Dead Air (Book One of The Dead Series) (35 page)

Steve didn't know how to reply to that. He didn't want to lie and say that everything would be all right when that was obviously untrue
. He also didn’t want to depress Marcia with his own prediction that the whole group was in for an extended stay at the Garnett Bank Building and that any type of normal life was a long, long way off.

Instead of voicing his thoughts, he told Marcia to hang in there and moved off toward the studio. As he walked,
he ran what she had told him about the phones through his head. Heather's cell had been sending calls to voicemail all day and night. He hoped it was a case of her being too busy to pick up as opposed to not being able to because she was dead.

Or worse
, he added, wandering around incapable of human speech.

Ginny's
cell number had quit giving the message that all lines were busy and had switched to the party is unavailable recording hours ago. Steve's imagination had run wild after hearing this. He envisioned a melted piece of plastic not far from a charred corpse that had been his girlfriend.

Now he had to accept the fact that his chances of being reunited with Ginny fell in the range of slim to none.

Heather was a different story though, he reasoned. She was armed and capable. She might be able to make it to the station.

Stopping at the glass wall separating the hall from the studio,
he exchanged waves with Jonny G before going back toward his office. Looking into the conference room, he saw that Meat and his girlfriend, Donna, had pushed two couches together and then laid sleeping bags over them to make a bed. It reminded him that coming up with permanent housing arrangements had to be added to his list of things to do today. He resolved to try and stay organized. He was the leader and needed to stay on top of everything no matter how insignificant it seemed.

As he stepped
back into his dark office, a brilliant flash of light from outside suddenly blinded Steve. Turning his head away from the windows, his first thought was that someone had set off a bomb as he waited for a sound of the explosion. He squinted, trying to see through the glare, then heard the rattle of automatic rifles and the deeper, throaty cough of the fifty-caliber machine gun from the street below.

After a few seconds, the light faded enough for him to approach the window and look out. He could see a flare dangling below a parachute drifting below and off to his right
. This explained the sudden burst of illumination. One of the National Guardsmen had used a pop-up flare, and it must have gone off right outside his window.

Steve pressed his forehead against the glass and looked down. In the stark relief of light from the flare, he took in the scene below.
The MRAP was still parked in the center of the street. Instead of a perimeter of National Guardsmen around it though, it was encircled by hundreds of the living dead.

As he watched, a panicked trooper opened the rear hatch of the armored vehicle to try and climb inside to safety. With only one foot in, he was mobbed and pulled back by a crowd of
zombies then disappeared into their mass.

The dead awkwardly clambered over each other to enter the MRAP while above them, the gunner manning the fifty continued to fire his weapon. His concentration was focused down the street
, so he was unaware that he was no longer firing from a secure position.

Steve pounded with no effect on the safety glass to warn him, the
noise was lost due to distance and the sounds of the battle below. He watched as the soldier suddenly straightened and then started thrashing around in the open turret before being dragged below.

After grabbing his pistol and two spare magazines, Steve ran from his office yelling, "Tick-Tock, Meat, Brain, quick, the foyer. We have to secure it."

Despite the dire situation, Steve almost laughed out loud at how he sounded. Just like Bruce Wayne saying, Quick, Robin, to the bat cave.

Marcia had a cell phone to her ear and called out as Steve passed her in the reception area, "It's
Susan. She's still downstairs."

Steve knew he had to move
fast; all Susan had was the little .25 caliber pistol. Without waiting for the others, he raced outside into the hall, noticing that Pontran wasn't at his post as he made the corner and headed for the stairs. Taking them two at a time, he reached the first floor and stopped at the door leading to the foyer. He didn't want to go bursting into a room full of zombies, so he pressed his ear against it.

Hearing nothing, he carefully cracked
open the door and looked out. He could see that the double front doors leading out onto the street were closed, and he was relieved that no dead were in view. He’d wanted to keep the entry doors locked but the National Guardsmen had insisted they stay open so they could use the bathroom and be able to switch guards easier.

Steve didn't want to give himself away to the dead outside the glass
, so instead of going into the foyer he said in a stage whisper, "Susan, are you out there?"

Getting no answer
, he called out louder, "Susan, if you can hear me, answer."

A timid voice came back, "Who's there?"

Relieved that she was all right, he said, "It's me, Steve. Where are you? Are any of the National Guard Troops with you?"

"I'm at the door to the mechanical room. I'm alone. Those guys got killed. I watched it. It was horrible
," she replied as she choked back a sob.

"It's okay now, I'm here. You have to hold it together
though," Steve said in a calming voice and then asked, "You have to tell me, are those doors unlocked?"

"That's why I'm hiding in here,"
she replied loudly. "I didn't want to show myself and draw them into the building."

"
Shhh," Steve said. "They're attracted by noise."

H
e heard footsteps thudding down the stairs behind him. Steve turned and saw Tick-Tock and Brain round the landing one flight up. Quietly, he asked, "Where's Meat?"

"Coming," Tick-Tock replied. "He's right behind us." As he said this, Meat rounded the landing, huffing and puffing.

Looking at the bulky Brain and comparing him to the lanky Meat caused Steve to ask Brain incredulously, "You outran Meat?"

Looking offended, Brain replied indignantly, "Fat people are nimble. Didn't you ever see Rerun dance on the
show ‘What's Happening’?"

Tick-Tock snorted out a muffed laugh, "Guess he told you,
Rog."

