“I guess we were lucky,” True said.
“I suppose,” Melvin replied and took a few photos. They made a sweeping circle, taking photos as they went before going back to the overpass.
“Your teas is waiting, Mastahs,” Logan proclaimed.
Melvin chuckled and sat with them on the asphalt. True looked down his nose at the two brothers as he handed them two cups.
“I’ll have you two trained in no time,” he said.
Logan gestured at the digital camera. “They love the pictures, huh?”
“Yeah, it’s all about the Intel and data gathering,” Melvin replied.
“Like drawing the blood off of those zeds,” Logan surmised.
“Yeah, but that’s for the docs at Detrick.” He panned the area with his hand. “Grace and Garrett add these pictures to the database. They could be a waste of time, or they could prove to be valuable information for future missions.”
Logan nodded in understanding. “If it makes a difference, it doesn’t look like any of these cars have been used in a few years.”
“Yeah, I put info like that in the Intel reports. If we see any humans or recent signs of human activity, that goes in the report as well.”
“I was never clear on one thing—if we saw signs of human activity now, are we to stop our mission and seek them out?” Logan asked. He had finished his meal and was now doing stretching exercises.
“The short answer is, it’s up to us. My take on it is, unless there is some compelling reason to do otherwise, we continue with the mission.”
“Understood,” Logan said.
Liam stood and began doing stretching exercises with his brother. Soon, True, and then Melvin joined in. After a few minutes, the men knocked out some light calisthenics, just enough to loosen and warm the muscles. The grueling workouts were reserved for when they were safely back at Mount Weather.
“Alright, let me send off a message and then we’ll get going,” Melvin said.
The men packed up what they had taken out of the truck and watched as Melvin set up a satellite radio, typed in a message, and then hit the send button. After a moment, he packed up the equipment and looked at the three men.
“Who’s driving this morning, and more importantly, has Liam taken care of his number two yet?”
“I’ll get right on it,” Liam said and walked off in search of a private spot.
“I’ll drive,” True said. The men were underway ten minutes later. It took the O’Malley brothers that long to start ribbing True.
“We’ll never get there at this speed,” Logan grumbled.
“It’s not the destination, it’s the ride,” Liam chided.
“Don’t listen to them, True,” Melvin said. “Just take it nice and easy. We’re making decent time, all things considered.”
“I’m going to wait until they take their nap before I speed up and hit all these cracks and potholes,” True said, and glanced over at Melvin with a ghost of a smirk, causing Melvin to emit a belly laugh.
Chapter 27 – Fred and Sammy
The Malloy farm was not much to look at. It was once a spacious, well-maintained farm. The house was painted white with a red metal roof situated on a small rise. A hundred acres of land backed up to it and across the street was more farm acreage. An old gnarled oak tree, Fred guessed it at over two hundred and then some, sat quietly in the front yard, silently watching.
Fred stopped the truck at the drive’s entrance. The gate was standing open. A lone zed came into view from behind the oak tree. Fred turned his head toward the open back window.
“I see one zed standing out in the open. Female. Looks like Katrina, JR’s wife.”
Sammy responded with a soft knock on the side of the truck bed, indicating he heard and understood. He was hiding under a tarp, which was rumpled up to where there were gaps in which Sammy could see targets to shoot at, if he needed to. It was a simple but effective tactic they’d learned from Zach.
Fred drove halfway up the drive and stopped at an angle, giving Sammy a field of view of the front of the house. He looked around for other possible zeds before scrutinizing Katrina. She was never a good-looking woman, and now she looked like a demon fresh from the grave. She was wearing a plain print dress that was dirtier than a shop rag at a grease monkey’s garage. The crotch area of the dress was deeply stained, Fred surmised it was a mixture of blood and fecal matter.
Fred armed himself with a hatchet and stepped from the truck. As soon as he did, Katrina charged. Her speed almost caught Fred off guard, but he managed to deliver a front kick. The heel of his boot connected squarely with her sternum. It knocked her down. Her feet flew up in the air, which caused her dress to slide up, giving Fred a good look at her pantie-less crotch. It was not a pleasant sight.
