by Gareth Wood
I picked up the radio.
“Here’s the plan,” I said, “We form a firing line in front of the truck. Sanji and Jaeger, watch our asses. Everyone else in the line. Got it?”
“Understood,” said Jaeger.
“Got it,” said Corporal Jacobson.
The undead near the back of the van were just starting to notice us, and I pulled a toque over my head and opened the door to get out, grabbing my C7A1 from Darren. I looped the strap over my shoulder and raised the barrel as we all stepped into position, Sanji to my left, and Amanda and Darren to my right, and then the soldiers to the right of them. Jaeger was on the other side, watching the other direction. The seven nearest undead, three women and four men, were coming towards us now, and had to cross forty meters of debris-littered highway. A few more behind them noticed, and were soon staggering across the road towards us as well. That made eleven. As soon as the shooting started they’d all be on us. We had to make this fast.
“Hello in the van!” I yelled. “Anyone alive in there, keep your head down!”
I took a breath, and aimed. We waited for them to come a little bit closer, and then the boom of the C7’s started, and the first three undead fell. The twenty or so zombies around the van came towards us in a wave then. I aimed and fired, aimed and fired, the rifle kicking at my shoulder. I found another target and fired again. Seven of us firing together were very effective, and the entire group of walking corpses was destroyed before they covered half the distance towards us. We got into a rhythm, and the last zombie, a balding man in his fifties at least, chest bare and covered in frozen gore, went down with three bullets striking him at the same time. He fell backwards heavily, and silence reigned again.
I looked around. We all did, taking careful note of the dozen or so approaching dead things coming through the snow, still far enough away to not be dangerous.
“Corporal, you and your squad watch for more of them coming. Darren, come with me, and Amanda watch our backs.” I stepped forward amid the grunts and nods, and started towards the van. We stepped carefully over the bodies, snow already covering them. The back door of the van was now peppered with bullet holes, and one back window had shattered. Just as I reached the van and touched the rear door, Corporal Jacobson called.
“Sir! You should hurry now!”
Several shots followed, and I turned back to the door. I stepped up on the rear bumper and looked into the shattered window. There was a broken grill covering the window, pushed away in a few places, but not enough to get inside. Upset crates of supplies and frozen bottles of water littered the back, along with trash and an unmoving body. From where I stood I couldn’t reach him, but I could reach the lock on the inside, something the undead would never be able to figure out. The figure wore a green parka and snow pants, and I could see a pool of red blood on the floor of the van near the figure’s head.
“Hey!” I called, “Are you alive?”
There was no response, so I reached into the van and fumbled for the lock. It clicked, and I stepped out and pulled the door open. It creaked, then groaned, and finally came open. The figure twitched, and just then Darren raised his rifle and fired one shot westwards. He kept the rifle raised, and Amanda came to stand beside him, also aiming in the same direction.
“Make it fast, Brian,” she said, her voice tight.
I stepped up into the van and tugged on the foot of the figure. It was a woman, I saw now, when she turned her head to face me. She blinked at me and winced, and raised her hand to her face, where her nose was swollen and bruised. Broken, I thought.
“Can you move?” I asked her. She nodded and sat up, then turned away and threw up a thin yellow fluid. She coughed a few times, and wiped her mouth.
“We have to go, right now,” I told her. I reached out and took her gloved hand, and pulled her from the van. She stood up, swayed, and I took her arm to steady her. She was dark haired, nearly as tall as I was, and looked like hell. She looked around.
“Who are you?” she asked. “Where are David and Caroline?”
“You’re the only one we’ve seen. Our airplane saw some people run up the hill towards that building there,” I pointed up the hill east of the highway, “but we haven’t looked there yet.”
The gunfire suddenly became constant, and I looked back to see our military escort moving back towards us from farther up the road. They were being slowly pursued by dozens of the walking dead. Undeterred by the cold, they came in search of prey. Our gunfire was drawing them though the blizzard from the town to our west.
I started helping the woman towards the F-250, and called for the Corporal to get his squad back to the Jeep. Amanda and Darren walked with us, and we got into our vehicles as fast as we could, as the undead closed in from almost all sides. I started the engine and gunned the vehicle forward, around the van and under the bridge on the only clear space, the soft shoulder between lanes. I glanced back and saw the other two vehicles following, and I turned right onto the ramp that looped up to the roadway leading across the top of the bridge. Amanda attended to our guest, using a cloth to wipe the blood from her face, and Darren collected the guns to reload them.
“I’m Brian,” I told our guest. “This is Darren, and that’s Amanda. I’ll introduce you to the army guys and our other two team members later.” The F-250 swerved a little on some ice, and I turned it back onto the road as we neared the top of the ramp.
“I’m Connie,” she said, holding the cloth to her nose gingerly. She pulled her hood back and looked at each of us. “Thanks for saving me. Where did you come from?”
“Calgary,” I said,” we have a base at the airport.”
