Chapter 36
Two zombies in police uniforms staggered forward, their arms reaching out. Leon felt a pang of guilt as he raised his gun and shot them both in the head. He then tossed aside his useless Desert Eagle, which was now empty, and retrieved the Berettas from the dead officers’ holsters. Another zombie, this one a middle-aged woman wearing a pair of dirty jeans and an oversized sweater, was behind the policemen, and Leon killed her as well.
How many more zombies would he have to kill before he got out of here? He resigned himself to the fact that the zombies were already dead, and putting them out of their undead misery was the truly humane thing to do, but it still bothered him when he was forced to kill police officers. These were the men who would have been his coworkers if things had worked out differently.
Thus armed, he made his way down the hall and finally found something that he had been seeking for quite awhile. A map of the building, or at least a map of the second floor.
“Finally,” he said to himself. He took the time to glance around the hallway to make sure no zombies were coming up behind him, and inspected the emergency exit plan. He put his finger on the map where the red X was, indicating his position, and traced a line down the hallway to his left and the stairway shown there, which would lead him to the ground floor.
Of course, simply going downstairs was not enough. After all, the ground floor was probably the most infested part of the entire station. When he and Claire arrived at the police station, they encountered a huge mob of zombies almost immediately. What Leon really needed was to find a way downstairs that was not completely packed with hordes of the undead.
At this point, finding Claire was a secondary goal. He had not seen or heard anything to indicate she was still in the station, or even if she was still alive. Right now, Leon had to focus on getting out, and then he could worry about finding Claire.
Leon walked purposefully down the hall and found the staircase a minute later. He passed an elevator on the way but opted not to use it. An elevator was just too dangerous. There was no way to know what waited beyond the doors on the main floor; if the elevator opened up right in front of a crowd of zombies, Leon would have nowhere to run. Stairs were a much safer option.
He stepped as quietly as possible down the wooden stairs, crouching down to look out to the hallway beyond, one of the Berettas firmly in his hand. The stairs led to a large foyer with several potted plants and a bunch of plastic chairs. The hallway was partially blocked off with a desk and some filing cabinets, and blood was splashed all over the floor nearby. The floor was covered in a mess of bloody footprints.
Someone had tried to stop the zombies, but they had clearly failed. As Leon stepped down the hall, he glanced beyond the makeshift barrier to see bodies in the hall, about a dozen of them. He was so focused on the scene out in the hall that he didn’t notice the zombie standing along the side of the staircase until it grabbed his foot.
Leon jumped back and swung his gun down to shoot the zombie in the head. Immediately, two more zombies appeared from the corner and Leon killed them as well. He waited in the middle of the stairs, but no other zombies showed their faces. Peering over the railing to make sure nothing else was waiting for him, Leon went down the rest of the stairs and stopped at the bottom.
He could see clearly down the hallway now. It was like a battlefield after the war, with bodies strewn everywhere. The entire floor was covered in a sheen of wet blood, and the walls were splashed with it as well. Maybe fifty dead bodies were littered down the long corridor, men and women, police officers and civilians alike. Leon swallowed hard, the sight making him nauseous despite all he had already seen today.
He could almost imagine what happened. The mob of zombies came down the hallway, and a group of desperate survivors tried to get away. Someone tried to block their path, and the unlucky ones got trapped there to be killed. But the zombies broke through the barricade anyway. Whatever survivors remained here earlier were probably all dead by now.
At the base of the stairs was another smaller hallway leading back in the other direction. It was empty, but bloody smears on the walls showed that it had not always been so. There must have been zombies down the other hallway at some point, probably a huge number of them, but they weren’t there now. And although the floor was covered in bloody footprints, it didn’t seem as if they were all headed in the same direction. The zombies appeared to have loitered there for some time and then left for some reason. The smaller hallway didn’t have as many footprints, so Leon guessed that it was safe to go in that direction.
“Safe,” however, was a relative term down here.
He walked down the hall, his gun always facing forward, and passed a few dusty storage rooms. The walls were lined with framed paintings. He turned a corner and almost smiled in relief when he saw windows along the hallway. Now that he was on the main floor, he could escape out a window.
His smile disappeared when he saw the crowd of zombies on the other side of the window. They were packed into a narrow avenue along the back of the station, dozens of them, milling around aimlessly. There was a tall chain-link fence on the other side and another narrow alley, but Leon could never make it there with all the zombies in his way.
One of them noticed him and slapped a hand against the glass, groaning loudly. Immediately, the other zombies noticed him as well, and began gathering against the building, pounding on the windows.
“Shit,” Leon said, backing away.
Before any of the zombies could break the windows and get inside, he ran off down the hall, turning a corner and finding himself in a wider corridor with a row of offices along one side. There was no wall, just a thin divider with a glass top section, allowing people in the hall to look directly into the office area, which was full of haphazardly arranged desks and tables. It was also mostly full of zombies.
