“Yessir. I’m sure you realize twenty or so untrained people traipsing through the countryside leave quite a trail. When I reconnoitered the Army base, I saw where your people came out and followed your lead. I caught up with you nine miles back and watched you for a time. You seemed like decent folks, so I decided it was time to approach.”
Will looked at him in disbelief. “So you’ve been back there, close enough to keep an eye on us, for the better part of two days. And we didn’t have a clue.”
The colonel nodded.
Will didn’t speak for several seconds. He stood, motionless, and stared off into the tree line. When he broke the silence, he rubbed the whiskers on his chin as he spoke. “I’m going to get some guys together, and we’re going to go somewhere and talk about this in private. Is that okay with you?” His tone of voice relayed that he didn’t care if it was okay with the Colonel or not.
Meekins nodded his approval.
“Fan-fucking-tastic.” Will turned to Danny. “Danny, keep the Colonel company right here until I holler.” Without awaiting an answer, he strode away, his hands balled into fists at his sides.
Danny stood in his assigned spot next to the Colonel while Will reset the perimeter watch and pulled together the team he wanted in the meeting. His face was dark with fury as he stomped about, and he barked at people three different times. Meekins tilted his head, his brow puckered, and Danny knew he found Will’s behavior unappealing.
“You’ll have to excuse Will, sir. You’re the second person to just walk in the camp in a week and he’s not taking it well.”
“I see,” replied the Colonel, his tone noncommittal. “I can see how that would be upsetting.” He focused on Danny as if seeing him for the first time. He eyed the young man from head to toe; there was an intensity to his stare that rivaled Will’s, no doubt there to make Danny uncomfortable.
“Eye-fuck me all you want, you little twerp,” Danny thought.
Colonel Meekins finished his visual inspection and nodded his head once as if approving what he saw. “You’re an impressive physical specimen, son. Did you serve?”
Inwardly, Danny rolled his eyes. “No sir. I wanted to join the Army, but they wouldn’t accept me.”
“Why was that?”
“Because I could read and I knew who my dad was.”
The Colonel laughed harder than the joke deserved, as if to tell Danny, if you want to insult me, you’ll have to do better than that, dispelling some of the awkwardness between them. He was poised to tell Meekins the one about the prom queen, the poodle, and the twelve-inch kielbasa when Will strode up.
“Colonel Meekins, if I could impose on you to join some of my group and me and share what you know?”
He smiled in affirmation. “Lead the way, my friend.”
“Excellent.” Will motioned him toward the jumble of tents. “Danny, you’re with us,” he called back over his shoulder.
On their way to the tent, Tempest surprised everyone when she stepped in the Colonel’s path. She looked up at him, her dark eyes filled with awe. “Are you a fighter pilot?” she asked him.
He put his hands on his knees and bent low to look her in the eye. “I used to be a pilot, but I didn’t fly fighters. I flew supplies to soldiers in other places.”
Disappointment showed on Tempest’s face. “I want to fly jets when I grow up.”
It seemed Meekins could tell he was letting the girl down. “Well then, how about this? One day, once this is all over and things are back to normal, I’ll take you up in an airplane-just you and me. It won’t be a fighter, but it’ll be fast and I promise you’ll have fun.”
“That would be awesome.”
“Then it’s a deal.” Meekins held out his hand and Tempest shook it, her eyes shining with anticipation. She fell back in beside her mother and the procession continued.
When everyone was settled, Will spoke. “Our stores are doing well, Colonel; can we get you anything to eat or drink?”
“I ate half a rabbit for supper this evening, but I would take clean water if you had it. Thank you.”
Will gestured at Jiri. The professor pulled a bottle of water from a bag at his feet and handed it to the pilot. He took a long drink from the bottle, then sipped from it as Will introduced the team- Jiri, Danny, Andro, Becky, and Tara. The Colonel made eye contact with each person and repeated their names in a soft voice.
