The Rising Dead (29 page)

It’s amazing how quickly you can adjust to the worst of circumstances,
Parker observed to himself as they shuffled blindly along under the earth. He thought about how his mind blocked out the smell of cologne shortly after he put it on, a lesson he'd learned the hard way in high school.
It’s too bad that the eyes don’t adjust as well as the nose does.

Within a short distance, they'd come to a major intersection which entered the aqueduct and turned left. They followed it. A frigid breeze whooshed past them as they walked on in silence, quickly losing all track of time and distance. The partial darkness did that to you. Shadow light turned things around and distorted them until the imagination began to fill in the blanks, projecting a mix of your inner fears and expectations on the world around you. Down there, a sudden rush of water sounded like the clumsy, drunken scuffle of the undead, hunting you down, coming to feast on your warm flesh and salty blood.

Please let me make it out of here alive,
Max thought.
I’d sacrifice anything for just one peaceful day alone.

Given the level of stress and fear they were all experiencing at that moment, imagination was not really their friend anymore. Parker knew they had to be quiet, they had to just keep their heads down and keep moving no matter what, but still he was glad when Max finally broke their silence. The sound of her voice broke the terrible spell his mind had lulled him into, with one dreadful and impossible image after another popping into his head over and over. Judging by the immediate reaction of everyone else, he knew he was not alone in his thinking.

“How much farther is it?” Max whined.

“I don't see the cross street yet,” Gunner said, holding the bright red flare to the wall to check for markings. “It should be labeled.”

“Then we need to keep walking,” Parker's deep, stern voice echoed all around them.

“Don't worry,” Gunner said. “It shouldn't be long now.”

“I can't believe all this time they've been living underneath us,” Max said.

“I know what you mean,” Parker replied. “Did you see their faces when we passed through? There must have been...”

“...thousands of them,” Max said in a voice little louder than a whisper.

“We need to keep the chatter to a minimum,” Gunner cautioned. “We don't want to attract any unwanted attention to ourselves, now do we?”

As if on cue a low, deep growl sounded nearby, echoing around them until it was hard to tell which direction it had come from . . . in front of or behind them.

“Too late for that,” Max said in her usual abrasive tone. “Listen.”

Splashing water sounds reached them from somewhere in the distance, accompanied by an echoing crash. Everyone froze dead in their tracks, holding their breath. What felt like minutes ticked by as they stood rooted in place. Parker couldn't take it anymore. He felt like he was going to jump out of his skin if he didn't say something.

“Maybe they left?” he whispered.

“Not likely,” Gunner chimed in.

There was another sound close by, like the scraping of feet, followed by the same terrifying growl.

“It sounds like it's coming from behind us,” Max said.

As they argued, Flynn walked out into the light, foam dripping from his snarling mouth. His eyes glowed an evil, blood-drenched red, reflecting the meek light of the road flare. His left ear had been bitten off, and a small chunk of flesh about the size and shape of a bite wound marked his left cheek down to the white of the bone. The visible skin of his arms was a tattered mess of ragged flesh, shredded by countless teeth marks as if a pack of wild animals had set upon him. There was no mistaking him this time. He was definitely one of them.

“Flynn,” Parker said, unable to hide a note of disappointment in his voice.

Flynn turned to face him. Was that recognition Parker saw? Did he know who they were? Was some part of him trapped inside the remains of his former body, silently screaming in protest as his dark passenger drove him to commit unspeakable acts of depravity in the service of a bottomless hunger? It was too terrible to contemplate. Parker immediately pushed it from his mind.

If any sign of intelligence was still left in him it was quickly extinguished as he opened his bloody mouth and roared a fierce cry before lunging at Max. Max stood frozen in fear. She wasn't expecting it. She was far from ready to battle one of her neighbors boyfriends to the death. Cold shivers ran through her as she realized this was how she was going to die. Everything seemed to slow down, the numbness reaching down into the core of her being. Max tensed up, ready for the bite, accepting the terrible fate that awaited her, when a loud crack rang out in her ears.

