Wheels and Zombies (Book 3): Aground

by M. Van

  When Cornwell finished spitting in my face, medics rushed in to place me on a stretcher and shoved me into a vehicle where one of them started to inspect my hand. Everything after that became a blur, and it wasn’t just because of this white mist swimming across my eyes. The needle that one of the medics stuck in my arm could have had something to do with it.

  The blur changed into strange images. Faces of people I knew and loved crowded my mind. Eyes with colorless irises engulfed by a white mist peered at me from every single person. My mom, dad, brother, and sister, even Mars, stood in the mob with stretched arms out to get me. It wasn’t until something jerked my body around to face William’s dead eyes that I woke with a start.

  It took me a moment to orient myself in the darkened space. Light filtered in from what looked like a door, but I couldn’t tell whether it was day or night inside this windowless room. At the sound of a soft click, a light standing on a small table switched on.

  I squinted against the brightness and wanted to cover my eyes. Pain shot up my right arm as I tried to raise it and found it heavily packed in a thick layer of bandages. Three fingers peeked out the top.

  “Zombies ate your fingers,” a soft voice said. I recognized Ash, and lowering the bandaged hand, I found her sitting at my side. The lamp cast a shadow across her face, hiding her features, but I could tell she looked tired. I blinked after I noticed the blur fogging up my eyes had vanished and color had returned to my vision. Feeling relieved Ash didn’t have to witness my zombie eyes, I shifted onto my side to face her. Muscles in my limbs ached and my hand, along with my head, throbbed, but otherwise I felt all right.

  Ash wore a new flight suit without the spatter of blood, and her combed hair looked damp as if freshly showered. I glanced down at what I was wearing and noticed a brand-new flight suit. Glad to see Ash, I smiled.

  “Where are we?” I asked. My voice came out more or less as a croak, and my throat felt as if I’d smoked a pack of cigarettes.

  “Above ground,” Ash said in a tiny voice, “Whitfield set us up in some kind of improvised housin’ while they are makin’ sure the base is zombie-free.”

  As she spoke I glanced around the tiny windowless room, but it was the quaver in her voice that drew my attention back to Ash.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  Ash shook her head no and rolled her chair closer to the stretcher I was lying on. Light fell on her features, and the sight of her took me aback. She looked so fragile and small. Tears glistened her eyes, and her lower lip trembled. This wasn’t the fake pucker she used to get her way.

  “Hey,” I said, reaching out with my good hand. “It’s okay.”

  My fingers raked through her damp hair before I pulled her closer. She leaned in, wrapping her arms around me and burying her face between my neck and shoulder. Within seconds, her tears dampened my skin.

  “It’s okay,” I repeated. “We’re both okay, right?”

  Ash gripped me tighter before she spoke into my shoulder, “You didn’t follow … we waited but you didn’t come … it took so long and you didn’t come.” Her words rolled out almost frantically—the voice of a little kid. Angie had been right, earlier in the lab. Ash was still a kid, and she needed to be reminded about that fact herself, once in a while. I gripped her tighter, wrapping both arms around her and ignored the throbbing in my hand.

  “It’s okay, baby,” I said without thinking of the repercussions. “I’m here.” This time there weren’t any.

  It turned out to be night, and by the time Angie showed up, Ash had crawled onto the stretcher with me and lay curled against my side. Without any room to move on the narrow stretcher, I raised a hand to welcome Angie.

  She also wore a fresh flight suit, and her wet, braided hair rested on her shoulder. A newly molded Mohawk perked on the top of her head. She plopped down in Ash’s wheelchair and let out an exasperated breath.

  “Zombie ate your fingers,” she said.

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” I said with a chuckle as I raised my bandaged hand. The loss of my fingers hadn’t hit me yet, probably because I felt glad to be alive; besides, I preferred my left hand, so I should be able to survive.

  “How’s our kid doing?” she said, placing emphasis on the word kid. Angie rolled closer, looking surprised at the lack of retort, but Ash was out cold—hopefully sleeping a dreamless sleep.

