“We can’t just leave him like that, man, we can’t. Jesus…”
The camera view was looking at the floor, at the brown puddles. Then it tracked sideways, following the floor and the other doors down the hall.
All of the doors were oozing.
The camera tracked the ooze all the way to the end of the hall, where there was a single closed door, a partially obscured sign that said MAINTENAN at the top.
The door was riddled with bullet holes.
Josh whispered, “Guys. Guys. Pay attention.”
The flashlight swung around and lit up the door. Somebody off camera said, “Oh God, oh God, oh God…”
Josh said, “Amy, if you can still see this, make sure it’s saving the feed for playback later. If I don’t get back, tell my parents and sis that I love them. Safeties off, everybody.”
Amy said, “Josh! Come back! Come back to the RV! Now.”
Fredo said, “He can’t hear you.”
The camera view wobbled down the hall, the MAINTENAN door growing in the video window. Josh gestured with his free hand, and two guys, Donnie and another guy Amy hadn’t seen on camera yet, did their thing, laying against the wall at each side of the door. Josh stood in front of the door. Gun barrels edged into view on his left and his right.
Josh said, “On three. One. Two…”
The view shook. There was the crack of a boot kicking a door. This was not coupled with the sound of a doorjamb shattering. Instead, the boot gave it another try, and another. Finally the door swung in.
The view whipped around as everybody piled into the room at once. It was a huge room, full of rusting pipes and machinery and barrels and crates.
“THE FLOOR! THE FLOOR!”
The view panned down. Amy yelped.
Someone or something was writhing on the floor of the room. Grasping hands appeared in the flashlight beam. A face. The thing on the floor reached out at Josh’s leg and he kicked it away. People were screaming. Josh was screaming.
“DONNIE! GET THE—”
“HEY! NO!”
Through the gun cam came the sound of rustling—scraping shoes and gasps and shouts. The flashlight beam was spinning. The camera swung over to it and something had Flashlight Guy, throwing him around. The flashlight swept the back wall of the room—
Zombies. Wall to wall. Shambling, caked with mud, advancing.
“THEY’RE COMING OUT OF THE WALLS! THEY’RE COMING OUT OF THE FUCKING WALLS!”
Flashlight Guy was spun around again and his machine gun roared. Amy heard it through the laptop first, and echoing from the building a half second later. That jolted her into the realization that this was happening right inside the building across the yard, behind exactly zero locked doors. The same thing seemed to occur to Fredo, who ran back up behind the wheel and buckled in.
The video window was black. The flashlight has gone out. Screams.
“MIIILLLSSS!”
“JESUS CHRIST GET BACK!”
“RON IS DOWN! THEY GOT RON! GET OUT!”
More rustling and jostling around the gun cam. Finally, light appeared. It was the hallway, the lantern still on the floor in front of the oozing door where they’d left it. The view was bouncing. Josh was running away.
The gun camera spun around to face the MAINTENAN room door again. No one was following. The view just froze there, the sound of Josh breathing hard, muttering, “Oh-Jesus-oh-Jesus-oh-Jesus-oh-Jesus—”
From behind the door came screams. Then gunshots.
The view swung again, and Josh was looking into the camera, looking into the barrel of his own gun. He looked like he’d aged ten years. Sweat matted his hair to his forehead. Tears streamed down his cheeks. Blood was running from his lip.
Into the camera, Josh said, “Mom, Dad, Hailey. I love you. To the rest of the world, my name is Joshua Nathaniel Cox. I have just witnessed the first shots of the Z War. Amy, go. Now. We’re going to hold them off as long as we can but if we can’t stop them, they’re going to be right on your tail—”
Something thudded heavily against the door. Josh closed his eyes and swallowed. The camera view swung back around, the view plunging forward, fast, Josh running into the battle. He stopped to scoop up the lantern, then kicked in the MAINTENAN door. He threw the lantern into the mass of thrashing limbs.
The flying lantern illuminated absolute chaos. Bodies falling on top of bodies. Strobing bursts of flame from gun barrels. Gunsmoke filling the room.
From the melee lumbered a big, bloody female zombie with matted hair that made it look like Medusa. The camera, and the gun barrel with it, drew dead center on the target and unleashed a burst of hellfire that tore into the beast. It let out an inhuman shriek and fell, flames sputtering across its ragged clothes.
The view swung to the left. A dark-skinned zombie was trying to wrestle the gun away from another member of the squad. Josh unleashed the Dragon’s Breath once more, clipping the target on the shoulder. It stumbled back, and Josh fired again, and again. Each shot blazed out like a lethal Roman candle. Josh was screaming, a battle cry. Donnie was next to him and he opened fire with his Vietnam gun. Side by side, the two unloaded into the room.
