Last Fight of the Valkyries (25 page)

They yelled something at him, but he still couldn't hear.

He just pointed and ran, hoping it was obvious what was happening.

The tunnel turned sharply to the right, which he took on the run
with the girls in tow. He looked back to ensure they were there; the
light was dimming even as he ran.

“No!” He yelled at the light in his hand, knowing it
was stupid but unsure what else to do. He saw this expedition ending
in the back of one of these cars as they were surrounded by hungry
zombies.

He'd almost stopped to check a car door—to find their last
redoubt—when the tunnel came to a final “T”
junction. It was a confusing tangle of cars, bodies, and rock piles.
He swung the light in an arc across the scene, and tried to piece it
together.

To the left, the traffic jam continued as far as he could see. To
the right, a few of the big mining dump trucks were parked next to
each other at the cusp of a larger room. Cars had tried ramming into
them, but that clearly failed. The big trucks seemed to huddle
together to block traffic in that direction. They most assuredly had
blocked the line of cars here.

Liam found a hole between the trucks large enough for people to
fit through, and he held the light as he stood next to the
crevice—pointing the way. Victoria stood by him, allowing the
two girls to get through first. She gave him a hasty smile and began
to wedge herself between the trucks. Then it was his turn.

He threw himself into the gap as if his life depended on it. The
hand on his arm suggested he'd once again made the right call.

A faint howl made it through his foggy brain. Lots of screams came
from the other direction. He was tempted to yell for everyone to be
quiet and scream one at a time, so he knew what was happening.

I'm going crazy. That's clear now.

He didn't look back. He felt more hands reaching for him in the
tight space.

Scooting along the truck, he absently wondered if zombies could
get into tight spaces. It seemed like a pretty complicated task for
the dumb things…

Fingertips on his shoulder gave him his answer.

Seconds later, he fell out the back side of the truck roadblock.

With very little breath in his lungs, and a mouth as dry as the
desert wind, he yelled, “Fight them here!”

He still had his spear, but it felt small in his hands. He put the
flashlight on the ground so it pointed to the gap. With a flourish,
he turned with his spear to stop them from coming through. He sensed
as much as saw Victoria and the two girls standing behind the next
truck. The dim light almost couldn't reach them.

The first zombie squirted through, and had gained its freedom
before he could bring his spear to bear. It moved toward the girls.

He hoped Victoria could read his mind, but he yelled the obvious
to be sure. “Get that one!”

A second zombie poked its head from between the two trucks. Liam
set himself upon it with growing anger. He channeled his fear at
almost being shot, and his fear of this dark space, and used that to
thrust with all his strength. The spear plunged into its face, though
even with all his pent up anger, he was unable to look at the damage
he'd wrought upon it.

Rather than fall to the ground, the body of the zombie wedged
itself into the space between the two trucks. The next zombie in line
behind it comically peeked over the head of its slumping partner and
Liam dispatched it—her—as well.

He could see what would eventually happen. As more and more
zombies got into the gap they would eventually push their dead
comrades forward to clear the space. But for the moment, he could
turn his attention to the one that got away…

In the ugly light, he saw the male zombie had on a too-tight
fitness shirt and running shorts. He had fallen upon Blue. He
imagined she was screaming, but he couldn't be sure. Victoria was
over the zombie swinging her tire iron like a mad woman.

As it happened, he added audio to what he was seeing.

“Crack! There goes the skull.”

It went rigid for a moment, then dropped like a lead balloon on
top of Blue. Victoria struggled to get the man to roll over until
Pink came out of the shadows to give her a hand.

His head was still a mess. His ears alternated between a tinny
ringing, a high pitched whistle, and perfect silence. Once in a great
while, voices would filter through, but he couldn't be sure what was
being said.

He felt hands on his arm, and jumped once again. But they were
friendly—Victoria picked up the flashlight, pointed it forward,
and pulled him with her.

There were no lights in the new area, and the flashlight continued
to flicker and dance as they ran. But there were no cars parked here.
That, at least, made it different.

He corrected himself. There was one light. It was tiny in the
darkness ahead. It took another couple of minutes of unsteady walking
to piece together what they were approaching. When he finally knew
what it was, he had regained a little of his hearing and a lot of his
hope.

It was a glass door.

3

A dull blue glow came through the frosted glass of the single
door. It looked like a typical door you'd see attached to any strip
mall tenant across America. Here, it was inset into a smooth concrete
face—and looked completely at odds with the mine.

Victoria swung the light from side to side on the rock, and there
was a large metal door twenty or thirty feet to the left, almost
outside the range of the poor light. Once she'd made her sweep, she
turned it off.

It sounded distant, but Liam definitely heard her this time. Only
a sharp pain remained in his left ear, but he could take it. “We
need to save this light, in case we really need it.”

He looked around and didn't like the fact he stood with Blue and
Pink as they stared at the door. Almost without thinking, he took a
step forward to be closer to Victoria—currently the only person
who seemed to be doing something.

She rattled the glass door, but it didn't budge. In return, he
scooted next to the door, and tried to look inside. The door revealed
no clues, save one.

“There's a bar across it. Here,” he said, as he slid
his finger from one edge to the other, “to here. This thing's
keeping it closed.”

Victoria gently pushed him back a step and gave him the “shush”
symbol. Her eyes conveyed a similar message.

He nodded, and tried to whisper, “Sorry.” The gentle
blue light illuminated the two girls—one of whom was also named
Blue, which he found hilarious—but nothing beyond them. A black
void enveloped everything but the door.

