Run (Book 2): The Crossing

by Rich Restucci

  Rick wiped his hand across his face. “One of those God damned things grabbed him and they both went down.”

  “Where’s Henry?” demanded Ravi.

  “Dead,” the SEAL said, shining his light into the bottom of the shaft. “Truly dead.”

  Linda put her hands to her mouth, “You shot him?”

  Seyfert pulled the screwdriver from the base of the elevator doors. “He was already dead. He landed on one of the Limas, and another landed on him. There was blood everywhere, I could see…” The SEAL sighed. “He was dead.”

  “One of the students grabbed him,” Phil said helplessly, “and then the whole damn campus was coming down the hall. Rick shot two through the door, and then he nailed the wedge holding the door open. It closed before the others could get to us.” He looked at Rick. “Damn fine shot.”

  “Too damn late more like,” Rick said

  Bourne put his hands on Ravi’s shoulder. “Did he have any critical data on him?”

  “Yes, he had—”

  “Is that all you can think of?” screamed Brenda. “The data? A man just died. Your man shot him!”

  “Ms. Poole, we didn’t come—”

  “He’s dead! He was alive two minutes ago and now he’s dead because of you!”

  “Because of us,” Rick whisper-yelled. “Us? Dammit, woman, look around! He’s dead because of this plague!” He pointed his finger at her in the dim light. “If anything, he’s dead because of you! Now shut the fuck up and do what you’re told, or so help me we will tape your damn mouth closed.”

  Brenda looked shocked, but she kept quiet. Seyfert was already looking through the tinted glass on the garage door, but everyone else was looking at Rick, Dallas with a small smirk.

  Seyfert broke the tense silence with a whisper. “Multiple hostiles outside, sir, a hundred at least coming this way.”

  Bourne looked directly at Brenda. “Nobody yells again.” He picked up his radio. “Tin Can, Lead. We need a smash and grab, hostiles imminent, over.”

  Seyfert was prying the elevator door back open when Androwski’s voice came back, “Copy that, Lead, inbound now, thirty seconds. We have a visual on the loading dock doors. Be ready, over.”

  Seyfert climbed down the last few feet into the bowels of the elevator shaft and retrieved two hard drives and a notebook from Henry’s corpse. Dallas gave him a hand up and they closed the doors again. The growl of the LAV’s engines, and then the roar of the Bushmaster were heard. Tin Can was close.

  “Seyfert, Rick, cover,” Bourne said, holstering his sidearm. “Dallas, you and I will hoist the door. Civilians, get close together in the center behind the weapons.” He pointed at Rick and the SEAL. “We need to do this quickly.”

  Two steel L-shaped slide-locks held the door closed. Dallas and the colonel reached down and put their hands on the locks, ready to pull them and push the door up when the LAV made its grand entrance.

  “Lead, you have two Limas in front of the door, we can’t fire or we could hit you…disregard, they are tracking us. They walked off of the loading dock. Ten seconds, over!”

  The rumble of the heavy vehicle was loud even through the steel door, and the group inside the building heard a hatch open followed by five quick reports. “Open the door, quick!”

  The last was shouted, but not over the radio. The colonel and the big Texan slid the locks and threw the door up. Seyfert and Rick turned left and right and both shouted, “Clear!” The ramp to the LAV was descending, an army of the living dead thirty meters and closing. Androwski popped back into the open turret and got on the light machine gun. “Move it, people!”

  Rick and Seyfert ushered the civvies in followed by Bourne and Dallas, and finally themselves. Seyfert slammed his hand against the red button and the ramp began to ascend. It closed, and he jerked the yellow lever locking it in place. “Piece of cake,” he said and sat down with his back against the hull.

  “This is nice,” said Phil as he looked around the inside of the LAV. Stark didn’t need marching orders, and he gunned the accelerator, the standing occupants in the back stumbling. There was no way around the oncoming horde, so Stark plowed through them at medium speed.

  Linda looked horrified at the first thump. “What was that?”

  Ravi looked at her. “Undoubtedly an assembly of former Beantown residents.”

