“Who’s John Burke,” Jerome asked. “And what lady?”
Before answering, Thuy turned to look back the way they had come. “John was a patient of mine. The only one in the study who proved immune to the effects of the Com-cells. His daughter was at least partially immune as well. But now I’ve gone and lost them both, and John is probably dead. We left him back at the camp.”
“Was he that skinny redneck?” Jerome asked and then held his hand up to his chin. “About this tall?”
Thuy’s eyes narrowed. “Yes.”
“Then I bet he’s still alive. He was with me for a few minutes when we were trying to find soldiers who were willing to ditch Colonel O’Brian and get out of the camp. I had just convinced these guys on the line to join us and when I looked around, he was gone. Probably snuck off into the woods like a chicken.”
“Do not be so quick to judge,” Thuy said. “His seven year old daughter has been out on her own for two days now. John is just doing what he feels is right.”
“As we should be doing,” Courtney stated before pointing up at an ivy-covered two-story bungalow. There was an older Ford Ranger parked along the curb in front of it. “I bet we’ll find the keys inside sitting on the credenza or hanging on a hook or something.”
The three went to the door, but before they rang the doorbell, each took a few seconds to make themselves a touch more presentable: shirts were tucked in and buttoned properly. Jerome patted down his short hair, while Thuy raked her slim fingers through hers, somehow making it look as though she had just stepped out of a salon.
Courtney wasn’t so lucky. Her curly brown hair was an unruly mane that only a shower and a proper brushing could tame.
Once they had made themselves look at least half-way presentable, Thuy rang the doorbell. She then stood back and waited with her head cocked, listening for the slightest noise from within. Thirty seconds passed and then she rang the doorbell three times in a row.
“I hope they have some food,” Courtney whispered. “I am starving.”
“Me too,” Jerome said. “And I need a shower. Being around those guys with the black eyes was disgusting. I didn’t even want to breathe when I was near any of them. Say, how does the disease pass from person to person, anyway? Can I get it just by breathing too close to one of them?”
Thuy, who was also hungry and, as she had dried urine all over her, was more in need of a shower than either of the other two, jabbed the doorbell three more times before answering. “I’m not sure how the transmission occurs in full. It’s almost certainly blood-borne, meaning the pathogen is present in blood and other bodily fluids. Normally, for a person to become infected from a blood-borne disease he or she must have an open wound. In other words, there has to be a path into the person’s system. But in this case…”
She trailed off for a moment, thinking about how quickly and thoroughly the disease had spread. Clearly, not every person who became infected was walking around with an open laceration and, just as clearly, not all of them had been scratched or bitten by one of the infected.
“In this case,” she went on, “I believe we are dealing with a hardy, virulent pathogen that can be transmitted in more than one way. But don’t look so worried, Mr. Evermore, you are young and fit. Your body’s immune system is strong enough to deal with a whiff of the pathogen, you might say. So as long as an infected person doesn’t cough into your face, or sneeze on you, or spit in your eye, you should be fine just breathing normally.”
“What about touching stuff?” Courtney asked, looking down at her hands which seemed extremely dirty compared to how clean she usually kept them.
Thuy glanced down at her own hand for a moment before saying: “Try not to touch ‘stuff’ and if you do, then wash your hands as soon as possible afterwards. Speaking of washing, I want to get to it. Let’s go around back. I don’t like the idea of breaking into this place right here out in the open.”
In no time, Jerome pounded in the back door. “Hello?” he called as he stepped in. “Anyone home?” The air was silent and the house as dead as the rest of the town. He waited only a moment before saying: “Dibs on the shower.”
While he showered, Thuy and Courtney went through the house and discovered it had everything they needed: plenty of food, water in plastic jugs, clothing in various sizes, though all slightly too small for Jerome and slightly too large for Thuy.
They also found the key to the Ranger hanging on a nail in the kitchen. In thirty-five minutes they were showered, changed and loaded into the truck. They took all the non-perishable food and left a note apologizing for the theft.
