All The Beautiful People (A Dread Novel Book 1) (11 page)

CHAPTER 23

Even as the door was swinging open, Taylor knew they were making a mistake. The blood, the lack of bodies, the stillness since their hike from the freeway, it was all leading to one eventuality. The diseased were gathered somewhere. Why they were packed into the stairwell would remain a mystery. Maybe someone had managed to trap them there. Maybe they were chasing some poor soul and once they feasted on their victim they became entombed. Whatever the reason, none of it mattered now.

As the door inched open Taylor screamed, “No!” Throwing her body against the outside of the door was of little use. Force equivalent to an army of pushing arms and legs was awakened. The power of what felt like a hundred bodies now hammered on the opposite side of the door.

A soldier brought out his pistol. He stepped toward the widening crack of arms and heads breaching the doorway.

“Stop!” Taylor yelled. “Get back!”

It was too late. The guard fired his weapon through the door as an arm reached out and with superhuman strength yanked him inside the stairwell.

The right side of Taylor’s body was braced against the door, her feet fighting to find traction on the blood-soaked floor. She was close enough to touch the unlucky soldier as he passed from the lobby to the interior of the stairwell, terror plain on his face. He screamed a yell of pure terror, one Taylor had never heard come from anther human being’s vocal cords. Then he was gone, sucked into the swirling pit of infected.

More bodies collided on both sides of the door. Beside her, Captain Martin hit the door and pushed along with her. On the opposite side of the panel, Taylor was left to imagine the sight of cramped, blood-crazed humans, their deepest inner darkness running rampant.

Despite their greatest efforts, it was a stalemate. Only seconds passed before Taylor knew they had to get out fast. Leaving the building wasn’t an option, not when they were so close. They had to try the elevators.

“Captain, we—”

“I know. We’ll hold them here.” He motioned to the trio of Frank, the doctor, and Cidney. “Get them to the roof, Taylor.”

Something in his voice made her pause. He gave her a long, hard look as he pushed with his remaining men against the creaking door. Taylor knew he had no plan to rejoin them. Like a true leader, he would die with the rest of his men. This was his way of saying goodbye without having to say it at all.

“No matter what, you get them to the roof. Understood?”

Taylor fixed him with a strong gaze and nodded. She pulled away from the door that was slowly inching open.

“We’re going,” she said in a tone that didn’t allow for debate. She didn’t look back at the door. She grabbed Cidney’s free hand and ran for the elevators.

The noise of the plagued muttering and howling followed them as they ran slipping across the lobby’s tile for the elevators. Taylor punched the button to call the steel box and hoped the elevator’s electricity was still responding.

Cidney clutched Taylor’s hand with white knuckles. Taylor unsheathed the machete-sized knife hanging on the side of her hip.

As the elevator doors dinged open, two things happened. First, there was a loud tearing noise from the stairwell door followed by running feet and Captain Martin yelling something about the door being ripped off its hinges. Second, the elevator in front of Taylor opened. The box revealed a mass of creatures that had at one time been human. Snarling blood encrusted humans with noses missing, teeth pulled free from gums, and ears ripped to shreds welcomed them.

It was havoc beyond anything Taylor had ever witnessed. Every group converged at the spot right outside the open elevator at once. As handguns were fired expelling their last rounds, Taylor pushed Cidney behind her. Both hands on the handle of her machete, she went to work.

Calling on every skill she possessed, Taylor charged the elevator. Somewhere beyond the flying blood, past the groping hands, she knew if she could clear the elevator they would have a chance.

Separating heads from bodies was something Taylor had never practiced. But like anything else, if she concentrated on the job rather than zeroing in on the details, she knew she could get it done. Instead of reminding herself that she was hacking into bone and meat of once living people, Taylor reminded herself it was a job. All she had to do was clear the elevator; that was it.

Thinking this way, she might as well have been hacking wood or branches. With each swing, her plan became more than a simple aspiration. She couldn’t spare the time to look back toward the screams and yells coming from behind her. What mattered to her most was none of the howls belonged to Cidney. The faster she hacked her way through the demons spilling out of the silver elevator doors, the faster they would be safe.

She took some with a baseball bat swing to the neck. Others she met knifepoint first, sinking the blade into their heads or the spot over their hearts. She moved like light. In a way that was exactly what she was, light fighting the darkness. Or in her moral case more specifically, a dim gray glow fighting the darkness.

