by JT Sawyer
Movement off to Shane’s left yanked his awareness back to the pool area. He could see at least fifty or more creatures pivoting away from the beach and heading towards him. “Welcome to the Cancun zombie fest,” he said, clenching his rifle and moving to the front of the helo as the rotors began spinning and the engine roared.
Chapter 21
As the rotor speed increased, Shane knelt down on one knee, his hair aloft in the mini-cyclone. He laid out twelve rifle magazines on the ground beneath him and then refocused his sights on the entrance to his right.
A barrage of leaves and sand began whipping against him and the engines erased the noise of the hungry flesh-eaters converging on his position. With only a hundred yards between him and the mob, he looked back over his shoulder at Matias, whose tan, scruffy face was eerily illuminated from below by the instrument panel. The wiry Panamanian raised his hand up to indicate five more minutes and then folded his fingers into a fervent thumbs-up position thrust towards the glass.
Shane turned around and grit his teeth. The two concrete pathways up from the beach were the only approach routes for the creatures to take but the chokepoints were spread apart fifty feet so Shane knew he could only devote a few seconds of shooting to one before he had to work the other entrance. As the first dozen zombies climbed onto the patio, Shane began a steady barrage of headshots. After four bodies piled up, he’d switch to the other entrance on the left and dispatch nearly the same amount then swing back to continue another barrage. This back-and-forth motion continued until he had burned through five magazines and a tangle of corpses were strewn about the concrete, which glistened ruby-red in the moonlight.
As he turned to the pathway on his left, he saw a lithe creature spring up on the garden retaining wall near the pool. He hadn’t seen one like this since their battle on the destroyer and the sudden movement sent an icy shiver along his neck. He repositioned his rifle sights but the beast had already bolted over the patio, moving on all fours like a rabid chimpanzee. He resumed his aim and fired off two rounds, striking it in the shoulder and right pectoral. It clumsily somersaulted into a shelf full of beer bottles and then sprung back to its feet. Shane fired off another round into its head, removing the back of its skull.
He gulped in a deep breath and then refocused his vision on the two entrances, which were suddenly overrun by dozens of creatures streaming onto the main patio. His shooting tempo increased until he was feverishly firing off rounds into the nearest heads then swinging his body to the other side to quell the incoming tide. He dropped out his spent magazine and reached down, fishing for the last one. A zombie dressed like a scuba diver rushed up the patio, his head shattering from a single round as Shane focused on close-range shooting. Two more beasts on his left, clad in pink bikinis and resembling twins, scurried beside the rear hotel doors, within twenty feet of Shane, who quickly dispatched them with the last of his rounds. He slung the rifle off his back and immediately transitioned to the Bersa 9mm pistol that Alejandro had provided.
As he plinked another creature in the forehead, he heard the faint voice of Matias behind him. “Let’s roll, amigo.”
He stood slowly, keeping in a crouched position, his hair whipping across his face as he continued shooting selectively at the onrushing crowd that was now moving around the front of the helicopter. He fired off the last three rounds into two creatures outfitted like waiters and then yanked open the side door and hopped inside. The maniacal beasts flowed around the helipad, some of them raising their arms furiously only to have them snipped off like rosebuds by the rotors.
Matias rose up forty feet and then accelerated forward, flying over the beach and past the flaming dock until they were safely over the bay. Then he swung to the left, turning on the searchlight and scanning the waters below for Alejandro’s sailboat. A few minutes later he saw a pattern of three flashes ahead. He descended slightly and flew over the boat and circled around it twice, both men smiling at the crowd on deck below who were raising their fists and howling.
Chapter 22
Twenty-Four Days after Departing White Sands Military Base
In the morning, after they had eaten breakfast together at the antique oaken table in the dining room, Eliza was cleaning off the utensils with a paper towel. She paused for a minute as she put a steak knife away in the drawer and turned towards Willis, who was still sitting at the table finishing a glass of water.
