The squawk of a radio shattered the quiet of the morning. Megan set off at a trot for the truck. While they all wore portable radios on their hips, they relied on scavenged military equipment for long-distance communication.
Jack already had the radio out and was speaking into it when she arrived. “It’s Steve,” he mouthed, his eyes full of concern.
Megan held out her hand, and Jack passed her the radio.
“What’s up, Steve?” she asked.
“Hey. We’ve… uh… got a bit of a situation over here.”
The hairs stood up on the back of Megan’s neck. There was no such thing as a ‘bit of a situation’ anymore, not since the dead had begun to walk. She tried to imagine Steve sitting in the main office in the visitor center, his ratty red baseball cap pulled low over his eyes, the blue vest he always wore unzipped halfway, and his feet up on the desk.
“What kind of situation?” she asked, locking eyes with Archie.
“Are you still planning to head back this afternoon?”
Megan gave Jack a confused shrug. “Yeah. We just finished loading the truck. It looks good over here.” She didn’t want to say much more until she had a chance to speak to Steve face to face. Of all of the people who would need handholding, he was at the top of the list.
“You may want to wait a little while. Maybe another night…”
Megan was perplexed. “Why would we want to do that? We’re done over here.”
“Something’s wrong,” Archie whispered.
Megan gave him a concerned nod. “What is it, Steve?”
Steve took a few seconds to respond. “We’ve got a swarm at the gate—”
“A swarm?” Megan gasped. “How big?”
“Fifty. Sixty. A hundred maybe,” Steve replied. She could hear the fear in his voice.
Megan bit her lip. A hundred zombies at the gate was most definitely not a small problem. “How long have they been there?”
Archie stepped away from the truck and began walking downhill, toward the mouth of the canyon. Jack moved in closer to Megan.
“They showed up sometime last night. We went out and took care of them like usual. This morning, though, there were more.”
“Shit,” Megan said, removing her thumb off the transmitter so Steve couldn’t hear.
Jack motioned at the radio. “Ask him if he’s sure of the numbers.”
She pressed the button and relayed the question.
“Yeah. I’m sure,” Steve said. “Hey. Hold on a second.”
“What the hell?” Jack sounded as frustrated as she felt.
Steve’s voice crackled through the tiny speaker again. “We’ve got more inbound. A lot more. They’re all over the place!”
“Hey, guys!” Archie was pointing north, at the mouth of the canyon.
Megan followed his outstretched hand, and her eyes grew wide as she saw the reason for his alarm. A small pack of zombies had entered the roadway near the entrance gate. The group stood stock still, as if waiting for something.
She cursed under her breath and hit the transmit button. “Are you still there, Steve?”
“Yeah, I’m here.”
“Do you have things under control?”
“I… yeah… I think so. They’re congregating a few hundred yards from the fence. I don’t know what the hell they’re doing. They’re just standing there like they’re waiting for something…”
Megan’s mind raced as she tried to figure out what to tell him. It was Steve’s first time dealing with a crisis of this magnitude, and he was probably on the edge of panic. For the first time, she regretted leaving him in charge. She decided to keep it simple and tell him to do exactly what she would do if she were there. “Okay. Keep your eyes on them and, if they make a move, take out as many as you can as quickly and quietly as you can. It looks like we’ve got a few unexpected visitors of our own to deal with. We’ll lay low and talk again in a few hours.”
She heard silence, then a sharp squawk of static. An accidental press of the transmitter perhaps.
“Gotcha,” Steve said a second later. “We’ll handle it. Talk to you soon.”
“Over and out.” She put down the radio and motioned for Jack to follow, then set off at a jog to catch up with Archie.
Five
Franklin Bunker
Arivaca, Arizona
Twenty-five. Twenty-six. Twenty-seven.
Ryan gulped. A sour taste flooded his mouth. There were twenty-seven zombies in the courtyard. He pulled his head back from the peephole and put his radio to his mouth. “You’ve got quite the party going on over there.”
