Cordyceps Trilogy (Book 3): Cordyceps Victoriosis Page 3

  The mag ran dry. Cole found the AR but hesitated to fire. His legs were already shaking from the continuous effort of pressing against the dead cougher, its body become a sort of door that was Cole’s last hope of holding the horde at bay.

  Not like this, he thought. Not like this. Not smothering in the stench of their rotting corpses, not beating away their hands until their gouging fingernails took him like piranhas, bite by tiny bite. Only one option remained for escaping the Jeep before it became his coffin: to climb up through the rear passenger window—facing skyward now—one of only two intact pieces of glass left on the vehicle.

  Cole pointed the barrel of the AR toward the window.

  A ghoulish face appeared on the opposite side of the glass, eclipsing Cole’s view of the sky, squinting through the tinted window and coughing ropy phlegm on the glass. Cole’s finger tightened on the trigger, then relaxed. He needed a plan. He knew by the burning and quivering in his leg muscles that they were about to give out. He didn’t know if he would be able to run even if he could, by some miracle, crawl out through the window and leap free from the wreck. He could easily break his ankle in the fall or find himself in a raging throng of Cord zombies one hundred deep in every direction.

  Cole looked up. The cougher squatted atop the window, looking through it and coughing, a teenager with a shock of wild hair and a bony fist he cocked back and rammed against the glass, oblivious to the pain.

  Cole swatted away the hands groping for him and drew the mechanic’s bag toward him and found another full mag for the AR, swapping it out quickly for the half-empty one. He draped the bag’s strap over his neck, knowing he’d need both hands but hoping like hell it wouldn’t snag on anything when he crawled out. He dropped the empty Glock into the bag and zipped it shut, then thought better of it and left the zipper open so he could reach into the bag for another magazine. He needed to give up pushing with his legs and let them recover if he could, even for a few seconds, but he didn’t know how fast the Cord zombies from the rear would come pouring in. He had to try it. Above him, the second and third blows to the window were no less forceful than the first, the teenage cougher seemingly outraged by the obstinacy of the barrier.

  The pressure against Cole’s legs steadily increased, even as his own strength diminished, but still he could not bring himself to do it. This was the last moment of stasis he could imagine in the short life remaining to him. He was in the zone. Somehow he had always known he would die like this.

  He relaxed his legs and drew them back, crying out through the respirator with the sudden rush of pain through his sinews and watching the dead body of the cougher roll toward him in the press of arms that writhed like a tide of snakes.

  Five

  WHEN THE WINDOW EXPLODED it rained shards onto Cole’s head and shoulders. He did not see the round from the AR explode in mist out the back of the cougher’s head or topple him backward over his heels. Cole began to rise toward the opening. His legs were as weak as he feared when he tried to get them under him. He needed the next thirty seconds to play out in slow motion, but they would not. Already, coughers were forcing their way in through the channel opened up by the dislodged body, and Cole could feel a hand grabbing at his boot. He stomped it, feeling fingers break like twigs under his heels. Again, he climbed upward. He could only hope that the cougher he shot through the window had fallen backwards and hopefully stunned a portion of the swarm long enough for him to make his exit.

  He stepped on the side of the driver’s seat and propelled his body up through the broken window frame, the muzzle of the AR leading him, no idea what he would see when his head cleared the window. A sea of Cord zombies was what he feared.

  What he saw, instead, was a mosh pit of coughers surrounding the Jeep, some pressed against it, reaching through any opening they could find, while others climbed up the exposed chassis and perhaps fifty others coughed and roared and seemed to add their own paroxysms of rage in support of the assault.

  They seemed stunned to see Cole appear, their eyes fixed on him in that terrible moment of a predator’s recognition of its prey, the instant before a synapse completes and the predator’s muscles respond, propelling it toward capture.

