by JJ Zep
“You sure about that?”
“And we got the high ground. One shot drops the fifty gunner. After that we can mop them up like gravy.”
“Even if we do,” Charlie said, “there’s likely to be others. Think for a moment.”
“Hello?” the voice from the speaker said. “You boys still up there? Still quaking in your little Ranger booties.”
Wackjob drew a breath as if to shout a response. Charlie backed him off with a look. “Let me deal with this. You stay put and keep me covered.”
Before Wackjob could protest, Charlie got to his feet and stepped from cover, his rifle slung over his shoulder, barrel down but ready to be brought up immediately, should the need arise.
“Hey down there,” he shouted. “Who am I speaking to?”
For a moment the man didn’t respond. Charlie tried to get a fix on who was doing the talking, realized that the man was probably inside the Humvee.
“Name’s Goliath,” the voice boomed. “What’s your handle?”
“I’m Charlie. How about you come out where I can see you, talk to me man to man.”
Goliath was silent for a moment. “You and your mealy-mouthed friend figuring on taking a potshot at me?”
“Why would we try something like that when you’ve got that fifty trained on us?” Charlie said. “We might be a couple of Ranger pussies, like you say, but we ain’t stupid Ranger pussies.”
That elicited a chuckle. Charlie sized up the men standing at the bottom of the embankment. Two of them were actually women, he now realized. Or, at least, he thought they were. It was hard to tell the difference with their filthy clothes and blackened expressionless faces. Either way, they were well armed, a couple of Mossbergs, AK’s, AR-15’s, bandoliers and grenades slung across their chests. And, of course, there was the fifty. Could he and Wackjob take them? He thought so. If the shit went down, Wackjob would take out the fifty gunner. After that, with the high ground in their favor, it would be a turkey shoot.
His attention was drawn back to the Humvee, where the door had just swung open. Goliath, all five-foot-four of him, stepped out. He was dressed in a black suit and a once-white shirt now turned dishwater gray. His face was the pasty pink of a picked scab, his dreadlocked hair and scraggly beard a coppery red. A scabbard was slung across his chest from which he now withdrew a machete, rusty with dried gore.
“Just wanted you to know,” he said, “in case you was figuring on starting something. We got your bitch.”
He reached into the Humvee and dragged a woman out onto the tarmac.
Skye.
seven
The blanket was nowhere near as wet as Jojo wanted it, but it was going to have to do. His eyes were teared up with smoke, his nose stung with it, his lungs screamed out for oxygen. If he didn’t go now he was going to die right here in this cell. He dropped to the floor, pressed his lips to the concrete and sucked in a breath that was mostly smoke. That triggered an almost irresistible cough impulse but he fought it back and tottered to his feet, pulling the heavy blanket around him. The wet fabric clung to his clothes like cling wrap. Jojo yanked it up and over his head, got a grip on the two flaps in front of his face and drew them together. Then he ducked his head and staggered towards the cell door.
The heat hit him as soon as he turned into the corridor. He veered left. The security door dangled from a single hinge, giving him a view of the inferno raging through the admin block. The alarm had fallen silent now, supplanted by the angry roar of the flames as they chewed their way through the furniture, the drapes, the shelving. Somewhere, something collapsed and there was a series of small explosions, probably from the gun store.
Jojo took a couple of steps along the corridor and felt the heat prickle at his skin. Another couple of paces and he felt the hair of his exposed eyebrow singe. Already the moisture was being sucked from the blanket. If he was going to do this it had to be now. Every second he waited reduced his chances of survival. He drew the blanket in tighter, dropped his head and took a step, then another.
“Walk don’t run,” he told himself. “Walk don’t run.”
And then he was in the midst of it.
It was as though someone had suddenly maxed the dial on a gas oven. Jojo felt the hair of his exposed arm crinkle, the air squeezed from his lungs. His trouser legs felt like hot irons against his skin. He put his head down and kept moving, blundered into a chair, swerved a falling cabinet, brought his foot down on some broken glass and almost fell. Regaining his balance, he chanced bringing his head up to orient himself. The long counter that separated the admin office from the reception area was ten feet ahead, a burning barrier that looked as impassable as Hell’s most fiery lake. Jojo fancied that he could see defused light from the glass doors that led out onto the parking lot. How far away? Thirty feet? It might as well be thirty miles unless he could get past the counter.
