He stopped and watched as she wordlessly got up from occupying Danny and headed toward the door of the office tucked inside of the lower level of the hospital. Too much had been put on the girl. She was being a trooper, but he could see that it was wearing on her. He needed to take some time and see to her needs, but he couldn't figure out how to do that without … God damn it, he still couldn't say her name—not even to himself. Elise, your wife's name was Elise, and she's dead. She was bitten by a zombie, turned, and then killed by your new partner, Lisa, as she rescued your daughter. But Elise is dead. Truly and completely gone.
He needed help, and—if his plan worked—the knock on the door just might solve some of his issues. He was going to have to play it right though. Politicians can be pretty slick when it comes to avoiding the actual work.
"Well, if it isn't Calvin Boweaver, my favorite mayor of Piney. What can I do for you today, sir?" Benson said cheerily as the suit walked through the door with Fenton Jones, his trusty aide who never left his side. In a Tolkien storybook world, he would be the Grima Wormtongue to Theoden of Rohan—except that Boweaver had probably never seen an honest day's work in his entire life.
"Hi, Art," he said, assuming a first-name basis with the officer in order to establish some type of hierarchy. Mayor Boweaver felt that as the only city administrator to have survived so far, he should have some say in the goings on around the compound. Up to that point, he had been denied access and virtually ignored.
"I noticed that you're really stretched pretty thin here, Art. I was wondering what I could do to help you out a bit," Calvin said as if they had been friends for years as opposed to just meeting a couple of days prior.
"All right, Calvin; I'm going to level with you. The days of politicking are gone … at least for a while anyway. I have heard about you out there actually campaigning, of all things, thinking that you can gain some sort of control here. Worse yet, you're campaigning against me like I actually want to be in this position."
"Noooo, no, never, Art. It's not—"
"Shut up. For once in your life, just shut the fu …"—he glanced at his kids—"up and listen, because I'm about to offer you something," Art said as he sorted through some papers on his desk.
Fenton looked as if he was going to quote some sort of protocol but, after a glaring look from Benson, he folded his arms across his chest and stepped back with his face averted down.
"I'm listening," Bo said.
"Okay, first you have to understand that this is a martial law situation and no one will be allowed to take control until the city is safe and functioning in a sustainable manner."
"I guess that's where we disagree, Art," Calvin said. "Now is when we need leadership more than ever."
"We have leadership, Calvin. Her name is Lisa Reynolds … Lieutenant Lisa Reynolds to you."
"And where might she be right now?" Calvin's tone was cynical.
"Probably cleaning her gun in order to deal with the next person who pisses her off." He then waved the sheets of paper he held in his hand. "Did you happen to read this article pertaining to Arkansas's martial law regulations? It says right here that any elected official trying to supersede authority of the ranking officer is in violation of the law. That means it's a felony, Calvin. It's a felony, we have no jail, and we have all seen how Lieutenant Reynolds deals with felons, haven't we?" Benson said and held Boweaver's gaze until he saw the fear coursing completely through him.
Fenton shuffled his feet nervously, obviously not having thought of the potential consequences of seizing power during a post-apocalyptic situation. Calvin had tried to talk to the lieutenant the other day; with a glance, she made him feel like ABC gum stuck to the bottom of her shoe. He knew without a doubt that she could pull the trigger on him and walk away without losing a wink of sleep.
Other than a blip on the radio announcing her new position, a few days ago she a was nobody who took a job in a low-end market. Now, she was a force that couldn't be reckoned with. He could deal with Art or Krupp or even some of the soldiers … but Lisa? Lisa scared the hell out of him. She could shoot someone in the center of town and the people would simply cheer.
"Here's the deal. You stop campaigning … period. End of story. Every morning, you and Fenton come here, where you will be assigned tasks. For instance, today you will be assigning locations for certain needs and issuing orders; we, of course, will let you know what those orders are. It doesn't sound like much, does it?" Benson asked, and Calvin shook his head.
"Well, here's your bonus. Do you have your official stamp here?" When Bo nodded his head, Benson said, "Somehow I knew you would keep it with you. You can put your Mayor of Piney stamp on all documents when they are issued. That way everybody will see you as being some kind of authority figure and when elections do arise—and they will—you will have an advantage."
Calvin thought about it for a couple of seconds before he looked to Fenton, who nodded his head.
"You can pretend you had a choice. Here's your desk, and here's your list. All things have to be approved by the council before being posted."
"Council?"
"Yes, your position includes you in the council meetings—but not him," Benson said while pointing to Fenton.
"Krissy, Danny … let's go." Benson headed for the door with the kids anxiously following him. They had been trapped with him the whole time he was trying to organize everything, and it was beginning to wear on all of them.
As soon as they were outside, they heard "Officer Benson! Officer Benson!" causing them all to want to duck out of sight; except Art recognized the voice and wouldn't mind talking to her.
"Oh, hi … ahh ..."
"Julie," Krissy whispered as she hit her dad's leg.
"Julie, how's the leg?" Benson asked while recalling Justin's face after he had shot her in the leg three days ago.
"Well, I'll have the limp for a while, but there's a bigger problem I want to talk to you about."
