Jim was not sharing in my feelings.
“What aren’t you telling us?” Tommy asked, realizing the same thing I was.
“When the generator shuts down and the battery kicks in, by default all of the doors that are currently locked will be opened.”
“What?” I finally saw a reaction out of Deneaux that did not revolve around scorn. “Whose brilliant idea was that?”
“It was a safety issue so that, in the event of something cataclysmic happening, personnel would be able to evacuate and would not be trapped in their rooms or work areas,” the lance corporal explained, his gaze drawn to the floor as if the industrial tiles perhaps housed an answer.
I looked from the door that a thousand zombies could flood through to the other side of the room, where I was certain a pissed off Yeti would come exploding through. Don’t get me wrong; the thought of seeing a Yeti thrilled the hell out of me no matter his mental state. That wasn’t to say I would not be scared shitless though. Out of necessity, it was he or she we were going to have to deal with. And it came down strictly to numbers. One Yeti is way better than a thousand zombies. We needed to start moving tables and equipment over to blockade our only egress. It was impossible to block the Yeti’s door, as it opened into the other chamber. That didn’t stop the soldiers from tying their rifle straps to it and then to a bolted down electron microscope though.
“What’s the tensile strength on those straps?” I asked James.
“A thousand pounds, at least, I guess. We’ve been told they could be used as tow straps in an emergency.”
We waited…what more could we do? The gurgles and moans of hundreds or thousands of zombies were compounded by their footfalls. I don’t know that I’d ever been so amped up for action and forced to sit on my hands. Could we wait out the zombies? Odds were against it, they were in now and without some sort of reason they weren’t going to leave on their own. In less than a day we were going to be trapped with them in these catacombs with the added burden of being completely blind. It was an impotent feeling, and I don’t use that word lightly. I sat in a chair, staring up at the ceiling, not really concentrating on anything.
“Can you get anywhere that way?” I asked, pointing to the drop ceiling.
“No, they just hide the miles of cables that crisscross this place. Again no, I know what you’re thinking, the holes the cables come in are designed specifically for cables and nothing more. A rat maybe, but certainly not a human,” James said.
From time to time, we heard something crash in the lab next to us, but that was more out of the norm. Whatever was in there seemed to know this was a waiting game, and it was in for the long haul. I never much liked intelligence in my adversary since, more times than not, it was me that came up lacking.
The lights brightened and then flickered incredibly fast, it was sort of like watching a film from 1915. Then they popped off. For the briefest of moments we were immersed in darkness as black as the depths of Deneaux’s lungs. In the expectant quiet the sound of industrial strength magnets releasing their hold was incredibly loud. The soul-sucking darkness was blessedly replaced by a soft red hue as the emergency lights came on. The effect was chilling; it made everyone look like they were bathed in blood. I could tell by the expressions on others that I wasn’t the only one that felt this.
We were all watching the hallway door. It would have been near impossible for the zombies to move it, but that fact didn’t stop the dread from flooding in. Just because the odds that the boogey man is real are infinitesimally small doesn’t make a child feel any more brave as he or she cowers under the blankets, waiting for an extraordinarily long hand to reach up from under the bed and snatch their leg, pulling them into the underworld and laughing a cruel laugh the whole way down. The zombies kept moving; where they were headed I’m not sure. Odds were they were just milling about, going back and forth. For now, there was not a concerted effort directed on us, and we would have to take that as the positive it was.
It was the nearly imperceptible squeal behind us that really pumped up the fear factor. The handle was twisting slightly back and forth. Either something was testing to see if it was locked, or it was learning a new skill. The rifle slings pulled taut as whatever was on the other side yanked on the door.
The tensile strength on the sling might be a thousand pounds, but I don’t think the handle it was tied to was going to match up. That was a thought that came glaringly late. All of our weapons came to the ready, even Deneaux’s who’d snubbed out a cigarette to do so. This must be the end, as I don’t recall ever having seen her do that. We could hear the fibers of the slings rubbing against each other as they were being pulled to their limits, louder still was the pops and groans of the handle as the metal was being stretched.
