“Are you okay, mom?” Stevie asks her.
“I’m fine,” she tells him as she pulls him close.
“Just a bad day again?” he asks.
“Yeah,” she says as she combs her fingers through his hair.
“It seems like every day is a bad day for us,” his dad whines.
Scout shoots him an irritated look.
I can only imagine how messed up this kid will be after everything that he has witnessed. My childhood was no picnic either, so I know that shit sticks with you for the rest of your life no matter how much you try to pretend it doesn’t.
“Things will get better soon,” Scout tells the kid.
“I don’t think they will,” Stevie says.
“Sure they will,” Scout says. “That’s why we have been so busy. We’re going to fix things so they can go back to how they used to be.”
“Good. Because I miss the old days,” Stevie says.
“It’ll be like that again soon, Stevie,” Scout tells him. “I promise.”
Part of me thinks she shouldn’t lie to the kid like that. She isn’t doing him any favors by trying to protect him from reality. But the other part of me thinks, it’s not really any of my business what she does.
If she wants to make stupid promises that will just give the kid a false sense of hope, then that is on her.
I just keep my eyes on the road and try to stay focused. Claire seems to even be a little wary of me after everything that just happened. The rest of them weren’t there, but she knows what Jenson did. I don’t understand how she can expect me to have done anything differently.
The sun begins to get low in the afternoon sky as we approach a series of large buildings set back across a field on the right side of the road. Hundreds of bodies decompose in the tall grass. A sign along the shoulder warns against stopping for any hitchhikers. High fences topped with barbwire and towering light posts surround the perimeter. It must be a prison of some sort.
I flashback to the prison in Nevada.
All the men that we killed. We shot them down even though we knew they didn’t pose a serious threat to us.
We could have just kept driving.
But we didn’t.
This correctional facility is much larger. There are approximately twelve buildings, long brown structures, several stories tall and lined with countless tiny slits of glass. It probably housed thousands of criminals. As we pass by the front gate, the rotting body of an undead guard hangs from the flag pole. He shifts his legs and stretches his arms toward us as we pass by the entrance.
I read the gold lettering on the brick wall alongside the road. It confirms what I suspected. This is the infamous supermax federal prison facility outside of Florence, Colorado.
The Alcatraz of the Rockies.
It houses some of the most dangerous psychopaths and criminals.
At least, it used to.
Druglords. Terrorists. Serial Killers.
You name it.
By the look of the place, even the most secure prison in America did not manage to survive the apocalypse. I look down the frontage road to the facility as we pass, but from this distance I can’t see much, and I am not about to slow down to have a look around.
“We shouldn’t have come this way,” I say to Claire.
“It didn’t say anything on the map,” she says. “How was I supposed to know?”
I know it isn’t her fault. If anyone is to blame, it is probably me. I knew about this place. I should have remembered it was up here, but it’s not like I didn’t have plenty of other things to be concerned about. All I can do now is try to get us out of this area as quickly as possible.
It doesn’t take a genius to start putting things together.
The compromised prison facility.
The Reapers.
I scan the road ahead as we approach the town. It’s a familiar scene. Mutilated corpses. Cannibalized vehicles. Graffiti scrawled across the buildings. Claire tells me to make a right turn and then we pass by the firehouse. The reaper is there. His skeletal hand reaching out to grab us. I push the gas down a bit to get through the area a little faster.
When I glance at the mirror to see if Blake is still following, I briefly glimpse another vehicle on the road behind us.
“Left here,” says Claire.
I make a quick turn and can see the last few buildings along the edge of town. My eyes go back to the side mirror as I watch Blake making the turn. About ten seconds later, a black van rounds the corner.
That is when I notice the modifications. The van has been turned into an improvised fighting vehicle, fitted with armor. Murder-holes have been created along the length of the chassis.
South of the border, drug lords have been making tanks like these long before the shit hit the fan. They call them Narco Tanks.
“Shit,” I say. “We got a Victor on our six.”
I forget in the moment that I’m not still with my team. No one around me understands.
“What?” Scout says.
“Someone is following us,” I say.
Blake flashes his lights at me so I know that he has noticed the tail as well. Scout and Steven swivel in their seats to look behind us. Claire checks the mirror on her side of the truck.
The driver of the black vehicle starts to gain on us. I’m only doing sixty, so I press the pedal down to the floor once we reach a stretch of straight, open road to stay ahead of our pursuers.
“Think we can outrun them?” Scout asks.
“I don’t know,” I say. “We’ll try.”
The van continues to gain on us, even as I go over ninety miles an hour. I notice Blake falls a bit behind us. It doesn’t surprise me. He seems like the kind of guy that would drive like a sissy.
“Come on, Blake,” I say to no one in particular.
I notice the next town in the distance as the road widens to four lanes.
“The map,” I remind Claire. “Stay focused.”
She stops looking at the mirror and looks at the map again.
“Keep going straight,” she says.
