by Dave Lund
“OK, you’ll see the shooting berms around the range in a second. Go right and we can go around them into the desert.”
“Wait, what is this? This isn’t an Army range,” Apollo asked.
“Sort of. It’s the Rod and Gun club. It’s the closest place I could think of where we could find ammo and maybe some other gear. If we’re lucky, it hasn’t been looted yet. If we’re really lucky, no one is in there, because it was closed for Christmas when the attack hit.”
Apollo slowed, driving the Humvee off the dirt road and into the desert, following the tall dirt berm of a rifle range before turning to drive across the back of the ranges towards the middle of the complex. They drove through the clay shooting range and stopped close to the rear of the building, parking on the range. Apollo turned the Humvee to point towards the open desert in case they needed to make a fast escape before moving the selector switch to “OFF.”
Chivo climbed out of the passenger seat and crouched by the rear tire with his rifle up, sweeping the back of the dark building with the muzzle of his rifle. Apollo climbed out of the driver’s seat and walked around the front bumper, rifle up, taking position next to his teammate. He opened Lindsey’s door and whispered, “Do you want to stay here in the truck or do you want to come with us?”
“I don’t want to be alone again.”
Lindsey climbed down from the Humvee and crouched beside Chivo. He pulled his pistol out of the holster and handed it to Lindsey. “You know how to work one of these?”
“Sure, I guess.” Her right index finger snaked into the trigger guard.
“Hang on. Keep your booger flinger out of there, off the trigger and along the side of the gun until you’re ready to shoot. Otherwise you’ll end up shooting one of us by mistake. Good. Now keep the pistol tucked up to your chest like this. We’ll take care of anything towards the front. Just make sure nothing shuffles up behind us. Got it?”
Lindsey looked over her shoulder to the desert expanding into an endless black hole and looked back at Chivo with wide eyes, who smiled and gave her a quick thumbs-up.
“If you two are done playing tea party, we need to clear this building and get secure.”
Apollo and Chivo glided silently towards the building, each with his M4 raised, carefully watching their own slice of the pie in front of them and to the sides. The back door of the building was not closed all the way. Chivo slowly pulled the door open and held it open with his foot. Apollo stepped forward and waited. Chivo put his left hand on Apollo’s shoulder, who waited for Chivo to squeeze his shoulder to give him the ready signal.
Chivo shook Apollo’s shoulder, the sign to wait. Apollo glanced over his shoulder at Chivo with a confused expression, not understanding what the holdup was and why they weren’t making entry. Chivo picked up a piece of a brick that was by the door and threw it into the dark building, which resulted in a resounding crash piercing the still winter’s night.
Immediately the sound was responded to by a dark moan that erupted deep inside the building, followed by more crashing and the sound of chairs being knocked over. Chivo picked up another piece of brick and propped the door open before signaling Apollo to fall back away from the door. Lindsey stayed behind Chivo, facing towards the Humvee and the desert, trying to keep rear security, but she kept looking over her shoulder nervously and shuddered with a soft whimper when the walking corpse crashed towards the open door.
Chivo squeezed the pressure switch on his M4’s vertical grip, activating the weapon-mounted light, and illuminated what used to be a very overweight middle-aged man stumbling towards them. Chivo backed up, bumping into Lindsey, who quickly scurried out of the way. Chivo let the corpse fall through the doorway before firing a single shot into the zombie’s skull, putting the man down for good.
They all waited for another full minute before stepping over the rotted corpse by the door and into the back of the Rod and Gun Club. Slowly, Chivo and Apollo swept each room, checking every closet and every place a person could hide. The smell was nearly unbearable. The small restaurant in the building must have been stocked with food before the EMP hit and all of it had rotted. The smell was so bad it even masked the smell of the rotting corpse just outside the back door. Twenty minutes later Chivo and Apollo were confident that the building was clear and they found what they were looking for: ammo.
