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  Henry Dalley, a stout man in his fifties who oddly looked like the Monopoly cartoon character, and Marcus Kulson, a five-foot-tall African American wearing a Chicago Bulls jersey, both approached him.

  Henry briefed him. “The wall came down. We’ve cleared out the debris. What you have here is another hallway. The rooms are a concern. They too have been recently emptied.”

  Brenner was astonished by the length of the hall. It was roughly carved, the rock walls and ceiling a makeshift cave. Blood spattered the floor and the walls, a mix of dried and fresh. The rooms were the size of modest bedrooms. Some were like cubbyholes. Each was cleared of belongings.

  “They left in a hurry, sir,” Marcus reported. “Every room has been evacuated.”

  “I can smell them.” Brenner was repulsed at the stench of abandonment. “But there’s something new I’ve never experienced before. So strange. I can’t place the tang in the air.”

  Henry and Marcus shared a concerned look and kept silent.

  Brenner pointed at the iron door at the end of the hall. “Has anybody opened that yet?”

  The two cohorts argued, and then Henry said, “We’ll have to dynamite that sucker. It’s too strong to kick down.”

  “Is that such a good idea? Consider the structural integrity.”

  “It’s safe. Just use the right amount of dynamite, and you’ve got yourself an opened door.”

  Brenner pointed to the living quarters wing. “Clear everybody out of here. Only necessary personnel can stay.”

  Whup-chink!

  He gawked at the ceiling, his attention stolen by the odd metallic sound. “What the hell was that?”

  A steel wall slammed down where they’d excavated through, and it pinned three workers down by their torsos. They wiggled and writhed, coughing up blood.

  “We’re trapped!” Henry shouted, losing himself to panic. “We walked right into it!”

  Zip! Zip! Zip!

  Three saw blades shot from the ceiling, fired by an unknown device. One split Henry down the middle. He landed in two halves, twitching, sputtering, and unable to form words once his jaw, tongue, and lips were separated. The other two blades whizzed through Marcus’s neck and uprooted his head. Four bounces and the head rested in the corner, draining blood.

  Brenner remained still.

  The devices firing the saw blades were a one-time occurrence, he deduced, after staying in place for many moments.

  “We gave you what you wanted,” he reasoned to whoever could be near and listening in, snarling the words with ice-cold contrition. “It satisfied me, so why couldn’t it satisfy you?”

  He was afraid to move. The men pinned under the steel door stopped thrashing. They were dead.

  Brenner couldn’t resist.

  Three veins ripped out of his arms, thick as chains and as long as the hallway corridor. The ends of his veins opened as jagged-toothed maws suctioned the blood from the floor with crude slurping noises. Then the snakes invaded eyeballs and emptied the brains and chest cavities of precious blood and proteins.

  I’ll need my strength.

  His body returning to normal, Brenner studied the corridor again. There were no vents or grates to slip through. The rooms offered nothing but four walls. Air would be used up quickly.

  Nobody’s here to see you as you are.

  He checked the door that divided him from their lair. The veins ripped out of his forearms, each encased in sinewy pink material and bundles of arteries. The macabre lock pick slipped into the keyhole. The mechanism jangled, and moments later, after a series of meticulous movements of his veins, it unlocked.

  He dared to ford the next corridor.

  The traps had only begun.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Addey toiled to set up the dinner buffet line in time. Tables had been cleaned and new stations created. A fire pit had been erected outside. Herman was assigned the task of stacking the wood and piecing together the grill. Wood-roasted pizzas were on the menu alongside buffalo wings, fried potato skins, barbecue ribs and T-bone steaks. The food was on the table for display when a scream disturbed everything. A woman had fallen; her leg had snapped at the knee. The foot was pointed backward. Her cheek had come undone, the triangle-shaped flap revealing slick muscle tissue beneath.

  “Help me, please—please!” The woman was hysterical. She began clawing out her curly white hair and taking chunks of the scalp with it. The skin peeled like an orange. “Take me to the med wing now!”

  Addey ran to help her. “H-how can I help you? What can I do?”

