He knew this was true and he knew their ammo situation was dangerously low and yet…those were people screaming. A part of him demanded that he do something to save them and, another, perhaps greater part demanded that he run away as fast as he could. The two sides vied within him and then rationalizations began to hurl themselves against his moral foundation until it crumbled.
“You’re right,” he mumbled a moment later, allowing Courtney’s words to act as a cover to his cowardice. “We’re too low on ammo. We should go.” The screams were making him queasy and he was afraid he could also hear the far off ones of Will dying. He put his elbow up on the door and pretended to rest his head in his hand. Really, he was hiding the fact that he had a finger stuck in one ear to help block out the sounds.
Chapter 24
The Cardboard Fortress
5:40 p.m.
Dr. Thuy Lee saw the three-car procession as it streaked back up I-9. She mistook their urgency for designed purpose and pointed Deckard to follow along after. He took the Humvee diagonally across a farmer’s field, crushed a wire fence beneath its huge tires, and bounced up onto the highway.
The great beast of a vehicle had no problem catching up and fell into position behind the Ford Windstar. Fearful eyes stared out at them from its rear window. Thuy smiled and waved, in as friendly a manner as she could contrive, but the fear remained and soon the three cars came to a stop and then guns were pointed their way.
“I should probably go talk to them,” Thuy announced. When Deckard began to protest, she explained: “I’m the smallest and thus the least threatening of us.”
“Check their eyes,” Anna Holloway suggested. She had managed to wriggle her way to a seated position and was squinting through the quickening dark at the cars. “They could be infected. That’s blood on that minivan. You can tell by the pattern that it’s not mud.”
“You can rest assured that I will take all precautions,” Thuy replied. She then glanced at Deckard. His rugged face was turned partially towards her and partially toward the cars. He was anxious for her safety. He cared, she could read it in his dark eyes. It made her feel warm inside and she had to hold herself in check otherwise she would’ve kissed him. She didn’t like the idea of kissing him just then—it would seem like a kiss goodbye. There would be too much finality to it.
“I’ll be fine,” she told him before opening the door to the Humvee. Stepping out, she smoothed the white blouse she had put on that morning, raked her slim fingers through her raven hair and then began to stride toward the cars.
Behind her, Deckard rolled down his window and eased the M16 from its place along the console. He wanted to be ready.
“Hello,” Thuy said to the soldier crouched next to the minivan. “I’m unarmed. You have nothing to fear from me.” He didn’t seem afraid, only wary, however the two teenagers with him were petrified and hid low in their seats.
“What do you want?” a greasy-haired man asked, belligerently. It was Benjamin Olski. He had a curl to his lip and an angry cast to his features. Despite the gun in his hands, Thuy stepped closer to inspect him. His eyes were clear.
She relaxed slightly. “Just to get out of the quarantined area, the same as you,” she explained. “We’ve traveled up and down the eastern perimeter, but there are simply too many infected persons to cross in that direction. The south has too many trigger-happy soldiers; no offence,” she added nodding to the other soldier who had come walking up. His nametag read: Fowler and his eyes were clear as well.
“Do you have soldiers with you?” he asked, giving a glance at the Humvee.
Thuy shook her head. “No. Unfortunately the area in which we were located was overrun a couple of hours ago and the soldiers there were all killed. We just managed to escape with the Humvee.”
“Just managed?” Benjamin asked, incredulously. He turned to the others and declared: “She’s probably diseased right now. Everyone knows you can’t get too close to the zombies and not catch the disease. It’s in the air all around them.”
“That is speculation. How the pathogen is transmitted from a human vector has not been determined as of yet, though I would not rule out the possibility of airborne transference in an optimum setting, I am strongly leaning toward a bloodborne route as the most likely of the choices presented.” The greasy man paused at this, trying to work out exactly what she’d said. While he did, Thuy turned to Fowler. “Tell me, do you know of a way out of The Zone? You’re a soldier, I’m sure you know the egress points.”
