Zombie Squad Read online

  “Lead the way,” Griffith said, clearly not impressed with the way this assignment had turned out.

  Nick took a moment to get his bearings straight. He’d only been to Katherine’s little hideout on three occasions: once to meet her employers and twice to work with Katherine. They had always worked in the same place—a remote and mostly abandoned building in a part of town that was somewhere between the ghetto and one of those wanna-be suburban neighborhoods that is never quite fully developed no matter how many tax dollars are thrown at it.

  He had been right when he had said that it was just ten blocks or so ahead, but ten blocks in this mess, with the potential of countless unseen ramblers lurking around, could be catastrophic.

  Nick led them forward and took a right when he came to a one way street that was mostly untouched by the clutter of traffic. Still, no matter which direction he picked, there were dead bodies on the street, reminders of what they could potentially be walking into.

  All three of them had some form of military training, although James’s was sketchy, and it was apparent in the way they walked down the destroyed streets. Nick took the lead, keeping his eyes on the road ahead. Griffith took center, making sure no threats crept up from their sides, while James brought up the rear and made sure nothing snuck up from behind.

  They passed sawhorses and sand bags that had been set up during the outbreak and as far as Nick was concerned, they were simply proof of a war that had been lost. There near the end, that’s exactly what it had been: a war between the police and the military against a panicked and infected population. As they made their way closer to the abandoned building that Nick hoped Katherine had continued to call home, he passed the decimated body of a police officer. His badge cast a dull glow in the gray and black of everything, as meaningless as ever. Several other bodies lay nearby in various forms of decay.

  The smell of rot began to creep in as they covered each block. They were headed towards the center of town, where statistics and percentages indicated the most death had occurred in the larger cities. The number of human remains began to grow as well, bodies often fallen atop of other bodies. Nick passed them by and found it unsettling that it was impossible to tell which had been ramblers and which had been the victims.

  As far as he knew, there was no prejudice in the eyes of the ramblers. While infection had been passed through bodily fluids spread through biting attacks, there seemed to be no requirements for those that the ramblers bit only to turn rather than those that they attacked for food. Nick had seen both occur with his own eyes—had watched as a horde of ramblers had thrown a man to the ground only to meagerly scratch and bite at him and then turn around to tear a woman’s entrails out for a feast within a matter of seconds.

  The fact that very little about the nature of the ramblers was known even to this day was one of the primary reasons Nick had agreed to come along with Griffith. He wanted answers…he wanted to know what had caused the outbreak in the first place. He knew there were no answers that would bring his wife and son back, but he wanted those answers anyway.

  “Hey, guys,” James said, his voice low.

  “Yeah?” Nick said.

  “I got movement about a block and a half over.”

  All three of them stopped. Nick wheeled around to face the direction James was looking. “You sure?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “A rambler?” Nick asked.

  “Not sure. I saw it out of the corner of my eye and then it was g—”

  He stopped here, raised his gun, and said “Shit,” through gritted teeth.

  Nick peered behind them, back the way they had come, and his blood went cold.

  There were four ramblers coming their way. They were walking with that same slow stride but there was still a sense of urgency and violence to the way they moved.

  Nick raised his Sig and lined up one of the rambler’s heads in his sights. As he did, he saw another three ramblers come stumbling into view from behind the building nearest the original four. He felt the weight of the shotgun on his back, begging to be used but Nick had already decided to save that for any up-close-and-personal ordeals.

  “More coming in on the west,” Griffith said, bringing his military issue M4 carbine rifle up to his shoulder.

  Nick looked to the west and saw six ramblers a block away. They were all coming together slowly, making a scattered group.

  “Where the hell are they coming from?” Nick asked. It was almost as if they had been in hiding, like hornets in a nest that would only come out when the hive was threatened.

  At first glance, it wasn’t much of a competition. With the firepower they had at their disposal, they shouldn’t have much of a problem. But Nick knew how the ramblers worked. He had just seen four sneak up on them and that four had become thirteen in less than ten seconds. They came out of the woodwork like termites and just kept coming and coming.

  “Hold off on firing until it can’t be helped,” Griffith said. “The gunfire will attract more of them. Nick, get us where we need to go and do it fast.”

  Nick faced forward again and sprinted up the street. He could practically feel Griffith and James on his heels. He peered behind him a single time and saw that the ramblers James had spotted were now a full two blocks behind them and essentially not a threat.

  He turned back around, took two more long strides forward, and then came to a hard stop. Griffith collided with him and both of them nearly went down.

  “What the hell?”

  Nick didn’t have to answer. He opened fire at the group of ramblers that had come around the corner and stood less than three feet away from them.

  15

  Fear and anger rampaged through Nick has he hammered down the trigger on the Sig. He felt foolish for having taken his eyes off the road ahead. But beyond that was the idea that this entire attack felt as if it had been planned…the ramblers seemed stupid, devoid of any reasoning and pushed by a savage means that humanity had evolved far away from.

