He was right. They did need to get going.
It would be getting dark before they knew it.
Harold’s house was overrun. Their plan to hole up in there would be a fruitless one. It looked like the bald, fat nancy had boarded up every window and placed four-by-fours over every door from the inside. It appeared as though one plank that covered up a hole in the back door was removed in order to peek out . . . or it was ripped from the house by a violent storm the night before. One four-by-four missing was all it took for the dead to gain a foothold to the building. Once even one of them was inside, the game was over. That was the time Ana Garner was perhaps the most frightened. Her eyes stayed blurry and watery. She couldn’t smell anything with the throbbing sack of nerves attached to her face. Thank God he hadn’t broken it. If it were broken, Christian would probably want to set it himself; fucking the whole thing up and turning her favorite feature into a misshapen hunk of human clay. With every second of the day that progressed, her thoughts kept coming back to the same silent, accepting disbelief. He punched her. He actually punched her. What would he do if they had kids and one of them drew on a wall or tore up one of his books?
They rested in the early afternoon at the point where the woods began to clear out a bit. The small town of Rockland, Iowa was only a mile hike, more or less. It wasn’t a huge city . . . not as large as Indianola or Des Moines, but it would no doubt be a hotbed for those creatures. The only way out was the foresty-area that surrounded Jackson and Steele counties. So far, Mr. and Mrs. Garner didn’t see one of them. Harold had seen a few. Poor Harold. For a moment, Ana felt ashamed of herself for feeling sad that she wouldn’t get to have another one of his famous boneless steaks again. She should have been feeling for the man himself, not his cooking. She assured herself that she was actually mourning normalcy. The life she once had. There was a spot in her heart for the people afflicted, but there was a bigger one in never seeing another movie at the theater or another ballgame on TV. The world wouldn’t just bounce back from this. She knew it. Felt it deep within her soul. Harold was a kind and generous man and it was disrespectful to think something like that. She pushed it from her mind and focused on the sting inside her face that was subsiding, but still leaving the strange smell one gets when they are popped in the schnoz. It kind of smells like chlorine. It had only happened to her once before, now that she thought about it. Schoolyard fight. Funny how fate was . . . she once won a fight because the sun was in her opponent’s eyes. Fate dealt another card later in her life. Her husband hit her. The sun was in her eyes this time.
Christian hadn’t decided what they were going to do when they got to the edge of Rockland. Ana just prayed that they would get the hell out in one piece. Who the hell knew what they would do and where they would go? She had mentioned what she thought was a great idea. Christian didn’t seem to notice. Maybe he was pondering it himself and weighing it out. He often did that and claimed it was his idea. If she corrected him . . . oh, buddy. Don’t wanna think about that shit. That friend of his in Kentucky. Ana knew that was the way to go.
Val Dobbs and Christian Garner went back a long ways. Val lived in Bardwell, Kentucky, but they both met at a doctor’s convention in Chicago. They were both surgeons at the time . . . right before Christian switched into the specialty area of electrophysiology last year. He is, or was, the youngest electrophysiologist in the state. Possibly the country. He liked that work more. He studied heart rhythm disorders and treated different disorders related to electrical activity of the heart. Yep. Val and Christian. Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-asshole. Those two were up for some kind of award and both won in a draw when whatever committee deliberated. The convention lasted a solid week and even after Dobbs had to catch his plane back to Kentucky, Christian and he remained great friends. Doctor Dobbs stood out to Ana because he had a very odd hobby. He called himself a theoretical survivalist. There were lots of people like that in Bardwell and people living in the area of western Kentucky known as ‘the bottoms.’ It was the layout of the land. It was all hidden away and virtually untouched. Another reason was the Civil War. Western Kentucky was the site of many battles in the war. Kentucky stayed neutral before the bloodshed broke out, but would soon sympathize with the Union. The Confederacy could never take over the bottoms, which would have been the prime place to set up a base of operations. An approaching army would have been heard approaching a hell of a long way away. The bottoms . . . referred to as the land itself- all lake bottoms and swampy areas . . . were so large that the cities of Wickliffe, Mayfield, Kevil and Paducah could be accessed by navigating the river and lake beds. In modern times, the areas were developed as the country progressed and grew their cities, but the bottoms still remained around parts of Mayfield, Barlow and Bardwell. Paducah had some of it left, but most of the bottom-areas were converted into parks and recreational areas.
