by Geo Dell
It was a perfect zombie tool Bob had told him that just happened to have been invented more than a hundred years before the first zombie came along. Maybe, Bob had added with a serious expression, who knows how long these people have been playing with this compound. That had caused both of them to fall silent.
Since Bob had given it to him it had been used a dozen times. It was accurate and completely fatal. None of the dead had come back. It was charged with a gas cartridge. The bolt was released with a backward pull of a slide mechanism and the bolt cleaned easily. The gun was easy, using it was not, and he hoped it never would be. He walked back into the room and sat on the edge of the bed for a second.
He could call someone, delegate this, but that was unfair. Arlene had done her share of this too. Far more than anyone. He could handle this one as he had a few of the others. He leaned forward and placed the business end of the gun against her forehead. He closed his eyes, said a quick prayer, and then without opening his eyes he pulled the trigger.
The noise was a small metallic clank, hardly any noise at all, even in the small, quiet room. It was inconceivable that a noise like that could kill someone. He heard her breath catch and become ragged. When he opened his eyes a few seconds later she had drawn her last breath and let it out slowly. It was over. He pushed himself away from the bed and went out into the larger barn area. He ejected the bolt into a container of bleach, wiped down the front of the gun with bleach too, and then returned it to the empty shelf he had taken it from. As he stood taking deep breaths to clear his head the barn door opened and Ronnie stepped inside.
“Hey,” Ronnie said. His eyes cut to the room where the door stood open. “Finished.” It may have started off as a question, but it became a statement.
“Yeah. Jess came, you know, gave her a shot so it would be painless.”
Ronnie nodded. “Well, let me help bury her. It's turning damn cold out there and the snow is starting to pile up. I wonder if it was smart to send Bear and the others out. They might not be able to get back.”
Mike nodded this time. “Nothing for it. You know they had to go. Hell, I would have gone too if not for Candace.” He looked around the barn and then back up at Ronnie where he stood. “I can use the help, Ronnie, and I appreciate it.” He nodded his head toward the open door.
NINE
Bluechip
Bear and Beth
Weston sat across from Bear and spoke in condescending tones about the world outside the base and what would have to become of it to make it habitable. He clipped his fingernails absently as he spoke. They were already short, and blood bloomed in places. There were bags under his eyes, and those bags were stark white. His skin looked bad, and he rarely made eye contact with Bear.
“Burning, a great burning would be the best. The rest of us need to be assured that the compound is dead completely. That it can never return,” Weston told him. “Can you see my concern? The two of you coming here is the worst possible outcome for us. This base is sealed, was sealed until you breached it. The whole place is contaminated now. The mutations the virus progressed through beyond these walls are now here, among us, infecting us. What if our own vaccines can't handle the newer versions? You may have killed us. Killed us with your carelessness.” He leaned back in his chair, his thin, white hair lending an air of fragility to his face. As though it could crack and fall into a million pieces at the slightest blow. He tossed the fingernail clippers down onto the desktop contemptuously.
Bear leaned forward partway across the Major's desktop. He saw his eyes flare with concern and that caused a wide smile to surface on his lips. He held it there as he spoke. “Your facility was already breached. We cut no holes in the ducting, they were there. “ He held him with his eyes. “As for you and yours, how many is that? A handful? I know many of them left months ago. I know that because one of the people that are with us, the ones that will come looking for us, was here. Held here. Escaped from here. You've probably experienced a slow bleed. Obviously not all of your cameras are working, how could you know? So, who are you protecting this place from? Who is here?” Bear waited but Weston said nothing at all. “A dozen people? That's about all I've seen, maybe less than a dozen. The breach has been there. You were infected months ago. Months, maybe even years.”
Weston's lips quivered. “I can not accept that. I... This would be for nothing at all if that were the case.” He lowered his head into his hands briefly and massaged his temples. “Decided,” he said, although decided about what Bear could only guess.
“You'll take nothing from me. You won't leave here.” He reached into his desk and pulled his hand back out. He opened the palm slowly. “So you can see it truly does exist.” In his palm rested a small silver canister, almost the size and shape of the small compressed air cylinders he used to put in his BB Gun as a kid, except this had a narrow rounded head with a small red button. The other item was a small glass bottle or vial filled with what looked like red liquid. “Yes, it does exist, but you will never have it. It was manufactured here. Two floors below, and there is enough of it to reverse it all many times over.” He dropped both items back into his desk drawer. He looked toward the door and raised his voice. “Lieutenant!”
The door opened and the same young officer that had been standing guard on the door when they had arrived stepped in.
“Take him back,” Weston told him. He turned away and dismissed them both.
Watertown
Billy and Pearl
The cave had been held by a few dozen gang members. Most of them had fled when Billy and Pearl had killed what turned out to be their leaders. They had made their way back to the cave on foot, fully intending to take it by force and wait for Bear and Beth's returning, but there had been no one to fight, nothing to take back. The half dozen kids that remained, children really, were not fighters: Were not part of the group that had attacked them, but were part of a small group of kids being held captive by the others. The remaining few gang member had fled once they realized the others had been killed. The children had been on their own for a few days now. They had welcomed Billy and Pearl.
