The Zombie Chronicles - Book 6 - Revelation (Apocalypse Infection Unleashed Series) (32 page)

“
Why haven’t you guys left?” Kate frantically asked. “You didn’t have to wait for us.”

“
We’re locked in!” somebody shouted.

“
Don’t worry. I’ve got a keycard,” I said. I pushed past the crowd of people and tried to slide my card. A series of beeps followed, but the door would not open, no matter how many times I tried. My heart thudded against my ribcage out of sheer desperation. So many lives were on the line, and I couldn’t get the stupid plastic card to cooperate.

“
What’s happening?” somebody asked.

“
I-I don’t know. It’s been working all this time,” I said. I tried again and again, with the same result: the true definition of insanity. As the red lights flashed, casting an eerie crimson glow over the entire corridor, I feared I was losing my mind, and I feared all of us might lose our lives. I wanted nothing more than to get out of this place.

Finally, a tall, skinny man gripped my shoulder. “Just give up, kid. It’s not gonna work.”

“
How do you know?” I asked.

“
Because I short-circuited it.”

I shot him a confused look. “What!?” I yelled. “Why would you do that?”

“
Because before you got here,
they
showed up for the party!”

I peeked through the glass and saw a dozen men with high-powered rifles and handguns. Our captors were there to clean house. Their grand experiment had gone out of control, and they were ready to take us out, one way or another.

“
I know another way out,” I said. “C’mon!”

Kate, Asia, and a few others followed me. Thinking quickly, I ran back to the original white, metal door I’d come through not too far away. Unfortunately, my card wouldn’t work there either.

“
That guy must’ve short circuited all the locks, Dean,” Asia said.

“
Maybe I can fix it,” I said.

I then ran to the control room and tried to tinker with the wiring, to no avail. When I realized that was pointless, I ran back to the crowd. Whatever that man had done, the damage couldn’t be fixed by my hands. When I ran into Kate, she was arguing with man that had locked us in.

“
How did you know which wires to mess with?” Kate asked the man.

“
I’m an electrician.”

“
So…you locked them out and us in?” I asked. “How’s that gonna do us any good?”

“
They were gonna storm this place,” he said. “I had to do something!”

A woman screamed, and when I turned, I saw why: Three white-eyed Rottweilers were rushing up the corridor in our direction. I pulled out my gun, took aim, and let off three shots, and the devil dogs whimpered and fell to the ground.

When another person shrieked, and I glanced over my shoulder. A laboratory monkey had bitten into a woman’s neck and latched on with its teeth. Birds were flying overhead, squawking in a most unnatural chorus, and rats were nibbling at a man’s ankles. Being careful not to shoot the woman, I landed a bullet in the monkey’s head, and it toppled to the ground without another sound; even though it was dead, the woman’s husband began kicking it over and over again.

“
Somebody let the animals loose,” I said, horrified.

“
We’re expendable,” a woman said. “They’re trying to kill us!”

“
Do you really think they’d go to all the trouble of catching infected animals, only to let them out?” a man asked.

“
This woman’s bleeding!” somebody shouted. “She’s been bitten.”

“
Then she’s zombie bait,” a man shouted quite uncaringly. “Shoot her.”

Chapter 32

Absolute mayhem broke out as the room rang with shouts, screams, curses, and those high pitched alarms and flashing red lights. The bitten woman shrieked, and her husband threw a punch at the man who’d so callously given her a death sentence. As the fight ensued, more animals ran past us, some attacking as they went. A German shepherd gnawed on a man’s arm, while a squeaky group of mice scampered up a woman’s leg, all the way to her face. Others tried to help her swat them off, but she screamed in agony as the things bit into her face and neck.

Meanwhile, I fired at the crazed canine and shot it right between the eyes. The man kicked the German shepherd away while holding his arm, trying to stop the bleeding, and a frail woman ran over to help him apply pressure to his fresh wound.

Another hellish hound inched its way toward Kate and Asia. The mutt’s head hung at an unnatural angle as it snarled. The creature bared its teeth, and a ghoulish growl rumbled from the depths of its soulless core. I could have sworn I was staring at the devil himself. Just as it bounded through the air on powerful legs, I fired and watched it drop to the ground.

A black cat with razor-sharp teeth screeched as it buried its feline fangs into the flesh of a short woman. I wanted to help, but two men pushed me out of the way as they desperately tried to get the demon cat off the poor woman.

A small, white dog with matted hair and stitches running down its back tried to bite my boot, but I kicked the little terror of a terrier away. “We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto!” I yelled as the furball flew.

A flock of black birds began pecking a woman’s head like something out of the Hitchcock classic, and she began to scream frantically. A few other birds flew in circles above my head.

It was painfully clear that we couldn’t stay there in that animal house, waiting for a door that wasn’t going to open. We had to find shelter and strategize a game plan, but there was a major glitch in any attempt to make a run for it. Half the doors were still opened, but since my keycard wasn’t working anymore, we wouldn’t be able to get through any closed doors. If we escaped into one of the rooms with an open door, we could possibly build a barricade with tables and chairs to keep the infected animals away. Regardless, we had to do something. If we didn’t, we were all going to be infected in a matter of minutes. I forced my mind to come up with some semblance of a plan while the four-legged and feathered fury erupted all around me in absolutely horrifying, vivid detail.

“
We’ve gotta help Louise,” a man said, wrapping his shirt around a woman’s arm tightly. “She’s been bitten!”

