Rotter World (4 page)

Despite their relatively safe situation, an underlying uneasiness had filtered through the camp. Distrust would be a better word. Having faith in other people proved difficult enough after watching civilization come crashing down around them and witnessing mankind default to its basest instincts. That distrust had been most pronounced among the women who arrived at camp, especially those who had experienced their own sexual hells while on the road. Everyone who had stepped foot into camp had no idea what to expect, and had been relieved when Paul had demanded nothing more than that those who stay provide their fair share of the work. But after those few first months of the Zombie Virus, trust had been the toughest emotion to rebuild.

What little trust Paul had been able to restore had been severely put to the test when he had allowed the vampires to join their ranks, especially since they had been the ones to release the Zombie Virus on mankind. Paul had argued that the humans needed to put the past behind them and unite forces against the greater threat. He had explained that the vampires significantly increased their fighting capability and would be a minimal strain on resources given that they had agreed to feed off of the livestock. No one had believed the bullshit. In those rare candid moments shared between one another, most people at camp had thought that at best Paul was being naïve and probably would get them all killed. But Paul ran the camp, so everyone had reluctantly agreed to admit the vampires, although Robson felt certain that most of the others carried a wooden stake and kept it under their pillows at night.

In time, the vampires had proven they were not a threat to the camp. At least not an immediate threat. They had accompanied Robson’s raiding party on every nighttime run and, as Paul predicted, had greatly increased the party’s strength. He personally knew of half a dozen people who owed their lives to a vampire. In time, much of the camp accepted their presence, and he increasingly found wooden stakes discarded with the rest of the camp’s garbage. As the months passed, the mutual distrust between the vampires and humans had slowly eroded and both sides had settled into a routine that gave them some semblance of a normal life.

Until today. Something did not settle right with Robson when Paul ordered them to rescue Compton’s party from Portsmouth. He could not quite put his finger on it, but that did not matter. One thing you learn as a sheriff’s deputy is to trust your instincts. In this case, they were spot on. By rescuing Compton, they had brought into camp the man responsible for creating the virus that had caused the apocalypse in the first place.

Robson’s instincts told him nothing good could come of this.

Chapter Four

Natalie crouched on the top of the fort wall for several minutes after the rescue party and those they saved climbed out of their vehicles and entered the compound. She ignored the commotion created by their arrival, though she did take a few quick glances at Robson. Slowly the others filtered through the gated tunnel into camp, heading back to their containers or to the blockhouse for breakfast. This was the only safe environment they now knew. Natalie, however, did not have the luxury of feeling secure. She scanned the tree line and the main entrance off of Route 103 for signs of rotter activity. Or for humans watching them from a distance. She knew all too well that not all of the dangers they faced came from the living dead.

Several minutes passed, and Natalie saw nothing that posed a threat to the camp. She glanced over her shoulder, hoping to catch another glimpse of Robson, but he had left the area. Below her, Hodges and his motor pool staff checked out the returned vehicles, making sure they were filled with gasoline and ready to roll in case the camp needed to be evacuated quickly.

Natalie stood up, groaning as her muscles strained against the stiffness caused by crouching for so long. She massaged her legs through the leather pants and worked out the kinks. Breakfast would be served for another forty-five minutes, so she decided to walk the perimeter wall and check for anything that required attention.

As Natalie made her way along the wall, she secretly hoped to find something out of the ordinary. A breach in the outer perimeter fence or a structural defect in the fort wall. A stray rotter that had made its way through the barbed wire. Anything that would keep her distracted. Distraction was good because it occupied her mind and repressed the memories, memories that were as clear and disturbing as if they had happened yesterday.

Natalie owed her life to an impulsive act. She used to be a reader for a large literary agency in New York City. The day before the outbreak began, she had decided to drive up to Maine to surprise her lover, Dave, who owned a real estate agency in Portland. They had spent the first night together making love and sleeping in each other’s arms, blissfully unaware of the unfolding apocalypse. Next morning, after some more love making, they had switched on television during breakfast and sat transfixed as the news carried live coverage of the end of the world. For close to forty-eight hours she and Dave had sat glued to the set, hoping the infection would burn itself out or be contained, and life would return to some semblance of normalcy. That hope had died with video images of zombies filing across the bridges out of Manhattan, and of the military blowing up the pedestrian-choked spans in a futile attempt to stem the virus’ spread.

