Salvation: Secret Apocalypse Book 5 (A Secret Apocalypse Story) (2 page)

And I realize I
am not dreaming.

I realize that…

This.

Is.

Real.

And I am in
pain. And the pain is freaking excruciating. And the pain is real.

I am
disorientated and confused and I’m thinking way too much. And my thoughts are
real and terrifying. And dead people don’t think like this, do they?

No. There’s no
way.

My watch beeps
three times.

And I can’t believe how hard I am breathing. How hard my head is
throbbing.

The watch says
fifty-three hours and fifty nine minutes. And the clock is ticking and I need
to get a move on.

I re-read the
message that the man in the gas mask left for me.

He wrote it on a
piece of paper that Kenji had folded into an origami crane.

The whole world
will look

for
a
girl to save their souls.

They will watch
hope die.

This is a
powerful message. It tells me what the man in the gas mask plans to do.

He is going to
kill Maria on camera. He is going to record it and broadcast it and show the
world.

He is going to
terrify everyone across the globe.

He says he wants
to set them free.

He says this
because he is insane. He says this because he is a mass-murdering psychopath.

I am lying on my
back and I scrunch up the piece of paper and throw it into the corner of the
room.

And I want to
get up. But I can’t.

So I close my
eyes.

And more time
disappears forever.

But then there’s
a thump at the door. The scratching of fingernails.

And maybe this
is the motivation I needed.

The
infected are banging on the door. They know I am here.
They are coming for me.

And I tell
myself, I am ready to die.

I tell myself I
am ready for hell.

I am ready for
the fight.

“I am ready.”

Let’s do this.

The wooden door begins to splinter.

And I can’t help but wonder, “How the hell do they know I’m here?”

The Oz virus is designed to find life.

Find life and destroy it. Consume it.

Feed.

Spread.

Repeat.

The watch beeps. It beeps on the hour, every hour. I have less than
fifty-four hours, less than three days left and the door is beginning to
splinter. The lock is beginning to break. The handle is coming loose.

Carved into the
door is another message.

Another haiku of
horror.

So how will you
live,

when
you
have three days to die?

The gods do not
hear.

I ignore the message left by the man in the gas mask. I ignore his scare
tactics and I finally get to my feet. I jam the table against the door. It’s
the only thing I can do to stop the infected from barging in here and tearing
me limb from limb and eating me alive.

The door and the lock and the handle continue to break. Bit by bit. The
door is now open a crack. And now they can see me. They moan louder. They growl
and snap their jaws.

They will eventually break through. I don’t have the energy to keep them
out for much longer.

I quickly scan the room. My brain is slow and sluggish and I can barely
think and I have no idea how I am going to get out of this room. This concrete
box. This prison.

The mirror.

It is not made of concrete. It is made of glass.

I can break the glass.

This is my brain on sedatives. Stupid. Slow. Sluggish. But I realize I
only have one option. I need to break the mirror and climb into the next room
and then deal with the seven years bad luck.

The mirror covers the entire wall and I can see my reflection.

And this is what I see. I see that I am struggling. My hair is still
short. They shaved my hair when I arrived at the New Zealand quarantine
facility. All those months ago. And now as a result, it’s grown into this
weird, messy, pixie cut. My hair is unbelievably dirty and greasy and it
matches the state of my skin. And my clothes.

I have bags under my bloodshot eyes.

I have this strange, sad, pathetic look of desperation on my face. It’s
a look that says, “I don’t want to die. Not yet. Not here. Not in a room. In a
prison within a prison. I don’t want to die alone.”

This is what my face says.

And what I want is; I want to live. I want to save Maria from the man in
the gas mask, the psychopath who drugged me and injected me with a time release
nano-swarm.

The psychopath who has sentenced me to death.

The psychopath who is going to kill Maria. Record it. Show the world.
Like a terrorist.

He wants to destroy hope. He wants to spread fear.

He wants to burn the old Empires. Create a new world.

A better, stronger world.

I need to stop this maniac.

I need to deal with my impending death.

But first, I need to find my friends. I need to
believe
my friends are alive.

I tell myself, “They are alive.”

