War of the Undead (Day One): The Apocalypse Crusade (A Zombie Tale) (38 page)

“Why?” he growled.

“Because you don’t want to have to share do you?”

“Share what?” He was easily confused.

She scoffed at his moronic answer, momentarily forgetting the delicate balance of power she held over him. His quick glare reminded her. “You know, Dr. Lee and the cure. There aren't a lot of the cures. Not enough for all of them.”

He looked at the other zombies with a sneer. He hated them almost as much as he hated Anna. “What am I supposed to do with them?”

She thought on it for a moment. “Get them all down to the lobby. All except a few to guard the stairs.” She could see his slow mind working and before he could ask why, she said, “To keep Dr. Lee from escaping. You don't want her to escape, do you?"

That was an especially tough question for Von Braun to answer because Anna's shit-fuck of a condescending voice had gone right to where his head was blackest and really he could barely remember Dr. Lee just then, not when this soft, pure, tasty treat was so close.

"Remember the cure!" she snapped, backing away. He followed after her, backing her almost into the elevator where there was no room to run. Again, the cure seemed like a distant thing to him, while she was so close, so haveable, so edible.

“What about your pills?" she asked as a last resort, holding up the bottle and rattling it to distract him. “If you hurt me, you’ll end up like all of them. You’ll be a freak just like them.” She pointed with her chin at the hated zombies. He had his pressure points just like all men.

He sneered at them, too. “You want them in the lobby?”

“Yes, until the time is right. Then we’ll turn them loose.” It was her one way to get by the police. It would be dangerous as hell, but she didn’t have many choices. Or any choice, really. She had begun to fervently believe that what was happening wasn’t her fault. It was all fate. She was only playing her role.

Von Braun left to do her bidding. Anna didn’t wait around to watch, she punched the “B” button. As before the elevator screeched and shook on its cable as it began to descend. She rode the car down to the basement. When the doors opened, she didn't rush out; she stood just inside the elevator, breathing as lightly as could, trying to hear anything that might sound like one of the zombies.

After a minute she crept out of the elevator, but only took a few steps before the door began to close behind her. Quickly, she jumped back and held the door open. “Son of a bitch,” she whispered, taking off one of her shoes and jamming it in the crevice. “That was close.” She didn’t want to think about what would have happened if it had slid all the way to the top floor. Her plans would've been ruined for one and she'd be jailed for two.

"Don't think about that," she hissed. "Concentrate!"

Anna pictured the gas lines and the ovens on the third floor and realized that she was going to start a hell of a big gas fire and the one thing she couldn’t have was it lighting prematurely. That meant no sparks and really the only way she’d get sparks on a deserted floor was through some sort of electrical short. She went to the breakers.

“Beautiful,” she whispered at the sight. She had never in her life seen a set of breakers so well laid out and so perfectly marked in her life. The first thing she did was to kill the electricity to the fourth floor. “That’ll fuck with any plans they might have," she said, gleefully. Next she snapped the breakers down on the third floor.

The cafeteria had six very large gas ovens—it would have been her next destination if a zombie hadn’t come gimping toward her just then. It was between her and the elevator.

Without thinking, she began to race away, only she’d forgotten she had been going about with just one shoe on. It put her at an odd slant and made for a painfully slow get away. She ran in a hitching, hopping manner for the boilers where she hoped the maze of machinery, pipes, and shadows would conceal her.

Anna tried to hide herself within it all, but the zombie was too close. As she ran she could hear its breath wheezing in and out and she could imagine she felt the heat of it on the back of her neck. A scream was a second away from ripping up out of her throat when she saw a door along the wall that was partially open; she headed right for it and slammed it shut behind her. The zombie struck it a second later with such force that it jarred the breath out of her.

"Shit," she whined. She had her back to the door and through it she could feel the beast punching at the wood. It was a cheap door with a hollow core—but it held against the single zombie.

When she was satisfied that it wasn't going to be able to get at her anytime soon she tried to figure out where the hell she was. The room was just about as black as it could be. Splaying her fingers she swept the walls next to the door, looking for a light switch, but not finding one. The dark was impenetrable and the smell, nasty. She had no clue what sort of room she was in until her shin barked up against a solid object. “Ow!” She bent down and found something hard and smooth. Tracing its outline, she discovered it was a toilet. Even though she still wore latex gloves, she pulled her hands back in disgust.

Now that she had a point of reference she discovered the dimensions of the small lavatory: six by four. The light still eluded her until she felt something in her hair. Thinking it was a spider she did a gross-out dance until she heard the chain above her head clink sideways against the light bulb suspended from the ceiling.

“Well, shit,” she said, feeling stupid. She reached out to paw the black air until she found the string. With a yank she had light, but no hope. The bathroom held an ugly little toilet and a sink, both of which were so filthy it was hard to believe they were as new as they were. Other than a mirror on the wall that showed Anna she was no longer the fairest of them all and a single roll of toilet paper, there wasn’t anything in the little box of a room.

She was trapped.

In despair, she slid down the door, which thrummed against her back as the zombie beat on it, relentlessly. Ten minutes went by with nothing changing other than the conviction that she was screwed. The zombie wouldn’t stop until either the door came down or the police would show up in large enough numbers to “rescue” her from it and put her in jail.

Since patience was her only option she clicked off the light and sat down again, and waited, and waited. In the world above, the families were being rescued from their cottages and General Collins, having just been debriefed was sitting in his pajamas studying a map of the
Hudson Valley
and realizing that the units of the 42
nd
infantry division from New York weren’t going to be enough to sustain a quarantine of the magnitude that was being asked of him.

