“The short of it is that the Lunds lost their father.” Cutter nodded at Oliver whose face was suddenly darkened at the news. “You know who they are, right?”
“I know,” I Oliver said. His light-colored locks were tossed by a sudden breeze and Ron was struck again by the idea that Jean and Oliver could pass easily for relatives; mother and son if not for the fact that Jean was far too young to be the boy’s mother.
“It wasn’t the zombies, though. Someone shot him.”
“Who? Who would do that?” Jean released Ron’s hand and moved to help him with his backpack and to take his rifle from him as he unslung it and handed it over for her to carry.
“There’s a guy.” Ron shook his head. “I don’t know much about him. But there’s someone in the Bank Trust Tower a few blocks away.” He pointed so that both of them could see just which building he meant. Oliver, of course, was well aware of it. “A guy we call 50-caliber lives there. I’m not sure which floors he uses, but he seems to have the run of the place. And he has some .50 caliber machine guns that he uses.
“Some time back he just took out the zombies. He was really effective from up there. Wiped out dozens of them at a time. Hell…those bullets are like bowling balls when they hit something. Direct hit will turn a body to pudding.” Thinking of the red remains of Mr. Lund, he stopped, knowing the power of the weapon and hoping he wouldn’t have to make things clearer to his charges. “But a couple months ago, the guy started shooting at people. Not many, but he took out some regular folk. At first, I figured he was shooting at deaders and some folk just got in his way, or he wasn’t paying attention to what he was doing…
“But now I’m pretty sure he’s doing it on purpose.” He sighed. “I think the guy’s cracked. I think he’s shooting at anything that moves, the living or the dead.”
By this time they were headed toward the blockhouse. The walls were substantial, but thinking of that crazy bastard, he was wondering if he should stack up sandbags on the wall facing the bank building. Just in case. He’d mention it to Oliver and Jean later. He didn’t want to worry them about it just then.
“So…what about the rest of his family?” Oliver asked. “Are they okay? His wife and his kids?”
The three of them opened the door to the house and went inside, closing and locking it behind them. “Mrs. Lund and her children…they’ll deal with it,” he said. “You know how it is.” He didn’t have to say anything else about the details. Oliver had to learn how to deal with his parents’ death, and Jean had seen her own father gunned down in front of her. By thieves who had once been neighbors.
“Where are they?” Jean asked. “Do we need to help them?”
Ron began to put his equipment away, storing the shells and weapons, hanging the pack on the wall where he always kept it. Then he went to his favorite chair and collapsed into it, the soft dimensions enfolding him. The other two pulled up seats and sat in front of him, ready to hear the news.
“They’re okay,” he said. “They’re with others.”
“What others?” Jean asked him, genuinely curious.
“That’s something I need to talk over with you guys. Things might be changing.” He leaned forward and wiped his brow with his right sleeve. “I ran into Colonel Dale. You both know who he is. Jean, I’ve told you about him and Oliver you’ve met him.”
They both nodded but were otherwise quiet.
“He was nearby when I got to the Lunds. Ended up helping me take them somewhere safe. We had to outrun some dead folk, but that was no real trouble. Could have been, but ended up being nothing to write down in the logbook of scary shit.”
Oliver giggled. That made Ron smile.
“The thing is,” he said, “is that they’re trying to put things back together. They have a hospital.”
“What?” Jean stood up. “Who has a hospital? What are you talking about?”
Oliver just stayed where he was, but he was eyeing the adults, noting the sudden difference in both physical and mental postures of the two grownups.
“Colonel Dale and some like-minded folk have organized. And I have to admit that I’m impressed with what they’ve done. About a mile west of here, they have a hospital set up. It wasn’t a hospital building before things fell apart, but that’s what it is now. They have electric power, beds, medicine, doctors, and the works.”
“Are you shitting me?” Jean was amazed. He could see expectation and something that might have been fear in her eyes. Maybe it was something else—anxiety. Hell, Ron couldn’t quite remember how to read faces anymore.
“Dale says that they have quite a group, now.”
Jean was obviously agitated now, and had begun pacing. She was actually hugging herself, each hand gripped upon the opposite arm. “How many?” she asked simply.
“Well, I don’t know how many were in that hospital. Had to be hundreds. He said there were more than that many patients there.” He paused, trying to recall everything the Colonel had told him. “But he says that there are over ten thousand of the living here. In the city.”
“Ten thousand? Are you kidding me?” Jean had stopped pacing and stood frozen, staring at Ron. Her face had grown flushed, her eyes almost bugged out of her head. A quick glance toward Oliver showed that the boy was getting upset.
“I believe him, Jean. I really think that there are that many people here in the downtown.” He stood and shrugged. “I’ve noticed just from how far afield I have to go scavenging these days.” Ron looked to Oliver for support, and to rouse the boy out of any growing panic he might be feeling.
The boy nodded. “He’s right. It’s not like it used to be. Just finding canned foods is hard enough.”
“Ten thousand,” Jean whispered it. “That means…”
Ron thought he knew what was going through her mind but he wanted to hear it from her without prompting her to say something else.