  Eight minutes later, the LAV entered the Charles River.

  “Brilliance, this is Tin Can, we are in the Chuck, with the city of Boston in pursuit. Personnel transfer will commence at the mouth of the river, there are too many hostiles too close, and the natives are restless, over.”

  “Copy that, Tin Can, we see you. Copy on the rendezvous.”

  Ravi, Linda, and Brenda were looking at the water sloshing around their feet. Brenda and Linda lifted their feet out of the water and put them under their legs on the seats. Ravi reached down and stuck his finger in the water. He pulled it back up and smeared his fingers together. He opened his mouth to ask a question, but Seyfert cut him off with a sardonic half-smile. “Relax, professor. We won’t sink.”

  40

  The orange and pink glow of the sunset was heartening, even if it was over a ruined town. The last vestiges of a dying day glinted off of thousands of small wave crests in Massachusetts Bay. A dingy olive drab military vehicle, looking much like a floating tank, stuck out in stark contrast next to a large pleasure boat in the harbor of the tiny town of Marshfield. The town had not been spared from the plague, and evidence of hasty retreats and watery graves were present at the small dock the survivors had chosen for anchorage. Several boats had been attached to a fuel dock when the dock had exploded. Burned pilings, and the ruin of several piers held melted fiberglass hulks that used to be boats. Bullet holes and brown stains covered a small shack near one end of the semi-sunken dock. A corpse was in a fetal position on the charred boards. Not much more than a skeleton, the body had been picked clean by sea birds and anything else brave enough to dine.

  “I’d rather not leave her moored like this, sir; I think solid ground would be better.”

  Bourne looked up from his torn and folded atlas, the GPS in the LAV having ceased to function through an internal fault a half hour before. “I understand, Stark, we should only be a few more minutes here and we can get underway.”

  The grind of a bilge pump echoed through the LAV as a black-eyed Stark ducked back in the top-side turret. The survivors had been anchored at the last unburned dock for approximately an hour, working out how they would get to a small industrial park in the low hills outside town. The park was actually an NSA front for computer research and training. Ravi told Bourne and his crew that there were four buildings on three acres surrounded by a nine-foot-tall stone wall. An electric fence twenty feet inside of the stone wall was another barrier would-be spies or terrorists would have to surmount should they attempt to break in to the facility. In addition, the entire computer research installation was underground, and it was six miles away.

  Not everyone would fit in the LAV, so another ride would have to be appropriated. The Brilliance would move a half mile off shore with everyone but the three SEALs, and Stark, Androwski, and Seyfert would commit grand larceny, stealing a local vehicle.

  Two hours after they left, Stark and Androwski returned, rowing a small boat out to the Brilliance, who had seen them and moved to intercept.

  “Where’s Jersey?” demanded Dallas, nervously looking about.

  Androwski held up a finger telling Dallas to wait a second, his hands on his knees and breathing heavy on the deck. “With…with your new vehicle.”

  “Ya winded, Navy?” Dallas folded his beefy arms. “Thought SEALs was tough.”

  Androwski switched fingers. “You try rowing for half a mile, Chief. That is if the boat would haul your giant, sasquatch-ass anyway.”

  Seyfert and the new vehicle, a blue dualie Ford F350, were in a good spot, and he would rendezvous with the team as soon as they radioed him. It was decided that after
an hour’s rest, they would get underway. Stenner, Wilcox, Anna, Rick, and Dallas would use whatever new vehicle they had, and the rest would ride in the LAV. Phil adamantly refused to leave his scientist friends.

  “I’m surprised you didn’t want to go with your wife,” Anna said to Rick when they were once again, anchored almost a mile from the beautiful beach.

  “Ex-wife.” Rick sat on the plush couch and put his dirty, booted feet on the glass table, closing his eyes. Dallas sat down beside him.

  Anna whispered to Wilcox, “Not surprised anymore.”

  Stenner called from the above decks, “They’re out of sight. And none too soon, the beach has some tourists.”

  Anna climbed out from below decks and made her way to Stenner. He passed her a bottle of water and pointed toward the coast. Two figures were walking the beach, very close together.

