She nodded amiably and said, “I’m in charge of bullets for Sid an’ Kate. Oh – an’ I’m in charge of passing out water and food.”
“And what are you
not
supposed to do?”
“Leave the carrier or go anywhere by myself,” she said flatly. “Don’t worry too much cuz I know you have other stuff to take care of, but I do have a question.”
“What’s that?”
Her face turned beet red. “What if I have to pee?”
Well crap. How could I have forgotten something as simple as that? I hadn’t taken into account how long we’d be hatches down as we exited the city. It could be as long as a day or more until we’d be out in the open where we could actually get out of the vehicles and stretch our legs.
“Um – canteen cup, Jo,” I said, as my face reddened.
“But I can’t go if people are watching!” she protested loudly.
I smiled at her and nodded slowly. “Remember that poncho liner?”
“Yeah.”
“Just throw it over yourself so that nobody can see you. And don’t spill any on you, okay?”
She nodded. “What if it’s number two?”
“Do you have to go number two?” I asked, hoping like hell her answer was going to be no.
She shook her head. “I went before we left the army.”
“Armory,” I corrected. “Good then. And Jo, that was a really smart thing to ask me. I’m sorry I didn’t think about it before we left.”
She kissed me on my right cheek and gave me another hug. “That’s why you have me here – to help you think about stuff you never thought about. I’m going to go back to my spot now.”
I lifted her around the turret cage. “And don’t stick your hands outside the firing ports, Jo. I mean it!”
“Okay, David!” she shouted as she crawled back over the ammunition case and into her corner.
Doug Manybears emitted a loud grunt from his driver’s compartment. “That was real sweet, Dave. I’m getting all misty over here.”
I smacked him on the back of his helmet and peered into my periscope. “She’s eight,” I said, as I looked down on the river. “I can’t even conceive of how all this is registering in her … oh, my God. This can’t be real!”
I thought six months of battling the living dead had prepared me for anything but clearly I was wrong on that account. The river was full of bloated bodies. Some were decomposed beyond recognition, their bony limbs reaching skyward to a God that had forsaken them, while others were fresh kills. Their torn corpses reanimated, only to find themselves swept away by the rushing current.
And this was where we were going to cross the river.
Sid Toomey’s voice squawked in my headset. “I wonder where they’re all coming from.”
I pressed the talk button. “Somewhere … everywhere. The city, the outskirts … Cochrane and the foothills. Maybe they thought that creeps couldn’t swim and they used the river as an escape route.”
“Yeah well they didn’t make it, did they?” said Doug Manybears.
I clenched my jaw tightly as Ark Two’s nose appeared out of the corner of my eye. The trim vane, a six-foot-long sheet of armor, slid up from beneath the nose, so I reached over and pulled the switch for ours. I could hear the hydraulic pump inside the engine panel humming away as the trim vane popped up, blocking my view.
“Okay, Sid,” I shouted into my microphone. “You’re navigating – I can’t see past the trim. Please get us across in one piece!”
The turret spun to the twelve o’clock position. “I’m on it. Doug! The forward slope is about forty degrees – take it down at crawl speed.”
The nose of the carrier pitched sharply. I held on tight and glanced back at the rest of the crew. Dawson peered out of her firing port as Jo dug her feet into the crew seat to keep herself from sliding forward. In seconds we’d leveled off, a sign we were in the cold water of the Bow River. At this point Dawson closed her firing port, choosing instead to sit quietly, her eyes staring blankly at the floor of the carrier. The look on her face speaking volumes, too. She’d seen what I’d seen only moments earlier.
“There’s so many of them,” she said. “They’re all dead – everybody is freaking dead!”
I looked back at Kate and gave her a slight nod. “Keep it together, Kate. Can you do that?”
“I’ll try,” she said, wiping at her eyes with the sleeve of her combat shirt.
“Good,” I replied. “Take a look out the back and see where Ark Two is.”
She scrambled to the viewing ports on the rear doors and peered out to the rear of the carrier. “Cruze is in the water – about fifty feet behind us.”
“Right on!” I shouted. Just then, Sid Toomey’s voice flooded my headset.
“Hang tight – we’re going out of the water in about ten seconds and then we’re going to head up the river bank. Doug, lower your trim vane – my job is done.”
I spun my periscope back to the twelve o’clock position and pressed the talk button. “You’re not done yet, Sid. Have an eye for obstacles on the top of the river bank because you’ll be the first one to see them.”
