The Apocalypse Crusade 2 (32 page)

“Eleven, I think,” Meeks answered. His face was suddenly the color of curdled milk.

“Maybe they’ll make a second trip?” Cheryl suggested.

“Will we last that long?” Eng asked. “There’s no way. You can hear them coming through the doors.” They all paused and sure enough, the banging and the shooting intensified. “If I was you, I’d hightail it out of here as fast as you could. I’d rather run or try to make it to the cars than just sit here waiting until you’re left behind.

Benjamin and Cheryl shared a look. “What do you think?” Cheryl asked, her face close to Benjamin’s as if she was sharing a secret.

“Wait here,” he said and then slipped out the door. He tiptoed down the hall to the call station and saw the fear on everyone’s faces. He saw the barricades that were being set up inside the lobby area and he heard the crash of rocks on metal and on glass. What he didn’t hear was the thrum of helicopters. They were minutes from death and where were the helicopters? One look at Dr. Lee and her oh-so-superior eyes and Benjamin turned back to where he had left Cheryl.

“We’re getting out of here,” he said, breathlessly to her, pulling her to her feet. “The doors aren’t going to hold. The zombies are almost through and there’s no sign of a helicopter.”

She made a whining sound in her throat as she nodded. Cheryl had a measly .38 and she wasn’t even comfortable with that small of a weapon. Benjamin had a shotgun that held three shells in the chamber. He had felt tough with it when the Lieutenant Pemberton had given it to him, now he was starting to second-guess the weapon. Three shots wasn’t much, not compared to the thirty in an M16. He had been thinking for some time that they had cheated him and now with the seed planted in his head that once again he was only a nerd in their eyes, a second-class citizen, he was sure the gun wasn’t top of the line.

But it would have to do.

They started for the door and Anna pushed herself up. “Hey! What about us? You can’t just leave us.”

“I think I can,” Benjamin said.

“I’ll scream,” she warned. “You won’t get too far if I do.”

He brought the shotgun up to his shoulder and walked right up to her so that the fat bore of the gun was shoved into her throat. “I’ll kill you if you do,” he whispered. “I’ll say you were trying to escape. I’ll kill all of you.” His eyes displayed the panic in him and Anna saw she had made the wrong play.

“Ok, Ben. I won’t scream. Just take it easy.”

“Easy-peasey,” he replied and then backed away with the gun still pointed at her. He walked into the wall, checked behind him and then backed out of the room.

Cheryl was dancing from foot to foot, her face was screwed up in fear, making her ugly. “I don’t know about this, Ben. Maybe they’ll let us on the helicopter.” She was actually thinking that maybe they would let
her
on the helicopter, but she didn’t know for sure. Normally, because of her looks she would’ve been a shoe-in for the first ride out, only things were all sorts of weird. She had tried to break away from Benjamin’s clinging grasp when they had first arrived at the station, but the cops had acted strange. They had kept to themselves and spoke only in whispers. She guessed that they had done something, or perhaps many somethings evil.

The other men weren’t all that open to her advances, either. Deckard and Chuck had their eyes on other girls, Dr. Wilson was old, Burke was sick, Max was married and Johnny Osgood was weak and she didn’t trust him. This just left Benjamin, and now she felt she was stuck with him. So far, at least, he had done his job; he had kept her safe. She was sure he would give up his life for hers. There wasn’t a chance in hell she would ever return the favor.

“We don’t have a choice,” Benjamin told her as he tugged her to the door. “This could be our only chance and I don’t want to bet my life on the kindness of those strangers. We’ll just make a run for the Juke and find a better place. Remember what that Asian chick said about hiding in a bank? It isn’t a bad idea. No one’s getting in a bank. Now, get your keys out.” As she dug in her pocket, he leaned his ear to the door. Up from the cool metal came the vibrations shaking the building. They hummed down his ear canal and right into his soul. The station wasn’t going to last. It made opening the door into the unknown that much easier—that and the fact there wasn’t a whisper coming from the other side of the door.

“Let’s go,” he said, taking Cheryl’s hand and holding the shotgun out—there was no way he’d be able to shoot the weapon like this, one handed, but he thought he looked cool. Luckily for him, there wasn’t anything to shoot. The back of the building was dark to the point they couldn’t see the woods twenty yards away. To their right was a green garbage dumpster; to their left a short wall that led to the single reinforced loading door that was in the down position and locked with a heavy Yale padlock. In front of them was a ramp that led to a back street.

