“Of course,” she said, unable to hide her sneer. “You should have said something sooner.”
He smiled coldly into that sneer, erasing it from her face. Her chin dropped and she meekly turned around, heading for the kitchen.
Kazakoff fell in beside her, enjoying her discomfort. He was an excellent judge of character and this girl fairly reeked of privilege—it was a privilege that he and other hard men like him afforded her. Without them, her life would be much different. More than likely, she would be the equivalent of some wool-covered maiden in Bulgaria, trying to work her looks into a good marriage.
It had been hard men doing the tough things that had made the country what it was. They had fought the wars, subdued the savages, tamed the land, and now hunted evil around the world…only to be sneered at.
And when things were turning to shit, who do they call? Who do they beg for?
His smile widened as he watched Trista’s flesh crawl, enjoying the fact that the world was unravelling her Ivy League education, unmasking it for the fraud that it was. She was in for a wake-up call and a part of him wished that he could be around when she was finally forced to see reality.
But he had work to do. There were renegade generals to break. History was replete with them, making and breaking kings, destroying stable governments for their own selfish desires, destroying lives at a whim. They were a common blight, except in America. There had never been an American Caesar and as long as Kazakoff was around, there never would be.
The smile vanished at the thought. He was grim and, in Trista’s mind, terrifying as he barged into the kitchens. The staff in their white aprons and high, fancy hats were just starting to get into gear, readying for breakfast. The two were greeted by the assistant kitchen manager.
“Show me your freezers,” Kazakoff instructed as he opened his wide, smiling mouth. There was something about the way he spoke that made the manager decide not to question the request. Fifteen years in the White House kitchens had taught him that sometimes it was best just to smile and nod.
The freezers, like everything else, sparkled in perfection. Inside the second one, Kazakoff found half a steer hanging from the ceiling. “I want that meat hook and chain,” he ordered and then spun on his heel leaving Trista and the kitchen manager gaping at each other. From there, he went to the closest butcher station and picked out a number of tools and wickedly sharp knives, laying them on the table.
“Have these sent down. I’m also going to need a sturdy, high-backed chair, rope, a hammer, jumper cables, and a car battery. Also sewing needles, and a Bunsen burner.”
Again, the two looked at each other. He walked between them, heading for the hallway, making Trista jog to catch up. She was morbidly curious but refused to ask what he was going to do with it all. In silence, they made their way to the elevators, where they were stopped by Secret Service agents.
“I’m going to need an all-access pass to this place,” Kazakoff remarked. “I don’t want to have to rely on escorts every time I want a sandwich…unless you plan on staying with me the whole time. You might learn something.” He leered down at her with a wolf’s grin and she shook her head.
“Good.” The elevator opened with a whisper. “I work alone. It’s best for everyone. That way you can lie to yourself and pretend you didn’t really know what was going on. As far as the world will know, this will just be an interrogation. The car battery and the jumper cables will be our little secret.” He gave her a little nudge with his elbow and a wink as if they were just two co-workers flirting in the elevator.
Her smile in return, an involuntary human reaction; was sour and weak. “Yeah, sure.” More than anything she wanted the jumper cables to be their little secret, but they wouldn’t be, she would have to request them. But not in writing, she told herself as the doors opened.
The important prisoners were being kept in a row of small offices that had been cleared out just for them. Each held nothing but a chair, a desk and a video camera. In the hall were two Secret Service agents and their credentials were once again checked. Kazakoff had been expected.
“Run along little Trista,” he said, taking her by the shoulders and turning her back the way they had come. “It’s time for the men to get to work.” She bristled, hating him; she did so in silence. She wanted to get out of that basement as soon as possible.
“Which one’s Phillips? I want him first.” He would be the toughest to break and Kazakoff liked a challenge. A glance in the monitor that had been set-up, showed a black and white feed of an older man, sitting in the corner of the room, slumped over to the side and sleeping with his mouth open. Kazakoff frowned. “I want them all awake. No one sleeps unless I say so.” He didn’t wait for a response and marched into the room.
