The Infected Dead (Book 3): Die For Now (36 page)

When Olivia had been six years old, she had gotten mad a her parents and run away from home. Just like all kids that age, they only make it so far before they turn around go home. They usually think they have been gone long enough for the parents to be worried sick, but in reality the parents don't even know they're gone yet.

Olivia went far enough to not recognize the neighborhood anymore, and before she knew it, the sun was going down. She was brought home by a policeman after an elderly couple saw her standing on a curb with tears streaming down her face. Standing in the elevator, she felt like that six year old again. She was afraid, and there wasn't going to be an elderly couple or a policeman this time.

The numbers arrived at eighteen sooner than she wanted, and she wished she had hit the big red STOP button. Until she figured out a way to go back up from wherever it stopped, she would have been content not the reach the bottom floor. When the bell dinged her arrival, and the door slid quietly open, the shape that stood there didn't rush in, but she screamed anyway. The shape wasn't really there because it was just the way the light came down the hall. Not all of the lights were on, so there were some odd shadows here and there.

After she screamed, Olivia felt really embarrassed because she had let out a good one. She hoped the kids were far enough away that they didn't hear that scream.

"Wait a minute," she said out loud. "I hope they heard me loud and clear."

Olivia peeked around the corner into the corridor and didn't see anything, but she did smell it. Something was definitely overripe. She couldn't tell if the smell was coming from the left or the right, but she could see she wasn't far from the stairwell door. Just to be sure she was in the right place, she went and checked to see if there would be a big letter S on the door. There was.

She let the door swing shut as she stepped back inside.

"Sam?"

As soon as she called his name she felt stupid. She didn't know why, but she didn't think that was the thing to do.

"Is it because there's something down here, and you don't want it to know you're here too?" she asked herself. "Better yet, if there's something down here, then why am I down here?"

Olivia decided if she was going to be part of this group, she had to do her job. If Sam was down here, then he could use her help taking the pictures of the supplies. If he wasn't down here, she had to at least make sure he was okay. On the other hand, if he wasn't down here, she needed to be back up top watching the outside of the fort through the monitors.

She decided she would just take a quick look around before going back up. There was a corridor up ahead that looked like a main area of some kind. There were rooms with the lights turned off, but she told herself Sam might have turned them off himself. Then she told herself kids don't turn the lights off.

Eighteen floors above her, Whitney and Perry had arrived together only moments before in one of the other elevators. Worried because they had not seen Sam or doors marked with an S, they had decided to go up and check to see if Olivia had seen him. They checked the control room and saw that Olivia was gone, and there was no sign of Sam. Whitney glanced at the monitors and saw that one of them was on in the stairwell. It showed the door to the bottom floor, and there was a big letter S on it.

"Hey, Perry. Check it out. That little weasel, Sam, went all the way to the bottom floor so we couldn't claim it."

Perry walked up beside her to look just as the door with the big S on it opened. It was so unexpected that Perry and Whitney grabbed each other. Both of them let out a scream before they saw it was just Olivia.
 

"I won't tell anyone if you don't," said Perry.

"What scream? I didn't hear anybody scream."

Before they could even get around to asking each other why Olivia was on the bottom floor, the elevator outside the control room dinged again, and Sam practically fell out onto the floor. He really was screaming.

Besides scaring the hell out of both of them, it did at least scare them into motion. After almost a year of dodging the infected and staying alive on that ship, they weren't going to let Sam make them run and hide, despite the fact that was exactly what he was yelling at them to do.

Sam bolted from his prone position on the floor and ran for the control room, and he was screaming something about the infected being inside. He ran right by the two of them and shouted.

"Where's Olivia?"

Whitney looked at the stairwell monitor again and said, "She was right there a moment ago."

Sam turned completely white, as if he wasn't already the whitest boy Whitney had ever met. He started babbling and crying at the same time. There was something about being chased around by the infected dead, and then something about the bottom floor and the lights being off in some of the rooms. Three minutes later Perry and Whitney were loading hand guns, and three minutes after that they were back at the elevator doors.
 

They were tempted to take the stairs, but eighteen floors was a long way. They made a promise to each other that they would hold their fire when the door opened at the bottom floor just in case Olivia was outside the door. Perry told Sam to watch the monitors in case the adults came back. They couldn't tell from Sam how many infected he had seen, but it sounded like it had been an army of them.

Olivia eased past the same dark rooms Sam had. She found a better lit corridor and followed it past a dozen closed doors before coming to a turn that felt like it was taking her back to her starting point. She was surprised that it did no such thing. The hallway she turned into had a dozen doors along each side of the hallway, and they were all open. There was also that familiar smell.

She tried to backtrack, but the corridor ended in some kind of service room, and it wasn't hard to figure out it was like a hotel laundry. There were huge washing machines, dryers, and folding tables. There was an odd smear across one of the otherwise sparkling steel tables. This room had never been used, so that smear shouldn't be there.

The fine hairs on the back of Olivia's neck had a life of their own. For the tenth time she cursed herself for being too stupid to bring a gun. There was a change in the air, and even though it couldn't have been something she really felt, she could have sworn it felt like warm air. She swung around in time to see the infected dead moving out from behind some stainless steel equipment. It was watching itself move in the reflection, but Olivia gasped before she could cover her own mouth.

The infected dead groaned and started for her, and all she could do was run. Olivia was close to another door, and she didn't care where it went, so she went through. It was another hallway with too many doors, but something looked familiar. The soft light coming from around the corner ahead was like the light where the elevators were, but the stairwell door was even closer. She bolted through the door and started the long climb upward.

