Broken (Book 3 of The Guardian Interviews) Read online

  And then the rest of my pursuers rounded the corner and showed up to the party.

  There were a lot of them, much more than I actually intended on attracting. All I really needed was to bring in about seventy or so to win. Javie only brought in around sixty when he ran. Somehow I had a couple hundred zombies jamming themselves into the alley.

  “How’d you do that?” Javie asked.

  “Beats me,” I answered. “I guess I’m just popular like that.”

  “Or maybe there’s a small horde nearby that you didn’t see,” Dudley added.

  “Nah,” I said. “I’m just popular.”

  Nick and Georgie started spraying out a virtual wall of belt-fed lead into the zombies below as we were talking. Even with silencers, the big machine guns were still sorta loud, so Dudley, Javie, and I moved over to the opposite side of the building.

  “Time to pay up,” I announced.

  I was already laughing as I searched through Dudley’s backpack and retrieved the battery powered razor.

  “You actually made him do this?”

  You sound like Dudley, but a bets a bet, and Javie wouldn’t have shown me any mercy if the roles were reversed.

  “How do you know?”

  Because Dudley didn’t want him to go through with it, so I finally asked Javie if he would have let me out of the bet if he had won instead.

  “Hell no,” Javie answered.

  Even Dudley was laughing when the hair started falling off. I’m sure you’ve seen Javie. He’s a pretty hairy fellow. I think it takes him about three days to grow out a full beard, so as a result he normally walks around with fuzz in order to save time from shaving every day.

  “Oh shit!” Nick shouted. “He’s actually doing it. Check it out, Georgie.”

  Georgie laughed the hardest. I tried making the bet with him in the beginning, but he adamantly refused to take me up on it. Still, he had no problems laughing at someone else’s expense.

  “Watch your corner down there asshole,” Nick shouted to Georgie. “They’re beginning to pile up under that window.

  I went to go see what Nick was getting all panty-wadded about. The building we were standing on was four stories tall and made out of brick. There was one boarded up window slightly above street level that happened to be on the same side Georgie was covering.

  Nick was covering the other half of the alley and his side seemed pretty good. He was able to cut into most of the zombies before they even reached the brick wall of our building. Georgie, however, was having difficulties.

  He probably shouldn’t have taken his eyes off the alleyway. By doing that, he gave the zombies enough time to mass around the dead end and push up against the brick. Georgie corrected his mistake immediately and directed his fire towards the base of the building in an attempt to cut down the shamblers below him.

  The bullets shredded the bodies instantly and then cut through the bodies of the next bunch of corpses that pushed forward in an attempt to take their place. This went on for some time, the pile of bodies growing higher and higher.

  Georgie’s gun went dry.

  He looked at me with a panicked expression as his fingers fumbled through the reloading process. Dudley rushed forward to help him. Javie stood by Nick and prepared to aid him in reloading when the time came.

  As Georgie panicked, the zombies in the alley climbed over the shredded remains of Georgie’s shooting and reached up for us. They were hungry. They hadn’t eaten in a long time. Then again, zombies are always hungry.

  I pulled my mp7 around and placed the red dot inside the holographic sight onto the forehead of a very rotten looking individual in a plaid shirt. I squeezed the trigger smoothly and watched as his head jerked backwards and a red spray splashed out onto the five zombies that replaced him.

  “Now would be a good time to start shooting, Georgie,” I shouted.

  “I’m trying,” Georgie replied, “but there’s a jam.”

  The zombies were getting closer and closer to the boarded up window. I shot any of them that could reach out and touch it, but it was getting more and more difficult as their numbers grew and grew.

  I chanced a brief glimpse down the alley. It was filled with the dead and more of them were coming. They pushed and shoved against each other as they fought to reach us. The smell was nasty, but fortunately the wind was picking up and making a valiant effort to carry the smell away from us.

  “It’s looking pretty bad, Jax,” Nick shouted. “I’m almost out.”

  “Javie is backing you up. He’ll shoot his mp7 while you reload. Just stay calm and stay focused.”

  It looked as if Dudley had been correct. I had attracted a small horde to our location. Unfortunately, it didn’t end with that pack. The screams and the assorted gun fire were attracting even greater numbers.

  We had never attracted a mass this size before. We weren’t expecting it. In retrospect, I’m guessing that with the lack of people to eat, the zombies were becoming more and more ravenous. As a result, it was becoming increasingly easier to attract lots of unwanted attention.

  We were quickly sinking in over our heads. Dudley and Georgie were taking too long to clear the gun and even on fully auto my mp7 wasn’t bringing enough of them down. It didn’t take the zombies long at all to reach the boarded up window.

  “Here we go,” I muttered. “Never gets easy.”

  “It’s worse than that,” Dudley shouted. “I think the machine gun is damaged.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “It’s busted,” Georgie agreed.

  “Then forget about it and use your rifles,” I ordered.

  We had lost this battle. I quickly left that edge of the roof and went around checking the other sides of the building. I was looking for an escape route. Unfortunately for all of us, our egos had gotten too big and we never imagined that we might need to make a run for it. Then again, why run when we could fly.