Almost above her head, Von Braun was busy filling the wide lobby with every zombie within reach. Already there were over a hundred and fifty wandering around the lobby, knocking into each other. Further up on the fourth floor, one of the hinges gave out on the central door and Deckard found his hand being held in a tight, cool grip. It was Thuy displaying the full extent of her fear. It was there behind her breastbone, a point of pain that had been building with each passing minute.

“It’ll be alright,” Deckard breathed into her ear. “I won’t let anything happen to you.” She didn’t believe him. Logic dictated that she would be killed in the same manner as the others: eaten alive.

Anna sat through all of this, waiting patiently, barely breathing as minute after minute ticked on by. No prayer crossed her lips. It seemed blasphemous to even consider a prayer when she was hoping to kill twenty-three people…
not that they didn’t deserve it
, she thought to herself for the hundredth time. They were the ones judging without proof, sentencing her simply because they didn’t know who the real…

A sudden touch of cool air at her wrist cut across her thoughts. She felt at the bottom edge of the door and found there to be a gap of at least an inch where cool air was slipping in. This little thing triggered an idea. Her greatest hope had been that the beast would stop its incessant hammering and go away. Only it never would on its own; it would need the promise of something else to lure it away.

She dug in her pocket and found two coins, both quarters, change from the vending machine on the third floor outside the cafeteria. Carefully she took one and set it rolling beneath the door. She heard the tiny clink as it hit the floor and for a second she heard the tread on its edges at it wheeled away. After that, nothing. The zombie, who hadn't heard anything, kept up its ceaseless banging.

Anna bit back a curse and produced the second coin. This time she got on her hands and knees, but instead of rolling the coin she slid it beneath the door as hard as she could. She could hear it skitter across the floor and then came a little sound:
tink
.

Immediately, the zombie stopped and turned. She could hear its heavy breathing retreat and then a slapping noise that she couldn’t place came to her. It went on for some time and unfortunately it wasn't all that far away. Using her good hand, she undid the buckle on her one shoe and then stood, deciding right then she was going to make a break for it, no matter how close the zombie was to the door.

She would have to be fast and her escape would have to be all or nothing.

Pausing only to make sure her mask was square on her face, she threw open the bathroom door in a quick move and saw immediately that her escape was going to be very, very close. The beast was nine feet away, staring down at a pipe, with its hands raised. It had been faced away, but at the sound of the door it had begun to turn. Anna surged forward, seeing she’d have to pass within arm’s reach of it. Speed was her only defense.

As she ran by, a diseased hand slapped down on her back, grabbing her lab coat, and checking her momentum. With a shrug of her shoulders she let the coat go and then she was speeding down the hall, racing on bare feet for the elevator, her soles slapping on the cement. The doors came up so fast that her momentum threatened to carry her beyond them. Skidding to a halt she bent, grabbed her shoe from the crevice and then leapt in. "Come on," she hissed in a panic as she repeatedly jabbed the button for the third floor. She tried to will the doors to close faster; they seemed to take forever.

With a thunk they closed in the zombies face. “Thank God! Oh, thank you, God!” she cried not caring that she was on her way to commit mass-murder. She bent over at the waist, panting, “Almost done. I’m almost out of here.”

As slow as the doors were, the elevator seemed to speed to the third floor the elevator. Before she was really ready the doors opened. Nervously, she peeked her head out of the door just in case there were still zombies around. The only light came from the elevator, making it difficult to peer into the dark, but as far as she could tell there were none. She started for the cafeteria and was halfway between the elevator and the double doors of the cafeteria when the central stair door opened and a zombie stumbled out.

It was Von Braun. To him, she was nothing but a splash of white in the dark and the erotic, exotic aroma of a hot woman. He could smell the sweat of her fear as well as her pussy and he was after her before he could think.

“Von Braun! Stop!”

Hearing his own name made him blink, her face coming into focus. “You! You left me. You were supposed to cure me and look at me. Look at me, bitch!” He looked just the same to her—gross.

“I have your pills. Remember the pills make you better.” She had the bottle out and was rattling it again. At the same time she was backing away because he looked on the verge of losing it. “Here they are, like I said. I also have the cure right upstairs with Dr. Lee. Remember her. Remember how you were going to kill her.”

“I was going to kill you,” he seethed.

“Then do it,” she challenged. “Go ahead kill me and see what happens to you. There won’t be any cure for you, and no more pills and…”

“And no gook,” he said. It was all coming back to him. He ground his teeth, not even feeling it when one of his molars broke; he only chewed on the splinter and felt his hate grow. “Give me the fucking pills, bitch-whore-shit!”

“Here you go.” She poured ten of the pills into the cap, which she held out to him. The pills clicked off each other as her gloved hand shook. It was clear to her he was on the cusp, seconds away from going full on zombie. His limited control was fading. “Here. Take them," she said.

A part of him wanted to just let go and eat her, but his head was killing him and he had a vague memory about the pills. They helped the pain. They helped everything. “Gimme,” he said, taking the cap. Watching her, he ate the pills.

“There,” she said. “You’ll start to feel like your old self any time now.”

He stared at her for a full minute, his eyes dripping black crap onto the floor; she didn’t dare look down at the twin puddles, afraid he would attack her if she broke eye contact.

“It’s not working,” he growled, taking a step at her.

“I said it would take a
few
minutes, ok? Maybe we should finish up with our plan.”

“I already did my part. Those fuckers are all down stairs. What the fuck have you been doing?” He took another step at her. When she took a corresponding step back, he grinned, showing his broken teeth. “What’s wrong? You been going behind my back? What were you doing all this time?”