Z-Volution (10 page)

And jumping up on the table! She leapt, lips parted in a feral, instinctive gesture. Alex sidestepped her attack and she landed on two feet against the wall, then sprang off with cat-like speed. He stepped forward. In an ordinary fight, his next move would have been to duck under the wild attack and try to get a punch in hard to her face and then maybe pin her to the floor as she dropped. But even as he interlaced the fingers of his two hands, one in front of the other to deliver a hammer blow, he knew he wouldn’t be able to do it.

Gone-crazy freak or not, she was still his mother, the one who had brought him into this world, as unpleasant as that world had become. He could not will himself to physically harm her, so he ducked out of the way, spun and raced toward the door. He reached it and flung it open.

Two soldiers were posted immediately outside, and they both spun, caught off guard at his wild appearance. He grabbed the doorknob and slammed the door shut behind him, leaning against it as something crushed into it from the other side.

“What the hell was that?” one of them asked.

“The CDC guys?” Alex hissed. “Where are they?” He had questions for them. Boy, did he ever.

One of the soldiers spoke softly into a speaker microphone mounted on his shoulder. As he did so, his associate tapped him on the arm and pointed at the window into the room, where Elsa Ramirez had backed up, then raced lightning-fast toward the door. It burst open, frame shattered in her wake.

She bull-rushed the guards, reaching Alex first but shoving him out of the way. One of the guards moved for his weapon but the pistol hung up on the holster catch as he tried to remove it and she knocked his hand away. The other soldier, thinking he’d have an easy time with this old woman, crazy as she may be, pinned her against the wall. She wryly slid under his grasp, shoved him aside with surprising strength.

“Jesus! Get her down!” the soldier who had tried to calm her said. Both soldiers jumped on her but she was like a Tasmanian Devil, a whirlwind of chaotic thrashing, flailing and random movement that was impossible to stop.

“She on meth?” one of the soldiers gasped, staring up at Alex from his position on the floor, where he’d been knocked to his back.

“No! Just hold her!”

Elsa wriggled a hand free and then struck—jamming a narrow index finger with a huge elongated nail into one of the soldiers’ eyes. He promptly cried out, shrieking in agony and clutching his bleeding eye socket as Elsa then turned her fury onto the military man who already lay on his back. Alex was there in a second, leaning in to break it up, pulling his mother’s head back as her mouth was open, jaws snapping at the air with a vulgar sucking sound. Alex stood up, shoved her back, then realized too late that he had let himself get much too close.

She turned and made eye contact with him and blinked—once, twice. Alex noticed that those eyes suddenly shifted and seemed to look more normal now. A little yellow, but not so much.

“Love you, son,” his mother rasped, and then she coughed, a guttural, violent, bloody sound. She shuddered, and as the guard on the ground got up, freeing his weapon, she took off, running smoothly down the hall. The three men wearing suits who had been inside the room came skidding around a corner, sound-suppressed pistols drawn. Apparently they’d been monitoring the situation as it unfolded. They glanced at the guard with the hole in his eye, whose mouth was moving but with no sound coming out, and then at Alex, who was way beyond a mere loss for words, half-standing-half-kneeling, completely dumbfounded by the sudden chain of events.

One of the CDC guys said, “Sector 7 Hallway, heading East,” into a radio and Alex heard the footfalls of multiple men come running from a hallway off to his right. Beneath him, the penned guard gasped, shuddered and went still.

His mother had killed someone, and—Alex had to finally accept—was most certainly infected, and free around this facility.

That fact somehow disturbed him less than the sudden suspicion that her release from Grenada, complete with the staged guard’s reactions, had been planned from the beginning.

Planned to get him to bring her here.

He shuddered and ran, chasing after the men. Chasing after her.

14.

Veronica left the control room in a rush. Where was her backup? Where was the support?

