The Apocalypse War: The Undead World Novel 7

by Meredith, Peter

  “Someone else is going to need it more than me,” she said. “I’m done, I know it, but Michael doesn’t and Ann will end up draining herself to the point of death, all for nothing.” Neil was having trouble grasping her words which seemed to be gaining in strength rather than losing it.

  “I can’t,” Neil told her. “That’s murder.”

  “If I do it, it’s suicide,” Marybeth said. “That’s a sin that can’t be forgiven. You have to do it, Neil, you’re the only one who is mentally strong enough to do it. My family won’t and neither will the doctor. I’m ok with this, Neil, really. Just do it. Now, before anyone comes in or Ann wakes up.”

  He wanted badly to cough or bump the bed or do anything to wake Ann up so he could shrug his shoulders at Marybeth, wish her good luck and scoot out of the room, but he didn’t. With a sick, oily feeling in his belly, he reached out to the IV tubing where the clamp sat six inches below the drip chamber. He rolled it all the way down so that the fluid no longer moved. He did this with his eyes on Ann, certain that she would flick her eyes open and catch him in the process of killing her mother.

  She didn’t stir and Neil finished the act that would kill Marybeth.

  “Thank you,” she said, already sounding quieter. “You’re a good man, Neil. Michael will remember that before it’s all said and done. Now, you better go.” Neil wanted to run out of the room but he stayed and squeezed her soft hand; it was cold as a morgue slab. He consciously kept from wiping it on his pants as he walked away from her. At the door they smiled at each other and then he was through it only to run into Margaret Yuan’s assistant. She tried to get past Neil.

  “She’s just fallen asleep,” Neil said, holding his hands out. “You understand how it is in hospitals, everyone constantly coming in and out. A person is supposed to rest and to heal but how can they with all the interruptions? Am I right? Why don’t you show me to Captain Grey’s room?” He was babbling.

  Neil took the girl by the arm. She grinned at him and it was the same grin he’d been getting since he came into the valley. It was an uneasy grin, one that suggested she was sickened by his mangled face or was grossed out by his chewed off fingers. Quickly, he let go of her arm and let her walk next to him.

  They walked in a stiff silence which lasted even after they had entered Grey’s room. Neil expected Grey’s every orifice to be plugged with a menagerie of tubes, but he could only see the one that ran into his arm, it was filled with O negative blood and Neil felt his stomach grip from the guilt.

  In a chair in the corner, Sadie was sleeping full on, her head back, her legs flung and her arms dangling. She had taken some time to wash off a bit of the blood that had been covering her, mostly just her hands and face. Otherwise she was a mess.

  Deanna stood next to Grey’s bed and she was on the other end of the spectrum: she had somehow recovered from all the stress she’d been under and if she was exhausted it didn’t show; she seemed completely at peace. “He’s going to live,” she told Neil before he could ask. “I know it. And he’ll be good as new, only he’ll have a few more scars to brag about.”

  Neil turned to the C.N.A. “Is that what the doctor said? Is he going to be ok?”

  “She thinks that if he wakes up in the next day he should be ok,” she answered. “But he did lose a lot of blood. It was really very close there for a bit, so I don’t know.”

  Deanna became adamant and her words took on a sharper edge. “He’ll wake up soon, I can feel it in my bones. Mark my words.”

  “I’m sure he will,” Neil said, not just to placate Deanna but also because he actually believed it. “Knowing him he’ll be up tomorrow for some light P.T.”

  The girl didn’t hear this as the joke Neil intended. “He can’t exercise. Those stitches in his arm are very weak. The artery was shredded up. So whatever you do, don’t let him move, don’t even let him walk to the bathroom. The doctor thinks he should remain bedridden for at least two weeks or the artery might rupture and she doesn’t know if she can repair it again.”

  “Of course,” Deanna agreed, without question or even blinking an eye. She was in love and was in some sort of happy, euphoric state simply because Grey was still alive. She wasn’t thinking. They didn’t have two weeks. They had four days at the most and they had to be gone by that fourth day, gone and traveling further up into the mountains where the land was unforgiving and the air frigid even in the deepest part of summer and where there would be little food and less shelter.

