District: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (19 page)

Causing everyone save for Daymon to turn in unison, the door
to the outside creaked and the curtain divider fluttered. At the head of the
aisle, having just returned from the vehicles, Oliver emerged through the curtains,
breathing hard and carrying a red nylon first-aid kit. He unzipped the kit and
from a plain-looking box the size of a cigarette pack he fished out a couple of
white fabric-wrapped capsules and passed them off to Lev.

There was a soft crunching sound followed instantly by a
heady eye-watering blast of ammonia when Lev rolled both capsules between his thumb
and forefinger. Turning his head away, he waved his closed fist directly
underneath Daymon’s nose.

One pass was all it took to snap the former BLM firefighter
back to the present. He leaned to his left to see around the pistol hanging off
of Lev’s right hip.

Sure enough, he hadn’t been seeing things. The reanimated
skeleton
was
affixed to a giant cross that was sure as hell not a
fixture original to the church. Still gawking at the surreal spectacle, he
accepted a hand up from Lev and thanked him for bringing him back from his
shock-induced stupor.

“You would have done the same for me,” Lev said, setting off
down the aisle toward Jamie, who was angling in to finish the job started by
the people who had skinned and flayed the poor man.

Head still spinning ever so slightly, Daymon stopped shy of
the raised carpeted platform and took a deep, steadying breath. “Shit,” he
said, exhaling. “First sight of this one took me right back to a place I
never
wanted to revisit.”

“I won’t even ask,” Jamie said. “Damn good to see you’re
back with us, though.” War tomahawk in hand, she turned and, going up on her
tippy toes, took one wide arcing swing at the Z’s gently bobbing skull. The
blow was a perfect “one-timer” as she’d heard Cade call a single bullet-saving
Z kill. There was a loud
crack
and the living skeleton’s upper body went
limp, all with little energy expended on Jamie’s part. Furthermore, the sound made
by steel cleaving bone meant a bullet was saved for a “rainy day,” the new
catch phrase being bandied about Eden. Rainy and snowy days were coming, which
made these last-minute runs outside the wire all the more necessary.

Daymon bobbed like a boxer to avoid a hurtling sliver of
hair-covered bone. Raising a brow at the close call, he looked over his shoulder
towards the foyer, where Wilson, Taryn, and a panting Max were filling up the
doorway. The thick burgundy-colored curtains used to seal off the sanctuary
during mass crowded them on both sides, blocking the view behind. For a half-beat
Daymon entertained the idea of asking where Oliver was, then thought better of
it.
Sink or swim. He’ll be the better for it.

Swinging his gaze forward, Daymon ignored the slumped
creature and instead focused on the cross. The upright was a four-by-four post
with a substantial amount of cured concrete still clinging to the end resting
on the dais. Dried clods of dirt had cleaved off the medicine-ball-sized plug
of cement and lay scattered about the floor behind the polished wood pulpit.
Some of the clods were flattened into irregular circles that bore distinct
prints from some kind of footwear with lug soles.

Seeing Oliver join the others now forming a rough
half-circle around him, Daymon cocked his head and stared at the writing on the
wall above the cross. Scrawled in a barely legible hand and likely with the
crucified man’s own blood was the question: WHO THE FUCK IS THE WICKED?

Bracketing the query on all four corners were sets of words
and numbers. All four of what could only be Bible verses were scribbled with
the same kindergarten-like sloppiness.

“What the eff?” Daymon said, crossing his arms.

“I have no idea what to make of the question,” Jamie said.
“But those are—”

Finishing for her, Oliver said, “Bible verses.”

Without consulting each other, Wilson and Taryn moved
quietly between the pews and returned with three Bibles apiece.

“Great minds …” Lev said. “Gimme one of those.”

Taryn handed Lev and Jamie their own King James.

After distributing his extras to Oliver and Daymon, Wilson
cracked his. Flicking his eyes to the numbers on the wall, he began leafing
through the parchment-like pages.

“Let’s see … Galatians 5:15, where are you?” He flipped
pages for a moment then cleared his throat and began to read. “But if ye bite
and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another.”

