Ghosts: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse

by Shawn Chesser

  Remarkably, the dome over the IMAX theater was intact. As was OMSI’s forty-foot-tall pyramid that sat atop a huge cube-shaped entry, both constructed from hundreds of panes of tinted glass secured to a vast metal framework. Looking closer, he realized there were very few dead wandering the walk near the seawall and the parking lots bordering on the north and west were mostly deserted. All in all, OMSI looked to be untouched. Nothing good to loot in a museum, he concluded. Then, recalling a news article that mentioned how the place had been built around a decommissioned steam plant with a sprawling upper level complete with multiple exits and dozens of rooms, he realized it would make for a good compound. Furthermore, with a couple of boats moored next to the static submarine on display, emergency egress could be accomplished from land or sea.

  Movement at the far edge of the clearing disrupted his train of thought. Pausing the image, he shifted his gaze just as Jamie stepped from the tree line and into the sun. He watched her walking slowly in his general direction, a long rifle slung over one shoulder, a pistol riding low on her right hip.

  Her black hair, worn short since she’d returned from her kidnapping ordeal, gleamed like patent leather. Lev, who was sweet on the girl—and not very good at hiding it—had mistakenly taken to calling it a pixie cut.

  But Cade thought nothing of the sort. This new close-cropped do was all Demi Moore a la G.I. Jane. High speed, low drag, and ready for war. And that’s what this woman had waged on the dead since coming back. She lived to man the overwatch. Said she appreciated the solitude it provided.

  Lev had no chance, Cade thought as he watched her stalk through the clearing. Jamie was never going to forgive herself for Jordan’s death. And she sure as hell wasn’t getting over losing Logan any time soon. The former he knew from the brief conversation he’d had with her aboard the Black Hawk three weeks ago. A revelation he didn’t intend on sharing with anyone. The latter, however, was common knowledge since her and Logan’s budding relationship had been cut short by an act of brutality that blindsided everybody.

  The wicked-looking tomahawk strapped to her hip beat a steady silent cadence on her thigh as she strode by seemingly unaware she was being watched.

  Cade shifted his gaze back to the laptop and started the image moving again, while a dozen feet in front of the F-650’s massive front end Jamie’s playful one-fingered salute skimmed above the grill just like a shark’s dorsal.

  Inside the cab, oblivious to the fact that he’d been made by Jamie, Cade stared at the screen. He saw the satellite trace a laser-straight trajectory over Portland and noticed the lens pan slowly aft; he felt a spark of emotion as he recognized his inner east side neighborhood hugging the natural contour of the land and rising gradually away from the river.

  Once again he paused the playback and zoomed in on the image with repeated taps of the + key until single family homes leapt out at him. Instantly he recognized Creston Park by the grove of firs that grew noticeably taller than anything else in his old neighborhood. In the center of the park he saw the sun-splashed waters of the pool of the same name where Raven had just completed swimming lessons, earning herself a bump up from Seal to Polar Bear—an achievement she couldn’t stop talking about until that fateful Saturday when he’d dropped her and Brook off at the airport. A little triumph over her fear of water she hadn’t said one word about since.

  While savoring the pleasant mental image of Raven’s wide smile as she thrust the certificate excitedly in his face, he traced a finger diagonally right from the pool until he located the alley running east/west behind the house he’d been forced to abandon what seemed like a lifetime ago.

  He stopped his finger moving and let it hover over the middle of the dirt track near the fence he’d hoisted his mountain bike over at the onset of this madness forty-some-odd days ago. And to his amazement, right of his finger, still standing—multi-pitched roof and all—was the craftsman-style home he’d grown up in. The same home where thirteen years prior he had carried Brook as a new bride across the threshold. And the same place they’d brought a newborn Raven home to barely a year later.

  Suddenly finding himself facing emotions he’d been stuffing for far too long, he started to close the laptop’s lid, but stopped short when he heard Nash mention the Omega Antiserum. Nash being Nash, he thought. Show him something she knew would tug at his heartstrings. Get him on his heels and then lower the boom.

