In a small voice, Cindy replied, “No, but-”
“Well then,
when the building was lost, you would have had to leave anyway,” Linda interrupted her before asking, “And do you blame yourself for the crazy people you ran into on the cruise ship?”
Cindy shook her head.
“Or the sailboat getting that hole in it?”
“But
that’s different,” Cindy almost whined.
“Different how?” Linda asked.
At a loss for words, Cindy was quiet for a few seconds before saying in a low voice, “But I still feel like they died because of me. Trying to protect me.” At this, she started to cry silently, her small body shivering.
Linda pulled
her close and said, “I think I know enough about people like Heather, Steve and Tick-Tock to say that any one of them would give their lives to save anyone else in the group.”
Her voice muffled from having her face pressed into Linda’s shoulder, Cindy said, “Then I want to at least be able to protect myself. I don’t want anyone else dying because of me.”
Looking down at the little girl, Linda wavered on what to do next. Cindy was so young, but after considering the world they now lived in, the decision was automatic. Extracting herself, she got up and pulled the end table in front of them before extracting her pistol and ejecting the clip. She cleared the round in the chamber and laid the weapon in front of them.
Igor looked on in silent approval from where he stood guard at the door as Linda
took on a serious tone and repeated the words that Heather had used to begin her firearms training, “This is not a toy. It’s a tool, but it’s a tool that can kill…”
***
Brain looked at the pots sitting on the stove as he ran the formula for plastic explosives through his mind again. There were only a few dos and don’ts, and he wanted to make sure he had them all down before he started. The last thing they needed was for him to blow a hole in the back of the mansion or set it on fire.
When he was sure he had it
right, he twisted the knobs of the burners to high and turned his attention to his helpers.
Looking to where Thing one and Thing two were
plugging the last of the two-way radios into a base charger, he asked, “Is that all of them?”
Thing one pointed to the seven
radios and nodded his head vigorously.
The radios had been an unexpected bonus. The plastic
explosives he was making were supposed to detonate if they were thrown against something, but it wasn’t a sure thing. An electrical charge was the only certain way to set them off. Brain’s only regret about the radios was that he hadn’t known about them when he was wiring the dynamite. With the way things turned out in front of the mansion when Sean freaked out, it might not have made much difference, but at the very least, he would have been able to take a hell of a lot more Zs out with command detonated mines.
Turning to Connie, who was standing in front of the eighth
radio lying on the center island with its back cover off and its wiring exposed, he asked, “You think you can remember what I showed you?”
“I’ve got the example right here,” she replied. “It should be simple enough.”
“I’ll be able to help you while I’m waiting for my stuff to cool down,” Brain told her, “so if you get stuck, just wait.”
Turning once again to the stove, he took a deep breath and let it out before scooping the first double handful of
Styrofoam peanuts into the biggest of the pots.
***
Linda joined the others as they followed Steve, Heather and Tick-Tock into the makeshift armory. At first she was uncertain if she should say anything about giving Cindy her pistol but decided in the end not to. While the group cared about the little girl, Linda could see that they didn’t know much about how she was feeling or what she was going through. While she didn’t doubt that they would kill and die to protect her, they so were busy keeping them all alive that they might decide she was too young to have a gun before thinking it through.
Steve saw her and raised a questioning eyebrow. With a sheepish grin,
she said, “I hate to tell you, but I lost my pistol when we were running for the house.”
“You still have
your rifle, though,” Steve said.
“Still got it,” Linda assured him
as she hefted the weapon. “It was on a strap over my shoulder. The pistol was in my pocket, though, and must have fallen out.”
After thinking about it a moment, Steve asked, “I know you shot your pistol a few times when the shit hit the fan out front, but did you ever get a chance to fire your rifle?”
Shaking her head, Linda replied, “I didn’t get it until yesterday, and we didn’t want to make noise and telegraph our position, so I never got a chance to shoot.”
“Then you can join the othe-” Steve stopped in mid-word and continued, “the rest of the group.
They’re going up on the roof for some weapons training and target practice after Tick-Tock gets them squared away.”
Eying the assortment of rifles and pistols
stacked in the closet, Tick-Tock added, “And there won’t be any shortage of targets.”
CHAPTER TWO
Jasper, Texas:
In October of the previous year, many small towns and cities were spared the initial impact of the infectious dead rampaging across the United States due to their relative isolation and the steps its people took to protect themselves. For all of them, survival was a near thing in the beginning, but in the end, as the H1N1 virus took the world by storm, it didn’t matter...
When the dead started to
replace the living population of the major cities in Texas, the first of many emergency town council meetings was held in the town of Jasper, Texas. Although there was a lot of shouting about action, and even more fist banging on the podium where the townspeople stood to be heard, it was decided to adopt a wait-and-see attitude. It was pointed out by the council that almost all the citizens owned at least one firearm, and the average was four per household, so it was taken for granted that they could protect themselves. Hell, one of the councilmen told the crowd, even Fox News was reporting that the situation was under control.
This
, combined with a small National Guard unit deployed at the center of town, served to assuage most people’s fears. As the meeting was winding down, the head of the city council also pointed out with pride that they were all Texans and could deal with anything that was thrown at them.
