General Arnold’s grip on the phone turned his knuckles white. “Beatrice!” he hissed. “You cannot tell anyone. If they catch me, they’ll throw me in jail and that’s if I’m lucky. They could shoot me you know, and you too, so please, do not tell anyone, do you hear me?”
He waited until she mumbled a reluctant: “Okay,” and then he sped through a quick class on how to operate the fifty-foot yacht, spelling everything out for her. It wasn’t difficult and yet, Beatrice had become more and more helpless during their forty years of marriage until now she could barely balance a checkbook and if she ever had a flat tire, she would come unglued.
“Get the boat and work your way east along the shore until you get to Old Lyme,” he said, spitting the words out faster now. He’d been gone too long. He’d be missed. There’d be questions. “You remember how to get there?”
“It’s right after that Outer Bar Channel thing, right?”
“That’s right. Now listen, don’t try to dock the boat. Stay just off the Outer Bar and don’t let anyone get near. Things are getting hairy along the coast; boats are being stolen and people killed, so don’t let anyone near.”
“Oh, Milt, I don’t think I can do this.”
The general felt a spike of pain in his temple and wondered if Beatrice had finally given him the aneurism she’d been hoping to kill him with for the last twenty years. “You can if you want to live. It’s as simple as that. Call me on my cell when you get close and for God’s sake don’t call anyone else.”
“Oh, Milt,” she said, again. She wanted to be reassured, but he didn’t have time. After a quick goodbye, he hung up and then ran for the stairs. He couldn’t arouse suspicions; he couldn’t be late or say the wrong word. From everything he’d read and heard in the last twenty-four hours, he knew Connecticut was doomed. The disease spread too easily, the politicians were too spineless, and the soldiers too unprepared for this sort of fight.
He wasn’t prepared either. Twenty-five years earlier, he’d been the commanding officer of an infantry battalion in Desert Storm; he been a hard man. Then, somewhere in the last fifteen years of pushing papers and saluting at parades, he’d gotten soft in the middle and had lost his nerve.
Firm leadership might have been able to save the motley force surrounded on the western border, but he was no longer that man. He was a frightened man who needed to buy time for his getaway and so he rushed into the governor’s office with an agenda. “I’m sorry about the delay, I was on the phone with the command post.”
There were six people in the office, all suck-ups who were too afraid to take a stand on anything. They all looked to the governor. Warner raised a penciled eyebrow. “And?”
“They are looking for orders to retreat to this north-south highway.” He pointed at a spot on the map. “Here outside of Torrington. That’s only thirteen miles from the Farmington River, the eastern most edge of Hartford.” This much was true, at least. Although the military channels were a mess as everyone with a damned radio was blathering for all they were worth, the one overriding cry had been a call to retreat.
“Can General Collins hold that line?” Warner asked, not realizing that Collins was a cold corpse with a hole in his head.
They hadn’t heard from Collins in two hours, which scared her to no end and increased the that had been stress building up and up inside of her. She had aged a great deal in the last day and a half. Where before her beauty had been considered timeless, now the years seemed to have stacked up on her almost overnight. Her hair was uncharacteristically flat and dull, and her makeup had worn away to reveal the sixty-year old woman beneath.
Looking at her made General Arnold wonder what he looked like. He turned from her to stare at the map. On its flat surface, he saw all sorts of possibilities—none of them good. If the few thousand men who were left, fell back as they wanted to, it would shorten their line, giving them more firepower per mile—in fact, if they fell back to a line that was even closer, one that ran from Bristol in the north to New Haven in the south, it would free up probably thirty percent more men…but that would move the zombies even closer, only nine miles away.
It would be so close that the civilian population would be able to hear the battle raging, and boy then there’d be panic. With the borders closed, people would flee in the only direction that was left open to them; they’d go south to the ocean. Every boat would be swamped by sheer numbers, his own included. Arnold couldn’t have that happen.
