Eric S. Brown (4 page)

Jacob landed on top, struggling to hold the man under him. “We’re here to help you!” Jacob pleaded. “There’s no need for any of this!”

The man slammed his forehead into Jacob’s face. Jacob’s world became one of pain. The man threw Jacob to the right, turning the tables on him. A long strand of saliva dripped from his mouth over Jacob’s eyes as the man clutched Jacob’s wrists, pinning his arms to the floor above his head.

“
I told you to leave!” the man growled like a mad dog, “I don’t want your help!”

Jacob didn’t notice Lori’s approach until the butt of one of her UZIs made contact with the backside of the man’s skull. His eyes rolled up to show only whites from the blow before he toppled forward. Jacob shoved his unconscious form aside. “I don’t care what Elijah says, we’re not taking this guy with us!” Jacob said wiping the man’s spit from his eyes and cheek with the back of his hand.

A frantic thumping noise drew Jacob’s attention towards the morgue’s main room.

“
What in the devil is that?” Lori asked.

“
Surely the whacko wouldn’t have locked one of those things in here with him, right?”

“
We’re here,” Lori told him, “might as well check it out.”

Jacob and Lori discovered the noise was coming from one of the slideout corpse storage units in the room’s wall. Jacob knew she wasn’t going to leave without taking a look inside it. He placed a hand on its lock. “You ready?” he asked, knowing he wasn’t.

“
Do it!” Lori ordered him, her UZIs aimed at the door of the unit.

Jacob threw the lock, jumping away as he slid the slab out from the wall.

“
Holy. . .!” Lori screamed. A teenage girl with pale skin, dressed in a torn black teddy, lay on the slab. Deep, purple bruises covered her cheeks and the flesh of her thighs. Her hands and feet were bloodied and battered things, likely from her continued attempts to free herself from her tight, metal prison.

“
Help me,” the girl groaned weakly at Lori.

“
Oh, honey,” Lori sobbed, helping the poor girl to sit up.

“
Yep,” Jacob said, “I am so putting a bullet in that guy’s brain on the way out. No question about it.”

As Jacob turned to leave the morgue and Lori was beginning to ease the girl onto her feet, a fist met his jaw like a sledgehammer. Jacob staggered, barely managing to stay on his feet as the room spun around him.

“
You ain’t doing no such thing,” the naked man smiled, his good arm holding the shotgun from the trap at Lori and the girl. “Thanks for leaving this here gun behind. Had a couple of shells for it in the pocket of this coat. Got a pretty good idea how I’ll use them too.”

“
Do you?” Elijah’s voice echoed in the room as he stepped into it. He was carrying Michael, or rather dragging him, with the big man’s arm over his shoulders.

“
For Heaven’s sake!” the naked man complained. “How many of you losers are there?”

Jacob watched Elijah’s wrist flick. A silver throwing knife imbedded itself in the naked guy’s hand, jerking it to the side as the double barreled shotgun thundered. The blast went wide of Lori and the girl, its slugs sparking off the wall beside them. A second knife caught the naked man in his forehead, sinking deep into his brain. A tiny trickle of blood formed below where the knife protruded from his flesh. He stumbled towards Jacob and fell over face first into the floor at his feet.

“
What are you doing here?” Jacob asked as Elijah dropped Michael and moved to close the heavy wooden side door.

“
You took too long,” Elijah said. “I couldn’t hold the rotters any longer.”

“
So does that mean. . .” Lori started, already moving to Michael’s side.

Jacob’s heart sank as Elijah answered, “Yes. We’re trapped.”

***

Michael sat propped up in a chair. His skin a greenish hue and his expression contorted into a mask of pain as Elijah finished bandaging his stomach. Lori knew he needed her. She loved Michael but she also knew the girl needed her more. She wouldn’t let any of the guys get close to her, not without it freaking her out, so Lori took charge of her care. The girl sat in another chair, across the room from Michael, as Lori knelt beside her. Lori wanted desperately to get a better look at the girl’s hands and feet to see how bad they really were but the girl wouldn’t even let Lori touch her yet. “What’s your name?” Lori whispered gently.