“What is going on?!” Bukkar asked, his voice changing pitch.
“Calm down, Lance Corporal,” James told his charge.
“Screw this, I watched Resident Evil. I know what’s on the other side of that door!” Bukkar hissed.
Now I’d watched R.E. myself. Was he right? Was there some giant, genetically-altered, super T-Virus zombie behind that door? If that was the case, we’d be better off in the hallway.
“Corporal Jameson, is he right?” I asked, wishing I didn’t sound like a seven-year-old asking his dad to check the closet for a crazed psycho killer clown named Timothy he knew was lurking behind the Star Wars toys and dirty clothes he’d told his mother he’d picked up yesterday.
“No, I mean, I don’t think so,” Corporal Jameson answered without much conviction.
“Well, that was convincing. Six of these bullets aren’t going to do anything against that kind of zombie.” Deneaux spun her revolver to make sure it was fully loaded.
I don’t know what was weirder, that a potential super zombie was behind door number two, or that Deneaux had watched Resident Evil. I wonder if the ushers had tried to kick her out when she lit up inside the theater. My bet was that nobody would have the balls to mess with her.
A loud screech pulled my attention away. Bukkar was pushing furniture out of the way to get to the hallway.
“Bukkar, stop!” Jameson shouted.
“I’m getting out of here, man. We don’t have a chance against that thing!”
“Mano, we don’t know for sure what it is,” Jim said, obviously going to a personal level with someone he knew well. “It’ll be alright, man. Just stop moving furniture.”
Mano was in full-on panic mode, words alone weren’t going to stop him. Tommy wrapped him up tight when Deneaux calmly leveled her revolver on Bukkar.
“Whoa, just stop Deneaux, Tommy’s got him.” I held my hands up.
“That in itself presents a problem, Michael.”
“How?”
“You see, this Lance Corporal Mano Bukkar has now taken Tommy out of the imminent fight, and I can’t allow that to happen.”
“You can’t allow it? What the hell are you going to do?”
“Shoot him if necessary,” she offered rationally. I mean, rationally at least to her way of thinking, which was somewhere between a cross between psychopath and ogre.
The door to the hallway pushed in just as the handle to the lab door smashed to the ground. We stopped what we were doing, each of us waiting for the pre-conceived notion of our own worst nightmares to walk through. All was quiet. Whatever was on the other side knew it had opened the door, and it knew we were on the other side. It also seemed to know we posed a threat or it would have just charged through. That was good and bad news. Good news, because it felt that it could be killed; but bad news because, again, this showed a high level of intelligence. Tommy let go of Mano, who seemed as rapt as we all were.
The door may have moved a fraction of an inch, or it could have been the play of shadows in the washed out red lighting. Whatever it was, it had a trigger-happy Jim Jameson open fire. Rounds thudded into the heavy handle-less doorway, pushing it open a fraction of an inch at a time.
“Moron,??
? Deneaux managed to get out between staccato bursts from his weapon.
Mano’s hands flew up to cover his ears, and I understood the reasoning. The explosion of the rounds in the room was deafening, but it was not the reaction I was expecting from a soldier. He was close to checking out—if the beginnings of his vacant stare were any indication. James finally got Jim under control. A thick cloud of smoke drifted around the room. It happened so fast, I nearly missed it, as the door was pulled open and Big Foot tossed a fire extinguisher. A major league pitcher could not have tossed a baseball faster. The distance from a pitcher’s mound to home plate is roughly sixty-six feet, from Sasquatch to Jim’s head was half that at best. I don’t know if he could have had enough time to blink, much less dodge that projectile. The back of his head exploded in a spray of bone and blood as the extinguisher sheered the top of his skull off.
Mano had dropped down onto his knees, cradling his own head in his hands as if he’d been hit. James was screaming, emptying everything he had into a door that had now been slammed shut. Tommy grabbed Jim’s body before it could completely fold onto the ground unchecked.
