Ghosts: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (32 page)

Schriever AFB

The mess dress blues were stored in a garment bag that Nash
kept tucked away in a closet. Worn only during very special occasions, much
like a civilian’s tuxedo or ball gown, the ensemble displayed all of her
ribbons and medals and had a frilly satin cummerbund and brass buttons. And as
ornate as the thing was, even if it was put away in good shape, it always
required special attention.

So Nash laid the uniform out on the small couch in the
corner of her office. Then she fetched the lint brush and Brasso out of the
garment bag’s pouch.

With a dab of the Brasso on a moistened fabric scrap and applying
a little elbow grease, Nash shined all of the buttons on her tunic to a high
luster.

The lint brush took care of any rough spots, smoothing the
navy blue wool out on the top and ankle length skirt with only a couple of
passes.

The shoes didn’t need much attention. Just a light buffing
and they were shiny and reflecting her face all wavy and distorted like a
funhouse mirror.

Nash put the shoes on the floor and went to the filing
cabinet and retrieved her semiautomatic pistol. On the way back she took the
photo of her and Nadia from the wall and placed it and the pistol,
side-by-side, on her desk.

She picked up the full shot glass from her desk blotter and,
without a toast or even pause, quickly downed the tequila.

After shedding her ACUs, she tossed them in a pile in the
corner. She poured another shot and dressed in her mess dress, being careful to
remain regulation while doing so.

Lastly, saying screw it to the wrinkles, she sat at her
desk, her gaze moving between the photo and the shot glass.

The decision-making process lasted a few seconds and the
tequila was downed and Nash was removing the magazine from her weapon. She
racked the slide back and found the chamber clear. Next she inserted the
magazine and placed the pistol on the blotter next to her open laptop and the
satellite phone.

She filled the glass again and started the image running on
the laptop’s screen and watched D.C. die for what seemed like the twentieth
time. And as she did she couldn’t help thinking about what was happening 2,300
miles away from the nation’s capital when the heartbreaking footage was being
recorded.

She picked up the glass and said, “To you, Nadia,” and just
held it aloft, her eyes misting over.

She downed the shot and thought to herself, “And to you,
Cade Grayson. Bring my girl back. And the information on those hard drives. Two
birds ... one stone.”

Eden Compound

After enduring a thorough full-body inspection from a young
blonde woman named Heidi and having been declared bite free as a result, Glenda
was given a towel and led to a crudely strung tarpaulin shower stall and given
a five-gallon bucket full of sun-warmed water. The thought of sudsing up and
rinsing with a commodity she knew was worth its weight in gold for the
scattered pockets of humanity trying to ride this mess out made her feel a pang
of guilt and she balked at first.

But the thin fellow who relieved Heidi and introduced
himself as Tran had insisted. Wouldn’t take
no
for an answer.
There’s
a creek nearby
, he had said.
We’ll collect more.
So, reluctantly,
again, Glenda stripped away her jeans and top and finished the job she had
started in the creek earlier, vigorously scrubbing away the bits and pieces of
Louie that still clung to her.

Afterward Tran had given her a full set of sand-colored army
fatigues, two sizes too big, and a fresh pair of socks which felt like butter
against her bruised and blistered feet. He also provided some kind of a
prepackaged meal that was appetizing enough and which she ate hungrily.

Finally, with the promised hot meal of venison and fresh
foraged greens and mushrooms keeping her mind occupied, Glenda was handed off
to one of her rescuers—a balding man named Jimmy—who gave her a tour of the
well-thought-out compound.

From the look of her guide, who was carrying an extra twenty
pounds and hiding a double chin and filled-out cheeks behind a close cropped
beard, hot meals looked to be a frequent occurrence and something Glenda
Gladson could get used to.

After meeting another of the survivors named Seth, a young
man with a budding beard and long stringy hair parted in the middle and who
looked like he would be more at home at Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of
Love than lording it over a high-tech security system, Glenda was shown to a
room filled with dry goods and supplies. There, Foley set up a cot for her and
started a gentle interrogation. A sort of fact-finding interview sans turning
of screws or vicious backhands. If she said anything that sent up a red flag
he’d note it and have Duncan or Cade follow up. He learned about the attack by
men in helicopters on the brigands who had been terrorizing Huntsville.
Immediately he thought of Carson and Bishop’s men. Better odds of getting
struck by lightning, he thought, than there being another group of killers out
there with black helicopters who left death cards scattered about their fallen
victims.

The story of her trek from there was remarkable. He was
really struck how she’d fashioned her armor from magazines and duct tape and
instantly thought of the stacks of Guns and Ammo and Field and Stream magazines
sitting in his home back in Idaho.

But the thing that nearly knocked him over was that, like
Brook, the matronly soft-spoken woman used to be a nurse. Hopes buoyed, he led
her to the Kids’ quarters not only to meet Raven, who was awake and had stopped
coughing, but to mine her for a second professional opinion. Which after a
three-minute exam was relayed to him in private and was precisely what Brook
had said before setting out on her foraging mission.

