Surviving The Dead | Book 9 | War Without End

by Cook, James N.

  “What happens if I do?”

  “You’ll get the answers you’re looking for, and a few more you’re not. You won’t like what you find, I can promise you that. But you’ll also get a chance to make a real difference in the world.”

  And with that, Caleb turned and walked home.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  Eric,

  Undisclosed Location, Rocky Mountains

  It was a profound relief when Caleb pulled the black hood from my head. It was also a profound relief to be on the ground and not flying through turbulent mountain air in a Blackhawk that had seen its best days over a decade ago.

  The port side door opened and a group of soldiers in heavy winter gear, armed with carbines, stood waiting. They wore goggles to shield their eyes from the wind and balaclavas over their mouths. I pulled my scarf up and rolled my knit cap down over my ears.

  “Let’s go,” one of the soldiers said. He wore no rank insignia, none of them did, but from the tone, I got the impression he was in charge.

  When I stepped down, the snow was ankle deep and loose as baby powder. The wind howled and the exposed skin around my eyes immediately began to ache. I pushed my scarf up over my nose and followed the soldiers toward a rocky outcropping. I tried looking around along the way, but between the wind and the blinding snow, there was not much to see.

  We stopped in front of a granite wall on a flat shelf of mountain just big enough to land a helicopter and hold maybe a dozen people. The soldier in charge produced a strange looking stick of metal and inserted it between a cleft in two rocks. There was a hiss of escaping air and a twelve-foot-high section of the granite wall opened inward.

  For a few seconds, all I could do was stare. The door was so well hidden, so carefully integrated into the lines of rocks, I never would have known it was there. But then again, I guess that was the point. I followed the soldiers inside and stood shivering while the doors shut behind us.

  “Impressive, ain’t it?” Caleb said beside me. He pulled down the furry hood of his parka and removed his goggles.

  “Yeah, no shit.”

  I took off my knit cap and pulled down my scarf. I was standing in a metal room with dull lighting that made the walls look amber colored. There were cameras up high in the corners and the floor looked like diamond plate aluminum. Another large door stood at the end of a short corridor. The soldier in charge walked over to it and inserted the key into a socket. A turn of the wrist, and a panel slid open. The soldier took off his goggles and one glove. I watched him give his thumbprint and submit to a retinal scan. A few seconds later, the inner doors opened.

  I was herded into another, larger room, this one with bare rock walls, a high granite ceiling, exposed conduit and wiring, and bright bulbs hanging from fixtures anchored to the mountain itself. The ceiling was over twenty feet high, and in the middle of everything, a pair of golf carts sat on a smooth track of concrete about fifteen feet wide. The track sloped off to more exposed rock on either side and disappeared around a bend over a hundred yards away. Taking it all in, I was in awe of the sheer scale of the place and the tremendous amount of work that must have gone into creating it.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “Pre-Outbreak construction.”

  Caleb grinned. “You think?”

  He walked over to one of the golf carts, sat down in the driver’s seat, and turned a key. There was no rumble of motor, only a dull electric click.

  “Well?” he said, looking over his shoulder. “You want a ride, or you gonna walk?”

  I went over to the golf cart and sat down next to him.

  “Where’s General Jacobs? I thought he was supposed to be here. And what the hell is this place?”

  The grin faded as he engaged the shifter. “The general’s waiting for us. As for what this place is, you’ll see soon enough.”

  I glanced backward and saw the soldiers were gone. No footsteps, no doors opening, no clank and rattle of kit and weapons. Just gone. I blinked at the wall a few times and turned back around.

  We rode for what felt like an hour but was probably much less. We encountered no one else along the way. The track was smooth, hardly a bump to jostle us, winding along through tunnels marked with signs bearing designations I did not comprehend. Everything was labeled with an alphanumeric system I had never seen before. There were intersections and Y-splits, all of which Caleb navigated without slowing down. And all of it, every single inch, looked exactly the same.

  I had a brief, mad instant where I wondered what would happen if Caleb just turned, booted me off the cart, and drove off. A man could wander through this place for an eternity and not find his way back. I imagined slowly going insane as exhaustion and dehydration set in and shoved the thought aside.

  We went up a few times and then back down again, straight through a few intersections, and then down, down, down, until finally we came around a corner and into a wide parking area. There were small, lined-off spots along each wall occupied by a few golf carts and a small van with a wheelchair lift. Another large steel door stood at the end.

  “This is the place,” Caleb said. He parked the golf cart, shut it off, and left the key in the ignition.

  I stood up and looked around. The air was cold, and my nose was beginning to go numb.

  “How deep inside the mountain are we?”

  Caleb shook his head. “Not sure, honestly. This place is a maze. It’s designed to be disorienting for anyone who gets in here without permission. You could walk around for a long time and not find another living soul. Ain’t a good place to get lost.”

  “Yeah, I got that impression.”

  Caleb walked over to the door. The panel was already open on this one, no strange-looking key on a stick necessary. He did, however, have to scan his thumbprint and retinas. There was a hiss of air, and the door opened. The two of us walked into another vestibule much like the first one I had entered coming in from outside. Caleb repeated the access ritual after the door closed behind us and another one opened in front.

