More of the undead creatures walked slowly out of the mist. Attracted by the noise of the fence, they all came together on the hanging jaw walker as a focal point. Soon, there were six standing and bumping on the low barrier. Jesse signalled for the group to get their gear on and get ready to go. He watched to see if they might leave, not wanting to risk running into the dark and out of their semi-safe enclosure. As he watched, a single figure pushed forward in the center of the undead mass. He had no idea if it had been male or female in its former life, but it was horribly injured. It looked like it had died in a fire and its flesh was an angry pink color. He watched the misshapen muscles as it moved, nude and vulgar in death. He swore later that steam arose from the body in the cold mist, but he dismissed that memory.
As he watched, shocked, the creature reached out with its burned hands and gripped the top of the old fence. It moved deliberately and slowly as the others moved randomly about. Its toes stuck through the holes in the fence and the metal sagged as it climbed carefully over the top. Jesse was frozen in fear as it crossed over and climbed lightly down on the far side, leaving the other six trapped on the opposite side of the waist-high barricade. It turned again and looked at Jesse with burned, black eyes before muttering a whispered help and falling to the damp earth.
***
“What’d she say?” Wiggs asked, bringing Jesse back to the present. It took him a moment to shake the memory of the Burned Woman’s approach, even feeling a chill from the cold night so long ago in the past.
“She said, she said she knows this group. These Neighbors, or whoever. She said Mel’s still alive and they took her.” He shrugged. “I don’t know what that means. But what I do know is that when we found her, she was mutilated and more dead than alive. If she says she knows these kidnappers, we need to consider them seriously dangerous. I can’t ask you all to follow me when we have no idea where we’d even start to look.”
“We want to kill these fuckers as much as you do,” the teenaged Ty stated. “Let’s just start looking.”
“That’s suicide, and you know it. These neighborhoods are filled with the dead, and downtown is overrun. Over a million people lived in San Antonio, and I’m not seeing many of them made it,” Ice replied.
“Boss, if you say ‘let’s go’, we’re in. Let’s find her and bring her back,” Wiggs spoke for both of the massive bearded brothers. Ty unslung one of the two carbines he carried and handed it over to the leader. Jesse accepted it and threw it over his shoulder, still unsure what to do. He looked at the last member of his team, the closest to him out of the entire group, and the only one who had witnessed the Burned Woman when she was first found. Deb wiped her eyes and seemed to prepare herself.
“I saw what someone did to her when we found her in the rain. We didn’t think she’d make it, but we carried her with us anyway. Not wanting to be so cruel to leave a burned, half-dead woman to die in the cold. We wrapped her and brought her with us on a litter we built out of metal poles. She never whimpered or cried out in pain. We thought she’d die. But she didn’t. She whispered to the reverend, telling him where to guide us next. She helped us find food and told us where to spend the night so it would be safe. She told us where other survivors would be hiding, and they joined us after hearing that the Burned Woman saved them. She found this place and helped us find the materials to make it safe from the dead. We didn’t save her that night; she saved us.” Deb’s words rang true to her teammates, each of them having witnessed the power the Burned Woman possessed to keep them safe. Each of them owed their lives to her.
“If she knows this group, they are more than dangerous. They are evil,” Jesse reiterated. Without words, each squad member stood their ground and maintained their commitment to finding the Neighbors and rescuing Mel.
“Did you say Alamo estadio, Ty?” Deb asked. He nodded.
“Yeah, that sounds kinda like what she said.”
“Well, I know where we should look first.”
Chapter 10
- Odyssey
Odyssey
The eerie feeling that something was wrong continued to gnaw at Kahn as he pushed the bellman’s cart into the abandoned parking lot. Bursts of rifle fire popped from far to the north. Must be the northern towers, he thought. There was no activity that he could see here, on the southern edge of the outpost. Both towers were silent and the Airlock was completely secured and still.