“So, where to?” Jerome asked, as he tugged at the collar of a plain, white t-shirt which he wore over a pair of clingy, grey sweat pants that stopped just above his ankle bone.
Courtney had on a pair of loose black slacks and a man’s button up dress shirt while Thuy had found a pair of blue jeans which she rolled up at the bottom and cinched tightly with a belt. A green t-shirt that hung, loosely on her slender form completed her outfit.
“Hartford seems like a sensible destination,” Thuy answered. “It’s the seat of government for the state. We should pass on the information to them concerning Anna Holloway and the vial she carries.”
With zero traffic on the roads, the eight miles flew by and they sped up to the newly created wall in minutes. Jerome stopped the truck a few hundred yards away and swore in amazement: “Holy fuck.”
“Indeed,” agreed Thuy. The wall that had been thrown up overnight stretched as far as the eye could see in both directions. It had been constructed with a nod to necessity and panic rather than to coherence or beauty.
In some places, mounds of furniture made up the barrier and in one place, thirty payloads of sand had been dumped to form a long pyramid connecting a jumbled mass of bed frames on one side to twisted hunks of scrap metal in the shape of an angular giant slug, on the other.
For the most part, the wall consisted of cars stacked on cars, which teetered on top of trucks or buses. In Thuy’s eyes, it was a most unsturdy affair and she noted with some relief that it was still being worked on by seemingly endless teams of people who welded and buttressed and shimmed, and others who dragged yet more items to be layered on top of the last.
With a smile, Thuy said: “It seems that, as well as forgetting the basic laws of physics, they also forgot a gate within their wall.” This was her version of a joke and so she was a little disappointed when neither of her traveling companions cracked a smile. “Or they just don’t want visitors,” she added. “Either way, let’s go see if we can talk our way inside.”
In short, they could not. The people of Hartford now consisted of two tribes. The first group were the people of the interior. They were the old and the weak and the fearful. They hid in their homes as zombies in ever growing numbers took over outside, lurking in the dark places and feeding until they were stuporous.
The second group were the people of the wall. They were the strong. They had spent all night building their wall and now they manned their wall and were prepared to defend their wall. They ate on the wall and slept on the wall and they pissed over the side of the wall—at least the men did, and yet, in a way, they were no less fearful than the first group.
Jerome eased the Ranger forward until he saw just how many guns were pointing at the windshield. He stopped the vehicle and looked over at Thuy. “I got your back.”
She had no idea what he meant by that, but smiled at him nonetheless, before slipping out of the truck and walking up the highway to where it ended at the wall.
When she was forty paces away, she was stopped with a sharp word from one man, who was joined by three others who told her to: Leave and Go back the way you came, and Get the fuck out of here. She attempted to explain who she was, but a thrown beer can made her hop out of the way.
“No one gets in,” said the oldest of the men present. He carried a deer rifle across his back and had on a black baseball cap, which he wore so low
that Thuy couldn’t see his eyes.
“I have important information for the governor,” she said, speaking quickly before another can was thrown her way. The older man held out a hand, stopping a young man in mid-stoop who was undoubtedly going for another can. Thuy went on in a rush: “I know who is responsible for all of this and that person is currently on the loose outside of the zone and is carrying a vial of what are called Com-cells.”
The older man looked at one of the people who had told Thuy to leave. They both shrugged. “That’s great and all,” the older man said, “but you still can’t come in.”
“May I speak to the governor, then?”
“She’s gone,” he replied. The fact that there were zombies within the boundaries of the city were just rumors that came to the wall in drips and drops, however the news that the governor had left the city had sped around the walls in two directions, the gossip meeting just south of where Thuy stood.
“Yeah,” the other man spoke up. “She’s gone to check the fortifications of the other cities and to try to reopen the border with Massachusetts.”
