End Zone

by D C Alden

  Her spirits soared momentarily, but the cold steel of reality cut into her wrists. No, she had to appear cowed, vanquished, while keeping her eyes and ears open, because she couldn’t shake the growing feeling that all was not lost.

  The cabin lights remained dimmed. Foley snapped on his overhead and busied himself with a newspaper. The other agents did the same, settling in for the flight.

  Coffman turned towards the window, not to admire the view, or to take one last look at the city they were leaving behind.

  It was to hide the smile that crept across her mouth.

  He checked his G-Shock and waited for the digits to roll over to midday. Then he waited another thirty seconds before speed-dialling the number. The man answered it almost immediately.

  ‘Speak.’

  ‘My name is Gary. I have intel for you that you may find useful.’

  ‘I was expecting someone else.’

  ‘He gave me your number. He’s in DC right now, by the phone. He says hi. He hopes you’re taking care of yourself.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘A friend.’

  ‘That so?’

  ‘Uh-huh. And friends help each other out, right? Especially those who’ve been through OTC.’

  More silence. ’When?’

  ‘A while ago now. I’ve moved on since then. To Peary.’

  The voice was still guarded. ’So, what have you got for me, Gary?’

  ‘A number. I’m going to text it to you. You’ll understand.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘And do yourself a favour. Memorise it, then ditch the burner.’

  ‘Who says I’m using a burner?’

  ‘Our mutual friend.’

  He heard a truck pass by at speed, and imagined the man on the other end of the call standing by a highway somewhere. It would’ve been easy to trace, find out his location, but not this time. Not this man.

  ‘Stand by for the text. And one more thing…’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Good luck, brother.’

  He ended the call, then sent the text message. He powered the phone off, popped the SIM out and snapped it in two. One half he dropped onto the floor of the bar and the other in a drain by the sidewalk two blocks away. The phone went into a trash can on the corner of Main and Cherry, then he walked to the Greyhound stop outside the Virginia State University. The bus arrived less than fifteen minutes later, and he climbed aboard.

  ‘Where ya headed?’ asked the driver.

  ‘Williamsburg.’

  ‘That’s twelve bucks.’

  He paid cash and moved to the back of the bus. He took off his coat, rolled it up and wedged it between his head and the window. Williamsburg wasn’t far, just over an hour away, but it had been a long day.

  A long few months, Mike Savage corrected himself.

  As the bus rumbled through Richmond and headed south, his motivations still troubled him. He’d always worked within the law, had never questioned his chain of command, so today was a first for him. He wasn’t a crusader, far from it, but sometimes it just came down to right and wrong. He knew the consequences of his actions too, but he doubted it would ever get that far. For those who knew, the news would come as a blessing. For Mike Savage, it would mean justice had been served.

  At the end of the day, he could live with that.

  When Felipe Gomez finally ran out of food, he’d started stealing from his neighbours.

  He’d raided the Harrison’s house first, because he hadn’t heard a peep from the place since that first night. Felipe assumed that they’d been caught out somewhere and hadn’t made it home, and he’d felt guilty as hell as he’d emptied their refrigerator and cupboards of food, but as the days turned into weeks, guilt stopped being an issue. It was all about survival, nothing more.

  He’d seen helicopters loaded with civilians fly over his suburb. That had lasted for the first several days, and after that he didn’t see any more rescue flights. He’d seen others ignore the emergency broadcasts, load up their cars and drive off, only to be swamped by hordes of fast-moving infected.

  His wife Consuelo and twelve year old son Felix had held it together at first, but as the weeks passed, Consuelo had become increasingly desperate and tearful, and Felix had withdrawn into himself. When hundreds of infected passed right outside their house one night, trampling across his yard and thumping against his front door, it had taken all of Felipe’s powers of reassurance to stop them both from screaming hysterically. Help was coming, he’d assured them. When it didn’t, Consuelo turned on him and called him a liar. Felix withdrew further into himself. Felipe was losing his family.

  Things got worse.