"Okay, shoot," Benson said.
"Well, I'm seeing a lot of kids wandering around with no direction, bored, and not even knowing where they can help. A few have been helping out in the kitchens and on cleanup, which is good, but we need them to be more than just that. Don't you think so, Officer Benson?"
"Please, call me Art. I think you need to fill me in a little bit more, Julie."
"Well, I've never seen an orphanage, but I am an educator so … I would like to take control of the children," Julie said, obviously expecting him to reject her idea.
"Done. Where?" Benson said, both stunned and delighted by the offer.
"In some of the lounges in the hospital on the second floor," Julie continued.
"Perfect. You'll need some help."
"I'll help her!" Krissy said excitedly, hoping to do anything other than hang with her dad any longer. Nice guy and all, but he was her dad.
"Thanks, Krissy; I was going to ask you anyway."
"So you want to open a school?" Benson stated.
"Pretty much."
"I think that's great, but it needs to be more. It's going to have to take care of these children 24/7 unless they have somewhere else to go. They're also going to have to be trained to do things other children would have been expelled for in the past, like shooting and carrying weapons in public."
"I'm aware that their curriculum is going to be quite extensive and quite different than it would have been back in the old world. How about you, Danny? Are you ready to go back to school?" Julie said, bringing the boy who hid behind his dad's leg into the conversation.
"You mean like big kid school?" Danny asked.
"Uh huh," Julie replied and Danny smiled. She looked back up at Benson. "I have some others lined up who want to help, but I could use more if you wanted to put out a call.
"Done; and thank you," Benson said, and then grabbed his radio. "Calvin, write up a memo requesting childcare workers and educators to report to the second-floor nurses' station at one o'clock today. Send that out immed
iately and post it on all notice boards. Over."
"Okay," Calvin replied.
"That would be ten-four or Roger, and you have to say Over when you're done."
"Oh, okay," he replied and Benson just shook his head.
Julie smiled and put her hands on the backs of both children. "Okay then … I guess I'll go and get this going."
"Thank you, Julie; I appreciate it. If there were restaurants still open, I would buy you a nice steak dinner."
"I’m sure we'll figure something out," she smirked.
#
The walls had been moved out to encompass the school and several neighborhoods, people were fighting back. There wasn't a single one who didn't realize how dire their situation was. Collectively, they realized that they were fighting for much more than themselves; their entire existence as a species was at stake, forcing them to bond with any who still lived.
Brett had focused the expansion toward the shore of the lake simply to accommodate more people. There were over six thousand in the small compound now and things were getting cramped as more people showed up every hour of every day, finding things easier the closer they got to Hot Springs. Guides and secure escort would direct them through the safest routes to the compound because everybody realized that each survivor could be the one that saved their life.
The airport reclamation was setting up for later in the day, but first Benson wanted to get to the new wall where Cat was dealing with the aftermath of the Skinner's murderous meddling.
He found Brett on the ground with the shooters—including Justin—who were in training. Malcolm, Ally, and Cat were up on the wall with his sharpshooters. They scanned the buildings and streets across the way, not seeing any signs of the Skinner across the currently impassable street. As Benson got up on the scaffolding that led to the train car roofs, he saw exactly how impassable it was.
Packed building to compound walls, the moans of the undead were a relentless drone filling the void with sound as the shooters covered different areas across the street, keeping in step with the equipment below. The train yard where they got the boxcars had revealed a load of heavy equipment destined for a fracking site up in the Dakotas somewhere. Among the equipment were eight oversized, futuristic-looking, enclosed cab bulldozers that now moved through the street below them.
Blades, over eight feet tall and horizontally curved to push the earth back in upon itself in a rolling wave, were now staggered across the street. Moving at barely two miles an hour, they pushed zombies in a mass of blood and viscera. In terms of mass versus size, dirt and mud weighs much more than a human body. Even though there were many thousands of the undead in front of them, the dozers rolled them back as if they were nothing more than a pile of dirt. Heavy rubberized tracks moved the flesh in a solid rolling wave as people with rifles followed behind, shooting any that may inadvertently end up on top of or behind the massive steel blades.
Benson was amazed. In the fiction stories about zombies that he used to enjoy, there was always so much humanity left that they overwhelmed the massive machinery. This may have been true if they were dealing with living, thinking people, but they weren't; they were dealing with dead husks that knew nothing about evasion or climbing. All they knew was the relentless pursuit of food.
There was nothing that could stand in the way of these machines; the sheer weight of the steel and slow, persistent motion caused by the tracked machines was unstoppable. The Z's were pushed back and away like leaves floating on a pond flowing with the irresistible wave that was the machines. Benson was nervous about the strategy when it was presented to him, but when he asked Brett—who had worked with a lot of heavy equipment in the old world—he was assured that it was the way to go. Brett was right. The street was packed with zombies one minute; the next, a machine passed, and all that was left was the highly toxic blood. Then, hydrants were opened and fire hoses and trucks rinsed it down.
They corralled the undead into a tight group against an older concrete building, and then crushed them against the wall until the building itself caved in on them. Slow, steady, safe, and surprisingly quiet.
