The Reaper Virus by Nathan Barnes Page A

on. There
was no point in bringing more attention to us than absolutely
necessary.
    We were down the hall about five feet from
the back door when the power went out and stayed that way. Lance
was walking in front and stopped in his tracks. He reached towards
his back on his utility belt. For a second there I thought he was
handing me his gun. Pulling his ASP Baton from its holster, he
flicked it open from its collapsed position and handed it to
me.
    Well at least I wouldn’t be completely
unarmed.
    Stepping out the door we stopped to listen. I
heard chaos in the background, but the generator drowned out
everything nearby. That was both good and bad. Good, because it
would cover up any sounds we might make – bad, because that worked
both ways.
    I eased the door closed. It was thick and
metal, and liked to bang shut. There was a slight alcove in the
brick leading to the door, which provided some concealment and the
opportunity to check out the alleyway. Streetlights were on, along
with some of the emergency lights in the deck. I could hear more
sporadic gunshots coming from all directions, glass breaking, cars
honking, and yelling… yelling from everywhere .
    The alley looked empty. There were a few
shadows at the far end of the block where the person was laying in
the street. We dashed to the parking deck side entrance. Heel to
toe, heel to toe. Combat boots were a great choice; they didn’t
make a sound on concrete, assuming you watched your step.
    Lance was two steps ahead of me, hand on his
holstered weapon. The generator was rumbling behind us, covering
any sounds we made, its mechanical whine blending with the echoing
anarchy of the rest of the city. Wearing only a white undershirt, I
should had been cold in the brisk November air. It would seem that
an adrenaline surge made for a great temporary jacket.
    Within seconds we reached the glass door
leading to the stairwell on the southwest corner of the deck. My ID
card was in hand ready to swipe the card reader several steps
before we even made it to the door. No need; power was out and so
were the maglocks.
    Great, one more thing to be positive about,
now the whole deck was open. Lance’s expression told me he was
thinking the same.
    All university owned buildings with maglocks
connected to a monitoring system. Power failures caused a
communication failure to the building, something we saw on the
monitoring console in dispatch. Most of the exterior doors held a
residual charge in the magnet long enough for us to send a security
guard out for manual locking.
    The problem was that it only took one person
to pull on said door hard enough that it opened; releasing the
residual charge and leaving the building vulnerable. During your
run of the mill inclement weather situation, this wasn’t a huge
concern, because plenty of people were available to quickly get to
the doors. This wasn’t your run of the mill situation.
    Lance barely touched the door and it opened.
That was all the incentive he needed to remove his Sig Sauer P229
forty caliber service weapon from its holster. He glanced over at
me, and then the dimly lit stairwell ahead of us. I nodded once and
we pushed onward.
    My right hand kept the cold steel baton in a
white-knuckled grip while the left muffled the keys attached to my
belt with a carabineer. We slowly and quietly sidestepped up the
dark concrete stairwell while listening to every sound that could
possibly be in our vicinity. I tried not to fill my mind with all
the worst case scenarios. Damn my pessimistic tendencies! Thoughts
of not being able to get back into the station, getting infected,
getting eaten or worse, all swirled about
my mind. Focus returned with a single thought of Sarah, Maddox, and
Calise.
    When we rounded the second bend in the
stairs, light from the thick glass window illuminated something I
didn’t want to see. Blood pooled over about half of the flat
landing between flights of stairs beneath the window. Handprints,
some so thick