Wheels and Zombies (Book 3): Aground

by M. Van

  “Yeah, we saw him exit the plane,” I said with a groan and then hid my face in my hands. “I just wanted to go home.”

  “I know,” Angie said. The sympathy I heard in her voice seemed uncharacteristic, and I dropped the hands from my face. She stared at me with those dark eyes that seemed to be filled with anger most of the time, but now I couldn’t read them. “Borders are closed,” she said as a matter of fact. “It’ll be a while until international travel is permitted, and even then I doubt it’ll be public or even private transport. They might permit nationals to come home, but …” Her voice trailed off, but she didn’t have to say the words for me to know their meaning—Dad had already said as much: Ash would never be allowed to come with me.

  I leaned back and let my shoulders sag as my hands dropped along my sides.

  “I already overstayed my visa,” I said in all seriousness. “Think you can help me out with the paperwork.”

  Angie kept a straight face for the longest time, and it started to make me feel uncomfortable, until one side of her mouth curved into a smile and laughed. Glad the agent had a sense of humor, I smiled back. It seemed my trip had extended indefinitely, and I could use all the friends I could get.

  Around us, the mess hall had emptied out, and the food counters closed. It unnerved me when I couldn’t see Ash and turned to check the room behind me.

  “Have you seen Ash?” I asked Angie. She looked at me in surprise and then around the room. Besides the two airmen who had escorted us here, the place looked deserted.

  I stood to look around.

  “She couldn’t have passed the guards,” Angie said. “Maybe she found her way into the kitchen.”

  I raised my eyebrows; that could be something Ash would do. It seemed that the kid had a thing for kitchens. Grabbing my tray from the table, I noticed sergeant Tyler enter the mess hall heading straight to us.

  The expression on the man’s face was beyond serious, and this strange foreboding feeling washed over me.

  “Agent Meadow,” Tyler said as he stopped at our table. Angie stood to face the man.

  “I would like you and … your guest to follow me, please,” he said. Angie shot me a look I couldn’t read, which didn’t make me feel better.

  “Let me find Ash, and we’ll be right—” I started to say, but Tyler cut me off.

  “You will meet the child there.”

  “Meet where?” Angie asked.

  “You’ll see soon enough,” he replied. She shot the man a hard stare and didn’t seem amused by Tyler’s vagueness. Tyler however remained unfazed.

  | 18

  Tyler took the lead as we walked down an unfamiliar hall. In a single file, we were led deeper inside the facility. Angie walked ahead of me, and our two escorts from before took up the rear as we passed military personnel in all sorts of getups. People of all types of ethnicities and genders went by in efficient workers’ clothes similar to the flight suits we wore, but there were also some in full dress uniform of different colors. I wasn’t familiar with the United States military and didn’t know all the designations, but they seemed to resonate from all the different parts of the armed forces. I even spotted several Canadian officers. The tiny flags on their shoulder made them easy to identify.

  We passed rooms that looked like overequipped offices. Huge monitors hung on the walls, displaying all kinds of interesting data. Some had maps of the world, others the top half of North America and Canada.

  Without success Angie had tried to gain some answers from Tyler, but the man kept his mouth shut. Every step, not knowing where we were going, added to the tightness in my chest. The fact that Ash—who hadn’t left my side for over a year—wasn’t around didn’t help, and neither did the concerned look Angie shot me over her shoulder.

  Tyler stopped at a white door and opened it for us. He stood by it as he ushered us inside a tiny room. Glass surrounded us on every side, and a sharp fluorescent light hung overhead. It reminded me of the boxlike rooms I had seen in Dr. David’s lab, and I felt my throat tighten.

  “Standard decontamination process,” he said. “You know the drill.”

  “Wait … What?” Angie said, turning to face Tyler. Without explanation, he closed the door and left us standing alone.

  “You little shit!” Angie exclaimed and stormed at the door. There weren’t any door handles on the inside, so she wouldn’t have any chance of opening it. Instead, she kicked it and cursed some more.

