by Mark Clodi
"Thanks!"
"Well you weren't moving!"
"I think I could have gotten him. Captured him, I mean, and controlled him."
Chuck's hand rose, then rose above his head. His face contorted, twisting together around his mouth.
"What Chuck?" Red asked.
"She. Is in. My head."
Worriedly Jimbo, stood and looked around at the others, "Red, we don't have any way to keep her out of these guys."
"They are stronger and the power seems to weaken with distance. I bet Chuck fights her off."
The group watched as Chuck struggled for a few minutes, then shrugged and said, "I can't keep her out. You'll have to kill me if you don't want her knowing where we are going."
"We?" Veronica asked pointedly.
"What does she want?" asked Red with a sigh.
"She is sending Hugh back to you, she says it's free of charge. She wants your help, but if she can't have it, she'll still do the right thing."
"Damn it." Red said, wondering if this was some sort of mind game Aubrey was playing or if she was sincere. He didn't really know much about the woman. They had seen each other a few times in Florida before heading out, but he hadn't known her before she died.
"She says it doesn't have to be you. Someone else can tell her, if she can convince them." Chuck said and then wryly added, "She knows I don't have the ability."
Jimbo was standing near Chuck, staring intently at the man, as if seeing things going on inside his head.
"Jimbo, stop staring." Veronica said.
Turning around Jimbo asked Red, "So you don't trust her?"
"I don't know her. The only thing I know is she was drawing all these zombies to her. I don't like that." Red answered.
"She says, she had no choice, her orders were clear and there was nothing she could do about them."
Nodding Red said, "Yeah, I understand that. That is why I am reluctant to help, but not saying 'no' outright. What has changed?"
"A building fell on her. Sentry is aware she is immobile for the time being and didn't mention anything about not learning how to block him out. He left her a loop hole in her orders. He said to take care of herself, then contact him."
Red smiled. "So fucking smart and yet, such an idiot."
"No, he is just very, very busy right now. This is going on all over the world and he is coordinating it."
A chill went up Red's spine; If Sentry is coordinating this all over the world then that means....
"He can't be doing this world wide!" Veronica sputtered out. "That would...I mean his reach would be...well, unstoppable!"
"Maybe." Red admitted.
"But how?" Jimbo asked. "He can't be that powerful."
"He never stopped eating." Red said.
"Never?"
"No, Jimbo."
"So do I help her or not?"
Why is he looking at me to make this decision? Why are they all looking to me? I just want out... Instead of voicing his doubts he shrugged his shoulders and said, "I just don't know. Can you get into her head from here to see if she is lying?"
Jimbo shook his head, "I have a strange ability, but I am not at your level...or hers. I don't have the range."
"But you could teach her without being there."
"It would be more difficult." Jimbo admitted.
"I'm not going anywhere anytime soon." Aubrey said through Chuck.
"Do you want to show her?"
Jimbo nodded, "I'll show her."
"Jimbo!" Veronica said in disgust.
"Fine. Do it. She can't be worse than Sentry is." Looking back at Chuck Red asked, "So will you keep using Chuck?"
"No, I'll send someone with Hugh, someone weaker."
"Alright, we'll wait here. When you and Hugh arrive we'll find a place to hide out for a little while until you think you have what you need."
Chuck's head nodded agreement and after a moment the rigidity left his body. Sagging he said, "That sucked. I don't suppose you could tell me how to keep her out?"
Red stared at the group, "There might be a problem with that. We'll see."
This brought a sharp look from Jimbo and Veronica, but they said nothing.
Chapter 6 - Katie
"In the desert I saw a creature, naked, bestial..." ~Stephen Crane
The noise was getting worse. It couldn't be shut out anymore and it was driving her crazy. Slowly she made her way through the building. 'How did I get here?' she wondered, ahead she saw a zombie shamble into view, not a smart one, a slow moving, half demolished piece of a man that had suffered as she had when the building came down around her. 'Katie, my name is Katie.' She held onto that thought as she ducked into yet another office inside the crumpled building. The ringing in her ears had subsided to a low whine. Looking around the office she thought, 'Good, this one isn't open to the air at least.'
