Dead Air (Book One of The Dead Series) (39 page)

Heather had made it.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Clearwater, Florida:

By flashlight, Steve and Tick-Tock dismantled the window washer’s platform that had been stored on the roof of the Garnett Bank Building. Brain had been the one to come up with the idea on how to get Heather across the no-man’s land of the street. Steve thought it was nuts. Tick-Tock, happy that his boss had come out of his shock, pointed out that the world was nuts, so they should just go with it.

After scavenging all the rope from the rig, Steve tied a large granite paperweight to one end while Tick-Tock bound the loose ends of the rope together to form one continuous line. While they were doing this, Marcia and Susan watched with excitement. They had taken the loss of Donna hard, but with the arrival of someone bringing news to their now isolated co
rner of the world, they found themselves distracted by the activity of rescuing Heather and their grief was pushed aside for a short time.

Steve had tried to call out to Heather when he first reached the roof
but distance, and a strong sea breeze that had come up, made communication impossible. She would have to trust that he was working on bringing her over.

Moving toward the parapet wall, Steve shined a flashlight down to where Heather waited and then
pointed it at himself so she could see him clearly. Motioning her to move back and take cover, it took a few minutes of hand signals before she understood; she then crouched behind an air conditioning unit on the far side of the roof.

Taking two steps back, Steve twirled the rope around in a circle until the weight at the end made a whirring noise as it cut through the air.
He let it go at the upswing of the arc and the paperweight tied to the end of the rope sailed out over the parapet.

Steve m
oved quickly to the edge of the roof but was disappointed to see that he had misjudged his throw. The paperweight had landed on the hood of the MRAP parked in the middle of the street and bounced off to land on the pavement.

Worried that the line might get tangled in the legs of one of the dead wandering around below,
he quickly retrieved the rope. He didn't want to have to drag a zombie up fifteen stories and then kill it before he could try again. An idea struck him as he wound in the line, so he stored it away for discussion later with Tick-Tock.

His second throw was right on target, landing on the roof of the building across the street. Heather came out and grabbed the end of the rope, tying it off on a metal plumbing vent. When he saw
that she was done, Steve turned to Marcia and said, "Go downstairs and tell Jonny to go ahead." He then motioned for Heather to wait, so she stood by patiently as he started to lower his end of the rope down the side of the building.

Moments later, there was a repeated hollow thumping sound followed by a crash.

Steve saw Heather jump back so he motioned to her that it was all right. Looking over the side of the building, he could see directly below him to where Jonny G had smashed out a window on the fourth floor with a chair that now lay in the street below. Seeing he had let out enough slack so that the line hung down to the fourth floor, Steve started gently swinging the rope back and forth. He saw a hand reach out, grab it and pull it in. Letting out more slack but keeping the line taut, he was soon rewarded by a series of tugs from below.

Tying off his end quickly
, Steve raced downstairs followed by Tick-Tock and Susan.

With Steve in the lead, they entered the office where Jonny and Marcia waited.
As he looked through the smashed out window, he saw Heather was already halfway across the street. With her legs slung over the line, she was rapidly pulling herself across the chasm with her arms. Steve breathed a sigh of relief. In seconds she would be safe. When she reached the building though, a problem arose. Steve noticed that, although Jonny had tied the rope up high around the top of the office door at the far side of the room, Heather’s weight still pulled the line down onto the window sill. Now that she had reached the building, she was hanging below the opening with nothing to use to lever herself up.

Steve, Tick-Tock
and Jonny G got under the rope and stood, lifting it so she could pull herself along and into the building.

Looking down to make sure she was safe, Heather unwrapped her legs and let them drop to the floor while still hanging onto the rope. She loosened one hand and let it down to allow her CAR-15
to fall to the floor before quickly re-gripping the rope.

Steve could see
she was unsteady on her feet, so he wrapped his arms around her to support her weight and eased her into a sitting position with her back against a near wall. Finding themselves nose to nose as Steve gently lowered her to the floor, neither could say a word. They just looked at each other as goofy smiles spread across their faces.

Everyone was talking at once and congratulating each other on their successful rescue
, so it took some time for the noise to die down enough for Steve to say to Heather, "You got a weird way of requesting a song. You couldn't call it in?"

With a smile so big it was hard to talk
, she replied, "Don't you know? The phone's are out."

Matching her grin
, Steve asked, "So what do you wanna hear?''

Expecting her to say
‘Freebird’, he was surprised when she reached out, pulled him to her in a hug and said, "How about Home Sweet Home?" Then she kissed him.

