He was doing everything he could not to panic, but it was no easy bit.
With what he’d seen, experienced, even all that rigorous training wasn’t enough to keep his mind from melting into slush.
But he would stay alive. Somehow, some way.
Dear Christ, he would not be like them.
He would not allow himself to become something that fed on corpses and human flesh, something that should have been zipped in a bag or slid shut in a drawer. No, dammit, he would kill himself first.
He’d been pretty much on the dodge since Green Team was attacked by those hands. He saw it now in his brain, like some nightmare one-reel cartoon that played over and over until it all became almost laughable.
But it was not funny.
Johnson had gone down under those hands and Oliverez had been inundated by the crawling remains of the headless men. But you could give that old, leather-faced bastard credit, for even knitted with a blanket of surging carrion that tried to engulf him like a pustulant jellyfish, he fought on. As Rice and Turner evaded their asses out of there, Oliverez stumbled along, fighting the abominations which covered his head and upper body.
Somehow, he’d gotten loose, tossed his attackers.
Screaming and covered in an ooze of corruption, he ran right past Rice and Turner, vaulted through a doorway and disappeared before they could catch him.
They found him, though.
He’d gone through a doorway, trying to make his way down a flight of emergency steps…and that’s as far as he made it. Something captured him there. Something that sent Rice running and burned a scar across Turner’s mind.
Even now, stroking his carbine and remembering, Turner could not believe it, could not stomach that poison memory.
At first, they’d thought Oliverez had stumbled into a spider’s web.
The sort of thing some gigantic arachnid mutation might have spun in a cheap 1950’s B-movie. But it was no spider. What Rice and he saw was an intricate network of knotted bowels, strung together in an oily web at the bottom of the steps. Oliverez had wandered right into it, got tangled up in those rubbery strands. Might have fought his way free, if something like a skinless girl hadn’t come racing down that network and chewed his face from the skull beneath.
Because that’s what was happening when Rice and Turner showed.
That skinless girl…maybe twelve or thirteen…was eating Oliverez. His face was gone and her own was buried in the cavity of his belly, pulling out coils of viscera and chewing globs of yellow fat with teeth that were not teeth, but shards of glass hammered into her jaws.
Turner stared at her in the beam of his light. She had eyes, but they were dangling out of her sockets by bleeding optic nerves. Yet, they moved and saw. She looked upon him with such a ravening lunacy, it made his guts slink in cold waves.
Rice ran off.
Turner gave her a few rounds, had been hiding ever since.
And the fact that he wasn’t laughing at it just yet told him he was not crazy. Maybe tomorrow or next week, but not now. Horror and revulsion and hot-blooded anger that God would allow a travesty like this…these things kept him hanging on, kept his edge polished and sharp.
He could hear sounds coming down the corridor, echoes of voices, dragging sounds, scraping sounds. But in that maze of corridors, it could have been around the next bend or upstairs.
Thing was, Turner was lost.
Even when he came to a room with a window, it did him no good: they were all barred like prison cells. But he could see that everyone was still out there beyond the blockade-cops and medics, journalists and the curious kept at bay behind them.
Wishing he still had his headset, Turner kicked open a door and plunged in there, flashing his light around with the sweeping motion of the Colt’s barrel. Nothing, nothing, nothing. He was in a little apartment with a bathroom off to the side.
He came around through the archway, saw a toilet that was filthy and stained brown with ancient rust stains. The sink. A mirror with jagged cracks in it. And Someone was in the tub.
At first he couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman, only that they were entirely red from head to foot, red and glistening, like a stick man (or woman) dipped in blood and bowels and decomposition, splashed down with a bucket of waste from a slaughterhouse. The tub was filled with human meat, the zombie chewing on a corkscrew of intestines, totally unconcerned that Turner was standing there.
He gave him-or her or it -two three-round bursts that splashed its anatomy off the bone beneath. Slowly, like a ship going down in a sea of blood, the zombie sank beneath the stinking, quivering sea of remains.
Turner got out of there.
He moved down the corridor, came to a room with a zombie splattered in the center of the concrete block floor. Splattered. Looked like he or she had been dropped from some great height, though the ceiling was only eight feet up. The body lay there, a gored plexus of meat webbing out in all directions, strands and streamers of it snaking about. And drowning in that still-pulsating ocean of pulp and tissue was a bleeding skeleton that trembled, seemed to be trying to breath.
It was too much.
Turner ran out of there, paused before another doorway, wondered if he’d ever find sanctuary in this morgue.
Then two slender hands reached out and yanked him into the room, threw him headlong to the floor. The door was slammed shut, a lock was turned. He brought up his carbine, training the light on his attacker.
A woman.
She was naked.
Tall and willowy, her hips nicely rounded and her breasts firm and jutting, she had a sweep of red hair falling down one shoulder. Her lips were moving as if she were trying to find words.
Turner eased his finger off the trigger.
“Please,” she said. “I…I was kidnapped…please don’t kill me…”
She fell to her knees, sobbing and shaking. Turner studied her closely. She was very pale, but not rotted or discolored. A scent of withered roses came off her in a sweet breath.
Turner lowered his weapon.
Jesus, she looked so much like Dierdre.
Too much like Dierdre.
He knew it was not because Dierdre had been dead seven years now. Leukemia. Turner had been with her through it all. Saw his love, his only true reason for getting up every day, slowly eaten away by the disease. And then she was gone and he turned his mind hard, tried out for the HRT so he could spread some of his pain around, give it back to bad guys and terrorists.
Turner felt cold and hot and confused, didn’t know what to say or even how to speak. It took time to fill his lungs with air, to wrap his mouth around some words that would make sense.
He licked his lips, said, “They…they’ll be storming this place, maybe they already are. I’ll protect you…”
Turner saw a candle on the table and lit it, loving the light and warmth it threw. He went to the woman.
She was still shaking and whimpering, all that lustrous red hair in her face. Turner set his weapon down, went to her. Was surprised…or maybe not at all…when she threw her arms around him, put her lips against his.
He felt her in his arms then, pressed up against him and she wasn’t dead and how could this possible be? She was cold and shivering under his hands and he felt his penis unfurl in his pants. Jesus, now and of all places. But the woman seemed to want it, too, for she was kissing him harder, pushing her tongue into his mouth.
Turned pulled away, said, “Not here, we can’t-”
“Please,” she said, kissing his face, his throat. “Oh please.” And then her tongue was at his ear and she was saying things and unzipping his Kevlar vest. Turner was helping her, pulling his coveralls off and growing dizzy then as she began to stroke his cock.