The Coalition: Part III 2% Solution Of The Dead (COALITON OF THE LIVING Book 3)

by Robert Mathis Kurtz

For the first time in years, the deaders were on the ropes. There were hardly any at all remaining within ten miles of city center.

  The gun barrel swept west, toward the airport. Even with the scope, he could barely see the buildings out there, miles away. He would either have to use one of his telescopes, or go into the clean rooms to view live Intel from space! Yes, he could do that. The GPS still worked and the images came down and only a few places on the globe were in a position to receive those images.

  And all because of the hard work of Stan Lieber.

  He put the gun on a table and walked away, passing through a sliding door into the building. Almost absently, he paused to shut the door behind him, closing out the fresh air and padding silently into his home.

  Lieber had always been good at what he did. Like most people in his trade, he’d started out as a hacker, tackling the digital challenges and dominating the code that he encountered. And like so many, he had gotten into his fair share of trouble over his mischief. But the dalliance with the law had paid off and before he was twenty years old, he was being paid six figures to create new codes for the people he’d so recently bedeviled. It was because of that job that he’d actually been in the Trust Tower the day when that last bit of shit had hit the fan.

  Alone, his chuckle was lost. The warm air inside the building swallowed up his short exclamation of satisfaction and it vanished so quickly that he almost didn’t hear it himself.

  This building was all for him, he knew. The tower itself and the three floors that sustained him and his tools were the most important place in the world. Going down the hallways, he stopped from moment to moment to peer through the opened doors into rooms that housed servers and keyboards, printers and charts.

  It was all for him.

  He knew that some of it was just plain dumb luck.

  When Dale had brought him to the Trust Tower, there had been five other programmers. And even Lieber had to admit that he wasn’t the best of even that remaining lot of computer geeks. He rarely thought of them now that they were all gone. They’d all been idiots when you got down to it. Three of them had just been careless—wandering into unsecured parts of the building before Dale had been able to cleanse it of threats. So much as a single bite and you were done for.

  When those three were dead, Kate Duncan, the only woman among them, had come down with influenza. The kind of thing that would have been just an uncomfortable interval in the past; but now it had been mortal and had taken her away.

  After that, two days later, Stan’s last co-worker did a header from the 33rd Floor, leaving a great red mat on the street below. Colonel Dale’s people hadn’t even been forced to clean up the mess. The zombies took care of that for them. The man—Trenholme—had just lost it. The guy had thrown himself from the concrete ledge overlooking the avenue. Lieber hadn’t even realized that the fellow had been so in love with Kate until she had died. The Colonel had been forced to fight poor Trenholme off so that he could put a bullet through Duncan’s dead skull before she could rise. It only took him forty-eight hours of dark brooding before the despondent fellow had killed himself.

  Stan wound his way slowly to that balcony. It was currently his favorite spot in the building, but not because Trenholme had leapt to his death from that point. This spot was his favorite because it was the one that offered him a view down on the place where Jean lived.

  Jean was like the Lund woman. Lieber had been slowly extricating Mrs. Lund from the ties that bound her so that she could be with him. He’d have been so much the better provider for her, once he’d removed the children who didn’t really matter. The husband was gone and all he had to do was go down and retrieve her, make her his wife.

  But the Colonel had interfered. And that other fellow—Cutter. And they’d stolen the blonde woman from him once she was all but his to retrieve. He didn’t even know where she was now. In one of the compounds the Colonel had set up on the other side of town. He knew where it was, but he couldn’t see it, not even from the top of the Tower. Clever of the Colonel to put it where he couldn’t see.

  He wondered why Dale had been so bothered by Stan’s long-distance quest to acquire Mrs. Lund. It puzzled him. But of course all things of that nature puzzled him. Why did anyone care about such details anymore? Unlike everyone else who had been around him since things had changed, Lieber had embraced it all. When the other programmers had lived with him in the Tower, he had argued with them to accept things and to enjoy their new status.