  “She’s out,” I whispered and wiped a couple of stray hairs from Ash’s face.

  “Probably a good thing,” Angie whispered. She rolled the chair back and forth. I watched her for a moment as she occupied herself, an aching question on my mind. Although I had no idea what time it was, it felt as if it had been hours since I’d woken up and there hadn’t been a sign from Mars.

  “Where’s … I mean, have you seen Mars?” I asked hesitantly. The same shadow from the lamp that had helped hiding Ash’s face now covered Angie’s. Her hands stopped rolling the chair, and I felt her dark gaze fall on me.

  “He’s been here, but you were out,” she said. “Now, it seems they’ve been planning for most of the night and will be for some time.” Something in her voice told me she didn’t agree or maybe didn’t like the fact of being shut out.

  “You mean with Whitfield and Cornwell,” I said.

  Angie nodded as she replied, “And some others.”

  “You know what they’re planning,” I asked and hesitated before I added, “for us?”

  Her hands wrapped tighter around the wheels of the chair and started moving it back and forth. It started to make me nervous, and it occurred to me she might be nervous, too.

  “I don’t know,” she said. She kept her gaze on the ground as if she didn’t want to face me.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked. I had known Angie long enough to know something was up. That woman lacked the capability to be nervous in normal circumstances. She stopped shifting the chair and stood. She leaned in, and her hand came down to gently caress Ash’s cheek.

  “You should get some sleep,” she said and gestured to an extra stretcher on the other side of the room. “You want me to take her? I doubt you’ll get any sleep like this.”

  I shook my head. “No, it’s fine. I don’t wanna wake her.”

  Her hand shifted from Ash’s cheek to my shoulder and squeezed it.

  “Then I’ll take it,” she said and took the two steps it took to cross the room. The stretcher creaked as she sat down. She grabbed the blanket on top and draped it over her legs.

  I waited for a moment for the silence to return. Outside I heard the sounds of wildlife and the occasional pair of boots slushing through the mud. In the distance, I could hear an engine or two rumble before they took off.

  “You haven’t answered my question before,” I said after a moment and had realized she had diverted my question when I had asked her what was wrong. Angie’s breathing had turned shallow, but I knew she’d be awake. Her head shifted to face me after a long moment.

  “I don’t like being kept in the dark,” she said in a low voice. “Now sleep. You’re gonna need it.”

  I watched her for a moment and then said, “But you've been out there, right, and talked to people. You must know something, like what happened to Dr. David.”

  Angie rolled to her side and looked straight at me. Even with the dimmed light, I could tell her eyes held me with a venomous glare.

  “For as far as I know, Warren is missing in action. No one has seen him, but it seems I am no longer in the service of the FBI, because my condition,” she said, making air quotes around the last word, “makes me a security risk, so it’s not like anyone is telling me anything—even your boyfriend won't talk to me.” Her words came out in a hard tone, but nonetheless she tried to keep her voice down, so she wouldn’t wake Ash. It wasn’t difficult to decipher the hurt expressed on her face. Angie huffed out a breath in frustration and plopped down on her back.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. She turned her head to face me

  “We used to be f
riends you know—went through training together and everything,” she said, and from her words I presumed she was talking about Mars. “Now he just looks at me with a pained expression as if he’s got the whole world on his shoulders.”

  “He must have told you something.”

  Angie nodded and placed a hand on her forehead and rubbed it as if to fend off a headache.

  “The big plan is to vaccinate large groups of soldiers who’ll be sent east to eradicate the zombies,” she said, “but they need to be sure the vaccine works. We are to meet with Whitfield in the morning, and maybe we’ll get some more details.”

  “So they wanna keep us around for that?”

  “Yep,” she said and dropped her hand at her side.

  I gaze up at the ceiling, not sure how I felt about that. “You think we’ll have any kind of say in whatever they’re planning?” I asked. On the other stretcher, I heard Angie shift and I directed my gaze toward her. She had regained her position lying on her side, her head perched on her hand.

