The Hungry (Book 2): The Wrath of God (8 page)

"Ripper? Brubeck? Psycho?"

Miller's voice sailed like a paper airplane down empty hallways, only to return faint and badly shaken. There was no answer. She walked further still, almost on tiptoe, the empty gun clenched in her right fist. She spotted a bit of light. The lab door was partly open. She could hear muffled conversation nearby and movements beyond the moveable white wall. She was not alone, though the premises seemed empty.

Miller entered the room. The lobby area was shadowy, but she could see light coming from the far side of the large laboratory, so she wasn't in total darkness. Nevertheless, the blind corners seemed packed with imaginary zombies. Miller saw large, bulky desks with scattered papers. Medical and office equipment sat in hulking silence throughout the room, as if playing possum but ready to pounce. She felt exposed and vulnerable, especially since her only weapon had no bullets. Her eyes couldn't seem to adjust. For a long moment, she stood where she was, listening to the whispering darkness, hearing nothing clear enough for her to understand. She couldn't smell anything but the medical cream she'd rubbed on her upper lip ages before, but something was wrong and she knew it.

Miller could feel the rumbling of the generators as a low, thin vibration under her feet. She swallowed dryly. It was ridiculous for her to stand in the dark as if she were still a rookie, waiting to be chum for an undead feeding frenzy. Might as well suck it up. It took her a moment to find the light switch. She flicked it on.

"Shit on a shingle."

Miller gaped. The room was a horror show out of a mad scientist movie. Everything was clinical and clean, bloodless. A shelf held neat rows of lab reference books. Someone's ID badge sat up against a microscope. Decapitated corpses lay on medical tables, partially dissected, chests pried obscenely apart. Severed limbs, unnamed innards, and other body parts lay neatly on clean white sheets, said organs and limbs evidently arranged by size—or, perhaps, by gender. They were dark with decay. And this time Miller felt her bile rise. For once she wasn't hungry. Miller walked deeper into the lab.

Something across the room looked like an oddly distorted aquarium with strange lighting. Her mind didn't want to accept what it was seeing. Miller forced herself to move closer to the odd collection of jars.

Several decapitated heads floated in a faintly greenish-brown liquid, with various lengths of hair that drifted, resembling seaweed. The heads were packed in large glass containers, staring blankly out into the room. Someone here had been experimenting on the living dead, and it had clearly gone on for many months, if not years.

Fascinated, Miller took a step toward one of the glass jars. The severed head was from a woman, and wrinkled up by the embalming liquid as it was, Miller couldn't tell her age. She'd had dark hair, an aquiline nose and full lips. Her eyes were closed, thankfully. If the scene weren't so morbid, Miller would have thought the woman pretty. Despite her intense desire to be anywhere else, Miller forced herself to look closely. She wanted to turn away, but this had been a person once, someone who still deserved respect. Miller herself had been near enough to zombie-hood to have some sympathy for the devil.
We're all human, after all
. She brought her face closer to the jar, though her instincts fought the move.
All because of an experiment…

Miller closed her eyes. She shook her head, on the verge of tears
. Poor girl.
She looked back, and stopped, again staring at the face in the jar.
I would have sworn her eyes were closed a second ago.
Miller looked closer still. Her pulse sped up. They had been closed. They were now wide open.

The dead woman blinked. Her lips pulled back in a rigid grin.

"God damn," Miller said, under her breath.

The head grimaced. The eyes focused. It saw Miller, saw
through
Miller and seemed to stare right into her troubled soul. The jaw moved up and down, the thing gnashing its teeth in a useless attempt to get free. To
feed
. The mindless hunger and hopelessness were clear in those milky-white eyes. And then somehow the severed head managed to move forward to the edge of the thick glass jar, flapping its tongue as if to lick her face.

