The gun looked like a Glock to Halverson. It wasn’t pointed at him. Not yet anyway, he decided. Two against one. Not good odds. But, then again, his MP7 had thirty rounds, more than twice as many as the other two guys had in both of their pistols combined. Still, he would have to swing the MP7’s muzzle from one guy to the other, which would take time. During that instant of time, the other guy could get off a clear shot at him.
“Are you infected?” asked the one-armed man.
He could talk, decided Halverson with relief. Flesh eaters could not talk. He relaxed his hold on his MP7 a tad. Even though they weren’t flesh eaters, they could still be dangerous. After all, they were armed.
“No,” he answered. “We’re heading east.”
“I’m Jake Swiggum, and this is Travis Probst.” Swiggum motioned toward the white-haired middle-aged man beside him.
“I’m Chad Halverson.”
“I’m Victoria Brady.”
Swiggum checked them out. “You two are never gonna make it through the desert on foot.”
“Tell me about it,” said Halverson. “Are you headed east?”
“As a matter of fact, we’re not. We’re headed west.”
“There’s nothing there,” said Victoria.
“What do you mean?” said Swiggum.
“They nuked Las Vegas and California.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Probst. “We’re trying to find someplace we can put down stakes. We thought maybe the West Coast was still in one piece.”
“It’s not,” said Halverson.
“How do you know?”
“We came from there.”
“The east isn’t any better from what I hear. They nuked the whole country. Some harebrained scheme to wipe out the infected cannibals.”
Swiggum caught sight of Victoria staring at his arm stump. “A zombie tore my arm off.”
“Did it bite you?” she asked with concern.
“No. It ripped my arm out of its socket. Then it ate my arm right in front of my eyes. I’m standing there bleeding all over the place, and that thing’s eating my arm like it’s daring me to stop it.”
“At least you didn’t get infected.”
“No. It didn’t bite me.”
“How did you escape it?”
“The sight of that thing standing in front of me eating my arm flipped me out. I totally lost it and blew its head to kingdom come with my Glock.” Swiggum glanced at the pistol in his hand. “Then I stomped its ugly face till it turned to mush.”
“I stanched the blood pouring out of his shoulder socket,” added Probst.
“The radio says they nuked the whole world,” said Halverson.
“Who’s they?”
“The governments, with ours leading the way.”
“Where’s that leave us?” said Probst.
“Up shit creek,” said Swiggum.
“It means we should head east because that’s where the government is,” said Halverson.
Swiggum sneered. “That’s the government for you. They kill everybody off, but the politicians all keep right on living.”
“There may be other survivors elsewhere,” said Probst, wiping sweat off his brow with the back of his hand.
“We don’t know that.”
“We survived, didn’t we?”
“That doesn’t mean anyone else did.”
Probst shrugged. “Maybe they were in an area that didn’t get much fallout.”
“Look at the sky up there,” said Swiggum, craning his neck upward. “All that rust-colored dust swirling up there. I bet it looks like that everywhere on the planet.”
“We’re still alive.”
“But for how long? We could be contaminated right now with the radioactive dust we’re breathing, even as we speak.”
Everybody stood in silence, pondering the unthinkable.
Halverson knew Swiggum was right. Radioactivity could be killing all four of them this very moment.
“We can’t think like that,” said Halverson. “We need to contact the government. They’re living safely at Mount Weather in Virginia. We’ll ask them to let us in.”
Swiggum guffawed. “Oh right, and they’ll fling open their doors for us at the sound of your voice,” he said ironically.
“We have to tell them the nukes didn’t work. There are still zombies out there.”
“And then they’ll let us in?” scoffed Swiggum.
“The fact is—”
Halverson cut himself off. He was about to tell them that the government would let him into their bunker because he worked for the CIA. He realized at the last moment that he could not tell them his real identity as a black ops agent for the National Clandestine Service arm of the CIA. He could not tell anyone that.
The fact that he worked as a spy isolated him from everyone else. His job put up invisible walls between him and everybody else. It was an unpleasant part of his profession that he had had to get used to. It wasn’t easy, but that was the life of a spy.
“The fact is what?” said Swiggum.
“The fact is, we can’t stay here,” Halverson ad-libbed.
“We don’t plan on staying here. Whatever gave you that idea?”
“California got nuked. There’s no point in going there.”
“Then where should we go?”
“Go with us to Mount Weather in Virginia.”
Probst cleared his throat. “What is this Mount Weather place you’re going on about?”
“The Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center. If America gets attacked, that’s where the politicians go to ground.”
“I’ve never heard of it. How do you know about it?”
“I’m a journalist,” Halverson lied. “I once wrote an article about it.”
“How can you be so sure they’re there?”
“That’s where they go during a nuclear attack. They went there on 9/11, too. It’s a hideaway for them during an emergency. It’s a bombproof reinforced bunker under a mountain.”
Halverson heard a commotion coming from the stake truck.
