Shaun Harbinger - Lightning - Fighting the Living Dead

The zombies followed at their deathly pace, a collective moan rising from them as if they were pleading with us to come back and let them eat us.

We reached a closed, locked, metal and glass door. Jax used her access card to open it and we slipped through. The door closed behind us. The zombies pressed themselves against the glass in vain, watching us with their hateful yellow eyes as we walked away.

I noticed a camera on the wall at the end of the corridor. “Can you see where we are?” I asked into the walkie-talkie.

Johnny answered. “Yeah, it looks clear. The door to the stairs should be on your left.”

We found it. The door was a regular door with a sign that showed a stickman going down a flight of stairs beneath the words EMERGENCY EXIT.

“What’s the fourth floor like now?” I asked Johnny.

“Still a whole lot of nastiness going on at the elevators.”

“What’s in the corridor directly below us? If we take these stairs down to the fourth floor, where will we come out?”

“Let me just check that.” There was a pause while he checked the map. “Looks like labs. Most of the fourth floor consists of labs.”

“Can you check the area where the emergency stairs come out on that level? Assuming the stairs and elevators are in the same relative positions as they are on this floor, we should be far enough away from the elevators to avoid attracting the attention of the nasties there.”

Johnny said, “Tanya, can you find a camera for this corridor here?” I assumed he was showing her the map. A few seconds later, he said to me, “The corridor looks okay.”

“Is there a locked access door between the elevators and the emergency stairs on that floor, the same as there is on this one?” I looked along the corridor at the zombies still trying to reach us by pressing themselves against the metal and glass door.

“Yeah, looks like it.”

“I have an idea,” I said to Jax, Sam, and Colbert.

I opened the door to the emergency stairs. The stairs were made of steel and led down to the fourth floor as well as up to the roof. We descended them slowly, wary of any movement below us. But the stairs seemed deserted. When we opened the fourth floor door, it revealed a corridor identical to the one we had just left. Except the doors here were all digitally locked and led to labs. Through the glass panels in the doors, I could see white-tiled rooms containing various machines, steel worktables, and glass cabinets full of chemicals.

Through the access door halfway along the corridor, I could see the pack of zombies at the elevators, still feeding from the dead bodies of the security guards.

I removed my backpack and found the waterproof matches I had brought from Apocalypse Island. “This should make them move,” I said. “And they can’t come this way because of that door.” I struck a match and reached up toward the ceiling where a sprinkler sensor was located.

An alarm sounded and a red light above the emergency exit door came on. The sprinklers went into action, raining water down on us from the ceiling.

When the water hit the zombies, they left their feast and shuffled through a set of swinging doors that led to the main stairs.

“I don’t understand,” Doctor Colbert said, watching them through the glass door. “What’s happening?”

“They hate water,” I replied, putting the matches into the pocket of my jeans. “I think it’s something to do with the virus trying to keep the host body from rotting quicker. When it rains, the zombies seek shelter.”

“So they have a weakness,” she whispered, almost to herself.

When the area was clear, we opened the access door and walked along the corridor, through the spray of water, to the elevators. The bodies of the security guards had almost been picked clean, their bones clearly visible. I had been right; the spines had been ripped out and were missing. The chill that ran through my body had nothing to do with the coldness of the water that was raining down on us.

We found the lab that Hart had told us contained the H1NZ1 at the end of the corridor. Sam opened the door with his access card and we went inside.

The lab was large, clinically clean, and smelled strongly of bleach. The white tiles and stainless steel surfaces shone beneath the overhead lights. The sprinklers weren’t on in here; the system was smart enough to know that the “fire” was in the fourth floor corridor. The alarm was still ringing outside, but with the door closed, it sounded far away.

I turned to Doctor Colbert. “Do you know where the H1NZ1 is kept?”

She nodded. “In the supply room there.” She pointed to a doorway that led into a smaller room of shelves stacked with plastic containers and cardboard boxes. “I don’t understand. What are you doing here, and what do you want with the H1NZ1?”

“We’re from Site Alpha One,” I said as we went to the supply room. “We’ve come to collect the H1NZ1 because the scientists there need it.”

“Site Alpha One is still in operation?” she asked. “Being on an island they would have more chance of survival, but there was a cross-contamination of both sites because staff moved between them as required. When we lost contact with them, we thought the site had been overrun.”

“They had problems,” I said, “but the building is secure.”

“And the labs are still running?” she asked.

“Yes. That’s why they want the H1NZ1; the scientists at Alpha One have worked out a way to make an antivirus from it.”

We entered the room and Colbert went to a shelf that held hundreds of small metallic boxes. “It’s in here,” she said. “Each box holds a single vial.” As we began loading them into our backpacks, she said, “That means they’ve been working on the problem all this time. At Site Alpha One, I mean. We thought that after the vaccine failed to work properly, and the zombies and hybrids took over this building, that was the end of everything. I had no idea they had developed an antivirus.”

“Yeah, apparently they have,” I said, stuffing handfuls of the metallic boxes into my pack. They were light enough that I could hardly tell they had anything inside. “But we need to get this stuff to them so they can produce it.”

Tears appeared in her eyes. “I thought everything had been destroyed. I thought that all of our work had ended. I was waiting to die and all this time, Alpha One was still operational and working on a solution. Do you people work for the security firm?”

Sam grunted and then said, “No, we don’t work for those fuckers at all.”

Colbert looked confused. “I don’t understand. You’re doing this for them but you don’t work for them?”

“We were coerced into coming here,” Jax said. She had filled her pack and slung it over her shoulder. “If we don’t get these chemicals back to Alpha One, we’re all going to become hybrids.”

Colbert looked shocked. “They let you get bitten?”

Sam rolled his eyes. “Worse than that, man. They injected us with the fucking virus.”

“Oh, my God,” she said with a tremor in her voice. “You’re not ill so you must have been injected with the pure strain. What color was it? It’s very important that you remember.”

“It was pale blue,” I said.

“When were you injected?”

“A few hours ago,” I said.

She nodded. “We must get these vials to Site Alpha One immediately.”

“They’re sending a chopper to pick us up the day after tomorrow,” Jax said.

Colbert shook her head. “No, that’s much too late. We need to go now.”

“We can’t,” I said. “They won’t be back here until 1300 hours on Tuesday. We can’t change that.”

“No, you don’t understand,” she protested. “You’ve been injected with the pure strain. You don’t have that much time.”