Zombies vs Polar Bears: Sirens of the Zombie Apocalypse, Book 5 (12 page)

“It
is
rather hot in here.”

It was enough of a request.

“Stand back, ma'am. I'm going to kick in the door.”

“Give me a minute.” After a literal minute, she
continued. “I'm clear.”

“No rush, lady,” he said softly.

He wasn't so old he couldn't kick the door. The paper-thin walls
were guarded by ancient wooden doors which should have been replaced
back in the 1960's. It gave away easily on the first kick.

The old John Jasper came storming through the door, but when he
saw the elderly and very small lady sitting on the edge of the bed...

“What? Oh, I'm so sorry. I thought I was breaking someone
out.”

“Well, mercy me. I don't know who you intended to break out,
but I'm glad you've let in some fresh air. They were trying to kill
me, I think.”

He looked at her with more scrutiny. The little white-haired woman
was possibly the oldest person he'd ever seen. She was the last
person he expected to constitute a threat to Ms. Cantwell. After the
way she'd talked about her, he imagined a woman locked in chains that
might not
hold her.

“I'm Grandma Marty. I'm 104. Praise God for small miracles.”
She smiled at him.

“I, uh. Ms. Cantwell made it sound like you were a threat.”

“Oh, she's a terrible woman. She cut the power cord for my
air conditioner.” She pointed down to the severed cord. “Do
you have any water?”

He ran to the sink and filled one of the dusty old cups. At least
it was clean.

“Bless you—”

“John.”

“Bless you, John. I thought they were going to do what the
zombies couldn't—get me to die.”

“She said you survived the plague. That a guy named Hayes
did some tests on you and then he scrubbed the results from the
system.”

“Oh, he did? That's a surprise.”

“So you don't know about that?”

She shook her head.

“Do you know why Elsa would want me to track down this Hayes
character? Does he really have a cure?”

The old woman took her time answering. He felt the weight of time
bearing down on him. He needed to get to his men, then he could focus
on Elsa from behind his weapons, if need be. Something wasn't right
in all this.

“I really don't know. He was a doctor with the CDC, I think.
My mind gets fuzzy these days.” She held her hand to the side
of her head, as if to emphasize where she was using her brain.

He couldn't see anything important about the old woman. She
continued to ramble nonsense, but she ended with something he took as
legitimate.

“Are you with Colonel Brandyweis?”

“No.” He'd heard that name before. There was an
alphabet soup of senior ranks in the town, but he couldn't place the
name. “Who's he with?”

“Who's he with?” she repeated, though a bit weaker
than before. Her age was a factor in her ability to answer simple
questions, he'd decided.

“I. Don't. Remember.”

He thought it was a lost cause, and was backing to the door, when
she stumbled on the answer.

“He said he commanded the bird planes, I think.”

Marines.

“Somebody has to have some damned answers,” he
muttered, already thinking how to get a hold of the colonel.

“I've been trying for weeks to get answers, my son.”

“What do you mean?”

“Answers from Al. He's either an angel or a figment of my
imagination. No one will tell me. What do you think? Am I crazy?”

John looked at her for a long while. The droopy eyes. The
incoherent speech. The woman wasn't just elderly, she suffered from
heat exhaustion. Maybe something more.

“Ma'am, I'm going to take you to the medical station. You
need some help.”

“That's right Al, I helped Liam. I helped the girl. I did
good.”

Her eyes rolled up into her head.

John shouted out the door.

“Tom—come here, I need you!”

4

John stood on the top of the levee, overlooking the entire
operation below. He felt the relief of being among his men again, and
away from strange women. The pullback of the tanks and men from up
north had gone smoothly, and they had redeployed at the base of the
levee so he could roll them up and fire over the berm behind the
ditch when the time came. Until then, he didn't want to have his best
tanks providing high profiles for any would-be hostiles. He wasn't
facing Soviet Guards Armored units in World War III, but it was his
job to act like he was.

What better time for a surprise attack.

The Paladins were also tucked in below the levee. They'd have to
be brought to the very top to get a clean shot down onto the bad
guys, which didn't suit his style at all. Firing over the heads of
friendly units a hundred meters ahead was dangerous. As long as he
didn't have bullets coming in from the other direction, he didn't
think it necessary to endanger the men. Especially since there would
probably never be a single replacement for one he lost. The machines
were irreplaceable.

As dusk fell, he actually felt pretty good about the turn of
events. It was a shame to give up so much ground, but now he would
have a front seat to command his men, almost as they did back in
Revolutionary War days. He'd yell commands, then watch them enacted
before his eyes. Killing infected wasn't nearly as complex as killing
Redcoats, but ultimately more satisfying because the things were so
vile. There was no quarter given, or asked.

Two Humvees came upon him as their headlights cut through the
ubiquitous dust his units lifted from the great field to the north.

It's her. What now?

Tom had stood by him while he issues orders via the radio. Other
commanders had come and gone over the course of the afternoon, but
currently it was just the pair of them.

“Hello, General. I trust you've done as I've asked?”

“Yes, ma'am. All my units are now effectively outside the
town, as you requested.”

“Nice work. I would send up a recommendation of a
commendation for your efforts, but I don't think anyone is active in
your chain of command.”

He pretended to laugh.

By way of a reply, she walked right up to him and got an inch from
his body. She was shorter than him, but not by much. Her blue eyes
were cold.

“Aww General, we could have been so good together. There are
so many zombies, so many types of zombies, it would have taken a
lifetime to kill them all. We need good men who can give and follow
orders.”

The impulse to step back was overpowering. He fought it.

“We'll stop them here, I assure you.” He was
unaccustomed to the feeling of inferiority she instilled in him. His
voice didn't carry his usual confidence.

