War of the Undead Day 5

by Peter Meredith

  Before she could go on, he crushed his hand across her face, bruising her lips. “Are you sure you want to finish that sentence?” he whispered so softly into her ear that it felt like a butterfly kiss. “If he hears, you’ll be in the hot seat next.” Her back shivered at this and he smiled, enjoying the effect.

  Sickened by how close he was, she pushed past him and turned off the camera. That had been close. Her legs shook and her blouse was plastered to her skin. “Please Kaz. Maybe let this one go. We could tell him that he slipped out of town with the refugees.”

  “And what happens when he turns up hiding in the basement of the Capital Building? Don’t be an idiot, Trista. The way to get through this rough patch is to roll with the punches.”

  “If that means torturing a little girl then no. No, I won’t roll with that. I can’t and neither should…” She bit off her words. There was no sense trying to find a soft spot inside him. Perhaps an appeal to his own safety would work. “Kaz, listen, the President is thinking about using nukes.”

  “Good,” was his blithe answer. “It’s about time. You’ve seen the maps. Don’t tell me you haven’t. Shit, every time I go in there, I wonder what he’s waiting for.”

  “Maybe he’s waiting for people to get to safety! Maybe he doesn’t want to set off nuclear winter. Maybe he doesn’t want to poison the entire eastern seaboard for all time. Have you ever thought about that?”

  “No, but I will when I’m carving my initials into this girl’s ass or when I’m raping her sister.”

  With anyone else, she would have thought they were being bombastic, or being purposely mean to get a rise out of her. That wasn’t his style. He really would do those things. Trista started blinking rapidly, tears burning her eyes. “Y-You can’t do that. Kaz! You can’t do that to her. And, and her, her, her sister’s only eleven. You can’t do that.”

  “I can and I will. Rape is torture, if it’s done right.” He was smiling again and she was sure she had never seen anything so evil.

  She stumbled from the room, her stomach rolling over. With tears in her eyes, she stared hard at the Secret Service agents, hoping to find a hero in one of them. Instead she saw cowardice. They’d had their chance to be heroes when General Phillips had been brought in, or when Haider was having his toes crushed with a hammer, or when Marty Aleman had been bawling worse than the seven-year-old girl who was, even then, screeching.

  They had hidden behind excuses and parts of oaths and now they were ruined as men. She could see it in the way they refused to look at her.

  “This is crazy,” Trista hissed, uncaring if she was heard or who saw the hot tears. She felt like a weakling, but she still knew right and wrong. It felt like she was the only one who did. “Let me through,” she challenged, as she came to the room where the Second Lady was being held, handcuffed to a chair.

  So far, she hadn’t been much abused and looked more angry than frightened, but not by much, and the fear in her began to ratchet up when she saw Trista, wild-eyed, panting, tears running down her face.

  “You have to tell them where he is!” Trista begged, dropping down to her knees next to her.

  “I know my rights. I demand to see a lawyer and a…”

  Trista grabbed her with such force that her nails bit through the woman’s shirt. “No! There are no more lawyers. Don’t you understand anything? There’s no more lawyers because there’s no more laws.” Trista lowered her voice and stared straight into the older woman’s shocked eyes. “They’re doing things to your daughters,” she whispered with such honest force that the woman sat back, understanding finally creeping through the lies she had been telling herself.

  The lies that nothing had changed and that America was still the land of freedom and truth had been her shield. Now, Sheila Patterson, the Second Lady of the United States saw her lies for what they were. She’d been hiding behind them. “Please, don’t let them do anything to my children. I’ll…I’ll tell them everything, okay? I’ll tell them where he is if they let us go.”

  “I don’t know if they’ll let you go, but I promise that if you tell me where he is I’ll save your daughters. I promise that.”

  As much as Sheila loved her husband, she was a mother first and a wife second. “He’s hiding with a friend of the family. His name is Gus Barkley and he lives in Falls Church. I don’t know the address.”