  “Hardin,” I called out after tapping my earpiece.

  “I’m here, Jax. What do you need?”

  “I need a lift off of this roof,” I answered.

  “I can see that,” Hardin said. “All the choppers are on the other side of the city assisting one of the other teams. It will take a little bit of time for them to reach you.”

  “They’re in the building,” Georgie shouted out from the opposite side of the roof.

  “I’m running low on ammo,” Dudley announced.

  “How long?” I asked Hardin.

  “Under ten minutes.”

  “Do what you can,” I replied.

  I ran back to the team. Zombies were now flooding into the building as they climbed up the ladder of corpses brought down by machine gun fire. I looked at the flimsy wooden door that marked the entrance to the roof we were all standing on. The shamblers would go through it in seconds.

  I ran to the other three edges once again. The distance to the rooftops of nearby buildings was too great a distance to jump. I thought about throwing a grappling hook, but there didn’t seem to be any place for it to grab onto on any of the other rooftops.

  I walked back to the team once again. They were still firing away at the zombies in the alleyway.

  “I’m going inside,” I said. “I’ll try to bottleneck them at the window until the chopper gets here to pick us up.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Dudley said.

  “Take a few mags from Nick,” I told him.

  “They’re in the back pouches of my belt,” Nick said as Dudley approached him. He was too busy with firing the big machine gun to get them so Dudley had to tug them free himself.

  Together we crossed the roof and headed for the door that led down into the building.

  “You ready for this?” I asked.

  “Why wouldn’t I be?” Dudley replied as he slapped a new magazine into his rifle.

  “Because you’re a pussy,” I answered him flatly.

  “I really don’t think I’m a pussy. I certainly don’t feel like a pussy
. I fact, I’ve been feeling pretty heroic ever since I defeated that Master Vampire.”

  That one caught me by surprise.

  “That’s actually pretty funny,” I said. “I didn’t know you were such a funny guy. I don’t remember you fighting the Master Vampire. In fact, as I recall, you were hiding under a pile of snow while I took care of the situation.”

  “Too bad for you there are not many people privy to that information. If I start the rumors now, I’m pretty sure I can take all the credit.”

  “You’re welcome to it. If that Master had any vampire buddies that are gonna show up one day looking for revenge, they’ll knock on your door instead of mine.”

  “Would Dudley really do something like that?

  No, but it’s funny for him to say that to me. Not as funny as the look on his face when I told him about vampire buddies looking for revenge, but it was still pretty funny.

  I kicked in the door, and our world got serious.

  We could hear the shamblers down on the first floor. They were pretty riled up and making a lot of noise. With our rifles held at the ready, we charged in.

  “I’ve got some bad news for you,” Dudley announced.

  “What?”

  “We didn’t clear this building.”

  “Why didn’t you clear the building?” I asked.

  “When we got inside, we didn’t hear anything and most of the doors were closed. We just figured it would be easier to quietly make our way to the roof.”

  “Well, I guess you figured wrong,” I said.

  “What do you want to do?”

  “We don’t have time to clear the building now. There are like ten doors down every hall. We need to get our asses down to that window and stop the flow of zombies that are getting inside. Let’s just hope the buildings empty and we don’t get surrounded.”

  As soon as I said that the pounding started.

  At first it was just casual knocking on a door we happened to pass. Then it got louder. Then it sounded as if other hands were joining in and before we knew it, other doors started sounding off as well.

  “Maybe the doors will hold them,” Dudley said.

  “Maybe,” I replied.

  I took off down the hall at a sprint. As I reached a T-intersection, Dudley told me to hang a left. When I rounded the corner, I had to duck out of the way of a zombie.

  My moving out of his way didn’t seem to faze him in the slightest. Instead of pursuing me, he made a beeline right for Dudley who was just a few feet behind me. So, after ducking his outstretched arms, I turned around, grabbed him by the back of his collar, and slammed him into the opposite wall.

  The zombie wasn’t fazed by the slam either. He spun around on me immediately but it was too late for him. The way was clear and I could take a shot without hitting Dudley. I aimed above his shattered nose and blew out his brains.

  I didn’t have time to rub it in to Dudley that I had just saved his ass. The muffled sounds of his silenced mp7 began before I even turned around. Behind me was the stairwell and rushing up it were shamblers.

  At this point, our enemy was beginning to look pretty rank. Their clothes were all nasty and stained with dark fluids. Their scalps were missing clumps of hair. Their faces were beginning to enter an advanced stage of rot. Their skin was a dark sort of gray mixed with a sickly yellow, and their fingernails seemed to have continued growing long after they died. What I’m getting at is how very unpleasant it was to turn around and see a bunch of those rotted monsters charging my way.

  “How many were there?”

  I’m thinking around ten, at least in the first wave. It’s really hard to say, because I began firing immediately. We found a target, brought it down and searched for another: all the while continuing to advance forward.

  It wouldn’t do us any good in the long run if we just held our position. At least I didn’t think so. I was still hoping to bottleneck them at the window and make my life just a bit easier.

