Zombiegrad. A horror novel

“The gun’s real. It belonged to my dad. You just have to aim at the head.”

Ramses cast an inquiring look at her. “Are we in a fucking weird lesson?”

Ksenia put the torch carefully on the floor. She gripped the gun with both hands, pointed it at the driver and squeezed the trigger again.

The bullet made its way through the man’s forehead, chunks of flesh and bones flying out from behind his skull. The echo of the gun report was deafening. The man collapsed on the floor. His ex-coworkers stumbled over the lying corpse. They got up and started shaking the door more violently.

Ksenia squinted and killed the fat man with one single shot in the head. Then she directed the gun at the female and fired. The contents of her skull were scattered around.

It was quiet for a second.

Then a crowd of psychos came shambling. A dozen hands clawed at them through the bars. The rusty door began to creak ominously under their weight.

She sent another bullet into the mob without taking aim. It hit the bars and twanged away in a ricochet. She tried to send another round, but the gun was giving only dry clicks. The magazine was empty.

Tears smeared Ksenia’s mascara.

“Don’t call me missy,” she said. Her cheekbones flushed red.

FOUR

Ksenia thumbed the release and ejected the empty clip into her hand. She put it in her pocket, took out a fresh clip and sent it home into the handle. She wedged her gun under her belt and stamped her feet upstairs.

Ramses looked through the bars and saw more monsters coming up to the closed door. He picked up the torch and ran after Ksenia. She stopped on the second floor and wiped her tears with the sleeve of her sweater.

“We have to leave this place,” she said. “The sooner, the better. The door won’t hold forever.”

“What are you up to?”

“We’ll break into the armory and arm ourselves.”

Ramses looked at Ksenia quizzically. “Sounds like a plan but please remind me next time to ask you who taught you to shoot and where you learned your good English.”

“Okay. Follow me.” She stepped into the dark corridor. The faint growling of the crazies was reaching them from the first floor. Ramses lit their way.

“Say,” he said. “Why didn’t those cops shoot back? They didn’t shoot back. Can you believe this? They all have a gun holster on their hips but none of ‘em were shooting at us.”

“They are robots,” Ksenia said, “not humans. Now you know what to do to survive.”

She halted in front of a heavy metallic door. She turned the handle, but the door was locked. She hit the door with her palm. “We have to find a way to get inside! We need those weapons!”

Ramses shook his head. “You’re looking really on edge.”

He searched in his pocket and fished out the keys he had found on the dead policeman. He put them into the torchlight. There was the Opel logo on the key fob. Car keys. No use for them at the moment. They had to escape from this place first before searching for that Opel in the parking lot. He put the keys away.

“Are you trained to pick locks by any chance?” he asked. “‘Cause I’m no expert here.”

“Unfortunately, no. The keys to the armory were on the first floor with the duty officer. Before this chaos began, that is.”

“We’re gonna have to use physical force, then.” He took a closer look at the three door hinges. “I’m thinking to try breaching it at the hinges.”

He touched the hinges, which were luckily not hidden from the outside. Easier to break. The latch side was strong, but he decided to break it too.

They went to the third floor, which was packed with various construction tools because of all renovations going on. They did not turn the lights in the corridor on and used the flashlight. Ramses picked a sledgehammer and a crowbar off the floor.

“Look around for some power-driven tools,” he said. “Like a drill or something.”

They rummaged through the tools, dispersing the darkness with the torchlight. Trickles of moonlight flowed through the windows and helped them see better in the dark. They found smaller hammers, cement spatulas and paint cans. Ksenia spotted a bulky plastic case under a stepladder and brought it to Ramses.

“That’s nice,” he said, opening the case and looking approvingly at the perforator. “Better than a drill.” He scanned around. “But we need the drill bit.”

“What’s that?”

“The drill bit?” He scratched the back of his head. “The thing, that’s attached to the business end of the perforator.” He looked at her tired face. “You know, to perform the drilling?”

“Ah.” She nodded weakly. “I got it – sverlo.”

Ramses felt a relief. “Yeah, whatever. Get a drill bit. Look around the place where you found this case.”

All the tools left by the construction workers were in disarray. There was an extension cord on a windowsill which Ramses added to his pile of items. Ksenia was lucky to locate the drill bits. She took an ax, too. They grabbed all the stuff and went back to the armory. There was a power source in the corridor, but the extension cord was not long enough to reach the armory door, and Ksenia had to go on a search for an extra cord. She came back with the cord and Ramses connected the two cords together. Then he plugged one of them into the power socket.

“Okee-dokee.” He revved the perforator, and it started buzzing loudly. “All systems are go, Houston.”