  “When one door closes…” I muttered.

  “Pretty sure whoever coined that phrase,” Caleb said, “this ain’t what they had in mind.”

  “Alexander Graham Bell.”

  He turned, eyebrows drawn. “What?”

  “The quote. Alexander Graham Bell said it. ‘When one door closes, another opens. But we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, we do not see the one opened for us’.”

  Caleb looked at the door behind and got a strange look on his face. “You know, he might have been onto something.”

  “How so?”

  “There’s been…several parts to my life,” he said quietly. “Chapters, you might say. Times when I could say there was me before this thing happened, and me after, and they ain’t the same man. And every step farther along the way I go, I can’t help but look back at the things I’ve left behind and wonder what might have been.”

  He was silent another moment, then turned and walked resolutely through the door ahead.

  “Come on. People are waiting for us.”

  *****

  I was not sure what to expect, but what I found was definitely not it.

  The first surprise was Gabriel. I saw him standing next to a man in military dress uniform sitting in a wheelchair. After a moment, I realized the gaunt, diminished soldier was General Jacobs.

  I stopped walking and stared for a few seconds. Jacobs looked to have aged twenty years, although it had been much less than that since I last saw him. His salt and pepper hair had turned solid gray and lay on his pale scalp in lank whisps. His eyes were sunken and stared out from under a shadowed brow. The eyes were focused on me and, despite Jacobs’s wizened appearance, had lost none of their heated intensity.

  “Yeah, I know” he rasped, his voice like sandpaper on metal. “I look like shit. Come on over, kid.”

  My paralysis broke and I walked closer.

  The second surprise I noted was the fact I was in an
observation area. There was a control panel on my right with a bespectacled man about my age sitting behind it. He smiled politely when I entered and gave a little wave. On my left, there was a big, partitioned glass wall with a metal barrier covering whatever lay beyond. The walls and ceiling were smooth granite and had the same exposed wiring and ductwork I had seen elsewhere. A thick bundle of wires ran from the control panel to the wall under the partitioned glass. A yellow plastic cord protector covered with red arrows and block-letter writing admonished me to watch my step.

  “I’m Doctor Higgins,” the young man behind the control panel said. “You must be Mr. Riordan.”

  He stood up and walked over to greet me, hand outstretched. I ignored him, walked over to Gabriel, and stopped in front of him.

  “Should I be surprised to see you here?” I asked.

  “No more surprised than I am to see you,” he said, looking pointedly at General Jacobs.

  The old soldier gave a thin smile, his face wrinkling from the effort. “Glad you could make it.”

  “Good to see you’re still kicking around, Phil,” I said.

  “You know what they say. Old soldiers never die, they just fade away. Quite literally, in my case.”

  “Yeah, I heard about that. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”

  He flapped the comment aside with a trembling hand. “Ah. We all gotta die of something. At least I’m still me and not some fucking ghoul.”

  “Silver lining.”

  Jacobs gestured at Caleb. “Get behind this damn thing, will ya?”

  Caleb walked over, took the handles of the wheelchair and positioned the general next to the control panel.

  “Listen fellas,” Jacobs said. “I brought you here because I want to show you something.”

  Gabe and I stepped closer.

  “I thought we were here because you need our help,” I said.

  “Yeah, that too. But you need to see this first. You need to understand what’s at stake.”

  Jacobs reached out to the control panel and flipped a switch. I heard the thrum of electricity and felt a vibration through the floor.

  “There’s not much I can say to prepare you for what you’re about to see,” Jacobs said. “Sometimes words just fail.”

  The young technician resumed his seat and typed something into a keyboard. To my right, the wall beyond the viewing window began to part in the middle, the two halves sliding left and right on hidden rollers. There was another click, and the overhead lights went out. The only illumination in the room came from a bank of lights around the edge of the viewing window. Gabe and I glanced at each other, shrugged, and walked closer. Caleb pushed Jacobs over to join us.

  “What are we looking at?” I asked.

  “Just watch,” Jacobs said.

  I glanced at him irritably. He ignored me, eyes fixed on the picture emerging as the walls slid away.

  Looking again, I saw a cement room—walls, ceiling, and floor all bare—with a lattice of heavy steel bars that allowed us a view into the confines. It was quickly obvious I was looking at a prison cell, only this one could have served as solitary confinement for a Tyrannosaurus. The cell stood in the middle of a chamber carved out of the mountain’s guts with a column of concrete connecting it to the ceiling.

  I heard a bell ring from somewhere. A door opened at the far end of the cell followed by a panel opening in the ceiling. A few seconds later, a slab of raw, bloody meat dropped down to the floor. The sound of it was strangely tinny, and, after looking around, I realized I was hearing everything through hidden speakers mounted at the corners of the window.

  For a few seconds, nothing happened. Then, through the speakers, I heard a low snuffling sound, like that of some massive animal sniffing the ground. Then came a low rumbling and, just at the bottom of my range of hearing, a clatter like bones shaking together in a bag. Next was a clicking sound like a dog with too-long nails on a tile floor.

  And then I saw it.

