by Nick Cole
There were orders so dark, no one knew about them. Orders that prevented the President from ever being taken as a hostage. No matter what. As long as one of his detail, and the not small army that surrounded him, had at least one bullet left, there was no way that was ever going to happen.
If he was dead, the Football was useless.
Steele said the Football was in play.
So, the President, and the government, were still in the game. Somewhere.
That was the way the technology and the double-blind system worked with the Football. Braddock had been on a foreign over-watch detail for the POTUS once. He knew the protocols. If the President was still alive, that meant the government was too. And that meant the world might not be totally gone yet.
That meant there was still a chance.
Except, now he had to prevent Steele from being killed. Steele, the man he was sent to kill. Sent to kill in order to save whatever was left of the world.
“Warlord to convoy,” came the monotone voice over the net. “Prepare to exit freeway for detour. The route ahead is blocked. Weapons live. Do not stop.”
Ahead, Braddock could see that the military had set up a roadblock around an overpass. It was still occupied and it appeared that every zeke in the world was swarming it.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Holiday crawled forward into darkness and pushed away thoughts that tried to tell him he was heading for a dead end, or...
... another drop.
... a large blade waiting, gleaming in cold, pale blue light.
... or something worse.
Not helping, he lectured himself, and continued crawling forward inch by inch.
But the truth of it was... things were not just getting worse. They were already worse.
This is bad, he thought. The sobriety of the situation washed over him like a sudden wave of cold ocean deep.
He was lost and trapped inside whatever this thing was. The thing that rose up like a weird wedding cake for robots in the remains of the old Marine base.
In the darkness he saw the dead. Not the zombies, or the zekes, as Ritter kept calling them. No. He saw everybody back at the castle. Saw the undead getting over the walls.
Saw Frank, Ritter, Dante, Candace, Skully, Cory, and Ash... dead.
Except now they were the undead.
And he would be alone. Always. In the dark. Just like now. Forever.
He thought of all the booze out there still waiting up at the Market Faire. And all the other places he would have time for once everyone was gone. Time to have his very own personal apocalypse.
He thought about that. About his very own personal apocalypse of booze.
And then...
You’re the one that’s probably going to die. Here in the dark. He continued forward again, trying to crawl fast, breathing harder. It seemed like he’d been crawling for hours.
It seemed like he would crawl on forever. In the darkness. All alone.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Ritter had Frank by the arm. But it was hot, and the their sweat-slick skin was making it difficult to hold on. Frank felt himself losing his grip while at the same time sliding out of Ritter’s. It was an awful feeling. A helpless feeling. He was losing consciousness, watching his vision dissolve down to a small pinpoint of what the world was without him. The ceaseless pounding of the dead against the containers getting farther and farther away, as was everything in this life. Nothing meaning much in light of what had happened. What was to come. Hanging from a ledge three stories up.
Every day.
He felt the blaze of noon hot griddle of the metal containers against his cheek. Felt the splash of cold water someone had tossed down upon him.
Every day.
“Get back!” someone screamed. And Frank heard the thick CHUNK of a weapon, an axe maybe, striking into soft rotten flesh.
“They’re coming over...” whispered Frank. Knowing that they were. That the dead were coming over the walls.
He was lying on the surface of the top container. They’d pulled him up. He’d blacked out. But they’d gotten him up.
Don’t give up on me.
“I won’t,” he whispered.
***
After that night in the temple that was not a temple, Frank had walked back down through the town alone. Returning to Jordana. Spotting her on the balcony from the street below, wrapped in a shawl, watching the street and waiting for him.
When she’d let him in and brought him back to her room, there was wine.
“So you know now?” she asked in her husky breath of a voice.
I do.
Frank nodded saying nothing.
He knew now what his job was. Why they’d recruited him to do what needed done. Shown him the date where he must be found. Shown it to him in a book, old and dusty, yellowed thick pages. “Vellum,” Andrea had proclaimed, as his hand barely caressed the ancient page, the silent monk holding it out reverently.
“Now do you believe, my son?” Andrea had asked Frank after Frank asked, “Why me?” His eyes unable to stop taking in all the horrors on the walls.
The Terrible Horribles.
“This oracle...” Andrea nodded to the sarcophagi. “She told us much. Many more things than I can show you tonight. It is written that she spoke for three years straight. In a trance. Never stopping. Everything. It was all copied down though they had no idea what she was saying. Only the knight knew that it was all somehow important to the future. That it all must be recorded and... someday, acted upon. The reference of you was found over two hundred years ago by a Brother Tysonious working on the future archives. Combing all the prophecies. Looking for clues. Do you see here...”
He pointed toward the ancient text. It was in Italian. But Frank could see that certain words were understandable. Indochine. Romano. The date. The time. The Battle of a place called Hill 319, in Italian.
