C
HAPTER
10
Halfway down the concourse they came to a wide stairwell. Signs hanging from the ceiling indicated that they led to the main tunnel network, two levels above them. At the far end of the concourse, tunnels branched off in three different directions. Another set of signs above those tunnels directed them to surface access, the airfields, and a series of research labs with long, confusing titles that Jacob didn't even try to figure out.
Jacob walked a little farther down the concourse and squinted at the signs. “Chelsea, what's your aunt's lab called?”
“Morphic Field Studies and Application.”
Jacob shrugged. “I need somebody with better eyes than me. I can't read those signs.”
But behind Chelsea, Kelly looked terrified. She was staring up the escalators, wide-eyed, shaking her head.
She turned to Jacob, held up her fist, and clenched it four times.
The nonverbal sign everybody in Arbella was taught to give to the rest of their party when there were zombies close by.
Jacob advanced on her position.
Sure enough, coming down the stairs were three zombies in tech uniforms.
A fourth appeared at the top of the stairs and started down after the first three. They had only recently turned, and like the dead bodies Jacob and the others had come across, they showed no signs of injury. That meant they moved fast, and they were still strong. Running from them wasn't an option. He had to engage them right now. If he didn't, they'd start to moan and their hue and cry would bring every other zombie within the sound of their voices over to them immediately.
Jacob ran up the stairs, got just out of arm's reach of the nearest zombie, and fired right in its face.
The woman's head burst open in thick clumps of hair and bone and blood that oozed down her shoulders before her body even got the message to fall to the ground.
Jacob sidestepped the corpse and bumped into the metal handrail that ran down the middle of the stairs. He'd wanted to get above the man in the yellow flight suit in order to put him off balance, but the zombie was faster than Jacob expected, and it closed the distance between them with a few quick steps.
It lunged for Jacob, like it was trying to tackle him to the ground.
Jacob ducked under the man's hand, grabbed the front of his flight suit, and pulled the zombie down so that it ended up bent over the railing.
Off balance, Jacob went for the shot anyway. He couldn't afford to let this one stand back up. It was too fast. He fired and landed a glancing blow across the back of the zombie's shoulders. Bits of the back of the man's head splashed onto the stairs below him, along with part of his left shoulder.
He turned to face Jacob, his dead eyes showing no pain, no surprise. The zombie collapsed the next instant and rolled down the stairs, landing in a heap on the tiled floor below.
The other two zombies were caught on the opposite side of the railing. They charged Jacob, only to run right into the handrail. They reached for him, tore at the air. They snarled and snapped at him like rabid dogs.
But they couldn't reach him.
Before they had a chance to figure out how to get to him, Jacob took a step back, leveled his weapon, and fired two quick head shots. Both zombies collapsed onto the handrail and then slid harmlessly to the floor.
Jacob glanced toward the foot of the stairs and saw Kelly staring at the second zombie he'd killed. She and Chelsea were okay. Moving quietly and staying low, he climbed the stairs to see where the zombies had come from. Near the top of the stairs he got down on his belly and poked just enough of his head above the top step to see the large junction beyond. It was a huge circular room, probably a hundred meters across, with eight passageways leading off in different directions. A few zombies were milling around the right side of the room, exploring, hunting for noise. Beyond them, filing out of most of the passageways, were more zombies. Too many to count. More than a hundred, though, certainly.
“Shit,” he muttered.
He slid away from the top stair, then rose to a crouch and hustled down the stairs. Kelly was kneeling next to the zombie he'd killed, studying the dead man's face.
“We need to get out of here pretty damn fast,” he whispered. He hooked his thumb toward the stairs. “We're about to have a whole lot of company from up there.”
“How many?” Chelsea asked.
“No idea,” he said. “I saw maybe a hundred, but there's probably more. And if we make any noise we're probably going to get a whole lot more.”
“Jacob,” Kelly said.
He knew that tone. She was worried.
“What is it?” he asked.
She turned the dead man's face toward him. “Look at that. There, around the mouth.”
There was a faded, uneven blue ring around the man's mouth, like he dove face-first into a blueberry pie and hadn't done a very good job cleaning up after himself. “What is that?” Jacob asked. “Some kind of bruise?”
“Cyanosis,” Kelly said. “That's one of the leading indicators of death by asphyxia.”
“You mean somebody strangled him?”
“More like poisoned him with some kind of nerve agent, like a poisonous gas.”
“Gas?” Jacob grabbed his shirt collar, ready to pull it over his mouth. “Are we in danger?”
Kelly shook her head. “These people look like they've been dead several hours. That would be enough time for it to dissipate. And we probably would have felt something by now if it was still a danger.”
“I don't understand,” Chelsea said. “You're saying somebody gassed all these people? Why?”
“I don't know. I don't even know if it was done intentionally. Maybe there was a massive carbon monoxide leak somewhere and these people just got trapped down here with it.”
“But you don't sound convinced,” Chelsea said.
Kelly shrugged. “It'd take an awful lot of carbon monoxide to kill this many people. But a concentrated nerve agent, like sarin or mustard gas . . . it wouldn't take much.”
“Okay, well,” Jacob said, “let's talk about it somewhere else.”
“Which way?” Kelly asked.
To Jacob, the choice was obvious. They couldn't go back to the train. They'd be sitting ducks there. And they sure as hell couldn't go up the stairs. There was only one other way to go.
“That way,” Jacob said, pointing toward the sign for the various labs and offices at the end of the concourse. “We go through there and figure out where your aunt's office is. Should just be a matter of following the signs, right?”
“No,” Chelsea said. “I think we need to go topside.”
“What?” Jacob said. “Are you crazy?”
