Carlie Simmons (Book 3): The Way Back (2 page)

Chapter 2

“What happened?” said Jared, who had just
run up with the others, standing ready with their weapons. 

“I’m not sure,” said Carlie, who was
kneeling beside her, applying direct pressure to the leg wound. “She must have
taken a fall onto some bamboo when she was whacking that creature. It doesn’t
look like she was bitten. I think she’s just got a nasty puncture wound. She
hasn’t lost too much blood but there’s a pretty big fragment stuck in her leg.”

Jared kneeled down on the other side of
Amy and ran his fingers through her chestnut-colored hair. Her eyelids were
fluttering as she came to. “It’s gonna be OK, darlin’. You just hang in there,”
said Jared.

As her eyes opened, tears began streaming
down her cheeks. Her lips trembled as she tried to sit up slightly on one
elbow. “You’re gonna have to pry it out, Carlie. It’ll bleed like hell for a
few minutes but you gotta remove it,” she said, panting in between gulps of air.
“If we were an hour out from a hospital, I’d say just wrap it as is but you’re
gonna have to yank it out. I’ll have to take my chances.” Amy shook her head
and looked up at the canopy. “All of my years of being a paramedic and I have
to end up on the other end of things. God, this sucks.”

Carlie looked into Amy’s watery eyes and
then up at the others. She motioned to Shane and Pavel to grab hold of a leg.
Matias moved towards Amy’s head and supported her quivering shoulders.

Amy looked at Jared. “Get me a stick and
make sure I keep it between my teeth no matter what happens.”

Jared leaned back and located a
finger-sized branch and snapped it in two then handed it to Amy. She lay back
into Matias’ lap, put the stick between her teeth and then blinked several
times before giving Carlie a nod.

Carlie took a deep breath and then moved
her fingers over to the jagged bamboo shank whose edge was protruding three
inches from Amy’s quadriceps. Carlie pinched the finger-sized fragment and then
swiftly yanked it out.

Amy’s misty eyes widened as her face
wrinkled into a contorted grimace. She let out a muffled shriek while arching her
back and forcefully grabbing Jared’s shirt sleeve, her fingernails digging into
the fabric.

“Damn that was deep,” Shane said, staring
at the finger-sized splinter while loosening his grip on Amy’s right leg. He
reached into his pack and extracted the first-aid kit and removed the last two
remaining packages of gauze along with a triangle bandage.

Carlie took the material and began
wrapping the wound while trying to steady her own breathing. She had dealt with
casualties before but had always had the luxury of having an ambulance to
shuttle off the victim to a hospital. She knew that with a wound this severe in
such a humid and hostile setting, the chances of infection were very high, not
to mention their fighting efficiency as a team had been reduced.

As Amy slumped onto the ground, her rapid
exhalations slowing, she spit out the wooden mouthpiece. Her chest rapidly rose
and fell and she eased her grip on Jared’s sleeve.

“This wasn’t some kinda ploy for male
attention, was it?” said Jared, who had resumed stroking her hair.

“Shut up, dufus,” Amy said in between
breaths as she tried to force out a half-smile and then returned to pacing her
breathing.

“She’s got you pegged,” said Shane.

Jared’s lips cracked a slight grin at his
comment. “She’s being nice. You should hear what she calls you when you’re not
around.” Jared turned back to Amy. “You can berate me as much as you like,
missy. I know you’re one tough cookie.”

“Let’s get what’s left of the liferaft
fabric out of the canoe and make a blanket-stretcher so we can haul her to our
camp. We don’t have much daylight left,” Carlie said, glancing at the overhead
canopy and the flame-orange sun hanging in the west.

****

That night Carlie and the others sat
around their makeshift camp inspecting their bows, repairing their arrows, and
carving small-game traps. Amy was asleep on a thick bed of palm tree leaves
behind them in a u-shaped enclosure of bamboo. A few feet out from the entrance
were two rows of angled, waist-high bamboo skewers that Shane had set out as
perimeter defense. Matias had carved out a small entrance in the rear of the
bamboo grove as an emergency exit and lined that area with similar trailguards.
This was the same setup they had used every night for weeks and it had served
them well against undead denizens of the night who would get impaled before
they could get within biting range.

