I was standing behind Celeste with the baseball bat, impotently watching her work her magic when I heard Alex scream. I ran over to help and found him backed against a wall between two cars with a zombie closing in. It must have already been in the garage because none of them were getting past Celeste. I cracked the zombie in the back of the head with the bat, and it dropped to the ground.
Alex went looking for the vehicle while I searched the garage for more stragglers. Most came after me as soon as they saw me, and the bat was a formidable weapon against a single attacker. Occasionally, I wouldn’t get a clean enough shot to the head, and they’d get back up after falling to the ground. One even took the blow like the bat was made of foam and got in close enough to get a hand on me. The thing with the ghouls is they were clumsy, so I was able to push him to the ground and finish him off with the bat.
“Found it!” Alex yelled from across the garage.
I sprinted over to him and saw that Carson’s “truck” was actually a white delivery van with no back windows. I hopped in, and we motored to Celeste.
“Swing around in front of her so that we can get between her and the freaks. Just watch out for that laser.”
Alex smashed into the zombies moving toward Celeste, and I opened my door. She hopped right on my lap, and we took off for the exit, ecstatic to be free from the menacing hands that thumped against the back of the van as we sped away.
19.
I expected the streets to be clogged with vehicles trying to flee, but so few civilians were allowed to drive that our biggest obstacle was the swarm of zombies wandering the roadway. Alex took pleasure in smashing into them, and he hit so many with such force that he had to turn on the windshield wipers to clear away the blood.
We drove straight up Broadway and hit the first checkpoint as we crossed the George Washington Bridge into New Jersey. We approached slowly. The checkpoint had been overrun. Infected soldiers ambled about along with a mix of the city’s denizens. At the far end of the checkpoint, a heavily armed troop transporter stuck on a concrete barrier was surrounded by zombies. The driver was trapped in the cabin.
“Hey, wait. Stop a minute. You see that?” I asked, pointing toward the back of the carrier. The door was open, and the remains of the troops who had been devoured as they exited were scattered.
“Ya, I see him, but we don’t want to help that guy,” Alex said.
“No, not him,” I explained. “Look at the back . . . on the ground. See all those guns? We should get those.”
“It’s not worth it,” Celeste said. “What if something happens to one of us?”
“Yes, we can find more elsewhere,” Alex chimed in.
“Just wait a minute, I have an idea. Celeste, give me the gun. How long can I make this thing?”
I rolled down my window and turned on the laser, pointing it laterally outside the vehicle.
“Um, it’ll go about ten feet, I think. Just push this button to change the length.”
I followed her instructions and extended the laser as far as it would go. “OK, Al, now drive me up alongside them.”
Alex drove slowly toward the transporter. When the zombies saw us coming, some started moving in our direction.
“Step on it, Alex! We need to get them while they’re all together.”
Alex accelerated, and I leaned outside the window. I pushed my tongue between my lips slightly. I was concentrating so hard on finding the right height to do the most damage. We whizzed by the crowd, and the burning laser cut them in two at the head, neck, or shoulders. Alex circled around to survey the damage.
“Hot dog,” I said, laughing. “Would you look at that? That worked like a charm. OK, buddy, loop me around again, and we’ll get the rest of them near the back.”
One more pass with the van, and we took the crowd out at the back of the troop transporter. I had Alex stop the car, and I hopped out to pick up the weapons. There were six assault rifles just like the one we already had and a big round silver grenade. I opened the back of the van, laid the rifles inside, and picked up the grenade before the zombies further away started coming. I hopped in the back, closed the doors, and we were on our way down the Turnpike.
I crawled to the front of the van and sat in the middle behind Alex and Celeste. I reached forward and squeezed Alex’s shoulder. “Nice driving back there, buddy. We made a pretty nice haul. What do you suppose this weird-looking grenade is?” I held it out between them so they could have a look.
“Careful with that one. That’s a neutron grenade,” Celeste said.
“You mean it’s nuclear?”
“Yessirree. Creates a controlled nuclear explosion within a fifteen-foot radius.”
I put the grenade in a compartment at the back of the van. It didn’t seem wise to be carrying a nuclear device in my pocket. I inspected the guns we retrieved to make sure they were in working condition. “These things are incredible. Hey, Celeste, where’d you learn how to use guns like that?”
“I was an army brat. My dad always took my brother and me shooting. He made sure we knew how to use the latest and greatest. Always said we’d never know when we might need to use one.”
“Guess he was right about that. Say, where’s your family now?”
“My parents were living in Boca Raton when the waves hit.”
“Did they make it out OK?”
“I don’t know. The last time I spoke to them was a few days before it happened.”
“The tsunami crippled all communication in the East, and then the Chinese reestablished it for their own purposes. We don’t have access,” Alex explained.
“You said you’re from the West, didn’t you?” Celeste asked.
“Um, yes.”
“They don’t explain what’s going on out here to you?”
“Well, you see, I’m different. I um—”
“Oh, I get it. He’s one of those failed lobotomies, isn’t he?” she asked Alex.
“No, Royce is different.”
“How so?”
“He’s a cryonic.”
“What’s a cryonic?”
