gatheringdeadkindle

by Stephen Knight

  McDaniels sighed. “Well, let’s have one of the troops stand guard, then. What’s the lay of the land around here?”

  “Typical office environment.” Gartrell waved to the virtual sea of cubicles that made up the office. “Cube farm, with offices on the far side that have windows overlooking Lexington. They’ll probably rename it to Dead Avenue, though—tons of stenches everywhere.” He paused. “It ain’t looking pretty out there, sir.” The older NCO sighed and adjusted his backpack. “You might as well walk the floor, and take a look around. I’ve got the rest of the troops poking around. Latrines are that way”—he pointed to his right—“along with a pantry. Vending machines, coffee, hot chocolate, even a refrigerator with that Parmalat milk. Tastes like crap, but you can drink it and it won’t kill you. I think.” He paused. “Radios work out here, since they’re not cut off by the stairwell walls, but they’re pretty much useless. Our private freq is blank, but there’s still some activity on the common net. All fragmented. Some of our guys are still alive, but they’re on the run, I think.” His face hardened a bit, and McDaniels knew the first sergeant had heard some things he didn’t like.

  McDaniels flipped frequencies on his radio. The private frequency USASOC had allocated for them was indeed silent, nothing but a vague hiss of static. The common tactical frequency was a mish-mash of static broken every now and then by pleas for assistance or other units trying to reconstitute. Most of the calls were unintelligible, and some of them carried with them the sounds of distant combat.

  He looked at Gartrell. “We need to keep focused on staying alive, first sergeant. Once we get established here, we should make sure the civilians are safe, and then take an inventory of our gear and ammo. We’ll also need to break out the sat phone and see if we can get a hold of anyone at Bragg.”

  “Satcom’s not going to work in here, sir. We’ll need to be up on the roof. And this building is 27 stories, so we’re going to have to go for a walk, unless you want to consider taking one of the elevators. Which are in a locked bay over there.” Gartrell pointed to his left. McDaniels turned and walked over to a nearby reception area. A set of glass doors separated the elevator bay from the office floor. When he tried to pull them open, he found they were locked.

  “Magnetic lock, major.” Gartrell hadn’t followed him, and remained near the fire exit. “To get out, you press that button on the wall there. To get in, someone either swipes an entry card or is buzzed in from that receptionist’s desk, there.”

  McDaniels saw the illuminated red button on the wall beside the glass entry doors. It was clearly labeled EXIT, and he pressed it. A loud metallic click sounded, and he pulled open one of the doors easily enough. He listened, but heard no evidence that any of the elevators were in operation. He let the door close, and the click sounded again. The doors relocked automatically.

  “I wonder if it’ll still work when the power fails,” he said.

  Gartrell said nothing. They would deal with that when it happened.

  McDaniels looked around. “The Safires?”

  Gartrell pointed to over his shoulder. “In the pantry. No windows, single point of ingress. Seemed to be the safest place to put them for the moment. Jimenez has guard duty.” As he spoke, the remaining two Night Stalkers appeared, carrying a heavy wooden credenza by either end.

  “Put that here,” Gartrell ordered, and stepped aside while the red-faced soldiers pushed the ornate piece of furniture against the fire door. It only blocked half of it, and the door opened into the stairwell anyway, but it was a start.

  “I’m thinking one of us should be on the other side of that door,” one of them said. McDaniels couldn’t see his nametape, as the ballistic vest he wore covered up the blouse of his battle dress utilities. He didn’t know any of these soldiers at all, and they didn’t know anything about him, other than the gold oak leaf insignia on his uniform lapels.

  “I’m Major McDaniels, with USASOC J-2,” he told them, “and this is First Sergeant Gartrell. Who’re you guys?”

  “Staff Sergeant Dane Finelly,” said the first, a tall, broad-shouldered man who spoke with a subtle twang. “Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 160 SOAR.” Finelly’s face was almost as broad as his shoulders, and he had the ruddy, rawboned look of a farmer’s son.