The last office she had taken shelter in was missing the back wall, she had been forced to stay in it for almost a day, waiting for the zombies wandering the building to go away. This particular office was very large, but still had the look of being for one person, there was another door out of it too. Katie pushed a well-designed leather chair over in front of the door she had come through and then hastily moved to the other door to leave.
'A fucking bathroom?' she stared in dismay at the shower, toilet and sink that the door revealed. The windows of the office allowed in enough light that she could see her reflection in the mirror. She approached it slowly, warily, like a wild animal approaches food held out for them in a human's hand. 'I am a mess.'
Her reflection was not kind to her; she was coated in grime and blood. The cuts on her head had bled down upon the rest of her body and then become a sticky residue to which the dust of the exploding buildings had adhered to willingly. It looked, and felt, like parts of her body were coated in a quarter inch of the bloody grime. She was naked. That disturbed her.
She didn't remember anything after being picked up by the zombie on the top of the building, just the sound of the first explosion hitting and then....nothing. Katie woke up inside an office, the door was locked and barricaded from the inside and she regained consciousness lying on the thin office building carpet under a desk. Stark naked, no water, no food, no weapons. Even her army boots were missing, whatever had blown those off of her had to have gone off quite close, yet for the most part her injuries were superficial. Something was missing though. Some sort of gap in her memory, she seemed to recall bits and pieces of it when she slept. Firing at the zombies that had come out of the Art Institute, she remembered killing them, then the bombs fell and....'What?' Just fragments, little puzzle pieces of seemingly different images all mixed up and thrown into one box.
Shaking her head Katie stepped forward and closed the valve on the sink, then turned the water on. Water drained from the pipe and pooled in the sink basin. There were actual towels here, hand towels, not paper towels and she dipped one into the water and used it to started cleaning off her face. The taste of blood in her mouth was strong and when she stuck out her tongue she saw deep gashes from where she had bitten it. 'Lucky I didn't gnaw it off in the confusion.'
The water cut off when the sink was about halfway full, but she thought that would be more than enough to get the outer layer of grime off. Katie worked for about half an hour, until the water was too much like mud to do any more cleaning, then stared in the mirror at what she saw.
'Skinny little bitch. No broken bones, no major cuts, just a few bruises and my half bitten off tongue. Pretty goddamned good for having a building drop on top of you.' Of course there was all the dust she was breathing in, that couldn't be good for her lungs. The cuts on her head appeared superficial as well, they were not bleeding anymore. The blood had coagulated enough with the dust to form a kind of cement that stopped the bleeding. Rummaging around beneath the sink she came up with an unexpected surprise, there was a man's duffel bag there, with shorts, a t-shirt and running shoes. 'It's always a dude. The corner office ne
ver belongs to a woman.'
The shorts were too loose, the shirt hung down to her knees and the shoes reminded her of the circus she and Randy had gone to on one of their unofficial dates. Randy. Katie leaned backwards, her bare ass pressing the thin material of the cotton t-shirt against the porcelain sink. 'Randy is dead.'
She couldn't cry. She had no tears left in her. It was the zombies that did this, the stupid, evil zombies that were the reason their lives had all come crashing down in only three weeks' time. 'I'll kill them all.'
It was a foolish notion, but for some reason it gave her great satisfaction thinking about it. 'Every fucking zombie that gets in my way. I need a gun.'
First things first, she set about tying the clown shoes to her feet, too big or not they would protect her from the broken glass and the sharp pieces of concrete and metal that littered the broken building.
