In the five hours he had been on the ground there had been a change in his soldiers’ attitude. They had been reluctant to kill—at first. Then, they killed out of duty to their brothers and their mission and to the people in the “real” world. Now, outside the city walls, they grumbled and cursed the people of Hartford for trying to escape what seemed like certain death.
Frazer felt the anger coming from his men and it saddened him
“They’re cowards!”
“They need to clean up their own mess instead of trying to pollute the rest of the world.”
“If you’re not going to shoot the zombies, you should at least shoot yourselves!”
The general turned away instead of reprimanding his men. As a student of history, he knew that civilization was the thinnest of veneers covering a dark and barely understood core. Humans had been little more than brutal beasts for two million years and it was only in the last three hundred years or so that the idea of civilization had come to take on a real meaning.
It wouldn’t take much to turn back the clock.
Deckard led his little group through the empty suburbs right toward the sound of the inhumane savagery. The hard-fought battles could be heard for miles and the closer they got, the more Stephanie regretted her words from earlier. She hadn’t expected such heated fighting.
In her mind she had pictured a slightly rosier scene: men sitting in foxholes outside the city, smoking cigarettes, chatting quietly and killing the occasional zombie that ambled by.
The sound of guns was very loud, when Chuck coughed and cleared his throat before saying. “We just gonna walk up on ‘em? They sound a might bit trigger happy for that.”
Deckard stopped under a shading tree, wiped a sleeve across his face, and asked: “What do you suggest?”
“Maybe if we had a white flag, they might be slower to shoot at us.”
It was a sensible idea and quickly adopted. Sheets were easily found and a flag created. Deckard carried it, holding it high as they walked through the deserted neighborhoods just south of the city.
The buildings grew closer and closer and the houses smaller, the further they went. The wall of cars and cast off junk ringing the city had just come into view when Deckard saw movement in an upper-floor window of a tall Victorian home.
He stopped, the hairs on his arms sticking up. People were watching him and worse, people were pointing guns at him. He could feel them. Then came the audible “click” as someone flicked their rifle from safe to fire.
Chapter 16
1—2: 41 p.m.
The Hartford Quarantine Zone
“Don’t make any sudden moves,” Deckard whispered.
“Why?” Stephanie asked, feeling strangely nervous and not knowing why. “What’s wrong?”
Deckard jutted his chin up towards one of the homes on the block. “Upper floor window at our eleven o’clock. Rifleman.” The group stopped and stared, trying to pick out the soldiers in their camo against a suburban backdrop. Deckard could pick them out better than the others. “There’s another cattycorner at our two o’clock.”
Stephanie squinted mightily before she saw the outline of a man in green, squatting next to a bush. When she saw the gun pointed their way, her heart missed a beat and the sweat seemed to freeze down her back. Instinctively, she raised her hands as if in surrender.
A voice from the house hailed them. “Go back! You can’t go this way.”
Moving slowly and deliberately, Deckard placed his rifle on the ground and raised his hands as well. “We can pass!” he yelled back. “You’re with the 82nd Airborne and we know that your orders are to keep people from leaving the city. They don’t forbid people from wanting to go into the city.”
“Why the hell would you want to go in?” the person in the window demanded.
Before Deckard could answer, Stephanie spoke up: “We need to find a woman in the city. Her name is Dr. Thuy Lee. She’s a scientist. She has the cure for the disease.”
Out of the corner of his mouth, Deckard whispered: “What are you doing? She doesn’t have the cure.”
“I know that, but he doesn’t,” Stephanie answered without turning her head. In her opinion, Deckard was too in love to lie effectively and Chuck was too honest to even make the attempt. Fowler seemed like a nice guy, but in her eyes he wasn’t the smartest of men.
If they were going to lie their way through to Hartford, she would have to do it. She raised her voice again and called out: “We need to find her before it’s too late. If the, uh, disease spreads too far, it might become unstoppable.”
