Run_Book 3_Long Road Home

by Rich Restucci

  “Next street over. The wheel squeaks and they get in my way when they come to see what it is.”

  “Ah. Have you thought about using WD-40?”

  “Whazzat? A Reggae band?”

  “No,” Billy offered, “it stops stuff from squeaking… How can you not know what WD-40 is?”

  “I do, it was a joke. I’m gonna go on a pickle raid, you want?”

  “I’ll wait here. Stay frosty; there’s some of them inside.”

  “Mmm hmm. They won’t touch me any more than they will you.”

  “Yeah,” the man agreed, “today we’re undesirable, who knows what will happen tomorrow?”

  The other man stood up, turning around to face the restaurant. He stopped. “Uh?”

  The seated man turned around as well. The entire street full of dead people had stopped to look at them. A hundred or so red eyes staring.

  “Oh,” he stammered and the things all moved toward the two living men.

  They ran.

  The bearded man panted heavily as he and his young compatriot stopped to rest. “What…what was that…about?”

  “Dunno,” the younger man breathed, touching the slight scar on his jaw, “but they sure looked hungry.”

  The two had run a block or so, leaving the pursuing crowd behind. The odd thing was that there were dozens of dead people shuffling quite close to them and none seemed to want to eat the living duo.

  “Was it ‘cause we were talking?”

  “Excellent incentive for us to shut up then, yeah?”

  “Yeah okay.”

  “Let’s get inside, shall we?” Billy whispered.

  “I got a penthouse suite at the Hilton downtown.”

  “That’s like, five miles from here!”

  “Didn’t say it was close, more like a mile though…”

  The men’s poor attempt at shutting up was cut off by a backup alarm from a nearby vehicle. It had come from somewhere to the north, in the direction of the water. They looked at each other then at the creatures in the street, who were already lurching and staggering toward the sound.

  “My dear Lester, I believe someone is about to get eaten.”

  “Yeah, well it ain’t gonna be me. Come on by if you get the chance, I got tons of Doritos.” With that, Billy’s friend Lester strode toward a shopping cart and began pushing it away. Several creatures paused in their trek toward the backup alarm to stare at the squeaking wheel and two began to follow the ex-homeless man, but the others continued on toward the louder sound.

  Beneath Vantel Corporate Lab

  Rick was exhausted. He stared at the battleship-gray wall in the cool room as he lay on his side in his bunk. He thought about his daughter, who was probably as far away from him as possible in the continental United States. A former San Francisco detective, he had left his little girl on Alcatraz. The island bastion sat in close proximity to several cities which had been claimed by monstrosities; millions of rotting corpses which refused to stay dead and felt a burning need to consume the living. He doubted his decision to leave his child. He doubted it every day. Rick had crossed an entire nation full of the insatiable dead and worse to find his ex-wife and bring her to an underground facility in Massachusetts. His former spouse and her group of scientists held the key to a vaccine that would either keep the dead dead, or stop the living from contracting the infection that would ultimately kill them and have them reanimate as something inhuman.

  An operative by the name of Brooks had trapped Rick and his group in the subterranean complex using a bomb and the living dead. The bomb hadn’t gone off yet, but it was sitting at the bottom of an elevator shaft just outside the sealed steel door to the compound. Any move to open the doors or disarm the explosive could set it off. Rick’s people were currently in search of a secondary means of egress from the facility.

  Rick’s plan was to leave this fortified bunker in just a few days to go back to Sam, his daughter. The odds were stacked against him that he would make it back to the west coast from the east, but he had successfully traversed the breadth of the nation once. His job was done and he needed to return to his little girl. He hoped he wouldn’t have to go alone, but he knew many of his group would remain to support those working in the lab, and he couldn’t stay much longer.

  The former detective rolled over and stared at the bunk across from him. It held a lone occupant, small and sleeping, the olive-drab army blanket pulled up to its blonde curls.

  Blonde curls. Nobody had hair like that in this entire facility. He reached for his sidearm, a Sig Sauer P226, which he had left on the footlocker he had placed next to his bed. Both the footlocker and the weapon were missing. He made a quick check under his pillow but came up empty.

