Crawlerz | Book 4 | From The Ashes

by Merritt, R. S.

  “I don’t think bourbon’s your thing babe.” Jeff said passing her a wet washcloth and a plastic cup filled with water.

  “Was I an idiot?” She asked miserably. The last thing she remembered was slurping down some pasta while Kate was explaining the differences between the different types of bourbon. At the thought of the explanation of how bourbon worked Yue had to put her hand over her mouth.

  “No. You were perfectly – “ Jeff started to lie and say she’d acted perfectly civilized. If acting civilized meant professing her love for Jeff in a song she decided to make up on the spot, then she’d been very civilized. Part of the civilized piece may have fallen away when she’d decided to switch to her own rendition of the Sir Mixalot classic “Baby Got Back” for an impromptu dance number. Luckily for everyone concerned she’d found a couch soon afterwards to pass out on.

  “You hesitated.” Yue said looking at Jeff accusingly.

  Jeff smiled at his miserable looking plus one. “You were the life of the party babe. In the future you may just want to pace yourself a little better. I understand you want to become a connoisseur of the finer things, but you’ve got plenty of time. If you want to party like a rock star, I’m down with that too.”

  “Shut up I hate you.” Yue said. She used the towel to wipe her mouth off then climbed back into bed. She was in the room Jeff had been given due to his rank. She was thinking she might just go to her own bed in the barracks instead. Jeff’s room reeked of puke now. Getting all that out of her system seemed to have helped some. She fell back asleep sideways on the bed. Jeff pulled a cover over her and got to work on cleaning up the bourbon scented vomit that was pretty much everywhere.

  The next time Yue woke up she felt a little more human. Her mouth still tasted so bad that she wished she could throw it away and get another one. Other than her mouth tasting bad and a pounding headache she felt ok though. She sat up and looked over at Jeff. He’d fallen asleep in the chair at the desk in the corner of the room. He must’ve sense her looking. His eyes snapped open as he gave her a worried grin.

  “How are you feeling?” He asked her in a gentle, soft voice.

  “Like crap. Why am I naked?” Yue asked suddenly realizing she was in fact without clothes.

  “You decided you wanted to take a shower at one point last night.” Jeff said smiling. Yue didn’t like the way he was smiling.

  “You don’t have a bathroom in here though, right? It’s down the hall?” Yue asked completely confused. She was worried she’d been walking around in the hallway naked. She stared at Jeff waiting for him to tell her what’d happened.

  “Nope. You stripped down and passed out in the closet.” Jeff said laughing.

  “I. What? How did I get back in?” Yue stumbled all over her words. She was completely mortified. She was going to need to dig a hole somewhere to hide in. No way she was ever going to leave this room again.

  “Don’t worry. I wrapped you up in a sheet and put you back in bed. I was a perfect gentlemen.” Jeff said. He didn’t mention that she’d been covered in her own puke at the time. It’d made being a perfect gentlemen a lot easier. The shower hadn’t been the only bathroom fixture she’d gotten confused about the night before either. He’d take that secret to the grave.

  Yue leaned back against the wall and shut her eyes. She didn’t even know the words to say how sorry she was. All she wanted at this point was a toothbrush, a bottle of aspirin and a rocket ship that’d take her to the dark side of the moon. She was wondering how to slip out of his room and find somewhere to hide in shame when someone knocked on the door. She immediately opened her eyes and started shaking her aching head. No way in hell did she want anyone to see her like this.

  Jeff got up and went to the door. He cracked it open enough to see that it was Captain Kate herself standing outside. Her nostrils flared at the pungent odor of cleaners mixed with vomit. She didn’t try and push her way into the room. Rather she handed him a plastic bag and let him know to come find her once Yue was feeling better. She wanted to continue the planning session they’d started the night before.

  She left after a final goodbye and Jeff closed the door. He opened up the bag and was happy to see there was a bottle of aspirin, one of those hot water bags and an actual orange Gatorade still in the original container. As hungover as she was Yue still appreciated the gesture. The Gatorade was valuable currency in today’s world. It touched Yue that the captain had been willing to drop it off herself as well. All in all it made her feel about a thousand times worse.

  “You heard the captain.” Jeff said. “Chug that Gatorade and take some pills. Once you feel better, we’re going to go meet up with her to do some more planning. The sooner we get people out there killing crawlerz the better.”

  A few hours later Yue was ready to face the music. She’d sent Jeff out to get her food. He’d brought her back a stack of pancakes which almost made Yue cry. He was so good to her even after she’d embarrassed the hell out of him the night before. It made it worse that he was so nonchalant about it. She almost wished he’d get pissed off at her. If he’d yell at her then she’d have someone to yell at. That sounded better than sitting in bed being mad at herself for whatever shenanigans she’d pulled the night before.

  “I’m ready.” Yue said in a shaky voice. Her headache was mostly under control now. She didn’t want to go but she didn’t want to be left out either. She wasn’t ready to live in a world where the men folk got to decide what they were going to do. It occurred to her that wasn’t really a fair thought since Jeff was going to go meet with a woman to figure out next steps. The woman who was in charge of the whole base. It was more about deciding her own fate than pure feminism evidently. She basically just wanted to hurry up and get past whatever idiocy had happened the night before.

