Here We Stand [Surviving The Evacuation] (Book 2): Divided

by Frank Tayell

  Here We Stand:

  Divided

  (Surviving the Evacuation)

  Frank Tayell

  Dedicated to Tom

  Published by Frank Tayell

  Copyright 2016

  All rights reserved

  All people, places, and (especially) events are fictional.

  Other titles:

  Strike A Match

  1. Serious Crimes

  2. Counterfeit Conspiracy

  Work. Rest. Repeat.

  A Post-Apocalyptic Detective Novel

  Surviving The Evacuation

  Zombies vs The Living Dead

  Book 1: London

  Book 2: Wasteland

  Book 3: Family

  Book 4: Unsafe Haven

  Book 5: Reunion

  Book 6: Harvest

  Book 7: Home

  Here We Stand 1: Infected

  Here We Stand 2: Divided

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  Synopsis

  It is a week since the outbreak began in New York. The president has been betrayed. The vice-president is dead. The government has collapsed. The conspirators are close to victory.

  Having narrowly escaped agents of the cabal, Tom Clemens heads to Washington hoping to get word of the conspiracy to the president. The highways become impassable, filled with millions fleeing from the cities. Towns are fortified, but it is too late. The infection has already spread throughout the country. Nowhere is safe from the undead.

  As refugees storm the towns, and zombies fill their smoking ruins, survivors become more deadly a threat than the impossibly living dead. Still hopeful he can find the cause of the outbreak, and so end it, Tom fights his way through an undead America. As he searches for the cabal, he is unaware that they are searching for him.

  The story of Tom Clemens / Sholto continues in Surviving The Evacuation: Book 1: London. That of the survivors in North America will continue in Here We Stand 3: Betrayed.

  Please note: As the President of the United States is a background character, and the presidential election a background event, American English has been used in this book though with some British spellings as most of Surviving the Evacuation takes place in the United Kingdom.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue - The Conspiracy So Far

  Chapter 1 - No Admittance

  Chapter 2 - What’s Yours Is Mine

  Chapter 3 - Unwelcome In Providence

  Chapter 4 - Airlift

  Chapter 5 - Brothers And Sisters

  Chapter 6 - A Very Grand House

  Chapter 7 - Toll

  Chapter 8 - Shopping

  Chapter 9 - Caught

  Chapter 10 - An Old Friend

  Chapter 11 - Questions

  Chapter 12 - Confessions

  Chapter 13 - Fire, Returned

  Chapter 14 - Outrunning Death

  Chapter 15 - Unlucky Survivor

  Chapter 16 - The Dark Night

  Chapter 17 - The Long Day

  Chapter 18 - Family First

  Chapter 19 - The Prisoner’s Dilemma

  Chapter 20 - No Bed, No Breakfast

  Chapter 21 - The Village At The End Of The World

  Chapter 22 - A New Day, A New Life

  Chapter 23 - Loose Ends

  Epilogue - Departure

  Prologue - The Conspiracy So Far

  February 27th, Clearfield County, Pennsylvania

  “Zombie!” Helena yelled.

  Tom’s attention had been so fixed on the burning motel in the rearview mirror he’d failed to notice the creature on the track ahead. There wasn’t time to brake. He stamped on the gas pedal instead. The truck accelerated and slammed into the zombie with a bone-crunching crack. The tattered creature was thrown forward. Its head smacked into the windshield. Its twisted face filled his vision. The mouth opened, revealing a row of broken, blackened teeth. The front right tire hit a pothole. The entire truck bounced, and the zombie was thrown clear. By the time Tom had regained control and was able to look behind, the zombie was pushing itself to its feet.

  “Are they following?” Helena asked.

  “Zombies can’t run. It’ll never catch us,” Tom said. “At least, I hope they can’t run.” Not for the first time in the week since the impossibly living dead had begun attacking people in New York, he had to remind himself that just because he hadn’t seen it happen didn’t mean it couldn’t.

  “I meant Powell,” Helena said.

  Tom took an involuntary glance in the mirror. The zombie was lost to sight. All he could see were trees and a thick plume of dirty smoke rising from the blazing motel.

  “I wish I knew,” he said.

  They’d been expecting rescue by agents of President Grant Maxwell. It was Powell, the cabal’s hatchet man, who’d arrived at the motel. The conspirator had been driving slowly. The undead had followed, lured into his vehicle’s wake by the sound of the engine. Hopefully, that truly malevolent act had led to Powell being ripped apart by the zombies he’d tried to use as a weapon.

  The tires hit another rut. Tom’s head slammed into the roof, and he took that as a sign to slow down.

  “Wish we’d taken the other truck,” he said. “The one you set fire to.”

  “Why?”

  “It was a four-wheel drive. This one’s ten years overdue for the scrapyard.”

  Helena finally turned to face the front. “I couldn’t see anyone, and they couldn’t get past that burning truck.” It was more of a question than a statement, but Tom said nothing. “I’d like to think he’s dead,” Helena continued. “I’d like to think they’re all dead, but… but he’s real, isn’t he?”

  “Real? You saw Powell for yourself,” Tom said.