“If there’s ten thousand just right here, in downtown Charlotte…then that means there must be many millions of the living.” She sat again, the strength gone out of her legs. Cutter was relieved to see the strain gone from her face, her coloration had gone back to normal, her features once again calm and so beautiful it made his heart ache.
“That’s what the Colonel says,” Ron agreed. “Or that’s what he was hinting at in so many words. And he wants me…that is…he wants us all to join in. For the long term.”
“What did you tell him?” she asked.
“It’s for the best,” he said. “I told him he could count on me. I gave him my word. We shook on it,” he added, smiling sheepishly.
**
Colonel Dale:
Alastair Conway Dale made his way through the streets from west to east. The sky was typically blue—a color he had come to recognize as ‘Carolina blue’, although it was likely a hue that had not been seen in these skies for a hundred years. “No more air pollution these days,” he whispered to the world.
He stopped from time to time to scan the streets and examine his surroundings. Although he was in this area fairly often, he didn’t care for it. The people who lived in that part of the city hadn’t yet learned that they could put the fear of gunpowder into the dead folk who lusted after their bodies, if not their souls. But that took organization and numbers gathered together, and most of the denizens in the eastern half of the city avoided both things. That would have to change.
He was a Colonel, last in the employ of the British Army. A number of circumstances had landed him on American shores shortly before the end had come. These circumstances had been important to the people who employed him, and were still important. He had a job to do and no matter how much he disliked the situation, he had to see it through. That meant he had to put up with Stan Lieber, as much as he loathed the toad. This was among the jobs he had to do, and as no one else remained to do them, it was all up to him.
Keep a stiff upper lip and all that rot.
As he often told those who would listen—and there were happily
more of that type every day—there were things that were now lost to them all. And more things being lost every day that the situation as they currently knew them continued. Oh, tell me I may sponge away the writing on this stone! He thought of Dickens constantly these days.
Lieber was almost completely mad, now. He knew that. But it was his job to see to it that the madman’s work was completed before it was too late. This was as important as anything left to do in this world, and there was no one remaining to see it done except Colonel Alastair Conway Dale, British Army.
From time to time Dale encountered people who actually liked the way the world was now. Men who enjoyed the violence and the sense of independence the situation had given them. He’d met fellows who savored the firing of endless rounds of ammunition into the skulls of the reanimated dead; who drooled at the thought of killing other people who got in their way. Of course, the Colonel generally ended the lives of such men, and it was the right thing to do. Such men were totally insane, like his current war, Stan Lieber.
But he was stuck. Lieber had been a highly adept hacker in the old world, but as the chips had fallen, he was probably the best at that particular work now living on the planet. Dale had under his care the best man remaining to get the job done, and he intended to see that Lieber did that job before the crazy damned bastard cashed in his chips. Of course Dale himself planned to kill the nut himself when the time came. It was just that the time had not yet arrived.
The Colonel saw that his way was clear and he used the opportunity to dash across the wide remains of McDowell Street. He liked the name. It reminded him of home and of leisure time he’d spent walking the Munros of Scotland when he had taken a vacation with his wife and sons. Hardly a day passed that he didn’t think about them, wondering if they were still alive. He’d tried to find out if they were safe; Lieber had helped him try. But despite having access to the last known Internet connection south of the Mason and Dixon Line, they’d found no such proof. Dale wondered what the others in the town would think if they knew that there was still such a thing as the Internet; that at least part of it was still up and running and that he and Lieber had access to it.
Likely, some would have just been amazed. Some, he knew, would probably be angry that something like that had been kept from them.
He intended to keep them in ignorance until he’d accomplished his work. He had to keep them all in the dark until Stan Lieber finished what he had to do, what Alastair Dale had ordered him to do.
Ironically, the biggest danger that Dale had to fear as he approached the Trust Building where Lieber was protected was Lieber himself. In a hell of a mistake (hindsight was always 20-20, the Yanks like to say), Lieber had been given .50 caliber sniper weapons and two mounted .50 cals. The guns had been supplied to the man at Dale’s insistence. The Colonel had figured that Stan had a great vantage point there in the tower and could teach the shambling dead to run when gunfire erupted, and their fellow dead began to blossom flowers of dashed brains and shattered skull bits. Such had worked in other places where he had set down the rules and it should have worked there.
But he hadn’t counted on the fact that from such a height (Lieber generally fired from balconies on the 30th floor) the gunfire could scarcely be heard as it dissipated skyward. The largely unthinking dead never had the chance to do their rudimentary reasoning as their company magically fell to the earth to lie truly forever more. And he hadn’t counted on the unfortunate fact that Lieber would go stark, raving mad.
As Dale liked to imprint on one and all, they were losing things. The longer the situation lingered, the more these things were lost for all time.
For months, he’d been keeping Lieber going by the gentle application of anti-psychotic medications. The doctors he’d carefully and painfully assembled in his makeshift hospital had supplied him the medications he’d needed. Abilify. Risperdal. Geodon. Sometimes they gave him medicines that didn’t quite match the malady from which Lieber was suffering, but they had done the job. The list of compounds they’d given him to take to his mystery patient had grown larger and the supplies had dwindled until now he was left with what he was now carrying to his most precious of wards. When this stuff ran out, he was either going to be one disappointed planner, or he was going to see his plot successfully completed.
