by M. Van
Angie pulled up her nose, and must have caught a whiff the same time I had. She grabbed a railing and pulled herself from her seat. I followed her to the front. Holding on to the driver’s cabin, I gazed to my left as we passed the large stretched out building, until Preston in the lead vehicle slowed to a stop and Gibs pulled up alongside him.
“That is just …” Angie started to say, but she didn’t seem able to finish her sentence. Not even the dark could hide the overwhelming sight, and the moonlight only added to its eeriness.
“Fucked up,” Tom said, finishing it for her. He slammed his palm on the top of the cab a couple of times and then called out, “I told you we should have brought RPGs, Sarge.”
Preston remained silent as he took in the sight. He had led us to a stop near an exit road at a safe distance from the building but close enough to realize this wasn’t going to be easy.
The fifty or so people who had kept themselves alive these past months and had even been able to maintain contact with Maxwell had done so tucked away in a distribution center. Most of the survivors had probably attempted to leave the state and were heading to Montgomery Regional Airport or had come from there when they had gotten themselves stuck inside that large building.
It had been their luck that the DC held tons of cargo, including food and water. What worked against them, though, was that apparently every zombie in this area and beyond had found their way to them. The L-shaped building measured over two hundred thousand square feet and from this angle looked to be completely surrounded by zombies.
Gibs stepped out of the truck and walked around it to where Preston hung out the open window.
“Now what?” he asked.
“Do we have any idea where these people are holding up?” Angie asked.
“From what Eaves told me, they’ve moved to the second floor after the fence collapsed, taking whatever supplies they could,” Preston replied as he stepped from the truck and climbed into the back with Tom. He pulled out a pair of night-vision goggles and peered at the building.
“Is the building compromised?” Gibs asked.
“It hadn’t been the last time they called in, but that was a couple of days ago,” Preston replied.
“But they know were coming, right?” I asked, feeling anxiety creeping up on me. “Because I don’t want to get shot or something by accident.”
Gearing up, we had decided not to fit the heavy armored plates into our vest, because zombies didn’t carry guns. I was beginning to doubt that decision.
“Maxwell has transmitted that we were coming, but they haven’t received a reply,” Preston said. “Eaves didn’t seem worried about that. It appears they’ve had trouble with their equipment before.”
“I say we run them down like bowling pins,” Tom suggested.
“Yes, that’s why you’re not in charge,” Preston said as he jumped from the truck. He pointed a finger in the direction of the building and started conversing with Gibs. I couldn’t make out what they were saying and figured I’d hear it later.
Feeling the need to release my eyes from the enormous number of mutilated corpses lumbering around, I sat down in my seat.
“Remind me why I’m here,” I said. I looked up at Angie who was still peering out over the cab. She shook herself and then sat down next to me.
“I’m not so sure about that myself,” she said in a low voice. “I can’t imagine surviving in there for all that time.”
“If someone is in there, then Divus would probably be their only way out,” I said. “There is no other way to get around those masses.”
“All right, ladies. Listen up, here’s the plan,” Preston said in loud voice. We both stood and lent him our full attention. “We’re gonna drive around the back and enter where the loading area used to be and where the fence is breached. Then we split up. You’ll stay close to give us cover fire until we can drive ourselves up close to a fire escape. If we can bypass the zombies, we should get close enough to park the Hummer underneath the ladder to pull it down. Once we’re up, the rest of you follow.”
My eyes shifted from Preston to Gibs and Tom. They both nodded in agreement.
“That’s all the plan there is?” I asked, surprised.
“What more of a plan you want?” Tom added. “We go in, we kick ass, and we go home.”
Annoyed at his bravado, I narrowed my eyes and zeroed in on Tom.
“Aren’t you just a tad bit stereotypical?” I asked, raising my brows. Tom’s eyes didn’t waver from mine as he shrugged and loaded a bullet into the chamber of his weapon.
