Explanations
“Wait,” Brick asked, “immune to what?” It was his turn to raise his eyebrows. “The plague? Bullshit!”
“Been bitten three times.” I pulled my pant leg up and put my leg closer to the fire.
Kinga, Brick, and Ray-Ban all looked at my bite then at each other. It was an unmistakable bite wound. I pulled the collar of my T shirt down and showed them the scar there too, but that looked like I had lost a battle with a belt sander.
Kinga took the laminated sheet from Tim. “What the hell is this? Why is Homeland looking for you?”
“I may have mentioned that I’m immune.”
“He did!” Tim added quickly. Thanks for the support there, Tim old sock. “A CIA spook found out, tracked me to Atlantis, and carted me to Baldy Mountain at gunpoint. Baldy fell apart, I escaped, and then I met you wonderful people.”
Remo came back and sat on his log. The three MARSOC guys looked at him, and Ray-Ban popped the inevitable question: “What do we do now?”
Remo held his hand out to Kinga, who gave him the laminated paper with my mug all over it. The tough bastard didn’t even look at it before he threw it in the fire. Then he spit. “We finish the mission.”
Ran Ban thumbed at me, “But he—”
“Doesn’t change the mission.” Interrupted Remo. “What I want to know is how you let three of them get close enough to bite you.” He hadn’t asked, he just said it and expected an answer.
Now everybody’s eyes (except you-know-who’s, he was poking the fire with a stick he pulled out of somewhere) were on me, even Tim’s.
“Well,” I started, “the first time I was working on a broken down truck, and the fucker was underneath it.”
“You didn’t check first?” demanded both Brick and Kinga at the same time.
“No, I’m not a fuk’n SEAL. I wasn’t trained to look under vehicles for undead cannibals. Besides, it was like, day two of the outbreak, and nobody knew shit yet. Anyway, that thing did the calf biting, and the group I was with decided that I was a liability and left me to die.”
“Assholes,” Tim blurted.
“You know,” I said sympathetically, “I thought about that as I lay dying in a decrepit Airstream trailer. Initially I agreed with you, but after careful consideration, I came to an understanding of what they did. I could have turned at any time. They had kids.” I shifted on my busted log and scratched my ass. “So after the thing bit me I got really sick. Like, super, gonna die sick. I had only seen a couple bites, but after day one, everybody knew a bite was a death-sentence.”
Tim looked really intrigued. I had told him that I had been bitten, but we had never had a detailed conversation about it. “Then what happened?”
“I got bitten again. These two enormous undead bitches tried to eat me when I began to die on the highway. I passed out and the heifers were on me in minutes. The first one got me here,” I pointed to my collarbone, “before I blasted her. The second one got close and I put one through her dome. Then I walked off into the woods, found the trailer, and climbed in to die. Then I got better. I met my buddy Ship a bit later, and the rest you know.”
“You said you were bitten three times.” I don’t know who said that, it was either Kinga or Brick.
“Yeah, I got another one here,” I tapped the one on my side, “in a struggle another time”
“I got sick every time I got bit, and when I was incarcerated at Baldy, they actually injected me with zombie goo to see if I would die.”
Things like: Those bastards, and Fuckers, and Assholes, blurted out from everybody. Even Remo stopped his fire poking and looked up at me. He looked pissed.
“Well, I didn’t die.”
“But are you a carrier?” demanded Tim.
“Apparently not. The Baldy doctors, and there were a lot of them, told me that none of my fluids, and they took them all, had any trace of whatever this is. My liquids are the same as everybody else’s. Then there’s the fact that I bit one of the doctors,” Remo whipped his head up at that one, he whipped it, “and he didn’t die. Well, at least not from my bite.”
Tim’s eyes were the widest, but it was Brick that asked, “What did you bite him for?”
“He was a dick, and he was talkin’ shit. All that stuff is in here.” I pulled out my first journal, and then the one I’m currently writing in. “Read it if you want, but I need it back.”
Tim looked at me funny, “You’re keeping a log?”
“Yeah, why not?”
“I’m still having a hard time believing the whole immunity thing,” Kinga said. “Everyone, absolutely everyone dies from a bite.” He was shaking his head.
