Conspiracy Theory (The Zombie Theories Book 2)

by Restucci, Rich

  Holy shit. Remo had said all that at once. An entire paragraph. I mean, I think I got it all correct, but still, just writing it freaks me out. This was unnatural.

  “So it will be a tough incursion. We’ll have to plan and—”

  “There’s another base.” Tim had interrupted Brick mid-speech, a small breach of etiquette, but it looked like Brick was going to overlook it. “Joint Base Jackson-Gray.” Everybody was looking at Tim now. “It’s here.” He put his finger on the map just like Brick had. “Just north of Tuba City Arizona. We’re…” Tim looked at the scale of miles on the map, “a hundred miles away, give or take. City had a population of about eight thousand, but the base is north of it, and it was a quiet area. We could head due south on Route 89, and be there in a few hours if 89 is clear.”

  “Never heard of it.” Brick’s brows were furrowed as he looked where Tim had touched the map.

  Ray-Ban shook his head. “Me neither.”

  I looked at Remo expectantly. He nodded in the negative. Back to his silent self apparently. We all redirected out gazes back at the Timster. “It’s there. We used to communicate with them all the time. We got spare parts for our helicopters from them; they have a huge machine shop way bigger than we did at Baldy. But… I was ordered to check on them using my Sentinel sats when they didn’t respond to us a few months ago.” He sighed. “It looked abandoned.” He perked up a little. “There were several helicopters there though. Four Chinooks, and some other, smaller birds.”

  Ray-Ban looked at Brick. “Operational range of a Chinook is about, what, two hundred miles?”

  “Yeah, easy. And,” he looked at me, “it can carry your pimp mobile.” He thumbed at my MRAP.

  I got an instant stiffy. Not only would we be flying over hostile, infected territory, but we would be taking my baby with us? Best. Day. Ever.

  “Yes, but carrying that,” it was Tim’s turn to thumb at my MRAP, “will seriously, and I do mean seriously, deplete the fuel. The Chinook is a transport helo, and can carry up to twenty-eight thousand pounds including cargo and crew, but heavy loads should only go for short distances. Also, I’ve never flown with a slung load.” He looked at me and looked down, saying in a weak voice, “I wouldn’t recommend carrying the truck all the way. Besides, what are we going to do, put it on the oil rig?”

  There are several ways to just straight up wreck a woody. One is cold water. Another is imminent danger. The third is when the group smarty-pants-nerd tells you that you have to leave your sexy, zombie-proof, armored vehicle behind when a certified killer has just told you it can come with us.

  Well, shit.

  “OK,” I said, “the MRAP stays at this base then. That’s a bitch, but I think flying is the way to go.”

  Brick and Ray-Ban nodded. “Agreed,” they both said at the same time.

  Remo got up and left. I didn’t see his face, but I knew he liked the truck as much as I did and was sad to see it go.

  The four of us talked logistics for another two minutes or so until a loud thud came from the plate glass window right next to us. I can admit a little pee might have escaped right then. Yes, it was an infected. Yes, it was a Runner, and yes, Remo dispatched it in about three seconds from behind with his knife. He yanked its hair back and drove his knife down into its esophagus as it pounded on the glass, a great gout of thick crimson spurting on to the pane. Rather than fall to the ground and bleed out in a matter of seconds as etiquette demands, the thing spun and launched itself at our buddy. Nobody, not even Remo saw this coming. The thing grabbed him by his T-shirt, and tried to gnaw his face off. The uninfected got his forearm across the infected’s ruined throat, and in only a few terrifying seconds, we could see through the blood smeared window that the thing’s strength was spent. It collapsed/was thrown to the ground, no doubt gurgling, before we could get outside to help. Before we could react at all really. My eyes were still wide from the initial impact of the thing against the glass.

  We got to him as he was coup-de-gracing the infected by driving his blade into the creature’s eye. He stood, a disgusted look on his face. “Ripped my shirt.”

  He went to drag his forearm across his face and I screamed at him, “STOP!” which he immediately did. Frozen with his arm in mid-air he looked at me. I pointed at his appendage. It was literally dripping with tainted blood. He looked at his arm, then at me, giving me a curt nod.