“The way I heard,” Angie said, pulling me from my staring contest with Tom, “was that we enter without stirring the zombies too much.” She glared down at Preston, almost daring him to contradict her.
“I agree,” Preston said, raising a sharp eye at Tom. “We can’t be sure there aren’t any zombies inside, and I don’t want any of them to go all crazy on us. With the amount surrounding the building, God, what’ll happen if they are to find a way inside? Inoculating those people might take a while, and we still have to find a way to get them out.”
Tom didn’t argue. Instead he lifted his arm in salute, but with the wink he gave Angie, it didn’t seem all that convincing.
As planned, Preston and Tom drove their Hummer around the distribution center. With that, they caught some attention from a couple of zombies that seemed intrigued by the movement and probably the engine noise. Gibs kept our truck at a low speed and at some distance from Preston’s. We had taken the exit road that eventually paralleled the DC until we hit an access road that led to the loading docks. An open field stretched out behind the building, and I assumed that would have had something to do with the approach trajectory of the planes heading to the nearby airport.
A couple of zombies heading in the direction of the DC shuffled across the road. They seemed intent on joining the others in crowding the building and perhaps the hope of a midnight snack. Preston didn’t stop as he caught them in his headlights and slammed into them head on.
Tom, who stood in the back, dropped to a crouch, hiding behind the driver’s cabin as one of the zombies slammed into the Hummer’s grille. I couldn’t hear him, but from Tom’s fist pounding on the rearview window, I could imagine the curse words that would have parted from his lips.
Gibs followed Preston as he took a turn that would lead us to the loading docks before he slowed the vehicle. As Preston kept moving closer to the loading docks, Gibs stopped.
“Get ready,” Angie said without taking her eyes of the other Hummer approaching the DC. I lifted my rifle on top of the cab and settled in comfortable position. Peering through the scope and adjusting it accordingly, I felt grateful for the familiar M4 in my hands. I had a considerable amount of experience with this weapon and wouldn’t have wanted to familiarize myself with something else at this point.
At my side, Angie did the same as we watched the lead Hummer maneuver through the first line of zombies. The vehicle shook and shuddered as it plowed over bodies. The truck did a good enough job, but I would have preferred to be driving a Knight XV, like the one Mars had confiscated at Warren’s lab in Florida to aid our escape. I had always regretted abandoning the massive tank-like vehicle. That truck had been a home to Ash and me for several weeks after we’d escaped the Florida lab and would have easily disposed of the zombies now faced by the smaller vehicle.
My thoughts started to drift, and memories of hanging out at the beach with Ash threatened my concentration when a burst of static in my ear brought me back to the present.
“It is getting pretty thick out here,” Preston said over the com link. “They don’t seem that interested in us, but they don’t seem to wanna move either.”
“At least we now know for sure that the serum works,” Tom said as he stood in the back of the Hummer, gazing over the bodies milling around the truck. With the night-vision scope, I could clearly see his discomfort by the grimace on his face. Talking about kicking ass was one
thing, but it wasn’t easy staring down into the glazed-over blank eyes of so many people who might as well be dead. Even a hard ass like Tom couldn’t deny that.
Tom lunged forward as the vehicle came to a sudden stop, but he managed to steady himself on the driver’s cab.
“What the hell!” he shouted over the earpiece. I grabbed my ear as if that would protect it from the loud noise.
“This isn’t going to work,” Preston said. His voice remained pretty much what it had always been—calm and collected. Zombies pressed against the hull of the truck from all sides, and it seemed the Hummer sat stuck in the mud. “There is at least eighty feet of zombies between us and that fire escape. We won’t reach it like this.”
“You want us to distract them?” Gibs replied.
“How do you wanna do that?” Tom said.