“Reopen the border?” Thuy asked. “When was it closed?”
The man with the deer rifle and the low cap stared for a long time before answering. “You have all this supposedly ‘important’ information and you don’t know that the borders are closed? Yeah right is all I gotta say.”
“Keep movin’,” cawed the other man.
Another can was thrown and the jeers recommenced, forcing Thuy to hurry away. “That didn’t go very well,” Thuy said in an understatement. After explaining what she heard and saw, she waited for Jerome’s and Courtney’s input. Neither knew what they should do.
“I say we go look for the governor,” Thuy said. “If I had to guess, she went to Manchester first. According to the highway signs, it’s not even thirty miles away and it’s a fairly good-sized city.”
They detoured north around the walled city and once again sped to their destination in no time. The walls of Manchester were smaller, but the people were no less fearful. Again, Thuy was greeted with pointed guns, and the faces that leered down on her had touches of paranoid madness to them.
This time, Thuy did not bother explaining herself other than to say that she had information for the governor that was “Top Secret” in nature. Her ill-fitting clothing did not add credibility to this claim and she was openly laughed at. At least the people of Manchester didn’t throw things at her, and they did acknowledge that they had not seen or heard anything concerning the governor.
“Maybe we should try New London next,” Thuy suggested to the others. “But first, I need a change of clothes. People aren’t taking me seriously.”
Clothes were found and time was wasted. Using a brick, they smashed open a shop window and Thuy found a serious looking grey pantsuit that fit her reasonably well. A note wasn’t left this time when they climbed back into the Ranger.
Jerome drove southeast for a few miles but stopped abruptly, the tires leaving black streaks behind the Ranger as a Kiowa scout helicopter buzzed right up Route 2, flying just high enough to clear the power lines that occasionally crossed the road.
Behind it came a massive train of green helicopters that stretched beyond the curve of the earth. Each was crammed with men and equipment.
“Mr. Evermore,” Thuy said, trying to make herself heard over the din, “why are those helicopters here?” It made no sense to her. The army had just had an airborne jump which had been mind-boggling in its scope, so why the need to bring in even more soldiers?
“It’s the 101st, I bet,” he answered. “But why they’re here I don’t know. Unless they have orders to…” The Kiowa suddenly dropped down to road level, coming to hover directly in their path. Behind it, one of the hundreds of Blackhawks landed, spilling out a dozen soldiers, who turned their guns on the Ranger.
“Oh shit,” Jerome hissed and spun the truck around.
2—Washington DC
Three hundred and fifty miles southwest of Jerome’s stolen Ford Ranger, Lieutenant General Phillips watched the little truck “flip a u-ey" and tear out of there. He sat in a high-backed leather chair, with a cup of tea at his elbow and a scone sitting on a hundred year old bone-china plate two inches from the cup.
The room—the Situation Room, beneath the west wing of the White House, was agreeably comfortable and warm without being hot. There was every amenity he could think of available with a snap of his fingers. He had access to technology that few people could ever dream of. Best of all, the air was scrubbed and filtered. It was unlikely that anyone had ever caught a cold from being in the Situation Room.
Despite all of this, Phillips wanted out of there as fast as he could. He belonged in the field with his men, not sipping tea with the president.
“They won’t kill those people in that truck, will they?” the president asked his chief of staff.
Across from Phillips, his boss, General Heider rolled his eyes. Marty Aleman glared at the general before restoring his face to its near-constant state of bland pleasantness. “Of course not, sir. The original use of force orders still apply. The men can’t shoot unless they are attacked.”
“Good, good. I wouldn’t want murder broadcast on live television. We’ve had enough bad press to last a lifetime.”
Heider sat back and drummed his fingers on the table as he tried to control his temper. It was becoming more and more evident in his eyes that the president was a moron and an utter empty suit. He was leader of the free world simply because he had good hair and could read from a teleprompter in a convincing enough manner that people actually believed the words he was reading were his own.