“How do you turn it on and off?”
“You mean my desire for you? It appears I can’t.”
“No, I mean your ability to, you know, take someone’s life, and then go back to eating a sandwich or playing cards the next day.”
“It’s different for everyone. For me, it’s always been about self-importance. I don’t mean that in an egotistic way. More like, too many people in my life rely on me and me on them.” He paused and looked out the window then back at Eliza. “In the beginning of my training, I used to recite to myself, ‘I must win this battle,’ over and over again while doing my moves. And then I remember the first real-world firefight I was in after joining the Secret Service. I had all this training in firearms and combatives and I just got pissed.” He leaned both his arms on the table and interlaced his fingers. “I remember thinking, in between the bullets whizzing past my head, ‘how dare you come into my world and threaten everything that I love—my friends fighting beside me, my president, my country. I will fucking destroy you.’ When you’re that angry, your fear gets squashed and your adrenaline can be channeled into a powerful tool for getting the job done and prevailing against overwhelming odds.”
Eliza paused in her work again. “Wow, I didn’t know all you Secret Service types were so in touch with your inner Yoda.”
Willis laughed and leaned back. “Believe me, this isn’t a mental space you want to dwell in for long. It’s a brief split in your psyche where you unleash the animalistic part of the brain to quell a violent confrontation. Like having a shotgun under your jacket that you blast away with when things turn to shit on the street. Afterwards, you pack it neatly back into its storage box until you need it again.”
“It sure isn’t like I ever imagined it would be, you know, from all the movie gunfights and zombie flicks I saw growing up. I just hope that on this trip, we…that we…” She paused, searching for the words. “I hope that we can just avoid any more encounters along the way and get to Fort Lewis without having to use these skills,” she said, looking down at the pistol on the counter beside her.
“Me, too,” he said, standing up and arching his back in a stretch. “But just remember those five words: ‘I must win this battle.’”
“Hmm, I like the other five words better: ‘I will fucking destroy you.’”
Willis chuckled and shook his head. “With that fiery look in your eyes, I’d hate to be facing you when you’re really unhinged.”
“So what ever made you get into personal protection work? You seem like the kind of driven, capable person who could have pursued anything in life—why the Secret Service?”
Willis tilted his head to the right, pondering the question. “You know many of us agents have had this conversation between ourselves and most of us found that we all have in common the fact that we are the oldest amongst our siblings and it was nearly unanimous that we got our noses broken more than once as kids fighting off the schoolyard bully. I certainly did, sticking up for my little brothers back in Houston. My dad abandoned us when I was six and after that life was about pure endurance and trying to watch out for my siblings. Sometimes just walking to school was a daily survival ordeal given the shitty neighborhood we lived in.” He rested both arms on the table, interlacing his fingers. “Later, after I got out of the military, I wanted to continuing serving my country here at home—protecting the presidency and all it stood for, that was a cause worth fighting for, even dying for if necessary—though I can’t say I had that sentiment about every politician I’ve worked with over the years.” He leaned back in his chair, look
ing at Eliza. “I certainly wouldn’t have hesitated for a second to step between the Grim Reaper and your father—or his daughter.”
Eliza was silent for a moment, letting out a faint smile while trying to hold back tears for her father. Willis stood up and moved alongside her, placing his hand over hers. “We’ll get through this, Eliza. We’ve got enough supplies to hole up here for a while longer and that’ll give you some time to round out your training.”
“Then what?” she said, squeezing his hand back.
“Then we’ll keep heading north by whatever means possible until we’re brushing past the guards at the entrance to Fort Lewis—unless you want to stay here in this cozy little farmhouse on the prairie.”
She pulled back, frowning while looking through the window at the bleak rural landscape. “Northward it is, then—just say the word.”
