Across the street a hot dog cart sits unattended, and a few pigeons peck hungrily at the remains of the stale buns scattered across the asphalt. Off to the south a small dog rounds a corner, takes one look at Kaylee and immediately turns and runs in the other direction. To the north...
To the north, far in the distance, Kaylee squints to see some kind of blockage in the street. It looks like a bright yellow school bus parked across the middle of the road. She takes a few steps towards it, stops and squints again. Yeah, it’s definitely a school bus, and there seems to be something built up around it like a wall, though it’s impossible to tell at this distance in the early morning half light.
She hesitates for a moment. After nine days in solitary she really doesn’t want to go stumbling blindly into a dangerous situation, but her rumbling stomach overrules her. The thing looks likes a roadblock. Maybe it’s the entrance to some sort of refugee camp. Maybe they have food. Safety. People she can talk to. People who’ll actually reply with words, and not just violent snarls.
She knows she doesn’t have much energy left. The bitter taste of bile in her mouth is the only memory she has of the candy, and the brackish toilet water she’s been drinking for days wasn’t nearly enough to quench her thirst. Any minute now she’ll collapse from exhaustion, and if there’s a chance she might find some sort of safety on the other side of that bus she has to take the risk. She takes a dozen steps towards the bus...
... A bullet ricochets off the asphalt a few steps to her right, and she drops to the deck. “Please!” she yells, casting her eyes about for the closest cover. “Don’t shoot!”
Her voice is dry and croaky and she fears it hasn’t carried over the distance to the bus. She coughs and yells again, a little louder this time. She can’t move for terror, and she expects the killing shot to come at any moment.
In the distance a shrill whistle sounds, and in the still air she hears the sound of voices carrying back and forth, questioning and answering. She can only make out a fraction of the conversation, but the final calls comes through crystal clear.
“I think it’s a woman.”
“Bring her in.”
΅
:::12:::
ALL I CAN hear is my wheezing breath, our echoing footfalls on the service staircase and the sound of Lewis’ jacket rustling against my right ear, his weight heavy on my shoulder. Ahead of us Warren clears a path, rounding each corner with his rifle leading the way, and behind Vee covers our rear with her pistol, wary of the sound of Laurence’s men reaching 406 and discovering what’s happened to him. The young woman we found sticks close to Warren, silent and wide eyed but apparently more comfortable in the presence of the biggest gun. We all run just a little faster as we hear the guards open fire on the infected.
Climbing the five flights down to the basement parking level seems to take an eternity. Lewis is far from heavyset but I’m in no shape to carry 150 pounds of dead weight over my shoulder, and by the time we hit the basement I can feel the days of grime glued to my skin sealed in beneath a fresh layer of sweat. My fatigues chafe against my armpits and crotch, and my hair sticks to my forehead. I’d give a year of my life in return for a shower and a change of clothes.
It’s only when we hit the parking lot and Lewis weakly taps me on the back that I realize why I feel so uncomfortable. He mumbles for me to set him down, and as I gently lower him to the bare cement floor I feel his clothes peel away from mine like velcro. There’s so much blood he almost slips out of my hands. I’m covered in it from shoulder to waist, and to my untrained eye it looks like more blood than a man can safely spare.
“Jesus!” I yell, cursing myself immediately when I see the stricken look on Lewis’ face. His eyes are sunken and his skin ashy. If his lips weren’t moving I’d swear he was already dead.
“Tom,” he whispers as he weakly beckons me closer with a hand. “You gotta...” His eyes roll up as if he’s falling asleep, but he pulls himself back with the last of his energy. “You gotta take the lead on this now.” His hand pats at his jacket, coming away bloodier with each touch until he finds the flap to his chest pocket and reaches in. He pulls out his elastic bound notebook and holds it out to me.
“Take it,” he whispers, pressing it into my open hands. “Go to the back page.”
Vee appears beside me, drops to her knees, lifts Lewis’ shirt and runs her hands across his bloodied skin, searching for the entry wound. “Hold on, Lewis, we’re gonna take care of you. Warren!” she yells, “bring the morphine.”
