And we are back! This next chapter was a blast to do, if only because it's filling in some of the time that we never see in the film. And yes, there are extra men showing up here, but they actually WERE in the flick.. only just for a moment. That probably doesn't bode well for them, huh? Oh well!
On to the mayhem, and as always I hope you enjoy it!
(No I don't own a damn thing you grouchy legal people you. So blah.)
Chapter 2: Stairway to Somewhere
"We need to get off this roof," Dannie's rescuer said. He turned away from her, and then stopped short. "Where the hell is the helo?" The redhead just shook his head and shrugged.
"They lifted off the roof as soon as the team was all grounded."
The darker man, the leader or so Dannie guessed, frowned as he glanced back at the woman he'd saved.
"Is there another way down from here?" he asked, but she could only shake her head no.
"Just the stairs through that door. Well, that or…" Dannie nodded her head to the edge where Tess had so recently chosen another way out. He cursed under his breath, and seemed to consider.
"How many more infected were there inside?"
"I have no idea. I didn't even know they were inside until Tess came running. We were both working late, and I'd finally sent her home. She wasn't gone a full 10 minutes before coming back in a panic. Then we were running for the stairs and…" She shrugged. The men had all seen how that story ended. The redhead eyed her, and then raised an eyebrow at his CO. The shorter man sighed impatient and then matched the redhead's speculative look.
"Yeah, she'll need to come with us. Men, over here," he called, and the other three hustled over to where Dannie and the other two commandos were standing. "Ma'am, I'm Carlos Olivera, CO of U.B.C.S. Alpha Squad. This is my team: Nicholai, Yuri, Taka, and Phil."
"Danielle Walker. Or Dannie," she mentioned in turn, absently. It was odd that they were referring to each other by first name, or so she thought. That certainly wasn't the norm in the military units she'd worked with in the past. Considering 4 out of the 5 names were decidedly exotic, and Nicholai's voice had a distinct accent, it was likely these men were ex-pats from some other country. Maybe mercenaries? She swallowed, feeling a bit intimidated and decidedly tiny as the massive men crowded around her. Military men she was used to, but mercenaries tended to be another animal entirely. At least she could safely say that the leader at least had a decently sized hero complex, unusual in a merc, but it might server her better than otherwise. "So, what are we going to do?" she asked quietly.
"Phil, get back on the comm, and try to get the damn helo back. If not, we'll be going down through the building, and it'll get messy." One of the men, the only one who looked to be as all American as the soldiers she was used to seeing, nodded at Carlos's order and pulled out a radio. "Nicholai, watch the door. Yuri, she's injured." He turned and looked her over again. "You won't get far barefoot; we'll need to-"
"Here." They both started at the Asian man's sudden movement. He was holding out a pair of bright red Converse sneakers, and Dannie's stomach turned as she realized he must have gotten them off of one of the bodies around them.
"Taka…" Carlos said, his face clearly scolding. The shorter man just shrugged.
"She needs shoes." He held them out to her again. "They are clean. I checked."
"Taka, you can't-"
"It's alright," she was surprised to hear herself say. She thought for a moment, and then reached for the shoes. She wondered if Taka was right about them being clean. He might not have been able to tell; they were really red. The thought sparked another, ironically amusing one. "Welcome to Oz, Dorothy."
Carlos and Nicholai half-chuckled half-scoffed behind her, and she offered then a small pained smile before turning back to survey the shoes. She swallowed, not precisely comfortable at the thought of robbing from the dead, but knowing all too well that there wasn't likely any other option. She looked around for a place to sit and then just shrugged to herself. She dropped the shoes and stripped off her blazer, dropping it on a blood-and-corpse free section of the roof. Then she frowned a little and plopped down awkwardly; there was no graceful or lady-like way to sit in the damned skirt, let alone put the shoes on. She maneuvered her legs and finally just hiked the skirt up a bit so she could reach her feet, pointedly ignoring the men who could likely see every inch of her designer underwear at this point. She pulled on the shoes and tied them tightly, surprised they were almost the right size.
"Here, let me help." The new voice startled her, and she looked up to see one of the men, the one named Yuri she thought, standing over her with a handful of bandages and an antiseptic swab. "I should tend to your knee, yes?" She nodded tightly; annoyed to see he was defiantly looking at her legs in what wasn't a strictly professional manner. There wasn't much she could do about it. He knelt down at her side and cleaned and then wrapped her knee efficiently, and she relaxed a little. Then he looked back up with a slimy smile, and she braced herself for him to cop some kind of feel.
"Are you finished?" Carlos's voice broke in from behind them, and Dannie hid a smug smile as she caught a faintly guilty expression cross Yuri's face as he nodded once to his CO. Carlos's hand appeared at her shoulder, and she clasped it with her own and allowed him to lift her easily to her feet. He nodded once to her, and then turned back to gather the men. "Phil, any luck on the radio?" Phil shook his head ruefully, and Carlos scowled faintly. "Down we go then. Dannie, stay in the center of formation, at all times. You have to keep up or we can't protect you. Do you understand?"
She nodded briefly, ignoring the urge to bitch about the condescending tone. He was just concerned about her safety, she reminded herself, and after all he didn't know she was actually relatively used to this sort of thing. She paused, and then decided to tell him, knowing any intel might be useful.
"I do understand. I've done relief work in combat zones. Soldiers with PTSD, trauma victims, children in natural disasters, that sort of thing. I've been on a battlefield; just not quite this close to the front lines." She shrugged at the surprised and considering expressions on the men's faces. "I know how to follow orders, especially if they'll save my ass."