He shook his head, his eyebrows drooping and his face down. There was an aura of grief around him. Even his voice held pain: “No, there aren’t any. Once you’re in The Zone, you’re stuck. The Army won’t let you out. Man, I think we’re fucked.”
“Don’t be like that,” one of the women in the group told him. She had mop of brown hair on her head that was in need of a brush and her clothes were disheveled and mud splattered. Her entire aspect was one of exhaustion, except her eyes, which were still bright.
“I’m not being like anything,” he replied. “What else would you call it besides being fucked? We’ve tried to get out north, south, and west. They’ve tried the east. There’s nowhere else to go.”
“How do we know she’s telling the truth?” Benjamin asked, cutting his eyes to Thuy as if to catch her reacting in some other way than puzzlement.
“Why would she lie?” the woman demanded. “You’re being paranoid, Benjamin.”
“I’m not lying,” Thuy said. “Though Mr. Fowler may be correct in his assessment of our situation. With night coming, I don’t think we’ll make it out tonight. I don’t think we should try.”
“Wait! Stop,” Benjamin said. “What’s this ‘we’ business? We don’t know you. We don’t know anything about you. We don’t even know if you’re diseased, despite what you said.”
“I know her,” the woman with the bushy hair said. “You’re Dr. Lee, aren’t you?”
Thuy gazed at her, certain that they had never met, so how did she know Thuy’s name? The woman didn’t have the usual academic air of a scientist, which meant it was doubtful that she knew Thuy by her professional reputation. Few ‘normal’ people read scientific journals so it was also unlikely she knew Thuy by her published works. And since Thuy wasn’t current with social networking of any sort, the woman couldn’t have known her face through that means.
This left two options: she was involved in some sort investigative work; perhaps she was a spy like Anna or Eng. However, her attire and her hairstyle suggested she was a local and that left only one way in which she could have known Thuy, and that was by her voice.
“And I know you,” Thuy said. “You’re Courtney Shaw, the state trooper dispatcher that I spoke to on a number of occasions yesterday.”
Courtney grinned. “Yes. I’m so happy that you got out of Walton. Surprised but happy. With the fire, I figured no one had gotten out of there alive.”
“It was a near thing,” Thuy acknowledged.
For some reason, Benjamin looked upset. “You two know each other? That’s rather convenient, don’t you think?”
“It is, rather,” Thuy agreed. “Since we are not exactly strangers it will allows us an opportunity to integrate our two groups without hesitation or suspicion…at least without unfounded suspicion.”
Courtney stifled a laugh as Benjamin floundered in the face of Thuy’s logic and cool demeanor. Thuy pretended not to notice. She waved to the Humvee and out came Deckard, Burke, Wilson, Stephanie and Chuck. Introductions were made and that included Sundance who gave a sniff and a tail wag to each in approval. The dog then went to the Humvee where he went about the edges with his nose working overtime and his tiny brain puzzled. He could smell the three people in the back but he couldn’t understand why they were there.
The two groups eyed each other in a stiff, formal silence; the soldiers made Thuy’s group uncomfortable and Benjamin annoyed everyone as he sneered. He seemed especially putout that Chuck smirked into t
he face of the sneer.
“So how do you two know each other?” Max asked. Courtney’s explanation, augmented on occasion by Thuy, did nothing to ease the tension.
“You did this?” Johnny asked Thuy. “You made the zombies?”
Although Thuy was the smallest person in the group, she somehow managed to look down her nose at the soldier. “I did nothing wrong. My Com-cells, had they not been sabotaged, would’ve been a cure for cancer. The people who ‘made the zombies’, as you put it are in the back of the Humvee.”
This spiked everyone’s curiosity and Deckard was pressured into opening the back to reveal the handcuffed criminals. Eleven people and one dog stood staring into the cargo area at the three individuals. Eng was a block of ice as he stared back emotionlessly, while Meeks glared and said: “You’re all accessories to kidnapping.” No one knew what to say to that; they were in the quarantined zone and as far as anyone could tell laws were no longer applicable. They had all been kidnapped, in essence, by the government, and sentenced to death. Each of them had witnessed murder on a vast scale and some had killed what had been humans only the day before. It made the concept of law, alien.