Gunner pulled his gun and pointed it directly at Flynn's head. One minute Flynn was there, a horrible nightmare come to life ready to take all meaning out of the world, and the next he was gone, a twitching corpse lying in the filth with most of its head blown clean off. The smell of the smoke lingered in the air around them, an acrid and sickly sweet cloud of spent gunpowder. The booming echo rolled through the tunnels and off into the distance. Max's ears were ringing. Everything grew silent again--too quiet, as if people were waiting in the darkness to make their move. Max realized she'd been holding her breath. She let go a rattling exhale. Her bladder screamed at her and she suddenly understood just how close she'd been to pissing her pants in that moment of fear and panic.

“I thought we were out of ammo,” Parker said.

“We are now,” Gunner said. “I always save one bullet just in case I need to use it on myself. Figured saving your pretty little girlfriend was a far more worthy cause. That okay with you?”

“Thank you,” Max said, holding her ringing ear.

“How did he get in here?” Holt demanded. “Are we back underneath Thunderdome?”

“How should I know?” Gunner countered. “All any of us can do at this point is guess.”

“Okay, then guess,” Parker responded.

“Maybe he wandered out behind the apartments and found the run off that leads to the sewers,” Gunner said. “He'd have to climb down in to get here. I know that. Maybe he was chasing some poor victim.”

“Damn,” Parker said, looking down at the now still corpse. “He was a good guy. He didn't deserve to die like this.”

“Like any of us deserve this?” Max sounded tired, worn down. She looked sick with fear. Parker turned and stared at her, but didn't respond. What could he say? She was right. They didn't deserve this hell.

“Wait a minute,” Holt said, pacing back and forth. “These tunnels could literally be swarming with zombies by now. Think about it. That old guy with the beard said they get a lot of traffic, workers coming and going all the time.”

Parker took the flare from Gunner's hand.

“Hey,” Gunner protested.

“I need to borrow this,” Parker said.

He turned and hurled the flare behind them like he was chucking the ball around at practice to an outfielder. The glowing stick toppled end over end for over a hundred feet. It came to rest with an echoing thud and rolled to a stop at the foot of a large, angry looking man in an Arizona Diamondbacks jersey who was missing most of his lower jaw. There must have been at least twenty of them, packed tight in the darkness, thrashing and clawing around him, some hissing, some moaning. The baseball fan screamed and the undead behind him swarmed past him toward them. Max let out a loud gasp.

“Run!” Parker cried out. They turned and fled in panic. They were trapped in a never ending network of concrete tunnels. If that horde caught up with them there would be no way to fight them off.

Gunner stood his ground, pulling the magazine and confirming it was empty. He didn't need the quick search he conducted to tell him he was out of ammo, but as a force of habit he did it anyway. He'd have to do this the hard way - hand to hand. A wiry girl with glasses hanging from her torn right ear ran past him, hissing. Gunner turned and ran at her, kicking her legs out with one quick sweep. She flailed and crashed head first into the wall with her momentum. Gunner was on top of her in seconds, holding her by the head to keep her gnashing teeth away from himself.

“No you don't!”

His right hand came free as a tangle of her dirty hair ripped free from the scalp. Gunner leaped up in surprise as she twisted her neck almost a hundred and eighty degrees, snapping at him in frustration. His boot came down on her face, smashing in her cheek bones and nose. He could feel the sickening crunch under his foot and it gave him a warm feeling inside. He brought his foot down on her face several more times as hard as he could, until eventually he felt her skull give. Looking down he could see her brain matter made of writhing gray foam and oily, black slime leaking out the back of her cracked head like a rotten egg. She stopped fighting. Her arms fell limp to her sides.

“Gunner!” Parker cried somewhere off in the distance. “Hurry!”

The others were almost on him. For a split second, Gunner had the urge to stay and fight them, one on one, until he'd killed every last one.

You could do it,
a little voice told him.
This is what you’ve been trained to do--to protect and kill.
He was fully aware that he couldn't just leave those kids alone and unprotected. Who knew what horrors they were already stumbling upon without him?

