Dead and Dead Again: Kansas City Quarantine

by Dalton Wolf

  “You Missourians are always pulling that out,” Joel complained. “It’s not really as clever as you think it is.”

  “What have you Kansans got?” Tripper snapped back. “Sunflowers? Now that’s clever. At least we’ve got a story to go with ours, one that changes with every person who tells it.”

  “Enough,” Calvin snapped. “Let’s put the border war on hold for a while.”

  “Ok, Calvin,” Joel agreed.

  “Whatever,” Tripper grumbled.

  The border war between Kansas and Missouri had started long before the American Civil War and even though lives were rarely being lost, the history was too deeply ingrained within the blood of citizens on both sides to ever truly fade away.

  “Joel, Sarah, every one of these random Shufflers you take down during your practice may be a life spared later. And you need to be ready to hit moving targets.”

  “But what if there’s a cure for this some time? Shouldn’t we try to save lives overall?” Athena asked.

  “We can’t look that far ahead. Maybe you’re right. I’d hate to kill people who can be cured. But this isn’t a movie. Maybe they’re really not…zombies. Maybe the virus is just taking on that appearance. But we can’t let them eat us, either. Let’s make sure the guns work and keep our paths and our bases clear. But let’s not kill them unless we have to, just in case. Just…pick a side and let’s find you some targets.” These last words were delivered in a raspy whisper as he contemplated their meaning—let’s kill some people.

  “I’ve got the left side,” Sarah said as if she were calling shotgun on movie night.

  “I guess I’ll take the right, then,” Joel said in a crazy, overdone clown voice.

  Several of the others laughed and Felicia squeezed his leg in affection. The vehicle Hephaestus had designed and built was an extended and lifted, armored Humvee with left front (behind the driver) and right rear gun turrets. Each turret had a 350 degree lateral firing arc, allowing the pair of gunners to cover each other. It also had a two-hundred-and-fifty degree vertical arc so it could be quickly flipped from one side to the other to clear hills, balconies, streets, and possibly even sewers on any side of the vehicle. In a ridiculous twist of fate, this type of mission was exactly how Hephaestus had intended it to be used when he had first showed Calvin the design. Of course, that was supposed to be for make-believe. This was all too real.

  “There,” Scooter pointed. “Straight ahead and on both sides, take them down.”

  Both guns set to and they could see a line of shiny darts jetting out at the stalkers ahead. All of the targets went down quickly as each gunner adjusted to the sights. Sarah brought hers on target first, to Joel’s shame as the resident FPS champion of the group. Scooter was very impressed, in every way. The guns let out only a barely noticeable hiss of expended air and along with the quiet metallic clink-shook of the nails being loaded and then fired down the barrel coupled with a uniquely doubled-up exhaust muffler system, it was no wonder they weren’t drawing much attention. The vehicle was silent. The guns were even more hushed. Dealing out death to the already dead was as peaceful as simply driving down the roadway. The armor would keep them safe from most surprises. Quinn’s vehicle was pretty quiet as well due to the snorkels used for intake and exhaust and the extra muffling system he’d made and installed himself.

  I could get used to this, he thought. Then chastised himself for getting comfortable. No one is safe. Not until this thing is cured…or at least countered.

  Most of these corpses were moving faster than the dead they had encountered so far. A group of five slavering feeders charged the vehicles in a pack, but the two ‘gunners’ took them down as Tripper swerved to give them both a line-of-fire.

  “Must be fresher kills,” Calvin mused to the others.

  “Or the virus is mutating,” Athena suggested.

  “You noticed it too?” he asked.

  “Of course,” she sounded insulted.

  “I didn’t notice,” Tripper said. “What are we noticing?”

  “These are moving faster than the others.”

  “Oh, that. I noticed that. Just thought it was obvious,” he lied.

  “We’ll inform the doc when we get back,” Calvin told them, ignoring Tripper. “Keep track of everything so we can use it in the future. We’ll debrief after each foray.”

  “Listen to you, Captain Leader Guy,” Athena joked.

  “Well doesn’t it sound like something we should do?” he snapped, annoyed.

