The shakes had left me drained, though. I had dark circles under my eyes and bruises were visible on my arms and torso. That was really saying something, too. I have never been one to bruise easily. My wife can walk too close to the coffee table and get a bruise, but not me. I had to have been taking a real beating to bruise up like this. I guess I had been pushing pretty hard. I knew that when Karen saw the shape I was in, she wasn’t going to be happy. She’d know instantly how close to the breaking point I was pushing myself.
“I’ll be fine once I get some sleep,” I thought.
I put on a clean uniform and headed to laundry. Southard was already in the laundry room, reading a gun magazine.
“Hey, man,” he said. I’m waiting on my uniform to dry. Want me to put yours in the dryer when it’s done washing?”
“Yeah, Chuck,” I said. “That would be great. I’m exhausted.”
“I can tell, man. No offense, but you look like shit. I mean, much worse than usual.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“Don’t mention it,” he said, smiling.
“Are you ok?”
“Fine, why?” he asked, innocently.
“Chuck, you know damned good and well what I mean.”
Southard put down the magazine and looked me in the eye. His entire demeanor changed in the span of a heartbeat.
“No, not really,” he said. “I’m trying not to think about it.”
“Want to have a drink and talk about it?”
“I’ll take the drink, but I don’t want to talk about it. I know they’re gone, Wylie. But I can’t let myself go to pieces, right now. There’s too much at stake.”
“Yeah, there is. But take some time for yourself, Chuck. Get drunk, let it out. Tomorrow, we can worry about the rest of it.”
“Only if you get drunk with me.”
I thought about it a second, then nodded.
“What the hell. I’m sure they can survive one night without me. I’m worn completely out.”
“Screw it, then,” he said. “Let’s drink some of that Bushmills you have and get it out of our systems.”
I tossed my clothes into the washing machine and headed out of laundry. Southard followed me and we headed for my bedroom/office in Classification. My pack was already in there, and we dug out a bottle of the Bushmills 21. Almost by magic, Sanders and Spec-4 arrived as I was opening the bottle.
“Whoa,” said Sanders. “You guys weren’t going to start without us, were you?”
“No way,” I said. “I just figured we’d open it up and maybe have a taste or six while we waited.”
We broke out our cups from the night before and I poured a generous measure for each of us. Southard and I both had a good long swig. Sanders took it down in a single swallow and Spec-4 sipped hers.
“Hey,” said Sanders. “This stuff is pretty good. No wonder you like it so much.”
We all laughed and talked for a couple hours, finishing off the entire bottle. We were all pretty drunk when we called it a night. Southard and Sanders headed off to the other office and I shut the door and turned off the light in mine. I sat down on my mattress and started taking off my boots. It wasn’t easy since I kept falling over. Eventually, I removed my gear and boots and lay down. I think I was asleep before I even hit the mattress. I was only vaguely aware of Spec-4 sliding up against me in the dark.
06 April
It felt like my head had no sooner hit the pillow, when someone was shaking me awake. I opened my eyes, grudgingly, to see Spec-4 kneeling over me. She was saying something. I could tell it was words of some kind, but my brain seemed to be wrapped in thick wool.
“Wylie,” she said. “Are you listening to me?”
“Mmmhmm,” I managed to mumble.
“Wake up,” she persisted. “The Lieutenant’s calling for you.”
“Ok,” I croaked in a voice not really my own. “I’m awake. What’s going on?”
“Main power is out. The generator’s holding, but we lost a lot of stuff. We still have doors, cameras and lights, but heat and A/C might be out of the question.”
“What about hot water?”
“Yeah, I think we still have that, too.”
“Ok, good.”
“Ok?” she asked. “Is that all you have to say?”
“Well, yeah,” I said. “I wasn’t really expecting the mains to stay on-line this long.”
“You might want to get up to Master Control and find out what’s going on.”
She didn’t seem the least bit worse for wear from our previous night’s drinking. I vaguely recalled that she hadn’t drunk nearly as much as the rest of us, though. Still, my mouth tasted like I had been drinking the water you boiled the hotdogs in. I sat up and my head hurt like hell. Great, just what I needed during the zombie apocalypse, a fucking hangover. Serves me right, I guess.