  Cole got his elbows outside the window and was struggling for footing inside the Jeep to push himself the rest of the way out when something below seized his leg and he felt a searing pain in his calf muscle. Cole screamed into the respirator and every Cord zombie outside the Jeep that had not yet noticed his exit now turned to contemplate him. Cole kicked and fluttered his legs, stomping on the cougher’s head and somehow pushing himself up through the narrow opening as zombies filled the space like waters closing beneath him. The mechanic’s bag swung around his neck, the ammunition in it heavy enough that the momentum of it nearly carried him over the edge into the outstretched hands of the coughers, leaping up to grab him in their frenzy.

  The first three shots Cole got off were fired down into the interior of the Jeep, killing the cougher that had bitten him and was even then attempting to follow him out. The next burst was into the face of another cougher that had grabbed his boot, reaching up from below the Jeep, and the seconds that followed were a melee of kicking, screaming, and firing, the AR spurting and recoiling while hot shell casings flipped down into the press of zombies lunging for him, and others gained a foothold on the luggage rack and snatched at him—all those hands reaching for him.

  Cole blew their fingers off and fired rounds directly into their gaping, spore-dusted mouths. He jerked the AR left and right, spinning to fire on several coughers behind him before he turned the AR back on another that had grabbed a fistful of his pants leg and nearly pulled his feet out from under him.

  He fired again and again, no time to take stock of how many zombies he had killed or how many remained, whether he was gaining an advantage or whether it was utterly hopeless. His perspective narrowed to that of a first-person shooter; he saw only the muzzle of the gun and the zombie in front of him and then the next and the next, pulling the trigger again and again until the gun ran dry and then he pulled the trigger again even harder and nothing happened and he was too deaf from firing to realize the weapon had ceased, only the nightmarish realization that the cougher he had aimed at had not fallen but had seized his ankles with both hands.

  Cole hit the magazine release button and reached into the bag for another loaded mag, but just as his hand closed around it he felt his feet jerked away, his footing lost. He fell butt first on the cargo bay window beside him, the last piece of intact glass on the Jeep. The breath was knocked from him but he was able to shove the magazine into the AR. He felt the glass sliding beneath him. They were pulling him from the Jeep.

  Cole fell. He was on the ground with them. They reeled from the muzzle of the gun as he fired, again and again, allowing him to press his back against the Jeep’s chassis and lay down an arc of suppressive fire. A red mist from their exploded wounds still hung in the air when Cole charged, a kind of football offensive into the opening he had blasted through the crowd. Most of them had lost sight of him and a confused roar of outrage went up from the horde. The AR was empty again, but Cole didn’t seem to realize it, leaping over bodies and stiff-arming coughers out of the way until at last he was running across open pavement.

  Six

  THE MAN RUNNING across the vast empty parking lot was, for the moment, at the lead of a race in which there would be no second place. The difference between the lone survivor and the zombies reaching for his shoulders seemed to be the very impetus that spurred their mad pursuit: the distribution of their spores was as necessary as osmosis, as inevitable as extinction for the last remaining specimen of his kind, and the agony on the faces of Cole’s pursuers, their open mouths and the blood and fire in their eyes, seemed to suggest some moral outrage, as though his refusal to breathe their spores were an affront, and his attempt to escape them audacious.

  Cole had the em
pty AR pistol in his hands, pumping it side to side as he ran, as though it were some horizontal piston in the machine he had become, his legs ablur beneath him and the HEPA respirator bouncing on his face, his very brain jolted with the force of every stride, and the mechanic’s bag flopping against his rump like a mudflap bouncing against a road-spun tire.

  He knew nothing in that moment but speed. There could be no other thought, no other unnecessary movement that might cause him to stumble. If he slowed, if he fumbled with the gun and dropped it, if he looked behind him and lost his stride counting the seventy-nine coughers behind him, it would all be over. If he were able to gain even a twenty-yard advantage, reach into the mechanic’s bag, find another magazine, reload the AR, turn, and face them, he might, with perfect accuracy, slaughter the first thirty, and then the remaining forty-nine would swarm him, batting away the gun and crushing his upraised arms, ripping away the respirator and possibly even tearing his body apart with their teeth and bare hands, as had been documented in so many instances in the previous outbreaks, when the coughers, crazed by the Cordyceps spores taken root in their lungs, had obeyed that maniacal compulsion to plant their spores as deep as possible within another body.

