The Zombie Wars: The Enemy Within (White Flag Of The Dead Book 8) (13 page)

Montana Community

“So what do I do with you?” Cole Hobbes said, looking over the man before him. He wasn’t impressed with what he saw before him, but it took a lot to impress Cole Hobbes.

Two days ago, word came to Cole that a large force had come through the mountains, following the old logging roads. Cole knew them well, he’d been over them himself when he first came to Montana. Over the course of the last two years, he had been through them several times and knew how treacherous they could be.  What this fool before him thought about moving a force that large through the trails, Cole would never know. There was a fork in the trail, and one path took you to the mountain, the other took you to the canyon.

The small army of two thousand men and women had taken the wrong trail, got themselves stuck in the canyon, and now were trapped at the base of the mountain. They couldn’t get out without Cole’s help, and he wasn’t inclined to offer any.

“You came to my mountain with the thought of putting us under your control, didn’t you?” Cole said.

Tom Haggerty shook his head. “That’s not why we’re here. The Commander in Chief has ordered us to clear any zombies from the northern states that we find and leave the communities that have survived the Upheaval to themselves that want to be left alone. That is the extent of my orders, and that is what I aim to do.”

Cole looked at Luke Blacktail who was standing nearby.  “Did your scouts ever come back?” he asked.

Luke shook his head. “I figure they are not coming back. I don’t have any idea what has happened to them.”

Cole turned to Haggerty. “Did you kill them?”

“No! We’ve seen no one, living or dead since we entered the mountains!” Haggerty protested. He was livid, more angry with himself than the situation. It was his decision to take the south trail to try and get off the mountain, and he led them right into that box canyon. The noise of the passing vehicles caused an avalanche which closed the trail behind them with thousands of tons of rocks and snow.

“Perhaps.” Cole was enjoying himself, like a bully always does when his prey is helpless. “Well, I ask you again. What do I do with you? If I give you shovels it will take you a year to dig out the mess you are in. If I bring you up, you’ll run us out or take us over.”

“No! We would not. We would take what we could, head south, and rejoin our army,” Haggerty protested.

“And bring them back here, I am sure,” Carson Hobbes said.

Cole looked at Blacktail. “Take him back to his people. They have enough supplies to last a while, and the river at the bottom will feed them if they know how to fish.”

Hobbes looked at Haggerty. “Maybe you’ll have luck when the snow melts. Probably around May these parts.”

“You can’t! There’s two thousand people down there!” Tom argued.

Cole waved a dismissive hand. “Your problem. You brought it with you.”

Tom knew when he was not going to win an argument with this man. He’d seen them before, and they were all the same.  Community leaders who let the power of their position get the better of them. It always ended badly. He looked down and missed the look that passed between Hobbes and Blacktail

Haggerty allowed himself to be led back to the rope swing that had brought him up. He tried to think about what John and Charlie would do in a situation like this. John would probably have told the Cole son of a bitch to go fuck himself and promise him that he’d be back to make him wish he’d played his hand smarter. Charlie would have probably upended the table and beat them all with it.

He smiled to himself as he walked to the canyon edge. It was an amusing thought, but not practical.  John always said put the most number of people first, and even if you’re wrong, you can’t be blamed.

They reached the edge, and Haggerty set himself in the swing. He stepped over the edge, with two men holding the rope.

Haggerty looked at Blacktail and shook his head. “I wish he had been more reasonable.”

Blacktail waited until Tom was suspended over the canyon edge.

“He was.” Luke slipped his knife out and with a slash, sent Tom hurtling to the canyon floor.

“No!” Haggerty watched the jagged rocks rush towards him, and his last thought was he hoped John would show up soon.

Luke Blacktail looked over the edge of the cliff and watched as the people below ran towards their fallen leader. Several faces looked up, and Luke stepped back as several bullets whistled past his head.

Probably should have disarmed them first, he thought. Oh well, we can negotiate for them later when they are hungry enough.

“Set a rope by the cliff, do not let anyone walk near it. No point in giving them a target to shoot at,” Luke said to his lieutenant.

Blacktail walked back to the main hall, ignoring the questioning looks coming from the people who lived in town. He went back to the conference room and sat down.

“Is it done?” Cole asked.

“It is. They won’t trust us ever again. Not until they have to,” Luke said.

“Good,” Cole said. “Now then. Listen to me. I want to talk about a few things, but I need to know if I can count on you for complete support.”

Luke bristled. “I think I just proved you could.”

