Cordyceps Trilogy (Book 3): Cordyceps Victoriosis Read online

  He held the wheel steady and glanced back in time to see the security gate give way, a good portion of the storefront’s edifice and hunks of jagged brickwork coming away with the bolts, and the gate still skidding across the parking lot behind the truck as the thieves scrambled into the store through swirling dust.

  “Where are the police?” Lindsay asked, incredulous.

  “Busy, I imagine,” Cole said. He piloted the truck into a broad parking lot and accelerated toward the towering stucco facade of a sporting goods superstore, the entrance glowing in the gathering darkness.

  “Don’t look now, but we’re about to try something similar,” Cole said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  Cole whipped the truck past the entrance, braked hard, and threw the transmission into reverse. He put his arm across the back of the seat and looked over the tailgate at the double set of glass doors.

  “Have you lost your mind?” Lindsay recoiled from him, her hand on the door handle. “I’m not going to jail. You’re a maniac.”

  “You’re not going to jail?” Cole retorted. “You just ran over fifteen or twenty people a minute ago but now you’re drawing the line at breaking and entering?”

  “You said yourself those people were as good as dead.” Lindsay looked at the storefront, wild-eyed. “This is a big business. They have security cameras, alarms—I’m pretty sure you can’t just ram through the door!”

  “Look, I know this seems crazy. Especially when you haven’t done it before. But this is end of the world type stuff, okay? If you want to survive what’s coming, we’re going to need food, gear, and more weapons and ammunition than you can imagine.” He jerked his head toward the door. “We gotta get in there.”

  Lindsay glared at him. “Get out of my truck.”

  Cole kept his foot on the brake but softened his voice. “Lindsay, look, I’m doing this so you and I can have at least a gnat’s chance in hell at—”

  “I don’t need your damned patriarchy.” She pointed emphatically at the door beside him. “Get out of my fucking truck.”

  Cole looked at her one more time.

  “Out!”

  “Alright.” Cole shifted into park, opened the door, and swung a leg out. “Take care of yourself, then.”

  He shut the door behind him without looking at her again. He slung his mechanic’s bag over his shoulder and limped toward the entrance, his knee hurting again after sitting all afternoon in the truck. He ejected the magazine from the AR pistol and hefted it. At least twenty rounds.

  He slapped it back into the gun and flicked off the safety. He stood there in the harsh illumination of the entrance and took one last glance at the parking lot behind him. Lindsay had slid behind the wheel but sat watching him through the truck’s rear window.

  “Farewell to civilization,” Cole said.

  He turned to the entrance, raised the AR pistol, and fired at the bottom corner of the tempered glass door. The full length of the pane shattered in the shockwave from the high-velocity round, falling in a cascade of angular shards. A high wail came from the interior of the building, the rising and falling pitch of a siren, and adding to the immediate din was another alarm, a rapid ringing: the sound of a bank being robbed in a heist movie, or the sort of bell one imagines in a firehouse as men are mustered in the night from their bunks.

  Cole stepped over the door frame into the airlock, shards crunching beneath his boots. He aimed the AR at the second set of doors, seeing, for the first time, the security gate lowered like a portcullis behind it. He hadn’t noticed this added security measure from the parking lot, where it had been obscured by glare on the glass.

  Even before he shattered the second door, Cole began to doubt whether he could shoot through the heavy steel links of the security gate. He stooped in the shards of the second door to examine the lock, his ears ringing from the gunshots and deafened even further by the competing siren and bell. The lock was situated at ground level, behind the frame of the glass doors, meaning there was no way to put a round straight through the bolt, and even if he could, the locking mechanism might not be defeated.

  Cole swore. At that moment another sound came to him, and at first he had trouble separating it from the ringing and wailing in his ears, but it was distinct: the revving of an engine and the squeal of spun tires. Cole turned on his heels in time to see the rear taillights of the truck. He dove toward the wall only an instant before it made impact, rendering the metal doorframes only a glued-together model of construction, rent apart at the seams by the irresistible force of the truck, which hardly slowed before it plowed through the second set of doors and caught in the steel security gate, arrested suddenly like a hockey puck slapped into the netting of a goal.