They went down it hand in hand—his was wet with sweat, as was his face and hair. Under his arms were dark crescents that were spreading quickly. Cheryl was chilled and she shook. Half her attention was on Benjamin; she was worried he would just run away at the slightest hint of danger, and there were many hints. The back of the station might have been free of the zombies, but there were things moving in the trees. Branches snapped and leaves crackled. They could hear ugly moans that weren’t human.

“This way,” Benjamin said in voice so high that he sounded as if someone had his balls in a vice. His contorted face expressed something similar. He pulled her along, hurrying for the side of the building, stopping just shy of the corner. He actually thought it was a secret that he was petrified with fear, even though he was almost hyperventilating. “W-we j-just have t-to get around the next s-side of the b-building and we’ll be in the clear.”

Finally, he decided it was time to let go of her hand, only his fingers were confused by the concept and they tangled momentarily until they both snatched their hands back. He took the shotgun in a tight grip. “Ok, here we g-go. No matter what you d-do, don’t drop the keys. Girls always drop the keys in the movies.”

“I’m not going to drop them,” Cheryl replied, angrily. “I’m not an idiot.”

He gave her a look that suggested he didn’t quite believe her. With a final shaking breath, he went around the corner, leading with the shotgun. What he saw caused him to stop short and when Cheryl bumped into him, he nearly pulled the trigger.

On the east side of the building there was a tall tree that grew not far from the station. It had long, dipping branches that were constantly in need of pruning and during the afternoons, they threw down a soft shade over the building. Now it was psychedelically shadowed beneath the tree. There was no wind, but the shadows moved and swayed…and moaned. There were zombies beneath the tree, a strange line of them. They stood shoulder to shoulder but didn’t advance.

Benjamin didn’t stop to question why. Foolishly, he assumed the beasts couldn’t see in the dark. Why else would they just stand there? With this erroneous thought guiding him, he pointed to the forest, because what was darker than that? Cheryl shook her head and mouthed the word: ‘No.’ For her the forest was just too frightening.

“They can’t see in the dark,” Benjamin whispered in her ear. “Let’s go.” She was resolved not to do something as stupid as going into the forest at night, however a little thing caused her to hesitate; Benjamin’s breath smelled of decay and onions. It was ghastly. She’d been smelling it all day, but when he coated her with it directly like that, her face squinched up and she waving a hand—but she didn’t say ‘No” to his plan, and worse, he was already creeping away from the building.

Cheryl had to hurry to catch up. The .38 in her hand was shaking as she had it pointing toward the forest. She reached out with her free hand to grab the back of Benjamin’s shirt; a part of her thought that he would run away from her if she didn’t hold on.

For his part, he hid behind the shotgun, holding it far out in front of himself, not bolstering it against his shoulder as he should have. It was as if he didn’t trust the night or his eyes, or he feared that there might be invisible creatures just in front of him that he would be able uncover with the tip of the gun.

The forest immediately at hand was loose in their vision; the trees were not straight and proper as they were in the light. They were amorphous in their structure, seeming to grow or shrink depending on the movement of one’s eyes. Thirty feet from the forest, halfway between the abstract nature of the forest and the literal concrete of man, Cheryl stopped and pulled back on Benjamin’s shirt, untucking it and gagging him at the collar.

“Something moved,” she hissed. “Right there.”

“It was just your eyes playing tricks on you,” Benjamin replied. “You’re being hysterical.” He started edging forward and despite his words, he shied away from the area to which she had had pointed. At twenty feet away, she pulled on his shirt again. There was no need for whispering this time because the movement had been accompanied by a grunt and a snort, and Benjamin couldn’t chalk that up to an over-excited woman.

The pair froze as a dim shape materialized in the dark. It was a zombie, tall and gruesome. It had only one arm left to it and even that wasn’t completely whole. It reached for the pair, straining, but not moving forward. Another one was just next to it and it too was reaching with the tips of its fingers curling and uncurling in desire. And it too was held back by an invisible force.

Only when Benjamin shifted to his right, in the direction of the loading dock, did he see the ropes around their necks. Someone had tethered the zombies in place. There were more of them along the wood line. Benjamin and Cheryl slowly backed away confused and more frightened than if the beasts had simply charged them. They had no clue what was going on, however they both knew on a gut level that there was something sinister about the way the zombies were roped in place. It felt like a trap had been set but neither of the pair was keen enough to realize that it had been sprung already.

They backed away with guns pointed out at the forest and it wasn’t until a grunt sounded behind them that they turned. Now, zombies were charging from around the other side of the building cutting off all escape. They were strange, silent zombies that ate up the distance between them and their victims, quickly.

