“Hell on earth, Book of Revelations, End of Days … who the fuck knows?” he replied. “Get your ass up in the hatch and single shots, okay?”
I pulled the carbine to my shoulder and nodded.
“Dave … you with me?”
Mel said as she batted me in the back of the head. “What’s our next move?” She spun around on her heels to look at me and I hoped she wasn’t expecting me to bark out orders like Sgt. Green would do because for the life of me, I didn’t have anything to offer. I wanted to throw her a glimmer of hope, something she could cling to that would get her through to the end of our sentry shift or to first light. I wanted to pull a genius tactical move that would save our lives but what could I offer that would have been better than Sgt. Green’s plan of hunkering down in the armory and waiting things out? There was nothing left to wait for in a city that’s little more than a creep-infested husk.
The man pack radio we’d kept on sentry had been silent for weeks. We’d monitored daily to keep track of any military movement in the vicinity and mostly in a desperate hope that maybe a helicopter would be dispatched to get us the fuck out of the city, but the army as we knew it was dead.
It occurred to me that other survivors somewhere might have access to the short wave band – the frequency ham radio operators used.
“Mel … flip that radio over to short wave. I want to try something.”
She nodded and pressed the toggle with an index finger as I started switching through the channels. A spray of radio static spat out of the speaker with each turn of the knob so I continued to switch channels in hope of hearing something … anything.
“You think there might be military assets broadcasting?” she asked.
I shrugged. “Probably civvies. I mean, if we’re alive there have to be other people out there somewhere. If they have a radio, they’d be using shortwave to contact others – the signal carries all over the globe.”
We spent the next half hour flipping through the channels one at a time, listening for a few minutes and then switching to the next one. I was about to switch back to the military frequency when I finally heard something. It was barely audible amid the background hissing so I fiddled with the squelch knob.
NODUFF. THIS IS SANCTUARY BASE CALLING. SANCTUARY BASE AT 53.200 NOVEMBER 105.7500 WHISKEY. ALL CLEAR NOW – I SAY AGAIN – ALL CLEAR. SANCTUARY BASE. NODUFF. ALL CLEAR. NODUFF. NEXT CONTACT AT 0630 ZULU.
Mel threw me a look of shock or surprise, I couldn’t tell which. “Noduff? They’re military, Dave. They’re using army voice procedure.”
I pursed my lips tightly as I scribbled down the message on my field message pad. It was broadcast three more times and then ended abruptly. “Yeah … maybe.”
“Someone else is out there, finally!” Mel said through a wide grin. “We’ve got to tell everyone what we heard. We’ve got to contact these people.”
I wanted to agree with her, but we didn’t have a clue who sent the message and what it meant. “Mel … don’t, okay? Not yet. We need more information before we get everyone’s hopes up – I need to talk with Cruze. She’s the only qualified signals person we’ve got. If there’s anyone who can verify the message, it’s her.”
“Everyone should know, Dave,” she said sharply. “They have a right.”
I couldn’t pull rank on Melanie Dixon because she’d probably kick my ass, but I had to reel her in. “Look … let me talk with Cruze, okay? Just trust me on this, Mel, can you give me at least twelve hours?”
“They’re broadcasting again at 0630, Dave. We might miss something. That’s seven and a half hours from now.”
I exhaled heavily and said, “Then give me seven and a half hours. We’ll let everyone know what to do at first light. It’s what Sgt. Green would have done. He’d take the cautious approach.”
She turned and then leaned over the parapet and pointed to the fire. “Yeah, well he’s dead … and we’re going to be dead if we don’t come up with a plan.”
“Just keep quiet about it, Mel,” I warned.
She didn’t reply and instead she just gazed out into the darkness.
