground floor. A thick layer of dust coated the vats and the floor below, along with some ash that had made its way through the industrial sized vents on the roof.
 

There.

Footprints.

They had gone down again. Two sets of small footprints leading behind the vats.
 

Kate turned as the door came down, the first of the pursuing creatures right behind her and gaining quickly.

Choosing the left, she bolted lengthwise down the walkway, dodging large pipes and hanging lights as she searched for a staircase. She considered hiding amongst the tangle of pipes and wires until the large group moved past, but discarded the idea, knowing that if she didn’t find those girls before these zombies did, they wouldn’t live long.
 

Ahead, a large red exit sign hung from a single wire where a door had been ripped from its hinges at some point. A smear of blood ran the length of the door frame, and Kate sped through the doorway with her eyes alert.
 

But she needn’t have worried. The blood was old and crusted through, and the carnage inside was simple. One body, the cavity below the chest ripped open and devoured. As she passed, the wizened head made a single wispy moan.

Passing through the rancid office, she saw the stairwell ahead, the door still slightly ajar from the passage of the children.
 

Behind her, she could hear the shambling footsteps on the metal grate of the walkway. Several low moans drifted through the office and followed her down the stairs, her footsteps clanging loudly on the metal.
 

She reached the ground level and paused, scanning the sides of the huge room. The large vats lined both sides, and the footprints led from the stairs into the main passageway between them. At the far end of the building—closest to where they had left the SUV—a set of large double doors stood closed, a thin chain dangling between the two latches. This was the loading dock, Kate realized, seeing the large barrels to either side, complete with destination routing labels on each.

She followed the footprints forward, deciding to risk a whisper. The creatures above had already reached the stairwell—she could hear them making their clumsy way down as she whispered loudly.

“Hey girls—you gotta come out. You can’t hide. We’ve got to get out of here, it’s not safe.”
 

Reaching the place where the footprints turned left, she branched off, moving between two large steel vats that stretched twenty feet into the air above her head.
 

“Girls—come on. We can’t wait here. Those things are everywhere. We have to…What the fuck?”
 

Kate’s mind took in the scene and immediately flashed to a memory from her childhood.
 

When she was a little girl, her grandfather used to produce a quarter from his sleeve and flash it in front of her nose. Just as quickly, he would reach up to her ear and make the coin appear to vanish. He took joy in that simple act of subterfuge, and Kate had never dared tell him that after the first time he tried it, she had gone to the library and diligently searched the card catalogue for books about magic tricks. When she had located the one that explained slight of hand tricks, it took her no time at all to determine where the coin had been going. For years, she endured the trick, humoring her good-natured grandfather even as she entered her teens.
 

Years later, when he developed alzheimer’s, she had played the trick with him, delighting him to no end for months, until the blessedly fast-acting variant of the horrid disease robbed him of the slight amount of cognition needed to find joy in the small act.
 

So Kate was no stranger to making things vanish, nor was she unfamiliar with the art of the disappearance.
 

But when the footprints simply ended behind a particularly large vat, and she was left staring at a blank wall and a maze of thickly intertwined pipes and wires on either side of the vat that no person—large or small—could fit through, she was stumped.

Dust was being kicked into the air by the dozens of creatures behind her, and she turned, shrugging her shoulders and sighing once. If this was how it was going to be, this would be it. She wasn’t going down in some podunk town—not after everything she had been through. And not surrounded by such horrible wine. It was just too much.

As the first of the large group started to stagger forward, passing the front edge of the vats, and no more than ten feet away, the soft whistle of well-oiled metal moving against metal met her ears and she heard the raspy little voice of a seven year old girl.
 

“Hey lady. In here! Quick!”

The warehouse was now the new home to nearly fifty of the creatures, their rotting and withered bodies slamming against one another as they traversed the walkways above the vats, stumbled into the stairs or got tangled in the pipes and wires that littered the building. Nearly three dozen had reached the ground floor as Kate disappeared from view behind the large vats. In such a large space, with no walls to obscure her path, there was no hiding where she had gone.

Now, as she disappeared, the zombie closest to her stumbled in confusion, its vacant eyes and rolling gait slowed by the vanishing human. It moved forward, hearing only an empty metal echo as it rounded the curve of the vat. Its dull eyes traced the wall, the pipes, and the smooth surface of the steel containers, momentarily excited about the outline of a human form that was revealed next to it. But as it reached forward and smashed its face against the human, it recoiled in surprise.