“I don’t think so.”
Halverson heard a scuffing sound and gazed down the street.
A lone thirtysomething man was doddering down the sidewalk toward them. Clad in shabby clothes and a Dodgers baseball cap turned backwards on his head, the guy was lurching toward Halverson.
“One of those things heard the gunshots,” said Halverson.
“Stop trying to change the subject,” said Victoria. “You’re good at wriggling out of giving me a straight answer.”
“We don’t have time to discuss this.”
Halverson shrugged his MP7 off his shoulder and drew a bead on the approaching figure.
“Are you sure that’s one of them?” said Victoria. “Or do you even care?”
He faced her. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You just killed two people without batting an eye.”
“It was them or us.”
Victoria shook her head briefly in frustration.
Halverson would have preferred an M4 carbine at this range. The MP7 was unbeatable in accuracy in CQB (close-quarters battle), but no more accurate than a pistol at long range.
Halverson waved at the figure to elicit a response and see if he was uninfected. The figure took no notice and continued trudging forward. Halverson pegged him for one of the walking dead.
Halverson debated whether to shoot the creature. If any other creatures nearby hadn’t heard his first two shots, another shot wouldn’t attract more of them, he figured.
He leveled his MP7 at the creature.
And then the situation changed.
Three more of the walking dead rounded the corner into view and scrabbled twenty-odd feet behind the first one.
Not thirty seconds later a swarm of the creatures halted around the corner bumping against each other as they crowded the sidewalk and spilled into the car-jammed street.
The throng of creatures thrummed like a horde of locusts as they jostled each other and shuffled over the cement, intent on devouring fresh prey. There was no end to their numbers, Halverson could see, as more continued rounding the corner and carpeting the sidewalk.
Victoria and Emma gawked at the mob. Halverson put his gun away.
“Time go get out of here,” he said.
“Look at them all,” said Emma in consternation.
Halverson turned his horse and headed away from the ghouls. Victoria and Emma followed close behind.
They trotted past a nightclub, turned right at the end of the block, and headed down the next street. Halverson brought his horse up short at the scene unfolding before him. Even his horse became skittish with fear and Halverson pulled on his reins worried lest he bolt.
CHAPTER 12
In the mouth of the alley up ahead, three of the ghouls were hunched over a wounded woman. They were literally eating the woman alive as she groaned in pain.
Two of the creatures were hunkered over her stomach, dipping their hands into the bloody hole they had ripped in her stomach lining and fishing out internal organs.
Halverson couldn’t believe the woman was still alive what with the damage the ghouls were inflicting on her body.
The third ghoul was perched near the top of her head and was tearing the eyelids off her eyes and scarfing them down like they were bonbons. The woman’s eyeballs jerked sideways back and forth in horror.
“Oh no!” gasped Victoria. “We have to help her.”
“It’s too late,” said Halverson.
Flaring its nostrils, spooked, his horse was bridling and whickering. Halverson was having trouble controlling the animal as it shifted its hooves on the sidewalk, unwilling to stand still.
“But she’s still alive,” said Victoria. “Can’t you hear her groaning?”
“They’ve already bitten her. She’s infected. There’s nothing we can do for her.”
“We have to try,” said Emma, whose neighing horse was becoming as restive as Halverson’s.
In fact, the fear in Halverson’s horse was spreading to Victoria’s horse as well.
“I can’t control my horse,” said Emma, grimacing, unsure what to do with the reins as her horse refused to stand still and tried to rear up.
Lest she fall off the saddle she grabbed the horse’s mane and held on for dear life.
“We need to get out of here,” said Halverson. “The horses are spooked and won’t go any farther toward those ghouls.”
“Can’t we do something for that poor woman?” said Emma, tightening her grasp on her horse’s mane.
“We can at least put her out of her misery,” said Victoria.
“I can’t get a clear shot from here,” said Halverson. “The ghouls are all over her.”
“How can she still be alive?” said Emma in anguish. “Look what they’re doing to her.”
Halverson couldn’t stand the sound of the woman groaning anymore. He tried to get his horse to go forward, but it reared and balked, whinnying.
“Hold on to my horse’s reins,” he said, handing the reins to Victoria.
He dismounted after his horse stopped rearing.
MP7 in hand, he bucketed toward the zombies that were feasting on the hapless woman. When he was close enough, he shot the three zombies in the head, one by one. They collapsed on the woman, blocking any shot at her heart or head.
Halverson cursed. He pelted toward the woman as she moaned underneath the creatures. He reached her, kicked the dead ghouls off her face, and squeezed off a round into her forehead, as her lidless empty eyes stared up at him, frozen in pain.
The woman stopped moaning.
Now that he stood near her he could see she was a brunette in her twenties. She looked like she must have been pretty before the creatures had laid into her and ripped her apart. Pity welled up in him for her. Christ, what was the world coming to? he wondered.
Then he whipped back to his horse.
He saw Victoria waving frantically at him. Belting toward her he wondered what she was waving about.
Then he saw two of the walking dead round the corner behind the horses.
Gasping for breath he accelerated toward his horse, legs churning, fists pumping.
