“Jesus,” Tara said, hugging me tight, “You guys are like superheroes and shit! You know all sorts of things that I can’t even imagine how to do.”
I kissed her and smiled, “It’s just the world we live in. There isn’t really much to do for the most part, so we train and read and study and stuff. Sam and Tony and my mom have been teaching me a lot since all this shit went down. It’s actually been pretty dull for a while, until the other night, that is.”
She leaned against me and sighed, “I wish it still was. This has been a fucked up couple of days.”
I nodded.
“Is it going to get better?” She asked. There was this quality in her voice, I’m not sure what. But she almost sounded like a child.
“I don’t know, Tara,” I admitted, “Hell, I feel like I’m just trying to keep up. I think Sam has a plan, though. Or an idea of how to make a plan, at least.”
She began to cry all of a sudden. I didn’t know what to do, or if I even should, so I just let her cling to me and cry.
Finally after a couple of minutes, she looked up with bleary eyes, “I’m sorry… it’s just I guess I miss my folks… I miss my friends and I miss normal…”
“It’s okay,” I said, “Nothing wrong with that. It’s natural.”
She buried her face in my chest again, “But you guys… Tony and Sam and your mom… all seem to be so sure of yourselves and able to handle anything. Even you. I’m two years older than you and yet watching you, I feel like a little girl who’s looking in awe at a seasoned man.”
I laughed, “I’m just lucky to have well trained military types around. I’m not special, not a hero and not even that bright. Just an average guy trying to survive. Hell, if the world was still normal, a girl like you wouldn’t even look in my direction.”
She pulled back, “Don’t be so sure. And anyway, what does it matter? I’m looking now and I like what I see. And don’t you dare sell yourself short. You’re the farthest thing from an average guy I’ve ever seen. I’m very glad you guys came to our rescue yesterday.”
“Andy!” Tony called out, “There’s no contact with Sam. Complete radio silence.”
My stomach dropped and I felt Tara squeeze me tighter, “Maybe they’re inside a bunker or something.”
Tony frowned, “Somebody should be monitoring.”
“Great,” I grumbled, “so now what?”
“We keep going,” Tony said, “Follow the plan and attempt to make contact regularly.”
I sighed, “Okay… but I think we should raise sail. Save on fuel. Wind is fair and blowing about fifteen knots out of the northeast. Can you guys sail that boat as is?”
Tony and Brenda exchanged glances and I saw Tony frown, “It should be easy enough… but I’m not feeling that great and as things are now, it’s easier for Brenda to take the wheel if she has to. Besides, we’re burning less than half a gallon an hour.”
“Fuck…” I muttered, “Okay then.”
I went and sat at the wheel and Tara came and sat on my lap, wrapping her arms around my neck and smiling at me. Her face was still wet with tears, “You okay?”
I shrugged and smiled at her, “Maybe I should ask you that.”
“Better,” She said with a smile, “Thanks. Sorry I blubbered back there… I guess sometimes all this shit just… gets to me.”
“I don’t mind,” I said, “I’m always here if you want to talk or anything.”
“You’re awesome, Andy,” She said, her blue eyes sparkling, “And what I want now I can’t have… you need to stay focused.”
I narrowed my eyes at her and it took me a second to realize what she meant. My stupid body betrayed me and I felt the heat rising out of my collar like a wave. Tara giggled at me.
“Look who’s blushing!” she teased.
“Better be nice to the captain,” I said sternly, “You might get barnacle scraping detail. And the water is only about seventy right now.”
“Oh, so you’re the captain now?” She asked, licking her lips and kissing me, “Do you have a log Mister Captain, sir?”
“You keep kissing me like that and I will,” I said, feeling another wave of heat rising.
The radio chose just that moment to crackle.
“Hey you guys,” It was Brenda. Now that the swashbuckling stuff was over, our two boats were about fifty feet apart and it was easier to talk over the VHF, “do you hear that?”
Tara and I exchanged glances and she picked up the microphone and thumbed the switch, “hear what? All we hear is engine right now.”
A pause, “Not sure. But as we get closer to the Skyway, it seems like I’m hearing something.”
I helped Tara to her feet and we both went forward to the bowsprit. The big platform was large enough for us both to stand on. Up here, far from the diesel engine, the only sounds were that of the wind, waves slapping the hull and… and…
“What’s that dull sort of roaring,” Tara asked.
It was low and barely audible but I distinctly heard it. Over on Sexual Heeling’s bow, clinging to the forestay was Brenda pointing to the huge Sunshine skyway suspension bridge which by now was only about a mile away.
“Oh!” Tara said, “That’s normal. Whenever you get close to the bridge by water, you can hear the rumble of vehicles passing up on it.”
“Yeah…” Brenda said, “But there aren’t any vehicles on it. I mean, there’s no bridge traffic anymore. There shouldn’t be anything on it. Remember, when the shit hit the fan, the county closed the bridge and the cops set up roadblocks at either end to try and control traffic.”
It was a puzzle and it was Tara who figured it out. She looked at the bridge, looked at me and her eyes went wide, “There shouldn’t be any noise up there… which means that somebody who shouldn’t be is up on that bridge and making a lot of racket.”
