He scanned the closet, but saw nothing that looked like a manual near the gas masks that remained on their shelf.
“How do you know so much about gas masks anyway?” she asked.
“I told you I’m a journalist. I once wrote an article on equipment for survivalists.”
He could not tell her the truth that he worked for the National Clandestine Service, the black ops arm of the CIA, which was where he had learned about weapons, gas masks, and anything else that had to do with surviving a war, including how to kill people.
Victoria continued to cough. Halverson figured she might be getting weaker on account of the dearth of breathable air in the blast shelter.
“We better get a move on it,” he said.
He eyed his gas mask. He didn’t look forward to putting it on. He wasn’t immune to claustrophobia. The mask swaddling his head gave him a sense of being suffocated. He had experienced the same sensation when he had worn a gas mask at the Farm at Camp Peary where his CIA instructors had trained him in the use of weapons and other military equipment.
This particular mask had a polycarbonate full-face visor and a cylindrical, perforated metal filter attached with rubber seals below the visor. He preferred the full-face visors because they permitted better peripheral vision than did the goggle-type gas masks that had a separate window for each eye.
“What are we waiting for?” he said.
He strapped the gas mask on and headed toward the blast shelter’s locked door. He had forgotten how well and truly wretched these gizmos felt. It wasn’t just the increased heat generated by the tight mask swathing his face, it was the sound of his breathing through the filter resonating through his ears, as well, that complemented his discomfort.
He turned around and saw that Victoria still had not put on her mask.
“What’s wrong?” he said in a mask-muffled voice.
“What?” she said.
“Why don’t you put on your mask?” he said louder, but his mask continued to muffle his voice.
She fastened her blond hair back in a ponytail with a pink scrunchie. She eyed her gas mask, looking about as happy as a cat swimming across a lake at the prospect of strapping the ominous device to her head.
“It looks like some kind of torture device out of the Middle Ages,” she said, coughing.
Halverson noticed she looked like she was getting weaker by the moment. Before long she would run out of enough energy to strap on the gas mask and walk out of this place, he decided.
He strode over to her and tried to fit the gas mask over her head, but was unable to because she kept jerking her head as she coughed.
“You need to stop coughing,” he said.
She withdrew a plastic liter bottle of water from her knapsack, unscrewed the red plastic cap, and swilled water to help her stop coughing. It did the trick. She stopped coughing. She screwed the cap back on the water bottle and returned the bottle to her knapsack.
Halverson finished attaching the gas mask to her head.
She eyed him accusatorily through the polycarbonate visor as if he was to blame for her discomfort.
“Time to go,” he said.
They made a beeline for the blast shelter’s locked door.
Sweat was pouring down his face and steaming up his visor. Not only could he barely talk through this contraption, now he could barely see through it as well.
Despite his misgivings about leaving the shelter, he threw the steel bolt and shoved open the steel door. After all, they had no choice. Without clean air, the shelter was uninhabitable.
“What are we gonna find out there?” he thought he heard Victoria say in a garbled voice through her gas mask.
The heavy door creaked open.
Chapter 8
Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center
Mellors knocked on the closed door to his boss’s makeshift office in the Area B bunker complex.
“Come in,” said DCI Ernest Slocum.
Mellors opened the door.
Slocum, the fiftysomething Ivy League boss of the CIA, was sitting behind his metal desk, wearing bifocals, perusing a document in his hands.
In fact, both he and Slocum had graduated from Yale, Mellors knew, though Slocum had graduated a few years ahead of him. It wasn’t at Yale where the CIA had recruited Mellors, however. The Agency had recruited him when he had attended the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.
“What do you want?” said Slocum looking up from his papers at Mellors.
“I didn’t mean to interrupt you,” said Mellors.
“I hope this is important.”
Slocum’s way of turning the heat up under him, decided Mellors on hearing Slocum’s response. Mellors wasn’t to be put off that easily. He thought he was onto something with his uncovering of the Orchid Organization.
“Did you ever hear of Orchid?” said Mellors.
“Orchid?” repeated Slocum as he peered at Mellors with unblinking blue eyes.
“Yeah.”
“You mean the perennial three-petaled flower?”
“No, I don’t. It’s some kind of organization.”
“I can’t say that I have. What kind of organization is it?” Again Slocum was studying Mellors with unblinking eyes.
“I’m not sure.”
“Then why did you bring up the subject?”
Mellors demurred. He didn’t know how much he should tell Slocum. After all, Mellors did not want to involve Slocum in an investigation that might turn out to be a wild-goose chase, which would reflect badly on Mellors.
“When I was reading documents about the Erasmus H5N1 experiments, I encountered the name Orchid,” said Mellors.
“In what context?”
Mellors hedged, thinking of a response that wasn’t too specific. In point of fact he had no damning evidence, no smoking gun. Only vague suspicions.
“I found the word mentioned in the same sentence with the Erasmus experiments,” he said.
Slocum shrugged. “Maybe they were just talking about the flower. What makes you think they were talking about an organization?”
“Somebody at Orchid was contacting a scientist at the Erasmus lab.”