Ksenia gave him a tired smile.

“You drill near the latch,” he said handing her the tool. “Once you start, the plaster will crumble like a cookie. I’ll go at the hinges.”

He took the sledgehammer and hit it against the upper hinge. A loud buzz instantly filled the building. It was numbing and it was continuous.

He put the sledgehammer down and looked at Ksenia.

“We’ve triggered the security alarm system,” she said. “But no one is coming to arrest us.”

“It’s gonna attract more deadheads from outside,” Ramses said. “Let’s hurry up.” He raised the sledgehammer and launched another hit against the hinge.

Ksenia pressed the drill bit to the wall surface near the door frame and began working, too. Pieces of paint and plaster crumbled to the floor. Dust and cement particles, barely visible in the faint light, were floating in the air. In a quarter of an hour, the instrument got very hot, and they switched it off to give it a rest. Ksenia sat on the floor.

It took Ramses nineteen hits to break the upper hinge. He took a break, wiped the sweat from his forehead and sat down beside Ksenia. He looked at her dirty face and dusty clothes, and he felt sad. His mind had not fully absorbed the irrationality of the things happening to them.

He said, “You’d make a great construction worker, for sho’.”

She smiled and coughed. “Yeah, you bet.”

He looked around the place. “Air-conditioning wouldn’t be such a bad idea around here. I’m dying.”

“You hang on in there,” Ksenia said standing up. She picked up the perforator and continued drilling. Through the ceaseless noise of the alarm system, she heard a gnashing sound of metal against metal and stopped.

“Damn!” she said, looking at a stump of the drill bit. “I’ve broken it!”

She put the perforator down and knelt beside the tool case to look for a replacement for the broken drill bit.

Ramses took a swing and smashed the sledgehammer against the middle hinge. The hinge did not move.

There was a distant clang coming from the first floor. Ramses stopped working and raised his head. Ksenia stood up and listened, but she could hardly hear anything.

She took her gun and the torch. “I’m going to check it.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.” She tucked the pistol under her sweater and picked up the ax. “Don’t worry about me.”

She turned to leave as Ramses said, “Wait … Ksenia.”

She stopped and glanced over her shoulder.

“Please be very, very careful there,” he said.

She weighed the ax in her hand. “I will.”

“When this is all over, I’ll take you to the Aziza restaurant. Best place in San Francisco.”

She snapped the torch on and smiled wearily. “Sounds like a deal. I’ll take you up on that.”

As Ksenia had left, Ramses got back to the middle hinge. With half a dozen powerful blows he broke it off. His muscles were tensed and beads of sweat dripped down his forehead but he was glad that he was winning this battle. He rested the sledgehammer against the wall and removed the broken mountain screws. Then he inserted the crowbar into the gap between the door and the doorjamb. He used some force to spring the door away from the frame. The metal resisted, but he maintained pressure on the tool and soon heard faint creaking. His hands were shaking and his T-shirt was damp. Useless. The gap was too narrow yet.

He moved the crowbar side to side to free it up and tried to separate the lower hinge but the weight of the heavy door was pressing on it. Using the perforator, he broke part of the masonry around where the lower hinge was anchored into the wall. In a minute, in the middle of the process, the perforator howled to a stop. The wailing of the alarm system ceased, too. There was brief silence, followed by the sounds of running feet. He squeezed the tool trigger multiple times, unplugged the cable and reconnected it into another socket of the extension cord. To no avail. There was no power.

The darkness of the corridor was torn by the beam of the flashlight and he saw Ksenia dashing toward him on the linoleum punctuated with moonlit patches. As she ran up to him, he saw fright and panic reflected in her exhausted face.

“It’s no good.” She was breathing heavily. “They’ve broken through!”

“Shit!” Ramses said. “I haven’t finished here yet.”

He heard deep growling echoing in the hollow space of the stairwell. The shuddersome sounds got under his skin.

“Then do something!” She was on the verge of hysteria. “They’re coming up!”

He dropped the tool and grabbed the edge of the door.

“I’m gonna make a gap,” he said. “And you try to squeeze in.”

“Okay!” Ksenia put the torch into her jeans pocket.

He pulled at the door using his entire force and wrenched it until the gap was wide enough for Ksenia to slip in.

Inside the armory, Ksenia took out the torch and had a look around. It was a tiny room with no windows. There was a rack of weapons on the wall and two rows of lockers.

Ramses put his head through. “What do you got?”

“Not much,” she said, opening a locker. “Most of the weaponry was taken away when the pandemonium began.” She took out a backpack and threw it at Ramses. “Here. Take this!” He caught it with one hand.

