“We should recon the crash site,” Jones said under his breath.
“We’ve got four snowmobiles and four drivers, so let’s just get out the shovels and make a ramp before we freeze to death.”
“Three drivers,” Jones said.
“Four,” Doctor O’Farrell snapped.
“You’re not going,” Jones told her. “Stay here with Houston.”
“Like hell,” O’Farrell replied.
“Would you two love birds can it?” Hank shouted. “Get a shovel.”
Jones and Hank dug out a section of the snow drift, using the excavated snow to raise the ground between the train and the path they made. Tom set out helmets, gloves, and thick pants and jackets for everyone, attaching the rescue sleds to the back two snowmobiles. Tom unzipped his pack and withdrew several devices, fiddling with them while putting one on each snowmobile seat. O’Farrell tugged on a pair of the pants and Penelope watched her carefully to see how to put them on. She hated needing other people’s help with trivial things like clothes. Penelope tugged at the leggings, but couldn’t get them over her boots.
“Here, let me help,” O’Farrell said, stepping close to Penelope while putting her hands over Penelope’s to stop her from tugging.
Penelope growled, startled.
“You need to stop that,” O’Farrell snapped softly. “Or everyone’s going to know what you are.”
Penelope glared at O’Farrell, then snatched a look back toward Tom, but he was busy punching buttons on a device in his hand and seemed oblivious. The noise from the wind outside did a sufficient job of quieting O’Farrell’s words.
“The infection damages the larynx,” O’Farrell said. “Are you taking enough Vitamin E? What dose are you on? 500 milligrams?”
Penelope’s glare became a wary stare.
“You need to boost your Vitamin E concentration if you want to get your voice back. It also helps with your hair and skin. You won’t be so dry.”
Penelope stared at her as she gave one last tug on Penelope’s ski pants. Penelope was perplexed by the doctor’s motherly behavior.
“There, now zip up,” O’Farrell said, stepping back to assess her work. “There are buttons on the back for the jacket,” she said, pointing at her own pants. “To keep the snow out.”
The men finished carving a ramp into the side of the snow bank and retreated to the container to suit up next to their respective snowmobiles. M.B. Houston climbed up onto the well-car, surveying their work.
“Nice,” Houston told them. “I got the switch-back moved into place, finally. I’ll be able to see the marker when I come back. I’m going to head up to the wye track and clear it out to turn around. It’ll take me a good four or five hours in this mess. If you get back before then, head west along the tracks to find me. Otherwise, I’m buttoning things up right here and getting some sleep.”
“You did good getting us here, M,” Hank said, stepping out to shake the engineer’s hand.
Houston nodded. Tom shook his hand too, and the engineer saluted toward the soldier, and bowed to O’Farrell. He winked at Penelope before hurrying back toward the front of the train. The idea that she might never see M.B. Houston again didn’t sit well with Penelope. She hoped he’d be safe.
“What’s this?” Hank asked, picking up the small unit Tom had put out on each of the snowmobiles.
“GPS. I pre-programmed the coordinates at Midamerica where we’ll drop the snowmobiles off, and I just loaded the coordinates of the train, here, as well. These will get us there and back, but Houston said he’d only hang around forty-eight hours. Anything longer and he’ll consider us lost too.”
“Forty-eight hours? That’s it?” Hank groused.
“It’s plenty of time,” Tom argued.
“Not if they’re not there,” Jones replied.
“They’ll be there.”
After suiting up, Tom lifted the seat of the snowmobile and stowed his shotgun and a backpack in a cargo space underneath. He fished a pair of sunglasses from a pocket of his jacket and slid them gently over Penelope’s ears, pressing them to her nose. The world around her dimmed and Penelope stopped squinting.
“That’s better, huh?”
Penelope nodded.
Tom smiled and handed Penelope a helmet. She looked at it with a furrowed brow, confused until she saw Tom put one on himself.
“Wait here until I’m clear,” he said and straddled the snowmobile.
