by Tristan Vick
“It is a little hard to believe that the military got caught with their pants down on this one,” grumbled the general in an apologetic tone. “But shit happens.”
“With all due respect, general,” Jennifer said, “This situation is far grimmer than any of us realized. It happened way too fast to be an isolated incident.”
“What are you getting at, Ms…?”
Putting her hands on her hips defiantly, Jennifer continued on. “Jennifer. Jennifer Hurley. And what I am getting at is there had to be multiple, maybe even simultaneous, outbreaks. Tell me I’m wrong.”
“It’s very likely,” Greer answered. Everyone gasped and then there was a moment of silence. But what else could he say? She was right. There was no way this just happened naturally. Someone had to have orchestrated this. But beyond this inference he wasn’t able to say any more than that.
Suddenly an unfamiliar voice called out, “Over there!”
Turning around they spotted two women jogging toward them.
“I don’t fucking believe it,” Jennifer said. All eyes shifted to her. “That’s the girl from before … and my divorce lawyer?”
“Your divorce lawyer? What do you mean your divorce lawyer?” asked Zanato. “You’re married?!”
Jennifer just shrugged nonchalantly, as if it were no big deal. This solicited a grin from Barnes who simply couldn’t believe the audacity of this woman. Noble grinned too, thinking that Barnes might be thinking what he was thinking. Nudging his pal’s elbow, Noble shot a big cheesy grin but it was met with a poker face and a slow nod in the negative. Noble’s smile melted away and he looked back at the excitement.
Recognizing a familiar face, Alyssa Briggs approached Jennifer. “Oh, thank God you’re al…” Jen began, but before she could finish her sentence Alyssa’s fist clocked her in her jaw. Jennifer fell to the ground, more from her recoil than from the blow, but it still stung. Sitting on the ground she and gripped her chin and dapped her lip with the back of her hand. Her lip was bleeding slightly. “What the hell did you do that for?”
“What did I do that for?” Alyssa balked. “You left me there to die!”
Barnes got in between them and broke it up before anyone else’s tempers flared. “Whoa! Ladies! Let’s take it down a notch.”
“What’s going on here?” demanded Greer.
Alyssa pointed her finger of condemnation at Jennifer.
“That bitch left me to die in that prison cell all alone!”
Jennifer was checking her lip as she crouched down on the ground. “Did it ever occur to you that I simply was unable to make it back? Those things were crawling all over the place. I was cut off. Otherwise I would have—”
“Save it,” Alyssa huffed, crossing her arms in displeasure. “You could have at least sent someone.”
Greer stepped in between them and raised his hands to get them to stop bickering. “The responsibility was all mine. It was my mistake for putting you in there in the first place, not hers. So if you need to blame anyone you blame me, are we clear?”
This temporary distraction allowed Rachael to cautiously draw out the shotgun. Pulling it out swiftly, she aimed it at the general’s head. Barnes and Noble reacted instantly and drew their weapons. Training their guns on Rachael, Barnes asked, “Seriously, what’s going on here?”
Rachael smiled, not taking her eyes off Greer for an instant. Alyssa stepped back a few feet and fixed her gun on Noble. Like an idiot, Jesse Zanato simply raised his hands in surrender.
“Pussy,” Jennifer heckled.
“Bite me, cock sucker,” Zanato whispered from the corner of his mouth.
Jennifer opted to flip him off instead of playing who gets the last word with an infant.
“I believe you owe my friend an apology,” Rachael said. “And you owe me a damn good explanation for why you were holding me there. What did you find that was so important?”
General Thompson Greer smiled at the thought of experiencing his first ever bona fide Mexican standoff. He thought that after at least three tours of duty in the Middle East he’d have seen it at least once, but no. It took a goddamned zombie apocalypse and the end of civilization as he knew it before the timing was right.
“I’ll answer any questions you might have, but first, I suggest we stop trying to play whose king of the hill and start hauling ass.” The general tweaked his chin in the direction the two women had come. Everyone turned to see a throng of zombies streaming out of the city streets. Out of the mouth of every street in either direction came a swarm of monsters—like an army marching to battle.