  Rick dared a glance back toward the other cot and noticed it was now empty. The previous occupant was standing and staring at him. It was rotten and he couldn’t believe he hadn’t smelled it until now. Blood-red eyes ripped into his soul as he recognized the thing in front of him.

  It pointed at his face. “You did this to me!” it screamed. “You left me, Daddy!” Blood poured out of the creature’s mouth as it staggered on unsteady feet the few steps between them. “I hate you!” It fell on him and he felt it crawling up his blanket. Panic began to set in and he tried to fight it off, but it had his arms pinned under the sheets and it was incredibly strong.

  “Gonna make you like me, Daddy! Like me!” Its fetid maw hovered above him, dripping fluids on his face. It bared its broken teeth in a rictus of horror as it leaned in. “Kiss me, Daddy…”

  Rick blinked his eyes a few times, Sam’s last word Daddy echoing through his newly woken mind. It was the same dream he had almost every day. Subtle differences defined each dream, but the gist of it was always his dead little girl casting blame then attacking. The dreams were horrible, but he was used to them by now. He stared at the gray wall, willing himself to get up.

  He sighed and looked at his watch. Almost 0600. Rick thought of getting back to Sam, but he also thought about what the crazy CIA bastard Brooks had insisted prior to making his escape: There’s no way out of that bunker for thirty-five years. The evil son of a bitch had also declared he was going to attack Alcatraz out of spite. Rick had no doubt he would do it either. He had to return to The Rock, he had to. At the very least, he had to warn Captain McInerney about what was coming so they could plan.

  McInerney, captain of the USS Florida, a nuke sub, had sent a team of SEALs with Rick and his friends on this rescue and relocation mission. They had suffered losses along the way to both the dead and an enclave of survivors calling themselves The Triumvirate. Three men; Bourne, Brooks, and Recht, had pulled a few thousand people together and were holding their own in Nebraska, sending out radio messages and search parties to bring people to safety. They met Bourne, an army colonel, who defected from the Triumvirate, joining forces with Rick’s group in an attempt to secure a vaccine for the plague. The remaining two leaders of the Triumvirate didn’t like the defection and chased their former partner halfway across the country. Bourne, a good man and a good leader, had been killed by one of Brooks’ associates in the main facility sixty or so feet above the shelter where Rick lay on his bunk.

  Rick looked at his watch again, 0603. Time flies when you’re having fun. He sat up, thinking about the firefight they had been in a few days ago. Brooks and his government stooges, wanting to kill Bourne and secure the vaccine for themselves, had attacked the facility. The fire teams had failed and had been killed or pushed back by Rick’s group. Brooks had sent several dozen of the dead down into the bunker via elevator and another battle took place. Some of the group had been injured, but none seriously. None had been bitten, although the battle had eventually gone hand-to-hand.

  One of those hands belonged to a computer guy that had been trapped alone in the underground Vantel facility’s server security room. He had turned out to be an important asset. Bob, like Brooks and another acquaintance of Rick’s, Billy, could stand next to the dead with
out being attacked. The scientists at Vantel had theories on how this was possible, but hadn’t tested anything yet.

  Anna looked at Bob’s injured hand and figured it probably needed to be glued or stitched. Androwski said it would have to wait, as they needed to lock the place down properly. They welded the steel doors to the common room closed from three of the modules, giving them access to the labs, PX, which held the kitchens and supply warehouse and the final module, the living quarters. They swept the place for a solid day, covering each room, (especially bathrooms) three times, but Androwski wasn’t satisfied. They had dealt with four more undead inside the perimeter, but that still left several unaccounted for. In addition, a living person had crawled into a vent and had never come out. The assumption was that the person had died and was still crawling around, unseen. Standing orders from Androwski were that no one went anywhere alone (especially not to the bathroom) and everyone was to be armed at all times. Brenda had balked at having to carry a weapon, but the SEAL shut her up with a glare. One thing was true: the place was huge.

