“Going to ask you this once old man, just once and if I don’t care for your answer, the clean up crew is going to have a bitch of a time cleaning your brains off the wall there. Do you understand?” I ask him calmly.
He nods slowly and swallows hard.
“Whiskey Dave is dead, did you kill him to get that damn ultra lite?” I demand.
“The prick was alive when I left him, he had a sore jaw, but the asshole was alive.” He rasps out looking me in the eye.
I let him sweat it out for a few long moments before carefully lowering the hammer on the revolver and putting it back into the holster.
“We just got a radio report, your camp has fallen to the zombies and everyone there, including Whiskey Dave, is dead. Now I have you showing up on my doorstep, you will forgive me for being a little skeptical.” I tell him pulling up a rusty folding metal chair.
“When I was flying here, I passed a big herd moving back the way I came, tried warning them, but the radio on the bird never did work great. Not sure if they heard me or not, but I tried.” He says with a sad little shrug.
“What do you know about Burners?” I ask him as Viv and Henry also pull up chairs.
“Haven’t actually seen one yet myself, I have heard chatter about them though. They have reddish skin and if they touch you, well you do a great imitation of a frog in a microwave, as you cook from the inside out.” He says flatly.
“Interesting.” Henry mutters under his breath.
Henry has always had what I consider an unhealthy interest in the mutations of the zombies. I have always had the nagging feeling that he knows more about them than he is sharing with us, I feel bad about it, but truth be told, part of me just doesn’t trust him completely.
“Look, we have to take the fight to theses freaks before they manage to change into something we can’t kill. Every day we wait brings us closer to that day.” Russ tells me urgently.
“You are preaching to the choir pal, I was just upstairs making that very point to people, who for the most part, didn’t want to hear it. You say you are retired Army, well those are skills I can always use. Viv here is our medical person, she is going to look you over and then you can show me the gifts you were talking about on the roof. Don’t give her any crap, that always ends badly.” I tell him as I stand up.
I point at Henry and motion for him to follow me out the door, leaving Viv to do her thing and check out our guest. It is mostly a formality, the bitten don’t live very long. If he was infected, he never would have been able to fly the ultra lite here. But, she will check him for signs of any illness or hidden injury, because we have learned the hard way not to take any chances.
Out in the hallway I lean against the wall for a moment and close my eyes, it has already been a busy day and there is still a lot of it left to get through.
“Go find Wilson, I want you both to collect any and all information floating around out there on these new Burners. Go through it, prepare a briefing for Matt and the rest of the council by the end of the day. Understood?” I give him the order blandly.
“Yes sir.” He tells me with a nod and moves off down the hallway. He is a good soldier, never blinks at a crap job and always follows orders. The kid is much tougher than he looks and smart as hell. Together, he and Winston are a valuable resource that I am lucky to have. Joyce was fond of him and trusted him completely.
All that being said, he has always made me a little uneasy, for no reason that I have been able to put my finger on.
But that is trouble for another time, got enough on my plate right now without starting to get paranoid about the people working around me.
I will trust him until or if, he gives me a reason not to.
If and when he does, then I will kill him.
Chapter Four
The roof crew has relocated the boxes that were bungie corded to the ultra lite to a storage room. Russ is grinning as he opens them and shows me what is inside.
He steps out of the way so that I can get a good long look at what he has brought us.
I let out a low whistle, and I gotta admit, that I am smiling just a little as well. Christmas has fucking come early.
He was lucky to make it here with this much extra weight on the bird, he says he was running on fumes for the last mile or so.
One box is full of various kinds of canned food, always welcome, we got a lot of mouths to feed, sadly less than we used to, but still enough where our scavenging teams are kept busy. If this spares them the risk of a run for a day or two, then Russ here is already pulling his own weight.
Another box has a good dozen handguns, along with ammo, mostly 9mm’s, but there are one or two large calibers in the mix. All of them, while well worn, are in great shape. In the same box are a couple of fragmentation grenades.
“The pistols are all mine, from my own collection. They are all like me, old, but still able to get the job done.” He tells me with a raspy chuckle.
The next box holds two pump action twelve gauge shotguns with a few boxes of shells thrown in. Like the pistols these are old, but obviously well cared for and serviceable enough.
I’m really starting to like this guy.
The final box makes me want to ask the bald headed bastard to go steady with me.
“Seriously?” I say outloud as I pick up the LAWS rocket launcher, I look in the box and see at least ten rounds for it.
“That one I stole on the way out. I tried to convince Whiskey Dave to join forces with you, but the stubborn jerk was determined that the best thing to do was to hunker down and shelter in place. All this stuff would still be at what is left of the camp, if I hadn’t decided to go my own way and join you myself.” I can hear a lot of things in his voice. Sadness and guilt being on the top of the list.
“I am glad you did brother. This is all great, but if we are really going to take the fight to the undead freaks, we are going to need more. This stuff gives us enough to go out and find more anyway. Thank you. Pick your own personal sidearm, the rest goes to the general armory. Any problem with that?”