So I need to break the mirror and jump into the next room and keep
moving. But how? How the hell am I supposed to break the mirror? I have my
entire body weight pushed against the table that is pushed up against the
broken door.

My weight.

The table.

The broken door.

These are the only things keeping me alive at the moment.

The infected snap their jaws. And their teeth clack together.

They are biting the air because they want to bite me.

I dig my shoes into the smooth concrete floor. The rubber soles take a
firm grip. I slide my back down against the door so I am almost sitting down. I
stick one leg out to reach for one of the chairs that are situated near the
middle of the room. The tip of my shoe brushes against the leg of the nearest
chair. But I can’t reach it. I try again and I end up kicking the chair further
away. I twist my body, keeping one shoulder against the door. The infected are
relentless. The door opens further but not enough for them to get in, just
enough to send them into a frenzy, to rile them up even more.

One of them squeezes half a shoulder and half their arm through the gap.
They reach through the gap. It reaches out for me. Its fingers graze my hair.

I ignore it. I focus.

I reach out to the chair. I
hook
my foot around
the leg and drag it over.

I grab the chair and stand up, keeping my weight against the door.
Pushing harder. Pushing so hard I hear the bones in the infected man’s arm
snap. Despite the broken bones it still moves and thrashes around. It is still
reaching out for me. It does not feel pain.

I have the chair in my left hand. My right shoulder is pinned against
the door. I swing the chair back and forth, building momentum. Building speed.
Building force.

Force = Speed x Weight.

Another documentary. More long lost information.

I throw the chair and it smashes the mirror and the glass shatters and I
now have a way out and I now have seven years bad luck.

But I don’t care about the bad luck.

Things can’t get any worse right now so I just don’t care.

I.

Just.

Don’t.

Care.

Now for the hard part.

I need to run to the mirror and jump into the next room. Once I start
running, once my weight is no longer pushed up against the door, the infected
will barge in. They will chase. With single minded aggression and unimaginable
ferocity, they will chase.

I won’t have long. Seconds maybe.

I prepare myself for this.

For the chase.

For the flight.

I take a deep breath.

I move away from the door.

I run towards the mirror.

I don’t make it.

Not before the door flies open and practically flies off its hinges. The
door shatters and splits in half and splinters into bits of kindling. I take
two big steps towards the mirror, towards the next room.

But I don’t make it.

The infected barge in. One infected man. He was too close.

He.

It.

Whatever.

It was too close.

I realize in an instant that I am not going to make it. Not unless I
fight back.

But I have no weapons.

The infected man, the one that was reaching through the gap in the door,
the one that had brushed his hand against my hair, my pixie cut, the one with
the arm that was surely broken, a man who was a soldier in a former life, runs
at me, sprints at me. It wants to eat me. He wants to eat me. The Oz virus
wants to spread. It has this primordial, primeval need to spread, to consume
and eat.

And I have no weapons.

There is broken glass. Mirrored glass.

I see a large triangle of sharp jagged glass, and as I am running for
the next room, I bend down and pick it up, cutting the palm of my right hand in
the process. The glass is so sharp, it slices my skin easily and effortlessly
and instantly. I don’t feel any pain. If I didn’t see the blood, I would never
have known I’d been cut.

As I raise the piece of glass up, blood drips down the length of my
forearm.

The infected man is almost on top of me.

Everything is happening in super slow motion, like my mind has realized
I’m about to die a horrible death and it’s soaking up these last few seconds of
existence, not taking this moment or anything for granted.

The infected man’s hands are now on me. That’s how close he is.

His jaw is wide, wide open. It’s so wide open, I think to myself, that
his jaw has to be dislocated. It has to be broken.

But it’s not. His jaw clamps shut. Snaps shut. Inches from my face.

The clack of teeth makes me flinch and the hair on the back of my neck
stands up and I have goose bumps. I think to myself that maybe the only worse
sound in the world is fingernails on a chalkboard. But then again, maybe not.

The infected man is still coming forward. Still charging. All of his
weight and all of his strength and energy is directed at my body.

The virus is so pure. Pure death. And this is perhaps its greatest
advantage. It is not complicated. And it is never distracted. It wants and
needs one thing.

Food.

Hosts.

It needs to spread.

It causes aggression. Single-minded aggression.

