She heard his words, and his sense of assurance made her feel a little better.
“I talked with the civilian camp manager. They could really use your help,” he said.
She smiled, nestling into his body for warmth. Being involved in helping others was just what she needed to take her mind off of this terrible situation. She hugged him close. “That sounds great,” she said into his shoulder. He smelled of the perfect blend of sweat and dirt.
“He asked you to meet with him first thing in the morning. I’m exhausted.” It wasn’t long before she could hear him breathing soundly. A sound she could recognize from anywhere. It seemed to beckon her into sleep like a masculine lullaby and soon she joined him.
The next morning she spoke with the distribution manager, Tim, a middle-aged balding bureaucrat. He put her in charge of managing care packages for new arrivals. The place was badly in need of organization. They had plenty of supplies, but getting the right supplies to the people that needed them was haphazard at best.
Once settled in, she set about directing her staff of one to tasks. She knew she could make the process of being homeless a little better for the refugees.
“Nathan, I need you to add blankets to all the incoming refugee packages, the nights are getting colder, along with the water bottles.” She bent over to review a checklist. “Nathan?” she queried. Her volunteer assistant was nowhere to be found.
A big box slammed onto the table. “Nathan, please,” she said, shifting her gaze away from the document.
A figure shadowed over her, his face blocked out by the sun.
“How can I-?” She failed to get the rest of her sentence out.
The man charged around the table and she was unable to resist him picking her up, and bear-hugging her tight. “Gwen, I never thought I’d see you again,” he said.
Realization came over her in a rush. “Mauser! Jarl! Oh my God! You’re alive.”
She cried, Mauser cried, and she was pretty sure Jarl also shed a tear, maybe two.
Mauser and Jarl were like family. The Division agents had always kept to themselves in a tight-knit circle of friends.
“Mauser, not so tight,” she chided. “I can’t breathe.”
He set her down and looked her over, inspecting her for mistreatment like an older brother. “I knew that wasn’t you in the townhouse, I just knew it. I tried to tell Steele.” He trailed off when he realized what he had said. His head bent forward in sorrow, worried he may have hurt her feelings by mentioning Mark.
She grabbed his hand. “He’s alive. He got me and a few others here safely.”
Mauser let out a wholehearted chuckle. “Well, I’ll be damned. That bastard didn’t quit, did he?”
Gwen beamed. “We found him half-dead at our place, but a little TLC fixed him up right,” she said with a cool smile.
“I’ll bet,” Mauser replied with a wink.
“Well, where is that son of a goat?” Mauser asked, his mouth crinkling in a smile.
The pop, pop, pop of gunfire echoed in the distance. The sound of gunshots was an aspect of camp life that people were getting used to, but to which they could never really grow accustomed.
Mauser glanced over his shoulder with no real concern. “It gets more frequent every day. I’m not sure about it. It’s just too big of a camp for us to secure.”
Gwen pointed over her shoulder to where she and Mark had set up their tent.
“Well, I brought you a new recruit. He’s over there in the orange and black tent getting some shut-eye.”
Mauser looked in the distance mirth in his eye. “Perfect. Let’s get his ass up, because I need some help.”
They all marched over to the tent, and Gwen watched Mauser unceremoniously rip it open and pounce on Steele. A struggle ensued, and then laughter came forth.
Well, at least they’re making up. Their friendship endured. Steele had told her about the harsh words that had been spoken between them as they parted ways. Not all things could be broken by this apocalyptic event; a part of the human spirit remained: friendship. She half-smiled at the sound of them talking. Things weren’t as bad as they seemed.
STEELE
Mount Eden Emergency Operations Facility, VA
Three days dragged by on the wooded mountaintop. It had been thirteen days since Steele left the U.S. on a mission to the DRC and returned to a country in utter chaos. It numbed his mind how things could change so fast. It was as if they had somehow stepped into a parallel universe that only mirrored their own. Only in this alternate reality, the disease had spread like wildfire scarring the land and everyone in it. It left only disaster and violence in its wake, and society - along with the cumbersome government entities - had been gobbled up by legions of the dead in the blink of an eye.
Steele awoke before the yellow sun crested the horizon and rolled Gwen off his arm, regaining feeling as the pins and needles drifted away. He gazed at her gold hair, snarled from sleep like a lion’s mane. He was proud of her. She contributed to the mission by aiding the stranded civilians here. It seemed to put her mind at ease and, in turn, put his mind at ease.
Steele stretched his arms above his head and rubbed his lower back. The firm ground is supposed to help bad backs, he thought. He never minded camping, but he also never thought he would view it as a luxury. Then again, anything on this side of the fence was a luxury. Life itself was a gold-plated pile of shit, but a luxury nonetheless.
He collected his long gun from the ground next to him. It had been returned to him by Mauser to support his law enforcement duties. He removed the magazine and looked inside. Brass-lined bullets lay side by side in the magazine. Little messengers of death. He shoved it back into the rifle. Always know the status of your weapon.
