Chapter 11: Chapter 11: Heavy Metal.

The elevators were right out as a method to get down a level. The sound of the door chime and the noise of the doors opening would be a dinner bell to the horde that I knew was there. There was only one way I was getting down to Level 2.

The Maintenance shaft. Something still felt off about it. Perhaps I was just being paranoid but I just knew something bad would happen if I went there. Maybe it would only happen if I used that path too much, maybe it wouldn’t happen at all. But I wouldn’t be counting on that.

The access point from the shaft was in the section with the food storage warehouses. Access to food and water meant zombies. That much food and water meant hordes. Supposing they could get at said food and water of course. The security feeds had too many irritating black sections for me to be comfortable, but there was trash.

Very likely zombies, so very likely there were hordes. I couldn’t bank on sneaking past. So I searched for ways to slow or block the hordes.

The Chief’s console didn’t have the option to throw up the emergency bulkheads. Of course not. Only management had that option- and they didn’t use it. The Chief could remotely lock doors, but zombies didn’t use door handles or access panels anyway.

I searched for anything that could be done from Security and there were some options. A disappointing few.

There was a Security checkpoint I could activate, and since it seemed prudent to do so, I did. Setting myself to friendly took some doing, but I was now a Security officer in the eyes of the system. A very junior one.

But the guns wouldn’t shoot at me or through me. Probably. Speaking of guns, the long guns from the upper management battle had disappeared when I looked for them on the way back. They’d been returned to Security and were now sitting in the racks in the armory.

Those could come in handy. But I’d never shot one before. I knew the pistol at least a little bit. It was small. Heavy, but not too heavy to carry. The long guns were bigger and heavier, with similarly scaled bullets.

I was not confident at all that I could destroy a horde before it destroyed me. Getting to the stasis pods had to be done quickly, and delaying too long for a battle was unacceptable.

The food storage warehouses were partitioned off from one another. They opened into a broad common corridor that led to a large elevator I hadn’t seen before. It probably existed to serve the cafeteria sections, as it wasn’t part of the main elevator banks. Maybe that was an option for future use, but it wouldn’t help me now.

The Security checkpoint was in a good spot for me, right outside one of the Hospital section entrances facing the cafeteria. Another horde was there. They were currently quiescent. But that could change in an instant. From there things went from bad to worse.

The Hospital was like the Engineering Level. Potential ambush spots everywhere. Lots of doors that couldn’t be remotely shut. I’d been closing the ones I could on the path I intended to take, which caused some interest from the resident zombie population. Not much though.

Perhaps my theory about zombie memory had some weight to it. Visual cues that didn’t repeat and didn’t look like food were often quickly ignored. I trapped at least one horde that way. The zombies in question there didn’t so much as twitch, as if they were dead already.

There were plenty of zombies within the Hospital itself. At least as many as the horde in the cafeteria, if not more. Some were active and wandering the halls. Others appeared to be hibernating. Some wore scrubs, others were naked.

There were nests all over the place. On one screen I could see a zombie eating a meal bar. It shoved the whole thing in its mouth with both hands and chewed. This confirmed for me that zombies did not have taste buds. I’d almost eaten a wrapper before and they tasted beyond foul. Not even a starving man would eat a meal bar wrapper. I already knew that zombie digestion worked differently than any normal human.

The stasis pods were located deep within the Hospital adjacent to the morgue. The door to the morgue was shut and there were no zombies inside, ironically enough. All the flesh eaters were outside. Waiting to chow down on my flesh, no doubt.

There were several problems to overcome. One, I had to make it to the stasis pods alive. Two, I needed to prevent them from failing or safely revive those inside. This being a hospital, chances were good that those inside had suffered serious injuries. Might even be moments away from dying.

But as long as they were alive I had to try and save them. Somehow. There were no other options for the last man alive on Walker. At least the last one awake and alive.

Third problem, I had to do this without bringing the hordes down into the hospital. There would be no saving those people while zombies were trying to eat my flesh. Which meant I had to somehow get the zombies out of the hospital.

I couldn’t kill them all in a reasonable amount of time. Not soon enough to save the one in the pod with the least amount of time before it failed. That meant I had to draw the zombies out and somehow not let them back in.

I knew how to attract zombies. That much I knew well. The howls they made when one sighted prey drew in other infected from as far away as they could hear. To be certain, I needed to sneak past the hordes in the food storage warehouses, past the horde in the cafeteria, and make it inside the Hospital undetected.

Then I needed to attract a zombie somewhere within the Hospital, run outside to the cafeteria area, not get mauled to death by the horde waiting there, and keep the zombies from getting into the hospital somehow. Then I needed to get into the hospital and to the stasis pods. Then I needed to somehow keep them going.

Or, failing that, safely resuscitate the occupants and keep them from dying.

No pressure.

Also I suspected impossible. I’d have to change the variables somehow in my favor.

