by Adair, Bobby
The wall was every color of post-industrial ugly with a wealth of rust spots where the parts had been tack-welded but not painted. Paint was a luxury. Pieces above overlapped pieces below—like shingles—leaving no apparent handholds. As much as the wall looked like a pile of junk at a glance, a second look revealed how formidable it was. No one would be scaling it without a rope. I suspected from the look of the pieces of cars and trucks incorporated into it, nothing short of an Abrams tank could knock it over or crash through it.
At odd intervals along the top edge of the rampart stood what appeared to be deer blinds. Inside some of them crouched men with rifles. The rifles had the now-familiar bulky suppressors on the ends of their barrels.
“You seeing what I’m seeing?” I asked.
“Yup,” said Murphy. “The Hillbillies made themselves a fort.”
“I wonder how they managed to get that built.” I looked up and down the length of the wall as it paralleled the street. Even through the night vision goggles, the sight was a familiar one. Four lanes of asphalt and concrete covered completely in the remnants of humans: clothes, shoes, bones, and bodies in various stages of rot. The carpet of the dead was not still. Among the corpses crawled rats, dogs, and even the brain-fried infected, so desperate for food that they were gnawing bits and bites of flesh off the decomposing bodies.
“They’ve been killing a lot of Whites down here,” said Murphy. “More than up at Mabry, I think.”
Pointing at all the pieces of clothing among the dead, I said, “I don’t think this wall was here when the naked horde came through town.”
Murphy shrugged and put on an innocent face. “Jealous?”
“What?” I shot him an angry look. “What does that mean?”
“These guys held out. We didn’t.”
Shaking my head, and recalling how easily the naked horde had knocked over the wall around Sarah Mansfield’s compound, I said, “You know as well as I do that if half a million naked Whites rolled up on this place, everyone inside would be dead now.”
“Whatever you need to tell yourself.”
I huffed and looked back at the wall.
Murphy said, “So, what’s the plan, Batman?”
Without looking away from the wall, I said, “I’m going in.”
“Couldn’t you think of something stupider than that?”
“Sarcasm?” I asked.
Murphy shrugged. “It works.”
“I’m not going to walk up to the door and announce myself.”
“Good,” Murphy chuckled. “Because you never know, when you’re dealing with the Valiant Null Spot.”
Ignore him. Ignore him.
Peering at the dark deer blinds atop their flimsy metal-pole frames, I said, “That one is empty. I’ll bet they don’t have enough guards for all of them.”
“Or they’re asleep,” Murphy said, looking around behind us. “Or having dinner. Or maybe that guard is on the other side of the wall taking a dump.”
“More than just that one is empty,” I said. “Besides, if they had enough guys, then they’d have enough guys for the night shift. All of those guard towers would be full.”
“Okay, Sherlock,” said Murphy, “if I say you’re right, will you get on with telling me your plan?”
Chapter 26
Diversion, is it the oldest trick in the book?
Maybe.
Under normal circumstances—
Who am I fooling? What do I know about “normal circumstances” with respect to military operations?
Nothing.
I guess where I’m going with my line of thought is this: I think people with military training expect diversions when they think an attack is imminent. Why? Because they work. The diversion worked on Monk’s Island. That’s why we used one there to rescue—or failed to rescue—those people from Jay Booth and his crazy fucks.
My thoughts about getting into the Capitol grounds undetected depended on a diversion I thought should work for one basic reason. The mix of military men—and whatever the rest of them were—didn’t expect an assault from an intelligent, organized enemy. They expected halfwit Whites. By the evidence of all the rotting corpses outside their walls, they were adept at handling those. Perhaps they didn’t even see Whites as a threat anymore, just a nuisance.
They must never have encountered the naked horde.
Anyway, that was the basis for my reasoning as I snuck toward the grounds of the Governor’s Mansion, which covered a city block adjacent to the southwest corner of the Capitol grounds.
At the intersection on the southwest corner of the mansion, an area where the guards in the deer blinds wouldn’t be able to see me, traffic barricades, burned out vehicles, bones, and spent brass bullet casings were everywhere. Rifles and pistols lay rusting on what remained of corpses under shreds of uniforms. As I crossed the intersection, I realized our days of scavenging weapons out in the open were over. Only those guns protected indoors were likely to be operable.
The fence along two sides of the mansion had been almost completely knocked over, and weeds had grown waist high through the wrought iron. Highway patrol cars were parked at odd angles on the formerly lush grass. The governor had clearly tried to make his stand in the mansion with as many state police as he thought necessary. Or maybe just all the ones he could gather.
Too bad for him.
Unless he’d fled out the back door when the mob of Whites that knocked down the fence showed up, he was likely dead for his bravado and so were all the policemen who’d died protecting him.
Under the dark night shade of the trees, I reached the wall of the two-story, plantation-style mansion and stopped to listen. Only birds in the trees and the breeze through the leaves made any sound.
