Rend, p.5
Rend, page 5
His heart melted. That was the first time that any woman had ever told him that she loved him. She was beautiful and she loved him! There’s no reason for the feds to search my home, his mind convinced him. We’re safe here. There’s nothing to connect us to the kidnappings so they’d never show up at our door.
“I love you too, Kate! I’ve wanted to say it for so long, but I didn’t know how you felt about me.”
She nodded and reached forward to paw seductively at his pajama pants. “You know I love you, baby. I love how you take me whenever you need me. I love the way you feel inside of me.”
Part of his mind told him that she was just using him to stay alive and that she’d run the moment that she had the chance. He’d known that she was an opportunist from the first time that he’d been with her those many months ago at The Wall, when she begged him to take her back to his place. She willingly allowed him to use her body in exchange for keeping her alive.
His mind knew all of that… But she loved him! She liked being with him. He quickly opened the door and set the Taser outside. “I’ve changed my mind,” he stated as he relocked the door. “I want you to stay with me. Forget those idiots up in Jersey, they don’t tell me what to do. And there will be a Christmas present. Two of them!”
She leapt from the bed and wrapped her arms around his broad shoulders. “Thank you! Thank you for saving me again, Jonesy! I’ll make it up to you every day to let you know that I appreciate it!”
“I know you will, baby,” he murmured into her blonde hair.
*****
30 December, 1150 hrs local
Fort McHenry National Monument
Baltimore, Maryland
Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit, the man thought as he sprinted toward Fort McHenry, the former historical site that was under bombardment when Francis Scott Key wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Three days ago, Steve Adams had been a prominent attorney in the New York City District Attorney’s office who was on the take for the Spanglinis, now he was running for his life from fucking zombies. Thank God, my wife made me go to the gym with her three times a week for the last eight years.
He helped the Family out of several tough spots over the years, but it only took one screw up and they’d disposed of him like an old hamburger wrapper. The FBI pinched Thomas Spanglini in a gun-smuggling sting and Steve wasn’t able to get the federal charges dismissed. Not even four hours after Thomas’ conviction, they nabbed Steve and the next thing he knew he was on the wrong side of The Wall.
After the trial, he was walking down Madison Avenue doing some window-shopping before Christmas and one of the Spanglini thugs got in his face about the hearing. Someone walked up behind him and then hit him in the back of the head. He was jarred awake when he hit the ground inside the Dead City and he saw a head peeking over the top of The Wall. He assumed it was his kidnapper, but didn’t have time to do anything except run from the zombies that immediately surrounded him. Their grotesque bodies shoved at each other in an effort to get to him. He’d been able to elude them though because they seemed jerky and uncoordinated in the frigid winter air. He outran them, but they forced him to go deeper into the interior instead of staying along The Wall.
The next morning when the sun came up he’d been able to determine which way was east by the watery light shining through the thick fog-like clouds that hung low inside the perimeter. The fog was an orange-brown color that guaranteed radioactivity in his mind. He headed east because he knew that he needed to get out of The Wall and he believed that he’d be able to find a boat and sail it out of there.
That was six days ago. The bigger boats that he’d found were all destroyed, so he’d headed southward along the bay until he reached Baltimore. He reasoned that the tiny, two-man paddleboats at the Inner Harbor would likely be unharmed. Once he finally snuck downtown, he made it out to the cheap wooden piers where the paddleboats used to be anchored. There was nothing there.
He had no way of knowing what had happened to them, if others had the same idea as him to escape up the Chesapeake or if the ropes had simply rotted away over the years of neglect. Whatever the reason, he was on foot and on his own. Steve briefly considered swimming across the bay to The Wall, but quickly discarded the idea as foolish since he had no idea what was in the water.
He decided that his best bet was to try to hole up in the old Army fort across the harbor until he could figure out his next move. What could be better than a military fort for security? He’d been working his way toward the entrance to the park when they found him near the old Hooters restaurant. It was strange. He hadn’t seen too many of them after that very first night, but they materialized from the gloom by the hundreds.
Steve risked a glance over his shoulder at the horde of undead and blanched at what he saw. Even in the rust-brown air, they stretched away as far as his eyes could see. Jesus! Go faster! his mind screamed at him to pick up his pace. He reached the old split rail fence and leapt over it. He’d been hoping for a real fence of some type, but the fort itself would be able to keep him safe.
His feet pounded across the meandering brick walkway leading from the city out to the fort. Steve figured that it was safer to stay on the path than to risk going out into the overgrown weeds that covered what used to be the park’s lawn. As he continued to run, the bushes on either side rattled. There were definitely creatures inside the fence already. His only hope was to make it to the safety of the forts earthen and brick walls where the zombies couldn’t get to him.
He surged the last fifty feet and came to the fort’s main entrance. A chained wrought iron gate barred the way into the central courtyard. Shit! He scanned left and right along the wall but the fort’s star-shaped design interfered with his ability to see anything beyond the little section immediately in front of him. He decided that his only option was to try to scale the earthen walls and get inside. Again, he was thankful for his wife’s insistence that he remain active as he clawed his way up the rampart.
