The Undead Chronicles (Vol. 2): Darker Days

by O'Brian, Patrick J.

  “Where the fuck did you pick up swords?” Bryce asked his brother, spying the two blades intersecting within a pack on the ground.

  “Early on I found them in a high-end pawn shop. They were already sharpened and ready to go.”

  Bryce sensed a bit of sadness in his brother’s eyes, stemming from his time on the road.

  “What is it?” he asked, digging deeper.

  “The guy who owned the pawn shop was Japanese, or maybe half-Japanese. His family was already dead inside the building from gunshot wounds to their heads, and he used one of the swords to kill himself.”

  Hurt showed in his brother’s eyes as he told the tale.

  “He was walking around, sword still hanging from his guts, and I had to use the other one to put him down.”

  “What kind of shit have you seen out there?” Bryce asked, not certain he wanted to know the answer.

  “It’s a hard world, Bryce,” Metzger answered. “Definitely not a place for someone traveling solo.”

  As much as the lieutenant commander wanted to catch up with his brother, duty called, so he opened the file and passed each page over to him once he finished reading it. Mission parameters called for them to examine the truck that caused the explosion, if possible, and if not, to look through the company’s manifests. Paperwork would prove much easier in their search, but if necessary, they could extract the company computers and let the intelligence people sort through them at the base.

  Basically, trained soldiers were playing detective, and the mission felt a little too straightforward for the elite skills of SEALs and Green Berets. The lieutenant commander simply wanted to contribute, though he wasn’t certain how overrun Buffalo was going to look compared to the global news footage, and what little he witnessed at the base.

  “How dangerous are the infected?” he asked his younger brother once they finished the file.

  “A few at a time isn’t a big deal. It’s when you run into a cluster that they become dangerous. A single bite is enough to infect a person and kill them, and there’s nowhere to run once they surround you.”

  “Buffalo?”

  His brother responded with wide eyes, as though they were literally entering the lion’s den to retrieve information.

  A man dressed in fatigues walked over to them, armed rather lightly compared to the other soldiers aboard the plane. He wore only a sidearm, but he carried needles and a small case with him. In order to speak to them, he donned a nearby headset not currently being used.

  “Need a blood sample, fellas,” he stated, standing over them, waiting for them to roll up their sleeves.

  Using a fresh needle for each of them, he stuck the sailor first, followed by his brother, who showed the curiosity of a civilian.

  “What’s this for?”

  “They want before and after samples for comparison from each of us,” the man said. “You guys are walking into ground zero, so they want to make sure there’s no physiological changes.”

  “Sounds promising,” Dan muttered after the man removed his headset and returned to his regular seat.

  “We have masks and gear,” Bryce promised. “Hell, the air is probably clear now anyway.”

  Considering the brothers hadn’t seen one another in almost a year, the two spent another two hours catching up before Metzger finally brought up the sore topic his brother avoided completely.

  “What happened to Mom and Dad? Did you find them like…those things?”

  “No. They were kidnapped and brought to some weird prison camp.”

  His brother explained how a group of armed men took over a school, abducting people off the street and from their homes for use as laborers. Even as a retiree, their father rebelled against their captors, causing the leader to publicly execute Donald and Connie Metzger as an example to the other prisoners. He added that a group of people trying to free their loved ones from the school turned labor camp killed most of the kidnappers.

  “Their ringleader followed us to the airport in some armored car,” Dan added. “We killed his buddies, and I watched him get surrounded by the undead.”

  “Did they rip him apart?”

  “I didn’t get to see what happened to him. We still had danger around us, so I was busy jumping on a plane.”

  As much as Bryce wanted to make certain the man who killed his parents was a rotting corpse, he asked his next question with loyalty to his mission in mind.

  “Which airport?”

  “The small Lancaster airport.”

  Lancaster wasn’t incredibly far from Buffalo, and he imagined the larger airports became a hotspot for people desperate to fly out of their states, or the country. Many people likely died at those airports, and other undead were attracted to them for numerous reasons.

  “Was that airport reasonably clear when you left it?” he asked his brother.

  “Well, yes. But it’s not very big.”

  “I know.”

  Bryce stood, removed his headset, and carefully walked up to the cockpit of the plane so he could address the pilot. A man with graying sand-colored hair and a thick mustache named Timmons, according to the nameplate on his flight suit, turned to address the lieutenant commander. He pointed to an empty headset, which the lieutenant commander placed over his ears.

  “What can I do for you?”

  “Where were you hoping to land, sir?”

  “I’m under orders to get us as reasonably close to the site as possible.”

  Outranked by the pilot, a Navy captain who likely accepted the mission due to a lack of qualified personnel, Bryce decided to appeal to the man’s logical side.

  “If the larger airports are overrun, I may have a suggestion, sir.”

  “And what is that?” Timmons asked, as though unconvinced any landing spot might prove safe.

  “My brother was at the Buffalo-Lancaster Regional Airport a few days back. He says it was reasonably clear of infected.”

