by J. W. Vohs
Alan Ganstler wasn’t on the screen, but he and his cameraman could both be heard mumbling, “Oh my God,” until they too were brought down by the voracious monsters pouring from the hospital doors. Thankfully the video was cut short before the screaming began, and the anchor was back onscreen trying to appear calm in spite of the horrific story just aired.
“Police chief Dusty Roark told us before this broadcast that at least twenty officers are missing after the attack at Riverview, and more than a dozen have suffered serious injuries. Unconfirmed reports from neighborhoods near the hospital are being phoned in from concerned citizens, some of them claiming to be under attack in their homes and vehicles. We here at the station are trying to figure out how to safely send a crew back into the area, and we hope to have an update for you as soon as possible. When we spoke with Chief Roark he asked us to once again stress the need for everyone to stay in their homes . . .”
Jack finished his coffee in two gulps and headed for a refill, calling back to Carter, “Wake everyone up and get them into the meeting room by six-thirty.”
When everyone was gathered Jack summarized the news reports from the previous hour and explained his strategy for protecting The Castle, as well as his plan for fighting the zombies without unsuppressed firearms. It wouldn’t be feasible to depend primarily on guns with or without silencers to battle these creatures, and firearms in general were only one piece of a more comprehensive approach. He and Carter modeled the protective clothing they had procured, and then they displayed examples of the various weapons stockpiled for the coming struggle. When the briefing was complete Jack declared, “All of this has happened very fast, and I know some of you are simply in a state of disbelief right now. You know yourselves better than I do; if you aren’t mentally ready to face what we are going to encounter in the coming days, we have plenty of tasks that need to be taken care of within these walls. Still, everyone needs to get down to the armory today and get fitted for their protective gear and weapons. Those of you who know you could put these creatures down today, with no hesitation, let me or Carter know ASAP. We need to install phone lines to some of our neighbors and brief them on the best way to fight the zombies. We also need to convince people in the area to create roadblocks between us and the rest of the county.
“If you think I’m being overly cautious I assure you that by now infected people have escaped Fort Wayne and are heading out into the surrounding counties. How many people at Riverview last night actually live in Fort Wayne? Maybe half, maybe less? I’ll be shocked if we don’t have actual attacks in our county today, so we need to be cautious; no, we need to be downright paranoid. So get yourselves some breakfast and get down to the armory. I know most of our Rangers are outfitted and ready to go, so I need all of you at the gate in an hour. Carey will organize the guard rotation and set up a weapons training schedule for everyone else.
“Some of you here were actually my superiors in the Army, and I know it seems like I’m running a dictatorship here. I promise you that within a few weeks we’ll all know who our leaders and fighters are. Those of you with other skills will find your niche as well. Doc and Deb, for example, are in absolute control of our clinic; what they say down there will be followed without question! We learned during the war that just seconds of confusion can cost lives, so their orders are to be followed immediately and with no argument.
“Beginning right now, everyone needs to be able to operate the suppressed .22s, and at least one of the medieval replica weapons as well. If you’ve ever been to a hockey game at the Coliseum you know what nine thousand people look like; they seem to be endless, don’t they? Now think about the fact that Fort Wayne has a population of over two-hundred thousand, and at least twice that many people living within thirty miles of their courthouse. Within days thousands of those people are going to turn, probably tens of thousands. Every one of them is going to be a mindless eating machine that can only be stopped by destroying the brain. Again, if you can’t deal with that reality yet just stay in The Castle until you can. Carter and I lived through this once before, and even though I’m going to fight and kill them, I’m afraid to face these creatures again. So nobody’s judging anyone who doesn’t feel ready for this yet, please just be honest about how you feel.
“Finally, I want all of you to take a deep breath and calm your minds; we are going to survive this. We’re inside one of the safest places in America at this moment. We have a plan, and we have experience. As any of us who’ve been to war can tell you, we will have casualties. When we do, we will close ranks and move forward. From this moment on, our purpose is the defeat of this virus and to ensure the survival of this group.”