Fred wrinkled his nose in disgust, but it did not slow him down. He stepped forward and put his boot across the woman’s throat. He was about to deliver the death blow with his hatchet when a woman’s voice interrupted him.
“Don’t kill Momma!”
Fred paused and looked toward the front door of the house. It was open, and a younger woman was standing in it, cradling a baby on her hip. It was Keeley, JR’s daughter.
“Keeley?” Fred asked. “What’s going on?”
“Don’t kill her, Mister Fred,” she begged. “She ain’t hurting nobody.”
Fred stared at Keeley and the baby a moment before staring back down at Katrina. He still had his boot across her neck, and he’d been bearing down with most of his weight. The result was she appeared to be unconscious. He looked back up at Keeley again. Her expression was that of both desperation and fear. Fred lifted his boot. The woman once known as Katrina Malloy gasped and coughed. He walked over to the truck and lifted the tarp. Shaking his head slightly at Sammy, he grabbed a length of rope and walked back to her.
Katrina was wheezing now and struggling to get to her feet. Fred kicked her onto her stomach and expertly hogtied her. When he raised up, he almost expected Keeley to be pointing a weapon at him, but she’d not moved. The baby began crying.
“If you’re here, that means my daddy’s dead,” she said. She pronounced daddy like dead-dy. “I tried to tell them not to do it, but they ignored me.”
She turned and disappeared into the darkness of the house. Fred motioned for Sammy to join him and walked inside.
When the men walked inside, they found Keeley sitting on a dirty couch, nursing her baby.
“It’s been bad, Mister Fred. You haven’t been here in months and we needed you,” she said. It was almost an accusatory tone.
“I fixed you up with chickens, a few calves, and plenty of garden seed,” Fred said. “What happened?”
She shook her head sadly. “Coyotes or zeds killed the calves and chickens, and none of us seemed to get the hang of gardening. There’s an old wine vineyard up the road we’ve been getting grapes from, and they’ve been doing some hunting and fishing, but that only goes so far, and they only had like two or three bullets left.”
“And some sixteen-gauge birdshot,” Sammy said with a scoff.
Keeley stared plainly. “Yeah, and some birdshot.”
“What was their plan when they came to visit Rachel and me?” Fred asked.
She’d been nervously glancing from Fred to Sammy, but now she stared at the floor.
“Their plan was to kill you and then we’d all move into your place,” she said. “Daddy said you’d got things fixed up real nice and we were going to move in.”
She stopped nursing the baby, fixed her shirt, and held the child against her shoulder, bouncing it gently.
“What happened to your mother, Keeley?” Fred asked quietly.
Keeley shrugged a shoulder. “She went out one day looking for some poke salad. She stayed gone all day. When she came back, she was like that. That’s been about four days ago now. She stays out in the front yard, which allows me to go out back and use the well pump.”
“Who’s the father of your child?�
�� Sammy blurted out.
Both turned and stared at Sammy. Fred’s stare was rebuking; Keeley’s was more of a mixture of defiance.
“Uncle Calvin is the father of my baby,” she said quietly. “Is there something you’d like to say about that?”
“Um, no,” Sammy said and stared at the floor.
“Is there anyone else living around here?” Fred asked.
“Daddy said he saw some people with a wagon and a team of mules going down I-66. That was back in April. Daddy tried to approach them, but they pointed guns at him and told him to go away. We haven’t seen anyone else.”
“You should come back with us, Keeley,” Fred said. “You won’t be able to care for your baby out here by yourself.”
Keeley hung her head. “They won’t let me back in Mount Weather.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Fred said. “You have a baby and that means a lot. We’ll get you fixed up.”
She gulped and took a deep breath before speaking. “What about Momma?”
Fred and Sammy swapped a glance.