  Neil stared down at his friend, thinking that it was a blessing he was unconscious. Grey would know the score, he could do the simple math: one plus one and he was dead. With their very limited fuel, he would know that all unnecessary items would have to be abandoned. Neil was sure he would count himself as unnecessary and would insist on being left behind, perhaps with a pistol and a single magazine.

  Of course, everyone would insist he come along, taking up valuable room on one of the dozen or so heavy trucks that the people of the valley possessed. But how far would he make it? The roads coming up from the foothills hadn’t just been pothole ridden, they had been dangerous. Landslides, avalanches and just plain erosion had turned the mountain road into an obstacle course. There had been places where the road had just disappeared and they had climbed down steep ravines or over piles of rubble. People and gear had been tossed around like crazy.

  And they weren’t even that high up yet. What would the mountain passes look like? A nightmare, Neil was sure.

  Grey was going to die, because Neil wasn’t smart enough to save him. Another life on his conscience.

  As these thoughts ran through Neil’s mind, Sadie appeared suddenly at his elbow, making him jump. She didn’t smile as she once would have. She only gazed down on the captain with a strange, unreadable look in her dark eyes.

  More by accident than design, she was once again Goth. Her eyes were shadowed in dried blood and dark circles; her fingernails were black with a combination of dirt, ash and blood; her hair was once more spiked, again with blood. Flakes of it had fallen to land on her cheeks like morbid freckles.

  Neil saw her appearance but with the weight of his new responsibilities and his fresh double helping of guilt, he couldn’t summon the energy to look beyond it and worry about her mental state. She was alive and that’s what counted; everything else would have to work itself out when there was time.

  Unless, once again, someone could think of something to either stop the zombies or stop the Azael. “What would Jillybean do?” he said under his breath.

  “What’s that?” Deanna asked.

  “Nothing. I got to go. The general is going to blow up the big wall at the Blue Gate once it’s breached and I should be there.” He didn’t really need to be, however he was hoping that an explosion would jar a Jillybean type idea into his head. He was sure that she would have some sort of explosion-based solution to their problem.

  With his Humvee having been “borrowed” by Michael, Neil commandeered another one from the clinic parking lot. Sadie was in the passenger seat before he had shut his door. Their eyes met and nothing needed to be said. She would come with him and share his pain and protect him if needed, no questions asked.

  Neil drove with a sense of urgency to the Blue Gate, well actually to the secondary wall a hundred yards behind it: Blue Gate 2. It was crowded with ragged, unshaven soldiers who rested with their strange weapons across their thighs. There were baseball bats, sharpened mop handles, sawn-off pool cues and fat-headed hammers that were caked in old blood.

  There were civilian workers present as well. These were forced to watch from further back, sitting up on the steep hills surrounding the road. They seemed eager for a show.

  As Governor, Neil was given VIP status and was escorted by a sergeant to the middle of the wall. After some barked orders by the sergeant, a way was cleared up and Neil climbed up to stand in the center of the wall that Deanna had built while the crane had been running. It was tall and frightfully unsteady. If he
felt he could have bowed out of the ceremony, he would have, but he thought he needed to be as close as possible in hopes of triggering an idea.

  He stood with an old finned caddy shaking beneath his feet. Next to him on his right, Sadie straddled the space between the caddy and a Volkswagen Jetta while on his left was the general, watching as the zombies fell from the great height of the now abandoned Blue Gate.

  The undead dropped down, stepping off into nothing as if expecting the thin air to support their weight. To Neil they appeared comically surprised and continued to walk their feet in the air as they fell. Sadie grunted once when it first started. It was what passed for a laugh for her.

  “Would you like to do the honors?” the general asked, holding out a small black box with a switch on it.

  Neil shook his head. “No. I don’t get any pleasure from this sort of thing. Death, even their death is a sad thing.”