  “Absolutely, Captain Leader Guy,” Trip quipped and the others laughed.

  “Ok. Some walk faster than others,” Athena listed off the first thing they’d learned on this mission—zombie related, anyway.

  “And they seem to get a burst of energy right after feeding,” Scaggs added.

  “Really?”

  “Oh yeah. Me and FeFe saw it in a gang of biters.”

  “You didn’t mention that before,” Gus admonished her.

  “There…hasn’t really been time. I didn’t even remember ‘til just now. They had us surrounded and were moving really slowly, but as soon as they bit into live flesh—not ours, thankfully—they got stronger and faster, overpowering the guys in the group where before they were just staggering mannequins likes most of the rest we’ve seen.

  “But it only seemed to last for ten or fifteen minutes,” Felicia added.

  “Yeah,” Scaggs agreed. “If that much. Then they were shufflers again.”

  “That’s very good to know,” Calvin noted. “Thanks, girls.”

  Continuing on, they tried to recall anything anyone had noticed or been told by one of the others while each person kept at least one eye on the street. The ride continued without incident until Scooter called out.

  “There’s the tower over to the right, Scaggs,” he pointed out his window and Joanne turned and looked into the distance at the big, triangular, rust-red thousand-foot tower rising from the suburban countryside like a redneck Eiffel Tower.

  “You sure you’re ready to climb that?” Gus asked her.

  “You bet. Looks fun.”

  The others simply shook their heads again in wonder. The convoy reached 31st street safely, but Sarah began to get an uneasy feeling.

  “Stop here, Trip,” she ordered when they entered the center of the intersection.

  “You see something, baby?”

  Sarah remained silent.

  “Babe?” he asked again.

  “Just a minute,” she shushed him.

  They waited for several minutes, all eyes and ears straining in every direction for whatever had spooked her. But there were only a few slowly stumbling zombies bouncing around in the shadowy doorways of the buildings or stuck inside the structures, rebounding from thick display windows, trying to get out.

  “Sorry,” Sarah announced at last. “There was something…never mind.” She shook her head clear.

  “That’s ok, Sarah,” Calvin assured her. “Better safe than sorry. And after five years of you saving our asses in-game and keeping us from getting caught smoking with your freaky female intuition, I’ve learned to trust your instincts about danger.”

  “Well it’s ok now. Not sure what that was about,” she said with a shrug.

  “Ok, Trip. Take us to the tower,” Scooter pointed to the tower.

  “To the Tower!” Trip shouted dramatically.

  “To the Tower!” Gus and Scaggs echoed.

  Scooter hung his head. “Gimme a break,” he complained bitterly.

  The tower base appeared before them, but it was not clear. Trip brought the Hedgehog to a slow crawl when they saw the small roiling mass of dead covering the street in front of the building. He looked at Scooter. “Think we should go around the block?”

  “I doubt it would do any good—”

  “—other than to attract the attention of all the biters on the other three sides of the tower,” Scaggs interjected semi-sarcastically.

  “Right,” Scooter agreed. �
�Where do you need to be?” he asked Gus.

  “Just back it up a few blocks,” Gus replied with a grunt, pulling his harness on.

  “I’m already moving,” Quinn informed Trip over the mic so he could back safely.

  “Cool,” Trip put the Hog in reverse and the vehicles backed up a block-and-a-half.

  “You ready?” Gus asked Scaggs, checking her harness and the cords to the equipment bag that would be dangling beneath him as he climbed.

  “Ready sir!” she saluted.

  Her only job was to watch the bag. She had to keep it free from entanglement, keep it from swaying back and forth too much in certain areas, and maybe occasionally she would need to lift it up so he could strap it to the tower and give himself a rest. This was a fifty pound bag compared to the thirty pound load he regularly carried. He had once carried an ancient replacement filament that had put the total weight to seventy and had regretted it the next day. But that was only a 600 ft. tower, not a thousand. For this trip most of the weight was in the charging system and batteries for the camera with the solar panels and miniature wind turbine actually weighing very little. But the wind had picked up. He didn’t bother telling anyone just how worried he was about the climb. It needed to be done and he was the only one who could do it.

