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He nodded. “Still, it is something.”
“Look,” Ksenia said. “I don’t want to hurt you, but if you pull a stunt on me I will.”
“Lady, I got it already,” Ramses said. “I got other business to do except being dead.” He looked down at his shoes with no shoelaces. “Okay. One thing at a time. I need a faster pair of footwear.”
Ksenia clicked the torch on and shone it on the floor.
“Let’s go,” she said.
They went along the corridor. At the end of it, she stopped. “Wait. There’s a man on the staircase. I shot at him as he assaulted me.”
She handed him the gun. “You go first. Please. I’m scared.”
Ramses took the gun. “We’re gonna be fine. Is the safety on?”
“Yes.”
“How many bullets are left?”
“It’s an MP-443 Grach pistol,” Ksenia said. “18 rounds in a magazine. I’ve spent four.”
“Aw, that’s coo,” he said, shifting the weapon into ready-to-fire position. “Okay, follow me. Light me through the staircase.”
They went down the steps. Ramses’s tall figure cast a long shadow, which looked like the silhouette of the alien hunter in the movie “Predator”. Walking in the shoes, which lacked shoelaces, was not comfortable, and he chose his step carefully so he did not stumble or fall.
They walked down two flights of stairs and saw the body. It was the bald police officer with the walrus mustache. He was lying face down on the stair landing, a pool of blood accumulating around his head like cherry liquor.
Ksenia gasped and pressed her hand to her mouth.
Ramses touched the dead man’s shoulder with the gun muzzle. “You knew him?”
“He was my dad’s friend,” Ksenia whispered.
“Sorry to hear that.” Ramses knelt down and searched the man’s pockets. He found a cell phone and a set of keys. He put both items in his pocket. Then he kicked off his shoes and started taking off the dead man’s leather boots to put them on. Ksenia looked away.
They went on. The third floor was under renovation. The dirty corridor was full of stacks of old heating radiators and bags of cement.
They passed the second floor. Their steps echoed in the stairwell. The security door cage, leading to the corridor on the first floor, was locked with a padlock.
The torch flickered in Ksenia’s hand. She shook it and it began shining normally. As she shone on the door again, they saw a female staring at them, her slimy manicured hands gripping the bars. She was wearing the dark blue police uniform. The red bubbly liquid was drooling from her mouth on her black tie and white shirt.
“Be careful,” Ksenia said.
Ramses approached the woman and stood within a safe distance. Her face was pale, and her eyes were bloodshot. The woman snarled and hissed and tried to reach him through the bars.
“Can you talk to her?” Ramses said to Ksenia. “I mean I don’t speak any Russian.”
“You might as well speak English with her,” Ksenia said. “Or Greek. Or Albanian. Or whatever. It’s all the same. They don’t respond. They’re like lifeless dolls.”
Ramses stepped forward to take a closer look. “What’s up with her?” He backed away as the woman attempted to snatch his face with her hands. “What’s your guess?”
“Maybe yesterday it wasn’t really a meteorite. I think it was some kind of nerve gas.”
“You think it was terrorists?”
“Kind of. And the chemical stuff made people insane and affected their speech.”
Ramses turned to Ksenia. “Why ain’t we gone crazy?”
Ksenia shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe we will. Sooner or later.”
Ramses shuddered at the thought.
“You got the keys to this door?” he said.
Ksenia patted her jeans pocket. “Right here.”
“Good.” He nodded. “Hold on to them.”
The woman opened her mouth and exhaled a loud groan which shot a surge of fear through his spine. They heard shuffling noises. A fat man in a police uniform shambled from around the corner and stood behind the woman. He snarled at Ramses and Ksenia, his white parchment lips parting in a ghastly grimace. His neck was torn open, and the blood mixed with gray matter oozed from the wound. He shoved the female aside and protruded his hands through the bars.
The monster versions of the police officers growled at them and started shaking the bars. What troubled Ramses was that if they had kept smashing the door, it wouldn’t have taken them long to rip it off the hinges. They pushed the door, spasms of fury shaking their bodies, but it did not budge. The door held.
Ramses stared at them blankly. He didn’t know those people, but he realized they had been persons just a couple of hours ago, persons who had families, kids, friends. His feelings were mixed. He was scared of them, and he wanted to kill them all, just to put them out of their misery. He looked at Ksenia. She was blinking, forcing her tears back.
