by Gunther, Cy
Lee shook her head.
“Ernst!” he yelled, “We’re clear.”
“Okay, let’s go.” Ernst was a man in his early thirties, a hunting rifle in his hands and a pipe in his mouth. “Hold your fire unless it’s necessary.”
Together the five of them kept a steady, calm pace. Lee followed them as they made their way to a large gated entrance with two huge dogs on the other side of the gate. She realized, suddenly, that the two other men were twins, one of them breaking off to the gate to flip open a lock box and punch in a code. A motor sounded from somewhere and the gate slid back.
The baldheaded man let off a shot, then, another as the first twin led the others into the gated yard. The baldheaded man was the last one in, the dogs jumping around him excitedly as the man Ernst keyed the lock, closing the gate.
“The gate’ll hold,” Ernst said, “let’s get inside. Maybe that’ll distract them for a bit.”
Lee moved with the men as they hurried towards a warehouse, one of the twins opening the door, the big dogs pushing by.
In a moment she found herself in a brightly lit area, row upon row of bookshelves stretching out in front of her and to the sides. The door closed behind them and the moans of the dead were shut out. The air around her was comfortable, and she could smell fresh coffee.
She realized that she still held her side arm, and she holstered it. The others were switching their safeties on and slinging their weapons. The dogs ran up ahead and turned off to the left.
“Sergeant?” the bald man said. “Are you alright?”
She nodded, looked at them all and said, “Who are you?”
The bald man smiled. “I’m Adam Kenyan, retired Sergeant Major.”
“Brian Murray,” one of the twins said, “USMC reserve out of Londonderry.”
“Corey Murray,” the other twin said, “same deal.”
“Ernst Hall,” the last man said, adjusting his glasses. “Bookcollector and madman.”
“Well, thanks for the rescue,” Lee said. “I’m Sergeant Lee Buckingham, and I don’t even know if my unit’s still functional.”
“Was your radio still working?” Adam asked.
She nodded. “But we hadn’t had a transmission in over an hour, and we didn’t have any response to our status updates.”
“The internet just went down a little while ago,” Ernst said. “I’ve got an old radio downstairs, see if we can pick up any broadcasts.”
“There’s a downstairs?” Brian asked.
“There’s a downstairs,” Ernst grinned. “Weren’t you listening last night? And more than one warehouse.”
“Are you serious?” Corey asked.
“Of course he is,” Adam sighed, “he’s fucking crazy.”
“Sergeant,” Ernst said.
“Just call me Lee.”
“Okay, Lee,” Ernst smiled, “do you need anything? Food, water, the bathroom?”
“A cup of coffee, black, would be great.”
Ernst nodded, waving for them all to follow.
Lee found him leading them to a small kitchen, a pot of coffee sitting in the maker. He took down a mug, filled it, and handed it to her.
The porcelain was warm and relaxing in her hands, and she sipped cautiously. The coffee was hot, and good.
“I’ll go grab the radio,” Ernst said, “and later I’ll show you all downstairs, just in case anything should happen to me.” He nodded once before walking to a small door off to the kitchen’s right.
Lee’s hands started to shake and she set the coffee down on an island, beside a laptop.
She blinked. “You have power here?”
The twins nodded, Adam saying, “Ernst has his own little self-sufficient set up here. He prepped for the end of the world.”
Lee glanced down at the laptop, and realized that it was showing scenes around the warehouse. Dozens of the dead were milling about the gate while others continued to walk around the humvee.
“A lot of the dead are first responders,” she said after a minute, looking at the images. Firefighters, police officers, paramedics, and people in scrubs, all bloodstained and vacant eyed.
“Makes sense,” Adam said. The dogs laid down at his feet, snuffling and closing their eyes. “First ones on the scene, or first ones to treat the injured.”
Lee picked up the coffee, took a quick drink, and put it back down before her hands could betray her.
“How is it out there?” Bryan, or Corey, asked her.
“Aside from my team being dead, even worse.” She shook her head. “Each roadblock we set up was either bypassed by the living, or overrun by the dead. Too many people panicking. Plus it seems like whatever’s reanimating the dead is passed through blood and fluids, so if someone survives a bite, they get infected.”
“How long does it take for the infection to take hold?” Adam asked.
“Minutes if they’re alive. Instantly if they’re killed,” she answered. “It’s terrible. A couple of teams tried to fight with their masks on to protect from bloodspray, but it cut down on their effectiveness too much. Oh, and head shots are the only thing that put them down for good.”
One of the twins nodded. “Yeah, we saw that.”
“Hey,” the other twin said, “how much ammo were you carrying for the .50?”
“I’m not even sure,” Lee said. “We were supposed to be delivering it to another checkpoint when we ran into a group of the dead and tried to find our way out. My shot-gun told me he knew a way through this area, but he was killed right after we got in here.”
Ernst walked back into the room, closing the small door behind him. He carried a small radio, with a hand crank attached to it, and set it down on the counter. “It’ll run on batteries right now. I don’t want to lose any initial information.” He leaned over the radio and turned it on, fine tuning the dial and raising and adjusting the antenna. Static crackled, then broke, as a voice came through.