  The PX weapons lockers had been stocked with six M16s, two M1014 tactical shotguns, and six M9 tactical pistols. Two G36C carbines were also discovered. Several thousand rounds of .223 ammunition were available for the M16s and G36Cs. There were two crates of twelve gauge shells in both buckshot and slug rounds for the shotguns, and the pistols would have plenty of ammo with six dozen boxes of 9mm. The big find was two thousand rounds of NATO 5.56mm ammunition, (same as.223) which would work with the HK416s and Rick’s M4, all chambered for those rounds. Basically, they found a shit load of ammo for all their weapons.

  Someone had tried to jimmy the formidable locks on the lockers to no avail and Dr. Crisp assured everyone that it hadn’t been him. This concerned Androwski, as they hadn’t found anyone alive other than Crisp in any of the modules.

  On day three, after Bob’s heroic sojourn to shut the blast doors, it was decided that a recon team would need to go down into the power station and check things out. Rick, Androwski, Stenner, and Wilcox would go, while Anna, Dallas, and Seyfert would remain behind as protection for the scientists while they worked.

  Anna looked across the top of her hand. “Go fish.” Stenner picked a card off of the table. “So can they smell or not?”

  “Not,” said Linda, who was making coffee in a small kitchenette in one of the living quarters. “They don’t breathe, so they can’t smell.”

  “So then how did they know that Bob was there if they couldn’t read his brainwaves? I mean, he did cut his hand and was bleeding everywhere. Are you sure they can’t smell without breathing?”

  Linda sat down. “At this point, no. I mean, they’re dead for Christ’s sake, they shouldn’t be doing anything.”

  Anna moved her cards around in her hand. “That’s true. Bob, how you doing over there?” she called.

  He raised his bandaged hand from his position on a cot and gave a thumbs up. “A-OK.”

  Stenner leaned forward. “How is he really?”

  “Well, his hand is pretty infected. I cleaned it out and gave him some antibiotics from the pharmacy, but I wasn’t able to treat him for an entire day and a half. We didn’t have the meds until the PX was cleared.”

  “How do you know he isn’t infected infected?”

  Anna shook her head. “Because he’d be dead already. Nobody lives a full day, you know that, and we’re on day three.”

  “Right, but didn’t one of your buddies die from a normal infection and then turn?”

  “Yeah. Martinez. He was a good guy.”

  “So…”

  “So what?” She raised her eyebrows but didn’t look away from her cards. “You want to shoot him now just in case? Hey, Bob! Stenner thinks we should blow you away in case you’re infected.”

  “Couldja get me a drink first?” he asked to anyone. “I would rather a bullet enter my noggin without me being so thirsty.” Bob rolled over.

  Stenner smiled. “Guy has balls of steel, I’ll give him that. Still, we should keep an eye on him. Any threes?

  “I just asked you for threes!”

  “I picked it up just now. Keep an eye on him, yeah?”

  “Way ahead of you, Army. Linda, so back to the blood, why do you think they went after him when he was bloody if they couldn’t smell it?”

  “The creature’s reaction might not have had anything to do with the blood. It is coincidental that they attacked only when he was bleeding though. Best I can see it, they don’t possess any superior abilities to us other than the ability to read brainwaves and that’s still just a theory.”

  Dallas, Rick, and Androwski walked in just then. “Stenner, it’s time.”

  “Roger that, sir.” He tossed his cards on the table and Anna immediately grabbed them and looked at them. She put them down quickly. Stenner picked up his weapon and began checking the slide action and extra magazines.

  Dallas sat down and picked up Stenner’s cards. “Me n’ Jersey’s gonna sit this’n out. Get some much needed R n R.” He rubbed his calf.

  Stenner pulled his combat knife from its sheath on his left breast, checked it, and re-sheathed it. “Where’s Seyfert?”

  “Watchin’ the lab rats do their thing.” The Texan looked at Linda. “Sorry, ma’am.”

  She laughed. “Lab rats. I like it. I guess I should be getting back too.” She stood up.

