by Joe McKinney
“What do you want to do?” I asked.
“Warn Daddy,” she said at once. “Daddy told me Nessel always attacks on two fronts at once. If he’s coming after me here, he’s probably trying to attack Daddy somewhere else too.”
“The radio?”
She nodded. “I tried back at the lake. Nobody answered. We’ll have to get closer into town and try for one of Daddy’s safe houses.”
“You got it,” I said and laid into the throttle.
§
When we got closer into town, I pulled off the highway and parked in a lot on the top of a small hill so Heather could call Naylor on the radio.
“Are you sure it’s Nessel’s people?” he asked.
“I’m sure,” she said.
He told us not to use the radio any more than we had to. Besides a good share of the gasoline market, Nessel controlled the sale of most of the electronic equipment in the area. The radio Heather was using was probably stolen from one of his shipments, and there wasn’t much doubt he’d be able to overhear her transmission.
“Can you get to the pickup point?” he asked.
Heather gave me a sidelong glance and a smile. “I’m pretty sure we can.”
We moved out, and as we rode, I thought about this old timer I used to know who told me what life was like before the outbreak. He said people were pretty much the same then as they are now, and that turning into zombies hadn’t changed them much. What was different, he said, was the noise. It was noisy back then. There were cars and planes and trains everywhere, not to mention all the crowds. He said you couldn’t escape it.
But these days, there are so few cars left you can drive around all day and never see another driver. Heather and I hadn’t seen any all night. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard a plane fly overhead. I’d never seen a moving train. Life in the Zone was quiet, even though it was rarely peaceful.
That’s how I knew something was wrong. Heather and I got on the highway again and started driving, but we hadn’t made it very far before I heard the high-pitched whine of a pack of racing bikes.
We glanced around, looking for them. They were behind us, coming down from an overpass and getting onto the freeway at top speed. I didn’t need to ask if they were Nessel’s men. All of them had machine guns slung over their backs, and the way they were riding, they clearly knew who we were.
I got my bike up to top speed, but they were faster. My bike was just a beat up Harley Sportster, but they were riding Honda CXRs—top-of-the-line racing bikes. I didn’t have a snowball’s chance of outrunning them in a dead sprint, so when they got close enough to take their shots, I did the only thing I could think of and veered over to the far left lane, let them come up on us, then downshifted and banked the bike hard to the right, taking the connector ramp to the Connelly Loop at almost a hundred miles an hour.
Heather yelled out in surprise. Nessel’s men overshot us. I saw them lock up their brakes and slide, but none of them reacted fast enough to take the ramp with us.
Their mistake bought us a few valuable seconds. The Connelly Loop led right into the heart of the Zone. There was nothing in there but crumbling buildings and legions of the infected. That made it low priority for the bosses who made it their business to keep the roads clear, so it was still choked with long lines of abandoned cars.
My old timer friend told me that rush-hour traffic used to be so bad the freeways would turn into parking lots, and when it was really bad, you could sit in your car for half an hour or more and never make it more than a couple of miles. Looking out over the abandoned cars ahead of us I felt like I knew what he meant. It was a three-lane, bumper-to-bumper junkyard as far as I could see.
As I slowed down to thread the gap between the cars Heather yelled in my ear, “What are you doing? You’re going the wrong way.”
I looked behind us and saw Nessel’s men coming for us. They looked like a squadron of mad hornets buzzing down the ramp, shooting the gaps between wrecks at fantastic speeds.
“Hold on,” I said.
One of the infected was stumbling along between two rows of cars about a hundred and fifty yards ahead of us. I dug into the throttle and went straight for him, darting through the narrow gap, feeling the thump thump thump of the air as we passed all the cars.
The infected are predictable. When they see you, they stumble after you. They don’t care if you’re on foot or driving a truck, they stumble after you just the same, which is exactly what the zombie ahead of us was doing.
About ten yards ahead of the zombie was a gap in the cars. It looked like a driver in the middle lane had tried to turn into the lane to his right and had hit another car in the process. The car was stuck at a forty-five degree angle, with just enough room for me to slip alongside it and cross over to the gap between the middle and right lanes. But I had to time it right. I had to get there just a fraction of a second before the zombie if I was going to make it work.
It was close.
When I got to the gap I hit the brakes, rocked the bike hard to the right, then hard to the left, feeling Heather gasping as she squeezed me. We threaded into the opening and took off at full speed.
I looked back just as one of Nessel’s goons hit that zombie. He must have been doing at least ninety miles per hour when he realized what was happening and hit his brakes. But at that speed, not even the Honda’s oversized racing brakes could help him. He hit the zombie, and both bodies went tumbling over the wrecked cars. The bike went sideways, hit the trunk of a car, and shot twenty feet up in the air, turning end over end the whole way back to the ground.
That slowed the other three down, but not by much, and I knew I couldn’t play those games forever. I took us up another hundred yards or so until we came to a small box van. There I slowed, turned the bike around, and headed back the way we’d come.
“What are you doing?” Heather said.
But I didn’t have time to answer. I ducked my head and charged.