  “Let’s wipe that shit off of you, OK Chief?”

  He nodded again. That was about the time we heard the screaming.

  Big Water.

  Population: Lots.

  When I was a kid, maybe eight, I went to stay with my grandfather for a week in Maine. It was a great trip. He lived alone on a lake in the middle of nowhere. We went fishing and hiking. We swam in the lake and he showed me how to make a fire and which plants were edible. I got to see some great wildlife that you just don’t see in Massachusetts.

  Round about nine o’clock on night two, we’re sitting around the campfire, just he and I, cooking the fish we had caught in the lake earlier that day. (Not a lot tastes better than landlocked salmon and largemouth bass that had been swimming around not five hours before, especially when you had caught them with your granddad.) So I reach over to grab a Coke out of the cooler and I hear this caterwauling scream that scared the ever-loving shit out of me. I looked around as a terrified eight year old does when confronted with something that unnerves them. I half expected some horrible apparition to come crashing through the woods to gobble me up.

  Grandpa put his rock-steady hand on my shoulder as I searched, and pointed to the tree across the fire from us. Perched on a branch not thirty feet from where we sat was a bird about the size of a beer can. It let loose with another scream, and I thought it impossible that such a loud noise could come from so small a critter. That was the year I learned about screech owls.

  The terror I felt as an eight year old hearing that screech returned as I stood looking at Remo’s dripping arm. The scream I was hearing now was not unlike that screech owl, but this time I knew what it was. Even though I had access to what was basically a tank against infected, and was surrounded by four of the toughest guys on planet Earth, my oversized nuts shriveled up into my stomach. I was, again, scared shitless. I wasn’t the only one either, as everybody searched quickly for the source of the sound.

  The scream was answered by another, then another, then two more. It seems we were surrounded by invisible runners. The really scary thing is that up to right then I had thought they were mindless. The calls they had just made certainly seemed like coordinated hunting calls, and answering hollers as well, but how could mindless infected be smart enough for that?

  I didn’t have time to contemplate this, as the first of them came sprinting around the garage side of the service station and headed right for us. (Good thing Tim hadn’t gone looking for a generator.) One came from the other side, and two from a house down the road. More shapes were loping towards us from the distance. Brick dropped the first one with his HK416; single shot, center mass, then Remo and Ray-Ban started firing as well. They moved into a triangular formation with Tim and I in the center.

  The MRAP isn’t overly loud, but it’s still a big truck, so why hadn’t we been attacked instantly upon arrival? They must have heard us. In addition, we have all figured out that Runners aren’t dead; they’re infected humans that have lost the ability to reason or think rationally at all. Moreover, if these things weren’t dead, that meant that either they had recently been infected, or they had been eating steadily. I instantly remembered the Runner that had taken a bite out of one of the dead ones back in Havre. Thing had chewed and swallowed, and that had been new. All interesting topics to discuss with the boys if we made it out of here alive. We hadn’t even gotten the gas yet. (I know, diesel.)

  My 416 was brought to bear, but I had been trained in the past few weeks only to fire if the MARSOC boys missed (didn’t see) something, or when they were reloading. Oddly enough, even though
I felt my nuts clench with every Runner’s scream, I didn’t feel that panic I usually felt creeping in.

  A group of six of them were dashing toward us from town, and Ray-Ban picked that moment to shout, “Loading!” I stepped up next to him took aim, and fired at an older woman with running gear on. She had been prepared I guess. I could see her blood-red eyes from two hundred feet. I missed the first shot, but got her with the second. She fell, but got up and started back toward us much more slowly. She wasn’t dead, but the round had fucked her up. I fired twice more, nailing another woman in the shoulder and spinning her, and missing with the last round. Ray-Ban shouted, “Ready!” and got back on the line. The dead ones were beginning to come out, and I had to wonder again why they hadn’t attacked when we first pulled in.

  “Negative!” I heard Brick shout. “Stay inside! If we need a quick out, we can fall back to you! Cover the back!” He must have been shouting into the radio to Kinga, who was still in the MRAP.

