Dead City - 01 (19 page)

Frantically, I climbed over the computer between the two bucket seats and squeezed out of the driver’s side door. Even as I was climbing out of the car, more bodies were pressing down on me. I felt a hand clutching at my shoulder and my neck, and then they were all over me.

I started swinging my fists at everything. As they swarmed around me I felt their weight pushing me back into the car. I put one arm across the top of the door and the other on the broken windshield. Before they could come down on top of me I jumped straight up and got on top of the car.

From the roof I could see Marcus fighting his own way toward the building. I also saw a way to get to him. I pulled my gun and shot at four zombies standing in front of the car, and then jumped to the ground and ran after Marcus, dodging zombies as I ate up the distance between us.

He was fighting them back from the doorway, yelling at me to hurry it up. I saw him break a man’s neck and then throw himself into a thick wooden door, ramming it with his shoulder. I came up right behind him and never slowed down.

We hit the door at the same time, and sent it flying off its hinges. We both crashed to the ground on the other side in a wave of dust and shattered wood.

I popped up and turned my gun back on the doorway. Zombies were already coming through. Marcus was running toward a large staircase off to the right. I fired at the first zombie through the door and was about to fire again when I heard Marcus shout, “Come on. Up here.”

I ran after him. He went up the staircase and around a corner at the top of the stairs with me on his heels the whole way. There we slipped in to a deserted office and I slammed the door behind us.

“Help me move this,” he said, pushing a cabinet in front of the door.

Together we pushed it flush to the door and then listened. We could hear heavy, plodding steps making their way up the stairs.

Chapter 25

I turned away from the door and the sound of the infected beyond it, breathing hard and shivering against the cold.

The building we had taken shelter in had started to rot after years of neglect. There were holes in the wall and most of the windows were broken out. A harsh, cold breeze bit through its dark cavities. It was like being in a cave.

I instinctively reached down to my gun belt for my flashlight, but it was long gone. We were stuck in the viewless dark.

Gradually my eyes became accustomed to it, and bulking shapes around us turned into the less obscure outlines of very old and very musty office furniture. The ravages of neglect were everywhere, and the place stank of wet, rotten wood. A wet, gritty sort of sawdust covered everything.

Marcus wiped some of it from his hands and asked, “Where’s the shotgun?”

Oh crap.

“I think it’s still in the car,” I said

“Why is it in the car?” His sense of humor never failed him.

“I don’t know. I guess we forgot it.”

“We? You were supposed to get it.”

“Me? Why me?”

“You were riding shotgun. That’s what that phrase means. You ride shotgun, you’re the one who’s supposed to hold on to the shotgun.”

“You don’t really want to argue about this, do you? Because you know, I’m not the one who just took off running and left his partner’s ass hanging out in the wind. I’m real sorry if I forgot it, but I was kind of busy—you know, with those zombies trying to eat me and all.”

“You don’t do sarcasm very well at all.”

“Was I being sarcastic? Because I didn’t mean to be. I’m being dead fucking serious. What the hell is wrong with you? You just left me out there.”

“You’re a big boy,” he said. “You didn’t need my help. You may not be able to shoot worth a damn, but you can fight when you need to. I’ve seen you do it, and I wouldn’t let you watch my back if I didn’t know you were up for doing it again. It would have been nice if you’d have remembered the shotgun, though.”

Something crashed against the door. Both of us jumped back, ready for those things to come busting into the room.

The door shook, but it held. That first loud crash gave way to a slow, steady beating against the door, and even in the faint light I could see little streams of white dust sparkling down from the seams of the door.

At first it sounded like there was just one or maybe two of them on the other side, but gradually the noise grew louder and less rhythmic.

Soon there were dozens of hands beating against the door, and the door was moving, creaking back and forth in the hinges.

“I guess we argue about it another time,” Marcus said.

“Where do they keep coming from?”

“I don’t know, but we should probably get going.”

“I mean it, Marcus. Where do they keep coming from? First the street’s deserted, and then the next thing you know, the whole damn place is covered in them. They don’t move that fast. How does this keep happening? What are we doing to attract them?”

“What do I look like?” he said. “Do I look like I have the first fucking idea about what is going on?”

“It’s weird.”

“No shit. Tell me it didn’t take you all night long to figure that out.”

“No,” I said.

“Okay then. We can’t stay here.”

“Where to?”

“Anywhere but here.” He walked to the back of the room and disappeared around a corner. “Come on,” he said. “There’s a hallway back here. Let’s see where it goes.”

