by JE Gurley
Judgment Day: Retribution
A Novel by J E Gurley
1
Uncompahgre Plateau, Colorado
No one could have foreseen the results of one sloppily positioned alarm, a motion sensor attached to a metal pole driven into the ground directly beneath a lightning-struck ponderosa pine. Exhaustion, boredom, a wandering mind – whatever the reason for its haphazard placement, a dead tree branch that had been weakened by heavy winter winds, broke during the night and fell across the wires connecting the motion sensor to the solar battery used to power the array of sensor devices scattered around the camp. Had it happened two hours earlier while they sat around the fire discussing the next day’s plans, someone might have heard it fall, but the branch broke while everyone was asleep, fatigued by their long journey.
The first sign of zombies in their midst was the scream torn from the savaged throat of Meara Corman, who, by sheer bad luck, happened to be sleeping farthest from the fire at the edge of the clearing. Jebediah Stone stirred quickly from a fitful sleep and reached for his rifle, an M14 automatic usually lying beside his sleeping bag. Too late, he remembered that he had left it in the back of the ATV in his haste to set up camp, a mistake that could cost him his life. Instead, he grabbed the machete he had used to chop firewood and stared at the scene of horror unfolding around him in the dim light of the dying fire.
Several zombies, merely dark shadows in the wan light, launched from the forest toward the sound of the scream. Jeb quickly assessed the situation and yelled to awaken anyone not already roused by Meara’s frantic cries. He propelled himself from a sitting position to a full run and rushed to her side, ignoring the cold sharp stones biting into his bare feet. He brought the machete down on the back of the zombie’s exposed neck with both hands. The sharp blade embedded deep in the dense flesh, severing its spine. The creature fell sprawling across Meara’s still body. He placed his foot on the creature’s back and yanked hard to remove the lodged blade. The savage blow would have easily decapitated a normal person, but the zombies were mutating into a new species – thicker skin, denser muscles, stronger bones, and smarter. He rolled the dead zombie off Meara and examined her, but quickly saw that it was too late for her. Her head lolled to one side, her once sparkling green eyes open and staring at him, her throat savagely ripped out.
The six others in the group, awakened by her screams and Jeb’s shout, joined him in defending their small camp. Pandemonium reigned as shots rang out around him. It had been a year since the beginning of the zombie plague, and most of his companions knew how to shoot. They were experienced zombie killers. People who weren’t good marksmen usually did not survive long, but awakening from a deep sleep during a zombie attack made for a certain amount of panic.
Someone – he hoped it was a zombie – fell into the fire and extinguished it, leaving them fighting by the gray light of a cloud-shrouded moon. He raced toward the crouched figure of a second zombie, a naked female heavy with child, pressing Mikal Antonov against a tree. The elderly Antonov was on his knees, holding his rifle in both hands and pushing against the zombie’s chest to ward off her gnashing teeth. His strength was failing quickly. His eyes were wide with fright, but he did not call for assistance. He knew everyone else was fighting for their lives as well. Jeb planted the machete tip first in the zombie’s back as hard as he could with both hands, but only managed to anger her. She knocked him to the ground with a vicious backhanded swipe that had his head reeling. She released Antonov and loomed over Jeb, growling. The eerie animal sound from deep within her throat reminded Jeb of a dog guarding its bone. Suddenly, her head exploded and she toppled to the ground beside him. He looked up and saw Karen, his wife, holding his rifle. The M14’s 7.62 caliber slug tore through bone and muscle, leaving very little of the zombie’s head intact, the reason he had chosen the weapon. He didn’t have time to ponder what had roused Karen from her silent lethargy to help him. She averted her gaze from him as he rose from the ground, took his rifle from her, and joined in the fray. As he passed the ATV, he switched on its headlights, throwing the campsite into brilliant illumination.
They were lucky that only a small zombie hunting party, an extended family of six members, had stumbled upon them. Had there been more, they would have been in real trouble. The headlights distracted the zombies just long enough for the defenders to get organized. They quickly dispatched the four remaining creatures with no further loss of life. He knew the noise, the smell of blood, and the burned flesh that now hung over the camp would draw more predators, both zombie and animal. The seven people stood looking at one another, and then down at Meara’s mutilated corpse.
