LZR-1143: Within (8 page)

His light sputtered to life, and he panned it quickly around, watching the beam reflect off pipes suspended from the low ceiling, and large supporting walls packed with cables and telephone lines extending into the distance. Antonio’s light was disappearing around the corner of one of those walls and it stopped momentarily to let him catch up.

Louis jogged to where the man stood, eyes scanning the room to the extent allowed by the small light.

“Sorry, I was …” Then Louis remembered the small piece of paper, still clenched tightly in his now sweaty palm. He quickly opened his hand and looked down at the paper, even as he heard Antonio walk forward. Walking carefully, one eye on the larger man and one on the paper, he trained his light on the scrap.

Went to basement. Back in 5.

That was odd, he thought. Why would someone in the basement leave a note at the door telling people they were going there?

Unless someone else had found that note, and went looking for that person in the basement and had dropped the note when they found them …

Someone like Voj.

Shit.

As he looked up, ready to speak, everything happened at once.

“Found it!” exclaimed Antonio, then cursed loudly as his light flickered and died. A sudden flurry of activity exploded in the enclosed space as Antonio started slamming his open palm against the flashlight in his hand, while Louis struggled to find words for what he had discovered.

As the first word left his mouth, Antonio’s light flickered on, this time pointed not to the ground or in front of him, but toward his own face. Louis watched as he blinked and averted his eyes, temporarily blinded by the light, and the beam drifted over his shoulder, illuminating the distorted, red-eyed face of a massive man in a security guard’s uniform. Blood streaked his cheeks, and his reddened eyes glowed malevolently in the momentary bright light.

Even as Antonio moved his face back from the glare of the light, the larger man struck, his head lashing forward, teeth gleaming in the dull glow of the cheap Chinese light as they slashed into the exposed neck. His eyes, closed against the light, now opened wide in pain and Louis watched, seemingly in slow motion, as Antonio’s mouth opened in a soundless scream, and blood flowed freely from underneath the mouth now attached to his neck. Then, the flashlight fell from Antonio’s hand, flickering off again as it slammed into the concrete ground.

Louis’ hand trembled on the small pen light, and his voice died on his lips. He tried to move. He tried to speak. His arms and legs were frozen, and his throat was closing slowly, immobilizing his vocal cords. He tried to raise the light, to give Antonio—to give his friend—some small amount of assistance.

But he couldn’t. Instead, he stood helplessly, thumb slowly pressing the button on the light that deactivated the bulb, plunging the room into total darkness.

In the pitch black, he heard the thrashing and the coughing scream of pain. He heard bodies moving against one another, and he felt the impact of two large men crashing against the ground. A muted scream came from one of them—Antonio, he imagined—and then a tearing gurgle. Detached, he noted it was the type of sound he made when he gargled at night. Wet, and bubbling.

He couldn’t move.

He wanted to help, but he couldn’t.

Then he realized why.

He wasn’t that guy. Never had been.

He was the wrong guy to go into a dark basement with. He wasn’t up to the task. He cared about one person: himself.

Even amid the scuffling attack, which had now lessened from a wrestling match to what sounded like a scraping or even a muffled humming, he realized he was numb from the shock of what he had seen. But he managed to back up slowly, eyes drawn to the faint line of red light shooting through the slightly opened door. Even in his fear and bemused confusion, he was careful not to place his body between the light and the scene in front of him, careful not to make himself a target.

Antonio had been foolish. He had been too sure of himself, too willing to work for the solution with too little information.

But you couldn’t find the solution without knowing the cause.

And now he had found the cause. Or rather, the cause had found him.

In the darkness, Tiny moved.

Or maybe Antonio, although Louis doubted that.

A sound like someone sloshing through spilled paint or a puddle of water cut through the silence, and the movement of feet came toward him.

He turned, finally, and ran forward, nearly tripping as he reached ahead and pulled the door back as quickly as he could, sprinting through the opening and up the stairs. His breath came in short bursts, his chest thumping in near panic.

Suddenly, he skidded to a halt.

The door.

The deadbolt was thrown, keeping it propped open. Tiny had been trapped in there for some reason, maybe not knowing where the door was, maybe not knowing how to open it. But Louis and Antonio had fixed both of those problems.

He stood on the landing between the basement and the first floor, noticing for the first time the very faint sprinkling of dark liquid near the far side of the stairs, leading up from the basement past the landing.

Blood.

Tiny wasn’t alone.

Louis was frozen, panic overtaking his urge to flee.

There were more of these … people. Someone had found that note in guard booth. Someone had come down here.

And someone had bled for the effort.

Louis held his breath as the door moved slightly, as if something heavy had fallen against it. The door opened into the basement, so perhaps the thing inside couldn’t figure out how to pull it. Maybe it was still trapped.