Tom stuck the key in the ignition before Penelope had a chance to put on her own helmet. The engine revved to life with a wailing wing, wing, wing, wing, and Penelope dropped the helmet to cover her ears. Tom drove the snowmobile out of the container without realizing what happened. O’Farrell stepped in front of Penelope and picked up the helmet, lifting it over her head. Penelope let it slide down, moving her hands out of the way. The helmet weighed her head down, but muffled most of the noise. The other engines all started and Penelope followed Tom out of the container to escape the chaos.
Tom drove up the ramp of snow and onto the high berm. Penelope climbed up behind him and stood alone, above the train, scanning the horizon in all directions. She could hardly see the snowblower in front of the engine through the haze. How would they ever get back to it?
“Come on,” Tom called while patting behind him on the snowmobile.
Penelope nervously took the seat behind him, wrapping her arms tightly around his waist.
“You’ll be fine,” Tom shouted over the whirring engine. “Just relax and hold on, and try to enjoy it a little.”
He revved the engine and the snowmobile lurched down the snow bank and into the endless white surrounding them. Tom stopped at the bottom of the rise and held up his GPS device as he waited for the others. A large arrow pointed the direction he needed to travel. He put his gloved hand through the strap and slid the GPS up to his forearm.
Hank rolled down the hill next to Tom.
“One thing’s for certain,” Hank shouted. “No biters will be out in this.”
Jones crested the embankment and rolled past Hank to stop a few feet further ahead. He was towing one of the rescue sleds. He looked back to make sure everything was secure. O’Farrell cruised over the hill as well and drifted alongside Tom.
“Are you sure you’ve got this?” Tom asked the doctor.
“I grew up in Minnesota,” she called back.
“Right,” Tom said, revving the engine to lead the way.
Penelope wasn’t sure what any of that meant or how Tom and the others knew how to drive snowmobiles. It reminded her again how dependent she was on other people for even the most marginal of things, like putting on ski pants. She needed the doctor to show her how. And that was another thing that troubled her. Doctor O’Farrell knew Penelope was a half-breed, but she didn’t treat Penelope any differently. Not like the thousands who once gawked at her through the bars of her cage. O’Farrell seemed to see Penelope as someone, not something. Maybe with O’Farrell it didn’t matter.
Penelope leaned her head around Tom once she realized that even though there was a world passing beneath them, she wouldn’t fall off into it. A blurry white expanse greeted her eyes. Everything not covered in snow appeared as dark shadows, like the wall of stark trees that cruised by on their left. To their right, and everything ahead, was endlessly flat snow. In the trees, there might have been zombies, but in this weather, and in the blinding white that stung even Penelope’s mostly normal eyes, they wouldn’t come out. Not by day. They were in there, though, hiding under a fallen tree or a thick bramble, in the darkest shadows, in the warmest crevasses, avoiding the world.
Mounds began to form in the snow ahead of them and Tom veered away to avoid them. Penelope would have thought them to be boulders if they hadn’t started to shake off their snow-white coats. The heads of cows appeared from beneath their blankets, first ten, then twenty, then a hundred, and more. Tom turned hard right and slowed down, driving out into the white expanse to avoid a herd of what looked li
ke thousands.
A bull rose to his feet, his horns dripping with what looked like stringy moss or lichen. Another bull stood near the edge of the herd, then another. The other snowmobiles slid to a stop near Tom.
“Let’s go around, really, really wide,” Hank suggested over the whining of his engine.
Tom turned further to the right, nearly back-tracking, as he revved the snowmobile and lurched them forward. The others fell in behind him. As a group, they drove straight across what looked like an endless field. Tom looked at the device on his arm several times, then began to veer left, back toward Midamerica.
Penelope looked behind her to see the other three snowmobiles following, all driving in separate tracks across the thick, white snow, sinking into troughs they left in their wake. Tom’s snowmobile shot clods of snow into the air behind them. She wanted to reach a hand out to feel one slap her skin so that she might know what it felt like. She wished she understood the world as easily as the others. She hated zombies more than ever, and she hated half-breeds more than that. If the cure made her able to do all these wonderful things, then finding Kennedy was becoming a necessity.