Before the door to the hallway had swung completely shut, the elevator door opened. Whitney and Perry were both in a shooter's stance ready to blow away anything that came through the door. Perry held out a hand and cocked his head to one side to listen. He couldn't have known the sound he had heard was Olivia making her way to freedom as the door to the stairwell clicked shut.
 

"Cover me," said Whitney as she stepped out into the corridor.

Perry didn't know exactly what she meant by that, but he stepped out of the elevator facing in the opposite direction as Whitney. They kept their backs together as they moved down the corridor in the direction of the dark rooms. When they got to the first one, Whitney whispered to Perry.

"We need to know what's in there. Olivia could be hiding."

"I know," he said, "and we can't exactly yell her name."

"On three," said Whitney. "I'll step in the room and hit the lights. One, two, three."

She stepped inside and hit the spot where the switch should be, and the room lit up so bright it blinded them.

"Jeez," said Perry, "what were they planning to use this room for. The lights are so bright they could grow crops."

"She's not in here," said Whitney.
 

She turned slowly in a circle to see all of the room. Everything was so bright and sterile that the hallway behind Perry looked much darker than it had been when they came into the room, and it almost seemed like it was growing darker.

The bright lights inside the room had blinded her and robbed her of the opportunity to see what was about to happen in time to help Perry. The sound of the much taller infected dead biting Perry on the back right where the shoulder touched the neck didn't sound real, and then she couldn't hear anything except his screaming. His eyes were panicked and he'd shut them at first, but then they were wide open with pain as the fire in his skin spread.

Whitney had seen too much in the time they had been together. She and Perry had hidden under porches, in closets, and behind doors. They had climbed out of second story windows and jumped to the ground. They had outrun more infected dead than she could count, but in the quiet times, they had talked and made solemn promises to each other that if the time ever came that one of them needed the other one to end it for them, they would make it fast. There could be no hesitation, because if they hesitated, then they might not go through with it.

Even through the pain, Perry screamed at Whitney.

"You promised me, Whitney. You promised me."

She could see there were tears on his cheeks, but he was being more brave than she thought she ever would be. Without thinking, she raised her gun and fired two shots, one for Harold Thornton III and one for her good friend Perry.

Olivia made it up six flights before she started to slow down. She made it two more floors before she sat down on the stairs and started to cry. The two gunshots came from somewhere below, but they were muffled. She pushed herself up from the stairs and went through the door of the tenth floor. There was a W on it.

The elevators were nearby so she ran over to them and pressed the button to go up. When the door opened to the middle elevator, she expected to find the thing inside that had been chasing her. As she got in she noticed the numbers on the left elevator were steadily coming up from eighteen. She didn't think the infected dead could push an elevator button, but she didn't want to find out. She stabbed at the button for the first floor repeatedly, hoping she would get to there before the other elevator.

It seemed like it took forever for the door to close, and then it seemed like it took even longer for the elevator to go from the tenth floor to the first floor. When it finally opened, Olivia ran out just as the first door opened. She screamed when she saw Whitney standing there with a gun pointed limply at the floor. Whitney was wracked by sobbing and shook from head to toe.
 

Sam ran out of the control room to see what was happening and found Olivia helping Whitney walk from the elevator. She couldn't talk, and she was shaking her head from side to side.

"Where's Perry?" asked Sam. "He was with you when you went down there."

Sam sounded frantic and kept trying to look around Whitney and Olivia into the empty elevator.

"He's not coming," said Whitney. "He's gone."

Now it was Sam's turn to cry. He knew what must've happened, and even though Perry had picked on him from time to time, he had still been like a brother.
 

"Maybe he's okay," he choked out at Whitney. "Maybe we could go down and bring him back up here."

Whitney just slowly shook her head at Sam. She knew Sam had probably been the cause of this, but she felt more sorry for him than mad. She knew he would blame himself no matter how long he lived from this day forward.

Olivia was piecing it all together. She didn't know about the promise between Whitney and Perry, and she didn't know that Whitney had ended it for Perry, but she understood that Perry was dead, and Whitney had a gun in her hand. She also saw something unspoken between Whitney and Sam that said it wasn't their fault, whatever it was that had happened.

"Whitney?" asked Olivia. "Can you tell me if there's still an infected in the bottom floor?”
 

"Not anymore," she answered barely above a whisper.
 

"Was there just that one?"

Whitney looked like she was thinking it over for a moment then shook her head.

"I only saw one, but I didn't go in every room."

Sam was crying, but he managed to add that he only saw one old guy, and he went in a lot of rooms trying to get away from it.

Olivia helped Whitney and Sam to the control room and scanned the monitors that showed the harbor. The Coast Guard ship was tied to the end of the dock, and she could see the men helping to steer a plane into position at the long side of the dock.

The adults were all excited and ready to move on from Fort Sumter when they came down the ladders into the shelter. They expected to find Olivia and the kids just as excited, but when they saw the tear streaked faces and that Perry wasn't with the others, they didn't need a crystal ball to know something bad had happened.
 

The Chief, Tom, and I took and elevator and headed for the bottom floor without hesitation. Kathy took Whitney and Sam to another room to see what she could do to get them calm. Bus went along because the obvious had to be done. They would need to check the three of them for bite marks. Olivia was content to let Chase check her, but Bus and Kathy both said she had to come with them. There was no guarantee that Chase would tell them if Olivia had been bitten.