“Chase Stadium?” Ian said.
“Yep, and how do the streets look there?” Kinsey prompted.
“Empty.” Ian was starting to tire from the game, but Kinsey was seeing something he didn’t, so he played along.
“Correct, and how can you see that?”
“Because of the street lights… because of the street lights.” The realization struck Ian dumb.
“I did some research after you guys crashed last night. I was too pumped to sleep. When I saw power in certain sections of town, I found out that all the community areas like stadiums and convention centers have power because they have a direct link to the nuclear power plant. Don’t ask me why, I don’t know why, I just know that they do.”
“That’s pretty cool, Kins, but how is that going to help us?”
“Well, we aren’t going to be able to help those people no matter how much we want to. Maybe we can create enough of a situation to enable them to help themselves if we think big enough.”
“But what if they don’t see it in time to take advantage?” Jose asked.
“Well, I feel that there has to be some sort of personal responsibility here. All we can possibly do is create an opening for them. That in itself will be huge, and here is how I think we should do it…”
They spent a couple hours going over what she had in mind, and soon all agreed that it was the best plan with the least amount of danger. Also, it would get them on the road much sooner.
They were to go to three major facilities and use their sound systems to draw the infected to a vacant area of the city, thus allowing the trapped persons to escape if they were sharp enough. They couldn’t fix stupid, and someone who wasn’t practicing situational awareness right now was an idiot and a liability to other survivors.
Ian became introspective as they prepared themselves for the endeavor. He knew they couldn’t pull this off without having something go wrong; it just wasn’t possible, so he said a silent prayer for protection over his team, which he silently repeated over and over as he loaded his gear. Be smart—maintain oxygen, focus, and response, but most important… silence, breathe.
Everybody slept, ate, and bathed throughout the daylight hours until the sun began to wane. They developed three teams, one for each building they were going to hit, the smallest team being Rex and Thor led by Jose. Toby and Kinsey’s team consisted of Julia and Chianti, who arranged with Beverly to watch their kids. They also took a trained mine sniffer dog named Shrapnel.
Ian took Armand, Dark-haired Tom, and Jasper with him. Tom was young, but they needed eyes, and he would provide that. Tom had done some shooting down in the range with Jose, and he was pretty good for a beginner. Jasper was also young, but he had almost completed his training, and he seemed to be responding well, so Ian thought they could give him a try. Armand claimed to be a crack shot, however none of them except Ian’s team had ever shot one of the tactical rifles they would be using.
They scoped out a spot a few blocks away that looked empty and would disguise the sound of the van that they were going to take down there. The last thing needed was the sound of a big diesel engine rumbling down amongst those buildings while they were there.
Toby and Kinsey’s group headed off toward Chase Field. Rex, Thor, and Jose headed for the Talking Sticks Resort Arena, leaving the convention center to Ian’s group.
The doors on the convention center were locked tight with chains looped through the handles on the inside, and Ian wondered how many of these buildings were left virtually untouched. He also began to wonder what they could do when they got in there. The building was huge, but would it do what they needed it to do? First, they had to get inside before they could have a clue about that.
“Ian, it looks like there is a service door propped open around back here,” Armand said, though his voice held no excitement.
“Yeah, what’s wrong?”
“I don’t know, it’s… dark in there. It kind of smells a bit off too,” Armand said.
Ian looked at Tommy, who was trying to look everywhere but inside. Jasper, on the other hand, was ready to go as if there were all sorts of foul things he could sniff in there.
“Well, I don’t know if this building is going to work for us, considering what we need it to do, but we have to check it out since there aren’t any other viable options.” Ian noticed that his words did nothing to ease their fears. “Maybe there are some speakers we can rig up, but to try and unchain all of these doors to get them trapped in here isn’t going to happen. But there is a lot of street and campus to fill up. Look, if we can’t do this, then nobody can because there is nobody else. So, pick your dobbers up and let’s go.” Ian headed into the dark hallway.
He froze when the lights flashed on as soon as he passed through the threshold.
“They’re on a sensor,” Armand said with a mocking grin that made Ian wonder if he just brought it out in people. Ian was a tough guy—large for his size, as he liked to say—and it would instantly put people off-step in any conversation, which was kind of Ian’s humor base camp. He also knew how to fight, wore camouflage and carried a gun—several, in fact—as well as a few knives. Yet no matter where he went and no matter who he met, they all seemed to take great joy in fucking with him.
Such is the nature of man, I guess, he thought.
Every situation seemed to be an extension of his childhood. At times he felt like he never had parents and was born to play cowboys and Indians all his life, and what a great life it has been. He had been all over the world and fought with every variation of man there was and thankfully had come out on top every time.
His time growing up in Milwaukee and Green Bay was not wasted, and the skills he learned while playing in the park or the neighborhood had stayed with him his entire life. He had experienced every emotion known to man except for one. And if what he heard was true, he never, ever, wanted to go through that.
