“Alright, it’s settled. We’ll omit the true cause of death for these two in our report, for now,” Liam said. His brother nodded in agreement.
They recovered a total of nine projectiles. Liam had them lined up and looked them over.
“All nines,” he observed, meaning nine-millimeter. Currently, the Mount Weather logistics team only reloaded 9mm and 5.56 due to a shortage of materiel.
“Indeed,” Logan said. “That and the stabbing makes one think two things.”
“They knew their assailants,” Liam said. “They had to.”
“Yeah, and Rochelle’s killing seems to indicate the assailant had a personal grudge against her.”
“Zach had a grudge against her,” Liam remarked.
“Yeah, but we happen to know he and his family were miles away when this happened,” Logan said. “Although that’s another one of those things we can’t tell anyone.”
Liam nodded in agreement. There were only a couple of people who knew where Zach was. The fact that the two brothers knew happened entirely by accident when Grace accidentally divulged the information. The two men agreed to keep it to themselves until they otherwise needed to let someone know about it.
“It’s getting dark,” Liam remarked.
“We can make it back, I think. The snow is powdery, and the tires still have plenty of tread on them.”
Liam nodded in agreement. “Let’s hurry up then.”
They gathered up their equipment and packed it back in their vehicle. The only noise heard in the desolate landscape were the sounds of the crunching snow from their footsteps. Liam put out the remains of the fire while Logan scanned the area.
“Still no zeds,” he remarked.
Liam looked around and shrugged his shoulders. He snapped a few more pictures before knocking the snow off his boots and getting in. Logan got in the driver’s seat, started it, and let the vehicle warm up as he continued scanning. The subdivision they were in consisted of a dozen houses and it looked like they had been building more before it all went bad.
“What’re the odds of finding the bodies if Fred hadn’t come along?” Liam asked.
“Slim,” Logan replied. “You have to give him credit. He’s a hell of a tracker. If Zach were involved in killing them, I don’t think the old man would have shown this to us.”
“Agreed, brother, but our work is hardly finished. It’s going to get more complicated. Alright, enough chitchat. I’m going to rest my eyes for a little bit while you drive. Try not to hit any potholes.”
Chapter 3 – Louisiana (the City, not the State)
It was well before dawn when Clay awakened. His fire had gone out during the night and he was shivering. Looking into the stove, he only saw a tendril of smoke.
“Dang it,” he muttered.
The bucket he kept kindling in was down to only a couple of pieces of pinewood and his other bucket only had a handful of dried leaves left. He put it all in the stove and tried to coax the embers to life.
“C’mon,” he growled in between puffs of breath.
He was rewarded a moment later with a lick of a flame, and after another minute the kindling was burning. He hurriedly dressed and, after peeking out of his spy hole, went outside and gathered up some seasoned logs from the woodpile.
Soon he had a roaring fire in the stove and the interior was warming up. He went through his morning chores with no level of vigor before washing up and sitting down to breakfast. While he ate, he thought of all the things he needed to do. He needed to go hunting, scavenging, and pay a visit to Big Tussey, but the snow and cold temperature would make any of those endeavors twice as hard.
He ultimately decided to fix a Thermos of hot tea and climb up the radio tower for a while. There were three small wooden platforms built by the previous occupant, a man by the name of Merlin LeBlanc. Clay estimated the first platform somewhere at the seventy-foot mark. The other two were higher up, but Clay never went up to those. Nope, seventy feet was high enough for him.
He secured his safety tether, brushed the snow off the seat, and sat. It wasn’t comfortable by any means. The cold seeped into his butt cheeks within seconds and the wind stung his cheeks. He made himself as comfortable as he could before doing a slow, deliberate sweep of the area with a pair of binoculars. The town of Louisiana and surrounding landscape was white with a four-inch blanket. Only the mighty Mississippi was free of snow, its brown water flowed quietly. He could see a few animal tracks, but no tire tracks, no humans, and thankfully, no zeds.
He hung the binoculars on a hook which was fastened to one of the pylons, stretched, and rubbed a kink out of his neck. One of his pressing tasks was to go through some of the houses until he found a comfortable pillow, but that would have to wait. Taking a sip from his Thermos, he began pondering his life, as he often did when he was sitting up here.
This gig, as he thought of it, was not bad. Except for the loneliness. The extreme loneliness.
When he was sentenced to banishment, his wife and stepdaughter turned their back on him. They did not even come to say goodbye when they loaded him up to bring him here. He still fumed at the memory and had to admit, it hurt. It hurt a lot.
He thought back to the first night he met Irena. It was at a honkytonk bar and she was wearing a tight shirt with a low vee-cut that revealed a lot of cleavage. He was probably smitten from the beginning and after a whirlwind relationship they married six months later.