  Stifling his feelings, he hinged open the lid and saw Nash staring him in the face. Judging by the desk, barely visible under reams of paper, and the plaques on the wall behind it, she’d recorded the video in her office. He watched and listened with rapt attention as she talked about the scientists’ many failures in replicating Fuentes’ antiserum. Her gaze wandered all over as she described how they’d lost dozens of Omega-infected soldiers and airmen even after administering the antiserum. Then there was a long pause as she stared straight into the video camera. Collecting her thoughts for the sales pitch, thought Cade. He imagined the lifeless lens staring back at her and the mesmerizing red light, blinking incessantly, reminding her time was mankind’s enemy.

  After the pause she began listing the successes—of which there were far fewer than failures. No matter how quickly the antiserum was administered, Slow Burns—victims who had suffered superficial bites away from major blood-delivering arteries—seemed to fare better than the quick bleeds. Another variable factored into a victim’s chance of survival, Cade noted, was the person’s sex and body size. For some reason, no matter their age, males responded to treatment better than females. And people who used to shop at Big and Tall stores—male and female—also had better odds at survival. Through it all Nash rattled off numbers and percentages, most of which Cade didn’t pay close attention to. There was one word that he’d been waiting to hear but never did. And it troubled him greatly. Twenty minutes worth of footage meant to show him how far things had deteriorated across the nation. Then sixty sentiment-filled seconds to show him what used to be and presumably, one day, could be again. All followed by the lengthy rundown on the Omega Antiserum during which the word perfected never passed her lips.

  But she wasn’t finished. Scooting closer to the camera, Nash looked over each shoulder. Satisfied she was alone, she let spill the real reason she was contacting him.

  During her spiel the main word that leapt out at him was volunteer, yet, inexplicably, his mind subconsciously inserted the word expendable. As quick as that thought came it was gone and he was in her shoes and feeling her pain. Rapid-fire, Cade weighed the risk versus reward of the mission against one another in his mind. Then, after a millisecond of sharing in the pain, and with the scale tipping toward reward, he was decided and already rifling through the center console for pen and paper. And as the recording finished playing he filled a piece of paper emblazoned with the Denver Nuggets’ logo with rendezvous times and GPS coordinates and other pertinent details. Finally, when Nash had finished speaking and she pitched forward and rose to approach the camera, Cade noticed that her brow and upper lip were dappled with small shimmering beads of sweat. And further darkening her navy blue uniform top, two half-moons had spread under both arms.

  Once the video quit running, Cade closed the laptop and, cradling it under his arm, popped the door and climbed to the ground. With Duncan dead in his sights he waded through the grass and said, “Forget the truck. Get the bird ready.”

  From under the hood, his upper body shrouded in shadow, Duncan said, “When are we launching?”

  “First light.”

  “When are we coming back.”

  “Undetermined,” replied Cade.

  Duncan bowed his head and stepped down off the front bumper. He wiped his hands on his shirt and said, “What about Brook?”

  Cade said nothing.

  Duncan watched the former Delta Operator, carrying the laptop in one hand, carbine in the other, as he strode toward the satellite dish in the center of his crop circle. “Why don’t you go inside and hook the lapt
op to Logan’s antenna?”

  “Doesn’t work that way,” Cade called back over his shoulder.

  Duncan shrugged and removed the oil dipstick from the engine.

  With the afternoon sun warm on his neck, Cade knelt and coupled the computer with the dish. He booted up the Panasonic and started the uplink sequence. When it was complete he logged his response to Nash’s overture and, before he could second guess himself, quickly hit Enter.

  With Duncan’s words still resonating, Cade broke the dish down and snugged each component into its proper slot and secured the case. What about Brook? Mulling over those three words, he lugged the equipment across the clearing and took everything inside the compound with him.

  Across the clearing, Daymon emerged from the trees carrying two scrawny squirrels by their tails, the carbon fiber crossbow slung across his back. He approached Duncan and tossed his kills to the ground. “What’d Cade have to say?” he asked.

  Duncan said nothing. He regarded the rodents, then arched a brow accusingly and looked a question at the dreadlocked man.

