The noise; the howling and the moaning and the screaming seemed to be coming from all around us.
And the smell. The wind carried it and it seemed to cling to the dust particles. It was the smell of rotting, putrid flesh.
Daniel was maybe a step in front of me. I risked a glance over my shoulder to see where the others were but I couldn’t see them through the dust. I couldn’t hear them over the noise of gunfire and howling infected.
I looked back at the computer store. There was no sign of Griffin. I couldn’t see clearly but it looked like there were loose wires or tentacles or something flailing wildly from the doorway of the store. A few of the wire things pierced the windows of the Toyota Prius we were only just hiding behind. The tentacles then lifted the car clear off the ground and flipped it over.
I continued running. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Something had just killed Griffin and dragged him into the store, to its lair.
I ran harder, almost tripped over. I dropped the handgun that Daniel had given me and it skidded underneath a car. I left it. There was no time to stop and pick it up.
The noise was driving me insane. It was coming from all around us, yet we couldn’t see anything.
Suddenly, Daniel shoulder barged into one of the infected. I screamed in shock. It came out of nowhere.
Daniel squeezed my hand tighter and pulled me along, making sure I didn’t stop. There was no time to kill it. No time to take up a position and return fire. We just had to run.
We ran past a truck, a big semi trailer that had jack-knifed across half of the road. It was a McDonald’s truck. On the side of the trailer, just under the big golden ‘M’ were the words, ‘Over a billion burgers sold. 100% Aussie beef. And real chicken breast.’
I remember hearing somewhere; maybe it was Kenji that told me, the golden arches were more recognizable than any other symbol on earth, even more recognizable than the Christian Cross or the peace sign.
“Climb up!” Daniel shouted at me.
I didn’t have time to ask why, or to argue that if we climb up there and get stranded we’d be absolutely screwed. I just did what he said. He climbed up on to the roof of the cabin, just above the driver’s seat and reached down to help me up. We crouched on top of the roof to see if we could see the others through the dust. But again, we couldn’t see anything. Even from our vantage point, the dust was too thick.
Just then I heard one of the loudest screams of pain I’ve ever heard. This was followed by choking noises. The scream seemed to come from back down the road, back in the direction we had just run from.
Daniel was about to call out to the Ethan and Smitty when something came flying through the air and smashed into the windscreen of the truck.
I didn’t fully understand what it was at first. Maybe my brain was playing a trick on me. Maybe it was trying to protect me from the reality of what it was. But then my brain caught on. The thing that smashed into the front windshield of the truck; it was Ethan. Or what was left of Ethan. His legs were missing; his guts were hanging out of his torso. He had a look of absolute horror frozen on his face.
A roar erupted from back down the road, in the direction from where Ethan had been thrown. It was different to the screaming howl of the infected. It was louder than the wind, louder than anything. It was loud enough that I could feel it in my chest. The windows of the surrounding buildings shattered. Glass fell from high above our heads, smashing on to the streets below.
None of this made sense.
The roar ceased and then we could hear Smitty shouting something. We heard the sound of a grenade launcher and his machine gun, his m249 mini-me, on full automatic fire. Two hundred rounds, I thought to myself.
Then we heard Smitty scream. It was blood chilling, heart stopping. It was full of pain and agony.
Daniel looked through the scope on his rifle.
“What the hell was that?” I shouted. “What happened to Ethan!? What did that to him!? Where are the others!?”
Daniel didn’t answer. He was scanning back and forth with his rifle. He was frantic. He fired off multiple shots in all directions, into the nothingness of the dust.
“Can you see anything?” I asked.
“I don’t know! Something big. It’s... it’s huge. We have to go!”
I looked around. “Go? Go where? What about the others?”
“They’re dead. Ethan’s dead. He’s...he’s in half. Smitty is gone. Griffin...”
His voice trailed off as he fired more rounds. When he ran out of ammo, he reloaded and continued firing. He unloaded two more magazines.
Daniel had gone into shock. His whole team was gone. The best and baddest soldiers in the world.
Gone.
I grabbed him by the shoulders. “Come on! If we don’t get out of here, we’re next!”
He looked up at me and nodded his head. But his body was still frozen. That’s when we heard the footsteps.
Loud, heavy footsteps.
One after the other, heavy enough to shake the truck we were on, heavy enough to almost knock us off.
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I looked around quickly. But again I couldn’t see a damn thing. And at that point it was hard to keep my balance as the cabin rocked back and forth from the vibrations. Down on the street I could just make out the crowd of infected surrounding the semi. Their outstretched arms and hands and fingernails were clawing into the truck, scraping the sides of the trailer. Their eyes were wide and glazed over; their mouths were stained with blood. Most of them were baring their teeth, some were missing teeth, others were missing the whole lower section of their jaws altogether.
They were starting to shake the cabin and the trailer, trying hopelessly to climb up. It then dawned on me if there were enough of them, they would start piling up on one another, like a swarm of ants.
I did not want to go back down to street level. We’d be ripped apart and eaten in a matter of seconds. Even with the protection of the NBC suits, there’s no way we’d survive that many of them.
I stood up and moved towards the trailer. When the truck had lost control and jack-knifed across the road, the trailer had slammed into the corner of a building, knocking out a section of the wall. It looked like the end of the trailer had wedged itself in the entrance to an alleyway.
If we could make it to the end of the trailer, we could maybe climb up and into a first storey window. Or we could get to the fire escape stairs that zig zagged up the side of the building.
“Come on,” I said to Daniel. “If we run to the end of the trailer we can make it onto the fire escape and get inside that building.”