  Cole ran. It was not a thing he needed to determine to do. His very primal essence, whatever being he had left, had been transferred into the act of running. He ran toward a cluster of low buildings that bounced in his vision; no more real, at this distance, than a mirage, obscured almost totally by the sweat and blood running in rivulets down his scalp, staining his forehead and blurring his vision in a phantasmagoria of crimson filters. All he could hear was his own heavy breath inside the HEPA respirator, hot against his face, blowing out through the rubber exhalation valves and sucking in through the disk filters. That protected and untainted breath, labored as it might be, was his own and his life and the one thing the coughers behind him were determined to stifle.

  Seven

  THE DOUBT first presented itself in the guise of exhaustion. It came as an idea, as a temptation to give himself permission to fail. It could not be done. The buildings grew no larger, no closer. His legs and his lungs were on fire and would, it seemed, simply turn to ash and dissolve. His tendons would snap, his ligaments would tear loose and recoil, irretrievably, into his musculature. He would black out from the lack of oxygen sucked through the mask or he would gradually slow until he felt their hands at his back, digging into his shoulders, and then he would collapse to the pavement and spend his last moments of consciousness gazing at some hairline crack there, while they ravished him, some pale weed struggling up through the suffocated earth by miraculous turgor, and he would know, at last, that no matter how hard he fought against it, nature would always win.

  A second and competing thought entered Cole’s mind, though it was not a thought at all, he realized, but a noise coming to him faintly though gunshot-deafened ears. A roaring. An engine. He noticed, at the very corner of his vision, something bright coming toward him from the left across the parking lot, though at first he could barely see it because it was bearing straight for him. It was the grille of a Ford pickup, flashing its headlights and accelerating as though it meant to run him over.

  When Cole turned his head to look, he could see, beyond the glare of sunlight on the windshield, the silhouette of a single occupant behind the wheel. At the same moment he felt some new resistance, as though an invisible tractor beam had fixed on him from behind, and when he felt a tug from the strap around his neck, he realized one of the coughers had caught hold of the mechanic’s bag flopping behind him.

  The truck’s horn blared right before impact, startling Cole and nearly causing him to stumble. The front bumper targeted him with a speed impossible to calculate or avoid. He had no greater expenditure of energy or speed to hurl himself out of its path. The truck passed behind Cole with the energy of a bullet train and he felt his feet leaving the ground, though the vehicle had not struck him but only the cougher clutching his mechanic’s bag. He felt himself jerked backward, a flat spin through the air, all bearings lost but flashes of the sky and pavement before he struck the ground and rolled, the AR pistol skidding away from him and his body making three complete log rolls while his arms flapped uselessly against the concrete.

  Tires screeched. An engine roared. Cole lifted his head. For an instant the earth seemed to rotate like a merry-go-round. The truck clarified from a triplet of ghost images. It was coming back. The coughers, stunned, had paused and stood looking after the truck, their predatory instinct to follow moving prey aroused by the greater mass and kinesis of the vehicle. They charged directly for it and even dove headlong into it as it came, glancing off the bumper and shattering the headlights with their skulls, several bodies under the tires ramping the front end up into the air, coming down hard and slowing as the driver was thrown against the wheel.

  Cole pushed off the pavement and stood wavering on his feet. He still had the mechanic’s bag. He limped to the AR pistol and scooped it up. He moved with difficulty at first, trying to assess his injuries while he reached back for the mechanic’s bag and groped in it for another magazine. Over his shoulder, at least a dozen Cord zombies were still coming for him, undeterred. The truck was making a tight turn too fast, one rear tire spinning smoke, while coughers hung from the door handles and side view mirrors before falling away.

