The Gathering Dead (10 page)

“I guess we’ll just do it the old fashioned way.”

“If that door really is tied down on the other side, shooting away the bolt won’t help.”

“I’ll blow off the hinges.”

“Why not just pull the hinges?” Finelly asked. “I mean, they’re right there, sir. That way we get access, and we save a couple of shotgun rounds.”

McDaniels thought about it. Since the door opened out into the stairwell, the hinges were on their side. It wouldn’t take much doing with a knife to pull them free and pop the door out of the frame. He looked back at Finelly with a raised brow.

“Hmph. Guess they do teach you Night Stalkers some things after all.”

“We may be sheltered, sir, but we do have our moments.”

McDaniels snorted and pulled his knife. Just as he started getting to work on the lowermost hinge, he heard a voice through the door.

“Who dat?”

“U.S. Army Special Forces,” McDaniels said, straightening up. “Mind opening the door? Otherwise, we’ll just take it off its hinges.”

“How many a them are you?”

“Two here, nine total, spread out on the ground floor and the fifth floor.”

There was no reply. After some moments, McDaniels and Finelly heard something hit the floor on the other side of the door. Then the door was opened just a crack. A figure peered out at them from the darkness beyond.

McDaniels slowly pulled the door all the way open. “You mind if we come in?”

A short, wiry black man stood on the other side of the door, blinking against the light of the stairwell. His tightly-packed afro was dusted with gray, and a small scar ran across his broad nose. His brows knitted as he regarded McDaniels with narrowed eyes.

“Well, well. You a brother. And in uniform, even.” He looked at the insignia on McDaniels’ lapels. “And an officer?”

McDaniels nodded. “I’m a major.”

“Damn. You come to take us out of here? I guess not, since we saw your helicopter crash in the street.”

“‘We’? How many of you are there?”

The man looked from McDaniels to Finelly, then back again. “You better come inside. I got the lights off in here, so they can’t see us. Least, I hope they can’t.”

McDaniels nodded to Finelly, and stepped through the door. Finelly followed him, still covering the stairway with his MP5K until the door was closed.

The darkness on the other side was not absolute. Some lights were still on. McDaniels saw they were in a corridor that ran along one side of the building with doors at either end. The door to the stairs had been tied shut with a fire hose that was stored on a reel on the wall opposite the stairway. In the center of the corridor was another elevator bay, just like on the fifth floor, although minus the glass entry doors. He worried about that, and the short man beside him followed his gaze.

“Don’t worry bout the elevators. I got em turned off.”

McDaniels looked back at the man, and saw he wore a green uniform. The nametape on one breast read EARL in red embroidered letters on a white background. His shoes were scuffed but sturdy, and on his belt were a huge key ring and a large flashlight in a holder. At his kidney was a walkie-talkie.

“You must be Earl,” McDaniels said.

“Earl Brown. I work here. Used to work here. Well, whatever.” Earl extended his hand.

McDaniels shook the proffered hand. “I’m Cord McDaniels, and this is Sergeant Finelly.”

“How you doin, sergeant,” Earl said, and shook Finelly’s hand. Finelly smiled and nodded, trying to look as friendly as possible since he practically dwarfed the man.

“You a maintenance worker, Earl?” McDaniels asked.

Earl nodded. “Yessir. Been workin here at Verbatim for almost twenny years.”

“‘Verbatim’?”

“The name of the hedge fund group that was in this building. One of the oldest ones in the city. Used to be an investment bank, but got bought out by another bigger bank and the principals started a hedge fund. This was their building. One of the partners lived here in the Upper East Side, and he didn’t want no long commute downtown.” Earl smiled. “Me, I come across from Queens, and it takes me an hour to get here.” The smile suddenly vanished from his face, and he looked at the two soldiers before him.

“Sorry. Guess I was ramblin.”

“That’s okay,” McDaniels said. “So, the cafeteria’s on this floor?”

“Yessir, that’s right. You gen’lmen hungry?”

McDaniels smiled. “You know Earl, now that you mention it, I think I’m
damned
hungry.”

Earl smiled, revealing a large set of nicotine stained teeth. “Den you came to the right place.”

