by Alan Baxter
It wasn’t a fight. Neither Tom nor Ledger was interested in a fight. This was slaughter. It was two against nine, and it was over in seconds.
When Ledger climbed down from the wall the last of the men was begging for his life. Ledger watched Tom’s face as the young man stood over the injured man. The girl lay six feet away, and from the way she was breathing it was clear she was on the verge of death. Her eyes were glazed and there were dreadful wounds all over her. The man on the floor was naked from the waist down and there was blood on his penis. Not his blood.
Even so, Tom didn’t kill him. Not right away. Instead he asked a question. “Why?”
The man looked at him and then turned to look at the girl. He frowned as if seeing her for the first time. Then he turned back to Tom.
“She’d… she’d die out here anyway,” said the man. He said it reasonably, as if what he and his friends had done to her was clearly okay given the circumstances.
Tom’s eyes went dead.
His sword moved and then there was fresh blood on the man’s face and body.
On the other side of the pen wall the screams had stopped and there was the wet sound of meat being torn, of chewing, of bones being cracked open for their marrow. Flies swarmed in the air.
Ledger and Tom knelt on either side of the girl.
She was a tiny thing. Emaciated, covered with infected sores, filthy.
Dying.
Tom offered her water and there wasn’t even enough left of her to remember how to drink. They dressed her most immediate wounds and covered her body with their blankets and the two men sat together, holding her between them, keeping her warm as the day wore on. Sometimes Tom spoke to her, whispering softly, making promises the world could not let them keep.
When she died, Joe took her from Tom, rolled her onto her stomach, drew his knife, and slipped the blade into the base of her skull. She would never reanimate. She would sleep.
They buried her and then the two men sat down with their backs against the pen wall.
And wept.
—8—
Top and Bunny
Owen led them down a winding path, descending the hillside to the valley road below. They followed that for about five yards, then wound into a cacti field and across a parking lot to a brick, one-story building with a worn wooden sign that read ‘Park Headquarters’ out front by the entrance off the road. American flags waved in the wind from several poles around a lot that contained RVs, official Park Service vehicles, and various civilian cars and trucks scattered throughout. Trees and landscaping decorated the land surrounding the lot and lawns leading up to the building.
Several armed men and women, as ragged and dirty as the trio, rushed to meet them, eyeing Top and Bunny with suspicion. After Owen explained their presence and fired off instructions, he left them behind with the sentries and headed inside. Within moments, Top and Bunny watched their mounts being led away, their packs removed from their backs, and were patted down thoroughly – men removing their knives, the spare Glocks they kept in their boots, and extra ammo.
“We want those back,” Bunny objected, but Top silenced him with a look. Just go with it for now, it said. Bunny sighed, nodding back in acquiescence.
Then they were surrounded and led into the building, then shoved into a small office and locked inside, guards posted outside. The office had a wooden desk, its surface covered by scattered stacks of paper, file folders, and manuals. Two old, faded grey metal file cabinets with three drawers occupied a corner behind it along with a table holding a laser printer and three open wire baskets marked ‘In’, ‘Out’, and ‘Pending’. The office smelled dusty and stale, like it hadn’t been used in a while, which it probably hadn’t. Top slid into a padded wooden chair facing the desk, while Bunny paced. A few moments later, the door opened and a woman brought them water bottles then left again.
“Well, they’re sure glad to see us,” Bunny said, taking a chair along one wall near the file cabinets.
Top unscrewed the cap off his water and took a long drink before responding. “We’ve dealt with cautious survivors before. You know we’d be the same.”
Bunny sighed, leaning back in the fiberglass chair against the wall. “Yeah, just anxious to get on with it.”
“Drink your water and relax, Farm Boy,” Top said with a chuckle. “We’re here. That’s the first step.”
“If these are even the right people,” Bunny muttered, then uncapped his own water and drank.
They waited in silence then until Owen finally came back for them an hour later. He’d cleaned up a bit, the dirt and grime gone from his face, his hair combed, and the shotgun had been left outside. He took a deep breath, nodding at them as he moved around the desk, and slid into the cracked leather chair behind it, leaning back and putting his feet up on the surface as he thought a moment.
“Why don’t you boys tell me who you are again and why you’re here, heavily armed, on our doorstep,” Owen said.
Top nodded and began explaining. He described generally their past work in black ops for the government, and how they’d stayed together after The Plague, fought to survive like anyone else, and then found their training and knowledge could help others and began looking for those needing help.
“Like some kind of modern A-Team or something?” Owen joked.
“Wow. A-Team. That’s old school,” Bunny said and looked at Top. “Didn’t you watch that when you were a kid?”
Top shot him an annoyed look as Owen chuckled. “You knew what it is, didn’t ya?” He turned to Owen again. “There’s just the two of us. No van either. But we do what we can. We came here because a group in Colorado heard rumors someone might need help finding permanent shelter, setting up defenses, getting supplies, etcetera.”
“And then we saw the raid,” Bunny said.
“Why didn’t you stop them?” Owen asked, his eyes accusing.
