CHAPTER 16

McDaniels was just closing the fire escape door on the 27th floor when the building shook. Gartrell spun around to face him as a whistling sound reached McDaniels’ ears; it was the explosion’s over-pressure wave, rushing up the stairwell. It hit full force and slammed the door closed, knocking McDaniels off balance. Gartrell grabbed him and steadied him on his feet.

“What was that?” Safire said. There was panic in his voice. He held Regina close to him, and she clung to her father’s narrow shoulders, eyes wide with fear. Earl had his arms around both of his daughters, and his youngest had her face pressed against his chest. Her shoulders shook. She was weeping.

McDaniels ignored the question and kicked open the fire door. He and Gartrell stepped into the stairwell and peered down between the hand rails. A cloud of dust was visible far below them.

“Ground, this is Six! Ritt, Leary, give me a SITREP, over!” McDaniels checked his M4 while waiting for a reply. The weapon was still cocked and locked, and he flipped off the safety. Wet wind swirled about in them, spilling in through the still-open roof door. It banged back and forth on its hinges, batted about by the wind.

“Rittenour, Leary, give me your status, over!” McDaniels said after several seconds had passed.

He heard gunshots from below, and a single shout.

“Watch over the Safires,” McDaniels said, then bolted down the stairs. Gartrell caught up to him on the next landing and grabbed the collar of his uniform, yanking McDaniels to a halt.

“No way, major. This is my territory. You watch after the Safires. I’ll see to the men.” Gartrell’s expression was flat and emotionless—his war face. Movement above and behind the men made him look past Gartrell’s shoulder. Finelly and Derwitz stood on the landing. Both of them appeared utterly shell-shocked, still down and out after the MV-22 crash and the sudden explosion in the stairwell. Finelly bled from an open cut on his cheek, which he apparently sustained when he had been blown across the roof. One of Derwitz’s eyes was swollen, probably a prize from falling headlong down the stairs.

“What’s the op, major?” It was Derwitz who spoke, not Finelly. A surprising turn of events, McDaniels thought.

“You two are going to stay here with the major and keep watch over the civilians,” Gartrell said. “I’m headed down to see what’s going on with Ritt and Leary.” As he spoke, Gartrell stared straight into McDaniels’ eyes, as if daring him to counter. McDaniels outranked Gartrell by miles, but the senior NCO was much closer to where the rubber met the road, and his battlefield skills were beyond redoubt.

“I’m not so sure you should be going alone, first sergeant,” McDaniels said.

“I’ll be good. Make sure the aviators don’t do anything stupid, like have a food fight or something. I have a feeling that any eggs we have in the kitchen are all we’re going to have for a good long time.”

And with that, Gartrell pushed past McDaniels and bolted down the stairs, his big AA-12 automatic shotgun held before him like a shield. McDaniels watched him go, then turned and trudged back up the stairs.

“Let’s get this floor secure,” he told Finelly and Derwitz.

###

First Sergeant David Gartrell pushed himself down the stairs as fast as he could go without slipping and breaking his ass. The stairwell was filled with an acrid odor that grew stronger the farther he descended: the remains of the explosives, cordite from gunfire, and unless he was wrong, the odious reek of the dead. He wondered how many had made it up the stairs before the first few flights were destroyed, and decided it could be anywhere from one or two to a dozen or more. At any rate, he’d find out pretty soon.

“Ritt, Leary, this is Gartrell. I’m on my way down to you guys now. Passing the 20^th floor, over.”

There was no reply, and that was worrisome. Gartrell had no idea what he was walking into, but he did hear sporadic gunfire from below. The thing is, it didn’t seem to be coming from the stairwell, but from inside the building itself. Which very likely meant Rittenour and Leary were trapped on a floor and had been engaged by the stenches.

He heard something above his own footfalls and stopped on the next landing. Stumbling footsteps echoed in the stairway below him, growing steadily louder. Gartrell checked his NVGs, still on the mount attached to his helmet, then took a moment to pull his light cotton gloves tight on his hands. Peering over the edge of the handrail, he saw flashes of movement down below. Whoever they were, whatever they were, they had climbed above the slowly-settling cloud of dust below.

