Deadlocked 5 (2 page)

"Then they should put up bars or gates or some shit in there so we don't have to worry about this kind of thing. I swear to God, man, when I got assigned Facility duty, I figured you guys were set up better than this."

The man in blue stared into the vent as the vibration from the spinning fan began to slow down. "You know what happens when you put up a grate in a vent shaft?" He didn't wait for the guard to answer before continuing. "You get a shit ton of bloody bodies all piled up against it. This far underground, we can't risk having any of the shafts clog up. The gas down here will build up too quickly. Besides, this place was originally built as an airport storage area, but then got buried. That was about forty years ago. The only up-to-date floor in this whole place is down there," he pointed at the floor, "where they keep the Dawns."

"Fine, whatever. Just hurry up and get the fucking grate open."

"Turn on the light on that thing." The man pointed at the guard's rifle and then backed away from the grate. "I turned off the motor, so the blade is slowing down. Look in there and see if anything's waiting for us. The Dock said this tube's interior fans all failed, which means there could be some zombies in there, all hacked up and crawling around. I can't see shit in there. It's too dark."

The guard clicked a switch on the side of his weapon and a bright beam of light shot out from the front, just under the barrel. Echo looked at the rifle she'd stolen from the dead guard to see if it had something similar and found that it did.

"See anything?"

The guard did his best to gaze past the grate and down the large shaft, but he couldn't get a good view. He shrugged and said, "I can't see shit."

The other man sighed and shook his head before begrudgingly stepping forward to remove the bolts that held the large metal grate in place. "I'll swing it open, but you're going in first. If I hear a single fucking moan, I'm closing this thing up and turning the fan back on." He seemed gleeful while threatening to abandon the guard.

He cracked the grate and started to pull it back. When he did, his rotation caused him to stare down the hall in Echo's direction. "What the fuck?" he muttered when he saw her.

The guard turned to look as Echo ducked back around the corner. Her heart raced as they called out for her to show herself. They started to scream and she debated turning and running the other way, but suspected that if she did, she would just run into the Meds that had been sent to deal with Paris's body. If that happened, then she would be caught between them and the other men that had just seen her. If she had to kill someone, she wanted to kill as few people as possible.

"I'm scared," she said.

"There's nothing to be scared of, sweetheart," said the guard. His voice was louder than before and Echo knew, without looking, that he had moved closer to the corner where she hid.

In a moment, he would be beside her. It was now or never.

Echo got on her knees and then swung the rifle around the corner first. She braced the back end of the weapon against her shoulder, now realizing her mistake from the first time she fired it, and pulled the trigger with deadly accuracy. The rifle continuously fired as she held the trigger down and devastated the men around the corner.

The weapon's shots ripped through the shins, calves, and kneecaps of the two men in a macabre display of crimson as chunks of flesh flew through the air behind them. The guard was close enough to have taken the brunt of the attack, but the man in blue soon died as well.

After the assault, she pulled the trigger a few more times to make sure they were dead. The guard's head exploded into a mire of bone and brains and the force of her final shots caused his body to flop backward as blood poured out of him.

Echo was breathing heavy as she stepped over their bodies and did her best not to cr
y as her foot splashed down in the muck. She was terrified and sickened by the violence, but her entire world had been shattered in the past ten minutes and her sanity threatened to leave her completely. If only she could reach the surface, maybe then…

"Freeze!"

She looked up and saw another guard far down the corridor. Her weapon's cacophonous blaring must've alerted him. He wasted no time in pointing his rifle in her direction and she leapt to the right, behind the protection of the grate that the man in blue had swung open.

"Put the gun down and step out where I can see you," said the guard.

She thought about getting to her knees and sneaking around the side of the grate to take him by surprise like she had the last men, but the grate between them provided him an outline of her, which would give away her subterfuge.

There were other hurried footsteps in the distance from behind her, back where she'd come from, and her heart raced as she was caught between two advancing groups. She could see the guard through the grate, walking slow and steady with his rifle pointed at her.

To her right was a fan blade, nearly the size of her, and a dark tunnel beyond. She had no other choice, and slipped past the fan as she fumbled with the switch on the side of the weapon that turned on the flashlight.

The ventilation tunnel was small and Echo had to crouch as she moved deeper in. The shaft stopped at a 'T' section and she chose to turn left just as the guard reached the opening behind her and shined his light inside. He took a shot and the gunfire reverberated through the tight corridor as Echo involuntarily screamed out in fear.

She darted through the tunnel, her rifle's flashlight beam bobbing wildly in front of her. She turned and fired the weapon toward where she feared the guard would soon be. Hopefully the random blast would prevent him from chasing her.

Her gunfire rattled her senses and the ringing in her ears changed from an obnoxious hum to a deafening roar. Her own footsteps on the metal floor were silent behind the severe ringing.

She fired again as she moved backward, and then again, continuing a series of short bursts to scare the guard into hiding. Her hearing was devastated and the ringing in her ears became so painful that she couldn't help but cry and cringe after every shot.

Then the rifle stopped working. She pulled the trigger over and over, but the tumultuous explosions had stopped. The rifle no longer worked, and she had no idea why.

Echo turned and prepared to run, desperate to stay alive, but she stopped dead in her tracks as her rifle's beam illuminated the corridor beyond. She'd been moving backward for so long that the gruesome contents of the ventilation shaft were a shock when she turned around and saw them.

