Revenence: Dead of Winter: A Zombie Novel (31 page)

     In the south building, Dr. Liu paced a long, relatively narrow common area, attempting to calm the residents.  He had particular concern for those he knew to suffer from high blood pressure or heart issues.

     "Are you feeling okay, Mrs. Taylor?" he asked a 91-year-old woman seated on a bench, the convention center's oldest resident.

     "Yes, dear," the withered, white-haired woman replied, her vibrant, green eyes locking his gaze.  "This old gal survived the horrors of World War II London.  I'm faring better than some."  She nodded down the way, where a young woman sobbed quietly, sitting on the floor with her knees drawn up to her chest as she leaned against a wide, concrete support pillar.  Even from the distance, about 30 feet away, the doctor could make out the visible signs of heroin withdrawal.  He started toward her, instinctually thinking to help, when a chain of thoughts occurred to him. 
Heroin...drugs...Merlin!
  He raised his walkie-talkie.

     "Shari, does anyone know if Merlin is accounted for?"

     "I don't know," Shari said.  "I assumed whoever was working security had him evacuated with the rest of the north building."

     "Oh, fuck," crackled a third voice over the speaker.  Shari recognized the voice as that of Paul, a forty-ish male member of the security team.  "I forgot.  I swear, I was going to come back for him--it was just me, and I already had Maximus to evacuate from the holding area.  Well, obviously I never made it back."

     "Someone go get him!" Shari hissed into the mouthpiece of her walkie-talkie.  She glanced nervously at the snow plow, which was perhaps a minute to a minute and a half away from the convention center.  She glanced behind her, where the holding cell lay on the northern wall of the north building, just off of Lake Shore Drive.

     "I was already on my way when I heard, 'Oh, fuck,'" Dr. Liu replied, breathing heavily as he ran through the south building toward the concourse.  From there, he entered the north building, making haste for its far side.  As he neared the holding area, he began to hear gunfire being issued from the roofs outside.  He reached the cell, where Merlin sat cross-legged on the floor of the cell.  He flinched as the sounds of gunfire from outside echoed through the room, shaking his head as the doctor approached. 

     "I knew Paul wasn't coming back for me," he said.  "That straight-edge, glorified mall cop would just as soon leave me as zombie or sadist bait."

     "You can tell him all about himself when we get to the south building," Dr. Liu said.  "Now is there an external release for the cell door?"

     "Behind the desk," Merlin instructed.

     From his walkie-talkie, Dr. Liu heard Shari raise her voice to a decibel far exceeding the incessant chirps and hisses issued since the situation had first arisen.

     "Stop!" Shari's voice hissed, so distorted from its loudness that it was barely recognizable as a word.  Then, more clearly, "Stand down!"

     Dr. Liu had not been paying attention to the conversation previously, as he was focused on the task of liberating Merlin from impending doom.  Therefore, he wasn't sure what was going on, or what was about to happen.  He located the cell door release Merlin had told him he would find behind the desk, freeing Merlin from his small jail.

     "This way," the doctor told him, exiting the room and making a right to head back toward the south building.  As they began to jog down the wide hallway, open on the left-hand side and overlooking the ground floor, they heard a deafening explosion from outside.  A moment later, a thunderous crash was heard downstairs, and a flaming truck came barreling through the north wall, near the corner where the northern wall of the building met with the eastern one.  After a moment, the air was thick with smoke and a heavy dust of ruined building material, floating upward to the second-floor overlook.  The doctor continued running south, covering his nose and mouth with the collar of his shirt and trying to breathe as little as possible while he attempted to outrun the burgeoning nebula of debris and flames. 

     When he had run far enough to no longer feel the menacing heat at his back, he looked back, trying to get a clearer look at what had happened.  As he gazed northward, he saw the vague outline of the gash torn through the building, illuminating the noxious cloud from behind with dim, overcast daylight.  On the first floor, in the center of a large, open office area full of cubicles, an orange city snow truck sat smoldering quietly.  Black smoke poured from a small section on the windshield, where they had left an opening, roughly ten inches high, stretching across the width for visibility.  The plow truck had laid waste to the cubicles in its path, leaving stacks of flaming papers, blown forty feet upward, to flutter at a leisurely pace back to the floor.

