Read Dead Hunger: The Flex Sheridan Chronicle Page 25

  Because we needed to leave Trina, Cynthia and the dog without a name with Max, we were acutely aware that we were without Gem and the firepower she provided. We’d brought enough spare 9mm ammo with us that we felt satisfied we had enough, but I grabbed the first axe I found in a fire hose cabinet, and Hemp snatched another when we reached a second station.

  If we ran into any uninfecteds, they would absolutely shit their pants. I imagined what we looked like. No sleep in a full day, sweating, dirty, bloody and bruised.

  And brandishing submachine guns and axes.

  I looked at Hemp. “Did you see the movie They Live?”

  We stepped into the service elevator that ran down to the garage level. “No,” he said. “Who’s in it? Anyone I’d have heard of?”

  “Not a chance,” I said. “But there’s a great line in it.”

  Hemp swiped his card, hitting the G button. The car began to fall smoothly. “And what’s that?”

  I smiled. “I came here to chew some bubble gum and kick some ass. And I’m all out of bubble gum.”

  “You Americans are all a bunch of John Waynes, aren’t you?”

  I shrugged and we both managed a good laugh.

  When the doors slid open it was into wall of zombies.

  There. I said it. Fucking zombies. I could use respectable terminology when I was dealing with Jamie, but right now, it was the first thing that came to mind.

  Rapid decomposition of their skin had turned it pocked, wrinkled and flaky, and as they pushed against one another to access the oversized cargo elevator, the dead skin flew into the air like tiny winged gnats.

  And they reeked.

  “Get over! Over!” Hemp shouted, and I did. He swung his axe neck-height, and whacked the heads from the first two he hit, the axe blade embedding into a third’s neck, the black-red blood spraying every visible surface. A disgusting stench that smelled like mold and shit accompanied the horrid mist.

  The moan-scream the things made seemed unlike the sounds they emitted when we were shooting them, perhaps because they were dying differently. I made a mental note to mention my observation to Hemp later as I swung in a broad sweep from right to left and at a downward angle, chopping diagonally through the head of another lab-coated freak whose teeth were exposed all the way back to the molars on the left side, and who had bitten his tongue off; it was now hanging by a couple of blue veins out of the side of his gaping pie hole.

  Thankfully, he dropped and I didn’t have to stare at him for long. I’d only slammed into the collarbone of the next one, which drove him to his knees, a short round mechanic-looking man-monster with Phil on his embroidered name badge. I yanked the axe toward me and it sliced into his neck further then came free, but before I could pull it back for another swing, he was coming at me, jerking along on his knees.

  Hemp had relinquished his axe and now swung the Daewoo submachine gun around. He took out the fat fucker coming at me first, then sprayed the door left to right and back, taking out six more of them. Shell casings rained down hot, peppering me and the zombies coming at us. As the front line of them fell we found five more right behind them, and now I had time to pull the H&K around to assist.

  Good thing. Hemp’s MP5 clicked, out of ammo as I sent round after round into the next layer of hungry predators outside the elevator. The pile was building now, and if there were more out there, then neither Hemp nor I could see them from our positions on the floor.

  But as Hemp slammed his magazine back into the Daewoo, we did see something.

  Something disturbing. The fat fucker was getting his nose chewed off.

  By a head. A fucking head.

  I looked at Hemp, and he followed my eyes back to the pile of zombies stacked in the elevator opening. As the doors attempted repeatedly to close, one side kept bumping the severed head of one of the undead creatures onto its face where it rolled until it hit the bump of the nose, then rolled back, again to be hit by the door, like a too-softly hit pinball falling back to the flippers.

  And it gnashed, biting its tongue in half as we watched, a pus-blood-bile liquid running down its cheek as it did so. The eyes searched frantically for the food we knew it could still smell, and that food was us. And as we looked on in wonder and horror, the other severed head munched on the fat fucker’s nose relentlessly, and was making impressive progress.

  I shot the one on the right, and Hemp shot the one on the left. We stood up and took a very close look at the barricade we would have to clear before we could either begin our work on the gas line or meet the others we would have to slaughter.

  I took a deep breath, then turned and puked in the corner of the elevator car. I heaved up an entire can of half-digested chili.

  Hemp looked away and tried to breathe through his mouth.

  And then he puked, too. Right on the fat fucker. When he was done, we wiped our putrid mouths on our sleeves and started kicking the bodies aside as best we could, making sure none of them were without severe brain trauma. Then we climbed the stack of really dead zombies.

  At the top of the mound, we found we were in the clear. All told there had been another eighteen of them.

  I was really beginning to wonder how outnumbered the uninfecteds in this world were.

  And then I thought of Gem and reached for my radio.