The Gathering Dead (23 page)

The pile of the moaning dead collapsed again. Their laments seemed disappointed, desperate, and forlorn as the bodies crashed against each other, bouncing off the cinderblock walls with enough force to snap bones and tear away skin. But the zombies did not pay their injuries any heed. They merely rebuilt their pile, dozens of them climbing over each other, trying to reach McDaniels.

“Gartrell, find them. Quickly. The dead are piling up in the stairwell. Hundreds, probably thousands of them. They’re climbing over each other trying to reach the stairwell. And eventually, they’ll make it. Over.”

There was a brief moment of silence before Gartrell came back. “Roger that, Six. We’re searching for it. We’ll find it and get ready to get out of here. Maybe everyone should come down to the garage, over.”

The pile grew with a sudden lurch, as if it were some sort of inflating balloon. Spindly, pale arms encrusted in dried blood reached upward, and finally, a pair of hands grabbed onto the twisted rebar sticking out of the bottom of the last stair. A small face appeared in the gloom, mouth open, eyes wide. The zombie released a dry, hitching hiss as it pulled itself away from the others on arms that seemed to be no thicker than kindling. It was a child, a girl, maybe five or six years old, wearing a blood-stained Dora the Explorer T-shirt. The zombie’s knuckles had been flayed open, and bone gleamed dully in the light.

My daughter, please take my daughter!

The ghoul’s dry hiss turned into something approaching hiccupping laughter as it pulled itself up onto the stair, reaching for McDaniels’ boot.

McDaniels put a bullet in its head. The gunshot was as loud as thunder in the stairwell, and the flash threatened to overpower the NVGs. But McDaniels saw the small skull explode into fragments, scattering ropey goo across the stairs, his boots, and the writing dead below. As the corpse fell back into the pile, it disappeared as dozens of the zombies pawed their way over it, shoving it deeper and deeper into the undulating mass of bodies.

“Major! Six, what’s going on? Report back, over!” Leary’s voice was still professional, but wearing. McDaniels shot two more zombies, then a third, before he could answer. He holstered his pistol and reached for one of the grenades strapped to the side of his body armor.

“I’ve got to knock this pile down before they get up here. A few of them almost made it, had to go to guns on them. Listen up, I’m releasing agrenade right now. Stand by.”

McDaniels pulled the pin and hurled the grenade into the growing pile of bodies beneath him, then turned and ran up the stairs. At the landing, he spun back and drew his pistol. Hands flailed in the darkness beyond the stairs, groping for them, missing them by millimeters. And then a muffled
whump!
echoed throughout the stairwell, more felt than heard due to the mass of bodies surrounding the blast. But the grenade did its job; the zombies fell away from the stairway as the pile collapsed, this time blown out from somewhere near the center. McDaniels scuttled down the stairs again and lobbed another grenade, then retreated to safety. The device went off, and the effect was much like the first. McDaniels visually verified the heap had imploded, and indeed it had. The topmost zeds had collapsed onto those beneath them, crushing them into the bottom of the stairwell, blocking the fire door at the bottom with a stinking pile of shattered, broken bodies that still writhed and twitched. McDaniels’ throat burned, and he realized he had been screaming during the grenade attack. The terror had finally overwhelmed him, albeit temporarily.

“Major McDaniels, what do we have going on down there?” Leary’s voice was all business. “I’m on floor eighteen, on my way down to you, over.”

“Negative! Stay upstairs, I need you there so we can communicate with the Night Stalkers.” McDaniels felt around his body and took a quick inventory of his grenades. Three left. It was a good thing everyone had manned up with ordnance before jumping out into the city, and McDaniels had Gartrell to thank for that.

“Six, you sure about that?” Leary asked. “What about you? Over.”

“I’ll keep an eye on things down here for a while,” McDaniels said. “If things get too hot, I’ll pull back. But if I go off the air, presume the worst. Get the civilians, most especially Safire out of here. His safety takes full priority. Over.”

“Good copy on that, Six. But uh, what about the kids? Over.”