Phillips jerked awake and gazed blearily at Kazakoff with red eyes. “Hello General.” He smiled down at Phillips, an evil gleam in his eye. “My name is David Kazakoff. I’m here to conduct your interview. Your real interview.”
This got Phillips’ attention. “Who are you with? CIA? NSA?”
“None of those. I’m with America. Come, have a seat. It’s going to be a few minutes before my accoutrements are assembled and I figured we could talk…” Kazakoff leaned over and turned off the video camera, “off the record, so to speak.”
“That’s not needed,” Phillips said. “I have nothing to hide. The President is dangerously unfit for office and if you were any sort of patriot you would kill him immediately.”
“With what? A knife? My bare hands?” Phillips shrugged as best he could with his hands cuffed behind his back. “I find it strange that you would ask me, a total stranger, to do this when you had every opportunity to kill him yourself. You have hands, don’t you? You could have bludgeoned him with a lamp or ordered a steak from the kitchens and stabbed him with your fancy silver cutlery. Yet you didn’t. Why is that? Was he not dangerous before?”
Phillips sighed. “I was weak. And I thought he was weaker. But he’s got a hard streak in him that I never suspected. You’re proof of that. And I get the feeling you’ll get to see that hard streak as well. In the end, he’ll kill you. No loose ends. That’s how these types work. But you know that already. Deep in your heart you know that.”
“Here’s what experience has taught me, General, snakes like you will say and do anything to save their hide. You are a cancer and the only way to stop cancer is to cut it out.” There was a knock on the door and one of the Secret Service agents slipped in holding a wrapped towel. It thumped when he laid it on the table. Kazakoff grinned as he opened it. On top was a steak knife; he shrugged and set it aside, preferring a nine-inch deboning knife. “Beautiful ain’t it?” he observed, holding it up, letting the light bounce off its edge.
3-4:26 a.m.
Smithfield, Ohio
“It’s time,” Heather Harris said to herself—lied to herself was closer to the truth. It was long past time to leave. Smithfield was a ghost town already. Only the funeral parlor over at the Nightingale Chapel still had its lights on. Seeing them gleam when everything else was so dreadfully dark had been the final straw.
But she couldn’t leave without Mister Renfro. He had been missing all night. “Doing what and with who, God only knows! It’s an embarrassment, especially at his age!” The only saving grace was that there hadn’t been anyone around to be embarrassed in front of.
Smithfield lay only eleven miles from the Pennsylvania border and although the edge of the Quarantine Zone was a hundred and fifty miles further than that, it still felt too close and people were bugging out and heading west. Heather had a sister in Kansas City and once she found that ridiculous Mister Renfro, she’d be in her nearly fifteen-year old 4-Runner and heading out. Normally it was a day-trip, but she planned for three days on the road.
Losing her patience, she stomped out onto her back porch and hollered, “Damn it, Mister Renfro! Get your butt back home this instant!” She paused, listening, straining to hear an answer. “He better not be hiding
down at that damned fishing hole.”
She hoped not. If he was carousing, he may not listen to reason. With a weary sigh—she had been up all night—she started through her backyard, leaving tracks in the early morning dew. An arc of trees was the only thing that passed as a fence around her house, and she slipped through the trunks to a small path. It branched, one side heading to her neighbor’s house and the other curving with a slope down to the fishing hole.
It was darker in the woods and she hesitated. Heather had lived on the property for over forty years and knew there wasn’t anything in the woods that could hurt her. And yet, she didn’t automatically take the branch of the path. “Mister Renfro?” she hissed. She wanted to pretend that she wasn’t afraid, and that she was only irritated. They had a very long drive ahead of them.
“I’m going to give him a piece of my mind,” she told herself, putting her hands on her plump hips. She was short and plump, and looked all the more plump because she was bundled in two cardigans. Despite them, a shiver took hold of her. “I’m being silly,” she said and forced herself on.
