by Gareth Wood
After a suitable interval we moved on to the business at hand.
“So, where are we headed this time?” I asked, leaning back in my chair. The Major rubbed his hand over his head, pushing the hair back over his skull. He stood up rather than answering me, and opened one of his filing cabinets. He took out some maps, and laid them on the desk.
“British Columbia. Specifically, to the town of Golden.” He looked at me for a reaction, and I whistled. Golden had been the first sign I had seen of organised response to the undead rise, and I had passed through the town on my way west over a year ago. They had had barricades, armed guards, and no desire to let strangers into town. Sarah, Darren and I had only been let through because we were able to prove none of us was sick or bitten. I hadn’t given any thought to the town since then, assuming it was lost like so many others.
“Why?” I asked. “There are plenty of closer places to get supplies.”
He frowned. Little wrinkles appeared on his head. “The Brass wants to reach out to a few more remote communities, if there are any left. Your file mentioned that you’d been through there, and you are the only ones here who have. This is not a supply run, it’s a contact mission.”
He stood again, and looked out the window.
“Understand this is strictly volunteer, Brian. If you don’t want to go, we’ll send someone else. But the CO wants you to go. Local experience. Never mind that it’s over a year old, right?” He raised an eyebrow at me.
“Tell me the details, and I might consider it,” I told him. So he explained. The plan, such as it was, involved flying to Calgary, a place I really didn’t want to return to anytime soon, and taking some vehicles from there around the city and west into the mountains, essentially retracing my initial trip as far as Golden, then returning by any means available to Cold Lake. While in Golden we were supposed to make contact with any survivors, and either get them to move to the relative safety of Cold Lake, or if the town was still in good shape and protected, help fortify them, and establish relations. This was all pretty vague, and I said as much to Major Couper.
“I know,” he said. He frowned again, and continued. “The thing is, we really can’t say with any accuracy what or who you’ll find there. We need you to go, though.”
Something in his voice alerted me to the tension I had missed previously.
“What’s happened, Major?”
He looked pained, and sat down again. With a deeply sad voice he told me, “There was an outbreak in Athabasca two nights ago. We lost nearly a hundred people.”
I was stunned. One hundred people. A hundred survivors who up until now had been safe. A hundred irreplaceable lives.
“What happened?” I asked, when I could manage words again.
“It started as a domestic murder-suicide, and mushroomed from there. The first deaths were in an apartment building. Most of the victims were sleeping, and woke up to screaming. Some went to investigate, and by then they were swarmed by a growing mass of undead. A few of the responders were killed by the dead, and then a perimeter was formed around the building. All the volunteer security and our entire PPCLI detachment were sent in and they ended up destroying eighty-six zombies. Some of them were only just reanimating. There were five casualties in the security volunteers, all bite victims who were euthanised.” He stopped, and looked at me. “I need a drink. Want one?”
“Yeah, uh, please…” I took the shot glass of whisky he handed me and knocked it back.
“The good news is that nearly three hundred other people in that building managed to barricade themselves in and survive. They even organised a response team, and managed to take out several undead themselves. But still…”
“Why hasn’t it hit the news yet? I haven’t heard anything about this.”
“The CO didn’t want to tell everyone until the next of kin were notified. We’re going to let it out in an hour or so. We’d like to be able to announce that your team is going out to contact other potential communities as well, to offset the bad news.” He sighed, and poured another round of whisky. “To be honest, Brian, we need some good news. Our position here is getting to be rather tenuous.”
That statement, more than anything else, alarmed me greatly. I had known for months that our hold on civilisation was becoming precarious, but hearing the same opinion from Couper was deeply troubling.
We talked about the operation for another half hour, and when I left I took maps, an equipment requisition, and his good wishes. We would be departing the day after tomorrow. Back to Calgary, where I had nearly died twice already, and I didn’t have any need to try for a third time. I left the base and went home.
* * *
Early the next morning the team arrived: Darren and Sanji, Eric and Amanda. We all gathered in my house and went over the equipment very, very carefully. Weapons were cleaned and ammunition was inspected. Clothes were checked for tears and rips, boots were checked for wear, and toiletries were checked and restocked. We emptied the vehicles and examined everything. I showed Amanda how we stocked everything, what we took with us and why we took each item. She had shown up on time, and had brought her own gear with her. Eric and I had gone through her things, carefully sorting out the chaff, and telling her what to bring instead. She had passed the basic salvage team member training we all went through, and wore a Browning on a hip holster like the rest of us. She had chosen to bring along a 12-gauge pistol grip shotgun as well. I couldn’t fault that choice at all.
We wouldn’t be bringing the Explorers on this trip, since we were flying down to Calgary. Vehicles would be provided to us there, so we’d have to repack all our gear once we got there. I went through the house and grabbed things to include in my kit. I stopped in the bathroom and took a small tube of toothpaste and a travel toothbrush. A three-pack of razors and a small plastic bag filled with cotton swabs. My next stop was the hallway bookshelf, where I took my SAS Survival Guide, a Collins Gem edition that fit into a small vest pocket. The kitchen surrendered a dozen tea bags and a 12-ounce bag of dehydrated soup stock.