Benjamin felt his bowels turn to water and with a scream on his lips, he fled, leaving Cheryl who had frozen in fear. She managed one shot with her pistol before they were on her, grunting and making a noise that sounded like: “Mmmph,” over and over. She screamed a note that was similar to a train’s whistle: high, long and piercing.

Her one-time hero didn’t get very far. When he had turned to run away, he saw the entirety of the trap. The forest was lined with tethered zombies as was other side of the building. The whole perimeter was probably surrounded by the horrible creatures all caught up by the neck. They probably formed a solid wall. The thought caused him to hesitate, which caused him to die. Near silent zombies rushed him. He fired the shotgun and the recoil was so great that it nearly leapt out of his slack hands. His grip was much firmer with the second shot and he turned a zombie’s head into mulch with it. His third was equally as effective, taking down another.

But then he was out of ammo and they were on him with their rending claws. His screams joined Cheryl’s as claws pinned him while others scratched at his face and arms…but where were the teeth? He wasn’t being bitten! His screams were more out of terror than pain. It was a few seconds before his panicked mind recognized the duct tape covering the zombie’s mouths. It made no sense until the boy in the striped shirt came up. His mouth was free of the tape and Benjamin saw the wickedness in the grin.

He also saw the hunger there, and soon he felt it as well. The boy wanted Benjamin’s blood all for himself and had contrived to make it so. Benjamin’s death was slow—the boy had small teeth. They were like a rat’s: gnawing and gnawing, and then there came the slurping and the erotic panting. Benjamin took twenty-two minutes to die and all the while Cheryl fought against the zombies holding her down. They were relentless in their desire to eat her but they could not get past the duct tape. She was battered by their fists and lost an eye to their claws, but she was very much alive and conscious when the boy waddled up with a belly ballooned by Benjamin’s blood.

“Mine,” he whispered as he knelt over his feast.

With the all the shooting inside the building and all the pounding from the outside, Benjamin and Cheryl’s screams went unheard, however the fact that they weren’t at their posts guarding the prisoners was remarked upon when Eng slipped out of the store room looking for a way to get his cuffs off. He figured there’d be keys to the cuffs in practically every desk drawer.

He never had the chance to find out. One of the dispatchers came hurrying out of the women’s room and practically ran right into him. The two stared at each other and then the woman said: “I’m gonna tell.” Eng shrugged as best he could with his hands cinched behind his back. As the woman scurried off, presumably to “tell” he looked around at the situation.

It wasn’t good.

The gaping holes in the front door were being slowly widened with each passing minute and now huge cracks connected them. It was only a matter of time before they came crashing down from the weight of the beasts pressing on them. The door that led to the office wing was already bent on its hinges and now Chuck and PFC Max Fowler were taking turns shooting through the gap. It was slowing the zombies but not stopping them. The hallway of the incarceration wing was jammed with the undead. They were so densely packed that they could hardly swing their arms enough to pound the door. The door was safe, but the exit was blocked completely.

Not only were the people in the station trapped, the trap was closing in on them.

Eng went back to the storeroom. “We’re screwed,” he announced, and then described what he’d seen.

Minutes later, Deckard came back, holding his M16 at the ready. “Where’d your guards go?” he asked.

“They did what any smart person would have, they ran away,” Anna answered. She paused, swallowed loudly, and then asked: “How bad are we screwed? I mean is there any chance of a rescue?”

“Slim,” was all Deckard could honestly say. “We’re hoping for a couple of Blackhawks to get here before the doors come down. You say they ran away? Out the back, I’m guessing.” She nodded, trying her best to be agreeable. He gave them a hard look, which melted away with the stress he was under. “Stay here, please, for your own sakes. Some of us are…a little wired right now. You might get hurt.”

“What’s he mean by that?” Allen asked as Deckard left the room. “We didn’t do anything wrong.” They were all nodding but jumped as Deckard opened the loading dock door. Cheryl was just about dead and still her screams cut the night like a razor.

Meeks looked like he was about to be sick. He was imagining that it was himself out there. Eng smirked at this and said: “And that’s how you thin the herd.” Meeks snarled something about revenge, making Eng shake his head. “You should be thanking me. You heard Deckard: a couple of Blackhawks. According to my count, there were thirty-one people and a dog in this station. Now there are only twenty-nine, and the dog. Your chances of getting on one of those choppers just went up. You’re welcome.”

“You knew they were going to die out there,” Meeks accused.

