Zombies Ever After: Sirens of the Zombie Apocalypse, Book 6 (33 page)

At her feet, Debbie’s bedding was an explosive mess of
sheets, pillows, and comforters all over the floor. It was too hot to
need any of those for sleeping under, but she probably needed them to
cushion herself on the hard floor. Whatever it was for, she wasn’t
among the wreckage.

“Debbie?” she said cautiously. She needed the girl but
wanted her to be gone, too.

No response.

She called louder to the same effect.

Time to do this myself.

In an act that immediately reminded her of that first day in her
St. Louis living room, she cautiously rose to her feet, using the
arms of the chair as her guides. Her rest the night before had helped
her back, but not as much as it would have with proper sleep in a
proper bed. Sleeping in a chair brought out new soreness in her body.

Once on her feet, she looked for her cane. Or, she thought, even
that darned walker. But this was a home for youngsters. The only cane
recently inside had been her own, and she managed to misplace it.

Pretending she was only 99, she grabbed the arm of the chair and
moved to the wall. She wall-walked to the front door.

“Where will I go?” she said to the empty room, talking
to herself exactly as she used to do back home. She giggled at the
realization. She was, after all, still alive. For her, that was a
thought worth celebrating.

“Who would have thought,” she mused, “that an
old lady like me would be in a pickle like this. Looking for a walker
when so many zombies are upon us.”

That sobered her.

The front door was flimsy wood and opened easily. With a few
stumbles, she reached the edge of the front stoop so she could see
the world outside.

It was worse than she feared. Because several lots had no houses
sitting on them—the old town had been stripped of many over the
years of decline—her view of the scene allowed her to see
several streets over. People were running on her street, on the next
street, as far as she could see streets further into town. All of
them were heading to the south—away from the battle in the
north.

In her yard, she saw a swath of destruction emerge from the side
of the house—dual troughs of dirt had been torn from the thick
grass. The cause of that mess sat in the lot across and down the
street a few houses. One of the tanks from the levee had driven
there, apparently through her backyard, and it came to a rest under
the impressive canopy of a towering old tree.

Two streets over she happened to glimpse Debbie walking between a
pair of hobbling elderly women. Everyone else was going south, but
her direction was against the grain—toward her stoop.

It gave her a moment to ask what could drive the young girl to
collect more elderly. It was almost as if she was doing a service
project of some kind.

“Save the elderly people from the zombies,” she
chuckled. “Well, not this old bird.”

With great care, she stepped out onto the front walkway and made
her way to the street. Once there, she knew she would get assistance.
It embarrassed her to do it, but almost no one would pass an elderly
woman swaying in the middle of the roadway.

To her surprise, many people did pass her with not so much as a
look.

Oh, heavens me. Things are bad.

But, with great relief, she felt someone grab her arm.

When she looked at her helper, she thought it was just about the
last person in the world she expected.

2

“General! What are you doing here?”

“I’m planning,” he said curtly.

With the whole town running in terror, and the leader of its
defenses on her elbow, she didn’t dare bring up her trivial
problems.

“Actually, this is called a fighting retreat, Ms. Peters.
Elsa bombed me yesterday so I had to move my vehicles into the town.
We've been fighting with spears at the ditch all night. Now I have my
people in a line behind us, trying to go door to door to evacuate
what we can before the zombies catch us.” As if to emphasize
that line, he shoved her to go faster—beyond her comfort zone.

It struck her that this might be where her story ends. After a few
paces of fast-walking, she stopped him.

“General, I’m not your concern. Leave me here. Protect
these other people.” She pointed back to Debbie, who was at
that moment walking over the lawn to the house she just left. “That
girl helped me get out. She's trying to help others escape. She needs
your help, more than I do.”

He looked back, but only for a moment.

“You aren’t going to understand this. I’m not
sure I do. But Elsa wanted you dead. There's a reason for that.
Whatever that reason is, that makes me inclined to refuse her wish
and save you myself.” His eyes conveyed the seriousness of that
statement. “Now are you going to walk with me, or not?”

She’d lived a long and happy life. Though she admired his
sentiment and shared his desire to deny that woman anything, she
couldn’t be responsible for dragging him down while trying to
take care of a spent soul like her. She did her best attempt to pull
herself free, intent on doing a movie-quality evasion of him. Of
course, she came nowhere near pulling it off.

“Leave me be.”

His response was rapid and decisive.

Before she knew what was happening, she was in his arms.

“Oh! No. Put me down, please.” Her words carried no
weight. They were as light as she was in the strong arms of the
military man.

“Ma’am, I’m sorry. I was taught to always honor
my elders, and I admit this is borderline disrespect. But we’re
in danger of losing the whole town because of that woman’s
actions, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to walk away and
leave you to die when I could easily save you.”

Marty didn’t know what to say. She couldn’t make him
put her down, even if she wanted to get violent—which was never
going to happen. As with a sizable portion of her later life, she was
now being swept up in events, and totally dependent on another human
being for her care.

Al, why didn’t you answer me?

In those moments she reflected on Al’s absence. Was he
giving her a message? Was it up to her what she did next? That seemed
right. He could have given her a destination, and she would have done
anything in her power to get there. But he didn’t work like
that. The being masquerading as her late husband liked to be
mysterious
. She laughed a little at the more-than-obvious
thought.

So where would a mysterious being want her to go? Liam would be
looking for her. She was sure of that.

I didn’t leave him a note!

The realization stunned her, but the more she thought about it—

I still don’t know where I’m going.

“Dear Liam, I left the house in the arms of a general.
Points unknown. Best wishes. Grandma.” That thought was as
accurate a note as she could leave at the moment.

The general wouldn’t take her back to that house, even if
she begged.