In the bedroom I gathered clothes. Warm, weather-resistant clothing was essential to this trip, since we were heading into the Rockies in winter. I had visions of snow banks as high as my head. I returned to the living room to find Jess helping with the loading and checking. She was telling the group her ideas for baby names. As I came in she was saying, “…and for a girl, I was thinking Barbara.”
“Didn’t we agree on Diane for a girl?” I asked.
“You agreed. I didn’t.”
“And we agreed on David for a boy,” I said.
“I was thinking of Benjamin if it’s a boy, actually.” She smiled at me as she said it.
Good thing we had seven or eight months left to decide on names.
I dropped my added goodies into my pile of gear, and we got down to final packing. Once that was finished I joined Jess in the kitchen, where I made lunch for everyone. Sarah called to say she would be joining us for dinner, and I invited the team to stay as well. After lunch we drove out to the base and dropped off our gear with the aircrew we would be flying down to Calgary with. It was a small, twelve seat passenger plane. I looked it over, and my very limited knowledge of aircraft told me it was in good shape and would get us there. Of course, I might have been talking out of my ass, and it could fall apart in midair as soon as we left the runway. I really hoped I wouldn’t find out about a structural failure like that while I was inside the plane.
Dinner that night was a collaborative affair. We had ham and vegetable soup with fresh bread and baked potatoes. Darren and Mandy made an apple pie, and Eric had found a small tub of ice cream made by one of the local farmers and traded for in the town market. Sarah brought some new books for the children, and promised me she would be over every day that I was out on this mission, both to keep Jess company and to make sure everything was alright with the pregnancy. After dinner everyone went home for a last night’s sleep in a good safe bed, a true luxury that wasn�
��t to be wasted. Jess and I spent some time with Michael and Megan, then put them to bed and spent some quality time with each other. I had no idea how long I would be away on this run, since you can never predict what might happen in the dead lands outside the walls and fences. We retired to our room, and shut out the lights.
* * *
“I swear, Amanda, that is the stupidest fucking thing I have ever heard! They did not fake the Apollo moon landings!”
I groaned. Eric’s voice was carrying over the engines of the plane as we came in for a landing. He and Amanda were two rows ahead of me, and she was telling him about her theories that the American government had filmed the Apollo moon mission landings in a movie studio in California. Eric wasn’t buying it. They had been arguing for over an hour as we flew south and west from Cold Lake to Calgary. The pilots had flown us over Drumheller, and we had spent a few minutes in silence looking down onto that desolate and dead city. We flew over the prison, where we had spent some time last year, and had encountered the first of the non-aggressive zombies. Well, non-aggressive wasn’t exactly right. It was more like ‘Stan’ (short for ‘standing zombie’) had a wire shorted in his rotting brain somewhere. He had seemed unable to move or act, even though his eyes followed us and he could remain standing. He had finally pitched over and seemed to expire, and we had put a bullet into him to be absolutely sure. Over the following months more of them had been noticed, but not a lot. It seemed that a small fraction of the older undead were finally dropping on their own. And it was indeed a small fraction. Probably less than one-tenth of a percentage. None of this had any bearing on what Amanda and Eric were arguing about.
The prison yard below us was likely empty, but we were too high to be able to make out individual walking corpses. Now, as we approached Calgary, we had lost enough altitude that I could probably make out dozens of the damned things in the fields and streets if I cared to look. I didn’t. I held onto the seat as we landed, and taxied into the terminal. We all looked around then, checking the area as we got ready to depart the plane. The airport in Calgary was surrounded by a high chain link fence on all sides now. It hadn’t been before the dead rose. It was now mainly because of the efforts of people from Cold Lake and CFB Comox, who had descended in force upon the airport to use as a staging area. Attempts to use the Edmonton airport in a similar fashion were ongoing, as the airport there was more open and harder to isolate. Here, most of the fence was already up. We had just sealed in the holes.
I had come here to help with that effort last year. It had been the most hellish experience in recent memory, and there have been a lot of bad experiences since May of 2004. Now though, the airport here in Calgary was clear and safe, and expeditions sent out here returned with food and equipment from the surrounding areas. Very few people ventured deep into the city itself; it was simply too crowded with the undead there to be safe. We gathered our things, and I shared a look with Darren and Eric as we crowded to the entrance. None of us had good memories of this place. I still had nightmares about the carnage that happened here, though they had lessened now. I got off the plane and headed for the terminal, waving to the armed sentries in the nearby towers.
It was cold out, on this seventh day of October. My breath misted in the air, and I guessed it was about four degrees above freezing. This was a good thing; it helped keep the stench down. The smell of several hundred thousand rotting, yet somehow still walking, corpses would normally have been unbearable. There was no sign of snow anywhere, and the sky was empty of clouds. We all hurried inside and met our contact, a young woman in military uniform bearing a Captain’s rank insignia. Her nametag read “Lowell”, and she introduced herself as Patricia. We followed her to the service bay where two vehicles had been prepared for us, a Toyota Highlander and a Ford F-250 with an extended cab. We set about checking them over, and when our gear arrived, brought in on a pallet by two more soldiers, we started stowing it. Captain Lowell stayed long enough to tell us where we were staying for the night, and then she left. We had the bay to ourselves for the most part, except for a few people coming and going to drop off or move equipment that was stored here. It took us less than an hour to properly organise everything, even with showing Amanda how we liked things laid in. After that, it was time for dinner and a walk around the terminal to see how things were holding up here.