The wheels of the cart rattled wildly on the rough pavement of the parking lot. There were about twenty cars parked in diagonal lines criss-crossing from interior to exterior fence. Kahn pushed the cart wide at first, around the closest vehicles, and then turned so he was travelling parallel to the north-south road in the center. He considered how the security that the fence provided to keep intruders out was going to trap him and keep him inside.
Maybe I can drive into a corner of the fence with the car, he brainstormed. He pictured wrecking the vehicle as he attempted to escape. He could get injured trying a stunt like that. He’d have to get to the car and see if he could work his way back into the main section of the post, then argue his way out of the Airlock to the south. Kahn tried to imagine what the guards at the Airlock might do with the rogue orderly as he tried to escape.
The thought gave him pause. He looked toward the military side of the massive entrance. No engines rumbled from that side either. Zero activity on the civilian side didn’t alarm him. But nothing from the mechanic shop, fuel depot, or Airlock enhanced his sense of unease. He left the cart and walked to the center of the compound, stepping over a broken curb and overgrown grass island in the process. He reached his fingers through the barrier and scanned left and right.
Nothing.
He couldn’t see over a set of three 5-ton trucks parked along the fence on the other side of the barricaded entry road. They blocked his view of the maintenance shop. There could be fifty people behind there and he wouldn’t know it. Looking to his right and down the road revealed nothing either. No vehicles sat in the weaving lane from the Airlock to here, and no Army personnel were visible through the series of fences beyond.
Turning his body, he looked back over his shoulder at the parking lot. Vehicles of various shapes and sizes sloped away from him on a slight decline toward the exterior fence. From this angle, the cars formed an interlocking chain with spacing enough to block almost all the ground between them. He leaned his back on the quiet fence and retrieved the set of keys he had looted from the lockbox. He held the fob in the air and struck the button.
beep beep
Three-quarters of the way to the end of the last row he saw his bounty. Orange lights flashed in the front and back of the vehicle, a white, late-model Honda Odyssey.
“Nice,” he quipped, “a van.” He pressed the button again, watching the flash of lights and soft honk of the horn. As he studied the black and silver fob he realized he should have expected the vehicle type, there was a button to open each sliding door and the rear hatch in the middle of the set. He tested one, and the door nearest him jerked open and slid along the guide, stopping in the open position. He tried to close it and clumsily pressed a few buttons.
beep beep
The faint clicking of the door catch traveling to the closed position before latching made him smile a little. A nice, convenient ride. He already liked his little Odyssey and hoped he could get it out of the outpost intact.
Without warning, movement in the distance caught his eye and made him freeze. He hadn’t noticed before, hadn’t thought to even look. His jaw dropped as he noticed the western barrier of the motor pool, and the scramble of a half dozen stumbling bodies emerging from the nearby treeline.
The fence here had been cut in the same fashion he noticed before. The intruders had created a wide T shape in the wire, folding each side back into a formidable looping opening shaped like a large rectangle. Each curve of the fence was hastily reattached to the undamaged section of the main links.
Three of the first corpses reach
ed the opening, attracted by the repeated beeping of the Odyssey’s door. They sauntered into the lot, two males and a female, and made a rough beeline toward the vehicle. One of the males was missing his left arm and had a stain of black blood dried from his face and down his protruding gut. The other was much thinner with a long black beard. The second creature moved more rapidly toward the vehicle. Taking up the rear of this first group was a gray-skinned female in torn jeans and a button-up shirt. The shirt was ripped and hung loosely from her shoulders, exposing the bones of her ribs and sternum where most of the flesh had been eaten away. The wet gore still glistened in the waning sunlight. More approached the hole in the fence from farther away and Kahn realized his only chance was to beat them to the van.