  “We’ll get it, don’t worry. And don’t worry about your daughters.” Trista hopped up, nodded once to the woman, again almost a bow, and then ran from the room, only to be caught by a grinning David Kazakoff.

  “That was perfect,” he said. “I couldn’t have staged that better if I’d tried. You and me make a great team.”

  Trista’s head spun. “You-you weren’t going to hurt that girl? You were lying the whole time?”

  “Of course, I was going to hurt her, and I still might. Pain is simply a tool like any other. Like you. You’re a tool. And I’m a tool, as well.” He leaned in close to her once more, and again, she shivered. He whispered gently into her ear like a lover would. “You should be afraid, my sweet little tool. I want you to think about something. You need to realize that we only keep tools around as long as they remain useful. I had a pair pliers once that would pinch my palm every time I used them. And you know what I did with them?”

  “You got rid of them,” she said, understanding dawning in her mind.

  “Shhhh,” he said, blowing into her ear. “Not so loud. You wouldn’t want someone to overhear you, because I think you now know what the President will do with you if he thinks you might hurt him in any way.”

  He was warning her yet again.

  “But this isn’t right.”

  A shrug lifted his shoulders. “Sure isn’t. Come here, let me show you something.” He pulled her to one of the rooms. It hadn’t been used yet, which meant there wasn’t blood on the floor or sweat stains on the arms of the chair. There was a folding table with some of the terrible tools Kazakoff had liberated from the kitchens: meat hooks and knives; there was even a bone saw that Trista couldn’t stop staring at.

  “I’m saving this room for you,” Kazakoff told her, picking up a viciously sharp-looking knife. She couldn’t have known it, but it was a Sakai Takayuki Aogami—a fancy peeling knife from Japan. It cost over a thousand dollars and had an edge that was sharper than any razor. “You’ll be sitting right there soon enough, if you can’t control yourself.”

  3-5:41 p.m.

  Grafton, Massachusetts

  At any point in the previous four hours, Ex-Governor Clarren could have been found with ease. The great eastern army of the dead had chased some magical willow-o’-wisp in a circle giving the defensive lines that were desperately trying to keep Boston safe, the slightest breather. The mass of undead was still frighteningly dangerous. It was millions strong and it moved with no rhyme or reason. Without apparent cause, it would cast off seemingly inconsequential tens of thousands in this direction or that.

  One such minor horde, a bare fifteen thousand, threw itself into the two-mile gap between the Wachusett Reservoir and Lake Quinsigamond, north of Lieutenant Colonel Ross’s regiment.

  Defensively speaking, the area was a jewel; there was a wide open 18-hole golf course, two deep quarries, three ponds and a “transmission highway” that ran right down the length. This last was simply a long lane cut through the existing forest and neighborhoods to allow for power lines. It wasn’t perfect, but fifty yards of open terrain was better than nothing.

  The hour-long fight was a nice break for Ross’ 1st Battalion, and while it went on in a great storm of flying metal and burning explosions, Ross slept easily. He had found in Clarren the makings of a great executive officer. The ex-governor paced the lines, making sure that what little ammo they had was distributed evenly. Not long after he had the ammo sorted out, a mass shipment of sandwiches arrived. They were brought in by a pickup truck driven by a woman with arms thick as hams and a vocabulary that was almost entirely composed of inventive cu
rse words.

  When she bawled, “I don’t give a monkey’s puckered-ass who ya were, ya ain’t gettin’ no more samiches!” at Clarren for daring to ask for more, it had the men crying with laughter.

  The ruckus woke Ross, who thought they were being attacked again. When he found out what was going on, he tried sweet talking the woman into letting him take seconds for his men.

  “Only for a kiss, honey,” she said in her guttural Bostonian accent. She made fish lips at him, which made him rethink the first sandwich.

  “I’ll do it,” he warned.

  “What are ya waitin’ for? Climb on up here prune-dick, I won’t bite.”

  When Ross hesitated, Clarren smoothed back his dark hair and put out his arms. “Whadya say, doll?” She shrugged and was given a longer kiss than Ross would have attempted with a woman half as ugly for twice as many sandwiches.