“Easy. I just wanted to hear it from you,” Hobbes said. “We’ll let them stew for a while, and in a couple of days we’ll see if they want to talk.” Cole turned to his son. “Go talk to the builders. See what it would take to drop a section of the canyon wall. Just as a demonstration.”

Carson smiled and left the conference on his errand. Cole turned back to Luke. “I think we may have an opportunity here,” Cole said.

“Really?” Luke asked. “What kind of opportunity?”

“This army has just worked their way across the northern states. The area is wide open and mostly free of zombies,” Cole said.

Luke thought about it. “So we can get off this mountain?”

“That’s the thought. There are huge tracks of land right to the east of us, free of zombies, and ripe for the taking,” Cole said. “I imagine every single person here could claim ten thousand acres without even running out of room.”

Luke thought about it. “And what about the rest of the army that this one belonged to?”

Cole smiled. “I doubt we’ll have any trouble from them. These mountains are a dangerous place.”

Far below the canyon wall, a group of men and women met within the confines of a small box truck.

“What can we do? Outside of shooting anyone who shows their face, we’re trapped.” The speaker was a small man named Harris.

“The army is trapped, yes. But we all are not.” This came from a woman named Alice Dorn who was named the leader after they buried Haggerty. She continued.

“Two of our fighters are experienced rock climbers. They will get through the avalanche that trapped us here and head south to find the Commander. Right now I figure he has to be somewhere around Kansas, maybe Nebraska. The good news is that he’s closer than he was a month ago, and that works for us. I don’t know what this asshole has planned for us in this canyon, but we will not just roll over.

“Stan, put your sharpshooters on notice. Rotate in teams, and keep a watch on the cliff. If anyone gets curious, kill them.” Alice was mad as hell at losing Tom. She was a forty-eight year old mother who lost two of her three children to the zombies. The fight she had with the zombies was vengeance, and this Hobbes person was in her way.

“Benny, inventory the supplies, and I mean all of them. Carolyn, you get your two climbers ready. I want them ready to go tonight. We will have a service for Tom, and while everyone is distracted on the one side of the canyon, those two are up and out. If we can get word to John, then I know he’ll get to us.”

Everyone in the room agreed. Not everyone, but most people liked John Talon, and knew he was loyal to his friends and the people who took his orders. It was just a matter of getting word to him.

“Dismissed.” Alice waited until everyone had left, then followed them outside. The river was loud and muffled the sounds of the camp. Alice shook her head.
We should have taken the damned other fork.

Nebraska, West Side of the State

“Mother of God, it’s cold.”

“I know. The zombies practically shatter when you hit them.”

“Useful that.”

“Can you imagine the mess when all this melts?”

“Let’s not be around to see that, hmm?”

“We missed Christmas, you know.”

“I know. We’ll celebrate when they come out to meet us in the spring.”

“Here’s to hoping we’re still here in the spring.”

“Amen, brother.”

We were in Nebraska, slogging through the plains, killing everything we could find. A Norther with a bad attitude had come blowing in two days before, and the resulting chill literally took your breath away. The upside was that every zombie within a hundred miles was practically frozen stiff. I sent the army far and wide to go through every county and town and kill every single one they found.  We cleared out hardware stores of hammers and sledges, since our edged weapons weren’t very useful against corpsicles. Bullets worked, but if they couldn’t chase you why would you waste a perfectly good bullet on them?

“What happened to Duncan and Tommy?”

“They went with a group over to the Air Force Base. Apparently there were some military survivors who had holed up there.”

“Alive?”

“Nope. Enillo got in when they let in some civilians, and they were eaten from within.”

“Same shit, different city.”

Charlie walked over to a zombie that was stuck in the middle of a yard. Its eyes followed him as he came closer, and a hand slowly raised in an attempt to grab at him. Charlie brought his axe down quickly, splitting the Z’s head like a melon. Charlie walked around the ghoul and raised his arm as he did so, leveraging his axe out of the dead man’s skull. It was casual but effective.

I admired Charlie’s choice of cold weather weapons since it took a second effort to pull the axe out of their heads. I was a bit lazier, choosing a log splitter. It was a long polymer handled thing, with a triangular hunk of steel on the end, kind of like a wedge of cheese. I had a choice of either an edge or a flat crushing surface.  Either worked, and my preferred method was to raise it up and let gravity take over. Like I said, lazy.

We worked our way up the street, staying away from the houses and the businesses. There was another crew that was taking care of that, and they were ahead of us by six streets. The goal was to get through ten streets, end to end. Kill everything you find, and then you’re done for the day. Usually it took only a day to get through a decent sized city. The dead basically just stood there and let us kill them.

