"We had a new arrival at the compound yesterday Preacher, man calling himself Hatchet Man.”
The Preacher remained silent, nodding to encourage Saphire to continue, for he knew there was more to follow.
"Seems he came upon your flock north west of Fort Warwick, said they took him in and fed him", Saphire paused to swallow deeply. "Gave him shelter within their compound.”
The Preacher felt the well-developed muscles in his broad back tensing, wherever this was going was a place he felt sure he would not wish to visit. "Continue sister," he encouraged, placing a broad hand over hers.
"Maybe I can help you out friend?" came a voice to their right.
Both The Preacher and Saphire turned their heads to watch the approach of a man that Saphire knew as Hatchet Man and who The Preacher guessed the same. The black man stood and watched the features of the approaching man twist into one he had seen many times as he lifted himself to his full height. It was a mixture of fear and awe, disbelief that a man could stand at close to seven feet high, weigh in at a little over two hundred and thirty pounds, yet move with the smooth agile fluidity of a panther.
"I believe you would be Hatchet Man?"
"I believe you would be one big mother," responded the man, offering a tattooed hand that was swallowed by a huge black paw belonging to The Preacher.
"Show some respect Hatchet," warned Saphire, jumping to her feet.
"I was,” winked the man, retrieving his hand. "Never swore once.”
The Preacher noted the letters inked onto each of the grimy fingers as he released the man’s hand and frowned. "Dark?”
Hatchet Man lifted both hands and placed them together with palms towards himself to give the colossus of a man studying him, the full message penned across his eight fingers.
"Dark Lord," read The Preacher, with no hint of shock or judgement.
The man smiled, exposing teeth that at one time had been white but now bore the hue of a thousand cigarettes. "Looking to convert me Preacher?"
"Sounds like a challenge," grinned the black man, exposing teeth at the other end of the spectrum.
"Hell, go for it," laughed the man, the rasp in his throat supporting the truth of his tobacco habit.
"Saving this S.O.B can wait Preacher, man knows something you need to hear," cut in Saphire.
Hatchet Man joined The Preacher and Saphire at the communal table, for long moments his eyes remained fixed to the surface that bore the wounds of a hundred riotous meals which had been enjoyed by the commune. The Preacher and Saphire both waited, he with a sense of loss as to what could disturb a hardened character such as Hatchet Man, she with a heavy heart for she already possessed that knowledge.
"Three months ago," began Hatchet Man, barely above a whisper, "I landed up at a small compound at a place called Stockton, about eight miles west of Fort Warwick. I’d been bouncing around the outer land since the plague, dodging the Tainted and holding up with small groups who needed some labour or traded for anything I could scavenge. People at Stockton were sound, no judgement, not looking at me like I was a freak.”
"Entitled to their opinion," snorted Saphire. "Clearly hadn't got to know you that well.”
Hatchet Man's laughter lasted just a few beats, his strained expression returning as he picked his story back up. “Been there around two months working side by side with a guy called Jacob. Spent a lot of time maintaining their compound defences and scavenging, work was hard but the food was good and the bed was soft.”
"I know this group, friend," interjected The Preacher. “I will be calling to see them in a week or so.”
Hatchet Man shook his head, lifting his eyes from the table top that had glued his attention. "No point Preacher, they're all gone. Not a soul left.”
The Preacher’s deep frown asked the question without a word being uttered.
"I'd gone out on my own scavenging, was out around four hours. When I arrived back at the compound I found the main gates open."
Saphire swallowed deeply and shifted uneasily in her seat. The Preacher's eyes flicked from her back onto Hatchet Man sensing the weight of the knowledge they both carried. "Continue my son," he encouraged. "Were the Tainted still inside?"
Hatchet Man shook his head. "No, it wasn't them, wasn't a sign they had been there. When I said they were gone Preacher......I don't mean they were dead, I mean they were gone. There were no bodies, no sign the Tainted had been there, it....it was as if they had simply vanished."
