Undead Rain (Book 3): Lightning (Fighting the Living Dead) (8 page)

Vess thrust his hand into the back of Johnny’s neck before pulling down viciously. Johnny’s eyes went wide, his mouth falling open as Vess tore his spine from his body. Tossing Johnny’s dead body aside, Vess advanced on Jax.

Obviously realizing that shooting at Vess was pointless after he had dodged Johnny’s bullet at close range, Jax scrambled to her feet and ran, almost slipping over on the wet floor as she turned a corner at the end of the corridor. Vess followed.

“No!” I shouted as I reached the door. My hand was shaking so much that my first attempt to swipe my card through the lock failed. I tried again, looking at Johnny’s lifeless body through the glass. The water around him was stained red. The look of shock and agony on his face remained even in death.

The door opened.

I ran through, past Johnny to the end of the corridor. Jax had turned right, so I did the same, expecting to come upon her body around the corner. She wasn’t fast enough to outrun Vess. Unless she had found a locked room to hole up in, she must be dead.

She was there, but she was alive. Kneeling in the water, tears streaming from her face, she held the gun in her hand up in the air in front of her, but her hand was shaking so badly that the muzzle of the Desert Eagle swung wildly left and right.

Vess was gone, his exit route marked by a broken air vent in the wall.

Why had he left Jax alive?

I went to her, putting my arm around her and helping her to stand. Her entire body was trembling like a leaf held to a branch by such a fragile connection that the slightest breeze would blow it away.

She leaned against me as if she had lost the strength to stand.

“We need to get out of here,” I told Sam.

He nodded, eyeing the broken air vent warily. We took Jax between us, moving back along the corridor as fast as we could. Doctor Colbert led the way, her own body trembling almost as much as Jax’s. I imagined that she must have seen some grisly sights since the outbreak, but seeing a living man’s spine being ripped out wasn’t one of them. I tried not to think about it but the image of Johnny’s face kept flashing into my mind.

We reached the emergency stairs and began to descend. Jax found her strength by the time we reached the second floor. She murmured, “I’m okay,” and supported herself on the metal railing as we went down to the first floor.

The door opened onto a first-floor corridor that led to an access door. We went through it and into the reception area, which was still deserted.

As we went through the main doors and out into the rainy night, I breathed the cool, fresh air thankfully. I had wondered, before entering the building, if I would ever leave. I had made it out alive, but we had lost Johnny Drake.

His voice had lifted my spirits so many times in the past, and now I would never hear it again.

T
he rain was still coming
down in force, blown into our faces by a cold wind that whistled along the edge of the building. The stars and moon were blotted out by storm clouds. As we crossed the parking lot, a flash of lightning illuminated the distant hills. A couple of seconds later, thunder rolled over the compound.

Tanya opened the door to the guard station as we approached. The pool of light coming from within the little building looked warm and welcoming. After we had piled into the room, I sat by the radiator, shivering wetly in its heat.

Jax dropped into one of the chairs, leaning heavily against the desk. She looked better than she had earlier, but I could see she was still fighting against some sort of pain.

“I should have come to help you,” Tanya said to Jax, “But Johnny was determined. He ran across to the building as soon as he knew you were in trouble. His last act was a heroic one.”

Jax nodded. “He tried to save my life but lost his instead. I’ll never forget that.” Her voice was low, her eyes locked on the floor at her feet. I wondered if she was in shock.

Hell, after what we had just been through, we were all in shock.

An air of solemnity descended over the room. Even Sam was quiet.

I hadn’t known Johnny for long, but his voice on the radio had lifted my spirits many times. Some of my best memories were of dancing to some tune or other that Johnny was playing. His rich voice, floating over the airwaves like silk, had been calm and comforting at a time when everyday living was full of stress. With the passing of Johnny Drake, we had lost a man who had done more good for the survivors of the apocalypse than anyone, simply by being there when we needed to hear a familiar voice or lose ourselves to music.

I closed my eyes and leaned against the radiator, letting the heat seep into my damp clothes and hair.

While Jax and Doctor Colbert brought Tanya up to date with exactly what had happened inside the building, I checked the time on my watch and put it into countdown mode, beginning at twenty-three hours. I wasn’t sure why I did it except that I wanted to know when my final seconds were approaching.

Sam came over and sat next to me. “Hey, Alex, don’t hog all the heat, man.”

