The Apocalypse Crusade Day 4: War of the Undead

by Peter Meredith

  She held up a hand. “Sir, I’m on a time crunch. I need information on the domestic terrorists. Do you have anything at all on them?”

  He shook his head. “I was hoping you feds knew. So far, the only thing the FBI is willing to release is that we are looking for a man and a woman. Is that all you really have?” Reluctantly, Katherine nodded. He looked pained at the admission. “Then I don’t know what to say. There are close to a million people within the city and with descriptions like ‘man and a woman’ it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack.”

  “I agree, but I still need to report something. Can I see what your people are doing?”

  Captain Questore waved an arm. “Me casa es su casa. Just say nice things about us to that useless, horny fuck in the White House.”

  Katherine gave him a grin. “If he looks up from my tits, I will.” The captain laughed and then disappeared, giving her the freedom to range where she wanted. She went through the corridors, ducking her head into every office. In one she picked up a clipboard and pen thinking it would make her look “official.”

  “What are you working on?” she asked each person she met. Invariably they would give her a who the hell are you sort of look and so she learned to cut them off quick. “We have a ton of redundancy. Captain Questore wanted me to make a list.”

  For the most part, they were monitoring the events occurring along the Maryland border and sending reports up the chain of command. These events consisted mostly of armed clashes with fleeing civilians coming south out of Pennsylvania. There were also problems with people coming out of Delaware. No one knew what to do about that.

  There wasn’t enough manpower to fully contain the city of Baltimore and shut down the hundred mile border with Delaware. Katherine found herself staring at the map and thinking that they were being fools. They had no evidence whatsoever to believe that Eng and Anna or whoever it was who had made the zombies on Long Island would make more.

  It seemed highly unlikely and yet the orders had come from the President, a man whose leadership and mental state were questionable. For just a moment, she considered racing back to FBI headquarters and dismissing that other blonde. She’d then meet the President and tell him to give up on Baltimore and concentrate on the Pennsylvania border. “But would he listen?” She doubted it. From the Director on down, the scuttle-butt was that the President was losing it. He was chasing shadows.

  In this instance, the shadows were real. Katherine just had to find them.

  She went to the newly formed Baltimore team and talked to each member, pretending to write on her clipboard. This led her to a large room partitioned off in little cubes, each with a desk and two or three monitors. There were twenty men and one woman working there. It was the same sort of setup Katherine spent most of her days in and the same sort of male to female ratio.

  She went up to the lone woman, looking for a little solidarity. The woman was a lieutenant commander named Dawn Brockett and she had started the night with her hair pulled back in a severe bun. It was now a loose, floppy thing with stray curls escaping everywhere.

  Dawn was studying infrared images of the city; she didn’t look up from her keyboard as she answered Katherine’s question, “I’m doing a comparison of the southeast quadrant of the city. Since midnight there have been six recon passes; one by a military satellite and the rest by UAVs. The circles are changes from the first and second passes. The squares are changes from the second to the third, and so on.”

  Katherine came to lean over the woman’s shoulder and was tickled by one of her errant curls. The screens were fantastically convoluted with circles and squares and triangles and figure eights all over the place. Katherine knew there really wasn’t any other way to collect data on such short notice.

  “Do you have these same pics in the visible spectrum?” Katherine asked.

  “Yeah, but why would you want it?” The question was legitimate. There had been rolling blackouts for the last two days, but as of midnight the Eastern Interconnection, what people called the east coast power grid, had been shut down completely before it could fail in a catastrophic manner.

  Only buildings with generators such as the one they were in had power. Outside, everything was very dark. It had been strange driving through such darkness. Katherine had felt distinctly alone, as if the entire population of the world had quietly left when she wasn’t looking.

  A picture of the darkness would have limited value, but on a hunch, Katherine directed the lieutenant commander to bring it up. Dawn began to splutter, but Katherine lied, “Captain Questore has given me access to everything. If you have a problem, bring it up with him.”

