World of Ashes (9 page)

             
“What about the nuclear plants?” Rowe asked.

“The closest one is halfway to Kansas City
.” Reynolds informed his colleague. “We may be drawing some power from it if it’s even still open. I’d say most of our power is locally made. I doubt, however, any of it is coming from Lake of the Ozarks. I heard the dam there had been shut down as well, maybe even burst. I don’t know. Lots of rumors.”

“We
get most of our power from local plants, what surplus they produce goes into the national grid, but that isn't a whole lot. We're still being powered by Labodie. If there wasn't so much fucking ash in the sky we could probably still see the exhaust stacks." Ethan said. "We need to take a scouting party, I guess.”

             
Keith nodded. "We'll take a Humvee. We need a gunner though. The fewer people the better."

             
"I'll go." A hand raised from behind the group of deputies who’d gathered for the meeting. It was the kid who'd been on the gun when the Bloods had shown up. Keith nodded, the kid wasn't trigger happy, but he also wasn't afraid to put rounds down range. Apparently his older brother had been in Afghanistan and at the Fall of Georgetown, the nickname for the decimation of Washington. When he came home, before being drafted like Ethan never to return, he’d trained the next oldest sibling how to use every piece of equipment he thought would save his family’s life if he were gone.

             
"What's your name?" Ethan asked after the meeting.

"Allen." The kid said quietly as Keith showed
him how to load and clear jams from the machine gun in the turret. They were checking the truck for the next day’s mission.

             
"Well, Allen, if we run into bandits I expect nothing short of gratuitous violence from you. Understand? Mind if I ask where your older brother is?” 

             
"He’s dead, Sir. Another soldier shot him on accident. The government sent my parents an email… couldn’t even be bothered to send a letter or someone in person. Happened about ten months ago at the Battle of Memphis.”

             
“I’m sorry, man. I didn’t mean to say… There’s a lot of that going around these days. I got a similar email, only it was declaring
me
dead. We’ll try to bring you home alive for your little brother.” Ethan promised, and pointed to the left breast pocket of Allen's cammo uniform. "Wear your badge up there. It will be easier for people to see. We’ll see you in the morning, okay? Zero Five Thirty here at the station.”

             
“Sure.” Allen said. He was still unsure and afraid of the town’s people after the Bloods incident. No one knew he was the gunner, but that wouldn’t stay a secret for long. Besides, he had to live with what he’d done, and that might be the hardest part.

             
Because of roaming zombies, Ethan and Keith slept in the house’s converted loft bedroom. Keith was asleep with a book in his hand on the couch, Ethan laying wide eyed in his bed watching the ceiling fan turn round and round. On the string for the lights was an action figure of Spiderman, and on string for the fan a Jack in the Box antennae ball. For hours he’d watched the ball’s nose bounce off Spiderman as the unbalanced fan continued like the world hadn’t stopped any more than it had. How many nights had it been since Ethan had actually been able to sleep? More accurately, when was the last time he remembered sleeping? It had been years. Since before Iraq for sure. Like every night that he hadn’t had enough liquor to knock him out, Ethan stayed up well into the early morning thinking. Mostly it was his self loathing, of seeing everything he’d once held dear fall through his fingers like grains of sand, and that was before the zombies…

             
The worst of the nightmares was one that had already happened once, the fear of it happening a second time was overwhelming. When Ethan had left Ft. Stewart, Georgia for the last time back in ’09, that was supposed to be the last time he ever had to see, hear, or smell a military base. The plastic aroma of C.I.F., the bleach of the chow halls or the unmistakable chemical stench of a brand of gun oil, CLP. (Note to the reader, CLP is an excellent product, just don’t get it in your eye. It’ll turn pink.) In this dream Ethan had to come back. The fog of details was there, as it was in any dream, but the point was he went from spiritual freedom to a tortured soul in the depths of hell reserved especially for non-hackers and cowards. Ethan would, as always, wake up in a puddle of his own sweat.

Keith started the truck
the next morning, letting the engine run a little to warm the crew compartment. "Have you ever seen a war-torn landscape before?" Allen shook his head no, still groggy from lack of sleep. Keith and Ethan hadn’t slept at all. "It's a sight that will never go away, kid. I'd say you're better off staying at home, but now your home
is
the war zone, so you're just going to have to accept the nightmares and cowboy the fuck up.”

“Cowboys aren’t real.” Allen caught Keith off guard. “They’re like Santa Claus. Only Marlboro made them up, not Coca Cola.”
Keith just stared at Allen blankly.

Ethan climbed back
out of the truck and put headphones and a mike on Allen, plus a new Kevlar helmet. He shoved him down to where only his head and shoulders protruded. "Nametape defilade." He smiled as the radio let him speak loud and clear. “This way snipers and low wires don’t cut you in half.”

             
“That would be a hell of a way to die.” Allen lit a cigarette, offering Ethan one. “What with my body flopping down inside and spraying blood everywhere. It would be like a Quinton Tarantino movie.”

             
“I’m beginning to think there is something genuinely wrong with you and your little brother.”

             
“It’s an extreme lack of parental guidance, I assure you.” Allen’s voice chirped over the radio.

             
The ride out past the Japan Checkpoint was a harrowing experience. They were actually forced to shoot at a Nissan pickup that looked, honest to God, like something from the movie
Blackhawk Down
(a military how-to guide in what
not
to do) with a machine gun poorly welded into the bed. Allen tore the truck in half and had to change belts. Someone should talk to him about how to squeeze a trigger for three to five rounds, not twenty. Everyone inside the truck was extremely dead and in more pieces than they could count as the Humvee crept cautiously by. There was no clear motive for the attack, except that the hillbillies in the truck must not have known what a Humvee was. Ethan suspected that if the truck weren’t starting on fire he’d find more than just empty beer cans in the floorboard.

