Chapter 39
The hallway was packed with undead, and Leon ran past them at fast as he could, just barely staying out of their grasp. They surged after him and he outran them easily, but he was running out of places to escape to. He turned a corner only to find more zombies, and had to shoot half a dozen of them in order to get through. He tossed the empty gun aside and pulled out his other pistol, which was still fully loaded. He had wasted too many bullets shooting at the strange monster earlier and was now down to his last clip.
At the end of the hall, there was another small area leading to a staircase, with a wooden door under the stairs. To the right, the hallway continued in a straight line before turning another corner. Across from the stairs, a large statue rested on a marble pedestal. It was of a roman soldier wielding a spear and tower shield, and seemed incredibly out of place in a police station. Leon ran forward, panting for breath, his gun aimed in front of him.
The woman, whatever her name was, had disappeared again. Leon tried to follow her, but she either ran too far ahead of him, or she took some other way. It was also equally likely that she was killed by zombies, but he believed she was still alive.
A “Maintenance” sign decorated the door leading under the stairs. Leon checked the door knob but it was locked. He looked around, down the other side of the hallway, feeling as if he had been walking in circles all day. He wished he had taken the map he found earlier. Shaking his head, he started up the stairs, not really wanting to back up to the second floor, but figuring that it was safer than down on the first.
Gunshots nearby got his attention. He raised his gun and hopped back down the stairs. As he hurried down the hall, he nearly opened fire on the first two people who came into view. He swung the gun up and came to a halt, staring in disbelief.
Claire stood there, an equal look of shock on her own face, as she aimed a shotgun right at him. She lowered the gun and broke out in to a desperate laugh.
“Oh my God, Leon?”
“Hey, Claire? How have you been?” he said stupidly, glancing down at the other person with Claire. It was a little girl wearing a tattered school uniform, and she clung to Claire like a lifeline, staring at Leon in confusion and distrust.
“Claire!” the girl cried. “Come on!”
Leon glanced down the hallway they came from, and saw another mob of zombies coming toward them. The entire hallway was packed. There must have been more than a hundred walking corpses shambling in their direction. Leon backed away and cast a desperate glance behind him.
“Is it safe that way?” Claire asked, her voice begging him to say it was.
“No, but come on anyway,” Leon said quickly. He led them back to the staircase, but the zombies coming in the other direction had already surged forward like a flood and reached the corner. In seconds, they began to swarm around the staircase. Claire wielded her shotgun but didn’t open fire just yet. Her face dropped at the sight of so many more zombies.
“Leon!” she screamed.
There were too many of them. Completely blockaded on both sides, they could never hope to shoot their way through without an infinite amount of ammo. Claire began to gasp for breath, swinging her gun around helplessly, while the little girl behind her cried out, cowering behind her.
Leon ran forward and slammed his foot into the maintenance door underneath the stairs, just above the doorknob. The door broke open with a crack, the wood around the lock splintering, and swung open to reveal a dark staircase heading downward. Heading underground was the last thing Leon wanted to do, but it was their only option.
“Let’s go!” he shouted.
Claire and the girl bolted past him, the zombies almost able to grab onto them. Leon killed three of the closest ones, giving him just enough time to back up into the doorway and swing the door shut. But the edge of the frame was broken around the doorknob and it wouldn’t stay closed.
“Leon! Here!” Claire shouted, handing him a mop. At the top of the stairs right behind him were some custodial supplies, a mop and broom, and a few empty buckets. Before Leon could even get the mop into position, the door buckled forward, almost knocking him over. He braced himself and pushed back, and Claire jumped up to help him. But the zombies on the other side were stronger, and they would never get tired.
Leon jammed the mop into the corner and pressed the handle into the door, but it was too long. Desperately, he swung down on the handle with his forearm and the wood cracked, sending a agonizing tremor of pain all the way up his arm. He forced the broken end of the handle down and managed to wedge it right under the door knob. The door pressed inward, but the wooden mop handle somehow stayed put.
“This won’t last long,” Leon warned. “We’ve got to get out of here, right now!”
“Then let’s go!” Claire replied, running down the stairs two at a time. The little girl was already at the bottom of the stairs waiting for them, a tiny yellow light bulb shining above her. Either Claire or the girl must have found a light switch. Leon winced in pain, cradling his arm, and went down after her. Above them, he could hear the door rattling as the zombies pounded against it.
When they reached the bottom of the stairs, Leon took a moment to consider their new situation. If anything, they were no better off than they were before, save for the fact that they were no longer in direct danger. But being underground was much worse, since it would be even harder now to find a way out.
The dim corridor stretched forward into darkness, the tiny bulbs over their heads providing only the smallest amount of illumination. Claire looked hopefully at Leon, but he could not return her gaze, and merely sighed, cradling his arm.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
Leon shook his head. “I hurt my arm. It’s not broken or anything, but I’m not doing too great right now.”
“What are we going to do?”
He shrugged. “Just start walking, I guess. We don’t have a lot of options, do we?”
Claire had nothing to say to that, so she took a deep breath and began to walk down the corridor, with the little girl still huddling against her for protection. Leon didn’t bother to ask her name. It wasn’t important now.
He could smell mold and dust in the air, and rubbed his nose absentmindedly. There were two small supply rooms up ahead, full of cardboard boxes and dusty shelves of plastic bottles, containing things like floor wax and bug spray. The boxes were full of paper towels, spare mop heads, and packets of urinal cakes. The ceiling was lined with spiderwebs and rusty metal pipes, and the floor was filthy with dirt and small puddles of stagnant water.