Alarms were going off everywhere, sounding like echoes from air raid sirens, as if enemy bombers were incoming and everyone had to flee to shelters. However, she wasn’t fleeing. Not a chance. Instead, she listened, focusing on the loudest source of commotion. The next hallway over, where she heard trampling feet, shouts and—gunfire!

She drew her 9mm and raced around a corner to find two servicemen in a bloody heap on the floor, with three more guards standing around them, one reaching down to check for a pulse.

“Stop!” Veronica yelled, aiming and trying to get a lock on the corpse’s skull. “Step away from them!”

The would-be helper glanced back, fingers on the dead man’s neck—just as its eyes opened. Yellow eyes, Veronica saw.

“Down!”

Too late, the dead man-turned-zombie lurched up, grabbed the living man’s neck and turned him around as he locked his jaws on the man’s neck. His shocked eyes locked on Veronica’s and froze her for a moment, a moment that in hindsight didn’t matter. Once bitten…

They were both goners, and Veronica hastened their end. Two shots: the twitching, dying man in the center of his forehead, the zombie through its right temple. The two other soldiers backed up, drawing their guns, aiming at Veronica, shocked and in utter confusion, with the alarms, the gunfire and the sight of their friends just put down with headshots.

Veronica raised her arms, but then pointed to the other dead man
(was he killed by Elsa as well? Had to be… oh God, how did they let this happen? And where was Alex?)
The thought drove an ice stake through her heart, but action called her back to the present. She dropped, aimed and fired low, just missing the head of the other zombie, clipping its shoulder. About to bite one of the soldiers, his friend reacted faster, or by sheer instinct—and drove the butt of his automatic rifle down against the thing’s head, knocking it back, dazed.

Then both men aimed their guns at the thrashing creature as Veronica ran up between them, gun outstretched.

“Don’t waste time questioning your vision.” She fired, blasting a hole in the zombie’s skull just as it was about to lunge at her. With just a glance back at the men, she ran ahead, toward the commotion. “Come on, now you know what to do. Anyone bitten who looks dead…”

“…isn’t,” said one of the soldiers, shaking his head as he watched the body missing half its head slump to the floor.

#

Veronica rounded the corner, into the lobby and skidded to a halt. How had it gotten this far already? Two agents in plainclothes—a man and a woman, nerdy types from level three, she realized—had been infected and changed. They were charging the front desk where two armed guards with a no-nonsense attitude didn’t think twice, but cut down the attackers.

Good,
Veronica thought, seeing them go for headshots.
Word’s finally out, and they believe my briefing.

The area safe, more agents and soldiers emerged from hallways and around cover.

“Lobby secure,” one agent in a black suit spoke into his Bluetooth. Veronica, taking a breath, was about to agree—when a shadow fell over the lobby, something blocking out the sun from the western set of windows on the second level.

Something large, something…

“Get down!” she screamed, running for cover—the nearest pillar.

An explosion of glass, tortured metal and concrete bursting apart. Shards rained down on the soldiers and agents, trying to dodge and flee the gray-leathery thing that had flown right into the building.

Veronica would have thought it a small plane at first, except for the stench.

The horrid, fetid stench of something that should have been dead millions of years ago.

Something that awkwardly careened off a pillar, shattering off a huge chunk of masonry, then flapping and rolling and gripping the third level landing with its giant claws…

It opened its beak. Its hideously vacant and remorseless eyes seemed to seek out Veronica’s, to root her to the spot, even as it regurgitated its payload.

Two human figures spilled from its gullet, tumbling, thrashing and alighting onto the marble floor beneath—

—where they promptly shook off the fall, got up, chose targets, and ran…

#

She couldn’t even get a shot off before the huge black shape fell to the floor, crashed and heaved itself up, spreading its wings and rearing back its enormous head. Pockets of flesh hung off the creature, as its eyes—empty, hideous, famished—continued to stare hungrily at Veronica.

The fear she felt now, confined in this building, surrounded by other zombies and screaming colleagues, was even more acute than being down in the cargo hold of the
Hammond
with the chained
T.rex
…

This thing was vile, unearthly and alien in a different way, as if its malice and brooding terror came not from animalistic nature, but from sheer evil itself—from the very nature of evil.