Taryn said, “Top right corner. Acts 15:29. That ye abstain
from meats obtained to idols, and from blood, and from things strangled, and
from fornication: from which if ye keep yourselves, ye shall do well. Fare ye
well.” She made a face and looked a question at Wilson, who simply shrugged and
continued thumbing through the Bible.

Daymon sat down hard on the front pew. “This one is heavy
duty. 1 Peter 5:8.” He drew a breath and went on. “Be sober, be vigilant;
because your adversary the Devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking
whom he may devour …” He went quiet, eyes parked on the butchered Z.

“I’ve got the last one,” Jamie said.

Imitating an English barrister, Daymon lowered his voice and
said, “Please cede the floor to the lady from Eden.”

“Salt Lake,” she corrected. “Revelation 22:13. I an Alpha
and
Omega
, the beginning and the
end
, the first and the
last
.
Now that’s come creepy, cryptic shit. Whoever did all of this”—with one arm,
she made a sweeping motion at the wall—“I want nothing to do with them.”

“Too late,” Wilson said, soberly. “We’re hip deep in it. All
of it.”

“Weather’s probably going to be mild again tomorrow,” Daymon
said, still staring at the whole surreal scene. “I say we go back to Eden and
regroup. Pick Duncan and Glenda’s brains. She might know more about Bear Lake.
At the least we can consult an atlas and see what we’re looking at.”

“Looking at?” Oliver sneered. “We’re
looking at
twenty
more miles of zombie-infested road between here and Bear Lake. All the while we
have to be on the lookout for psycho killers who just so happen to enjoy
setting up Omega-tainted traps. That’s all. What could go wrong?”

Rising off the pew, Daymon said, “That’s the attitude we’re
not
looking for. Keep thinking that way, Oliver, and you’re going to end up like
him
.”
Then, as if he hadn’t just been kneeling there a few minutes ago in a near
catatonic state, he strode down the aisle, seemingly without a care in the
world.

Eden Compound

“Brook,” bellowed Heidi, “a man from Bear River wants to
talk to you.”

Two turns away, behind the closed door of the Graysons’
quarters, Raven slid off the lower bunk and tossed her mom a tee shirt several
sizes too big for the petite woman.

“Does your back feel any better, Mom?”

After rising up from her stomach with no attempt to cover
herself, Brook spun around on the bunk and planted her feet on the wood floor.
“I hate to say it, honey, but the pain is worse now than ever. Thank you,
though. I appreciate all the massages you, Sasha, and Glenda are lavishing on
me. You especially are getting way better at it. I ought to call you fingers of
steel or something like it.”

Pouting a little, Raven said, “No thanks … that sounds like
a wrestler’s name.”

“Like Nacho Libre,” Brook said, suppressing a smile and
wondering fleetingly what had become of Jack Black after the shit hit the fan
in Los Angeles.

With a blank look on her face, Raven ignored the reference
to Mexican food and said, “What
do
you think will make your back feel
better?”

“Just time, I suppose, sweetie. Just time.” Brook doubled
over as a coughing fit gripped her.

Raven rose from the bed, face a mask of concern.

Wiping a rope of spittle from her lip, Brook faked a half-smile
and straightened out the shirt. Forgoing her only bra, which three months into
the apocalypse was threadbare and mostly just wire and straps, she shrugged on
the shirt and rose gingerly. Then, hiding the true amount of pain she was
experiencing, a seven or eight on the scale of one to ten she used to query her
patients with, she grabbed her gun belt and headed off toward the security pod.

“Brook!” Heidi called again, her voice echoing off the low
metal ceilings.

“I’m coming. I’m coming,” Brook said. “Keep your—.” She bit
her tongue. Figuratively, of course. No reason to say the wrong thing and risk
setting Heidi off again. The woman
was
even-keeling it at the moment. She’d
found her baseline with the meds and most of the credit went to Cade for having
scavenged them. No longer was the twenty-something sequestering herself belowground.
Lately she had been venturing topside without any sweet-talking from Daymon. She’d
even come so far from the dark place she’d been languishing in to have managed two
consecutive nights topside with him in the purloined RV. Or “Love Shack” as
she’d heard Duncan refer to it as.

