Here We Stand (Book 2): Divided (Surviving The Evacuation) (18 page)

“She wasn’t a zombie when they locked her up?” Tom asked.

“She turned. Please. Please let me out.”

If she was infected, others probably were, too. They had gone into a mine when they heard some warning about the bombs. They had been infected, and that would explain why they hadn’t emerged. He might be wrong, but he wasn’t about to unleash thousands of undead from some underground tomb. That left him with a decision about whether he should free the young man, but it wasn’t really a decision at all. He opened the cell.

“Thank you. Thank you,” the man said.

Tom shrugged away his thanks and walked back out into the police station, then out into the street. He wanted to feel the fresh air again.

“Thank you,” the man said again, following him outside. “I’m Rufus Greenwald.”

“You said you weren’t from around here, so where were you heading?” Tom asked.

“North. To Canada,” Rufus said.

“I wouldn’t,” Tom said. “I met some soldiers yesterday. They said they’d seen a mushroom cloud near the border.” Although, now he thought about it, they hadn’t said where along the border. “Me, I’ve come from the south. There was at least one bomb dropped somewhere in New York or Pennsylvania.”

“Where are you going now?”

“To the coast. So what happened here?” Tom asked.

“I was driving through. I stopped, asking for gas. They locked me up. They said that bombs had fallen on Houston and L.A.”

“How did they know?”

“The emergency broadcast system, I guess,” Rufus said. “I don’t know. Said they were going down to the mines until the radioactivity had passed. Left us locked up.”

“Who was the woman?”

“I don’t know. She died before she could tell me.”

“Where’ll you go now?” Tom asked.

“Home, I guess. I mean, I don’t know. Pennsylvania, Canada, Texas, California. It’s the end of the world, right? I’m going home. If I have to die somewhere, that’s where I want to be.”

“You might find another Geiger counter in the fire station,” Tom said. “Good luck.”

“Yeah. And you.”

Tom got back in the SUV and drove to the edge of town. There was something about the man that made him regret what he’d done. He couldn’t place what, but it was that instinct that he’d developed growing up on the streets, and honed during his years manipulating the paths of power. It was why he’d not told him where he was heading, and why he’d not told the man his name. He reached the edge of town, and another barrier across the road.

On the far side were the undead. He picked up the carbine, climbed onto the roof of the SUV, and picked the zombies off, one by one. When they were lying motionless on the ground, he turned to look back at the town. There was enough death in the world; he’d done the right thing letting Rufus out. He jumped down, opened the gate, and drove through. Pausing only to close it again, he continued east.

Chapter 20 - No Bed, No Breakfast

Crossfields Landing, Maine

Crossfields Landing was on the southern side of a crescent bay. One good road led from the west into Second Street. A far more neglected one ran north to south through Main Street, following the coast. Tom’s cottage was off an unpaved, seldom beaten track on the northern edge of the bay. To the north of the bay and south of the village were a pair of decrepit bridges whose repair had been promised for the last eight election cycles. Anyone driving anything larger than a pickup along the coastal road had to divert ten miles inland. This had kept the developers away, but not the tourists. There were a handful of guesthouses and bed-and-breakfasts inside the village and out. During the summer, they’d fill up, but the population of Crossfields Landing was as seasonal as the income. As soon as the leaves began to turn, the tourists would depart, and the majority of the residents went with them. The few that stayed survived on pensions or savings. There was no school, no police station, no nearby industry. It was a place where people scraped by, retired to, or used as a temporary refuge from the rat-race further down the coast.

Tom had fallen in love with the village the moment he’d stumbled across it. When he’d first arrived in America, he’d spent eighteen months drifting from place to place, masquerading as a university student on a year abroad. It wasn’t so much that he was searching for a home as that he was seeking a new identity. He tried Los Angeles and Las Vegas, New York and New Orleans, the Floridian delta and the Blue Ridge Mountains, and anywhere else he’d heard mentioned in song or film. He took to hitching and hiking, and by accident had stumbled into Crossfields Landing. Quite literally. Having spent his entire young life in a city, he’d been unaccustomed to reading a map or using a compass. He thought he was heading west, so when he caught sight of the tempestuous Atlantic, he assumed it was the Pacific, and was baffled by how he’d traveled so far so quickly. That had caused some amusement when he’d said as much in the only restaurant that was open during that stormy November afternoon. He’d booked a room for the night and stayed for a month. He would have stayed longer, but there were too many questions he didn’t know how to answer.

It was a decade before he’d returned, this time with an American accent. If anyone remembered the geographically confused student, they didn’t connect him with Tom. He’d bought the cottage, and dreamed about being able to live there permanently. His fantasies were always muted by the knowledge that the world would have to be turned upside down before he could ever retire. The world
had
changed, but the idea of retirement had been forever lost along with so much else.