Life was good, but not without its problems. Irena was needy and high maintenance. At one time he suspected her of cheating on him with a co-worker and was ready to leave her. She swore it wasn’t true, and then played the sympathy card; if he left, she and Hermione would be homeless. Hermione was seven at the time and her mother had her crying uncontrollably. Clay ultimately caved in.
Then the plague hit. Fortunately for the Flemings, Clay was one of those guys who regularly surfed the survival and conspiracy websites. He believed, like most doomsday preppers did, that a major event of some type was coming. When they started closing the International airports, he knew this was no ordinary winter flu bug.
This was it. The big one. The red balloon.
He left work early and promptly cashed out his retirement account, bought everything he could think of, and hauled his wife and stepdaughter to his grandmother’s old farmhouse in the Shamong Township of New Jersey. It was him, his mother, wife, and daughter. The three women did not have the first clue about using firearms, but he figured it was far enough out of the way that they’d be safe.
He was wrong.
They were overrun by zeds in the first week. Clay had killed several. He was a good shot, and he didn’t waste ammo, but there were too many of them and they were trapped inside his grandmother’s house.
His mother died the same day the electricity went out and they had to store her decomposing remains in a closet for the next fourteen days until the zeds finally ambled off, drawn away by some other stimuli.
Then there was the flooding and the marauders. The flooding destroyed the garden. The marauders showed up before sunrise a day later. They were probably nice, civilized people at one time, but when they showed up on the property, they were starving and desperate. They also had Clay out gunned. They took all their food, but at least they did not rape Irena and kill them.
That all happened before the new year. They nearly starved to death that winter. Clay remembered how he had to sneak around, using snares to trap small game, and fishing every morning before sunup.
Then the Marcus Hook survivors found them and took them in. He missed that place. Sure, there were unending days of hard work, but they had a safe place to live and hot food on most days. And the people were decent for the most part. Clay wouldn’t admit it, but even Dalton was a decent guy. He still could not understand why he lost his temper and killed him. If he had taken the time to think it all out, he would’ve realized Hermione was a drama queen, just like her mother.
Clay took a deep breath of the c
risp air. It was clean, brisk, intoxicating. This area had grown on him. He’d always loved the outdoors. He loved hunting and fishing and fell in love with the Mississippi River the first time he saw it. If not for the loneliness, Clay was content. Aside from Big Tussey and little Natty, he’d not seen a human in three months. He thought how nice it’d be to find a woman who was content to hunt and fish alongside him and keep him warm at night.
He sighed to himself. The way it looked, the odds of him finding a woman like that were between slim and none. There was always Big Tussey, but he didn’t see that happening. She was a decent cook though, he had to admit that. He absently licked his lips. It’d been a week or so since he’d had a good meal. He briefly thought about strapping on the snowshoes and making the long walk to their house but dismissed the idea. It would take a couple of hours just to get there, and then another couple of hours to walk back.
He knew he was going to go nuts if he had to spend much more time by himself. That’s why he was keeping a meticulous journal of all the things he had done to improve this outpost. He hoped to send it back with the next supply run, along with a letter requesting his sentence to be commuted and he be allowed to return.
He scanned the area again with the binoculars and spotted a familiar animal emerging from a copse of trees near the riverbank. It was a lone wolf that’d been hanging around for a few months. Clay watched as the wolf ambled along the riverbank, pausing occasionally to sniff the air. It was an adult male, perhaps getting up in his age. He’d lost some weight since Clay last saw him, although he still had muscle under his thick coat. His muzzle had a lot of white in the fur and there was a distinctive scar on the bridge.
Clay knew he should probably kill him, but he felt a kinship with the wolf. They were both solitary souls, without a mate or family. The wolf looked up and toward Clay, perhaps sensing Clay’s presence. He sniffed the air once more before trotting off and out of sight. Clay grunted in amusement. He was about to end his surveillance and climb down the tower when something caught his eye coming up the river.
Grabbing the binoculars, he focused and inhaled sharply. It was a paddle boat!
Chapter 4 – The Russians Are Coming?
Clay stared in amazement as the paddle boat banked itself on the east side. Two men tied off the boat and took up guard positions while others began unloading. Clay took his eyes off them momentarily to open a suitcase that was strapped to one of the rails. It was a gray colored plastic piece of luggage that blended into the tower’s metal rails and was waterproof. He pulled out a digital camera with a five-hundred-millimeter zoom lens attached.
“Let’s hope you still have a charge,” he muttered as he turned it on. He was rewarded with three out of four bars. Nodding to himself, he began taking pictures.
He counted as he snapped photos. They were all dressed alike in nondescript gray outfits with generic hats of the same color. Most of them were armed with military style assault weapons that were unfamiliar looking to him. After a few minutes, he stopped taking photos and tried instead for a headcount. If he got it right, there were approximately four hundred of them.