With the niceties out of the way, Will picked up right where he left off. “So, you were explaining that you’ve been watching us from behind for the last two days.”
“I wasn’t behind you all time. They teach us to alternate our position because it lowers our chance of being detected. Sometimes I was beside you guys and for a while one afternoon I stayed out in front.”
“My mistake. You were explaining that you’ve been watching us from every direction for the last two days.”
“Indeed.” Meekins raised his eyebrows and held up his index finger. “I’ll tell you this, though- that teenager you have with you, I believe he’s your son? Wiry little guy that always has a dog with him?”
“Yeah, that’s my boy- Coy. What about him?”
“That kid is a bona fide woodsman. He is a tracker, a trapper, and knows his way around the boonies like a Special Forces veteran. Amazing talent for his age. I’d say he has a great future in the military, but there’s not apt to be a military again, at least not in his lifetime.”
Danny and the others gave him blank stares.
Will held his palms out on his sides and raised his shoulders. “I’m sorry Colonel, but our world has been pretty small since the outbreak. If it didn’t take place between Topeka and Fort Leonard Wood, I reckon we don’t know about it.”
Meekins let out a big breath of air. “Perhaps that’s just as well. Not knowing keeps you from having to face it.”
“Face what?”
“The fact that America and probably the whole goddamn world doesn’t exist anymore.”
Meekins sat ramrod straight, his soldiers squared and his hands at his sides. “Let me start at the beginning. Nobody understood what we were dealing with. Go back to last February, when it first popped up on the cable news shows and the conspiracy blogs. We’ve had scares like this before. Remember the idiots in Florida eating bath soap? A couple of those guys got so high, they chewed the face off a homeless guy. The media said the zombies were here! A year or so after that, it was those poor slobs in California that got a batch of very wrong tuna. A mutant enzyme or a protein in the fish caused an inexplicable rage in the poor slobs who ate it, and they attacked people on sight. Strangers, friends, family- it didn’t matter. The media said zombies then, too.
“So when the real deal started, somewhere on the East Coast, nobody took it seriously. Why would they? Zombies are a thing of science-fiction, and that TV show everybody was crazy over toward the end. The damnable thing about it is that we had plans in place for how to defend the country in the event of a zombie outbreak.”
Danny laughed. “Oh, come on!”
“It’s true. The Army had a crazy little group of guys that did nothing but sit around and come up with defense maneuvers and battle plans for impossible events. Alien invasion, vampire outbreak, the animals get smart and turn on us... zombies.”
“No shit?” Danny muttered, flabbergasted.
“Yeah shit. The plans existed, but by the time the powers that be first realized and then accepted what was going on, it was too late. It was spreading too damn fast. That was always stage one of the battle plan- containment. But when we got in the fight, outbreaks had spread so far the CDC couldn’t even determine the location of patient zero.”
Becky spoke up in a soft, languid voice. “Excuse me, Colonel? What is patient zero?”
“In any outbreak, if you go back far enough you’ll find the originating case. Most often with a disease or virus, it’s the first guy to eat the pork infected with a new strain of bacteria or virus. Finding patient zero is vitally important to develo
ping a cure because that’s where you find the disease in its purest form. But like I said, in this case, by the time they realized the extent of the crisis, the outbreak was so severe that the closest we could come to patient zero was ‘somewhere on the eastern seaboard’.
“When they sat us down and told us it was real and presented the containment measures we would use, there were already outbreaks in nine states. We had no chance to contain it; you can’t fight a war on nine different fronts.”
Danny raised his hand as if he were in school and immediately felt foolish for doing so. “So what caused it?”
Meekins spread his hands wide. “Everything fell apart too fast to determine that, son. It could’ve been a terrorist attack. I know for a fact that our government had three different locations where they played with some really nasty bugs- the kind of stuff where one vial in a water reservoir will knock out an entire city. Maybe somebody got careless and there was a glitch, though I doubt it. Most of the work in those places involved making existing viruses more virulent. A super smallpox, super influenza, super yellow fever. In twenty-two years in the military if we ever worked on a zombie virus I didn’t hear about it.