Miller jumped back. Her hip banged into another one of the jars. That one tipped over, the loose lid clattering to the floor, and spilling some of the foul liquid out onto the pristine tiles. Miller whirled and managed to catch it before the head—a man's this time—rolled out to crash at her feet. Her empty gun clattered to the floor. The head in the second jar was also awake. He repeated the piranha imitation that the first female had demonstrated, snapping and licking mindlessly. Miller steadied him on his perch. She backed away from the jar, found the empty 9mm on the floor. She heard herself moaning faintly. Her nightmares returned in full force, spinning her close to the edge of sanity. Miller fancied she saw old Luther Grabowski's head in one of the medical jars, grinning and licking his decaying lips. Whispering for her to join them.

Miller needed time to think. She jogged into the maze of the inner lab, away from the muffled human voices. She ran blindly, hands at her sides, a little girl racing through a haunted house on Halloween. She stopped when she found herself in another large room, this one devoid of bodies. She retched.

"God in heaven."

Miller gathered herself. Some of the greenish-brown liquid had splashed on her hands as she'd righted the jar. She wiped them on her jeans. The gooey stuff was cold as the grave. God only knew what was in it. Miller ran to the long, white porcelain trough of a sink across the lab. She yanked on a tall faucet, but nothing came out. Miller retched again. She searched frantically for something to wipe the foul goop off her trembling hands.

Miller examined all the bottles that sat on one of the laboratory tables, then the drawers beneath them, in search of soap and towels or rags. She would have given anything for a gallon of hand sanitizer right about then. Finally she found an irrigation bottle marked "sterilized water." She put the empty weapon down and squirted it liberally on her hands. She leaned over the long sink and scoured her palms and fingers like someone with spiraling obsessive-compulsive disorder. When the bottle ran out, she wiped her reddened hands on her t-shirt. A little of her initial anxiety had dissipated.
What did you expect, Princess? Of course it's Frankenstein's lab. These assholes were nuts enough to endanger their own species. Sheppard was a willing part of it before he wised up. Get your shit wired tight. Start thinking, stop reacting.

One problem presented itself almost immediately. How the hell was she going to get back out of the lab? She was completely lost. In her frantic search for something to clean her hands, she had gotten even more turned around, and now she couldn't remember which way to go.
How do I get back to the entrance?

Miller listened. She heard someone talking not far away, back a ways and to the left. Those muffled voices from before? She decided that anyone who could still maintain a conversation was probably going to be breathing and thus on her side. She took a deep breath, closed her eyes for a moment, and regained her composure. Gripping the empty 9mm in her right hand, she followed the sound.

She heard someone's muffled laugh. Miller walked toward the noises. She opened a door, went into a cluttered closet. She backed up and found another way to follow the noise, this time through a medical office. The overhead light had been shot out. Someone or something was inside. Miller's heart kicked like a terrified mule. She squinted. Someone was seated there, as if waiting for her entrance. Someone who didn't move. Miller steadied herself. She waited for a time. Her eyes adjusted.

A white-haired, bearded scientist sat behind a metal desk, minus a face. He had his own Glock clutched in his right hand. He'd blown his brains out rather than be eaten.
Good move, Doc.
Miller searched for his magazine. His gun was empty as well. Someone had come through here and taken the ammunition, probably to make his or her own last stand a few moments later. This place had unleashed hell on earth.

Miller kept walking and entered another corridor. She walked on, heading toward the voices. One last hall, almost there. She sighed, came around the corner into another large laboratory, and found the other humans. What she discovered shocked her more than anything back in that dissection room.

Ripper, Brubeck, and Psycho were loading a live zombie onto the pallet truck. It was a body strapped to a stretcher, Hannibal the Cannibal in a leather bite mask and long restraints. Miller took it all in at once. Also on the small electric vehicle were more of the heads in jars, and some huge boxes marked "biohazard." The three men were efficient and cheerfully indifferent to the horror before them. They were laughing and joking as they worked. At least, they were until Psycho looked up and spotted Miller.

"The fuck?"

They all turned in her direction.

Ripper actually looked disappointed. "Aw, Sheriff. Now why'd you have to go ahead and wander off the reservation?"

"What the hell are you men doing in here?"

"I was just about to ask you the same question."

Miller raised the empty 9mm. She gripped it properly. "Stop what you are doing and put down your weapons. You're under arrest."

