Free Web NovelChapter 11: A Hellhole in the Making
The elevator opened into a lobby that was nothing like the one I had walked through an hour ago.
Overlapping voices filled the entire lobby: a woman crying hard into her phone against the far wall, two men arguing loudly near the entrance, and above all of it were the roars of a man shrieking obscenities at everyone.
The moment I stepped out, my eyes landed on a man lying flat on the marble floor six meters to my left with a kitchen knife buried to the handle between his ribs while a pool og his own blood formed beneath him.
One of the building’s security guards was kneeling beside him with both hands pressing down on the wound while the blood kept coming between his fingers.
Eight meters further, two other guards had a man pinned against the reception desk, one on each arm, and the man was throwing his whole body in every direction at once, spit trailing from his mouth, eyes red-rimmed and showing too much white; his screaming had stopped being words sometime recently.
"Hold his fucking arms!" one guard shouted.
"What the hell is wrong with him?!" the other one shouted back, voice cracking.
I recognized the look on the restrained man’s face. I had seen it on way too many faces across three years.
He was at best twelve hours away from completing turning, maybe less, given the timeline had already accelerated.
At least there was a silver lining.
Nobody looked at me as I made my way to the exit.
The receptionist was standing behind her desk with both hands pressed flat on the surface and her eyes fixed on the guards, too focused to notice the missing assistant manager who should’ve been walking out of the elevator alongside me.
I moved through the lobby at a steady walk, pushed through the glass doors, and did not look back.
Outside, three sirens overlapped from three different directions simultaneously, ambulance and police, and something further away that might have been a fire truck.
A helicopter was moving fast and low over the buildings one block north with its searchlight sweeping the rooftops.
Two cars blew through the intersection ahead of me without touching their brakes, one of them laying on the horn continuously.
A shop owner thirty meters down the street was pulling a rolling shutter down over his front window with both arms, moving fast and not even stopping to lock it properly.
The October evening cold had teeth in it now, even the light coming through the clouds was a dull orange.
As I walked over to the bike, I heard a dull crash of glass. From the sound of it, it came from one block over, somewhere I couldn’t see.
I could tell that the glass broke, then someone screamed, and then stopped screaming.
I reached the Diavel, checked that Tikki was settled in the pocket, started the engine, and hit the throttle hard enough that the front wheel lifted as I pulled out into the road.
The compound sat in the western slums, and I knew it well enough from my previous life. ƒreeωebnovel.ƈom
Back then, it had become one of the strongest survivor groups in the city.
Hundreds of members by month three, military-grade armor and weaponry from the drone drops the surviving military had organized weeks into the outbreak, high concrete walls that were already there, and a basement that stored enough supplies to outlast most of the city.
I had traded with them many times.
Mostly bartered bullets for canned food.
Stood at their front entrance and haggled with a man at a folding table, blissfully unaware that Kara was somewhere deeper in that building, having things done to her that I had not let myself fully picture even now.
I found her eight months later, and the picture assembled itself from the evidence.
My grip on the throttle tightened until my knuckles went white, while I breathed hard, trying and failing not to picture what I’d find if I got there too late.
[They shouldn’t have military hardware yet,] I told myself, because thinking about logistics was better than what I was otherwise going to think about.
The military bases had fallen internally, the airborne strain infected personnel way before anyone understood there was a virus, before anyone had even started calling it a virus.
People had barely a week before the turning began, starting from the first signs.
What was left of the organized military had resorted to drone supply drops over the following weeks.
Survivors would arrange buckets, tarps, or anything bright they could find on rooftops or anywhere visible to spell out what they needed: food, meds, ammunition, field manuals, all falling from the sky to whoever was organized enough to spell it out for them.
So they shouldn’t have any military hardware on them.
[Pistols... Civilian pump actions... Maybe a few semi-auto hunting rifles. Nothing is fully automatic. Should be about fifty men, maybe less. A hundred at worst.]
But even so, I was still one man, and they were in the tens. All armed.
And yet, I rode harder.
The slums hit differently than the city.
I cut the engine two blocks out, rolling the Diavel to a stop before sending it to the inventory, and walking.
The streets here were narrow and damp, the buildings pressed together with hanging wires strung between them at every level.
The gutters were overflowing with sewage water while overstuffed dumpsters sat at the corners with flies buzzing around them.
The entire place reeked of old cooking oil, sewage, and cigarettes. But compared to the stench of rot and death that would blanket the city a week from now, this place smelled almost pleasant.
Saw a stray dog standing in the middle of the alleyway ahead of me, eyes bloodshot and frothing from the mouth. It bolted into one of the alleys as it saw me approach.
Everyone who was still in these streets knew something was wrong with the day. But nobody knew what.
One block from the compound, I stopped beside the wall of a shuttered repair shop, pulled the chest from inventory, put the helmet on, locked the chin strap, and seated the ear protection over it.
Done with the final prep, I sent the chest back into the inventory and kept walking.
The compound’s outer wall was four meters of concrete with barbed wire running the full top.
The back gate was solid metal, with two cameras mounted at the corners of the rear wall, each covering half the perimeter from its respective ends.
[Can’t stealth this...] I thought, studying the angles. [Every minute I spend moving carefully around the compound is a minute they might have uninterrupted attention on Kara.]
That meant going in guns blazing, against tens of armed men who were violent for a living, inside their own playing field.
Looking at the narrow alleys, congested houses, each overstuffed with people about to turn, and the literal army of street dogs roaming the slums, I knew this place would be hell on earth in a mere few hours.
Even worse was the fact that it’ll be dark soon. freēwēbnovel.com
[Gotta get her out of here before the turning begins...]