This last part wasn’t exactly a lie, still it caused a whispered conversation to break out among the hidden soldiers guarding the street. Stephanie was able to track their voices and now saw them hidden in the shadows and beneath bushes and under cars. Eventually, one of them asked: “How do we know you’re telling the truth?”
“Why else would we want to get into a city full of zombies?” Stephanie answered. The soldiers had no response to this. It was clearly something they hadn’t expected.
As the soldiers whispered back and forth to each other about what to do, Deckard dropped his white flag onto the street and called out: “We’re going to take the magazines out of our guns.”
Slowly, deliberately, the four of them dropped their magazines and jacked out the chambered rounds. With their bolts back and their ports open, they slung their rifles across their backs and advanced with their hands up. Twenty feet from the house, a sergeant with a face that was stubbled and pock-marked stepped out from behind a minivan and ordered them to halt.
“There really is a cure?” he asked, unable to keep the hope out of his voice.
“Yes, there is,” Stephanie lied, easily.
Deckard added: “If we can speak to an officer, I can give you proof.”
“Why an officer?” the sergeant demanded, suddenly suspicious. “Why can’t you explain it to me?”
“Because when I explain things to you, you’re going to talk to your company commander and he’s going to talk to the battalion commander and so on. I want to cut out as much of the crap as possible. We don’t have a lot of time. Tell them we know where Dr. Thuy Lee is. She’s wanted by the FBI, probably on their Ten Most Wanted list.”
“Ten Most Wanted? Why would someone with a cure be wanted by the…” He paused at seeing Deckard’s glare. “Right. Sorry. I’ll make the call.”
It took thirty-six minutes, seven calls and seven abbreviated explanations before General Frazer was reached. The name Thuy Lee was not a name he was likely to forget. Hours before, it had come up when he had been debriefed on the cause of the virus. A smirk had crossed his face at the idea that an evil scientist, as she was thought to be in some circles, would have such a cartoon name.
The name Thuy had come up a second time, thirty minutes before. Someone high up on the food chain had floated the question of whether or not it was feasible to rescue a person from within Hartford.
“Who’s so important that I should risk my men?” he had asked his boss, General Phillips, thinking that good men would be killed trying to rescue the governor or some senator, or some filthy rich fat cat who thought he could bribe his way to safety.
Phillips surprised him by answering: “The Mayor of Hartford says he has the scientist who started the plague. A woman named Thuy Lee. The FBI is after her, too. Some people think she’s valuable and others think she’s dangerous. Either way, they want to know if you can zip in there and get her.”
“Zip in?” Frazer pulled the sat-phone from his ear wondering: Zip in? Was that a joke? “No, sir. No one’s going to be zipping in any place. Other than a few Apaches I lent to Ed Stolberg, all my choppers are grounded from lack of fuel. And I won’t send men in on foot. The chances of one of them coming out infected is too great. I don’t think one scientist is worth it.”
But a scientist with a cure would be.
Frazer was on the other side of the city when his intelligence officer tr
acked him down with news about a possible cure. In a minute, he had commandeered a truck, hoping to “zip” around the city, but with all the zombies it was slow going. By the time he reached the little group, they were snoozing in the shade of a poplar tree, flinching every time a soldier gunned down one of the zombies that had been limping along in their wake. There was already a mound of them in the street.
The general conferred with the pock-marked sergeant for a moment and then cleared his throat, loudly. At the sound, PFC Max Fowler cracked an eye. In a flash, he hopped up and came to attention. “You a soldier?” the general asked in his slow drawling voice.
“PFC Maxwell Fowler of the 42nd, sir. I’m an MP, sir. My unit was one of the first guard units in place holding the perimeter of the zone. Unfortunately, the line was pulled back without our knowledge and we were left stranded.”
“And your uniform?” Frazer asked.
Fowler hesitated, glancing down at the blue jeans and Led Zeppelin T-shirt he had taken from an abandoned home back in Gamet Corners. “Sorry, sir. I…I had to throw it away when it got zombie blood on it. That was hours ago, sir. We’re not infected, I promise.”