  “Sergeant Eugene Derwitz, Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 160 SOAR,” said the second, a smaller-framed man with dark eyes and a hooked nose. The way he truncated his Rs spoke of somewhere on the Jersey Shore.

  McDaniels nodded to both men. “Keep doing what you’re doing, troops. Any problems taking orders from a couple of ground pounders for a while?”

  Finelly shook his head. “Negative on that, sir. If you’re Special Forces, then this is your show.” Derwitz offered nothing further, so McDaniels presumed Finelly spoke for both of them.

  “All right. Keep bringing over stuff to form a barricade. When you’re done, one of you relieve First Sergeant Gartrell at the door. The other will inventory his ammo and gear. Once that man is finished, he’ll stand overwatch while the other man does his own inventory. Count every bullet, every MRE, every NVG battery you have. And fill your canteens. We don’t know how long the water will hold out.”

  The soldiers murmured their assent and set off to gather more furnishings to use as barricades. McDaniels looked back at Gartrell.

  “When they’re done, come join me in the pantry. We’ll need to plan our next step, and we should get that done sooner rather than later.” He nodded toward the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Manhattan’s Upper East Side. “It’ll be dark soon, and I don’t think things are going to get any better.”

  CHAPTER 5

  “How long will we be here for?” Regina Safire asked. Her dark eyes had taken on what McDaniels supposed was their usual predatory cast, and they followed the tall black Special Forces officer as he stepped into the pantry and slowly removed his Kevlar helmet. McDaniels made her to be about thirty-five years old, a few years younger than he was. He knew she had been a medical doctor before joining her father’s company as a medical consultant, but he didn’t know what her specialty was. He hoped her bedside manner was a bit more refined than what she was presenting now.

  Just the same, beneath the hard exterior, there was a certain softness that was visible whenever she looked at her father. She was a Daddy’s Girl, as incredible as it might seem. She was also very attractive, McDaniels thought. Her dark hair and tanned face were complemented by what seemed to be a trim body beneath her sturdy jeans and long-sleeved work shirt. Her denim jacket lay across the top of a nearby Xerox copier.

  “Major?” she prompted.

  McDaniels set his helmet on the counter next to the sink and allowed his radio headset to hang around his neck. He looked at the Safires for a moment, then focused on the woman. He held out his hand.

  “I’m Cordell McDaniels. I’m afraid we were never properly introduced.”

  She looked at him for a long moment, as if his sudden politeness was something alien, untrustworthy. Then she finally extended her own manicured hand and shook his.

  “Regina Safire. But I’m sure you know that already?”

  McDaniels nodded. “But an introduction is never something you should waste.” He looked at Safire, who sat on a pile of copying paper boxes next to two softly-humming vending machines. He didn’t meet McDaniels’ eyes; instead, he kept his gaze rooted on the industrial-looking white-tiled floor.

  “Doctor Safire?”

  Safire looked up at him. In the pantry’s harsh overhead light, he suddenly looked like Andy Warhol, only not quite as swishy. “I already know who you are, major. There’s no need to waste time with pleasantries. Are they coming for us?”

  “Is who coming for us?”

  Safire frowned. “The military, of course.”

  McDaniels turned to the sink. There was a Keurig coffee machine next to it, the kind that used the single-dose K-cups that McDaniels was so fond of. He opened one of the overhead cabinets and found several boxes
of coffee. He sorted through them and pulled one down.

  “We’re having communication problems at the moment. Our uplink to the communication satellite was at the assembly area in Central Park, and it seems to be offline. The helicopters had satellite radios built into them, but we obviously lost access to those as well.” He opened the coffeemaker and dropped in a K-cup of extra-bold coffee. After positioning a cup beneath the spout, he pressed the brew button.

  “So you mean we’re stranded here?” Regina asked.

  McDaniels watched the dark liquid fill the paper coffee cup. “Not at all. Once the men have this floor secured and we take an inventory of our consumables, I’ll go up to the roof with my satellite phone. I’ll be able to reach my component command and arrange for another extraction, probably by helicopter.”