“Some scientists speculated that it was something that floated in from outer space. Hell, it could’ve just been a wrong turn in the evolutionary process. Whatever the cause, it was damned effective.
“So the brass finally opened their eyes to the problem and we undertook the biggest military maneuver in the history of the world. It made D-Day look like a grade school Christmas program. Militaries in seventeen countries worked together on a two-prong maneuver- attacking the dead everywhere they could, and the evacuating the civilians in grade two zones.”
Meekins looked around the room. “I can tell by your faces you don’t know about the zones. Every government divided their country into zones, whatever way they chose. They gave each zone a grade. Grade one was an area with no significant zombie activity. Grade two were areas where the number of dead was significant, but people were holding their own against them; society was hanging in there. Grade three meant an area overrun by the dead. Almost all the cities were grade three zones.”
Jiri nodded his agreement. “That makes sense. The more people concentrated in an area, the faster the outbreak will spread in that area. It also tracks with what we have seen as we’ve traveled. The higher the pre-outbreak population of a town or city, the bigger the number of dead in that area now.”
“Yeah,” Will chimed in, “we learned early on to stay out of towns and cities, except for emergencies.” He squinted his eyes at Meekins. “So you guys essentially wrote off the people where the outbreak was the worst?”
“Well I didn’t do it, but someone made that decision, yes.”
Danny was taken aback. “Wow. Way harsh.”
Meekins shrugged. “What are you going to do? You can’t save everybody. We lost so many soldiers in the cities before he wrote them off. Whole companies would go in and we’d never hear from them again. It wasn’t my decision, but I would have done the same thing. There has to be triage, and in any triage, there’s always a group beyond saving.
“So, for five weeks the world conducts the largest military exercise in history. Three-hundred-thousand flights a day, worldwide. Dropping troops in, lifting refugees out, enormous food and weapon drops. And do you know what the result of all that activity was?”
He paused, but there was no answer, so he continued.
“Nothing. We didn’t slow the spread one iota. As a matter of fact, we watched it get faster as more and more dead were created every day. Then, the order came down from on high. Bomb the cities.”
Will’s people were struck dumb. They stared, slack-jawed, at the enormity of Meekins’ statement.
Meekins nodded his head in affirmation. “The Air Force and the Navy bombed the twenty-three largest cities in the United States. Sidewinders, sparrows, javelins, tomahawks, harpoons. We also dropped thousands of tons of ordnance on bridges, dams, canals. Dropped them to create chasms and water barriers that the dead couldn’t cross.
“None of it worked. I think the Generals just wanted one more chance to play with their toys before the lights went out.”
Jiri looked at Meekins, his face troubled. “And the rank-and-file had no problem with that?”
Meekins’ eyes flashed with anger. “Of course they had trouble with that. Hundreds deserted. On top of the thousands that deserted to get back to their families. I know of six enlisted men and fourteen officers the Navy executed on the spot for refusing to follow orders to bomb civilian population centers. Rumor has it that some damn general ordered the release of five tactical nuclear weapons. Supposedly, somebody higher up put the brakes on before the completion of the launch sequence.
“Then, when we thought things couldn’t get worse, military bases started going under. Tinker, my base, turned to shit fast. We were completely overrun in early April. I made my way to Vance Air Force Base in Enid and McConnell in Wichita, with no joy. No sign of life at either base. I was on my way to Whitman Air Force Base in Warrensburg, feeling pretty sure it was a wasted trip when I thought Why not see if the Army fared any better than the Air Force? I veered south to Fort Leonard Wood, saw signs of your group, and here we are.”
Will leaned forward, a look of curiosity on his face. “Let me interrupt for just a second. Why did you feel pretty sure Whitman was a wasted trip?”
