Zombie Apocalypse: The Chad Halverson Series

by Bryan Cassiday

  Victoria scoffed up the plastic transistor radio that lay on the tabletop. She flicked the serrated on dial.

  “Everything is under control,” said the president’s voice over the radio waves via a transmission that was crackling with static. “Keep calm and carry on. Find shelter and do not drink tap water. I repeat, do not drink tap water. Drink only bottled or canned fluids until we can determine whether the water in reservoirs is safe to drink. Remain in your shelters as long as possible and do not go outside. The air and water supplies are contaminated with high levels of radiation. We are safe now from the plague. This is the president of the United States speaking.”

  “You heard what the president said,” Victoria told Halverson. “We’re not supposed to go outside.”

  “He also said everything is under control. If the reservoirs are polluted, how can everything be under control?”

  “Everything is under control,” said the president. “Stay calm. We have vanquished the infected cannibals with our nuclear explosions, which have cleansed our great nation of the plague. Now all we have to do is to wait for the radiation in the atmosphere to disperse, so that we can leave our shelters. We have succeeded in taking back the country from both the plague and the flesh eaters it spawned.”

  “I wonder how many uninfected were killed in the explosions,” said Halverson.

  “Victory is ours,” said the president. “We must be patient before we start rebuilding our glorious nation. When it’s safe outside, we’ll commence our task and once again make ours the greatest country in the world. It is a difficult challenge that faces us, I’ll be honest with you, and it will take many years to complete our goal of rebuilding our civilization from the ashes of our almost complete destruction, but we can do it. We will do it. All of us together will do it.”

  “Not unless we can find more water,” said Halverson under his breath.

  He startled at a clattering he heard in the shelter.

  “What’s that noise?” asked Victoria.

  “It sounds like the generator’s acting up,” answered Halverson.

  She sighed. “Great. That’s all we need.”

  Halverson checked out the streamers in front of the air duct. They seemed to be drooping even lower. But at least they were still moving, which signified that air was continuing to flow into the shelter.

  “The EMP emitted by the bomb blast might have had something to do with damaging the generator,” said Halverson.

  “EMP?”

  “Electromagnetic pulse. It’s electromagnetic radiation generated by a nuclear blast that can disrupt electrical devices.”

  Victoria shook her head in frustration. “We can’t stay here without air. That’s for sure.”

  Chapter 4

  Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center

  Scot Mellors, the deputy director of the National Clandestine Service, was sitting in his office hunched over a computer in the bunker complex in the Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center that he and the remainder of President Cole’s administration had taken refuge in when the plague broke out on American soil. The complex had sheltered its residents from the pestilence and the atomic radiation that had wreaked havoc on the country.

  Situated in the Blue Ridge Mountains in Blumont, Virginia, Mount Weather originally opened as a weather station at the end of the nineteenth century, hence the name of the installation. In 1959 the emergency haven of the federal government, the sprawling underground bunker complex known as Area B, was added. It took up six hundred thousand square feet.

  It was in this selfsame Area B that the forty-six-year-old Mellors was rapt in his perusing of a document that was being displayed on the screen of his silver laptop. Actually it wasn’t his laptop. It belonged to Greg Coogan, an NCS field agent Mellors had had to eliminate when Coogan had tumbled to the top secret fact that the US government had funded the creation of the mutant H5N1 virus, aka the zombie virus, that had rubbed out most of the world’s population in a matter of days.

  Mellors had managed to hack into Coogan’s encrypted laptop because as deputy director of the NCS, to which Coogan belonged, Mellors had access to a master password, essentially a backdoor built into the computer system used by NCS agents that allowed him entrance into any NCS computer. He was never supposed to use the back door without approval from the director of the CIA, but he did not want to involve Slocum—not yet, anyway. Frankly, Mellors did not know whom he could trust with the top secret intel on Coogan’s laptop at this point.

  There were indications from what Mellors had been reading that Coogan knew even more than Mellors about the creation of the plague virus. Mellors found that hard to believe. After all, Coogan was a mere field agent, whereas Mellors was a deputy director. Still, Coogan could have stumbled onto something in the field that Mellors, for whatever reason, had no access to.

  From what Mellors could piece together from his reading, it looked like a supersecret organization by the name of Orchid had had something to do with the H5N1 experiments at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam. Mellors had never heard of such an organization.

  Mellors pored over the text on Coogan’s laptop screen. From what he had just read, he had gleaned that this Orchid Organization was working behind the scenes in some fashion at Rotterdam. It wasn’t clear in the document, which was a cryptic e-mail correspondence, what the connection between Orchid and Rotterdam was. Everything in the letter was vague and open to multiple interpretations.

  The letter indicated that somebody at Orchid was telling an employee at the Erasmus Medical Center to go ahead as planned with regard to the H5N1 experiments, as though Orchid had the authority to give such orders to an Erasmus employee.

  What the hell was going on? wondered Mellors.

  Leaning back in his chair he wondered how Coogan had gotten his hands on this document. What in fact had Coogan discovered about this Orchid Organization? Mellors wondered. What was their connection with the zombie virus? What kind of authority did they wield over the Erasmus Medical Center? Did Orchid somehow wield more authority than the US government when it came to Erasmus? The idea was inconceivable to Mellors.

