Cordyceps Trilogy (Book 3): Cordyceps Victoriosis Page 6

  No one else had exited the rear of the sporting goods store. Cole had just finished consolidating his two AR mags into one, and it still wasn’t quite full. He replaced the full magazine, ran the bolt carrier back against the mainspring and let it go, a loud clack when the action closed.

  “I have to go back,” he said.

  “Back where?”

  “Into the store.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “Think about it. Where else are we going to get ammo and a car?”

  “I wrecked the truck, though.”

  “Yeah, but that cop’s car could still be sitting out front, and even if it isn’t, the truck might still be drivable. The bottom line is, unless we get either a vehicle or a significant amount of ammo, we’re not going to make it.”

  “How many bullets do you have?”

  “About twenty-eight, I think.”

  “Like, you just pull the trigger twenty-eight times and we’re done?”

  “Yeah, like I shoot twenty-eight Cord zombies at best and then we’re going hand-to-hand.”

  Lindsay seemed to consider it. “Okay, but only if I go with you.” Cole started to refuse, but had an idea. “Okay, here’s what we can do. Hopefully most of the infected have already crawled into the building, right? So we circle back around front, take out any coughers hanging out there, and then you lock yourself in the truck while I go in to find the cop. That way, if you see a new wave of coughers coming, you can lay on the horn and I’ll get out of there fast.”

  There was fear in her eyes, but Lindsay nodded.

  They came out of the shadow warily, Cole limping as quickly as possible, watching for any sign of movement.

  “Cole,” Lindsay said in a low voice when they’d nearly reached the corner of the building. “What if we do all that, like you said, and the coughers come, and you still haven’t found any ammo and then the truck won’t start either?”

  Cole stopped at the corner and rested his back against the rough block wall beside a gutter downspout. Headlights moved in the distance along the main road, but he couldn’t make out what type of vehicle they belonged to. He looked at Lindsay. She had scratches on one cheek and her face was washed in the wan yellow light of the parking lot. Her eyes were earnest and imploring and Cole realized he didn’t even know what color they truly were. Any other time he might have had occasion to think she was beautiful.

  “It’s the apocalypse, okay? Don’t overthink it.” Cole eased his head past the corner and scanned the parking lot. On the far side of the lot, he could see looters going in and out of another big retail outlet with boxes held over their heads like ants at a picnic. In the other direction, although another corner hid the storefront from view, he could see blue light flashing faintly on several light posts in the parking lot.

  He looked back at Lindsay. “Let’s move.”

  “That’s it? That’s all you’ve got to make me feel better?”

  “That’s it.”

  Cole limped out into the parking lot, intending to turn the next corner as broadly as possible, the AR held firmly in the pocket of his shoulder and the front sight a part of his field of vision.

  “How bad are you hurt?” Lindsay wanted to know. “How far could you run if you had to?”

  “What difference does it make? Are you a nurse?”

  “No, I’m a stylist.”

  “Not exactly the girl of my dreams.”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” She sounded genuinely offended.

  Cole kept moving forward. “It means you would’ve been a martial artist and come with two ninja swords.”

  “Wait, do you hear that?”

  Cole stopped and turned his head, the AR still pointing forward.

  Lindsay gazed up into the starless sky, a gauzy gray between the light posts. “I swear I heard that drone.”

  Cole listened. “My ears are full of cotton.”

  They kept moving forward. Headlights swept the lot once, but the car stopped at the office warehouse to join the other looters and seemed to take little notice of the solitary figures moving through the night.

  The police officer’s car was parked on the curb, blocking Lindsay’s truck, perhaps intentionally to keep them from pulling out, Cole figured. No sign of any coughers, although Cole stopped long enough to fit his respirator back over his face and cinch the straps around his neck and head.

  “What about me, Lord Vader?”

  Cole dug a crumpled paper dust mask out of his mechanic’s bag and handed it to her.

  She looked at it less than enthusiastically.