He was at the little pond—she almost stepped on his lifeless body. Her foot came down right next to his head before she realized what it was. “Oh God!” she hissed, dropping to one knee, her cartilage popping as it always did. He had been torn open; his guts were simply gone.
His green eyes were missing as well and his big bottlebrush tail that he had always been so proud of had been nearly torn off. Heather’s chest began to flutter. “This is terrible. What got to you? Oh, you poor thing.” She told herself that it had to be a fox, probably. There were a few that wandered in close to town and an old tom like Mister Renfro didn’t stand a chance against one of them…and besides, the monsters weren’t supposed to eat animals. She took off one her cardigans and, with tears in her eyes for her old friend, she wrapped him in it.
“You need a proper burial.” Funeral…the word just popped into her head and for the first time in her life it had an evil undertone. She was just wondering why when she caught sight of something across from her by the water’s edge. It looked like a squat boulder sitting halfway in the water, only there were no boulders down there. Then the thing stood.
It was a man staring silently at her, an air of burning menace surrounding him.
Smithtown was one of the friendliest places on the Earth and it was unheard of to find someone lurking like this without even the simplest of greetings. Even struck by a sudden, incomprehensible fear, she started to bring her hand up to give him a small wave. Her hand was at shoulder height when he charged with a terrible growl.
She let out a shriek and took off running up the path, her old legs wobbling her along the curve of the path, one arm out in front of her, the other carrying Mister Renfro in her arms like a football. In her shrunken heart she knew she would never make it home. The man was charging through the forest at a sprint, cutting her off.
Sucking in a huge gulp of air, she spurred herself on to her fastest—it still wasn’t enough. He loomed in her periphery, a terrifying growling shadow. She knew it was madness to take her eyes from the path, but her eyes were drawn to his blackened face and, sure enough, she stumbled over a root and fell. Her mind tried to categorize the fiend bearing down on her. A week before she would have thought he had escaped from an asylum. Now, she thought he had escaped from hell. His clothes were in tatters and his flesh was torn in a dozen places. The scabs were as black as tar.
It’s one of them! she realized. It was a creature from the news. And it was in Ohio. This was worse than any demon. The army couldn’t stop them and if the army couldn’t, what chance did sixty-eight-year old Heather have? She froze, waiting for the inevitable, and watched as the man-beast ran itself onto a tree branch. Its momentum was so great that the branch went right through its neck almost dead center.
It should have been dead, only the thing had been dead to begin with, or that was what everyone said. Instead of “dying” it drove itself further onto the branch, its hands out reaching for Heather. It got intolerably close before she finally started kicking back away. Scrambling to her feet she began running again, this time determined to keep her eyes forward.
A hundred yards went by with aching slowness and all the while she dreaded hearing the monster coming up after her, its diseased breath hot on her sweating, wrinkled, old lady neck. Any second, she expected the beast to break the branch off, scream in rage and crash through the forest like a freight train, but she heard nothing like that. In fact, soon enough, the only thing she could hear was her own harsh wheezing and her heart thundering in her ears.
Her world shrank to the path and she plodded up it at barely a jog, her legs growing heavier and slower with every step. It seemed impossible that she was going to make it to her reliable old 4-Runner, yet there it was fully packed, the keys in the ignition.
As if she had been carrying a purse, she tossed the dead cat into the passenger seat and jumped in herself. There was no fumbling around like in every horror movie she had ever seen; her hands worked with precision. Her left locked the doors while the right turned the key, gunning the engine to life. She reversed in the hardest, fastest arc she had ever made in her life, causing her other five cats, scrunched in their little boxes, to hiss and yowl.
“Sorry, sorry,” she said in a warbling voice. “We’re gonna be…” What she saw illuminated in her headlights caused her to choke.