Reaffixing the fake smile, Brook rounded the corner and
calmly asked the young blonde who from Bear River needed her on the phone this
instant.

“Alexander,” Heidi said, balancing the sat-phone on her palm.

Baseline my ass,
Brook thought as she received the
slim black Thuraya.
You spoke too soon, Mrs. Grayson.

“This is Brook,” she said.

After offering up a few pleasantries, which Brook
reciprocated, Dregan got down to brass tacks. “Have you or your people been by
Ray and Helen’s place? You know, the stubborn elderly couple.”

“No, we haven’t.” Recalling the aid she and the kids had
received from the couple, she grew concerned. “You think they’re in danger?”

“They’ve always answered their radio,” Dregan said. “I
didn’t want to have to, but I’ll stir up some volunteers and go have a look.”

Listening intently, Heidi sat back in her chair and fixed
her gaze on Brook.

Alarm creeping into her voice, Brook asked, “Is the horde
back in the area? We’ve got people outside the wire. North, actually.”

“No, no, no. We haven’t seen them since before the snow fell,”
Dregan said, then started coughing, the fit lasting a few seconds. “I just
didn’t want to waste fuel to do what a radio could. Though growing scarce,
batteries are still easier to come by than fuel.”

Not in our neck of the woods
, Brook thought. “I’ll
call Daymon and have them go to the Thagon farm and see what’s up.”

More coughing on Dregan’s end.

Heidi furrowed her brows. “Is he OK?” she mouthed.

Brook grimaced as a lightning bolt of pain shot out from the
scarring where the Z had bitten her. “Do
you
need anything, Dregan?”

“No, Brook, my bones have already been thrown and come up snake
eyes. It’s just a matter of time before the cancer takes me. It’s Gregory I’m
concerned about. He’s not doing so well.”

“The sutures aren’t holding?”

“They’re fine. He’s up and about,” Dregan said. “But the
infection, it’s back. In his lungs, though.”

“Sounds like the flu. Or walking pneumonia. He
was
out in the elements for some time.”

“There’s a bug going around Bear River,” Dregan conceded.
“So you know, we’ve doubled the dose of antibiotics Glenda provided. We’ll have
to wait and see if it helps.”

“No,” she blurted. “The antibiotics are to knock down
whatever bugs the rotter may have introduced into your son’s system when it
took a bite out of him. They do not work on viral infections. Period.”

Silence on Dregan’s end.

After doing the math in her head, Brook said, “This means
you now have less than a week’s worth left.”

“You are correct, Brook.” Dregan said. “So begs the question
… will I outlast the remaining pills?”

“Don’t go there,” Brook said. “I’ll see what we have here
that we can part with. If we have any narcotics … for your pain, I’ll see that
you get those as well.”

Dregan thanked Brook and reassured her that Eden would be
the first to know when the rotters made their return visit.

Brook thumbed off the satellite phone and swapped it for the
long range CB. Raising the group outside the wire, she relayed the information
regarding the Thagons’ radio silence as well as Dregan’s confirmation that there’d
been no recent sightings of the migrating horde.

Immediately after launching off the rocky, snow-crusted soil
adjacent to the blood-spattered kill zone, Ari had spun the Ghost Hawk around
in a tight one-eighty and resumed their near laser-straight flight path towards
Colorado Springs. Before the gear had snugged into place in the belly of the
bird, a thick blanket of silence had descended upon the once jovial atmosphere
inside Jedi One-One.

Now, thirty minutes removed from the close call with the
Chinese FN-6 surface to air missile, Cade could see the red rock spires of
Garden of the Gods on the distant horizon. Illuminated by the late afternoon
sun, the National Park bordering the southwest edge of Colorado Springs was one
of the prettiest places he had ever seen, though admittedly, each time he’d
made its acquaintance, it had been from altitude and through the thick Plexiglas
window of one type of aircraft or another.

