Convoy 19: A Zombie Novel (14 page)

Chapter 23

The cracked and broken stairwell door barely hung upon one hinge, its frame splintered. Bloody claw marks on one side implied that things within this DDC had gone badly. A dark-haired woman stood at the top of the stairs, gesturing for the team to hurry. “Come on. Up here!”

The soldiers ascended to the second floor quickly, but Miguel hesitated. His sense of caution, the obsessive compulsion that had kept him and his convoy alive through Walk-ins too numerous to count, forbade him to follow. Instead, he surveyed the derelict DDC – ruined furniture, shattered windows, and blood-covered walls. His eyes fell upon an odd collection of objects; a pile of clothes heaped around a stepstool sitting against a door. Metal pans sat in a clear plastic tray atop the stool.

“Come on!” Pam called after Miguel.

Reluctantly, Miguel followed his comrades up the stairs and into a hallway where a group of people greeted them with cries of relief. Two dozen survivors – most of them children—stood huddled together as a desperate rag-tag group. A lone DDC Private was not yet willing fully to embrace the possibility of rescue. He leaned against a wall, watching the convoy team suspiciously.

“Are you…” Pam produced her requisition list, “Dr. Thomson?” Whoever had inserted the black and white identification photos in her file had failed to label them.

The dark-haired woman gave orders to the people around her. “Everyone, start filling your packs with food and supplies… whatever you can carry. Private Stenson, start dumping all the medical provisions you can into boxes, please.” She then addressed Pam’s question. “I’m Dr. Kelly Damico. Unfortunately, Dr. Thomson is dead, so I’m in charge. I want you to know that I’ve personally cleared everyone in this room… At this point, anyone who can, needs to take an armful of supplies.  If you could assist us, we can begin the evacuation immediately.” She gestured to boxes that were stashed in various corners and nooks throughout the DDC.

“I’m Private Stenson.” The young soldier stepped forward, nodded, and gave a half-hearted salute to Carl before limping off to collect supplies.

Soldiers and civilians fanned out and began grabbing boxes. Pam scanned her requisition orders and continued talking to Kelly. “What happened to Dr. Thomson?” She eyed her list carefully, and Pam saw that Dr. Thomson and Dr. Damico were the only two ‘Skill Assets’ on the list – a politically correct term for people who were of value to the fleet. Everything else on the list consisted of medical supplies and food. The two dozen others, even the lone soldier…the military had not intended on taking them as refugees. Pam inched her way to Carl, showed him her list, and shook her head.

Carl frowned. The thought of leaving two dozen innocents—nearly half of them children—behind was banished from his mind instantly. “Fuck the list.” He sighed. “Tear it up.”

“Okay, kids, line up on me.” Kelly squatted down as the children got in line in front of her. She began systematically to check each to ensure they were ready for the journey ahead.  She filled Pam in on what had transpired. “Last night, we were compromised. Before we knew what had happened… Everyone started...” Kelly’s eyes began to stream with tears. She turned a young boy around and checked his Super Hero backpack for a change of clothes, antiseptic, and some non-perishable food. “Dr. Thomson used himself as bait to pull all the ghouls into the connecting music store. He drew them off us…we’d be dead without him.”

“A truck punched a hole in the side of the building,” Private Stenson said dryly. “We were overrun.”

“How did you clear the building?” Miguel asked, examining the stairwell door. The look on his face read that he was amazed that it was still hanging on the frame.

A metallic crash of pans came from somewhere downstairs and everyone looked around confused. Kelly went wide-eyed and pale at the sound.

“We didn’t clear the building…” Private Stenson sighed, set his box of supplies down, and picked up his rifle. “We thought with all that gunfire that
you
had cleared it.”

“Where are the dead now?” Pam asked. Her heart thumped in her chest, and Pam realized that in the group’s haste to get into the clinic and back out, they had made some assumptions about the security of the DDC.

“Oh my God! Didn’t you clear the ground floor? What the hell was all that gunfire?” Kelly rushed the children over to an adjoining office that overlooked the front lot. “In here!” She yelled, as she upended a cot, stripped the bed sheet, and began tying them together.

