by JE Gurley
He waited patiently until the invisible, deadly nerve gas reached his vicinity. Zombies began staggering and dropping. Some, sensing the danger, tried to escape, but the wind moved faster than they could. They fell in groups, coughing and clawing at their throats until they lay still. He felt a sense of pride as he witnessed the culmination of his plan. The gas gave them a toehold in the city; troops would sweep the streets of any survivors, cordoning off downtown and the rail center. Slowly, city by city, they were taking back the country. He gave no thought to the countless human lives succumbing to the gas. They were collateral damage.
With any luck, he thought, the Gray Man and Holcomb are down there, coughing away their miserable lives.
20
Mace Ridell stalked the labyrinth of miles of pipes, conduits and corridors beneath the sprawling Biosphere2 habitats. They sought dangerous prey – Nick Harris and Juan Mendoza, Hunter spies. Harris had betrayed the group at Biosphere2 to the military authorities, who could attack at any moment. Elliot Samuels accompanied him on the manhunt, while Jed Stone oversaw the group’s defenses. Danger lurked at every corner, every stairwell. They had searched for a fruitless hour
“We could split up,” Elliot suggested, “Cover more ground.”
Mace considered Samuel’s proposal, but with so many ways their quarry could come up behind them, separating could be dangerous. “I’d rather have you at my back,” Mace said.
Elliot did not argue. He, too, felt the fine hairs on the back of his neck standing at attention. A slight sound, like the scuffling of a boot on concrete, came from just ahead. They looked at each other and kept moving forward, but more cautiously. A forest of sixteen large air handlers provided the perfect spot for an ambush. Used to cool, clean the air and to generate condensate water for the irrigation systems, any damage to them could eventually kill the living habitats, including the gardens. Mace motioned for Elliot to move low along the left side of the narrow corridor, while he hugged the right side.
A chunk of masonry exploded beside Mace’s head. The gunshot that followed was deafening. Mace fired at a slight motion at the edge of one of the units and ducked back, but if he hit anyone, they didn’t cry out.
Samuels glanced at Mace and saw the trickle of blood on his cheek caused by a splinter of concrete. He lay prone on the floor, poked the end of his pistol around the corner, and almost had it torn from his hand as a bullet hit the barrel. He examined the pistol. The shot had been a ricochet and did little damage to the heavy metal, but it proved their opponents were good marksmen.
“Any ideas?” he asked.
“Yeah, stay alive,” Mace replied. He raced past the corner, threw himself to the floor, and slid behind the cover of a second unit just as another shot hit the floor behind him. He grinned at Elliot and motioned him to follow. He began to mouth one, two, three... On three, he fired three shots where the first shots had come from. Elliot rolled across the floor to land beside him.
“I caught a glimpse of a Stetson,” he said. “It must be Mendoza.”
“Then where the hell is Harris?” Mace growled.
“It would be like him to leave Mendoza here while he tries to get away.”
“No, he knows he would have to shoot his way out. It’s too risky. It’s safer for him to wait for outside help.” Mace peeked out at Mendoza. “He’s in a good position. If we try to surround him, he can slip past us and move to another area.”
“Can we seal him in here?” Elliot asked.
Mace shook his head. “No, this room is open. It’s probably why he chose this spot. They’ve had three days to learn the floor plans.”
Elliot looked at Mace chagrinned. “He might have gotten the plans from the computer. I think that’s how he found out about the Blue Juice.”
“That’s just great! He probably knows more about the systems here than I do. He could shut us down.”
“Not if we keep him busy,” Elliot replied.
