Rend, p.19
Rend, page 19
Caleb followed the line of her finger toward the cabinet and then asked carefully, “How he did what, Katie?”
“Threw away the people. I was the only one that he ever saved. He said I was the prettiest person he ever saw and decided to keep me because I was special.”
Uh oh, she’s gonna start talking… Where’s the goddamned shrink! his mind yelled. “It’s okay if you don’t want to talk about it right now, Katie. I know a really nice lady who can help you talk about what happened.”
She ignored his comment and continued, “He kept me. He saved me for himself and he loved me. Even after the mob gave him a direct order to get rid of all the evidence, he disobeyed them and kept me safe.”
“The mob? Jones talked to you about the mob?”
“Yeah. They’re the ones who gave him the people to throw away. Jonesy only needed to do it for a few more months, then we were gonna move to Saint Lucia together.” She peeled her eyes away from the cabinet and stared directly at Campbell. “If we’d gone there, no one would have ever found me again… Thank you, Agent… I’m sorry, I don’t know your name.”
“It’s Caleb, Katie. My name is Caleb Campbell and I’m very sorry for what happened to you.”
A shadow darkened the doorframe and the psychologist stepped into view. Caleb gestured toward the woman in the doorway and said, “Katie, this is the nice lady I told you about. She wants to talk to you about what happened.”
Katie looked the shrink up and down and shook her head. “No way. I don’t want to talk to some therapist. I trust you, Caleb. You saved me. I know, up here, that I have to talk to her later,” she said as she tapped hard on the side of her head strangely, “but right now, I want to tell you what I know while we’re still in Jonesy’s house. That way, you won’t ask me about it again once I’ve started getting better.”
Campbell opened his mouth and then closed it. He looked to the psychologist for help. She said, “It’s okay, Caleb. I’ll be here to help if you need me, but Katie needs to talk to you right now.”
Great, he thought. “Okay, Katie. If you’re feeling up to it, can you tell me how Jonesy kidnapped people and threw them away?”
“He didn’t kidnap anyone… He threw the people away for the mob. They’d meet him at The Wall with people they kidnapped from New York City and places like that. He was the only one who knew exactly where to put the people so the government wouldn’t find them.”
Her voice took on a strange tone and she twitched slightly as she said, “You see, the government doesn’t care about keeping every inch of The Wall secure, just the parts that nosey reporters are interested in.”
Katie visibly relaxed and continued, “That’s what Jonesy would always say. He believes the government doesn’t care about anyone but themselves. He told me about three or four times that we had all these “near misses” with asteroids that no one knew anything about until they’d already passed the earth. Bullshit. The government knew that those things were on a collision course for us, but we’re powerless against them, so they just kept them secret. It’s easier that way.”
Campbell nodded in false agreement with her. Don’t tell the victim that they’re wrong, just let them get their feelings out and listen. His lessons from the HRT course continued to resonate in his mind as he talked to Katie.
“So, the government doesn’t care about The Wall. They don’t even believe that the zombies are that big of a threat. But I’ve seen them. Jonesy took me there once. He knew that I’d never run away into the night, so he took me with him. He said it was to show me that he trusted me and loved me more than anything in the whole wide world, but I think it was also to show me how easy it was to get rid of me if I did anything wrong…”
The girl trailed off and Caleb finally had to prompt her when she didn’t continue, “So if Jonesy didn’t kidnap people, how did he get them, to throw them away?”
“Some big, fat Italian dude named Marc brought them. I don’t know for sure, but I think Jonesy worked for different groups because he talked to a lot of people on the phone. He had better relationships with some of them than others. That sort of stuff always came out after we’d… y’know, done it.”
Campbell placed a comforting hand on the girl’s arm. “Do you know where along The Wall that he took them?”
“Not exactly. It was somewhere kinda close to the water because I could hear ducks. It took about twenty-five minutes driving down back roads in the Gator to get there. Other than that, I can’t really say. Oh, wait. One time he said that the Army and Navy were idiots to leave such a wide space unprotected between them.”
“I think that answers our question, Katie. Thank you. He probably used the area between the Navy and the Army’s jurisdiction to dump the people. In the early days, the Navy mistook and accidentally shot several soldiers. They thought they were escaping zombies. Since then, there’s been an unofficial buffer, a “no-man’s land,” that nobody patrols. I’ll talk to the military right away and make sure that they correct it, okay?”
She nodded absently and then said, “He used a Taser on them. That way they were unconscious, but they weren’t dead when he threw them over The Wall. I heard the… the zombies on the other side eating the people he’d thrown over. There were three the day that he took me. Only one of the victims screamed. The others must have died right away before they even woke up. I knew right then to never question Jonesy or else I’d end up the same way.”
She stared at the same kitchen cabinet again. “It’s in there. The Taser he used,” she mumbled while she pointed to the cabinet.
