Yeah, he thought, that sounded good.
He looked at Marshall again. Sighed again. “If you had heard the fucking stories I got from the others,” he said, “you’d understand why I’m a bit stumped when you come walking back in here telling me Bryce got a bus dropped on him.”
Marshall shifted in his seat.
“Did you bring my personal effects? From the bus?”
Marshall nodded, reached down and picked up a suitcase. Got up and brought it around the desk.
Bowers nodded. Marshall went back around and sat down.
“So,” Bowers said, “here’s how it’s going to be: Chris will now be in control of the prison from six PM to six AM. We’re on twelve hour shifts now. I’m telling you this the same way I told the others just made it back today, and for the same reason: a lot’s changed since you left. Even if it’s only been a day.”
Marshall nodded.
“When’s the last time you slept?”
“Last night, about an hour.”
“Fine,” Bowers said, and nodded. “You can take the night off and pull day shift starting tomorrow. A lot’s going to change tomorrow, as well. So, rack out and in the morning Brooks’ll have your orders.”
“Yes, sir.” Marshall nodded. Got up and walked to the door.
“One more thing,” Bowers said, stopping him. “You told Brooks you saw your sister, she was a creeper.”
Marshall turned around and nodded.
“And then you said she got hit by a car.”
He nodded again.
“Explain.”
Marshall took a deep breath, and said, “I was going to put her down. The only thing I could do. Then I heard music. Like, riot rock stuff. It got louder and louder. Samantha started walking towards the noise. It got louder. Then I saw a car. It was something small, I didn’t get a good read on it because it had a plow on the front.”
“A plow?”
“Yeah,” Marshall said, nodding. “Like an icebreaker or something. You know, pointed. So it screams up and swerves and takes out Samantha and keeps right on going.”
Bowers frowned. “Strange,” he said.
“That’s one word for it.”
“Alright,” Bowers told him, “dismissed.”
Marshall went out. Warden Bowers watched the closed door for a moment, then looked at the clock. Right on time, he thought. Got up and went to the door. Opened it and went out. Passed his secretary’s desk – empty, she would be back to work in the morning, but for now she was resting – and went out into the hall.
Went two doors down. To the one marked “SAM WATKINS”, and knocked.
Silence.
He knocked again. Heard shuffling inside the room. Then a light came on, shining under the door. Bowers waited. The door opened a crack.
Chris, looking as disheveled as ever, peeked his head out, sweating.
Bowers ignored his appearance and said, “Your shift is up.”
Chris looked down the hall both ways, then back at Bowers, as if he was a complete stranger. Then he said, “Gotcha. My shift. No problem.”
“Are you alright?”
“Perfect. I’ve got it all figured out.”
“What?”
“Nothing to worry about,” Chris assured him. “My shift. Everything’s perfect.”
Bowers shook his head. Cleared his throat. “So,” he said, “it’s your first shift running the prison. There’s some things you need to know: we converted the auditorium in the male wing of the prison into a barracks for the male guards and administrative workers. Same with the women. Everyone should be at their post, but if they’re not, that’s where you’ll find them.
“We got hit again last night along the fence. So you’ll need good men up there again. I put one thirty-aught in each tower. Those are for the longer shots. If we can keep them away from the fence, that’s what we wanna do.
“You’ve only got half the staff we normally would during the night. I’ve been using female prisoners in eight hour shifts to fill the void. Pope will have the names for the shift and a half you’ll preside over. It shouldn’t be much of a problem. But I wanted you to be aware of it. You following me?”
Chris nodded.
“Good. And, most important of all,” Bowers told him, “if anything goes wrong. Anything at all. Please hesitate to call. Seriously. I’m gonna pour myself a strong one and lean back on the couch and enjoy a good movie. Can you handle that?”
Chris nodded again. “I’m good,” he said, “I’ve just got so much work to do.”
“Good boy,” Bowers told him and patted his shoulder. Turned and went back down the hall. Past his secretary’s desk again. Into his office. Closed and locked the door.
Went to his cabinet and took out a bottle of scotch and a glass. Brought them over to the couch. Opened the bottle and filled the tumbler with scotch, closed it up and set them both on the coffee table. He’d need the bottle for refills.
Went back around and pulled up the suitcase and set it on the desk. Unzipped it and looked at the contents. Smiled. Scanned through them, reading the dates and remembering which was which. Picked the one he wanted. Zipped the suitcase back up and brought it over to his coat closet. Put it in and closed the door.
Went around the couch and put the disk in. Back around the table and sagged into the couch. Took a sip of his scotch. Picked up the remote and pointed it at the screen.
“And…” he said.
Someone knocked on his door.
“No,” he called to them. “No one’s home.”
“Warden,” Pope called.
“No.”
“Warden, sir,” Pope pleaded.
“No! It hasn’t even been five minutes!”
“Warden, please.”
Bowers tossed the remote on the couch, pushed himself up, and stormed over to the door. Flung it open and shouted: “What?”
“Sir,” Pope said, his head bowed. “We have a situation.”
