Zombie-dem

by James J. Stubbs

  Chapter 3

  Known unto God

  Logan had been digging for a few hours, through the pain of the midday sun, when the light began to fade into dusk. The darkness of another night wasn't going to slow him down though. He moved rocks and rubble from the shallow grave that he had been digging all day, with his bare and now blood drenched hands.

  There were a few supplies on the transport plane but nothing substantial. The longer the zombie mess went on for, the fewer things seemed to go right. Lizzie had managed to find a few bottles of clean water and some dry rations. They were far from tasty but they would keep them moving for at least another day. The biscuits in the dry rations just swelled up with water. Like cat food. But probably tasted worse.

  She had been racking her brains, trying to figure out the mystery of the cockpit. She kept finding her eyes darting to the hole in the cockpit window. There was no glass inside the cabin. That meant that something on the inside was trying to smash itself out, not in. Her mind wandered and was clouded by her feelings for the man Logan was about to bury. Or at least it was probably him.

  She tried to think that if Jack had survived, then he would have come looking for them by now, or he might have had the sense to stay with the plane until they found him. But even that plotline was filled with holes. When Logan jumped, it had been a long fall to the ground, and they only managed to figure out where the plane crash-landed because of the fireball it made when it impacted the ground. So on the other side of that, Jack would have been looking for a single parachute, while wrestling the enormous plane into a safe enough landing zone, in this expansive wilderness. So if he went looking for them, he was never going to find them.

  Logan was panting for breath. He wasn't short of food or water because he had taken easily his fair share of the rations and eaten them in half an hour or less. All the while Lizzie was struggling to keep anything down, and forced herself to sip from her water bottle just to stay conscious. Come to think of it, no manner of atrocities ever did seem to numb his appetite. But working every day, just with the sheer graft of survival, was hard on everyone.

  She never did find out his age. She was annoyed by it at first. He had promised her that if they made it through, he would tell her. She took that to mean if they tracked down Cygan, stopped any more nuclear launches from going ahead, and found some kind of validation to Abe's plan. But Logan clearly thought different.

  A while back, when she was a humble enough city Cop, one of her squad had been murdered in a seemingly random attack. She was horrified as expected. Cold and angry. She, like everyone else in the Nine-Nine, wanted to find the person responsible and choke the life from them with their own hands. But they moved another precinct in to deal with it and eventually turned it over to some special branch while busying the original squad with smaller cases. She hated the powers that be for it at the time, but she got it in the end. Revenge, or emotion of any kind really, can blind someone. You work on partial evidence and make assumptions that can't be justified. That was what she was doing now, thinking about Jack.

  'Do you think it's him?' She finally stopped staring at the open chest cavity of the unidentified corpse, hoping she might recognize anything of the scarred remains, and turned her question to Logan.

  'Nothing he does can surprise me anymore.' Logan sniggered. Grief, or whatever this was, can do some funny things to people.

  It can bring back the most inopportune memories at the least appropriate times. 'Do you remember when he fought off that zombie group with a pack of store bought fireworks?' He laughed out loud and Lizzie was understandably taken aback. Logan rarely showed anything past his armor. But he kept on laughing and it was just about funny enough for it to become infectious. She started chuckling along too. Logan had a deep but unpronounced laugh. More like a snigger that never really made it past his voice box into actual sounds.

  Jack... who never did tell them his real name, and only took the name "Jack" due to his fondness of certain whiskeys, had fought off a whole pack of zombies with nothing more than a few firecrackers and Catherine Wheels. They had gotten into trouble while out on a run in DC. They were trying to hook up with CDC (Center for Disease Control) but got sidetracked on the way. There were a few scientists there trying to cook up some batches of zombie killing zolpidem but they were cut off. It was a botched rescue mission at best.

  Despite the apparently deserted city, as it was when they finally made it there from the obliterated New York, a large horde of zombies was slowly making its own way there too. None of them had any idea where the mass of walking corpses came from, or why they started bonding together like pack animals. But they started acting like that the older they got. They started moving like cattle, with no obvious direction other than the possibility they were guided by the scent of flesh. Once they raped one area clean of living people to eat, they just moved on, joining together with other smaller packs to form bigger packs.

  They were out of ammo and pinned down in a large department store. They had obviously, as big stores do, taken the first deliveries of the fireworks they were planning on selling to celebrate July 4th. Jack found the fireworks in a warehouse and started firing them at the zombies like grenades and rocket launchers. It was funny, even at the time, but maybe in a bit of an evil way.

  The bright colors bouncing off the walls and igniting the tattered clothes on the zombie walkers made for a nice colorful picture. It was just a funny spectacle, even though it shouldn't have been.

  'Yeah... I remember.' Lizzie was happy there in that moment they both cherished from the past. But it wasn't the answer she had been looking for. She just needed some closure, and even though Logan sensed that, it wasn't like he could give her any.

  'I served in Russia a long time ago. Around the time the Berlin Wall came down... which was 89 I think...' He was cut off mid flow, even though he was telling the story to try and cheer her up...

  'I was four years old when that wall came down!' Maybe it was a cruel jab at his age but Lizzie just saw it as another clue to piecing together the puzzle of his actual age.