  And yet . . .

  Mellors had plenty of questions, but no answers. To get to the bottom of the mystery, he had to find out the identities of the members of Orchid. Then maybe he could figure out what they were up to and if, indeed, they possessed any kind of power that could pose a threat to the US government.

  The question was, had Coogan imparted his knowledge of Orchid to Halverson on the phone before Mellors had silenced Coogan with a bullet to the head? Mellors knew that Coogan had told Halverson about US government involvement in the funding of the H5N1 mutation experiments at the Erasmus Medical Center because Mellors had overheard snatches of that conversation. But Mellors had not heard anything about Orchid being mentioned by Coogan during the phone call, which did not necessarily mean Mellors had not mentioned it.

  If Halverson did indeed know about Orchid, it would establish him as a threat to the group’s very existence, which depended on shadows and secrecy. If Orchid suspected Halverson knew about them, they would be out to eliminate him—if he wasn’t dead already.

  In point of fact, Mellors figured Halverson was already dead. The Predator drones Mellors had deployed to track Halverson had not reported seeing him in California or in any of its neighboring states before or after the nukes had devastated those areas. It was a good bet Halverson was dead.

  But that didn’t alter the fact that President Cole still wanted Mellors to bring back Halverson dead or alive to Mount Weather. If Halverson was still alive, Cole wanted him debriefed. If Halverson was dead, Cole wanted proof of it.

  And so Mellors was persisting in his search for Halverson, using the drones at his disposal to track Halverson down—and then kill him. It would be easier to kill Halverson with a Predator’s Hellfire missile than it would be to bring him back to Virginia alive. It was a matter of logistics. And besides, the understaffed NCS
didn’t have the manpower to send out field agents or special-ops forces to hunt down Halverson and capture him.

  The NCS was down to a skeleton crew, like every other arm of government. The plague had seen to that.

  Chapter 5

  Nevada

  Halverson threw on some jeans and a T that he had scrounged in the shelter. The clothes were a little small for him, but they would have to do.

  He opened the steel door of a closet in the alcove of the blast shelter. The closet had been locked when he and Victoria had entered the blast shelter, but he had found the key. The best thing about occupying a shelter built by a militia was the fact that the place was a veritable treasure trove of ordnance. Halverson was scoping out that ordnance right now.

  Rows of Heckler & Koch MP7s, as well as M4s, standing upright in racks confronted him, with a plethora of fresh magazines in cardboard boxes piled on the closet’s floor.

  “What are you looking for?” asked Victoria, padding up behind him.

  “We’re gonna need guns when we leave here,” he answered.

  “Why? I thought you said the A-bombs wiped out the infected ghouls.”

  “I hope so, anyway. But it’s best to be prepared. And . . .”

  “And what?”

  “And we don’t know who’s roaming around out there.”

  “You mean, gangs of marauders?”

  He nodded. “It’s best that we walk out of here armed and dangerous.”

  “That’s just another reason for us not to leave here, if you ask me.” She noticed a wooden crate on her right, leaned over, and opened it. “Look. Gas masks. Maybe we can use these if we run out of air.”

  Halverson picked up one of the gas masks and inspected it. “They just filter the air. They don’t have oxygen tanks. If there’s no air recirculated in this bunker, these masks won’t do us any good inside here.”

  “Too bad they don’t have hazmat uniforms in here somewhere,” said Victoria, eyes casting around the closet’s interior. “They have independent oxygen systems.”

  Halverson was still examining the gas mask. “We can wear these when we leave the shelter. They’ll filter out any radioactive dust in the air.”

  She looked at him. “You think the air’s still radioactive out there?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know how long we’ve been holed up in here.”

  “It’s easy to lose track of time in this place,” she said, staring off into the distance.

  “I’ve heard one theory that says the air doesn’t stay radioactive very long after an A-bomb explosion because the biggest radioactive particles fall to the ground, while the smaller ones that linger in the air are too small to cause any harm.”

  “So we won’t need gas masks up above?” She cocked her head up to look at the ceiling.

  “According to that theory.”

  “You sound like you don’t believe it,” she said, cutting her eyes toward him.

  “I’d rather be safe than sorry. It’s best we wear the masks.”

  “We can always take them off later.”

  Halverson heard the generator chug and wheeze. “It sounds like we’re gonna run out of air before we run out of water.”

  He dropped the gas mask he was holding into its crate and began rummaging through the cardboard boxes of ammunition on the floor, searching for MP7 magazine clips containing 4.6 X 30 mm rounds.

  The generator chuffed and whistled then became quiet.

  Halverson looked up with alarm. He scoped out the streamers that were tied to the air duct’s metal vent. As he had feared, they were hanging motionless down the front of the vent.

  The air had stopped circulating.

  Chapter 6

  “What was that?” asked Victoria, looking in the direction of the chugging.

  “The generator’s shot,” Halverson answered.

  “Why’s the light still on?” she asked, squinting up at the light bulb that depended from the ceiling.

  “Probably runs on a battery.”

  “Now what?”

  “Now we have to leave before we suffocate.”