“To be honest, we weren’t sure who the good guys were or what was happening,” Top said.
“For all we knew, the kids were being rescued or something,” Bunny added.
Owen grunted and his eyes turned sad as his shoulders sunk and he leaned back in the chair behind the desk.
“Everything okay?” Top finally asked.
Owen shrugged. “As fine as it can be after one of the doctor’s raids, I suppose.”
“Who is this doctor and why are you being raided?” Bunny asked.
Owen met their eyes a moment as if weighing options then continued, “We don’t actually know. Just rumors and such from others who claim to have seen or heard things. But as they tell it, the doctor runs a lab down outside Tucson. They used to raid the survivor camps there. One of the reasons we started relocating two years ago, making our way north. Somehow they tracked a few of us up here and started raiding us once every few months. We’ve lost twenty-five people, including ten women, ten children, and five elderly. We lost six tonight.”
“And you don’t have any idea what happens to them?” Bunny asked.
“Experiments we’ve been told,” Owen said, his eyes wrinkling as he pondered it with obvious pain and regret. “Something about a vaccine for The Plague, but a few captives have supposedly escaped and they weren’t cured, they’d been turned. Some graves were discovered in a nearby park as well that people say were victims of the lab.”
They gaped at him.
“A vaccine? Holy shit,” gasped Bunny. “That could change everything!”
“How sure are you?” demanded Top. “Is this real intel or rumors?”
Owen locked eyes with him. “You hear something from so many different sources, experience the raids on your families and friends, your children, you start believing the worst. Doesn’t much matter if it’s true. People are being kidnapped. Others turned up dead. Draw your own conclusion.”
Top grunted with understanding. Ec
ho Team had dealt with many similar rumors and situations for the DMS. “But you know where the lab is?”
Owen shook his head. “Just rumors. So far, at least, but a lot of people believe them. Yeah, we’ve talked about finding it. Getting our children and loved ones back. But the teams come heavily armed for the raids. Can you imagine what the security is like around the lab?” He shook his head. “We can’t risk it. That is, if we could even find it. A couple of people tried to rescue their families, we heard, with disastrous results.”
“This has gone on for two years?” Top looked as if he couldn’t believe it. Bunny knew that look though. Beneath it was simmering fury.
“More like four,” Owen said. “We just decided to try and get away, out of reach two years ago. Look. My people are mostly city folks, a couple farmers, but most had never touched a weapon before, let alone served. I had training from an enlistment after college, so I’ve taught them what I could, but defense is our best strategy. Organized, strategic attacks would probably just get more people lost or killed.”
“And they tracked you here…” Bunny shook his head.
“Someone who saw us could have told them, I suppose,” Owen said. “Truth is, we rarely see zombies these days, keeping to ourselves. If we weren’t constantly moving to try and avoid the raids, we could settle in. This headquarters recycles waste and water and we could stay here indefinitely, hunt the desert for food, grow our own – but that would just make us easier to find.”
“They only come every few months?” Top asked.
Owen thought a moment. “Yeah, every two or three. We haven’t really nailed down a pattern. It varies.”
“But if you stay here, you’ll be okay?” Top said.
“We might be,” Owen said. “We could make a go of it.”
Top and Bunny exchanged a look that spoke volumes. They’d worked together so long, reading each other was just part of it. They both agreed they needed to help these people, and that had to start with finding the lab and seeing what they could do to end the raids.
“Why don’t you tell us everything you know about this lab and doctor and where we might find it?” Top said.
—9—
The Soldier and the Samurai
They camped in the pen that night.
The men they killed had been poorly equipped, but there were some useful items. More ammunition, guns, a better backpack than the one Ledger had. Three freshly-killed geese, and a whole box of power bars. Plenty of water, too, as well as matches, knives, and most of a bottle of Advil. All useful.
Ledger and Tom opened a kind of vent in the wall and threw the bodies out to the dead, then blocked it up again.
The man who had screamed was dead, his body pinned to the ground by short lengths of rebar. He reanimated and Ledger sent him on to the other side with another quick thrust. They buried him next to the girl. The man was black, the girl was Latina. There was no identification in their clothes, no names to put over their graves.
“Hey, Joe,” said Tom, looking up from a backpack through which he was rifling. As Ledger came over, Tom handed him a faded map of Arizona. “These sons of bitches knew about the cure.”
Ledger took the map and sat cross-legged beside Tom, and spread the map out on the ground. There was a circle around a spot in Oro Valley and the name Pisani scribbled in black and underlined a half dozen times. Above the name was the word ‘CURE’, and even though this wasn’t the first time Ledger had heard about this, it still made his heart flutter.
“Shit,” he said.
Tom licked his lips. “Does that mean this is real?”
“That’s what we’re going to find out.”