The zombies shambled slowly from the murk and assembled below him. They stared upwards expectantly waiting for him to fall into their grasp and they moaned incessantly, which sounded like the wind blowing through a dry cornfield. Even in the frigid air of the Baltimore Harbor in December, Steve was sweating freely from his narrow escape at the Inner Harbor and the physical exertion of climbing to get inside the fort’s wall.
The creatures below him stopped their keening and he looked over his shoulder to determine what was happening. The disgusting, oozing zombies parted like the Red Sea and a different type of creature walked through their ranks. It didn’t walk like it had been dead for six years, like the others, this one seemed to move with the ease of the living. He couldn’t even begin to comprehend what he was looking at.
For the most part, the zombies that he’d seen so far resembled the ones that had been in the film about the DC attack. They were grayish-blue, in varying states of decay and their bodies seemed to ooze some type of shiny fluid constantly. But the evil creature that made its way through the crowd was a strange tan color, like when a peeled apple sat out too long. He stared at the abomination in fascination. The thing also looked similar to when a person underwent rapid weight loss and had a lot of excess skin everywhere. He knew the look because a few of his clients in the early years of practicing criminal law had sued a national weight loss company after they lost a hundred pounds, but ended up looking worse than they did before because of all the extra skin that fell in layers around their bodies.
“What the fuck are you?” he screamed in frustration at the creature that now stood ten feet below him.
It didn’t answer but he swore the goddamned thing grinned at him as it reared back and threw a rock. It hit him hard enough in the calf to draw blood and the zombies below him started to go crazy. They grunted and shoved each other in anticipation of a meal. What the fuck? his mind screamed. Zombies don’t throw rocks!
Steve grimaced and did his best to ignore the pain in his leg as he reached up to secure another handhold so he could pull himself higher above the crowd. His injured leg gave out on him when he attempted to put pressure on it, so he had to rely on his upper body strength to pull himself the rest of the way up. He had a hand up over the top of the wall when another rock whizzed out of the dark and slammed into his kidney.
He almost fell, but was able to hold on and finally pull himself up onto the flat area on top of the fort’s wall. The creatures down below howled in anger and tore at the wall in an attempt to get to him. When he finally worked up the courage to peek over the side at the zombie horde below, the strange creature wasn’t there anymore.
Did I imagine it? Steve asked himself. He felt along his leg below where he thought he’d been hit and his hand came away bloody. The pain in his lower back from the second blow added to the validity of his story. It didn’t matter right now though because he was safe.
He wasn’t sure how long he’d be able to stay in the fort, but at least he’d have a roof over his head when the weather turned bad like it tended to in early January. As soon as the creatures outside thinned out enough that he could safely leave the perimeter he planned to try and make it across the river to safety. Surely, it was better on the Eastern Shore.
THREE
22 February, 0834 hrs local
Asher Hawke’s Home
Rocky Mount, North Carolina
The former CIA operator poured himself a glass of calcium-fortified orange juice for his old bones and carried it to the table next to his plate. On Saturday mornings, he made himself an actual meal instead of the cereal or breakfast bar that he crammed down his throat during the school week. Today it was bacon and a Belgian waffle with fresh fruit on top and real Vermont maple syrup that he’d warmed up slowly by placing a ramekin full of syrup in a pan of hot water.
Asher enjoyed his weekend breakfasts immensely and chuckled to himself about the first meal he’d made after he retired. He had to force himself consciously to slow down and enjoy the little things like powdered sugar sifted evenly over a waffle. He’d been in the military or the Agency for his entire adult life and always ate whatever was in front of him without pausing to taste his food. In fact, one of the women that he saw every once in a while had gotten him to branch out into more exotic foods and he was even beginning to develop a taste for the sweeter red wines.
He finished his meal and set the coffee pot to brew a half of a carafe while he washed the breakfast dishes in the kitchen’s old farm sink. As he wiped out the cast iron pan that was his first purchase when he moved to Rocky Mount he wondered if he had it in himself to find a woman who could put up with him. Sometimes—like this morning—he felt the pull for a full-time companion that he could share his blooming culinary skills with. Someone whom he could sit beside while she read a book and he studied or whittled like an old man is supposed to do.
Maybe he really had grown up after his retirement. When he was with the Agency, every day seemed like an extended frat party with bullets. The men wrestled, talked about how drunk they’d gotten the night before, told dick and fart jokes, planned complex pranks on one another and generally acted like giant children. It was a blast, but now that he was away from that environment, he wondered how he’d been able to carry on like that for more than thirty years.
His two ex-wives had both initially fallen in love—truth be told, they’d become infatuated—with the fact that he had an extremely dangerous profession and seemed eternally youthful. But that non-stop party atmosphere wore each of them out when he didn’t settle down after marriage like they thought he would. Asher realized now that the atmosphere that the teams surrounded themselves with was part of their efforts to diffuse the stressful and extremely dangerous lives that they led. He felt as if he’d now grown beyond that and could actually devote the time required to develop a healthy relationship with someone.
