Chapter 34: Cue and the Fall of the Vertical Village pt 2

Alex's eyes widened one last time, and she coughed hard before the light inside her simply disappeared.

Cue frowned, tears slipping down her cheeks as the battle continued. “I promise, Doc, we will go where you say,” she said one last time, kissing her knuckles.

“Fuck!” Daniel yelled. “God dammit, someone just grab that one now!”

Someone came up behind Cue and grabbed her around the waist, lifting her bodily off the ground and hauling her backwards.

Cue had a brief flash of Gunner and Trigger. Trigger was holding on to Gunner’s chest with her arms and legs and firing up the stairs at the inbred army coming down, while Gunner fired and used his lasers on the people coming up from below.

“Help me!” Cue screamed, biting and thrashing at the man holding her.

Gunner shifted and fired his lasers, the beams mere inches away from Cue’s face. Suddenly, all Cue could hear past the gunfire and screams was the sizzling of meat coming from behind her and the smell of roasting flesh.

The man’s body convulsed, squeezing her tighter as it backed up on its own. It flinched, hit a wall, and fell. When the body was finally on the ground, its grip loosened, and Cue was able to escape.

“We’re never going to get out of here!” Cue screamed, ducking into the corner of the stairway and firing both up the stairs and in front of her through the door. There was a wide passage there and a dark tunnel that led away. If only they could get there…

A deafening roar came from above, and the shooting instantly stopped

“Is that a—” one of the inbreds asked, but his voice was cut off by a shrill shriek of a zombie on the floor above them.

Their radios started crackling, many voices screaming at once, some begging, some crying, but all saying the same thing.

The gunfire had brought down a horde on the Vertical Village.

The inbred men looked at each other and then looked at Daniel and fled. Their loyalty only lasted as long as their safety did. But the moment they left the stairwell, they began to scream.

Daniel, bleeding from a gunshot wound to the chest, walked past Cue and the others slowly, his eyes glued ahead. They let him walk by, guns raised, and waited. When he got to the top of the stairs, he held the door open and looked out.

The blood drained from his face, and he slowly looked back down the stairs at them.

“The soakers got out of the pond,” he said flatly, his eyes wide with sheer terror. He looked at Gunner, “Save the women, EHEC. Save them and save humanity.”

“You weren't trying to save humanity, you were fulfilling your depraved fantasies,” Cue snarled, raising her pistol as the legless zombie crawled through the door towards Daniel.

Daniel laughed in disbelief and started to run down the stairs, but Cue shot him in the kneecaps.

“You don’t get to escape this,” she told him as he crumbled on the stairs. “You brought this on yourself.”

The roaring got louder then, and Gunner turned his back on Daniel before the screaming started and pushed his women out the door.

On the tracks in the subway, there was a cart with a pump-action handle waiting, with a small cart full of supplies tied to the back of it.

“Let’s go,” Trigger said, pulling Cue in a run to the cart. Once they were all loaded and Gunner was at the pump, they paused in terror.

The screams of humans had stopped; all that was left were the shrieking wails of the dead.

Gunner pumped the cart once, twice.

They could hear the dead in the hallway above.

He pumped three times, four.

They could hear bodies hitting the stairs as they stumbled over each other, racing for the only other signs of life.

The cart was starting to move and was slowly picking up speed.

Gunner pumped four times, five…

Something burst through the door. Something dark and evil, something leading the zombies down toward them.

“That’s the cretin we saw following you!” Trigger shrieked, aiming her automatic and firing.

The dark-skinned cretin threw his head back and roared, his matted dreads flying as he shook his head. Around him, zombies started pouring out of the stairway and attacking, but they were already moving too fast.

Cue and Trigger fired their guns at the horde as it ran behind them, but at this point, they were too slow to catch up to them. Eradication was the only option now.

But even as they picked up speed, and even as they mowed down zombie after zombie, the cretin could still be seen parkouring and hanging off the ceiling, vaulting himself from pipe to hanging cord like it was nothing at all, and he was gaining on them.

The cretin roared, its white teeth shining in the darkness from the lamp on the cart.

“What the fuck does he want?” Trigger cried.

“Kill him!” Cue begged.

Gunner turned, still pumping the handle, and blasted his laser right through the Cretin’s leg as he jumped. The monster howled in pain and lost its grip on the ceiling of the subway, falling into its zombie horde below.

Only then did the zombies slow.

Left without the direction of their leader, they turn into the mindless beasts they are.

Cue breathed a sigh of relief, her body trembling. “You really think he’s following me?” she asks, her heart racing.

“If anything, this proves he is. Why else would he come down here? How would he know to?” Trigger asked, putting her arms around Cue protectively while exchanging a worried look with Gunner.

“Why? Why would one of those almost mindless creatures want to follow me? Of all survivors?” Cue shook in her arms, unable to control it, and lay her head on Trigger’s shoulder.

“I don’t know why, baby, but next time, we will kill him.”

“I don’t want there to be a next time. I want this nightmare to be over. I want to go back to my dome and my safety!” Cue cried, clinging onto Rat as he jumped onto her lap from the bottom of the cart.

“There’s no going back to the dome, baby,” she said quietly, stroking Cue’s hair.

Outside, the unmistakable roar of the tank firing could be heard even as far as down here. Someone had gotten into the tank, someone had survived.

The roar turned into a cacophony of screaming metal and collapsing rubble as the Vertical Village finished collapsing the rest of the way.