Undead Rain (Book 3): Lightning (Fighting the Living Dead) (4 page)

S
am and Tanya
turned their weapons on the hybrids, but as soon as they began firing, the hybrids dropped to the ground and came scuttling through the grass on all fours like spiders, presenting smaller targets. And they were crawling fast.

“We have to go over the wall,” I said. “The only safe place around here is that house.”

“There’s a guy in there trying to kill us,” Tanya reminded me.

“I’d rather face a human being with a gun than deal with…that,” I said, nodding at the approaching hybrids.

“Yeah,” she agreed. “Let’s go. We’re making a run for the farmhouse. Sam, lay down some cover fire.”

Sam leaned over the wall and fired a few rounds at the upstairs window of the house. “Go!” he shouted.

We scrambled over the wall, and sprinted for the farmhouse. As we ran, Tanya brought up her rifle and let off a few shots toward the window we had been targeted from. I heard glass shatter, and a startled cry, and wondered if the shooter in the house had been hit by glass shards, if not by Tanya’s bullet.

Sam caught up with us, breathing hard.

The farmhouse was built of stone, with double-glazed windows and a front door that looked like it was made of heavy wood. It wasn’t going to be easy to get inside. We ran around the back, and as we reached the corner of the house, I risked a glance over my shoulder.

The three hybrids were back on their feet, sprinting toward us.

“We don’t have much time,” I said to Tanya. My words were rushed as I gasped for air. I wasn’t built for running, but at least I had reached the farmhouse without stopping. There was once a time when I wouldn’t have been able to make that run. I’d be lying in the grass back there while the hybrids tore into me and ripped me apart.

The back door looked less heavy duty than the front, but it still looked sturdy enough to withstand being forced open.

“Fuck,” Sam said. “We can’t go through there.” He turned to face the advancing hybrids, the assault rifle raised so he could look along the sights.

Tanya aimed her rifle at the kitchen window and blew it to pieces, glass crashing everywhere. “Be careful,” she said as she climbed through. Jax followed and then I climbed in, wary of the deadly looking pieces of glass lying on the kitchen counter on the other side of the window.

Johnny and Sam followed quickly.

“They’ll follow us in here,” I said.

“That won’t matter,” Tanya said. She and Sam pointed their guns at the space where the window had once been. “They’ll have to come through that gap, and when they do, we’ll blast them.”

The first hybrid appeared, his yellow eyes filled with determination and hate. Both MP5s spat bullets, and the hybrid’s head jerked back, crimson blood gushing from its face.

The second hybrid appeared, clambering past the window frame, driven by a sense of rage far stronger than any sense of self-preservation. After the MP5s spoke a second time, the hybrid’s lifeless body slid heavily from the counter onto the kitchen floor and lay dead at our feet.

I wondered how strong the bloodlust must be in these monsters that it drove them to attack without any regard for their own lives.

A flurry of gunfire dispatched the third hybrid before it even managed to get through the broken window.

“Sam, find the stairs and cover them,” Tanya said. “There’s someone up there who wants us dead. The rest of you, help me move that table to cover the opening.”

We wrestled with a heavy wooden table that had been sitting in one corner of the kitchen and positioned it over the hole where the window had once been. By sliding the refrigerator across the floor and pushing it up against the table’s legs, we managed to press the table firmly in place, covering the gap.

There were still plenty of zombies out there, but we knew they didn’t have the basic intelligence of the hybrids; zombies would walk past that table-covered opening and not even think about trying to break in.

“Any trouble, Sam?” Tanya shouted out.

“Nothing,” he replied from somewhere in the house. “Whoever was shooting at us is holed up somewhere upstairs.”

We left the kitchen and walked along a hallway to where Sam was crouched at the foot of a flight of stairs, MP5 aimed at the landing above.

I glanced through a door into a living room. The house was furnished simply in a rustic manner, but looked comfortable. You would never know from the quiet atmosphere in the house that a zombie apocalypse was sweeping across the land outside.

Through the window, I saw some of the zombies pass by the house, nothing more than dark shapes in the night. I knew they would roam around out there until something else caught their attention and drew them away. They functioned on a very basic level, their actions controlled by the virus that infected their dead bodies. Their simple, dead minds had no reasoning power.

The people upstairs were another matter entirely. Armed, and presumably smart, they presented the greatest immediate danger to us.

I assumed there was more than one person up there, because the framed photographs on the mantelpiece in the living room showed a couple in their sixties, and whom I presumed to be two sons in their thirties.

That meant that there were potentially four armed people to deal with up there.

I told the others.

“Fuck ‘em,” Sam said. “We’ve probably got better firepower. I say we go up there and clear all the rooms.”

I had to stop myself from rolling my eyes. When did we become a SWAT team? We were being sidetracked from what was important.