Whenever her blade became stuck, sunk deep into the flesh of yet another victim, she would plant a boot in the drooping mass’s chest or stomach to pull it free. Groping arms became nubs; faces full of evil were separated from their bodies and fell to the floor twitching and squirming.

Lucky for Taylor, there weren’t as many as she originally thought. Finally, the last elevator rider came at her, an overweight child sporting a shirt that said,
‘I’m not fat, I’m just a little husky.’
Taylor experienced a brief moment of sympathy as she brought her knife down hard in a two-handed overhead swing. The blade did its work well. In one hungry rend, it tore through skin and bone, finding a deep resting place in the boy’s skull.

When the child’s husky body fell limp like a bag of apples, Taylor planted a boot on the kid’s face and jerked her blade free. The elevator was cleared. More blood smothered the tile floor along with jerking bodies, but their means of escape was open.

Taylor was covered in a splattering of her enemies’ blood. Her body looked like a Pollock painting gone wrong. In the minute or so it took her to clear the elevator, fate had not been so kind to her remaining unit.

All of Captain Martin’s men were dead or in the process of discovering the extent of the evil that lived within them as they struggled with the plagued. Only a handful still drew breath, and they were already too far gone to save. A soldier to Taylor’s right was screaming as he was torn apart. Another to her left, already bitten and clawed, was wrestling with a pair of nuns hell bent on finishing what they had started.

Frank used his laptop to beat on the skull of a large man with thick legs. Captain Martin drew his knife and sawed at the attacker’s throat. Dr. Jenkins hovered over Cidney, zipping closed her backpack in a corner, so far lucky to avoid the attention of the diseased. Taylor could only imagine what was going through her mind.

“Here!” Taylor yelled over the screams of the dying and the tearing of flesh by the diseased. “Get inside the elevator!”

No one wasted a second. Frank and the captain were the first to move, with the doctor and Cidney close behind.

Taylor was already inside the elevator’s metal box of promised safety, her right hand on the doors struggling to close.

The captain slowed down for the doctor and his daughter to catch up. The four made their way high-stepping through the mass of dead and dying bodies on the floor. Frank’s computer was destroyed. Its use as a club rendered it to a mass of missing keys and a broken screen. Despite this, he carried it like a star running back with a football, sprinting for the elevator doors.

Cidney was matching her father’s longer stride with a fury of pumping legs. They would make it. Taylor found herself almost smiling. They would make it.

Frank ran inside the elevator, unable to stop his forward momentum and colliding with the back wall.

Captain Martin was now only a foot ahead of the doctor and his daughter urging them to run faster.

Behind them, the infected discovered the escaping victims. It was angering them beyond degree. With a massive group howl they followed in pursuit, hounds from Hell itself, chasing their prey.

It was going to be close. The elevator door was struggling to close every five seconds. Taylor timed their run by falling in sync with their pace. If she timed it right, they could make the safety the elevator promised with the doors closing behind them. When they were only feet from the elevator door, Taylor removed her hand from holding the doors open. “Hurry!” she yelled.

In the next moment Captain Martin was in, then the unthinkable happened. A hand from a downed yet not dead diseased victim shot from the floor catching the doctor on his right ankle.

Taylor was able to make eye contact with Thomas Jenkins as he fell to the floor. The doors were already sliding shut. He knew this. No scream escaped his lips as he began to fall, the crowd of infected behind him reaching to ensure a failed escape attempt. We wasted no energy on fear, and used his last strength to propel Cidney forward. The entire time, his eyes never left Taylor.

With Cidney flying toward her, Taylor knew what the doctor was asking.
Take care of my little girl. You’re all she has.

Cidney tumbled into the elevator. The doctor went down under a pile of bodies.

The elevator doors closed.

CHAPTER 24

“We should go bac—”

Taylor silenced Frank’s suggestion with a piercing glare. As much as she wanted to go back for Cidney’s father, it was already over for him. She saw the open mouths of the diseased as he fell. He was gone. Suggesting they go back now would only put Cidney through more pain. False hope would be salt in her open wound.

The battle-hardened leader was a mess. Not only had the captain failed his mission, he had lost every single person in his unit. The guilt of surviving the ordeal when so many hadn’t was already taking its toll on his conscience.

The doctor was gone, and with him, the hope of finding a cure for the insanity spreading across the globe. As they ascended to the top floor, the world could be seconds away from its total destruction for all Taylor cared. All that mattered now was the trembling little girl by her side.