One of the remaining three riders was in our gap, and even though he was wearing a full helmet and shield that kept his face hidden, I could tell by the way his body stiffened that his eyes were going wide.
I pulled my Glock and fired. I’m not sure if I hit him or not, but the bike shimmied beneath him, he lost his balance, glanced off a car, and crashed out.
I saw his head smack a bumper as he fell.
I stopped the bike and told Heather to get off. She looked panicked, but she did like I asked.
“What are you going to do?”
I pulled out my other Glock. “Just stay down, okay? I got this.”
Those huge green eyes of hers melted me.
“We’re going to be okay,” I said.
She nodded, and I moved out on foot. The other two riders were going slow now, practically walking their bikes through the cars, looking for us. I crouched below the top of the cars and jogged into position. When the rider I was targeting got close enough, I stood and fired both Glocks into his chest, knocking him backward off the bike.
The other rider tried to react, but he was stuck between two pickups. I threw a lot of ammunition at him with both guns and managed to catch a lucky shot. He spun around, hit in the shoulder, and went down.
I ran over to where he fell and saw him rolling on the pavement, wounded. He pushed off his helmet and let it tumble away. He looked up at me, his eyes pleading with me. Most of the time my moral compass swings closer to the good than the bad, but some people just aren’t worth the effort.
So I shot him in the head.
§
When I got back to Heather, she was holding that portable radio in her hands and crying.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Daddy was right about Nessel,” she said. “The bastard used me as a decoy.”
“What do you mean?”
“Daddy sent a squad of his best men to the safe house where we were supposed to go.” She looked up at me and choked back tears. “Nessel was waiting f
or them. They’re all dead. Now he’s attacking Daddy’s compound.”
“Oh, Jesus.”
“He said for us to stay away.” She looked deep into my eyes. “But my God, Andrew. It sounded so bad. I heard explosions. And Daddy was screaming at people while he was talking with me.”
I had no idea what to say. She told me while we were dancing that she had begged her father for a week to let her go out on a date with me, and now his empire was in serious risk of crumbling, and it was all because of our date.
It’s a lousy feeling, knowing you’re to blame for something that big.
But Heather, she was full of surprises. “Andrew,” she said, “you were telling me the truth about my mom, weren’t you? You really did read her my letter?”
I nodded.
“You worked a miracle bringing her back into my life.”
I shook my head.
“You did,” she said. “I believe that. And I believe you can do it again. I believe you can give me my father back.”
It was my turn to look deep into her eyes. I felt confused. “What are you asking me to do?”
“Help me save Daddy, Andrew. Please.”
She turned those big green eyes up at me, and in that moment, I knew I was powerless to refuse. I’d have handed her my soul for the asking.
“Let’s go get your dad,” I said.
§
I started toward the main gate because that was the only way into Ashcroft’s compound that I knew of, but when Heather saw where I was going she pointed me in a different direction.
She had me go to the west side of the compound and drive into a crumbling building that looked like it had been a bakery before the outbreak. It was the corner shop in a block-long strip mall. She told me to stop. Then she got off the bike, opened a door that had been made to look like it was rusted shut, and ushered me into a freshly painted white corridor.
“This leads right into the compound,” she said.
I nodded, impressed. Concealed doors and hidden tunnels were the kind of thing you’d expect from a powerful boss like Ashcroft, but it was still weird to actually see them in real life. That kind of engineering was way beyond what most bosses were capable of.
We took the motorcycle all the way to the end of the corridor, where we were met by guards who took us to see Ashcroft.
Ashcroft and Naylor were watching the battle from the third floor of the Fairmount. Nessel had focused his troops around the main gate, but they were hitting the compound’s wall in a couple of different places, forcing Ashcroft’s troops to divide their strength.
Heather and I stood back, listening as Naylor relayed to Ashcroft updates he was receiving over the radio.
The outer perimeter of Ashcroft’s compound was made up of smashed and stacked cars. Nessel’s men had used rocket-propelled grenades against that wall and it had partially collapsed in two places. A large group of Ashcroft’s men were boxed in near the gate, fighting a close-quarter’s battle in the rubble from the explosions, and Nessel’s superior numbers were starting to wear them down.
Ashcroft surveyed the scene with night-vision goggles. “Pull them back, Naylor,” he said. “Tell them to regroup around the courtyard.”
Ashcroft’s troops began falling back. Heather reached over and touched my hand as the soldiers ran toward the hotel. I looked over at her and saw she was holding her breath.
Just then another blast from a rocket grenade lit up the night, and when the smoke settled, we saw there was a huge hole in the wall.
Naylor was watching the space beyond the wall. “Something’s happening,” he said. “They’re bringing up buses.”
“Buses?” Ashcroft said. He focused his binoculars on the hole. “My God,” he gasped.
Two yellow school buses broke through the burning debris that had once been the wall of flattened cars and rolled to a stop not far from Ashcroft’s retreating troops. Some of the men stopped to fire at the bodies getting off the buses but took off running again when they realized they were the infected.
