The Rotting Souls Series (Book 2): Charon's Blight: Day Two

by Timothy A. Ray

  Mark had put a hand on his arm, “are you trying to piss me off?”

  He looked down at the hand; then up into his friend’s face.

  Mark’s grip persisted for a few moments, then dropped away. He cast his eyes south and the broken contact left him free to resume watching the horrifying display beyond.

  “Look, you wouldn’t have a zombie movie if the army could win the fight, right? Most of that shit takes place after the military has failed to do their job, most of the time due to desertions and lack of planning to handle the situation. But is that realistic? Sure, they probably lost a great deal of their men to either this plague, or whatever it is, and to people rushing home to be with their families, but not enough to seriously hamper them. Most of those boys down there are fired up. They don’t have time to think about what they’re doing, and believe me—they’ll keep them moving to keep it that way,” he explained.

  “Right now, they are firing their guns at the enemy and that rush is enough to sustain them for the moment. It won’t be til later that they’ll realize the horror of what they’re doing and some of them will break. But even then, it won’t be all of them. You have hardened veterans, career men who have no families, no attachments, who will keep fighting to the last man, because that is what they were trained all their lives to do. And they won’t falter, because in the end they are fighting the good fight; the fight for our survival. Not the survival of Wichita Falls, obviously, but Walters didn’t look too bad off when we came through and that herd was marching in that direction. Maybe they were driven out of the city by the Air force dropping their bombs, I don’t know, but sooner or later they would spread further and another city would fall. Containment is not in the cards but that doesn’t mean they aren’t going to try. This thing hit too fast and in too many places for it to be properly contained and it looks like they are systematically wiping out plague areas in an effort to keep it bay.”

  He nodded towards the battle taking place. “I’m quite sure there were plans in place in the unlikely hood that this would ever happen and the moment it did—orders went out. The military was moving last night without hesitation and with too much foresight. It begs the question if they knew it was going to happen beforehand; but that is too insane an idea to contemplate. The dispersal to the major cities might have been caused by one individual in an airport, but I don’t think that person came from some secret military lab infected with this shit.”

  “Why not?” Mark asked, his eyes watching Joseph’s face as he worked it through, organizing his thoughts. He could feel them boring into him and didn’t realize that others had come closer to listen as well.

  “If there had been an accident, say like in the Stand, where that guy Campion got out of the base and infected people on his journey across the US, things would have been more isolated and you would have heard of quarantines for some rare disease on the news. That didn’t happen,” he said, thinking of the week leading up to the outbreak. Most of it had been about the President Obama’s first term and some celebrity’s racist remark caught on video; the normal bullshit.

  “You mentioned the airport though. He could have gone straight to one and gotten on a plane,” Mark said, trying to work it through himself.

  “Ah, but that would have been easy to isolate. You are talking about someone that escaped a lab with top of the line video surveillance and real time feeds to the Pentagon. Someone would have known the moment this thing was loose and ordered an immediate clamp down on the nearest airlines and escape routes. No, the only way the guy in the Stand got so far was staying off the radar. He didn’t use plastic, he used cash, and he avoided every major roadway. Now, it’s possible he infected someone else who got on a plane and spread it; but I’m struggling with the idea of one lone guy getting past all the safeguards in place on this sort of thing. I just don’t think it’s possible in this day and age. No, this probably came from outside the country and before we even knew what was happening, it had spread too far to contain.”

  They stood there in silence for a moment.

  He was still watching the herd, which was still surging back and forth after the Humvees. If they just focused on one direction, they could overrun the army’s positions; killing most of them, then refilling their numbers and moving on, but they seemed to lack the intelligence to make such a simple leap. If anything saved the human race, it was going to be the stupidity of the enemy.

  “I still don’t understand why you think I’ve been trained to think the military will fall?” Mark said, falling back on the earlier comment.

  When he looked at his friend, he noticed the other faces and realized they had drawn an audience. When next he spoke, he raised his voice so they didn’t have to strain so hard to hear him. “What kind of zombie movie, or book, would it be if the military won? Oh, look, they contained it and we can go back to our lives zombie free! Where would the draw be to watch or read something like that? These things always take place with some unlikely group of heroes performing feats that the trained men and women of our armed forces had been unable to do. They survive through the harshest conditions and fight the most stunning battles, or they get away by pure luck. Where is the reality in that? That some cook in a hick town suddenly has the ability to fight and take out a herd of walkers with his meat cleaver? How does he do it when a SEAL can’t? It’s dramatic; it’s what people want to see. It gives them hope that they could do it themselves should any of this actually happen, and it gives the writer a sensational tale to spin. But is that really what would happen? You don’t give the men down there enough credit. The majority of the people who watch those movies are everyday people sitting at home on a couch eating popcorn. They do not put their lives on the line every day to preserve and protect anyone. Those men do—it’s all—they—do. To think that some cook could do a better job, or a pizza delivery guy, then those in service to our country? It’s just plain stupid.”

