Gravewalkers: Dying Time

by Richard T. Schrader

  “I have seen you two in action,” Bertram praised their skills. “If you need an extra pilot, I’ll go with you. I’m a King’s man ready to pay my debts. I keep my word and don’t have any weak nerve.”

  “I appreciate the offer and we’ll keep that in mind,” Critias told him. “For now I would like you and the others to draw up a driving map. We will be leaving in about a week.”

  “I have a car in mind for you,” Jim told Critias. “You need to give me a list of anything else you think you might require.”

  “I’ll have time to think about it,” Critias promised patience with his aches and pains. “I won’t be healed up for a while yet. I feel like stomped shit.”

  “I’m sure Carmen will be all too happy to nurse you back to health,” Jim said as apathetic commiseration. “Kevin tells me you’ll recover quickly from your bumps and bruises.”

  “Poor Critias,” Tony Banjo mocked, “has to suffer a sickbed with Carmen as his nurse.” He could not help but laugh, “I want to sign up for some of that misery.”

  Carmen needed clarification from Tony, “What does a sickbed nurse do exactly?”

  “Sponge baths, catered meals, and blowjobs,” Tony explained, “all twenty-four-seven.”

  “Oh,” Carmen took him seriously, “he asks for sponge baths and refreshment after wearing the armor for too long.” Her memory of having done it so many times in the past pleased her. With that said, she got up to leave the table, “Come along my darling patient. You’ve had your catered meal. For the rest of your rejuvenating treatments we require a modicum of privacy.”

  Chapter 11: Behind the Unreasoning Mask

  Carmen remained true to her word; for five days, she nursed Critias around the clock so that he did not want for any comforts. During the passage of those days, Jim had his construction crews fortify the roof of the Customs House with pickets of lances that would impale any ghouls who managed to leap so far as to reach it. They also replaced the roof door with a much stronger one. Bob and Kevin installed motion sensors that would sound an alarm if anything larger than a bird moved about on the roof while the scanners were active.

  Bertram and the other survivors from Denver completed a map of their drive from the airport so Carmen and Critias could follow it in reverse to get to the functional airplane they had abandoned there. Kevin delivered his maps of where they should land in Houston and where to find the building that headquartered Hale-Wellington Pharmaceuticals.

  Jim went to the room of Critias and Carmen a few hours before dawn on the morning they would depart so he could escort them to the Customs House where their car awaited in a garage at street level on the south side of that building.

  When Jim switched on the light then pulled the drape off the car, Carmen clapped in delight with her excitement of getting to drive it, “It’s magnificent!”

  “Five-hundred horsepower from an aluminum big-block,” Jim told her, “a welded tubular frame with roll cage, puncture-resistant tires, and five-speed manual transmission. The body is custom-made carbon fiber composite. After they found her, Bob added the armor that he made out of tool-steel and the shafts from premium golf clubs.”

  “And I even like the color,” Carmen stroked her hand down the blackish-purple paint.

  “Her name is Betty,” Jim told her. “I want you to bring her back in one piece if at all possible. This car belonged to my father and I would like to see it back in this garage after you’re finished with it.”

  “I’ll be as gentle as making love,” Carmen promised as she caressed the car some more.

  “Jim said in one piece,” Critias joke with her, “not ridden hard right into the ground.”

  She gave Critias a raised eyebrow, “Lucky for us, you have experience pounding the dents out of your machines. I can testify to that.”

  “Touché,” he conceded to her jibe. “We leave at sunrise so make whatever maintenance check you think we need while I start loading our stuff.”

  After Carmen checked over the vehicle, she put on a ragged brown robe over her synthetic diving rubbers to serve as her ghoul disguise. She wore her pistol at her belt and had her sword nearby.

  As Critias brought in a box of survival rations and bottled water, he saw her finish the rapid reassembly of a contemporary firearm then pick up a second one of the same model to break it down, so he asked about them, “What are those?”