Flashlight held in his teeth, Apollo stacked boxes of civilian .223 in a pile on the counter next to the cash register. Chivo ripped open the cardboard packaging and dumped the rounds, one twenty-round box at a time, into an empty green ammo can.
“Are you keeping count of how many boxes you’re opening?”
“Yes, but if you keep interrupting me I won’t be able to.”
“Twenty, thirty-three, fourteen, seventy-two ...”
“Damnit, you ass.”
Chivo and Apollo both chuckled, their first chance for real humor since Zennie died.
“OK, looks like we have right at three hundred rounds.”
Chivo looked at the loose rounds in the bottom of the ammo can.
“Shit.”
“Yeah, well, it’s still better than nothing and much better than what we had before.”
“Lindsey, how about we get you your own pistol so I can have mine back,” Chivo said, pointing at the glass case she was sitting on. In the case lay a single pistol, a Glock 19. The rest of the case was empty. In a drawer under the glass case, Chivo located the pistol’s case and the two magazines that came with it. Also in the drawer was a fifty-round box of 9mm, and the good luck continued when on the wall behind the glass cases they found a display of holsters, including one for a G19. A few moments later, Lindsey was now the proud new owner of a Glock 19, loaded and holstered on her right hip.
“You didn’t even have to wait seven days, chica.”
Lindsey smiled at Chivo, who busily got back to work reloading his empty M4 magazines.
CHAPTER 26
The Basin, Big Bend National Park
February 16, Year 1
Russell pushed the nude woman off the bed and onto the floor where she fell with a thud and woke with a scream. He backhanded her across the jaw and she fell silent, staring at the floor, scared to look up at him while he pulled his dirty jeans on. The motorcycle club president pulled his long hair into a tight ponytail, lit a cigarette, and walked out of the cabin into the cold morning air. The sky over the mountains to the east glowed faintly orange with the rising sun; Russell hadn’t slept in three days, flying high on crystal meth. He pulled a large zip-top bag out of the saddle bag on his motorcycle, which was full of smaller bags of Xanax, Vicodin, and Viagra, and a handful of smaller “one hit” bags of crystal meth. His supply was dwindling fast. The decongestant was cooked down into crystal meth for the club members, and if he was getting low then he knew everyone was getting low. If they ran out of drugs, the club members would tear themselves apart.
“Where the fuck is Buzzer?” Russell yelled to no one in particular, his voice echoing softly against the mountains.
“Give me a prospect!”
Two scraggly men leapt out of the old van in the parking lot and ran to where Russell stood.
“You two get another prospect, take the van north, and knock over as many pharmacies as you can find. Get back here before sundown tomorrow, and you better come back loaded with gear.”
“What, leave now?”
“Yes, god dammit! Leave fucking now!”
The two prospects ran back to the old van, yelling another man’s name before starting the van and driving down the road towards the exit of The Basin.
Russell walked to the row of smaller cabins on his right and opened the door to the first one he came to. Brad, whom everyone called Dirty Dick or DD for short, lay flat on his back, feet on the floor, passed out on his bed with a lit cigarette in his mouth. Russell kicked DD’s foot, startling him awake.
“What, Prez?”
“Have you seen Buzzer?”
“Naw, he and M
ike haven’t gotten back yet.”
“Get someone and go find them.”
“Right, Prez.”
DD pulled on his boots, walked out of the door, pissed on the bush in front of his cabin and sauntered off to get another club member. Ten minutes later the mountains echoed with the thundering exhaust of the two motorcycles leaving The Basin towards Terlingua in search of Buzzer and Mike.
Russell walked back to his motorcycle and pulled out his bag of drugs and a small glass pipe. He needed a boost to make it another day.
Groom Lake, Nevada
Cliff entered the conference room. Wright, Arcuni, and four other airmen, along with Chris, Rick and Evan, the newly arrived PJs, sat waiting around a large table in the middle of the room. The PJs were dressed in brand new woodland BDUs and were freshly showered, which they took no small joy in after having had to endure such a long time without running water while stranded at Nellis AFB.