  The general didn’t bat an eye, nor did his pleasant expression change in the least and his hand holding the detonator out to Neil didn’t budge. “Some things we do because we have to and not for pleasure. The men will be cheered to see their new leader do the honors. Remember, half your job is as figurehead.”

  Holding back a sigh, Neil took the detonator and held it up. “Who wants some fireworks?” he cried.

  The weary soldiers, desperate for something to break up the awful monotony of killing, cheered in a great voice. It was taken up by the civilians swarming the hills until the man-carved valley echoed with their cry. Neil waited until the sound had begun to slacken before he thumbed down the switch.

  The general’s engineers had linked three hundred rounds of 105MM ammo to explode in one tremendous thunderclap. When Neil hit the button, the back face of the concrete wall blasted up and out, flinging huge chunks of concrete into the air, some of which smashed into the wall of cars a hundred yards away. Neil did his best not to flinch as concrete starred windshields and dented the car he was standing on.

  When the wall let go, the mound of zombies, a fantastic mass of corpses, gushed forward, spilling out as though someone had kicked over a pail filled with worms. The grotesque sight killed the cheers and, just like that, the celebration was over. The civilians came down off the hills and went back to their tasks and the soldiers took last sips from water bottles or puffed cigarettes as the tens of thousands of zombies that had been held back by the mound and the wall surged forward, their hunger all-encompassing.

  “Take a good look,” General Johnston said as the first of the zombies rushed across to the wall of cars. When the first hit, the entire structure shuddered. “This wall won’t last. You can see that, right?”

  Sadie spoke for the first time that afternoon. “We’re not blind.”

  “Good,” Johnston said. “Then you know that the inevitable can’t be staved off for long. When this falls, we’ll retreat to the next and, as you can see, it’s a lot less impressive.” The three of them, glanced back at the next wall; it was only three cars high. “And when that one falls we’ll retreat again and again and so on. But there is a limit that we have to consider both in material and human stamina.”

  “What are you saying?” Sadie asked with acid in her voice.

  “He’s saying that we have to consider abandoning the valley,” Neil said.

  Sadie’s eyes blazed and she stepped across to the caddy, so that the three of them shared the dented in hood. “I can’t believe what I’m hearing. You want to give up the very thing you sent a dozen men to die for this morning? Why? Why sacrifice those men for nothing?”

  “They didn’t die for nothing,” the general explained. “They bought us valuable time so that when we do retreat, we can do so in relative safety and not with artillery sending us running out of here empty-handed. At least now we can make an orderly retreat and salvage a lot of our necessities.”

  A category in which Grey didn’t belong, Neil thought. The guilt which had been held to a simmer with the explosions and the rickety Cadillac was on him again full force. “And if we can think of some way to delay them? Have you considered sending out more assault teams? If we stop their horsemen driving the zombies on, the pressure on the stiffs will slack off and…”

  Johnston cut in: “We have already thought of that. I sent out teams hours ago, but unfortunately our enemies have finally wised up and are now protecting their men and positions with proper numbers. The hills above their camp and above their driving teams are now too well defended for another assault to be successful. Believe me, if I could save this valley I would, but we can’t. That’s the simple truth.”

  The fury in Sadie became too great and she stomped her foot on the caddy’s windscreen, cracking it, sending white lines shooting out from her heel. “No! I refuse to believe Morganstern died so that we could have a few more hours to pick through our crap. I won’t believe that.”

  “Would you believe he died in order to give us enough time to realize the truth?” Johnston asked in that deep, soothing voice of his. “We were so focused on defending our walls that we…that I didn’t look at the big picture. That was a mistake, and if we keep going, blindly defending these walls, it’ll only end up costing more lives. The truth is we need to leave. We have to.”

  Leaving would cost at least one more life: Captain Grey’s. Sadie knew it and, with her eyes, she implored Neil to say something. The problem was that the explosion that marked the end of the Blue Gate and perhaps the entire valley hadn’t triggered anything in him. He was just as clueless as how to save the valley as he had been thirty minutes before. He had failed and now Grey would die.