My gaze was drawn to the armory like a magnet. The combat suit that had stood in the elevator, visor shattered and holding a corpse stood restored. The corpse was absent, removed and bagged as a casualty awaiting loved ones long dead or infected.

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The visor was similarly repaired, but I mistrusted it. On the downside, I’d never piloted a combat suit. Just like the long guns, I didn’t know what I was doing with it. But the clock was ticking and I was prepared to try something potentially crazy.

I’d taken to carrying meal bars and nutrient paste in the medical satchel just in case. I hadn’t taken the satchel with me on the spacewalk, but I had it now. I wasn’t especially hungry, but I choked down two meal bars and nutrient paste anyway.

What I was about to do was certifiably insane. If there were any psychologists left, they’d likely have all sorts of diagnoses on the actions I was about to take.

The nanites flowed from me into the combat suit. Unlike the access panel to the upper management’s lair, the combat suit had several dozen functions built right in to the access point. It checked all queries for identity, authorization, health status on several levels, medical history, service jacket, and more.

This was a piece of serious military equipment, not a private security device. I briefly wondered how Walker Security had gotten their hands on it. But then, we did do military research in some of the labs.

The suit didn’t want to give me access because I wasn’t trained (true), too junior in rank (also true), not authorized (partly true. I authorized myself), and what’s this? I dove into the last option and found a wealth of things that Security likely had never known.

I authorized myself as a test pilot under the military testing program. This gave me access to the combat suits full military capabilities which were considerable. I withdrew from the hardware and the suit opened to allow me access.

It did not smell of rotting flesh, sweat, or anything else. I had to get out of the space suit because the combat suit embraced it’s operator tightly. The catheter installation was a surprise and not a pleasant one. But there was no time.

The suit functions were simple to navigate from the HUD, verbally, or through the neural net. I didn’t have time to calibrate the latter, which was a day long process by the documentation I skimmed. The suit blinked a query as to what weapons were to be included in the test.

I selected everything.

The suit cradle exploded into motion, the manipulator arms swarming over me as the combat suit held me still. Several warnings popped up as various lethal weaponry was attached pretty much everywhere. There wasn’t enough applicable ammunition. It wanted to know if I wanted to substitute new test stock from available ammunition storage.

I said yes. It also wanted to know if I wanted non-lethal options. I said no. It told me that there weren’t enough explosives available for a full loadout so it gave me the option of selecting what kind of explosives were to be loaded. The only thing I recognized even slightly was grenades, so I chose those. It asked what kind of grenades. Fragmentary was the top option listed, so I picked that.

Something lowered over the armor glass visor of the suit enclosing me in darkness for a moment. Then the darkness receded and I could see everything around me as if there were nothing between me and the armory itself.

I saw the cradle still busying itself with installing even more weapons on the suit’s torso, legs, and shoulders. The suit informed me that all available ammunition stocks were depleted. I looked to the ammo count and found that it read only 14% filled. Then I saw the actual number.

14,000 bullets is a lot. But it wasn’t even half of the capacity of the combat suit in test mode. It looked like a large backpack like device could be installed to carry all that extra ordinance but wasn’t necessary because the onboard stocks weren’t full.

There were melee options. Blades and spikes pretty much everywhere. I was beginning to think that the suit wasn’t really designed to mount everything at the same time.

At least I hoped it wasn’t. The amount of potential lethality worried me for a moment. Then I remembered the hordes and decided that worried was probably the sanest possible option for a completely different reason.

The power reserves blinked at me, showing they had dipped from full and were recovering. A tooltip popped up saying that estimated run time at full combat load was twenty minutes. Twenty minutes didn’t seem long. I suspected the Security officers that ran these combat suits before getting killed had a little longer than that, but it hadn’t done them much good.

The cradle arms finally retracted having installed the last bit of lethal hardware on my boots. More spikes. The added weaponry up top added to the combat suit’s overall height to the point it was around nine feet tall.

I stepped out of the cradle slowly. The suit legs were longer than mine and simply walking would take me farther to the point it was almost like jogging. It took getting used to, but I was out of time. There was no telling whether the estimated time left on the stasis pods was optimistic or not.

I had to duck and crouch to get through the hatches to the maintenance shaft. It appeared that combat suits were not meant to be taken into the showers either. An understandable oversight, I reflected.

There was a faint sound coming from down the shaft. I couldn’t tell what it was. A hissing noise? Not like atmosphere escaping, something deeper in tone. Not like the soft shush of the ventilation system either. There was no time to investigate. But it worried me.

I entered the maintenance shaft and climbed up. I didn’t trust the suit’s attitude jets. Or rather, my operation of them. The suit’s gauntlets did not crumple the handholds in the shaft, for which I was grateful to my formerly boasting colleague. I hadn’t been properly social with my fellow researchers, I supposed. But then, we’d all been oddballs of some flavor or other.

The access to Level 2 was larger than the one on the Security Level and I could enter without crouching. I briefly wondered if the zombies would recognize me as human in all this metal.

That question was swiftly answered by a chorus of bloodthirsty howls.

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