Heather was so weak that
Steve had to carry her to the elevator and down the hall to the radio station. She explained that she hadn't eaten much in the past two days but didn't go into detail. Steve didn’t press, instead he went about taking care of her in a contented silence. He cooked for her and then helped her to the bathroom where she could clean up. Heather's uniform was torn and filthy so Marcia took down her sizes. With Jonny accompanying her, she went to the clothing store in the Galleria to outfit her in the latest fashion.

When Heather was clean and dressed in a khaki shirt and pants, Steve escorted her back into his office and onto the couch where he helped her stretch out and covered her with a blanket.

"I don't know if I can sleep," she said when he was finished tucking the blanket around her feet. "I may never sleep again."

"Try," he replied. "I'll be right here
, so don’t worry, you're safe."

She closed her eyes and seconds later opened then.

"You promise you won't leave?" She asked.

"Promise,"
he replied.

Heather closed her eyes again
, and in seconds was asleep. During the night and into the next morning, she would awake with a start, sitting up and looking around wildly until she spotted him. But true to his word, Steve never left the room. Reassured by his presence, she would then lay back down and go to sleep.

Steve was sitting at his desk trying to find some news on the Internet about what was going on and only
finding huge gaps. When he looked over to check on Heather, he found her watching him from the couch.

"You're awake,"
he stated the obvious.

"What time is it?" She asked.

"Little after ten," he replied. "Sleep some more if you want. I'm here."

"No, I have to get up
," she said, and continued to lie where she was.

Steve smiled and asked, "Would coffee help?"

"It wouldn't hurt."

Heather was still exhausted
, so Steve didn't press her for information. Instead, he went and got her coffee.

When he returned, t
hey sat sideways on the couch facing each other, talking in fits and starts about inconsequential things like Steve's office and the radio station.  Eventually, he got her talk about how she ended up on the roof across the street from him, in the middle of a city full of the walking dead.

"Remember the last time I talked to you?" She asked.

"Early Monday morning," he replied. "Three days ago."

Looking slightly disoriented
, she asked, "What day is it?"

''Thursday.''

She fell silent as she took this in then said, "After I talked to you Monday, I went to the pier to meet up with the remaining deputies. The National Guard was pulling back to the relief centers to protect them because they ended up being magnets for the dead. With all those people grouped together, all they had to do was hang out a sign saying it was an all you can eat buffet."

Steve nodded, "We lost contact with the last evacuation center yesterday morning
. It was over in Safety Harbor. We lost phone service pretty fast and cell phones were hit and miss, so we went out to the parking ramp and took a CB radio out of a truck. Brain rigged it up and that’s how we kept in contact with the safe zones until they went off the air."

"By the way, Brain is the one who figured out how to get you over to our side of the street
," Steve added.

Heather smiled, "Point him out so I can give him a big hug. When that rope dropped down I looked up and knew I'd never be able to climb it. Then
, when that chair came crashing out the window on the fourth floor, I realized what you were up to." She fell silent as she seemed to gather her thoughts, so Steve waited patiently. He wanted to know how she got here but knew not to push. She would tell him in her own time.

"That first night we probably lost half of our patrol units," Heather finally said. "Everyone who could drive was put in a car and sent out on the road
, but it didn't make a difference. There were too many of them and not enough of us. By Monday night we had quit going on calls and were just trying to survive while we ferried people to the pier and a couple other secure locations along Tampa Bay. We were hoping to have them evacuated by boat but it never happened.

"Why the pier?" Steve asked.

"Easy to defend," She replied. "We threw a barricade across the mouth of it and turned the building into a refuge."

Steve could
picture the huge inverted structure at the end of the St. Petersburg pier and had to agree it was a good idea.

"Is it still open?" He asked.

"Last I saw of it Tuesday, as I was hauling ass across Tampa Bay, it was. The Sheriff called all the remaining deputies together that morning and told us it was up to each individual to decide what they wanted to do. It was too dangerous to continue going into the city on rescue missions, and he wouldn't risk any more Deputy's lives by ordering them to."

"How many of you were left?" Steve asked quietly.

"Eight," she replied. "Eight deputies and maybe twelve St. Pete cops. The city guys were guarding the pier and keeping the peace inside the building. There might have been others but they were in the city, cut off from us."

Shaking her head with disgust
, Heather said, "You wouldn't believe it, but in the midst of all that was going on, we still had to deal with rapes, robberies and a couple murders in the so called safe zone. The strong were still preying on the weak. I talked to one of the St. Petersburg cops who said they were going to start publicly hanging the worst offenders to try and restore order. That’s when I decided to come here."

Heather sipped some coffee before continuing, "I drew some ammunition from the supplies we had stashed there." She saw Steve giving her a curious look so she explained, "After the riots back in the mid-nineties, the Sheriff stashed ammunition, tear gas
and riot control gear at different spots across Pinellas County."

Steve nodded and motioned her to continue.