Moving back into the main office Katie looked at her options for weapons, the desk drawers provided nothing useful at all, just pencils, computer software books and reams of drawings. This was supposed to be an Architecture firm so the drawing supplies were probably normal, even if they did most design on computers these days. She finally settled on breaking apart a small table near one of the massive windows. Broken down the table yielded four hefty clubs, which Katie harvested. She knew if she had to take on the hordes of zombies with only clubs for weapons she would not get very far, but hopefully these would allow her to escape the building and find better weapons. Moving the leather chair away from the door she opened it and was not surprise to find a slow zombie standing there stupidly gawking at her.
Poking it backwards with her club she clown-stepped out into the reception area and gave it an overhand swing to the head. The blow dropped it to its knees, but didn't finish it off. The zombie looked like he had been dressed for a night on the town, his white silk shirt was bloody, torn and almost as coated with grime as Katie had been a half hour before. His mustached mouth made an 'o' shape as Katie's club slammed into his head against his left ear. Her follow up blow on the other side finally finished him off and Katie stood there for a moment to relish her first victory over the zombies since she had regained consciousness. Running and hiding had their place and she was going to make sure to keep a low profile, but fighting felt too damned good and right now she was angry enough to defeat a zombie or two in close combat.
'I will kill them all, as many as I can. I will find them, hunt down their leaders and kill them.'
Chapter 7 - Max
"Good to see you up and about." Max said to Stewart, who glared at him from behind the iron bars of her prison cell.
Stewart didn't get further than a glare when a warning klaxon sounded from the far end of the hallway.
"What the fuck is that?" she asked, the sight of Max jumping in alarm gave her a smidgeon of pleasure.
"How would I know?"
"You gonna let me out of here?"
Max held the key to her cell up and nodded, "Sure thing."
Stewart had been in quarantine the last two days since Colonel Draper had dropped them off at the Great Lakes Naval Training station, or as the military personal called it, RTC, which stood for Recruit Training Command. Their wounded included a younger man named Chen, who had come in with a gunshot wound to the leg and Stewart, who had a fractured skull and many cuts and gashes. Both had been confined to the infirmary for possibly contaminated personal since they arrived. Preliminary testing of blood from both of them had indicated they were probably not contaminated by whatever it was that caused the zombies to be zombies. It was the 'probably' that kept both of them locked up in individual cells that the training station used for a brig. Nominally it was for everyone's safety, but Stewart felt singled out by the accommodations. Chen had been released to general quarters the night before, Stewart had not. Coming out of her cell Stewart continued to glare at Max, who was making every effort not to smile at all, when a military police officer bellowed at them from the end of the hallway.
"We're being attacked! Get to your stations!" Then she disappeared down the hallway.
"We have stations?" asked Stewart.
"Not that I know of. We better go see what is going on."
"Can you, ah, sense anything close by?"
Max looked at Stewart for a moment, then nodded and closed his eyes; a moment later he opened them wide and softly said, "Fuck. C'mon!" then he went running off down the corridor after the military police officer, hoping the woman had not locked them into brig by shutting the outer door. Fortunately, the woman had left the sliding door open and Max slithered through and ran towards the front of the building.
"Max! Slow down! Max!" Stewart called. Her words finally penetrated Max's brain and he slowed so she could catch up. "We don't have any weapons and you don't know where we need to go."
"I...we gotta get out of here! We need to find Bill."
"Okay, we can do that. Calm down. Where was Bill last at?"
"He was on watch until four, then went to the barracks...he should be there or close to it."
"You lead, I'll follow. How many zombies are we dealing with here Max?"
Looking over his shoulder before he opened the front door Max said, "All of them!"
"Thousands?"
"Or more. I can't sense anything farther out than maybe a mile, but the whole area is covered with the dead, and Stewart too many of them are smart ones." The sound of gunfire reached a crescendo to the east of their position. "Most of the attacking zombies are hitting the east side of the facility, but there are a ton waiting to the west, not moving up yet. We gotta tell someone."
"Draper? He should still be around."
"If we can, he would believe me. I think."
"Yeah, Bill first, then Draper."
