Authors: S. A. Lusher
“
How many?”
Billings murmured over the radio.
“
Unsure. Echoes may be interfering, but more than one.”
“
Noted. Hurry up with that generator.”
“
Understood. We've just arrived.”
There were windows in the wall on either side of the door into the generator room. Greg played his light through them, finding the area vacant. He opened the door and waved Kyra and Powell into the room. Greg tossed a glance down the corridor, the way they hadn't gone. The noises got louder, closer. He retreated into the room and closed the door, but found the action fruitless. If the zombies wanted in, they'd get in.
Powell already stood at the terminal linked to the generator, working hard to bring it online. Greg surveyed the room, looking for good places to fire from. At the back of the room was an elevator, the doors were open, the lift itself missing, leaving a dark hole in the wall. Other than that and the generator, the room was quite bare. Greg cursed, no good places to hide. He glanced at Kyra, who stared at the windows.
“
Get ready.” He turned and faced the front of the room.
She nodded to him as he brought the rifle to his shoulder, staring down the digital sights. Vague shadows played across the wall of the corridor beyond the windows now. The zombies were coming. Powell worked ceaselessly, ignoring everything around him. The sounds, Greg realized, were chillingly different.
Instead of the incessant moaning or the meandering groans, the vocalizations of the creatures were now more focused, almost intelligent sounding, echoes of communication and humanity that were growing into their own language, though still as alien as the ghostly echoes of whales or cries of a bird. The first zombie wandered into view, followed by a second and third.
Four became six, six became a dozen.
Greg swallowed, trembling with a terrible cocktail of terror and adrenaline. They hadn't noticed him, Kyra, or Powell, not yet. Maybe they would just keep going. He could warn Billings. Maybe they could set up a trap. Or maybe-
One stopped, turned, looked.
That was all it took.
Awareness spread like fire and soon they were at the windows, beating at the glass. The windows cracked, fragmented, shattered. Greg and Kyra opened fire, squeezing off single shots. Quick, efficient, and cool as they could manage. The first wave of Undead dropped, their corpses slumping forward as portions of their heads vanished in plumes of black gore. The second wave climbed eagerly over the first, who had taken care of some of the jagged glass teeth that now ringed the perimeter of the shattered windows. Teeth gnashed and claws reached for them.
“How's it coming, Powell?” Greg called as his clip ran dry and he slammed a fresh one in.
“
It's coming along,” Powell replied, barely loud enough to be heard over the combat.
Greg and Kyra backed up, putting more distance between themselves and the invading Zombies. He brought his rifle back up and kept up a steady rate of fire. Having already put down over a dozen of the bastards, Greg began to seriously worry about how many there were. They still came in through the windows, growling incessantly.
“Powell, we could use some help!” Greg shouted.
Then it happened. One of the bigger zombies broke away from the crowd and rushed him. Greg shouted and managed to bring the rifle up in between them in time. He fired off a round, watched a portion of the ugly bastard's skull vaporize into an obsidian spray of gore, but the corpse still had momentum.
It slammed into him, knocked him off balance...and right into the open elevator shaft. Greg let out a short scream and heard Kyra call his name before he hit the bottom. His head bounced off of something unyielding and everything went black.
Chapter 16
Awake again.
His consciousness was mired in a wasteland of black pain.
Greg groaned and flicked his eyes open, trying to think through the fog of misery that gripped him. Everything was dark and reeked of death and rotting meat. When the world slid fully into focus, Greg screamed. It was a hoarse and pitiful thing, but it seemed to jump-start his brain.
He stared into the dead black eyes of a Zombie. Panic ignited him and he tried to slide away. That was impossible, or at least it felt that way because the ground kept shifting beneath him. He couldn't get a good hold on anything and all at once Greg realized he was lying on a bed of corpses. A new horror began creeping through him.
He ceased struggling and instead surveyed his surroundings. Now that he was aware of what made up the floor, the awful smell of death seemed nigh overwhelming. First order of business was to find a way out, and then he could think.
Greg clambered across the pile of bodies toward a pair of slightly ajar elevator doors. In a flash, he remembered what had happened. Glancing up, Greg saw a thin gray light.
“Kyra?” he called.
His scared, lonely voice echoed up the elevator shaft. There was no response. Maybe they'd been forced to retreat or maybe they thought he'd died. He reached the crack in the doors. Greg peered through, his hope spiking. The same gray light awaited his inspection on the other side. He sensed nothing moving and, after a moment, shoved his fingers through and pried. The physical effort sent a lance of pain stabbing through his bruised skull, but he managed to work the doors open wide enough to get through.
His rifle clinked against the frame while he slid through and then he remembered he
had
a rifle. That was a testament to how hard he'd hit his head. At this rate, he would end up with serious brain damage. After slipping through the door and giving the room a quick once-over, Greg checked the weapon.
