Orbital Decay Read Online Free PDF Page B

cafeteria. Looks like at least two of them are bleeding.”
    “All right…” Ben pointed to the schematic on the right side of the display. “They’re one floor down from us. Let’s go one more floor up and stay to this side so we don’t run into them. They may try to bypass the cafeteria if they can’t force their way through.” He turned to the scientist. “You have the cooler loaded?”
    “Two hundred doses,” he said, patting the plastic case on the counter.
     “All right, everybody,” Ben began quietly, “we need to move fast. Once they figure out we’ve gone around them, they’ll move damn fast to catch us. It won’t take them a lot of head scratching to figure out what we’re up to, and they’ll have already cleared the way. If you have a weapon, keep the safeties on. I don’t want a panic shot giving us away.”
    “What if we run into infected staff?” Brown was pulling out a pistol to check its status.
    “If they move like the one I saw, you can probably just run around them and keep going.” Ben waited until the Doctor looked back up from his weapon. “Our weapons are for defense against the living, not the dead. If you think a slow-moving corpse is dangerous, wait till you bring a half dozen special-forces operators down around our ears, each firing a thousand rounds a minute.
    “All right, how do we get up to the next level?” Ben asked Dwight.
    “There’s a shaft ten feet down the hall,” he answered, picking up the cooler and sliding its sling over his shoulder. He headed for the door.
    Ben joined him, nodding at the control box. Dwight hit the button and the doors hissed open. Leaning out, Ben saw a clear hallway and moved toward another set of glass doors, ten feet down on the far side. Again, Dwight hit the button and they leaned in to check the shaft.
    “Shit,” Dwight muttered in quiet alarm. “There’s one of ‘em floating up there.”
    Ben reached over and pushed the scientist’s shotgun down. Dwight looked down as though unaware that he had begun to point it at the horrific mess that had been a person only days ago. Holstering his XD, Ben crossed the hall to grab an intravenous stand from an alcove in the wall. Holding the stand above his head by the top end, he pushed off from the edge of the floor to float up into the weightlessness of the shaft. He guided the four-wheel base of the stand into the midriff of the animated corpse before shoving up on the chrome pole for all he was worth. The two bodies, the quick and the dead, rebounded away from each other. Ben let go of the stand and flailed his arms, trying to avoid dropping past the floor he had just left and two pairs of hands grabbed him and pulled him back out to the comforting familiarity of the gravity plating. 
    “Huh!” Dwight was leaning into the shaft, peering upwards. “We’re clear.” He straightened, looking over at Ben. “Maybe next time you could explain what you’re about to do? I thought you’d gone all Don Quixote on us with your lance…”
    “Well,” Ben replied, double-checking his pistol, “our opponents are a little more dangerous than your average windmill.” He grinned at Dwight. “Let’s get moving, Sancho.”
    As he floated out of the shaft on the next floor up Ben was a little too high and he crashed to the floor, tumbling over to the far wall of the corridor. He watched with rueful admiration as the scientists, accustomed to using the zero-G shaft, stepped neatly out onto the grav plating.
    “Not bad for a first timer,” Dwight said, one eyebrow arched.
    “Really?”
    “No, not really.” He chuckled. “One of our chimps got loose once, and he did better coming out of the shaft. Seriously, it’s like watching a…” He slowly turned his head to the left, looking toward the interior of the station. “Oh shit!” he breathed. “It must have heard you.”
    A grisly form shuffled toward them. His skin was grey and hanging loose at the joints where the bones were most