Mother Russia

Chapter Twenty

The squads made their way down the street, keeping just ahead of the huge mob of infected hosts that slowly pursued them. The mob still numbered at least a hundred, even with all the ones they had killed so far. Darby briefly debated checking the nearby houses for more survivors, but they decided against it. At the moment, anyone still hiding in their home was safer there. Until the squads could get some more distance between them and the zombies, and manage to contact a helicopter to transport them to safety, trying to locate survivors in this neighborhood would likely cause more harm than good.

They cut through another row of houses. In the back yard of one house, they encountered an infected dog. It was still hooked up to its chain and could not reach them, but its gurgling barks were enough to set them on edge. The dog looked like it had been killed and partially eaten, probably by its infected owner sometime the evening before. Okada shot it in the head as the squads went by.

“Sorry, sir,” he said as he pushed his pistol back into the holster. “A waste of ammo, I know.”

“It’s okay,” Hunk said. “We should have shot it as soon as it started barking. Besides, the virus makes them stronger. It might have been able to pull the chain out of the ground and come after us.”

Okada sighed and nodded. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

Darby led the squads to another side street and checked the map on his tablet. According to their original plan, the other squads should have relocated to another neighborhood to the west. Currently, the squads were traveling south, back toward the major six-lane street that Darby’s squad had crossed earlier. Hunk could only assume that Darby would attempt to continue that original plan and move the squads west, as long as they could get around the huge infected mob.

From over the tops of the nearest houses, they could see a large office building about a block away. Five stories tall, it was easily the tallest building in the vicinity. Hunk noticed vaguely that the upper two floors had all the lights on, but the lower floors did not. Although from their current vantage point, they couldn’t see the first or second floor. It was nearly light out now, so he barely noticed the lights were on at all.

Suddenly, everyone straightened and raised their guns as a bestial roar erupted somewhere not too far away. Next to Hunk, Okada let out a terrified moan.

Abdallah looked around with wide eyes. “Is that what I think it is?”

“Yes,” Darby said, his voice tight. “It’s the primary.”

“How far, do you think?”

“A few blocks, either south or southeast.”

Another scream of rage from the primary host washed over them. To Hunk’s ear, it sounded just a little bit closer than before.

Abdallah looked at Darby. “We should go in another direction then, yes?”

“Sir!” a soldier named Johannson blurted out, swinging his gun around. Down at the end of the street, a dozen or more zombies had appeared from out of the shadows.

“We can’t stay here,” Abdallah said.

Darby shook his head. “Let’s cut across to the next street and try to get around them.”

The squads quickly went through another yard and climbed over a chainlink fence to an empty lot bordered by scrubby trees. That row of houses was the last one, and now they found themselves standing opposite a concrete lot with weeds creeping through cracks. To their left and right were the rear lots for the rows of businesses on the main street ahead. There were dumpsters, piles of crates and other garbage, and a few business trucks. Hunk wondered if they could hotwire one of them.

Teeäär, the Estonian in Abdallah’s squad, suddenly pointed upward. “Look! Up there!”

They all cast their eyes up at the office building, which now loomed right ahead of them. As Hunk had noticed before, the upper floors had the lights on, but now some of those lights were flashing on and off. As he looked up at the building, he saw people standing in the windows, maybe ten or twenty of them. One of them, a woman in a white blouse and black skirt, was waving her arms and hopping up and down, apparently trying to get the squad’s attention.

“I can’t tell for sure from here,” Abdallah said. “But they don’t look like they’re infected.”

Darby took a small pair of binoculars from his pocket and looked up at the figures in the windows. A faint smile played across his face. “Right. We have some more survivors.” He turned and faced the rest of the team. “All right, here’s the plan. We will enter the building and meet with the survivors. We will take them to the roof, where we can use flares to signal a transport. The survivors will be evacuated, and we will take the transport to a new location to continue our search. Is that clear?”

It was clear. By the looks on their faces, the other soldiers thought it was the best idea they’d ever heard. They double-timed it across the street and along the rear parking lot until they were about halfway to the office building.

Just then, they heard another roar of fury from the primary host, and this time it was definitely closer than before. In fact, it was just ahead of them, somewhere out on the main street on the other side of the office building. Some of the soldiers crouched down instinctively, even though they had nothing to hide behind, should the beast come running at them.

Then they heard what sounded like a car crash, the smash of glass and screech of tearing metal. More demonic roaring followed the crash, and it seemed to go on for minutes.