The Colonel pointed in the air with his index finger and looked at Will with a grim smile. “No air traffic. No flyovers, no planes on the horizon, no contours in the sky. Those are things I watch for out of habit, and I can tell you this- there hasn’t been air traffic in this country, commercial or military, for almost half a year.”
There was a pause while they processed that information.
“What are your days like, Colonel?” Will asked. “How do you get by?”
“That’s a good question. I mentioned I taught SERE school. SERE stands for survival, evasion, resistance, and escape. It’s for pilots shot down over hostile territory, soldiers captured or behind enemy lines, that sort of thing. Survive by living off the resources available to you, evade the enemy, if captured resist giving up information, and find a way to escape. I pay particular attention to what we learned in evasion. Those fuckers can’t bite me if they don’t know I’m there. I try to make good time during the day while also staying off the dead’s radar-”
“You’ve put them down though, right?” Danny interrupted.
The Colonel gave him a flat look. “Son, I’m pretty sure there’s not a man alive today that hasn’t re-killed plenty of those things.”
Danny dipped his head by way of apology, both for interrupting and for asking a stupid question.
“Anyway,” Meekins paused, eying Danny as if waiting to see if he would interrupt again. When he didn’t, the Colonel continued. “I make progress and avoid the dead during the day. At evening time, I like to find a garage, small outbuilding, something of that sort, that I can lock from the inside. Eat a meal, read if there’s enough daylight, get some sleep and do it again the next day.”
Will looked lost in thought and didn’t reply. After a long silence, he cleared his throat. “We might have a... safe place to stay awhile. We hope so, anyway. I don’t think anyone would object to you traveling with us.”
Meekins gave him a weary smile. “That’s a kind offer, and I’m sure your group is good people. But somewhere, the military is still fighting these things, and I have a duty to find it and do my part.”
“I can respect that. You’re certainly welcome to spend the night and break bread with us before you leave in the morning.”
“Now that is an offer I will take you up on.”
Coy and Sally left camp at dawn and returned an hour later, as the rest of the group got started on their day. Coy smiled, walked to the middle of the campground, and shook out the contents of his game bag- a plump rabbit and two domestic chickens.
He explained to a
happy audience that he’d snared the rabbit not far from camp. He and the dog walked another mile, climbed a short hill and discovered a flock of chickens pecking at the grass on the other side. An ecstatic golden retriever ran down first one, and then another before the birds scattered. The chickens kicked and cackling with indignant fear when she presented them to Coy.
Becky and Kathy fried the meat over a small fire, seasoning it with pepper and rubbing it with garlic. They served it with several cans of hominy from the PX at the base. Will, who was damn tired of beef jerky, gobbled his down and wished for more.
Meekins ate heartily, wiping the grease off his chin with the sleeve of his jacket and patting his stomach when finished. He loaded up his pack and shared a quick word with most of the group members as they went about their morning routine.
Will and Jiri walked alongside him for a short distance. Near a deadfall a couple hundred yards away from the highway, they stopped to say their goodbyes.
“Good luck on finding a safe-haven, Will,” Meekins said. “This place you’re traveling for; do you know its exact location?”
“One of our group does.”
The Colonel regarded him with a sober look. “Be careful on your approach. In fact, be careful approaching anybody out here. Unfortunately, the events of the last year have allowed people to cater to their worst instincts. That’s why I watched you guys for so long before I announced myself. It seems more bad guys are left than good ones.” He shook his head and stared into the deadfall. “Some of the things I’ve seen...”
“Oh, I know. We’ve run into people that have no business drawing air. A twenty-person group has its advantages. We’re hard to get the drop on, and we’ve been able to- let’s say, correct, two really heinous situations we found.”
“God bless you then. You guys take care. Who knows, maybe we’ll meet somewhere down the road.”
The Colonel exchanged warm handshakes with both men, turned, and walked away. He melted into the woods without looking back, and Jiri and Will returned to camp.
Haven (Book 1): Journey Page 11
