Blackout

Eight

Becks slammed her back against the open door, keeping it pinned against the wall. That gave her a good vantage position on the rest of the room, while defending her against rear attacks. She held her pistol in front of her in a classic shooting stance that would have sold a thousand promotional posters for her blog if she’d been wearing something other than jeans and a bleach-spotted gray tank top.

I couldn’t admire the precision of her pose; I had issues of my own to worry about, like the screaming lab technicians running for the doors. Half a dozen of our previously captured zombies were shambling after the fleeing technicians. Three former technicians were shambling with them, only their increased speed and bloody lab coats distinguishing them from the rest of the mob. All the zombies were moaning in a pitch that made my bones itch. No one knows why zombies moan. They just do, and it’s enough to drive you crazy if you listen to it too long.

Mahir stopped behind me, managing only a startled “Oh dear Lord…” before I whirled and shoved him back.

“Get in the van,” I snapped. “Lock the doors, engage the security. If we don’t come back for you, drive. Drive until you get back to England, if you have to.”

“Shaun—”

“You’re not made for fieldwork! Now get back in there!”

“Don’t argue, Mahir,” said Becks. Her tone was calm, like she was asking us not to raise our voices during a business meeting. “I need his gun, and you’re not equipped for this.”

Mahir’s mouth set in a thin line, and for a moment, he looked like he was seriously pissed. Someone else screamed in the main room, the sound cutting off with a gurgle that told me the infected had stopped trying to spread the virus, and started trying to feed.

“Get the others on the com,” I said, more gently. “Make sure they’re safe, and that they’ve managed to get themselves under cover. I don’t want to lose anyone today.”

The line of Mahir’s mouth softened slightly as he nodded. “Be careful,” he said, and turned to walk toward the van. I watched him just long enough to be sure he was actually going to get inside.

“Any time now, Mason,” said Becks. The moaning was getting louder. So were the screams. The fact that we hadn’t been attacked yet was nothing short of a miracle—one we could probably attribute to the fact that we were standing relatively still in a room full of much more active targets. Faced with a choice between someone who isn’t moving and someone who is, a zombie almost always goes for the runner. It’s something in their psychology, or in what passes for psychology inside the virus-riddled sack of goo that used to be a human brain.

“On it,” I said, and turned to face the main room, bracing myself in the doorway. As long as we held our positions, we knew we had a clear line of retreat.

“About fucking time,” said Becks, tracking the progress of one of the infected with her gun. As soon as one of us fired a shot, they’d stop looking at us like furniture and start looking at us as potential meals. That would be bad. Even if I was immune, Becks wasn’t, and immunity wouldn’t stop them from tearing me apart. “Got any bright ideas?”

“Prayer would be good, if either of us believed in a higher power.”

Becks’s eyes widened, disrupting her carefully schooled expression. “I don’t say this often, but you’re a genius.”

“Because I don’t believe in God?” I trained my gun on another of the infected, one that was drawing a bit too close to our position for me to be comfortable. The screams seemed to be getting quieter. I had to hope that was because most of the technicians were out of danger, and not because most of them were dead.

“No. Because there is a higher power at work here.” Becks removed one hand from her gun long enough to tap her ear cuff, saying in a calm, clear voice, “Open general connection, main lab.” There was a single loud beep.

Too loud. The nearest of the infected looked up from her meal—the torso of a technician whose name had either been Jimmy or Johnny; I wasn’t sure, and it didn’t matter now. Her eyes searched the area, looking for new prey, and settled on Becks. With a low moan, she stood.

“Becks, whatever you’re doing, do it fast,” I muttered, adjusting my stance so that I was aiming directly at the standing infected. “Once the shooting starts, this is going to turn into one hell of a duck hunt.”

“I can handle myself,” she said. More of the infected were turning to face us, their attention attracted by the strange silence of the one nearest our position.

Steady, cautioned George. I thought I felt her fingers ghost across the back of my neck, and that was more frightening than anything else about our situation. If I started hallucinating during combat, there was no telling who I’d shoot, or what I’d let get past me.

“Not now,” I whispered. “Please, not now.”

Becks’s ear cuff beeped again, and Dr. Abbey’s voice said loudly, “A little busy right now, children! Maybe you could do something to help with that?” Joe—her English mastiff—was barking in the background, almost drowning out the sound of moaning.