Chapter 23
Thirty-Three Days after Departing White Sands Military Base
Willis was crouching beside a cluster of bushes near a narrow bridge, scanning the surrounding streets in the small town of La Grande, Oregon. The Ford Taurus they had hotwired a few miles from the farmhouse the day before had enough fuel to make it nearly 87 miles. During the past day of walking, Willis only had to dispatch a few zombies at a derelict rest area along the highway. The small towns dotting the route were either cleaned out of supplies or burned to the ground.
Eleven miles later on foot, they had entered the outskirts of the small ranching community of La Grande, population 13,752 according to the bent highway sign on I-84.
“The only way into town is over this bridge or a bone-chilling swim across the river below,” said Willis. “Looks like six of those things are between us and our destination so I opt for staying dry. I’ll take the lead and you follow up behind me taking any strays, OK? We’ll stick to our blades as I don’t want to draw down a whole town full of these things.”
She nodded, clutching her large serrated knife and feeling her heart punching through her chest. Most of the zombies were clad in cowboy clothing except for the first one which was a leprous creature dressed in a red hockey jersey. She could smell the rotting corpses and see the black crust of accumulated tissue under their fingernails. She felt her stomach clench up and she tasted a hint of bile in her mouth. Panic wasn’t far away and she forced herself to pace her breathing as Willis had showed her.
“OK, now,” said Willis as he sprang forward with his knife, slamming it into the left temple of the hockey player and then shoving it over the guardrail into the waters below. Eliza wanted to run the other way but she pushed off from her crouching position. It seemed as if she was watching someone else for a moment as she saw her blade hand go into position just as it had so many times in training. The creature to her right was wearing a pink-striped apron and looked like a coffee barista. Its muted groan turned into a bellow as it lunged for Eliza. She sidestepped and thrust the blade forward, aiming for the eyes, but miscalculated the distance and buried it into the upper lip, splitting it down the center and shattering the front teeth. She yanked it out and delivered another fast jab, this time hitting her target and dropping the beast onto the yellow centerline on the road.
She instinctively recoiled, unprepared for the blood splatter and the sickening noise of the blade hacking through bone, neither of which she had thought about during training drills on a padded post. Eliza staggered back a step, gulping down air, and then forced herself to move forward.
Willis had already dropped two more creatures when she moved up to his right, attacking a stout zombie clad in greasy mechanic’s coveralls. Eliza grit her teeth and slammed the hefty blade down on the cranium with all her might. The pulpy head split apart, spraying fragments onto the bridge with a wet slap.
The last creature had moved in fast and was nearly upon her. She pivoted and sliced it across the neck, causing it to totter momentarily. The milky eyes of the long-limbed beast zoomed in on her, its mouth widening as a stream of black drool spilled out. Before it could regain its momentum, she closed the distance and punched the blade in an uppercut motion through the lower jaw. The lanky creature collapsed in a heap. She stood looking at the lifeless thing, her adrenaline-induced tunnel vision preventing her from seeing anything around her. She felt something grab her right arm and turned with her blade ready only to see Willis stepping back with his hands up.
“Come on, we gotta go,” he said, nodding over his shoulder to the cluster of buildings near Main Street.
She pulled herself away from the slumped body, looking at the other nearly headless figures along the road and then down at her dripping blade. She took a deep breath and then sprinted after Willis, following on his heels.
They darted in and out of derelict vehicles to a large cluster of rosebushes near a daycare center.
“I don’t get it, everything looks so normal, except for all the bullet-riddled walls on most of the buildings. The streets look good and there are numerous cars still parked in an orderly fashion.”
“The whole town looks like it was quickly abandoned,” said Eliza. “I don’t see any evidence that people even tried to hole up here.”
“But something did happen here,” Willis said, pointing to all of the spent brass on the streets and sidewalks in every direction. “Looks like a small army traipsed through the place. Maybe they wiped out most of the undead here as there are only a handful.”
“Army is right,” said Eliza, pointing to an olive-drab jeep with a flat tire parked near a bank. A white star adorned the passenger’s side.