###

The lights were on in the kitchen, and they were bright and antiseptic. The main serving area was empty, but there were stocked refrigeration units filled with soda, tea, milk, and specialty drinks, as well as ready-made sandwiches and takeaway meals that the sign declared were “Grab-N-Gos”. On both sides of the area were serving stations with refrigerators under the counters; Finelly walked behind one and notified McDaniels he had found the sandwich station.

“Complete with roast beef, salami, tuna, turkey, you name it,” he said.

“Bread too,” Earl added. “An all the condiments a man might want.” He swung an arm wide, indicating the rest of the kitchen. “We got a grill, we got a pizza station with ovens, we got a sushi station if you like eatin dead fish, we got Fryolators, we got gas ranges, we got ovens big enough to cook turkeys in, we got chips, cakes, pies, fries, cookies, gifelte fish... whatever you want, it’s here.”

McDaniels nodded appreciatively. “You certainly have everything laid out, Earl.”

The praise seemed to please the small maintenance worker, and he smiled and nodded. McDaniels caught a whiff of tobacco clinging to the man’s green uniform.

“So who else is up here? You said ‘we saw your helicopter crash’.”

Earl shuffled his feet a bit, head held low. For a moment, McDaniels wasn’t sure he was going to answer, and he wondered why that was.

“Just me... and my two daughters,” he said finally, his voice so low that McDaniels barely understood the reply.

Daughters. Ah.
That explained the reluctance on the maintenance worker’s part, and McDaniels didn’t blame him for being cautious. After all, it seemed the world had just ground to a halt, and a responsible father had to be mindful of his children. Always.

“I see. Well, at least you have your kids with you, Earl. Might not be the best place in the world for them, but at least you know they’re safe for the moment, right?”

Earl didn’t look up, only shrugged. “If’n you can call this safe.”

“It’s definitely better than being on the streets,” Finelly said, walking out from behind the sandwich station. “Take it from us, we drove from the west side to Central Park, and look where we wound up.”

Earl looked up at Finelly and favored him with a thin smile. “Yeah, I guess so. You boys hungry? I can start the grill or somethin’, I guess.”

McDaniels’ radio crackled. “Six, this is Gartrell, over.”

“Excuse me for just a second,” he said to Earl, then half-turned away from him and pressed his microphone button. “Five, sorry about that. We’re on twenty-seven, and have made contact with an individual who is up here in the cafeteria. He says he’s with two dependents, though I have not seen them yet. What’s the SITREP from your end? Over.”

“Zeds are still massing outside, but they don’t seem very directed at the moment. Can’t really keep eyes on them all the time, but it appears they’re just milling around in the street. Maybe attracted by the lights, Lord knows the lobby is bright enough with all that white marble. Any news from USASOC? Over.”

“Roger, news from USASOC. Break, Leary, you listening in?”

Sergeant Leary transmitted after a brief delay. “Yessir, listening in. Over.”

“Good. Here’s the deal: Rapier is looking for an aviation asset that can haul us out of here. The assembly area at Central Park was completely overrun by the zeds, and all the aircraft are a write-off. Lots of aviation units are repositioning, but no one’s in reach right now. I’m supposed to get back with them in an hour. Leary, how are the Safires doing? Over.”

“About as well as can be expected, major. Scared stiff, like the rest of us, but coping for the moment, over.”

“Five, the twenty-seventh floor seems pretty defensible. The maintenance man up here says he has the elevators turned off, and the cafeteria seems to have its own controlled exits separate from the fire escape door. We might be better off up here, over.”

“Roger that, Six. We should still keep someone on overwatch in the stairwell, though. Wouldn’t advise we keep them on the ground floor, since support would have to cover twenty-seven stories in case something goes bad, over.”

“Understood. Let us check out the rest of this floor up here, and we’ll figure out how to play it. McDaniels, out.” McDaniels turned back to Earl. “Mind showing us around the rest of the floor, Earl?”

“Sure, no problem. Follow me.”

The small maintenance worker led them through the serving area and into the kitchen in back, where everything seemed to be made from stainless steel. Cooking ranges sat dormant. There was a walk-in freezer built into one wall, and a walk-in refrigerator in the other, both well-stocked. Cookware had been put away neatly; whatever had befallen the city had done so when the building was shut down for the day. McDaniels realized it was Sunday, and the order to evacuate Safire hadn’t come to him until Saturday morning. So the building was very likely unoccupied.