“Working on it,” said Becks. She must have realized there was no way we could fade back out of sight. The sound of Joe barking would have guaranteed that, even if nothing else could. “Mahir’s secure, but the lab’s in chaos. What’s your twenty?”

Dr. Abbey’s answer was drowned out by the local infected, all of whom started moaning at the top of their lungs as they lunged, shambled, and even ran toward us. “Less talky more shooty!” I snapped, and started firing.

“We’ll be there,” said Becks. She tilted her head, studying our onrushing attackers, and chose her first two shots with an almost languid care. Two of the infected went down, each with a hole in the middle of its forehead.

“Show-off,” I muttered, and kept firing, trying to assess the tactical options presented by the room. I counted eight active infected in closing range; five of those were old, probably from the most recent batch of catches, while the other three wore lab coats and scrubs that identified them as former members of Dr. Abbey’s staff. I recognized one of them as the tech I’d yelled at the day before for being careless around the infected.

Guess he’d learned his lesson, even if it hadn’t done him any good. Anyway, those three would be the fastest movers, and the slowest to react. The virus that drove their bodies was still adjusting to being in control. Even the smartest zombie is pretty damn stupid, but new zombies are the dumbest, nastiest of them all.

I don’t think they’ve got the density to start reasoning, said George.

I nodded, acknowledging her words, and stepped forward as I kept firing. “Becks! Fall in, and tell me where we’re going!”

“On it, Boss!” She moved to flank me, our shoulders almost touching as we began to make our way forward. The door, freed from her weight, swung shut, slamming with an ominous bang. “Dr. Abbey’s in her office on the second floor! They’re holding the line, but they can’t do it forever!”

“Got it!” I took aim and fired again, silently counting my bullets. There were two of us; that was good. That meant we might have time to reload, assuming we didn’t both run out at the same time. I had a second pistol on my belt, for emergencies—and this qualified—but I didn’t have my cattle prod, or anything as convenient as, say, a brace of grenades. That would teach me not to stay fully armed at all times.

“Look at it this way.” Becks shot a former technician in the throat, sending the man backward. We continued to advance, moving in smooth, long-practiced tandem. “If we run out of bullets, we can just let them chew on you for a little while.”

“I feel much better.” I fired again. One of the older infected went down. “Any idea how many of these things we’re dealing with?”

“Not a fucking clue!”

“My favorite kind of duck hunt.” My breathing was starting to settle, the adrenaline in my bloodstream slipping away. The endorphins that replaced it were soothing, my old, familiar drug of choice. This was the feeling that used to drive me into the field with a baseball bat and a cocky grin, this floating, flying, nothing-can-hurt-me feeling. Georgia’s death clipped my wings. In moments like this, I could almost forget that. There were no voices in my head that shouldn’t be there, but they were replaced by contentment, and not the yawning void that usually opened when George stopped talking. This used to be what I lived for. I couldn’t live for it anymore. But oh, God, I missed it.

Fire. Step forward. Fire. Becks ducked behind me, letting me cover her while she reloaded her gun. I pulled my second pistol, buying us a few more steps before she needed to repeat the favor.

“This is not cool,” I muttered. “Becks? You got another reload on you?”

“No,” she said grimly.

“Didn’t think so. On my signal, we’re going to run.”

I didn’t need to see her face to know what her expression looked like. “That’s a terrible idea.”

“So is staying here! Either Dr. Abbey’s been doing independent collections, or the locals called for friends. Either way,” I aimed, fired, and took down another zombie, “we’re going to run out of bullets before we run out of walking corpses. We run or we die. Got a preference?”

“I like running.”

“Good. One…” I took another shot. This one went wild, barely grazing the zombie I was aiming for.

“Two…”

“Three!” I shoved Becks in the direction of the stairs, firing rapidly to cover her. She’d been right about one thing; if one of us was going to get chewed on, it needed to be me. One bite and it was game over for her. I’d consider a few more scars to be a fair trade for getting Becks out of this alive.

They can still kill you, hissed George.

“Maybe I deserve it,” I replied, and ran after Becks.

One nice thing about stairs: Zombies can navigate them, but they can’t do it fast. There’s a certain comedy to watching them try, as long as you’re not in a position to get knocked over by an infected body tumbling back down to the ground floor after it manages to misjudge the positioning of its feet. A few zombies had already fallen by the time we reached the bottom step.