  “PICK—ME—UP!”

  Hands bared of skin extended out to her. “I don’t want everybody to see me like this.”

  The woman was practically melting, yanking, tearing and removing every sinew and bolt of skin from her body, as if she just now realized she was a living corpse. The woman wanted nothing to do with the cloak of flesh now that it had expired.

  Addey did what she could, wrapping the woman in a blue tablecloth and picking her up. She looked up and down the outside dining area and spotted a white sign with a red cross.

  The med wing!

  “I’ll get you fixed up,” she promised, trying to steady her voice but failing. “Stay calm. Stay still. I’ll take care of you.”

  She raced through the recreational area, lugging the heavy load. The attempt failed as the woman kept shrieking and mutilating herself. The dead stopped playing volleyball, crocheting or lazing in lawn chairs to observe Addey darting across the resort area. They stared with a mix of reverence and fear. That could be them any day now, many of them thought.

  Mary-Anne Higgins blew the whistle, the supervisor catching on to the escalating situation. “Everybody freeze! Medical emergency. Clear out of Addey’s way!”

  Hurrying, Addey reached the door of the med wing, and it opened from within. The staff inside had heard Higgins’s blaring whistle. Once inside, it stank of gauze, bleach and, worst of all, the death stench she had become so familiar with in the sublevel.

  A pair of staff guided her into the maze of water heater tanks plated with steel. Cryogenic chambers. Many were occupied. On the opposite wall, plastic troughs were filled with a clear, gelatinous fluid. Naked bodies were submerged in the mess, connected to tubes that fed blood into their necks and into their hearts. The patients slumbered in a coma-deep sleep.

  Deeper into the odd room, a row of jukebox-size machines read BioClense on the front. A clear plastic window in the center revealed arms and legs and human bones undergoing a rinse and clean process as jets of high-pressure water and chemical mixtures doused the items. Unable to fully appreciate the device, she was ushered on with emergency speed. A curtain separated one corridor from the other, and she was guided through to the other side.

  The orderly raised her voice at Addey. “Move it, move it! This one’s a code red.”

  The open-air section of the med wing was as graphic as a Civil War scene. The dead were splayed on gurneys, many opened up and undergoing surgery. Organs were removed and replaced with assembly-line efficiency. Stranger yet was the machine that spat out a continual fabric of skin like a demented spaghetti machine. Each machine churned out African American, Caucasian, Mexican, Indian and other ethnicities of flesh. An incubator housed dozens of brains undergoing a soak in a blood-red syrup, the crimson broth like tomato soup. One doctor removed a crimson-dripping brain and replaced it in an opened skull of a sleeping level-one zombie who was sitting in a wheelchair.

  “Take your eyes off the patients,” the orderly demanded of Addey. “One more curtain and we’re there. This one’s bordering on cannibalistic. We can’t waste another second!”

  That’s when Addey felt something wet cross her skin. Then the lapping noises. Turning her eyes down, she discovered the woman was licking her stitches!

  She dropped the woman in reaction. The orderly seized the woman’s arms as she drooled pink froth out of her mouth and screamed for skin. Twisting both arms around her back, the orderly
demanded, “Take her legs. Take them now or else be eaten!”

  She seized hold of the woman’s ankles, still feeling the woman’s wet tongue slither across her stitches. The zombie was in a worsening state, her tissue peeling back at alarming rates, coming undone without the woman clawing it free, the body committing a self-flensing aided by decomposition. The stench of the process was kicked up in her face as the maddened woman attempted to bite the orderly’s arms, growling and clamping her teeth so hard Addey thought they’d shatter.

  “I need help here! Code red! Code red, goddamn it!”

  Addey joined in the fight to pin the zombie onto the floor, but her efforts were too late. Thrashing her head and clacking and biting and bending forward to reap flesh, the zombie claimed a square piece of meat from the orderly’s forearm. Between juicy chewing noises, the zombie woman shouted with a frothy mouth and a blood-laden tongue, “Flesh—more flesh! Fuck your food. Fuck your food! I want real meat!”

