“What’s this
all about?” I asked.
“Wait.”
Washburn came into the room a few minutes later. He didn’t tell Fields to leave. He asked “You were on flight 3044 to Kansas City from Seattle on August 15?”
“Yes I was.”
“Were there any other survivors?”
“I told you I didn’t stick around. There were zombies coming out of the plane. It was on fire. It exploded. I ran away.”
Washburn motioned to Fields. Fields pressed his pistol harder into the back of my skull. Washburn asked again “Were there any other survivors?”
I thought about it.
I remembered the man who had been lying on the stone, ripped in half, his clothes burned off. He was screaming something over and over…a name. Lynn? Lisa Something. I couldn’t remember. But then the man died. I watched him die beside me.
Anyone else?
I didn’t think Norm had been on the plane…or had he? No. Norm had been out on the highway all night looking for his wife and daughter.
“Were there any other survivors?” Fields
asked, his voice rough.
“I’m thinking. Hold on.”
I didn’t stay around long enough. There were a lot of deads coming out of the plane. Some were walking around the crash site. I couldn’t remember seeing anyone else alive.
Finally I said “No. I was the sole survivor.”
“Take him back to the others,” Washburn said.
Fields roughly grabbed me and took me
back.
As Fields left, Ski asked “What was that all about?”
“They asked me about the plane crash. They wanted to know if anyone else survived it.”
“Why?”
“I have no idea. I thought it was all an accident. Evidently, something else was going on.”
Washburn stepped back into the room, a smug smile on his face. “Shall we continue?”
“Why’d you take him out of here?” Ski asked, standing.
“There was something I needed to clear up before I went forward.”
“What did you need to clear up? What the hell happened with his plane crash? The man is lucky to be alive and now you’re harassing him for it? Come on! What, was the plane crash intentional? This is some jacked-up shit, man,” Ski hollered. “This place isn’t safe!”
“Then why did you come here?”
“Because of Jenny,” Mindy interrupted. “My friend told me to come here on my cell phone.”
“Ah, cell phones,” Washburn smiled. “We have been trying to get a satellite link-up operational. Obviously one worked for you. We are trying to make it easier for people to find loved ones.”
“There are so many dead people,” Cindy said. “I don’t think there’s enough people left out there
to
find.”
Washburn said “We have reports coming in from all over the western seaboard. You would be surprised how many people are still alive. There are survivors in Salt lake City,” he said, a short smile on his lip.
“
But!
They all have MCON – they all have the visible sign of infection.”
“Visible signs?”
Mindy asked.
“Large bruises under the
skin that appear to be dripping. The bruise is normally somewhere on the head or neck. This is the first
symptom
of the infection. Then severe headache, dizziness, a strong craving for food, followed by death. This virus is airborne. After death everyone’s brainstems will swap at the cellular level…unless…we do what must be done.”
I
asked “What must be done?”
“Reversal.
A reverse high-level nuclear explosion. In laymen’s terms, the warhead of the missile will have a reverse magnetic pulse. In theory this will reverse the poles of the earth. It will also…reverse the cells of the human brain back to where they were before.”
Ski said “You gotta be
fucking kidding
me! You’re going to launch another nuke?”
“Yes Mr. Markowski. The missiles are already planned to launch.”
“Missiles? You mean there are two more to launch? No way! No! You can’t do this!”
“We are. The missiles are set to launch at 0830 two days from now.”
“What if they don’t work? What if one of them backfires? What about the people you said that are still alive in Salt Lake? How many more people are going to have to die?”
“This is a chance we must take. There are no alternatives. We have been studying the effects of reversed magnetic pulses on the brains of the stalkers. Would you like to observe some of our investigations?”
Marge quickly said “No.”
Washburn smiled slightly at Marge. “I
assure you it is quite safe. Please, follow me.”
He went to the locked door, opened it and led us down the hallway to one of the black doors. Inside there was a small room with four of five chairs and
another one-way glass window. We could see through this window. On the other side there were three people, all nude. One was a lady who was weeping loudly. The other two were a couple holding each other very tightly. The man’s hand was bleeding badly.
