“Is this everyone? Where's Zachary Taylor? Why aren't you already moving?”
“Not everyone is coming, dear.” Grandma sounded nonchalant about what should be a very serious claim.
“Not coming? We have to get them out of here. They are going to bomb us any second!”
“Liam. Look at me.”
He was near-panicked.
“You and I are going to walk out of here together. Will you help me down the road?”
He felt like he was going to piss himself, but his tension eased as he took her hand. They were leaving, finally.
“And now, we start walking.”
With that, Liam and Marty started along the road. The others were spread in front and behind, moving as fast as their legs would carry them. Most actually moved at a good clip. Being in their 80's wasn't always synonymous with lack of mobility, and these folks were the survivors from wherever they'd been rescued. A tough lot, given their age.
Grandma and Liam quickly fell toward the back of the pack, then the very last in the line. “Liam, will you leave me here and save yourself? I really can't go any faster. I think they took too much of my blood.”
Uh oh.
Alarm bells were cracking from overuse inside his head, but he didn't want to worry his walking partner. He could guess who took blood samples while he was off with the colonel. He'd cross that bridge with her when the time was right. Walking out from under the shadow of a massive explosion was not the right time. Instead, he kept it light.
“No. It's you and me together, remember? I made that promise when we left your house. We are one wheelchair ride away from home!”
At the last possible point they could see the camp, Liam turned around while Grandma took a short rest. Looking that direction, Liam could see two large plumes of smoke snaking up from deep in the woods. The remains of the corral and the pit grave were wafting to the sky. Were they far enough from the camp to be safe now?
Leave nothing to chance.
If there was one thing Liam understood, it was that the military, for all their technology, was prone to making mistakes. It wasn't a slight against the modern military; it had been happening for millennia. They could just as easily bomb this empty road as destroy the camp itself. Call it operator error. Call it a computer glitch. Call it Murphy's Law. Whatever it was, it happened.
The high cloud ceiling and dense tree cover made it hard to know if planes were lurking high above, but he thought he could hear aircraft noise coming from somewhere.
“Grandma, keep moving!”
Another ten minutes and they could see the park exit. The geriatric brigade they'd been following were a short ways out of the gate, as if they had reached the finish line and were now catching their breath. Everyone had spent what they had pushing the limits to get here.
For his part, Liam was practically dragging Grandma over the line. The steel gate was smashed outward. Useless. A vehicle had run it down.
He doubted anyone was listening, or cared, but he risked a moment to stop and talk out loud. He was looking off to the side, as if giving color commentary to an imaginary camera crew. It was a thing he did.
“And this is why containment always fails. Right here. This gate. One hundred zombie books out of a hundred will have this gate, or something like it. Those jerks could have just as easily unlocked the gate and driven out so this place could be used by future survivors. Instead they tossed it like a disposable diaper. This park would have been a great refuge to hide from the zombies until the world cleaned itself up, but now it's just going to get infected like everywhere else.”
Almost as if in a script, the bombs fell on the camp. The explosions were loud and on target. Or close enough by Liam's reckoning because they didn't fall on their heads.
“And those planes. Were those really necessary? The whole damned world is already infected.”
The howl of several aircraft ripped overhead. He looked up to watch the dusky gray fighter jets scream up into the clouds like playful cats hiding on a high shelf, their bad deed already forgotten.
“I bet those pilots are hootin' and hollerin' like they just sank the Bismarck. Idiots.”
It tempered Liam immediately when he remembered who had been left at the camp.
“Grandma, will you pray for Zachary and all those left behind? I feel like someone needs to remember them.”
And then, for the first time in his life, he prayed with her.
6
After a few moments of prayer, Liam looked up, taking stock of where they were. It was mid-afternoon on the seventh day since the sirens. He'd spent much of the past few days holed up in his home, hidden in the back of a military truck, or at the secluded military camp. He'd only glimpsed the decay of the world briefly as they drove into the park this morning. He was shocked now that he could clearly see what the breakdown had wrought.
He was gazing down at the interstate, not fifty yards away. Most of the fires and smoldering cars had been reduced to cold charred ghosts dotting the landscape. Other intact cars were scattered haphazardly up and down the highway, in both directions. Probably sitting where the gas gave out. Every household item you could imagine was strewn on the pavement, as if people had tried to escape the city with their personal effects, only to toss them down once they were separated from their cars.
And bodies. They too dotted the landscape, providing a horrible tableau of what happened here the past week. Now they were bloated manikins left to lie where they fell. Wretched and smelly, even from a distance. Liam couldn't see them with any detail, but so many bodies suggested they were either humans shot by other men, they were bodies ravaged by zombies, or zombies put down by survivors. It was all due to chaos. He'd seen the start of this on his own earlier journeys. Now he was seeing the result of the full bore zombie plague. The dirty horde of infected who exploded out of the city—in pursuit of the refugees—had created this mess.
