Allegiance (15 page)

“That’s it?”

“No... not exactly.
They’ve already declared war. We’d be stupid to fight this on their terms. We
need to go and hit them where they sleep... get them on their heels and either
run them out or kill ‘em all. And if it’s put up for a vote... mine goes for
the latter.”

Looking around nervously
as if the bullets might start flying at any moment, Phil summoned up the
courage to ask Duncan what he thought they should do right this moment. As if
on cue, another hollow-sounding burst of gunfire rang out in the distance.

“They’re coming this
way,” Duncan said assuredly. “Quickly... we need to get this thing on the
road.”

***

After reeling off
fifteen feet of cable from the Humvee’s winch, Duncan positioned the Land
Cruiser pointing east—the direction of the compound—and hitched the spooled-out
cable to the towing receiver underneath the Toyota’s rear bumper.

“The rotters are getting
close,” stated Phillip.

Duncan stood on the
Toy’s rear bumper and looked west down 39. A trickle of walking corpses
approached, weaving in and out between the mass of stalls. Then he gazed east,
the way they had come. More of the creatures, only these were separated from
the road—kept at bay by a farmer’s fence.

Phillip prairie-dogged
up. Looked up and down the road. “Shouldn’t we be going?” he asked nervously.

“Yes, but we’re taking
the Hummer... if it’ll start.”

Phillip cast a weary eye
at the shambling dead. “What can I do?”

“Get in the Toyota, put
her in the lowest gear you can, and when you hear me holler, stomp on it.”

“OK. But why do we need
it? You said the gun was out of ammo.”

“I’ve got an idea,”
Duncan replied as he mounted the listing Humvee. He applied the brake and
turned the switch on the left of the dash towards the start position. Then held
his breath. With a loud
Braap
the open-topped truck’s diesel engine
turned over and thrummed to life. Out of the corner of his eye he noticed
movement, and then two things happened at once: gunfire rang out—seven or eight
tightly spaced shots. Then the two first turns that had apparently emerged from
between the vehicles and had been flanking from the left—out of his blind
spot—fell to a heap five feet from him. He shifted his gaze to the front where
he could see the upper half of Phil’s body protruding from the Toyota’s open
moon roof; he flashed a thumbs up and then cursed himself for the lapse in security.
More shots rang out before he could un-ass himself to assess the situation.
Phil grinned, flashed a thumbs up back at him and yelled, “All clear,” before
he and his AR-15 vanished back inside the Land Cruiser.

“Now!” Duncan bellowed.

The Toyota’s power plant
whined and strained, trying to pull the nearly three ton rig from the ditch.
Like an enormous Salad Shooter, the Hummer’s meaty tires chewed up grass and
gravel, sending chunks of sod blasting the barbed wire fence to the rear.
Slowly but surely, with the Land Cruiser tugging, the effort paid off as the
200 horsepower and 380 foot pounds of torque transferred from the Hummer’s 6.2
liter engine to the tires grappling with the road’s edge.

Duncan was nearly
launched from his seat when the front end came down with a resonant bang. As
quickly as his old bones would allow, he leaped out, shotgun in hand, and
following his own advice put his head on a swivel.
Clear.

He hastily rewound the
cable into the front-mounted winch, then retook his seat in the Hummer. Being
careful to avoid driving overtop the Guardsmen, he conducted a three-point turn
and sped off to the east.

With the white Toyota filling
the rearview mirror and thankfully blotting out the macabre scene, he thought
about the soldiers and lamented the fact they would never receive a proper
burial. That they would molder in the elements until the birds and wild animals
had picked their bones clean only made their fates harder for the old veteran
to accept.

Headed east on 33 with
only the thrumming of the big tires for company, one of the motor mouth’s lines
from Fargo popped into his head, bringing a smile to his face.
‘Would it
kill you to say something?’

Duncan looked in the
mirror and spied Phil with his hands at the proper ‘
ten and two
’ on the
wheel. “It almost did you in Phil, old boy,” he said aloud. Then he drove on in
silence. A totally glorious vacuum of space type of silence.

Outbreak - Day 15

Schriever AFB

Colorado Springs,
Colorado

Taryn took a sharp right
and bounded up the steps of a much nicer structure than Wilson could have
imagined she would call home. “We’re here,” she proclaimed proudly.

He waited patiently,
kicking an errant pebble with the toe of his boot as she worked the lock. He
could feel the subtle twinge as the sun cooked his pale dermis. Suddenly he was
self-conscious of his appearance. What really worried him was that maybe the
brim of his hat hadn’t provided adequate coverage for his nose, and when he
removed it he might be mistaken for Ronald McDonald.
Oh well
, he
thought. At least there was one positive thing about having a sunburned face.
It provided good camouflage for a blushing fool like him.

He admired the row of
squat pre-fab buildings. All were painted the same battleship gray as most
everything else on the sprawling base, and with their rectangular angles and
flat roofs he thought they belonged inside a prison’s walls. In a way, the
entire base had become quite penal to him these last few days.