Victoria was having difficulty maintaining her grip on his horse’s reins. The horse was rearing in its determination to gallop off.
Halverson snagged the reins from Victoria and attempted to mount his horse after it stopped rearing. It backed away from him, nickering and baring its teeth. With the horse fighting him, Halverson could not mount it.
To calm the horse he stroked its neck.
“Settle down,” he said and climbed into the saddle.
Emma screamed. Halverson whipped his head around to find out what was happening.
One of the ghouls was grabbing Emma’s horse’s tail and wrenching it. In a reflex motion, her horse’s rear leg kicked the ghoul in the chest and sent it tumbling down the sidewalk.
A mob of creatures rounded the corner and piled onto the sidewalk, barging toward Halverson, Victoria, and Emma.
“Let’s go,” said Halverson.
He rode his horse away from the writhing mass of ghouls, Victoria and Emma in tow.
The horses didn’t like it, but Halverson rode toward the dead woman with the three ghouls sprawled on her. He had no choice. It was teeming with flesh-craving ghouls behind him.
Emma felt like she was going to fall of her horse any second, but she gamely hung on.
Halverson continued riding toward the dead woman. He hadn’t wanted to head in this direction, thinking there might be more of the flesh eaters up ahead. But now there was no going back. He could not go in the opposite direction thanks to the mob of creatures tailing him. There was a phalanx of the things behind him. All hope of getting past them was dashed.
He rode to the side of the dead woman, his horse shying a bit as it neared her but continuing nevertheless on course.
He only hoped none of the creatures lurked ahead.
“Are we headed in the right direction?” asked Victoria beh
ind him.
“We need to dodge these zombies before we get back on course,” he answered.
“Then where do we go?”
“Let’s head toward Vegas. Maybe Nevada hasn’t been hit by the plague.”
“What are the chances?”
Not good, he decided. He said nothing.
The tension of battle was getting to him. He had a headache and could not sort out his thoughts. Still, he had to press on.
“The horses seem restless,” said Victoria. “Maybe they need to eat.”
That was the problem with using horses for transportation, decided Halverson. They needed to be fed. And where was he going to find bales of hay? Hay wasn’t exactly a prevalent commodity in the city. He wondered if the horses would eat Cheerios. He would have to make for a supermarket after they extricated themselves from this war zone.
“We have our hands full getting away from the zombies for now,” he said.
The realization of the impossibility of his mission hit him like a flatiron full in the face. Did he really think the three of them could pass through three thousand miles of plague-infected territory infested with flesh-eating ghouls and live to tell about it? It was madness for him to presume they could. They might as well jump onto the moon.
One thing at a time, he told himself. They had to get off this street.
He coaxed his horse into a gallop. Victoria and Emma followed his lead.
That was when he spotted a guy straddling a parked motorcycle up ahead.
The guy had to be human, decided Halverson. Zombies didn’t possess the muscular coordination to ride motorcycles. The question was, was the guy a friend or a foe like the deceased duo of Putty Face and Headband?
The fact that the guy was holding a gun in his hand didn’t bode well.
CHAPTER 13
Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center
President Cole was sitting behind a desk on a studio set in the Mount Weather underground fortress. Behind him stood a flagpole with Old Glory lolling from it. A cameraman aimed a TV camera at him, the red light in front of its lens on.
Cole’s broad-featured folksy face stared into the camera lens.
“I am here to assure all of you, my fellow Americans, that everything is under control,” he said, reading from the teleprompter placed beside the camera. “We are battling the plague and winning. Together, we’re gonna beat this bug and reclaim our country. The important thing is to have faith in your government. It’s the steadfast belief in your representative government that made our country the most successful country in the world. Without your belief in us, we the government are nothing. Believe in our mission to save this great country and we cannot fail. God bless all of you.”
“I wish I could believe him,” muttered Mellors behind the cameraman.
“What matters is that he believes himself,” said Slocum, who was standing next to Mellors. “If he believes what he’s saying, no matter how unfounded it is, the people listening to him will believe him.”
“I’ve got to hand it to him,” said Mellors, watching Cole, “he looks convincing. He’d make a great actor.”
“If he wasn’t a great actor to begin with, he never would’ve been elected in the first place. He didn’t get elected because what he was saying was true. That had nothing to do with it.”
Mellors allowed himself a subtle smile. “You’re even more cynical than I am about the Beltway.”
“We have to convince the people that they’re safe and that we can overcome this plague. Mass panic will doom all of us.”
“I wonder how many people out there are able to watch a TV.”
“Not everyone. A lot of the TV cable lines were burned in the wildfires that are sweeping across the country.”
“I guess you need a satellite dish to watch this.”
“A lot of dishes were burned as well, I’m sure. As long as we’re reaching somebody. That’s what counts.”
“Even if Cole’s spewing a pack of lies?”
Slocum faced Mellors. “You know what Churchill said. Truth is the first casualty in war. And we are at war, Scot. Make no mistake of that. We may not be fighting the Nazis this time, but we’re fighting an enemy even more deadly than them—a plague that can wipe humanity off the face of the earth.”
