Chambering a round, Andy swung out of the jeep and surveyed their surroundings. Large rectangular bins stood in a row beside an access ramp and door. Andy kept a wide berth, aiming his rifle between the bins, ready for something to jump out of the shadows while Clara checked the door. It was locked. They moved around the side of the building, searching for a way in. Andy peered beyond the chain link fence for signs of movement. A road and small concrete verge separated them from another large facility, but still nothing to shoot at.
At the rear, a fire escape climbed to the roof, but was inaccessible–the ladder had not been let down. They ran down a row of windows, boarded up with nailed planks or pilled furniture, until they found one with less defences. Gunfire popped from the car park on the other side of the building. Andy felt a pang of jealousy for whoever was taking shots. “Break the window?” he said, switching to his new sidearm, eager for some action.
“Hold on.” Clara ran her finger over the edges of the window, inspecting it. “I think it’s tempered glass.” She retrieved something from her tool belt and threw it at the glass. The pane shattered instantly, transforming into a block like blue ice with a small hole at its centre.
“Spark plug,” she said, picking the small white cylinder up off the floor and pocketting it. “It cuts right through tempered glass.”
Andy pulled chunks of the glass off with his new fingerless gloves. “Neat trick.”
Climbing inside, Andy pushed through a stack of chairs, toppling the barricade, ready with his 9mm pistol for something to react to his entrance. He was inside a small office space, stacks of papers piled on a large desk beside a computer monitor. The plaster walls cracked and crumbled, renovated by a mould infestation. A whiteboard bore drawings of chemical compounds, annotated at length with colourful felt tips, beneath which stood a coffee mug frothing with eight-years old mould.
Andy moved through the quiet office, inspecting the corners and crevices for movement, heading towards a door at the rear. Clara followed him into a dark and bare corridor beyond.
“This way,” Clara whispered. Her headlamp shone in moats of dust in the corridor beyond. Splintered bodies scattered the floor, soft like ash, crumbling like dry leaves beneath his boots. Rags clung to their emaciated limbs like scraps of fabric caught in barbed wire fences. Bullet holes marked the walls, spent casing twinkled like nails in heaps of sawdust. Something rustled through one of the bodies. Andy aimed his pistol as a fat black rat scurried into the shadows.
“Where they burned?” Clara said.
“No,” Andy said. “Their clothes are fine. They’re just dry.”
A tapping sound caught his attention at the end of the corridor. An arm rose out of the heap of desiccated flesh, patting a red door leading to a staircase. Andy strode over to the body and nudged it over with his boot. Severed at the torso, the zombie stared past him towards the ceiling with one bloated eye, like an overripe fruit. The flesh of its face was stretched so tightly, he could make out the contours of its skull. Tufts of hair sprouted like dying yellow weeds out of its scalp. It’s jaw moved like a creaky hinge as its eyes tiredly focussed on him. Fingers stroking his calf, then clenched.
Andy stomped on its head, crushing its skull as easily as stomping on a cardboard box. The zombie went limp.
“They’re weak,” Clara said.
“Seems that way.”
“Same as the ones in the liquor store?” she asked.
Andy thought back. “Similar. Dried out, slow.”
Beside the staircase was a second door. Andy peeked through the door’s window, his headlamp reflected off glass making it difficult to see inside. He turned the lamp down. Something shifted in the dark–dozens of shapes, like a forest of trees swaying in the breeze.
“Something in there,” he said.
“What are they doing?”
“I’m not sure. Moving around. Drawn by the gunfire outside, maybe.”
“People? Survivors?”
“I doubt it.”
Quietly, Clara checked the door’s handle. It was unlocked, but required the handle to open. Most zombie variants didn’t possess the cognition to operate a handle. “We should be fine, as long as we don’t spook them.” Clara nodded at the stairwell. “The facility is on the top floor. Let’s go.”
Clara opened the door into the dark stairwell but stopped abruptly. Bodies piled against the walls. Andy raised his pistol, expecting a reaction, but nothing moved. Carcass limbs outstretched on the stairs, clawing upwards, or collapsed at the base of the steps. Their flesh clung to their bones like strands of dry leather. Andy stepped forward, snapping an outstretched arm under his heavy boot like it was old pottery. Where the bodies piled up, they crumbled like sand, shapeless, except for withered features–a hand bearing a tarnished bracelet, a leg wrapped in knee-high heels, a face entombed inside a motorcycle helmet–all buried beneath a fracture of limbs.