“Sorry brah, not everyone. Do you think I made those damn laminated wanted posters up myself, then littered the countryside with them so some military dudes would think I was cool?”
“Don’t brah me, bro.”
Remo reached for my first journal, nodding in acceptance when I gave it to him. “I’m going to get some rack.” He stood up and got in the MRAP. What a line of bullshit. This guy was so tough I’m sure he thought sleep was for pussies.
Now the MRAP, having two fold-down stretcher bays, and two banks of seats you could sort-of stretch out on, was somewhat accommodating for sleep, but only for whoever got into a stretcher first. There were six of us, so five guys could sleep lying down if one guy was on the floor between the benches, but somebody had to sit in a driver’s seat for the first watch.
I volunteered. I had gotten a good snooze with my busted head back in Deer Lodge. Tim said it was a good idea that I didn’t sleep too much, even though I had gotten some sack time, if not quality, already.
We finished eating, and got back in my truck. Remo gave us a nod as we entered, he was stretched out and reading on the left side bench seats with a small light. Brick, Ray Ban, and Kinga threw one or two fingers, and Brick was odd man out. He got the floor. Tim and Kinga took the stretchers with Ray-Ban on the opposite bench from Remo.
Everybody was asleep in minutes.
It’s boring and lonely when you’re alone with your thoughts with nothing to do for a few hours. Reminded me of prison. I thought about my friends back on Atlantis, and couldn’t help but wonder about the destroyer that I had seen tied up to her when Tim and I had used the spy satellite. I thought about Lynch, and what had happened at Baldy, both what they had done to me, and the cluster-fuck they had pulled on themselves. Lynch made me think about Dallas and his spooks. Dallas’ Lynch and mine couldn’t have been a coincidence. Then I went off on a me tangent. Did I have the right to keep myself away from those who could use me to figure out what the hell was going on and how to stop it?
With all the tests the doctors and nerds did on me at Baldy, they had never come up with anything. One of the doctors had said that if this thing was a virus, it was damn difficult to figure out where it was. It had to be in the bodily fluids, but they couldn’t find it even in captured undead specimens. They had looked for odd bacteria and fungi in addition to viruses and had found nothing. That was about the extent of what I knew, but I still mulled it over until Remo scared the ever-loving shit out of me with a tap on the shoulder.
He handed me the journal. “That was some funny shit. How much of it really happened?”
I was groggy, but I got what he was asking. “All of it.”
“And that Lynch guy was a real bad-ass huh?”
“He was. He called himself an asset. I prefer ass-hat. If you read the second journal, somewhere in there I say I wouldn’t have minded seeing you and he duke it out.”
“Huh.” He nodded to the side like he wanted me to follow him.
“What’s up?”
“Time you learned some shit,” he said and moved to wake up Brick for second watch.
I got up and followed him out of the MRAP, as Brick woke up with alarming alacrity and took my seat up front. Nobody else even stirred.
We closed the door and it locked behind us. He pulled his giant knife and pa
ssed it to me hilt first. “Kill me,” he said.
Planning
I lifted an eyebrow and looked at him in a no way manner. “I may be dumb but I’m not stupid. I try to stick you with this thing, and shortly thereafter it resides in my anus.”
“Exactly. Don’t you want to learn how to do that?”
Guy had a point. How had I lived on earth so long without learning the skill to put a big knife in some dude’s pooper?
“How would you come at me? Do it slow.”
I held the knife so I could come at him with a downward stabbing motion and did just that. He put his hands up in sort of an X and caught my wrist. Ever so slowly, he rolled one hand over the other gripping my wrist with his right hand and using his left forearm to push down just above my elbow. He did it gradually, so as not to hurt me, and show me what he was doing at the same time. “Grip the wrist here, and exert pressure above the elbow. Below the elbow and you lose most of your effectiveness.” I ended up facing down, he took the knife from me and I was looking at the butt end of it half an inch from my face in half a second.
“Now you try. Slowly.”
