I knew I had to accomplish this task on my own.
I reloaded my Glock with a fresh magazine, glanced down below and then vaulted over the handrail.
Chapter Forty-Seven
The armored truck roof wasn’t as soft as it looked. My feet hit the canopy and I felt the impact jolt through my damaged ankle, causing a ripple of pain to pulse right up my left leg. I sincerely hoped I hadn’t broken or sprained the joint as I rolled around on my back.
Grimacing, I waited for the pain to recede. Thankfully, it did after a few seconds. Now I could concentrate on the impending task.
I rolled onto my front, studying the scene beyond the armored truck. I tried to filter out the sound of gunfire, the smoke and the yells and screams of the battling militia men and the undead. I tried to focus on the person I was looking for. The woman wasn’t in plain view. Where the hell had she gone?
I glanced at the row of low buildings, around twenty feet to my right. Yellow light flickered through the small windows, high in the walls. A wooden doorway stood in a dark recess in the center of the block. She must have gone through that doorway. That was the only explanation for her sudden disappearance.
Shadows moved back and forward in the yellow light behind the building’s windows. Somebody was inside, maybe more than one person. I had no choice but to go in there and try and flush them out. I studied the buildings for more entry or exit points. There weren’t any. It was one door in, one door out.
I aimed my handgun at the door and considered waiting it out. Would whoever was inside come bursting out of the door in an escape attempt? Probably not. They’d try and weather the storm inside the buildings, which led me to believe the door was more than likely locked and bolted on the inside. Another problem.
I lay on top of the truck and waited, unsure of what to do. Then an unexpected opportunity presented itself.
A petrified militia guy fled from the ranks, who were trying to shoot down the advancing undead crowd. He shouldered his rifle and ran to the building’s doorway. Wide eyed and terrified, he battered on the wooden door with his fist. I silently slipped down off the roof of the truck, moving between the shadows of the back wall and the vehicle. The guy continued banging on the door, his face sweaty and full of anxiety. He’d obviously not faced a mass invasion of undead before and had clearly decided to flee from the front line.
I edged closer through the shadows, keeping my Glock held up at the ready. The guy kept glancing nervously back at the approaching zombie horde, unaware of me creeping closer behind him to his right. I got within six feet of him when the door barged open. I lowered my handgun, aiming at the guy’s head and rushed closer. The militia guy cried out in shock and surprise when I jammed the gun barrel against the back of his head. The guy inside the door looked on with an equally shocked expression when he saw me hunched behind the man standing in the entranceway.
“Move inside, now,” I growled in the guy’s ear, pulling the semi automatic rifle from his shoulder. I wasn’t sure if he understood what I said so I gave him a shove in the back and followed him closely through the doorway.
I could smell the guy’s sweat and sense his fear as we bustled thorough the entrance. I nudged the door shut behind me with my foot. The second guy raised his hands and backed off. His dark eyes were wide in fear and as he stumbled backwards into a bare concrete corridor that smelled strongly of human body odor. He had a crop of bushy hair sprouting around his head and several days’ dark stubble on his unshaven chin. I noticed he wore a silver crucifix around his neck that hung above his sweaty gray vest.
I shook my head and pointed at the cross. “God won’t save you, friend,” I said, slightly callously. I’d been through too much shit to believe in the divine assistance from the almighty.
The bushy haired guy shook his head and muttered something in Spanish. He looked nervous and if he’d been armed, I would have shot him on the spot. He had no weapon in his gun belt around his green camo fatigues so I waved him to the opposite side of the corridor. I pushed the guy in front of me forward to join his comrade and he raised his hands on top of his head.
I pulled the rifle sling over my shoulder and kept the Glock handgun aimed at the two men. I wasn’t quite sure what my next course of action was going to be. The corridor seemed to run directly between the rows of buildings, spiraling off into doorways every few feet. I heard talking from the room directly to my left and risked a quick glance.
A concerned looking militia guy with a shaved head suddenly loomed beside the door jamb. A shocked expression engulfed his face when he saw me and he reached for a sidearm inside a holster at his right hip. I didn’t hesitate, instinct took over. I raised the Glock and fired once, straight in the shaved head guy’s face from around a distance of three feet. The guy’s head burst in a cloud of blood as his head rocked backwards and he tumbled to the floor in a heap of twisted arms and legs.
The two men in the corridor immediately started babbling. I didn’t know whether they were scared or pissed off that I’d just shot their comrade. They both went quiet when I aimed my Glock at each of them. I felt my pulse beating in my head and sweat run down my back.
“Where is the sniper?” I asked. “The woman? Where did she go?”
The two men looked at me blankly. Of course they weren’t going to tell me, even if they could understand English. I watched their eyes but neither of them gave away a tell tale glance.
I took a quick look through the open doorway to my left, where the body of the guy I’d just shot lay. It was some kind of small operations room beyond the blood stained door jamb, with maps of the island spread across a table in the center of the floor space. Photographs of the docks and deserted streets with closed up stores were pinned to a notice board fixed to the far wall. An old fashioned but unmanned radio set, with a big chrome microphone sat on a table below the notice board.
In my peripheral vision, I saw one of the men edge slowly towards me. I spun around and motioned backwards with the handgun. It was all very well holding these two at gunpoint but it didn’t allow me to freely search around the buildings for the sniper. I had to either render them inoperative somehow or temporarily put them out of action. I didn’t have the time or means to restrain them and no knowledge of the building layout. I was going to have to let them go.
