She struggles to keep up with the near limping man who appears to be just under the age of her father. “What makes you think I’m some kind of preppy girl?”
“When I put your shoes on you, you had painted your toenails. I’ve my doubts a girl bent on survival has the time for a pedicure.”
“I like to look nice. It’s the one luxury I got in the camp.”
“Lot of time for dating where you sleep?”
“You put me in the truck the way my dad used to tuck me in at night. Why are you being such a cartwheeling douche-goblin to me now?”
“Think about it. Nice won’t keep you alive.”
He grabs her by the jacket and pulls her down to the ground. After the last time, she decides to trust him at the moment and remains perfectly still. He produces small binoculars from his coat. After a moment he hands them to her and points. Emily glances across a field with them. A warehouse sits hidden among trees.
“The place looks new. If the grass were mowed.”
“People are stupid. They panic. Imagine the sheer number of people killed rushing to get to Bass Pro when they first realized Grandma was a slobbering dunderhead. I bet thousands ran there knowing they could get a gun.”
“I take it not you.” She hands back his binoculars.
“I’d a few guns in my closet, so no, not me.” He scans the area around the warehouse. “Next, people ran to Walmart and looted the place. More killings, more car wrecks. More chaos. People’s brains returned to Neanderthals. Anyone who could remain calm and retain thoughts made it through the first night.”
“I was part of an organized evacuation.”
“Not many were lucky like you.”
“So, what is this place?” Emily asks.
“Kids today. You don’t understand how anything arrives on the store shelves.” He exerts mild effort to reach a hobbled stance.
Emily wants to ask about his leg but doesn’t. “Seems like all your knowledge is an advantage for me right now.”
“It does.” He gives her the corn knife. “Use this first. The less noise the better.”
She grips the machete with both hands, unsure how to handle the weapon even with a practice swing.
She stays on his heels as they cross the field to the warehouse. “So how does stuff get to the shelves?”
“Products are shipped into a central location, unloaded from one truck or train and loaded onto new trucks to be sent to the individual stores. Everything stores need to restock their shelves is shipped to a warehouse before it is sent out to individual stores.”
“So this place has food?”
“Some. It’s a distribution center for non-perishables. Food would mostly be shipped directly.”
“What did you used to do, work in a grocery store?”
“It was a summer job once during high school. This place’s off the interstate, so most people don’t know about it. The doors are all still secure.” He flips the lock on a cargo bay door.
“So you went after bolt cutters and stumbled onto me.”
“Yeah…I’m sorry I couldn’t save your friends.”
“Nobody can save anybody.” A tear rolls down her cheek.
He snips the padlock, waving her back before dropping the bolt cutters. Emily raises the corn knife. Gun drawn, he swings open the door.
Nothing. No gross undead smell. The place is clean, clear and dark. He hands her a pen light. “Stay behind me.”
“There’s no stink.”
“A good sign. Doesn’t mean the night watchman didn’t die in his sealed office. I didn’t reach Eldorado to get bit.”
“Eldorado?”
“God, you kids can’t survive without Google.” He rolls his eyes. “When the Spanish conquistadors invaded the American continents they slaughtered thousands in search of a fabled city of pure gold.”
“This’s Walmart, not a gold city. I don’t get it.”
Debating if he should continue, he explains, “It was a metaphor for lost treasure.”
The wheel turns for Emily as she recalls and English class lesson. “Oh, I get it. You were comparing two things using like or as.”
He flashes the light over sealed boxes of products, scanning for anything useful. “A simile.”
“Oh. What’s hiss and buzz, you know, where words sound like what they mean?”
“Onomatopoeia.” He cuts open a box and jerks out two duffle bags. “Here.” He shoves one at her. “You’re going to have to carry back some supplies.”
“Carry to where?”
“The hundred plus miles back to my camp.”
“A hundred miles!”
“A little more actually.” He cuts open a box and pockets some small vials.
