Die Trying: A Zombie Apocalypse (19 page)

“Pentelle,” Walker said. “Like I told you. There are navy ships off Norfolk. Her father is there, and a couple of the Joint Chiefs.”

“Where is the President? Where is the rest of the government?”

“Dead,” Walker said. “There is no government.” He started to shiver. The head wound was seeping fresh blood, soaking through the thin bandage of his shirt. I didn’t know what else was wrong with him. Maybe broken legs. Probably internal injuries. Jed shredded a pillow case into long strips and I bound the rags around Walker’s forehead.

I snatched a bottle of wat
er from the nylon bag and held it up to his lips. He drank thirstily.

“The helicopter was flying us to
Pentelle,” Walker went on. “It got into trouble.”

“That’s why it was painted black, right? Because you were carrying the Vice President’s daughter.”

Walker nodded – a barely perceptible movement of his head. “There was no pilot charging thousands of dollars for flights, was there?”

“No,” Walker admitted. “We were one of the last flights out
of the Capitol. It was done in secrecy. I was under direct orders from the Vice President to get his daughter to safety. It was covert.”

“And the pilot?”

“Secret Service,” Walker said.

“You shot him.”

Walker’s eyes suddenly went wide with surprise. He said nothing.

I leaned over him and stared into his eyes. “I checked the pilot’s body
when we reached the helicopter,” I said, and my voice took on an edge of menace. “It was the first thing I did, Walker. He was dead in his harness. He had a bullet hole in his chest. I felt it.”

Walker held my gaze for a few more seconds, and then nodded. “
When the chopper crashed, the first thing I did was check Jessica, and then the pilot. He was already dead,” Walker said. “So I shot him through the back of the seat.”

“Why?” I was incredulous.

“Blood,” Walker said. “There were zombies coming from the houses on the hill. We could see them backlit by the fires. I knew my only hope of getting Jessica to safety would be if I used the pilot’s dead body to distract them. So I shot him. Then I saw you and the others come running from one of the houses. I hit myself on the head with the butt of the gun and threw it aside.”

I looked up at Jed and saw my surprise and shock reflected in his expression. I stared back down at Walker.

“That’s why you came alert so quickly when we reached you in the wreckage. You were faking.”

He nodded.

“And that’s why you were shouting,” I suddenly realized. “When we pulled you from the helicopter you were shouting about your daughter.”

Walker nodded again. “Jessica was unconscious. I knew when she came too, she would need to know the cover story.”

“The story about her being your daughter.”

Walker nodded.

I sat back again and stared up at the ceiling, then glanced malevolently over my shoulder at Jessica Steinman. “And you were in on this? You played along every inch of the way.”

She said nothing. I took a deep breath.

Walker coughed weakly and bloody spittle trickled from the corner of his mouth. I suddenly didn’t care.

“And the story about your wife?” I asked through a rising sense of outrage. “The story about your poor wife being trapped in your house by undead. Was that fake too? Were the tears faked, Walker?”

He nodded. “I made it up,” he said. “All of it.”

For some ridiculous
, illogical reason, this betrayal enraged me more than any other deception. Perhaps it was because Jed and Harrigan and I had all lost precious loved ones. The pain was real and raw for us – and this Secret Service assassin had cheapened their deaths with his deceit.

Like I said, it made no logical sense – but the sudden hatred
that overwhelmed me was so intense, I felt my hands bunch into angry fists.

I pressed my face close to his until just a few inches separated
us. I glared at him hatefully. “I hope you die, you bastard,” I whispered.

I got up from the bed and turned to Jessica
Steinman. “Come with me,” I snapped.

I took her out into the kitchen. I wanted her away from Walker. She followed me like a condemned man on his way to the gallows. I pressed her up against a wall and stood over her, my arms folded, simmering with a poisonous cocktail of emotions.

Jed drifted into the room casually but kept his distance. The girl stared up into my face, her enormous dark eyes like twin pools of fear and despair.

“What happened jus
t before the helicopter crashed?” I demanded.

She frowned, like she didn’t understand the question. “The helicopter was spinning out of control,” she said softly. “There was smoke in the cabin. The pilot was screaming at me to hold on to something.”

“And when it hit the ground – did the pilot die instantly?”

Jessica shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “I was knocked out. I don’t remember anything until the moment I saw your face leaning over me.”