“We just need to make some noise,” I said. “I’ve done it before.” A zombie attack while we were having a pit stop at a gas station had forced Ash and me to help out some of the locals. All it had taken was some loud rap music to distract the zombies surrounding the car occupied by the chief of police and his deputies. After that, I only had to run them over. Of course, then I had my iPhone available with a considered amount of high-strung, bass-thumping songs to choose from. Not that I had taken the time to choose an appropriate song, although I didn’t think a ballad would have cut it. Ash had always been in charge of the entertainment, and I had even given her my phone before I’d left for Alaska. The kid would have gone crazy without her music.
“Why don’t you take a couple of shots at them?” Preston said.
“Is that wise?” Tom countered, “I mean, I’m sitting right here in the open.” With an exaggerated gesture, he tapped a hand on top of his helmet as if he needed to remind us he was still standing there. Ignoring him, Angie and I both lined up our sights.
“Is the safety supposed to be up or down?” I said over the com link. On the truck, Tom threw his hands up in an I-don’t-believe-it gesture. I grinned as Angie pulled the trigger and shot a zombie in the back of the head. Brain matter splattered the other zombies as its body crumpled down after it.
“Take a couple near the back,” she said. “Let’s see if we can trigger their interest.”
I followed her example and pulled the trigger. Three bullets and three permanently dead zombies later, none of the others took the bait. We had hoped the sound of gunfire might draw their attention toward us. Unfortunately, that tactic failed.
Tom threw his hands up at the ineffectiveness of our efforts. It wasn’t enough to kill them. The infected showed no interest in us. They shared only one common interest in finding their next meal. To find that next meal, zombies primarily used their sense of smell, but that didn’t work with us anymore, so we needed an alternative to attract their attention.
“I have another idea,” I said as I lined up my sight through the scope. My finger hovered over the trigger for a moment until I found my target. The bullet slammed into the zombie’s shoulder, and the force of the impact spun it around. “Now take out your flashlight and wave at it.”
Angie hesitated for a moment but then seemed to pick up on my thinking.
“Gibs,” I said, “honk your horn and flash the truck’s lights.” Waving her flashlight, Angie shouted at the zombies to come get us as I shot two more of them. One just tumbled over, but the other spun in a similar fashion to the first one. Whether because of Angie’s waving or Gibs’s honking, the zombie kept its gaze in our direction. It took a moment for the few remaining gears inside its head to start spinning, but then it moved its feet and headed our way.
“Keep at it,” I said as I fired another shot.
Once a couple of them headed our way, it seemed more of them decided to follow. I stopped firing and stood to wave my own flashlight in the same manner as Angie. Fortunately, we stood up wind and the zombies couldn’t catch our scents.
As the zombies had drawn their attention from one Hummer to the other, Gibs started the engine and eased us into reverse. It wasn’t a pretty sight, watching the undead after all those weeks, and time hadn’t done them any good. The limp forms struggling to make their way to us didn’t own any recognizable features. As they came closer, I couldn’t tell whether I was looking at a male or female, even in the truck’s headlights, although their clothes sometimes betrayed them. But it wasn’t as if I wanted to see them as the human beings they had once been. It was better to view them as the things they had become.
To do that was easier with these zombies than those that we had encountered in Cheyenne. With these, I didn’t have to fear their pleading gazes as if they knew what had happened to them. The zombies walking toward us had that fogged-over, blank glaze in their eyes that made it a lot easier to take them out for good.
The mass of zombies on the left side of the building started to thin out as the amount of zombies that followed us grew. When the number of zombies surrounding Preston’s Hummer had decreased, he moved backward, running over a couple. With that he managed to draw the attention of the zombies still clawing at the building. As soon as the remaining zombies noticed their peers were leaving, they followed in the hope of an easier prey. Preston took advantage of the situation and parked the truck underneath the fire escape.
| 12
Ash
Mars hadn’t shown up an hour later. In fact, it had been several hours, and he still wasn’t there. The sun started to set, and the number of zombies roaming the street had increased. The delivery guy with the red baseball cap still sat undeterred in his van as the pile of cigarette butts on the ground next to it grew higher.