  “I doubt it,” she said, which wasn’t exactly what I wanted to hear. “But we kind of owe it to the world to try and help.”

  “I guess,” I said with a sigh and looked down at Ash who lay nestled at my side. “The kid stays out of it, though.”

  “I think we can all agree on that, even Whitfield,” Angie said. “The general might be a hard ass, but he’s not callous.”

  “I’m not so sure about that,” I said under my breath. The room fell silent after that, and my thoughts shifted toward home. I wondered if I would ever get to see my family again and felt the urge to call them, but I had left my phone inside my pack somewhere inside that mountain.

  “Listen,” Angie said, pulling me from my thoughts, “I’m not going to roll over and do whatever they want, but let’s not freak out before they have a chance to explain themselves, and if it turns out to be something we can't agree to, then we figure out something else.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like get the hell out of here, find a nice place, and ride out the apocalypse,” she said. “Now get some sleep.”

  I could read the determination on her face, and as I held her dark gaze, I felt this nagging feeling that it was going to be a long time before I would see the rest of my family again.

  “It’s going to be okay, and no one is going to touch the kid,” Angie added as she pulled a blanket over her shoulder, “right?”

  “Right,” I said at a mere whisper. Although I didn’t have much faith in tomorrow, I knew we also didn’t have much of a choice. I reached for the lamp, which wasn’t easy without waking Ash.

  With a click, the room was bathed in darkness.

  “Good night,” I whispered into the dark and soon felt the world around me disappear.

  | 31

  It hadn’t been a good idea to let Ash sleep on my stretcher, because I woke from a fitful sleep. Ash stirred and perked her head up. I groaned as I tried to shift my body and lifted my hand. Pain shot up my arm, and I hissed in agony.

  “Son of a …” I moaned. Ash quickly pushed her legs over the side of the stretcher and sat up.

  “Sorry,” she whispered as she pulled her chair closer and slipped into it. I sat up, cradling my arm and grinding my teeth to bite through the pain.

  “Not your fault, kiddo,” I said through clenched teeth. Realizing my mistake, I looked up at Ash. She sat unmoving in her chair with a scrunched-up face and biting her lower lip. From the other side of the room, Angie glared at me as if I’d just kicked a puppy or something.

  “Back at ya,” Ash said after a moment of silence.

  Angie burst out laughing, something I didn’t hear too often. The sound together with the expression on Ash’s face made me smile, while I leaned forward in the same instance. I felt sick and sucked in air to keep myself from throwing up. My hand felt as if someone had been whacking it with a hammer.

  “Here,” Angie said as something landed on my stretcher. A plastic bottle lay next to me, and I grabbed it with my good hand. I fumbled to get the cap off and set the bottle to my mouth.

  “Just two,” Angie said. “Take two every couple of hours.”

  Taking her advice, I let two pills drop into my mouth and dry swallowed them. I took a moment, hoping the painkillers would kick in fast, and let out a long breath of air.

  “What time is it?” I asked no one particular.

  “Time to get up,” Angie said. I scowled at her. The pills hadn’t kicked in yet, and the pain was killing me. I wasn’t in the mood for fun and games.

  “About eight” she added.

  “You think they’ll let us out?” Ash said as she rolled her chair to the entrance. What I had thought to be a regular door last night turned out to be the opening to a container. I had figured it had to be part of that of makeshift housing Ash had mentioned.

  “Huh,” I said blinking at the sunlight coming in through the door. “Out of what?”

  Angie stood from her stretcher and walked over to me. She helped me stand and then said, “It’s time you find out what we’ve gotten ourselves into.”

  I frowned, not liking were this seemed to be going. Angie’s face looked strained as she maneuvered me to follow Ash out the container. As I walked out, I cradled my arm tightly to my chest—afraid someone would bump into it. My eyes needed some adjustment to the light. The sun had barely found its way up into the sky, but already shone brightly. I blinked and found the meaning behind Ash’s words.