Washburn said “This observation will show you the outcome of people who have failed any of our tests. This is only introduced to groups who cannot pass introduction or inoculation. This group did not wish to participate.” He turned to look at us. “This happens to people who not only fail our steps
of indoctrination, but also those who disobey or question the authority of this base. In turn, this allows us to study the cannibalism of the stalkers, and the effects of brain stem reversal. I will allow you all to witness our test structure.”
All of us were
open-mouthed. Shocked.
Stalkers.
Sleepers. Deads. We all have our own names for them.
Washburn
went to a small control panel. He pressed a succession of buttons. In the other room, a part of the ceiling opened. A dead fell down into the room. It was a Marine.
The couple started screaming, clawing at one another, trying to save one another. The single woman who had been weeping loudly screamed. She ran to the one-way window. She started beating on it, trying to break it.
“Oh God! Save us
please!
” she screamed
The dead Marine went after the couple first. The man tried to beat the dead away with one of the chairs, but the zombie was too strong. It swiped the chair away. It literally tore the man’s arm with the bloodied hand from his socket. The man went down. Instead of eating the man, the dead tore into the man’s wife. It pulled the woman’s hair out while she tried to run away. The dead bit into the side of her n
eck. She went down screaming.
The dead went after the woman beating on the window. I
t ate her right in front of us.
We all held one another as this happened.
Scared. Disgusted. The dead went to the other two and fed on them.
The whole time Washburn stood there, watching, unemotional, his arms crossed.
When the dead had finished feasting on the people, it stumbled around the room, grunting. Washburn pressed another succession of buttons on the panel which caused a different light and a quiet hum to fill the room. The zombie didn’t seem to notice or care. It didn’t look like the brain stem reversal worked. The zombie didn’t change.
Washburn turned off the testing machine.
Minutes later, Fields came into the room. The dead tried to attack him, but Fields put a bullet into its head. After this, two men in lab coats came in. They studied the room, made notes about the people who had been attacked, took some photos of the dead, and left the room.
“Why are you showing us this?”
I asked, mad. “We’ve seen enough of this on the outside!”
“This is what happens to FEEs who do not follow the rules.”
“You do this to your own men? He was one of the military…”
He was bitten outside the base. Once he was inside we subdued him and brought him in so he wouldn’t infect others.”
“Is that what you do?” I asked. “Bring people in so they don’t infect others.”
“In a sense, yes,” Washburn said.
“In a sense. So we’re basically prisoners here until we have been cured?” I asked.
He chuckled.
“Oh no. There is not a cure. And no, you are not prisoners here. You can leave anytime you wish.”
“Well we wish to leave,” Ski said
strongly. “We want out now!”
“All of you want this?”
He asked us, a sick smile still on his face.
We all agreed. We wanted out of this madness.
He pressed a different button on the console and said “Gray Unit 20-15 through 20-20 wish to leave the base.”
Cindy asked “Can we get our clothes back?”
Washburn said “They have been incinerated. They were infected with MCON as well.”
“Well Jesus-fuck!” Ski said through clenched teeth. “This is some real fucked up shit here. I want out of this madhouse now!”
“Contain yourself, Mr. Markowski. You will be free soon enough.”
Two guards came in the door.
Washburn said “These people wish to leave.”
The guards
escorted us to the elevators.
As we left, I looked over my shoulder at Washburn. He still had his arms crossed. F
ields stood right behind him. They both were nodding, sick smiles on their faces. They knew we were going to our deaths. We were being led to our executions and they weren’t going to do a goddamn thing about it.
In the elevator we went up a long time, just about as long as it took us to get down into this hellhole. The doors opened. We were led outside onto a loading dock. It was morning. There wasn’t a parking lot, just a long open field with high fences on either side. It looked like there had been some construction work going on. There were a lot of tools and planks lying around.
The loading dock was about 10 feet off the ground. As I looked out into the fields, I saw that there were a lot of people walking around off in the distance.
I realized they were deads.
I also saw that the high fences had barbwire
on the top of them.
Ski moaned “You gotta be fuckin kidding me. We’re going to have to run for our lives?”
One of the guards said “We’re letting you escape. We’ve been letting people go.”
W
e all looked at them, confused.
The other guard said “We were supposed to take you to the gas chambers.
We’re not doing that anymore – we’re going against Washburn’s orders. It’ll probably be our hides, but we don’t care. We’re tired of this shit.”