Brubeck blinked. "Under arrest?"

"Hell, you ain't gonna shoot us, Sheriff," said Ripper. But he kept his hands in plain sight anyway. She had their attention.

"You just keep telling yourself that, Ripper," Miller said. "Psycho, handcuff Ripper and Brubeck. Do it slowly." Miller kept the pistol trained steadily on Ripper's head.

Psycho reached behind him with an exaggerated slowness. He retrieved his handcuffs, and brought them to where Miller could see them. He let them dangle mockingly for a few seconds, and he grinned.

Then he threw them in her face.

Miller had the good sense and reflexes to duck. If she hadn't, her head would have been so much red and gray goo, because Ripper brought his pistol up and fired one shot where she had been standing just a millisecond before.

Her own gun was empty, so Miller ran for her life. She headed back into the laboratory, hoping to God that she would be able to find her way out the other side. She could hear the three mercenaries following clumsily behind her. She knew the ground, they didn't. Miller did her best to make this as difficult as possible for them. She ran zigzag, busily knocking over shelves and jars with heads as she passed. Body parts, heads, torsos, fluids, glass, everything crashed to the floor to block their way. Finally Miller paused to catch her breath. Two shots rang out, and holes appeared in the wall near her head. She kept running, ducking, bobbing and weaving.

Miller burst through a door and locked it behind her. She kept moving. A moment later, she found herself in a familiar corridor. If she remembered correctly, Sheppard's old lab was to the right and down two doors. She ran as hard as she could, and dodged into the lab before she could accidentally give her pursuers a clean shot.

"Nice of you to join us, Sheriff," said Rat. Hanratty was standing by a rack of computers, her left hand on that shapely hip. In her right hand she held a small automatic weapon, a mini-Uzi, cut down and wickedly efficient. It was held at low ready, pointed loosely in her direction.

"Major, your boys are trying to kill me!"

"What?" Lovell almost laughed.

Brubeck came into the lab first, weapon raised. He had murder on his face. Ripper and Psycho were right behind. They fanned out from force of habit but came to a full stop when they saw Hanratty.

"What's going on here, gentlemen?" Miller read Rat's confusion as genuine and was immediately relieved.

Ripper stepped up. He waived his hands, palm down, ordering Brubeck and Psycho to lower their weapons. They did, but only by a few inches. Brubeck continued to keep his blazing eyes on Miller. He wasn't planning to give her a kindly hug.

"Just following orders, Rat."

"Who's orders, Ripper? We're supposed to protect these people, not execute them."

"You don't need to know," Ripper said. "I'm truly sorry to have to do this to y'all, but I need y'all to hand over your weapons." And then Ripper brought up his M-4. Brubeck and Psycho did the same.

Rat saw the look in Brubeck's face. She hesitated, studied Miller and her men and came to a decision. She ejected the clip and the round in the chamber, and placed the weapon on the table next to her.

"This is mutiny," Rat said. "Your career will be toast. Think carefully."

Lovell disarmed himself. Sheppard rapidly did the same. Miller, knowing the thing was empty, placed her own useless 9mm on the floor. She scooted it away from her with her foot. It clattered as it skittered across the floor and under a bookshelf. Terrill Lee and Scratch just stood there, trying to look inconspicuous. Miller knew Scratch was thinking hard. She could see it his studied nonchalance. He was down-shifting into his reckless mode.

"It ain't mutiny, Rat," Ripper said. "See, you was never really in charge. From back at base on, this was always my mission. Unfortunately, you're about to become collateral damage. Come on, it's time to go."

Psycho and Brubeck came forward and collected their weapons. Psycho whispered, "Bitch, you should never have been in command in the first place."

Miller saw Scratch consider taking Brubeck down, but shook her head. The angles were wrong. Scratch understood. He relaxed again. Terrill Lee had come out of his shock and was scowling, probably working on something of his own. Miller studied Rat, who seemed genuinely confused.

"Indulge me," Rat said. "What's this all about, Ripper? Who issued those orders?"