McDaniels reached into one of the pockets on his body armor and pulled out the chem stick Leary had given him and shook it vigorously, twisting it between his fingers. To the unaided eye, nothing happened. But through the NVGs, it was as if a floodlight had been switched on. He tossed the chem stick into the pit below him, then grabbed his M4 and pulled it tight against his right shoulder. He activated the laser targeting system on the barrel, and used it to mark targets below as the zeds flailed about, struggling to reconstitute the pile.

“Leary, Safire is the primary objective of this mission. The kids are... the kids are nonessential to mission success. Over.”

“Understood, sir.” If Leary felt any other way about it, it didn’t register in his voice. (
My daughter, please take my daughter!
) “I’ll be heading back upstairs then... are you sure you don’t want me to send one of the Night Stalkers down to give you some cover? Being a separate operation right now probably isn’t that smart, over.”

“Understood Leary, but this is how it’s got to be. These things are stupid and slow, but they’re starting to pull themselves together again, forming another pile. I’ll keep knocking it down as quickly as I can. I’ll stay down here until the first sergeant can get that vehicle ready, or until I start running out of ammo. Break. Terminator Five, SITREP, over.”

“Still looking for those keys,” Gartrell said through the static. “Six, maybe we ought to relocate everyone down here. Might be wiser, with those things trying to go up if we were to come down. Over.”

McDaniels shot a zombie through the head, then another, and another. He didn’t rush; he took aim and fired as methodically as he could. The stenches fell back into the pile, and the dead (
Re-dead?
he wondered idly) bodies were eventually flung to the side of the heap.

“Negative on that last, Gartrell. The last thing we want is for these things to hear the elevator and maybe have OMEN figure this shit out and come hunting for us. Over.” McDaniels fired and sent two more zombies back to the bottom of the heap.

“Understood, Six. Still looking for keys. Over.”

“Roger that. Break. Leary, have Finelly contact Rapier and tell them the current circumstances—I left the sat phone with him. We might be forced to boogie sooner than we’d liked. Get an update on where that Coast Guard boat is, and find out if our radio gear is compatible. At some point, we’ll need to talk to the Coasties, and I want to make sure they can hear us. Over.”

“On it, Six. You want more grenades? Over.”

McDaniels fired again, dropping a zombie back into the flailing pile, dark ichor spurting from its ravaged skull. “Negative, Leary. Just relay the information. McDaniels, out.”

For a moment, McDaniels stood at the edge of the stairway to nowhere and looked down at the mound of dead below him. The zombies continued to moan, and almost all of them looked up at him with those soulless, dead eyes, their mouths open, exposing teeth and blackening tongues. McDaniels stared back at them in disgust.

“Fuck all of you,” he muttered, then raised his assault rifle and patiently fired aimed round after aimed round.

Regina Safire no longer flinched every time she heard the distant
crack!
of a single gunshot every minute or so, but the soldiers in charge of their protection hadn’t been very forthcoming with the reason behind the shots that echoed up the stairwell. The soldier Derwitz
—
Maxi, she remembered they call him
—
had told her that Major McDaniels was establishing a safe zone down below. He had been evasive when she pressed him for a more definitive answer
—
what kind of safe zone? Derwitz basically fed her some double-talk and was generally unconvincing when he told her she and the others had nothing to worry about. Regina wasn’t certain about that at all. Of all the soldiers, she found she only really trusted McDaniels and the one named Gartrell. They were the pair who had been in command of the rescue operation which hadn’t turned into much of a rescue after all. On the whole, circumstances hardly made her feel more comfortable.

