Running With The Horde (Book 2): Delusions of Monsters (26 page)

“Doesn’t mean it’s not about greed and power,” Bill mused.

“Where were you planning to go when this Syndicate made their move?” Derrick asked.

“I had a place built south of the cities. It’s like a fortress. I figured I wouldn’t have to worry about the Syndicate because of all I’ve done for them.”

“Thought you’d be protected like a favored pet?” Bill quipped.

“Exactly,” Nolan said, clearly not catching the insult.

“So why build a fortress if you’d be protected?”

“C’mon, Bill. I meant the Syndicate wouldn’t go out of its way to kill me. The fortress is to protect everything I’ve built from the masses if things really go south.

“Protection from the villagers when they are scared and starving?” Derrick said.

“Something like that,” Shipman said. He was starting to squirm in his seat under the scrutiny.

“Why did they take you today? How did you fall out of their good graces?” Bill asked.

“It’s that shit Chip sent me. Yes, I received the same package you did. Then Area 51 blows up. Something went wrong and the Syndicate is in full panic mode. I have no idea what the hell happened.”

“That’s why you put the hit on us? To cover your own ass?” Derrick asked.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Shipman stuttered, a glassy sheen of sweat making an appearance on his forehead.

“Don’t bother, Nolan, I knew you were hiding something when I came to visit. I dropped a bug in your pocket and heard the whole conversation.

Shipman looked like he might cry as he tried to look Bill in the eye while simultaneously stealing nervous glances at Derrick. “A few days after I got that package in the mail I got a call from Control. They told me not to open any strange packages. They started asking how I knew Chip Fielding and how I knew you. I was to call them if you made contact. Naturally I had already opened the package from Chip. As far as the hit goes, I’m sorry, I panicked. I hope you also heard me try to call it off,” he said.

“That, old friend, is the only reason you are still alive today,” Bill said. He decided to stop torturing the man before he became completely useless. “Maybe it isn’t too late. If we can find Andrew Penrod maybe we can get ahead of this thing. Maybe Andrew has a cure or something and we can get it out there before the virus kills everybody.”

“How?” Shipman asked.

“Those goons showed me their hand when they thought I still had something useful to share. They claim Andrew blew up Area 51 and escaped to Minneapolis with some dangerous materials. They are pretty desperate to find him.”

“They think Chip Fielding’s snot-nosed, wisp of a step-kid did all that? Anyway according to his coded message he was trying to stop the Syndicate,” Shipman said incredulously.

“Maybe he grew up to be a badass or maybe they didn’t tell me everything they knew but the point is that he is here somewhere in the city and you can help us find him. Did you keep records of every real estate purchase you brokered for the Syndicate?”

“Of course I did but there were hundreds.”

“I’m willing to bet one or two of those aren’t quite like the others. Where are the records?”

“They are hidden in my apartment back at the Nic,” Shipman said.

“Then we wait until dark, head over there and get them and hope to God the Syndicate doesn’t find them first.”

“One that front, gentlemen, I can assure there is no chance,” Shipman said, smiling for the first time since they’d seen him. “You know they’re going to have people watching the place.

“That’s why I’m going to bring some friends,” answered Derrick. Then he ducked out of the room with his cell phone.

…

Just after darkness fell, Derrick’s friends arrived at the complex in two blacked out SUVs. They were ten of the toughest looking customers Bill had ever seen. He had no idea how Derrick knew them. He had stopped questioning the big man’s methods years ago. Derrick led his colleagues into the family room of the apartment to discuss the night’s objective and tactics. Bill sat across from shipman in the moonlit kitchen. The ambient light made his old friend look like he’d just crawled out of a drawer at the morgue. Eventually the quiet conversational tones from the other room faded away and Derrick popped his head back into the kitchen. “Where’d you hide the flash drive, Nolan,” Derrick asked.

“Well, I will have to show you,” Shipman started but Derrick cut him off.

“No, you and Bill aren’t going. Tonight belongs to the young and fleet of foot. No offense, Bill”

“None taken,” Bill said.