  She stuck her hand out while she was drinking from the bottle and Stenner passed her the binoculars. She raised them to her eyes with one hand. “Oh shit, that’s awful.”

  “What?”

  “Those two dead people are hand-cuffed together.”

  “Aw shit, that is awful… Lemme see.”

  40

  The town of Marshfield Massachusetts is small area-wise in comparison to some towns in the United States. Approximately thirty square miles of land, with several miles of beautiful coastal seashore, complete with gorgeous beaches and dunes. Approximately twenty-five thousand people live in the small town year round, but in the summer time the population swells to over seventy thousand, even higher during holidays like Memorial Day, or the Fourth of July. Some simple math on a winter month indicates there are almost eight hundred thirty-five people per square mile. Triple that for a summer month, and you are at about twenty-five hundred people per square mile. Frustrating for townies when they have to deal with “Cape traffic,” but down-right deadly when it’s not just your neighbor, your mom, and the local constable that are trying to eat you, but thousands of tourists as well.

  The plague hit the town just after Memorial Day, and the Department of Public Works had put up dozens of street signs announcing the three-hundred-eightieth birthday celebration for the town at various spots and beaches throughout the area. When the dead started rising, poor Marshfield had been cursed with a full house.

  The streets, both wide and small, were teeming with shambling victims close to the beaches. They had invaded the shops and restaurants, homes and businesses with no thought to nautically themed porches or carefully manicured lawns. With a single-minded objective, they converted all in their path to their cause with no hesitation, no mercy, and no remorse. Other than the sound of the breeze through the marshes, or the occasional shrill cry of a seabird, the only noises were those the dead intermittently made. It was deathly quiet.

  The rumbling roar of a Detroit Diesel 6V53T engine coupled to an Allison MT653, 6-speed transmission, sounded like thunder in a breadbox as the LAV made its way past abandoned vehicles, the debris from burned-out houses, and the ever-present forms of the dead. A blue Ford truck followed close behind. Every creature, living or otherwise could not help but hear the vehicles make their way westward. The living ones were no longer ignorant of the inclinations of the stumbling former humans, so they stayed put in their hidey holes. Dogs, cats, rats, and even one horse kept out of sight. The dead did no such thing. They came from behind smashed doors, from dumpsters and under cars, from fire stations, and summer cottages, even from the candy shop. The unearthly quiet that had settled upon this picturesque little town disappeared when the LAV thundered down the garbage strewn streets, but soon the moans of the hungry dead became just as loud.

  In minutes, a veritable river of dead people flowed behind the LAV and the truck, emanating frustrated, mournful noises.

  With the abandoned vehicles, and unrepaired road damage, it was slow going initially. After about two miles, the salt air was behind them, and the dead thinned considerably. They still stumbled onto the road, however, Stark avoiding them where possible. The teams arrived at the long winding driveway to the Marshfield Hills Industrial Park just before 1500 local time. There were no living or dead in sight.

  A large white sign with red letters reading, Please report to the gate house to check in prior to entering the industrial park. Speed Limit 10 MPH, was posted on the left side of the driveway.

  When they reached the empty gatehouse, Ravi pointed at the forward monitor. “We want the building to the center left over there.”

  Stark turned and looked back at Bourne. “Sir, that’s a serious gate.”

  The gate was a yellow monstrosity of tube steel stretching across both lanes with the guardhouse in the middle behind it. A second identical gate was twenty or so meters further up the road with a second guardhouse. In between the gates were six cylindrical pistons extending upward from the driveway, three in each lane. A pretty stone wall spread in both directions from the gate and hooked back toward the compound at about a hundred meters to the east and west.

  “Sir, I can blow the gates,” Seyfert tapped on the view screen, “but I can’t do those pistons.”

  Bourne looked at the group. “Suggestions.” It wasn’t a question.

  Stark was shaking his head. “I can’t run over those pistons, but I might be able to crash the wall.”

  “Negative, I like the wall as a defensive barrier. We can shore up the gate area after we get in.”