Shane was hunched over a primitive firemaking
set, his muscular arms rubbing the bamboo components together in a sawing
motion as he had done every night for the past seven weeks. One end of the
split bamboo was wedged in the sand and the other pushed into a folded bandanna
tucked into his gut. The bamboo firesaw was a challenging method but one that
was necessary in the tropics where other fire-by-friction methods were even
more difficult. As he leaned forward, he skillfully rubbed another split
section that had a small angled groove cut into the center over the fine edge
of the tilted piece in the ground. Thirty seconds later, with the bamboo in his
hand smoking furiously, he stopped and dumped the tiny glowing coal into a
fist-sized wad of shredded grass. While taking a moment to inhale, Jared came
over and hunched down to blow a steady stream of breath into the smoldering
bundle. A few seconds later, the entire tinder bundle ignited and then he added
finger-sized twigs to the flames.

“I suppose you’re gonna take credit now
for my toil,” said Shane, wiping the sweat from his brow with his forearm.

“Nah, this one is all you, amigo. Besides,
I wouldn’t have taken so long to get my coal,” Jared said with a grin. His expression
changed as he looked over his shoulder at Amy, who was groaning in her sleep. “You
think she’s gonna be alright?” whispered Jared.

“The barbiturates out of the trauma kit
will help with tonight but we’re gonna have to keep an eye on that wound.
Things go septic fast in the tropics,” said Shane. “I once made the mistake of
shaving the day before being deployed to Colombia and a little nick on my chin
got infected within twenty-four hours.”

“She is going to need to rest for a few
weeks if that leg muscle is to recover properly,” said Pavel in his slight
Russian accent.

“Well, this island at least seems bigger
than the others we’ve tried. Tomorrow we’ll see what we can harvest in terms of
the ‘two Cs’: coconuts and critters,” said Matias, who was carving the end of a
set of wooden snare components.

“We’re not alone here,” said Carlie. “Just
before Amy was injured, I saw a single set of footprints along the beach near
our canoe.”

“Another pus brain?” said Jared.

“No, these were too rhythmic to be
anything other than human. The tracks went north along the shoreline.”

Shane looked at Matias. “Looks like we got
some mantracking work to do at sunrise.”

“I’ll take the first watch tonight,” said
Carlie, pulling out her machete and pistol. She removed the magazine and stared
at the last two rounds that were left as if hoping more had magically
re-appeared since their last encounter with zombies a few days earlier. She
shoved the magazine back in place and felt a raindrop land on her face as dark
clouds thickened and lighting shone in the distance. The raucous monkeys in the
treetops stopped chattering as the wind ruffled the canopy. Carlie lay down,
her bony shoulder blades pressing into the fine sand. She thought about Amy and
knew that her survival now was about simple mathematics. The clock was ticking
not only on the prospect of finding a cure for the global pandemic but on the
survival of their small band trying to wrest a living from their unforgiving environment.
The longer they struggled under these precarious conditions, the greater their
chances of succumbing to starvation, zombies, or further injury. They had to
get back to the mainland, wherever that was, no matter how difficult the
journey.

Chapter 3

Payette, Idaho, North of
Boise, One Day after Departing White Sands Military Base

Eliza looked out from the two-story window
of the high school to the rubble-strewn streets below. In the distance she
could barely discern the still-smoldering wreckage of Air Force One, its
shattered blue-and-white fuselage spread along the interstate followed by at
least a mile of debris. She thought their harrowing escape from White Sands in
New Mexico was horrific but those ghastly images had been pushed aside in the
aftermath of their plane crash.