“Tell Chris,” Bowers snapped.
“I can’t find him.”
Bowers cursed under his breath. “What is it?” he asked.
“There’s someone at the gate.”
EPISODE 6:
WITH A VENGEANCE
PART ONE
One
Phillip Craig thought he smelled bacon. He sniffed once – his eyes still closed – and then coughed. If someone was cooking bacon, he decided, they were burning it.
He opened his eyes and peered through the football helmet’s Plexiglas visor, wondering where the hell he was. Then, in a wash of memories, he knew exactly what happened: he hadn’t made it back to the trucks in time. The dynamite must have gone off with him too close. He recalled running through the mass of zombies, chainsaw held out, blood and sinew and bone raining back on his visor. He remembered wondering how much longer he had, and then…
He sat up and looked around. The air around him was clotted with pale white smoke. The houses along the street cold, pastel through the haze. No movement at all. He panned his view right, searching for the four white trucks that should have been there. His head swiveled and he noticed his right shoulder was on fire.
“Shit,” he said and laid back down, rolling left and right for a few moments. Stopped, and stayed where he was. Face down. Took a few breaths, the cage on the helmet resting on the cold pavement.
Phil sighed and pushed himself up with a groan. Brushed soot off the thick, coarse bite suit he was wearing, and spun in a complete three hundred sixty degree circle.
Everywhere he looked: smoldering bodies and miscellaneous parts, blood and gore. The smoke was hanging lazily above the frozen street. A few dry trees had caught from the blast. There were no trucks in sight, but he thought he heard gunfire off in the distance.
Phil thought a moment. If he was still here, where were the creepers? He couldn’t have gotten them all with the crate of dynamite. Or could he have? No. If they were all dead the other guards would have at least checked around, seen if he had
made it. But they had hightailed it. Which meant they were most likely being chased.
So Phil was on his own.
He unhooked the strap and took the helmet off. Then he shrugged off the bite suit – unzipping it as he went, moving as fast as he could – revealing his guard’s uniform beneath. Embroidered on one breast was: BRENNICK MAXIMUM SECURITY. On the other: P. CRAIG. At an average height, average weight, average face, with average length hair that could be a sandy blond or a sun-bleached brown, there was nothing to distinguish Phil in appearance. He had always thought his personality made up for it.
Phil started walking. Stopped and studied a twisted piece of red metal. The wagon he had pulled out. He hoped that fucking squeaky wheel had been vaporized. Got going again, not really sure where to.
He needed a weapon. He wasn’t sure where his chainsaw had been thrown, but it would have been too loud anyway. He needed something quiet but fierce. Something he could run with. He made a right and came off the street, stepping over body parts as he made his way to the sidewalk. Turned left and followed the sidewalk, looking at the houses. He needed to find one with a shed.
Passed down half the block before he found one. He crossed down the snow-covered driveway to it and sighed: locked. He could pry it open if he had a bar, but it would be noisy. Walked around it, looking for a window.
Nothing.
Scratched his head a minute, then turned around and went up to the house’s back door. Tried the handle: unlocked. He smiled. Started to turn it and stopped. Were there creepers inside?
“Only one way to find,” he told himself and opened the door. Peeked inside. Said, “Hello, hello…?”
No answer. Phil shrugged and went in. Walked down the hall to the kitchen. Empty. Opened the fridge. Took out a beer, closed the fridge and popped the spin top and took a gulp. Still cold.
Went over to the key rack and studied them. He needed to find the small pad-lock key, but didn’t see one. There were a few assorted keys, some with little white tabs connected to them for reference but without anything written on the paper. A single keyless entry set with buttons for lock, unlock, trunk, car-start, and panic. He fingered the emblem on the plastic remote.
“Now we’re talking,” he said, and smiled.
Two
“Say that one more time,” Warden Bowers told Alexander Pope.
“There’s someone at the gate,” Pope told him.
Bowers turned from him and went to his computer. Pulled up the security system and looked at the film from the front gate. There was a sports car at it, idling. Attached to the front end was a V-shaped plow blade. Marshall – one of the five guards who had actually returned from town – had mentioned something exactly like the car. Bowers wondered who could be driving it, and how they would know the prison was secure.
“Who do we have at the interior gate?” Bowers asked Pope.
“First interior gate is Eldridge and Green,” Pope told him.
“Get them on the line.”
Pope picked up Bowers phone and punched in an extension. Waited for someone to pick up, and then handed the phone to the Warden.
“Who’s this?” Bowers asked.
“Eldridge, sir,” Peter Eldridge returned.
“And who the hell is that?” Bowers asked him, pointing at the car on his screen.
“Sir?”
“The car, the fucking guy in the car! At the main gate.”
“We can’t tell, sir. He’s all the way on the other side of the gate, and there’s that plow hooked up to the front. Couldn’t see who’s behind the wheel to save our lives.”
Bowers nodded. “Okay,” he said, and pressed the enter key, opening the main gate. “Get your rifles ready, because he’s coming to you, and they just might save your lives.”