I backed away a pace and lowered the intensity of my voice. “Are you really Vice President Steinman’s daughter?”

She nodded. “Yes.”

“And is he really on a warship off the coast?”

She nodded again. “He came back with the fleet from the Middle East,” she said. “He had been on a diplomatic mission to Afghanistan and Iraq through most of June.”

“And you stayed in Washington? Why didn’t you go with him? I see the President’s kids on the television all the time travelling on Air Force One. Why did you stay behind?”

She shrugged her shoulders. “I had studies, and I was helping my step-mother with a fundraiser for returned veterans…”

“Your mother?”

“Step mother,” Jessica corrected me pointedly. “She’s dead. She died when the Capitol was overrun.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

There was a brief pause. “How did you survive?” I asked.

“I was in
a bunker for almost three weeks,” Jessica went on. “When the navy ships with my father aboard reached the coast, they started ferrying people to Pentelle – or directly offshore to the fleet. I wouldn’t leave until the others had been evacuated first. Walker stayed with me and the helicopter we were on was the last one.”

“And I suppose you think that makes you some kind of a hero?” I asked. It was churlish, I suppose, but I wanted to
vent at this girl for being part of Walker’s deception – for putting all our lives in danger without ever telling us the truth.

But I couldn’t.

She had done what her bodyguard had told her, even though she had been clearly terrified out of her mind. She had maintained her silence – and her discipline – through two days of terrible fear. Grudgingly, I had to respect her – but I didn’t want to. I wanted to hate her.

Jessica didn’t answer. Her eyes flicked to where Jed was standing, and then back to me.
Maybe she was wondering about her safety now that Walker was so badly injured. Maybe she was wondering what we were going to do with her.

She took a deep tremulous breath, like she was getting herself under control
, and then she looked up at me with a clear steady gaze.

“Before we left Washington,
Mr Walker gave me this,” she said and held out her arm. The big chunky bracelet dangled from her narrow wrist. “It’s a homing beacon of some sort,” she said, “made to look like a piece of jewelry.”

I had noticed this bracelet before. Now
I took her hand and twisted it, studying the floral pattern more closely. It looked like it was made of something like pewter. The latch at the back of the chain was peculiar.

“How does it work?” Jed asked the question.

Jessica shrugged. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “All I know is that it’s some kind of beacon. If I activate it, it sends out a message or radio signal on a military frequency to anyone nearby.”

“How nearby?” I asked.

“Mr Walker said it was about ten miles,” Jessica said.

“And it’s a military frequency?”

She nodded. “That’s what he said. He said if we got within ten miles of Pentelle, the navy helicopters would be able to find us.”

“Then why not activate it right now? Why not get the navy here to pick us all up?”

“Have you heard any helicopters?” she shook her head. “There are none. The navy is only flying survivors who make it to Pentelle, out to the waiting warships. There aren’t any helicopters left for search missions. That’s what Mr Walker said before we left the Capitol. It’s why it was so important that we made it to Pentelle.”

“No
helicopters to spare? Not even for the daughter of the Vice President?”

She
shrugged and stared at me. “How would that look?” she asked cynically. “How would the other survivors react if they knew my father was sending helicopters across the countryside looking for his missing daughter while their friends and loved ones might be trapped somewhere in just as much need and just as much danger?”

She had a point.

Jed stepped closer. I could smell the sweaty odor of his body. “Does the bracelet come off your wrist?” he asked. Perhaps it was my imagination, but I sensed something sinister in his tone, as if cunning thoughts were forming in his mind.

Jessica shook her head. Her hair swished across her shoulders. “No,” she said. “There’s some kind of lock…”

“Like one of those house arrest ankle bracelets?”

Jessica shrugged. I wasn’t sure she even knew what Jed was talking about.

Jed frowned thoughtfully, then stepped back, turned and looked out through the curtains – the action had become almost as instinctive as breathing. Then he went to the refrigerator and pulled open the door.

The stench of rotting food was awful. Jed recoiled and wrinkled his nose. He slammed the door shut.

I turned back to Jessica, my temper cooled. “Go back and check on Walker,” I said. “Make him comfortable and see if he wants more water. We’ll join you in a couple of minutes.”

She
scurried from the room, almost grateful to be gone. I waited until I knew she was well out of earshot, and I turned to Jed.