He threw his tactical vest over his thermal base layer, tightening a strap, and stepped outside, his breath fogging in the morning air. It would get warmer as the day went on. It wasn’t the time of year yet when it stayed cold. The sheer amount of walking would ensure he was sweaty by the end of the day. Slinging his AR-15 around his neck and shoulder, he let it relax across his chest pointed toward the ground. They had offered him a military version, but he kept his own.
Mauser had enlisted him into the camp law enforcement forces. Not that he would have denied his friend’s request for help given a choice. The military maintained control of the perimeter and their base, while the various mismatched law enforcement groups loosely prevented the civilian camp from imploding onto itself. The job he performed was similar to that of a regular patrol officer. It wasn’t what he had trained for, and he quickly found out that the duty of settling petty disputes was not his forte. He would manage, knowing that he made a difference. The camp grew everyday as the amassing hordes of infected from D.C. pushed more refugees ahead of them onto the mountaintop.
He walked to a tent that served as a temporary detention center and command post for the refugee camp security teams. A group of new refugees stumbled in making the ever-growing sea of colored tents.
“Excuse me, sir. Where do we go?” a haggard elder man asked. Is he old? Or has he been beaten into such a run down state?
Steele pointed. “If I were you, I would set up away from the latrines, but not too close to the fences.”
The man nodded, understanding his meaning. “This place was a bitch to find, but we just followed the direction of the helicopters.”
Steele nodded and took his leave. Mount Eden was hidden away, and he suspected that people were not the only ones following the helicopters and military trucks. Word had gotten out that it was the only place to find safety in the area, so they kept coming. It didn’t matter what walk of life they came from, they were all in the same leaky boat now.
A yellow and black bulldozer pushed dirt down the hill clearing trees in the process. A day prior, the military started clearing the tree line to increase their field of fire.
A group of men with picks and shovels marched through the front gate with an armed escort. Onl
y three soldiers went with the workers. Hardly enough to protect them. Every morning they would go clean up the bodies from the night before, dumping them in shallow graves and torching the remains.
Valuable resources were being poured into camp defense and the cleanup of corpses instead of fighting the masses of undead flooding across the Key Bridge, Arlington Memorial Bridge, and the 14th Street Bridge into Virginia.
Steele continued his round through the camp toward the perimeter fence. He nodded to a man in a once-smart sports coat, now filthy and tattered. The man crouched over a small fire, heating water. The human apocalypse was the great equalizer of men. You were dead or trying to avoid it. Either way, they were all living on borrowed time.
Steele patrolled along the perimeter fence. It was a ritual he did every morning. He would prefer to be the hunter, but he wasn’t sure what he was. He pushed on the standard chain-link fence and it bowed out. It was not a sturdy fence, having been designed to prevent easy access as opposed to physically blocking an attacker. A mass of infected could push through it. Steele tried not to think about it.
He gazed out at the retreating line of trees, green and lush, and then at the brown earth covering the ground from the forest to Mt. Eden. Open ground had been churned up making it appear like a World War One no-man’s land.
From Steele’s position, the land rolled moderately downhill and now had no obstacles. That asshole facility director should have us digging some sort of trench, maybe a pit of stakes, to slow down the infected and prevent them from piling up on the fence. Then we would only have to focus on protecting the chokepoints, access gates up and down the mountain. This could be a fortress, impregnable, well supplied, and safe. This could be a bastion of hope. This could be a true Eden in a dead world.
Steele had previously voiced his concerns to the facility director.
“This is a FEMA operations facility, not a medieval castle,” the sniveling bureaucrat had told Steele.
“But you don’t understand. These ‘things’ will come in the hundreds and thousands, and when they do-” Steele was cut off.
“Thank you for your input, but please leave facility management to the professionals,” the facility director had said, moving on his way clipboard in hand. This is like no disaster we’ve ever seen.
It was only a matter of time. His sharp eyes caught sight of a figure as it emerged. His awkward gait exposed him as one of the infected. From a distance he looked as though he might once have been a farmer.
A sniper rifle cracked through the morning air and the infected man’s shoulder ripped backward as if something pulled on him from behind. He staggered but didn’t fall. He slogged forward, blackened coagulated blood running down his front. A second boom resounded and this time the man went down, his head turning into a red mist.
Steele cut up through the refugee camp and navigated his way up to the command tent, where Mauser and Jarl awaited his arrival.
“How’d you sleep?” Steele asked Jarl.
“No good. The gunfire keeps me awake.”
Mauser handed Steele a cup of coffee, which he drank greedily. Instant joe or not, he welcomed the boost.
“Nothing much to report from the overnight team. Everyone’s scared shitless out there,” Mauser said. “Military brought in a couple of truckloads of MREs last night. Facility Director Douchebag, wants us to be there while they hand them out. He’s nervous there will be another food run like the last time.”
“Jarl and I will handle it,” Steele said, looping his thumbs on his tactical vest.
“Make sure you give the camp a once over before you head up. We can let that little turd sweat it out a bit without us. Stay safe.”
Most altercations broke out over the limited distribution of government-issued supplies, but the real reason Steele wanted to man the food distribution was so he could be close to Gwen. Mauser knew this and deferred to Steele, giving him the patrols near the civilian disaster response tents.
“Maybe you could borrow a box of MREs for our packs,” Mauser added with a wink.