“Run aft and bring me the binocs,” I said, a cold lump forming in my gut, “They’re in the binnacle storage locker.”
Tara dashed aft and I kept looking up, but couldn’t see much from far away. The huge suspension bridge was an optical illusion. It was so tall and huge that you felt like you were much closer to it than you really were.
Tara appeared at my shoulder and handed me the field glasses. I put them to my eyes, adjusted the focus and peered up at the highway deck suspended one hundred and sixty feet over the water. At first I didn’t see anything, but some movement caught my eye. There were men lined up along the guardrail in the center of the bridge. And even though I couldn’t really see much detail in their faces, I could see that each of them held long thin objects up near their heads… and then I saw them train what could only be rifle barrels at us.
“Oh shit…” I breathed, “The bikers!”
Chapter 21
From the personal journal of Samuel R. Decker
I don’t mind admitting that when that stairwell door closed behind me and I was engulfed in an almost palpable darkness… I was more than a little ill at ease. My guts were doing a butterfly routine. I was worried for me, of course… but I was also worried about my teammates.
What’s the number one rule of horror movies?
Easy – you never split up.
Yeah, I know this wasn’t a horror movie, but it was pretty damned close. What could be more horrific than your entire way of life not to mention nine out of every ten human beings transforming into ravenous flesh eating monsters?
Being alone in such a world. Leaving your friends and family to fend for themselves while billions of the undead shambled toward you all, their dead eyes alive with ghoulish hunger.
“Fuck…” I moaned.
Andrea could take care of herself. Carl… well, Carl had a pretty good head on his shoulders and Andrea could take care of him. Besides, the only G’s we’d seen since we’d gotten here were dead G’s.
I don’t know why that thought didn’t make me feel better. I guess it was the unknown… and something else. Something that had been nagging at my mind since we arrived
on base.
As I slowly and silently climbed the metal steps toward the third floor, shining my LED flashlight ahead of me and finding only the occasional zombie body – truly dead zombies, I mean – the tiny whispering of unease finally got loud enough for me to realize what had been bothering me for the past hour or so.
Andrea and Carl had kind of touched on it outside. They’d felt like we were being watched, or that there was this sort of sinister feeling of expectation in the air. And now it had a concrete question behind it.
Why hadn’t we seen any zombies?
Again, you’d think that the lack of danger would make you feel better, but not in this case. Because there should be zombies here. There should be thousands of them.
The entire city of Tampa and its surrounding suburbs had been gobbled alive by the undead. Which meant that a large majority of their victims had joined their ranks.
So where were they all?
Had they moved on?
Military base’s had very quickly been overrun in the early days of the apocalypse. It just stood to reason. People flocked to them for protection. This meant more people on base, many of whom were infected but didn’t say anything. Then these later turned, only adding to the chaos from within as wave after wave of ghouls attacked from without.
As far as anyone knew, certainly as far as I knew, zombies didn’t migrate much. They were attracted by sound and movement, but when there was nothing for them to do, they often simply went into standby mode. They’d just stand around in clumps doing nothing.
Yeah, there had been hordes that roamed over the land, and probably still did. Yet the odd behavior of the ghoul was that it would relentlessly pursue its prey so long as there was stimulus. When the stimulus was gone, they’d simply pause for the most part. Sometimes they’d move on, but without some impetus to do so, why would a zombie decide to up and leave Tampa and head to Miami or Orlando or even Albuquerque?
It was just odd. I don’t know why, but I was more uneasy with the total lack of activity on the part of the walking dead then if we’d run into a horde of two-thousand of them here.
I got to the third floor door and put my ear to it, listening. I didn’t hear even the tiniest of sounds, so I slung my AK and pulled my Desert Eagle from the holster on my right hip. I quickly checked the load and that the silencer was in place and eased the door open.
The third floor was laid out exactly like the first. A U-shaped hallway with offices on the outside of the building and more offices and conference rooms taking up the center. This had the unfortunate effect of making the place almost as dark as the stairs, except for the fact that a few doors were open and light filtered in from the windows in the rooms beyond.
There were bodies lying in the hallway, although not many. I didn’t know what to make of that exactly, so I began searching methodically.
The third office I entered was that of Lieutenant general Francis Pagent, commander of MARCENT, the Marine Corps Forces Central Command unit assigned to MacDill. The office had been trashed, but in the top drawer of the desk, I found two things of special interest.
First was what appeared to be a backup external hard drive. There was no label on it, but I slipped it into my pack all the same. One never knew.
The second was one of those file folders with the flap that you held closed with an elastic snapped around a button. The folder was fairly thick and in it were some DVD’s and a bound report titled “Reanimation study, Medical Section” by an army doctor named Major Tasha Williams.
I whistled softly and slid this carefully into my pack too.
“The things one finds just lying about,” I muttered.
I stepped out into the hallway again and made my way toward the rear of the building. Interestingly, the silence in here was even greater than outside. At least outside there were the sounds of the occasional bird and insects.
