by W. J. Lundy
He strained, sitting up from his spot against the far wall. He could see Captain Spencer and his two shooters farther up the roof, focusing on the collapsed enclosure. There was plenty of noise coming from below, and they knew the infected were trying to break through. Spencer seemed to feel his stare, and the man looked back at him. Concern showed on his face as he shook his head. Sean pushed himself to his feet, knowing sleep wouldn’t be coming to him anyway.
Moving toward the fighting position, Spencer stood to meet him. The captain was holding the radio in his hand. He looked at Sean and again shook his head. “Nothing. I power this on at ten minutes to six, morning and night, religiously. Every time, I get an operator before five minutes to the hour.” Spencer rolled his wrist to look at his watch. “It’s five after.”
“Is there anyone else? You have to have other protocols for emergencies.”
Spencer nodded. “We have some open command nets. Nobody uses them though; they’re on their own encrypted net and only for inside traffic, like truck drivers, supply drops… stuff like that. Most guys don’t even carry the freqs in the field.”
“Well, unless you have a better idea, you should start scanning.”
“Yeah,” Spencer said. He pulled a plastic map book from a sleeve pocket and flipped it over. He looked at a series of numbers written in blue pen on the back of a yellow scrap of paper. He slowly punched in the encryption key, and he hit a scan button. The backlit display began to scroll frequencies. The first it stopped on was static, so he pressed a key to continue. The scrolling stopped at two more with static before the dial halted on the voices of screaming men and automatic weapons’ fire—the unmistakable sounds of desperate men pleading for help as they were overrun. The two young soldiers’ heads spun back in his direction. They’d all heard it before. Spencer’s arm went rigid as if he was going to toss the radio like a burning log.
“What is that?” Sean said, pointing at the number on the dial. Spencer handed the radio to Sean then tore open the map case and dug at the scraps of paper. He found one with an extensive list of frequencies and call signs. He froze, comparing the number to the back lit display and then back at the paper. He took a step back and dropped to the ground with his arm outstretched, holding the handwritten page. “It’s Rapture,” Spencer said.
Sean moved closer and took the paper, comparing the number on the page to the radio and confirming the call sign Rapture. “What is it?” Sean asked. “Who is Rapture?”
“It’s the Battalion TOC at the railhead,” one of the soldiers said.
Sean looked at the young man and could see the name Adams written on his right chest. Sean looked from the young soldier and back to Spencer. “What’s your call sign?” Sean said.
Spencer dropped his head and looked at his boots. “I don’t have one for talking to the Tactical Operations Center.”
“Give me a fucking name!” Sean shouted, wanting to reach forward and slap the officer.
“They call us Recon. The Straight Six,” Adams said, turning his shoulder and pointing at a patch on his sleeve with a dark six and an arrow cutting through it.”
Sean nodded and keyed the radio, saying, “Any Rapture element, this is Straight Six.” When he lifted his finger, he received nothing but screams in response. “Any Rapture element, this is Straight Six.” Sean held the radio, listening to the screams. He took it and placed it on an empty ammo crate to his right with it pointed in Spencer’s direction. The captain still had his head down, his hand shaking as the screams of his battalion poured over the open channel.
Sean looked back to the young soldier. “Adams, is it?”
“Yes, sir,” the boy said back. “Corporal Bill Adams; this is PFC Doug Jones.”
“Not a sir,” Sean said.
“Sorry, Sergeant.”
Sean grinned, trying to lighten the mood. “I’m not a sorry sergeant either. If you must, you can call me Chief, but I prefer Sean.”
This time the boy just nodded.
Sean pointed to Spencer, who still had his head down. “Your captain here is rebooting. While that happens, I have a few questions to ask.”
“Yes, sir—er—I mean Chief Sean.”
Smiling, Sean moved closer and put a hand on the corporal’s shoulder. “This battalion is at the railhead. How far away is that?”