  When we reached the stairs, the first wave was down and we managed to reach the third floor. After that, the attacks became sporadic. A wave of zombies would rush us and we’d begin firing. When the wave was down, we’d make some progress only to have another wave of zombies rush up the stairs towards us.

  At one point, things got pretty hairy and a wave of zombies came at us from behind while we were busy engaging a frontal assault. I’m not sure if they had been there all along and just got excited from the noise or if they came from the window and somehow found a way to sneak up on us. For a moment, though, we were pinned in the stairwell.

  Dudley continued shooting down our frontal attackers and I spun around and started taking out the ones coming from behind. Like I said, it was a pretty hairy situation. The stairwell itself often made finding targets pretty difficult. We often had to wait until they were right up in our faces before we had a good enough angle to shoot them.

  As soon as I had taken out our followers, I joined Dudley and the two of us cleared out all the immediate threats before continuing down the stairwell.

  “Jax!” Georgie shouted into my earpiece. “There are a bunch of them getting in now. We can’t keep up. You guys need to get out of there.”

  “Let me know when you see the helicopter, Georgie,” I replied. “That’s when we will retreat.”

  Like I said before, a bottleneck at the window was our easiest bet. I didn’t want to use the stairwell or a hallway because the window was a smaller area that the shamblers had to squeeze through. They would be struggling against each other in an effort to get inside before I even started shooting them.

  Also, Georgie tends to get nervous around one zombie. I don’t really start to get excited until about twenty or so show up. Despite what I had seen from the roof, I was hoping that Georgie was exaggerating.

  Turns out he wasn’t.

  The biggest wave yet came up at us just as we reached the second floor. It was bad. It was real bad. Fortunately, the tightness and the corners of the stairwell finally worked in our favor. Despite their numbers, the stairwell was too thin to allow more than a few to reach us at a time and the corners slowed them down even more.

  Our ducks were in a row. We fired and fired until our trigger fingers became numb, and then we fired some more. The stairwell was pretty disgusting when we were finished. The gore and blood painted the concrete walls. Bodies were everywhere.

  We picked our way gently through the mess and continued our journey to the first floor. I gave another magazine of ammo to Dudley and told him to pull on his big boy pants and carry more spare ammo in the future.

  Despite taking out that big wave of zombies, things didn’t slow down too much. We were still being rushed every few seconds or so. It was just by two or three shamblers instead of a whole mess of them.

  In retrospect, the bigger masses were a bit easier to deal with since they slowed each other down and tripped each other up. Alone, a zombie is pretty fast. A fast attack is much more dangerous than a slow and ponderous one. At least as far as a stairwell goes.

  Finally, we made it to the first floor. The stairwell still continued downward but we weren’t interested in going any farther. We could already hear the sounds of multiple zombies coming from beyond the metal door marking the exit of the stairwell.

  I slammed open the door expecting trouble and trouble was what we got. There were about ten shamblers in the hallway. We brought them all down and continued to push our way forward only to have another bunch spring up at us around the first corner.

  This new attack was way too close for comfort.

  Before I knew it, a large zombie wearing a black hoodie, blue jeans, and hiking boots was up in my face and reaching out for me. His nose had rotted away and little crispy flaps of skin still hung over the vacant hole. His hands were dry and cracking as they sought out something on my body they could grab ahold of. I reacted out of instinct and belted out a front kick that caught him under the chin and jerked his head back. His hair was so dirty; it d
idn’t even move with the impact.

  I followed up the front kick with another kick. This time, however, instead of striking, I placed my boot on his chest and pushed him away from me. The shambler fell to the floor but was replaced instantly.

  That was fine by me. I just needed enough room to bring my mp7 into play. I rapidly lined up shots and set about clearing the hallway. In the midst of all the shooting, I saw the once boarded up window that the zombies were using to enter the building.

  “Dudley,” I shouted to be heard over all the zombie screams. “I’ll handle the ones inside, you secure the window.”

  I didn’t wait for a reply. I just continued picking my targets. Usually, it was the zombie closest to me. Dudley was trying to secure the window, but every time he took out a zombie clawing its way inside another one rose up to take its place.

  As soon as I finished clearing out the hallway, I joined him at the window. Even with both of us firing we were barely able to hold back the tide, but that wasn’t too big of a deal. The goal wasn’t to wipe all of them out. Dudley and I were merely trying to buy us some time for the chopper to pick us up.

  “I don’t have the ammo for this,” Dudley said as he dropped his mp7 on its sling and reached for his 1911 Kimber.

  “Fall behind me and shoot over my head,” I said. “I have a few new tricks I want to try out.”

  Dudley did as I asked. I dropped to my knees and took off my backpack. To be honest, it was a little nerve wracking to have Dudley shooting right over my head. But seeing as we didn’t have a lot of choices, I did my best to focus on the task at hand.

  I removed multiple sets of black disks from my backpack and crawled to the side of the window. After removing the thin sheet of plastic over the adhesive strip, I placed one of the disks on the wall at about knee height. A rapid crawl to the opposite wall and I repeated the procedure. I made sure the new disk was exactly opposite the first disk that I put up. I knew I was on the money when I heard a soft beep. I pressed the power button and saw a thin red laser stretch across the hall to the other disk.