  “We’ll walk you back,” Androwski told her. “We need to speak with Crisp anyway. Bob, how big is this power plant?”

  Bob rolled over. “Mmmm?”

  “The geothermal plant, how big?”

  “Dunno, I never did anything down there. Crisp will know where the schematics are.”

  Androwski stretched and rubbed his shoulder. “Let’s rock and roll then.”

  Dr. Crisp didn’t know where the blueprints were, but he had been down to the power plant on several occasions. He drew the recon team a crude schematic and the place didn’t look huge, but it would still take some time to clear it. Androwski wanted to make sure that if anyone were alive down there, that they were friendly and hopefully could operate the plant’s systems, keeping the lights on indefinitely.

  Three sets of concrete stairwells brought the team from the back of the PX module down to a fire door. 6332 was printed in yellow block numbers on the green door. The door was not locked.

  “Weapons check,” the SEAL demanded. “Suppressors on.” Everyone double-checked their gear again and Rick put his hand on the door handle as three battle rifles trained on the entry. Androwski nodded and Rick pulled the door wide. It was bright in the hallway and nothing came at them.

  “Stay frosty. Constant-zero and stick together.”

  Wilcox had opted for one of the M1014 shotguns and he went first with Androwski, the men moving two by two, Rick and Stenner to the rear.

  The hallway was approximately fifteen meters long. Eight doors, all closed, lined the hall equidistant from each other. A ninth door, open, ended the corridor. The hum of equipment could be heard through the ninth door.

  Wilcox threw his closed fist in the air and everyone hunkered down, weapons pointing in all directions. Androwski looked at the young private and the kid simply pointed toward the floor. A single drop of blood stood out in stark contrast to the dark industrial-gray paint. Androwski nodded and moved to the first door on the left. It was locked. As was the second. And the third. The fourth was open and led into an empty office with large filing cabinets and a chart cabinet as well. The office, approximately four meters by four meters, also held a desk and a computer monitor. Pictures of a heavyset woman and two equally heavyset boys were in some frames on the desk. Rick closed the door as the team moved further down the hall.

  The rest of the closed doors were locked as well.

  Although the fluorescent bulbs on the corridor ceiling threw plenty of light, it was dark inside the final, open door. The night vision goggles that the team had been issued when the mission began had died weeks ago from battery loss and
Androwski cursed the proprietary batteries that they used. They were only available through military channels and such channels no longer existed. The SEAL flipped on his tac light and the others followed suit. They moved forward as a cohesive unit, lights pointed toward the floor.

  The hum got louder as they approached and Wilcox raised his shotgun. Androwski moved quickly and shone his light into the darkened portal. Nothing stumbled or came at them shrieking. Androwski let out a loud whistle and the team waited. Again, nothing came. The SEAL made some gestures with his right hand and Wilcox nodded. He pointed to Stenner and into the room and to Rick, then back down the corridor behind them. Stenner and Rick both nodded, Stenner going to one knee five meters in front of the door, Rick next to him, standing but aiming back the way they had come.

  Androwski and Wilcox each moved to one side of the open door. The SEAL held up three fingers and the Army kid nodded once more, curtly. Androwski bobbed his head once, twice, and on the third time, both men entered the room quickly, each turning toward the direction he was facing. No gunfire erupted and a few seconds later, a light switched on in the room. Wilcox moved in front of the now-illuminated doorway and waved the other two in.

  When he got inside the door, Rick couldn’t believe his eyes. The room looked like the bridge of a ship. Controls, dials, lights, handles, and screens, all arranged in an outward bow shape, greeted them. Six large rectangular windows at the top of the bow looked into a small natural cave below. Doors to the left and right side of the large room led to catwalks with stairs leading down. Rick looked out the windows and saw three five-meter-long, five-meter-wide turbines on the ground perhaps ten meters below. Each turbine had two large pipes extending into the ground, one on each side. Thick cables ran from each turbine to a series of gray panels fastened to the walls above and to the sides. The walls looked like the surface of a golf ball but as if you were inside it looking out.