Chapter 3

The hour came and went. She decided to give the infantry sergeant another half hour before she went looking. The crowd behind the fence acted different with the sun up. Some of them rattled the fence with even more fervor than before, but others just stood there. A few had even wandered off. One of them pounded on the windows of a car in the outer lot.

The unmistakable sound of a chaingun echoed around the parking lot. It was joined by another and several automatic weapons. Melody snatched at the handset. "India-Charlie-Three, this is India-Charlie-Two. Status. Over." She tried again, and again, as the fire dwindled, faltered and finally stopped all together.

Someone broke squelch on the freq, then after an agonizing pause, she heard the same voice as before over the speaker. "Ch-charlie-two?"

Melody did her best to project a calm assurance she didn't feel. "India-Charlie-Three, this is India-Charlie-Two. Status. Over."

"Charlie-Two, the refugees ... they..." The voice trailed off, but over the open mike, she thought she heard sobbing. She realized she was holding her breath, and forced herself to a slow steady rhythm. "India-Charlie-Two, I am inside Track Three-One, hatches locked. The ramp was down on the other track when they hit us. Some of the refugees came running out the main doors, followed by more rioters." The voice paused, but continued, although shakier. "They just walked right over us. Everyone else is dead. They ate them."

Melody felt the stares of the others on her, the drivers had come over to get whatever word she might have to give them. "Charlie Three, we are going to extricate you in thirty, I say again Three-Zero Mikes, Hold tight with what you have. Over." She hoped the pounding of her heart didn't show.

"Charlie-Two, I understand hold position, be prepared to move in three-zero mikes."

"Specialist Roland, go find out who the rankinest man here is."

He snorted at the old joke. "Yes, sergeant."

Melody keyed the mike again. "Make a radio check every five mikes. Break." That should give the soldier something else to worry about, and she needed the time to find out for sure what had happened. "Move to the driver's station and make the checks from there. Over."

"Wilco."

"Hang in there soldier, Charlie-Two out." She hung up the mike, and bent down to where she could see the driver. "Come on out here, stock up on ammo."

Eckert, the PV2 who'd shot up her truck crawled back to the crew compartment. She made sure his ammo pouches were filled, then sent him to get extra from ammo point in the loading bay. Roland was back first.

"I've got date of rank on the other guys."

"Right. Post a guard on the doors leading from the bay to the rest of the stadium, I think it's been overrun. Load up all the ammo, and all the food you can. Put as much as you can on the outside of the vehicles. You have thirty minutes max."

Roland looked nervous. "What are you going to do sergeant?"

"I'm going to see if I'm right, and find Top if I can, he wouldn't leave us behind. If I don't come back, head up to my place." She gave him directions to the mine.

In the warehouse, she used Five-Fifty cord, green nylon parachute line, rated to hold five hundred and fifty pounds, to tie all but one set of doors shut. For the last, one of the sets that opened in, she used a forklift to move a pallet stacked with five gallon cans of coconut oil close enough that there was just enough room to slip through. Eckert followed her around like a lost puppy.

Occasional shots still echoed down the maintenance hallways, but either things were almost back under control, or ... She didn't even want to think about that. A last look around the room showed her that Roland had everything under control. He'd taken the drivers out of the Hum-Vees and had one of them helping him shift the reserve ammunition while the other watched the doors. She almost reminded him to make sure he was there for the radio check, but realized it was only her nervousness. Instead she checked the shotgun, and satisfied squeezed through the door, beckoning Eckert to follow her.

Fortunately the lights were still on, the generator was located in a room off the loading bay, and still had half a tank of fuel. The floor was coated concrete, shiny, but not slick. She took a guess and pointed "This way to the CP?"

Eckert seemed startled by her question. "Yes, sergeant, the freight elevators go up to the infirmary and the CP is next to that."

Melody had a vision of the elevator doors opening to reveal a crowd of them and shuddered. "No, we need stairs." Their footsteps echoed down the corridor, she didn't know what she'd expected, but it wasn't this emptiness. Fortunately there was a stairwell, next to the freight elevator. She listened at the door, distant thumps echoed inside. Opening the door just a crack, she saw several bodies on the floor, they'd fallen from the stairs to land in the middle of the stairwell.

The red paint on the floor was tacky under her boots. It took her a moment to realize the 'paint' was blood, much more than could be explained by the bodies on the floor. Bloody footprints led up the stairs, and the walls were smeared with dull red handprints. Shots again, sounding from inside the arena, M-16s on full auto, then nothing but a faint moaning roar.

The skylights in the arena concourse made it easy to see through the windows in the stairwell doors without exposing herself. Scattered bodies and blood smears littered the tiled floor. A few of them wandered aimlessly. Eckert pointed past her, and she jerked away. Her heart pounded so heard she didn't catch his first words. " ... corner, and the infirmary was set up on the other side of the main lobby."

"The CP?" she whispered?

He moved to the side and squinted, voice very low. "I can see some tables we were using, nobody around them."

"You set up the CP and infirmary in the corridors?"

He nodded. "I don't think that those things would be wandering like that if anyone was still there."

He was right. Melody tied the door to the rail. Normally it would need a key to open, but someone had pried it loose from the frame. She started up the stairs, towards the pounding. She stopped at Eckert's whispered "Sergeant?" The kid's face was pale and he held his rifle in a white knuckled grip. "Where are we going?"

Melody pointed up the stairs with her shotgun. "I figure if anyone is alive in this place, they'll be up there."

"Those things are trying to get to someone?"

"Only one way to find out..." She took the stairs quietly, one at a time, stopping to listen on each landing. The five flights of stairs seemed to take an eternity to climb. Several times, she had to step over bodies, the tops of their heads blown off. Someone living had definitely come this way. The lights at the top threw crazy shadows down the stairwell, they shifted as whatever waited moved.