I backed up slowly to the door and grabbed the handle. I pulled it open a crack and waved the two men forward with the handgun. The bushy haired guy looked petrified and shook his head, muttering a protest under his breath.
“Go,” I growled. “Go out there and try and help your comrades.”
The sweaty guy dropped his hands and moved slowly forward. I opened the door and let him go outside. The bushy haired guy wailed and followed his companion through the doorway. I slammed the door closed and locked the heavy steel bolts at the top and bottom.
Now, nobody else could get into the building without the bolts being pulled back. If the female sniper was within the building’s walls, I was going to find her.
Chapter Forty-Eight
I stood in front of the door and listened for any sounds of movement inside the low ceilinged building. All I heard from outside was the screams of the dying militia men, the screeches of the undead and erratic semi automatic gunfire.
I briefly wondered if Smith and the boys had managed to keep Freek alive out on the gantry. It was a difficult enough task but with no medical equipment, it was bordering on the realms of impossibility. I liked Freek. It was sad to see another good person gone forever.
A scuffle of movement from a doorway further down the corridor to my right caught my immediate attention. I instinctively took up a hunched firing stance and edged further along the corridor.
A guy dressed in green combat fatigues, clutching a Kalashnikov AK-47 rifle and who looked a little like a young Fidel Castro scurried into the corridor. Before he even noticed me, I aimed the Glock and fired twice, catching the guy in the center of his torso with both rounds. He cried out and fell onto his back, the rifle clattering to the floor beside him. The guy floundered, coughed once and his eyes rolled upwards.
As I trod further down the corridor I realized the element of surprise, my advantage was now gone. Anyone in the adjacent rooms to the corridor now knew I was a threat.
I ducked my head through an open doorway to my right and saw a small store room, piled high with canned goods and bottles of water. Nobody lay in wait inside the room.
I moved onward, stepping over the dead Fidel Castro lookalike. I crouched and slipped the magazine off his rifle, tossing it through the storeroom doorway. I still had the semi automatic rifle from the first guy draped over my shoulder and couldn’t carry another loaded weapon. The rifle I carried was shorter and less cumbersome than the AK-47. I thought it was an Israeli model of some sort, without studying it too closely.
I threw myself onto the ground when a blast of gunfire from my right thudded into the wall behind me. I twisted and rolled against the nearside wall. The shooter was located in the room beside me. I sat upright with my back against the wall and my handgun raised. I waited for my breathing and heart rate to slow, deciding on my next move. I wasn’t even sure the shooter was the woman with a change of weapons from her sniper rifle.
Footsteps rattled over the concrete, echoing from a room in front of me. I rolled to my left and three bullets slammed into the wall in a diagonal line where I’d been sitting. I was beginning to feel like I was out of my depth and maybe taking on these guys single handedly was way above my limited capabilities.
I twisted on the ground and fired off a couple of rounds with the Glock at the doorway opposite. One of the rounds ricocheted off the concrete door jamb and I heard a grunt and then the sound of a body collapsing.
I tried scrabbling to my feet as I heard more sounds of movement from the adjacent room. I heard a gunshot but didn’t feel any immediate pain so I rattled off a shot of my own. I saw a blur of green and a guy rushed me, knocking me down hard on my back. The jarring motion as I hit the ground caused me to drop the Glock and it scuttled away over the concrete.
The skinny guy with a close cropped beard, who sat on top of me grunted and grimaced while he tried to point his own handgun at my head. I wrestled his hands away so the firearm was aiming towards the wall beside me. The guy gritted his teeth and yelled out something I didn’t comprehend. He twisted the gun in his hands and pulled the trigger. I jerked his hands as he did so. A shot rang out, the sound was almost deafening but the round pinged off the concrete floor somewhere beyond my head.
Two more people emerged from the room beside me and rushed by, muttering something in Spanish. A shadow fell across me as I still wrestled with the guy on top of me. I glanced up briefly and saw the woman aiming her sniper rifle at the center of my chest. Another short, stocky guy with gray flecks at the sides of his curly hair was busy unlocking the bolts on the exit door at the end of the corridor.
I looked into the woman’s eyes and saw no compassion there at all. Her round, tanned face was attractive enough but masked in cold, steely determination. She squeezed the trigger and I flinched.
The rifle didn’t fire. It only clicked empty.
The guy at the end of the corridor jabbered something and flung open the door. The sound of the melee outside reverberated around the corridor walls. My arms grew weaker while I continued to try to fight off the guy on top of me.
The short, stocky guy disappeared through the open doorway. The woman muttered something in Spanish through clenched teeth and then followed the stocky guy out of the building.
The skinny man started to get the better of me and the handgun slowly turned in my direction. I fought back, trying to twist his hands the opposite way but my strength was quickly evaporating. I twisted and writhed on the ground, attempting to shove the guy off me but he sat firm. I jerked my head to one side, away from the line of fire of the handgun.
We both made grunting and groaning noises of exertion but I also became aware of two other noises in close proximity. The rumbling sound of one of the armored trucks starting up was slightly masked by the throaty rasp of an approaching ghoul. I couldn’t afford to take my eyes off the firearm swinging dangerously above my head, even for a fraction of a second.
The guy’s eyes were wide and wild as he forced the firearm closer to my head. I screeched in frustration, trying to force the gun barrel away. Sweat dripped from the guy’s face and our locked arms juddered with the opposing directional force.
The gun barrel turned slowly my way and I knew I’d be staring straight down the muzzle in the next couple of seconds.