CHAPTER TEN

 

 

IMAGINE TWELVE WILD, hooded dogs on leads. Imagine trying to walk those dogs. Imagine trying to walk those dogs while they’re hungry, and drunk. Imagine trying not to get bitten or scratched by those dogs while keeping them moving in a straight line.

You are now imagining something about half as impossible as marching a handcuffed, hooded zombie through an underground lab facility.

The first part was relatively—note relatively—simple, as Ghost Melissa—I’m going to have to refer to her that way while two Melissas are in the same place—led me to a narrow maintenance corridor that connected the underground sections of the admin block with the other sub-levels.

It was tricky, but guiding a flailing, blind zombie down a narrow corridor wasn’t impossible, my undead captive ricocheting off the walls and moving in the general direction I wanted, provided I nudged her in the back now and then. I held on to the back of Zombie Melissa’s jacket, or the tag that tied her wrists together, allowing me to guide her while also pulling her back if she was about to fall over or crash face first into the wall.

I found myself thinking of the zombie as ‘her’. Partially that was because I knew Melissa, while I hadn’t known any of the other zombies I’d encountered. It also helped that with the head bagged it was harder to tell Zombie Melissa was undead, and wasn’t just a normal woman I had tied up and was manhandling down a corridor.

So she seemed more like a person, but I felt unbelievably horrible, creepy and guilty about the whole business, which seemed slightly unfair as Zombie Melissa would happily eat me if given the freedom to do so.

Soon we emerged into an underground car park, and that was where the real problems began. Not only was it a more open space, but the floor was slightly skiddy with oil and other liquids I didn’t want to think about.

Yes, there were other zombies there, as well as the remains of people who had been torn apart without getting the chance to rise again. Thankfully, they were quite far away, and Ghost Melissa alerted me to their presence in advance. I tried to keep Zombie Melissa quiet as we began to cross the space.

I was surprised by how big it was. A cavernous, high-ceilinged concrete space lit by a small number of electric lights, the car park contained a large selection of civilian cars, a row of anonymous black vans, and a couple of high-end sporty vehicles that I presumed belonged to the most senior staff. There was a lot of empty space, and I could see zombies staggering around between the cars.

There was an exit ramp at the far end, in which half a dozen cars had collided, blocking the exit. A queue of cars were abandoned behind the crashed cars, and human remains were scattered around the floor on that side of the car park.

The crashed cars still had lights on, and it was easy to see how the chaotic attempt at escaping the facility had gone badly, badly wrong. In the light from the cars, a large group of zombies bustled around each other at that end of the car park, though there were a few nearer to us too.

‘How do we get past that?’ I hissed to Ghost Melissa. She had indicated the door we were heading towards, but had now come back to join her corpse as we—rather, I—tried not to draw the attention of the horde.

‘We don’t,’ Ghost Melissa said, using a normal tone of voice as only I could hear her anyway. ‘We take a vehicle from the next level down, the secure loading bay, and take the other ramp. The specimen transports are armoured, so they should smash through anything we need to get through.’

I nodded. Ghost Melissa had had me check the pockets of her zombie self before we left the server room, and I presumed the keycard and ring of random keys were related to getting into the relevant area and stealing the vehicle we needed. I certainly didn’t want to have more of a conversation than I needed to, not with so many undead lurking nearby. Though I suppose, strictly speaking, they were going about their business and it was I who was doing the lurking.

One of the zombies in the horde let out an exceptionally high moan, and another returned the same noise, like the worst call and response birdsong you ever heard. Zombie Melissa started to try and steer herself towards the rest of the group, and I had to drag her back on course.

Shit, could they communicate? If so, I needed to get Zombie Melissa away from the rest before she could call for help.

From beneath her hood, Zombie Melissa let out a low, keening moan.

Across the car park, in the lights from the crashed cars, I could see the large group of zombies turn towards us.

‘Shit,’ I said out loud. There seemed little point in pretending I wasn’t there anymore.

The horde began to move towards us, spreading out as they did so. Meanwhile, we were only halfway across the breadth of the car park. Even with their jerky, clumsy movements, some of them were going to get between me and the door I needed to reach.

I began to shove Zombie Melissa with more urgency. We were just passing behind an abandoned sedan car when she tripped, falling clumsily sideways and taking me with her.

I rolled on to my back, letting go of Zombie Melissa, who had ended up on her front, legs kicking aimlessly.

It was then I saw that zombies were emerging from the shadows nearby, far closer to me than the approaching horde.

Ghost Melissa stood there looking between me and her zombie self stuck on the floor, the handful of zombies nearby, and the larger group moving in from the end of the car park.

The look on her transparent face said it all. We were screwed, she couldn’t see a way out in time.

Then a bullet passed through her chest, hitting a zombie a couple of feet behind her.

The zombie, which I hadn’t even noticed before, was knocked back. A second shot took its head clean off.

They were followed by more shots, thin red laser lines cutting through the darkness, gunshots echoing in the large concrete box of a car park, accompanied by muffled orders and the static bark of close range radio communication.

I squeezed myself close to the floor, and shuffled forward to see past where Zombie Melissa was lying. The other end of the car park was sufficiently far away that I could see up to about waist height from this low angle, and I could make out figures moving purposefully in the darkness, military boots and fatigued legs.

The clean-up crew. Zombie Melissa’s stumble, which had seemed to doom us a moment ago, had just saved us from a gunshot each to the head.