“This is a secure feed,” Heider eventually said, speaking to Marty. “We’re the only ones who can see it.”
Marty grinned at him—the mechanical movement of his lips never touched his eyes, which were dead cold. “Good. I think the time for pageantry is passed. Thanks to the president’s quick action, we have given the news stations enough footage to keep them busy for a few days. Hopefully long enough for you to fix this situation.”
“What is the situation, exactly,” the president asked, pointing at the wall screen. “That map is for Connecticut and those markers say 101. I just got done telling the press that the 101st was going to reinforce the southern line in New York. What the hell are they doing in Connecticut? Don’t we already have men in Connecticut? That was a real parachute jump this morning, wasn’t it? That wasn’t a fake, right?”
Heider leaned back in his chair so that the front legs came off the ground. He stared at the ceiling. Clearly, he wasn’t going to answer. Marty said: “Those were real sir, but remember there was an outbreak in Hartford.”
“Yes, but we have the 82nd in Connecticut already.” The president then leaned in close to his chief of staff and hissed: “Do I need to explain how important New York City is? The rest of the state is just forest and hills and crap. New York City is vital.”
Vital for your re-election? Phillips wanted to ask. Instead, he went to the map and tapped the city of Hartford, which was shaded in red. “There are infected persons in Hartford. We don’t know how they got there or how long they’ve been there or if there are more of them in the suburbs. We can’t pull the 82nd back to a new line because they would have to cross through an infected area to do so and we don’t how the disease is transmitted. It could be that some of them are infected even now and have yet to show symptoms.”
Heider blew out a long breath before letting his chair thump down. “This was all spelled out in the brief that we submitted. We don’t write them because they’re fun, we write them to make ignorant politicians less so—if that’s possible.”
General Phillips grinned at his boss, thankful that he was finally speaking out. The morning had been the single biggest cluster-fuck Phillips had ever been a part of, and it was all due to one man’s need to look good no matter how much shit was being thrown around.
On the literal fly, with eig
ht hundred copters in the air, Phillips had been forced to change the orders of the 101st Airborne Division. Instead of being dispersed on the southern perimeter of the Quarantine Zone, they were forming a new line east of Hartford.
From a logistics point of view this actually helped out greatly. The division would be able to move and fight as a proper division with its chain of command intact and its supply line unhindered and unpilfered by other units. General Milt Platnik of the 101st was the only general happy with the change of orders.
Ed Stolberg, commanding officer of what was left of the 42nd Infantry Division had, as expected, hit the roof. “I can’t do it, sir. I can’t hold the line with what I have left. You can court martial me if you wish but I’m pulling back ten miles to Highway 6. It’ll shorten my lines and give us some breathing room.”
“You’ll do no such thing!” Phillips barked. “You will fight in position until help arrives, and it will arrive shortly. The 10th Mountain Division is on its way. The first units should arrive within about three hours.”
That was a lie. Fort Drum was three hundred and fifty miles away on the other side of the state. They would have to drive at a hundred and twenty miles an hour to get there in three hours.
“I’ll be out of ammo in three hours,” Ed replied, his voice rising well beyond what would normally be considered insubordination. “I’m pulling back. That’s all there is to it. I don’t have any choice in the matter.”
“What if I got you air support?”
Ed made a rumbly sound in his throat as he thought it over. “Yes. I could hold with air support. But where would you get the fuel? There isn’t a drop of JP8 left in the state.”
“There’s plenty in Boston. Logan sits on a sea of it. I have a marine detachment and two destroyers heading to fetch it right this moment. And I have a good two hundred or so Blackhawks and two dozen Apaches that are now at my disposal. Most of them are practically empty after trailing their coattails along half the Atlantic seaboard, but we’re scraping together all the fuel they have for a few sorties. You just have to tell me where to send the Apaches.”
The Apocalypse Crusade 3: War of the Undead Day 3 Page 21