  The lie worked and even though Katherine felt like a gambler letting her winnings ride and ride, she shooed Dawn over and sat in her still warm seat.

  “See? Useless,” Dawn said, once the “picture” was on the screens. She was right. Other than the headlights of a few vehicles, almost everything was pure black. If people had candles or flashlights in their homes, they were hidden behind dark curtains or layers of wood. Since they couldn’t flee, people had fortified their homes as best as they could.

  Snapshots of car headlights were also of very limited value. They gave her the position and the direction of a handful of cars. It was impossible for her to know if car A in the first picture was any of the cars captured in the next picture, which was taken forty-five minutes later.

  “What is this lit-up building?” Katherine asked, pointing.

  Dawn squinted at the screen. “Police station and that one is a hospital.”

  Mentioning a hospital sent a queer thrill through Katherine. This entire mess had started in a hospital. “Which one? What’s it called?” she asked chasing a new hunch.

  “That one? Uh, University of Maryland Med Center.”

  Katherine clicked through the images to see if any of the cars were pointing its way. None were, however on the second to last picture a tiny pinprick of light in the corner of the frame caught her eye. “What’s that? Can I enlarge this?” The program was similar to Google Earth and she was able to center and zoom in. But only so far. “What is that? Is that a mobile home?”

  “Yes, I think so. Let’s see if it comes up on infrared.” Dawn reached across Katherine and clicked so they could see if the mobile home was giving off a heat signature. “Yup, right there. It’s low, probably a propane heater.” She clicked through each of the shots and then when she got to the last, the heat signature had disappeared.

  “Blow that up!” Katherine ordered and scooted out of the chair. Dawn took over and went to full zoom mode, going through all twelve shots of infrared and visible light.

  “See that? The one picture with the light? You can see a truck hitched in front. Now look at the infrared views. You can see it just as a smudge near the front, except on the last. Someone moved that truck between shot five and six.”

  Katherine felt excitement brewing in her gut. “When was the last pass and how do I get to this place?”

  “It was a quarter of five this morning and I guess you just drive.” That really wasn’t what Katherine had meant. She knew how to get there. She just needed to know how she would get back.

  2-Baltimore, Maryland

  Getting through the first roadblock would have been impossible without Anna’s acting skills and Eng’s deathly cold stare. Charlie had driven the Silverado just down the block from where a group of soldiers had strung rolls of concertina wire across the street. When he slowed the truck, Eng stuck his Beretta up under Leticia’s throat and pressed it hard until she started crying.

  “Hey, Scott, what are you doing?” Anna asked.

  “I need them to know that I will not hesitate to blow her brains out if they try to signal those soldiers in any way. You hear that, Charlie? I will kill her and then I will shoot the soldiers. And it will be your fault. So don’t be a fucking hero.”

  This got the two senior citizens properly frightened. They were both shaking and pale, however
it was Anna who stole the show.

  Seventy yards from the roadblock, someone with a bullhorn stopped them and demanded that they turn back. “Turn off your lights, but keep going a little further,” Anna said. “Slowly, slowly, slowly…”

  “Stop or we will open fire!”

  Charlie stopped. His fear was so obvious that it couldn’t have been faked. Anna was ramped up, but not precisely afraid. She had been through too much to be afraid of a few nitwit, part-time soldiers. Instead of going to the very closest roadblock, they had used the CB to tune into the frequency they were using and had steered clear of the first two crossing points because they had officious sounding policemen with the soldiers. Police officers were naturally suspicious and generally hard-hearted from having had to deal with human scum for so long.

  “Have grandma hold her breath until I get back, it’ll make her panting more believable.” Anna let her own breath out and then opened the truck’s door. She climbed out, pausing to point in at the cab.

  The bullhorn blared, “Get back in your vehicle and turn around.”

