The Demented Z (Book 3): Contagion (19 page)

Hank shouted, “Go, I’ll cover.”

Abby pulled Eli back to his feet.

Tom’s rifle ran dry.
  “Keep moving.”
  He yelled while turning for the door that
Abby and Eli were just disappearing through.  
With practiced swiftness, Tom hit his mag release, dropping the empty magazine
to the floor. He ran past Hank while
slapping a fresh mag into the well and charging the rifle.
  “Leave the door.”

Hank didn’t argue, instead rushing
through the door behind Tom. It wouldn’t
slow the demented much, but he pulled the door closed anyway, giving it a hard
tug, hoping that the jam’s tightness would help hold it.
  The narrow hallway beyond was lined with doors
on each side and a grimy window at the far end.  
Outside, dark figures rushed past the window, creating long shadows that
danced across the floor with each passing.

They flew past all of the closed
doors, bunching together at the end of the hall.
  Now they stood next to the window, looking up
at a set of stairs.

“Not up, we’ll get trapped.”
  Tom said.  
As soon as the words were out he turned for the nearest door.
  There was no way to know what lay on the
other side, so he just went for it, giving the handle a turn.

Angry growls filled the break room
behind them. There was a loud
thud
at the door and then the handle
began rattling.

Tom pulled the door open and found
himself staring at row after row of shelving stacked with cleaning
equipment. He cursed and turned for the
next door. Behind him, Abby and Hank
began checking doors. Eli moved between
them, rifle raised , pointing it at the break room
door.

“This way.”
  Abby shouted.

The break room door popped open
with a
groan
of wood on wood.
  Eli’s rifle
barked
before any demented reared their ugly faces.
  The shots ripped through the thin wood
paneling, sending splinters flying into the air.
  He continued the relentless barrage.

“Go, go!”
  Eli shouted.

Abby led the way into the darkness
beyond the open door. Flashlights knifed
through the gloom, hitting on row after row of long tables.
  Fabric and sewing machines dotted the
tables. It looked as if all the employees
stood and walked out in the middle of their work day.
 
Probably
exactly what happened.

Shattering glass echoed in from the
hallway. Next came a sound they had not
heard for quite some time – huffing.  
Infected frequently used it to communicate that prey was in sight.
  For reasons none of them knew, most of the
infected had quit using it. Whichever
ones had broken out the window were now using it and
Tom knew this would not be good.

Eli fired off several shots and
then ducked into the sewing room. As
soon as he was in, Hank closed the door and clicked the lock into place.
  All of them turned toward Eli, wondering what
he had seen.

“Keep moving…pouring in the
window…break room too.” He said while
shining his flashlight all around the room.  
He dropped the magazine from his rifle and slammed in a fresh one.
  “I’m running out of ammo.”

Much of their ammo had been left in
the deuce and a half when it crashed.  
Hank and Eli had prepped backpacks with a bit of food and lots of ammo,
but that was all gone now. They only had
what they carried in vest pouches and side pockets.
  Abby pulled a pair of full
mags from pockets on her thighs and handed them to Eli.

“Thanks.”

Tom was quickly moving between a
pair of tables. He scanned the walls for
options.

There was a thunderous
boom
as demented pounded into the
door. They continued to hammer into the
door and jiggle the knob. The lock would
hold for a bit, but not long.

Between a pair of orange lockers
Tom found a dark hallway that extended to a heavy metal door.
  Through the tiny window he could see a
section of sign from the building across the street.
  He didn’t know what the red ‘E’ and ‘R’
belonged to, but it was their best shot.  
“This way.”  
He shouted to the others.

Partway down the hall there was
loud banging from inside one of the side doors.  
A brass tag on the center of the door marked it as the supervisor’s
office.

“I don’t need supervision.”
  Hank said.

“Yes you do.”
  Tom said while continuing toward the front
door.

The faint sound of splintering wood
alerted them that the sewing room door was nearing its end.

Tom peered through the small,
square window, like a tourist staring out of the porthole of a submarine at a
theme park. One the other side stretched
a wide street dotted with undead. Their
slow shuffle moved them ever onward in the same direction.
  They often tried to catch their faster
brethren and the
huffing
from earlier
likely marked their destination.

A loud
bang
followed by angry growls let them know that demented were in
the sewing room and would soon be in the hall with them if they didn’t get out
of here.
Better than nothing,
Tom thought to himself as he turned the knob
and pulled the door open.