He came at me with an exaggeratedly slow attack, the knife coming down toward my skull the same way I had done it to him. I mimicked his movements, and to my surprise, had him face down with his arm bent up in a moment. “Now pull the knife from my hand with a slight twist, but don’t grab the blade.”
This last part was trickier, but he walked me through it until I had it. He sheathed the knife and we worked it without the knife, again and again, over and over until I could do it quickly and effectively.
It was awesome.
We worked few more techniques as he called them, until I could defend multiple forms of knife attack. He taught me to attack the weapon, not the man, if I could. He said that club attacks were almost the same thing, and we would learn those as we moved south.
And we did. We moved overland to bypass Idaho Falls to our east. Like almost everywhere else, the dead had claimed it. The Reapers may have been more evil than this plague, but at least they had kept Deer Lodge zombie free.
Moving southwest, we crossed over Route 26, west of a town called Blackfoot, then did the same to Pocatello where we crossed over Interstate 86 then swung south. There were small rural roads that we took until we reached Interstate 84. We stopped there to have a pow-wow. Salt Lake City was to the south, then Provo. Two big cities for the middle of nowhere. Provo had about a hundred thousand people pre-plague, but Salt Lake City, when you figured in all the surrounding boroughs, was a headliner with about one point two million. We hadn’t seen any infected in two days.
We were cooking chow when we decided that we would have to go overland to the west then hook south and run parallel with Interstate 15. That was about two hundred miles of flatland to the west of the Rocky Mountains. State parks all over. That could be good or bad. Last time I had stopped at a state park, we had been attacked by lions.
Lions were better than a million zombies though, and Remo continued to instruct me on how to defend myself and kill bad guys at each stop.
Another issue popped up as well. We would have to swing east at some point, as I-15 moved right through Sin City. Las-effing-Vegas. We ended up deciding on south to Route 89, then east just north of Grand Canyon National Park. We would be immediately north of Arizona by then, and ironically, that’s where we ran out of gas. Diesel actually, but you get the point.
Big Water was the town. Town. It had a population of less than five hundred. But it had diesel pumps. This shit place was about three miles from Lake Powell, and that was a big tourist trap.
All five hundred Big Water people seemed to have better places to be, and not a soul, living, dead, or undead was in the area except us. Yes, Dear Reader, I realize that the undead have no souls, but kindly shut it, this is my story. We didn’t recon the buildings, as anything in them would come toward us anyway, and we had no intentions of entering any of them except the gas station.
We spotted the gas station on Route 89 just before noon. It looked like it had been buttoned up for the weekend not the better part of a year. No signs of distress. No signs of anything. We did a quick circuit of the joint and pulled over. Remo was the first one out of the MRAP, and we all followed him except for Kinga, who remained behind to charge the batteries on three of the spare ANPRC 152 radios using the in-vehicle charging station. I busted out the map, and Tim helped me spread it across the asphalt. The wind was such that we couldn’t keep it on the ground, and we opted for a quick recon of the station itself.
Brick banged on the door five times and we waited for the obligatory stumbler to come…well… stumbling. Nothing came. Using a crowbar from an outer container on the MRAP, (actually it was a military tool that looked really fun to play with) Ray-Ban busted us into the place. We cleared it in under a minute. It wasn’t that big.
It was also completely untouched. No power, so all the milk and other refrigerated items from the convenience fridges were gone over, but there was tons of other stuff, including…you guessed it: Mountain Fucking Dew. I grabbed a twenty ouncer and did half of it in one tilt. Nectar of the gods, I shit you not.
I put the Dew down on one corner of the map that Tim was spreading on the counter by the cash register. I snapped into a Slim Jim and we studied the chart. Route 89 to 98, overland to 264 through the Hopi Indian Reservation, south on 87, west on 40… holy shit. I remember Dallas talking to me about traversing the US from west to east, and that took three months. We were going north to south, and I had been away five months at least already. I looked out the window at the MRAP, then back at the scale of miles on the map.
Shit.
“Team huddle,” I said aloud.
Everybody perked up and came over. I passed out Slim Jims. “We need a plane.” They all looked at me, then at the map, then back at me. It was friggin’ funny. “We have another thousand miles to go give or take, and we’re averaging about forty miles per hour when we get good road. That’s…”
I started counting on my fingers, but Tim piped up damn quickly, “Twenty-five hours.”