“Ha-ha. Very funny,” Jim said. “How many do we have?”
“Twenty-seven.”
“I hope you’re kidding.”
“Nope.”
“Christ. How do you wanna do this?” Jim asked.
Ryan broke down his plan step by step. While the corpses were focused on Jim’s tower, he had a brief window in which they wouldn’t notice his approach from the rear. At least he hoped they wouldn’t. He would sneak up behind them and take out as many as possible with his suppressed Ruger MK II. The pistol, which he had originally acquired for the purpose of teaching Paige and Luke how to shoot, had turned out to be a godsend when it came to dispatching the undead. One pop to the head at close range, and the creatures went down like a sack of potatoes. The only limitation was the magazine, which held only ten rounds. Ryan had four extras, two in each pocket, but he doubted he would get the opportunity to use them all. He cursed himself for wasting his stockpile of Colibri subsonic rounds on varmints and tin cans. If he still had that ammunition, he would have been able to sit in his own observation tower and pick off the bastards in safety. He sighed. Once he had thinned the herd a little, Jim would slip out and join in the slaughter. With any luck, they’d be back inside, safe with their families, inside of ten minutes. With the larger horde almost upon them, ten minutes was all the time they had. They would leave the remains for cleanup later.
Ryan patted the nightstick hanging from his hip. After the Ruger, his police baton was his second favorite weapon for dealing with the undead. Rotted skulls, it turned out, were no match for a blow from the polished hardwood, plus it was a useful defensive tool for holding the creatures off if they happened to get too close.
Placing his fingers under the rough-hewn, two-by-six brace securing the heavy steel tower door, he lifted the bar up and out of the way. He had already unlocked two of the three deadbolts, leaving only a single keypad identical to those securing the stairwell between himself and the horrors waiting outside. With a final glance through the peephole, he punched in the unlock code.
An acrid stench assaulted him as he stepped outside, and it took everything he had not to gag. He cast a glance at Jim’s door, hoping and praying his friend would be ready to move when the time came.
He covered the distance to the rear edge of the mob in a quick dash, the soles of his favorite running shoes barely making a whisper on the hard-packed desert floor. He raised the Ruger as he approached the first zombie, a teenage male about Luke’s age, and squeezed the trigger once. The gun whispered, and the thing that used to be a boy crashed to the ground. So close to the crowd, the sound and the stench made Ryan’s skin crawl. He tried to put it out of his mind, to focus on the task at hand, but he was quickly approaching his limit.
Pivoting to his next target, he placed the muzzle of the Ruger against the creature’s skull and pulled the trigger. The pistol chirped, and the zombie collapsed. Using the same method, he dispatched three more zombies in quick succession. He was down to half a magazine.
Something brushed his shoulder. Spinning, Ryan found himself face to face with an old woman—Native American, some reptilian part of his brain informed him. Her mouth hung open, and a cool, fetid blast of rotten-meat-scented breath rolled over her toothless gums, bathing his face in the stench of abject despair. Ryan choked and tried to breathe through his mouth.
Now, where did you co
me from? Taking two steps back to put some space between himself and the zombie, he centered his aim on her forehead and squeezed the trigger. The gun spat, and the old woman twitched as the bullet found its mark.
She kept coming.
Ryan cursed and fired again. A neat little hole opened up over her left eye. A viscous stream of liquefied brain matter squirted out, barely missing him.
She kept coming.
Fuck! He was down to three rounds. He heard the sound of feet in the dirt behind him. The guttural moans grew in volume as the horde shifted, zeroing in on him. The woman reached out and shuffled forward. Ryan’s brain raced as he tried to comprehend why she hadn’t gone down. She had two bullets in her head. One should have been enough. Centering his aim on a hairy mole growing in the divot between her eyes, he fired again. One round left. The old woman’s face went slack, and she crashed to the ground at his feet, kicking up a cloud of dust in the process. Ryan glanced over his shoulder and found he was out of room. Two more creatures had flanked him, while the rest of the horde, close to fifteen he figured, bore down on him from the front.
