Sever, p.21
Sever, page 21
The same scraping noise continued and he finally got tired of waiting. Kestrel heaved himself back to his feet, a slight groan escaping his lips that betrayed the age he felt weighing heavily on his joints from carrying the huge backpack full of gear. A quick shuffle over to the escalator entrance revealed a short set of steps that led to the entrance below.
A dismembered zombie lay at the bottom of the stairs, its one arm clawing uselessly at the step to pull itself up. Kestrel crept down the stairs slowly, eyes averted from the harmless creature at the base of the stairs, searching for more relevant targets. Nothing presented itself, so he examined the wretched creature.
It had been a woman once, long ago. Dried bloodstains trailed away to the depths of the subway where she must have dragged herself from years ago. There were several long, jagged rips in her skin that convinced him she’d been eaten by either dogs or rats. They’d pulled the meat and bones away from her legs, took her other arm, and left her with just the one to try and make her escape into the city.
Kestrel hadn’t given any thoughts to the wildlife that lived within The Wall. He’d always assumed that the zombies killed everything, but that really didn’t make any sense. Some things, like packs of wild dogs, would likely have been able to survive by learning to hunt the zombies. They probably wouldn’t know the difference between a man and a zombie and he was thankful for the sharksuit once again.
The pathetic creature snapped its jaws at him, but couldn’t get its torso to move closer and grasp onto any part of his body. Its eyes were sunken in and milky white, like a blind old lady and he wondered if it saw him or sensed him. At one time, he might have felt sorry for the thing, but he only felt contempt as he slid the knife from its sheath and he pushed the tip gently through the eye into her brain. A thin, watery substance oozed from the opening in the eye for a moment before the blackness began to cascade from inside of the thing’s head.
Add another one to the long list of zombies that he’d put down on his journey. Most, like this one, were too crippled to be of much harm, but every one of them needed to be destroyed in order to eradicate the virus.
No one would ever know of the things that he’d done to help cleanse the city, but it still brought a smile to his face as he used the zombie’s long brown hair to clean the sticky black ichor off his knife’s blade.
*****
31 October, 1545 hrs local
US Route 22, Lehigh Valley Thruway
Allentown, Pennsylvania
Shawn pulled the Buick over to the shoulder and surveyed the scene stretching out below them. The entire city of Allentown was nothing but rubble. Most of the smoke had long ago blown away, but in a few places it still drifted lazily toward the sky where the fires had recently burned away the last of the flammable surfaces.
“Did we do that?” Katie asked.
“Yeah, we did that,” Maria muttered from the back seat where she’d chosen to ride that day.
“So what do we do now?” the girl asked.
They’d known that the Army planned to go to the small city after Parsippany, but they had no clue where they’d gone after that. This morning, they’d decided to keep driving through the day, even though the zombies had been out because they thought that they’d be sleeping in the Army camp in Allentown before nightfall.
“I don’t know,” Shawn admitted. He really didn’t know; he thought that they’d be safe and would be able to stop running every day. The two women looked to him to help keep them safe and it was wearing on him mentally. Maria was a shell of her former self and he didn’t know if she’d be any good in a firefight or if she’d crumble. Katie had never used a weapon, not even a stick to defend herself from the zombies; she’d relied on staying hidden until Terry and Jon had captured her.
“I guess we should go down there and see if there are any survivors,” Shawn stated as he grasped the shifter.
“Wait!” Maria cried. “Do you really think we bombed the camp? Don’t you think it’s more likely that they evacuated and then bombed the city after the army left? There’s nobody left down there.”
He took his hand off the knob and said, “Well, maybe. I guess that’s probably what happened… Unless they were overrun and had to bomb the camp.”
Katie grabbed his forearm, “Doesn’t that mean there are zombies down there?”
“There are zombies everywhere,” he replied, gesturing around their general location.
“Yeah, I mean, like a lot of them, not the two or three that we’ve hit with the car,” the girl clarified.
“What else are we supposed to do?” Shawn sighed. “We know that the Army was going to set up camp near that town and we don’t know much of anything else. There might be a clue about where they went or directions about where survivors are supposed to go.”
“I know that I don’t want to die,” Katie stated. “It looks like everything down there is dead. Maybe we can just go around the town and keep heading west.”
She had a point. They could avoid the town and just head west on their own, but the fact that he’d been hoping for the safety of the Army wouldn’t stop nagging him. He turned in the seat to look back at his longtime partner. “Alright, Maria. You’re the deciding vote. I want to go down and see if there’s a clue as to where the Army went; Katie wants to go around. Whatever you say, we’ll do.”
“That’s not how this was supposed to work, Shawn,” Maria grumbled. “You’re effectively putting this decision off on me. You should have reserved judgment until I’d given my recommendation and then made the group’s decision.” She smiled and then said softly, “You’re a crappy leader.”
He accepted her rebuke, “I didn’t go to school to learn all this stuff. You have the leadership experience, that’s why you should have been in charge.”