Becks shot the first of them and ran on, leaving me to take out the other two. Both of them were wearing lab coats. They moaned, reaching for me. I grimaced as I jumped over them, and paused long enough to turn back and shoot them in the head. It took a few seconds to be absolutely sure they were dead, not just incapacitated. I spent the time. I knew these people. I might not know their names, but I knew them, and this was at least partially my fault. I could have forced Dr. Abbey to up her security. I could have helped more. I could have stopped this from happening.

You need to stop taking responsibility for things that aren’t your fault, said George, sounding cranky enough that I could almost see her frown.

“You need to stop telling me that things aren’t my fault,” I countered, turning to shoot a zombie that had been lurching up behind me. It went down hard. I kept my gun raised and began backing up the stairs, scanning the lab below me. The occasional gunshot from above told me that Becks was doing her part to clear the landing.

My ear cuff beeped. I jerked my chin upward, answering the call. “Kinda busy, so this better be good.”

“Maggie’s upstairs, locked in one of the cold storage rooms. She’s not injured, but she’s bloody pissed at whoever it was that shoved her in there,” said Mahir. “Dr. Abbey says she made contact with Becks?”

“We’re en route now.” I took another shot. That left three. Four if I decided to use all my bullets, rather than going with the traditional approach to zombie-killing, and saving the last one for myself. The thought made me crack a smile. Saving bullets for myself was something I didn’t have to worry about anymore.

You are so fucking morbid, muttered George.

“Learned from the best,” I replied. There were only two visible zombies left on the floor, and both of them had been infected for long enough that they were moving slowly, in that classic Romero shuffle. Better yet, killing so many of their pack mates meant the viral intelligence driving them all had been reduced from mob level smarts back to individual stupidity.

No one knows why zombies get smarter when you have a bunch of them in one place, but they do, and it’s a problem. Tactics that work against one or two lone undead will get you killed when you go up against a mob. I’ve seen them demonstrate complicated hunting techniques, like actual ambush preparation, and it’s scary as hell. If nothing else, it forces you to remember that the things inside those rotting shells used to be human, and on some level, still might be. They just got sick. It could happen to anybody.

Anybody but me.

“Shaun? Shaun, are you there? Shaun?” Mahir’s voice in my ear dragged me out of my thoughts and back into the situation.

“Sorry, just assessing.” I turned, running up the stairs. Becks was waiting on the landing. She had her gun up, and was braced against the banister; two infected were shambling toward her, neither moving fast enough to be a major threat at their current distance. She was letting them set up the shot. It’s a classic field tactic, and a good way to save your ammunition. There was just one problem with it.

If there were only two zombies out here, where was all that moaning coming from?

“What’s your assessment?” asked Becks.

“We’re fucked. Where’s Alaric? I’m pissed off, I’m almost out of bullets, and I’m not having any fun.” And that, right there, was the reason I stopped doing active fieldwork, even before we stopped really being a news site. You can’t be a professional Irwin when you can’t at least pretend to enjoy what you’re doing. It doesn’t work. The center does not hold.

“He’s with Dr. Abbey.”

“Good.”

Becks took the first of her shots as I reached her. The zombie went down. She didn’t even glance in my direction. “We clear below, Mason?”

“Two zombies, both too uncoordinated to handle the stairs. I made an executive decision. We need to conserve bullets more than we need to perfectly secure the area.”

“Well, just don’t forget that they’re down there and sound the all-clear without going back to mop up your mess.” She squeezed off her second shot. This wasn’t a clean hit; her bullet took the infected in the throat, reducing it to a mass of torn flesh and visible bone. It kept shuffling forward.

“Uh, Becks—”

“One,” she said. “Two. Three…”

The zombie went down, the virally enhanced clotting factors in its blood finally giving up the task of repairing the arteries shredded by her bullet.

“Three,” she said, and flashed me a self-satisfied smile. “Just like getting to the center of a Tootsie Pop.”

“Did you know they made that commercial in the 1970s?” I asked. There were no more infected in sight. The moaning in the distance continued. “How are you for bullets?”

“I did know that, yes. Three bullets left. You?”

“Four.”