Cidney’s hair was a tangled mess; her clothes were red with the blood. Varying degrees of crimson ran over her shirt, threatening to cover the pun on her top. Her head was tilted down, trying to hide her shed tears, her tiny hands fervently seeking to wipe the blood off her shirt.

Taylor’s interaction with children was limited to giving crying babies’ parents dirty stares at her local grocery store. In floundering for something to say to Cidney, she remembered what her mother had told her while she was recovering from the loss of her best friend.
Sometimes we don’t need to say anything. Sometimes just being there is enough.

Taylor knelt on the elevator floor beside Cidney. Without a word, she drew the girl in close. Cidney melted in her arms. Her soft sobs meant more than if she were bawling for the world to hear. Her hands stopped trying to clean the blood from her top.

“It was—it was his favorite shirt. He gave it to me.”

Another wave of tears made it impossible for Cidney to continue. Her body quaked with grief as she wrapped her arms around Taylor.

Taylor set her jaw, promising herself that she wouldn’t cry. Despite her best efforts, tears filled her own eyes. She was too strong to cry, she reminded herself. Although she didn’t allow a single drop to fall from her own tear ducts, she felt Cidney’s grief as though they were one.

Everyone was lost in his or her own moment. Frank determining what they would do next, the captain in disbelief at his failure and loss of his unit, Cidney swimming in grief, and Taylor forced to revisit the experience of her own pain when her friend died so many years ago.

Like four people being woken from a nightmare at once, the elevator’s slow, steady ascent came to a halt. The familiar ding of doors opening dropped them off at the building’s top floor.

As much as Taylor wanted to remain kneeling beside Cidney and hold her, she knew their survival balanced on a precipice. Holding his combat blade ready, Captain Martin stepped into the dark hall. Frank followed, holding the doors open for Taylor and Cidney.

Tearing herself away from the girl was harder than she expected. She held on to Cidney’s shoulders at arm’s length. Cidney looked up at her, her eyes pools of sadness, already reddening and swelling from the intensity of her sobs.

“Your father was a great man, Cidney. We aren’t going to let his sacrifice be in vain. We are going to stop this disease and the world will know, like you do, that it was because of him. We’ll find a way.”

Even as the words left her lips, she wasn’t sure what she said would bring any comfort to an eight-year-old girl. Whether it was Taylor’s words or Cidney’s own internal fortitude, the girl composed her sobs and nodded.

Taylor took her by the arm, following Frank and Captain Martin out of the elevator. Darkness cloaked the hall with shifting shadows. The only illumination came from the row of large windows to their right. Their numbers whittled down to only four, the last survivors of the night searched the floor for the roof entrance.

Taylor’s gut twisted when Frank pointed to the end of the hall and a door that led to the stairwell. If this was going to be anything like what they had experienced downstairs they were in for another fight. Down to only her long blade and Captain Martin’s combat knife, the odds were not in their favor.

Captain Martin stopped in front of the door. Recovered at least for the moment, his mind was struggling to come up with a solution. Putting the deaths of his men behind him was something he was capable of, however he wasn’t able to do it yet. The massacre of his men was a wound too fresh for him to simply glance over.

Trusting Cidney’s grip to Frank, Taylor leaned forward and pressed her right ear to the door. The cold metal sent a shiver down her spine. She held her breath as she listened. Nothing.

Even so, she needed to be sure. Her heartbeat was the only thing sounding in her ears. She strained to catch anything that would hint at danger on the other side of the door; the shuffling of feet, the clicking of teeth, anything. All was quiet.

With effort, Taylor drew the long, wet blade from her sheath. She didn’t want to open the door and expose the group to yet another onslaught, but what choice did they have? The roof was only a few feet above them. This was the only way.

“I’m going to open the door. If anything comes at me, you two get Cidney out of here. Get back to the elevator.”

Frank took a long swallow and nodded. Captain Martin readied his knife without saying a word.

Taylor took in a long, slow breath. It seemed a large quantity of adrenaline was in constant supply to her since they had left the doctor’s house. Now, as she readied herself to open the door, a new rush of adrenaline flooded her from disheveled hair to bloodstained boots.

Her left hand made contact with the long metal handle of the stairwell door. In situations like this, Taylor found dealing with the moment of tension quickly was far better than dragging it out into minutes of self-inflicted agony. With a violent shove, she swung the door back from its jamb. Rushing in knife raised, Taylor was met with silence. Heart beating like a drummer at a rock concert, she lowered the knife. A breath of air she didn’t know she was holding escaped from between her dry lips.

Taylor poked her head back through the doorway. “We’re good. Let’s move.”