  Victoria sighed. “I wish I was back in my dress shop in California, and this whole mess was just a nightmare.” She ran her hand down her brow.

  Halverson wished he was back on a black ops mission for the CIA’s National Clandestine Service instead of being locked up here. But wishing changed nothing, he knew. Their only option was to soldier on and adapt to the world that lay in bomb-gutted ruins around them.

  He picked up on a half dozen leather bandoleers hanging from a wooden peg on the left side of the closet. He snagged one of the bandoleers and draped it over his shoulder. Stooping on his haunches over the box of ammo, he fell to digging out MP7 clips from the box and jamming them into the bandoleer.

  He straightened up, latched onto another empty bandoleer, and slung it over his other shoulder. He squatted down again and stuffed the bandoleer full of clips.

  “You got enough?” said Victoria, tongue in cheek, watching him.

  “I don’t know what we’re gonna run into out there.”

  “Looks like we’re gonna run into Godzilla, the way your packing clips.”

  “We have to be ready for anything.”

  “Don’t forget to take a missile launcher as well.”

  He eagerly canted his head up toward her. “Do you see any RPGs around here?”

  Smiling, she shook her head at him. “I was being facetious.” She paused. “What are RPGs?”

  “Rocket-propelled grenades.”

  “I wouldn’t know one if I saw one.”

  “You need to stock up on weapons yourself,” he said and resumed slamming thirty-round clips into his bandoleer.

  “I’ll find something,” she said, eyeballing the arsenal of weapons stocked in the closet.

  His bandoleers loaded, Halverson snapped up a Belgian FN 5.7 semiautomatic pistol from a lower shelf. He noticed a cheap Velcro holster on another shelf, seized the holster, and attached it to his leather belt by means of its Velcro straps. He jammed the FN 5.7 into the snug holster.

  He searched for boxes of ammo for the FN 5.7. He knew 9 mm cartridges would not work with this pistol. It needed 5.7 X 28 mm rounds, which were hard to come by. The fact of the matter was, the majority of pistols used 9 mm bullets. But why would the militia that built this shelter store an FN 5.7 pistol here without providing ammo for it? There had to be ammo for it in here somewhere.

  Crouching, he rooted through the boxes of ammo on the bottom shelf and finally found a box of magazine clips loaded with 5.7 X 28 mm rounds. He clawed open the cardboard box, dug out a clip, and slapped it into the empty receiver of the FN 5.7.

  “Can I have one of those?” said Victoria, who was standing over him watching him.

  He handed her the loaded pistol.

  He found another FN 5.7 for himself, loaded it, and snugged it into his holster.

  He could have selected a Beretta 9 mm pistol, which would have been easier to find ammo for, but he preferred the armor-piercing capability of the FN 5.7. In any case, the FN 5.7 was just backup for his MP7, his gun of choice.

  Victoria fell to coughing. Her face turned red as she doubled over.

  “Are you OK?” asked Halverson.

  “This air’s . . . getting . . . to me,” she answered between choking and coughing fits.

  The air was fuggier than ever, he noticed.

  “We have to get out of here,” he said. “Put on your gas mask,” he added and reached for his own.

  Chapter 7

  “We need to load up on food and water before we leave,” said Victoria, recovering from her coughing jag.

  Halverson nodded.

  They gathered up canned goods, dry goods, bottles of water, and bottles of fruit juice, and stuffed them into knapsacks till the knapsacks were bursting at the seams.

  Victoria groaned under the weight of her knapsack as she lifted it onto her back. “These cans and bottles are heavy.”

/>   “I know,” said Halverson, hefting his knapsack onto his back and breaking into a sweat what with the musty air and heavy heat of the blast shelter.

  “I don’t know about you, but I’m not gonna be able to walk very far with this load on my back.”

  He looked at her sweat-smeared face. “Look at it this way. The farther we go, the less heavy our sacks will get.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “Because we’ll be drinking and eating on our way, so there’ll be fewer cans and bottles for us to carry.”

  “It’s gonna be a long, slow journey with all this stuff we’re carrying.”

  “What’s the rush?”

  Victoria gave him a look. “Where are we going anyway? Have you even thought about that?”

  “Nothing’s changed. We’re still heading for DC. We have to find out who’s running the government and why they nuked Las Vegas. What is their plan?”

  “To kill the flesh eaters, you said.”

  “Yeah, but they’re killing everybody else, too. What kind of a plan is that?”

  Victoria heaved a sigh and shrugged. “Well, we can’t stay here. Not without air.” She coughed again.

  Halverson inspected his gas mask. “I hope these masks have reactor filters for both radioactive iodine and methyl iodide.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There are different gas masks for different types of toxicity.”

  “Like what?”

  “Some gas masks protect the wearer from toxic gases. Other masks filter out bacteria and viruses that are airborne. Then there are masks that do both.”

  Victoria glanced at the mask in her hands. “Hopefully this does both.”

  “That would be the best-case scenario.”

  “Is there any way to tell which kind of gas mask this is?”

  Halverson screwed up his face, inspecting the gas mask in his hand. “Not without an instruction manual. I don’t see one of those around here.”