Billy had left Pearl there. They had parted tearfully, he on his way to the river and the entrance to the underground facility. Her to heal.
Pearl had settled into the cave before Billy had left and within a few days others had joined her. At first she had done her best to dissuade them, silence and moodiness seemed to be her only persona for most of that time, but somewhere in those first few days she recognized the need for others, if only for strength in numbers, and she began to welcome newcomers and get them set up with sleeping areas inside the cave. She organized daily outings for supplies, and that enabled her to get a better idea of the area and how it had changed in the months since she had made her escape. She had done what she could for her leg, the infection had gone, but the limp and the pain had stayed.
She left early on the first morning of the second week, she and a newcomer, Anna, on foot: Rob and Lisa, two other newcomers, in a truck to cruise the fields outside of town looking for deer, or cows which seemed to be everywhere you looked.
Gina, another newcomer, had stayed to keep things going at the cave which was close to fifty people now. Gina had been one of the first to come along. Tall, young, a shock of red hair that hung well below her waist, but was usually tied back into a ponytail and wrapped around her forehead. She had become completely devoted to Pearl. “Happy hunting,” Gina had called as they left.
Pearl remembered that aloud as they walked, startling a small herd of goats that had been browsing the inside of a gas station as they passed. Things were beginning to get on her nerves, and she was concerned about Billy who had been gone far too long. They let the goats go without a shot. Shots sometimes bought the dead.
For some reason no one understood, the dead seemed to be changing. Less fearful of humans: Faster; out in the daylight sometimes. And their use of tools was becoming alarming. More than once they had seen evidence of
tool usage by the dead. So this herd of goats were some that they couldn't hunt. She only hoped things were better for the others.
There was a police precinct seven blocks over where they hoped there would be a stash of weapons and ammunition, and that was Pearl's real goal. She had no idea how many dangerous people were still in Watertown, but she doubted all the bad had left and only the good remained. The police precinct should have plenty in the way of rifles and ammunition both.
The Police station took half the day to break into. The cops had left, they had simply left the inmates there.
It had been a close fight at first. They had expected a few dead, not dozens. It was late afternoon before they had what they had come for, which turned out to be no more than a few hundred rounds of ammunition Pearl wasn't even sure they could use.
The trip back to the cave was impossible, there was not enough daylight left, so they had found a liquor store with its steel panel burglar doors intact to spend the night. A well placed shot had shattered the cheap padlock, and they had managed to force the doors open. The inside was untouched. They had secured the panels once again, jamming them from the inside, and begun the long wait for morning.
Bluechip
Bear and Beth
The door slammed and the footsteps faded. He had lost track of the schedule as he had been in Weston's office, but he was fairly certain that he had not missed the most recent check in.
He had taken a hard look at the doors and walls as they had come back. There was nothing at all. No windows, no view-ports in the doors that he could see. He could conceive of no reason why they stopped, waited and moved on.
That may well have remained his only information except the soldier received some sort of call on the way back. He wore what had appeared to be an ordinary radio at his side. It burred several times, the soldier retrieved it from his belt and a small screen had come to life before the soldier had turned far enough away to hide it. Beth, pacing a room very much like his own. Bear purposely forced himself to look elsewhere so that the soldier wouldn't suspect he had seen it. It answered many of his questions. Most likely there were cameras in the room. They could access them from the radio or whatever the device was. They had to be accessing some sort of signal feed to do it. Checking on them, logging off the feed and moving on.
He stood in the room now and waited for the footfalls. He had no doubt now that Weston intended to kill them. He had just decided that maybe he was incorrect, maybe the guards had already passed by on their check, when he heard a commotion in the hallway.
At first he couldn't place the noise in context, but a second later a deep rattle of gunfire filled the air and he could feel as well as hear the running in the hallway along with the gunfire. He watched as a hole suddenly appeared in the door. One second the door had been smooth and whole, the next there was a ragged hole, torn metal at its edges. He followed the hole to the wall where another less ragged hole had been punched through into whatever was behind that wall, probably it was a cell next to his own, he told himself.
The noise flashed by, moved off. A few screams in the distance. More gunfire, and then silence returned and settled over him like a blanket. He couldn't stand it and dropping quickly to the floor he called out to Beth. No answer came. He cried out again, louder, panic griping his voice, hoarseness creeping in from yelling so loudly, but there remained no answer.
Bluechip
Billy Jingo
The way in had been easy to find. The path they had taken easier still. Their boot tracks had been printed into the muddy floor of the tunnel.
They had to be days old, but they looked as though they had just been made. He doubted that this environment changed much. There were other tracks, older, filled with water in places, clear and crisp in others. Adams and Beth's tracks covered those tracks in places. The reason he knew the other tracks were older. Other than that they looked just as fresh, just as new to him.
He stood from his examination of the tracks and continued on deeper into the facility, thinking as he went.
If these tracks were days old, and they had to be, where were Bear and Beth now? Why had they entered this direction and not returned. He checked as he made his way forward but there were only the sets of tracks going in. The size of Bear's tracks alone made them easy to spot. With Beth's smaller tracks beside them they were even easier to spot. There were no tracks returning.