“No,” the girl said again. “Think about it. All these tunnels are connected. The same air circulates through all these vents. If these people really were gassed, the people through that corridor would have been gassed too. There are hundreds of people working in those labs. Maybe even thousands. We should go topside.”
“But how will we get inside your aunt's building? With everything on lockdown, won't they be barricaded?”
“Only on the ground floor. Zombies can't climb the outside of buildings. My aunt's building has balconies all over it. We can just climb up.”
“Chelsea,” Kelly said. “I can't . . . that sounds like suicide to me.”
Just then three figures emerged at the top of the stairs. One of them let out a long, death rattle moan, and soon more joined them.
“Shit,” Jacob said. He turned to Kelly. “You know what, I'm beginning to like her plan more and more. Chelsea, lead on.”
They ran for the end of the concourse. Behind them, a large crowd of zombies spilled out of the stairwell, their death-rattle moans taking on the more urgent feeding call of a herd closing in for the kill. The three ran faster, charging toward an angry red sign that read: D
O
N
OT
E
NTER
âS
URFACE
T
RAVEL
P
ROHIBITED.
Beyond the sign, the passageway that led topside was bathed in red light.
And a hurricane fence blocked the way.
“Jacob!” Kelly shouted.
Jacob had been checking their position. The zombies moved stiffly, awkwardly, yet a few of them were still fast enough to keep a running pace. They weren't catching up, but they weren't falling behind, either.
At the sound of Kelly's voice, Jacob turned. More zombies were emerging from the corridor that led to the research labs and offices. Chelsea was right.
“Keep going!” he said. “I'll cover you.”
He veered off, putting himself between the women and the new herd of zombies coming at them from the labs. Two female zombies lumbered toward him. He stepped into the path of the nearest one and fired once at her face. The second one got on him before he could readjust. She put her hands on his shoulder and snapped her teeth at his face and his hands. He used her momentum to guide her to the ground, then stomped on her nose with his heel. Her head snapped back against the tile with a solid
smack
. If a living person had taken a blow like that, it would have put them out cold, but it didn't have any effect on the zombie. She just tried to get back up again.
Jacob broke away and put a little distance between himself and the fallen zombie. He raised his pistol, took aim, and turned her head into a puddle of dark red gore and bits of bone.
“Jacob, the gate is locked!” Kelly said.
He glanced her way. He'd seen lots of fences like that one in the little towns around Arbella, back when he was with the salvage teams. They were an effective visual deterrent for the zombies, who rarely tried to force their way through them unless they had their sights on a victim close at hand, yet they weren't very solid. They could be knocked down.
A large man in light blue medical scrubs staggered toward him. Jacob raised his weapon to the man's head, but didn't fire. Instead, he ran around the zombie and came up behind him before the dead man could turn around.
Moving fast, Jacob shoved the man toward the fence. He didn't let him fall, though. He caught the man's shirt in his fists and half-carried, half-shoved the big man headlong into the side of the fence, where it looked weakest.
The man's head crashed into the fence like a battering ram and plowed through. Jacob tried to pull the dead man back out and maybe ram him through again to widen the hole, but man's head was stuck.
“Jacob, they're close!”
“On it,” he said. He pulled his pistol, put it up to the back of the zombie's head, and fired. The dead man's head turned to muck, and Jacob pulled the headless corpse out of the way.
He grabbed hold of the frame and used his leg to push on the fence until one of the clasps holding it to the frame snapped.
It was an opening, but not big enough.
“Jacob!”
He spun around. Kelly and Chelsea were backing toward him. Three zombies were closing on them from the right, and two more on the left. Jacob slipped around Kelly's shoulder and shot the dead woman standing there. He looked left, then right, and shot at the woman coming up on his right. She was moving faster than the others, though, and his shot went low and to the right, hitting the dead woman in the shoulder. It separated her and spun her around, but she didn't fall. He fired again and this time landed a head shot.
But he had wasted seconds he didn't have, and by the time he turned on the two zombies coming out of the lab passageway, the first one was on top of him.
The dead man swiped at Jacob's face.
He ducked away from the zombie's hand, but it put him off balance and he nearly fell over backward. The zombie lunged for him again, carrying him further off balance. Jacob was bent over all the way now, forced to crab-walk away from the zombie with only one hand. He took the only shot he had. He hit the zombie in the left knee. The leg was blasted in half by the impact and the zombie pitched over. The dead man landed facedown on the tile and immediately tried to pull himself back up.
Jacob circled around the dead man, grabbed him by his hair, and pulled him to his feet. The zombies from the stairwell were closing on them, and Jacob hurled the one-legged man at their feet. It didn't knock them over, but it slowed them just enough. He turned and rushed back to where Kelly and Chelsea had backed up to the fence. Another man in soiled hospital scrubs was bearing down on them. Jacob ran at the man, got into kill range, and raised his weapon. But before he could fire, the dead man's head exploded.
As the body fell, he saw Kelly standing there, holding the gun in both hands. She was shaking, her eyes wide open and unblinking. The gun pointed directly at Jacob's face.
“Hey!” he said. “Whoa, hold up! It's me.”
Only upon hearing his voice did Kelly catch herself. She gasped, and lowered the gun. “Oh God, Jacob. I almost shot you.”
He smiled. “That sure would have sucked.”
He rushed to the fence and kicked at it until another clasp snapped. From there it was easy to bend it over.
“Come on,” he said.
He held the fence down as the women crawled through, then he climbed through himself. A dead woman tried to dive for him through the hole. Rather than risk catching her fingernails in his face while pushing her back through, he grabbed her hair and pulled her through. She landed facedown and he popped her in the back of the head. He grabbed the curved-over section of the fence and pushed it back in place. It wouldn't hold against even a single zombie, but if they couldn't see the hole, it might slow them down a second or two until they found it.