They eventually arrived at a small train station. The Marine who’d driven the truck came around to help them get out. Moving quickly the group was guided to the entrance to the train station. They were separated into two groups. The ones with the light duty or bed rest bracelets on were told to wait. The other group was sent with half the Marines to start unloading the trucks. The rest of the Marines were working on clearing the train station.
The train station itself had been secured with wire and chains covering the windows and other entrances. The train sitting out on the tracks had to be cleared though. Or rather the bottom of it had to be cleared. A few shots rang out as the Marines shot at anything that looked like it might possibly be a crawler. None of them were dumb enough to lean in for a closer look. It made way more sense to waste a bullet than to risk getting your face ripped off. Especially now that large bands of surgers were pretty much a thing of the past.
“Hey, you guys might want to help carry some of this stuff!” Lisa shouted out from over by the trucks. She sounded excited.
Ignoring the orders to stand where they were and wait for the platform to be cleared the motley group headed in the direction of the trucks. A beaming Lisa was pointing at a stack of boxes that’d been set aside. Yue noticed what was going on first. She pointed at Lisa and grinned.
“Nice guns!” Yue shouted out. Lisa responded to that by pretending to pose like a body builder to show off her arms.
It was the fact that she was armed more than her actual arms that everyone was noticing. She had her weapons strapped back on her body. It was funny how that made her look normal again. They’d all spent so long walking around with weapons dangling off them that walking around the base without them had felt unnatural. It was like they were finally allowed to get dressed again.
A Marine standing a little too close to the beaming Lisa started giving them a speech about how they were being given their personal weapons back as a courtesy. They weren’t expected to use their weapons unless the situation warranted it. The train they’d be riding in was only going to be in motion during the day. At night it stopped wherever it was and sat there until morning. They’d be riding in cargo boxes with passenger seats installed in them. That eliminated the windows as a weak spot. With the front and back doors closed the cars could easily withstand the crawlerz pounding on them all night.
When the Marine was done with his spiel he leaned over and whispered something in Lisa’s ear. She laughed and punched the handsome, tall Marine playfully in his shoulder. Drew launched himself at the guy. Harley snatched Drew out of the air and hugged him close to his own body. A frustrated Drew tried to break away, but his fractured ribs hurt too much for him to do anything besides grunt in pain. The Marine looked on with concern as Drew gasped in pain.
“Take it easy man. I was just telling your girl that you looked like you wanted to take a swing at me. All good here?” The Marine asked walking over and sticking his hand out for Drew to shake it.
Lisa walked away shaking her head in anger at Drew’s response. Yue and LeBron tired quickly of the drama and started digging through boxes to recover their weapons. Once they had those unboxed and on, they both felt much better. Meanwhile the Marine was telling Drew he needed to calm down. Even in Fayetteville the men outnumbered the women by a wide margin. He was going to need to let Lisa handle herself and trust her.
A chastised Drew walked over and glumly pulled his own weapons out of a box that had his name clearly written on it in sharpie. LeBron and Yue quickly rallying to cheer him up. Something was obviously bothering him. Drew was usually much more of a go with the flow kind of guy. It wasn’t until they were finally boarding the train that Drew said something that made Yue realize what the problem was.
“Mikey and Gus would’ve fit right in here.” Drew said walking up the stairs into the dimly lit cargo trailer they’d be riding in.
Yue agreed. It wasn’t just Mikey and Gus though. It was so many of the others they’d met and lost along the way. It was their mom and dad. It was the loss of their way of life. Simple things like going to school or watching a movie. All of those things were dead now. They were getting on a train to go join an army of murderers. Estimating how many there were in the country they could literally end up doing nothing but murdering the infected for the rest of their lives.
They were survivors riding the crest of a tidal wave composed of the moldering corpses of their countrymen. Assuming they survived the attempted culling of the infected what kind of life was there for them? So far Yue hadn’t heard anything about where Jeff may be. Her subtle jabs at unlodging any information from guards or fellow refugees about the ‘guy who’d been talking on the radio’ had been met with shrugs of indifference.
She understood now why Drew had suddenly grown so overprotective of Lisa. He was realizing at least subconsciously that she might be his best chance at something resembling normalcy. The constant reminder that there weren’t that many women floating around in these military installations must have gotten to him. She really hoped the Marine was wrong about the refugee base. She wasn’t sure how well Drew would handle being around guys hitting on his girl all day. Even more worrisome she wasn’t sure how Lisa would handle it. Currently she was sitting in a row of chairs by herself pointedly not making eye contact with her jerk of a boyfriend.