Slocum leaned back in his chair. “Maybe it’s a flower company trying to sell the guy an orchid. What’s the point of bringing this up?”
Mellors suspected that Orchid might have had something to do with the funding of the Erasmus zombie virus project, but at this time, without more evidence to bear him out, he didn’t want to air his suspicions to Slocum. When Mellors had accumulated more evidence about Orchid, if there was any, he would be more forthright with Slocum. All Mellors was trying to do now was hook Slocum by arousing Slocum’s curiosity so Slocum would green-light Mellors’s further investigation of Orchid.
“I thought this Orchid might have had some bearing on the H5N1 experiments,” said Mellors.
“You’re barking up the wrong tree,” said Slocum, who stood up and ambled around the windowless room. He halted and faced Mellors. “Exactly what are you trying to prove?”
“Nothing. I’ve never heard of this Orchid Company or whatever it is and I wondered what it was. I thought you might know.”
“Well, I don’t. It seems like you’re wasting my time, after all—and yours as well.”
“Yeah,” muttered Mellors, preparing for Slocum’s next rebuke.
“We need to be concerned with the present, not the past. The past is over and done with, and nothing can be done about it. We have to be concerned about repopulating the country, now that we have cleansed it of the plague.”
“And contaminated it with radiation in the process.”
“Like I said, we have to adapt to the current situation,” said Slocum, ignoring Mellors. “The past is dead, like the dinosaurs. We’re not in the Jurassic age anymore.”
“What age are we in now, sir?” said Mellors, trying to ingratiate himself with his boss.
“The age of the purge, of the great cleansing
. We have vanquished the plague and we must repopulate the earth.”
“You don’t care who caused the plague?”
“As far as we know, it was an accident.”
“But what if it wasn’t?”
“What are you talking about? Of course, it was an accident. Who in his right mind would deliberately let loose on the world a plague that wipes out the human race?”
“I don’t know.”
“Nobody. That’s who.”
“Maybe he wasn’t in his right mind.”
“Who are we talking about?”
“That’s what I want to find out.”
Slocum threw up his hands in irritation. “This is idle speculation. We need to move past the plague. It’s over with. Don’t waste your time and the government’s time with unsubstantiated speculation. Get back to work.”
Slocum turned his back on Mellors and retreated to his desk, where he turned around and stood watching Mellors.
Mellors headed for the door. He wasn’t about to let the matter drop, no matter what Slocum said. Mellors wanted to know more about this Orchid Organization.
“One more thing,” said Slocum.
Mellors stopped in his tracks and wheeled around to face Slocum.
“How are you proceeding with your mission?” said Slocum.
Mellors looked puzzled. He said nothing.
“Halverson,” prompted Slocum. “Have you found Halverson yet?”
“I don’t see how he could have survived the nukes that demolished the entire country. We have to assume he’s dead.”
“Never assume anything. When you assume anything you make an ‘ass’ out of ‘u’ and ‘me.’ You know how that goes,” said Slocum with a dismissive wave of his hand.
“You want me to bring back his dead body?” Mellors already knew the answer to his question, but he wanted to make sure his orders had not changed.
“That’s your mission. The president wants Halverson’s body here, dead or alive.”
His orders had not changed, decided Mellors with dismay. “I haven’t got enough field agents to send out and scour the countryside for Halverson’s corpse.”
“That’s your problem. The president wants to be sure Halverson is taken care of.”
“Why worry about him? Who’s he gonna tell what he knows? There’s nobody left alive to tell.”
“We’re still alive. There have to be others out there hunkered down in bomb shelters.”
Mellors massaged his chin in thought. “He can’t still be alive.”
“Whatever. Forget about this Orchid nonsense and focus on finding Halverson. That’s your mission. Bring him back here.”
Right, thought Mellors. And I have an “S” on my chest. He was about to say something to that effect when Slocum cut him off.
“Make sure you close the door behind you,” said Slocum, head down, poring over a sheaf of papers in his hands as he seated himself behind his desk.
Chapter 9
Nevada
Breathing laboriously through his gas mask, Halverson entered the blast shelter’s cramped vestibule and scaled the wooden ladder to the trapdoor that led outside. He wondered if he really needed the uncomfortable mask. He felt hotter than ever. Was the air still contaminated with radioactive particles dispersed by the A-bomb that had leveled nearby Las Vegas?
It wasn’t just the mask bothering him. It was the combination of the mask, the heavy bandoleers draped over his shoulders, and the knapsack stuffed with cans of food and bottles of liquid on his back.
He shot the bolt in the trapdoor. He lifted the door, climbed a few more rungs on the ladder, and peered outside at the blast-scorched flat desert landscape. Apart from the charring, it didn’t look much different from what it had looked like before the nuke had slammed into Vegas—except now, of course, not a trace of Vegas’s looming skyscrapers remained on the horizon. All that remained of Vegas were congeries of rubble.
Halverson started as he swiveled his head to scan the environs. The better part of two feet from his face a scorched flesh eater, its putrescent flesh burned off its skeleton, lay prostrate with its bony hand stretched out toward the trapdoor. The skeleton’s skull lay on the ground facing him with the toothy rictus of death.
