by Justin Bell
Broderick looked over and saw that Clark still held the shotgun on his lap, and he nodded, cranking the wheel suddenly right. Behind them, two snowmobiles swerved right as well to compensate. Broderick slammed on the brakes, slowing, and a green Polaris leaped up toward them while Clark pushed himself out the open passenger window, the shotgun in his hands. He roared off a single shot, and the snow machine driver screamed, throwing his hands up, losing control. The vehicle lurched right, struck a stump and pitched forward, throwing the driver end over end, tumbling through the dirt and snow.
“We’ve got two more on our tail!” Broderick shouted as the truck punched through another slim tree and finally spilled out onto a smooth passage through the woods. It was a two-lane dirt road running what seemed to be north to south, and the truck bounced once, then hit the tightly packed dirt and picked up speed, charging forward.
“This is more like it,” said Clark as the truck evened out, though behind them the two remaining snowmobiles accelerated, closing the distance.
Suddenly the last two snowmobiles burst through the trees almost right next to them, hitting the road, and closing.
“Dammit!” Broderick shouted. “They’re on us!”
“Lose ‘em!” shouted Jackson. “This thing’s gotta be faster than their snow machines!”
Broderick looked in the rearview mirror, seeing them grow nearer, coming upon them, starting to bracket the rear bed and converge. The Ford was handling like a dead dog, and as he coaxed the clutch and accelerator, it only seemed to be running worse.
“I think we knocked something loose coming down that hill. This thing is losing acceleration, not gaining. They’re almost on us.”
Gunfire roared from just behind them and Broderick ducked low, bracing himself, but he heard no impacts. Felt no bullets striking. Even as the truck continued to stutter and slow, there was another blast of gunfire from just behind them, and this time Broderick looked in the rearview mirror. As he looked he could see one snowmobile upended on the dirt road, the second careening sharply left, tilting off the passage and hurtling into the thick trees. It collided headlong with a large tree, bent around it and flipped, disappearing into the forest.
The road behind them and around them was empty.
“I’ll be damned,” Broderick whispered.
“What?” Jackson asked, looking over.
“I think that lady doctor just opened up on those chumps.”
In the window separating the cab from the bed, Priscilla flashed him a thumbs up, her other hand holding onto the M4 that had been in the canvas bag in the back of the truck.
Jackson shook his head and smiled.
“Give it a few minutes,” Clark said to Broderick, “then pull this beast over. Let me take a look at it, see if we can’t get her back up to speed.”
Broderick nodded, his heart slowing back to its normal rhythm and his aching fingers starting to relax slightly on the steering wheel. The truck barreled forward on the empty road, and he finally felt as if they were at least one step closer to him getting back home.
***
“Did you have to shoot up the car? We could have used some of that material.” Mayor Harris walked along the shoulder of the main road into Aldrich, looking at the sedan, pock marked with puckered bullet holes and spider-web cracked windows. Thin fingers of smoke stretched out from underneath the bent and bullet-ridden hood. In the passenger seat, Monique lay back, her head tilted to one side, eyes staring out into the barren trees to her left, the life in them just as absent as the leaves on the trees.
In the middle of the road, three of the men in hazardous materials suits were peeling Ralph from the road and dragging him across the pavement toward the opposite shoulder.
“Sir, you really should be wearing one of these suits,” one of the men said, looking at the mayor.
Harris grinned. “I was in a city council emergency session just after the crisis in Boston started, my good man. Every single person in the room died. Every one of them. Except me. I was the only one left standing. Whatever this thing is, whatever it does to people, I appear to be immune.”
The man shook his head and shrugged, turning back toward the other two who were struggling to muscle Ralph off the side of the road.
“Man’s got balls,” one of the men said.
“He’s freaking crazy, more like it,” a second one said.
Three other men were converging on Francine where she had fallen next to the car and worked together to scoop her up off the pavement and maneuver her in the same direction as Ralph. They were having a much easier time with the older woman.
