Chapter 27
Eliza’s rifle ran dry and she transitioned
to her pistol, dispatching two zombies that moved in around the guardrail. She
quickly glanced at the raging waters below for any signs of Carlie. She
strained her eyes downriver for movement—of Carlie clinging to a branch waiting
for her help—but only saw the distant whitecaps as they roared through the
gorge.
The sound of gunfire brought her focus
back to the road. She angled off to the smashed front grill of the semi and
rejoined the melee as the zombie horde was steadily reduced. The remaining
twenty creatures were mowed down by the line of shoulder-to-shoulder fighters,
the air obscured by a pink fog of gunsmoke and blood particulates.
Matias dropped a fresh magazine into his
rifle and did a slow sweep along the road and rear of the truck for any
stragglers, ending full-circle by the smashed guardrail. He could hear a low
rumble of vehicles moving along the road in the distance and saw black plumes
of diesel smoke rising up from the approaching rigs. He motioned to the rest of
the group to head back up the hill.
“We have to mount a search effort,” Eliza
yelled, her eyes rollercoaster wild. “She’s gotta be along the riverbank
somewhere.”
“There’s no time. The enemy is headed this
way and we are greatly outnumbered,” said Matias, grabbing her sleeve. “Believe
me, I’d go back right now if there was a chance we might be able to locate her
but we don’t even know how far down the river she went and we can’t risk losing
anyone else.”
“She’s alive, Matias,” she said, pulling
away and clenching her fists.
“If anyone could’ve made it through, it’d
be Carlie. And she’s probably on some riverbank with her fist held up at the
world, cursing. Right now, there’s a bigger picture we have to focus on. We
need to get this band of fighters and our team in place to sweep up behind
Mitchell’s forces.”
Matias moved up closer to the young woman,
whose face was taut and body rigid. “Eliza, I need your help in working with
these people—you know them and they trust you. If they see you faltering then
this is going to fall apart.”
Eliza sniffled and then took several deep
breaths, her breath misting up like tiny ghosts dancing on the pine boughs. “What
do you need?”
“Right now, let’s get back into the forest
and out of sight. Then we’ll call Duncan and inform him of our situation.
Eliza nodded then ran alongside Matias. They
retraced their steps up to the ledge as Eliza kept casting glances back over
her shoulder to the swollen waters below.
Chapter 28
Shane made a sweep of the warden’s office
and examined the maps tacked on the crumbling drywall. There wasn’t much of
value, nothing that he didn’t already know regarding the attack on the dam. He
looked at a bunch of black-and-white drawings papered on the wall. Each contained
exquisite artwork of different cities from around the world. “Bizarre son-of-a-bitch,”
he muttered under his breath.
Shane heard Duncan’s voice coming into his
earpiece. He tapped his ear-mic then moved towards the large window overlooking
the prison grounds.
“Go ahead, Hammerhead, this is Black Bear,”
said Shane.
“What’s the intel on your recon there?”
“This place is a ghost town. Other than a
few sentries we dispatched, it’s completely empty. Even lacking in zombies. We
also found that the main circuit breakers were destroyed and water tankers
ruptured. They weren’t planning on living here again.”
“How close are you to departing?”
“I’ve gotta gather up a few items that may
be of value and the helo is inbound in fifteen minutes. I’ve already sent a fuel
truck and ambulance we discovered and they’re headed back to Lewis. We can be
on our way to you after that.”
“No, I need you to link up with the
resistance fighters near Yakima. Matias is leading his group along a
southeastern flank behind the prison army headed our way.”
“Matias? Where’s Carlie?”
“Listen, Shane.” The voice in his earpiece
hesitated. “Carlie is MIA. She disappeared after a skirmish. Eliza said she
last saw her taking a fall into a river while fighting off a few creatures. I’m…I’m
sorry.”
Shane felt his mouth go dry and his stomach
coil in knots.
He must be wrong. Carlie just got separated
—
probably
making her way back to the group now.
“I need you to link up with Matias, near
Yakima, do you copy?”
Shane was silent, not even hearing the
last order. He thought of her lovely eyes which now seemed so distant. He choked
down a breath, his sides squeezing in on him.
The order came through again, Duncan’s
voice growing louder in his ear. He tapped on his ear-mic, his eyes racing
along the ceiling of the room and his chest heaving. “Copy that,” he said
robotically.
He clicked off his ear-mic and then
steadied himself on the table. His vision narrowed and his hands gripped the
metal edge while he hung his head low. As the tremors inside him built up and
he fought to choke back his tears, his grip increased until he finally bent to
his side and jerked the table over, sending it crashing into the wall. Shane
grabbed a chair, flinging it through the window. He moved up to the edge of the
jagged glass, staring out the gaping hole at the snow-covered peaks in the
distance and hardly noticing the onslaught of cold rushing in. “You better
still be alive and kickin’ ass, Carlie, you stubborn, reckless,…” He leaned
against a steel filing cabinet and pounded his gloved fist on its side.