“Come on, hurry up,” Darby said firmly. “We can enter through the rear doors.”

His orders shook the squad out of their frightened paralysis, and they all ran across the open lot to a set of glass doors, probably one of the employee entrances. The doors were locked, so Darby broke the glass with the stock of his rifle and reached inside to open the door.

A short distance down the hall there was a break room with plastic tables and chairs, vending machines, and a shattered coffee pot on the floor with spilled coffee everywhere. Down the hall there were some offices and small conference rooms, an empty security office, and a central corridor that led to some elevators. While the squad checked around, Hunk continued to the main lobby at the front of the building.

His boots made uncomfortably loud footsteps on the gray tile floor. Even before he reached the lobby, he knew what he would find. It was almost like a sixth sense. He edged carefully out from around the corner and looked into the lobby.

He counted six zombies, all of them bumbling around near the front doors, as if they were trying to get out. The front of the lobby was all floor-to-ceiling windows looking out to the street, and the side walls were done in fake wood paneling. There was an unmanned front desk and a few scattered chairs along the wall for visitors. There was blood splashed all over the floor, but whether or not it was from the zombies, Hunk couldn’t tell.

Through the windows, Hunk could see about ten more zombies out in the front lot, wandering away from the building. Across the street, it looked like a convenience store was on fire. Hunk didn’t have a great line of sight to the store, but he saw cloudy gray smoke pouring out of the front windows, which appeared to be smashed to pieces.

Hunk pressed the stock of his rifle into his shoulder. If he had to guess, he figured the car crash sounds they had all heard earlier had something to do with the store across the street. Just before that, they had all heard the primary host howling in fury. What did it do, throw a car into the storefront? And where had it gone? Hunk shook his head and frowned. He didn’t like this at all.

He heard footsteps coming behind him, and he immediately turned and held out his hand. It was Okada, who froze in mid-step.

Hunk silently backed away and met Okada farther down the hall. “Six hosts,” he whispered. “They didn’t notice me. Whatever happened outside a little while ago has their attention.”

“Okay,” Okada whispered back. “The rest of the floor is clear. Captain doesn’t want to use the elevators, so we’re taking the stairs.”

“All right, let’s go.”

When they caught up with the squads, Hunk informed Darby about the zombies. Darby thought about it for a moment and then shook his head. “Leave them. They aren’t a threat. Besides, if we shoot them, we’ll just draw more attention. The primary is out there somewhere, and the last thing we want to do is alert it to our presence.”

They went up the stairs all the way to the fourth floor. Darby wanted to make contact with the survivors first and question them. Only then would they check the other two floors. Hunk let the other soldiers go ahead of him and brought up the rear. By the time he got to the fourth floor, he could already hear the sounds of frantic civilians babbling in Russian.

The survivors were all in a large office area divided into cubicles. There were eighteen of them, most of them employees that worked in the building. They all looked about as bad as Hunk would have expected. They were tired and hungry and scared. Most of them had not been able to sleep at all during the night, and those that did had just curled up on the floor and slept in their clothes. Snyder and Teeäär tried to calm them down and translated for the rest of the squad.

“This woman said her boss was infected,” Snyder said. “The last time she saw him, he was on the second floor.”

Teeäär said, “They said a few people tried to leave the building late last night, but they don’t know if they even made it out alive.”

Darby asked, “Do any of them know if there are any survivors on the other floors?”

None of them did. It seemed that everyone who was not infected had managed to escape to the fourth floor.

Abdallah said, “We should still check the other floors.”

“We will,” Darby said, “once we get these people out of here. We’ll check the whole building before we evacuate.”

“They want to know if more help is coming,” Snyder said.

“Tell them we’re going to the roof to –”

He was cut off by the faint sound of a strangled roar coming from somewhere outside the building. Even up on the fourth floor, they could hear the primary host. Two members of Abdallah’s squad, Johannson and Silva, came running. They had been posted at one of the windows facing the front of the building to keep a look out for anything outside.

“Sir!” Johansson blurted, “My God! It’s out there on the street! It’s huge!”

“It was chasing someone!” Silva said.

Darby looked at Silva. “You mean another survivor?”

The civilians could not understand what the soldiers were saying, but they could tell from their body language and the pitch of their voices that something was wrong. Just then, they all heard a powerful booming crash and the entire building seemed to tremble just a tiny bit. The civilians all cowered in fear, and starting crying out in Russian. Hunk didn’t even have to guess what they were saying this time.

“I think it found us,” he said simply.

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