She gave him four hand grenades, which he put into the backpack. One by one. Quickly. But very carefully.

“And this,” she said, handing him an AK-47 assault rifle, a shortened variation used by the police.

The morbid moaning could be heard more distinctly now. Ramses turned his head to the left and saw dark creatures lurking at the threshold of the corridor. He held his breath and gulped.

“Get the mags!” he said in a loud whisper. “The dead ones are here!”

Ksenia was slamming frantically the locker doors in search of the ammunition. Her torch beam grew feeble, and the light terminated. It was pitch dark in the room again. She beat the flashlight against her palm and flipped the switch on and off, but it wouldn’t function.

“The cell phone!” she said. “Give it to me!”

He took the cell phone out of his pocket, turned it on and gave it to her. She cast the scanty screen light around and kept on looking. Her face was glowing in the white light of the display. For a second he imagined she was a distant lighthouse showing the seaway in the blackness of the night.

A young woman clad in blood-stained pajamas made shuffling steps along the corridor in the vanguard of the ghastly procession. The moon threw its silver light on her disfigured face. Her bare feet were leaving filthy undulating trails on the floor. She raised her arms and gave a hoarse moan. A police officer in a tunic was walking behind her, his jaws clacking. A group of other automatons followed them slow but steady. Nearer with every step.

Ramses’s heart grew sick. Blood was pulsing in his head. He aimed the Grach pistol and squeezed a round into the civilian woman’s face. There was a wet sound and the female collapsed.

Ksenia’s frightened face appeared in the gap. “This is all there is.” She slipped three banana-shaped magazines into his hands and then pushed through a sniper rifle. Ramses shouldered the rifle, never taking his eyes off the approaching monsters.

“We got no time to be choosy,” he said, attaching a magazine to the AK-47. He fired a series of shots. The hot spent cartridges propelled through the gloomy dark and fell down with a ringing sound. All the bullets hit the policeman’s chest, which did not stop him. “We gotta fall back!”

The crazies were advancing. Frenzied hunger was pushing their unsteady feet forward. And their prey was so close.

Ksenia put her right leg through the gap. The rough edges of the door tore the front of her sweater and scratched her cheek as she tried to shove herself out. The cell phone dropped to the floor. The screen shattered and faded out. Her leg was caught in the narrow space between the door and the door frame, and tongs of pain squeezed her thigh.

“I’m stuck,” she cried out, cold claustrophobia gripping her. “Ramses, I can’t move!”

For a nanosecond, Ramses was bewildered to hear Ksenia say his first name. He pulled the door away with one hand and used the other hand to wrestle her leg out of the metal trap.

The group of the undead was nearing. He fired a series of slugs into the approaching robotic creatures. Two of them sprawled to the floor like logs, others stumbled and fell on top of them. He switched the firing mode of the AK-47 to single shot to use the ammo sparingly. The created pile of bodies bought him some more time. He snatched the cell phone off the floor and shoved it into his backpack.

“Get down on the floor,” he said to Ksenia, “with your head in the far corner of the room.”

“What? But I—,” Ksenia said.

Ramses didn’t try to explain what he was up to. Every second was at stake now. The pile-up on the floor started to untangle. He cast a worried glance and was paralyzed with horror. A living corpse of a teenage boy had risen to his feet and was pushing his way toward him. He was wearing a black Nike woolen cap with a piece of advice saying “Just Do It” written in white letters.

Ramses turned to Ksenia. “Just do it, baby,” he said suppressing a nervous chuckle in his throat. “I’ll get to you pronto.”

“Okay,” Ksenia gave a quick nod and disappeared in the depth of the armory.

Ramses grabbed all his gear and made a crazy dash to the end of the corridor. He looked back. The ghouls walked up to the armory door and slammed their fists trying to break through. More dead visitors were seeping into the corridor through the entrance.

Now, this is a real fuck-up, Ramses thought.

He turned the corner. It was an L-corridor, and he faced a dead end. He put the backpack and the sniper rifle down on the floor, shouldered his AK-47 and clutched a lemon-shaped hand grenade. He pulled out the safety pin and took a wide swing, sending the grenade into the midst of the deadheads. He dived for cover behind the corner just a moment before a loud blast roared in the darkness, tearing the dead meat into shreds and breaking the window glass out. He looked around the corner and saw twitching body parts on the floor. The rearguard ghouls were still advancing.

Ramses grabbed another hand grenade, yanked the pin out and threw it as far as he could. The throw was not successful. The grenade hit the wall, bounced away and rolled right up to the armory door. He hid behind the corner, adjusting the backpack and gripping another bomb in his hand. The bang was humongous and it shook the corridor. The metal door caved in.