A man and a woman climbed out of the front seat. They were both armed.
CHAPTER 18
Halverson had not realized there had been four passengers in the front seat of the truck.
Now he had four armed individuals to deal with. The odds were getting worse by the minute. Four against one. No, he decided. Four against two. He had Victoria with him, and she had a gun, but she had no experience as a professional shooter. To wit, she would not be much help in a gunfight, even though she did have experience killing flesh eaters. But flesh eaters didn’t shoot back.
It all depended on whether the four were friendlies or not. Despite being armed, they didn’t seem hostile. The man and the woman that piled out of the truck had their automatics holstered.
Halverson did not put away his MP7. He wanted to see how things would play out, now that the two newcomers were joining them.
The thirtysomething man looked Scandinavian with blonde hair down to his shoulders and blue eyes. Standing five nine with a lissome build, he wore a camera slung over his shoulder. He wore khaki trousers, a bright flower-printed aloha shirt hanging out over them, and beige espadrilles. He projected a naturally upbeat personality. He latched onto his camera when he clapped eyes on Halverson and started bouncing around snapping pictures of him and Victoria.
Halverson wasn’t pleased. He didn’t want photographers taking pictures of him. After all, he was a spy. The last thing a spy wanted was publicity. He held his hand up in front of his face to block the camera lens as Nordstrom tried to photograph his face from different angles.
“That’s Sven Nordstrom, our resident photographer,” said Swiggum. “And that’s Simone Leclerc.” He nodded to an olive-skinned green-eyed twentyish brunette who stood beside Nordstrom in red capri pants and a loose pink sheer blouse.
She looked tall on account of the glossy black patent leather stiletto heels she was wearing. She was probabl
y five six without the stilettos. Not exactly the attire for an apocalypse, he decided. She would have been pretty, if she wasn’t wearing such a surly expression on her shapely face.
“Camera shy?” said Nordstrom, noticing Halverson’s hand in front of his face.
“Yeah,” said Halverson.
“Everybody likes having their picture taken.”
“Not me.”
“Why not? You don’t look that bad.”
“I just don’t like having my picture taken.”
“It’s for posterity. We might be the last people on earth.”
Halverson continued holding his hand in front of his face.
“You got something to hide?” said Nordstrom.
“No.”
“Whatever.” Nordstrom turned to Victoria and started photographing her, hopping around her, crouching and getting different angles for his shot. “She’s a lot better looking than you are, anyway.”
“Do we have time for this?” asked Victoria.
“There’s always time for photography. It’s what I live for. My photos are more real to me than life.”
“What’s with her?” Victoria asked Swiggum and nodded at the petulant Simone.
“It’s nothing personal,” answered Swiggum. “Simone just hates herself.”
“Why?”
“She blames herself for her sister’s death at the hands of the flesh eaters.”
“I could have helped her, but I chickened out,” blurted Simone. “I was in her apartment when one of those things grabbed her on the street. I could have gone outside and helped her get away, but I froze . . .” Her voice trailed off.
“You can’t go around blaming yourself all the time,” said Victoria.
“Why not? It’s my fault she’s dead.”
“I tell her, man, she should lighten up,” Nordstrom told Victoria. “She’s like all gloom and doom kicking herself, all cut up about her sister.” He pulled a face. “She’d be drop-dead gorgeous if she would only chill out. It’s the pits having her moping around like an undertaker.”
“What do you know?” Simone said and shot a glare at him.
“If I’m lying I’m dying.” Nordstrom made a show of shrugging, using his arms to emphasize it.
“How can I chill out? Look around you. It’s a nuclear wasteland we’re living in, or haven’t you noticed yet?”
Nordstrom waved his hand at her dismissively. “It ain’t the end of the world.”
“Oh yeah?”
“You only live once.”
“Halverson says California got nuked,” Swiggum told Nordstrom and Simone.
“So now where do we go?” said Simone.
“Are you all related?” Victoria asked.
Swiggum chuckled. “Not even close. That’s Travis’s furniture from his house that we got in the back of the stake truck. He was heading west and he picked the three of us up along the way.”
“We’re all a bunch of refugees,” said Probst. “We’ve got nowhere to go.”
“DC or Mount Weather is our best bet,” said Halverson.
He heard a rumble overhead. He peered skyward. As he had feared, a Predator drone was flying toward them from the east. He turned his face away from the aircraft to avoid detection by the facial recognition software its camera carried.
Had he averted his face in time? he wondered with a pang of apprehension.
CHAPTER 19
Nothing had changed since the atomic explosions had devastated the country. The government was still trying to drone Halverson because he knew too much. He knew the government had funded the creation of the so-called zombie virus in the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam. They had tried to drone him unsuccessfully earlier in Santa Monica and now they were at it again. They would never stop trying till he was dead. They considered him a threat to their very existence.
“What’s that?” asked Probst, checking out the aircraft.
