Gravewalkers: Dying Time (35 page)

They found three small
scouting helicopters out in the weather at the landing pad area.
They had only their metal cables to secure them from tipping over
in strong winds. Three and a half years of exposure hadn’t done
them any good. Closer inspection revealed that fruitless escape
plans had vandalized each of the aircraft. Various amateur
mechanics had attempted to get each of them started. They had
frequently looted parts from one in a foolish hope to repair one of
the others. The failures had left all of them beyond salvage. One
even had a bird’s nest in the engine.

“
No chance with these,”
Carmen communicated with whispers by internal radio to his helmet.
“They would keep more aircraft out of the weather inside those
hangars over there. Would you like to check that too?”

He nodded that they should
look. If any functional helicopters had ever been in the hangars
then survivors had already taken off with them long ago. Nothing
remained inside the shelters but two mostly disassembled helicopter
frames.

“
Don’t get discouraged
just yet, princess,” he said to be hopeful. “I really do have a
good plan for doing this on foot, so everything will be fine. We’re
going back to Jim with the specimen and then I will set a
completely new standard for romance to show you how much you mean
to me. I just need you to trust me.”

She had her doubts about
the battle plans and especially his pledge to romance her, “You
mean it?”

He meant it, “I guarantee
you we can complete this mission.”

“
No,” she corrected him.
She would prefer that the mission failed so she didn’t care about
that very much. “Do you mean you will be romantic?”

“
Like it’s my mission in
life,” he promised her, which it would be. Critias still had an
inner pain that the bioengineers made her frigid to his touch, so
if Carmen’s sole intimate pleasure came from being a romanticist,
then he would provide that delight instead.

“
Just tell me what to do,”
she pledged with new enthusiasm born of her desire to win the prize
he offered.

Critias took out their
maps, “I need you to lead us west.” He pointed out a region, “All
north of here is suburbia death-zone tightly packed as trees to
forest so we have to stay clear of that thorny bramble.”

She made an endearing pout,
“Nearly the whole city between here and the building we are heading
for is that same kind of death-zone. Once we’re away from this
airport, it’s more of that trouble in every direction.”

“
You just stay away from
those residential areas,” he cautioned her. “Lead us west for about
four kilometers.” He pointed the place out on his map, “To right
there.”

She adjusted her backpack
under her rags so that it made her hunchbacked and even more
ghoulish in her disguise. Carmen suffered no discomfort while she
walked stooped over with a limp. Critias shuffled along in his best
zombie imitation ten to fifteen meters behind her. Once he had a
clear field of vision, he could see that some of the ghouls had run
into his wildfire where they had ignited their filthy rags. After
that, those flaming infected had dashed about in mad pain,
inadvertently setting fire to other areas of grass. The situation
had not yet turned into a threat to the whole city, but Critias
realized it could end up that way if bad luck had it in for
them.

“
You must be entirely calm
and indifferent,” she advised him by radio. “Do not show any
reaction to an infected unless it is close enough for you to use
your sword for a decisive decapitation.”

Only moments later, five
ghouls ran between Carmen and Critias on their way south toward the
fires and its fleeing rodents. They took no notice of the ghouls
and they in turn took no interest in them.

Carmen led them the
seventeen-hundred meters across the landing strips in just under
twenty minutes. She maintained that walking pace as they went
between rows of airport buildings, across overgrown lawns, and
eventually into the massive airport parking lot for the many
automobiles. They reached the place that Critias had requested in
well less than an hour by walking past dozens of ghouls that
routinely mistook them for fellow infected.

While dense suburbia was
within sight to the northeast, their way had led across a highway
into an indigent area of distantly scattered and well-wooded
homesteads.

Carmen discretely snapped
the neck of a ghoul that ventured too close to her so Critias
stopped there over the disabled body to check his map again. He
pointed further toward the west, “About five-hundred meters over
there is this rain channel. I want you to get us there and then
follow it north. I don’t see hardly any homes through this area so
it will still be plenty safe.”

Carmen set off again and
made a better pace in the thick cover and deepening darkness as
night set in fully. Just as Critias had hoped, she found a manmade
valley about forty meters across with a three-meter wide stream
that flowed north along the bottom.

Once they stood in the
shallow water, Critias took the lead as they headed north. The
sides of the valley completely shielded them from all view unless
an infected was down inside with them and close enough to see them
in the dark. When the stream encountered a roadway, it went beneath
through a concrete tunnel that was large enough for them to walk
through without ever having to stoop or even being able to touch
the sides. The size of the drains attested to the volume of runoff
rain that would channel their way when there was a storm to provide
it. As it was, the water remained shallow and hardly tapped the
flash flood capacity that their path could receive
otherwise.

Within an hour after they
had left the helicopter hangar, Critias had followed the stream to
an even larger manmade river that was twenty meters
wide.

Carmen groaned with
distaste, “You want to swim there through filthy plague-infected
drainage water swarming with alligators?”

“
It had been my plan until
I saw those,” he pointed up the hill to the east where at the top
of the crest were four giant steel-girder towers that supported the
high-tension power lines. “I saw this legless hunter once and it
gives me an idea. We’re going along those wires like
monkeys.”

Carmen examined the tall
towers and saw that their high-tension transmission cables were
going toward their destination. She knew from the maps Kevin had
provided them that there was a northbound junction of the same type
of lines that would deliver them to a main transformer station that
stood only a block away from the pharmaceutical building they were
after. The arrangement was so perfect that it was like a miracle of
astounding luck. She hugged him with a gush of great relief,
“You’re a genius, my beloved master! By traveling along those
cables, we could be there in no time without ever coming anywhere
close to the ghouls.”