Jack took a moment and looked around the room, then declared, “Let’s do it!”
Jack’s first stop upon leaving The Castle was Andi’s house. He took along Tina, the wife of one of his Ranger buddies who had been an MP for eight years with three deployments to Iraq where women in combat was a foregone conclusion. Though only a shade over five-feet tall, Tina was wiry and tough, her short-cropped hair taking nothing away from her natural beauty and charm. Jack knew that Tina had been an excellent soldier and had run her own security company since leaving the service, but that wasn’t why he brought her along today. He hoped that Tina’s presence would assure Andi that he wasn’t some weirdo trying to get her into his compound, but he discovered that his fears were unfounded when the young mother met him at the door with an expression of overwhelming relief.
“Thank God you’re here,” Andi called out breathlessly as she pushed open the door then headed down the main hall in one fluid motion. “Have you been watching the news? I’ve been afraid to leave the house and come over. Can you follow me and the girls to your place right now? I hope it’s OK to bring the dog—the girls would be lost without her.” She stopped in front of a duffle bag and two small suitcases leaning against the wall next to a bedroom door. “As you can see we are all packed and ready to go.”
Jack smiled at Andi’s eagerness. “Sure, we can go any time, and the dog is no problem, but I brought someone I’d like you to meet.” Tina smiled warmly as she stepped around Jack and held out her hand. Jack gestured between the two women. “This is my buddy’s wife, Tina. Tina, this is Andi. Tina was in the Army with us, and she wanted to meet you and reassure you that half of our group is female and they’ll look out for you and the girls.”
Tina shook her head and explained, “I wasn’t exactly with ‘them’ in the Army. They’re Rangers and I was an MP, but yeah, you’re safe over there with me and the other gals.”
Andi ignored the proffered hand and impulsively hugged Tina, “Thanks for coming; I’m sorry I didn’t notice you when you came in. I’m not usually so self-absorbed. All I can think about right now is protecting my kids.”
Tina stepped back and looked Andi over, “There’s no need to apologize. Considering the circumstances, you’re just being smart. You look like an athlete—were you were in some kind of sport in high school?”
Andi smiled, “Good call; I actually had a volleyball scholarship to Ball State and played for two years. Then I had a two-minute lapse of judgment with a guy from my first-semester history class and my athletic career ended nine months later.”
Tina chuckled, “Well, we’ll keep ya’ll safe and teach you how to take care of yourself. Is there anything else you would like to bring? I can help you throw a few more things together since it might be quite a while before you can get back in here.”
Andi looked over at Jack and confessed, “I trusted you from the first for some reason. Even if you hadn’t brought Tina with you I would want to move the girls over there today. But thanks for being concerned enough to bring a woman with you.”
Jack smiled, “I felt the same way about you, or this wouldn’t have been my first stop after seeing the news this morning. Still, it’s a crazy world and a person needs to be careful about who they trust. I thought I’d bring Tina along in case you thought we might be a bunch
of wackos over there.”
“I appreciate it, Jack, I really do.”
Tina interrupted, “Hey, you two can take a cruise on the Love Boat when this crisis is over; for now I suggest that I stay here and help you pack up the girls for a longer stay, and we let Jack get on with the rest of today’s business.”
Andi nodded her agreement to Jack who decided, “All right, you two call me if there’s any problem. Keep the kids inside and the door locked. Give The Castle a call and have a truck brought over to help out. One person should always be on guard when you’re outside of this house.”
“All right, dad,” Tina joked, “I can handle this. Now get out there and stop the virus!”
Jack chuckled, “I can see that I’m not needed here. All right, thanks Tina. Andi, we won’t let you down. I’ll see both of you later today at The Castle.”
Next stop was the sheriff’s department, where Jack’s status as the county eccentric won him an audience with Sheriff Bob Gates after only a five-minute wait.