Through open countryside, beautiful in the late summer, they saw hundreds of
undead people just wandering around in the fields. None of them made much effort to go after the truck, and most looked half rotted already, though looks were deceiving when it came to the infected. The smell of death and fire hadn’t let up, and flies could be seen in droves that blotted out the sun like birds. Shit eating birds. The sun was warming them fast and Ethan switched on the air conditioner, one of the few things that made the combat vehicle bearable on long trips. The seats were uncomfortable “floatation devices” (as if this truck wouldn’t sink like a stone,) and his ass was already numb. Maybe, Ethan mused, he could take the seat out and weld something more comfortable in place, like a medieval torture device, or a lit oven. Anything was better than the standard green cushion.

             
A shot pinged off the truck's armor and Allen put a burst into the wood line. The shots stopped and they drove on. There were a dozen abandoned Army checkpoints, some of the former defenders were still meandering about with those pail dead eyes, black goo dripped from every orifice, staining their uniforms as the clothing began rotting off of them faster than their skin. Around a corner, while Allen's turret was turned the other way, Keith swung wide and plowed over a little girl in a tattered flower sundress, a bouquet of dead flowers still clutched in her tiny hands. Ethan looked in the mirror to make sure she didn't get back up again. Though a mercy killing it might have been, it wasn’t any less haunting. Someone’s day at church had ended in a horror worse than any of the biblical plagues.

The winding route they
took made a forty five minute drive last three excruciating hours. The Labodie bottoms came into view slowly, overgrown in thickets of tall grass. (Could there be Velociraptors? No one in Ethan’s generation went in the tall grass without backup. Thank you
Jurassic Park II.
) Allen made sure not to shoot any infected, no matter how close they were, so as not to draw attention. Besides, even ten thousand rounds of 7.62mm wasn’t going to solve the undead problem. The Middle East was a testament to that now, an irradiated wasteland, victim to the crossfire between India and Pakistan, and Israel and Iran. The undead were destroying the world, and all the living could do was settle old scores and help the zombies race to the finish line. There was some argument to made that mankind had this coming. 

Figuring they were lost, Keith was preparing to turn around and
onto a second dirt road when an explosion on the road in front of them made him slam the breaks. A zombie he’d decided to avoid rather than run over had stepped on a land mine and was blown several feet in the air. It landed with a thud, and with no more ceremony than an exhale of air it didn't really need, dragged its legless torso off into the reeds that were growing in the bottom lands like rice patties in Vietnam.

             
"
They mined it
?" Keith's jaw dropped when he spoke into the microphone. "*static*
-uck me. We gotta get off this road.”

             
"
Cut the engine.
" Ethan took a swig of water. "
I have to piss. We’re still out of view
,
we can find another road in a minute
.”

             
Keith turned the noisy truck off. They were on a small hill behind some trees, and reasonably well hidden. Aside from the zombie who'd been blown up, there were no other undead around. The silence was deafening, not even the insects made noise. Not the squirrels or birds either. Ethan took his rifle and scanned the area, his thumb ready to flip from semi auto to three round burst. The three round burst for the living, not the undead. The unshakable feeling that he was being watched made his hair stand on end. Could someone know they were there? Absolutely.

             
"Allen, stay with the truck. Make sure your turret never stops moving for more than a couple of seconds, I got my throat 'cut' with a red marker during a training mission because I wasn't watching behind me. And unless you see something, don't sit above nametape defilade except to fire either."

             
"My ass is asleep." Allen complained, unbuttoning his pants to piss in a bottle.

             
"We'll look into a better gunner's seat." Keith promised as he set his backpack on the hood. "Let’s go to the tree line and see what we can see." He pulled a machete out of a sheath. Together the two men walked to the edge of the dust covered forest, grateful that in the Missouri summer they weren’t under the Army’s bullshit sleeves down regulation, the humidity trapped by the ash was becoming a bit much. While the soft mechanical whir of the rotating turret faded into the background, they used their gun sights to read a white sign that had a skull and crossbones stenciled onto it just down the path. Several languages were stenciled in bold black lettering.

WARNING
LAND MINES

MINAS TERRESTRES DE ADVERTENCIA

WARNUNG LANDMINEN

ВНИМАНИЕ
МИН

警告地雷

مرحاض

Ethan could still read a little Arabic, and tried his best to translate, just for his own amusement. The Arabic scribbles read "Toilet” rather than a warning about mines. Some genius’s idea of a joke. It was all Ethan could do not to laugh hysterically.

             
Keith didn’t get why Ethan was laughing, but had to stifle his own laughter when his friend translated for him. Keith put the binoculars to his eyes and leaned against a tree for stabilization. Ethan provided security and pulled out a camera to film the power plant. It had zoom, and he utilized it. He filmed every landmine on the road before the tall grass obscured them. Most mines hadn’t been hidden at all because the undead were too dumb to avoid them. The mines probably went all the way up to the main parking lot. The entire place had been fortified, and a Sally Port* for trains that stretched half a mile where each car could be inspected by armed Marines was a drastic change to the power plant Ethan had toured with a school group as a child. Construction equipment and workers were finishing the final few concrete sections that would effectively turn the plant into a castle. Rows of Hesco Barriers ringed the modern fortress like moats, a complex maze no infected could ever hope to navigate before being shot. Somewhere there would be snipers and sentries, a miracle they’d not already been spotted.

             
"This is insane." Keith said softly. Another mine blew up on the other side of the property. None of the guards bothered to investigate with more than a casual glance. "We could get real close if we wanted."