     "
Merlin!"
Dr. Liu called out in a loud whisper.  He paused for a moment, deliberating whether or not he should go back to look for the other man, when the smoky cloud began to near him, spreading its way into the building.  He drew in a sharp breath of frustration.

     "Well, isn't this magical," he muttered, retreating alone toward the south building.

     Shari crouched on the roof of the eastern building, gazing through her scope.  She eyed the snow truck, estimating that it would reach the building in about half a minute.  She reached for her walkie-talkie, intending to ask Dr. Liu whether or not he had reached Merlin.  Before she could press the button to speak, the receiver crackled.

     "I'm almost there with the dragon's breath," came Hugo's breathless voice over the speaker.  "Someone come to the door to get this thing."

     "I got it," a female guard told him.  "I'm just outside the door."

     "You guys," Shari said after a few moments, "that thing's getting a little close to the building now.  We're going to have to abort, or it's going to hit us and it's going to hit us on fire.  Who on the ground has the incendiary grenades?"

     "I'm trying to get some distance from the building," said a male guard.  "See if I can hit 'em with one before they get any closer."
     Shari panned her scope slightly further down Lake Shore Drive until she spotted the riot-gear clad guard heading up the length of railroad tracks that ran parallel to the highway.  He crept around the rear of the small building, leaving his cover as he reached the other side and attempted to roll an improved incendiary bomb into the path of the vehicle.  He missed his mark, the grenade rolling into the side of the rear tire and bouncing off, doing no discernable damage to the truck as it sped on down the highway.

     "Forget the fire, guys," Shari said into her radio.  "They're too close now.  Snipers, let's do our thing."  She pocketed the walkie-talkie and pointed her assault rifle at the very narrow window left on the windshield for the visibility of the truck's driver.  She joined roughly a dozen other snipers, scattered across the rooftops of the complex, in a rain of assault rounds directed at the advancing vehicle.

     After about a half-dozen shots, the vehicle suddenly veered sharply across the barren section of four-lane highway.  Just before hitting a concrete median, the truck's course was corrected and it continued to barrel toward the convention center, now a mere fifty yards away.  It's driver had gone off the road as it came upon the complex, and the truck was now steered directly toward the northeast corner of the north building.

     To the west of Lake Shore Drive, in the edge of her periphery, Shari saw a flash of silver and black that she recognized as McCormick-issued riot gear.  She shifted the barrel of her assault rifle toward the movement, and saw one of her security guards, Jimmy, hop down from a skateboard.  He was carrying the shotgun delivered to the ground forces by Hugo, presumably along with the the incendiary rounds.

     Shari raised her walkie-talkie, her heartbeat pulsating in her throat and fingertips in her panic.

     "Stop!" she shouted into the mouthpiece, her lips brushing its surface.  "Stand down!"

      He crouched as he aimed the shotgun toward the windshield, previously shattered by the snipers, and attempted to line up a shot to fire a flaming round into the interior of the truck.  He realized that he was unlikely to make the shot, and that if he did, he wasn't guaranteed to kill anyone inside the truck. 

     The driver was, by this point, aware of the shooter beside and slightly ahead of the truck, and as a result, jammed the gas pedal down to the floor.  It turned out to be too much for the engine of the truck.  Just before it buzzed past the young, shotgun-wielding McCormick security guard, its engine stalled out, apparently beginning to succumb to the effects of the sniper rounds which had rained onto the vehicle with the added pressure of being pushed to accelerate.  Jimmy took the opportunity to mount the hood of the truck before any of its occupants could escape, inserting the muzzle of the shotgun directly into the glassless opening in the windshield and firing the dragon's breath into the cab.  He fired one of those two rounds toward the driver's seat, and the other at the rear passenger-side occupant.  The result was that all four of the passengers, plus the driver, were set aflame. 

     To Jimmy's amazement, the driver of the truck turned the ignition, managing to turn the engine over, rather than exit the vehicle to put himself out.  He pressed hard on the gas pedal, barreling once again toward the building.  In the back seat, two of the passengers jumped out of the moving truck, tumbling gracelessly into the highway, where they rolled in their panic, trying to extinguish the flames covering their clothing.  They were sniped to death at once by McCormick forces on the roof.  The other rear occupant and the one in the front passenger seat appeared to be dead, having succumbed to the burns and shock.  The driver plowed foreward, while fire raged in the interior of the cab.  Jimmy, clinging to the truck, inadvertently breathed in just as a plume of fire shot suddenly from the opening in the windshield, funneled through the narrow rectangular opening.  Jimmy went lifeless, having severely burned his lungs as well as the entire half of his body that faced the flames.  His body went limp, tumbling back onto the hood before doing a backward somersault onto the V-plow, where he bounced off, between the plow attachment and the truck itself and was subsequently run over.