  'Yeah, how cute?' Logan shrugged it off as always. A big part of their relationship was built on banter and horseplay. 'Anyway.' He panted again from the exertion of moving the last sizeable rock out of the way. 'I was on a mission, spying on West Germany would you believe, not East, with a guy called Vasiley Droitsev. I thought he got hit when we were discovered. He went down and didn't get back up. I hated myself for it but I kept on running. I was as green as they got back then. I should have stayed.' He shook his head, clearly still pretty upset with himself even though it was so long ago. 'But a week later, as I was hightailing it over Poland and making for Russia for exfil, the ass hole is pulling me out a ditch in the middle of a fire fight at the border.' Lizzie didn't get it. But what he was trying to say, was that you just never know with people like them.

  'I thought Cygan was your only friend?' She laughed at him in some kind of effort to lift the horrid atmosphere. But she finally figured that Logan had a point. You never know. Not without a body in front of you.

  She was nothing to speak of on the science front, but she knew a little history. Logan didn't rise to her jibe, but she wanted to dig for answers. His comment about East and West Germany had pricked her ears up. 'What the hell were you doing working for the US Air Force and spying on West Germany? Weren't they on our side back then?' She asked and was genuinely interested. Logan just smiled.

  'I never said I was always in the Air Force.' He left it like that. He could have told her. But it was probably a long story. And indeed one that mattered for nothing anymore anyway. 'Besides, I haven't seen him for years. Helped me put down an Ebola outbreak once over in Africa... but Vas... he's hard to find.' More cryptic clues. It was always like Logan could never let go of the world of secrecy he had tried to leave behind when he retired.

  'Maybe he just doesn't like you?' She was oddly determined to make fun of him as the sun continued to set over
the valley sides. They could spend the night in the crippled plane as soon as he could get the as yet unnamed body safely in the ground. He finally clawed himself out of the shallow grave and dusted off his black hands.

  'Mercenary. Not cheap either.' Is all he said and slid past her into the cockpit via the window. He ducked his head to avoid any scrapes against the frame, but he had taken the time to cave the rest of the glass in to avoid injury. There was something he needed to ask her. Something that was playing on his mind. But he would leave it for later. 'Help me with this?'

  Lizzie slid her body through the broken window of the fat nose of the plane's cockpit. There was no denying she was pretty. Everything she did was graceful and petite. Not that Logan ever really looked at her in that way. They had cultivated some kind of unspoken bond over the months. They were partners. Friends. Best friends. Was he her father? Or she his mother? There really was no point in labeling a relationship that had become ultimately symbiotic.

  She had the faintest hint of a tear forming in her eye. But she held it all together as she helped Logan unclip the blood caked body from the seat. She supported its head the best she could. Its hair had matted into the skull and had singed into the fabric of the seat behind it. But there was no way to work out the color of the hair from this much evidence.

  Logan took the bulk of the weight. He had never tried to pick up Jack, and from the brief glimpse he took of the co-pilot as they stumbled through the airport back in DC, they looked about the same build. So there really was no point in him filling his head with dreams about being able to estimate the identity of the body with the weight left to measure.

  They dragged it, in the most dignified way they could, out into the open. The night air was settling in just nicely and they could enjoy the lull in temperature between too hot and becoming too cold as the daylight slipped away.

  Logan pulled the dead man into the hole he had been digging for hours and climbed out the other end. Confident that nothing more of his identity was going to reveal itself, he immediately started pushing dirt over the corpse. Lizzie helped and it didn't take too long before it was covered and dusted with a thin layer of larger stones.

  To avoid the clich? of whether or not it was appropriate to say a few words, Logan leapt to it instead.

  'Jack... if your still out there, then come back to us. If this is you, then thank you. Have a safe journey and we'll see you on the other side. If this isn't you. Then thank you still, even though you remain known unto God.' He raised a salute as Lizzie began to cry. But he turned away just as quickly and started washing his hands with one of the last bottles of fresh water.

  They could have saved it for drinking water, but best to keep some form of cleanliness. Who knows what diseases that body might have been carrying? It also must have died infected. No other reason for it to have had a flare gun launched at it.

  'You've done that before?' She held his hands, despite him protesting, and washed his and hers together.

  'More often than I should have.' She was talking about his brief but moving eulogy. Obviously he had buried a lot of fallen comrades.

  Lizzie had always been impressed by his ability to make fire out of nothing. He had cobbled together whatever he could find from inside the plane that he felt was unusable as a survival tool and piled it together at the top of the exposed mountain. He then proceeded to build a small fire inside the cabin of the plane. It had been cracked open enough to be well ventilated so the fire wouldn't be dangerous at all. Besides. They could use the shelter from the wind that was surely coming.

  'You're taking this better than I thought.' Logan was always a man to cut to the chase. No sense wasting time easing in the conversation. But his soothing accent of the American deep south made him talk slowly, and comforted without causing offence, even when poking around sensitive topics.

  'I've lost people before you know.' She could have been overly defensive but wasn't. Because she had lied to him from day one.

  'Like this?' He meant someone that she had feelings for.

  'I never told you about him.' That was just fuel to the fire of their brow beating relationship. A good chance for him to get a few points up on her too.

  'So you weren't always such a tomboy?' If there was a line in their relationship, between what was banter and what was out of bounds, they were yet to find it.

  'Not a boyfriend... Not really.' She started to cry and nestled into him just a little tighter. Logan immediately felt overwhelmed by guilt.

  'I... I'm sorry.' He was just as confused that he had missed something. He thought he had her figured out from day one. He thought that she had no partner. No boyfriend. Maybe not even any friends. But he was wrong.

  'His name was Jason. Everyone called him Jace.'