“He knows,” Sadie agreed, “But he’s confused. He will only consider what route will keep the greatest number of people alive in the short term. He doesn’t see that endless running will only end in ultimate disaster. There’s nowhere that is really safe. Nowhere that’s better than this.”
Deanna’s eyes shifted away. “I don’t know about that. It’s not safe here, not really, but that doesn’t mean we can’t hold out for a few more days. Five might work, but they have to try. They just can’t give up on the valley so easily.”
Sadie saw that Deanna was blinded by love. She would allow a hundred men to die in order to save Grey. It was a selfish love, but then, Sadie thought, most love was. And what was the basis of her own motivations? She had felt an ugly, visceral reaction to the idea of giving up the valley so easily after so many lives had been cut short defending it. Beyond that, why did she want to stay? Did she really think this was it? The last refuge left in America?
In short, yes.
During the last year, she had crisscrossed the country, fleeing from place to place and only finding disappointment and pain, betrayal and bloodshed. So far the valley had been the one place she had found where the people and been truly good and where the leaders weren’t deluded or barbarous. Even the land itself with its fertile soil and its natural barriers screamed to be defended.
“What we need is a way to convince Neil...” Just then the door opened and Neil Martin strode in, so much different than the first time Sadie met him when he was as timid as a mouse.
“Convince Neil of what?” he asked, pleasantly, not at all upset that Sadie had abandoned him at the wall.
“To give us more time,” Deanna said right away, even though that wasn’t what Sadie was thinking. “Just a few days. Grey’s life depends on it. And you owe him. As...as a friend, you owe it to him to do everything possible to save his life.” She advanced on Neil as she spoke, her hands out to him.
Neil looked distinctly uneasy. With a strange crooked smile on his face, he glanced back at the door as if he was contemplating running away or perhaps he was afraid that someone one was going to run in.
When neither occurred, he turned to Deanna. “You have to know I understand what you’re going through. I really never expected Grey to come back in this condition. I just thought he’d come back the same gruff soldier he left as. But...but that doesn’t really matter, does it? What matters is that this valley can’t be defended. It’s that simple. Whether it’s three days or four, the zombies will get through and then it will be running and screaming and chaos. Our only choice is to anticipate this, pack up what we can, and get out before it happens.”
“Or we figure out a way to stay,” Sadie said. “We figure out a way to fight them to a standstill until the Azael give up and go home. It’s possible, I’m sure it is.” She didn’t add: If Jillybean were here she’d have thought of a way long ago.
“We’re doing everything we can already,” Neil countered. “If you have a better way to fight them, let me know, I’d gladly present it to the general, but I’m not going to him with wishful thinking. The Azael aren’t just going to give up and go away.”
Sadie countered: “We don’t know that for sure. Just think, they probably didn’t bring much food with them, a few days’ worth only. And I bet their water situation is way worse. I bet they were counting on the rivers. The Big Thompson is polluted, we should consider throwing in a bunch of zombies corpses in the Little Thompson as well.”
“That’s a great idea!” Deanna said in an excited whisper. “We can use germ warfare to get the Azael so sick they won’t be able to fight. What else can we use?”
“I don’t know,” Sadie answered. “I don’t know anything about war, but he does.” She pointed at Grey. “We need to wake him up.” Deanna began shaking her head, but Sadie ignored her. She went to Grey’s bedside; he didn’t look peaceful, he looked tired, even in sleep.
“Grey,” Sadie said, shaking him gently on his shoulder. She glanced back and saw Deanna waiting apprehensively, seeming afraid for Sadie to wake him and afraid that she wouldn’t be able to. “Come on, Grey, Wake up. Hey, what’s his first name? I know it’s not captain.”
“James,” Deanna told her. “I tried to call him Jimmy once and he got so mad that he threatened to throw me in the lake. God, that was just like three days ago but it feels like a month.”
Sadie bent over Grey a second time and started shaking his good right arm saying: “James,” over and over until he his eyes fluttered and he began a confused blinking. When his eyes could focus, Sadie said: “Hey, Jimmy.”