Gartrell whistled loudly. The figures climbing up the stairs moved even faster, and one of them looked up the center of the stairwell. A pale, gaunt face with shrunken eyes and scraggly hair turned toward Gartrell. When it saw him, it opened its mouth and released a lingering moan that continued even after it had pushed away from the handrail and took off up the stairs again.

Zombies. Of course, they have to be fucking zombies.

 Gartrell radio switch. “Major, this is Gartrell. I’m on eighteen, have zeds coming up the stairs toward me. Don’t know how many, but if it’s more than fifty or so, I think we can elevate our condition from ‘definitely screwed’ to ‘absolutely fucked’, over.”

“How long until they reach you? Can you fall back? Over.”

Gartrell peered over the railing again. “Contact in less than ten seconds. I can still hear gunfire below me. Ritt and Leary are still kicking. Will report my progress to you as soon as I can—if the shooting stops and you don’t hear from me, that’s probably not an awesome sign. Five out,” he said, as the first zombie mounted the landing below the one he stood on and charged up the stairs. Gartrell hadn’t expected it to be a child, but there it was, a little girl in her pink pajamas, her neck a ravaged mass of torn flesh that was turning black as the fluids there dried into a crust. Its eyes remained focused on him, and did not blink; when Gartrell raised the AA-12, the zombie accelerated toward him, as if eager to face the weapon and be released from the hell it was confined to. Gartrell obliged, and the tungsten-core round destroyed the zombie’s skull. As it sank to the stairs, another zed appeared, and another, and another. These were adults now, not children, and Gartrell dispatched them with an almost mechanical precision. The AA-12 rounds didn’t just destroy their heads—it absolutely obliterated them. In a matter of moments, Gartrell had dispatched four zombies without even breaking a sweat. It was much easier engaging them in the stairwell than outside on the street. He pressed on, stepping over the bodies, grimacing in disgust. Not only were they smelly, the shotgun blasts had left pulped viscera all over the place.

“Major, Gartrell. I’m through the first wave, making my way down to seventeen. Break. Rittenour, Leary, come in.” Now that he knew that zeds had managed to make it past the stairways rigged with charges, he had to press on with more care. He didn’t want to run headlong into a group of stenches because he wasn’t paying enough attention.

Just the same, it almost happened. Gartrell came around the corner on the tenth floor landing, and there was a tall, reedy stench with a shining bald head and pale blue eyes advancing up the opposite stairway. When it saw him, it lurched toward him with thin, outstretched arms. It was dressed in a filthy white dress shirt and khaki pants that would have been too baggy and ill-fitting even if the corpse had been a living man. Its bald head was surrounded by a fringe of long, greasy hair, and most of its nose was missing. So was its entire lower jaw, which made Gartrell laugh as he backpedaled from the stench and raised his shotgun.

“Dude, you don’t have a jaw! How the hell are you gonna be able to eat me?” he asked. As if in answer, the zed groaned and stumbled across the last step and fell face-first to the landing. It grabbed at Gartrell’s boot with one hand.

The AA-12 roared once again, and the dead zed count went to five.

Gartrell resumed his descent, trying to reach Rittenour and Leary on the radio after he cleared every landing. Still no response, and the gunfire had stopped. As he pushed past the seventh floor landing, the dust had mostly cleared. He felt a cool breeze whisper up the stairwell. Gartrell moved more slowly now, more stealthily, as most of the lights had been broken by the blast. Chunks of concrete became more numerous on the steps the closer he got to the fifth floor. When he descended to just above the fifth floor landing, he saw three stenches lying where they had been gunned down. Black ichor leaked from their ravaged skulls. Gartrell leaned over the edge of the hand rail and looked down. All he saw was mostly blackness, broken sporadically by a light here, a light there. The charges had apparently done their job—the stairs were completely gone, nothing more than a pile of rubble near the lobby floor. Gartrell straightened and looked toward the fifth floor fire door. It had buckled inward from the blast and the attendant shock wave, and hung in the mangled doorframe by one hinge. He saw several hashes of blood on the door, and more on the doorframe. Zeds had pushed their way inside. That explained the gunfire.

