Bloodshed (Book One in the Apocalypse Trilogy)

Chapter 12: Tunnelling

Location: Research Station

Williams

When he woke, he was lying on a gurney in a room similar to the lab. The pain hit him immediately, causing him to yelp. His nose throbbed, one of his eyes was blurred and his throat hurt. He looked around the room. Johnny was lying on a gurney as well, a bruise on his eye and one of his legs stitched up messily. Cal sat dosing in a chair. Williams got up, and staggered out of the room, a splitting headache ringing through his skull. The sign on the door read ‘Infirmary’ and realised that Cal must have shot Johnny to get him off. Without a doctor nearby, he’d gone with the second best option: playing Operation.

Jake was nowhere to be seen. Williams went back to Cal and woke him up.

“What?” Cal mumbled sleepily.

“Where’s Jake?”

That woke Cal up properly. “He’s not here?”

Williams shook his head. “You didn’t notice?”

“I was up to my wrists in Johnny’s leg!” Cal shot back angrily. “I had to shoot the bastard.”

“Sorry.”

“Never mind. Where could Jake have gone?”

They were silent for a minute. A quiet tapping sounded off, and they followed it to the escape tunnel.

“JAKE!” Cal shouted down the tunnel. The tapping stopped, and they heard, faintly, “Yeah?”

Williams sighed with relief. Cal continued the yelling.

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN THERE?”

“I’m checking to see if anyone’s in here! There isn’t, by the way!

“GET BACK HERE! WE’RE LEAVING SOON!”

In the silence that followed, they heard a moaning from the Infirmary.

Johnny had woken up. And judging by the sounds he was making, Cal had forgotten the painkillers.

“What...What happened?” he murmured, eyes still closed. His hand went to the stitches on his calf, and opened his eyes. One was bloodshot, the other swelling up from the hit.

“Oh shit, I got stoned again.” Not a question, just a statement.

“Yeah, and we’ve both got the scars to prove it,” Williams replied.

Johnny sat up. “Sorry man, I-”

“Shut up, you old crackpot,” Williams interrupted. “It wasn’t the first time it’s happened.” He immediately regretted that, because one of the last times was when Sharon had been killed. But Johnny didn’t seem to register that comment.

Cal went to the lab to copy the files onto the USB, while Williams bandaged Johnny’s leg and gave him a painkiller.That was when the tapping started.                                                                                              

Tap. Tap. Tap. The sound came from the walls, very similar to knocking. Cal came back into the room, Jake by his side.

“What the hell is that?” Johnny whispered. They were all silent as the tapping continued.

Williams followed the tapping to the wall, and kept his ear to the walls. As he walked along the wall, he heard several sources. He got his switchblade and stabbed at one of the sources, and a small, ring-sized portion of the wall came away.

Williams put his eye to the hole. For a moment, he saw nothing. Then his eyes were met by the blank, white eye of a zombie.

“Jesus!” He leaped backwards and fell onto his back. “Zombie!” he gasped.

Cal immediately pushed a bookshelf in front of it, but more holes in the walls emerged.

“They’re digging through!” he yelled. Williams raced to his bag, and filled it with medical supplies. The others stood staring at him.

“Don’t just stand there! Grab the useful stuff!” he yelled. Johnny hobbled out of room to get the bags. Cal ran back to the lab to grab the cure prototype and the USB.

“Jake! Load the guns!” Williams said as he swept painkillers and antibiotics into his bag. Jake knelt and began to put shells into the shotguns, and more shells into bandoleers, bullets into the handguns, and magazines into the rifle.

The tapping increased in volume. More and more sections of the wall fell away, and rotting hands tipped with claws emerged, and dirt fell in. “They dig?” Jake gasped. Apparently they did. Williams slung his bag, now heavy with medical supplies and batteries, onto his shoulder, and took his rifle from Jake.

He and Jake ran to the lab, where Cal was still bent over at a computer.

“C’mon, Cal, let’s go!”Williams yelled.

“It’s still copying!” He yelled back, as the tapping turned to cracking as the walls collapsed.                                                                                                                          

Johnny, who was now keeping upright with a crutch he’d found, hobbled into the lab. Jake threw him the Lupara, and he began to blast at the hands coming through the walls.

Cal yanked the USB out of the computer and took his shotgun. Williams went to grab the explosives.

“No!” Cal said. “Leave those, I’ve got an idea.”

Cal took out the wire connecting the explosives to the plunger.

“Cover me!” he said. They sprinted down the hallway, Cal trailing the wire after him and the others shooting. The zombies were now in the station, darting behind support columns to avoid buckshot and bullets.

They reached the elevator. Leaving the door slightly ajar, Cal continued to unwind the wire. It was only when they were about twenty metres from the station that he stopped unwinding. He pulled up the plunger and brought it back down.

For a second the ground shook. Then, almost as if in slow-motion, the space around the station sank into the ground. First the building with the elevator, then the garage, then the supply shed. It all sank into the ground, leaving behind a huge hole and a cloud of sand rising into the sky.

Johnny was first to speak. “Well, shit.”

“Shut up, man,” Williams said, bubbling with rage. They had just lost a discovery vital to curing the virus. A virus he had helped create.

“What’s that?” said Jake, his voice filled with fear. He was pointing at the side of the newly formed hole in the ground; it was riddled with tunnels, all about the same size. All large enough for people to crawl through.

“What if that’s where zombies go? What if they’ve been under us all the time, never going away?”

“It’s like a giant... ant hive.” said Cal.

“Do we check it out?”

“Hell no,” said Williams immediately. He smiled sheepishly. “I’m claustrophobic.”

“We live in a world largely populated by dead people who want to eat us, and you’re afraid of small spaces,” said Cal, shaking his head in disbelief.

“Shut up.”

A pair of hands came out of a tunnel, followed by a head and a torso. The zombie turned and snarled at them.

“Shoot it Lyon, shoot it,” Cal urged.

“You don’t have to say it twice,” said Williams, lifting the rifle.

“Adios, bitch,” he said, and fired.