A Shrouded World (Book 2): Atlantis Read online

  The zombie fell away even as I fired again, the amber sheen of Trip’s flashlight giving the room a surreal quality. Zombies fought to get in; the light didn’t reach far enough into the hallway for me to know if we were dealing with six or sixty.

  “Back up, Trip!” We’d lost the doorway. I’d hoped that I could have him slam the door shut if things looked bleak, but there were so many bodies in the way now he wouldn’t be able to do so. I kept firing. The light bobbed as he did what I asked. Surprisingly, the beam stayed pretty much where I’d asked him to aim it, even as I heard the heavy squeal of furniture being moved over the floor. Maybe he thought a little feng shui would bring some order to the room.

  The only reprieve we got was the log jam at the door as the sheer mass of zombie bodies clogged the artery. My right pistol bolt clicked and held open as I expended the last round, the left was not far behind. I had to change magazines out and quick; unfortunately, I was not an action star who could hit the release button and slam the empty pistol down onto a special belt that housed my new full magazines before hitting the bolt release and firing again. No, my process was much, much slower and more mundane. I would need to put one gun down while I fumbled with the lever, root around in my deep pockets, pull out a fresh magazine, and I would invariably have to orientate it correctly as I would try and shove it inside the handle upside down at least once, maybe twice. Then I would mess around again looking for the bolt release; the second gun might be slightly quicker or maybe slower as the fear and adrenaline made every part of my body shake while I waited for the teeth to rip into the soft flesh of my neck. The zombie would tear back with a mouthful of skin, muscle, tendon, carotid artery—maybe bone if it could sink its teeth deep enough.

  “Ponch! The desk!” I didn’t know what Trip was talking about until I turned around. He’d placed the desk kitty-cornered against two walls, giving us our own private triangle of somewhat safer real estate. It was the only lifeline we had, and I grabbed at it greedily. I turned, ran, jumped, and slid across the desk in my best Dukes of Hazzard move. It was textbook, too, at least until I came to a quick stop against the wall. Tending to the bruises and possible concussion would have to wait.

  Trip had placed the flashlight on the desk, it wobbled back and forth as I messed around with the guns. He’d pulled out his slingshot and was propelling steel ball bearings at eyeball-bursting speed. Trip with a slingshot was like Legolas with his bow and arrows. The fluidity of his movements combined with the grace and lethality was staggering. He’d kept them at bay long enough for me to get reloaded. I brought my gun up and fired once, figuring this one would quite literally be pressed against the nearest head, but what I hit was the back of a retreating zombie. I felt a sick satisfaction as I severed its spine. The zombie fell over, still very much alive, its hands reaching out for the doorframe as its legs remained stationary.

  “What is going on?” I wondered aloud. The room was nearly empty, except for the dozen or so dead and dying zombies.

  “I like what you did with the place,” Trip said, looking around with the flashlight.

  I kept an eye out on the doorway. At first, I didn’t know what I was seeing as the pile began to shift. I mistakenly believed that a couple of the zombies might not yet quite be finished and were trying to crawl out from under the pile. That would have been bad, the truth was terrifying.

  “Trip, shine the light on the zombie—I mean, funky pile.” The light quickly came over. A zombie that was leaning over snarled viciously at me but kept doing what it was doing. Which was pulling a body out from the doorway. I still had hope that maybe this was a zombie friend and he wanted to give the thing whatever last rites zombies give to each other—that was dashed when another zombie came into view and pulled another body away. They were cleaning out the clog so that they could come in quicker.

  “Fuck you, then,” I told the second zombie as he moved. My shot caught him above the right eye, sending him falling backwards in pulsing globules of blood. Trip had followed him all the way down with the light; we saw his head being dragged down the hallway by a zombie we could not see.

  I thought about waiting until they cleared the doorway and then slamming the thing shut like my original emergency plan had called for, but what was the point? There was the chance that more zombies were coming to aid their brothers with every minute we fought for these six square feet we called ours. Plus, it would bring us no closer to getting out of here. Either we got out or we died—that pretty much summed up how these worlds worked. Trip had the light trained down at the floor; there were only three zombies left to be removed. A hand reached and felt around until it snagged the material on a pair of pants and then started pulling the body out and away. That really freaked me out—of course there was the creep factor of watching a gray, sore-crusted hand blindly moving around, but the seeming humanity of the action was worse.

  Up until recently, the zombies very much looked and acted as you would think a zombie should. Walked slowly, hands outstretched, mouth open, gray coloring, tattered clothes, various wounds, missing skin, opaque eyes, and a slow stunted gait. I mean, there they were, exactly how we horror aficionados expected the things to be. Not anymore, though—things were changing. They were faster and more dexterous, and along with their insatiable hunger, they were getting smarter. Made sense though, as all predators get smart—they have to in order to find ways to attain their prey, which just so happened to be us in this case.

  We did nothing except wait. The flashlight dimmed just long enough to give me a minor heart attack and then came back on quickly and brightly, letting me know just how precarious our situation was. Once the batteries died, the miniscule advantage we had at the moment would swing back hard to the zombies’ side.