  There was no way this was coincidental.

  Nick knew that they were being pinned in. The ramblers were coming at them in a strategic maneuver. It spoke of an uncanny sense of planning that was beyond terrifying.

  The group he had nearly run into consisted of five men, one of which was stark naked, his body covered in bruises. When Nick put two rounds in his forehead, the naked rambler was no less than a foot away from him. The blood spray that jettisoned out of the back of the rambler’s head looked both black and bright at the same time in the morning light.

  Behind Nick, Griffith had managed to collect himself. He took out two of the five with neatly placed single rounds directly between their eyes. The rifle was much louder than his Sig; its suddenness seemed to tear the morning in half. The five ramblers were on the ground less than three seconds after Nick had almost run directly into their rotting arms.

  Nick looked ahead and saw that the coast was clear, but there were at least a dozen closing in from the right, ambling down the street.

  “Haul ass,” Nick said, sprinting forward again.

  The three men ran up the street, having to keep to the sidewalk by the time they neared the end of the street due to another thick traffic jam.

  As they made their way around the wrecked cars, Nick heard James mutter a curse behind them. This was followed by two shots from his rifle and the sound of something crumpling to the ground.

  “They’re everywhere,” James said. “There’s at least thirty of them behind us now. The closest are half a block away.”

  “Thank God they’re slow as hell,” Griffith said.

  Nick didn’t risk another glance back. By doing so, he was rewarded with the corner he had once met Katherine at several years ago. The building she had done her freelance work from was inside a tall featureless building at the other end of the block.

  “We’re almost there,” he called out.

  When he reached the intersection, he looked to the left and the right. Se
veral ramblers were coming from both directions but were at least half a block away.

  Where did they all come from?

  It was worth thinking about later. He supposed if they travelled in packs it only made sense that they would reside in the same way. Were there nests of these things located around the country? It was a sickening thought but one that would have to be entertained back at Langley.

  If they made it back to Langley.

  It was a harrowing thought that he let fall to the bloodstained floor of his mind.

  He covered the next block and came to a stop in front of the abandoned building. A flight of concrete stairs led to a set of glass doors. One of the doors had three bullet holes and a splatter of blood along its center. A female body lay sprawled in the corner of the steps. Her neck, arms, and feet had been stripped of flesh, chewed to the bone.

  Nick looked back at Griffith and James and saw that they were still directly behind him. Further down the street, the different groups of ramblers were beginning to merge together at intersections. There were easily fifty of them now and certainly more coming.

  “Inside,” Nick said, bounding up the last of the stairs.

  He opened the door and let Griffith and James inside. Nick dashed in behind them and took the lead again. He ran to the end of the first floor hallway, electing to skip the elevators and take the stairs instead.

  Another body laid in the floor near the stairwell, a teenage boy that looked to have been shot in the stomach. There were deep bite marks in his neck, showing bone and what Nick thought was his windpipe.

  He looked away quickly and hit the stairs, taking them two at a time. When he reached the second landing, he looked back behind him and saw that his two partners were taking the stairs with the same panic and speed.

  “Fourth floor,” Nick yelled back. “Almost there.”

  They made their way up to the fourth floor and found the hallway untouched. Other than the deafening silence of the place, there were no signs that the world had ended. The floor was clean, albeit dusty. The entire building had been abandoned for quite some time now so its lack of features weren’t surprising. Still, the silence struck Nick the wrong way. He suddenly became very concerned about what they might find inside Katherine’s quarters.

  He came to the last door on the hallway, a door he had entered on three different occasions, always without anyone else’s knowledge.

  “You understand that we’re trapped here, right?” Griffith asked as he came up the stairs behind him. “They’re slow, but not invalid. They can come up these stairs.”

  “That’s a bridge we’ll cross when we get to it,” Nick said.

  He raised his hand and hammered on the wooden door in front of him. They waited a few seconds and got no response.

  “Katherine?” Nick said. “It’s Nick Blackburn. If you’re there, please open the door!”

  Again, there was no response. What they did hear, though, was a distant clamor of noise from beneath them. The ramblers were in the building and heading their way.

  “I got this,” James said.

  He stepped forward, raising one of his size twelve boots as he did so. He delivered a devastating kick to the door that sent it flying inwards, the door popping a hinge in the process.

  They walked in quickly and Nick instantly started searching the place over. The headquarters consisted of one large open room, a bathroom and two smaller offices that were both empty. He did a thorough search of the place but he knew within a handful of seconds that it was empty.

  Katherine wasn’t there.

  The place looked exactly like Nick remembered it. There were several laptops scattered all over the place, sitting on a large table in the center of the large room. Others sat almost haphazardly in dusty corners, never to be powered up again.

  He noticed, though, that there were no papers, no folders, no proof of life. Katherine had apparently left with what she felt she needed and left the expendable equipment behind. She could be anywhere now. She could be dead.