As Critias headed up the
hill to climb a tower to reach the cable, he asked her facetiously,
“Who’s the pig-headed emotionally-stunted idiot now?” When he had
considered sneaking into the city using the water it had never
occurred to him that major predators lurked within it as she had
suggested. He asked, “Are there really alligators in that
water?”

“
Oh yes,” she confirmed
there was. “This is prime habitat for them now with no humans to
keep them away from this major population center. I’ve seen three
already, though none of them was especially large. In time they
will be. From the tracks I have encountered thus far, I can tell
there are also large populations of feral dogs, wild hogs, and
feral cattle. All three of those are potentially lethal, to humans
anyway.”

Critias climbed the
northern-most electrical service tower to reach one of the thick
power transmission cables that spanned to the next tower and then
to the next after that for kilometers to come. The wires had seemed
thinner from the ground, but up close, the bundled cable was the
diameter of Carmen’s forearm. Critias went out on the cable headed
west. He advanced slowly hand over hand beneath it like an
orangutan. His mechsuit would easily support him all day without
fatigue.

Carmen sprang up the tower
on her way to the adjacent cable of the four available. After she
ascended above the taught wire, she climbed out on its support arm.
With elfin-grace, she stepped onto the cable and then ran along it
as if a tightrope walker in the circus. Once she got along side of
him, she suggested, “Beloved, you don’t need to brachiate yourself
along like an arboreal primate. Kevin’s upgrades will allow you to
funambulate just as easily as I can. Your onboard computer
recalibrates your fine motor balance several million times per
second.”

When Critias saw how she
traveled, he stopped at the next tower to emulate her method. The
upgrades that Kevin installed to increase his balance made the
cable feel like a sidewalk one meter wide so he chased after her in
the right lane with the intention of passing her. No ghouls ever
made any effort to pursue them while they traveled so high above
the ground because the infected never had even the remotest
association between food and the high wires for them to watch them.
In less than two hours, Critias and Carmen reached a junction of
cables that headed northward. They followed those all the way to a
transformer station that filled a city block with steel girder
towers and electrical power equipment. From there they could see
just to the west of them was the trapezoidal business tower that
contained the offices and laboratories of Hale-Wellington
Pharmaceuticals.

They climbed down to the
ground quietly then made a patiently meandering walk to the
building’s front entrance. They were deep in the heart of the city
where a sufficiently loud noise might eventually cascade-summon a
hundred-thousand infected who could swarm through the area within
an hour.

When a ghoul came into
Carmen’s path, she refused to alter her course to avoid the
creature and instead seized it by the head to snap its neck. If any
other ghoul came close to her, she would do it again.

Critias preferred to avoid
any close encounters.

“
I have good news,” she
radioed. “The doors are still locked from the inside so that should
mean no man or ghoul has yet to vandalize this place.” Using the
twenty-third century skeleton key from her pocket, Carmen applied a
simple twist to the amorphously intelligent tool to unlock the
door.

When no infected were in
sight, they slipped inside then locked the door behind them. As
Carmen had suspected, there was no sign of looters having ever
entered the place. They readied their weapons anyway.

After Carmen walked to a
black message board attached to a far wall to read the names and
companies situated on the various floors, she told him, “Upstairs
we go, to the fifth floor. Are we staying in
nightvision?”

He started left to look for
the usual steel fire door that protected stairwells, “We don’t want
the infected seeing reflected light out any windows to make them
curious so let’s keep the electric torches off for now.”

“
This way,” she summoned
him right in the proper direction.

They saw nothing on the
flights of stairs beyond trackless dust, but eventually Carmen
paused to freeze perfectly still anyway so Critias followed her
example expecting danger.

“
I smell something,” she
sniffed again. “Smells like, bile.”

He didn’t know what to make
of that, “Bile you say? That’s just extra swell. What the hell
smells like bile?”

“
Your gallbladder,” she
joked though serious. “It’s a gastrointestinal thing I wouldn’t
normally smell unless I was actually tearing out a liver at the
time.”

Critias called upon his
stoicism to reinterpret their situation into something positive,
“Let’s call that a good thing then; if we’re looking for some
specimen nobody has seen before, it should stink like one
too.”

Carmen picked the lock on
the fifth floor door to discover it jammed, so after a moment’s
consideration, she just kicked it in to discover that a folding
metal chair wedged under the handle had been the
culprit.

Critias saw the stainless
steel, glass, and technical equipment of a bioengineer’s
laboratory. He certified it, “This is the place.” He imagined
Carmen knew what one looked like too since she had been born in
such an environment.

They explored separately
until Carmen discovered a video conference room with a stack of
storage disks all in labeled sleeves. “This looks really
important,” she radioed. “The times and dates on these home movies
coincide with their science team while they were in Mexico digging
up whatever it is we came here for.”

He instructed, “Leave them
there while we search everywhere first to make sure we have no
surprises. We can rest up in there later and have plenty of time
for it then.” Critias found an office that seemed to have potential
so he sent Carmen there to rifle through the documents so she could
commit them to memory. He went on to locate a containment lab with
hermetically sealed barriers. Through the window, he saw an ancient
stone sarcophagus in the center of the chamber. The weird box had a
lot of intricate carving like from some ancient human culture.
There was a bluish slime mold that puked from the many yawning
mouths and leering faces that adorned the stone box. The vomit had
run down to the floor then spread out to all four corners in a thin
layer. He also saw the feint patterns of five human bodies that the
gel had presumably digested. They remained visible only as the
circulatory systems of otherwise invisible men, like only a color
photograph in the slime that revealed where they had
been.