Outbreak: A Survival Thriller (13 page)

Sweat pours down my face. I’m
cold and shivering now, gritting my teeth at the sudden wave of hopelessness
that chills me to the bone. I’ve reached a dead end. The only option is to look
for another way in, maybe around the front, something I missed before.

The moans grow louder,
accompanied by the rustling of bodies moving through the woods, and finally the
clapping of feet against pavement in the back lot.

The infected know I’m here.
They’re coming for me. I might as well use my gun on the door, though I’ll have
to lock it back up somehow once I get inside. Assuming the bullet even breaks
through the lock.

I stand back several feet and grip
the pistol in both hands.

A swarm of infected appears
behind the warehouse. From the corner of my eye, I see them rounding the tanks,
making a beeline toward me.

I place my finger on the trigger.

A naked man heads the pack of
infected. He’s about ten yards away, hands clawing toward me.

So close.
They’ve gotten so close, so fast.

I curl my trigger finger. Press
it against the metal.

I hear a click.

Releasing the trigger, I watch as
the door handle turns. The door swings open.

My pistol goes up, ready to shoot
at Wheels. I imagine him standing there with his own weapon raised.

It’s Melanie.

“Get in,” she says. “Hurry!”

The infected arrive.

I twist away as the naked man
dives toward me. He misses by an inch. My back slams against the wall, followed
by the back of my skull. The impact puts me in a daze.

Melanie’s arm reaches around the doorframe
and grabs the fabric of my coverall. She yanks me into a warm, dark room and
slams the door shut as I land against concrete, everything suddenly black
around me.

I push myself up and holster my
pistol, eyes searching the darkness for Melanie. This part of the warehouse is
stuffier than where I awoke the night before. The smell of gasoline, though
still pervasive, is mixed with another smell that reminds me of an old,
untended garden.

No time to explore smells.
Wheels is
probably running toward this very room.

“Where is he?” I ask the darkness
in front of me. I have to shout over the battering the infected have unleashed
against the building.

Melanie responds by cupping my
face with both of her hands and kissing me.

“I’m so glad it’s you,” she says.
“Are the others dead? Did you kill them?”

“Yeah, they’re gone. But Wheels—”

“I hurt him. I don’t think he’s
lucid.”

“What?”

“Hold on.”

Something scrapes against fabric.
Her hand sliding into her pocket.
A scratching noise
is followed by a loud pop as Melanie lights a match. She holds it in the space
between our faces.

A rifle shot from the main
storage area startles us. Wheels is firing—but at what, exactly? Have the
infected gotten inside?

Melanie blows out the match. I
have to raise my voice to be heard over the pounding against the walls.

“You said he’s not lucid. What
does that mean? Is he infected?”

“No. I drugged him.”

“How? Melanie, what—”

“While he was up on the roof
waiting for you, I managed to escape.” She presses herself against me and speaks
into my ear. I’m assaulted by the thick scent of her hair, the warmth radiating
from her body. I put my arms around her.

“Then what?”

“Then I thought about leaving,
but I knew you’d come back for me.”

“You did?” I feel a surge of affection
for her.

There’s another shot from inside
the warehouse, followed by a shout of helpless anger. Wheels must be shooting
at phantoms now.

“I went looking for a weapon,” Melanie
says. “I found this room, which is where they were keeping my bow and arrow,
and a few other things.

“What?”

“I’ll show you.”

She ignites another match and
brings it to a table a few feet away, where she lights a candle. She blows out
the match and steps aside. I can only stare in open-mouthed wonder as I
approach the table. Her bow and quiver lie at the far end, but the end closest
to us is covered in drugs—not pill bottles but packaged marijuana,
cocaine, and others, all wrapped and ready to go.

“I think they were drug dealers
before the Outbreak,” Melanie says, flinching as an unusually aggressive
infected throws its entire weight against the door. It’ll hold for a while, but
not long.