Private Stenson followed, but he stopped to take up position just inside the office door, fix a bayonet to his rifle, and wait.

“That gunfire was us just getting here, lady!” Miguel growled.  He dropped the box he had picked up, drew his rifle, and knelt down at the top of the stairwell.

A chorus of gut-wrenching moans from the foot of the stairs echoed up to the second level, and someone screamed. Miguel took aim, and he began pouring shots from his M-16 down the staircase.

“SHIT!” another soldier yelled, dropped the box he was carrying, and joined Miguel.

“Jesus Christ!” another soldier shouted, and all nine crewmen who had entered the building rushed to defend the second floor. Pam took her place next to her comrades, and she swallowed hard when she saw the solidly packed crowd of undead crawling up the stairs. Their hungry eyes were fixed on prey.

It became instantly apparent that the rate at which the soldiers could deliver headshots was far slower than the rate at which the undead wall advanced. For each shot that felled a bloodthirsty ghoul, two more writhed and wriggled over its corpse to take its place. Bullets cut through grasping claws that felt no pain and thudded into torsos that had no beating heart. The headshots needed to bring down the undead were never easy, even for a trained professional. The undulating mass of cold flesh and broken teeth that crawled over itself up the stairwell to devour the living was unstoppable.

Pam emptied her clip, threw her rifle over her shoulder, and rushed into the office that overlooked the front lot. “In here!” she shouted. “We can’t get out that way!”

Kelly secured her bed sheet rope to a desk and flung it out the window. It was only a one story drop – doable in a pinch, but it would hurt, possibly
injur
, and there were children who could not be left behind. “Go!” She yelled.

A father hoisted his young daughter onto the ad hoc rope and began to lower her to the ground. Kelly grabbed more linen and began crafting a second rope.

In one synchronous motion, Carl, Miguel, and the other soldiers broke away from their position in the hallway and rushed into the office. One soldier grabbed the stairwell door and slammed it shut, but a split-second later, the crash of weight against the other side sent it exploding into slivers. Two snarling ghouls burst into the hallway and dove after the soldier. He tripped, rolled onto his back, and roared in anger as he emptied his rifle into the relentless horde. In the blink of an eye, he was swept beneath the voracious onslaught.

Carl whirled. Every muscle in his body wanted to send him charging headlong into the fray to pull out his man, but he stopped himself. “Damn it!” He growled, slamming the office door and leaning against it to keep it closed. “God damn it!”

“Gunners four and five!” Miguel shouted through the communications network to the crews outside. “I need you to pull the Hummers away from the building, get on the heavy guns, and pour everything you have into the ground floor. We will be exiting from the window on the second floor directly above your target, so watch your fire.”

“Brace the door!” Carl shouted. Thud after thud slammed against the only thing that separated everyone from a gruesome death: the door to the office. The soldiers and DDC survivors struggled to hold the door from swinging open as wailing and moans from the other side incited the swarm into frenzy.

Private Stenson looked out the broken office window. He scanned the area with his rifle and watched the first two DDC refugees, the father and daughter, proceed cautiously through the parking lot toward the Humvees. The middle-aged man held the petite girl’s hand tightly, but also gently. A flailing ghoul burst through the front door of the DDC with a screech, and it ran at full speed after them. Calmly, Private Stenson took aim, exhaled, and fired. The monster fell, and red-black gore pooled on the ground. A second monster came charging out of the DDC, and Private Stenson fired. It also fell, and Stenson took position to cover the civilian escape.

A loud splintering sound filled the room, and several gray arms stretched through a crack in the door to thrash wildly at whatever was within reach. “Keep it closed!” Carl ordered. The soldiers redoubled their efforts, and the heavy door shut with a snap and a sickening splatter of dark and half-congealed blood. Rotting, severed limbs thudded to the floor.

Just then, the sound of heavy machine gun fire from the Humvees added itself to the moans, snarls, cries, and screams. The force shook the entire building, and the noise was deafening.

