“Z!”

The world came back to me in a rush. A zombie was busily trying to cut its way through my visor and into my face with that strange black cutting thing. I swatted it away. Other zombies had latched on to my exosuit and were ineffectually bashing at it with their fists or gnawing the bare metal with their teeth.

Some of them showed the same black mark that was now etched into my visor.

I triggered the suit jets. That made me spin erratically, but that was to the good. The concentrated gas cut into zombies as well. I hoped it would kill a few, but that wasn’t my main concern.

One, I was covered in zombies that wanted nothing more than to get to the juicy insides of what they were treating as a giant metal lobster dish.

And two, I’d lost track of the other fast zombie.

“I am still here. Was anyone able to track the other fast zombie?”

“Not a chance, Z. That thing buggered off as soon as the other one got splattered by the turret guns,” Sam said. His words with liberally punctuated with gunfire. There were still zombies left trying to get through to the tasty humans on the other side of all the bullets coming their way.

It took a few more seconds to clear away enough zombies for me to see the cafeteria. There were still zombies around, but the horde had greatly decreased. The howls were down to a mere fraction of what they’d been when we first arrived.

I managed to scrape the last of the zombies from the exosuit a short while after the turrets finally fell silent. That moment of silence was not to last, however.

“More incoming. I hear howls coming up the elevator shaft.”

“Hold on a moment! Let me throw some traps down the shaft,” Vera called out.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” one of the guys called out.

“Suck it up, Quenton. Don’t puke in your helmet. You won’t be able to see out and it’ll make you sick later,” Ileane said sternly.

“I don’t think I can-” The sounds of a man throwing up came over the com.

“Damnit Quenton, at least shut off the com when you spew. It’s gross. And I for one am glad I can’t smell you right now,”

“Don’t you think kicking a man while he’s down is a bit much, ladies?” the other man stated. This one must be Hank.

“No,” came the chorused reply from all three.

A zombie popped through the elevator shaft just as Vera began taking the traps from the crate she’d brought with her. It looked like a luggage box. I grabbed the zombie by the head and crushed it, tossing the corpse to the side.

Vera did not even look up from her careful extraction of two objects.

“Can you check the shaft for me? If it’s clear, I can toss these in.”

I stuck one of the exosuit’s arms into the shaft. The camera mounted there was clear, fortunately.

“You’ve got about six seconds before the next group comes. Five. Four,” she tossed one of the devices directly across the shaft. The next was angled to land somewhere lower.

“Get away from the opening!”

I shifted aside, putting the bulk of the MHU between her and the shaft. A fraction of a second later, fire bloomed from the shaft opening, followed by another pressure wave. This time I’d had the presence of mind to lock my suit boots to the deck, so I didn’t go flying.

“What were those, Vera?” Sam asked. I wanted to know that, too.

“Sticky bombs with proximity triggers. Er. Can you detect any more coming up the shaft, Z?”

“Nothing now. But we should probably withdraw to the Medical unit while it is clear,” I said. Vera laid a few more traps around the elevator shaft before packing her box of boom away. As effective as the first two had been, I approved.

“Good idea. Quenton can clean up there,” Doctor Delveccio replied. The man in question was still dry heaving when he was gently pulled along for the ride.

“So. Those were zombies,” Ileane said.

“Normal ones. Except for the last two fast ones, that is.”

“There are other kinds?”

“Zombies come in as many forms as humans do. Some have implants. Others, body mods. I’ve run into fast ones like those before. Bigger ones that are resistant to gunfire. Strange ones that are slow and weak, but can cut through armor like butter with that black cutting attack they do.”

“That’s how they cut the arm off this combat suit,” Sam said, indicating the arm that had been damaged before. He’d repaired it on the way back, but it looked rather ugly to me. For all he swore the welds were strong, it wasn’t pretty.

“So there are catgirl zombies?”

“There undoubtedly are,” Doctor Delveccio replied dryly.

“Indeed. All forms of humanity are susceptible to the zombie biological/nanite virus.”

“Except you,” Vera said. We reached the entrance to Security Medical. I was about to trigger the decontamination cycle when Doctor Delveccio stopped me.

“Quenton, you might want to take off your helmet now,” she said. As he did so, she triggered the command I’d been about to give.

Pressurized soap and cleaning chemicals sprayed out from the walls, ceiling, and deck at all angles. The blood and gore that had covered my exosuit was scoured away to the sound of a man cursing us all. On the rare occasions that he could get the words out, that is.

The decon cycle ended and I exited the MHU, giving Raspberry another bottle as I entered. The empty had been rattling around inside the exosuit during the fight. The fuzzball also needed cleaning, but I was not going to send her out to endure the cleaning cycle like Quenton had.

He was a grown man. Experiment Number One was still a kitten.

“Welcome to our little base of operations,” Sam said grandly, indicating the examination rooms, the break room, and the offices stacked with crates of looted supplies.

“Cozy,” Vera said with a frown.

“I know it’s not much, but this is one of the safest places on Walker right now.”

After recycling the used formula bottles and queuing up a new set I decided to head back out to check the camera feeds from the chief’s office.

“You’re not headed out on your own, are you?” Doctor Delveccio wasn’t frowning at me, but her ears were cocked back. I had learned this to be a sign of displeasure, even without the frown or twitching tail that usually accompanied it.

“Just to the chief’s office to check the feeds and see if there has been any change in activity since we left. New areas might have become dark, others might be powered up again so we can see inside.”

