The Arklay Outbreak

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Chapter Twenty-Three

Rebecca finally stopped screaming. Eyes wide and hands shaking, she stared up in front of her, at the man standing at the other end of the passenger car. He was tall and muscular with greasy brown hair and a harsh, narrow face with sharp brown eyes. He wore black boots, blue jeans, and a dark blue muscle shirt. His right arm was decorated with swirling black tattoo from his bicep to his wrist. In his hands was a Desert Eagle pistol, and it was aimed at her.

He studied her over the gun sights. “Did it touch you? Did it bite you?” he asked guardedly, his voice low and raspy.

“No … no,” she stammered.

“Who are you?”

Rebecca lowered her trembling hands and glanced at the dead zombie at her feet. The bullet had taken off half of its head, and a mass of bloody gray clumps oozed from the opened skull. If the man chose to shoot her as well, the bullet would do the same to her.

“Rebecca,” she said, feebly wiping her tear-streaked face.

“Rebecca who?”

“Chambers. I’m Rebecca Chambers. I’m with the Raccoon City police,” she said, knowing that no lie she could have told would be as convincing. “The train sent out an emergency signal. We came to investigate.”

“We? Are there other cops on this train?”

“No, just me. Our helicopter went down in the woods. We got turned around.” Rebecca got her legs under her and stood up slowly, keeping her hands in view. “I don’t know where my teammates are. My walkie-talkie broke and I can’t call them.”

“How unfortunate.” The man did not lower his gun, and Rebecca began to wonder if she’d been any safer with the zombie. Her own gun was lying on the floor just a few feet away, but she did not dare try to reach for it.

“Aren’t you going to tell me who you are?” she asked.

“My name’s Tom,” the man said. “I had a private room. somebody hit the emergency brake and I heard all this screaming. I came out to check it out and this is what I found.”

Rebecca could still hear the zombies banging incessantly on the door right behind her. She stepped away from the door, walking around the body on the ground, and waited. “You don’t have to point your gun at me anymore,” she said. “I’m not … like them.”

The man debated it for a moment, and then relented, lowering the pistol to his side. Rebecca bent over and picked her own gun and the clip off the floor. She casually slid the clip in and loaded a shell into the chamber. And then she quickly swung the gun up to aim it at the man, who started in surprise but did not raise his own.

“Don’t move,” Rebecca said, her voice tense but uneven. “Drop your gun on the floor.”

“Why do you want me to do that?” he asked calmly, staring at her face as if studying her, ignoring the gun in her hand.

“I know who you are. Your name is William Coen. We found that truck by the side of the road. You killed the men inside.”

“I didn’t kill anyone. The MPs in the truck got killed by whatever killed all the people on this train. And my friends call me Billy.”

“I’m not your friend.” She looked at what he was wearing and frowned. “What did you do, steal someone else’s clothes?”

“Well, I couldn’t walk around in my prison uniform, now could I?”

“It doesn’t matter. Now drop your gun.”

Billy snorted a harsh laugh. “What do you think you’re going to do, officer? Arrest me? Handcuff me and take me out of here with all these zombies in your way?”

Rebecca said nothing in response to that, because there was nothing she could say. He was right, and she regretted drawing her gun in the first place. She should have waited until they were out of the train before trying to apprehend him. Now she was stuck.

“I am going to arrest you,” she insisted.

“And what if I don’t want to be arrested? Are you going to shoot me?” he asked lightly, taking a look at the gun in her hands.

“Yes, I’ll shoot you if I have to.”

“I have a gun too, you know. And mine’s bigger than yours.”

She glanced down at the Desert Eagle. He wiggled it in his hand, just to remind her that she was seriously outgunned. A Desert Eagle was a hand cannon, capable of downing a charging rhino. If William Coen decided to shoot her with it, the bullet impact would knock her off her feet. It blew a zombie’s head in half, and it was in the hand of a convicted murderer.

Suddenly, she heard a splintering crash directly behind her, and she spun around in a panic. The zombies behind the door finally broke through, snapping the sliding door off of its track. The top half bent forward and the zombies on the other side banged on it relentlessly. Each impact bent it down further, until it was barely hanging on.

Rebecca turned back around and saw that Coen had his gun pointed at her. She froze in place, flinching with each groaning smash on the doors behind her, her pistol pointed at Coen in self-defense now. The barrel of the gun trembled as her hands shook.

“It’s me or them,” he said calmly. “Make up your mind.”

“I can’t,” she whispered to herself, “I can’t do this.”

The stand-off lasted another few seconds, and then the door gave way with the sound of cracking plastic. The door fell to the floor and the zombies poured through, more of them than before, at least five of them herded into the narrow doorway.

“Get down!” Coen shouted, and Rebecca listened. She let her legs give way and fell to the floor, twisting so she landed on her side.

Coen pulled the trigger and the deafening report stung her ears again. The zombie in front, the one wearing a train engineer’s uniform, took the round directly in the chest and was kicked backward into the others. He fired again, and this time the bullet hit the zombie in the face, his head kicking back, the shot knocking him in a circle. Rebecca slid across the floor toward Coen, holding her gun up with one arm.