I look around the room. The
shelves are packed with even more bricks and packets. The bundles of weed,
wrapped in transparent plastic, look brown and dry inside their shells. Some of
the shelves contain shoeboxes with the covers removed, exposing neat rows of tiny
glass bottles—the kind you stick a needle into to extract the fluid
inside.

Wheels fires another shot, and I
hear him
yell,
“Get out here now,” followed by, “Oh,
fuck
!”

“I shot him with an arrow right
after he lit those fireworks,” Melanie tells me. “I laced it with this just in
case it only nicked him.”

She takes a bottle off a nearby
shelf and shows it to me. It’s about the size of a shot glass, a quarter full
of a transparent liquid I can only identify by reading the label.

“Lysergic acid die…” I don’t
finish. “It’s LSD.”

“How do you know?”

“Chemistry class.”

“Mr. Rothschild?” When I nod, she
says, “What does it do exactly?”

I shrug and put down the bottle.
“It makes you trip.”

“Like, hallucinations?”

“I think so. I remember him
saying it could cause paranoia. How much did you use on that arrow?”

“I soaked the whole tip.”

“Good.”

We both go silent. I don’t hear a
peep from Wheels.

“He’s stalking us,” Melanie says.
“We need to get out of here and go someplace safe.”

“Not outside. The infected aren’t
going anywhere. Not without a meal.”

“Oh God. My mom and my sister
must be freaking out. I can’t die here. I need to go home.”

Her eyes glisten with fresh tears
that catch the candlelight. One slides down her dirty cheek. I wipe it away
with my gloved thumb, which reminds me of holding my father’s severed head. I
can still feel the sticky blood inside my gloves.

“I won’t let you die,” I tell
her. “I promise.”

She nods and looks down at her
bow and arrow on the table.

“We have to kill him,” she says.

I pull the 9mm out of my chest
holster.

“I’ll do it,” I say.

Melanie is about to speak when a
loud burst goes off in the building’s main storage area. It almost sounds like
the grenade I used to kill the Colonel.

Only it’s much worse than a
grenade. I recognize the sound, and it tells me that Wheels has ditched the
hunting rifle.

Now he’s using a shotgun.

“Come out, come out,” Wheels says,
his voice muffled by the wall between us. “I’m gonna find you and your little
bitch.”

I’ve blown out the candle. The
room is pitch black again. I stand by the door and listen. The fact that I can
hear his voice over the incessant pounding of the infected means he’s close. The
windows that look out into the storage area have been boarded up, but a sliver
between two of the boards lets me see stacks on the other side, silhouetted
against the glow of lanterns he has set up.

I’m thankful for all the noise
the infected are making. It’s more than enough to mask any sounds I might make opening
the door. I don’t have my gun anymore, so I’ll have to use the spare hunting
knife from the emergency pack, then stealth to gain the advantage.

My hand is already on the doorknob
when Melanie speaks.

“I’ll go with you.”

I hesitate. We had agreed that
she would stay here with the 9mm. If Wheels is wearing body armor, the bow and
arrow won’t do her much good.

I look back, though I can’t see
her in the dark. Occasionally a pinprick of light appears in the door’s viewing
hole as the infected move past it.

“I really think you should take
the gun,” Melanie says. “You can’t go out there with just a knife.”

“You keep it. Stay here and wait
for me, and if I’m not back in ten minutes…”

“I know,” she says.

Every muscle in my body tightens
with the urge to hold her again. My nose still holds the scent of her hair.

“Melanie,” I say.

I can’t find the words to express
what I feel. She finds them for me.

“Kip, come back to me.”

“I will.”

I turn the knob, open the door
just enough to slide through, and shut it again as quietly as I can.
Immediately, I fall into a crouch and study my surroundings. The stacks at this
end are arranged in a more grid-like fashion, creating aisles of space.

I sneak through them, listening
for my enemy. But Wheels has gone dark again. He might be crouched in one of
the aisles, waiting for me. Overhead, a suspended metal walkway bends around
the storage area, hugging the walls.

No, he wouldn’t be up there. Not
if he’s using a shotgun. A weapon like that is more effective at close range.