A message on short wave radio from a place called Sanctuary Base and some possible map coordinates along with the words “all clear”. For all I knew those coordinates could be on the other side of the world. I stared at the hastily scribbled message on my field message pad and rubbed the back of my neck as I wandered down a hallway lit only by tea light candles. We’d made lanterns out of tin cans and the tiny candles threw heavy shadows on the walls, each one shifting and stirring amid the soft ambient glow.
I needed to talk with Pam Cruze because if we couldn’t come up with a way to present news of the broadcast to the team, the shit could hit the fan. We’d managed to cobble together some measure of military discipline but that was all under Sgt. Green’s leadership. The only thing scarier than the prospect of being ripped apart by creeps was to wind up on the receiving end of one of his patented blasts of shit. I’d seen him make Sid Toomey cry without even raising his voice and Sid was a good foot taller than our now deceased section commander.
We’d spent nearly six months hunkered down in the armory; a four-storey brick and sandstone fortress that was built after the First World War. It looked like a throwback to medieval times, a weathered old castle surrounded by glass-encased skyscrapers and million dollar condominiums. But it was a defensible position with four towers, each with a commanding view. All the windows were secured with iron-bars, though the creeps had broken through the main level windows on the north side in a skirmish that cost us ten lives. There was a thick oak door at street level reinforced with a two-foot thick wooden brace. Inside there was the parade square with two fully functional armored personnel carriers, offices and billets on the second floor and a kitchen, not that it was of much use given we’d run out of gas and electricity months ago.
“We can’t stay here forever,” I whispered.
I poked my head inside the room I shared with my kid sister Jo. She was sound asleep on a folding cot buried beneath a pair of thick grey wool blankets. On the wall above was a gun rack – the same kind we’d screwed into the wall above everyone’s cots. It was Sgt. Green’s idea. He’d said that personal weapons are useless if they’re not within arm’s reach and that we’d have to scramble if the alarm went during the silent hours. If that cowbell rang everyone would know that creeps had somehow managed to get inside the armory.
And Jo knew how to use her carbine; I’d made sure of that as early as three weeks past Day Zero. Even at eight-years-old, my sister knew how to double tap when shooting at a creep all the while making sure to count the remaining bullets in her thirty round magazine.
Across the room was the now empty cot where my mother used to sleep. All of her belongings were stuffed into a duffel bag that lay atop the cot and in the darkness its outline could easily be mistaken for a person sleeping. Jo had made that mistake two days after Mom died and I knew that deep down inside, my little sister was still reeling from losing her. We did what we could for Jo up to and including lying about why Mom killed herself. We told Jo that Mom had become infected and that she took her own life. We said nothing about the suicide note she’d left in the breast pocket of the old combat coat she’d been issued.
And there are only so many lies I can tell.
Jo was the only family I had left next to the people still holding out in the armory. We’d all lost family members, we’d all stared death in the face every single day since we bugged out – we all counted on each other. And those times when things looked their bleakest, Jo would lift everyone’s spirits by somehow, miraculously, still managing to resemble the person she used to be. She always helped out, never once complaining. She could still smile even though there was little to smile about anymore. Even though I’d seen her shoot creeps from the north tower of the armory, or when she’d insist on taking part in night sentry duties, Jo still somehow managed to remain an eight-year-old kid. She did chalk drawings on the floor all the while singing in a voice so sweet that even big burly Sid Toomey would get choked up.
“Sleep well, kiddo,” I whispered as I shut the door. I took a breath and shambled down the hall to Pam Cruze’s room. The door was wide open so that meant I could come inside. She was hunched over a map of the city on top of a metal desk and she was dressed in a faded blue t-shirt tucked into her combat pants. Her doo rag was folded neatly over a chair and in her left hand was a large plastic cup with a scratched up 7-11 logo. She took a sip and then placed it on the table.
“You can come in, Dave,” she said, not even looking up from the map.
“How’d you know it was me?” I replied as I walked into the room.
“You’ve got a heavy left foot. It’s a little louder than your right foot and that’s how I know it’s you. Kenny’s heels click on the floor and Dawson glides when she walks – an amazing feat when you consider she’s wearing combat boots like the rest of us.”