As Earl led them out of the kitchen, McDaniels asked, “Earl, what were you doing here over the weekend?”

“My shift is Wednesday through Sunday nights,” Earl said. “When things started to go bad, I was already here. Had no place else to go, and it was just me and Artie Johnson and the two security guys in the lobby. Everyone else left. I stayed back.”

“Why was that?”

“Because my family was nearby, and they came here when I called ‘em. We was gonna go north, but we got caught here.”

Beyond the kitchen was the dining area itself, a fairly expansive area that took up most of the available space on the floor. Dominated by floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked the city (parts of which were still lit up, McDaniels noticed) and dozens of tables and long booths, the cafeteria could easily hold almost 300 people. After coming from the brightly-lit kitchen, the cafeteria itself was dark and gloomy, illuminated only by a few lights. Earl turned to McDaniels and Finelly and held one finger to his lips as they walked through the semi-dark area. McDaniels saw why. Sprawled across one booth were two figures beneath coats, their legs and feet visible in the tepid light. Earl’s daughters.

“We’re going to take a quick look around, if you don’t mind,” McDaniels told Earl. He nodded to Finelly, and the big sergeant turned and headed for the far side of the cafeteria, his feet whispering across carpet and linoleum tile alike.

“Sure, go ahead,” Earl said.

McDaniels smiled and nodded, then headed off in the opposite direction Finelly had taken. There wasn’t a great deal to see. The cafeteria had been closed, cleaned, and readied for a working week that would never come. McDaniels checked around for any indication someone other than Earl had been on the floor, and there was nothing to say that there had been. McDaniels slowly walked toward one window and looked out over the city. The windows faced Central Park, and he saw the glow of fire there, and more noxious smoke roiling into the air. It looked to him that one or more of the helicopters at the assembly area had caught on fire, and the jet fuel that propelled them was burning bright and strong. Several buildings in the area still had power, and if he looked hard enough, McDaniels saw survivors had hung signs outside the windows:

4 TRAPPED, PLEASE SEND HELP!

SINGLE MOTHER WITH TWO YOUNG CHILDREN, PLEASE HELP!

SOS SOS SOS WE’RE TRAPPED SOS SOS SOS

GOD IS PUNISHING US

Through the windows in some buildings which were still illuminated, figures moved. McDaniels didn’t reach for his binoculars to get a better look. From the shambling, roiling gait most of them exhibited, he knew the figures were deadheads moving about aimlessly in their search for human flesh. Hundreds in the buildings and, when he looked down, thousands in the brightly-lit streets.

He finished checking the rest of the floor, including the restrooms. The lights flicked on automatically when he stepped inside, blinding him momentarily. He checked the stalls and found nothing. On impulse, he checked for running water by waving his hand under the sensor in one of the sinks. Warm water came forth immediately. At least that hadn’t changed.

He rejoined Finelly, who stood near the table Earl sat at. His daughters continued to sleep in the booth across from where the he sat, looking at them with sad, weary eyes.

My daughter, take my daughter!

Again, the image of the woman on the street, clutching the toddler to her chest. If he had reached across Safire and thrown open the door, could he have saved mother and daughter before the zeds got them? If he’d allowed the hard curtain of discipline he hid his emotions behind to drop for just that one instant, could he have made a difference?

My daughter, take my daughter!

Stop it, lady.

Finelly turned and looked at him oddly. “Sir?”

McDaniels realized he’d whispered the last thought aloud. He rubbed his eyes tiredly and waved the comment away.

“Never mind, sergeant.” He looked at Earl. “Earl? The zombie in the stairway?”

Earl nodded. “Yeah... that was Mr. Walsford. He was the CEO. Hard-workin’ cat, always here late at night and early in the mornin’. I went out to the stairway to have a smoke, and all a sudden he comes runnin’ up the stairs lookin’ to eat some brains.” Earl snorted humorlessly. “Course, mine wouldn’t be more’n a snack.”

“You’re a lucky guy,” Finelly said.

Earl shrugged. “Don’t know ‘bout dat. I was already done and heard his footsteps when he started runnin’ up from the 25th floor. That’s where his office was. Musta just pushed open the fire door there and got into the stairway. Guess he smelt the smoke and came up.”