For Marcus, there was no stopping and questioning what he was doing or what he was about to step into. He was tough, and he knew it. It never occurred to him that he couldn’t stand toe to toe with anything or anyone he encountered.

But I wasn’t that way. For me, rushing headlong in to a fight was just plain stupid. I only fought when I had to, and even then I tried to have a plan about it. They say opposites attract, though. Maybe that was why Marcus and I worked so well together. We counteracted the worst in each other.

As I followed him into the hallway I was still troubled by the way so many zombies always seemed to descend on us so quickly everywhere we went. It seemed impossible that death could have overtaken so many, so quickly. I thought about the crowds we had encountered, and I wondered if it was just our stupid luck or if there was something more to it than that. I wondered what Ken would have said about it.

For Marcus, it wasn’t even an issue. He seemed to think it just happened, that it was completely random, and that we just happened to fall into the thick of it because we were unlucky.

“More of the fuckers to shoot,” was all he said about it.

Behind us, I heard the sound of the door giving way, and the filing cabinet being thrown to the ground. It was a sudden, hollow sound that reverberated through the building.

“Sounds like we’re going to have some company,” Marcus said.

“Yeah. Better keep going.”

The hallway we were in connected to a whole series of small offices. They were more or less interconnected, and the walls between them were little more than particle board partitions that didn’t completely separate one cubicle from another.

Once we were past the offices we stepped into another hallway that was much narrower. There were doorways on each side that were more substantial and I guessed that they had belonged to the people who ran this place.

But there must have been another way in besides the one we took because as soon as we stepped into the hallway, two zombies came out from around a corner to our left. I stepped over and pushed the one in front into the arms of the other one, and they both fell to the ground. I took out my pistol, but before I could fire Marcus stopped me.

“Don’t waste your bullets,” he said. “Let’s keep moving.”

We took off at a trot, winding around a couple of corners before we slowed to a walk again. The floorboards creaked under our feet, which wasn’t good. We were bringing unwanted attention to ourselves with every step.

Suddenly Marcus stopped, held his hand up, and listened to the darkness ahead of us.

I stopped too, and listened.

Footsteps. They were coming closer, too. Marcus looked back at me and I nodded back.

“Can you tell how many?” I asked.

He shook his head. “More than one,” he said.

“Okay, I’m ready when you are.”

He rose from his crouch and moved out around the corner. Then he stopped and let out a frustrated sigh. I stepped around the corner to see what he was looking at, and when I saw it, I gasped.

The hallway opened up to a landing, and beyond that was a wide staircase that led out to a row of truck bays. One of the overhead doors had collapsed, and a huge crowd of zombies was pouring in through the hole. A narrow stripe of blue moonlight ran crossways through the room below, and a small group was crossing it and mounting the stairs.

They had already seen us. I could only see a short distance beyond the door where they were coming in, but the little bit of the alley that I could see was packed in tight with bodies. From the rate they were pouring into the building, I guessed that the first floor was already overrun.

“There are so many of them,” I said.

“This is getting old real quick,” Marcus answered. “We can’t stay here. Let’s double back and see if we can get around them.”

“Right behind you.”

We both backed away from the landing. I could hear more of them coming up the stairs, and while they didn’t seem to climb very well, it was only a matter of time before there’d be enough of them to cause us problems.

We ran into a dark hallway off to our right because it looked like it went all the way back to the far side of the building.

We made it maybe fifty or sixty feet when we heard the floorboards creaking in front of us. Marcus stopped and knelt down, listening, trying to figure their direction from the sound.

“We’re surrounded,” I said.

“Start trying doors,” Marcus suggested, his voice a barely audible whisper in the darkness.

When I found a door I told Marcus to stop so I could check it. I found the knob, cold and gritty with dust, and tried it.

It was frail, but the lock held.

“See if you can force it,” Marcus whispered.

I tried putting pressure on it, and the door felt loose on its hinges, but it wouldn’t open.

“It’ll make too much noise,” I whispered back.

“Okay,” he said. “Keep moving. Maybe one of these doors will—”

I couldn’t see what made him stop talking, but I felt him move violently away from the wall, and I heard him struggling with one of those things.

“Get that door open,” he said, and even as he said it he ran at me and pushed me forward against the door.

I lost my balance. Marcus didn’t wait for me, though. He hit the door with his shoulder, knocking it down.

Both of us went sprawling through the doorway and landed on a pile of broken wooden slats.