  “What about destroying the pistons with the tank weapon?”

  Bourne looked thoughtful. “This is an LAV, Ravi,” he corrected. “We could damage the pistons enough that we might not be able to get in, and I want to conserve ammo, but I’ll keep it in mind.”

  Phil, sitting on the bench and cleaning his fingernails with a pocket knife, pointed to the screen. “Light’s on in the guardhouse.”

  Everyone looked at him.

  He shrugged, but didn’t look away from his nails. “Power’s on. Why don’t you just open the gate and lower the pistons?”

  “Wanderer One, this is Two, what’s the hold up?”

  “Big damn gate,” Stark answered. “Stand by.”

  “Copy that, out.”

  “Sir, I’ll check the guardhouse then?” Seyfert asked.

  “Stay frosty, I don’t see any Limas in our area, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there. Check for living hostiles as well, this is a government facility. Chief, go with him.”

  “Roger that, Colonel,” Androwski confirmed.

  The SEALs exited the LAV via the top hatch and climbed down to the road. The pistons were lowering in fifteen seconds, and the both gates swung wide as well. A second chain-link gate rolled back on wheels, allowing access to the facility.

  Seyfert scanned the area as he and his partner walked the vehicles through the perimeter fencing. “This whole place screams to be left alone, I’ve got to admit it has me uneasy.”

  “Me too, I don’t like it at all. Where the hell is everybody? I would think an installation like this would have tons of people hiding out behind the walls.”

  “Maybe they’re inside.”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  Seyfert hit the buttons in the guardhouse to shut the gates and ran toward the rolling fence. He had to jump through sideways as it was almost closed when he reached it. The gate locked into itself as it closed. As an afterthought, Androwski moved to the inner gate house and in seconds a little red light appeared on top of the gates, and at every post along the chain link.

  “Electric fence,” he said when he returned to the group.

  The vehicles and the pedestrians made their way to the building that Ravi had previously indicated. The front entrance lights were on, and the glass doors had been prevented from closing by two wooden wedges. The building was wide open.

  The back of the LAV opened and the scientists and the colonel came out stretching. Four doors on the pickup opened and the rest of the team stretched as well.

  Androwski pulled his balaclava down to cover his face
and checked his weapons. “Everybody stay frosty, something’s wrong.”

  “How do you know?” demanded Linda.

  “Because this place has ridiculous security, a huge wall, a secondary fence, a gate system that could stop an Abrams,” he pointed to several locations, “and cameras everywhere.”

  “So how does that make something wrong?”

  “Because there’s nobody here to greet us or stop us and the damn front doors are open.”

  “Androwski, Seyfert, Wilcox, and Keleher, exterior recon of the buildings, then report to me. Dallas, you’re in the back of the pickup, Keleher, you drive if we have to bug. Rick, get up on that tower with one of the rifles,” the colonel pointed to a small radio tower with several antennae approximately thirty feet high, “and provide cover. Everyone else gather around. Except you Stark. Sorry, I want you in the LAV.”

  The obligatory Yes, sirs and Wilcos sounded off, and people started checking their weapons and radios before they got on the move.

  Forty minutes later, the recon team returned with intel that the other buildings were secure. No signs of anything ambulatory in any of the main structures or outbuildings. A silver Lexus was in the parking lot behind one of the buildings with the door open and the keys in it, but the dome light was off so the team assumed the battery had died. Androwski didn’t want to attempt turning the vehicle over for fear of giving their position away. Wilcox told Stenner that the gargantuan, eight-wheeled LAV had given them away already and they chuckled under their breath.

  No evidence of struggle, no blood, no people, and most importantly, no Limas had been detected. Bourne had heated up some food, and distributed some MREs as well. Androwski and Seyfert pulled their masks up and flipped on their safeties. “What’s next, sir?”

  “Recon team,” he looked at the four he had previously sent out, “get some chow and hit this building. Standard two-by-two cover formation, check rooms and lock doors as you go. Do not split up, Androwski is Team Lead. Ravi, Brenda, can you give us any intel on the building?”