“Great. Let’s hope this party isn’t strictly BYOB.” She turned and ran in the direction of the dead.

“We’re on our way, Mahir,” I said, and ran after her.

“Do they train you people to say stupid things when in mortal danger? I’m just curious, you understand, I’m not judging you.”

“Yes, you are.”

“Yes, I am.”

“There are classes.” I followed Becks around a corner, skidding to a halt. “Uh, Mahir? I’m going to need to call you back.”

“What are you—”

I reached up to tap my ear cuff, breaking the connection. Becks raised her hand, signaling for silence. I nodded understanding. And then we both just stood there, staring at the five-deep wall of zombies that was trying to claw its way through the door into Dr. Abbey’s office. They weren’t paying any attention to us yet. That was the good part. The bad part was that they would inevitably either break down that door or lose interest in what was behind, and either way, we’d eventually wind up on the menu.

“Here,” I mouthed, pressing my gun into Becks’s hand. I shook my head at her questioning expression, nodding back the way we’d come. Slow understanding bloomed in her face, and she nodded, pressing herself against the wall as I turned and crept quietly away. Once I was back in the main hall, out of sight of the infected, I broke into a run.

This floor’s armory was located at the far end of the building, in what used to be a bathroom. Dr. Abbey’s technicians couldn’t get the water working in the corroded old second-story pipes, and so the room had been converted to hold all the weapons of mass destruction that a bunch of geeks who insisted on playing with dead things could possibly need. I don’t know what science geeks were like before the Rising, but these days? After seeing the kind of armaments they pack, you couldn’t pay me to get on their bad side.

It was just too bad they hadn’t been carrying more of those armaments while they were “at home” in the lab. Maybe I wouldn’t have needed to shoot so many of them.

I passed the bodies of three dead technicians as I ran. Really dead—they’d been torn apart, practically shredded by the hungry infected. Their screams probably saved the lives of everyone who was now huddling behind a locked door. The people who ran toward the trouble—or toward the armory, wanting to get ready to face the trouble head-on—had been the second wave of victims. That was how it almost always went in an outbreak. The first wave dies. The second wave rises.

The last of the bodies was right in front of the armory door, fallen like he had almost reached it when they finally managed to run him down. I grimaced as I stepped over him, leaning into the armory to turn on the light.

The zombie that had been lurking there lunged, the moan escaping from its lipless mouth bare seconds before the startled shout of “Whoa!” escaped from mine. I managed to jerk my arm back before it could get its teeth into me, and they clacked shut on empty air. The zombie lunged again.

“Back off, ugly!” I grabbed it by the hair, using its own momentum as I shoved it past me, into the hallway. If Dr. Abbey was wrong about my being immune, I was going to regret that in a minute. I would have regretted it a hell of a lot more if the thing had managed to get its teeth into me.

The zombie stumbled as I released it, taking several steps forward before it could get its balance back and remember how to turn itself around. I took advantage of those precious seconds, darting into the armory and looking frantically around me. I didn’t use this room very often. We had our own equipment, and while Dr. Abbey was perfectly willing to be generous with the ammo, she usually didn’t want us fetching it ourselves. The grenades were—were—

“Over here, Shaun,” said George. I turned. She was standing in the far corner of the room, next to a stack of beautifully familiar olive-green boxes. “This what you were looking for?”

“Yeah. Thanks, George.”

“Not a problem. Now kill your friend.” She was abruptly gone, blinking out like she had never been there at all. That was reasonable. She hadn’t been there.

I grabbed the nearest pistol that looked like it might be loaded—bad gun safety, good zombie safety, it balances—and whirled, taking aim right at the place I estimated my dead friend’s head would be. “Bang, ugly,” I said, and pulled the trigger.

Thank God for paranoia and overpreparedness. The gun barked and a large chunk of the zombie’s skull vanished, transformed into red mist and a hail of bone fragments. I shoved the pistol into my belt and tapped my ear cuff, heading for the back of the room.

“Shaun?”

“Mahir, listen. If you can get a connection to Becks, tell her she needs to back up. I’m coming in with grenades.” I grabbed guns as I walked, dropping anything too light to be loaded and cramming the rest into my belt. If I was making a last stand, I was doing it so ridiculously overprepared that I’d rattle when I walked.