“
Am I going to die?” the woman asked, weeping.

“
The bite is from an animal, not a zombie,” said a redheaded man.

“
But look at them, Hank! They’re infected with the virus.” She sniffled. “I’m a goner, aren’t I?”

Monkeys squealed and scampered into a group of women, attacking viciously. One particularly challenging chimp leapt onto a woman’s back. Just as it began to sink its teeth into her skin, I aimed my gun and fired. When the monkey fell, the woman screamed and jumped into my arms, thanking me.

“
Ah! I’ve been scratched,” somebody yelled. “That little sucker drew blood!”

“
Scratched? Oh, you poor baby! That’s the least of our worries right now!” someone retorted angrily. “Don’t you hear that?”

Asia peered down the hall. “Dean, we’ve got big trouble,” she said, pointing.

The sound of moans and feet and worn shoes shambling across the linoleum made the hair on my neck stand on end, and a shudder shot through me. I shot Asia and Kate a look. “When that man tinkered around with the wires, I think he opened all the doors on all the cages and pods! The hybrids are loose!”

Realization flickered in Asia’s eyes. “What!? What an idiot. Let’s feed him to a zombified ape!”

“
Better yet, I saw a two-headed shark in one of those lab rooms!” I yelled.

Kate sighed and held both of us back. “Calm down, you two! Fighting amongst ourselves won’t help us one bit. We humans have to stick together, like it or not.”

“
Do it!” a man screamed. “Feed him to the sharks. He just sentenced us to death!”

“
He didn’t do it on purpose,” a blonde woman pleaded. “Rodney’s just a lousy electrician. He was only trying to help.”

“
Those scientists won’t come down here with all the infected running around,” Rodney said, sticking up for himself. “It just buys us a little time to find an escape route.”

“
Yeah,
if
we don’t get bitten first,” a woman shouted, kicking a big rat that was foaming at the mouth. Two more angry, growling rats staggered toward her, as if they’d set their eyes on their prize. I stomped on one rat with my boot, and two other men killed the others.

“
Some of these people are too weak to fight,” a man said.

“
Besides, we don’t have weapons,” another shouted.

“
There’s has to be another way outta here,” I said.

“
I think there’s an exit at the end of A block,” a frail-looking man said, wheezing as if the mere act of speaking had worn him out.

I nodded. “Follow me, people.”

I ran down the corridor with the crowd behind me, fueled by the horrible shrieks and moans behind me. The sirens and flashing lights suddenly stopped and I couldn’t be more thankful for that. At the end of the twisting, turning corridor, we reached a steel door with a neon “EXIT” sign above it, but before I could even get to the door, the crowd swooped in. A man with a crowbar struggled to pry the door open, but it was difficult to get anywhere near the door with the panicking swarm of people fighting to be the first ones out.

“
Back up. I’ll shoot it open,” I said.

Suddenly, pain exploded across my back, and I crumbled to the ground. A man kicked me hard in the gut and swiped the gun out of my hand. Another one grabbed my rifle. Asia and Kate tried to fight them off, but the others just threw them to the ground like ragdolls. The guns meant the difference between life and death, and those thugs knew it.

“
Dean!” Asia said, scrambling up.

I moaned as I ambled to my feet and saw that zombies were coming from behind us. Our only option was to fight or flee, and the latter was going to be difficult because the door wouldn’t budge. I glanced down the corridor and could make out shifting shadows limping toward us.

Asia wrapped her arm around me. “Are you okay?”

“
I’m good,” I gasped between heaving breaths. “You?”

“
Just peachy,” Asia lied.

“
We’re clearly not in their clique,” Kate said, breathing hard. “They pushed us all the way to the back, like zombie food. Those things will be here any minute, and we’ll be the first to fall.”

The thought made my stomach clench. I peered through the gang, my heart racing. They were screaming, cursing, and shouting at one another as they fumbled with the lock. I then looked behind me at the zombies; they were about twenty feet away, so close I could smell their rancid stench. “Hurry!” I shouted.

“
Got it!” someone finally shouted, sounding relieved.

As the door opened, zombies flooded in, instantly attacking and biting the first line of people who’d shoved their way up to the door. I was sure the scientists had something to do with that; they knew we’d head for the next exit, so the trap had been set, and we’d fallen for it, hook, line, and sinker.

Zombies attacked from the front, and the undead behind us were anxious to join in on the feast. We fought off the first few who reached us. I kicked one in the gut, then smashed its head with my boot. One of the gang members lay on the ground next to me with a pipe in his hands. Since he was dead and could no longer use it, his neck lined with crude bite marks, I pulled the pipe from his fingers.

“
We’re trapped,” Kate said after trying all the doors with the keycard.

“
We can’t get in any of those rooms!” Asia yelled. “Quit wasting time.”

“
Fine,” Kate said, “but I had to try.”

Something pulled my hair. I whacked at a group of birds flying overhead, trying to peck me. Two of them crashed to the ground when I bashed their heads in with my pipe. The others flew off startled. A zombie walked by, dragging a convulsing, screaming woman by the hair, like some kind of decaying Neanderthal. Her feet kicked violently as she thrashed in its grasp. I kicked the zombie, forcing it to loosen its grip on the woman, and the thing actually cursed at me as I bashed its head in. Finally, it fell lifelessly to the ground, and the terrified woman took off down the hall.