Abby feared going back out into the streets.
  She knew demented and undead would be all
around them. Inside the building at
least gave a small amount of comfort, knowing attackers could only come from a
limited number of directions.
With little ammo we would surely be
overwhelmed
. She and Eli had been
through countless encounters since they escaped Portland together, but this was
different. It was like Portland all over
again…in the wrong direction; rather than escape, they were going in.

Without hesitation, Tom rushed outside onto the
sidewalk. A couple of the nearest undead
heard the door and footsteps. A mangled
and bloodied woman turned awkwardly toward them.
  Her neck and shoulders were a shredded mess
of blood and bone. One leg was missing
large chunks of flesh, revealing the white bone beneath.
  Favoring her good leg, she began limping
toward Tom.

“Leave them…no shots.”  
Tom said to the others while beginning to run along the sidewalk in the
direction of the supposed Echo One research facility.

Eli slammed the large metal door closed.
  He was just beginning to trail the others
when demented began pounding into the door.  
The flat steel reverberated, sending hollow
thuds
echoing up and down the street.
  Several
huffs
from all around answered the noise.

“Just keep moving.”  
Tom said.

Hank felt like he had finished a marathon.
  Whether it was his age or the sickness, his
boots were surely made of lead, dragging him down.
  His lungs were on fire, barely able to draw
enough air; he knew it wouldn’t be long before he collapsed out of exhaustion.

Tom must have noticed him faltering.
  He slowed and moved next to Hank.
  “Not much further.”
  A few strides later he added, “Three maybe
four blocks.”

Loud shrieks and growls filled the street behind them.
  Tom looked back to see demented pouring out
of the sewing company entrance. Several
of them stood still and began
huffing
into
the sky. Strange
grunts
sounded from the streets around them.
  It reminded Tom of wolves on the hunt; pack
communication, zeroing in on their prey.

Abby was easily keeping pace with the others,
her breathing was even an unlabored. It
was clear that her toned athletic body was not just for show.
  “It’s going to be one block over.”
  She said.  
“The map had it to the left at the end of that street.”

A large intersection loomed just ahead, jammed with wreckage.
  Tom could see demented rushing toward them
from beyond the cars. “At
the intersection.” Tom said
between breaths. He began cutting across
the street, trailing after Eli and Abby who were already on the way.
  “Come on old man, we’re almost there.”
  He said looking over at Hank.

One of the demented on the other side of the intersection
stopped and began
huffing
into the
sky. More responded immediately, their
shrieks, huffs, and strange bark like noises echoing from all directions.

Eli was nearly to the street corner when a demented rushed
around the building directly in front of him.  
The once businessman, wore a torn and bloodied suit.
  His cartoon tie looked ridiculous given the
circumstances. His eyes locked on Eli,
lips curling back in a vicious grimace of hatred.

“Shoot him.” Tom
shouted.

Abby already had her rifle at the ready.
  A quick trigger squeeze sent a round slamming
into Businessman’s forehead. The
tremendous boom echoed off nearby buildings.  
Businessman crumpled to the sidewalk like a ragdoll.

Tom raced up to Eli and Abby.
  “They’ve already located us…time for quiet is
gone.” He said as he rushed past.
  The others trailed in his wake.

“Right…take a right up here.”
  Abby shouted.

In front of a chain coffee shop on the corner were several
undead. They staggered slowly
ahead. Tom led the way out into the
street and around the small group. Each
of them reached out awkwardly trying to grasp at an impossibly fast prey.
  They all slowly turned in unison, like they
were doing some kind of macabre dance.

Once they made the corner, hope was in sight.
  The giant building was surrounded by a high
fence topped with concertina wire. A
windowed guardhouse sat beside the massive gate that marked the entrance.
  Several OD green Humvees sat parked on the
other side.

“There it is.” Abby
said with relief. She had doubted that
the place still existed and to see it seemed surreal.
  The thought of a desert mirage crossed her
mind. Visions of the building and all
its fencing disappearing as they neared almost made her laugh out loud.
 
Wouldn’t
that be frustrating?
She thought.

“Come on Hank, it’s right
there.” Tom said.

Abby was silently relieved that the others could see it.

The wide four lane street was lined by aged brick buildings,
patched and connected by dismal attempts at making them look like a single
structure. Some had signs detailing the
business that lied within, but most stood blank, hiding their contents.
  Many were crumbling from lack of use and
maintenance.

