For a few seconds I lay there, trying to catch my breath. Finally, I got up on all fours and dragged myself over to the flashlight, which cast a faint, ghostly glow. I grabbed it and shook it, muttering a prayer to all the gods that it wasn’t broken.
To my relief, the beam glowed bright and steady. I shined it on the body I’d stepped on. It was the corpse of a woman in civilian clothes, bloated by gasses. My left boot had punctured her abdomen allowing all the fluids to drain. The body looked like a grotesque, inflatable doll. Disgusted, I looked away. When I passed the beam of light around the rest of the room, the horrified scream I’d held in flew out of my throat.
38
Lucia couldn’t see a thing. The chemicals had irritated her unprotected eyes so badly she could barely open them. What if my corneas are burned? As if I didn’t have enough to worry about.
The first thing she noticed was a faint smell of ozone and the hum of the air conditioner. She felt her way along a wall until she came to a sink where she splashed her eyes with lots of water. When the burning subsided, Lucia convinced herself she wasn’t going to go blind, but she’d have a bad case of conjunctivitis for a few days.
With water streaming down her face, she looked up. The airlock was closed again and the red light above the door was back on. Through the disinfectant steam, Lucia could make out two figures. Those bastards just wouldn’t give up.
The disinfection process only lasted a couple of minutes. Lucia had spent half that time flushing out her eyes. That left very little time to decide her next move. In desperation, she reached for the phone on the wall. It didn’t have any buttons but she got a line out the second she picked up the receiver. Wherever the terminal was, no one was at the other end, so she hung up in frustration. Her eyes fell on a tray of surgical supplies. She grabbed a small scalpel the size of a butter knife. It wasn’t much of a weapon, but it was better than nothing.
A door at the back of the room caught her eye. When she opened it, she felt a gentle stream of air. A lab technician could have told her that it was an osmotic pressure lock and that the difference in the pressure in the rooms caused the air to circulate inward to prevent leakage. But Lucia didn’t know a thing about airlocks or osmotic pressure. She mistakenly thought there was a window that opened to the outside and that she could get out that way.
Feeling confident, she strode through the door. Ultraviolet lamps lit up a corridor that led to a line of rooms with large windows. In the first room, someone who wasn’t wearing a hazmat suit was bent over a table, moving clumsily around something hidden by his body.
“Hey! You! I need help!” Lucia pounded on the glass to get the technician’s attention. “Hey! Can you hear me?”
When the man turned, the smile on Lucia’s face froze. The guy’s face was covered by the burst veins and had the vacant look Lucia knew all too well. He was an Undead.
With a groan, the Undead guy pounced on the glass with such force, he shook the entire structure. Terrified, Lucia stepped back, braced for the glass to give way, but whoever designed that cubicle had done a good job. The window withstood the barrage of punches.
A siren wailed nearby. The entry lock had just opened and her two stalkers were in the next room. Lucia fled down the corridor past more rooms. She was mesmerized by what she saw: Each cubicle held Undead in different states of decay. In one room, an Undead’s head and torso were strapped to a gurney. In another, a half dozen heads floated in formaldehyde in jars arranged on a shelf. To her horror, the heads opened their eyes and glared at her, snapping their jaws as she passed by.
The back door opened into another laboratory similar to the first. Her heart pounding wildly, Lucia realized that that last door had a lock on the inside. She pushed with all her strength, closed the door behind her, and bolted it.
She quickly backed away from the door and tripped over a chair that a technician had left in the middle of the room. She tried to keep her balance and for a second she thought she was going to stay on her feet, but she was falling too fast. She threw out her left hand in desperation to grab hold of a control panel, but her fingers slid over the buttons, pressing them randomly as she fell. The razor-sharp scalpel in her right hand cut a wide arc on her leg. The thin slit in her white nurse’s uniform was immediately stained red. That cut was thin and shallow but it was bleeding profusely.
“Awwww fuck!” she cried out in pain and cursed her clumsiness.
There was a thud on the other side of the door. Dragging her leg and cursing, Lucia braced herself on the control panel and got to her feet. Her eyes fell on the buttons she’d accidentally pressed. Horrified, she read the label on the paneclass="underline" CELL OPENING SYSTEM. The muffled groan she heard outside the door told her exactly which cells she’d stupidly opened.
39
My cry of horror faded as my lungs run out of air. I was so overcome, I forgot to breathe for a few seconds. The room was a huge mausoleum, a scene from a movie that ends tragically.
Dozens of bodies were scattered everywhere in twos and threes. Most were swollen like the body I’d tripped over, but a few were dried out like thousand-year-old mummies. There were an equal number of men and women, mostly civilians, but a few wore military uniforms. Everybody clasped the same kind of crumpled paper cup.
“There you are!” I heard Prit’s familiar voice behind me as he rocketed into the room. “How the hell’d you get in here?” he asked, when he was sure I was in one piece. “If I hadn’t heard you screaming like a madman, I’d never…” Prit’s last words hung in the air.
The two legionnaires behind him stopped short when they got a look at the scene. “What the hell…” one of them mumbled.
A terrible thought occurred to me. I stepped carefully around a body and walked over to a table in the middle of the room. An enormous pan sat on a camp stove. Dozens of empty soft drink bottles were scattered around it, along with two smaller bottles. I picked one up and shined my flashlight on it. A skull and crossbones printed on an orange label smiled at me. Below it were a chemical formula and the hospital’s logo. Across the label, someone had scrawled “hydrocyanic acid.”
“Mass suicide,” I muttered, letting the bottle fall into the pan.
Any liquid left in that pan had evaporated long ago. No doubt it was once filled to the brim with soft drinks laced with that powerful poison.
“Who are they? Why’d they do that?” Prit asked.
“They are the last survivors of the Autonomous Government of Greater Madrid,” Tank said, “the ones whose evacuation convoy never made it to Barajas Airport.” My gaze wandered over those dirty, thin bodies dressed in suits and ties.
One of the legionnaires whistled through his teeth. “That must’ve been a fucking bitch to discover all convoys had left.”
“They must’ve felt so safe in this bunker that it didn’t occur to them to look outside until days later.” I looked down at the body of a middle-aged woman sitting in an expensive leather chair, her head resting on her chin, her arms limp at her side. She was elegantly dressed. Her very pricey pearl necklace was partially covered by her dirty, matted blonde hair. I shuddered when I realized who she was. Before the Apocalypse, I’d seen her at a number of press conferences.
“They were stranded with no provisions or weapons,” Prit said as he picked up my train of thought. “They had two choices: throw their lot in with the Undead or slowly starve. The bravest ones probably tried to leave.” The Ukrainian clicked his tongue at the thought. “Those who stayed behind chose a faster, less painful way to escape.”