The Dead Walk The Earth II (33 page)

“No,” he gasped, “I can manage. I just need to rest, mate.”

Bobby nodded and offered him something to drink. He took the time to check on how the makeshift casts were holding out and saw that they were sodden with water and beginning to fall apart. They had lost their rigidity and were now nothing more than piles of mushy pulp that were wrapped around Danny’s battered legs.

“Hey, you,” Bobby hissed across at the two regular soldiers that were attached to the militia platoon. “Find a couple of able bodies amongst your group that can help.”

Two of them were called forward and made responsible for the continued mobility of the wounded soldier. Bobby instructed them to stay with him at all times and that they were not to worry about fighting or anything else other than ensuring that Danny was kept moving and away from harm.

“What about those things?” Michael asked nervously.

“You two just worry about my friend here,” Bobby cut in before Peter was able to reply. “We’ll do the rest and as long as you’re close to Danny, you’ll be safer than being amongst that gang-fuck over there.”

Bobby shone his light and nodded his head towards the two women and one man that remained in the tunnel behind them. They nervously shone their torches in all directions, spinning their bodies and aiming their weapons at every sound, no matter how slight.

Peter followed Bobby’s eyes and saw that he was referring to the remnants of his platoon. He did not feel any particular loyalty to the militia soldiers that he had been part of but at the same time, he did not appreciate them being referred to in a derogatory way. They had been through a lot and suffered just as much as any of the regular soldiers. However, the look in Bobby’s eyes convinced him that he should keep his opinions and protests to himself. Instead, he assured the man that they would stay with his friend and keep him moving.

Bull snatched a light from one of the other soldiers and shone it into the black void beyond the shiny steel bars. The beam brushed over the smooth surfaces of the walls and what looked to be a junction further along and illuminating a number of bundles that he interpreted as corpses scattered over the floor. Directly in front of them, roughly thirty metres or so, it appeared that there was another set of security doors, made from thick solid sheets of steel or iron. They too lay wide open.

“What do you think this place was, Stan?” He asked, leaning in over the threshold of the gateway but reluctant to step through.

“We should
all
know,” Stan replied and received a number of quizzical looks in return. They had no idea of what the place was.

“Through there,” Stan continued and nodded to the second set of blast proof doors at the far end, “is our old headquarters.”

The rest of his men turned and shot him a look. After a moment they realised that Stan was right. They had not recognised the place without the bright lights that were fitted into the ceiling and constantly blazing overhead. They were also used to seeing it from a different angle, from along one of the corridors branching off to the left and right of the main entrance. They had never approached the bunker through the underground rail tunnels. Guards were normally posted on either side of the doorway, controlling access in and out while a continuous flurry of men and women were always moving in different directions along the passageways. Now the place was silent, dark, and unrecognisable as the former hiding place of their command centre.

They moved through the gate and towards the bunker doors. Nothing but blackness greeted them from the other side of the complex’s entrance. Even the beams of light aimed through the doorway seemed to be swallowed up in the thick blanket of darkness. The place had become an unmarked grave for the people who had failed to make it out when the command centre was overrun.

Stan looked over the door and its locking mechanisms. Bloodied claw marks with human nails that had been broken off and became embedded in the thick congealed blood covered the outer surfaces. Thousands of hands had pounded against the barrier in their attempts to break in but the entry point would never have given way against a million bodies pressing against it.

The bunker had once been part of Winston Churchill’s underground labyrinth during the Second World War and later, a nuclear fallout shelter designed to withstand a direct hit on the city above and keep the remains of the government safe below ground. It was virtually impervious to a direct assault, even with explosives.

The heavy deadbolt locks that were made from titanium appeared to be untouched and undamaged. Stan stepped back and grunted in realisation that someone had opened the doors from the inside or possibly by remote, having broken through all the firewalls and sophisticated programming of the computerised security systems.

“What do you reckon, Stan?” Taff asked as he scanned his light over the ground around them. The beam glinted against something that reflected brightly in the otherwise inky darkness and he moved towards it. “Shit.”

Stan turned and saw Taff crouching down beside the remains of a body. There were a number of corpses lying around them but this one in particular was clearly different. It was armed and appeared to be fresh. As he moved closer, Stan recognised the man’s face. Most of the side of his head had been blown away but he could clearly see that it had once been the commander of the SAS team who had gone missing during the insertion. It was the same man who had slipped from the side of Werner’s U-boat and had almost been lost in the Thames. His weapon lay beside him, spattered with blood and grey matter while more of his skull’s contents decorated the wall directly behind the remains of his body. His limbs and internal organs had been ripped away and all that remained of him was his head, shoulders, and the upper part of his ribcage that was still protected and held together beneath his assault vest. 

Taff reached down and picked something up that was lying beside the remains. It was a folder of some sort and filled with a thick bundle of laminated pages. He looked at the front of the beige coloured file and then turned it over, looking for a label of some sort. It was blank and gave no indication to what it was for.

“What do you think?” He asked as he passed it across to Stan who then began flicking through the pages that were filled with graphs, numbers, and diagrams. Stan knew exactly what the file was and what it was for.

“Launch codes,” he said, shaking his head as he stared down at the folder.

Taff looked at him with a raised eyebrow and then back at the weighty file of documents in Stan’s hand.

“They’re launch codes for ICBMs,” Stan clarified. “These poor bastards were obviously sent in to retrieve them from this death-trap.”

“Nukes? Why would they be in here looking for the codes to launch nuclear missiles? We have enough trouble as it is.”

Stan shrugged and turned to look back up at the open blast doors leading into the bunker complex.

