He slipped out, locked the door and, with that feeling that someone was about to jump him from behind, sprinted to the stairwell and ran up the flights, two stairs at a time to the eighth floor.
Abigail’s flat was directly across the corridor from the stairwell. Tomas tried the door and found it was open and the flat abandoned.
Still not giving up hope that he would find them safe in Jamie’s flat, he ran back down the stairs and across to Jamie’s building.
Barely winded, he sprinted up to the twelfth floor.
Figuring he would bowl over anyone in his way, he continued rushing forward down the corridor to #12-371. Immediately, however, he sensed there had been trouble, the iron gate had been pried open and was standing ajar. Inside were signs of a struggle--a broken glass and shelving that had been pulled to the floor.
Tomas pictured a horde of infected yanking at the iron bars until the gate was pulled free, rushing in to the girl’s home and savaging the family. But to his relief, he found no bodies or blood.
He turned to walk out and noticed Abigail’s handwritten note on the table.
He read the note.
Gleneagles … what the hell is that?
This note was his only clue to at least one of their possible whereabouts. He was heartened that Abigail’s note mentioned they were planning on meeting him as he had requested, but it was equally discouraging that they hadn’t made it.
His chances of finding the girls were diminishing.
Tomas took a moment to focus. He went into the kitchen, took a broom and broke it near the bottom. Then he pulled a large butcher’s knife off a rack of cooking utensils hanging from the stove’s hood, took the duct tape from his pocket, and fashioned a spear out of the knife and broomstick.
The boy had managed to pull one arm loose from his restraints and had nearly freed his feet from the tape when Tomas opened the door. He looked disappointed to see him, “Man, I thought you were outta here.”
“Look, Khai Meng is it?”
The boy nodded as Tomas cut the duct tape with his spear. “I’m not in the habit of letting people in my protection get killed. Now, there’s an empty apartment upstairs where you can hole up until all this is over. But I need to know where this is.” He handed Khai Meng the note. “This Gleneagles.”
“Yo, that’s way
way
downtown on Orchard. If you say there’s a zombie outbreak down there, you’ll never make it. From here to downtown, I can guarantee the streets will be clogged with traffic. You’ll never make it in this lorry or by foot on the streets, what with all the riotous multitudes and random zombie freaks. You may as well give up.”
“You may be right. But I’m not traveling on the streets. I’m going underground.”
*****
Jayden beat himself up for underestimating the resourcefulness and conniving nature of Abigail.
A girl not much older than a child bested me,
he thought through gritted teeth. He was a soldier and was taken down by doe eyes and an innocent smile.
But she didn’t have more than a three-minute lead.
Once Abigail had locked the gate on the apartment door, Jayden had scrambled out from underneath the fallen shelf and managed to pry his way through the iron gate. But when he reached the stairwell and listened for her descending footfalls, he heard nothing. He figured she was already out there somewhere, blending in with the multitudes of people ebbing and flowing in the streets below as infected attacked, bit, and killed; and minutes later those bitten attacked and bit and then were killed.
Jayden ran down the stairs and searched for his rifle, pack and Eli’s bio-sample kit. The mission called for the capture of the two girls and samples. Without the rifle, it may prove difficult to protect the girls once they were within his control. Without the bio-sample kit, he would have to find a means to take samples - and biology had never been his strong suit.
He had half expected to see his rifle in pieces on the pavement, but the strap had caught a tree branch and it was dangling above his head within easy reach. Vine’s rifle was nowhere to be seen. His pack had also survived the fall, but the bio-sample kit was gone like the second rifle.
Someone likely absconded with them while I was running down the stairs.
But more than anything, it was his rifle that he had been hoping to find still in functioning order.
The looters in the mall scurried away from him as his gait and step spoke of the authority they were attempting to avoid with their shameful eyes and handfuls of luxury booty.
Jayden clicked his barrel adjustment to silencer and picked off a zombie chewing on the remains of a salesclerk, its flat shiny eyes no longer tracking him as he marched along. He wasn’t there to kill zombies or save civilians, so he left those infected attacking the thieves and opportunists he passed to do what they do best. He ignored cries for help as victims caught sight of him marching by with his rifle and military garb.
Orders are orders. I have to protect myself to protect the mission.
Jayden figured Abigail had headed into this shopping center because it was directly across the street from her apartment block and there would be plenty of places to hide within.
Besides,
he reasoned in his mildly chauvinistic way,
she’s still a woman after all and where else would a woman go to hide from a man but a mall.
He knew he was at a disadvantage. Bishan was her home turf. She probably knew every inch of every store and eatery in the neighborhood. At this point, he was relying on instinct and his experience tracking enemy combatants during his tours in the war-torn regions of Middle East and North Africa.
Inside, Jayden glared at the looters running by as he searched for signs of Abigail’s passage. His thoughts drifted to the negative, prejudiced by his six-month furlough in a Singapore wellness center after his minor mental breakdown which had occurred during his last assignment as a military exchange observer at the former US naval base located off the eastern portion of the island state.
Inevitably, anyone who’s lived or vacationed or passed through ends up at a shopping center full of high-end name brand merchandise, always “on sale” but never at a discount,
he lamented, letting his inner monologue drift along as he trekked.
Singapore’s economy,
he recalled,
was geared towards high-end spending and materialism as social status. By and large, shopping centers, and acquiring the money to spend at said establishments, are the nexus of Singapore social life.
It was deep within one of these cathedrals to consumerism where Jayden found himself navigating through darkened empty corridors, his senses keen to the sounds of the people around him scavenging through piles of Gucci bags and Prada sunglasses, unaware of the imminent zombie danger or too greedy to care as they sifted through the goods inside boutique stores.
Jayden continued along the corridor, hoping to spot his bulky helmet atop a petite frame.