The coffee pot beeped indicating that it had completed the brewing cycle and he rushed through the final few dishes in anticipation. He dried his hands as the aroma of the dark roast tickled his senses. Before he filled his coffee cup, he went onto his screened front porch and flipped on the small space heater the he kept beside his chair. Within minutes, he was seated with a book. He loved to read the military thrillers and it always made him grin when he thought about how far away from the truth they usually were. The characters in his books never experienced the days and weeks of mind-numbing surveillance and none of them ever had to lie perfectly still in a hide site as a colony of fire ants wound their way up the operator’s legs and attempted to make a home under his nut-sack—true story, that one really sucked.
Asher had only made it to the fourth page of his latest novel when the front gate opened. When he first bought the home, the entire fence had to be replaced, but it was worth it because the traditional white picket fence made the house look nice from the street. He watched cautiously as a redheaded woman in a light jacket moved fluidly up his walkway. He took in the way that her thin body unconsciously moved with the grace of a fighter, coiled like a snake, ready to strike without notice. Within moments, he’d decided that she was from the Agency.
She noticed him sitting on the porch when she was halfway up the steps. She stopped and asked, “Are you Asher Hawke?”
“Yes ma’am. Can I help you?” he answered slowly.
“Authenticate,” she demanded through the screen door.
His mind snapped to the ingrained task and he answered woodenly, “Kestrel, 384362.”
She nodded her head slightly. “May I come in?”
He dog-eared his book, then stood and unlatched the door. “Yeah, come on in.”
They sat next to each other on the bar stools that he had placed at the kitchen island. Asher motioned for her credentials and said, “Let’s see ‘em.”
“My name is Allyson Harper,” she replied reaching into her jacket slowly and deliberately so he could see what she was doing. She pulled a thin leather wallet out of an inside pocket and flipped it open to display a badge. “I work for the FBI.”
Asher’s heart sank. What the fuck does the FBI want with me? He searched his mind trying to see if he’d done anything that the Company didn’t sanction, not that it mattered if there was going to be a witch-hunt of some type. “Hello, Miss Harper from the FBI,” he answered.
“I’ve read the parts of your file that they’d allowed me to see—”
“Cut the shit,” he interrupted. “What do you want?” He did not like that this unknown person had access to any part of his file, unclassified or not.
If she was taken aback by his abruptness, she didn’t show it. “The Bureau is in a bit of a pickle, Mr. Hawke. As I’m sure you know, the president has directed that we will make every attempt to recover a few items of historical significance from the Washington disaster area.”
“Yeah sure, he built his entire campaign around discrediting President Holmes for not going after the Constitution,” Asher acknowledged. “What’s that got to do with me?”
“Mr. Smith vouched for you so it goes without saying that what I’m about to tell you doesn’t leave this room.”
He chuckled and gestured widely across his humble home. “It’s just you, me and the oven, Miss Harper,” he replied.
She glanced about disapprovingly at the surroundings. Asher was sure that she’d term his furnishings “shabby” since he’d purchased everything secondhand, but he preferred to think that his stuff was broken in. “I’m sure,” she replied. “There’s no one else here, right? My team didn’t get on site until last night, so I don’t want to be surprised by a half-naked coed who stayed the night.”
His previous half-hearted laugh gave way to a full belly laugh. She glared at him as it carried on longer than she felt appropriate. “No, ma’am. There’s no half-naked coed in the bedroom,” he said after a full thirty seconds. “I wish there were, but there’s not. We’re all alone.”
“Are you finished, Mr. Hawke?”
“Listen lady, you came to me—not the other way around. If you don’t like my sense of humor, please leave.”
She sighed in exasperation and clenched her fist a few times. She calmed herself down and held up her hands in a gesture meant to placate him. “You’re right, I’m sorry. Okay, we’re all alone and you’re not telling anyone what I’m going to tell you, right?”
He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Mr. Hawke,” she continued. “I need audio confirmation from you that you aren’t going to discuss this with anyone.”
“So we’re being recorded then? I love it. Very cloak and dagger of you, Miss Harper,” he replied sarcastically.
She finally lost her cool and burst out, “Stop it, goddammit! I know what you did for the Navy and for the Agency. I know that you were a hot-shit operator who took part in a lot of missions, operations that even I don’t have the clearance to know about. We went to the Agency for help and they gave us you. You’re not our only hope, but given the timeline that we have, you’re the best shot we’ve got.”
“Alright,” he conceded. “Nothing we discuss leaves this room. I swear it on my mother’s grave.”
“Your mother is still alive and lives in Arizona with your stepfather.”
“What your file didn’t tell you is that I consider the word ‘stepfather’ an insult when it’s used to reference my mother’s current infatuation. But okay, you caught me.” He pulled a large, faded gold emblem from his pocket and slapped it down on the counter. “I swear on my Budweiser that I won’t tell anyone anything about our conversation.”
She picked up the SEAL Trident that he’d placed on the counter and examined it. While the Bureau didn’t need his oath sworn against some inanimate object, she could tell that it obviously meant a lot to him since it was so worn and battered. It must have been in his pocket for a very long time. Finally, she said, “Okay, here goes.”
