“Castle? What do you mean? It’s a building.”
“Not for them,” Cutter said. He lifted his binocular and peered at the maze of buildings and tarmac not too distant. Not distant enough. “Believe me…it’s going to be their castle.”
“Like…like a king’s castle?”
At that, Jean put her hand on the head of her adopted son. “Yes. That’s right. Like kings.”
“Tyrants, you mean,” Ron said.
And they were bringing all sorts of problems already, he could see.
“They’re just diverting the deaders,” Jean said. “All of that noise and activity is bringing them in like flies, and all they’re doing is pushing them aside. They have the firepower to wipe them out and they’re not doing it. What’s wrong with them?”
The infestation was getting worse, it was true. All along the western line the dead things were marching toward the city. In the night, they were attracted by the bright lights that now gleamed from Douglas Airport. And in the day, the sound of engines and motors and the construction of berms and barriers brought them even closer.
“They don’t care about us.” Cutter glared at them. “Not really. They’ll have a purpose for us in the long run, but for now they don’t give a damn about what this is doing to our situation.”
“Why is Dale helping them?”
He turned to her. “He’s one of them.”
NEXT
Ron was on the street again.
More and more of the dead were creeping into the city center, but people had been able to keep them suppressed. There had been organized groups venturing out and neutralizing the things in an organized fashion, and loners like Cutter had also been doing their parts to take the things out wherever they detected them.
Now Ron was on just such a mission to search the vicinity around his building. Earlier he had seen one of the Colonel’s motorized crews moving around the streets, looking to score points, the flatbed they were using already piled with rotting corpses that no longer moved or twitched. Ron had taken that as his own cue to venture out and see that at least the land in his own immediate vicinity was clear and safe. They needed their avenues to their vehicle clear and easy if they had to get clear of the city in a hurry.
So far, Ron had seen nothing he needed to shoot. There had been some surprising activity—some people coming out of their homes and shelters and walking down the street. Most were strangers to him, but some were people he had come to recognize as Dale had seen his plans of re-colonizing the city begin to bear real fruit. Cutter had almost begun to relax a little before hearing something coming from the next street. It was a sound that he’d not heard in almost a year, but which he had not forgotten and would not forget.
Feeling his heart freeze, he still had to see, to make sure of his deep fear. Steadily, he walked toward the corner where the Trust Tower loomed over everything and turned to the right, where the sun had risen and was shining like brilliant gold rays onto everything.
All it took was a single glance to know what they were.
Cutter stopped in his tracks and looked down the avenue, counting silently. Automatically, he did a mental accounting of what he was wearing and which of his weapons he’d brought along. Unlike so many others he had not given up his makeshift armor, nor had he given way to moving around the city without his guns. And he had seen others walking the streets without even a bludgeon to protect them. So many had grown complacent that they were beginning to think the danger was past, that the dead were no longer a grave threat to the city.
All they had to do was to see what he was seeing and whatever that sense of security they had all felt would have been proven to be nothing more than a bad idea.
The dead were coming. Not just in numbers, but in vast hoards.
He didn’t bother to count, but knew at a glance that there were scores of them. And when you could see that many, there was good reason to conclude that hundreds were around.
“They’re coming from the countryside,” Ron said.
A few other people had been going about their ways on the street and their gazes, too, had been drawn to the irregular movement of the things that were heading their way. Apparently there had been no others closer to the edge of town to see them approaching, and so no warning had been given. Or, quite possibly, the people who had first encountered them had been taken out before they could sound an alarm of any type. If there had been screams, they had been snuffed out before others could hear them.
.45 pistol. Hammer. 30.06. 100 rounds, all told. These were the terms foremost in Ron’s mind. Next, he tried to recall where Jean and Oliver said they would be. They had all decided to go scrounging for supplies that morning and each had gone in separate directions with specific goals in mind. If the others had made the same progress Ron had made, then each of them were more than two miles from home. There was almost no possibility he could find either of them and get back before this herd of the dead came staggering into city center.
Maybe it wasn’t as bad as it looked. The hope came to him as he watched the figures advancing stiffly, implacably. It had been so long since he’d seen this many of the damned things that he realized that the sight had shocked him. Something like nausea scratched at his gut.
He began counting the ones directly in front of him, and as he got to twenty-five he not only realized the situation was a bad one, but that it might be worse than he could imagine. His hand going for his rifle, he took it from his shoulder and peered down the barrel, using the scope to take a look northward. As soon as his eye met the lenspiece, he saw a dozen new deaders rounding the nearest corner, their pale eyes staring hatred, lips drawn back to reveal teeth prepared for ripping. They were hungry.
As he stood, deciding his next move, someone came running down the street, a young man of no more than twenty years, his black hair streaming behind him in the cold air. The guy raced right past Ron and did not stop, did not even pause as he went dashing madly down the street, headed for city center. At least there was nothing to block the fellow’s way. The street had been completely cleared of the wrecks and debris that had cluttered it. The Colonel and his men had bulldozed the stuff away, hauled it all onto empty lots or dumped it at the ends of streets they weren’t planning to use. Now the roads were almost the way they’d been that last time civilization had been intact and things like road maintenance was something other than fantasy.