“Jim!” he screamed. “Get out here!”
A rifle cracked above him, and the head of the zombie closest to Ryan disappeared in a black and gray mist. Glancing up, Ryan saw the deadly end of an AR-15 poking through the window, aiming in his general direction. He heard another crack and ducked as the gun fired again.
Ryan ground his teeth in fury. The noise would draw the incoming zombies like flies to shit. He had told Luke to wait underground with his mother until he gave the all clear, and as usual, the boy hadn’t listened.
“Behind you!” Jim called.
Ryan twisted his head in time to see his neighbor raise an old Louisville Slugger and pulverize the skull of a nearby zombie. He hadn’t even heard Jim’s door open.
Meanwhile, the AR-15 continued to chatter as Luke worked his way through the crowd.
Ryan waved at his son and screamed, “God damn it! Stop shooting!”
His plea was answered by a final report, which decapitated an elderly man near the solar panels and sent bits of brain matter and congealed blood sliding down the dull black glass in a slow-motion waterfall of gore.
Luke’s rifle fell silent. There were less than a half-dozen corpses left on their feet, and their attention was divided between Ryan and Jim.
Ryan slipped his gun into his holster and tore the baton from his waist. It was time to get up close and personal.
Jim shrieked.
Spinning toward the source of the noise, Ryan discovered Jim only a few yards away, whirling like an out of control dervish as he tried to shake loose a sun-dried monstrosity that had somehow gotten its fingers laced around his tactical vest. “Jim!” he yelled, as he took off at a sprint.
Ryan wasn’t fast enough. Knocked off balance by the frenetic thrashing of the creature latched to his chest, Jim tumbled to the ground with a scream. In a heartbeat, the creature was at his throat, its teeth sinking in through the soft flesh with a wet tearing sound.
Luke screamed, “Dad! Watch out! Behind you!”
Tearing his attention from the sight of his downed neighbor, Ryan searched for the source of his son’s alarm. When he found it, his blood turned to ice.
A second mob of undead had emerged from behind the shed, and they were heading in his direction. They would be on top of him in seconds. Shouting from the direction of Jim’s tower drew Ryan’s attention. Jim was on his feet again, banging on his door. Blood gushed from a deep wound on the side of his neck. The zombie responsible for the injury lay in the dirt, the contents of its skull a rotten puddle of stench. Jim’s Louisville Slugger lay abandoned a few feet away.
“No!” Ryan screamed.
Jim’s door swung open, and Jim slipped inside his bunker. The door slammed shut behind him, and Ryan heard the electric grind of industrial-grade deadbolts falling into place.
He dashed over and banged his fist against the cool, smooth metal. “Jim! Felecia! You can’t do this! Your family!”
He got no response. His heart sank.
A groan just behind him caused him to jump. A quick glance over his shoulder at the approaching horde told him he was almost out of time.
“Hurry up, Dad!” Luke shouted. The AR-15 started to spit fire as Luke set to work on the new threats.
Abandoning all pretense of an orderly retreat, Ryan ran the fastest twenty-yard dash of his life, his only goal reaching his bunker in one piece. Their plan was blown. Jim was dead. And soon, Ryan feared, he and his family would be, too.
Six
Madera Canyon
South of Tucson, Arizona
About half an hour later, the zombies by the gate finally wandered back into the desert. With no other immediate threats, Megan decided to take advantage of their departure delay to hike higher into the canyon and check the condition of the other springs Archie had mentioned. Archie agreed to stay behind and guard the truck, claiming a little alone time with his memories would be good for him and that he could handle any zombie foolish enough to wander into their camp.
By the time she and Jack reached the third spring, Megan was dripping with sweat, and her legs burned with the exertion of the steady uphill climb.
