Quadragesimus Quintus Gradus

Heavily inspired by “Thank You for the Venom” by My Chemical Romance.

I recommend listening to the song before and/or while reading this story. A familiarity with the song may enhance the reader’s enjoyment of this story.

The kill team encircles the facility, shadowy specters against the oily trees of the morning forest. Eddie severs a padlock, kicks in a door. Angie swings inside. The shadows storm through the hallway. Muzzles aimed at scrambling lab coats cry out with flashing rage. They clear the living, converting them to the dead. They clear every room, converting each into a mass casket. Bright blood from the slain spatter roses across the coffin doors.

At the end of the hall Angie scurries toward a frosted glass door, weapon nuzzled in her shoulder, barrel steaming. The opaque panel shatters as she nears.

“Sister!” Eddie yells as she’s caught by the rotting arms of a bloated corpse five times her size. Her pretty face screams, she pulls the trigger. Brown mush spurts out of her attacker’s back, a spray chasing each bullet. They don’t stop the fangs of the monster from sinking into her neck. She never had a chance. Her flesh splatters to the floor as the monster turns and leaps onto another person, then another, lurching from wailing victim to victim. Each becomes a pile of mutilation seeping over the polished floor.

Eddie fires at the monster until it disappears behind a corner. Screams echo out of the corridor. He bellows and kneels next to Angie, alive and suffering. “So this is what life’s like…” she managed, but Eddie didn’t hear her. The screams of throats and guns drowned her whisper in a putrid symphony. He pressed his ear to her lips “…bleeding on the floor?” She exhaled with her life.

Eddie pulls his blood-soaked ear away only for a chorus of moans to scratch it, even over the fray around him. Outside, dozens of decomposing legs stumble with haste toward the facility, gushing through the tree line.

Guards clad in white armor storm into the rotunda. They exterminate two of Eddie’s team before they can return fire. Eddie scrambles among the lockboxes in the lab, bashing glass cabinets with the butt of his gun. He tears open a door and finds them. A searing pain cuts his side. He growls and raises his eyes over the counter to see three guards.

“Give me all your pills!” Eddie screams as he sweeps his rifle across the counter, holding the barrel down with his meaty arm. The guards crumple. Maroon rivers taint their matte white armor plates.

Eddie sets his arm on the shelf and drags the canisters of pills into his satchel. He hoists the rifle upright and begins to sprint back down the corridor. His surviving teammates fall in behind him as the guards pour into the room.

The kill team bursts out of the facility and slam the door closed only to face a horde of unhinged mouths that belong to rotted faces.

“Hallelujah, lock and load!” Eddie orders. In the spare seconds they have, the specters reload and re-chamber. The barrels of his kill team raise at the same instant, blasting open the skulls of the dead and cutting a pathway of blood through the courtyard out into the forest.

Spilling into the tree line, Eddie hears a roar emanate from the facility. He turns over his shoulder and catches a glimpse of the great beast bursting out of the rotunda’s glass roof with a squirming guard in one hand and half a scientist in the other. As the monster turns to consume the head of the guard, cracking through his white helmet and splashing his brains over the roof, it notices a train of survivors pouring into the forest opposite Eddie’s kill team. The corpse drops the bodies and lunges toward the fleeing crowd.

Eddie pushes off the ground, shouldering a decaying man hard enough to rip it in gory twain, and sprints toward the survivors with a roar. 

“Eddie!” His team screams behind him, “You’re running after something that you’ll never kill!”

“Give me all your hopeless hearts,” Eddie cried over his shoulder to the team as he carried on, spraying down the dead in his way. He took a hand off his rifle and sunk it into his satchel, tearing out a canister and popping the lid with his thumb. He hurled the satchel back to his team.

“If this is what you want, then fire at will,” his team blessed him as they turned to make their escape with the pills.

Dropping his empty magazine and stuffing it into the eye socket of a corpse, Eddie began to vomit. He remained on his feet and forced his burning eyes to remain locked on a fresh magazine, replacing his rifle’s food. The puke poured over his chin and down his neck, soaking his chest. Hands clamped down on him from every angle. His pace suffered. The scratches and bites hurt, but they couldn’t kill him. They couldn’t turn him.

“Give me all your poison!” he taunted the dead through his bile, “it’ll be the last!”

He stopped running and thrusted an elbow back, lodging it in the chest of a corpse. It kept his aim steady as he circled, blowing heads apart all around him. Enough space cleared for him to pull his arm free and carry on, he sprinted once more toward the monster that had ripped his sister apart. It was amongst the crowd eating every bullet the guards threw at it and every soul it captured in its grip. The bodies in now-red clothes rained over the dark forest.

Eddie felt a shin snap below his foot and heard a yelp of pain. Shocked by the expression, he turned to look at the victim. It was a scientist, who gazed forlorn at the monster.

“You’re going after it,” the woman whispered. “It can’t be killed!” Her body quaked. “But… give me a reason to believe…” she let her final wish fade into the screams of the forest, the screams of both the dead and of the dying.

Eddie reset his attention on the monster. He shot at its head. No flash or noise revealed the shots. His gun was empty. Yelling, Eddie threw the empty rifle at a stumbling corpse and scanned the carnage for another weapon. All he found was a fire axe. Hoisting it up, he ran again toward the violent beast. Swinging the iron axe head with adrenalized ease he cut down multitudes on his way to the monster, leaving them to rot into dust at his heels. 

He leapt into the air with the axe behind his back. The blade spliced the beast’s sternum. Eddie sunk his fingers around its clavicle and took the axe in the other hand. He cut into the chest over and over, the dead flesh hanging like mourning veils over the holes he gored. The monster struck Eddie, tearing away his grip. He spewed gasping for breath into the crowd of dying people and stumbling corpses.

“Love it or leave it!” Eddie heard a man scream. 

“I don’t understand…” Eddie began, choking on spittle. He heard a wet gargling, but before he could turn to look a body collapsed onto him. It pinned his hips to the ground. He stared into the barrel of a PAW-20. The guard’s finger, warm dead blood still draining, was collapsing into the trigger. Eddie’s muscles snapped into action to punch the corpse’s arm away from the gun and take it into his own. 

Still pinned, Eddie spun the launcher, nestled the stock into his shoulder, and squeezed the trigger seven times. Seven rounds split through the air sailing toward the beast. They bounced off its gray skin, or rolled around its feet, and a few sunk through the axe wounds. One by one they exploded into a hail of shrapnel and flame. Brown blood and bits of flesh blanketed everything in the fray, soaking Eddie’s face. He sputtered and wiped his eyes. The beast was both nowhere and everywhere, and Eddie wore it on his sleeve.