The Zombie Plagues Dead Road: The Collected books. (145 page)

Something snapped in his shoulder as he
hit the wall and a second later Alice slammed hard into him pushing
him further into the wall. Pain flared in his head. He tried hard
to keep his eyes open. If he could make his feet and then somehow
get them to the elevators they could get up to the surface levels
of the complex and be safe.

He pushed hard, fought the shaking, and
managed to get to his knees. He glanced over at Alice where she had
come to rest against him, the one look made it obvious that Alice
was beyond help. A huge chunk of concrete had come down on her
chest and smashed it nearly level with the floor. Her eyes bulged,
he looked away quickly, but the image would not go away. The
shaking seemed to go on forever before it eased in a series of
starts and stutters. Silence descended in the corridor. He had his
chin tucked into his chest. His mouth was coated with dust, and his
lungs seemed to be working overtime to get air.

He moved and his shoulder screamed
softly. He could handle it. It was dislocated, maybe broken, but it
would not stop him from gaining his feet. Who knew, he asked
himself, how much time there was before the next earthquake hit,
and would it be harder than this one? A lesser shock? He didn't
know. He had been honest when he had told Pauls and Black that no
one really knew how or when it was going to happen. He wondered if
they had made it out of the state before it hit. It didn't matter
he told himself almost as quickly as the thought had occurred to
him. The compound was being released all over the world. Had been
for a few days time now. Military flyovers were releasing it,
dozens of operatives out in the field. It would do its job. Their
mission was simple overkill. Just a push to be completely sure. A
backdoor for the backdoor.

He made his feet, carefully shrugged
out of his uniform shirt and pulled the bottom of his t-shirt up to
cover his mouth. He stood in the swirling dust, lights blinking and
swaying from the ceiling, t-shirt clamped across his mouth,
breathing as shallowly as he could. The dust was so thick in the
corridor that he could see only a few feet.

Somewhere, it sounded far away, an
alarm began to bray. A minute or so after that as he stood trying
to breath, the sprinkler system came on. In most places it was
still intact, although sagging from the rock ceiling far above
where mounting points had broken. In some places the pipe broke as
soon as the water pressure hit it, already too damaged from the
quake.

The air cleared almost immediately and
the spray felt soothing against his overly hot face. He took his
bearings and then staggered off down the hallway in the direction
of the elevators.

Richard Pierce

Richard Pierce picked himself up from
the floor. The shaking had been horrific, but the facility had
held. At least so far, he told himself as he dusted his hands
against his pant legs. Both palms were cut and bleeding. The hybrid
composite windows that looked out on the main floor of the facility
had splintered and cracked, shooting sharp pieces of glass like
material all over the computer room.

He lowered himself into his seat and
fought the panic that hammered at his heart: As he calmed down he
began to look around the room to assess the damage.

Besides the composite glass he saw no
problems. The monitors were encased in rubber, designed to survive
this sort of scenario and they had. The OS was offline though. The
small blinking cursor at the bottom of the screen told him it was
rebooting. It would be only a matter of seconds before he knew
whether the system had also survived.

The screen came up in a burst of blue,
and then settled into a command line. He righted his chair and
began to type. A few minutes later he had a much better idea of
what had transpired and how the facility had stood up.

The entire first level was gone. Shaken
to pieces and filled in with dirt and debris. The second and third
levels were in bad shape. Bodies littered the hallways. An
occasional lone straggler appeared through the spray of water and
dust clouds that dominated the camera feeds.

One camera showed an empty elevator. It
was the second bank of freight elevators that came from the surface
to the bottom most levels of the facility. It was the only one that
appeared to be on line and operational. He was surprised that was
even possible. As he was just about to dismiss that view the
elevator door parted as if nothing had happened and Major Richard
Weston stepped into the elevator bay.

Blood and dirt streaked his face. His
eyes were red rimed and bloodshot. He looked up into the camera. A
second later his voice came through the system as he pushed the
talk button on the elevator panel.

“
This is Major Richard
Weston to the main monitoring station. Are you on-line? I need a
status report ASAP.”

Pierce hesitated. He was not the
monitoring station operative. He was a code jockey, nothing more.
No military rank, nothing. He hesitated a second longer hoping
someone else would answer the Major, but the lights for the main
and secondary stations were dead. They were off-line. There would
be no answer. As he waited the channel remained silent and the
Major finally repeated his message again. Reluctantly Pierce
depressed his own bypass switch to answer the call.

“
Major, civilian Richard
Pierce, programming. The boards are dead, Major.” Pierce leaned
away from the monitor and began to check other station lights. Not
a single station from the top five levels was lit. There
subterranean levels were lit for two stations, but neither station
tied into this circuit.

“
Pierce... Pierce, where
are my men assigned to the monitoring stations?”

“
Major... Sir, my best
guess is dead, or the stations have been destroyed. I have two sub
levels that are manned. Nothing else.”

“
Patch me through, Pierce.
Either one. Doesn't matter,” Weston told him.

“
Sir... Sir I can't do
that. The board isn't designed to do that. I... I can speak to them
and relay information,” he shrugged helplessly. “The best I can
do.”

The Major looked so long into the
monitor that Pierce was sure he had lost him. The alarm for the
elevator error procedure began to chime and Pierce cut it off, over
riding the automatic sequence.

“
Major?”

“
Here... Read you. Okay,
Pierce, let's shift gears... How does this bank look to get me to
the surface?”

