“Oh, Jake.” I wrapped him in a tight hug.
He buried his face in my shoulder and wailed, his arms hanging limp at his sides. As I rubbed his back and smoothed his hair, I turned my head and glanced over at the opposite side of the wall. Michael and the others were heading over, and were already halfway between the end and left gate platforms. That passing thought I’d had earlier flashed again in my mind like a strobe light. Keeping one arm around Jake, I turned my body and extended my other arm out.
“John, walkie! Now!” I shouted to be heard over the runners below. I snapped my fingers impatiently when John only stared back at me; my friend’s massive shift in emotion had scared them both stiff as a board. “Now, goddamnit!”
He twitched as though he’d been pinched and jerked the walkie off his belt. I grabbed it from his hand and keyed the mic.
“Michael, stop!
Stop
!”
Jake was leaning heavily against me, and the other two men were looking at me like I’d lost my mind. I watched as Michael slowed down, forcing the others behind him to stop. He brought his walkie to his mouth and said something in reply, but I couldn’t hear it. John had turned the volume down and Jake was bawling into my neck. I turned the dial with my thumb and tried again.
“Repeat that, I didn’t hear you!”
“I asked why the hell should I stop?! Jake just pitched Eric off the fucking wall!”
I jabbed the walkie in the direction of the staircase before answering.
“Because if you draw their attention to those stairs, we’re dead!” I released the mic and waited. His group didn’t move back. They didn’t move any closer to the staircase either.
“Oh my God, the stairs…” Jonah whispered behind me.
A heavy weight fell over all of us as we realized what that meant. If the runners found the stairs, we’d be helpless to stop them. Unlike the slow zombies, these fast ones could climb. We wouldn’t be able to stop them, and we wouldn’t be able to get away from them. It was too long of a drop off the other side of the wall, and the club was too far away from the ends of the wall to attempt a jump over.
“Alright. Let’s stay in the end platforms, try to keep their attention on us,” Michael finally answered. His voice was uneven, almost panicked. I understood the feeling. What was worse, it seemed as though Waters had finally left us hanging with our dicks in the wind.
I handed John the walkie and started leading Jake to the end platform. Michael was ushering the others on his side back to their end, yelling at the runners and drawing their attention back toward the platform. John and Jonah picked up on it and began cussing a blue streak at the deadheads on our side, leading them along like the Pied Piper.
“It’s okay, Jake, just don’t look,” I said to him as we stepped up into the platform.
It was impossible for me to not look down at what remained of Nancy’s body, so I shielded Jake’s view of it as best as I could. It was almost dark now, making it difficult to see inside the roofed enclosure. I led him over and sat him down with his back against the watchtower’s wall, crouched down in front of him, and smoothed the hair from his face.
“You gonna be good now?” I asked after he abruptly fell silent. Jake looked up at me and his forehead creased, his mouth twitched, and he took two ragged breaths before answering.
“I’m sorry, Kase. I messed up bad, I’m so sorry.” Then came the tears again. Not as heavy and loud as before, but they still ran freely.
I looked back at the other two. “You got that?” I asked, jerking my head in the direction of the runners.
They nodded solemnly and stepped outside the platform, where they resumed their cussing and yelling, keeping the runners gathered in close at the bottom of the wall. Meanwhile I focused on Jake, scooting up between his bent legs and holding him tightly. I let him mourn and grieve, cry and swear, keeping him close to me and riding out the storm with him. Part of my mind, however, was focused on something else entirely.
How the hell are we getting out of this one?
* * *
“I doubt that would work,” Michael said into his walkie.
Mia sat across from him inside the platform, picking absentmindedly at the hem of her coat. She watched Michael with disinterest; it was taking every ounce of willpower she had to block out the zombies. She kept thoughts of Nancy, Jake, and Kasey out of her mind. Those would only distract her. If she became distracted, the murderous screams of the runners would drive her insane. They’d been listening to it for hours, a steady and merciless song of death. They had been successful in keeping the runners contained to the ends of the walls, taking shifts outside the platform, making themselves seen and heard so the collective attention of the swarm would not wander. Abby and Todd were the current distracters.
“We don’t have much of a choice, Mikey,” John answered over the radio.
Michael ran a hand through his hair. “If we try making a run for it, how far do you think we’ll get before those bastards realize we’re not up here anymore? And how the hell do you propose we get off this godforsaken wall anyways?”
“Well, we tie our boot strings together, smartass. Don’t give me shit about the wall. Do I need to remind you whose idea it was to make it so fucking tall?”
“Hey, you agreed! We both decided better safe than sorry, remember?” Michael lowered the walkie and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. They’d had no water for most of the day and it was two hours after sunset. “Alright, so say we got off the wall. Jump off the end of the wall and try swimming away. What then?”
Silence.
“Listen, John,” Michael said, his voice lowering. “I want to get the hell out of here too. But if we get off this wall, they
will
run us down.”
Mia tipped her head back against the wall behind her and closed her eyes. She considered tossing a few people over the ledge, to buy the rest of them some time. This made her chuckle, drawing a strange look from Michael.
“So what do you want to do, Michael? Stay here, die of dehydration? Or better yet, wait for those fuckin’ runners to figure out there’s an easy way up here, then what? Fight them off with our rifles? Swing them around like clubs?” John’s voice was angry, bursting out of the walkie with a crackling edge.
“John.”
Silence.
Michael’s voice had picked up that military-authoritative tone again. It made Mia’s eyes snap open. Just what was his plan? They only had two choices: stay and die, or run and die. After giving John enough time to get himself under control, Michael continued.