“It’s a drone,” answered Victoria.
“That proves we’re not the last people on earth,” said Nordstrom with a broad smile.
“But whose side are they on?” said Swiggum, following the drone with his gaze. “Maybe they’re trying to figure out if they should drop more A-bombs on us.”
“Why would they want to do that?”
“Why did they do it in the first place?”
“They were trying to wipe out the infected cannibals. That’s what the president said on the radio.”
“They wiped out a lot of healthy people in the bargain.”
“But there’s no point in dropping more A-bombs.”
“Not all of the flesh eaters were killed by the nukes,” said Halverson.
“What do you mean?” said Swiggum. “We haven’t encountered any after the nukes exploded.”
“We have,” said Victoria.
“Then there are more of those things still out there?” said Nordstrom, scanning the horizon with gaping eyes.
“Afraid so.”
“Why didn’t the nukes kill them?”
Halverson put his oar in. “Maybe radiation doesn’t affect them the same way it does living things.”
“But the president said—”
“Just because he’s the president doesn’t mean he knows what he’s doing.”
“Great! I thought all we had to worry about was radiation poisoning and starvation. Now this.”
Halverson could not hear the drone overhead anymore. He turned to Swiggum. “How much water do you guys have?”
“Several gallons,” said Swiggum. “We need to find more and load up our truck with it.”
“Could we come along?”
“We don’t have any room for you,” said Swiggum, eying the stake truck. “That cab holds only four in its seat.”
“Really it holds only three, but we’re squeezing in four,” said Probst.
“What about if we sit in the back?” asked Halverson.
“It’s a tight squeeze back there,” said Swiggum. “I don’t think the two of you will fit.”
“Sure, they’ll fit,” said Probst. He faced Halverson. “But I thought you wanted to go east. We’re going west.”
“Are you still bound and determined to go west?” asked Halverson. “There’s nothing there but bombed-out rubble.”
Musing, Probst ran his fingers through his shock of white hair. “I don’t know.” He paused a beat. “We need to hook up with civilization.”
“Then our best bet is going east. The government’s still functioning. That drone we saw proves it.”
And it probably means they still want to kill me, he thought.
“Let’s put it to a vote,” said Probst. “Those in favor of heading west, raise their hands.”
Swiggum raised his hand. He scrutinized the faces around him expectantly.
“What’s the point of going there if it’s wiped out like here?” said Nordstrom.
“Those who say east, raise their hands,” said Probst.
Halverson, Victoria, and Probst raised their hands.
Probst gazed at Nordstrom and Simone. “What about you two?”
“I don’t know where to go,” said Nordstrom.
Simone was more to the point.
“I don’t give a shit,” she said and stalked off.
“We go east,” said Probst.
“Could we tag along?” said Halverson, indicating him and Victoria.
“Sure, it’s my truck. If you can find a place in the back, you’re invited.”
“You’re gonna regret this,” said Swiggum disconsolately.
“If we leave them, they’ll die in the desert.”
In fact, the desert heat was taking a toll on Halverson. He was feeling lightheaded thanks to the incessant sun doing its best to pound his head into submission. Sweat trickling off his chin, he wondered how Victoria was holding up. She didn’t look in any better shape than him.
“This isn’t gonna turn out well,” said Swiggum.
“You don’t have to come wit
h us,” said Probst.
“Yeah, sure. You know as well as I do, I wouldn’t last a day in this heat on foot.”
“Then stop bellyaching and let’s split.”
Probst headed back to the truck.
“Why don’t you just admit we haven’t got a prayer?” said Swiggum.
“We’re not giving up.”
Swiggum walked with Halverson to the stake truck. “What did you say your job was before the plague hit?”
“I don’t remember saying.”
“Well . . . ?”
If Halverson didn’t answer, Swiggum would become suspicious, Halverson knew.
“A journalist,” lied Halverson, employing his cover story, or legend, as it was called in the Agency. “What about you?”
“I was a plumber.” He shrugged his shoulder that had its arm amputated. “Not anymore, I guess. Not much demand for one-armed plumbers.” He flashed a lopsided grin, which took on a sinister aspect, highlighted by the scar on his face.
“There should be a lot of demand for plumbers what with the damage caused by the nukes.”
“But nobody’s left to pay the bills.”
“Most running water must be contaminated with radiation at this point.”
“I wouldn’t risk drinking tap water. That’s for sure.”
“What about Probst? What was his job?”
Swiggum threw a glance at Probst, who had almost reached the truck. “He was a teacher.”
“Nordstrom was a photographer, I gather.”
“Yeah. A photographer.”
“And Simone?”
Swiggum massaged his scarred cheek reflectively. “A hairdresser.”
“I guess it doesn’t matter much. We’ve all got the same job now. Staying alive.”
“The only job in town.”
“With a very high unemployment rate.”
Swiggum chortled. “You got that right. If you’re out of work, you’re dead.”
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