Having taken a tour of the Governor’s Mansion with one of my freshman high school classes—in an old life that seemed like a different nightmare—I knew the rough layout of the place. I also knew the décor had plenty of overstuffed furniture, hideous wallpaper, and lots of useless decorative flammable crap everywhere. I only hoped that after the 2008 fire and subsequent renovation, most of that flammable stuff had been replaced with more equally useless flammable crap.
Climbing into the darkness of the mansion through a first-floor window, I was pleased to see that my memory hadn’t failed me. I found myself in the library, which stood two stories high with a walkway around the perimeter of the 2nd floor that provided access to the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on all four walls. Half or more of the books had been scattered through the room as though a wind had blown them into dunes of sand with book-sized grains. The furniture was splintered, shredded, and overturned. Brownish spots and splatter were everywhere. It was clear that when the Whites overwhelmed the police outside, the monsters had poured in through the windows and the battle continued inside.
Brass shell casings, their shine lost, lay among the clutter on the floor. Grenade blasts marred and scorched the floor and walls. I wondered for a moment why the mansion hadn’t burned a second time, but figured that during the renovations seven years ago, a more robust fire suppression system had probably been installed. Looking at the ceiling to see sprinkler heads two floors up, I further guessed that those systems were now not functional. No water. No electricity.
No luck for an old building that was going to rot into nothingness anyway.
I hefted the gas can I’d collected along my way to the mansion and had filled two-thirds full with scavenged gasoline and diesel fuel. I dumped some of the wickedly aromatic liquid onto piles of books against two of the walls.
Having decided that I was only going to light two or three rooms before retreating, I hurried about my business and doused the couches in an adjoining room after pushing them against the walls. I definitely wanted the old wooden walls to catch fire. Lastly, I poured the remainder of my can over the desk, shelves, and furnishings in the governor’s personal office. Knowing that office was definitely going to burn left me satisfied for reasons I didn’t co
mpletely understand.
Maybe in my mind the governor was the kingpin on top of a pyramid of authoritarian fuck-sticks whose boot heels had been repressing me my whole life.
Maybe I just hated authority because my parents were a pair of belt-happy repressive pricks.
Maybe I never grew out of my third-grade fascination with flames.
After leaving the gas can on the governor’s desk, I went out into the central hall where curiosity got the best of me as I looked up at the grand staircase covered with a layer of human remains so thick it was almost impossible to see the individual steps. All up and down the wall, bullet holes had torn through the plaster, leaving gouges with shards of the underlying wood sticking out.
Stepping between the rotting bodies, I followed the course of the battle up the stairs and wondered how many policemen had been standing on the upper landing, shooting into the mass of screaming monsters as they flowed up toward them. It reminded me of the house in East Austin where Murphy, Mandi, Russell, and I had been trapped when the Whites were rushing up the stairs to tear at our flesh.
Once I reached the landing at the top, I saw that several sets of tall double doors made of thick wood had been broken off their hinges by the weight of the Whites pushing them to get at those inside. I thought about the terror those within the rooms must have felt as those seemingly impenetrable doors flexed and creaked. Then the oaken doors shattered, and the real screaming started as the last of the bullets failed to stop the wild-eyed hungry. It was a horrible tale—one that had been replayed over and over in nearly every home in the city, the country, maybe the world.
I looked at all the bodies in the governor’s bedroom, scattered among the shredded mattress, the overturned dressers, and the torn curtains. With one of several lighters I kept on me at all times—lighters were a handy thing to have—I lit the shredded mattress and watched the fire take hold before running downstairs to touch a flame where my gasoline was already soaking in.
The library was the last room I lit before jumping out the big broken window I’d come in through a short while earlier.
Peeking and sneaking, I worked my way through the governor’s yard, past the police cruisers, corpses, and fence. Few things were done in a hurry when Whites were about, especially when a bunch of assholes with rifles and a helicopter were just a block away.
When I reached the street, flames were visible through the broken windows on the south side of the mansion, and Whites were starting to peer out from the buildings where they lurked and from the inside of abandoned cars where they nested. I was half a block away when the first of them screeched and ran toward the fire.
I smiled. Diversion created.
Chapter 27
The night vision goggles gave me an advantage when jogging through the dark streets. I saw most of the Whites up ahead long before I was close enough for them to hear or see me. Nearly all of them were easy to avoid. Some forced me to take a detour. That being said, they might have left me alone, but that was always a gamble. You never knew which anachronistic behavior of someone acting normal would set the Whites off. Running car engines, talking, and shooting guns were the top three that nearly every White recognized as a sign of edible normals. Toting a gun, using a flashlight, or wearing clothes too clean and tidy seemed to be a trigger for a few.
Other Whites, as I’d seen too many times, were something akin to bullies. With their gangs of toadies, they might attack anything—person, animal, or another White—as long as the numbers were in their favor. With me alone, and exhibiting classic prey behavior of running in the dark, I was advertising myself as being in a vulnerable position. I could only hope that any problems that arose could be solved with bluster and blade.
At the northwestern corner of the Capitol grounds, I slowed and stopped behind a burned out car. Across the street, near the corner of the junk-puzzle rampart, partially concealed by low mounds of corpses, I spied Murphy. He was squatting, keeping himself concealed, signaling for me to come.
