posted by toddkelley on Apocrypha, Novel

Downtown Traffic

Lieutenant Clarence Tate lead his team of four out of Saint Francis Memorial Hospital, and out onto the streets of San Francisco. The retrieval transport that was scheduled to rescue them from the hospital never arrived.

They found it two blocks away at the corner of Jones and Sutter Street. The large gunmetal black van had been caught in the intersection, blocked three ways by a mass of abandoned cars. He speculated that when the transport came to this position, they probably got trapped by a horde following them. There were no roaming corpses in the area. The soldiers from the transport must’ve abandoned the vehicle and fled for their lives, with their monsters in pursuit.

After a few minutes of reconnaissance, he ordered everyone forward. They continued to move east on Sutter Street, which seemed to be the only route with no enemy presence. Their journey was trouble-free until they reached Grant Street. Ahead of them, Kearny Street was crawling with corpses who seem to have found a meal. Tate was hoping it wasn’t the Retrieval Team.

The only direction they had was to head south, down Grant Avenue. The journey was uneventful, until they reached the 3-way intersection of Grant, O’Farrell and Market Street.

Just as they arrived, Tate caught multiple movements just ahead. Using military hand instructions, he ordered his group to stop and hide. All five of them crouched behind a smoldering Mercedes S-Class 10 yards from the intersection.

Officer Hanna Johnson, an unusually tall Black woman positioned herself next to Tate.

“What do you see?” she whispered.

“Multiples at the intersection.” He unshouldered his P90 sub machine rifle. “I count four. Get the boys in position.”

Without another word, Hanna nodded and then signaled Officer Milwaukee an Officer Scott to find attack positions.

They both carefully and quietly moved out in opposite directions and found good line-of-sights for their targets. Once the three of them were in position, they looked back at Tate for the next call.

Ivana was amazed at the organized operation of signals and coordinated movements.

It was quiet.

Insanely quiet.

Back when the world was normal, you took for granted all the sounds of the city. Even at it’s quietest with no one around, there still was a good amount of background noise in the world. Now, there was nothing. You could hear the people next to you lightly breathing. You could hear the wind blowing trash as far as a block down the street.

Tate took another look out at their targets. The four corpses hadn’t moved. They stood scattered in-between the big traffic jam at the 3 way corner; 3 women and a small boy. He used finger gestures with each of his officers to designate their specific targets. One at a time, they nodded and opened their scopes on the head of their corpse.

While the officers set up their attack, Dr. Ivana couldn’t help but study the dead things in their unnatural habitat. All four stood slightly swaying with blank looks on their faces. It was the same look she saw from the drunks the Police use to deliver to the ER. She took mental notes on a few things. She wondered why they didn’t attack each other. She concluded their must be some type of recognition; maybe smell or body heat registration. They didn’t seem to have any higher brain functions. They didn’t use weapons. They didn’t know how to use door handles, or operate any type of complicated machinery. She knew she would need to study them more. That would require obtaining an active specimen to run tests on.

Dr. Creed came out of her thoughts just as Tate started a silent countdown with his fingers. When he reached 2, the four of them quickly rose to their feet in unison and each fired a silenced shot at their targets. All four of the corpses jerked at the same time when the bullets cracked open their skulls. The bodies fell to the ground with what seemed like giant thuds in the silent wind. The four soldiers quickly crouched down once again, just in case the noise brought more walkers to the intersection.

After a minute, Tate gestured for his team to move forward toward the intersection. The each reformed a tight group and quickly moved through the maze of automobiles. Their diamond formation was primarily to protect Ivana Creed. Tate took the front position, while Hanna brought up the rear, making sure they weren’t being followed. Officers Milwaukee and Scott were positioned on either side, with the Doctor at the center of the group. Earlier on, Tate had given her a gun; a pristine subcompact Glock G29. She held it in her sweaty left hand, but kept the safety enabled.