Daniel regained his senses. He slung his rifle over his shoulder and jumped from the roof of the truck onto the roof of the trailer.
He sized up our options. “That’s a pretty big jump. Even with the aid of the suits. Do you think you can make it?”
It was a distance of about fifteen feet and at least another storey up from where we were.
“Yeah, no problem. Ah, I think.”
The loud, heavy footsteps continued to come closer. And the roaring. My god, the roar of this thing was incredible. It was like a howler monkey and a 747 jumbo jet engine combined. And it sounded angry, like we’d woken it up or something. So I guess we didn’t really have a choice. We needed to get inside the building or die trying.
“We’ll need a running start,” Daniel said.
“Just go!”
The thing coming towards us roared again. It was an earth shattering, ground shaking roar.
Daniel didn’t need any more prompts. He took off at full sprint, taking five huge steps and then jumped from the very end of the trailer. He practically flew through the air, his arms were flailing and his legs were kicking like he was still sort of running through mid-air. He made the distance easily and landed on the fire escape violently.
He waved me forward. “Come on!”
I took off running, leaning forward, nice and low. I can make this, I was telling myself as I ran. I can make this. I took another step but was tripped up by something. I fell and slid along the rest of the trailer, coming to a stop at the very edge, stopping myself from falling over, stopping myself from falling down to the road below.
I looked back from where I had run. The infected had done what I feared they would do. They’d started piling up on one another. One of them had reached out to grab my foot, tripping me over.
Another one had almost climbed on top of the trailer. He stared at me the whole time. His mouth was open, his teeth were bared. He pulled himself up and on to the trailer. He was about to charge at me but then all of a sudden his head exploded.
“Hurry!” Daniel shouted. “Get up! I won’t be able to shoot them all!”
I clambered back to my feet. The rest of the infected were now starting to climb on top of the trailer. I didn’t have time for a run up, I didn’t have room. I took two quick steps and jumped as far as I could, reaching out with my right hand. Just as I hit the top of my jump and began falling back to earth, I grabbed on to the lowest rung of the fire escape ladder. And I held on for dear life.
Below me, the crowd of infected swarmed, trying to climb up and over each other to get to my dangling feet. I swung my left arm up and grabbed on to the ladder.
Come on, I thought to myself. All I needed to do was one pull up. One measly, little chin up and I could climb up the rest of the ladder.
Daniel was just above me. He had his rifle cocked and ready. He looked like he was pointing the rifle right at me.
“Wait! What are you doing?” I asked.
“Hurry! Climb up. But don’t move. And don’t look down!”
“What!?”
“Don’t move your head!”
Just then I felt something grab onto my foot and I nearly lost my grip on the ladder.
Daniel fired a couple of rounds. I ducked my head into my shoulder, closing my eyes.
“I told you not to move!” he shouted.
“I didn’t!”
“You did!”
Another hand grabbed my other foot and I really started to lose my grip on the ladder. “Get them off me!”
I braced myself for another barrage of bullets from Daniel, hoping he was still calm and controlled enough to keep his aim.
A few seconds passed but there were no shots. I looked up. Daniel had put his rifle down. He was now climbing down the ladder towards me.
“What the hell are you doing?” I asked.
“I can’t get a clean shot.”
He stopped climbing and hooked his legs around one of the ladder rungs just above my head. Then he leant all the way back, so now he was dangling upside down, his back against mine, his head down near my butt.
He took his sidearm out. It was the Desert Eagle.
He took aim and fired twice. I could feel the grip on my feet loosen and fall away.
Daniel pulled himself back up the ladder and then leant down and helped me up. We were on the first landing of the fire escape. We were safe from the swarms of the infected but that big thing was still coming.
There was no time to catch our breath. We had to keep moving.
Suddenly, the huge McDonalds semi-trailer was pushed out of the way, crushing hundreds of the infected in the process.
“We need to get to a higher level!” Daniel shouted. “Now!”
We started running up the metal stairs. I kept tripping over, step after step. I wasn’t used to running up stairs in the suit. It was weird and awkward, like my feet were too big or I was wearing oversized clown shoes or something.
We got maybe two flights up when that giant thing grabbed on to the first level of the fire escape and ripped the whole lower section off the wall.
I nearly fell over the railing. The force knocked us off our feet and Daniel dropped the Desert Eagle down into the alley below. I still couldn’t see the damn thing because the dust was concealing it. But it sounded like it was climbing up after us.
We managed to run up two more flights before another huge force rocked the entire stair case. It began to break away from the side of the building. The metal staircase, the whole structure, the entire fire escape, was rocked again, even more violently. It started shaking back and forth.
“We need to get off this structure!” I said.
Daniel was one move ahead of me. He had his rifle pointed at one of the adjacent windows. He unloaded a barrage of bullets, smashing the glass. He dived through it, breaking the rest of the glass with his body. He didn’t even check to see if it was safe on the other side. He just jumped. I guess anything would’ve been safer than staying on the fire escape at that point in time.
Daniel picked himself up off the floor and turned around and motioned me forward. “Hurry!”
I looked down, a huge hand, like the hand of God, or a giant demon, reached up out of the dust and grabbed on to the staircase.
As I jumped through the window, the giant hand ripped the entire fire escape from the side of the building. Everything, including the staircase and half the wall of the building and that giant thing fell back down into the alley.
We were breathing hard, crouching just below the window we had jumped through. The loud, heavy footsteps passed us by. We snuck a look, peering over the edge of the window sill. We couldn’t see it clearly. All we could see was a shadow of something massive walking through the swirling red dust.
I shook my head. It just didn’t make sense.