He slowed when he reached the sign marking the village as ten miles ahead. In strident lettering was the familiar admonishment that heavy vehicles wanting the coastal route would have to take a different road at the next intersection. Over that was a new, hand-painted message. He couldn’t quite make out what it said because of the zombie standing in front of it. He brought the SUV to a halt. The creature staggered out into the road. It appeared to be alone, but he checked and double-checked before getting out of the vehicle. He grabbed the carbine. The zombie lurched another step, moving more erratically than the undead usually did. As it drew nearer, he saw why. It was wearing cowboy boots, high-heeled with pointed toes. Now he was looking for it, he saw the shirt’s rhinestones occasionally glittering amidst a layer of dirt.

“Were you a singer? Or at some fancy dress party? Or do you always dress like that?” Then he silently berated himself for asking questions that could never be answered. He fired. The zombie fell. The shot echoed across the landscape, and he wished he had a quieter weapon.

“A sword would be good. Or something medieval. A pike, that’s the—” He stopped, as he saw what was written on the sign.
Warning. Quarantine Zone. Do Not Enter.

There was something achingly familiar about that sign. Before he could work out what, he heard a shot. It wasn’t close, and he couldn’t pinpoint its direction. There was another. Then a third. Then silence. Was it a hunter? Or a survivor needing assistance? He climbed onto the roof of the SUV, taking in his surroundings. He saw no one, and no more shots came.

Agitation grew as he got back in the truck, but he’d only driven a hundred yards before he thought he heard more shooting. He stopped. Got out. Listened. His stomach twisted in knots. There was a person, somewhere close. Were they trapped by the undead? He could imagine their fear all too easily, and that blossom of hope when they heard the engine. He could also imagine how that hope would fade as the sound of the truck receded into the distance. He grabbed the carbine and fired a shot into the undergrowth. Five seconds. Ten. Twenty. A minute. No reply came. Reluctantly, he got back in the SUV. More slowly than before, with the window wound down, he drove on.

After a quarter mile, he saw the intersection with the roads that ran north and south for vehicles that had to bypass the broken bridges. On the far side of the junction, two bed-and-breakfasts loomed at one another from opposite sides of the road. One was painted red, the other blue. There was a story about the buildings, how they’d once been owned by two families whose rivalry put the Hatfields and McCoys to shame. His mind wasn’t on that, but on the smattering of corpses by the buildings, and the pack of zombies in the road between the two properties. They’d heard the sound of the engine and were drifting toward the road. Someone inside the red-painted house had heard it, too. A bearded man had opened the window and was waving at him.

Tom did a quick calculation and came up with an estimate of between thirty and fifty zombies. They were getting nearer. He stuck the SUV into reverse and drove back thirty yards. Balancing the carbine on the open doorframe, he took aim. He fired one careful shot after another. Not all hit, and not all those that did were fatal. A zombie collapsed, but it was only when it stood up again that he realized the bullet had taken it in the chest. When the magazine was empty, twelve lay unmoving on the road. The rest were heading toward him, the nearest now less than a hundred yards away. He drove back another fifty yards. He reloaded, took aim, and began firing again. He downed five before he had to drive back another four dozen yards. Three of the slower-moving creatures had turned back to the house. He fired. Aimed. Fired. Reversed. Reloaded. Fired. Twelve zombies were left, and they were all heading back to people trapped in the house.

He got back in the SUV and drove forward. He raised his foot over the brake, but, wanting to end the confrontation quickly, slammed it into the gas. The SUV rocked as it drove over the bodies of the twice-dead until he reached the trailing line of zombies drifting back to the house. The bumper slammed into one zombie. He swerved left, dragging another under the tires. Right, and he’d lost too much momentum. The creature was pushed along the road, its arms slapping against the hood. He hit another, and then stopped three feet from the broken white-picket fence. The zombies moved toward him. In the mirror, he saw one of those he’d mowed down slowly stand up. Before he could be surrounded, he put his shoulder to the door, slamming it open and into a snarling face. Not waiting to finish the creature off, he grabbed the carbine and clambered onto the roof.

The SUV rocked as the zombies walked into it. His feet slipped as elbows and arms, knees and legs, faces and palms beat against metal and glass. As those grasping, reaching hands stretched up to him, he tried to aim, but it was as much as he could do to stay on his feet. He fired, missed, and hadn’t braced the gun properly. The recoil put him off balance, and as the vehicle rocked sideways, he slipped, falling to his knees. Cursing his stupidity and the ridiculously small target a head made, even at such a close range, he fired at shoulders and arms and any piece of necrotic flesh he could see.

