by A. P. Fuchs
“And what is your next move?” Billie said.
Isabel led her down an aisle between a row of cubicles and the long tables in the middle with all the gear on it. “Rebellion. All you see here are preparations for warfare, bits of tech we’ve cobbled together from the old world while also adding twists of our own, resources being limited. It might look impressive, but understand dozens of people lost their lives finding it for us. Many of our people lost theirs just trying to get to the people that found these old computers, machines and odds and ends.”
“How are you powering them?”
“Solar panel on the roof. You wouldn’t have seen it as it’s on the south side. We’ve also been able to use a generator in conjunction with it as the solar radiation filtering through the gray and brown clouds is minimal. Every bit helps, we figured.”
Billie and Isabel passed two eight-foot tables completely covered in an array of pistols, machine guns, rifles, grenades and even what looked like a small bazooka. Billie looked over her shoulder back at Sven, who gave her a warm smile.
“Most of our weaponry until now we’ve kept simple, saving all we can artillery-wise. Knives, machetes, spears, compound bow and arrows—saving bullets is one of the rules around here.”
“Well, you did a good job,” Billie said.
“We work hard,” Bastian said.
“So I see.” They came to the end of the room. Given its length, Billie knew they were far past the cottage above, a good twenty yards away. She gestured to the area they just passed. “And all this has gone unnoticed?”
Sven and Bastian cast their eyes to their feet.
“What?” Billie said.
“Sadly, no. There were problems. All of us working here are from all over the world, each with their own story on how they got here, who they lost, why they won’t give up. Others couldn’t accept times have changed and tried functioning like they had in the old world, making alliances that were out of sync with our aim to create a stronghold for the sake of safety. Deals were being made, people found out and ratted out. Led to a major fight both down here and up on the hills. There were so many of us when this all started, over four thousand coming and going, gathering, helping—now we’re down to just ninety-four. Ninety-four. That’s self-inflicted casualties and ones from the monsters. When we came to our senses and things began to settle, we swore to work even harder, not just to help ourselves, but to help others once we felt ready. That was going to be the plan: head out of here in about six months’ time and work our way through the cities, checking for survivors, gather more to our ranks. We figured that if we were organized enough, we could create our own military and perhaps succeed where that of the old world failed.”
Putting her hands on her hips, Billie took in a slow, deep breath, held it a moment, then breathed out slowly. “Seems to me the plan was seen as a good one by those looking on,” she said, referring to the angelic forces she’d become acquainted with, “but your timetable and theirs were on different schedules.”
“Whose?” Sven asked.
“Angels,” Billie said squarely.
Sven arched an eyebrow. So did Bastian and Isabel, each looking at her like she was crazy.
“The man in the white coat, you didn’t think he was human, did you? You said he disappeared right in front of you.” She knew she was no better, though, because when she first saw Nathaniel in his elderly man form, she thought he was just an old guy with an unusual dress code. It was only when he spoke to her despite her being invisible to everyone else did she realize he was something different.
Isabel smugly smiled and wobbled her head with pride. “I knew it.”
As if.
“Yah, me too,” Sven said, clearly lying. He jabbed his elbow into Bastian’s ribs.
“Me too, yah,” Bastian said.
“Whatever, guys,” Billie said. She took a moment, got her head together, then got down to business. “’Kay, I was told to recruit those who would stand with us against the dead. Why me or for what purpose, I don’t know. In the end, I was sent here—”
“How?” Isabel asked.
“Let me finish. I was sent here to get you guys. Fine. Here we are.” She furrowed her brow. “Actually, where are we?”
“Austria,” Sven said.
Of course. Austria. “Okay then,” she said. “It’s clear that you guys, at least for now, are weapons people. This whole place is loaded with things we can use.” Turning to Isabel, she asked, “How much arms do you think you have?”
“Oh, I don’t know, enough to thoroughly equip probably a thousand men.”
“Serious?”
“Yes. What you see here are our experiments. There’s a chamber beyond where we store our completed work.”
“Your completed work?”
“Would you like to see?”
It was getting a little too hard to swallow, yet it made sense there’d be factions out there working on ways to take the Earth back from the dead. “Okay.”
Isabel went to what looked like a regular garage door in the corner. Sven lifted it open for her, and the four of them went into another large room beyond, this one as big as the room they were just in, however the walls, floor and ceiling were made of cement. Lining the walls were rows of arms, ammo, defense shields and helmets. A couple of cars that were outfitted for combat were in the middle, but the biggest surprise of all lay beyond the vehicles.
“You got to be kidding me,” Billie said slowly, walking ahead of the group and heading right for the row of over a dozen armored humanoid transports. They looked like robots outfitted with wheels along their legs. The actual form was very boxy with a domed hood at the top for the head. Billie thumbed toward them and called back to the others. “You call this ‘cobbled together?’ Man, you actually built these things?”
“Over time,” Isabel said.
“They test ride very good,” Sven said.
“Ride?” Billie said.
“Ride,” said Bastian.
“You can actually go in them?”
