Rend, p.24
Rend, page 24
“I’m pretty sure that we’re safe in here,” he replied as he gestured around them at the attic that they occupied. “That’s why we came up here.”
It was true. Once they outpaced the initial mass of zombies, they’d snuck around the city’s residential neighborhoods in an effort to reach one of the skyscrapers downtown. By the time that the light had failed completely, they were already breaking into this two-story house in Federal Hill, which was more than halfway to the nearest building. After they cleared it with only Steve’s pocket knife for protection they’d gone into the kitchen and filled the backpack with canned food, a can opener and utensils and taken several kitchen knives and a roll of duct tape.
Then they headed up the stairs with the intent of sleeping in the master bedroom, but Allyson noticed the small pull-rope dangling from the attic stairs set into the ceiling. She grabbed several blankets and pillows and they went up into the attic for added protection against the zombies. Steve discovered that it was harder to close the attic ladder quietly from above than he thought it would be. Between the two of them they finally got the damn thing closed and then they set about moving the previous tenant’s boxes so they could create a little nest for themselves to sleep in safety.
“Hey, Steve. Hello. You’re doing it again. It’s kind of freaking me out a little bit,” she admitted.
“Shit, I’m sorry. This place has done something to me in the head, y’know?”
She didn’t say anything so he continued, “I’m a lawyer. Just a normal everyday guy, but I got mixed up with the Spanglinis and before you know it I was fixing tickets, greasing palms and destroying evidence against them.”
“You know that I’m legally obligated to report what you just told me, right?” she said as she faced the wall.
“I don’t care anymore. I mean, I do care about my family and seeing those assholes put away for life, but I don’t care if I get arrested. Even jail would be a hundred times better than living alone in this city with those things.”
She turned over and faced him, “Steve, I can’t guarantee you anything, but I will try to see if we can give you some kind of deal in exchange for your testimony about the Family being dirty.”
“Yeah, I know all about it. I worked in the DA’s office—that’s why they sought me out in the first place. But when that fucking idiot Thomas Spanglini got sent up the river for gun-smuggling charges, the Family blamed me for not getting him off and the next thing you know, here I am.”
“Wait, you know that it was the Spanglinis who kidnapped you?” Allyson asked excitedly.
“Keep your voice down!” Steve warned her. “Yeah, it was definitely the Spanglinis. One of their junior thugs that I used to deal with on a regular basis stopped me on the street before Christmas. The next thing I know, I’m falling and I hit the ground on the inside of The Wall like a sack of potatoes.”
“You’ve just became a lot more important to me than you were five minutes ago. Do you realize what this means? If we can get you to testify, we may be able to break open this entire kidnapping ring and put a stop to it.”
“Wait. There are more people like me? There are other people who’ve been kidnapped and left to fend for themselves behind The Wall? I haven’t seen anyone.”
“Steve, there have been thousands of kidnappings over the last four or five years that we’re pretty sure are mob-related, but that’s based only on hunches and circumstantial evidence. We have satellite imagery showing what appear to be newer zombies behind The Wall. I guess ‘fresher’ would be the correct term.
“There are a lot of zombies in here now that resemble missing persons so our theory is that those kidnapping victims were somehow put inside The Wall and then they were attacked and turned before they could escape. You’re an anomaly. Actually, you’re a miracle. How did you get all the way over here? We’ve got to be twenty, twenty-five miles from the drop point, and ten of that is across the Bay—”
“What do you mean?” Steve interrupted. “I didn’t swim across the Chesapeake. I’m not sure exactly where they put me over, but it was close to Towson on this side of the water. I tried to work my way back north so I could travel along The Wall and find a gate, but the goddamned zombies kept showing up and I had to keep going further south. Before too long, I was in Baltimore and I got a crazy idea to try and steal an old boat. That didn’t work out so well.”
“That’s a brilliant idea, we should try it!” Allyson replied excitedly.
