Last Fight of the Valkyries (28 page)

He pulled his leg free, then continued across the pile of bodies.
If the girls wanted to die back there, he couldn't do anything for
them. His brain tried to square his feeling of wanting to save them
with the reality of needing to save himself, and Victoria. The
prodding of Victoria and the now-angry buzz of the drone nearby
spurred him on.

The sounds of crying almost made him turn around, but Victoria
whispered, “They're coming.” That kept him going forward,
too.

The bodies were piled two or three deep, but he saw them spread
out on the ground all around. It was darker here because they had
collapsed on the blue strands of light. The path continued forward;
he thought he saw a shape on the wall ahead—another large door.

Several red beams of light reached out of the darkness and
converged on his chest.

When Victoria caught up to him, she tried to push him. This time,
he couldn't move at all.

“I've got a problem here.” His voice was high-pitched,
but he wasn't embarrassed. It was his extreme panic voice, though he
tried with all he was worth to keep it together. “There
are...lasers...aiming at my chest.”

Victoria, perhaps not believing him, scrambled next to him. When
she arrived, a couple of the lasers moved to her white shirt, making
large red blotches in the darkness.

With the force of a fist to his face, he realized where he was.
Bodies everywhere, but mostly in an even arc from left to right, as
if someone had sighted in the distance and shot anything that made it
into that space.

He reached over to Victoria. “Can I have the flashlight,
please?”

With mechanical motions, he was able to get it from her and turn
it on. At first, it refused to light, but he banged it with his hand
and a tired glow came forth. He turned it on the pile of dead,
confirming his suspicions.

“These people were all shot. Look at them.” He panned
the light on the bodies closest to them. It wasn't strong enough to
see much beyond a few feet. All the bodies had terrible wounds. The
amount of blood was sickening. He felt his stomach retch, though it
was completely empty.

“These were zombies...” He said it almost with relief,
though the implications were no less damning for them. Not with laser
sights drilling into their hearts.

He turned to Victoria with the light. It was almost completely
dead. In the final gasps though, he saw the recognition on her face.
He felt it on his own. Together, they turned forward and screamed.

“We're alive!”

“Don't shoot!”

A few moments of silence followed.

The reply flew out of the darkness.

3

“Saffron! Azure! Get over here.”

The girls, sounding distant from over the pile of bodies, shouted
back. “Indigo!”

They came up next to Liam and bear crawled over the worst of the
pile. He followed them with Victoria next to him. The lasers
vacillated among the four, as if unsure which to choose. With certain
death behind, and the possibility of death dancing on his chest, he
prayed.

Please God, don't let my friends die on a pile of zombie
bodies.

He'd learned a lesson from Grandma Marty about praying. She once
told him she never prayed for herself. Instead, she prayed for
others. Liam wondered if she really meant that, or if it was some
kind of adult way of making him think of other people first. Whatever
the truth, he thought it made a lot of sense as he slid across the
remains of the dead.

The bodies cleared up as they moved closer to the source of the
lasers. The blue lights on the floor reemerged, and the overall
lighting situation improved. Liam felt he was seldom surprised these
days, so it was with almost businesslike recognition he saw the big
machine guns lining the wall with the door. He counted six of them,
spaced about ten feet apart. The farthest one was almost invisible to
his left, out in the darkness.

A young girl stood in the small doorway to the right of the
larger, closed metal door inset into the rock face. It was very much
like the last big room he'd been in, although the smaller door was
not frosted glass—it was heavy steel. A little light spilled
out from inside, setting the girl in profile for those in the
darkness. Liam knew the girl even before he could make out her
features. She was, after all, as short as the two girls already with
him.

Blue and Pink ran ahead to their sister. Liam grabbed Victoria's
hand and followed.

“Hurry guys. We have to get inside. I'll turn on the guns
again.” The triplets hugged briefly then disappeared from view.

Victoria had a knack for reading his mind. She voiced his thoughts
with a close whisper. “Lucky that their sister is the one
operating these guns, huh?”

He nodded, though she probably didn't see him in the darkness. He
let her go up a couple steps to reach the doorway. When he mounted
the steps, he turned around, wondering how close the zombie pursuit
had come to reaching them.

He was genuinely shocked when a nearby gun barked several times as
it fired. Its laser had found something at the edge of its awareness.
The zombies had come very close to catching up. He threw himself
through the doorway and shut it with a bang. He stood with his back
against it to catch his wits, and heard more of the guns start up.
The sound was muffled through the doorway. He could feel them as much
as hear them.

“OK, this is too much. Who are you three?”

He was still at the door, but the three girls were nearby in front
of a big computer monitor. They were talking to each other in a tight
hug-huddle, apparently unaware he said anything.

The guns chugged outside the door, and he had a hard time
separating himself from the metal. It was as if part of him wanted to
be back there. Part of him
wanted
to get caught. He reveled in
the vibrations from the machine guns.

Victoria looked lost. She stood between him and the other girls
with her hands on her hips. She either wanted to peel him off the
door, or listen to what the girls were saying.

Peel me off the door!

With a flourish, she turned to the big monitor near the girls. “My
God. There's an infinite number of them!”

That got everyone's attention. Even Liam managed to free himself.
The control room was very similar to the one they'd left earlier,
though it had white lights on the walls, rather than deep blue. They
seemed extra dim as if they only got half the electricity they
required. Still, it was enough to see the third triplet. She was
identical to the other two, of course, but was covered—absolutely
covered—in dried and peeling blood. It was as if she took a
bath in the stuff, and then picked off what she could from her skin,
but was unable to get it out of her clothing. As he closed the
distance, he thought she smelled horrible, though he couldn't say for
sure as they were all covered in blood now from their climb over the
kill zone.