The final pieces of this horrible scene were the broken people. Living humans, not zombies, were trudging along the highway. A thin stream of survivors moving from the city, out to the wooded and rural lands. Their slow and deliberate pace made them seem like sleepwalkers out on a midnight stroll. Some picked through the treasures strewn everywhere, but most kept moving.
A couple of survivors were on bicycles, but no one was in a moving car now. A car probably couldn't fit through all the obstacles on this stretch of highway.
Liam looked at his fellow escapees. They needed a mini-bus to come along and take them back to their respective homes, where they could resume dying in the manner of their choice.
The task was daunting. Perhaps insurmountable. Getting Grandma out of the city was luck more than anything else. Things were still running. Law and order still reported for duty. Now, he had to get her across miles of suburbia without the help of trains or cars. It had taken Hayes and a convoy of military almost a day to travel the twenty miles, and they had a freaking chain gun to win arguments with the natives.
Plus, I had Victoria.
It was amazing how her presence had made the previous journey seem almost pleasant. Now he had no help at all. In fact, he was now carrying more baggage. He looked at the other survivors from the camp. Did he owe them anything? Could he and Grandma head for home and leave these people to their fates? Could he realistically do anything for them?
She was surveying the highway too. “Too bad we never saw any elk in the park.”
He looked at her as if she'd just said the funniest joke he'd ever heard. “Grandma, do you ever get depressed? How do you do it?”
“Oh, Liam. I have been down. Many times. Once you get to be my age, you take each day as a gift. Sure this looks bad, but it looked bad back at the Arch. It looked bad in your basement. It looked bad when the truck crashed. It looked bad running from this camp.” She used her thumb to point back over her shoulder. “But, through it all, I still have you by my side, and we're still alive. We've gotten this far together. We just need to work a lit
tle harder to get back home this time. The Lord will provide.”
It was an echo of the speech she gave as they left her home the day after the sirens.
The planes screamed overhead, more bombs fell on the camp behind them.
It's the only way to be sure.
That movie quote was more true now than ever.
Here and there gunshots could be heard in the distance. A portent of the challenges ahead.
That very day, Liam had witnessed strange zombies, horrible experiments, and the erasure of an entire government camp with heavy ordnance. He was stuck on a highway with his 104-year-old great-grandmother again, and the path to home and family looked more complicated than ever. But holding her at his side gave him a new strength. He suddenly had a premonition he would make it home with her and that everything was going to be OK.
Together, they took their first steps.
Toward home.
Chapter 10: Interludes
Five days since the sirens.
Jerry and Lana were exhausted. They'd been on the road for almost five days, including one short visit to Marty's now-abandoned flat. They mostly traveled at night, and stuck to routes as least traveled as possible. That included parks, greenways, drainage ditches, creeks, and sewers. Anything to keep them off the radar of the multitude of human opportunists who were out to cause trouble in the absence of law and order. It also kept them off the radar of desperate men and women suffering in normal, everyday desperation. Those who ran out of food. Those who were injured, with nowhere to go for help. Those who ran out of their psych meds. Those who had caught any number of secondary diseases, once the dead started stacking up in their neighborhoods. Finally, their most loathsome enemy was the infected. The zombies weren't as thick as they were at the beginning of the collapse, but they were well-ensconced in the landscape, and much harder to see or anticipate.
Taken together, there was hardly a minute in the journey that the couple was able to let their guard down. It took a toll on their constitutions that could only be replenished with healthy sleep. The nightmares kept pleasant dreams and healthy slumber at arms-length for both of them. But now, on the fifth day since the sirens, they could see their destination. Their own home.
“What in the name of God happened to our house?” Jerry was looking down his street from the hidden safety of the woods surrounding his neighborhood. The house looked like it was used for target practice by a platoon of infantry. “And Poole's house has been burnt to the ground.”
“What did we miss while we were gone?” Lana replied.
Thoughts turned serious once they realized Liam could have been inside when it was attacked. Or in Poole's. No other people were on the street, if they ignored the many dead bodies.
Jerry advised, “Let's use the woods to get behind the house, then see what we can see.”
They moved through the foliage until they arrived at their own property. From this vantage point, they were horrified to see the trees were gnarly and mangled from the effects of shots going through the wooden structure. The backyard was littered with the remains of the zombies who had been blown out the back. One grisly figure was clawing himself around the yard with his single good arm. Everything below his rib cage was...somewhere else. Scores of others on the grass were much worse off. Here and there they could see lone heads with mouths opening and closing, as if they were fish out of water.
“I hope those were zombies before they were shot, and not anyone we know.”
They discussed their options and decided to move between their home and the next, so they could enter through the front. The gore on the back side was just too much. They weren't ready to learn the identities of those—things.
They snuck to the side of their house. There were no windows on that wall, so they kept moving to the front corner. Jerry studied the scene. On the far side of the street, Poole's place lay in ruin. The fire had destroyed everything, and the house collapsed upon itself. It was now a smoldering pile of roof shingles. Bodies were thick between their home and Poole's. The front yard was as gruesome as the back, though the pieces were smaller in the front. Lots of blood, and relatively fresh because it still glistened on the grass. Jerry's fought his unsettled stomach.