“Was this really necessary?” another man asked, coming up next to the mayor. “When you asked us to come help with town security, this wasn’t exactly what we had in mind.”
“Captain Zyon, I understand your concerns. I know this situation is not optimal; however, I think you and I share the same need for operational security, do we not?”
Zyon nodded. “That’s the reason we’re here, Mayor. The reason we stopped here instead of continuing to Hartford. It’s not just because we served together.”
Mayor Harris smiled. “And here I thought us Army Rangers always stuck together.”
“Well, that certainly helps,” Zyon said. “You should consider yourself very lucky, Harris. It’s not every town that gets their own detachment of United States Army personnel. Fortunately things are in such a state of chaos right now that our leadership structure has effectively… lost track of us. We’re off the grid.”
“Just like Aldrich itself will be,” Mayor Harris replied. “Our own little self-sustaining ecosystem. A pocket of sanity among the infected chaos of the world at large.”
“And you think in order to continue that existence, we need to kill all those who might jeopardize that?”
“Do you disagree?”
“Not necessarily, but I don’t know. Seems to me that the larger the community, the more able-bodied citizens we’ll have to help rebuild.”
“At a point, yes. But until we have a better handle on exactly what this affliction is, I think it would be to our detriment to allow outsiders to just come waltzing in. I believe I’m immune to whatever this sickness might be, but just because I am does not mean everyone still alive in Aldrich is.”
“Fair point.”
“We hold the line. For a little while. Do what we can, then once the major crisis has passed, we focus on outreach.”
“Very well. Until then, we will continue our border patrols on the east and west entries.”
“Excellent,” Harris replied. He looked over toward the sedan and saw two more men working to free the limp and lifeless body of Monique from the front seat of the car. After a few moments they pulled her out and carried her across the road toward the spot where Ralph and Francine lay in a haphazard pile in the grass just off the shoulder.
“Keep up the good work, Captain.” Mayor Harris turned from the scene and walked around the concrete barricades, making his way down the shadowed path back into the town.
Chapter 9
Welcome to Connecticut felt less like a welcome and more like a warning as the beat up old pickup ambled past it, shifting from barely paved back roads to a full blown multi-laned highway. The truck was moving slowly, stuttering and coughing, straining to hit twenty miles per hour, and Clark had spent the past several miles cursing under his breath.
They veered right onto the freeway, and Clark eased off the accelerator, coaxing the brake. Although the sky had deepened to a near black darkness, he could make out the vehicles in the wash of his headlights, and there were a lot of them. Tail lights reflected in the pale light, dozens of them, most of the cars and trucks off at the side of the road, parked lazy and cockeyed as if everyone had held a competition for who could park the worst. As he navigated the pavement, Clark imagined what it must have been like for these people, roads full of normal, everyday traffic, when suddenly, all at once, they’d all started coughing and hacking, simul
taneously feeling compelled to ram their cars off the road to try to collect themselves.
But they never did. And they never would. He could almost picture the drivers still strapped in their seatbelts in every single car, heads bowed low, shirts stained with the remnants of their liquified lungs. Lucky for them (and unlucky for all of these others) the final few seconds of their lives had been frantic enough that they’d pulled their cars off the road, and there was at least a single empty lane allowing for travel, where the old Ford currently puttered, moving along at nearly walking speeds.
“We’ve got to do something about this,” Clark mumbled, steering further wide left of the ramshackle vehicles and applying a bit more force to the accelerator. The truck groaned and coughed, made a little lurch, but then resumed its tepid pace.
“Agreed,” Broderick said. “We’re still quite a ways from Aldrich, at this rate, it’ll take days to get there.”
