Chapter 103: No Rockets Here

Angela was standing in front of the clogged corridor where she had been separated from Rick. After getting back her knife from the remains of the mushed brain of the licker she killed and getting back her bag of supplies, she had made her way back and started mixing chemicals inside a plastic bucket.

Acetone, bleach, and drain cleaner were a terrifying combination. The moment she heard a hissing sound and the plastic containing the mixture melting, she ran as far as she could to get away. A good choice, the resulting explosion had been quite loud and bright. When she saw what was left of debris, she swore to herself to never store the three of them together.

Right there, most of the debris had crumbled down from the pure, raw strength of the explosion. It didn’t destroy everything but it didn’t matter. Whatever was obstructing her could now be dislodged and removed by hand.

With a clear path, she grabbed her submachine gun and walked through. The sight beyond the clutter was gruesome and grim. Blood, flesh and corpses everywhere. The hunters who had attacked her and Rick were all dead. She had no doubt it was Rick’s work. Angela felt relieved and vindicated when she didn’t find her mentor’s body or limbs among the carnage. The utter destruction of the surroundings however, baffled her. Holes in walls, rubble left and right with no end in sight. One wall even had a long indent in it crossing multiple feet. It was as if someone had dragged something deep into it.

Her first order of business was to find the AI’s servers and look for Rick second. The threat of their digital opponent was far more important than assisting her partner who probably didn’t need a helping hand. So, instead of following the trail of destruction left behind, by what she was sure was Rick and his fight against the Tyrants, she went the other way.

Not a safer way, she didn’t know anything about it but she was sure, considering the area, that there would be danger but the way that wouldn’t lead to a fight between three juggernauts who far outclassed her physical capabilities or gear. Short of a rocket launcher or anything in this category of damage, there was no killing the two BOW.

Passing through a sign on the wall indicating she was on the path to what was called ‘The Menagerie’, Angela doubled down on her focus. Even more so when once again the lights went out.

She wanted to shout in a frustration at the AI or perhaps a taunt but she knew better. In total darkness she would simply announce her position to every bio organic weapon out there. That is, if they couldn’t detect her like this anyway. Still, not wanting more lickers on her if she could avoid it, Angela stayed quiet and moved forward albeit, at a slower pace.

Her senses were on alert but not on their way to fry anytime soon. After Harvardville and the WhilPharma outbreak, she doubted she would ever lose her composure again in a situation like this.

Entering a room, not bothering to check what it was above the door with her light, she found herself inside a huge space filled with a dozen zombies from what she could tell from a quick swipe. They were either sitting at a desk behind a monitor or on the ground unmoving. One of them was standing in front of a whiteboard, marker in hand and moving it up in the air. It looked ridiculous but it told a lot about the scientist and its love for science if even in death it was still trying to write equations.

What shocked her the most was how clean they were. There was no blood, no wounds or injuries. They were just dressed normally in their lab coats. Their rotten flesh still melted though and Angela wondered how they were infected to begin with. It wasn’t from a bow for sure, meaning the T-Virus must have been administered in another way.

After letting go of her P90 and drawing her .45, Angela began to work, tomahawk in hand. Her first target had not been the closest zombie on the ground. There were two others in proximity and she may have been attacked and brought down by them while she was taking care of the first. Instead, she silently crept to the side of the room and took the whiteboard one. One hit to the neck. She didn’t bother killing it with a second blow. The zombie was neutralized and she would waste time on it when she could be moving along to her next target.

Undead after undead, she went on and on. The ones sitting came first, then the ones on the ground later. Taking care of everyone else before the zombie at the entrance had been a smart move as the two others jolted and began crawling to her, while moaning and grunting loudly. They too were taken care of. From their number she knew she had just taken care of most if not all the personnel in the complex. Collins’s monthly food bills were for around a dozen people after all.

‘That’s weird. Why isn’t the AI stopping me? It could lock me up in here and I’d be done for.’ Angela looked up at the air duct up on the wall. ‘Maybe not and it knows it. I hope I won’t encounter any licker in there if I ever go that route.’’

The next room she went through was the actual command room. Monitors were everywhere on the wall above the many extensive consoles at the back end of the space. Cameras were all around the complex. The laboratories, the offices, the mess, the living quarters…. The only places not covered were the restrooms and bathrooms.

A few of them caught her attention. There were huge movements going around. Having a better look, she saw Rick fighting what she recognized as a Super Tyrant in a wide closed space. His tactical vest was gone and so were his weapons, leaving him only with his axe in hand and his .45 at his thigh. The encounter wasn’t going in his favor, which surprised her.

‘Then again he’s been fighting for nearly three hours, two Tyrants and who knows how many more BOW. He must be exhausted.’

She understood why when her mentor had to dodge rapid gun fire from multiple sides and barely blocked the punch of his opponent which sent him flying a few feet away. Hurrying, Angela checked on the console to get Rick’s location and the AI’s core and servers room. The letter was in a secure part of the lab and she couldn’t get access to it directly because of a steel door as thick as one of the entrance.

With not much of a choice, she made her way to the testing area. Taking care of the AI was something she could do alone and Rick clearly needed help. On her way more BOW tried to kill her. A courtesy of the sociopathic digital lifeform who suddenly remembered she existed. Or perhaps it had considered her as negligible and unimportant. It was easy to understand why. Compared to Rick, Angela was a simple regular human and wasn’t worth the attention.