  They found Kate in her office drinking coffee. Commander Scott was also in the room with her. She signaled them to come in and grab a seat. Once they were sitting down, she asked them if they wanted any coffee or anything. It being a hungover Yue and your everyday Jeff they absolutely did. Scott left and came back with a seaman carrying a tray with a coffee thermos and two mugs on it. They each started putting together their drinks while making small talk.

  “As part of this plan to reclaim North America I think we need to capture at least a couple of cows and bring them back here. I know most people just drink it black now or use the dried creamer, but I miss milk. I’d kill for a latte.” Kate said with a grin.

  Yue smiled and told Kate how they’d talked about what they’d do once the coffee supplies started running out. The four of them agreed that’d be a solid reason to get in a big boat and head south. Yue was feeling better every second. It occurred to her that with everything else going on in the world her getting drunk and acting like an idiot wasn’t going to be front page news. Jeff wasn’t big on idle chit chat, so he went ahead and kicked off the real reason they were there.

  “I think at this point we’ve hashed out the plan pretty well. The numbers suck but it seems doable. We could always do something else if someone eventually figures out something better.” Jeff said. He was referring to putting teams in trains and trucks and training them on how to setup explosives to kill off the crawlerz who’d come for them at night. It really was going to take forever but if they never got started then it’d never get done.

  “Yeah. I agree. At some point we need to start eating the elephant. For it to have any chance of working though we’re going to need teams of people to go out and do it. We still haven’t been able to raise Weathertop. Everyone else we’ve reached out to is in the same boat.” Commander Scott said.

  “Weathertop’s not that far from here. We should send a team to check it out.” Jeff said. The looks he got back from Kate and Scott pretty clearly indicated what they thought of that plan. They were ok with sending scavenging missions out but sending people any further than that required volunteers. They were pretty sure they could recruit some volunteers for the country clearing m
ission they were putting together. Sending people to a secret base that’d suddenly stopped communicating? That sounded like a one way ticket to everyone in the room.

  The most likely reason Weathertop had gone offline was because it’d been overrun by the infected. It seemed extremely unlikely but so had losing an aircraft carrier in the middle of the ocean. They all knew that if a group of people stayed in a single place for too long that eventually the demons would find a way in. Typically that way in was handed to them on a silver platter by the frustration people felt at being locked away underground for months at a time. The crawlerz were fully capable of digging into the dirt like moles then finding a weakness somewhere to exploit but they mostly didn’t have to get that fancy.

  “We could go. It’s not far. We could make it there and back in a day if we had to.” Yue said.

  “The sooner we get there the sooner we can talk them into lending us some troops to get the party started. Weathertop is also the only place left on the continent with a decent computer system. We should be able to pull a half accurate inventory of where the military has all their explosives stored.” Jeff said.

  Commander Scott nodded thoughtfully. “You might want to look and see if they kept records on fertilizer and dynamite and other stuff that could be used to make bombs. Homeland security should’ve been tracking all of that. You don’t necessarily need claymores if you have sticks of dynamite and bags of ball bearings.”

  Kate stood up and announced she had someplace else to be. She left Commander Scott to work with them on the logistics piece. He let them know she was meeting a ship with some wounded on it who were going to stay on land while they healed. The ship they were on had caught on fire. They’d put the fire out but not before it raged through part of the berthing area.

  “How are the people out on the ships doing?” Yue asked.

  Scott held his hand out and seesawed it back and forth before answering. “The ones on the nuclear powered ships are cruising around doing pretty good. Everyone else has either found a place to weigh anchor or ended up dead. There was a fleet of cruise ships that went south looking for a place to land and start a new life. They were loaded down with people. The last we heard from them they were almost out of fuel and still trying to find somewhere safe to land. They wanted somewhere that wasn’t crawling with the infected or defended by men with big guns. It’s not like anybody wanted tens of thousands of people suddenly coming ashore to join them.”

  “What about sailboats?” Yue asked Scott. She’d heard repetitively about the ships powered by nuclear reactors being able to keep on cruising. She’d been curious why people weren’t just using sailboats. It wasn’t like the apocalypse had gotten rid of the wind.

  “Sure. The Eagle is actually anchored off Block Island right now. She’s a three hundred foot beast with three masts. She’s gone from being the antique training ship to being our most modern vessel. There’s plenty of others out there as well. It kind of boils down to where are they able to actually go?” Scott answered.

  “I’m thinking for the trip to Weathertop we just need a couple of trucks gassed up and ready to go in the morning.” Jeff interrupted the tangent that Scott and Yue had gotten off on. He was hoping to steer them back on course. It was too late in the day for them to leave now but he’d like to have everything ready to take off first thing in the morning. The sooner they got done organizing the mass murder of millions of crawlerz the better. He was hoping that as they did it, they’d come up with ways to speed up the process.

