Battlefield Z Series 2 (Book 1): Flyover Zombie

by Chris Lowry

  “Why don’t you tell me what you’re thinking?”

  “I think we need to get a caravan of buses or trucks and drive these people to the wall. It’s only fifteen hundred miles.”

  Sharp looked away from her and stared at the wall to the West, as if he could see through it and to the horizon.

  “Fifteen hundred miles that we don’t know anything about.”

  “They won’t come get us,” she pouted. “I don’t want anyone else to die trying.”

  “We don’t have buses.”

  “We can find them.”

  “Fuel.”

  “We’ll pick it up along the way. I’m not saying it’s going to be easy.”

  “Food.”

  “They’re running low on stores here. If we stayed, we would have to scavenge anyway. We can do it on the move.”

  Sharp shook his head.

  “It’s too risky.”

  “Staying here is risky Captain.”

  “My friends call me Sharp.”

  “Am I your friend?”

  He stared into her eyes then and wondered.

  This was the daughter of one of the most powerful men on the Council.

  She had learned at the feet of her father. It was going to be tough to tell her no.

  When he saw her eyes, he knew that it wouldn’t be tough at all. Impossible was the word that came to mind.

  “I’d like us to be friends,” he said. “We’ll need to be if we’re going to pull this off.”

  That made her smile.

  He liked how it looked on her cheeks.

  “But it would be better for you and my squad to make the trip. Scout the lay of the land, get you home. Then we can decide to send a plane or bus back to get everyone else.”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “No. You dragged me out of here last time against my will and you saw how that worked out.”

  “You caused the zombie herd plane crash?”

  She gave him a sad smile.

  “These people are dying. We don’t know how long they have left. Food is low. Morale is low. My father always told me people need hope. Hope for something better. If you give them that something, that vision of something, then they can move mountains. They have. Look at all we’ve done in the past, what we’ve overcome.”

  “And you’ll give that to them?”

  Maybe she would.

  Her little speech had inspired him, moved him. He had a little hope.

  Maybe she could make that spark up in the townspeople.

  If that was all they needed, just something to work toward and aspire too, then he and his men would protect them.

  Teach them to protect themselves.

  He blew a long breath through his lips.

  “Have you talked it over with Jacob?”

  She shook her head.

  “I wanted you on board first.”

  Smart, he thought.

  She knew she could talk him into it, and if he agreed, then the leader of the community might buy it.

  It beat waiting to die and was in line with what he had been thinking to share with her.

  She just had to lay out the facts in a way he would understand.

  He went with her so she could.

  27

  They found Jacob and shared the idea with him.

  “You should just go on your own,” he told her after she explained it.

  Sharp almost spoke up to say he agreed, but held his tongue as Pam shook her head.

  “You’re starving,” she ticked off her the tips of her fingers.

  “You’re going to have to hunt for food and scavenge. Your people are divided. If you stay out here, you’re going to die.”

  Jacob hung his head and let her words wash over him.

  They weren’t new thoughts.

  He had spent many nights thinking the same thing.

  It was a matter of time, and he wasn’t sure if he could watch his constituents starve to death.

  “We might starve,” he agreed. “Or we might find enough to keep going. But out there, we don’t know what to expect. In here, some of us might die. But out there, some of us will die.”

  He glared at her then, not full of blame, but full of anger at her making him make the choice.

  “If I talk us all into going, can you guarantee our safety?”

  “Can you do the same if you stay?” she said. “These people, your people, need you to lead them across the desert.”

  “Do I look like fucking Moses to you Pam?”

  “Watch your language,” Sharp snapped.

  “Sorry Captain, but what the fuck are you going to do about it?”

  Sharp pulled his sidearm and clicked the safety off.

  “Whoa, whoa Captain,” Pam moved between the solider and the politician. “Don’t you think that’s a bit extreme?”

  Sharp raised his pistol and fired.

  Jacob flinched and collapsed on the ground.

  “Jesus!” he screamed.

  Pam covered her ears and stared at the soldier, a tiny trickle of smoke lifting out of the barrel of his gun and trailing across his face.

  “You shot him?”

