Zed's World (Book 2): Roads Less Traveled

by Baker, Rich

  “At least I have clothes here to pack,” Danielle says.

  Ben looks at Toni and Natalie. “We’ll pack the stuff you all have here,” he says, referring to the drawer each of them has in the boys’ respective rooms for nights when they stay over “unexpectedly.” They each have some of the essentials—clean underwear, hair ties, t-shirts, toothbrushes, and other critical sundries—stored in the apartment. Ben continues, “And you two grab some food and water from the kitchen. When we get going, we’ll see how it looks out there, and if it’s clear we’ll go by your places and get a real bag packed, okay?”

  The girls agree, and the guys and Danielle all go to pack their bags. Toni grabs Natalie, and they hit the kitchen, getting bottled water from the fridge and some protein and cereal bars from the cabinets. It’s only forty-five minutes to an hour from the apartment to Ben’s and Keith’s parents’ houses, but Toni doesn’t want to take chances on getting stuck somewhere and letting thirst or hunger cause them to make a bad decision. Natalie agrees, and they get the essentials packed in red and blue plastic milk crates and wait for the others to come down so they can start their exodus.

  Three

  Denver. Friday, May 17th, 2013 6:30 PM – ZPOC +0

  In Denver, Colorado, Jason “D-Day” Bowling returns to his apartment building just after 6:30 PM and goes straight into a hot shower to wash the dirt from a hard day’s labor off his tired body. He stays in the shower for a full thirty minutes. After returning from Afghanistan in 2012 and getting his discharge papers, he’s never missed a chance to take a long, hot shower. It’s a luxury he seldom had in his deployments.

  Jason had been deployed to Iraq almost a year to the day after enlisting in the US Army. He served a tour in 2004, back-to-back tours from 2006 through 2008, and then deployed to Afghanistan in 2010, where he stayed until 2012. His unit’s base had been relocated from Fort Hood in Texas to Colorado’s Fort Carson as part of a reorganization in 2009, so that’s where he returned. What time he’d been able to spend in Colorado outside of his deployments convinced him to remain there after his discharge, but the recession has taken its toll on the job market, and Jason is working for a landscaping company until he can find something better.

  The apartment is quite nice, just off of Denver’s Park Avenue, and it would normally be out of his price range, but after ten years in the military with no wife or family and no real expenses, he’d saved a lot of money. He plans on riding out his lease here and finding something cheaper in the fall. For now, though, he enjoys the south facing view from his living room window. From his tenth-floor vantage point, he can see downtown Denver and the Rocky Mountains beyond it.

  He gets out of the shower just past 7:00, throws on jeans and a t-shirt, and puts dinner in the microwave. That’s another thing he doesn’t miss about the Army—the food. The frozen dinners he microwaves are ten times better than the Army food he’s eaten for just shy of a decade. He grabs an India pale ale from the fridge and takes dinner over to the little table he has set up by the windows. It’s about an hour and a half before sundown and Jason loves watching the transformation as the huge buildings downtown cast the streets into shadow and the buildings themselves slowly light up as the sun descends behind the mountains to the west.

  As he eats, he notices a lot of emergency vehicles going in and out of the downtown area. His apartment is only a mile from the massive medical complex that houses Children’s Hospital, Presbyterian St. Luke’s Medical Center, and the Exempla St. Joseph Hospital, so he’s used to seeing a fair amount of emergency traffic, but this appears to be worse than normal. He turns on the TV and sees an emergency alert scrolling across the bottom of the screen. It’s in the middle of a sentence when he starts reading it.

  … 16th Street Mall and the surrounding area. Denver police are asking that people stay out of the area for their protection, and people in the area should remain sheltered in place and stay where they are until it is safe to leave. The wounded are being taken to Presbyterian St. Luke’s Medical Center. Anyone searching for a friend or relative who has been taken away by ambulance should contact them at 303-555-6000.

  The message starts over at this point.