The tall, broad-shouldered lawman with a decent beer-belly on his sixty-year-old frame nodded recognition and asked good-naturedly, “What can I do for you, Mr. Smith?”
“Well, sheriff, I’m here about what’s going on in Fort Wayne with the viral outbreak. Did you see the footage of Riverview this morning?”
The sheriff turned serious, “Yep, I sure did. My people are on the lookout for anyone showing symptoms around here.”
Jack nodded, “That’s good, sheriff. I don’t know if you know that I was a Ranger in Afghanistan, before I became a professor in Louisville for the past few years. I faced this virus in the first year of the war.”
With that admission Jack had the sheriff’s full attention, and he spent the next ten minutes explaining his wartime experience with the infected. He also explained why he had built The Castle, the force he had in there with him, and the way he planned to fight the infected when they made it to their area. To his credit the sheriff accepted Jack’s information with no sign of ridicule, confessing, “The news footage has really messed us up around here. My people are scared. I’m going to share everything you’ve told me with my deputies, but I know most of them just aren’t gonna be able to accept it. We’ll set up roadblocks on all the major routes into the county from Fort Wayne, and keep an eye out for signs of infection around here. But I need you to keep your guys out of our hair. If things get as bad as you say they will, then you’ll get your chance, but right now I can’t have you running around as a paramilitary force in the county taking out infected citizens.”
Jack really hadn’t expected anything more out of Sheriff Gates, but he still tried one more time to convince him of the reality of the situation. “Thanks sheriff, I will keep my people out of your way, but you have to believe me when I tell you that the virus is already behind your roadblocks. It was probably already here by the time we saw the scene from Riverview. Dozens, maybe hundreds of people escaped that place after being bitten, and some of them are from our county. From what I can tell, some of the infected are turning in twenty-four hours, maybe less, so we could have attacks here today. If you’ll use your emergency powers to deputize me and some of my men we can be available for calls to subdue these creatures and quarantine those who’ve been infected. We won’t hurt anyone; we’ll just restrain them and bring them to your jail or some other secure facility.”
Now the sheriff did look a bit skeptical, “Well, I can’t do that, Mr. Smith. You and your folks have the right to defend your property, but I don’t want you out and about trying to be a police force. Take care of your own, but follow the curfew I’m about to order and stay inside like the rest of our citizens. We’re a bit out of the way of the rest of the world out here; I think we can keep the virus out of our county.”
Jack frowned but nodded his agreement, “Ok, sheriff, we’ll stay put. Good luck to you and your men.”
Jack’s next stop was the small clinic in the town of Albion. He walked in and took a look around the waiting room before walking up to the reception window. A shaken mother was speaking with the nurse manning the desk, holding a little boy who had a bloody T-shirt wrapped around his arm.
The poor woman had obviously just walked in and was explaining to the nurse behind the desk how her son was hurt.
She told her story with a few tears and a baffled expression, “We stopped by to see if my dad was all right. He was one of the officers at Riverview last night, and I was worried about him; he wasn’t answering his phone so we went over to the house. I found him in the bedroom, passed out with blood all over the place. I set Timmy down and went to Dad to see if I could help. Before I knew it Timmy was over at the bed and reached up to touch Dad’s face. Then Dad just bit him on the arm! His eyes weren’t open or nothing, and he wouldn’t let go. Timmy was screaming and crying, and I finally had to hit Dad in the head with a lamp to get him to let go. We left him there moaning and bleeding. I called 911 on the way over here and they said they would take care of him. Do you think I did right just leaving him there? I mean, Timmy is really hurt!”
The nurse nodded as if she wanted the woman to stop talking, finally interrupting with, “Address, please?”
The distraught mother immediately answered, “He’s at eighty-two-seventeen Johnson Road.”
In an annoyed tone the nurse explained, “No ma’am, I need your son’s address.”
“Oh,” The woman replied. “We live at nine-thirteen Smith Street in Albion.”