I gave him a flat smile but said nothing. We’d had some disagreements since coming here, and I felt uneasy when he was around me. I didn’t want to say the wrong thing and be on the receiving end of another gut punch.

As if reading my mind, he said, “How’s your stomach?”

“I’ll live,” I said. The truth was, my stomach muscles were still sore where he had hit me.

“I’m sorry about that,” Sam said.

I raised an eyebrow. “You’re sorry that I’ll live?”

He grinned, and I saw the old Sam return. “Nah, I’m sorry I hit you, man.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Then I decided to risk another punch and said, “We’re all pissed off with this virus situation but you seemed more pissed off than anyone. What’s got you so mad?”

“I can’t stand having my freedom taken away from me, man. Before the shit hit the fan, when I was working as a cameraman with Vigo in the jungle, or in the desert, I felt so free. Like I didn’t have to answer to anyone, you know? My old man used to work for a big corporation, and his whole life revolved around his job. He was the original corporate yes man, and the company came before anything, even his wife and his sons.”

“Sons,” I said. “You have a brother?”

He nodded. “I have two. One of them, my older brother, is in the army, stationed in the Middle East, so he’s probably safe.” He laughed. “That shows how bad things are here when being in a warzone in the Middle East is safer than being in Britain. My younger brother is a corporate man just like dear old dad. He works in New York and he probably treats his family just as badly as our dad treated us.

“I hate all that bullshit, man. I’ve never gone down the route of a nine to five job. And I couldn’t join the army like my older brother either; I’m not good at taking orders. So I’ve been working freelance all my life. I probably made less money that way but at least I was my own boss and I didn’t have to clock in. Being forced to work for the authorities doesn’t sit well with me, man.”

“This will soon be over one way or another,” I reminded him.

“Yeah, we know how this is going to end, Alex. If we had stayed away from that island, we’d be on the waves right now, as free as birds.”

“We would,” I said, “but Lucy wouldn’t.”

“No, she wouldn’t.” He looked down at the floor and sadness passed over his face. “It’s good that you’re fighting for her. I don’t really blame you for everything that’s happened since we went to the island, Alex. I don’t blame you for anything.”

His words might have sounded better if they hadn’t been delivered in the grim tone of someone who was trying to set the record straight before they died. Was this how we were going to spend our last hours, gong over the things we were sorry for? I couldn’t do it. I wasn’t going to sit here in this small, hot building and wait to die.

I turned to Sam and said, “Thanks, man,” using his standard term of address as I had once done with Mike.

I got up and went over to the monitors, glancing at the images on them. One of the monitors showed a corridor that was in complete darkness. “Where’s this?” I asked Tanya.

“Johnny and I found it,” she said, coming over and taking a seat next to me. “We were going to show you when you got back, but then…things happened…and I forgot about it. This is a corridor on level two. Remember how all the lights are off on that level? There’s only one main room on that level. This camera is in that room. See those shapes in there?”

I studied the blackness on the monitor. There were bulky square-shaped objects lined up in the room.

“What are they?” Jax asked, leaning in closer.

“They’re computer servers,” Tanya said. “That room houses the servers that run the computer network.” She pointed to one of the maps on the desk. “This room here is the server room, and this is the corridor that leads to it.” She pointed to another, smaller room on the map. “This is the level 2 maintenance room. It contains the fuse box that runs the electricity on level 2. Johnny thought that one of the fuses must have blown, plunging the entire floor into darkness.”

“And cutting power to the servers,” I said.

She nodded.

“I turned to Colbert. “You said that your emails and video calls stopped suddenly, so you couldn’t contact Alpha One.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“And those videos you showed us on Vess’s computer were stored on his hard drive.”

“Yes.”

I looked at Tanya. I was sure we were both thinking the same thing. The servers going down had cut all network connections to the outside world. If we restored power to the servers, we might be able to contact Alpha One.

“Do you think it’s worth the risk?” I asked her.

She knew exactly what I meant. “Turning those servers back on is probably our only hope of getting Hart’s men out here before time runs out.”

I brought up other areas of level 2 on the other monitors. The main corridor by the elevator was packed with zombies, visible as shambling shadows in the darkness. I now knew that because the main corridors were accessible from the main stairs by swing doors, the zombies tended to gather in these areas.

“We can get to the servers and the maintenance room via the emergency stairs, and avoid those zombies by the elevators,” I said.