The stairwell smelled musty, a layer of dust coated the steps. Andy cleared his throat, retrieving a balaclava from his pocket, covering his mouth, keeping his other hand free to use his sidearm. His focus was drawn to the skulls, as though his AI implant was pointing a laser pen at the gunshot wounds there. Even when his AI wasn’t talking to him directly, it was running Combat Conceptualisation programmes, manipulating his train of thought.
“They’re dead,” Andy said. “Headshots, all of them.”
Clara kicked a shell casing, glinting in the dust. More casings left a trail, leading upstairs. “Come on. The gunner might still be alive.”
As they climbed the stairs each new corner was hidden in darkness, slowly revealed by their torchlights like the turning of a page. Bullet holes pocked the walls. On the top floor, Clara pointed out an escape route on the ceiling. “Roof hatch.”
Andy opened the stairwell door to the sixth floor, but it jammed half way. Something barricaded it from the other side. Heaving, he opened it wide enough to slip through the gap. At his feet was a corpse. It was wearing a hazmat suit covered in blood. A visor hid its face.
Andy checked his surroundings. The room was large and well lit by a wall of windows facing the car park. A semi-circle reception desk greeted him to his left. Chairs were piled on top of it and cluttered at its base–hastily erected defences. Three pillars held up the roof, but aside from them, his vision was unobstructed. They were alone.
He moved the corpse and Clara followed him into the room. She bent and inspected the body, removing its visor. The man inside was old with long dark hair and thick eyebrows. His flesh was pale, but otherwise well preserved. “Fresh,” she said. “A day or two. Probably one of the scientists, but maybe…” Clara glanced into the lobby area. “Maybe more.”
“What’s our plan?” Andy asked.
Clara nodded to the reinforced double doors at the other end of the room, painted black with yellow stripes. Andy approached them. A keypad was fixed next to the doors, above it read ‘Authorised Access Only.’
“Does your spark plug work on steel?” Andy said.
Clara tugged on the handle. “It’s bolted shut, looks like we’ll have to turn the power on to the building to get them open.” She jogged back over to the hazmat corpse and searched its pockets. “Ah-ha.” Raising a key-card, she waved Andy over. “Once we get power on, this should give us access.”
“How do we do that then?”
Clara pursed her lips. “The basement? There might be a generator.” She led the way back downstairs. Outside, the rate of gunfire had increased. Did that mean there were more zombies out there, attracted to the sounds? At a window, he wiped a layer of grime off with his sleeve to peer outside.
“Come on,” Clara said.
Reluctantly, Andy followed. Why was it their job to get the power back on? How unfair. At the ground floor, Clara investigated a laminate diagram on the wall depicting the building’s layout, then travelled through several empty rooms until they found a stairwell which delved underground. A heavy door hung ajar, the sign above it depicted electricity. “In here,” she said.
Andy led the way–he was quicker at reacting in tight spaces. His headlamp illuminated a small, dusty cellar. A large transformer filled the room, accompanied by control panels and fuse switches. Andy had seen systems like it before, linked to the defunct power grid of the old world. Likely, it hadn’t been turned on in years. A tunnel had been excavated in the concrete wall nearby, descending at a slight gradient away from the old power unit. Thick cables were pinned to the one corner of the floor, trailing away into the dark. Andy shone his headlamp inside, but the distance was too great for it to illuminate the far end of the tunnel. Pointing his sidearm, he whistled softly, like calling a dog.
“Stop that,” Clara said, as the sound dissipated down the tunnel. “There must be a backup generator at the other end. I think it leads towards the ocean.” Clara checked her wrist terminal. “Maybe tidal generation. I bet this tunnel was built by the Bulwark Project when they took over this place.”
Andy took an impatient step forward. “Right, sure. Shall we?”
Clara shifted her submachine gun and nodded.