  “Damn,” Nick said.

  “Damn is right,” Griffith said. “Where the hell is she, Nick?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “This was one huge mistake, wasn’t it?” Griffith asked.

  Nick didn’t provide an answer. He noticed that James had taken up a position by the door he had kicked in. He was looking out into the hallway, waiting for the ramblers to show up.

  Nick looked back to Griffith as a desperate plan started to come together in his head.

  “You got your Langley computer in that bag?” he asked.

  Griffith looked shocked but the guilt was plastered to his face.

  “You do,” Nick said. “I saw it when you were checking your supplies in Langley. I don’t care. If you have secrets, you have secrets and we’ll deal with that later. But get the computer out right now.”

  Griffith hesitated, looking around the room like there might be someone in hiding that would pop up and take his side in this.

  “Power it up right now,” Nick said.

  “Why?”

  “I’ve got an idea.”

  “Is it better than the current idea we’re in the middle of?”

  “Just get out the fucking computer!”

  Sneering, Griffith did as he was asked. He slid off his pack and took out the computer. He powered it up and waited, looking to Griffith at the doorway like a man looking at the gallows moments before execution.

  “Okay,” Griffith said a few moments later. “It’s up.”

  Nick was not a computer expert by any means, but he knew enough about Katherine to know that she would not have left any hardware behind if she planned on never coming back to this location. He hoped that meant she somehow had a wireless connection still thriving in the building. He had no idea if that was even remotely possible, but he had to hope. If anyone would have been capable of pulling off such a feat, it would have been Katherine Laslo.

  Thankfully, it didn’t take much hunting to find the list of available networks. Within just a few clicks, Nick found what he needed. And, given the fact that nearly every connection that had ever existed in the US was now down, there was only a single one available.

  Nick clicked it and glared hatefully at the screen as a prompt for a password popped up. He typed in a random sequence of letters and tapped ENTER. He got a Wrong Password message and then tried again.

  “You know her password to a connection that has no business existing?” Griffith asked.

  “Of course not,” Nick said. “But Katherine covers her tracks. If she’s still alive, she’ll know someone is trying to access this connection. She’ll know someone is here. And I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t have gone too far. She left too much stuff behind.”

  He hit ENTER a second time and this time, in addition to the incorrect password window, got another window that read: You Have Been Locked Out.

  “Good going,” Griffith said.

  “That’s exactly what we wanted,” Nick said. “If my hunch is right, Katherine will—”

  “Heads up,” James called to them from the door. “They’re here.”

  Nick left Griffith’s computer up and running as he went to the door. He looked down the hallway and saw that one rambler had come through the door. Several others were jockeying for position at the doorway, too anxious to file into any order to get through the door without jamming themselves up.

  “Fire?” James asked, his finger flexing at the trigger.

  “Yeah,” Nick said. “Fire.”

  James started firing into the doorway. Nick only watched for a moment as the zombie in front did a little shudder-dance and then collapsed to the floor. James then took down the other two behind the leader. They fell back through the doorway, blocking entry for those behind them.

  Nick looked back to the computer, suddenly afraid that his hunch was wrong. He knew Katherine very well. He knew her mannerisms and he knew how she worked. She had always taken her work very seriously and h
e didn’t think that would change after the end of the world. As a matter of fact, Nick felt that she was probably more serious than ever now that everything had come to an end. He had no doubts that she had the know-how to hack into the government’s satellite systems and use their resources to get information in order to stay safe. It was that hunch that Nick was now waging his success on.

  And it was a hunch that turned out to be right.

  On Griffith’s computer screen, a basic white square appeared. It looked very much like a Notepad function without menus. A message appeared there, letter by letter, being typed in real time from somewhere else.

  Who is this?

  Nick smiled as he set his fingers to the keyboard. Five feet away, James was still firing towards the stairwell. Griffith walked back and forth between the two, unsure of whom to be more concerned with. Nick watched him nervously as he typed in his response.

  Nick Blackburn.

  “What’s going on?” Griffith asked. “Who the hell are you talking to?”

  “It’s Katherine. I figured she’d have some sort of failsafe set up in the event someone found her HQ. When I tried logging into her network, she was alerted. So she hacked into your computer. She’s using it to communicate with me right now.”

  “She’s in my computer? Blackburn, what the fu—”

  He was interrupted as they both watched Katherine start to type in her response.

  Good to know you’re alive but why are you there?

  “It doesn’t matter,” Nick told Griffith as he typed his response. “If she has the capacity to have any sort of network up and can run this sort of program, she’s using your satellites to do it. I doubt there’s any information you have on this computer that she hasn’t already found out for herself by hacking into the satellites.”

  This seemed to stun Griffith but he remained quiet as Nick and Katherine continued their conversation. Beside them, James kept firing, keeping the horde away.