“A what?” Ron started to get up but cringed when a sharp pain shot through his head, and he fell back down.
The man pushed off the side of the doorway and slowly walked toward him. “Relax son. You’ve been asleep for a whole day. You passed out from a nasty blow to your head and lost a lot of blood. We had to stitch you up as best we could. Thankfully I had a first aid kit handy.”
Ron closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “The last thing I remember…I was…in an alley? I could hardly stand up and those things came pouring in after me.” He reached up and lightly patted a bandage on his forehead. “Hey, where's Ann?”
At that moment Ann charged into the room. “Oh, you’re all right! You gave us a scare you know!”
Ron closed his eyes and cracked them open. “Sorry about that. My little plan didn’t work out so well did it? Funny how sometimes things play out differently than you pictured in your mind. Is this the church? We’re in the same church? What’s your name?” Ron pointed at the middle-aged man with eyes like darts.
“I'm Reverend Bristol. But I think under the circumstances you can just call me Lewis. And, yes, this is the church you remember.”
“Okay, Lewis it is.” He extended a limp hand. “Where did you stay when the asteroid hit?” Ron’s forehead furrowed as he stared at Lewis.
Lewis shook Ron’s hand firmly with two shakes and stepped back into a wide stance. “I was here. I went downstairs and locked the door. We have a small rec room and a classroom down there for Sunday school.”
Ron fell back onto his back but kept his eyes trained on Lewis. “How long did you stay?”
“A couple days I guess.”
“So where’s your flock Lewis?”
“Well, I opened my doors to any and all who might seek refuge here, but none came. I guess The Lord’s House just doesn’t have the sway that it used to.” He cast his eyes down and then slowly raised them. “Might I ask you a question?”
Ron nodded. “Shoot.”
“Those guns you have, a little intimidating to say the least.” Lewis punched out his lips, and his bushy eyebrows hugged his eyes.
“Yeah those, I don’t know what to say. I just have ‘em.” Ron broke eye contact and stared at his feet. “Look, I’m really a nice guy, okay. You don’t have to worry about me. I’m not going to go crazy or anything.”
Ann stepped forward and placed her hand on Ron’s shoulder. “I can vouch for him. Don’t worry. He really is a nice person.”
Lewis stared at Ann for a second and then smiled. “Well, I’ll leave you alone to get your rest.”
Once Lewis had left the room Ann looked back at Ron. “That was awkward.”
“It’s okay. I’m not really worried about social graces right now. “What do you think of him? Is he okay?”
“I think so. He speaks the plain truth, like you would expect from a Reverend.”
Ron nodded. “So how many would you say are out there?”
She looked away and stared at the wall. “We killed a lot of ‘em, but then some more came from somewhere. I’d say there’re about as many as when we first saw ‘em, maybe a little less.”
“So we’ve essentially got the same problem as before, but now we’re locked in here instead of out there, mobile.”
Ann pressed her lips together and kept her eyes off to the side. “Yeah, something like that.”
“I guess in retrospect I took a big risk to save one person, didn’t I?”
“Well, it was a very brave thing to do. There was no way to know how many people were in here. Besides, most people would have just moved on and saved themselves, including yours truly.”
“You’re just trying to make me feel better.”
“Am not, it’s true.”
“No, it’s okay. You can say it. I screwed up.”
Ann knelt beside him and smiled. “It took a lot of courage, and that’s all I’ll say about it.”
“And when I passed out, you...?”
Ann smiled and nodded. “Yep, I saved your life.”
“You’ve been holding out on me.”
“Well, I thought it took a lot more skill. That gun’s so easy. I just pointed and blam, all gone.”
“Ammo? How much does the…” Ron grimaced and placed his hand over his eyes.
“Maybe you should get some rest. You’ve had a hard time of it for the last twenty-four hours.”
He lifted his hand off his head and blinked. “No, it’s okay. All I’m doin’ is layin’ here thinkin’. It shouldn’t be that tough.”