  Felipe spent three careful days spelling out HELP on the roof of his home with torn sheets, only to have it buried by a snow storm. Without power, the cold December nights were black and terrifying, and they would huddle in the dark, listening to the infected crunching through the snow outside, snarling and barking. When he saw footprints around his doors and windows the next morning, Felipe knew they were running out of time.

  He’d tried to persuade Consuelo to leave, but she’d seen the neighbours die too. The radio had convinced her that staying home was the safest option.

  The snows thawed and the food ran out. Felipe started scavenging further afield. He broke into a house a block away and didn’t see the infected senior dragging herself across the floor until she’d grabbed his ankle. He’d screamed, and that brought a couple more through the back door. Felipe had escaped through the bathroom window. He’d made it home, but only just.

  They lost weight and Felipe had started feeling listless. Anything he could scavenge was given to little Felix, but even his son’s face was starting to look hollow. Consuelo still wouldn’t leave. Felipe started to lose hope.

  Christmas came and went.

  Felipe broke up some furniture and made a fire in the back yard under a clear blue January sky. He waited until the sun had set to light it, and then they watched it burn. When morning came Felipe fed it some more lumber, primarily the wood panelling from his lounge. When that was exhausted he broke up the dining room table and chairs and threw them on top. They had no food anyway, so what the hell.

  It was Felix who saw the drone. He’d woken his father from an exhausted daytime slumber and pointed to the back yard. The drone was pretty big, a lot of rotors, but it was pretty quiet too. It dropped a box on the patio and then it flew away. Felipe thought he was dreaming. Consuelo told him to go get the box.

  He snuck out of the house. The back yard was ringed with fencing but it wouldn’t hold a sustained attack for long. He picked up the box, a green plastic container about two feet long and a foot wide. After the door was barricaded and the curtains drawn, Felipe snapped the latches and opened the box.

  Consuelo cried. Felipe cried too, and so did Felix. That night they feasted on MRE’s, bottled water and vitamin pills. The candy they gave to their son, who’d spoken for the first time in over a week. There was a radio in the box too, a walkie-talkie type deal. They huddled in the storage cupboard and Felipe switched it on. He pressed the transmit switch and asked if anyone was out there. When a voice answered and told them they were coming for them the next morning, they cried again.

  They slept soundly that night, or as soundly as a family could with packs of killers roaming the neighbourhood. After the sun had risen, the voice on the radio told them to walk a hundred and fifty yards to the junction of Memphis Avenue and 63rd Street. Consuelo’s fear returned and the voice worked hard to assure her that their short journey would be watched by an overhead drone. The voice also told her that her son would die if they didn’t leave.

  They stepped outside the house as a family for the first time in weeks. They crossed the yard to the back gate. Felipe checked the deserted alleyway beyond, and the voice told him to keep moving. The alleyway was long and dangerously exposed, and Felipe’s heart hammered. He’d never owned a gun but he made a promise to himself that if they mad
e it out, he’d never be without one again. He cringed at every creaking door, every shutter that swung back and forth in the wind. The voice in his ear told him when to move and when to stand very still.

  They took cover between two cars at the junction of Memphis and 63rd. When Consuelo heard the sound of an approaching helicopter, she wanted to stand up and wave. Felipe did too, but the voice ordered them to stay low. The drone was watching.

  The helicopter came in low and fast across the rooftops. The pilot hot-dogged it, flaring to a hover over the junction and almost touching the ground with his tail rotor. Then the skids hit the road and the voice was telling Felipe to run.

  Felipe broke cover, swinging Felix into his arms and grabbing Consuelo’s hand. The big grey helicopter sat in the middle of the intersection, its rotors hammering trees and bushes, the noise deafening. Uniforms waved from the open doorway, and a soldier behind a black visor sat behind a doorway mini-gun, sweeping the barrel left and right. The rotor-wind battered Felipe’s body. Felix felt like a concrete weight in his arms, Consuelo like an anchor dragging behind him. Then he saw them, beyond the helicopter, a dozen infected, some clothed in rags, others naked, sprinting towards the intersection. Fear surged through his body, charging. The uniforms waved and yelled. One of them jumped down and ran to him, snatching Felix from his arms. Consuelo screamed.

