About 70 Marines spent the following day clearing every boat docked around their peninsula. Nearly every water-front house had a personal dock. Many of the docks still had personal boats and small yachts. The rooms were small, the hallways were smaller, and any time the Marines found a zombie, it ended as a very close encounter.
A crew of a dozen civilians went onto the boats to remove bodies as the Marines exited the boats. Another team of four civilians drove a truck around to collect the bodies. The truck crew took the bodies to what had become known as “the pit.” It wasn’t anything more than a clear spot just behind the defensive perimeter where the zombie bodies were unceremoniously burned in a pile.
The lone pastor among the refugees said a few words before the fires started the first time. He wanted to do more, but the living who still sought prayer, counseling, and confession took up all the time he wasn’t doing his part to build their sanctuary. Besides, zombies don’t need prayers.
Gunny Thorn hoped he didn’t hamper the clean and sweep or barricade efforts by pulling so many Marines to clear boats. The National Guard supplemented those groups who had Marines reassigned; still he worried.
Squad and shift leaders reported the all clear back to Gunny Thorn. He was fairly happy about the reports, given the nature of the job. No Marines had been bitten, and only two had been injured: one was tackled by a zombie and landed on some glass, which cut his back fairly deeply, nothing the corpsman couldn’t handle; the other won a wrestling match with a zombie only to burn his hand on a lit stove as he stood up. As a bonus, most of the boats remained water worthy, giving them one more fallback option.
It took the Marines from full light until just before dark to sweep and clear every boat along the peninsula. The captains had, quite rightly, issued commands that everyone was to be indoors or aboard the LMTVs after dark. Gunny Thorn stood on the second story balcony of the command post and looked toward the water.
Today was actually a good day.
Chapter 10
Walk in the Woods
Lily looked at the dirt path beyond the sharp V-dip. The path bottomed out and climbed back up far too sharply for her underpowered truck. Heavy branches hung low over the sharply sloped path, and trees kept a tight formation on each side of the narrow trail. It was the same story on her side of the dip. There was no room to turn her truck around—not that it would have done any good; the tank would run dry long before she found her way back to anything close to civilization.
“Damn!” Lily yelled and hit the steering wheel with her palms.
She knew better than to try to drive the partially overgrown ranger trail. Choosing between more towns and the road untraveled seemed like a no-brainer at the time. “Stupid! Stupid!” she continued to beat her steering wheel as though it had a say in where she went.
Lily loved hiking—for recreation. Now she faced hiking her way out of Wallowa-Whitman National Forest, maybe even all the way back to Haskell, Texas.
Her watch showed 3 p.m. Even if she set out immediately, she wouldn’t get very far. She decided to spend the night in the truck. For the hours until dark, Lily busied herself repacking her backpack. She ditched all but one set of spare clothes and a couple pairs of socks in favor of more food and water. She kept as much of her ammo for the AR-15 and her pistols as she could.
Total she wanted to carry two pistols with six boxes of rounds and five magazines; the carbine and its two spare magazines; a flashlight and batteries; two gallons of water; a can opener; the bottles of antibiotics and birth control; her sleeping bag; and as much food as would fit in the remaining space. She put the over-loaded backpack on the tailgate and checked the weight distribution.
Resting the backpack so the straps hung off the tailgate allowed her to easily slipped them over her shoulders. It was heavier than any load she’d carried on any camping trip. She could, and would, carry the weight, but she knew it would exhaust her, and she worried that it could pull her over if she got careless. After about five minutes she felt reasonably sure the straps wouldn’t break or bite into her too much.
“I’ll just have to be sure I don’t get careless again,” she said.
Lily stretched out across the seats in the truck with her feet on the door panel and the windows partly open. Trees and rocks blocked out the sun’s final, feeble rays, drenching Lily and the woods in darkness. She sat in the dark and absently ran her finger around the carbine's barrel. City life had her way too used to staying up late to fall asleep easily.
