He ate in silence, wishing Zach were there. He thought about when he’d first been pulled to go on deployment, that Thursday morning at the beginning of November when he’d gotten the call.
“So, I’m not deploying with my own unit?” he asked Staff Sergeant Johns.
“No. Only some of you got pulled. The state needs them at one hundred percent, and they’re only at ninety-five right now,” he explained. “You most likely won’t even go with them after mobilization. You’ll just be an extra body.”
“Is there any way I can get out of it?” Cale asked.
He didn’t want to be a deployment dodger, but he’d just become a father. There were so many things he was going to miss.
“Unfortunately, no. Stop loss is in effect,” Johns answered.
“Roger,” Cale replied.
“Just get your ball rolling, and everything in order and we’ll talk to you later,” Johns stated.
“Roger,” Cale replied again, “bye.”
Staff Sergeant Johns had hung up without another word. Cale had just stood and stared at his cell phone for a moment. It was really going to happen. He walked out of the bedroom, and into the living room, where Lauren and Marie were cuddled on the couch in their pajamas. Lauren was feeding Marie a bottle while she watched television. It was a show she’d become addicted to about a young Clark Kent in high school.
She smiled at her husband, “What was that about?”
“I might be going to Iraq,” he replied, not making eye contact with her.
Cale blinked, coming back to the present. There were only a couple of pear slices left in the can, and his orange juice was all gone. Quickly, he crammed what was left into his mouth, and set his trash aside. Once all of his belongings were packed into his bag he put it on. His shoulders ached. He retrieved the AK47 and reattached the knife to his belt. The door creaked as he opened it, and the sound echoed throughout the house. He wanted to be quiet, but his every move, every step, made a sound. Outside, he could hear throaty calls and growls. Cale speculated for a moment. If the creatures were dead, and not breathing, how could they wail and moan? Recognizing the question as pointless, he put his brain back to work on his escape plan. He looked carefully through a space in a broken window. He’d pushed the sofa into the opening to block it, but the gap gave him a small peephole. Their numbers were intimidating. Cale tried to count them, but with them constantly moving it was impossible.
He went to a spot where he could see the backyard. There were eight or so of them shambling around. He sighed.
“Why can’t this ever be easy?” he asked himself.
He’d have to do something to draw them all toward the front of the house, and then escape out the back. He was pondering a couple of ideas when he noticed that some of the herd was peeling off toward the house adjacent to his. He hurried upstairs to get a better look. The crowd moved in between the houses, one of which had white paneling with green trim, the other made of brick. Something definitely had their attention. He watched as the rest of the zombies turned and followed. Their shouts grew louder as they changed direction.
“The fuck?” Cale whispered.
Gunfire erupted, as armed men moved around some of the homes. The infected, though large in number, fell one by one as the platoon of men formed a firing line in the street; a tactic Cale never thought he’d ever see. One row of men knelt down, while the row behind them stood and shot over their comrades’ heads. Cale recognized the uniforms.
Egyptian Armed Forces.
“Shit,” he said, as he ran from the window and down the stairs.
He wondered if it was just a coincidence, or if they were deliberately searching for him. His boots struck the stairs loudly and he fell down the last three steps. Once he’d recovered, he headed for the back door. He wanted to get as far away as possible, as quickly as possible. He’d rather be killed than recaptured. He moved the objects he’d used to barricade the back door, and ran out. Some of the undead were still trying to figure out how to get back to the front and were still bumping into each other. Cale’s emergence from the house went unnoticed for a few seconds, and he zigzagged through them so quickly that their diseased brains didn’t register him as food. He barely pulled himself over the fence in time to avoid their deadly hands. His fever had weakened him.
A group of infected waited on the other side. They must have tried to join the others in the street, but were too dumb to go around. He hadn’t wanted to, but he was forced to begin firing. His first volley missed and struck the house. He still wasn’t very good with this weapon. He waited ‘til he was closer to fire as he shot the ones in his direct path. To waste ammunition was surely a death sentence. Behind him, he could hear shouting amidst the gunfire, and Cale couldn’t be sure he hadn’t gone unnoticed. He ran through a narrow walkway between two houses, and out onto the next street. A parade of undead stood waiting to greet him.