The flashlight had broken and somehow he'd managed to fuck up the barrel. Something inside him said that this weapon wasn't firing anytime soon. He salvaged the mostly depleted clip, pocketed it and found his pistol still in its holster. A quick inspection revealed that the pistol was still intact, and even came with a tiny but powerful flashlight of its own. He checked the clip, found it adequate, flipped the safety off and turned on the flashlight.
The room he'd come to was empty, the walls made of bare concrete, and reeked of true isolation. There was only one door, but he left that alone. Top priority was establishing contact. He stood beneath the sole strip of light in the room and attempted to contact the others. His earpiece radio had managed to stay attached, but when he called out into the gloomy desolation, he received no reply. In fact, he heard nothing at all.
He slipped it carefully out of his ear and looked it over. Nothing looked wrong, but radios were made of up small, delicate pieces. Jostle it too much and something gets knocked loose or broken. Unwilling to abandon the radio, he slipped it back into place, left it on, and hoped that he was transmitting.
“In case anyone is hearing this, I'm underground. I'm alive. My head hurts like hell, but otherwise I'm all right. There didn't seem to be a way to get back up in the elevator shaft so I'm going to try to find another way up.”
Hoping
someone
could hear him and he hadn't been left for dead, Greg made his way over to the door. It was closed, but opened when he hit the activation button. He wondered if the power was emergency reserve, if Powell had been successful in his attempts, or if any of them were even still alive. The possibility that everyone else was dead and he was truly alone down here struck him, but he shoved the notion aside.
Either way he'd need to get
up
.
A short corridor saturated in stark gloom awaited him. He found three doors and continued his investigation, pistol-first. It didn't seem like there was anything alive down here, as this area felt more of long abandonment than even the previous floor, yet...Greg couldn't shake the sense of being watched, the same sense as before, only stronger. Behind one door he found a grimy bathroom with cracked mirrors.
The need to piss suddenly took him and he decided now was a good a time as any. He relieved himself and went to wash his hands. He turned on the water, and wondered about contamination, as the city had been without regular services for a while now. The water looked clean, though, so he turned it up hot and washed his hands, then continued to glance around, aware of the growing pressure of apprehension.
Behind the second door, he found an office, and had a moment of empathy for the poor bastard who had to work down here on a regular basis. The third door revealed a low-ceilinged but vast warehouse. The area instilled an immediate sense of fear in Greg, as most of the floor space was taken up by stacks of crates and packed shelves. There were dozens of places to hide and the poor lighting made it all the worse.
Greg worked his way through the warehouse. Visions of Stalkers, of things drenched in darkness and malice, filled his mind. He kept his pace even, flashlight pointed forward, finger on the trigger. Straining his ears against the silence, Greg couldn't hear a thing. The quiet was an annoyance all its own, seeming to fill the room. As he wound his way through the crates and between the shelves, which had been gathering dust for some time, something made a sound.
A soft scrape.
Greg froze, his muscles tensed in anticipation for some unseen attack. He was convinced that someone or something was in here with him. He looked around, playing the flashlight across the area, half-expecting it to bring something horrific into view just before it lunged at him. He made a complete circle, even looking up for vents, and saw nothing.
He carried on. By the time he’d made it across the warehouse, he was sweating from the dread coursing through his body. He found another door and quickly went through it, finding a long, narrow corridor that stretched away to the left and right. It, too, was poorly lit with strips of simple, cheap lighting.
There were no signs of conflict, nothing that spoke of death and destruction, just the faint smell of dust and the relentless tone of mute desolation that seemed to saturate everything. Greg began to make his way down the corridor. There was something up ahead that seemed to block the passageway. He had no idea what it might be, only that it grew much darker a ways down.
He passed more doors, almost all of them leading to warehouse-style rooms. He realized this must be a large storage complex for some corporation or maybe even a rent-a-warehouse kind of deal. The elevator he'd come through must have been a back entrance. As he came within a dozen meters of the strange collection of stuff blocking off the corridor, Greg began to worry. It looked organic in nature. It certainly wasn't just a pile of crap or even a collapsed ceiling. It was too uneven, too...stringy, he realized.
As Greg studied this unhappy development, a burst of static came across his radio and he screamed and jumped. Greg laughed. He hadn't realized how tense he'd been. His hand went to the radio.
“
Is anyone there?”
There was still nothing, and he wasn't sure how to feel about the static. Was it bad? Good? Was it nothing at all? He sighed and decided to press on. He needed a map, a route out of here. Although everything in his head came to a grinding halt as he abruptly realized what it was that was blocking the corridor.
Webbing.
Spider
webbing.