As they reached the intersection they they turned to head east on Market Street. With the others occupied, checking the targets they just shot up close, Ivana was the first to see them. She looked down the street in the direction they were traveling, and nearly felt her heart explode in her chest.

Officer Hanna Johnson was to first to hear the doctor’s gasp. She swung her P90 up from the corpse at her feet, in the direction the Doctor was facing and caught the frightening wall of silent corpses twenty yards away. The others followed suit just as the first corpse opened his mouth and let out a deafening wale.

“Run!” Tate yelled, yanking Ivana by the shoulder and pulling her west down Market Street. He could hear the sound of his team’s boots hitting the asphalt hard and the clamoring of the assault rifles as they weaved their way through the mass of cars. The sound of hellish moans increased as the mass of undead all slowly pushed their way after them.

Tate knew this was bad. He knew the dinner bell cry would carry like loudspeakers through the silent city and bring any and all walkers their way.

“We have to get out of their line of site!” he shouted to his team, as he turned north at the next street.

Those were the words the group heard Tate say as he raced around the corner and out of site. He had run ahead of the team, while the other three kept their cadence at a speed that Ivana could keep up with.

As the rest of the team raced around the corner, they nearly ran into a frozen Clearance Tate standing in the middle of the street. Ahead of them, was another wall of lumbering corpses coming directly at them. It was apparent the waling had started a tsunami of walking dead coming from all directions.

They all turned to retreat in the opposite direction when Tate heard Officer Scott call out.

“Sir!” he called to Tate, who had already reached the intersection.

Take looked back to see Officer Scott heading for the nearby subway entrance. The big Bay Area Rapid Transit logo had an arrow pointing down toward a stairwell. The others stopped and looked at Tate for orders.

The Lieutenant had to think fast. He wasn’t knowledgable about San Francisco. He had only been stationed there for a few weeks. If they went for the stairs and it led to a dead end, then they’d be done. But they couldn’t stay on the open streets. It was almost certain that corpses from all directions were heading their way.

“Fuck it! We go mass transit!” he ordered, pointing to the BART entrance.

Tate didn’t notice how close the first horde had gotten. It was the smell that woke him up. He turned to see a couple pair of arms almost at his neck.

“Shit!”. He started to peddle backwards. He tried to ready his gun, but his shoulder strap had gotten tangled with his elbow.

He fell on his ass.

That’s when he heard the sound of rifles with silencers firing from behind. The three corpses that were on him, jerked backwards and fell. He turned to see Scott and Milwaukee firing into the crowd. He staggered to his feet.

Officer Hanna Johnson was the first to descend the stairs toward the train station. As her feet shuffled down the steps, she noticed that she couldn’t see the bottom of the stairway. They led to total blackness. As she flipped on the flashlight on her P90, her right foot stubbed something soft. It sent her flying and falling into the darkness.

Ivana was right behind her, and saw the amputated leg on the steps that Hanna had tripped over. She saw the officer fly forward and twist into the darkness.

Hanna was dazed. She had hit the bottom of the stairs, head and left shoulder first. On instinct, she tried to tuck and roll. She was partially successful, as her body tumbled across the floor in the darkness, until she hit the wall. For a moment, she didn’t know where she was or what was happening. It was almost like her brain needed to reboot.

“Help!” she heard coming from a slight distance. The sound of Dr. Creed’s frantic cry woke her up, just as the moldy touch of rancid arms started to crawl across her body. The smell was unbearable. Moans and chattering teeth were all around her.

She started to flail uncontrollably. She felt something bite down on her calf, and panicked. She kicked violently and felt a skull implode inward around her boot heel.

“Their biting me! Their biting me!!!” she hysterically cried out, pushing herself along the floor away from the moans.

Suddenly, the darkness around her was filled with flickering red and white light. The the road flair came soaring from the top of the steps from Tate’s hand. It bounced of the back wall back wall of the stairwell and fell at the feet of the three walking corpses, and the one crawling corpse that had been feeling around for Hanna in the darkness.