“ay again, Waltner Airfield is overrun. All residents are urged to make their way towards outlying towns where Army and Air Force personnel will give you further instructions. Boston, Nashua, Manchester, and Concord are no longer accessible, and they have been cordoned off. All effort must be made to get to outlying towns. The infected are extremely contagious, and if encountered, must be avoided. If they cannot be avoided, they must be killed. I say again, they must be killed. The infected can only be killed by lethal wounds to the head, or severing the head from the body. Avoid contact with bodily fluids.
“I say again, Waltner Airfield is overrun. All residents are urged to make”
Ernst turned off the radio.
“Well,” he said, “I guess that answers that.”
Adam poured himself another cup of coffee.
Lee picked up her own cup, her hands surprisingly steady. She took a long drink, then looked at the others. “So,” she said, “what do we do now?”
Ernst
Once more Ernst sat alone in his small room, the memories of the past twenty-four hours still spinning through his head. Lee was prowling amongst his bookshelves, and in the kitchen Adam sat at the island, scanning the images on the laptop as they were relayed by the cameras. The dead hadn’t increased around the warehouse, but they hadn’t gone away either. Some sort of decoy would have to be figured out if they wanted to slip out at all. He really didn’t want to open any of the emergency exits until it was absolutely necessary.
The twins had crashed out on some bunks in the second warehouse, where Ernst had all of the hydroponics necessary for several acres of tiered growth planting. His unexpected guests had all been suitably impressed with the third warehouse, and the fully stocked machine-shop inside of it. The second, third, and fourth sub-floors of the main warehouse, though, had left them open mouthed and silent. Food – canned, frozen, and freeze dried of course – to last a platoon for several years. Multiple weapons, repair kits, ammunition, explosives, everything your homegrown paranoid could ever want.
Except for an
easy way out of a city full of the dead.
Ernst took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He took his prayer beads out of his pocket and said the Jesus prayer silently to himself.
A knock sounded at his door.
“Come in.”
The door opened and Lee came in, her brown eyes flicking quickly around the small room.
Ernst smiled tiredly, gesturing with the beads to his bunk. “Take a seat on the bunk, Lee.”
“You live like a monk,” she said, running a hand through her short brown hair. Her eyes were sunk, her cheeks hollow.
“And you’re exhausted.”
She nodded. Her face was sharp, not particularly attractive or unattractive, although that could simply be the situation, Ernst thought. His beads moved slowly through his hand.
“Rosary?”
“Close,” Ernst said. “They’re Greek prayer beads. A friend of mine gave them to me years ago. They help me relax. Calm down in stressful situations.”
“And is this stressful?” she asked with a tired smile.
“Just a little.” He looked at her for a moment, then asked, “You’re part of the Guard?”
She nodded.
“What were you doing when they called you up?”
“I was just finishing up derby practice.”
“Derby?”
“Roller Derby,” she smiled. “Queen City Cherry Bombs…but I’m not even sure if Manchester’s standing, or if the place has burnt down. I’m an engineer by training, though.”
“Really? That’s great. You should be able to make good use of the machine-shop then, if we have to.”
She nodded. “So, what were you doing when it happened?”
“Reading,” Ernst said. “Just sitting here reading when Adam called.”
“Okay, I have to ask, how the hell did you afford all of this? What the hell do you do for work?”
“I could tell you that I made some fantastic money in the real estate business prior to the bubble bursting, or that I invented something.” He gave her a small smile. “Truth is, I write erotic novels for women.”
Lee blinked. “What?”
“I basically write soft porn for women. And it sells really well.”
“You know, I spend a lot of time in bookstores,” Lee said, “and a lot of time on Amazon, so, I don’t recall ever seeing an Ernst who wrote women’s erotica.”
“Do you think any woman would even look at a book written by a man named ‘Ernst’?” he asked.
Lee shook her head.
“I didn’t think so either. That’s why my publisher and I came up with A.A. Archer.”
“Hold on,” Lee said, holding up a hand. “You’re A.A. Archer?”
Ernst nodded.
“Fuck, even I’ve read a few of your books.” Then she blushed. “Those kind of push the erotica line.”
Ernst laughed, shrugging. “Whatever sells, sells. It got me this, and it lets me write what I really love to write, even if there is no money in it.”
“What’s that?”
“Military history.”
“Is that why your friends with the brothers and Adam?”
Ernst shook his head. “We actually worked together a few years ago on a construction site, before the Archer books started selling. It just turned out that they were current and former military.”
“Did you ever serve?” Lee asked.
Ernst nodded.
She waited a minute then asked, “Did you serve your full enlistment?”
Ernst sighed, shaking his head. “Turned out at the end of AIT that I have bi-polar manic depression. They cut me loose right after.”
“Sorry to hear that,” she said. “I hate to ask, but a friend of mine has it, and he takes a shitload of meds for it…”
“I have a good supply stashed. Theoretically enough to last me a very, very long time,” Ernst said. He looked down at his prayer beads, his fingers on the cross. He smiled to himself and put the beads away.