It was exactly that childhood and the training since then that told him of the body approaching soundlessly around the corner up ahead. They weren’t alone, and whatever was coming wasn’t infected. Infected lumbered and slid across a floor every now and then, eliciting a grunt or snort, unless they were in rage mode then it was balls to the walls screaming all of the time.
He crept to the corner with his back against the right-hand wall of the five-foot-wide hallway, peeking out in the opposite direction for a shadow or, if lucky, a convex mirror mounted on the wall. There was no such luck today, so he listened. There was something there, though he could only feel it by a disruption in the air flow, as opposed hearing or smelling anything. The nose had become more than something to sniff wine with or to savor the succulence of a fine roast. With all the unwashed bodies wandering around as well as the spewed fecal discharges of the infected, one’s schnoz was a useful tool.
Movement.
Ian trained his rifle down at the patch of white that sauntered into the hallway and sat, staring at Jasper.
“It’s a cat,” Armand said.
“But we’re dog people,” Tom said.
Ian had just relaxed, when he heard from around the corner where the cat had come, “Ssshhhhhhh!”
Ian stepped around the corner, rifle shoulder-ready as Tom looked down the opposite direction for an attack from the rear. Armand watched with his rifle held up in the most unprofessional two-handed grip ever seen. It was obvious he was more concerned about pointing at his comrades than getting attacked.
If Ian would have had to shoot, his shot would have been high, very high. For before him stood a perfect-looking, little Asian girl who probably wasn’t even three feet tall.
“It’s not nice to point, would you kindly stop,” she said in almost a whisper but in an accent that spoke of South Carolina or even Georgia.
“I’m sorry,” Ian whispered. “I thought you were bad people trying to hurt us.”
“Oh, you mean the infected. They’re in the main conference hall right through there.” She pointed toward a s
et of double doors that was chained through the handles with a short length of chain and was bolted instead of locked.
Ian realized that securing as many doors as they would need to in order to make a safe zone, they would need something more available than padlocks.
“Are you here alone, sweetie?”
“Ssshhh… c’mon, Sylvie,” the girl said to the cat, who strutted directly under Jasper’s nose with her tail pointed straight up then curling it around his snout in an obvious taunt. To Jasper’s credit, he didn’t even flinch, having been trained in cat etiquette, but there was no doubt the feline had his attention.
The child and cat led them down a maintenance hallway with the LED lighting following their progress in blocks as they entered each section. They came to an adjoining hallway, and Sylvie slowed before rounding it then slid silently around the corner and trotted down the hall. The cat reached another corner and sat down. The girl froze and so did Ian’s group, ears straining for sounds.
They had all survived the last few weeks, and nobody did that by being rash or careless. The cat turned and looked at the group. The child backed up to the last intersection and continued in their previous direction. The cat was soon ahead of them again, her twitching tail the only hint that she was on edge.
They walked along various mechanical rooms that, even in low-use status, provided a hum of power usage. The girl walked them past two more adjoining hallways with nothing coming in from the right, telling Ian it was an outside wall.
They stopped before slowly moving out into a large open area, confirming Ian’s suspicions when the entire outside wall displayed a series of giant overhead freight doors. The hallway was a river leading out into an ocean of empty space before coming to the area that led into the auditoriums. They were sealed off from the maintenance area with large roll-type entry doors of lightweight aluminum caging, typically used for night security on mall boutiques.
Tom put his hand out to stop Ian.
Ian suddenly heard it too—the screams of infected. These weren’t the frantic prey screams, but more the frustration screams he had heard so often in the past. They were behind the roll-up doors, and there were a lot of them.
“Walk like this,” the girl said and moved along slowly with her arms to her sides and her head looking down toward the floor. Armand stifled a chuckle; being a father, he found this as cute as could be, or at least it would be if there wasn’t an untold number of infected right behind the gates. Then they all thought about it and felt that maybe there was a clue here. From a distance, they could camouflage themselves just by how they moved. Ian understood that close proximity probably wouldn’t keep the infected from smelling a non-infected’s difference or seeing something in the eyes, but from a distance… the game changes.
Armand felt like Jeff Goldblum in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, when they had to creep through the city as if they were just formed in a pod. Any minute now, an old acquaintance would point his finger at him while staring all crazy-eyed and screech. The similarities were uncanny, except these didn’t come from a pod, and they weren’t any type of replica. These were infected people who only wanted to make more infected people.
Armand knew this wasn’t a movie or a game, but he let his mind toy with things like that and, in a strange way, it helped him stay sane. He remembered being so frightened by that movie when all they did was get bug-eyed, point, and scream. You never saw what they did to people, other than set them up in a garden. Now though… oh yeah… now, they knew what happened to people who get caught.
Armand chuckled at the thought of that movie scaring him after what he had been through. Fear is life; it is what enables you to survive every minute of every day. If you don’t feel it, use it, suck it in, and digest it with every breath, then… you die. He knew that now better than he ever had before.