  The men cheered the kiss and slapped Clarren on the back for “Taking one for the team,” as they collected their extra sandwiches. Ross was surprised to discover that he liked Clarren, and not just because his stomach was full for the first time since he had heard that zombies were real. They had been mortal enemies only the day before, and Ross would have punched his ticket without hesitation. Now they were on the same side, and Ross found himself admiring the man’s raw courage. This courage was all the more impressive since he was not just a soft civilian, he was a pampered politician.

  They were sharing their sandwiches when a Humvee filled with MPs came tearing up. The driver was a vaguely familiar butter bar with sweat on his upper lip. He stared out over the battlefield where the black bog stretched for hundreds of yards. Out in the middle of it were a few thousand grey beasts that seemed uncertain what to do; zombies were weird like that sometimes.

  Without taking his eyes from them, the lieutenant said, “Hey, sergeant, I’m looking for Colonel Ross.”

  “You got him.”

  “Ha-ha. No really.”

  Ross looked down at himself and saw that somewhere in the last six hours of fighting, he had lost the little bits of silver that meant he could order men to their deaths. “I was bumped up. What’s going on?”

  The lieutenant gave him a closer look and then shrugged. “Division is looking for Dean Clarren. He was the governor; they’re going to arrest him.”

  “Wasn’t he the governor of this shitty little state?” Ross asked. “That’s not something to brag about if you ask me. What do they want him for? Not paying his taxes? He get caught with the maid? The maid and her rottweiler?”

  Clarren had been sitting stiffly next to him, but now he began to laugh out bits of turkey sandwich.

  “No, they want to kill him. Well, they want to take him back to DC, but you know what’s going to happen there.” The young man put a finger gun to the side of his head and pulled the trigger. “Pow. Anyway, they said he was with you guys. This is 1st Battalion, right?”

  “Yeah, but I don’t friggin’ know every swinging dick around here. Wait. He was that fancy-pants fudge-packer. Sort of swishy, right?” Next to him, Clarren was turning red, tears streaming from his eyes. Ross refused to look at him as he started to nod. “Now, I remember him. He took off a while ago. Said he had salsa lessons or was getting a facial or something. Sorry kid. Hey, tell those morons up at division that its’s safe to come down here. They’re no longer in danger of being fragged because we’re out of fucking ammo. I’m not kidding. Use those exact words.”

  The lieutenant gave him a it’s-your-funeral look and went back to the Humvee. When he was plowing back up the road as if the entire zombie army only cared about eating him in particular, Ross turned to Clarren, who had sobered up fast. “You better take off. I know you want to fight, but you don’t have to do it here.”

  “No,” Clarren said, wiping the tears from his eyes. “I can’t run, not even from them. And I can’t have people thinking that I have. I know I’m not governor any more and I know a lot of people hate me…”

  “I’d use loathe. Is that a good word? Maybe try despise.”

  Clarren elbowed him. “All those are fine words. They can hate me, but I don’t want them to ever doubt my commitment to my state. If they kill me, fine. I’ll even let them drag me out of here, but I won’t go voluntarily. I don’t want to toot my own horn, it’s just I think it’ll hurt morale if it looks like I’m chickening out, and that’s already dangerously low.”

  Morale was actually high with the 1st Battalion. Ross had shown real leadership and Clarren’s good will, courage and his stunt with the beefy truck driver had cemented his position as a favorite among the soldiers, especially among the guardsmen and militia. The few men of the 101st still in the battalion had a grudging respect for him since running away had been an option most politicians would have taken.

  After finishing what had either been a very late breakfast or an early dinner, Ross made a tour of the line. It would be dark in two hours and he didn’t know if he could expect flares. While it was quiet, he had the men work on making hedges of spears. Everyone knew that hey wouldn’t stop the undead. They could only hope to slow the beasts down long enough to get a bullet into their heads.