  “Ok, we need to get onto the top of the ambulance,” he told the actress. The pair exited the Hedgehog and ran back to the Ambulance. Scaggs instantly climbed the hood, narrowly avoiding getting her harness caught on the snorkel. Gus walked over to the driver side and leaned close to the window. Athena jumped out and dropped into a crouch, aiming at two zombies that had appeared half-a-block behind them, but Trip turned the Hedgehog slightly again so Sarah and Joel could shoot them quietly with the air guns.

  “No sense drawing any attention,” he quipped over the com, with a smile for Athena, who nodded her thanks.

  Gus leaned in through the tiny block window to talk to Quinn, his thin face an emotionless mask.

  “Ok. You see that flat part of the brick building right at the far side of the tower?” he pointed to a low overhanging roof next to a stretch of high picture windows.

  “The part right before you get to the area that has another few stories?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ok. I see it.”

  “Well, there’s a big iron drainage pipe there, just next to all the windows. All you have to do is get us up against the building there, and we’ll climb the pipe.”

  “But the tower ladder is on the other side, Sweetie,” Scaggs noted, frowning down at him from the roof, her shiny auburn hair hanging down and perfectly framing her beautiful, heart-shaped face. His breath caught in his chest, but eventually he continued.

  “There’s…there’s a sort of walkway we can use to get to it. This saves us having to clear out the parking in the back. We’d have to find a way to keep it clear long enough to finish the job. I used to come this way before it was legal, when I was sneaking in. Trust me, this is where we need to be,” he beamed confidence.

  “Hmm, and this way we only have to clear enough space for this vehicle so you can shimmy up the drain pipe instead of us having to clear a massive perimeter so you can waltz in the front door…” Quinn ran the plan through his already over-taxed brain.

  “Right,” Gus answered, climbing onto the roof of the ambulance.

  “Great. Hey! No stomping around up there,” Quinn ‘yelled’ as quietly as he could.

  Gus laughed and Scaggs stifled a giggle, though it may have all been nerves as they were now the only ones outside without protection…other than light chain mail armor. Gus had worried about that earlier, but this chain mail weighed so little he hardly noticed. Scaggs seemed to have little difficulty with hers as well, but things might be different several hundred feet in the air with a decent wind. Still, he’d asked the man for the lightest coats and these seemed to fit the bill. He sure as hell wasn’t going out there without armor. The pair had discussed it with Hef and Calvin; if they could only climb half the tower before fatigue set in, then that’s all they would climb.

  “Ok, here we go,” Tripper announced with some trepidation.

  “Just get up on the sidewalk and try to force them away,” Scooter told him.

  Trip steered onto the left side and up onto the sidewalk.

  “You know there’s a sign there, right?” he warned Calvin.

  “Run it down. I’ve done that in seven cars in the winter time; nothing to it.”

  “Ok,” Trip said with even more uncertainty.

  “But, do it slowly,” Scooter added.

  “I am doing it slowly,” Tripper grumbled in exasperation.

  “Stay at this speed here,” Scooter said and they hit the first few Shufflers, as everyone was starting to call the slow, mostly unwounded upright walkers, the wounded ones being called Gimps. Most of the Shufflers became instant road fill, but a few of the more active ones, Joggers and Grabbers as Trip named them in his mind, tried to climb the hood. Sarah immediately turned their heads into pin-cushions.

  “Nice shooting, Honey,” Tripper praised her. “Way to keep the Grabbers away.”

  “Almost there,” Scooter warned.

  “That street sign is right in front of us, man,” Trip huffed.

  The vehicle hit the sign and nearly stopped, but Tripper hit the accelerator and pushed it over. As he advanced slowly a heavy metal scraping screeched from the undercarriage and Trip stopped as zombies further away were now looking at them and edging closer.