  What did it matter now? How a man went about getting what he needed was no longer bound to a system of rules. You had to take what you needed; go ruthlessly after what you wanted.

  His thoughts went back to Mrs. Lund. He smiled, thinking of her, and of how she’d been taken out of reach. Funny, really—he’d never even known her name. She had always just been “Mrs. Lund”. That’s all he’d ever known about her, except that he had been attracted to her and had decided that she needed to be his. And the closest he’d ever been to her was through a fucking telescopic gunsight! He laughed.

  It didn’t really matter anymore. He’d chosen a new woman to be his wife. She was younger, more beautiful, her hair even more golden than that of Mrs. Lund. Lieber had seen her, up close, within reach. And he wanted her.

  He’d have her, too.

  He unlatched the glass door that led out to that wide and spacious balcony where Trenholme had made that last terminal step. There was a small table of metal and glass sitting out there. Lieber had left a pair of binoculars on it, and he reached casually down and picked them up, brought the lenses to his eyes. With practiced ease, he shifted his gaze toward a lower building two blocks distant. His view down the twenty floors to a certain rooftop was almost perfect and unimpeded. Most of the day he could see anyone who was there. Three quarters of that rooftop was easily visible to him.

  For the past week he had scanned that space, aiming down the barrel of his unique and quite intimidating sniper rifle.

  Soon, he’d make use of that gun. And then Jean would be coming to live with him.

  The world owed him that much at least.

  And now, he knew, hearing the mild alarm warning him on the cell phone vibrating in his pocket, the Colonel was on his way upstairs.

  NEXT

  As they’d planned, Cutter hung back, tucked quietly into an overhang that covered a small loading dock for the old convention center. It was the best place for him to wait while the Colonel entered the building and rode up to Lieber’s quarters.

  “We have the area covered completely,” Dale had warned him. This is the closest spot that can’t be seen with the surveillance system at Stan’s use.

  Cutter sat comfortably on a metal bench set well back in the shadows. His back was to the corrugated steel door that had once opened into a hallway at the enormous building. He’d been inside it a couple of times over the past few months, part of an organized sweep with several other men from the city. Good guys, vetted by the Colonel, but Ron had not known them well. Still, they’d been good companions and not trigger happy as they’d all gone from hall to hall, room to room, seeking out zombies. In the end, they’d only located a half-dozen of the damned things. Dwelling on it, he realized those had been the last really aggressive ones he’d encountered. Locked up in the giant building, they’d not been exposed to the relentless slaughter the deader population had been subjected to over the months of the new year.

  They’d put them all down with single shots to the head. After that, they’d swept the building end to end, top to bottom, and there had been nothing but empty spaces and cobwebs. The place had been effectively locked up tight before the end and so only the six people who had become the dead things they’d popped had been the only inhabitants. With the corrugated metal at his back, he felt pretty secure.

  He sat and ate the green apple he’d brought for lunch. There was a small orchard of the fruit trees in a walled garden on a steep slope just west of city center. Part of an old public garden,
he’d been told. It was the only such orchard the local herd of elephants had not been able to plunder into splinters. That was something else he had to watch out for. The herd wandered in and out of town, and the things were sometimes unbelievably silent. You wouldn’t think animals of that size could be quiet—but they were.

  And now, with that crazy bastard in the tower having killed another one, Ron knew the bull was likely agitated again. The memory of that last close encounter he’d had with the big critter made him think of his bad knee, and he reached down to massage it, his gloved hands rubbing muscles.

  Finally, he looked at his watch. It was 11:00 a.m. sharp, and time for him to head for the Trust Tower.

  *

  The door was locked, but the key Dale had given him worked and he eased the heavy steel thing open on lubricated hinges. Looking back up the alleyway, he checked his back just to make sure he wasn’t being tailed. It was something he would likely never be able to stop doing. Thinking of the dead things that could sometimes creep breathlessly upon noisy, coughing, breathing, stupid human, he looked up into the stairwell to make certain the way was clear before he shut the door behind him and made sure that the lock had engaged before he began climbing.

