Road to Grissom: Part three of the Aftermath series

by Duncan McArdle

  “Fuck”, she said under her breath, before turning and running back over to the F150, “Can’t we take the truck?”, she yelled over ahead of her arrival.

  “It’ll take too long to move the semi”, Lester replied, himself still rummaging essential supplies out of the Ford’s bed.

  “What about the back exit?”, Andrew asked, the sound of the dead now so loud it was making it difficult to hear properly.

  “My guess is it’s just as overrun as the front”, Sonja replied before Lester had a chance, “Honestly Andrew, this is bigger than you can imagine”.

  “How long do we have?”, Andrew asked, him being the one member of the group who did poorly under pressure.

  Sonja looked at Lester for confirmation, and then returned her gaze to the now fearful bespectacled man in front.

  “Seconds”, she said in unison with Lester.

  With that final word, the pace ramped up immensely. Having finished packing his things, Lester darted off in the direction of the boarded-up window gap, opting to go as far left as possible in order to get a head start on the horde. With the entrance about to be overrun, there was only one option, and that was to rip off the boarding, climb outside, and run for it. The last thing he wanted was to emerge outside right in the thick of the dead.

  Sonja and Andrew meanwhile grabbed whatever was in easy reach – giving preference to things already in bags that could be easily transported – and slung them onto their backs.

  “What about the guns?”, Andrew asked, knowing their most important asset was two floors above them.

  “We’ve got to leave them”, Sonja replied, hating the words as they left her mouth, but knowing they were true, “I’d rather be out there unarmed than stuck in here facing that thing”, she said, before herself beginning the short run over to Lester’s position.

  The huge, muscular man was already making short work of the boards, ripping off with his bare hands what had actually required a nail gun to put in place. It was as if this were the task his huge, almost seven-foot structure had been designed for, and within a few seconds he’d ripped off and bent back enough to expose a hole just the right size for all three of them to get out via. Arriving last, Andrew hurriedly climbed through the gap just after Lester – who had himself put Sonja through first – and then emerged into what by now was beginning to look and feel like a warzone.

  The sound was nothing short of deafening. Suddenly Andrew found himself unable to hear his own feet hitting the ground, the words spoken by his fellow survivors, or even his own thoughts. They’d emerged onto the street outside around twenty metres ahead of the horde – or at least, this part of the horde – and couldn’t help but take a moment to inspect just exactly what they were facing, for the first time in Andrew’s case.

  Standing there side by side, the three figures staring out at the immense sight in front of them, it almost seemed pointless to try and run. They knew full well that they could outpace the dead, that wasn’t an issue, but when confronted with the reminder that such incredibly huge numbers remained in the world and could be waiting around the very next corner, running seemed almost pointless. It was just another last ditched effort to extend their painful life of survival, and stave off the inevitable for a short period of time.

  But despite all the negativities, a very different attitude had been instilled in all three of the people stood there confronting close to a hundred thousand wandering bodies. They were survivors, their only objective each and every day was to survive until the next one. So it didn’t matter just how bad things looked, because as long as they had the power to keep on fighting, that was exactly what they were going to do.

  But before they could stage the next part of their escape, a particularly quick member of the masses of dead broke ranks and began sprinting towards them. Presumably housed in the thick of the horde for some time, it was clear from the look on the slim, rotting body that it had been waiting for this very moment, which made it almost disheartening to watch just how quickly Lester brought up the M16 he was holding in both arms, and fire two quick but well placed shots.

  But everyone there knew it was just a waste of ammo. Despite bringing down the being, it was just one biter in a very large army, the likes of which they had far from enough ammo to take down, and that was if they had all of the other rifles they’d been forced to leave behind. This was not a battle they could win, and nor was it one they could hide from, and so instead they turned their backs to it, intent on opting to flee.

  But what they were confronted with was not the empty street leading off into the unknown distance that they had hoped for. Instead, a series of large off roaders sat lined up along the street, all of them with their lights turned off, and their large engines drowned out by the immense sound of the dead. On several of the vehicles’ rooftops sat a number of men and women, each of them carrying various weapons that ranged from assault rifles to sniper rifles, and all of them pointed right in the trio’s direction.

  “Shit”, all three of them said in tandem, not even bothering to try and raise their weapons in time.

  Even with a hail of bullets as big as this one, the sound of gunfire was all but silent as the deadly rounds soared effortlessly through the dark night air.

  Chapter 25: Love, loss and regret

  Danny’s knees scraped awkwardly along the floor of the gravelly rooftop he’d spent the last hour laying on top of. His muscles were beginning to cramp and spasm awkwardly, his hands throbbing from being tensely gripped on various parts of his weapon, and his eye now had a red imprinted ring where he’d pressed it too hard against the rifle scope he was using to survey the area. Attempting to stave off some of his discomfort, he’d attempted to move around slightly whilst still sticking to his duties, but it wasn’t much use, laying on your front on what was essentially hardened ground was never going to be comfortable.