Chapter 4
"The Land of the Brave"
Anderson stood with Tom, Bull and the rest of his team on the containment wall overlooking sector 30. In the time it had taken to redeploy from the first bleed only two kilometres away, two thousand metres, the sector had been lost. Lumbering swarms of WDs were roaming the streets with the Mutant Tainted darting among them, bringing down the screaming Pure who had not been quick enough to escape the sector when the bleed started. There had been little time to alert the thousands of Pure who only moments before had been going about their early evening routines, some were eating, some were bathing their children, some were watching the crude TV channel beamed throughout the Fort but the common thread in virtually every household was a radio tuned to the information channel that was relaying reports on the fight going on to save sector 42 just two kilometres away. Each resident of FL had their own way of dealing with the blanket of fear that settled over the Fort at a time of a bleed. The majority simply threw themselves into their normal duties refusing to even think that the next announcement would be an evacuation order for their sector. Every such announcement began the same way, it would begin with a shrill siren followed by an automated announcement that always began the same way, “Warning, warning", then all breaths throughout the Fort would be held waiting for the sector number, each praying it would not be the one they were in. Sector 30 was called that very evening causing pandemonium as the Pure within simply dropped what they were doing and ran, for each knew that unlike the early days where a bleed would involve the lumbering WDs, which gave residents at least thirty minutes to make their way out of the affected sector, these days the escape time was literally minutes due to the panther like Mutants. At 5.45 pm that very evening the warning came that every man, woman and child within the sector dreaded, "Warning, warning, all residents inside sector 30 are to evacuate immediately.” Then the stampede had begun and just five minutes after the announcement had boomed out through the loud speakers, the automatic walls closed off the area and breaths held in every other sector were released.
Neither Anderson, Tom, Bull or any of the men with them spoke, each was unable to drag their eyes away from the carnage taking place below, each wanting desperately but unable to block out the sound of the screaming Pure beneath. People they had lived with side by side within Fort London were being hunted down among the alleys and the streets, trapped inside cars where they would either die of hunger or give in to the masses and certain death by leaving the vehicle that gave only delayed false hope. Each side of Anderson, pockets of his men were still laying down fire into the masses of Tainted below them.
"You want me to call a halt?" shouted Tom to the Fort London head of security.
Anderson shook his head, his eyes sweeping left and right, the rage within him burning white hot. “No, they need to vent their anger." Turning, he looked deep into the eyes of his lifelong friend and posed a question. "How can we stop this Tom, we've lost 24 sectors and over three hundred thousand souls in less than a year? Bruger won't stop until he has completely destroyed us."
Tom looked back down into the eating frenzy below him and shook his head. They both knew that many of the smaller outposts had defected to Fort Warwick as the danger from the mutated Tainted escalated. They were far more dangerous than the lumbering WDs that covered the planet, they were fast, cunning and even more worrying, they were starting to think. “I don't have an answer Craig, Bruger's Fort has grown by half a million while ours has shrunk. We don't have the fi
re power to make an assault and as soon as he knows that he's gonna bring in his army and finish us." Tom brought his gaze up from the slaughter below him and fixed Anderson with tired bloodshot eyes. “This is all about making you suffer Craig, that and......." Tom didn't finish his sentence, he didn’t need to. The flash of fire in his friend’s eyes told him that he knew what was in his mind.
Anderson moved in close to his friend so that he was only inches from his face. With his extra height he towered over Tom and anyone watching would think he was threatening the smaller man. But that was not Craig Anderson’s intent, it was merely his way of driving home the commitment of his words. "He will never.... get Hope again.” Without another word the Fort London security leader turned and strode quickly down the stairway and away to the parked Land Rovers below the walls.
Tom watched the man he had known all of his life walk away, the man that he, and any of his men, would follow through the gates of hell. He had seen first-hand Anderson achieve the impossible on countless occasions in the theatre of battle yet he could not clear the dark clouds of doubt that were gathering over Fort London. Bruger was playing with them, chipping away at their defences but one day he would grow tired of the game, one day he would come with the full force of his expanded army and in all honesty, Tom did not know how they could stop him or how they could protect Hope.
