Washington Deceased

by Stephen Jones

  Kevin watched her finish with the gauze and said, “You could’ve told me.”

  “Maybe. Hell, it wouldn’t be the first mistake I’ve made. Might be one of the last, though.”

  She unlocked the handcuffs, shoved them back into a pouch, and said, “I’m sorry, but now’s when we say goodbye. The tanks are almost at Washington, and I’ve got to be there.”

  She started to walk off but Kevin called after her, “Rocky – I hope you find Jo.”

  “Well, one way or the other, I think we’ll be together again soon.”

  As the two soldiers walked Kevin back to his cell in the office building, he was already missing Rocky.

  [CIA transcription of encrypted voice communication]

  CRCVG1:

  We’ve cleared the area around the South Lawn Fountain and now have all RCVs in place.

  PARKER:

  Tanks?

  CTB1:

  We’re lined up behind the RCVs. Encountered some heavy resistance in the Ellipse, but the ground troops coming in with us cleared it out pretty well. The flamethrowers were what really turned it for us, but it stinks like barbecue gone bad down here.

  PARKER:

  Losses?

  CTB1:

  Minimal so far. A few of the ground troops. One RCV got swarmed and we lost both crew and vehicle.

  PARKER:

  Hold position and wait for my command.

  CRCV1:

  Yes, sir.

  CTB1:

  Copy that, sir. We’re holding.

  Chapter Twenty

  STEELE LOOKED OVER the monitors Ty had set up. Next to her, Gillespie, the President and Vice President watched, seated in office chairs. In front, Parker and Ty waited, their fingers tense above controls.

  The situation still looked close to impossible.

  The vehicles were equipped with cameras, so they’d followed the progress of the modified RCVs and the Bradley tanks through Washington, with ground troops walking behind and at the sides. West of the Potomac, the dead had still been light and clearing them out had been relatively easy. But crossing the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Bridge had taken an hour, as they’d angled two RCVs to open the way, with the foot soldiers turning flamethrowers on the dead and trying to push the smouldering bodies to the side. They’d finally created enough of a path that the RCVs and tanks were able to roll forward, bumping awkwardly over piles of scorched flesh.

  Just beyond the bridge the roads had been packed, but they’d had more room to manoeuvre and they’d moved quickly. The tanks had sent in rockets, squads on the RCVs equipped with assault rifles had kept firing, and the soldiers had picked off stragglers with fire and bullets. The number of truly dead mounted into the many hundreds.

  “It’s working,” Gillespie had noted at one point, as the vehicles had rolled on to the spacious lawns south of the White House.

  “It’s not over yet,” Parker said. Steele knew “over” would mean that Moreby had been terminated and removed from the Oval Office.

  There were still tens of thousands of the dead between the human soldiers and the White House.

  Parker studied the screens for a moment, and then said, “Launch the second wave.”

  They’d already used drones once to help open the central area of the lawn known as “the Ellipse”, and it had proven to be an effective tactic. Flying in MQ-9 Reapers armed with Hellfire missiles, they’d cleared an astonishing amount of square footage in seconds. The President had initially objected to the use of the Reapers and the Hellfires closer to the White House – she didn’t trust the accuracy of the missiles – but Parker had told her it was the best way to achieve victory with minimum human casualties, and she’d relented.

  Steele wondered briefly about the drones’ operators; they were working from an Air National Guard base in Hancock Field near Syracuse, New York. She imagined young boys who’d probably won video-game competitions before joining the military; to them, these missions were probably not much different from a scenario in which they levelled up after beating the computer.

  The Reapers had been hovering overhead, and they couldn’t see the actual aircraft – but they saw the missiles hit, and heard the tank and RCV crews whoop and holler.

  The Hellfires struck the ground like angry gods, their fury blinding the cameras for a second before they showed hundreds of the infected being blown apart. The OC was too far away to feel the impact, but Steele knew those on the ground were feeling the shockwaves rumble through them.

