Eric Brown: Season of Rot

Mike stepped up and fired around Michelle as she paused to reload. Brook stayed in the rear, and she was the one to notice the rats using the dead for cover. “They’re coming back!” she screamed, unable to fire with her friends in front of her.

Pressing themselves against the walls, Warren and Brent reloaded, then resumed firing as Jenkins and Daniel took the center, smothering the floor of the corridor in flame. More rats squealed, dying as they were cooked alive, but the dead paid no attention to the fires swirling about their waists; they continued to press forward. The base’s defenders were ever so slowly being forced to retreat.

Then Daniel’s flamethrower ran dry. “Incoming!” he shouted and ran behind the others as the rats made a renewed push forward. Jenkins cranked up his flame and engulfed the whole corridor in a sea of fire.

“Fall back!” Warren ordered.

Kyle, who was watching the battle from the control room, sealed a door behind them as they retreated deeper into the complex. When the door slammed shut, the defenders paused to regroup. Benji came running up to them with a new flamethrower in his hands. Daniel grabbed it and began to strap it onto his back.

“Thank you,” Warren told Benji. “Now get the hell out of here!”

Benji turned and fled as the pounding on the door started.

“Grenade again?” Daniel asked.

“Can’t,” Warren replied. “Not enough cover this time.”

“What about the demon?” someone shrieked.

“We’re going to have to shoot the fucker!”

The monsters bashed through the door, and it flew inward, slamming Brent into the wall and cutting his body nearly in half. Blood and intestines spilled from the long gash across his stomach.

The demon sprang at them like a force of nature. Michelle and Warren blasted it, and spent round casings clattered to the floor around them. It howled in pain but kept moving straight into the heart of the group, clawing away most of Jenkins’s face. His finger tightened on the trigger of his flamethrower, hosing Daniel and Mike. Daniel’s flamethrower exploded, and Jenkins’s erupted soon after.

Michelle and Brook managed to evade the blasts, ducking away around a corner. They got to their feet as the demon came around the bend, stumbling, its whole body ablaze.

Brook watched in horror as Michelle stepped up to it and stuck the barrel of her rifle against its face. She pulled the trigger, and its head splattered from a point-blank, three-round burst. “That’s for Warren,” she whispered as its body toppled over with a thud. Michelle stared at the burning thing with tears welling up in her eyes until Brook yanked her backwards by her shoulder, screaming for her to come on.

Kyle’s voice boomed over the intercom. “Run! Get to the lower levels! I’m locking down the top completely—run!”

Brook dragged Michelle into a lift and didn’t let go until its doors sealed behind them. Michelle slumped to the floor, shaking with sobs. Brook kneeled beside her and took her in her arms.

The lift didn’t stop until it reached the bottom level. Darren met them and helped Michelle to her feet. “Kyle’s on his way here, sealing the last of the doors manually behind him.”

Michelle took a deep breath, steadying herself. “How long?” she asked.

“Kyle said he didn’t know. If they work their way to a lift and come down its shaft, less than an hour, tops.” Darren reached out and put a hand on her arm. “I’m sorry about Warren.”

She slapped his hand off her. “We don’t have time for this. I’m the only one left who has real training in fighting the rats. I’ve got to do something to try and stop them.” She marched off towards the mess hall with Brook and Darren reluctantly following her. “These people need to know what’s coming,” she said without looking back.

Benji was standing inside the doorway to the mess hall as Michelle entered. She shoved him aside before he could ask where Mike was, and every pair of eyes in the room turned towards her.

“Warren’s dead,” she stated in a hollow voice. “So are Mike and the others.”

The news hit Benji like a fist to the gut. He fell to his knees with tears flowing down his cheeks.

“The rats are inside the base and coming for us. We have less than an hour.”

The other survivors remained silent, stricken with terror.

“There’s no way out,” Michelle informed them. “I know none of you are soldiers. Most of you never used a gun before the rats came, and some of you probably don’t think you can, but we’re it. What we do in the next few minutes will determine who we are and what our lives meant. We can sit and wait for the rats to gnaw us into bits, or we can go fighting like Warren and the others did. It’s up to you, but I need to know this instant where we stand.”

“Haven’t been too keen on waiting around my whole life,” a big man named Paul said.

A redheaded woman in her early thirties spoke up next. “Those things took my husband when the convoy was attacked. I say we kill as many of those little pieces of shit as we can.”

Corrie, who’d been serving as the group’s main cook, pushed herself to her feet; she was in her forties, overweight, and she had a horrible complexion. “You point me at ‘em, honey, and I’ll blow the bastards to pulp,” she said, pumping a round into the chamber of the 12-gauge she carried.

“Are we all in agreement then?” Michelle challenged them, slinging her rifle onto her shoulder so that it pointed at the ceiling. A chorus of approval echoed in the mess hall as Kyle entered behind Michelle.

“Rallying the troops, I see,” he said, laughing.

Michelle spun around, taking a swing at his face. He caught her by the wrist and twisted her in front of him, pinning her arm against her own back.

“That’s cute. It really is.” Kyle gave her a kiss on the cheek as she broke his hold and bolted from him. “Whoa, beautiful. We don’t have to die today. There is another way out of the compound without going through the bulk of the rats.”

“What?” Michelle asked, struggling to keep her anger in check.

“The rat,” Kyle said, “the one that got in alone. It used the back door. There’s an old part of the base that doesn’t show on the scanners. It isn’t part of the base proper, so to speak. It was part of the original bomb shelter built on this spot before your government remodeled this place into a high-tech death factory.”

Darren was stunned. “If that’s true, why didn’t you tell us about it before?”

“Didn’t know about it myself until a few minutes ago. I know this place went on beyond the steel walls we called the base, but I didn’t know they were still accessible until I saw a demon just appear on the bio-scanners as I was running for my life. Since as far as I know they can’t walk through rock, I figure it came from a tunnel in the old base and ripped its way into this one.”

“What does all that mean?” Paul asked, trying to keep up.

“It means if we can take out a single demon and maybe a much smaller force of the rats and the dead than the one up top, we can get the hell out of here and have a shot at staying alive.”

“Where’s the tunnel?” someone called out.

Kyle kept his eyes on Michelle. “It’s in the emergency stairwell between this level and the one above it, only on the other side of the complex. If we’re lucky, the rats will spread their numbers thin on the level above us, thinking some of us are hiding on that floor. We’ll hopefully have even less of them to fight through.”

“Michelle,” Darren said, “could we really do what he’s saying?”

“Maybe. If we had more weapons.”

“We don’t and we’re wasting time,” Kyle spat. “I can’t do this on my own, or I’d be gone already. We go now with what we have, or we die here without question. It’s as simple as that.”