“I’ve been waiting all night, friend,” the flabby, leering monstrosity said. “What took you so long?”
Johnny shook his head.
He hated the idea of shooting this creature, repellent though he was; he started busting caps all over and everyone and everything would know right where to find them. He had high hopes they could do what he had in mind covertly.
But the rabid came on, swinging the thigh bone.
Johnny stood his ground and gave him a burst to the belly.
The rabid stumbled back three, four feet, but did not go down. There was a huge, smoking crater where his belly had been. Intestines—what was left of them—trailed out like burnt sausages. He reached in there with one shaking hand, rooted around in his abdomen, brought his hand back out. It was dark with blood and cinders of flesh.
His raging yellow eyes never left Johnny.
A good deal of his anatomy had been sprayed against the marble wall behind him. With a crazy, agonized smile, he shambled forward, bone raised high to strike.
Johnny stepped back now, a cold terror in his belly.
He racked the pump and aimed for the guy’s head.
He pulled the trigger.
It blew away the left side of the guy’s face, leaving a ruin of blistered meat, tendrils of smoke puffing from the bleeding cavity. He made it two, three steps and pitched over face-first, limbs still attempting locomotion.
“C’mon,” Johnny told the others in an airless voice.
They passed a bank of elevators and then paused before a set of steps climbing into the darkness. There was a body sprawled near the bottom. A naked woman.
Johnny approached her carefully, nudged her with his combat boot.
A surge of panic rode through him as she began to move, but it was only gravity, he saw, her body tumbling down the last few steps onto the floor. Her chest was riddled with bullet wounds, the trail of blood—still wet—glistened on the steps. Somebody must’ve shot her (and with an automatic weapon, judging by the pattern of wounds) and she dragged herself down the steps and died near the bottom.
Nothing spooky about that.
Johnny started up.
“Shouldn’t we try the police station?” Lou suggested, clutching the wound in his shoulder Johnny had bandaged with strips of rags. “It might be worth a shot.”
Lisa licked her lips, shook violently. “I thought… I thought you said the place was trashed?”
“Maybe I overlooked something.”
Johnny shook his head. “You didn’t. It won’t do us any good. Even if we found a working radio, we couldn’t transmit. It would be just like the radios in the cruisers. That army out there, they’re jamming everything. They don’t want any messages getting out.”
Lisa and Lou didn’t argue with that.
They both remembered how Johnny had tried in vain to raise the outside world with one of the radios in a parked police car and had gotten nothing but static.
Isolated. Contained. That’s what they were.
They submitted. They both knew what Johnny’s alternate plan was and it was as good as any. Make for the roof. It was defensible. Lock themselves up there and wait for dawn.
At least that’s what he told them.
His real plan was only slightly different in that it had something to do with a glorious death.
He led them up through the darkness, his bald head gleaming with sweat.
Go slow, he told himself. There’s probably rabids everywhere. And there might be soldiers, too. You run into a group of them and you’re all dead.
So he moved slowly, quietly up the steps, knowing he had only two rounds left in his shotgun and they were valuable. More priceless than gold now.
They made it to the second floor, or Johnny did.
Lou and Lisa waited on the stairs. The second floor was much like the first, dimly lit, corridors snaking this way and that, studded with doors.
Johnny waved them forward.
He kept the 12-gauge before him, the stock greasy beneath his sweating fingers. He rounded a corner, coming down low. There were a few bodies sprawled on the floor. Dead rabids, a man and a woman. They were both naked. Looked like they’d been fucking when the soldiers found them. Their bodies were riddled with bullet holes. Brass shell casings littered the floors.
The rabids were tough.
They could take shit that would have killed normal people five times over. But, still, this many rounds spent on these two was a real waste. Johnny could see those soldiers in his mind, spraying down the copulating rabids on full auto. He’d seen plenty of that in Vietnam—cherries, newbies, spending magazine after magazine when two, three well-directed bursts would have done the job quite nicely.
It told him something about these troops.
Either they were scared shitless or inexperienced.
He figured it was probably both.
Okay, keep going.
He led the other two past the bodies. A few offices were lit up, light spilling into the hallway. He didn’t like that—either the lights had been left on or somebody had turned them on.
The latter was a possibility he didn’t care for.
Why he didn’t see the guy squatting in the doorway of the dark office was beyond him. In the old days, the guy would have been dead. But tonight Johnny had walked practically right up on him. He didn’t even notice him until he’d seen the gleam of metal from the rifle barrel.
Johnny went down low, bringing the shotgun to bear.
“Don’t even think about it, motherfucker,” the guy said. “You touch that trigger, I cut you all down.”
And that was what stopped Johnny.
His finger touched the trigger, then retreated.
He knew he could grease the guy… but he didn’t want Lou and Lisa paying the price for it. So he let the shotgun down, knew that they were at the mercy of this sonofabitch. Good thing was, his eyes were normal. They didn’t shine at all. If rabids started using guns, the jig was up.
“Come in here,” the guy said. “It’s cool.”
They filed into the office, sat next to each other on the floor in front of a big desk. It was just a typical office—desks, filing cabinets, computers, water cooler in the corner.
The guy stayed in the doorway.
With the moonlight flooding in through the big windows in the rear, they could see him well enough. He was one of the soldiers. He had a white protective suit on, sans hood. Some young white guy, early twenties maybe, narrow face, crewcut.
“I ain’t gonna shoot you,” he said. “You’re the first normals I’ve seen in an hour. Creepers are everywhere, man. Them bastards’ll eat your ass for breakfast soon as look at you. If they don’t fuck you first.”
“What’s your name?” Johnny asked.
“Johnson… nah, fuck that, name’s Tony Terra. You?”
They introduced themselves.
“Why’d you say Johnson?” Lou wanted to know.
He laughed at that, plugged a little cigar in the corner of his mouth, lit it. “Smoke ’em if you got ’em,” he said. “Not supposed to, you know. Smoke, that is. Creepers can see in the dark like fucking cats. They can smell body heat. That’s what they told us. A cigar? A cigarette? Like a bonfire to those animals. But, fuck it, right?” He dragged off his cigar, blew smoke into the shadows. “Reason I said Johnson, man, was because we all got code names, you see? Smiths and Johnsons and Browns and Blacks—you get the idea. Must be a hundred Johnsons. I was Johnson-12, see? We never knew each other’s names. That’s the way this shit works.”