“Was anyone bitten?” he demanded breathlessly as his lungs fought for air.
The blood or saliva of a zombie could infect even those immune from the airborne virus. Everyone shook his or her head to indicate no. They had been lucky.
“Pack it up,” he called to them trying to break their stupor, “we’re leaving.”
“We have to we bury Meara.” Sylvia Nabors, a middle-aged woman who had been a schoolteacher in the previous world, stared at Jeb. In her hand, she clutched the bloody hatchet with which she had beheaded one of the zombies. The hatchet looked incongruous in her pale, thin hand. Her graying, disheveled hair hung to her shoulders.
“There’s no time,” Jeb replied as he sat down to put on his socks and boots. He then rolled up his bedroll and shoved it into his haversack. Karen worked in the calm silence that had fallen over her since the escape from Biosphere2. She no longer wanted to die, or wished him dead, but she had not yet decided to join the land of the living. He helped her with her sleeping bag. She meekly accepted his assistance.
“Thank you for saving my life,” he whispered to her.
She paused, nodded, and then turned away, her face as stolid and emotionless as ever. He resisted the urge to spin her around, make her talk to him, but this was not the place or the time for another confrontation with her.
Nabors remained standing over Meara’s body, defiant, arms crossed over her chest. Blood from the zombie she had killed splattered her face.
“We could at least take the time to say a few words over her,” she said. “She was our friend.”
Jeb stopped packing and stared at her. He was sympathetic to her desire to mourn her friend’s body, but he had seen too many deaths, witnessed too much tragedy the past year to feel pain. The living required too much attention to spare it for the dead.
“If you stay, you’ll die. It’s as simple as that. Say your words and pack up.”
He continued gathering their meager supplies, including the motion detectors and the solar battery, and carefully positioned them in the back of one of the ATVs with his haversack. He breathed a sigh of relief, when out of the corner of his eye, he saw Nabors doing the same. The two Honda Polaris RZR4 All Terrain Vehicles they had picked up at a motorcycle dealership north of Taos sat four people each, but allowed very little room for supplies. Thus, they traveled light out of necessity. They packed with an efficiency born of practice in a world where constant movement was the norm. The vehicles were quickly loaded and ready to go. Remaining too long in one place invited disaster, either from zombies or from the military and its Hunter mercenaries searching for munies. The entire group was munies, people naturally immune to the airborne virus. Their blood was precious to the Hunters, who captured them for the Blue Juice their blood could produce, a temporary vaccine against the zombie virus. Blue Juice had become the new currency, replacing the almighty, worthless dollar. Without it, thousands of others would succumb to the mutated Avian flu virus and risk turning zombie.
“We’ll go higher up,” he told them, “maybe
the snow will keep the zombies to a minimum.”
They were traveling northwest along the Uncompahgre Plateau in southwestern Colorado through broken stands of ponderosa pine, blue spruce, and aspen. Ten-thousand-feet-tall Horsefly Peak, a silent sentinel to the east, wore its snowcap like a Spanish shawl cascading down its shoulders. Soon, winter snow would cover it completely. To the west, steep shale and sandstone bluffs dropped off sharply toward the Colorado River Basin. To the south, Telluride with its large population of zombies remained a bitter memory where they had lost two of their number and one of their vehicles. Avoiding the main roads served two purposes – evading people who used the roads and the zombies that followed the people. He had ignored that law of survival and it had cost them dearly.
Karen sat beside Jeb in the front seat, staring blankly ahead of her, hands folded in her lap, not because of any love for her husband, but because none of the others could tolerate her. Her head jerked with each bump and dip. He had thought she had experienced a catharsis during the fight at Biosphere2 three months earlier. For a time, she had quit fighting with him, paid more attention to her surroundings, and even initiated conversations with him, but lately she had slowly slipped back into her own silent world, albeit without the overriding desire to die. As a psychiatrist, he saw slight progress in her condition. However, her refusal to forgive him for abandoning her bitterly disappointed him. It mattered little to her that she had ignored his advice and had taken their ailing son to the hospital where the authorities had seized them and transferred them to the Marana FEMA camp. He could imagine the horror she had felt as she had watched those same authorities rip their ill, six-year-old son from her arms and dispose of him before he could turn into a zombie. Later, after the authorities had whisked her away to San Diego, he had risked his life to free her, but it seemed to count for little in her warped scales of justice.