“I say they hold in place,” he said, forcefully. “They may be cut off and surrounded, but they would become the focal point of the fight. They’d be like a magnet for the zombies.” Warner looked stricken by the idea and so he reassured her: “They are being resupplied and reinforced by a swarm of Blackhawks. Trust me, they could conceivably fight for days in this manner.”
Right up until one person got infected, and then the 360-degree perimeter would implode in hours, he didn’t add.
Warner stared at the map; the zombies were already so close and the idea of letting them get even one step closer made her stomach jitter. “But how do we know that none of the Infected Persons are getting around them? There could be ten thousand of them coming right at us for all we know. Without an actual line, we’d never know until it was too late.”
“Trust me, we’d know,” Arnold said. “With all the flights going back and forth, we would know. The pilots use infrared; they’d know if a large enough group was heading our way. Besides, like I said, with all the shooting and all the commotion, the soldiers are the main focal point for the zombies. From what I gather through my channels, Collins is attracting every one of those creatures in a hundred mile radius. We should be safe.”
Again, they’d be safe right up until some poor soldier got splattered with blood and then they’d all be “dead” in hours. After that, the zombies would head east to Hartford and how many of them would still be wearing helmets and armored vests? How on earth do you kill an armored zombie?
And what would happen if the soldiers disobeyed orders and retreated? What if they broke out of the throng of undead that surrounded them and came racing to Hartford? Who could stop them from tearing down the flimsy wall that had been thrown up? There’d be blood in the streets and anarchy.
That’s why he had to get away in the next few hours even if he had to kill to do it.
“I say we try to get some sleep,” he suggested. “There’s nothing more we can do tonight and we should be as ready for whatever tomorrow brings.” Reluctantly, the governor agreed.
3— The Quarantine Zone
Sleep was a luxury few could afford outside the heavy stone walls of the capitol building. On the outskirts of Hartford, the people toiled like ants, fortifying their city. Using every available piece of construction equipment, they dug tremendous ditches and behind these they created a wall out of a mishmash of items.
They emptied three different lumber yards and eight mega hardware stores of every scrap of wood. From two nearby quarries and three granite wholesalers tons of stone were heaved into place. Entire neighborhoods lost their trees when they were felled by men and women, some of whom had happily claimed the mantle of “tree hugger” just two days before.
The wall was immense and fantastic but it wasn’t the only project that the people of Hartford set for themselves. They also demolished bridges, tore up roads and cut railroad tracks.
Their efforts were so prodigious that getting out of the city was nearly as difficult as getting in, though for the moment, almost no one but General Arnold was even considering leaving. The outside world was just too frightening, and now that the walls were going up so quickly, most people were beginning to feel, if not safe, at least safer than they had been.
Deep in the Quarantine Zone, sleep was even harder to come by. For Ryan Deckard, the only sleep he could foresee was the moment he put a bullet in his own head, something that was fast becoming a possibility.
His little group of six was nearly done in. What felt li
ke hours before, he had watched Thuy disappear in the last helicopter leaving the trooper station. It had hurt to see her go, but it wasn’t something he allowed himself to dwell on. He had pushed aside the pain, taken a deep breath and charged out the back door of the station. From that moment on, he had been running for his life and fighting for others’ lives. He was thirty-eight, fit and strong. He could have left them all behind; he could have left them to choose between suicide or being eaten alive.
But it wasn’t something he could do.
The only one besides Deckard who had any real chance was PFC Max Fowler. He was young and strong, and what was more, he could shoot his M16A2 like nobody’s business. If he got lucky, he stood a chance. The others simply weren’t going to make it. Chuck Singleton, a tough-as-leather good ol’ boy, had tumors riddling his lungs which made breathing an arduous chore. He wheezed like a broken accordion and was so loud that the zombies could track him by sound alone.
Chuck was a tough one and a gamer, and yet the real reason he dropped further and further behind was that he was weighed down by Stephanie Glowitz, who stumbled and veered side to side as she coughed up what looked like bits of grey lung. He promised not to leave her and told her so over and over again.