Billy looked up like the answer was written in the clouds. “Fifty miles, maybe. Hard to estimate, but it’s at least a half day’s drive.”
“Okay, and how many troops there?”
Billy looked at Sean suspiciously.
“I know you don’t know me, and you aren’t supposed to give that kind of info to strangers, but if we want to stay alive, I need to know.”
Billy looked to his captain who now had his knees drawn into his chest, his head still down. “Bout a hundred and fifty, not counting the soldiers that are garrisoned there. With them, maybe two hundred, tops.”
A long scream came from the radio before it stopped suddenly, replaced by the howls and moans of the infected. Sean lifted the radio and looked at it, knowing it was hot mic’d in some dead man’s grip. He found the knob and powered it off.
He looked back at Billy. “Where are you from, Billy?”
“Pittsburg.”
Sean moved closer and looked the man in the eye. “Billy, what are you doing out here?”
The young soldier again looked to his leader for support but, getting none, looked back at Sean. “Texas is invading, and we got to stop them.”
Sean grimaced and exhaled. “I see.” He rubbed his hand through his hair and walked closer to the barricade before turning to look back at the two soldiers. “Texas isn’t invading.”
“They are,” Billy said. “We shot at one of their scout teams yesterday—two vehicles and a bunch of guys.”
Sean slowly shook his head. “That was me and my guys,” Sean said.
Billy looked at him, his eyes going wide as he scanned the rest of the men on the roof… Henry sitting against the wall smoking a pipe, the two young Baker boys asleep under a flannel blanket, and Riley, who was fishing apples from a mason jar. “Why—but ’cept for you, these aren’t soldiers at all.”
Sean touched his finger to his temple. “Now you are starting to get it. And now I’m going to tell you why Texas isn’t invading.”
“You are?”
Sean grinned and dipped his chin. “They aren’t invading because of this,” he said, pointing toward the enclosure. “And because of this,” he said, holding up the radio. “Texas has known that the infected were massing and coming in from the big cities. They’ve been pulling back and trying to fortify their lines while all you assholes do is make noise and draw more and more of them in.”
“We didn’t know,” Spencer gasped, finally looking up from his stupor.
Sean glared. “You had to have known something, if that was really you shooting at us by the railroad crossing. You were surrounded by a mass. You didn’t notice the numbers of infected growing? The number of large groups? The way they were becoming more aggressive?”
“Was a couple hundred,” Spencer said, just above a whisper. “We attract groups like that to block roads all the time. It’s not a big deal.”
“You stirred them up; you brought this here,” Sean said. “Now your battalion is dead, and we’re trapped.” He wanted to pull his pistol and shoot the man dead, but he looked at the two young soldiers and knew he would need them all if they were going to live out the day. He walked to the roofline and looked out. He knew Brooks was somewhere making a plan to get them out. “We’re getting off this roof. When we do, we need a place to go. Give me a suggestion.”
Sean turned to the young soldiers, who returned puzzled stares.
“Toledo,” Spencer mumbled. “Toledo will be there. It’s sturdy, lots of security; it’ll still be there.”
“Toledo?” Sean asked. “Where?”
“No,” Spencer said, shaking his head. He pushed a fist to the roof and pushed himself
to his feet. “No, I’ll show you, but you have to get my men there. We all go.”
“That was the plan,” Sean said.
The splitting and cracking of wooden beams echoed from the enclosure. The roof buckled and reverberated. A blast of dust and smoke erupted as what was left of the rooftop building dropped into the floor below it. Howls filled the air, and the first hand of an infected grabbed the edge of the hole and began to pull itself up. Sean leveled his rifle and pulled the trigger. Without being given instructions, Adams and Jones were online with him, taking out targets of their own. Soon, Henry and the others were all flanking the hole and firing into the void.
They were backing up as the hole filled with the dead. Sean reloaded and continued firing. In his peripheral vision, he saw a bright fire in the distance. He took his finger off the trigger and stepped back from the hole. A cloud of black smoke was billowing through the tall trees. He moved to the building’s edge as a large explosion went off near the fire and a trio of flares flew in the air.
