“Top—?” I asked.
He gave me a wild look for a moment, then he seized control of himself and slammed his control back into place.
I squatted over Van Sant’s corpse. His clothes were torn and it was clear he’d been brutalized. The question was … in what way. Top and Bunny stood on either side of me looking down at the body.
Noah asked the question. “What was wrong with him? Was he a walker?”
“I think so,” I answered.
“But he was using an axe … I thought they were mindless.”
I sighed. “It depends on which generation of the
seif-al-din
they had. This looks like Ten, maybe. If it was Twelve he’d have his full intelligence.”
“Jesus,” he said, appalled. “Why would someone create something like that?”
“It was a doomsday plan. A small group of radical extremists wanted to dose their own people with Generation Twelve and everyone else with Generation Six.”
“That’s insane.”
Ivan punched him on the arm. “Dude, what part of ‘doomsday plan’ sounds sane to you? If you’re going that far out and trying to kill everyone, is it really that much crazier to leave some thinking zombies behind? It’s all fucked up.”
Noah almost smiled. “Zombie balls.”
It took a two-count but despite everything everyone cracked up.
The laughter was brittle and short-lived, and as I pulled back the collar of Van Sant’s shirt it died completely. There two ragged half circles torn into his flesh. The marks of human teeth.
He’d been bitten.
Then I touched the BAMS unit to his throat. It had a small panel for reading surface temperatures. The meter said ninety degrees.
“Dead,” I said.
“I had no choice,” began Dunk, but I cut him off.
“No. His body temperature is already down five degrees. He’s been dead for a while.”
Montana helped Lydia to her feet and she leaned heavily on her as they came to join us.
“Talk to me, Warbride,” I said.
There was a glaze in her eyes but it was fading. She looked around to orient herself and then those eyes flared when she saw the damage to Bunny’s suit. She pushed past Montana and grabbed Bunny, checking every inch of the tape to look for the smallest flaw.
“
Canejo!
”
Dunk looked at Noah. “Big guy’s popular around here.”
Bunny gently pushed Lydia back. “I’m okay,” he said, though he still sounded breathless and scared. “It’s cool.”
It wasn’t cool, and we all knew it. He may not have been bitten, but the BAMS unit told the tale about the ambient toxicity. The air was a soup composed of at least four different pathogens. We had no way to know if the tear in Bunny’s suit was going to prove as fatal as a bullet to the heart.
The others gathered around me.
“What’s that mean?” asked Dunk, looking as scared as he should be. As we all were.
“It means that you don’t want to unzip to scratch your balls,” said Ivan.
“No,” he said, “does that mean they’ve already opened the Ark?”
That was a tough damn question.
“We can’t know,” I said. “This place is a research facility, so the BAMS could be reading stuff released from labs on any of the lower levels. We’re going to have to get to the Ark to make sure that it’s intact.”
It was news I didn’t want to say and they didn’t want to hear.
I was going to say more, but the lights suddenly went out, plunging us into absolute blackness.
“Night vision,” growled Top, and we all snapped the devices down over our goggles. The darkness went from a stygian nothingness to that weird and disturbing green.
“I got movement!” cried Montana.
I whirled and saw that she was right. Someone stepped into view from one of the small offices that lined the far wall. A woman. Tall, slim, dressed in a white lab coat that was spattered with black dots. Black in this light, red if we still had normal lighting.
“Freeze!” I yelled. “American Special Forces. I need you to put your hands over your head and—”
The woman bent forward at the waist and bared her teeth at us. The shriek she uttered was in no way human. It sounded more like a mountain lion.
Then she rushed at us.
Not a slow, shambling gait.
She ran full tilt at us, hands reaching, fingers hooked to grab, teeth bared to bite.
“Damn,” murmured Montana.
She raised her rifle and shot the woman in the chest.
The rounds punched through her and knocked her back and down.
But she immediately began climbing to her feet.
Ivan reached out in an almost intimate way, touching Montana’s arm to raise the barrel.