“The president’s speech isn’t reassuring me. I’m not one of the ignorant public. I know we’re between a rock and a hard place. We need to take action against these walking dead, or we’re all gonna be dead. Giving speeches isn’t gonna save us.”
“I know that and you know that, but the people don’t. We can’t let them know the truth that our chances of surviving this plague are becoming slimmer by the moment. They can’t handle knowing the truth.”
Cole was oozing with sincerity in front of the camera as he spoke, laying his just-one-of-the-guys charm on thick. You wouldn’t know from the looks of him that the country was teetering on the brink of extinction, decided Mellors.
“Come with me,” said Slocum.
Slocum and Mellors left the room as Cole’s longwinded speech droned on.
The DCI and the deputy director of the NCS emerged in the airtight aluminum-sided corridor and made a beeline for the elevator. They entered the elevator and got off at the floor below.
Yellow and black biohazard signs lined the corridor walls. Twenty feet down the hallway Slocum opened an unmarked door.
He ushered Mellors into an anteroom that had a floor-to-ceiling bulletproof Plexiglas window on one side. On one of the walls adjacent to the window hung another biohazard sign, which had a sign beside it that displayed a picture of a nurse and said Have You Had Your Flu Shot Yet?
Mellors wondered if the flu sign was somebody’s idea of a joke.
On the other side of the Plexiglas, three men, their backs to the window, were standing in bulky white insulated hazmat suits with self-contained breathing apparatuses. The men held fully automatic M4A1 carbines in their gloved hands.
Opposite the men, shackled to the wall, stood six of the walking dead, facing forward, writhing against their fetters, trying to break free.
“Aim for upper body mass,” said one of the men through the mike in his helmet.
The three men opened fire on the creatures, cycling through their thirty-round clips in no time.
Their chests stitched with bullet holes, the creatures kept churning in their bonds as though nothing had happened.
The three men ejected their spent clips and slapped fresh magazines into their M4A1s.
“Headshots,” said the lead man.
The three men opened fire on the creatures and plastered the grimacing heads with a fusillade of rounds.
The zombies hung motionless in their chains, their heads blown apart, jagged chunks of their skulls strewn on the floor from the impact of the carbines’ bullets. Gouts of the creatures’ pulverized brain matter slid down the wall behind them.
“Only headshots will kill them,” Slocum told Mellors in the anteroom. “We’ve shot them in every vital organ with no results. The only organ that is alive is the brain. Once the brain dies, the creature dies. A shot in any other organ cuts no ice.”
“Why are those men wearing hazmat uniforms?” asked Mellors. “I thought the disease wasn’t airborne anymore.”
“Splash back.”
“Splash back from what? I thought the creatures are bloodless.”
“That’s true. They have no blood. What blood they do have doesn’t circulate and resembles a powder more than a fluid. But their mouths generate saliva. Their saliva is highly infectious. In fact, that’s how the disease is now spread. If any of that saliva gets into your mucous membranes or into your blood, you’re infected.”
Mellors nodded. “That’s how their bite spreads the disease.”
“Exactly.”
The three men in the hazmat uniforms approached the motionless creatures and examined the cadavers.
“We’re trying to find the most effective means of killing them
,” Slocum went on.
“A bullet to the head,” said Mellors, watching the uniformed men inspect the corpses that hung from their shackles.
“You don’t want to be anywhere near these creatures when their heads explode. The fluid in their heads, the brain matter, is contagious. Their spinal fluid is also contagious.”
“What if you get any of that stuff on your skin?”
“We’re still testing that. We don’t believe the fluid can be absorbed through the skin. If you thoroughly wash your hands and body, you should be OK.”
“Then the safest way to kill them is by shooting their brains with a bullet that doesn’t cause the skulls to explode.”
Slocum cupped his left elbow with his right hand and massaged his chin with his left hand. “Yes. A bullet to the brain is sufficient to kill them. The collateral damage of the skull bursting does nothing but spread the virus to anyone in its range.”
“Then kill these things from long distance to be on the safe side and avoid splash back.”
“Low-velocity rounds would be preferable to high-velocity ones, too.”
“Less chance of breaking through the other end of the skull.”
“Right.”
Mellors paused in thought. “What about a flamethrower?”
“A flamethrower will kill the creature and incinerate the virus. The only problem is, the fire has to burn through the skull and the dura mater to get to the brain and destroy it—and that takes a while. Death isn’t instantaneous like it is with a bullet to the brain.”
Mellors quirked an eyebrow. “These creatures can continue living even when they’re on fire?”
“As long as their brains are intact.”
“Flamethrowers are out then.”
“They’re good for destroying the virus after the creature’s brain is dead, but their stopping power against the creatures is limited.”
“Kill ’em first then burn ’em.”
“That’s the best plan. After they’re killed, the infectious corpses must be cremated to prevent the spread of the plague.”
Mellors peered through the Plexiglas. “Who are those soldiers in the hazmat uniforms?”
“Why do you think they’re soldiers?”
Zombie Apocalypse: The Chad Halverson Series Page 88