“Don’t you want to put her out of her misery?” Sammy asked. “I mean, she’s never going to be normal again.”
Keeley stared at Sammy for several seconds, as if he’d said something blasphemous. She then turned to Fred. “What do you think, Mister Fred?”
“I think Sam is right. We should put her out of her misery. If you’d like, I’ll take care of it and she won’t feel a thing.”
“Will you give her a Christian burial? I don’t want her set on fire.”
Fred gave her a solemn nod.
Chapter 28 – Team Joker
Trader Joe muttered one or two invectives. Joker gave a small slow nod in agreement. The entire horde were milling in and around the parking lot. Several of them had surrounded their SUV. They seemed preoccupied with it. As Joker watched, one of them bent over and appeared to sniff it.
“What do we do now?” Little Joe asked again in a nervous whisper.
“We wait,” Joker said.
“Wait for what?”
Joker glanced at him in irritation. “Look, somehow the SUV has attracted them. Maybe it’s the smell of the diesel. It’s something we’ll need to figure out later, but not now. At some point, they’ll realize there’s nothing to eat inside it and they’ll move on.”
“I hope you’re right,” Trader Joe murmured.
Joker hoped he was right as well. They watched the horde the rest of the night. Several crowded the SUV, pawing, scratching, pushing, and slapping at it, while others walked around the parking lot and into any open doors on the ground floor.
Joker shook his head. Partly in worry, partly due to irritation. He had requested one of the drones for this mission. If he had one, he could have done some aerial recon before they bedded down and perhaps would have spotted this horde. But he was denied. They only had a couple that were still working. One was at Fort Detrick; the other was stored safely in the armory at Mount Weather with the instructions to use it only when necessary.
He made a silent oath—if he found a working drone, he was keeping it. He frowned to himself. The first thing was to somehow get out of this alive and complete this mission, then he could fret over finding a drone.
“Do you think they’ll leave when the sun comes up?” Little Joe asked. He pointed east. Dawn was approaching.
“More importantly, what are we going to do if they don’t?” Trader Joe countered.
“This is becoming a royal pain in the ass,” Joker muttered under his breath.
The three men skipped breakfast. Instead, they sat and watched. Joker glanced at his watch. He’d done so several times in the last four hours. It was an hour after sunrise now and the zeds had not left.
Instead, they continued standing around or wandering around the parking lot. It was getting warmer, an indicator that it was going to be another hot June day. Joker wanted badly to get on the road, but there was no way they could run the gauntlet of zeds and make it to their SUV in one piece.
“So, the question once again begs itself, what do we do now?” Trader Joe asked and pointed at the floor where their gear was sitting. “We can go without eating for a bit, but we only have enough water for a day. Two, if we don’t exert ourselves. I’ve seen some of them who can walk uphill again. It’s only a matter of time before one or two of them get a whiff of us and walk up those stairs.”
“Yep,” Joker said and gestured toward the parking lot. “We’ve got enough ammo to take them out, but we may need every single bullet and then some at Holston. We have no idea what we may encounter once we arrive and it’d suck if we get ourselves into deep doo-doo at Holston and we run out of ammo. Or, even worse, we go back to Weather with our tail between our legs and report we had to abort the mission.”
“Don’t let pride get in the way,” Trader Joe said. “We could kill these off, go back to Weather, and re-up on ammo. There’s no shame in that.”
Joker frowned. The man was right, but he didn’t want to admit it. His fellow Marines would have a good time chiding him if he had to abort a mission. He scratched the stubble of his chin as he thought it over and mused out loud.
“The only way to get them away from our ride is if something else attracts their attention. We need to create some kind of diversion.”
“I kind of have an idea,” Little Joe said.
“Alright, let’s hear it,” Joker said.
“Before it got dark yesterday, I noticed a hatch in the ceiling in our bathroom. You know, like a service hatch to the attic area. I can get up there and walk down to the opposite end of the hotel without being seen, drop down into a room, and make a lot of noise. That should lure enough of them away from the SUV so you two can get to it and drive off.”