Either way, it was do or die.
At the corner of the building across from the Trust Tower, he stopped. Unlike some others, the Colonel preferred to travel light. He carried two handguns these days, and a truncheon he’d constructed from his own design. Only when he knew that he was going to be out in the field for an extended time did he carry more elaborate weapons. Things like rifles were heavy. Heavy meant extra risk. And so Dale was travelling light as he approached his goal.
He pulled his pack from his shoulders long enough to extract the little periscope he’d been carrying with him since he’d lucked across it in a looted gun store. The idiots who’d taken all of the firearms from the place and all but the most unique ammunition had left it behind. It had saved his life more than once. On days when he suspected Lieber was drifting in and out of sanity, the thing was a must-have item. Putting the lens to his eye, he leaned against the warm, concrete surface of the skyscraper and peered at his target.
Dale knew where the computer programmer liked to linger on days when he went out to fire the weapons the Colonel had been so unwise to install. There were windows and balconies up there between the 27th and 31st floors where the crazy man lived and worked. That was where the danger lurked, but Alastair knew to watch for movement there and make sure there was no obvious danger. Too bad Mr. Lund hadn’t had that information. All the Colonel had been able to impart to the dead man was that he needed to stay away from the place. The loss of his oldest son had obviously not been enough to keep him from the most dangerous locations around the building. What else could Dale have done?
Peering up, he saw that Lieber was visible on the northwest balcony on the 30th floor. It was, after all, the man’s favorite spot from which to shoot. The mound of deaders lying below at the intersection was impressive, even as Dale watched the shooting commence and a zombie stumbling dumbly across that intersection went to pieces. The part with the heads and arms still attached was crawling along, and Lieber continued his fire, doing his best to turn the moving half of the deader into bits.
The Colonel took that moment to scoot across the street, running a gauntlet of brush, of newly grown shrubs, passing by the withering husks of abandoned autos and pocked concrete barriers placed here and there.
At the building, he made his way to the solid steel door inset just at street level, and he inserted a key into the lock, opened the door, and vanished inside. There was work to be done.
**
From their hiding spot in the window two floors above the very spot where Colonel Dale had paused to scan the street with his periscope, Ron, Jean, and Oliver looked down as Dale vanished into the mysterious building across the way.
“See?” Cutter said to his family. “I told you that guy was up to something.”
Jean and Oliver just nodded in the shadows.
**
Once inside the Trust Building, Dale locked the door securely behind him. The door was unbelievably stout. Solid steel with a triple lock that could likely not be breached with anything less than a couple of pounds of high explosive. And if there was anything the Colonel knew well, it was high explosives. He’d been initially trained as a sapper; his knowledge of the basics of engineering were considerable, and his expertise in how to knock that stuff down with explosives was even more vast.
He paused, peering up the staircase that loomed steeply before him. This access to the building had always been considered for emergency use only, despite the solid door. Anyone wishing to use it would have been in possession of the keys necessary to get in or out. These days the only person with such a key was the Colonel himself. He’d made it a point not to allow Lieber to have a set, even though the progr
ammer had asked for them on several occasions. Because of this, he never expected to encounter the hacker at this entrance or even on the long climb to the floors above. But because of the other man’s mental state, he never knew exactly what to find when entering the place.
Dale also wondered what the other denizens of the city would think should they encounter what he was now experiencing at this moment: air conditioning. He couldn’t hear the compressors or even sense the rumble of the huge generators that were supplying power to several floors of the Trust Building, but he could certainly feel it as the air descended upon him from the heights. It was an almost forgotten pleasure that he never tired of finding. It was one more thing that would soon be lost for a very long time if things didn’t change for the better; and soon.
This stairwell ascended at such an extreme angle that the steps were all but in the face of anyone using them to go up. It was something almost more akin to a ladder than a stairway. He went up slowly, the way lighted by dim panels that kept him well out of total darkness, but did little more than that. He could see where he was going, but he couldn’t make out any details in the subdued illumination. And that was all right with Alastair Dale. He counted his way up the tower, heading toward the haven preserved for the man most precious on Earth to the officer: Stan Lieber.
Saving his energy, he proceeded slowly, in a calculating way. Now and again, he stopped to catch his breath and to listen. There were actually only four landings on the way up—access spots where one could move from the stairwell onto various floors. But until you hit the 30th floor, those places were dead spots, open to the elements, their contents long succumbed to water and heat, ice and cold. Nothing on those floors was worth a second glance. Still, he paused at each of them, putting his ear to the steel doors to listen, sometimes hearing scrabbling from the opposite sides. He supposed that there were dead on some of those floors, people perhaps trapped there since the last days and wandering the halls and rooms in search of flesh. Or maybe he heard only the stirrings of the wind, or the going and coming of buzzards, hawks, and rodents. He didn’t know, and he really didn’t care. All that was important to him was the preservation of a vision for the future, and that vision was Colonel Alastair Conway Dale’s vision.
The Coalition: Part II The Lord Of The Living (COALITON OF THE LIVING Book 2) Page 4