It had once been Dan Crenshaw. Where his wife was, he didn’t know and he was beyond the capacity to care. His mind was a hive of hate and pain, and it was entirely focused on gasping, round-eyed Heather. He was so far gone that he didn’t notice that he had torn a gaping hole in his own neck. The wound was nasty and there was black blood pouring in a torrent from it.
Heather stared at him in disbelief, her body frozen in shock, her heart seizing in her chest with a sudden spear of pain. She was having a minor heart attack and had no idea; her brain was as frozen as the rest of her.
The light flashing into Crenshaw’s face had confused him, stopping him momentarily. It was a pause that could not last. Destiny and the disease were running hand in hand, and after a long slow blink, he charged the rumbling SUV. At the same time, Heather stomped the gas. Gravel spewed out behind as her worn tires dug for purchase and the 4-Runner sped forward.
It would have been best if she had plowed right through the zombie, mangling and crushing it, turning its bones to dust. Instead, she turned at the last second, giving it only a glancing blow and leaving a long black streak along the side of her vehicle.
Feeling as though she was either going to vomit or pass out, she raced out onto the main street and blazed west, her car covered in zombie blood and the carcass of a diseased cat sitting next to her.
“Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God,” she panted, only just beginning to feel the pain of her heart attack. It was nothing compared to her fear. Her fear kept her juiced for good hour and by then it was her head that was the problem, not her heart. The headache was so bad that when she pulled into Columbus, Ohio with its population swollen to over a million people, her eyeballs were throbbing in their sockets.
A quick stop for some Extra Strength Tylenol doomed central Ohio, and then she was off again, hoping to make it to Cincinnati before the sun came up.
Chapter 6
1-5:12 a.m.
New Rochelle, New York
“Cannan, please,” Axelrod begged. Begging sounded strange coming from his normally growly voice. Strange and pathetic in his ears. “Please, me and you go back to the Point. Remember Riyadh?”
“Yes, and I owe you for that, but we’re talking about treason.” Thomas Cannan’s voice came through the sat-phone grainy with far too many clicks and whirls than Axelrod would have liked, making him worry that the spooks had already picked up on the call. With so many thousands of conversations running through the military net, he knew the chances were very slim. His luck had been running like crap.
He glanced to the window, wonder
ing if even then a cruise missile was streaking towards him at Mach 2.
“We’re talking about the fate of the country, Cannan. The President is bopping units here and there like they’re checker pieces. He’s damning us, Cannan. If we don’t shore up the western zone, that’s it. Game over. We need the 3rd ID. Harrisburg is on the fucking verge and if it falls…” Once more his eyes went to the map. The only things holding back a horde of some ten million zombies were the Susquehanna River and a patchwork army of farmers, out of shape reservists, and a hodgepodge of Army units that were being worn down to nothing.
“If we can’t hold the center we’re screwed. We’d have to fall back thirty miles to the Juniata River and that’s halfway to fucking Pittsburgh. And do you even see the Juniata on the map, Cannan? It’s a fucking stream!”
Axelrod realized he had been yelling. Taking a deep breath, he added one more “Please, Cannan.”
Two-hundred miles to the south, Major General Thomas Cannan was riding in his command Humvee somewhere in the middle of a four-mile long convoy that held his entire twelve-thousand man division. In the Humvee directly behind his were six political officers who had joined the group an hour before. The lead P.O. made it clear that there would be no deviating from the planned route or the planned timetable.
If there was a change, Cannan would be arrested immediately. The same would be true of his successor and his successor, and so on. “We’re not playing,” the soft-faced P.O. threatened.
Cannan had wanted to smash his face in; however, thirty years of training held him in check. His job was to follow orders to the best of his ability and he could only hope that his superiors knew what they were doing. “Sorry, Rod,” he said, and hung up on his friend.
On the tenth floor of the R&K Building, Axelrod set the phone aside. He had called in every favor he could and had been turned down one after another. His name was poison and General Phillips’ idea of him leading the 7th Army in hiding had been undermined before he had even got off the ground.
War of the Undead Day 5 Page 8