He returned to his original question to himself, but he knew the answer. They had to be held somewhere inside. They would have returned if they could. He only hoped that it wasn't worse. He pushed that thought away and slowed as he spotted a light source far ahead. He shrugged his rifle from his shoulder, and with one free hand thumbed the safeties off both pistols he carried at his waist. He carried a knife in one boot, and a second that looked like nothing more than a belt buckle at his waist. Things he had picked up from Beth. That thought bought him back to where they could be and what might have happened. He pushed his concerns away nearly as soon as they had surfaced and made his way slowly, silently, toward the light ahead.
Beth
The hallway was dark and the footing unsure. She had no idea why the lights were out in so many places. What lights were left made it hard to see. One soldier had Beth by the back of her jacket and kept forcing her forward when she didn't move fast enough. Her hand was zip tied to her belt and was already painful. She was pretty sure that complaining about that would get her nowhere. These five didn't seem the compassionate type. She stumbled along as she was pushed, slowing down purposely, hoping against hope that Bear would somehow find her.
Bear
Bear fished the fingernail clippers form his pocket. He had palmed them when he had leaned across the desk toward Weston. He went to work on the door, first prying off the chrome retainer ring on the inside of the door that covered the handsets mounting screws. He had been sure that once he got it pried off that the screws would be security screws, but they were not. A few more minutes and he had the screws out. The handle set pushed through and fell out onto the tiles outside the door. He could only hope that there was no one there to see it. It took a second or two to figure out how the mechanism worked, but once he did he had the door opened. He ran to a room three doors down where the door had been opened. It was empty, but the unmade bed told him someone had been there and who else, he questioned, was there besides himself and Beth?
He stood in the hallway only a few seconds before he ran off in the direction he hoped would take him toward her and those who had taken her. Less than fifty feet down, the hallway curved and two bodies lay sprawled in blood on the white tile flooring. The walls were blood splattered like a slaughter house. Bear slowed, hoping that he would not find Beth among the bodies. He bent and turned a woman over; not Beth. Just a young woman he remembered from earlier, black hair with a shock of green. She had fallen forward onto her rifle. Bear snatched it up quickly, ripped an extra clip from her belt and sprinted down the hallway.
Beth
She stumbled and fell, crying out as she did. Something, some piece of debris had cut her. Nothing serious. She saw that quickly, but it looked bad. Maybe it could buy time.
“Get up, Bitch, get up,” The one that had been prodding her told her. He kicked her hard in the groin with one booted foot. “Get up and get moving, Bitch.”
“I can't.” She tried hard to catch her breath. It was no act. He meant to kill her whether she got up or didn't get up, and that had caused fear to settle in, her heart to race, her breathing to become ragged, the pain on top of that was incredible, it had taken her breath away, nearly made her vomit. She had also fallen badly on her wrist. “Broke it... Feels like I broke it,” she said between pulls of air. The air seemed bad, as though the oxygen content were poor.
The man bent down and stopped just inches away from her face. His fingers curled into her jacket pulling her toward him roughly. “Get up or I will kill you right now. I won't ask again. I don't give a fuck.” He held her eyes brief
ly, but they slipped away when someone else spoke.
“Shoot her and I'll shoot you next.“ Her eyes darted backwards as best she could. Probably one of the soldiers that had been behind them. His rifle rose from the floor and settled on the man in front of her. She couldn't see his face, but his voice had a cadence she knew.
The man who held her shoved her away: He tried to shoot and turn at the same time. Not a word was spoken, no retaliatory words, nothing. He just started to turn and fire at the same time. A bad mistake apparently, as the other man had also not been joking: The duct work lit up brightly with the flashes of rifle fire that punched the air and felt as though it would puncture her eardrums.
The other three standing close by had frozen. The rifle fire lasted seconds only and the man lay dead when it was finished.
The gunfire in the enclosed hallway had taken most of her hearing. She couldn't hear right. Sounds seemed coated in cotton, far away, muffled, nonsensical. She didn't know Bear was there until her eyes rose as a boot stepped into her vision and continued to rise until they found his profile. A rifle in his hands, turned toward the remaining three. She rose slowly to her feet. A blade flashed and her hand was cut free from the zip tie, she knelt and pulled a knife free from the dead soldier next to her.
She could hear nothing that made sense, but she could tell there was anger and urgency in the words she couldn't understand. The three had their weapons held rigidly, refusing to drop them. Freed only to be killed in a shoot out, she thought.
Her hand was numbed from the tie, but she let the knife fall and immediately squatted and picked up a discarded rifle. In the space of two seconds the entire situation had changed. She longed to turn and look at Bear. Maybe he had tried to say something to her, but the cottony silence held her. She watched as one of the men started to raise his rifle. She wondered after, what he had intended: To throw it down? Toss it away? She didn't know. A shadow parted from the shadows behind the three and stepped quickly forward. A rifle barrel rose, the barrel pointing at the mans neck. A split second late she was shoved to the floor by an unseen hand.