The Union soldiers, realizing how valuable that huge section of land was, trained their children to survive out there with nothing. They were taught to protect the land from any possible scenario, no matter how far-fetched. Shit, parts of the land were still owned by the same families that were around when the country was in its infancy. Survivalism remained a tradition there. It survived here and there well into the modern day. Just a part of the culture. It was an odd tradition, but one that Ana bet all those Theoretical Survivalists were grateful for now. The Garners had to get out there. Being in the bottoms of Western Kentucky was like standing on Mount Sinai. It was just one of those places in which Mother Nature saw fit to provide a fortress for her two-legged caretakers.
Christian didn’t seem agreeable to it, but he didn’t exactly object, either. Ana didn’t press it. They were in a dangerous situation. She’d left the security door unlocked and practically invited death inside, leaving her husband boxed in. Harold. Harold . . . Ana wished he could have come along with them. The hubby didn’t like gay people. As if what they had was contagious or something. Didn’t stop him from eating like a pig every barbecue weekend and steal two or three cans of beer on the way home. Homosexual or not, Ana wished there was another man with them. Christian always seemed calmer when other men were around. He would actually listen to reason. The husband didn’t have that whole alpha-male thing out in the world. He was actually quite cowardly. Maybe he was just intimidated around other men. Christian is a doctor. The man’s hands were soft, free of the burly hard work that all his neighborhood friends did. Christian spent half his life in school and he never had a father. He didn’t know about cars, he didn’t know how to boil an egg and he spent more time hovering over medical journals than other members of his kind fought and fucked. Christian wouldn’t dare to speak to another of his persuasion the way he talks to her. Even after he slugged her, she found herself still making excuses for him. She didn’t see them as excuses. Her husband was just a misunderstood man. He was kind of like his Daddy was before the old man took off when Christian was fourteen. Ana had met him a couple times after he and his son reconnected. Pops didn’t seem to like her. Actually, he didn’t seem to like anyone. He was that kind of guy that acted like everybody else always feasted on the pleasures of life and all he got was the indigestion. Men in the Garner family are a little rough around the edges, but they were good men. Strong men. Their love was just as fierce as their anger. They are passionate people . . . about everything. Men in his family seem to mellow a bit with age. All men do eventually. At least that’s what Christian’s mother said. She walked with a permanent limp.
A low rumble announced itself off in the distance. For a second, it sounded like thunder. Christian pointed his head up to the sky. He was visually trying to confirm what his wife was thinking. Not a cloud in the sky.
“What is that?”
IV
Once again, Sergeant Major Alexander Powers sat in the APV while the General and his fuckards were having all the fun outside. This was their sixteenth mission out in just under the space of a year. They only stayed out about a week-and-a-half
at a time. Alexander knew damn well that wasn’t nearly enough time for an all-out active search. Doctor Miles will never be found this way. The M1126 Stryker armored personnel vehicle was a forty-nine billion dollar home away from home. The Sergeant Major just saw it as another sixteen-wheeled sardine can with a thirteen year-old CAT engine. Only a couple six-man teams were sent out this time. The President was sure they’d find Miles at the Locke facility. They had set up remote surveillance equipment at the lab, should anyone show up. The possibility of anybody, especially Darin Miles, was more than a long shot. By some miracle, the plan paid off. One day, the motion-detection cameras lit up like fucking Christmas trees back at the underground Greenbriar bunker in West Virginia. Just out of nowhere. All the monitors just switched on. Everyone held their breath waiting to see who had entered. Powers and Teel hated each other’s guts, but they agreed on one thing . . . that any previous Locke employee showing up was practically an impossibility. It seemed that the Commander-in-Chief was correct in setting up those cameras. Miles had survived the initial invasion and also had another survivor with him. A woman. It was him that entered the university lab. One could hear a pin drop in that room when the video feed that ran directly into the bunker showed his face. Thank Christ for auxiliary power. At first, no one had any idea how he could have made it at all, but he did. No use questioning it until he was located. General Teel believed that he had developed either some kind of cure or some way to repel the dead that had taken over. Cure or repellent, that knowledge was absolutely imperative. When he left the university, Darin Miles simply walked past the walking corpses that surrounded the facility like he paid them no mind. The creatures didn’t even look his way. It couldn’t be the plants, though. They were too dangerous. All the buds were now back at the bunker, locked up with four armed guards at that door working in shifts twenty-four hours a day. How Doctor Miles achieved his ability to walk among the dead without being torn apart was placed first on the need-to-know.