  Sunlight spilled into the steep angles of the steps from small windows at each landing. It was good not to need a torch or a headlamp to light his way. The soles of his boots were crepe and enabled him to ascend with almost total silence. His rifle sling was snug against his shoulder, comfortable and ready to be smoothly employed if he needed it. And the .45 was on his right hip, loaded, a shell chambered. And on his left hip was his trusty ball-peen hammer. He never left home without it.

  By now, the Colonel would have his pet techie sedated, and Ron would be able to do what the officer had asked of him. It was time to search.

  *

  “You do know that all of this isn’t necessary anymore,” Lieber said.

  There was something about the man that scared him, but in the case of Lieber, the Colonel knew exactly what it was: the hacker was completely and irrevocably insane. You could sense it in the way he spoke, the quick staccato manner in which the words leaped out of him at odd moments. And in the way the man would suddenly invade your private space, sticking his face into yours and repeating the first things that seemed to come to mind, his surprisingly strong fingers reaching out to dig into your upper arms, or land on your shoulder close to your neck.

  The fellow was bats.

  But the Colonel had needed him—still did, he figured, and so these regular sessions.

  “I suspect as much, Stan,” he lied, smiling down at the crazy man. Lieber didn’t look like much of a threat. Just your average Joe American with his bland accent and plain features, sandy hair thinning just a little as he plodded into his late thirties. “But we need you to do the best work possible, you know. Until things are completed, I want to keep you in top shape.”

  “Top shape, yes,” Lieber said. The IV was taped securely in his arm. Dale had become good at finding the vein and prepping his charge for the drip. Stan’s black eyes peered up at the bag of solution, waiting for the officer to open the valve. “We can’t have me screwing up, now can we?”

  “Now, Stan. You know I have nothing but complete respect for your talent and abilities. You have done better than anyone else could have done. But we’re almost to the end now. You know what’s coming and you know how important this is. You’ll see,” he said. He gave the crazy bastard a smile that he knew was as good as the truth.

  “Yeah, I know. They’ll be here soon. And then things will begin to really get back to normal. Just the way it used to be.” And with that Lieber began to chuckle, the mirth building to a laugh that threatened to turn into mad cackling.

  But before that could happen, Dale reached up and opened the valve and the drip coursed down the IV tube and within three seconds the Propofol slammed into Lieber’s system like an Antarctic glacier pouring into the sea. The madman felt one jolt of cold and then he was dreaming.

  *

  Ron got to the sixth floor and opened the door that led into the hallways. As always when he came into the Trust building’s environs, he was startled at the dry comfort of the place. The system was still chugging along, some floors heated and air-conditioned as the situation dictated, the air kept at the perfect humidity to keep one from breaking into anything resembling a sweat.

  Vents breathed slightly warm air down on him. There were the scents of carpet and old cleanser and even wood polish still drifting along, left over from the last time a crew of janitors and maids had gone through the building that last time more than two years before, putting everything into order before monsters had come to kill and eat them all.

  The silence in that building was overwhelming. State of the art, it was, the ventilators chugging along somewhere deep in the bowels of the tower or out in some far wings, covered beneath a heavy roof and behind thick concrete walls. This floor hadn’t originally been on the charts to be kept ventilated and dry, but the Colonel had taken some care to program it just so, bypassing the control center in Lieber’s workspace. Dale might not be a hacker, but he did know how to get the basics done, apparently without his charge finding out what was going on.

  Going to the first intersection, he turned left and followed that hallway to the western side of the tower. He came to the far wall, windows facing out on Trade Street and took only a moment to look down. An SUV was driving silently down the avenue, and he quickly counted more than a dozen people walking on the block below. There was no time for trivial pursuits and so he turned quickly to his left once more and counted the doors.