So he left Glenda with Heidi and Raven and went topside to
get ahold of Brook and relay the good news. Maybe take a load off the woman’s
shoulders while she was away from her ailing daughter.

The navigation system was still glitching and not showing
the business, town, or road names, let alone the distances between. But nearing
the junction with State Route 39 and with the bust of a town, Woodruff, gliding
by, Brook spotted a north-facing sign that indicated Bear River, Wyoming was
thirteen miles south and Evanston an additional ten beyond it.
Last resort,
thought Brook.

Then there was a warbling sound she was unaccustomed to
hearing. She looked at the two-way radio. Furrowed her brow and took her foot
off the accelerator while digging in a pocket for the satellite phone.

Chief wiped his brow and stuffed his handkerchief back into
his pocket. He opened the console and the electronic tone intensified, filling
the cab. “It’s the long range set,” he said, fishing out the bulky black
half-of-a-brick-sized CB radio.

Brook put the sat-phone aside and took the CB from Chief.
She spent a few seconds looking for a way to receive the transmission. Finally
she keyed the correct button and listened as Foley caught her up to date on the
new arrival.

“What’s your gut telling you?” she asked.

“She’s legit. I think she’ll be a real asset going forward,”
he answered. “And she’s with it too. A real survivor ... for sure.”

“Keep an eye on her, though. I crapped out in Woodruff and
Randolph.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing,” replied Brook. “So we’re going south. Maybe Bear
Lake or Evanston, which are just over the border in Wyoming, will have what we
need.”

“Alright,” said Foley. “I’ll keep this radio close. Supposed
to have a forty-mile range. Call if you need anything. And stay frosty.”

Suppressing a chuckle, Brook said, “You do the same.”

“Why didn’t you tell him about me?”

“Because you’re not bit,” she said, not so sure if the
statement was still a lie or not. But she thought:
If you are there’s
nothing I can do about it until Cade returns with the carrots Nash dangled in
front of him.

Chief said nothing. Instead he peered at the desert outside
the window, dabbing at his forehead.

Just before the junction with 39, Brook took her eyes from
the road on the gentle right-hand sweeper and set the radio next to the smaller
Motorola in the console. She slowed some more and looked at Chief and didn’t
like what she saw. Applying more brake, she asked him to get on the radio and
warn the Kids not to look at Jenkins’s corpse. When she returned her eyes to
the road ahead, with the F-650 now rolling at a slow crawl, she saw another
vehicle pulled up close to Jenkins’s high-centered Tahoe and completely
blocking the northbound lane, its front end facing directly at her.

After a couple of seconds she decided that the early model
SUV, boxy and painted in a woodland camouflage pattern of browns and greens
with black splotches simulating shadow, was an old Army surplus Bronco or
Blazer.

The Tahoe’s driver side door was open and a wiry-looking
man, or teenager—Brook couldn’t tell from this distance—had his arms wrapped
around Jenkins’s lifeless body and was manhandling it from behind the steering
wheel. At almost the same instant that she saw the person, the person heard the
Ford’s engine note and looked up, surprise etched on his face. In the next
heartbeat the person let go of Jenkins’s corpse and Brook saw the blood-soaked
upper torso fall the three feet to the road and what was left of the dead man’s
mangled head strike the blacktop and bounce a couple of times before going
still.

With a pair of binoculars already raised to his eyes, Chief
said, “There’s someone else ... a woman. She’s crouched behind the camouflaged
rig’s passenger-side quarter-panel.”

The Ford finally crunched to a halt on the shoulder a third
of a football field from the clogged intersection, with its rounded front end
partially blocking the right lane at about a sixty-degree angle. A tick later
the radio came alive with Wilson chattering excitedly and telling them
everything about the situation that they already knew.

Hearing the squelch and pop of gravel as the Raptor pulled
in behind the F-650, Chief lowered the binoculars for a tick, snatched up the
two-way, and began relaying a play-by-play to the Kids. He said, “I see two
bodies. Both of them are armed—” He squinted hard into the field glasses and
added, “—rifles and side arms only ... as far as I can tell.” There was a pause
as he muted the radio and informed Brook that the two would-be scavengers were
about Taryn and Wilson’s age.

To that Brook shrugged. Age was only a number in the
apocalypse.

Still glassing the scene, Chief said, “Now they’re taking
cover behind their rig. The male is behind the driver’s side door. The female
is near the rear bumper ... passenger side, crouched down. Be advised ...” He
looked at Brook as he spoke the last five words, “... she’s wearing a ballistic
vest.”

“Only the two of them?” whispered Brook.