The Oz virus is simple and pure and deadly.

And this infected man is almost on top of me.

He wants to feed on me.

He wants to eat me.

He is running and moving faster than humanly possible.

Doctor Hunter, or was it Doctor West? One of those guys said that the Oz
virus stimulates the adrenal glands. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it
sure as hell looks like it.

Anyway, the speed, the weight, the force.

This actually works in my favor.

The shard of glass in my hand is a knife. And his force, his weight, his
speed, allows the glass shard to slide into his eyeball, right into his brain.

It also slices the hell out of my palm in the process, and I finally
feel pain.

And the pain lets me know that I am alive and that I am not infected.

Not yet.

I let go of the piece of glass because I can no longer physically hold
it. It is stuck into the infected man’s eye socket, into his skull and brain.
The infected man goes limp but his weight and the force of the collision
carries us into the next room. We flip up and over the window sill where the
mirror used to be.

I land on broken glass.

The infected man is on top of me and I am cut up and bleeding and I can
feel pain.

It is excruciating.

But I keep moving.

If I stop for a second, to catch my breath, to check my injuries, to
stop the bleeding, I am dead. I roll the infected man off me, and I jump to my
feet. I cut my hand up even more on the glass on the floor.

I ignore the pain and the blood.

I keep moving.

More infected pour into the interrogation room, they jump through the
window where the one way mirror used to be. One of them jumps through and falls
over. They thrash around on the floor, around on the glass, like a shark out of
water. One of them gets jagged on a large piece of glass as they jump through
the window. The piece of glass was protruding from the window sill. The shard
of glass pierces his abdomen, slicing his stomach open. He is stuck in the
window sill, guts falling out onto the floor.

And I keep moving.

I get to the door and I try and open it with my right hand because I
always open doors with my right hand. I have never had to think about this
before. But I can’t open the door because my hand is covered in blood. I can’t
grip the handle.

I use my left hand and I finally open it.

The door opens up into a corridor.

To my left the corridor is empty. It is a long, long corridor. I can’t
see the end of it. A long line of fluorescent lights flicker on and off. The
corridor is so massively long that I can’t see the end of it and it eventually
disappears into darkness.

I look to my right. To my right is a crowd of infected people. A horde.
A swarm. I can feel their energy. It is simply incredible.

The horde is a mix of soldiers and research scientists and civilians. I
tell myself in that instant I need to stop thinking about what these people
used to be. I can’t think of them as soldiers or civilians or people. Because
they are not people. Not anymore. They are infected. They are zombies. They are
the living dead.

I can’t afford to give them my sympathy, but I am only human and I can’t
help it.

The former soldiers and scientists and civilians are all trying to
squeeze through the door into the interrogation room at once. The door that I was
just barricading with a table and my body weight. The sheer number of infected
people and the narrow area of the corridor and the doorway have created a
bottleneck.

But then they see me.

And I turn and run into the next room. And we’re going to rinse and
repeat. We are going to do this all over again.

For a second, a split second, a nano-second, I think, what’s the point?

There’s too many of them.

There is nowhere to run.

Nowhere to hide.

No escape.

I am underground. I am trapped.

I am trapped in a prison within a prison.

I am surrounded by the infected.

For a split second, I think about giving up, leaving the door open,
letting them in, giving myself to them, to the Oz virus. But then I walk
through the door. I enter the room. The doorway leads to an office. The room
looks like it belonged to someone important. There is a desk. It has paper
strewn all over it. A computer. A bookshelf full of files and folders. Two
chairs in front of the desk.

And crouching behind the desk, is a man.

He sort of looks like a businessman. He is wearing a white, long sleeved
shirt. A black tie.

He looks middle aged.

Why the hell is he wearing a tie?

The top button of his shirt is undone, his tie is loose, like he’s had a
rough day at the office.

“Shut the door!” he says. “Lock it!”

I do as he says. I do it quickly. I shut the door. I lock the door.

“Did they see you?” he asks.

I nod my head.

“How many?”

“Too many,” I answer.

“The door has a dead lock. It should hold them for a minute or two.”

“Maybe less,” I say.

I push my weight into the door.

And I know it won’t hold for long.