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

by Frank Tayell

  “We need weapons,” he said, walking over to the RV’s rear door. “And gasoline. Food, too. It’s all inside.”

  The knocking came again.

  “One minute they’re friends, allies, our saviors,” Helena said, coming over to help him pry the barbed wire away from the door. “The next, they’re corpses that we have to rob.”

  “Yeah. Go up to the roof. Distract her,” Tom said, “I’ll open the door and… and do the rest.”

  She grabbed at the ladder and climbed up. She stamped on the roof, and then bellowed down through the hatch. “I wanted to thank you,” she yelled. “An hour ago, you saved our lives. You said we should repay the favor, and this is the only way we can. I’m sorry. She’s underneath me, Tom. I can see her.”

  Tom hammered the machete into the lock. The door popped open. He took a step back. He saw the woman, the same one who had come to their aid, illuminated under the open skylight. Her front was covered in blood. Her face was almost unrecognizable.

  “Come on,” he said softly. “It’ll be over soon.” And even as the undead woman took a step toward them, he realized how wrong the words were. He raised the machete. It wouldn’t be over soon. Even if the zombies all suddenly collapsed, the memory of this would live on forever, tainting the past and coloring the future. She staggered toward him, her arms banging into the sides of the RV, knocking over items neatly stowed on shelves. She reached the door and toppled forward as she failed to manage the steps. The zombie landed face first on the cold ground. Tom brought the machete down, bringing a swift end to the zombie who’d been a person who’d done nothing but help strangers in need.

  There were no other bodies in the vehicle. That was a relief. Tom had been dreading the discovery of children. Dead or undead, he wasn’t sure which would be worse. They did find fuel.

  “That’s about sixty gallons,” Helena said. “And enough food for a week.”

  Tom picked up the rifle. “Three and half magazines, and another seventy rounds of ammo for a 9mm.” There was a spare pistol on the driver seat. There were also two boxes of shotgun shells, but no sign of the shotgun.

  “We’ll take enough gas to get us to the airfield,” Helena said. “We’ll leave the rest, most of the food, and the shotgun shells. We don’t need it. Someone else might.”

  Tom didn’t argue. It was a small offering, and utterly insufficient. He did take a small portable radio. They locked the RV, went back to the truck, and continued driving.

  Chapter 1 - No Admittance

  Clinton County, Pennsylvania

  “And you…. in California… ago?” a stuttering voice on the radio asked.

  Most of the reply was drowned out by same static that distorted the question.

  “Really? And what…?” the reporter asked. The signal was lost. Tom twisted the dial.

  “The seven seals are broken,” a man boomed. “The sky shall turn black. The…” Tom turned the dial, preferring static to another raving rant.

  “It’s opened. Not broken,” Helena said. “I understand why people turn to religion when times are darkest, but if they are going to quote, and have to do it from that particular verse, they could at least get it right.”

  “All we know is that there are zombies in Washington.” The signal was faint, but Tom recognized the voice of the woman they’d heard a few days before. “We don’t know that the president’s dead. We don’t know that the country is lost. We don’t…” Tom wasn’t sure if they’d lost the signal, or if the woman had finally given up. Certainly, when she started speaking again, it was with a weariness that hadn’t been there before. “I do know the zombies are in the streets outside. We lost Corporal Grenville and Private Browne an hour ago. No, lost isn’t the right word. I know where they are. They’re right outside the door. We won’t leave. We can’t. The parking lot has been overrun. I recognize some of the zombies. My neighbors. My friends. I… I wonder if they stayed because we continued to broadcast. I’ll never know. The bank is on fire. The flames will spread. The town will burn. We will die, but that doesn’t mean you have to. If…” The signal faded. Tom nudged the dial, but when the station came back, it was the sound of an old country western song about an eternally unrequited love.

  He turned the radio off and the sat-phone on. “Not much battery,” he said, waiting for the screen to load. Helena said nothing as she gripped and re-gripped the steering wheel.

