Riker's Apocalypse (Book 3): The Precipice

by Chesser, Shawn

  Riker nodded. “It’s a sixty-four giga … mega … something byte. I’m not tech-savvy at all. It seems to capture everything you point the lens at, though.”

  Working the joysticks, he got the quad moving again. As he popped the craft up and over the distant fence, the timer on his watch indicated he’d already burned two minutes of flight time.

  Giving the half-dozen thirty-foot-tall light poles a wide berth, Riker piloted the drone across the parking lot to the cluster of vehicles parked near the far edge, then brought it to a hover fifteen feet off the lined blacktop.

  No sooner had the noisy quad entered the airspace directly over a white minivan than Riker saw on the display before him signs of movement.

  First, the driver door on a Japanese compact hinged open. While Riker couldn’t see the culprit, he guessed it wasn’t a person whose midday siesta he’d just interrupted. While that was happening, a man in a suit and tie stumbled from behind a midsize SUV, took a few stilted steps toward the drone, and thrust his arms over his head. Even viewed from a good distance, and at a steep downward angle, there was no disputing the middle-aged man had tied his last Windsor knot.

  While the cause of first death wasn’t in plain sight, the torn jacket sleeves and deep, red fissures on the knuckles of both hands suggested he’d put up one helluva fight trying to remain among the living.

  Finding the drone’s gimbal control with his thumb, Riker panned and zoomed until the distant compact car filled up the screen. Witnessing a second zombie poke its head over the car’s curved roofline, Riker said, “Look at how she’s bloated. My guess is she died a few days ago in her car.”

  Benny said, “I’ll buy that. But how’d she open the door? They can’t do that, can they? ‘Cause if they can. If they’re evolving or something, we … are … hosed.”

  The thought had already crossed Riker’s mind.

  Out loud, he said, “The daytime highs were pushing seventy in the days right after we got to Trinity. Maybe she was in her car with the door open. Burning up with infection. I’d want a breeze on my face.”

  “Why didn’t she leave?”

  “Maybe she couldn’t. Maybe the gate guard was already gone on his”—Riker let go of the gimbal control and made air quotes with one hand—“ten-minute break. Maybe when he failed to return, she went ahead and called emergency services from her car. Settled in for a long wait.”

  They went quiet and watched the female zombie shamble around the little green compact.

  Losing her momentarily on the display, Riker nudged the camera controls until he reacquired her, then slowly pulled back on the zoom as she trudged the open ground, face upturned, dead eyes locked on the drone.

  The zombie kept up the same steady pace, jaw pistoning up and down until she made it to the businessman zombie’s side. Riker imagined the smell coming off of her as she took a futile, slow-motion swipe at the drone. The move hiked her tank up, revealing a bloody compress taped to her abdomen.

  Nudging the throttle, Riker put more altitude between the quad and the bloated kielbasa-like fingers straining to get ahold of it.

  The undead woman’s once-dark eyes now had a dull sheen to them. With her high cheekbones and coal-black, braided hair, Riker figured she must have had some kind of American Indian ancestry. She looked to have been nudging the south side of forty before contracting the Romero virus.

  Another time and under a different set of circumstances, Riker would have asked her out for a coffee.

  Looking over Riker’s shoulder, Benny said, “She couldn’t leave.”

  Nodding, Riker said, “The fence here is designed to keep people in. Then there’re the spikes. With no guard to retract them, they would have torn up her tires. She knew that.”

  Having seen enough, he nudged the drone to a higher altitude, then rotated the craft until the mirrored building filled up the display.

  After checking their surroundings, and finding it still clear of threats, Benny said, “How’d she get the bite?”

  Riker shrugged. “Maybe she was a nurse inside. Or a head shrinker.”

  “Or a guard,” Benny proffered.

  Riker said nothing.

  “Maybe she got bit outside,” Benny added. “Then she came here to see a husband or boyfriend.”