Gartrell slowly moved toward the door and peered inside the office. The lights were dimmed, but he could still see part of the floor. A stench lay face down on the carpet, a wide furrow blasted through its head. A distance away, another one—an obese woman in a loud flowery dress—reclined in similar repose, its chubby-cheeked face turned toward Gartrell, its eyes gazing off in different directions below the ravaged skull. Gartrell was about to push through the door when a slow movement caught his eye to the left. Whatever it was, it moved among the shadows on the far side of the office floor. Gartrell reached up and dropped his NVGs in front of his eyes. They automatically flipped out of standby mode, and the light amplification tubes powered up.

Walking along the offices on the far side of the floor was a zed. Its mouth was wide open, and a flap of skin hung across one eye, bobbing as the corpse shuffled along the carpet. It seemed that Rittenour or Leary had shot at this one, but hadn’t scored a kill. Gartrell could rectify that, but he would want to get closer. The first sergeant slowly eased himself onto the office floor, looking to his left and right to ensure nothing lay in wait. The zombie didn’t see him, because the flap of skin hung across its right eye. But if it had the common sense to turn its head, it would be able to zero in on him clearly.

And just as he thought it, the stench did just that. It moaned loudly when it saw Gartrell, and immediately charged down the aisle toward him.

Three other zeds moaned as well, and Gartrell was surprised to see them emerge from several cubes. One of them was fast, real fast. Before Gartrell could turn the AA-12 on it, it sprinted toward him, covering the twenty or so feet separating them in what seemed to be a blink of an eye. Gartrell couldn’t step back into the stairway, as the opening he had crawled through was too small, he’d have to turn his back on the zeds and go out head-first. That just wasn’t going to play.

He let the AA-12 hang across his chest by its patrol strap and met the oncoming zed head-on. It leaped for him, and Gartrell grabbed one of its wrists in his hand and flung the corpse over his hip. It crashed into a nearby water fountain, severely denting its stainless steel casing. The zed didn’t even seem to care; it clawed its way to its feet. Gartrell was ready for it, and as the corpse whirled upon him again, he sank his knife through the top of its skull. The zed stiffened, then fell to the carpeted floor, where it hissed and kicked and slashed at the air. Gartrell was disappointed the knife attack hadn’t killed the thing, but at least it rendered it inoperative for the moment.

He seized a hold of the AA-12 and spun as another zed closed upon him, this one being an entirely nude woman. He didn’t have time to aim for the head, so he merely blasted away at the corpse’s midsection and blew it ten feet away. It collapsed to the floor with its face and buttocks pointed in more or less the same direction. The shotgun blast had completely severed its spine, leaving the zombie grotesquely twisted. But it was still operational; even though its legs couldn’t work, the thing started crawling back to him.

The zombie Gartrell had seen initially bore down on him. An office door popped open then, and Leary stepped out of the darkened room, his M4 shouldered and ready. He took aim and fired once as Gartrell jumped to his left. The 5.56mm bullet found its target, and the zombie’s forehead exploded outward in a spreading flower of brackish blood and putrid gray matter. It fell to the floor face-first next to the fat woman in the flowery dress.

Leary pumped his fist in the air. “I GOT YOU, YOU FUCK!” he shouted.

Gartrell turned to the last zed that was still moving, and was surprised to see it was an Orthodox Jew, complete with yarmulke and black suit. It moaned at Gartrell as it hobbled toward him, its mouth a black maw surrounded by a matted gray beard. Gartrell dropped it before it got within fifteen feet of him.

