Читать книгу Apocalypse of the Dead - Joe Mckinney - Страница 13

“What are we gonna do?” Richardson asked.

He was following Michael Barnes as best he could, wading through water that looked like melted caramel, holding his AR-15 up above his shoulders to keep it from getting wet.

“Be quiet,” Barnes ordered him. “I’m gonna get us to a secure position. A roof, if possible. From there, we’re gonna call for extraction.”

“They’ll extract us? You’re sure?”

Barnes put a finger to his lips. Then, using hand gestures, he indicated that they were going to go around the back of the grocery store and into the buildings behind it.

They couldn’t use the roof of the grocery store. Richardson knew that. Scared as he was, he’d been able to tell from the air that the building’s roof had collapsed in on itself. It wouldn’t be safe.

He turned and looked back at the wreckage of their helicopter. The thing looked like the jumbled exoskeleton of some enormous insect. A thick column of smoke rose into the air. Beyond the wreckage, he could see the infected already coming into the area. They were attracted to noise. All their senses worked, but their sense of hearing was the strongest. And the moaning of those already in the area would only make things worse.

He’d read Eddie Hudson’s book about the first night of the outbreak in San Antonio, and like a lot of others had, he found it hard to believe that so many of the infected could pour into a street that was completely empty only moments before. But after seeing it for himself, he knew it was true.

Michael Barnes clearly knew it, too. Like all members of the Gulf Region Quarantine Authority, Barnes was a graduate of the Shreveport Survival School. Richardson had interviewed some of its instructors and had even been through an abbreviated version of the program before being allowed to go inside the quarantine zone with GRQA agents. He had a sense of what Barnes was trying to do by guiding them against the side wall of the grocery store. Richardson was ready for the slow but steady pace of their advance, stay quiet, stop, listen, scan, and move out again. While at the Shreveport School, he had felt like a kid playing cops and robbers. But this was the real deal.

Ahead of him, Barnes stopped and looked around. He motioned for Richardson to come forward.

“When we go around this corner, we’re not gonna stop, okay? You’ll see a strip center just ahead of you. We’re gonna stay to the right of that. You got me?”

“Yeah,” Richardson said.

“That weapon you’ve got there can fire through a magazine in a hurry, so don’t lose your cool and empty the whole thing into the first zombie you see. Every shot counts, or you don’t take it.”

Richardson nodded.

“Okay, let’s go.”

Barnes stepped around the corner and Richardson tucked in right behind him. Ahead of them was a long stretch of water, the strip mall Barnes had told him about on the opposite side. In between, a few cars were sunken up to their windshields. Here and there they saw a tree.

Richardson counted sixteen zombies, all of them within fifty yards of their position and closing fast.

“Let’s go,” Barnes said.

He was already moving out, going quickly, but without splashing. It was harder for Richardson. He was terrified of moving through water, especially when he couldn’t see his feet. He had a terrible feeling that the infected were just below the surface, waiting to grab him, even though he knew that to be impossible. The infected weren’t truly dead, after all. They needed to breathe to go on hunting.

As they were moving forward, he tripped over the curb of a traffic island and went face-first into the water. When he came up, spluttering and blinking the water from his eyes, he saw that Barnes was already a good ten yards ahead of him.

He ran forward, making a terrific splash.

But Barnes didn’t try to quiet him. One of the zombies had closed the distance between them, and Barnes leveled his AR-15 and dropped him with one shot.

Two others were close by and he dropped them as well. The pools of blood spreading out around the dead zombies turned green as they sank.

Barnes turned back to Richardson and said, “Heads up. Behind you.”

Richardson twisted around.

A male zombie, the face a blotchy pattern of scabs and abscessed wounds, was less than ten feet from him. He hadn’t heard it moving behind him, he realized. And then another thought occurred to him. This was one of the later-stage zombies. It didn’t move with the same clumsy gait. The milky film had cleared from its eyes. The dead, vacant stare was gone. In its place was a feral intensity, the deliberateness of a hunter.

“Shoot it,” Barnes ordered.

Richardson muttered an acknowledgment and raised his rifle and fired.

His first shot hit the zombie in the neck and sent it spiraling backward into the water.

Richardson got it in the head with his second shot.

He heard firing behind him. Barnes had zombies on three sides, but he was still calm. His firing was controlled, his pattern deliberate. One after another, the zombies went down until only a few remained, and those farther off, not yet a threat.

The battle had lasted perhaps twenty seconds, but Barnes had managed to drop a dozen or more of the infected. Richardson was in awe.

“Be careful,” Barnes said. “Don’t get too close to them. They may look dead, but it’s always possible for one of them to pop up suddenly.”

Richardson nodded.

“Come on. Let’s go.”

Barnes led him to a five-story building a couple hundred yards away. All the windows and doors had been blasted inward during the storms and the first floor was choked with debris, lath visible through the walls. Water came up to the bottom of the few pictures still on the walls and lapped at the top of the receptionist’s counter toward the back.

“Come on,” Barnes said. “We’re headed for the roof.”

They found the stairs and started up, water pouring out of their flight suits as they moved up to the second floor.

Richardson stayed behind Barnes, letting him make sure the way was clear before they proceeded upward again. Every floor was a repeat of the one below it, wrecked, the walls peeling, the carpet dark and moldy beneath their boots. The place smelled of seawater and sewage and rot.

When they reached the roof, Barnes moved immediately to the edge and looked down.

Richardson moved in beside him.

Below, a few zombies were moving toward the fallen corpses. Richardson knew that these later-stage zombies were cannibals, and wouldn’t hesitate at an easy meal.

He was watching one pack of zombies eating a floating corpse when all of a sudden the corpse was yanked under the water. One of the zombies refused to let go of his meal and was pulled down with it. He resurfaced about twenty feet away, but with one arm bitten off at the elbow.

“What the hell was that?” Richardson said.

Barnes watched the zombie get to its feet and just stand there with a vacant expression on its face.

A moment later, it was pulled under again.

“What’s down there?”

“Tiger shark, probably.”

“A tiger shark? You’re kidding.”

“They’ve been known to come in this far during high tide,” Barnes said. “And we did put a lot of blood in the water.”

He stood up then and took the radio from his tactical vest.

“Quarter Four-One to Dispatch,” he said.

“Go ahead, Quarter Four-One.”

“Quarter Four-One, we’ve set up on the roof of the Clear Lake Title Office. Our situation is stable at present, no injuries. Request evac A-sap.”

There was a long pause.

“Quarter Four-One?” Barnes said.

“We read you, Quarter Four-One. Negative on your request. Evac is not possible from your current location.”

Barnes looked at Richardson and frowned. “What the fuck?” he said. He keyed up his radio again. “Quarter Four-One, you did copy my transmission, didn’t you? Our situation is stable, but urgent. We are not injured. We need immediate evac.”

The radio was silent.

Barnes tried again, but got nothing.

“Fuck,” he said, and clipped his radio back onto his tactical vest.

“What does that mean?” Richardson said. “Why won’t they answer you?”

“What the fuck do you think it means?”

Barnes sat down against an air duct and took a Snickers bar from his vest. “Might as well get comfortable,” he said. “We’re not going anywhere for a while.”