by Gareth Wood
The closest of the three coming towards me had once been a construction worker. Its blue hardhat was covered in old stickers, including a bright green one on the center of it. I aimed for that, wondering if the hardhat was bullet proof.
BANG!
Guess not.
The blue hat rattled as it hit the ground, and I was already aiming for the next one. She had been a soccer mom once, I thought. Jeans and a nice sweater, good shoes now stained with mud, old blood, and leaves. A massive leg wound that made her limp along.
BANG!
The last one was in terrible condition. Missing the left arm at the shoulder, clothes in tatters, and chunks of flesh missing from throat and torso. It grinned at me as it stepped over the soccer mom, and I saw something black slip between the lips and fall to the ground. I think it was the tongue.
BANG!
It fell on top of the former soccer mom, and I turned back.
We were loaded and ready to go a minute later, and pulled out onto the road well before the crowd of the approaching walking dead was near us. Thomas Dand looked back at the approaching creatures, and said, “I’d really like to study them.”
Jaeger was sitting beside him in the back seat, and said, “Under safe laboratory conditions, please.”
Darren and I laughed, and we drove down the road towards Crossfield. It was an uneventful trip, mostly driving slowly and avoiding the few undead that we saw. Crossfield itself looked like it had been abandoned quickly, and there were empty cars and trucks everywhere. A school bus was actually tipped onto its side near the gas station in the center of town, and a few of the dead could be seen staggering about on the side streets. There were not enough of them to impede our passage, and we made good time to the highway. Crossing over Highway 2 we looked south, but the great swarm of the undead was not visible from here, only kilometer after kilometer of slowly rusting abandoned vehicles. So many people had left the cities with no planning or supplies that the highways were clogged in many places, and they had died of starvation or zombie attacks or exposure. Only a few were lucky enough to make it to Cold Lake or some other surviving community. As bad as it had been here, I still wondered what it was like to the south. I had been to the States a few times on business trips, and I knew what the population density was like in places like Austin or San Diego. Those would not have been happy places to spend the apocalypse.
“Do you know anything about how it spread?” Thomas Dand asked from his seat behind us.
“No,” I said, “not really. I have heard rumours.”
“Even those might be helpful,” he said. He had his notebook in his hand, and was taking notes as we drove.
“It spread really fast, man,” Darren said, and he looked like he was remembering something unpleasant. “I was at school and my dad came to get me, took me right out of English class. We heard news stories all week about how this rioting in Africa was spreading to the Middle East, and then the next day my dad got me from school in the middle of the day.” This was the first I had heard of anything from Darren’s past. He was usually pretty close-mouthed about what happened to his family.
“We got home and he had already packed the camper. My mom was worried about the fish tanks, but my dad said to leave them. We were standing in the driveway, and Mom was telling Dad that he was overreacting to the news and we should stay. All of a sudden this police car came around the corner of our block and stopped down the street in front of the green house on the corner.”
“What happened then?”
“The cops ran to the door of the green house and we stood there watching. A few seconds later we heard shooting. Not one shot or two, but lots. Then out the front door came this old man covered in blood. He staggered like he was drunk and fell off the steps, then got up. The two cops came outside, and one of them was holding a hand over a bloody wound on his arm. They both aimed at the old man and ordered him to lie down, but the old guy kept coming at them. They shot him right there, but he didn’t fall down, just grabbed at the nearest one and tried to bite him.”
“What did they do?” Jaeger asked.
“They kept shooting him in the chest. It did nothing, man,” Darren said. “Finally they ran out of bullets, and the old man tackled one of them and started biting. Dad pushed us into the camper right then and we drove off. I was looking back at the old man feeding on the cop until we turned the corner, and we tried to get out of the city. My mom never accused my dad of overreacting again.”
“Why not?” Dand asked him.
“Because she got herself and my dad killed two days later,” he said bitterly, “on May fourteenth.”
“I’m sorry, Darren,” I said to him.
He shrugged. “It’s okay, man. It’s old news.”
* * *
We arrived at the airport a little after two o’clock in the afternoon with a minimum of trouble. We called in to cancel our supply drop. Heading north of the city to cross the highway had been the right idea. We were able to bypass the swarm on the #2, and crossed into open prairie on the east side of that road. Swinging south down local roads we made it to the outskirts of the cleared zone around the airport just as the temperature was dropping and the sky was clouding up. It looked to me like more snow was on the way.
Urban sprawl had not fully surrounded the airport when the dead rose, so there was an open corridor to the countryside to the north east of the airport, and it was this zone that had been fenced in, barricaded, and manned with nearly a thousand troops and support people, including a few scavenger teams, search and rescue specialists, and pilots. It wasn’t a popular job, but it had to be done. The airport outside Edmonton was in better shape, since it was outside the city itself, but Calgary’s had closer access to resources, even if the flight to Cold Lake was longer.