“Go! Go! Go!” a voice bellowed. Out of the corner of his eye, he registered that the door to the house had opened, and people were running out. Three or six, he wasn’t sure. He fired again, now trying to keep the creature’s attention. When he glanced at the house, he saw a small mob running out the door. A grey-haired man was in the lead. He slashed a bowie knife across the neck of a zombie with such force it neatly decapitated the creature. The others weren’t so well armed. With crude wooden clubs, or the butts of their rifles and shotguns, they beat and struck at the zombies. The air filled with the sound of breaking bone and primal screaming that drowned out the low rasp of the undead.

With the arrival of this new prey, the zombies turned away from the SUV. It stopped rocking, and he was able to stand, aim, and fire. Aim. Fire. Aim. Fire. And with one last savage slash of the bowie knife, the old man killed the last of the zombies.

“Tom?” a familiar voice called in a tone of sheer disbelief. He turned. He saw Helena.

“It is. It’s you!” she said.

He jumped down from the vehicle, his feet landing softly on a road covered with dark brown gore. “Sorry, I’m a bit late.”

“Tom?” the grey-haired man asked, walking over to him. “As in Tom Clemens?”

“I am,” Tom said. “I remember you. You live in Crossfields Landing.” He didn’t remember much more than that. The man was about sixty, and six feet tall, with a lined face that spoke of experiences of twice that number of years. The slight paunch he’d been developing the last time Tom had seen him was starting to disappear.

“Jonas Jeffreys,” the man said. He didn’t extend his hand. Instead he carefully peeled off gloves covered in dark brownish blood. “So this is the guy, is it?” he asked Helena.

“This,” she said, “is the guy.”

“You’re the one who tried to stop the outbreak?” a younger man asked. “He clapped Tom on the shoulder. “Our savior! We ran out of ammo. Would have been in trouble if you hadn’t turned up.”

“Wouldn’t have had any problems at all, Gregor, if you’d kept a proper watch like I told you,” Jonas said, running a rag down his monstrous blade with a theatrical flourish.

The young man dropped his head and walked a few steps back to the house. The others, a mixture of men and women of a variety of ages, watched Tom with a mixture of interest and caution.

“What happened, Tom?” Helena asked.

“The short version?” he asked.

“The very,
very
short version,” she said. “I’ve told them all you told me.”

“It was Charles Addison,” Tom said. “He was behind it. The cabal recruited him at some point during the election campaign. They wanted someone in Max’s administration who could be blamed for all that happened. He figured that out and began killing off the conspirators himself. He drugged the president and arranged for the military and other assets to be moved to the countryside where they’d be safe from the undead. He intended to redeploy them once he’d secured his grip on power. He got Max to appoint him to the cabinet and began killing off those in the line of succession. That was his plan. It was never going to work, and in the end, it didn’t.”

“He was behind the zombies?” Jonas asked.

“No. I don’t know who was,” Tom said. “Did she tell you about Dr Ayers? Well, the only reason they abducted her was because I had looked up her address on a computer that they found when they were looking for me. Though they got there first, they were actually following me. She didn’t know how to stop the zombies, and they wanted me alive because, in part, they thought I did. The other part was to frame me as the one responsible for all this.”

“What about the bombs?” Helena asked.

“You heard about those? Russia or China, I guess. There was something Addison said that made me think we retaliated. There was a failsafe plan that devolved command and control to the field, and I’m pretty sure that was put into action. Addison’s dead. I shot him myself. A nuclear bomb was dropped within twenty miles of the place they were holding me. Factor in the people Addison killed, and though there might be a few members left, the cabal’s effectively been destroyed. But they killed the president, and the first family. That’s a story for somewhere else.”

“What you’re saying is that it’s over,” Jonas said.

“Yeah. I’d say so. On my way here, I met a few people and learned that bombs fell on Los Angeles and Houston, and somewhere along the Canadian border, probably close to Montreal or Ottawa. There have to be other bombs, but the good news is that I found a Geiger counter, and from the border with Vermont all the way here, the reading has been normal.”

“It’s over,” Jonas said, speaking to the group. “Which means we’ve only got to worry about food, water, the zombies, the weather, and disease. Get your gear. Get the trucks loaded. We’re moving out in twenty minutes. Gregor, keep watch. A proper watch this time. And… yeah, pass out the ammunition. But keep your safeties on, everyone. I don’t want a repeat of what happened a couple of nights ago.”

“And… and what about Bobbi?” a dark-haired woman asked.

“We’ll take her body back with us,” Jonas said. “Go on, move.”

The survivors hurried back to the house, all except Helena.

“Hey,” Tom said.

“Hi,” she said. A smile crept over her face. “You’re alive.”

“So are you. And you’re here.”

“This is where you said we should go,” she said. “After the helicopter landed, I drove the truck. Kaitlin stayed behind with the rifle.”

“She did?”

“Of course. She stalked through the woods. She was going to shoot them, but they took you on board before she could get a clean shot. There’s a lesson there, Tom.”