They climbed north along little-used game trails into freshly fallen snow. The temperature dropped to ten degrees above freezing and the wind picked up. Night morphed into dawn with hardly a line of demarcation between the two. Thick, gray clouds rolled in from the northeast and were blotting out the sun. A storm was coming and they needed to find shelter. They had left their tents and most of their gear behind in their hurried rush to leave Telluride. They had also left behind two of their number, Arthur Davis, and Willard Tempest, the man who had first convinced Jeb to bring the small party north into Colorado. He still had Tempest’s maps, but without his intimate knowledge of the country, they were driving blindly through the wilderness.
Since leaving the glass domes of Biosphere2 in Oracle, Arizona, the group had flown in a Russian Mi17 helicopter piloted by Antonov to northern New Mexico. They took refuge in an empty school outside of Taos for several weeks to recover from their ordeal, and for the wounds of those injured in the fight at Biosphere2 to heal. At that time, they numbered fourteen. One had died of his wounds a few days later. Two had decided to leave the group when Jeb had suggested that the group continue north into Colorado. When they ran out of fuel, they abandoned the helicopter and walked. Two more had died during a zombie attack while foraging for supplies, another from an infected wound.
Jeb tried not to dwell on their losses for fear it would overwhelm him. His reins of leadership weighed heavily upon him. He had hoped to discard leadership altogether at Biosphere2, but its demise had thrust him back into a position of power. Mace Ridell, Renda Beth Kilmer, and Vince Holcomb had taken Erin Kostner’s group of researchers to set up a new laboratory to find a vaccine. He wished Mace were with him now. He could use his single-minded determination.
Snow began to fall, lightly at first, but as the morning progressed, the flakes became heavy and wet, presaging the blizzard to follow. Driving became a challenge as visibility dropped. The second ATV driven by Craig Tyndale, dropped farther and farther behind. He drove slowly, fearing they might separate in the blinding snow. Finally, he spotted a dark opening in a cliff and nosed the ATV off the trail to investigate. It proved to be a narrow slit cave barely twenty feet deep and ten feet wide, but it was shelter against the weather.
They covered the ATVs with tarps to guard against the snow, weighted each down with large rocks, and then crowded into the cave. As Jeb watched the snow falling, he wondered if they would have to abandon the four-wheeled vehicles and find snowmobiles somewhere, perhaps the next town they encountered, thrusting them into even more danger. The small fire provided little heat, but its psychological value outweighed its functionality. Hot tea and a beef stew from scavenged cans warmed their stomachs and their hands, as they held their mugs close to their bodies. No one spoke other than banalities about the food or the weather. No one wanted to mention Meara Corman’s death for fear of reviving the ghosts of their other losses. Jeb could feel their accusatory eyes on him as he sat at the cave’s entrance with his back to them, staring into the white blankness outside. The long mournful howl startled him until he realized that it was a wolf and not a zombie. He relaxed slightly. If animals were around, then zombies weren’t.
Jeb shivered as blast of frigid air found the cave entrance. He despised the cold. He missed Arizona winters, where a seventy-degree Christmas was normal. He enjoyed looking up at the Catalina Mountains with a blanket of fresh-fallen snow on Mount Lemmon from the cozy, warm comfort of his Foothills living room. Trekking through a frozen wilderness was not his idea of a good time. The zombies did not seem to mind the cold. Their thick, olive-hued skin rendered them immune from extremes of heat and cold. They preferred warmer climates only because of the greater availability of food, but as game at lower altitudes became scarcer, they would begin to venture higher into the mountains. No place was safe from zombies for long.