She never understood the damage that could
be inflicted by a severe thunderstorm of the scale that overtook them. She was
used to being safely tucked away in a private room while waiting for another
dull flight to be over. The pilots called the storm a supercell that had a squall
line a hundred miles long with winds exceeding 80 mph. With their lack of intel
from weather satellites and ground towers, they headed right into the
maelstrom. Under normal conditions, the pilots would have diverted to another
airport to ride out the storm. In their case, there weren’t any safe havens
below or available makeshift landing strips in the predominantly mountainous
region. Instead, the pilots dropped to a lower elevation in the hopes of skirting
beyond the worst of it. At first Eliza thought they had eluded the reach of the
powerful tempest. After her father reassured her, as he’d done countless times
in her childhood, she put her headphones back on and continued listening to
music in his private office. She didn’t know that the pilots were frantically
sending out a distress signal and poring over their inflight data to locate a
potential highway below where they could set down. She didn’t know that Agent
Willis was busy checking the emergency gear or that General Adams was hastily securing
cargo door locks. Nor did she know that Doctor Efron had just stowed his
research notes and was on his way back up to the front of the plane when a
lightning bolt struck the right engine, the shockwave in the main cabin shooting
an empty carafe of water from a nearby table with such force that Efron was
dead upon collapsing to the green-carpeted floor.

But as the overhead emergency lights began
flashing red in her room and the plane precipitously veered to the left with
the sound of screeching steel, the smell of black smoke in her nose and the
pulsing of excruciating G-forces upon her face, she knew that her brief calm
was about to be shredded by forces beyond what even her father could control.

In the haze of memory after they
crash-landed among the jumble of abandoned vehicles on the interstate, she
vaguely recalled Willis pulling her out of the crumpled cabin as General Adams
hobbled alongside her gravely wounded father, their forms backlit by the
flaming shell of the once magnificent airborne symbol of her father’s
presidency. With her vision foggy from the impact, she struggled to piece
together the images of Willis and Adams helping carry her injured father
through the burnt-out city streets, battling zombies along the way until they
arrived at the high school.

Standing in the drafty gymnasium, she
lowered her head and fought back the terror wrestling for control of her soul.
Then looked at her arms which were crisscrossed with tiny lacerations. Her body
ached in every joint and along every muscle striation. She felt like she had
been dragged across a field of broken glass and then beaten with a shovel.

Why couldn’t they have just made it to
Fort Lewis? They would all be safe now and she wouldn’t have the gnawing
uncertainty of her father’s fate. Fort Lewis was her bastion of hope after the decimation
of White Sands from the swift-moving viral outbreak. Now, even that base in
Washington seemed light-years away but she knew that making it there was
imperative given it was one of the last intact military facilities left in the
western U.S. Eliza glanced over to her father who was asleep on a pile of blue
wrestling mats in the corner, his button-down shirt partially open, revealing a
thick layer of gauze.

Eliza pried herself away from the window
and walked over to where Willis and Adams were sitting cross-legged on the
floor. A thick bandanna was wrapped around the general’s forehead to cover a
deep laceration while Willis was still scraped up from their narrow escape from
White Sands. Adams was poring over hand-drawn maps as they discussed options
while Willis was doing an inventory of the go-bag he had removed from the plane
prior to bailing out.

“We’ve got two MP-7 rifles, two Sig-Sauer
pistols, seven loaded mags for each, extended trauma kit with IVs, two
flashlights, and two tactical blades. What we don’t have is food and water.
Secret Service protocols were always such that we only had to provide for
running and gunning as reinforcements would be on the way within the hour.”

“How long before a rescue team is
dispatched to our location?” said Eliza, who had knelt down beside the two men.
“Will there even be a rescue team coming, given the depleted capabilities of
the military?”

“Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it?” said
Adams. “From what the sec-def at Lewis told me prior to us departing White
Sands, they had a lot of their SF teams already deployed gathering resources
and sweeping through other military bases for supplies.” Adams exhaled, tilting
his head back. “They probably got the SOS the pilots sent and will have a fix
on the president’s subdermal transponder but we may be holed up here for a
while until they can pool resources to extract us following the weather
clearing.”

“My sub-dermal GPS tracker is probably
offline,” said Willis, who looked down at the thick gauze swaddling his forearm
where he had sustained an impact injury upon landing. “Near as I can tell, we
are about 35 miles northwest of Boise, a few miles from Highway 95. We need to
stay close to the wreckage so the search teams have an easier time finding us
in the event that the president’s transponder isn’t functioning or he…” Willis
paused, looking at Huntington and then back at Eliza. “I’m doing everything I
can to ease his pain and keep him stable, Eliza, but his injuries are too
severe to treat here for very long.”