“My god,” Jennifer said as Barnes helped her up. “There must be thousands of them.”
28
Painting the Town Red
WHEELS SMOKED AND RUBBER BURNED into the pavement as the tires of the Komatsu LAV and newly acquired Humvee bit down onto the road and peeled out. Tearing out of the entrance of the base, the two trucks headed straight for the wave of zombies crashing down on them. The general slammed his foot down on the accelerator and used the hand brake to skid the Komatsu around the corner of the gate. Staff Sergeant Jared Barnes followed close behind in the wider, more sluggish, Humvee.
Luckily, Greer remembered to load the Browning .50 caliber machine gun mounted to the roof of the Komatsu. It had armor-piercing rounds that could eat up darn near anything. The Hummer was equipped with a twin-barrel Minimi machinegun. Its double barrels allowed for a wider spread at close range.
Barnes looked over at Rachael, who sat beside him in the passenger seat. “You’re gonna have to take the wheel.”
“What?”
“Someone has to man the gun turret. You up for it?”
“Shit,” Rachael said, sliding over into the drive seat as she took the wheel. Barnes slid into the back and then popped open the hatch and scrambled up through the cupola’s hatch, and took position.
General Greer’s led foot lead the way, and as they plowed through walls of the sluggish undead, he barked, “Sergeant, get up on the Browning and plow me a path. And remember…” Greer paused dramatically. “Fire is the Devil’s only friend.”
“Yes, sir!” Noble said with excitement and taking ahold of the Browning, squeezed down on the trigger. His arms vibrating, Noble grinned as the streaks of hot white tore into the meat-sacks that made up the undead. He held down on the trigger of the machinegun as it spat streaks of fire like hot needles which obliterated anything in its way. It didn’t matter if it was a precise headshot or not, because the high velocity rounds literally disintegrated the bodies, living tissue or not. Walkers popped like water balloons and left large blood splotches with residual splatter where they once stood. Limbs exploded left and right as the bullets sawed through the sea of zombies.
The weapon spat fire like a goddamn dragon. Good for shooting planes out of the sky or for turning Walkers into minced meat. “Wow-wee!” screamed Noble. “Like a hot knife through butter!”
Racing out of the fallen city, the two vehicles carved a path of carnage right through the center of the swarm of monsters. Red drenched tires shot up blood splatter that painted their undercarriages and side panels with gory spackle. General Greer picked up the walkie-talkie and keyed in. Yelling to be heard over the whir of high powered gunfire, he shouted through the intercom, “Hang on to your hats!”
Swerving to dodge the assortment abandoned vehicles littering the road the two vehicles cut a wide swath through the horde of monsters standing in their way.
Plugging their ears at the deafening noise, Jesse Zanato and Jennifer Hurley road along in the back transport bay. Zanato looked so frightened that Jen thought he would piss himself. She felt her stomach churn in revulsion as she looked at him. Worse than the nerve-wracking racket was the nerve-wracking itch she felt. Jennifer wanted nothing more than to flick the bean, a proved remedy for high stress situations. Sharing diminutive glances they acknowledged each other’s uneasiness.
As Ulysses parted the sea of undead with the Browning, Bar
nes used the Minimi of the Humvee to lay down a series of controlled bursts. It acted like a wedge to keep the walls of the undead from closing in again.
Rachael followed hot on the General’s heels, making sure not to lose any distance. Suddenly the radio crackled. “You alright over there?”
Rachael fumbled to get the receiver. She clicked the button. “Um… yeah. We’re okay.”
“Looks like we’re through the thick of it,” the General informed. “So relax and follow me.”
Rachael nodded in confirmation.
Back in the Komatsu, Zanato took his fingers out of his ears and asked, “Where are we headed?”
“It’s a top secret military installation called Sector Twenty-seven. I can’t tell you any more than that.”
Zanato looked over at Jennifer. “Sector Twenty-seven? Have you ever heard of any such place?”
