Ascension

and….'What?' Just fragments, little puzzle pieces of seemingly different images all mixed up and thrown into one box.

Shaking her head Katie stepped forward and closed the valve on the sink, then turned the water on. Water drained from the pipe and pooled in the sink basin. There were actual towels here, hand towels, not paper towels and she dipped one into the water and used it to started cleaning off her face. The taste of blood in her mouth was strong and when she stuck out her tongue she saw deep gashes from where she had bitten it. 'Lucky I didn't gnaw it off in the confusion.'

The water cut off when the sink was about halfway full, but she thought that would be more than enough to get the outer layer of grime off. Katie worked for about half an hour, until the water was too much like mud to do any more cleaning, then stared in the mirror at what she saw.

'Skinny little bitch. No broken bones, no major cuts, just a few bruises and my half bitten off tongue. Pretty goddamned good for having a building drop on top of you.' Of course there was all the dust she was breathing in, that couldn't be good for her lungs. The cuts on her head appeared superficial as well, they were not bleeding anymore. The blood had coagulated enough with the dust to form a kind of cement that stopped the bleeding. Rummaging around beneath the sink she came up with an unexpected surprise, there was a man's duffel bag there, with shorts, a t-shirt and running shoes. 'It's always a dude. The corner office never belongs to a woman.'

The shorts were too loose, the shirt hung down to her knees and the shoes reminded her of the circus she and Randy had gone to on one of their unofficial dates. Randy. Katie leaned backwards, her bare ass pressing the thin material of the cotton t-shirt against the porcelain sink. 'Randy is dead.'

She couldn't cry. She had no tears left in her. It was the zombies that did this, the stupid, evil zombies that were the reason their lives had all come crashing down in only three weeks' time. 'I'll kill them all.'

It was a foolish notion, but for some reason it gave her great satisfaction thinking about it. 'Every fucking zombie that gets in my way. I need a gun.'

First things first, she set about tying the clown shoes to her feet, too big or not they would protect her from the broken glass and the sharp pieces of concrete and metal that littered the broken building.

Moving back into the main office Katie looked at her options for weapons, the desk drawers provided nothing useful at all, just pencils, computer software books and reams of drawings. This was supposed to be an Architecture firm so the drawing supplies were probably normal, even if they did most design on computers these days. She finally settled on breaking apart a small table near one of the massive windows. Broken down the table yielded four hefty clubs, which Katie harvested. She knew if she had to take on the hordes of zombies with only clubs for weapons she would not get very far, but hopefully these would allow her to escape the building and find better weapons. Moving the leather chair away from the door she opened it and was not surprise to find a slow zombie standing there stupidly gawking at her.

Poking it backwards with her club she clown-stepped out into the reception area and gave it an overhand swing to the head. The blow dropped it to its knees, but didn't finish it off. The zombie looked like he had been dressed for a night on the town, his white silk shirt was bloody, torn and almost as coated with grime as Katie had been a half hour before. His mustached mouth made an 'o' shape as Katie's club slammed into his head against his left ear. Her follow up blow on the other side finally finished him off and Katie stood there for a moment to relish her first victory over the zombies since she had regained consciousness. Running and hiding had their place and she was going to make sure to keep a low profile, but fighting felt too damned good and right now she was angry enough to defeat a zombie or two in close combat.

'I will kill them all, as many as I can. I will find them, hunt down their leaders and kill them.'

Chapter 7 — Max

'Good to see you up and about.' Max said to Stewart, who glared at him from behind the iron bars of her prison cell.

Stewart didn't get further than a glare when a warning klaxon sounded from the far end of the hallway.

'What the fuck is that?' she asked, the sight of Max jumping in alarm gave her a smidgeon of pleasure.

'How would I know?'

'You gonna let me out of here?'

Max held the key to her cell up and nodded, 'Sure thing.'

Stewart had been in quarantine the last two days since Colonel Draper had dropped them off at the Great Lakes Naval Training station, or as the military personal called it, RTC, which stood for Recruit Training Command. Their wounded included a younger man named Chen, who had come in with a gunshot wound to the leg and Stewart, who had a fractured skull and many cuts and gashes. Both had been confined to the infirmary for possibly contaminated personal since they arrived. Preliminary testing of blood from both of them had indicated they were probably not contaminated by whatever it was that caused the zombies to be zombies. It was the 'probably' that kept both of them locked up in individual cells that the training station used for a brig. Nominally it was for everyone's safety, but Stewart felt singled out by the accommodations. Chen had been released to general quarters the night before, Stewart had not. Coming out of her cell Stewart continued to glare at Max, who was making every effort not to smile at all, when a military police officer bellowed at them from the end of the hallway.

'We're being attacked! Get to your stations!' Then she disappeared down the hallway.

'We have stations?' asked Stewart.

'Not that I know of. We better go see what is going on.'

'Can you, ah, sense anything close by?'

Max looked at Stewart for a moment, then nodded and closed his eyes; a moment later he opened them wide and softly said, 'Fuck. C'mon!' then he went running off down the corridor after the military police officer, hoping the woman had not locked them into brig by shutting the outer door. Fortunately, the woman had left the sliding door open and Max slithered through and ran towards the front of the building.

'Max! Slow down! Max!' Stewart called. Her words finally penetrated Max's brain and he slowed so she could catch up. 'We don't have any weapons and you don't know where we need to go.'

'I…we gotta get out of here! We need to find Bill.'

'Okay, we can do that. Calm down. Where was Bill last at?'

'He was on watch until four, then went to the barracks…he should be there or close to it.'

'You lead, I'll follow. How many zombies are we dealing with here Max?'

Looking over his shoulder before he opened the front door Max said, 'All of them!'

'Thousands?'

'Or more. I can't sense anything farther out than maybe a mile, but the whole area is covered with the dead, and Stewart too many of them are smart ones.' The sound of gunfire reached a crescendo to the east of their position. 'Most of the attacking zombies are hitting the east side of the facility, but there are a ton waiting to the west, not moving up yet. We gotta tell someone.'

'Draper? He should still be around.'

'If we can, he would believe me. I think.'

'Yeah, Bill first, then Draper.'

The two of them ran across the open grounds to the building Bill was supposed to be housed in. The RTC trained up to fifty thousand recruits a year, so they were used to large numbers of people, even if the barracks were sparse. There were also maps everywhere pointing the way to the common areas recruits would need to get to. Max had only been wandering around the place for two days and he still didn't know how to get everywhere, but he knew how to get back to the barracks. Running up to the building the two of them saw a couple of men