by David Achord
“It’s coming down pretty good,” Savannah said.
“I like to scavenge when it rains,” he replied as he looked over the area. “Most people seek shelter and it messes with the zombies’ vision.”
“Are we going to search something?” Savannah asked.
Melvin nodded and pointed at a building to the west of them. “The sign says it’s a health clinic. Maybe we can find medical equipment or something.” He looked around. “Have you been watching for people or zombies?”
She realized she had not and did a slow three-sixty. “I don’t see shit,” she said with a smirk.
Melvin gave her a look.
“I do not see any threats,” she amended.
“Better. Okay, see that tree over by the corner of the building?” he asked as he pointed. Savannah nodded. “We’re going to jog over there and stop a second to see if we’ve drawn any attention. If we haven’t, we’re going to circle around the building and check it out.” He patted the holster on his left side. “Always stay on my right side, got it?” He motioned drawing the weapon with his left hand for emphasis.
Savannah nodded.
“Okay, and if we were to somehow get separated, come back to this tree first, if you can. If you can’t, find someplace to hide. Don’t go back to the truck until you’re sure nobody is close enough to spot you.”
Savannah nodded again. He motioned for her to follow and took off. The rear of the building faced the interstate. They worked their way around to the front and Melvin paused again. He pointed at the parking lot.
“Check out those cars,” he whispered. There were only two of them. They were grimy and the tires on all of them were low.
“They’ve been parked there a while,” Savannah whispered back.
“Yeah,” he agreed. “That’s a good sign.”
He motioned for her to follow him to the front door. It was typical of most commercial buildings, a metal doorframe of tempered glass, broken out long ago. Melvin went through his procedure: he tapped on the doorframe, whistled, and then called out.
Nothing.
“Stay behind me,” he instructed and walked inside. He rounded the corner into the lobby and his foot inadvertently hit an overturned chair, causing something to fall off of it and clatter to the floor.
“You’re far too noisy,” Savannah whispered. “You should learn to be quieter.”
Melvin glared at her. She responded by pointing at her eyes with two fingers and then pointed toward the interior of the clinic. Melvin could think of no retort, so he gave a silent grunt as he scanned the lobby.
There was a security door separating the front lobby from the examination rooms, nursing station, and the doctor’s offices. It was one of those doors with a magnetic lock which was opened either with a key or by the receptionist sitting behind the counter pushing a button. One could easily hop the counter and walk on back, but someone, a previous scavenger perhaps, had decided to take an axe to the door. Now it was a mass of splintered wood.
Before the two of them could climb over the broken door, a zombie wearing soiled scrubs launched herself through from the opposite direction. She tripped and fell, giving Melvin enough time to perform a two-handed downward chop, sinking the edge of the war sword into her head.
Another one, a man this time, was close behind her. Melvin gave him the same treatment. This occurred two more times. After the last one fell, Melvin was sweating even more profusely now. Savannah started to say something, but he held up a finger. He made a similar motion with his fingers to his eyes and then pointed at the entry door.
Savannah understood. She turned back the way they had entered and scanned the parking lot and beyond.
“Nothing,” she whispered as she looked back at Melvin. He nodded and held a finger over his lips. He stood still as a statue for a full three minutes. Savannah mimicked him. Finally, he motioned for her.
“Search them,” he said. “But don’t get any of that goo on you.”
Savannah made a face and tentatively patted the pockets of the scrubs. She came up with a pack of cigarettes and a stethoscope.
“Put them in your pillow case,” he directed and then motioned for her to follow him through the doorway.
The back area consisted of a nurse’s station in the middle of an open area and surrounded by seven individual examination rooms. Every door except one had a number on it. He started with the unlabeled door, which he correctly deduced was the doctor’s office. They diligently searched each room for zombies before searching for property.
“Okay,” Savannah whispered as they started rummaging through one of the examination rooms. “How are those things still alive?”
“I don’t know,” Melvin responded. “Maybe the plague isn’t in them anymore and they’re somehow recovering. Their cognition is better than it used to be.”
“Cognition?” she asked.
“They’re thinking better than when they first got infected.”
“Oh.” She looked around. “Are we looking for anything special?”
“Medical stuff takes priority, but anything we can use or trade is good. Like those pack of cigarettes for instance.”
“Got it,” she said.
“You search low and I’ll search high.”
“Okay,” she whispered and began searching the cabinets under the sink.
The place had been ransacked and was in shambles, which was not unusual. Nevertheless, Melvin was hopeful and they searched meticulously. After a solid hour, they located a couple of items overlooked or ignored by previous scavengers.
“Alright, I think we’ve found everything we can, let’s get out of here,” he said. Savannah nodded and started toward the front door, but Melvin grabbed her by the shoulder.
“Never exit a building the way you came in,” he admonished and led her to a side door. The stenciled lettering on the gray metal door identified it as an emergency exit. Melvin pushed on the handle, wondering if the alarm was going to activate. Luckily, the batteries in it were dead. He led them on a roundabout jog back to the truck.