Straight down the street I saw past the intersection at the southwest corner of the Capitol campus. Whites were in the road on the far side of the Governor’s Mansion from the Capitol grounds. Some were loitering. Some were running toward the fire, which by then had engulfed the old white plantation house. Hundreds of them were howling. More were silent.
Infected voices were crying out from other directions. The Whites were aroused by the noise. The city was coming alive.
I found it interesting that the Whites down there hadn’t ventured onto the streets adjacent to the wall around the Capitol grounds. Did they understand that to be a killing zone? Were they all capable of learning?
Matters of concern.
I scanned down the length of the wall, letting my gaze linger on the deer stands where shortly before guards had watched. All the deer stands nearby were empty. To me, that seemed exactly the kind of move a shorthanded military commander would make when he believed he had an advantage in intelligence over his enemy. He’d sacrificed strength at the perimeter positions where no threats existed in order to fortify himself where the danger did exist—the growing horde of Whites around the Governor’s Mansion.
By virtue of them still being alive, the men inside must have understood the absolute necessity of preventing a breach in the walls. A breach would lead unavoidably to them being overrun and killed.
That being said, I also knew that any commander smart enough to still be alive would be smart enough to always watch his flanks. So though he’d moved his strength to the southwest corner of the Capitol complex, he most certainly had eyes watching the other walls.
I sprinted across the street and slid to a stop next to Murphy. I whispered, “We in?”
He nodded and noiselessly pulled back a flap of tin, creating a gap in the wall wide enough for me to slip through.
I was more than pleased to emerge on the other side of the wall into a hedge of ragged bushes, with a car on one side and a dumpster a little ways to the left, both components of the wall. Murphy squeezed in beside me and slowly let the tin flap spring back into place.
I sneaked forward to get a glimpse down the length of the inside of the wall. Whereas it had a smooth front, necessary to prevent the infected from climbing it, the back was a hodge-podge of all the things of various sizes that had been used to construct it.
I looked carefully at the dark windows of the Capitol building. I saw nothing there. But that didn’t mean there was no one inside looking back.
Murphy tapped me on the shoulder and pointed along a row of trees headed toward the buried annex behind the Capitol.
I nodded and whispered, “Ready to run?”
“Dude,” Murphy grabbed my shoulder as I started to stand and pulled me back down, “put your gun in your hands so you’re carrying it like a guard. Jump up real quick like, and we’ll walk together along the wall, back that way.”
“Ah,” I smiled. “In case somebody inside sees us. In the dark, they’ll think we’re a couple of them.”
“Ready, genius?” Murphy asked.
We got to our feet and walked, making a show of looking at the wall, pointing, and pausing.
“What do you see down there?” Murphy asked, nodding his head back toward the southwest corner of the grounds.
Looking back as we walked, I said, “I see at least a dozen dudes with guns, but with the trees and stuff in the way, I can’t tell for sure.”
“Look again.” Murphy nodded more emphatically.
I looked back and shrugged. “Dudes with guns? What do you see?”
“No helicopters.”
I stopped and turned to stare for a second. Damn. “Maybe they’re on the lawn on the other side.”
Murphy shrugged and moved on. “Maybe they aren’t here.” He went on to mutter, “Maybe we should get the fuck out of here the way we came in.”
“We’re here now.”
“You know what else?” Murphy asked.
Sarcastically, I said, “I love g
uessing but why don’t you just tell me.”
“No bodies.”
That put a stop to my sarcasm. I snapped my head around as I scanned the grounds. Murphy was right. No bodies. No bones. None of the usual detritus left when the dead had been scavenged for all that was edible. I said, “I guess they cleaned the place up when they moved in.”
From where we were, off to the west side of the Capitol building, we headed across the grass toward the rear. We passed through a cluster of brass sculptures—children frolicking on the grass. It made me wonder how long it would be before that scene became a reality again. Past the sculptures, we rounded a tall hedge and came to the edge of the spacious plaza that covered the underground office complex.
There, between two long rows of skylights, were parked two helicopters.
Murphy nudged me roughly with his elbow, and all but pushed me in a new direction as he quickened his steps.
I was already hurrying as I turned my head to see the danger.
We came to a stop behind a small square building built to house the elevators that Capitol employees rode up from down below.
“What?” I asked as I noticed chips out of the concrete wall. Bullets had hit it. Brownish stains not completely washed away by all the rains told me that some of those bullets had found their mark.
Nodding back in the direction we’d been going, as he looked at the darkness on the backside of the Capitol, Murphy said, “Three guys are over there smoking.”
“Fuck,” I chastised myself. I hadn’t seen them.
He peeked around the corner of the building and pointed. “Right there, you can barely see them past the row of skylights. By that stairwell.”
He leaned back and I took a quick look around the corner. Sure enough, there they were, glowing green in the night vision goggles with bright points of starlight shining from their lit cigarettes. “Got ‘em. What are you thinking?”