Survival Instinct: A Zombie Novel (6 page)

“Then how are we getting out?”

“Did they tell you much about this park,
Officer
Sam?”  Cillian put the rig in drive and slowly pulled out from between the other fire truck and the police cruiser it had been sitting between.

“Not really.  Just where the exits were.  I was told more about the concert and how security was going to work.”

“Well, we firefighters got a more thorough breakdown in case a fire did break out.”  He started carefully turning the fire truck around.  He tried very hard not to think about the two people he had shot and was now running over, repeatedly.  “You see these big brick walls all the way around?”

“Yes.”

“They’re actually two walls.  Two brick walls with a large gap in the middle and a flat stone lay on top to make them appear much thicker than they are.  We were told this because if a fire were to break out near them, the air inside could super heat and possibly even cause an explosion.  It’s highly unlikely, but still, not a good design.” The fire truck was now completely turned around.  Cillian found his helmet and put it on his head.

“And what does that have to do with us?”

“I suggest you duck your head.”  He stamped his foot on the accelerator, turning on the sirens and flashers for good measure.

“Wait, you’re not...  Oh
God, you are.”  Sam bent over, placing his head between his knees and his hands on his head.  One of them still clutched the pistol.

“Hold on to your ass.”  Cillian was speeding the truck right at the wall.

Just before they hit, he ducked down, holding his helmet tightly to his head.  The fire truck rammed into the wall, sending bricks in all directions.  Many crashed in through the already-broken half of the windshield and several more got in by breaking the rest.  The heaviest hit came from the stone slab.  It hit into the truck cab’s roof making a big dent and causing the sirens to sound distorted.  It scraped along the roof for a moment before sliding off to the side.

Once Cillian thought they were through, he tramped his foot down on the brakes.  They didn’t stop in time before ramming into several cars on the street.  The crunching squeal of metal on metal drew Cillian back up.  They were in the middle of the street, jammed between a couple of cars.

He groaned and pushed the chunks of brick off himself.  After putting the rig in park, he partly stood up and looked out through the broken windshield.  Cillian looked at the cars around him first and noticed that they were mercifully empty.

“You’re a crazy man,” Sam groaned from the back seat and sat up, rubbing his neck.

“Well we’re out of the park.”  Cillian sat back down in the driver’s seat.  He put the truck back in drive and started scraping his way through the vehicles.  The easiest route was the one they took, up the centre of the road.  The big fire engine plowed the cars to either side out of the way.  Cillian thought about the guys and how they were going to hate what he had done to the rig.

* * *

“Where are we going?”  Sam unbuckled himself and started climbing back up into the front.  The constant bouncing off other cars made it a somewhat difficult thing for him to do, but he finally got up there.  Before being able to sit, he had to first shove some bricks into the foot well and toss others out through the broken windshield.  Once seated properly again, he buckled back up.

“I don’t know,” Cillian finally answered.  He was choosing his route randomly based on the space between cars.

“You’re bleeding,” Sam gestured to Cillian’s head.

Cillian took his hands off the wheel for a brief moment to strip off a glove.  He touched his bare hand to his forehead while the other resumed steering.  It stung a little and his hand came back bloody.  It seemed that, despite the helmet, something managed to hit him hard enough to draw blood.  “I don’t think it’s bad.”

“Still, we should head to the hospital.  Maybe there’ll be someone there who can tell us what we should be doing.”

“That’s right, why haven’t I heard anything over the radio?  Try getting someone on it.”  Cillian grabbed a handset and passed it to Sam.  The moment he looked away from where they were going, they slammed into something and came to a dead stop.

“Oh, God,” Sam whined.

Cillian looked out the windshield.  There was a huge multi-car pileup in front of the rig.  “I’m getting out to look around.”

“Are you shitting me?  Out there?”

“You have a gun
, remember?”  Cillian had to kick his door to get it open.  He took off his other glove and jumped out of the truck.  Looking around, he saw panicked people running all over the place.  Except that not all of them were panicked.  Some were running after others with murderous intent in their eyes.  Cillian couldn’t see as much as he would have liked, so he climbed up on top of the fire truck.