  “That would be a haul for your group to travel into Buffalo, son.”

  “Thirteen miles or so, sir. Mostly interstate, which could be good or bad.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind, but I’m going to fly over the larger airports first. I need to get you boys as close as I can to the target zone.”

  “Understood, sir.”

  Bryce removed his headset and returned to his seat.

  “What was that about?” Dan asked.

  “Presenting the Lancaster airport as a possibility,” Bryce answered once able to speak into the headset’s microphone.

  “He has to be dead, Bryce. And we don’t have time to go hunting him down anyway.”

  “This isn’t personal,” Bryce told his brother. “I’m simply providing an optional landing spot that may conveniently give me an opportunity to spit on the asshole who killed our parents.”

  “No, that doesn’t sound personal at all.”

  Within the hour, Timmons flew them over the two largest Buffalo area airports, finding them swamped with the undead, which looked like a swarm of bees in a honeycomb on the pavement below.

  Bryce studied the faces of his fellow travelers, each ready to carry out the mission in their fatigues while armed to the teeth. A man named Cory Nestler introduced himself to the brothers within the first hour of the flight. Somewhere close to the elder Metzger in age, the Marine second-lieutenant made it abundantly clear he was heading up the mission, deferring to the lieutenant commander in all local travel decisions. The man didn’t act haughty or like a person who loved being in charge, but rather a soldier who wanted to follow orders, complete the mission, and get home to his family.

  Bryce could relate.

  After circling the Buffalo area for about five minutes, Timmons summoned both Nestler and Bryce to the cockpit area.

  “Boys, I can’t land at the major airports because those
things are everywhere. They’d either fuck up my landing gears, or they’d swarm us the minute we touch down. I’m going to try the lieutenant commander’s recommendation and shoot for Lancaster. It’ll be tight, but if it’s halfway clear, I can stick the landing.”

  “That’s fine by me,” Nestler said. “We’re no good to anyone if we get killed or stuck here.”

  Everyone except the man that drew blood samples, Timmons, and the copilot, readied themselves for work on the ground. In all, ten people were going to exit the plane, five in each of the Humvees, with mounted M240 machineguns. Bryce looked to his brother, who carried only the two swords and two handguns, unfazed by what the group was about to encounter. He wondered exactly what his brother witnessed during a month on the road, and as Timmons circled to land at the small airport, Bryce questioned what awaited them on the ground once they landed.

  Two

  Dan Metzger looked to his brother while the plane circled the small airport for the best landing scenario. Like most brotherly scenarios, Metzger never told Bryce that he looked up to him during their childhood years. He also withheld his feelings that he felt abandoned and devastated for a nearly a week after his brother formally left home for college, and the military following that.

  Bryce provided an excellent model for him to follow during his formative childhood and teenage years, steering clear of drugs and wayward friends. Every so often they fought, as brothers do, but only once did they come to blows, and a mutual friend broke up their skirmish before any real damage was done. While Metzger set his course early on for his college studies, Bryce didn’t seem as certain about his path, opting to join the Navy, never knowing it would become a career entrenched with his college studies.

  Now his brother wore military fatigues, fitting the part of a responsible leader with neatly trimmed hair and a mustache that appeared meticulous, despite the end of the normal world. Bryce knew how to lead men, handle firearms, and operate machines Metzger couldn’t begin to understand. Despite Bryce’s strengths, he wasn’t ready to confront a wall of undead that looked like the front rows of a rock concert when they drew dangerously close.

  Timmons landed the plane reasonably smoothly, informing everyone aboard that the runway wasn’t devoid of undead. He tried avoiding the slow-moving bodies as best he could, but the plane still smashed through a few zombies as thumps against the plane’s exterior were heard by everyone inside.

  Dan Metzger envisioned what the airstrip looked like several days prior when he flew south with a group of people he barely knew. Taking up the modified backpack that held his weaponry and a few supplies, he stood beside his brother, waiting for everyone to file into the two armored vehicles. Nestler verbally assigned each person to the front or rear Humvee, balking slightly when it came to Metzger and his brother, as though he wanted to separate them.

  “He stays with me,” Bryce stated firmly, drawing a nod of agreement from the second-lieutenant that both brothers would take seats within the lead vehicle.

  Without any windows to look through, Metzger could only envision what he last saw. He expected a few dozen undead wandering aimlessly, an armored car, and Xavier’s body ripped apart and left unceremoniously beside the car. No last name given, Xavier was the man responsible for the deaths of any number of people at the reconfigured school where people were used as slave labor.

  Nestler opted to drive the vehicle the brothers were assigned to, letting Bryce ride shotgun for full visibility when navigating them to the factory. Metzger crammed into the back seat with a muscular black man whose tag indicated his surname was Bryant, and a man who assumed the firing position of the M240 machinegun, whose name he didn’t get to read. The Marine stood in the center of the backseat, his upper body out of sight because the gunner position placed him out the top of the Humvee. Metzger stared at a pair of feet and legs covered in traditional fatigues, wanting to warn the soldier that the undead weren’t especially nimble, but they could climb.