Leon froze for a heartbeat, snapping out of his indecision when he heard glass shattering behind him. He ran forward and then skidded to a stop when someone appeared at the other end of the hallway, running toward him.
It was the woman he saw earlier. She stopped suddenly, glaring at him suspiciously, before her gaze traveled to the side and she noticed the crowd of zombies packed into the office area. She raised her shotgun to her shoulder and then glanced behind her.
On cue, the zombies in the office finally noticed them, and the crowd began to surge forward in jerky steps. There were maybe fifty of them, and they moved forward like a flock of birds. The woman braced herself but did not fire her gun. She lowered it and swore loudly.
Leon ran up to her and she pointed back the way he came. “What’s back there?” she demanded angrily.
“More of them are coming in,” Leon said. “They’re breaking the windows to get inside. What about the way you came?”
“The main lobby is back that way. There’s probably two hundred of them back there. I don’t have enough goddamn bullets.”
“Neither do I,” Leon said.
The main hallway branched out just past the offices, and another hallway led in the opposite direction. Leon shrugged and pointed down the hall with his gun. “I guess we’re going that way,” he said uncertainly.
The woman clenched her teeth as the zombies in the office began to shuffle into the hall, and made up her mind. “All right,” she snapped, “but try to keep up with me.”
She ran down the hall, with Leon following closely on her heels. He decided to ignore for the moment the fact that she hadn’t given her name yet, or bothered to explain why she ran away from him before. If anything, she seemed thoroughly annoyed that he was there at all, as if finding another survivor was some kind of hassle. He kept up with her as she ran down the hall, and neither of them said anything.
They turned down another hallway, and suddenly the floor buckled underneath their feet. The woman went flying and crashed to the floor, her shotgun slipping from her hands. Leon stumbled an
d fell against the wall, although he managed to hold into his pistol. The floor lifted up, planks of wood snapping and splitting, and then it slumped back down again with a crunch. The woman crawled across the floor to retrieve her shotgun and sat up, looking around frantically.
“What in the hell was that?” she asked.
“Well, it wasn’t an earthquake, that’s for sure,” Leon said, looking around. “Come on, let’s get out of here before it –”
His words were drowned out by an ear-piercing, inhuman scream that echoed down the hallway like a shockwave. Leon almost fell over at the sound, and the woman cried out and jumped to her feet, the shotgun immediately braced against her shoulder. She spun around, her long hair whipping back and forth.
“What the hell was that?!” she screamed.
A few yards farther down the hall, the floor suddenly buckled up with a crash, chunks of wood and tile flying into the air. The entire hallway rose up with a shuddering crunch, as something huge tried to burst its way through. The walls on either side trembled, plaster and dust trickling to the floor.
The woman shouted something else, but Leon didn’t hear her. The entire floor section broke upward and exploded, and he had to shield his face from flying debris. He scrambled backwards and gazed forward through the cloud of dust and wreckage to see something standing there, something that almost looked like a man.
A shotgun blast rang out and the creature jerked and twisted to the side, another deafening scream emanating from its bestial face. It swung a massive, misshapen arm and smashed it into the wall, more plaster and debris raining to the floor. Ripped, shredded remains of clothing hung on its body like cobwebs, and a bright yellow eyeball peered out from a bloody orifice on its upper shoulder. The creature reared back as if to jump.
Leon swung his gun up and opened fire in a panic, squeezing the trigger as fast as he could. The gun spat out bullets and the creature lifted its arm to protect itself, the bullets striking its mottled, warped body. The creature slammed its arm down and Leon was thrown backwards as the floor shook underneath his feet. He skidded across the floor and wound up against the wall.
He managed to glance back at the woman and was somehow surprised to see her still standing there. She dropped her shotgun and slid her other weapon off her shoulder. In disbelief, Leon recognized it as a grenade launcher, and called out for her to stop.
She ignored him and raised the weapon. Leon got to his feet just as she pulled the trigger and the gun fired with a muffled “whump,” the grenade bursting from its gray barrel with a puff of smoke and a spray of fire.
Leon jumped and grabbed the woman, pulling her down as the grenade smacked into the wall a few feet away from the monster. Together, they fell through an open door into one of the side offices as the entire hallway exploded in a thundering burst of fire and flying wreckage. The entire building seemed to shake with the concussive force of the blast, and a shockwave of debris and flame roared down the hall. The door was blown clean off the frame and smashed down on top of them, partially protecting them from the force of the explosion.
The sound of the blast was equaled by the unbelievably loud scream of the monster as it flew down the hall in the other direction, partially engulfed in flames. The wall was reduced to a gaping crater of burnt debris, and the ceiling above it was scorched black as well. Bits of wood and paper were scattered about, burning slowly. The entire hall was black with smoke.
Leon coughed and rolled onto his side, his ears ringing. The woman pushed the door off of them and got to her feet unsteadily. She looked out into the hall and picked her shotgun up, brushing debris off of it.
“Thanks,” she said. “I owe you one.” And then she ran off down the hall.
By the time Leon got to his feet to go after her, she was gone.