Dark Days

“Mark nine hundred!” Lucia answered, as scared and confused as the rest of us.

The Undead had advanced another fifty feet. More than a dozen bodies dotted the runway now. They were close, very close.

“Shit!” the Ukrainian shouted, punching the valve. “Shit,” he said over and over as he furiously threw a wrench into the Undead crowd.

I stared for a moment. Pritchenko’s eyes were flooded with tears and his expression was one of utter desolation.

“The tank’s empty. Just air inside. It’s empty.”

“It’s over,” I whispered.

“It’s over,” Prit repeated, a deep sadness in his voice, his arms limp at the sides.

All the color drained from Lucia’s face, as she fell back against the fence. Prit looked at the two women, then down at the HK in my hands. Don’t let them suffer the indignity of being Undead, his eyes said.

He didn’t have to say a word. I knew what I had to do. We wouldn’t let that crowd take us alive. I hoped I’d have the guts to finish the job and that my hand wouldn’t shake when my turn came.

I turned to Lucia. She was white as a sheet and trembling like a leaf but she had a determined look in her eyes.

She stared into my eyes and nodded. She knew what came next. I read “I love you” on her lips. “Me too,” I said. My soul was torn in two by what was going to happen. I shuddered. Tears ran down my cheeks and I couldn’t see clearly.

I raised the gun and aimed at Lucia. A few seconds later, we heard a rattling coming down the runway. Lucia had closed her eyes and braced herself for the impact of the bullets. When nothing happened, she opened her eyes and saw my astonished expression and Pritchenko’s and Sister Cecilia’s spellbound faces.

That rattle was not a firearm. It was a helicopter, approaching fast.

6

“There!” the Ukrainian shouted, pointing to a tiny dot on the horizon that was growing larger by the minute. “Headed right for us!”

To say that hope was reborn in us was putting it mildly. But the helicopter was still a couple of minutes away and the Undead were closing in. They were less than three hundred feet away. That didn’t give us enough time.

“Head for the control tower!” shouted the Ukrainian. “Run! God dammit! Run!”

“Wait,” I said as I jammed the last magazine in the HK. The first Undead were now within a hundred feet of us. “I can’t leave Lucullus!”

My poor cat, frightened by the gunfire, meowed plaintively in his carrier back in the helicopter’s cabin. I handed my rifle to Pritchenko and raced back to the helicopter, loading the spear gun slung on my back as I ran. I had only six spears left, but that was better than nothing.

I dashed inside the helicopter, bashing my shin against the steel post. I grabbed Lucullus’s carrier and groped around for the other HK we’d stashed behind the backpacks. Finally, my fingers touched the cold metal of the gun barrel. I swept aside the pile of our belongings, racking my brain for where we’d stashed the ammunition. Then I flashed to the image of Sister Cecilia and Lucia carrying a large chest—they’d packed it under the rest of our gear, behind the medicine boxes.

I started tossing bundles aside, but abandoned the effort after a quick glance out the cabin window. A group of about eight Undead was less than thirty feet from the helicopter. If they cornered me in that tight space, I was a goner.

Not looking back, I jumped out of the helicopter, cursing a blue streak. Just then, the rattle of the other helicopter’s rotors almost drowned out Prit’s muffled shots. With astonishing sangfroid, he retreated slowly to the control tower, covering Sister Cecilia and Lucia, who were running ahead. As cool as 007, the Ukrainian held the gun to his eye as he slowly walked backward. From time to time, he stopped, calmly aimed at the oncoming tide, and fired. Almost all of his shots left an Undead in a heap on the pavement, but the Undead were less than twenty feet away and he was running extremely low on ammunition.

I backed away from the Sokol, not taking my eye off the eight Undead surrounding the helicopter. Lucullus let out an enraged yowl, alerting me just in time. I turned and nearly bumped into four Undead. They must’ve come around the back of the helicopter and now cut off my path to the control tower. Switching Lucullus’s carrier to my left hand, I aimed the spear gun at the Undead closest to me and pulled the trigger. The spear entered the base of his neck and angled upward with a soft choop. He collapsed and flailed around on the ground as if he were having an epileptic fit. I lowered the spear gun and reloaded quickly, then turned to the other three Undead, who were almost within arm’s reach.

For a split second, I stared in amazement—two of those beasts were Moroccan soldiers. I could tell from their uniforms, but they were just as fucking Undead as the rest. The other was a teenage girl, in shorts and a yellow bikini top that had slipped off, exposing one of her breasts. That would have been a nice sight if it weren’t for the hole in her belly that was teeming with maggots.

The Moroccans advanced toward me, shoulder to shoulder, their arms outstretched. Desperate times call for desperate measures. I crouched down like an American football player, let out a yell that would’ve made a Comanche proud, and rammed them. That sudden movement took the Undead by surprise and they fell like bowling pins. However, my momentum caused me to stumble and I landed at the girl’s feet. She eagerly lunged for my throat.

Without thinking, I raised my left arm and slammed Lucullus’s carrier into her face. The carrier and the girl’s jaw shattered with a hideous crunch. I leapt to my feet but felt one of the Moroccan’s hands fumbling to grip my leg. Again, I said a prayer of thanks for my wetsuit. If I’d been wearing anything else, the bastard would’ve gotten a firm grip on me and I wouldn’t have had a chance, since the other eight were almost on top of us.

When I got back on my feet, I saw with dread that Lucullus was standing on the runway, stunned by the impact, looking first at me, then at the Undead as they struggled to their feet.

“Go on, Lucullus,” I said, as I cocked the HK. “Run!”

I don’t know if cats understand what their owners say, but they do have a strong survival instinct. Because of my shouting (or more likely, because of those creatures hunting us), Lucullus took off like a shot toward Lucia, who was silhouetted in the distance against the control tower.

I didn’t hang around to study the scene. I ran for my life!

7

Jaime wasn’t a bad kid. Midtwenties, tall, well built. He had a lot of friends, a girlfriend, a job, and a car. He played on a handball team and spent the weekends in the country, like everyone else. He’d grown a beard and let his hair grow long, which didn’t look good on him, but he liked it, along with the tribal tattoo he’d gotten a few years ago. A regular guy.

The only problem was, Jaime didn’t remember any of that. At the moment, Jaime was staggering around like dozens of other creatures, in the blazing sunlight that washed over the runway at Lanzarote Airport. He was one of Them now.

Jaime was an Undead.

Jaime’s mind, or what humans call reasoning, had shut down almost a year before when he’d become an Undead. If a doctor could’ve looked at his brain with a CT scan, he’d have been astonished to find that all the activity was taking place in the so-called “reptilian brain,” the most primitive part. In that hypothetical scanner, Jaime’s reptilian brain would be glowing with vivid colors, inundated by an abnormal amount of activity. The rest of the brain would be cloaked in darkness, like a city during a power outage.