Beyond the corpse, other than the shimmering thermals, Halverson could discern no movement on the desolate desert.
Halverson flung the trapdoor all the way open and climbed out of the bunker onto the desert. Now that he was higher he could make out scores of incinerated corpses of flesh eaters that lay strewn on the dirt a stone’s throw from the trapdoor.
The noonday soon was burning down on him, increasing his discomfort.
“I feel like I’m smothering in this gas mask,” said Victoria with a muffled voice after she climbed out of the shelter and stood at Halverson’s side.
Halverson know how she felt. He was dripping with sweat. They wouldn’t last long in the burning desert dressed like this. They would end up victims of heat prostration. Not only did their masks hinder their breathing and make them hotter, the masks prevented them from drinking water to keep themselves hydrated.
Halverson consulted his National Clandestine Service wristwatch, which contained a compass, and headed due east. He trudged twenty-odd yards, stopped, and gasped for breath.
Victoria plodded after him.
“We’re never gonna make it like this,” he said.
“I feel like I’m gonna pass out any second,” said Victoria.
“We’ll have to take off the masks.”
“What about the radioactive air?”
“The air might be OK to breathe by now.”
“But what if it isn’t?”
“We’re already dead if we keep these masks on in this heat. We’ll have to take our chances.”
Straining, face sweaty, Halverson unstrapped his mask and wrenched it off his head.
Victoria followed suit.
Halverson sniffed the air under the summer sun. The sky had a dirty, rusty haze to it, he noticed. Could it be radioactive dust floating in the atmosphere? The nuclear winter that was predicted would take place after a nuclear attack? Halverson didn’t know.
Sniffing, he didn’t notice any distinct odor in the air. Maybe the air was OK to breathe. Then again, he had no idea what radioactive-contaminated air smelled like—if anything.
“How do you feel?” he asked Victoria, who was finishing doffing her gas mask.
“Better than I felt with that mask on.” She flung the mask into the dirt. “How do you feel?”
“I’m still alive,” he said, inhaling a deep breath then exhaling.
“For how long, I wonder?”
“It’s still hot, but not as bad as with that mask on.”
He withdrew a plastic liter bottle of water from his knapsack, unscrewed the bottle’s cap, and chugged down water.
“Maybe we won’t die of heat prostration now,” said Victoria, latched onto a bottle of water from her knapsack, and drank greedily.
“What’s that?”
“What?”
“Am I seeing things?”
Halverson was staring into the barren desert at what looked like a large fire engine red eighteen-wheeler that was driving erratically across the ground in their general direction. The truck had Coca-Cola written on its sides in large white cursive letters.
“Where?” asked Victoria.
Squinting through the harsh sunlight of the desert, Halverson pointed at the Coke truck.
“I could use an ice-cold Coke right about now,” she said. “Are you sure we aren’t dreaming it?”
“If we both see it, it can’t be a hallucination.”
“Maybe it’s a mirage conjured up by our wishful thinking.”
“And we both see the same mirage? I don’t think so.”
Victoria tensed. “It looks like that maniac at the wheel is driving straight at us.”
Indeed, the Coke truck came barreling their way, chugging clamorously, swerving this way
and that, spewing out dust at its flanks like a motorboat slicing through water and displacing arcing sheets of frothing water.
“Run!” Halverson hollered at Victoria and bolted away from the careering truck that was bearing down on them full tilt.
Victoria didn’t need to be told twice.
Screaming, she pegged out of the semi’s path, the growling snout of the truck less than twenty feet from her.
Chapter 10
Victoria ran for her life.
The Coke tractor-trailer rocketed past them, kicking up a rooster tail of sand and dust in its wake.
“Jesus Christ!” said Halverson as he stopped running and gawked at the semi speeding away. “The bastard tried to kill us.”
He darted over to Victoria’s side.
“I don’t know,” she said, watching the slaloming truck.
The constant veering and lurching of the big rig put it at imminent risk of tipping over, it looked like to Halverson.
“What do you mean, you don’t know?” he said.
“The maniac in the driver’s seat doesn’t seem to be able to control that truck.”
“You think it was an accident that he almost ran us over?”
“I don’t know what to think.”
“Did you get a good look at him?”
“No.”
“I caught a glimpse of him before I peeled off.”
“What did he look like?”
“Like a middle-aged guy wearing wraparound shades.”
“That doesn’t tell us much.”
Eyes on the truck, Halverson cursed.
“What?” said Victoria.
“He’s coming back.”
“How can you tell with the crazy way he’s driving?”
“I’m telling you, that truck is coming back here.”
“Then it wasn’t an accident,” said Victoria, eyes popping out of her head. “He’s gonna finish off what he started and turn us into roadkill.”
“If he can figure out how to steer.”
The semi meandered in their direction in a roundabout manner.
“Maybe the peabrain doesn’t know how to drive a truck,” said Victoria.
Zombie Apocalypse: The Chad Halverson Series Page 116