  “Yet, they do seem to be losing,” Mark said, reminding him of all the devastation and loss of life they had witnessed on their journey west. “What exactly have they saved? How will they live through this any better than any other movie out there has shown?”

  “We have lost our major cities, but that is due to the amount of people in them. The military knows they’re lost and they aren’t pulling their punches. Look at that smoke. The Air Force is wiping Wichita Falls off the map without regard to anyone still alive inside.”

  “That’s horrible, they wouldn’t do that,” Roxanne spoke up, joining in on their conversation as the others still tried to comprehend all that he was saying.

  “Wouldn’t they? This isn’t about containment; I said that, it’s about survival. Those cities are lost. Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Boston, New York; there is no feasible way to contain an outbreak in cities of that size. The population will just feed the enemy’s numbers until the military is overrun, and the likelihood that they could go in there and fight man to man to save the people still trapped in there is just naïve. Those people are on their own or already dead.”

  “How can you say that?” the older man in the back asked. “You can’t possibly know what’s going on out there; we’ve been cut off since this thing began.”

  He fished his cellphone out of his pocket and waved it in the air. “Have we?” The rest of the group looked confused and he couldn’t believe none of them had worked this out on their own. “You still have your phone service, don’t you? They’re still letting you make calls. Even with the televisions out, the radio out; the internet shut down, you are still able to dial your family and talk to them. Sure, they were shut off at first, but then someone wised up and turned them back on. A radio signal can be picked up anywhere. Internet servers log usage, but some people never turn their computers off. Televisions are left on in people’s rush to leave their houses. But cell phones? You have to dial to get service. You have to make a phone call in order to use them. You have to be physically using the thing in order for it to tell the provide
r it’s in use. Someone is out there monitoring cell phone usages; keeping track of those that survive by their need to connect with somebody. They aren’t completely accurate, as some people will have lost them, not charged them, or simply didn’t own one; but the phone usage of those that do, provide the military with some idea of where the people who are surviving are. Wake up; they are probably listening to this conversation right now!”

  “That’s just paranoid!” the old man said in response.

  He laughed, “the idea that one day an outbreak would start a zombie apocalypse that would end the world was paranoid too; now look at us.” He shook his head and focused on the old man. “They knew what to cut and how to cut it when this shit hit the fan. Most of the radio stations I listened to did not have a jockey talking on them, most were just playing music. Then that went away as well as we began to notice it. Do you actually think that all of the newscasters fled? That not one of them was in front of a camera somewhere trying to tell this story? No, they got shut down immediately; either through their electronics or by military personnel in their studios. The internet was down and then brought back up, but you could tell that big brother was watching every click and typed word. They have their fingers in all of it. Do you honestly think that Verizon or T-Mobile would say no to the government when they walked into their offices and said, we’re going to turn you on so we can keep track of where everyone is? They think they’re helping! And let’s be honest, are we trying to hide from the military or the zombies?”

  “What is the point?” Mark asked, his eyes weary and his face drawn.

  “The point is the military knows when a city goes dark. They know that cell phone usage has stopped in an area and they send in their men to clean it up. That’s how they stay ahead of the spread. Once an area begins to go dark, send in the Air Force and bomb the shit out of those areas. Don’t you see? They are using the cellphones to track this thing!”

  They all looked at him uncertainly, but he knew that he was right. It made sense why they were still able to use their cells when everything else had been completely shut down. From a strategic view, it was brilliant, and might just save them all in the end. People’s reliance on technology made them easy to follow; the problem areas would be the small towns and rural communities, but they weren’t the main threat, population wise.

  He continued, “almost everything you have seen has told you the military will fail, but looking out at that battlefield and watching what is taking place, I’m telling you that if they do, it won’t be as easy as it’s been made out. They are making those creatures work for it. They will vastly destroy most of them and the people that survive will rise up and fight back. We all know how to kill a zombie, shoot it in the head. This isn’t an ignorant population of shmucks that don’t know how to do that. Every redneck with a gun is not shooting them in the chest and claiming victory—they are blowing the damn thing’s heads off. And in a country that loves their guns, we are going to make it; there are just too many people out there with one in their closet. England? That’s a different story, but in the good ol’ U. S. of A., we hate the thought of someone trying to tell us not to have something; so we go and buy more of it just to piss someone off. No, if we don’t make it through this, it’ll be because of the idiots out there who turn on each other and not because we couldn’t fight it off.”

  He was thinking of that gang rape crew that Mark had come across and he could see that his friend was too. Such a sick thing to happen at a time like this and it made him wonder if their race was even worth saving.