“The head,” he said. “You know this.”
Montana took the shot and the left half of the infected woman’s head disintegrated into pulp. Her next step was meaningless and she pitched forward, landed hard, and slid to within a few feet of where Montana stood.
“Faster,” she said softly. “They’re faster.”
No one answered.
There was no chance.
Doors opened all along the wall and people began pouring out. Some running. Some staggering. All of them marked by the wounds that had killed them.
Just as we had in the subway, we raised our weapons and moved into a shooting line. It was hell for me, and I’d had years to fit the reality of this into my head. For my team it must have been a hotter hell because this was an insane rewind of yesterday.
But then the game changed on us.
One of the running figures suddenly dropped to one knee, raised a pistol, and began firing at us.
“Gun!” yelled Ivan.
We broke left and right, firing as we dived for cover.
Except for Dunk.
His head suddenly snapped backward and black wetness flew up from the ruin of his face. He fell hard and did not move.
“Goddamn it!” howled Noah and he hosed the shooter, knocking him down and back.
Before the body hit the ground two other guns opened up from beyond the crowd of running infected.
I had an angle on one shooter and took him with a double tap to the chest and head. He pitched sideways, careening into two walkers and dragging them down. Their heads whipped around at the sight or smell of fresh blood, and the monsters fell on him, tearing at his clothing to expose the meat.
Not sure if that meant that there was some chemical on their clothes that masked their smell, but whatever kept the shooters safe during the charge was for shit when there was blood in the air.
Works for me. Something to bear in mind.
Bunny, Lydia, and Noah were crouched down in the open elevator doorway, firing continuously. Montana and Ivan had ducked behind a desk. I knelt next to the desk, taking whatever shelter its corner offered.
The first wave of the dead reached us and their screams tore through the darkness, challenging the thunder of our guns for domination. Montana and Ivan both copied my double-tap method, using first shot to stall the mass of the oncoming infected and thereby allowing an easier headshot. The others were sawing back and forth with automatic fire, trying to kill or cripple enough of the dead to create a barrier.
“Frag out!” I yelled as I pulled the pin on a grenade and hurled it into the center of the oncoming mass. The infected caught in the center of the blast radius were torn to pieces. Others lost limbs and went down.
One of the opposing guns went silent, too.
It was the moment we needed to take charge of the situation.
Bunny, Lydia, and Top moved forward, using the brief advantage to take better shots while the rest of us covered them. Noah concentrated his fire on the third shooter and he had to drop three infected before he took the money shot. The third gun went silent.
That opened another door for us. We all rose from cover and moved into the diminished crowd of walkers. I still had my Beretta and the others switched to handguns, allowing the dead to close to point-blank in order to guarantee a head shot.
We fired and fired.
They fell.
One by one, they went down.
Then there were none.
“Reload!” bellowed Top.
Dunk lay sprawled between Top and I. A short, squatty ATF agent from Boston. A man I’d been in two horrific battles with, but about whom I couldn’t really recall a thing. Not one personal detail. A bit of a sense of humor, some genuine astonishment at the things he was experiencing. A good soldier. A brother, fallen in battle.
There was no time to react, to acknowledge, or to grieve.
With the night-vision goggles in place I couldn’t see anyone’s eyes, couldn’t tell how they were dealing with this. One by one they turned away to focus on the room.
Top and Noah knelt on either side of one of the shooters. The man wore a lightweight hazmat suit over street clothes. The white protective material was tucked down into the Tims.
“That’s some weird shit,” said Top.
“Would that even work against this stuff?” asked Noah, gesturing to indicate the pathogen-filled air.
“Not for long,” I said.
“Wonder if they knew that,” mused Noah.
It was a good question, and it opened up a very interesting line of speculation.
I called up the floor plan of the Locker, picking the fastest route to the Ark.
There was no “safest” route.
“Let’s go,” I said. “Clock’s ticking.”