“Or we could just leave,” I said. “I saw a set of car keys hanging on the wall near the back door. We can take their car and get to Site Alpha Two much quicker. We aren’t here to murder people.”

“They shot at us,” Sam said.

“And who can blame them? They’re probably scared shitless, trying to protect their farm from zombies. Wouldn’t you shoot at trespassers if it was you?”

He shrugged. “I guess so.”

“What kind of car is it?” Tanya asked.

“I don’t know. The keys have the Volkswagen logo on them.”

Jax went into the living room and peered out of the window. “I don’t see any car out there, and there wasn’t one at the front of the house, either.”

I went back to the kitchen, grabbed the keys, and found a door that opened into a garage. It was neat, with tools hanging on the walls in ordered rows, a stack of tires in one corner, and a smell of oil and rubber in the air.

When I had first seen the VW keys, I had wondered if the car might be a Beetle, or something compact that we wouldn’t all fit into. I needn’t have worried; a metallic-blue Volkswagen California camper van sat in the garage.

The others appeared at the door.

Jax said, “Sweet.”

“I’ll drive,” Tanya said. “We need to get the garage door open.”

“It’s automatic,” I said. “There’s a remote opener in the van.”

Tanya climbed into the driver’s seat, with Sam next to her up front. The rest of us piled into the spacious rear area. Tanya hit the button on the remote and the garage door slid slowly upward to reveal a gravel driveway beyond and a dirt road beyond that.

Tanya started the engine, turned on the headlights, and got the camper van into gear, revving the engine while she waited for the door to open enough to let the camper van through.

When we finally drove out of the garage and into the night, Tanya said, “Hang on,” as something thumped off the side of the vehicle. She gunned the engine and we shot forward down the driveway, gravel crunching under the tires, and onto the narrow dirt road.

I could hear moans beyond the windows, but we quickly left the zombies behind as we drove away, the headlights illuminating the deserted road.

“Do you know the way?” Jax asked Tanya.

Tanya nodded. “I think so.” She kept her eyes on the road ahead.

Sam turned to us, looking into the back of the van over his seat. “Did you see the way those hybrids hit the deck and came at us like spiders? That was some fucked-up shit, man.”

“Yeah,” I said. The hybrids scared me much more than the zombies. I remembered when I was reading zombie novels and playing zombie video games that there would always be a debate about shambling zombies versus running zombies. I always thought that running zombies were too dangerous. Now, I knew how true that was. The hybrids moved so fast that it would be easy to get caught by them. And they had an appetite for flesh, even rotting zombie flesh.

I thought back to how they had ignored the shambling zombies by the stone wall and come after us instead, even though we were running away. They obviously preferred their meals to be alive and kicking.

We turned off the main road—if the dirt track could be called a main road—and drove along a narrow track that cut through a wood. Dark trees rolled past my window, and I wondered how many zombies were in there among the pines. Woods inhabited by monsters were once just a thing of fairy tales, but longer. Now, the stories of flesh-eating monsters were true. And just like in the fairy tales, anyone wandering into the trees might never be seen again.

We bumped along the track for half an hour before emerging from the trees. Tanya hit the brakes and the camper van came to a stop in front of a tall wire fence topped with razor wire. Beyond the fence sat a five-story building identical to the one on Apocalypse Island. Although the second floor windows were all dark, the lights on the other floors were switched on, giving the impression that the building was full of people.

A small yellow sign on the fence had six black words stenciled onto it: Government property. Trespassers will be prosecuted.

“I can’t see any people,” Jax said, leaning forward in her seat. “But why are all the lights still on?”

“Nobody bothered to turn them off,” I guessed. “When everybody is being eaten by zombies, saving energy isn’t a priority.”

“Let’s not jump to conclusions,” Tanya said. “For all we know, there might be another reason they lost contact with Alpha One. Maybe everybody in there is alive and well.”

I wasn’t sure about that, and Tanya herself didn’t sound convinced. There was an eerie, deathly-quiet atmosphere around Site Alpha Two.

“So what’s the plan?” Sam asked.

“We don’t have one.” Tanya turned in her seat. “Anyone have any ideas?”

“I think we need to take it slow, and see what we’re getting ourselves into before we go in there all guns blazing,” I said.

“Typical,” Sam said.

“So do you think the best idea is to go storming through the door and advertise our presence to everybody in there, zombie or otherwise?” I asked, annoyed that Sam seemed to be contradicting everything I said just for the hell of it. “Didn’t Hart tell you about patient zero? Because he told me there’s a creature in there that’s worse than any hybrid. Do you want to go blundering into the building if that’s waiting in there for you?”

“Of course not, man, but there’s such a thing as too much caution. We can’t go sneaking around forever. The chopper will be coming back for us the day after tomorrow. By then, we need to get to the fourth-floor labs, grab the H1-whatever, and get out again. We can’t do all that by fucking about.”

