Allegiance (37 page)

Outbreak - Day 16

National Microbiology
Laboratory

Winnipeg, Manitoba
Canada

Cade and Cross slid out
of the hovering chopper in unison, and once they were on the roof they steadied
the dangling fast ropes against Jedi One-One’s vicious rotor wash.

Cade stared up at
Lopez’s size nines as they rocketed towards his face, and at the last moment
released the rope and stepped out of the way.

A half second later
Cross let go of the other fast rope and Tice was also safely on the roof.

“Clear starboard,” said
Hicks over the comms.

“Copy, starboard clear,”
answered Ari.

“Clear port,” intoned
Gaines.

“Copy, port clear,” said
Durant.

Cade went to one knee,
brought his M4 up, and swept the barrel left to right.
Clear
. He gazed
skyward and flashed a thumbs up at the black helicopter and watched the fast
ropes free-fall to the rooftop and the portside door slide shut. In his
earpiece he heard Durant calmly report back to Nash—who was monitoring the
mission from the TOC at Schriever—that he, call sign Anvil Actual, was on
target.

“Let’s move,” Cade said
as he took off at a trot across the metal rooftop. Pitched to fifteen degrees
and slick as snot, the going was precarious, and a fall equaled death at the
hands and teeth of the Zs below.

Once he and his team
reached the east side of the rooftop, they formed up next to a doorway inset
into a sort of step-up on the building top.

Cade let his M4 hang on
the center point sling and pressed his ear to the cool metal door. He
considered having Tice scan the interior with a fiber optic camera, but seeing
as how something was steadily scratching the other side of the door he saw no
need. “We have Zs,” he said, stabbing a finger at the door. Once again he took
a knee, slid the lock gun from his cargo pocket, and went to work on the
mechanism. After manipulating the tumblers for a short time, there was a soft
click. Just to be on the safe side, he put his shoulder and all one hundred and
eighty pounds of his body weight against the door while he stowed the lock pick
tool and drew the Glock 17. He fished the suppressor from another pocket and
threaded the flat black can onto the Glock’s barrel, pulled the slide back an
inch and saw the reassuring gleam of brass.
One in the pipe.
“Counting
from three,” he said.

“Copy that,” came three
near simultaneous replies.

He counted down, hit
one, and pulled the door open in one fluid motion. The carrion blast was like
nothing he had ever smelled.
Well, almost nothing
, he thought to
himself. Stuck in a superheated attic with a bitchy Daymon and a sweaty Hoss
and a hundred Zs a floor below would never be topped on the stench scale. But
this blast of air from the darkened stairwell was a close second.

A heartbeat after the
door hit the stop, the source of the scratching filled the doorway. Badly
decomposed and trailing greasy ropes of lower intestine, the creature staggered
into the light and hungrily eyed the operators.

“Engaging,” Cade said as
he swung the Glock on target and put two 9mm rounds through the creature’s
right eye, sending brains and blood blasting through the exit wound behind its
left ear.

Immediately, another two
moaning Zs ambled through the doorway and were tripped up by the prone body of
the first creature. As they struggled to rise, Cade took a quick step to his
right and pumped a pair of rounds point blank into each of their skulls. “Going
in,” he said, pulling the NVGs in front of his eyes. Without hesitating, he
stepped over the leaking bodies and entered the stairwell with the Glock moving
in a defensive arc to the left.

It was your
standard-sized stairwell, four feet from wall to rail. Just enough room for the
team to traverse one at a time while practicing proper spacing. Cade counted
seventeen stairs from where he stood to the next landing where the run doubled
back to the right.

He took the stairs
slowly, keeping his Glock moving wherever his eyes went. Nearly to the next
landing, he looked over his shoulder. Four stairs separated him from Tice.
Similarly spaced, Cross was in the three spot with Lopez a few steps up from
him keeping an eye on the team’s six.

