He ran. It was still going to be a long time, if ever, before he could break into a full on dash. His knee still ached and he might never regain full mobility in the joint. But he could put out a burst of speed if he really had to. And now, he decided, was a moment for speed. If he ran toward the obviously panicked group, they couldn’t draw a bead on him and accidentally shoot him, and the shuffling dead that were congregating at the intersection wouldn’t be able to latch their wet and clumsy paws on his body.
As he got to them, he recognized everyone present. It was the Lunds, the family he had intended to ask to take in Oliver. But only Mrs. Lund was there screaming. Her husband was dead on the cracked and root-buckled pavement, his body blasted almost as if he had been hugging some kind of explosive when it had gone off. He was cut virtually in half and everything in him that might have been an organ had been converted to a red soup that steamed in the daylight beaming down through the concrete towers. What had happened?
Ron looked up. This was it. This was the place. This was where Old Fifty-two lived. This was where the crazed gunman could look down from twenty floors and blow a person to little specks of crimson with those tremendous guns of his.
The next shot whizzed past his shoulders, and later Ron would be horrified to note the geometric crease the tumbling shell made on his leather jacket as it came within a lizard’s whisker of his back. The fist-size wad of metal smacked into the asphalt beneath the tangle of weeds and sent a little shockwave through the feet and shins of everyone present. In that instant, without thinking much about what he was doing, Ron spread his arms wide and grasped Mrs. Lund and her two children and slammed all three of them to the ground.
For the first time since he’d gone out for his run to find metal, the woman ceased to scream. He didn’t know if it was from the contact with his body, or the blow of being smashed to the ground, or if she’d just come to her senses. Whatever the cause, she was suddenly very quiet. For just a second or two, Ron lay there, covering the three people beneath him. He could feel them breathing, feel the beat of their hearts, the pulse of their blood. They were alive and alone.
And Ron would save them.
Goddamn, he would save them.
Already he could hear the soft thrash of undead legs moving through the weeds and leftover trash of society’s retreat. The zombies who had shoes were crunching small stones and sand under what remained of those bits of clothing. It never ended. Why didn’t they just all fall over and stay dead? Why was it such a struggle to make them lie down and turn to dust?
Ron went to his feet, his right hand already drawing the .45 free of its hip holster. His eyes were full of salty sweat and even tears, so he almost didn’t see in time.
“Put that away, son.” The voice was low and cool and it did the job.
“Colonel Dale. Where did you come from?” A silly question, perhaps, but how had the soldier appeared so suddenly, as if by magic. Ron looked at the man who was dressed now in what appeared to be a military uniform other than an American one. It looked similar to what he’d often seen on soldiers in the States, but altered in some ways. And immediately, Cutter realized that Dale was wearing one of his actual British uniforms, medals and all.
“I was on my routine, son.” The man turned and looked back toward the building where the .52 caliber killer was safely sheltered. “We’d best be moving. I can already count a good one hundred of the dead folk zeroing in on us. In a few minutes it’ll be a thousand, and then two thousand…you know the drill.”
Instead of saying anything, Ron only nodded, turning his attention immediately to what remained of the Lund family. The trio just stood, saying nothing, doing little else but breathing. Cutter figured that shock was setting in, if not already in full blossom. His eyes went to Mrs. Lund and he found her staring at the ground and followed her gaze to see that she was looking at nothing at all. “Mrs. Lund,” he whispered. “We have to get out of here. Can you go? Can you run?”
She finally peeled her eyes from whatever scene she was viewing and met his gaze. And she nodded. “I can run,” she said. A crazy kind of smile turned up the corners of her mouth; Ron felt a chill go through him despite the heat. Somewhere nearby there were big, fat, blue bottle flies buzzing around, looking for a place to lay their eggs. Not in the zombies. They never laid eggs in zombies. That wasn’t, apparently, fit food for maggots.
“We can take them to a safe place,” Colonel Dale said. Already the officer had the children by the hand and was leading them away. “It’s not far away,” he continued, moving swiftly but not running. Not yet. At their backs the dead moaned to see more food fleeing the scene. But there was one body lying still, surrounded by a still-warm pool of blood and guts. They would eat that, most certainly.
Peering over his shoulder as he and Mrs. Lund followed in Dale’s wake, Ron saw the first of the rising tide of shamblers reach the shattered halves of Dan Lund’s body. Those undead fell to their knees, to all fours, crouching and crawling, crabbing forward to reach out with half-ruined hands to grab that one thing they always desired: human flesh. For the next minute or so, he kept looking back, stealing glances, watching in disgusted fascination as the monsters pulled at their prize, tearing it into fist-sized gobbets, into hanks and streamers of flaccid guts, of sweating meat and unyielding tendons. They fought and snarled; pushed and pulled, snapped at one another until they had enough to retreat with a handful or their jaws filled with red pudding, there to find a peaceful spot to gnaw and swallow.
They turned a corner and dove quickly into a shadowed corridor of an alleyway. In a moment, they seemed to be alone; the scene in the center of that intersection was only a dimly heard buzz in the background.