He spoke first. “That kid
is our meal-ticket to safety,” he said. “She’s going to buy us our freedom.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Really?”

He nodded and looked smug. “When we get her to safety, we’ll be heroes,” Jed said.

“Really?” I asked again. I wasn’t so sure. “And what if she sets off her little transmitter and a big fat navy chopper lands to pick her up – but they won’t take us? What happens then, little brother?”

Jed smiled bleakly. “We hold her hostage.”

“As simple as that?”

Jed nodded.

“I thought you might just cut her arm off, Jed. Then we could travel more easily and activate the transm
itter when we get near Pentelle,” I said, my words dripping with sarcasm.

“Thought about it,” Jed said matter-of-factly. “But I don’t think the chopper woul
d land. And I don’t think they would pick us up. They’ll be expecting the kid.”

I stared at him, and I had no doubt that he had seriously considered amputating the girl’s arm as an option.

When we went back into the bedroom, somehow Walker looked worse. His face was the color of marble, glistening with beads of perspiration. He was lying under a sheet, shivering through clenched teeth, as though he were in the grips of some terrible fever. I touched his cheek and it was hot.

There was a bottle of water on the bed beside him. Jessica sat on the edge of the mattress, her face furrowed with desperate worry and helplessness. She looked up at me. Her eyes were huge and haunted.

“We’re getting out of here,” I said. I wasn’t sure Walker was lucid enough to hear me, but I made my voice sound confident and determined for the girl’s sake. “We’re getting you to Pentelle.”

Jessica looked doubtful. “
Mr Walker?”

“He’s coming with us,” I said firmly. But I didn’t add,
‘if he lives long enough.’

“When?” she fidgeted with the bracelet anxiously, like she was desperate to activate the beacon.

“Early tomorrow morning,” I declared. “A couple of hours before sunrise, I’m going out to get a vehicle.”

And revenge.

Chapter Five.

“This ain’t a smart thing you’re doing,” my brother said. He was leaning in the doorway of the living room. He had a bottle of rum in his hand.

He had spent the afternoon ransacking the house. He had found a hunting knife, and a liquor cabinet.

He had spent the evening drinking.

For the first couple of hour
s he was voluble, and expansive, but as the night dragged on, his mood had become somber. Now he stood in the doorway, swaying ever so slightly, and staring at me with red-raw eyes and an expression that was like thunder.

“We don’t have a choice,” I said. I had found dark pants, and a black t-shirt. I pulled them on and shrugged my leather jacket back over my shoulders. “We can’t stay here. We need to get to
Pentelle. To do that, we need a car.”

Jed nodded. We had been over this ground before. “But going out on your own…? Man, that’s stupid.”

“Do you think I want to?” I snapped hotly. “Jed, there isn’t another option. You can’t go on your own – your ribs are all banged up, and you can’t come with me because that would leave the Vice President’s daughter and her dying body guard alone in the house,” I said dramatically. “There’s no other choice. I have to go out and find a car.”

I snatched up the
Glock, made sure the magazine was full, and pulled back the slide to chamber a round. The mechanism made an ominous
‘click-clack’
noise that sounded obscenely loud in the heavy silence.

I strode purposefully past Jed and headed for the bedroom. He followed me.

Jessica was perched on the edge of the bed, staring blankly into empty space. She was holding Walker’s hand. The man lay prone and perfectly still under the sheet. He wasn’t shivering any more, and he wasn’t sweating. I didn’t think that was a good sign, but I said nothing. A candle was burning on a low dresser, spilling soft yellow light around the room.

Jessica turned her head slowly towards me
. Her eyes were red and puffy and her cheeks slick with tears. She had been weeping.

“I’m going to get a car,” I said. “Something reliable and in good condition that will get us
all to Pentelle.”

Jessica looked suddenly alarmed. Her eyes flicked
instinctively to where Jed stood in the background, then quickly back to me. She shook her head, like she was in a dazed state of denial. “No!” she said vehemently. “You can’t leave us.”

“I’m not,” I said. I didn’t have time for this.
The sun would rise in a couple of hours. I wanted to be away. The fear of going out into the zombie-filled night had been churning in my guts throughout the afternoon. Now I just wanted to get it done. “I’m going to get a car. I’m coming back for you – and for Walker.”

