Sever, page 20
If it had been a coordinated attack at every gate, with a Type One controlling the masses, then the units wouldn’t have been able to respond and assist where the creatures broke through. It would have been a bloodbath. He could almost hear the screams of the young men as they were ripped limb from limb by the angry horde before they succumbed to A-Coll and joined in the rampage themselves.
He checked his surroundings and then hopped out of the truck when he was sure that he was alone. The metal links of the exposed sharksuit made tiny clinking noises until he slid an old BDU-type shirt over it and buttoned up. It was the uniform that he’d worn his last few years in the Navy and had even worn it on a few ops over the years. He’d felt a little nostalgic as he pulled it out of the closet and added it to his supplies. The pockets were great for holding all sorts of things and the camouflage would help him blend into the environment so the zombies, who had poor eyesight anyways, wouldn’t be able to see him.
He wanted to see inside The Wall and thought about driving closer to his target for a once-over, but Kestrel wasn’t able to get close enough for a clear view in his truck because there was an Army PLS truck stopped just a few feet beyond the opening. The PLS was a giant beast of a truck designed for hauling oversized equipment in the back. It looked like the defenders had tried to use it as a battering ram to block the entrance and failed. Whoever had been driving it went too far and allowed the creatures to pass behind the back end of the truck.
Kestrel walked up to the opening, his SCAR rifle at the ready. He’d decided to leave the Lapua Magnum .338 sniper rifle with the IR scope since he was likely going to be walking most of the way. Instead, he’d attached both a 20Xs scope and an ACOG combat optic to the SCAR that he could switch between for long- and medium-range targets. He also only had one of his three Heckler & Koch HK45 pistols. His original bug out plan to have two rifles—and the different types of ammunition—plus three pistols would have been too much weight to carry for days at a time now that he was going into the city looking for a fight instead of avoiding one.
He walked around the front of the PLS truck and was shocked at the number of bodies piled up under the tires and dangling from the bumper. The truck must have hit a large group of them as they were coming out of the gate and then finally stalled against the crush of the horde. They were the older creatures that he’d fought against last spring, he could tell by the sad state of their clothing. Years of sun, rain, wind and snow had taken their toll on the fabrics. Several of the creatures were still alive and swiped half-heartedly in his direction from underneath the massive tires, but they were too damaged to do anything to him. Still, he gave them a wide berth.
He started to continue by, but then decided against it. Kestrel didn’t know how the zombies communicated, so he thought it best that he finish these ones off before they passed on the information about a human in the city. He pulled a giant 9-inch Bowie knife from his belt and jammed it through the soft eye sockets of seven zombies in various states of decay that were trapped underneath the truck. When he was done, he used the creatures’ own tattered remnants of clothing to clean the gore from the blade before sheathing it once more.
The big Army truck’s door squealed loudly as he opened it. If he could move the truck, then he’d be able to have a clear path down the street that the gate opened to. He climbed up and sat his rifle on the seat next to him. The truck used a push-to-start button to ignite the engine, but when he pressed it, nothing happened. He fiddled with a few gauges and knobs until he realized that the batteries were dead. This thing isn’t going anywhere, he thought. Oh well, it was worth a try… And now there are seven fewer zombies to worry about.
He climbed down from the cab and checked the immediate area to ensure that there weren’t any more of the creatures remaining before he walked back to his truck for the rest of the supplies. Once there, he sat his rifle on top of the truck cab and shrugged into a heavy coat, then pulled his backpack over the old uniform top. Inside the bag, he’d included more ammo than he could easily carry and enough rations for two weeks, water for a few days and salt tablets to help him retain the fluids instead of sweating them out.
He’d be able to pick up bottled water along the way, especially farther out from the nuke’s epicenter. Like most nuclear weapons, the missile that the French had used contained low grade uranium, so it was likely that the radiation had dissipated enough that it wasn’t really deadly anymore. That guy, Steve, was trapped in Baltimore for four or five months and he was fine, so Kestrel was certain that he’d be able to sustain himself long enough to get the job done.
The last thing that he put into place was his mask. It had a full face shield to allow the maximum range of view; it also had a gigantic scratch down the middle where a zombie had scraped its teeth against his mask in an effort to bite his face when he and the FBI agent Caleb Campbell had gone to rescue the downed helicopter’s crew. That protective capability was his primary motivation for wearing the mask now, not because of the radiation.
He didn’t bother with the radiation suit either. The Bureau had been overcautious when they made their team wear the gear. The man didn’t plan to live beyond his encounter with the Type Ones anyways, so what was the point in restricting his movement if he didn’t have to?
He checked inside the truck one last time to make sure that he had everything and then he left the keys in the ignition. If there were any survivors around, the truck would be a huge help to them in escaping the area. He pulled the SCAR off the roof of the truck and walked back toward the entrance.
It was now time for the payback to begin.
