The Coalition: Part 1 The State of Extinction (Zombie Series) Read Free Page B

done for Lacy and so he had turned on his heel and made for the stairwell. Already , he could hear sounds of chaos coming from the floor below him. The front doors had obviously been left unlocked as the scarlet-haired Ms. Penland had vacated the premises when the getting out had been good. She had obviously been in too much of a hurry to bother to lock the door behind her, or else she had been unable to do so. Cutter figured the latter. Maybe she had left with others when the entire lot of them ran like people who had the good sense to get the hell out of Dodge.
    The power was gone, so he knew that it would be pointless to try the elevators. Instead, he carefully opened the door to the stairwell and peeked in. Dim light filtered in from small square windows in the concrete well of the place, and he could see that nothing moved in there. However, he could hear shuffling sounds from below. Those things had already opened the door on the first floor and were checking out the stairwell. He would have to move fast, so he quickly ducked through the door and began moving up the stairs as fast as he could without actually running. Cutter had a bad knee—two rounds of surgery to fix floating cartilage and a torn meniscus. He had to be careful on that right knee , since it had not fully recovered from that last bit of arthroscopic work. I’ll have to miss my next session with the physical therapist , he mused, almost laughing.
    From downstairs, the sounds of moving feet were becoming louder. He could hear the muffled moans of those dead throats, also. He had heard them before, out on the streets when the problem had first appeared. Generally, they made no sounds at all, but when they got agitated, they would begin a kind of moan that could generate into a low snarl when they got down to the business of killing. What Cutter was hearing now from down in the shadowed stairwell were the initial moans, as they must have figured they had something to chase. It was his own hurried steps that had tipped them off, he knew. Well, now there was nothing to do , except climb and find a way out before he was completely trapped.
    Breathing hard, and feeling the heat that was creeping into the building, he reached the next floor and once more, the prospect faced him of opening a door that would lead into a possibly bad situation. Behind him, he could hear the sounds of dead lungs and tromping feet. Those things normally did not move very fast, but they could almost trot when they knew there was someone to kill and eat within reach. Thinking that he could even see movement coming up through the darkness, he took his chances and pushed the door open.
    Nothing but silence greeted him ... Moving into the hallway , he turned and looked to see if he could lock the door or bar it. There was a lock, but he had no key for it and didn’t know where he could find one . All he could do was keep moving. At the back of the floor was a kind of covered walkway that led over to the warehouse, and there was also a closed scaffold that led down to the street. It was caged in and there was a gate at the bottom that latched from the inside. Since you could only open it from inside the walkway, they never locked it. And … theoretically … only employees would be using that staircase. It really was his only option out of the building now, so he pushed on.
    Walking on, Cutter loosened his tie and opened his shirt. The sun was up, showing above the level of the building around Briggs Stationers . It was getting hot. Taking a moment, he looked down at the streets to see that the marching dead packed them . Among them, he saw the figures moving quicker than the dead do , and noticed that most of those people were surrounded in quick order and taken down. Muffled screams and high-pitched yelling that was not mercifully muffled filtered up the three floors to his ears. He could not block out those sounds of pain, and he averted his eyes so that he didn’t witness the worst