The figures were moving in on the horde at the other end of the car park, and switched to what, to my untrained ear, sounded like automatic weapons, guns that let out cacophonous short bursts of gunfire. I could see bodies dropping as the clean-up crew tore into the large group of zombies.

I rolled over and looked around. There didn’t seem to be any shots coming down this end of the car park now.

That was my chance. Staying low, I pulled myself up to a crouch, then dragged Zombie Melissa up on to her knees. As she made a muffled noise of what could have been complaint but probably wasn’t, I glanced up at the violence at the other end of the car park.

The clean-up crew looked like a stereotypical SWAT team, all body armour and goggles and helmets. They were busy with the main group of zombies, but it wouldn’t take them long to finish them off. Behind the heavily armed group I could see a couple of men in suits and gas masks following, along with similarly masked men in lab coats or hazmat suits.

It was getting crowded. Once that zombie mob was dealt with, they would no doubt sweep the area, and all it would take would be for one of the execs or scientists to glance my way as I got up and all that firepower would be aimed at me.

I dragged Zombie Melissa to her feet and ran, half-dragging her with me, across the open space between the car and a row of vans.

There was a zombie that had managed to stay out of the line of sight of the clean-up crew wandering around near the first van, just where I was running towards. As I pulled Zombie Melissa behind the van I let go of her, letting her stagger the rest of the way herself, and shoulder charged the other zombie.

I crashed into it at waist level, knocking it sideways and somehow sending it flailing without losing my own footing. It keeled over with an aggrieved moan, and I scrambled away from it.

There was only a short distance from the van we were hiding behind to the door Ghost Melissa had indicated.

‘Card,’ Ghost Melissa hissed. ‘We need to use the card.’

I nodded and readied the card I had picked from Zombie Melissa’s pocket in one hand, and used the other to hold her by the wrist restraints again.

I took a deep breath, aware that the zombie I had toppled was scraping its way towards me across the concrete floor, then pushed Zombie Melissa out into open space again.

The card reader was to the right of the door, and as I swept the card through it I held Zombie Melissa face-first against the door, my left hand pressed into her back as she struggled.

The card went through. Red light. Nothing.

I glanced down at the other end of the car park. The gunfire had ceased and the SWAT brigade were having their own special kind of fun, finishing off zombies with batons as they climbed over piles of corpses.

Then I looked at the swipe card in my hand. It was the wrong way around, magnetic strip facing out of the reader.

I flipped it between my fingers, swiped it through the reader, and the light went green with a louder-than-I-would-like beep.

I didn’t wait to look around and see if any of the clean-up crew had heard the noise, I shoved Zombie Melissa straight through as the door swung open, and rushed through behind her.

 

 

THERE WAS A story to be told about the places we went through on our way to the location Gregson had marked on the map, but I wasn’t the one with the background knowledge to tell them and if Melissa was, she was keeping quiet, subdued by the presence of her zombie body stumbling along ahead of her.

I couldn’t tell you the narrative behind what we saw down there, in the labs. I just saw the aftermath, the evidence of fallen cages, shattered glass, bullet holes in walls and blood smears on the floor.

The clean-up crew had obviously torn through here, guns blazing, albeit via a route whereby they reached the car park we’d just left at a different entrance; thank fuck, as we’d have run straight into them otherwise. Most of the zombies we saw were dead—deader than they had been, rather—and there were neat piles of body bags set aside from some of the carnage.

The only zombies we saw walking were still trapped in their pens or cages. There were clearly various environmental tests going on with both the dead and the undead—at one point we passed through an open room with wired-off areas of artificial grassland, under huge high-intensity lights, a cross between the FBI’s body farm where they observed decomposition in the wild, and a large scale urban dope farm.

Within the little pens were prone bodies and wandering zombies, the smell drifting through the air conditioned space, and making me gag.

Worse still was the specimen pool, a dank underground lake with bodies floating by, only the floaters visible as the filthy water was almost opaque. I actually threw up at that point, and would have been doubled up for ages if the gantry that ran above the pool wasn’t relatively short, leading to another heavy door.

I exited the pool room with a complete lack of caution, and I think it was only the sheer noise in the next chamber that saved me from drawing attention to us, the roar of grinding gears and the hiss of flames, accompanied by the muffled shouts of workers.

After the dampness of the pool room, the next room was baking hot, with a foul but scorched stench in the air. Thankfully the sides of the gantry were at shoulder height, so I didn’t need to force Zombie Melissa to kneel or anything as we slowly crossed the area.

Shadows of moving men were cast onto the ceiling above the gantry, flickering in firelight, and I glanced briefly over the inner edge of the gantry to see environment-suited men and women throwing bagged corpses into what looked like an industrial crusher, feeding into a vast incinerator.

 

 

AFTER ALL THAT, the fact that the testing room where they stored, and presumably administered, the stabiliser looked like a torture chamber seemed relatively tame.

It was a clean, scrubbed room with whitewashed walls, intense light and a series of medical cupboards down one wall. At the centre of the room were a row of three padded chairs, each with restraint straps dangling from them.

After what I had just seen I was perfectly prepared to shoot any scientist or just-following-orders body disposal goon we ran into, but the room was empty. Nudging Zombie Melissa in, I holstered my pistol and locked the door behind us using one of Melissa’s keys, following her instructions.

‘What do we do now?’ Ghost Melissa asked. She seemed less confident, having improvised well beyond the reaches of the plan she had pitched to me in the diner.

‘You find the stabiliser,’ I said. ‘While I get you seated.’

As Ghost Melissa stuck her head through the doors of cupboards and fridges, I prepared to wrangle her zombie body into one of the chairs.