At the top of the ramp was a merge lane leading west towards the heart of Chestermere. I turned east, bumped over the divider, and drove around wrecks and debris towards the turnoff to the waterslide parking lot. I could just make out the building through the falling snow, off to our right. A small crowd was gathered outside the main doors. That was a good sign, sort of. It meant there might still be people alive inside. We turned into the nearly empty parking lot and towards the main structure, a long single floor building showing signs of long-term abandonment. Rusting metal and peeling paint were the most obvious.
We stopped fifty meters from the front doors. Jaeger and Sanji pulled up to our right, and the Jeep pulled up to our left.
I turned to address Connie before I stepped out. “Your friends might have survived in there. All the activity by the doors is a good sign. You said their names earlier, David and Carol, right?”
“Caroline, my sister. Please help them,” she said around the cloth bandage. There was colour in her face now, and I could see where frostbite had marked her cheeks. She was shivering, though whether it was from cold or shock I had no way of knowing.
“Stay here, it’s warmer in the truck.” I took my reloaded C7 and stepped out after my team.
Sanji had everyone in place already. I joined the firing line and saw that the group of undead had noticed us and were coming towards us. I heard Williams mutter under her breath as the stench wafted over us; it was gag-worthy even at sixteen degrees below freezing. We aimed, and when they got to twenty meters we opened fire. There were eleven, and they were killed quickly, falling into a line.
Jacobson said, “The noise will bring lots more of them.” I agreed, thinking we’d probably have five or six minutes before the ones on the highway climbed the hill and covered the few hundred meters of open space. We had to be very quick.
“Sanji and Amanda,” I said, “inside with me. Darren and Nathan, stay at the doorway in case we need you. Corporal, you and your men stay out here and keep a lookout. Take good care of our guest as well.”
We started for the main doors, and I slung my C7 and drew the Browning. I wanted a small weapon for inside. The C7 is great outside, but far too cumbersome inside a building.
“What are their names?” Sanji asked, he also switching to his Browning.
“David, and Caroline
,” I said. “That’s Connie in our truck.”
I led the way over the bodies to the main doors; they had been broken open. Furniture had been hastily thrown into a barricade, but it hadn’t worked. There were two zombies inside, lurching towards us and clambering at the pile of debris. Amanda shot one, and Sanji the other. They fell back, and we could hear a more distant racket from inside somewhere, a thumping and cracking sound.
Sanji and I pushed a table aside, pulled out a chair and a lamp, and stepped inside. It was dark, but enough light came in the doors and a few high windows to see the carnage. Four more decomposing and now frozen corpses lay on the floor. Each had been shot in the head, but not by us. The room was a gate, with a cashier’s desk and a turnstile to let people in to change rooms and access to the waterslides.
“Look here,” Amanda said, pointing at something on the floor. I walked over to look at a small pool of blood in the disturbed dust, and a handgun. The gun was an empty revolver, lying beside a corpse. The blood was frozen, but looked fresh, and I shone a flashlight at the corpse’s face. There was gore on its lips, and a bullet hole between its eyes. Damn, one of the survivors was wounded.
“There is a blood trail here,” Sanji said, shining his own light on the ground. It led towards a pair of doors at the back of the room. There was a sign that said ‘Change Areas’ beside the door. We followed the blood and opened the doors, and the sound increased from a distant thumping to a more immediate pounding. A short and very dark hallway led to another set of double doors, and I led the way, gun raised and ready.
A bloody handprint on the doors showed us where those who had come before had gone, as well as the footprints through the thick dust.
“Careful,” I said, and we stopped. Sanji stepped forward to open the left side door, placing one gloved hand on the crash bar. He took a breath and then pushed the door open, raising his gun at the same time. I stepped forward to aim into the dim space beyond. The thumping sounds grew louder, and I saw why. Inside a larger room, five of the undead were trying to push their way past a metal door on the far side. Someone or something on the other side was holding them off, and I heard a voice cry out in anger or frustration. This room was a lobby of sorts. There was a door to the walkway leading to the top of the water slides, and more doors that led to change rooms and lockers. Chairs lined the walls, and the light came from floor to ceiling windows on two walls.
The nearest of the undead, about ten feet away, had turned at the sound of the door being pushed open by Sanji and I aimed at the thing, a teenaged girl with the skin peeling from the right side of her face, and shot her twice in the forehead. As she fell I stepped to the right to make room for the others, and Amanda came through firing. The boom of our three guns was deafening, and it was nearly impossible to miss at this range. Within moments the last of the five walking dead was falling to the floor, and silence reigned.
I took a few steps towards the door, carefully watching the bodies. “Hello?” I called.
The door flew open and I was staring at the face of a young black man. He hadn’t shaved in weeks, from the look of him, and he had a wild look in his eyes. He held a gore covered hammer in his left hand.
“David?” I asked. “Are you okay?”
At the sound of his name his eyes lost some of their wildness, and he lowered the hammer, looking at me suspiciously.
“How-how do you know my name?” His voice was rough and he shivered in the cold. I saw he was wearing a fleece sweater, but that wasn’t enough in this cold.
“We rescued Connie from the van,” I told him. “She told us your names. Is Caroline with you?”
“Connie’s alive?” I heard a distinctly female but very tired voice ask from the darkness behind David. “We thought she was dead!”
“She’s fine. Broken nose and she was really cold, but fine otherwise. Can I come in?”