“C’mon,” Ramses said. “We gotta get out.”
The noise was getting unbearable. One more policeman walked up, wearing a winter coat and a hat. The closed door stopped him. He grabbed a bar with his left hand and looked at them savagely with his red eyes. His right arm was missing.
Ksenia pointed at him and shouted, “That’s him, the bastard!”
Ramses looked at Ksenia. “Why are you shouting? Don’t we have to be quiet?”
“He left my father to die out there. Kill him!”
“You must be kidding, yeah?” Ramses frowned. “I’m being convicted of murder and going to spend five years in some shitty prison in Siberia. You want me to become a cop killer now?”
“Can’t you see they’re not humans anymore?” Ksenia said. She was on the verge of crying and her eyes were full of rage. “At least they’re not acting like human beings to me. They’re like rabid animals. They attack what they see and use their teeth and nails.”
Ramses said and gripped his gun firmly. “Girl, you’re nuts. Totally. I can see you’ve been through a lot today but I just don’t buy this shit. Man, it’s crazy!”
“I knew we couldn’t go through this door. I just wanted you to see what we’re dealing here with. You didn’t see the half of what was going on here.”
She pulled a handgun from under her sweater and aimed it at the one-armed man.
Ramses hastened to step away. “Jeez, missy! You told me you had only one heater!”
Ksenia did not listen to him. She concentrated her gaze on the police car driver, who had left her father outside to be killed at the hands of dozens of brutal creatures with reddened eyes and hungry mouths.
“God forgive me.” She pressed the trigger.
The bullet hit the man in the chest but he did not even wince. The loud bang nearly made them deaf in this closed area.
Ramses looked at her gun. “Are you sure it’s not a training pistol?”
“The gun’s real. It belonged to my dad. You just have to aim at the head.”
Ramses cast an inquiring look at her. “Are we in a fucking weird lesson?”
Ksenia put the torch carefully on the floor. She gripped the gun with both hands, pointed it at the driver and squeezed the trigger again.
The bullet made its way through the man’s forehead, chunks of flesh and bones flying out from behind his skull. The echo of the gun report was deafening. The man collapsed on the floor. His ex-coworkers stumbled over the lying corpse. They got up and started shaking the door more violently.
Ksenia squinted and killed the fat man with one single shot in the head. Then she directed the gun at the female and fired. The contents of her skull were scattered around.
It was quiet for a second.
Then a crowd of psychos came shambling. A dozen hands clawed at them through the bars. The rusty door began to creak ominously under their weight.
She sent another bullet into the mob without taking aim. It hit the bars and twanged away in a ricochet. She tried to send another round, but the gun was giving only dry clicks. The magazine was empty.
Tears smeared Ksenia’s mascara.
“Don’t call me missy,” she said. Her cheekbones flushed red.
FOUR
Ksenia thumbed the release and ejected the empty clip into her hand. She put it in her pocket, took out a fresh clip and sent it home into the handle. She wedged her gun under her belt and stamped her feet upstairs.
Ramses looked through the bars and saw more monsters coming up to the closed door. He picked up the torch and ran after Ksenia. She stopped on the second floor and wiped her tears with the sleeve of her sweater.
“We have to leave this place,” she said. “The sooner, the better. The door won’t hold forever.”
“What are you up to?”
“We’ll break into the armory and arm ourselves.”
Ramses looked at Ksenia quizzically. “Sounds like a plan but please remind me next time to ask you who taught you to shoot and where you learned your good English.”
“Okay. Follow me.” She stepped into the dark corridor. The faint growling of the crazies was reaching them from the first floor. Ramses lit their way.
“Say,” he said. “Why didn’t those cops shoot back? They didn’t shoot back. Can you believe this? They all have a gun holster on their hips but none of ‘em were shooting at us.”
“They are robots,” Ksenia said, “not humans. Now you know what to do to survive.”
She halted in front of a heavy metallic door. She turned the handle, but the door was locked. She hit the door with her palm. “We have to find a way to get inside! We need those weapons!”
Ramses shook his head. “You’re looking really on edge.”
He searched in his pocket and fished out the keys he had found on the dead policeman. He put them into the torchlight. There was the Opel logo on the key fob. Car keys. No use for them at the moment. They had to escape from this place first before searching for that Opel in the parking lot. He put the keys away.