“Maybe whoever opened this place up couldn’t find them, or never made it out?” He reasoned aloud. “Thompson may have sent these guys in to retrieve them before someone else did. We were all brought up to speed on that lunatic in the north, Gibson, wanting to use heavy nukes on all the cities. Maybe the Prince of Darkness was afraid he would find them down here and wanted to keep the codes from falling into the wrong hands?”

“So where’s the rest of the team?” Taff asked as he glanced back down at the pale ruined face of the SAS commander.

“All over the fucking place,” Marty’s voice replied from behind them.

Stan and Taff turned around and looked at the bodies that were sprawled throughout their immediate area. Marty was right, the SAS team were still there. They had been ripped apart by the infected and their body parts lay scattered and mixed with the corpses of their attackers. Clusters of bullet holes that had not been noticed sooner began to appear in the walls all around them and piles of empty brass cases carpeting the floor glinted in the beams of light. By the looks of things the SAS men had been caught unawares from all sides and trapped there, fighting it out with the undead until they steadily run out of ammunition and then took their own lives.

“Jesus, there must’ve been hundreds of those things in here,” the veteran gasped as he shone his light over the piles of corpses stretching in either direction along the two tunnels. “Poor bastards never had a chance.”

A noise in the passageway leading back into the tube tunnels made everyone spin around. There was something approaching them from within the darkness and the sounds of heavy scraping feet could be heard creeping towards them along the vaulted ceiling.

A loud bang to their right made everyone reel as one of the militia fired off a round. Its muzzle flash was like a bolt of lightning, flickering from the walls and blinding anyone that was facing in the general direction of the firer. The weapon’s report in the cramped space boomed and pressed violently against the eardrums of everyone, causing a flurry of gasps and curses as they instinctively raised their hands to the sides of their heads.

Stan was about to cry out, ordering everyone to hold fire, but a number of other rifles opened up almost immediately after the first. The airspace in front of the bunker’s entrance erupted with deafening cracks as the militia began firing blindly into the darkness behind them. The veteran was screaming for them to cease-fire as he launched himself against the man who had been the first to pull his trigger. He slammed into him with his shoulder, flattening the civilian against the wall and ripping the magazine away from the rifle in his shaking hands. The man stared back at the veteran in terror for a moment as his weapon ceased firing.

The ear-splitting blasts of the weapons continued uncontrolled, illuminating the tunnel with flashes of brilliant white as glowing red tracer rounds spun away into the dark passages and ricocheted from the walls. Men and women alike were suddenly knocked from their feet as Stan and his men set about trying to bring the militia back under control and having no choice but to hit them with forceful open-handed slaps across the sides of their heads. Some of them dropped to the ground and others tumbled across the narrow space, colliding with the people beside them and either dropping their weapons or releasing their death grips on their triggers.

Behind them, as the militias fire began to whither, another series of loud snaps emitted. They were not the same booming reports of the SA-80 rifles that the civilian soldiers were carrying, but the muffled sounds of a suppressed M-4.

Stan whirled and saw a figure standing close to the bunker doors and a rapid series of flashes blasting outwards from the rifle in its hands, firing a long burst into the dark opening. It was Bobby, shooting at something that was unseen to the others. There was another form at his feet. Its legs kicked frantically as it writhed and thrashed against the cluster of withered hands pulling it back into the doorway. Bobby reached down and grabbed one of the man’s legs and began attempting to pull the figure back towards himself while still firing his rifle into the gap between the bunker doors.

The man on the floor was Marty. He screamed with pain as he felt a set of incisors clamp around the soft tissue of his hand and begin crunching down on the bones of his fingers. The sharp searing pain of his flesh being torn was quickly mingled with the agony of digits being crushed and gnawed as he continued to fight to free himself from the multitude of hands that refused to let go. More of the infected began to pile in around him.

Bobby’s rifle continued to blast away at their attackers but it was not enough to stop them. His M-4 suddenly fell silent as the magazine became empty and he let it fall to his side, hanging from the sling attached to his harness. He drew his pistol and began to pump rounds into the heads of the infected. Some of them fell back beyond the doorway and others landed on top of himself and Marty. He could feel his body being pulled into the darkness beyond the threshold as he fought to tear himself free while keeping a tight grip on his friend’s leg. He could smell the rotting stench of the dozens of reanimated corpses that clamoured around him, pulling at his clothing and clawing his kicking legs as he tried to climb back to his feet while fending the infected away from Marty.

Another bright flash of pain flared in front of Marty’s eyes as the skin around his neck was torn and a large gaping wound began gushing with a torrent of blood. More teeth began sinking into his soft flesh as he was pulled away from Bobby and set upon by a mob of ravenous monsters. They tore and bit at him, digging their fingers into his soft tissue and biting at any part of him they could reach. His hand was suddenly pulled backwards and a large hole was ripped out from his wrist. Arterial blood instantly began to spray from the wound in long jets, coating the grotesque faces of the dead and driving them into a frenzy as they tasted the warm metallic life fluid of their victim. Marty howled again, his blood curdling screams echoing through the tunnels of the underground labyrinth.

Bull vaulted across the militia soldiers lying prostrate on the ground where they had been bowled over by the heavy whacks of the men behind them. He landed at Bobby’s side and instantly reached down for his friend who was half way in through the door, kicking and screaming as the dead piled in around him. Bull grasped Marty’s thrashing legs, and yanked him back into the tunnel and away from the bunker as Bobby scrambled backwards away from the entrance.

Without pausing, Bull swung his Minimi around and loosed off a long burst into the bodies that surged out from beyond the doorway, gnashing their teeth and growling angrily at the man who had taken their prey away from them. They fell into a heap beneath the hailstorm of fire that was thrown against them but there were more of them charging towards the entrance from the black depths of the bunker.