  Denver police have confirmed that a civil disturbance in downtown Denver has resulted in multiple fatalities this evening, including several people who were shot by the police. Multiple policemen have been injured and the violence continues to rage through the 16th Street Mall and the surrounding area. Denver police …

  The phone rings, interrupting Jason’s train of thought. He picks it up and scowls at the caller ID. Fort Carson.

  He presses the button. “Bowling,” he says, using his last name out of habit.

  “D-Day?” the voice on the other end of the line says. Jason recognizes the voice—Martha Cowher. They’ve had a few flings together here and there over the last ten years, though her feelings ran much deeper than his did. Like him, she’s unmarried and happy that way—mostly—but unlike him, she’ll never leave the Army if given a choice. They parted on good enough terms, although he knows she’s pissed that when he was offered the chance to get out, he took it. He feels guilty he hasn’t called her since getting out, but he’s trying to forget a lot of bad things, and she’ll never understand or believe that it’s not all about her.

  “Hey, Mar, yeah, it’s me. It’s good to hear your voice!” This can’t be good, he thinks to himself.

  “I’m just going to get right to it, D-Day. They’re recalling everyone, and before you say ‘I’ve completed my full-term of service,’ an emergency session of Congress has authorized this. They want you—everyone, not just you—to report immediately. This call serves as your official notice. If you’re not here by 8 AM tomorrow, you’ll be considered AWOL.” She says all this with a flat official tone. Jason—D-Day since an early age, owing to his birth on June sixth—can tell she’s reading from a script.

  “Mar, what’s going on? Does this have anything to do with the stuff happening downtown? If the cops can’t deal with it, isn’t that what the National Guard is for? The regular army doesn’t get involved in domestic stuff.”

  She didn’t answer his question. “Just do yourself a favor and get down here ASAP. I have other calls to make, D-Day. Just get here.”

  He looks at the phone as the connection goes dead. He has a familiar, but unwelcome, feeling in the pit of his stomach. It’s the same feeling he got in Afghanistan before his unit’s last mission went all FUBAR. It’s the same feeling that made him pull his lieutenant behind a cement barrier just before the homicide bomber flipped his switch and turned himself and fourteen other people—including three in D-Day’s patrol—into red mist at the checkpoint in Iraq. It’s the same feeling that kept him alive multiple times in combat, the feeling that told him things were about to get really, really bad.

  He looks out the window and from the elevated vantage point, he can see that the amount of flashing emergency lights traveling up Eighteenth Avenue toward the medical complex has increased at least tenfold. He turns back to the TV and turns on the local NBC station. The info screen says the show should be Dateline, but the reporter on screen is local to Denver and is reporting from downtown.

  “We’ve been told that the riots are spreading out from Sixteenth Street throughout the lower downtown, or Lo-Do, area. The police have confirmed that they’ve seen people getting attacked by groups of five or six assailants, and a short while later these same victims have actually joined the mob in attacking others. We even saw what looked like policemen in one of the mobs before we were told in no uncertain terms to move to another spot for our safety.”

  They told them to get the fuck out of there, D-Day thinks. He mutes the TV and grabs his binoculars from the bag in his bedroom. He trains them toward downtown, and though he can’t see directly to the Sixteenth Street Pedestrian Mall, he can see between the buildings enough to glimpse some of the cross streets. He sees pandemonium—people running through the streets, cars driving up onto sidewalk
s or even driving backwards to get out of traffic. He sees a yellow Hummer H2 pushing vehicles out of the way as it tries to get clear of an intersection. The feeling in the pit of his stomach gets worse.

  He goes back into the bedroom and changes out of his jeans and into a pair of khaki cargo pants and tan tactical boots, a tight fitting polyester undershirt and a black long-sleeved shirt over that. Now dressed in more combat-ready clothing, he checks out the window again.

  He sees people running down the street going from east to west. Cars going by are driving way too fast, and he sees one clip a pedestrian. The car doesn’t stop, and the three people running behind the pedestrian pounce on him and attack him mercilessly. D-Day sees blood spurt from a wound into the face of one of the assailants, who doesn’t notice or slow his attack.