  It was as if they were mapping out the last days and hours of her life without her input. Riker suddenly felt uneasy speculating about what had befallen the woman. As if the wrong conclusion might somehow tarnish her former reputation. To halt the conversation, he said, “She’s dead, Benny. Get over it.”

  Benny said, “No shit, Sherlock. You don’t have to be a dick about it.”

  Riker’s neck was getting stiff from peering down at the screen. Another of the headaches that had plagued him since he received the head injury in Iraq was manifesting as a calypso beat behind his eyes. Thankfully, the ringing in his ears remained at a manageable volume.

  Fingers working the controls, he set the drone rocketing off toward the trio of flags standing sentinel before the mirrored building.

  A hundred feet short of the parking lot fronting the mirrored building, Riker slowed the drone’s forward momentum. Coming to the white cement sidewalk encircling the lot, he threaded the drone between a pair of vans parked there and brought it to a hover a yard or two from the pair of glass doors set equidistant in the building’s stark facade.

  For obvious reasons, the doors were not mirrored. Instead they were tinted just enough to block the sun’s UV rays and still allow people coming and going to see through them.

  On the display, Riker saw furniture crowding a cramped lobby. In the middle distance, parked on a square of burnt-orange carpet, was a low table piled high with magazines.

  In the far distance, thick glass rose up from a waist-high counter. Riker’s best guess was that the partition was bulletproof and put there to keep the waiting public from wandering into the jail’s sensitive areas. Which seemed a waste because the door next to the partition was hanging wide open.

  The recon was just seconds old when they saw the first flicker of movement behind the glass. At first, it was just a man-sized shadow, slithering the periphery of the lobby, jinking between chairs, all pertinent detail obscured by the gloom.

  The shadow grew larger and larger until finally it neared the tiled section of floor and completely filled up the display.

  “That thing’s one of them,” Riker spat. As he pulled back on the zoom, behind him, Benny said, “Maybe it’s the gate guard. See all the keys on his belt?”

  Both statements were confirmed when the form entered the dim rectangle of light just inside the double doors. Centered on the display was a middle-aged man with a high-and-tight haircut and a gym rat’s physique. A thick neck and bulging biceps stretched tight the white short-sleeved shirt. On the breast of the shirt was an embroidered shield. Words Riker couldn’t read were stitched in black below the shield. The uniform pants were navy-blue and bore the obligatory light-blue stripe down the side of each leg.

  Holding up the pants was a wide black belt. It was glossy and reflected the meager light spilling through the tinted windows. The ring of keys Benny had spied was there, too, bouncing and jerking wildly with each forward step.

  Strangely, the holster on the belt was empty. Same for the ring meant to retain a baton.

  The fireplug of a man didn’t slow or even seem to notice the doors when he slammed into them.

  On the right-side door, like a forked lightning bolt, a series of thin cracks shot diagonally from the single pane’s upper left corner.

  Voice showing no kind of satisfaction at being correct in his original assumption, Riker said, “Looks like your guard is dead, Benny.”

  For a long three-count, the undead guard continued the relentless forward march, only to be repulsed again and again by the door glass.

  So close, yet so far, thought Riker as more runners sprouted from the initial crack.

  Though the action taking place on the display was o
ut of earshot, with each new impact Riker heard in his head the clack and screech of the keys on the guard’s hip striking the glass. Each bang of the guard’s lug-soled boots striking the doors resonated as if Riker was standing beside the hovering drone.

  Benny said, “Put a gap in that thing’s front teeth, you got a dead ringer for young Ahhhnold Schwarzenegger.”

  Focused intently on keeping the image centered on the touchscreen, Riker grunted but made no comment.

  “You keep that thing hovering so close, he’s going to break out,” added Benny.

  Riker said, “I’m trying to see if there’s anybody alive in there. Maybe someone’s holed up in a back room and can hear the drone.” He paused and pulled the drone back from the doors. “If there is, maybe the distraction of the drone will buy them the time they need to find a way out.”

  As if to punctuate the statement, a second zombie rammed the doors.