Sean smiled. “Brooks.”
Looking down, he could see that the infected on the ground were turning and running toward the distant inferno. Even those fighting to get to the roof had dropped in intensity.
Sean moved back to the troops, grabbed Spencer by the arm, and chopped an imaginary line. “Get on line and fall back to the roof’s edge,” he shouted. Sean pointed to ropes and guidelines that were tied together, holding down solar panels. “Get those ropes linked together and be ready to drop down.”
Spencer looked at him, confused. Sean pointed to the fire on the horizon. “I got transportation inbound. We need to be ready when it gets here.”
Chapter 28
Toledo City Limits, The Dead Lands
The steel pole building was long and wide, filled with empty boats wrapped in plastic and tarps and now a rusted black MRAP. Brad walked from the back of the building to the front, where the rest of the crew had made themselves comfortable up on the deck of a large trailered cabin cruiser. Brad moved around to the back and pulled himself up on a ladder and climbed to the deck of the boat. From the high vantage point, he could see the long rows of plastic-wrapped boats.
Probably more than twenty boats of all types, even though the building could hold three times as many. The fall happened in the late summer, so the place probably wasn’t close to capacity yet, with people trying to get every drop out of the Midwest summer before storing their pleasure boats for the winter. He could hear the men talking up in the pilot house, and Brad moved up a narrow ladder to join them. In the pilot house, he saw Chelsea sitting in the captain’s chair eating an MRE.
“Seriously?” Brad said, pointing at the brown package. “Even two years after the end of the world, I have to be tortured with that shit?”
Chelsea grinned and tossed him a package. He caught it and looked at the black writing. “Potatoes with ham; nasty. Where the hell did you find this stuff?”
She laughed and pointed to a bright-yellow Nautica bag on the deck. “There was a bag of ’em down in a storage locker. Bunch of survival stuff, first aid kit—probably gear for a lifeboat.”
Brad shrugged. “Yeah, probably.” He moved and dropped into a seat next to her and opened the package, dumping the contents onto the table and fishing out the entrée. He ripped the top off then scrunched his face in disgust. “With all the scientists they had working on this stuff, you’d think they could have found a way to get rid of the ass smell.”
“Just eat your breakfast, Brad,” Chelsea said.
He dipped the spoon in and looked through the windshield to the two men out on the bow. They held binoculars and were looking through the skylight toward the distant cooling towers of the nuke plant.
“Is it going to work?” Chelsea asked.
Brad turned his head. He could see the worry in her eyes, even though she was trying to hide it.
He swallowed down the mixture of greasy clumped potatoes and pork and blinked his eyes, pretending to choke down the food. He smiled at her. “Yes, it’s going to work. It has to.”
She forced a smile. “You remember that boat back in the gulf?”
“How could I forget it?” Brad said, thinking of what the military attack brought and how they sailed from the oil platform toward Oman.
“You ever wonder what would have happened if we’d just stayed on it? Found a home of our own? Every place in the world couldn’t have been scarred by this disease. There must have been something out there; an island, a remote beach… something.”
“I think about it all the time,” he said. Brad sipped from a water bottle, trying to wash out the taste of MRE pork. “But there’s no going back, Chelsea. Only forward.”
She frowned. “Sometimes I feel like going forward is going back.”
The bow access door opened and Gyles stepped in, carrying his SCAR. Luke was beside him with an olive painted Remington Model 700. Luke looked at them and said, “It’s time.”
Sighing, Brad said okay and put the bottle back in his rucksack. He stood and moved closer to Chelsea then looked down at her. “If you really aren’t sure, we can walk away. I’ll leave with you right now. I’ll go wherever you want.”
Her face turned red. He thought she was about to go off but, instead, she reached out and hugged his chest. She pushed back and looked him in the eyes. “Can I have a rain check?”
