Sever, p.23
Sever, page 23
Katie thought it was strange how much more time there seemed to be in each day when you were bored out of your mind. Not having television or the internet made each day drag by and they seemed almost twice as long as a normal day. Then, add to that the three days of being cooped up in the car, driving at twenty miles an hour and she was ready to go insane. She’d been both frightened of the prospect of leaving the car and exhilarated for a change in the scenery.
But now, she was flagging. Her side hurt and she wished that she’d skipped the KFC in favor of the treadmill more often. Her companions weren’t all crazy in shape or anything, but she could tell by the way that they moved that each of them went to the gym regularly. No one foresaw this crazy scenario happening, but if they did, would people have changed their lifestyles or would it be a struggle no matter what?
Of course, she’d never know; for now, she had to take a break. “Hey guys!” Katie called softly. “I… I hafta take a break. I can’t keep up.”
Shawn slowed down to a walk while Maria continued running for another twenty feet. Finally, she stopped and turned toward the girl. She had her hands on her hips and one side cocked out like she was pissed off to have to wait for anyone else.
“What’s wrong, Katie?” Shawn asked with concern. The bastard wasn’t breathing hard either.
“I just need to walk for a minute. I’m all light-headed.”
He glanced up at Maria as they walked to where she’d stopped. “She took that knock on the head from those cans,” Shawn stated. “I don’t want to stress her body too much. We put enough distance between us and the zombies for right now. Let’s slow down, conserve our energy and think about finding a place to bed down for the night.”
“Shawn, are you kidding me?” Maria asked, now folding her arms defensively across her chest. “Our bodies are pretty fucking stressed, but we’re finding the strength to go on. These things are the most active during the day, we should keep moving at night while we have the chance.”
The group’s leader looked back and forth between the two women. Katie could tell that he wanted to keep going—Maria obviously did—but she really was tired and didn’t know how much longer she’d be able to go at the pace that Maria set. Her life had been laid back before the end came. She wasn’t used to all of this stress and physical activity.
“I can keep walking, Shawn,” she admitted. “I just can’t do the non-stop running that you two can.”
Shawn reached out and put a comforting hand on her shoulder. “We can’t keep going forever either, Katie. We’ve just seen what these things can do up close and that fear is what’s motivating us to keep going. Come on, let’s keep walking west, we’ll eventually find a car or a sign that will tell us where the military went.”
She looked around at the devastation in the pale moonlight and stated, “I don’t think we’re gonna find anything in this town, Shawn. They destroyed it.”
He was silent as they walked down the road, making their way around, over and sometimes under the scattered wreckage. Thankfully, they hadn’t found any bodies but Katie figured it was only a matter of time; you couldn’t have this level of damage and not have dead people.
Suddenly, Shawn let out a soft cheer and pointed off in the distance. “Look at that! That’s a sign if I’ve ever seen one!”
Katie followed his outstretched arm and saw a bright light shining into the sky. With zero electricity, even a flashlight would have stood out in the night, but the light that had unexpectedly appeared could be seen for miles and miles. Then, another light came on a small distance away from the first, followed rapidly by a third and fourth, all shining radiantly into the sky.
“Holy shit!” she muttered.
Maria stopped short and placed a warning hand across Shawn’s chest. “What if it’s a trap?” she asked.
Shawn pressed her hand down and pulled her into an embrace. Katie could hear him mumbling something into her ear and see Maria’s head nodding, but what passed between the two of them was a mystery to her.
Finally, Shawn broke away and said, “Okay, we’ve got to take that as a sign that somebody wants us to see. Since we don’t know who it is, we’ll have to be careful and approach it with caution. I don’t want us to get captured by some weird-assed gang of thugs so we’ll use the wreckage to sneak along and once we get close enough to see what it is, we’ll make the determination if they’re friendly or not. Deal?”
The girl noticed that Maria’s fingers were tightly intertwined with Shawn’s, but didn’t say anything about it. “Yeah, of course,” she replied. “We’ll be quiet, sneak up and make sure it’s the Army and not some cult or something and then decide what to do once we get there.”
“Okay, let’s get moving again,” Shawn stated. “Remember, now that we know that we’re not alone, we need to be on the lookout for traps and stuff like that.”
“And zombies,” Katie quipped.
*****
31 October 1751 local
Crockett County Courthouse
Ozona, Texas
“Alright… Alright, dammit! Enough already! Everybody quiet down. What’s going on, Calvin?”
“The Mexicans are roaming all over the desert by my house, that’s what!”
“Okay, so what?” Crockett County’s Commissioner replied with a sigh toward the two men who blocked the doorway of his office. Even from behind his desk, he could smell the whiskey oozing out of their mouths and the pores of their skin. He hoped this didn’t take too long, he had plans tonight. “We’re only seventy miles from Mexico; the Mexicans are out in the desert all the time.”
It was true. Ozona was only about seventy miles, as the crow flies, from Del Rio, which was right across the border from the Mexican state of Coahuila de Zaragoza. Just to the west of the border town, only another fifty or so miles, the United States’ Big Bend National Park boasted the most rugged and vacant land in all of Texas; it was a major point of entry for both drugs and illegal immigrants. Grayson had seen hundreds of Mexicans making their way illegally across his land since he and Jamie settled in Texas more than six years ago after they’d evacuated from Indianapolis, so it wasn’t a big deal to him anymore.