#
The Land of the Free was no longer that, it needed the brave for there were horrors and demons roaming the vast continent, hunting down the Pure, obeying the voice in their heads that played the same instruction over and over on loop. “Eat, eat, eat.” Dozens of small strongholds sprang up across the fifty states that make up America as the realisation set in that what was happening was not some freak epidemic that was going to blow itself out, it wasn't some conspiracy theory story ignited and amplified by social media, this was real and it was rampaging through the entire world. The only area to react with enough speed to create a safe haven of any size was an area in the north east made up of most of the area of New York, running all the way to Gaspe in the north and bordered by the mighty Saint Lawrence River to the west and the Atlantic Ocean to the east. Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia were all part of the stronghold that stretched over seven hundred miles by three hundred and twenty at its widest point. A containment wall measuring nearly 350 miles in length and five metres in height had been constructed by an army of a little over five million workers, many of whom had never picked up a hammer in their lives but survival was a wonderful motivator and under the protection of over a million well-armed military personnel, made up from a mixed bag of all of the services, the containment wall rose up in just six months. It ran from Oswego on the shores of Lake Ontario to the west tip of Lake Oneida, starting again at the eastern point of the Oneida, continuing south east through Edmeston, on through Liberty, ending just beyond Brick on the shores of the Atlantic, just north of New Jersey.
Walls of sheer steel plate sat alongside skyscrapers that had the windows and doors on the first two floors bricked up. Open fields had concrete walls cast overnight. Every bridge from Kingston to Quebec, including Île d'Orléans Bridge on route 368, The Quebec Bridge on route 175 and The Valley Field Bridge on 132 was blown, creating a natural moat on the north east border of the expansive stronghold for the Americans had quickly discovered, just as the survivors all around the globe had discovered, that the Tainted could not swim. Every available fabric that could be found was used on the containment wall to achieve the ultimate goal, to keep out the Tainted from what became a country within a country, a mini continent that became known, ironically, as Fort Hope but now it was a land that was no longer of the free and the brave but of the frightened and the trapped, or at least most of it was. Long Island, on the south east side of this new country, stretching over a hundred miles long by around twenty four miles wide was sacrificed to the Tainted, the cost to re-take it had been, calculated as one not worth paying by the new President, plus the fact that, at that moment in Fort Hope’s history, all focus had to be on containment and survival. So at the same time as the wall from Lake Ontario to Brick was being constructed, every bridge from The Throgs Neck Bridge all the way south along to The Bon Voyage Bridge was blown into the waters below cutting off and trapping the Tainted on Long Island or some would say trapping the Pure within Fort Hope. The President knew that many hundreds, possibly thousands of Pure hiding out on Long Island, would be condemned to be hunted down by the Tainted but he had to do what all Presidents past and present had done and visit the well of tough decisions, the few would have to be sacrificed for the many.
Over forty military bases sat within Fort Hope and as the extent of the plague was realised, many other military personnel moved to take refuge in what had become known as the only safe haven of any size within the states. However the safe haven had come at a cost, the tentacles of the plague had reached into Fort Hope during the early days and if not for a cull on a biblical scale, it too would have fallen to the Tainted. Now it was sealed, a solid base to fight back and a government of form had been created where there were no Republicans or Democrats, simply survivors. The chosen President of this new country was Zack Nelson, who prior to the plague had been Vice President of this great continent and by pure luck was in the city of New York at the time of the outbreak and remained there at the instruction of the then President, who fell to the Tainted, to establish a base.
"Mr. President," announced Grant Johnson, his PA before and after the plague.
Nelson looked up from his desk as Johnson came striding into his office, and as usual without knocking. "Are you ever gonna learn how to knock Grant?" snapped Nelson.
"Oh hush," responded Johnson, flapping down the old accusation he had heard a thousand times. "This is important.”
