smiled and coughed. “Yeah, you bet.”
He looked around the place. “Air-conditioning wouldn’t be such a bad idea around here. I’m dying.”
“You hang on in there,” Ksenia said standing up. She picked up the perforator and continued drilling. Through the ceaseless noise of the alarm system, she heard a gnashing sound of metal against metal and stopped.
“Damn!” she said, looking at a stump of the drill bit. “I’ve broken it!”
She put the perforator down and knelt beside the tool case to look for a replacement for the broken drill bit.
Ramses took a swing and smashed the sledgehammer against the middle hinge. The hinge did not move.
There was a distant clang coming from the first floor. Ramses stopped working and raised his head. Ksenia stood up and listened, but she could hardly hear anything.
She took her gun and the torch. “I’m going to check it.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.” She tucked the pistol under her sweater and picked up the ax. “Don’t worry about me.”
She turned to leave as Ramses said, “Wait … Ksenia.”
She stopped and glanced over her shoulder.
“Please be very, very careful there,” he said.
She weighed the ax in her hand. “I will.”
“When this is all over, I’ll take you to the Aziza restaurant. Best place in San Francisco.”
She snapped the torch on and smiled wearily. “Sounds like a deal. I’ll take you up on that.”
As Ksenia had left, Ramses got back to the middle hinge. With half a dozen powerful blows he broke it off. His muscles were tensed and beads of sweat dripped down his forehead but he was glad that he was winning this battle. He rested the sledgehammer against the wall and removed the broken mountain screws. Then he inserted the crowbar into the gap between the door and the doorjamb. He used some force to spring the door away from the frame. The metal resisted, but he maintained pressure on the tool and soon heard faint creaking. His hands were shaking and his T-shirt was damp. Useless. The gap was too narrow yet.
He moved the crowbar side to side to free it up and tried to separate the lower hinge but the weight of the heavy door was pressing on it. Using the perforator, he broke part of the masonry around where the lower hinge was anchored into the wall. In a minute, in the middle of the process, the perforator howled to a stop. The wailing of the alarm system ceased, too. There was brief silence, followed by the sounds of running feet. He squeezed the tool trigger multiple times, unplugged the cable and reconnected it into another socket of the extension cord. To no avail. There was no power.
The darkness of the corridor was torn by the beam of the flashlight and he saw Ksenia dashing toward him on the linoleum punctuated with moonlit patches. As she ran up to him, he saw fright and panic reflected in her exhausted face.
“It’s no good.” She was breathing heavily. “They’ve broken through!”
“Shit!” Ramses said. “I haven’t finished here yet.”
He heard deep growling echoing in the hollow space of the stairwell. The shuddersome sounds got under his skin.
“Then do something!” She was on the verge of hysteria. “They’re coming up!”
He dropped the tool and grabbed the edge of the door.
“I’m gonna make a gap,” he said. “And you try to squeeze in.”
“Okay!” Ksenia put the torch into her jeans pocket.
He pulled at the door using his entire force and wrenched it until the gap was wide enough for Ksenia to slip in.
Inside the armory, Ksenia took out the torch and had a look around. It was a tiny room with no windows. There was a rack of weapons on the wall and two rows of lockers.
Ramses put his head through. “What do you got?”
“Not much,” she said, opening a locker. “Most of the weaponry was taken away when the pandemonium began.” She took out a backpack and threw it at Ramses. “Here. Take this!” He caught it with one hand.
She gave him four hand grenades, which he put into the backpack. One by one. Quickly. But very carefully.
“And this,” she said, handing him an AK-47 assault rifle, a shortened variation used by the police.
The morbid moaning could be heard more distinctly now. Ramses turned his head to the left and saw dark creatures lurking at the threshold of the corridor. He held his breath and gulped.
“Get the mags!” he said in a loud whisper. “The dead ones are here!”
Ksenia was slamming frantically the locker doors in search of the ammunition. Her torch beam grew feeble, and the light terminated. It was pitch dark in the room again. She beat the flashlight against her palm and flipped the switch on and off, but it wouldn’t function.
“The cell phone!” she said. “Give it to me!”
He took the cell phone out of his pocket, turned it on and gave it to her. She cast the scanty screen light around and kept on looking. Her face was glowing in the white light of the display. For a second he imagined she was a distant lighthouse showing the seaway in the blackness of the night.
A young woman clad in blood-stained pajamas made shuffling steps along the corridor in the vanguard of the ghastly procession. The moon threw its silver light on her disfigured face. Her bare feet were leaving filthy undulating trails on the floor. She raised her arms and gave a hoarse moan. A police officer in a tunic was walking behind her, his jaws clacking. A group of other automatons followed them slow but steady. Nearer with every step.
Ramses’s heart grew sick. Blood was pulsing in his head. He aimed the Grach pistol and squeezed a round into the civilian woman’s face. There was a wet sound and the female collapsed.
Ksenia’s frightened face appeared in the gap. “This is all there is.” She slipped three banana-shaped magazines into his hands and then pushed through a sniper rifle. Ramses shouldered the rifle, never taking his eyes off the approaching monsters.
“We got no time to be choosy,” he said, attaching a magazine to the AK-47. He fired a series of shots. The hot spent cartridges propelled through the gloomy dark and fell down with a ringing sound. All the bullets hit the policeman’s chest, which did not stop him. “We gotta fall back!”
The crazies were advancing. Frenzied hunger was pushing their unsteady feet forward. And their prey was so close.
Ksenia put her right leg through the gap. The rough edges of the door tore the front of her sweater and scratched her cheek as she tried to shove herself out. The cell phone dropped to the floor. The screen shattered and faded out. Her leg was caught in the narrow space between the door and the door frame, and tongs of pain squeezed her thigh.
“I’m