  A beat later a third outline skated across the dim lobby and careened into the others from behind.

  The combined weight of the three finished what the stocky zombie had started. Bowing outward, the slightly misshapen pane tumbled to the ground at the base of the door. Instead of disintegrating into a thousand tiny shards upon impact, the window skittered across the cement walk, to the curb, where it finally came to rest, intact and clouded with a multitude of scratches.

  Following the same path to the ground as the glass, Arnold stutter-stepped over the bottom door frame, then fell through the void, feet tangled and arms outstretched. Practically climbing up Arnold’s back, totally oblivious to their coming fate, the other two zombies pitched forward and followed him to the ground.

  Now out in the open, without the tinted glass and shadows obscuring their features and clothing, Riker saw the pair crushing down on the undead guard for what they were: inmates. The young men both wore blaze-orange county-issue uniforms. Property of D.O.C - Santa Fe County was stenciled in white across the back of each smock-like top. To add insult to injury, both men wore plastic jailhouse shoes over faded pink socks.

  “None of them is Crystal,” Riker said.

  “Master of the obvious,” Benny shot.

  Just as the fallen zombies were getting to their knees, another wave of orange-clad monsters filed out of the building. It was a diverse mix. Most races were present, with the men outnumbering the women two to one.

  Squinting hard to see the tiny figures on the screen, Riker muttered, “Still no Crystal.”

  Having just made another visual sweep of the feeder road and the prison grounds surrounding their position, Benny said, “That little amount of footage won’t be enough to satisfy Rose. She’ll want proof of life … or death. Let’s humor her. Can you still fly that thing when it’s out of your direct line of sight?”

  “Never tried. I’m not opposed to giving it a shot.” He glanced at the G-Shock. Six minutes. “I’ll just pop it over the building, find the yard, and see if anyone made it out alive.”

  While Riker had sounded confident in his delivery, deep down he harbored doubts in his ability to maneuver the thing once it was out of sight.

  Benny asked, “How much juice does the thing have?”

  “Twenty minutes flight time … give or take.”

  Riker was already flying the drone away from the squat building’s mirrored façade. Once it was in the center of the smaller lot, he gave it power and started it on a return path nearly identical to its approach.

  As the noisy craft rounded the corner and shot south, hugging tight to the outside wall and moving quite fast, Benny said, “Make it quick. We’ve got five slow movers coming our way. Right now they’re at the junction with the highway. Figure they’ll be on us in five minutes or so.”

  Putting his trust in Benny, Riker bumped the throttle to the stops and flew the drone balls-out to the facility’s distant southwest corner, watching it with the naked eye until it was but a white speck. When he was just about to lose it from sight, he throttled down, initiated an auto-hover, and glued his eyes to the screen.

  While Riker had been getting the hang of flying the two-thousand-dollar toy, once he was beholden to orienting it to its immediate surroundings using just the image on the tiny screen, he was quickly humbled.

  He was saying, “Keep me updated on the zombies’ whereabouts,” when the camera—still facing dead ahead—transmitted a picture worthy of mounting and framing. Desert in the foreground. What looked like an arroyo, running left to right, in the middle distance. And backstopping it all the way off to the west: low, scrub-dotted hills that rambled away to an eventual merger with a sliver of blue sky.

  What made the image so spectacular were the bars of honey-colored light lancing groundward through the billowing cloudbank. Like a swipe from God’s paintbrush, the shafts accentuated everything they touched across the miles-wide swathe of desert.

  With dark, angry clouds edging ever closer from the south, and the rest of the land but a drab sea of earth tones, what Riker was seeing on the screen was an oasis for the eye.

  After getting his bearings, he disengaged the auto-hover, skimmed the flat roof, and dropped the quad over the edge of the distant cube. Reaching a point on the interior wall where he guessed the windows would be, he again engaged the auto-hover.