“This thing is tricky,”
she said over her shoulder. Then, after fiddling with the lock for a few
seconds, the tumblers fell and she made her way into the shadowy interior.
“It’s dark. Watch your step.”

Wilson noticed a slight
drop in air temperature when he reached the top step. Then, as he crossed the
threshold into the spacious living quarters, a refreshing blast of conditioned
air enveloped his body, causing a wave of goose bumps to break out on his pale
arms. He whistled, a long drawn out note that commingled with the low thrum
emanating from within the room.

“
Surprise
,” Taryn
said, her arms spread wide like Vanna White giving away a new car. The air
inside her quarters was at least thirty degrees colder than the air outside,
and through her black tank Wilson couldn’t help but notice her nipples reacting
to the shock.

Surprise indeed
, he thought. Reluctantly, he tore his eyes away,
turned and crossed the room. “How in the heck did you score this?” he called
out as he spread his arms and wallowed in the cold air blasting him. Shoehorned
into a window, two feet above a row of desks lining the wall to the right of
the entry, the boxy modern unit looked out of place—like some kind of an
afterthought that had been added recently.

Taryn parted the
curtains flooding the room with natural light. “It was already there when they
assigned this trailer to me. It’s funny though, I keep waiting for them to
figure it out and send me packing. That’s one of the reasons why I haven’t gone
out much since I got here.”

“You’ve been here three
days—right?”

“I did the mandatory
twelve plus hours of quarantine first. Followed by two and a half days of
self-imposed solitary right here.” She shrugged. “Might as well call it three.”

“When you arrived here
did they give you the TSA pat down and the full naked search?”

Taryn nodded. “You?”

“Yep. I received the
full on drop the shorts once over. And the whole ‘
have you been bit
?’
yada, yada, yada,” Wilson said.

Taryn nodded. “I’ve
never felt more violated... and I’ve been through my fair share of airport
security.”

“I wouldn’t think that
would rattle you. You seem really confident to me. Like you could handle
yourself before all of this. You know, with guys and stuff. But against the
monsters, how’d you pull that off?”

“One day at a time.”

“Sounds like one of
those twelve step slogans.”

Taryn didn’t get the
reference but laughed anyways. Then she suddenly became aware of the climate’s
effect on her anatomy, and folded her arms across her chest and smiled
sheepishly at Wilson.

“I have a sister,
remember... I’ve seen ‘em before.”

“
Gross
—” she cried.

“No, no, no...” he
stammered. “I didn’t mean
outside
of her shirt. At least not since me
and her were kids.” The more he said the deeper the hole got. So he clammed up.
The last thing he wanted to do was get on her bad side.

Taryn glared from across
the room, arms still clamped in front.

He blushed, but
thankfully the red badge of embarrassment was masked by the second degree
sunburn that made his face feel like he’d been bobbing for apples in a tub of
Tabasco.

Trying to salvage any
modicum of respect she might have for him, he quickly changed the subject. “You
want to talk about...
things
?”

“I’m ready.” She crossed
the room and took a spot on the lower bunk, her thigh resting a few inches from
his. “Where to start?”

“From the beginning,”
Wilson said in a low voice.

She drew a deep breath
and began by describing how the two passenger jets—one from Salt Lake and one
from Vegas—had delivered the Omega virus to Grand Junction Regional. She went
on about witnessing her family, friends, and the entire world outside die over
the span of a few short days, in real time, via Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube,
brought front and center on the Retina display of her iPhone. She described her
glass-walled prison at the airport—her undead boss’s office—as a skybox seat to
the end of her old life. She recounted how her boss, Richard Lesst—also known,
not so affectionately, as Dickless—had constantly harassed her when he was
still alive. Then she gleefully recounted how the nonstop nitpicking and sexual
innuendo had finally died when he did, going so far as to describe in
painstaking detail how his rotting, lifeless corpse had stared at her through
his own office door for nine straight days.

“So what happened to
Dickless
?”
Wilson asked.

“I shot the
fucker
.”

Struck by the irony of
the situation, Wilson lost it. And wracked by uncontrollable laughter, he
collapsed onto the bunk which jounced under them after each of his full body
spasms.

“I’m sorry,” he said,
wiping the tears from his eyes. “You killed
Dickless
. The Cohen brothers
couldn’t have written a better ending.”

“That’s not all.”

“There’s more.”

“It’s not as funny.”

“Lay it on me.”

Taryn stretched out on
the bunk next to the redhead, gazed up at the loadbearing slats above her, and
finished telling
her
story.

“So after you survived
the fall from the airport terminal and shot Dickless dead, a silent helicopter
full of soldiers scooped you up.”

She reached up and
drummed her fingers on the bunk bed overhead. “That’s what happened.”

“Sounds like something
out of a Michael Bay movie. But I believe you.”

“I’m done spewing,
Wilson. I’m not kicking you out. In fact, as cliché as this may sound... I
need
you to stay and just hold me.”

He shifted his gaze,
looked into her eyes.

