Crawlerz | Book 4 | From The Ashes

by Merritt, R. S.

  It was a lot. They were all blood splattered and worn out. As the day wore on, they’d made the decision to keep fighting no matter how long it took. They’d sealed off the doors behind them so no more crawlerz could get in. Eventually silence fell in the corridor that they were in. The doors on the ends of it were all sealed tight. The only possible place for more of the infected to be lurking was behind the large metal doors leading to the storage space that included the 1970 time capsules that quarantined refugees were put up in.

  “There’s no crawlerz behind that door.” Yue said when Lindsey looked over at her questioningly.

  Lindsey looked slightly more ferocious than she had at the beginning of all of this. Her ponytail was dripping with blood where a crawler had leapt over about ten other people to tackle her to the ground. She’d somehow landed with the barrel of her shotgun in the jumpers mouth. It’d gone off when she slammed into the floor blowing a gigantic hole in the back of the things head. It’s face had slid off the skull and she’d been covered in a variety of bodily juices. All of which had harmlessly dripped onto the goggles she wore over her face mask into battle. She’d landed in a pretty deep puddle of blood though. Her dry cleaning bill was going to suck.

  Lindsey flipped her shot gun around and beat on the door a few times to see if maybe someone would respond. A second or two later the bottom of the door rolled up a few inches and a man called out for them to identify themselves.

  “We’d be the people who just mass murdered enough of the infected to fill a small city to save your sorry asses. Open the damned door before I huff and puff. Also, are the showers working still?” Lindsey asked as the doors were rolled up.

  A group of armed men stood in a loose group on the other side of the garage door. They were a mix of secret service and regular military. A few of them were sporting air force work uniforms. To a man they were all gawking at the blood covered military misfits who made up the suicide squad. Despite the lack of facial art Tom’s men were fitting right in at this point. They’d waded the Styx together to save these people. You didn’t need props or jail house face tattoos to be a certain kind of crazy.

  “The showers actually do work.” One of the men said. He was staring at the blood dripping off their rescuers.

  “That’s good cause I’m a walking biohazard right now. I love this coat, but I may have to burn it.” Harley’s voice boomed out from up front. Everyone was still just sort of standing around the now open door. Harley had been in the forefront of the fight for almost the entire time. Yue suspected his energy level had been drug fueled. It’d worked though so who really cared?

  “Is that you Harley?” A blast from the recent past called out from the overcrowded room that’d just been opened up.

  “Shaun?” Yue asked looking over at Jeff. Jeff shrugged and watched as Shaun cut through the crowd to shake Harley’s hand. One of the steely eyed men on the other side of the open door frame asked for them to make room for President Thompson. Jeff hadn’t really been looking forward to this specific moment. He’d known it was a real possibility though. He kind of hated that he’d risked all their lives to save the prick. He started looking around for Thompson. The only person he could see moving around was Shaun.

  Shaun heard Jeff and made a beeline for him and Yue. He continued to shake everyone’s hands and thank them. By the time he got to Jeff his hand was covered in blood. That didn’t stop him from coming in to give Jeff and the rest of them hugs.

  “Now you’re going to need a shower.” Yue said looking at him.

  “I thought I was going to need a hole to bury myself in. A shower doesn’t sound too bad compared to that. Thank you. I don’t even know how to thank you for saving our lives.” Shaun said graciously.

  “Where’s your uncle hiding at?” Jeff asked to change the subject. None of them were really great at accepting the level of gratitude Shaun was hurling at them.

  “He didn’t make it.” Shaun answered succinctly. Jeff smacked himself internally on changing the subject to something that was now even more awkward. He tried to think of the right thing to say.

  “Mr. President we should pull them all back into the warehouse and seal off the doors for the night. We need to verify the area is secure.” A very competent looking man was tugging on Shaun’s sleeve to get him to go back in the open space behind him. Shaun told the man to stand by. Turning his attention back to Jeff he smiled at the bewildered looks on the faces of his former traveling companions.

  “You ever see that old Kiefer Sutherland show on Netflix? The Designated Survivor one?” Shaun asked.

  “The one where most of the government gets blown up and he ends up being President even though he was like the secretary of housing or something?” LeBron supplied.

  “That’s the one. Basically it’s that scenario with some nepotism sprinkled into the mix.” Shaun said with a wry grin on his face. Lindsey and Tom were both struggling to figure out what was going on. Having known Shaun’s’ uncle everyone in Jeff’s party pretty much got how this could’ve happened. The man had been a paranoid power hungry selfish type with major dictator tendencies.

  “How many men do you have shoved in here?” Jeff asked peering over the crowd separating them from the open warehouse. The people who’d been rescued were mostly standing a little back from their tattoo and blood covered saviors.

  “We’ve got around a hundred. Pretty much everyone who’s left alive would be my guess. We tried to get outside to save everyone but ended up jammed up in here. Not that it’s been horrible with electricity, running water and plenty of food. We were almost ready to make a break for it when you guys showed up. The secret service guys kept saying to stay put until someone came to rescue us. I guess they were right after all.” Shaun said.

