Carlie Simmons (Book 1): Until Morning Comes (11 page)

Damn…why does it have to be federal agents
again?
Jared thought. He turned and looked back at the red-faced group of students,
their eyes rollercoaster wild.

His hand hesitated, hovering over the
door lock.

“Why don’t you let them in?” said Amy,
who was standing behind him.

“Yeah, right. I was just making sure it
sounded safe out there,” he said, flipping the latch on the handle and yanking
it back. As the door swung inward, Jared saw two heavily armed, scruffy
officers enter. The rest of the students rushed forward, encircling the men.

“Are we ever glad to see you,” said Amy.

Jared tucked his pistol into his waist
and half-smiled at the two men.

“You the one in charge here?” said Shane,
glancing down at the weapon and back up at Jared. 

“Yeah, you could say that,” he replied, seeing
Amy roll her eyes.

“Look, we don’t have much time. The
creatures outside are massing and you are the only morsels left on campus. We
need to get out of here ASAP. How many people you got?”

“There are ten of us,” said Amy while
pushing past Jared, stepping on his Nikes.

“Where to? Those things are all over.
That’s why we’ve been holed up in here,” said Jared.

“The creatures were spread around
earlier in search of victims but you are the last group left on campus so they
will be descending on this building as soon as they can locate you.”

“Well, what’s the plan, Sheriff?” said
Jared.

“There’s a series of storm drains at the
end of the hallway, beneath this sub-level. We’ll head there and make our way
underneath the campus, back north towards our facility. We should be able to
get within about a quarter of a mile of our tactical operations center. From
there, we’re gonna practice our sprinting skills.”

“That’s your plan—crawl through sewage
and then play zombie tag on the streets?” said Jared.

“Unless you’d rather join the cadaver museum
in here, grab your shit and follow us.”

The rest of the students were crowding
around the doorway. Jared turned and grabbed his daypack and then joined the
others. Shane was in the hallway as the others pushed their way out of the
room.

“From my laptop images, it’s about two hundred
yards to the storm drains,” whispered Shane. “Once we’re inside, we’ve got a
few twists and turns, which should take a few hours, and then we’ll go over the
plan for hitting the streets above. Keep the formation tight and we’ll get
through this. Rory will come up the rear,” he said, nodding back to his friend,
who was keeping watch on the corridor that they had just come from.

“Boss,” Rory shouted. “I hear movement
headed this way. We gotta roll.”

As Shane stepped into the hallway, he
saw Carlie leaping down the last flight of stairs towards them. She was heavily
laden with weapons and wore a pale look.

“Run…run…all of you…there are hundreds
of them headed this way,” she said.

Shane turned and bolted in the other
direction with the others following him as Carlie caught up. “No offense,
Carlie, but what the hell are you doing here?”

“You know me—always needing to be in
charge. I thought I’d give you some pointers on how to run a proper
extraction,” she said in between breaths as they sprinted into the darkness
with the light from Shane’s headlamp bouncing off the walls. “I think I lost
those things in the tangle of hallways above but probably not for long.”

As they approached a corridor
intersection, Shane raised his fist, motioning for the others to stop, then
realizing they probably didn’t understand military hand signals. He turned
around and lifted his hand. As everyone came to a halt, he shined his headlamp
down the corridor at the t-section.

“Here, hold this,” he said, handing his
backpack to Amy, who was standing behind him. He removed the laptop and scanned
the real-time imagery of their surroundings, noting that the passage to the
right led to the storm drains. He panned out, taking in the larger picture of
the building and adjoining structures while people pushed in around him to see.

“What is that throbbing red mass by the
nursing building?” said Amy, pointing to the screen.

“That’s the flesh-eating mob waiting to
get their paws on us. Must be a thousand or more creatures now compared to the
size of that glob an hour ago when I checked.”

 “What are they all doing, just waiting
there like that?” said Amy.

“Not sure, but a few hours ago there
were eleven other groups of survivors on campus and each time the size of the
cluster would increase before those things attacked. They must be massing,
waiting for another chance to locate us.”