That was all Jack needed to hear. He ran out to the Jeep and sped off, quickly calculating that he was only seven or eight minutes away from the infected man’s house. When he arrived he saw that a sheriff’s department cruiser had just pulled in, so Jack turned into the next driveway, hoping the residents were at work on a weekday morning. Nobody appeared from inside the house to ask what he was doing, so Jack slipped behind the garage and pulled a set of binoculars from his backpack. The deputies were knocking at the door and calling out the man’s name, but after several minutes it was obvious nobody was coming to open up. Finally one of the deputies put his hand on the grip of his pistol and nodded to his partner to open the door.
Even from over a hundred yards away Jack could hear the moan of hunger as a large zombie rushed through the open doorway and attacked the deputy who had turned the handle. They immediately fell to the ground and rolled several times until the creature found an opening to the lawman’s throat. The deputy’s cries for help were transformed to a wheezing gurgle as the zombie ripped a huge chunk of flesh from the man’s neck, severing one of the main arteries and the windpipe in the process.
The stricken deputy’s partner now held his gun in trembling hands, but hesitated to shoot out of what Jack assumed was fear of hitting his partner. As the zombie pulled back from the successful neck-bite, the uninjured deputy rushed forward and grabbed the creature by the hair, pulling it off his partner and pointing his firearm at the chewing monster who for the moment seemed satisfied. Believing that the zombie was offering no more resistance, the deputy knocked the creature onto its stomach and slammed a knee into its back, keeping his weapon pointed at the head while using his other hand to reach for his cuffs.
The zombie must have finally swallowed the bloody morsel taken from the first deputy’s throat and realized it wanted more flesh, because it suddenly reached back with one hand, grabbed the arresting lawman by the shirt near the shoulder area, and slammed him to the ground with stunning force. The deputy found himself face to face with a creature cut straight from a horror film. The zombie’s eyes were all black pupils, it smelled rancid, and its mouth showed cracked, bloodstained teeth as it moaned and moved in to bite its next victim.
The deputy had seen the damage the zombie’s mouth could inflict during the attack on his partner, who now lay ominously silent and unmoving behind him. He wondered what had happened to his gun, remembering the feel of the weapon being jarred loose as the zombie smashed him to the ground. All of these thoughts were fleeting how
ever, as the stunned lawman instinctively moved to keep the zombie’s gnashing teeth away from his own face and neck. For a moment he seemed to be winning the struggle, shoving back the creature’s face as he stuck his thumbs into the attacker’s eye sockets and pushed him away with all his strength. Then the zombie began rapidly thrashing its head back and forth, causing the fingers of one of the deputy’s hands to slip into the monster’s mouth.
CHAPTER 8
Jack watched the struggle from his hiding place, silently repeating the sheriff’s warning to not interfere with law enforcement as he fought the impulse to help the two deputies. As the remaining officer began to scream in pain and Jack realized the lawman was losing his battle with the zombie, he decided to break the sheriff’s orders and intervene in this situation. He reasoned that aiding an officer in peril was not the same as interfering. Jack was carrying the usual assortment of weapons on his body, with plenty of backups in the Jeep. He pulled a short mace as he rapidly covered the distance to the struggle on the ground, slowing just a bit as he swung the heavy weapon like a baseball bat. The blow caught the zombie just above the ear, and his head was crushed with a sickening crunch as the body actually lifted off of the ground a few inches.
The deputy screamed again as the dead zombie took three of the officer’s fingers with him as he was propelled away from the scrum. Jack stood over the zombie for a moment to make sure he was truly dead, then turned back to the deputy to see if he could help. The officer was trying to wrap the bottom of his shirt around the stumps of his severed fingers, doing his best to ignore the pain as he asked, “Is that thing dead?”
Jack nodded as he checked on the other deputy, “So is your partner. Do you want me to take you to the clinic, or do you want to wait for the ambulance?”
“I’m not leaving Jackson. You better go on and get outta here, Mr. Smith, I heard what the sheriff told you about interfering and all. Do you think I’m going to be infected now?”