The two of them ran across the open grounds to the building Bill was supposed to be housed in. The RTC trained up to fifty thousand recruits a year, so they were used to large numbers of people, even if the barracks were sparse. There were also maps everywhere pointing the way to the common areas recruits would need to get to. Max had only been wandering around the place for two days and he still didn't know how to get everywhere, but he knew how to get back to the barracks. Running up to the building the two of them saw a couple of men coming outside hastily, a third trailed behind them. The first two were Ruben and Javier, men from Iowa who were unlucky enough to be in Bill's platoon when he volunteered to help Max and Stewart get to Chicago. The third was Bill.
"Bill!" Max yelled, bring all three of the men to a halt.
"Max. What's going on?" Bill asked, fatigue lined the three men's faces.
"Zombies are attacking from the east, thousands of them, but there are more being held back to the west, way more than are attacking us now. We gotta get out of here! Even with a thousand soldiers we won't be able to hold out."
"We'll see what the military decides Max, guys with guns can hold off a lot of zombies."
Shaking his head Max said, "Not this many."
The group of them was standing near an open field used by the recruits for physical training, as Max finished speaking an explosion threw dirt up into the air, followed by another one closer to them, then a third.
"Let's go!" yelled Bill running east as the line of explosions grew closer. They made it to the edge of the buildings when the barracks Bill had been sleeping in blew apart. "When did the zeds get mortars?"
"When the soldiers that came back from the dead showed them how to use the damned, things." said Ruben with a scowl on his face. The old man had seen action before, in Vietnam, and was well past his prime, but he had been pressed into service alongside of thirteen year olds back when the governor of Iowa issued a general call to service. He was not the fastest of Bill's soldiers, but the man knew tricks that the others had not had time to learn.
"What now?"
"We get the fuck out of here before some bright boy drops more shells on our heads." Ruben said.
"Seems smart." Turning to Max and Stewart
Bill said, "You guys don't have your weapons."
"I was just going to unlock Stewart...didn't think I needed them."
"You always gotta keep a gun with you Max." Pausing he asked, "Why were you still locked up Jane?"
Stewart shrugged, "The blood tests, something was wrong and they took another sample, they said it didn't appear that I was infected, but they wanted to be sure, so I got to spend another night on the hard bed."
"Dang. Are you feeling okay?"
"I am not infected Bill!"
"Didn't say you were. I was thinking maybe...."
No one said anything for a moment and the screams of the living carried back to them from several blocks away where the fighting was going on.
"You ain't going like that one bird in the Art Center are you?" asked Ruben bluntly.
He was referring to a living woman, Stella, who had been encouraged to kill zombies, by her handlers, the woman had become an abomination, fast, strong and remorseless....and a killer of the living. Stella had eaten living flesh of the uninfected and seemed to grow stronger for doing so, she had also been stunned into inaction when Ruben shoved his cut hand into her mouth, which resulted, ultimately, in her death.
"No, nothing like that. I've killed a lot of zombies, but not that many Ruben."
Javier had been quiet so far, now he chose to speak up, his voice completely without accent he said, "What about Chen? He is in the hospital."
"As good a place as any, lead the way Javier." Bill said. They trotted along quickly towards the hospital, trying not to listen to the sounds of young men and women being overrun to the east.
The hospital was a hive of activity, with men carrying stretchers into the hospital and wounded lying on the sidewalk in front of the place. Technically it wasn't even a hospital, just an infirmary, but the Navy had changed its designation after the extent of the crisis had been realized.
To the east a roar sounded about the same time that more mortar shells dropped near the west end of the campus. One, by chance or intent, landed at the corner of the hospital, sending shards of metal fragments through the air and literally obliterating those unfortunate enough to have been on the sidewalk next to where it landed. Stewart was thrown into Max and both of them tumbled to the ground in a heap. Ruben didn't break stride, he picked up Stewart and hauled her into the building, leaving Bill to do the same with Max. In the lobby the stretcher bearers were cringing on the ground afraid to move from the lucrative cover they found in the lobby of the building.