  “For the effin dog, numbnuts,” said Daymon, tucking a stray dread behind his ear. He shook his head and fixed his gaze on Duncan. “Really? You thought I was going to eat those tree rats?”

  Duncan shrugged. He hinged back under the hood, the shadow hiding the shit-eating grin spreading on his face.

  Muttering, Daymon scooped up the carcasses, adjusted his bow and, walking slowly, started off in the direction of the compound entrance following the same beaten path in the grass Cade had taken.

  Chapter 15

  Nash had been staring at the computer screen for so long that her eyes were itching and dry. There was a dull ache between her shoulder blades—the least of her maladies. Every dozen seconds a lightning bolt of pain would strike behind her eyes, the beginnings of a migraine headache that if left unchecked would grow into a debilitating monster.

  Ignoring the half-full bottles of over-the-counter painkillers lined up on her desk blotter she instead rose and crabbed around the desk and hauled open the squeaky top drawer of her government-issued filing cabinet. On tiptoes, she found her last bottle by feel and fished it out.

  Pausing by the wall containing photos and framed pieces of paper proclaiming her many achievements, she plucked one off the wall and stared hard at the 8x10 glossy trapped under glass. Better days, she mused. All gone by. She etched the image into her memory and replaced it on the wall.

  Back at her desk, she cracked the seal and spun the cap off the bottle of Don something or other—the good tequila she’d finished weeks ago. The bottle of so-so Anejo tequila she’d just finished sat on her blotter. Wondering if the cloud of depression would lift long enough for her to mount an expedition to procure some more, she tossed the empty into the wastebasket with the others. Then she poured herself a shot and hefted it towards the wall and the photos there. “To you.” Crinkling her nose, she downed the clear liquid and refilled her glass.

  The message from Cade was still front and center on the laptop screen, the news there simultaneously good and bad.

  A few keystrokes later and the reply was gone. A couple more quick taps by Nash and up popped an ominous-looking home page with the words National Security Agency front and center. Below the red letters were a whole slew of warnings pertaining to things like need-to-know and detailing how high a security clearance one had to possess to proceed any further. Save for President Clay and a handful of others sheltered in place around the CONUS, anyone with a pay grade and security clearance high enough to allow them access to the NSA servers housing the top-secret PRISM data collection program were still missing and presumed dead.

  Bite my pay grade, thought Nash as she once again did something that before the collapse was totally unthinkable to someone without the proper security clearance. Feeling a shudder of anticipation ripple up her spine, she keyed in the password given to her by the President and in seconds was in and navigating her way to the servers that contained metadata concerning virtually every electronic communique made before, during, and after the Omega virus swept the globe. Fifteen hundred miles away in a climate-controlled glass building in Fort Meade, Maryland, the sixteen-character password was received and verified by a Cray XT5h supercomputer nicknamed the Black Widow. There was no perceptible lag between keying in the President’s only daughter’s name and a series of numbers and letters and the screen’s change from dire warning to a host of different avenues leading to a slew of highly classified information. Nash moved the cursor and selected a link with an innocuous header reading Data Stores. A fraction of a second later she was granted access to a separate firewalled server bank containing an ungodly amount of metadata surreptitiously collected from Google, Facebook, YouTube, Microsoft, AOL, Skype, Apple, and every major cell provider in the world. That the facility was still up and running didn’t surprise Nash one bit. She smiled at the pun. A bit was a minuscule amount of memory compared to the nearly limitless storage available there and elsewhere around the world. But Meade was still up and running and that’s all that mattered to Nash. Before the outbreak it was reported widely via FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests that funds had been allocated and released to build a 150-kilowatt-power-generating substation on the premises in Maryland as well as a vast NSA-run data storage facility at Camp Williams in rural Utah. And knowing the secretive nature of the DoD and NSA and all of the other alphabet agencies as well as she did, Nash believed the construction of the substation had been finished and was up and running well before the funds were even requested. The latter probably coming as a big case of CYA after armies of government bean counters were unleashed in order to account for every last red cent immediately following the worldwide banking crisis that started in 2007 and peaked in 2008. And since Nash had firsthand knowledge that Camp Williams had fallen to the dead just days after the first cases were reported, the data center slated to be constructed there was a moot point even if ground had been broken and construction had started unbeknownst to the congressional gatekeepers overseeing it, or the American taxpayers funding it.

