Dead: Winter (7 page)

The three women were silent for a moment. Eventually it was Lena who spoke up. “Do you wo
n
der how they went down? I mean they couldn’t be breached if their set up is like ours.” She indicated to the monitor that still gave them a live picture of ou
t
side. The perimeter fence had long since fallen, and the massive crowd of zombies was now packed in tight around the concrete cylinder that the ca
m
era was mounted on top of.

“Doesn’t matter how they went down,” Samantha spoke up. “What matters is that, as far as we know, we are the last ones looking for a cure.”

“And what do we do if we find one?” Darlene pointed to the monitor. “It’s not like we can just load up in a car and take off. There must be thousands of them out there.”

“We can worry about that when we have a reason,” Lena said with a shrug.

“Or when we go down like all the others,” Darlene added.



Bald Knob, AR—
Corporal Jody Rafe stepped out into the cold morning air and scanned the area. He was relieved to see everything exactly how he’d left it before going to sleep. That meant it was just a bad dream. Or, more accurately, another bad dream.

As part of 3
^rd
Battalion, 153
^rd
Infantry, Charlie Company…the last of the “Gunslingers” of A
r
kansas, Jody’s unit had been in Little Rock at the start of what Command Central r
e
ferred to as “The Event” or as the soldiers more commonly called, “The opening of Hell.” The city had fallen in under two weeks. That still boggled the mind; at least it still boggled Jody’s mind.

The battalion was gone. The 153
^rd
was gone. As far as an
y
body could tell, Charlie Company was it…the last group standing. Of the two hundred and sixty-three members of Charlie, forty-seven r
e
mained. They continued to hold to the command structure. Some of the men complained, saying that there was no more United States, therefore, no more United States Army. Yet, they stayed; they took their watch and patrol assignments, and still addressed their ranking officer as Co
m
mander (despite the fact that he was a field-promoted captain who had been out of the academy for less than six months when this whole thing started).

“Hey, Jody,” a voice heavy with a Boston accent called, “you got forage team in two hours.”

“Thanks, Danny,” Jody groaned with a stretch and a wave. “Who’s leading?”

“You ain’t heard?” Danny O’ Leary unslung his weapon and stopped with an over-exaggerated “present arms” move while coming to a half-assed semblance of attention.

“Heard what?” Jody asked suspiciously.

“You got the detail
Sergeant
Rafe.”

“What?”

“Pitts went AWOL.”

And then there were forty-six
, Jody thought.

“He take that local?”

Sergeant Bill Pitts had gotten involved with one of the local girls shortly after Charlie Company had secured the little town of Bald Knob—back when there were still over two hundred living me
m
bers serving under the banner. There were a few problems with the relationship. The first being the young lady’s hu
s
band; that had been solved when the man suffered a bite from one of the stiffs. Only, when the young lady got herself nipped, Pitts tried to hide her instead of submitting her to quarantine.

What happened next was actually pretty sad. It turned out that the girl demonstrated immunity to the bite! It was the first time they’d known anybody to survive the bite and not become one of the stiffs. That was almost worse for the poor gal. Back then, they still had radio contact with other co
m
mands. The o
r
der came to have the woman secured and sent via helicopter to Georgia. The CDC in Atlanta hadn’t gone offline yet and was very interested in the woman’s apparent immunity.

Pitts had slipped in and taken the girl from the holding cell. It couldn’t be proved since neither of the men on watch that night saw anything. The inquiry was cancelled when Atlanta fell a week later. No use worrying about anything when the location causing all the fuss was no longer active. To n
o
body’s surprise, the young lady reappeared the next day.

Jody was a little astounded to hear that the sergeant had bailed out on Charlie Company. The man was a damn good so
l
dier and an exceptional leader.

“Took the girl, the dog, and a few crates from the armory,” Danny said with a snort.

“So who decided that I was the next in line?”

“Cap posted it outside his quarters along with the results of the induction testing. About a hundred of the locals are being drafted.”

“How is that news going over?”

“Town’s as quite as I can ever remember…we have extra men patrolling the street in case that piece-of-shit mayor tries to pull anything,” Danny reported.

That was another problem entirely. When Charlie Company had rolled in, they’d been treated like heroes. But it was just like any other occupation after a while. The folks didn’t like being told what to do by the military. It had started with a few of the locals doing a number on one of the men who had gone in to one of the local bars after spending three days out in the unprotected countryside looking for possible survivors.

Lately, the defiance had escalated. The citizens were declining to do the duties assigned to them as the preparations were made to ensure that the town was safe. Walls were being constructed, su
p
plies gathered for distribution. The mayor was behind it all, insisting that it was the duty of the military to pr
o
tect the “Good folks of Bald Knob, glory be and amen!”