Chapter Ninety-eight
The Locker
Sigler-Czajkowski Biological and Chemical Weapons Facility
Highland County, Virginia
Sunday, September 1, 12:27 p.m.
We had several levels to go down to reach the Ark. Twice we had to use blaster-plasters to blow open sealed airlocks. As we ran I tried to reach Nikki or Church or anyone on the command channel, but there was nothing and we hadn’t found the jammers.
I thought about Samson Riggs and his team. Was this the kind of thing they’d walked into?
Riggs was older and more experienced than me. He was a superior team leader in all regards. If Mother Night had taken him out, then what chance did I stand?
Doubt of that kind is an ugly, ugly thing.
The warrior in my head snarled at me.
We ran down level after level. Four times we encountered infected, all of them employees of the Locker. We tore them down with guns and grenades.
We made it all the way to the airlock on Level Fourteen.
We were a long way down, and as we crept into the room it became apparent that we had just stepped into one of the inner rings of hell itself.
The chamber on our side of the airlock was big and dark, with hundreds of metal packing crates stacked in rows. Some of the crates had been pulled down and pushed together to form a barrier directly in front of the Ark airlock. Thousands of shell casings littered the floor all around the barrier and everything—cases, floor, and airlock façade—was splashed with blood. This was clearly where the Locker’s security forces had made their last stand. Thirty men and women, all highly trained, all combat veterans, had tried to hold this position.
And that is where all of them died.
Now they stood there, around and behind the barrier, their faces slack and white, their eyes dark, their bodies torn by bullets and blades. Here and there among them were a few of Mother Night’s people, as damaged and dead as the rest.
The dead turned toward us as we entered the room.
They bared bloody and broken teeth at us.
Behind them, the airlock to the Ark stood ajar.
We were too late.
Chapter Ninety-nine
The Locker
Sigler-Czajkowski Biological and Chemical Weapons Facility
Highland County, Virginia
Sunday, September 1, 12:38 p.m.
The infected guards milling in front of the Ark were all looking at us now. Maybe it was the heavy stink of gunpowder hanging in the air, but even though they were aware of us in the room they seemed confused, not yet reacting to us as prey.
I wanted to take that moment and use it.
“Echo Team,” I said sharply. “
Take them down
.”
We opened fire. Bunny had switched from an M-4 to the big shotgun with the drum magazine. Fully loaded, it was a brute of a weapon, but it was a toy in his hands. The gun bucked and bucked as he fired round after round at them, aiming head-high and blasting snarling faces into meaningless red junk. The others let out a howl of savage hunger and rushed us, all hesitation shattered.
It was a slaughterhouse.
Another fucking slaughterhouse.
How many times would this happen? How many times would Mother Night force us to massacre people who had already suffered, people who had died in fear and pain from the pathogen, or from the bites of their friends who’d been infected first? How many rungs down were we required to climb into the pit? Nietzsche wrote, “Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster.” Was that the endgame here? Was Bliss somehow punishing me, the killer with whom she philosophized about the creation of monsters, by making me kill so much that I lost my humanity?
I could feel it slipping.
I was screaming. No. Yelling with a weird and savage joy.
It was a dangerous, dangerous place to be.
The dead came at us and we—did what? Made them deader? Desecrated their corpses? What would you call this?
“Kill them!”
It was my own voice shouting.
The voice of the Warrior, the Killer who lives inside of me. The one who gets stronger with every trigger pull.
I obeyed his orders.
I killed.
And so did the people who followed and trusted me.
As the infected rushed us, we met their charge and as a group began angling to one side, forcing them to attack us on our flank as we edged toward the open door of the Ark.
That’s when Mother Night sprung her trap.
Bright lights flared on all around us, blinding us, stabbing through the optics of the night vision, tearing cries of pain and confusion from us as we scrambled to raise the devices away from our tortured eyes.
On either side of us, two stacks of metal cases leaned out and fell with mighty crashes as six huge figures sprang out from hiding.