NINE
28 October, 1957 hrs local
The House Next Door
Randolph, New Jersey
They were battered and abused, barely able to stand, let alone walk, but Shawn and Maria couldn’t bring themselves to stay in the house where Terry and Jon had molested them. After searching futilely for the handcuff keys in the cabinets and drawers for several minutes Shawn finally got the nerve to dig his hands into the pockets of his captors. The key was in the blonde man’s front pocket and he’d had to rub his hands several times on the carpet to wipe off the cool urine that had soaked the deceased man’s crotch into his pocket.
After he was free, Shawn had helped Maria up onto the couch and covered her with a blanket before going off to find their clothes. In the car, he found the biggest surprise of all: another woman, trussed up like they’d been a few days earlier. She’d screamed against the tape that covered her mouth at the sight of Shawn’s naked form but he’d been able to convince her that he wasn’t going to harm her. He showed her the raw, bloody rings around his wrist where he’d been handcuffed and told her that she was safe.
When he was certain that she wouldn’t scream and attract zombies to the house, he took the tape off her mouth and then her feet before he helped her out of the back seat. The sight of Terry’s blood-soaked corpse sent her over the edge and she screamed. He’d jumped toward her and covered her mouth, begging her to stop. The screams had brought Maria staggering out of the house into the garage where she appraised the newcomer shrewdly.
“Shut up!” she hissed. “You’re going to attract the zombies and get us killed.”
Maria, once an attractive, young Hispanic woman with beautiful, seductive hazel eyes, looked awful when she first met Katie. One of those eyes was swollen completely shut, there were bite marks and bruises all over her naked body and dried, crusted blood ran from her private areas in dark, almost black streaks in all directions.
Maria’s appearance had been enough to make the woman stop and they’d explained to her what had happened. With Katie’s help they found their clothes and the younger woman helped clean Maria up enough to get dressed. It was something that Shawn had been extremely grateful for, because even though it wouldn’t have been sexual in nature, the woman would have likely suffered more mental anguish with him getting an up-close view of the damage.
Maria rested on the couch while Shawn and Katie searched the house for useful items. The electricity still intrigued him so he’d opened the window and could hear the chugging of a gas-powered generator far away. The two men must have run power lines to the house from a generator that they’d wisely set up quite a ways away. The true test of the power was the fact that there was hot water.
They decided immediately that they weren’t going to stay in the kidnapper’s house. It wasn’t a matter of the dead bodies—they could have dumped those outside. The events of the past several days occurred next door, and that drove Shawn and Maria to insist on moving to a different house.
Katie had stayed with Maria while Shawn sneaked out the back door and across the yard to the house next door. He’d broken the back door’s window and gone inside after unlocking it. The men hadn’t even bothered to explore the homes around them; they had the supermarket and potential victims right across the street, so the house still contained the previous tenant’s stuff.
Shawn decided that it would do and went back out the back door. In the yard, he noticed a thick red and black cable running from the house where the girls were off toward the sound of the generator. He’d followed the cable for half a block before seeing several zombies heading toward the source of the noise and he had to duck behind a shed to avoid being seen. Once the small group had passed, he trailed them toward the noise cautiously.
Another couple hundred feet further on he was able to see the generator with about twenty of the creatures clawing and biting it. There were another fifty or so dead zombies piled up near the curb where Jon and Terry must have been putting the bodies after they killed them when they needed to refuel the generator. He’d made his way back to the girls and told them about the generator and the zombies. There was no way to switch the power cable from one house to the other without turning off the generator first, so the house next door would remain without electricity.
Before the group switched houses though, they each took hot showers and felt clean for the first time in weeks. They also switched out their tattered travel clothes for the previous owners’ clothing. The woman had been almost the same size as Katie and Maria both, but the man of the house had been huge. Shawn reluctantly put his old, dirty and travel-stained clothes back on before they relocated to the house next door, which actually contained better-fitting clothing for him.
They’d spent two nights in the house before leaving. Maria had developed a fear of being left alone, so Katie slept in the master bed with her while Shawn had to drag a mattress from one of the children’s rooms and place it across the doorway on the floor. It was far from perfect, but it made Shawn feel better to keep the group together where he could see everyone.
This morning, Maria had announced that she was healed enough to continue their travel westward. They still believed that going west was the best thing that they could do since that was where the Army had gone and Shawn’s daughter was in Cleveland beyond where the Army was setting up their defensive position. It left the unasked question of whether their younger companion would stay in Randolph or go west with them.
Katie asked if she could stay with the two of them, regardless of where they were going. She’d been on her own for more than a month when she decided to stay at her apartment when her boyfriend Chris left to go out on a supply run. That was the last time that she saw him and she’d been slowly traveling between convenience and grocery stores since then—which is how she’d been captured. She was trying to find some more substantive food than what she found in gas stations and risked going into the grocery store.
They traveled as a group to the kidnapper’s house one more time for hot showers and a microwaved meal of canned food. They hated to leave the modern conveniences of electricity, but they knew that the generator would run out of fuel soon enough and none of them felt like taking on an entire group of zombies just to fill it up again.
