Zero World (53 page)

He swung back toward the chaos to the south. Insanity had pushed through Old Downtown like typhoon floodwater.

“Must be that disease,” a breathless voice beside him said.

Russell glanced to his right. Schmidt, his second in command, stood there gulping air, rifle held combat-ready.

“Heard it was a flu,” Schmidt said. “But, holy fucking hell, look at ’em.”

“Get your shit together,” Russell snapped. “Can’t be a disease. A disease doesn’t stop in a line. Look: South side, riot. North side, fine.”

“Sir…,” the younger man whispered.

“What?”

“Look.” Schmidt jerked his chin toward the mass of people pouring in through the south gate of the golf course.

Blackfield followed the man’s gaze. Many of those rushing through the gate were fleeing the violence. Citizens and soldiers in almost equal number. Some of those in uniform had spotted Russell and angled toward him.

Behind them were others. These weren’t fleeing, they were giving chase. Their faces, every last man and woman and even child, were twisted in a rage so primal they looked like caricatures. One among them stood tall, walking instead of running though his face shared the same anger. Russell knew that face.

Lieutenant Rockne.

Their eyes met and the lieutenant’s lips curled back in a snarl. Despite the writhing violence all around he walked in a straight line toward Russell. The city behind was nothing more than a seething mass of death and pain now. Russell heard cars crashing, saw a body burst through a third-story window and fall into the sea of animals below.
Animals, yes.
“They’re all animals,” he muttered aloud.

Those fleeing rushed straight past the line formed by Russell and his men. Most kept going, but many of the soldiers among them slowed, stopped, and fell into a loose formation.

Lieutenant Rockne came on, leading the pack like a wave toward the north side of the fairway.

“That’s far enough!” Russell shouted. The words changed nothing. “I mean it! Don’t make us—”

Rockne dropped into a low run. Sort of a half gallop. Those at his back surged along with him. There were so many now, and still they poured from buildings. Bodies lay everywhere, trampled like garbage. Far more dead than alive, Russell thought.

And all south of this spot. It was like he stood at a glass wall, safety on this side and hell on that. Only there was no wall, and when the monsters came…

“Move back,” Russell said. “Back! Back! Now!”

He turned with his men and ran, the throng of diseased fifty meters
behind and closing. A crowd ten-deep had formed along the north edge of the course. Many broke and fled when they saw the soldiers doing so, but a lot of them remained. Frozen by fear or perhaps, perhaps, ready to fight. Maybe they thought they could actually help. Those directly in Russell’s path broke and ran when they realized he wasn’t stopping. He ignored them all and made for an office complex across the wide street. The front doors of the building were open wide, two janitors standing just within watching the carnage with stunned expressions.

“What are we doing?” Schmidt asked over haggard breaths.

“Moving to a defensible position, what do you think?”

The janitors turned and fled inside as Russell reached the doors. Inside was a bare-bones lobby. Two desks on either side of a hallway leading back. He went behind one desk and flipped it on its side, crouching behind it. His men took up similar positions around him and in the hallway. To his surprise their numbers had swelled. Many of the soldiers fleeing the madness had found their wits, apparently, and fallen in with his squad. Fifty or more to go with his meager eight.

They filled the lobby, pushing back behind the overturned desks or in the hall. Only Russell’s men had weapons; the others were all dressed simply. Olive tees and camo pants. Base garb.

A deep rumble began to build from outside the glass doors. Not a second later the stampede hit, smashing into the front of the building like a rogue wave. Floor-to-ceiling panes of glass along the building’s façade shattered with the press of bodies, spraying shards across the black tile floor.

Lieutenant Rockne was first through the doors.

Russell Blackfield didn’t hesitate. He’d already raised his gun, subconsciously, and now he dipped his head to the sight and fired twice. His superior officer took both rounds to the chest and kept coming. Someone else fired now, clipping him in the shoulder and sending him spinning, sprawling.

Rockne tried to rise, failed, and died.

The room erupted. It was as if the killing had finally made it all real, finally broken through some collective fog within which rules still applied.

