“She’s stable,” Kate said, “but we’ve yet to see what effect Mike’s lumberjack impression is going to have, long term.”
“That was quick thinking, Mr. McKnight. I must say, your reputation precedes you. Unfortunately, given that reputation, quick thinking from you seems as unbelievable as poetry from a baboon.” He smiled and jumped up to sit on the hood of the Humvee and put the cell phone away.
I paused for a minute, making sure I heard right before answering. “I’d just appreciate the benefit of the doubt at this point, Colonel. It’s been a long week so far.”
“I can give you that, but not much else I’m afraid,” he said, glancing at his men as they stared alertly into the surrounding forest. A shot rang out from the rear of the caravan, then another short burst of that impossibly loud 50 cal fire.
“If you’re intent on moving up the mountain, you’ll have to go by foot after another mile or so. We hit a large group of these things a while back and took out part of a retaining wall behind us in the fight,” he nodded back the way that they had come. “Not passable by vehicle any longer.”
“We’d sure welcome your company, Colonel. Like I said, this could be really important. A cure or a vaccine might be possible, and this facility might hold the information we need.” We had given him the run down almost an hour ago, when we ran into them and brought them up to speed on the extent of the reigning apocalypse.
“Sorry, Mr. McKnight. We’ll be needed down the mountain, trying to weed out survivors and terminate as many of these ungodly beasts as possible. We can’t divert these assets to a wild goose chase.” He looked at Sam. “But you’re welcome to leave your friend in our care. I can’t imagine she’ll be better off continuing on with you.”
He scanned his command. “Besides, my men will be wanting to check on their families soon. I can’t keep them up here like this without more information.”
I nodded in understanding, and looked at Sam. “It will be up to her. We don’t know what her infection status is, but according to Kate, she might be ahead of the curve already. If it’s been an hour and she hasn’t gone to the dark side, we might be in the green.”
“Suit yourself,” he said. “Just be on the lookout. There are a lot more of these things in the forest than there should be. This is a pretty sparsely populated area, but we’ve already put down about fifty of ‘em between the last town and this one. Leads me to believe something more serious is going on up here.”
He looked at me quizzically. “Really odd thing is that some of these creatures looked really out of place… I swear we’ve put down at least twenty creatures that looked like they were Middle eastern or something. You got any idea why that would be?”
“Shit, Colonel. You’re asking the wrong guy. I’m just up here ‘cause I’ve got some sort of insane death wish.” I leaned against the door next to him. “Does seem kind of off though, huh? This area doesn’t exactly strike me as the most multi-cultural bastion of the state.”
“Tell me about it. Some of ‘em looked really old too, like they hadn’t just turned a couple days ago. Smelled really bad too,” he chuckled softly, “But I guess that’s relative.”
“None of these things smell like roses, that’s for sure.” From the front of the caravan, a small explosion shook the air.
“Stupid SOB’s-I told them to hold back on the grenades.” He shouted an order into his radio.
“Why’s that?” Kate asked.
He grunted a short laugh. “The short answer is that they don’t work worth a shit. The long answer is that the effectiveness of a grenade is in its collateral damage; it’s not exactly a tool of great accuracy. Explosions typically take out legs, arms, torsos. That’s the kind of damage that a human body can’t sustain and keep going.”
“Well, these things keep going until you destroy the head, as you very well know. You take out the legs, injure the torso, what not, they can keep functioning: slimy little stumpy torsos draggin’ on the ground, armless, legless fuckers that are still able to bite…” he cringed. “Let’s just say you’re not doing yourself any favors using explosives. They’re next to useless when you’re dealing with that kind of resiliency.”
He jumped down, holstering his pistol. “Just in case what you’re telling me is true, about the cure or vaccine, I’m going to send a soldier with you, get you past our little roadblock and help you find your facility. We passed the road you’re looking for a while back, and he knows exactly where it is.” Into his radio, “Sergeant Gary, send Corporal Lansing to the med vehicle. Get the rest of the vehicles ready to move.”