Ron increased the pace and Mrs. Lund stayed with him, her grip sure but her eyes remaining downcast. They pulled up to a single step behind Dale and the two kids. “Where are you taking us?” he asked. There, within inches of the Colonel, Ron could not only see the man in detail for the first time, but could smell him. He was completely clean. He’d not only been able to shower or bathe at leisure at some recent time, but his uniform was spotless and pressed; and there was the unmistakable scent of fabric softener emanating from the fellow. Ron couldn’t remember the last time he’d encountered that once-familiar and very pleasant odor.
“We’ve been getting on with things,” Dale said. “You folk who want to stand apart are welcome to do so, but the rest of us are intent on pulling things together. We’ve been making some changes around this city, and we’re going to do our best to set it as right as we possibly can.” The admonition in the soldier’s voice was apparent, but Ron had been immune to it for so long that he could only acknowledge it without feeling any guilt whatsoever.
“Okay,” Ron replied. “I Roger you on that, Colonel. But where the heck are we going with this family? You say it’s not far. But how far away, exactly? And what is this place, precisely?”
Instead of pointing, which would have required Dale to release his hold on one or the other of the children, he merely nodded his head, indicating a building to their left and less than a block away. Once upon a time it had been a department store, but had been closed up for most of a year before the rising of the dead. It was eight floors high and took up a good quarter of the block on which it was constructed. Ron wasn’t sure, but it probably dated back to the 1930s or so.
Looking at the place, Ron initially thought that it was still just a set of gutted walls, but as they approached it he saw subtle signs that there was something going on there. Formerly bare windows had been patched and curtains placed over them. Trash and weeds had been efficiently removed from doorways and driveways, and barricades of wood and concrete had been placed strategically around the building. Some of the barricades had well-built guardhouses cobbled together from diamond plate and welded together. There were gun-slits cut into places and none of them seemed to be manned at the moment, but it was obvious to Ron that they were intended for that.
“How many
here?” Ron asked.
“This? This is the hospital,” Colonel Dale informed him.
“Hospital?” He wanted to stop and look at the building before they got any closer. He was afraid to stop however, for fear of upsetting Mrs. Lund, who seemed at this point content to just walk and stare at the ground and not think of the father of her children lying in bloody bits on the street less than a mile away.
“Best we can do, for now,” Dale answered, never pausing. Far ahead of them, more than three blocks north, Ron could see zombies moving into the street, probably drawn out of their hiding spots by the deliberate movement of the little group of tempting humans. As he looked at them, their heads exploded into neat little flowers of bone and brains. Somewhere there were snipers watching the streets, but either they were out of earshot or were using guns equipped with some kind of silencer. A few more zombies moved up to replace them and were put down in a carbon copy of the first response, and after that, nothing moved.
“How many do you have here?” They were now at the front of the building and Ron saw that the sidewalk had been completely cleaned of weeds and shrubs, and had been swept and washed down with military precision.
“Patients? Or everyone involved?”
Ron could only stand in place as the officer stopped in his tracks and looked up at the eight floors looming over them. “Here we have about one thousand souls. Maybe a hundred patients. Most minor injuries and sicknesses, but a few are critical.” He half turned and looked back at Ron.
“Do me a favor, son.” He indicated his left pocket on his jacket with a nod of his shaved chin. “There’s a whistle in there. Could you retrieve it for me and stick it in my mouth? I don’t wish to let go of their little hands just now. I think they’re just this side of hysteria, and I want to keep them that way as long as possible.”
Ron did as requested, unbuttoning the flap with his left hand, keeping his right one clasped tightly to Mrs. Lund’s fingers. Producing a glittering chrome metal whistle, he held it out while Dale took it in his teeth and turned to face the building with it clenched tightly there. He breathed in and then blew briskly through the little instrument. The sound was piercing and quite louder and more intense than Ron had suspected it would be. If not for Mrs. Lund, he would have put his hands to his ears to block the offending shriek.
Immediately a double-door opened just in front of them, on the far side of concrete barriers that had been staggered to create a bit of a maze. Cutter followed the Colonel’s lead and before any of the lines of undead could move within a hundred yards of the building, they were inside and the stout doors were quickly shut and locked tight. Stopping only for a brief moment, Ron looked back at the door, at the locks and metal bars reinforcing it. To his eyes, it didn’t look strong enough to hold back what he suspected was coming. He wanted to ask about it, but before he could they were joined by four women and two men—all of them roughly in their late 20s or early 30s—who took charge of the Lund Family and took them through another door and down a hallway where all three of them vanished.
Allowing just a second or two of relaxation, Ron let the muscles in his shoulders relax and he took in a deep breath. The place smelled clean and antiseptic. “Damn. Is this…is this a hospital?”
Dale nodded. “It is, now.” Taking a few steps to his left, he turned down the hallway, moving in the opposite direction from where the others had taken the Lunds. When Ron hesitated, the Colonel motioned to him. “Come with me. We need to speak.”
And so Cutter followed the older man down hallways that were clean, that glistened in the electric lights that were keeping even the darkest corners revealed. “You have a generator going?” He thought to ask, moving quickly to keep up with the brisk pace his companion had set.
