The truck was kicking up more clouds of dirt and debris as it zigzagged back toward Halverson and Victoria, charging like a runaway locomotive, its rear wheels spinning and fishtailing in the soft dirt, unable to maintain purchase. Yet the berserk driver kept barging toward them, crushing the gas pedal in his mad onslaught on them.
“Whatever’s wrong with him, he’s a menace,” said Halverson, eying the advancing truck warily. “The idiot can’t drive, yet he’s flooring the gas pedal.”
“He’s definitely heading toward us if he could figure out how to steer,” said Victoria, blue eyes bright with adrenaline like a cat’s eyes gleaming in the dark.
Thirty feet away from Halverson and Victoria, the truck veered sharply, jackknifed, and toppled onto its side, carving a rut into the dirt as it skidded over the ground, plowing up tumuli of dirt around its boxy shape.
“The idiot’s gone and done it,” said Halverson.
Upended, the truck slid to a halt on its side, its motor still running, topmost tires spinning in the air.
“Thank heaven,” said Victoria with a sigh of relief.
Halverson struck out for the beached eighteen-wheeler. “Let’s have a look.”
Victoria hesitated. “What if that driver’s still alive?”
Halverson tapped the MP7 slung over his shoulder. “That’s what we have this for.”
She slogged after him, weighed down by her jam-packed knapsack, not eager to inspect the truck.
“If that idiot didn’t tip over the truck, we could’ve used it to drive out of here,” she said.
Halverson nodded. “The motor’s still running. But there’s no way we’re gonna be able to tip that big rig upright. It must weigh a couple tons, anyway. Even if we could uncouple the cab, there’s no way we can flip it onto its wheels.”
“Another reason to hate that creep who tried to run us over.”
“Maybe if we’re lucky, there are cans of cold soda in the back of that truck.”
“I’ll drink to that.”
Some ten feet from the semi, Halverson thought he heard a commotion inside it. He brought up. He pricked up his ears.
“Did you hear that?” he asked.
“What?” said Victoria.
“It sounded like rumbling in the back of the truck.”
“The motor?”
“The motor’s in the cab. It wasn’t the motor.”
Victoria shook her head. “I didn’t hear it.”
Halverson strained his ears to pick up on the noise, but it had stopped. Wondering what had happened to the driver, Halverson glanced at the cab. From his vantage point he could not see into the cab that lay on its side. All he could see was the scratched, dust-mantled chassis, as the engine continued to idle.
“What are you waiting for?” said Victoria. “You were all juiced up to see what’s in the truck.”
On the qui vive he stole toward the back of the rig, his concern about the rummaging he had heard unallayed.
Then all hell broke loose.
Chapter 11
A mob of flesh eaters broke open the back door on the semi and spilled out onto the desert floor. Clad in a shredded turquoise wife-beater, a five-six twentysomething guy with scraggly brown hair and an equally scraggly beard was the first guy out, followed by a motley crew that shambled after Halverson and Victoria, climbing all over each other in their eagerness to reach them.
His mouth hanging open with a drooling sneer, his head tilted to his right, Wife-beater skittered toward Halverson and groped for him with his bony claws.
“I thought you said the A-bomb killed those things,” said Victoria, face twisted with fear.
“That was the government’s plan.”
“I’ve got a scoop for you . . .”
Halverson snapped up his MP7, leveled it at Wife-beater, squeezed the trigger, and unleashed a withering burst into the creature’s decomposing, scowling face. Thrown back by the impetus of the hollow-point 4.6 X 30 mm rounds, Wife-beater’s head jerked as his brain-splattered occipital bone hurled into the clutch of flesh eaters that were tailing him.
Rendered dead, Wife-beater reeled back onto the ground and was immediately trampled underfoot by his comrades that persisted in clawing their way toward Halverson.
Walking backward, retreating from the creatures, Halverson emptied his magazine into the sea of necrotic faces that washed toward him. Three of the creatures dropped dead into piles of decomposing flesh.