The door behind him swung open and Jared
entered followed by Amy, their weapons leveled. “What the hell—thought there
was a bunch of biters in here,” said Jared, looking at the upended table and
the shattered window.
“Hey, you OK?” said Amy.
Shane clenched his jaw, taking a deep
breath. “Carlie’s missing—there was a battle—she fell…and…she got swept away in
some goddamned river.”
Jared shook his head and gripped his
lowered rifle while Amy half-staggered to a chair and plunked down. The only
noise was the fluttering of the wall map as one corner had loosened and whipped
furiously against itself. The rest of Shane’s team was coming up the steps and
filed into the room. Shane heard the voice of the helicopter pilot crackling in
his earpiece, their ETA ten minutes out from the prison.
Shane looked out at the mountains again
and then let out a snarl. He grabbed his pack off the ground and pushed past
the others, trotting down the stairs. “Let’s move, we’ve got a
search-and-rescue op to take care of enroute to Yakima.”
Chapter 29
The fuel
tanker and ambulance bobbed along the secondary highway until they were an hour
from Fort Lewis. Mitchell had twelve of his best shooters accompanying him and
nine heavily sedated mutants. His men were pressed as far back into the rear
wall as they could go, keeping an eye on the tangle of subdued creatures at the
other end, their features illuminated by the green glo-sticks in the middle of
the compartment.
The mutants’ eyes were filled with raging hunger but still kept in check by the
narcotics.
Each
lithe creature was nearly a carbon copy of the others. The virus preferring
ectomorphic body types which it then ravaged and outwardly reshaped into the
same pale, smooth-skinned exterior. Where there had been hair there were now
spiderwebs of fine red veins; the eye-sockets were sunken and the eyes
themselves bulbous, which allowed for increased peripheral vision; and the
fingernails were hardened and protruded like those of a badger, their nailbeds
encrusted with the remains of former victims. Mitchell could hear their
orchestrated breathing, the shrill sound resembling a broken whistle. Attached
to each mutant was a vest containing small C4 charges.
Mitchell
pondered the intel he had gathered from the interrogation of personnel captured
at the remote military outpost. He went over the layout of Fort Lewis that he
had memorized and rehearsed his upcoming assault. A short time later, he opened
his eyes and looked at the illuminated face of his watch. “An hour until the
tranquilizers wear off and we’re at the east entrance of Lewis. Then, we
release these hellish fiends.”
He glanced around at his men and then at the
twitching mutants. “We need to take out the helo bay first.” Mitchell handed
the detonators for the explosive vests on the mutants to Deacon, who was
sitting beside him. “Once that’s done, let the muties hash out some carnage
around the base. Any that are cut down, detonate their vests and take out as
many personnel around them as you can. I want the buildings intact. I repeat
—
do not detonate
any muties that go inside the structures.”
“Don’t
we want to try and save the helo bay?” said a dark-haired man with a braided
beard.
“Once
the security of the dam is assured and Lewis is ours, we will be the sole
governing force in the Pacific Northwest. From there we can sweep down through
the other states and take what we want from other bases and regions. More
firepower is in our very near future. Besides, a nice explosion in the helo bay
will draw everyone out from the adjoining buildings
—
it will be quite a
mutant chompfest.”
Mitchell reached into his vest pocket,
removing an amber bottle with pills concocted from his own synergistic blend of
meth-amphetamines, caffeine, and ephedra. He had used this potent
pharmaceutical before to stay awake for three days at a time on missions—it
turned the normal human engine into an amped-up race dragon, nearly impervious
to pain and fatigue. He popped off the lid and took out two pills, ingesting
them without water, then handed the bottle to Deacon. “Everybody take a few of
these and pass it around.”
“What is it?” said the bearded man across
from him.
“Three parts lightning and one part
thunder.” He smiled and took a deep breath. “There’s going to be a helluva storm
coming.”
Chapter 30
After her clothes and footwear were
semi-dry, Carlie pulled out a weatherproof topo map and her baseplate compass
then plotted a bearing back to the encampment near Yakima. If she was lucky,
she could link up with the remaining personnel from Darcy’s group and get a
message out on their radio. She sighted in her bearing and began the arduous
and time-consuming process of lining up landmarks to walk a straight line as
she walked through the dense forest.
Several hours later, concealed in the
treeline, Carlie came across what looked like an abandoned ranch. She studied
the distant buildings and meadow for movement. The center house was still
intact but surrounded by numerous structures that had recently burned to the
ground, a few wisps of smoke still wafting upward. She saw close to a hundred
men climbing aboard a single semi-truck whose interior walls were lined with
benches welded to the frame. In the center of the cargo area were what looked
like stacks of rifles and ammo boxes. Within minutes, the vehicle pulled out
and disappeared down the road through the forest.