Yue slid into the seat beside a visibly distraught Drew. He looked anywhere but at her. His face was burning red with embarrassment from being dressed down by the Marine earlier.
“Go sit with Lisa. Tell her what’s bothering you. Quit being an idiot.” Yue finally said after a minute or two of awkward silence.
Drew continued to sit there not making eye contact. Looking around Yue noticed Harley sitting right behind them. He shook his head as if to say leave me out of this and pretended to go to sleep. She’d tried talking some sense into him. That wasn’t working so she slapped him. Hard.
He continued to ignore her. She hit him again. He kept facing straight forward. His skin turning a bright red where she’d slapped him. She pulled her hand back to smack him again. His hand snaked out and caught her before she could.
“Ok. Whatever. I’ll do it.” Drew hissed angrily. He grabbed his stuff and huffily stomped up the aisle to the row of seats Lisa was in.
She of course wouldn’t let him sit down. Deciding Drew would have to fight that battle for himself Yue pulled out Jeff’s fully charged iPad and powered it on. Ignoring the slightly shattered screen she scrolled through some pictures Jeff had taken on it. Mikey and Gus featured prominently in them. The two men had died due to the information contained on that iPad. The President had considered the notes on here so vital to national security that he’d dispatched a delta force patrol to retrieve it.
The government had gotten the iPad in their possession and never even known it. That didn’t give her a lot of faith that there was some sort of secret database that’d alert Jeff as to where to find them. The same government that’d sent men to kill them was the one they were volunteering now to help. She guessed that wasn’t exactly right. The country as they’d known it before was never going to exist again. The people they were banding together with now were just survivors like them. Hopefully they could rise above just trying to survive and begin rebuilding. The goal was to kill the crawlerz not each other. That’s what they were on the train for. That’s what they wanted to be part of.
Epilogue
Jeff shut down his laptop and snapped it shut. He’d just finished brain dumping everything he could remember into it. It was the same effort he’d gone through with the iPad he’d given Yue the password to. He slid the laptop carefully into his backpack. You had to be beyond careful with electronics now a days. It wasn’t like you could take it down to the Apple store if the hard drive decided to stop spinning for some reason. If the blinky lights stopped working you were screwed. There was no such thing as a cloud to download your backup from.
On the plus side new ones were relatively easy to f
ind. During the rampant looting preceding the crawlerz arrival certain stores had been targeted more heavily than others. For the most part people wanted food and weapons before they wanted computers or PlayStations. Not that the Best Buys of the world had escaped completely unscathed. Most of them had been at least moderately looted. Compared to grocery stores and large retailers like Walmart or Target though they’d gotten off lightly.
The tablets and computers were handicapped since most everything seemed to need the internet to work but there were still some items that were helpful. Especially when you’d been given the impossible job of taking back a country infested with monsters. The Delta captain who’d taken Jeff back had resigned when he’d found out. He’d been disgusted that the President had elected to reinstate Jeff rather than execute him as a traitor. That’d been quite the enlightening conversation between Jeff and Thompson. The Delta captain and his family had disappeared without a trace a day later.
Jeff was getting whiplash from all of the back and forth. Thompson had abandoned him on a doomed carrier after stripping him of his authority, had him arrested and then reinstated in Fontana, and then finally dispatched him to a warehouse under false pretenses so the Delta team could easily capture him. At some point the political winds had shifted once again. The President decided it was better to put him back into his original role rather than executing him for treason. Jeff surmised this had something to do with the military not being willing to let the survivors out there continue to suffer unsupported no matter what their elected leaders may want. Rather than risk a coup the President had flipped once again and set Jeff up to run with that effort.
Now Jeff spent his days creating safe spaces for everyone to ride out the night while coordinating wide scale crawler clearing efforts during the day. It was slow and dangerous work, but they were coming up with new tricks every day. He’d only been there a couple of weeks, but the military had been carrying these operations out for months now. Jeff hoped to speed the effort up even more by onboarding refugees to help with the fight. The President had finally seen the logic in that which is why Jeff was in Fayetteville instead of in an unmarked grave up by Weathertop. They were learning how to use that rabid viscousness of the infected to their advantage.
