The Coalition: Part 1 The State of Extinction (Zombie Series) (3 page)

“Lacy?” Cutter stopped, seeing the blood seeping between her fingers.

Before
he could say another word or move at all, Mr. Linden suddenly surged around the corner of the hallway, looming behind Lacy Morgan like the wall of animated flesh he had become. His own shirt was stained with blood. You could see that
he had
been injured at some point and had put a crude bandage over the wound, and
now
that crude bandage of gauze and tape had peeled away, blood soaking through his neatly starched white shirt. He’d come
into
work all the same, trying to pretend he would be just fine as soon as he dabbed on a little
antibiotic
.

With hardly a sound
,
Linden
put his huge, bluish paws on his confused mistress. Before
either,
she or Cutter could say or do anything at
all;
dead
Linden
leaned forward and took a hideously huge bite out of Lacy’s long and flawless neck. Finally, realizing what pain truly was, she screamed. Cutter screamed, too, knowing now that everyone else had either run, or were perhaps bleeding and
lying
quite dead in some corner of the place,
and
perhaps about to get back up.

At that moment,
he knew that he was on his own.

**

The
first
thing he did was flee that scene of horror. There was nothing that could be done for Lacy and so he had turned on his heel and made for the stairwell. Already
,
he could hear sounds of chaos coming from the floor below him. The front doors had obviously been left unlocked as the scarlet-haired Ms. Penland had vacated the premises when the getting
out
had been good.
She had
obviously been in too much of a hurry to bother to lock the door behind her, or else
she had
been unable to do so. Cutter figured the latter. Maybe
she had
left with others
when
the
entire
lot of them
ran
like people who had the good sense to get the hell out of Dodge.

The power was gone, so he knew that it would be pointless to try the elevators. Instead, he carefully opened the door to the stairwell and peeked in. Dim light filtered in from small square windows in the concrete well of the place, and he could see that nothing moved in there. However, he could hear shuffling sounds from below. Those things had already opened the door on the first floor and were checking out the stairwell.
He would
have to move fast,
so he
quickly ducked through the door and began moving up the stairs as fast as he could without actually running. Cutter had a bad knee—two rounds of surgery to fix floating cartilage and a torn meniscus. He had to be careful on that right knee
,
since it had not fully recovered from that last bit of arthroscopic work.
I’ll have to miss my next session with the physical therapist
, he mused, almost laughing.

From
downstairs,
the sounds of moving feet were becoming louder. He could hear the muffled moans of those dead throats, also.
He had
heard them before, out on the streets when the problem had first appeared.
Generally,
they made no sounds at all, but when they got
agitated,
they would begin a kind of moan that could generate into a low snarl when they got down to the business of killing. What Cutter was hearing now from down in the shadowed stairwell were the initial
moans,
as they must have figured they had something to chase. It was his own hurried steps that had tipped them off, he knew. Well,
now
there was nothing to do
, except
climb and find a way out before he was completely trapped.

Breathing hard,
and
feeling the heat that was creeping into the building, he reached the next floor and once
more,
the prospect
faced him
of opening a door that would lead into a
possibly
bad situation. Behind
him,
he could hear the sounds of dead lungs and tromping feet. Those things normally did not move very fast, but they could almost trot when they knew there was someone to kill and eat within reach. Thinking that he could even see movement coming up through the darkness, he took his chances and pushed the door open.

Nothing but silence greeted him
...
Moving into the hallway
,
he turned and looked to see if he could lock the door or bar it. There was a lock, but he had no key for it and didn’t know where he could find
one
. All he could do was keep moving. At the back of the floor was a kind of covered walkway that led over to the warehouse, and there was also a closed scaffold that led down to the street. It was caged in and there was a gate at the bottom that latched from the inside.
Since you could only open it from inside the walkway, they
never locked it. And
…
theoretically
…
only employees would be using that staircase. It really was his only option out of the building now,
so
he pushed on.

Walking on, Cutter loosened his tie and opened his shirt. The sun was up, showing above the level of the building around
Briggs
Stationers
. It was getting hot. Taking a moment, he looked down at the streets to see that
the marching dead
packed
them
. Among
them,
he saw the figures moving quicker than the
dead do
, and noticed that most of those people were surrounded in quick order and taken down. Muffled screams and high-pitched yelling that was not mercifully muffled filtered up the three floors to his ears.
He
could not block out those sounds of pain, and he averted his eyes so that he didn’t witness the worst of the atrocities being committed below. Already, the streets were literally running red with blood.

