Sever, p.16
Sever, page 16
They didn’t see the two humans and they shuffled past. The creatures even turned in a complete circle from twenty feet away and didn’t see them lying on the ground. After a few seconds of casting about looking for a trail, they turned and headed in the direction that they were originally going.
“They didn’t see us,” Maria had said in awe. Then it made sense to them, looking back on it, how they’d been able to escape the mob when they’d accidentally gone to the wrong building in Parsippany. They’d been able to dodge in and out of the trees surrounding the office complex and lost their pursuers due to the poor eyesight and lack of critical thinking ability.
Since leaving the firehouse, they’d made their way slowly westward, but the relative peace of the nights like they’d had before was no longer available. Once the sun went down, the creatures now dotted the landscape in small groups, huddled together as the pair tried to slip past them. A few times, they’d had to throw old bottles or other trash in the opposite direction to clear the way of zombies when they chased after the noise. If it hadn’t been so deadly serious, Maria would have laughed at the absurdity of it all.
They’d also had the misfortune to learn that the creatures could see very well in the daylight, though. They tried to see if they could travel in the daytime, but a harrowing chase had proven that only distance and sharp 90-degree turns would save them. The zombies weren’t particularly fast, but they were relentless.
Their current planned hiding spot was a medium-sized grocery store along the New Jersey 10. They’d traveled all night long, each night for three nights and they were only about eight or nine miles from the firehouse in Parsippany. Besides the groups of zombies that they had to avoid, they spent a considerable amount of time each night searching for usable vehicles with keys. The problem with an organized evacuation was that the people took their possessions with them, apparently along with all the spare sets of keys for cars that were left behind and Shawn’s jokes about Cubans knowing how to hotwire cars had gotten old quickly.
They circled the grocery warily; Shawn watched the surrounding area while Maria observed the store for movement or signs of break-ins which would indicate that they might not be the only ones there. They’d yet to find anyone else alive after they were abandoned by the Army when their pick-up team was killed, but there had to be hundreds—thousands—of people hiding in their homes and they were bound to meet up with others soon.
It didn’t seem like anyone had been to the grocery store before them, so Shawn used a small pry bar that he’d liberated from the firefighters’ tool chest to break into the back door. The snapping of the deadbolt sounded like someone had fired a shot in the early morning, causing Maria to jump. The noise echoed across the loading dock and off into the surrounding neighborhood.
“Shit!” Shawn hissed. “That was too loud!”
“Let’s get inside,” she replied with a worried look over her shoulder out toward the adjacent houses.
“Yeah, I think you’re right.” They slipped inside and used their heavy-duty flashlights—another find at the firehouse—to illuminate the produce receiving area.
“God, this place smells awful!” Maria gagged with her jacket over her nose.
“Let’s clear this back area real quick and then secure the door to the outside,” he answered. “Just be thankful that it’s autumn and not summer.”
The two of them walked rapidly around the stockroom together to make sure that they were alone and then returned to the door that Shawn had jimmied open.
“How do we secure it?” Maria asked, pointing to the broken handle.
Shawn shined his flashlight around for a minute until he found a large roll of packing tape. “I don’t think we can lock it anymore. Maybe we should think about breaking a window or something next time.” He paused and then picked up the roll. “Let’s use the tape to keep it closed and then we can pile up some of these boxes in front of the door. That way, if the zombies get the door open, they won’t be able to see us and think the place is empty.”
“But they’ll be in the way if we need to make a run for it,” she reasoned.
“Yeah, but I don’t know what else to do. It’s better than nothing.”
Maria acquiesced and they spent several minutes using the tape to hold the door closed and then another few minutes pulling the boxes of rotting produce from where it had sat for weeks. She threw up in her mouth and swallowed it twice before allowing herself to vomit onto the floor, but by the end of the ordeal, they’d successfully blocked the doorway against casual accidental opening and casual observation.
After they had the back area relatively secure, Shawn suggested that they clear the front of the store before they relaxed. They walked up and down every aisle searching for others, acknowledging that if there was someone else in the building, then they could easily have avoided the pair. When they got to the front of the store, they found an elaborate trap set up near the door.
“What the hell is that?” Maria asked.
“Uh… It looks like a booby trap or something.”
The front door was unlocked. Stretched across the bottom was a thin piece of fishing line that ran to a pallet full of cans for weight. The fishing line was tied off to the end of a rope that ran through a pulley set into the pallet. The rope ran through the pulley, up to an eyelet set in the ceiling and then across to another eyelet directly above the doors. Suspended from the second eyelet was a huge rope net with what appeared to be a large grocery bag full of cans secured in the middle.
She pointed to the bag and said, “I bet those cans are to knock somebody out if they trip the wire.”
Shawn looked around the store. “Whoever set this up probably knows that we’re here,” he whispered.
Maria was more inquisitive than her companion. “How is all of this operated?” she muttered.