He kept his head down, trying to search the area without turning or using any fast or deliberate motion because that is how they moved. He and Gene had watched and even mimicked them on occasion. They learned from having lived on the streets with the infected. There were tricks they could utilize in order to clear a roadway full of them or slink by a horde virtually unseen, but it took a calm mind as well as the ability to contain emotions. They kept the kids away from such situations, as they didn’t have the guile and follow through.
Armand saw Ian flinch when a couple of infected fell upon another and started to devour it. This told him that Ian hadn’t spent as intimate of a time with them that he had.
Tom had, he mentally noted. Armand had a feeling that both Toms had seen some things in Texas that could turn anybody’s bowel into jelly, not to mention what it could do to their psyche. What would these children turn into? Providing they survived until adulthood. According to the stories told, neither Tom would have survived if they hadn’t chosen just the right truck to protect themselves against the infected that were trying to reach them.
Nothing was said, but Armand had the impression that their parents or some other family members were in the crowd trying to assail them as they took refuge on the truck they had adopted. Even then, it could have gone poorly if Ian’s group hadn’t been the honest group they were. If the Toms would had been found by thugs or malcontents, things could have been very unfortunate for the two young boys.
Armand, along with Gene, had seen and met many people over the last few weeks and had been so unimpressed by them that they decided to stay away and seek their own path. Creeps, losers, and bait were all they had found. Then they met Ian’s group the day before and everything changed. It wasn’t easier now… but it was better, and they seemed to have regained more control over their destiny. Armand was grateful, and he had no intentions of screwing this up.
As the group continued following the little girl, the infected were much closer than Armand was comfortable with. They slowly passed through a wide entrance, into spaces that were more customer-oriented as opposed to the Spartan area of the maintenance halls. As the pillars and entry jambs cleared from his view, he could see several hundred bowed heads of the infected wandering through a mini village of booths. Shattered pottery and decimated carcasses littered the floor. Tables with novelty cell phone covers and tee shirts, as well as other tradeshow goodies, had collapsed, spreading their contents across the floor. It was causing some of the infected to fall and claw through debris, while others stood swaying or slowly walking with their heads down. Sometimes they lifted their heads to scream in frustration, making Armand feel like wetting himself.
Oh yeah, he told himself, this kind of fear is way more intense than what you experience from a movie. This is a fear that shook him to his bones and took control of his every action, for every action was a matter of life and death.
Chapter Seven
Phoenix Arizona May 2
Twenty feet away… and the only thing separating them was a row of trash containers and a steel crowd-herder bar. Ian was amazed. To be so close and not running for their lives was an anomaly to be sure, yet here they were.
They must have been stuck down here since the beginning but how… and why didn’t they just leave the way we came in? Ian’s thoughts were interrupted, and he winced when he saw some of the infected fall upon another of their own and start to feed. No. It was more than feed. They were devouring him. I guess that solves the mystery as to how they sustain themselves.
Ian was perplexed and had to think back to the beginning of this nightmare. He was out in the bush, manning the fuel dump in Tennessee in the early days, so he was out of touch with the world for the most part—other than a Christian country station that would come in over the radio sometimes. His contract had a cloaking clause, so the only outside communication was a sat phone. As soon as they abandoned the dump, they got a little bit more radio from whatever stations were left and triage centers that were being established in many of the larger community buildings. However, a lot of preparations were made and enacted while he and his crew were in the wilderness, stringing fence
line and securing product, oblivious to the rest of the world
That would explain why the doors were chained at the main entry… to keep people in as well as out. He wondered if that even made sense. It must have to someone, since the chains are there.
The girl led them through the main hall, maintaining her lumbering stride until she got behind the escalators’ walls, where she crouched down and rode the stairway up. By the bodies piled on the outside at the next level, it was obvious they had to clean the infected off of it from time to time.
Ian signaled to his two followers what he saw around the walls. There were pikes and sharpened pieces of lamp posts or mic stands, anything they could find, lying in random patterns. Most were bloodstained, as was the commercial carpet, in blotchy red patterns. There were ad lib spears and clubs, but there were some that looked as if they were modern-age versions of halberds and spears.
The girl turned around and stopped the group, not doubting for a second that they would follow her lead. Jasper stared at her like she was an angel from heaven, which is the way of young dogs, especially around kids.
“Okay, we can talk here but only in whispers.”
“Who are you?” Ian asked.
“I am Emili, Emili Schwartz.”
“Are you here alone, Emili?”
“Noooo,” she whined. “You’re supposed to tell me who you are now.”
“Oh… well, I’m sorry for forgetting my manners. I am Ian, and this is Tom, Armand, and Jasper.”
“Hi Jasper.” She waved at the dog before reaching out and touching his nose.
“Are you here alone, Emili?” Ian repeated, and Armand started to step forward, thinking that he might be the better choice to talk to the girl.
For Which We Stand: Ian's road (A Five Roads To Texas Novel Book 3) Page 7