  “So you’re like the legal President now?” Drew asked. He was playing catch up having had his attention diverted by trying to help Lisa unjam her rifle. It’d stopped working when she beat a crawler in the head with it a few times. She’d been reloading and thought she saw it twitch.

  “Pretty much. The appointment was even approved by the senate. Or, at least by everyone in the senate that was still alive. About a dozen governors approved it to. I think they mostly did it because their wives wanted to spend a day outside having a picnic.” Shaun answered.

  “A picnic?” It was Lisa’s turn to look baffled by the rapidly evolving conversation with Shaun. Shaun shrugged and explained.

  “Yeah. About the stupidest idea possible. All the bigwigs and their wives and kids got cases of cabin fever. My uncle got them to agree to put me in a cabinet position in exchange for them getting an afternoon outside. It sounds stupid but he told me political deals had been done for way less. Anyway, they got their picnic. Booze and hamburgers and loud music and just the whole freakin’ deal. Got so damned drunk one of the senators forgot one of his kids. He ordered the guard to open the doors so they could go out and find him. It’d only just started getting dark, so the guard did it. Crawlerz must’ve been attracted by the party noise during the day. It all went to hell faster than you could believe.” Shaun realized he’d been talking for a long time while blood literally dripped off parts of his rescuers bodies.

  “Mr. President if you can come back in here until we’ve determined the hallway is secure.” The secret service agent tried again. The guy must be feeling pretty bad since it was his job to protect important members of the government. All the important members of the government had recently been turned into zombie chow per Shaun. Picturing the murderous monsters rampaging through the picnic it was doubtful that getting to play some volleyball and eat some hamburgers had been worth it. There’d be time to get back to normal if they won this war. That time had not yet come.

  Chapter 35: Send out the Clowns

  Clearing and cleaning the base was a dirty dangerous chore that took them a little over a week to complete. It would’ve been done much sooner if not for the emphasis on separating the fallen from the damned. It also took
a good bit of effort to patch up and fix the massive holes ripped in the walls, floors, ceiling and pretty much everything else shot up by the assault force. The joke becoming that next time they got in a fight they’d try to aim away from anything they may have to fix or clean later.

  More survivors were found scattered around different parts of the base. A handful were found in the storeroom of the galley. When the crawlerz had gotten in the first wave of people turned had kept right on running for cover. They ran with their access cards out so they could run right through doors. Doors which they left open for the crawlerz behind them. Inside those sections they accessed more people were turned. Those people then ran deeper into the base with their access cards in front of them. People had survived in a lot of cases because there was a mechanical locking mechanism in place where they hid. Shaun hadn’t realized until they figured that out that he was lucky to have run for the oldest part of the base. It was the part that hadn’t been upgraded to the fancy new access control system yet.

  Plenty of the turned were still locked up in their little sealed off sections of the base. Access badges still swinging off the necks of many of them. Yue was sent scurrying around the base with her guards like some kind of demon divining rod. No one wanted to open a door until she’d told them what to expect on the other side. She wasn’t a hundred percent accurate. It definitely wasn’t an exact science. She was right enough times that it was stupid not to ask her first though.

  Despite the hard work it was a good week for everyone. The base had electricity and plenty of stockpiled provisions. Lindsey had told them that the rations on the ship had been getting scarce. Pretty much everyone who could be offloaded had been off loaded. As the primary fighting men of the ship the squad had been spared until the end. The helicopters they’d landed in were out of fuel and the captain had made it clear they weren’t expected back. This battle had been a one way trip for them one way or the other. Just another day in the lives of the infamous squad.

  They avoided talking about future plans for the first few days. If for no other reason than it was hard to address the President of the United Stated when he was mopping blood and guts off the floor along with the rest of them. Shaun insisted he could spend a few hours a day helping to clean up since he had all the smart people sitting up in the communications and operations rooms working up briefs for him to review when he wasn’t doing custodial work. No matter how much Shaun tried to hide it everyone knew he was doing the manual labor because it was cathartic.

  They knew it was cathartic because they were all doing it too. When you scrubbed and got all the blood out of a hallway it gave you something rare in the apocalypse. A sense of completion. A feeling like you’d accomplished something. They spent so much time running in place just trying to survive that they never seemed to get anywhere. It was also kind of meditative to just sit on the floor for an hour scrubbing away at the stubborn red stains that coated the corridors.

  As fun as scrubbing up blood and guts was though they knew it had to end sometime. That sometime was marked by an airman asking them to join the President for lunch in the Presidential dining room. Idly wondering if Shaun would still have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with oyster crackers while eating off fine china, they washed up and headed in the direction the airman had told them to go. They ignored the available golf carts in favor of stretching out their legs. They had plenty of time to get there and they’d been squatting or bending over most of the morning. It felt good to work the kinks out.