There was just enough light to see the shape of the room. The whole left side wall had been knocked out, and gave us a view of the first floor. The smallest hint of moonlight made it through the windows along the west wall of the warehouse, but it was enough for us to see that the first floor was a seething mass of zombies.

Straight ahead of us, the wall only went part of the way up to the ceiling. The top half was broken away, exposing a wide, flat crawlspace that stretched all the way across to the other side of the building.

“Through there,” Marcus said, pointing at the crawlspace.

The crawlspace had just enough room for us to go through on our hands and knees, and it looked pretty unstable. But even as I stood there thinking about it, Marcus was shooting at zombies in the hallway.

“Go,” he said. “Hurry it up.”

He fired again and that got me moving. I climbed into the crawlspace and started moving across the boards.

The floor was uneven, and it felt weak. I could feel it give a little as I put all my weight on it. Raised wooden slats crisscrossed the floor and made going forward difficult. Each time I came to one, I had to steady myself on it and swing my legs over one at a time so that I could put my weight down slowly on the other side.

“Here they come,” Marcus said, and when I turned to look back at him I saw zombies climbing into the crawlspace.

“Be careful,” I said. “The floor feels weak here.”

I was just over halfway across when I heard Marcus fire a shot. The hollow space made it sound like an explosion. I turned back and saw him on his back, firing his gun through his knees.

“Marcus.”

He rolled his head over so he could face me. “What?”

“Cut it out. Just get across.”

“There are only three of them. We get them and we don’t have to rush.”

“Don’t be an idiot. Just come on.”

I couldn’t see his face clearly, but I know what kind of look he was giving me. He rolled over onto his stomach and propped himself up—and then we both heard the floor crack.

“Marcus,” I said, but before I could say anything else there was a loud popping noise, like an ice skin cracking. I felt the floor move.

I saw him look down at the floor beneath him, and then the whole thing gave way. He disappeared through the floor in a rush of snapping wood and flailing arms.

“Marcus,” I said, and rushed towards the spot where he had just been.

There was a gaping hole in the floor, and I crawled right up to the edge and looked down. Marcus had landed on his back on top of a huge mound of rotten wood, and all around him was a narrowing ring of zombies, moving in to claim him.

“Marcus.” Even as I yelled it I was firing down onto the heads of the zombies nearest him.

“Get up,” I said. “Move, damn it. Move!”

And I fired and fired and fired until the slide locked back, but Marcus never moved. I saw him roll his head to one side and try to sit up, but in a moment they were on him. He kicked at them and tried to push them away, but they weighed down on top of him and tore into his body with their hands and teeth.

“Get out of here,” he said to me, his voice breaking with the pain. “Go. Get out of here. Don’t waste your bullets.”

I screamed for him to move, but it was wasted breath. All I could do was watch as he died in that gurgling, violent mass of bodies. A little stream of white dust sifted down from my fingertips onto the scene like the barest hint of snow.

I closed my eyes.

The floor creaked again, and my eyes shot open. The zombies Marcus had shot at were still crawling towards me. I pointed my gun at them and pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened. The slide was still locked back and the chamber was empty. The trigger wouldn’t fall.

I screamed at them to stop, but of course they wouldn’t.

And then I heard the floor pop again. There was another pop, and another, and the floor shifted under me. It took my breath away.

“Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit.”

I looked up at the zombies in pure, unadulterated panic, like I expected to see some sort of echo of my own fear in theirs. But they were oblivious. They kept coming.

“No,” I said, pleading with them. “Stop. Stop.”

But there was no use saying anything at all. It was like talking to a wall. They crawled on and nothing would have turned them back. They didn’t notice the floor beneath them. I was the only thing they saw.

I inched my way backward on my elbows, crawling away on my belly at first, and then on my hands and knees as I got farther away from the hole. Every time the floor popped and cracked I felt another wave of panic wash over me.

There was a wooden slat on either side of me, and I held on to them, using them to pull myself along. Putting one hand over the next kept me focused on movement, and helped me think about not falling through the floor.

And then I did fall through.

The wood beneath me didn’t even pop. It was there and then it wasn’t. The next thing I knew my feet were dangling in the air, swinging back and forth, kicking for a foothold that wasn’t there. I grabbed the beams on either side of me and squeezed my fingernails deep into the rotten wood. My grip was so tight that a sharp pain shot through my knuckles and into my wrists and arms. But I would not let go. I held on with all I had, willing myself to pull up. I heaved myself up, but couldn’t get over the beams.