Turning to watch the other person, Ron was staggered to see that there were dead coming from that direction, too!
“Watch out!” he yelled. His warning was heard and the man skidded to a halt just as a pair of zombies crept out from a darkened alley, their hands clawing at the youth who was well out of reach because of Ron’s call.
At first Ron was relieved to see that the man was armed, a 9mm pistol suddenly in his bare right hand. But he knew what would happen should the guy start firing. The shamblers would come from everywhere, and they’d move at a much faster pace, aroused by the sound of gunfire. To one of the dead, the report of a discharged firearm was almost like a dinner bell. They would come from everywhere at once, zeroing in on the thing they wanted most of all.
And, of course, before he could ask the young man to hold his fire, the gun went off.
Two shots pierced the relative silence, precisely. A Glock, Ron thought, recognizing the sound. At least the man could shoot, the tops of the skulls of the nearest pair of deaders turning into bloody fragments. The duo went down in a heap of desiccated flesh and tattered fabric. But, as always, there were more moving up to take their places.
They were new dead, Ron saw. These were zombies from the wilderness. The creatures had not been witness to the constant withering fire of the citizens of Charlotte. Colonel Dale and his army had never blasted these things, teaching the survivors that they were the ones who would be going down for the count, seeing their fellow monsters cease to exist in explosions of lead and brain matter. All they knew was that urge to gnaw living flesh. If there wa
s fear in their rot-eaten brains at all, that fear was vague and forgotten and had never been rekindled in them.
Most of his attention drawn by the escaping man, Cutter almost failed to see that three zombies had staggered to within a dozen feet of his position, coming out into the sunlight from a dark and bare walkway that he had thought led only to a loading dock. Now, though, he surmised that the concrete path between the buildings either went all the way through the block to the next street, or that the zombies had been filtering into the city for many hours and had already found places to wait in hiding.
One of the things groaned, its voice the dead’s equivalent of a curse. He hated the sound and it brought back the loathing he had felt for the damned things before the Colonel’s plans had given them all a sense of security and normalcy. “To Hell with it,” he said, his jaw set and his teeth grinding.
The .45 bucked in his gloved hand. The zombie that had uttered the sound went away in a shower of atomized flesh, its already-ruined face vanishing as a vast flower opened gory petals across the space that had been its skull.
Another of the deaders was right behind it, filling the space almost instantly. This was like the worst of times, a return to the days when the living corpses had filled the city and made it their own, when the simplest task of moving and scouting was a dangerous undertaking. Ron’s thoughts kept going to Jean and Oliver, then back to his own situation. He had to keep telling himself that if he didn’t concentrate on the here and now then the welfare of his family wouldn’t matter at all. Because if he didn’t worry about himself, he’d die.
Ron heard someone screaming for help. He risked a glance in that direction and saw the man who had passed him earlier was in a bad situation, surrounded by the lurking mass of hungry monsters that now poured out of one of the partially blocked alleys. “Damn,” he said, knowing that he had to try to save the guy.
There were two zombies directly between himself and the trapped stranger, so there was nothing to do but go through them. Ron fired the .45 and the bullet plowed through the head of the nearest of the pair. But he knew that he couldn’t just shoot his way through the mass; there were far too many of them to take out that way. Eventually he’d run out of ammunition and that was a situation he didn’t want to face--not ever.
Rushing toward the second of the two, he brought his boot down on the side of its bare leg, aiming for the outside of the knee. There was a snapping sound and the leg bent inward, toppling the semi-naked thing. It fell to the left and sprawled on the street, scrabbling for some way to right itself. They couldn’t feel pain, but with a shattered leg there was no way it was going to stand upright again. Cutter left it clawing at the asphalt as he pushed forward.
“This way!” he screamed at the man with the Glock. “Don’t try to go north!” he yelled. “This way!”
There was just a second’s hesitation as the man paused, trying to decide whether or not to heed Ron’s advice.
But that was all the time the zombies needed to bridge the small gap behind the man. Ron was not able to close his eyes as the mob descended on the unfortunate soul and bore him to the ground.
“Just like old times,” Ron whispered. There was a hint of panic in his mind and he fought hard to contain it as the monsters around him suddenly lost interest in him and concentrated on the meal that screamed in the boiling center of the mass of killers in the street.
Turning his back on the action of tearing arms and bloody mass, he trotted easily away. He could make it back to his home with no trouble, he figured. And if something truly did rise up to block his way, there were any number of good places where he could retreat if he had to find refuge. Or the Colonel’s people would certainly emerge from their fortresses to kill back this resurgent plague. As he dodged from point to point along the recently cleared thoroughfare, he kept expecting to hear the approaching march of Dale’s cadre or the orchestrated precision of their rifles. But there was only the sound of his footsteps and the occasional groan of the living dead.