  “Forget it, just go,” Scooter ordered. He hadn’t expected the sign to be so unyielding. Tripper hit the gas, and there was a terrible lurching shriek of metal-on-metal followed by a clunk that no wanted to think about. Grass, part of Calvin’s mind reminded him. Those signs I hit were all imbedded in the grass. These are in concrete. Why didn’t I remember that before I told him to do this? There was no answer. He wasn’t sure whether to be happy about that or not. “Damn, that was stupid,” he mumbled, forgetting about the little mic resting on his cheek.

  “Not really,” Athena argued. “You’re parallel with the building only a few inches away and you’re clearing a nice little path for us. It looks good from back here…except for the sign sticking up your ass thing.”

  “We may have ripped the entire undercarriage from Hef’s toy.”

  “That would definitely be bad,” Athena agreed. “But I’m sure Hef built it better than that. He would have designed it for mountain climbing. We should be able to skid across boulders and even roll over a few times and keep going. A few dead guys and a rusty old pole shouldn’t kill it.”

  “You’re right,” Calvin agreed. “Unless he wasn’t finished with it, yet.”

  “If it wasn’t done, he would have told us,” Tripper guaranteed the others with confidence. But talking with his hands caused him to accidentally pull too far away from the building and one of the dead slid in between the vehicle and the wall of the building. When he steered back, the Shuffler was crushed between car and wall and smeared like peanut butter under a knife, leaving a dark, gory stain on the wall, and worse, on the windows and body of the vehicle.

  “Sorry about that,” he apologized to whomever was retching in the back.

  “You saying that to the zombie you just turned into a hamburger patty or to us for having to watch?” Athena asked while making disgusted retching sounds.

  “Ew, gross! There’s an eye looking at me,” Felicia laughed uneasily. “I think we’re going to have to keep track of nearby car washes.” Though laughing, her pale features suggested she was close to losing her breakfast. The unfortunate girl had pressed her face to the window to examine the building, putting the former man’s right before her eyes as the head popped and she was now unable to rip her fascinated gaze from the solitary eye that slid slowly down the window within a thick stream of yellowish mucus.

  “Ok, we’re here, hold up,” Gus announced. The ambulance pulled in right behind the Hedgehog and paused for a minute as the two climber
s reached out and scurried up the big pipe and out of sight. “It’s going to take me about forty minutes to get up there.”

  “We’ll drive around the block a few times to make sure you get going and that everything is going ok,” Calvin suggested.

  “You mean to be sure I’m not freaking out,” Scaggs disputed.

  “That too. And then we’ll head towards Boomer and Brick.”

  Tripper drove around the corner while Scooter watched the pair progressing across what looked like a corrugated tin roof that was erected over pipes and wiring harnesses, all of which ran under the tower into a shack in the central area.

  The lumpy metal roof made a nice little walkway and they were quickly in position. Gus used a key to open the protective gate to the ladder, swinging it noisily away. Pulling himself up first, he then nodded for her to climb up behind. He handed her the keys and after a deep breath for courage, she pulled the gate closed and locked it. Looking up, she realized that it seemed a lot higher up close. No turning back now, girl.

  “Ok, they’re in position,” Scooter informed Tripper.

  “You can go one block south and run a bigger block, Scoot,” Gus said. “I can’t see any biters on the next block over there, just around the tower here.”

  “I wonder if there are people in there,” Scooter asked. “Let’s make a pass by the windows again. Far side of the street,” he ordered Trip.

  Trip spun the wheel the big Hummer exhibited a much tighter turn radius than anyone had believed possible Their first trip through had pulled all of the zombies to the south side of the street, next to the building, allowing them to now pass unhindered in the north lane. Nothing, living or dead, watched them through the clear glass of the station.

  “I think we should go get the Hedgehog checked by Hef,” Athena suggested.

  “You know, you’re probably right, Athena,” Calvin agreed. “Wait. Why do you say that? Do you see something?” he asked in concern.

  “It’s…ugh.” She gagged.

  “It’s hard to tell with the zombie guts dripping off,” Quinn answered for her.

  “I didn’t think about that. Might need mud flaps for this thing, too,” Trip suggested. “Goo flaps? Dead flaps? Blood flaps?” he tried to find the right name. “Yeah, that’s it. Blood flaps.”