Want to hurl yourself at the side of my house at fifty miles per hour Mr. Crawler? No problem I’ll affix metal spikes all around the walls, so you impale yourself and die. Want to dig into the dirt covering our lair? Cool here’s some mines for you to find. Need to hide during the day to avoid the sunlight? No problem we’ll make some nice safe looking hideouts for you to camp out in. We’ll even come by in the morning to see how you’re doing.
It wasn’t exactly lining them up and mowing them down, but it was effective. They had crews of people who spent their days hauling the corpses away to be burned. They were developing new tactics for killing more of the infected bastards every day. The ideas they came up with during the day were put to the test at night. They’d most likely already slain all the crawlerz originally in the city limits of Fayetteville. The just kept coming from the surrounding areas. They could sense all the uninfected people moving around the city.
His escort and aides trailed behind him as he walked down the long concrete corridor of the high school turned fortress. They’d learned the hard way nothing was crawler proof. Which is why every twenty yards or so they had to open up a gate in recently installed chain link fence to keep moving. Just like they were spending time coming up with new offensive tactics they were also greatly improving their defensive capabilities.
It was a slow and steady wins the race approach. It was working but if they didn’t figure out a way to speed it up, they’d all die of old age before they’d made much of a dent in the numbers of the infected. They were killing hundreds a day of an enemy that numbered in the millions. It was this problem of scale that Jeff was wrestling with. He had a meeting later that day with the top military and scientific minds both here and in Weathertop to discuss. Another thing they’d been putting back together was lines of communication.
A key part of their strategy now involved looping in survivors from across the country to the effort. The more people actively hunting crawlerz the better. If they could supply those groups with supplies, then those groups could focus on the fight instead of trying to survive. Doing all this meant ensuring there was a reliable supply line in place. The easiest way they’d figured out to provide that so far was by train. There was one arriving from Weathertop in a few minutes which is why Jeff was there.
He’d told his men he needed to be there to check the supplies and introduce himself to the new forces coming to support them. He also liked letting the refugees who’d come through Weathertop know how it worked there in Fayetteville. Most of his staff assumed he’d tire of meeting the trains eventually saving them a lot of walking. What he didn’t tell anyone was that he mostly met the trains hoping that a certain young woman of Asian heritage was going to turn up there one day.
He stood on the platform watching the train steam its way towards him. For no discernable reason he was suddenly buoyed by an onslaught of giddiness. He didn’t know where the feeling had come from, but he was now certain this was going to be the day. As the train rolled to a stop in front of him the feeling became so certain that he immediately started questioning himself.
How come he hadn’t brought flowers?
Author’s Note
Once again, I want to thank you for coming on this journey with me. When I started this book, we were in a pandemic that seemed like it was never going to end. As I’m wrapping it up, we’re still in the same situation. Albeit now there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. It’s a dim light that’s flickering a little bit but at least it’s there. It’s that light that helps ease the fear.
The fear that strikes parents especially hard. When your children are sick with a disease that’s showing up on the news it’s scary. When your kids sniffle, it goes from being this thing they talk about on the TV to something intensely personal. From an idea or a theory to something that’s real.
My wife and my family are all healthy. We’re doing ok through all of this mess. We actually have a newborn who’s going to have lived the first year of his life during this pandemic. There’s not much for it except to soldier on and look forward to the silver lining hidden on the other side of this dark cloud. Like most people I have friends who’ve suffered greatly from this. I’ve reached out to help where I could or just offer condolences where I couldn’t. I see and hear of plenty of others doing the same.
The next book in this series is going to be about hope. It’s going to be about turning the corner. Or at least I think it is. I guess we’ll have to wait and see what happens. Until next time. Thank you again SO MUCH for coming on this journey with me. If you have the time and are so inclined, please leave a review. Sprinkling a few stars on it would also be greatly appreciated.
Thank You!!!!
R S Merritt
February 6th, 2020
Other Books by RS Merritt
Try an excellent 7 Book series built around a Zombie outbreak:
Zombies!
Need more Zombies? Check out the 6-Book Zournal series:
The Zournal Series
Looking for something a little different? Try the Son of the Keeper series:
Son of the Keeper
Crawlerz: Book 3: The Mountains Are Calling Page 32