“This says... seek the survivor who would not quit. Our agent determined that was you. And even...” Andrea moved his long manicured finger farther down the page. “There was a message from the oracle... to you... personally... it says, ‘Tell him... don’t sleep in the subway.’” Andrea looked up at Frank, his eyes wide, searching for something.
“Does that mean anything to you, my son?”
“No,” Frank said numbly. “Maybe the Petula Clark song...”
The monk closed the ancient tome, returning it to a table among tables, each piled with many, many more of the same. The room was filled with books. Filled with terrible horrible futures that might have been, and still might be.
“The only thing we know, is that to stop these... these nightmares... we must stop the agents of the Black Hand. Stop them from their wars, plagues and famines. From their work. Wherever there has been such, in history, we have found them. We use these...” he cast one hand out over all the books in the room. “to find them. You, my son, must go and stop them.”
“Will you,” asked Jordana as the night wore on and they sat by the lone candle drinking the red wine she’d set out for them. The fog had come in to smother the town in a thick blanket of white swirling mist. There was only silence beyond their murmurings.
“What about you?” he asked her. Watching her eyes move from the fog beyond the balcony and back to him. The night was quiet. So silent it felt as though they were hiding in it.
“I have no choice,” she said. “I never did.”
“But... I do?”
“For now...” she said and it seemed a sigh. A breath that expressed a space unknowable. A shifting of some great burden from one shoulder to another. If just for a moment. And then a long journey must continue.
“Who was the oracle? Who was she?” he’d asked Andrea.
Andrea walked toward the sarcophagi. Frank followed. Standing above it, he ran one hand along its co
ld surface. Gently.
“I used to wonder about her. We have theories... guesses... but no one really knows. She knew... everything, and even things that seemed crazy and could never be. Even now. The miracle is not that she knew these things, but that those knights, that murky King Arthur no one really knows, trusted her enough to found this place based on what she told them. To make a way where there seemed to be none. To try to save a world they would never know, again and again... without ever knowing why. They had no evidence that we know of. But something happened in Montmartre that changed them. Something not written down in any of our books, but alluded to in another book far more ancient, and it would seem lost to time now. Something happened that made Arthur and his knights take her very seriously.”
Andrea paused and took one step away. Then stopped. He turned back once again.
“That was the miracle. That they believed. And as the years passed and the things she told us came true, it became easier for the order to trust her words. Now, they are unquestionable. But then... how? How could they have known? There are mysteries inside of mysteries here.”
Andrea stared down at the heavy stone lid and his manicured fingers upon it.
“We have no idea who she was.” And, “Of all the mysteries, this is the one I would like to know the most, even though it probably means nothing. Who was she? Some peasant? Some nameless village girl with a gift... some witch? An alien? Someone from the future? We will never know in this life.”
Within the candlelight circle fighting the gloom back in the apartment, Frank reached out and took Jordana’s hand. It was cold, and yet there was an energy, a warmth, waiting there. She smiled up at him. But it was a sad smile.
“I’ll stick,” he said.
She watched him for a long moment. And then smiled. And this smile was different. As though some hope had finally dared to try again.
“I couldn’t leave you,” he told her. Not because it had been written down. Because who could predict the heart? But because of the heart, and no prophecy or dark conspiracy, he would stand by her... because she could not leave this place.
Because of her.
He would stick.
And Frank is back. On his hands and knees on top of the cargo container gate. He can hear Ritter and Dante grunting. Wet pulpy slaps. Makeshift weapons battering at corpse-y sacks of rotting flesh and brittle bone. Gnashing teeth and reaching claws.
I was just like you once, they seem to say in every grave-rasp growl.
Now I’m dead. And soon... you will be too.
When Frank looks up, he can see the gray, green, and purple hands of the dead, necrotic and scabbed, bones broken and protruding or bent and shattered, at eye level. The head of a raving man whose eyes have been gouged out, rising up, pulped nose twitching as it scents the living, and Ritter plants the fire axe right down into its head. A second later, his boots shift at Frank’s eye level and Ritter kicks the corpse off and down into the crowd three stories below. But more are coming up. Trying to get over.
Both Dante and Ritter are breathing heavily. They won’t last long, thinks Frank.
The dead are coming over the walls.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Steele’s Humvee swerved off into the dirt and smashed through a wire mesh fence that once guarded the freeway from pedestrians. The rest of the convoy followed, jumping a curb and landing on a main street that ran alongside the highway.
“Brees! Dial in the standard channels and see who they are!” ordered Braddock.
“On it!” called Brees from the back of the large vehicle.
Atop the makeshift overpass fort, Braddock could see guys with entrenching tools swinging away at zekes, and climbing atop piles of other live zekes and dead-again corpses to reach the heights of the pre-fab barricades that had been erected along the overpass. Massive military fuel haulers lay across the highway as some sort of blockade.
Then they were gone from view as the convoy dove into the business district streets surrounding the freeway.