“Roger that!” said Sid.
In seconds the nose of the carrier pitched up sharply and I held on to the front of Doug’s driving seat. The engine protested loudly as we crawled up the embankment, but only for a short moment before leveling off. We pushed on for about fifty more feet until I heard the radio hissing in my ear.
“Ark Two is clear,” said Sid. “Give me a minute while I do a three-sixty so I can get my bearings.”
“Take your time.” I poked my head into my periscope. Waves of heat from the engine rose over the hull, giving everything a blurry appearance. The ground was carpeted with acres and acres of fallen poplar leaves, only they weren’t yellow and gold, they were black and brown, probably poisoned by the poor air quality or low level radiation. .
Sid gave the crew commander seat a small kick, so I turned around to see his head poking down below the turret. “There’s a pretty big gaggle of creeps bearing down on us,” he said grimly.
“How many?” I asked.
“Hard to say,” he replied. “There’s a ridge up ahead and I’d peg it at maybe fifty or so. Want me to open up on them?”
We had a good supply of ammunition, but I remembered Sgt. Green’s first rule of combat: don’t waste a single bullet. At the same time, I didn’t want the carrier to get bogged down with the monsters as we climbed to higher ground. Then an idea came to me. We knew that the creeps were attracted to sound, light and movement. We had five crates of smoke grenades and six grenade dischargers on the sides of each carrier. Rather than waste bullets, I decided to create a diversion. I pressed the PTT button. “Ark Two, fire three smoke grenades onto the riverbank. I have a hunch the creeps will be attracted to the smoke and it should clear them off the crest of the hill.”
“Will do,” Pam Cruze replied.
Sid spun the turret to his left. “Smoke’s on its way!” he said. “Good call, Dave. The creeps are following it.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Give me a boot as soon as the area is clear and we’ll move on.”
“Yup.”
I glanced back at Kate who was keeping close watch on our surroundings from the safety of her viewing port. Jo was hidden underneath her poncho liner but reappeared after a short moment with a canteen cup full of pee. She gave me a helpless look, so I crawled between the turret cage and the engine panel into the back of the carrier.
“I’ll take that,” I said as she happily handed me the canteen cup. I opened a firing port and carefully dumped the contents out of the carrier, then wiped out the cup with a rag.
“Thanks, David,” she said, her face beet red. “I didn’t want it to splash on me cuz it’s like a rollercoaster back here when we’re moving.”
“I know,” I said, as I tightened a bungee cord around the cases of small arms ammunition just above her head. “I want you to wear your helmet back here at all times, okay? It’s going to get even bumpier and stuff always falls onto people when you’re going cross-country in these things.”
She nodded as she placed the SPECTRA helmet on her head and I allowed myself a small chuckle when I saw that it came down past her nose.
“I can’t really see anything,” she said.
“Good,” I replied. “The less you see of what’s out there, the better, kiddo. Trust me.”
Jo put a dirt-smeared hand on my knee and exhaled heavily. “I’ve already seen lots of bad stuff. How come we’re stopped?”
“We’re just checking out our route and then we’re going to get moving,” I lied, not wanting to tell her about the wall of creeps on the ridge ahead.
She pushed the helmet up to her forehead and her eyes narrowed. “I know what’s outside, David,” she said fixing me with her gaze. “Sid was doing a lot of shooting and I know that you have to shoot them in the head. Did he get them all?”
My heart sank a little at her question. Jo was eight years old and thin as a twig. Her red hair hung limply onto her shoulders and her heavily freckled face was smeared with dirt and grease. She should be playing with freaking Barbie dolls and experimenting with makeup and costume jewelry, not sitting in the back of an armored personnel carrier surrounded by bullets and grenades. She shouldn’t have to live in a world that had been transformed into a living nightmare – none of us should.
“I want you to listen carefully to Kate, okay?”
Jo nodded, the helmet bobbing up and down on her forehead. “Don’t worry, I know the rules.”
“And what’s the number one rule?” I said with a note of warning in my voice.
“Don’t ever get out of the carrier by myself,” she said with a groan.
“What’s rule number two?”
She rolled her eyes. “Don’t stick my arms out of the firing holes.”
“And rule number three?”
She blinked. “What’s rule number three?”
I leaned over and wrapped my arms around her bony shoulders. “Your brother is never going to leave you. Ever.” I whispered in her ear.