“Katie. Katie, look at me,” Campbell insisted as she ignored him, continuing to stare at the cabinet. He reached out and took hold of both sides of her face with his hands and gently turned her head toward him. He heard the psychologist behind him suck in her breath, so he knew that he was breaking some type of protocol. But he figured that right now, the girl understood forceful men and he needed her to get the message.
“Katie, you’re safe now. We will guard Jonesy. Full-time, twenty-four hours a day while he’s in the hospital and then he’ll be in a jail cell. He can’t hurt you anymore. Do you understand?”
She nodded reluctantly and Campbell said, “I’m serious, Katie. You will never have to see him again.”
“The trial…” the actress mumbled.
Campbell frowned. “You’re right, there will be a trial. Years from now. Don’t worry about that. What I want you to focus on is that you’re safe. The FBI will also have a guard detail placed on you full-time. You don’t need to be worried anymore. You’re safe.”
She finally broke down and began crying into his shoulder. Campbell looked over to the psychologist, who was now smiling and she made a gesture for him to hug the girl. He was in unfamiliar territory with this victim-comforting thing, but he wrapped his arms around Katie and gently rocked her back and forth.
She sobbed with great, full-body spasms that would help to cleanse her soul of the evil that Jake Jones and the mafia had forced upon her. Campbell made a promise to himself that he’d somehow get onto the team that raided whatever mob family that ended up being responsible for ruining this beautiful young life.
SEVEN
02 June, 1023 hrs local
Fort McHenry National Monument
Baltimore, Maryland
Steve clawed his way through the old sewer drain system on his hands and knees. He’d discovered the tunnel a couple of months ago and now it was his go-to route when he had to leave the fort and didn’t want the zombies to know what he was doing. It angled sharply away from the basement of the fort down toward the Chesapeake Bay and with a little bit of effort, he could climb back up and onto the walking trail on the southwest side along the bay.
Today’s trip was for some more canned food. He’d found a small market not too far from the fort near Latrobe Park. He went there every eight or nine days depending on what he could fit in the backpack that he’d pilfered from the fort’s gift shop. Before long, the market would be out of canned food and he’d have to either find another market or begin going into the houses in the surrounding neighborhood.
Early on, he focused most of his energy on trying to escape from Baltimore and then make it outside of The Wall, but nothing was successful. After that almost disastrous flight from the inner harbor to the fort, the zombies had stuck around for a few days, but then they got bored or forgot why they were there and wandered off. He was positive that if he could make it to where the paddleboats had been, then he’d be able to determine what had happened to them he could simply take one of them all the way to The Wall to be rescued.
He tried to make it to the old paddleboat rental dock by land, but it quickly became apparent that the creatures hung around down at the Inner Harbor for some reason and the way was blocked by the undead. He often wondered why they congregated there, was it because they’d gone there in their previous life and whatever mental synapses still fired in their rotten brains caused them to return or was it for some totally random reason? Obviously, he’d never know, but he had a lot of time on his hands to think about such things.
Then he tried to reach the boats by swimming across the harbor, but that shit about zombies not being able to swim was flat wrong. Fuckers might not have been very coordinated, but they retained enough muscle memory to doggie paddle after him. He supposed it made sense that they could swim since they remembered how to walk and do certain other things that he’d observed them do over the months. He’d tried to swim the harbor twice and both times, the creatures headed him off, causing him to turn back. To tell the truth, he was also concerned about what lurked beneath the murky waters that he couldn’t see.
He knew that there were boats all over the place and he could likely row his way to The Wall, but it seemed like whenever he got close to a boat, zombies would pop up and he’d have to run for his life. The same thing happened when he tried to travel overland from the city toward the countryside where, presumably, there would be less zombies and he could make it to a military checkpoint. He’d made it all the way down Interstate 95 until it intersected the 695, then he was herded back toward the fort. It seemed like they were content to leave him alone as long as he didn’t try to leave the peninsula where they’d stuck him.
The neighborhood that he headed to now was fairly devoid of the creatures. He usually saw ten or twenty of them each time he went out, but they were solitary, lone zombies not the large packs of them that showed up whenever he tried to escape. As he’d done hundreds of times, he tried to figure the damn things out.
Everything he knew about zombies was from fictional television shows. The few news reports that discussed the creatures and not the social situation that led to their reality, but these things didn’t really conform to any of what he’d learned about how zombies were supposed to act. For one, they could swim. For another, in his experiences, the large groups of them weren’t nearly as dangerous as the individuals were. Some type of pack mentality was definitely at play, but it was the opposite of what he’d always thought since the groups of them just blocked his progress to places. The individuals were almost like some type of feral animal that would attack anything that moved—more like the ones in the movies. Then there was the day that he barely survived the trip into the fort. One of those things had thrown a rock at him. That took coordination and the fact that the rock had hit him meant that the zombies thought, in some manner.
Even after being alone for so long, he was still hopeful for a rescue. He’d spelled out “SOS” on the lawn of the fort outside the walls with rocks, but the creatures had scattered the message by shuffling around the area, so he’d repeated the process on a smaller scale in the courtyard since they seemed content to allow him to do whatever he wanted behind the walls of the old fort. So far, he’d gotten zero indications that anyone had seen the message. That didn’t mean that they hadn’t seen it and weren’t trying to mount a rescue mission at this very moment, he told himself.