“
Helena,” the teen whimpered. Helena cocked her head to where Jacob placed the psycho in the lab coat’s body underneath a sheer, black plastic cover. “He’s really dead? He’s not coming back?”

Lori shook her head. “No, he’s dead for real. No one is going to hurt you anymore.”

Helena leaned into her, arms wrapping around Lori in an embrace. Jacob was pacing the length of the morgue’s main room, muttering to himself. Lori did her best to ignore him. “Helena, can you run?”

The girl nodded. She offered Lori one of her hands. “They look worse than they are.”

A lab coat, like the man wore, was all they could find to cloth Helena with. Lori made a mental note to try to find the girl some shoes as soon as they could.

“
Your friend,” Helena said cautiously, “is he okay?”

“
Huh?” Lori wasn’t sure who the girl meant.

“
He keeps talking to himself,” Helena explained.

At that moment, Jacob must have snapped. “Dang it!” he screamed. “I didn’t go through all this to be trapped again, Elijah! How in the Hades are we gonna get out of here?” Jacob walked closer to the morgue’s side door, smashing his fist into it. “Come on, Elijah! What’s your plan? There’s only a bloody couple of hundred rotters surrounding us. You’ve got to have a plan, right? I can’t take this. I really can’t.” Jacob slumped to his knees by the door, tears pouring over his cheeks.

Lori’s eyes darted to Elijah. He simply stood above Michael’s unconscious form, watching Jacob. “We need another vehicle,” he said at last. “The van is broken.”

“
No. . . really?” Jacob wailed. “I would never have figured that one out!”

“
Calm yourself, Jacob,” Elijah ordered him. “The city is full of them.”

“
Yeah, that’s wonderful, Elijah. We can’t even open the blasted doors without getting overrun. How exactly are you going to get a new one for us?”

Lori saw Elijah staring at Jacob as if he too was wondering if the writer had truly lost it or if this was just a normal breakdown from the stress they were under.

“
Jacob,” Elijah said, “we can still go up.” Elijah pointed at the ceiling.

Jacob buried his face in his hands, his body shaking with sobs.

“
Up?” Lori asked.

Elijah nodded. “We can escape from the roof. Everything we need to do so is here. It won’t be easy given your husband’s current condition but it is possible.”

“
Tell me more,” Lori said.

“
I will bring a new vehicle here. We’ll create a diversion as the rest of you get aboard then we’ll continue on as planned.”

“
And if you don’t make it back?” Lori asked though she didn’t really want to.

“
Another of you will try or you’ll all die here,” Elijah said flatly without a trace of emotion in his voice.

Michael groaned, stirring where he sat. “No, Lori,” he begged her.

“
No, what, hon?” Lori moved to kneel in front of him, taking his hands in her own. They were cold and clammy on her skin.

“
I can see it in your eyes. You’re thinking about going with him.”

“
I’m sorry, Michael, I can’t sit by and do nothing. That’s not who I am and you know it.” Lori gave Michael a quick kiss then turned to Elijah.

“
I work better alone,” he argued.

“
I don’t care. Let’s get to it.”

There was no access to the roof until Elijah made one with a pus covered chainsaw they found. The sky was black and starless as Lori stood beside him now overlooking what remained of the rotters below. “Storm’s coming,” she commented, feeling the static in the air.

Elijah grunted in response. “There’s less than I imagined,” he admitted, “Still gonna need to be careful though. A scratch is just as lethal as a bite.”

“
So?” Lori asked. “Where are we getting our new rig? I mean there’s a pickup sitting right over there.” She pointed at a red truck in the street a few yards beyond the edge of the morgue’s parking lot.

“
It’s too open,” Elijah told her. “On the way in we passed an Outback that looked to be in pretty good shape. It’s a block or so North. That’s where we’ll start.”

Elijah removed a compacted crossbow from his coat and began to unfold it. He loaded it with a bolt that was attached to a thin, wire climbing cable. Tying the wire to a metal pipe on the roof, he fired the crossbow. The bolt fell into the asphalt of the lot below, imbedding itself there.