  Carmen tossed him the assembled weapon to keep, “This has single and automatic firing of ten millimeter projectiles with a screw-on suppressor. I couldn’t find any subsonic ammunition in this caliber so it will not be entirely silent. You should keep it. The engineers of this era really outdid themselves with this design. They named it the maschinenpistole-fünf, but I think Jim’s people call it an MP5.” Carmen had hers fully disassembled to check all the components for dirt or wear, then rapidly put it back together without even watching her hands; her eyes were on his.

  “I’m not a big fan of their fire-sticks,” he checked it over dubiously.

  “You’ll have to trust me then.” She dropped her assembled MP5 through the open roof hatch onto her driver’s seat, “Just think of it like this car.” She touched the smooth body of the vehicle, “It may be a primitive chemical combustion device, but it sure can get the job done with style, in the right hands.”

  “Alright then,” he agreed. “Show me how to operate it.”

  Carmen pointed out how to operate the safety, rate of fire, and the reloading of the clips. “It’s quite excellent up to a hundred meters and effective well-beyond that. I still think it would be wise of us to use our pistols subsonic. If anything goes wrong like last time, these are small enough to use quickly where your teslaflux tactical rifle is not.” She opened a duffle bag to show him some explosives, conventional grenades, and two tubular portable rockets. “I also found some other things in the arms locker.”

  He asked about the tubes, “What are you planning on shooting missiles at?”

  “They’re unguided unfortunately,” she meant that they were only rockets. “As to what we might launch them at, I have no idea yet, but if we see another Grendel I’m sure you will get an inspiration.” Carmen loaded them into the backseat.

  Jim returned with Hatchet and four additional armed guards. He told them, “The sun is coming up. I have a man watching the street who will tell us when it is clear for you to go out.”

  “We’re ready to go,” Critias informed the King.

  “Radio us for as long as you can with situation reports,” Jim instructed. “If anything goes wrong before you can get the plane off the ground, we can come out to pick you up.”

  Hatchet handed Carmen a laser storage disk, “I brought you some road music. You be sure to come back in one piece. Watching you get naked for your decontamination washes is the sunshine of my life. If the most beautiful woman I know gets herself killed, I’ll be very disappointed with the rest of the world.”

  “I wish Critias was as flattering,” she kissed his cheek. “I’ll come back, and you can keep watching me with my blessing. I may even dance for you.” Carmen showed Hatchet her hand, “It’s not like you see a ring on my finger.”

  “You will if you come back alone,” Hatchet pledged, “with a rock as big as the moon.”

  “She won’t be coming back alone,” Critias commented jealously. “Mount up, princess. It’s show time.”

  Carmen hopped in through the roof hatch then Critias followed to sit on the passenger side. Jim was on the radio in contact with a man who watched the street and he signaled for Hatchet to open the heavy garage door when it was clear. Carmen started the rumbling engine as she pushed the disk of music into the dashboard player.

  As she pulled out into the street, Carmen sang, “Whoa, Black Betty,” with the music as she accelerated so fast that the g-forces pressed Critias into his seat. “Black Betty had a child,” she sang as she took a left corner at a drift, “the damn thing gone wild.” The next right put them on the straightaway toward Forag
ers’ Castle where she scorched off the tires with each release of the clutch and ratcheted through the gears to accelerate up to an insanely dangerous speed.

  Critias knew better than to complain about her reckless driving because she had the skill to get away with it and wouldn’t listen to him anyway. Their car was as fast as the Rhino had been slow. They raced past the infected so quickly that the ghouls did not even have a chance to see what the passing noise had been.

  Carmen had to slow down when they headed north up the highway so she could dodge debris in the roadway, but she still pushed the car to rash limits. She only had one lane through the cars cleared by the Rhino, but it was wide enough for the Betty to have room to spare and the impacted vehicles along both sides made a good fence to keep ghouls out of the road.

  It took them only minutes to get where the Rhino had picked up the survivors; once there, Carmen slowed down for a look. The car the Denver survivors took from the airport revealed its identity by having a clean windshield.