Each had been altered by the sudden calamitous change in their lives. Their inner beings had been reset to a point in their evolution where, as human animals, they could accept death on a daily basis and move on with the demands of surviving, because they had come to understand fully that their time on earth was fleeting as hell.
Anna Holloway understood this completely on a conscious level, which was why she could plot the deaths of everyone around her without feeling the least squirm in her soul. “My hands hurt,” she said with a little whimper. “I think they might be suffering from necrosis. That’s when the flesh begins to rot from lack of circulation. You can untie me. I don’t plan on running. Where would I run to?” She saw that Benjamin had been hooked by her performance just as surely as if she had a rod and reel. Johnny was equally snagged and even Courtney felt the tug at the elemental cry of mercy that ran beneath Anna’s words.
Deckard shut the hatch with a heavy thump and a sour smile. “So, we can’t make it out tonight? Is that the general consensus? If so, we need to find somewhere safe to hole up in until morning.”
“Nowhere is safe,” Alivia said. She was on her knees clutching Sundance in a two-armed embrace. For some reason, he made her feel safer than the men with guns did. “And you can’t hide from the zombies. They can sniff you out. I know. I saw it happen to my family and our neighbors.”
“It’s true,” her brother Jack agreed, nodding his head. “I saw it too. And doors won’t stop them. The zombies are too strong. They just keep bashing until the wood breaks. Either that or they get you through the windows. Windows are even easier, and it doesn’t matter if they cut themselves. They keep coming.”
“I know somewhere safe,” Courtney said. “Or I should say, safer than a normal house. My trooper station. The windows are a special treated glass and are at least an inch thick. They may even be bullet proof.”
The group began to show some signs of excitement at this, but Thuy doused it by asking: “If it’s so impregnable, why did you leave?” Everyone became immediately suspicious.
“Because of what happened at Walton,” Courtney admitted. “That was a sturdy building and it didn’t seem to matter how many troopers we sent in, they all died. I left the station because I was afraid to put my trust in glass and brick, but now I don’t have a choice. We can’t drive around all night and we can’t get out of The Zone, so that only leaves us with hunkering down. And we won’t be alone either. Before I left, my lieutenant was recalling all the troopers in order to make a stand. There could be forty or fifty men there.”
This was the deciding factor.
In the Audi, Courtney led the way. She drove at a dangerous speed. The failing light made spotting and dodging the many zombies in the road a difficult thing, however she feared the full night more than she had feared anything in her life. It was childish but it also went along with evolutionary reset; the night held the terrors of the unknown.
Just as twilight was beginning to erode, and the stars were clear as white pinpricks, she pulled into the parking lot of the trooper station. There were lights blazing and Courtney could see a few of her friends moving about behind the glass, but it was eerily quiet and the shadows around the building were intense: anything could be out there only a few feet away.
She slid out of the Audi and called Sundance to heel. In her hand was the Glock. Around her, the others were slipping up close, their eyes staring all around and their weapons at the ready. There was fear in the air, pervading each breath.
Thuy, Deckard, and Chuck were the only ones who seemed unaffected by it. “I believe you might have oversold us on the safety of this building,” Thuy said. “For one, it’s only a single story. That doesn’t allow us any room to maneuver in case one of the doors or windows is breached. And for two, I highly doubt there are forty police officers in that building.”
Courtney couldn’t answer to the first point since it was logically sound, however, there was no way Thuy could have known how many troopers were inside. “The building is larger on the inside. The troopers could be resting in the holding pens for all we know.”
“Look at the parking lot,” Thuy said, gesturing with one hand. “There are only seven cruisers so unless the other troopers caught a bus here, I suspect that, at most, there are fourteen men in there and I would wager good money that the number is a lot less. I bring this up only so that the group can decide whether this facility is properly suited to our needs.”
