The Zombie Plagues Dead Road: The Collected books. (170 page)

NINE

Bluechip

Bear and Beth

Weston sat across from Bear and spoke
in condescending tones about the world outside the base and what
would have to become of it to make it habitable. He clipped his
fingernails absently as he spoke. They were already short, and
blood bloomed in places. There were bags under his eyes, and those
bags were stark white. His skin looked bad, and he rarely made eye
contact with Bear.

“
Burning, a great burning would be the best. The rest of us
need to be assured that the compound is dead completely. That it
can never return,” Weston told him. “Can you see my concern? The
two of you coming here is the worst possible outcome for us. This
base is sealed, was sealed until you breached it. The whole place
is contaminated now. The mutations the virus progressed through
beyond these walls are now here, among us, infecting us. What if
our own vaccines can't handle the newer versions? You may have
killed us.
Killed us with your
carelessness.
” He leaned back in his
chair, his thin, white hair lending an air of fragility to his
face. As though it could crack and fall into a million pieces at
the slightest blow. He tossed the fingernail clippers down onto the
desktop contemptuously.

Bear leaned forward partway across the
Major's desktop. He saw his eyes flare with concern and that caused
a wide smile to surface on his lips. He held it there as he spoke.
“Your facility was already breached. We cut no holes in the
ducting, they were there. “ He held him with his eyes. “As for you
and yours, how many is that? A handful? I know many of them left
months ago. I know that because one of the people that are with us,
the ones that will come looking for us, was here. Held here.
Escaped from here. You've probably experienced a slow bleed.
Obviously not all of your cameras are working, how could you know?
So, who are you protecting this place from? Who is here?” Bear
waited but Weston said nothing at all. “A dozen people? That's
about all I've seen, maybe less than a dozen. The breach has been
there. You were infected months ago. Months, maybe even
years.”

Weston's lips quivered. “I can not
accept that. I... This would be for nothing at all if that were the
case.” He lowered his head into his hands briefly and massaged his
temples. “Decided,” he said, although decided about what Bear could
only guess.

“
You'll take nothing from
me. You won't leave here.” He reached into his desk and pulled his
hand back out. He opened the palm slowly. “So you can see it truly
does exist.” In his palm rested a small silver canister, almost the
size and shape of the small compressed air cylinders he used to put
in his BB Gun as a kid, except this had a narrow rounded head with
a small red button. The other item was a small glass bottle or vial
filled with what looked like red liquid. “Yes, it does exist, but
you will never have it. It was manufactured here. Two floors below,
and there is enough of it to reverse it all many times over.” He
dropped both items back into his desk drawer. He looked toward the
door and raised his voice. “Lieutenant!”

The door opened and the same young
officer that had been standing guard on the door when they had
arrived stepped in.

“
Take him back,” Weston
told him. He turned away and dismissed them both.

Watertown

Billy and Pearl

The cave had been held by a few dozen
gang members. Most of them had fled when Billy and Pearl had killed
what turned out to be their leaders. They had made their way back
to the cave on foot, fully intending to take it by force and wait
for Bear and Beth's returning, but there had been no one to fight,
nothing to take back. The half dozen kids that remained, children
really, were not fighters: Were not part of the group that had
attacked them, but were part of a small group of kids being held
captive by the others. The remaining few gang member had fled once
they realized the others had been killed. The children had been on
their own for a few days now. They had welcomed Billy and
Pearl.

Billy had left Pearl there. They had
parted tearfully, he on his way to the river and the entrance to
the underground facility. Her to heal.

Pearl had settled into the cave before
Billy had left and within a few days others had joined her. At
first she had done her best to dissuade them, silence and moodiness
seemed to be her only persona for most of that time, but somewhere
in those first few days she recognized the need for others, if only
for strength in numbers, and she began to welcome newcomers and get
them set up with sleeping areas inside the cave. She organized
daily outings for supplies, and that enabled her to get a better
idea of the area and how it had changed in the months since she had
made her escape. She had done what she could for her leg, the
infection had gone, but the limp and the pain had
stayed.

She left early on the first morning of
the second week, she and a newcomer, Anna, on foot: Rob and Lisa,
two other newcomers, in a truck to cruise the fields outside of
town looking for deer, or cows which seemed to be everywhere you
looked.

Gina, another newcomer, had stayed to
keep things going at the cave which was close to fifty people now.
Gina had been one of the first to come along. Tall, young, a shock
of red hair that hung well below her waist, but was usually tied
back into a ponytail and wrapped around her forehead. She had
become completely devoted to Pearl. “Happy hunting,” Gina had
called as they left.

Pearl remembered that aloud as they
walked, startling a small herd of goats that had been browsing the
inside of a gas station as they passed. Things were beginning to
get on her nerves, and she was concerned about Billy who had been
gone far too long. They let the goats go without a shot. Shots
sometimes bought the dead.

For some reason no one understood, the
dead seemed to be changing. Less fearful of humans: Faster; out in
the daylight sometimes. And their use of tools was becoming
alarming. More than once they had seen evidence of tool usage by
the dead. So this herd of goats were some that they couldn't hunt.
She only hoped things were better for the others.

There was a police precinct seven
blocks over where they hoped there would be a stash of weapons and
ammunition, and that was Pearl's real goal. She had no idea how
many dangerous people were still in Watertown, but she doubted all
the bad had left and only the good remained. The police precinct
should have plenty in the way of rifles and ammunition
both.

The Police station took half the day to
break into. The cops had left, they had simply left the inmates
there.