“Look, I don’t care what you two think about who’s in charge,” Katie muttered. “Just make a decision; there are zombies coming up the hill.”
Shawn whipped his head around. Sure enough, a group of zombies from the city had noticed them. They were slowly ambling up the hill toward the car so they hadn’t necessarily seen the humans, but they had noticed the vehicle.
“Okay, we’re going down into the city,” Shawn decided. The potential to get separated from the last remnants of humanity on this side of the mountain outweighed the odds of the city teeming with the undead.
Katie harrumphed loudly and clutched the large kitchen knife closely to her chest as Shawn shifted the car into drive. With any luck, he’d be able to get up enough speed to plow into the zombies and take them out.
*****
Oh my God! Katie screamed to herself. These two are gonna get me killed! She didn’t know if putting her life in the hands of Maria and Shawn had been the right thing to do. She could have set herself up in that grocery store back in Randolph and been just fine to ride this thing out. There was food, water, even a bathroom.
But that would have meant staying alone at the store. She missed Craig, but he’d abandoned her and was probably dead; she didn’t plan on ending up like him. If she was honest with herself, she was only a scared kid. She didn’t know anything about survival, the fact that she’d gotten captured on her first trip that was farther than a couple of blocks from her apartment proved that with almost disastrous results.
No, until something better came along, she needed to stick with these two. She’d formed a tenuous bond with Maria in the week that they’d been together, even though the woman seemed to get annoyed with her quickly. Shawn was unsure of himself at times, but overall, he seemed okay. Besides, they had a car that worked and were steadily making their way toward the safe-zone so that was a point in their favor.
If they kept their current pace of about 30–40 miles an hour, they should make it over the mountains in a few days. Of course, that didn’t account for the massive vehicle pile-ups that they’d ran into since they started traveling, which caused them to backtrack and change their route several times. Katie thought that was annoying; why couldn’t people just drive like normal? Then everyone would have escaped and she wouldn’t have had to see all the dead bodies and the gross zombies hanging around the scene.
The car accelerated down the hill and she accidentally let out a tiny shriek when they hit the first of the zombies that were coming up the hill. Shawn looked over at her like she was a baby and she stuck out her tongue at him. Hitting another human being—zombie or not—wasn’t something that she’d ever get used to.
The movies always made it look so spectacular when a car hit a person. They would fly up and hit the windshield, then continue rolling over the vehicle to land in a heap on the pavement behind the car. In real life, that didn’t happen. When the Buick hit one of them, their body got trapped against the grill and they’d claw at the hood until, inevitably, they would get a foot caught on the road or under a tire and physics took over, pulling them under the car. The car would bounce up into the air twice as first the front tire and then the rear ran over the poor creature and that was it; no dramatic battle by the passengers to dislodge the beast or a hand grasped onto the bumper to come back and get them through the rear window miles later. Just bump, bump and then it was gone—boring!
That’s what happened with the first guy, and then again with another. Shawn ended up hitting and running over four zombies in that descent from the hilltop down into the ruined town. Almost immediately, he began to mutter things to himself and every few words Katie could make out things like “mistake” and “gone.”
“What is it, Shawn.” she asked.
He looked over at her, wide-eyed and gestured wildly around the car at the broken masonry and shattered glass that had once been storefronts, homes and peoples’ livelihoods. Now everything was just a massive pile of junk. “It was a mistake to come down here. We’re gonna get caught up in the rubble.”
“Turn around then!” she squealed.
“We have to keep going,” Maria moaned from the back seat. “We can’t turn around now.”
Katie twisted in her seat and asked, “Why, what’s—” she never finished her question as her eyes focused out the back window where the older woman stared. The roadway behind them had filled with the dead who’d flowed out of the wreckage.
The creatures that pursued them were a truly wretched bunch. Broken bodies shambled along, missing limbs and necks wrenched at unnatural angles. The ones who couldn’t stand used broken arms to pull themselves along, ragged body parts trailing behind them. Katie was certain that she even saw one of the creatures trying to roll down the hill, but it had veered sharply out of her line of sight into one of the rubble-strewn parking lots.
More of the creatures ambled out of hiding along the road as they drove. They were in some deep shit and the three of them knew it. Shawn pressed the gas pedal a little further and the gap widened.
The nose of the car edged around obstacles, scraping against large pieces of concrete as they attempted to continue their slow getaway through Allentown. The gap continued to widen between the things pursuing them and the back end of their vehicle and Katie allowed herself to hope that they would escape. She lifted herself up slightly to look at the dashboard, Shawn was driving a steady ten miles per hour and, more importantly, they had over a half of a tank of gas.
She turned to look back at the creatures; they were almost hidden from view behind the wreckage. Things were looking up. They’d make it through this hell and then go over the mountains to safety. Then, Katie’s luck once again ran out as Shawn’s curse exploded into the Buick’s interior.
“What is it?” Maria asked and then muttered, “Oh.”
Katie stared at Maria and the look on her face made her afraid to turn around. When the car slowed and then stopped completely, she finally turned to see what had happened.