He stuck his pistol around the side of the air handler, snapped off two quick rounds, and then rushed Mendoza. Mace cursed and followed, firing blindly. At least he could keep Mendoza’s head down for Elliot. Elliot landed on his floor sliding, emptying his clip into Mendoza’s position. Mendoza staggered but remained on his feet. Elliot’s momentum had left him in the open with an empty gun. Mace watched in horror as the barrel of Mendoza’s rifle came up but it was too late to shout a warning. Mendoza fired. Elliot’s attack had caught him off guard. The wound in his side spoiled his aim. Instead of striking Elliot dead center of his chest, the bullet grazed his arm and continued into his clavicle. Mace let loose a string of obscenities and pulled his trigger on full auto. Bullets tattooed a line of bloody holes in Mendoza’s back. Mendoza dropped his rifle, spun halfway around with his arms raised, and collapsed on the floor. He was dead.
Samuels was groaning. He held his left hand to the wound in his shoulder, just inches from his carotid artery. Blood dripped around his fingers.
“He broke my damned collar bone,” he hissed from teeth clenched against the pain.
“You fool,” Mace snapped. “He almost killed you.” He looked at Elliot lying there and began to laugh.
“What are you laughing at?”
“Where the hell did you learn that move – late night westerns?”
“It worked, didn’t it?”
Mace reached down to help Elliot to his feet. Pulling the six-foot, two-inch Elliot from the floor was not easy and caused him considerable pain. He was losing blood quickly.
“Let’s get you to a first aid kit and get you patched up.”
“What about Harris?” Elliot protested.
Mace shook his head. He wanted Harris more than Elliot did, but he couldn’t leave Elliot alone and he doubted he could make it back on his own. “You’re in no shape. Harris will have to wait.”
He wasn’t sure, but as they climbed up the stairs leading to the main level, he thought he heard the echo of laughter coming from the distance.
* * * *
William Sikes had located a small weapons locker in the basement and he forced the lock. He now had an M16, a .45 automatic, and ammunition for both. He was hiding beneath a workbench when Elliot Samuels and Mace Ridell passed by. From their conversation, he learned that Harris and the others were Hunter spies. Now the pieces fell into place. Janis knew Harris’s secret and for that, she had died. It was just like her to try to use her information as a bargaining chip. He chuckled silently. And she was afraid of me, he thought. With Ridell and Samuels searching the basement, he needed a new place to hide. He found it in the network of girders in the arboretum dome. No one ever bothered looking up. He realized he had dallied too long after his escape. Armed men were searching for him and for Harris’s group. He saw them atop the berms and patrolling the grounds both inside and out. He hadn’t eaten that day and he was hungry. He had also forgotten to bring water.
“I’m so stupid,” he said to himself. “Why did I run? I didn’t kill her.”
He had seen Janis Heath leaving the habitat shortly before her murder, but had thought nothing of it. Now he knew Harris or Mendoza had killed her and left his lost button there to incriminate him. That angered him. He slammed an open-palmed hand against a girder and damned himself when it rang out like a bell afraid someone would hear it.
It never occurred to him to give himself up. Everyone still hated him. They might shoot him on sight. His only out was to find Harris and make him confess to Janis’s death. Mumbling to himself about what he would do to Harris, he waited.
21
Colonel Schumer stood outside the hospital room of Private Lloyd Osterman as the doctor finished his examination. Bandages hid Osterman’s hands and face, and an IV bag dripped rehydrating saline solution into his arm. An oxygen line slithered across his chest and into his right nostril through a slit in the bandages. His presence was almost miraculous. First, he had survived the battle with the zombies, and then he had walked through the desert to Delta only to find himsel
f in the middle of the largest man-made conflagration since the bombing of Dresden in WWII. Ten seconds had been the difference between life and death. Such a narrow margin was the stuff of legend, the material from which heroes arise. The doctor finished his examination and stepped out into the corridor. Schumer confronted him.
“Will he live?” he demanded.
The doctor sighed, unconsciously tapping the chart in his hand with one finger to the rhythm of the heart monitor beeps. “I don’t know how, but yes. His hands and face received third-degree burns, but he should heal in time. His lungs are badly damaged, though. He will recover, but he will never be able to run a marathon, I’m afraid.”
Schumer stood at attention. “I’m going to promote that man to sergeant.”
“Later perhaps. Not now. It will be a few months before he leaves that bed.”