When dusk neared, they packed their meager belongings into the Buick that the two men used and headed out into the cold night. On their way past the A&P Food Store, Shawn diverted and pulled up to the front doors. He hopped out of the car without an explanation and opened the grocery store’s door. Then he stepped over the tripwire and went inside.
He reappeared less than a minute later with his old backpack slung over his shoulder. Once again, he stepped over the trap with an exaggerated step and then turned back toward the store. Using the folding knife that he’d taken off Terry’s corpse, he cut the fishing line stretched across the threshold. The sack of cans came crashing down to the linoleum floor, echoing loudly in the early evening. Shawn jumped at the sound, but then the air horn began blaring as the brick swung free and depressed the trigger, causing even more of a ruckus than the net and cans had.
“What the hell did you do that for?” Katie asked from the back seat when he returned to the vehicle.
“You were hit by that trap,” Shawn replied pointing toward the rapidly healing scab on her forehead as he shifted into drive and pulled away from the store toward the New Jersey 10. “I don’t want someone else to get caught in that net the same way that you were. Only the next time, there won’t be two rapists to clear out the zombies following the sound; they’d be dead meat.”
The girl accepted his explanation and they made their way down the ramp onto the highway. With three-quarters of a tank of gas, Shawn felt much better about their odds of making it over the mountains than he had before when they were on foot. They’d faced evil incarnate and came out on top, gaining a useful companion in the deal.
Shawn’s hand unconsciously went to the backpack that he’d retrieved from inside the store. The pictures of Annie and Shana were all that he really had left in this world that was his and he wasn’t about to let them go. Now all he needed to do was get his little group across 150 miles of zombie-infested territory and then somehow make it to Cleveland. His little girl needed him and nothing would stand in his way of seeing her again.
*****
31 October, 1521 hrs local
Near Rosslyn Metro Station
Arlington, Virginia
Kestrel had decided early on to get off of Interstate 66. He only made it a few miles to Fairfax before he’d assessed that it would be quicker to simply travel east down Highway 50 to Arlington and then over the Potomac directly into the old capital city. Highway 50 fed directly downtown and ran along the northern edge of the National Mall.
When he’d initially conducted his map recon, he’d thought it would be faster to travel down 66 instead of the smaller highway, but the sheer number of cars that choked the interstate made him conclude that the straighter way would likely be faster. The missile hit at the height of rush hour six years ago. The administration announced the evacuation before it exploded, so the road was blocked by cars that got into accidents when they tried to turn around. Being a driver on those highways had stranded and ultimately killed a lot of people. He’d passed a lot of dried and desiccated corpses, trapped in their vehicles until the end of time—they were the lucky ones. People who’d gotten out of their cars were either burned alive by the superheated air or attacked by zombies as they stumbled hopelessly around the ruined city.
He’d fought and killed hundreds of the zombies, most of them alone and easily dispatched with his knife. There’d been two times that he’d been forced to use his precious ammunition and had to put down large groups of the creatures wandering aimlessly through the ruins.
He knew the damn things communicated somehow—which is why he killed every one of them that he encountered. What he didn’t understand was how they did it; he couldn’t hear anything when groups of them shifted directions like a school of fish. Thankfully, it was easy to anticipate their moves since they were concerned only with a headlong frontal attack. He could easily dodge the creatures and murder them at will. But the constant movement was beginning to take a toll on his body and he knew that if he didn’t find something soon, then he’d need to take an extended rest in an apartment somewhere.
So far, he hadn’t had to test the sharksuit’s value and he planned to keep it that way. As he walked down the old, abandoned highway he looked forlornly to the right where the thousands of once-white headstones were now a dingy gray from the ash and fallout. He had friends buried in Arlington and their families would never be able to visit their graves again. Over a block away to his left was the Rosslyn Metro Station, the entrance beckoned him to explore and determine what was down there.
Kestrel grimaced when he thought about the extensive tunnel system under the city. It made perfect sense to use them as a place to hide from the satellites and helicopters that used to fly constantly over the region. He planned to check out the National Mall like Hank had suggested, then head down into the Metro tunnels to see what he could find. He didn’t want to do it, but he knew that he needed to sweep them at least once.
Of course, he was a realist and knew that if a Type One wanted to, it could hide from one man indefinitely by simply staying a step ahead of him in the city. He admitted it to himself, but he was the fucking Kestrel; if there was a way to figure out the dilemma, then he’d be the one to do it. He chuckled to himself at the errant thought; he was the only one to do it. The rest of the military had its hands full trying to stay afloat against the army of undead created in the rapid fall of Philadelphia, New York, Boston and everything in between.
A noise from the Metro entrance made him drop to one knee and bring the SCAR up to his cheek. Another faint scraping told him that something was coming up the useless escalator stairs. He tried to remember from the times that he’d visited the city how long those stairs were, but it escaped him. He thought they were short, compared to some of the stairs—like the Medical Center escalators that went on for hundreds of feet.