  Cole tucked his head and shielded himself with his arms in the corner as metal pieces of the door and window frames flipped through the airlock and a tsunami of broken glass washed over him. He recovered slowly, glass shards sprinkling from his clothes as he stood.

  All but the engine compartment of the truck had entered the airlock. He could see Lindsay struggling against the inflated airbags, batting at them as though they had attacked her. The store’s alarms still rang at a deafening volume.

  “ARE YOU NUTS?”

  The only thing he could hear from the cab of the truck was coughing.

  “WHAT THE FUCK?”

  Lindsay opened the driver’s door and fell from the cab, wracked with coughing.

  Cole realized he didn’t have the AR.

  Lindsay struggled to regain her feet, dry heaving.

  Cole backed away, watching her, kicking the AR pistol with his heel before he stooped to retrieve it, shaking glass from it and holding it at his side.

  “Augh,” Lindsay said, straightening, “What is this dust?” She rubbed her fingers together before her face. Her fingertips were white.

  Cole blew out the breath he’d been holding. He bent and rested the heels of his hands on his knees. “Unbelievable.”

  “WHAT?” Lindsay shouted.

  “Talcum powder,” Cole said.

  “WHAT?”

  “POWDER! THE AIRBAGS ARE PACKED IN IT.”

  Lindsay still looked mystified. Cole shook his head. “You just about flattened me!”

  She had the temerity to grin.

  Cole was still inclined to shoot her, but instead examined the security gate. Incredibly, both sides were still relatively intact in their channels against the wall, but underneath the truck’s rear bumper, the impact had wrinkled the steel curtain sufficiently to lift it nearly a foot off the floor. Cole kicked away the remnants of the door frame and swept away glass with his boot before going to his knees and pushing the mechanic’s bag through the hole ahead of him. He flipped the AR’s fire selector to safe and slid through on his back, head and shoulders first.

  Lindsay followed.

  Cole got to his feet and attempted to take in the layout of the interior while emergency lights strobed from the ceiling. Spandex clad mannequins towered over nearby displays but made no move to stop him. A maze of clothing racks took up the center of the store. A golf shop to the far right, useless to him. Rows of bicycles and kayaks. He noticed tents mounted to the wall in the far left corner and began limping toward the outdoor section. The guns and ammo were bound to be nearby. He began to worry, as he made his way past racks of athletic clothing and numbered sports jerseys, that redundant security measures or even a vault might make the guns inaccessible, but hopefully the ammo, at least, would be displayed on a shelf. He still had the Glock and the funstick in the mechanic’s bag. There had to be ammo. He had chosen a nine-millimeter and 5.56 AR pistol for his bugout bag for this very reason, not because they were the most powerful or effective calibers, but simply because they were some of the most popular and widely available NATO rounds.

  He passed an end cap stocked with hanging
bags of beef jerky and salted nuts, and stopped long enough to stuff several fistfuls of each into his mechanic’s bag. There would be bottled water near the checkouts, he was certain.

  He limped through aisles of camping gear, reluctant to add too much bulk to his kit. Everything he added would slow him down, and slowing down would eventually make the difference between life and death.

  He came to the archery section, lame even by standards of apocalyptic desperation, obviously geared more towards target shooting than actual killing. He turned in a slow circle, thinking he might have missed the guns. At last, he saw a counter at the rear with a glass cabinet behind it. Even in the dim light, Cole could see rifles lining the interior of the cabinet like a stockade fence.

  Lindsay’s voice came from somewhere behind him. “Where did you go?”

  “Over here,” Cole said without turning. He limped past rows of hanging sleeping bags and stepped around a counter full of knives and binoculars to stand in front of the gun cabinet.

  “Cole!”