“
No way, sir. That bank is
probably going to return here soon, in fact. It does that when it's
damaged, returns to control, and control for that unit is sub level
sixteen. There is no surface above you, just debris. I have no
camera shots at the exit, but I have red lights across the board
from sub level four to the surface. I have one camera on the
surface that looks toward the entrance. The entrance is gone,
though. Nothing but churned up dirt. “

“
What do you mean this will
return to the bottom once more and stay there?” Major Weston
asked.

“
It's a safety mechanism,
Major. It comes back and stays until the error messages are
cleared. Major, you should probably decide soon on whether you'll
be making a trip to the surface or joining us down here. I am over
riding the error procedure. I can get away with that for a few
minutes, but then the status will change and the elevator will
freeze there,” Pierce told him.

The major swore, turned away from the
camera, looking back out of the elevator. Pierce saw little. The
camera angle caught only a corner of the open doors. The major
looked back up at the camera, and a second later the door slid shut
as he removed his foot. “Bring me down, Pierce,” he said quietly.
Pierce saw the elevator lurch as he removed the over ride to allow
the error sequence to repeat. He watched the levels increase as the
elevator dropped into the bowels of Project Bluechip.

Public Square

Watertown New York

Pearl (Pearly) Bloodworth

The streets were clogged with snow, but
the sidewalks were impassable, so she had no choice but to walk in
the street.

She made her way carefully, slipping
and sliding as she went. It was just before 6:30 P.M. and she might
make it to work on time if she could make the next two blocks
without incident.

She had been working at the downtown
mission for the last several months: The night shift for the last
two months. The mission night shift was an easy shift. Everything
was closed down. Those who had made the curfew were locked in for
the night. Occasionally there would be a little trouble between
residents, but that was rare. Watertown was small, as a consequence
the homeless population was small. And trouble, when it came, was
usually settled long before her shift. Her shift amounted to
catching up on paperwork, dispensing an aspirin or two, and being
there if there was an emergency of any kind. At 4:00 A.M. The
kitchen staff would be there to start their day. Shortly after that
the rest of the day-shift would be in. At 6:00 A.M. The mission
doors would open and the homeless would take to the streets. She
would have an hour of quiet at the end of her shift, sitting and
listening to the bustle from the kitchen as they cleaned up after
breakfast and began to prepare for lunch.

She heard the approaching vehicle as
she was stepping around a mound of melting snow and ice. It was
late and there had been no traffic on this side street when she had
stepped into the street at the cross walk three blocks down. The
alternative was the foot deep snow and ice thrown onto the sidewalk
from the plows. She would never get through that and make it to the
mission on time.

The Mission was on upper Franklin
street, a short walk in a straight line, or even if you had to walk
around the square and start up, as she usually did, but tonight the
square was packed with traffic and so she had chosen the shortcut
instead. Unfortunately it was not well lit: A four block wasteland
of parking lots and alleyways.

She had almost turned completely around
to make sure the car had seen her when the horn blared and startled
her. A second later she finished the turn, hand clasped to her
throat, and watched as the car skidded to a stop and three men
piled out of the back seat slipping and sliding in the slush,
laughing.

“
What's up, bitch,” one
asked as he found his feet and stood staring her down. The laughter
died away.

“
Nice ass,” another said as
he moved toward her.

She turned to the second man, the one
who had just spoken, as she shrugged her purse from her shoulder,
caught the bottom of it in one hand, and slipped her other hand
inside. The third man, really just a boy, looked frightened as his
eyes slipped from his two companions and then flitted to her. The
driver leaned out the window,

“
What
the fuck!
Get
the bitch!” He was looking over the roof-line, sitting on the
windowsill of the driver's door, a smirk on his too-white
face.

“
Yeah... How about a ride,
baby,” the nearest one said. The other had finally found his feet,
stopped slipping, and was skidding his feet across the slush
heading in her direction. She pulled her hand from her pocket and
aimed the mace canister at them. They both skidded to a
stop.

The closer one, the one that had made
the remark about her ass, cocked his head sideways, shrugged his
shoulders and then pulled a gun from his waist band. “Yeah... Kind
of changes the whole situation, don't it?” He asked.

His gun was aimed at the ground, close
to her feet. She had only a split second to decide. He was less
than five feet away, the gun rising from the ground, when she
pushed the trigger and watched the stream leap at him. His face
went from sarcastic smirk to alarm just before the stream of mace
hit his nose and splattered across his face and into his eyes. A
second later he was screaming. She had just turned to aim at the
second guy when the world turned upside down.

She found herself tumbling sideways.
Somewhere, close by, a roar began and rose in pitch as the ground
below her feet began to jump and shake. She found her knees after
she fell and skidded across the roadway as she tried to hold
herself, but the shaking was just too hard. She collapsed back to
the roadway and the relative softness of the slush and snow, her
body jumping and shaking as she seemed almost to bounce across the
short expanse and into the snowbank on the opposite side of the
road.

The roar went on for what seemed like
minutes as she tried to catch her breath and steady herself at the
same time. Both seemed impossible to do, but almost as soon as she
had the thought the trembling of the earth became less and a split
second after that the roaring stopped. There was no silence. The
sound of breaking glass, tumbling brick, blaring horns and screams
in the dark night replaced the roar. Sounds that had probably been
there, she decided, she had just been unable to hear
them.

Pearl made her feet and stared back
down the street where the car had been. The car was still there,
the nose tilted upward, the back seemingly buried in the street
itself. She blinked, but nothing changed. She noted the broken
asphalt and churned up dirt, and realized the car had broken
through the street. There was no sign of the men, including the
driver that had been hanging halfway out of the window.