“Why so gloomy?” Antonov asked as he walked up to Jeb. “Come closer to the fire.”
Jeb smiled at the old Russian, a friend since the escape from San Diego. Antonov moved with a slight limp in his right leg, the cold affecting his arthritis. “No, I’ll keep watch for a while.”
“Do you think they’re out there?”
“We killed a hunting party. The snow will cover our tracks and our scent, but, yeah, they’re always out there.”
Antonov nodded his head slowly. “True. They are an ever-present danger.” He made a fist and his voice became more strident. “I want to kill them all. They are an abomination.”
Jeb snorted derisively. “Are they? Maybe we had our chance and blew it. Maybe God is having his revenge.”
Antonov looked at him with a scowl. “Do you really think that? If that is so, then we have no chance.”
“Hell, I don’t know what I think anymore,” he admitted. He clasped his knees against his chest with his arms to help warm his body. “All I know is that there are seven of us when there were fourteen – forty-five at Biosphere2. If there’s a battle, we’re losing.”
Antonov shook his head. “Don’t let the others hear this. You are our leader. You cannot have doubts.”
Jeb reached out, grabbed Antonov’s knee with his hand, and shook it gently. “You’re right, old friend. I’m much too morose. I must shake off this lugubrious mood.”
“The sun will come out tomorrow as it always does, and the day will be brighter. Your wife needs you.” With this, Antonov limped back into the cave and settled down beside the fire.
Jeb stared into the mounting storm and wondered if Antonov was right about the sun. He knew he was wrong about Karen.
The storm blew throughout the night and the next day, piling snow three feet deep at the entrance of the small cave. Everyone grew restless. They had no destination, but all were eager to resume the journey. The storm ended just before sunset. The moon rose full that night in a clear bright sky filled with stars and the promise of better weather to come. After digging the ATVs out of the snow, they set out across a flat, windswept ridge free of snow and made good progress for several hours. Dropping into a shallow valley, they plowed through knee-deep snow, often dismounting to dig the ATVs out
of snowdrifts. While crossing one frozen stream, Jeb’s lead ATV broke through the thin ice. Luckily, the water was only two feet deep, and the other ATV easily winched it free. After that, he chose his route more carefully.
Steep slopes forced them to descend into a wide forested valley of junipers, spruce, and hollies, where they weaved through the trees at little better than a walking pace. By dawn, they were all exhausted and eager for a chance to stretch their cramped muscles. In a small clearing by a brook, they rested and ate a cold breakfast of cheese and bread. Jeb spotted an elk within easy rifle distance, but refrained from shooting it to avoid the noise. Their supplies were running low and they needed fresh meat, but the risk of discovery was too great. Just as Antonov had predicted, the day was beautifully sunny. Jeb hoped it was a sign of things to come, but the pessimist in him knew it was too much to hope for.
Back in the vehicles after their hurried meal, Jeb spotted a well-used game trail that made travel easier. He saw signs of a large herd of elk passing through – trampled earth, broken branches, and hoof prints in patches of snow. Free of mankind’s hunting policies and of its restraining fences, the wild game population soared, increased by animals fleeing bands of foraging zombies. The presence of the large herd moving in a hurry made him uneasy. Animals could sense danger as they could detect the approach of a storm. From what were they fleeing? Jeb’s apprehension mounted when they rounded a small rise and saw a hunter’s log cabin nestled in the shelter of a small grove of ponderosa pines. As much as some undefined urgency pressed him to move on, he knew everyone needed a rest. Even he was feeling the weariness of weeks of restless sleep and hard travel. If he suggested they bypass the cabin, he would have a rebellion on his hands.
He called a halt and dismounted to check it out. The snow would have covered any tracks, but the cabin looked deserted. A rocking chair from the small front porch lay on its side on the ground, almost covered with snow. A wooden shutter on a front window had fallen off and leaned against the wall. Several large rocks had tumbled from the top of the river stone chimney. A small shed sat twenty yards from the cabin, its leeward side protecting a cord of stacked firewood. Despite the cabin’s deserted appearance, he decided to announce his approach.