They were closer than Kahn was, but moved with little coordination and zero thought. He sprinted into action, hitting the button on the fob to reopen the sliding door before securing the keys in his coverall pocket. He flew over the curb and stopped himself on the cart that contained his gear. Wrenching his arm, he gripped the vertical pole and dragged the wheels across the rough ground. His momentum increased as he got close to the diagonal row of vehicles nearest him. He pushed the cart sideways and it protested over a patch of loose gravel as he changed direction and started down the row. The van was close to the fence and one row over, so Kahn watched for an opportunity to cross behind one of the cars to align himself with his goal.
He pulled the cart to the rear of a small, red station wagon and dug his heels in to zigzag the heavy cart behind the car. He turned his back and pulled with both hands. The off-center wheels tilted as he first pulled the cart left and then spun and pushed it forward into the adjacent column.
More quickly than he could have imagined, the skinny bearded creature crashed into the front end of his bellman’s cart. The creature bounced, and Kahn could see bite-shaped chunks of flesh had been taken from the man’s cheek, neck, and arms. The figure growled and spread its mouth wide, revealing stained teeth, and reached for Kahn through the vertical bars of the cart. He shoved, hard, and the walking corpse fell backwards and slammed into the ground with a thud and a shot of gray dust. Kahn ran past and grabbed the pickaxe from the top of his stack of supplies before standing over the struggling creature. He raised the axe and swung down in a long arc. The flat end of the axe glanced the creature’s face, splitting it open horizontally from cheek to ear and spilling the cloudy eye out of the socket. An inhuman croak sounded as Kahn struck again, more accurately this time into the undead figure’s forehead. It collapsed, dead still.
Sweat sprung from his pores as he began to move the cart again by pulling with one arm. He strained and wobbled the equipment around the skinny corpse slowly, pulling with all his strength against the rough ground. He leaned over at an extreme angle and looked forward. There! The van! It angled away so his current path would take him directly to the open rear door.
Both of the remaining figures he had seen stumbled into view. The fat one with the missing arm appeared from the next vehicle. Kahn plowed past as the creature reached impotently with its ragged stump. The woman was a problem. She came into view over the low hood of the van and bounced along the front bumper. He raced to beat her to the van, but she walked into the open space between the door and him. He quickly stepped aside and let the cart overtake him, bringing up the rear and pushing the heavy object forward. He aimed true and struck the damaged body, knocking her back and spilling the cases of water and food onto the ground. She fell back, landing with her head on the track of the van’s sliding door, limbs tangled in the now askew bellman’s cart.
In victory, Kahn reached forward to the handle intending to slide the door into the corpse’s skull. He pulled the handle hard toward the front of the car. It wouldn’t budge. Instead, the door clicked and a low beep sounded before the door began to slide slowly and safely along the track.
“Dammit!” he stepped back, knowing he only had a moment before he had a second, larger biter to deal with, and kicked the cart off the woman. The door had reached her head and safely began to slide back into the open position. She bent her knees and came forward on all fours, swiping the air looking for her prey. Kahn swung the heavy pickaxe from the side and struck her in the temple, crushing bone with a sickening crunch as the body collapsed.
Without hesitating, he sprang into action. He tossed the bloody pick into the back of the van before scrambling to collect the scattered cases. The heavy, humid air weighed him down as he tossed one after the other into the open door. He retrieved the last box, the heavy-packed case containing MREs, and turned to judge the time he had left before corpse #3 attacked. The box bounced off the gut of the big guy and Kahn found himself sitting on the edge of the van’s door. One hand grasped at the air as the heavy fiend tried to snap and bite at Kahn. The box kept them separate, and both of Kahn’s hands were occupied holding the body away, making him unable to get his weapon. He struggled to each side as the massive and tireless corpse began to wear him out.
Desperate, he shoved the box away as he slid on his back into the vehicle. He rolled onto his back and brought both feet up and into the cardboard against the creature’s chest. It stumbled backwards as Kahn fell with the box into the van. The body caught a divot in the ground with its uncoordinated feet as it stumbled. Kahn watched as it seemed to fall in slow motion, like a great tree, and slammed the back of its head on the side runner of the truck parked aside the van. A splatter of dull blood sprayed onto the paint of the truck, and Kahn was alone. He collapsed in exhaustion in between the captain’s chairs.
