The Common Cold (Book 2): A Zombie Chronicle-Cabin Fever

by Roberts, David K.

  The helicopter crew had brought the ammunition boxes indoors as none of them felt comfortable leaving them unattended, even though it seemed likely that there was no-one within miles of this spot. While rummaging through the truck they had also found several brand-new rolled up sleeping bags and distributed them around the cabin. Now everyone could get warm; not that heat was likely to be a problem with so many people in the same small building.

  Tom looked at his watch and saw it was four am. He was tired but wanted to talk with Rob and Danny, to find out what they’d encountered and make enquiries as to the new folk, especially the self-styled Daughter of the Lord. Surreptitiously he gathered Brad, Danny and Rob together as well as Captain Simms and the sergeant. Clutching their coffee they went outside and gathered around the engine of one of the trucks, eager to steal its remaining warmth while they talked.

  “So, Rob and Danny,” Tom kicked off. “I’m really glad both you and yours got here in one piece. Sorry BB and I couldn’t wait, but as you can see I found my family.”

  “No problem, Tom” Rob replied. “We’re just really glad you found your folks. BB, have you worked out a way to get to your wife yet?”

  “Still working on it but I have an idea or two.” It was clear he didn’t want to expand on the subject for some reason. With no phone signal in this area - assuming phones were still an option - whether or not his wife was still alive was the biggest question he had to answer; he would always find a way to get to her.

  “BB?” the sergeant asked.

  “BB was my air force call-sign. It’s kinda stuck ever since.”

  “So what’s the skinny on Denver, guys?” Mike asked, eager to work out whether there was something to get back to or not. He was lucky, he had divorced a couple of years earlier and had no kids, so he was pretty bomb proof as far as family needs were concerned. He was more worried about his crew and was primarily concerned as to whether, upon finding out the worst from these newcomers, they would want to get down the mountain and do some personal rescue missions. Without the use of the helicopter he suspected the risks would be exponentially greater by road.

  “Well, our journey to Castle Rock wasn’t too bad all in all,” Rob replied. “The military looked like they took a pasting, especially around our house. From what my wife told me, they came to our area, got creamed and most died.”

  “What happened to the rest?” Cliff asked.

  “Well, when I said most died I meant they all died but quite a few came back to life. A lot are walking around having become infected. There don’t seem to be many fast ones; we only came across one of them at the Factory Outlet when we were gathering supplies. All the rest seem slow so they aren’t a big threat unless you’re trapped in a confined space with a large number of them.”

  “When we got to Rob’s house we had time for a quick bite to eat,” Danny interjected. “We discovered the hard way that the smell of cooking does attract them; it was touch and go for a while there. I’m sorry to say we let our guard down when we got to Rob’s, we were just so bloody exhausted.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Rob agreed, playing the slaughter through again in his mind. “Good thing we had loads of ammo. Having said all that, one upside of our mistake was that Joshua and Ethel found us by following the smell of our cooking. When they came a’knocking they warned us the infected were gathering in the street. We had to shoot a load of them in order just to get back out to the truck. We just chucked as much as we could in the back and drove away. Angela threw herself out in front of us as we neared the end of our street so we had no alternative other than to bring her with us. She was damn lucky we didn’t run her down, I nearly didn’t stop. Maybe God is looking out for her after all; she certainly seems to think so. Whatever, she’s a strange one, that’s for sure.”

  “I got that impression earlier,” Tom agreed. “Bit of a bible thumper I’m guessing.”

  “Maybe we’ll need the Lord’s help in the coming days,” Cliff interjected, sounding defensive on Angela’s behalf.

  “You may be right, sergeant,” Mike replied with an eyebrow raised questioningly. Cliff seemed not to notice.