Isabel came up beside her and ran a hand over one of the armored humanoid’s hull. “This is our D-K-Fourteen-P-Two-X.” She cleared her throat. “Our Dead Killer Fourteen—as it took fourteen separate designs to make it work—Phase Two—second edition of the fourteenth model for more stable use—Exoskeleton.”
Billie’s legs went rubbery. “A mech? Are you serious?” She knew what mechs were, but those were the things of science fiction and Japanese animation not science fact.
“It was the only suitable design for hand-to-hand combat. Not meant for strict one-on-one battles, but for entering a horde of the undead and being able to keep the upper hand the whole while.”
“You’ve tested it?”
“Just on the cattle.”
“Is amazing, no?” Bastian said.
Sven came up beside Billie and looked at her. “Special.”
She blushed without meaning to. “You have twelve of them?”
“Thirty-six,” Isabel said, “the other two dozen are off-site in two secure locations for safekeeping.”
Billie rounded the front of the DK-14-P2-X. It was almost triple her height, probably around thirteen or fourteen feet tall. The computer geek inside her was itching to climb into it and see how it worked. She’d feel awkward asking, though, so she didn’t say anything. “How long until you can get everything up and running?”
“Three hours.”
“For just the DKs or everything?”
“Just the DKs. About six for everything else. We have procedures in place for assembling an army if required.”
Billie nodded. “I was told to recruit so that’s what I’m doing.” She went right up to Isabel. Sven followed behind like a puppy dog, Bastian beside his brother. “Assemble everyone, then. Do you have GPS or some sort of navigating system?”
“GPS went down when the satellites were stopped being up kept, but we do have navigating procedures for long distances. Where are we going?”
<
br /> “Winnipeg,” she said.
“Where?”
“I’ll show you,” Billie said.
* * * *
15
The Safe House
Tracy had been able to take down three of the dead. Those ones were of the extremely slow-moving variety and were harmless unless they got their rotten fingers on someone. Two others had gone down with the cleaver. She lost the mallet when she meant to bash another one’s skull and instead missed when the creature unexpectedly moved in the opposite direction. It had been knocked from her hand by another before she had a chance to try again.
Now she was moving as fast as she could down the adjacent street, able to outrun some of them, others hot on her tail. Her hand was pressed to her side, her shirt damp with blood. As she’d observed before, many of the undead were getting more and more aggressive, even more capable and were transitioning from slow-moving, incompetent flesh-eaters to feral killing machines.
Tracy couldn’t lead them to the safe house, but she also didn’t want to spend the better part of the day trying to outrun and hide from them. They had to be taken down except there were too many of them.
She turned and jumped in behind a taxi that had gone and rammed itself up over the curb, and waited a moment to see if she’d lost them. Their ever-nearing footfalls said otherwise. Back on her feet, she maneuvered in between the traffic-filled street, using the cars like a hedge maze to slow down the dead. At the end of the street, she ran into a parking lot which had been an old construction site, one that appeared to have been in the process of repaving the lot and setting up short concrete walls as dividers between certain areas.
She saw a shovel on the ground by the cement mixer. She picked it up along with a bucket of dried cement beside it. The bucket weighed at least fifty pounds and she was thankful she was able to lift it albeit with a heft of effort.
As the dead started to come out of the maze of cars, she swallowed the dry lump in her throat and approached them head-on. She knew she wouldn’t take them all down, but if she could remove some of the threat, perhaps the others would get the idea and move on, or at the very least become a small enough group for her to finally evade.
The moment the first zombie neared, Tracy dropped the shovel, grabbed the bucket of cement by both hands, and spun around in a circle, gaining momentum. She whipped the bucket across the zombie’s head, splattering its skull. As the creature fell, she went to do the same thing to the next one, but the momentum from her original spin made her fumble and she ended up lobbing the bucket at the undead woman instead. The creature held out its arms as if to catch it. The bucket slipped between its arms and landed on its toes. The monster merely stumbled around it and came forward.
Tracy lunged for the shovel, picked it up, then brought it back around like a baseball bat to the female zombie’s head, the shovel’s rusty metal scoop slicing through the creature’s skull like a pickax into tightly-packed earth. She pulled the shovel free and brought it down on the next approaching zombie, this one an elderly woman, short, with half her face rotted away. Knocking the woman’s skull from her body like a ball off a tee was easy work. Right after, Tracy jabbed the shovel into the rotting guts of a nearing undead Asian man. She tore through his stomach in one fluid motion, his guts spilling out at his feet in slops of black goo and intestines that looked more like rotten lasagna. He kept moving forward and she brought the shovel back the opposite way and smacked him in the head, knocking him down.
About to turn and run out of there, she was intercepted by a hillbilly of a zombie with three teeth, a long beard that was ripped out from its jaw in places, and overalls without a shirt underneath. The thing flopped its arms over the shovel’s shaft, the force enough to cause her to drop it. She pushed Huckleberry-dead to the side, pulled out the cleaver, and brought it across the back of the hillbilly’s head. She got the blade a good ways through, but it wasn’t enough to kill it. The creature turned around, grabbing her in the process, mouth open and coming in for the kill. She jerked the cleaver free from its skull, got it over its mouth, saving herself from getting bit, and pushed herself away. She immediately lunged back, bringing down the cleaver on its head, splitting it like a coconut.