She crouched near the fishing line and followed it in the opposite direction from the pallet. A razor blade was glued to the side of a carpet cleaning machine near the door. When the victim hit the trip wire, it would carry the fishing line into the razor and sever the line, causing the entire contraption to go into motion. The far end of the line attached to a brick suspended in the air.
“What the hell?” She searched a little further and saw that the brick was tied to the handle of an air horn, rigged to blow when the string was cut and the brick dropped. “Jesus, this is elaborate. Who could have done this?”
“More importantly, why?” Shawn asked. “We need to get out of here.”
Maria glanced through the store’s glass front. “I don’t think we can. Look, some of the zombies are already starting to come out from wherever most of them go during the night.”
A few of the creatures wandered across their line of sight at the edge of the parking lot. “Shit!” Shawn exclaimed. She moved quickly back to the front door and reached across the trip wire to twist the lock home.
“No sense allowing them an easy entry,” she smirked.
“We gotta get out of here,” he said and started toward the back of the store.
She jogged and caught up with him. “Hold on. Think about it. Whoever set that trap can’t come out here in the daytime either—wherever they are. That air horn is to tell them that somebody’s sprung their trap. They aren’t expecting anyone to go through the back door. We might as well stay here; get some supplies and some rest, then try to leave before they come back.”
Maria could tell that Shawn was considering ignoring her logic, but ultimately agreed that it made sense to stay put for now. They could stock up on non-perishable food and get some rest before they took off on the road again. She didn’t like the prospect of staying where some shitheads had made a trap any more than he did, but it just made sense for them to do so. The air horn convinced her that they were likely close, but not close enough to be able to watch the store constantly.
Their first priority was to get the supplies together. They got a cart and went toward the aisles in the center of the store—which Maria usually avoided before the apocalypse. She used to hold the belief that the healthier food was on the perimeter of the store, whereas all the processed junk food was on the center shelves. Except for toiletries, she almost never went down the rows that held canned goods. Now, everything she used to eat was rotten and the processed stuff was all that survived a few weeks without power.
They quickly made their trip around the store and she said that she needed to get more tampons and some pads as well. “You can go down there, I’ll stay here,” Shawn said with his hands folded over his chest.
“Oh come on. We’re supposed to stick together, remember?”
“You’ve already made me think about that nasty stuff, I don’t want to have to go down there and pick it out with you too.”
“Really? How old are you again?” she muttered and flicked her long, dark hair over her shoulder.
He stared back at her, indignant, so she let out a disgusted breath and walked toward the darkened interior of the store where they stocked the feminine hygiene products. She glanced over her shoulder at Shawn, but he wasn’t visible. What a childish jerk! she thought. They were supposed to stick together, not get grossed out by human anatomy and something that she couldn’t control.
When she got to the section containing tampons, she flicked her flashlight on and searched for what she needed. The multi-pack is going to be my best bet, she thought as she picked up the box with several different absorption capacities and placed it into her cart.
A row of smaller boxes caught her eye. Oh, condoms… I wonder… She glanced back where Shawn was supposed to be, but he still wasn’t there. Dammit, where is he? The box of condoms went into her cart along with the tampons and she started walking back toward the front of the store where Shawn waited for her.
When she got to the end of the aisle, the shadows shifted and someone came out of the darkness. The last thing she saw was an upraised arm.
The arm came down and a rubber mallet connected with the side of her head. She dropped instantly and two forms stepped from the darkness into the gloom shining through the store’s windows.
*****
23 October, 1202 hrs local
Asher Hawke’s Residence
Rocky Mount, North Carolina
“Don’t know why I left this,” Kestrel said out loud to his empty home as he held up the sharksuit that he’d kept tucked away in the garage after he’d led the team to rescue Allyson and Steve Adams from Baltimore last summer. The suit consisted of thousands of tiny metal links similar to the chain mail that knights wore in the Middle Ages. The suits were designed to cover every inch of a diver’s body when they went into shark-infested waters. It was also extremely effective at keeping zombie teeth from ripping into flesh like Rachel had done when she bit him in the arm.
Technically, he wasn’t supposed to have kept the suit because of the radiation that it had been exposed to, but he’d placed it in a thick chest in the garage and covered it with old dental x-ray vests that he bought online years prior for a different assignment. He figured the radiation hazard was minimal since he’d worn the sharksuit under his radiation suit, anyways. Now he was glad that he’d kept it. It didn’t matter to him if he survived, but he needed live long enough to complete his mission.
He’d been violently sick for two days after he’d injected the A-Coll antidote into his veins. He threw up all over the bathroom and even ended up shitting his pants in his delirium. Finally, he was well enough to stand and staggered to the window. Rachel’s body still lay where he’d left it with the tomahawk sticking out of her head. Boomer was there as well. Nobody had come by to disturb the scene.
Asher worked his way outside and dragged the bodies into the camper. He laid them on the bed, covering them with a heavy blanket. The RV park was now mostly empty, but he was surprised that the dead hadn’t been found. The police would have taken him to jail, regardless of how sick he’d been. It turned out that all coastal areas had been given a mandatory evacuation order and everyone left without so much as a backward glance.
