Dead, but Not for Long (41 page)

~*~

Autumn was the one that found the new batteries
and Keith thanked her, quickly putting them into the flashlight. He sent the
message at once, telling the others that a group was on the way up to help them
but that they didn’t know if all of the infected were out yet or not.

~*~

“Yes and no,” was Snake’s answer to Lindsey. He
held his makeshift spear in front of the corpse and its eyes followed. The
flesh was completely gone on the right side of the head, but the left still had
some meat. The exposed tendons seemed to tighten and loosen in an instinctive
attempt to bite, but the jaw only moved sideways. Snake placed the spear over
one eye socket and thrust it into the creature’s brain, causing the exposed
tendons to immediately relax. Pulling the spear from the socket, Snake
continued up the stairs.

The mostly dark stairwell made Lindsey nervous.
Her previous close call had scared her badly but she had not for even a moment
thought about not helping to complete the task at hand. They were coming up on
the fifth floor and with any luck they’d be heading back down shortly and be
back to the hospital before she knew it.

Smiley, who was struggling with the climb, had to
pause and catch his breath, which gave Snake an excuse to slow down. His legs
were aching and he was a little too out of shape to be climbing so many stairs.
He stopped in his tracks and Lindsey again bumped into him.

“Did you hear something?” he whispered. The bulky
biker’s breathing was the only sound to be heard.

“Stop breathing!” Snake commanded.

Smiley held his breath.

~*~

As the parade of undead continued their trek
toward the warehouse, Moose searched the back of the building. There were what
appeared to be service bays, large enough for heavy equipment. Around the
corner, he found several backhoes and an asphalt paving machine. He was hoping
for a machine large enough to demolish the building while the undead were
locked inside, but none of the equipment seemed powerful enough. Then he saw
the pavement roller. He climbed into the cab and smiled when he saw the set of keys
dangling from the ignition. A few minutes after fumbling with some levers, he
was back inside, waiting in the cab of the machine.

“Guys,” he radioed. “We may not have to burn the
building down after all.”

He sat upon his perch on the roller watching his friends rumble into the service
bay then move through the office and out the back door, one at a time.
The ghoulish procession followed. Moose saw the last biker pull the office door shut
and he watched as the frenzied horde piled up behind it, scraping and clawing.
Several minutes later, someone else quickly closed the large overhead door,
trapping the crowd inside the building with Moose.
He watched as they mercilessly trampled each other with a blatant disregard for civilized behavior.

The biker’s curiosity turned to nervousness as one of the creatures turned his way.
Soon, it seemed that every eye was upon him as a thousand ghouls swarmed in his direction.
He knew that they were pretty lousy climbers, but he wasn’t very high off the ground it would only
take seconds to claw their way over each other to reach his open cab. Pulling a lever, he surged forward.

The first few ghouls in Moose’s path disappeared
beneath the giant roller, their expressions never changing as they were pulled
under. They’d barely disappeared from view before more were there to take their
places. Moose felt the giant piece of machinery shift slightly as it moved over
the bodies, pulverizing them into a mass of red sludge. The crunching of bones was
accompanied by a symphony of moans to make an unearthly sound as the biker
continued to grind the dead into the cement floor.

~*~

“Oh, no,” Lindsey whispered, hearing the moaning
now that the biker was holding his breath. The hallway to her right sounded
like it was filled with the undead. Snake shone his light that way just
as Smiley let out his breath and gasped for air. The hallway was packed with
the dead and when Snake moved his light around, the reason was obvious. It
appeared that someone had made a last stand, leaving at least twenty corpses
littering the floor between the infected and the stairs. The bodies were heaped
two and three high and had held the crowd back so far, but now that the
infected saw prey before them, some began to climb over the pile of bodies.

“Get that door closed,” Snake said, trying to remain calm.

“I can’t,” Wolf said. “Something’s stuck.”

Lindsey and Smiley hurried over to help him. It
looked like the clothing from one of the bodies had gotten stuck in the hinge
somehow, preventing the door from closing.