  In the past hour Danny had seen little happen in the vast area visible in front. He’d spent a large amount of his time focused solely on his advancing comrades, scoped in to make sure nothing snuck up on them, but had made sure to also look away from the lens, in order to check little was happening elsewhere. That said, it had been almost completely still for the entirety of his time there.

  One minor exception had been when he’d seen guards of the stadium switching position. A little under half an hour ago, he’d looked up from the road John and Devon were slowly making their way along just in time to notice a shimmer of movement at the stadium’s south-east corner, the nearest corner to him. Scoping in quickly to get a better look, he’d watched as a man and woman had walked out to replace the two men already on duty, all of them seemingly well-armed with some kind of rifles. It hadn’t told him much about those they might be potentially facing off against in the near future, but it still seemed like useful information all the same.

  Other than that particular incident, only the dead had disrupted his observation time. One of several more minor disturbances had come in the form of three biters roaming in the nearby area. Down several floors from his current position, and spread out across such a large area of empty car parks, they’d done little to cause Danny any concern, either for his own safety, or for that of his fellow survivors, but that didn’t stop him keeping an eye on their movements just in case.

  The more pressing issue that the dead were causing him came from much closer, and was growing worse and worse by the second. Situated on the other side of the few inches of steel that made up the door leading to the rooftop, an incessant amount of banging was growing in both volume and ferocity, as what now sounded like a small horde of the dead continued to try and break their way through the barricade that separated them from the human on the roof, his scent presumably strong enough for them to sense his presence.

  Danny had spent far too much time already coming up with various plans as to how he might deal with the situation, the majority of which involved him engaging in actions that were far more masculine than he actually believed hims
elf to be capable of, though that didn’t stop him wondering. In any case, he’d opted after serious contemplation to simply ignore it, and to continue on the way he was, hoping someone or something else might deal with the problem for him.

  What he was doing instead, in order to take his mind off the banging, was to simply think of other things. He thought about what John and Devon might be talking about right now, if anything, and he thought about just what exactly might be going on inside the stadium. But eventually he began to broaden his thinking, moving onto reminiscing about his time before the world had come to an end, dreaming about what it might be like in the years to come, and eventually, he began thinking about Julia.

  Julia was an early twenty-something girl with bright blonde hair and even brighter blue eyes, and the kind of smile that could make a young guy like Danny all but forget just what a sorry state the world was in nowadays. She’d come over from the Milwaukee camp a few months prior, along with her mother, and now lived in one of the many apartments scattered around the downtown Chicago area.

  Julia and Danny had hit it off right from the start. Introducing himself to the girl just a day after she’d arrived, Danny had become her go-to resident at the camp, and the two of them had developed a fondness for each other quickly. His confident – albeit only when in or near the camp – and cocky nature had been exactly what Julia needed, especially when she’d just been thrown into a whole new mix of people in an unfamiliar place. Danny had been like a rock to the girl, and before long, it was clear they were effectively dating.

  That said, dating now was very different to dating before the end. There was of course no movie theatres to go to, no beaches to soak up the nice weather – something that was in itself a rarity now between all the smog – from, and no fancy restaurants to splurge on come the first Saturday night after payday. There were few luxuries in the camp, and even less that didn’t require electricity. Everyone was confined to stay inside the walls, and everyone ate the same tired rations and tinned food as each other, with no exceptions.

  Despite that however, Danny had still managed to be at least somewhat creative. Eating rations was never going to be the most exciting experience, but eating them on an apartment block’s rooftop while watching the sunset was something Danny had managed to arrange on more than one occasion. Of course, it might not have been strictly within the rules of camp to go sneaking up to the top of restricted areas, but they’d not been caught yet.

  Unfortunately, as with all good things, they must come to an end. More recently, Julia had begun pressuring Danny on their future together, if there was to be one. There didn’t seem to be much sense in dating for years, living together, marrying, and then having kids, all spread out across the best part of a decade. If things were ever going to return to some semblance of normality, people needed to repopulate, and that meant having kids sooner, rather than later, something Danny felt he was far too immature to handle.

  The subject had been a sensitive one, and had led to more than a few fights and arguments over the past few weeks, eventually resulting in Julia walking out on him one night and not coming back. Danny didn’t feel like they’d officially ended things – and for that matter, very much hoped that they hadn’t – but he couldn’t help but think that if he didn’t do something soon, he’d lose her forever, and that would be something he’d truly regret.

  At this point, Danny had begun to feel as if he needed a distraction from his distraction. He’d set about re-learning what little there was to know about the Chinese made sniper rifle he’d leant on for the past hour, flipping between its various switches and adjusting everything there was to be adjusted, making it ever so slightly more comfortable for his skinny stature. But it only ever took his attention for seconds, or minutes at best, before he eventually returned to thinking about Julia.