  “How long will that take?” Safire asked. “Shouldn’t you do that now?”

  “I’ll attend to it as soon as we can fortify our position, Doctor. As far as how long it will take, I can’t tell you. I would imagine we lost a lot of aircraft back at the park. I don’t know what resources are still in the area, so it could be some time until we see any kind of rescue mission mounted. Which is why we have to fortify our position. Coffee?”

  Safire rocketed to his feet, and his pale face flushed with sudden color. “No, I don’t want any fucking coffee! I want you and your people to do your job, which is to get us out of here!”

  “Dad! Take it easy,” Regina said softly.

  McDaniels stirred a serving of light cream into his coffee. He brought the cup to his lips and tasted it, noticing for the first time his hand was trembling slightly. Was it from fear, or just the aftereffect of what seemed to be a gallon of adrenaline wearing off? He couldn’t tell which.

  “Doctor Safire.” McDaniels kept his voice low and level, striving to at least sound calm and collected, though in truth giving the scientist a nice shiner sounded good at the moment. “You might have noticed that no fewer than fifteen men have died trying to get you and your daughter away from... those things out there. We’re now down to seven gunslingers against probably thousands of the walking dead. The precariousness of our situation is hardly lost upon me. I think maybe you can cut us a little slack?” He stared at Safire as he took another sip of his coffee. Right now, it tasted better than a cold beer on a hot day.

  If Safire was moved by McDaniels’ comment, it did not show. “You need to get us out of here,” he said.

  McDaniels sighed. “As I tried to tell you, that’s pretty much what I’m all about right now.” He leaned back against the counter and crossed his arms over his chest as looked at Safire.

  “Tell me who else knows what you do, doctor. Because if things go any further south, we’re going to need a contingency plan.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Regina asked. She walked over to Safire and put a hand on his arm.

  McDaniels ran a hand over the stubbly bristle on his head. Even though he wasn’t required to keep his hair as short as it was, he found a tight crew cut suited him just fine after fifteen years in the Army.

  “He means that in case I get killed, someone else will need to know what I do,” Safire said in an acidic tone.

  “I mean we might need to spread the wealth a bit,” McDaniels countered. “Who else knows what you do, Doctor? Who else knows how to stop the walking dead?”

  “No one,” Safire said immediately.

  “So you’re telling me that all of your research is—what? In your head?”

  “I’m the only person who knows what RMA is, and what it does to a living human host.”

  “RMA?” McDaniels asked.

  Safire loosened up a bit, now that he had something else to occupy his thoughts other than fleeing from the walking dead. He straightened his navy blue dress jacket by pulling on its lapels.

  “RMA. Rex Articulus Morte. Essentially, ‘the moving dead’, the name I assigned to the bioengineered virus that started all of this.”

  “Bioengineered? So whatever’s causing this is man-made?”

  “Without question. The signature in some of the precursors that I was able to find in the bug’s building blocks definitely point to something from the old Soviet Union. I learned all about Soviet biological weapons when I was working for the government in the 1970s and 1980s.” As he spoke, Safire drifted toward the vending machines behind him and regarded their wares through the glass in their doors. “How it can reanimate the dead is still something we don’t know. There’s obviously some components that make up the virus which we’ve never dealt with before. But I have developed a method for preventing humans who are bitten by the dead from becoming one of them, and if the drug is administered while the individual is alive, even their death won’t result in them rising again.”

  “But why would the Russians develop a weapon like this in the first place? It’s not like they could ever deploy it.”

  “Perhaps,” Safire agreed. “Or perhaps they had a therapy that would prevent their troops and citizens from turning into ghouls after exposure. Maybe they lost the records for the therapy over the decades, or maybe they never had one to begin with, and what was released was only a test study. Whatever the case, the U.S. most certainly experimented with some rather esoteric weapon systems. Did you know we worked on a weapon that was designed to make all the Russians go mad and attack each other? What we face now is much the same, only ours was chemical, this is biological.”