She hit one and kicked another, shoved two small ones at the same time into the two behind them, causing them to trip over each other and fall.
Having thinned the ranks some, Tracy took the cleaver to the heads of two more before sprinting away, once again using the crushed vehicles on the street as a means of confusion to any that pursued her.
After a couple of blocks, the stitch in her side forced her to stop running. She took a few deep breaths then moved at a brisk walk.
Finally, she was on the right heading to the library. Mouth dry, she couldn’t wait to see if there was something there to drink. Cautious of the undead that might have followed, she remained off the street and hid in a partly-buried bus shelter until she felt the coast was clear and she could emerge and get to her final destination.
* * * *
The secret lever leading into the safe house was inside a telephone booth that had been partly crushed in the rubble the day the Millennium Library fell. The booth itself sat on an angle against the heap of ruin, most of it above the surface of the debris, its bottom portion hidden beneath slabs of concrete. Tracy pulled out her “key,” the small flathead screwdriver given at the Hub. She put it in the middle screw that kept the phone unit itself in place against the rear inside wall of the phone booth. The screw she turned was actually an extension of a key, which unlocked the phone unit as a whole, allowing it to swing open on small hinges. Though Tracy thought the whole Mission Impossible aspect of this a bit excessive, she understood the reason for the secrecy: security, randomly hidden. She pulled a small lever inside the phone unit and there was a loud click; the lower half of the rear phone booth wall swung open. She closed the phone unit, crouched, and stepped into the back of the phone booth. Once in, she closed the small door behind her, counted three steps forward, two to the left, all the while keeping one hand along the rough cement wall of the narrow corridor she found herself on. Navigating in the dark wasn’t easy for anyone, hence the step count. At the end of the narrow corridor, about ten feet from where she first entered, was another door. She felt for the handle, found it, then opened the door.
The dim lighting was easy on the eyes as she stepped down a short set of stairs to what used to be the library’s first floor. If the lights were on, somebody had to be home.
The room had been partitioned into strategy centres, living quarters, kitchen, bathroom facilities, a large workshop, and a chapel. The partition walls were made of wood, unpainted so the colors and types varied, each running floor to ceiling. If anyone was here, they’d be in one of these sections.
Tracy went down the center aisle. “Hello?”
The closer she neared the first partition, the louder the voices behind came. When she peered in, she saw two men in ratty T-shirts and jeans looking at a map that was spread out on a table, small pebbles and stones of different colors placed purposefully along the map’s grids. The men saw her, but didn’t give her a nod. She wasn’t sure if they recognized her or not.
Doesn’t matter, she thought, and went further in. She checked the various divided areas, some empty, others with folks chatting, some exercising, others resting. Toward the end was the aroma of what smelled like veggie soup.
She followed her nose to the end then stopped walking when she sensed someone behind her. Dean Brandt, one of the original planners of the safe house and on its team of architects. He was also the unofficial head honcho. He looked much older since she last saw him, the stress of the recent days having turned most of his hair gray. He was unshaven, scruffy, and looked like he hadn’t been out of the safe house for months. His dirty collared shirt and brown slacks made him look even worse than he probably intended, not that looks mattered these days.
“About time you showed up,” he said, his sixty-or-so-y
ear-old voice sounding uncharacteristically young against his old and haggard appearance.
“Other things came up.” She stepped closer to him.
He embraced her and she wasn’t sure if it was for the right reasons. Either way, she didn’t like being touched. He let go. “You obviously know what happened.”
“I saw.”
Dean put his fingers to his lips. “Oh my. I hope you didn’t get hurt.”
“Wasn’t there when it happened.”
“Good. Not many made it, at least from what we can ascertain. I came here immediately after I escaped. Others followed. So few compared to what we had.”
“I can see that,” she said, remembering how many people were actually down here with them.
“A handful of other survivors that managed to stay alive elsewhere in the city and the suburbs followed a couple of Hub survivors in here, which is fine, just mentioning. One couple had been with us. Saw their young daughter eaten alive, completely devoured by a whole crowd of the monsters. They lasted with us for just a few short hours before completely losing it. They started to yell and thrash and destroy things around here so we had to throw them out. I don’t think they made it on the outside, though. Sorry. Don’t know why I’m telling you all this.”
“It’s okay,” she said. “Got to tell someone. Hard to keep in.” She coughed. “You didn’t take in a young man, short, short hair, unshaven, wearing black, did you?” Joe didn’t know where the safe house was, but she thought she’d check anyway in case someone of their party brought him down here from the outside.
“No one that fits that description, no. Friend of yours?”
“His name is Joe and we’ve been together for the past bit.” Wait. “Not together-together, I mean, on the run together, watching each other’s backs and stuff.”