It was thick, impossibly so, with strands as big around as his wrist. It was so dense that it blocked light from the other side of the corridor. Greg felt a wave of pure horror do a slow roll through his body. He needed to be somewhere else, far away from this nightmare. He turned, found the nearest door, and went into it.
It wasn't much better inside. Another warehouse, this one just as packed as the original he traversed, maybe more so. The thick, dark webbing hung across half the area, giving the room a menacing, threatening glaze. Greg swallowed and tried to control himself. Arachnophobia. He must have it. He forced himself to concentrate. He spied a doorway across the room, along the back wall. He needed a terminal that might have a map of the area.
Working his way as quickly as he could across the floor, Greg listened harder than ever for signs of life or movement. There was nothing, just the dead silence of the tomb he found himself encased in. He realized how morbid that thought was and hoped against hope that he would somehow manage to see the light of day again.
The door led to a pair of offices and another bathroom. No elevator. Ignoring the bathroom, Greg entered the first office and took a seat at the desk. He booted up the terminal there and was glad to see it wasn't protected in any way. He spent several moments navigating the database until he finally found a rudimentary map of the area.
His heart sank.
The only ways out besides the way he'd come in were beyond the wall of webbing. Greg grimaced as a fresh wave of pain rolled through his skull. It had reduced to a dull, steady throb, but this was bad. He needed some kind of painkiller. His vision blurred. He waited the pain out until it returned to a background murmur, then continued studying the map.
It seemed that there were three ways to make progress, the central corridor and the warehouses on either side. The corridor was blocked, as was this warehouse. His only hope was to check out the corresponding one, but he didn't feel like betting on that, either. That simply left one option: the ventilation shafts.
The bathrooms had man-sized vent shafts along the ground level that he could crawl through, but he rejected that as well. His mind wandered as he considered the webs. Greg knew nothing about local wildlife, he supposed it was possible that there existed spiders big enough to produce webbing like this. It was also possible that some spiders had mutated...
He couldn't just stay here and hope for the best. If there was one thing he remembered about being a
soldier, it was that you needed to act, whatever that act might be. An action, even the wrong one, was better than simply sitting around with your thumb up your ass.
He finished memorizing the map, stood, and decided to check out the opposite warehouse. It was a quick and disheartening walk. The webbing was even thicker over there. He could see nothing in the webbing, no large, forbidding shapes, but he didn't exactly want to wait around for any such thing. He returned to the previous area and slipped into the bathroom. As promised on the map, he found the vent grate in the far wall.
It was intact, if a little discolored with age. Greg pried it off as quietly as he could, and then pointed the flashlight within. It was big for a vent, but still a small and confined space to be in. He lingered for a few moments, looking behind him, to the ceiling, and in the vent again. Delaying, he knew, but the actual prospect of doing this was terrifying.
Greg took a deep breath, wished he could kiss Kyra again, and forced himself into the vent. His fear swelled, so much so that he nearly backed out.
“I'm a fucking soldier, goddamnit.”
Greg took another deep breath, let it out, and crawled through the cramped confines. There was barely any light in the vent, but he took solace in the fact that he saw no webbing and would only have to crawl about six meters before he popped out in the adjoining bathroom.
He passed dark openings to either side and even above him as he hurried on. He paused only once to peer down one of them with the flashlight. Something caught in the beam's light and skittered away. Greg let out a little cry and moved, pressing himself as fast as he could. It might have been nothing, might have just been the machinations of a terrified mind...no, he didn't really believe that.
It was real.
Something was in the vents with him.
Greg kept going, his heavy breathing, thudding heart and frenzied crawling blocking out any other sounds. Resisting the urge to look back and see if anything was scurrying after him, he kept his focus on the corresponding vent grate. It was close now.
There
.
He hit the grate, trying to get it off, pushed against it, and then pounded it. If only he could turn around, kick with his feet...
Something let out a small but high-pitched sound, somewhere nearby. Greg panicked, his pulse raced, his skin crawled. He finally took several shots at the vent and managed to do enough damage that he could punch it out of its frame. Greg pulled himself free.
Even before he could make sure the bathroom was clear, even before he was fully free, Greg looked back and pointed the pistol into the dark opening, preparing to empty the rest of the clip if necessary.
There was nothing there, merely a thin gray light. He waited for several seconds, chest heaving, and then crawled to his feet. He staggered, stumbled, and barely managed to slump onto a toilet before his shaky legs gave out. In all his time awake and aware, except for perhaps the advent of his current memory, he’d never been so terrified. Greg let out a long, shuddering breath.
After what felt like an eternity, he gained control of himself. He stood and popped his neck, trying to relieve some tension. He tried the radio again, but it was still dead. Greg decided it was high time to get back to it. The corridor beyond the bathroom held no webbing.