“And we’ve only seen a few bodies that looked like they were chomped on. The other towns had way more carnage than this,” said Willis.
Two tumbleweeds blew across the street and lodged against a chain-link fence in front of the Chamber of Commerce. Eliza could hear a door flapping against its wooden frame and saw the entrance to the daycare center was open.
“That might be a place that has some supplies. It’s worth checking out. Looks like the only building in town without any bullet holes in the walls.”
Eliza scanned the streets around the one-story structure and searched for escape routes and areas that would provide cover as Willis had taught her. She looked at him also studying the layout and then he nodded at her in approval.
“I’ll go first and sweep the front entrance while you watch our six as we move in tandem,” said Willis.
A few minutes later, both of them were moving silently through the lobby and into the main hallway, performing smooth, two-man entry techniques. Rows of finger-painted murals hung on the walls to the right while rows of knee-high cubbies lined the left side. With each room they cleared, they found no evidence of any struggle and an absence of zombies.
“Damn strange,” Willis whispered as they moved in unison to the kitchen area at the rear of the hall.
He pushed open the swinging door of the kitchen and swiftly entered, sweeping his rifle along either side. This room was also clear of any signs of struggle. Clean coffee cups were still hanging on their j-hooks from the cupboard and a neatly folded pile of towels was stacked along the edge of the stainless-steel sink. Eliza saw Willis look back with his eyebrows scrunched together.
She walked up to the cabinets and opened them. Most were empty but the last two on the far right had a box of instant oatmeal, Cheerios, and a dozen bottles of assorted baby food.
“Well, dinner’s on me tonight,” Eliza said with a crooked smile. “Question is—where should we have it? Not sure I want to linger here. There’s something off about this whole town.”
“Agreed. I saw a weather-service relay station on a distant hilltop to the northeast, maybe two miles out from here. That would provide us with some distance and tactical high ground for tonight.”
“Alright. Sounds like a plan. I’m going to gather up as many blankets as I can sling over my shoulder first.”
“I’ll tank up on water jugs and anything else of value. Hopefully we can find some toothbrushes and hygiene stuff as
our supplies are running low.”
Chapter 24
Carlie walked down to the beach where Matias was inspecting the helicopter. Jared and Amy were sitting under the shade of a nearby palm tree twenty yards away providing overwatch. There hadn’t been any zombies or footprints on the beach in several days but Carlie had instructed everyone venturing out to maintain their former protocols and have at least one other person with them for safety.
Matias was sitting on a tree stump to the right side of the helicopter, inspecting the engine, whose rear quarter panel was aloft. Spread out below him was a tarp with an array of wrenches, screwdrivers, and other tools.
As Carlie approached, Matias leaned back to wipe his greasy hands on a rag.
“Hola, mi amiga, como te va?
“Not bad, thanks—you?”
“Can’t complain. I always enjoyed working on these things as much as flying ’em.” He tossed the soiled rag onto the sand and picked up a wrench. “Everything looks good with the engine, hydraulics, and rotors. Once I’m done here, I’ll do a diagnostic on the interior instruments and control console and that oughta do it.”
She leaned her tan arm on the fuselage. “So, how long are we looking at before we can depart?”
“Barring any issues, we should be ready to lift off the day after tomorrow.”
Carlie dragged her left toes through the sand, making a half-moon shape, then sighed. “Alright, looks like two days hence it is then.”
“Or I could drag this on for another week if you want to stay longer,” he said.
Carlie looked at him and then out at the ocean, losing her thoughts in the waves for a moment. She reflected on how everyone was looking and feeling better again. Their figures had filled out from proper nourishment and rest. Smiles had emerged on their faces and now she was going to have to pull them away from the private paradise they had stumbled upon. “No…no…it’s time to push on. It’s just been nice having a few weeks of living without day-to-day uncertainty and always looking over my shoulder. Now, it seems like we’re headed back into the storm.”