She tried talking it over with her father, but he was generally noncommittal. His eyes were downcast, contemplating nothing farther away than the tabletop before him. Regina understood why. All his life, Wolf Safire had been a man who had kept his emotions strictly contained. His forte was science, nothing but science. Though he had tried to improve himself, every time he stepped outside of Wolf the Research Scientist and tried something else
—
Wolf the Caring Father or Wolf the Attentive Husband, for instance
—
his efforts were dismal failures. The fact was he was spectacularly unsuited to carry forth with anything else but science. Regina had resented that as a young girl, but in her later years after college and while in medical school, she had grown accustomed to her father’s shortcomings. And by the time she was in med school at Johns Hopkins, she no longer viewed her father’s simplex existence as a deficiency. She had grown to find his emotional makeup actually admirable. Anything beyond the realm of the sciences wasn’t for him, and he found that acceptable. After a time, so did Regina. Her mother had never grown accustomed to it, however. She had divorced Safire in 1978, and had been awarded custody of Regina. She saw her father only intermittently throughout the years until she graduated high school. It wasn’t until she started looking at the various universities she could attend that Safire had come back to her, advising her on which program she might be best suited for, and at which university. That she should choose his alma mater was practically a foregone conclusion, though both Harvard and Yale were equally attractive. But as she grew older, Regina found that she very much wanted to win her father’s attention. Though her mother had been the one who guided her through life and assisted her in navigating its treacherous currents as a young girl in middle and high schools, Regina found herself courting her father’s interest once she was a junior in high school. This had doubtless wounded her mother, but if so, she merely suffered in silence. At that time, Regina was already becoming more and more like her father; she was less interested in personal relationships, and more aware of the callings of science. Oh, she knew all about boys of course, and had sought out experiences with them whenever it was convenient, but at the end of the day, they proved to be more of a distraction than anything else. Studies were what fulfilled her, and meeting the challenges posed by well-heeled instructors who felt their silly tests and quizzes were the sole measure of a student’s scientific merit. By her senior year in high school, she had enrolled in every advanced placement course available to her, and where there were none, she merely took their college equivalents.

By then, of course, she had transformed completely into the closest approximation of a “daddy’s’ girl” as she could. Her mother suffered in silence, and the damage Regina had caused in her filial defection remained today.

If her mother was still alive, of course.

She reached across the table and squeezed her father’s hand. He looked up at her slowly and gave her a wan smile that did nothing to reassure her. Regina smiled back with as much strength as she had and scooted out of the booth. Safire grabbed her hand suddenly.

“Where are you going?” he asked, finally breaking his long-standing silence. They were the first words he had spoken to her in over an hour.

“Just to take a look outside,” she said. “I won’t go far.”

“You need to be careful,” he said. “We’re very close to a tipping point here. The military won’t tell us that, but of course we can’t really trust them to tell us everything.”

Regina didn’t know how to respond to that. The sudden anti-establishment streak her father had displayed since all of this began was a bit disconcerting. So she just shrugged, nodded, and slowly extricated her hand from his. Safire let her go and returned to his intense study of the Formica tabletop before him.

Regina walked across the darkened cafeteria, nodding to Earl and his family. The youngest girl was finally asleep, which was a godsend; seeing the tiltrotor airplane or whatever it was called crash had been horrifying for her. For all of them actually, but for her young mind watching several people meet their death was powerful stuff. Sleep was the best thing for her. She leaned against her father’s chest, wrapped up in his arms. Earl’s eyes were closed as well, his head tilted back against the booth’s backrest. The oldest daughter was still awake, and she returned Regina’s nod. Regina continued toward the windows, hands in the pockets of her jacket. She peered outside, resting her forehead on the cool glass as she looked down at the storm-torn street below.

Below, totally ignorant of the driving rain and wind, the dead had massed around what would be the front of the building. Forty, fifty, maybe even sixty deep. The sight of so many zombies collecting in one area was significant, she thought. It meant New York City had a much larger problem than the one she had heard on the late night news, where the sightings of the dead were sporadic at best, nothing to worry about, the NYPD could handle them. Contrasting that with what she saw now, not even thirty-six hours later, made it difficult to ignore. New York City, if it hadn’t fallen already, was within hours of doing so. And the gathering zombies outside meant they were still hungry.

And we’re the food.

She sensed movement beside her, and turned as Earl’s oldest daughter joined her at the window. She looked down at the gathering dead, her face mostly expressionless. Regina wondered if that was because she was too young to be frightened by things like this, or if it was because her life had been much harder than, say, her own. Maybe she had already developed a tough shell, and a vista like the one below them just wasn’t strong enough to penetrate it.