Instinctively, he stayed away from the edge of the roof. Not because he feared falling, but because he did not want any of the masses of dead
that were
flowing through the streets to notice him and follow his movement or give chase. He would have to stay as invisible as possible if he
were
going to escape. At the door to the caged fire
escape,
he risked a look below and his heart sank.

The shamblers seemed to pack the
street from side to side. Bodies of every shape and size were moving as a single-minded mass, reaching out for anything that was different from them
,
grasping for anyone who was alive and thinking. God help him, but Cutter actually found himself hoping that some of the people fleeing before that monstrous parade would stumble and allow him to pass unnoticed by the throngs of undead. The pleas for mercy and the curses that degenerated into madness let him know that his hopes had come true.

Once inside the caged walkway,
he was committed. He turned to see if he could block the gate behind him, but there was no latch there. If any of the things from the stairwell stumbled out onto the
roof,
they would be after him in
a heartbeat
and the door to the fire escape would open.
If
that happened
,
he would have not retreat at all, except to make straight down for street level
, to the
streets where the dead were pushing in
ever-increasing
number. He paused to catch his breath and the stench from below almost gagged him. Rising up on the hot summer wind was the stench of death, blood, shit and urine. Cutter put his tie to his nose, breathing in the fabric softener in which
he had
washed the cloth the day before. It cut the stench a little and allowed him to move without stopping to vomit.

He was happy for the crepe soles he was wearing. They made hardly a sound on the metal grate of the fire escape.
Moving
carefully
and
deliberately,
he was
taking care not to put his weight down so heavily that he brought attention to himself. As
long,
as didn’t make too much noise, the figures below would keep their eyes straight ahead and not pay him any mind at all.

In a moment, he was at the bottom of the stairs. He glanced back up toward the roof, and as
he had
feared, the shamblers had found the door to the upper end of the fire escape and were heading in a long line toward it.
Now
Cutter knew that if they became agitated and began to moan or snarl at him, then the ones on the street would focus on the object of their desire.
They would
zero in on him and he would not make it.
He would
die, right there in that stupid metal cage.

Taking a deep breath, Cutter pushed the
chain link
door open and carefully closed the door behind him, making sure that metal did not meet metal with enough force to make a sound. Then he turned around so that he could make his way down the alley and head for any place that might provide refuge. His car was out of the question. The parking lot where
he had
left it was in the path of the hordes of undead and even if he got to the car,
several tons of rotting flesh
would soon have surrounded and
weighed it
down. He
would never
get out of the parking lot, much less the neighborhood. Instead, he would make his way toward a condominium project two blocks away. It had only recently opened and only
they had only sold
about a third of the units—the economy in the months before the dead had begun to rise was already shot. Almost no one had been able to afford to buy one of the homes. It was ten floors of mainly empty condos, all waiting for buyers who had never arrived.

It would give him a place to retreat, if he could get there without
them seeing him
. Once there, he hoped that he could find someone to help him. Barring that, if he could just lay his hands on a gun
, anything
that he could use to shoot his way out of a bad situation. Cutter had been a good shot when
was
a younger man. His dad taught him how to shoot and he was an adequate marksman. All he needed was a weapon.

Turning the corner, away from the fire escape, he moved as silently as possible down the alleyway. One of the warehouse workers had left a bay door open.
They had
obviously taken one of the big trucks out and had not bothered to
close
the place behind them. Who could blame them? Walking past the great dark square of shadow that led into what would normally have been the brightly illuminated warehouse; he looked quickly to his right to see if anyone was still there. Maybe there was still a worker inside who would help him.

Instead,
the
figure
that
emerged from the shadow was not, in any way, going to help him. The fellow had once been a warehouse worker. Cutter recognized
what was left of
the man’s face. He found himself trying to recall the gent’s name
. He had
worked with a
cherry picker
hauling down big items like filing cabinets and modular desks from high racks. Ron often found himself speaking to the guy, asking if certain items were in stock. The guy seemed to know where to find things even if their own programs said they were sold out.
True
to that same old stubbornness and tenacity, the creature noticed Cutter doing his best not to
be
noticed, and it gave chase.

Shit
, Ron thought.
Despite
everything, knowing that he shouldn’t do anything to draw attention to himself, he began to race away as quickly as he could without breaking into a full run.
Nevertheless,
he was
trotting;
causing
his gait
to echo off
the walls of the alley
, and
the thing that had seen him began to moan. The moans
also
echoed from wall to wall. Cutter risked a look back, and the dead that had been stumbling along the caged catwalk
,
turned their dead faces toward him and realized that he was not like them, that he was among the living,
and
that he was merely
there
for them to consume. Their moans rose in volume and pitch until they were snarling, almost yelling. The footfalls on the metal grate began to hammer, adding to the growing noise that was filling the alleyway.