by Mark Rivett
Dr. Rosenthal looked at the dead man with an emotionless expression. By now, the convoy gunners had mounted their weapons and the display of force was clear enough that the mob was quelled. “These are the youngest and most vulnerable children in this DDC. There is no more room in these vehicles. If you want to go, you will have to take the place of a child. Is that what you want?”
The crowd remained silent, dumbfounded by Sergeant Keal’s actions.
“Who is this man?” Dr. Rosenthal asked, referring to the dead civilian.
The crowd stood silent for a moment, until a female voice answered quietly. “His name was Oliver.”
Dr. Rosenthal spoke, as the last child was loaded into the convoy. “Oliver died because he wanted to take the place of a child. If any among you want to take the place of one of these kids and feels they deserve that space more than everyone else here, don’t hide in the crowd, step forward and show your face.”
No one moved.
“Come on! You were all willing to kill for a ride a second ago.” Dr. Rosenthal yelled in anger. “You think you deserve a spot in this convoy more than any one of these soldiers? You think you deserve a spot more than one of my medical staff? What is wrong with you? Where is your courage? Step forward!”
The crowd remained silent, shamed by Dr. Rosenthal’s words. The only noise was the convoy engines and the waves of undead moaning beyond the walls.
“No one? No one? Soldiers died to protect you. Soldiers died to bring this convoy here. Some of these soldiers may yet die returning to the fleet. You… are… not… entitled… to… that… sacrifice!” Dr. Rosenthal shook with fury as she bounded off the roof of the vehicle she had been shouting from, to the ground. “No one wants to be here. Not you, not these soldiers, and certainly not me, but I’ve watched as you’ve hounded, harassed, and threatened every convoy that’s come through here, hoping to bribe yourself into the fleet.”
“Why do the kids get to go?” Someone dared to ask.
“Who said that? Who said that?” Sergeant Keal bellowed as he holstered his pistol and cracked his knuckles anticipating a fistfight.
“Why do the kids get to go?” Dr. Rosenthal laughed; her face beet red with hysterical anger. “I’ll tell you why the kids get to go! They get to go because I’m in charge here! I have saved your ungrateful asses a hundred times over since you got here. I know what I’m doing, and if any one of you thinks you know better than me how to do my job, you’re welcome to it.” She glared at the crowd for a few moments before continuing. “You have a problem with how things are run, how decisions are made…there’s the god damn door.” She pointed to the bus that had driven forward to allow the convoy passage out. The second bus remained in place, ready to open when the first bus had closed.
“We are going to be here for a while, and if you are going to behave like animals, then we don’t need you. Go back to your living space, your petty cliques and suburban politics! Go back to bitching about how things are run and how rations are low. Go back to playing cards and squabbling over supplies! But leave us alone to do our job.”
Dr. Rosenthal had assumed a demeanor much larger than her stature, and the crowd began to disburse. Carl shifted his vehicle into drive, noting how the small woman summoned the fury to intimidate an angry mob into backing down. Her fire was something sorely lacking in the fleet.
Sergeant Keal looked at Carl and nodded at him.
“We’re leaving.” Carl said over the communications network as he pushed down on the accelerator toward the DDC exit.
“Thank God…” Someone’s voice came back.
The convoy followed Carl’s lead and passed into the exit. The inner bus drove forward to seal off the DDC behind them, and Carl’s sense of relief was matched only by his sorrow. He empathized with many of those people. A nagging sense of impending doom – day in, day out, for months – was enough to drive anyone to madness. The DDC was dying in more ways than one, and it wouldn’t take long for the situation there to dissolve beyond any hope of repair.
The second outer-most bus drove forward to reveal the ruins of San Diego. With the desolate suburbs before him, Carl was met with an odd sensation. The simplicity of the city, the road, and the dead, were strangely comforting over the complex social breakdown of the Spring Valley DDC.
Carl led his team away into the suburbs. Children sobbed. The soldiers were silent. The rear car fired some shots at a nearby band of walking corpses, and Carl pressed his communications link. “We need to conserve our ammo. Do not fire unless absolutely necessary.”