  “Over here!” Cole said half-heartedly, his voice coming back to him off the Lexan.

  He scanned the rifles. Something was wrong.

  Something was very wrong.

  None of the rifles were black, military style “assault rifles.”

  The cabinet doors were locked but Cole bent to look more closely. Tags dangled on strings from the trigger guards.

  “Air guns,” he muttered.

  Lindsay came around the corner wearing a new insulated jacket, tags dangling from the sleeve. “Find anything?”

  Cole grunted. He had begun to feel a tightening feeling in his chest, a fluttering more significant than exhaustion or mere anxiety. He had nearly forgotten how fear tasted in his mouth.

  “Are those guns?”

  “Toys,” Cole said. As though in a slow and waking nightmare, he reached for a framed statement standing on the countertop. He tilted the glass to catch the light.

  SportStop respects and supports the Second Amendment, and recognizes that the majority of gun owners are law-abiding citizens, but gun violence is an epidemic taking the lives of too many of our best and brightest. The unwillingness of Congress to pass common sense gun legislation compels us to take action to stop this tragic violence. Effective immediately SportStop will no longer offer sales of firearms or ammunition.

  “You gotta be kidding me.” Cole tossed the frame behind the counter.

  “What?”

  “They no longer sell firearms,” he said bitterly.

  Lindsay’s mouth hung open for a moment. “Oh yeah, I think I remember my boyfriend being pissed about that.”

  Cole looked at her. “Your boyfriend has guns?”

  “Tons.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “Missouri.”

  Cole limped past her. “Of course.”

  He sat on a YETI cooler and unslung the mechanic’s bag from his shoulder. He needed to take stock of what he had left, and to think for a minute, if he could, in spite of the nerve-jarring sirens and the strobing lights, all of which, combined, was enough to make him feel like he was having a nervous breakdown.

  “Shouldn’t we get out of here?”

  “In a minute,” Cole said.

  The Glock was empty and he only had two partial magazines left for the AR, probably less than thirty or forty rounds all together. He kept rummaging in the mechanic’s bag, hoping to find another mag miraculously hidden in some interior compartment. The worst thing was, in his running gun battle with the Cord zombies, he had only thought to save one empty magazine, so even if he did find more ammo, unless he also came across more high-capacity magazines, he would never have more than three loaded mags—only enough to last a few minutes in an onslaught of coughers.

  “What was that?” Lindsay said, loudly over the sirens.

  Cole looked up. “What was what?”

  Lindsay was craning her neck to see something in the rafters of the store, thirty feet above them. “I thought I saw something flying up there, like a bird.”

  “Maybe it was a bird?” Cole said.

  “I don’t know, it was—” Lindsay’s voice faltered. “Cole, look!”

  Cole had seen it, too, a flashlight beam dancing on the far walls of the store and then the ceiling, sweeping now over the racks of clothing.

  “Get down!” Cole hissed.

  Cole started crawling, the commercial carpeting hard on his knees, already lacerated from so much abuse. Lindsay crawled close behind him, whispering, “Oh my gosh, I told you they would come! I told you we would go to jail!”

  “Shut up!” Cole whispered. He stopped behind a rack of canoes and peered across the overturned hulls. He didn’t see the light. He couldn’t hear any footfalls for the sound of the sirens. He had his hand on the AR’s grip, but he needed to be careful to play this right. He decided to slide it into the bag.

  “Where did they go?” Lindsay said behind him, too loudly.

  Cole was about to shush her when a blinding light illuminated the aisle where they hid.

  “DALLAS POLICE! KEEP YOUR HANDS WHERE I CAN SEE THEM! RIGHT FUCKING NOW!

  “Shit,” Cole breathed. He could only see the man’s legs at the end of the aisle, his entire upper body obscured in a brilliant corona of white light. He couldn’t be sure there was a gun or that the man even wore a police uniform. He could have been a manager.

  “STAND UP! STAND UP AND PUT YOUR HANDS ON YOUR HEAD!”