Satisfied everyone was
inside, Cade inched over to the rail and peered down the well. On the next
flight down, a corpse was wedged in the door, allowing natural light to filter
in. He put his gloved hand on the handrail and felt subtle vibrations
transferring through the metal. He shifted his gaze straight down between
hundreds of feet of serpentine handrail where he could hear scraping noises
echoing upwards as an unknown number of dead things negotiated the stairs.

He pressed forward, made
the landing and stood over the headless corpse. Pressing his back to the wall
next to the fifth-floor door, he flipped his goggles up and peeked around the
door’s edge. Ringed with windows letting in a copious amount of light, the
expansive rectangular-shaped room spread out before him. There was sturdy gray
carpet on the floor, and overhead a white drop-down ceiling housed scores of
long dead florescent tubes behind frosted plastic panels. There were numerous
offices fronted with opaque glass doors running away on the left. In the far
right corner there was an immense glass enclosed meeting room with a long dark
wood table and comfortable-looking high-backed chairs arranged around it. In
the center of the office were row upon row of unoccupied desks in various
stages of clutter.

In the center of it all,
he counted a total of three zombies, all of which were not dressed in office
attire. One had on a tee shirt and shorts, and the other wore tattered blue
jeans and a bloodied tank top. The third creature was large by anyone’s
standards and wore a tent-sized floral muumuu revealing much more than Cade
needed to see.

“Contact, three Zs.
Going in solo,” Cade said in a stage whisper. His voice was amplified and
transmitted via his throat mike to the rest of his team as well as Gaines, who
was monitoring the mission from Jedi One-One which was either at a standoff
position close by, or orbiting the facility high above.

Cade pushed the door
inward, fully flooding the stairway with bright light. Pistol clutched tightly
in his gloved hands, he stepped over the dead body and padded into the room
across the forgiving carpet. He picked his targets by order of awareness and
proximity. When he had closed to within ten feet of the
tee-shirt-and-shorts-wearing Z, he promptly put it down with two rounds to the
back of its head, sending its skullcap and half a head of hair careening end over
end across the room.

As he crabbed sideways
cutting the room, he targeted the portly female Z that had obviously suffered a
terrible attack at the hands and teeth of the dead. He made a face at the sight
as the creature lumbered around on tree-trunk-sized legs and faced him. The
muumuu that the woman had been wearing before she died had been reduced to
strips of fabric where the feeding Zs had torn into her abdomen. Raised
teeth-marks a vicious shade of purple peppered its pale abdomen. All of the organs
needed to sustain life were missing, leaving only yellowed fat framing the
empty chest cavity. Feeling more than a little sorry for the pathetic sight, he
put a round in each eye and ended her hell on earth.

The third monster was
still a few yards away and had turned at the sound of the first suppressed
salvo. Simultaneously it snarled and raised its arms, then caromed off a desk
and staggered towards the operator.

Keeping a three-desk
buffer, Cade went to one knee, steadied his aim atop a computer printer, and
caressed the trigger twice. The Glock rocked in his grip sending lethal lead
into the walking cadaver’s open mouth, and sending teeth, tongue, and blood
erupting through a shredded cheek. The muzzle-climb from the first discharge
changed the angle minutely, sending the second round into its left eye and
peeling a flap of dermis and skull backwards as the bullet and its considerable
kinetic energy was absorbed by bone and brain.

Ten seconds had elapsed
between Cade’s solo entry and the third Z hitting the ground. “Clear,” he
called out. “Last man through secure the door.”

No effin way, el
Capitán
, thought Lopez when he
heard this. He was rear guard, therefore he was the one whom Cade expected to
manhandle the dead body out of the way. Still recovering from the ordeal of
carrying the wriggling Alpha specimen up fourteen flights of stairs at the CDC
in Atlanta, the prospect of touching another Z corpse—moving or not—didn’t sit
well with the highly religious operator.