  “That is damn pretty,” she heard Delancy say.

  As the explosions died away, the extent of the devastation was astonishing . . . and astonishingly gruesome. Severed limbs littered the scorched and cratered grass. Corpses, now truly dead, cluttered the grounds, some headless, others merely faceless. Zombies who had lost everything below the waist continued to pull themselves along the ground, still driven by the need to consume.

  “Oh, shit, you’re not gonna believe this.”

  Steele thought she recognized the voice coming over the speakers as belonging to one of the RCV drivers.

  “Hold on – I gotta pan the camera down . . .”

  The view on one of the monitors tilted down, revealing first a complex dashboard; then the picture jittered as the camera was apparently removed from a mount and walked over to a side window. It manoeuvred past bars until it had a clear shot of the tan side of one of the RCVs . . .

  . . . and the two zombies who had somehow been fused by heat, skin melted together until the midsection of one had merged with the chest of another. Two of the arms were missing and only one of the four legs was still complete, so the thing’s efforts to climb the side of the RCV were constantly hobbled by its own unsteadiness. The faces – a heavyset middle-aged man and a muscular African American in a sports jersey – snapped at each other in frustration.

  “Looks like we got us zombie Siamese twins now,” the driver said, and chuckled.

  “Driver of the RCV, get that camera back inside your vehicle now,” Parker said, watching the monitor where the camera was plainly held out past the safety of the bars.

  “What’s that? No, it’s cool, they can’t get up here. Look at ’em, fer Christ’s sakes, fucker can’t even stand—”

  Steele flinched as a scream echoed around the command centre. On the monitor, the view whip-panned, revealing a split-second image of a desiccated hand reaching in, an open mouth dripping saliva bearing down . . . then the screen went black. The screams, however, continued for several seconds, not drowned out by the babble of other voices crying out in alarm.

  “Ty—!” Steele saw Ty was also grimacing from the shocking sounds. It took him a few moments to locate the matching audio channel and mute it.

  “We’ve lost one of the RCVs,” said the tank commander.

  Beside her, Steele heard a small groan from the President.

  “Listen up,” Parker answered, “I don’t want any more fuck-ups from this point on. No matter what happens, or what you might see, everybody needs to stay focused on the mission – is that understood?”

  A chorus of answers sounded over the speakers.

  The lawn between the White House and the vehicles was only sparsely occupied now – Steele could even glimpse the Rose Garden just outside the Oval Office. But she knew they’d have to move quickly, before the dead returned (there were always, impossibly, more of them) and overwhelmed the human forces.

  Parker was already ahead of her. “Reaper pilots,” he said into his headset, “we’re done with you now, so you can fly your birds home, but reload them and keep those engines warm. RCVs, move forward and commence clean-up.”

  The RCVs trundled forward, the thin horizontal plates affixed to their fronts pushing zombies, both moving and inanimate, aside. The President asked, “Do the RCVs always come with bulldozer shovels?”

  Parker answered, “Actually, those aren’t shovels – they’re blast shields. The RCVs are designed first and foremost as mine detectors. But we realiz
ed they’d function equally well to clear masses of infected.”

  On the monitor, cameras mounted in the RCV cabs showed the vehicles lumbering forward and quickly piling up heaps of bodies on the plates. When they reached maximum capacity, they stopped, backed away, turned and moved the bodies to the side, where the foot soldiers helped scrape them off the makeshift shovels into mounds. If any of the bodies moved, a single bullet to the head quickly put a stop to that.

  Nearby, Steele heard a small mutter of revulsion, and thought it might have been Gillespie. Of course the intelligence chief liked to keep his hands clean.

  Parker let the clean-up continue for a few minutes, and then ordered, “Get the trucks in and the perimeter secured.”