Out of boredom, she clicked on the dome light and grabbed the notebook she’d written in the day the dead stopped staying dead. By some miracle it had stayed on the dashboard where she’d absently shoved it when she left the mill to go back to town.
This notebook with its dumb song is the only reason I wasn’t zombie food that day.
She sighed and ran her fingers over the black ink on the page. Lily read the words once and the music popped in to her head to accompany them.
It really would have been a good song.
Lily closed the book and hugged it to her chest as she spread her sleeping bag over her. She clicked off the dome light and settled against the door.
***
Lily woke after dawn but before the sun reached her half way down the mountain. Being exhausted had its advantages and let her get quality rest even in the cramped and awkward space of the truck cab.
She stretched next to the door and rolled the sleeping bag. Her stomach growled hungrily before she finished.
“Shush. I’ll feed you in a second,” she said as she finished rolling the sleeping bag and strapping it to the top of the bulging backpack.
Looking at the mountainous stock of food in the bed, she decided on a box of raisin bran cereal for breakfast. Her plan had been to sit on the tail gate and eat while the sun came up, but she felt the itch to be in motion, and there was enough light to see by.
On a whim she folded her notebook in half and shoved it in the last sliver of space in her backpack before she shouldered it and set off. She walked along the path eating her cereal all day.
Lily stuck to the path as much as possible. The park rangers clearly didn’t use the path often, but since it was a ranger path, it had to lead to a tower, station or something. Eventually. Maybe when she finally found it, she could charge her cell phone or find some way to reach the rest of the world.
Leaving the main road was really dumb. I should have known better. But at least the woods here are pretty.
She spent her nights camping in her sleeping bag looking up, through the tree limbs at multitudes of stars. Her backpack made a terrible pillow so she didn’t try it after the first night. She kept it and the AR-15 within arms reach and a pistol in the sleeping bag.
Being an experienced camper, she knew bears and wolves would be drawn to even the slightest smell of open food. Everyday she made sure to eat and ditch the packaging well before she made her small camp for the night. It worked because she never had anything approach her.
Once, on the second night, as she drifted off she imagined she heard something shuffling through the undergrowth. She eased her hand around the carbine’s grip and lay as still as she could. When nothing moved again for ten wide-eyed, adrenaline-elongated minutes, she wrote it off as a rabbit and rolled over, falling quickly to sleep.
Three days.
Four days, she walked. Her Doc Martins rubbed holes in her socks and blisters on her feet. This morning she’d put on two pairs of socks, but she continued to rub blisters on her feet through cotton. Her pack grew steadily lighter as she used up her water and food.
She had no idea where she was. The map she had didn’t show the ranger’s path beyond where the grading stopped. And she hadn’t seen a navigable landmark since before she left her truck.
By the sixth morning, her water ran out despite being refilled from a groundwater spring. Lily didn’t feel any closer to home despite having walked just short of hundred miles.
What was I thinkin
g? I'm never going to get to Daddy at this rate.
Shortly after noon the sixth day, she walked into a small clearing. A dry, brown, rocky stream bed cut through the heart of the large grassy clearing like a jagged scar down an otherwise smooth face. Knee high golden grass filled the clearing except for the stream bed and a few feet on each side of it. Brittle, gray branches on the dried out bodies of trees poked out of the grass like rigid limbs on corpses that didn’t come back.
Lily stopped near the edge of the clearing and looked toward the lower end. A few hundred yards down slope, the trees slowly filled in the space around the stream until they swallowed it.
She scanned the clearing, expecting to find a bear, or wolf, or deer, or other woodland creature, but all of them were either miles away or staying extremely well hidden. A raptor soared lazy circles overhead, looking for the rabbits and mice Lily would no doubt scare from cover.
The bird of prey circled back southeast toward the ridge line. Lily didn’t expect to find a ranger tower, and she may not have seen it nestled among the trees on the next ridge if she hadn’t been watching the bird hunt. She stared at the tower for more than a minute before her brain registered the gray-brown box surrounded by green treetops as a man-made tower and not a hallucination.
