They all peered in that direction, the building casting long shadows on the streets, making darker blots of the steady movements of the zombies. There was a vehicle driving toward them, moving down the center line of the avenue. It was a large pickup truck with a fenced bed reinforced with pipes and wire. Standing on each corner of the truck bed were men, each armed with a small-caliber rifle. As they eased toward them, the motor humming almost silently, the deaders turned toward the vehicle and began to converge on it.
“I don’t think these have been shot at,” Jean said. “Or chased down with fire.”
“I think you’re right,” Ron agreed with her. These deads acted like the ones of old, who didn’t hesitate to turn toward any potential victim and move implacably toward them. They’d obviously been out in the bush, or off in some isolated nearby town, wandering and killing, and waiting for opportunity.
Then there was the sound of gunfire. Not all at once, but each person firing independently, as if they were taking turns, knocking down targets at a fairground game. They were good shots, too. Not that it took the highest of skills to hit the zombies at middle ranges like that. Most of the men on board the truck only needed single shots to take down their targets. Only rarely did they waste more than one bullet on what they were aiming for.
The truck stopped for a few moments and the men discharged their weapons. Zombies fell. Then the truck’s motor would hum and the vehicle would move forward again, only half a block or so. Following that, it would come to a complete halt. The dead things were attracted to the sound of the guns and the sight of the moving truck and they would begin to close in. Guns would speak. Dead brains would splatter onto the pavement. And so it went until the truck was directly below them, the guns speaking sporadically until the street was finally cleared and nothing moved except for the men in the fine, modified truck with its purring V-8 motor.
The driver’s side door opened on the truck and somehow Cutter was not surprised to see Colonel Dale get out. The officer looked up the heights that separated them and waved.
“You guys wait here,” Ron said. “I’m going to let them in.”
*
At street level, Ron unlocked the door and stepped out. He could see the zombies lying in dark, stinking heaps up and down the street. He noticed three of them moving toward them from farther down the way, but he didn’t have to say anything before two of Dale’s men detached themselves from the perimeter they’d established to close the distance. Their guns snapped off a trio of shots and nothing moved again.
“I came straight away,” the Colonel said to Ron. “I knew you’d be concerned even before you realized the streets were getting full of deaders.”
“We were wondering,” Ron admitted. He didn’t ask the Colonel if he and the others wanted to come up to the roof, because they hadn’t asked and he knew they would if there had been a need.
“I knew the flights were going to begin coming, but I didn’t know they would be arriving so soon.” He paused, his head swiveling as he scanned the nearby buildings, looking for threats.
“Flights?”
“Yes,” the Colonel admitted. “There will be others. At least a dozen more before it’s done.”
“Before what is done?”
“We’ll get to that. Come to the compound this afternoon. For now, we have teams moving around the city taking out these zombies. It’s actually not as bad as I feared after all of the noise yesterday. But it’ll take a couple of hours, at least, before we take most of them out.”
“And we’ll just pop the others as they come? The stragglers?”
Dale nodded. “I’m afraid so, Ron. We’ll knock out the worst of the lot, and then we’ll all just have to keep on our toes until we can clear them all out again.”
Cutter sighed. “Okay,” he said. Peering east, he could see some more of the damned things crawling out of the side streets, rotting forms dark and ruined in the gaining light. “I won’t keep you, then.”
Dale turned and headed back to the truck. His men climbed back aboard and Ron noted how they each strapped themselves to the wire cage that rose to their ribs as they stood in the truck’s bed. “Let’s call in 3:30 this afternoon,” Dale said, and then the truck was moving off to find more targets.
Ron turned, locked the door behind him, and began to climb the steps back to his family. At the top of the stairs, he emerged from the doorway and paused just briefly to secure that lock also, walking slowly and casually across the roof where the door to the house was opened, Jean and Oliver watching him come close, their faces expressing curiosity.
*
To his north, other eyes peered at him as he went to tell his family what he knew. From a balcony on the southern side of the 33rd Floor of the Trust Tower, Stan was looking down. He drew in the cool air and expelled it, watching his breath float away on the breeze like gossamer. His soft programmer’s fingers seemed to massage the steel lines of his .50 caliber rifle, as if testing it to make sure that it was real and nearby. He could barely see the top of Cutter’ skull, his light brown hair lifting and falling in the same cool breezes that touched the madman.
As he had known they would do, they’d found and stolen his expensive elephant gun. Of course he’d only pretended to hide it, making sure that the Colonel’s pathetic cameras had spotted him in the act, as if he was just some idiot with no guile at all. But Lieber was a step ahead of them, and that’s the way it would remain.
After Dale had left, he’d retrieved his real weapon of choice. No one knew he had such a thing. A work of art that put the enormous elephant gun to shame. The weapon he really used to do the important work was a very special one. He wondered if there was even another one in the city. Sometimes he doubted it. His hands ran along the solid lines: a state of the art .50 caliber sniper rifle. It worked flawlessly, as the dumb brutes he liked to kill had discovered, the massive bullets punching through their stupid flesh. The kick was even minor, the recoil absorbed and stunted by ingenious design.