He cleaned himself as best he could in the filthy bathroom and then made a sandwich in the kitchenette—he was ravenous. He’d become comfortable with death a long time ago, so it wasn’t strange to him to have Rachel’s corpse laid out on the bed behind him. Besides, he was little more than a walking corpse himself.
The journey into Washington would be a one-way trip for Asher Hawke—the Kestrel, he corrected himself. Asher died with the zombie’s bite. The Kestrel would make sure that this nightmare ended.
On the drive back to North Carolina, the abandoned countryside flew by. He saw evidence of rampant looting and rioting, including more than a few bodies lying unattended on the side of the road. Kestrel once again called his friend Hank Dawson to get as many details about the differences between the Type Ones and Twos as well as a refresher on their tactics. He needed to know everything about these things and Hank had spent months fighting the Type Ones during the original breakout.
“Hey, man. I need you to give me a rundown on the Alexandria-Collins Primaries again,” he said when Hank answered the phone on the third ring. He knew that somewhere out in Denver, the DIA or NSA computers would begin recording the conversation since he’d said the name of the virus over the phone.
“Well, hello to you too, Asher. What’s this about?”
“I’m going back to the city. I’m going to find the fucking Type One behind this and end it while we still can.”
There was an obvious silence and then the soft click of a door shutting as Hank went outside or into a quiet room. “What the fuck, man? What do you mean you’re going back?”
“She’s dead, Hank. I couldn’t protect her from a simple run-of-the-mill zombie. This has to stop and I’m gonna go get that fucker who’s directing these things. Then the Army will be able to handle them.”
“What… I’m sorry for your loss.” There was another moment of silence and Kestrel heard him reply to someone, “Yeah, it’s okay, babe. Old Army buddy….”
A female voice said something that he couldn’t understand and then Hank replied, “No, I’m not going back. I… I just need a little bit, okay?”
The woman said something else and then the door clicked closed once more. “Sorry,” Hank said into the phone. “Emory’s worried that someone is trying to convince me to go back into the fight again.”
“Again?”
“Yeah, it’s been almost nonstop since this began. Our old buddy Alistair Reston has called several times, asking me to come back and consult—at the operational level—not about the tactical level shit like you’re asking.”
“Alistair knows what he’s doing. He’s the right guy to coordinate and get the teams spun up on what to expect.”
“I told him no. I mean, I packed up my family and ran like a little bitch away from the mainland… I hope you don’t think less of me.”
Kestrel grinned in spite of himself. Hank had gone into full civilian mode when he hung up the dog tags and started his family. “Nah, you did the right thing, Hank,” he replied, trying to ease the guilt that was so obvious in his friend’s voice. “You have a family to worry about. You did the right thing getting out of the Americas before they stopped the flights.”
Kestrel paused to let that sink in and then continued, “Another thing that’s happened over here in the southern part of the US is that the fucking zombies are coming out of the water. I was in Florida with Rachel when she went missing and I ended up fighting a zombie that came out of the water. Luckily the police were there and they shot it.”
“Jesus, they’re coming out of the water?”
He knew that if the weenies at NSA were listening in because of the keyword “A-Coll,” then they would pick up on that information right away. “Yeah. It was the Gulf side, so the thing had made it all the way around the tip of Florida. That’s another reason why I have to take out the Type One. I don’t think the thing making it that far was random—or isolated. I think they’re being directed by that Primary in DC and it’s trying to circumvent our defenses.”
“My God. They could potentially make it all the way to South America.”
“Well, they could make it anywhere in the world if you think about it. This has to end before it gets worse.”
“That changes things,” Hank said. He could tell from his friend’s voice that he was thinking about one of those things washing up on the beach in Hawaii where his children played.
“It does, but not for you just yet, Hank. I’m going back to the city alone. I just need some intel.”
“Listen, Asher. Are you sure about this? I mean, you’ve been there before. You know what it’s like. You almost got yourself killed a few times the last time you went in.”
“I already had to take an injection of the A-Coll antidote,” he replied.
“What? You were bitten?”
“Yeah, Rachel attacked me. It was dark and I didn’t know she was infected at first, but she bit me in the arm. I had to put her down.”
“Shit, are you alright?”
“Yeah, it made me sick as fuck and I don’t remember the last two days, but I’m slowly regaining my strength.”
“Good, I’d hate to lose you, buddy.”
Kestrel ignored the comment. “I’m headed back from Florida right now. I’ve got to stop at my house for some supplies. This is a one-way trip, Hank. I need a quick, down-and-dirty refresher of what you told me last spring when the team got your briefing at Quantico.”
“Let’s see,” Hank said as a strange clicking noise filled Kestrel’s ear. His friend had a habit of tapping his fingernails on a tooth when he was deep in thought. “The Type Ones are the leaders. We thought we killed them all, but I’m convinced there are more of them—at least one of them. The attacks that the news has shown have been too targeted for a random mob of zombies.” Tap, tap, tap.