We bedded down for the night in one of the areas formerly reserved for security and airport staff, and as I lay there waiting for sleep I remembered Jess’ words to me before I left. It was early in the morning, and she was with me at the airfield. We had dropped off Michael and Megan at the school, and she had driven me out to the base to board the plane. We had pulled up in front of the plane, and everyone on the team was already there. We loaded our gear, and then Jess hugged them all, and waited as they got aboard. She took me by the hand, and kissed me, then looked into my eyes and said, “Make sure you come back to us. I love you. The kids love you. This baby,” and she touched her belly, “this baby of ours loves you.” She looked away for a moment as I squeezed her hands.
“Just make sure. Come home again, no matter what you find out there.” She kissed me again, then climbed back into the Explorer and drove away, leaving me beside the plane.
Sleep was a long time coming.
* * *
We started out early in the morning. Darren and I were driving the F-250, and the others in the Highlander. We had full fuel tanks, and each vehicle carried another four gas cans. We drove the vehicles to the main gate, and stopped at the checkpoint. High fences were supported at intervals by sniper towers, and I could see the sentries in the nearest towers looking at us. I waved, and a woman in the nearest tower waved back. The gate guards opened the chain link barrier, and we drove through into the kill zone outside the fences. The snipers here had orders to shoot any zombies they could see that approached within one hundred meters of the gates, and they were good shots.
Periodically a team had to go out in an armoured bulldozer to clear away the dozen or so bodies that had been destroyed by the sharpshooters. Fortunately this gate faced away from the main area of the city. Calgary’s airport was located in the north east quadrant of the city, well away from the main population center. In recent years, development and urban growth had begun to encroach on the airport land, but the area immediately east of the terminal buildings was still empty countryside when the undead rose. There wasn’t that much of an undead population out there, and those that approached the activity in the airport did so from the west and south.
We drove out onto country roads, spotting only a few shambling corpses in sight several hundred meters away. We drove east for ten minutes, turned north, then followed an old road towards Airdrie, a satellite community of Calgary, where many who preferred the more relaxed ‘small town’ feel of an urban center removed from the ‘big city’ had once lived and played. Airdrie had been a city in its own right, but it had faired as badly as Calgary in the disaster. We avoided it, turning onto Highway 566 heading west. This route took us through hilly countryside north of the city, where dozens of abandoned cars and minivans dotted the roads. Some still had passengers. We carefully drove around the ruined cars, stopping for nothing. The tragedies that had unfolded here upon these people had happened long ago, and there was nothing we could do for them now. Lone zombies would lean towards us as we passed, their flesh blackened and shrivelled, bones showing through the split skin. A few brave flies, not yet dead from the cold temperatures this time of year, flew about them in spotty black clouds.
Worse than the undead were the victims who had been torn apart, their bones gnawed clean and left to bake or freeze with the seasons. The walking corpses fell behind us as we left the sad convoy of dead vehicles, and the highway before us was open and clear. Grass had forced its way into cracks and seams in the road, and the ride was bumpier than it would have been in the spring of 2004. Finally, we turned north again, passing four or five kilometers of empty houses and dead farms. Fire had to
uched some of these properties, but not all. Some were as pristine as the day their owners had fled or died, save for the unkempt lawns and overgrown gardens. Wildlife walked the land here as well. A small herd of deer ran from us for a hundred meters before stopping, turning, and regarding us with bored eyes. Our undead seemed to leave other animals alone, so the wildlife populations were thriving.
We turned west again on Highway 567, which we planned to follow to Highway 22, which ran north to south through this area of Alberta. That road would take us south to the Trans-Canada Highway, passing through another satellite community of Calgary called Cochrane. That town was largely empty of the undead. The population had mostly fled during the uprising, and recent flights by small aircraft out of Calgary International Airport had confirmed that there were very few walking corpses in the streets. It should be safe for us to pass through Cochrane on our way south.
Darren and I talked very little on our way to Cochrane. For me this was déjà vu, since I had driven out this way, if not exactly this route, back in May last year. Sarah and I had escaped the city heading west on almost exactly the same route that we planned to follow to Golden now. This trip, however, would have a few less detours and side trips, provided the mountain roads were passable.
We made excellent time to Cochrane and arrived at the edge of the plateau just before 1030 hours. The town is located in a river valley surrounded on three sides by the prairie. To get to the town you have to drive down long winding roads that drop a few hundred meters of altitude in only a few kilometers, making for a slippery and treacherous ride in winter even when the roads are in repair. Now? The roads were in terrible shape, having suffered frost heaves last winter, plant intrusions in the summer, and now more frost and ice had built up on them. We proceeded down the slope slowly, very slowly.