Halverson ejected the spent clip and rammed home a fresh one into the smoking hot MP7. He opened fire with a full burst of thirty slugs on the bloodthirsty mob that poured toward him.
Two of the plague-infected creatures hived off from the attacking mob and took off after Victoria.
She wrested her FN 5.7 pistol from its holster and aimed at the two. The first one was a middle-aged woman with Brillo soap pads for hair and a suppurating face that oozed maggots. Her disintegrating lips were smeared with flaking crimson lipstick. The portly creature was wearing an apron, as though she had turned while cooking supper.
Victoria shot Apron twice in the chest. Apron jerked to a halt then took two steps backward, driven back by the impact of the bullets. Gathering herself, bullet holes in her chest, Apron resumed her assault on Victoria.
“Aim for the head!” cried Halverson.
Victoria shot at Apron’s head and missed. Victoria steadied her gun arm with her free arm and fired again. The round slammed into Apron’s forehead. Apron crumpled to her knees in the dirt with a small hole in her brow and a much larger hole in the back of her skull.
Apron’s mate, a dwarf with a grime-streaked white sweater tied jauntily around his neck, kept coming at Victoria, undeterred by the death of his comrade. Grimacing with his rotting face, the dwarf extended his emaciated puny hand toward Victoria’s thigh.
Victoria cringed at the thought of him touching her. She fired off three rounds at the creature. In her haste she missed the flesh eater with her first two rounds that flew wide of his head. The third did the trick. It burrowed into the dwarf’s eye and slammed into his brain, dispatching him on the spot.
Halverson ejected another empty clip, reloaded, and opened up on the remaining half dozen creatures that plodded inexorably toward him, the air reeking of the stench of death they carried with them. Halverson put down three more of the creatures, reloaded, and wiped out the next two, reloaded, then blasted the third one, who spun on his heel, keeled over dead, and sprawled on the two deceased flesh eaters that lay strewn beneath him.
Halverson didn’t pick up on any more creatures piling out of the back of the truck. He heaved a sigh of relief. Then he froze—
He heard a scraping sound emanating from the overturned cab.
Chapter 12
The driver.
He was still alive.
And was clambering out of the tractor’s door, which was giving him trouble since the force of gravity was preventing him from keeping it open above him as he tried to crawl out of his overturned seat and down the now-vertical steel chassis of the vehicle.
“This makes no sense,” said Halverson, watching the driver struggling to emerge.
“It’s crazy,” said Victoria, replacing her FN 5.7 in its Velcro holster.
“Why would that driver be transporting a bunch of flesh eaters in a Coke truck?”
“And how could he drive? I thought the creatures couldn’t drive.”
“Maybe he’s not one of them.”
The driver emerged from the open window, contrived to scrabble down the upended chassis, and landed with a thud on the ground.
Unsure what to do, Halverson wheeled around and prepared to shoot him.
“Wait a minute,” said Victoria.
“What?” said Halverson.
“How do you know he’s one of them? We can’t see his eyes with those shades he’s wearing.”
The way the guy had been driving, Halverson figured he had to be one of them. But Victoria was right. He could not be sure u
nless he saw the guy’s eyes. Did the guy have that telltale glassy-eyed thousand-yard stare flesh eaters had?
His wraparound black sunglasses obscuring his eyes, the driver plodded toward Halverson.
“He’s shambling like one of them,” Halverson told Victoria.
“Maybe he got injured in the crash,” she said. “His clothes are torn, too. But they could’ve gotten ripped in the crash.”
“If he’s not infected, why did he try to run us over?”
Victoria said nothing.
The driver lurched toward them.
Halverson could not be sure whether the driver was infected or not. His body didn’t show the signs of advanced decomposition like most of the flesh eaters Halverson had just shot. Halverson needed to scope out the guy’s eyes.
“Hello,” said Halverson.