  “It’s really more of a psychological comfort anyway,” Cole said.

  Lindsay pulled the elastic straps over her head and grimaced her way into the mask.

  They moved toward the entrance, Cole forcing himself into a faster gait despite the pain shooting down his legs. It was eerily quiet now, he realized. The sirens and alarms had ceased, though whether they had timed out or had been shut off remotely, he couldn’t have guessed.

  Cole tried the door handle of the police cruiser and shook his head at Lindsay. The car’s continued presence certainly didn’t bode well for the officer inside. He moved around it cautiously, keeping the AR up. They stepped as lightly as possible through the broken glass to the truck, still wedged in the shattered airlock. Cole opened the driver’s door and Lindsay crawled in. He shut the door behind her as gingerly as he could, making sure it clicked into place.

  Lindsay looked at him through the glass, her eyes strained and the dust mask sucking against her face. Cole pointed to the power lock button and watched her press the button. He motioned at his eyes with two fingers and then pointed emphatically at the parking lot. She nodded. He gave her the thumbs up.

  Cole moved down the side of the truck and crouched by the rear tire. He peered through the security gate, listening as well as he could. No motion, no sound.

  He looked down and saw a bloody drag where someone, perhaps wounded, had slid under the gate. It was still wet when Cole rolled onto his back and pushed with his boot heels to slide through it. On the other side, he rested on his elbows and panned the AR’s front sight across the store. The emergency lighting still flickered like mock lightning. Several bodies lay close by. An open hand was visible, lines in the palm stained with filth of a markedly yellow hue that Cole did not fail to appreciate. He made certain the respirator was sealed tightly against his face.

  He got to his feet and moved in a half crouch, the AR leading him. He stepped over several more bodies, tramping wetly through blood-soaked carpet and blotting bloody boot prints across the floor. He realized he should have told Lindsay not to panic if she heard shots fired, and not to get out of the truck for anything.

  Now he did hear something: the noise of an insect, amplified. It was coming from one of the aisles across the store, close to the ceiling. He panned over it twice before it bobbed enough for him to see it, hovering. Was that thing alive or mechanical? It didn’t look much bigger than a dragonfly at that distance. Whatever it was, he couldn’t afford to take pot shots at it.

  Something else was moving at ground level, at the back of the store. Only a shadow. Cole kept low and moved along the front wall, trying to replicate the path the Cord zombies had taken when they charged the officer.

  The bodies led Cole to him. He lay on his back in a pool of dark blood peppered with brass shell casings, the action on his pistol locked open where it had fallen, knocked some feet from his outstretched hand. The flashlight lay beside him, only the faintest gleam from the bulb.

  Cole tried not to look at the officer’s face, at what was left of it. Only one eye remained intact, gray and fixed on the ceiling. He knelt beside the body, keeping the AR aimed toward the back wall while he went through the gear attached to the officer’s duty belt. He unsnapped a pair of polished leather pouche
s and found two fully loaded Glock mags, still snug in their holsters. The officer had never even had the chance to reload.

  Coughing, wet and close.

  Cole froze.

  Repeated hacking like someone trying to dislodge food from their windpipe.

  His eyes scanned the nearby aisles, waiting for movement. Nothing.

  He deposited the flashlight, mags, and the officer’s Glock into the mechanic’s bag and patted the dead man’s pant pockets. The outline of a smartphone in one, nothing in the other. On the other side of his belt was a taser, a radio, and a key ring on a retractable cord. Cole unhooked the key retainer and added it to his bag. He felt the bloodied uniform shirt for bulges, particularly under the left arm. Nothing but a rigid layer of body armor.

  Cole had never heard of a cop that didn’t carry at least one backup pistol. He needed to roll him over. He decided to risk laying the AR on the carpet beside him.

  He got both hands under the man’s hip and lifted until he could push on his buttocks and flop him over. He picked up the AR again and checked the back pockets: only a wallet. He yanked out the officer’s uniform shirttail. No gun in the back waistband, either.