“Stand back, guys.” Victoria's voice was starting to
register at a normal volume again. As he began to turn back to her,
he heard the shattering of glass. When he looked at her, she had
shattered the entire pane of the door. It had splintered into
thousands of fragments, many of which fell to the ground as he
watched. Victoria used her tire iron to scrape the remainder from the
edges—causing shards to spray all over the rocks at their feet.

Liam saw into the room. Security lights around the edge of banks
of computers were bright blue. The main lights on the ceiling were
all out.

Victoria stuck her head into the room, then kept going. She had to
duck under the heavy steel bar that had been placed into the handle
of the door on one end, and into some kind of bracket on the other
side. It ensured the door could not be opened in the conventional
fashion.

Here I am again, ruining someone's refuge.

He hated to admit it, but dying on the doorstep of a refuge
because he didn't want to break the glass seemed like a stupid
option, too. He was too important to die like that.

Too important, am I?

Was he starting to believe his own press? Hadn't Hayes said
something very close to that back when they were under the Arch? He
claimed he was too valuable to the research effort to waste himself
fighting hand-to-hand to protect others.

He searched his feelings. He didn't think he'd told anyone to
fight for him while he watched. That's how he'd know he'd gone round
the bend.

As it was, he was the second person into the room, and that was
only because he didn't know Victoria was going to go through before
him. Pink and Blue followed him in.

The control room—he called it that, but he really had no
idea what it was—had walls on three sides. The fourth side was
covered by big glass windows. He walked toward it and immediately
recognized he was looking through the glass at the big garage door
he'd seen from outside the blue door.

“So the computer guys are in here, and the worker guys are
out there?”

Victoria sidled up next to him. “What do you think they did
in here?”

They'd both seen the interior of Riverside Hotel and Casino, so
nothing was off the table in terms of possible uses for the place.
Even so, Liam couldn't fathom the purpose of the control room or the
larger facility outside the glass. A lone door beckoned them.

“We should look around here, first.”

He thought that made perfect sense. Something about the blackness
outside the windows made him uneasy. It was more pronounced than the
fear he had for the zombies somewhere outside the now-broken glass
window through which they'd entered. They were known unknowns.
Whatever was in that other room was an unknown unknown. Big
difference.

They realized pretty quickly the bank of computers were in
power-save mode. He moved a mouse on one of them and the screen
blinked back to life. The bright light from the huge monitor forced
him to squint until his eyes could absorb it all in comfort.

He turned to Victoria, unable to control his excitement. He
smiled, “I wonder if the internet's working?”

“I have an auction ending, would you mind checking it.”
She leaned to watch over his shoulder, and while there, rubbed her
fingers through his hair, partly to tussle it, and partly—he
hoped—as a sign of affection. But when her hand grazed his ear,
he winced.

She jumped back. “Liam. There's blood.”

He'd forgotten all about it. His whole head hurt already, he'd
almost overlooked the pain of having his ear partially shot off.

All the girls looked as Victoria used the dying flashlight to
observe the damage. She spent a lot of time prodding near the wound,
and she even used her shirt to get some of the blood out of his hair
and lower ear. Her analysis was that it wasn't that serious, though.
The bullet had removed the top half-inch of his ear.

“My God, you were lucky.” That passed for Victoria's
official prognosis.

He worried a little, as he realized he could hear almost nothing
out of that ear, but even that was tempered by what he saw on the
computer screen.

The internet
was
up.

4

He decided now wasn't the time to worry about security. He logged
into his online account, and found himself faced with pages of
emails. Many had been sent in the last two weeks.

“Ha! They must have automated emails. The most recent ones
showed up just today.” He laughed quietly at the thought of
computers continuing to send out spam long after mankind had lost the
ability to receive them. He took a moment to force that into his
memory; he wanted to include that in his book someday.

He cracked his knuckles, and prepared to tackle the wall of spam.
He wanted to see if anything important had been sent to him by
friends or family. He may never get another chance to find out where
they'd all gone.

He'd just started to sort when a chat window popped up. Since he
was logged into his profile, anyone looking for him would see that he
was online. The words scrolled out a letter at a time. “Thank
God! Worried about you, Liam.”

“Huh?” He leaned back. “Look at this.” He
meant it for Victoria, but all the girls crowded around him.

The white box waited for his reply. The identity of the person on
the other line just said, “Anonymous User,” and no other
information was given in Anonymous' profile.

“Who is this?” he typed back.

“Go into WOUS.” The chat window showed the other
person had logged off.

He turned around and pointedly looked at the broken window on the
door. Somewhere out there, zombies were trying to get through the
dump truck road block. Would he have time to play a silly game?

Part of him really desired to play. He hadn't touched it since
just before the sirens went off. That game was, more or less, the
last normal thing he did before the zombies came. After that, it was
survival all day, every day.

He had no other plan, and whoever was on the other end knew who he
was. That alone made it worthwhile to see what they had to say. With
a few clicks, he found the game installer and had it loaded onto this
computer in sixty seconds.

“Wow, this computer is fast!”

The girls continued to hover around him. Victoria's hand was on
the back of his neck. He took a deep breath as he fired up the game.

He guessed none of them had ever seen it, so he took the time
while it loaded to explain what he was doing. “So, this game is
about...”

The words got caught in his throat. His eyes watered as emotion
surged. With a cough, he tried to play it cool—he had three
girls hanging on his every word—but his efforts failed. Where
seconds before he was ecstatic at being able to play this game, he
was now losing it. He had no idea why.

He felt Victoria stroke his back.

She can read me like a book.

The tears rolled down his cheeks; he continued to stare at the
screen. It waited for his input.

“Liam?” Blue asked. “Are you cryin'?” She
kind of laughed, though Liam felt his chair move and heard something
that sounded like a kick.

After a short pause, she continued, “Seriously, you OK?”