“Pretty cool trick,” I said. “How can you tell if it’s Sid?”
She glanced at me through the corner of her eye. “Two reasons. One, he smokes cigarettes so I can smell them on him and two, he likes to announce his presence by farting.”
I chuckled and made a sour face. “Yeah, there’s something wrong with that guy’s guts, man. What are you looking at?”
She pointed to our location on the map. “Obstacles and odds. We’re going to have to make some difficult decisions.”
I bent over and examined at the map. The armory was on the western edge of the downtown core in a city that once had a population of more than a million and that meant there were probably a million or so creeps waiting to rip us apart. To make matters worse, our location was in the geographic center of the city. The Bow River flowed in from the mountains and was located just a few blocks north of us, and the roadways were jam packed with abandoned and burned out vehicles as far as the eye could see.
“We should have bugged out of town five months ago,” I said. “This old armory might be a fortress but every fortress throughout history has been breached. I can’t see how this one would be any different.”
Cruze made a grunting sound. “No shit on that one. How are you and Jo doing after what happened to your mother?”
Anger bubbled up in the pit of my stomach as my mind flashed to the suicide note. It was just four sentences long. Four rambling sentences and not even the word goodbye written down anywhere. Just a lot of “I’m sorries”.
“We’re fine,” I said coolly.
Cruze snorted. “No you’re not. Christ, I know it took me weeks after—”
“After your parents were attacked,” I said, finishing her sentence.
Cruze lost her mom and dad in those mad first weeks after Day Zero when the world began to burn amid wave after wave of monsters. A detachment from the King’s Own somehow managed to get Cruze and her parents to the armory alive. They were attacked while they slept by a member of the Combat Support Section who’d turned in the night. Cruze was on night sentry and heard noises in the small dorm room her parents were assigned to when she saw their wounds. She killed the creep and then put a bullet in both her parent’s heads – that left her pretty much catatonic for days. She’d lie on her cot staring at the ceiling. She refused to eat, she didn’t wash. Cruze was simply frozen in place – her mind fused to that bloody moment in time.
We all took turns caring for her and I’d spend my nights reading from Pierre Berton’s book
Niagara
to kill off the silence. I wanted to get her talking and I was willing to do anything that would snap Cruze out of reliving the hell of shooting her own parents. The fact that both were dead the moment they’d become infected or that she killed them before they transformed did nothing to diminish the sheer totality of her loss. It took some a couple of weeks, but Pam Cruze came back to us – this time with a fire in her eyes and a desire to mete out payback to the monsters that destroyed her family.
“You got me through the death of my parents and I want to help you get through this, Dave,” she said. “Jo needs you – we all need you.”
I took a deep breath and kept my eyes fixed on the map. Cruze was only trying to help, I knew that, but Mom abandoned us. She gave up and shot herself because she couldn’t cope. She stopped caring about survival and because she’d killed herself, I couldn’t place her in the same category as those who’d died through no fault of their own. Cruze’s family were victims. Sgt. Green was a victim. Anyone who survived an attack from a creep and became infected as a result was a victim. Mom could have hung on. She could have at least talked to me about how she was feeling and maybe we could have done something to help her. She betrayed Jo and me when she chose to end her life at the very moment when everyone else was fighting a daily battle just to draw their next breath.
“I don’t want to talk about it, Cruze,” I said, my voice shaking.
She gave me a small shove. “Yeah well maybe you should
start
talking about it because if your Mom’s death has been hard on you it’s a hell of a lot worse for Jo. You’re her only blood left, Dave. If you can’t sort out your feelings then how the hell is your own sister going to learn how to heal?”
“I’ll protect her,” I said trying desperately to maintain my cool. “I’ve been protecting her for the past six months. And healing? What the hell does healing have to do with anything anymore?”