When the last one had disembarked, the paddle boat reversed, and once off the bank, turned around and started back south. When it was out of sight, he descended the tower as quickly as he could without risking a slip and fall. Once on the ground, he hustled to the radio house.
He gave an anxious look around before stepping inside and securing the door behind him. He shrugged out of his jacket and hung it from the hook on the back of the door before sitting down in front of the radio. He was breathing heavily, and even though it was cool inside, he was sweating profusely.
“Damn it,” he muttered and wiped his brow with his shirt sleeve. After a minute, his breathing slowed and the shaking in his hands diminished somewhat.
He willed himself to take slow, deep breaths while trying to think how best to proceed. Should he use the shortwave radio or the satellite radio? If he used the shortwave, he would need to start the generator. That would use precious fuel and make noise. The satellite radio was the better choice, but Clay always had trouble tuning in the dish to the satellite and repeatedly seemed to mess up the sequence for sending an encrypted message.
A few more deep calming breaths brought his heart rate returned to near normal. He looked back and forth from the shortwave to the pelican case containing the satellite radio. The thought of the generator’s noise was the deciding factor.
Grabbing the case, he peeked out of the eye hole before walking outside to a clearing and opening the case. He went slow and careful, silently reciting the step-by-step process of setting up the radio and aligning the dish. He then slowly spoke into the microphone before sending the encrypted message. After a moment, a small diode flashed, indicating the message was successfully transmitted to the satellite.
Now, it was a waiting game. They usually responded within thirty minutes, but sometimes it took longer. The battery was running low, but he continued to wait. He’d recharge it later and send the digital pictures, but right now he wanted a response from Mount Weather.
He wanted direction from them. Most importantly, he wanted them to tell him to pack up, they were coming to get him.
Chapter 5 – Let’s Talk About Murder
It was well after dark when Liam and Logan arrived at the front gate. They had plans of raiding the kitchen before getting a hot shower and then perhaps some sexy time with their respective girlfriends before sleep, but the guards at the main gate thwarted those plans by making prompt notification of their return to the TOC. Within minutes an emergency meeting was ordered, and the two men were gathered up and escorted to the main conference room. Vice President Gil VanAllen was sitting at the head of the conference table, the chair normally reserved for the President of the United States.
It was an oddly interesting story of how Gilbert VanAllen came to be sitting in that chair. It started back in college. He was a typical college kid; a laid-back, fun-loving guy who leaned toward the liberal side of politics. He was at an after-football keg party and found himself discussing politics with a pretty, bouncy-bottom cheerleader. Her name was Rochelle, and her political beliefs were far more to the left. As she frequently liked to brag, Karl Marx was a pussy compared to her.
They fell in love and eloped in Las Vegas on graduation night. Gil was enamored with his beautiful young wife. Rochelle had a differing view of life and set down rules from the beginning. One of those rules was Gil could not expect her, a modern independent woman, to be monogamous. Gil did not like it but agreed.
Upon graduation Gil landed a job at an investment firm. Rochelle was accepted to the Scalia law school at George Mason University but was kicked out halfway through her first year for an undisclosed misconduct violation. She told Gil it was a contrived act of vindictiveness from a dean whose advances she had spurned.
That was their life for the next three years. Gil fit in nicely with his peers and was even promoted ahead of schedule. On the other hand, Rochelle had a succession of jobs and affairs.
One dreary November morning, Rochelle and Gil were watching the morning news over breakfast. There was a live feed of a panicked journalist watching the infected attacking other people.
“Oh my God,” Gil muttered.
The two of them sat in stunned silence, transfixed on the live feed for several minutes. Eventually, Rochelle quietly stood and walked into their bedroom. She moved quickly, packing two suitcases and a shoulder bag with what she felt were the most important items. She then went into the restroom and applied fresh makeup. Gil was still staring at the TV screen in a hypnotic trance and either did not notice her walk out or did not care.
She ignored the speed limit and hurried to Peter’s condo. Peter was her latest lover. He was a handsome, rugged kind of guy who liked tequila and Rochelle’s proclivity for kinky sex. Peter was also an avid outdoorsman who had a hunting cabin near Seneca Caverns. Rochelle had spent more than one weekend there.
But he wasn’t alone. A young, trim, blonde bombshell was walking with him. When she got out of her car, Peter was momentarily surprised.
“What are you doing here?” he had asked.
The blonde stopped with him. She was standing so close, one of her oversized breasts was pushed up against his arm and threatening to burst through her tight jersey. Rochelle’s mouth went dry.
Zombie Rules | Book 8 | Who The Hell Is That? Page 2