She hugged me back and said, “That’s what big brothers are for, aren’t they?”
My idea for a smoke diversion worked surprisingly well. The three canisters landed on the river’s edge and nearly all of the creeps plodded down the riverbank and out of sight. Only a handful remained on the top of the ridge and we smashed through them like they were crash test dummies.
Thank God zombies don’t have any reasoning ability. If they did we would never have made it past nightfall on Day Zero.
We’d been gone from the armory for more than two hours. It wasn’t nearly as far as we’d have hoped and that presented a problem. The last thing we wanted to do was to fuel up the carriers with our Jerry cans while we were inside the city limits. Creeps were on our tail and the risk of winding up being overrun was too great if we stopped. But damn it, I’d told everyone we’d be clear of the worst of things within a couple of hours and clearly I’d called that one wrong. Both carriers crawled along at less than twenty clicks an hour and that was eating our fuel.
The radio hissed. “We should have covered more ground, Dave.” said Cruze. “If we keep moving at this pace we’ll be fuelling up in a built-up area. We’ll be exposed.”
“Don’t think that hasn’t been worrying me too,” I replied. “We’ll go hatches up. That way we can gun the engines and we’ll have all eyes providing security.”
“Alright,” she answered. “I’ll get everyone ready.”
It wasn’t a bad idea to go hatches up. We needed to air out the stench of diesel and motor oil from inside our carrier, and I’d be able to orientate my map to the ground without having to rely on the pale yellow lights inside my hatch and the restricted field of view through my periscope. Even though the sun hadn’t shone in months, daylight was still something we all craved. Terror lived in the darkness and night was when we’d had our most vicious skirmishes with the creatures.
We’d made it as far as Edworthy Park on the southern tip of Sarcee Trail. To my left was what used to be the Trans-Canada Highway, heading west to Banff, and to my right was the entire northwest of the city. That meant suburbs full of walking corpses. The smartest thing to do was to avoid the entire area, but that meant that we’d have to ford the river again and hug the tree line along the eastern edge of the woodland that led up to Olympic Park. But even though it might have been a smart move, there was still an element of risk. The ground would be uneven, there were sharp culverts and of course any number of the monsters could come teeming out of the woods and swarm our carriers.
I glanced down at the map and ran my finger along the river’s edge. We could simply drive along the river bank, but we’d be exposed to the southern tip of the community of Montgomery and that meant possible swarms, too. I dropped back down and lowered the hatch door over my head. Kate was carefully removing the gun tape from around the doors and gun ports while Jo held a small garbage bag.
It was dumb luck that had allowed us to make it two-thirds of the way to the western edge and I decided when push came to shove, it probably didn’t really matter which route we took – there was always going to be an element of risk. I pressed the talk button on the radio. “Ark Two, we’re going to alter our route. Stay within twenty meters and keep your turret peeled to the right. The best way to go is along the forward slope of the Bow River, over!”
“Roger, Ark Two,” Cruze replied. “Um … you do know we’re going to be exposed from the high ground.”
“I know,” I said grimly. “And if we have to, we’ll gun the engines and race along the riverbank like we’re on a combat run. But the sooner we get to the western edge of the city, the better. Keep your weapons primed – we don’t know what we’re driving into.”
“Will do, Dave,” said Cruze. “We’ll have an eye for creeps and obstacles, too.”
I squatted on my crew seat and leaned into my periscope. “All right, Doug – keep along the bank,” I said into the intercom. “Sid, you’re our eyes on this again and you’re weapons free if shit hits the fan!”
The engine groaned as we pushed through a tangle of broken trees and brush. I could hear the turret spinning left and right behind me as I swung my periscope to the right just in time to see a shopping plaza come into view.
Dozens of charred bodies and skeletons lay strewn about the sidewalk. The only proof that it was ever a plaza was the Safeway grocery sign at the entrance to the parking lot. I decided that survivors must have barricaded themselves inside the store – that’s where the food was. Judging from the scorched shell of the building, they’d either been overrun or fought a pitched battle against other survivors to get at the goods. In the end it didn’t matter because there was nothing left.
We edged along the uneven ground at a decent clip as I surveyed the now dead community. Burned houses dotted the landscape, their foundations poking through the blackened ground like gravestones. Bowness Road, once a main artery into the city core, was filled with debris and abandoned cars. I spotted small clusters of the monsters turning their heads toward us as our two APC’s passed by.