"Fair enough," Carlos said, a smile tugging at his lips as he turned away to nod to the rest of his men. "Taka and I are on point, Phil with our guest, Nicholai and Yuri on our 6."
The men move silently into formation around her and then headed toward the door. Nicholai moved out of position to tug on the door, but it wouldn't budge.
"Locked. What's the code?" Carlos turned and asked her over his shoulder.
"My code's 4026." He nodded sharply, and moved to the pad, hovering his left hand over the numbers while his right hefted the assault rifle toward the door. He counted down 3, 2, 1, then entered the code. Nicholai wrenched the door open instantly, ducking half behind it, and then Taka opened fire on the freaks that were waiting just beyond in the stairwell. Carlos fired as well, as between the pair, they mowed down their opponents in very little time. In the brief silence, Taka stepped over the downed infected and then moved carefully past them into the building, sweeping for any more of them.
"Is clear at this level." Carlos joined him, and then waved the other men and Dannie forward. The team stalked down the stairs with a silent grace, pausing at each floor's emergency door to glance in and check for more infected. They only opened fire a few times in the first few flights: once into the floor itself, and then again as a trio of infected clambered up below them.
Dannie tried to emulate the quiet footsteps of the men, but time and again, she managed to trip as the tight skirt hampered her normal relatively graceful steps. The third time it happened and her faint cry of "shit" broke the silence, Carlos turned around to glare at her impatiently.
"Is it the shoes?"
"The skirt," she answered shortly, not impressed by his frown over something she couldn't control. He surveyed her for a moment.
"Don't move." Then too fast for her to panic or argue, he was pulling a blade and slitting the skirt up the front between the legs to just below her crotch. She actually could feel the cold of the metal just above her knees, and she gasped and forced herself to be still. Carlos removed the blade with a smirk, he tried unsuccessfully to hide. "That should help. Keep moving."
He turned away, and Dannie resisted the urge to push him farther down the stairs. She could hear the sound of smothered laughter behind her, and she glared over her shoulder at the two men bringing up the rear. Nicholai quickly hid the grin, but Yuri was just amused.
"Ignore it. He's always like that," Phil said quietly as they proceeded down the next flight of stairs.
"Which one?" she snapped under her breath. It was so nice to be humiliated. Damned testosterone fueled muscle heads. And damned her freaking legs for proving Carlos right. She was already moving more easily and she'd yet to trip again. She'd cuss him out for it later, assuming she survived, but in all fairness, she would probably have to thank him after that. And better the relatively polite leader than one of the others like, say, Yuri, she admitted.
They continued down the stairs and were nearly down to the ground level when a door just a flight below them slammed open and a mass of infected rushed into the stairwell. Dannie couldn't help a smothered cry of fear; there were easily as many pouring in as had chased Tess to her death, and all were moaning and snarling viciously.
"Back, move back!" Carlos shouted and opened fire, retreating back up the stairs with Taka keeping pace right beside him. The others were moving back as well, firing over the railing to hit the crowded steps below them. Dannie clung to the railing as she tried to keep far enough back that she wouldn't trip either man in front of her. Phil's hand gripped her elbow and steadied her, supporting her weight and drawing her up with him onto the landing at the next floor up.
"Just a few more now," he called to her encouragingly as the men made short work of the half dozen remaining monsters below them. She turned to smile gratefully at him, then screamed as the door beside them slammed open as well. There were fewer infected on the other side than there had been on the floor below, but they poured through the door in a wave and crashed into Phil who was nearest to the door. He shouted out in rage, and reached to shove Dannie clear. She fell down the steps into Carlos who'd turned at the shout. He yanked her between him and Taka, and yelled in rage to his teammate.
"Phil!" With Dannie out of the way, the men opened fire, but it was too late. The infected had reached him, and as Dannie watched in shock, the weight of the figures pushed the man backwards into and then flailing over the railing to fall down the center of the stairway to land on the ground floor with a sickening crunch below. There was a moment of horrified silence as the infected seemed confused by the sudden loss of their prey, but then they turned in a shuffle to face the rest of the team.
"Fire at will," Carlos ordered into the quiet, and then in a rush bullets, the infected were dealt with. As the last one fell to a bullet right between the eyes, Dannie found herself shaking. She caught hold of the back of Carlos's vest, needing something to support her suddenly weak knees. A second person was gone, and she'd now watched both fall to their deaths in the space of barely 10 minutes. Carlos turned at the faint tug on his vest, and nodded to her sadly before glancing about his men. "Anyone else hurt?"
They all shook their heads, and Nicholai and Yuri stepped over the pile of dispatched bodies with a much more solemn air than they'd had only moments before.
"We're fine," Nicholai answered subdued. Carlos ordered them back into formation, and Dannie was once again in the center, this time of four men. The pair behind her stayed much closer for the last few flights to the ground, and she was painfully comforted by the weaponry so close to her. They reached the ground floor and the sick sight of Phil's broken and bleeding body. Carlos was the one to move over and check him for movement, but the other man was clearly dead.
"Guess the fall broke his neck. He won't turn." He hesitated for a moment, and then regretfully reached down to take the battered comm from the fallen man's vest. He straightened and glanced to his remaining men and the one woman stuck trembling in their midst. "Dannie, where's this door open to?"
"It should be the parking garage, I think."
"Alright, everyone keep eyes open." He reached out to pull Dannie close behind him, and then nodded to Nicholai where he waited by the door. "Go."
Nicholai pushed open the door and one by one they all surged through.
Reviews might just get Carlos or Nicholai to strip later! They said so... really. *looks innocent*