“Do you think this was an assassination attempt on us? Is this what happens to people on the hit list?”
Lana couldn't or wouldn't answer.
“Cover me.” Jerry ran to the front door and waited. Lana followed after he made it and turned around to watch her. They didn't have to worry about knocking, or even swinging a door. It was totally gone. Jerry moved into the house, incredulous at the destruction. There was no doubt guns did this, but he'd never expected his own house to absorb such abuse.
He whispered, “Who would use such firepower on our house? None of the other houses have been attacked like this.” Poole's house was an unknown. It could have been arson or something as mundane as a cooking mistake. They'd seen lots of fires the past few days.
Lana was unable to provide any answers. She went right into the living room while Jerry stood near the door and covered her. The front window had sprayed glass all over the inside, and the remains of the television and numerous pieces of artwork had been shredded. Body parts and blood had splashed everywhere—even the ceiling. It was the stuff of nightmares.
Jerry took a step farther into the entryway, and heard the squeal of a girl.
“Ouch!”
Jerry nearly jumped out of his skin. He did jump as he realized he was standing on someone's hand. Lana swung around in surprise too. The hand was sticking out from some debris. A piece of the wall had fallen on top of her, knocking her flat on the floor. Lana had missed her as she came through the front wall.
Jerry began uncovering the victim while Lana moved back to cover the operation with her rifle. The load wasn't heavy; mostly drywall. The victim was a young girl. A teenager.
As the debris came off, she didn't immediately stand up. Unencumbered, she grasped her bloody hip as she tried to right herself against the remains of the wall behind her. “I've been shot!” She adjusted for a second, appearing to get comfortable. Then she paused, despite her own obvious pain. “Wait. I might have been hallucinating, but did you say this was your house?”
“Yes, I'm Lana and this is Jerry. We live here. What the hell happened?”
“My name is Victoria. Liam and Grandma and I escaped the city together.” She winced as she grasped her hip tighter. There wasn't a lot of blood from the wound, but enough.
“Grandma? Liam! Where's Liam?” Lana looked around, searching.
“If there aren't a bunch of Army trucks still on your front lawn, he's gone. Grandma's gone, too. Taken.”
Jerry remained kneeling. Lana came over, slinging her rifle behind her back so it was out of the way. She squatted next to Victoria to look directly in her eyes. “Victoria, who took our boy? Did they mention anything about a hit list? Was he taken because he was on that list?”
“The CDC took him. Some guy named Hayes. But they didn't take Liam specifically. They took Grandma. Liam went with her to look after her. I'm sorry, but I don't know anything about a list.”
“That doesn't sound like Liam.” Jerry asked. “So he did take her guns. He's protecting her?”
“After what he's been through, I don't think you'll recognize your son.”
Thinking of their own journey in and out of the city, Jerry couldn't argue. “No, I don't imagine we would.”
Lana began reaching for her backpack medical kit. “Let's get you patched up. Then, tell us everything.”
2
14 hours before the sirens.
Angie Jacobi was Marty Peters' live-in nurse. She finished her chores for her 104-year-old friend tonight so she could go pick up her granddaughter, Mary Beth, from work. The girl's mom had called and begged Angie for this favor. She knew better than to even think about arguing with her daughter-in-law.
“Thanks for picking me up, Grandma. There were some creepy pe
ople coming into the store today.”
“I don't know why Cheryl kept the place open. Everyone should be staying home, now.”
“Well, they sold out of shovels, hoes, machetes and all kinds of other yard junk. You should have seen how many chainsaws we moved. It would be great if they weren't using them for the wrong purpose. People said they needed them for fighting. How crazy is that?”
Angie took a moment to consider. “I'm sure they're just scared. We all are.”
“You're scared? I've never seen you scared about anything.”
“This isn't anything. This is something.”
“You believe all that internet stuff about zombies and the undead? I've seen videos from overseas on my phone, but it looks fake to me. Not half as real as those zombie TV shows.”
Angie steered the car through the evening traffic. Mary Beth lived in the county with her family, but worked in a small corner hardware store near the double flat she shared with Marty. She spoke with her mother and they agreed to let the young woman stay in the city for the night. Tomorrow, Mary Beth would get a ride back home—and Angie resolved to put her foot down about her still working in the dangerous metropolis. She couldn't imagine why her mom insisted she go to work, and normally knew better than to question her about it, but this was different.
The young girl had access to the internet and what was happening overseas, but Angie had spent time volunteering in a local clinic. She held her tongue about the things she'd seen “disposed of” by social services, but she was sure the sickness wasn't just overseas.
“Once we get to Marty's, I want you to stay inside, do ya' hear? I have a bad feeling about the direction things are heading. There are even fewer cars than normal out tonight. Something is wrong.”
Emergency vehicles skittered back and forth the entire journey, giving added weight to her belief something wasn't right. Several times during their trip through the city blocks, she had to pull over to allow the howling cars and trucks to get by. They came and went like angry bees.
Since The Sirens Box Set | Books 1-7 Page 46