“Shouldn’t be a problem.”
Steele didn’t see any harm in commandeering some loose supplies to make sure their ‘Go packs’ were well stocked. Steele and Mauser had stashed the packs and extra supplies near the vehicles in case one needed to high tail it out of the camp. It was a constant feeling of uneasiness, but it was better than being on the run, or at least that’s what he told himself.
Steele made his rounds with Jarl, knowing that Gwen would already be prepping for the food distribution. He had to keep telling himself that they were safe, although he knew that simply wasn’t true. But what chance do we have on our own?
They walked by a giant motor pool and waved at Eddie, who helped a military mechanic working a Humvee. The mobile lounge sat dark to the side like some ancient relic. It was one of the only areas in the compound that civilians had easy access to the military.
“How you doing, Eddie?”
The elderly black man waved at him and smiled. “Oh, ya’ know. Just showin’ these young army brats how to fix up a Humvee with a little style.” The old man laughed and did a dance move, spinning in a circle.
Steele chuckled and patted him on the shoulder. “Keep up the good work. I’ll see you later at lunch.”
He and Jarl continued their patrol of the camp. They rounded the shanties up near the civilian disaster response tent. It was a large green tent, probably on loan from the military surplus.
Many remaining federal employees, who were not considered ‘essential’ enough to be protected underground, had set up camp there. A sort of begging around the table of the bunker for the scraps of security. It was a general whirlwind of activity, with federal employees attempting to apply some sort of order and hierarchy to the situation. It seemed to give the civilians a little hope that someday things might get back to normal.
Steele knew better, but people had faith that the government may yet save them from death. Even he had a little hope.
A couple of armed soldiers stood nearby, faces flat. Uneasy. Worn out. On edge. And grim. It matched what he had seen and what he had been told by some of the military operators working out of the base. It would only be a matter of time before they asked him and the other law enforcement officers to supplement their ranks, leaving the camp even more poorly defended. Not that everything wasn’t already spread too thin.
“The food is killing my stomach,” Jarl grumbled.
“Don’t like the four fingers of death, huh?” Steele laughed.
“I hate the processed food. Give me steak. Give me whole chickens. But no. They give me hotdogs in beans, and the shits.”
Steele could see Gwen from where they stood. She smiled offering a man a bag of supplies. The old man nodded as if he were crying and she gave him a hug. She held so much empathy in her heart.
“I’ll be back. Have to conduct some actions from the seat,” Jarl joked.
“Careful in there,” Steele laughed.
“Bah,” Jarl barked back, walking away.
Steele continued his watch over Gwen. At least she was safe, that was all that mattered. Now that Steele had his allies around him, he had seen very little of Ahmed, and that was just the way he liked it. He didn’t trust the bastard. Maybe he had found some work in the laundry facility or, better yet, cleaning the latrines. Steele laughed inwardly.
Bang, bang. Rapid gunshots interrupted his overwatch of Gwen, hair rising on the back of his neck. Steele turned around, squinting his eyes as he combed the tent village. Tents, tarps, shelters, cook fires, and lawn chairs decorated the landscape in a disorderly fashion. That sounded close. A stab of fear wound into his gut. That sounded like it came from inside the camp.
He gripped his pistol grip rifle handle a little tighter and walked quickly toward the gunshots, boots treading hard over the ground. It was his instinct to move toward a disaster that others ran from, like a sheepdog protecting its flock. Before the outbreak, he would have been movi
ng, high-speed, weapon drawn to the sound, thinking there was an active shooter in progress. Now, it promised something so much worse.
A man in a sweatshirt and jeans shaded his eyes with a hand.
“What’s going on?” he mumbled.
“Get your family back to the command tent,” Steele said, fearing the worst and hoisting his long gun up to his shoulder.
Gunshots were heard all the time. No reason to think that anything was amiss. It had become a regular part of their lives, like car traffic on a busy city street. Everyone expected it and ignored it. Why is my hair standing on end?
Pop, pop, pop. This was different. The gunshots came rushed and frantic; the kind of shooting a scared person does. Steele picked up his pace, half-running to the gunshots, his active shooter training shining through his complacency for the sound of gunfire. People materialized from inside their tents. That was not a good sign.
It had been made crystal clear that any outbreak was to be extinguished with extreme prejudice, which meant there would be many needless deaths unless someone stopped it right away. He imagined one of the AH-64 Apache helicopters strafing the civilian camp with a 30 mm chain gun. Must be quick.
Steele’s tactical badge bounced against his vest as he sprinted. He shouldered through people running his way. Shanties whipped past him, and he slowed as the screaming got louder, not wanting to run headlong into a shit storm.
Wailing pierced his ears. He modified his position and moved into the high ready, peering over his sights. He kept his stride as tight as he could shoot effectively. He scanned left and right searching the area for threats. He tracked two people racing toward him. He let his trigger finger rest easy upon the slim piece of metal. They sprinted for him and he slowly depressed the trigger backward, only holding when he saw the wide-eyed look of fear in their eyes. He let them run by, one of them clutching a baby. He scanned the area twenty to thirty yards ahead. Where are the bad guys? Follow the screams.
End Time Page 33