David nodded, and stepped aside. I holstered my Browning, and shone my flashlight around. The room was a dark, windowless storage room for towels and janitors supplies, about ten feet long and five feet wide. This was the only door. I looked at the lock, and saw it was broken. A poor choice for a hideout, but we had arrived in time to save at least one of them.
“My name is Brian. I’m a Salvage Team leader from Cold Lake. We’re here to rescue you. This is Sanji and Amanda.”
I found Caroline at the back of the room, sitting on the floor, holding a towel over her right hand. She looked a lot like Connie, I thought. The fabric of the towel was stained a bright red. My stomach tightened, remembering the empty gun and pool of fresh blood out front.
“What happened there?” I asked. She grimaced, in obvious pain, and showed me.
“Lost a fuckin’ finger,” she said. “One of those things out there bit it off.”
It had been taken off just at the second knuckle. It wasn’t bleeding a lot, but must have hurt like hell. It was also going to kill her within a day and reanimate her corpse, and I shook my head sadly. At least we’d saved two of them.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “We have euthanasia kits in our vehicles. They’re painless, and I promise you won’t feel a thing.”
She jerked away from me like I was going to bite her myself, trying to back away like a caged animal.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?!” she yelled. “It’s just a finger, and you want to kill me?” She wrapped her hand again in the towel, and glared at me. I felt like a real asshole, but there was no real hope for her now that she’d been bitten. The sooner she accepted that the better. I put my empty hands up in front of me, and tried to speak calmly. I also hoped David was being watched behind me. I didn’t want to get hit with that hammer.
“I’m really sorry, but you’ve been bitten. There is nothing we can do. You’ve got a day at most, and then you’ll die and rise as one of them. It’s nothing but pain and sickness all the way to the end. The euthanasia kit just makes you go to sleep, and stops your heart. You won’t feel anything.”
She looked at me like I was an insane monster, and she would have bolted if there was anywhere to go at all. Then she surprised me. She started to take off her coat, still glaring at me. She rolled up her right sleeve, goose bumps forming all over her exposed flesh. There was no concealing the horrible scar on her forearm. It was a bite mark, and it was healed.
“Look at this!” she hissed, “I’m alive. I’ve been bitten before, and I’m alive! This,” she waved her wounded hand at me, “won’t kill me. So fuck off!”
It was healed.
Holy shit!
* * *
On the 16th of November I went to see Major Couper, who had flown down yesterday. We were enjoying the warmth, the hot showers and hot food, as well as the warm beds I and the rest of my team had been assigned. Returning to the airport had been fairly uneventful, but had taken a long time in the dark and snow. I had escorted Caroline directly to the medical team, who had taken one look at her and then called the commanding officer. After hasty explanations and a quick look of his own at our new star patient, a high priority call had gone out to Cold Lake, and days later the Major and a small team of biologists and medical doctors had flown down with the semi-regular supply run.
Caroline had indeed survived the loss of her finger. She had a serious infection and some major hostility, but nothing that would kill her. She’d been in medical supervision since arriving, and the doctors had run probably a thousand tests on her, but I hadn’t heard what the results were. Major Couper had called me to come see him, and I hoped he had something to say about what they had found. I met him in a small office in the administrative section of the airport, one with a good view of the empty snowy runways and zombie-infested residential areas beyond the carefully patrolled fences. It was early evening, and the sun was about to set beyond the dark and ruined houses and shops. The Major looked up as I entered, and I shook his hand.
“Good to see you, Brian,” he said, and waved me at a chair across from his desk. I sat down and said that it was
good to see him too. He looked older, but there was something new in his eyes.
His hands fell onto the small stack of papers on the desk, and he smiled at me.
“You are not going to like what I have to ask you,” he said. He was right. I seldom liked the things he asked me to do.
“What is it?”
He changed direction. “Do you know what this is?” He indicated the papers, and then answered the question himself. “It’s the medical report on Caroline Spencer. The medics have been going nuts over her for a while now, and there’s serious talk of taking her up to Cold Lake and letting the lab there have a go for a while.”
“What did they find out?” I asked, genuinely interested.
“There’s a lot of technical babble in here,” he said, thumping the paper stack with a finger, “but it boils down to she has a natural immunity to whatever it is that kills people who get bitten by the undead. Her blood has something in it, what the heck that is I don’t know, but the medics keep talking about prions and DNA, and one of them was talking about quantum mechanics and the Uncertainty Principle.”
This was all over my head. I waited for him to go on. He stood up and leaned against the window behind his desk, and I crossed my feet under the chair.
“There’s some equipment we need to really dig into this, and some software to run on one of the computers back in Cold Lake. It’s a pretty rare program, only available in some very specific biology labs. The labs near Vegreville have been checked already, and they didn’t have what we need.”
“I had no idea there were biology labs near Vegreville,” I said.
“They worked on genetic engineering of crops, or some shit like that. Doesn’t matter, they didn’t have the software. It’s called Mat Gen P. R. P. two point one, and I know where there should be a copy. That’s the part you won’t like.”
“Someplace heavily infested, would be my guess. Am I right?”
