America the Dead (22 page)

“Thanks, man. I owe you one,” Duncan said, cleaning off his knife.

“No score, brother, you know that,” I said, clapping him on the shoulder.

Tommy spoke up. “More coming.” He pointed down the street. “We gotta get out of here.” His sleeve was torn, but I didn’t see any bites.

“You’re right. Let’s get the hell out of this town,” I said, running over to the RV. We would clean up later, right now, we needed to get away to relative safety.

We jumped inside and stowed our gear, stripping away any clothing that might have zombie virus on it. Tommy took off his shirt and I was relieved to see he didn’t have any bites. Duncan had a welt on his leg, but that was the worst of it. I was very careful removing my vest, since the little Z had gotten its mouth on it.

Nate moved the RV out of the town, heading out again on Route 40. I slumped in the passenger seat and looked over at him.

“Well, that was a bust. Did you manage to get any gas?” I asked, hoping for some good news.

Nate grimaced. “No and they jumped me so fast I left an empty can behind. So we’re going to need another one from somewhere.”

I sighed. I guess this confirmed my suspicions about the place, but something was nagging the back of my mind and wouldn’t let go. I mulled it over for a bit and when the answer hit me, it was like a ton of bricks.

I called Duncan and Tommy up to the front. They had changed clothing and were in regular duds.

“What’s up?” Tommy asked, dropping into a kitchen seat. Duncan plopped down beside him.

I looked at both of them. “Remember when we were walking, we had a bad feeling about the place?”

“Yeah, what about it?” Duncan asked.

“What was your feeling on the situation?”

Duncan looked up. “Let’s see. We were moving through what looked like an abandoned town, but when we got away from our safety, suddenly there were Z’s everywhere.”

“Right,” I said. “What did you think right when we saw all the zombies?” I knew what I thought, but I wanted to see if they shared my sentiments.

Tommy spoke up. “I remember thinking we had just walked into a trap.” His face suddenly fell. “Oh, man.” He said.

Duncan looked stricken as well. “If they laid a trap, then here’s a whole new ballgame.”

I nodded. “It goes in line with the doorknobs,” I said.

Nate piped in from the driver’s seat. “What about the doorknobs?” I explained and Nate responded in typical fashion with eloquent cursing. “Well, that just about finishes off a shitty day,” he said, angling the big rig around a car in the road.

Something in the tone of his voice tweaked my attention and I turned back to him. Tommy and Duncan were lost in their own thoughts regarding what we had just lived through and what we had learned.

“Something on your mind, hoss?” I said to Nate.

“Well, since you asked…” Nate stretched his arms one at a time before he went on. “While I was waiting for you numbskulls to figure out how to get out of the mess you got yourselves into…”

I narrowed my eyes but let it go.

“I was remembering all those communities we saw who were communicating through CB radios. So I decided to turn ours on and see what I could hear.”

I was surprised. “We have a CB?”

Nate pointed to a small compartment above his head. I noticed in a similar opening the cat we had rescued was lounging. Tommy had named it Zeus, since it liked to look down on all us mortals.

“Anyway,” Nate continued, “I turned the thing on and worked my way through the dials, listening in on a couple of conversations, but unable to respond, since their signal strength was low and they wouldn’t have heard me anyhow.”

I kept silent, wondering where Nate was going with this.

“But things got real interesting when I hit what used to be known as the Public Announcement channel,” Nate said.

“Do tell.” I prompted.

“Turns out there was a fella doing a broadcast, sending it out over the airwaves, talking about how everyone should accept the new order of things and he is gonna be in charge and we all had better toe the line if we didn’t want to suffer, yadda, yadda, yadda.”

“Really? Where could he have been broadcasting from?” I asked.

Nate looked over at me. “I thought the same thing, but then I remembered an old retired Army guy talking about how he spent a year of his life being bored to death in a listening post
inside
the US. Turns out the Army was taking a lot of paranoia seriously and set up listening and broadcasting posts all over the US, usually in out of the way places. They were set up to be nearly self-sufficient to minimize contact with locals. I wonder if this guy found one of those places, figured out how to turn it on and was sending a message out to all us low-life types.”

I remained silent, thinking how useful a tool like that could be for organizing communities to strike out against the zombies.

“Anyway, I was about to shut him off when something really weird happened,” Nate said.

“What could have been weirder than that?” I asked, stretching my legs up onto the expansive dashboard.

Nate looked over at me. “He mentioned your name.”

19

Brother, you could have knocked me over with a cool breeze at that moment. I stared at Nate until he started to get uncomfortable.

“What?” I finally asked, not believing what I had heard.

Nate replied, “I said things got really weird when he mentioned your name.”

Tommy spoke up from the kitchen table. “Who is this guy and how the hell did he hear of John?”

Nate shook his head. “You’re not going to believe it, but it was none other than our good buddy Major Ken Thorton.”

I went from disbelief to downright amazed. My mind worked overtime. How could Thorton have heard of me? I remembered Simon mentioning he had heard of me when he was a captive in California, but had Todd spoken to Thorton about me? Why would he in that situation? It didn’t make sense.

“What was Thorton saying about me.?” I had to know, this was incredible.

“Thorton was announcing to the airwaves that you were a traitor to the country and you were not to be trusted. In fact, he came out and said that anyone who helped you would be punished by death. He said your mission to stop him was illegal and you were trying to take over the country for yourself.” Nate nearly spat out that last.

This just got more and more incredible. “How did Thorton find out what we were doing? Who could have told him?” I asked out loud, more to myself than anyone else.