“Thanks, birdie buddy,” she said, nearly shouting. “Don’t know how you knew I was looking for that, but thanks.”
She looked again to check her bearing. The tower was a fair ways off, but she’d make it before dark as long as she made straight for it. She struck off through the clearing toward the ranger observation tower, jumping the stream bed when she came to it.
***
Lily woke up late the next morning, grateful for having slept well for the first time in more than a week. She’d arrived at the tower just before it got too dark to see where she was going. She had to break down and use her flashlight to get up the stairs. The door had been unlocked and opened easily. She slept with her feet against the door, just in case someone else tried to get in.
Lily spent the rest of the morning poking around the shed under the tower and the surrounding area. The shed held an assortment of tools, including a couple of gas cans. One of the five-gallon gas cans was bone dry. The other sloshed loudly when she tried to move it.
Outside, Lily walked around the shed and found a lean-to on the backside. She pulled on the bulky tarp under the lean-to and found two things that made her heart flutter and nearly brought her to tears: a generator and a four wheeler. Both looked to be in good repair.
Lily looked at the four-wheeler, the tarp still hanging in her hand. The seat was worn and had several tears near the gas tank. The drab green paint was scratched and faded. It had a flat-black rack mounted behind the seat with a canvas bag hanging off each side. She hit each of the tires to make sure they were good.
Lily jumped up and down, quietly screaming “Yes!” She ran to the shed and dragged the gas can to the four-wheeler. She ran up the stairs, still bubbly. That she missed the obvious electrical outlet right next to her head all night spoke volumes about her exhaustion. She ran downstairs and turned on the generator. Lily listened to the steady rumble of the generator for a minute; then ran up stairs to plug in her phone.
Lily turned on her phone while it charged.
“Of course. No signal.”
She turned her phone back off and leaned against a small desk. The handles for the drawers dug into her back. She jumped up and tore through the desk. At first it looked like a junk drawer with nothing even potentially useful. Between her days with search and rescue and surviving the undead, something told her to go through the entire ranger tower with a fine-tooth comb. She had all day anyway, so she went back through the contents more slowly, examining each item. Among the blank forms, she found a map of the mountains. Lily sat down and studied the detailed map.
I might be in better shape than I thought.
Chapter 11
Home Away From Home No More
Joseph felt bad for McCoy. The child turned leader of some sixty cadets yelled to be heard over the complaints and protests of the cadets he found himself in charge of. McCoy had called a mandatory meeting in the courtyard to tell everyone about the plan to move everyone down to Carlsbad Caverns.
The ten cadet raiders and McCoy’s second-in-command, whose name Joseph couldn’t recall, stood behind him, relatively well armed, and they had one hand ready to pull their weapons at the slightest need. Yet, they kept their faces neutral and kept themselves calm as their brothers and sisters reacted with the same outrage they’d felt when they first heard the plan.
Joseph was impressed by how McCoy kept his cool while defending the choice to abandon the Box. He made his voice carry over the cacophonous chorus of protesting cadets, but he never ‘raised’ his voice. Watching the whole drama play out, Joseph couldn’t help but think if he were in McCoy’s place, he’d have just fired several rounds in the air to get everyone to shut up.
“Yes, this is home for us, but Joseph and Mike came from the Dallas area. This problem is getting worse not better. To have half a chance to not be over whelmed by zombies, we have to move on. The caverns will be safer, but far from easy. There will still be plenty of work to do,” McCoy said in answer to an accusation that leaving the Box was taking an easy way out.
“This is the final word. The trucks, with all the supplies we’ve raided,” McCoy pointed at the eleven behind him, “They’re all leaving with us come sun up. You want to come with us, go pack your things, bring your weapon and your bag to the load masters, and be in the courtyard at zero-six-four-five. If you want to stay here, that’s your choice. No one will think less of you for it. Dismissed!”
McCoy walked back to the raiders shaking his head. Joseph watched the formation break and the cadets head back to their rooms. He hung back and waited in the courtyard for a moment before going to grab his backpack.