“That is fucking brilliant,” Ashcroft said, impressed despite himself. “Using the infected like that. I didn’t think Nessel had it in him.”
“Problem, sir,” Naylor said.
Ashcroft smirked. “What now?”
“There, sir. To the right of the main gate. See him?”
I followed Naylor’s finger to a high point on the wall. There was a man crawling to the top of it, but he was too far away for me to see what he was doing.
“Sniper,” Ashcroft said. And then, one at a time, Ashcroft’s retreating troops started to fall. The only clue why were the bright muzzle flashes of the sniper’s rifle.
In the confusion, Ashcroft’s men didn’t know which way to run.
“They’re getting slaughtered out there,” Ashcroft said. “Get some of your men back up to the front and take that sniper out.”
Naylor said, “I don’t have anybody, sir. Prescott is the only officer I have left, and he’s coordinating the retreat.”
Ashcroft said nothing. He gripped the railing and stared down at the battlefield.
“Mr. Ashcroft,” I said.
“What?” he growled.
“I can get him, sir.”
“Just stand still and shut up,” he said.
For the second time that night I met his gaze and didn’t look away.
It looked like his first instinct was to throw me over the railing, but then he stopped himself and nodded. “Okay,” he said. “You want to do it, go ahead.”
I turned to go.
Heather followed me.
“Andrew, wait.” She said, “You’re not serious? You can’t go.”
I nodded in her father’s direction. “Heather, do you really think he’d ever let us be together if I don’t do this? He’ll always have it in the back of his mind that this happened because of me. But I can change that if I do this.”
“Don’t be stupid, Andrew. He’s got people to deal with this.”
“I’ll be all right,” I said. “I promise.”
“You better be,” she said.
I grabbed her roughly around the waist and pulled her close, planting a kiss on her lips right there in front of her dad.
“I’m coming back,” I said. “Count on it.”
§
The battle had reached the courtyard right in front of the hotel. Ashcroft’s men were in defensive positions behind the fountain and the rows of small garden walls leading up to the front doors. Nessel’s men were still getting into position, using the infected as a moving barrier.
That sniper on the wall was the key to the battle. From his position, he was picking off Ashcroft’s men, no matter how well hidden they were, and it was only a matter of time before he got so many of them that there wouldn’t be enough left to put up a fight.
I moved across the right flank of the battle and headed for a ditch that ran through the cow pasture. I figured that as long as I stayed inside it I’d be able to make it all the way to the wall of cars. I had no idea what I was going to do from there, though.
I got most of the way across the yard before I saw a small group of the infected wandering on the fringes of the battle. I was so intent on reaching the wall that I didn’t even notice them until I was right on top of them, and by then it was too late. I jumped out of the ditch and ran for it.
The infected followed me.
I veered right and ran along the inside of the wall until I got to a section where rocket grenades had blown it apart. I jumped over the debris and landed outside the wall—right in front of a military-style Humvee where Nessel and two of his lieutenants were watching the battle unfold.
I wasn’t wearing one of Ashcroft’s uniforms, so they didn’t know what to make of me for a second. I might have been a civilian, or even one of their own hired goons. That hesitation saved me. With the infected hot on my heels, I drew both Glocks and ran straight for Nessel, firing the whole way.
I wasn’t aiming, just sp
raying and praying, but I got one lucky shot and hit Nessel’s driver in the head. He went down onto the hood of the Humvee. The other lieutenant tried to break and run but got caught by the infected and went down screaming.
That left Nessel.
He fell over the back of the Humvee and landed face-first in the grass. Before he had a chance to get up, I shot him three times, once in the neck and twice in the chest. With Nessel dead, I turned to face the infected. There were eight of them, and with the Humvee for cover, I used up the last of my ammunition on them. That left me with nothing but my machete to fight the sniper.
I started to climb up the wall of flattened cars as quietly as I could. I heard him up there, popping off shots every few seconds with a bolt-action rifle. Maybe, if I’m lucky, I thought, he’d be so into his shooting rhythm that he wouldn’t hear me coming.
But it wasn’t to be. I made it most of the way to the top when I heard something moving below me. It was one of the infected, and he was coming after me. He made a gurgling, moaning sound as he bumped and clanged his way up the side, and I knew he was making enough noise that the sniper would be able to hear him even over the sound of his rifle.
I was stuck.
I couldn’t go up because I would lose the element of surprise and probably get killed, and I couldn’t go down, either. But there was a little gap between two of the cars on the top row, and I ducked into that, facing outward. I waited to see who would get to me first, the sniper or the zombie.
It was the sniper. He poked his head over the side, his face barely a foot above my waiting hands. I reached up, grabbed him by the back of the head, and yanked down as hard as I could. He came down the side of the wall like a snowball going downhill, picking up loose car parts as he hit the sides, trying to hold on, only to keep tumbling downward, right into the waiting arms of the zombie below us. The two of them hit hard, and both ended up on the ground.
I didn’t waste any time. I jumped over the top and picked up the sniper’s rifle. The sniper was fighting the zombie barehanded, and doing pretty well, until I shot them both.