Before her eyes could adjust to new light, Tate’s controlled bursts of gunfire ripped into the three walkers, knocking them silly and falling lifeless to the floor. Hanna pulled her sidearm and double-tapped two shots into the crawler moments later.

Milwaukee and Scott had made it to the the top of the steps, constantly firing shots into the two oncoming hordes, as Tate and Dr. Creed reached Hanna at the bottom of the steps.

“You Ok?” The Lieutenant asked.

“Fucker bit me!!” she hysterically yelled.

As the road flare started to die down, Ivana grabbed the tactical flashlight out of Tate’s belt and shined on Hanna’s leg to examine the wound.

She let out an encouraging sigh.

“Looks like there’s no damage. It didn’t get through your clothes.”

At the top of the stairs, Officer Milwaukee exhausted the second-to-last ammo magazine and let his P90 fall to his side.

“This is pointless.” He yelled.

The approaching hordes were only 5-10 yards away. He scanned all around until he looked up and saw the reinforced steel gate used to lock down the train station at night.

“Danny, help!” he yelled as he jumped up and grabbed the rolling gate. It started to slowly roll downward.

Officer Scott. Lowered his gun and helped.

With the two of them helping, the gate came thundering down and locked into clamps that were drilled into the asphalt sidewalk. The two officers managed to close the 4 attached Master Locks into place just as fingers started to reach through the gate at them. The gate gave a little movement space inward, but the two officers had already made their way down the steps to the others.

“That’ll hold ‘em.” Milwaukee said. “But at the same time, we don’t have the combo’s for those locks so we’re trapped.”

To the right of the stairwell, was yet another set up stairs and a parallel escalator leading down into the subway station.

“You good to walk on you’re own?” Tate asked Hanna, who braced against the wall and pulled herself up.

“Yeah, I’m good.” She replied. “Sorry. I lost it there, for a moment.”

Tate gathered himself and tried to focus on their next move, while the moans and smells of the undead came from upstairs. The road downward was going to be a lot more dangerous then the streets. They were going to have to journey down into the BART station; a darkened, confined space. There was no telling if there were ten walkers or a thousand down there.

“Alright fellas. Let’s get back in the game.” Tate pulled another a couple more road flares from his belt. “We’re going down in a diamond. Protect the Doctor. When we get down there, if it moves, clip it in the head, and keep moving.”

The two flares sprang to life and Tate tossed them down into the blackness. They all watched as the two flare stick bounced their way twenty yards down into the station. Right off, they could see three walking corpses slowly shuffling nowhere.

“Alright people, let’s move.”

The four officers raised their P90 Assault Rifles and quickly started to downward and into the station. The flickering red luminance of the burning flares lit up the undead targets like it was daylight. Immediately, the sounds of compressed rifle shots went off around Doctor Creed. Moments later, the three walkers ahead of them fell lifelessly to the floor.

The group moved deep into the station, revealing another darkened corridor to their right. More flares were tossed into the darkness. This time, there weren’t any other enemies. They made their way deeper into the station until they discovered mass of escalators and stairwells heading both upward and downward.

Officer Scott and Milwaukee found the transportation maps on the wall nearby. They both shined their flashlight on the large, intricate system map, while Tate And Hanna kept their eyes open for any movement in the area.

“Okay, we’re looking at the BART trains downstairs and the MUNI trains upstairs.” Officer Scott called out.

“We need to head west.” Tate said. “There’s a shopping center, somewhere. We got about an hour of daylight left.”

“The Westfield Mall looks like it’s the next BART station over. The station looks like it’s connect directly to the mall. A quick trip in the tunnel, and we should get there, no problem.”

Dr. Ivana grew even more nervous. “You mean we gotta go in to the tunnels?”

“That’s the plan. We move or die.”

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