  “There,” he said. “The satellite’s over a desert. There’s a road, a few buildings, not much else. Let’s see if I can get a different satellite.”

  “Can you find something nearer?” she asked. “Maybe… maybe you could look for a town that’s on fire.”

  “I can only see what the satellites are over. I could try to change the orbit by a few degrees, but even then it’s still a guess as to what it’s showing a picture of. There is fire and smoke in this one, but it’s coastal. Baltimore, I think. I could be wrong. Hell, it might not even be America.”

  A lime-green sports car overtook them at what had to be at least a hundred miles an hour. The truck rocked in the car’s slipstream. Helena gave a short growl, and then she sighed and stretched, as if forcing herself to forget the grim report they’d just heard on the radio.

  “So,” she said loudly, and seemed uncertain what to say next. “How did you… How did you get access to those satellites?”

  Tom took one last look at the smoke-shrouded port before shutting the tablet down. “About fifteen years ago, a kid hacked into the DMV. Corrie Guinn is her name. I managed to get to her before the cops did and got the kid a place at college. You could think of it as a scholarship if you like.”

  “Could I think of it as a pre-emptive pay-off?” she asked. “You were basically hiring her, right?”

  “That’s why I was looking for someone with her skill set, but after I met her, not so much. She’s very good, but not reliable. Not in the line of work I do. Too… erratic. There was a team at the university doing some government research that was beyond top-secret. Within a month of arriving, she’d managed to hack into NORAD, and installed a less than salubrious welcome message on all of their terminals. That’s quite a feat, and she did it because she was bored. She’s the kind of person who sees a firewall as a challenge, and a password as a puzzle to be cracked. I got her out of trouble again, this time by using the contacts I’d developed in various branches of government. I pointed out that someone this good was an asset to be cultivated. That she just needed to grow up a bit, learn some responsibility, and then she could be tasked with hacking China. To help prove my point, I told her to learn Mandarin. Instead, she learned Russian, but it only took her a month to become fluent. She needed supervision, and it had to be somewhere she could use her skills. You know Lisa Kempton?”

  “The billionaire?”

  “Back then she was just a multi-millionaire who’d cashed in on the tech-bubble. She was always on the watch for capable women with a disruptively keen mind. I thought Corrie was a good fit. Here’s the thing. I didn’t do it out of the kindness of my heart.”

  “I could have guessed that.”

  “I felt sorry for her, sure,” Tom said. “And had no intention of putting her in harm’s way. Not directly at least. This was before I knew about the cabal. I was pursuing this British politician. I wanted him dead, but I wanted to destroy his reputation first. Lisa Kempton had made a very public donation to his election campaign. It made no sense. She was a tech CEO with interests in the U.S. and Asia, and he was a parochial Englishman with little interest in the world beyond Dover. I thought Corrie would get me access to the files that would explain why. She didn’t. She self-destructed in what was, in retrospect, an entirely predictable fashion. Before she burned out, she did get me access to the satellites.”

  “Huh. So Kempton’s part of the cabal?”

  “I’d say she’s a fellow traveler rather than a card-carrying member. She financed parts of the project that couldn’t be run through the government. In return, her co
mpany was going to get the contract to produce the anti-viral. I would say that she saw the cabal as a tool toward her own ultimate power.”

  A minivan shot out of a side road, swerving in front of them. Helena tapped the brakes. The van was so overloaded that it struggled to do more than the truck’s forty miles an hour top speed. Helena slowed again, letting a gap form between their two vehicles.

  “What kind of things did Kempton finance?” she asked.

  “There’s the ordinary stuff, the donations to keep politicians from investigating precisely to where government funds were disappearing. Then there’s the other stuff, like the abduction of test subjects.”

  “Oh. I can guess what happened to them.” She glanced in the rearview mirror and pushed down on the gas. A big-rig was behind them, slowly gaining ground. Their truck stood no chance of overtaking the minivan.

  “There’s an intersection ahead. Which way?” she asked.

  “Follow the minivan.”