Cliff walked to the front of the room by a large smart board and began, “Lance is dead.”
Most of the people in the room looked shocked. Wright was the first to speak, “What happened and what are we going to do now?”
“Unless by some miracle of God or Buddha or The Flying Spaghetti Monster or whatever deity anyone can believe in anymore we find a microbiologist or a virologist or someone else who is similarly trained, we will have to assume that there is not nor will there ever be a cure for the Yama Strain. The Kali Project is now officially over.” Cliff met the face of each man. The feeling of defeat filled the room.
“Our mission now, what we must accomplish, is to redouble our efforts to find survivors. We have to help them in any way we can. We need to bring survivors here so we can protect them and help them survive. We are no longer fighting to save what is left of the United States. Our fight now is against the extinction of the human race.”
“Ben.” Cliff pointed to Major Wright. “What is our current status board of survivors?”
Wright sat up and flipped through the pages on his clipboard. “We currently have contact with two hundred and nineteen known survivors in sixty-seven groups that are confirmed through radio contact on the civilian amateur radio bands. We have located another hundred possible survivor group locations using the SeeMe SATINT system.”
“Anything on the military bands? Any contact with any of the remains of our military?”
“We have only caught brief bursts of encrypted transmissions, but we didn’t have the right crypto to intercept and decode.”
“Keep trying. Broadcast in the blind on the military freqs as well. If we’re going to make this work, we are going to need more than just the civilian survivors. We’re going to need trained men and women to fight the undead to protect our facility first, then to branch out into the surrounding areas.”
Cliff stopped for a moment. “What about our first group, our friends in the national park in Texas? Do you have the new imagery yet?”
Wright pointed to one of the airmen sitting further down the table. “Have you had a chance to evaluate the latest?”
“Not yet, sir. We just got it downloaded from the last overhead pass before coming to this meeting.”
Cliff pointed to the smart board behind him. “Can you pull it up now? Put it up here? I want to take a look at it.”
The airman said he could and walked to the computer on the table against the wall. The group continued to discuss finding more surviving military members when Evan, one of the PJs who had been silent thus far, joined the conversation.
“Nellis was completely dead. We had to scavenge the base for supplies and four teammates were lost during those operations. We didn’t find a single survivor. Maybe there are others, maybe there were better equipped bases, or our Navy not in port might still have living souls on their ships, but out of our entire base I’m confident that we were the last three living persons.”
The airman by the computer cleared his throat. “Cliff, the latest imagery is up.” He dimmed the lights and a large photo taken from the satellite that passed overhead filled the screen. It showed The Basin in Big Bend National Park, but was too far zoomed out to see more than just the general outline of the roads. The airman zoomed in the image, panning up the road towards the standing structures and stopping on what looked like a small group of people congregating near a vehicle before zooming in further.
“What the hell?” Cliff pointed to the group of undead bent over something in the middle of the road. “Is that a child?”
An uneasy silence fell on the room before the airman used a laser pointer to begin talking everyone through the evaluation of the imagery as he completed it.
“That appears to be a crew-served weapon, those are motorcycles, and yes, I believe that is a group of walking corpses feeding on a small child. That appears to be the remains of another body near the child and I think that is another body on the roof of this building here.” The red dot pointed to the overhead view of the roof of one of the cabins.
Cliff stood and walked closer to the screen. “Zoom out. We need to see if there is any evidence of survivors.”
The photo zoomed out slowly. The roads were quickly lost in the expanding view of the desert.
“Wait, pan north and zoom in a little along the road to the north. The projected screen zoomed into the road and panned slowly, following the empty road.
“Wright, which direction did those bikers come from again?”
“They rode in from the west.”
“OK, follow the intersection road west.”