Infected poured into the street both ahead and behind
them. A whirlwind of growls surrounded
them. The huffs were constant, like the
din of a sports stadium after a touchdown.

Tom had been relieved when they saw on the map that Echo One
lied on the outskirts of the city. Now
he realized how naïve he had been. The
infected roamed. In a city of nearly a
million people, there would be an overwhelming number anywhere you went.
  Echo One was less than three blocks away, but
it looked like three miles. With every
demented that raced onto the street in front of them, the distance appeared to
grow.

“Don’t stop… keep moving.”
  Tom shouted.

Abby angled off the sidewalk.
  “Get to the middle.”
  She said while cutting across the pavement.

Dozens of demented flooded the street ahead.
  All Tom could think was
there are too many; there is no way we can get through them all
.
  He tried to keep telling himself that they
had been through worse, but deep down he knew it was a fabrication.
  This was as bad as the worst he and Hank had
run up against.

Several demented rushed across the pavement, heading
directly for Eli. His nerves held,
waiting for them to get closer. Once
they were just a few steps away, he raised his rifle and rattled off several
rapid shots. Each one found its target,
the bodies falling to the pavement as he ran by.

All of them joined in, sprinting full tilt down the center
of the street, firing rapidly into any demented that approached.
  The withering gunfire was holding them at
bay, but a steady stream of infected continued to pour in from side streets and
building openings. Their numbers were
staggering.

“Keep moving.” Abby
said.

“Get ready to climb the gate.”
  Tom added.

Eli fired off a rapid burst into the nearest attackers and
then shouldered his rifle. “Hit it next
to the towers…no concertina.”

Abby and Eli angled toward one tower, splitting away from
Hank and Tom racing for the opposite side of the gate.

Tom shouldered his rifle and raced
ahead of Hank. “I’ll boost you.”

Eli followed suit and boosted Abby
up to the top of the gate, making it an easy climb and flip up and over.
  Hank was a bit slower, but Tom was able to
get him high enough up the tall gate that it didn’t take him long to drop to
the pavement on the other side. Both Eli
and Tom made quick work of the gate.

Before their boots hit the ground,
demented began slamming into the gate.  
One after another they piled onto each other and like fans at a soccer
game they spread and surged until the fence became a massive wall of bodies.

At first, the four of them slowly
backed away. The sheer mass of infected
was overwhelming. They all wished there
was relief in getting to this point, but the escalating growls and flurry of
shrieks and screams weighed heavy on all of them.
  Panic and fear rose in their throats.

And then the fence toppled over.

As one, they all turned and sprinted for the towering
building. The horde that followed was
the largest any of them had seen. The
sound of so many feet pounding on the pavement could be felt in their chests, a
deep bass that had weight. There were
far more than they had bullets for. They
all knew Echo One would be the end, one way or another.

The stairs leading up to the entrance blurred by as all of
them took several steps at a time. A
flat expanse of cement led the way to a pair of glass doors.
  The building’s front lacked any kind of identifiers
other than stark white characters that read, “ST4934ZU.”

Eli was the first to reach the doors, his hand immediately
going for the handle. Locked.
  He pulled his sidearm and fired into the
glass. The round barely left a dirty
scuff.

“Hit the lock.” Hank said between labored breaths.

Tom and Abby spun back toward the gate with plans to defend
their position and slow the onslaught. It
only took a glance to see that it would be a waste of ammo.
  More than a hundred had already hit the
stairs and would be on them in seconds.

Eli fired rapidly at the silver locking mechanism on one of
the doors.   Hank un-shouldered his rifle
and joined in, pounding away at the one piece that was keeping them from
entering.

“Go, go, we gotta move.”
  Abby shouted.

Hank stopped firing.  
“Cease fire.”

Eli grabbed the door handle and gave it a hopeful jerk.
  There was a huge sense of relief when the
door popped open with a loud
clank
.
  He held it wide while everyone raced inside,
none of them knowing what to expect.

The lock was destroyed, chunks of shredded metal hung
loosely from below the large handle.  
Hank checked it over for a second and then pulled the magazine from his
rifle.

Tom looked out the glass at the horde sprinting across the
short expanse of cement that led to the door.  
“What?” He asked Hank.

Hank didn’t answer.  
He jammed his rifle between the two doors’ handles, wedging it between
the door itself and the metal loops.

Boom.
  The first of the demented slammed into the
doors. The ponytailed man had his face
shoved right up to the glass, smearing it with putrid saliva and blood.
  His red rimmed eyes glared at Hank and
Tom. His teeth gnashed hungrily at empty
air. More demented continued to pile up
behind him.