The utter weight of those eyes, the slavering bloody ooze dripping from its beak, and the enormous wingspan, all served to freeze her in her tracks like susceptible prey.

She was a goner.

Except in the next instant, as the pterodactyl reared back and was about to launch upon her, a strafing run of bullets—armor piercing 50-caliber rounds—tore through its right side, from shoulder to skull. Veronica watched in awe as the rounds fired from a second story turret and an M2 machine gun raked the undead creature up and down and sideways, shredding its skin and bone as it would a tank or armored vehicle.

The pterodactyl issued a baneful shrieking as it flapped and tried to cover its head with its wings—that were subsequently obliterated, and then it lifted its beak and made one last attempt to snap at its unseen attackers. After that, another salvo bored holes through its carapace, shattering its skull and blasting its brain stem into gory shreds.

Its neck almost completely severed, it flopped awkwardly backward and lay flat, with its wings spread out in tatters. Smoke rose from its bullet-ridden body.

The gun went silent as Veronica looked up, now with the sun back and streaming through the broken window, where she could just make out the machine gunner running from the turret toward the stairs and down to join the closer fighting below.

She recognized the man as he appeared on the lower landing. Recognized him from the briefing about the aircraft carrier’s attack. He was a pilot, and Alex’s escort, and must have been finishing his debrief here as well when the assault began.

Clear-thinker, she thought proudly. Major Casey Remington rounded the pillar just as Veronica leapt over the ptero’s twitching tail. They both had their sidearms out, taking aim at the pair of zombies engaged with unarmed CIA agents trying to keep them at bay with a fire extinguisher.

Two shots, each firing simultaneously, and the two zombies fell, backs of their skulls blown out.

“Nice shooting,” Remington said to her.

“You too, and thanks.” She nodded back to the twice-dead flying dinosaur. “Was that three of those birds you’ve killed now?”

He nodded. “By my count. Although it’s getting easier. And thanks to you and your briefing. Head shots…”

She nodded, then glanced around, listening. “Is that all of them?”

More gunfire erupted down the western hallway, followed by screams.

“Damn it, they’ve gotten into the building.”

“Go,” Remington said. “Help where you can, I have other orders.”

“What orders?”

“I’ve got to get into the air and protect the harbor, and… do what I can from the air.” He gave the pterodactyl a wide berth, but lingered with a look of grudging awe and respect, then turned back to her. “I have a feeling we’ll meet again.”

She met his look and saw the fear lodged there, the same almost resigned acceptance one would expect seeing a tidal wave heading toward an unprotected beach. She hoped it wasn’t true, but thought:
maybe all we can do is hang on and wait for the aftermath
.

As he ran off, a new round of gunfire echoed from the eastern hallway. Veronica froze, undecided. The lobby was empty but for the dead dinosaur and the corpses with their heads shot up. She hesitated, unsure in which direction to run and provide aid, but then heard screams and shouts outside, as well as a roaring and something unearthly rumbling in the streets. She saw the broken front entrance and wondered for a moment if the best spot for her might actually be at the turret upstairs, guarding the entrance and shooting anything that shambled inside. They had to protect this intelligence center. Who knows what was happening out there, but inside, they had access to worldwide communications, an arsenal, a bunker and could hold out and direct the outside forces if need be.

However, if those screams from the other hallways were any indication, Langley’s interior was far from secure. Whoever planned all this—and did she even have to wonder—knew what they were doing, attacking it first as a high priority target.

Then she shuddered, thinking of the planning, and what she would have done if she were on the other side. What other targets would have been selected, and what other battles were raging right now?

In the midst of such questions, her phone rang.

It was Nesmith. She was wanted in the control room, mission of vital importance. She couldn’t hear everything through the gunfire, but it sounded like they needed her to get to Atlanta, where there just might be a key to stopping all this.