General Frazer had taken a small step back. This promise of not being infected had not been believed by the paratroopers, either, and the group hadn’t been allowed to come within fifty feet of the line which, at this point happened to be a cross street called Jordan Lane.
“As much as I want to believe you, we can’t take chances,” Frazer replied, holding up a hand, just in case the soldier thought about advancing. “Perhaps you should tell me what you know about Dr. Lee. Does she really have a cure?”
Fowler glanced once at Deckard and then dropped his head. “No, sir, I don’t think so.” He paused as the soldiers around the general began to mutter and grumble, angry that they’d been lied to. “She might not have the cure, but I believe she could be our best chance at finding one. She’s a genius. I’ve seen her in action. She’s scary smart. I think it would be wise to find her and secure her.”
“Scary smart?” General Frazer asked, showing his temper. “That’s all you have?There are plenty of smart people in the world and I doubt that she’s so much smarter than any of them.”
“I’m willing to bet she is smarter than most people who call themselves geniuses,” Deckard said. “But it’s not her smarts that you should save her for. It’s her knowledge of the disease that makes her valuable. She developed what’s called a combination cell. It’s a cell with regenerative powers—healing powers you might say. It was sabotaged during testing, but I bet she could find a way to use that same cell to cure the disease.”
Frazer shrugged. “I won’t hang my hat on a ‘maybe.’ I won’t gamble the lives of everyone in the world on a ‘maybe.’ Because without a doubt if you go into the city you will come out as a zombie or someone on the verge of becoming one. I won’t stop you from going in, but I will kill you if you try to get out.”
“People have been trying to kill me for days now,” Deckard said. “I’m not too worried.”
“I am,” Stephanie murmured.
The general caught her words. “Then don’t go. It’s a suicide mission. Listen to that.” From the city came a steady pop, pop, pop of guns firing. Beneath the sound of the guns were faint screams that went on and on. “Don’t go to Hartford. Find a different town to hole up in. Mansfield is walled and is supposedly zombie free. Try there.”
Stephanie gave him a tired smile. “Sounds lovely, but I don’t think I can walk that far. No, I’ll go into Hartford and we’ll find Dr. Lee. I trust her and I trust Mr. Deckard. And you know what? I trust you, General. You’ll do the right thing when the time comes.”
He shook his head. “When the time comes, I’ll kill you ma’am, and it will be the right thing to do. The disease spreads too easily. You know that probably better than I do.” Her tired smile turned sad. She looked so done in that the general wished he could order her to stay, but he didn’t have the authority. Instead, he turned to the sergeant. “If you have any extra ammunition, give it to them. And some food and water.”
“See?” Stephanie said, her smile growing bright again. “You are doing the right thing already.”
“It feels like a stupid thing,” Frazer said.
As a few magazines, some MREs and a couple of canteens were reluctantly laid in the street, the general told them: “Your doctor friend is at the Hartford City Hall. Once in the city, go north. There’s a road that cuts through the city on a diagonal. You’ll want to veer right on that for a couple of miles. When it ends, there’ll be a park on your left. City Hall is in there somewhere. Good luck.”
“Thanks,” she said, taking Chuck’s hand and following after Deckard, who was in a hurry to get to Thuy.
The four person group scooped up the food and ammo and crossed through the thin line of men. Stephanie had expected there to be hundreds of soldiers, but there were only eight visible and that was counting the general. Once on the other side of the street, the men slunk back into the shadows, leaving only the general watching them. Stephanie waved and the older man waved back. He did so with his face set in grim lines. He didn’t think he would ever see them again, in fact he was sure of it.
2—The Hartford Quarantine Zone
“We got through that line easier than I thought,” Stephanie remarked. “I thought it was going to be much harder. Maybe Hartford won’t be so bad, either.” They had gotten in a good long rest while waiting for the general and now she felt as close to perky as a person with stage four lung cancer could.
“Let’s hope so. Lock and load, people,” Deckard said, pulling his rifle off his back, slapping in a magazine and letting the bolt thunk forward.