“How will they even find us down here?”
said a voice from the back.

“I think they’ve got a heightened sense
of smell. I’ve seen them locate others from inside closed buildings,” he said, shutting
the computer. “Let’s push on. Then we can get the hell out of here before another
feeding frenzy begins.”

Carlie moved up alongside Shane. “Looks
like there’s no chance Matias could’ve gotten back to airlift this many people
out of here after all.”

“Yep, the storm drains are our only
option now,” said Shane.

As they neared the terminus of the
corridor, Shane saw two gray steel doors ahead. They were marked with the
words,
Water Treatment.
The doors were locked so he smashed the knob
with the butt of his rifle and swung them open.

He entered and surveyed the wall to the
right, which held a row of switches alongside a circuit-breaker box. He flipped
up a red handle for the emergency generators and saw the overhead lights
flicker on in the room.

“Excelente,” he said, turning off his
headlamp and walking into the cavernous chamber. Carlie grabbed a clipboard off
the wall and studied the floor plan.

“Rory, slide a metal pipe through the
two door handles and then I want everyone to grab tables, chairs, tool cabinets
and place them against the door,” said Shane.

As Shane and Carlie were surveying the layout,
Jared came over. Shane looked at the two Glocks in Jared’s belt. “So, where did
you get the pieces?”

“Off a U.S. Marshal who was dead on
Drachman Street, a few blocks from here.”

“How do you know he was a marshal? Those
guys mostly use plain clothes and unmarked cars,” said Carlie, analyzing the
man’s features.

“Because he had a Tommy-Lee swagger
about him, more so than most cops,” Jared said, looking over Shane’s rough
beard and tan face. “Not you, though—you look more like a deer hunter out of
Deliverance
.”

“I thought you said the marshal was
dead.”

“Yeah, yeah—he was already dead. A bunch
of those things had jumped him and his partner while I was nearby. There was
nothing I could do to help.”

Shane just frowned and returned his gaze
to the floor plans. “Alright, looks like the tunnel we need is just up ahead.
Everybody follow me and we can be on our way.”

Carlie, Jared, and Shane walked beside
each other down the room.

“You from Georgia originally?” said Carlie,
trying to decipher the man’s accent.

“Louisiana—honest-to-God born-in-the
bayou—but not from one of those cousins-marrying-cousins kinda families. No, ma’am,
my kin were royalty before the war, but then, that’s probably what you were
noticing when I saw you checking me out back there.”

“Oh, please.” Carlie laughed—a sound she
hadn’t heard in a long time. “You need some water. The mind gets squirrely when
a person gets dehydrated.”

Before Jared could reply, the sound of
thumping on the metal doors behind them echoed off the cement walls of the water
treatment facility.

“Seems like we’re always just barely one
step ahead of those things,” said Shane.

When they reached the storm drain, Shane
and four others twisted off the rusty manhole cover. It was three feet in
diameter and weighed two-hundred pounds. They slid it to the side and let it
slam on the ground. The sound of fast-moving water emanated from the tunnel
below.

Shane peered inside and saw a torrent of
knee-deep water racing through the cylindrical passage. He leaned back and
scratched his head while shooting a glance at Carlie, who was raising her
eyebrows.

“Was this part of your plan, skipper?”
said Jared.

“The thunderstorm up top must have been
more severe than I thought to have moved all this water through here,” Shane
said.

Shane stood with his arms folded while
Amy pushed her way forward to look inside the entrance. “Where does this lead
again?” she said.

“South,” said Shane.

“To an actual place away from these
onion-eyed freaks or into the open desert with cougars and snakes?” said Jared.

“Kill the sarcasm before you spook the
others.”

“I kept the others alive this long, Wyatt
Earp.”

“Like hell—you’d still be out on the
streets if I hadn’t let you in a few hours ago,” said Amy.