Duncan spoke up. “You don’t think he found our home and forced the information out of our families, do you?”

At first my blood went to ice thinking Thorton might have tortured my friends and family to get information from them. But as quickly as my rage surged, it dissipated just as fast. “No,” I said. “He’s the type to gloat if such were true. My guess is he found out about us from someone who had been with us, knew what we were doing, and got caught out away from safety. I wonder who the poor bastard was?”

“What do we do about it?” Tommy asked. “This guy seems to have the upper hand, information-wise.”

I shrugged, not really sure myself. “We see if he makes another broadcast. If he does, maybe we stand a chance of talking to him.”

“What do you think you’ll say?” Duncan asked

“No idea,” I said, meaning it.

We rode for a ways down the road, avoiding towns and contact with anyone, just looking for a quiet place to spend the night. It was interesting that we managed to keep moving east, always east.

Nate finally pulled up into a state park area, just outside of Dayton. He parked
it
close to a small pond, giving us access to water and providing a little security. If we got overwhelmed, we could always retreat through the water. When we came to a stop, Tommy climbed up on the roof with his rifle and binoculars and spent a good half an hour watching the surrounding area, looking for any ghouls that might be inclined to come over for a look. Nothing made your day look gloomy than a zombie clawing at your window first thing in the morning.

After he came back down, the four of us sat around the kitchen table, munching on a little dinner and discussing the events of the day. The zombies managing to turn doorknobs was a hot topic and in the end, we decided to see if it happened again. If not, it could just have been a freakish incident. The ambush had us more worried, because that was not something that could be dismissed as easily. That was group behavior focusing on a common goal and not a good thing. Again, we had a lot of questions and not enough answers. Would only large groups of zombies work together that way? Or would smaller groups hunt in such a fashion? We’d have to be more careful than we’d been before to find out.

When our conversation turned to Thorton, the mood got considerably darker. We believed nothing had happened to our loved ones yet, but there was that nagging doubt. How had Thorton heard about me? I had no clue. I was feeling pretty glum when Tommy reminded me of a simple fact.

“Charlie’s not a fool and he knows about Thorton and his men. If they came calling, they’d pay a heavy price before they got past him. I doubt anyone would want any more after that particular kind of hell,” he said.

I thought about it for a minute, then had to agree that Tommy was right. Charlie would be on alert and would shoot first. I freely admitted the man was a ghost in the woods, despite his size. Anyone trying to tackle him on his home turf would be dead before he knew what hit him. We’d lived long enough in the park to know every rock, canyon, tree and gully.

Reassured, I suggested we hit the sack. We had more long days ahead of us and we had to start thinking about our plan of attack when we reached the capital.

In the morning, after a restless night because my mind kept wandering back to my wife and son, I climbed up onto the roof to take a look around. The small lake at our back was as still as glass, with morning steam rising off the water’s surface. The woods were alive with sound, making it pretty clear there were no dead wandering around unwanted. I listened carefully to the sounds around me, turning an ear to the wind and closing my eyes, sorting out the sounds that drifted my way, identifying them, placing them as normal or not normal. Charlie had taught me that particular method of listening, using it as a means of hunting. Find the sounds that fit and the ones that don’t. After a while you’ll know whether or not you’re alone, or if you have company you need to take care of. It worked well in the dark..

Not finding anything out of the ordinary, I went back down to find Duncan had awakened and Nate as well. Eating a granola bar for breakfast, I spread out a map of Ohio and looked around for passage around Dayton. I saw a bunch of lines and circles on the map that weren’t there yesterday and I looked up to see Nate looking at me from across the table.

“Sorry about that. I had a notion last night and spent some time sorting it out,” he said.

“What kind of notion?” I asked, looking at a heavily circled area outside the town of Fayetteville.

“Thorton’s broadcast had to have come from somewhere nearby. Those government stations were set up all over, with overlapping ranges so nothing could get by on any frequency. But listening is different from broadcasting and if the government wanted to keep these things quiet, they had two options. Hide them far away from prying eyes or hide them in plain sight. In this area, they had to be away from sight. Given the range of most radios and equipment I’m familiar with, I’d say Thorton has to be somewhere within a hundred miles of us, give or take twenty.

“Before you get any notions,” Nate cautioned, “Thorton has you outmanned and outgunned. Chasing him down would get you killed”

I shook my head. Nate knew me pretty well. “Why did you circle Fayetteville?” I wanted to know.

“Best guess as to where he might be. I imagine he found one of these stations and was able to determine where others might be located. He’s probably jumping from one to the next, sending out his message, impacting as many people as he can.” Nate said.

I thought about that one. We had to find a way to shut him up before he managed to demoralize half the country.

“You don’t think there might be a way to link those stations, be able to send out a broadcast over a wider area?” I asked, thinking about a general message.

Nate pondered that for a bit. “Might be possible if you had someone at each station, but we don’t have enough men for that. Not sure about the power of those stations, either. I’d know more if we were able to take a look into one.”

“Fair enough,” I said, looking down at the map. “We need to think about a route around this town. It’s too big for a run through.”

“No problem. Have fun with that. I’m going to stretch my legs a bit and look around.” Nate pulled on his gear and stepped outside. Tommy watched him go, then took out his rifle and climbed onto the roof. I’ll bet Tommy didn’t even think about what he was doing. We were so used to backing each other up it was second nature.

Duncan strolled out of the back, yawning and stretching his arms. He popped his neck, then dropped down to do about forty push-ups. His morning routine was pretty close to mine, although I tried to do pull ups on the roof access ladder for variety.