  My eyes darted around the room. Beyond the glass, I saw people working at different workstations. Each station carried a computer screen, but the rest varied per workstation. Some had small devices hooked to the computers; others were loaded with glass bottles and test tubes. My eyes roamed past the desks where an examination table stood. I swallowed hard and balled my hands into fists so my shaking hands wouldn’t be too obvious.

  As if she could sense my discomfort, Angie started to explain.

  “Standard decontamination,” she said in a low voice. I nodded as if I had any idea what that meant.

  A faint smile curved on Angie’s face and she said, “Don’t worry. It’s just a shower, but we have to take our clothes off.”

  I felt my eyes grow wide and stared at her. Then I shifted my view to the glass wall overseeing the lab on the other side. When I turned back to her, Angie grinned and shook her head before she slammed a button mounted on the wall. Within the same second, the glass seemed to turn into a wall, although I knew it was tinted glass, just as the windows of the Knight had been.

  After we stripped our clothes, a panel in the glass wall opened, and that tightening feeling in my chest grew again at an alarming rate. Angie guided me through every step of the process and explained it as if I was a child, and I gladly let her. She wasn’t disrespecting my intellect, and I knew that. It was her way of giving me a handhold, something to focus on. It actually worked, and I felt the urge to freak out and slam my fists against the glass fade. She warned me when to close my eyes as a cold substance that bit my skin poured over us, and when to hold my breath as a white fog released from something that looked like a showerhead sprouting from the ceiling.

  When the white fog had dissipated, another panel opened, and we stepped through. I felt relieved to see the windows inside this room had been tinted as well. Angie pointed at two piles of white fabric displayed on a stainless steel cart. After we had changed into not-so-charming hospital gowns, Angie pressed a similar button to the one she had pushed in the first room.

  A geeky beanstalk of a man with black, wide-rimmed glasses and wearing a surgical mask opened the door to let us out and guided us to a section of the lab separated by white plastic sheets.

  “The doctor will be right with you,” he said from behind his mask in a high-pitched voice before his gloved hands closed the sheets of plastic that almost looked like a see-through wall and left us to our own device.

  I looked at Angie, in search of answers, but she shook her head.

  “I don’t know,” she said, “but if I don’t get any answers soon, I will punch someone.”

  I raised an eyebrow at her, and she smirked.

  “Don’t worry. It won’t be you,” she said.

  As I opened my mouth to reply, someone else spoke.

  “I hope it won’t be me either,” a kind, but a raspy voice said. I turned to the sound of a woman in a dark-blue skirt and suit jacket standing on the other side of the plastic wall. The middle-aged woman, with wild red hair that she had tried to tame in a ponytail along with a bunch of hairpins, approached us with a warm smile.

  “I apologize. I won’t be able to shake your hands,” she said. “I’m not wearing the proper attire.”

  My mouth fell open, and it wasn’t because of the obvious plenitude of pounds the woman carried that made her clothes seem too tight and uncomfortable.

  “Welcome to Cheyenne Mountain. You can’t imagine how glad I am to finally meet you. My name is Dr. Kelly Matley,” said the woman who I had last seen talking t
o Ash.

  “Where is she?” I said through clenched teeth. Even Angie glared up at me in surprise at my tone of voice. Matley seemed startled, but I could tell she knew exactly whom I was talking about.

  “Now calm down,” she said raising her hands. “The girl is fine.”

  “What!” Angie piped in.

  I pointed a finger at Matley and said, “I saw her talking to Ash in the mess.”

  Angie stepped in line beside me and crossed her arms. Her dark eyes looked as if a shadow had fallen over them as she gazed at Matley.

  “You better start talking right now,” she said.

  Matley took a step back, her hands still in the air. “The girl came to me,” she said in her raspy voice. “She wanted to help.”

  Blood started to boil as my hammering heart pumped it through my veins. I wanted to calm down. We were in a good place. Angie and Mars would have never taken us here if we’d have been at risk. I glanced sideways at Angie, who seemed as pissed off as I was.

  “The kid is here?” she asked.

  “Well—” Matley started to say, but I didn’t let her finish. I pushed past the sheet of plastic.