We were stopped at the first gate, a chain-link and barbed-wire outpost just off 80th Avenue North East. The guard post was a construction trailer, hauled here with a generator, phone lines, radio, and food and ammo for ten guards. All ten of them came out to meet us, since anything not dead and moving around was cause for curiosity. We identified ourselves, Sanji getting out to show them our travel papers, and they opened the gates and let us in. We were all taken inside the trailer, and one by one a medic examined us while the guards watched cautiously. I had warned our passengers about this, and they all went along with it. The medic finally gave us the all clear, and the tension level of the guards dropped noticeably. I asked one if anyone had come through recently that had tried to hide being bitten.
“Nah,” he said glumly, “but there was a woman came in a week ago from out east someplace with two young kids. She was bit, this nasty bite on her left arm, but the kids were fine. She stopped near the gate and dropped them off, then drove off in this beat up Volvo. I guess she knew the kids would be okay with us, but that we’d tranquilize her.”
“Did the kids say where they came from?” Amanda asked.
“All they knew was they’d been hiding in a church outside a small town for a while, but not which town. They were pretty young, though.”
After that we drove on towards the airport itself, stopping at another gate a kilometer later. We were passed into the main area of the airport itself, and drove around the north side of the building as the first fat flakes of snow started to fall. Once on the tarmac, the business side of the airport, I saw that the salvage teams here had been moving planes around. Several of the abandoned passenger jets had been towed away from the terminal building, parked to the south near the hangars. I saw the hangars behind the planes, and shuddered at a sudden memory.
As we drove up to the hangar where we were to re-supply and drop off our passengers, I saw a familiar face waiting for us. A young military woman, Captain Patricia Lowell, watched us as we drove in. She had a clipboard in her hands, and walked right up to us as we stopped inside the warm hangar. I got out to greet her.
“Captain Lowell, good to see you again.” I offered my hand, and she shook it.
“Is there something going on I should know about, Captain?”
She gave me a sad smile, and looked down at her clipboard.
“We need you to go right back out again. We have a situation that needs investigating.”
“What? We just got back in.”
“I know, and I’m sorry, but we need someone to go search for some survivors, and your crew is the only Salvage Team we have nearby at the moment.” That might be true. There were five teams working out of Calgary, and we were all usually in the field.
“Survivors? Where are they?” I asked.
She handed me a map of Chestermere and the area between the town and Calgary. Chestermere was a bedroom community a very short commute from the east side of the city, filled with nice large homes with double garages, a central lake for boating, and lots of oil executives and their trophy families. At least, before, it had been. Now?
“They were spotted by a survey plane this morning, just before noon, approaching the city from the south east. One vehicle, a white and red van with the number fifty-three painted on top. Attempts to contact them failed, though they waved at the plane when it flew overhead. They were driving towards Chestermere, and the plane was trying to warn them off.”
I found myself suddenly really not liking where this was going. “Go on…” I urged her.
“Chestermere is full of the undead,” she said quietly. “Our plane watched the van drive up to the Trans-Canada Highway and turn towards the town. We think they were planning to take the highway around the north edge of the town, but they ran over something in the snow and blew a tire. The van lost control on the icy surface and struck the central pillar of the Highway 17 bridge. The undead were close by, and several hundred converged from all directions. The pilot of the plane managed to see some survivors get out of the van and run towards the waterslide park on the east side of the town. They ran into a building there, and the undead surrounded them. Some people were apparently still trapped in the van, since a small crowd of undead remained there. The plane circled for another half hour, but nothing changed.”
I looked at my watch. It was 2:32 pm, and I looked outside at the snow blowing down from the sky. The temperature had fallen a little more as well.
“Shit.” I said it with feeling.
Well, might as well break the news to the team, I thought. Captain Lowell followed me as I walked back to the group of people unloading our vehicles. I told them what was going on, and that we were going back out again. My team, despite being tired, wanting a real shower, hot meals, and nice warm beds, started loading the equipment right back into the vehicles. Our passengers looked a little lost, not sure what to do.
“Doctor Dand, Miss Toyotomi, and Mister Jaeger,” I said, “this is Captain Lowell. She’ll see to it that you are taken care of.” She stepped forward and said hello to them, and asked them to bring their bags. Thomas Dand and Keiko picked theirs up, but Jaeger shook his head.
“I would like to go with you, if it is allowed,” he said to us.
Captain Lowell looked at me and raised an eyebrow. It was my call, after all.
“Are you sure? This will be very dangerous.”
He shrugged. “No more than anything else in this time. I would like to come.”
I looked at the others. Sanji nodded, and Darren gave a thumbs up. Amanda just shrugged. He listened to instructions, and from what I had seen was good with his rifle.
“Alright. Load up your things.” He turned and threw his bag back in the F-250, and began to help with the rest of the gear.
Captain Lowell shook her head, and said to me, “You’ll have help. We can spare a four-man squad to assist. Corporal Jacobson is in charge of them, but they’ll listen to you. They’ll be here shortly.” She took Keiko and Dand with her, and led them out of the building. Keiko looked back at us and smiled, but Dand just kept walking. I waved at her and then turned back to help with the loading.
