Left With the Dead (3 page)

Fine stuff.

A leather seating set was arrayed before the television. Next to the TV was a fireplace, though Gartrell couldn’t tell if it was real or one of those faux decorative touches he’d heard a lot of New Yorkers favored. Several pictures hung on the wall, and he leaned forward to examine them. Jolie was in many, though most featured a small boy with a distant expression. A man he presumed to be the boy’s father was in several photos as well. He looked to be in his 30s, and something of a cross between a hipster and a finance guy, with his expensive-looking business attire, skimpy beard, and artfully messed-up hair. He apparently dabbled in local politics as well, for there were several photos of him with political figures—all Democrats, of course. There was even one of him mugging it up with a ranking member of the U.S. Senate, a very liberal New York Democrat who was totally anti-war until the current president needed to show the nation how tough he was. Whenever that happened, the senator never met a conflict he didn’t like.

One ceramic frame held a family portrait. Names were written on the frame:
Jack, Jolie, and Jaden
.

Gartrell snorted.
A family where all the names begin with the letter J. I guess I really am on New York’s Upper East Side.

A few works of art occupied high shelves in a display case—bronze statues, knickknacks from different countries, a framed coin collection. The lower shelves were filled with the trappings one might expect to find in a residence where a small child lived. Bright, smiling cartoon characters, toy trucks and airplanes and boats, building blocks, a small riding scooter. The dining area was a round table surrounded by four chairs; there were no place settings, and the table was covered with canned goods and other items—plastic trash bags, paper towels, bottled water and juice, a bucket full of cleaning supplies. Two North Face backpacks sat on the Persian rug beneath the table, packs that were probably more expensive than the one he had left in the white van the team had driven cross-town in their gamble to reach the East River and the cutter
Escanaba
. The packs were likely more comfortable, as well. Gartrell didn’t inspect them any further. He walked toward one of the shaded windows and stood next to it, listening.

The artillery barrage to the north continued unabated, a distant earthquake that went on forever. There was no other sound he could detect, no moaning dead, no wind, no distant horn blasts from the
Escanaba
—

Movement in the darkness caused him to spin away from the window, and the AA-12 fell into its normal firing position on complete reflex. Jolie looked at him from across the room, her eyes—blue eyes, he thought, but the light was so dim he couldn’t be sure—narrowed in what he took to be consternation. Gartrell slowly relaxed and for the first time he could remember, he took his finger off the AA-12’s trigger.

“Sorry about that,” he muttered.

She waved him to silence with one strident motion. There were two doors behind her, one on either side of the fireplace and media station. Gartrell presumed one led to the child’s bedroom, while the other led to the parents’. Jolie stalked past him and beckoned for him to follow. Gartrell trailed after her as she led him into the kitchen, where she picked up the small LED lamp and turned down a short, dark hallway he had missed before, right past the refrigerator. She slid open a pocket door at the end of the hall and stepped into the room beyond. Gartrell followed, stepping lightly across the polished ceramic tile floor.

The room was quite small, barely worthy of being called a guest room. It contained a twin bed, a miniscule closet, and a small bureau. A narrow door led to what he presumed was a bathroom. The single strip window there was blacked out like the rest.

“You have to be quiet,” she said after she closed the pocket door behind them. They stood almost cheek-to-cheek at the foot of the bed, which took up almost all the available room. “My son is on a very regular schedule. I can’t have it interrupted, do you understand?”

“A ‘regular schedule’?” Gartrell couldn’t quite believe his ears. “Look ma’am, it’s not like he’s going to be able to get up and watch cartoons tomorrow morning before he goes off to school, you know what I mean?”

Jolie shook her head sharply. “No. You don’t get it. My son is autistic. Variations in his schedule make him act out. Yelling. Screaming. I can’t have that right now. Not when those things might hear him. Do you understand now?”

“Ah…okay.” Gartrell sighed at the revelation, and a small part of him suddenly regretted linking up with this woman, even though she offered him the chance to find at least partial shelter from the storm of dead meat stalking the streets of the Upper East Side. And he was no stranger to autism; one of his brothers had a son who was moderately autistic, and he also exhibited a very limited ability to process new experiences before breaking down and becoming so disorganized he could hardly walk.

“I get what you mean about the autism,” he told Jolie. “Whereabouts on the spectrum is he? Asperger’s, or—”

“Classical autism. He doesn’t speak, doesn’t point, and has difficulty controlling himself and understanding requests.” She paused. “And he wouldn’t understand that we’re all in danger. That’s why I need to pay as close attention to his routine as possible. You understand?”

Gartrell nodded. He understood, and the more he knew about it, the less he liked it.

Hang tough, old dog. These are the cards you’ve been dealt.

“Why didn’t you evacuate?” he asked.

“My husband and I agreed we would wait for him, so we could leave together. I was afraid I might get separated from Jaden if I tried to take him out of the city alone.”

“I take it your husband never made it home.”

“He…he was coming from downtown. He was in the quarantine area in the Financial District. When he tried to leave, he…he couldn’t get out right away, but they were going to try and make it past the police blockades. When he called me last before the cell phones went out, they had made it all the way up to Thirteenth Street. But…” Jolie looked past him and seemed to shrug, her eyes (
They
are
blue
, Gartrell thought) distant and haunted. “But he never came. And by the time I got things together enough to try and make a break for it, it was too late.
They
were already in the streets.” She nodded toward the window behind Gartrell. “They killed the police at the corner barricade. I could hear the fighting and…and the screaming.”