  He said nothing, however, considering himself a guest who shouldn’t be handing out advice to capable military personnel.

  When the rear hatch of the cargo plane opened, both vehicles backed out with precision speed and technique, immediately ramming a few zombies to the ground as the three men left on the plane used their pistols to calmly shoot any undead that drew too close to the plane. Metzger spotted the loadmaster calmly pushing a large button to close the hatch once both armored vehicles were clear of the plane. He quickly turned his head to see if the armored vehicle, or a ravaged body, remained near the airstrip.

  Neither could be seen.

  “No,” he muttered, bobbing his head to look out every available window to cover every view, fearing he hadn’t avenged his parents at all, short of winging the man during the airfield skirmish.

  “What’s wrong?” Bryce asked, turning to look at him.

  Metzger returned a sour expression, along with a negative shake of his head, and his brother immediately understood.

  He spied the car he’d driven to the airport still sitting near the hangars, appearing undisturbed. Metzger still had the keys to that car in his pocket, hoping when he left that he might see it again someday because the last of his family memorabilia rested within the trunk. As the Humvees sped out the downed airport fencing near the entrance, he felt his heart sink a bit because he never got to say a proper goodbye to his parents, or even bury them.

  Although he tried to stay in the moment, his thoughts wandered to the group of people who escorted him to Naval Station Norfolk only to be turned away by the soldiers guarding the gates. He wanted to think he’d see them again, and he left the means to contact the group with one of its members, but the odds felt incredibly long as the world grew large again without technology to connect people.

  Riding in the mammoth plane felt much more comfortable than his current situation. At least the plane smelled of synthetic materials, like opening an action figure for the first time as a kid, discovering that fresh plastic odor. Now enclosed with four other people, Metzger reunited with body odor and the discomfort of being crammed in a seat with people and equipment all around him.

  Traveling along county roads and state highways, the vehicles made good time, occasionally swerving around the undead or stalled vehicles. Not until they reached the interstate did the group discover thicker traffic with numerous cars and trucks parked along the road, sometimes blocking the interstate completely. At first, Nestler veered off the road when necessary, but eventually they came across a string of cars parked so tightly together that a bicycle would barely fit through.

  Parked every which way, the grouping of cars presented no means of squeezing through because of the barricades lining either side of the interstate. Nestler stopped the Humvee, knowing someone needed to get out and begin the arduous task of moving the vehicles. Not one to use his rank to excuse himself from work, Bryce jumped out of the passenger’s side as Bryant and the gunner followed suit. Metzger scooted over, toting his pack with him, prepared to assist with the labor.

  “You don’t need to go,” Nestler said.

  “This will go quicker if I help,” Metzger insisted, making his way out the door as the military men began approaching the cars to see how best to clear a path.

  He clutched the handle on the shorter of his two swords, making his way up to one of the cars for a look inside. Tapping on the window, he used a trick from previous vehicle encounters to see if any undead were lying dormant inside. No deceased monsters popped up against the windows, so he tried the door, finding it unlocked. Taking notice of his technique, the others cautiously studied the vehicles they approached, each using his trick while their shooting hands clasped firearms.

  Metzger looked down the road, seeing additional clusters of vehicles similar to the one they currently handled, knowing their trip wouldn’t go as smoothly as anyone hoped. About to jump inside the car to see about starting it, or throwing it
into neutral as a second resort, he heard a throaty growl coming from his left. The military men, including his brother, drew their firearms, anxious to notch their first undead kills, but Metzger put up a hand, indicating he would handle the situation.

  Regardless of sex, all zombies tended to sound very much alike once they returned to life. This one, a woman wearing a faded, dingy yellow dress with floral printing staggered along, seeing Metzger as her next potential meal. He let her draw within a few feet, his right hand already clasping the wrapped handle of the sword, before letting loose horizontally with the weapon, slicing the zombie’s skull in half, sending the top portion of her cranium flying while her body slumped to the ground.

  “Watch your feet,” he warned the others as loudly as he dared speak. “Sometimes they lurk under cars.”

  Rather efficiently, the group worked out a system where a few of them kept lookout while the other two jumped into the vehicles, either moving them aside or using them to shove other vehicles out of the way. After the first batch was cleared, Metzger walked with his brother the short distance to the next unintentional roadblock created by gridlocked traffic during a time people desperately wanted to get somewhere else.

  “Don’t be afraid to speak up,” Bryce told him. “You’ve seen what happens out here. We haven’t.”

  “I’m a guest,” Metzger replied, “so I’m trying not to make waves. But it just takes one bite from them, maybe even a gouge, and it’s game over.”

  “These guys think on a different wavelength,” Bryce admitted. “They’re capable, tough, and they’ll get the job done, but they also think the infected aren’t much of a threat.”