As she rounded the last corner, she was grateful that whoever had built the stairs had made them 'wrong' they spiraled up counter clockwise, making it easy to aim across the gap. She stepped over another body and fell across it as it grabbed her leg. The M-16 was deafening in the close confines of the concrete shaft. The bullet blew through the skull of the woman she'd stepped over ricocheted off the concrete stairs, the wall and the steel rail before its deformed shape skittered across the black painted tread just under her nose.

The shadows stopped moving on the far wall. Melody held her breath trying to hear over the ringing in her ears. She thought she heard a vague moaning, then saw a bloodstained sneaker move on the landing above and behind her. Wishing she had time to put in earplugs, she rolled over into a crouch, shotgun ready. A gentle squeeze on the trigger rewarded her with an even louder report, and the sneaker's owner falling to the landing. She moved to the next landing, opposite, and fired three more times as the zombies stumbled down the stairs.

She yelled at Eckert, hoping he could hear her. "Headshots! Shoot them in the head!" She emptied her weapon, and reloaded. Eckert fired with a steady precision that she hadn't even hoped for. Bodies tumbled down the stairs and the landing opposite became a seething mass of writhing limbs as the zombies struggled to reach them. One fell over the edge in its haste, but the rest either realized they couldn't walk on air, or the railing stopped them.

They had to have been packed like sardines on the landing above Melody's head, they just kept coming. She emptied her shotgun twice more and switched to the captain's pistol. Their fire was joined by the booming of a .45 above them, and suddenly it was over. She reloaded and gestured for Eckert to watch behind them. A shadow moved on the wall, at fist she thought it might be another of them but she held her fire as Top limped into view. He said something, but she couldn't hear it.

Melody tapped Eckert on the shoulder to get his attention and they picked their way up the stairs. She prodded each corpse as she climbed, making sure it was really dead. She had to stifle a hysterical giggle at the thought. The stairs led to a maintenance area for the lights, catwalks led from the room to racks of spotlights around the circumference of the arena.

In the shadows of the room, it took her a moment to make out the figures as people. She recognized one of them as the woman they had picked up. Sandy held a baby in her arms and a little boy slept next to her, his head in her lap. Next to her, a woman cradled a toddler, and tried to reassure an older girl. Several people argued with Top while he secured the door, but she couldn't hear what they said. She counted heads, thirteen, including Top. It would be a tight squeeze, but they could do it. If half of them weren't kids, there wouldn't have been enough room in the vehicles.

Melody moved out to the catwalk, and looked down into the brilliantly lit stadium. It was full of tiny figures that wandered aimlessly, except for a moaning mass at one end. She could hear them, a good sign because it meant her hearing was returning. They pressed in towards the center of the mob, tiny hands held up, reaching for ... Melody pulled a small pair of binoculars from her breast pocket, and trained them on the basketball hoop in the middle of the crowd. A child, probably a boy from the close-cropped hair, sat inside the metal hoop suspended only feet above a straining mob of zombies.

"He's still alive. I don't know how he got there, but I think we can get him out." Top's voice sounded dull and flat, she didn't think it was all due to her ringing ears either.

"We don't have enough ammo to take them all out."

Top shook his head, "No but we have some cables that should support someone small and light." He pointed to a kid in scruffy clothes who whispered reassurances to a white-faced girl about his own age. They were probably fifteen or so. "Paco was going to try..."

Her stomach sank, she knew what he meant. She looked into his eyes and saw what it was going to cost him to ask. "No, I'll go. I'm smaller and we did that rappelling last year." While they made a safety harness and climbing ropes from Five-Fifty cord and electrical cables Top cut with his bayonet, she filled him in on the situation. "This is going to take longer than we have." she finished. "The way should still be clear, we could start the civilians down."

Top agreed, and organized it while she finished up. The safety harness was tight, with no give in it at all. It bit into her thighs as she walked over to Eckert. He had the boy who'd been asleep on Sandy's lap on his back, tied there so his hands were free. "Eckert, you get everyone out safe and we'll call it even on the truck." She put out her hand and after a moments hesitation he took it. "Be careful."

"You too Sergeant." He seemed about to say something else, but Top called him over and gave him some final instructions before sending him on his way.

Top barred the door behind them, and nodded to the man who'd stayed behind. "Lets get this done." Between them, Top and the man in coveralls carried the heavy cable to a point above the backstop. The drop was probably only fifty feet or so, but it seemed a long way down to Melody. After Top tied it off to an overhead girder, she attached the climbing ropes then the safety harness. She hung on the rubberized cable with all her weight and bounced to make sure both that she wouldn't slip and that the cable could take the weight.

While the other man lowered the end of the cable an arms length at a time, Top took her aside. "Be careful down there, don't get bit. That's what happened down there, the ones that came in bitten died and turned."

The tug of the cable lifted her off the catwalk. She eased herself over the railing, and stood in the climbing ropes. She'd set up a three rope system to be safe, one for each foot, tied securely around her boots, and another for the safety harness. The ropes could be moved, but if they were supporting any weight at all, they wouldn't slide over the cable. She went down slowly at first, shifting her weight from one foot to the other and sliding the ropes that didn't have tension on them. After she got the hang of it, it went faster, but the slight swing she started with increased as well. Before she knew it she was level with the pole supporting the backstop.

She'd heard the moans increase in urgency as she descended, now they echoed from walls in an overwhelming wave. Her hands shook as she grabbed the pole and eased herself along the top bar. At the end, she lowered herself directly behind the backstop, and balancing against the pull of the cable, bent over.