  “I can’t! It’s my mom.” She started lurching forward with her hands up. “She’s having a heart attack! We need help. Do you have a medic or something like that?”

  “Stop or we will shoot. Miss, I said stop. We will open fire!”

  “Go ahead!” Anna shrieked, and at the same moment tore open the green blouse she was wearing Her bra looked stark white in the beams of light. “I’m unarmed, but my mom is having a heart attack and the hospitals are overflowing. They said she wouldn’t be seen for hours and she doesn’t have that long. Please, take a look at her.”

  She was only twenty feet away, near enough to see the looks of confusion on the faces of the guardsmen. She was close to sealing the deal. Dropping to her knees, she begged, “Please, she never hurt anyone.”

  “None of us are medics,” a sergeant said. “I don’t think there’s anything we could do for her.”

  Anna pointed at the early morning skyline to a building rising just beyond I-695, the Baltimore Beltway. “That’s Roosevelt Memorial Hospital. It’s just two blocks. You can follow us if you want, but please just let us through.”

  “I don’t know, miss.”

  She got up, clutching her shirt around her bosom and came forward, right to the wire. “Please take a look at her and you’ll know we’re not lying.”

  “Aw fuck,” the sergeant said. “Let me see her.”

  Leticia was so scared she was practically wetting herself. She hadn’t been able to hold her breath for the entire time that Anna was gone, so she would gulp in air and blow it out seconds later. She looked truly pathetic, but that didn’t stop Eng from glaring right up until Anna and the soldier arrived.

  “What can you do for her?” he asked, using his best American accent. “I think she’s dying.”

  “I-I don’t know, um…” The sergeant didn’t know at all what to do. His instructions were to let no one through, under no circumstances. And yet his LT hadn’t mentioned someone having a heart attack. “I guess I could have one of my guys follow you.”

  Anna faked tears and hugged the man while Charlie was so relieved he actually felt like puking. In minutes, the rolls of wires were pulled back and the Silverado had a military escort to the hospital, which was shockingly busy. Fear was in the air and it brought the paranoids and the hypochondriacs out of the woodwork. On top of the crazies there was a greater than average accident rate due to darkness. All of this was aggravated by the immense stress everyone was under and it was no wonder there were patients lying in the halls.

  There were also cars parked bumper to bumper all around the Emergency room. “What do we do?” Leticia asked, afraid that the two maniacs would blame her for this.

  “Just keep acting sick,” Anna said. “Lay back down. Charlie take a left. Start looking for a parking spot. Go slow.” The Humvee followed, but after five minutes the sergeant got nervous about being gone too long from his post and flashed his lights.

  Anna ran back but before she could say anything, the sergeant said, “We got to go. Will you be alright?” She said she was good and even grabbed his arm in a very friendly way as she smiled.

  “Man, that is one fine piece of ass,” he murmured, watching intently as she hurried back to the truck. The private sitting in the passenger seat growled appreciably. “Yeah, she is all that, but we got to forget her, got it? It’ll be our ass on the line if anyone finds out that we let someone through, got it? No one came through.”

  When Anna got to the truck, she grinned, “We can ghost now.”

  3-The Taconic Valley, New York

  “Take off your shirt,” Jerry said, his voice low and hungry. He had taken his belt off and was now running it through his hands. Thuy had her chin set straight forward, but her eyes were canted. She couldn’t look at anything but the belt.

  “Y-You w-won’t need the b-b-belt,” she said, her lower jaw jabbering up and down.

  Thuy sucked in her breath as Jerry brought the belt up and around. When it hit her back, the pain was fierce, a strange combination of fire and ice except that it was not any fire or ice she had ever felt before. It was agony, and after that one breath, she couldn’t seem to suck in another.

  Jerry was saying something only just then she couldn’t hear anything but a rushing in her head and the sound of her teeth grinding together. She was squirming on the ground when she caught sight of the belt lifted a second time. “No.” She tried to scream the word; it came out as a whisper. The belt came down as she flung up an arm and turned her head.