  He eventually wanted a normal life with Yue. A life that didn’t involve nightly discharges of hundreds of ball bearings into the walls of flesh that’d be trying to get at them. Commander Scott realized he’d let himself get way off track. He coughed and mentally pulled back from the conversation him and Yue had been having. It was almost comical the way his face lost some of its animation as he turned to focus on the task at hand.

  Chapter 29: Don’t Forget the Snacks

  “Go away.” Drew slapped at the hand that’d dared poke him in the shoulder while he was trying to sleep. There was the annoying trilling sound of an alarm going off on a smart phone somewhere. He finally figured out it was his.

  “We’ve got to go bro.” LeBron poked the bear one more time then jumped backwards when Drew took a swing at him. LeBron watched until Drew dragged himself out of bed and started pulling all his crap together. If the other side of the barracks was on fire Drew would hit snooze to try and get a few more minutes of sleep before the fire spread to their side. You had to make sure he was completely out of bed or it was almost guaranteed he’d fall back asleep.

  Drew started to ask why they had to leave so early. Then he remembered it hadn’t sounded bad at all the night before. When that four in the morning wakeup call was still ten hours away the plan had made a lot of sense. Lisa and LeBron and the other smart people who’d gone to bed early were probably still fine with it. Drew had stayed up late with Harley and a couple of other guys playing cards. At least he hadn’t been drinking like a fish. Harley may have an even harder time getting out of bed than Drew had.

  They were leaving early so they had time to get all their gear together and get down to the docks before sunrise. They’d be taken by boat over to where Commander Scott had two trucks waiting for them. He’d sent men over the day before to make sure the trucks were gassed up and ready to go. From there it should be about a four hour drive to Weathertop. That’s about how long it would’ve taken in the old days with minimal traffic anyway.

  Once they started driving it was going to be a Weathertop or bust kind of situation. They weren’t taking a big rig with a nice safe trailer to sleep in. They were taking a couple of Ford trucks. They were nice trucks, but they were in no way, shape, or form crawler resistant. If they made it to Weathertop and the place had been overrun, then the plan was to turn around and haul ass back to Cape May. They were all hoping it’d turn out to be something less dramatic. A generator failure or something along those lines.

  It wasn’t just the Cape May folks who were waiting to see what they found out. All up and down the coast people would be tuning in to see what was discovered. Weathertop had been the hub of communication flow between all the facilities up until now. Having them drop off the air like that had a lot of people wondering if there even was a government anymore. If all the leaders were dead, then they really were on their own. They may have all thought the orders coming out of Weathertop were idiotic at times but at least there’d been someone somewhere trying to get them all organized. Someone speaking from a position of legitimate power keeping them all bound together.

  Drew helped Lisa carry her stuff outside to the truck. It felt horribly wrong to be traipsing around outside in the dark. Every bit of his sleepiness had melted away when he realized he was going to be walking out of the barracks into the yard at nighttime. Even after Yue had walked over and told him she didn’t sense anything he’d still kept a pistol in his hand. Not that he’d be able to defend himself if a stalker came out of nowhere at lightspeed to sink its teeth into him.

  The crawlerz owned the night now. That was a truth anyone who’d spent time out in the field thoroughly believed. The men helping them get loaded up were walking around shining flashlights all over the place. They even had the gall to be talking and laughing to one another. These guys would make it about five seconds on the other side of the inlet. Hell they better hope like crazy that no crawlerz managed to swim across. They’d hear that conversation from miles away.

  They got the truck loaded up and made the short trip over to the dock. The chief who was taking them across shook hands with Haywood when he boarded. The two NCOs had bonded over a shared love of expensive bourbon and fishing. Fishing now being a little more stressful than the old days. In Cape May it was the only fresh food you were getting unless you liked cabbage. Some people like the two bromancing chiefs loved the simplicity of it. You fished, you caught fish, you ate them, then you went to bed. You woke up and s
tarted all over again.

  They turned on the spotlights as they cruised for the dock. They’d timed it to get there a little before sunrise to make sure they didn’t waste a single second once the sun came over the horizon. That may have been a little too ambitious. The bosuns mate steering the boat was keeping them as far to the left of the center of the inlet as he could without risking running aground. The reason being the fast moving shadows on shore that were pacing them. There was the occasional loud splash as one of the infected decided to hell with it and leapt for them.

  “You want to see something messed up?” The chief asked. When no one responded he took that as a yes. He went forward and turned on the powerful spotlight that was used in search and rescue missions. The beam cut a hole through the darkness that seemed to extend forever. The chief spun the light so that it was pointed towards the shore of the mainland. It was immediately apparent what he was talking about.

  “Holy hell. There’s a zillion of the bastards.” Harley said staring into the darkness at the far shore where it was illuminated by the powerful beam of light. The shoreline looked like the front row at a Metallica concert if the band was throwing pogo sticks out into the crowd. The crawlerz were bouncing all over the place. They began to get that familiar dirty sensation of psychic tendrils slipping into their minds. Yue was rocking back and forth and rubbing her temples. She’d refused any drugs so that she could be fully functional when they arrived at Weathertop. She had a feeling her sensitivity was going to be very useful there.