He glared for a second and then turned to stare around the room until he saw Deanna, who was crying. “Don’t cry,” he said in a course, dry whisper. “We won. Sadie blew up the guns. Shame about Morganstern and...and...and, who else was there?” His brown eyes had slowly come to focus again on Sadie, looking to her for answers, but just then her mind drew a blank. She knew Morganstern’s name and then there was the guy who had been pinned down and was killed by the Azael after he was already shot. She couldn’t remember his name, which she thought was a little unsettling. Nor could she remember the soldier’s name who had been carrying the M16 with the grenade launcher.
“There were a lot of guys,” Sadie said her eyes blurring; she tried to grin through the tears that had sprung up. “But don’t worry about them just now.”
Deanna stepped forward and grabbed his right hand, the tears on her face coming quicker now. She bent and kissed his lips. “How do you feel? Are you in pain? Can I get you anything?”
“Water,” he said, and swallowed audibly. Deanna hurried out the door, letting it swing shut with a bang. In the fifteen seconds she was gone, there was silence in the room that wasn’t at all awkward between the long time companions, though they each jumped a little when Deanna came rushing back to hold a small cup to Grey’s lips.
He took only a couple of sips before he shook his head and said, “That’s good.”
Sadie was anxious to ask him how they could win the war against the Azael; however she didn’t rush her question. He was still too groggy and if he only shrugged or couldn’t otherwise answer, she knew that Neil would take that as an admission that winning wasn’t possible.
Neil spoke first: “We have a bit of a problem and a large part of it concerns you.” This brought Grey around and the shrewd look that Sadie had come to know was back. “The bad news is that despite yours and Sadie’s heroics in destroying the enemy’s artillery, our walls aren’t holding the zombies back and it’s only a matter of time before they come down or are breached.”
“And how can that possibly concern me more than it does anyone else?” Grey asked.
“Because it behooves us to plan ahead and to act prior to the event, which means we will be evacuating the very youngest and oldest and anyone infirm or injured. I know this isn’t news to you, however, the problem stems from the fact that Ms. Yuan seems to think your injuries are too grievous for you to be moved for quite some time.”
Grey looked surprised at this and glanced down at his body as though expecting to see missing limbs. He tried to move his arms and legs under the hospital blanket and grimaced. “Please, let me see,” he said to Deanna. She pulled back the cover to reveal his body adorned in fresh, white bandages. He grunted. “A couple of bullet wounds and a not-so-bad burn is hardly fatal.”
“It’s your arm,” Deanna explained. “The artery was in ribbons and Margaret is afraid that her stitches won’t hold if you move it. You could bleed out quickly and there isn’t very much blood left for a transfusion, really, there’s only one liter and that I scrounged this morning.”
“What about Marybeth?” Grey asked. “She needs more than that.”
A muscle jumped at the end of Neil’s lip as he stammered: “I-I’m afraid I’ve had to restrict Marybeth’s access to blood. With the battle raging as it is, the donors are too exhausted and too busy. Really, we were lucky to get this last liter.”
“Give it to Marybeth,” Grey demanded through clenched teeth. “I’m clearly on the mend. I don’t need it.”
Deanna wouldn’t hear of it. “You’re fine at the moment, but what happens if the stitches tear? You’ll die in minutes without the blood.”
“That’s not necessarily true,” he answered. “But what is completely true is that Marybeth is going to die without the transfusions. Normal saline won’t cut it. So. Give. Her. The blood.”
Neil wasn’t put off by Grey’s growling voice as it was only a shadow of its former self. In fact, his own voice rose sharply as if he were dressing down a very junior colleague. “No, not yet, not until we get at least three liters. I think we can all agree that she is not going to make it and I won’t have such a precious commodity basically run down the sink for no good reason. This is my final word on this, Grey.”