The airman continued west, following the empty desert road before stopping on a view with a vehicle in it. Without being asked he zoomed in, filling the screen with the overhead photo of an SUV pulling an RV traveling westbound.
“OK, that has to be them,” Cliff said, a rare smile creeping onto his face. “When is the next overhead pass?”
Wright looked at the clock on the wall. “Four hours.”
“Great. Go back over past imagery and figure out where that RV and truck came from, then find out where it went. I want to know what happened to our friends.”
CHAPTER 27
Cortez, Colorado
February 16, Year 1
“I have no fucking idea where they found something like that!” Jake yelled.
Jake and Bill hunkered behind a concrete retaining wall, while automatic rifle fire strafed the ground above them. The plan to fight back against The Tribe was failing miserably. Seven of his men lay dead. Their school, their sanctuary, was under siege, and they were pinned down in an ambush while trying to sneak back into the school after a scavenger run. This was wrong on too many levels. The Tribe wasn’t supposed to win; they were the bad guys. Jake thought of Sara and his anger raged. His wife, his best friend, had been taken and was being held captive by the violent cult. If she were alive, that is. Most of the women who had taken refuge with Jake and Sara at the school were missing, either captured or possibly killed. The men who remained fought hard, but were armed only with axes, machetes, and improvised weapons. Those worked well against the zombies, but against The Tribe, Jake simply felt helpless.
Jason, the married teenager who was the first to seek refuge with Jake, had left a few minutes before, running away as fast as he could from the machine gun fire, zigzagging as he ran before ducking through a row of houses and towards a construction site to the south. The sound of a large diesel motor rattled through the silence. A manual gearbox ground and crunched with each shift, rattling the air with the approaching sound of an old semi-truck. Accelerating as quickly as the worn motor could muster, an ancient semi-truck burst into view, black smoke pouring out of the twin stack exhausts over the back of the cab as if the truck were burning coal instead of diesel.
The machine gun erupted into a new barrage of fire. Approaching from the rear, Bill and Jake watched The Tribe’s fire dance around the truck, but they couldn’t bring their rounds to target. The truck’s windshield shattered as the truck roared by the pinned-down
men.
The automatic rifle fire abruptly stopped, the machine gun silenced. Jake peeked over the top of the retaining wall to see Jason climb out of the bullet-riddled cab with a bloodstained machete in his hand. Jason walked to the rear of the truck where the two ruined bodies of The Tribe’s attackers lay in grotesque horror, killed by being run down and driven over by the truck’s heavy wheels. Surprisingly, only one of the rear dual tires on the trailer appeared flat; the rest of the truck appeared serviceable.
Jason walked to the first man’s body and with a hard overhead swing cleaved the man’s head in two. He walked to the second body and repeated the same motion with his machete. Jake and Bill joined Jason and found the offending machine gun lying on the ground under the truck’s trailer, the barrel sharply bent.
“Damn, that would have been handy to have.”
“Sorry, Jake. This was the best I could come up with.”
“Jason, no, don’t be sorry. You did great. You saved Bill and me. But how did you know the truck would start?”
“I didn’t. I took a gamble. I remembered seeing this truck at the construction site while out on a scavenge, but we never investigated to see if it worked. We just assumed it didn’t work like all the other vehicles. But I figured that being old, it might be old enough to still work. I couldn’t think of anything else to try so that was all I had.”
“Well good gamble, let’s get your new beast back to the school. We’re going to have to figure out the next step.”
CHAPTER 28
Terlingua, Texas
February 16, Year 1
Indifferent to the end of the world, and just like before the EMP attack, the little girl of the Reed family rarely slept in to what could even be considered a normal time, although they had no working clock anymore. Bexar parted the curtains slightly and saw the eastern horizon growing faintly lighter, the sun just starting to rise. The moans of the undead had subsided during the night, and Bexar really hoped that a rat or a javelina or something had distracted them and led the zombies away from the cabin and his family.