  “No,” the Captain corrected. “I shot a zombie.”

  He indicated a point past the mewling politico and Pam stared.

  One of the hippies, a girl she had never met lay sprawled on the road.

  Her gray skin was pasty, and even from here Pam could see two long jagged lines down her wrists.

  Another suicide.

  Damn it, she shuddered.

  Didn’t these people realize how stupid suicide was inside the compound.

  Did they even know how Z were made?

  Where they came from?

  Surely no one left alive was that stupid.

  Killing yourself was selfish, but doing it now

  was almost murder.

  A dead body turned Z and could kill or infect dozens more.

  It was a biological time bomb, and she hated it.

  Jacob picked himself up off the ground and ran a finger across his left ear.

  “I felt it!” he shouted. “I felt the bullet whiz my ear.”

  Sharp shook his head.

  “You heard it, yeah.”

  “See Jacob,” Pam pointed. “You can’t stay here. I don’t want you to stay here.”

  “We were fine until you came along.”

  “Starving. Political dissent. You were one missed meal away from being Zombie food.”

  “Captain,” Pam chided.

  But she agreed with him.

  So, did Jacob, even if he wouldn’t put voice to the words.

  “The walls you built are strong,” she said to him. “You did a good job holding out until help arrived. This is help. We are your help.”

  Jacob shook his head.

  “You’re asking me to lose more people.”

  “I’m asking you to save as many as you can.”

  She let him think about that.

  Pam could outline all the scenarios where staying here went wrong, but she suspected that those visions haunted his dreams at night, and maybe took up more than a few of his waking hours.

  He could respond with all the things that could go wrong on a trip to the West.

  This caravan was ill conceived, and ill outfitted for a long journey.

  But until they found communications, it was the only way to reach help.

  Her father would know what to do.

  He would bully everyone onto the buses, send out a scout party for fuel and food, maybe more than one scout party to determine which way was most clear.

  But he wasn’t here. She was.

  “You’re coming with us,” she told him. “We’ll meet with your people tonight and come up with a plan.”

  “We’re not. We can’t.”

  Sharp put his hand on the weapon at his hip and waited.

  Pam gave him a slight shake of her head to warn him off. She moved to sit beside Jacob on
the porch.

  “I know it’s a lot to take in,” she reached a tentative hand and placed it on his shoulder.

  “I show up, you learn there’s more out there but no one is coming to save you. Then these guys show up. You’ve lost people.”

  Jacob put his face in his hands and sighed.

  “I’m responsible for their safety,” he said through his fingers. “I can’t guarantee that out there.”

  Pam looked at the dead hippie body up the street.

  He noticed and followed her gaze.

  “You can’t guarantee that in here either.”

  28

  “It’s not going to be safe out there boys.”

  Mickey moved around the narrow confines of a long room with racks on both walls.

  There were hundreds of rifles, shotguns and pistols lining the space.

  “I’m sure we’ll find out first hand just how dangerous it is,” he passed out weapons to the eight men in the room with him.

  They looked hard, dirty, roughhewn features with stone expressions that watched him as he explained their mission.

  “We’re going in a little caravan across the country and I ain’t afraid to tell you, this ain’t no vacation.”

  He selected a Vietnam Era M-16 and checked the action on it, dusted the magazine on his leg.

  “But there’s rewards waiting when we come back.”

  “You told us hard work was its own reward,” one of the men said in a gravel laced voice.

  He was as wide as he was tall, a solid slap of beef in a leather duster with squinty eyes and a lump of a nose.

  He told everyone his name was Murdock, and had said that lie for so long that he even believed it himself.

  But Murdock was the name of the first man he killed back when he lived in Boston and worked for another Irish man.

  There had been dozens since, each action building on his reputation, a tale that landed him in Los Angeles and under the tutelage of young Mickey.

  Then the zombies.

  He didn’t count them on his mental kill list, but there were hundreds he could account for, including a woman who said she loved him.

  Mickey smiled at him.

  “Murdock,” he picked up a burnished .45 off the bench and passed it to him. “If I were to tell you that our ship has come in, would you plaster a smile on your pretty face.”

  “I don’t know Mickey, I get seasick sometimes.”