Pam opened her laptop, began checking her reports and maps, and paused with a concerned look on her face.
“What is it?” Carl knew Pam well enough to sense when something was wrong.
“Take this next left.” Pam replied.
Carl was confused, but he did as his communications specialist instructed. “What’s up?”
“The WD tracking report just updated and there’s a STOG in the area.” Pam replied. STOG was a military acronym for Significant Threat or Gathering – a designation reserved for dangerous areas typically occupied by an extremely large number of living dead. A STOG was characterized by a mass of over a thousand, and in some cases, tens of thousands of roving undead monsters. Convoys were advised to give them an extremely wide berth. There were always one or two STOGs in or around the city. Their movements were monitored by air and fed into the software that communications specialists used to plot the safest course. Because they were continuously moving, STOGs were notoriously difficult to track, particularly at night. There was the additional danger that a completely new and un-tracked STOG could spring up from nowhere, as hundreds of wandering ghouls spontaneously clumped together for no discernible reason.
Unofficially, the acronym stood for Shit Ton of Ghouls.
“How close are we?” Carl asked.
Pam turned her laptop monitor to face Carl. A map of the city was overlaid with color-coded regions reminiscent of a weather map. Blue stood for mostly clear, green for somewhat infested, yellow for heavily overrun. Red indicated a densely packed mosh pit of teeth, claws, and death. They were in a yellow zone on the edge of a red zone.
Carl glanced down briefly. “Is that right? This doesn’t seem any worse than when we came through.”
“Contact!” Private Richard’s voice came over the communications network.
“Contact!” Private Barona’s voice followed.
“Holy fuck! Contact!” Miguel’s voice finished.
The wail of corpses rose up like a tidal wave. Thousands of wild dead washed forth from between building like a flood converging upon Convoy 19 from every direction.
Chapter 15
Suffocating blackness filled the soundproof room. The night’s havoc had knocked out power to the music store. Twice, Private Stenson had cracked the door for a little light and the undead had come. Each time he had been forced to close the door and thrust the room back into darkness. He dared not crack the door again. The studio was nigh impenetrable, but the area around the door would need to be relatively clear if they were going to escape.
When the truck had smashed through the music store wall, zombies had poured through the hole, and guards from every corner of the DDC converged to hold them back. Private Stenson had tried to help the situation initially, but he had been forced to retreat when his ammunition ran low. In the darkness, soldiers could not tell the undead from civilian or fellow soldier from flesh-hungry ghoul. The confusion was lethal, and it took less than fifteen minutes for chaos to deliver the DDC into the hungry jaws of the undead.
“Is he dead?” Vanessa asked. The teenage girl had reacted quickly when the dead began to pour into the DDC. Unlike the many civilians who woke in a confusion that cost them their lives, Vanessa’s sense of self-preservation was in control the second she awoke. She had bolted directly toward the back offices.
“No, he’s sleeping,” Private Stenson answered. It had been his duty to ensure that the terminal
ly ill Liam would not rise as a ghoul, but Liam had not yet passed. His breathing was shallow, his pulse was weak, but he was alive. The prospect of being trapped in pitch blackness with someone who was certain to transform into a flesh-eating monster was unsettling, and Private Stenson had been tempted to take matters into his own hands. However, he had thus far decided against it. Doomed as Liam was, he was still alive.
“Private?” Kelly Damico’s voice came over his radio.
“I’m here, Dr. D. What’s up?” Stenson answered.
“It’s morning. Are you ready?” Kelly asked.
There was no sense of time within the soundproof studio. Mere minutes felt like hours. Other senses began to compensate for the lack of vision, and the mind began to play tricks. Was that Liam’s pulse or his own? Was there a fourth person breathing somewhere in the small room? Was that Vanessa moving or something else?
“I don’t think I can do this,” Vanessa confessed nervously.