She sprang from the bed and took a step towards me. There was desperation and panic in her eyes, but then she stopped in mid-stride and the energy seemed to leave her like she had been punctured. She sagged and grabbed for the bed. Big fat tears were rolling down her cheeks.

I crouched down in front of her, lifted her chin in my hand until she was looking at me through glistening damp eyes. “I will be back,” I said firmly. “Before you know it.”

I got up and went out through the bedroom door, the sound
of Jessica sobbing following my steps like a haunting ghost. At the front door of the house I stopped and turned round to face Jed.

“Two hours,” I said grimly, “maybe sooner. While I’m gone I need you to get Walker into this room. Lay him out on the floor and get him ready.
Get the girl to help you. It will give her something to do – keep her occupied.”

Jed nodded but said nothing.

“When I pull up out front, you’re going to need to be quick,” I went on. “There could be undead all around us. You’ll need to get Walker and the girl out to the car, so be ready to go at a moment’s notice. Understand?”

Jed nodded again. He took a long swig fro
m the bottle of rum. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “What happens if you don’t come back? What if you don’t make it?”

“I’ll be back,” I said confidently. “But if something goes wrong, and I don’t get back here within two hours, you need to get Walker and Jessica to
Pentelle – any way you can.”

I had lit a candle at sunset and perched it on a bookshelf that had been set against one wall. Now I blew it out, and the living room was plunged into darkness.

We shifted the chest of drawers barricade, and I cracked the front door open.

The sounds of night came to me, faint on the breeze: the rustle of insects and the soft, distant call of an owl. I narrowed my eyes and concentrated on the dark shapes scattered across the front lawn, wary of
everything that might hide one of the undead.

I stood, waiting and watching
, for a full minute with my heart pounding and my nerves strung tight to snapping point. My hands were damp with sweat, and the Glock felt like it was made of lead. I glanced over my shoulder at the dark specter that was my brother’s face.

“Remember. Two hours,” I whispered. “If I’m not back by then, I’m dead. Get the girl and Walker to
Pentelle. Be a hero, Jed.”

I
crept out into the night.

* * *

I went across the lawn in a low running crouch and stopped when the gnarled shape of a low shrub suddenly loomed out of the darkness. I hunched down beside it, using the bush for cover, and listened carefully for sound
s above the racing beat of my heart. The night was clear, and there was a big chunk of moon quite low in the sky. The stars seemed impossibly bright and their ambient light gave me some kind of visibility up to about fifteen feet at which I could define differences in the shadows.

I waited just long enough for my breathing to settle, and then I doubled back on my tracks, turning to move down the side of the house towards the back yard.

The house had been built just a few feet from the neighboring fence. There was no path. Instead I waded through long tangling vines and heavy clumps of grass. Every step was a new sound. Every pace I took was fraught with tension. But I kept one hand on the fence to guide me and reached the rear corner of the house without incident.

Another moment of hesitation – this time to get my bearings. Jed and I had carr
ied Walker across this lawn earlier in the day, but under the heavy cloak of night everything looked very different. I knew in my mind where the fences were and I struck out across the grass, trying to move in a straight line – trying to re-trace our steps from earlier in the day.

I was heading back towards where Clinton
Harrigan had died.

It had been several hours, but the grief and sadness of the big gentle Christian man’s loss was still upon me, like a black shroud. I knew that returning to the scene of his murder was filled with danger, but I didn’t think that danger would be lingering
hordes of undead. I doubted they would be still massed on the street, nor that they would be still gathered around the shredded remains of his body. I was gambling they had drifted away in search of new prey.

Gambling with my life.

I figured it took me fifteen or maybe twenty minutes of careful stealth to reach the house we had escaped into earlier that day – the house we had fled out through the back door without stopping. I reached the back step and looked up. The door was swinging open. I went up the steps carefully and pressed my ear against the wall.

I heard the creak of floorboards from somewhere inside the house – a noise like a mournful groan. My senses screamed in alarm. The sound was carrying towards me ahead of someone – or something’s – footsteps. The footsteps stopped briefly and then came again.

I went back down the stairs quickly and scrambled to the corner of the house. My plan had been to go back through the house, and then out onto the lawn to reach the wrecked car where Harrigan had been shot. But the sound of footsteps frightened the hell out of me, and I knew that if I got cornered and was confronted, any chance of carrying out my plan would be destroyed in a blaze of panicked gunfire.