I switch lanes to drive around a corpse on the highway. Blake shadows the maneuver behind me. Then, I watch as the tank just plows into the corpse so hard that the rotting limbs of the thing fly across the road before the body vanishes beneath the vehicle.
The road narrows back to two lanes as we leave the small town and head back into a winding stretch of road through the mountains. I have no choice but to slow the truck down or lose control going around the curves.
As the van closes the distance on us, rifle barrels slip out through the murder holes. Blake swerves to keep the driver from pulling alongside of him. These people must have done some work on the engine too because that van obviously has plenty of muscle under the hood.
I wait until Blake swerves into the opposite lane and then I slow down to drive beside Blake and prevent the van from flanking him.
“See if you can get a shot on the driver,” I tell Scout.
She rolls down her window and reaches outside with the Glock in her hand and fires. The bullets just ping off the front of the truck. On the passenger side a barrel emerges from the hole and sprays bullets all over the street. Several of them ping off the rear of the truck and one shatters the rear window.
“Take the wheel,” I tell Claire.
She scoots over and puts her foot on the gas. Then she slides beneath me as I get into the passenger seat. I grab my rifle and prop it on the seat.
“Get down,” I tell Scout and Steven.
They grab the kid and crouch behind the front seats, using their bodies to shield him. I try to look for some weak point on the vehicle behind us, but it is a moving fortress.
I shoot at the driver, and after a couple tries I manage to hit the window. The bullet just puts a small chink in the bulletproof glass. The passenger of the van fires the submachine gun blindly, and a hail of nine millimeter bullets pepper our vehicles again. Claire ducks down in her seat
beside me as bullets whiz through the interior of the pickup and hit the radio and the windshield.
“Do something, Chase!” she pleads with me.
I take aim at the truck again and focus my fire on the tires. There is maybe two inches of exposed rubber below the armor. It might be the only shot at stopping this thing. I fire and miss. Fire again, and again, and again and miss every time.
“Fuck,” I curse.
It’s an impossible shot, but I have to keep trying.
I steady the rifle and aim and squeeze the trigger. With all the movement of the truck, I know the shot is too low as soon as I fire. The bullet hits the concrete. But it ricochets off the street and punches the front tire. The front passenger side of the tank slumps down and the armor grinds against the concrete until it comes to a halt while we continue down the road. I stare at the van in disbelief for several seconds as it falls farther and farther behind us.
“You did it!” Claire says.
“Is everyone okay?” I ask.
Scout raises her head up and checks Stevie. Steven doesn’t move. I look down and notice Scout panicking at the blood on the kid’s clothes, but it isn’t his blood. It all came from his father.
Scout pulls Stevie onto her lap. His father slumps down on the floor behind the seat and I can see the bullet wounds along his spine and the bloody hair on the back of his head.
Stevie sobs into Scout’s shoulder. I’m not even sure he knows what happened to his dad. He is just terrified from the last few minutes. I lock eyes with Scout and shake my head to tell her that Steven is already gone. Scout clutches the boy to her tightly to keep him from turning around and looking.
“It’s okay,” she tells him. “It’s okay.”
She repeats it over and over again.
But no matter how much she wants the kid to believe it, that still doesn’t make it true.
Forty
After I swap seats with Claire again, we drive down the highway through quiet farmland in the shot-up pickup truck while the sun slowly sinks behind the mountains to the west. Even half an hour after we last saw the armored van, I still keep checking the road behind us.
No one has said a word in that time. The only sound has been Stevie crying softly in the backseat. Scout still clutches him, but the kid must know by now that something happened to his father.
The highway expands to four lanes again so we must be getting close to Colorado Springs. Claire scans the map and watches the roads that we pass. The dashboard emits a soft ding when the gas light comes on again.
Once we hit the west side of town, abandoned vehicles and corpses start to appear along the road. I have to reduce our speed enough to navigate the mess. There is no time for this. The sun is gone, and the sky is getting darker by the minute. A sense of urgency sets in, and I drive along the grass median to avoid the majority of the traffic.
“Left here,” Claire points her finger across my face, and I turn into a residential district. The dead wander along the road, moaning and reaching for our vehicles. I drive a few blocks, and then Claire tells me to make a right. Then another left.
The sky turns a deep indigo, and I have no choice but to flick on the headlights in order to see.
“How much farther?” I ask her.
“We’re almost there,” Claire says. “It’s on this road.”
We speed up the winding road lined with evergreens until we round a curve and see an abandoned guard post outside an office building. Several corpses wander in the parking lot amongst scores of cars covered in a layer of dust. It doesn’t look like there is anything alive around here at all.
I pull around the parking lot and spot a round tunnel that leads inside the mountain. The door is closed, but this has to be it. I drive through the security fence and bring the truck skidding to a halt several feet from the door.
When I get out of the truck, I notice the security cameras and lights above the door. I wave my arms in the air and hope that someone inside is paying attention and can see me in the darkness.
Blake pulls the other vehicle to a stop beside us and they climb out of the car. Stitch hops out and starts barking like an asshole at the corpses. I turn away from the door and take aim at the figures approaching the tunnel entrance.
