Two creatures were in the process of tearing one of Becker’s legs out of his hip.
“Whatever,” said Mannering.
“He’s still alive,” insisted Victoria, annoyed at Mannering’s indifference.
“Not for long. He’s had it. Why do you care, anyway? He’s a scumbag who threw Reba to those things and tried to rob us.”
“So we stand by and let him get killed?”
“Yep.”
Two car lengths behind Becker in the road, a creature stood up with a foot and a shoe in its mouth.
“Oh my God!” gasped Victoria. She covered her mouth with her hand.
“What?” said Mannering.
“Isn’t that Reba’s shoe in that thing’s mouth?”
Mannering shook his head. “I never got a good look at her shoes. I don’t know.”
At that moment, another creature rose beside its fellow zombie munching on a blood-soaked foot in a matching shoe.
“We can’t leave Reba,” pleaded Victoria.
“I don’t see what we can do for her now,” said Mannering, watching the creatures in disgust. “They’re tearing her apart. They’ll massacre us if we go back for her.”
“We have to get to the end of this block before the creatures cut us off,” said Halverson. “We have to go now.”
Victoria and Mannering drove their motor carts forward. Halverson rode beside Victoria. Wincing, they listened to Becker’s screams as the creatures tore him asunder.
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
“That generator’s probably been running all night long,” said Mannering.
“It must’ve been going when the plague hit and nobody turned it off,” said Halverson.
“Do you have any spare clips?”
Halverson felt his trouser pockets. “I’m all out.”
“Not good. Both Glocks are empty.”
“I’ve only got a few more cartridges for the shotgun left.”
Halverson dug the last three red cartridges out of his pocket and fed them into the Mossberg’s magazine.
“I still have my trusty cleaver,” said Mannering, “but we are seriously in need of more firepower.”
“We can’t fight them here. We have to get out.”
They drove toward the end of the block.
Suddenly Mannering bellowed a curse. His motor cart limped to a halt.
“We can’t stop here,” said Halverson. “Keep going.”
“I got a fucking flat.”
They were twenty-odd feet from the corner where the generator was rumbling.
“You’ll have to make a run for it,” said Halverson.
“What about the money?”
“We’ll have to come back for it later.”
Halverson had no intention of coming back for it. He was just trying to allay Mannering’s concerns about it. The bottom line was they had to keep going, whether they had the money or not. He wanted Mannering to forget about the money and concentrate on surviving.
On Mannering’s right, a creature burst out of a beauty salon’s plate-glass door that advertised Brazilian Blowouts for $150. Nothing was cheap on Wilshire in Santa Monica, Halverson knew.
It was a city of the well-heeled and the down-at-the-heel. It was a small city, but it wasn’t much different than its big-city neighbor Los Angeles in that respect—except everything was more expensive. This Santa Monica beauty boutique the Living Ends was no exception.
The female creature’s hair was the best part of the ghoul. Halverson didn’t know a Brazilian Blowout from a blow-dry, but compared to the rest of the creature, its brunette hair was drop-dead gorgeous. The creature’s face was an oozing mass of suppuration and disintegration and had gums and cracked teeth the green hue of the Wicked Witch of the West’s complexion.
Mannering was facing in the opposite direction when it happened and had no idea the creature was lurching toward him.
“Look out behind you!” exclaimed Halverson.
Mannering whirled around. As he did so, the creature snatched Mannering’s arm and took a bite out of his forearm.
Mannering cursed. Cleaver in hand, he swung his uninjured arm toward the creature and beheaded it. The head, Brazilian Blowout and all, plunked down on the sidewalk in front of the salon.
Blood poured out of Mannering’s wounded arm. He tried not to think about the pain.
“Are you OK?” asked Victoria.
“It got me,” answered Mannering.
Nobody said anything. Everybody knew what it meant. A tension-fraught silence hung heavy in the air.
At last, Halverson broke the nerve-racking quiet. “We need to keep going.”
“I’ll have to keep up with you on my feet,” said Mannering.
He tried to stanch the bleeding in his arm by compressing the wound with his right hand. He clambered out of his motor cart.
“You can throw the money out of the back of our cart and sit in the back,” said Halverson.
“What’s the point? You and I both know it’s over for me.”
“Don’t talk like that,” said Victoria. “As long as you’re alive, there’s hope.”
“Not for me. I’m infected now. I’m fucked. I’m a walking dead man.”
“Maybe they can find a cure for this.”
“By then I’ll be dead.” Mannering paused. He gazed at the generator up ahead. “Isn’t that a jackhammer lying on the road near the generator?”
“Looks like it,” said Halverson, following the direction of Mannering’s gaze.
“I’ll stall these ghouls while you two beat it.”
“What are you thinking?”
Mannering winced at the pain in his wounded arm. He shook it off. He struck out for the generator at a brisk clip.
“I think I found us some firepower,” he answered.
“What are you talking about?”
“That jackhammer. The generator’s on. The power’s working. You’ll see.”
Mannering jogged up to the jackhammer in under a minute.