“
We slid down and hit it hard and fast. There will be no stopping until we reach the vehicle. Are you sure you want to do this?”

“
Totally,” Lori stood her ground.

Elijah tossed her a pair of thick gloves. “These worked for Jacob. Put them on.”

Lori complied. They were a tad big but she guessed they would serve their purpose.

Before she could say anything else, Elijah took a running leap, grabbing the cable as he plummeted from the roof and slid into the parking lot. He knocked aside several rotters as he reached the ground, drawing twin pistols from underneath his trench coat. His shots echoed in the night as he began to send the closest creatures to Hell where they belonged.

Cursing, Lori grabbed the cable and jumped off the roof. As soon as her feet touched the parking lot, she was running after Elijah through the path his guns had cut in the rotters’ ranks. Her UZIs blazed, the bursts from their barrels flashing in the darkness.

“
This way,” she heard Elijah yell as he kicked in the rear door of the warehouse neighboring the morgue. Lori saw what he planning. By cutting through the warehouse, odds were they would lose the bulk of the rotters on their tail. She sprinted after Elijah. The two of them wove through aisles of crates and large wooden containers until they reached its other side. Elijah came to a halt at a doublewide door looking to lead back onto the street. He glanced at her and she nodded. Without hesitating, Elijah threw the door open. A small pack of eight surprised rotters snarled at them. Lori emptied the clips of her UZIs, sending them sprawling. Elijah darted through the doorway ahead of her. His pistols were holstered, his swords in his hands.

The street was fairly clear of rotters in comparison to the area around the morgue. Lori paused to close the warehouse door. One good thing about rotters was that most of them didn’t know what a door knob was.

As she ran on, Lori let one of her UZIs go as she popped the other’s spent clip, shoving a fresh mag into it. She could see the Outback they were after up ahead. Elijah sidestepped a rotter who came racing at him as he neared it. One of his swords gutted the creature as the other slashed its spine in two as he passed it. Another rotter dove around the Outback at him. Elijah cut a deep wound into its face where its eyes had been. Lori watched as he flung open the driver side door.

“
Cover me!” Elijah shouted, bending under the dash and tearing loose the wires he would need to hotwire it. Lori came to a halt just short of his position. One after another, the rotters who charged them were met with bursts of automatic fire, tearing flesh and spraying stale blood on the street.

The Outback’s engine roared to life. Lori didn’t wait for an invitation. She ran for its passenger door. A rotter met her as she rounded the rear of the vehicle. She raised her UZI at its snarling lips. Her heart froze as she squeezed the weapon’s trigger and it clicked empty. The rotter’s hands grabbed her shoulders, slamming her into the Outback’s side. Her UZI bounced away as it was knocked from her grasp and fell to the pavement. She struggled against the rotter’s hold on her, kneeing it in the groin with no effect. Its teeth snapped at her flesh. Frantically, Lori got her arms up in between the rotter’s. She wasn’t strong enough to push it off of her so she shoved her thumbs into its eyes, pressing as hard as she could. Its decayed tissues gave way with a sickening, popping noise as her thumbs sank into its sockets. Thick, stale blood oozed over her hands and down her arms but still the thing refused to let go. Glass shattered next to her as a round from one of Elijah’s pistols came through the Outback’s rear side window and splattered the rotter’s torso open in a shower of guts and pus. Lori screamed, a fresh wave of adrenaline pulsing through her, and pushed the off balance rotter from its feet. Several more of the creatures were almost within grabbing distance of her as she hopped into the passenger seat. “Go!” she yelled at Elijah. The Outback peeled out as it lurched forward.

Lori’s breathing was hard and fast, her eyes glistening with tears. She noticed Elijah steal a glance at her. “I’m okay,” she lied. By the grace of God, the rotter hadn’t broken her skin with its teeth or nails but it had shaken her to her very core. With trembling hands, she drew the pistol on her belt and tried to ready it.

“
Elijah,” Lori asked, “where were you when all this started?” She hoped talking would help her reign in her emotions.

“
An army base.”

“
Wow,” Lori tried to smile. “That explains so much. Were you in command there?”