  Our container sat in the corner of an enormous parking lot. About four meters from the metal box stood wooden fences that surrounded the container on all sides. They weren’t the threatening barbed wire kind of fences that stood seven feet tall, but more like something used at a construction site. They wouldn’t have stopped us from an attempted escape if it weren’t for the three guards walking around the perimeter. At a significant distance across the parking lot, I could see an area with buildings and people bustling around. I glanced down at Angie who shrugged.

  “Wanna explain?” I asked.

  “Well, you had those funky eyes and everything,” she said and shrugged again, “so they thought it better to keep us from general population for the time being.”

  “Great,” I said before I considered Ash might have seen my eyes after all. I glanced at her, but she didn’t seem fazed by the mention of them.

  “They said it would be a short isolation to be sure you wouldn’t turn,” Ash said. “And you didn’t eat us, so you passed.”

  “So why are you in here then?” I asked.

  “Moral support,” Angie said.

  “We volunteered,” Ash said, looking up, “to keep an eye on you.”

  I managed a hesitant smile. While I appreciated Angie and Ash’s gesture, the fact that they thought I needed to be separated didn’t make me feel any better.

  “Thanks,” I said, despite the twisting feeling in my gut.

  “Good, you’re awake,” a man said in a loud voice. I looked up to see the geeky-looking beanstalk of a man with the black wide-rimmed glasses who we had glimpsed inside Dr. Matley’s lab. The man entered our makeshift isolation area. Ignoring Ash and Angie, he pulled out a penlight and directed it at my eyes. I flinched at the bright light, but the man seemed satisfied. Then, while he guided us past the barricade, he started talking about how excited he was that I not only had survived one but two zombie bites. It took about a minute for me to feel exhausted by the man’s chirpiness, and my shoulders slumped as I followed him. Two of the soldiers who had been standing guard at the container followed us, and as I glanced at them, one of them rolled his eyes at his colleague while he nodded in the direction of the geeky beanstalk. His gesture made me smile. Guess, I wasn’t the only one jaded by the rambling man.

  The geeky-looking beanstalk didn’t notice as he kept blabbing away about my medical significance while we followed him across the parking lot to a two-story building. Everywhere I looked, trees surrounded us, and to our left, the mountain that I pres
umed held the military complex rose over the roof of the building we approached. The thought of Dr. Matley and her lifeless corpse lying on the floor of her own lab, along with all the other lives lost, sent a cold shiver down my spine.

  Not at complete ease, I glanced over my shoulder at the two soldiers following us. It wasn’t any different from what I had experienced inside the mountain. In there they wouldn’t let us walk around on our own either, but somehow it felt daunting out here in the open sky as if our lives weren’t our own anymore.

  The beanstalk, whose name I couldn’t remember—or maybe he had never mentioned it—flashed a card at the entrance of the building. One of the two guards posted there nodded, and they both turned to open the door for us.

  Angie had taken the lead behind the beanstalk, Ash stuck to the middle, and I took up the rear as we walked along a corridor that reminded me of a combination of a hospital and the office spaces inside the mountain, but with windows. The beanstalk guided us past a secretary’s desk and through a pair of glass doors. It was when the doors fell closed that I noticed that Beanstalk hadn’t followed us inside. The room behind the glass doors had a similar boardroom feel to it as the one inside the mountain, except this one looked a lot brighter. Light filtering in from the outside reflected on to a mirror, which I decided to avoid, but it added more light to the sand-colored interior. Big leather chairs that seemed to beg for my attention stood around a mahogany table. My hand throbbed, although I had a feeling the pain medication had started to do its work, and I debated whether to sit down.

  Al those thoughts faded into the background when, beyond the glass doors, I saw Mars approach us. If it weren’t for the serious expression on General Whitfield’s round face and Colonel Cornwell with his permanent frown at his side, I might have been tempted to make a short sprint to greet him. It wasn’t until our gazes met and I registered his expressions that my heart sank. Something was wrong—I could see it in his eyes.

  I moved to stand alongside Ash while Angie stood behind her. We exchanged glances, and I think we all knew something was up as we waited for them to enter. The three of them took up the side of the table near the door while the three of us remained standing on the other end of the room.