“Yes,” Dale told him. “Big ones. We run them on diesel for several hours a day. Whenever the doctors are going to do surgery we fire them up, or just to let the patients feel extra comfortable when we think they need it,” he added.
As they walked, other doors opened as people went about their ways. Some of them were dressed in street clothes, some in military fatigues, others in white smocks that marked them as either physicians or nurses or nurse’s aides. “You’ve got doctors here,” he said, amazed.
“Twenty, last time I spoke to the head physician,” Dale told him. “Six certified physician’s assistants and fifty-three nurses. Not sure how many certified surgical techs and nurses’ aides. A fair number, but not enough. We never have enough of anything, really.”
And then they were at a door that Colonel Dale opened. He held it wide and once again motioned, this time for Ron to precede him. It was an office, furnished with a large oak desk, swivel chair, a couple of leather easy chairs in front of the desk. “Not really my own office,” the Colonel told him. “But I share it with a couple of the doctors. I try to stay out of their way, but they’re all on duty just now, so it’s mine.” He closed the door behind Cutter.
Going to the desk, he produced a key from his pocket and used it to open one of the drawers in the big desk. “The office and desk might not be all mine, but this drawer by Jove surely is,” he told his guest. With a flourish, he produced a bottle of whiskey, the bottle mostly full, light shining through the vital liquid as if through gold. “Have a drink with me,” he told Ron.
“Not a problem,” Ron said.
From somewhere, suddenly they heard gunshots. Ron stiffened, but Dale continued as if nothing was wrong, pulling a couple of shot glasses from the same drawer and filling them. He handed one to Cutter. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Guards and snipers taking care of the curious deaders who were stupid enough to follow us here.”
“The shots will draw them here, you know,” Ron said. “It always does.”
Without immediately replying, Dale tipped the glass up and downed the contents. “Ah,” he said, smacking his lips. “Good stuff. Pretty soon we’re going to have to learn to make it ourselves. We have a few people around who say they’re good at it.”
“Moonshiners?” he asked.
“If you want to call them that. They think they’re craftsman. I prefer to think of them that way, too.” He turned and drew the blinds aside just a bit to take a look. There were more shots. “You know, the shambling monsters out there won’t stay around very long. They’ll all turn tail soon enough.”
“Turn tail?” Ron was still standing there, holding his full shot glass. “What are you talking about? They’ll fill the street out there. Then they’ll start pounding on all of the doors and trying to climb up here to these windows. You’d better have a shitload of bullets handy.” Finally, he seemed to realize the whiskey was in his hand and he put it to his lips and drank it, savoring the flavor. God, he loved a good whiskey, and this was about as good as it got. It had been weeks since he’d chanced across a sealed bottle of anything decent.
“They do learn, you know.”
“What? What the Hell are you saying?”
“They learn. Certainly you’ve noticed…well, perhaps you haven’t. Living almost alone as you have been. Until recently, though, right?”
Ron squinted suspiciously at the Colonel and wondered if he should be worried. Something told him that he was safe, though, and so his hand did not creep toward any of the host of weapons he carried. “Have you been spying on me?”
“I like to think I keep up with everyone here in our fair city.” He stopped to fill their glasses once again. “You have Oliver with you, now. I have to admit that I don’t know the young lady who’s with you these days, but I have seen her. She’s very attractive.” The Colonel downed his whiskey again with an efficient tilt of his wrist.
A clumsy moment of silence followed before Ron began to sip at his whiskey, savoring it and hoping that Dale would offer him at least one more sample. “Her name is Jean,” he told, without giving up her last name. “She was outside Charlotte and came in just a few days ago. Crack shot, that woman. Made it all the way here from Matthews with a bag full of .22
shells and a single-shot pop gun her dad hand-made for her.”
“A woman of some talent, then,” the Colonel replied.
“You’ve got that right,” Ron told him, and finished off his drink. He held out the shot glass again, raising his brows expectantly. He smiled as Dale filled it a third time.
“Much as you want,” he said to his guest.
“Just one more. I don’t want to get shit-faced if I’m going to have to fight my way back home.” Looking around, he located one of the stuffed chairs and setting his rifle aside, he fell into its leather comforts. Sighing, he eyed his host as the other man also settled into the chair behind the desk and tipped another serving into his glass.
“You said something about them learning,” Ron said.
There was another fusillade and then silence. The two waited to see if there would be any more shots fired. A minute passed. Two. Then three.
“Are you telling me that they’re leaving?” Cutter asked.
Colonel Dale nodded and smiled. “They’re not as completely stupid as we first thought they were. Or, to put it another way, they’re not as stupid as they were when they first came back to whatever state in which they find themselves.” Dale, too, had taken to sipping this latest glassful of whiskey, tasting it and allowing it to slide over his palate slowly.
“I don’t even have to look out there right now to tell you that the crowds following the ones in the lead, saw their fellows’ heads explode and decided that most basic of instincts; that being that discretion is the better part of valor.” He thought for a second. “Not that they have any idea of something as complicated as valor, mind you.” And then he nodded at Ron.
“But you do. I know that you know all about valor.”
The Coalition: Part II The Lord Of The Living (COALITON OF THE LIVING Book 2) Page 2