Everyone held their melee weapon close. One by one they turned their flashlights off. The pace had slowed down even more as they gave their eyes time to acclimate to the darkness. Marcus and Atticus approached the soggy zombies awaiting them in the deep dark sewer tunnels.
Marcus hammered in one’s skull bringing it down in two strikes. Atticus rifle-butted two to the ground, quickly sliding his rifle over his shoulder and pulling a tactical dagger in each hand, cutting into their brains, and thusly rendering them inert. The party passed through the chunky water. Marcus and Atticus kept the lead. They were all warmed up and ready for business.
The tunnel had minor off-shoots here and there when finally, it gave way to some sort of station. Everyone checked around. Rebecca found stairs leading out of the sewage. It led to a sealed door. Most of the team followed her up the stairs. Samuel fished around down a hallway pumping fresh water into the sewage. Atticus watched him wander off while Marcus tried furiously to get the door atop the stairs open.
Atticus followed them up, “Odds are for whatever reason that door is locked it’s keeping the dead either in or out, and its clear out here.”
“Do you have an alternative for us?” Rebecca panted as she rested after her latest attempt at opening the sealed door.
“Me? No. But Samuel might be on to something.”
A metal clank loud enough to stir any kind of unwanted attention was heard down the hallway that Samuel disappeared into. Everyone followed suit behind Atticus, all popping their flashlights back on. More and more bangs against steel pipes told them they were headed in the right direction. Atticus just hoped they were the only ones.
Samuel had his back against a wall while heaving his heel into shower-pipes, causing the ruckus. He had dislodged the shower plate above them enough to squeeze through, one by one, to ground-level. Whatever Samuel just did stopped the flow of fresh water through the room allowing the sewage to return. Marcus and Atticus helped Samuel up. Atticus passed Samuel his rifle while he boosted Rebecca and Karina through. Malcolm and Harold climbed through and then Atticus let Marcus step onto his shoulders. When Marcus got to the surface he turned around, letting Malcolm and Harold hold his legs, and grabbed Atticus bringing him up.
Samuel stood while they pulled Atticus up and brushed his shoulder off, grinning, “I can’t believe we made it to the showers.”
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There, waiting for him, was a corrections officer. And by the look of him he had long since stopped living. Just about the same time the bloody drool from his lip hit the ground, the corrections officer tried to put his cold dead hands around Samuel’s throat. The girls screamed as they were caught off-guard, the men finished pulling Atticus through, and Samuel helplessly, almost seamlessly, fell through the hole back into the sewers.
He saw his friends struggle with the sneak-attack zombie as his view was pulled both far from and below them. Samuel braced for an impact but what proceeded was far worse. By the time he felt the cold grit slick over his head the sewer juice flooded his vision. It was everywhere. The scientist in him was running the probability of infection whereas the survivor in him was trying to push through, block it out of his head; there were greater things to fear than a little sewage.
A firm grasp of his ankle.
Samuel thrashed around before he let anything else happen to him. Gasping for air and some footing, he had kicked the intruder away temporarily. The sewer zombies had little flesh remaining on their body. Most of it pruned and washed away long ago. Being in the darkness for so long they were also practically blind and hunted for living flesh through sound. Samuel pushed as many as he could off. Thankfully, he had gloves on to protect his bare hands from the amount of flesh slipping off of their decrepit bodies. Even their moans were different, slow gargles of lifeless hunger. Samuel finally got to his knees in the sludge, with both arms beside him, balancing him, he stomped the waterlogged zombies into chunks of their own messes. But that didn’t stop all of them.
Legless torsos pushed through the sludge, nipping at Samuel’s heels. He had gotten to the pipes he slammed ajar before and hooked an arm around them. Samuel wiped the sewage water from his face and looked up. His friends had not abandoned him. Rebecca was being lowered in to give him a hand.
“You got me?” he asked her.
Rebecca shook her head and gave a brief smile.
Rebecca firmly grasped his wrist as they pulled both of them back up into the shower room. One last sewer zombie lunged for Samuel’s bare ankle. The wretched thing threw its face at Samuel being lifted away and would have caught him if it wasn’t for Rebecca pulling her sidearm out with her other hand and blasting a hole through the undead head.
Samuel took a second to gather himself while everyone else secured the room. The first thing he did was get as clean as possible, and then he fixed the shower pipe which closed the crack in the floor. Samuel armed himself with Atticus’ spare pistol and rejoined the infiltration group.
“Ok. Where were we?”
Marcus led them all into the cell block.