“I don’t think we have much of a choice,” Max said. “We’re here, it’s dark, and the building looks secure enough. I say we go in.”
“Your first two points are neither here nor there,” Thuy said, dismissively. “Only your third point makes sense, and yes, I would agree that the building does look secure, but are there other buildings that are more so? A bank for instance might be one. I do not wish to be argumentative, I only want to make other options available to be voted on.”
“We don’t have time to vote,” Benjamin said. Other than Alivia and Jack, he was the most nervous and his eyes sped about with panicked speed. “We should just go in before it’s too late.”
“No,” growled Deckard. “You aren’t our leader. I say we vote. Do we pick this place or do we go on and try to find a better spot? All in favor of staying raise your hands.” Eight hands went up while only three remained down.
“Excellent,” Meeks said, when he saw the vote. “You’re going to get what’s coming to you. Kidnapping, assaulting a federal officer, conspiracy to…”
Deckard grabbed him by the lapel. “Shut up,” he snapped. “Burke, watch the girl. Chuck watch Eng. You, Fowler, watch our back and Mrs. Shaw, lead the way.”
“It’s Ms Shaw, really, and you all can call me Courtney.” Her eyes slid from Deckard’s and lingered on Max when she said this. She then went around to the front door of the building and after fishing out her keys, she let them in. “Hello? Lieutenant Pemberton? Renee?”
She had expected to be greeted like The Prodigal Son returning, instead Pemberton held a gun on her. “Don’t come any closer, Courtney. Let me see your eyes.” She opened them as wide as possible and he squinted to see if she was infected. Next, he had every member of the group come forward and do the same thing.
Meeks started in as soon as he was dragged forward by Deckard. “I’m an FBI agent and I am being held against my will.”
“Is that so?” Pemberton replied. He looked far from concerned and dismissed the man without another look. He was most curious over Courtney. “Why’d you come back? Too many zombies or too many soldiers?”
“Zombies,” Courtney replied. “Out east there was this long grey wave of them. I bet there were at least twenty thousand of them. There was no getting through in that direction.”
“Heading east?” Pemberton asked, mostly talking to himself. “Wo
uld it be wrong if I said: good? I’m sorry but it’s been weird since you left. We’ve seen bands of them for the last few hours. They’re almost always in groups of a hundred or more. Thankfully they haven’t come sniffing too close.”
“That will change if you don’t take certain precautions,” Thuy told him. She began ticking off instructions: “Your windows should be covered in dark cloth or cardboard. Basically anything to reduce the amount of light that escapes. This will be made easier when we institute a strict light and sound policy. Next, you’ll have to treat every…”
Pemberton interrupted: “Who are you?” He turned to Courtney and asked virtually the same question: “Who is this?”
“This is Dr. Thuy Lee from the Walton facility. She’s an expert on the zombies.”
Thuy grimaced at the odd compliment. “I’m not an expert on the infected persons and I highly doubt there is anyone who can make an honest claim of being an expert. That being said, simple commonsense procedures should increase our chances at remaining secure in this facility. The infected persons seem to have retained some of their faculties and thus we should minimize such things as light, noise, movement…”
“And smell,” Jack added.
“Yes,” Thuy said. “Showers should be taken, clothes washed and we should douse the doors and windows with either bleach or ammonia. Food stores and ammunition should be inventoried and all available containers should be filled with fresh water. There’s no telling how long the water will remain on.
Pemberton’s mouth came open. He was not used to being ordered around in his own station. As he failed to make a noise and only stood blinking, Thuy continued: “Mr. Deckard will be in charge of securing the facility. When it comes to the defense of the building, everyone will listen to him. That is not an option. Mr. Fowler, if you will be so kind as to begin the job of cataloging our weapon situation. Lieutenant Pemberton, will you please take charge of the prisoners.”
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