"Ain't it always with you Grant?" replied Nelson, his attention not lifting from the report he was studying.
Johnson leaned forward onto the large desk, hands spread wide. "We picked up a radio transmission from the United Kingdom."
Nelson’s head snapped up.
"Important enough?" beamed Johnson.
Since the plague, all worldwide communications had gone into freefall as satellites beamed randomly without control blocking the airways and despite concerted efforts, only random snippets of unintelligible transmissions had been harvested.
"What was said, when, who?" replied Nelson in a jumble.
"Think I'd better start with the who," winced Johnson. "Seems someone called Kitchen man wants to make contact.”
"What was said?" prompted Nelson.
"Guy said very little before we lost the link but what he did say was..........." Grant Johnson never got to finish, a blaring horn going off brought a stream of uniformed staff bursting into the President’s office.
Somewhere within Fort Hope there had been a break-in of Tainted.
Chapter 5
"Mutant 221"
Andrew Wilson opened his eyes, having woken from a deep sleep, or at least he thought that was what he was doing. He guessed this had to be what was taking place for there was nothing but a blank space where his logic probed, suggesting he had been asleep. Added to that, there were the shards of light that suddenly pierced the darkness causing him stabbing pains behind his eyes and as those same eyes adjusted to the scene in front of him, a scene that should have been a nightmare living inside his subconscious, he let out a scream that came out as an anguished grunt as he reluctantly accepted this was no dream, no nightmare. He found himself kneeling over the body of a woman, or at least what used to be a woman, naked from the waist up, her stomach gaping open, not a neat cut but a ragged, jagged wound, her intestines and stomach spilling out onto the floor of the room he was in. Andrew shuffled back his knees, sliding easily through the pool of blood surrounding the corpse. Looking frantically around him, he struggled to take in what he was doing in what appeared to be a bedroom. He stared in disbelief at the lump of dripping
flesh clutched in his right hand. He threw it against the , wiping his hands down his shirt front as he struggled to his feet and backed away from the bloody mess that was once a living breathing human being. Crashing up against the wall of the room he spun around and was confronted by a sight that was even more horrific than the corpse on the floor, for in the full length mirror was a reflection, a reflection that had to be someone else yet he knew it was not, he knew it was him.
Staring back was a man, no... not a man but a thing, a beast that was covered in blood that had turned black at the edges telling of age. His breathing was ragged, his heart pounding as he tried to take in what he was seeing, then he caught in the reflection the corpse on the floor behind him and then he knew, knew he was Tainted, but how could he be? He was feeling, thinking, hurting and everyone knew that the Tainted experienced none of these things. Suddenly he began to feel heat building within him, it grew hotter and hotter until he felt he would combust from within. He had to get out into the air, he had to get away from the stench of the corpse on the floor and breathe the fresh air. Avoiding looking at the corpse on the floor, he moved on shaky legs to the door of the bedroom he had found himself in, the flames burning within were making him sweat, breathing was becoming difficult, he had to get outside. Reaching the landing outside the room, he placed a hand on the bannister ready to negotiate the stairs that were now swimming in front of him. Suddenly the heat within seemed to rage up through his chest and into his head and then there was nothing as he convulsed violently, falling to the floor, his arms and legs thrashing wildly around. His right leg smashed through the thin banister spindles causing pin thin splinters that pierced deep into his shin yet he felt no pain as he slid back into the world of the Tainted. With a howl, he leapt to his feet, his head twitching left and right, his nostrils flared as it filtered the air searching and finding the aroma he craved, that of untainted flesh. Stepping quickly to the bedroom door he threw back his head and howled as he spotted the food he had to have on the bedroom floor. Surging forward, he dropped onto the corpse, burying his face into the open stomach, his teeth locking onto a section of stomach lining, his head whipping from side to side to tear it loose, snarling like a rabid dog. Andrew Wilson had left the room just seconds before but Mutant 221 had returned.
Bravo Two Zombie (Book 3): The Final Solution Page 3