The other zombies surged forward and knocked the engineer to the ground, trampling right over him as they rushed into the car. Coen reached down and grabbed Rebecca’s arm to pull her to her feet. The two of them backed rapidly out of the train car as the zombies came forward. Rebecca fired twice and managed to hit one of them in the head.

“Conserve your ammo,” Coen ordered as they exited out the rear door and slid it closed.

The next car was composed of private compartments with a narrow hallway along the right side. Coen took her a few steps down the hallway, out of sight of the doorway, where the zombies were already gathering to bash the door down. As soon as they were out of sight, the zombies calmed down and stopped hitting it so much. After a few nervous breaths, they stopped hitting the door at all.

Coen pressed her against the wall of one of the compartments and jammed the barrel of the Desert Eagle into her midsection. He put his face close to hers but she turned her head away, closing her eyes.

“If they can’t see or hear us, they forget about us,” he said softly. “There aren’t any of them in this car. I was hiding here when I heard you screaming.”

“So what are you going to do with me?” Rebecca asked, keeping her face away from his. She could barely move with his body pressing hers into the wall, but her hand with the gun was free. She subtly pointed it upward at Coen, not reassured by the knowledge that if they shot each other, she would get it much worse than him.

“Nothing,” he said. “The way I figure, we can help each other get out of here and then we can just go our separate ways. After we get out, you can go and tell your bosses whatever you want. I plan to run away and never ever come back.”

“I can’t let you go,” she said. “You’re a murderer and I have to arrest you.”

“I’m innocent,” he whispered right in her ear. “I never murdered anybody.”

“You were convicted in a court of law.”

“No, I wasn’t. I was convicted at a military tribunal. Not the same thing.”

Rebecca inched her gun forward until it was touching Coen right under his rib cage. He smiled and slid the Eagle slowly up the front of her kevlar vest, ending its journey right under her chin. “We don’t have to be enemies,” he said sincerely. “I just want to get out of this train alive. You owe me your life, remember?”

“You didn’t save me in there just to blow my brains out right here,” Rebecca said, finally turning her head to look him in the eyes.

“And you don’t have the guts to shoot me in cold blood,” he replied smoothly. “So let’s stop playing games, okay?”

“You drop yours first,” Rebecca said.

Coen leaned forward and tilted his head down as if breathing in her scent. “I don’t think so. I saved your life, so you drop yours first.”

“You’re a murderer. I don’t trust you.”

“And you’re a cop. I can’t trust you.”

Rebecca glared up at him defiantly. “I guess we can’t trust each other then.”

“We have to trust somebody,” Coen said, not backing away. He was pressed so close to her, she could feel his heart beating. “There’s nobody else left alive.”

“I can take care of myself,” Rebecca said, emphasizing the last word by nudging her gun a little deeper into Coen’s midsection.

“Well, in that case, I’ll just dump you off with the zombies out there and let you handle things by yourself. How does that plan sound?”

“I’d rather be stuck with them than stuck with you.”

Coen chuckled and backed away an inch. “Okay, then. If I drop my gun, are you going to try to arrest me?”

“And if I drop mine, are you going to ...” Rebecca glanced down at his body, held so close to hers, and then stared disgustedly in his eyes, “I don’t even want to think about what you might try to do.”

“Why don’t we just promise to work together until we can escape this death trap?” Coen suggested. “I mean, we can’t spend forever pointing guns at each other.”

“You drop yours,” Rebecca said, “and I won’t arrest you until we get off the train.”

She knew that they were stuck with each other whether they liked it or not, but she wasn’t going to just let Coen maintain the upper hand. She couldn’t even try to arrest him in this situation and they both knew it. Leading him through the train in handcuffs was not an option. If she tried it, it would probably get both of them killed. And he was right about needing his help to get out of there. And he did save her life, despite what else he may have done, and she could not afford to count that out.

He could have left her to die, and maybe that fact alone made her want to trust him. She knew next to nothing about him except for his name and the fact he’d been court-martialed and convicted of murder. She didn’t know enough about the crime he had supposedly committed to judge him yet. Maybe he’d been wrongly convicted; it was possible. She didn’t trust him yet, but something about his manner or his speech made her believe she was not in danger from him.

Even when his gun was under her chin, he spoke light-heartedly and tried to defuse the stand-off. He pointed it partially in self-defense, just as she had. He didn’t seem to want to hurt her. If he wanted to, he probably could have overpowered her by now and done what he wanted.

And she needed his help. He had been in the military and would know how to handle himself against whatever it was they were fighting. Maybe he knew a way out of the train. He knew something, that was certain.

But she could not let him get away. After they got out of the train, she was going to arrest him and turn him in, one way or the other.

Coen slid his gun back down the front of her vest and let it hang at his side. Rebecca eased her gun away from his ribcage and held it away from him. Slowly, Coen backed away until his back was against the opposite wall of the narrow hallway. There was a space of about three feet between them. He casually crossed his arms and sighed. Rebecca stood up straight and held the gun at her side, clicking the safety on.

“Okay,” Coen said. “Now we can talk.”

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