“Are you trained to pick locks by any chance?” he asked. “‘Cause I’m no expert here.”
“Unfortunately, no. The keys to the armory were on the first floor with the duty officer. Before this chaos began, that is.”
“We’re gonna have to use physical force, then.” He took a closer look at the three door hinges. “I’m thinking to try breaching it at the hinges.”
He touched the hinges, which were luckily not hidden from the outside. Easier to break. The latch side was strong, but he decided to break it too.
They went to the third floor, which was packed with various construction tools because of all renovations going on. They did not turn the lights in the corridor on and used the flashlight. Ramses picked a sledgehammer and a crowbar off the floor.
“Look around for some power-driven tools,” he said. “Like a drill or something.”
They rummaged through the tools, dispersing the darkness with the torchlight. Trickles of moonlight flowed through the windows and helped them see better in the dark. They found smaller hammers, cement spatulas and paint cans. Ksenia spotted a bulky plastic case under a stepladder and brought it to Ramses.
“That’s nice,” he said, opening the case and looking approvingly at the perforator. “Better than a drill.” He scanned around. “But we need the drill bit.”
“What’s that?”
“The drill bit?” He scratched the back of his head. “The thing, that’s attached to the business end of the perforator.” He looked at her tired face. “You know, to perform the drilling?”
“Ah.” She nodded weakly. “I got it – sverlo.”
Ramses felt a relief. “Yeah, whatever. Get a drill bit. Look around the place where you found this case.”
All the tools left by the construction workers were in disarray. There was an extension cord on a windowsill which Ramses added to his pile of items. Ksenia was lucky to locate the drill bits. She took an ax, too. They grabbed all the stuff and went back to the armory. There was a power source in the corridor, but the extension cord was not long enough to reach the armory door, and Ksenia had to go on a search for an extra cord. She came back with the cord and Ramses connected the two cords together. Then he plugged one of them into the power socket.
“Okee-dokee.” He revved the perforator, and it started buzzing loudly. “All systems are go, Houston.”
Ksenia gave him a tired smile.
“You drill near the latch,” he said handing her the tool. “Once you start, the plaster will crumble like a cookie. I’ll go at the hinges.”
He took the sledgehammer and hit it against the upper hinge. A loud buzz instantly filled the building. It was numbing and it was continuous.
He put the sledgehammer down and looked at Ksenia.
“We’ve triggered the security alarm system,” she said. “But no one is coming to arrest us.”
“It’s gonna attract more deadheads from outside,” Ramses said. “Let’s hurry up.” He raised the sledgehammer and launched another hit against the hinge.
Ksenia pressed the drill bit to the wall surface near the door frame and began working, too. Pieces of paint and plaster crumbled to the floor. Dust and cement particles, barely visible in the faint light, were floating in the air. In a quarter of an hour, the instrument got very hot, and they switched it off to give it a rest. Ksenia sat on the floor.
It took Ramses nineteen hits to break the upper hinge. He took a break, wiped the sweat from his forehead and sat down beside Ksenia. He looked at her dirty face and dusty clothes, and he felt sad. His mind had not fully absorbed the irrationality of the things happening to them.
He said, “You’d make a great construction worker, for sho’.”
She smiled and coughed. “Yeah, you bet.”
He looked around the place. “Air-conditioning wouldn’t be such a bad idea around here. I’m dying.”
“You hang on in there,” Ksenia said standing up. She picked up the perforator and continued drilling. Through the ceaseless noise of the alarm system, she heard a gnashing sound of metal against metal and stopped.
“Damn!” she said, looking at a stump of the drill bit. “I’ve broken it!”
She put the perforator down and knelt beside the tool case to look for a replacement for the broken drill bit.
Ramses took a swing and smashed the sledgehammer against the middle hinge. The hinge did not move.
There was a distant clang coming from the first floor. Ramses stopped working and raised his head. Ksenia stood up and listened, but she could hardly hear anything.
She took her gun and the torch. “I’m going to check it.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.” She tucked the pistol under her sweater and picked up the ax. “Don’t worry about me.”
She turned to leave as Ramses said, “Wait … Ksenia.”
She stopped and glanced over her shoulder.
“Please be very, very careful there,” he said.
She weighed the ax in her hand. “I will.”
“When this is all over, I’ll take you to the Aziza restaurant. Best place in San Francisco.”