  Critias told her, “Here we go,” as he shut off her music. “You’ve seen the map Bertram made, but it might have some mistakes.”

  Carmen raced on again. She drifted the corners and barked the tires when she shifted gears. A left after a straight run dumped them out on a highway crowded with old automobiles that she weaved through for a long block headed north before kicked around another left to shoot through the gatehouse that led into a wooded cemetery.

  “This is a beautiful place,” she commented as the trees passed their windows in a blur of speed. Their straight road became a series of turns that zigzagged through the woods, mausoleums, and tombstones. Another gatehouse on the westside of the cemetery put them back on a major boulevard that split the cemetery on their right from dense suburbia on their left.

  “Bertram was right about the neighborhood ghouls,” Critias told Carmen. “They must have swept through here like the wind, to judge by all the cars still in their driveways.”

  The Betty made high speed down a long straightaway until Bertram’s map sent them left into the guts of a suburb. The houses were in tight rows down both sides of the street, so close together that if one were to take fire, the flames would spread to a thousand others. The overgrown lawns and countless homes served as prime habitat for squirrels, rabbits, and deer. That abundant wildlife served to feed ghouls in legion, though thankfully the infected were not in groups. Critias dreaded the thought of them having a breakdown in the place since the ghouls would overrun them in number, and none of the homes was sturdy enough to offer any shelter.

  Carmen had to swerve and brake to avoid hitting any ghouls, but it still happened with some regular frequency. The front ram did a decent job when it hurled their bodies aside even if the impacts jarred their teeth.

  Critias felt grateful when she finally drove out of the subdivision. They crossed a broad boulevard to enter a golf course country club by its main driveway. Carmen followed pavement for as long as it lasted then finally pulled off it onto a thinly graveled path that had served for little electric carts the players had ridden. After they hopped off the course onto a roadway, Carmen negotiated more boulevards to plunge back into a crowded suburb. Her final exit followed the still obvious tracks of the Denver car that they had driven through the tall grass between two of the homes.

  “It’s going to start raining soon,” Carmen warned Critias with certainty as she drove out of the neighborhood homes onto a wide level plain of wild grasses. She still followed the tire marks of the previous vehicle that had blazed the trail.

  Critias observed from the sparse landmarks that they were in yet another suburb, only it had not grown beyond the stage of leveled ground and a completed boulevard for access.

  As Carmen got off the grass onto the roadway, she said, “The airport is just ahead, but the way in might be a little rough.”

  He assumed, “If they could make it in their car then you can make it in this one.”

  “Not necessarily from this direction,” she reasoned. “I can drive off a cliff a lot easier than driving back up one.”

  The first raindrops fell on their windshield as Carmen turned off the roadway to head down a grassy slope that bottomed out sharply in a valley that a concrete waterway furrowed at the bottom. She cut across the ditch at an angle then spun the wheels as the car struggled to climb the far embankment. At the top, they crossed a superhighway to struggle up a rocky path that ascended a steeper hill. The track crossed a twin highway of the reverse lanes further up, to then snake through a stand of trees. The end of the rough road finally delivered them to the extreme eastern end of an airport runway.

  “That was some great driving,” he praised Carmen before he radioed home to tell Jim they had reached the airport.

  Jim radioed back, “You made it in just over twelve minutes. Carmen must drive like a bat out of Hell.”

  “You would have to see it to believe it, Jim. I’ll tell you when we’re airborne with wings instead of tires,” Critias signed off.

  “Jim says you drive like a bat out of Hell,” he told Carmen as he watched her bury the needle of the speedometer that ended at two-hundred and forty kilometers per hour. She pushed it to more like three-hundred and thirty down the smooth wide runway.

  She sang to him, “But when the day is done and the sun goes down and the moonlights shining through, then like a sinner at the gates of Heaven, I’ll come crawling on back to you.” She decelerated hard as she worked her way left toward the main buildings with its rows of jumbo-jets that still had sky-bridges that linked them to their boarding gates.