There were men in there with her. The first was almost at her feet, and his tortured limbs caused her to quiver in terror. He was on his belly and pulled himself forward with what used to be his arms but were now just shattered sticks of flesh and splintered bone. His skin was devoid of pink luster and his wounds didn't bleed red, but instead seeped a sticky black fluid. He had sunken cheeks and wrinkled skin that seemed to have shrunk, revealing his yellow and black teeth in a demonic visage. His eyes were similarly exposed, bulbous and protruding from his face as he stared up at her, his mouth opening and closing as if desperate for food or water. The creature had no legs and wha
t trailed behind him instead were strands of rotted intestine that slid through his black trail of blood like a limp tail. He snapped his jaws at her as he drew closer.

Beyond the eviscerated creature were more of the living dead, all of them with tremendous wounds that would've killed a normal man. They reached out to her as they staggered forward and clawed at the space between, as if hoping to hasten their advance any way they could.

Echo Dawn turned away in time to be blinded by the muzzle flash of the guard that chased her. There was no pain before the darkness.

BEN WATANABE

Twenty years had passed since the outbreak of the zombie virus decimated the world's population. I survived while six and a half billion others died. I didn't survive on luck.

My father prepared me for this. He trained me to fight and survive in a post apocalyptic world. While my friends were watching television or playing videogames, I was in the wild, learning to kill animals with deadfall traps. He taught me how to filter water through a sock filled with gravel before boiling it to ensure safety. He scolded me as I used my knife too often, insisting that it should be a tool of last resort when all other possibilities failed, to help keep the blade sharp for when I really needed it. Our vacations were never to Disney World, or Six Flags - instead, he would blindfold me and drop me off in the middle of a forest preserve with the promise that he would return in a week to see if I survived. My birthday presents were blowguns, bows and arrows, and guns.

My father saved my life, but he did it with the intention of turning me into an assassin.

The apocalypse had been planned, but the men holding the reins lost their grip. I was only thirteen and living in Georgia when it began, but was captured and brought to a facility where they ran tests on me and several other children, most of them much younger than I was. My capture wasn't an accident, and got me close to my first target, a general that was involved in the development of the virus. Unfortunately, by the time I found him he was already dead. A shard of glass had been pushed into his throat.

My father was supposed to meet me in a safe house several miles away from the city, but he was gone when I got ther
e. He left behind twelve files labeled with a name that contained all of the information he'd been able to gather about the people responsible for the apocalypse, including where they were scheduled to go after the virus spread and what land they owned. The first file, labeled 'Covington', concerned the general I'd found dead in the facility where they were running tests on me. I burned that file and moved on to the next target.

The next two targets were easy to find and convinced me that my mission would be easier than it ended up being. Nineteen years have passed since then, and in that time I've only managed to find two more of the initial twelve, leaving me with seven files unburned. I'd nearly resigned myself to failure when I was tipped off about a caravan traveling north of Colorado that was being run by a man named Jerald Scott.

Jerald Scott's file was the thinnest of them all. He was a member of the military, but all details about his service were missing. I had a picture of him, staring at the camera with a hateful scowl and a pock marked face, that had my father's writing on it.

"Kill on sight. Don't let him speak."

It was the only file my father had scrawled something on, and that made Jerald Scott feel somehow more important than the others. For that reason, I abandoned my other leads when I heard someone mention that a man named J. Scott had taken control of a nearby group of traders. That's how I ended up laying on the second floor of a ravaged home in a forgotten town near the Colorado border of Wyoming.

There was a scuffling noise from outside. I slid forward and peered off the edge of the dilapidated house. The two-story home sat alongside a cleared road and I had been staying in it for four days, far longer than I usually camped. The area showed signs of frequent travel. Abandoned cars had been pushed off the road outside of this house, a sign that humans were using it to traverse the flat land of Wyoming's eastern plains. This wasn't uncommon, as many of the roads had been cleared over the past two decades, but this one was cared for. Most of the roads that crisscrossed the country had succumbed to the elements, cracking and shifting until they were nearly impossible to drive over in anything but the sturdiest of vehicles, but this one was repaired. Someone used sand to fill in the potholes and had cut down
trees that were encroaching on the road to prevent their roots from breaking apart the concrete. This wasn't simply a road used for temporary passage; this was a trade route.

The north wall of the house I was camped in had been torn off, probably by a tornado or perhaps just from termites. The façade lay in the weeds below, broken into several pieces with vegetation growing through the cracks. Most squatters would avoid a structure in this condition, but as the years went by there were fewer and fewer homes that hadn’t fallen apart in some way or another, and the roof on this one was still sound. It was late summer and cold weather wasn't an issue. The breeze from the missing wall was a luxury rather than a burden.

I stayed on my belly as I moved to the edge overlooking the yard that sat between the house and the cleared road. The sound I'd heard could've been caused by a myriad of creatures, most of which I'd eat given the chance, but there was always the possibility it was something that would eat me too.

I'd heard moaning from somewhere in the neighborhood a couple days ago. It was the unmistakable sound of zombies, crying out in hunger as they wandered the streets. Zombies had mutated since the start of the apocalypse. Originally the virus killed its host, then reanimated it and turned the corpse into a ravenous monster intent on devouring human flesh in a seemingly chaotic, cannibalistic fervor. Corpses that were infected early on were ravaged by the bacteria in their bodies, ballooning up with gas until their stomachs burst and they fell to the ground, useless masses of flesh that withered in the sun. The disease actually seemed to hasten their decay, and most of the zombies that were created at the outset were dead in under a week. Then the mutants arrived, and with them came the assurance that humanity's time had come to an end.