  “The pop culture that has been ingrained in us is that if you get bit, you turn. Yet, we know that not to be true. We have someone in our own group that got bit four hours ago and he’s not even running a fever!”

  That had been a close one too; a few more seconds and he would have been dead. Mark had saved that one, his axe cleaving the zombie’s head from its shoulders. They had watched after the guy constantly since, watching for the signs, but so far it had just bled and acted like an ordinary flesh wound.

  “If it’s not true, can you imagine how many people out there are shooting victims of attacks? Sure of themselves that it means a death sentence? All that agony and pain of killing those that you love? Then what happens when you find out it wouldn’t have happened? How will they live with themselves? You need to throw out everything you think you know and concentrate on what you do—when you die, you turn. Everyone seems to be infected with this shit and if one of us goes down, then we need to take care of it before it becomes a problem. People will still die from stupid shit like accidents and infections, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be careful and take care of each other to prevent that from happening.” They were nodding now, and he felt the confidence in himself begin to build. The military was now mopping up stragglers and his spirit was beginning to soar. “We stick together, we protect each other’s backs, and we keep moving, because there is a place out there where we can hold up and wait this thing out.”

  “How can you be sure it’s still safe?” a woman asked him. He hadn’t learned her name yet, having not invested himself in these people too much in case something bad did happen, but it wasn’t something he’d be able to keep doing. If he was going to trust these people with his life, he had to open up and find out who they were and what they were capable of.

  Everyone jumped. As if on cue—his phone rang.

  Chapter 32

  Secrets

  Todd

  Compound 2

  He left his kids with his parents and made sure that Alicia and Manny were tucked away. He shook his head as he walked, the two sounded like a pair of ragdolls when he said their names in his head like that. When he had left them, they were too tired to do much else other than take a nap. He had promised to come back later and take Linda and Jackie’s things out of there when he had time. They had waved it off and he was sure he had heard a snore even before the door shut behind him.

  Time seemed to be picking up now; moving along with a speed that frightened him.

  His mother had insisted that they start ferrying their stuff over to this compound and after he got them set up in a room; he set the boys upon doing that. After the first run he had come by and saw his mother unpacking some of her Precious Moments; He could only laugh at the relief she showed that they had made it without breaking. Only his mother would worry about those during a zombie outbreak.

  His father had cornered him on his way out and it was the topic of their conversation that was bringing him to the situation room to confer with Ben. He had been avoiding the young boy, letting Monica give him the back of her tongue rather than interceding himself. He needed more time to cool off; but as he said, time was slipping from him. If he was going to go back out there, he wanted as much information as he could get.

  Ben was just touching his ear to end a phone call and had a satisfied look on his face. He looked up as Todd entered and it fell back to a pout instead. “Joseph’s in Texas. He says they are moving west and should be here by tomorrow.”

  There was so much going on, that even though he knew the news should uplift him, somehow it didn’t. There was a time and place for that and right now he had other issues to address; things that were long time overdue in hashing out.

  Seeing the lack of reaction, the young boy asked him what was going on, as if he didn’t expect some kind of backlash after this morning’s events.

  Trying to focus on the more immediate problem he told the boy, “my father says that my family is holing up in Morenci. He wants me to go down there and convince them to come here. He doesn’t like sitting around while they’re still out there exposed like that; especially his parents.”

  Ben shook his head. “Like any of us want to sit here and wait? We all have family out there.”

  “I know,” he responded, “but unlike your family back in Columbus, mine are just half an hour down the road.” It stung to say it like that, but was there a nice way to put it? He saw the paine
d look on the young man’s face, but he didn’t have the patience or inclination to worry about how hurt his feelings were.

  There were a lot of things that had gone on around here that Ben had to be involved in and his trust in the boy had suffered because of it. Something told him that time was slipping away, that something bad was on the horizon. He had to deal with this new ordeal before he could spend time addressing the rest. “Look, I don’t mean to sound harsh about it. I just need to do something; something meaningful other than sitting around watching my friends and family die.”

  Ben’s face cleared up and he put on his, “back to business” face. “I don’t know what you want from me, the internet servers went down and I don’t have access to anything anymore. Most of what I was doing involved remote accessing and I lost that when the umbilical was cut. The only things I really have are the phone networks, but I’m being blocked from accessing those as well.”

  He nodded, as if expecting that. “I had to check though, just in case they had come back up.” He turned to leave but Ben coughed and made it clear that he had more to say. He wasn’t sure if he was ready to have this conversation right now and the young boy might not like that he started this once it was finished.

  “Could you lock the door? I think it’s time you and I got some things off our chest,” the young boy said, as if taking his measure and pointing at the door. His voice sounded more mature, more serious than he had ever heard it before. But at the same time, he sounded weary, as if he was tired of handling things on his own.