Schumer nodded. “See that he gets anything he needs.”
The doctor straightened his shoulders and scowled. “I always give each of my patients all the attention I can.”
“No disrespect meant, doctor. I know you’re short-handed and over-worked. I meant small things – something to read, extra food, cigarettes, if he … “He sighed. “No, I don’t suppose that would be good for him. Make him comfortable.”
The doctor softened his features. “Yes, I’ll see to it.” He took Schumer’s shoulder and gently drew him away from the door. “He needs rest now.”
Schumer nodded. “I understand.”
Before leaving, he glanced in the room at Osterman. Osterman was only one man, but somehow his survival softened the loss of eighty-one men, not much, but enough to give Schumer hope. Most of the zombies that entered Delta were dead. Units were tracking down and eliminating the survivors. It had cost a city, but Salt Lake City was safe – so far.
He knew his relief could be short-lived. Thousands more zombies were perhaps a week away – ten times the number he had just destroyed. He had no more cities or fuel to spare. It was now impossible to evacuate Salt Lake City. He had to turn the zombie herd or destroy it. He had no idea how to accomplish this task. He hoped the sight of so many dead zombies at Delta would frighten them, change their line of march, but the fire had been too intense, too destructive. Few corpses survived the conflagration. Delta was a pile of ashes; houses and buildings razed; cars and trucks molten were puddles of metal. Even the bones had turned to powder and were now blowing away in the wind.
His requests for more fuel and more men had been denied. He was on his own. He was no military commander; he was a builder. If the job required him to build a bridge to stop the zombies, he could... His mind spun as a wild idea formed in his head. It seemed too simple, too bizarre. He carefully considered all his options, all the obstacles facing him and he decided that it could be done. He rushed back to his office and picked up the phone.
“Motor pool? I want you to round up every piece of excavation equipment in the city and every man capable of driving one.”
He paused and frowned as the voice on the other end offered a protest.
“Now, you fool,” he yelled. “We’re building a ditch, a very big ditch.”
He hung up the phone and smiled grimly. Who could have imagined a black man from Red Bay, Alabama, would become a modern Gordon Pasha. In 1885, Major-General Charles Gordon had defended the city of Khartoum, Sudan, from the armies of Mahdi Muhammad Ahmad by building a moat to separate the city, surrounded by the Nile River on three sides, from the mainland. The city had eventually fallen and Gordon was beheaded, but the idea was sound.
Schumer checked a map. The Great Salt Lake, a remnant of the ancient Bonneville Lake, lay west of the city. The Wasatch Mountains to the east and the Oquiffh Mountains west of the city provided natural barriers. By digging a canal south along the edge of the Oquiffh and east across to the Wasatch at Bluffdale, the narrowest point in the Utah Valley, a natural choke point, he would prevent the zombies from reaching the city. Zombies did not swim. He would use the lake’s seventeen-hundred-square-miles of salt water to his advantage. Faced with an insurmountable barrier, the zombies must either follow Highway 6 east into the mountains, or starve. They could not skirt the Great Salt Lake and if they remained grouped beside the canal, he could wipe them out with the A10s.
He slammed his fist on his desk and grinned. It was a bold plan, a risky plan. He doubted his superiors would see the wisdom in it, but since they had abandoned him, he would ignore them. It was his ass on the line. If he failed, it wouldn’t make much difference. It would require a Herculean effort. The Ditch, as he already thought of it, would have to be wide and deep. It would require all the manpower of the city, every man, woman and child. Their biggest obstacle was time.
The next two days were the busiest in his life. He did not have time for orders to filter down the chain of command. He took personal charge of securing every bulldozer, backhoe, crane, every pick and shovel, and every case of dynamite in the Salt Lake City area. He rounded up every person capable of driving any construction vehicle and started schools under the tutelage of experienced operators to teach them the basics. He didn’t need experts; he needed bodies. Eight hundred people volunteered, but he decided that wasn’t enough and conscripted three hundred more.