  “You sure? The other road looks clearer.”

  “It’ll take us in the wrong direction,” he said.

  They followed the minivan. The rig had settled in a hundred feet to their rear.

  “Damn. Can’t see much of the road behind, now. What happened to the programmer?” she asked.

  “Corrie? She went to farm alpacas out west. After six months, she disappeared. Went completely off the grid. I got a few messages from her in the years since, but she’d go silent anytime I asked where she was or why she’d run. In hindsight, I guess she must have discovered the same thing I did.”

  Silence settled. Tom turned the tablet back on, waited for a signal, and began searching through his files to see if he had a record of any property Lisa Kempton had purchased in Pennsylvania. It was a long shot, but those were all they had left. The app flashed, alerting him to a new message from Bill Wright.

  “Here’s something. They’re going to evacuate the cities.”

  “What? Who? How?”

  “No, I mean in Britain,” he said. “It’s a message from Bill. They’re implementing his evacuation plan. They’re going to set up enclaves along the coast, move the population out of the cities to where they can be more easily fed. He wants to know… Oh.”

  “What?”

  “Quigley’s taken over. The foreign secretary,” he added. “He’s the PM now. I bet that was a coup.” He wondered if he could find out. Other than Bill Wright, he had a few contacts in the British government.

  “Is that bad?” Helena asked.

  “Quigley being in charge? Yes. Very bad. He’s a—”

  “Zombie!”

  Tom looked up. A ragged creature in a long skirt staggered out of the open door of a farmhouse. The minivan accelerated, but the zombie was stopped by a closed gate. Its arms waved at them as they drove past.

  “She’s probably safe, then,” Helena said.

  “Who?” Tom asked, looking in the mirror until the zombie was lost behind the bulk of the rig following them.

  “The programmer. Corrie. If she knew what was coming, she’s made preparations. She’s safe?”

  “Probably,” he said.

  “Good. I was going to be an actor.”

  “Oh?” Tom forced his brain to switch gears at this abrupt change in conversation. “This was the new life you were after? You were going to quit teaching and try acting?”

  “No. Teaching was what I did after I stopped acting.”

  “In the theatre?” he asked.

  “No. TV. I was going to be big. I suppose that’s what all actors think. It’s certainly what all those people I jockeyed with while waiting for an audition thought.”

  “Were you in anything I might have seen?” he asked.

  “A few commercials, and some pilots that were never picked up. But my big break was that serial killer show, Fifty-Two. Do you remember it?”

  “Sure. Fifty-two episodes over fifty-two weeks, with a different victim each week.” He’d seen the end of a couple of episodes, though only when he’d turned the set on to catch the beginning of the news. Mostly, he remembered it from the ubiquitous advertising, and the frequent complaints that it was too violent for network television.

  “I was the sorority girl killed in the bathtub,” Helena said. “In the third episode? It would have been my big break, but they cut my lines, and decided they didn’t need me for the autopsy scene the following week.”

  “Ah. That’s why you went into teaching?”

  “No. That was because of Jessica. Just being attached to that show was enough to get me into a pilot for a sitcom about two sisters trying to make it in the big city. The actress who was meant to play my sister dropped out. They needed someone for the pilot or it wouldn’t get made. I suggested Jessica. They gave her a screen test, and the camera loved her, and she loved it. A little too much. The pilot didn’t get picked up, but she got offered a few parts. Small ones, like mine, but she thought they were big. I guess we suffered from the same delusion, but where she thought she was going to be a star, I looked at her as if I was looking in the mirror. I knew it wasn’t going to happen for either of us, so I quit. She didn’t. She kept at it, and kept getting knocked back. She got enough small parts to keep the flame alive, but enough rejections that when that cult found her, she was easy to reel in. I should have looked out for her, but I didn’t.”

  And Tom thought he now understood what had brought that memory to the forefront of her mind. “But you said she escaped,” he said.

