Picking up a remote control from the table, he pressed a button. The lights dimmed
, and a map of the world appeared on the screen behind him.
Pointing to Taiwan, he said, “
Once we are done with the United States, this will be our jumping off point in the taking of Asia.”
***
On his way to a meeting about the defense of all the safe zones across the country, General Eastridge paused in the hallway when he heard his name called. Turning his head back and forth as he looked through the throng of people moving past him, he searched for a familiar face but couldn’t see who had hailed him.
Shrugging, he started off again, almost walking into a seaman first class. Waiting for the enlisted man to excuse himself, Eastridge was surprised when he said
in a low voice, “The Thomas Jefferson Memorial at 2100. It’s on your normal route tonight, so no one will get suspicious.”
Eastridge was about to ask what this was about, but
the man had already disappeared into the mob of clerks, enlisted men and officers that streamed past him.
***
General Eastridge waited at the Memorial until 2115 before giving up. Deciding that what he thought he had heard the seaman say was just his mind playing tricks on him, he started walking to where he’d parked his Humvee.
Wishful thinking, he told himself
dejectedly as his feet hit the walkway. Despite Admiral Sedlak catching on to my signal to stall for a few days, it would be too farfetched to believe he would set up a clandestine meeting.
A clicking noise made him turn, but seeing nothing
except the dark shape of the memorial, he spun back around to continue to his vehicle - and almost walked into the same man that he had almost run into earlier that day. Seeing him now dressed in tiger stripe fatigues and fully armed, Eastridge guessed he was a Navy SEAL. While most of them had been wiped out by the president when they were recklessly thrown into combat in the dead cities, Eastridge knew that a few had survived.
The
SEAL motioned for him to follow and walked off the path between two large clumps of brush.
After looking around to see if anyone was watching, Eastridge followed.
With essential areas receiving electricity first, the only light was that of the moon as the General followed the shadowy figure across a piece of uncut grass and into a small copse of tree. The seal stopped and said quietly, “Here he is, sir.”
Thinking the man was talking to him, Eastridge opened his mouth to ask what this was all about but was silenced when Admiral Sedlak emerged from the shadows to say, “Sorry for all the cloak and dagger stuff, but I had to make sure that you weren’t followed.”
***
PFC Quintana
adjusted the surgical mask over his face to try and block out the rotting, dank stink of the dead. Noticing that his partner’s hung around his neck, he asked, “Doesn’t the smell bother you?”
“Been
doing wall duty for two weeks now,” the man replied. “I’m used to it.”
Looking over the ruins of Washington
, D.C., Quintana wondered if he would ever be. As far as he could see, the city surrounding the wall had been reduced to a smoldering pile of rubble that still burned in a few places. These hot spots tended to be further away from the wall since most everything close in that could burn had long ago done so due to the constant bombing. The A-10 Warthogs used napalm when they had to work close to the wall, but further out they used high explosives. Either way, it destroyed the buildings and the dead with equal success, but the napalm left their charred remains behind to create a stink worse than when they were zombified.
Jumping slightly at a small screeching noise that was abruptly cut off, he heard his partner say, “Something got something. At least the food chain is still intact.”
“The only problem is that we’re at the bottom of it now,” he answered quietly.
This got a small laugh
.
Turning away from the destruction of what had once been a thriving city, Quintana ran his tongue over his teeth. Grimacing at the buildup in plaque, he asked, “What’s up with the toothpaste we were supposed to get on the last resupply?”
His partner shrugged and said in an offhand manner, “Same thing that happened to real toilet paper, tailor made cigarettes and coffee. It’s a thing of the past. They’re giving out baking soda from the chow hall. You can use that or a pine cone.”
“Where in the hell am I going to find a pine cone?” Quintana asked.
After another shrug, his partner said, “You can try around one of the parks or memorials. Not many people know that trick, so you should find something.” With a snort, he added, “You’ll be lucky if you see real toothpaste again in your lifetime.”
This suddenly hit home with Quintana.
After being stationed in Japan for the last eighteen months, he had been brought back only two days before and was trying to adjust to his surroundings. When the HWNW virus had broken out in Tokyo, the natives had managed to quarantine all of the infected and stop its spread. Japan was one of only two countries completely free of the dead. There, the trains ran on time, the shops were open and it almost seemed like business as usual except for the occasional blackouts and brownouts that plagued the country. The country might only be running at partial capacity, but at least you could still buy toothpaste there.
Looking over the ruins of D
.C. again, Quintana wondered if the U.S. would be able to recover to even half of what the Japanese had accomplished.
***
As his boots thumped on the wooden parapet built along the inside of the wall, General Eastridge’s head spun from his encounter with Admiral Sedlak. His mind turned over the possibilities of what he could accomplish now that he had an ally. Wondering if they could get any of the other Joint Chiefs to join them, his thoughts were interrupted by a voice that called out, “Halt, who goes there?”
Remembering th
is morning’s briefing on passwords, he replied, “Scooby Doo.”
“Advance and be recognized,” called the sentry
.
Walking into a small pool of light cast by a flashlight pointing down
ward, Eastridge asked, “Are you men doing okay?”
“Doing great, sir,” the first man said.
Looking to the second sentry, Eastridge only received a nervous nod.
“Any movement tonight?”
he asked.
“A few stragglers, sir,” the first sentry replied.
“Let’s take a quick look then, Corporal,” Eastridge told him before climbing onto the top of the wall and leaning over to gaze down at its base.
In the dim light of the moon, he could see more than a dozen dead clustered below him
. They looked up with hungry faces, their mouths whining softly as if to say, “Jump.”