Of course, we were freezing our asses off, and I was pretty sure I couldn’t feel my left hand anymore, but we were almost done, anyway.

“Yours,” Charlie said.

I walked over to a group of three zombies that were standing by a lamppost in the middle of one of those turnabouts that most drivers hated. The three watched me approach, and the one on the left actually managed a step in my direction. He must have been very hungry. His skin was grayish blue, and his eyes were freaky, being nearly all black.  I mean, there wasn’t any white at all. I was actually fascinated, staring at his eyes while he reached up for me. 

“Umm, John? You hypnotized or something?” Charlie asked from the side of the road.

“Oh! Right!” I batted away the zombie’s hand and brought the splitter down on the Z’s skull. The other two slowly turned their heads, and I bashed both of them as well. The far zombie’s head actually cracked into four pieces.

“What were you looking at?” Charlie asked.

“Hm? Oh! The first zombie didn’t have any whites in his eyes. Pretty weird, actually,” I said.

“Really?” Charlie walked over to the dead zombie and looked at its freaky eyes.

He came back a minute later. “That was weird. I think his eyes were bloodshot when he died, and the blood turned black as it spread out.”

“That makes sense,” I said.

“Shall we?” Charlie asked.

“By all means. How many roads do we have left? Two?” I asked.

“Umm, one actually.”

“Nice.  Should wrap this up by the end of the morning tomorrow,” I said.

“Cool,” Charlie said as he spotted another zombie. He walked over and slapped it in the forehead with the edge of the axe, knocking it off its feet and planting it in the snow. The zombie was an older woman who still had a couple of curlers in her hair. When Charlie hit her, two of the curlers went flying, and when she hit the ground, a few more flew up.

I was chuckling to myself and didn’t hear the radio I had in my pocket.  It took a few times before I realized my chest was calling my name.

I fumbled with my mitten before I could get the radio out of my pocket.

“Talon here.”

“John, is that you?” Duncan was on the other end.  Charlie heard the response, and I swear he sprained his eyeballs rolling them so hard.

I opted for sarcasm. It had been that kind of day.

“No, this is Jake, the other Talon,” I said.

“Wait, what?” I actually think I heard Duncan working his head around that one.

“Jesus Christ! It’s John!  What do you want?” My hand was starting to freeze a little. If the wind chill was over twenty below I think I would have been surprised.

“Got a little problem. You might want to call in everyone for the day or get them inside somewhere,” Duncan said.

I didn’t argue or ask why. If Duncan thought it was a good idea to get everyone to safety, he had a very good reason to do so. I switched the channel on the radio and made an all call to everyone within range.

“Attention! Attention! Attention! This is John Talon. All teams report to shelter or base. All teams, report to shelter or base until further notice. Talon out.” I switched the channel back to Duncan.

“What’s going on?” I asked. I realized we were about as far as we could be from base, and it was a long walk back to any warmth. My balaclava was starting to ice up, and my goggles were getting foggy.

“We were cleaning up the base, and found there were some kid zombies in here.   They ran out of the base and got away through a hole in the fence,” Duncan said.

“Wait a second. You said they ran? How could they have run? Why weren’t they frozen?” I asked.

“When did I become an expert on creepy dead people?” Duncan said. “All I can tell you is what I saw.”

I appreciated Duncan’s sarcasm, so I got down to business. “All right. How many and what direction?”

“Sixteen, and they were headed north to northwest,” Duncan said. “None of us got a shot off since they were too far away for pistol shots.”

“So, essentially they’re headed our way,” I said.

“Sorry. Tommy and I are going to take to their trail as soon as we get our rifles,” Duncan replied.

“Thanks for the heads up,” I said. “Over.”

I looked at Charlie. “You catch any of that?” I asked.

“Not really.   Did he say something about rifles and a pistol shot?” Charlie asked.

I filled him in, and he was as surprised as I had been about the little ones.

“Son of a bitch! Does anything slow them down?” Charlie asked rhetorically.

“Just one thing that I know of.  But we have a little problem,” I said.

“Yeah, we don’t have any long guns.”

“And supposedly they’re headed this way,” I said.

“What’s the play?” Charlie asked.

“I’m not much for hiding, and I’d rather sleep in my own bed tonight as opposed to some store or unfamiliar house,” I said.

“Same here,” Charlie said.  “Let’s make our way back, and with any luck we will catch up to another group. Safety in numbers and all that.”

I nodded, and we headed south, going over one street and then down. I figured since we were already here we may as well finish the job.