“GOOD SHOOTING, FIRST SERGEANT!” Leary shouted as he ran up. He put a round through the broken zombie crawling on the floor, and its movements stilled.

“GOT THAT ONE!” he reported.

Gartrell said, “Leary, where’s Rittenour?”

Leary turned and looked around the darkened office with unaided eyes. His NVGs were still in their pouch on his belt. He advanced down the row of cubicles with his rifle shouldered, and began clearing them systematically.

“Leary? Leary!” Gartrell shouted. “Where the hell is Rittenour?”

“Right here, first sergeant.” Rittenour appeared then, walking out from behind a file cabinet he’d been hiding behind. He looked down at the zombie thrashing about on the floor. It made no attempt to pull the knife from its skull, nor did it seem to know the men were even there.

“Man, that’s some weird shit,” Rittenour observed.

Gartrell slapped him on the arm. “Hey dumbass, why didn’t you answer the radio?”

“Huh? Oh... I guess it got busted in the blast. I’ve been trying to transmit our SITREP for a few minutes, in between hosing zeds. You didn’t hear me?”

“Negative. Why didn’t Leary answer?”

“Because he’s —”

Leary appeared beside Gartrell and tapped him on the shoulder. He pointed to the shuddering corpse on the floor when Gartrell turned to him.

“THAT’S SOME STRANGE SHIT HUH, FIRST SERGEANT? WE OUGHT TO SHOOT THAT THING AND GET YOUR KNIFE BACK.”

“Leary! Stop shouting!” Gartrell said. “What the hell is wrong with you, you go fucking deaf?”

“He did,” Rittenour said. “He wasn’t wearing any hearing protection when the charges went off.”

“What? Why the fuck not?” Gartrell turned back to Leary. “Where the hell is—”

“SORRY FIRST SERGEANT, BUT I CAN’T HEAR YOU! MY EARS ARE REALLY RINGING, LIKE—” He stopped when Gartrell clamped his hand across Leary’s mouth. The first sergeant stared right into his eyes.

“Leary! Read my lips—shut... the fuck... up!” When Leary nodded, Gartrell removed his hand.

“SORRY FIRST SERGEANT, WAS I TALKING TOO LOUD?”

Gartrell shook his head and turned back to Rittenour. “Are either of you hurt?”

Rittenour shook his head. “Negative. Some bumps and bruises, but no bites or anything like that.”

“Good. Recharge your weapons and get ready to move out. We’re going back up to 27. And you’re in charge of Copernicus here.” Gartrell jerked his thumb over his shoulder at Leary. “I’m going to check out the damage to the stairway.”

“Be careful, first sergeant. OMEN’s still out there.”

Gartrell nodded as he pushed his way past the twisted door. “Roger that. Get squared away ASAP.” He shoved the door open as far as it would go, its bottom scraping across the concrete floor. Cautiously, he picked his way down the debris-strewn stairway that went nowhere. Where there should have been a landing and a return to another set of stairs, there was nothing but gloomy darkness, but the NVGs revealed all in stark green and white imagery. The fourth floor landing and all those below it were gone, a mass of rubble at the bottom of the stairwell. Gartrell slowly looked over the edge. The zombies swarmed about down there; dozens of them had shoved their way into the stairwell. They moaned as if one when they saw him and reached upward, as if they could somehow pull him from his high perch. Gartrell realized that even though the zeds were in almost total darkness due to the lights being blasted out, there were still lights shining above and behind him, which meant he was presented to them as a clear silhouette. Cursing himself for forgetting such a basic soldiering skill, Gartrell climbed back to the fifth floor landing. Rittenour and Leary were waiting for him. Gartrell looked at Leary and held a finger before his lips. Leary nodded. Gartrell pointed to the stairway and motioned for them to start climbing up. As the two soldiers mounted the stairs, Gartrell hung back, wondering what could be done about the zombies massing below.

Nothing, he decided. He followed the Special Forces soldiers instead, and once they were on the tenth floor, he made a quick report to McDaniels. Plan B was looking pretty good right now.