  “That’s the spirt. Boys, what we have in front of us is a genuine opportunity where our actions earn recognition.”

  “I’ve done plenty that people recognize.”

  “I know you have Murdock and that’s why I need your skills with me. We’re going to be a couple of knights riding to rescue a lady in distress.”

  “You lost me.”

  “We’ve got us a mission boys. The big man himself is sending us on a joy ride to rescue his daughter and when we get back with her, he’s giving us the keys to the kingdom.”

  He let that sink in while he slid magazines into an ammo pouch and slung it over his shoulder.

  “You’re saying we’re going out there?”

  “Over the wall.”

  “Out there with the zombies?”

  “Yeah Murdock there’s zombies out there. There’s also a treasure in the form of Ballantine’s daughter. We save her and we’re set for life.”

  Murdock mulled it over in his head.

  His mind was as lumpy as his features from a few knocks on it.

  “But aren’t all the zombies out there?”

  Mickey stopped loading up his pouch.

  “You’re afraid of some walking dead people?”

  Murdock shrugged.

  “Afraid ain’t the right word Mickey. Dead people are supposed to stay dead. We got most of the ones on this side of the wall, but out there? What are they? Millions of them.”

  “Yeah, probably,” Mickey finished up one pouch and threw it into the arms of one of his men.

  He started on another.

  “But we’re smarter than the Z’s boys. And we’ve got each other. I looked at a map and it’s a two-day drive to where she might be, and a two-day drive back. Add an extra day or two for trouble on a just in case basis and you’re looking at a week to do this rescue.”

  “A million zombies in a week.” Murdock grumbled.

  Mickey glared at him, then set his face in a determined grin.

  “We’re not going to find all the zombies. In fact, we’re going to move so fast we blow right past most of them. We’re just going to pop out, grab her safe, and pop back in.”

  “That easy.”

  “It’s simple. Not easy. We keep it simple, we watch each other’s backs and we stay safe.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  Murdock glanced around at the other men.

  A couple nodded their heads in a show of support.

  “You don’t have to like it,” Mickey stopped loading a ruck and faced the wide man who worked for him.

  “What’s the reward?”

  There it was.

  Mickey knew the man was loyal so long as the police weren’t involved.

  But this whole act was an angle for them to find out what waited for them when they returned.

  Murdock just wanted a larger slice of the pie and he wanted to know what flavor he was getting.

  Mickey took a step closer and said in a low voice.

  “You’re looking at the next member of the Council Murdock. You want to be on that side?”

  Murdock let a large smile break across his wide face.

  “Council huh?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why didn’t you just say so?” he turned to the other men in the group. “Those are the keys to the kingdom. We can fight a few zombies for that.”

  The men agreed, and they pitched in to finish kitting up.

  Mickey had two SUV’s waiting to carry them to the wall and beyond. He had planned for Murdock to be in one, the man was a de facto leader in his organization.

  But the little show in the storage room made him reconsider.

  “Murdock,” he said. “You’re riding with me.”

  29

  Jacob had three other townspeople with him and Sharp brought in Javi and Bear, but they could tell Pam was in charge.

  She had assumed the role with practiced ease like some alpha over a pack, and the others allowed her to do it.

  It was the dynamics of her personality, along with some intangible way she carried herself.

  Confidence was part of it, but it was also decisiveness.

  Jacob bet she had been called bossy a lot as a kid growing up, and chided himself for thinking it now.

  Bossy boys were called natural born leaders, and that’s just what Pam Ballantine was.

  A natural born leader.

  He let his eyes drift to Sharp.

  The soldier watched Pam with hooded eyes, studying her while she moved.

  He was a leader by rank, but his men seemed to respect him.

  Jacob had heard that he killed two of them once they were bitten by the Z.

  That took a certain kind of guts, and he wasn’t sure if he had those.

  He was a leader by default, and he knew it.

  The people looked up to him because of his role on the City Council, and he assumed the mantle because they needed it.

  It had worked so far. Or worked out, if he thought about it.

  But he knew it couldn’t last.

  The two factions had been at each other’s throats since he put up the fortress walls.