It had been a close fight at first.
They had expected a few dead, not dozens. It was late afternoon
before they had what they had come for, which turned out to be no
more than a few hundred rounds of ammunition Pearl wasn't even sure
they could use.

The trip back to the cave was
impossible, there was not enough daylight left, so they had found a
liquor store with its steel panel burglar doors intact to spend the
night. A well placed shot had shattered the cheap padlock, and they
had managed to force the doors open. The inside was untouched. They
had secured the panels once again, jamming them from the inside,
and begun the long wait for morning.

Bluechip

Bear and Beth

The door slammed and the footsteps
faded. He had lost track of the schedule as he had been in Weston's
office, but he was fairly certain that he had not missed the most
recent check in.

He had taken a hard look at the doors
and walls as they had come back. There was nothing at all. No
windows, no view-ports in the doors that he could see. He could
conceive of no reason why they stopped, waited and moved
on.

That may well have remained his only
information except the soldier received some sort of call on the
way back. He wore what had appeared to be an ordinary radio at his
side. It burred several times, the soldier retrieved it from his
belt and a small screen had come to life before the soldier had
turned far enough away to hide it. Beth, pacing a room very much
like his own. Bear purposely forced himself to look elsewhere so
that the soldier wouldn't suspect he had seen it. It answered many
of his questions. Most likely there were cameras in the room. They
could access them from the radio or whatever the device was. They
had to be accessing some sort of signal feed to do it. Checking on
them, logging off the feed and moving on.

He stood in the room now and waited for
the footfalls. He had no doubt now that Weston intended to kill
them. He had just decided that maybe he was incorrect, maybe the
guards had already passed by on their check, when he heard a
commotion in the hallway.

At first he couldn't place the noise in
context, but a second later a deep rattle of gunfire filled the air
and he could feel as well as hear the running in the hallway along
with the gunfire. He watched as a hole suddenly appeared in the
door. One second the door had been smooth and whole, the next there
was a ragged hole, torn metal at its edges. He followed the hole to
the wall where another less ragged hole had been punched through
into whatever was behind that wall, probably it was a cell next to
his own, he told himself.

The noise flashed by, moved off. A few
screams in the distance. More gunfire, and then silence returned
and settled over him like a blanket. He couldn't stand it and
dropping quickly to the floor he called out to Beth. No answer
came. He cried out again, louder, panic griping his voice,
hoarseness creeping in from yelling so loudly, but there remained
no answer.

Bluechip

Billy Jingo

The way in had been easy to find. The
path they had taken easier still. Their boot tracks had been
printed into the muddy floor of the tunnel.

They had to be days old, but they
looked as though they had just been made. He doubted that this
environment changed much. There were other tracks, older, filled
with water in places, clear and crisp in others. Adams and Beth's
tracks covered those tracks in places. The reason he knew the other
tracks were older. Other than that they looked just as fresh, just
as new to him.

He stood from his examination of the
tracks and continued on deeper into the facility, thinking as he
went.

If these tracks were days old, and they
had to be, where were Bear and Beth now? Why had they entered this
direction and not returned. He checked as he made his way forward
but there were only the sets of tracks going in. The size of Bear's
tracks alone made them easy to spot. With Beth's smaller tracks
beside them they were even easier to spot. There were no tracks
returning.

He returned to his original question to
himself, but he knew the answer. They had to be held somewhere
inside. They would have returned if they could. He only hoped that
it wasn't worse. He pushed that thought away and slowed as he
spotted a light source far ahead. He shrugged his rifle from his
shoulder, and with one free hand thumbed the safeties off both
pistols he carried at his waist. He carried a knife in one boot,
and a second that looked like nothing more than a belt buckle at
his waist. Things he had picked up from Beth. That thought bought
him back to where they could be and what might have happened. He
pushed his concerns away nearly as soon as they had surfaced and
made his way slowly, silently, toward the light ahead.

Beth

The hallway was dark and the footing
unsure. She had no idea why the lights were out in so many places.
What lights were left made it hard to see. One soldier had Beth by
the back of her jacket and kept forcing her forward when she didn't
move fast enough. Her hand was zip tied to her belt and was already
painful. She was pretty sure that complaining about that would get
her nowhere. These five didn't seem the compassionate type. She
stumbled along as she was pushed, slowing down purposely, hoping
against hope that Bear would somehow find her.

Bear

Bear fished the fingernail clippers
form his pocket. He had palmed them when he had leaned across the
desk toward Weston. He went to work on the door, first prying off
the chrome retainer ring on the inside of the door that covered the
handsets mounting screws. He had been sure that once he got it
pried off that the screws would be security screws, but they were
not. A few more minutes and he had the screws out. The handle set
pushed through and fell out onto the tiles outside the door. He
could only hope that there was no one there to see it. It took a
second or two to figure out how the mechanism worked, but once he
did he had the door opened. He ran to a room three doors down where
the door had been opened. It was empty, but the unmade bed told him
someone had been there and who else, he questioned, was there
besides himself and Beth?

He stood in the hallway only a few
seconds before he ran off in the direction he hoped would take him
toward her and those who had taken her. Less than fifty feet down,
the hallway curved and two bodies lay sprawled in blood on the
white tile flooring. The walls were blood splattered like a
slaughter house. Bear slowed, hoping that he would not find Beth
among the bodies. He bent and turned a woman over; not Beth. Just a
young woman he remembered from earlier, black hair with a shock of
green. She had fallen forward onto her rifle. Bear snatched it up
quickly, ripped an extra clip from her belt and sprinted down the
hallway.