It took a few moments, but I managed to sit up. Then I pulled on my zip-sided tactical boots and zipped them up. After I bloused my BDU pants, I stood up. Albeit slowly. The room only spun a little bit, but my head felt like a large high school marching band was doing an extremely off key John Phillip Sousa march through my skull. Spec-4 handed me a bottle of water and a palm-full of ibuprofen.
I washed them down gratefully, and started putting on my gear. Even hung-over, I had the presence of mind to put on the Interceptor vest. Then I buckled on my duty belt and checked my pistols. Odd, but it seemed like second nature, like I’d been doing it for years. I ran through it almost automatically. Once all of my gear was checked out, I headed out the door. I almost made it to the stairs before EMT caught me.
“Hey, Wylie,” he said. “I need to check your head wound, again.”
“Can it wait ‘til later?”
“I suppose. But I want to see it and examine you before you go back out there after someone else.”
“Deal,” I said, and headed up the stairs.
“Wylie?” he asked. “Are you feeling dizzy?”
“Nope. Just hung-over.”
I didn’t even look back as I continued on up the stairs, but I could feel his eyes on me until I rounded the corner at the landing and disappeared from his view. I appreciated the fact that he was worried about me, but I’ve been hurt way worse than a little bump on the old noggin. Hell, I’d wager my old bean was the most invulnerable bone in my body, considering the number of times I’d hit my head and not done any serious damage.
I reached Master Control less than a minute later. My skull was pounding from the exertion of climbing the stairs. I couldn’t wait for the ibuprofen to kick in. As I walked in the door, Lieutenant Murdock handed me a Styrofoam cup of hot coffee, which I gladly accepted. He gave me a few seconds to enjoy a few sips before he started.
“We lost the grid sometime around 0300 hours,” he said. “All things considered, it lasted far longer than we had any right to expect. The generator is holding, and we have enough fuel to run it for the better part of a week. Longer, if we can find some propane.”
“We can shut down unnecessary lights and equipment,” I said. “We don’t need the booking computers or the fingerprint machines.”
“We’ve already gotten started on that,” replied the L.T. “We cleared and emptied the towers, except for medical. All power has been cut to all floors but five.”
“Good, we can also turn out any of the big pods we aren’t currently using. We can consolidate people into one pod.”
“I’ll get on that, next,” he said, nodding. “We still have door control and cameras.”
“That’s good news. If we lose the doors, we can always key them manually. But if we lose cameras, we lose our eyes outside.”
“We can always replace the cameras with a guard on the roof, if we have to,” said the L.T.
“True. But once we lose all power, we lose the radios.”
“We have a couple of boxes of batteries. I’ll see to it that all of them are put on chargers. So if we go dark, we’ll have radios for a while longer.”
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br /> “Anything else?”
“Yes, I’m afraid so,” he said. “We had a few survivors try to get in the gate last night.”
“Where are they now?”
“I wouldn’t let them in,” he said. “They claimed that they needed medical attention for bites.”
I sighed and let my shoulders slump. I hated to turn away any survivors, but we couldn’t risk letting an infected person inside here. If they turned, we could lose everything we’d accomplished. He was right to turn them away, but it still bothered me. It went against my nature not to help someone in need.
“Did they get clear?”
“They left the same way they arrived. On foot,” he said, solemnly.
“On foot?” I asked, incredulously. “No wonder they’d been bitten.”
“I don’t know where they went, but I’m sure that they’ve all turned by now,” said the L.T.
I let that sink in for a few seconds, and tried not to let it get to me. I failed. So, I changed the subject.
“How many more officers do we have locations for?”
“Hmm,” said the L.T. “Let me think. “
He reached over and picked up his clip-board and started running through the papers stuck to it.
“We have two that are on the roof of Cox Hospital North,” he said.
It killed me to say it, but I really didn’t have any choice.
“There’s nothing we can do for them. I’ve seen it, and it’s completely overrun. If we had a helicopter, maybe we could go after them. There’s no way we could fight through all of those zombies and get them out. There’s just too many of them.”
The Lieutenant looked thoughtful for a moment, then nodded.
“I can’t think of a way to get to them, either. If the place is as bad as you say, then it would take more men than we have to fight our way inside. Even if we had a helicopter, we don’t have a pilot.”
“Anyone else?” I asked, hoping I didn’t sound callous.