We were three blocks down when I thought I saw something flitting between buildings off to my left. I stood still, thankful I had a line of trees behind me. I whistled softly to Charlie who froze as well. I waited, staring at the spot, and then I saw it again, this time it was a small dark shape that slipped along a wall, trying to stay in the shadows. I moved slowly, slipping off my mitten and putting my hand inside my coat. When the little zombie was about twenty yards away it stopped, sniffing the air. It was a boy, about eight or nine years old, with a crew cut and t-shirt.  His eyes were ringed with black which emphasized the white parts. He kept his head to the small breeze, turning it this way and that, moving ever closer to where Charlie and I were.

There was a sound behind the zombie, and he whipped his head around, crouching like an animal at bay. Smelling the wind again, he moved back the way he came.

There was a blur and a crack, and suddenly the boy dropped to the ground, his skull having suddenly sprouted a tomahawk.

I watched as Charlie retrieved his hawk and did a mental calculation around how far he had been from zombie, and I reached a suitably impressive conclusion. That was at least a thirty yard throw, and he hit a target that was about the size of a cantaloupe.

Charlie jogged back, and at the far end of the street about six blocks away there was a cry as six more small zombies ran into view.  They spread out to cover the street, and hurried towards us, their little feet churning the snow.

“Wish we had rifles right now,” Charlie said.

“Got a handgun, but that’s good for one if you’re lucky and they hold still long enough,” I said, watching the little horde get closer. They dodged around cars and trees, keeping us in sight as they got closer and closer.

“We going to run?” Charlie asked.

“Nope,” I answered. “Don’t feel like wasting my breath when it’s this cold. “

“Let’s restrict their access at least,” Charlie said.

“Yeah, that’d be good. I like that box truck over there,” I said, pointing to a roofing company truck parked in a driveway.

“Perfect.” Charlie and I ran over to the truck and pulled on the back handle. The door was stuck fast and padlocked to boot.

“Not so perfect,” Charlie said. “Another idea?”

“I like that porch over there,” I said. It was on an older house that had a long porch covering the front. The porch had large brick arches going from one end to the other, and the owner thoughtfully had put wrought iron decorations that blocked the porch off. I thought it was a little ironic that the gate to the porch had a small sign n it that said ‘Welcome.’

Charlie and I raced across the street just as the six little zombies rounded the corner. It was a race to see who would reach their objective first. Charlie flew across the yard and plowed into the gate, halting for a second to wrench the handle down and burst inside. I was right behind him and slid across the porch to crash into the front door.  Charlie slammed the gate shut just as two of the little zombies slammed into it. They bounced off and then slammed into it again, reaching through the gaps in the iron. I took the log splitter and hammered the little girl on the left, trying to ignore the fact that she had large brown eyes like my son Jake’s. Charlie cracked the skull of the other one, and we waited for the rest to arrive.

It didn’t take long. The remaining four saw us and launched themselves at the gates. I had a small moment of panic when the gates on the far end didn’t look like they were going to hold, but I only needed them to hold for a short amount of time, anyway.

I swung the splitter down, crushing one skull, then another.  Charlie brought his axes out to play, and he had killed two of them without it being ridiculous.

A fifth one came out of nowhere, jumping at the bars and being repelled. She scrambled up, trying to squeeze through the bars, and Charlie killed her for good the next time she came within reach.

We sat back and caught our breaths, exhaling mists of vapor into the chill air.

“Do you think the Upheaval would have been different if the zombie kids weren’t so fast and dangerous?” Charlie asked. “I mean if they moved as slow as the rest?”

“Good question. Probably not as bad,” I said. “Parents could more easily control the ones that were slow moving, and we could have gotten a handle on it sooner.”

“We killed eight total here.” Charlie counted. “How many did Duncan say were loose?”

“Sixteen, so we’ve accounted for half,” I said. “Want to keep moving?” I asked.

Charlie shrugged. “This is a nice little setup, but we can’t stay here forever.”

We stepped back out into the streets, trying to see where the rest of the kids were.  The sun was nearly directly overhead, and everything was bright. Even the sky was a brighter shade of blue, although that just made it look colder, if that was possible.

I walked ahead, with Charlie about five yards behind me. We stayed in the middle of the street, not wanting to be near any corners that might have surprises for us. I carried my log splitter on my shoulder while scanning from side to side. I had no idea where an attack might come from, but we had to keep moving. It was a risk to be out in the open like this, but I didn’t like just sitting around waiting for something to happen. If they were out there, they needed to be killed, plain and simple.