“All I’m saying is that we should try to get some idea of what we’re stepping into,” I said.

“We know what we’re stepping into, man. It’s called shit.”

“I have an idea,” Johnny said. I looked over at him. He had one of the maps of the facility open on his lap. “Look here,” he said, pointing at a small structure located inside the fence but separate from the main building. “This is a security guard station. And according to this diagram, there are monitors in there. What if they monitor the security cameras in the main building? We could see what’s going on in there before we walk in through the front door.”

“Good idea,” Tanya said. “Where is that building?”

Johnny studied the map and looked out of the camper van window to get his bearings. “If you follow the road around to the left, we should come to a main gate. This building is about fifty yards inside from there.”

Tanya turned the steering wheel and took us along the road that ran around the perimeter of compound. I looked closely at Site Alpha Two as we followed the fence toward the main gate. There was no movement in there that I could see. If the place was full of zombies, they were waiting quietly inside.

But I knew that as soon as we entered the building, they wouldn’t be quiet anymore.

W
e arrived
at the main gate at the same time as a light drizzle began falling. I hadn’t noticed that the sky, which had been clear earlier, was now murky. Even the moon, which had been so bright when the Chinook had dropped us off in the field, was partly obscured from our sight by dark clouds. Typical. Just as we were about to enter a dangerous area, the night got dark. It would make it much more difficult to see if there were zombies or hybrids wandering around inside the compound.

The gate was closed, but when Sam got out of the camper van and went to check if it was locked, it swung open. Sam waited while Tanya drove us inside before closing the gate again. When he got back into the vehicle, I asked him why had had closed it.

“We don’t know what’s in those woods, man. We don’t want something following us in here.”

I nodded. His argument was sound. On a quiet night like this, even the gentle idling noise made by the camper van’s engine would drift through the trees, attracting whatever was in those woods. It might be a good idea to barricade the gate somehow, but then we could be locking ourselves in with a much worse monster than anything outside the compound.

The guard station was a single-story brick building with lighted windows, sitting across the parking lot from the main building. A few cars were parked in the lot, waiting for owners who would never return. The guard station had a single door, which had a glass panel set into it at eye level. Sam checked it out, peering through the glass before giving us the thumbs-up signal. “It’s clear,” he said, opening the door.

Tanya switched off the engine and sudden silence descended. That silence seemed to be laced with an anticipation of danger, as if something was going to come quietly out of the night and take us one by one, like an owl swooping noiselessly onto its prey, razor sharp claws bared.

I had to stop thinking like that or I was going to spook myself to the point that every tiny noise was going to make me jump.

We got out of the van and walked through the cold drizzle to the guard station.

It was warm inside the small building, the radiators on the wall throwing out more than enough heat to combat the chill of the night. There was a single main room, a restroom, and a storeroom that held a filing cabinet and a coffee machine.

The main room had a row of a six monitors affixed to one of the walls, each with a number 1-6 painted on the wall above it, with a row of desks and chairs beneath, each desk holding a small control panel. The monitors were switched on, displaying black and white images of the parking lot, the perimeter fence, and various corridors that I assumed were inside the main building. A row of walkie-talkies sat in a charger on one of the desks.

“The main building looks deserted,” Jax said, watching the monitors.

It was true that the screens seemed to show an empty building, but they only showed corridors. The only room interiors shown were two small rooms that looked like the mirrored room I had been held in at Alpha One.

“There are only six monitors,” I said. “That’s a huge building, so these screens aren’t showing everything in there. The guards must select which cameras to monitor using the control panels.”

I took a seat at one of the desks and looked at the controls. There were two rows of white buttons beneath labels that denoted which camera they were related to. There was a small joystick that I assumed controlled the cameras’ movements. There was also a button that said
Audio
with an On and Off position. It was currently turned to off, and the button for the
Level 1 Main Corridor
was depressed. I clicked the button next to it, labeled
Level 5 Elevators
, and one of the screens changed the image to show three closed elevator doors and a section of corridor. The camera was obviously set high up on the wall opposite the elevators, the image looking down from that vantage point.

Something moved across the screen suddenly. A woman in a skirt and blouse came into view, walking along the corridor slowly, aimlessly. She wore thick-rimmed glasses that were broken, the right half of the frame hanging loosely, the lens missing. That didn’t seem to bother her. She stared vacantly ahead as if in a trance. I couldn’t see any wounds on her that would indicate that she’d been bitten but because the image was black and white, I had no idea if her flesh was mottled blue or if her eyes were the hateful yellow of the zombie. She passed from the view of the camera.

“What’s up with her, man?” Sam asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

Everyone took a seat and began hitting various buttons on the control panels, switching cameras until they found something of interest.