“And you’ve both done a bang-up job, so
let’s cowboy on and get the fuck out of here already,” said Shane, motioning to
Bird Beak and Floor Mop at the front. “Let’s go. The water ain’t getting any lower.
This is our only way out.”

The two students peered inside while the
rest of the students huddled around the opening, whispering their concerns to
each other.

“Those things will be through those
doors any time, boss,” shouted Rory, who was running back from the main
chamber.

“Look, if you guys hop in there, you’ll
at least have a fighting chance. This drain heads away from the city so you
should end up in the undeveloped regions a mile or two from campus. If you stay
here there’s no chance—it’s over.”

The metal doors in the distance gave
way, crashing to the ground as the first wave of creatures began pouring through
the water treatment room, their piercing shrieks echoing off the cement walls. 

Carlie and Rory stood side by side with
their weapons raised while Shane began getting the others into the drain. First
to go were Tex-Mex and Chatty Cathy, followed by Bird Beak, whom Shane had to push
in.

As Carlie and Rory began shooting, the
creatures flooded in through the room. The staccato of gunfire echoed off the
narrow confines of the chamber. Within minutes, a pile of spent brass began
accumulating on the dusty floor beside both shooters and a hazy ribbon of gun smoke
wafted along the ceiling. As the body count rose, the frenzied beasts climbed
over the growing mound of fallen carcasses choking the path. Replacing the
magazine in her M4, Carlie shot a one-armed maintenance worker whose head
looked like a moldy scarecrow. She leaned back towards Shane, shouting above
the gunfire. “We’re almost out of space in here—they’re closing in fast.”

“Copy that. Only a few more people left
to go,” said Shane, who had just finished helping Floor Mop into the storm
drain.

Jared looked back with a crooked smile at
Shane. “Maybe all the firepower has got those things demoralized.”

“OK, Jared, get on the ready line—you’re
next,” Shane said, glancing down at Jared’s wrist, and at the exposed handcuff.

“What if I get E coli or something—I
haven’t had a tetanus shot in years,” Jared said coyly.

“This is a river trip straight to hell—the
rapids alone will probably kill you,” said Shane. “Move it or I’ll kick your
ass in myself.”

“You gotta work on your persuasion
skills a little more,” Jared said, and then plunged into the frothy mess below.

As Shane unslung his rifle and turned to
fix his sights on an approaching creature, he heard the sound of the ceiling
vent above being smashed. Before he could react, the mesh screen broke free and
a brutish figure clad in a soiled baseball jersey crashed down on Rory. It
mauled him on the neck and then lunged at his face. Carlie turned and kicked it
in the throat, sending it backwards, and then shot it twice in the head.

Shane rushed forward, pulling a bandanna
out of his vest pocket and swabbing the seeping wound. Part of Rory’s muscle
was torn out and two deep lacerations ran down his right cheek.  Carlie
continued holding the perimeter while slapping in her last magazine.

Rory was bleeding heavily from the gash
and Shane could see his friend’s eyes darting around as rivulets of arterial
blood ran down onto his pants. “You and Carlie better go. I got this,” muttered
Rory, holding the soiled bandanna against his neck and motioning for Shane to
head into the storm drain.

“No, we’re going together or not at
all,” said Shane.

“That ain’t how this poker game is gonna
play out, amigo, and you know it. I’m done for but you two can still get out.
Now go,” he said, shoving Shane back and removing a grenade from his vest. Shane
stood up and staggered back to the storm drain, looking into the determined eyes
of his friend.

Carlie finished her last round and
tossed the M4 on the ground, removing her pistol. She was retreating in a
half-squat as more creatures slithered over the carcasses before them. She reluctantly
headed to the drain, crouching opposite Shane, both of them peering into the foamy
river below and then glancing back up at the oncoming horde.

Shane looked at Rory, who let out a
contorted grin. “Go, my friend. I’ll hold the line,” he said, pulling the pin
on the grenade and tossing it into the crowd that was nearly upon him.

Shane grabbed Carlie’s hand, pushing
her, then jumped in behind as the room ignited in a barrage of cement and
flying limbs.