I take down a couple of them but notice more and more of them emerging from the darkened streets and heading straight for us. Blake, Danielle, and Natalie begin shooting at the dead as well, but with so many of them coming at us, we might only be able to hold out a few more minutes.
Claire pounds on the steel door and screams for help, but no one inside will hear that. We will be lucky if they hear the gunshots at all. I’m about to give up and try to make a run for it to one of the buildings nearby when the floodlights flick on over our heads. The steel doors groan and slowly slide open.
As soon as the door is open a few feet, a security team emerges and rushes out.
“Get inside, get inside!” yells the pointman as he takes up a shooting position. The team lays down heavy cover fire to hold off the dead as we rush inside; then they fall back behind the doors as they begin to close again.
A couple corpses manage to get inside the tunnel before the guards drop them. One more gets halfway through the slow moving panels as they come together and seal us inside. The thing hangs there, caught between the massive doors. The dead man snaps his teeth and waves an arm at us until one of the security force members walks over and fires a round into his head.
I look around the interior of the dimly lit tunnel as I try to catch my breath. I still can’t believe we actually made it here. My eyes dart around at the guards, not sure what to expect. After everything we’ve been through, I am kind of anticipating that something is about to go terribly wrong.
“Hello,” says someone behind me.
All of us turn around to find a man in a blazer, dress slacks and a clean white shirt standing in front of a trio of black vehicles.
“Welcome to Cheyenne Mountain,” he says with a smile. I recognize his voice. This is the man I spoke to on the phone.
“I’m Corporal—” I begin but he holds up a hand.
“I know,” the man says. “We’ve been expecting you. If you’ll all get in the vehicles we’ll get you inside.”
We climb into the SUV’s and then the drivers take us down the long tunnel with pipes running across the length of the ceiling. After we drive through a chainlink gate and get waved through a guard post, we come to a stop. We get out of the vehicles to see a white wall built into the rock. Government seals are painted on the wall and a plain blue awning over the doorway welcomes us to Cheyenne Mountain Complex.
The man in the white shirt leads us through the doors and down a hallway. We emerge back out in the tunnel and see a pair of large blast doors that sit open with a pair of military police standing guard.
After we walk through the blast doors, the guards and the security team follow us inside as the massive doors slowly swing closed.
The man in the white shirt stops in the entrance to the bunker and turns around to look at us.
“You all seem so nervous,” he says.
“We’ve been through a lot,” Blake says.
“Relax,” the man tells us. “The nightmare is over. You’ve made it. You have nothing to fear anymore.”
I glance around at the rest of the group. Scout clutches Stevie beside her. Stitch sniffs around on the floor and decides to lift his leg and piss on the wall. Danielle looks at Blake and then she reaches up and wraps her arms around his neck and hugs him.
We all want to believe we are safe. It’s just not easy after everything we’ve been through.
“You must all be very tired,” the man says. “We have some rooms ready for you. If you follow the guards they will escort you there. If you’re hungry there is plenty to eat in the cafeteria, which is right down that hallway on the right. In the morning, we will show you around and get you briefed on everything you need to know.”
“Excuse me,” Cl
aire says. “Doctor Schoenheim should probably visit the medical center. His medication—”
“I’m well aware,” the man says. “It’s all been taken care of. His prescription is waiting in his quarters.”
“Right this way,” one of the guards says and we turn and follow him down a hallway.
The man in the white shirt reaches out to pat me on the shoulder as I walk by.
“Nice work getting them here safely, Corporal,” he says. “You’re a hell of a soldier.”
I don’t really know what to say, so I just give him a nod and follow the guards with the rest of the group. They lead us to a long hallway with a series of mahogany doors.
“We’re a bit over capacity,” the guard says. “You’ll have to bunk up together.”
Claire looks at me, but then she follows the doctor inside his room. I enter the room across the hall and Natalie follows me inside and closes the door.
The room is as plain as any of the barracks I’d been in during training. I set the Honey Badger down on the desk, collapse onto the twin bed, and just stare up at the halogen light on the ceiling.
Being here still just feels unreal. After more than two months of constant fear and tension, it is hard to shake the feeling that something awful is always lurking nearby.
Natalie opens up the locker and then she closes it again. She sits down on the bed and stares at me on the other mattress across the room. I’m kind of afraid she’ll start talking but she just sits there quietly for several minutes until she starts untying the laces of her boots. Natalie kicks them off and collapses on the bed. She quietly stares up at the ceiling, too.
“Chase,” Natalie finally says.
I wait for several seconds before I answer. I really don’t want to talk right now.
“Yeah?” I finally say.
“Can you shut off the lights?” she says. “I’m too damn tired to get up.”
“I’ll get them,” I say.
I force myself to sit up and then I walk across the room and turn the lights off. I head back to the bed and kick my own boots off and lay down again. I close my eyes and let out a long, deep breath.
“Thanks, Chase,” Natalie murmurs. She is already drifting off to sleep.
ROTD (Book 3): Rage of the Dead Page 25