  “What are they waiting for?” I asked aloud. Trip said nothing, and as if just verbalizing it had infused the air with the answer, I got it. They were waiting for exactly that: the light to go out, I mean, or for us to fall asleep or maybe even to poke our heads out and get them chewed off. At the max, I figured we had three to four hours of battery life left. Trip could probably take a nap in the next ten minutes. It was time to leave.

  “Trip, wait until I get to the door and then follow me.”

  He nodded, but there was a chance it was to music from a Dead show in 1976.

  I kept my eyes riveted ahead of me as I slowly crawled back over the desk. I tried to move as silently as I could, but the room wasn’t much over the size of a crypt, so just me placing my gun-laden hands against the steel banged loud enough to wake the dead. (Horrible fucking pun, sometimes they just happen.) Once I got off the desk, I waited. I knew, I mean I fucking felt that an entire zombie army was pressed up against the wall right outside that door. Maybe Trip did as well, because the light was shaking.

  “Steady as she goes.” I was referring to my heart, not Trip’s wayward hand. I took a small step, large enough to say I actually moved, and that was about it. Nothing: not so much as a “How do you do.” I was not emboldened, as some might say they were at this point. I took another step. Two steps I’d taken, and I would have been amazed if I was more than a foot from the desk. I could have easily reached out and touched it. At this pace, I’d reach the door by the middle of next week. Blood was traveling so quickly through my veins that I was concerned it would break through when it hit a corner, much like a train that comes up on a curve with too much speed and careens off the track. I could imagine the high-speed pulsating blood trails shooting out from my elbows, knees, and curled fingers.

  Another step. I had both guns out in front of me. I wasn’t a fan of the duel shooting imagery famous in the movies, but there I was nonetheless. There was a perceived safety in that cold steel. Sort of my own leaden force field. I took my next step—I was about a quarter of the way across the floor when I almost turned and headed back. Something beyond the door banged, sounding like a door had been opened quickly; or possibly, and this was much scarier, a zombie had removed a fire axe from th
e wall and was testing it out. How far from that leap were they? Tomorrow? The next day? Now? I was halfway across the room and the far-off echo had long since died away. The flashlight dimmed, died, and I heard the heavy hit of it against Trip’s palm as he resuscitated it back to life with the handyman’s version of CPR.

  Before the light could settle back into place, I swear I saw the side of a zombie’s face as it quickly peered around the doorjamb to see if it was time to eat yet. I wasn’t completely sure, but the stakes were too high: I had to assume it was indeed there. The trap had been laid, now the question was how to respond. My foot shuffled forward. I kept one gun firmly pointed toward where I thought my peeper had been, and the other on the opening in the hopes that what was out there would run into my bullet. I was less than seven feet from the black maw of the opening, which was laced with deadly teeth like the yawning mouth of a great white. I tried not to let my brain run wild with these things, but I was literally about the length of an average man’s height away from something that wanted nothing more in this world than to kill me. That can be a crippling thought. You, who sit safe and secure in your bunker, may or may not have ever experienced this phenomenon, but my insides felt like they were liquefying and puddling in my feet. One more step, and my pistol was nearly touching the door’s trim.

  The zombie came around the corner so fast I barely had time to react—it was a good thing I already had most of the trigger pull taken care of. I put three rounds in him before my brain caught up to the fact that I was firing. Always used to think it was a load of bullshit when the woman accused of murder would say she didn’t realize she’d pulled the trigger fifteen times on her abusive husband thus finally ending their doomed relationship. I get it now. I’d been so ramped up, I could easily see blowing through both magazines; the only thing that prevented it was the sheer number of combat situations I’d found myself in. I backed up quickly, fully expecting the attack to be back on. That wasn’t the case: the zombie was mostly out in the hallway, just his head and shoulders had fallen in the security room, yet no ghostly hands reached out to drag him away.

  I backed up another step, waited a few tense seconds, and was about to go forward. I looked back to make sure Trip was still on the same page. I now had a different type of fear to contend with. The flashlight was firmly clenched in his teeth, and he was holding my recently put down rifle. I’d rather a monkey had a machine gun than Trip a rifle. He was holding it down by his hip in typical Rambo fashion, though I don’t think it was intentional.

  “What are you doing, Trip?” There was not much aiming capacity if he were to shoot the rifle that way.

  “Relping.” He said around the mouthful of aluminum tubing.

  “You could help by not pointing that thing in my general direction.”

  “Right, right.” The barrel moved away, but slowly started to creep back my way like he was holding a compass and I was true north. I was now splitting my time between the front and rear.

  “Gun goes toward the enemy, Trip.”

  “I row rat.”

  Fuck I hoped so. I started back toward the door, wondering what it would feel like to watch my spleen be forcibly ripped from my body. Would it pulse around on the floor for a while before it stilled? Or was that only a heart that did that? Not sure, I’d never had my internal organs violently hewn from me. I waited for any indication that more zombies were close. They were around, that was a given, their smell would always give them away: just how close was the question. My foot was even with the threshold. I was holding my breath, trying to minimize the noise, the barrel of my pistol was actually in the hallway. I fully expected something to reach out and grab it. I thrust my head out and damn near gave myself whiplash with how fast I looked to the left and right and then pulled back in. I was happy to report I’d not been eaten. That was the first priority, then I started to filter the information I’d gleaned in my seven millisecond recon mission.

