Free The Flood by Michael Stephen Fuchs Page A

face – and when he examined them, found they had been shattered by impact with the controls. And then… as his vision dialed up from woozy pinholes, and his natural night vision started to come back… and he peered out the cockpit glass ahead of him, he was substantially less thrilled.
    Because the night had already started to come alive all around him. Humanoid shapes, most of them in what looked like heavy military overcoats, were moving in every direction he could see. And they were all, unmistakably, horribly, ineluctably, moving in the same direction: straight toward him.
    Worse – much, much worse – was that some of them were… running. Running? Fuck! He’d never seen them run before. Maybe it was the cold of the Altai mountains, maybe it was due to when the population there went down. Maybe it was the sparse population in the region itself. But the dead in Aliyev’s world had only ever stumbled. He’d never seen runners.
    For a second, he wondered if he’d really regained consciousness at all, and this wasn’t another terrible dream. But he beat his face with his fist a couple of times, after which they were all still there. Except closer now.
    Only when it all finally came back to him did he realize his awareness of his situation had been badly muddled by the impact of the crash. And his situation was simplicity itself: He was in the middle of Red Square. And that was the undead Red Army coming for him. And in a matter of minutes, if not seconds, he was going to be a singularity of one – trapped in his Eurocopter for all eternity.
    Basically, he had to get the ever-living fuck out of there.
    He unbuckled and hurled himself into the cargo area in back, to gather his resources and make a plan. To gear up – and psych up.
    Now , he thought, narrating his whole hopeless situation to himself, lecturing as always, if only in his own head, of anyone else it might be said: Are you mad? Going out into the middle of Moscow alone? On foot? With no safe haven?
    As he lectured, he pulled together the three items that were going to be absolutely essential to take with him: his bug-out bag – the 5.11 Tactical backpack filled with apocalypse survival essentials – check . The medical coldbox – holding his custom-designed zombie-annihilating Meningitis Z virus, as well as the vaccine against it – check .
    And, last but first, the Benelli motherfucking Tactical shotgun. Check.
    Yes, anyone else might be thought mad for going out alone on foot into undead central Moscow. Whereas Aliyev on the other hand, perhaps uniquely among living people, actually had at least two places nearby where he knew he could seek refuge. In fact, he knew the whole government sector well – from his many visits there over the years, when he had been one of the most senior scientists with Biopreparat, the secret Soviet bioweapons program.
    This didn’t mean it was going to be easy.
    As he furiously planned in his head, he got two boxes of shotgun shells out of the bug-out bag with trembling fingers and dumped the contents into his jacket pockets, then dumped the empty boxes and sealed the bag up again. He realized he could actually hear the approaching dead now, that horrifying frenzied moaning, growing in volume every second. But he refrained from even stealing a glance out the side windows, as that would be a pointless waste of precious seconds – not to mention priceless courage.
    Now – there was the question of where exactly the hell to go, once he opened that door and started legging it.
    There was, for starters, the Moscow headquarters of Biopreparat itself. This was housed in a yellow brick mansion with a green roof that had previously been the home of a certain nineteenth-century vodka merchant named Pyotr Smirnoff. Ironic , Aliyev thought. Comrade Smirnoff’s product did more than any foreign invader to undermine the health of Russian citizens. And it was from there that we undertook to create bioweapons to destroy the