“We’re staying right where we are. A solution will present itself. Waters might even show up. Either way, for the time being, we wait. Is that understood?”
Silence.
“John, is that understood?”
“Yeah, understood.” John’s voice had dropped from anger to resignation.
Everyone knew who the boss was, though Mia was betting that if Kasey was on this side of the wall, she’d be giving Michael a run for his money.
Damnit, don’t think about her
, she thought. Michael dropped the walkie into his lap and covered his face with both hands.
“Shit,” he whispered and let his head fall back against the wall. After a long moment, Mia cleared her throat. Michael opened his eyes and looked in her direction.
“We’re screwed, aren’t we?” she asked.
“Oh yeah, we’re completely screwed.”
* * *
“Chief Collins, I want that bird ready to fly in fifteen minutes!” Captain Waters shouted as he burst through the door of the communications center.
Collins snapped off a salute. “On it, Sir.” Then began barking his own orders to his flight crew.
The Guard had refitted Warden Harvel’s office and surrounding rooms with communications equipment shortly after arriving at the prison. From there they could track most radio frequencies, receive orders from the Command Center downstate, and stay in constant contact with all the survivors’ camps they’d been able to find via scouting missions and aerial reconnaissance.
“Dunkard, you and Cumbridge get over to the garage. Make sure Acklin has those vehicles ready to move when the chopper is in the air!” he instructed, crossing the yard.
The two privates saluted him and took off at a run toward the old garage, where a squad of men was preparing to head over to the Winchester. Waters ripped the cap off his graying head and ran a hand through his thinning hair. He headed straight to his personal quarters in the old dormitory, cursing with each step.
How had things gone so bad so quickly? He ran up the steps, taking two at a time. They’d been hit on two fronts almost two days before; Zacks on the outside and Zacks on the inside. Why had this happened? Following orders, that’s why. As Waters jerked on his gear and grabbed his weapons, he decided that the time for following the Command Center’s orders was over. What were they going to do, court martial him? He snorted a chuckle and slammed his door shut behind him, pulled his cap on tightly, and jogged back down the stairs.
The CC had ordered all survivors to be recovered. Infected or not. Waters was to say and do whatever it happened to take to convince the locals to aid and assist. Waters had never questioned those orders, he had simply followed them. And his men? They had carried out his orders, to the letter. He knew none of the men had been happy about it. How could they be? Even he wasn’t. They’d brought in so many infected to transfer to the CC, that he’d had to assign a group to retrofit a section of the prison to hold them, once the infected had completely turned. These days, simply being in the same vicinity as a Zack went against every fiber of his being, and his men’s as well. But they had their orders.
Why the CC wanted the infected and the Zacks, he didn’t know. Here was the kicker: not all the transferees were infected. On any given transfer, roughly half the shipment had been clean. Living, breathing, uninfected people; everyone the Winchester clan had rescued. Sure, Waters had his theories. Until now, he had never questioned his duties. What ultimately changed his way of thinking happened two nights ago.
A horde of runners, hundreds of bodies strong, had laid siege to the outer fence. Even reinforced, it hadn’t stood a chance. After thirty minutes, the fence had been trampled down. The inner fence had suffered the same fate twenty minutes after that. Once the Zacks had surrounded the prison, as Waters and his men were getting into position to attack, the unthinkable happened: the Zacks inside the holding cell got out. It couldn’t have been an unlucky coincidence. Someone had let them out. He currently had a few of his best men looking into it.
In the resulting chaos, thirty-seven men and women died.
Waters had seen to it personally that his soldiers would stay dead.
What was left had fought for almost two days to reclaim the prison. In the end they had succeeded, putting down all Zacks inside the prison walls, including the infected individuals who hadn’t turned yet, and they’d thinned the horde outside to a more manageable level. Waters had received word halfway through the battle from the communications room that an S.O.S. had come in from the Winchester. His com officer had been killed, however, before a message could be relayed to Michael.
There’s still time
, Waters hoped as he made his way to the small landing pad in the center of the yard. Still time to save the Winchester group, who had been working so hard for him during the past several months. Maybe, just maybe, there would be time to redeem himself, to reverse whatever evils he had unknowingly carried out for the CC.
* * *
“That’s it. Take off your coats.”
I’d been pacing back and forth inside the platform, going crazy listening to the deadheads down below. John and Jonah were just outside, keeping the runners’ attention on them, and Jake was reclined back against the wall of the platform. He looked up at me and drew his eyebrows together.
“Why?”
“Yeah, why, Kasey?” John put one foot inside the platform to repeat Jake’s question.
“Because we’re getting off this wall. Take ‘em off and tie the sleeves together at the ends.” I stripped my own jacket off and was reaching for Jake’s. By this time Jonah had joined the other two in throwing me stunned looks.
“Well? Are you going to stand there and tell me you’re willing to wait on a rescue that isn’t coming? You wanna die of thirst up here?” My voice was strong and clear, carrying through the platform even over the zombies’ screeches.
“But Michael said—”
“I know what Michael said. And I’m saying we’re getting off this wall. So let’s have ‘em,” I interrupted John and walked over to him, hand out. He looked at Jonah, then at Jake, before finally removing his denim jacket.
“No way! Kasey, no!” Jake was up and on his feet as John began tying my coat sleeve to his.
“Yes, Jake,” I answered, motioning with my hands for Jonah to move faster. “Once I’m down, I’ve got maybe sixty seconds, ninety if I’m lucky, to make it to those boats.” I grabbed a loose sleeve from John and tied Jonah’s to it. “I jump in, start it up, and head out into the middle of the river. I’ll draw them away and hopefully into the water.”