“They kill anyone who comes here looking for shelter,” the first guard said. “If you see anyone out there on the road, tell them not to come here.”
Mindy went to one of the guards and hugged him. ‘Thank you,” she said.
“We can’t give you our weapons but there is a farm about two miles in that direction.” The guard pointed to the northwest. “You should be able to find shelter there.”
“I won’t be able to run,” Marge said. “I think my foot is broken.”
I said “We’ll help you, Marge. Don’t worry.”
“I’ve got a bad foot too,” Mindy said. “I broke it a long time ago and it healed wrong.”
I nodded to her too. “We’ll get you guys through this, no problem.”
The guard said “You better get going.”
Ski grabbed Cindy’s hand. They both jumped down to the ground and ran.
“Nice,” I said. “Let’s go guys.” I jumped down onto the grass. I motioned for Mindy to jump down. Her feet were about three feet above my reach. She jumped. I caught her well enough – we stumbled a little but didn’t fall. I yelled at her “Go!”
She went running after the other two.
“Come on Marge,” I yelled to her. “You can do this!”
“I don’t think I can cowboy!
I don’t wanna fall on you and hurt you either!”
“Just jump! You’ll be fine!”
She jumped. When her feet hit the dirt her ankle gave way. There was a pop. I don’t know if she broke it, but she wailed in pain.
“Just go cowboy,” she cried. “I’ll be safe here. I’ll stay here at the base!”
“Like hell you will,” I said. “You are not staying here! You can do this!”
“Come on you guys!” I heard Ski yelling at us. “We gotta go now!”
“Ski! Get back here! Help me with Marge!”
He ran back to us. We stood Marge up between us. We both carried her. She could use her good foot for balance. “Let’s go!” I shouted.
The five of us ran. The stretch of field was about a mile long with knee high grass. About a quarter of the way in we met up with the deads.
THE FALL FORWARD
Ski and I used our elbows to bat the deads out of the way.
We were like a train, Ski, Marge and I leading, the two girls right behind us.
Marge was taking the pain like a sport.
At the end of the long field, the fence came to an end. There wasn’t a gate, just open fields. Off to the northwest, we saw a farmhouse. It was about another mile away. We all ran toward it, the deads in chase.
Thankfully the deads were slower. Mindy kept falling behind due to her bad foot. We kept urging her to keep pushing harder. She, too, fought like a champ.
The deads were way behind us by the time we made it to the farm. There was a sliding door open on the side of a barn. We all went inside shutting the door behind us. Ski looked around for any kind of weapon while I helped Marge find somewhere to sit down. We were all out of breath.
Cindy said “We need to get out of here fast!”
“We’re trying honey,” Ski said. “We’re trying.”
“I mean we need to get out of here,” she pleaded. “Didn’t you hear what Washburn said? This place is going to be nuked again in two days.”
“I know. First we need to find something to fight those fuckers coming this way with.”
Marge motioned that she was ok, so I helped look for something to use. I found a pitchfork hanging on one wall. Ski came back with a shovel.
“We need a car.
A truck. Something!” he said.
The deads arrived at the barn. They started pounding on the doors. Dust started to settle down from the rafters. The noise was loud. It sounded like the wood of the barn was splintering.
“There’s a ladder. Let’s climb!”
I shoved Mindy up the ladder. Cindy followed then Marge. Marge was slow because
of her ruined foot and ankle.
One of the deads broke through the barn door.
Marge made it to the top of the hayloft. Ski yelled at me “Go!”
I took the ladder up quickly.
Ski was starting to get surrounded by deads. He was swinging wildly back and forth with his shovel.
“Ski!”
Cindy screamed. “Ski get up here!”
He started yelling as he swung. A dead’s head went flying.
I looked around for any kind of weapon. There was only bay hales up here and all I had was a pitchfork.
I heard a groan next to me. For a second I thought a dead was up here next to us, but it was Marge. She was holding her
chest.
“Ah hell cowboy,” she said, staring at me. Her eyes were wide open. A drop of saliva dripped from the side of her mouth. She was having a stroke.
She fell off the hayloft. I think she was dead before she landed on the ground behind the deads. When she landed, a puff of dust billowed out from underneath her. Some of the deads turned to face her. This gave Ski the moment he needed. He quickly climbed the ladder. He stood next to us, his chest heaving in and out. “Oh fuck!” he screamed as we watched the deads overtake her. “Oh hell and Jesus” he whispered “…poor lady…”
Cindy and Mindy started crying.