  Ty tabbed commands on his screen, and several of the monitors switched to views from cameras mounted at the rear of the RCVs. Semi trucks rolled up now from behind the tanks and positioned themselves to form as much of a barricade as possible, crews leapt out, rolled up the truck gates, and began unloading sections of emergency fencing. While snipers picked off approaching zombies, the crews swiftly assembled a solid wall of chain link, stretching between the West and East arms of Executive Avenue. When Parker was satisfied that the South Lawn was locked down and cleared, he gave the order for the ground troops to move into the West Wing.

  Steele wished they had DEVGRU – more popularly known as SEAL Team Six – to handle this; or the Army equivalent, Delta Force. She would have settled for a team of expert hired mercs . . . but they had to work with what was left, and what was left was a ragtag team of veterans from different military branches and enthusiastic rookies. The commander, Scott Harkins from Letterkenny, had served with distinction in Afghanistan and was a smart, capable leader with the lined, dour face of hard-won experience.

  If Harkins succeeded today, he’d be one of the most famous military men in history. He’d be the commando who took down Thomas Moreby and set the human race back on the path to its rightful future.

  One monitor hung on the wall before them had a piece of masking tape with the name HARKINS scribbled on it in black marker, and all eyes now turned to that screen.

  The picture bobbed. A hand entered the frame, gesturing and pointing. A dozen armoured and armed soldiers ran up; two carried a portable metal ram. Occasionally a zombie staggered up, but they all went down with ruthless efficiency.

  This might work, Steele thought.

  The team had cleared a path to the edge of the West Wing now . . . where the Oval Office was. They circled it, fingers tensing on triggers.

  Harkins moved forward and gave unheard orders to his troops. They centred on a French door. One of them stepped forward and ran a scanner around the door, then nodded and stepped back. Another soldier reached down and rested a hand on the knob. She took a breath, looked at her companions and tried the knob. It turned. The door opened.

  The soldiers poured into the office. Harkins waited.

  The audience in the command room waited. Silence.

  Finally Harkins moved forward. He stepped up to the opened door, through it and into the Oval Office. The camera panned around the circular interior, past elegant fixtures, paintings of past presidents, chairs and the large desk.

  The room was empty. “Nobody home, sir,” Harkins reported.

  “Copy,” Parker answered, “search the building.”

  Most of the soldiers ran out through the interior door of the office, combing through the West Wing. Two of the men stayed with Harkins, guarding the all-important office.

  “Where the hell is Moreby?” That was Gillespie.

  “You should know that,” Parker answered. “The intelligence part of this was your baby.”

  “General, our intelligence was good. We know Moreby was still in that office yesterday.”

  Parker stayed quiet. Steele knew he didn’t trust Gillespie any more than she did, but right now he had to focus on the military operation, not divert his attention to a squabble about an agency’s failure.

  After a few minutes, a soldier ran back into the office and said something to Harkins. The camera view bobbed up and down slightly, and Harkins said, “Okay, General Parker: we’ve now searched and secured the West Wing. We took out a few zombies, but there was no sign of Moreby. We’re continuing on to the East Wing now.”

  “Copy that. Good work, Harkins.” Parker pulled off the headset and turned to address the President. “Madame President, we believe the South Lawn, the Oval Office and the West Wing are now secured, and the East Wing should be shortly. But there’s no sign of Moreby.”

  “So what’s our next move?”

  “Let’s see if anything turns up in the East Wing. If there’s still no sign of Moreby . . . we’ll proceed from there.”

  “Fine.”

  It took forty minutes for Harkins’ troops to report that they’d searched and cleared out the East Wing. The front entrances had been sealed and barricaded, and the building was now under human control.

  The President asked, “General Parker . . . recommendations?”

  He considered for a moment, and then rose. “Director Steele, may I see you privately, please?”

  Steele blinked in surprise. “Of course.”

  The President restrained her as she walked by, grabbing Steele’s arm even as she addressed Parker. “Hold on here – what’s this about? What would you say to Director Steele that you couldn’t say in front of anyone else here?”