Mahir sighed deeply. “Of course you are. Couldn’t you try something a little less, I don’t know, insanely idiotic?”

“I could, but they don’t have a flamethrower here. Now let her know.”

“I’m on it.” The connection died.

Grabbing the top box of grenades, I paused only long enough to check that its contents were both intact and well secured. Then I ran.

Becks met me halfway down the hall, somehow managing to run silently in her combat boots. There was one more skill I’d never mastered. “What are you doing?” she demanded, tone barely above a whisper. “Mahir called me! He said you told him to do it! I could’ve been killed! Are you really planning to use grenades?”

“You got a better idea?”

“No, but the risk of structural damage—”

“Is minimal. Are the zombies where you left them?”

“What? Yes.”

“Then you would have been killed if you’d still been in that hallway.” I kept moving, holding the box up just enough for her to see the shape of it. “I’m going to aerosolize me some dead guys.”

“You’re insane.”

“Yeah, probably.” I pulled the first pistol I’d snagged out of my waistband, passing it to her. “Stay out here and guard my back. Oh, and if you could call Dr. Abbey and tell her to turn off the lab ventilation system until the spray settles, that would probably be good. I don’t want to zombie-out the whole room trying to save them.”

“You’re dangerously insane,” Becks amended—but she took the pistol, and added a quick, “Good luck,” before retreating farther down the hall.

I felt better knowing she was out there. One close call per day is pretty much my limit. I walked until I reached the end of the short hall leading to Dr. Abbey’s lab. The zombies were still trying to claw their way inside, their moaning echoing through the confined space until it seemed loud enough to drive a man insane. They were still focused on the prey in front of them, and not on things moving around behind them. That was good. I’d be changing that in a moment, but for now, distracted zombies were in my best interests.

Putting the box of concussion grenades on the floor, I opened the lid and pulled out the top two. They were designed for use in situations like this one, and would do maximal damage to soft tissue—such as zombies—while doing minimal structural damage to the building surrounding the zombies. They were usually used for large government extermination runs. A series of helpful cartoon thumbnails on the inside lid of the box used stick figures and the universal sign for NO to remind me that I shouldn’t use concussion grenades without putting on a gas mask first, since aerosolized zombie isn’t good for anybody.

“Too bad I have no respect for safety precautions,” I muttered, and pulled the pin on the first grenade.

I might be willing to stand in the open air while I created a fine red mist of viral particulates, but that didn’t make me stupid. I chucked the first grenade into the middle of the mob, causing about half of them to turn in my direction. I threw the second grenade about three feet in front of the mob. Then I ran, pausing only to grab two more grenades out of the top of the box. I pulled the pins and threw them behind me, into the path of the onrushing mob.

One, said George. Two, three…

“Four, five,” I added, and kept running.

The first grenade went off with a low crumping sound, muffled enough to tell me that it had been buried by a substantial number of bodies when it exploded. The other three went off in rapid succession, each of them a little louder and less cushioned by the weight of the bodies on top of it. I kept running. When Becks came into sight ahead of me, I stepped to the side, giving her a clear line of fire, and pulled two of the guns from my waistband.

“God, I wish we had cameras on this,” I said… and then the infected who’d managed to survive my little party tricks came shambling and running down the hall, and I forgot about cameras in favor of keeping us both alive.

They were a sorry-looking bunch, even for zombies. It’s true that you can kill a zombie with trauma to the body; once they lose enough blood, or a sufficient number of major internal organs, they’ll die like everybody else. The trouble is that they don’t feel pain like uninfected humans do, and they can keep going long after their injuries would have incapacitated a normal person. Some of the zombies making their way down the hall were missing arms, hands, even feet—those stomped along on the shattered remains of their ankles, shins, or knees, giving them a drunken gait that was somehow more horrifying than the normal zombie shuffle. One had a piece of grenade shrapnel stuck all the way through his cheek, wedged at an angle that would make it impossible for him to bite even if he managed to grab us. That wasn’t going to stop him from trying.

“Becks? You clear?”

“Clear!” came the shout from behind me.

“Great,” I said, and opened fire.

The bad thing about setting up a kill chute like the one we were in is that it can just as easily turn into a “die” chute. The good thing about setting up a kill chute—the reason that people keep using them, and have been using them since the Rising—is that as long as your ammo holds out and you don’t lose your head, you can do a hell of a lot of damage without letting the dead get within more than about ten feet of you.