  Cole ripped out the empty magazine and shoved it into the mechanic’s bag. He couldn’t feel his left foot and there was a level of pain in his knees he’d never experienced before. He glanced at the loaded magazine to orient it correctly before he slid it into the magazine well and slapped it home. He limped as fast as he could and tore the bolt back and let it fall. Thirty more rounds. He wasn’t sure he had another loaded magazine. He remembered packing a dozen in the bag but he had no idea how many he had already spent.

  His progress was painfully slow. Without even looking, he knew the coughers were gaining on him. He would have to make a stand. He turned and knelt, bracing his elbow on one knee and pocketing the Sig Brace in his shoulder. The truck had just clobbered another knot of them, but still others merely dodged it and came on for Cole, their eyes fixed on him, their faces set in fury.

  Cole lifted the dog ears of the front sight to the torso of the closest cougher and pulled the trigger. It went down. He snapped the gun right and left, taking marks. He had to be mindful of the truck now, lest he overshoot, and when the truck pulled away to make another turn, Cole saw the mass of them still coming behind it and realized it wouldn’t work, that the truck, like some furious rodeo bull, was too slow in turning, and that he would still be overwhelmed on the ground even if the horde was reduced by half.

  The driver must have had a similar realization, because when Cole beckoned furiously with his arm it finally pulled away and roared toward him, running over several dead coughers and rocking on its shocks before it stopped suddenly beside him. Cole hurled himself over the side of the bed and slid headfirst into the tailgate as the driver floored it, and for at least a minute he lay flat against the ribbed plastic bed liner without even attempting to sit up. A cooling wind passed over him. He felt the transmission shudder into second, third, and fourth gears. There wasn’t enough sleep in eternity for the rest he needed. He rolled over onto his back and watched power lines and utility poles and tree branches floating by. The sky, blue and empty. Had he looked at the crumpled fast food receipt in his pocket, he would have been shocked to find that not even an hour had passed since he ordered his sandwich; an hour in which the world had changed and would not likely be reconciled to the thing it was before.

  Eight

  THE TRUCK came to an abrupt stop on the pavement some ten minutes later. Cole had righted himself several minutes before, leaning against the corner of the truck bed. He pulled loose the strap that held the respirator over his head and rubbed his hair vigorously in the wind coming over the top of the truck, hoping to blow away any spores that might have accumul
ated there during the attack. His hand came away with gobs of partially coagulated blood and brain matter like bits of pasta. Cole wiped it on his pants.

  He noticed the driver glancing at him in the rear view mirror, a pair of pale eyes heavy with shadow and her hair full of kinks in the manner of a fashion that had long since passed out of vogue. Cole finally broke the respirator’s seal and pulled the mask from his face. He rubbed his jaw and filled his lungs, relishing the cool air. He could see his own reflection dimly in the truck’s rear window, and the face there was marked by angry lines across his cheeks from the respirator and streaks of blood across his forehead and cheekbones. He looked like hell.

  She pushed the gearshift into park and shut off the engine. She opened her door and got out, a twenty-something in skinny jeans and a robin’s-egg blue parka vest. She looked around them, seeming as casual as a tourist stopping at a scenic overlook. But when she turned and looked at Cole, her eyes were bloodshot and full of tears and her face was streaked with rivulets of diluted eye shadow.

  Cole didn’t say a word. Any other man would have thanked her for saving his life. Instead, he turned his eyes away to scan their surroundings. No movement. A flag snapping in the breeze outside a fast food stand-alone. Several SUVs and a minivan nearby, parked along the curb of an outdoor shopping center. Through the windows of one retail outlet he could see mattresses on display, bright under the fluorescent lights. Things had been abandoned in a hurry.

  “You should keep that engine running,” he finally said.

  Her eyes pooled and her face tightened and she turned away from him, her shoulders convulsing, an occasional wet gasp the only sound that escaped her. Cole looked around them again, his eyes scanning the rooftops and radio towers visible on the horizon. Still nothing. He got to his feet—painfully—and swung a leg over the side of the truck, climbing down the rear tire. He reached back into the bed for his bag and the AR pistol, which he thought to safety and slide into the bag, muzzle first.