  Parker fixed the President with a look of such silken intensity that Steele felt the other woman’s grip on her loosen. “Madame President, I’ll have to ask you to trust me, at least for a few more minutes.”

  The President held the look for a beat, and then released Steele. “Of course, Ames.”

  Parker led the way out into the corridor. He found a quiet space a few feet away and turned to Steele, speaking softly. “Something’s wrong, Steele. We won that battle way too easy.”

  “Maybe it was just well planned and executed—”

  He cut her off. “Maybe, but I don’t believe that’s why we won, and I don’t think you do, either.”

  “Maybe . . .”

  “Think about it: Gillespie’s been feeding us reports for days about intelligent zombies, a new strain created by Moreby.”

  Steele thought back to the battle she’d just witnessed on the monitors. “If that were true . . . they would have been using weapons against us.”

  Parker nodded. “That’s right. But what we saw out there today were nothing but the same old mindless dead things. And where’s Moreby?”

  “Do you think Gillespie has deliberately been giving us disinformation?”

  Parker exhaled and sagged back against the metal wall. “I don’t know, Steele. I hope not. If our own intelligence director was working against us, he could probably have fucked us over before this. So no, I don’t think it’s anything planned. He’s as clueless as we are about Moreby’s plans.”

  “So you think it’s a trap?”

  Parker nodded. “Yes. They know how important it is to us to get the President back into that office. And they know what a blow it would be to the human resistance to show her reanimated corpse stumbling around. It’d be completely over.”

  “So you think they’re just waiting for her to show up?”

  “You got it.”

  Steele let out a long, shaky breath. “So what the fuck do we do? Every moment that we sit here waiting is giving them more of a chance at building up their forces again. Soon all the fences and barricades in the world won’t matter . . .”

  “Right. And I don’t think we’re going to convince the President that getting into that office with a camera crew is not a great idea.”

  “But what if we’re wrong? What if we really did win the battle today? Can we be so sure we didn’t?”

  “No, we can’t. But we have to be sure. If this is all a trap, they’re probably waiting for us to fly a ’copter in there, land it on the lawn, and her to step out.”

  “But w
e’re not going to do that. I mean, we can’t, right?”

  Parker didn’t answer; instead he looked away.

  Steele stepped closer, her voice lower, more urgent. “Parker, you know there is no way I’m going to let that happen . . .”

  “Of course I know that. And that’s not what I’m suggesting.”

  Steele stopped, staring . . . and realized what it was that Parker couldn’t say to her, what had made him turn away. “You want me to pretend to be her.”

  He nodded. “I won’t ask you to do it alone, Steele. I’ll be on that bird with you. They’d probably be expecting me by her side anyway.”

  Turning to pace a few feet, Steele mulled it over. “So we fly in, step out – and if we don’t trigger an attack, we know it’s safe to bring the real thing in.”

  “And if we do trigger something, you and I are probably the best equipped to handle it. We wouldn’t go in defenceless.”

  Steele laughed weakly. “You know, Parker, this means we’re probably going to die because of an office.”

  Parker smiled. “Well, it does have a great view.”

  “Yeah, except right now that view is mountains of dead zombies.” Steele turned to Parker, serious again. “She’ll try to stop us, you know.”

  “I know. And that’s why I think we shouldn’t tell her. I can have that ’copter ready to go in ten minutes.”

  “Give me fifteen – I’m going to need a blonde wig and a pantsuit that looks like hers.”

  Parker offered her a warm look. “You got it. Meet you at the elevators in fifteen minutes.”

  Steele turned, but was stopped when Parker said, “Oh, and Steele . . .”

  She looked back to see him drawing a holstered pistol at his side. “I haven’t forgotten about our earlier discussion, so . . . the last two bullets will be for us.”

  Steele walked off, and a strange calm descended on her. She’d never felt it before, and it took her a few seconds to recognize it: she expected to die today, and had already accepted that fact. She’d felt this day coming for sometime, and it arrived with neither fear nor relief.