Snake held the light while Lindsey and the big
biker began to take out the dead that were making their way toward them. While the
guns made far too much noise, they had little other recourse. A couple minutes
passed before Wolf finally lifted a piece of cloth triumphantly and said, “Got it!”

The group hurried out the door, slamming it closed
just before the dead began to smash their bodies against the other side.

“That was close,” Lindsey said. The portly biker just nodded, completely winded.

“We’ve got three more floors to go and I’m
guessing the gunshots have been heard,” Snake said. “We need to hustle.”

~*~

Moose was amazed at how easy it was to flatten the
creatures into pan-corpses. The ones that chased him could not catch up. The
others were simply rolled under, their arms still grasping and teeth still
gnashing as their bodies were pressed under the weight of the roller. He
laughed at their inability to reason as they continued to come, oblivious to
the fate of their flattened friends. Some had fallen to the side, only partly
crushed. Moose glanced down to see a man, flattened from the chest down, still
clawing at the air with one arm while stuck to the floor.

 The job would have been easier if the
infected weren’t moving. He had to make several passes in lawn mowing fashion,
yet many of them managed to evade the crushing roller time and time again. He
glanced back to see them following. Looking down at the controls, he found
reverse and backed up. As soon as he did, the crowd began to grow in front of
the machine so he shifted it forward again, taking out more of them.

With about half of the mob incapacitated, Moose
noticed that the floor was becoming slick. He felt a moment of panic when the
barrel spun freely on the cocktail of blood, guts, and brains. He quickly
switched to reverse and backed his way out. When it happened the second time,
he was able to free himself again, though it took a bit longer. The third time
he wasn’t so lucky.

~*^*~

Moose’s heart sank as he felt the drums continue to
spin on the gooey mixture. He helplessly watched as the remaining dead gathered
around the machine. The cab was high enough off the ground that they couldn’t grab him easily, but it was open.
He could foresee a grisly death if the zombies managed to climb on top of each other and drag him off the machine.

The other bikers had successfully exited the
office and closed the overhead door. Twenty or thirty of the infected had
lingered outside the building, and the men dispatched them with ease. Through an
upper window, one of the bikers had been watching Moose grind the ghouls into
the concrete, and he noticed his friend’s current predicament.

“We’d better do something, fast,” he said, after
letting the others know what was happening.

“Yeah, but what?” another asked. Anybody got an idea?”

~*~

The threat on the fifth floor had barely been
dealt with when Snake heard a loud thud and turned to find a moving corpse at his feet.

“Did he just roll down the stairs?” Wolf asked,
using a sharpened metal pole to put the creature out of its misery.

“I forgot to mention that part,” Lindsey said. “When
I was in here earlier, some of them were doing that. It caught me by surprise,
but I guess they don’t always realize they have to step down stairs.”

A couple more of the walking corpses made their way down and were quickly dispatched,
but it was becoming obvious that many had stayed in the building rather than follow the others.

“It’s hard to believe there are so many still
left,” Lindsey said. “It seems like half of Lansing must have been in this building.”

“It explains why there weren’t too many in our
parking lot this morning,” Snake said. “They must have figured out there were
living people in here and told their friends about it, too.”

On the next landing, the group once again had to
work to get the door closed, though this time it was just a matter of moving
bodies out of the way and killing a couple of stragglers. Snake was well aware
of the time that was ticking by, and when they had to wage another battle to
get to the seventh floor, he was seriously starting to worry. Not only did they
need to get the survivors back to the hospital, but he needed to go check on
his men at the warehouse and see how they were doing.

~*~

Back at the warehouse, a couple of the men ran to the back of the building, looking for some more heavy equipment.

They radioed the others, moments later. “Get ready
to open the door, the cavalry’s coming!”

Rounding the corner was a backhoe with a fully
enclosed cab. The mood among the men improved significantly when they saw it.

“These tires should grip just fine,” the driver radioed.