“It has everything to do with it,” she said sharply. “Nobody knows what caused Day Zero and here we are six months later. We’re fighting for our freaking lives, Dave, but if we’re going to survive this we also need to remember who we once were. Part of being human is allowing one another an opportunity to grieve – you showed me that.”
“Just stop, okay?” I half-growled at Cruze.
“No I won’t stop,” she shot back. “You can’t protect Jo from the truth of this world. And you can’t save her from the creeps all by yourself, now listen to me. We all rely on each other and you need a clear mind if you’re going to be of use to anyone. Just talk about how you feel, can you do that? Talk to me, talk to Dawson … hell, even talk to Sid Toomey for all that’s worth.”
She wasn’t going to let this go so I simply nodded and put on my best “I’ll be fine” face. “I’ll get through this,” I said flatly. “But right now there isn’t time … I need you to look at something we picked up on short wave not more than an hour ago.”
I flipped open my field message pad and handed it to her. She read the message aloud and stepped back, taking a seat on her cot.
“Wow … um, close the door,” she said.
I did as instructed and then pulled the chair away from the desk, taking a seat with my arms resting on the back. “It could be a military unit out there, somewhere,” I said. “Those coordinates aren’t six figure grid references though.”
“Nope,” said Cruze. “It’s longitude and latitude. As a matter of fact, it might not even be that far from here.”
I blinked. “How do you know?”
“Because the border with the U.S. is the 49th parallel. The message says it’s the 53rd parallel north – that’s what NOVEMBER means. It’s phonetic voice procedure. 105.75 WHISKEY is the longitude. Here in the city we’re at 51 degrees north and 114 degrees west, so this Sanctuary Base is northeast of us. I’ll need to go down to the OPS room and look on the map to confirm the location for certain, but yeah … I’m thinking about a thousand miles east.”
“Outside of Wainwright, the only military base northeast of here is at Dundurn and that’s awfully close to a built-up area. The message says they’re all clear, but clear of what? Creeps? That’s impossible – there are creeps everywhere.”
She tore the page out of the field message pad and stuffed it in her pocket, tossing the pad on my lap. “They broadcast again at 0630 so we need to listen to see if the message has changed. It would be nice if we could send a reply but those radios don’t have the range.”
“That’s what Mel wanted to do. She also wants to let everyone know about it but I asked her to hold off on telling the team until I had a chance to consult with you.”
Cruze emitted a heavy sigh. “We should do a briefing as soon as that broadcast comes through.”
“They’ll want to break out of this place when we do,” I said ominously. “Probably within an hour of hearing the news if this message checks out.”
Her eyes narrowed sharply. “Then you put them in their place. You’re in charge now that Sgt. Green is dead. They’ll listen to you because they’ve been listening to you for the last three months.”
I hadn’t seriously considered that I should take over now that he was dead. I just figured we’d pick Cruze – she’d have received my vote in a heartbeat. The funny thing is that I don’t recall ever once aspiring to lead anyone. Sure, I tried like hell to keep everyone’s spirits up and yes, I did have my nose in the books on soldiering and field craft, but that’s because I wanted to make sure all the angles were covered. I wanted us to have an edge.
“You actually want me to be in charge?” I asked. “Christ, we’ve reached rock freaking bottom then.”
Cruze cocked an eyebrow and I hoped that she didn’t think I was fishing for a vote of confidence or a compliment or anything stupid like that.
“Take your self-pity and shove it up your ass, Dave,” she said flatly. “We’re at war. When a section commander is killed, it’s his or her 2IC that takes over. Everyone will accept you because that’s what they’ve been trained to do. Look, I need to go to the OPS room and you need to get some sleep.”
My face flushed with embarrassment and I said, “Okay … give me a shake when you verify that location.”
She hunched over the map a final time. “We’re running out of time, here. We can’t stay.”
“And we need a plan,” I replied. “Soon.”