My tone clearly states that there really shouldn’t be any trouble worth mentioning.
He just shakes his head.
“I will take the guns I had on my hips when I landed, the rest you are more than welcome to, if you are going to use them to kill the damn zombies.”
Good answer.
He reaches into the shotgun box and pulls out a small ziplock bag with a couple of dozen rounds of fifty caliber ammo in it. He tosses it at me and smiles a little as I bobble it and have to pick it up off of the damn floor.
“Whisky Dave was saving those for somebody here named Katrin, or some shit like that. Figured he would like that they got delivered.” He tells me gruffly not looking at me.
I tuck the bag into my pocket, Katrin will appreciate this gift from a dead man that she despised. Ammo for her sniper rifle is hard to come by and she is nothing, if not pragmatic about where shit we need comes from.
Me, I spare a second and close my eyes and say a silent prayer for the foul mouthed bastard, may he rest in peace.
“Hit the mess hall and grab something to eat, ask them there for a room assignment and we will get your quarters squared away. I will send a runner to find you later tonight to attend a briefing with some security people.” I tell him as I put the rocket launcher back in the box.
I leave before he can answer, walking down the hall, I tap a runner on the shoulder and tell her to deliver a message to the armory. I want everything stowed away and inventoried as soon as possible.
Like I said, what he gave us is a great start, but we will need to go out and find more. Not just guns, but enough boom boxes and batteries so we can keep stunning the zombies into being easy meat for our guns, clubs and blades. Not to mention more medical supplies, because sure as shit some of us are going to get hurt in the coming battles.
And some of us are going to die.
No use pretending otherwise, we are going into a w
ar and in any war a lot of the people fighting it die.
So that the rest of the people have a shot at living.
These are my people now, so that weight is all on me. Big Al carried that weight longer and hell, truth be told, probably better than I am, but that don’t matter because I am the one carrying it now.
I am doing my best.
And praying to a god I don’t believe in, that my best will be good enough.
I head up to the roof to check on just what condition our condition happens to be in today. It is a lot of flights of stairs and a lesser man would have been winded by the time he got to the top floor.
Yeah, my ass was winded.
“Report.” I manage to gasp out as I lean against the doorframe of the roof access door.
“You smoke too much.” Katrin says with a slight shrug as she scans the area with a big pair of binoculars.
“Only when I can find cigarettes. Whiskey Dave is dead, but sends his regards.” I tell her tossing the bag of ammo at her head.
She has the nerve to catch it one handed, without even looking away from whatever the hell she has the binoculars trained on.
“Anything I need to see?” I ask her mildly.
She puts down the binoculars and takes a look at the bag of ammo in her hand. Her eyebrows quirk slightly, which is far more emotion than she usually shows.
“There is a lot of activity just outside of the kill zone, they are learning to keep out of that. I have seen mostly common Feeders, but there have been a few Screamers, Singers and Jumpers.” No trace of stray emotion finds its way to her voice.
Guess the whole eyebrow thing used it all up.
“Our guest brought us some nice toys, when your shift is over, stop by the armory and check them out.”
“Da.” She tells me flatly and picks up the binoculars again and goes back to scanning the streets below.
She goes back to ignoring me, like I never existed.
“Hey Katrin?” I call out to her.
“What?” She barks in a tone that manages to be utterly bored and completely irritated at the same time.
A smarter man would listen to that tone and walk quietly back down the stairs without saying a damn word.
Yeah, I would rather be a smartass.
Call it a personal failing if you must.
“Got a cigarette?” I ask with a smirk.
“Go now or I will shoot you. You have your uses, so I will shoot to wound, but it will still ruin your whole day.” She answers without looking at me.
Fair enough.
I have other shit to get done, so I don’t stay long enough to goad her into shooting me.
Fate is enough of a bitch without tempting her.
Chapter Five
Henry and Winston sit together across from me, both look nervous, but that is more or less normal for both of them. They are talking to each other in low urgent tones and they have a stack of papers on the table in front of them.
“Report.” Matt barks out rapping his knuckles on the table hard and loud, bastard beat me to it, by like a second.
Winston and Henry both jump a little at the sound.
“Um, we have been on the radio all day trying to find out more about new mutations being reported. A lot of chatter and gossip, but not a lot of hard information unfortunately.” Winston clears his throat and looks over at Henry.
Henry pauses for a moment looking like a deer caught in the headlights before he switches over to student teacher lecturing mode.
“Here is what we know, it seems that some Screamers have gone through a secondary mutation. Before when they screamed and swelled up, they burst and sprayed highly corrosive blood everywhere, now it seems that the reaction has become internalized in some way. Their touch seems to start a catalystic reaction in the person being touched, it seems to trigger some sort of spontaneous combustion that works from the inside out.” Henry continues reading off of a sheet of paper and not looking at anyone.