“I know…I know,” she said, lowering her
head briefly and taking in a deep breath.

“Right now, our immediate needs are procuring
some fresh water and food as the supplies we scrounged up in this building are nearly
gone,” said Adams. “The president definitely needs to be adequately hydrated as
do the rest of us.”

“We passed that tiny subdivision of new
homes a few blocks from here on the way in. Those looked to be in OK shape,”
said Willis. “If we head down the fire escape we used to get in here, then we
should be able to bypass most of the tangos. The county sign on the highway
indicated this was a town of only 7400 so we shouldn’t have too many of those
things running around here.”

“Alright, I’ll go with you to provide
backup,” said Adams, reaching forward for an MP-7 then looking at Eliza. “You
and your father will be safe in here. Just make sure the exit door we depart
from locks behind us. That’s a steel-reinforced barrier that will keep out
those things.” He grabbed a pistol and handed it to her, showing her how to
manipulate the safety. “But just in case.”

****

After the two men departed, Eliza sat down
beside her father. His wheezy breathing was the only sound and it echoed
throughout the spacious gymnasium.

His internal injuries were significant and
the concussion he had suffered made him lapse in and out of consciousness
throughout the night. As she sat there, looking down at the pistol, she felt
his hand slide over the top of her forearm. “My daughter—my lovely daughter,”
he said in between grated exhalations. “I remember when you first left for
college. How I thought I wouldn’t see you again for a long time because you
were angry with me for the public life I’d forced you to endure.”

She leaned over next to him, brushing his
gray hair back away from his forehead. “Shh…you need to rest, Dad. Besides, I
could never be mad at you for being the man you are. You’re a great leader. It
was the media pundits I couldn’t stand, never you.”

“You have your mother’s moral compass.
She’ll be glad to see you again when we can get you back east to her location
one of these days.”

“For right now, we just need to get you
back to Fort Lewis. That shouldn’t be too long.”

“It will be for me,” he said, trying to
sit up, firmly gripping her forearm. “If I don’t make it, you have to get the
laptop back to Fort Lewis. It contains leads on the virus—a research facility
in Alaska that may hold some crucial answers.”

“What about Carlie and her team—where are they?”

“Cuba—somewhere in Cuba, but that’s all I
know. They must have made it out by now. They’re probably back at Fort Lewis
after getting the re-route signal from the emergency beacon at White Sands.
From what you’ve told me about her, she’s probably busting some helicopter
pilot’s chops and prepping her team to come find you.”

“I don’t want to be so dependent on
everyone to help me. Once we’re out of here, I want to learn to take care of
myself.”

“I’ll see to it that Willis shows you some
of his tradecraft,” he said as his chest spasmed and he coughed uncontrollably.
Foamy, bright red blood issued forth from his lip as he gurgled out a breath.

Eliza knew that the color and consistency
of the blood indicated bleeding in the lungs, probably connected with his
broken ribs. Huntington shivered and scrunched into a fetal position while
Eliza pulled the wool blanket up around his shoulders.

He pulled on her arm, motioning her to
come closer. “Promise me that you won’t die here in this wasteland—that you’ll always
keep fighting and will do whatever it takes to get back.”

Eliza nodded her head. Her eyes welled up
with tears as she wrapped her arms around him, pulling him close and trying to
contain the growing fear starting to punch through her chest.

“Get yourself, the others, and the laptop
back to Fort Lewis,” he said, his voice shrinking to a whisper. “You can do
this, Eliza. You are so strong. Remember how strong you are…remember…” His
cheeks tightened and his gurgling voice trembled as he slumped into her, the
raspy sound of his breathing gone.

Eliza squeezed his shoulders. “Daddy,
don’t go. You have to come with me….you have to come with me.” Her chin
quivered uncontrollably. She leaned down and ran her fingers through his hair
while looking into his glassy eyes. Then she pulled his head in close to her
side, clutching him firmly with both hands.
A
painful tightness in her throat welled up as wave after consuming wave of sobs
sprang forth from deep inside her, the anguish filling every inch of the cavernous
room.