Stanley chuckled.
He realized that he could—barely possibly—get off a shot that would kill his rival. But he couldn’t be sure. The shell might tap the edge of one of the walls that partially blocked his view. Or it could hit one of the lines that created a kind of maze around the house of that artificial family. And if that happened, the bullet would disintegrate into harmless fragments or perhaps just bothersome shrapnel. Then Cutter would realize where the shot came from and he would take precautions.
Lieber sighed in frustration. Now was not time the time. He’d have to wait.
And, anyway, he’d want to be able to kill the boy along with the man so that he could have Jean all to himself.
Eventually, she would be his woman, his wife.
All it would take is a little more time.
NEXT
“No school today,” Ron told Oliver.
Although he tried to hide it, Ron could see a shadow of disappointment cloud the boy’s face. “That’s okay,” he said.
“I want you to stay here with Jean. There’s lots that needs to be done, and I have to go over to the hospital to speak with Colonel Dale. Apparently there are some changes coming.”
“No shit,” the boy said, uncovering a little of the person Ron had first found so alone and lost.
“We need some new shells for the Springfield,” he suggested. “You and Jean can melt some lead and re-load some cartridges. We’re running low on that caliber and I’ve got a feeling we’re going to need them. So dust off the tools and make us some ammo.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Oliver said cheerfully.
Then he turned to Jean where she was already retrieving a canister of natural gas that she would need to fire up the kiln to melt lead. “I’ll be back around six,” he told her. “You guys make us enough ammo to kill a small army. There are probably a hundred brass rounds polished and primed there in the corner.”
“I’m quite aware of that,” she told him, smiling.
; He just stopped what he was thinking about and looked at her as she stood before him, hefting the weight of the canister of propane. Her hair was draped over her left shoulder, like gold, no need for chemical fakery that wasn’t practical these days, anyway. And her eyes glittered, lashes as thick and long as any model’s had been before the catastrophe. And although the jeans on her legs and the flannel on her body were relatively loose, those folds of cloth could not hide the fact that her figure was flawless.
“You’re the most beautiful woman in the world,” he suddenly said, unable to avoid the truth that needed saying.
“And you’re the nicest man in town.” She grinned back at him. “So. Go on. Then you can hurry back and we can all count bullets together. How’s that sound?”
Ron laughed at her. “Sounds good to me,” he admitted. “I shall return.”
And he was off.
*
Ron hugged the buildings as soon as he hit the street. The corpses of the zombies put down by the teams the previous day had already been gathered and hauled away. He’d heard a large motor echoing as it cruised along. He hadn’t had to look to know that it was a large dump truck that the work teams had been using to haul debris from the city center. The workers had dumped most of the wood and metal trash along the roads leading into the areas cleared out by the controlled burns that had robbed him of some of his safe houses. From rooftops, those piles of wrecked cars and broken barricades looked like defensive berms. Cutter supposed the same had occurred to the Colonel who was directing the task.
Now, though, the work was to move rotting corpses. He stood and surveyed the skyline but didn’t spot any greasy streaks of smoke etching the blue. So no one was burning the bodies. Not yet, anyway. Maybe they were just dumping them in a big pit and covering them with a good layer of earth. Ron would find out, or he wouldn’t. It didn’t really matter.
When he got to the first intersection where he would have to turn southwest toward the hospital and its accompanying compound, he looked toward the Trust Tower. Cutter was thinking of the rifle he had found hidden in the floors above that Dale’s crazy hacker had used to shoot down the elephants and the family of that poor woman. He hoped that they had pulled his fangs, but the Colonel had insisted that Lieber not be deprived of all of his guns. For that reason, Ron made sure that he would keep himself from being an easy target for the creep.
“Just wait,” he muttered, staring up at the heights of the former financial center. “Your days are numbered.”
But the hacker was not up there, either hiding or watching. In fact he was less than a block distant, on the street. Lieber had his own plans for the immediate future, and he was putting in the final touches.
*
Along the way, Ron saw that the streets were not as filled with people as what had grown to be normal. There were no families, at all, and mainly adult males were out, obviously out to secure a town they had thought was relatively safe again. In fact, Cutter couldn’t recall the last time he’d heard about a zombie attacking and even injuring anyone, let alone killing a person.
It made him feel good that there were people out to keep the city cleared, but also more than a little nervous to know that he had to be on guard from trigger-happy people ready to pop the first thing they thought was a deader; whether it was a danger, or not.
As he walked the two miles that separated his place from the compound, he heard a few shots and actually saw one of the monsters go down as a young kid—a red-headed, lanky fellow no more than nineteen or twenty years old—dispatched the thing with one well-placed shot from a 9mm pistol. Ron was close enough to even see that the young man was firing a Beretta pistol. And in no time at all, two more men emerged to drag the wrecked, bloody thing away. And Cutter realized that the kid was not alone, and that he was part of a team. They probably even had a truck around where they could toss the diseased load, but Ron wasn’t there to help and he wasn’t there to watch how well-organized they were. He was on his way to find out what was going on.
And in less than ten more minutes he was there, standing in the Colonel’s now-familiar office while the halls were busy with flutter of people taking care of human business.