“Do we have to walk?”
“Some of it.”
“No way. The military base’s closer.”
“Something like forty miles. But you’ll never go back there.”
“Why not?”
“The best reason, you said Bowlin had brothers, and if he doesn’t return some of them will…”
“Will what?”
“I don’t know, but you’ll wish you were dead long before they kill you.”
COLONEL WILLIAM B. Travis jogs the freshly spread gravel along the newly constructed chain link fence. Running at his age keeps his joints from stiffening. It seems these last seven months have aged him twenty years on top of twenty more for having a teenage daughter.
Tattered designer clothes dangle from what was once a woman on the outside of the security fence. Rotten flesh hangs from her bones as chunks of meat have been bitten away from her arms. She must have been beautiful before death. She shambles at the fence wanting to satisfy a hunger for those still living. She hisses at Travis as he jogs by.
No one in history has had to deal with an enemy like this. The Infected are the perfect soldiers; they never tire, never sleep, and never stop. Hell, those rotting corpses don’t need pay or time off and don’t bat an eye when their fellow comrades fall in the line of duty. Blow one up and it still doesn’t stop them.
Perfect soldiers.
They do need to eat—their only motivation.
Speculation from Army Command is the undead are the by-product of an engineered virus and introduced as a weapon.
The colonel believes the plague wasn’t engineered by someone’s military. Reports state it is spread worldwide. So, who initiated this war and how did they plan to win?
Infected gather along the fence. They must smell what’s beyond. Warm living flesh—a lot of it. The hunger instinct never wavers from the primordial lizard brain at the base of the skull. Hearing seems to function as well. Scary cataract-glazed eyes prevent vison, and yet they track the living. Even on fire they just keep going: ever in search of satisfying their hunger.
Ratatatatatatat!
The colonel unsnaps the securing strap on his sidearm and runs toward the M16 fire. His training kicks in because no sane person would race toward the sound of rapidly dispensing bullets.
A group of soldiers spray Infected with more bullets.
“Attention!” The men, without hesitation, snap into formation awaiting the colonel’s inspection. “What the hell’s going on?” Travis demands.
A sergeant steps forward. “We’ve been ordered to expend this ammo, sir.”
“Expend my ammo, sergeant?”
“Yes, sir. Lieutenant Browns couldn’t fit these boxes on his truck. He ordered us to expend these rounds.”
The colonel scowls. “Sergeant, when he ordered you to do this, did he give you specific instructions?”
“To eliminate any Infected at this end of the base, sir.”
The colonel jerks the M16 from the sergeant’s hands. “He didn’t order you to waste it. He ordered you to use it.” The colonel spins around, raises the rifle to his shoulder, and squeezes off five rounds. Each bullet splatters open the skull of an Infected on the other side of the fence.
“Don’t waste my ammo, son. I want each
of these bullets in the skull of one of those Vectors. We don’t have spare ammo to waste. No one will be making any more bullets for a long time. I won’t have this again or you five will be on permanent Infected burn detail. Clear?”
“Sir, yes, sir!” They cadence in unison.
The colonel ejects the empty clip, and takes a full one from the sergeant before slinging the weapon over his shoulder and jogging on.
They don’t have extra ammo. Maybe he shouldn’t have said they wouldn’t be getting any more. After nine months the men should know not to waste a single bullet. Half a clip to an Infected’s chest does nothing. Hell, many weapons are designed to disfigure not kill. Sending a human soldier home with missing limbs costs willing governments valuable resources to care of the wounded. The disfigured warriors promenading among the civilian populace makes a war unpopular, a tactic employed when both sides have the ability for compassion. Here, these things just keep crawling—forever hungry.
The field he jogs was to be a new tent city for the growing number of civilians still surviving. There should be a lot more people alive but the damn media sent too many to rescue stations already overrun in those first few days. Early energy broadcasts should’ve sent them here to the Fort.