Engines came to life around us as a young, red haired man jogged into sight, friendly face peering out from underneath a helmet and above his Kevlar vest. A rifle was slung over his shoulder and a pistol strapped to his waist. He came to attention in front of the Colonel, saluting.
“Yes, sir,” he said sharply, voice deep and serious.
“Corporal, I need you to show these people past the rock slide and to the road we passed on our way down. They’re heading to a facility in the forest that may have a cure to this disease we’ve encountered.”
“Sir?” he asked, unbelieving.
“You’re going back up the mountain, soldier,” he said.
“You mean back up to where those crazy mother fuckers tried to eat us? Back to the hillbilly all you can eat buffet?”
“Corporal…”
“Just clarifying, sir.” His tone said otherwise but his face stayed blank.
“Grab the rest of your gear and some MRE’s. You’re dismissed.” Kate followed him to the med vehicle, probably to talk to Sam.
As Lansing and Kate walked away, a thought occurred to me. “Colonel, you do any time in Iraq?”
He looked at me hard, eyes like agates as he climbed into the passenger side of the Humvee. “Son, every person in uniform has done time in Iraq. Most of us a couple times. Why?”
“You ever heard of anything called the Baghdad protocol?”
He stared out the front window of the Humvee, face impassive, not responding.
The hum of the idling motor was the only sound, and then, “Where’d you hear that?” he asked, still staring forward.
“Sam heard the President use that term right before he left the White House.”
He turned to me quickly, eyes searching my face for more information. Finding nothing, he turned away again as if he were ashamed to look at me as he explained, “I heard it a couple times. Nothing definitive, but it was thrown around once and a while after entire streets were destroyed in the war and during the occupation.” He shrugged. “I never knew for sure, but I always figured it was some sort of total destruction order designed to take out large areas of hostiles.”
This time he looked at me. “The thing is, it was total,” his face was hard. “And when I say total, I mean terrorists, civilians, police, men, women, children, babies, pet gerbils…anything that breathed. We’re talking massive, undiscriminating collateral damage.” He turned away again.
He shook his head, closing the door. “Your friend must have heard wrong, Mr. McKnight, the president couldn’t have given an order like that here. Not on American soil. Not even now.”
He turned to the driver, “Move out.”
I stepped back as the vehicle began to roll. His arm extended from the window, wrist flicking once in a wave, and then back inside.
As the caravan pulled away, Kate, Anaru, Lansing and Sam walked slowly forward. “Ready to go?” Kate asked, looking around nervously.
“Yeah, man. The last thing we need to do right now is stand around waitin’ for more of those things to come chompin’ around.” Lansing was holding his rifle up, staring into the forest. Anaru helped support Sam, who spoke up as I looked at her.
“I finish what I start, and I’m going to see this through,” she said, teeth grinding through the pain but her face serious. I nodded, respecting the commitment.
“Then let’s get this creep show on the road,” I said, moving toward the truck.
“Fuckin’ A, man,” Lansing said, helping Sam into the truck and then following her. “The faster we find your damn zombie headquarters, the faster I get off this mountain.”
It’s not just the mountain, kid, I thought as we walked toward the plow. The world is a big place.
Chapter 23
When you’re a child, you don’t really appreciate the beauty of summer camp. Part of the problem might be that summer camp is designed by adults, who have clearly created something that every adult very much needs in their lives once and a while: a retreat to nature, solace from the rigors of day to day life, and a general return to youth.
But as a kid, you don’t need that stuff. Camp is just a different place to do nothing.
I remember going off to summer camp and being disappointed at leaving my neighborhood and all my friends. When you’re a child, it doesn’t matter where you are, you’re still having fun. You don’t have to remove yourself from society because your social interactions are uniform no matter where you are. You play, you eat, you play some more, you eat some more, you go to sleep. Beautiful stuff. And you can do that anywhere.
Don’t get me wrong, once you’re at summer camp, it’s great; you’re outdoors, you meet new people, you play games. You might even learn something. I learned how to eat shitty food just because you’re hungry, how to sleep through incredibly loud and obnoxious snoring, and even how to kiss a girl-all of which prepared me for real life; especially for marriage. But it’s not the retreat it is for adults. It’s just a change in locale.
