“Yes, I am.”
“There are classes.” I followed Becks around a corner, skidding to a halt. “Uh, Mahir? I’m going to need to call you back.”
“What are you—”
I reached up to tap my ear cuff, breaking the connection. Becks raised her hand, signaling for silence. I nodded understanding. And then we both just stood there, staring at the five-deep wall of zombies that was trying to claw its way through the door into Dr. Abbey’s office. They weren’t paying any attention to us yet. That was the good part. The bad part was that they would inevitably either break down that door or lose interest in what was behind, and either way, we’d eventually wind up on the menu.
“Here,” I mouthed, pressing my gun into Becks’s hand. I shook my head at her questioning expression, nodding back the way we’d come. Slow understanding bloomed in her face, and she nodded, pressing herself against the wall as I turned and crept quietly away. Once I was back in the main hall, out of sight of the infected, I broke into a run.
This floor’s armory was located at the far end of the building, in what used to be a bathroom. Dr. Abbey’s technicians couldn’t get the water working in the corroded old second-story pipes, and so the room had been converted to hold all the weapons of mass destruction that a bunch of geeks who insisted on playing with dead things could possibly need. I don’t know what science geeks were like before the Rising, but these days? After seeing the kind of armaments they pack, you couldn’t pay me to get on their bad side.
It was just too bad they hadn’t been carrying more of those armaments while they were “at home” in the lab. Maybe I wouldn’t have needed to shoot so many of them.
I passed the bodies of three dead technicians as I ran. Really dead—they’d been torn apart, practically shredded by the hungry infected. Their screams probably saved the lives of everyone who was now huddling behind a locked door. The people who ran toward the trouble—or toward the armory, wanting to get ready to face the trouble head-on—had been the second wave of victims. That was how it almost always went in an outbreak. The first wave dies. The second wave rises.
The last of the bodies was right in front of the armory door, fallen like he had almost reached it when they finally managed to run him down. I grimaced as I stepped over him, leaning into the armory to turn on the light.
The zombie that had been lurking there lunged, the moan escaping from its lipless mouth bare seconds before the startled shout of “Whoa!” escaped from mine. I managed to jerk my arm back before it could get its teeth into me, and they clacked shut on empty air. The zombie lunged again.
“Back off, ugly!” I grabbed it by the hair, using its own momentum as I shoved it past me, into the hallway. If Dr. Abbey was wrong about my being immune, I was going to regret that in a minute. I would have regretted it a hell of a lot more if the thing had managed to get its teeth into me.
The zombie stumbled as I released it, taking several steps forward before it could get its balance back and remember how to turn itself around. I took advantage of those precious seconds, darting into the armory and looking frantically around me. I didn’t use this room very often. We had our own equipment, and while Dr. Abbey was perfectly willing to be generous with the ammo, she usually didn’t want us fetching it ourselves. The grenades were—were—
“Over here, Shaun,” said George. I turned. She was standing in the far corner of the room, next to a stack of beautifully familiar olive-green boxes. “This what you were looking for?”
“Yeah. Thanks, George.”
“Not a problem. Now kill your friend.” She was abruptly gone, blinking out like she had never been there at all. That was reasonable. She hadn’t been there.
I grabbed the nearest pistol that looked like it might be loaded—bad gun safety, good zombie safety, it balances—and whirled, taking aim right at the place I estimated my dead friend’s head would be. “Bang, ugly,” I said, and pulled the trigger.
Thank God for paranoia and overpreparedness. The gun barked and a large chunk of the zombie’s skull vanished, transformed into red mist and a hail of bone fragments. I shoved the pistol into my belt and tapped my ear cuff, heading for the back of the room.
“Shaun?”
“Mahir, listen. If you can get a connection to Becks, tell her she needs to back up. I’m coming in with grenades.” I grabbed guns as I walked, dropping anything too light to be loaded and cramming the rest into my belt. If I was making a last stand, I was doing it so ridiculously overprepared that I’d rattle when I walked.
Mahir sighed deeply. “Of course you are. Couldn’t you try something a little less, I don’t know, insanely idiotic?”
“I could, but they don’t have a flamethrower here. Now let her know.”
“I’m on it.” The connection died.
Grabbing the top box of grenades, I paused only long enough to check that its contents were both intact and well secured. Then I ran.