  It wasn’t that he was particularly against the idea of marriage, or even children for that matter. It just wasn’t something he’d expected himself to be thinking about at such an early age. He’d never kept a girlfriend longer than a few weeks before then, and had certainly never had any kind of serious discussion about a future with any of them. In fact the more he thought about it, the more he realised just how lucky he was for having finally found someone who seemed to be willing to talk about such things with him, and someone who seemed to be content enough with him that they might be willing to do such things. Suddenly Danny began to feel like he might have come dangerously close to squandering something that had the potential to be so very, very good.

  But it wasn’t long until once again, the rising sound of banging on metal brought him crashing right back down to the present moment, laying there on that uncomfortable rooftop, praying that the hinges of the door wouldn’t give way at any moment. His present task might not hold a candle to the nights he’d spent eating with Julia on the rooftops of downtown Chicago, but right now, he had a more important job to do, so he once again looked back into the scope, and caught up with John and Devon’s progress.

  Now around halfway between the apartment block and the stadium, the pair had managed to stay behind the row of cars lining the side of the street for their entire journey, obscuring themselves from view by any of the guards. Danny couldn’t help but wonder if it was a little overkill – they were so far out in such a big area that it was unlikely they’d be spotted – but given how easily the slightest movements had caught his own attention while up on his present perch, he couldn’t blame them for their overly-cautious methods.

  In their current position, Danny didn’t imagine it would be much longer before they were close enough to get a view on one of the rear guard stations, a key part of their stadium reconnaissance. Looking up ahead, Danny himself could occasionally see some kind of movement at the western end of the stadium, but his angle of viewing obscured anything of great interest from being exposed, so he returned his gaze to the other two.

  One disadvantage of John and Devon’s tactic of hugging tightly into the cars was that Danny frequently lost track of just where exactly they were up to. Looking back to the area he thought he’d last seen them, Danny quickly realised they’d moved on from the spot, and so began scanning further up the street. But it was no use, there was no sign of them, so he instead began searching to the left, looking over the various buildings and then onto the next street along, wondering if they might have moved into better cover.

  He eventually found them at the rear of a store that faced onto the road they’d previously been walking along, an unusual change in position that he didn’t entirely understand, but chose to simply accept. What was more odd however, was that as he continued to watch them, he saw them make their way over to a ladder, and then begin climbing on to the rooftop of the store. For a pair that had so recently been dedicated to a slow, crouched walk up to the stadium, this seemed like a strange change of pace, but again he gave them the benefit of the doubt that they had a plan, and simply continued to watch.

  Within a few moments though, the pair had reached the rooftop of the single storey store, and slowly made their way towards the front, now overlooking the street. At this point, Danny imagined they were in a position where they were quickly becoming easy to spot by any of the guards at the nearest station. Something seemed wrong about their movement, and Danny wasn’t too keen on just watching them do something that he felt was a mistake.

  Leaning out from the scope of the rifle, Danny reached down to his belt and grabbed hold of the radio clipped to the side of it. Puling it up to his mouth, he placed his finger on the button, and then hesitated. But he wasn’t hesitating because he was unsure of what to say, or because he was seriously considering whether or not it was a good idea to say it. He was hesitating because he’d suddenly begun to hear a strange noise somewhere nearby, and perhaps more importantly, that the nearby banging had stopped.

  The noise sounded akin to a lawnmower going off in the distance, or perhaps an insect buzzing at an unusual frequency. But in both cases, the distance w
asn’t quite right, it sounded much more like it was coming from just a few metres away. Slowly the noise became louder and louder, until Danny was eventually able to zone in on a more exact source, eventually realising that it was coming from above.

  Jumping off of the ground into a crouched position, Danny quickly snapped his neck up in an attempt to sight the source of the sound. It took a moment to adjust to the much closer object – he’d spent a large amount of the last hour looking through a sniper scope – but when he eventually did he identified it almost instantly. It wasn’t an insect of some kind, or a bird for that matter, it was a quadcopter, a small, unmanned drone being piloted remotely, and it was descending right in front of him.

  Withdrawing his pistol, as if preparing himself for battle with what was effectively a toy, Danny watched with an utterly bemused look on his face as the small white object came to a soft landing in front of him, and then spun down its propellers until they came to a complete stop. Unsure of what to do, Danny stared at the thing for some time, inspecting its rotors and noting its pristine condition, and spotting a complete lack of dirt on any part of the device, before eventually noticing that it had a scrap of paper taped to its front, with writing scribbled on its outside that simply read, “READ ME”.

  Cautiously Danny leant forwards and peeled off the piece of paper, tearing it slightly but managing to get it off of the drone without too much trouble. Slowly he unfolded the note to reveal a larger message written on the inside, and after taking a moment to contemplate whether or not this strange sequence of events were really happening, he began to read out the small, scribbled message.