After a few minutes, each monitor showed a very different scene to the one it had displayed when we’d first entered the room.

I studied each monitor in turn. The second floor main corridor was blacked out. It looked like the power had been cut from that floor, although the cameras were still working so they must have been operating on a separate electrical circuit.

The fourth floor elevator camera showed the closed doors of the elevators and, lying in front of them, the bodies of four security guards, all lying face down and dressed in the same uniforms and caps as the guards at Alpha One. They were covered in blood and guts. A dark pool of blood had spread across the floor from where the bodies lay. Had they been killed by something that had ripped out their insides, or had they been gutted after death? They hadn’t turned, suggesting a cause of death other than a zombie bite.

The first floor reception area seemed deserted. When we went through the main door into the building, this would be where we’d begin our journey to the fourth-floor labs. The camera showed a wide-open space, decorated with a few large potted plants and a seating area. The reception desk itself sat behind a semi-circular wooden counter. The camera also showed the three closed elevator doors. But unlike the fourth floor, there was no sign of carnage here.

I turned to the others. “At least our entry point into the building looks safe enough.”

Tanya nodded. “Well, it’s not crawling with nasties, anyway.” She pointed to the monitor that showed the guards lying dead by the elevators on the fourth floor. “But what the hell happened to them?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

Sam said, “It looks like a straight forward snatch and grab to me, man. We go into the reception area, get an elevator up to the fourth floor, step over the bodies, and go down this corridor to the lab.” He pointed to the next monitor, which showed the deserted fourth-floor corridor. The lab doors were all closed. If there were any nasties on that floor, they were hopefully sealed behind those doors. “Then we get the H1 stuff, ride the elevator back to the first floor, and get the fuck out of there. We spend the rest of tonight, and all of tomorrow, in the van. The day after that we drive to the pick-up point for one o’ clock. It’s so easy, it’s almost like a vacation.”

“It sounds too easy,” Tanya said.

I didn’t say anything, but I agreed with Tanya. I wanted this mission to be as easy as Sam had said, but I didn’t dare hope that it would be. My hopes had been destroyed too many times in the past.

The other two monitors showed the facility’s cafeteria, which had at least fifty zombies wandering between the tables, and the third-floor corridor, which was deserted. Unlike the other floors, where the doors were all closed and presumably locked, with access only being granted to holders of the proper security clearance cards, the third floor seemed to be a communal area. The doors were all open.

“What level is the cafeteria on?” I asked.

“Third floor,” Johnny said.

I leaned closer to the monitor showing the third-floor corridor. “Strange.”

“What is it?” Jax asked.

“See the cafeteria door? It’s open. I think it’s this door here.” I pointed to one of the doors leading off the deserted third-floor corridor on the other screen.

Jax nodded. “Yeah, I think that’s it.”

I looked at her. “So, why aren’t those zombies wandering out into the corridor? We’ve seen how they usually act; they wander everywhere. But these are acting differently. It’s like they’re huddling together for protection. But there’s no danger in the corridor that I can see.”

Jax said, “Try some of the other rooms on that floor. There must be something there.”

I pressed a button labeled
Level 3 Meeting Room 1
. The screen showed a typical meeting room with a long table running down the center of the room, chairs on either side. A large screen at the front of the room was turned off.

Pressing the next button showed us
Level 3 Meeting Room 2
. It was identical to the other meeting room, except for one thing: lying on the floor in one corner, among a mess of blood and entrails were a man and a woman. Both of them wore white lab coats, although the amount of blood made that difficult to distinguish. Their bodies lay at unnatural angles, as if they had been tossed into the corner like discarded, worn-out dolls.

“Holy fuck, they’re hybrids,” Sam said.

He was right; the parts of flesh that were visible in the gory mess showed the dark web of veins beneath the skin that was typical of hybrids.

Blood covered the walls in patterns that I knew from watching cop shows to be arterial sprays. A smear of it led from the bodies, across the carpet, to an area off camera.

“So now we know what the zombies are afraid of,” I said. “Hybrids eat them. So all the zombies have moved into the cafeteria to stay off the dinner menu.”

“Ironic,” Jax said. “But what killed the hybrids?” She leaned forward and moved the joystick on the control panel, panning the camera along the bloody trail on the floor. The trail ended abruptly, and then seemed to smear up the wall. Jax panned the camera up.

The blood disappeared into a large, dark, square hole near the ceiling.

“That’s the air vent, man,” Sam said.

The metal grille was hanging loosely by one of its corners beneath the hole, bent out of shape as if something had smashed it open.

I sat back in my seat and looked out of the window at the building beyond the parking lot.

It seemed that patient zero had become a creature so strong and vicious that was capable of killing hybrids.

It was hunting for prey.

And it was in the air vents.