Shipman wasted a few more seconds grumbling but then got down to business and wrote down explicit instructions to where Derrick would find the drive. Derrick read the paper and grimaced. “Please tell me you’re fucking with me,” he said. Shipman shrugged and gave Derrick an evil smile. “Fine,” Derrick said and headed out. His men had already left in a quiet, orderly fashion.

Soon the apartment settled back to an uncomfortable silence until Bill said, “So where did you hide it?”

Shipman grinned, “It’s in the freezer in one of my stool samples.”

“Yeah, that’s a good spot. Kind of a pain in the ass when you had to update it though I bet.”

“Oh yes, it was quite an unfortunate process.”

“Gross. When they get back you are cleaning it.”

“Fair enough,” said Shipman.

One hour turned to three and then to five as Bill kept watch looking out the window for Derrick and his crew. Every siren and loud noise made him jump. He kept waiting to hear a torrent of distant gunfire but it never came. He was worried but not yet ready to panic. Shipman had been dozing on the shabby couch since midnight. Bill hadn’t bothered rousing him to take a turn at the window. He wouldn’t have been able to sleep anyway. Waiting always had that effect on him. Around three in the morning he spotted first one SUV and then the other as they turned into the complex.

“Wake up, Nolan,” Bill said. Shipman sat up and stretched his long legs to a series of cracks.

Ten minutes later Derrick was back inside with three of his men in tow. “Success,” he said as he flipped a small zipped baggie filled with a dark substance at Shipman. He missed the catch and the bag bounced off his nose. He stifled a curse, picked the bag up off the rug and disappeared into the bathroom to begin the retrieval process.

“I’ve always told him nobody likes a brownnoser,” Bill said as he watched him disappear down the hallway. He turned back to Derrick, “Did you have any problems?” he asked.

“You might say that. They had three cars worth of guys surrounding the place. One in the lobby, a couple on Shipman’s floor and two more in his apartment tearing the place apart. Thanks to Shipman’s instructions we were able to get in without engaging the men outside but things got a little dicey after that. Though I have to say there is something fascinating about a fight in which both sides are trying to be silent. It’s kind of like a ballet and monster-truck derby mash-up.”

“Sounds terrible. Were there casualties?”

“Two on our side and six on theirs but no civvies were hurt though we did scare the shit out of some dudes partying in the lounge. That place is pretty nice. At least it used to be.”

“Did you learn anything about our enemy?”

“Not much, those guys were good not great. Most of them were contractors. The guys in the apartment seemed like something more. They didn’t go down easy. It would have been nice if we could have taken one of them alive.”

“Well
you
made it back alive and you got the drive, that’s the important thing.”

“Let’s just hope it was worth it.”

Shipman appeared in the kitchen a few minutes later with one very clean flash drive in his hand. “I hope one of you has a computer and remember I told you there were a lot of land deals so this isn’t going to be easy,” he said as he tried to hand the flash drive to Bill.

“I’m not touching that fucking thing,” Bill said as he pointed to the laptop on the table.

“It’s clean,” Nolan insisted but fit it into the USB port anyway.

Nolan Shipman showed them where the files were located and how he had them categorized. It only took a few minutes for Bill and Derrick to see there were hundreds of records for property purchases in the syndicate file. Both men groaned at this revelation. “It was a busy 15 years,” Nolan grumbled.

“We need to filter some these out of here. I think we can throw out anything along the fringes of downtown or outside of Minneapolis. Those were clearly acquired for Safety First infrastructure changes. Anything inside the city is a target property we need to search. We narrow it down and formulate a plan from there. Agreed?” Derrick and Shipman begrudgingly agreed. “Okay, then, sooner started sooner done,” Bill said with fake cheer.

Morning arrived and bled into noon. The urgency of their task kept the exhausted trio working on data mining the Syndicate list down to a total of five targets. Two of those were the Government Center and the Minneapolis City Hall, two others were high-end luxury apartment buildings and the last was three floors of Investor Tower.

“I can’t believe a private party owns the Government Center and City Hall.” Derrick said.