I crept along the side of the house, with one hand against the cold abrasive texture of the bricks and the other extended way out in front of me, clinging tightly to the
Glock.

At the front corner of the house was a narrow gate made of white wooden pickets and topped with a screen of lattice timber. It was too high to climb, and I couldn’t go around, unless I climbed the neighbor’s fence. I
groped around in the eerie silent gloom until I felt the latch and unfastened it.

I inched the gate open with my jaw clenched and my face screwed up into a fearful wince. The hinges groaned
a little as the gate swung – and then screeched loudly in sudden ear-piercing resistance. The sound rang out into the night like a blood-curdling scream.

My heart stopped beating.

When it started again, it was pounding faster than any human body could possibly endure. I was in an ice-cold lather of panic. The sound seemed to echo in the night and fade away slowly, and – fool that I am – I stood there like a deer caught in the headlights of a speeding car, waiting for precious seconds until the clamor of warning sirens going off in mind finally reached my legs.

I began to run.

I ran as fast as I could – straight across the front lawn towards the roadside where the shadow of the wrecked, mangled car loomed out of the starlit night like some prehistoric monster. I ran to get away from the piercing sound of the gate – but made noise I couldn’t avoid in my fleeing panic. My breath sawed in my throat, my footsteps sounded loud as drums, and my arms pumped furiously. I saw a shifting, ethereal shape close to my left. It was a bush. I kept running. Another shifting shape, this one somehow denser, seemed to peel away from the hulking silhouette of the car wreckage. It lunged at me.

Too late I realized it was the figure
of a woman, her hair a tangled mess, her hands seized into claws. I threw up my arm in a purely defensive gesture and felt the woman clasp hold of me with a grip like a vice. I lost all momentum. I felt myself being pulled off my feet. I heard the woman snarl and saw a flash of yellow teeth. She bit into the sleeve of my leather coat and her jaws locked tight. I screamed. We went over together on the soft spongy grass in a tangle of flailing, clawing arms and kicking legs. I went ice cold with fear. The woman snarled and thrashed her head from side to side, trying to burrow her teeth through the heavy leather. I flung up the Glock and jammed the barrel against her face. I pulled the trigger and fell scrambling backwards as the woman’s head exploded in a great gout of dark gore.

I crawled to the curb. My hands were shaking uncontrollably. My legs wouldn’t work. Fear had turned my limbs to jelly.

I got as far as the wrecked car. The night was filling with strange noises – the rising sound of warning voices like jungle drums becoming louder and sounding closer.

I scrambled on my hands and knees in the gutter, working my way in a panic to the front of the
flat-bed truck we had rear-ended. The side of the road was a littered mess of broken headlight glass, shards of twisted metal and gravel that crunched under my boots. I reached the front fender of the truck and crouched there.

Dark shapes were gathering further down the road – shapes still too distant to have substance or definition. They coalesced and seemed to writhe like black smoke, forming and then breaking apart.

I charged across the street like a sprinter out of the blocks, running as fast as my shaking legs would carry me, directly towards a two-story brick house.

I reached the dark cover of dense shrubs and I burrowed low seeking the safety of the shadows. But I didn’t relax.

This was the house the gunman who killed Clinton Harrigan had fired from.

My nerves stayed tight
ly strung, my senses heightened, cranked all the way into the red zone by my fear… and an underlying cold implacable urge for retribution. I felt the anger within me grinding like gears.

There was a narrow
belt of long grass stretched out before me, then an equally narrow area with more low shrubs and bark chips. Then, down a narrow walkway, there was the front porch of the house. I went left instead. A driveway wound down the side of the home and wrapped behind the back of the building. At the end of the drive was a two-car garage. The roller doors were down. I didn’t try to lift either of them. There was a small window cut into the side wall of the garage. I pressed my nose against the glass and cupped my hands close around my face. There was a hulking dark shadow inside the structure.

I turned away and studied the back of the house. The moon
hung over the distant treetops, casting everything in a ghostly grey glow. It was enough for me to make out the shape of a long porch and a wide set of three steps leading up to the back door.

I went to the steps. They were a basic wooden assembly. I went up one step at a time, treading carefully, keeping my weight
on the edges of each board where they had been nailed to the side rail to minimize the risk of them creaking.