“Captain says we will be issuing booklets to everybody.”

“What?” Jody asked as he checked his patrol pack to ensure he had all his gear.

“Yep,” Danny nodded, “every citizen will be issued a booklet every month that will be used to record their hours and determine what they will be allocated at the stores depot.”

“That’s not gonna go over well,” Jody sighed.

“That ain’t the half of it,” Danny whispered. “Starting t
o
morrow at just before sunrise we will be going house to house to confiscate all supplies such as food and even half-used toot
h
paste tubes. Cap says that he wants everything under lock and key by nightfall.”

“How does he figure we can get that big of a job done in so short of a time?”

“Because everybody is going to be placed in the detention facility until we are finished.”

Jody stopped the inventory of his pack and turned to face his fellow soldier. “Sounds a little
Red
Dawn
-esque if you ask me.”

“Maybe so,” Danny agreed, “but most of the company seems to think it is a good idea. The fellas are tired of busting their asses for a bunch of ungrateful folks who are starting to treat us worse than the rag heads did over in Iraq.”

Jody closed up his pack and slung it over his shoulder. He grabbed his weapon and headed to the patrol’s muster area. A cold rain was just beginning to fall. To Jody, this seemed too much like an omen to ignore.

Kevin poked his head around the corner. Up the street he saw four more zombies. Each was busy pawing at a door or window of an equal number of houses that lined the litter-strewn, tree-lined road. He didn’t like it; the road itself that is. It was cast in shadows even though the venerable oaks that stretched their limbs across it to form a natural archway had lost all their leaves weeks ago.

“I can’t hold it much longer,” Aleah whispered in his ear.

“You wanna go right here?” Kevin hissed. “I don’t know if I’d feel comfortable taking a leak here…and it is much less of an ordeal for me than it is for you.”

“More proof that God was a man and wanted to stack the deck against women early on,” Aleah groused. Kevin had to bite back a chuckle.

“If we stay behind that fallen truck, we should remain out of their line of sight.”

“And which house are we making a run for?” Aleah peeked past Kevin.

“The brick one with the tall columns along the front porch.”

“Why not the dark brown one with the motorcycle crashed in the fountain?”

“The one with the columns has a car parked in the driveway. The door in back is open and I can see a car seat,” Kevin explained patiently what was, to him at least, so obvious. “A car seat means that we have a better chance at scoring baby stuff.”

Aleah had to tell herself to shut her mouth.
How in the hell did he pull this stuff out of the air?
she wondered. Time after time he came up with things that absolutely amazed her. And not just her…the others commented on it frequently; even Peter who had been making it a point to get in a pissing contest with Kevin seemingly every day.

Kevin shifted his body enough to free his machete from its sheath. He didn’t need to say a word, Aleah knew the drill. She drew her own iron spike-tipped axe handle (Kevin had shown her the disadvantages of an axe…namely the head of the axe tended to get lodged in a skull) and watched his head bob.
One…two…three…

And he was up and scurrying to the rear of the large truck that would be their cover for the first half of their run to the house they intended to scavenge for supplies. Aleah followed, hating how the adrenaline rush of the situation aggravated her need to pee in the worst way. Coming up behind Kevin, she could hear the closest zombie now. His hands were clawing at the wooden door. She was willing to bet that the creature had lost most of the flesh from its fingertips. She could hear that deeper sounding scratches that came when bone clawed at wood.
Funny the new skills a girl picked up in the apocalypse
, she mused.

Kevin bobbed his head three times and took off again. This time he was crouched low and trying to stay close to the trees that lined the road. She followed as fast as she dared while still managing to hold her bladder. It was that terrible need to relieve herself that probably made her miss seeing the rusted tin can. Of course, in her defense, it was half-buried in a pile of rotting leaves. Still, her foot caught it solid and sent it clattering along the cracked surface of the road.

In eerie unison, four heads turned, ceasing instantly in their attempts to claw their way in to one of the formerly grand houses. They began to lurch in the direction of the sound.

“Crap!” Kevin sighed.

“Sorry,” Aleah apologized.

“Later!” Kevin stood and moved wide of the truck. “Make for the house, but go to the one next door and use the back yard. Hopefully that will keep them from clustering around the one we want.”

Aleah took off. As she ran, she couldn’t help but appreciate the fact that, even in the heat of events, Kevin’s mind still worried about the details. She paused long enough to spike a portly teenaged boy, ironically dressed in a
Walking Dead
tee shirt.

