Dead Calm (24 page)

He knew what he had to do.

Raising his rifle, he sighted in on the side of the
blonde head as his finger moved to the trigger. Hesitating as he
thought back on all the good times they had shared, he steeled his
resolve by rationalizing that he wasn't killing someone he loved.
He was shooting a blind, wounded animal that needed to be put
down.

As Derrick took up the slack on the trigger, the
zombie turned as if it sensed his presence. It seemed to stare
directly through the scope at him with sightless eyes.

The rifle jumped in Derrick's hands.

A second later, a quarter mile away, the blonde head
exploded in a spray of black pus.

The emotional pain gripped Derrick again so he set
the rifle down across his thighs and lowered his head. Tears
streamed from his eyes to freeze on his face in the below zero
temperature. After allowing himself to grieve a few minutes, he
once again raised his rifle to check out the town again. The more
information he could gather, the better they could prepare for what
he hoped would be a slaughter of the dead.

Shouldering his rifle and looking through the scope,
the first thing he saw sent fear shooting through his body. His
shot had alerted the dead and they had zeroed in on his location.
Hundreds of them were staggering and sliding across the ice in his
direction.

Not that I'm too hard to miss, he thought
sardonically. I'm on a black snowmobile, wearing a bright red
snowsuit, sitting on a field of white.

Putting the rifle back in its case, Derrick thumbed
the throttle on the snowmobile and turned it in a narrow arc before
gunning the engine. As he started the trip back to Woman's Lake, he
realized that he was moving into a strong wind.

That's why we didn't hear any shots or noise when
Hanson got overrun, he thought sadly. The whole town had been wiped
out and no one knew it was happening because the wind was blowing
in the wrong direction.

Returning to Woman's Lake shortly before sunset,
Derrick went immediately to the Constable's office and reported
what he had seen to the deputy on duty. The Deputy used the
shortwave radio to call Carl Hibbing and inform him of this new
development. Carl ordered him to send Derrick over to his place
immediately and to call or send messages to the rest of the town
council that they were to meet at the lodge in one hour. He also
told the deputy not to let anyone know about this recent
development. He didn't want to start a panic.

Secrets are hard to keep in a small town.

With so many people showing up, an hour after sunset,
Carl decided it would be too crowded to hold the meeting in the
main room of the lodge and suggested they move it outside. Besides
the ten men and women on the town council, over sixty others had
shown up when they heard of the disaster that had befallen Hanson.
More wood was added to what was already set in the fire pit and
soon a good-sized blaze was going.

Once everyone was settled, Carl had Derrick stand in
front of the fire and relate what he had seen. Embarrassed at being
the center of attention, Derrick lowered his head and, leaving out
the part about his ex-wife since that was no one's business but his
own, related how it appeared that the town had been overrun by what
looked like a thousand dead. There didn't seem to be many
survivors. Finishing his story with how he went three miles out of
his way so that the dead couldn't follow him back to Woman's Lake,
he expected to be overwhelmed with questions when he was done.
Instead, he was surprised to hear only the crackling of the fire
behind him. Looking up in curiosity as to why everyone was so
quiet, all he could see were shocked faces staring back at him. The
crowd was speechless. At first he didn't understand, but then it
dawned on him. The people of Woman's Lake had been insulated for so
long that it was hard for them to comprehend that the HWNW virus
and the walking dead were only a few miles away and would be soon
heading in their direction.

Finally a woman spoke up, breaking the silence as she
said, “My sister lives in Hanson and a lot of you have friends and
relatives there. We have to organize a rescue party. Even if
there's only one person left alive, we have to try and save them.
People might be dying as we sit here.”

This statement was met by others agreeing that this
was what they needed to do. Immediate action was called for. When
the initial clamor died down, Carl Hibbing stood and raised his
hand for silence. He reminded those gathered, that Derrick had seen
thousands of the dead in Hanson and that it would be foolish to go
off half-cocked in the dark with only a small number of men and
women. He suggested they get better organized and set out at first
light when there would be more volunteers and the rescue party
could see better. It would also cut down on the risk of them
shooting each other or any of the survivors by accident.

While many calls of, “Strike while the iron’s hot,”
and “People might not make it until the morning,” rang out, the
wisdom of Carl's suggestion prevailed. Soon, those gathered around
the fire settled back into their chairs. Small groups formed and
broke up to reform as plans were laid for the morning. A few
bottles were passed around to lubricate the thought process.

The moon rose, reflecting its light against the snow
and ice on the lake and causing it to glow a bluish-magenta that
created a surreal landscape. Covering hundreds of square miles,
Woman's Lake was one of the bigger bodies of water in the area and
it was easy to get lost on it in the winter or the summer unless
you had a landmark to navigate by. Before Dead Day, finding your
way had been fairly easy, since the lights of the resorts and small
towns dotting its shores each had their own characteristics. Now,
with the power out, the dark mass of the trees surrounding the
water made finding any single point of reference difficult, if not
impossible.

This being the case, the hundreds of dead who tried
to follow Derrick Olson across the ice might have wandered around
all night until they were spotted the following day when the rescue
party came across them on their way to Hanson. With the dead
scattered all over, it would have been like shooting fish in a
barrel.

Except for three things.

The first was the bonfire in front of the Hibbing
Lodge. Seen for miles across the ice, it acted like a beacon in the
night for the dead to follow.

The second was the wind. Even though some smells are
frozen out in cold weather, the overwhelming stench of the dead
would have given those at the Hibbing Lodge some sign of their
imminent appearance. Since the wind was still blowing from the
shore out over the frozen lake, the musky rancid odor of the
zombies was picked up and blown in the wrong direction.