She snapped the torch on and smiled wearily. “Sounds like a deal. I’ll take you up on that.”
As Ksenia had left, Ramses got back to the middle hinge. With half a dozen powerful blows he broke it off. His muscles were tensed and beads of sweat dripped down his forehead but he was glad that he was winning this battle. He rested the sledgehammer against the wall and removed the broken mountain screws. Then he inserted the crowbar into the gap between the door and the doorjamb. He used some force to spring the door away from the frame. The metal resisted, but he maintained pressure on the tool and soon heard faint creaking. His hands were shaking and his T-shirt was damp. Useless. The gap was too narrow yet.
He moved the crowbar side to side to free it up and tried to separate the lower hinge but the weight of the heavy door was pressing on it. Using the perforator, he broke part of the masonry around where the lower hinge was anchored into the wall. In a minute, in the middle of the process, the perforator howled to a stop. The wailing of the alarm system ceased, too. There was brief silence, followed by the sounds of running feet. He squeezed the tool trigger multiple times, unplugged the cable and reconnected it into another socket of the extension cord. To no avail. There was no power.
The darkness of the corridor was torn by the beam of the flashlight and he saw Ksenia dashing toward him on the linoleum punctuated with moonlit patches. As she ran up to him, he saw fright and panic reflected in her exhausted face.
“It’s no good.” She was breathing heavily. “They’ve broken through!”
“Shit!” Ramses said. “I haven’t finished here yet.”
He heard deep growling echoing in the hollow space of the stairwell. The shuddersome sounds got under his skin.
“Then do something!” She was on the verge of hysteria. “They’re coming up!”
He dropped the tool and grabbed the edge of the door.
“I’m gonna make a gap,” he said. “And you try to squeeze in.”
“Okay!” Ksenia put the torch into her jeans pocket.
He pulled at the door using his entire force and wrenched it until the gap was wide enough for Ksenia to slip in.
Inside the armory, Ksenia took out the torch and had a look around. It was a tiny room with no windows. There was a rack of weapons on the wall and two rows of lockers.
Ramses put his head through. “What do you got?”
“Not much,” she said, opening a locker. “Most of the weaponry was taken away when the pandemonium began.” She took out a backpack and threw it at Ramses. “Here. Take this!” He caught it with one hand.
She gave him four hand grenades, which he put into the backpack. One by one. Quickly. But very carefully.
“And this,” she said, handing him an AK-47 assault rifle, a shortened variation used by the police.
The morbid moaning could be heard more distinctly now. Ramses turned his head to the left and saw dark creatures lurking at the threshold of the corridor. He held his breath and gulped.
“Get the mags!” he said in a loud whisper. “The dead ones are here!”
Ksenia was slamming frantically the locker doors in search of the ammunition. Her torch beam grew feeble, and the light terminated. It was pitch dark in the room again. She beat the flashlight against her palm and flipped the switch on and off, but it wouldn’t function.
“The cell phone!” she said. “Give it to me!”
He took the cell phone out of his pocket, turned it on and gave it to her. She cast the scanty screen light around and kept on looking. Her face was glowing in the white light of the display. For a second he imagined she was a distant lighthouse showing the seaway in the blackness of the night.
A young woman clad in blood-stained pajamas made shuffling steps along the corridor in the vanguard of the ghastly procession. The moon threw its silver light on her disfigured face. Her bare feet were leaving filthy undulating trails on the floor. She raised her arms and gave a hoarse moan. A police officer in a tunic was walking behind her, his jaws clacking. A group of other automatons followed them slow but steady. Nearer with every step.
Ramses’s heart grew sick. Blood was pulsing in his head. He aimed the Grach pistol and squeezed a round into the civilian woman’s face. There was a wet sound and the female collapsed.
Ksenia’s frightened face appeared in the gap. “This is all there is.” She slipped three banana-shaped magazines into his hands and then pushed through a sniper rifle. Ramses shouldered the rifle, never taking his eyes off the approaching monsters.
“We got no time to be choosy,” he said, attaching a magazine to the AK-47. He fired a series of shots. The hot spent cartridges propelled through the gloomy dark and fell down with a ringing sound. All the bullets hit the policeman’s chest, which did not stop him. “We gotta fall back!”
The crazies were advancing. Frenzied hunger was pushing their unsteady feet forward. And their prey was so close.