The corridor extended forward and then branched off to the left and right. Two more supply rooms were empty except for some piles of trash. A few of the light bulbs were burned out as well.
“I don’t think anyone came down here very often,” Claire said.
“Doesn’t look like it,” Leon agreed.
“At least we won’t have to worry about any zombies.”
They picked at random and headed to the right. A little ways later, they came to another downward staircase, and hesitated for a moment. It was only about half the length of a regular set of stairs, sending them maybe six or eight feet deeper underground. Metal pipes on the wall dripped water along the steps, and the walls were discolored and crumbling.
“Maybe we should go the other way,” Claire suggested.
“Yeah,” the little girl said, looking down the stairs nervously.
In the silence that followed, they all heard a loud but muffled noise come from somewhere behind them. The noise, a sudden thump like a loud impact, echoed lazily down the dirty corridor, and Claire grabbed Leon’s arm reflexively.
“What was that?”
“What do you think it was? It was probably those zombies smashing the door down.”
“Oh, Jesus.”
They went down the stairs and kept walking down the dimly-lit hall for a few minutes, none of the
m saying anything. Leon’s boots splashed through puddles of foul-smelling water, and the light bulbs over their heads were covered in dust, some of them flickering randomly, as if on the verge of going out. The corridor was like a deserted tunnel in an abandoned mine shaft.
“Where does this lead?” the little girl asked, holding onto Claire’s hand.
“I have no idea,” Claire said. “But it must lead somewhere, right?”
“What if it leads to a dead end?”
“Let’s just hope it doesn’t.”
After a short pause, the girl looking up at Leon and asked, “Your name is Leon, right?”
He nodded. “Yes. Claire told you about me?”
“Yeah.”
“I didn’t catch your name.”
“I’m Sherry.”
Leon managed a weary smile, but his heart wasn’t in it. He didn’t think this hallway led anywhere at all. It was probably some old access tunnel between buildings, and when they reached the end of it they were going to find a boarded-up door with a rusted padlock on it, if they even found that. They would probably find nothing but a wall. And frankly, Leon didn’t feel like investigating a bunch of abandoned basement corridors that didn’t lead anywhere. The zombies had probably broken down the door by now, which meant that their way back was blocked.
“Do you think we’re still under the police station?” Claire asked.
“I don’t know,” Leon said honestly.
“Where do you think this leads?”
“At one time, it probably led to one of the buildings nearby. A lot of these old buildings used to be interconnected with these underground hallways.”
They discovered some long-abandoned rooms on each side of the hall, now coated in dust and grime. This portion of the underground hallway hadn’t been touched in years, probably decades. Leon was surprised the place even had electric lights. The rooms were stacked with boxes and wooden barrels, now rotted and decayed. They heard scratching, and Leon guessed the place was infested with rats. They didn’t stay to sight-see, and quickly moved on.
“More stairs,” Claire said, gesturing forward.
They descended once again, deeper underground. But the next hallway did not go very far. It ended in a large metal door, its edged coated with rust. The tiny light bulb above the doorway flickered and wavered.
“Should we try the door?” Leon asked.
Claire looked at Sherry, who clutched her arm tighter and stared straight ahead. Claire sighed and held her shotgun forward. “Do you think it will even open?”
“We can give it a shot.”
Leon grasped the large metal handle and turned it with a grunt, the metal scraping and grinding. He braced his feet and pulled as hard as he could, and the massive metal door slowly opened up. Claire pulled the shotgun to her shoulder and aimed it through the opening as Leon pulled the door all the way open. Bits of rust drifted to the floor.
Leon drew his own gun and aimed it into the inky darkness beyond. He made a sour face and covered his mouth with his hand.
“Oh, it stinks in there,” Sherry said as soon as she smelled it.
“Smells like sewage,” Claire said with a frown, pinching her nose closed.
Leon looked into the area on the other side of the door, but couldn’t see very much because it was so dark. “Yeah, I think it is sewage,” he said. “That’s the good news.”
“Why is that good news?”
“Because if this leads into the sewer system, it means we can find our way to get back up to the surface.” Leon stepped through the doorway, the smell not as bad as it first seemed, but still pretty strong. Through the gloom, he could see that the doorway led into a large room lined with machinery and shelves. He fumbled along the wall for a light switch and found one, and the room blinked into view as a line of yellow bulbs came on.
The room, like the hallway, had apparently not been used in a very long time. All the machinery was coated in rust and dirt, and the ceiling was covered cobwebs, except for one spot in the center where water dripped intermittently from a large crack above them.
There was a door at the other end of the room, and they quickly went to it and opened it as well, discovering a wide hallway lined with more rotting machinery. After a few more minutes traversing a series of short corridors and cramped chambers, they finally made their way to a section of the underground complex that seemed as if it was still in use.
It was still dusty, but the electrical boxes along the wall were much newer, and had new locks placed on them. Leon led Claire and Sherry to another wide corridor, illuminated by long fluorescent lights that looked like they were installed much more recently.
For the first time since they went into the basement, Leon felt a little bit of hope. As they continued down the sewer maintenance tunnel, he looked at Claire and managed a smile. She smiled back and patted Sherry gently on the shoulder. There were no zombies down here, and at the rate they were going, it could not take them very long to find their way out of the sewers entirely and back up to the city.
Maybe they were going to make it out alive after all.