All through that dreadful night, he had coaxed her along, but he knew the truth as well as she did. At one point, he had said: “Say the word, darling and we can sit for a spell.”
She knew exactly what he meant. Sure, they would be able to sit and try to catch their breath, but for how long? A minute? Perhaps two? And then what? There would be no getting up again, they both knew it. Their muscles would seize, and the cancer in their lungs would allow only sips of air, just enough for a few last murmured words of love.
And then Chuck would kill her.
He had promised he would and she knew she could trust him in this. If there was one thing in this new world of monsters and constant death and misery that she had faith in, it was that Chuck Singleton loved her enough to put a bullet in her brain.
She certainly didn’t trust herself. She would hesitate and make excuses and put off the end until the beasts were on top of her. It would be a nightmare death. Chuck would do it right. He would hold her and whisper words of love in her ear and she would die knowing the fullness of his love.
But she wasn’t ready to die just yet. Doggedly, she ran even though it felt as though her feet had been cast in cement. She ran despite the pain, because there was still a chance. There was always a chance. What if they could get away at least for a little while? What if she and Chuck could enjoy this new love as God had meant them to?
She ran, stumbling and slewing right and left. She ran, sweat in her short brown hair and glistening on her pale face, wishing she could throw away the useless gun in her hands and the pack on her back. She ran for love and yet she was barely running. Her meandering, faltering steps were more of a haphazard jog.
Still, she kept ahead of Dr. Wilson who lagged far in the back with zombies nipping at his heels. The middle-aged oncologist had a slab of gut hanging over his belt that jiggled with every step and his once brown face was now a shade of grey. He looked like he was on the verge of a heart attack; if he hadn’t had one already.
The only exercise he’d had in the last fifteen years was his bi-weekly golf outings, and even then, he had an electric cart to haul around his golf bag, along with his fat ass. The entirety of his exercise consisted of walking that fat ass from the cart all the way to the ball and back again. If the ball ever went into the rough, he broke a sweat searching for it—this was as close to jungle warfare as he had ever come.
Now, Dr. Wilson regretted the endless cheeseburgers and millions of fries he had consumed at the clubhouse after his “exercise.”
Exhaustion slowed everyone including the German Shepherd, Sundance, who had his tongue hanging halfway down to the ground as he padded along, his nails scraping endlessly on the asphalt.
They were so far gone that they were nearly too done in to fight, which was okay with Deckard. Fighting was the last thing he wanted to do.
They had blasted out of the ring of zombies surrounding the trooper station, or rather, Deckard, Chuck, and Fowler had blasted out. When Deckard had seen Stephanie’s atrocious shooting, he had put his hand on the barrel of her M16 and pressed it down so that it pointed at the dirt. Although she had been going full bore, rocking her weapon for all she was worth, she had accomplished little beyond poking holes in the forest.
“Save your bullets,” he had said, trying his best not rip her a new one for wasting precious ammo. “Don’t shoot unless they’re right on you, okay? And then only head shots, okay?” A minute later, he’d said the same thing to Dr. Wilson, who had only slightly better aim—he was almost hitting the zombies.
Now, hours later, those first few minutes still played on Deckard’s mind and stoked his fears. As they had rushed out into the night, there had been zombies tied in the trees, as if on leashes. They had been placed there to pen the humans in, to keep them from escaping. Although these zombies had been easily shot down, the ramifications scared the crap out of him.
He could deal with normal zombies. They were mindless feeding machines that didn’t have the mental capacity to tie their own shoes…if they even wore shoes. Frequently, they came without pants, their parts flopping around as forgotten as the rest of their old lives.
And yet there were some, mainly the child zombies, who could think and who could plan and plot. Some part of their underdeveloped brains allowed them to “think” through the virus eating them alive. Unfortunately, the thoughts always concerned death and the need for more blood. As they ran, Deckard kept a sharp eye out for these little beasts, knowing that they were a hundred times more dangerous than the others.
