by Bryan James
“Yes, sir,” he said sharply, voice deep and serious.
“Corporal, I need you to show these people past the rock slide and to the road we passed on our way down. They’re heading to a facility in the forest that may have a cure to this disease we’ve encountered.”
“Sir?” he asked, unbelieving.
“You’re going back up the mountain, soldier,” he said.
“You mean back up to where those crazy mother fuckers tried to eat us? Back to the hillbilly all you can eat buffet?”
“Corporal…”
“Just clarifying, sir.” His tone said otherwise but his face stayed blank.
“Grab the rest of your gear and some MRE’s. You’re dismissed.” Kate followed him to the med vehicle, probably to talk to Sam.
As Lansing and Kate walked away, a thought occurred to me. “Colonel, you do any time in Iraq?”
He looked at me hard, eyes like agates as he climbed into the passenger side of the Humvee. “Son, every person in uniform has done time in Iraq. Most of us a couple times. Why?”
“You ever heard of anything called the Baghdad protocol?”
He stared out the front window of the Humvee, face impassive, not responding.
The hum of the idling motor was the only sound, and then, “Where’d you hear that?” he asked, still staring forward.
“Sam heard the President use that term right before he left the White House.”
He turned to me quickly, eyes searching my face for more information. Finding nothing, he turned away again as if he were ashamed to look at me as he explained, “I heard it a couple times. Nothing definitive, but it was thrown around once and a while after entire streets were destroyed in the war and during the occupation.” He shrugged. “I never knew for sure, but I always figured it was some sort of total destruction order designed to take out large areas of hostiles.”
This time he looked at me. “The thing is, it was total,” his face was hard. “And when I say total, I mean terrorists, civilians, police, men, women, children, babies, pet gerbils…anything that breathed. We’re talking massive, undiscriminating collateral damage.” He turned away again.
He shook his head, closing the door. “Your friend must have heard wrong, Mr. McKnight, the president couldn’t have given an order like that here. Not on American soil. Not even now.”
He turned to the driver, “Move out.”
I stepped back as the vehicle began to roll. His arm extended from the window, wrist flicking once in a wave, and then back inside.
As the caravan pulled away, Kate, Anaru, Lansing and Sam walked slowly forward. “Ready to go?” Kate asked, looking around nervously.
“Yeah, man. The last thing we need to do right now is stand around waitin’ for more of those things to come chompin’ around.” Lansing was holding his rifle up, staring into the forest. Anaru helped support Sam, who spoke up as I looked at her.
“I finish what I start, and I’m going to see this through,” she said, teeth grinding through the pain but her face serious. I nodded, respecting the commitment.
“Then let’s get this creep show on the road,” I said, moving toward the truck.
“Fuckin’ A, man,” Lansing said, helping Sam into the truck and then following her. “The faster we find your damn zombie headquarters, the faster I get off this mountain.”
It’s not just the mountain, kid, I thought as we walked toward the plow. The world is a big place.
Chapter 23
When you’re a child, you don’t really appreciate the beauty of summer camp. Part of the problem might be that summer camp is designed by adults, who have clearly created something that every adult very much needs in their lives once and a while: a retreat to nature, solace from the rigors of day to day life, and a general return to youth.
But as a kid, you don’t need that stuff. Camp is just a different place to do nothing.
I remember going off to summer camp and being disappointed at leaving my neighborhood and all my friends. When you’re a child, it doesn’t matter where you are, you’re still having fun. You don’t have to remove yourself from society because your social interactions are uniform no matter where you are. You play, you eat, you play some more, you eat some more, you go to sleep. Beautiful stuff. And you can do that anywhere.
Don’t get me wrong, once you’re at summer camp, it’s great; you’re outdoors, you meet new people, you play games. You might even learn something. I learned how to eat shitty food just because you’re hungry, how to sleep through incredibly loud and obnoxious snoring, and even how to kiss a girl-all of which prepared me for real life; especially for marriage. But it’s not the retreat it is for adults. It’s just a change in locale.
So it is that when, as an adult, you enter a summer camp, you do so with some dual sense of nostalgia and regret. You remember the times gone by, and you regret not appreciating them more and, frankly, not being able to return to that life. Such were my own feelings when we passed under the rough-hewn gateway to Camp Lillikanda.
Even when being chased by flesh-eating zombies.
Our good corporal got us past the rockslide. It was quite impressive. Apparently they had fired rocket propelled grenades-RPGs, he called them-into the retaining wall. Held in only by a thin layer of metal-reinforced fabric, the rocks behind tumbled out onto the road, creating a barrier of shattered granite and limestone that prevented carrying on by vehicle. It also covered a few zeds.
There was a small pathway slightly hidden to the South of the slide that Lansing knew of. We followed him down off the road, around the slide, and back up to the concrete. A small portion of the rock fall had intruded onto our passage, and as I climbed over a particularly large pile, an arm that lay well-concealed and half-buried in the small chunks of gray and brown stone grabbed my ankle.