The injuries to our mob were extensive enough that most of them weren’t moving very quickly, and the ones who’d been shielded from the worst of the blast by the bodies of their companions were hampered in their efforts to move forward by those same bodies. The fast zombies got mired in the slow zombies, and their efforts to break free of the mob just slowed everything down a little more. Becks and I didn’t bother aiming for the fast ones. We just went for the head and throat shots, and kept on knocking them down.

“Shaun!” called Becks. “Dr. Abbey just called! They’re opening the lab door!”

“Awesome!” I shouted back, barely a second before gunfire started from the direction of the lab. I fell back several yards, pulling another gun from my waistband and holding it out behind me. “Reload?”

“Thanks.” Becks snatched the pistol from my hand, taking aim on another of the infected. “So this is fun. This is a fun time.”

“Sure.” I fired twice, taking down two more zombies. I was about to shoot a third one when Joe came bounding into my line of fire. He grabbed a zombie by the leg, shaking so hard that the entire leg came off. The gunfire continued behind him, but for Joe, the party was all out here in the hall.

It probably says something about Dr. Abbey that she named her massive black English mastiff after her dead husband and used him for illegal medical experiments. I’m not sure what it says, exactly. I just know that Joe is now functionally immune to Kellis-Amberlee—he can get sick, but he can’t go into conversion—and that meant that the enormous, angry carnivore now spreading zombie guts around the hall was on our side. Thank God for that.

“That’s disgusting,” said Becks, and shot a zombie who was continuing to advance on our position, ignoring the chaos behind him. “Oh, jeez. Is that a spleen?”

“I think that’s a spleen, yes.” I fired one more time, taking down a zombie that had gotten a little too close for comfort. Joe looked toward the sound of the shot, ears perked up questioningly, and barked once. “It’s cool, Joe. We’re not hurt.”

“How cute. The giant dog is concerned.”

“Someone’s got to be.” I leaned against the rail, watching Joe work. The gunshots from behind him were starting to taper off. Only three zombies that I could see were still making any real progress, and all of them were badly wounded. Becks raised her gun to fire. I pushed her arm gently down again. “Let him have his fun. He’s had a long day, and he deserves the chance to kill some things.”

“If you say so.” Becks looked at me, seeming to tune out the sounds of slaughter coming from the hall in front of us. She frowned. “You have blood in your hair. And on your face.”

“Great. I’ve been exposed. Dr. Abbey will be thrilled.”

The gunshots from the hall had stopped. Becks and I exchanged a look, nodded, and waited where we were for a few more minutes before starting to make our way in that direction. Joe barked again as we approached him, the sound only slightly garbled by the fact that he had most of a human throat in his mouth.

“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” I told him. He dropped the throat, chuffing happily, and fell into step beside us. I patted his blood-tacky head with one hand. “Good dog.” There was no possible way of minimizing my exposure at this point. I might as well just go with it.

Dr. Abbey, Alaric, and four of her technicians were in the hall, their faces covered by ventilator masks and eye protectors. “You made it,” she said, sounding unsurprised. “Are we secure?”

“Not quite. There are at least three shamblers on the ground floor, Mahir’s in the van, and Maggie’s locked in a storage room,” I replied. “Alaric? You okay, buddy?”

“Shaken, but intact,” he said.

“Good.” I looked to Dr. Abbey. “I’ve been exposed.”

“There’s a shocker.” She shook her head, shoulders slumping. She looked tired. That wasn’t normal. Not for Dr. Abbey. “Help with the cleanup, and I’ll get blood test kits for both of you. Shaun—”

“I know, I know,” I said. “I’ll be donating a few more vials to the cause of science.”

“We’re still leaving in the morning,” said Becks. I turned to blink at her. She shrugged. “There’s always something, isn’t there? We have to go. It’s never going to stop long enough for there to be a good time.”

“She’s right,” said Alaric. “Alisa can’t wait.”

“Well, then, I guess we’re leaving in the morning,” I said. “Let’s get this place cleaned up, and figure out what happened with the security. Oh, and can someone go let Maggie out before she kills us all?” I looked at the mess surrounding us, and sighed inwardly.

It was going to be a long night.