Jennifer nodded in the negative.
General Greer pulled out a cigar from a cubby on the dash and lit it up. Speaking with a mouth full of cigar, he inquired, “You ever hear of Area Fifty-one?”
“Yeah,” Zanato replied. “Aliens and shit, right.”
“Right. You’ve heard rumors, but you know it exists because it’s not exactly a big secret. Never really was. People knew it was there, they just didn’t know what they did there. But you’ve never heard of Sector Twenty-seven. Want to know why? Because if you had it wouldn’t be secret, now would it?”
“That makes sense,” Jennifer affirmed.
Zanato folded his arms and turned his head defiantly. “Whatever.”
Ulysses Noble popped down for a moment and fished up the M32 grenade launcher. “A parting gift” he said, flashing Hurley his pearly whites. Climbing back he fired off a forty millimeter round of grenades, and said, “Sayonara, mother fuckers!”
Loud explosions rocked the cars as a series of fireballs erupted on the asphalt patch stretching behind them. Various abandoned vehicles blew up in a daisy chain of explosions as grenades went off all around them. The wall of fire erected efficiently cut off the march of the living dead.
Stopping at the prominence of the hill at the edge of town, the team of vehicles rolled to a halt. The dark contours of a vast cityscape were propped up against a bright horizon. All that was left of Newcastle City was stained with ash. It had become a decrepit ghost town in roughly a week. Glistening skyscrapers had turned into a dog-eared version of the same; leaving the once shining city charred and ruined.
Rachael looked over at Alyssa. They could only feel disbelief and shock. Both had been held captives when the city was falling apart all around them. They really had no clue of how bad it had been until now. Looking out across the burnt carcass of a once thriving civilization, they couldn’t believe their eyes.
Amid the rot and decay, the road they had just traversed looked like it had been flooded by a river of the blood. The red tributary glistened in the twilight of the setting sun. It was almost serene.
All of them, worn with fatigue, watched in silence as the convoy pulled out of Newcastle City. General Greer got back on the two-way. “We are officially leaving Nightmare City. Sit back and enjoy the ride, and if anyone dare asks when we’ll get there, I swear to god I will leave you by the side of the road. Over and out.”
Smiles of elation topped with relief stretched across everyone’s faces. They were scot-free.
29
The Third Coast
MITCHELL REINHART AND LINDA SHERIDAN stood and watched the massive gates of the North Portal open. With a mechanical clunk, the giant lock of the blast doors unbolted, and a whirr of screeching gears rattled as the monstrous doors spread open. A streak of light cracked through the eight-hundred meter high doors which rose before them, and before the convoy of vehicles even fully entered into the bay area, the doors shuddered to a halt and reversed to close again.
Leading the caravan was a tan military issue Humvee, followed by a yellow school bus, a Winnebago, a mud-spattered sapphire blue Toyota Tundra with an extended crew cab, and finally, taking up the rear, was a Komatsu LAV spackled with the muddy color of dried blood.
General Greer was the first to step out and approach the two military personnel standing in the large underground cavern. Mitchell Reinhart, a tall but balding red head with a potbelly, tinge of gray in his ginger beard, and Paul Bunyan like forearms, was the head of Sector Twenty-seven’s maintenance and operations. Linda Sheridan, on the other hand, was a short and stout woman with darkly painted eyes and a bobbed haircut, and was head of the facilities population and welfare division. Her duties ranged from planning meals to making sure there were enough towels for the bathrooms in the personal sleeping quarters. Mitch liked to joke that he was an overpaid janitor and she was an underpaid chambermaid, even though they made the exact same wages. Linda liked that about Mitch. He made her laugh even as the world was slowly crumbling around them.
Greer smiled as he took Mitch’s hand and gave it a hardy shake. Mitch and Linda were only the manpower behind Sector Twenty-Seven, the brains of the outfit belonged to the late Patricia Hemingway. Everything from biological engineering, to pharmaceutical development, to virology and toxicology were all overseen and guided by Hemingway’s genius. Sadly, Greer knew that if she wasn’t among the rest of team greeting him, she likely did not make it back alive. He suspected as much when he saw Rachael Ramirez return without saying so much as a word. It wasn’t hard to put two and two together.