“He was cryogenically frozen in twenty ten.”
“When I died,” I added with a wink.
“You can’t be serious. I thought that was next-century technology?”
“Not for the Chinese,” Alex said. “Though Royce is the only one. There were three others, but they’re, well, they were the source of the outbreak.”
“Why didn’t you get sick?”
I shrugged. “I dunno.”
Celeste sat quietly for a moment looking through the window. “So what year were you born?” she asked.
“Nineteen sixty-three.”
“You must think the world is a really messed up place.”
“It’s pretty bleak.”
“But look at you. You’re alive again, and you’re not like them. Not to mention you’re free. Not too many people in this part of the country can say that.”
She had a point. At least I liked her positivity, and her beauty made her message that much more convincing.
“So what about you, Alex?” I asked. “Where’s your family?”
Alex’s eyes welled with tears. “They were in Denver,” he choked.
Celeste put a comforting hand on his shoulder. I didn’t dare ask what had happened in Denver.
“A few years back,” Alex said, composing himself, “the government decided to nuke Shanghai. The situation here wasn’t changing, and they figured the Chinese wouldn’t retaliate against territory they wanted to possess. They were wrong. The bombing of Shanghai was successful, and the Chinese retaliated immediately by wiping out Denver. It’s been a complete stalemate ever since.”
We sat for a time in silence. I wondered why the Chinese chose Denver. I figured they wanted to send a message without deleting territory that would jeopardize their future plans. Erasing Los Angeles or San Francisco would probably have destroyed valuable shipping ports on the West Coast.
I
eyed Celeste’s blood-stained baseball bat, which danced about on the floor of the van every time we hit a bump. I spoke to Celeste and tried to lighten the mood. “So you’re a big baseball fan, huh?”
“Big time.”
“What’s your team?”
“Braves.”
“Ninety-eight was nice. We crushed you in the NLCS. I went to every game.”
“Ah, so I take it you’re a Padres fan?”
“Guilty as charged.”
“Well, I wasn’t even born in ninety-eight.”
“That’s funny. I didn’t even think about that. Say, did the Padres ever win a World Series? Cause you know they hadn’t yet when I . . . well they hadn’t yet in twenty ten.”
“They most certainly did. Had a dynasty in the late twenties and early thirties. I think they won three times.”
“Really? That’s awesome.”
“Nope. Just messing with you.”
Celeste’s joke made Alex laugh, and that made me smile.
20.
We left the 95 before we got to Baltimore and parked in a wooded area along the Chesapeake. It was summertime, and the evening air was thick and warm. It felt great to get out of the car and smell the trees. The shrill songs of cicadas resonated throughout the forest.
We were headed in one direction and that was to safety. Philadelphia and Wilmington weren’t burning like Manhattan, but something wasn’t right. The military checkpoints outside both cities were abandoned. Staying away from the infected and the Chinese was a tenuous proposition, and the woods felt like a safe bet.
We lit a fire with a laser near the back of the van and sat on logs. Alex cooked rice in a metal hard hat he had found in the back of the van. We hadn’t eaten all day, and we devoured our meal in silence.
“Oh, man, I never thought rice could taste so good,” I said.
“It’s amazing how much better food tastes when you’re starving,” Celeste added. “We’ve had a lot of that over the last ten years.”
“Where do you two think we should go?” I asked.
“I suppose there are places we could hide,” Alex suggested. “The Chinese rounded everyone up and moved them into the cities after the war began, but there’s rumors of independent settlements in the hills.”
“You believe those stories?” Celeste asked.
“I don’t know,” Alex said. “I don’t know what to believe.”
“What about the West? You think we could make our way to freedom?” I asked.
“Fat chance,” Celeste said.
“The front is heavily fortified, from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada. There are five million troops on the Chinese side alone,” Alex explained.
“We’d never get past them. Besides, this feels an awful lot like freedom to me,” Celeste said, stretching her legs out and laying her head against a log.
“We shouldn’t sleep out here,” Alex said nervously. “Just in case, you know, they come.”
“Good idea, Al. It’ll be a little tight, but it won’t be the first time you two have spooned. Am I right?”
“You’re hilarious,” Alex said sarcastically.
“Ooh, Al . . . sarcasm. Let me hear some more of that. It suits you,” I said with a grin.
We spread the extra clothes out in the back of the van, locked the doors, and called it a night. Although I was tired, I lay there thinking while Alex and Celeste slept. My family, whatever was left of them, was out West. I just knew it. They would never leave their hometown. The thought of living the rest of my life without seeing them again made me sick. I couldn’t tolerate it. I wouldn’t tolerate it. We were going to make it past the front, whether Alex and Celeste thought it was possible or not.
21.
The next few days in the woods were delightful. We were carefree, killing fish in the bay with the laser and shooting squirrels and rabbits with the guns. Killing fish with the laser made a mess of our catch, but it was ridiculously easy. We just turned it on and swiped the laser up and down across the water until something floated up to the surface. I found the hunting particularly fun. I even shot a couple of nutria that emerged from their burrows along the shoreline. They tasted like rabbits.
