The Romero Strain Read Online Free Page B

have no clue to what’s going on. Those crazy people. They’re the undead. And you can get infected through blood or saliva.”
    “That’s crazy,” she said, shaking her head.
    “ Yes , it is.” I confirmed, with deep sincerity in my voice.
    “ What? How do you know this? I was bleeding, remember?” She held out her overly bandaged arm. She began to panic. “I don’t want to be one of those things. I don’t want to be—”
    I interrupted. “You’re buggin’. You didn’t get bit, right?”
    “No.”
    “Then chill. You’re fine. I should know. I’m a paramedic, remember?”
    “But—”
    “No buts . Time to go.”
    I moved toward the door.
    “No. We can’t go that way. There are more bodies.”
    “You wanna go back that way?” I pointed to the way we came. Then I saw them: the legion of dead at the gate. “Fuck,” I said, with slight disbelief and despair in my voice. I had become so self-involved that I had forgotten about the mob.
    Max wasn’t with us.
    “Where’s Max?” I asked, looking around.
    He was behind the closed door. I looked at Marisol disapprovingly. “Kommen,” I said, opening the door. “Gute Hund. Gute Max.” I affectionately roughed up his fur behind his ears, and turned to Marisol. “We go in.”
    “I don’t want to go in there,” she replied, despondently. She was frightened but so was I.
    “Look,” I told her. “The barbarians are at the gate.”
    “What about the pickup?”
    “You wanna check out the pickup, go ahead. I’m going in. Your choice!” Max and I entered the building.
    Marisol was right. There were dead bodies. And no one behind the reception counter to the right as we entered. The door opened behind me. I was startled. I whipped around with pistol in hand. Marisol screamed.
    I said nothing as I surveyed the area.
    “Where are we going?” she said, as I moved to an intersection of corridors.
    “I’m not sure. It’s all changed.”
    “Changed?” she inquired. “You’ve been here before?”
    “January 22 nd , 2000. But this part of the building wasn’t here then. Must have been part of the repowering project a few years back.”
    “I remember the crane. It was huge.”
    There was a big corridor ahead of us. I hoped it would lead to the old section of the building.
    “We can’t stay… this way.”
    The corridor led us to two blue-colored, double-leaf doors, like the ones at the entrance of a cinema. As I pushed the doors away from me, they struck something. I looked through the long and thin glass window on the right door. There was a body blocking our entry. I pushed the right door away from me again, hard and fast. It struck the body and swung back a few inches. I grabbed the door before it could swing closed and pulled it toward me. The human doorstop was a cop.
    ConEdison had started contracting off-duty uniformed police officers for security through the NYPD Paid Detail Unit, like many other places in the City of New York. Using police discouraged intruders, plus they had full law enforcement powers to do whatever was necessary if unauthorized individuals tried to gain access to the facility.
    He was dead. He had bled out. I took his weapon from him and removed the ammo clip. My father used to say, If you don’t have a backup, you don’t have a plan. I stuck the clip in my pocket and left the pistol.
    The turbine room was three floors. The main level, which we were on, was level two. The first level, below us, was where the generators stood. The floor above was the third level, which I knew nothing about. The entire inner structure was open-concept, surrounded by railings and staircases. I looked over the guardrail, down into the abyss.
    One hundred plus miles of steam mains stretched from Lower Manhattan to 96 th Street, with over eleven hundred manholes. I could go anywhere in the Borough of Manhattan, via way of the steam or subway tunnels.
    I had read that they had bored a tunnel, twelve feet in diameter, up First Avenue from