It was after five on Halloween and he’d planned to take his kids, Jessica and Gregory, trick-or-treating this year. He wasn’t sure what was making all of his constituents so upset, but he’d made a commitment to his kids that he wouldn’t miss the holiday again this year. He’d just call Andre over at the local Border Patrol office—like they were supposed to do—and have him go investigate. Even Sheriff Cochran would have been a better alternative for Calvin and Nathan than the county commissioner, but the two drunks knew better than to go inviting the law into their lives.
“A few illegals ain’t the problem, Mr. Donnelly,” Calvin Espinoza said. “What I mean is there’s a whole Mexican army driving around my ranch!”
“Calvin, is this like the time you swore that we were being taken over by aliens disguised as armadillos and jack rabbits?”
“You know that I took that back. I was just mistaken by all the crazy lights out there in the sky,” the old drunk muttered with downcast eyes.
“Hell, Calvin. Just last week you and Nathan were in here telling me that the Russians were invading, now it’s the Mexicans?”
Grayson sighed again as Nathan raised his hand like he was in court or school. Finally, he said, “What is it, Nathan?”
“Well, Your Honor, I—”
“Please, how many times do I have to tell you two to just call me Grayson or Mr. Donnelly?”
“Uh, okay, Mr. Donnelly. In Calvin’s defense, we heard about the Russians on the internet radio show and the reports keep coming that they’re up there in the Virginias fighting against the zombies.”
The mention of zombies changed Grayson’s mood. He couldn’t believe that the nation was once again facing a major outbreak of zombies. He’d fought against the damned things and helped to contain them in Indianapolis before they’d been wiped out there. He’d even gone to Quantico last spring as a Type Two “expert” to brief the FBI team that was responsible for recovering some of the United States’ most prized possessions—which also apparently kicked the hornet’s nest.
Grayson tried to not to think about those dark days in Indianapolis often. Yes, he’d met his wife, Jamie, and made lifelong friends in Curtis and Julie Long, and Sam and Gretchen Johnson from Three Pillars and Bill Downs and his daughter Carrie from Pecan Valley, but when they got together, they almost never mentioned their time in the quarantined city. The thought of the quarantine then made him think about Major General Ian Clarke and the British Prince of Wales’ Division that had ringed the city while the Americans fought on multiple fronts against the zombies in DC, the militias in the Midwest and the gangs in the cities. It was a perfect storm of discontent and terrorism that almost brought the nation to the brink of anarchy and he wasn’t sure if America would survive this war.
“Okay, I don’t know about the Russians being on American soil helping to fight the zombies; we’ve accepted help from other nations before, but an army of Mexicans running around the desert? That’s a little hard to swallow, guys.”
“I knew you wouldn’t believe us, so I took pictures of them. There’s a whole mess of ‘em and they look like they’re headed toward Ozona!”
Humor him for a little bit; you’ve got time until the trick-or-treating starts. “Well how many people are in this army of yours, Calvin?”
The older man dug into his pocket and pulled out his cell phone. “Here, take a look. It ain’t a whole mess of illegals; it’s the actual Mexican Army. They’ve invaded!”
Grayson sighed and glanced at the clock on his desk once again before accepting the phone. “Just swipe the screen from right to left to go back and forth between pictures,” Calvin directed.
He looked down at the smart phone’s small screen. The old man had taken pictures from what looked like his back porch. They were grainy and hard to see when he tried to zoom in on subjects that were far away, but there were definitely a lot of pick-up trucks, SUVs and even several non-US wheeled military vehicles out across the flats near the old man’s house.
He swiped the phone from the right and grimaced at the picture of Nathan peeing on a toad in Calvin’s yard and laughing like an idiot. “Really?” Grayson asked and held up the phone for Calvin to see.
Calvin grinned despite himself and replied. “You went the wrong way, but that’s when we noticed the Mexicans. Go the other way on the camera roll.”
He did as asked and tried to forget the image. He went past the first photo that he’d seen and then went into ones that he hadn’t seen yet. They certainly looked like an invading army. Some of the pictures were better than others and he could see a lot of men and wheeled vehicles driving across the open scrub desert behind Calvin’s house. Grayson looked up from the phone and asked, “Where’d you take these photos, Calvin?”
“Right off of my back porch! And I looked it up on the internet, those big army vehicles are infantry carriers. They hold six or eight soldiers per vehicle, plus all those men walking. I’m telling you, they’re invading!”
Grayson was concerned that the two men had actually found an army of Mexicans invading the United States. “How long ago did you take these pictures?”
Calvin looked over to his best friend and drinking partner before answering. “What? Maybe five minutes before we left and then a twenty-minute drive into town.”
“That’s ‘bout right,” Nathan slurred.
“Alright thanks, fellas. You two did a great job coming in here and telling me about this. I’ve got to call the sheriff and then the governor’s office,” Grayson answered. So much for getting any trick-or-treating in with the kids, he thought as he picked up the phone to dial Joe Cochran’s number.
