"There was one final piece to the Eden Project that we needed but still didn't get at the time of your viewing."
"The hormone inhibitor..." Sarah muttered as her gaze was transfixed to the screen.
"I bet you said the hormone inhibitor," Ron said with a chuckle. "Was that what made you come here in the first place? I hope it was. We needed one last mysterious item that remained uncollected so it would stick in the back of your mind. If I laid my clues properly, it led you back here to see this and now that you're here, that means that it's the only thing left. This time there's no dual-purpose; you'll have to get in, grab it, and get out. But whatever you do, don't let Glass know why you were there, otherwise this whole thing can yet be sunk. But I have ultimate faith in you, Sarah." His rosy cheeks beamed at her. "The final thing you need to finish the project is something called 'galanin'. It's a neuropeptide that inhibits certain hormones in the body that will be necessary to overcome this terrible disease that we've created. It will also take care of the advanced regeneration that I talked about. There's a small base several miles south of where you are. Mr. Glass uses it to train his soldiers and do some small experiments on his men. But while the place may be small, it's heavily guarded. The galanin you're looking for should come in a box that you'll find in a small medical office on the property. Here are the coordinates to the training facility..."
Sarah scrambled around the lab, looking for a pen and paper. When she got them, she copied down the coordinates Ron relayed to her. Then he told her to pay careful attention while he gave her simple but detailed instructions on how to complete the project when she had the item. He introduced all of the equipment in the lab to her, reassuring her that he would have set up everything and automated it as much as possible to leave as little work for her as could be.
She furiously jotted down his notes with all the detail she could get, and with a final corny joke and heartfelt goodbye, the video stopped and the security screen soon went back to showing the camera feeds surrounding the lab.
The two of them stared at the screen for a moment longer, stunned into silence by the overwhelming information in Ron's video.
"Wow, that was really quite something," Wayne said.
"Yeah... I can't believe it." It was hard for Sarah to take it all in at once, and she found herself suddenly overwhelmed by emotion. After the horrible turn things had taken lately, this all seemed too good to be true. But this meant that Ron was working against Glass from the inside, where David was. And it meant that there was still a chance to save her son.
"Are you all right?" Wayne asked.
"Yeah, I'm okay," she said, wiping the tears from her eyes. "I'm just trying to figure out what to do next."
"Well," he said, "I think we have a base to scope out."
Sarah lowered the binoculars. "Ron was right. The security is tight."
"Nice rhyme, poet," Wayne teased.
Sarah smirked and jabbed him in the shoulder. "Anyway, it would take a good plan to break in and get the galanin. And I hate to say it, but it looks like it's a two-man job."
"Tell me what you see."
Sarah raised the binoculars again as loud gunfire rang out in the distance. "Much smaller than the base I busted you out of. It's mostly shooting ranges on the outside, but I see an obstacle course, too. There's a pretty large building in the back corner that I'm guessing is a training facility. The medical office must be somewhere in there."
"What about the perimeter?"
"Double fencing with plenty of barbed wire. And the property is small enough that I don't think we could get past it anywhere without being noticed. We also wouldn't want to just drive a truck through the gate with all that firepower against us."
"Lotta guards?"
"Actually, it seems like it's pretty lightly guarded. But there's a ton of soldiers training right now, so even though it only looks like there's a few people guarding the perimeter, there's still a whole hell of a lot of soldiers with guns.
"Stealth it is," Wayne said.
Sarah agreed with his assessment and they slipped back into the woods and disappeared as the gunfire echoed through the bright day.
When they arrived back home after their excursion, Sarah took a trip out to the sewer tunnels outside of Glass's compound. She drafted up a small note, this time written with pen and paper, and she was far more careful this time, being silent and watching and waiting as carefully as possible for any guards patrolling between the entrance and the drop box to leave. She placed the note inside for Jeb to find, detailing that she discovered Ron's message, and that she was in the process of acquiring the final item to complete the Eden Project. She left the tunnels without incident, knowing that Jeb would deliver the note to Sandra, and that she in turn would relay the message to Ron for her. Having a strong sense of hope for what was ahead of her and the general plan that was starting to hatch, she returned home.
Sarah and Wayne rested at the cabin, going over the notes that she'd written down at the lab. Her brain was working in overdrive trying to keep track of it all as she and Wayne also planned how to break into the training facility.
"I just don't think it would be a good idea for you to come with me," Sarah told him.
"Ouch. Don't sell me short so quickly."
"I don't mean to sell you short, but let's face it... to say you're a hundred percent or even fifty percent or even twenty-five percent of what you used to be would be a gross overstatement."
"Even though I don't have eyes anymore, I'm still a man through and through. And the one thing you don't do to a man is insult his pride," he said bitterly. "I'm still a soldier. I can still fight."
"I'm sorry," Sarah said. "I didn't mean that. I just don't know how this is going to work."
"Well how are you going to get in on your own?" he retorted.