“What the fuck was that?” James screamed when his rifle bolt clacked open.
I could have just as easily echoed his words. I’d only been half serious when I’d said “Yeti.” Now I wasn’t so sure.
“Jim, did you see it?”
James had finally turned around to see the damage done to his brother. It was not a pretty sight. Brain matter and blood had covered the far wall in a heavy mist. It was so thick that it looked like someone testing out a paint sprayer had been trying to clean out a particularly nasty jam. We’ve all seen the movies where the hero picks up a fire extinguisher and smacks the bad guy in the head with it and then within a few seconds the bad guy is up and fighting again. Let me assure you, that is Hollywood bullshit. A fire extinguisher weighs in excess of twenty pounds, and when that much steel collides with the comparatively fragile bone of a human skull, metal wins out every time. Jim was dead before the extinguisher hit the ground. Shards of his forehead were still embedded in the part of his brain that had remained in his head.
I thought James was going to join Mano soon as he pushed Tommy out of the way to cradle his brother’s nearly headless neck. He was understandably crying and rocking.
“I told Mom I’d look out for you.” He was staring into his brother’s eyes, which were now as flat and lifeless as a fish.
“Tommy, what was that?” I asked, clutching my rifle.
He shrugged. When a five-hundred-year-old vamp admits to not knowing what he just saw, you could pretty much assume that it is pretty rare.
“So no on the Yeti?” I asked seriously.
He looked over at me with an expression I couldn’t easily discern. It was either, “Don’t be a dumb-ass, there are no such things as Yetis” or “Don’t be a dumb-ass, I’ve seen Yetis and that was no Yeti.”
I guess in the end, it really didn’t matter. Whatever was in there, was a killer. Although that wasn’t completely fair, there was a chance it was defending itself. Jim had opened fire first. Still, I wasn’t going to be the one that tried to reason with it while it was trying to rip my spleen out.
“Help!” Came from behind us as a zombie had come in and fallen atop Mano who had been sitting on the ground. It had bent him forward so far that he was as close to smelling his own ass as he’d most likely been in his entire life. The zombie was draped over him and desperately biting at his boots, pulling on the laces like they were particularly stringy tendons.
“Tommy! The door!” He was closest to the other zombies that were trying to get in and join their brethren for lunch or dinner.
I’d help Mano if it was possible. It was the damn beast though—I could feel its eyes on me from the other room. He was watching through the hole in the door where the handle had fallen out—I knew he was—just waiting for an opportunity to come in and do whatever it is beasts do. Me thinks Tommy had as much adrenaline pumping through his system as any of us; he slammed the door shut so hard he severed a zombie’s leg from the rest of him. The only thing holding it to its host was the fabric of its pants. Chinos, if my quick glance was correct. Seemed Tommy had somehow bagged a zombie from 1982.
Mano cried out. It wasn’t the falsetto scream of someone who was having their flesh torn free, but it was close. Deneaux and I glanced at each other.
“This is why I like you, Michael. You don’t cave in battle.”
“Yet you keep trying to kill me.”
“Like I said before consider it a compliment. I’ll watch this door.” She had her handheld cannon pointing unwaveringly at the Yeti’s potential entrance.
I nodded. I wasn’t a fan of Deneaux, and, at some point, I was going to have to keep an eye on my back before she could bury a knife in it; but shit, when she was on your side, you were definitely better off—though her position changed faster than a crack addict trying to get some sleep. (Pause, let that one sink in for a second...got it?) Mano was folded neatly in half, his nose pressing against the floor. The zombie had ripped through the laces and tongue of his military boots and even into his socks, which were most definitely not Army standard issue green. They were Argyle socks. I wanted to laugh, and maybe I would have if they weren’t stained with blood.
Tommy and James were too close to risk using a bullet. I quickly put my gun down on top of a filing cabinet. With my left hand I grabbed the zombie’s neck, and with my right I grabbed its shoulder. I pulled her straight up, a small piece of Bukkar’s ankle hanging from her lips. This time Mano did cry out in a scream, spiked with painful misery and, worst of all, death. The Black One rode along that sound, reveling in its victory. What he was so happy about made no sense. He always won.