“The last I heard, Captain Meredith was trying to fortify his residence,” said the L.T. “He was calling for officers to assist him.”
“Fortifying his residence?” I asked, anger rising in my voice. “We all got the speech about duty first and all that shit, but he went home to sit it out there?”
“So it would seem. I would have thought he would have been here or at the mobile command post.”
I didn’t want to say it aloud, but I wasn’t planning on rescuing someone that selfish. Someone who would order us to put our asses on the line and put the department before ourselves, then run home and do exactly the opposite. Well, I guess rank hath its privileges.
“Where does he live?” I asked, more out of curiosity than anything else.
“He has a house in the Ravenwood subdivision,” said the L.T.
“Ravenwood,” I said, surprised. “How does he afford that on a LEO’s salary? I don’t make enough to afford a mailbox in Ravenwood.”
“I never asked, but I understand it’s a really nice house.”
“I’m sure it is,” I said, a little heatedly. “A cheap house there costs six times what mine did.”
The Lieutenant continued to consult the clipboard, while I steamed about that information. Rank definitely has its privileges, I guess.
“Sergeant O’toole checked in yesterday. He said he was awaiting a rescue on the roof of a jewelry store at Battlefield and US 65.”
“Did he have anyone else with him?”
“No, I believe he said he was alone,” replied the L.T.
“Wasn’t he assigned with six other officers and some National Guardsmen to close US 65 at US 60?”
“Yes, I believe that was his assignment,” said the L.T. “He was in charge of that detail.”
“Why doesn’t it surprise me at all that he got his entire team wiped out?” I said, acidly. “O’toole is the perfect name for that jackass. He’s a tool, alright. I’m sure it’s no coincidence that he survived and no one else did.”
The Lieutenant didn’t comment on that. He didn’t have to. O’toole was a joke. No one in the department respected him, as far as I knew. But that was ok. The Tool loved himself more than enough for anyone. I really didn’t want to rescue him. I would, but I didn’t want to. I’m sure he’d have a grand story on how his team was wiped out, yet he managed to fight his way clear with nothing but a combat knife and a hub-cap, or some-such nonsense. I’m sure the truth was far more likely that he ran as soon as they got hit. He probably even used his team as a distraction to get away.
“I’ll file that one away,” I said. “Anyone else?”
“Four officers were at the Airport, helping to cover the Evac-center,” said the L.T.
I figured that they were all dead. I knew what the Army had done to the people at the Evac-center. I’m sure that the officers weren’t spared. I decided that I’d better tell the L.T. that story.
“Sir,” I said. “You might want to sit down for this.”
I spent the next several minutes telling the L.T. about the Colonel at the Catholic Church. He took the news of the containment with grim stoicism. When I finished telling my story, he sat back in his chair and stared into his coffee cup. I could tell by the look on his face that it had a profound effect on him. We’d spent years dealing with inmates who had killed people, but this Colonel had killed hundreds. Murdered them, really. That was something more heinous than any of our experiences had prepared us for. After a long moment, he spoke up.
“You’re sure of this?” he said, at last.
“Yeah, I am. I mean, he didn’t outright admit it, but he didn’t deny it. All he said was that this was a Containment zone.”
“I see,” said the L.T. “Then I think we can safely assume that the officers at the Evac-site have either been conscripted back into the military or are dead.”
“You’re probably right, sir.”
“But, that still leaves several other officers trapped and unable to communicate. Or they’ve been overrun.”
“Who’s the closest?”
“That would be Kubichek and Sullivan,” he said. “They’re in a lawyer’s office on Glenstone. I believe they said it was at Elm and Glenstone.”
I knew both of them. They were both on C-shift. Kubichek was an average looking guy, about medium height and medium weight. But he was a fourth degree black belt in Jujitsu. Sullivan was very pretty, but tall for a woman. She stood almost six feet two inches tall. She also grew up hunting deer and turkey with her four brothers. She was an excellent shot with pretty much any firearm you wanted to give her. We needed both of them.
“I know the place. I’ve seen it a few times, driving by,” I said. “So long as the place isn’t crawling with zombies, I should be able to get to them with the Humvee.
Ragnarok Rising: The Awakening (Book One of The Ragnarok Rising Saga) Page 35