Sadie jumped in, quickly as Grey’s face grew stony. “Hey, let’s put a pin in that for now, alright,” she said. “One liter won’t save Marybeth so let’s figure out a long term solution, one that doesn’t revolve around running away. We need a solution that will save not only this valley but also Marybeth and you as well Captain Grey. We need a way to fight the zombies to a standstill.”
“A standstill? To what end?” Grey asked after giving Neil a last hard look. “They need to be destroyed.”
“Maybe not. If we hold out long enough, the Azael will give up and go away. They’re not real military people. I bet they haven’t planned for a long stay, sitting on the side of a mountain road. Their food situation is going to get critical soon and I bet their water supply is worse, especially if we dump a bunch of dead zombies in the rivers to poison them.”
Grey smirked and there was a shade of evil to it that darkened his features. “I like it, but how are you going to stop the zombies. I gather from Neil’s nervous-nelly look that he doesn’t think it’s possible.”
“It isn’t possible, or it’s highly unlikely,” Neil said, ignoring the nervous-nelly comment. “That’s why we’re working on a contingency plan that, yes, involves retreating into the mountains.”
“We were hoping you could think of some new way to stop the zombies,” Sadie said to Grey. “The walls we’ve built won’t hold. We had this crane that got bombed and so now the walls are barely twelve feet high. And you know our ammo situation. We just don’t have enough bullets to kill them all. So…” Her lip quivered on its way from an uncertain grin to a hopeful smile.
“So…” Grey said, settling back in his bed to stare up at the ceiling. “No ammo, hummm, and no walls.” He hissed between his teeth and then his lips pursed. “Are the back loaders still operational?”
Neil replied slowly, cautiously: “Yes.”
“Have you tried digging trenches before the walls? A ten foot moat will be the equivalent of adding ten feet to the height of the wall.”
“We haven’t,” Neil said. “Huh? That’s crazy we hadn’t thought about that before. Do you have any other Jillybean-esque ideas?”
Grey was silent for a long time and then a spasm of anger crossed his features. “No, nothing’s coming to me. The zombies don’t have many weaknesses. We have a little CS gas, but it wouldn’t faze them in the least. Now if we had mustard gas, we could burn the eyes right out of their heads.”
“Is there another way to blind them?” Deanna asked. “Maybe really powerful lights would do it. Do you guys have any lasers?” she asked, excitedly.
“Like in the movies?” Grey asked, smiling at her. “No we don’t have any lasers and we don’t have sonic beams either.”
Sadie started tapping the metal frame of Grey’s bed, her brain trying to eke out an idea. “Can you make one? Are they hard to make?” Grey gave her a look that suggested the idea was preposterous. She went on, thinking aloud: “Well what do we have that will hurt them, besides weapons and stuff like that? What affects them? Poison?”
Grey started to shrug and then grimaced and glanced down at his injured left arm. “No,” he said, his voice quivering with pain. “We brought only what we had to. We have a bit of C4 and some artillery and a few hundred rounds of mortar ammo, mostly flares, nothing that’ll do any lasting harm, though it might dazzle them a bit.”
There was a moment of silence that was interrupted as Neil thumped his fist down on Grey’s mattress. “Yes, we could dazzle them,” he said, his scarred face lit up with a grin. He turned to Sadie and asked: “Remember when Ram died? Remember the fire that Jillybean set?”
A thousand years could pass and Sadie wouldn’t forget the flames that reached twenty stories into the sky or the smoke that went forty more. Nor would she ever forget the heat that stretched the skin of her face as tight as a drum. It had been so hot she had feared that her hair would spontaneously ignite.
“I remember,” she said. “Do you have some way to replicate that fire? Wouldn’t it take up all of our fuel reserves?” Even she thought that was a bad idea; retreat had to be in their contingency plans at some point.
“I don’t think we need the exact same sized fire. I mean, if we could turn them to ash I would do it in a heartbeat, but we don’t have those sorts of resources available. But we may not need that sized fire. When the boat was first going up in flames, and Jillybean was running around trying to save me, Ram was, for want of a better word, mesmerized by the fire. He couldn’t take his eyes off of it.”