Deep into the night, he pushed his little group along, keeping just ahead of the black-eyed beasts. His one hope was to come across a fully fueled Humvee just sitting in the middle of the road waiting for him to drive it away to safety. But all that lay ahead was more pavement, and more forest on either side, and more zombies coming up out of the darkness. They were on a road that went, well, if he was to be honest, he didn’t even know what direction he was traveling and he didn’t have time to stop at a gas station or poke around in one of the many crashed cars littering the road for a map.
He could only press onward and hope.
A sound from behind caused him to glance back. Doctor Wilson was whimpering between gusts of breath as one of the faster zombies had its rotted hand stretched within inches of snagging his collar.
“Oh…shit…Deckard…please…” Wilson gasped.
“Take point,” Deckard ordered Fowler. He stopped and shouldered his rifle, pausing to let the others run past, trying to calm his own breathing. It wasn’t easy, seeing the mass of undead surging after them.
They were fearsome things, made all the worse by the dark. In the light, one could see their deformities, the chunks that had been eaten out of them by those who had fed off of them, creating them. Frequently, they were missing fingers and hands, faces and bellies. And yet, they still came on, so hungrily it was unnerving.
In the dark, they looked and sounded like a host of demons.
When Wilson was twelve feet away, Deckard caressed the trigger of his M4, sending a bullet just over Wilson’s right shoulder and into the black, spored-eye of a zombie who had been inches from getting hold of the doctor’s white lab coat. It went down in a tumble, piling the ones closest into a tangle of scabbed arms and legs.
He shot another, dropping it, upsetting another cadre, creating another stumbling block. Slowly, Wilson lumbered by, his breath rasping in and out. Deckard fired four more times, making sure each shot counted for more than just one of the beasts. Only when he had caused enough chaos to give them some running room did he turn to catch up. As he pulled even with the doctor, he took Wilson’s rifle from his numb fingers and slung it across his own back.
“Just keep going, it’ll be okay.” Deckard t
old him, though why, he didn’t know. Nothing was going to save the man. They had another twenty miles to go before they got to the edge of the zone and once there they’d have to fight their way to freedom. Wilson wasn’t going to make it another two miles, and as for fighting, he couldn’t hold his own against the weakest of the zombies.
“I…need…my…gun,” he rasped. “Just…in case.” There was fear in his deep brown eyes. Deckard knew all about that particular fear. They all did.
“It won’t come to that,” Deckard lied to him. “Just keep going and you’ll be fine.” They would all keep going but to where, and for how long, none of them knew.
Chapter 2
1—2:44 a.m.
The Edge of the Zone, West of the Hudson
Up to this point, Private Ginny Kinna had held her own. She had her mask and her MOPP gear and her gun—to her it was and always would be a gun and the bullets that went in it were bullets. It wasn’t a “weapon” and the bullets weren’t “rounds” no matter what her drill sergeants always said.
She had her gun and her bullets and so far, everything had been okay. Her unit was a “support battalion,” meaning they rarely went into the field, and almost never fired their guns. Because the 250th was what the infantry called REMFs—Rear Echelon Mother-Fuckers, they had been placed on the long perimeter across the wide river in what everyone thought of as the safest location.
There hadn’t been a single zombie within a mile of Ginny and that was a very good thing, and not just for her. It was good for the nation as a whole, because in the two years she had been in the New Jersey National Guard, she had never actually qualified with the M16A2, or any other gun for that matter.
In basic training, after two miserable attempts in which she failed to hit anything beyond fifty meters, she had quietly been given a waiver. When she went to qualify with the 250th Brigade Support Battalion, she didn’t think she had shot her gun any better and yet they pinned a little badge on her Class A uniform. No one pretended she was a marksman, then again no one had said a thing when she consistently failed to knock down target after target.
The Apocalypse Crusade 3: War of the Undead Day 3 Page 2