“You can. Come here, I’ll show you one more time.” Vanessa had never shot a gun, but Stenson had tried to teach her through touch. He was not confident in her ability by any stretch of the imagination, but he had chosen to keep his doubts to himself. With any luck, she wouldn’t have to fire the pistol at all, and he would be able to keep the undead at bay long enough to cover their escape.
“Give us a minute, Dr. D,” Stenson answered back over the radio. “Here, give me your hands…”
Over the course of the evening, he had given Vanessa six identical lessons in how to shoot a pistol by guiding her hands along its contours. It had amazed him that, in the midst of an undead apocalypse, he had managed to become trapped with the one person on earth who still had no idea how to use a firearm. She was terrified of guns, and her fear had not diminished with his lessons.
When the training was complete, Private Stenson left the pistol in Vanessa’s hands to reinforce the idea that, in the coming minutes, she might have to use the weapon to protect herself.
Private Stenson shook Liam until he awoke.
“Wa… what? What is it?” Liam asked, as unconsciousness threatened to retake him.
“Do you know what’s happening?” Private Stenson asked. “Do you know where we are?”
Liam paused for a second, sifting through his thoughts. His mind swam through mud, and it took him a moment to arrive at an answer. “We’re trapped. We’re going to try to escape.”
“That’s right. Vanessa and I can’t carry you in your cot, so you’re going to have to hold onto my back. Are you ready?” Private Stenson crouched down to hoist the feeble man onto his shoulders, but Liam did not move.
“No, I don’t think so,” Liam replied weakly.
Stenson sighed. He had been through this three times already, and he had hoped he wouldn’t have to go through it again. “Listen, Liam…”
“I have a better idea.” Liam interrupted in a surprisingly strong tone. “Leave me here with your pistol and I’ll draw them to me. You take Vanessa with you and get to the roof.”
“You want me to leave you here?” Private Stenson asked, dumbstruck. Stenson had hidden his doubts about their chances, but had remained outwardly positive for the sake of Liam and Vanessa. He would have to carry Liam while holding off an onslaught of undead, defend Vanessa while she checked the other rooms for survivors, and finally climb through the window in the back office with the undead nipping at their heels. None of this would be easy. With Liam over one shoulder, it had seemed hopeless. Private Stenson had nearly written off their chances, but he was determined not to give up without a fight.
“You can’t carry me. Who are you kidding?” Liam sat up in bed. He took a moment to get his bearings, and Stenson could tell it was a struggle for the dying man even to move. “I’m fucked, but you two can make it out.”
“You know they’re going to rip you apart. It won’t be this quiet peaceful death in your sleep.” Stenson didn’t mean to be so blunt, but he figured the man ought to be fully aware of what he was facing.
“How many bullets in that pistol?” Liam asked.
“Fifteen.”
“Then I’ll count to fourteen,” Liam replied. “I’ve spent this entire disaster on the sidelines, Private. Guys like you have been giving up their lives for months now, and I’ve been lying in bed waiting to die. I’m going to die today, or if you make it to the roof with me, I’ll die tomorrow or the next day, and all I will have done will have been to screw over your chances. Let me die, Private. Let me die for something good.”
Stenson hit the talk button on his radio. “Dr. Damico?”
“What’s up?” Kelly’s voice came back.
“We have a change of plans.”
It took a few minutes of convincing and double-checking to know that Liam knew what he was getting into, but in the end, everyone agreed. Liam would stay behind while Private Stenson and Vanessa made their escape. Liam was weak, and Private Stenson still had his doubts… but once Liam’s adrenaline hit his system, Stenson imagined Liam would be able to function long enough to do what he had to.
Private Stenson dragged Liam’s cot next to the door and angled him so he’d be able to fire at anything coming down the hallway toward him. “Are you guys ready?”
“Yeah.” Vanessa answered.
“Let’s rock.” Liam replied, the weakness in his voice betraying the confidence in his words.
“Liam…” Stenson was hit by an intense wave of gratitude. “I’m counting to fourteen too… Thank you.”
“Good luck!” Liam replied.