Cade felt his heart rate
returning to normal as he swapped magazines in the Glock and racked a new round
into the chamber. He swept his gaze around the room, waiting for the rest of
the team to file in.

“Clear,” was called out
by both Tice and Cross as they stepped over the decapitated woman and hustled
through the doorway.

Lopez reached the
landing last. He checked the stairway to ensure he was alone.
Clear.
He
regarded the task waiting near his feet.
Fuck
. His nose crinkled at the
sight of the shredded and decapitated body. Nonplussed, he swung his M4 behind
his back, letting it hang on its sling, and reluctantly grabbed the clammy
corpse by its bloated ankles. Muttering a few Spanish curse words, he dragged
it the rest of the way inside and clicked the door shut, then announced that
the door was cleared and secured.

Calling out more orders,
Cade sent Cross to check out the fishbowl-looking conference room. He told
Lopez and Tice to hang tight. He went down the row of offices on the left,
checking them for survivors, then came back empty-handed with a look of
resignation on his face.

 “Clear,” called Cross
from across the room.

“Moving to four,” Cade
stated calmly. He flipped down his night vision goggles, approached the door to
the stairs, and held up a fist.

The three other team
members donned their goggles and quietly waited.

Cade put his ear the
metal door.
Nothing.
He gently pushed the panic bar, and entered the
well with the silencer on the Glock’s business end leading the way.

The team made both
flights of stairs and the landing in between without running into trouble.

Cade stood in front of
the fourth-floor door with the team stacked up behind him. He cocked his head
and listened to the sounds in the stairwell. They seemed to have increased in
volume, though thankfully not in tempo. From past experience he knew stairs
gave Zs trouble, so he figured the multiple flights might buy the team enough
time to get to the third floor without having to fight a bunch of them in the
close quarters of the stairwell.

He pressed his ear to
the door. “Lots of movement,” he whispered. He rose and motioned Tice forward.

Without a word Tice
descended the stairs, crabbed past Cross and went to a knee in front of the
steel door. He pulled a flexible fiber-optic periscope from a pocket and
manipulated the lens with the small trigger at the base of the cable.

Cade watched through his
NVGs as what resembled a glowing green eye on the end of a bendable stock
swiveled around like something alive.

Tice squeezed the lens
under the vinyl door sweep affixed to the bottom edge of the door, powered up
the four-inch-square LCD screen and mated the display to the fiber optic mast.

“Contact,” Tice called
out as he swept the lens back and forth.

Master of the obvious,
thought Lopez, who had glanced over the Spook’s
shoulder. Though the ‘
Contacts
’ on the screen appeared but an inch tall,
there had to be at least twenty of them stumbling around the sunlit room which
looked to be identical in layout and furnishings to the one they had just
cleared.

Still affected by his
decision to abandon the survivors on the dam at the Flaming Gorge Recreation
area, and with the desperate looks on the faces of the lady and her kids adrift
on the sailboat still visiting him nightly, Cade weighed the odds and made the
difficult call. “Wrap it up Tice... I’ve seen enough.” He paused for a moment,
second-guessing his decision, then continued. “Five and four are cleared...
There are no survivors. Moving on to three.”

“Copy that,” replied
Gaines.

Thank God
, thought Lopez, pushing the flashbacks from the
CDC mission to the back of his mind.

A few seconds later,
when the team had reached the landing between floors four and three, Cade spied
the source of the scuffing sounds. Glowing green in his goggles, on the flight
below the door to the third floor, at least a dozen undead were climbing
upwards on shaky legs, one stair at a time.

Holstering the Glock, he
pressed his left shoulder to the wall, and using hand signals which only the
team could see in the dark, ordered Cross to engage the rear of the pack and
Tice and Lopez to hold fire and continue watching their six.

He swung his M4 around
and thumbed on the infra-red laser pointer attached to the weapon’s Picatinny
rail. About the size of a pack of cigarettes, the device emitted a beam in the
light spectrum that could only be seen with a night vision device.