  Cole stood slowly, only to notice the officer’s ankle where the pant leg had hiked up in the process of moving him. A dark neoprene band contrasted the pale skin of his leg. Cole took a knee by the officer’s feet and pulled up the cuff, finding the Velcro strap and removing a slim Glock 43 from the ankle holster.

  A resounding gong from the back of the store nearly caused him to drop it before he could add it to the bag. A man in a sports coat and tie came down the aisle from the gun counter, shambling and coughing. His tie was crooked and his hair flattened on one side as though he had slept on it. Not much older than Cole.

  He stopped and doubled over, coughing, his face turning red and his eyes bulging. When the fit was over he straightened and looked directly into Cole’s eyes. No human recognition there. He started shambling toward him as though uncertain whether Cole were real or a mannequin.

  Cole flicked off the AR’s safety, even that tiny movement sending a shock of excitement across the cougher’s face and igniting fury in his eyes. Cole shot him once, center of body mass, and did not linger to watch him writhe on the floor, coughing and gasping. He limped back along the front wall toward the entrance.

  Coughers seemed to come from every department of the store at once. Mannequins in the golf shop—what Cole had mistakenly assumed were mannequins—came to life and rushed for him, knocking over clothing racks and product displays in their frenzy to cut a straight line to their prey.

  Cole moved briskly, choosing his targets, always shooting the closest cougher first, resisting the urge to double tap, jerking the AR sights from one to the next, blasting his way toward the entrance until he had backed up against the wrecked security gate. Coughers kept coming, and even some of the shot ones still crawled, hands and knees, gutshot and vomiting blood, and Cole almost panicked wondering how he would buy enough time to crawl under the gate. He would have to either kill them all or run the AR pistol dry in the process.

  Please don’t be more than two dozen.

  He shot a woman he had almost missed running at him along the front wall, nearly outside of his peripheral vision, slewing the gun at the last second and literally stopping her with the barrel of the AR like a blunt bayonet before he pulled the trigger twice, her long hair whipping into Cole’s face from the force of the impact and her open mouth and bloodied teeth, so close to him, falling back in agony and rage.

  He shot three more men less than ten feet from him. None of them exactly stopped moving. He needed that Glock. He had made a serious mistake not loading it soon as he found the extra mags. Now it would take critical seconds to locate both the pistol and the magazines in the bag and load it.

  Three more coughers burst from the stockroom and charged down the main aisle through the clothing racks. The last of them was buck naked and big as a linebacker, the folds of his flesh shaking like the meat on a running steer.

  Cole had just put the gunsights on the first of the three when he heard, through his concussed hearing, the unmistakable sound of a horn.

  He squeezed the trigger and took down the first cougher, a bearded man in a flannel shirt and skinny jeans.

  Several short blasts in a row came from behind him, and although the horn sounded far away, it might have been because the truck was pointing away from him or because his hearing was damaged. Lindsay must have seen another wave of Cord zombies coming from the parking lot. No time to turn and see for himself.

  The second cougher coming down the aisle wore heavy boots and the blue coveralls of a utility worker and his mouth seemed to stretch preternaturally large, a black void from which a guttural growl sounded and into which, it seemed, he intended to swallow his victim entire.

  Cole risked a head shot and missed, the round instead striking the naked linebacker behind him, inducing an unearthly howl. Cole swore into his respirator and double-tapped the utility worker, falling at the feet of the linebacker, who trampled him under like an insect and kept coming, his eyes never leaving Cole and the jowls of his bullish neck shaking with every stride. Cole tightened his finger on the trigger at ten yards and pulled.

  The naked linebacker kept coming. Cole pulled the trigger even harder without any response from the gun. No muzzle flash, no recoil.