Thirteen
Tom let the snowmobile drift to a halt, looking at the GPS device on his arm. He revved the engine again and cruised another thirty or forty feet, his head looking ahead and up, then down at the device before throttling back and coasting to a stop. He killed the engine.
“Hop off, Penny,” he said, getting up stiffly. “We’re here.”
Penelope’s own joints ached a little. Her knees protested, preventing her from standing on her first try. On her second attempt, her legs revived enough that she lifted a leg over the seat and stood beside the snowmobile as Tom lifted the seat to open it. Hank’s snowmobile coasted to a stop nearby and he killed his engine as well. Tom hoisted out his pack and shotgun, and looked around cautiously.
Jones coasted to a stop ahead of them, standing as the snowmobile dug into the soft, white powder with its engine already dead. Doctor O’Farrell’s snowmobile ground to a halt next to Tom and she shut off her engine as well.
The world sounded deathly silent all of a sudden.
Tom parked them in the middle of the taxiway that connected the two runways of the Midamerica airport and Scott Air Force Base. Penelope remembered walking along the wide airstrip road only a month ago with Tom, Hank, and the other survivors of the destruction at Biter’s Hill. She knew almost instinctively where to find the terminal building, the control tower, and the woods where she and Tom went to find Larissa.
“No welcoming committee?” Jones asked, his boots crunching through the snow as he walked toward Tom. His legs sank into the snow a foot or more with each step. “Got any snow shoes in that pack of yours?”
“I wish,” Tom said. “Bright side is that if you can’t walk in this, neither can any biters.”
“Mason, get your med kit,” O’Farrell told Jones as she pulled open a compartment on her rescue sled and took out a backpack. “We might be able fabricate something with the tape.”
Jones nodded, turning around to hike back to his snowmobile.
“And you wanted to leave her on the train,” Hank said with a grin as Jones passed.
“If you like her so much better, I can always go back,” Jones replied.
“Bah,” Hank said with a dismissive wave. He turned toward Tom, and then let his eyes scan the white expanse in every direction. Penelope knew he sensed it as she did, like there was a massing horde of zombies just beyond sight, weighing the very air down. At any moment, she expected a ring of biters to manifest in the haze, their dark shadows lumbering toward them, slowly squeezing off their escape.
“Which way?” Hank asked Tom.
“Stick to the plan,” Tom answered.
“Right. You head to the tower, I head to the terminal, and Jones recons the barracks.”
“And stay out of the woods,” they said in unison.
“Got it,” Hank replied. He lifted open Tom’s seat and plucked out the medical kit. “These have inhibitors in them, right?”
“Standard issue,” Tom said. “Don’t go in the terminal. Just look through the glass.”
The terminal was one of the places Penelope didn’t like thinking about. The last time they came to Midamerica, Peske put her in the dark bathroom overnight, locking her in alone, surrounded by cold tile that echoed with the sound of even the slightest twitch. Her only comfort was a blanket to fend off the chill and a flashlight, but she remembered Tom’s fingers touching hers through the crack under the door. She remembered his voice keeping her company.
“Kid, it’s not like I haven’t been out here before,” Hank said as he checked the pistol holstered at his thigh. He opened a cargo pocket of his pants and pulled out two long sticks, and waved them around. “Besides, Houston gave me a couple of these if I should run into anything big.”
“What the hell are those? Flares?”
“He calls them starbursts. Flares on steroids. Don’t worry about me, kid.” Hank stuffed the flares back into his cargo pocket and started lurching through the snow, his legs sinking with each step.
Doctor O’Farrell stepped up next to Penelope and touched her arm. Penelope turned to face the doctor, startled.
“You don’t need your helmet anymore,” O’Farrell said, reaching her hand up under Penelope’s chin to loosen the strap. Penelope didn’t mind letting the woman help her, and even allowed O’Farrell to tug the helmet off her head. “Put this on, though. It’ll keep your head warm.”
Penelope slipped on the knit hat O’Farrell gave her.
“We go that way?” O’Farrell asked Tom, pointing the opposite direction Hank had marched off.
“Yeah,” Tom said. “Barracks are over there, and admin offices and the tower are that way.”