“Sometimes even that’s too much to ask. Rest, regain your strength, and then we’ll work this out.” Ann eased her hand under Ron’s neck and gently massaged it and gave a gentle nod accented with a slight smile. “When we do whatever it takes to get out of here, you have to be at a hundred percent. We need you, so rest, okay?”
Upon hearing Ann’s words Ron’s eyes relaxed and lost their tension. His breathing drew out longer and grew shallower. He felt all his muscles go limp and his eyelids sagged and felt heavy. He yawned, and his head eased back into the pillow. “Actually, that’s not a bad idea.” Then darkness unfurled and settled over his eyes, and he drifted off into an abyssal slumber.
✹✹✹
In Kingsport, Tennessee, a medium size town just west of the mountains in the northeast part of the state, a detachment of army vehicles rolled through the streets, accompanied by foot soldiers with guns and flamethrowers. They dispatched the undead in an efficient, military manner—fire. Systematically they cleared each section of town using a combination of bullets and Napalm-B. The foot soldiers walked alongside Humvees with large caliber machine guns mounted on top, periodically detaching to investigate any movement within a building. The soldiers came from the nearby Army Ammo Base. It served as a research facility, and in anticipation of the post-disaster circumstances was stocked with extra provisions and an increase in troops from around two thousand to about twenty-five hundred. The soldiers and personnel survived by taking shelter in underground labs spread throughout the facility. When they came out, the undead had gathered around the perimeter, held off by high fences. From that moment forward, they had busied themselves mowing them down, burning them, blowing them up, or anything that got the job done. They had also learned what happens when somebody takes a bite. Every soldier had strict orders to shoot anyone who got bitten on sight, regardless of rank.
Very early on, under orders, they had cut a path straight to the hospital, not to treat the injured but for an extraction. It turned out that the plague of undead affected the entire planet, wherever people lived. Anyone who had taken refuge in a bunker or basement, anything relatively airtight, and had not emerged for at least forty-eight hours avoided exposure to an airborne pathogen that coincided with the asteroid strike. They had not identified what exactly happened but knew one fact for sure: The plague massively depleted global populations to such a degree that governments needed to implement breeding programs for re-populating Earth.
The highest echelons of the military sent out orders to any surviving personnel to secure and extract as much stock as possible from sperm banks, embryo storage facilities, and embryonic stem-cell research labs.
Every detachment of soldiers around the country that had a secure base to return to for research took what they could find and stored it before the power went out and sacrificed all the samples. Military bases that could still operate managed to get their own power restored soon after cities across the country failed. When the government got quasi-organized again, they started the long process of restoring order and rebuilding cities across the nation. By encouraging other governments that they could contact, that still had enough organizational capability, to do the same they hoped to bring the planet back online at some time in the foreseeable future.
High ranking officers in the United States military, mainly the army, ordered large numbers of enlisted men and women into secure underground bases and bunkers before the asteroid struck. They
intended to protect them from a polluted atmosphere in order to maintain control and organize relief efforts in the aftermath. Instead, they had stowed the largest number of people in the world safely underground, and out of harm’s way, from a fate much worse than living with the asteroid’s collateral damage. After the strike they emerged from underground observing strict protocols regarding the implementation of their gas masks and air exposure. Their preparations made all the difference.
Officers everywhere got straight to work to take back the nation. In Tennessee they had drawn up an optimistic plan to have half of the eastern part of the state cleared in the amount of time it had taken to almost completely wrap up Kingsport. They had found out the hard way that when they wiped out one part of town more of the undead migrated from the outskirts and negated their work. They tried to stop the influx with a perimeter of road blocks around town, but quickly abandoned those efforts when the undead found their way in through fields and forests, day or night, ending up wherever their noses led them.