“What are you going to do then, son?” Trader Joe asked.
“That’s no problem. I can outrun any of those stinking bastards. I’ll head toward the interstate and y’all pick me up.”
Trader Joe frowned. “I don’t know, son. There’s a lot of what if’s in that scenario.”
They discussed it some more and walked into the bathroom. Sure enough, there was a small hatch in the ceiling. The men hefted Little Joe up. The hatch gave way freely. He used his flashlight and cautiously stuck his in. Three or four pairs of beady eyes stared back, causing him to gasp and jerk back. Trader Joe instinctively pulled his son down.
“Zeds?” he asked in a frantic whisper.
Little Joe chuckled. “Nope, a family of raccoons. I think I scared them more than they scared me. Hoist me back up there.”
He was a little more cautious when he stuck his head back in, but the raccoons had already scurried off. Little Joe peered around for a moment before exiting and motioning for the two men to set him down.
“It’s a clear shot all the way down,” he said.
“No firewalls or other impediments?” Trader Joe asked.
“Nope. Nothing but spider webs,” Little Joe answered. “If there isn’t another service hatch, I’ll just kick through the sheetrock and drop down into a room.”
“What kind of diversion are you going to create?” Joker asked.
Little Joe grinned. “I suppose I’ll scream and shout and act like a fool until they notice me. I might have to shoot one or two, but I’ll try to conserve ammo.”
Trader Joe was apprehensive about it; he was naturally concerned for the safety of his son, but after a few minutes of whispered discussion, he agreed to it.
“Alright, wish me luck,” the younger Joe said with a grin and then disappeared into the darkness of the attic.
Chapter 29 – Fort Detrick
The sun was peeking up over the horizon as I finished my last lap around the perimeter, which equaled five miles. Dropping down, I knocked out a hundred pushups. Jumping to my feet, I saw Bob Duckworth walking toward me. He was dressed rather casually, a dark gray Polo shirt, khaki slacks, and black loafers. If I looked closely, I’m sure I would see he wasn’t wearing any socks.
> “Good morning, Director,” he greeted.
“Good morning, Senator.”
“Your wife said you’d be out here,” he said. “How many pushups was that?”
“Oh, just a few. Do you still want to go?”
“Yes, absolutely.”
“Alright. Give me a few minutes to get cleaned up and meet me in the cafeteria. Oh,” I said and pointed down at his shoes. “Change out of those shoes. Put on some running shoes or hiking boots, and a pair of thick socks.”
I managed to get a quick shower without the kids interrupting me and walked into the cafeteria forty minutes later. Bob was waiting. When I reached the table, he pointed down. He was wearing a pair of brown hiking boots. They looked like Skechers, which was a good brand. I nodded in approval. He leaned closer and spoke in a hushed voice.
“I’m already getting questions about what we’re up to. If you don’t mind, let’s have a quick breakfast and get going. I’ve had my fill of Mount Weather gossip and would rather avoid it.”
I readily agreed. The inflammatory flyers and the trial seemed to have everyone stirred up. There wasn’t always a lot to talk about around here. We sat at our respective tables and made polite conversation but ate hurriedly and were rolling out of the motor pool thirty minutes later.
“So, what’s the real plan, Zach?” Bob asked after we’d given our plan at the front gate
I glanced at him. When I first met Bob, he was in his fifties and always clean-shaven with a fresh haircut, courtesy of his wife, Angela. She was now our resident barber, stylist, manicurist, and aid to Doctor Salisbury when the need demanded it.
Bob was sixty now, but aside from the gray hair, you wouldn’t know it. He was an average-looking man with an above-average intelligence. He was friendly too and always had an easygoing smile.
“We’ll head to Fort Detrick and get a firsthand accounting of what happened, but I don’t plan on staying there too long.”
Zombie Rules (Book 7): The Fifteens Page 17