He shook his head, “I tried to reach the pier by going around to the inner harbor by land, but couldn’t make it because there were too many zombies. So I tried to swim across to it, but that didn’t work. The zombies can swim and kept coming after me.”
“Huh, we didn’t know that they could swim,” Allyson muttered. “I guess we really don’t know anything about them. We don’t know what they want or why they want to kill us. The only thing we really know about them is how to kill them.”
“Makes you wonder who the monsters are, doesn’t it?” Steve asked.
“Not so much. These things started the war against us.”
“Did they? How do you know? Maybe we started it by accident and they just plan on finishing it.”
Steve could tell that Allyson hadn’t thought of things in that perspective before. Score one point for the old lawyer side of his personality. He decided to redirect the conversation back to her original question. “Why’d you think I swam across the Bay?” he asked.
“A few weeks ago, we arrested the man who’d been physically depositing the victims over the wall,” she answered. “But the man we arrested only operated across the Chesapeake on the Eastern Shore. It makes sense now that you told me that the damn things could swim. We’d previously believed that maybe they went across the Bay Bridge and then wandered up, but who knows how they really got over there.”
She paused and stared off into the darkness to collect her thoughts. “So now we know that there have to be multiple drop locations, so that must mean that there are multiple kidnappers and people doing the dirty work of throwing live humans over The Wall into a zombie-infested region. Our man in jail isn’t talking about who hired him and all of his bank accounts are in offshore banks in the Caribbean so we can’t trace where the deposits came from.”
“Hmmm, well I don’t know about others, but it was definitely the Spanglini Family that got me,” Steve remarked. “I know because I was confronted by a low-level thug of theirs that I used to deal with on the night I was captured. While he—”
“Steve, you’ve already told me this,” she said gently.
“Oh, I did? Sorry.” Shit, the point I got for thinking outside the box just got taken away… Am I crazy? he wondered for the thousandth time.
*****
18 June, 2341 hrs local
FBI Forward Field Headquarters
Quantico, Virginia
Asher’s truck pulled into the nearly empty parking lot of the headquarters. There were just enough vehicles to let him know that they hadn’t scrubbed tomorrow morning’s mission. He’d driven the speed limit and avoided the impulse to drive to Virginia as fast as possible. He didn’t need to get pulled over with all the weapons he had in his truck. The retired operator had been in this game a long time. He knew if the aviators said that they were going tomorrow, then there was nothing anyone could do to goad them into speeding up their timeline.
Even though he’d driven the speed limit for the most part, thoughts of what was happening to Allyson distracted him. Was she still alive? Was she injured and needed him to be there? Who the hell was the second person at the fort this morning?
He walked up to the guard desk and saw Winston, the police officer who had manned this desk the last time he was in the building. “Hey, Winston. I’m here to see Alistair Reston.”
“Good evening, Mr. Hawke. What’s in the bag?”
“All the good stuff. I have my MK-17 SCAR with an attached sound suppressor, a Lapua Magnum .338 sniper rifle with 32X’s IR scope, a Heckler & Koch HK45 pistol, a few knives… Oh yeah, I have a tomahawk for the up-close stuff and enough ammo in here to wipe out half of Cleveland. Other than that, I have nothing to declare.”
Winston let out a low whistle and said, “Man, you Company boys come loaded. Mr. Reston already called and told me to be expecting you, so I already filled out the paperwork that you’ll need to sign based on your last visit.”
“Thanks, Winston. I appreciate that,” Asher replied.
“No problem, Mr. Hawke. It gets boring around here sometimes so this gave me something to do.”
“Better than the alternative,” Asher stated as he took the paperwork from the officer’s hand.
Since the alternative was some type of criminal activity on the Bureau grounds, Winston nodded his head and admitted, “Yeah, you’re right about that I guess.”
“When did you switch to night shift?” he asked the cop.
“We do a rotation every other month. It allows for family time instead of one group always working third shift.”
“Hmpf, sounds complicated.”