After some difficult lessons they finally drew up a new plan the soldiers disapprovingly dubbed “Operation Watch Yer Ass,” officially named Scissor Hands, since they had to keep clearing the entire city over and over again, block by miserable block. They did see light at the end of the tunnel though. The creatures finally thinned out in most of the town. They realized that since the undead kept migrating in from smaller outlying areas, they should find those places relatively deserted once they reached them.
The government also implemented plans to study what sort of disease caused people to die and rise again. They moved forward with a three-phase plan consisting of: studying the disease, exterminating the undead, and reestablishing the population. They made extermination their top priority.
In the middle of downtown Kingsport, a small group of five soldiers wearing gas masks walked down the middle of a street with a Humvee in tow. They reached an intersection and one of them looked left and pointed as he knelt to fire. “Over there!”
The other squad members turned and looked down the street, knelt, and opened fire. The Humvee pulled up behind them and a soldier, whose upper body poked out of the roof, swung a minigun around that instantly spat fire and bullets into the fray. Down the street body parts flew off and blood spattered the road as the lumbering creatures collapsed.
When they had all fallen, one of the soldiers, a Lieutenant, raised his hand and situated a microphone over his mouth. “Cease fire!” Then he waved a thick arm at the fallen mob. “Vasquez! Finish it!” The other soldiers kept their rifles trained on the bodies but did not fire.
The man with the flamethrower stepped forward and blasted all the carcasses with searing liquid hell. Any moisture still in the tissues popped and sizzled as the heat poured on until the only sound was that of a roaring fire. Once all movement ceased, he held his finger on the trigger for a few more seconds, grinned, and finally let go. As he walked away, the blaze of human remains reached for the sky, and the heat caressed a street light’s plastic cover.
The Lieutenant held his gaze on the street for another second and dropped back in his seat. “Area clear! Return to base!” He placed his cap on his leg and rubbed his face, and the others climbed into the Humvee and moved out.
As they drove back to base, they swerved in and out of black piles of charred remains until they reached a long straight road with the base visible off in the distance. As the soldiers drove through town they kept a vigilant eye on the streets but only saw smoldering piles until the gates closed behind them.
When the troops arrived back at base, they got cleaned up and raided the mess hall. The widespread smiles were accompanied by sporadic laughter and more soldiers poured in to eat and unwind.
Once the room had filled up an intercom cracked to life and blasted the latest news throughout the complex. Inflated voices tapered to whispers and finally stopped as the news poured out. “Attention, all personnel. I am pleased to announce that operation Scissor Hands is complete. Congratulations!”
The room erupted into cheers, high-fives, handshakes, fist bumps, and laughter as caps flew through the air.
“Watch Yer Ass!” One soldier yelled as another soldier stuck his butt out and jumped just before it got poked with a fork. Everyone laughed harder, and the reality lurking outside vanished for a short while.
The intercom cracked back to life. “This means that Kingsport has officially been declared clean and clear. Although, travel outside the base, unless under orders, is still not permitted. Everybody rest up tonight and meet in your assigned briefing rooms at o-nine hundred tomorrow to hear details of the next phase of operations. Well done everyone! You should all be proud.”
The next morning soldiers walked into briefing rooms wiping sleep out of their eyes and stifling yawns. Several sets of red eyes stood out in the groups, and some heads began to nod off until the meeting started.
Once everybody had taken their seats and quieted down Captains stood up in front of their respective companies and started the briefings. They told their men that with the town in order they aimed to take back the countryside, rescuing any survivors along the way, and ultimately neutralize the major cities. Statistically they expected to find more survivors hiding throughout the countryside and in smaller towns. The new operation, named Gray Wolf, would commence the next day and carry on until they had claimed the eastern half of the state and could turn their eyes on Nashville. Nods and smiles passed through the ranks as soldiers listened to the details unfold. Several commented that Gray Wolf was a much cooler name than Scissor Hands, because wolves hunted in packs, used stealth, and never gave up.