  First, the hallway was fucking dark. Yeah, that’s some valuable intel right there. Second, and this was a biggie, there were no zombies right by the door, except for the dead one and he was fine where he was. Third, I could just make out a group of zombies right at the limit of the light’s influence. What were they doing? They had to have seen me, my shadow danced all over the wall on the far side of the hallway, and then my head would have been lit up like an OPEN sign. There were a few things going through my head. They were amassing more numbers to make a final assault, or they did not have the numbers to make a final push. Or they were laying a trap. Making it look like we could leave, and then we’d run headlong into another group and we’d be surrounded in a hallway with no way to adequately defend ourselves. Or, option number four, they wanted us to go out so they could follow and pursue easier prey. Well great, I’d just cycled through four scenarios: two saw us surviving, two got us killed. Our fucking lives came down to a coin flip. Heads, we went for it and lived; tails, we went for it and died.

  “Trip, you have any change on you?”

  He took a second to put the rifle down and remove the flashlight from his mouth before he spoke.

  “Like clothes? No man, I’ve had these since that time Jerry puked on them, I’m never going to wash these pants. If you look close you can still see the mustard from the Rueben sandwich he had.”

  “Coins, Trip; do you have any coins on you?”

  “Oh, well why didn’t you say so? Which country?”

  “Are you fucking kidding me? Fine, Russia.”

  My location instantly darkened as he shined the light down on himself. If I had more than some old gum left in my colon, there was a good chance it would have made a speedy exit. “Trip! The light! Shine it over here!” I was bracing for impact, certain a zombie was about to tackle me. When my shadow reappeared across the hall, I nearly pulled the trigger on it.

  “Pretty sure I have a ruble in here,” Trip said, completely oblivious to the fact that I’d been as scared just now as I’d ever been in my life. I heard the sound of a zipper opening and change being moved around. “Found it!”

  Did he really have a coin purse? “This is so not worth it. Flip the coin and tell me what it lands on.”

  I heard the coin clink off the top of the desk, rattle around a bit, and then go still. Nothing from Trip.

  “Trip?”

  “Yeah?” he asked foggily.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Sorry, I think I was hypnotized.”

  “What did the fucking coin land on, Trip?” I was rapidly approaching my breaking point.

  “Turkmenian Eublefar.”

  “English, Trip, English.”

  “Gecko, it landed on a gecko.”

  “The Russians have a lizard on their money? Whatever. Is that the front or the back?”

  “I think it’s the front.”

  “Think? How sure are you?”

  “Fifty-fifty. Want me to flip a coin to see?”

  “No, I think we’re past that. Come on man, we’re making a break for it.” He was by my side without any further incident, which was just fine by me. I reluctantly placed one of the pistols in my pocket.

  “Let me borrow the flashlight,” I said, and he handed it off. I moved forward. Half my body was outside now. I turned the light to the left, the way we’d come: the hallway appeared empty. I quickly turned it to the right and was momentarily gripped by fear. Easily a dozen zombies were standing there, watching me intently.

  “What are you guys doing?” I asked quietly. One that was a foot or so in front of the others snarled, but made no move toward me. I felt something press against the small of my back. I swatted it away only to realize it had been the barrel of the rifle; Trip’s head was next to mine as he leaned out to take a look as well.

  “Trip, you have a high fucking powered hunting rifle pressed up against my spine.”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Oh, okay, that makes it all right. Asshole.”

  “What are they doing?” Trip echoed my t
houghts as he stared at the zombies.

  “Wish I knew. You ready to get out of here?”

  “Ponch, I think I am. Maybe I should flip a coin.”

  “Let it go buddy, let it go.” I stepped completely out into the hallway, figuring that might be the mechanism that spurred the zombies on. It wasn’t. I grabbed Trip and pulled him out with me. I looked in the direction we were going just to see if a ninja zombie was coming up behind us, but the path was clear. This sucked—it was possible it smelled worse than the zombies. I was walking sideways so I could keep an eye on both ends. For every half side step I took, the zombies behind took two. They were creeping closer.

  “This is insane. I’m having a standoff with them.” The idiotic thought of squaring my shoulders to them and approaching as I fired rapidly really sounded like a good idea right then. Twelve zombies, twenty rounds, and a less than trustworthy flashlight wielder made for a sketchy conclusion.

  I was just having a difficult time believing we weren’t being herded to our slaughter. These zombies were too smart to be thwarted by a fucking door handle, weren’t they? And even if that were the case, what kind of asshole was I to show them the way out? Any poor victims they ate would rest on my shoulders. The fact that I hadn’t seen another living person besides Jack since I got here made the choice marginally easier. Not sure if the poor bastard they stumbled upon would agree with my assessment. Something else was going on here, though: if they could employ tactics, they could certainly leave the building on their own. Unless, of course...