  “I mean it’s all real,” she said. “Everything you told me. I don’t think I believed it up until now. I didn’t want to believe it. I was sure you were making some of it up, or that your time on the run was making you exaggerate or something, but they really came for you.”

  Tom swerved to avoid a waterlogged puddle almost big enough to be called a pond. In the month between the inauguration and the outbreak, snow had fallen across the northeastern United States, but the media outlets’ gleefully predicted ice storms hadn’t appeared. In the week since the outbreak, as Tom and Helena had driven, hiked, and run from New York to Pennsylvania, the few flurries of snow had been washed away by frequent rain. Right now he would have preferred that the ground was frozen and ice-covered. It would have offered more traction than this swampy morass. He shifted down into first and hoped the track led somewhere. At the moment it only seemed to head deeper into the forest.

  “There really is a cabal. A conspiracy,” Helena said. “They really did try to take over the government. But why did they come all the way here?”

  “Good question,” he grunted, swerving again, this time barely missing a fallen log.

  “I mean, with everything that’s going on, why did they waste the effort and resources and… and I just got it!”

  “What?”

  “Powell was trying to kill us, all of us,” she said. “Me, Lawrence, Noah, Amy. He didn’t want any witnesses. You told that kid, Nate, that we were there with you. He must have been the one who told Powell.”

  “Not him,” Tom said. “No, he’s too innocent to be caught up in this. Too young. But he told so
meone, and they sent Powell.” He leaned forward in the seat and peered at the sky. “Keep an eye out for a helicopter.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because it’s possible that Max did send someone to rescue us, and that Powell just got there first.”

  She glanced out the window. “It’s not likely, is it?”

  “We can but hope.”

  She gave an irritated grunt in reply. “Powell wanted to kill all of us. That’s why he lured the zombies after him. But why?”

  “Like you said, he didn’t want any witnesses,” Tom said. He wanted to tell her to stop talking, but similar questions were going through his own mind.

  “Yes, but why? You have to know something,” she said. “That has to be it. Something important. Something that could stop the zombies. They took Dr Ayers, and now they want you. It has to be connected. Or maybe it’s a clue as to who was behind the outbreak.”

  The ground leveled out as the track widened, and he was able to put the truck into second.

  “They came for me,” he said. “That’s the fact that matters. Powell wanted me dead, but his boss wants me alive. If he’s dead, they’ll send someone else. If he’s not, Powell will keep looking. I’ve met people like him, people who get so obsessed with a course of action that they can’t be turned away from it.”

  “People like you?” Helena asked.

  It was a perceptive comment. Tom had fled to America as a teenager. He’d spent nearly three decades plotting revenge on the man responsible for the death of his family. Vengeance had only been put aside when he’d discovered Projects Archangel and Prometheus. A transatlantic cabal, with agents in many world governments, had created a vaccine that would cure some of the most deadly diseases. They planned to use this wonder drug to blackmail every nation on the planet and thus bring about their vision of a new, global hegemony. Even now, Tom wasn’t sure if part of their plan was to unleash plagues that would make the anti-viral a necessity. He did know that they planned to destroy non-compliant countries with radioactive fire.

  The cabal had rigged the presidential election so that it would be a contest between Farley and Senator Clancy Sterling, both members of the conspiracy. That was why Tom had persuaded Governor Grant Maxwell to throw his hat in the ring. Max had won, but on the day of the inauguration, and before Tom could tell the newly sworn-in president about the conspiracy, he was framed for murder. He had the footage of Powell shooting the journalist, Imogen Fenster, but he’d been unable to get that evidence to Max. Instead, Tom had searched for proof of the conspiracy that the world would believe. Before he could, there was the outbreak. He didn’t know who was behind it. Russia or China were the most obvious suspects, but it could have been almost any nation. Someone had learned of Archangel and Prometheus, and dusted off some ancient Cold War weapon, unleashing the unbelievable nightmare of walking corpses on the world.

  “The road’s curving,” Helena said.

  “I know.”

  The plume of smoke was now to their left, rather than directly behind them. Tom leaned forward, trying to spot a deer trail, hunter’s path, or anything that would get them away from the motel. The track narrowed again. The trees closed in. Branches slapped against the window. Pine needles smeared the zombie’s red-brown gore across the windshield. One branch after another bent and snapped, but each was bigger than the last. It was only a matter of time before a more immovable bough brought the truck to a final halt, and not much time at that. Vivid memories of the grinding horror they’d seen when hiking during the past week made him hesitate in pressing down on the brake. He had no choice. He eased his foot onto the pedal just as the woodland came to an abrupt end. The truck bounced out into sunlight, though not onto a track, but onto a cleared area of land filled with felled trees and torn-out stumps.

  “There’s a road!” Helena waved her arm to the right, but Tom had to navigate around a fallen log before he dared look. The road was on the far side of a plowed field, and he couldn’t see a track or trail leading to it. Wishing there was a gear lower than first, he aimed the truck at the distant road. Separating the farmland from the farmed forest was a three-wire fence. It snapped a sharp above middle-C as the battered vehicle smashed through it.