Shipman laughed, “The Syndicate leases the buildings back to the government for pennies on the dollar. They would have been crazy not to take that deal.”

“Meanwhile the Syndicate refurbished the basement into their own private torture dungeons right under their noses,” Derrick added.

“As I thought one of these things is not like the other,” Bill said, steering the conversation back to the problem at hand. “Four complete buildings and three floors of another building. I think if Andrew is in Minneapolis this is where we will find him and most likely anything that he stole from Area 51.

“So we are storming the Investor Tower?” Derrick said.

“In a manner of speaking I suppose,” Bill said. “We are going to need your friends back, Derrick.”

“I assumed as much. They are on standby. But they are going to expect payment,” Derrick said while staring at Shipman.

“Oh, yes, of course. It’s only right that I pay,” Shipman said as he rubbed his eyes.

“Are we going at night?” asked Derrick.

“No I think we’ll go straight at them during the day.”

“With all those people inside? That place is a madhouse during the day,” Shipman said.

“That’s why we’re gonna call in a threat and clear the whole building out,” Bill said. He laid out the skeleton of the plan he’d been thinking about.

“I think we can make that work,” Derrick said.

“Then, fellows,” Bill said, “tomorrow afternoon we invade the Crystal Court!”

“You make it sound like some kind of fantasy quest,” said Shipman

“I guess that’s an apt description,” Bill said, “But instead of a princess maybe we save the world.

The Past

It was only due to Randolph’s quick thinking they hadn’t lost anyone yet except for George, the girl and the dog. When they’d spotted the soldiers amassing at the bridge everyone had fled back the way they’d come. Only through sheer determination had Randolph managed to get in front of everyone and stop them before they gave away the group’s position. He had them all buried in a snow bank just before the first helicopter blazed overhead. It was a cold but effective evasive maneuver.

Since then it had been a game of a lot of cats and a few mice as they ran along the darkened streets trying to find a hiding place. They had stopped in an auto repair shop for a badly needed rest and so he could do a quick headcount of the dazed group. That was when he realized George was missing.

“Where’s George?” He yelled as softly as he could, trying to keep the fear out of his voice. He remembered the sound of gunfire as he lay shivering in the snow bank. If they had lost George they were most likely done for.

“He went after the kid,” Gallegan blurted like he was feeling guilty. “I told him it was suicide but he wouldn’t listen.”

Randolph lunged at him before he could say anything else but it was too late.

“Kid?” Mark yelled and dashed around looking for his boys. Mailue got the idea from watching him and followed suit.

Randolph watched in frozen silence as they scrambled around the room shouting and counting kids. Mark was the first to calm down when he was sure both of his boys were present. Mailue went on scrambling until she realized who else was missing then she exploded into a shrieking series of indecipherable phrases.

“Shit! Calm her the fuck down please,” he said to the room. His men moved to comply but were unsure how to approach the inconsolable woman and just surrounded her with their arms outstretched as though to quell her with a group hug. Tessa cussed and pushed through the men, stepped behind Mailue and wacked her in the head with the butt of her rifle. It was graceless and lacked any semblance of humanity but it was effective as Mailue dropped unconscious to the floor.

Randolph groaned through clenched teeth, unsure what to do about Tessa. She saw him looking at her and yelled, “What? She ain’t dead!”

He continued glaring at her for a moment before turning back to Gallegan. “Tell me what happened to George and the kid,” he said in a clipped tone, his patience wearing thin.

“You were there! Things went to shit, the kid panicked and ran into the middle of the street while everyone was running away and the dudes from the vehicles saw her. I couldn’t get there. I just couldn’t! But I guess George thought he could.”

“You didn’t try to stop him?” Randolph all but shouted in his face.

“Of course I tried; he wouldn’t listen, basically told me to fuck off and ran after her. Last I saw they were heading for shelter in one of the bars across the street. Based on the number of men out there it would be a miracle if they weren’t both captured or dead by now.

Aside from Mark, who was busy trying to wake Mailue, Randolph told everyone else to gather around for a briefing.