The sniper rifle was too clunky to carry around, and he had no ammo for it. He made a quick decision to ditch it. He detached the scope, put it in his backpack and ran toward the living dead.

Ramses stood within the safe distance from the dead and discharged his bullets into them. Bodies covered the floor.

There was one living dead policeman standing. He locked his dead gaze on Ramses. Ramses fired at the dead man’s skull. Dark blood spurted out in a fountain and the dead cop collapsed.

Total silence reigned for a couple seconds. Even the wind outside was still. Then the broken door moaned and came crashing down.

“Ksenia! You okay?!” he shouted, turning in the direction of the noise.

He heard coughing and Ksenia’s voice: “Yes.”

He shuddered, as out of the corner of his eye, his peripheral vision registered a movement in the pile of bodies. His eyes widened, seeing the dead teenager creeping out of it. Or rather the upper half of him. The grenade blast had torn his torso off from the lower part. Coils of guts were unrolling out of his abdomen. He clawed the floor in front of him and moved forward. His moonlit face was contorted with rage.

Ramses pulled the trigger pad, but the AK-47 mag was empty. He took out his Grach but the dead boy was already at his feet, ready to bite him with his bleeding mouth. Ramses kicked him in the head while he was fumbling with the machine gun.

There was a sudden gunshot and the living dead boy’s face exploded.

In the doorway, two-handing her Makarov’s pistol stood Ksenia. The smoke was rising from the muzzle. Ramses took a deep sigh and gave a nod of appreciation to her.

The place was reeking of rotten flesh. The cold wind blew through the broken window and carried away the stench. Outside, the sky was getting pink. The morning was coming. Ramses cringed. He was getting used to the protection of the dark.

“Quick!” Ksenia shouted. “Upstairs!”

They ran to the exit at the end of the corridor. A female creature was standing on the floor landing, blocking their way. Ramses slammed her on the head with the butt of the assault rifle. The creature fell down the stairs on top of other ghouls.

Ramses slapped a fresh magazine into his Kalashnikov and they ran all the way up to the fifth floor.

“The ladder,” Ksenia said, pointing at the fire ladder outside the double windows. Without thinking twice, Ramses opened the first window. The second one was barred, and they had to use their last hand grenade to break the bars.

When the way outside was free, they stepped out of the window onto the narrow ledge, coming along the building wall.

A horde of moaning psychos appeared at the beginning of the corridor just at the moment when they started descending down the ladder. Ksenia was the first to go. Ramses followed her. Ksenia’s long hair was blowing about in the icy wind. She lost her footing on one of the rungs, slipped and nearly fell off the ladder.

They got down into the police station parking lot and had a look around. The parking lot was surrounded with a high brick fence, razor wire running along its perimeter. They crouched behind a black Lada.

Ramses fished out the car keys. “Let’s locate that Opel.”

It was not so hard. They spotted an old and well-used blue Opel Corsa in a distant corner of the parking lot. Two dead ones were shambling about as if drunkards shopping for cars in a dealership. Dispatching them would attract undesirable attention, and Ramses and Ksenia walked around them in a wide arc, hiding behind the cars and vans.

They opened the driver’s door and switched off the alarm system.

Ramses turned the key to warm up the engine. “Stay inside,” he said to Ksenia. “I’ll check the gates.” He left the backpack on the passenger seat and slammed the door shut.

The first sun rays shone shyly on the city. It was a clear morning, and it was not snowing. He went the length of the fence to the gates. He was shaking with cold and his body temperature was dramatically falling. He could feel the frost was compressing his heart muscle. His T-shirt was a bad protection against the severe winter cold. He started running to get warm.

As he reached the gates, he saw they were closed. Though the power was out, he could open them manually with ease.

He entered the checkpoint. It was empty. Plastic cups and newspapers littered the floor. Puffs of his warm breath filled the small gatehouse. He took a little break from the harsh wind and then went out into the cold again.

He crawled under the gates on his stomach and elbows and hid behind a lamppost. He peeked cautiously around it. The street was swarming with the dead. Lots of abandoned cars. An emergency vehicle was sitting in the middle of the street. Two cars had crashed into it. The lights of the emergency vehicle were still blazing, but there was no sound of the siren. It must have broken during the collision.

A white Subaru was parked near the gates. He made out corpses inside the car. Mutilated. A kid seat had been dragged out of the car and thrown on the snow-covered ground. Blood splatters all over the seat. No sign of the kid anywhere. He cupped his mouth with his hand. A scanty tear froze instantly on his manly cheek.

