Sirens of the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 2): Siren Songs (23 page)

He ran to the other big canvas tent, the mirror image of the one
where Bart died. He wasn't surprised to see it was a duplicate on the
inside too, probably so they could run two tests at the same time. He
flew out of that tent and started exploring the remaining smaller
tents. What he needed had to be in one of them.

The fear was creeping up on him, but he forced it back down. He
made himself take a few deep breaths and think. That's how he saw the
data cables. Those wires would inevitably end up in the tent with the
connections to the outside.

It was a tent very near the colonel's. It made sense he'd want to
be near the expensive equipment. Liam ran in and was rewarded with a
blast of cold air. They spared no effort to keep the servers and
other equipment properly cooled, even inside a leaky canvas tent.

He whipped out his phone, and tried to acquire a signal. Even
though there were a dozen wireless access points, he was unable to
find any that didn't require a password to let him link up. He was
not a tech guy per se; most of his knowledge had to do with keying in
passwords, not how the internet was built or functioned. His dad was
the tech guy, and even he had to write his password—

That's it!

He ran out of the tent and popped directly into the colonel's. He
went to the bank of computers off to the side. Even though they were
off, he was able to locate the wireless router for this tent. It was
still blinking happily. He flipped it over and was rewarded with a
hand-written note, providing the password to access this device.

“1 2 3 4 5”

“Hey, I use that on my luggage!” Liam shouted the joke
from an old movie his dad loved to watch.

It was the combination a leader would use who didn't want to be
bothered with the minutia of ever having to remember a complex
password to access his own network.

Not as security-minded as you thought, herr colonel.

In a few seconds he had entered the pass code and found a
connection. He scrolled into his chat history and found a discussion
between himself, mom, dad, and a few other family members. He didn't
want to engage in a lengthy conversation, but it was the easiest way
of blanketing as many people as possible with a short message.

***This is Liam. At Lone Elk Park at a gov camp. Just broke free.
Beware Hayes. Heading for home. Have grandma. 7d since sirens.***

He entered the time in case there were delays. He hit send and was
thankful to see the message went out the door, figuratively speaking.
He waited a few moments for a reply, wondering if anyone happened to
be looking at their phones. Were the networks even working? A couple
minutes of nervous pacing and he decided he could wait no longer. He
had spent maybe five minutes running around the camp looking for the
data connections, and it felt like an eternity. If a message went out
to the Air Force when the alarm first sounded, how long before they
were here? He felt the crush of urgency.

No answer came through. But no “network not found”
messages either. He opened his email and banged out the same message.
He only sent to mom as she had an easy-to-remember email address. He
hit send and was pleased again to see it go out.

That's when the first bombs exploded. He nearly dropped his
precious phone out of fright.

He hung his head out of the tent, afraid he would see his own
death falling from above, but the big explosions were coming from
inside the woods. A good ways into the woods. They were blowing up
the corral and destroying evidence of the grave. Had to mean the camp
itself was next.

Run!

Liam made it to Grandma's tent in time to find many—but not
all—the residents standing around out front. There were
actually three other tents in the compound used for test subjects, so
the total number of elderly was quite a bit more than he imagined.

“Is this everyone? Where's Zachary Taylor? Why aren't you
already moving?”

“Not everyone is coming, dear.” Grandma sounded
nonchalant about what should be a very serious claim.

“Not coming? We have to get them out of here. They are going
to bomb us any second!”

“Liam. Look at me.”

He was near-panicked.

“You and I are going to walk out of here together. Will you
help me down the road?”

He felt like he was going to piss himself, but his tension eased
as he took her hand. They were leaving, finally.

“And now, we start walking.”

With that, Liam and Marty started along the road. The others were
spread in front and behind, moving as fast as their legs would carry
them. Most actually moved at a good clip. Being in the 80's wasn't
always synonymous with lack of mobility, and these folks were the
survivors from wherever they'd been rescued. A tough lot, given their
age.

Grandma and Liam quickly fell toward the back of the pack, then
the very last in the line. “Liam, will you leave me here and
save yourself? I really can't go any faster. I think they took too
much of my blood.”

Uh oh.

Alarm bells were cracking from overuse inside his head, but he
didn't want to worry his walking partner. He could guess who took
blood samples while he was off with the colonel. He'd cross that
bridge with her when the time was right. Walking out from under the
shadow of a massive explosion was
not
the right time. Instead,
he kept it light.

“No. It's you and me together, remember? I made that promise
when we left your house. We are one wheelchair ride away from home!”

At the last possible point they could see the camp, Liam turned
around while Grandma took a short rest. Looking that direction, Liam
could see two large plumes of smoke snaking up from deep in the
woods. The remains of the corral and the pit grave were wafting to
the sky. Were they far enough from the camp to be safe now?

Leave nothing to chance.

If there was one thing Liam understood it was that the military,
for all their technology, was prone to making mistakes. It wasn't a
slight against the modern military; it had been happening for
millennia. They could just as easily bomb this empty road as destroy
the camp itself. Call it operator error. Call it a computer glitch.
Call it Murphy's Law. Whatever it was, it happened.

The high cloud ceiling and dense tree cover made it hard to know
if planes were lurking high above, but he thought he could hear
aircraft noise coming from somewhere.

“Grandma, keep moving!”

Another ten minutes and they could see the park exit. The
geriatric brigade they'd been following were a short ways out of the
gate, as if they had reached the finish line and were now catching
their breath. Everyone had spent what they had pushing the limits to
get here.

For his part, Liam was practically dragging Grandma over the line.
The steel gate was smashed outward. Useless. A vehicle had run it
down.

He doubted anyone was listening, or cared, but he risked a moment
to stop and talk out loud. He was looking off to the side, as if
giving color commentary to an imaginary camera crew. It was a thing
he did.