  Enormous hands seized Cole by the arms, lifting him in a way he had not felt since he was a child, and slammed him into the rattling steel mesh of the security gate. Cole was aware of falling; he was vaguely aware of Lindsay screaming, behind him in the cab of the truck, and he was aware of a far-away horn sounding out peals like some final warning of the advent of God, and then he hit the floor, knocked breathless before the naked linebacker seized his leg and slung him like an Olympic hammer throw, tumbling across the carpet and stopping just short of hitting his head against the wall of the cashier’s checkout.

  Cole fought to his hands and knees, gulping air through the respirator and looking back to the linebacker, who had dropped to his knees in a massive fit of coughing, mucus hanging from his open mouth, and the spore dust not caught in the mucus wafting from him in wisps fine as yellow smoke.

  Cole groped for the mechanic’s bag but the strap over his shoulder was gone. Then he saw it: the broken strap pinned under one of the brute’s hands and the empty AR pistol lying beside it.

  Cole got to his feet just as the cougher lifted his head, mucus streaming from his nose, his eyes bloodshot and savage as any animal’s. Cole ignored the screaming pain in his body and sprinted for the back of the store. The linebacker roared and stumbled after him. Cole weaved and dodged around clothing racks the naked man only plowed through, tripping himself once in an elastic tangle of yoga pants, giving Cole another five-yard lead. Cole got to the archery section and frantically looked around him. The linebacker was already back on his feet. Bows hung above him by the dozen, but where were the damn arrows? No time. He broke right and ran along the back wall. The cougher registered his change of direction and charged through the center of the store, cutting off Cole’s path to the front entrance.

  For a moment they stopped and stood looking at each other, only twenty-five yards apart, their chests heaving and Cole’s breath blowing furiously against the seals in the respirator. Then the cougher came on and rather than running Cole reached for a nearby rack he’d seen and wrapped his fingers around the handle of an aluminum baseball bat. He swung the barrel of the bat up and found the handle with his other hand and brought it up over his right shoulder and stepped into the swing, and the sound the bat made in perfect contact with the cougher’s huge skull was not unlike the solid ring of a base-clearing grand slam.

  The cougher staggered and fell against Cole, his shoulder hitting Cole with the force of an automobile bumper, sending him reeling.

  Cole got to his hands an
d knees. The cougher was recovering, too, but had only just laid the flat of his palms against the carpet. Cole picked up the bat and raised it over his head, screaming into his respirator, but not loud enough to bar from his mind the wet sound the cougher’s brain made when, with repeated blows, he broke through the skull.

  He limped to the front of the store still gripping the bat, still dripping blood. He gave a wide berth to those coughers lingering in the process of dying and scanned the store wearily for any other movement. Satisfied he was alone, he dropped to his knees beside the mechanic’s bag, spread it open, and found his Glock 19. He locked back the action, ejected the empty stick mag, and shoved in one of the officer’s loaded magazines. It protruded from the grip since it had belonged to the officer’s larger Glock 17, but it hardly mattered since the caliber was the same. Cole pulled back the slide and let it leap forward. He dropped the empty AR pistol in the bag and shoved the other loaded Glock magazine into his pant’s pocket.

  He slid under the security gate head first, the Glock close by his face. He dragged the mechanic’s bag through by the broken strap and limped alongside the truck. He couldn’t see Lindsay in the cab. His eyes went to the parking lot beyond the airlock. No coughers that he could see, but several hundred yards away, brilliantly illuminated by the lampposts over the pavement, sat an enormous armored vehicle of a type he had never seen before. It had eight huge tires and the shape of its undercarriage was more like the hull of a steel boat than the body of a truck. The roof of the vehicle held racks of lights and a steel cage that appeared to be empty.

  Then Cole heard the same horn he had heard from inside the store. It wasn’t the pickup’s horn after all. It was an air horn, and it seemed to coming from the armored vehicle. A loud blast, followed by silence.

  Cole rapped his knuckles at the driver’s side window.

  He cupped his hand against the glass and looked in.

  Lindsay was gone.