Ksenia put her right leg through the gap. The rough edges of the door tore the front of her sweater and scratched her cheek as she tried to shove herself out. The cell phone dropped to the floor. The screen shattered and faded out. Her leg was caught in the narrow space between the door and the door frame, and tongs of pain squeezed her thigh.
“I’m stuck,” she cried out, cold claustrophobia gripping her. “Ramses, I can’t move!”
For a nanosecond, Ramses was bewildered to hear Ksenia say his first name. He pulled the door away with one hand and used the other hand to wrestle her leg out of the metal trap.
The group of the undead was nearing. He fired a series of slugs into the approaching robotic creatures. Two of them sprawled to the floor like logs, others stumbled and fell on top of them. He switched the firing mode of the AK-47 to single shot to use the ammo sparingly. The created pile of bodies bought him some more time. He snatched the cell phone off the floor and shoved it into his backpack.
“Get down on the floor,” he said to Ksenia, “with your head in the far corner of the room.”
“What? But I—,” Ksenia said.
Ramses didn’t try to explain what he was up to. Every second was at stake now. The pile-up on the floor started to untangle. He cast a worried glance and was paralyzed with horror. A living corpse of a teenage boy had risen to his feet and was pushing his way toward him. He was wearing a black Nike woolen cap with a piece of advice saying “Just Do It” written in white letters.
Ramses turned to Ksenia. “Just do it, baby,” he said suppressing a nervous chuckle in his throat. “I’ll get to you pronto.”
“Okay,” Ksenia gave a quick nod and disappeared in the depth of the armory.
Ramses grabbed all his gear and made a crazy dash to the end of the corridor. He looked back. The ghouls walked up to the armory door and slammed their fists trying to break through. More dead visitors were seeping into the corridor through the entrance.
Now, this is a real fuck-up, Ramses thought.
He turned the corner. It was an L-corridor, and he faced a dead end. He put the backpack and the sniper rifle down on the floor, shouldered his AK-47 and clutched a lemon-shaped hand grenade. He pulled out the safety pin and took a wide swing, sending the grenade into the midst of the deadheads. He dived for cover behind the corner just a moment before a loud blast roared in the darkness, tearing the dead meat into shreds and breaking the window glass out. He looked around the corner and saw twitching body parts on the floor. The rearguard ghouls were still advancing.
Ramses grabbed another hand grenade, yanked the pin out and threw it as far as he could. The throw was not successful. The grenade hit the wall, bounced away and rolled right up to the armory door. He hid behind the corner, adjusting the backpack and gripping another bomb in his hand. The bang was humongous and it shook the corridor. The metal door caved in.
The sniper rifle was too clunky to carry around, and he had no ammo for it. He made a quick decision to ditch it. He detached the scope, put it in his backpack and ran toward the living dead.
Ramses stood within the safe distance from the dead and discharged his bullets into them. Bodies covered the floor.
There was one living dead policeman standing. He locked his dead gaze on Ramses. Ramses fired at the dead man’s skull. Dark blood spurted out in a fountain and the dead cop collapsed.
Total silence reigned for a couple seconds. Even the wind outside was still. Then the broken door moaned and came crashing down.
“Ksenia! You okay?!” he shouted, turning in the direction of the noise.
He heard coughing and Ksenia’s voice: “Yes.”
He shuddered, as out of the corner of his eye, his peripheral vision registered a movement in the pile of bodies. His eyes widened, seeing the dead teenager creeping out of it. Or rather the upper half of him. The grenade blast had torn his torso off from the lower part. Coils of guts were unrolling out of his abdomen. He clawed the floor in front of him and moved forward. His moonlit face was contorted with rage.
Ramses pulled the trigger pad, but the AK-47 mag was empty. He took out his Grach but the dead boy was already at his feet, ready to bite him with his bleeding mouth. Ramses kicked him in the head while he was fumbling with the machine gun.
There was a sudden gunshot and the living dead boy’s face exploded.
In the doorway, two-handing her Makarov’s pistol stood Ksenia. The smoke was rising from the muzzle. Ramses took a deep sigh and gave a nod of appreciation to her.
The place was reeking of rotten flesh. The cold wind blew through the broken window and carried away the stench. Outside, the sky was getting pink. The morning was coming. Ramses cringed. He was getting used to the protection of the dark.