  “We stopped off at the Factory Outlet near Rob’s home,” Danny continued, “and denuded the winter sports shop of its coats, clothing and other supplies. I think we’ll be alright for a few weeks until we can sort something out. Strange thing was we didn’t see too many people around. I can’t imagine where they’ve all gone. And the military, they just seemed to have abandoned their vehicles and weaponry. It’s really weird. That’s how we came across the second truck. Just as well, we needed the space for the people and supplies.”

  “That’s why it’s not stealing, sergeant,” Rob argued, his previous annoyance still evident in his voice. “We have a pressing need right now to do what we have to in order to survive. We can work out who owes who what if things return to normal.”

  “You may be right,” Cliff acceded reluctantly.

  “We also got some more after-shave and perfume, Tom. I’m sure we’ll find it of use when we go out on forays for food.”

  “Of course. Well done,” Tom agreed. Looking at the quizzical expression on both Mike and the Sergeant’s faces he decided to explain. “From what you’ve told me of your experiences, you’ve seen less of their behaviour up close than we have. You’ve already noticed how the infected people change and then attack, trying to bite us. They seem to want to eat us for some reason known only to themselves. These two lads discovered the fact that if we spray ourselves all over with after-shave that the infected people can’t detect us as either food or the enemy. Seems to work pretty well; it sure as hell saved Brad and me more than once.”

  “I thought you guys smelled a little too fresh when we first met but I didn’t like to say,” Mike stated, grinning at the misunderstanding. “If it works I’m happy to use it.”

  “When we’ve fixed the chopper in the morning we can go take a look-see at what’s left. What do you say?” BB asked. Rob suspected he knew now exactly how BB intended to get to his wife in San Francisco.

  “Sure, that would be just fine. Thanks, BB.” Cliff replied, trying out Brad’s air force handle.

  “And while you fix the whirlybird,” Tom added, “we can check a few of the closer buildings to see if it’s reasonable to spread out a little. I sure as hell never expected to sleep twenty odd people in my cabin.”

  “We’re not all odd,” Mike replied, pretending offence. “Sure, I’ll give you a hand, never been much use repairing the thing, I’m just the chauffeur.”

  Tom looked at his watch again. He looked tired. “Shall we get some shuteye now? I think we’ll need all the rest we can get for what’s coming.”

  “Um, BB. Can I speak to you alone for a moment?” Danny asked.

  “Sure, what is it?”

  “Over here, if you please,” Danny replied walking away out of earshot of the others. BB followed.

  “And?” he asked impatiently. He looked exhausted.

  “I’ve got something you might find of use, come with me.” Without waiting for a reply Danny climbed into the truck he had been driving and BB followed. He retrieved what looked like a black brick from a secure compartment within the truck.

  “I didn’t want everyone to know we have it unless we really need it, but I kept the satellite phone from your plane.”

  “What? Oh, man. That’s real great, Danny,” BB exclaimed excitedly. “I can’t get a signal on my phone so I’ve no idea whether all lines are dead or whether it’s just in this area. I hate remote places, they’re just not civilised.” He pressed a few buttons and checked the charge. It still had a sixty per cent charge and a full signal. Dialling his house he was met by an unobtainable signal. “Shit!” he said in frustration. Quickly dialling his wife’s cell phone his heart leapt as it began to ring. “Come on, come on,” he mumbled impatiently. It was picked up at the other end.

  “Hello?”

  “Kim?” Brad began. “Oh, thank God. Are you okay?
”

  “Brad! Oh my God. I thought I’d never hear from you again.” He could hear little sobs as she fought to stay in control of her emotions. Brad wasn’t doing much better and was breathing deeply as well. Danny got out of the cab to leave him in peace to make the call.

  He wandered back to where the meeting had been held but only Tom remained, the others had gone back into the warmth. “I take it you gave him the sat phone from the plane?”

  Danny nodded.

  “Well done, I presume he’s gotten through?”

  “Oh, yeah. She’s in San Francisco, isn’t she? How will he get to her?”

