Dead Air (Book One of The Dead Series) (50 page)

"Pack?" Brain asked loudly, disbelief in his voice
. "Boat ride?"

"We've lost all of the first four floors," Steve explained as Heather fired a few shots down the stairs. "There's got to be hundreds of those things in here now
, and we can't kill them all."

"Where do we go?" Brain asked.

Steve and Tick-Tock had discussed an emergency evacuation plan with Heather shortly after obtaining the MRAP. It looked like they would have to put it into effect.

Steve's reply to Brain was cut short by a sudden flurry of firing as
Tick-Tock and Heather opened up with their rifles. When it subsided, Steve tried again. "Get everyone to the roof," he yelled. Then explained what he needed Brain to do.

***

Susan managed to get Mary up and dressed by the time Brain came back to the station and told them the plan. She went into Tick-Tock's room and looked around at what she thought the man would need for himself and to keep them alive. She knew Tick-Tock was tied up with defending the stairs and wouldn't have time to pack, so she would have to do it for him.

Shaking open a duffle bag she found hanging from a coat hook,
she started throwing clothes in the bottom before carefully wrapping the hand held radios taken from the MRAP in shirts and placing them inside. More clothes went on top of these along with a box of ammunition. She was searching for the next item when Mary appeared at the door and asked, "Have you seen my brown suede boots? You know, the real soft ones."

Susan gave her a pained look and opened her mouth to say something along the lines of,
‘Get your shit together’, but knew it was useless. Mary was Mary.

"Try in the knee space under the desk
," she replied and then stopped as she thought of Cindy and how she had been hiding in a spot like that when Heather found her. Where was the little girl? No one had even thought about her in all the confusion. Throwing the rest of Tick-Tock’s clothes into the duffle, she carried it over to the door of the suite and went in search of the little girl.

Susan looked in the office that Jonny and Marcia shared and saw that the cot they
had made up for Cindy was empty. She was about to turn to go when a thought struck her. Walking over to where a desk was pushed against the wall, she crouched down and said, "Cindy, honey, are you in there?"

The knee space
was facing the wall so Susan had to almost lie on the floor to see under the desk. In the dim light she spotted two, small, tennis shoe clad feet and said, "Cindy, it's me Susan. I'm going to pull the desk back so don't be scared. We need to get all of your things together so we can go."

The little girl
’s muffled voice came back, "Are we going on the trip Marcia told me about?"

Susan smiled. "Yes
, we are, honey," she said as she slid the desk back.

Cindy came out and stood, unsure of what to do
, so Susan knelt by her and said, "You've got to help me, Cindy. You've got to be a big girl and get all your clothes together and pack them in the bag Marcia got for you today. We've got to leave soon and I've got more packing to do, so I have to leave you to do this alone." Susan took the little girl’s hand and asked, "Are you going to be okay alone?"

Cindy nodded and replied, "I was alone for a
long time already. I’ll be okay."

Susan hugged Cindy as she worried about Marcia. There was no way she would leave the little girl alone like this
unless she was incapable of getting back when the alarm went off.

"You won't be alone anymore,"
she reassured her.

Letting Cindy go
, she said, "Now, I need you to hurry and then you can help me, okay?"

Cindy answered with a nod and turned to where her clothes were stored under her cot. Susan watched her bring out her carrying bag
, so she turned to go pack her own belongings before checking on Mary and starting back on Tick-Tocks things. Too much to do, she thought, as she hurried toward her own room while trying to mentally account for everyone's whereabouts.

Mary, Brain and Cindy were now accounted for here at the station. Jonny and Marcia were missing
. Since they hadn't made contact with anyone, she had to assume they would stay that way.

At least calling them missing was better than calling them dead,
she decided.

Heather, Tick-Tock and Steve were in the stairwell and she had warned Meat what was happening on her way up
to wake Mary.

Susan suddenly thought about the crazy guy who lived down the hall but couldn't remember his name. They would collect him when they started moving things to the roof. If he didn't want to come
, then screw him, we don't have time to deal with a bunch of his crazy assed shit.

Feeling calmer about the situation, Susan entered the room she shared with Mary.
Surprisingly, she was ready to go, and although complaining loudly about it, was helping Brain stack boxes by the door. Susan had seen Brain go in Tick-Tock's room, grab an ammunition container and run out, so she knew that their defenses on the stairwell would hold for a while. Once Meat joined them, they might even be able to kill enough of those dead things to retake the first floor and not have to evacuate. With these thoughts in mind, she started to gather her things.

***

Meat had been awakened by the fire alarm and didn't know what to do. Should he go upstairs to the station? Should he stay where he was and wait for someone to come get him? His questions were answered when he heard Susan pounding on his door and yelling about the building being invaded by the dead.

Knowing what to do now, his first action was to retrieve his pistol. Running to the stairway to help repel the
zombies, Meat realized he was in such a hurry that he’d forgotten to put his shoes on.

They always feared there might be a small breach in their defenses
, and the plan was to quickly use overwhelming firepower to push the dead back. Once this was done, they could close off the break-in with sheets of plywood that they left cached at different spots around the building.

Meat had heard Susan saying that the
zombies were coming up the stairwell so he assumed she meant a few of them had made it this far before being spotted. He was surprised when he opened the door to the stairs and saw through a haze of gun smoke the mass of hideous creatures dressed in filthy rags crowded just below the landing he was on.