He scanned left and right, looking for a gap. The access hatch, he knew, was at the far left, near the offices. But the fire was at its most intense there. He’d be cooked alive.
He turned right, jarred his leg up against something that ripped through his pants and the meat of his calf. The pain was instant and exquisite, but nothing compared to the pressure on his lungs as they screamed for air, nothing compared to the sensation of being slow broiled.
The blanket was of very little use by now. All of the moisture had already evaporated. Jojo shrugged it from his shoulders and saw that it was smoldering. He dropped to his knees and took a breath of air that felt like hot lava in his chest. His hand came down on something that instantly blistered the flesh of his palm. A cry escaped him carrying with it most of his precious oxygen. He felt disorientated, woozy.
Get up! Get up! Get Up! the piece of his mind still concerned with survival screamed.
Jojo straightened his knees, tottered, banged his shin on something metallic, the same object that had ripped into his calf and seared his palm. He kicked against it and it responded with a hollow clunk. He knew what it was now, a file cabinet, lying on its side.
An idea occurred to him and he executed it immediately, operating from somewhere beyond logic. He picked up the blanket and bundled it, used it to protect his hands as he got a handhold on the file cabinet and pushed.
No good. It was too heavy. He was too tired. It wasn’t going to work.
“The hell it won’t,” he told himself, ripping open the top drawer, scooping out the paperwork inside, scattering it into the fire, repeating the action with the second and third layers. Now he tried again, straining, sucking in air through clenched teeth. The cabinet gained a foot off the ground, then another and then reached the tipping point and sprung upright, almost overbalancing.
Jojo immediately draped the blanket over his shoulder, applied that shoulder to the file cabinet and pushed, gaining a few inches.
The smoldering remains of the counter were three feet away. Jojo tapped his last reserves of energy, bunched his muscles, strained with every ounce of his strength.
The cabinet shifted slowly at first, then gained momentum. By the time it collided with the counter and burst through, Jojo was screaming, some incoherent, primal scream that hailed back to the days of the cavemen. He wasn’t even aware he was doing it.
eight
The cabinet struck a fire-damaged crossbeam and burst through in a hurricane of white-hot sparks. Jojo pistoned his legs, drove hard, sensed the breakthrough and drove harder still. Then the cabinet collided with an iron bracket at floor level and shuddered to an abrupt halt before Jojo’s momentum sent it crashing over, and he over it. For a brief moment he was airborne and then gravity slammed him into the tiled floor and he went careening into the plastic benches against the far wall.
With no ready fuel, the fire hadn’t yet taken hold here. Jojo lay on the warm tile and sucked in the degraded air as though it were the sweetest he’d ever tasted. Distress signals flashed from every part of his body. From his seared hand and his mutilated calf, from the shoul
der he’d bruised when he’d crashed to the floor, from his lungs, which still protested the poor quality of fuel they were being fed.
But he was alive, goddammit! He was alive!
Alive, but still under sentence of death, he immediately realized. Whatever had happened here, whatever weird quirk of fate had tossed him this lifeline when he’d fully expected to be shot, whatever cosmic force was at play, it would all stand for nothing if he allowed himself to be re-captured. He had to get out of here, out of the camp, away from Pendleton before Harrow and his cronies got things back under control.
But where was he going to run? Big Bear was the obvious answer. He had family there, friends. Ferret was there. But did he want to involve them in this? There was no doubt in his mind that Harrow would send men to find him. Big Bear Lake was the first place he’d look. No, Jojo would have to stay away from Big Bear for a while, at least until all of this died down. North was still his best option, though, north to the mountains. First he’d need to find a vehicle.
He got slowly, painfully, to his feet, using the bench to pull himself upright. Now that the adrenalin was beginning to wane, his various injuries, particularly the gouge to his leg and his blistered palm, were hurting like a motherfucker (as Uncle Joe was so fond of saying). Jojo leaned against the wall a moment as a swoon of dizziness washed over him. He looked back into the admin office, the fire still raging. He was amazed that he’d made it out of there.