  Cole held up the palms of his hands. “Look,” he started.

  “STEP OUT FROM BEHIND HIM, MA’AM.”

  “Ma’am my ass,” Lindsay growled.

  “TAKE THE BAG OFF YOUR SHOULDER AND DROP IT.”

  Standing now, Cole noticed faint blue lights flashing at the store entrance, what he assumed was the police cruiser parked out front. “Alright, alright,” he said. “Just relax.”

  Cole wondered if the officer could see the AR’s Sig Brace protruding from the mechanic’s bag. With its Velcro straps it looked like little more than a wrist splint to the uninitiated.

  “DROP THE BAG!”

  “Look, brother, I’m not going to drop this bag and you’re not going to shoot me, all right?”

  “If you refuse to comply you may be fired upon!”

  Cole made a show of looking around the store. “Are you seriously out here by yourself? Do you have any idea what’s about to happen in this town?”

  The light shifted for a moment and Cole glimpsed a uniformed officer, Glock extended. He was clean shaven and young, Cole noticed.

  “I will fucking shoot you, do you understand?”

  Cole heard it in the officer’s voice now. He was scared.

  “Look, man,” Cole said, “I’m not trying to be a pain in the ass, I’m really not, but, uh, have you seen what’s going on out there? We’re going to need each other to survive.”

  Behind the light, he heard the officer cue up his radio. “Six-two-six requesting backup, over. Any reply, over.”

  A strange tone sounded from the radio, long and garbled. It reminded Cole of the old days of dial-up internet, when a router struggled through static to connect to the web.

  The officer tried again. “SIX-TWO SIX, over. Any units reply, over.”

  The same garbled noise was the only reply. The officer swore.

  “What’s that mean?” Cole said.

  Silence behind the light. “I don’t know,” the officer admitted. “It’s never made that sound before.”

  “Look, man, a lot of things are about to happen that haven’t—”

  “KEEP YOUR HANDS ON YOUR HEAD!”

  “Good grief, would you give it a rest?”

  Amid the sirens, Cole thought he heard coughing. He turned his head in time to see multiple figures running from the front entrance, dispersing int
o the store.

  “Shit, here they come!”

  “DON’T YOU MOVE!”

  Cole couldn’t believe their luck. They would find the one rookie cop that didn’t know when to quit.

  The light swung away. “DALLAS POLICE! STOP!”

  He could try his textbook professionalism on the coughers. Cole grabbed Lindsay’s arm and bolted the moment the light left them. “Run!”

  The officer’s nine-millimeter popped in rapid succession behind them: five shots, ten. Screaming into his radio.

  Cole had the AR pistol in his hand now. “Go, go, go!” They ran for the back of the store and crashed through a set of swinging doors. The stockroom. Nearly dark but for the strobing emergency lights. Cole could make out pallets of shrink-wrapped boxes. A forklift parked by a single loading dock door, and beside it, a glowing exit sign over a steel pedestrian door. They ran toward it, and Cole turned to cover the stockroom door while Lindsay hit the crash bar, flinging open the door and stepping out onto a concrete landing. Behind them, a cougher burst into the stockroom like an outlaw hitting a set of saloon doors and Cole only had an instant to lay the front sight on the silhouette and decide that it did not belong to the officer before he fired two rounds into the cougher’s chest and dropped him. Cole could still hear the nine-millimeter popping and a voice yelling in the store beyond. He hesitated one second longer before he turned and fled.

  Eleven

  COLE AND LINDSAY crouched in the shadow cast by a roll-off container under the stark fluorescent lights mounted to the rear of the building. They were gazing at the ass end of suburbia: dumpsters and loading docks, unadorned block walls and concrete pavement rubbed black by the turning of heavy tires. Weeds grown up in the expansion joints and glass bottles shattered by winos.

  The night was no longer quiet. Gunshots and sirens sounded off in the distance, seemingly from every point of the compass now, the stereophonic sound of law and order in the city dying a thousand deaths.