  “No, stop, wait, you can’t …” she said and tried to step into my path. “You can’t leave this area.” Then she must have thought the better of it and stepped aside. If she hadn’t, I would have probably shouldered her out of my way. I stepped past her and into the lab. Keeping my cool would probably have been the wiser thing to do, but labs, doctors, and Ash missing weren’t a good combination for me.

  “Please, if you just let me explain.” Matley’s voice echoed behind me.

  “Oh, shut it,” Angie said as she followed me.

  On bare feet, I stomped through the lab to the area where I had seen the desks before. Around me lab technicians glanced up from their work, and I felt their eyes bore into me. Angie came up from behind me.

  “It’s like they’ve never seen a skinny ass before,” she said in a loud voice as she met a couple of the ogling eyes with an angry look of her own.

  “I was kind of trying not to think of that,” I said to her in a low voice, fully aware that the flimsy gown wouldn’t cover my butt. A few of the technicians shifted uncomfortably as they returned their attention to their work.

  “Yeah, pretend you’re working,” she said in that same loud voice.

  Ignoring the lab techs, my eyes scanned the beds lining the wall beyond the desks.

  “There,” I said as I recognized Mars sitting on one of the beds.

  Angie followed as I moved past the row of beds to where he sat with Ash.

  “Mars,” Angie said as we closed in.

  He turned to face us, a grim expression on his face, and got to his feet. I stared at the scrawny form that lay lifeless on the bed.

  “Ash,” I said under my breath.

  “What the hell, Mars!” Angie exclaimed.

  In unison, we moved closer to the bed. Mars shot me a pained expression as he stepped back. Anger threatened to overtake me, but my concern for Ash pulled me to her, and I ignored Mars. At the side of the bed, he touched my arm, and my head shot up. His eyes widened, clearly taken aback at what would have been a venomous glare.

  “I didn’t know. Matley called me, and I found her like that,” he said as fast as he could, while his hands shot up in defense. His words registered somewhere in my brain, but the emotions coursing through me were overwhelming. I bit my tongue and decided to focus on Ash.

  Her eyes were closed, and the color of her skin had reduced to the reason she was called Ash in the first place. I stroked her head as my eyes slid down her neckline past the white hospital gown and along her thin arms that had been strapped to the bed.

  My head snapped up, and facing Angie’s darkened expression, I knew she had noticed the same thing. I started to undo the straps as I registered Dr. Matley’s raspy voice.

  “Please, don’t be alarmed.”

  “Are you fucking kidding me,” Angie said.

  “Agent Meadow,” Mars said aloud.

  “What!” From the tone of her voice, I could tell Angie fumed with anger.

  “Please …” he said and paused as if to compose himself, “just let the doctor explain.”

  The room around us must have gone silent, because I couldn’t hear a thing. Not that I cared. My focus lay with Ash. I scooted onto the bed next to her head and pulled her onto my lap. With the edge of her sheet, I wiped some saliva from the corner of her mouth and heard Matley suck in a breath.

  “The child came to me,” she said. “She volunteered.”

  I glared at her, hoping, waiting for a better explanation.

  “She thought her blood might be able to help Agent Meadow over here,” Matley added and paused to glance at Angie. In turn, Angie’s face went crimson, and she shot me an apologetic look. I shook my head. This wasn’t Angie’s fault.

  “Anyway,” Matley continued, “the child freaked out as we attempted to draw blood, and we had to sedate her.”

  I didn’t know whether it was the red hair, her tone of voice, or the why are you all so upset expression on her face, but it worked on me like a red rag on a bull.

  “And you think it’s normal to act on a child’s offer like that.” My words rushed out in rage. I felt like punching the woman.

  “Now, now, it’s not like there are any parents to consider, but I must admit I overestimated her courage. She freaked out and nearly stabbed one of my men’s eye out with a syringe. We needed to sedate her before she could hurt anyone.”

  That was it—this was all I could take from this woman. I slid off the bed, replacing Ash’s head on the pillow within the same motion and charged at Dr. Matley.