“We’ve got to go
NOW!”
I shouted. “Run!”
“What about Marge?” Ski shouted at me.
“She’s gone! Let’s get out of here! She gave us a chance! We need to take it!”
We all quickly slid down the ladder and out the opposite end of the barn. A few deads noticed us moving around but they were too busy with Marge to worry about us.
Marge gave us the chance to live. I know she did. When she fell, she made sure to fall forward into the deads and not back into the hayloft. Marge wanted us to live.
I could hear her saying to me “
You run now, cowboy. Scat! Get away from those sleepers!”
There was a farmhouse
out the other side of the barn. There were a couple vehicles parked on the other side of the house. We checked both but neither one had keys.
We were in the middle of open fields
now. There were farm houses in every direction. We didn’t know which way to go. I led the group north. We weren’t running, but we kept a steady pace walking. We weren’t talking at all. Our minds were on trying to find somewhere to go and fast. We needed to go east. We had less than two days to get out of Washington. We needed transportation.
It was getting dark, too.
We followed an old over-grown set of train tracks to the north. As night fell, we kept following the tracks. The moon gave us enough light to see if anything was blocking the way. Ski carried the shovel with both hands, the spade ready to slice if we were attacked.
We continued walking through the night.
We finally came to a highway with no vehicles on it. It was highway 28. We headed east.
Around dawn, we came into the small town of Stratford. There was a large grain elevator caved in on the north side of town. Bricks and large piles of wheat blocked the road.
We saw several vehicles. A minivan was parked sideways in the street. The driver’s side door was open. A dead man was sprawled out the door.
There were keys in the ignition.
Quickly, Ski and I pulled the man out of the car and laid him down in the street. The girls got in the back seat. Ski hopped behind the wheel and we were off.
Once we passed the piles of wheat on the road, the way became clear. We saw maybe three vehicles betwe
en Stratford and Wilson Creek.
In Wilson Creek we ditched the robes from Washburn’s nurse. We found a small clothing store which hadn’t been looted at all. There were racks of old t-shirts and jeans along one wall, and another wall had an assortment of shoes. We all stripped out of our robes. We stood naked together looking through the clothing we found. There was a long mirror above the shoes. I watched Mindy in the reflection of the mirror as she stood topless going through the t-shirts. My mind raced back to the dream I had of Tara; how she was standing on the bow of the boat, naked, torn to shreds. I hoped nothing like that would happen to Mindy.
She noticed me looking at her in the mirror. She looked down, embarrassed a little maybe, but she didn’t turn away. She looked up again, noticed me still looking at her. She lowered the shirt she had been looking at, giving me full view of her very shapely breasts, her hard nipples. She stood there, looking at me, not ashamed of her body.
I said “Don’t die, ok?”
She smiled, swung her hair back behind her head and said “You better protect me then.”
“I will.”
Smiling, she slid a gray t-shirt with a black
Nike
emblem on it over her head. I could still see her hard nipples under the shirt. She already had a pair of jeans on. I also put on a blue t-shirt and jeans. She walked over to me, looking me squarely in the eyes.
We stood that way for a minute, not touching,
not saying a word, just there. I saw her crystal clear blue eyes darting back and forth as she looked at me, a smile still on her soft lips. Her eyes were open, receptive, and genuine.
I thought about leaning down to kiss her, but this wasn’t the right time. Not yet. “Let’s get some shoes,” I said.
“K,” she said softly.
Ski and Cindy were already at the shoes. Ski had found another baseball cap, too. This one had KC on it. He was also wearing a light colored t-shirt and jeans. Cindy was wearing a tank-top with jeans, also. Next to her on the ground her Gray Unit outfit was spotted with blood from her period.
We all found comfortable socks and shoes. Cindy was able to clean herself up.
“Let’s get something to eat,” Ski said.
‘There’s a diner on the other side of the street.”
Inside, the place was in shambles and dark. We rummaged through the kitchen area, finding a walk-in full of dry goods. There was also a freezer. Inside, the meat was spoiled and smelled horrible.
Back outside, we went back to the van. We drove while we ate the stuff we found. It wasn’t a very hearty meal, but it satisfied our hunger for the time being.