“Listen up. As you heard, George is gone and we have no way of knowing his status. He was pretty much critical to our mission. Obviously this puts us in a really tough spot. As you know there are a lot of soldiers out there and I have no idea what their intentions are especially if they find us without George.

“It won’t be long before we’re discovered so we need to move on pronto. As I see it we have two viable options. We either run north, back the way we came and forget trying to get into the city. We have very little food and water and shelter is minimal. If we do this we will likely die, just maybe not tonight.”

Aside from a few groans nobody said anything to option one, though they did continue staring at him like sheep before a slaughter.

“That leaves option two. We do our best to evade these guys, circle around to the east and try to rendezvous with George and the others down on Main Street, assuming he makes it there.”

“That is also assuming his tunnel even exists and he can find it,” said Tessa.

“Correct,” said Randolph. “I should also add this option will likely result in death and probably tonight.”

“So you are asking us to choose between death and death and it’s just a question of timing?” Mark asked.

“Essentially yes, Mark, but let’s be honest here, we’ve been fubar since the beginning and I’m not talking about just tonight, I’m talking about all of it. We’ve been more than fortunate to have survived this long. I’ll admit it, I am exhausted. I’m not saying I want to die but I wouldn’t argue too hard about it either.”

Nobody said anything.

“Let’s vote. I don’t really give a shit either way aside from to say I’d rather go quickly than starve or freeze to death in an abandoned building. Not to mention what happens if we get hit by a horde.”

The group came to attention with Randolph’s horde comment. It seemed in the excitement of the chase that everyone had temporarily forgotten about the zombies. When the vote was tallied it was unanimous they would go with option two. Ten minutes after the vote, the children were once again divided up amongst the adults. As punishment for losing George and the kid he made Gallegan babysit the prisoner.

They crept out the garage doors to the rear of the shop. Randolph took point and led them out of the alley to a small marketing firm located on the first floor of a squat office building. Next came a real estate office and then an insurance company. Finally, they were waiting at the corner of Hennepin and University. Randolph heard a sound he hadn’t heard in a few days and it made him freeze in terror.  Over the howl of the wind was the unmistakable moan of the undead. Randolph peeked out to gaze down the avenue toward the bridge.

He counted three vehicles. The largest was on fire. Zombies were everywhere. Many of them were wandering in and out of the closest building while others appeared to be wrestling in large piles on the snow-covered street. Then he remembered the gunfire he’d heard while they were running and realized the zombies weren’t wrestling. They were feeding on the bodies of dead soldiers. He felt gorge rise in his throat and turned back around the corner to vomit.

“What is it? What’s the problem, Randolph?” Tessa whispered.

He glanced up at her after he heaved. Somehow she had drawn baby duty. She was rocking the baby in her arms trying to keep her quiet. “Zombies,” he replied as he looked into her eyes. “A shit-ton of them.”

“What are we gonna do?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Just give me a minute,” he said.

“What’s the hold up?” someone called quietly from the back.

“Shhh,” Tessa shrilled. “We’ve got a zombie problem right around the corner!”

Randolph heard the sounds of a scuffle coming from the rear of the line. A moment later someone cursed and a snow-covered figure was running into the street making a beeline for the corner with his hands tied behind his back. It was the prisoner.

“Hey!” the prisoner screamed at the top of his lungs as he cleared the corner and ran into the middle of the street. “I’m over here!” He stopped in his tracks when he saw the scene on the street in front of the bar. He froze for a moment but then he turned back to Randolph and the others with a horrified expression on his face. “RUN!” he yelled.

The others didn’t need to be told twice. Randolph shoved Tessa in front of him but then caught her as she started to slip. Ahead of him Cove was running with Jacob riding on his back. Gallegan and Hawkey were helping Wilbur navigate the icy snowdrifts. Mark was struggling with Sam high-stepping through the snow. Mailue appeared out of nowhere and grabbed the baby from Tessa.