A rasping sigh, wet with fluid and loud in the echoing space, ripped through the silence of the stairwell. Above Louis’ head, the final red emergency light flickered once, plunging the stairwell into a flood of darkness before reigniting in a sputtering staccato. His head whipped around furiously until the light came back, and his eyes flashed back to the basement as a gentle creak of metal against metal sounded in the confined space. Below him, the door swung open, swinging back slowly, like a mouth savoring the first bite, darkness inside the basement hiding the beast within.

He fled. Feet furiously pounding against the cement and steel stairwell, heart racing. His mind was a scattering of images and sounds.

A head frozen in time above the shoulder of Antonio. Antonio’s triumphant smile as his flashlight illuminated the threat unseen behind him. The blood and the tearing.

His own cowardice.

He blinked back a single tear as he flew into the doorway to the first floor, yanking back the heavy metal and flying through the doorway.

He leaned back against the door, hearing the metal click satisfyingly into the frame, and gulping air into his lungs.

That’s when he heard the screaming.

***

It was stunning how quickly society seemed to disappear.

Under throngs of teeming, bloody bodies, amid fires and screams and the popping of gunfire and explosions, the world seemed to ignite.

On a normal day, in a normal world, it is easy to lose sight of how tenuous everything really is. It has been said that any society is merely a few missed meals from revolution. 

What about when the society is the meal?

When the power goes out and men with guns are no longer a phone call away, to whom do you trust your security?

Social norms and societal security are constructs of a larger truth: that people live within the rules and operating instructions of other people, out of a knowing sense of vested self interest. 

But the system in which society exists is not natural, and it is far from infallible. In fact, it can fall within just twelve hours.

And it did.

The world lost many people on that day. But it lost many other things as well.

Hot showers and hot meals.

Cold beer and iced tea.

Roads, bridges, telephones.

Police.

Fire departments.

Airplanes.

Safety.

Hope.

When that curtain of illusory safety is pulled back by throngs of the living dead, the world becomes a much more serious place. A place inhabited by the walking dead, where the the living are an endangered species
.

***

Bridget started to worry when the emergency lights began to flicker out, one by one, on the bottom floor. She checked her watch, noting absently that it was nearing dawn. Her fingers were sticky with blood and she drew several more tissues from a generic brand box on someone’s desk.

Behind her, Beverly had stopped crying, and now drew ragged, pained breaths. The small crowd was silent, sitting in a ragged ring around the injured woman, eyes darting nervously around the cavernous space, ears perked for any sign of movement or disturbance.

Ty lay down on his desk, eyes staring into the distance, shaking slightly.

Bridget had tried to ask him what he was doing upstairs, why he had come up to join them. But one look at Beverly had sent him into his current state, and none of the others had any idea. They hadn’t noticed him leave, as they huddled anxiously in the cubicles, waiting for news or salvation.

Someone’s breath caught loudly as another light flickered and died, plunging the entire northeast corner of the building into darkness. Bridget cursed under her breath and stopped scrubbing her hands ineffectually. The blood had caked into the small grooves in her skin, and underneath her fingernails, and she knew it was a losing battle. But she’d be damned if she was going to risk the bathrooms.

“Should we go check on them,” asked a quavering woman’s voice from a cubicle near the end, referring to Antonio and Louis.

A quiet guffaw cut through the oppressive silence, one of the men who had gone to the front door earlier. Someone else spoke sharply, the words indeterminate, and the man fell silent.

No one answered the question.

Bridget looked at Cam, whose skinny form was the only one caring for Beverly as she lay on the floor between two cubes, skin pallid and cold, breath shivering and shaking her frame. Her eyes were staring into the distance of the cavernous ceiling and Bridget swallowed a sigh.

To die in this building. There couldn’t be a fate much worse than that in life.

From across the vast empty floor, the sudden sound of something falling heavily against the ground near the stairwell split the silence, and Bridget heard several loud gasps. Bodies moved behind her in nervous agitation, even as a loud, droning sigh breathed out from Beverly.

It had been her last.

Cam reached down to check her pulse, as two of the men from customer relations moved tentatively toward the noise, stopping merely feet away from the group. The lights were failing fast, and as another sound filtered through the echoing space—this one from closer to the group, near the main entrance—another red light died.

The space was nearly completely dark, now, with only three lights remaining. Two were on the wall nearest the stairwell to the basement, while the last remaining light glared like a single red eye, staring at the huddled employees from above the main entrance.

“Do you see anything?” Cam said softly from behind her.

“Is she alive?” Bridget said quietly, eyes staying locked forward, searching for the noise.

He waited several seconds before answering.

“No.”

Bridget nodded, unsure of how to deal with the death. Unconsciously, she began scrubbing her hands again before sticking them firmly into her pockets. She wondered whether she’d ever get to wash her clothes again. Surely, the blood would remain.

“We should move the body, we don’t know if she …”