Chief put the field glasses back to use. He made a
ten-second sweep of the vehicle-clogged 39/16 juncture and beyond, paying
closer attention to the grassy shoulders and interiors of all three vehicles.
The bus was on its side, and running horizontal on its grease-stained
underbelly was a thick driveshaft and a mess of exhaust pipes. Splitting them
up vertically were the two tree-trunk-sized axles still shod with six oversized
commercial grade tires, two up front and four bolted two to a side—dually
style—at the rear. Save for the open doors, the Tahoe seemed undisturbed atop
the mass of bodies that were now stilled, killed by the scavengers, presumably.
Finally, having discerned as much as he could from afar, Chief declared that
there was no one else up ahead.

“We’re going by them no matter what. Dead or alive ... it’s
their call,” said Brook as she unbelted and kicked open her door.

“What should we do?” asked Wilson over the radio.

Ignoring the radio, Brook turned from where she was crouched
near the F-650’s left front tire and waved Wilson and Taryn forward.

She conferred with the pair for a second then sent them back
to the Raptor, where Taryn slid back behind the wheel and Wilson climbed up
into the bed and sat, back against the cab, waiting for his cue.

Come on kids ... throw up a white flag
, thought
Brook.
You’re way outgunned.

A minute passed and Brook nodded to Chief, who with as much
bass as he could muster and doing his best to project his voice down the road,
ordered the pair to throw their weapons down and put their hands into the air.

But the only thing being thrown from behind the
rattle-can-painted 4x4 were a couple of middle fingers. Then the male declared
that they owned Woodruff and everything south. The girl spoke up and in a
shrill voice ordered Chief and the others to turn around and leave.

“Can’t do it,” shouted Chief. “Make way. We’re going to
pass.”

The scavengers’ body language changed as they used some
colorful words to defame Chief and the proverbial horse he rode in on.

Brook inched her head around the angular metal bumper and
was immediately pelted with chips of matte black paint and felt her own blood,
hot and sticky, seeping from her hairline and wetting her forehead.

The sound of gunfire his cue, Wilson shouldered his carbine,
took a deep breath that did little to calm his nerves, and rose to standing. He
planted his elbows on the sun-warmed sheet metal and laid his rifle over the
Raptor’s moon roof. Pressing his lower body firmly against the back of the cab,
he flicked the selector to
Single
and peered through the 3x magnifier,
searching for the woman.

A tick after being sprayed in the face with tiny fragments
of God knows what, Brook had the shooter’s head bracketed in her sights and a
volley of answering gunfire erupted from behind and above. Finger tensing on
the trigger, Brook heard Cade’s voice in her head.
Never use a vehicle’s
door for cover if there’s something else nearby
. Which she’d already done
without thinking. However, the kid shooting at her had not. And seeing as how
he wasn’t a Z, she had no reason to go for a headshot. Much more difficult.
Then Cade’s voice again, reminding her to shoot for
center mass.

So she adjusted her aim lower by a couple of degrees, took a
calming breath, and drew back the rest of the trigger pressure. And then after
the first bullet left the muzzle, repeated the latter part of the process
continuously for three seconds until there were six puckered dents grouped
closely together chest-high in the 4x4’s camouflaged sheet metal.

A surprised look on the kid’s face was the first indication
that the 5.56 hardball ammo had continued on through the door’s internals and
penetrated the inner trim and found flesh. And happening near simultaneously,
the second indicator, caused by a ripple effect from the projectile’s kinetic
energy and trailing shockwave, was a violent eruption of pebbled glass and
pulped cardboard and flecks of sun-hardened vinyl.

Shots three through six must have struck the body as it
melted vertically into the ground, because the initial split-second scream
coming from the kid’s mouth was silenced mid-collapse.

From his perch in the Raptor’s bed Wilson continued taking
single potshots at the small form crouched down behind the camo 4x4. He heard
Chief’s instruction:
Keep her head down so I can flank her.

Already one step ahead of Wilson, at the onset of gunfire
Chief had angled to his right and gone into a low crawl in the nearby ditch. By
the time Brook’s volley went silent he was a dozen feet beyond the F-650’s
right front tire, rifle tucked in tight and peering through the roadside grass.

Magnified by the scope atop his carbine Chief could barely
make out the woman’s knees where they met the asphalt near the camo rig’s
jacked-up rear end. He hovered the crosshairs on a square foot of air above and
behind the diamond plate bumper near where the whip antenna was bolted to the
quarter panel. He waited a few seconds and, when Wilson’s firing stopped
altogether, drew a few pounds of pressure off the trigger. A tick later, as
expected, human nature overcame fear and the woman, lips pursed into a thin
white line, poked her head out from behind the vehicle.

With his stomach in knots, whether from the deed he was
about to commit, or something else entirely, Chief took the shot. The 5.56 left
the muzzle traveling 3,100 feet per second and in less than a fifth of that the
woman’s head snapped back and a halo of pink blossomed where it had been. In
the next instant she was flat on her back, one knee pointing skyward, left arm
twitching.

The hollow clang of his boots on the truck’s metal bed
preceded Wilson bellowing, “They’re both hit,” as he jumped down to the road.

Then in the next beat, with the report of Chief’s shot still
rolling across the open range, Brook called out for help. Saying she couldn’t
see.