In the building, the silence was sort of… closer. More confined. It was somehow more comforting, which is strange to consider. Probably some early evolutionary instinct from my amygdala. That lizard brain part of our brains – the part that fears being in the open because of the cave lion and seeks the closeness of the cave.
That’s why when I heard the sound of the doorway to the rear stairs click closed, it sent a shock of iciness up my spine.
I stood in place taking shallow breaths and listened while my mind ran through the possibilities.
Had that been Andrea?
No – she was meeting me on the second floor.
Had she and Carl split up?
No – why would they?
Was somebody… or something… up here with me?
Definitely.
I heard nothing for a long minute. If it had been zombies, it might have only been one. Either it had been in the stairs and was now in the hallway with me around the corner, or it had been in the hallway and was now in the stairs.
Either way, the time for deliberation was over. I crept forward silently until I reached the corner where the hall turned right. There was a decent amount of light here coming through an open rear office door, and I simply stepped out into the bend in the hallway with my .44 trained ahead of me, ready to put a bullet into the first diseased brain I saw.
Nothing.
The hall was empty. Entirely empty, too, which was sort of strange in and of itself. So far I’d seen the occasional body, either dead zombie or a human that had been eaten enough that it couldn’t reanimate.
Something caught my eye. Movement from the office whose door stood open beside me.
I turned quickly and peered inside. The room was empty.
Then what the hell did…?
The movement wasn’t from inside. There was movement outside. I rushed to the window and looked down and suddenly wished I hadn’t.
“Zombies,” I whispered as that icy tingling up my spine transformed itself into a fist that clamped down around my guts.
There were hundreds of them. A horde, all moving steadily toward the rear of the building. Like a wave of gray, they crashed up against the structure below, pressing in on each other and…
…and there was a crash from below as the rear door was pushed in or broken through.
“Shit…” I cursed as I grabbed my radio, “Green, this is red. Come in green.”
Only static.
“Silver, this is red, do you read?”
No answer.
I knew true fear then. Not fear for my own life that was rare. I’m not saying I don’t experience self-motivated fear, but when you’ve spent your adult life fighting and training, most of the irrational fear inherent in the human animal is conquered.
After a few battles, you realize it’s not as scary as you thought the first time. You begin to understand that your training and your focus on doing the job correctly lowers the odds against you.
Your personal fear is replaced with confidence. It doesn’t go away completely, but you learn to master it rather than letting fear be your master.
Yet fear for others, especially those you love, is a harder thing to master. You can ignore it and control it, but that stomach churning fright that something bad might happen to someone you care for, especially if you aren’t there to protect them, is an ugly thing indeed.
The radio silence was a bad sign, no matter how you examined it. Either Andrea or Carl couldn’t answer because they were dead or because they were too busy with ghouls.
I ran back out into the hallway and turned left, bolting to the other side of the building and peering around the corner to the last section I hadn’t examined yet. It was the same. Just a few bodies strewn about and nothing more.
I ran for the stairs I’d come up originally and threw open the door. No sound.
The stink bags hadn’t made it this far yet, but they certainly would be pouring into the first floor and might be in the rear stairwell by now.
And what about the sound I’d heard? What about the closing of the rear door? That seemed like an odd behav
ior for a zombie. It was almost… stealthy.
I ran down the stairs and threw open the door to the second floor. It opened into a large room that took up most of the floor. There was a cubicle city that stretched from my stairs to the rear stairs. The entire floor was open except for a couple of rooms near the rear and probably on my side too. It was surprisingly bright, so it was easy for me to see Carl step through the door and hold it open. In the darkness beyond, I saw a couple of muzzle flashes and heard the echoing booming report of Andrea’s Glock.
That would get the zombies attention.
“Carl!” I said loud enough for the man to hear me from over a hundred feet away.
“Sam!” He said, relief evident in his voice, “We’ve got a couple of stiffs in the stairs.”
The man seemed a bit freaked, even from far away. As I jogged over to him I thought that was strange. He’d seen a lot more zombie action than this. Just the day before, in fact.
“Not anymore,” Andrea said with a grin as she stepped out of the stairwell.
“Why didn’t you guys answer the radio?” I asked as I came up.
“We were being quiet,” Carl said, “I had it shut off while we were in the stairs. We did find some good info.”
“Great,” I said, “But we’ve got a problem.”
They exchanged a look.
“There’s a horde of ghouls outside and they’ve already broken into the first floor,” I said.
“Fuck…” Carl dragged out the curse in a moan.
“A munch?” Andrea asked hopefully.
I grinned, “Nope. An honest to God horde. Maybe three or four hundred of them… hell maybe more, it’s hard to count.”
“So what do we do?” Carl asked, white knuckling his rifle. His eyes were wide with fear.
“Act now,” I said, running back for the front stairs, “We may have to shoot our way out, but right now, as far as I know, the G’s are in the rear of the building. They’ll be bottled up in the hallways, so we get down the stairs and make our way out front.”
By the looks on their faces, I could see they weren’t big fans of this plan. Hell I wasn’t either, but it was either that or we get trapped inside this building.
World of Corpses (Book 1): World of Corpses Page 26