Beyond the reddish ochre expanse, downtown Colorado Springs
was bookended to the south by 14,113-foot-tall Pikes Peak. And just as downtown
Los Angeles had appeared clear as day over the horizon weeks earlier, the
pollutant-free air here also let him make out the city’s sparsely appointed skyline
from twenty miles out.

By Los Angeles, or even Denver standards, the buildings in
Springs were stunted. Roughly a dozen high-rises between twelve and twenty-two
stories rose up from the city center. Dozens more smaller buildings, nearly all
of them less than ten stories, were scattered around the periphery of the taller
standouts.

In just a handful of minutes the helo had drawn to within
two miles of the darkened city. By this time Lopez was sitting up straight and
at times grimacing and groaning softly. It was also when Cade first spotted the
vast wall undulating across the landscape’s natural contours. Constructed from
what appeared to be hundreds of cement freeway noise barriers, the type of
which bracketed nearly every metropolitan stretch of road nationwide, the impressive
feat of engineering lent the impression that the modern structures the wall
encircled had been dropped there through some manipulation of time and space.

The metal and glass stronghold throwing off the westering
sun appeared to be in the clutches of a giant sleeping snake, its rigid cement spine
made up of hundreds of individual panels that ran in straight lines on the west
and east perimeters and arced gracefully where they met on the north and south
ends. Modern meets medieval; the juxtaposition was stunning.

Seeing Cade craning his head to make the most of the limited
viewing angle afforded by the small porthole-style window, Cross said, “You’re
looking at miles and miles of unbroken twenty-foot-tall cement wall. Wherever
possible, the engineers fortified the interior with dirt berms. In the places
where it runs over cement or blacktop they resorted to driving ten-foot steel
rods into the ground to shore it up. They finished their work at Schriever
weeks ago. I’ve no idea how many panels that took them to complete. Stripped
most of it from the interstates north of Castle Rock and southwest of Denver
and Aurora. Smaller panels sourced from Yoder and south near Pueblo were used
to shore up Schriever and Cheyenne’s fences.”

The helicopter banked softly to port and Cade felt the
airspeed increase. A half-beat later, Ari said, “The engineers have drawn up
plans to stretch the south perimeter to Carson in the next week or so.
Eventually they will have the north perimeter moved all the way up to the Air
Force Academy.”

“Wow,” Cade said, eyes glued to the city below. “Any idea
why the engineers didn’t just use the 25 and 21 as natural borders on the east
and west?”

“The overpasses and side streets were a pain in the ass to
deal with. President Clay figured that as long as we were taking back the city,
we might as well take it all the way to Garden of the Gods and maybe even
Schriever sometime next year.”

“
We
… damn easy call for her to make from deep inside
Cheyenne Mountain,” Cade said, incredulous. “What Gaines, his 10th group and
the 4th ID all started, the sacrifices that they made going door to door clearing
the living dead, was no small feat.”

“She’s a good leader,” Cross said.

“I get that,” Cade said. “That’s a lot of work in a short
amount of time. I just hope she gives them a break … that’s all. Maybe do the
extension once the temperature drops and stays low for a stretch.”

“If we waited for Mother Nature to green-light the
expansion,” Ari added. “We may never get it finished.”

Skipper looked away from the window. He said, “Captain Grayson,
you know about the Kansas mega horde?”

“I saw footage of it,” Cade conceded. “I can appreciate the
desire to create as much inside-the-wire real estate as possible.” Always the
realist, he shook his head and added, “Whether it’s going to stand up to the
sheer size of that horde of migrating corpses—Schriever included—only time will
tell.”

Atop some of the downtown buildings Cade could make out
forms milling about. Collars were turned up against the coming chill, and the
unmistakable silhouettes of the long guns they carried told him they were
providing overwatch should the Zs somehow breach the walls or, God forbid, an
outbreak occur inside the wire. From the way they carried themselves, moving
about beside the low parapets instead of staying in place, conserving their
energy and letting their eyes and high-powered optics do the leg work, he was
near certain civilians were still shouldering a good deal of the security load.
It struck him as a kind of neighborhood watch on steroids.
Better than
nothing
, he mused. Lord knew the soldiers were stretched thin executing President
Clay’s bold new plan of which he was sure to learn more about within the hour.
Maybe more than he wanted to know. Because if she was sending him and the team
to the place he was thinking, it was more than likely they’d be right in the
middle of the biggest pincer movement ever attempted by
any
standing
army. Between the proverbial rock and a hard place, with the “rock” being the
reconstituted combined forces of the United States and the “hard place” a mega
horde consisting of twice the number of Zs that had marched out of Denver.