Russell shot two more of the less-than-human creatures before the crowd became a confused mess. A writhing sea of clawing fingers and thrown fists. Behavior proved the only way to tell the sides apart. The infected were vicious. Utterly rabid in their desire to inflict damage on those still sane, most of whom were unarmed and cornered. They fought without a shred of dignity or even apprehension, and they were winning.

“Schmidt!” he shouted without looking.

“Sir?”

Russell whirled on him. “See if there’s a way out the back.”

“What? Leave?”

“Yes.”

“But…defensible—”

“Fucking
go.
”

The man nodded once and bolted down the hallway, staying close to the wall.

Blackfield rose from his crouch and took aim at the nearest savage combatant, firing a bullet into the thing’s side just below the armpit. It toppled awkwardly, trampled almost instantly by a replacement. There were too many, and still more poured in.

“Schmidt!”

No response. Russell took aim again, stilled his finger just before shooting as a plain-clothed man tackled the diseased one he’d been about to kill. All around people were screaming and shouting. Some howled, a high, baying sound Russell didn’t think could come from human lips.

One of the creatures barreled low into the midsection of the soldier at Russell’s right, driving him into the lobby wall. Air rushed from the man in a muffled
hoof
and he went down, screaming. Russell lifted his rifle only for the movement to catch the creature’s attention. It leapt off the fallen man and onto Russell in a single motion,
driving him backward as they fell together. Its knee met Russell’s groin when they hit the floor, filling him with an electric, all-consuming pain. Somehow he’d kept the gun and raised it enough to fire. The earsplitting crack drowned out all other sound for several seconds. His bullet hit the diseased animal in the leg just above the knee, exploding out the back in a splatter of blood that reached the ceiling above. It cried out and took a wild swing at him. Russell turned with the punch, using the momentum to his advantage, throwing his attacker into the shins of someone standing nearby. Russell sat and fired at it again, riddling the thing’s back with small red circles.

His balls felt at once on fire and frozen solid. “Fuck this,” Blackfield growled. “To the roof!”

Most of his soldiers and a few civilians heeded the call for retreat. By now bodies clogged the entrance to the building, stemming the tide of murderous freaks.

In the middle hallway Russell found a pair of elevator doors closing, the car full of terrified faces staring at him before the two barriers slid together. He kept moving, aware of a growing entourage behind him. The stairwell door pulled open easily. He took the steps two at a time, ignoring the pain from his groin, for three flights. At the end he vaulted a waist-high bar meant to prevent unauthorized wags from reaching the roof.

Outside the sun shone brightly on a gravel-covered roof. Plumes of oily black smoke rose from a dozen fires in Old Downtown. A few people stood about the perimeter, watching the calamity below. They whirled in white-faced terror when Russell pushed through the door, then relaxed upon seeing him.

By evening all the easy prey had fallen to the grinding, animalistic machine of the diseased. The streets below, while still rife with violence, nonetheless became preferable to cowering on a rooftop devoid of resources. “Time to move,” Russell said, and ordered the
surviving soldiers back down the stairs. They’d march, he decided, until they found answers.

If Russell Blackfield allowed his eyes to defocus, to look beyond the immediate dangers, the city resembled a volcano.

Still distant, the glorious space elevator could just be seen, marked by a few climbers visible between the tiny gap that separated skyscrapers from the clouds they reached for. The huge buildings were tallest near the alien cord’s base, and tapered away rapidly. Fires small and large dotted the scene, like the glowing embers spat out by an eruption. Only this eruption was happening in reverse. Violence and destruction had begun at the edges and were creeping ever inward toward the peak.

A long row of sulfur-yellow streetlights marked the road to Nightcliff, wrapped in glowing orbs of smoke from the scattered flames. Flames that no one fought. The two-kilometer stretch of road, when he viewed it at the exclusion of all else, resembled a carnival. Vague human forms gyrating and dancing around the flames, the crackle-chatter of fireworks and celebratory gunfire. Except the people weren’t dancing, they were killing each other. They were robbing newcomers and neighbors alike, they were banding together for mutual reasons and turning on each other when those reasons became nothing but well-intentioned dreams.