  “One. Two. Three. Four. Five,” he said, muttering into the oppressive silence of the place.

  At the fifth office he stopped, reaching out and quickly turning the knob. He almost didn’t draw the .45, but at the last instant he did so and carefully pushed the door open.

  No dead, rot-blackened face emerged to try to kill him. Only more of that dry, silent air. Cutter went in.

  Inside there was another door, which opened into a closet roughly four by eight feet. On the carpet, he could see where once upon a time a copy machine or some similar device had crushed its footprint into the woven, light brown fabric. Sunlight leaked in from the hallway, but Ron flipped the wall switch and fluorescent bulbs behind frosted panes flickered to life.

  He walked to the back of the big space and without hesitation pushed his left hand into the right corner at chest height. And the wall moved inward, with a click, becoming nothing more than a hidden door. Inside was another space just large enough for a six-foot wide desk with three flat screens and a couple of servers winking in the shadows. Ron sat and did exactly as the Colonel had asked him, gaining access to the trio of recording devices the man had hidden in those three floors where crazy Stanley lived out his days.

  “You’ll see where he hides it,” Dale had told him. “When you see it, just come up and get it. Don’t wait for me. Lieber will be sound asleep or in no shape to know what’s going on, and I’ll be watching over him at any rate.”

  As Dale had suggested, it didn’t take long for Cutter to find what he was looking for. Within ten minutes, he was looking at video footage of Lieber walking soundlessly down a hallway on the lowest floor of his trio of levels. In his arms was the most intimidating rifle Ron had ever seen. He wasn’t even sure what it was and had never seen the like. But whatever the type, it was powerful enough to kill an elephant at range.

  They needed to get it away from the disturbed man. And today was the day it left his hands for good.

  *

  Six hours later, as Cutter and his family were assembled again in their rooftop redoubt, the Colonel arrived. Ron had been watching to note his arrival and met him on the ground floor to admit him. Together, they climbed the stairwell to the top.

  “It only took me a few minutes to find it,” Ron told him. “On the video, he went into an office off the main hall. It wasn’t in there, though.
It was behind a wall panel in a supply room adjacent to the office. I had to climb up on a table to gain access. It’s not much different from one of my old hiding places that I used to keep in one of the neighborhoods you and your pals burned down.”

  Dale smiled, exhibiting some genuine guilt. “Sorry about that,” he said.

  “Eh. I got over it. What’s done is done. You couldn’t communicate with everyone in those days.”

  “So…what kind of rifle is it?” Dale asked.

  “I swear I don’t know,” Cutter told him. “I’ve never seen one. Takes a single shell. There was one in the chamber and a packet with five more rounds. Biggest damned shells I’ve ever seen.” They were almost to the rooftop. “I’ll tell you one thing, though. I wouldn’t want to fire it. Damn thing has to have a kick like a Mack truck in reverse.”

  And then Ron was unlocking the door at the end of the stairwell, swinging the metal barrier open so that they were flooded in the light of the afternoon sun.

  “Well, then, let’s have a look. Regardless of what it is, Lieber can’t use it anymore and he won’t be able to torture anyone or any animal with it.”

  The two marched across the roof to the blockhouse-turned-home. Cutter rapped on the door and it quickly opened to reveal Oliver in the threshold and Jean sitting on the big couch, reading a book on small engine repair. She was her father’s daughter, which was certain.

  The Colonel greeted the boy and then Jean. As always, he was stopped in his tracks by the sight of Cutter’s woman. She was easily one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen, and gorgeous females had never been in short supply in his circles. Things could go south very quickly for this family because of her beauty. If things went wrong, as he knew they likely could, Jean and Ron would need to be strong to get through it. He banished the thoughts of both lust and pessimism from his mind.

  “So,” he said. “Let’s see what he was using to kill elephants. I have enough to deal with besides trying to protect us all from angry elephants out for revenge.”