“Whoa!” he exclaimed in shock.
He looked for a gap where they weren’t as clustered, found one, and barreled through their line. Hoping to slow them down, he entered another house at the north side of the street. The infected had successfully laid siege to this home—and won. Its door had been splintered off of its frame, and the furniture was overturned. The floors had long ago been stained with blood. He made these observations as he ran through and out the back door. This yard hadn’t been fenced in and was open to the others. A group of undead huddled over something as Cale ran by. The husk they fed on must have been someone’s pet. He thought he’d seen the head of a dog.
At the rear of the yard he entered a grove of trees, a bit of nature that broke up suburbia. The leaves were in various states of budding and blooming. Tree after tree zipped past him. He felt weak but feared stopping. He couldn’t see the undead but he could still hear them. The foliage obscured his view, and he suspected it probably hid dozens of infected around him. Cale entered a clearing where a children’s playground stood. Only a few infected were present, and one of them was a teenager, trapped inside a dome climber. He’d entered the dome for safety, only to succumb to his injuries and become one of the undead. Another was a child of maybe ten or eleven years old. She was mostly naked, and her body was rotted. She stood under a tree, reaching for a scared squirrel a few branches up. For a moment, Cale considered the thought that she was starving and felt bad for her.
“She’s a monster now,” he tried to convince himself, but all he saw was a hungry little girl. Cale decided to change course, and followed a sidewalk toward the street. He slowed his pace to a jog so that he could catch his breath, and after a couple of zombie free blocks he began to walk. Occasionally, he still heard gunshots far off to the south. He began to cough violently, and his body shook. His little run had left him feeling weaker than before, and it didn’t help that the world was spinning. Cale’s eyes were burning in their sockets, and all he wanted to do was close them…
“You gotta keep moving,” a familiar voice echoed in his head.
Cale pushed on, and walked down the middle of the street through an abandoned neighborhood. Trash floated by on the breeze, and plant life clawed its way through cracks in the pavement, reaching for the sun. Cale occasionally bumped into vehicles left in the road.
“I should take one of these,” he told himself.
After making sure that there weren’t any infected inside, Cale climbed behind the wheel of a green four-door. He wasn’t familiar with the make or model, but it had four wheels, which was all that mattered to him. Unfortunately, when he tried the key, all it did was whir and click.
“Dead battery,” he said to himself.
He got out and moved to the next vehicle, a small minivan. Cale opened the door and reached to see if the keys were inside. They weren’t in the ignition, so he pulled the visor down. Again no luck. In the rearview mirror, something caught his eye. Without thinking, he leaped out of the driver’s seat and slammed the door as he fell to the ground. Just as it closed, an infected threw itself a
t the window.
“That was close,” the voice said to him.
Cale got up and looked at the occupant of the van as he dusted himself off. Phillip was what his nametag said. Given his uniform, and the van, Cale deduced that Phillip there had been a deliveryman for a florist shop. His skin was ashen, and he anxiously pawed at the glass, smashing his face into it. His black tongue wagged back and forth over his yellowed teeth. He’d been struck in the face with something, and his jaw hung useless and broken. It had to have been his own blood that stained his light blue uniform. He howled, desperately trying to get at Cale.
Cale looked down the street at other potential transportation. Every few feet there was another vehicle. He was able to dismiss a third of the ones he could see. Their doors had been left open, and it was safe to assume that the batteries would be dead. Two others had smashed into each other. Ruling them out, Cale moved from car to car, hoping for the best. Many had no keys. Others contained trapped infected.
“Come on,” Cale said, looking at the sky, “give me a break.”