"I don't know," she admitted, exasperated. Her thoughts of David grew in intensity ever since she watched Ron's video in the lab. In fact, her heart still hadn't settled from the pounding rhythm that the video stirred up in her. And now all of this seemed too much to process at once.
She looked between the notes she had taken and an unfolded map of the area, trying to think of strategy, both before and after she got the item.
"What?" Wayne asked.
She turned her head to him, confused. "I didn't say anything."
"It sounds like you're muttering," he said.
"Well, I'm not," she replied. She felt a little insulted, even though she now began to question whether she was unconsciously muttering to herself. But then a second later, she heard it too. "What is that?"
Wayne's eyelids drifted opened, revealing the empty pockets within; if he had eyes, they would have been wide as moons right now. "Sarah..."
"Is that—"
She shot up to her feet and ran over to the window overlooking the deck. She pressed her face to the glass and craned her neck, but she couldn't see anything. She ran around the cabin, trying to get a vantage point, but she couldn't find one. She finally opened the front door and stood on the porch, looking left and right in the woods surrounding them. And then she saw it.
"Wayne! We have to leave right now! Run!"
A huge horde of highly-intelligent zombies swept through the woods, filtering past the trees like ants in grass. They were hungry, and Sarah and Wayne were on the menu.
7
Enkindled
Wayne hurried out of the cabin, now swiftly handling the corners and hallways leading to the front door. He was gaining experience moving around without his ability to see, and when he was outside with Sarah, he could easily hear the direction they were coming from and how big the horde was. It made his skin crawl, and he took off running with her. He only had time to bring his cane, and it swung wildly by his side as they fled.
Sarah wrapped her arm around Wayne's back as he threw his arm over her shoulders. She navigated him through the woods so he wouldn't run into any trees and he'd have something to hold on to when he stumbled.
>
She twisted her head over her shoulder to glance at the crowd chasing them, and there was no doubt that the zombies were the same intelligent type that Glass had unleashed in recent weeks. But she had never seen them in this quantity, and the way they moved after them—some of the zombies beginning to branch off and flank in the woods, looking for points ahead to try to close them off—was terrifying.
Sarah only had her pistol and knife on her, and they would be practically useless against the horde behind them. And with the speed of these zombies, she knew it was only a matter of time before they caught up to them.
She searched the landscape in front of her and Wayne, looking for anywhere they could hide or for something to put distance between them. And with Wayne relegated to following along where she pulled him, all the strategizing was left to her.
Wayne periodically shouted out questions for Sarah, mostly asking her to keep him updated on what she saw to prepare himself for the feel of the terrain ahead.
But the woods stretched on in front of them as far as Sarah's eyes could see. To their right, there was the cliff that ran past their property, but she didn't think it would be wise to take a blind leap of faith over the edge of it. It was some thirty to forty feet down, she guessed, and though it would certainly get them away from the chasing horde, they wouldn't live to tell the tale.
"Over here!" Sarah yelled. She yanked Wayne's torso along with her as she pulled him down to the winding road at the edge of the woods, not far from where Sandra had passed by.
The undead horde was fifty yards away and gaining.
They began to pass a few stores at the edge of the nearby small town, but there would be no hiding in them; no vehicles to climb into and get away; nothing. The droning chatter of the undead grew to a cacophony behind them as Sarah prayed for relief.
She had the pistol within quick reach in case she had to use it. Not on the zombies, but on her and Wayne. At first she didn't even want to think about it, but then the zombies closed in. Forty yards from them. Thirty yards. When they closed the distance to just twenty, Sarah seriously thought about it. She didn't tell Wayne how close they were, but she knew he could hear.
She made a silent exasperated cry to God in that moment. The thought that it was over hammered into her head more and more, and she just couldn't believe it. She couldn't believe that right when there seemed to be a glimmer of hope again, the rug was pulled out from under her so quickly and finally without her even seeing it coming. It wasn't fair.
The mindless sea of droning faces bounced up and down behind them. The crowd stretched and contracted from each other, trying to anticipate their movements. When Sarah and Wayne got into narrow roads between buildings, they would funnel in behind them, and when they changed direction and darted back into the open woods, they would begin to spread out to the sides in case they made a sharp turn so they could intercept them.
And now Sarah could hear the crowd right behind them. It seemed like only a few more seconds and the dead's cold hands would be grasping at their collars and dragging them down to the dirt. Sarah's eyes scanned frantically in front of her. She hadn't been paying much attention to where she was going anymore, her mind now filled with a dull buzzing from the panic she felt. But even still, Wayne seemed to keep his calm in spite of all of this, still asking her where they were going.
They had slipped back into the woods where the cliff face still sidled up next to them. And then Sarah noticed that the tall firs that sprouted up from the bottom of the cliff rose far taller than they should have at thirty or forty feet down; in fact, most of each tree was visible, and that meant the drop wouldn't be far. It was the only chance they had. They had to take it.