I glance into the empty aisles as
I move through the main storage area. Despite the additional lanterns scattered
throughout, it’s too dark to see much of anything. Armed only with a knife, I
keep to the outer aisle in hopes I’ll come up behind him.

A blast shatters my train of
thought and sends me ducking toward the center. The hunting knife has slipped
out of my hand. I’m completely unarmed now.

At the sound of a footstep, I
hook around a stack as another blast tears through the space where I had been
standing. The pellets make a ringing noise against the metal shelves. I drop to
avoid ricochets.

I scramble on knees and elbows to
find better cover. The clapping of boots tells me Wheels is running after me.
Either he knows I’m not armed—it suddenly hits me how brash I was to part
with the 9mm—or he simply doesn’t care.

“Where are you, Kip?” he croons
into the darkness, and I hear something clicking. “Come out, come out.”

The clicking must be coming from
the shotgun. He’s loading it. A heavier click tells me he has just snapped the
barrel back into place.

I’m not an expert in shotguns
since my father hated them and collected rifles and pistols instead, but I know
enough from my own research to have an idea of what he’s carrying. I’m pretty
sure it’s a double-barreled shotgun. If so, he has to load it after every two
shots.

I can’t make that assumption
without evidence, though. If it’s actually a pump-action shotgun, he might have
as many as eight rounds at his disposal before he has to reload again.

The space is more open near the
storage area’s center, the stacks fewer and farther apart. I feel around for
something I can throw across the room to distract him. On a shelf above my head
is a pair of paint buckets. I nudge one ever so slightly, but it’s either full
of paint or stuck to the shelf. One next to it feels empty.

I hear a footstep nearby, then
another. Does he realize he’s being this loud?

The empty can comes off the shelf
easily. I hold it in one hand while, with the
other,
I
struggle to unstick the heavier one without making a sound.

I fail at that task. The dried
paint around the base makes a ripping sound as the can comes off.

Boots scrape the floor as Wheels runs
toward me.

I toss the empty paint can to my
left. It lands somewhere with a hollow clatter. He immediately shoots at
it—a boom like the entire warehouse caving in, followed by more ringing
of lead against the shelves.

I maneuver around the nearest
stack, taking the heavier paint can with me. His careless shot has just
confirmed his location.

There he is, back turned to me.
He’s only a silhouette against the dim lamplight.

I swing the paint can as he turns
to aim at me. His head is just a black lump above his raised shoulders, but my
aim is accurate. I feel the impact a split second before the shotgun coughs out
another
ear-shattering
burst, its muzzle flash
lighting the darkness.

“Fuck,” he roars.

The can, heavy as it is, definitely
hurt him. He isn’t down for the count, though. Not even close. He whips around
to face me. By now, I’m on the floor, having thrown myself backward to avoid
the blast.

His shoulders rise as he takes
aim.

The word
shit
tears through my mind, accompanied by the body-length chill
that comes from anticipating a world of hurt.

Except there is
only a click.

The shotgun went off twice,
meaning he has to reload.

I never give him the chance. I’m
up in a flash, every muscle in my body tight with the excitement that comes
from being alive after tasting certain death.

My first move is a head-butt. As
I’m thrusting my forehead toward his nose, I catch a glimpse of the shotgun’s
barrel and realize I’ve made a terrible mistake. He’s holding the weapon
parallel to his chest. With a powerful push, he slams it against my collarbones
before my forehead can connect.

I’m thrown off balance and
stagger back. As I reach to grab hold of a shelf, he lands a kick against my
stomach that knocks me down.

The remaining air goes out of my
lungs as Wheels drops all his weight onto me. Straddling my chest, he lifts the
shotgun above his head and drives it down toward my face.

I deflect it using both arms,
almost fracturing a bone or two.

Ignoring the pain, I drive my
right fist into his side, going for the lowest ribs. My knuckles hit a hard,
padded surface instead.

Body armor.

“Fuckin’ amateur,” Wheels says.

He slaps me hard enough to throw
stars across my vision.