“Count me in.” Sam got to his feet, his earlier grim mood seemingly gone. “I’ve always been a sucker for a life or death situation.”

“I’ll go too,” Tanya said. “I’m tired of sitting here not being able to do anything.”

I said to Jax, “Could you and Doctor Colbert watch the monitors and help us?”

She nodded. “Of course.”

Before we went across the parking lot to the main building, we emptied our backpacks of rations and water, putting those items into the back of the camper van. We also put all of the H1NZ1 into one pack and loaded that into the vehicle. There was no point taking the precious chemical back into the building with us. If we didn’t come back out of there, Jax and Doctor Colbert would be back at square one with no chemical.

This way, if we managed to get the servers online but didn’t get out alive, Alpha One could be contacted and Jax and the doctor could take the H1NZ1 to the island to save themselves and Lucy.

Tanya and Sam shared the remaining MP5 rounds between themselves so that each rifle was loaded. I took a freshly charged walkie-talkie from the charger in the guard station. I felt like I was in a montage from an eighties TV show where the good guys are getting ready to face the bad guys and prepare themselves while the soundtrack plays a synth-laden piece of inspiring music.

Except this wasn’t a movie. Any blood spilled in that building would be real, not fake. And the bad guys weren’t actors; they were real-life monsters.

“You ready?” Tanya asked me as I clipped the fresh walkie-talkie to my backpack strap.

I nodded. I was as ready as I was ever going to be.

The three of us walked across the parking lot to the main building. The rain was still hammering down, splashing into puddles that had formed on the parking lot surface and pinging off the cars. Distant thunder rumbled as we reached the main door into the building.

Tanya held her door card ready near the digital lock. She looked at Sam and me. “Let’s do this as quickly as we can.”

Sam and I nodded.

Tanya opened the door and we stepped inside.

S
tepping
into the quiet reception area, I felt a familiar sense of dread in my stomach. It was as if the building itself was a huge monster and we had just willingly stepped into its mouth to be eaten. Nobody in their right mind would come in here unless they were desperate. And that was exactly what we were; those servers on level 2 were our only means of getting back to Apocalypse Island and being injected with the antivirus that would prevent us from losing every last shred of our humanity. I would do anything to see Lucy again, and if that meant entering this monster-infested building once more, then so be it.

But that determination did nothing to quiet my fear.

We crossed the reception area quickly and silently, heading through the access door that led to the emergency stairs. Tanya took the lead, with Sam behind her. I stayed behind them; they had the big guns and were cooler under pressure than I could ever be.

When we got to the emergency stairs, they pushed through the doors quickly. I wanted to tell them that we should check the area ahead before we went charging up the stairs, but they were already ascending the steel steps. They seemed so eager to get this done that they had lost an edge of caution. I followed them at their pace, almost running up the steps to keep up.

We were halfway between level 1 and level 2 when the first hybrid appeared above us. It had once been a woman known as Doctor Debra Francis, according to the name badge on the lapel of its lab coat. Now it was a monster, a killing machine we had to deal with.

It rushed down the stairs toward Sam, lips drawn back and teeth bared. Sam was taken by surprise. He let out a yell and instinctively stepped back to avoid the hybrid. He lost his footing and tripped backward on the stairs, dropping to the unforgiving steel with a grunt of pain.

The hybrid continued past Sam, carried by its momentum, and made a grab for me. It got hold of my shoulder and we tumbled together down the hard steps. I tried to hold it at arm’s length because even as we were falling, it tried to sink its teeth into me.

I landed on my back, the hybrid on top of me. It snarled and leaned its face forward, ready to bite. Its breath smelled of rancid meat, probably the remnants of its last meal.

A shot rang out in the stairwell, and the hybrid dropped heavily to one side, blood spurting from its head.

I pushed it off me and stood up quickly. Tanya was crouched in a firing position, the MP5 raised.

“Thanks,” I said.

“No problem.”

I saw a second hybrid coming down to us, this one a man in a shirt and tie. His yellow eyes were wild and hateful.

“Behind you!” I shouted to Tanya.

She whirled around and fired. The hybrid dropped immediately to avoid the bullet, crawling down the steps toward us like a spider.

Sam had regained his footing. He aimed at the hybrid’s head and fired. The hybrid skidded to a halt, blood pouring from its temple.

Walking over to the lifeless body, Sam kicked it with the toe of his boot. “That’s some fucked-up shit, man.”