"This way!" she shouted. "There's going to be a—"
Before Sarah even had time to get the words out of her mouth, they were already sailing through the air. Once they had cleared the cliff edge below them, Sarah looked down, hoping and praying that the ground was closer to them than she feared. But how far down it was, she couldn't tell, because it was all a blur.
Wayne's heart heaved into his chest at the unexpected plunge, and in the next moment they both hit the ground. They landed on relatively soft earth that sloped down to a vast expanse of forest in front of them. Their bodies tumbled down the slope and they lost their grips on each other. They picked up speed and began to roll down like wheels. The world tumbled around Sarah, and Wayne only had the feeling of it as he spun through the blackness. Sarah made it okay, only getting a few cuts and bruises on her limbs as she came to a crashing stop where the grade leveled out, but Wayne took a good hit to his back on a hard fir on the way down. His cane had been flung somewhere and lost as he grunted out in pain when he finally came to rest. Sarah crawled over on her hand and knees, checking on him. Her body felt numb, and she couldn't tell if she had seriously injured herself, but the fact that she was still able to move over to him told her that it couldn't have been that bad.
"Get up, we have to keep going," she said in a shaky voice.
Wayne grunted again but rolled over onto his hands and knees. She slung his arm over her shoulders and hoisted the two of them up again.
The undead made the plunge after them, being a little more apprehensive than normal zombies might have been to throw themselves into possible danger. Their bodies pinwheeled down the hill like an avalanche of boulders. By the time they reached the shallow grade and returned to their feet, some of them breaking limbs on the way, Sarah and Wayne were already out of sight.
The dead lost track of them in the tumble, and the two of them moved through the woods as fast as they could, cutting a hard angle away from them. They worked their way back toward the cliff face eventually and found a large oak tree with huge roots that had come up out of the ground. When they skirted around to the other side of it, they found that the tree butted right up against a little hollowed alcove in the rock, creating the perfect hiding space.
"In here," Sarah whispered, feeling like her lungs were about to explode. They both hobbled inside and Sarah helped Wayne sit himself down as he winced and wheezed from the pain in his back.
The thunderous sound of footsteps pounded along the edge of the woods by the cliff as the zombies spread out and slowed down, searching for them.
"I think they're coming," Wayne whispered, relying on his heightened sense of hearing.
"Here," Sarah said. She began scraping up handfuls of dirt and loose leaves and other clippings of the forest and rubbed them all over herself and Wayne.
"What are you doing?"
"So they don't smell us," she whispered.
There was enough space in the alcove for them to rest comfortably against the smooth rock, but Sarah pulled Wayne toward the partially-uprooted tree and wedged them as deep between the tree roots and the earth as she could. It was a tight squeeze, and Wayne was extremely uncomfortable from what he thought were broken ribs, but he kept it together and stayed silent.
The zombies continued to spread out. Most of them had continued down the gentle grade deeper into the forest, but a few straggled along the bottom of the cliff and sniffed around.
A tall and lanky female zombie stumbled in front of their alcove and stopped, gazing around. It tossed a glance over at the little nook that Sarah and Wayne had crawled into. It saw all the smooth rock inside, but no people. It turned its head and started to stumble away, but then it stopped again. It darted its head back toward the nook, then it took a few investigative steps and crept around closer to the cliff face. It bent down a little and peered closer into the alcove, but still it didn't see anyone. Smelling the country air, there was no scent of them either.
Then the undead creature turned and left.
When the footsteps of all the patrolling horde faded away and they were sure that the undead were gone, Sarah and Wayne crawled out of their extremely tight space and relaxed in the alcove. As Wayne began to catch his breath, they stared out of the little space, propping their backs against the smooth rock, and
they gazed at the pale pinks and creamy oranges washing across the sky as the day faded into night.
"We should keep moving," Sarah suggested.
But Wayne was still wheezing, though his breathing started to slow. "No, I think we'll be okay right here for tonight. The space is small enough to hide, but comfortable enough to sleep; it'll do. Plus I don't really want to move too much now, to be honest."
"Are you okay?"
"Yeah, might have a broken rib or two, but I'll get on. I just need a decent night's rest."
They both found themselves huddled together, unconsciously gravitating toward each other as the night sky poured in deep blues. The air began to get a little chilly as the sun set down toward the other side of the world.
Sarah felt a big, warm hand wrap around hers.
"Thanks," Wayne said. "I would've been a goner if it wasn't for you."
"You did pretty good yourself back there," she said. "Much better than I thought you would, actually." Her eyes fell. "And... I just want to say I'm sorry for what I said back at the cabin. I should have never questioned your ability to fight and your warrior attitude. You're like a lion."
"Don't mention it," he said. "Like I said, I may not be like I used to be, but I'm still good with my hands." Wayne had unconsciously placed his hand down on Sarah's thigh. It gently pressed against her warm skin that peeked out beneath the bottom of her shorts.
Zombie Apocalypse Box Set 2 Page 68