A new sound came to his ears; he noticed more of the dozers coming in from a side street but that was not what caught his attention. From behind them, a large crane-like machine draped a large steel ball over the machines and down into the massive horde being pushed by the second group of dozers.
Slowly the boom arm started to move. In a circular motion at first, the tight little circles slowly started to expand outwards while staying only a foot off the ground. It decimated everything in its path as skid loaders swept around the equipment and kept stray zombies from hurting any of the operators. There was no way that they could have handled this many of the ex-humans with rifles or ordnance alone. By using the equipment in the way they were, the zombies were quickly becoming a non-factor in the day's confrontation.
Four people had been lost to the Z's today, and Skinner had killed eight more in order to allow it to happen. It was not a good day for the survivors of the compound.
The serial killer had been putting a slowdown on their operation and killing valuable personnel. They couldn't afford to lose any operators, which meant that any expansion with the equipment had to be secured with small arms and teams before the equipment moved in. It put a lot of people in direct contact with the infected, but Benson had no choice. They needed to keep gaining property for the space, resources, and overall morale.
People would arrive destitute and hopeless as to what they had lost, only to be instantly swept up into the hustle that had become everyday life. Before the fall there were a lot of lazy people in the world, but no matter what people say, there are ten times as many as who work. For most, that was all they knew so when they entered, they were instantly swept up into the activity that needed to be addressed. Their nature took over and, because society still needed their services every day, they got back to work.
Benson's father always told him that, no matter what you did, there was more to work than just money. Now, there was no money; their only reward was survival—they knew it; they had seen it firsthand. So they did what they always did and went to work and, surprisingly, it helped. They had a goal and they were helping other as they helped themselves and nobody was left out. More jobs were reestablished every day, and now they had childcare; Benson had a feeling that Julie would have a lot of help there.
Thankfully, their next goal of the airport was open ground and they wouldn't have to deal with the Skinner or too many Z's, but he would make sure the surrounding buildings were cleared and secured before they made their move on the hangars and terminal.
He watched Cat and Tanner's niece, Ally, as they scanned the buildings. Malcolm and his boys were doing the same thing two cars down the line. He was wondering how good of an angle the doctor would have inside the compound. To cut down that angle, he felt that they should move the new line up to the cleared areas in front of the buildings right way.
He noticed a very large dog just sitting and watching the procedures; he remembered Lisa and her association with a mastiff. The dog watched a building farther down and across the street with rapt attention. Is this the Skinner's dog? He remembered the transmitter on his collar.
"Cat, watch that building," Benson said and pointed. Both she and Ally turned with their rifles focused but they were too far away. It was almost two hundred yards to the three-story building that Benson indicated.
"Second floor, center," Cat said, but Ally never wavered.
"No, top floor back corner," Ally said before her barrel flashed, startling the doctor and causing his shot to go wild as five different shooters focused on that corner window.
Others moved out from behind the dozers to get a bead on the building and to start moving in, but there was still a horde between them. Massive chunks of brick started falling in a lined pattern when a ma deuce mounted on a Humvee opened up. Being behind the bulldozers and fifteen feet lower than the other shooters, his bullet
s sent spraying brick up and into the window and high into the air. It probably didn't penetrate through the wall, but it sure shook the hell out of the building. A flash of color in a shattered window sent the ma deuce into a constant stream of fire. If they didn't hit a target, hopefully they could rain enough debris down on top of his head that they would simply dig him out when they got there. It only took a couple of seconds before sky was showing through the ceiling, and the gunner stopped but kept his vision searching. He knew that by firing a ma deuce, he had made himself the sniper's next target. Luckily, there was only the one sniper and he was running. Cat turned back to Benson, amazed that he knew where to look.
"Watch the dog," he mouthed to Cat; she had been on the rescue to get Lisa and knew about the transmitter on his collar. Benson saw the wheels cranking in her head as she looked at the dog while putting two and two together.
Sedge the mastiff got up and started trotting farther down the wall of boxcars and past the crane base erected to move boxcars and equipment in place and over the wall. One single section was all that had been needed to create an unobstructed view for several blocks in all directions. It wasn't in use, or the operator surely would have seen the zombies coming.
She waved Ally on, who was now being followed by Benson, his M4 on his shoulder in ready position as he ran by. Cat took to the ladder, her M14 slung over her back as she climbed the steel monstrosity. Fifty-five feet up, she landed on a platform that allowed a three-sixty surround of the crane's head just below the cab.
The view was incredible; if they didn't have to worry about shooters, it would be the perfect watch area. Sadly, the Skinner wasn't the only human taking potshots at people. There were a lot of unstable people in the old world. Most didn't make it; yet there were some who were finally able to live out their sick natures. Web was the worst of these, but he wasn't the only one.
#
Sedge was down at the wall going crazy like he wanted to follow whatever was out there. Anyone watching would wonder how the dog could smell anything beyond the scent of the zombies. Humans could never understand the sensitivity of an animal's nose. Humans allow their senses to be overwhelmed by the scent that is most shocking and prevalent; there is no bad scent to a dog, only different scents and a canine will react instinctively to certain scents before they even register in the brain.
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