Fluorescent tape ran along the wall like a pole of faint yellow light, thrust into a black pool. Underground, it was utterly silent except for their footsteps–even the gunshots outside had disappeared into nothingness. The air was dingy and dry, not damp, as he had expected. Andy walked through the featureless corridor and soon lost track of time. Looking back, he tried to grasp the distance they’d travelled. Ten metres, then fifty. One hundred? Clara’s headlight behind him cast dancing shadows of his body on walls, stretching down the corridor at irregular angles, seeming to move on their own. The blackness was oddly impenetrable, like a splash of black paint.
Andy reached out to touch the walls when his boot kicked something–a pistol discarded on the ground. He knelt and checked the magazine. Empty. Andy grinned. His heart quickened. A metallic taste trickled over his tongue as his Augmentation released combat enhancing hormones into his system.
Danger, the AI advised.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
“Very astute,” Andy whispered, holstering his sidearm, switching to his assault rifle.
Ahead, the corridor opened up into a large room. Andy’s headlamp shone off the hazy grey moats of dust, as though someone had just ripped open a bag of flour and tossed it around. Squinting, he spotted mesh gates, generators, cooling racks, consoles, and piles of rubble. Perhaps the masons hadn’t finished excavation, or perhaps the generator room had caved in. However, as he grew closer, a shuffling sound grew louder, like white noise, easy to mishear. But once he noticed it, he couldn’t unhear it. Something rustled amongst the piles. The sound grew louder, like hundreds of maggots writhing in a can.
Andy dimmed his headlamp to the lowest setting, then froze in the archway. There were bodies there, dozens of them, twisted together like corpses in a mass grave. They squirmed and twitched, the abrasions of their rough flesh reverberating off the stone walls.
Behind him, Clara dimmed her flashlight and peeked over his shoulder, submachine gun raised, ready for his signal. “Are they alive?” she whispered.
“Technically, no.”
Andy could hear Clara grind her teeth. “Threat level?”
Somewhere in the dark beyond the reaches of his flashlight, there was a clatter. The zombie closest Andy was lying on its back, lidless eyes grey and soulless, gazing into oblivion. Its mouth was agape like a fish, mouthing soulless words. The flesh clung to its skeleton like a thin crust, crumbling away. Years ago, Andy and Clara had encountered a very different breed of zombies–a rage-virus variety–but they were incomparable to this strain. As far as he could tell, these zombies were slow and dry like crackers. He wished he’d tied a balaclava around his mouth because of the dust, but if the virus was airborne, it was already too late for him and Clara.
“Docile, for now,” Andy whispered, no louder than the shuffling sound in the room. He took a step forward, his footfall softened by a carpet of dust.
Clara pointed to a console near the entrance. Andy nodded and escorted her to it, making sure not to step on any toes. The bodies were mostly piled towards the centre of the room, with stragglers stretching their limbs on the concrete at his feet. Andy had never seen anything like it before. Had someone piled the bodies up–perhaps when they had at first died–or had they gathered like that themselves. Once at the console, Clara inspected a padlock over the casing. Her dim torch reflected off a metal panel. A zombie's head twitched nearby, seeming to look in their direction.
“Careful,” Andy whispered. If the zombies got startled and attacked, they might be slow, but there were a lot of them. With his headlamp dimmed, Andy spotted three piles of zombies–about thirty or so undead. He couldn’t see all of the way to the back of the room, but by the sound of it, there could be dozens of piles, and their exit was a few metres away now. He rested his finger gently on the trigger of his rifle. Synthetic combat enhancing hormones seeped into his bloodstream as his Augmentation swelled, ready to explode in a moment’s notice.
Clara fished inside one of her many utility pouches and withdrew a key, placing it inside the padlock, then, with the butt of her dagger, struck the key once. The sound cut through the air like somebody had snapped their fingers. Clara struck the key again. A cluster of zombies piled five-high seemed to have stopped moving. Slowly, their heads turned to face him, grey eyes reflecting the light of their headlamps like pebbles at the bottom of a lake. Andy’s hand drifted towards a frag grenade.
Not taking his eyes off the undead, Andy heard the ting of metal on metal as Clara removed the padlock and a rusty creak as she opened the panel door.
She tapped Andy on the shoulder, then pressed her lips to his ear. “Once I pull this, we run.”
Andy nodded. His hands were sweaty, but his aim was steady. He knew without needing to check that his rifle was set to rapid fire, the magazine was full. His heart beat like an alarm as his Combat Conceptualisation protocols accelerated, picking priority targets, focussing on details. He sensed the quickest route to escape back into the tunnel, but wouldn’t take it until he knew Clara was safely ahead of him.