Sadie had a flash of memory: Jillybean lighting a house on fire in a Philadelphia suburb to help them escape. Sadie had looked back on their way through the backyard—the zombies in the house had been standing, rooted in place as the fire in the living room had slowly engulfed the house. They hadn’t done anything to save themselves.
Then a second memory flicked across her conscious mind: The fire Jillybean had set on the fuel truck outside the hangar when a thousand zombies had surrounded Neil, Grey, Deanna and herself. It had gone up like a bomb and the flames spun tornadoes of light and smoke into the air, a hundred feet high. The zombies had stood, transfixed as if witnessing a holy event.
“We could build bonfires,” she said, “big ones on platforms.”
“Or right on the walls themselves,” Deanna said. “The closer the better. The fires we had been using to light things were too small.” She grinned all of a sudden, her teeth looking so very white and her eyes just as bright. Grey couldn’t stop staring at her and Sadie thought that was just the finest thing ever. They were in love and that was a great thing.
But then the captain’s eyes dulled slightly and his smile softened and grew less. Deanna was quick to assume a motherly role: “Maybe you and Neil should go get those fires started.”
“Of course,” Neil said. Before he left, he grabbed Grey’s good shoulder and squeezed. “Who needs Jillybean, right?”
“We do,” Grey answered in a snap. “She would’ve seen these simple things right away. We shouldn’t have allowed her to leave like we did.”
Neil paused in the doorway, feeling the edge of the door with his thumb. “You’re probably right, but that’s water under the bridge now. It’s not something we should bother dwelling on. You get better, quick.” He gave Sadie a look and jerked his head toward the door.
She followed him out and the two of them were almost immediately run over by a sprinting Margaret Yuan, who was decked out in full scrubs, her gloved and bloody hands held out before her. Sadie flattened herself against the wall as Margaret smashed opened a door with her foot and charged through.
“Was that Marybeth’s room?” Sadie asked, taking a step in its direction. Neil pulled her back by the elbow.
“Yes and don’t go in there. Let Margaret do her job, we’ll do ours.” He hurried her out of the hospital with his eyes darting from side to side as if they had just robbed a bank and were making a getaway.
Chapter 25
Neil Martin
Had Marybeth died so quickly? Neil wondered as he speed walked out of the clinic, dragging Sadie after him as if Marybeth’s ghost was hot on their
tail. Neil didn’t look back, afraid not only of said ghost, but also that Michael would come storming out. Neil wasn’t truly afraid of the man. He just couldn’t abide the idea of looking him in the eye, he was sure his heart would shrivel to nothing in his chest if he did.
In the parking lot was “his” official Humvee that Michael had taken earlier. It was a command and control vehicle sporting two radio antennae whips, a strange dome on top and a useless laptop on the console between the back seats. Neil purposely ignored it and headed for the same Hummer that he had used earlier. He hoped that no one would know that he had been at the scene of the crime.
Thankfully, Sadie’s mind was elsewhere and she didn’t notice what he thought was painfully obvious. How could she not see she was traveling with a murderer? That’s what he was. He hadn’t thought of himself as such when he had denied Marybeth the blood earlier; that had been a decision made in his official capacity. Sure, he had felt guilt over it, but it was nothing compared to what he was feeling just then.
She had asked for it, he told himself. His conscience didn’t care.
She had practically begged to be killed, he added silently. Still the guilt burned.
I did her a favor. Premeditated murder is a favor? Not hardly. He could have, as governor, ordered the O negative donors to stand in line to be drained of their last reserves.
Neil knew he shouldn’t feel the weight of such guilt, but that was logic speaking and guilt was simply far more powerful. It grew even greater when his mind switched to a second, very rich vein: Jillybean. Why had Grey said that about not allowing her to leave like that? He had used the pronoun ‘we’ but everyone knew it was Neil who had allowed her to sacrifice herself.
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