"So I made my way along the beach into Kenwood, hoping to find a boat." She laughed a little and said, "All I could find were these huge cabin cruisers. I climbed into one but couldn't figure out how to start it. Eventually, I found a little Zodiac lashed to the back of one of the big boats and managed to get it in the water."

"How did you keep from being noticed by the dead while you were doing all this?" Steve asked
, amazed.

"They congregate around the food
, so I was able to move about pretty easy. The hardest part was getting away from the pier. I had to swim out into the bay a few times to avoid them."

Now Steve understood that when Heather had said she'd made her way along the beach, she hadn't meant it was a Sunday stroll. Then he realized one of the things he found attractive about her, she was tough.

"So my first thought was to come here," she said, looking at Steve with a raised eyebrow. "I knew it was a long haul so I hit a couple more docks looking for gas. I didn't find enough, so I headed out across the bay to McDill, hoping I could get some from the guys at the air base.  It was still light out, so I had no problem finding it, but when I got close I could hear a lot of shooting. I used a pair of binoculars to see what was going on, and I saw those things coming out of the water right onto the base. The fence kept them out on land so they just went around it. Once I saw that, I turned back and headed for St. Pete again. I hit a few more docks as I headed down the bay and figured I had enough gas to make it."

Heather swallowed hard and said, "
I had a real close call at one place and that kind of helped me along on my decision to get moving." Heather looked into the depths of her coffee mug, so Steve waited patiently for her to continue. After a few seconds, she said, "You know those plastic dock boxes that people store all their junk in?"

Steve nodded. He had seen hundreds of the white, chest sized crates bolted to people's docks.

"I opened one up to see if I could find anything I could use, and one of those things was in there," Heather said, trying to keep her voice calm. "He popped out and bit me on my left tit."

Steve's eyes got big on hearing this
and his body tensed.

Seeing his expression
, she said quickly, "Don't worry. I was still wearing my vest."

Steve relaxed.

With a sick laugh, she said, "The son of a bitch latched on good though. Bit right through my shirt. You should see the bruise." Realizing what she said, Heather added with a half smile, "If you're lucky, I might let you see it."

They both
smiled at that before she went on, "It let go to try and bite me again so I backed off and shot it in the face. There were more of them around and they heard the shot and started coming in my direction, so I skipped my plans on breaking into one of the houses there to look for food. I made it all the way around the southern tip of Pinellas down by Fort Desoto in the dark. I pulled into John’s Pass looking for somewhere safe to tie up but everywhere I looked on the Boardwalk I saw those things staggering around. A few of them even stepped off into the water to try and get to me.

She shuddered
, then said, "There was no way I'd get any sleep thinking of those things crawling around underwater below me, so I moved on."

"Underwater?" Steve asked.

Heather nodded, "We found out they can stay under water from that diver who found the first one off Indian Rocks Beach. It makes sense that they don't need to breathe since they're dead. That’s how they got into McDill too."

Steve nodded thoughtfully at this
. It was something to keep in mind. He didn't plan on being on the water, much less swim in it, but it made him wonder what else the dead could do since they were dead.

"I headed up the intracostal and I could pick out the houses that had survivors in them because
they were mobbed by the dead," Heather explained. "You know the bridge that crosses into Bellaire Bluffs?"

"Know it well," Steve said, thinking of the night he drove to Ginny's.

"Just past that I ran out of gas. I think I might have made it all the way to Clearwater, but I was fighting the tide when I went under the Sunshine Skyway Bridge and used up a lot of fuel. I was too afraid to tie up anywhere, so I pulled out the oars and started rowing."

"How big was this boat you were in?" Steve asked.

Heather thought for a moment then replied, "About eight feet."

Again
, Steve was amazed. Heather had piloted an open, eight-foot, inflatable boat all the way from the pier to Clearwater. On a normal day it would be difficult, but under these circumstances...

He had a greater respect now for the woman sitting next to him as she continued to tell her story. "I tried to land in a few places but kept running into those things. I finally ended up at the Marine Laboratory and stayed because it was absolutely deserted. I broke in just as it started to get light
, but it was so spooky. I kept hearing noises that sounded like those things. I was going to look for somewhere else when I realized what the sounds were."

Steve looked at her expectantly.

"The animals," Heather said. ''No one freed them."

This made Steve think of all the other places that kept animals and people caged up. Zoo's, mental institutions and prisons came to mind, but his focus returned to Heather.

"So you went around and let them go," he stated with a smile.

Looking slightly embarrassed
, she said, "Someone had to."

I'm glad you did that," Steve said. "They would have starved."