The civilian numbers arriving overwhelmed the previous base commander. After two months he lost it—ate a grenade. He had to make sure he didn’t come back as one of those things. Travis wonders if he had been the smart one.
He has to maintain control of this base, though. Keep his only daughter safe and secure. The only reason he keeps going.
Hannah trudges through the growing muck around the tent city. The refugee shelters remind her more of a third-world slum than a military base in the middle of Midwest America. She saw such a camp once in Africa. Her father had to tour such a place once with a Bush president. She was young. She remembers the plane ride and the little girl at the camp—the one near death, a walking skeleton. The men dragged her away when she begged for food. Loud pops happened after. She knows now they shot her. They shot a lot of people.
Bush sent troops home.
She tries to blend with those stationed in this part of the camp, but she has hot showers where she sleeps. These people have brief and cold running shower water. Her blonde hair hangs in a single ponytail. She had splashed it with some mud to appear dirtier. These people won’t trust someone who’s too clean looking. Dried blood from a bullet hole decorates her sleeve. The oversized jacket serves another purpose: to hide her budding fifteen-year-old chest.
Hannah didn’t understand and had no capacity to help the little skeleton African girl, but the people here she does understand. She knows how to help, even if some of them have forgotten what it’s like to be human. Maybe they haven’t forgotten. Maybe this is how people are—violent, heartless and selfish. People seem to have been only a few Happy Meals away from reverting back into the savage creatures who crawled from the primal ooze a few hundred thousand years ago. People are savage and that is abundantly clear here.
The base commander before her father built a new gate at this end of the post. Her father pulled back troop patrols to secure what he said would be more safe room for people arriving soon. What he won’t admit to her is his substantially shrinking number of troops. He gave clearance for several groups described only as local toothless hillbillies to leave the camp and patrol for survivors. They bring back a few, but mostly they bring back looted supplies. The Bowlin brothers use those supplies to fund a black market. They’ve even taken away a few people, claiming in another camp their family members survive. She knows of no other camps, but no one wants to believe everyone they once knew has died.
The Bowlin brothers have a circle of tents and a personal team of non-thinking guards easily paid off with foodstuffs, or worse, flesh. A young mother begs the oldest brother for some baby formula even though the camp has already given her rations for her newborn.
Hannah has seen the stacks of formula Washington sent, and she’s even handed some out at first until she realized simply handing out food was not enough. She had to do more to help survivors.
She eases closer. The mother explains her baby daddy traded, no, gambled the formula in a card game and lost. Now she has a starving child. He warns there will be a price. The mother agrees.
Kade Bowlin leads the mother into his tent.
Hannah should be too young to fully know what’s about to happen but she’s not. She knows. The real question is how depraved a sexual act will this mother have to perform in order to feed her baby.
Even with her own slight urges of wanting a boy to explore parts of her body with his hands, Hannah knows consensual pleasure isn’t what Kade extracts as a price from women needing food. She pushes the sexual thoughts from her mind. She’ll make sure the Bowlin brothers pay for such violations.
The colonel reaches the end of the new fences. Few Infected have gathered here. He jogs up to a group of cargo trucks. Lieutenant Browns snaps to attention at the colonel’s approach.
“As you were.” The soldiers complete their task of loading cargo trucks. “You give those jokers extra ammo to expend?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Next time, you tell them one bullet per each Infected.”
“Sorry, sir. We just couldn’t fit—”
“I don’t want any explanations. We don’t have ammo to waste.”
“No, sir.”
“SITREP!” the colonel demands.
“These trucks are all loaded with the equipment you ordered. The bunker has been hidden and the cement truck’s ready to seal it, sir.”
“Good.”
“Sir, I’ve got to know. Why don’t we just train a few hundred civilians to use these weapons?”
“When you and your men get back inside the fence you’re all ordered to get on the next supply chopper. Washington wants to debrief men who have been in the field. Your group has had the most patrols.”