  As he was heading back to his place in the center, he heard the rumble of engines. He hoped for an ammo run, instead he got a Major General with a stiff bottlebrush mustache, his Brigade Commander, looking like he’d been pulled out of bed after a three-minute nap. Along with him was a gaggle of political officers in BDUs that still had creases in them, and twenty MPs. It was obvious what this was about. Ross grabbed a soldier from the line. “Run and get the reserve company. Run! The rest of you, come with me. Come on, let’s go.”

  Two platoons of dirty men trudged after Ross as he made his way up the little hill to where he sometimes came to take a leak against a tree. It was his version of a command post—he preferred to command on the go.

  “What can I do for you, sir?” he said, coming to attention. Behind him the guardsmen stood straighter though none was particularly stiff. The militia men looked on casually, one quite flagrantly picking his nose.

  “You have a person of interest among your men, Ross. Governor Dean Clarren. He’s a traitor to the government.”

  Ross glanced back at his men. “We don’t have any traitors here, sir. These are all patriots. They’re all risking their lives…for our nation.” Clarren had been terribly wrong about closing his border and fighting the US Army, but the news was getting out about how the President was handling things—Courtney Shaw was seeing to that. She had made it her mission to foil to let everyone know the insane nature of the orders that were being sent out.

  When Ross had heard about what was happening in Pennsylvania, he had mentioned to Clarren, and a number of others, that he would have told the President to go fuck himself. It was big talk that he didn’t think he’d ever have to back up with action, and yet here he was, more or less stuck in the same position.

  The general’s eyes drew down into angry little slits. “I’m sure they’re all great men and I admire loyalty, but this is going to happen one way or another, Ross. Go get Clarren up here or I’ll be forced to send my own men to get him. And if that’s the way this is going to go down, he won’t be the only one we’ll be taking away with us.”

  Ross was regular army and it felt distinctly, perhaps even genetically wrong to even consider going against a direct order. He took a shaky breath and managed to say, “I’m sorry sir, but I need every man that I can get on the line. Your orders, as lawful as they are, do not take precedence over my duty to protect the people of Boston.”

  It felt like he had just put his head in a noose.

  The general grew red in the face. He took two oddly large steps forward, almost as if he were some sort of robot. “We are not going have a fucking repeat of what’s going on in Pennsylvania. Bring me the traitor, or else.” He growled out these words, barely opening his mouth, his teeth grinding as if he were chewing on each word before spitting them out.

  “With all
due respect, sir, the answer is no. Chances are he’ll die fighting the dead and that will be punishment enough.”

  “Don’t listen to him, General,” the ranking PO ordered. “If he dies on the line, he’ll be lionized as a hero. That is unacceptable. And it’s also unacceptable the way he’s talking to you or how he spoke to our representative earlier. He basically threatened all of us.”

  Ross scoffed, “Your representative? This isn’t a board-room, jackass. The man was a second lieutenant and what I said was a joke. Trust me, we have enough bullets for a good ol’ fashioned fragging.” The general growled something in the back of his throat, while the political officer was beside himself with indignation. “It’s nothing you have to worry about,” Ross said to the PO. “Fragging involves the killing of a superior officer. I don’t know what you are, but you aren’t an officer and you aren’t superior to anything.”

  “That does it!” the PO cried. “Arrest him! Arrest him right now!”

  The MPs had been watching all of this with growing anxiety. At the beginning of the little altercation, they had about equal numbers with the platoon Ross had brought with him. Gradually, more and more soldiers had come from the line, and even more had come jogging up from behind, until now they were outnumbered three to one.

  A staff sergeant in charge of the MP detail looked decidedly uncomfortable as he nudged two others and came forward.

  Ross slid his rifle up to his shoulder and aimed it at the PO. “Keep coming and see what happens.”

  The political officer blanched, his face sour and pale. He looked over at the general, whose face was rigid but impassive. He then surveyed the men behind Ross; they wore sneers and their weapons were no longer carried casually.

  “Fine. We’ll leave. But I guarantee that when we come back things will be different. You’ll see.”