The story had been passed from one survivor to another, but it had been whisper-down-the-lane, becoming so distorted that Tom and Ledger had wasted weeks following bad leads. Now in the space of a week they had three separate indications that an infectious disease researcher named Al Pisani had a working lab in, or near, Oro Valley in Arizona, a few miles outside of Tucson, and that Dr Pisani had developed some kind of vaccine. The reports were not from any official source because, as far as they knew, there were no official sources left. Which made the whole thing a big fat ‘maybe’. Seeing it again on a map was not conclusive, either, because these scavengers might have heard the same unreliable stories Tom and Ledger had heard.
Or, maybe, these bastards had better intelligence.
Tom must have read his thoughts. “Maybe we should have… you know… asked them before we…”
Ledger waved it off. “Fuck it. That’s yesterday’s box score, kid. Besides, sometimes a motherfucker just needs to die and these motherfuckers were all past their sell-by date. I can’t see either of us having any kind of meaningful conversation with them.”
Tom said nothing. Instead he set about building a campfire so they could cook the geese. The zombies outside moaned, but neither man cared.
“If it’s true,” said Tom while he worked, “what’s that really going to mean? How could a vaccine be mass produced? The EMPs killed the power. Frankly, I don’t even understand how this Dr Pisani even has a working lab.”
“Portable generators and ingenuity,” suggested Ledger.
Tom grunted and concentrated on fanning the flames. Ledger sat there slowly plucking the feathers off one of the geese. He stared into the heart of the newborn flames.
“If there is a vaccine,” he said, “then we’ll find a way to mass-produce it and distribute it.”
“That would be enormously difficult, though.”
Ledger smiled at him. “Seriously, kid, do you have something better to do?”
Tom smiled back. Smiles were rare for him.
They talked and cooked and ate and talked some more as the clouds slid across the darkening sky. Neither of them spoke about the hope that was being kindled inside their chests. They were each superstitious in their own way, as soldiers and samurai, killers and hunters always are. Talking about hope was like holding a burning match up into the wind. Instead they let the fire grow slowly in their hearts.
That night they slept and dreamed of not being dead.
Rare dreams for both of them.
—10—
Top and Bunny
It took another two long nights of riding to reach Oro Valley, the general area where Owen’s people thought the lab might be located. Owen’s people had provided a few details the two soldiers used to scout the area until they found the lab itself, which took them most of a day. It was well hidden inside a rocky cliff side south between the smaller town and Tucson itself – or what was left of it.
Tucson, like most major cities, had been hit hard by the EMPs and other weapons the government deployed in an attempt to eradicate Lucifer 113. From the rise where they’d stopped and pulled out their binoculars, the city stretched off into the horizon under a grey cloud.
The lab must have been built inside the rocks well before that, as it had a well-concealed, well-guarded entrance with multiple security systems that had clearly been in use before the EMPs took them out. The cavern entrance was clearly big enough to take vehicles inside, with a thick steel, hydraulic door its only visible opening. That explained the cargo van, as far as Bunny was concerned. He wished the DMS had had the same so they could be using a vehicle themselves instead of the horses. His ass still ached from the hours of riding. He rubbed at it as he thought about it and Top chuckled.
“How long’s it take to get used to riding?” Bunny wondered, his skin .already clammy from the sun blaring down overhead.
“We’ve been doing it almost two years, so maybe forever for you,” Top said with a grin. “I feel fine.”
“Yeah, well, you’ve been riding most of your life, Old Man. Or maybe your ass is so old the nerves are shot anyway.” Bunny gave up on his ass and scratched at an itch developing on his sides. Fucking desert. He hoped it wasn�
��t some poisonous creature that’d somehow made it into his clothes.
Top laughed. “See any sentries?”
Top didn’t seem to be bothered by anything at all. That just annoyed Bunny more. At least if they both were itching and miserable, he’d feel better about it. Son of a bitch. Bunny shook his head as he adjusted his field binoculars again and took another look.
Top tapped Bunny’s arm and nodded to a spot on a slope leading toward the cavern. The road was mostly blocked by a wall of cars, but there was a gap across where two men were erecting a moveable boom made from heavy-grade PVC pipe.
“Looks like they’re setting up a checkpoint,” said Bunny.
“Uh huh,” agreed Top, “which means they’re getting ready for visitors.”
“Who, though?”
“My guess,” said Top, “would be ordinary people. If this doctor really has some kind of vaccine then this would be a good chokepoint to filter anyone coming to get a shot. They’d want to screen anyone going into the actual base. Can’t let just anyone stroll up. The doctor’d be too damn important, and if there’s a lab in there, then controlled access would need to be guaranteed. Especially if someone shows up from one of the camps these cats have raided.”
“Why bring them here, though? I mean, from what I can see they have a nice set-up down there. Protection, limited access, plenty of spots for elevated observation and defense. They have power and security. Why let anyone in? Why not send teams out to do field inoculations?”
“Don’t know,” said Top.
“Kind of want to find out,” said Bunny. “On one hand we have what could arguably be the greatest humanitarian project in the history of… well, history… and on the other we have some of these guys acting like bad guys from a Mad Max flick. Doesn’t compute.”
“No, it don’t.”
“So we have to get down there,” said Bunny. He scanned the landscape again. “Those cameras and sensors can’t still be working, can they?”