He began to shiver again, despite sweating like a pig. He felt cold, but knew he was burning up. Cale began to feel lightheaded again, and the world spun around him. For a moment he thought he would be okay, but the next moment began to vomit. He fought back at his body’s compulsion to empty his stomach, succeeding only in making it worse. Once all of his breakfast had been relocated to the pavement, he was able to regain his composure.
“What a waste,” he said angrily, as he wiped bile from his mouth.
His body didn’t realize just how precious food and water were at the moment. Mad at himself, Cale continued his search for a vehicle. He felt like he could crash at any moment, and fainting out in the open would be more than fatal here. He glanced around at the houses. It looked like it had once been a nice middle class neighborhood. In one of the windows of a home to the west there was an infected. She just stood there in a trance. She probably hadn’t seen Cale as he walked by. In a driveway, Cale could see a windowless van. He walked up to it, peering into the back windows. It had to have been a moving van at one time. There were no seats, but a variety of items crowded its interior. Cale could see canned food and bottles of water, as well as a couple of suitcases. On the roof of the grey van was a rack that had fuel cans tethered down.
“Yes,” he said quietly.
The doors however, were locked. That was both good and bad. It was good in the sense that the battery was probably still okay, but bad because he needed to locate the key. He looked up at the house. He knew there were many reasons to pack up the van and lock it. There were only a few reasons not to use the escape vehicle. He walked up the wooden steps and onto the porch. Cale removed his tan jump bag and placed the rifle next to it. He held the combat knife, ready to strike. The door was locked, so Cale circled to a window. The glass had been broken in, but the barricade that blocked the entrance still remained. Cale threw his body at it a few times, until it fell over. It had been a heavy oak bookcase, now its books had been dumped across the floor.
As Cale stepped across the threshold he listened for inhabitants. They could still be alive, and just hiding from the infected. They could also be dead or worse. He heard nothing, and so cautiously began his search. He rummaged through drawers and over counter tops.
“Come on. Be here!” he said desperately.
He began pulling out drawers and dumping their contents on the floor. All he found were kitchen utensils and a junk drawer. A ceramic bowl sat on the table, but it was empty, as were many of the cabinets. After stopping a moment to comb through the mess he’d made on the floor, he heard something. Someone was walking across the floor upstairs!
Instantly, he was back in the home in Tel-Aviv, slinging his rifle over his shoulder, and getting ready to leave the bedroom, when a series of thumps and creaks moved down the wall. He thought about how he’d discovered the two boys hiding in the attic. Right now, they were upstairs waiting for him. He urgently searched for the stairs. He needed to find them. Cale ran out of the kitchen and into the dining room. The table had been tipped on its side to block a large window, and the chairs were spread all across the floor. He exited the dining room toward the hall.
“There you are,” Cale said, as he found the stairs.
Without hesitation, he began his ascent. Just as he reached the top of the stairs he heard something.
“What are you doing?” a voice asked him.
“I have to find them. I have to rescue them,” Cale answered, as he walked down the hall looking for the right door.
“Cale! Stop, you don’t know what’s in there,” the voice shouted.
“I have to save them!” Cale shouted back at the empty hall.
He could hear movement on the other side of the door. It had to be Adam and Matthew, and he had to save them. The door had a note taped to it, but it was all in French. He rigorously turned the doorknob, but it wouldn’t budge. They were locked in.
“Help us!” he heard Adam’s little voice cry.
“Hold on!” Cale pleaded with him.
Cale backed away from the door and prepared to ram it. The first impact hurt his shoulder, but he was determined to enter. The second impact splintered the frame.
“One more,” Cale said, breathing heavily.
After the third hit, he was in the room. What he found before him wasn’t Adam and Matthew. Instead, he found a father and daughter. They were holding hands. Or were they? It took a moment for him to realize what he’d discovered. They were undead. Their hands had been tied together. The man looked as if his neck had been eaten out, and the little girl had a bite on her arm. The undead family hesitated for only a moment before pouncing at him.