“Son of a bitch!” I was yelling as I ran the zombie into the nearest wall, headfirst.
A carefully placed M-80 shoved in its mouth could not have equaled the damage I did when wall met skull. There was a moment of resistance before the bone plating yielded and the brain smacked wetly against the indifferent cement. Black matter, riddled with a wriggling worm-like infection, coated what was once a dry erase board. If only I could clean up the stain of them as easily. The brackish matter dripped down and pooled onto the small tray that held a myriad of colored markers. I’d used enough force to nearly crush her head all the way down to her mouth; it slightly resembled a spent beer can under the heel of an overzealous drinker. The funny part—if you can call it that—about the whole thing was, as she was falling, her shoulder hit the edge of a chair and spun her over onto her back.
Her shirt was white and surprisingly clean for a monster, the words on her apparel clearly displayed for me on a bosom that I’d imagine would have earned me a smack upside the head from my wife in an earlier time: Keep Calm and Zombie On. I wondered if the morning she put that on she’d had some sort of precognition that she was going to end her day as her slogan read, or did it perhaps invoke that particular nasty outcome, somehow swaying the yet unknown fates, like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
“Mr. T,” Tommy beseeched. He was still holding the door closed, his shoulder occasionally jumping as something big hit it. The only thing I could think of that would move him at all was a bulker. If that was the case, that door wasn’t going to hold for very long.
“Right…sorry,” I said, looking up from a girl who could very easily be my daughter’s age, tough to say with her face obliterated. Her lower jaw was all that remained on her face. A life cut so short…I hope she’d achieved at least a little of what she’d set out to do.
“Mr. T!” Tommy was actually pushed away from the door by a good few inches, he leaned his shoulder in and moved his feet back to get into a better bracing position.
I think I was getting caught in a loop looking down at that girl, a girl who had parents that loved her. She was the face of all the wrong that had happened, and when I thought of it that way, it made me smile a sick, shriveled little thing that certainly didn’t crinkle
the corners of my eyes. Deneaux would have been proud. I moved quickly, shoving furniture back into place that the simpering Mano had dragged away from the door earlier.
I had enough things in the room that I could have easily gone from end to end, but that would have entailed getting closer to the Yeti’s stronghold; I wasn’t game for that. I’d be in reach of his incredibly long arms if he decided to open his door and pull me in there with him. I could just see the fake “Ooops” expression on Deneaux’s face as she failed to fire her weapon in my aid, probably even put her hand up to her face, and I could also hear her explanation if I somehow survived. “Why Michael, I didn’t have a clear shot, I may have hit you, dear boy, and I just wouldn’t be able to forgive myself if that happened.” Mind you, this would be coming from the woman that could shoot the balls off a mosquito from thirty yards while she was riding a horse. Do mosquitoes have balls?
“What about him?” Deneaux asked. I was assuming she was talking about Mano, but she never turned to verify this. “You watch the door; I’ll take care of it.” Now she was pointing with her free hand toward him, confirming my earlier thinking.
Well, if I had any doubt about the bleakness of her heart, she’d just stomped that last vestige out.
“Wait a second before you go blowing a hole in him,” I said. This got Mano’s attention. He went from whimpering and gingerly touching the skin around his bite to looking directly at Deneaux, his eyes wide.
“Yeah, no holes,” he pleaded. “James, help me.”
James was still rocking his brother’s corpse back and forth, wailing to a deity who right now was not present. The way I saw it, Mano was still technically master of his own fate if that mean looking M-16 sitting on his waist was any sort of indicator. From his position, if he thought about it, he could maybe put five or six rounds in Deneaux before she could swivel his way. I quickly rethought my stance—it was even money. Bookies would have a field day with this if there were such a thing as betting on duels. As it was, Mano had completely forgotten about his weapon.