Turning to the Corporal, Eastridge asked, “This is all of them?”
“Yes, sir,” he replied. “There was about two hundred last night, but the airstrikes thinned them out some.”
Nodding, Eastridge jumped down onto the parapet and said, “Carry on
, then,” before continuing on his way.
When he was nothing more than a faint shadow, the new sentry asked in awe, “Was that
just the fucking Commandant of the Marine Corps?”
“Sure was,” replied the Corporal. “He walks a section of the line every night. Usually
he comes by a little earlier, though.”
Shaking off his excitement at his brush with greatness, Quintana cursed
at himself as he ran his tongue over his teeth again while thinking, Maybe I should have asked the old man if he had any toothpaste.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The John H. Kirby State Park:
Tick-Tock slowly duck-walked through the waist high grass to where Steve knelt at the edge of the firebreak. Stopping next to him, he scanned the area for threats before saying quietly, “I don’t know how much longer everyone’s going to last if we keep this pace up.”
“I know,” Steve replied. “Going through the woods has cost us a lot of time and energy. If we hadn’t
have run into that herd on the path, we’d be a lot further along and in better shape.”
Tick-Tock nodded. They had been making good progress until they came across a clearing with a small house in the middle of it. This wasn’t the first they had encountered,
the two other shacks they had come across had been abandoned, but this one must have still had living people in it since it was swarmed by hundreds of the dead. The group wasn’t spotted, but they had to make a big detour to get around it. This shouldn’t have been a problem, but when they tried to regain the path, they found it populated by a steady trickle of Zs moving to join their brethren circling the shack. Knowing that a trickle could turn into a flood within minutes of the dead spotting food, they had been forced to go through the woods.
Turning to his friend, Steve asked, “How’s Denise?”
Tick-Tock grimaced slightly before saying, “Not good. My guess is that she’s got a serious concussion or a skull fracture. She can’t even keep water down now, and it’s gotten so bad that we have to carry her most of the time.”
Steve nodded. He had been
leading the group, so this was the first he had heard about her worsening condition. Patting his friend on the back, he said, “Then we need to find a place to hole up for a little while.”
Tick-Tock shook his head and said, “We can’t stop now
. We might have kept the Zs at the nuthouse from following us when we blew the bridge, but we can’t take the risk of another group getting wind of us if we stop.”
Steve shrugged and said, “And it’s just as risky if we keep moving. We could run into another herd at any time.”
Tick-Tock started to argue, but Steve cut him off by saying, “It’s not just for Denise. Like you said, everyone is dead on their feet. We need to stop for a little while and rest up. It’s going to be dark soon, and no one’s had anything to eat all day, so we need to find a place to make camp.”
Seeing his reasoning, Tick-Tock said, “We could go back to that clump of trees we passed about a quarter mile back
.” Looking at the black stains on his friend’s shirt caused by the blood of the dead dropping on him when the bridge was blown, he added, “And there’s a stream nearby that you can use to clean up.”
Wrinkling his nose at the rank smell of the dead wafting off him,
Steve nodded and said, “That’s what I was thinking, too. It’s a good defensive position, and we can put sentries out in all four directions to keep a watch for Zs. If the shit hits the fan, we’ve got plenty of ways to run.”
“We
also might want to send someone down our back trail a couple miles to make sure nothing is following us,” Tick-Tock added.
“Good idea,” Steve said.
“Once we get everyone settled, I want to scout a little ways down the firebreak, too.”
Tick-Tock gave Steve a questioning look and asked, “I thought we ruled out using it
?”
Steve replied, “I know when we
first saw it on the map that we thought it would be too risky since we’d be exposed to anything coming at us out of the woods or from the front, but if we send a scout out ahead of us, it might be the safest, easiest way to go. When you think about it, we’ve been following the trail, and the firebreak is just another trail.”
Tick-Tock considered this for a few seconds before saying, “It does head in the general direction we want to go, but is the risk worth it?”
Steve shrugged and said, “It might be less risky going through the woods, but how long is everyone going to last if they have to keep climbing over deadfalls and crawling along old game trails?” Waving his hand to encompass the thick woods on both sides of the firebreak, he added, “And look how hard it is for us to get through this shit. If the Zs try to get through it onto the firebreak, they’ll get hung up in it just like we did. On top of that, we’ll be able to hear them from a ways off.”
Tick-Tock looked at the thick grass covering their intended path and said, “Whoever’s on point is going to have to break a trail. We’ll have to rotate point every fifteen minutes or so.”
Steve looked at him quizzically and asked, “Why every fifteen minutes? I know it’s going to be hard on the point man, but the grass doesn’t look that thick.”
“
They’re going to have to be twisting their feet outward with every step to break a trail, and I don’t want anyone getting too worn out in case we have to run,” he replied.
Knowing he was right, Steve felt a sinking feeling in his stomach at the thought that their only defense against the dead now was to run away.
***
Lois crouched at the edge of the stream as she tried to wash the black stains off her
face and arms. Shaking her head in disgust, she said to the woman next to her, “This crap is never going to come off.”
“Use some
sand mixed with water,” Connie told her. “It makes an abrasive.”
Scraping up some of the
creek bed in her hands, Lois rubbed it vigorously over her forearms. It stung a little bit on the scrape she’d picked up when she’d climbed over the porch railing in their escape from the mansion, but she was pleased to see the black stains quickly disappear. Fresh blood seeped from her wound, and knowing it would cleanse it, she nodded in approval.