He took a step, leading with his good leg, dragging the other behind him, his hand trailing along the wall for support.
Another tottering step. The glass doors loomed up ahead, faint light filtering in, smoke obscuring his view of outside. Jojo closed his eyes to a slit and peered through the gloom. He thought he could detect movement in the parking lot.
A thought occurred to him. Where were the prison guards? Out in the lot, watching the building go up in smoke? If so, he was going to walk right into them.
A crash drew his attention back to the admin block just in time to see a section of ceiling collapse onto the remnants of the counter. Hot sparks were flung across the room like a meteor shower. Jojo threw up his arm to protect his eyes as a million pinpricks peppered his exposed skin. Now the shelving at the back of the room collapsed and Jojo knew that, even if it meant re-capture, he had to get out of here. He reached for the steel door handle, gritting his teeth, mindful of the fact that it was going to be hot.
Movement on the other side caught his eye. A figure appeared at the glass and peered in, a nightmare face loomed out of the smoke. The Z staggered up against the door and the door swung inward.
nine
For a moment, Jojo was sure that his eyes were deceiving him. No zombie had made it past the perimeter fence in years; none had even got close since the frequency had started transmitting. Yet the thing that had stumbled through the doors was undoubtedly a Z, a recent kill by the look of it. The man was tall and angular and looked to have taken a blast of shrapnel to his right side, leaving his arm a bloody stump and his face splayed open in ugly, meaty lacerations. His right pants leg was shredded, his t-shirt bloodied and ripped away to reveal shards of smashed ribcage and a pulped mess of internal organs.
The Z started towards him, dragging its damaged leg, a slew of bloody spittle trickling down its chin. It was then that Jojo noticed the pistol shoved into the waistband of its jeans.
Jojo’s first instinct had been to evade the thing and get out of the building. But the gun put a different reflection on things. He needed that gun. That gun might just be the difference between getting out and getting killed. He circled, feinted left, encouraging the Z to come at him, backed off a couple of paces and then planted his leg. He waited for the thing to lurch at him, then thrust out a hand and buried his fingers in its throat. The Z swung wildly with its good arm but Jojo easily ducked under the blow and lunged for the 9-mil. Shards of pain erupted in his blistered hand as his fingers closed on the pistol. He yanked upward, freeing the gun, felt it slip through his fingers and clatter to the ground. He let it fall, kicked it out of reach, then turned his attention back to the Z. Maintaining his hold on the creature’s throat he walked it backwards towards the smoldering counter, delivering a sharp push as he approached. The Z staggered back, crashed into the collapsed rafters and went down. In an instant the flames engulfed it. It tried to rise, gained a handhold on a steel file cabinet that must have instantly cooked its dead flesh and pulled itself upright with its hair and clothes on fire. It took a few faltering steps, then kicked up against something and went down on its face.
Jojo didn’t wait to see if it would get up again. He dropped to his knees, scanned along the floor for the gun, spotted it against the wall, under one of the benches. Behind him he heard the door fly open with such force that the glass shattered. The room was filled with a maddening buzz, as though a swarm of wasps had been riled to anger. Somewhere close a fifty opened up and Jojo heard the sound of a Humvee traveling at speed.
The pain in his hand, in his leg, his lungs, was now a seamless blanket. Jojo gritted his teeth and pulled himself along the ground, fingers fighting for purchase on the slick floor. The bench lay feet away, the gun tantalizingly close. He reached for it and fell just short, lunged forward on his belly and closed the raw flesh of his damaged right hand on the pistol.
Almost at once a strong grip closed on his ankle. He was dragged back, tossed bodily across the floor. The gun tried to wriggle out of his fist but he held on, twisted as he hit the ground, raised the pistol as the Z’s closed. There were three of the things, all of them dressed in the black uniform of Litherland’s infantry unit. Jojo shot the first in the face as the thing angled its head in for a bite. He pushed himself up onto his butt and fired two-handed as the second came blundering out of the smoke. The first bullet struck it in the shoulder and barely slowed it, the second left a neat hole between its eyebrows.