Private Stenson swung the office door open. A corpse instantly whirled on them, and Stenson drove the butt of his rifle into the creature’s skull. The ghoul’s head snapped backward, and a gout of thick black blood oozed from a shattered face. It groaned in hunger and continued reaching for prey. Stenson kicked it away and smashed his rifle into the zombie a second time. The damage had already been done, though. A chorus of wails rose up behind them. Every ghoul in the DDC was now after them.
Private Stenson and Vanessa hurried to the opposite office door and banged on it. “Anyone alive in there? Open up!”
Vanessa looked behind them and screamed. A densely packed mass of ghouls was pressing toward them through the narrow hallway. Their silhouettes were outlined by the morning sun, which shone through the huge hole in the music store wall.
Liam’s first pistol shot echoed through the building, and Private Stenson was struck by the image of every walking corpse in a mile radius being drawn toward the noise. “Open up if you want to live! We’re going to the roof…”
The door flung open, and a woman made eye contact with Private Stenson before looking down the hallway toward the oncoming ghouls.
Another three shots rang out from the soundproof room.
“Come on!” Private Stenson took the woman’s hand. A pre-teen girl and a teenage boy followed as he led them down the hallway toward the back office.
Two more pistol shots thundered down the hallway, and Stenson pounded on the back office door. “Open up! Now!”
Five more shots rang out from Liam’s position, and the Private turned and aimed his rifle down the hall. The press was moving towards them, some breaking off into the soundproof room. He took careful aim at the lead ghoul before firing and sighting the second. “Open up!”
“Oh, my God!” The woman screamed. Her eyes wide with panic. “We’re trapped! We have to go back!”
Three more pistol shots came from the soundproof room and three walking corpses tumbled to the ground.
“No! Stay with me!” Private Stenson turned, took aim at the lock, and fired twice before kicking the door open. A ravenous ghoul on the other side was knocked back against the opposite wall, as it was snarling back at the intruders.
Stenson pulled the trigger of his rifle again, and a crimson spray exploded from the zombie’s skull. He quickly went to a window where a white bed sheet dangled from the roof. He slammed the butt of his rifle through the windowpane, and glass
showered the office floor. With a couple sweeps of his rifle, he knocked away most of the jagged shards that remained.
“Go!” Private Stenson ordered. He hoisted the pre-teen girl onto the improvised rope before taking up a defensive position just outside the door. The girl gasped with fear as she saw the drop outside the window, but as soon as she gripped the sheet, she vanished upward.
The voices of those on the roof came down through the open window. “Hoist her up! Go! Go!”
A final fifteenth pistol shot rang out from Liam’s room, and Private Stenson bit his lip. Liam was gone, his last bullet spent to ensure he would not join the living dead. A handful of undead would be occupied with Liam’s corpse, but that majority would continue their pursuit down the hall. He glanced at Vanessa, who gripped the sheet and disappeared out the window, leaving only the woman and teenage boy.
With controlled breaths, Private Stenson took aim down the hall. He squeezed the trigger, and the closest monster dropped to its knees before toppling face-first onto the floor. He took aim and shot once more, and the next monster dropped. He aimed and fired again. A third.
The gut wrenching click of his empty chamber rang in his ears. He rolled into the office and slammed the door just as the first corpse made a clumsy lunge toward him. The legs of the last civilian woman disappeared out of view and he clamored toward the window.
“Come on, Private!” Dr. Damico’s voice came through the radio and echoed in real time from the roof above. “Come on!”
Private Stenson heard the office door behind him slam open. He gripped the sheet, hoisted himself up, and kicked himself out the window. A claw caught his pant leg, and he swung back hard into the broken window. Shards of broken glass ground into his legs, and he grunted in pain as he fought against his attackers. A second and third hand pulled at him and soon, the window was filled with snarling hungry faces snapping after him.
Then, he heard the sound of tearing linen and panic threatened to overwhelm him. If he couldn’t make it to the roof, his only option would be a several story drop down a rocky rise. That – or be torn apart.