  Chapter 24

  Sadie Walcott

  The ladder down from the swaying wall of cars shook and rattled as her feet clunked on the rungs. Neil was above her, moving far more slowly. He was, as always when it came to heights, methodical, making sure each hand had its proper grip before moving on. That was his way. He was smart, but not a risk taker, nor was he the most inventive of men.

  There was a way to save the valley, Sadie knew it in her bones and the reason she knew it was because of Jillybean. In every given situation, the little girl had always been able to see the one thing that no one else could. If she was here in the valley, she would have scratched the side of her nose or picked the panties out of her bottom and without much effort would’ve said: Have you tried this or that, in that infuriatingly innocent way of hers, and voila, the valley would be saved and the Azael sent running for their lives.

  In Sadie’s mind it was as simple as that. There was a way to save them, somebody just had to come up with an idea.

  At the bottom of the ladder, Sadie went in a slow circle, her eyes staring hard at everyone and everything, trying to force inspiration into her sluggish mind. “What if we tried...” she asked, hoping that the end of the question would just fill itself in with the answer she needed. The answer didn’t come.

  Above her, Neil called down: “You okay?”

  A growl escaped her throat and she stomped away. There were soldiers around her. They were the usual tired and blood-bedraggled men. She stared into their eyes, looking for any spark of intelligence greater than her own, trying to find someone who could furnish the ending to her unfinished question: What if we tried... The only problem was that her IQ was well above the average, though she would never admit that to herself, and the men around her seemed either too dimwitted or too fatigued to think straight.

  When none of the soldiers satisfied, she moved onto the civilians and they were even worse. For a year they had been coddled and protected like no other group on the planet. They weren’t used to the nerve-rending stress of living with a true zombie threat hanging over their heads. And they weren’t used to back-breaking labor while in survival mode twenty-four hours a day.

  Half of them walked around with their shoulders so stooped you would think they were trying to drag their knuckles along the ground as they moved. The other half were simply too afraid to come up with complex plans. These people cast un
easy glances up at the hills or they went about with their hands tucked in close to their chests and their lips quivering.

  No one seemed to have that spark Sadie had come to rely on in Jillybean.

  Sadie looked around for Neil, however he had been stopped by the flow of soldiers and civilians, all of whom were looking to be reassured that everything was going to be ok. His smile was a lie that she recognized from fifty feet. She could also see the pain in his eyes at having to wear that awful smile.

  Deflated, she went to the Humvee Neil had appropriated and, without a single qualm, she hopped in and sped out of there.

  She knew one person whose intellect was more than a match for anyone she had ever met, besides Jillybean that is…she just hoped he was conscious.

  Sadie slipped through the clinic doors on cat’s feet. There were dying people in the building after all—or at least one dying person, Marybeth. She didn’t think anything could kill Captain Grey; in her eyes he was too tough for the grim reaper.

  Deanna was still by his bedside and the captain was still zonked out. “How did it go?” Deanna asked. “I feel a little shabby about not being there for Neil. I am supposed to be Lieutenant Governor after all.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about that if I was you. And the explosion was...it was impressive, I guess, and eye opening.” Sadie paused for a second, wondering if telling Deanna about the plans to evacuate the valley was a good idea. She’ll find out soon enough, Sadie decided.

  The older woman caught the pause and the odd choice of words. “Eye opening? How so?”

  “After the wall came down General Johnston basically said that the military won’t be able to defend us for long. He wants to abandon the valley. Which means...”

  Deanna’s eyes swung from the girl to the unconscious captain. “It means Grey will die. They know that right? Neil knows that. He was right here when the C.N.A said so.”

  Neil knew. Sadie guessed it was why he looked so miserable when he was glad-handing it with the people. For the “greater good” she knew he would pack up whatever he could and march at the head of his new clan of renegades acting as a modern day Moses looking for the promised land. But Sadie knew that they were already in their promised land, they just had to defend it.