The new girl took a moment to introduce herself. She reached her
hand out to Liam. “Hi, I'm Indigo, but you can call me—”

“Black.”

The girl paused her handshake. “How did you know that?”
She nodded to her sisters. “They tell you?”

“Yeah.” He wanted to believe they had agreed
beforehand what they would call themselves in the event of a Zombie
Apocalypse, but just thinking it sounded stupid in his head.

“We told him,” the other girls agreed.

They all gathered around the computer screen. It displayed a view
from what was apparently a floating camera in the room outside.

“Is this the drone?” Liam asked.

He shivered again, involuntarily. He wrapped his arms around
himself without thinking about it.

Black happened to look at him as he did it. “Yeah, it's cold
down here. I thought about going out to get some extra clothes from
those people, but...”

She turned back to the screen, describing what the drone was
observing. “When I first saw you, I wondered how you'd gotten
through that door back there. I guess I shouldn't be surprised you
broke the glass. I would have done the same. But you could have at
least blocked the second door.”

Liam knew they'd made a mistake.

“But that isn't the worst part. These people you see out
there...” She put her finger on the computer screen to point to
them. For the first time in his life, it didn't bother him. “...they
came from across the courtyard.”

“Oh, I guess I should explain.” She punched up some
keys and a map of the mine appeared. She again began to drag her
finger around the screen.

“You guys came in the only door to this place. The one with
the dump trucks. They get an A for effort on that one. F for delivery
though.” A sad laugh. “So most of the people who came
down into this wing of the mine went across the courtyard area where
you came in. I don't know for sure, but I was told they keep some
more dump trucks and other equipment over there. They like to have
backups on every level.”

“
Most
went that way?” He asked.

“Yeah, a few people who work here tried to get everyone into
that doorway. I wasn't going to go anywhere near a large group of
people, especially not in an enclosed space. I went through the blue
door. Plus, I was pretty messed up though after my—”

She looked away from everyone for a few seconds. “—my
descent into this place.” She stood up and turned to her
sisters. “I don't think Mom made it. She...she ran to get out
of the mine. I had to run the other way or I would have died, too.”

Her sisters gave her a hug, and Victoria spoke up. “You did
the right thing. I had to leave my friends behind. It sucked.”
She put her hand on the scrum of girls. A hand reached out in thanks.

Liam's eyes returned to the monitor. He sat down at the terminal
and cleared the map. He brought up the screen showing the scene
outside. The drone watched as more and more zombies arrived at the
bodies of their friends and continued on, unaware what was ahead. A
small rise of bodies formed in the middle. It created a rudimentary
defilade for those coming up behind the leaders. Many of the clumsy
things fell over their mates and sort of crawl-walked onto the pile.
This kept them low enough to avoid the bullets of the automated guns.
They sought targets elsewhere.

The guns continued to fire, but many rounds went over the backs of
those slithering across the pre-sighted killbox. In minutes, those
same crawling zombies crested the little rise. Some were shot on
sight, but others slid down the other bodies. Even if they took a
bullet, they continued—unless it was a headshot. The guns had
to readjust constantly. They weren't smart enough to aim for the
head, but by the sheer numbers of bullets, they often did hit their
head.

The controls for moving the drone were labeled on the screen. With
the mouse and keyboard, he quickly learned the basic maneuvers so he
could turn the drone to face the guns. About half of them turned on
their automated paths, but they weren't firing.

“Uh oh.”

The girls had all turned to watch him work, and he heard mumbles
of curses. They all saw how this game would end. On a whim, he asked
Black if the drone had a gun.

“Nope. They told me it was just a camera.”

He turned to her, looking up. Even from the chair, he didn't have
to look up very far.

“Who told you? Where are they?”

Black looked at him with a serious face.

“Yeah.” She dragged out the word, as if hesitant to
get into it. “About that...”

4

“So, I said I broke off from the main group. I came through
the blue door and the computer room there. I hid under the desks for
a long time. Days, maybe. But I had to find water. I wasn't going
back out the way I'd come. I was convinced there were infected just
outside...”

She pointed to the computer screen with the drone footage. Only a
couple of the guns still had ammunition.

“I ran deeper into the mine, and I came through
there
.
But back then, there were no dead bodies. Just a couple soldiers
inside this room, watching things on the outside, just like we're
doing here.”

The second-to-last gun dropped out of action.

“Timothy and Frank. Ha! I'll never forget their names for as
long as I live. We spent days in this room. For a long time, we sat
doing nothing. They gave themselves time on the computer, but they
said I didn't have clearance. Sometimes they showed me the news of
the plague up top from websites they liked, but mostly I just hung
around. They wouldn't let me go deeper into the mine—through
that
door.” She pointed to the inside door of the
control room. “At least not at first.”

“Days went by, but eventually the dead started to show up.
The guns started to shoot. It wasn't constant, but hour after hour
the guns would go off. They had a drone they used to do surveillance
of the columbarium, but they brought it in so they could see into the
room you just came through.”

“Columbarium?” Victoria again anticipated his own
question.

“Yeah, it's what they called this room.” She pointed
to the dark windows on the far wall. “I think it means it's
where they store ashes of the dead.”

Liam's dry mouth reminded him of another point. “Do you have
any water here?”

Black pointed to some hard hats in the corner. “We filled up
those hats with water, help yourself. There's plenty in the mine, as
long as the dead aren't nearby.”

The whole party drank from the hats, as Black continued.

“Anyway, they told me what was through there, but they
refused to show me. They were more scared of what was back there than
they were of the dead piling up at our front door.”

She got up and moved to the interior door. Like the previous
control room, the wall was made up of large windows, and the light of
the room spilled out into another large cavern. The large metal door
for trucks was just outside the window. Liam wondered how many big
rooms were in the system. He didn't recall seeing many chambers
beyond the first on the map.