Someone shut the door and left the two men alone as the Colonel had a seat. He offered one to Ron. “Please,” he said, palm up, indicating that same, soft leather chair.
Ron sat.
“We could have talked about this yesterday, but we need to keep the streets clear and not let the situation get ahead of us. The territory around us is full of deaders. Probably more than a hundred thousand from what we’ve been able to see. And the activity out at the airport is just going to draw them in. Especially when more aircraft begin to arrive.”
“More? There are more coming? More than that Galaxy?”
“Well…you know what it is, then. Most everyone else just gaped at the thing as it cruised into town.”
“Yes,” Ron told him. “We used to see them coming in to land at the Warner Robins Air Force Base when I was a kid. They were kind of new back then.”
Dale nodded. “So. To answer your question, yes. There are going to be more aircraft coming in. At least two more C5-A jets, and a Dreamliner, a 737, a dozen F-16s, a Warthog, and probably two Mirage jets.”
“You’re serious?”
“Of course they won’t arrive all at once. This will be a bit of a task. The aircraft have to be stored and secured as they come in, and the whole job has to be handled carefully and efficiently. There’s also the logistics of moving all upkeep of these vehicles and quite a few people from Point A to Point B.”
Cutter leaned forward, feeling encumbered for the first time by the body armor and the weapons he had to carry. He looked down at his rifle, making sure the safety was on, and nudged it aside, sliding it across the neat, gray carpet. “Well, I know that ‘Point B’ is Charlotte. But what is ‘Point A’?”
Ron was glad when the Colonel did not hesitate. “That would be Houston, Texas,” he admitted.
“How many are coming? And who are they?” Cutter did not feel entirely good about this, and now he began to consider the mad chances the Colonel had taken to keep his crazed hacker at work in that vast tower so close to Ron’s own home.
“In total, probably something over twelve hundred people. I couldn’t tell you exactly because the number is fluid. It changes from week to week. Sometimes they pick up some people, and sometimes they lose a few.” He cleared his throat. “But the last time I heard something concrete, they had one thousand, two-hundred, and sixty-four people that they will need to transfer from Texas to North Carolina.”
Sighing, Ron considered what the Colonel was telling him. This was a lot to absorb. “If they can outfit even one Galaxy C-5A and keep it flying, why would they need to move their operations from Texas to North Carolina?”
“Good question,” came the answer. “As you know, our disturbed friend in the Trust Tower is doing very important work. And I’m going to tell you what it is.” He leaned into the desk, pressing his elbows onto the polished wood surface.
“Charlotte—and that bank tower—are unique. When everything finally came to pieces…when the systems of communication went down for good and everyone began to scatter and begin looking out for Number One, the dice rolled and came up a hard eight for Charlotte, North Carolina.
“Serendipity placed the only way to control worldwide records of every sort within the confines of the Trust Tower right over there on Tryon Street.” He nodded. “While every other similar place that we know of was burning to the ground or being dismantled by looters or wrecked by raving deaders or washed away by encroaching moisture…here everything was safe and sound.
“In that building are digitized records of just about every sort. Financial. Legal. Specific information delineating everything from international borders to scientific particulars on every matter one could name or conceive.
“Furthermore, because of those servers stacked up like giant tinker toys on those t
hree floors at the height of that skyscraper, and the satellite dishes that can be aimed independently at the heavens, it ended up being the last place we know of that can control and maintain that most precious of things, our Global Positioning System.”
“What?” Ron almost stood, but kept his position in the chair. “Are you saying that crazy Stanley Lieber is controlling the world’s GPS?”
“Ron. That man is not only maintaining the GPS, he has been responsible for keeping it operative. More than half of those satellites would long ago have drifted out of synchronous orbit and all of those devices would be worthless to us. We wouldn’t be able to use those little handheld navigators, and no one would be able to use the system to fly from Houston to Charlotte without doing so the old fashioned way, by sight and dead reckoning.”
“Jesus,” Ron said, almost at the level of a whisper.
“And, more than that, Ron.” Colonel Dale stood to make his point. “Because Mr. Lieber is so…unstable… and because we cannot depend upon his health or on any reliable way to treat his condition—he has been hard at work for months to create a program that will put those very important satellites into solid, sustainable orbits and to keep them there autonomously for several more years without any tinkering from anyone down here.”
“Shit.”
“Now you see why it has been so important to keep our wondrous hacker at work. And why I have had to…be more tolerant than I had wished to be regarding his past…actions.”
“Yeah,” Ron said. “I see. But I have to tell you, I was beginning to wonder.”
“As to when the serious business of the arrival of our new citizens will begin, all I can say is that it has already begun.” He nodded in the general direction of the airport far out of sight. “The people out there now, at Douglas International, they’ll be very busy for the time being. We won’t see any of them, I suspect. We got the runways in order for them to land the Galaxy, but they’ll have to clear more tarmac and prepare a number of hangers for all of the vehicles that will be coming after them.”
The Coalition: Part III 2% Solution Of The Dead (COALITON OF THE LIVING Book 3) Page 4