The zombies were farther away this time when they began their attack. It gave me time to line up the pistol and fire more carefully. I noticed something after I missed my first shot. The pistol did not stay lined up after I pulled the trigger, it jumped. I gripped the weapon tighter and fired again, feeling the recoil pushing me. The emergency suit boots were locked to the deck, but I had to step back a pace. I leaned into my next shot with the pistol more and it didn’t push me off balance this time. This time I hit one.

When focusing on the skittering laser sight I still didn’t hit what I thought I was aiming at and my shot instead struck one nearby. The bullet struck it in the hand, making it tumble. Three others were ahead of it. They scrambled and pushed off one another, almost leapfrogging forward. The launchpad zombie would reach the deck, or the bulkheads and have a way to push off there. That made me think there had to be some sort of coordination within the herd. Horde. Whatever. They appeared to be working together somewhat.

I shot again and missed, hit twice more and missed again. One of the three frontrunners was swimming weakly in the air, something important must have been hit in its chest. Three more shots and I had to replace the magazine. Of the two now frontrunners one was down a leg but still moving forward. The other was nearly on me. I reloaded just in time to shoot it in the face.

It was a lucky shot. Not skill. The zombie was reaching towards my outstretched hand in hopes of a meal. All I had to do was pull the trigger. It still crashed into me and I flung it away, firing at the one legged zombie and missing again. I missed four more times as it bounced closer before I hit it in the arm, then in the chest. It sagged limply. I looked up to shoot at another zombie, the one with the mangled hand. It took most of the rest of the magazine to kill that one and I reloaded again.

Two more zombies were closing in, one to my right and bouncing between the deck and ceiling. I backed up, shooting at the one on the right, trying to keep them from getting too close. I hit it in the upper chest, but it didn’t seem to notice. The bouncing zombie was still getting closer, so I shot at it, hitting it in the groin after missing a few times. That was when the third zombie, the one I hadn’t noticed, tackled me from the left.

I crashed to the deck and bounced off while I struggled to keep the snapping jaws away with one hand and line up the pistol with the other. I quickly gave up on that and just pulled the trigger as fast as I could into its body, but it wouldn’t let go. With my left arm being dragged down and floating, I was spun around when I shot at the next closest zombie. The bouncing one evaded my wild shot easily by not being anywhere I was pointing the pistol. I managed to get a boot locked to the ceiling for a split second before I was again grappled by a hungry cadaver.

This time when I was knocked off balance I kept my pistol close to my body. When the zombie negotiated the obstacle of its dead pack mate, I was ready and shot it in its open mouth. I looked around wildly for the one that had been on the right but didn’t see it until I felt it climbing the two corpses that even then had a death grip on me. I couldn’t free the pistol in time as it swarmed up so I jumped and twisted in panic, slamming the four of us into a desk terminal. I hadn’t planned to do that, but it worked well enough to disentangle at least one of the bodies.

Unfortunately this gave the zombie easier access to my face. It grabbed my helmet in both claws and tried to chew through the visor at the pinch point. I tried to shoot it but the pistol was empty. Then I punched it, pushing it away with one hand and slamming my fist against it over and over again. This only seemed to embolden the creature, which kept trying to chew my helmet off.

I grabbed it by the throat and squeezed as hard as I could. I felt a pop as something broke in its neck, and it began to wheeze even as it kept trying to chew. I kept squeezing until something tore. It was then I realized that the thing was limp and no longer breathing. And it probably had been for some time. My bruises made their presence known again with adrenaline no longer keeping the pain at bay. I felt tired, more tired than I’d been in a long time.

Detaching the now dead zombies from my suit took several minutes. I ended up using the vibroknife that I’d forgotten about in the middle of the fight to cut the tendons in their hands. After that, things went quicker. Messier, but quicker.

I found the pistol floating near the ceiling. It was filthy with blood. That couldn’t be a good thing. Would it become more inaccurate if the crusty mess got inside it somehow? Would it just stop working? Or blow up in my hand? I worried. There had to be a way to clean my only ranged weapon. I’d have to figure it out, somehow.

There were no more zombies trying to eat my face, so I took stock and looked around, still jittery from the close call. The cafeteria looked like it had been ransacked. Of course, I suspected where all the food had gotten to. The zombies hadn’t eaten it. There would have been wrappers and detritus scattered all over if they had. I could see the packed together squalor of another nest in the kitchen area through the open doors with scraps of clothing and bones sticking out. Nothing moved other than the drifting corpses and spreading blood clouds. My suit was filthy again.

Worried over gunky pistol, tired and strangely hungry again, I went back to the Medical section. I held out the pistol as the decontamination cycle began again, turning it around to let the soapy disinfectant get the blood off. It seemed to take even longer to complete this time, but once it was done I put it from my mind, grabbing another meal bar and nutrient tube. I dreaded going back out again. Finding more zombies again. Their coordination when seen up close was uncanny.