This was the latest mission out and it wouldn’t be the last. Not until they found Doctor Miles. On the video footage, Darin Miles and his companion explained their plans in detail. The doctor was looking for the General too. He was scouring everywhere . . . just like the General and Alexander Powers were. Sooner or later, they would cross paths. All the Sergeant Major and his team would have to do was go to every government facility no matter how large, small or obscure . . . any facility that Darin would seek out and place surveillance equipment there, too. They had to find him.
But . . . the President must have said something to the General.
Powers, there’s no way in hell you’re setting foot out of that APV, soldier. You die and it is my ass. I’d like to keep it attached, if I could.
Yes, General.
The search team had arrived at the Cheyanne Mountain Air Force Station that morning. It was a short distance from Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs. The complex served as a NORAD and USNORTHCOM’s alternate command center. Cheyanne Base was a hardened facility built right into the side of a mountain. Everybody inside was dead or roaming around dead. The scattered radio transmissions from the guys, their flamethrowers and anti-tank grenades came through here and there as Sergeant Major Alexander Powers sat in the vehicle, waiting for the team to finish up a sweep-and-clear of the area. They shouted orders when the noise would break. Alexander could hear his fellow soldiers fighting. It sounded like all-out war. The booms of the grenades, the deep rumbling swooshes of the incinerator units. This is bullshit. Alexander needed to be out there, not being kept inside. His stomach was in knots. Every time, the thought of them not coming back plagued him. Fearing the absolute worst was not an option when one is sitting all by himself and listening to them fight for their lives on a small radio. They’d lost four men already. That was only on this trip out. The only thing that worked were the beefed-up incendiary flamethrowers that were nearly as dangerous and violently unpredictable as the infected themselves. A Captain Jacqueline Bishop went with them on the first mission to collect the Archies in DC. All three APV’s were loaded and ready to go when the zeds came running out from fucking everywhere. Ten of the search party were armed with the flamethrowers – and they were working. The team for two of their APV’s was ready to go when Captain Bishop’s weapon malfunctioned. The flamethrower exploded and killed seven souls inside her own APV. She had attempted to use the weapon and it jammed. With the hordes running toward them, she leapt into the vehicle and tried to fire it off one more time before it sped away and her life with it. Another incident was when, during that same week, a Master Gunnery Sergeant Marine fired his flamethrower in a strong wind that caused it to backdraft and melt his goddamn arms. The man set the gas pressure too low. The flame sputtered, bounced back and melted the arms right off of his body. The flame was so hot that the wounds cauterized themselves. The arms themselves were incinerated instantly and had become nothing more than scattered ash at his feet. He was back at the bunker now. The poor man still refuses to eat.
The flamethrowers were just modified M202 A-1 incendiary grenade launchers. With the modification, they got a flame that could spray from the front end hot enough to melt steel if the conditions were right. The units were hurriedly rushed out and redesigned from old Vietnam-era throwers with parts Frankensteined from new models. Those fuckers were dangerous, but they worked. The sweep and clears they did looking for Doctor Miles weren’t really sweep and clears in the truest sense. They just stuck around to see if anyone was there. In and out. No stopping to smell the roses. When the dead came, they came in hard. They came in hungry.
The large metal door slammed open and the men piled in. Marine Corps First Lieutenant Russo plopped in last, joining the General and his men to sit inside the APV covered in sweat, panting like dogs and looking like they were expecting to wake up from a nightmare any second. “How’d it go in here, Powers?” Navy Chief Petty Officer Sims said with a shit-eating grin. “Have fun whacking off in here while the men were working?”