The sporadic gunfire was anything but celebratory.

Cars clogged the wide street. Every make and model imaginable. Most pointed straight along the path of lights, as every idiot in the north apparently thought when they arrived in Darwin they could just drive up to the Platz mansion and ask for a lift to the safe haven above. They were moths, Russell mused, drawn to a long, thin flame that stretched all the way to the moon.

Not literally, he knew enough to know that. But the moon indeed loomed large above them. That little astronomical event was supposed to have been cause for a party, something the city had been
promoting for weeks. “See the great Darwin Elevator silhouetted against the full moon,” the Hoc-casts said.
Nothing quite like having your big party canceled due to the end of the fucking world.

A crash of metal on stone whipped his attention back to the immediate surroundings. Somewhere ahead a delivery truck had barreled out of a side street and slammed into an abandoned city bus. Russell didn’t need to see the driver to know he’d lost consciousness in the impact, if not more, for even from here the sound of the horn could be heard above the riot.

Twenty people swarmed out of the same side street and converged on the vehicle, tearing open the back doors. When they swung open Russell saw half of the logo for a popular grocery chain on the door facing him, and understood.

“They’re finally getting it,” he said, to no one in particular.

All around him the uniformed men who made up the vanguard of the column voiced their agreement. During the first few kilometers of their march they’d all been stunned by the moronic things citizens pulled from shattered store windows.

The food truck drew more looters from the crowd at large, and as the contents began to dwindle the people began to take from each other. A melee ensued. Russell had thought he’d seen everything already on this march, but the surprises kept coming. He saw an elderly man punch a teenage girl in the face as she clawed at the bag of fruit in his arms. He saw a couple work together to wrest an armful of cereal boxes from a terrified woman, only to then run off in separate directions as they fled with their prizes. The man noticed the separation first, turned to look for his wife, or whatever she was to him, and subsequently never saw the pipe that hit him in the back of the head. Three others fell on his limp body and tore at the cereal, sending a spray of golden brown flakes into the air like confetti.

Russell laughed, then, wondering if this mob was really any better than the savages at the rear of the column.

There were differences, to be sure. The infected didn’t flee at the sound of a gunshot, and they tore for arteries rather than crunchy
bran flakes. What they didn’t do—ever, apparently—was come to their senses.

“Keep moving!” he shouted. “All the way to Nightcliff, mates!”

Then men hooted their agreement with uncanny unison, producing a sound the crowd ahead could not ignore. The deranged mob stopped their street battle and stared at the approaching soldiers. Russell saw fear first, but then something else. Something more like hope.

They parted. Stood in silence as the column made its way down the street. The infantry filtered around and over the abandoned vehicles, not stopping to enforce law or restore order, but marching with unwavering focus on the brightly lit tower ahead, and the impossibly long cable that stretched out from its peak all the way to the sky and beyond.

Russell’s radio chirped. “Report,” he said into it.

“Starting to quiet down back here,” the reply came. Schmidt, his second, at the back of the line.

“Good, because I need you at the front before we reach Ryland.”

“Copy that. On my way.”

Blackfield holstered the radio and glanced ahead. The forest of buildings grew like a stepped pyramid toward the main attraction. Many of the glass structures, especially those without their own reactors, were dark. Plumes of smoke rose from dozens of small fires that licked out from broken windows or seeped up from the streets where vehicles, trash cans, and even bodies burned.

He soaked it all in. The whole city reverberated with an energy he’d never dreamed possible. Every last person pushed to one limit or another. Except for his men. They were an ice cube in a pot of boiling water, and Russell knew he needed to reach Nightcliff before it all melted away.

Schmidt arrived a few minutes later. Bags under his eyes matched the color of his buzz-cut black hair. Dots of blood were splattered across his cheeks, brilliant against the pale skin. “You look like shit,” Russell said.

The man’s eyes were huge saucers, unblinking. “We’ve developed a following back there.”