In spite of the situation, Steve smiled before saying quietly, "Listen up, Susan's stuck in the mechanical room and the front door
is open. What I want to do is lock that door. I don't want a complicated plan; I just want that door locked. We line up and go out in a rush. Tick-Tock pushes open the right hand door -."

"Open
?" Meat almost shouted.

"I've got to make sure the upper and lower bolts are shut on the left hand door
, or it won't make any difference if we lock the right one, they'll just bust through," he explained. "It won't take a second, and I want you and Brain behind that right side door ready to pull it back shut once I'm done. Then we lock it and haul ass upstairs."

"Are we talking right and left as we look at it from the inside or outside?" Brain asked.

So much for keeping it uncomplicated, Steve thought.

Tick-Tock spoke up
, asking, "Is your ass inside or outside the building?"

"Inside
," Brain replied, to which Tick-Tock gave him a 'no shit' expression and looked back to Steve.

"Go on three?" He asked.

"On three, but let me tell Susan what we’re up to." When he finished, he pulled back from the door, turned and said, "Count it down, Brain."

Looking startled that he was given what he considered an honor, Brain recovered quickly. "One, two, three,"
he said, with an emphasis on the three. At this, the four men burst out of the stairway and made straight for the double doors.

That was when everything went to hell.

After telling Susan their plan, Steve had turned away and wasn't watching the entry. In the time it took Brain to count to three, a zombie had opened the front door in search of food. Running forward, Steve saw the dead thing, dressed in a Miami Dolphins jersey, standing half inside the opening. Seeing food running toward it, it reached out to grab at him so he reacted instinctively and grabbed it instead. Snatching the thing by the wrist, he yanked it inside the foyer and twisted, using centrifugal force to spin the zombie across the foyer where it bounced off a far wall and landed on the floor. Pushing the right side door open to get at the latches, he yelled to Tick-Tock, "Shoot it!"

Tick-Tock aimed his pistol, but the walking dead on the outside also heard the shout and turned their attention to where Steve was fumbling to throw the lower latch on the door.

With whining, screeching noises, over fifty zombies converged on the entry to the Garnett Building.

As Steve crouched in the opening, rattling the door back and forth to make the bolt drop down into its hole, he heard two quick gunshots from behind him. The bolt finally dropped and he pushed the lever down
so it lay flush. Standing to get at the top latch, he looked up and saw one of the dead only five feet away and coming toward him fast.

This one was wearing a Tampa Bay Buccaneers
jersey, causing Steve's racing mind to ask, is this Monday Night Football or something? Pulling his Glock from the small of his back, he shot the creature in the center of its face.

Seeing dozens of the dead right behind it and more coming in from the sides, Steve made a snap decision and tried
to yank the left side door closed.

Too late, he realized, as the dead clawed their hands through the gap, reaching for him.

Brain and Meat jumped forward to grab the handle and shut the door, but it was held ajar by three zombies who were trapped with their forearms caught in the opening. One pushed its arm further through and bent it at the elbow, its hand flailing wildly before it latched onto Meat's ponytail, causing him to scream out in pain and revulsion.

From behind him, Steve heard another gunshot followed by Tick-Tock screaming at the
zombie Steve had thrown into the foyer to die already, motherfucker.

Steve could see through the Plexiglas that
a crowd of the dead was now pushing forward at the doors. For a second, he almost told everyone to run for the stairs. He stopped himself just as the words formed in his mouth when he realized something.

The doors swung outward.

Although the living dead could do simple tasks such as opening the door, they didn’t have the reasoning power to see that as they shoved forward to get at the food, their weight was pushing the door closed from the outside.

Steve let go of the handle and reached up to try and pry loose the dead hand wrapped around
Meat’s ponytail. Meat let out a howl of pain and string of curse words so he gave up. Tick-Tock joined them and pulled out a long blade from a sheath attached to his web belt.

"K-Bar," he identified the knife, and with a single swipe cut Meat's ponytail near its base.

The older man fell away, causing Brain to scream in wide-eyed terror, "Someone help me hold the door."

He had his feet planted as he leaned back and was making breathing noises like a runaway steam locomotive.
 

Steve approached cautiously and laid his hand on Brain's shoulder. "Take it easy. I think
it’s okay. They're pushing it closed. Keep your grip on the handle but let off on the pressure."

Looking skeptical, Brain did as he was told and was relieved to see it worked.

Rubbing the back of his head where his ponytail used to be, Meat looked accusingly at Tick-Tock and said sharply, "He only had the end of it. You didn't have to cut off so much."

Tick-Tock said something under his breath that sounded like, "Ungrateful fucking hippie
." Looking at the mob of zombies pressed against the glass, Tick-Tock raised his voice and asked sarcastically, "Think they know we're here yet?"

The other three men followed his gaze
and looked into a scene straight out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting.

Men and woman dressed and partially dressed in a variety of clothes were jammed up against the glass doors and against the windows on each side of the entry. Hands from the dead crowded behind them reached over, under
and between to claw at the glass, some leaving trails of black puss in their wake. Faces were distorted as they pressed and rolled against the transparent partition making hideous faces out of the already grotesque.

Seeing that they were safe for the moment, Tick-Tock walked to his right and knocked against the
shatterproof Plexiglas as he said, "Get a load of this. It's the Rhea sisters."

He had pointed out three women in the identical blue uniform of the Church of Scientology
, looking in with hunger as they pressed flat against the window.

"The Rhea Sisters?" Brain asked.