W
e continued
up the stairs with more caution. I had a pain across the back of my shoulders where I had slammed into the steps and a throbbing tenderness in my right elbow. If we had been more careful, that could have been avoided. We couldn’t afford to get sloppy now, not when so much was at stake.

When we reached the second floor, I asked Jax over the walkie-talkie if the corridor beyond the door was clear.

“All clear,” she said, her voice sounding distant through the crackling airwaves. “At least, I think it is. The lights are out, so it’s difficult to see.”

Tanya opened the door onto the dark corridor. The smell of petrol hit me immediately. It was so strong that it burned my nose.

“Wow,” Sam said. “This must be the no-smoking zone.” He turned on his flashlight. I did the same, playing my beam along the corridor. Red plastic petrol canisters lay littered all around. The floor and walls seemed to be soaked with the flammable liquid. My flashlight picked up an axe, its head buried deeply in the wall as if someone had swung it with all their might.

“What the hell happened here?” I asked.

Tanya shrugged. We carefully moved farther along the corridor and found two male bodies lying face down. It looked like their spines were gone but the abundance of blood and guts made it difficult to tell for sure.

“Do you think they poured the gas over everything?” Tanya asked.

“It looks like it. Maybe they were trying to kill Vess. If so, their plan must have gone horribly wrong.”

We stepped past the dead bodies and found the door marked M
aintenance Room
. Tanya opened the door, stepping back as I shone my flashlight inside.

The room was small, barely more than a cupboard. Wooden shelves were fixed to the walls, holding cleaning equipment, some power tools, and plastic containers full of nails and screws. The fuse box was positioned on the back wall, thick wires running from it into the wall. I inspected the row of switches. All except two were in the up position, indicating that they were on. The two in the down position were labeled
Server Room
and
Light Circuit
.

It was hard to believe that by flicking these switches, we could establish communication with Alpha One and save our own lives. It almost seemed too simple.

I flicked them both to the upward position. The overhead fluorescent lights in the corridor came on, casting stark illumination over the bloody bodies on the floor. “We should check the servers,” I said.

We walked quickly to the server room and opened the door. There was a hum in the room. It sounded like everything was booting up. Red, yellow, and green lights began flashing and I could hear the whir of fans within the servers.

Doctor Colbert’s voice came over the walkie-talkie. “Bring a laptop. I can try to log onto the network.”

“Okay,” I said as we went back out into the gasoline-filled corridor.

I opened the door next to the maintenance room, hoping to find an office with a computer, but instead I was looking into a large storeroom with shelves full of chemicals in plastic containers and larger drums on the floor. Everything was labeled as flammable. It seemed a strange place to store such chemicals; I would have thought that these things would usually be kept in a fireproof room.

Maybe the two dead guys had tried to set a trap for Vess, or the zombies, hoping to burn them. The petrol was all over the floors and walls in here too. Someone had splashed it around everywhere for a purpose, and the only purpose I could see was to blow up these chemicals. Maybe they were trying to make an explosion so big that the sprinkler system wouldn’t be able to handle it. Maybe they had realized that they couldn’t defeat Vess unless they blew up the entire building.

My guesses were just that…guesses. I couldn’t know what had happened here in the madness that had occurred after patient zero had gotten loose in the building. Maybe the two dead guys had simply lost their minds.

“We need to get off this level,” I said, “The smell is going to make me puke and we should get a far away from this stuff as possible. We can find a laptop somewhere else.”

Tanya and Sam nodded. As we headed back the way we had come, I heard a noise behind us that sent my fear level spiking, the crash of the metal air vent grille hitting the floor. All three of us spun around to face the creature that had once been a scientist but was now a bloodthirsty monster. Vess stood facing us with a sneer on his lips. He knew we couldn’t escape him; it was too far to the stairs and he was too fast. He stepped forward, his eyes flicking from Tanya, to Sam, and then to me as if he were deciding which one of us to kill first.

When those yellow eyes met mine, I felt as if Vess could see inside me all the way to my spine.

Adrenaline rushed into my system, making me panic. There was no way we were going to get away from him. I wondered if those dead men had felt the same desperation when they had decided to blow up the building.

Vess took another step forward. I felt like I was frozen to the spot in the floor. Sam grabbed my shoulders and pulled me along the corridor toward the stairs. Tanya was sprinting for the door.

