“We could build a moat,” Johnny suggested. “You know, like a ditch.”
Because of their BDUs and their heavy MOPP gear they were already sweating. “You go right ahead and knock yourself out,” Will said. Johnny put away the entrenching tool that he had pulled from his pack.
“So two up,” Max said, pulling out his protective mask. “You want to do the first stretch with me, Will?”
“What? Are you kidding?” Will asked. He settled himself down in the shade of a tree that sat just off the road. He put his back to the bark and opened his MOPP overcoat wider. “Only when…if we see a zombie, I’ll put on the mask. Until then, no thank you. It’s too hot.”
It wasn’t exactly hot; the morning was new and the clouds that had dumped so much rain the day before were threatening, banking thick and dark in the west. Now that they weren’t actively working, the MOPP gear was comfortable. Johnny, with a great deal of sighing, eased himself down as well.
Max shrugged, giving into the “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em philosophy.”
Instead of digging foxholes and clearing brush for fields of fire, they sat and chatted about everything under the sun: zombies, of course, but girls and movies as well. They also bitched as only soldiers could bitch.
At about 10 AM some of the locals began to creep down the road like shy mice. For the most part they were advanced in years and for sure they were a timid lot, but they were armed. Most carried rifles or shotguns, while a few had pistols. They smiled and nodded and stayed back a ways until one woman in a tracksuit and sunglasses, got up the courage to ask what was going on. “Zombies,” Will told her matter-of-factly. “I know it sounds crazy but listen to all that shooting.” The sound of gunfire had never let up. The shots came, one, two at a time with rarely more than ten minutes between them.
“You should pull up stakes,” Johnny suggested, loudly enough for them all to hear. “I’d get clear out of here for the time being.”
The advice was taken much to Max’s anger. The locals had been frail and nervous, but at least they had been armed. The town emptied quickly and then the silence was like a weight. It was ominous, threatening a coming doom. Max checked his M16, re-checked his extra magazines, and then double re-checked his mask and gloves, keeping them near, just in case.
Will tried to scoff at this, however at 8: 58 by Max’s watch, a gun battle flared east of them. The sound of guns banging away drifted along the still air and the three soldiers held their breath as they listened. The crackle of M4s and M16s was mixing it up with the heavier boom of 30-06s, 308s, and 30-30s, bores that every hunter was accustomed to hear, but only in late autumn when the leaves were red and gold and the deer rutted and the squirrels frantically stored for winter.
They were out of place now.
“You think it’s zombies?” Johnny asked. “Or are the people really fighting the army?”
The firing quieted down and because the thin crackle of the M4s died away first, Max had the feeling it was an actual battle. “That sounded like it came from that first stop we made,” he said. “You know the one Starling, Mick, and Boyd got out at?”
“The one we were supposed to get out at,” Will reminded them. “Maybe we should, uh…” He pointed to where his and Johnny’s helmet sat in the dirt on the road’s shoulder.
“Yeah,” Max agreed, strapping his helmet on his head and zipping up his MOPP overcoat. Once they were geared up properly they each pulled out their entrenching tools and began to dig proper foxholes. Max’s was barely three feet deep when the first zombie came slouching down the road.
“Shit,” Johnny whispered. “Is that…?” It was thirty yards away. A slight bend in the road had hidden it until that moment.
Max scrambled for his mask as the thing charged in a gimpy stuttering run. It had been a man, and it had been fed upon. Its face, looking like black-moldy hamburger, was nearly gone however its teeth were all present and accounted for. They were stark white in black gums and looked big enough to be tusks.
Johnny ripped his mask out of its carrier, hissing: “Shit, shit, shit,” as he did.
The masks were hot and tight, and with the hood, it made Johnny feel claustrophobic and more than a bit paranoid. He couldn’t see Will and Max though they were right next to him on either side, and what was coming up behind them he could only guess. There could be zombies there, as well. He spun in place, wagging his head from side-to-side. They were alone…alone with the zombie.