“Nothing like your job, Mr. Hawke,” the old man answered.
They continued making small talk as Asher thumbed through the pages and signed each one where Winston indicated. Once he was finally done the police officer handed him a badge to clip to his t-shirt so he wouldn’t stand out as an outsider. “Alright, you’re good to go. You know where the deputy director’s office is, right?”
“Yeah, I do. Thanks a lot, Winston. I’ll probably see you tomorrow morning when we leave, but if not, be safe man,” Asher said over his shoulder with a wave.
“Always am, Mr. Hawke,” Winston beamed.
Asher walked through the headquarters until he came to the central staircase. He climbed them slowly to the second floor and worked his way back toward Reston’s office. The lights were on and it smelled like fresh brewed coffee, but no one was in so he dropped his bag full of weapons and a couple changes of clothes beside the couch and sat down.
After a few moments of silent reflection on the situation he began to feel his eyelids getting heavy. It wouldn’t hurt to get a quick nap in while he could. In fact, it would help to refresh him for the mission into the city tomorrow he reasoned. Asher pulled out his phone, set the alarm for 4 a.m. and then turned sideways against the arm of the couch. Within seconds he was sleeping.
*****
19 June, 0412 hrs local
Federal Hill Neighborhood
Baltimore, Maryland
“Allyson, wake up,” a man said as he shook her gently.
“Hmm… What?” she asked, confused about where she was. She slowly opened her eyes and the dim outline of boxes around her combined with the angled slope of the roof above brought the reality of her situation crashing back. They’d decided to sleep here in the house and then planned on leaving early to go downtown.
She sat up and groaned. Then she rubbed her eyes to remove the rheum from the corner where it had built up overnight as she slept. She needed to pee badly, but wasn’t sure what the best thing to do was. They’d secured the house below, but they’d also trapped themselves in the attic. “Steve, I gotta use the bathroom. Is it safe to open the stairs?” she asked.
“Hold on, I’ll check out this vent, you check the other side.”
She walked gingerly across the floor and peered through the circular vent window into the back yard. There wasn’t anything making the mist swirl strangely in the dim moonlight, so she was pretty sure that there weren’t any zombies back there.
“We’re clear back here,” she whispered.
“Up here too. Come on, I’ll need help getting the door open again.”
Between the two of them they finally got enough pressure against the side of the door farthest away from the hinge and spring to get the door fully opened. The damned spring twanged loudly in the darkness as it locked into place and they both froze for several minutes, dreading the sound of crashing glass. Finally, Allyson’s urge to urinate overcame the need for any further observance and they carefully unfolded the ladder to the floor below.
Allyson rushed down the wooden ladder and went into the master bedroom. She locked the bathroom door behind her and began shedding layers of clothing and the metal sharksuit. She sucked in a breath of air and caught it in her lungs as the mesh pulled away from her hip bones, exposing an area where the suit had rubbed several layers of skin away and scabbed over during the night. Now, the blood ran freely from either side of her body down her legs. She was finally able to use the bathroom and thankful that the previous owners had plenty of toilet paper. It’s the little things in life that make it worth living, she mused as she wiped.
She decided to forgo the diaper that she’d worn all through the day yesterday. It was a disgusting mess of bunched up material with dried sweat anyways, so if she wore it much longer, she risked an infection that would take days to get rid of and she had plans to make it out of this place alive and spend time with Asher. He’d been right, of course. She shouldn’t have come on this mission.
Allyson saw her reflection in the bathroom mirror and shook her head at the image. Second-guessing herself now was a waste of time. She and Steve needed to get somewhere safe and then they’d find a way to contact the Bureau so they could be rescued. She strode naked through the bathroom into the closet and found an elaborate organizing system that would make most women jealous. Pulling out the most logical drawer rewarded her with a wide selection of underwear in her size. Allyson bypassed the thongs—even though some of them were really cute—and went for a pair of briefs that would allow her body to breathe and not cut into her skin as they moved through the city.