“I need you to hold on to this rope very tightly, okay?” Kelly addressed a teary- eyed child, who nodded in understanding. Nearly paralyzed by fear, the young boy gripped the bed sheet.  Kelly hoisted him out the window and began to lower him. “When you get to the ground, run! Run to the soldiers in the trucks, okay! Don’t stop for anything! Just run!”

The five-vehicle convoy was pouring everything it had into the first floor. Tracers zipped past the escaping civilians and into the monsters that pursued them. Beyond the fenced in area, a sea of shambling dead—drawn by the commotion—was approaching. Some followed their brethren into the DDC via the hole in the music store, while others gathered at the worn and tortured fence. Minute by minute, their numbers were growing.

Miguel braced his back against the splintering door.  He glanced over his shoulder, and his eyes caught the motion of the office drywall giving way to the hammering fists of the voracious dead. He slowly slid one hand down to his sidearm and shouted: “We’re losing it!”

Carl grunted and tried to keep himself pressed against the door while simultaneously reloading his rifle. “We aren’t gonna hold much longer!”

Kelly glanced up from lowering children to the ground and looked at the survivors. Some comforted the children, while others struggled against the door with the soldiers. “Everyone! You gotta climb down with a kid on your back or jump! Go! Go now!”

Private Stenson watched a mother descend to the lot with a child on her back. Suddenly, two clumsy zombies staggered from the front doors of the DDC and snarled. The woman took one look and hit the ground running, keeping the child on her back. Stenson quickly dispatched the pursuing ghouls. More and more zombies were wandering into the parking lot from the DDC. Most were mowed down by heavy machine gun fire from the convoy, but a few survived.  Walking or crawling, many pulverized and bullet-ridden bodies continued their pursuit of the living. So long as their brains were intact, they would not relent.

A fetid hand burst through the drywall next to the door, reached up, and gripped Miguel by the arm. Miguel screamed and fought against its grip. Pam pushed herself up from holding the door, pinned the arm against the wall with her boot, and fired her rifle into the elbow until the limb was severed and useless.

“We got trouble.” A voice came over the communications system. Pam looked out into the lot, and she noted that one of the Humvees was no longer firing into the ground floor. Instead, it unleashed devastation on the huge mob of dead gathered at the perimeter fence and threatening to bring it down. The fence already shook violently as sheer body weight began to accumulate against it. The crews on the ground were picking off as many as they could… but the hordes were growing. Escape routes were rapidly disappearing behind walls of mindless flesh-eaters. If the fence were to fail, the convoy, the DDC, and everyone inside would vanish in a violent frenzy of bloody death.

Miguel struggled to stand while keeping his weight against the door. He drew his pistol, and he fired into undead limbs that broke through the drywall. He was hoping to shatter bone and sever tendons. “They’re breaking through!”

Kelly fought against the terror screaming at her to run, and she helped a woman out the window. Almost all the children were on the ground now and a handful of civilian adults remained.

A hissing corpse pushed through a weak spot in the wall. It slithered onto the pile of struggling soldiers, gripped someone by the arm, and bit down. A spray of blood erupted from the screaming man. Another soldier lunged to help his comrade. In one fleeting instant, chaos exploded.

The door splintered open, and soldiers fell to the ground. Howling undead clawed after anyone within reach, trampling and tripping over bodies in an all-consuming madness.  An endless wall of death vomited into the office, and everyone—soldier and civilian—was in the fight of their life. Snarling hungry ghouls were met with combat boots, knives, and fists.

“JUMP!” Pam screamed at the remaining civilians. She pried a ghoul off Carl, threw it out the window, and pulled him out of the dog pile. Carl got to his feet, and joined Pam in helping whomever they could.

“GO! GO! GO!” Miguel yelled. He thrust his combat knife through the jaw and into the skull of a zombie before rolling out of the melee. As the room filled with ravenous dead, anyone who was not trapped swallowed their fear and leapt from the second story window to the blacktop below.