  “You know he doesn’t fix helicopters for charity, don’t you?” Tom smiled knowingly. “She’s a qualified doctor. If we can’t get support from the others to go get her for the sake of the group, something would have to be really wrong.”

  “That’s cool. I suspected something like that. He’s definitely going to have a spring in his step now.”

  “All we have to do is convince the helo crew that there is nothing to report back to and I’m sure they’ll be only too glad to help. They are bound to have people they’ll want to get as well. The nice thing about where we are right now is that there are quite a few cabins up here. I bet most of the owners won’t be returning any time soon, if ever.”

  “I can’t believe how few people, normal people, we’ve seen since we landed. Apart from the shopping mall yesterday - we had to plough through a huge mass of infected shoppers on our way past - we saw almost no-one, not even all that many zombies. I have to wonder where they all are.”

  “Let’s just hope they don’t start marching out of the cities and into the mountains. This place would become interesting, to say the least. The snow will come soon, and with luck that should prevent that sort of migration. Then we just have to keep our food supplies up - I’m pretty happy about having a helicopter at our disposal - it should make food searches safer and quicker. Perhaps we can get hold of a second one if BB takes this one to SF, if their co-pilot’s eyes mend properly we will have at least two further qualified pilots at our disposal and I could come up to speed pretty quickly I reckon.”

  “All this assumes BB can get it going again.”

  “I think it won’t stand a chance against his iron will. Anyway, he has a wife to collect so that’s his motivation to succeed.”

  At that moment BB came over, a big grin on his face. He’d left the sat phone in the cab’s secure compartment for safety.

  “The cat that got the cream,” Tom said, slapping his mate on the back.

  “Yeah. Thanks Danny, I appreciate that. We’ve agreed some additional places she can go to, just in case it becomes too hot for her at home. It’s fairly quiet at the moment; with a huge traffic blockage on the Golden Gate, pretty much no-one’s getting near Sausalito. With luck, in three days I’ll be with her and a week from now we’ll be back here. Not that she’s too partial to cold. But she’s always got me to keep her warm.”

  “Ugh. Enough, BB. I was hoping to grab a little more sleep, but now I have that image to contend with.”

  “Well, you may as well stay up. Haven’t you noticed? The sky is lighting up in the east,” the first officer pointed out. “I may as well get started on the chopper.”

  “Didn’t I tell you Danny?” Tom said, looking pleased. “The horn dog has his motivation.”

  BB feigned offence and walked over to the frost-covered helicopter and peered in.

  “Uh, guys. You might want to see this,” he called beckoning them over. He wiped at a window and stood back as Tom and Danny looked inside.

  “She’s dead, I presume?” Danny asked, trying to get a clearer view.

  “With that hole in her head it’d be hard to be anything else,” BB commented.

  “And no-one felt it reasonable to tell us about that?” Tom asked rhetorically and walked over to the cabin. Peering in the front door he caught sight of Mike Simms. “Captain, may I have a word, please?”

  The captain looked up, catching the look in Tom’s eyes. “Sure thing, Captain.”

  Once outside, Tom walked him over to the helicopter.

  “I know what you’re going to say,” Mike began. “She got out of her straps and attacked Zoë. Cliff killed her ’cos he could see what she wanted to do. If he hadn’t we might have lost our Warrant Officer.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me about this? This is my place and I don’t want dead bodies littering it up. The kids here have seen enough shit in the last couple of days without being confronted with this sort of thing.”

  “Sure, maybe you’re right,” he agreed reluctantly, looking down in embarrassment. “We were going to fly her body back down to Denver as soon as we got the chopper fixed. Perhaps we ought to bury her up here instead.”

  “I doubt you can do that, the ground will be too hard to dig into. It’s frozen solid. I think flying her away would be the best option.”

  “Sure, then that’s what we’ll do. If you can just keep the kids away we’ll leave her there for now. It’s not like the sub-zero temperature will give her a chance to defrost.”