I couldn’t believe it. “Is that all?”
“Yeah, but the further south we go,” Brick said, “it will be much harder to stay away from populated areas.”
“Better think on a couple of weeks if all goes well. That’s if we can keep in the diesel.”
“Speaking of which.” Ray-Ban dangled a set of pump keys from his fingers, but with no power we would have to figure out a different way.
“Place has got to have a generator,” Tim said. “I’ll go check out back.”
Brick grabbed his arm. “Not alone. Actually, even with the wind it’s quiet here, I don’t want to start up a generator and tell anyone or anything we’re here unless we have to. Let’s see if we can find some hand pumps.”
Tim nodded, and he and Brick moved off to look for a pump. “Hey!” I said, “I wasn’t done.” They all looked at me expectantly. “We should think about flying. In fact,” I looked out at my MRAP again and let loose with a tremendous sigh, “we have to fly. Brick’s right when he says that the population is going up as we go south. It will explode.” They all looked thoughtful. “Besides, what happens when we get to the water? We’re hoping there are boats, and there probably are, but what if there aren’t? We need a plane.”
“Nope,” Remo said and spit out his toothpick on the floor. He looked exactly like Clint Eastwood in the Outlaw Josey Wales. It was uncanny. “How you going to land a plane on an oil rig?”
“Fine, a helicopter then.”
Brick began looking at the map, drawing lines with his finger. “There’s five of us. Better be a strong bird. No sightseeing news choppers.”
A thought came to me, “You MARSOC guys can all fly helicopters right?”
“I played Call of Duty a couple times,” Ray-Ban volunteered. “I was pretty good.”
I blinked. “Wait, none of you guys can fly?”
“Why would
we,” Brick asked, emphasis on we, “know how to pilot a helicopter?”
“You’re bad-ass military dudes! Don’t they teach you that shit on day two of basic or something?”
I don’t think anybody caught it except me, but there definitely had been the flicker of a smile on Remo’s face. Microsecond timeframe, but it hadn’t been my imagination. I looked at him hopefully.
“Don’t look at me.”
Brick, Ray-Ban, and I began to get into a heated discussion on why I thought they should all know how to fly at least something. A single-engine prop plane, a military helicopter, a fucking kite, anything!
Nope.
Remo tapped me on the shoulder and I turned to face him. He was pointing over my shoulder, and it was my turn to whip my head around. Tim had his hand up. “I can fly.”
I was astounded. “You can fly what?”
“A helicopter or anything up to a multi-engine fixed wing. I have a commercial rating.”
This guy! I love him, I shit you not. True blue, dyed-in-the-wool hero. Yay nerds!
“How many hours do you have in a helicopter?” Brick asked Tim.
“Almost a thousand. They didn’t let us out much at Baldy, and one of the things they encouraged was training.” He shrugged. “I liked to fly, so they trained me.”
Brick pointed at Tim. “That’s good.” Brick looked at the map, then ran his finger in a line southwest. “Closest base to us would be Camp Navajo, and it should have a shitload of everything we need, assuming it hasn’t been looted. It’s a training facility for all kinds of shit. I did my crew-served training there, as well as M-203 and desert survival.”
Ray-Ban nodded. “I did M-203 and M-249. Desert too.”
“Sweet numbers,” I said. “What the hell do they mean?”
“Grenade launcher and Squad Automatic Weapon. You’ve seen the SAW, they were on the walls at our camp.”
“Oh, yeah, I’ve seen them in other places too. Sorry.”
“Yeah, but Navajo is right outside of Flagstaff,” Remo said. “That’s a city with more than a hundred thousand people. Some of them must have tried to get to the base for safety, and that base is huge, so I don’t see the base personnel being able to keep them out. When we did our desert training out in the middle of nowhere, the only deterrent I saw was a threatening sign on a chain-link fence as we drove in. No way Navajo could possibly defend the entire perimeter.”
The Zombie Theories (Book 2): Conspiracy Theory Page 18