"That's what I was thinking," Heather replied and then laughed. "I almost couldn't get the otters to leave me alone. They were the first ones I let loose and I expected them to haul ass out to the water, but they followed me around the whole day while I let the other animals go. The dolphins were the hardest because I had to wait while another pool filled so I could open the door between them to the outside."

"So you didn't get any sleep?" Steve asked.

"A little," Heather said. "But it was getting dark so I just rested my eyes for a bit and then left. I made it all the way to the library overlooking Clearwater Beach before I was spotted by some of those things. I thought I was cornered up against the building but I managed to get up on the roof of the library and run across it. That's when I started cutting through alleys and climbing up on roofs to scout the way I wanted to go. I eventually made it to where you saw me on the building across the street."

"And waved me down with a flashlight," Steve finished.

"After I tried calling a dozen times," she said. "I'd been trying to get ahold of you for days but couldn't get through. A lot of cell towers are down because of the blackouts. I'm surprised you still have power here. I saw the lights on in a few of the offices. I didn't know which one was yours so I was just running my light over all the windows, floor by floor, until I got a reaction, just hoping I was on the right side of the building. If your office was on the other side, I was going to have to move again."

"Well
, you made it," Steve said. "You didn't give up."

"I'd been shining that light for two hours and I was ready to give up when I saw your office lights flash. What took you so long?"

Steve explained about Donna and about what they'd been doing for the past days. Heather listened intently and asked, "Are you sure there's no more of the dead lurking anywhere else here in the building?"

This made Steve pause and consider. Marcia was at her desk
so he asked her to find Susan and send her in. While they were waiting for her, he explained to Heather that Susan had been watching the door in the lobby on Monday, but with everything going on he'd forgotten to ask her if anyone came in.

When Susan entered, Steve quickly introduced her to Heather and then got down to business. Susan told him that no one had entered through the foyer but she
couldn’t be sure about the second floor walkway from the parking ramp.

Steve thanked her
, and before she left, Susan invited Heather to lunch. Heather accepted gratefully. She felt like she’d been isolated for days from normal human interaction. When she was serving as a cop during the crisis, she had been insulated from others by her position and now looked forward to talking to another person.

When Susan was gone, Steve filled
Heather in on the other survivors at the station. When he got to Mary and Susan being a couple, Heather raised a questioning eyebrow.

"How do you feel about that?" She asked.

Waving a hand in dismissal he replied, "I've got way too much to worry about already. As long as they don't cause problems, they can call in the whole staff, break out the Crisco oil and the rubber bed sheets and play nude twister for all I care."

"Sounds fun," Heather commented with a half smile and then grew serious before saying, "Any word from Ginny?"

Steve shook his head, "She's still missing in Tampa."

Heather didn't wish any bad on Ginny
but she hoped the woman stayed away. In the present circumstances, Tampa was about as attainable as the moon. That left Steve here. With her.

Going to the office door, Steve called out for Tick-Tock, who
appeared seconds later. Steve introduced Heather to Tick-Tock who looked uneasy in her presence. Turning to his second in command, he said, "Since all three of us are here, I want to clarify something. Tick-Tock, you're still my right hand man. I don't want you to think that because Heather showed up that you're going to be kicked to the curb."

Steve brought this up because he thought it might cause potential problems. He had spoken to
Tick-Tock about Heather possibly showing up while they had been working on various projects in the building over the past few days and at the time had thought nothing of it. When Heather finally did arrive, Steve noticed Tick-Tock being standoffish and unusually quiet and reserved and saw a conflict in the making.

Looking at Heather, Steve explained, "Tick-Tock knows these people better than I do. He's worked with them for
years and he also served as a Marine. I just wanted to get this out in the open, so there won't be any confusion later on. I still need your opinion Heather because you have a lot of experience that we can use, but Tick-Tock is in charge if I'm not around.

Heather had no problem with this and said so. Tick-Tock looked relieved so Steve continued,
"With that out of the way, I want the three of us to sit down and figure out what we need to do to reinforce our position. Heather brought up something that we need to address, and I have an idea that I want some feedback on."

Sitting down next to Heather, Steve asked, "Do you feel up to going over a few things?"

She gave him a smile and replied, "If I could eat again first, I could."

"No problem, I'll get you something from the deli,"
he said and started to rise.

Tick-Tock spoke up, "You two hang out. I'll run down and grab something for all of
us. They had a couple of those party platters made up so I'll see if they're still fresh. If not, I'll whip up something."

To Heather
, he asked, "You're not a vegetarian or anything are you?"

"With what I've seen
the past few days I should be," she replied. "But right now, I could definitely go for a roast beef and swiss on rye."

"Coming up
," he said cheerfully as he went out the door.

When he was gone
, Heather said, "You handled that fairly well, blunt and to the point, but fairly well. I was wondering how I'd fit in here."