  Tom grimaced at the callousness of Mike’s response; maybe it was just a defence mechanism. “Okay, thanks. BB wants to get started on fixing the helo before the snow comes. You don’t want to be working outside when that happens, which I reckon it could do any time now. Do you want to send the sergeant out? Unless he wants some sleep, of course. He was on sentry duty after all.”

  Chapter 4 - Round, Round, Get Around…

  “Gotcha, you bastard!” BB exclaimed. He stood up and arched backwards, recovering from the awkward position he’d had to adopt to reach the fused wires he had just repaired.

  “I’d ’a never guessed that was the problem,” Cliff said in awe of this mere pilot. BB had made it look so easy, as if he’d been doing it all his life.

  “I spent huge numbers of hours working with the most amazing engineer at my local airfield. My wife Kimberley,” he paused, thinking of her smile, “works long hours as a resident at San Francisco General in their trauma centre. So I’d spend hours with my other wife, helicopters, at Marin County Airport. Actually airport is a pretty big word for a dock for seaplanes and a helo pad. Anyway, as with all private flying, it’s four hours shootin’ the breeze and one hour in the air. I learned some pretty cool stuff from that old timer. One of the things I learned is that anything made for the government will have faults that will ultimately interfere with its specified function. In this case, at the distance you were from the relatively small nuke those bastards dropped, you should have been well-enough shielded not to be knocked out of the sky by the EMP. And it seems you almost were.”

  “Not sure what you mean, BB,” Cliff responded, enthralled by what the flyer was saying.

  “Well, the electromagnetic pulse from the nuke creates charged surfaces wherever it hits. With electronics that’s dangerous, especially if you rely on them to fly. In this case, it fried some unprotected wiring down there,” he said pointing to where he had been working. “It didn’t get you right away but finally broke when your captain landed the bird when you checked out the emergency call. Perhaps it was the jolt from the landing, I don’t know. Frankly, I’m not even sure if he’d have had enough control left to do an auto-rotate with this problem so you’re doubly lucky, I’d say.”

  At that moment Tom came over to the helicopter to see the state of play. He’d heard BB waxing lyrical about the doom the helicopter crew had almost certainly narrowly avoided. “Don’t believe everything this guy tells ya,” he told Cliff while smiling at his favourite first officer.

  “I reckon in this instance he isn’t bullshitting,” Cliff argued. “I saw the damage to the wires. The engine just stopped dead and we’d have gone down like a stone.”

  “Yeah,” BB asserted his assessment of the situation. “There’s a set of wires that splits out from the main loom that pass under the floor and into the vertical riser there to the engine control system. My engineeri
ng buddy told me that some of the wires there have been shown to be vulnerable to EMP in the past but they should have been fixed. Looks like your maintenance guys didn’t follow their ADs to the letter. Maybe they never thought you’d have to resist EMP in the good ol’ US of A.”

  “Let’s prep it to test your fix,” the sergeant suggested enthusiastically.

  “Captain Simms will be back shortly,” Tom said, “I’m sure he’ll want to do the honours. He’s just accompanying some of the others to see if some more of the cabins up here are habitable. We sure do need the space.”

  As he spoke the investigating party turned the corner in the distance, walking in the direction of the helicopter. They were bristling with an assortment of weaponry. Danny and Rob were leading the group back, closely followed by Mike and Chuck. Their faces were grim.

  “You guys alright?” Tom asked when they came over.

  “We had to do a little clearing of the way,” Rob replied enigmatically. Tom noticed a slight red stain near the handle of the machete he was carrying and caught the meaning of the words.

  “Can we safely split the party across a couple more cabins?” he asked anxiously.

  “Yes, we can use the two nearest,” Chuck replied. “Because they spend so much time empty the cabins are surprisingly well secured, so they should be pretty safe from those things. If we use two more huts and each hut has a walkie-talkie, we can stay in touch to support each other. Of course we’ll need to post night watchmen in each.”