“On you, sis.”
“Three,” Clara whispered.
Andy aimed into the room, turning his headlamp up one notch at a time, slowly revealing the depth of the walls.
“Two.”
As more of the room illuminated, the true size of the horde revealed itself. Piled to the ceiling, the zombies writhed and slipped free of their tangle, cascading softly towards them like a trickle of sand.
“One.”
Clara flicked the switch. Yellow light blinked, then came on with a buzz. Andy’s heart skipped a beat. The room was massive, there were dozens more piles of zombies than he’d first seen, stacked taller and wider. They flinched and jumped in the light, untangling themselves, climbing over one another towards him and Clara, a sudden landslide of desperate hunger. The generator beside Andy burst to life as Andy opened fire. He sprayed from the shoulder with Enhanced Precision, drawing his muzzle across the room in an arc of destruction. Skulls burst in plumes of dust, each bullet–a killshot.
Clara grabbed his belt and guided him towards the exit while Andy focused on shooting. The zombies picked up speed, first loping towards him, tripping over themselves, then breaking into a run. His adrenaline surged as the zombies charged–he hadn’t expected them to be so fast. They shoved past one another like droplets before a downpour, funnelled into the bottleneck of the corridor. Their mouths were agape but no screams came out, just dry, throaty rasps. The white-noise abrasive sound of decrepit flesh on flesh grew like a waterfall.
Backing into the corridor, Andy’s adrenaline subsided as his Marksman’s delineation powers kicked in. He switched his rifle to single-shot, picking his shots to conserve ammo. The combat enhancing hormones flooded his system as though he had just taken a measured sip of vodka on the rocks–sharp and cold, sophisticated and precise.
“Class four,” he said between shots as they retreated down the long corridor.
“What’s that?”
“Think, mid to late game Nazi Zombies. Not as fast as the Dawn of the Dead remake, but definitely no Walking Dead in the park.”
“What,” Clara said, relieving Andy with a fusillade from her submachine gun as he quickly reloaded his rifle. “They’re Nazis?”
“No, they’re class four.”
“Why would they be Nazis?”
“Forget it!”
Andy took over shooting again, counting the beats of his rifle like a drummer keeping time. The tide of bodies was picking up speed, falling over itself like a wave of bodies. Just as soon as he shot one zombie, another would replace it, charging forward at a sprint, jaw flapping, spindly arms outstretched. Before his rifle’s magazine ran dry, he felt for his grenades, but a frag grenade was too dangerous in the tight space–the concussion and shrapnel might just as well hurt Clara and him than the undead, and what if it bounced off a charging zombie, or they happened to kick it back? Boom and goodbye.
Turning, he ran past Clara, who returned fire down the hallway as he reloaded. There was a rhythm to how they worked together, perfected over years.
“Shoot ‘em in the head, right?” she shouted over gunfire.
“Sure,” Andy chambered a fresh magazine and cracked the heads of a dozen more zombies, but before the forerunners fell to the ground, more closed the distance like the froth and overflow of a shaken beer bottle.
“Or cripple ‘em,” he added, switching his rifle to rapid fire and kneeling, emptying the magazine into the frontrunners’ legs. A swathe of zombies collapsed as their kneecaps splintered, forming a temporary blockade.
“They don’t show you that in the movies,” Clara said, grabbing Andy by the collar of his leather jacket and hauling him to his feet, training her submachine gun on the toppling horde.
“That’s cause it doesn’t look very cool.” Andy weighed his rifle. He had fourteen bullets left, and three full magazines in his combat vest. That wouldn’t be enough ammo for the whole horde, not without chucking all of his grenades. And even then… Maybe they could make it out of the basement and barricade the door behind them? But he remembered the broken latches–it wouldn’t hold. If only he had something more powerful, like a flamethrower or bazooka.
Suddenly, Clara stopped ahead of him and opened fire on their exit. Zombies were pouring in from the building’s ground floor. They must have been attracted by the sound of gunfire. Now he and Clara were trapped, pressed on both sides by a horde.