Sergeant Major Powers stared the man down and nodded with a smile. “Eat shit, Sims.”
Arnold Sims stood up. All six-feet-two and E-7 rank of him stood over the seated Sergeant Major who already had his hand around the Bowie strapped to his ankle. “What did you say, fucker?”
“Sit down before you embarrass yourself,” Alexander said. The men looked on, staring at the spectacle in front of them and each other.
“I wish I could ask your babysitter for permission to re-arrange your face, but precious-boy here . . .” he pointed at Powers with a smirk of defiance on his face. “God forbid he comes back with even a bruise.”
“Sit down, bud,” Teel spoke in nearly a whisper as he casually loaded his 9mm sidearm and pointed it to the Sims’ head. “You got all this backwards if you think I will let him go back on this shit detail we landed ourselves in. Powers is already in hell. He’s with us. I am sure we are the last people he wants to be around. Wanna punish his ass? Do nothing. Stand down, Sims. You have orders from the President himself. I will not hesitate to make you walk home with a bullet in your kneecap. You’ve done well today, Petty Officer. Well done. Enjoy that. So sit the hell down. Right now.”
“You actually sticking up for me?” Powers leaned over and whispered to the General. “I think hell just froze over.”
Teel smiled and whispered back. His fiery, stern eyes were locked on Sims the whole time. “Powers . . . oh, what I wouldn’t give to slow dance with you just once. If we find Miles and we part our ways, you had better watch your ass. I’m sick and tired of babysitting your worthless butt. You have orders too. Your orders are to stay safe and come back in one piece. You need to learn to deal with that and not be so . . . reactionary.”
“General, have you ever thought just once that you’re not the only one babysitting? Maybe I’m the one sent to make sure you don’t fuck up. I believe the President needed someone a little more even-tempered than you and your . . . men.”
“I pray for the
day I can tango with you, you little shit. Until then, you stay seated just like Sims . . . right here and out of everybody’s way. Orders are orders.” Teel glanced back over his shoulder at the monitors that showed the cockpit. The rear cargo area was closed off completely, and the only way anyone could see the driver was on-camera. Teel leaned into the monitor and pushed a button to talk to the driver. “Corporal Ballard, hit it. Let’s scoot. The place is empty. I’m sorry, son. I know you have a brother that works here. I hope that he’s okay.” The other men leaned out of the small, bullet-proof windows and looked out. There didn’t appear to have been any visitation from Darin Miles. Like with usual places, they set up the video surveillance equipment, silent proximity alarms and shit of the like to monitor back at the bunker. Power plants no longer worked, but the government had their ways. If anyone entered the bases they’d hit so far, the equipment will automatically switch on and feed directly into the bunker back at White Sulphur Springs. Just a couple weeks ago, what was left of the United States government had no idea Darin Miles and Victoria Rains were going to military installations looking for the Archie’s new owners. They would have never known that Doctor Miles was looking for them. They would have never thought to watch the surveillance videos from the Locke lab. All would be lost . . . without a woman named Paula Grantham.
Paula Grantham, all eighty-one years of her, survived the invasion and had been found with others inside an office lounge at Nellis Air Force Base in central Nevada. She didn’t talk about how she made it out of Vegas. It seemed to upset her. She knew about the base located in the middle of nowhere from her late husband, Colonel Hans Allen. He was in charge of the propulsion laboratory and trained the welders in the engine manufacturing area. Nellis Air Force Base was so closed off, that the zeds who did take it over had wandered away in a matter of hours. No food source. Miss Grantham and two of her great-grandkids hauled ass out of Las Vegas during the outbreak and ran into the desert. She hotwired a car that had been left on the side of the road and made it to a military base that more than eighty percent of Americans couldn’t find on a map. A woman in her eighties and children both under eight years old. She stayed at that base for months. She said that one day, she had a couple visitors. A man and a woman. They wanted Grantham and the kids to travel with them, but Miss Grantham refused. She felt safer at the base. The man said he was a doctor and that he was looking for anyone military. Preferably an officer.
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