Regardless of the reason, it seemed the AI wasn’t in favor of her assisting Rick and had released more bio-organic weapons. Beside two giant spiders the size of a cow, most of them were original ones. She came across two bears and surprisingly: one elk. All were abnormally huge making the spiders the smallest in comparison. Why the scientists tried to make bow out of regular animals when they already perfected the hunters and the Tyrants was beyond her but most of all a question for later.

The spiders were turned to shreds from her submachine gun, leaving it empty. This was fine as Angela doubted her P90 could have done real damage to the bears. Their appearances may have been similar to cerberus, with rotten flesh, exposed skin and dangling eye but their muscle mass, bone density and on top of that their fur, made too many layers for her main weapon to pierce them and kill.

That was why she switched to her .44. One bullet in the head for each, after dodging the charging elk so she wouldn’t get impaled, did the job. Making sure she was alone, she quickly reloaded her submachine gun, her last magazine for it then her Python. She still had twenty four bullets and they would count, she’d make sure of that.

Turning at a corner she ended up face to face with a mutated monkey. She ended up on her back with the mammal lunging down to bite her. Her free hand sneaked as fast as lighting right onto the animal’s throat to keep it at length. Already in survival mode, her brain didn’t even bother to register it was actually an ape. As far as it was concerned it was a lethal threat needing to be dealt with promptly. And promptly it did, when Angela stabbed the monkey deep through the eye with her knife.

She didn’t know if the beast was dead or staggered but she remembered Rick’s very first lesson about the brain: destroy the lower part. The knife was pulled out from the orbit while she pushed the mutated animal to the side. With more space to maneuver she aimed for the ear and plunged her blade into it. There was no reaction from the undead, not even a jolt.

Multiple screeches at her back had her turn around. More monkeys were cluttering the corridor.

‘The Eliminators may be fast but their speed doesn’t mean much in a restricted space like this one.’

Without hesitation she aimed her P90 and fired. They weren’t meant to kill, she didn’t have the time to aim for that and the apes were too fast. She shot to incapacitate or delay. A good thing, the suppressing fire allowed her a few precious seconds to use her .45 with her other hand to finish the job.

Angela’s mad trek was uninterrupted afterward. On the way she encountered Rick’s discarded shotgun and picked it up. There were still three shells in it. The weapon would have been very useful against the monkeys and wouldn’t have depleted her last magazine for her submachine gun.

Further down the corridor she heard multiple gunshots being fired in succession. Quickening her pace she arrived at a big hole in a wall, giving a very good view of a wide area where she could witness Rick fighting the super Tyrant. To the side, on the ground, was Rick’s Winchester and his tactical vest, covered in a lethal amount of blood.

‘He must have been hurt badly.’ Angela thought to herself as she loaded the shotgun with the few shells left in the bandolier.

Picking up everything she could, filling into her pouches the surplus of ammo. She ignored the hole and instead kept going down the corridor to enter the one and only room there was. There was nothing she could do by going through the hole and joining the frey. If anything she’d be more than a liability and she knew it.

It proved to be the right decision to make.

The room was a command room. Different from the one from earlier, this one didn’t have a whole wall covered in screen monitors. Instead it had a huge and wide window spanning from one side to the other. Through it, Angela had an unrestricted view of Rick fighting. The access to the consoles was restricted to her. Whatever help she could offer was limited with it. It was fine. She may not be a tech wiz and even if she was wouldn’t probably defeat an AI but she had firepower and that was more than enough.

Angela walked to the window, shotgun raised and fired as many shells as she could until the glass broke. When she got a hole, she swung her axe to make it bigger. Big enough for her to be able to aim the Winchester at the two turrets on rail going around the area and more than just inconveniencing Rick.

It wasn’t an easy task and she needed to wait for the right moment more than anything, she knew. When the first turret came, she held her breath and measured the right timing. Once locked in, she took her shot. One bullet of .357 caliber wasn’t enough to outright destroy it but it did some damage. Angela didn’t stop at one shot however, she fired again and again following her target.

It was a success. That one turret had been hit in its axis and couldn’t turn properly. It could still shoot but since it was only in one direction, it gave Rick some room to breath. Not stopping at the one she dealt with the other much the same way.

Things immediately changed down below. Rick had been mostly defensive until now, dodging the suppressing fire of the turrets while fighting the super Tyrant. With them gone he went on the offensive. Angela didn’t even see him move and speculated that moving that fast was quickly tiring otherwise he would have moved like this all along.

The fight didn’t last.

Rick took it to the BOW, fighting in close quarters. With a clear advantage and with a clear weakness to hit, he rained blow after blow on his opponent, bringing it to its knees. Multiple hits to the giant glowing heart on the chest with the tomahawk did lots of damage but it wasn’t enough. In the end, Rick threw caution to the wind and simply grabbed the heart with his hand and pulled with everything he had to tear it away. The super Tyrant, as expected, didn’t let him. A swing of its huge and sharp clawed hand pierced Rick’s stomach through and through.

Angela’s heart nearly stopped beating when she saw it. She knew her mentor had an extreme healing factor, there was no way she would ever forget seeing him healing third degree burns in a matter of minutes, but she didn’t know how extensive it was.

Rick had pulled the heart away enough to use his axe to completely cut the veins and arteries linking it to the Tyrant’s body. The effect was immediate, the BOW went limp as if its strength had been completely sapped. Its weight was too much for Rick who was dragged down with it. He still had the strength to remove the claw embedded in its torso. It was slow and painful but it was doable.

Once free, he rolled to the ground and let his body heal the soccer ball size hole. His eyes closed and he enjoyed a well deserved break. Up into the control room, Angela watched with relief but also with fascination her partner surviving.