  From the corner of his eye, he sees the TV flash to the Emergency Alert System message, and he unmutes it right at the end of the irritating, braying noise.

  “This is a broadcast of the Emergency Alert System. Authorities in your area have issued the following emergency warning. Civil disturbances and riots are taking place in downtown Denver and cities across the greater Denver Metropolitan Area. All people living in or near downtown Denver or any of the affected areas are urged to remain indoors with the doors locked. Do not open your doors to anyone you do not know or anyone who appears to be violent. Police are working in multi-jurisdictional task forces to gain control of the affected areas. Local National Guard units, at the request of the governor, have begun mobilizing to assist in containing the situation.”

  D-Day mutes the TV again and goes back to the window. The three men who were attacking the pedestrian have moved on to attack someone else directly in front of his building. In the waning light, D-Day can see a massive pool of blood under the pedestrian. He trains his binoculars on the victim. He sees a hideous, ragged neck wound from where much of the blood has poured forth. Other equally vicious wounds are peppered up and down his arms and chest. D-Day has seen enough carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan to recognize a dead body when he sees one.

  Except, this man isn’t dead. Despite the ragged hole in his neck, despite the spreading pool of blood that screams out “this guy is dead,” the dead man twitches. First his legs move, and then his arms and then he opens his eyes. His mouth opens, and he coughs out a black, oily glob, and then sits up. His eyes are little more than black orbs. The man rises and spots the three people who attacked him. He sprints—sprints!—over to them and momentarily joins them in savaging the body of a young woman. Mere seconds later, in unison, they all stand up and look around. They spot a young hipster running to the gated pool area of the building across the street. The four of them give chase, bringing the young man down before he can get his ID card in the gate’s lock.

  D-Day looks to the east, toward the hospitals, and sees people similar to these, some in hospital gowns, barefoot, some in scrubs, here an EMT, over there a policeman. All are covered in blood, all bearing hideous wounds, all of them looking for people to attack.

  He looks back to the woman who was attacked on the grassy area in front of his building. She’s wobbling to her feet, leaving a bloody pool behind her. She has a wounded leg which doesn’t allow her to move with the speed of the others, but she still moves with surprising agility for someone who should be dead.

  D-Day thinks through his options. He knows he’s not going to make it to Fort Carson tonight. As if to punctuate that point, a Ford Taurus comes speeding the wrong way up Twentieth Avenue and hits a group of five of the bloodied assailants. The driver loses control trying to make the sharp turn and sideswipes an older Nissan pickup. The pickup spins nearly 360 degrees, and then the driver rights its course and hits the gas. The Taurus appears to have stalled, and a crowd of attackers descends on it. An elderly man in a hospital gown is pounding on the driver’s side window, his IV tubes flailing around wildly, not caring that his bare ass is hanging out in the breeze.

  D-Day knows the AR-15 he has in the closet and the few thousand rounds of ammunition he has on hand will not be enough to fight through this growing crowd, not with the speeds at which they’re moving. He grabs his phone, scrolls through his contacts, finds one and hits send. He’s greeted with a message stating that all circuits are busy, try again later. He hangs up and hits the number again. Again, all circuits are busy. He continues to watch the carnage unfold outside his window. Finally, on the tenth try, the phone rings.

  “D-Day, I don’t have time for this,” Martha says, already irritated as soon as she answers. “I’ve got about a thousand calls to make and it’s getting harder and harder to get through to people.”

  “Zombies, really?” he asks. “Because that’s what they look like to me. Is this why they want everyone back? Why didn’t you say something before? And I have news for you. I’m not going to make it out of here. Not tonight, not in one piece, Cowher. They can list me as AWOL if they want, but if I try to get down there tonight, they’ll be listing me as KIA.”