Block by block they ran with zombies popping up from all directions until they were surrounded on all sides by the shrieking monsters. Because of the snow it was like running in slow motion but at least the zombies had to deal with it too. In all the commotion Randolph lost sight of most of the group. He was still behind Cove and one of the children but the zombies were beginning to close in. Randolph saw a zombie dive at Cove and tackle him around the knees. He went down with a scream and Jacob spun into the air. Randolph made a lunge for him just as a helicopter flew in low seemingly out of nowhere. A burst of air threw him to the ground as the chopper shot back up into the night sky.

A hand clamped onto his leg and Randolph kicked as hard as he could without even thinking about it. Something crunched under his boot and he was back up running again. A child was screaming to his left. It was only then he realized he was holding a tiny hand. In one powerful move he swung the child from his side to his back without missing a step.

Risking a quick look at his surroundings he realized he had gained a few feet of distance from the pursing zombies. Up ahead was large municipal parking lot miraculously clear of all but a few vehicles. On the far end of the lot he saw a host of headlights aiming in his direction. If he could only make it to the lights they might be safe. Spurring himself on he put everything he had into running just a little faster, the theme fro
m
Chariots of Fir
e
playing in his head. He could see soldiers lined up by the vehicles, weapons pointed in his direction. Another helicopter idled beyond the vehicles in the distance. The plume of their engine exhausts curling into the night like the breath of metal beasts. The soldiers seemed to be cheering him on.

He heard no sound but the sound of the horde. Hundreds of feet chuffing behind him through the snow. A chorus of voices grunting through the first ever undead 5K. He knew he might be shot when the soldiers opened fire but he didn’t care. He only knew he wouldn’t die as zombie food.

The pounding in his chest and the stitch in his side were telling him he was almost out of gas. He was sucking in shallow breaths of oxygen because the boy on his back was squeezing so hard. He let out a primal scream, closed his eyes and counted out twenty torturous paces. When he opened them he was almost to the vehicles. He took two more strides and dove headfirst past the line of soldiers. He hit the pavement with a wet smack and slid to a stop through the snow. Curling into a ball with his arms around the boy, he waited for the night to come alive with gunfire.

It never happened. His eyes popped open. He and the boy sat up and looked around. The soldiers were still there but most were facing him. They were clapping and laughing in mock cheer. Incredibly, the zombies that had been chasing him were also there. They waited just on the other side of the vehicles like dogs behind an invisible fence, greedily eyeballing the prey they would never catch.

“What is going on?” He asked the short, heavyset man with a buzz cut standing in front of him sucking on the nub of a cigar.

“That was a hell of a run, soldier,” the man said with a grin. “What’s your name, son?”

Randolph wiped his nose with his glove and tugged the listless boy closer to his side and said, “Dimitri Randolph.”

“It’s nice to meet you, Randy. I’m Captain Morgan. You and the boy wanna take a trip in that chopper? There is somebody in the city that wants to talk to you.”

“That’d be nice,” Randolph said. He was still in shock and would have agreed to anything at this point. He was sure George would’ve understood.

Captain Morgan pulled him to his feet and the three of them headed for the helicopter. As they drew closer he could see Gallegan, Wilbur, Mark and Sam were already inside. There was no sign of the rest of his group.

“Was there anybody else?”

“Nope,” Morgan replied. “What you see is what you get. I imagine you lost a few to that deader stampede. Shit, I know I did.”

“I see,” Randolph said. He couldn’t believe what a cluster fuck this day had become. No more Tessa. The poor little baby was gone. The old lady and her grandkid. Cove and Hawkey were lost too. They had been good men.

“Chin up, son,” Morgan said. “We caught a few of your friends earlier tonight. Though they were surprised as hell to see me,” he chuckled. “Fought like wildcats, those three. But they’re still kicking. I am sure you’ll feel better after a hot shower and a nice meal.”

Randolph grunted as he lifted Jacob into the chopper. The boy scrambled into Mark’s lap. A hot shower did sound pretty damn good. It was the small things that made life worth living now. He would take them as long as he could get them. He no longer wanted to die.