She smiled, looked at him for a long moment, then backed away.

“It really is impressive, is it not? This entire field will
be crawling with the dead, soon. The whole state is walking this
way.”

John had nothing to say.

She turned around, as if to leave, then halted.

“There is one more thing, General.”

“Yes?”

“What did Ms. Peters tell you?”

The soldiers getting out of the Humvees were not his own.

“I don't suppose you'd listen to my orders if I told you to
arrest this woman?”

Their lack of reply was answer enough.

Liam was at the edge of the ten-foot-wide pedestrian bridge, along
with the leaders of the group fleeing toward mid-town. As he crept up
to see what was below, he heard the familiar angry moans of the
zombies before he saw them. He also smelled them. In large groups
they carried the smell of death far and wide. Some even mastered that
smell, which gave off some strange vibes to anyone unfortunate enough
to smell them. It had happened to him in the railyard. Victoria on
the side of that building. And all of them back on that boat.

He wondered what a pack of them would do.

Hundreds of zombies were on the railroad tracks below the walkway.
It was perhaps a hundred feet across, made of concrete, but with
metal side railings. There was no way to hide someone on the bridge.

“We have to find another way,” he said quietly to
those near the front. He thought it was pretty obvious. The original
plan was to run through the park to get around the unexpected group
of zombies on the tracks, but that group was bigger than anyone
expected.

“But what about them?” A young woman pointed to the
far end of the bridge. He didn't see them at first because they were
lying down and the bridge had a slight arch to it. But now that he
knew where to look...

“The scouts?”

She nodded. “They must have gotten over, but don't know how
to get back without drawing those crazies in.”

The situation was dangerous. They were far out on the span, very
near the far exit on the far side of the tracks. But that exit was
exposed. The zombies below would surely see them. And if they came
back toward the main group…

He wished he could use his phone to look at a map, but it wasn't
linking up with any towers. One of the problems with depending on the
internet to always be there. But the group couldn't possibly cross
the bridge. They would have to go on city streets for a while until
they reached the bike path on another block. Well away from the
gaggle of zombies below.

A plan formed in his head, but it was the usual half-baked
craziness he told himself he needed to control. He found it
disconcerting how many times regular people allowed a
sixteen-year-old boy to come up with ways to save their lives. He
admitted this time he was probably the most fit, given their head
start on starving themselves, but he much preferred other people
think of the master plans and he simply help refine them. He was
uncomfortable doing
all
the thinking.

In five minutes he was set up. Victoria decided to join him,
because she wouldn't take no for an answer. A fact he appreciated.

Lana and Jason listened as he explained his plan, and their role
in it. As expected, his mom said absolutely not, though Jason was
more pragmatic. Saving the two men on the far side was going to take
some creativity.

“Are you sure about this?” Jason asked.

“Unless you have radios?”

“I do, in fact, but I don't have chargers to run them.
That's why my scouts had to come back and talk to me. The good news
is those two can run.”

He looked at his own shoes, out of habit, whenever the topic of
running came up. They were always ready for the abuse he gave them.

His mental map of the area was simple. The bridge crossed the
railroad tracks, and they ran north and south along the big river. He
could see the water through the trees beyond the two stranded men. A
mile to the north was the floodway which would take them away from
the river and into the city. The safest way, they all thought, was to
walk along the tracks where the zombies would be light, but that
turned out to be false. Now they would have to run through the houses
where—he hoped—all those zombies had come from. They'd
reach the floodway that way.

Jason led the column at a fast pace into the backyards of the
nearby houses. He said he was going to keep them off the streets
until they reached the bike path along the floodway, then they were
going to follow that to Forest Park. He was going to drive them hard,
but most weren't in any condition to run that far, that fast. A few
gunshots indicated the homes weren't entirely abandoned. Their
progress could be tracked as the gunfire grew more distant.

His mom was the last to leave, taking his backpack with her. He
was glad she wasn't going to be around for what he needed to do. It
wasn't because it was hero stuff, as he called it, but because he
didn't want to have to worry about her as well as himself and
Victoria.

Almost before he knew it, Victoria was the only one left. They sat
and talked for fifteen minutes, or so. Often they would wave to the
two men on the far end of the span, letting them know they hadn't
been left behind. He thought about kissing Victoria, but it never
felt right with the moaning dead, and the two men hanging on their
every move. If he pulled her out of their view, they might think
they'd been left for dead. That could lead to desperate acts.

Liam had instructed Jason he would wait an hour and then set his
plan in motion, but scarcely twenty minutes had gone by when he knew
he was out of time. The horde below had either grown, or moved,
because some of them had wondered up the hillside and could nearly
see them sitting on the safe end of the bridge.

“If we go now, the main group won't be far enough away,”
Liam said with rising panic.

“If you don't go now, those two men won't make it.”

The good of the many. Or the two. A dozen books and movies
cascaded upon him with the very same scenario, but he couldn't get it
to apply to his moment. The bottom line was he wouldn't leave a man
to die if he could help it.

“I'm going for it. You with me?”

She gave him a good luck kiss. “Go get 'em, sport.”

He ran out onto the bridge, attempting to stay low and in the
middle so he'd only be seen by zombies far out in the crowd. That
worked to an extent, but he
was
seen. By the time he'd covered
the distance to the far end of the bridge, the roar was deafening. He
crouched next to the men.

“You guys ready to run? We've got to run to catch the main
group!” He had to yell to be heard over the roiling masses
below.

“Do you have any water?” one of the men asked. Both of
them were in their thirties or forties, well cut, and athletic. They
wore the right shoes.

“No, sorry.” That was an obvious mistake in his plan.
His own water was in his backpack, walking away.

“We're going to run over the bridge again, then keep going.”

“How far?”