Jojo staggered to his feet, scanned the smoky interior, picked out a black shape and tracked it. The third Z came lumbering out of the smoke. Jojo let it come, leveled the pistol and picked out a kill shot. He waited until the thing was almost on top of him before he squeezed the trigger. The pistol returned a dull click.
The Z barreled into Jojo, swatting the gun from his hand and driving him back until he crashed into the wall. In a flash its hands were on his throat, its fingers gaining purchase. Jojo got his hands up, palms flat against the thing’s barrel chest. But the Z was strong. It thrust its head forward, teeth bared, face spattered with gore but instantly recognizable. It was Colonel Litherland.
A cascade of stars danced across Jojo’s vision. He felt the breath being squeezed from his body, the light graying, his strength ebbing away. Litherland increased the pressure on his throat, beefy forearms quivering with the effort. One of those arms had a crescent-shaped chunk of flesh ripped from it, the bite that had turned Litherland.
Jojo’s grasp on consciousness was slipping. A picture began playing in his mind, a boxing tournament back in New York when he’d been pitted against a bigger kid who’d spent the first two rounds rabbit punching and hitting below the belt with the referee doing nothing about it. Jojo had been ready to give in, had even asked his father to throw in the towel. But Chris had refused. Instead, he’d taught Jojo a dirty little trick for dealing with a taller, stronger opponent. Draw your opponent into a corner. Deflect his body blows with your forearms. Then get your forehead pushed up against his chest and thrust upwards, driving the top of your head into the underside of his chin. Jojo had executed the move, and the bully had retired halfway through the next round with a lacerated tongue. Afterwards, Jojo had felt bad about it. Now, there was no room for sentiment.
Litherland was about the same height as him so the tactic wasn’t going to work exactly as his father had taught it. Instead, Jojo dropped his head, closed his fists on the front of Litherland’s shirt and thrust directly forward, simultaneously pulling Litherland towards him. The top of Jojo’s head crashed into the colonel’s
jawbone, in a blow that would have knocked a normal man flat on his ass. Litherland clung on, but his grip was weakened. Jojo headbutted him again, then again, breaking his grip. Litherland staggered back, but Jojo wasn’t about to let him recover and counter. He closed in, grabbed a handful of Litherland’s shirt and flipped him in a perfectly executed judo throw. Litherland hit the floor with a crunch of snapping bone. He tried to rise, his head cocked quizzically, bone shards protruding from the base of his neck. Jojo planted a boot flat against Litherland’s chest, sending him skittering across the floor on his ass. He closed in, delivering a roundhouse kick to the temple, then brought his heel down on Litherland’s pelvis as he lay on the ground. Litherland lashed out, his clawed hand just missing as Jojo danced out of reach, circled the maimed creature and stomped down hard, pulping its nose to mash.
The door at the front of the room pushed open but Jojo barely noticed. He slammed his boot against Litherland’s cheekbone, drove his heel into the thing’s throat, smashed in its teeth with another stomp.
Eventually, he staggered back, slumped against a wall, and threw up. He paid no attention to the approaching footfalls, to the creatures looming out of the smoke. He was done, shot. He’d fought as hard as he could. If this was where he fell, so be it.
The figures closed in, at least six of them, wading through the smoke like phantoms.
“Major Collins!” one of them shouted. “Jojo, you in here?”
It was Buckland.
ten
Charlie looked across the overgrown fairway of the Desert Springs golf course, through the trees to the small man-made lake beyond. Aside the lake a cluster of dilapidated zinc and tarpaper lean-to’s had been arranged into a rough square. At the center of those dwellings stood a pit, where a fire had been blazing away for the past two hours, tended by a couple of elderly men. A steady stream of Eaters, men, women and a few children, beat a path from the nearby resort hotel to the fireside, carrying items of furniture to feed the blaze. Why on earth they chose to live in shacks, when there was a luxury hotel just fifty yards away, was anyone’s guess. Then again, you were dealing with Eaters here. They were not exactly rational beings.