  Three doctors swooped in to give their assistance. One wrapped what looked to be a leather bowling-ball bag around the woman’s head. The other two seized her limbs, joining Addey’s struggle. The bitten orderly was whisked into another corridor for medical treatment, the poor woman’s eyes bulging wide at the bleeding wound.

  Addey clamped her hands down over the woman’s legs. The zombie thrashed in their hold, her protests muffled under the mock hood. Regaining control of her, they delivered the woman through another curtain, hoisting the kicking, thrashing monster onward. A new crew of orderlies now helped them, and together, they heaved the woman into a separate room. One of the orderlies closed the entrance, the door being made of steel. The scene moved so fast, Addey only briefly caught sight of what lurked within the chamber. On the floor, six zombies were fighting for a live human being. A middle-age woman. The victim’s screams were abruptly cut off when the door was slammed shut.

  A man approached her and shook his head as if flabbergasted. His black-rimmed glasses magnified his eyes to twice their size. He owned a head of silver-gray hair, his well-kept beard the same color. His face was stoic, constantly on the lookout for something to fascinate him or attack him.

  In a bored tone—how he naturally spoke—he said to her, “I’ve heard about you. Your name is Addey. I’m Dr. Kasum. You can call me Ted.”

  He extended his hand for her to shake, and she accepted, though too out of sorts to appreciate the gesture, especially after watching the woman behind that steel door about to be eaten alive. Her words burned with accusation. “What’s going on in there, murder?”

  Dr. Kasum expected the question and already had a response. “The woman you escorted into that room is turning. Her flesh wasn’t repaired in time to curb the process. Once the rot eats you, the brain goes into a Neanderthal mind-set. The body is always hungry, and flesh—new cells, new blood, new regenerative tissues—are all she craves. But you did well under the pressure. You acted quickly. You saved lives.”

  Refusing to be sidetracked by the compliments, she demanded, “But what’s that damn room about? Jesus, someone was being eaten alive in there.”

  “I assure you, Addey, the bodies in there are cadavers. We wouldn’t do such a thing as kill people like that. We’re not monsters,” lowering his voice, “we’re not like them.” He returned the conversation to the woman Addey had brought there. “We hope she’ll calm down in there. Once that occurs, we can attempt surgical procedures to renew her flesh. If it’s successful, she can enjoy her life as it was beforehand. If not, she can’t be saved. She’ll go straight to the sublevel. She’ll be level two, and level twos can’t be saved.”

  She didn’t know how to follow up the comment. She swore there was someone being eaten alive inside, but she decided against questioning it. They ran the show, and to pry too much would be to take an unnecessary risk, so for now, she pretended to be satisfied with the explanation.

  “That was scary,” she said, selling her cooperation. “Is that bitten orderly okay?”

  “She’ll be just like you.” The doctor winked. “Some stitches and back to it, right? We have to be strong on the island. You’re doing wonderful. You’ll be joining ranks with us one of these days, just you wait. You’ll be promoted to a better station.”

  Mary-Anne Higgins shoved aside the curtain, and the rigid schoolteacher pursued her. “I see everything’s safe now, Addey. Back to work. Dinner’s in a half an hour. We have hungry guests, and we need your help. We’re short-handed, as always.”

  The doctor let her go, already moving on with his work. Once they were back in the main area, Mary-Anne muttered to her, “What you saw, you don’t repeat to anybody. It’s a private matter. Your worries are the buffet line. I’d say that’s sufficient. I’m glad you’re safe. Now back to work.”

  Gee, thanks for the concern.

  She began collecting the chicken wings and ribs for her station, continuing with the dinner service.

  Herman, at his station, had arranged the plastic sauce bowls according to their labels. She read the cards posed in front of each bowl: red hot buffalo sauce, bacon ranch sauce, bleu cheese habanera sauce, and honey teriyaki. He gave her an eyeful, the stare demanding she tell him what had happened earlier.

  “That woman’s skin started to peel,” she said, giving him the edited version. “So I had to rush her to the med unit to be patched up. She leaked blood and pieces of flesh. End of story.”