We got to know each other well, and our friendship blossomed. Turned out Alex and Celeste met before the war and had been friends ever since. Alex had a bug collection in college, and Celeste played baseball with the boys until she was in high school. I told them about my surfing habit, the thought of which got me obsessing about all of the empty waves peeling off unridden because of the war.
One evening, we were sitting around the campfire cooking the last of our rice. I started thinking about our next move.
“Where do you guys think we should go?” I asked.
“I’ve been thinking south,” Celeste said. “It isn’t going to stay warm forever, and we could work our way toward a better climate.”
“What about food?” Alex asked. “There’s plenty if we stay here.”
“It’s not like this is the only place to shoot a squirrel, Al. I’m more worried about that van. It’s electric, right? Don’t we need to plug it in or something?”
“It’s solar,” Celeste said.
“Wow, that’s so cool. Where are the panels?” I asked.
“Panels?” Celeste asked, laughing. “You mean those big plastic things they used to put on top of homes?”
Even Alex chuckled. I shrugged.
“I’m sorry, Royce. It’s in the paint. The whole van absorbs the energy from the sun. Not too many vehicles run on electricity or gasoline anymore,” Celeste explained.
“What about when it’s cloudy?”
“Doesn’t matter. As long as you don’t park it in the garage for a week or more it’ll keep on running.”
“Well, that’s a bonus. We’re going to make great time.”
“That’s assuming we have somewhere to go,” Alex said. “The Chinese have a pretty tight grip on things, and once they see us—”
Crack! Someone or something stepped on a stick.
We grabbed our rifles and headed in the direction of the noise.
“Should I turn my laser on?” I whispered.
“Too dangerous,” Celeste said. “Better to know you have a target before you start waving that thing around.”
“Hello, is somebody there?” a voice called out from the woods. “I’m a friend. I’m . . . I’m unarmed.”
“Show yourself,” I barked.
A portly, pale man with a protruding belly and bright red hair stepped out from behind some bushes. He was sopping wet and wearing dirty white underwear.
“Who are you?” Celeste asked.
“I’m Mike. Mike Dexter. I just escaped from the Chinese.”
“I’m Royce,” I said. “This is Alex and Celeste. Come with us. We’ve got a fire. You can warm up.”
Mike was thrilled to come back to our camp and get in a dry jumpsuit.
“Boy, I sure am glad I came across you three,” he said. “How’d you end up out here?”
We told him about the outbreak and our journey from New York. Then we started asking questions.
“Why were you wet?” Alex asked awkwardly.
“I was on a boat. There was an outbreak on board. A field officer arrived with a secret message, then asked to be relieved of duty so he could rest. Next thing you know, he’s running around attacking people. Before long, the whole ship was crawling with those things. I had to exit stage left.”
“You were working for the Chinese?” I asked.
“They had me working as a secretary in a communication center for the military. I was an attorney before the war, and those bastards had me making coffee and taking out the trash. This is my first time off that boat in more than nine years. They disguise it as a cargo vessel to eliminate suspicion. Afraid our boys back west will pick up on it and take it out.”
“How about the virus?” Alex asked. “Have they been able to stop it?” Mike looked at Alex like he was nuts. “I mean, elsewhere.
”
“Quite the opposite, actually. They think it is some sort of bioterrorism from the US side. Once they lost communication with the research center in New York, they started ferrying infected soldiers around the territory to their best research centers. They wanted to get to the bottom of this thing immediately so that they could stop it before the Americans fully implemented the campaign. They’d fly infected soldiers into a city, there’d be an outbreak, and they’d lose contact. They figured they were too late.”
“But they’re the ones causing it, not the Americans,” Alex said.
“Makes sense to me now,” Mike said. “Not so easy when you don’t know what you know. It’s complete chaos out there.”
“Oh shit,” Celeste said with a sigh. “They’re spreading this thing everywhere.”
“Where are the research centers where they sent the infected soldiers?” I asked.
“Let’s see . . . there’s Richmond, Macon, Cleveland, Sheboygan, Weston, Birmingham, Tallahassee, Charlotte, Charlottesville, Philly, DC, um, Bangor—”
“Ok, ok, we get the picture,” I said. I glanced at Alex and Celeste. They looked as deflated as I felt. If there was a bright side to all of this, we weren’t seeing it.
Mike continued. “They said solving this thing was job one so they wanted all of their scientists working with the infected. They even sent the sick home to their research centers in China.”
“There goes Asia,” I said.
“How’d you even pick up on all this?” Alex challenged. “Where I work, they only speak Chinese.”
“Obviously, I speak Chinese. Unbeknownst to them, of course. Back before the war, there were a lot of Chinese businesses trying to make hay over here. They were snatching up property, buying US companies—the whole nine yards. I learned some of the language, and I cleaned up because I spoke it. Kind of poorly back then, but listening to their conversations for the last decade has sharpened my saw, so to speak. It’s funny—eavesdropping on them was the only thing that kept me sane. I felt like a covert operative, even though I couldn’t really do anything with the information.”
“Why you giving him a hard time, Al? You learned Chinese working in the lab. What, you think you’re smarter than everybody?”
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