He arranged for the construction of mess tents and temporary barracks near the work sites to avoid transportation delays. When the first row of blasting charges was in place, he pressed the button to ignite it. The explosion produced a plume of dust that settled slowly amid enthusiastic cheers of the crowds gathered to watch and work. The rumble in his chest as the sound waves raced through the soul and up his legs brought a smile to his face, but he didn’t have time to sit back and savor the feeling. There were buildings to raze, roads and bridges to demolish, and land to clear.
The Ditch began as a quarter-mile long scar in the earth a fifty yards from the shores of the Great Salt Lake. As he stood watching man and machine rip into the earth, he felt more like the engineer he had always desired to be. Once again, he was building something.
Almost immediately, they ran into problems. Some areas along the route he had chosen were marshy and flooded as they dug. Large pumps were located and installed to drain them. People were injured and equipment damaged, but the Ditch slowly took shape. He ate and slept on site, a radio in his hand to deal with the hundreds of petty problems that constantly arose. The work continued twenty-four hours a day in twelve-hour shifts.
By the fifth day, faces were beginning to look haggard. Men and women worked slower; machines needed repairs. The fifty-feet-wide, twelve-feet-deep Ditch extended from the shores of the Great Salt Lake south for seven miles, less than a third the length required. They did not have ten more days in which to complete it. His scouts reported the zombie migration had reached the blackened ruins of Delta and veered east as he had hoped, but then resumed a march to the north along I-15 toward Salt Lake City. If they could not complete the Ditch in time, then they would have to slow the zombies.
He selected one-hundred men armed with LAWS rockets, machine guns and mortars. He couldn’t spare more without impeding the digging. Helicopters dropped them a mile ahead of the zombies to set up positions along their route. Their job was not to engage the zombies in a pitched battle, but to use hit-and-run tactics to split them up and confuse them. He could not leave the Ditch, but kept in constant radio contact with Lieutenant Wavers, who he had placed in charge. He then sent a crew to block I-80 east of Salt Lake City, the only pass through the Wasatch Mountains. A third crew began work on the short section of canal across the pass at Bluffton where the Traverse Mountains almost connect the Wasatch and Oquiffh ranges. The Jordan River ran north through the narrow pass, draining freshwater Utah Lake into the Great Salt Lake. They would cut the Jordan in half, using the lake to fill that section of the Ditch first.
He eagerly waited on news from Lieutenant Wavers. The initial report was not good news. The first attack killed some zombies and drew some away from the main body, but did not slow them ap
preciably. The second produced similar results, but zombies cut off twelve men and slaughtered them. He cursed at the unwelcome tidings, but had no choice except to keep them harrying the enemy. He had the lives of thousands to consider.
The Mormons with their hard work ethic performed miracles. By the seventh day, the east-west trench across the Jordan was completed and filling with water. He positioned his howitzers on the northern slopes to pour fire into the zombies when they arrived. On day eight, a strong wind blowing in from the desert caused the visibility to be reduced to a few hundred feet, making progress difficult, but to his surprise, no one called for a halt. With rags over their faces, they continued to dig with picks, shovels and hoes. Drivers of the heavy machinery could barely see the red-flagged stakes along the route but did not slow down.
The wind also slowed the zombies’ advance. Lieutenant Wavers reported they had settled into large groups in whatever shelter they could find. His men, however, continued to press the attack, picking off individuals and small groups at the edge of the herd. More men died. He tried to push their deaths out of his mind and concentrate on the Ditch. The Ditch now consumed him. There were a hundred places where his hasty calculations could be wrong. A difference of a few feet of elevation could mean hours of extra digging or blasting. He crunched numbers and re-crunched them, but in the end, it was still mostly guesswork. He had to trust the workers to do their jobs.
The wind blew for two days and only a single mile was completed. Day 10 dawned bright, clear and hot. The east-west section had reached the foot of the Wasatch Mountains. He withdrew that crew and reassigned them to the southern leg of the north-south section working north. Attacking the Ditch from two directions, the work progressed more quickly.