  “Come on. Come on,” Tom muttered as the truck bounced in and out of the plowed furrows. Dirt sprayed up, coating the windows, but the road grew nearer. Nearer. Near enough he could make out the dents on the bumper of a white sedan that sped past. The truck lurched as the front tires hit the edge of the field. It tilted as they found purchase on the firmer soil of the road. It stalled as the rear wheels finally bogged down. He revved the engine, stamped on the gas, tried to reverse, and then slammed his fist into the steering wheel. They were stuck.

  “I never was any good at gambling,” Helena said, as she opened the door.

  “What?”

  “Luck. Mine’s always been terrible.”

  He opened the door and stepped outside. The front wheels were on the compacted, gravel-edged ribbon at the side of the road. The rear were stuck in a foot of mud.

  “Nothing in the back,” Helena said. “No planks. No shovel. No chance to dig our way out.” She threw a glance at the dirty black plume hovering above the tree line, not nearly far enough away. “I guess we walk.”

  Tom looked about for an alternative, but there wasn’t one. The motel was barely a mile away in a straight line, and that was how the zombies would walk. They were slow, but they would come.

  “North or south?” Helena asked.

  “In one direction, it must link up with the road that runs outside the motel,” Tom said. “We don’t want that one.” That road would be full of the undead, but as to which direction that was, he couldn’t tell. More out of optimistic reflex than expectation, he raised his hand as a red minivan sped past. It didn’t slow.

  “I guess we don’t want to head toward what they’re fleeing,” Helena said.

  Tom took out his revolver. At some point he’d remembered to reload, but he only had two loose rounds in his pocket. “How much ammo do you have for that 9mm?”

  She ejected the magazine. “Three rounds.” She opened the bag she’d brought with her from the motel. “And we’ve got a quart of water, and two boxes of crackers. Not quite a feast.”

  Tom buttoned up the borrowed jacket. Like the rest of the clothes he’d taken from the manager’s apartment in the motel, it had a pervasive smell of damp. The sat-phone and tablet were a comforting weight, but utterly useless to their immediate needs. He couldn’t think of anyone they could call, at least not anyone who could help them. He found himself staring up at the sky. The clouds weren’t thick.

  “We’ll cross this road, and take to the woods,” he said, though those trees looked more like a thin screen than proper woodland.

  “Because you think the zombies will follow the cars on this road?” she asked.

  “Partly that, but mostly because if the cabal had the ability to compromise the White House communications system, they’re more than capable of arranging for a satellite to watch over Powell and his attack. We stand a better chance of losing them if we stay under cover.” Paranoia had kept him alive during his time on the run; now he second-guessed himself. Would it lead to their deaths? They’d taken to the woods before, and all it had proved was that their only skill to surviving the harsh winter wilderness was the ability to put one foot in front of the other.

  Helena sighed. “When there are no good choices left…” she said, but didn’t finish the thought. “We’ll go after that RV has gone past, yes?”

  It was a twelve-wheel monstrosity, the kind where the ‘V’ stood for vanity. The dented aluminum sidings gleamed where frequent collisions had abraded the metal. As it drew nearer, it was the wire-mesh on the windows that caught his eye, and so it had almost driven past before he noticed the barbed wire around the edge of the roof.

  “That’s the way to survive the apocalypse,” he said as it drove past. “Not in a mobile home but a mobile fo
rtress.”

  “Until the fuel runs out,” Helena said.

  The vehicle did something completely unexpected. It stopped about fifty yards down the road. Then it reversed almost as swiftly as it had driven past. A hatch on the roof opened. A woman stuck her head out. From what Tom could see of her arms and shoulders, she was wearing military fatigues.

  “You stuck or out of fuel?” she asked.

  “Stuck,” Helena said.

  Suspicion reared its head. In a flash, Tom thought he understood how these people solved the problem of fuel. They stole it from people who were stranded by the side of the road. His hand went to his pocket, and the revolver concealed within.

  The woman ducked out of sight. Tom readied himself. The front passenger door opened and another woman stepped out. She wore distinctly civilian garb, and was a decade older than the soldier, but there was an unmistakable familial resemblance.

  “Can’t spare any gas, and don’t have any room for passengers,” the civilian said, “but we can give you a tow.”

  “Thank you, that’s all we need,” Helena said.

  The civilian looked inside the RV’s cab. Whatever signal she was waiting for was given. She reached inside. Tom’s hands tightened on the revolver. When the woman turned around, a tow-cable was in her hands.

  The soldier reappeared through the hatch on the roof, this time climbing up. She held a rifle, though when she raised it, it was to use the scope to scan their surroundings.

  “Tie her off,” the civilian said, throwing one end of the rope to Tom. He had to let go of the pistol’s grip to grab the rope. His suspicions didn’t subside until, a few minutes later, the truck was pulled out of the ditch, and the woman was coiling the rope. “Try the engine,” she said.

  Helena did. The truck bounced forward a few feet. The civilian seemed to relax and, when the soldier didn’t switch her aim and shoot both him and Helena, Tom finally allowed himself to do the same.