  “Right, but whatever momentum she’d built up had gone. Her career was over. Our mother was dead, and she… We had a fight. A big one. Jessica didn’t come to the funeral because her ‘faith’ wouldn’t allow it. They don’t believe in death, you see, just transformation and ascendency. That’s what they call it, except it’s just another part of the scam.” She swore.

  “I went down there, after I’d buried our mother. They let me speak to her. I yelled and screamed, and that was just what they wanted. I didn’t realize that until after, when it was too late. They wanted her to know she had no one but her fellow believers, no family except them. So, yeah, she got out, but I didn’t know about it until a click-bait article popped up on my newsfeed. It was one of those ‘where are they now’ things. Specifically, she was in a small town in Texas, but she’d already fled by the time I got there. I hired a detective to track her down, followed her to Toronto, and she left again. She could be anywhere in the world, and I won’t ever see her again. I know that the last time I saw her was after I sought her out. She has to know that means I love her, that I made the effort of finding her. That’s the only comfort I’ve got. I did everything I could to reconnect with the only family I have.”

  That comment hit too close to home.

  “You ruined a lot of lives, Tom,” she said. “You know that? The programmer. That kid in the White House, Nate. If he wasn’t working for Powell, he’s probably trapped in Washington. There are others, aren’t there? There have to be. Dozens. Hundreds. All those people who could have been something, but aren’t.”

  “I know,” he said. “I came to terms with that a long time ago. My only comfort is that the cause has been proven just, even if my original motives weren’t.”

  A compact came level with them. Its engine whined as it struggled to overtake. The roof was covered with half-a-dozen bulging suitcases, tied down with washing line. Helena stamped on the brake as it pulled in, just in front of them. She gave a short growl of irritation. “There’s a kid in there,” she said.

  The child, perhaps seven years old, was wedged in the backseat between more luggage and a greyhound that was making a spirited attempt at burrowing through the rear windshield. There were eight cars between the compact and the point the road curved out of sight. Behind them, the rig blocked most of the view, but in his mind’s eye Tom could imagine them as part of a long stream of traffic stretching far beyond the horizon.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I really don’t, except those people in the R
V had the right of it. We have to help one another, and that’s we should have been doing all along. Not… not anything else. But that programmer, Corrie, she’s probably safe, somewhere. Maybe that woman in the radio station will find a way to escape. And maybe Jessica kept running north, and she got work in some lumber camp so remote that even the zombies won’t find her. Maybe.”

  “Maybe,” he said. “That’s more or less the hope I’m holding onto.”

  She sighed. “Thirty-five. We’re definitely slowing down.”

  Tom knew it and knew what it meant. He glanced at the oncoming lane just as a convoy of cars overtook them. They each bore the logo of a rental company. “And everyone’s heading the same way,” he said.

  “So where are they going? Thirty.”

  The compact ahead of them suddenly swerved to the left, off the road, and onto a track that Tom could barely see.

  “Do we follow?” Helena asked, tapping on the brakes.

  “No. No. Don’t!” Tom said.

  “You sure?”

  “Don’t!” They passed the track. He turned to watch the compact bounce along a path. A four-wheel drive that had been trailing the rig pulled off the road, following it. A third car joined the truck.

  “We should have taken that track,” Helena said.

  “This truck isn’t built for off-road, and that compact certainly isn’t. It’ll stall and block every vehicle behind. We’re moving slow, but at least we’re moving.”

  “I feel sorry for the kid in the back of that car. He’ll be walking soon.” She tapped the brake. “Twenty-five. So will we. I know we can’t help everyone, but I can’t help but think every face I see is only minutes from death.”

  The minivan, once again the vehicle immediately in front, accelerated. Helena stamped on the gas pedal hard enough that the dashboard shook. Tom thought he knew why the traffic was suddenly freeing up, and it became obvious within a few seconds. Impatience had finally broken whatever mental block was keeping some drivers to obey the law of the road. They drove across the median and sped down the opposite side of the road. Within a mile, as those cars reached whatever blockage lay ahead, vehicles on both sides of the road slowed, this time with an abrupt finality.