  McDaniels sipped some more of his coffee, then poured it down the sink. “But the question remains, doctor... with all the research that went into creating this process you’re speaking of, you’re the only one who knows what it is? No assistants, no researchers, no laboratory partners, no one at all?”

  “Just me, major.” Safire smiled grimly. “You see, if you had been a little faster in getting to us, you might have been able to save two colleagues who could have replicated my work, and who in fact contributed to it greatly. But doctors Walsh and Vinjamuri were taken by the dead, like so many others before them.”

  “Our... tardiness was hardly our fault, doctor. It took a while for your message to make its way through the command structure and get to someone with the horsepower to actually do something about it.”

  Safire waved the explanation away as he turned away from the vending machines and sat heavily on the cardboard paper cases again. “Whatever. The end result is the same. I’m the only one who knows how to do what needs to be done, and I’m just thrilled to be trapped here in the city with the rest of you. Truly.”

  McDaniels put his helmet on and walked to the door. “Then maybe you can make yourself useful? Get off that skinny ass and take a look at Jimenez, he’s hurt bad. And since he’s one of the people who will be saving you and your daughter, maybe you might want to do something to start returning the favor ahead of time.” He put his hand on the door knob and turned back to the Safires. The daughter looked at him with anger in her eyes; the elder couldn’t be bothered with such a useless emotion. His expression was totally blank.

  “We have to save you whether we like you or not,” McDaniels said, as much to Regina as to Safire. “But it might be better for all of us if you didn’t act like such a prick, doctor.”

  “I’ll take that under advisement,” Safire said sarcastically.

  CHAPTER 6

  “We have about six hundred rounds of five-five-six per man, and around half that in nine millimeter. I have one hundred fifty-five tungsten cored magnum rounds for the AA-12, and one drum of high-explosive minigrenades for a total of 25 shots. Three hundred and ninety rounds of .45 ACP for our sidearms. Every man still has five M67 frag grenades, four M8 smokers, night vision goggles with two spare batteries, enough MREs to get through the next five days—more if we ration ourselves—and water, which we can replenish here. Personal radios with two spare batteries. One satellite phone, three PRC-90s...” Gartrell had written everything down on a yellow legal pad in block letters that were so neat McDaniels thought the list had be
en printed. He read the list as Gartrell recited it from memory. The Night Stalkers had less gear to lug around, as all of their equipment was mostly defensive, for protecting forward area refuel points where their helicopters would refuel and rearm. The assembly area in Central Park’s Great Lawn had been nothing more than one gigantic FARP, and the 160th ground control teams had been outfitted accordingly. While their load-out was consistent with the mission they were to accomplish, it wouldn’t sustain them for long if bad things started to happen. The three Night Stalkers had only Heckler & Koch MP5K Personal Defense Weapons, which fired 9mm rounds but were limited by a fairly short range. And besides basic soldiering skills, they weren’t especially proficient in military operations in urban terrain, which is what street fighting zombies in New York City most assuredly was.

  The Special Forces troops—which included McDaniels and Gartrell—weren’t really all that much better off. The heavy weaponry, such as the M249 machine guns, had been lost when CW3 Keith’s helicopter had crashed during takeoff in Central Park. Not that the weapons were a key concern. The loss of the lion’s share of a Special Forces Alpha Detachment and all the skills associated with it were what weighed heavily on McDaniels now. As things stood, he just didn’t have enough manpower to go around.

  “Major?”

  McDaniels looked up from the list, a little annoyed. After what had happened between them in Afghanistan, Gartrell consciously avoided calling him “sir” whenever he could. It was always “major”. And that bothered McDaniels more than he would like to admit, even to himself.

  “I got what you said, it’s all here.” McDaniels tapped the pad. “Sounds like we’re good for the time being, so long as we don’t get decisively engaged. But we need to start making some noise and see if we can’t get the hell out of here.”

  Gartrell nodded, and waved toward the cube farm behind McDaniels. The two men stood at a long row of filing cabinets while the rest of the troops sat near the reception desk on office chairs. There was no need to keep them on their feet the entire time, and everyone’s dogs were already tired to begin with.