When Boston fell on the fourth day, Dave had decided they were no longer safe in Maine and had opted to head north to Nova Scotia where the combination of cold weather and isolation should keep zombie activity at a minimum. Gathering supplies for the trip, though, had proven nearly as dangerous as being exposed to the infection. By then, most of the grocery and convenience stores had been stripped of bottled water, canned goods, and medical supplies. When a tractor trailer had showed up at one nearby Stop-and-Shop with stocks of water and food, the employees had confiscated it all for themselves and abandoned the store to looters. Even more mercenary, most of the gas stations had taken advantage of the crisis to price gouge, one station charging fifty dollars a gallon, with cars lined up for a mile to get fuel. Only at the gun store had a dozen heavily-armed clerks maintained order despite hundreds of people waiting to arm themselves against the zombies, including the head of the local chapter of the Brady Center.

Getting out of Portland had been next to impossible. Route 95 north had been gridlocked with traffic, so David had headed for the coast road. They had joined a slow-moving line of traffic heading north, traveling less than ten miles in three hours, when everything suddenly ground to a halt. Swarmers had overrun the road ahead, stopping traffic and trapping the cars behind it. They had made their way down the line of vehicles, feeding on those not quick enough to escape, David among them. She had watched him hold off three of the living dead just long enough for her to stumble down the embankment of an underpass and escape along a county road. She was still haunted by his screams as the swarmers ripped him apart.

Not familiar with the area, Natalie had headed south toward the only place she thought might offer safety – Portsmouth Navy Yard. She had walked for a full day before finding an abandoned SUV with a quarter of a tank of gas, and then had wound her way along the back roads until eventually running dry just north of York Beach. Natalie had abandoned the SUV and continued on foot until she reached the center of town, fortunately long since deserted. She had raided the local convenience store and stocked up, mostly on soda and junk food, which were the only things left, and then had broken into one of the summer rental condos. She had held up there for five days planning her next move when Robson’s raiding party came through town looking for supplies. Her fear of being left alone had overrode her uncertainty of what would happen if she joined up with this group. Thankfully, she had ventured out and flagged them down.

Natalie stopped where the wall veered south and paralleled the ocean. Crouching down, she dropped her legs over the side and sat on the edge, looking out over the water. She always thought it ironic that in a world gone completely to shit anyone could call themselves lucky, but she definitely fell into that category. She still could not think of David without tearing up and experiencing that emptiness that tore a void in her heart. What made Natalie one of the lucky ones was making it here without having been brutalized.

The collapse of society had been accompanied by a breakdown in humanity. Much of it could be attributed to people doing whatever they had to in order to survive, which was understandable given the situation. More than half of the camp members had been robbed of food, weapons, or a vehicle. Several had been turned away from another sanctuary because they would have been a drain on already-strained resources. Daytona had narrowly avoided being executed by a New Hampshire sheriff who mistook a cut on his forearm for a bite mark. Survivalist instincts had replaced compassion.

A small but significant segment of the population had taken advantage of the collapse to prey on the weak. In the first few weeks after the outbreak, hunting parties had roamed the countryside shooting everything in sight, living or living dead. Several camp members had related harrowing stories about their own encounters with these groups, or what they had seen done to others. They related stories of families who had survived the outbreak only to be robbed by gangs, then murdered or shot and left for dead. Of one gang that had captured outsiders and tied them to posts surrounding their perimeter to serve as a human early warning system for approaching rotters. Of other gangs that had commandeered the women and let the men go on their way. Three of the girls in her unit had joined up with such parties, trading sex for safety until they could escape and set out on their own. One of her girls, Josephine, had been the plaything of a roving rape gang from upstate New York, having been debased nightly by each member of the gang until rotters eventually overran it outside of Manchester. Josephine had survived the attack and wandered the countryside until picked up by one of Paul’s raiding parties near Newington, nearly catatonic and unable to remember how she had gotten there. With a little time and a lot of kindness, Josephine had come out of her shock and became one of Natalie’s girls.