Ahead of them stood the makeshift wall which had been built only the night before. Brown stains—blood that had run down its metal structure and had dried—gave the wall a far older appearance. The bodies sprawled along its top baking in the sun gave it an evil feel. It was now deserted save for the crows that picked over the corpses.
In the end, the wall had proved worse than useless. Not only had it failed to protect them from the zombies, it had trapped them when they were most desperate to get out. Right then the wall appeared to be little more than a monument to man’s desperation.
It stood roughly forty feet in height, though to Stephanie it might as well have been a hundred. She couldn’t climb it if her life depended on it. Thankfully, the wall had been tumbled over in a number places as people had rammed it with their cars in order to break free. Usually that hadn’t helped in any appreciable way. Cars still couldn’t get past the wreckage.
But people on foot could.
Deckard, moving slowly with his head up and his eyes out, led them toward one of these areas. As they got closer, the air hummed with the sound of tens of thousands of flies as they gorged themselves endlessly on the corpses.
The gap in the wall had been the scene of one of the more intense battles. There were bodies everywhere—a few of them still moving, a few still groaning, a few pleading for help.
One man sat propped against the rear bumper of a Volvo that sported Utah plates. He had four holes in his body and a pool of blood around him that seemed impossibly large. By all accounts, he should have been dead.
“Give me water,” he gasped, holding out a hand to Stephanie. The hand was red and shiny and slick.
She paused, but Deckard grunted: “Don’t. It would be a waste.”
Of course, it would be a waste of water, but that wasn’t really the point in her mind. She needed to help the man. It was an imperative that came from the soul. Wouldn’t she want to be helped if she was in the same position? Wasn’t that the nature of the Golden Rule?
“It’ll just prolong his sufferin', darlin',” Chuck said as he tried to ease her along. That at least made more sense. She didn’t want to be the cause of more pain. Willing her heart to stone, she turned away from the man. Two steps later there was a loud BANG! from behind her and something t
hat was akin to an angry bee zipped between her cheek and Chuck’s.
Before she knew what was happening, Chuck threw her down behind a car that her shocked mind could only classify as “green,” and it was a moment before she realized that she had just been shot at. Feeling a strange zing of electricity go through her, she stared around and watched as Fowler dove to the ground, dragging Sundance with him, while Chuck struggled to disentangle his rifle that had become fouled in the grill of the green car.
Amazingly, Deckard had not moved except to spin around. In a blink, his M4 was at his shoulder, his right index finger on the trigger. He had it aimed back the way they had come. Stephanie craned her neck over the green car to see who had shot at her: it was the bloody man.
He was struggling with a deer rifle, trying to pull back on the bolt with hands that shook and were as weak as a child’s. He never got the bolt back. “Give me some damn water,” he hissed. Almost as an afterthought, he spat out: “Please.”
“I can’t,” Deckard replied, lowering his rifle. “We don’t have enough for ourselves. Besides, if you’re infected…”
“I’m not!”
A look of anguish crossed Deckard’s rugged features. “I can’t take that chance. There’s too much blood. Sorry.”
The man spat at him. “Fuck your sorry.”
“Right,” Deckard replied, backing away. When he came up alongside the green car, he gave Stephanie a once over. Satisfied that she hadn’t been shot, he said: “Let’s move. Things are only going to get worse the deeper into the city we go.”
She was slow to get up. When Chuck had tackled her, she had cracked her knee on the pavement and now she couldn’t bear to put her full weight on the leg. Chuck let her drape an arm across his shoulders so that she could keep up as they moved down the trash-strewn street.
Hartford had changed overnight. The city that had banded together in such an amazing display the day before was now a city without pride or joy. No longer was the city open and bright. It was now a dark and frightening place. The streets were a disorderly confusion of abandoned cars and dead bodies. Blood, both black and red, sat in congealing pools, or ran down gutters in horrific little streams.
The Apocalypse Crusade 3: War of the Undead Day 3 Page 24