“What is takin’ him so long?” I muttered as I peered out the window.
I was starting to get frustrated with Mars for taking so long and with myself for having waited this long. With every minute, the number of zombies outside increased, and if we had left earlier, we might have been able to evade them. But as I glanced over my shoulder and watched Rowdy fast asleep on the couch, I knew I could never have left the house with him—not with the zombies roaming outside that viewed him as a mere snack. Besides, I didn’t know the intentions of the guy in the van, and I would never have been able to climb the fence surrounding the backyard, not without attracting a whole lot of attention from either zombies or the guy in the van.
I cursed my inability to use my legs and the fact that I was the reason that guy sat out there in the first place. He must have been sent by Warren, and that also meant I was to blame for the outbreak. I was the reason Rowdy’s grandparents were dead and the reason he and Luke were now in danger.
“What do you think he’s waiting for?” Luke asked from the hallway. He had taken up position at the front door to watch the delivery guy and keep an eye on the roaming zombies. Now and then he would walk around the house to check the windows and doors, but our main focus was the guy in the white van.
“I don’t know,” I said in a whisper.
“I mean,” Luke continued, “this whole outbreak was probably meant as a diversion to create time for whatever it is he has planned, and it appears to be working, because from what I could tell of our short conversation it seemed Agent Marsden was pretty determined to get here, so if he didn’t …”
His words faded as if he had suddenly realized the implications of what he was saying, but it wasn’t as if I hadn’t thought about it. Something could have happened to Mars—something bad. I didn’t want to think about it and rolled my chair away from the window. I yawned, and my back ached as I straightened.
“Why don’t you take five?” Luke said as he watched me from the hallway. I nodded and rolled my chair between the couch and the coffee table. I grabbed one of the energy bars off the table that we had dumped there and stuck it between my teeth. Hefting my body from the chair, I slid onto the couch and then grabbed the fabric of my pants to hoist my legs up onto the wheelchair. Finally, seated, I leaned back and took the energy bar from my mouth.
My movements hadn’t been subtle and
were enough to stir Rowdy. He lifted his head, and sleep-filled eyes peered up at me. I smiled as he scooted closer and laid his head on my lap.
“Hey, buddy,” I said, caressing his cheek, “want something to eat?” He shook his head, let out a deep sigh, and fisted the fabric of my hoody before he drifted off to sleep again.
I knew we had to act. We couldn’t just sit here and wait for the inevitable. That man out there was waiting for something, or worse, someone, and I had a distinct feeling I knew whom. There were just too many coincidences that made it all seem deliberate: the delivery of the package, Mars’s warning that Warren was nearby, and now the deliveryman sitting out front waiting. What was worse was that he repelled the zombies just as much as I did. They didn’t attack him, so that would mean he’d be able to walk straight up to the house without a zombie sniffing twice about it. So what was I supposed to do if Warren showed up before Mars?
I lifted my gaze from Rowdy and caught Luke staring at me from out of the hallway. He seemed to have his eyes fixed on my legs resting on the wheelchair. This stirred some annoyance inside me, but I could understand the worried look on his face.
“You don’t have to worry about me,” I offered. “I can handle myself.” His eyes widened as if he were embarrassed to have been caught staring.
“I … uh …” he started to say, but stopped himself. He leaned against the doorpost, abandoning the window and the delivery guy for a moment. He inhaled sharply as if to compose himself and said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to stare, and Agent Marsden has told us as much during the briefing before he sent us out. It’s just …” He paused and his eyes drifted to the ground.
“It couldn’t have been easy out there, you know, during those first days,” he said. “Agent Marsden has told us some of what had happened in New York and Colorado.” He looked up to face me, and I didn’t know what he saw there, but he quickly added, “No details, but just the idea of being out there and not being able to, you know …” Luke gestured at my legs and then fell silent. I peeled the wrapping from my energy bar and took a bite, mulling over his question.