“What the fuck is going on here?” he said slowly.

***

Just when Ramses and Ksenia pulled out of the parking lot into the infested street, the piercing shriek of an air-raid siren choked off the monotonous wailing of the triggered car alarm systems and made a flock of sparrows take wing off trees and inactive trolleybus wires.

The traffic in the city was paralyzed. There were stranded cars sitting even on the sidewalks. Ramses maneuvered the Opel around the cars and the debris, looking frantically for gaps between the vehicles. They nearly hit a couple of survivors, a man and a woman, who whisked past them, riding a motorbike. The undead stretched out their hands toward the riders, but they were too slow to capture their prey. In only one day, the city streets were filled with fear and death. Hundreds of hungry eyes were pointed at the old blue Opel Corsa, which was making its way through the ravaged city.

“Where are we going now?” Ksenia asked. They had not had the time for discussing this issue before. Now it was the most vital one.

“I really don’t know,” Ramses said. He looked at Ksenia. She was huddled on the passenger seat and hid her hands under the sweater sleeves. It was still freezing in the car. “How about your place? To rescue your family?”

Ksenia lapsed into silence. She was sad and shivering with cold.

“Dad was … everything I had … in my life. He was my family.”

“I’m sorry,” Ramses said. In a minute he asked her, “You have any other relatives?”

“No.” She paused. “An aunt. In Moscow.”

Ramses said, “We’ll head to my hotel then. Let’s hole up there if the place is safe. My friend Steve must be still there.” He turned the steering wheel to avoid a bump against an attacking living dead. He was driving on the separating strip now. “I hope he is. We gotta stick together.”

They drove into an area where the power was obviously on. Some traffic lights kept on functioning, blinking only yellow lights for the indifferent immobile vehicles and the uncaring pedestrians from hell.

Ksenia gave Ramses the directions to the hotel.

“The Arkaim Hotel is half an hour ride from here.”

A pair of red fuzzy dice was dangling from the rearview mirror. There were distracting Ramses from driving and he took them off and tossed them on the back seat. He looked through the windshield at a burning car.

“I wish it were a dream,” he said. “And I wish I snapped out of this dreadful nightmare.”

“Can murderers be afraid?” Ksenia said with sudden anger.

Ramses breathed out a sigh. “It was an accident. I haven’t murdered anyone. I mean … This is all about self-defense. That kid pounced on me himself. Now, this,” he waved at the chaos outside, “is worse than what I’ve done.”

“Sorry,” Ksenia said. “I just don’t know where to go, who to trust.”

“I see. Sure thing, I’m afraid. I’m scared shitless. You don’t see dead people every day, you know. Especially the sort that walk around the streets and devour other people using no kitchen utensils.”

Ksenia opened the glove compartment covered with hot babe stickers and fished out an apple, two stale cheese sandwiches, a gas lighter, a pack of cigarettes and a penknife. She put everything into the backpack.

Ramses could feel the welcome warmth gradually returning to his body and numb extremities thanks to the heater.

“Brr! What a cold! Why did you choose to live here?” he said without taking his eyes off the road.

“I didn’t. I was born here.”

She dug into the apple greedily. She handed him one sandwich, and he wolfed it down in one go.

The danger was scattered around the city. Here and there, groups of creatures were moving around. A female monster wearing an expensive fur coat sat on the sidewalk, eating a piece of flesh. Blood and drool streamed down her chin. Ksenia closed her eyes and turned away from the window. Then she opened them and shoved the half-eaten apple into the backpack in disgust.

“Right there.” She pointed in the direction of a bridge. “Behind that bridge. The hotel is on the riverbank.”

An overturned bus had blocked a large portion of the road through the bridge.

“Uh-oh,” Ramses said and applied the brakes. “Not good. We can’t drive through this jam.” The car shuddered to a halt in the middle of the bridge.

“Let’s go back,” Ksenia said. “There might be crazies in that bus.”

Ramses strained his ears.

“Wait,” he said, letting out tendrils of vapor through his nose and raising his hand. “Think I can hear something.”

The ambient sounds were a cacophony. It was composed of the banshee-like scream of the air-raid siren, car alarms and incessant moaning of the horrid creatures. Now another disturbing sound added. It was a rumbling noise coming from behind the bus. Ramses could not see what it was because of it. The thunder was getting louder.

Ksenia said she could hear it, too, and looked at Ramses, hoping to find the answer to her questions on his worried face.

There was the screeching metal sound, and the body of the bus was burst open by the brutal force of an army tank, rushing along the bridge at full speed with the turret facing backward.