Part Five
Snow fell in a storm of white, obscuring the world and making it pure again. Our small convoy was just outside the fence of the airport, driving through wind and cold and blowing snow onto a road that we could barely see. The weather had leapt up, building from a wall of clouds to a light snow, and now to a full on blizzard.
I sat in the drivers’ seat of the Ford F-250, Darren in the seat behind me, and Jaeger in the passenger seat. In the vehicle behind us, a Highlander with dents and scratches earned in the mountains to the west, Amanda drove and Sanji sat in the passenger seat. The Highlander was stocked with first aid supplies, blankets, food, and water. Behind them was a Jeep Liberty, and riding in that vehicle were four soldiers, heavily armed. Corporal Jacobson was their leader, and the driver. The others had been introduced to us as Janet Williams, Charles Lee, and Matt Hannigan. All carried C7A1 rifles, wore cold weather gear, and had the thousand-yard stare people assigned to combat zones tend to have. I have it, and so does my whole team, so we all understood each other right away.
We drove out into the cleared land surrounding the airport to the north east of the city, seeing only a few wandering dead. Without fail, as soon as they spotted us they started forward, but they were few and we avoided them. They were more snow covered the farther we traveled, but that did nothing to make them any prettier. To our south the ruins of the neighbourhood called Saddle Ridge made a brief appearance, mostly burned out homes, broken fences, and a few cars and trucks abandoned and left to decay. Then those too vanished into the now swirling around us, and I looked at the outside temperature display, which read -15 degrees Celsius. It dropped another degree as I watched.
Jaeger was studying the map, tracing the route we planned to take with his finger. He tapped the marking for the small town called Delacour, and looked at me.
“Has anyone been to this town? What is there?”
“It was cleared out a month ago,” I replied, “but by now wanderers from Calgary and the countryside will have come back in. Probably not too many.”
The plan was to avoid the city itself, driving east along the unfinished Country Hills Boulevard that had been under construction at the time the dead rose. From there we’d follow the country road east to Delacour, a very small town within shouting distance of the city limits, and turn south on Highway 791. That would take us to the Trans-Canada Highway just east of Chestermere, and we would head in towards where the survivors’ vehicle was last seen.
The snow thickened as we drove, and the temperature stayed at -16 as we approached Delacour. It was no more than the ruins of a few homes and small shops, and we turned south and it fell behind us without incident. The 791 was in terrible shape in places, the road having been washed out in one place by a stream that overflowed. We drove over the ice, around fallen trees and abandoned cars, and continued on. There were very few of the walking dead along this road for some reason, and we talked quietly. I suddenly had a thought, and picked up the radio.
“Amanda, a question for you,” I said.
“Go ahead,” she said a moment later, her voice full of static but recognisable.
“I was just thinking about your father.”
There was silence for a moment. He had died of injuries he sustained after we rescued him, Sanji, Amanda and her boyfriend Adam, and several others from Prince George. He hadn’t reanimated.
“What about him?” She sounded a little anxious, or maybe defensive.
“Your last name is Martin,” I said.
“Yeah. So what?”
“His name was Marty. Does that make him Marty Martin?”
When she came back on I could hear her laughing. “His name was Dan Martin, but he always told everyone
to call him Marty.”
“Okay. Why didn’t I know that?”
“Beats the hell out of me, Brian.”
* * *
Sooner than I expected we came upon the sign informing us that the Trans-Canada Highway was a mere 2 kilometers ahead. We saw it soon thereafter, and slowed even more. Turning west, we found our path nearly blocked by a wide variety of abandoned cars, minivans, and trucks. They occupied the lanes and ditches going east and west, now only snowy white lumps over rusting chassis. The leftmost lane was mostly clear, and we started onto that. Passing the vehicles we could see the occasional skeletal remains of people unfortunate to have died here. I cautiously accelerated, very aware that we had only a few hours of daylight left.
Ahead of us, a few car lengths away, a zombie stepped directly into our path. I slowed and turned slightly left, hoping to go around it on the shoulder between the east and west lanes. It stepped forward again and we hit it on the passenger side. It bounced away and fell over, and was just climbing up again when the third vehicle in our little convoy, the Jeep with the soldiers in it, passed it by. It was soon lost in the blizzard.
The snow was falling even harder when we passed a highway sign that read ‘Chestermere 2km, Calgary City Center 21km’. The road ahead curved gently northwards, and we slowed again to follow it. I began to make out the very dim outline of the bridge ahead of us, more a shadow in the blizzard than a defined shape. Suddenly there was motion ahead, a crowd of figures surrounding a van. I braked and stopped, the other vehicles doing the same behind us. We looked ahead and took in the scene.
The van was nose-first into the central support pillar of the bridge, surrounded by around thirty of the walking dead. They were pounding at the sides, pulling at the doors, and pushing at the windows. All the doors were still shut, so I hoped that whoever was inside was still alive and not freezing to death.