  This time the belt struck her on the forearm and across the top of her back. Because she had managed to block part of the blow, the pain was far less. She was able to breathe, which meant she could talk. “Okay, I’ll take it off. I’ll take it off.”

  “Slowly, slowly,” he said, grinning. He seemed to like that her hands were shaking. They were shaking so badly that slow was all she could handle. “Good. Very good.” He had the belt ready.

  Thuy did not find anything sexy about taking off a t-shirt even if it did have the word Juicy on it. Once it was off, she had no idea what to do next. That this horrid man was going to rape her was, it seemed, inevitable. She shuddered, and tried her best to think of a way out, but he was so big and the belt hurt so much that she realized there was nothing she could do to stop him. Her thoughts skittered to what would happen after…Would he kill her then?

  She held the shirt against her chest and waited to be told what to do next. As she waited, she forced her eyes away from the belt and scanned the trash scattered all over the floor, hoping against hope that she would see a gun or a butcher’s knife or something she could use against him.

  “Drop the shirt,” he said.

  Thuy let out a shaky breath and dropped the shirt. It landed, covering the toes of her borrowed sneakers. She couldn’t look up, now.

  “Now unbutton your pants, slowly.”

  Her hands were on the first button when she heard something. For the last few days there had been a constant rumble in the sky above the Zone as planes flew back and forth. This sound was a rumble of a different nature. It was a car.

  “I said unbutton your…” Jerry stopped, his head cocked. Thuy had a great view of him as washed-out sunlight from a cracked window framed him in a square. Jerry was unpalatable in the dark; in the light, he seemed to be part ogre. She was still staring when he suddenly leapt on her, slapping a hand over her mouth.

  The two of them, an unlikely pair who could only have been brought together by the most unlikely series of events froze, listening as the car came closer. It was driving on a course that would take it south, unless it turned. For a second, Thuy felt a tiny spurt of hope, but the car didn’t turn. It just kept going.

  When it passed without stopping, hope left Thuy completely. She knew this man would use her, break her bones, wreck her face, and then kill her. Instinctively, she knew he was an outcast who had lived with rejection for years while h
ate was filling his entire being. Now, she realized, he had an opportunity to unleash it all on her and get some sort of revenge on the world--without consequences.

  As the sound of the car diminished, Thuy was suddenly aware that his grip on her had relaxed and she thrust away from him.

  “Hey…” he started to say, but she spun and unleashed a straight right square into his jaw. Pain flared in her hand. It felt as though she had broken a bone, but she ignored it as she drove her left fist into his gut which had the consistency of a slab of beef.

  Thuy had hit him as hard as she could and Jerry sucked in a sharp breath and then laughed. “That’s more like it!” he cried.

  This was why she was without hope. Her right hand ached and her left wrist throbbed; she had hurt herself more that she had hurt him. She wasn’t built to fight, but she could run. She turned, meaning to run and had she been in the open she would have gotten away, however the mobile home was narrow and cluttered. He was right behind her as she got to the one door and as she grabbed the knob and heaved the door back, he put one hand on it and slammed it closed.

  She tried to run towards the living room, but he gave her a light shove, sending her flying. Jerry laughed as she scrambled around the folding card table and tried to keep it between them. He slapped it aside, his eyes gleaming. He was enjoying himself. He was getting jazzed. For him, this was foreplay.

  “Yes,” he whispered. “And to think I was afraid you’d just lie there and take it like a Chinese fuck-doll.”

  “I’m Vietnamese, asshole,” she said, glaring.

  “Oh? Then it’s time for some payback.”

  Chapter 9

  1– 8:16 a.m.

  —The Taconic Valley, New York

  Ryan Deckard jogged past the football field with the sun climbing on his left. The school was ahead of him, sitting quietly as if waiting, as if it had been expecting him. If Thuy had decided to wait for him, it would be in there.