  “Loading,” Remo said almost casually, and I stepped up to his position. He did this tactical reload that was so fast it was almost done before he had finished speaking. I hadn’t fired a round. Tim was standing in the center of us with his pistol, and to his credit he looked as not-terrified as I felt.

  In about a minute, all the Runners were down. Not all dead, but hurt enough that they could no longer run. Brick switched magazines. “Pack it up and let’s re-fuel before they get here.” Several dozen undead were on the way, and it was then I realized that Big Water was as dead as every other place we’d been to. It just looked better. These dead things had flair.

  Kinga had pulled the truck up to the pumps, and it was then we grasped the fact that we hadn’t had the chance to get any hand pumps. Remo and Ray-Ban ran off to find a generator, Brick, Tim, and I setting the Jerry cans out and removing the caps. The vanguard of the dead would be on us in thirty seconds. Brick grabbed an entrenching tool off the side of the MRAP, passing it to me and he hefted his crowbar-like apparatus. Tim grabbed a piece of pipe that was lying next to one of the pumps. “Don’t get too close,” Brick told us.

  “They’re damn fast when they get near you,” I reminded him. He nodded. The first to reach us, a fat guy and a thing so mauled I couldn’t tell what sex it had been, received equally as deadly thumps on the noggin from Brick and I. I had used the side of the shovel end of the tool so as not to get it stuck in fat dude’s head. We got through about six more before we realized that this wasn’t going to work. There seemed to be many more undead coming from the surrounding area than the five hundred or so that were supposed to make up this town. The three of us heard shots, and soon Remo and Ray-Ban were running back around the side of the station. They both skidded to a stop when they saw what was shuffling toward us.

  “We. Are. Leaving!” Brick yelled. We were sprinting back to the MRAP, Kinga waiting with the door open firing Ray-Ban’s EBR. With the sound of the .308 rounds, he couldn’t see the dozen or so stumblers that were right on him. I did the only thing I could think of. I shot at him. Well, I shot at the glass window with fresh Runner goo on it. It imploded and he jerked his head to the left. Seeing the pus bags that were already reaching for him, he fired into them and was able to get the door to the truck closed after a brief but victorious tug of war with a dead girl wearing only a bikini bottom. The dead bastards began beating their rotting fists against the side of the vehicle until they noticed the four meat popsicles in the middle of the road, then started toward us.

  At the same time, dead began to flood around both sides of the station. We were in some deep shit. The MRAP fired up and Kinga took right off. He barreled down the road, turning anything in his way into bad-smelling strawberry jam. But while I was looking at the new stains on my MRAP, all the stainees and their pals were looking at me. They looked hungry. Except the ones that had come apart at the seams when they got run over, they looked like the aforementioned strawberry jam.

  It didn’t take long for Kinga to turn the truck around and flatten some more pus bags on the way back to us. He made it just as the main force got to us, but we had already dropped quite a few of the vanguard.

  I had an extra two magazines on me, but we were starting to burn through ammo. A particularly skinny woman pushed up to Brick and he hit her with the butt of his rifle. She didn’t give a shit and latched on to his forearm with her nasty paws. I was in mid swing with the entrenching tool when dead bitch’s head snapped back, goo shooting out of her as Tim’s .40 cal round exited her melon. I over-swung and took an involuntary step forward, right into the reaching claws of a half-naked young guy with horrible wounds on his neck and shoulder. This guy had no doubt been one of those dick-head tool-bags, complete with gold chains and fifty selfies on his phone of himself and the other shitheads he hung out with. Shirtless, muscles flexing, and baseball caps on sideways.

  The claws were on the left hand only, the right arm was nowhere to be seen. I wonder if he was popping a selfie as the thing tore his arm off?

  The thing fell forward, teeth first, to rob me of my schnoz. Off balance, I was able to get the blade of the tool in front of my face, and his teeth smashed into the other side of it, both of us going down in a heap. I kicked away and tried to roll back into the relative safety of my friends, but the dead douche grabbed my 416, and the sling choked me when he started pulling me back toward him. I spun and tried to fight him off, but Tim shot this one too, and it let go of my rifle.