“Cillian!  Where’d you go?” Sam called from the other side of the truck.

“I climbed on top!”  Cillian rolled his eyes.  He couldn’t believe his luck getting stuck with this complete idiot.  At least he had that gun though.  They both would have been screwed without it.  It didn’t take long for Sam to climb up on top with Cillian.  He dragged up two firefighter jackets with him.

“Here, you should put this on.”  Sam handed Cillian the jacket he had used to wipe away the gore.  He then put on the clean jacket himself.

“One, this jacket is disgusting.  And two, it’s like forty degrees out here.”  Cillian shook the jacket out over the side of the truck, trying to knock the chunks off it.

“I noticed only the outside was...  dirty, and it’s the only other jacket in there.  If someone attacks us, they shouldn’t be able to bite through the material.”

So maybe he wasn’t a
complete
idiot.  Cillian put the jacket on as he started looking around again.

As far as he could see up the street, cars were stopped and abandoned.  Some were even piled onto sidewalks as a result of their drivers trying to pass the traffic, only to end up slamming into light posts, garbage cans, mailboxes, and bus shelters.  Cillian thought he saw a way around it though.  He pulled his helmet off, tossed it over the side of the truck, and looked to the sky for a moment, trying to clear his head.  A headache was starting to form, most likely from the bump on his skull, but maybe just from Sam’s constant whining.  He also really wanted a cigarette.  That’s when he spotted him.

On a four-story building nearby, a man with a camera under one arm was looking frantically up the street.  He kept glancing over his shoulder at something.  Cillian could probably guess what.

“Sam, follow me.”  Cillian made his way across to the back of the rig, having to step carefully around the damage the stone slab had caused.

“What is it?”  Sam stumbled a few times but made it over to him.  They stood at the base of the fire truck’s turntable ladder.

“See that guy?”  Cillian pointed up to the roof while he flipped some switches.

“What about him?”  Although Sam shielded his eyes from the sun with a hand, as he looked up, his eyes squinted into narrow slits anyway.

“We’re going to help him.  Pay attention.”  When Sam looked, Cillian pointed to the levers before him.  “This extends the ladder up and down and this one moves it left and right.  You have to get me up there.”  He got on the ladder and started to make his way to the end of it.

“But...”  Sam was nervous as all hell.

“Just do it, Sam!” Cillian snapped.  He couldn’t stop thinking about the girl outside the rig, the one he didn’t warn.  He didn’t help her.  He didn’t help any of them.  He
killed
two people.  This man though, he thought he might be able to help him.

The ladder shook and moved in jerks as Sam worked the controls, but Cillian held on tight.  He rose up and began moving towards the man on the roof.  Cillian didn’t bother calling to him, as it looked like the guy had given up.  That, and climbing the ladder, was exhausting; he needed to save his breath.  The man was just sitting on the ledge, doing nothing but filming with this large camera on his shoulder.  Cillian wasn’t going to give up on him though.

Sam didn’t raise the ladder to the height he would have preferred, but it was good enough.  He stood very carefully on the end of the ladder as it neared the roof.  The stairwell door burst open and Cillian watched as five deranged and bloody people ran a beeline at the man.

Cillian gritted his teeth and silently urged the ladder to move faster.  Come on, come on!

At last, he could finally reach the man.  Cillian wrapped his arms around his waist and pulled.  The man gasped in surprise as he was swung out over the edge.

“Move us away, Sam!  Move us now!” Cillian shouted as loud as he could, but it was unnecessary.  As soon as Cillian had laid hands on the guy, the ladder began swinging the other way.  The motion, and Cillian’s momentum from pulling the man to him, caused them to topple over.  They went over the edge.

Amazingly, Cillian managed to wrap his legs around some ladder rungs and hook his feet through them.  The man nearly slipped out of his grasp, but Cillian caught onto a strange harness around his waist.  The stranger started screaming as his camera fell and hung by its wires.  Out of the corner of his eye, Cillian saw two of the attackers leap over the edge at them.  One came terrifyingly close, but both missed and fell to what Cillian assumed would be their deaths.  He couldn’t see what the other three were doing.