  “D-Day—Jason—they’re not telling us everything, I’m sure, but we’re mounting a counterattack right now. We have squads out in the Springs as we speak, and when I’m done here, I have to help load out the trucks for resupply and reinforcement. If things go to plan, we’ll be hitting Denver by morning. Hang tight and do what you can where you are. We’ll get there, and you can link up with us then.”

  He ponders for a moment that there are regular army troops on the streets of Colorado Springs right now. This is unprecedented. But then, so is what he’s witnessed in the streets outside his building. “How big is this, Cowher? And please tell me this isn’t something WE started.”

  She pauses for a long second before replying. “I’m not authorized to say anything; you should know that. But … it’s massive. Global. And no, it’s not ours, at least not that I’ve been told. I’ve told you more than I should. I have to go. Jason—please be careful. Hopefully, I’ll see you in the next day or so.” She hangs up without saying goodbye. Either that or the line cut out; either way, she’s gone, leaving D-Day alone with his thoughts.

  The last time she called him Jason was more than a year ago in Afghanistan, when she was the driver on what was supposed to be a non-combat supply run, and they were caught in an ambush. Alone and outnumbered, she had been convinced they were going to die. She was not combat seasoned like D-Day and the others with them, but she was brave and fought as well as could be expected. Their situation was dire, though, and there was no way she was going die without telling him she loved him, and there was no way she was going to tell him she loved him using his nickname. Of course, they lived, and he didn’t reciprocate her feelings, not in the way she wanted. While he liked her company and found her easy to talk to and fun to be with—and he definitely enjoyed being intimate with her—he just didn’t feel the same gravitational pull toward her that she felt toward him. After that things became awkward between them.

  Now she’d used his given name again. Twice. It’s like a “tell” in poker. It’s her subconscious way of dealing with a serious, life-threatening situation. She’s stiffer, more formal. It must be even worse than I think it is, he says to himself. And I’m thinking this is pretty damned bad. Maybe it’s an extinction-level event. Well, I’ll be as ready as I can. With that cheerful thought bouncing around his head, he goes to his bedroom to do something he never thought he’d have to do again; prepare for combat.

  Four

  Fort Collins, Colorado. Friday, May 17th, 2013; 8:30 PM

  The FJ Cruiser weaves its way down Shields Street, navigating around abandoned cars and undead bodies. The undead fly at the side of the old SUV with wild abandon, bouncing off with a loud thud every time. There are bloody streaks on some of the windows, where ruined body parts have slid across the glass while gore-covered fingers try to find purchase.

  Whether they’re getting used to it or are just desensitized, the noises no longer bother the six people inside the vehicle. After the first few elicited screams from s
ome of the occupants—notably Danielle—once they realized that the tough old Toyota was capable of navigating the melee around them, they settled down and either kept their eyes away from the windows or stared out of them with morbid curiosity.

  All along the stretch of Shields from the campus south, the undead have been busy running people down, attacking them, and turning them into creatures like themselves. One sorority house has the door ripped from its hinges; blood-covered coeds roam around both in and out of the house. The lights are all on, and the carnage inside is plain to see for those driving past.

  The group decided to take the main route out of town, thinking that it would be the fastest. They didn’t think there’d be as many crashed and abandoned cars as there are, but they’re already several blocks into the journey, so Ben keeps the FJ pointed south.

  The vehicle approaches the intersection of Shields and Horsetooth where, a few hours earlier, a delivery van dropped two of its human vectors of death at a graduation party. Ben, Keith, and the rest of the group have no idea that it was the same van that stopped by their party. For that matter, they don’t know that Saji Masun Safar, using his Facebook alias “Brian Hansen,” found and targeted the party because multiple people had been posting about it and said he should come. This party was the first location to experience the living dead, and it is the one the police had responded to first. All officers reporting to this site were killed.

  As they draw near to the intersection, Ben sees hundreds of the undead swarming the parking lot of the apartment complex, the green spaces in between the buildings, and even on the balconies of the upper units.