Meanwhile, creatures were already into the middle of the street as they made their crossing.
Victoria and Halverson drove up to Mannering.
Mannering lifted the heavy jackhammer. He switched it on. The jackhammer vibrated and jerked in his hands as it clattered, raising a racket. The shuddering of the equipment irritated the wound in his arm. He grimaced. His arm ached and started bleeding again.
“You guys get out of here,” he yelled to Victoria and Halverson over the deafening cacophony of the jackhammer.
Victoria was reluctant to leave.
“Go ahead,” Mannering went on. “I’ll try to take out as many of those things as I can to slow them down.”
“Are you sure?” asked Victoria.
“Just get out of here before it’s too late.”
Creatures inched dangerously close to the motor cart.
Victoria accelerated. She drove into the gnarl of cars abandoned on the street then veered onto the next block’s sidewalk.
Halverson blasted a zombie that had wandered too close to them. The creature’s head burst into skull fragments and brain pudding that bedecked a scarlet custom-made Ferrari’s hood.
Creatures massed around Mannering, who hollered at them and held the pounding jackhammer up in his arms.
Whenever a creature came at him, he thrust the jackhammer into its face and made mincemeat of it with the driving blows of the edged cutting tool.
“Come and get it!” thundered Mannering.
A seventysomething tall creature hobbled toward him. It had a bald pate, close-cropped grey hair, and lousy posture. The geezer zombie was wearing a black Hollywood Park cap. It halted toward Mannering on its bum pins. It opened its mouth and groped toward him.
Unable to raise the jackhammer high enough to reach the ghoul’s head, Mannering jammed the smoking, raucous tool into the geezer zombie’s rib cage. The rapid thrusting of the tool’s drill pulped the creature’s chest. The drill bored all the way through
the rib cage, the heart, and the creature’s back.
But the creature kept plodding toward Mannering.
Mannering wrested the jackhammer out of the creature’s rib cage and this time mustered enough strength to aim higher at the creature’s screwed-up, emaciated face. He managed to home in on the creature’s bulbous nose and atomized it with the rapid metallic jabs of the jackhammer’s drill.
The drill crashed through the skull and decomposed flesh as easily as through an egg, obliterating the diseased reanimated brain encased in the cranium. Its face an unrecognizable mask of mush, the geezer zombie dropped dead at Mannering’s feet. Mannering kicked the creature away from him.
More creatures swarmed around Mannering. There was no end to them as far as Mannering could see.
He kept jamming away at them with the jackhammer overheating in his hands. As soon as he dropped one creature, another one took its place in short order.
A wall of corpses was piling up in front of Mannering some five bodies high. Still, ineluctably the creatures kept coming.
Mannering kept drilling the walking dead with the juddering jackhammer. The strain of holding the heavy jackhammer high in his hands was taking its toll on him. He could barely hold his arms up.
It was only with great effort now that he could lift the jackhammer waist high. He bored the smoking jackhammer through the next zombie’s entrails all the way through the spine and out the other end without even slowing down the grimacing creature.
The creature kept walking toward him, heedless that it had no spine or stomach left as intestines spooled out in front of it.
Mannering kept his back to the chugging generator to prevent any creatures from bushwhacking him from behind. He remained vulnerable on his flanks, however.
As he buried his jackhammer to the hilt into the stomach of one creature, another creature staggered toward him on his left and clawed his head.
Mannering tried to hoick the jackhammer out of the stomach of the creature in front of him, but there were several other creatures lined up behind their mate exerting pressure on the creature forcing it into Mannering, rendering it impossible for Mannering to withdraw the jackhammer in order to turn it on the creature bearing down on his left.
The creature on his left opened its toothy open mouth and descended on Mannering’s carotid artery.
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
Victoria kept driving toward the ocean.
Halverson glanced over his shoulder at Mannering, but could not see him any longer. All Halverson could see were zombies swarming over the generator like bees on a hive.
Halverson flinched in shock as he saw an amputated arm suddenly catapulted out of the pile of creatures. As the arm plummeted, a creature snatched it out of the sky, stuffed it into its yawning mouth, and buried its teeth into the bloody flesh.
His gorge rising, Halverson turned away from the mayhem, unable to watch the slaughter any longer.
Victoria saw the same thing in the rearview mirror and gasped. Unconsciously, she released her foot from the gas pedal.
The cart slowed down.
“Keep driving,” urged Halverson. “Those things will come after us as soon as they finish with Hank.”
Victoria pulled herself together and accelerated.
They didn’t see any creatures in front of them.
“At least there aren’t any of those things ahead of us,” said Victoria. “They can’t box us in.”
“Maybe we can make good time now,” said Halverson.
“Why are we in such a rush? Where are we going?”
“We gotta get out of this area. We’re going to the coast.”
“But what’s there? Do you think it’s any better there?”
“Maybe,” he lied.
“Do you really think things are gonna get any better?”
“The only good day was yesterday,” said Halverson.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It’s the motto of the SEALs.”
“Are you a SEAL?”
“No.”