“Take someone with you. We need to watch out for each other,” she said. This time there was a hint of a frown.

“I’ll go,” Ileane said, looking up from the terminal she’d been accessing. “I can search through the hospital records from there just as well as I could here, I expect.”

“That’s settled then.” Our resident catgirl crossed her arms and nodded, her ears flicking back forward, her tail going back to its normal, lazy wave.

“Shall we?” Ileane said, already heading out through the decontamination chamber. I followed, stopping only long enough to pick up a pistol and my vibroknife.

“Living in that little compartment is going to drive some people crazy right quick. We’d best find a way for people to get some privacy soon.”

“There’s no reason we can’t use the offices in that section for bedrooms in the short term,” I said. “They’re deep enough in Security that zombies are not likely to penetrate that far without us hearing it.”

She nodded.

“Not walking out in that big hunk of metal this time?”

“No need. We’ll not be bothered for a while, at least. Zombies have periods where they remain dormant, as if they are sleeping, and others when they are more active and wander about. Unless another horde’s cycle overlaps, we won’t see any more for at least a few hours.”

The cleaner bots were out in force once again, cleaning up the gore and trash left over from the fight. The air was clear on the Security side but the bots were still gathering up the clouds of blood and other bits from the cafeteria.

“I’m surprised this doesn’t seem to bother you, Doctor Zolnikov. You are a researcher, yes? I wouldn’t think that dealing with the smell of death and sight of corpses in pieces would have been a part of your field of study.”

“I wasn’t always a researcher,” I said. There were still spent bullet casings here and there, and I had to brush a few aside as I went.

“When I was still putting together my dissertation I worked nights in the waste reclamation department of the university. Before that, I was a resident of City 4. Bad smells and decomposing bodies are not the worst things I have experienced.”

“I see,” she said. What that meant, I could not tell.

The chief’s office was just as I’d left it. The terminal had powered down, but otherwise nothing had changed.

“There should be an auxiliary terminal access here somewhere,” I said, searching for the proper command function.

“Here,” she said, indicating an icon in the lower right with a plus sign above it. Pressing that caused a smaller input pad to slide out from the desk.

“And that is all I need for the moment. Now where was I,” she murmured, flicking through the menus.

The security feeds filled the holoscreen above the desk. I cycled through them, finding the ones that I had been monitoring before.

The habitat level was still packed with the massive horde that called that area home. There was an activity tracking program embedded in the feeds that I’d seen reference to before. It was only now that things were not as immediately pressing that there seemed to be time to pursue things like this.

I clicked through the analytics in the program submenu, finding the parameters that I wanted to set. The program spent a few moments tabulating the results.

“That’s a lot of zombies,” Ileane noted. She was glancing over at the screen I had brought forward.

“It is.”

The number kept rising. Three hundred thousand. Four hundred thousand.

“There are probably more than that. I do not know if the program can account for areas that are now unpowered and dark, like the warehouse district on the docks.”

“Can’t you use Walker’s former population census?” she asked.

“That would discount the transient population, which was always changing. And the refugees.”

“Right. I’d forgotten about the refugees.”

The program finally stopped on a number. Nearly seven hundred thousand possible individuals.

Most of them were on the Habitat level. There were a few cameras still active on the docks, so at least part of the horde there would be counted. I could see them through one of the upper quadrant screens.

Level 5, the Laboratory and upper engineering level was comparatively light at nearly a thousand possible traces detected.

“I don’t know that we have enough firepower for that many. Let alone almost three quarters of a million. How many did we kill in the cafeteria today?”

I ran the video feed backwards and ran the analysis again.

“One hundred fifty-three.”

“Crap.” Ileane sat back in the seat that she’d belted herself into. “Just a fraction of that thousand nearly kicked our butts.”

That reminded me of something. I tapped the intercom to open a channel to Security Medical.

“Sam, if you are not busy I have a question for you.”

After a moment, his face appeared on the communications window.

“Sure thing, Z. What’s up?”

“What would it take for us to seal off the main elevator shafts on this level?”

“Plate stock, some welding gear, and no zombie attacks for like, a half hour or so. That’s probably a good idea. The zombies still could cut their way through the plate like the do armor glass-”

“But they have no reason to so long as they don’t detect us,” Vera finished, coming into the video pickup behind Sam.

“I think I know where to get you those tools and supplies. If we can seal off the elevators, that would go a long way to keeping Level 4 actually secure.”

“Should we be doing this before we take on the substations on Level 5?” Doctor Delveccio asked from off screen.

“I don’t think we can afford not to. It shouldn’t take too long, once we have the tools and the materials to do it with. How long would it take you to get those, Doc Z?”

“They’re on the lower engineering level, I believe. The ore processing area should have what we need.”

“Alright, who needs to go?”

“I think we should all go,” Sam said. “We’re better off together. And we can haul back more stuff with more people.”

“We could also get some things that could improve my traps and IEDs,” Vera said. “Magnus told me a few things that we could try if we had the time and materials to work with.”

“Oh he did, did he? Why’d he tell you and not me?” Sam asked.

“I think we should go ahead and get ready,” Ileane said, unbuckling from the chair and getting up. I followed suit.

No zombies greeted us on our trip back to Security Medical. Raspberry took that occasion to bounce an empty bottle off my head in complaint.

My companion stifled what sounded suspiciously like a giggle at the ‘bonk!’ sound it made.