  Hands grabbed him, ripping at his clothes, at his flesh. Other hands dragged him inside the helicopter and then his stomach was left behind as the helicopter rose like an express elevator. Consuelo lay on top of him, sobbing, shaking. The soldiers made them sit and strapped them in. Consuelo wrapped her arms around Felix and cried. Felipe held his wife’s hand and looked down. Hundreds of infected were converging on the intersection, their hands clawing the air, but they were too late. The aircraft dipped its nose and headed east.

  As they climbed higher, Felipe saw for the first time the devastation caused by the outbreak. Downtown was gone, the heart of the city now a shattered, blackened pile of rubble. There were no lights anywhere, no vehicles, no life. Except for the infected. They were everywhere, moving in packs, large and small.

  The helicopter passed over Highway 289 which resembled the aftermath of a murderous demolition derby, the lanes choked with blackened cars and corpses. Flocks of black-winged birds took to the air, their scavenging interrupted. Felipe knew how they felt.

  The city fell behind them and the wall rose out of the early morning mist, a huge green barrier thirty feet high that stretched from north to south as far as the eye could see. They flew over shimmering fields of razor wire and then the wall was behind them.

  The aircraft slowed and began to descend, sinking lower until another field came into view, one lost beneath a city of tents, portacabins and equipment parks, all systematically dissected by a network of muddy roads. And there were soldiers everywhere.

  The helo settled onto one of a dozen landing pads and Felipe shook the hand of every crew member, including the hot-dog pilot who remained impassive behind his black visor. They boarded a humvee that drove them to a reception centre where they gave their names and other personal information. Then they were escorted to another huge, heated tent some distance away. There were other civilians there too, hundreds of them, sitting at tables, eating breakfast, talking quietly. People smiled at them as they passed, and children laughed and ran about, doing what children do best.

  A big African-American soldier in a spotless camouflage uniform smiled as he approached them. He held a clipboard in his hand and he ruffled Felix’s hair. His name tag said SINCLAIR.

  ‘How’s the little fella doing?’

  Felipe shrugged. ‘Okay,’ he answered, shaking his head.

  The soldier got the message. ‘Don’t worry, we’ve got a lot of medical support here. He’s going to be fine. Be playing with the other kids real soon.’

  ‘Lot of people here,’ Felipe observed, looking around the room.

  The soldier’s smile faded. ‘Not as many as we’d hoped. We’ve been bringing survivors out for weeks but then they pretty much dried up. You guys might be the last ones.’ He gave Felipe a look that said, you’re a lucky sonofabitch.

  ‘How many?’ Felipe asked quietly.

  The soldier lowered his voice. ’A hundred-thousand, estimated. Another hundred-thousand infected. Where were you when it started?’

  ‘South Plains Mall. I’m a restaurant manager. A few of us managed to escape in a pickup.’ Felipe was reminded of that night, those men in that vehicle, and wondered if they’d made it too.

  ‘South Plains? That’s Ground Zero.’ The soldier recalibrated and smiled. ‘Go get yourselves something to eat while I arrange your accommodations. I’ll assign you a family unit, afford you a little privacy.’

  ‘How long will we be here?’ Felipe asked.

  The soldier shrugged. ‘As long as it takes.’

  Felipe sat his family down at the end of a long row of picnic tables. He got a couple of trays of food from the hotplate and they sat in silence for a long time, watching Felix eat, gently stroking his hair, all of them lost in their own thoughts.

  There was a crash of metal and Felipe spun around. One of the cooks had dropped something behind the hotplates. He turned back again, trying to control his heart rate and stop his hands from shaking. He closed his eyes and forced himself to accept that they were safe now, all of them, for the first time in a very long time.

  Consuelo reached across the table and took his hands in hers. She squeezed them and smiled. ‘Thank you for saving us.’

  Felipe was too overwhelmed to reply. Instead he held her hands as the tears rolled down the gaunt hollows of his bearded face.