  She scrolled past the date now called Z-Day by those who’d survived it and saw the numbers of captured communications fall off exponentially from tens of millions of intercepts a day down into the hundreds of thousands. Then just a week after that awful Saturday when the dead began to walk, the collecting of private data all but ceased including all outgoing calls and data usage from the particular number she was searching.

  Freezing the scrolling list of phone numbers three days prior to the current date, which was the last time she’d accessed the servers, she cued up the first capture on the list. At 12:34 AM Eastern time someone tried calling out from a device bearing a West Virginia area code. Probably a prepper with a solar charger for their phone who happened to be lucky enough to have holed up close to one of the few cell towers with its own solar backup system.

  Finished hypothesizing, she scrolled slowly through the list, keeping a vigilant watch for a certain area code. There were only a couple of hits before she got to the current day’s date. Nothing new. And she wasn’t really surprised. For over the past week since she’d first started snooping around the NSA’s servers she’d conjured up a hundred different scenarios why the number she was hoping to see wasn’t still active, none of them positive.

  After downing the tequila, Nash slammed the Panasonic shut and leaned back in her chair, eyes fixed on the photo, fingers drumming a slow funeral dirge against the armrests.

  ***

  Thirty minutes later, the phone Nash had taken to calling the bad phone jangled. Picking up between the first and second ring, she cradled the fire-engine-red handset between her neck and shoulder, stated her name, and then listened as the President spoke.

  ***

  Five minutes later, President Valerie Clay wrapped up her call and told Nash to relay words of praise from her to the 50th Space Wing—the seasoned group of airmen at Schriever whose job it was to keep the nation�
��s few remaining satellites aloft and continually beaming images of a world fully in its death throes back to Schriever.

  Nash hung up the bad phone which had once again lived up to its newly bestowed moniker, snatched up the sleek black handset and dialed the Satellite Operations Center.

  A young female airman named Jensen, one of Nash’s brightest, answered at once. She listened to the instructions while copying them word for word into a logbook.

  The entire exchange lasted just a few seconds; however, the implications, if what President Valerie Clay’s last remaining intelligence asset had asserted was true, would be felt for quite some time and possibly open up a whole new front in the war in which the nation’s very survival was at stake.

  Nash said a silent prayer as she replaced the black handset. She consulted her watch. Forty-five minutes. That was how long she had to wait to see if, for the second time in an hour, she would be doing another thing, totally separate, yet also unthinkable to her before Z-Day—rooting for the dead.

  Chapter 16

  The finality of the deed wasn’t lost on Glenda as she slipped a pair of Louie’s 2X sweatpants over her own pair of Levi’s. Holding the bathrobe open, she looked in the mirror and noticed the sharp ridges where the magazines she’d taped there bulged underneath. Like a Saturday Night Live caricature of a hard core bodybuilder, her thighs and calves appeared enormous. Perfect. Resisting the urge to stare in the mirror, clap her hands, and say, I want to pump you up, she instead slipped back on the worn Hi-Tec hikers that hadn’t seen action since last year’s trip to Yellowstone. As she cinched the leather and nylon items tight the movement caused a thick strand of sinew to work loose from the robe and fall across the top of her hands with a wet splat.

  Gloves, she thought to herself.

  She found the fingerless leather driving numbers, one of many accessories to Louie’s mid-life crisis, in the closet stowed inside the authentic Aberford tweed driving hat which was placed strategically on the shelf above the camel hair coat he usually donned for their many weekend countryside drives. She smiled, remembering him in the ensemble. So proud. Yet so goofy-looking. A Scotsman in English aristocratic guise. An article in a car magazine kicked off the obsession and in a weeks’ time a restored one-owner Austin-Healy Sprite was taking up space in their garage, as well as her mind. But she loved Louie so she learned to love that car. And the getup. And the faux English accent he’d surprised many a gas attendant with—even the ones who knew him.