Clark eased the truck toward the shoulder and found an empty spot near the grass embankment that surprisingly wasn’t occupied by other stalled vehicles. Cutting the engine, he sat there for a moment, listening to the silence, thick and opaque, like sludge. The light was nearly extinguished all around them, a vast, dark curtain of noiseless dark, and for a moment he just sat and let himself be consumed by it, trying to convince himself that the world wasn’t completely falling apart all around him. He saw Broderick doing the same, then drew in a breath and opened the noisy driver’s side door, easing his way out onto the pavement.
Jackson stirred inside the truck, sitting up from where he’d been hunched over in the rear seat and Broderick turned toward him.
“The truck is dying,” he said quietly. “We need to see what to do about fixing it. Fixing it… or finding another vehicle.” He turned and looked up and down the highway at the dozens of cars littering the shoulder, but he could not bring himself to get excited about searching them all to see if they were… occupied.
“I’d rather just get this beast running,” Clark replied from the road outside. “Picking through corpses to find the right vehicle… yeah. Let’s leave that as a last resort, shall we?”
“Makes sense,” Jackson replied sleepily.
“That exit sign we just passed, the one right after the welcome sign, mentioned a gas station at the next exit. I see some buildings right over the grass here,” Clark gestured through a narrow row of trees at the side of the road. “I’m going to take a walk down there and see what I can see.”
“Here, you’ll need a flashlight.”
Clark turned and saw Priscilla approaching him, flashlight in hand, offering it out.
“Thanks, Pris,” he replied. “How’s the kid? And Javier?”
She shrugged. “Both resting. I’ve dug out all the buckshot and we grabbed some ibuprofen from the cabin, so he’s got 800 milligrams of that on board right now. Best we could do. Melinda is snoozing next to him.” She glanced at the back of the truck, covered by the cap. “They related?” she asked, turning back to Clark.
“Nope. We met them in different spots in the city. She just… really took to him, I guess.”
Priscilla chuckled and shook her head. “Well, I’m glad she’s got someone to care about.”
“Me, too,” Clark replied. “Long as we can keep him alive.”
Broderick came up on Clark’s left. “The rest of you should grab some sleep while we’re stopped. There’s no telling how long it’ll take Clark to fix whatever’s broken. Long way still to Aldrich; we need to take advantage of the down time while we’ve got it.”
Priscilla nodded. “Best idea I’ve heard in a while. I’m exhausted.” She turned and walked back toward the tailgate.
“Clark, go find what you can for tools and parts if you need them. I’ll stand watch out here until you get back, all right?”
The ex-Marine nodded. “Thanks, Brody. Can I call you Brody?”
Broderick looked appalled. “No. No you can’t.”
Clark laughed to himself, then turned and pushed through the trees, walking down the gentle, grass-covered bank away from the truck and toward the scattering of buildings, barely visible in the low light of almost night.
Broderick turned and looked back inside the truck and Jackson was already back in the rear seat, his head bowed and chest heaving back and forth. Walking to the rear of the truck, he opened the tailgate carefully and peered in. Priscilla was still awake.
“Everything okay?” she whispered.
He nodded. “Yeah. Need the rifle.”
Priscilla acknowledged and reached next to her, bringing up the M4 carbine.
“This thing has some punch,” she said with a smile.
“Yeah, you made those guys on the snowmobiles look silly. Nice work.”
Her smile faltered and she lowered her gaze, looking at the ridged metal floor of the truck’s bed.
“He would have been proud,” Broderick said quietly, knowing what she was thinking.
She looked up at him, her eyes wet in the dim light and blinked away the scant tears that had formed.
“Yeah. He would have.”
“Good night,” Broderick said, nodding toward her and pulling away.
She didn’t reply, she just drew in a long, heavy breath and tipped over to try to get some sleep.
***
The December evening was cool and raw, but Agent Wakefield paced back and forth out in the grass in just his coat and tie, hands stuffed into the pockets of his once well-ironed slacks that had been wrinkled by over forty-eight hours of restless devotion to work.
“Aren’t you cold?” Agent Bryce asked, his coat and tie covered by a dark windbreaker emblazoned with the letters FBI. Bryce wasn’t with the FBI, he never had been, but that had been his cover story for the past several years, and even in the midst of the end of the world, he wanted to keep up appearances.