He pursed his lips and forced a smile, nodding. “Just let me know.” Brad held in place, holding her as he watched the other two drop down the ladder and off the trailered boat. He put his hand on the back of her neck. “Let’s go.”
They dropped to the ground and strapped on their packs before checking their rifles. Brad moved to the tall double doors that were rust-locked into an open state. They could see out into the morning sky, blue with a few white clouds floating past, the sun just breaking the horizon. Two tall cooling towers of the nuclear plant sat in a wide field across from them. The compound was lined by double-wire fences, and in other places, hasty makeshift barriers dotted the scene.
Luke stepped through the door and pointed across the uncut field to a blacktop road. “That leads around and right to the front gate. I’ve spotted a half dozen watch towers on the wall. We figure it’s best to just walk right up to the gate and knock on the door. Sneaking up kind of goes against us delivering a friendly message.”
Brad looked at Chelsea, who dipped her chin slightly as she leaned in close. “Okay, lead the way,” he said.
The road toward the power plant sitting on the banks of Lake Erie was clear. Multiple large buildings were backdropped by two wall cooling towers, the tower farther north emitting a steady cloud of steam. The compound was lined with several rows of fencing. There, beyond the fencing, were wide fields of cut grass. Brad let his eyes scan the terrain. “Guess nobody wants to live next door to a nuclear reactor.”
Gyles grinned. “At least not before, anyway. Now people want to live in one.”
“Guess the risk of being eaten outweighs the risk of cancer.”
Gyles pointed ahead on the road to a long concrete building. It gave the appearance of an administration office. Or at least it would have before the windows were boarded over and the sides lined with several layers of fencing. Even though the compound was set back from the perimeter road, the fencing extended away from the building. As they got closer, they could see that it was actually two buildings, not one. About three quarters down, a section of the building was scarred with blackened craters and crumbling concrete. Next to it was an access road and a tall, steel gate with a pair of guard towers on either side. The men in the towers were already looking their way.
“That’s where I crashed the ambulance.” He laughed. “That building took an entire can of forty mike-mike. I’m surprised they fixed it up.”
As they walked closer, they heard no alarms, but more men entered towers and other heads popped in a gap between the fences and on the roof of the structure. “You sure about going in there? They might sti
ll be holding a grudge,” Chelsea said.
Luke looked at a gap between the fences, where two men with carbines at the low ready were watching them. “Change of management,” he said. “You notice something about the guards here that you didn’t down in West Virginia?”
“Camo,” Brad said without looking directly at the guards.
“It’s more than camo,” Luke answered. “They’re uniforms. Military uniforms. These guys think of themselves as regular Army. These aren’t the raiders we’ve been scrapping with.”
“Wait…” Chelsea said. “The government is here?”
Luke shook his head. “Their version of it. Same as we have a version of ours. Those other people—from what I can make out from scout reports—are freelancers, scumbags and opportunists doing dirty work for their republic. The closer we get to the Republic lines, the more squared away they are.”
“Interesting time to share that with us,” Brad said.
“I can’t teach you everything, son. If you wanted to know what’s going on at home, you should have come back sooner,” Luke said. “It makes no difference to us… just know that these guys think of themselves as legit, not criminals or outlaws.”
“Are we?” Chelsea asked. “Are we outlaws? We wear uniforms, but they look like shit.”
Luke turned his head and eyed her curiously. “You know… in their eyes, we just might be.”
They walked to where the access road began, and stopped. A big sign off to the left that had once read something about a nuclear power station had now been painted over. The words FOB Toledo, New Republic were stenciled onto it.
Brad pointed at the sign. “That new?”
Gyles nodded. “They’ve really moved in and taken ownership.”
They stood in a line, arm’s length apart, with their weapons slung. Gyles stood on one end next to Luke, with Brad on the other end next to Chelsea, closest to the right side of the access road. “Just hold here for a few,” Luke said.