“I didn’t know, actually,” Eng answered. “But truthfully, I didn’t care.” They paused in the conversation as the door to the loading dock closed and Deckard walked by. His face was drawn down and the lines produced aged him by ten years. He had crept out to the edge of the building and had seen the horde of beasts crowding over the two bodies and he had seen the others straining at their leashes in the tree line.

There were hundreds.

In a flash he saw the trap for what it was; it made him want to gag. This was a step up from rocks tied to hands. This was diabolical. This was planned evil. This was why he knew he was going to die sometime in the next half hour. He hadn’t been lying when he had told the prisoners there was only a slim chance at being rescued, and now, seeing this trap, he would say their chances were even lower.

With that dark thought in mind, he went to where the dispatchers were working. Under orders from General Collins, they were trying to find where many important, but abandoned items belonging to the National Guard were. During the scramble for men to hold the line, equipment such as guns, ammo, fuel, water, and even batteries, had been left behind, either in trucks on the side of the road or in warehouses. They were also making lists of men: who was where and under what command. Two of the ladies were trying to keep track of the helicopters that were constantly whipping by overhead. It was their job to coordinate between the aviation side and the supply side of the army. Deckard knew there were supposed to be specifically trained soldiers doing this, but where they were, he didn’t know.

The women worked with one eye on their computer screens and with the other on the doors that were minutes from coming down. They spoke in a high-pitched jabber and took many tiny sips of air instead of normal breaths. Deckard wouldn’t be surprised to learn that a few of them had wet themselves in their fear; if he had known, he would have understood.

He sidled up to Courtney, trying not to let on that he was a s scared as they were. “Where are we on the choppers? You gave Collins everything he asked for, he’s not going to screw us is he?” She started to shrug, but he turned her chair around to face him. Next to her, Sundance gave a growl of warning and showed some teeth. Deckard glared right back and said: “I need an honest answer.”

“He’ll come through,” she answered. “I just don’t know when. Jenny is working the choppers, you can ask her.”

Jenny didn’t look up from her computer as she said: “Fifteen minutes give or take…but they’ve been saying that for the last hour, so I don’t really know. I don’t even know where they are.”

“Then stop what you’re doing and find those choppers!” Deckard snapped. “I want them here in fifteen minutes like they promised. The rest of you prepare yourselves to either get on those choppers or to fight. As of this moment, you’re done working for Collins. You’re working for me now.”

“What we’re doing is very important,” Courtney said. She had tears in her eyes; she didn’t think the Blackhawks would get there in time to save them and she wanted her last moments to be in helping the situation and not spent cowering in the corner crying. “This will save lives and besides, stopping now won’t get those choppers here any faster.”

A grimace crossed over Deckard’s features. He was bristling, ready to either snap out a harsh reply or pull the trigger on his M16 and put a hole in each of the computers. Thuy appeared at his elbow. As usual, he calmed when in her presence and as usual, she had a grasp of the entire conversation even though there was no way she could have heard it all. She inferred what she hadn’t heard from their expressions, and by the way they held themselves.

“Courtney, we will proceed from this point as if the deadline for our rescue is set in stone,” Thuy said, confidently. “Have the other operators make preparations to abandon their positions. Back up the files that need to be saved and then have them inform their contacts among the various National Guard units that they will be out of the loop for a minimum of one hour. Deckard, you will do the same thing with the personnel here. Prepare them to make a quick and possibly bloody exit from this building.”

Bloody exit
…those words went deep into him, echoing down to the crevice where he hid his fear. It bloomed like poison.

Perhaps she saw. Thuy put a soft hand on his arm. “We’ll make it out, right?” she asked.

You will
, he thought to himself. “Yes, without question,” he said. Inside he crushed down on his fear, pushing it back down into its crevice. He even managed to give her a smile. It would be his last smile of the day.

The second he left her, the smile morphed into a scowl. He wore it as he began to round up the people who weren’t currently fighting, bringing them to sit in the call station, which was the geographic center of the building. The prisoners were also brought forward to sit slightly apart from the others. Bob and Allen, the two men who had come in with the dead Mexican sat at the edge of the room. So far, their eyes were clear, but no one trusted them.

“M-Me and Allan sh-should be armed,” Bob said in a light stutter that went hand-in-hand with the sound of the guns blasting away. “And we shouldn’t have to wear these stupid cuffs. We didn’t do anything and besides we can fight. You have to let us fight. At least for our survival. It would be inhumane if you didn’t.”