Finally, as the Ghost Hawk pulled out of orbit and set off
east again, towards Schriever less than twenty miles distant, Cross addressed
the elephant in the room. Looking directly at Cade, he said, “If Lopez is
suffering from what I think he is—”

“I’m not dead yet,” Lopez interrupted. “So don’t talk about
me in my presence as if I am.”

Cade smiled.

“Forgive me,” Cross said, addressing Lopez directly. “If for
some reason you’re not mission capable, who’s running this op?”

Grimacing, Lopez gestured toward Cade.

Cade leaned back and rested his helmet on the bulkhead. He
studied the panels and conduits snaking overhead.

“OK,” Cross said, agreeably, staring at Cade now. “If Wyatt
is taking point … which I’m totally onboard with”—he shifted his gaze to
Lopez—“who’s going to take
your
place?”

“Axelrod,” Lopez answered.

“Sure would make the long flight more enjoyable,” Ari
interjected over the comms. “Plus … he has a good outlook on life.”

“Axe is a pain in the ass,” Skipper said. “And I have a hard
time understanding him.”

“Cause you’re half hillbilly,” said Haynes ahead of a loud cackle.

Intrigued, Cade took his eyes off the cabin ceiling and
slowly settled his gaze on Lopez, who was again doubled over and wheezing
softly. “So we have Griffin, who’s as solid as they come,” he said. “Besides
Doctor Silence here needing a Queen’s English Rosetta Stone to understand
Axelrod, what’s wrong with the guy?”

Skipper didn’t humor Cade with a response. He kept staring
out the port side, his eyes flitting over the ground below as the helo banked
to port and began to slow.

Lopez shook his head while holding up one vertical finger.

Taking the gesture as a sign Lopez needed a second to
compose himself, Cade posed the same question to Cross, minus the Rosetta Stone
quip.

Cross said, “There’s nothing wrong with Axe. And I
understand him just fine. Just the usual lift for elevator. Lorry for truck.
Bonnet for hood—”

Cade said, “I get the picture. The man’s capabilities?”

“I’ve run a handful of ops with him over the last couple of
weeks. Mostly setting out seismic sensors and the like,” Cross said. “Oh …
there was a snatch and grab, too.”

Cade looked a question at the blond operator.

“A couple of guys who were loyal to Robert Christian,” he
answered. “Someone at Schriever scanning the shortwave bands picked them up.
After figuring out they weren’t who they said they were, we went in and rolled
them up. Dumbasses thought they could hide in Vail … right under our noses. We
discovered some documents suggesting more of Christian and Bishop’s gang
survived the fall of Jackson.”

If Cade was concerned about the revelation, he didn’t let
on. Remaining stone-faced, he asked, “What about Axe?”

 “He’s not one of us,” Cross divulged. “He’s SAS. Axelrod was
on a training swap at Bragg when Omega broke.”

“And that’s a problem, why?” Cade said.

“I’ll vouch for him,” Lopez said.

“That’s good enough for me, then,” Cade replied. “But you
better not be tapping out yet, Lopez. Don’t you want to see what the docs have
to say?”

Lopez shook his head. Sweat beads rolled off his brow, down
his nose and cheeks. After swaying there for a tick they fell to his uniform
blouse and cascaded from the semi-waterproof camouflage fabric. “I’ve taken a
bullet and kept on going,” he said. “This is different. I feel like I’ve got an
alien spawn clawing its way outta me.”

Not liking what he was hearing, Cade turned his head and
stared at the large hangars and dozens of aircraft parked along the flight line
southwest of Schriever proper.