“Just hold—” she said,
and then quickly looked away. But before she did Wilson noticed a crack in her
brave facade. She seemed embarrassed by the simple request. Hell, he couldn’t
blame her. After a long moment she regained eye contact and the corners of her
mouth upturned into a half-smile. “At least for now,” she cautioned. “And I’m
going to warn you... I’ll be thinking of my dad at first.”

Wisely, Wilson said
nothing, and there was silence except for the low hum from the wall unit.

“Why couldn’t I have
died like everyone else?” Taryn asked. Then her body went into convulsions as
those final words crossed her lips. She rolled over, facing away from him, and
with sobs wracking her body drew her legs and arms into a fetal ball.

He wrapped his gangly
arms around her and drew her body closer. Abruptly his own survivor’s guilt
reared its head. His thoughts turned to his own father whom he hadn’t had much
contact with since he was a little boy; for all he knew he was probably dead
before the outbreak started. Then he shut that part of his past away and
thought about his mom and all of the things that he had been meaning to tell
her, but thanks to the dead would never have the opportunity to. And as he lay
there spooning with the young woman he wanted to get to know better, his throat
constricted and his own bottled emotions welled to the surface.

***

Shivering and
disoriented, Wilson woke up first. He dodged his eyes around the room. After a
few seconds he remembered where he was, but since his watch was on his left
wrist and his left arm was trapped under Taryn’s dead weight, he had no clue
what time it was. Not being used to sleeping during the day had left him
feeling groggy and hung over. Like someone had jammed cotton balls into his
cranium, his thinking had gone fuzzy. So he closed his eyes, lay still, and
tuned in to the rising and falling of Taryn’s chest, let himself be comforted
by the calm steady tempo to her breathing.
Still sleeping
, he thought.
Then the realization that he had left Sasha alone to fend for herself, God
knows how long ago, hit him like an electric current. While holding Taryn’s
head off the pillow with his right hand, he tried to worm his left arm out from
under her limp form.
Almost there
, he thought.
Don’t wake her up
.
Because if she’s anything like Sasha
, he thought to himself,
there’ll
be hell to pay if I do
. His arm was almost free, when suddenly he found
that he couldn’t move it any farther. Good job, Wilson. He supposed his watch
was snagged on her long braided hair.

He lowered her head to
the pillow. “Taryn,” he whispered.

She mumbled something
unintelligible, then rolled towards him, curling his arm up in the process.

As he recalled
Operation
Arm Removal
, a morbid smile crossed his face. Oh how the tables had turned,
because this time it was his arm that had become stuck in someone else’s hair.

He tried again, a little
bit louder this time. “Taryn, wake up.”

Nothing
. He couldn’t coax a twitch out of sleeping
beauty.

“
Taryn!
”

Two things happened
simultaneously. She came up swinging, landing two well-placed blows to his
chest, thus freeing his arm which hadn’t been entangled in her hair after all.
However, the thin filament with the thumb drive hanging from it had been. The
clear line snapped, resulting in the metal drive going airborne and finally
coming to rest underneath one of the desks.

“What the heck, Wilson!”

He tapped his Timex. “I
didn’t want to wake you but your necklace was hooked on my watchband.” He
rubbed his chest through his shirt. “Gonna bruise up good.”

“Well you scared the
shit out of me. Up until today I’ve been sleeping with one eye open.”

“Because of your boss?”
Wilson asked her.

“Mainly him and Karen.
She worked at the Subway at the far end of the concourse. They’ve been visiting
me in my nightmares. I’m
sooo
afraid to close my eyes.”

“Could have fooled me.
You were out,
o-u-t,
out. Almost like you had been drugged or
something.”

“I felt safe, Wilson...
for the first time in a long time... I felt secure in your arms. And I have
only you to thank for that.”

Wilson’s eyes went wide
and he nearly threw up in his mouth. Not because her words seemed trite or
insincere, but because he sensed that he was venturing into uncharted waters.
Then another one of his mom’s favorite sayings popped into his head, ‘
Be
careful what you wish for, Wilson
.’

“Let me get this for
you,” he said, changing the subject while at the same time trying to deflect
her praise. He crossed the room and retrieved the brushed aluminum thumb drive.

Taryn went silent as she
observed the redhead turn the device over in his hands, giving the thing more
scrutiny than a thumb drive in a world with few operable computers deserved.
And when he walked his gaze over to meet her eyes she noticed that the color
had drained from his face—sunburn and all.

“What’s the matter,
Wilson,” she asked, worry cracking her voice. Fearing that he was suffering
from a touch of heatstroke and was getting ready to pass out or something, she
bolted to his side. “Are you OK? You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”

“I think I just did.”

Taryn made a face, then
stared at him trying to decide if she needed to get him to a doctor—
if there
were any left
, she thought to herself. He ignored her. Just stood there
staring at the drive resting on his open palm. Then, after a few seconds of
quiet layered atop the subliminal rumble of the hardworking A/C unit, he spoke
up. “Where did you get this?”

She grabbed his elbow,
guided him to one of the U.S. Air Force issue metal chairs, and parked him
there. “I found it sticking out of that top bunk,” she finally replied.
“Wrapped up with some Oreos. Why do you ask? It’s probably filled with nothing
but country and western music anyway.”