It was just a hand, no gnashing teeth above ground, but it still freaked me the hell out. After what we had been through, I was understandably a bit jumpy. I wasn’t willing to fire my rifle or pistol at it, but its grip was firm and merely pulling at it with my fingers availed me little. My admittedly pseudo-girlish shriek brought Anaru from the head of the line, and he chuckled at my predicament as he knelt down at my side. He tested the grip of the fingers, shook his head and drew his combat knife, pressing it to the gray flesh and sawing quickly.
“Can’t you just… ya know,” I made an opening gesture with my hands, miming that with his great strength, he could just rip it off.
“Sorry, but this thing is on good. Best idea would be detach from the body first and then work on getting the hand off later.” He chuckled as he sawed, “Cause the hand don’t bite. The head buried down there somewhere probably does.” He finished cutting, leaving a gray stump capped with a congealed brown liquid protruding from the pile.
When he finished, I got up, feeling absurd with a dismembered hand clutching my ankle. That, of course, is when they showed up.
There were at least twenty or thirty, and they came from the trees behind us. We had ditched the plow at the rock wall, making sure to point it back toward town in the event we could make it back this far.
They shambled out from the tree line, covered in dirt and dried blood. There were locals among them to be sure, but the Colonel’s suspicions were accurate. There were definitely people in this crowd that were out of place on a rural mountain road: mainly Arabs and a few Asians, all dressed similarly in uniformly blue pants and shirts. Several of the creatures were in a more advanced state of decomposition than the others, indicating more age. This also seemed to corroborate the Colonel’s comments, but how was it possible? The outbreak only hit a week ago, but these things had been dead for far longer than that.
We shot out onto the pavement, the sounds of our rapid footfalls echoing off the rock ledge that ascended vertically for hundreds of feet on our left side. On the right, the tree line ahead of us was clear, but they were emerging quickly out of the woods behind us.
“Up here on the right, it’s the
turn off,” said Lansing, not even winded from the jog.
I remembered the way and how I had missed the turnoff when I came up with Maria, drawing her mock ire and a slight punch to the shoulder. It was an easy road to miss, obscured by trees and bushes. She had made a joke about asking for directions; I had made a joke about that movie Deliverance. We had both laughed. It had been a nice day.
Jesus, Maria. How did this happen?
“We go down a few hundred yards, past the camp, then up the hill into the facility,” I said as we kept moving, huffing the sentence out in brief syllables, trying to keep up.
Anaru was watching Sam, who seemed to be recovering her strength now. Kate was in front of me and Lansing was in the lead, rifle held at hip level, eyes alert. I tightened my grip on my own weapon, the moans from behind spurring us forward.
The surface turned from pavement to gravel as we began down a narrow road, surrounded on both sides by tall, dark trees. Leaves of various shapes and colors littered the ground before us, causing our steps to be accompanied by the crisp crackling of broken fauna as we ran from our pursuers. The road dipped down through a gully and back up, water running through a small culvert under the graded path, as we topped the opposite side and moved forward. I was starting to lag behind, my inability to complete extended aerobic activity catching up to me, when the sign came into view.
KAMP LILLIKANDA 100 FEET AHEAD!
WHERE KIDS CAN BE KIDS!
Fall Semester Now Open!
The sounds of pursuit from behind us had faded, our sprint having temporarily outdistanced our slower moving assailants. I slowed to a brisk walk, still searching the trees to either side.
“Corporal, I think we’re in the clear for the moment. I would suggest we hole up in a solid building in the camp until those things are off our…” I was going to say scent, but it didn’t seem possible that this virus would improve any of the normal human senses. They must track and hunt using the same faculties that we did: sight and sound. So if we hid well, they’d no more be able to track us than would any normal human.
“Mike?” Kate asked, looking for the end of the sentence.
“Let’s get inside and keep our heads down until they pass. They must hunt and track the same way we do - so if they can’t see us or hear us, they won’t know that we’re here. Even if they come through the camp, they won’t know we’re there unless we tell them.”
“Fuck that, man. We need to keep going to your facility. If it’s just ahead, we can get there now, before those creepy bitches can catch up.” Lansing was calm, and his idea had merit, but we needed to be cautious.
“We have no way of knowing what condition it’s in. It had a large, electrified fence and was heavily guarded. If it’s still in business, we may have to talk our way in. If it’s not, we may still run into the fence or a bunch of those things. We need to start off fresh and that means not being chased by fifty zombies, savvy?”
He looked back over my shoulder then back to the camp and nodded. “Yeah man, whatever. Let’s just get inside nice and quick. I’d rather not be standing here waiting for them when they come around that bend.”
We moved quickly but carefully into the camp, underneath the large wooden gateway, and past a totem pole, brightly colored in oranges and blues. A camp bus stood empty next to a small administration building to our right, dormitories in front of us set back against the lake. To our left, a cantina and a large cinder block building with a curved roof, probably the gym.
“What the hell kind of camp is this?” asked Sam, looking around. “It’s early September-past time for kids to be in school.”
“From what I remember Maria telling me, it’s a ‘study outdoors’ kind of place. Parents from the city pay top dollar to send their kids to the mountains for a semester.”
Sam just looked at me and scowled. I shrugged. Why the fuck’d she ask, then?