  She withheld the fact the woman had tried to eat her flesh, and her suspicions about the special room where human victims seemed to be sacrificed to zombies.

  He gave her a once-over, believing her. “That woman was screeching. I haven’t seen anything quite that crazy before.”

  He patted her shoulder, careful not to disturb her stitches. “Whatever you’ve been doing, keep doing it. You’re holding up well, considering everything.”

  Yeah, considering everything.

  Six o’clock sharp, it was time to eat. The walking dead lined up at the buffet in shambling groups. Forty-five minutes later, they were out of food. Dinner was over, and she considered it strange how the zombies collectively walked to the elevator and returned to their rooms. They made haste, as if afraid.

  Herman whispered to her, “Someone explained to me that they are troubled by the dark. It reminds them of the grave.”

  “And do they sleep with night-lights on?”

  Mary-Anne Higgins blew her whistle before he could reply, listing her instructions to finish out their shift. “If you guys want to rest, then hurry up. Collect the dishes, fold up the tables, and deliver the leftovers to the kitchen.”

  Herman rolled his eyes. “Just because she’s in charge doesn’t mean she has to be a huge bitch.”

  Together, they dismantled the serving trays and carried the dishes into the kitchen. The leftovers were disposed of next, the scant pickings. The dead preferred bacon ranch over the rest of the sauces, she observed as she stacked plates. I guess if it’s too hot, acid indigestion can’t be healthy for a dead throat.

  They were enough ahead of schedule to take a short break and enjoy a draft beer at the nearby tiki bar. Herman chose Guinness, Addey a Pabst Blue Ribbon.

  “Why do you drink Pabst?”

  She shrugged. “My dad drank it with me when I was sixteen. The shit was cheap, right? He also thought twenty-one was too old to have your first beer. And then the next day, he took me out shopping for a new car—keep in mind it was a used car. A ’79 Pacer. I remember the faded bumper sticker on the back read I Love Poodles. The clunker cost him four hundred dollars. My dad was a masterful mechanic. He worked on that piece of shit every week. Fuel line, alternator, the clutch went out, and I put a quart of oil in that shit-kicker every four days. God I miss him. I miss my mom too. I miss everything.”

  Herman felt the same.

  The whistle blew. Mary-Anne Higgins stopped behind them with her hands on her hips. “Hey, kids, your shift’s not over. Get back to work.”

  Addey argued, “But our station
is clean.”

  “Then carry those tiki torches into that storage shed.” She pointed to a mobile structure as big as a house. “You can get tanked on your own time. You’re still on the clock.”

  They went to work without another word. Mary-Anne Higgins jumped on another group smoking cigarettes around the volleyball sandpit. They collected the tiki torches—almost thirty in all. The stink of citronella was nauseating up close.

  Herman opened the mobile unit entrance. Inside, it was air-conditioned, but the air was stale and unventilated. Stacks of random items filled the shelves: seasonal decorations, tables, lawn furniture, cookware in unopened boxes, yard tools, bags of organic soil, vermiculite, wheelbarrows, bricks and concrete mix. They searched for the place to stow the tiki torches. They were halfway into the structure, the shelves towering eight feet high, when the lights were turned off. The door slammed shut. Bolts were thrown, locked. Steps resounded at every corner, bare feet against concrete. Then whispers. Shared instructions. Evil titters.

  Herman grabbed her arm. “What the hell is going on here?”

  She reached for the flashlight on her belt. “I’m going to find out.” She turned the beam on and clutched her .28 pistol in the other. “Get your gun. I’ve got a bad feeling.”

  Herman muttered, “I always have a bad feeling these days.”

  Two beams of light and two handguns trained at sixty were their lifelines. They stood side by side, watching and waiting.

  A deep voice called out, one boasting of corrosion and death. “These walls are soundproof. Nobody can hear you scream.”

  The laughter was spread out in many corners. Mocking them.

  The villains scattered.

  “Who is that?” she whispered to Herman. “The dead went back to their rooms. Who stayed behind?”