“You’re going straight to the tower?”
“Yeah, and then there are hangars too. We’ll check it all out.”
“Good luck, you two,” O’Farrell said. “Keep him safe,” she added, winking at Penelope.
“You too,” Tom said, looking past O’Farrell and toward the soldier. “Don’t let him get bit again.”
O’Farrell nodded knowingly. She turned to Penelope and smiled, holding a finger, telling her to wait as she tugged at the strap across her shoulder holding the camera under her armpit. She slid the camera to her eye and aimed it toward Penelope and Tom. Click, click, click, the camera shot several photos. O’Farrell smiled as she stowed her camera, then crunched her way through the snow toward Jones.
Jones and O’Farrell faded into obscurity. Hank had already disappeared.
“Just like old times, huh, Penny?” Tom asked softly. “I didn’t bring any handcuffs, though.”
Penelope snorted a laugh. The last time they came to Midamerica, Peske handcuffed them together to make sure she didn’t try to escape. He thought, for some absurd reason, that she might prefer returning to the wild over being cared for and having clothes and food and a place to sleep that was safe from the worry of zombies. Or at any rate, safer than this. The only thing that bothered Penelope about living with Peske was that she always had to be inside a cage.
“Do you want to just hold hands?”
Penelope obliged, taking Tom’s hand. He led her into the snow, sinking to his knees with every step. Her own steps didn’t sink nearly as deep. Memories of the years out here quickly became common knowledge again. Her steps weren’t awkward or unbalanced like Tom’s first few, but even he began to get the hang of it. When she looked back, she barely saw the snowmobiles in the white haze washing across the emptiness. Tom glanced back as well, nodding.
“Don’t get separated,” Tom told her. “I don’t want to lose you.”
Penelope nodded in agreement. Not here.
Fourteen
The snow fell in waves that undulated like the tide. Flurries took over whenever the heavier fall abated, making it nearly impossible to see anything more than twenty or thirty feet away. In the rare pocket
s of calm, Penelope recovered her bearings. She halted abruptly at finding she strayed too close to one of the buildings. Looking up a weeping wall of an old brick three-story building, she expected faces to be leering out at them from inside the shadowy windows. The silence surprised her, too. She expected to hear the haunting moans of starving zombies hiding within, all wailing because they now saw her and Tom outside. Thankfully, the snow half-buried the ground floor and the sills of every window wore thick white brows of fresh powder. Of the windows that were still intact, a thick white ice coated them, making them impossible to see through. Long icicles hanging from the sills and roof lines formed like teeth.
“Can you smell them?” Tom whispered into Penelope’s ear as they corrected their direction.
She nodded, taking long steps to get them further away from the building. With the reek in the air, made more intense by the wind itself—redoubling the stench the further it travelled through the gauntlet of buildings—Penelope was sure Tom could smell it too. She looked at him, the question in her eyes.
“Yeah,” Tom replied softly. “Smells worse than the kennels.”
The tower began to take shape in the haze of falling snow, eclipsing the sky enough to create a black shadow looming overhead. Tom took the lead with no sign of hesitation.
“My father would go to the tower, if he could,” he whispered.
Penelope didn’t need Tom’s explanation. She understood his conviction. You protect the ones you love, Tom told her when they first moved to Biter’s Bend, to their apartment at the EPS. He said it in response to her questioning gaze after she looked the apartment over, end to end. She understood that. She’d do anything for Tom.
Tom stopped when they stood beneath the dark windows above. The structure blocked out the falling snow, but flurries danced in the air with the wind gusts that came through unannounced. The door to the main building was partly open, with snow piling up outside. The first floor was half submerged, making the windows nearly level with the snowline.
Tom bent down and scooped up a wad of snow, packing it in his gloved hands. He grunted as he flung the snowball up at the nearest tower window, where it thumped and burst into clumps that slid down the angled glass. Penelope looked around them, expecting the noise to wake the slumbering horde, but nothing stirred.
Plagued States of America (Book 3): Plagued: The Ironville Zombie Quarantine Retraction Experiment Page 7