The bras were much too large for her, so she settled for the sports bra that she’d worn for the past day. She also grabbed a few changes of clothing that seemed to be in her size and stuffed them into a duffle bag that was in the closet. Next she went about searching the bathroom for anything useful. There was a small first aid kit and some hydrogen peroxide under the sink and she used those to clean and bandage herself up.
A soft knock on the door startled her and she dropped the bottle of peroxide into the sink. She picked it back up and said, “I’m almost done.”
“Okay, just checking on you.”
“I’ve got a few hotspots that are bleeding, but I found a first aid kit and I’m getting it cleaned up now, then I’ll be ready to go.”
“Alright, I’m just outside if you need anything.”
“Almost done. Promise,” she answered and stared in annoyance at the door. Even when she was stuck behind The Wall and on the run, men couldn’t leave her in peace for five minutes in the bathroom. Allyson smirked at how normal it sounded to want to be left alone in the bathroom, regardless of the situation.
Once she’d bandaged herself up and put on the woman’s underwear, she grabbed the first aid kit, some toilet paper, a hairbrush, some hair ties, make-up removing wipes, a small handheld mirror and an unopened toothbrush and toothpaste. She shoved them all into her bag and began the arduous task of putting the multiple layers of protective clothing back on.
The sharksuit seemed to rest differently on her today. Every time she moved, the damned thing rubbed against her hips so she went back into the closet and found a pair of thick socks and opened up the first aid kit once again to remove the cloth tape. She put a sock against her hip and taped it in place, then repeated the process on the opposite side. Once she zipped the suit closed, the weight of the metal helped to keep the padding in place. Everything went back into the bag and she walked out of the bathroom. Steve sat on the stairs doing something with a curtain rod.
“Whatcha’ doin’?” she asked softly so she wouldn’t scare him.
“I left my other spear at the fort when the zombies overran it,” he replied holding up a thick four-foot long metal rod. “The previous tenants had these thick, expensive curtain rods that’ll work perfectly. A spear gives us some stand-off distance from them.”
The agent remembered her own experience with getting the flash suppressor of her rifle stuck inside a zombie when she tried to push it away from her. Having any type of reach besides just what they had with their arms was bound to be an improvement. Steve had used heavy-duty duct tape to secure a kitchen knife to the end of one and was working on the second half of the curtain rod.
“Give me a minute and I’ll have a spear for you also,” he continued.
Allyson gave him his space and wandered over to an empty nursery. The soft green walls didn’t give her an indication whether the baby had been a boy or girl. It made her sad to think about all the children caught up in all of this. She picked up a stuffed bear and her mind drifted to a possible future with Asher, a man she’d been with for a little while. She wasn’t getting any younger, if she wanted a child…
She was staring blankly into space when Steve came up behind her. “Okay, here’s your weapon. It’s time to get going.”
Allyson took the spear that he offered and then gently set the teddy bear back into the crib. She turned to follow him down the hallway and thought better of her decision to leave the bear behind. She twisted back and picked it up, stuffing it into her duffle bag with the rest of her supplies.
*****
19 June, 0957 hrs local
Downtown Baltimore
Baltimore, Maryland
The two wary humans traveled the dangerous street between the old warehouse that overlooked Camden Yards and the Baltimore Convention Center. They’d made good time and were almost to the high rise area of downtown where they’d break into an apartment building, secure it and then find a way to contact the bureau.
Allyson felt extremely exposed in the open area between the ballpark and the convention center. She wished that they’d been able to stay at the fort instead of wandering the city, but tried to distract herself as they walked by studying the faded red brick. Baltimore used to be a great day trip for everyone in the Bureau’s Northern Virginia offices, until the zombies and the nuclear bomb destroyed the city. There’d been a great little bar where people gathered before the Orioles played. Her mind drifted as she tried to remember the name of it, but it escaped her. She remembered that the logo was some kind of fruit or vegetable, but that’s all she could dredge up at the moment.