  The damn thing must have been twenty feet from nose to tail. The tail made up more than half its length and ended in a long, sharp barb. And when I say barb, I mean the kind with a hook at the end designed to harpoon things and keep hold of them. The legs were short and eerily humanoid, the feet elongated and stretched so that the creature walked on its toes only. The toes had huge claws that looked as if they could disembowel a man with a single swipe. The knees of the hind legs were hinged backward, and the two front legs looked way too much like human arms. After walking through the door on all fours, it reared up on its hind legs and stood like a man.

  Except it was definitely, without question, not a man.

  The face looked like the Draugr I had seen, only instead of having an overbite and a long bottom jaw, it had a snout like an alligator or a moray eel. The eyes were large and forward swept, the retinas blood red and the irises yellow with black, slitted pupils. There was a crest of bony spikes on its head from the bridge of its nose to the base of its neck. The arms were large and horrifically muscular, the fingers ending in claws, the chest broad and striated like bundles of steel cable. But for all its fearsome appearance, the thing I found most disturbing was its skin.

  When I was a kid, my parents took me to a borderline illegal petting zoo outside my hometown. One of the animals I encountered there was a baby Asian elephant. Where the owners got it, and whether it was lawful to have the thing, I have no idea. What I do know is when I petted it, I was amazed at how dense and tough its skin was. The hide must have been several inches thick and sturdy enough to stop a small caliber bullet. In retrospect, my assessment was not far off the mark.

  When I looked at the Draugr’s skin, I was again reminded of the elephant’s thick, armor-like hide. Except this thing’s skin did not look armor-like. It looked like armor, plain and simple. Scale armor, to be specific. Hard, bony, overlapping rows spread over heavy muscles as if connected by a network of strong, stretchy fiber. The scales moved and rippled as the Draugr shifted, and much to my sinking dread, I saw the thickest, hardest-looking scales were around the creature’s skull and spinal cord.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Gabe muttered.

  “That,” Jacobs said, pointing, “is Anthony Jones, formerly of Salt Lake City, Utah.”

  Gabe and I both turned to him.

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  He produced a photograph from inside his uniform jacket. Gabe took it, looked at it, and passed it on to me. The man in the picture was in his thirties, a little portly, bespectacled, balding, and had the open, honest expression of a man who seen minimal hardship in his life. There had been millions just like him before the Outbreak, and most of them were decent enough people. They worked, raised families, complained about their wives, bragged about their kids, bemoaned their taxes, played fantasy football, and cooked burgers on the grill. I knew the kind exactly. My father had been one of them.

  “He was a software engineer before the Outbreak,” Jacobs said. “He was married with a daughter. Both died the first year after Atlanta. Mr. Jones here managed to reach the Wichita Safe Zone, then got recruited by the Phoenix Initiative.”

  I looked back through the window. The creature had moved over to the slab of meat, sat down on its haunches, and begun to eat. Its clawed hands kept a firm grip on the bloody flesh as its rows of teeth tore through it like a chainsaw through paper.

  “What happened to him?” I asked.

  “He was en route to Kentucky when his caravan ran afoul of a big damn horde. They were navigating a mountain pass under low visibility and got caught with their pants down. Mr. Jones escaped, but got bit in the fighting. A few others survived and managed to salvage the communications equipment. A little while later, they found Jones half dead and called for rescue.”

  “Rescue?” Gabe said. “Why didn’t they just put him down?”

  “They were under orders not to kill any members of the team, even if they got infected.”

  A blink. “Why the hell not?”

  “Be
cause, at the time, there was hope for a treatment that could reverse the effects of reanimation. We wanted to keep members of the Initiative alive, so to speak, in case the research panned out. Sadly, it did not.”

  I opened my mouth to ask about a hundred questions, but Jacobs held up a forestalling hand.

  “We’re not here to talk about that,” he said. “The treatment turned out to be a bust. There’s no cure for the infection, and there never will be. After the eggheads figured that out, they turned Jonesy here over to Doctor Higgins.”

  The man who had been sitting behind the console approached us. Gabe and I turned to look at him. He was close to my height, lean, pale, clean-cut, and had the jaded eyes of a much older man. His white coat was pressed and starched, and he wore a button-down Oxford and black slacks beneath. There was even polish on his shoes. I had seen a lot of guys like him over the years, people who just could not let go of their grooming and dressing habits from before the Outbreak, as if by holding on to such things they could retain some piece of the life they used to have. People like that always made me feel sad, like watching an old man eating a meal by himself.

  “He hasn’t always been like this,” Higgins said, pointing. He was peering through the window with a drawn expression. “When he came here, he was a garden-variety wobbler.”

  I looked at the Draugr, and then back at Higgins. “What the hell did you do to him?”

  A shrug. “I fed him.”

  Silence.

  “That’s it?” Gabe said. “You just fed him?”

  Higgins nodded. “That’s it. For three years, all I’ve done is feed him a steady diet of whatever meat the supply folks could bring in. It’s a lot more protein than most revenants get, so the transformation you’re seeing here is highly accelerated. But sooner or later, they’re all going to look like that.”

  For a long moment, I couldn’t speak. I stared at Higgins open-mouthed and then looked back at the creature.