As Meat watched, two of the dead detached themselves from the pack and came toward him. Even as he raised his pistol, a salvo of shots came from up the stairs on his right to cut them
down. Looking in that direction, he saw Steve and Tick-Tock perched on the intermediate landing above him with rifles raised. Over the noise of hundreds of whining, dead throats, Meat heard Tick-Tock yell, "Run you old hippie. Get your ass up here."

Meat hesitated for a second before throwing himself through the door and starting toward his friends. The dead, who had been massing for another push toward the food above them, saw Meat and surged forward. Meat, in a leap that belied his age, jumped the first of the bodies lying prone on the landing and was stepping forward to dash up the stairs when his foot came down
in a large puddle of black goo leaking from the shattered head of one of the zombies. He tried to catch himself, but his bare foot slid out from underneath him as he lost traction in the noxious substance. Landing on his butt, he tried to crab walk backward away from the hands reaching out to him but was suddenly grabbed around the ankle by a dead woman dressed in the rags that were all that remained of her business suit. Looking over his shoulder for help from Steve and Tick-Tock, Meat screamed and a look of horror crossed his face as the first set of teeth sunk into his leg.

Tick-Tock and Steve saw the pleading look on Meat's face as he was bitten and fired as one into his head. Mike Kemp, aka Meat, died as two bullets penetrated his brain, never to rise again. Heather, who had watched Meat's demise as she reloaded her rifle, joined Steve and Tick-Tock as all they fired into the writhing mass of walking dead below them. They cleared the area
around Meat's body only to have it fill with more zombies as they reloaded.

The trio backed up, expecting the dead
to stop at Meat's corpse to ravage it, but the wave of zombies moved inexorably toward them. Some stopped to feed on Meat, but a majority, urged on by the scent of fresh meat, overcame any hesitation at attacking an armed foe and surged upward as one.

"Fall back," Heather said. "There's too many of them."

They had been pushed back to the seventh floor when Brain rejoined them. He was ignored in the fury of the battle. Steve had wadded up pieces of paper that he stuck in his ears to block the noise of the gunfire. After finally noticing the tech standing behind him trying to get his attention, he removed one to listen to what he had to say. Even with the plug out, Steve could barely hear over the ringing, dull roar that seemed to come from the center of his head.

Between the gunfire and deafness, it took Steve a little while to understand that Brain was telling him that everyone was heading for the roof and that most of the supplies and equipment had already been transported there. Steve relayed this to Heather and
Tick-Tock and then motioned Brain to join the others. Once he was gone, they started a slow, steady, retreat up the stairs.

Steve burst from the stink of cordite and the musky rancid smell of the dead that permeated the stairwell into the fresh air of the roof and inhaled deeply to clear his lungs. Heather and
Tick-Tock rushed through the door right behind him, Heather pausing to slam the door shut before staggering forward a few steps and throwing up.

Brain immediately started bracing the door with wood
while Susan wrapped the small building that held the top of the stairwell in lengths of rope to hold the door shut. Steve, Heather and Tick-Tock moved out of their way, bent at the waist as they tried to catch their breath, occasionally gagging and spitting to clear their throats.

Steve was the first to recover enough to talk. "That smells bad enough to knock a buzzard off a shit wagon."

Tick-Tock laughed and said in a raspy voice, "You know what I hate about the Military channel?"

Steve and Heather shook their heads as they tried to spit the slimy residue of bile out of their mouths.

"They show all that great shit that you can kill things with, but they never give you a one eight hundred number to call and order it."

Steve's laugh turned into a coughing fit and he couldn't reply
, so he waved Tick-Tock off. He finally caught his breath but was still having trouble with his watering eyes as he called out, "Brain, where in the hell are you?"

Brain materialized at his side and said, "I've got it all set up like you told me, Steve. Everything's ready."

Helping Heather stand upright, Steve said, "Show me."

Brain led them to the edge of the roof that overlooked the MRAP and said, "I reattached the window washers seat to one line and I still had enough rope to splice together another
one we can use to lower our stuff. I already dropped that one down with a bundle attached to it, so the first person down can untie it. That’ll save us some time. I also packed most of your and Heather's things and grabbed the radios and ammunition and gear from your room."

"Good job," Steve said
. He was joined by Heather, who looked over the side and appraised the area before adding, "No dead in sight."

Tick-Tock
replied, "That's because they're not out there anymore. They're all inside the building."

"We thought this could happen," Heather said. "That's why we made this plan. I just
thought we'd never have to use it."

"Is the rest of
the stuff we need in the MRAP?" Steve asked Tick-Tock.

"Too volatile," He
answered. "I stored it just inside the entry to the parking garage in an igloo cooler."

Behind them
, they could hear the dead banging on the metal stairway door as they tried to break through to the roof.

"How long do you think they'll stay mobbed up inside the building," Steve asked.

"Long enough," Tick-Tock replied.

Steve again looked down at the rope trailing away to the dark shape of the MRAP. The
building shadowed the area below, but the moon threw enough light to show it was deserted. Turning to what was left of the survivors who had holed up at the Garnett Bank Building on the day that the dead rose up to walk the streets of Clearwater, Steve was saddened to see that Jonny and Marcia were not among them. He pushed the emotion down and kept his voice even as he asked if anyone had seen them. No one replied.

Mary asked where Meat was
and received her answer by Steve lowering his head and shaking it slowly from side to side. Looking up quickly, he refocused his concentration on the situation at hand. He would grieve for Jonny, Marcia and Meat later. Right now, he had a responsibility to those still left alive.

"Tick-Tock, Brain and Heather go down first to act as security
," he said. "Susan, Mary and I will start lowering down the gear on both ropes. When we're done, we go down in this order; Cindy, Susan, Mary and me last."