He spun back around, nearly smacking Max with the business end of his M16. Max didn’t notice. He was just thinking they had spazzed out for nothing. The zombie had managed to get hung up in the concertina wire and was flaying its own skin off trying to get at them.
“Maybe we should…” Will started to say. He was interrupted when Johnny started firing, ignoring completely the Rules of Engagement. He was simply too keyed up. His heart was going so hard in his chest that he could feel it in his hands. The M16 was set for three round burst, but he was pulling the trigger so quickly that he might as well have been going full auto. His aim was atrocious; half his shots struck sparks off the road’s surface and the other half thudded into the thing’s arms and shoulders.
“The head!” Max cried. “Shoot it in the head! Damn, what kind of shooting is that?”
Johnny was hunched over his rifle in the strangest manner. “It’s the mask,” he whined. “It got in my way so I couldn’t hardly see. But look. I got him.” With his chest heaving, he pointed with the M16. The zombie was an ugly hunk of shredded meat that oozed black goo from a dozen holes.
“I was going to suggest that we wait until it got through the wire before we killed it,” Will said, wearily. “Now, we’re going to have to untangle it.”
“We could just leave it,” Johnny replied. “It’s not going anywhere.”
Will shook his head. Even with the mask covering his face and the plastic hood that draped down to his shoulders, he managed to look annoyed. “And let the flies land on it? What do you think will happen then? They’ll get all germed up, and the next thing you know they’ll be landing on your MRE or drinking the sweat out of your helmet. You want to end up like that guy?” He pointed with his rifle at the zombie.
“No,” Johnny whispered so low that the mask held back most of the sound.
“Yeah, me neither.” Will picked the entrenching tool that had fallen in his half-dug foxhole. “Let’s do this.”
It was a horrible task, made slightly better due to the bulky MOPP gear. The mask made the body difficult to see, which was a positive, and it kept back the awful stench, which was an absolute blessing. They hauled the body to the side of the road and buried it in a low trench. Will then insisted they clean the bloody concertina wire and no one complained over the extra work involved.
They shouldered in the door of the nearest house and then went back and forth with pots of water until the wire was again shiny. The three soldiers then cleaned themselves and their gear. Max was glad for the work. It kept his mind from dwelling on the fact that the zombie had been real. Completely and utterly real. Every time the thought entered his head, he got the shakes and would pause to look around, afraid that more of them would come storming down the road, or that the one they had killed would suddenly crawl out from beneath the thin layer of dirt.
“We killed it,” he said, to reassure himself. “They are killable.”
After they were clean, the three stood well back from the concertina wire, staring down at the bend in the road, waiting for the next zombie. It wasn’t a long wait. One came bipping right down the dotted yellow line as if he owned the road. “Don’t let it get in the wire!” Will cried and began shooting.
As he’d been trained, Max turned his gun slightly to the side and took careful aim down the barrel. His first shot went off into the woods and scared a bird into flight. His next took the thing’s left ear off its ugly head. The third went high, hitting a tree, and a fourth wasn’t needed.
“I got it!” Wil
l yelled as black brains went flying and the zombie fell to the side, its body stiff and rigid, looking like a tree going down.
“Nice shot,” Max said and gave his friend an awkward high-five. Feeling content with themselves they again went to work burying the body.
It had taken fourteen bullets to bring down the one zombie and they didn’t give it a thought. None of them considered for a second how many rounds it would take to kill a dozen zombies, or fifty. They figured they’d be resupplied eventually. After all, there was a constant stream of helicopters buzzing all over the place. Some were stuffed with equipment, ammo mostly, while others had men hanging out of them. None of the three remarked how many of those birds flew east with men in them and returned empty. There wasn’t supposed to be anything east of them that needed so many men.
Chapter 8
Jailed
8:33 a.m.
From an upper story window in Thuy’s townhouse, Deckard watched the government men pull up. They had to be Feds. He could tell by their matching black suits and ties. Normally, they looked stiff, but dapper. Now, with the heavy gasmasks strapped to their faces they looked ludicrous.