Our conversation turned to Marge. We all agreed that she died to save us; but also died before the deads got to her. The girls both cried as we talked about her. Ski said that Marge had reminded him of his grandma because his grandma talked with a southern accent too, even though she lived in Portland.
“Or
lived
in Portland,” he said.
We talked about what had happened in Moses Lake, too. We wondered how many people were alive in there – how many had been tricked into believing that it was somewhere safe. Mindy hoped Jenny was safe – and Owen her five year old son. Mindy wished she could talk to Jenny. She wanted to warn her about the place, but then Ski reminded Mindy that when she called Jenny, she already was
in
Moses Lake…and was probably
told
to say that things were safe there.
We couldn’t figure out why Washburn had been so interested in my plane crash. We all felt like there was something he wasn’t telling us – like an agenda that only he knew about.
We all agreed that we were lucky to be alive. We were grateful for the soldiers who let us escape. I wondered how many others they had let escape. I wondered how many people had been killed who had gone there looking for shelter. The one guard had said something about gas chambers…
We kept heading east. The further away from the Air Force base we got, the better I felt. As Ski drove, Cindy kept her hand on his knee. She watched out the window for a while, but then she leaned closer to him and put her head on his shoulder.
Mindy put
her head on my shoulder, too. I held her hand.
I saw Ski looking at me in the rearview mirror.
All I could see was his eyes.
They were smiling.
We arrived in Davenport about an hour before sunset. Ski told us that we should start looking for another vehicle because this one was just about out of gas. We found a dingy gray hotel with chipping paint that we decided we’d stay the night at. Across the street was a Safeway grocery store.
“We’ll have breakfast over there tomorrow,” Ski said. “For now, let’s get some shut-eye.”
The rooms of the hotel were all on the ground floor. It was only a one-story building. The far ending of the hotel had
splintered. I asked “Do you think it will be safe on the ground floor? Think we should find a place that has some higher floors?”
“I think it should be ok as long as we’re
quiet and keep the doors locked,” he said.
Mindy asked “Can we get somethi
ng else to eat first? I’m starving.”
“Well let’s do this,” he said. “Dan, you and Mindy go to Safeway.
See if you can get us something to eat. Cindy and I will check out the hotel here.”
I grabbed a tire iron from the back of the minivan. “We’ll take this, just in case.”
Ski flexed his arms. “And I’ll use
these
, just in case.”
We all laughed.
Mindy and I ran across the street to the Safeway hand in hand.
The parking lot was full of cars. None of the cars were in parking spots. It looked like all of them had been jolted a bit – almost shook on the ground like sand through a sifter. I said “We should be able to find something here to drive.”
“Yeah,” Mindy said.
The entrance to the grocery store was covered in dead bodies. There were no deads to speak of, just corpses. Mindy held her hand over her mouth as we stepped through the bodies as we entered the store.
Even though the sun was now setting, the store inside was still light enough
to walk through without falling over things. The store had not been looted entirely.
There was a delicatessen full of spoiled meat. Food that had been prepared before the flip was still in display cases. There were closed display cases full of birthday cakes, doughnuts and other bakery items. Further down there
were bowls full of prepared potato and noodle salads, macaroni and cheese, several types of hashed meat; all of which had gone bad.
Mindy went down an aisle close to one of the display cases. She picked out four new toothbrushes, two tubes of toothpaste, a box of feminine napkins for Cindy, and deodorant. “We might need a cart,” she said.
“Be right back,” I said.
“I’m coming with you, silly,” she said grabbing the back of my jeans by a belt loop.
We went back to the front of the store. The shopping carts were lined up on the other side of the littered corpses. I pulled one of the carts out. I had to drag it over the bodies.
“I’m sorry, Dan” Mindy whispered. “I didn’t mean for you to do that.”
“It’s ok,” I shrugged. “We need to do this.”
We filled the cart. We found a lot of dried goods. There were canned foods that we knew would still be ok to eat. In the fresh produce area of the store, flies were moving in swarms over all of the fresh fish and vegetables that had been left out since the flip. On one side of a different aisle I found a small round barbeque with a cover. I threw that in the cart along with a large bag of barbeque briquettes. There was also a large bottle of lighter fluid and matches that I threw in the cart as well.