“I can hear them, general,” she said softly. The yelps
of the zombies carried on the air.

“Marty, listen to me. The lines are about gone. The town is
going down. I’m going to leave you somewhere safe, but you have
to trust me. I’m going to get you out of here, and then we can
see how you and Elsa fit together. Deal?”

“Are you giving me a choice?”

“No.”

“Well, then. Carry on.”

She would be on the lookout for her escape. Wherever he was going
to put her, it would not be safe. And worse, it would endanger
others. She’d spent too long already allowing people to fight
for her, and die for her. Liam, especially. She was as proud of him
now as she was ashamed at her own selfishness through all this
bother.

It wouldn’t be suicide to let myself get caught, would
it? Not if I tried, for a little while, to escape them.

Her mind was aflutter with competing life directives when she
finally saw what the general was going to do with her.

John knew how it would end. Always did, once he saw the zombies
coming over the interstate. And every death was the result of
Elsa—and whatever group she worked for—and her
abandonment of these people. Deep down he wanted to walk away from
this fight so he could prepare for the next one, but, alas, that
wasn’t going to happen.

He'd gotten Ms. Peters to a safe spot. One victory among a string
of fighting defeats.

“Sir, everyone who’s getting out is behind us.”

“And we have nowhere to go,” he replied.

“Sir?”

There were two bridges on the southern tip of the peninsula on
which the town of Cairo had been settled. Today it was essentially an
island, since the ditch linked the two rivers on the north side. It
had been filled with bodies, so maybe that disqualified it from being
an island. A strange thought given the gravity of the situation.

There were hundreds of barges floating around the town, as part of
the recovery efforts of the past several weeks. He could have jumped
any one of those, cut it loose, and gotten his men out. But not the
equipment. That’s why he’d made every effort to get his
surviving tanks, Humvees, and Bradley’s to the southernmost
bridges. But now that he was there…

“The mayor did us one last favor,” he said with
derision.

While they were busy fighting zombies hand-to-hand up in the
north, the mayor and some of his public works lackeys had been here,
in the south, clogging up the bridges with every vehicle they could
find. Somehow they’d even managed to wedge a truck-sized
shipping container on the Missouri bridge.

“We can just climb over that garbage, sir,” the
civilian man said.

John didn’t reply. They’d spent the morning fighting a
delaying action block after block in the long, narrow town, and he
assumed this was going to be where he rides off into the sunset after
a job well-done. He'd even gotten lucky and found Marty wandering
about. But their escape was in jeopardy.

The mayor had made sure he couldn’t get his heavy equipment
out of the town. He couldn’t say for certain the old man knew
what he was doing—maybe he got a call from Elsa. The end result
was the same: the mayor screwed him over.

There were barges out on the water with cranes attached—the
port area had two he knew about—and with unlimited time he
could have this bridge cleared using those cranes. But he had
minutes, not hours.

He reached into his Humvee, searching for a miracle. “This
is Warfighter actual.” He called to his aid Tom using the
designation he'd written on the piece of paper. "Dunkirk, how
copy?”

Nothing but static.

He’d tried to keep his radio chatter to a minimum because
Elsa was always listening, but this was important. The surveillance
drones did slow circles over Cairo, reminding him of the wider world
and his lack of a role in it.

“Tom, dammit, are you there?”

He’d sent his assistant out the previous day, and he feared
he’d come to harm. If he’d come through it might have
made this whole fiasco more palatable. As it was, he was going to
have to abandon all his equipment to the zombies. Maybe someday he
could come back and collect it…

That gave him his out.

As civilians streamed onto the Kentucky bridge, he gathered the
remnants of his unit. He had the two Abrams, four remaining Humvees,
a mostly-empty supply truck, and a rabble of civilian cars. Both
Bradley’s had been lost—one by the JDAM, the other due to
a maintenance failure. It made him laugh to think he was probably
still the most powerful man for hundreds of miles. The two tanks
would make him invincible in a world where everyone used spears.

“Mount up. We’re going to the most southern tip. We’ll
swim if we have to, but I’m not abandoning these tanks until I
have no other choice.”

Some of the men looked at the bridge—he knew they were
considering their own odds. But to their credit, everyone followed
him into a little park that sat on the southern tip of the fake
island. The buildings of the town faded away, and the last few
hundred yards south of the bridges was a pleasant grassy parkland.
They were outside the levee system, so the ground sat very near the
water level. Hundreds of barges rode the water in every direction.

He shut off the Humvee and sat for a moment staring out at the
water. This was the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers.
The Mississippi came in from his right, linking with the other
waterway in a large V. One jump and he could float in perfect safety
all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.

That made him laugh. There would be no such easy escape.

He got out of his truck, intending to explain his reasoning at
what had to look like a desperation play, but an Osprey swept in from
just above the Missouri-side bridge, it rumbled almost directly over
his position, then flew north in what could only be described as a
landing maneuver. His instinct said it was Elsa coming in to gloat.

He thought through all the possibilities of the day. Fight or
flight time. The noontime sun smacked down on him—hastening the
need for action.

“Change of plan, gentlemen. I need volunteers for a mission.
We’re going back into town.”

“I’ll go,” a soldier said without any
hesitation.

Chloe. You wonderful woman.

2

Chloe explained how she’d just left the port area—and
her makeshift spear factory—because zombies came a’
knockin’. When a tank drove by she figured that was the last
hurrah. Her people helped get civilians over the Kentucky bridge, but
she decided to throw her fate in with the general.

“I’m glad you made it.” Then, looking at the
rest of his men, he noticed there was an almost even mix of civilians
and formal military. Perhaps the transition was already taking place.
The order of the old military was giving way to a citizen army. “I’m
glad you all made it here,” he said loudly.