Lewis tries to bat her hand away, but he lacks the strength to do anything but wave weakly. “No, no, don’t worry about it.” His voice emerges as little more than a whisper. “I can’t feel a thing. Tom, come closer.” I kneel down beside him and lean in, holding the book open where he asked, and I try to ignore the thick coppery smell of blood that fills my nostrils. Lewis reaches out and touches the page, leaving a bloody fingerprint behind. “You gotta get there, Tom. All of you guys, you gotta get there. The vaccine is in my bag in the Stryker.”
I look down at the book and read the scrawled handwriting. It’s a street address somewhere in Nevada.
“What’s there, Lewis? What are we supposed to do?”
His hand slips down to his waist as he tries vainly to fight off Vee. She’s tearing through his pants with her knife, pulling the hole in the fabric wider to locate the entry wound. “No no no, stop it. I’m done, don’t worry about it.” He looks up at me and cracks a faint smile. “Never thought I’d be trying to stop a beautiful woman from tearing off my pants.” He tries to laugh, but descends into a coughing fit instead.
I grab his shoulder and wait for him to catch his breath. “Come on Lewis, stay with us. What’s in Nevada? What do we have to do?”
His eyes are losing focus now, and he’s clearly fighting hard to stay conscious. “It’s the last... the last CDC lab. Hoover Dam, you know? There’s still... I think there’s still some people there. They know I’m coming.” He reaches up to me and grabs my collar with surprising force, pulling me in closer. “You have to put the vaccine in their hands, Tom. Just put it in their hands and they’ll take care of the rest. Promise me, Tom.” His eyes focus on me, and for a moment they burn with intensity. “Promise me!”
“I promise,” I reply, meeting his gaze. “Don’t worry, Lewis, I’ll get it to them.”
At Lewis’ waist Vee sighs, and when I catch her eye she shakes her head. I feel Lewis’ hand loosen its grip on my collar and slip away. With his last ounce of strength he reaches out to touch the photo stuck to the front of the notebook, staining the picture of his own face with a bloody fingerprint.
“My boy,” he whispers, his voice now little more than a breath. His eyes begin to close, and I have to lean in close to hear his final words. “Tell him I tried my best.” His hand falls limply to his side, and after a few seconds I realize his chest is no longer rising and falling. He’s gone.
Vee lifts herself to her feet and hurls her knife angrily to the floor. “Fuck!” Her hands are drenched to the wrists in blood, and she wipes them on her jacket until her front is stained dark. She looks down at herself and sees the mess she’s made, then turns away from the body. “It severed his femoral artery. There was nothing I could have done, he was dead the second the bullet hit him.”
“You tried, that’s the important thing,” I reply. I’ve no idea if that’s the right thing to say, but she nods and turns back towards me. “Yeah,” she sighs. “Fuck. An inch either side and he’d just have been limping for a while.” She stares at the pool of blood slowly creeping away from Lewis’ body, and when I look down I notice I’m standing in the middle of it. I take a quick step back, as if it’s somehow disrespectful to disturb it.
The silence is broken by echoed shouts coming from the stairwell. They’re still distant, maybe a few floors above us, but we know it won’t take the guards long to find us. A splash of blood every few yards leads all the way to Lewis’ body, like a trail of breadcrum
bs.
“Come on,” I say, tucking the notebook in my jacket pocket, “we have to get out of here. Where did Warren and the girl go?”
Vee opens her mouth, but before she can speak the roar of an engine answers her question. With a squeal of tires the immense Stryker turns the corner, its bright headlights blinding us as the vehicle approaches, and I feel my body tense. Over the last month I’d almost succeeded in blocking out the terrible memory of this damned vehicle, but now it all comes flooding back. The muzzle flash from the dark interior. Kate falling back, landing in a heap on the street. The lifeless look in her eyes, and her glassy gaze staring blindly up at the sky. The tires crushing her body.