She may be wily, but she isn’t a soldier,
he figured.
She’ll try to hide and wait me out.
She would be scared, though, and probably wouldn’t venture into the shops where an attacker could easily be waiting inside. That is, unless the iris controls on the helmet began reading her intentions as they were designed to do. Then he would have a devil of a time finding her. More likely though, the helmet had remained on standby and she was sticking to the dimly lit corridors, hiding on one of the upper floors - perhaps in the highest, furthest corners hoping he wouldn’t make it that far. He found a dead escalator and marched up to the second floor, planning on making sweeps of each level until he reached the top. If he didn’t find her on his first sweep up, he would make a second sweep down then focus his efforts on the train station underneath the gargantuan shopping complex.
He had three hours before his window to evacuate closed. If he didn’t picked up her trail or find her within the hour, he would have to contact VIRaL command and request assistance. It would be a humiliating but necessary step that could jeopardize his current rank of Sergeant, and maybe his lucrative contract with Vitura.
*****
What a miracle,
Abigail thought as she lithely jogged along the side of the train tracks deep underground about half a mile south of Bishan,
that I’d taken this helmet from that Neanderthal.
The visor on the helmet was magnificent. The tunnel was pitch-black, but the visor adjusted to a level akin to dusk. Abigail could see just as well as if she were in the half light of late evening.
She hopped over the tracks to the far side to avoid a person standing in the center of the tracks facing away from her into the darkness. Not that she was sure, but the person was most likely infected if he didn’t have the good sense to stop wandering this far into the tunnel with absolute zero ability to see where he was going. After she passed him, she turned back to get a good look at his face and, sure enough, spotted the overt signs of crazed lunatic zombie tendencies, what with the dried blood on its chin and matted into the front of its T-shirt and the scrapes and scratches on its bared arms where it had slid along the walls as it wandered further and further into the tunnel.
It had been a while since she had seen any people or zombies. Like any healthy person, the infected couldn’t see in the dark and drifted towards bright spaces.
She adjusted the helmet. It was way too big for her head and, even with the strap adjusted as tightly as possible, it kept sliding to the right and back as she jogged.
Abigail continued her run, estimating another five minutes before she got to Newton Station. From there, another twenty or so to Sommerset Station at the end of Orchard Road would be a quick hop, skip and a jump to Gleneagles Hospital--less than a football pitch distance opposite the station.
Sure enough, the visor flashed a warning that the ambient light within the tunnel was growing brighter.
Abigail stopped and flipped up the visor briefly but couldn’t see any difference.
She slowed to a walk, ever wary that an infected could be lurking in the nooks and crannies of the passageway.
Ahead, she could make out a train sitting dead on the tracks.
I’ll have to walk alongside the ten-car train, leaving me little room to maneuver if I’m attacked.
The train’s first car looked abandoned.
The second car was also abandoned, but there were smears of blood on some of the windows.
Inside the third car, she could see three zombies, two of them wandering the aisle inside, the other one calmly sitting in one of the seats, its head twitching unnaturally to the side.
Abigail’s heart began to race and she began to jog faster.
The fourth car was empty as well.
But what she saw in the fifth car made her stop dead in her tracks. There were at least fifty people inside, sitting and standing, no doubt waiting to be rescued by the “proper authorities” as they were trained to do. The power above ground had gone out when she was on her way to rescue her family. That was seven hours ago. It was likely that the underground system lost power at the same time and these people had been waiting for help ever since.
Sneaking by and leaving them flashed through Abigail’s mind, but she wasn’t that sort of person.
It was quite possible that these commuters weren’t even aware of the epidemic,
she reasoned,
and need me to lead them to safety.
She knocked on the train door window and the stranded passengers jumped and screamed in surprise. The nearest commuters aimed their glowing phone and tablet screens towards her to see who had finally come to their aid after such a grueling wait.
They saw her helmet and took her to be an authority figure.
Three men wedged their fingers between the sliding doors and slid them open about a foot, and one shouted, “It’s about time! You come after so long! We are thirsty and getting hungry! Many of us missed appointments! No phone signal or internet in here either! Get us out now!”
Shouts of agreement peppered the crowd as they pressed towards the door, all of them wanting to be the first off the carriage, reeking of armpits and fresh urine.
Abigail tried her best to calm them, “Wait! Don’t open the door yet! I’ll help you, but you need to hear me out first!”
But either they didn’t hear or didn’t care. They pulled the door open and began tumbling out of the carriage on to the ground beside Abigail in a flurry of Hokkien and Hindi cuss words.
Abigail backed up a few paces and waited while the more timid folks gingerly made their way off the train.
So much noise.
Abigail fretted about attracting zombies further in the tunnel or from the Newton Station platform, which couldn’t be more than a few hundred yards ahead.
Now there were fifty plus sweaty bodies blocking her path and she was on the wrong end of the group to lead them to safety. She pushed her way through the crowd and there were exclamations of “Little girl with helmet?” “Where are the rest of you?” “Are you police or transit authority?” “Don’t you have a flashlight?”
When she was clear of the tightly packed group and their groping hands, Abigail turned and waved for them to follow. She decided against telling them about the outbreak for the time being. She didn’t want to cause a panic and thought it best to get them out of the dirty dank tunnel and onto Newton Station’s platform before letting them in on the terror above.
The first of the crowd began trailing behind her and, fearful of being left behind, the rest followed, complaining loudly about the lack of proper light and the need for more personnel to help with the evacuation.
Once clear of the remaining five abandoned train cars, the tunnel grew brighter from the glow of the station ahead. As a safety precaution, all the underground train stations had a series of thin LED tubes embedded in the walls, ceiling and floor that activated when the power was disrupted. The blue lights gave off an eerie iridescence.