There were four all told. Three arrived in a Humvee and one came in a local ambulance that had been commandeered and modified for the occasion: what looked to Deckard like white bathroom caulking had been run along every glass edge and metal joint.
Stephanie Glowitz, who, along with Chuck Singleton, had been staring out from the next window over, asked in a whisper, “Dr. Lee, will we be able to breathe in there?”
Thuy didn’t answer. Resigned to her fate, she continued to watch the men, her face wooden. They were coming to arrest her. The reality of that fact was just hitting her. It was one thing to conjecture over the possibility of incarceration, it was another to see the agents of the government coming for you.
Stephanie reached a long arm over and tapped Thuy. “Dr. Lee? Hey? What do you think? Will we be able to breathe in there?”
“I don’t know,” Thuy answered without giving the question so much as a thought. She could’ve been asked if she liked cherry pie and would’ve given the same answer. The government men walked down her walk and disappeared from the view of the window. They would knock any second and then they’d arrest her and put her in prison and take away the sun forever.
“You ok?” Deckard asked, giving her a concerned look. She liked the look. He cared for her. His feelings radiated out from him.
They would take that from her too. “Yeah…I’m just.” Thuy tried to shake her head to show that she was feeling slightly disoriented, but her head shake became a confused motion as her shoulders twitched and her hands came up and trembled for everyone to see.
Thuy retreated into science, giving Stephanie an answer. “How long we can breathe, depends on a number of variables, the most important being the permeability of the seals. If they are airtight, then it depends on the length of time we’re in…”
The government men knocked on her door. They had done so, importantly. Three heavy knocks that couldn’t be denied.
No one moved. Around them the townhouse felt dead as though the knocking had transformed it into an ancient, dusty, mausoleum. Even the air seemed thick and stale as if it had gone unbreathed for centuries.
Stephanie was the first to speak. “They won’t arrest me and Chuck, will they? We didn’t do anything wrong. We didn’t even get the IV.”
“You broke the quarantine,” Deckard said. “That’s all the justification they’ll need.”
“I just want to know how they knew we was here.” Chuck said in that slow, calm cowboy drawl of his.
“I’m sure we’ll find out soon enough,” Deckard replied. “Look, if you two want, you can hide and if they ask, we can say you left, but they’ll likely go after your families if you do.”
“No, I can’t do that,” Stephanie said, picturing her plump, little mother being dragged from her home in shackles.
Another series of knocks came to them; these were important and demanding. Wordlessly, Thuy started for the stairs and behind her came the others. She tried to smile when she answered the door. “Y-yes?” Her voice broke and the smile, which had been warped to begin with, trembled into a frown at the sight of the men. In their masks, they were tall, angry, boggle-eyed aliens. Each held a gun in their gloved hands as if their presence wasn’t threatening enough.
The leader of the alien band looked Thuy up and down, before turning his head toward the others, he seemed unsurprised at their number and unimpressed by their appearance; only Thuy was wearing anything different from the day before. She had put on a white blouse over black slacks. Deckard wore his clean but wrinkled black suit, Stephanie had cover her thin frame with jeans and a heavy cream-colored sweater, and Chuck wore the oldest and most faded pair of blue jeans that Thuy had ever seen. Above that he had on a blue work shirt, rolled at the sleeves and scuffed with soot.
They were a ragged lot compared to the suited-up agent.
In the agent’s free hand he held a white note card which he brought up to eye level before reading, “Dr. Thuy Lee, Charles Singleton, Stephanie Glowitz, and Ryan Deckard, you are hereby legally detained under executive order R-3. Please, face the wall and put your hands in the air.”
Chuck turned slowly, his eyes going flinty. Thuy and Stephanie turned quickly, fearfully. Deckard’s lip curled. “R-3? Who do you think you’re fooling? Executive orders are numbered in…”
He stopped as one of the Fed-aliens brought his pistol up. He was wearing purple latex gloves which looked almost clownish but the gun looked very real. “Shut up and turn around,” he said. Although his voice was muffled, there was unmistakable anger in his words.