“Not a bad haul,” he said as he started the truck. “Let’s get on back to Weather. If the roads are still clear, I think we can make it in about three or four hours.”
“Do they serve hot meals too?” Savannah asked.
“At Weather? Oh, yeah. It’s a mixture of fresh food and freeze dried, but if the right cooking crew is on duty, it can be pretty good.”
“Sounds wonderful,” she said.
They drove in silence for a couple of miles before Savannah spoke.
“Were you bullshitting me when you said you have a Master’s degree?”
“Nope.”
“I dropped out of high school,” she said as she opened a can of spam. “Not that it mattered. That’s the year everything went to shit.”
“How old are you?” Melvin asked.
“What’s the date?”
Melvin checked his watch. “August ninth.”
She thought for a moment. “Eighteen. How old are you?”
“Thirty-nine.”
“Fuck, you’re old,” she said with a grin.
Melvin glanced at her. “Remember your savior vivre.”
Savannah scrunched up her nose. “What’s that? Some sort of weird sex act?”
Melvin sighed. “Never mind.”
Savannah shrugged and took a long drink from the canteen. “I need to visit the loo,” she said and then looked at him with a smirk. “Is that classier than saying I have to take a shit?”
Melvin gave her a sideways look and started looking for a dry spot. Almost three days of steady rain was starting to show. Several times they drove through standing water. Melvin used derelict automobiles as benchmarks to determine if the murky water was shallow enough to drive through. He finally spotted a fairly dry spot under an overpass, stopped, looked around, but didn’t see anything threatening. He reached into the back and retrieved the partial roll of toilet paper he’d found earlier.
> “Stay close,” he warned as he handed it to her.
“Don’t leave me,” she rejoined and jumped out of the truck. Melvin decided it’d be a good time for him to go as well, number one not number two, and exited the truck on his side. He’d no sooner unzipped his fly when he heard the sound of water splashing and looked down the interstate. A zombie rounded a curve in a loping run and was heading directly toward them. A car rounded the curve right behind it, maintaining a slow pace with the zombie. It was a compact car, small and quiet. There were two men in it, laughing gleefully. One of them leaned out the window with a large barreled revolver in his hand.
Lonnie.
Chapter 17 – Go Boom
It was stifling hot inside the building, which made it slow going. Most of the bodies were dead, but not all of them. As a precautionary measure, each one received either a bullet or a bayonet to the head, dead or otherwise. The last thing Justin wanted was one of his Marines to get themselves bitten and become infected.
It took them almost six hours of dragging the corpses outside, piling them up, and setting them on fire. Justin mandated several rest breaks so he wouldn’t have any cases of hyperthermia.
Occasionally, he’d hear distant gunfire, followed by Rachel gleefully reporting on the radio in a mock baritone voice.
“Delta Two Actual, this is uh, Delta Two-Two. Contact has been made with a zed who appears to have once been an army colonel. Major Fowlkes has just blown the living shit out of said colonel. I repeat, she just blew the living shit out of him. Said colonel appeared to have been perpetuating lewd and lascivious acts with a friendly cow shortly before his demise.”
Crumby looked at Justin. “That girl ain’t right in the head.”
Justin shook his head in exasperation. He motioned over to Kirby, who walked over.
“Sir?”
“You’re relieved of zombie duty. Go get yourself decontaminated so you can take that gear off.”
“And then what, sir?”
“Call me sexist, but I want you to get that drone operational and keep an eye on our girls.”
“Aye, sir,” he said before hustling over to the decontamination station.
Justin could imagine Kirby grinning beneath his mask.
After a long rest break, they reentered the hallway and gazed at the locked security doors.
“They haven’t been blasted open,” Crumby observed. “But, those locks have been damaged. Somebody made it so you can’t use a key card to open them. Can’t use key cards without power though.”
“They did have a key card, but I don’t know about the power.”
“Maybe they’re on the other side and they’ve locked themselves in,” Justin said.
“If that’s true, why ain’t they answering?” Crumby rebutted. The two men had pounded on the doors repeatedly and shouted out, but they were met with silence.
“Yeah, well where the hell are they?” Corporal Conway asked rhetorically.
“They’ve got to be on the other side,” Justin replied. “The question is, what kind of physical state are they in now?”
“Are we going to breach the doors?” the sergeant asked.
“We don’t have any other type of breaching equipment, so I don’t see any other way. Do you?”
Sergeant Crumby shook his head. “I’ve never received training on how to use C-4, have you?”
Justin looked at him with a wry grin. “Classroom training? No. On the job training? Absolutely.”
Sergeant Crumby grunted in appreciation. “That’s the real way to learn things. Let’s get to it then, sir,” he said.
When it came to Marines blowing things up, the standard protocol was to figure out how much C-4 was needed, and then multiply it times ten. Or more. Marines loved to blast the ever-loving shit out of anything in their way.
Justin was no different, but this time, he had to be delicate. After all, the lab needed to remain intact, otherwise the mission was a fail and his leadership would come into question once he returned to Mount Weather. He sat outside and configured two small, shaped charges wrapped with detonation cord, or detcord for short. Joker watched in fascination.