So it is that when, as an adult, you enter a summer camp, you do so with some dual sense of nostalgia and regret. You remember the times gone by, and you regret not appreciating them more and, frankly, not being able to return to that life. Such were my own feelings when we passed under the rough-hewn gateway to Camp Lillikanda.
Even when being chased by flesh-eating zombies.
Our good corporal got us past the rockslide. It was quite impressive. Apparently they had fired rocket propelled grenades-RPGs, he called them-into the retaining wall. Held in only by a thin layer of metal-reinforced fabric, the rocks behind tumbled out onto the road, creating a barrier of shattered granite and limestone that prevented carrying on by vehicle. It also covered a few zeds.
There was a small pathway slightly hidden to the South of the slide that Lansing knew of. We followed him down off the road, around the slide, and back up to the concrete. A small portion of the rock fall had intruded onto our passage, and as I climbed over a particularly large pile, an arm that lay well-concealed and half-buried in the small chunks of gray and brown stone grabbed my ankle.
It was just a hand, no gnashing teeth above ground, but it still freaked me the hell out. After what we had been through, I was understandably a bit jumpy. I wasn’t willing to fire my rifle or pistol at it, but its grip was firm and merely pulling at it with my fingers availed me little. My admittedly pseudo-girlish shriek brought Anaru from the head of the line, and he chuckled at my predicament as he knelt down at my side. He tested the grip of the fingers, shook his head and drew his combat knife, pressing it to the gray flesh and sawing quickly.
“Can’t you just… ya know,” I made an opening gesture with my hands, miming that with his great strength, he could just rip it off.
“Sorry, but this thing is on good. Best idea would be detach from the body first and then work on getting the hand off later.” He chuckled as he sawed, “Cause the hand don’t bite. The head buried down there somewhere probably does.” He finished cutting, leaving a gray stump capped with a congealed brown liquid protruding from the pile.
When he finished, I got up, feeling absurd with a dismembered hand clutching my ankle. That, of course, is when they showed up.
There were at least twenty or thirty, and they came from the trees behind us. We had ditched the plow at the rock wall, making sure to point it back toward town in the event we could make it back this far.
They shambled out from the tree line, covered in dirt and dried blood. There were locals among them to be sure, but the Colonel’s suspicions were accurate. There were definitely people in this crowd that were out of place on a rural mountain road: mainly Arabs and a few Asians, all dressed similarly in uniformly blue pants and shirts. Several of the creatures were in a more advanced state of decomposition than the others, indicating more age. This also seemed to corroborate the Colonel’s comments, but how was it possible? The outbreak only hit a week ago, but these things had been dead for far longer than that.
We shot out onto the pavement, the sounds of our rapid footfalls echoing off the rock ledge that ascended vertically for hundreds of feet on our left side. On the right, the tree line ahead of us was clear, but they were emerging quickly out of the woods behind us.
“Up here on the right, it’s the turn off,” said Lansing, not even winded from the jog.
I remembered the way and how I had missed the turnoff when I came up with Maria, drawing her mock ire and a slight punch to the shoulder. It was an easy road to miss, obscured by trees and bushes. She had made a joke about asking for directions; I had made a joke about that movie Deliverance. We had both laughed. It had been a nice day.
Jesus, Maria. How did this happen?
“We go down a few hundred yards, past the camp, then up the hill into the facility,” I said as we kept moving, huffing the sentence out in brief syllables, trying to keep up.
Anaru was watching Sam, who seemed to be recovering her strength now. Kate was in front of me and Lansing was in the lead, rifle held at hip level, eyes alert. I tightened my grip on my own weapon, the moans from behind spurring us forward.
The surface turned from pavement to gravel as we began down a narrow road, surrounded on both sides by tall, dark trees. Leaves of various shapes and colors littered the ground before us, causing our steps to be accompanied by the crisp crackling of broken fauna as we ran from our pursuers. The road dipped down through a gully and back up, water running through a small culvert under the graded path, as we topped the opposite side and moved forward. I was starting to lag behind, my inability to complete extended aerobic activity catching up to me, when the sign came into view.