“Let’s go.” Tom
shouted over the chaotic noise.

“One sec.” Hank
said. He took the magazine he had
removed and slapped it back into the rifle’s well.

Once Tom saw what Hank had done, he was more than
impressed. The long magazine sat between
the two door handles, preventing the rifle from going either way.
  “Solid work.”

They turned around to find Eli and Abby a dozen feet away,
standing with their backs turned. Both
of them were shining flashlights down a wide hallway.

“What have we got?”  
Tom asked.

Abby looked over her shoulder.
  “Take a look.”

Both Tom and Hank stepped up next to them and got a look at
what they were seeing.
Scientists…dead scientists.  
They wore long white lab coats, smeared in stark red blood.
  A few were stacked neatly on top of one
another. They were pushed tight to the
wall like an emergency stack of firewood.  
The rest were in haphazard piles.  
Without counting, Tom guessed there were more than thirty bodies – maybe
more.

Loud
bangs
and the
groan
of stressed steel reminded all
of them that hundreds, if not thousands, of demented were piled up at the doors
just behind them.

“What the—“
  Hank started to say.

Tom charged forward.  
“Let’s move.”

The group dodged through splayed out arms and legs as they
made their way down the hall. The faint
odor of bleach hung in the air. Their
flashlights cut through the eerie darkness.  
Stark white walls gave no indication of where they needed to go.
  Everybody they passed had a ragged hole in
their skull.

As they past door after door,
moving deeper into the dark interior, they realized both how enormous the
facility was and how difficult this was going to be.
  All of them figured the tough part would be
getting here. Just how wrong they were
was becoming clear.

From behind them, an angry
boom
signaled the failure of the doors.
  The crazed howls that followed were more than
enough to terrify even the most steel nerved among them.

Abby said, “Which way?” when they came to
a four way intersection in the hall.

Eli shined his light to the left.
  “I’ve got stairs.”

Tom knew they didn’t have time to stand around.
  “Let’s go.”  
He said, spurring all of them down the left hall.

They quickly covered the distance to the stairwell door,
marked by a large blue square with unmistakable stairs pictured in white.
  The four of them slipped through the windowed
door before any of the demented hit the hall’s intersection.
  The flood of demented would slow and spread
without prey in sight. They had at least
bought some time.

After going up a set of stairs, they came to a door with a
large ‘2’ painted in yellow on the wall beside it.
  There were no other markings or information
to give away what was on the second floor.  
All of them stood staring at the door, as if they would be granted x-ray
vision if they tried hard enough.

Tom finally broke the spell.  
“Let’s go to the top…as far from them as we can get.”
  Nobody argued with that logic.
  Before starting up, he used a cylindrical
garbage can to prop the door open, figuring it would provide more space for the
flood of demented to pour into.

Eli led the way up several more
flights of stairs. At each door they
used identical garbage cans to create more overflow points.
  The building could now devour hundreds of
demented before filling to the top floor.  
After a lot of huffing and puffing by Hank and Tom, they arrived at a
cement pad that had no more stairs beyond.  
The door was marked with a large yellow ‘8.’
  This was it, the final floor…the last
hope. Unlike the others, this
rectangular window was covered by something on the other side, not allowing
them even a peek at what would greet them.  
They knew what they sought could be on any of the floors below them, but
they had to roll the dice.

Hank leaned up against the
wall. His eyes looked sunken and drained.
  His face was as pale as a blank sheet of
paper.

“Making it?”
  Tom asked him.

“I’m about done.”

“Don’t quit on us yet.”

“Quit?
  Believe me, I’ll go
out with a bang…guns blazing and all that.”

Tom nodded his head.
  “I’d expect nothing less.”

Eli grabbed the door handle and took a look at Tom, waiting
for the go ahead. Tom nodded and Eli
gave the handle a pull. With it just
inches open a sliver of light sliced into the stairwell.
  Once the door was further open there was a
loud
clang
from the other side.
  He stopped, leaving the door partially open.

“What was that?” Abby
asked.

Tom moved around to the other side and peered through the
opening. “Door was rigged…redneck alarm.”
  He said when he saw the string tied to the
crash bar. He looked back at the
others. “Lights are on.”

“Power?”
  Hank grumbled.

“Must be a generator.
  Can’t still be occupied…can it?”
  Abby said.

Tom replied, “Somebody’s adding fuel.”