  “We should go loot a Sherwin Williams or something. This paint is gross.” Lisa said pointing at the freshly painted lime green walls. It was her, Drew, Yue, LeBron and Jeff strolling along. Harley had been a little scarce lately. They’d all been wondering if he’d hooked up with one of the squad girls or if he was just sitting in a corner somewhere huffing paint. This lime green stuff could probably get you high enough that you’d be looking down at the moon.

  “We’d have to bring a generator to get the paint mixing machine to work.” Yue said. She was right there with Lisa though in this color being atrocious. She’d never actually said the word ‘atrocious’ out loud but was thinking it might be time to give it a whirl. If anything deserved the use of that particularly pretentious word, it was the leprechaun puke color of the paint they were being forced to smear on the walls.

  “It’s either this lovely baby poop color or we leave the blood spatter stains uncovered.” Drew said. He didn’t personally see a problem with the color. It seemed very military to him.

  “Yeah. The blood spatters lent some class to the place at least. Like works of modern art. Probably worth millions of dollars if we’d framed them instead of scraping the clumpy parts off and painting over the rest.” LeBron said. The banter helping make the long walk seem to go by much faster. They were already there by the time Lisa started to say that blood spatters were pretty much the new normal modern art.

  Entering the dining room they were immediately reassured that they hadn’t needed to dress fancy for the occasion. This was definitely going to be a working lunch. Captain Lindsey and Major Tom were both in attendance as were a couple of their lieutenants. Shaun had a few of the leaders from his team present as well. He thanked everyone for coming and got a round of drinks started for those who requested them. It was only noon but after a few days’ worth of cleaning unidentifiable globs of bloody bio gunk out of the nooks and crannies of the huge base everyone was feeling pretty entitled.

  Conversation remained light for the beginning of the meal. One of Shaun’s men gave an overview on the status of cleaning out the base. He also let everyone know that the communications room was back to being fully operational. There’d only been a couple of people with knowledge of how those systems worked who’d survived. They were busy training others now so that the radios could go back to being manned around the clock.

  One of the principal pieces of news the radio men had been broadcasting was the fact that a large portion of the United States government hadn’t survived. They’d had to spend a good amount of time explaining how the nephew of the late President was now the new President. It sounded a little too much like the way power was passed in dictatorships to suit most patriotic Americans. Once it was explained in detail how it’d come to occur most of them seemed to accept it. It wasn’t like there was really another option. No one was going to be sporting an “I Voted” sticker anytime soon.

  The state of the bases and ships that responded to the broadcasts was really the most troubling news. They were all in similar positions to the ship the suicide squad had flown off of. They were low on supplies and looking to just find a place to anchor and work on trying to survive. One thing they weren’t short on was mouths to feed.

  Those mouths to feed were a subject Jeff wanted to explore more fully. A lot of them were the mouths of highly trained soldiers who were currently floating around in the ocean not doing anyone any good. In Jeff’s opinion they needed to marshal those forces and get them turned on the enemy. The sooner they exterminated the plague of infected the sooner they could start reclaiming their country. Hiding in underground bases behind thick walls wasn’t going to do it. Going on the defensive was a losing strategy here.

  As the lunch wound on Jeff got more and more animated discussing the plans that they’d made for clearing the country. He described their train trip up to Philadelphia to everyone. No one was surprised to hear that there were groups of survivors who were resentful of the way the government had handled the crisis. It was a little concerning that those groups were coming together to do things like ambush trains on government business. Trains that’d been trying to give out supplies to the same survivors who’d shot at them.

  Shaun agreed that they should get the countrywide crawler cleansing operation started as soon as possible. No one was safe while a single infected roamed the country. There was going to be the issue of venturing into South America and people traveling from other countries. They all agreed those were proble
ms for another day. Right now they needed to focus on building out secure locations for noncombatants and get their own combatants out into the field. They needed to continue to work on how to kill the most infected with the smallest risk. That’s when Captain Lindsey spoke up. Until that moment she’d been mainly listening and adding quick relevant insights when she had them.

  “This mission to experiment with ways to crush the crawlerz. That’s got my unit written all over it. Mr. President and Mr. Jeff we do hereby volunteer to lead that effort.” Lindsey said.

  “It does seem like a good fit. I’m assuming you know it’s going to be dangerous as hell. You’re good with that?” Shaun asked in his best Presidential voice.

  “My guys and I are meant to be out in the field killing those things sir. That’s what we do.” Lindsey answered. She was munching on a bowl full of noodles while she answered. Her whole attitude portraying that the prospect of riding a train car filled with explosives around the country to fight off hordes of insane super powered freaks didn’t bother her in the slightest.

  “You’d be reporting to Jeff for this operation. I’m putting him in charge of it. Or, keeping him in charge of it anyway. Jeff, on this one I’d rather you lead from the rear. I need you here to work on some more logistical tasks on top of this one.” Shaun said firmly once again practicing his Presidential tone. No one bothered to tell him he sounded slightly Australian every time he tried to sound official. No one told him but Lisa and Drew giggled every time Shaun talked now and they were rapidly dragging LeBron into it too.