Thuy cast an eye Deckard’s way suggesting that she thought they were correct, but before he could say anything, another of the prisoners spoke up. “And what about us?” Meeks asked. “The least you can do is uncuff us. I don’t know about them, but I am innocent. I was wholly within the law. You may not like it and I’m sorry it went down the way it did, but this…you can’t do this. You can’t leave us cuffed and unarmed, and pretend that you’re the good guys.”

“Uncuff them, but no weapons yet,” Thuy ordered.

Deckard handed his M16 to Dr. Wilson, knowing it would be dangerous to bring it among the five prisoners. “Cover me,” he said to the doctor.

Wilson chuckled. “Aren’t you being a little melodramatic?”

“No,” Deckard replied. He wasn’t blind to the desperation in their eyes. And he hadn’t forgotten that two of the five were mass murderers and that Meeks had been willing to kill in cold blood. Deckard ordered the five to face the wall. When they did, he went to Anna first. She was the smallest and with her mangled left hand, she was physically the least dangerous. When she tried to turn around after the cuffs were off, he pressed her face against the wall.

“Not yet. Not until I say so.” She smiled as if to say there were no hard feelings, but she couldn’t hide the cold look in her eyes. He went next to Allen and then to Bob. Next, he went to Meeks. One cuff was off when two different screams lit the air.

One was Burke who yelled: “They’re in! The door is down! Everyone get ready.”

The other was Jenny who whooped: “The Blackhawks are almost here! I just got in touch with the pilots, we have two inbound in ten minutes.”

Meeks spun suddenly. He was smaller than Deckard and fast as a snake. He was also a trained FBI agent and knew a dozen ways to break the grip of a bigger man. Deckard was trained as well and, more significantly, he had been trained to a higher standard than what was mass-produced in Quantico. The spin didn’t catch him unprepared. A quick step back gave him room and then he leapt up and in, surprising Meeks and catching him square in the diaphragm with his full weight driving in behind his right knee.

Meeks went down gasping for air as Deckard stepped back, his eyes flicking to Eng, whom he suspected of being the most dangerous of them. Eng smirked in appreciation of the move and said: “My cuffs? I’ll be good. I promise.”

“No, not yet.” He strode to Wilson and took back his M16 and then glanced to the front where Burke, Johnny Osgood, Lieutenant Pemberton and two of his troopers were killing the zombies piling in through the collapsed front door. For the moment, the flying lead was holding the beasts back. At the door to the office wing, Chuck was pointing for Max to join the fight at the front of the lobby, and in the call center, the women were pulling memory sticks from their computers and rushing to join the group waiting to leave. The situation was, for the moment, under control.

It was a short moment.

Deckard had to get to the front of the building. He could see the zombies blasting through the broken doors and the sound of gunfire was thunderous. He jerked a thumb toward the prisoners and was just yelling to Wilson: “Watch them closely,” when Anna made her move.

The vial of Com-cells had sat in her bra all this time and now she fished it out. Calmly, she stepped behind Allan and took a hold of his collar. “Whatever you do, don’t move,” she said to him. Louder, she called out to Thuy: “Dr. Lee! Do you recognize this?”

Thuy’s dark eyes went wide as she recognized the vial. “How? I mean…that’s not possi…” Her words faltered as her mind struggled to come to grips with what she was seeing and what it meant. She wanted to tell herself that Anna was bluffing, that the world was full of vials if one knew where to look…however Anna’s vial had a black top with a band of gold around it—the same ones they had used strictly for the Com-cell trials. They were exceedingly rare outside of a research lab; and in the hilly forests of the lower Catskills it would have been impossible to come across one.

Logically, this meant Anna had to have picked it up in Walton, and this begged the question: if there
weren’t
Com-cells in it, why would she have bothered to steal it? There was just one answer: she wouldn’t have.

The only conclusion Thuy could reach was that she had stolen it sometime before or during the trial, probably to give to the company she was spying for…and now she was threatening to release the Com-cells in a room crowded with people. Thuy glanced around; of the twenty-nine people trapped in the station, twenty-three of them were in the immediate vicinity and of those, only three were currently masked.

“No one move!” Thuy commanded. The people weren’t stupid. They saw the vial and they knew where Anna had worked; they had frozen in place even before Thuy had spoken. “What do you want?” Thuy asked.

“I don’t want to kill anyone, but I will if I have to,” Anna said. She held the vial up, ready to hurl it if need be. “I just want to get out of here, the same as all of you.”

With zombies already in the building and now this, Thuy could feel her heart begin to jitter. It was a struggle to force her words to come out smoothly. “I already planned on taking you with us. I swear that is the truth.”