I was more convinced now than ever that there was something connecting the zombies to each other. Like a social grouping. It wasn’t clear if they communicated with each other somehow. They didn’t so much speak as howl and scream, and only then when prey was in the offing. But the way the last two seemed to be deliberately distracting me from the third, sneaky one- was I reading too much into their behavior? I would have to rig a recording device so I could review things later one to see if my suspicions were correct.

I slurped down the last of the nutrient tube and caught sight of the medical satchel I’d brought with me. The samples! I hadn’t collected any samples from the last fight! Quickly suiting back up and heading out again, I remembered to load up more bullets. Just in case.

Returning to the scene of the fight I heard a faintly familiar humming sound. A cleaning bot? No, not just one cleaning bot, but a whole swarm of them. The bots were on a schedule, and usually wouldn’t come out when residents were present. Maintenance staff tried to keep them discrete, as if messes disappeared by magic when no one was looking. Once a job was begun though, they did not stop until they were finished. The bloody clouds were sucked up and stains scrubbed away. The bodies were bagged and secured to the deck in a corner. That was strange. The bots were treating dead zombies like trash, not human remains. I itched to bring one of the bots back to the lab so I could dig into its instruction set to see what triggered that behavior.

But there was work to be done and an unknown time limit. The newly cleaned cafeteria showed the elevators with two of the five blinking green and ready to be put to use. The others were amber, indicating maintenance had been informed of a problem. A zombie problem, no doubt. The elevators were a trap. Almost every level opened to the cafeteria, which would doubtless be home to a horde of zombies. I might have to risk the maintenance shaft again, but before I did, there were other places to check. Just in case.

None of the lieutenants or sergeants or detective offices had anything of use or interest in them. Probably already looted by the scavenger. Across the way from the desk line was another hatch, this one with secured with a palm lock and retinal scanner. The Chief’s office.

Now with a source of food to keep me going, I decided to crack this door as well. It surrendered just as the hatch from the maintenance shaft had, even quicker as I knew where the input handles were this time. The process still tired me out, but not nearly as much as the first time when I had to fumble about in the dark. The hatch clicked open and swung out silently.

Inside was not the office I’d expected. It was a cluster of offices. And what looked like a personal armory that could outfit four or five people in style. There were racks where long guns should go, empty cradles where combat suits would be charged, ammunition crates that stood empty of the hundreds of bullets they must have once held. The only things left were a few magazines that would not fit my pistol filled with bigger, longer bullets and a toolkit for field repairs to the combat suits, locked to the wall.

I checked the offices one by one, finding that these ones had snacks. And a coffee machine. The company wide ban on lunch breaks at your desk slash scavenger looting did not apply here. Evidently the scavenger wasn’t the Chief or anyone else with the credentials to access the Chief’s office. I stuffed the snacks in my satchel and moved to the Chief’s office opposite the armory.

The chief’s office was large, easily four times the size of the others. There was a huge locker open beside the desk with a rack that must have held the chief’s armor. Smaller shelves and cupboards within it were open and empty. One of them held a small black case labeled “Firearms Maintenance Kit.” That sounded promising, considering my pistol worries. I snagged it.

The large desk also had four banks of video panels above it showing various parts of the station. I saw zombies in many of the shifting views. Several entire hordes in the other level cafeterias. The one I’d run through on Level 5 had its horde back, but they were still awake and wandering. I had no intentions of going back anyway, but this just cemented that.

The habitat level was, as expected, swarming with infected. Hallways, cafeteria, atrium, nowhere I looked was there a place free of zombies. They clustered in places, but there were singletons and smaller groups here and there throughout. The habitat’s many levels meant that the atrium in the center, the largest open space in the station saving the docks, was home to the biggest horde of all. Sleeping, of course, but there would be no shooting my way through that with a pistol. There probably weren’t even enough rounds in the stash back in Security Medical to give each one a headshot, assuming my piss poor accuracy made instant and dramatic improvement to the point such was possible.

I saw the engineering section. As expected, there were zombies hidden everywhere, nests all over in maintenance nooks and crawlspaces. No plucky adventurers had gone down that way to clear them out. I certainly wouldn’t be doing it. I just wanted to get off the station and maybe bring some samples along to continue studying the viral/nanite plague. Not that I knew very much about the medical side of things. The virus itself was currently beyond my knowledge, but perhaps with sufficient study and materials to learn from, I could manage a C grade effort. With enough time and little to no distractions, of course.

The docks and the merchant quarter were dark. I did not know if the lighting had failed or the monitoring equipment, but there was nothing to see on those panels. Security was quiet, save for the cleaning bots of course. The maintenance shafts appeared to be quiet as well, but I did not trust that to be completely true. I’d been noisy in that vicinity recently. Something was bound to investigate, sooner or later.

An icon on the desk caught my eye. It was a gear symbol labeled “Headquarters Access Shaft.” That might be a way to avoid both the elevators and the maintenance shaft. I clicked it open, and sure enough, there was a command there. I heard a heavy thumping noise, like something heavy being dropped from outside the Chief’s office.

It was a hidden hatch opening in the armory. Inside was an elevator shaft with the car showing that it was on its way down. I readied my pistol as a precaution. The elevator dinged, and the doors opened.