Apocalypse: The Savior with System

42 Trainwreck

Paul ran past Eli and Eric as he hurried up to the arsenal’s battlements where Rahu stood watching down. He also found Quinn several feet away, perched at the edge of the wall, ready to fire using the modern crossbow in her hands.

‘What’s going on?” he asked Rahu above the screaming that was becoming louder. He trained his sight at the edge of the treeline, several yards away from the arsenal walls. Soon, what looked to be humans running and fleeing for their lives broke out from the trees, all of them heading towards the arsenal.

“Help us!”

“Please, open the gates!”

“I don’t want to die!

All those the people were screaming in various accents and languages. Paul heard Quinn move.

“Don’t shoot them!” he ordered. “They’re people!”

“Paul, we can’t help all of them,” Rahu argued.

“If I don’t shoot, we’ll be overrun,” she snapped, eyes trained on her targets. “This is not the time for your morals.”

As if in spite, she fired. Paul’s mouth opened in a scream but he did not see any one die below them. A bloodcurdling scream echoed, however, from the trees and a heartbeat later, a zombie with an arrow sticking out of its neck ran forward and fell to the ground.

“Start deciding what to do now or I’m not going to empty my quiver beyond that treeline! Don’t make me regret taking that shot!”

Paul exchanged a look with Rahu. Rahu nodded once. Through a throat mic, he spoke, “Eric, open the gates for five minutes. Beyond that, the gates will close in thirty seconds.”

“Roger that,” they heard Eric reply over the static.

Rahu took out a small tablet, a clone of the one Eric always carried around, and typed. The guns manning the battlement walls moved and angled to target at the treeline. Paul peered at the plume of black smoke even further than the trees.

They heard a rumbling from below and Paul knew Eric had already started opening the gates. More people were running from out the trees, some even carrying children and the elderly. Another minute passed and then the zombies came.

One after another, Quinn fired at them with precision, seeing her targets even before they were visible from out of the cover of foliage and shadows. What she could not follow, the guns Rahu controlled took down. Mutliple explosions once again reached them and the plume of smoke from before now became six.

What the hell is going on out there?

Paul decided. His fireballs have developed but his targeting was still askew. If he used the system from the walls, he was also in danger of hitting the multitude of scattered people running towards them, the zombies close behind. Tapping Rahu on the shoulder, Paul made a move to run down towards the gate but paused in the act when he saw the stampede blocking his way out.

Something hit him in the back and he saw it was a rope Quinn managed to tie around a sturdy post. “Like I said, don’t make me regret,” she quipped, returning to her shooting position.

“Do it like we did before!” he shouted at her as he grabbed the rope and vaulted over the wall edge, falling to the ground and narrowly avoiding getting pancaked under the feet of a hundred panicking people.

Once back up on his feet, Paul ran tangent to the direction the people were running from, bringing himself almost to the treeline.

And from there he saw.

Scores upon scores of zombies, some of whom had gathered around those unfortunate to be caught, eating human flesh without compunction. Those who did not have a meal went after the people still looking for avenues of escape towards the arsenal.

Trusting Quinn’s keen sense of sight, Paul pushed forward, encountering a group making their way after three humans. He opened his system, quickly selected his fireball of choice and shot. The zombies were incinerated one after the other. As more people escaped, more zombies appeared. When the zombies scattered in their attempt to rush after their escaping dinners, Quinn’s arrows redirected them to Paul’s preferred position, enabling him to use one fireball to take down ten or more zombies all at once.

They continued this way for a few more minutes until Paul was surrounded by silence and piles of ashes and burnt zombies. He walked a few steps further to ascertain there were no other humans lingering around.

A short while later he heard, then saw, Rahu and Quinn walking towards him. The two looked like stone sentinels, their cold expressions telling Paul nothing of their thoughts.

“I smell gasoline,” he remarked to them. Rahu gazed towards where the air was more fetid and cloying with the odor of burning motor oil.

Something grabbed Paul’s leg, making him gasp and jump away. A man half-lay on the ground propped up on a large tree root, half his face scratched, bitten, and bleeding. He was missing one foot and his clothes were torn off violently, his chest riddled with bite marks and torn, oozing flesh.

From the dregs of his shirt still hanging on to him, Paul saw that the man was called John Halsey and he was a train engineer. He knelt beside the man and asked, ‘What happened?”