  “You bitch,” I said and balled my fists. “Consider this for a parent.” Ready to punch her I stepped forward. Before I could get anywhere close to her, Mars wrapped his arms around my waist and held me in place. It didn’t keep me from swinging at her, but I hit the air. Matley stepped back as shock spread across her face.

  “Mags, stop,” Mars said near my ear as I kept trying to get at the doctor. “The kid is okay. Matley didn’t mean any harm.”

  Anger peaking and my heart pounding, I whirled in his arms.

  “Don’t call her kid,” I said and shoved him in the shoulders so his arms would release me. “She doesn’t like it.”

  Mars stared at me with those pale jade eyes that would have made me melt at any given time, but the anger inside me made me pick up on the sympathy behind them, which added fuel to the fire. I hated it when people gave me that sympathetic look as if I was something fragile—about to break. I opened my mouth to spit out something I knew I would later regret, but fortunately, a loud voice interrupted me.

  “Would someone explain to me what is going on?”

  I turned to see two men in full dress uniform standing behind Matley. Their presence suddenly gave me the urge to stand at attention.

  Before I had gotten stuck here in this country, I had never even been in contact with the military, let alone knew how to stand at attention, but these two men demanded it with their presence. One of the men stood tall, with a bald head and what seemed like a permanent frown on his face. The other one was significantly shorter, with a round face and gray hair, but what he lacked in height he made up for in presence.

  I sucked in a breath to compose myself and saw Angie glaring at me. Unlike Matley, it wasn’t shock, at least not in the negative sense of the word. Her face seemed filled with pride. She nodded, her way of telling me it was okay, when a tiny voice made our heads swing in the direction of the bed.

  “Mags.” Ash had pushed herself up on her elbows and watched me with a raised eyebrow. Ignoring everyone around us, I moved to the head of the bed and wrapped my arms around the scrawny kid. I pulled her close and knew she didn’t mind when she hugged me back.

  “You okay,” I said after I kissed the top of her head. She nodded her answer, which I didn’t think to be a good sign.

  “Hey, kid,”
Angie said, standing on the other side of the bed as she rubbed a hand over Ash’s back.

  “Don’t call me that,” Ash retorted.

  Angie glanced up and nodded at me with a smile.

  “Where you about to punch Dr. Matley?” Ash whispered. I let out a nervous chuckle—the anger from before almost forgotten.

  Angie leaned in and whispered near Ash’s ear, loud enough for me to hear, “I think she would have taken her out.”

  Ash pulled away from me and glanced up at as her mouth curved into a smile.

  Before she could say anything, a loud “Ahem” filled the room.

  The shorter man stepped forward and extended his hand. He shook Angie’s without introducing himself and then came over to our side of the bed. He shook Mars’s hand and asked him how he was doing before he turned to Ash and me.

  “My name is General Leon Whitfield, and I am the commander of this base,” he said as he extended his hand for me to shake. Startled, I looked at my own hands that were still holding on to Ash.

  Unsure of what the man had seen of my little outburst, I felt heat creep up my neck and settle in my cheeks when Ash shifted and grabbed the general’s hand.

  “Ash,” she said in a firm voice, “pleased to meet you.” The general politely switched his gaze to Ash, but I wasn’t sure he was too interested in her. He turned back to me and once again offered his hand. This time I took it.

  “I am very glad to finally meet you, Ms. Vissers,” he said. Shocked to hear my last name, I fumbled the words into a “Nice to meet you too,” and shot Mars a look. His eyes had gone wide, and he shook his head in an almost imperceptible no.

  The general smirked as he shifted his gaze from me to Mars.

  “Did you really think you’d be able to smuggle someone inside my facility without me knowing who they were?” General Whitfield said. “The doctor here recognized our young friend Ash from her stay in Florida.”

  “Sir …” Mars started to say, “I never—”

  The general cut him off with a wave of his hand.

  “Later,” he said with a firm voice. Then he turned to the man who was now standing behind him. “This is my second in command, Colonel Nathan Cornwell.”