The guy did not answer.
“Hello,” Halverson repeated, louder this time.
Again no answer. The driver kept trudging like a stumblebum toward Halverson.
Halverson had to make up his mind on the spot whether to shoot.
“Why isn’t he answering?” Halverson asked Victoria.
“Maybe his vocal cords were damaged in the accident,” she answered.
That was possible, decided Halverson. His finger wrapped around his MP7’s trigger, he hesitated. He had no desire to kill a fellow human being. Was the driver infected or not?
The driver kept slogging toward him.
Halverson’s heartbeat accelerated. He had to make up his mind.
Slewing around, he reared back his foot and delivered a jarring tae kwon do kick with his heel to the driver’s chest. As the driver stumbled backward, Halverson charged after him, plucked the shades off the guy’s nose, and flung them away.
Glazed eyes stared blindly back at Halverson.
Halverson drew a bead on the driver’s head and blew it apart with a three-round burst from his MP7.
“He was one of them,” said Victoria. “Then how could he operate the truck?”
There was only one answer, Halverson knew. “He must have turned while he was in the process of driving. The flesh eaters don’t have the necessary coordination to drive a truck.”
“I don’t understand.”
“A flesh eater bit the driver before he started the truck,” said Halverson. “The bite infected him. Then he turned while he was driving.”
“What about those creatures in the back of the truck?”
Halverson chewed it over. “Maybe they were all uninfected when they first got into the truck and were trying to escape in it. He was driving them to safety.”
“Escape from what?”
“The flesh eaters.”
“But you said the atom bomb killed them all.”
“Apparently, it didn’t.”
“How did they get infected?”
“One of them must have been bitten by a ghoul before he boarded.”
Victoria angled toward the dead driver and gazed at his motionless supine corpse. His white eyes seemed to be returning her stare, sending a frisson down her spine.
“Well, I guess we can make up any story we want,” she said, jerking her head away from the cadaver. “What difference does it make?”
“We need to understand what’s really happening so we can deal with it.”
She looked up at him. “So what do we do now, Sherlock?”
“Like Churchill said, ‘When you’re going through hell, keep going.’”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, we keep heading for DC. Maybe we can stop the politicians from dropping more bombs on us.”
“Just you and me?” she said dryly.
He withdrew a half-full translucent plastic liter bottle of water from his knapsack, unscrewed the red plastic cap, and took a long pull of water.
“Yeah,” he said and wiped water from his lips with the back of his wrist.
He craned his neck up and peered at the sky, which an easterly blowing dark cloud of dust was in the process of obfuscating.
“If we don’t die of radiation poisoning first,” she said, following his gaze.
“There’s that.”
“It’ll only be an agonizing death. That’s all.”
“In the meantime, let’s get going.”
He walked eastward.
Even though the thick dust swirling in the atmosphere was obscuring the sun after a fashion, the desert was still baking hot, he noticed, as the combination of the heavy knapsack on his back, walking, and the blistering heat sapped him of energy.
Chapter 13
Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center
Sitting hunched over his desk in concentration, Mellors was back in his office poring over Coogan’s laptop’s screen, finding more intel that he knew nothing about. How had Coogan scored this intel and from where? wondered Mellors. And above all, was the intel any good?
He had to check its bona fides.
He kept encountering the term apocalypse equation in his readings. He wasn’t sure what it meant. He had never heard or seen the term used before.
Not only did he have to investigate the Orchid Organization, he wanted to know more about this apocalypse equation. There seemed to be a connection between said equation and Orchid.
In the documents he had been reading, the links between Orchid and the apocalypse equation were vague at best.
Was he on a wild-goose chase? wondered Mellors, or was he really onto something? Had Coogan uncovered some diabolical connection to the Rotterdam H5N1 experiments? Something more than the fact that the CIA had funded the experiments that had ultimately, albeit accidentally, contaminated the world’s population and wiped it out?