He didn’t like lying to her, but lying was part and parcel of the job of spying. He felt uncomfortable lying to her. He wanted to tell her the truth. But in the end, he decided, it was probably best for her that she didn’t know what he knew about the origin of the plague at the Erasmus medical center. That knowledge alone would be enough to get her killed, along with him, by the government.
“Then how would you know about the motto of the SEALs?” she asked.
“I told you, I do a lot of research for my articles.”
One eyebrow cocked, she looked at him skeptically, doubtful he was leveling with her.
From what Coogan had told him over the phone, Halverson knew the coast wouldn’t be any better than anywhere else. The whole world was a wasteland now, overrun with the infected living dead. The manmade plague had wiped out most of the human race.
There could still be pockets of survivors, like him and Victoria, out there somewhere, he suspected. After all, his boss Mellors and a contingent of the Agency as well as of the executive branch of the federal government were holed up in Mount Weather in Virginia.
In Mellors’s case it wasn’t exactly a good thing that he was still alive, not for Halverson. Halverson was convinced Mellors had tried to take him out with the missile fired by the drone. And Halverson figured Mellors wasn’t the only one in on the attempt on Halverson’s life.
However, it proved that survivors of the plague existed. Whether they were enemies or friends remained to be seen. The important point was that Halverson and Victoria weren’t the only ones left on earth. After the missile attack, Halverson was having second thoughts about finding other survivors. He and Victoria might live longer if they avoided other humans, especially if those humans worked for the government.
On the other hand, it would be tough sledding for the two of them to make it on their own. To do so they would have to start a farm or commandeer one somewhere and become self-sufficient. It wouldn’t be easy, he knew.
It would make more sense from a self-defense standpoint to join up with other survivors and form some kind of society with division of labor. That way they would have a better chance of defending themselves from zombie attacks. In the end, there was safety in numbers.
Of course, none of that mattered if they didn’t live through the day. The immediate goal was to survive.
He heard a noise overhead. He looked up. As he had feared, he saw the drone.
“The drone’s back,” said Victoria anxiously.
“The question is, can it see us?”
Halverson felt relieved on one account—at least the drone could not home in on the GPS signal in his satphone to track him any longer. But did the drone possess some other means of tracking and ID’ing him?
“My question is, why does it want to kill us?” said Victoria.
What were its orders? wondered Halverson. Was its mission to hunt down and kill him or to hunt down and kill any and all survivors? Why would anyone, even the government, want to kill all survivors?
“I don’t know what its mission is,” said Halverson.
“Maybe it’s programmed to kill zombies.”
Halverson watched the drone rumble above them. He didn’t notice any red laser dots on his chest. That was a good sign. Maybe his jettisoned satphone was still generating a GPS signal and the drone was searching for it, he decided.
“I don’t want to take any chances with that thing,” he said. “Pull under that marquee so it can’t see us.”
Victoria steered under the marquee of a hotel, out of view of the drone.
“Drones are operated by the federal government,” she said. “The government’s not supposed to kill their own citizens.”
“They’re not supposed to. But who’s to tell the feds what they can or can’t do?”
“How many missiles can a drone carry?”
“Depends on the drone. That’s an MQ-1 Predator. It carries two AGM-114 Hellfire
missiles.”
“It already fired two missiles. It must be empty now.”
“If that’s the same drone that fired at us before. But it might be a different one.”
“I don’t understand why they’re attacking us? It makes no sense.”
It would make sense to her, he decided, if he told her that he knew too much for the Agency to allow him to live. But he was sworn to secrecy. He could not tell her anything he learned at the Agency. And, for her own safety’s sake, the less she knew of the catastrophe that had occurred at the Erasmus medical center, the better for her.
“Whether it makes sense or not, we have to deal with it,” said Halverson. “Just think about it. A world full of flesh-eating ghouls? None of it makes any sense. The world is chaos.”
“The person who’s operating that drone must be nearby. Maybe we can find him somehow and get him to stop shooting at us.”
Halverson shook his head, no. “He could be anywhere. Most of the piloting of drones is done from Creech Air Force Base northwest of Las Vegas. All you need is a satellite link to fly one.”
She searched his face. “How can you know all this?”
“I do research for my articles.”
“I think there’s more to you than meets the eye.”
“That could be said of anyone.”
Unsatisfied with his answer, she shook her head. She changed the subject.
“Whoever’s flying it should be killing ghouls, not humans,” she said. She pounded the steering wheel in exasperation.
Halverson could not hear the drone overhead.
“I think it’s gone,” he said. “Let keep going.”
Victoria put the motor cart in gear. She ventured out from under the shade of the marquee.
“Sometimes I think we’d be better off dead,” she said.
“One thing we have in our favor is the smoke. Drones can’t see through smoke,” said Halverson, scanning the skies for any trace of the drone.
Victoria coughed. “It’s havoc on our lungs, though.”
“A couple more miles and we’ll be at the coast.”
“If only we don’t meet up with any more ghouls.”
They drove for a mile through desolate and ruined Santa Monica.
“They don’t seem to be around here,” said Halverson.
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