“That’s bad,” stated Gautreaux. When no one asked what was bad, he answered as though someone had. “When you’re down to shovels... eh, Cap-i-tain. Very bad for them.”
Ahead, a crowd rushed into the streets, moving faster than the usual zekes. Steele’s vehicle clipped half of them, sending corpses flying in every direction as the rest careened into the next Humvee, throwing themselves all over it. It swerved suddenly, lost control, and smashed though the large plate-glass front of a car dealership showroom. By the time the MRAP passed, the stranded Humvee was buried in corpses that raged at the doors like insane lunatics as they smashed the windows of the stuck vehicle.
There was no way the guys inside were getting out of that one.
Gautreaux shot Braddock a quick look from behind the steering wheel as the rest of the convoy followed Steele, leaving the trapped Humvee behind.
Braddock ignored Gautreaux and pointed his gaze forward.
At the end of the street, a corpse-swollen intersection waited for the convoy. At the last second, Steele’s Humvee made a hard left and followed an alley Braddock hoped led somewhere other than a dead end.
The gargantuan MRAP smashed into the side of a brick building, barely fitting along the tight passage down the alley. Shadows and corpses fell beneath the wheels as Braddock watched the passage ahead while disintegrating brick turned to dust along the sides of the vehicle. A moment later, the lead Humvee erupted onto a main street and disappeared into another alley across the far side of the road.
The claustrophobia and tension were palpable inside the seemingly normal, narrow alley that raced by the speeding giant war machine. Even to guys who had been trained in environments that were the very definition of claustrophobia and tension, things were getting too close. Too real. Too deadly.
“They say they’re National Guard, Cap,” reported Brees. “Ran out of ammo four days ago. Waitin’ on evac.”
Evac ain’t coming, thought Braddock as the convoy sped farther and farther away from the besieged bridge.
The convoy vaulted onto another cross street and smashed through a wave of zekes, sending bodies flying while others pressed forward in some convulsive reflex of dead people seeking living flesh.
Miniguns erupted in short burps farther up the convoy. The remains of the bullet-shredded dead painted the blood-spattered walls of the next alley.
That alley opened up onto a wide street and a football field-sized vacant lot where a building had been in the process of being demolished. Before everything went to hell. Gangs had tagged the demolished building despite the world ending all around them. Maybe they hadn’t noticed. Maybe their constant destruction had immunized them against realizing they were being destroyed at that very moment. Maybe destruction was all they desired. Maybe a zombie-overrun world was what they’d wanted all along.
Zekes clogged the streets and surged forward at them.
“This is rapidly going from bad to worse, mon Cap-i-tan.” Gautreaux stared out at the vast sea of corpses. “I think we’re getting really lost in here, eh?”
It was true. Things were getting worse and they were off the mission route and headed into the unknown. The possibility for something catastrophic to happen and get them all killed was increasing by the second.
But what could they do, thought Braddock, as he watched the ex-legionnaire turn the wheel rapidly to follow the snaking convoy further into the construction site.
“Yeah,” said Brees. “Feels like it’s about to go sideways real bad.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
Holiday heard an industrial thrum. The walls of the air duct shuddered. Ahead, some lost screw or nut vibrated on the surface of the duct creating a secondary, more neurotic rattle.
Don’t think about the guillotine, he told himself.
How long would this last?
And then some voi
ce, not the one that hectored and called him a “maggot.” Not that other voice, but a new one, whispered, “Hell is forever.”
And he crawled on and on in darkness until wan blue light began to illuminate something ahead. A moment later, the duct opened up into a larger duct. Except it wasn’t a duct. It was a space between large metallic pipes and walls that felt ceramic when his fingers reached out to touch them. There were no walkways. No spaces to stand. Nothing for a man to move about in. The way ahead was merely an open space between a massive curving wall that ran off in both directions, and arcane pipework that thrummed and barely vibrated, as though radiating some immense and uncontainable power.
Holiday slithered along the curving ceramic wall, at points either having to duck or suck in his already nonexistent stomach, to squeeze past some odd bit of piping.
He felt the surface of the wall at his back change. Felt some kind of seam there. With difficulty, he turned around and faced the gigantic wall. It rose high above into sightlessness where a mist seemed to swallow everything in the heights up there.
In front of him lay the outline of a door. Its seams drawn like perfect lines matching the curvature of the surface, just waiting for someone to open it.
Finally, thought Holiday. A door.
There was something comforting about the shape of the door. As though its roughly human-sized height meant that at some point people had come here. Worked here. Done maintenance here. That there was some way out of this never-ending maze of arcane machinery. For a long time it had begun to feel as though he’d gone beyond some line that tourists weren’t supposed to pass. Anything that happened now was his own fault. Some line that divided the known and the real from the unknown and surreal. Some limbo he would cross into forever. Not knowing why. Just some cosmic do not cross line that never should’ve been crossed in the first place.
But there was no lock. No handle. Nothing...