Mellors decided to check with the director of the National Security Agency Burton Holmes III. If anyone knew about Orchid and the apocalypse equation, it would be Holmes.
Mellors took himself to Holmes’s office located at the other end of the cement-walled hallway and rapped on the shut door.
“Come in,” said a man’s voice, which Mellors found barely audible.
Mellors opened the door.
Holmes was standing in front of his desk, his back to Mellors.
Nobody had secretaries anymore, Mellors decided. They weren’t high enough on the pay scale to be worth saving from the plague, maybe. He wondered who had decided whom to save. Of course the politicians were at the top of the short list of survivors. That went without saying.
Wielding a green plastic watering can Holmes was watering a pink begonia that sat in a plastic flowerpot on his desktop. He had some special light rigged on the table for the flower. Maybe it was ultraviolet, decided Mellors. He didn’t know much about plants. He knew they needed sunlight, which was hard to come by in a bunker buried beneath a mountain.
Turning around and spotting Mellors, Holmes set down his watering can on the tabletop and negotiated his mammoth girth around his table making for his seat.
“Yes?” said Holmes.
“I’m Scot Mellors, the deputy director of NCS.”
“You’re with the Agency?”
“Yes.”
Holmes carried his three hundred-plus pounds to his black cushioned swivel chair and plunked down with a sigh on the creaking chair behind his kneehole desk.
Mellors could have imagined it, but he thought he felt the floor vibrate underfoot.
The five-nine forty-eight-year-old Burton Holmes III considered Mellors through his rimless spectacles.
Holmes was a picture of contrasts. With his pasty-faced complexion, double chin, and balding head he looked like none other than Heinrich Himmler, while thanks to his mountainous belly he resembled Hermann Goering.
Now that they were all confined to a bunker, they would soon become as pale as Holmes, as convicts in a supermax, which was what they were in effect, if not in name, decided Mellors with a tinge of despair.
“How can I help you?” said Holmes in a low voice that Mellors had to strain to hear.
Holmes s
poke in an undertone that suggested he feared lest his room be riddled with bugs, noted Mellors. Holmes must have figured since the NSA was bugging everybody else, somebody must be bugging him as well.
Mellors surveyed Holmes’s office. Devoid of pictures or paintings, the cement walls yielded no hint of his personality unless it was that he wanted his personality kept sub-rosa, which in itself spoke volumes about Holmes. He was a man with a lot of secrets. To Holmes’s left a computer sat on a small table that abutted his desk.
“Has your agency picked up on any chatter on the Internet about Orchid?” asked Mellors.
“Your people are jamming the Internet,” said Holmes.
Mellors found himself leaning forward, head bowed, ear tilted toward Holmes’s mouth, as he strained to hear Holmes’s voice.
“I know,” said Mellors. “I mean, before the plague hit.”
Holmes glanced warmly at his begonia. “An orchid is a flower. It’s a perennial epiphytic or terrestrial monocotyledonous plant—”
“I’m talking about an organization,” Mellors cut in.
“I never heard of it,” snapped Holmes, annoyed at the interruption.
“Could you please check your records?”
Holmes wheezed. “Is this important?”
“I believe so.”
Holmes studied Mellors with his blue grey ball bearing eyes. “Why?”
“It may have something to do with the plague.”
“Is it spelled like the flower?”
“Yes.”
Holmes spun in his swivel chair toward his computer and busily tapped keys. He shook his head. “I don’t see any inordinate traffic about orchid.”
“Is your agency tracking the word?”
“No. There’s no reason to.”
“What about apocalypse equation?”
Holmes entered the words into his computer and checked its screen. He harrumphed.
“What?” said Mellors.
“It’s got a red flag on it,” said Holmes, eyes intent on the screen.
“What’s that mean?”
“It means I don’t have access to the word.”
“If you don’t have access, then who does?” asked Mellors, puzzled.
Zombie Apocalypse: The Chad Halverson Series Page 117