Loading and repair work stopped for two hours as the cadets responsible for loading the trucks went to their rooms to pack their gear and few personal possessions. After they had their things together, they slept in the trailers until the other cadets brought their things out to be packed onto the trucks.
Joseph loaded his and Mike’s backpacks onto the bus in the overhead rack he’d welded in place two days earlier. The overhead rack on the driver’s side was fairly full with the addition of the backpacks. It already held the helmets they grabbed way back in Wichita Falls, a duffle bag full of clothing for Walter and Stacy, and Mike’s leather jacket. Joseph’s leather jacket still hung on the back of the driver’s seat.
The back of the bus was crowded, even with most of the seats removed. Only the first two seats on each side of the bus were still bolted to the floor; the rest sat piled haphazardly near one of the inner walls of the courtyard.
The oxyacetylene torch stood in the back corner, chained upright. Milk crates and boxes of supplies lined the driver’s sidewall; each strapped in place with bungee cords. A shopping cart Joseph cut legs off of and tack-welded to the floor opposite the cutting torch served as a makeshift weapons rack. Mike used elastic cords to strap two milk crates to the mutilated shopping cart and stacked a fair amount of their spare ammo in them. Add a fold out cot for Stacy, Joseph’s tool box and a half dozen-five-gallon Jerry cans of diesel, and it was more than a little claustrophobic.
Joseph grabbed the road atlas from where he’d tucked it on the left side of the driver’s seat then headed off to Stacy’s room.
***
Mike sat in Stacy’s room with one small lamp burning a single forty-watt bulb instead of the bright overhead light. Watching over Stacy left you with plenty of time to yourself with just your thoughts; which is a rather dangerous combination in a world where the only thoughts you normally have time for center on how to keep yourself alive, and every waking moment is filled with work or running from things trying to kill you. Mike reached over and adjusted one of Stacy’s blankets. Like a father tucking in a small child, Mike brushed a
stray strand of damp hair out of Stacy’s face.
Poor kid. Putting up a hell of a fight. Even if she comes through… It’s bad enough for me to see this shit. I can’t imagine how she’ll handle this…this…
Mike sat back in his chair. He let his mind wander over Stacy and the whole series of events of the last two weeks. Joseph had told him about keeping the cadets from putting two in Stacy’s head the second they were all safely in the courtyard. Two of the hall patrol cadets told him how hard it was to get Walter to leave Stacy’s room for anything—most of the time it involved carrying the crying and exhausted man across the hall and posting a guard on his door.
Mike understood the love Walter felt. It nearly destroyed Mike to shoot his mother’s reanimated body.
It would devastate Walter if anything happens to her. I can’t imagine having to watch someone I love turn like this.
Mike looked over at Stacy again. He reached over and gently wiped the cold sweat from her brow with a corner of the topmost blanket. Joseph knocked gently on the door frame. Mike jerked as if Joseph had fired a gun.
“Am I interrupting? I wanted to look over the route you wanted to take tomorrow,” Joseph said, slowly entering the room, slapping the road atlas against his left palm.
“Yeah, come on in, and we’ll do that,” Mike said, sitting back in his chair.
“I’ve been looking at it, and this is going to suck no matter what,” Joseph said.
“Wouldn’t be the end of the world if things didn’t suck,” Mike fired back. He waited, grinning, for Joseph to laugh at the wise crack.
Joseph smiled and nodded, resisting the urge to laugh. “Well put.” Mike inclined his head as if taking a bow. “Seriously though, one part of this trip is really going to suck, majorly.”
Mike held out his hand for the map, which Joseph handed over without a word. Mike studied the map of New Mexico for a moment. Small towns littered the roadways of New Mexico, but it would be easy enough to avoid major population centers once they got out of Roswell and Carlsbad. He didn’t like that they’d be going through most of Carlsbad and have to skirt Fort Bliss in order to avoid back tracking entirely. Las Cruces was likely to be ugly and might make the back tracking worth it.
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