  “If there are any more survivors from Denver, they could be anywhere in this maze,” Critias observed. “How would we even begin to search for them?”

  The rain began to pour accompanied by lightning and thunder.

  Carmen slowed to about the sprinting speed of a ghoul as they passed the giant aircraft at their moorings. She complained, “It would still be difficult to find anyone even if we could see without this rain. Bertram’s plane is just ahead by those cars and buildings there. If the other passengers left by car they could be anywhere at all. If they never drove away, they would still be in those buildings.”

  Critias suggested, “We blow something up with one of those rockets you have. If they are here they would see and hear the explosion then they would signal for help.”

  The plane came into view with its rear ramp still down, just as Bertram had promised it would be. He had taxied the aircraft to be near a parking lot of cars so they would not have to run far to reach them. Not much further past the plane was a line of military fighter jets. Past those was a line of concrete hangar-bunkers for sheltering more of those types of aircraft.

  “I might hide in one of those,” Carmen pointed out the large bunkers. “Go up through the hatch and shoot anything that gets too close while I drive around nice and slow so we can have a good look-see.”

  “Forget that,” he disagreed. “Drive out away from the plane to get us lost in the rain then swing back to go up the ramp as quietly as possible. If we’re going to search, I want to do it covertly on foot.”

  Carmen drove out on the runways to lure away any infected that had seen their car already. She got away far out into the middle of nothing then stopped.

  Critias climbed halfway out the roof hatch with his MP5 in hand. The pounding of the rain worked wonderfully to obscure all visibility and deaden every sound. Critias fired his maschinenpistole one-handed in single fire. The occasion was his evaluation period for the weapon that Carmen had recommended, so he took his time to aim for clean headshots. Determined ghouls sprinted in out of the rain, sometimes singly and once in a group of three, until Critias had littered the tarmac with fourteen twitching bodies.

  When they stopped coming, Critias dropped back inside to his seat then closed the hatch ready for her to drive off.

  The engine died.

  “Please tell me that was a bad joke,” he hoped aloud.

  “The car jus
t died,” she shrugged innocently. With a turn of the key the engine came right back to life. They chuckled over their moment of panic then she pulled away, doing her best to keep the engine noise to a minimum. She drove straight back toward their plane and then right up the ramp to park inside.

  Critias climbed out the top of the car then went to the ramp behind it. He told her, “Go to the cockpit; see if this thing looks like it will still fly. Watch out for any ghouls that might have crawled up in there.”

  She went to the front pilot-area of the plane to do as he asked.

  He readied his teslaflux pistol set for silent operation then did his best ghoul impersonation as he walked down the ramp toward the runway. Lightning flashed overhead with the boom of thunder that followed a moment later. Critias waited at the base of the ramp while he put down the ghouls that still had some interest to investigate the passage of the Betty. He dispatched them with close-range headshots as they wandered up stupidly out of the rain. The ghouls didn’t know to scream at him before it was too late to try and his muffled shots didn’t summon in any more of them either. Within two minutes, he had downed five and it seemed no others were aware of his location as a place of interest.

  Carmen reported by radio, “Everything seems good. You want me to come with you, power up the plane, or wait here?”

  Critias considered what to do next until a faint red laser beam shined intermittently at him through the rain. The unexpected spectacle broke his train of thought. His first impression was that a survivor tried to signal to him, but then a rifle bullet struck him in the face at the right side of his jaw.

  The blindsiding impact dropped him flat though it fortunately failed to penetrate his fibrous armor that trapped the slug and dispersed the energy enough that he was unharmed.

  Apart from having superior bullet-resistance to anything in the current era, his armor would regenerate the injury it suffered. His helmet was the most rigid part of the whole suit and apart from the vulnerable visor was the toughest spot on his body. It was mostly his surprise and the slippery ramp that knocked him on his ass rather than from any wounding.