Becks met me halfway down the hall, somehow managing to run silently in her combat boots. There was one more skill I’d never mastered. “What are you doing?” she demanded, tone barely above a whisper. “Mahir called me! He said you told him to do it! I could’ve been killed! Are you really planning to use grenades?”
“You got a better idea?”
“No, but the risk of structural damage—”
“Is minimal. Are the zombies where you left them?”
“What? Yes.”
“Then you would have been killed if you’d still been in that hallway.” I kept moving, holding the box up just enough for her to see the shape of it. “I’m going to aerosolize me some dead guys.”
“You’re insane.”
“Yeah, probably.” I pulled the first pistol I’d snagged out of my waistband, passing it to her. “Stay out here and guard my back. Oh, and if you could call Dr. Abbey and tell her to turn off the lab ventilation system until the spray settles, that would probably be good. I don’t want to zombie-out the whole room trying to save them.”
“You’re dangerously insane,” Becks amended—but she took the pistol, and added a quick, “Good luck,” before retreating farther down the hall.
I felt better knowing she was out there. One close call per day is pretty much my limit. I walked until I reached the end of the short hall leading to Dr. Abbey’s lab. The zombies were still trying to claw their way inside, their moaning echoing through the confined space until it seemed loud enough to drive a man insane. They were still focused on the prey in front of them, and not on things moving around behind them. That was good. I’d be changing that in a moment, but for now, distracted zombies were in my best interests.
Putting the box of concussion grenades on the floor, I opened the lid and pulled out the top two. They were designed for use in situations like this one, and would do maximal damage to soft tissue—such as zombies—while doing minimal structural damage to the building surrounding the zombies. They were usually used for large government extermination runs. A series of helpful cartoon thumbnails on the inside lid of the box used stick figures and the universal sign for NO to remind me that I shouldn’t use concussion grenades without putting on a gas mask first, since aerosolized zombie isn’t good for anybody.
“Too bad I have no respect for safety precautions,” I muttered, and pulled the pin on the first grenade.
I might be willing to stand in the open air while I created a fine red mist of viral particulates, but that didn’t make me stupid. I chucked the first grenade into the middle of the mob, causing about half of them to turn in my direction. I threw the second grenade about three feet in front of the mob. Then I ran, pausing only to grab two more grenades out of the top of the box. I pulled the pins and threw them behind me, into the path of the onrushing mob.
One, said George. Two, three…
“Four, five,” I added, and kept running.
The first grenade went off with a low crumping sound, muffled enough to tell me that it had been buried by a substantial number of bodies when it exploded. The other three went off in rapid succession, each of them a little louder and less cushioned by the weight of the bodies on top of it. I kept running. When Becks came into sight ahead of me, I stepped to the side, giving her a clear line of fire, and pulled two of the guns from my waistband.
“God, I wish we had cameras on this,” I said… and then the infected who’d managed to survive my little party tricks came shambling and running down the hall, and I forgot about cameras in favor of keeping us both alive.
They were a sorry-looking bunch, even for zombies. It’s true that you can kill a zombie with trauma to the body; once they lose enough blood, or a sufficient number of major internal organs, they’ll die like everybody else. The trouble is that they don’t feel pain like uninfected humans do, and they can keep going long after their injuries would have incapacitated a normal person. Some of the zombies making their way down the hall were missing arms, hands, even feet—those stomped along on the shattered remains of their ankles, shins, or knees, giving them a drunken gait that was somehow more horrifying than the normal zombie shuffle. One had a piece of grenade shrapnel stuck all the way through his cheek, wedged at an angle that would make it impossible for him to bite even if he managed to grab us. That wasn’t going to stop him from trying.
“Becks? You clear?”
“Clear!” came the shout from behind me.
“Great,” I said, and opened fire.
The bad thing about setting up a kill chute like the one we were in is that it can just as easily turn into a “die” chute. The good thing about setting up a kill chute—the reason that people keep using them, and have been using them since the Rising—is that as long as your ammo holds out and you don’t lose your head, you can do a hell of a lot of damage without letting the dead get within more than about ten feet of you.
The injuries to our mob were extensive enough that most of them weren’t moving very quickly, and the ones who’d been shielded from the worst of the blast by the bodies of their companions were hampered in their efforts to move forward by those same bodies. The fast zombies got mired in the slow zombies, and their efforts to break free of the mob just slowed everything down a little more. Becks and I didn’t bother aiming for the fast ones. We just went for the head and throat shots, and kept on knocking them down.