“It’s stifling down there,” Wakefield replied, pulling his hands from his pockets and crossing them over his chest, his head slightly upturned.
“You’re waiting for someone?” Bryce asked.
Wakefield nodded, almost imperceptible in the dim light of dusk. Bryce followed the direction of Wakefield’s gaze, up into the cloudy sky.
“All flights are grounded,” Bryce said. “You’re not going to see anyone up there.”
As if in response a low thumping of helicopter blades emanated from the distance, coming in from the northeast, a quiet whisper of noise just barely audible, but audible just the same.
“What the—?” Bryce asked, taking a step forward, coming up next to his intelligence partner. “Is that a helicopter?”
Wakefield’s mouth twisted into a smirk, his head nodding gently. As they watched, the dark egg shape drew in closer, coming in low, slightly tilted, drifting downwards, coming in slow and angled. The rotors were louder, a slamming thump, quickly drowning out any sparse exterior noise, punching them with thrashing wind, snapping the tails of their jackets up around their waists. As it came closer, the Bell helicopter twisted slightly, bringing the tail around, positioning itself for a clean landing in the open field, dropping more quickly now, the tail lifted, grass whipping underneath the beating propellers.
The two agents turned their heads away from the punishing downdraft as the helicopter set down in the grass, jostling to avoid taking off again, the side door swinging open. A man in bright fatigues slid from his spot in the co-pilot’s seat, one hand clasped around the handle of a thick, metal briefcase, a case so heavy he struggled to maneuver it single-handed, but he managed, levering it out of the aircraft and holding it against his thigh as he strode toward the two intelligence operatives.
As he reached the halfway mark between the helicopter and the two men, the dark aircraft slowly lifted from the grass, turned northward and swiftly elevated, its dark hide consumed by the blanketing evening sky.
He reached the two men, his face still obscured by an attached hood pulled tight over his head, his eyes glaring out from underneath the baggy, thick
fabric.
“You have it?” Wakefield asked him, gesturing toward the briefcase.
“This was all I could grab,” the man replied. “There were some… difficulties.”
“Difficulties, Sergeant Davis?” Wakefield asked.
Dean Davis lifted his head, pushing the hood from it, his stone-cold eyes glaring out from a purpling bruise on the left side of his face. He nodded slowly.
“Team Ten was lost. Major Chaboth and the rest. All except for Broderick Schmidt.”
“Not to sound callous,” Wakefield said, “but I could care less about the team. We need what’s in that case. We need the analysis data.”
Davis held out the case and Bryce moved forward, lifting it from his extended hand. It was heavy, and his shoulder sagged as he retrieved it, but he sucked in a breath and held it tight, refusing to show weakness in front of the other man.
“It’s not all there,” Davis replied, joining the two men as they walked back toward Fort Detrick. “I grabbed what I could. That’s one of the portable workstations, it should be pre-loaded with most of the genetic sampling that we captured at the scene. There were three more cases I couldn’t grab.”
“Better than nothing,” Wakefield replied.
Davis clasped a hand around Wakefield’s shoulder and spun him toward him, stepping into his face. “That’s the thanks I get? I was out in the middle of that,” he stabbed a finger in the general direction of the Northeast. “I was almost killed. Twice. All for the sake of what’s in that damn case.”
“Don’t raise your voice to me, Sergeant,” Wakefield hissed. “The Quincy convenience store was your operation. You were in charge and it went swirling. Don’t get on your high horse, Davis. It’s a long way down.”
“Are we really talking about this?” Davis asked, a sharp edge to his voice. “We stand on the precipice of the apocalypse and you’re worried about who reports to who and who’s in charge of whom?”
“We all have our jobs to do,” Agent Wakefield replied, “and now, more than ever, we need to operate efficiently and with structure, or all is lost.”