“Sir!” Cillian shouted at the man he held.  “I need you to calm down and stop squirming!”  He was making it difficult to hold on.

The man’s terrified face looked up at him and nodded once, his brown hair hanging straight towards the ground.

Why was the ladder still swinging?

Cillian looked down at the control station.  Sam was gone and he had left the lever up.  Someone, probably whoever had scared off Sam, was now slowly climbing up the ladder after them.

“Shit.  Sir!”

“Tobias!”

“What?”

“My name is Tobias.”  The man, Tobias, patted his chest twice then let his arms hang again.  His hands and face were going red from the blood collecting in them.

“All right, Tobias, I need you to cut loose your camera.”  Cillian was trying hard not to think about whoever was climbing up.  Right now his biggest concerns were losing his grip and the ladder swinging completely around into the building again.  At least the ladder’s current slant meant it couldn’t hit anything on the other side of the street.

“With what?”  Apparently, Tobias had no sharp objects with him.

“I don’t know!  Just get rid of it!”  Cillian tried but he couldn’t pull Tobias up at his current weight.  He didn’t even know if he could pull him up without the camera’s weight, but he had to try.

Tobias first grabbed the strap of a bag he had on and threw it off over his head.  The mostly empty duffel bag fluttered as it fell.  He then reached down and grabbed all the wires between him and the camera.  He started pulling and jerking at them.  One by one, they popped out of the sockets in the camera.  When the last one went, the heavy thing dropped to earth.  Tobias seemed distressed by this, but then immensely relieved.  Probably because it wasn’t him plummeting.

“Okay
, good!”  Cillian was getting tired.  Even without the camera, Tobias was still pretty heavy.  “I need you to help me now!  You have to try and climb over me, up onto the ladder!”

Tobias frowned up at him from his upside down position, “Can you try and get me upright so I can reach you?”

Cillian figured this Tobias guy didn’t have a fear of heights, but he probably would after his.

With a supreme amount of effort, he switched his hands to be hooked through Tobias’s harness the other way, causing his legs to swing down and his head to swing up.

“Thanks, man,” now being relatively face to face, they didn’t have to shout to hear each other.  They probably didn’t need to shout to hear each other to begin with, but the situation seemed to call for it.

“Don’t mention it,” Cillian grunted.  “Just hurry the fuck up.”

Tobias heaved himself up, using Cillian’s pants’ pockets as handholds.  With a lot of effort, and a lot of cursing from Cillian, Tobias managed to get onto the ladder.

“Now help me up!” Cillian shouted again.  The building was getting uncomfortably closer.

“Who’s that climbing up?”  Tobias had looked down and noticed the person halfway up the ladder.

“Probably no one good!  Now help me!”  Cillian tried to swing himself up using all the strength of his ab muscles.

Tobias grabbed his arms.  Soon they were both crammed upright on the narrow ladder.  Tobias then hurriedly wrapped the wires still attached to him around his waist so that they wouldn’t dangle.

“Start climbing down.”  Cillian looked at the looming building.  The three that hadn’t jumped after them were standing there, waiting for the ladder to come to them.  “If I tell you to hold tight, do it.”

“Jesus Christ.”  Tobias started down the ladder.  “This thing is steep.”

The two men inched their way down the ladder, keeping a hard grip on the metal and stepping carefully.

“Hold on tight!”  Cillian gripped the ladder to him and Tobias did the same.  The top of the ladder slammed into the side of the building, causing the whole thing to shudder and groan.  The gears continued to try to swing it, but they only succeeded in pressing the ladder tighter against the brick wall.  Cillian had been looking down when they hit.  He watched as the person coming up the ladder was thrown to the side by the impact.  Being lower, the shock wasn’t as bad as where the boys were, but it was still enough to tip him over the side.  The climber grabbed the side of the ladder as he tipped over, desperate to keep holding on, but ultimately, failed and fell.  He must have been badly injured by that fall, but Cillian could see him continue to squirm and then crawl under a car.  Cillian made note of which car.  At least it was one less thing to worry about on the ladder.