Debris from the airport they’d passed blocked the roadway ahead and on the sides. They’d driven down the partially-cleared path as far as they could go and now they were trapped because the tail of a big airplane rested across the highway. There wasn’t even enough room to turn the car around in the tight space that Shawn had driven into. The idiot had just kept blindly driving without thinking of alternate escape routes or any other way to go about traveling through the city besides the main road that they’d followed.
Katie realized that she’d made a very bad decision by joining Shawn and Maria. The deplorable state that they’d been in when she first met them should have convinced her of their bad luck. Now she was truly fucked.
Happy Halloween, Katie thought as she watched her death slowly come into view through the car’s back window.
TEN
31 October, 1813 hrs local
Wreckage of the Washington Monument
Washington, Dead City
Kestrel had been here before. The zombies covered the National Mall like ants on a picnic basket, blocking his way to the buildings there. Why the president had continuously denied the clearance of the city was beyond him; those things were a scourge that needed to be eliminated. From his elevated hide position on the top of the hill he could see the skeletal remains of the very creatures that his team had killed on their last visit. It was one of the strongest feelings of déjà vu that he’d personally felt before and didn’t like it. Nothing had changed since the last time he was here.
When he’d crossed the old Theodore Roosevelt Bridge toward Capitol Hill he’d caught a glimpse of movement in the shifting fog that seemed to be a constant presence in the city now that the wind was held at bay by The Wall and no longer blew across the region. To his experienced eye, that one small flicker of movement had meant so much more than it would have to others. He’d been on the Mall last spring when they assaulted the Archives; he knew that there was an unusual amount of activity there, which is why he’d decided to begin his search in earnest on the Mall.
He’d slipped silently up to the back side of the Lincoln Memorial and slid along the wall until he came around to the front and crept up the stairs. He needed to clear the area between the memorial and the pillars of the World War Two memorial on the east end of the Reflecting Pool before he could move to the Mall. There had been about thirty of the creatures—one full magazine—that he dispatched and then continued on to his next objective, the Washington Monument. In hindsight, those were likely just spillover from the massive group that stumbled around on the Mall before him now.
He’d chosen the Washington Monument as his next location because it was elevated above the Mall where the creatures were heavily concentrated. The elevation would provide him with an excellent observation point to determine which building they were protecting. Once he learned all that he could from them—and as long as he could stay hidden—it would be a time consuming task to kill all the creatures before he moved forward, but doing so would allow him greater freedom to maneuver so he could do what he needed.
He crept cautiously along the broken length of the Washington Monument’s remains. Kestrel trailed one hand along the massive obelisk’s side as he walked to help keep him in line with where he wanted to go and for the experience of touching the monument itself. The moment he reached the top of the monument’s small hill, he knew that he was in business. The National Mall was covered with hundreds, if not thousands, of zombies. He knew without a doubt that they were guarding something in the area.
Kestrel had planned ahead for the large number of creatures and packed 2,000 rounds of ammunition for his dual-scoped MK-17 SCAR in his backpack—over 73 pounds of 7.62-millimeter ammo. At first, he’d questioned bringing so much ammo and his back had really questioned the decision over the last four days as he had to hump it around with him. His mind told him to dump at least half of the ammo since he’d only seen one or two of the creatures at a time, most too crippled to be a threat and easily dispatched with his knife. But he’d held on, pushing those thoughts of weakness to the back of his mind. Seeing the target-rich environment in front of him, he was grateful that he hadn’t pussed out and he planned to make use of all the ammunition.
The nuclear explosion toppled the Washington Monument all those years ago and it was broken into several useless parts behind him. The base of the obelisk up to about fifteen feet high looked to be relatively intact, while the rest of the structure stretched away toward the west where the blast’s overpressure had pushed it. Kestrel used a small hooligan tool to open the doorway inset on the side of the Monument. Then he secured the door and climbed the remaining stairs to the highest point remaining where the staircase ran along the eastern side of the wreckage. He sighed involuntarily when he set the ridiculously heavy backpack full of ammunition on the stairs beside him. Oh yeah, he thought as he checked his fields of observation and fire on each side. This will do perfectly.
He worked the drawstrings on his backpack quietly and laughed to himself about the absurdity of the military uniforms these days that used Velcro fasteners in place of buttons and simple tie strings. In this situation, the opening of the fabric would have echoed across the open area and drawn the zombies directly to him, leaving him stranded inside the obelisk.
He peeked inside the bag at the small cardboard boxes of ammunition. To save on weight, he had the ten magazines on his chest rig and another five in the backpack, but the rest of the cartridges were in their factory-sealed cardboard boxes. He’d have to reload his magazines by hand since the speed loader strapped to the inside pocket would make too much noise. It would be tedious work, but he had time. If he played this right, he’d have all the time in the world.
The operator eased the rifle up onto the granite wall carefully; it wouldn’t do to accidentally knock off a large chunk and bring the entire group over to him. The fog couldn’t be helped, it was an element of the environment he’d have to deal with.