In halting words, John Halsey recounted how he was supposed to take six cars filled with the infected to a treatment facility in Texas when the engine car exploded. They had to stop but in doing so, allowed them to be targeted by zombies prowling the area. Gasoline leaked, flowing and spurting towards the other cars, hence, the explosions. All the passengers and crew, or at least those who survived the explosions, ran into the trees, making their way to the arsenal for help. But even the woods were littered with zombies.

When John Halsey started to have trouble breathing, Paul was about to tell him he could recover inside the arsenal when an arrow whizzed by his ear and lodged itself in the man’s trachea, killing him in an instant.

“Don’t lie to spare yourself of guilt,” Quinn said without feeling, re-adjusting the string and peering into the scope. “You would’ve prolonged his agony, not to mention brought a disaster waiting to happen into our sanctuary.”

Paul rose to his full height and glared at her. “You could’ve showed him a bit more mercy—”

Quinn raised an eyebrow. “Mercy? What I did, that was mercy. I bet his soul, wherever it is, must be so grateful for my mercy.”

Paul fisted his hands at his sides, fighting the urge to strangle the woman. “You’re not a very nice person, are you, Quinn Vega?”

“Really? Is that the best you can do?” she sneered. Ignoring Paul thereafter, Quinn turned to a stoic Rahu and said, “Check the wreckage if you want but I’m going back. I’ve run out of arrows and bolts. God forbid we get another hundred surprise guests later but if we don’t, leave me alone and keep them well away from me or I’ll decide to play with them with my babies.” She kissed her crossbow obscenely.

Then, with a graceful turn of her lithe body, Quinn left Rahu and Paul and walked back to the arsenal.

“Her attitude shouldn’t matter,” Rahu spoke immediately once she was safely beyond the treeline. “Quinn has her uses and we best take advantage of that in the meantime.”

“For euthanasia, obviously, among others,” Paul said through gritted teeth. He gave John Halsey one last regretful look and led Rahu towards where they could detect the smell of gasoline. Their trek ended at a fenced in railroad track.

Fenced in before six large cars toppled to the side and destroyed the metalwork, all of them burning. Here and there, dead humans lay, most of them victims of the explosions rather than zombies. A few zombies also had the luck of burning along with their victims inside the burning wreckages. Thankfully, it started to drizzle, the rain effectively putting out the fires.

Rahu and Paul scouted around the perimeter and finding nothing untoward, helped each other clear out the wreckage, with Paul taking what salvageable resources he could find. There was much damage to the tracks but based on the map provided by his system, another set of tracks going south was available three counties away.

 As they walked back to the arsenal, Paul and Rahu discussed what happened and how it would affect their plans.

“I estimate about five hundred people inside the arsenal now,” said Rahu. “We didn’t expect something like this happening and since you’ve taken apart an entire building for your conversion upgrade, we have even less space to accommodate all of them. What to feed them will also be a problem.”

“That and staving off the infection,” Paul added. The arsenal was a weapons facility. It was not meant to become a treatment facility or a hospital with enough medical equipment and medication to help sufferers. And if what John Halsey told them was true about their destination in a treatment facility, then all those people were at Phases Two to Three already.

Judith’s last serum cannot help even one of them.

“Right now I don’t know why I changed my mind about not letting them in,” Rahu admitted.

Paul laid a hand on Rahu’s shoulder as they arrived at the gates. With an instruction from Rahu to Eric, the gates opened to let them in. Paul inwardly gasped at the sheer number of people at the front courtyard of the arsenal. Eli and Eric stood to a side. Paul saw Andie pushing Judith’s wheelchair forward.

His and Judith’s eyes met and somehow, they communicated across the bowed heads of the infected.

We have to talk, she conveyed.

Yes, he replied.

Morgan looked up from a wine magazine he had been perusing. His secretary held out a phone to him. The phone was a specially-made one, which only he and the twins had access to. He took it and held it to his ear.

“Hm.”

“Sinon is in.”

“Hm.”

The line went dead. Morgan gave the phone back to his secretary, who will do with it what was he was trained to do: pound it to pieces.

When his secretary was gone, Morgan went back to the magazine, returning to an interesting read on McAllister wines from Arkansas.