     The cab of the truck was now fully aflame, inside and out, and the driver seemed to have finally passed away.  The driverless  truck hopped the curb, barreling down into a ditch and toward the east wall of the north building.  After a few moments, when the truck was around one-hundred feet from the building, a nearby member of McCormick security on the ground reached into his pocket, taking out an improvised incendiary device consisting of thermite placed inside a speaker magnet.  He realized that the fiery truck was going to hit the wall of the complex, and there was nothing he would do to stop it.

     He set a timer on the device for five seconds, then threw it at the truck as it rolled forward, where it struck the armored plating just beneath the driver's side cab door.  Due to the magnetic nature of the device, it stuck and held.  Seconds later, the gas tank ignited, causing a flaming, dirty explosion.  Shari watched, helpless and unhelpful, as the truck barreled into the cavernous northern building, the entirety of its structure on fire, but with the threat of explosion passed.

     "It would have blown eventually," the security member who had used the grenade explained.  "I just wanted to hurry the explosion along, before it happened inside the building."

     Shari shrugged from her position on the roof.  "Probably for the best," she conceded. 

     She hurried across the roof of the concourse, crossing over Lake Shore Drive below, toward the roof of the north building.  She wondered if any of the sadists had managed to survive the explosion and ensuing crash.  She glanced northward briefly as she crossed the glass-enclosed walkway, her assault rifle raised.  The rest of the fleet of sadists was on their way down the highway, and would likely arrive at the convention center within a few minutes.  Shari uttered a perturbed titter of delirium as she ducked into the north building.

    
When they get here,
she thought,
I'll get to see how else I can fuck this up.

     Merlin had already begun to to sneak away from Dr. Liu, backtracking toward the holding area,when the building was hit by the snow truck.  The average person may have retreated, fearing for their safety, as the area was filled with sudden, intense heat and a black cloud of smoke and debris.  For Merlin, however, that fear was easily overridden by his desire for the duffel bag which had been locked in the holding area.

     "Merlin's kind of goodie bag," he said to himself, his tone sing-song and giddy.  "The kind that will only fit in a duffel bag."

     As he reached the holding room, he realized that half of it now lay downstairs, having collapsed on top of several cubicles on the first floor.  He started across a vertical metal beam, spying the intact evidence locker containing the duffel bag on an unbroken section of floor on the other side.

     As he balanced his way across the beam, it became difficult to lift his feet. He realized that the rubber soles of his old-school, high-top sneakers were becoming pliable and beginning to melt as he crossed the hot metal beam.  He yanked his feet free, managing to narrowly avoid toppling off-balance, and then hurried the remainder of the way across.

     He reached the locker, roughly four feet high.  As he studied the lock, he realized that he was unlikely to either pick or break it.  He inspected the locker itself in closer detail, noting its rather shoddy materials and design.  In the distance, he heard McCormick security approaching.  He took a deep breath, lifting the locker slightly off of the floor.  He gathered his strength, edging it toward the border where the floor had been ripped away.  He lifted the locker as high as he could, then slammed it with all his might down into the first floor below, striking it hard against a marble reception counter.  Its structure buckled upon impact, like a piñata, spewing its contents among the litter already scattered throughout the ruined room.

     Merlin slithered carefully down a diagonally-slanted section of floor, lowering himself until his feet dangled about six feet from the tiles of the first floor.  He dropped down, crouching softly as he landed.  He claimed his prize, the duffelbag, and perused the other items littering the floor.  There had been more drugs in the locker, and he scoured the floor to find as many as he could.  He stopped to inspect another object, catching the light from outside, pouring in through the hole in the wall.  He crouched to look more closely at the shiny, metal instrument.  It was an eating utensil, bearing a small engraving. 
TITANIUM, MADE IN U.S.A.

     "Epic spork!" he breathed, tucking it into a pocket.

     He stood, slinging the bag across his chest, and slipped away quietly into the smoky  bowels of the north building.