Her girls, Natalie thought derisively. It sounded so fucking sexist, but the term aptly applied. Out of all those who had found refuge at camp, slightly less than half were women. Very few, either male or female, had brought along any skills that would benefit the group’s survival. For better or worse, Paul had erred on the side of survival over egalitarianism. Anyone with military or law enforcement experience had been drafted into raiding parties. Those without such experience had been confined to camp and assigned to more mundane chores such as farming, the motor pool, the mess hall, planting, and the like.

Natalie had been among the latter until she grew tired of sitting around on her ass contributing nothing. After one raid to Kittery, Robson had returned with a cache of World War II-era Mauser rifles. None of the men in the raiding party had wanted them since they already were equipped with more powerful assault rifles and shotguns. So Natalie had convinced Paul to let her have the weapons and train those who stayed behind so they could defend the compound in an emergency. She had set up a training schedule of an hour a day. Everyone had attended at first, but after a week attendance had declined as most people felt relatively confident in their ability to handle a rifle. By the end of the second week, the only ones who had continued to show up were fourteen of the women in the camp.

Natalie never knew for certain why these women stayed with the training. She had always assumed it was because it had given them a sense of empowerment after being at the mercy of a collapsed society for so long, or maybe because of the camaraderie. Or maybe they had just been bored and were looking for something to keep them preoccupied. For whatever reason, the fifteen of them trained every afternoon for almost two hours. Emily, who had hunted prior to the outbreak, had led the training. Only a few of the girls had ever shot a weapon before, and their levels of skill varied. Over time they had become more than just proficient with the Mausers, with most of the girls being able to hit their mark at fifty yards at least two-thirds of the time. Along with the newfound skills had come an increased confidence in their abilities and themselves. All of which had paid off two months ago.

It had happened shortly after the raiding party had returned from a morning run to Wells. Someone had forgotten to secure the main gate, and a pack of sixteen rotters had stumbled onto the entrance and easily pushed their way into the outer compound. Thankfully, Natalie and the girls had been training at the time. They had rushed into the outer compound, formed a line abreast in front of the gated tunnel, and systematically took down each one. It had taken just over a minute to eliminate the threat, and not a single rotter got closer than twenty yards to the tunnel, but that single incident had solidified the girls’ place in the camp hierarchy.

After that incident, Paul had made Natalie head of camp security. Because she and the girls were now responsible for protecting the compound, they were excused from all other duties, a sweet deal considering they now did little more than take care of stray rotters that wandered too close to the compound or occasionally accompanied the raiding party on supply runs. All of the girls still helped out around the camp, though, to prevent themselves from going stir crazy. The new-found prestige gave them a sense of self-worth and importance. It made them feel in control of their lives again. For many, it gave them a reason to go on living.

At first they had a few detractors who had made fun of the girls, calling them Nat’s Brats behind their backs. That teasing had ended when Robson finally chose the name by which everyone now referred to them. During a pre-brief for one of his raids, he had used it when asking Natalie if the girls could provide armed back-up. Natalie and the girls loved it because they knew he had meant the name as a sign of respect.

The Angels of Death.

Swinging her legs back onto the wall, Natalie continued her rounds along the perimeter. The more their prestige grew, the greater became the uneasiness that nagged at her. She tried to ignore it, writing off the feeling as her own natural pessimism bubbling to the surface, but deep down she knew there was more to it than that. Natalie would never downplay the Angels’ success. Her Angels had kept the camp safe from the few rotters that wandered too close for comfort. Even when they accompanied the raiding party, they never encountered more than thirty or forty at a time. Not the kind of odds from which legends are made.

That was the problem. The Angels had become legendary at camp for no good reason, in her opinion. Fighting off the living dead at three-to-one odds was not extraordinary. It created false expectations among the others. Worse still, some of the Angels had begun to believe the hype, which threatened to make them over confident and sloppy. Natalie trained them relentlessly, but still she would occasionally overhear some of her girls talk about how they were invincible.

This feeling of impending doom had gotten much stronger since Paul announced that the raiding party would head into Portsmouth to pick up an important group of survivors. Although the rational part of her brain tried to convince her that these feelings were just paranoia, her woman’s intuition warned her to listen. Something told her these survivors were bad news for the camp, for her, and for her girls. If only she knew why.

Arriving back at the gated tunnel, Natalie used the inside ladder to climb down off of the wall. Wiping her hands together to brush off the dirt, she made her way to the blockhouse for breakfast.