The biker who was riding on the step jumped off as
the machine approached the slowly-opening doorway. The others picked off the
escaping zombies then closed the door behind the backhoe.

Spinning around quickly, one of the bikers took
out a couple of strays that had taken a little longer to get to the warehouse. “Awww,
sorry boys,” he said to them as he took his shots. “You missed the party.”

As the ghouls clawed their way over each other to
get to Moose, he finally moved out of the cab to climb onto the roof, stabbing
at the zombies as they piled up on the machine. Their jaws were precariously
close to his legs as they snapped like hungry dogs. He was relieved to see the
door open and the backhoe plow toward him, pushing piles of undead, along with
pulverized remains, out of the way as it went. The operator lifted the scoop
over the cab of the roller and motioned for the big biker to jump in. Moose
began to climb into the bucket, but quickly jumped back onto his perch, making
a gesture to the operator with his wrist. The backhoe driver pushed a lever and
the bucket tipped, spewing guts and body parts onto the floor. Tilting the
bucket back up, he waited for his friend to get in. Slightly disgusted, but
thankful at the same time, Moose jumped into the bucket, trying to find a clean
spot to hold on to as his friend raised him high above the surviving mass of
infected. Turning the machine around, the operator released the hoe apparatus
and used it to claw at the fuel tank of the roller. After a few minutes, a hole
appeared and the diesel fuel gushed to the floor. He radioed to those that were
outside and the door opened.

Once the backhoe and its occupants were outside,
the door was quickly shut and the undead escapees were finished off.

“Anyone got a match?” the backhoe operator smiled.
“Those tires should burn real well.”

~*~

“End of the hall,” Snake said, pointing. “That’s
where the survivors are holed up.”

They closed doors as they made their way down the
dark hall, having to stop and exterminate three more of the dead along the way.
When they reached the large room at the end, Snake banged on the door.

“Hey, you guys in there?” he asked.

The survivors were ecstatic, letting out a loud
cheer from inside the room. There was the sound of furniture being moved away
then the door was opened to reveal a group of anxious-looking people.

“We are so glad to see you,” one man told them,
shaking Snake’s hand. “My name is Jackson. I don’t know how much longer we
would have lasted up here.”

“Snake,” the biker said, grinning. He quickly
introduced the others in his rescue crew.

“Do you have any flashlights?” Lindsey asked. “We’ve
only got one with us and it’s very dark in the building.”

“Claire’s got one,” he said, nodding toward a
woman with straight, black hair.

The woman lifted up a tiny flashlight and turned
it on, surprising Lindsey when she saw the powerful beam.

“It’s an LED flashlight,” the woman said.

“Thank God we had it or we’d have had no way to
signal for help,” Jackson said. He nodded toward a teenager standing toward the
back of the group. “Dustin had it, but he got trapped in a room down the hall
when we finally made it up to this floor. The room he was in had a window on
the opposite side of the building from the hospital.”

“How’d you make it to this room?” Snake asked the
teen as they moved out into the hall.

“I called Jackson on his cell phone and told them
I was making a run for it and they needed to get the door open,” he said with a shrug.

“We tried to tell him that it was a bad idea,”
Claire added, “but he opened the door and started fighting his way down the
hall. We grabbed anything that we could find that could be used as a weapon and
came out to help him. Between all of us, we got him here in one piece.”

“In hindsight, it was a good move, though I sure
didn’t think so at the time,” Jackson said as they stepped into the stairwell. “I
think we made enough noise to draw every deadhead for miles around.”

“That’s explains why there were so many,” Lindsey
said. “The building was filled with them.”

“Just to let you know, we need to move fast,”
Snake said, starting down the stairs. “The military is going to be bombing the
area starting at dawn.”

“That’s what Keith told us. We saw the jets flying
past yesterday,” Jackson said, hefting a backpack onto his shoulders. “The guy
in the penthouse said he put a sign on the roof for us, so I don’t imagine they’ll
hit us, but still, we were kind of holding our breath.”