“That’s all the C-4 you’re going to use, sir?” he asked.
“We won’t need much. All we want to do is blast the locks, nothing else.”
“It’ll still go boom, right?” Now, there was a hopeful, shit-eating grin on his face.
“Absolutely,” Justin replied.
“Can I help you with it?”
Justin looked at him. It was often difficult to determine when Joker was being serious or clowning around.
“Sure,” he said.
Joker’s shit-eating grin got bigger. “I like it when things go boom.”
They donned their NBC gear and went back in. Justin carried a roll of duct tape with him in case he needed to improvise and tape the C-4 into place, which, in fact, he ended up having to do.
After double-checking his work four times, he and Joker walked the wire outside and took cover behind one of the Strykers. Sarah and Rachel had returned and he waved them back.
“Give me a head count,” he ordered Joker as he did the same.
“Eighteen,” Joker said. Justin came up with the same number.
“Alright, everyone is present and accounted for,” he said, and looked around.
“Take cover! Fire in the hole!” he yelled as loud as he could and then activated the detonator. A long two seconds passed before there was a concussive thump, followed by steel gray smoke billowing out.
“Awesome,” Joker said.
They waited for the smoke to clear, and more importantly, to see if any infected zeds would come wandering out.
While they watched the smoke coming out in slow wisps, Briscoe and Stalling walked over.
“It took longer than we thought, but the generator is now fixed. It’s ready to fire up whenever you give the word,” Briscoe said. “We can’t guarantee what the status is inside though. For all we know, every circuit is blown.”
“Alright,” Justin said. “Let’s give it a few minutes.”
They waited several minutes. The smoke had dissipated to nothing, and more importantly, no zeds emerged.
“Major, will you and Sergeant Benoit help Kirby provide rear security?” Justin asked.
“Certainly,” Sarah said.
He nodded and looked over at Briscoe. “Alright, fire it up.”
When the big generator came to life, he walked back to the main entrance. Looking back at his Marines, he shouted.
“Alright, men, stack formation, behind me.”
He also used the relevant hand signal so there would be no confusion. All of them reacted instantly and lined up behind Justin.
A few lights flickered on as he led them into the building and down the hallway to the blown door.
Chapter 18 – The Lab
“Oh my God.”
Justin didn’t know who said it, the respirators muffled and distorted everyone’s voice, but it didn’t matter. He was thinking the same thing. Each lab was visible from the hallway through bulletproof glass. The first lab was unoccupied. Not so with the second lab.
Sergeant Crumby pointed. “There’s Sergeant Rivera.”
He was a fresh one, Justin thought. His decomposing face was torn and oozing pus out of the open wounds. All of them were wearing Marine combat utilities, and all of them were now zombies.
“That’s a shitty way to die, man,” Joker muttered.
Justin made a count. “Looks like we have one who’s unaccounted for,” he said.
Sergeant Crumby did his own count and nodded in confirmation. “That scientist is missing, can’t remember his name.”
“Doctor Craddock,” Private Burns said. “Mayo Craddock.”
“Yeah, that’s him,” Sergeant Crumby said.
“They ain’t wearing their masks,” Joker observed. Justin agreed and wondered what would have made them remove their respirators in what was obviously a hot zone.
“Sir?”
Justin looked around to see who was speaking. “Yeah, Joker?”
“We ain’t going to leave them like that, are we?” he asked. “They’re Marines; we’ve got to take care of them.”
“Roger that,” Justin replied.
“Um, Lieutenant?”
Justin looked around. It was Doctor Kincaid. The two scientists were told to wait down at the end of the hall until the Marines had cleared the labs, but they were impatient and followed behind them.
“What is it, Doctor?”
“We can’t go in there. It’s a hot zone. I think it should be obvious.”
“Not a problem,” Joker said. “We open the door a crack and put a bullet in their heads. It’s the right thing to do.”
“Opening the doors, even slightly, will be releasing a toxin,” Doctor Kincaid rejoined. “It may be several days before we can decontaminate.”
Justin’s sigh was magnified through the respirator.
“Point taken,” he said. “Is there any way they can get out of that lab on their own?”
“Not without one of these keycards,” he said, holding one up. “If the power goes out, the locks on the doors stay locked.”
He pointed at the glass. “It’s bulletproof. They won’t be able to break it out.”
“Roger that. Alright, will lab one work for you two?”
The two scientists looked at each other. Smeltzer shrugged.
“I’m sure it will,” Kincaid said with his own shrug.
They spent the first hour testing for contamination and then the rest of the day making the lab sterile. On the morning of the second day, they started the long, meticulous process of creating a vaccine. At the end of the day, the two doctors went outside. The afternoon sun hurt their eyes. Justin waited until they went through the decontamination process before speaking.
“How’s it going, guys?” he asked.
“We’ll know in six weeks,” Kincaid replied. “That’s how long it’ll take to ferment the correct proteins.”