I wanted to tell Sam that there was no point in running; Vess would catch us no matter how fast we ran.

I fished the matches out of my pocket and struck one. It flared to life with a hiss. I couldn’t see any way to escape the monster with the yellow eyes that could see right through me other than completing the task the two dead men on the floor had started.

I threw the match. The flame spread immediately. Vess stepped back as the flame ignited the petrol beneath his feet.

I ran for the stairs as fast as I could, not daring to look over my shoulder. Whether Vess came running after us or not, we had to get away from the corridor; once the flames reached the chemicals in the storeroom, there was going to be an almighty explosion.

I was slower than Tanya and Sam, and by the time I got through the door, they were already halfway down to the first floor. I had stumbled down the first two steps when the chemicals erupted. A wave of force and heat knocked me off my feet. I rolled down the steel steps and hit the wall. Staggering to my feet, I saw a bright orange glow beyond what was left of the door. Even the sprinkler system wouldn’t be able to douse that fire, and if there were labs on the second floor with more chemicals, things were going to get worse.

Getting to my feet, I followed Tanya and Sam to the first floor. We sprinted across the reception area to the main door as a fire alarm began to wail.

The door slid open when Tanya ran her card through the lock. We went outside into the storm. Tanya and Sam sprinted for the guard station.

When I reached the parking lot, I stopped running and stood with my face turned up to the downpour. The heat wave from the explosion had singed my skin slightly, and the cool night rain had never felt so good against my face.

Sam looked over his shoulder, saw me, then came back to grab me by the shoulders. “We need to get out of here,” he shouted as he dragged me toward the camper van.

I nodded, shook off his hands, and staggered through the storm toward the vehicle. My legs felt weak and I was out of breath. The adrenaline rush was gone and now I was crashing.

I could feel the heat of the burning building against my back. Somewhere inside, another explosion sounded, this one ripping out the windows and sending glass crashing into the compound.

Jax and Doctor Colbert appeared outside the guard station, standing in the shaft of light that angled out from the doorway as they watched the building burn. The cars in the parking lot seemed to flicker in the light from the flames.

I reached the camper van and leaned against it, trying to catch my breath as I looked back at the building. Most of the second floor windows were gone, a plume of dirty black smoke rising from them into the night sky. There was an acrid smell in the air, and I wondered if it might be poisonous. Those chemicals were probably dangerous.

“We need to get out of here,” Tanya said. Her voice was flat, unemotional. I knew what she was thinking.

If she didn’t want to voice her opinion yet, Sam had no problem voicing his. “Way to go, Alex. You just destroyed our last hope of survival, man.”

I didn’t argue with him; he was right. We had risked our lives to get the servers back online, and I had just panicked and blown them up. Everything on level 2 was burning, and so were our hopes of contacting Site Alpha One.

“We need to leave,” Tanya said again. “This place will be crawling with zombies soon.” She got into the driver’s seat and slammed the door.

I climbed into the rear of the camper van and went all the way to the back of the vehicle, shrugging off my backpack before sitting heavily on the padded bench that served as a sofa. I didn’t need to be reminded of how my stupid actions had just cost us our lives. That was surely going to be the hot topic of the evening, so I sat in the darkness alone while the others sat in the front seats.

Sam opened the gate and Tanya drove us out of the compound, waiting on the outside of the fence for Sam to return to the van. When he did so, Tanya put the van into the gear and drove along the track without a word to anyone. Everyone was silent. The only sound was the hum of the engine, the drumming of rain on the van roof, and a distant crackling coming from the burning building behind us.

I looked out through the rear window. Flames and black smoke rose out of the second floor windows. The orange glow in the night sky would be visible to every zombie and hybrid within a twenty-mile radius.

After a few minutes, Tanya turned the van onto a second track that ran through the woods. We bumped along through the trees for a few minutes before she cut the engine. With the vehicle’s lights extinguished, we were in total darkness. All I could hear now was the patter of rain on the van and the murmur of my companions as they spoke about what had just happened.

I didn’t need to go over it all again. What was the point? With the exception of Doctor Colbert, we were all as good as dead. I wasn’t going to talk about it.

Through the window, in the distance, I could just make out the orange flames through a gap in the trees. I leaned back and watched them. They flickered and died over and over in a pattern that was hypnotic.

The monotonous flash of color made my eyelids heavy. I decided to close my eyes and shut out the world. Just for a moment.