A second later he was up and pulling the keys out of his pocket. He slipped over the center console into the driver’s seat as he pressed the button to close the driver’s side sliding door. He sighed and looked out the grimy windshield. Whoever maintained the motor pool parked each vehicle far enough apart that they could be freed from the row and column individually. Kahn saw a path forward and out, with several more bobbing heads of shambling bodies in view through the other vehicles. He inserted and turned the key and the ignition sprang the engine to life. He thrust the shifter into Drive and eased the van forward into the open path ahead.
He quickly came to the end of the row and paused, looking through the passenger side at the undead walking around the unsecured lot. He saw about ten bodies slowly moving toward him, but there was space between each one to escape. His exit had been made for him, and there was plenty of room to make it. The hole cut into the fence was large enough for the van, or even a much taller vehicle, to fit through. He punched the gas and turned the wheel toward the outside of the complex. The van easily rolled past a couple of undead who ended up grabbing at the air and he was at the breach in no time. He coasted the van into alignment and exited Lone Star Outpost.
The opening scraped noisily on the passenger side of the van. Kahn gritted his teeth against the awful sound and turned parallel to the fence. He hit the accelerator and sped away from the few infected nearby. He reached the corner and turned to the left again, rounding the southwest corner below the guard tower, approaching the Airlock from the outside.
He slowed and looked into the typically manned checkpoint. Nobody was visible so he eased the van forward a few more feet trying to see inside the fortified entrance.
Now he saw the guards. Three of them lay supine on the road with their weapons scattered behind each of them as if they were ambushed. Kahn realized that not all the gunfire he heard earlier came from his people keeping the dead at bay. He was suddenly very nervous and braced, gripping the steering wheel with white knuckles when one of the dead soldiers suddenly lurched to the side and came awkwardly to his feet. Kahn saw the bloodstains and holes in the front of its uniform as it moved toward the noise of the idling van. It crashed into the fence, smashing its face into the diamond-shaped holes and biting at the air.
He thought of Colonel Johns and First Sergeant Mac, needing good soldiers to fight, and realized the outpost would be shorter now than ever before and fa
cing a threat they would not be prepared to face. He considered turning back, rejoining and telling them all he knew about the Neighbors. He thought of Kimble, still inside, and Daisy. Wanting to go to them and tell them to run, take them away from this place. They were all targets now, and Kahn could smell the burning to come.
No, they were safer here than with him. He was going to find those bastards. He was going to find Llewelyn, and he was going to kill him and destroy everything he cared about.
Hal Kahn was ready to fight, and he knew just where to start looking.
Chapter 11
- Stadium
Stadium
“There’s nobody fucking here,” Ty complained. He and the rest of the squad were in a squalid third-story apartment east of downtown San Antonio. Wiggs shushed the unruly teenager and was greeted with a scowl. Deb and Jesse each had a pair of binoculars and were peering across the highway at the massive complex they came to investigate. Moonlight illuminated the signage, parking lot, and one side of the domed structure.
“This was the first place I thought Pat might have been talking about,” Deb replied absentmindedly. “It was close, so I thought they could have seen us and found where we live. Estadio. Stadium.” She stood from the window and handed her field glasses to Ice, who took position at the crusty window to view the iconic building.
Jesse kept his eyes up, scanning slowly at the faraway structure. “Just because we don’t see anybody outside doesn’t mean Deb was wrong. Wouldn’t you be inside at night, Ty?” The young kid shrugged at his patrol leader. Jesse swung around and handed the pair to Wiggs, making room by rising and pacing the room. Ricky tried to grab at them and the two brothers bickered silently over who would use the binoculars next. Wiggs relented and his giant brother knelt in front of the right hand window with a victorious smile.
Nation Undead (Book 2): Collusion Page 8