“Did you manage to get a shower?” he asked.
Lee shook her head. “Not yet.”
“It’s nearly midnight.”
“I know, but I can’t seem to relax. I don’t want to be in the shower if anything happens.”
“I understand,” he said. “I could always stand guard outside the door if you want.”
She looked at him with a raised eyebrow.
“Honestly,” Ernst laughed, “just to let you know if something happens.”
Lee shook her head, smiling. “Maybe in the morning. Right now I’m just too keyed up. I’ll probably just walk around the books, maybe go down and look at the supplies again.”
“Whatever you need to do. And the offer does stand, Lee, I’ll stand by the door so you can shower. Anyone of us will, probably.”
She nodded, stifling a yawn. “Actually, do you think I could just stretch out on the bunk for a minute? I’ll go make one up when I go for the walk.”
“Sure,” Ernst said. He leaned over and picked up his book from the floor, a tattered copy of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf. As he straightened up Ernst saw that Lee was already asleep, eyes closed and mouth open partly, her arms folded across her chest, the fingers of her right hand twitching.
Sighing, Ernst settled in to read until Adam came to get him for his turn at watch.
Adam
With a simple click of the mouse Adam was able to switch the exterior cameras to night vision as the sun finished setting over the bridge leading into Hudson. Parts of the city still burned in the distance, and he wondered, idly, how the hell the government was going to secure the city, if that was even an option.
Adam took a drink of his water, opened another window, and started running the search program that he had installed for Ernst back in June. The program would let him find any video feeds that were being transmitted, normally on the regular grid, but now they’d be powered by generators. Since most stores and government buildings had exterior security cameras that operated wirelessly, he might be able to get a good look at what was going on in the city.
The program ran quickly, and Adam soon found himself with access to nearly four hundred cameras. How long their power supplies would last was something else. He needed the intelligence the videos could provide, and he needed it quickly. There would be no easy way to get out there and refuel generators once they ran dry.
Another click of the mouse and the camera for a convenience store on Lake Street appeared.
Nothing. Just pavement and a set of stairs…
A set of feet clad in sneakers, the rest of the body hidden, slowly shuffled by.
Adam took a screen shot of it, created a file, and dropped the image in.
Shaking his head he moved on to the next, a traffic camera at the corner of Lake and Main. Smoking cars, walking dead, and motionless corpses on the pavement.
Adam took another screen shot and moved on.
Camera after camera, image after image. Minutes passed slowly, and he became numb to the death he saw, and the sheer horror of the zombies roaming. Several times he saw people try to use the cover of night to break away from their hiding places.
None of them made it.
The dead were too many. They didn’t need speed. They simply kept coming. From everywhere.
Adam put those images into the files as well.
The dogs lifted their heads, and Adam realized that Ernst had walked out of his room.
“Surfing for porn?” Ernst asked.
“I wish,” Adam said, stretching. “Just trying to get as much intel as possible before the generators start crashing.”
Ernst nodded. “I figured. You know it’s one in the morning?”
Adam rubbed his eyes. “Really?”
“Yup. I even fell asleep for a little while.”
“Should we bother waking the brothers?” Adam asked.
“Are you going to sleep yet?”
Adam shook his head.
“Me neither. I wouldn’t worry a
bout it.”
“What about Lee?”
“She’s still asleep on my bunk,” Ernst said, sitting down on the kitchen counter. Diane stood up, walked over to him and put her head against his leg. Ernst smiled down at the dog, scratching between her ears. “She crashed hard.”
“She’ll hold it together.”
“I don’t doubt that at all,” Ernst said. “She looks like she did at least one tour in Afghanistan, if not two.”
“Well,” Adam said, taking a drink of water, “we’re lucky. We could have been stuck with some real shitbags.”
“Very, very true.”
Adam went back to the cameras, accessing and saving, over and over again.
Then he paused, staring hard at the screen.
“What is it?” Ernst asked.
“Is this the bookstore on Main Street?” Adam asked, turning the laptop for Ernst to look.
“Raven’s Books? Yeah, I think it is. Why?”
“Look at the display window, do you see what it says?”
“’Still Alive!’” Ernst shook his head. “What the fuck. Really?”
Adam spun the laptop back, nodding. “Damn right.” He stared hard at the image, the occasional zombie passing by –
“There’s definitely someone in there,” Adam said.
“How can you tell?”
“I just saw the barrel of a rifle following a zombie that walked in front of the store. Real steady, too.”
“We’ll have to get them tomorrow morning,” Ernst said, resting his hand on Diane’s head. “We can’t risk a night time mission.”
“No way in hell. Everybody’s still crashed anyway. We’d just be setting ourselves up as dinner.”
“What do you think, you and the twins?” Ernst asked.
“That sounds good. I figure two to provide cover, one to get the person out of the store.”
“When you three leave that should actually give Lee and me the opportunity to get that damned humvee in here, too.”
“Think so?”
Ernst nodded. “It’s a short distance, and the dead should be distracted by the pick-up. If they’re not, we’ll put the salvage operation on hold.”
“Okay.”