I shiver despite the heat, and my hands clench in tight fists before a wave of calm suddenly washes over me. I haven’t had time to process what happened in the last few minutes, and I can’t help but smile when I remember that the man responsible for all this pain is a few floors above me, his body torn and broken by the people he hurt. I don’t think I’m a vengeful person, but I won’t apologize for this feeling. I’m not ashamed. Some people deserve to die.
The Stryker pulls up alongside us, and before it comes to a stop the rear hatch swings open with the same creak I remember from New York. Vee rushes to the back and I follow slowly, reluctantly, almost as if I imagine Sergeant Laurence will be waiting there for me. I finally shuffle to the back of the hulking vehicle and find nothing but the new girl offering a hand to climb into the rear cabin, but before I lift myself up I don’t miss the dent in the side of the Jerry can mounted to the rear by the hatch. Without thinking I lift my hand to my head and rub the spot where I hit that damned thing.
Up front Warren turns in the driver’s seat as I swing the hatch closed behind me. “Lewis?” he asks. I shake my head, and Warren turns back to the controls and sighs. “Damn shame. So, where are we–”
We all flinch at the sound of shots ricocheting off the armored exterior. Warren floors it, and I tumble backwards at the Stryker bolts forward through the parking level. I can’t see out the window but I swear I can feel a couple of slight jolts, as if we’re barreling into people.
The new girl unsteadily stumbles to the front of the vehicle as we emerge from the parking lot and sunlight suddenly floods the cabin, and I follow close behind. “This thing’s armored, right?” she asks.
Warren nods. “Don’t worry, they could shoot all day and we’d be perfectly safe in here.”
“No, that’s not what I mean,” she replies. She points out the narrow slit windscreen at something I can’t see. “I mean is it tough enough for that?”
Warren grins and mutters under his breath, “I like the way this one thinks.” He pulls to a sudden stop, turns back to me and Vee with a cheerful smile plastered on his face and raises his voice above the guttural roar of the engine. “Hold onto something, guys. We’re leaving a little farewell gift.”
I scramble to the front, grab the back of Warren’s seat and peer through the narrow window, and as soon as I figure out what I’m looking at a smile appears on my face.
Warren guns the engine, straightens up the Stryker and plants his foot hard on the gas. Through the window I see a few men scramble to get out of the way. A few more stand fast and try to fire on us, their shots swatted away like mosquitoes from our toughened bullet resistant window. Nothing can stop us as we gain speed and barrel towards our target.
We’re thirty yards away now. Twenty. Ten.
With a deafening crash the heavily armored vehicle tears through the bright yellow school bus in the center of the compound’s largest roadblock like wet tissue paper. The rear axle of the bus shears away from the rest of it, and as we race across the open space in front of the hotel we drag a section of the bus along with us, the broken, twisted bench seats hanging from the gash we tore through the vehicle. It sticks to us until we hit another, smaller roadblock, batting aside the stack of cars like a 16 pound bowling ball toppling racked pins.
The smile is still plastered across my face as I spin around and see Vee push the rear hatch halfway open to survey the wreckage. Behind us the remaining guards scurry desperately around the front of the compound, some yelling orders at each other while others stare open mouthed at the two gaping holes in their barricades. Warren picks up speed, and as we race away from the hotel we see the first groups of infected emerging curiously from the side streets, no doubt attracted by the sound of our engines. As we pass they try to chase, but when they realize we’re moving too quickly they begin to turn back to a closer target. The sound of yelling pulls them back towards the hotel, which quickly gives way to the sound of gunfire, which only attracts yet more infected from the shadows. Dozens of them. Hundreds.
Maybe some of the men will survive, if they’re smart enough to run.
΅
:::13:::
THE STRYKER GROWLS north through the low rise city sprawl for ten blocks before Warren swings the wheel left and guides the hulking vehicle towards the Harvey Taylor bridge. He easily shunts aside a pair of cop cars parked up to serve as a barrier, their tires squealing in protest as they slide sideways, then guides us slowly out across the broad, lazy Susquehanna.
Beyond the cop cars the bridge is clear of traffic. It stretches half a mile across the river with a clear view to either side, so when Warren pulls the Stryker to a stop in the middle we quickly crack open the rear hatch and climb out to regroup. Off in the distance I can still hear the sound of gunfire, but from the occasional lonely pops it sounds like there are only a couple of guys still shooting. Fuck ‘em.