Three
Phil tossed the empty beer bottle on the passenger side floor board and reached into the plastic bag on the seat next to him. Pulled another out and popped it. Had a pull, trying to do it all while keeping the Porsche on the road. It wasn’t easy at the speed he was going.
He cut left and took the small car around a corner, drifting in the snow as it made the turn.
He needed some tunes, he decided, as he brought the wheel back even. But what could he do? There was no radio and he certainly couldn’t hit up iTunes. He thought about that and took another draw from his beer.
A creeper was off on the sidewalk, keeping in the shadows of a store front. Phil swerved and clipped it at the knees, sending it flying over the roof of the sports car and rolling to a stop in his wake.
“Shit,” he said, and swerved back on to the road, barely missing the pole to a stop light. He took another drink and thought some more. Looked down to see how fast he was going as he passed a speed limit sign: three times the legal limit.
He laughed and sped up.
Turned right and took that for a few minutes until he saw something that piqued his interest: a junk yard. Not a grimy one, just a long fence with mesh to block prying eyes. On the gate it read “WE BUY BEATERS.”
Phil had an idea. He pulled the emergency brake and sent the Porsche into a spin. Then let it go and cut the wheel and brought the sportster sideways, skidding on the slick street, stopping perfectly in a parallel parking space.
“Ha,” he said, and put it in park. Got out, the engine still running. Went to the gate and pulled the latch up out of the ground. Pulled it open – they must have been open when the creepers hit for it not to be locked – and left it that way. Went back to the Porsche and got in. Pulled it around into the lot. Shut off the engine, got out, and closed the gate.
Four
Peter Eldridge was middle aged, plump, had a single lock of hair smeared across his otherwise bald scalp, and had been looking forward to an early retirement with a solid pension. He had absolutely no fucking idea how to handle what had been happening over the past few days. He’d been trying to convince himself it was all just a dream when the car had pulled up to the main gate and honked its horn.
He held his rifle – an Aptomov Kalishnakov 1947 – so tight in his thick-fingered hands it was starting to make his knuckles hurt. The gate opened fully and the car pulled forward. Rolling toward Peter and his compatriot, Stuart Green.
“Be ready,” Green told him without needing to. Peter was ready; he just wasn’t sure what for. At that moment he was ready to fire or faint – leaning evenly between both.
The car crept forward.
Now Peter was certain he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t fire into the car if needed. He couldn’t run if his life was in danger. He was completely frozen. His life was flashing before his eyes. He could see himself sitting in the grass as a child, playing with matchbox cars. He could see himself sitting in his room as a teenager, reading comic books. He could see himself sitting in his apartment in his twenties, looking ridiculous in his eighties’ attire, watching MTV. He could see himself in his thirties, sitting in his living room, watching football. He could see himself now, in his forties, sitting in his guard shack.
Jesus, he thought, did he ever do anything?
He shook his head, tried to clear it, as the car rolled to a stop next to him.
Five
Phil pressed the CD he had stolen from the tow truck into the Porsche’s player. It was a burned disk that had “ROAD MUSIC” scrawled in sharpie across the top.
The player didn’t start by itself, so Phil hit play and cranked it. Bass rumbled through the car. He smiled. He couldn’t remember the song – something from the late nineties – but it was perfect. True, angry, drive music. The kind that forced you to push the pedal down.
He rolled the shifter for a second, and then dropped the clutch and took off. He didn’t stop to open the gate this time, just blasted through it, the plow blade he had attached splitting it and sending both sides flying out in their respective directions. Creepers attracted to the music tossed to either side by the gates as they were thrown open.
He took a right and tore through the
outskirts of town. Clipped a creeper and kept on going, checking the rearview mirror only long enough to note the thing wrapping itself around the same pole he had barely missed earlier.
Hit the highway and took the onramp up and around, dropping in the middle lane. Punched it. Music blaring. Engine humming. Cold beer in his hand. He looked off to his left and watched the town roll by. Peaceful in the pale winter light. He wondered how many more creepers were down there. Right now.
He shrugged. Enough to keep him busy for a bit, he figured. Up ahead a creeper was trying to cross the road. Had turned to follow the sound of his music. Buses parked along the side.
“Odd,” he said of the buses, and then swerved and smacked the creeper with the plow, sending it careening off the side of the highway.
Six
“Hey, Pete,” Phillip Craig said as he pulled the Porsche up next to Peter Eldridge. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost, man.”
Peter sagged. “You scared the shit out of us,” he said.
“Speak for yourself,” Stuart told Peter. Then to Phil: “Where’d you get the Porsche?”
Phil smiled at him, revving the motor. “Some guy gave me a screaming deal on it,” he explained. “I practically stole it.”
“Where’d you get the plow?” Peter asked.
“That,” Phil said, “I can’t tell you. A magician’s secrets and all that. Anyway, are you boys gonna let me in?” He revved the engine again. “I wanna talk to Chris. Let him know he forgot something back in town.”
“What’s that?” Peter asked him.
“Me.”
Stuart nodded. “Right,” he said.
Outpost Season One Page 22