  With the southernmost cellblock and connected passage standing in the way of the wind building ahead of the storm, the craft provided a rock-solid viewing platform. Manipulating the camera controls, which started the sphere spinning clockwise in its gimbal, Riker located the upper floor windows. They were set high up on the wall. One for each cell, he guessed. Each window was a two-foot square fronted by industrial-looking wire-mesh panels.

  There were two rows. One for each floor.

  Way too many to count. Especially on the tiny screen.

  Zooming in on a couple of nearby windows didn’t give Riker a clue as to what may be happening inside. Panning the camera groundward, however, painted a much clearer picture.

  As the screen suddenly filled with an orange mosaic in constant motion, he intuitively knew what he was about to learn, even before the camera responded fully to operator input.

  A beat later, with the lens fully pulled back, his hunch was confirmed: the inmates, most still clad in their Santa Fe County smocks, owned the yard. They milled about in small packs; no rhyme or reason as to why they had glommed onto their pack mates. Men and women, blacks and whites and Hispanics—all hanging together. There were even a few white shirts intermingling with the orange. The common denominator: They were all zombies.

  Slowly but surely, the dead things became aware of the buzzing interloper.

  Bodies still in motion turned to locate the sound. Sallow faces aimed expectantly skyward, the undead inmates surged toward the trampled soccer-pitch-sized parcel of grass thirty feet below the drone.

  Riker’s best guess as he panned the camera over the yard was that he was looking at more than a hundred former human beings.

  Over his shoulder, he said, “Where are the Slogs?”

  “They’ve covered about a hundred feet of road. Still about three football fields to go.”

  Having played some football in his day, Benny’s way of breaking it down made it easy for Riker to picture the road in his mind’s eye.

  “Tell me when they’re a hundred yards out.”

  Benny grunted an affirmative. Back to peering at the screen, he said, “How are we supposed to pick out Crystal from the crowd?”

  “I’ll fly a grid pattern over top of them. Low and slow. Your eyesight is better. Keep a lookout for a bleached blonde. She should stand out pretty good against all that orange.”

  Benny crowded Riker on the right. Focused intently on the screen, he said, “You know this isn’t going to fly with Rose. She will want proof of life.” He paused. “Or death.”

  “This is going to have to be good enough,” Riker said. “Short of going inside and checking every one of them, this is as good as it’s going to get.”

 
***

  After a full minute spent crisscrossing the yard, the drone buzzing just feet above the upthrust arms of the undead, neither Riker nor Benny had spotted a zombie with a single platinum hair on its head, let alone a whole shock of it.

  “We gave it our best shot,” Riker said. “When we get back, Rose can pop the memory card in the laptop and watch the footage for herself. Hell, she can watch it in slow motion if she wants. That’s a thing, right?”

  “I think so,” answered Benny. “I just hope it appeases her.”

  Finishing the final pass, Riker found the Auto-Hover button by feel. Only when the craft had leveled off and come to a complete halt did he shift his attention from the scene on the display to the remote control’s many buttons.

  “You see the return to home button?” he asked.

  “No,” Benny replied. “But I do see something on the display that may warrant a closer look.”

  Chapter 9

  The something on the display Benny had alluded to was a cluster of human forms far off in the distance. Setting them apart from the rest of the crowd was their clothing, location, and the way they moved.

  The former Riker and Benny had seen before. It was the same white shirt and navy-blue pant combo worn by the stocky guard. Additionally, a few of the dead things patrolling the yard had on the same shirt and pant combo.

  How the people got to their present location—a ten-by-thirty-foot rectangle of rooftop bordered by ventilation equipment, all of it head-high to them and encircled by razor-wire-topped chain-link fence—was not immediately evident.

  As the quadcopter closed the distance to the far northeast corner of the yard, Benny asked the obvious: “How’d they get themselves up that tree?”

  Indicating a portion of the yard showing on the bottom of the remote-control screen, where a fully extended aluminum ladder lay on the ground along the interior wall, Riker said, “That ladder is how they got up there.”

  Benny said, “They should have pulled it up after them. Used it to get over the rooftop fencing and then down on the other side.”