Blackout (15 page)

“No,” she said grimly.

“Didn’t think so. On my signal, we’re going to run.”

I didn’t need to see her face to know what her expression looked like. “That’s a
terrible
idea.”

“So is staying here! Either Dr. Abbey’s been doing independent collections, or the locals called for friends. Either way,” I aimed, fired, and took down another zombie, “we’re going to run out of bullets before we run out of walking corpses. We run or we die. Got a preference?”

“I like running.”

“Good. One…” I took another shot. This one went wild, barely grazing the zombie I was aiming for.

“Two…”

“Three!” I shoved Becks in the direction of the stairs, firing rapidly to cover her. She’d been right about one thing; if one of us was going to get chewed on, it needed to be me. One bite and it was game over for her. I’d consider a few more scars to be a fair trade for getting Becks out of this alive.

They can still kill you
, hissed George.

“Maybe I deserve it,” I replied, and ran after Becks.

One nice thing about stairs: Zombies can navigate them, but they can’t do it fast. There’s a certain comedy to watching them try, as long as you’re not in a position to get knocked over by an infected body tumbling back down to the ground floor after it manages to misjudge the positioning of its feet. A few zombies had already fallen by the time we reached the bottom step.

Becks shot the first of them and ran on, leaving me to take out the other two. Both of them were wearing lab coats. They moaned, reaching for me. I grimaced as I jumped over them, and paused long enough to turn back and shoot them in the head. It took a few seconds to be absolutely sure they were dead, not just incapacitated. I spent the time. I knew these people. I might not know their names, but I knew them, and this was at least partially my fault. I could have forced Dr. Abbey to up her security. I could have helped more. I could have stopped this from happening.

You need to stop taking responsibility for things that aren’t your fault
, said George, sounding cranky enough that I could almost see her frown.

“You need to stop telling me that things aren’t my fault,” I countered, turning to shoot a zombie that had been lurching up behind me. It went down hard. I kept my gun raised and began backing up the stairs,
scanning the lab below me. The occasional gunshot from above told me that Becks was doing her part to clear the landing.

My ear cuff beeped. I jerked my chin upward, answering the call. “Kinda busy, so this better be good.”

“Maggie’s upstairs, locked in one of the cold storage rooms. She’s not injured, but she’s bloody pissed at whoever it was that shoved her in there,” said Mahir. “Dr. Abbey says she made contact with Becks?”

“We’re en route now.” I took another shot. That left three. Four if I decided to use all my bullets, rather than going with the traditional approach to zombie-killing, and saving the last one for myself. The thought made me crack a smile. Saving bullets for myself was something I didn’t have to worry about anymore.

You are so fucking morbid
, muttered George.

“Learned from the best,” I replied. There were only two visible zombies left on the floor, and both of them had been infected for long enough that they were moving slowly, in that classic Romero shuffle. Better yet, killing so many of their pack mates meant the viral intelligence driving them all had been reduced from mob level smarts back to individual stupidity.

No one knows why zombies get smarter when you have a bunch of them in one place, but they do, and it’s a problem. Tactics that work against one or two lone undead will get you killed when you go up against a mob. I’ve seen them demonstrate complicated hunting techniques, like actual ambush preparation, and it’s scary as hell. If nothing else, it forces you to remember that the things inside those rotting shells used to be human, and on some level, still might be. They just got sick. It could happen to anybody.

Anybody but me.

“Shaun? Shaun, are you there? Shaun?” Mahir’s voice in my ear dragged me out of my thoughts and back into the situation.

“Sorry, just assessing.” I turned, running up the stairs. Becks was waiting on the landing. She had her gun up, and was braced against the banister; two infected were shambling toward her, neither moving fast enough to be a major threat at their current distance. She was letting them set up the shot. It’s a classic field tactic, and a good way to save your ammunition. There was just one problem with it.

If there were only two zombies out here, where was all that moaning coming from?

“What’s your assessment?” asked Becks.

“We’re fucked. Where’s Alaric? I’m pissed off, I’m almost out of bullets, and I’m not having any
fun
.” And that, right there, was the reason I stopped doing active fieldwork, even before we stopped really being a news site. You can’t be a professional Irwin when you can’t at least pretend to enjoy what you’re doing. It doesn’t work. The center does not hold.

“He’s with Dr. Abbey.”

“Good.”

Becks took the first of her shots as I reached her. The zombie went down. She didn’t even glance in my direction. “We clear below, Mason?”

“Two zombies, both too uncoordinated to handle the stairs. I made an executive decision. We need to conserve bullets more than we need to perfectly secure the area.”

“Well, just don’t forget that they’re down there and sound the all-clear without going back to mop up your mess.” She squeezed off her second shot. This wasn’t a
clean hit; her bullet took the infected in the throat, reducing it to a mass of torn flesh and visible bone. It kept shuffling forward.

“Uh, Becks—”

“One,” she said. “Two. Three…”

The zombie went down, the virally enhanced clotting factors in its blood finally giving up the task of repairing the arteries shredded by her bullet.

“Three,” she said, and flashed me a self-satisfied smile. “Just like getting to the center of a Tootsie Pop.”

“Did you know they made that commercial in the 1970s?” I asked. There were no more infected in sight. The moaning in the distance continued. “How are you for bullets?”

“I did know that, yes. Three bullets left. You?”

“Four.”

“Great. Let’s hope this party isn’t strictly BYOB.” She turned and ran in the direction of the dead.

“We’re on our way, Mahir,” I said, and ran after her.

“Do they train you people to say stupid things when in mortal danger? I’m just curious, you understand, I’m not judging you.”

“Yes, you are.”

“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.