As he was about to bang his gavel to
close the meeting, a young girl named Megan bravely stood up and approached the podium. Resting her hands on its top, she stood with a slight tilt to her head, waiting silently until she was recognized by the chair. A few of the city council members groaned and shook their heads when they saw her, regretting a decision they had made a few months ago to let everyone have their say, regardless of age. Ever since doing this, fourteen-year-old Megan had gotten up at each and every meeting to lecture them on everything from Monsanto’s use of illegal substances in their products to mandatory firearm safety for everyone over the age of ten.
Reluctantly, the chairman said, “
The council recognizes the next - and last - speaker.”
Not holding back, Megan told them in a loud, clear voice, “Your
‘wait-and-see attitude’ is going to get you all killed.”
This brought gasps and excited chatter from the crowd
, loud enough that the chairman had to bang his gavel to restore order. When it was quiet once again, he started to say, “Now, Megan -”, but she cut him off before he could finish.
“Have any of you seen
or heard about how bad it’s gotten?” she asked. “The Internet is full of stories about the dead coming back to life and feeding on the living. It’s a very virulent disease, and it’s spreading like wildfire. It’s worse than the Black Death, and sooner or later it’s going to come here.”
This caused another outbreak from those gathered, and when it was
again subdued by the pounding gavel, the chairman said, “We’ve all heard the rumors, Megan. But they are nothing but that – rumors. The situation is being taken care of by the authorities.”
“What if I could show you
how what the disease is really like and how well these so-called authorities are taking care of the problem?” she asked. Without giving them time to say no, she pointed to the case hanging from a strap on her shoulder and said, “I brought my laptop with me, and I can -”
She was interrupted by one of the councilwomen laughing and saying, “And what are we all going to do, crowd around
its little screen?”
With a self-satisfied smirk, Megan said, “Not to worry, I
also brought a projector.” Waving her brother Ethan forward, he reluctantly started setting up the equipment while trying to keep a low profile. While he shared his sister’s love of technology, he hated her bringing so much attention to them.
This
is so uncool, he thought.
After calling for the lights to be dimmed, Megan said, “I was going to do a PowerPoint presentation
, but I ran out of time. What you are about to see is raw video footage taken from across the United States. Some of it’s from news crews that managed to upload their material before the government could confiscate it, but most of it is from people just like you and me.”
“Where did you get this footage?”
one of the council members asked.
Knowing that if she told the truth -
how she had hacked into a number of websites –she would get in trouble, Megan replied with a shrug, “I surf the Web a lot and came across them. The first video is of particular interest since it came from a researcher.”
For the next half-hour,
the crowd sat in mortified silence as dozens of scenes of blood and gore were projected onto the wall behind where the council sat. Starting with the video shot by Professor Hawkins, the same video that Steve had watched in his apartment on Indian Rocks Beach, and followed by numerous lengths of footage showing the dead coming back to life to feed on the living, it ended with an overhead shot of the streets of Little Rock teeming with thousands of the dead. When the screen faded to black and the lights were turned back up, not a sound could be heard.
Finally, a man in the crowd asked, “Is th
is for real, or is this some kind of prank you and your friends cooked up to try and scare everyone half to death? Because if it is a joke, it’s not funny in the least.”
“
It’s real as it gets,” Megan answered. “I downloaded all of this from reliable sources.”
The council looked at each other in shock.
The reports from Austin kept saying that these were isolated incidents and that they were being taken care of, but what if this video proved that to be a lie? A catastrophe of this magnitude was nothing they’d ever had to deal with before, and they had no idea on how to proceed. Most of them had grown up with the threat of nuclear war hanging over them and knew how best to survive it, but these precautions didn’t seem practical in dealing with an invasion of the dead. In the event of a thermonuclear war, you got a store of food and water and went into your basement or storm shelter until the radiation levels fell, but these safeguards didn’t look like they would help in this situation.
Radiation didn’t chase you in groups of hundreds
- or thousands - until you were pulled down and torn apart to be eaten alive. Radiation didn’t infect you so that you died and came back to life to eat the living. Radiation didn’t mutate your loved ones into flesh-eating zombies that turned on you and tried to eat you. Radiation didn’t come at you in numbers so large that they overwhelmed any structure they came across.
The dead coming back to eat the living was something totally new and terrifying.
Finally, the chairman cleared his throat and said, “I suggest a fifteen-minute recess before we discuss this enhanced threat.” He banged his gavel and added in a lower voice, “Megan, would you come up here and talk to us, please? And bring your laptop.”
The recess ended up
lasting more than an hour while the council sought more information. They viewed numerous official sites that assured them that everything was all right, and the same amount of independent ones reporting the end of the world by the flesh-eating dead. With so much contradictory information, the council ended up splitting into two factions. The smaller one believed it was a hoax perpetrated by the commies, the Arabs or the Chinese, while the larger group was quickly becoming believers in a zombie apocalypse. Coming across a recently updated map from the CDC that showed the extent of the spread of the virus across the United States, one of the naysayers pointed out that only a small part of the country was infected. Gesturing at the black blur that covered most of the country, he then zeroed in on the outlying areas in white.
“Here’s you
r proof,” he said pompously. “An official government map that shows only a small percentage of our country is infected. All those other videos are staged to try and panic us.”
When Megan scrolled down to the map key, h
is triumph was short-lived. Black referred to the areas with outbreaks of the HWNW virus, while white showed the areas that had been spared.