“True, sir, but—”
“Those weapons are for resupply.”
“Washington’s found a way to beat back the Vectors?” Browns asks.
“Lieutenant, you’ll be debriefed and filled in on the Pentagon’s plan. I just know fuel has become an issue, so resupplying any large troop movements once the retake begins will be difficult.”
“I understand, sir.”
The colonel turns without another word. No. No, you don’t, son, but I’ve my orders. You don’t even get ‘a need to know’ pass. I doubt you’d follow orders if you knew what Washington was planning.
Hannah drags a sandbag off the bottom of a tent wall. The seam between the base and the side has torn. She uses the tear to crawl inside and slides past stacks of boxes all marked FEMA.
She knows these supplies were not issued by the military. The Bowlin brothers must have found it while out hunting for survivors. Her father was foolish to have trusted these men. He may not want to risk the soldiers, but at what cost? It’s their job to protect civilians.
Hannah reaches into a box and removes FEMA-labeled beans. Burly, hairy arms lock around her like a vice as a shit-smelling hand clamps over her mouth.
“What do we have here?”
She jerks once in an attempt to escape. Her accoster bear hugs her so tight she loses a breath.
“Now, now, pretty, can’t have you going anywhere.” He carries her like she weighs nothing into the command tent of Kade Bowlin.
Hannah closes her eyes.
“Get the fuck out! Shitfurbrains!” Kade chucks an empty wine bottle at the burly man, barely missing him.
Hannah feels herself being spun around and the door flap brushes the side of her head. The scene in front of her is etched permanently into her memory. Kade Bowlin has the young mother bent over the table with her jeans around her ankles. She has the look of holding back screaming in pain as if Kade had been doing something with the bottle before he tossed it.
What was he doing to her? Hannah forces the image from her thoughts.
&
nbsp; Kade storms from the tent. “What the fuck’s wrong with you?” He slaps the man on the side of the head.
“Sorry, boss. Caught her in the tent stores, stealing beans.”
“I wasn’t stealing,” Hannah protests, “I was gathering evidence.”
Kade hands the woman her baby formula. She hurries away, limping. “Need anymore, you come see me.” He turns his attention back to Hannah. “Evidence of what?”
“Evidence you aren’t disclosing all supplies you find when you go on patrol.”
“Disclosing. Such a big word for such a little girl.”
“I won’t debase myself by using your depraved language. Tell this shit-smelling sheep fucker to put me down.”
Kade laughs. “Sheep fucker. He would if he hasn’t.” He shoves his face into hers, glaring into her eyes. “If I were your father I’d wash your nasty mouth out with some soap.”
“Touch me and my father will send in every last piece of military hardware this base has to hunt you down.”
Kade realizes who this girl is. He grabs her by the wrist and drags her behind him.
“Where’re you taking me?”
“To chat with the colonel about a young lady who needs her ass beaten.”
DETECTIVE HYUN SU Rho hangs out the window, locking his feet against the sill so he doesn’t plummet five stories to his death. Twin extension cords rain from the roof. He catches them and pulls them inside. He plugs them into surge bar protectors, and tediously connects the spaghetti stream of cables to the computer tower on the desk.
Police detective Marcus Danziger races down the stairs from the roof, hurrying to the computer.
Hyun Su presses the power button. The machine whirs to life.
“Why is the machine so loud?” Danziger asks.
“I doubt you will attract any DKs. We’re too high up.”
“Damn thing sounds like a jackhammer. They always sound this loud?” Danziger plugs his right ear with his trigger finger.
“It’s not loud at all. You just haven’t heard a computer in months,” Hyun Su assures him. “Other than the constant moans of the undead, there’s no ambient noise floating around.” The monitor flashes to the operations screen. Hyun Su types in commands. “Too bad we can’t power the full server.”
No Room In Hell (Book 1): The Good, The Bad and The Undead Page 2