A soft, slightly high-pitched sound caught on the wind as we made our way toward the gym, made our destination by an unspoken agreement that it was likely the strongest choice of redoubt if we were discovered. We crossed the open space between the gate and building warily, eyes darting to windows and doors, every slight change of light or movement of shadow a potential threat. As we moved, the sound seemed to get louder, and I strode forward faster, thinking it to be the sounds of our pursuers, amplified and twisted by the wind.
From the lake, the solitary sound of a water bird echoed between the branches of the trees. A small animal, most likely a squirrel, darted up a tree to my right, causing my finger to tighten involuntarily on the trigger of my drawn pistol before I exhaled in relief.
As we reached the door to the gym, Lansing held up his hand. “Anybody else hear that, or am I fucking crazy?”
“Yeah, I think it’s those things behind us,” Anaru said, looking instinctively over his shoulder. “But it seems louder here than it was on the road.” He shrugged. “Probably the wind.”
“Maybe not,” said Kate, moving toward the door, where Lansing stood, hand on the steel bar that bisected the double doors leading inside. She held her finger to her mouth in a hushing gesture, and pushed softly and slowly against the steel bar. It didn’t budge. She squatted in front of the bar and looked closer.
“This is locked from the outside,” she said, standing up. As she did so, the noise seemed to crescendo, a chorus of high notes joining in a mockery of the moans we had been listening to for days. A horrid thought occurred to me, and my heart thumped in my chest as I backed up, turning to the side of the building where I had seen a door with windows on our approach. From behind me, I heard Sam’s voice ask where I thought I was going, but I didn’t hear, hoping and praying in my hasty walk that I was wrong.
The doors were painted a garish purple, the kind of color people paint for kids under the belief that youth automatically equates with poor taste. A large red ladybug adorned the one on the right; a yellow butterfly to the left. I approached the window with dread as Anaru appeared on my right. I peered through, stomach in my throat.
“Holy shit,” Anaru said from my side, his massive form doubling over and retching next to me, vomit spraying onto the door and oozing down to the dirty concrete walk. Some of it got on my boots, some covering the rotting stump of the hand still attached to my right foot. But neither of us cared.
I had been right.
God help me, I had been right.
Chapter 24
There were maybe a hundred of them, most clustered around the far doorway, pawing at the steel panels. They were between 6 and 10, but it was hard to tell. So many faces and bodies were mutilated or defaced that apart from size, clues as to age were difficult to come by.
It appeared that the only adult in the room had been too badly ravaged to reanimate, its bloody misshapen form lying prone against the far wall. Tatters of clothing lay strewn about and around the corpse as if tossed in frenzy by a pack of wild, hungry dogs.
Almost all of them wore the uniform apparently imposed by the camp, a khaki shirt bearing the logo of the place, as well as khaki shorts and tennis shoes of different makes and brands. Breaking my concentration, Lansing came around the corner, followed by the two women.
“What the hell, man? We gotta get inside…” he stopped talking as his eyes focused in on the window and his face changed slowly from irritation to dismay.
“Daaaaaaamn,” he drew it out softly and slowly, like a long drag from a cigarette. As Kate and Sam took turns at the window, both silent in the face of the unspeakable, I scanned the road behind us, which remained clear. But only for so long.
Trying to put the scene behind me, I spoke as I put the window out of sight. “Let’s get to the dorms. We can shut the doors, hunker down, and wait for them to wander past.” I stepped forward and away from the doors as Sam spoke up.
“What about them?” she said, her thumb jerking over her shoulder toward the pack of zombie children now moving toward the window, where our peering faces had been spotted.
&
nbsp; “What about them?” asked Lansing before I could answer.
“We can’t just leave them,” said Sam, incredulous. “They’re children.”
His eyes widened in shock at realizing her lack of comprehension. “Yeah, fucking cannibal campers from hell, man. They ain’t normal no more-they’re monsters. We’re leaving their rottin’ asses here, end of story.” Her facial expressions changed rapidly in response, from sadness to anger to despair and back to indignation. As she looked at each of us, it finally shifted to acceptance as she turned away and cradled her injured arm.
“Yeah, okay. Let’s go then.”
We moved quickly across the grounds toward the furthest dorm. They were low, long buildings, with dark roofs. Brown cedar siding covered the exterior walls, there was one door on each end, both doorways bearing a screen door backed by a solid wood interior door.
Lansing reached the closest entrance and pulled the screen back, signaling for silence as he moved in, rifle held at the ready. Moments later, he reappeared.
“We’re clear-in a manner of speaking,” he said, waving us in as he watched behind us for any signal of pursuit.
“What do you mean by that?” asked Anaru as he passed from daylight to the dark confines of the room. As our eyes adjusted to the dark interior, we understood.
A teenager, maybe sixteen or seventeen, hung suspended from the ceiling by a lanyard of belts and sheets. Bulging eyes searched the room, moaning made impossible by the constriction of the voice box by the attached belts around its crimson and gray neck. His feet kicked in a crude imitation of perambulation as its arms stretched forward, hands opening and closing in unrequited hungry desire. Sandals lay below a overturned chair below the moving legs, and a piece of paper lay folded neatly under a blue Nalgene bottle at the foot of a nearby bed.