Andy didn’t much appreciate feeling trapped. He felt a dizzying power as his Augmentation flooded his system with adrenaline and combat steroids. Turning, he fired with desperate precision. His tactic to stall the horde had worked, but only briefly. Cracks appeared in the melee of crippled bodies as a crush of zombies pushed against them from the opposite side like a hose pipe with a blocked spout. The dam broke, and the horde burst forth with terrifying momentum. Andy held his finger on the trigger, pulling the muzzle down against the recoil, making minute adjustments to control the spray. He reloaded in a blink, letting the spent magazine fall to the floor.
The horde piled up before him, but kept on coming. Then his back hit Clara’s. He turned. Zombies poured in steadily from their only exit, too many for Clara to clear on her own. Andy spun around, firing five precise shots, clearing a path towards the exit.
Something grabbed his shoulder. Andy’s Killer Instinct triggered, and before he could think, he had drawn his 9mm sidearm and shot backwards underneath his armpit three times, drawing a line up through his attacker’s spine towards its skull. The zombie’s head exploded, white colourless eyes flying in opposite directions. Time slowed down as a killing urge seized Andy. It tasted like he was chewing lead as his Hitman delineation pumped steroids through his veins.
Andy slung his rifle up in one hand, holding the 9mm sidearm in his other. The corridor flashed like a rave. Zombies fell at his feet. One collided with him. Another grabbed his pistol arm. Andy recoiled, ducking and weaving, firing point blank into their faces like a boxer throwing jabs. But it wasn’t enough. His marksmanship wasn’t cutting it. Panic washed over him. He couldn’t die to zombies, that was lame. So vanilla!
I’m yours.
A warm sensation spread through his hip as Julie vibrated in her holster. Suddenly, the whole world melted away, and it was just Andy and his revolver. Normally, he wouldn’t use the six-shooter against hordes, but something told him to forget logic, and trust Julie. With a thought, she bolted out of her holster and snapped into his hands with Deadly Attraction. As soon as he touched her polished wood handle, he knew it was right. He could feel her swollen energy, begging for release. Andy cocked her hammer and obliged.
A shockwave erupted from Julie’s barrel, screaming down the corridor, ripping through the horde. The shockwave tore the zombies apart like dynamite thrown into a box of matches. Many of the forerunners turned to dust in a second, like smoke bombs. Andy coughed and cleared the air with his hand. What was that? His powers? He didn’t know he had it in him.
Alert: Affinity delineation synthesis complete. Experimental programme installed: Vortex Shot. Please calibrate at an Augmentation Master Console.
Julie hummed in his hand, pining for him to pull the trigger. That quickly, and she was eager to go again.
Andy strode towards the horde with Julie outstretched and fired another Vortex Shot. He felt power swell from the soles of his feet up his spine, through his arm and into Julie’s slick mechanism. It was as though his entire body had become an explosive device, combusted by his and Julie’s passion. The walls shook as he pulled Julie’s trigger and she screamed. The boom was low, laden with sub-frequencies, making his ears ring in new ways he didn’t think they could.
With just three Vortex Shots, he had cleared a path down the corridor back towards the generator room. But the zombies at the rear were getting up, and there were more behind them. If thrown right, he could plant a grenade right in the middle of the horde. Unpinning the grenade, he ran towards the exit. Clara was there, covering his back. He threw the grenade down the corridor and leapt through the doorway, slamming it shut behind him and leaning on it. The explosion shook the door.
“What was that?” Clara shouted, though her voice sounded distant and dull.
Andy rubbed his ears. “Grenade.”
Clara attached two thick zip ties around the doors’ handles and pulled them taught. “No, stupid. Before that?”
“Oh, just me and Julie.”
“What do you mean? How?”
Andy spun his revolver around his finger, blew her barrel, even though it wasn’t smoking, and holstered her, just like he’d practised in front of the mirror a hundred times. “A new Augmentation thingy.”
Clara’s mouth dropped. “What, really? What is it?”
“Just something me and Julie have been cooking up together.”
“That’s incredible,” Clara said. “You can just do that now? The big explosion thing?”
Andy clicked his tongue. “Yeah.” Though he wasn’t entirely sure.
“Nice one, bro.” Clara punched his shoulder.
Pretending it didn’t hurt, Andy flicked Julie’s cylinder open and refilled her with bullets. “Cheers. Now give me something else to try it out on.”