Carlie’s attention was diverted back to
the front of the house, where two men were moving the remains of dead bodies
into a pile. She saw a third man come around the side with a can of gasoline in
his right hand and a bottle of whiskey in the other. All three men were dressed
in army fatigues.
Carlie moved a hundred yards south along
the treeline searching for others, but only saw a few cows anxiously huddled in
a distant corner of the property. After she was confident that her odds were
three-to-one, she slunk along the back of the property towards the remains of a
charred barn. She made her way to the rear of the main house and entered
through the back door, its hinges barely attached. As she swept through the
kitchen with her pistol extended, she caught sight of the fire out front erupting.
She stepped over the fallen figure of an older woman clad in an apron, her
silver hair fluttering in the breeze whipping along the floor. Carlie cleared
the rest of the downstairs, noticing the spent rounds lying on the oak
floorboards and bloodstains along with the slumped body of an older man in
Carharts resting against a bookcase. His eyes were glossed over and bullet
wounds lined his midsection. From the odor in the house and the lack of
significant decay, she surmised he had died in the last few days.
Carlie raised her head up to the corner of
the jagged front window and peered past the thin veil of fluttering white
curtains to the men outside. The three were laughing as they passed around the
whiskey, commenting on their role in the gruesome slaughter.
“Did you see the look on the face of that one
woman when we tossed her in the truck with the mutants?” said a tall man with
tattoos adorning his skull.
“What about that old dude on crutches who
kept jabbing at the freaks while trying to get to the house,” the fat man said
as he imitated hopping on one leg.
The man in the middle, who was wearing a
white cowboy hat and had just donned a tan trenchcoat from a pile of clothing
beside the fire, yelled at the other two. “One of you go inside the house and
get those old fucks and dump ’em on the fire with the others. Then we gonna get
us a cow and grill up some steaks tonight.”
As the fat man walked up the porch and
swung open the screen door, his nose crunched under the weight of Carlie’s
pistol, the butt slamming into his pudgy face. The man recoiled as her boot
drove into his chest, sending him over the railing into a pile of firewood.
While the skinny man stood in shock for a
second, Carlie placed a round into his forehead, watching it shatter like a
crystal sphere. Then she swung around and shot the third man in the head twice.
He crumpled to his knees, falling into the blaze.
Carlie walked down the steps and stood
over the large man, who was clutching his fractured face and screaming. She
tapped his thrashing head with her muddy boot. “How many more of you are there
here?”
“Just us. The rest are all headed north.”
“Why were you three left here?”
The man tried to sit up but she knocked
his elbow out, causing him to careen back into the mud. “We were supposed to
drive a truckload of freaks out to one of your smaller outposts to the west of
here in a few hours and turn ’em loose then head to Lewis to meet the others.”
“Lewis,” Carlie said with a frown. “You
mean the dam, don’t you?”
The rotund figure shrugged his thick
shoulders as Carlie jabbed him in the ribs with her boots. “All I know is that
he had a shitload of doped-up mutants he was gettin’ ready to take to Lewis and
the others were gonna meet him there.”
Carlie’s eyes shifted around on the ground,
trying to determine Mitchell’s next move.
My God
—
the dam was only one
small part of his plan. He wants Fort Lewis as well.
Her heart began racing
and she felt so utterly alone.
I have to warn the others
—
Lavine
—
before
it’s too late and everything that we fought for all these months is lost
forever. I need to get out of here.
“Anything else I can help you with, bitch?
I could use a fucking first-aid kit now before you cuff me.” He pulled his
hands back from his bloody face. “I heard you Fort Lewis types still try and be
civilized by locking up lawbreakers, eh. So, go ahead with readin’ me my
rights.” The man smirked but then growled at the pain from his defiant
expression.
She looked at the pathetic brute. In
another time, she would have taken him to jail and then been free of her moral
duties. “Cuff you? Why, this is your trial, right here.” She raised her pistol
at his head; his eyes widened. “And if I had more rounds to spare, I’d see to
it that you got one for each of the poor souls you killed here today.” The
sound of gunfire from her barrel filled the cold morning air and then silence
settled over the valley as though the forest was holding its breath.
Carlie searched the goons’ pockets for
vehicle keys and removed their weapons. She walked around back and inspected
the green jeep, noting the ample fuel level. Carlie looked up at the old ranch
house with its antique wood trim, wondering how many winters it had been through
and how many family gatherings had taken place under its roof.
She went back inside the house and quickly
grabbed some canned goods and replenished her drinking water. Carlie looked at
a framed photo on the kitchen wall, taking in the small family who were
gathered under a spacious oak tree. She moved the man and woman beside each
other into the center of the living room, brushing the woman’s hair back off
her cheeks and placing a cowboy hat over the man’s face. Then she covered each
with a blanket before closing the front door behind her. She hopped into the
jeep, her heart racing with the need to alert the others as the farmhouse
retreated from her rearview mirror.