  If anything, there were more of the dead here than three minutes ago. Kinga drove right past us and skidded to a halt. The back door to safety opened up, and we rushed over to it, Kinga firing his rifle over us at the closest ones.

  “Save it!” yelled Brick. “We’re good!

  We piled in the back of the truck, Remo closing the door in a bunch of dead faces. The truck jolted forward a little and we were off. No, Dear Reader, I haven’t forgotten about the lack of fuel in our vehicle, but driving away from this particular event with almost no diesel in the tanks was better than hanging around being trapped in the MRAP with a thousand fists pounding on the steel.

  The only road was the one into town, and we barreled down that for another quarter mile before the MRAP began to shudder. “Fuck!” Kinga yelled from up front. My Mine Resistant baby shuddered a few more times, sputtered, and the engine quit. We were smack-dab in the middle of the residential section of the crappy town, and its residents all decided to come out to see us. We grabbed what ammo we could, as the majority of the dead folks were coming from where we just were, and they were slow. We didn’t want to hang around though.

  Another scream rent the air, and there were scrabblings up front as a speedy infected climbed up on the hood of the truck like a four-limbed spider. It threw its head back and screamed so loud I thought it would pop, then launched itself at the front window trying to bite Kinga through the bullet-resistant glass. Its vile fluids spattered the window as it tore at the glass. Kinga recoiled appropriately, and moved to the back with us.

  “Remo, how we looking back there?” Brick demanded

  Remo, looking through the back door double window, spit out his toothpick. “Environment is target rich.”

  “How close?”

  “Sixty meters.”

  Brick wiped his forearm across his ebony forehead, “Last guy out shuts the door, we might be able to get back with fuel. We head for those houses and see what we can find. You two,” he pointed at us, “make sure your safeties are off and don’t shoot unless you have to. Ray and Tim, you carry the food.”

  They each picked up one of the bug-out bags we had previously packed with food and water. Brick and I had the ammo bags, and Kinga was positively covered in ammo already. Remo had his knife.

  “Remember the one on the roof.” Yeah, like we all couldn’t hear the bastard up there, trying to scratch through the steel with his fingernails

  “Forty meters,” Remo said like he was informing us it was tea-time.

  “Do it!”

  Remo t
hrew the door open, and kicked out with his boot. He jumped down, leaned over and stabbed a pus bag through the eye, then let out with another side kick to the right. I heard a sickening crunch, and another dead woman fell forward into view, her leg bent wrong. She reached out to grab him and he shot her in the forehead with his sidearm. He spun, swinging the knife in an arc, catching what used to be a young girl in the top of her dome while simultaneously shooting out of my line of sight. An upward palm thrust sent the tongue of one of the things flying out of its mouth before he pulled the knife from the little girl and jammed it through the eye socket of now-tongue-less.

  This had all happened before any of the rest of us could get out of the truck. “Clear. Well, for a minute.” He casually lifted his handgun and shot the Runner that had leapt screaming from the roof of the MRAP. He had caught it in the throat, and it gurgled as we filed out of the armored rear door. It reached for him, and he kicked its filthy claws away, shooting it again just below the left eye.

  We spread out and surveyed our surroundings. Ray-Ban took care of the last dead man in the area with his knife. “This way!” Brick said quickly, and we followed. We ran through a small housing development, the homes way too close together for a town of so few. The first house had an above-ground pool in the backyard, and it was occupied. A blueish-gray man with no shirt on reached for us over the pool wall. Poor bastard would probably be trapped in there forever. We continued on, not seeing any dead in front of us because, hopefully, they were all behind.

  Continuing on blindly, we rounded the corner of the next house and my hopes proved fruitless. Brick ran into a group of six of them. Two latched on to him and leaned in to eat, but the MARSOC guy was having none of that, and fought them for all he was worth. Both were down before we could come to his aid, and I drilled a third that had grabbed his shoulder with my shovel, cleaving its rotten dome down the side. The front half of its face fell to the overgrown grass, the thing taking another step before collapsing. Brick destroyed another before Kinga and Ray-Ban were able to dispatch the remainders.