“Ark One, they’ve caught wind of us,” said Cruze into her radio. “I don’t know if you can see them, but there’s creeps coming out of houses and burned-out shops. Want me to open up on them?”
“Hold fire for now,” I said into the radio. “The ones behind us aren’t a threat. If there’s a few hundred in front of us, then we’re in the shit. Keep going straight, Doug!”
The APC crawled over deadwood and debris along the riverbank. I tapped the fuel gauge with my index finger, noticing that we’d burned half of a tank of diesel.
Damn. We should be out of the city by now.
The temperature gauge showed we weren’t putting any major strain on the engine, but this was just the first day. What about tomorrow? What about when we’d eventually break down or when our Jerry cans were empty?
The cool breeze brushed against my face and the air carried the stench of death and smoke. I glanced to my right and nodded to Cruze who was standing in her crew commander’s hatch with her weapon at the ready.
“What are you seeing up ahead, Sid?” I shouted
“Hang on,” he shouted back as he gazed into a pair of binoculars “Dave, you
gotta
see this!”
I motioned for Sid to climb down. He slipped off his helmet – his face was practically gray.
I pointed to the crew commander’s hatch and Sid handed me the binoculars. He grimaced as he made room for me to climb up into the turret. In seconds I was poking my head up through the hatch and gazing through the binoculars.
“What the hell?” I whispered.
It wasn’t the hundreds of creeps now stumbling and tripping along the riverbank behind Cruze that had worried Sid. It was the small front-end loader on an overpass about a thousand meters in front of us that was pushing smashed-up vehicles and human remains over the railing and directly into our path. I spun the turret left and right and saw the loader had built a wall of smashed up cars and trucks on the east side of the overpass.
Then things went from bad to worse.
Cruze’s panicked voice on the radio filled my ears.
“Ark Two contact, over!”
I whipped the turret to the reverse position, just in time to hear the sharp clang of bullets ricocheting off the hull. Then Sid’s voice filled my headset.
Sid’s head appeared through the crew commander’s hatch. “Holy mother, Dave! – They’re trying to create obstacles for us – they want to slow us down!”
“That’s not the only thing they’re doing,” I shouted. “We’re taking fire!”
I spun around to see Ark Two being chased by a rigged-up Brinks armored car with a ten-foot-long spiked I-beam welded to the front bumper. The makeshift tank barreled through the wall of creeps behind Cruze smashing them to grease under its wheels. A male figure dressed in coveralls and a hockey helmet with a face cage popped up from a hatch in the roof and hurled a flaming Molotov cocktail at Cruze’s vehicle, narrowly missing the rear end by a few feet. It exploded in a burst of orange light, spilling liquid fire across the tinder dry grass.
“Cruze!” I shouted into the radio. “You’ve got someone on your tail.”
The radio hissed loudly. “No shit, Sherlock! If we get hit with one of those fire bombs we’re screwed!”
“Roger that!” I replied as I spun the turret around and cocked the .50 Caliber machine gun. “Hit the brakes and hold fast, Doug! We’ll give supporting fire to Cruze!”
A series of well-aimed shots, like large hailstones hitting a tin roof, bounced off the lid of the turret and only thing on my mind besides providing support to Cruze was protecting the Jerry cans of diesel lashed onto the hull of our APC.
I dove out of the turret and into the back of the carrier. Jo had awoken from her nap and gave me a worried look, but I didn’t have time to offer any reassurance.
“He’s gaining on me!” Cruze’s panicked voice blared through my headset. “Give me the word, Dave, and I’ll open up the turret guns!”
“Hold your fire!” I replied, as I climbed back into the crew commander’s hatch and peered through my periscope.
“Holy shit!” Doug choked as a blinding flash filled my entire field of vision. The ground shook beneath us and the APC pitched sharply to the right as the blast from an exploding car swept over us like a rogue wave. I ground my knuckles into my eyes and within seconds my vision returned. I gazed up to see three men with hunting rifles in the kneeling position, their weapons aimed straight at us.
“Dave, if they knock out our tires, we’re going to be SOL!” Doug shouted into the intercom.
“They’re shooting at me, Dave!” Cruze barked. “And they’re going to try to ram us if they get enough speed going!”
I looked over my shoulder at Jo, who was just about to peer out of the rear viewing port, and made my decision.
“Weapons free!”
I roared.