And third was the lack of warning. Since the first
snowfall and freeze, the populace of Woman's Lake had received no
visitors, except a few people from neighboring towns that stopped
by to barter. Thinking they were safe, the citizens voted to
temporarily discontinue the roadblocks and halted the patrols along
the lake's shore until the snow melted and the ice broke up. With
no sentries to raise the warning, and being deep in discussion
about the rescue mission to Hanson the next morning, no one around
the bonfire saw the dead until they were among them.

Pandemonium broke out as dark loping shapes appeared
in the flickering light to grab at the people around the bonfire
and drag them screaming to the ground. A few men and women managed
to raise their weapons and fire off a quick shot or two before
being pulled down by six, seven, or even eight of the zombies that
flooded off the frozen lake. But even if more people had managed to
open fire it would have been useless, the dead were too many and
too close.

In minutes the killing was over, leaving only the
feeding. The dead tore at the clothes of their victims to get to
the still warm meat underneath. They had been roaming the frozen
north for months now in search of food and had learned that if they
didn't eat quickly, the meat would freeze.

The dead who hadn't been quick enough to grab food
passed by their bloody brethren and followed the very visible trail
used by snowmobiles to get back and forth between the town and the
Hibbing Lodge. Within an hour, they had spread out and started
smashing their way into homes, pulling the residents down in flurry
of screams, teeth and fingernails.

By the time the sun rose, the town of Woman's Lake,
Minnesota had been almost wiped out. A few human holdouts living in
sturdy dwellings, or those who barricaded their homes against a
possible invasion of the dead, looked out through peepholes at the
devastation wrought on their community. Although some of dead
remained to try to get into these few remaining outposts of
humanity, a majority of the zombies had moved on once the food that
could be easily accessed was depleted. One of the few learned
behaviors in the dead was that it was futile to try and bust into
these strongholds. Instead, they found that if they went in search
of food, they might come across something easier to get.

Thus, the majority moved on.

Many small groups, banding together over the past
months, had formed the horde of living dead that assaulted Woman's
Lake. Coming from as far away as Duluth to the north and Des Moines
to the south, their number fluctuated between seven and twelve
hundred. Although some of the dead didn't stay with the mob and
stopped to outwait their food when it was barricaded inside a
structure, the main mass found and absorbed into its group many new
smaller packs of zombies. This kept their numbers high.

All throughout the country this scene was repeated as
the dead used up their food sources in the cities and towns and
went in search of more. In California, one group numbered over
thirty thousand walking dead, moving like an army of ants as they
devoured any living flesh they came across. Where in the beginning
the zombies preferred to eat human flesh, now nothing was safe,
dogs, cats, birds and live stock were fair game. If it weren’t for
a biological barrier that prevented the disease from jumping to
animals, the infected beasts would have soon overrun the Earth.

Early on in the war against the dead, when a large
group of zombies had been spotted and their location pinpointed by
the military, helicopter gunships were sent in to deal with them.
As parts and fuel became scarcer, the number of air missions
against the zombies dropped dramatically until they were almost
non-existent. Now it was left to the ground troops in the immediate
area to deal with the problem.

Search and destroy missions quickly declined and soon
became of second importance as the local unit's numbers were
depleted when men were taken from them and assigned to units tasked
with driving out the dead in the cities. With multiple buildings
and miles of underground sewers and drainage tunnels to hide in,
this became a deadly game of cat and mouse. The kill ratio stood at
one dead soldier for every two destroyed zombies. In most rural
areas, the troops garrisoned there were doing their best to just
hold onto the ground they had taken in the initial push ordered
weeks earlier by the Joint Chiefs.

Although they didn't know about these events, the
dead now moving through the snowdrifts piled on the road leading
out of town could sense it.

They had an almost uncontested free reign of the
countryside.

Chapter Thirteen

The Dead Calm:

Having recovered from his fight with the zombie,
Brain slowly got to his feet and started checking himself to make
sure he hadn't been bitten. Stripping off his shirt, he turned his
back toward Tick-Tock so his friend could make sure the dead
thing’s fingernails hadn’t scratched him.

“You got a gouge on your side but it doesn't look
like it came from the Z, Tick-Tock observed. Looking closer he
said, “It's a pretty good scrape but it's stopped bleeding. You
must've landed on your pistol after you dropped it.” Straightening
up, he added with derision, “And by the way, the next time a Z
comes at you, just shoot the son-of-a-bitch. Don't try and wrestle
his ass.”

Brain looked apologetic as he put his shirt back on.
“I forgot I had the gun in my hand. That thing was so close that
all I could think of was trying to keep its hands and teeth away
from me.” After a moment's thought, he asked, “Why didn't you shoot
it when it was on top of me?”'

Tick-Tock pointed to Steve, “I was going to but he
stopped me.”

“You would have gotten sprayed by that black shit
those things have for blood,” Steve explained. “It would have gone
in your mouth and eyes and up your nose. Then we would have had to
shoot you.”

Brain shivered as he remembered lying helpless
beneath the zombie, knowing what would happen to him if he got
infected and wondering if he would feel it when the bullet fired
into it cleaved his head. Instead, Steve had saved his life by not
firing. His mouth dry, Brain croaked out a thank you. Swallowing
hard, he asked Tick-Took, “How did you know it wasn't a cat behind
that door?”

“Without food or water it would have died months ago.
Anytime you hear anything moving around in a room on this ship and
you can't figure out what it is, it's bound to be something moving
around dead,”

Brain lowered his head at his near fatal mistake and
said, “I wasn't thinking.”

“Oh, you were thinking all right,” Steve said
harshly.

When Brain gave him a questioning look, he added,
“You were thinking about Connie.” He then gave Brain a none too
gentle cuff on the back of his head. “What did I tell you about
that shit?”

“You need to keep your head and your ass wired
together if we're gonna do this,” Tick-Tock warned Brain.