“And this is why containment
always
fails. Right
here. This gate. One hundred zombie books out of a hundred will have
this gate, or something like it. Those jerks could have just as
easily unlocked the gate and driven out so this place could be used
by future survivors. Instead they tossed it like a disposable diaper.
This park would have been a great refuge to hide from the zombies
until the world cleaned itself up, but now it's just going to get
infected like everywhere else.”

Almost as if in a script, the bombs fell on the camp. The
explosions were loud and on target. Or close enough by Liam's
reckoning because they didn't fall on their heads.

“And those planes. Were those really necessary? The whole
damned world is already infected.”

The howl of several aircraft ripped overhead. He looked up to
watch the dusky gray fighter jets scream up into the clouds like
playful cats hiding on a high shelf, their bad deed already
forgotten.

“I bet those pilots are hootin' and hollerin' like they just
sank the Bismarck. Idiots.”

It tempered Liam immediately when he remembered who had been left
at the camp.

“Grandma, will you pray for Zachary and all those left
behind? I feel like someone needs to remember them.”

And then, for the first time in his life, he prayed with her.

6

After a few moments of prayer Liam looked up, taking stock of
where they were. It was mid-afternoon on the seventh day since the
sirens. He'd spent much of the past few days holed up in his home,
hidden in the back of a military truck, or at the secluded military
camp. He'd only glimpsed the decay of the world briefly as they drove
into the park this morning. He was shocked now that he could clearly
see what the breakdown had wrought.

He was gazing down at the interstate, not fifty yards away. Most
of the fires and smoldering cars had been reduced to cold charred
ghosts dotting the landscape. Other intact cars were scattered
haphazardly up and down the highway, in both directions. Probably
sitting where the gas gave out. Every household item you could
imagine was strewn on the pavement, as if people had tried to escape
the city with their personal effects, only to toss them down once
they were separated from their cars.

And bodies. They too dotted the landscape, providing a horrible
tableau of what happened here the past week. Now they were bloated
mannikins left to lie where they fell. Wretched and smelly, even from
a distance. Liam couldn't see them with any detail, but so many
bodies suggested they were either humans shot by other men, they were
bodies ravaged by zombies, or zombies put down by survivors. It was
all due to chaos. He'd seen the start of this on his own earlier
journeys. Now he was seeing the result of the full bore zombie
plague. The dirty horde of infected who exploded out of the city—in
pursuit of the refugees—had created this mess.

The final pieces of this horrible scene were the broken people.
Living humans, not zombies, were trudging along the highway. A thin
stream of survivors moving from the city, out to the wooded and rural
lands. Their slow and deliberate pace made them seem like
sleepwalkers out on a midnight stroll. Some picked through the
treasures strewn everywhere, but most kept moving.

A couple of survivors were on bicycles, but no one was in a moving
car now. A car probably couldn't fit through all the obstacles on
this stretch of highway.

Liam looked at his fellow escapees. They needed a mini-bus to come
along and take them back to their respective homes, where they could
resume dying in the manner of their choice.

The task was daunting. Perhaps insurmountable. Getting Grandma out
of the city was luck more than anything else. Things were still
running. Law and order still reported for duty. Now, he had to get
her across miles of suburbia without the help of trains or cars. It
had taken Hayes and a convoy of military almost a day to travel the
twenty miles, and they had a freaking chain gun to win arguments with
the natives.

Plus, I had Victoria.

It was amazing how her presence had made the previous journey seem
almost pleasant. Now he had no help at all. In fact he was now
carrying
more
baggage. He looked at the other survivors from
the camp. Did he owe them anything? Could he and Grandma head for
home and leave these people to their fates? Could he realistically do
anything for them?

She was surveying the highway too. “Too bad we never saw any
elk in the park.”

He looked at her as if she'd just said the funniest joke he'd ever
heard. “Grandma, do you ever get depressed? How do you do it?”

“Oh, Liam. I have been down. Many times. Once you get to be
my age, you take each day as a gift. Sure this looks bad, but it
looked bad back at the Arch. It looked bad in your basement. It
looked bad when the truck crashed. It looked bad running from this
camp.” She used her thumb to point back over her shoulder. “But
through it all I still have you by my side, and we're still alive.
We've gotten this far together. We just need to work a little harder
to get back home this time. The Lord will provide.”

It was an echo of the speech she gave as they left her home the
day after the sirens.

The planes screamed overhead, more bombs fell on the camp behind
them.

It's the only way to be sure.

That movie quote was more true now than ever.

Here and there gunshots could be heard in the distance. A portent
of the challenges ahead.

That very day Liam had witnessed strange zombies, horrible
experiments, and the erasure of an entire government camp with heavy
ordnance. He was stuck on a highway with his 104-year-old
great-grandmother again, and the path to home and family looked more
complicated than ever. But holding her at his side gave him a new
strength. He suddenly had a premonition he would make it home with
her and that everything was going to be OK.

Together, they took their first steps.

Toward home.

Jerry and Lana were exhausted. They'd been on the road for almost
five days, including one short visit to Marty's now-abandoned flat.
They mostly traveled at night, and stuck to routes as least traveled
as possible. That included parks, greenways, drainage ditches,
creeks, and sewers. Anything to keep them off the radar of the
multitude of human opportunists who were out to cause trouble in the
absence of law and order. It also kept them off the radar of
desperate men and women suffering in normal, everyday desperation.
Those who ran out of food. Those who were injured with nowhere to go
for help. Those who ran out of their psych meds. Those who had caught
any number of secondary diseases, once the dead started stacking up
in their neighborhoods. Finally, their most loathsome enemy was the
infected. The zombies weren't as thick as they were at the beginning
of the collapse, but they were well-ensconced in the landscape, and
much harder to see or anticipate.