The Dead Come for Us

Chapter 6

She lost the gun and it was a shock like a blow on her face.

When the rail-worker ripped the pistol from Lola’s grasp, the metallic click of its body against the gravel sounded like the report of a closing coffin.

The bulk of the man drove her backward and against the rusted tin siding of the warehouse door, his black coagulated fluid stained teeth snapping inches from her throat.

“Take your hands off her!” Mac bellowed.

Mac, who was now empty on his primary shotgun, dropped the weapon off the strap and out of his vest came his combat knife. He stepped forward into a death lunge and buried the thick, five-inch steel blade upward into the tissue under the rail-worker’s jawbone and into the creature’s brain stem.

The steel went in smoothly and the monstrosity’s eyes rolled back, its bulk going completely slack, collapsing on top of Lola’s boots.

To his right, things were getting dicey; the other two concealed runners had finally closed the gap and reached Isaac.

Isaac did not freeze this time. The fear had been burned away and he responded with a raw, instinctual defense.

He swung the iron pipe club from the shoulder with the heavy hook of the pipe smashing the first infected directly into the temple – a female clad in a faded orange safety vest. Her zygomatic bone exploded and her limp form flew into the gravel where she landed face down and still.

The second runner, a lean, wiry fellow with a shattered clavicle, ducked the swing, grabbed Isaac around the waist, and knocked him hard to the sharp ballast stone nestled between the rusted rail ties.

“Isaac!” Rose screamed at a shrill, panicked pitch.

Mac leaped over the gravel but was already beaten to the punch; Lola had scrambled up and snatched the iron pipe from the gravel.

She dropped it on the ground with two hands, smashing it directly on the middle of the attacker’s spine and snapping the bones with a wet pop that paralyzed its lower body, allowing Isaac to wrench free from its grip.

“Up! Get into the concrete ditch!” Mac yelled, snatching Isaac by the pull loop on the back of his jacket and pushing him forward.

They sprinted across the web of rusted steel tracks, their boots cracking loudly on the loose, shifting gravel.

The hardware store exit behind them was no longer a refuge; the main bulk of the one-hundred-strong swarm of monsters was beginning to pour from the rear fire door, attracted like dark, viscous ink by the commotion.

The family crossed the boundary of the train yard to the south where the property stopped at the edge of the city’s concrete secondary storm drain channel.

It was an enormous, open-air concrete ditch, twenty feet wide and fifteen feet deep, carved out beneath the industrial area.

“Down we go! Slide on your backs!” Mac ordered while glancing at his own rearside.

They clambered over the low retaining wall and slide down the steep forty-five-degree concrete slope until they reached the cold, stagnant, fetid concrete bottom of the channel; a putrid reek of urban runoff, industrial oil, and wet moss filled the space.

The family arguments fueled by their recent experiences of constant, close-quarters horror, immediately broke out the moment their boots met the concrete.

“You let me run empty!”

Lola shrieked in his face, heaving as she leveled the retrieved iron pipe at him. “You wanted me in front but you couldn't do a perimeter check. Mac, I’m not in your old Marine Corp anymore, we are not operating under a fighting withdrawal!”

“I scanned the avenue Lola! Threat assessment was evolving!” Mac shot back in a low lethal whisper as his eyes darted up to the edge of the concrete ditch overhead.

“We would have all been turned to mush on the asphalt without me shoving us into the store! I took out the asset that disarmed you!”

“You are going to kill us all because you can't accept that you do not have control of this map!” Isaac yelled with a shaky, volatile mixture of raw adrenaline and resentment he hadn't been able to express before.

He wiped a thick smear of infected blood from his cheek with a trembling hand. “Look at Rose! Look at her Dad! She can barely take a breath, and you're just looking for the next thing to shoot!”

Mac turned his attention to his daughter. Rose sat against the cold gray concrete, her knees drawn up tightly against her chest, her hands clapped over her ears. Her eyes were wide with a level of sensory overload that was about to shatter her sanity.

The cacophony of dying city sounds – the distant, mechanistic cry of air sirens, the throbbing drone of heavy military rotors overhead and muffled screams from the suburbs – bounced off the channel walls and seemed to be amplified by the concrete.

“Rose,” Mac said, dropping to one knee and changing his tone to a soft, encouraging one,

“Rose, look at me. Listen to me. Listen to me; listen to the concrete.”

“ It is not the city, Dad,” Rose whimpered, her voice trembling uncontrollably, teeth chattering loudly. She was not looking at him, but ahead into the darkness of the massive, yawning concrete intake opening of the subterranean channel system under the industrial sector, where the tunnel disappeared.

“It is the tunnel, listen to the tunnel.

The tunnel is changing.”

Mac rose up, his hand already dropping to the butt of his empty shotgun. He turned out their arguments to try to focus his hearing toward the dark maw of the underground system.

The initial sound was the slow rushing of stagnant water.

Then, the thin sheet of runoff flowing down the concrete channel began to tremble; not with a surge of water but with a vibratory instability.

A low seismic thrumming began to vibrate up through the soles of his boots; it was not the vibration of a vehicle or a jet breaking the sound barrier. It was a deep, hollow, roaring rumble growing louder each second with thousands of bare feet skittering in the dark.

The first hint of trouble from the mouth of the tunnel was the emergence of hundreds of rats; they exploded from the dark, a skittering torrent of panicked rodents scrambling away from the oncoming onslaught to spill into the open air at their feet, leaving them undisturbed.

Directly behind the rodents, the real trouble had arrived. A massive column of infected; trapped in the subterranean system since the outbreak in the city center; had located a vector out.

They were densely packed in a single sprinting avalanche of human bodies, like a ravenous, primal apex predator.

“Climb the wall!” Mac bellowed, turning back to the blackness and reaching for the last magazine in his sidearm,

“Isaac, get your sister up, now!”

But the concrete slope behind them had been slicked with algae and industrial oil. When Isaac reached to pull his sister up, his boots slid on the incline and he and Rose tumbled backward into the center of the channel right where the torrent of teeth and claws was rushing to meet them.