“Nice to see your still up and kicking, General.”
“Likewise, Mitch.”
Nodding her chin at the train of cars Linda quipped, “Looks like you brought the whole circus with you.”
Greer whipped out a cigar and lit up.
“Picked up a few stragglers along the way,” he informed between puffs.
Stepping out of the vehicles, curious passengers, consisting of men, women, and children looked around with probing eyes. Sector Twenty-seven was built inside an underground cavern so massive it could easily fit a ten-story building. The cave tailored off into an entrance built right into the rock walls. It looked like something out of a James Bond flick. A black painted tank, a black Humvee, and six heavily armed Marines, dressed in full gear, guarded the entrance.
“Holy shit-balls!” Zanato exclaimed stepping out of the Komatsu. “I don’t freakin’ believe it! It’s like the Bat cave.”
Jennifer Hurley got out behind him. Noble exited after Jennifer, and as he passed her he glanced back and winked.
Rachael and Alyssa got out of the Humvee at the same time and looked over to see that some of the other survivors had noticed the flow of bodies and started following after them, as if somebody actually knew where they were all going.
“Welcome to the Third Coast, ladies and gentlemen,” said Mitch Reinhart in his booming voice. His balding head gleamed under the halogens which dangled from the cave ceiling like Chinese paper lanterns. “As you know by now, you are in what is designated as Sector Twenty-Seven, but we commonly refer to it as The Third Coast. This is the science division of the United States Military. Our work here is beyond classified, but since it also happens to be the safest and most secure location in the country, if not the world, we welcome you to join us here.”
Immediately several hands went up without his prompting, including Zanato’s. Linda shot Mitch that look which said he had better address some of their concerns. Many looked as though they were still in shock, so maybe a little reassurance would be a much provided comfort. He knew she was right, of course, and pointing toward Zanato, Mitch said, “You have a question, son?”
“Where are we, exactly?”
“You are approximately two hundred feet under Lake Erie. The entrance to the facility you see behind me goes an additional four hundred feet underground.”
Linda jumped in and began spouting off statistics with impressive fluidity. “Lake Erie is the shallowest of all of the Great Lakes. It sits at a hundred and sixteen cubic meters in volume, is fifty-seven miles across, and is t
he ideal location to put a base for several reasons. The first is that it provides adequate cover for both protection and secrecy. Second of all, the lake provides enough fresh water for all our basic needs. Of course we filter and purify it before we use it, but it’s enough water to supply us for decades. The water also generates our power, and keeps everything from the base’s electricity to the air purifiers running. Finally, I hope you all like fish, because that’s what’s for dinner.”
One of the small children tugged on his mother’s sleeve and protested, “But mamma, I don’t like fish.”
This caused a bit of laughter among the rest of the group and looking somewhat embarrassed the boy’s mother shushed him. After the small interlude, other hands shot up. Mitch pointed his thick forefinger at a skinny woman wearing baggy clothes, a hemp bracelet, and thick black framed glasses which made her look like a hipster librarian. Sexy and nerdy all at the same time. “If this is the safest place on the earth, does that mean the president is here?”
Mitch looked over at Greer and said, “This one is all yours.”
Greer cleared his throat. “My name is General Thompson Greer, First Homeland Science Division, and I will keep you posted on any and all important updates as they come in. As for the lady’s question, no, the president has declared a National crisis and is currently aboard Air Force One coordinating with the National Guard and Military officials as Commander and Chief.”
More hands shot up.
“Yes, you sir,” Mitch said, raising his voice to match the volume of excitement of the small crowd.
A tall man with rugged features spoke up. “How bad it is? I mean, the epidemic. Is it just the East coast or…?”
Turning to General Greer, Mitch said, “You want to take this one too?”
“I’m afraid it’s bad. The last reports of the viral threat were of large-scale diffusion.”