“JOSH! IT’S ME! DON’T SHOOT!”
The view swung over to show Flashlight Guy, stumbling over the tangle of smoking bodies on the floor. He joined the other two, raised his gun and the three turned the room into a shooting gallery.
Josh yelled, “WHERE’S MILLS?”
“THEY GOT HIM. THEY GOT EVERYBODY BUT US!”
“I’M OUT! I’M OUT OF AMMO!”
Josh screamed, “GET BACK!”
The camera leveled at the lantern laying on the floor. The barrel jutting up from the bottom of the frame roared once more. The lantern burst into a ball of flame.
The screen flared white, then to total darkness. The sounds of the battle faded to a trio of hurried footsteps and frantic breathing. They emerged into the hall.
“AMY! FREDO! CAN YOU HEAR ME? PREPARE FOR EVAC!”
TWO HOURS EARLIER …
At the sight of Molly and her bloody hunk of meat, TJ screamed, “Holy shit, stand back! Get back!”
I said, “Okay, I really don’t think she tore that spine out of a living person.”
“And how do you know that?”
“Because she doesn’t have any blood on her paws or her face. I think she just found it. So, you know, let’s figure out whose spine it is.”
Hope was already walking down the hall, past the bank of dead elevators. Watching the floor as she went.
Blood. A smeared trail of it, where Molly had been dragging the spine. TJ followed Hope, put his hand on her shoulder, and took the lead. I made Molly drop the spine, and grabbed her collar. I dragged her along while we all followed TJ like we were the Scooby-Doo gang. We went down two flights of stairs, and arrived at a STAFF ONLY door in the basement. Behind it was a dark hallway—no windows and no lights. Without a word, Hope clicked on a flashlight and handed it to TJ.
The blood smear ended partway down the hall, presumably at the point before the spine got too heavy for Molly to keep it aloft in her jaws. But there were only three doors: an employee restroom, a break room, and a door that read BOILER ROOM.
The bathroom was clean. Well, not clean, but there were no corpses in there. People were eating calmly in the break room, by candlelight. We went back into the hall again, and stared at the boiler room door.
TJ said he’d go check it out first, since he had the only flashlight, and I thought that was a good plan. He leaned his shoulder against the door, the flashlight held at the ready like it was a gun, when he turned to me and said, “You comin’, Spider-Man?” So apparently I was an extension of TJ somehow, which was not mentioned when he apparently volunteered on behalf of both of us.
With Hope and Molly behind us in the hall, TJ pushed the door open and expertly shone the light in one corner, then the other. Ambush points, I guess. Nobody home. There was a massive, dead machine to our right, a pair of huge, armored barrels laying on their side, sprouting pipes big enough for a raccoon to crawl through. Boiler. TJ edged over, checked behind the cylinders, and swept the flashlight across the concrete floor. Nothing. Then the light found another metal door on the opposite side of the room, paint peeling around the edges and stained with rust, and I realized we weren’t finished.
The door was standing partially open, wide enough for a dog to slip through. The floor was streaked with red. TJ edged over toward it, and I wondered why we didn’t just go get Owen to lead the way with his pistol. What were we going to do if some spidered-out zombie came leaping out at us? Die, to serve as a cautionary tale to the others? Was that our role here?
TJ pushed the door in. Same procedure with the light—corner clear, clear behind the door. Suddenly we were in a room from an earlier century—exposed bricks on every wall, black with grime and patched with cobwebs. A remnant of the original building, buried by multiple renovations. TJ swept the flashlight across the floor and hit a pair of dead eyes, staring up from a white face wreathed with matted bloody hair. A woman, middle aged. Her torso was still wearing a green jumpsuit, but everything from her rib cage down was white bone draped with shredded crimson ribbons.
“Shit. That’s Rhonda.”
“Okay. And who’s the other one?”
TJ hadn’t noticed the other body yet, but I pointed and he found it with the light, facedown next to the far wall. It was a guy who looked like his ass had been blown out with a grenade. His abdomen had a flat, deflated shape, disemboweled from the back end. Spine was missing.
TJ sighed and said, “Carlos got ’em.”
He approached the facedown corpse and lifted the head with his foot.
“Don’t know this guy.” TJ did another sweep with his light to make sure that “Carlos” wasn’t in the room with us.
I said, “Who is ‘Carlos’ by the way, other than the monster who eats people’s assholes?”
TJ shrugged. “Don’t know him in any other capacity. Suave little Latino dude. We identified him as infected, but he didn’t show any signs and he didn’t seem to know. So we didn’t tell him. Then one day with no warning, he transforms right in front of us, like Optimus Prime if he was made of meat. Turns into this wicked corkscrew worm thing and digs into the dirt. Comes up when he gets hungry. Or when somebody sits down. Look.”