Gunner bolted up and ran at full speed down the tunnel, praying he wouldn't catch on anything and fall or run head first into a wall, the way the zombie he killed had. In less than a minute he’d caught up with them. They were at a locked gate, fumbling, trying to pick it.

“This is the one,” Parker said frantically. “This leads up to the Strip.”

“Get out of the way,” Gunner said, out of breath. “I got this.”

“You gonna shoot it off?” Max asked.

“No,” Gunner said, fishing around in his pocket with his left hand as his right hand examined the lock. It was a Master Lock 5.
Perfect
, he thought. He pulled out two thin strips of metal.

“I told you. I'm out of bullets so we're going to have to work fast,” Gunner said.

“Mister Apocalypse is unarmed? Unbelievable.”

“Mister Apocalypse?” Gunner chuckled as he fed one strip of metal into the keyhole and pulled it hard to the left. “I like that.”

“What are you doing?” Holt asked as Gunner shoved the other strip of metal into the lock and began shimmying it back and forth.

“I'm popping this lock,” Gunner said. “Should take me about three seconds with this brand.” Gunner turned his head to look past Max. The horde was closing in on them.

Stay calm,
he reminded himself.
In a life or death situation, the people that panic are always the first to die.

Gunner felt a sharp click as the shackle was released. He yanked down and the lock popped open.

“You are never unarmed when you have a strong mind,” Gunner said.

Max gave him a sneer as she passed. Parker and Holt quickly followed. Gunner went last, pulling the gate shut just as the remaining swarm arrived. Cold fingers scratched at his skin as he clicked the gate into place. The Diamondbacks fan screamed in anger as he threw himself head first at the steel, marking his gray skin with a waffle pattern from the bars. Gunner wasted no time administering a well-placed kick that caught the big guy square in the face full force and sent him tumbling back with a splash.

“Not today, hombre,” Gunner said with a grin. He turned and followed the rest of the gang up the embankment that lead to a trickle of daylight.

CHAPTER THIRTY

For a short while, it seemed like they had locked themselves into a concrete prison with no escape. The only way out to the street above was through a tiny grate cemented in place. Parker cursed at himself freely for taking them all to what appeared to be a dead end, and no one came to his defense. In the end, it was Max who realized that a small tunnel set in the side of the boxy room, originally intended for the engineers, was large enough to crawl through on their hands and knees and eventually lead to a runoff ditch. They came out in a cluster of red berry bushes down from the Luxor, emerging from under the world to a nightmare landscape of unimaginably hellish proportions.

Holt spoke first.

“You're looking pretty hot right now,” Holt said. “And you're not even my type.”

“You're a guy,” Max chided him. “Every girl is your type under the right circumstances--and I would say the end of the world as we know it is the right damn setting.”

“He's right though,” Parker said. “You kinda look amazing right now.” He expected her to lash out at him the way she usually did, but instead she smiled wider.

“Thanks,” Max replied. “You're not so bad yourself, stud.”

“Look alive, people,” Gunner yelled. “We've got incoming,”

They came out from every direction. It looked like the line of undead stretched all the way down to Treasure Island.

“Looks like you're zombie walk was a big success after all,” Parker teased. “Record turn out I'd say. I kinda wish Travis could see this. He'd be so impressed.”

“We need to get someplace safe fast,” Max said.

Gunner glanced across the way at the wedding chapel. There was a clear path right to it. If they ran now, they might be able to make it before the dead swallowed them up like the rising tide.

“The chapel. Over there. We can still make it,” he said, “if we hurry.”

“This is gonna be close,” Holt warned. “Let's go!”

Without another word they all took off running, breaking off into a mad dash for survival. Max was the first to pull ahead. Holt and Parker followed behind her. Gunner hung back to make sure they weren't picked off.

“Keep moving,” Gunner yelled as he saw Max slow down.

There was a work truck in the middle of the street. Max stopped and pulled a machete off the back of it. A fresh zombie raced out in the street to greet her, but she hacked off its head with a wide, sweeping blow from her right hand. By the time Holt and Parker reached the corpse there was nothing left to do but kick it over.