  Permanent Vacation

  Amy Coffman stared up at the ceiling, at the brown stain above her bed.

  Melting snow must’ve seeped beneath the shingle roof. Soon it would begin to drip and she would have to move her bed again. She wouldn’t complain, nor would she expect them to do anything about it, but that’s how things worked around here. It was better than being in a real prison.

  She swung her legs off the bed and stood up, wrapping a thin grey blanket around her shoulders. Her accommodations were not just austere, they were frontier, yet she had become accustomed to the creaking wooden floors, the hard mattress on the single bed, the perpetual drafts. There were plus sides, however. She’d learned to master the art of fire building, and she made sure that one burned in the bedroom grate for most of the day. She stood at the window for a few moments, her eyes squinting at the bright field of snow that stretched away towards a distant forest. Sometimes she would pull up a chair and sit at that window for hours, watching a world that had passed her by, reminding herself that things could’ve worked out so much worse. But not today.

  Today she had a visitor.

  She stepped out into the hallway and shuffled into what passed as a bathroom. She sat down on the cold seat and peed, the blanket wrapped tightly around her. She ran the tap and washed her hands in icy water. She studied her face in the mirror, fingering the lines around her eyes that she was no longer keep at bay by expensive creams and serums. She ran a hand across her shaved head. Her hair was getting long, and soon one of her mute guards would sit her down and shave it again. She hoped.

  Because they always came for her after a fresh clipping. They would crowd inside her cabin, strap her to a gurney and inject her. When she woke again she would be far from her wilderness prison. There would be central heating and thick carpets underfoot. There would be coffee served in china cups. There would be hot showers and soft toilet paper. She would dress in her own clothes and have make-up applied, and then she would tie an expensive silk scarf around her head. She would be given another sedative, one that slowed her speech and physical movements because they couldn’t take the chance. Then they would escort her to a waiting limousine and whisk her to whatever ceremony they’d decided she would attend. There she would shake hands and smile weakly, but she wasn’t allowed to have private c
onversations with anyone.

  That was fine with Coffman. She cared nothing for the sympathetic smiles, the furtive whispers and the pitying glances. To ride in a limousine with a police escort, to dress in fine clothes and eat real food, to once again be called Madam President, was all she had left, and she was grateful. And once the cameras had captured the walking stick, the shaved head, the overlarge sunglasses and trembling hands, she would be transported back to the cabin at the edge of the world. It was a compromise she could live with, but the excursions were becoming less frequent, and it troubled her.

  She dressed in thick corduroy trousers and a roll-neck jumper, then jammed her feet into thick rubber boots. In the cramped lounge-cum-kitchenette, she made an instant coffee and sat down at the small table. She was hungry, but she was sick to her stomach of MRE’s. She glanced up at the ticking clock on the log wall; almost ten a.m. Almost time.

  She stood up and tipped the coffee dregs into the sink. She tugged on a quilted parka and pulled an orange beanie hat over her head. She opened the door and stepped out onto the porch, where the freezing air wrapped itself around her. It was cold, but she was getting used to it. It was summer she dreaded, where the air would be thick with insects, and where multi-legged abominations would lurk in every dark, dusty corner of the cabin. That’s if she was still here, of course.

  She slipped on a pair of cheap sunglasses as the bright sun reflected off the snow. She was convinced she was in Alaska. The valley was ringed by forests, and on clear days she could see jagged mountains the horizon. Big moose-like things often trotted across the valley, and she’d heard wolves too. Birds of prey drifted overhead, screeching and calling, or whatever it was that birds of prey did. There was an abundance of wildlife, but identifying them wasn’t her strong suit. She’d thought about asking for a book on the subject because books were all she was allowed. There was no TV, no radio, just a dusty collection of American and European literary classics on a shelf in the lounge. Coffman had actually read a couple, and while she had never been a fiction fan, she appreciated good writing. At night, after she’d eaten her freeze-dried rations, she would sit at the table and read by the light of the lantern while the wind moaned across the cabin.