Steve glanced back at the fort and then scanned the sky for any type of plane or helicopter, but he was too far away to see anything clearly through the haze that was his constant companion. The fog was another thing that he wondered about—why was it always present? He assumed that it must have something to do with the radiation from the missile that had exploded down south and The Wall must keep the wind from blowing the radiation away. He’d taken meteorology as a jerk-off class in college, but he was sure that the mist didn’t conform to any of the subjects that the teacher had tried to instruct the underclassmen.
He turned back to the task at hand and focused on where he was going. He’d been this way probably twenty times, but there was usually something different about the path each time. When he was alone late at night, he imagined that the zombies were testing his reactions to various scenarios and learning from him somehow. Once, there’d been a trashcan along his route that wasn’t there on the previous trip. He’d tried to skirt the can, but the location on the trail made it so that he had to go close by it and a zombie stirred from inside the barrel to lunge at his foot. He’d screamed like a child and ran, but the creature followed him slowly toward the fort. He’d been forced to turn back and bash its head in with a rock from beside the trail.
Since then, he’d fashioned a spear out of a sturdy plastic composite broom handle and a large knife from the market. He’d had to use them a few times against other individual zombies and a well-aimed stab through the eye put them down each time. There never seemed to be an end to the supply of the creatures, so if they were using him as an educational tool, they didn’t care about sacrificing a few of their buddies.
Steve worked his way across a large parking lot, moving roughly parallel to Fort Avenue. He’d decided long ago that even if the damned zombies were using him for something, he wasn’t going to make it easy for them and tried to vary his route often. Sometimes he went down the road, other times he went along the harbor, and then there was the southern route that he took today.
He was halfway across the parking lot in an area where abandoned cars were parked against buildings on either side and canalized him to a single driving lane when two zombies stumbled out of the shadows of the building on his right and blocked his path. He turned to go back the way he’d just come from but two more were behind him at the start of the parking lot. “Fuck,” he muttered softly while he searched frantically for a third option. Nothing readily presented itself to him and he started to wonder he would die today. The zombies advancing toward him made the twenty feet to the end of the lane where the parking lot opened up seem like two thousand.
He looked around trying to find an option that would allow him to escape. Steve stopped and stared intently at a window above him overlooking the scene in the parking lot. A man stood in the window watching him. He waved his arms to try and get the man’s attention, but as he looked harder, he saw that it was a zombie in the window, not a man. This one looked a lot different from the ones he faced off against down in the parking lot though and he stumbled when he recognized where he’d seen it before. The day that he escaped into the fort, he’d seen this creature before. It was the one that threw the rock at him.
He realized that the thing was watching his actions intently so he flipped it the bird and focused on the four zombies closing in on him. I don’t have time to worry about that fucker, he told himself as he stared down the advancing zombies. They’d timed their advance so that they’d reach him at the same time, which meant fighting was out of the question. He thought about running forward to fight those two and then going to the other pair, but if he dropped his weapon or it got stuck in one of them, then he was done for, game over.
Shit. Shit. Shit. His mind screamed at him to figure something out. The creatures were less than ten feet away from him on either side when he decided what he needed to do. He scrambled up the trunk of an old sedan and stood on the roof just as the creatures reached the car. He leapt to the hood of the next car over which allowed him to get beyond the original trap. Then he scrambled down while the creatures were trying to unfuck themselves and sprinted out of the area between the building to the large open parking area and the railroad tracks beyond.
He slowed from the all-out sprint that he’d used to escape and settled into a steady jog that he knew he could maintain for a couple of miles if he had to. Once he was beyond the tracks and on the outskirts of Latrobe Park, he hooked a right up Andre Street so he could go into the Locust Point neighborhood where the market was located.
When he reached the neighborhood, he slowed all the way down to an easy walk to conserve energy if he had to run again before he could get the market secured. What the fuck just happened? he asked himself. That creature in the window was definitely overseeing the operation in the alley and there was no longer any doubt in Steve’s mind that they were testing his abilities. He didn’t know what the zombies wanted, but they sure as hell wanted to know how a human reacted to situations and what they did when faced with trouble. What did that mean? Why were the zombies concerned about how people solved their problems? They couldn’t get out from behind The Wall, could they?
*****
05 June, 1325 hrs local
The Outer Banks
Duck, North Carolina
Asher pulled her firm body onto his lap and she lay across him with his arms wrapped around her. The waves ebbed against the shoreline playing a peaceful song that both of them wished could last forever. But it couldn’t, tonight was Allyson’s last night on vacation before she had to return to Quantico. She’d hinted around to another big mission and Asher was determined to get the information from her about what it was. He was adamant that she should be directing recovery efforts from the command center, not going out on the missions, but she was just as determined to be on the ground with the teams in order to maintain control and make snap decisions that didn’t have to be relayed through a radio.