ELEVEN
31 October, 1903 hrs local
Lehigh Valley Mall Parking Lot
Allentown, Pennsylvania
“Hey, Sergeant, I’ve got movement,” Specialist Vaccaro stated in the strange, detached voice that she always seemed to use when she watched the KillTV for information during a mission.
Kevin edged up next to her to look at the small tablet computer that she held. The tablet showed a direct video feed from one of the drones flying above. The Army had been given dynamic retasking authority over the entire unmanned aerial vehicle network to support the ground movement of troops as they fought against the creatures on the ground. It drove the Air Force crazy to give up control of their birds to the ground-pounders.
“Are those our civilians?” the sergeant asked as he pointed to the small, ruggedized screen. It was amazing that they had a potential visual on their objective so he could readjust their planned route before they’d found their way out of the mall’s parking lot. In addition to the overturned cars and general wreckage in the area from the MOABs that the Air Force had dropped almost a week ago, the squad had already encountered several zombies that were attracted to their beacon lights and had to be dispatched quietly. That took time that the civilians running for their lives didn’t have, so Kevin used every advantage that he could to get to them as quickly as possible.
“Hold on, let me switch to infrared. If they’re human, they’ll show up bright and rosy, if they’re zombies, they’ll disappear….”
“And if they’re recently deceased, we might be walking right up to our death,” Private Majors muttered from a few feet away.
“Dammit, there has to be a better way,” Kevin muttered. The fact that the creatures didn’t show up on IR was a huge advantage, but the team’s mission was to go rescue people trapped behind the main zombie offensive line. Often, the Army had no clue where those civilians were located until they started moving around to look for food, shelter or weapons and then the satellites or drones caught them and a rescue team was scrambled. Unfortunately, when people started moving around, they tended to get dead. Several times, his team had deployed to a target location and found the people that they’d been sent to rescue had already turned. The problem with infrared was that the human body would retain heat for several hours and they’d went forward expecting an easy extraction, only to end up besieged by the newly-transformed zombies.
“We could always yell out ‘Marco’ and if they answer back ‘Polo’ then we’re good to go,” Vaccaro answered sarcastically.
“And if they moan back, I’ll answer them with Karen here,” Private Folsom quipped as he patted the 40-millimeter grenade launcher mounted underneath his M4 rifle.
“Or, we could just let them come to the lights,” Majors said hopefully.
“I swear to God, Majors, if you don’t quit being such a pussy, I’ll cram this rifle up your ass and squeeze off a few rounds,” Folsom replied quietly while still managing to convey his message.
“Alright, all of you; knock it off,” Kevin ordered. “While you three stupid fucks are making jokes and threatening each other, we could get ambushed. Practice good noise discipline, or I will get my revenge once we get back to base. You get me?”
He looked back and forth between the privates as they each nodded and then glanced over to his real problem child. She wore a wide, toothy grin. “What’s your problem, Vaccaro?”
“Oh, I’ve just never seen you so fired up before, Sergeant. Maybe there’s hope for you yet.”
Kevin was in a strange place. He outranked Specialist Lisa Vaccaro in the Indiana National Guard, but in the civilian world, she was his boss. They both worked for a pharmaceutical sales company in Evansville and by a twist of fate, they were also in the same platoon in the Guard. Before the zombie war, they’d been in different squads and it wasn’t a big deal, but the attrition from their time in the defensive line had taken over half of the company out of action and this squad had been cobbled together from the remnants of everyone else left alive.
Vaccaro turned out to be a great soldier with an even better sense of humor about the situation, but there was always that lingering doubt in the back of Kevin’s mind that she was evaluating everything he did—both as a noncommissioned officer in the Guard as well as his potential in their civilian job. It was just another aspect of the National Guard that he’d have to work around. The unit had tried to do the right thing initially, but attrition had forced the situation, now he just had to grin and bear it while still doing the best that he could as a soldier and leader.
He chuckled uncomfortably and said, “Okay. Let’s get focused on what we’re doing, people. We need to find out if those are our civilian targets or if they’re zeds, and then we need to act accordingly; either we rescue their stupid asses or we murder ‘em.”
Kevin cross-referenced where they were with the heat signatures on the tablet and decided that they should stay with the plan he’d came up with on the roof of the mall. “The satellite imagery has confirmed what I thought; they’re traveling down Route 22, more or less. We’re going to continue on our preplanned route to the checkpoint, call it in and then wait for them to come across the river to us. Questions?”
When there were none—and thankfully, no more attempts at witty banter—he said, “Alright, let’s move out.”
The four of them continued forward, sliding around overturned cars and stepping as lightly across the shattered glass as possible.
*****
31 October, 2013 hrs local
Lehigh Valley Thruway
Allentown, Pennsylvania
Maria was exhausted. They’d been doing a mixture of running and walking when Katie couldn’t keep up for an hour and a half now. That girl was really starting to get on the older woman’s nerves; she was a complainer. Maria wasn’t in the best shape of her life either, especially after what happened at the house in Randolph, but there wasn’t a chance in hell that she’d say anything to the others about being so tired.