The room is quiet, a lot of shit has come our way lately and there hasn’t been a lot of time to deal with it. We have lost a lot of good people since the wave of mutations began and the hits just keep on coming.
“Apparently they don’t feed, they just burn up their victims and go looking for the next. They go down and stay down with solid headshots, just like the other zombies, but there is one difference that is going to give us trouble.” Henry continues in a lecturing tone.
“From the reports we are seeing, it would appear that sound doesn’t work against them. They don’t have ears.” Winston says quietly.
Matt slams his fist down hard on the table and the noise is like a gunshot in the small room.
It does serve to get everyone’s complete and undivided attention.
“That’s it people! We need to hit the freaks now while the weapons we have still work against them. If we let them keep mutating, we are toast.” He barks out glaring at the rest of the council.
“We need to kill as many Burners as possible, if we don’t, that mutation wont be a successful one. Maybe, whatever is driving the mutations won’t repeat the no ears variation.” Henry chimes in, looking up from his paper and giving Matt a quick nod of agreement.
Our new recruit, retired Army Colonel Russ Olsen, is sitting a few chairs down from me. His craggy face doesn’t give much away, but he doesn’t look happy.
“I suggest we do a run tomorrow, get the lay of the land. An aggressive run mind you, we kill as many of the damn things as we can, while finding some things that we need. Your stun and gun approach is working for now, let’s get the maximum benefit while it still does.” He growls out to the council.
“There is a sporting goods store several long fucked up blocks from here. I suggest we raid it. We haven’t touched it yet, because it has always been completely over run, but I think we should go for it.” Matt says, I can hear eagerness in his voice.
Since moving here, we have been busy getting set up, there have been no runs and the only zombies we have killed, have been sniper shots from the rooftop. Not very satisfying. We all lost people to the Jumpers and I think we all need a little payback just now.
Fuck it, time for some action. The council will piss and moan, but I won’t be here to listen to them. We are going to go out tomorrow and we are going to take the fight to the freaks.
I lost Joyce, Katrin lost Cassandra, hell almost everyone we know has lost somebody. Nothing we do will bring back those that we have lost, but fuck it, vengeance isn’t for the dead anyway.
Vengeance is for those of us that are left behind.
A handful of years ago I taught small children how to make playdough and sing the ABC’s. We danced the god damn hokey pokey for christsakes.
That used to make me smile.
Now it is the idea of splattering zombie brains all over whatever walls happen to be there, that makes me smile.
Worst thing about all that is, I am completely ok with it.
So be it.
Chapter Six
We hit the streets at dawn.
A dozen of us left the front gate about a half hour ago. Henry and Marvin push a shopping cart with big ass speakers strapped into it, connected to a cluster of car batteries all loaded up with really bad music that we will play at high volume. All of us are heavily armed with guns, clubs and blades as we move at a steady pace away from our new home. We are heading steadily in as straight a line as we can manage towards our target for today, the sporting goods store.
Shit hits the fan almost immediately.
A wave of Feeders hit us before we even have time to hit the on switch, once we do, the music will start blaring. For the record we are using an old Kayne West mix tape today, which I feel a little bad about.
Not even undead fiends deserve to die listening to that wanker.
But you work with what you have.
We waste time and ammo putting the Feeders down, which I have the uncomfortable feeling was the point of them rushing at us in the first
damn place.
God help us, they are learning tactics.
All the more reason to wipe them out before they get any better at adapting to what we are trying to do.
“Play that funky music white boy!” I bellow, as the last Feeder falls to the bloody ground.
We all have earplugs in, so we are spared the worst of the din as sound erupts from the speakers in the cart. The noise bounces off of the walls of the buildings around us as we move on down the street.
Like magic, the zombies clear out of the streets, we shoot or slice up a few stunned stragglers.
Usually we employ what has come to be known as the stun and gun approach. We use the speakers to stun our undead friends and then while they lie helpless, take them out and move on. Repeat as necessary.
Today we have a different agenda.
We keep the speakers blaring as we work our way to the what we hope is a big ass score of weapons and ammos. The game right now is more beat the clock, the batteries will only last so long and we need them to not only get there, but back again.
Our new friend, Russ and a couple of others are snapping off shots every few minutes taking down whatever targets are presenting themselves. I let them do their jobs and concentrate on the task at hand, which is moving us down the road to where we need to be.
Movement catches my attention from the roof of a four story garage to our left and I only have time to shout once before they are on us.
“Jumpers!” I scream .
They are stunned by the noise as they fall, but they still manage to take out two of our people by landing on them. Marvin steps away from the cart and blasts the damn things into kibble and bits with his AR-15.
“They haven’t tried that little trick before.” He tells me flatly as he kicks one of the dead things into the gutter.
Damn it, not a third of the way there and we have already lost two people.
“Keep moving.” I order flatly and we leave our dead lying where they fell. As we pass, one of us puts a bullet through each of their brains, just to make sure that they don’t reanimate.
Zombie Extinction Event (Book 3): War Page 2