He had to head toward home and find his family. It took all of his will power not to go sprinting down the street, so he moved as quickly as he could at a pace that would not leave him winded and vulnerable if he found he needed all the strength he could muster. The dead were appearing wherever he looked. They were stumbling and crawling and walking in every direction he could see.
It was possible he wouldn’t be able to hunt for Jean and Oliver. Maybe all he’d be able to do would be to make it back to his own home and hole up until…
The sound of an engine was building in the distance. It was coming from south of him, getting closer. A few shamblers had appeared from a nearby side street and had spotted him, in that strange way that they had of picking out the living from everything else. Of all the things about them, this was the one trait that Ron had never been able to understand. How did they do it?
He had already picked out a position of defense and drew his pistol. The damned weapon would make an awful lot of noise and bring others in quick order, but it was the only thing he could do for this situation. With the pistol gripped in his hand, he turned to measure his range and his options.
And suddenly the distant groan of that gas engine became a roar. An armored Humvee was suddenly raging down the avenue, directly toward him, swerving now and again to crush the odd zombie that got anywhere close to its advance. The vehicle was headed for Ron. He holstered his pistol and waited.
The thing screeched to halt beside him, its armored driver’s side door swinging wide.
“Get in,” the voice came to him. Colonel Dale. And inside, with one of Dale’s soldiers—Jean and Oliver.
Ron leaped inside, throwing himself in. He briefly embraced his family, but resisted the urge to kiss their faces. He did not want these others whom he did not trust to understand the depth of his feelings for them. They might, he knew, use that against him at some point.
“Can you take us home?” he asked.
The Hummer leaped forward, crushing two anxious dead things under its treads. The engine growled and rumbled.
“No,” Colonel Dale told him. “No, I cannot.”
NEXT
The Humvee sped down the avenue. The zombies were there in large numbers, creeping and stalking, searching for victims. Occasionally the driver ran one down, but generally he chose to avoid them. Cutter had seen large vehicles stopped cold, their engines fouled with blood and guts, tires and axles jammed with bone and flesh. Ron said nothing and just sat back, his arms finding his family and gripping them as the vehicle moved with all haste.
In less than five minutes, they were pulling into the alleyway to the north of Trust Tower. It was clear of any movement, but there were forms lying wet and oozing on the asphalt: deaders recently shot down and left in the shadows, their brains decorating the surrounding surfaces in black and red. They slowed and Cutter saw two men standing in the alley, heavily armed, guns at the ready but nothing on which to fire. The Hummer slowed to a crawl as the soldiers knelt and quickly pulled a winged door aside, revealing a ramp leading down. They drove into it and the soldiers followed, closing the doors behind them and locking it tight.
They were in a lower level loading dock. When the assault vehicle came to a complete stop, the Colonel and his driver got out. Cutter and his family followed. The two soldiers who had opened the way for them trotted in behind them.
“Where to now?” Ron asked.
“The usual,” Dale told him. “Up where the command center is. We’ve all been there.” He spent a moment to look down and meet Oliver’s eyes, smiling. “Don’t worry,” he told the boy. “We’re going to help everyone.”
They all ascended a set of bare concrete steps, passed through a steel door and went directly to an elevator. Dale had to punch in a code, but he made no effort to hide the secret of it. “Four-three-two-one,” he said, his back to them all. “It’s just to lower the odds of some dead thing accidentally getting on board, should one find its way in the building
here.”
In silence, the seven rode the elevator up to the heights, the contraption operating smoothly and flawlessly. Quickly, they were where they needed to be and the doors slide aside.
Jean was always nervous when any door opened. Even if she was in control of it. Here, now, with no say in how they should proceed, she was even more ill at ease. This was not familiar territory to her. There was no way for her to know what would be there when those doors slid aside. Her hand was on her pistol, and a sigh of relief sounded out of her chest when nothing but sunlight and empty, quiet hallway greeted them.
“By the way, Colonel, thanks for bringing my family to me.” Ron followed the quickly striding officer down the hall. He knew where they were going.
“That’s quite all right,” he said. “We found them and decided to bring them along. Safer here than anywhere else just now.”
They all had to practically jog to keep up with Dale’s long strides. The building was quiet except for the low purr of the vast ventilation system that alternately cooled and heated the place and kept it comfortable and dry. One never broke a sweat in this place.
Ron held back a little, not quite knowing if they would be automatically welcomed into the room where previously only Dale and the dead Lieber had held court. But the Colonel said nothing at all as he marched in and went directly to one of the keyboards and flat screens. Within a minute, he had set up communications with others and they were all peering at screens, cameras aimed and providing moving images of locations all around the city.
Despite what he’d just seen on the streets, Ron could not suppress a gasp of shock.
He hadn’t foreseen the sheer volume that had appeared from the wilderness like a great, dark wave. The cameras revealed pure horror. They came swarming out of the overgrown woodlands that surrounded the city in numbers that he had not imagined.
The Coalition: Part III 2% Solution Of The Dead (COALITON OF THE LIVING Book 3) Page 9