The new girl hops down from the back, stretches and starts to massage her wrists, the skin raw from the chafing of the cable ties. For a long moment she gazes upriver at leafy Independence Island, her face tilted towards the sun, smiling, before she finally turns back to find the three of us staring at her.
“Oh,” she says, smiling casually as if she didn’t have a care in the world, “thanks for, umm... all that.” She points vaguely back towards the hotel. “I’m Kaylee.” She gives us all a little wave. “So the world ended, huh? Bummer.” At that she turns back to the river without another word.
Vee and I exchange glances. PTSD? A little crazy? Just plain dumb? Her behavior seems a little weird, but we don’t have time to deal with an unhinged young woman right now. “OK guys,” I say, turning to the only other people who seem to be sane right now, “Lewis said we need to get to a lab somewhere in Nevada with the...”
A thought occurs to me. I climb back into the Stryker, drop to the floor and search under the bench seats in the rear cabin until I find what I’m hunting for. Lewis’ camo backpack is hidden away toward the front, and I dig through the pockets until I pull out a small plastic disc. I climb back down from the back and hand it to Warren. “This is the vaccine. Lewis told me there’s a CDC lab still operational that can, I don’t know, work some magic and mass produce this or something. He mentioned something about the Hoover Dam, but he wasn’t making much sense at the end. I don’t know what he meant.”
Warren nods as he looks at the disc. It’s a Petri dish containing a layer of agar jelly spotted with dozens of small black patches. “Power,” he says. He glances up and notices my questioning look. “The Hoover Dam. It’s hydroelectric. You remember that old documentary? What was it called, Life After Humans or something? No? Well, it said the dam would continue to generate power for about a year without maintenance, until the cooling pipes became too clogged up with mussels or something. I think I’m remembering that right, anyway. It’s been a few years since I saw it.”
My jaw drops. “You mean there’s still power somewhere?”
“Oh yeah, sure,” Warren nods. “I mean, I’m not saying all those neon lights in Vegas will still be shining. I’m guessing a lot of the infrastructure has started collapse now there’s nobody there to balance the power load. A lot of transformers have probably blown out, but yeah, I’d guess there’s still pockets of power in Nevada and California. Maybe a few other places w
ith solar power or wind turbines. That shit’ll keep going for years so long as the grid can take the load.”
I feel almost giddy at the thought. I’m not sure why, but it just feels like there may be hope for the future if the lights are still on somewhere. Forget the infected. Forget the assholes like Sergeant Laurence and everyone who follows people like him. Just the thought that somewhere in the country a refrigerator is still humming away makes me think we might be able to pull ourselves back from the brink. Maybe all it takes is a cold beer and a frozen steak that hasn’t started to rot. We can start there and work our way up.
“We’re going,” I declare, more certain of this than I’ve ever been of anything. “We can get the vaccine to the lab and then find a place with AC, a cold Bud and some ground beef.” A grin plasters itself on my face as a thought hits me. “I can make chili. I make a fucking awesome chili.”
Vee chuckles and pats me on the arm. “OK, settle down Tom. How do you think we’re gonna get to Nevada from here? You really think we can make it, what, two and a half thousand miles without getting ourselves killed? We couldn’t even make it out of Pennsylvania before some fucker tried to make me a slave. Bishop’s dead, Lewis is dead and Warren got a bullet in his leg for his trouble. What makes you think tomorrow will be any better?”
Kaylee spreads her arms wide, basking in the sun, a peaceful smile on her face. “We could fly there,” she says, then she makes a whooshing sound and thrusts her arm out ahead of her like Superman.
Vee adopts the tone of someone humoring a child. “That’s a lovely idea, Kaylee. Maybe we can think about that a little later.” She turns back to me and rolls her eyes. “Look, I know it’s important to get to this lab, but I just don’t know how we’re gonna make it all that way. It’s a suicide mission.”
Last Man Standing Box Set [Books 1-3] Page 32