She dipped her fingertips into the sun-dappled water in the primitive stone spring catchment tank beside the trail and flinched. “Holy crap! It’s freezing!”
Jack grinned. “I’ll bet.”
She brought a cupped hand full of water to her mouth and took a tentative sip. She licked her lips and smiled. “It’s good. Clean.” She opened her fingers, and the remaining water dribbled to the ground.
Jack glanced back down the hill. “It’s steep enough we shouldn’t have any problem directing the flow.” He pointed to a flat spot a hundred yards away. “We could probably build a cistern right there.”
Megan followed his gaze. “I like it.” It would be a bitch getting the construction materials so far up the canyon, and it would take time to complete construction, but a cistern up there was definitely within the realm of possibility. However, with three springs, water wouldn’t be a problem for a long time.
“I think we can do a lot more than we did over in Scorpion Canyon,” she said. “Hell, maybe we should put up two cisterns, one here and one near the middle spring as a backup.”
Jack nodded enthusiastically. “I like the idea of a backup.”
Megan pulled her water bottle from her pack and unscrewed the lid. “We should fill up while we’re here.” She dipped the bottle into the tank.
Jack agreed, taking out his own bottle and doing the same.
Megan scanned the nearby forest as she stuffed the full bottle into her pack. “I’m kind of surprised we haven’t seen any wildlife yet. I would have expected to have seen something on the way. I mean, Archie said he used to hunt up here all the time.”
Jack shrugged. “I’m sure they’re here. There are probably animals all around us. They’re just staying out of sight”
Megan hefted her pack. “Yeah. You’re probably right.” She checked her watch. “I’m going to give Archie a call.”
“Okay,” Jack said before taking a sip from his bottle.
Megan unclipped her short-range radio from her belt and put it to her mouth. She pushed the transmit button. “Archie? Are you there?”
The radio emitted a burst of static, then Archie’s voice came through loud and clear. “Yep. How’re things up your way?”
“Good. Really good. The other springs are flowing fine, just like you said. I think we even figured out where to put our first cistern.”
“I told you so!” Archie responded, the excitement in his voice contagious. “Did you guys see the bear?”
Bear? Megan spun around to check all sides of the clearing. “What bear?”
Archie guffawed. “I can’t believe you missed it! It came ambling down the canyon a few minutes after you guys headed up the trail. You must have walked right past it.”
Me
gan frowned. “You didn’t say anything about bears.”
“Fuck,” Jack muttered. “I hate bears. Nasty creatures.”
Megan gave the nearby brush another nervous glance. “I don’t hate them. I just hate the idea of one more thing out there trying to eat us.”
“Yeah,” Jack said. “Well, at least they aren’t undead.”
Megan grew serious. “We hope.” In truth, no one had any idea if the zombie virus had affected the animal population. They hadn’t seen any signs indicating it had; however, they hadn’t seen enough animals in general to make an accurate determination. Dogs and cats, abundant in Tucson before the outbreak, had all but disappeared. Whether they had been consumed by the undead or had gone feral and vanished into the desert was anyone’s guess. At night, they sometimes heard the distinctive yip-yip-yip of coyotes calling, but none had ever ventured close to the compound. The idea of zombie bears was one she didn’t even want to contemplate.
Jack patted the pistol strapped to his hip. “I don’t think we have to worry about zombie bears. If they were infected, we would have encountered them a long time ago.”
Megan gave him a dubious grin, then keyed the radio. “We’re heading back down now. We should be back in about a half hour, maybe a little longer.”
Archie responsed, “Take your time. It’s all quiet down here.”
“No more signs of our visitors?”
“Nope. All clear.”
“Good. We’ll see you soon.” She clipped the radio to her belt and met Jack’s eyes. “You ready?”
“Always,” he said, lacing his thumbs under his chest strap. “I’m getting kind of hungry.”
“Me too.”
With a determined stride, Megan set off down the hill.
Elements of the Undead - Omnibus Edition (Books One - Three) Page 22