kicked that door wide open to reveal a vast room with rows and rows of shelves, and thousands of neatly arranged boxes of medicines.
“This is huge! There must be tons of medicines. We can’t take it all!” I protested.
“We don’t want to take it all,” Pauli replied as she rushed past me. “Just what’s on the commander’s list.”
Marcelo added, “Just the reagents.” His gaze flew down a shelf, then he tossed me a plastic bottle that I caught in midair. “They’re the most important.”
“Why?” I asked, cramming those boxes and bottles into my backpack.
“We need them to make our own medicines. If we take back a lot of reagents, we won’t have to come back here.”
“I’m all for that!” Prit’s mustache flapped up and down as he nodded and stuffed box after box into his backpack.
It took just fifteen minutes to fill our backpacks with medicines and the reagents. The list had a bit of everything on it: antibiotics, opiates, stimulants. I didn’t have a clue what most of those things were. To save space, we took the medicines out of their boxes and tossed them on the floor. The mountain of empties grew. Sitting on one of those mountains like a Buddha, Broto took bottles out of a bin, examined them, then pitched them over his shoulder. When he found what he was looking for, he shouted for joy.
“Great! I was afraid I wasn’t going to find these.” He leapt to his feet and came over to us, unscrewing the lid of a bottle. He popped a couple of nondescript, white pills into his mouth, looking very pleased with himself, then handed me the bottle.
“Want some? You’ll be glad you did.”
“What are they?” I asked suspiciously.
“Methamphetamines, my friend,” Broto said with a wink. “It’s the best buzz. You’re not sleepy or hungry or thirsty, and you’re more alert than an Indian scout.”
I didn’t want any drugs in my body, so I shook my head, but Prit eagerly took a couple of the pills. He swallowed one and held the other out to me.
“Don’t be stupid. Take it,” he said sternly. “If it helps right now, it’s a good thing, even if it’s speed. We don’t know what we’ll face in the next few hours.”
I understood the Ukrainian’s logic and swallowed the pill. I didn’t feel anything, but I assumed it would take a while to feel the effects.
I stood up, strapped on my backpack, and groaned—it weighed a lot more than I thought. Prit handed me the flashlight and the Glock I’d carelessly left on the floor.
“This thing weighs a ton. I’ll be sweating like a pig in five minutes.”
“Don’t be a baby,” Prit said cheerfully and slung his equally heavy backpack over his shoulder. “Every week, my Aunt Ludmila lifted fifty sacks of potatoes that size at the kolkhoz, that collective farm the Soviets forced on us Slavs. Of course, my Aunt Ludmila weighed three hundred pounds, had a glass eye, and was ugly as sin.” Then he launched into a wild story about his aunt, a burning barn, and a dairy cow trapped in a mud pit.
Listening to Prit ramble on about his family, I wondered if the speed was kicking in. If he kept on chattering like that, I was going to strangle him.
“Then my cousin Sergei, who was still naked, jumped out the window with a hoe in his hand and—” Prit was still talking when two shots rang out on the other side of the shelves. In a split second, the Ukrainian’s cheerful chatter ceased. He cocked his HK and crept over to where the shots had come from. I struggled to keep up with him, half-buried under my backpack. Marcelo threw off his pack so he could man his MG3.
We reached the door as more shots rang out and I heard warning shouts. Three legionnaires were trying to hold back a group of Undead amassed at the door to the supply room. We’d run out of time—our presence was no longer a secret. The building rumbled as hundreds of creatures howled, beating the walls or clumsily climbing the stairs, heading right for us. In a moment the place would be swarming with them.
“We gotta get out of here!” one of the sergeants screamed.
“Head for the ground floor!” Tank yelled over the rattle of guns. “In the satellite photos, I saw some tanks in the parking lot behind the building. We gotta get outta here fast! Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!”
His words spurred us on. We closed ranks and headed for the stairwell. Every few feet, a group of Undead appeared out of nowhere, but the soldiers were well trained and they hit their marks every time. Yet it was slow going, just a few feet at a time. If they’d caught us in a larger space, we wouldn’t have had a chance, but being inside the building worked in our favor. The narrow stairs were our greatest ally. Those creatures could only attack us from the front or back, no more than two or three at a time.
Nestled in the center of the group, I focused on not getting out of step or tripping on the trail of bodies as we were leaving.
The deafening clack of the guns bounced off the narrow hallway. When a soldier in front needed ammunition, he’d turn and tap the shoulder of the man behind him. Broto and I grabbed those empty magazines and passed them to the soldiers behind us. Like magic, they filled those empties with ammo they carried in a backpack and kept walking. Gunshots tinged the darkness with a spectral orange glow. Flashlight beams swung wildly from side to side. The smell of gunpowder, blood, and sweat filled the air.
The soldier in front of me turned for a magazine. Just then an Undead came around a corner, wrapped his arms around the soldier’s neck and dragged him out of the group. I heard the guy’s desperate cry, but before anyone could do anything, the creature dug his teeth into the unfortunate soldier’s arm. Without slowing down, Tank raised his pistol and fired at the Undead that fell at his feet. Then he turned his gun on the wounded soldier.
“NO!” was all the poor devil had time to yell before Tank blew his brains out.
I froze. I knew the guy was doomed; it was the only humane thing Tank could do, but I wasn’t prepared for his brutal reaction. I felt the blood drain from my face.
Tank leaned toward me and said something, but deafened by gunfire I couldn’t make out a word he said. All I heard was a high, steady whine in my ears. Even the gunshots sounded muffled, as my ears were packed with cotton. Someone pushed me from behind and before I knew it, I’d taken the fallen soldier’s place at the front.
Three Undead swayed a few feet from us. On my right, Marcelo carried the MG3 on his back. The shooter would have to be a real Hercules to fire that gun without resting it on something. He coolly fired his pistol at everything that crossed his path. On my other side, the veteran sergeant with a scar on his neck leaned toward me and shouted something. I didn’t need to hear him to know what he meant.
Gritting my teeth, I raised my HK and started shooting.
42
I don’t know at what point things started to turn around. It’s hard to calculate time when you’re on dark stairs shooting at everything that moves. To be honest, I don’t think I contributed a lot to the team. Most of the time Marcelo and the veteran sergeant had already cleared out the Undead before I even aimed. However, once we made it to those stairs, we made better time and came across fewer creatures. Maybe the cacophony of gunfire bouncing around all the recesses on the stairs and in hallways made it hard for the Undead to locate us.
Whatever it was, it was a blessing. In just a few minutes, we’d used up almost all the ammunition that wasn’t defective. Once the magazines were empty, the soldiers threw down their rifles and grabbed their handguns with desperation in their eyes.
“Magazines! A fucking magazine, dammit!” Marcelo yelled.
“Here!” Broto said, sweating profusely. In a trembling voice, he added, “It’s the last one!”
To make sure the Argentine had understood him, he held out his empty hands. I turned to him in disbelief. We still had to go down a flight of stairs, cross the ground floor, go out the exit and head to the lot where supposedly the tanks were parked. Without any more ammo, we wouldn’t make it to the exit.