The soldiers sat quietly while their commanding officers explained that the undead overran larger population centers to such a vast degree that the army had to consider the possibility of human survival as unlikely, if not impossible. Once the military took back towns and their outlying areas, they could beef up their numbers with survivors and prepare to invade the cities. Morale lifted as the meetings went on and everybody looked forward to the prospect of finding survivors. Hopes reached an all-time high not seen since before the outbreak of the global pandemic.
Military leaders initiated similar programs in every state, wherever they survived. Gradually they could pool their resources and allocate their numbers into grids: Northeast, Southeast, Midwest, Northwest, and Southwest, clearing each area concurrently.
They planned for the eastern divisions to start west and move east, pushing their quarry toward the coasts and straight into the oceans, if necessary. The western divisions would do likewise, pushing west. The Midwest division had orders to start in the center and fan out in every direction. Once the coastal divisions had cleared their areas, they would turn back inward and secure the long borders with Canada and Mexico. The plan had a five-year forecast. However, after seeing the effort involved in cleansing one town, most leaders saw it realistically going on for fifteen to twenty.
Behind the advancing columns, in clear zones, they planned to revive neighborhoods and gradually restore cities. The plan took audacity and daring, especially with the necessary resources not yet acquired. The alternative, as it appeared, was human extinction, so any sense of apathy became synonymous with outright failure. With the stakes so high, they embraced their bold design and moved forward with all possible haste.
In towns like Kingsport the war had started with an unclear outcome, but the prospect remained optimistic. They had no idea what lay ahead, only what they saw before them.
Chapter Twenty
Jackson beat a nail, as quickly as his arm could go, through a sheet of plywood and into the railing at the base of the steps. He wedged in as many supporting boards on either side as he could and drove nails into them as well. When he finished, he had a flimsy plywood wall blocking the entrance to the steps, but at the very least, if it was not torn down, it would force the undead to try and climb the railings.
All of the supplies from the Jeep sat in a pile on the porch in
no particular order. Several feet from the porch sat a mound of fresh dirt where Michael’s body had been with the shovel lying beside it. No tombstone marked the site. Occasionally Jackson stopped hammering and scanned around the trees in silence, then slowly turned and resumed banging a nail’s head mercilessly. At one point, a squirrel jumped from one tree to the next causing several branches to sway, and he picked up his AK in the blink of an eye. When the bushy-tailed marsupial popped up in the leaves just inside the forest Jackson stared at it for a second, then exhaled loudly through his nose. “I almost shot you!” The squirrel looked back with wide eyes, fidgeted, and jumped to another branch and disappeared. Jackson stared at the tree swaying in the wind for a second longer then returned to his hammering.
When he finished with the plywood, he dragged a couch out from the house and leaned it on the stairs at an angle so that it hung over the railing. After that he placed shelves, an ottoman, and other assorted, small furniture in the way, anything that would hinder the progress of an assault.
Kathleen came out and stared at the plywood wall. “How’s it goin’?”
Jackson shook his head. “It’s just not enough, I’m afraid. There’s not enough spare junk around for me to completely block the railings, and I don’t know if that plywood will hold. It’s not exactly the most difficult wood in the world to break in half.”
She pursed her lips. “You need any help?”
Jackson gazed at the steps and poked a shelf with the toe of his boot. “Know what I wish I could do?”
One of her eyebrows rose up. “What?”
Jackson smiled slightly but it fell off his face instantly. “I could make this place so safe if I had more tools and material. I mean look around. This place is perfect, but I don’t have what I need. If I did, I could block these steps and install a sturdy door at the base with a big bolt to lock it. And I could extend these railings with more wood, or perhaps bars. There just wouldn’t be a way up here with this porch as high as it is and that huge retaining wall on the other end of the house. It’s a fortress, but I can’t secure it without the right materials.”
The Inroad Chronicles (Book 1): Legion Seed Page 23