Deckard turned and, as he had expected, they were each expertly searched—he had left his Sig Sauer under the couch cushion a few feet away for this very reason.
The search uncovered nothing but a pen in Thuy’s pocket and Chuck’s house keys that he had carted with him from Oklahoma to California, to New York City, and then to Walton. They were taken from him and he counted it no great loss. The clapboard little cottage with the slanted shutters and the squeaky porch boards felt a world away. No, it weren’t no great loss, not compared to the woman at his side. He would give up a hell of a lot more for Stephanie Glowitz.
With much glaring from the boggle-eyes, the four of them were herded out to the street and then shut up into the back of the ambulance. Much to Stephanie’s great fear, she could hear the sound of the feds caulking up the joints around the door.
Quickly, the air inside grew stale and heavy. Stephanie held back another question about how much oxygen they had left; she was sure Dr. Lee would start off with It depends, and Stephanie knew that would only make matters worse. She would end up fixating on every little variable. It was better just to…
The ambulance started up with a hum that was soon superseded by the urgent wail of its siren. The four of them began to rock and each pictured them flying along at a ludicrous speed, but there was no way of knowing how fast they were actually going. No one spoke.
Stephanie laid her head on Chuck’s lap. She blinked the sweat from her eyes and tried not think about how the air felt old and used. She tried to force the word suffocation from her mind. She tried not to think about how it was more and more of a struggle to take a deep breath.
It was odd, she thought, that no one else looked like they were on the verge of panic like she was. Dr. Lee was pensive, her normally exquisite features drawn down. Deckard was scowling; he seemed more angry than afraid. Chuck was leaned back and relaxed. He had an arm thrown out casually along the back seat every bit as though he were lounging at a bus stop, waiting on the 3:01.
Stephanie had her hands clasped tightly together and her knees were pinched. To her, it felt as though the ambulance was under water, as though the government had decided to get rid of the loose ends of the Walton fiasco by driving them right into the Hudson.
“Jeeze,” she whispered. Chuck lai
d his broad palm on her forehead and brushed her hair back. His hand was rough and dry, the calluses on it, like the knots of an oak tree, looked old and she thought he must have been born with them. She kissed the hand and then laid it across her eyes. That was better. That was love.
That was what?
Slowly, so as not to startle Chuck, she pulled his hand back. She tried to be calm and cool as she stared at him. Above all else she didn’t want him asking, What’s wrong, in that sleepy drawl of his. No way did she want that, because then she’d have to lie. She’d say nothing, when she would really want to say everything. Everything was wrong. She was dying of suffocation. Cancer was eating her body from the inside out. The government had put her under arrest. She had been a part of death and destruction and she had seen things that would have had her running for a hit of any drug she could get her hands on not too many days back.
Everything was wrong…and one thing was right, and for some reason that one thing threw a greater fear into her than all the rest combined. What if she screwed it up? There was no denying that she had screwed up everything else in her life. A college scholarship had gone up in the smoke of a thousand bong hits. A plum job for a fashion magazine that her friend Amanda Dockins had got for her, had come to nothing because she missed so much work due to sickness. In the early days of her cancer, she had fooled herself into thinking she was just dealing with a bad case of bronchitis. The friendship with Amanda had disappeared along with all her other friendships. Few friendships can stand the pain, the anger, the self-pity, and the wasting away of a cancer victim. Sure they were all there at the beginning, but the daily, depressing grind of the disease turned friends into acquaintances who assured her that, “We’ll do lunch, next week, I swear.”
She had screwed up a lot, and now, with what felt like so little time left to her, here was the greatest thing she could possibly screw up. She had never been in love before and yet, right there in the rocking ambulance, she was sure this was it. In the last three weeks, she hadn’t gone five minutes without thinking of Chuck Singleton. There was an ache in her breast for him that put the cancer to shame. She was in love.
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