Cale fumbled with his knife for a moment as he pedaled backwards. The man was on him first, his teeth snapping just inches from Cale’s face. He managed to push him back, but dropped the knife. The little girl closed in from the side, unknowingly kicking the knife away. Her little hands clutched at Cale’s clothes, and her teeth sank into his leg. She was yanked away when her father fell back, dragging her with him. Cale checked his leg. Her bite had gotten caught on the extra fabric of his pocket. Much relieved, he quickly began searching for the knife. It had slid underneath a coffee table. He slid across the floor on his stomach and clamored for the blade, succeeding only in pushing it further away. Behind him, the man groaned as he climbed back to his feet. The little girl was already on the offensive. She clawed at Cale’s boots and attempted to bite him again. Cale turned his attention back to his weapon after he kicked her loose. The knife was gone.
“Oh, no, no, no, no…” Cale said frantically.
The man howled, and then the little girl shrieked. Cale rolled over, unprepared for their attack, only to find a man dispatching them both. The man pulled the knife from the girl’s head, and the father’s body already lay motionless on the floor. Cale’s defender pushed the girl onto her father, then dropped the knife and walked down the stairs.
“Told you not to open that door,” he said, as he walked away, “The keys are on the hook.”
“Who are you?” Cale asked.
The man didn’t answer. Cale jumped to his feet. His vision was blurry, and the hallway felt like it was sloped to the side. Cale felt dizzy. He retrieved his knife and looked down at the things that had attacked him. The little girl, who looked about seven years old, lay across her father. A final embrace between father and daughter. Cale felt bad for them. Why were their hands joined? He shook his head and scurried down the stairs to find his savior.
“Hello?” he called, moving through the house and trying to be quiet.
The house creaked and groaned, but no one answered. He moved from room to room. He was alone. Did the man leave? Cale stood in the hall and looked at the door. It was still closed, so the man must have closed it behind him before he left. A set of hooks on the wall caught Cale’s attention, and from one of them hung a set of keys. He’d walked right by them at least twice.
>
“Great,” he said.
Cale lifted the keys off the hook, and sorted through them. One was a house key and another was for the van. He had what he’d come for, it was time to leave. Cale stepped out onto the porch. Several infected were walking down the street toward him, no doubt following his scent. He quickly picked up his bag and rifle, and jumped off the porch, skipping the stairs. He hurried over to the van, flung open the door and jumped inside. The key slipped smoothly into the ignition. This was the decisive moment. Cale held his breath as he turned the key. The van’s engine sputtered, and then hummed.
“Yes!” Cale laughed.
An infected threw itself at his window, startling him. Her rotted face was home to a patch of green mold, and her brown teeth chomped on the other side of the glass. Cale ignored her as he put the vehicle into reverse and backed out of the driveway. He wanted to take stock of the supplies, but that would have to wait. Someone had been watching out for him. Was it the mystery man? Cale pulled out onto the street and drove north, away from the coast, and most importantly away from the Egyptian Armed Forces, or whatever they called themselves now. In his mirrors he could see a gaggle of infected pursuing him futilely. That didn’t matter now. He kept his speed low, avoiding abandoned vehicles, as well as the occasional infected. He wasn’t sure where he was going, but northwest sounded like a good plan. Even moving slowly, things seemed to pass in a blur. It had to be the lack of sleep coupled with his fever. He wouldn’t be able to drive for long, but at the very least he needed to get out of town before stopping.
25.
Fastfood
The occupants of the diner sat in their seats as they had for the last several weeks. They’d all been stopped here when the government prohibited travel on the highway. They’d locked themselves in before any of them knew what the virus was, or how it spread, not knowing that it was already among them. It started with an elderly woman. Her husband held her as the fever ravaged her body, while the other thirty-nine occupants huddled around the television, hoping for any kind of news. Their angry shouts of frustration drowned out the screams of the woman’s husband, as she ripped his throat out with her teeth. One by one, the crowd fell before they realized what was happening.
Z Plan (Book 2): Red Tides Page 16