“You should have left with everyone else,” Gartrell said. “Your neighbors, other family…they could have helped with your boy.”

“You don’t understand. We never really knew our neighbors, though the Skinners next door tried to get me to go with them. And our friends…well, they had families of their own to take care of.” Jolie looked up at him after a moment. “What happened to you? Where are the rest of your soldiers?”

“Dead, mostly. Some…the officer I was supporting and some civilians made it to a Coast Guard cutter in the East River. I was cut off.” He waved the question away. “Anyway, it’s not important now. When does your son normally wake up? It’ll be daylight soon.”

“Seven-thirty. Sometimes eight, eight-thirty.”

Gartrell checked his watch. It was 4:18am. “Roger that. All right, you should get some sleep. We’re going to have our hands full with him tomorrow. How do you think he’ll respond to me being here?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, we’ll have to do the best we can. Will you sleep with him? In his room?”

“Yes.”

“You have to make sure he doesn’t pull the shades off the windows,” Gartrell said. “If those things in the street see him, they’ll know where we are. They’re plenty stupid, but when there’s food on the table, there are enough of them to make a difference in how things will go down. Understand?”

“I know. Like I said, they killed the police manning the barricades on Second Avenue.”

“My team and I were in a fortified high rise building, and they broke into it and took it down. We barely got out. Listen, ninety-nine percent of those stenches out there are as stupid as a bag of rocks—but a few of them are smart enough to figure out things like doors and the like, you understand? They see us in here, from the street or from maybe another building, they’ll try and get to us. And there’s no way to reason with these things. The only thing they understand is that they want to eat—nothing else matters. Nothing. No negotiation, no chance for last-minute mercy,
nothing
. They see us, we have to boogie, and real, real quick.”

“Where would we go?”

Gartrell sighed and rubbed his eyes tiredly. “I don’t know. I need to figure that one out. You’re sure none of your neighbors are around?”

“No. They all left, like I said. I’ve been all through the building—most of the apartments are locked, but I’ve been in a few that aren’t, and no one’s around. That’s where I got all the stuff on the dining room table.”

“I noticed that. Good, so you’ve already scavenged a lot of stuff. How many apartments are on each floor?”

“Two.”

“Have you been in the apartment next door?”

“No. The Skinners locked up when they left. Why?”

“Because we’ll need a place to fall back to in case this unit gets compromised.”

She looked at him oddly. “Like I said…it’s locked. We can’t ‘fall back’ to it, unless you want to break down the door. And what good would it be then?”

Gartrell waved the question away. “We’ll go over that tomorrow. For now, though…we ought to get some sleep. We might be here for a while, so we should take the opportunity to rest while we can. Can I bunk in here?”

Jolie nodded. “Sure.”

“Great. Thanks.”

“I’ll catch you tomorrow morning, then.”

She left, taking the LED light with her. Gartrell closed the door, then reached behind him and felt around for the bed. It was right behind him, and he slowly lowered himself onto it. The mattress was firm, just how he liked it. He stretched out on it and found it wasn’t lumpy at all—an extra bonus. He stood the AA-12 on its butt stock in the corner, between the bed and the wall, figuring it would be relatively safe from a certain young boy’s inquisitive fingers, at least as long as he was in the room. He flipped on the radio and scrolled through the frequencies. The ones assigned to the former OMEN Team were silent, as he had expected. He tried to raise McDaniels, but he was certain the major was well out of range as the Coast Guard cutter returned to the open Atlantic Ocean. The rest of the open frequencies were mostly silent, devoid of any organized chatter, though a few of them did reveal some garbled transmissions. Gartrell identified himself and tried to make contact, but no one responded to his calls.

Exhaustion hit him suddenly, and Gartrell slowly pulled off the remainders of his gear. His web belt and his MP5 went under the bed, while the radio and knapsack and the contents of his pockets went on the bureau. He would take a full inventory of his meager possessions when the sun came up. But for now, he needed as much sleep as he could get. He stretched out on the bed fully clothed and stared into the blackness, listening to the sounds of the building and the city beyond. The artillery continued exploding in the distance. Gartrell figured the 10th Mountain Division or whoever was launching the attack was going for pure neutralization fire. He hoped the arty would be effective against the zeds, but knowing them as he did, he rather doubted it.

And with that cheery thought in his head, Gartrell fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

###

When he awoke, it was daytime.

At first, he couldn’t remember where he was. He looked about the small bedroom, blinking against the dim light that filtered past the window shade. He saw his gear lying on the bureau next to his head—his radio, his web belt, the grenades, magazines of ammunition, his knapsack, flares, bottled water, white plastic quick ties, paper bags with the Starbucks logo on them—and wondered how it all got there. Then he remembered the woman from the night before, the one he had met in the blacked-out Starbucks, the one who had been prowling through the store looking for lemon cake. He sat up in the bed and listened, but the apartment was quiet. He checked his watch. 9:37am. As Gartrell swung his legs over the edge of the bed, he was struck by something else.

The artillery barrage had stopped.

That could have happened for several reasons, one of them being the arty emplacements had been overrun by the walking dead. Or they had run out of ammunition. Or the advancing echelons of the dead had been destroyed, though he thought that unlikely. Or the artillery batteries were repositioning, or had ceased fire so other units could move in and secure the zone…

Enough guessing. Let’s see what we can find out.

He donned his radio headset and switched on the transceiver. He scanned through the channels, and was overjoyed to discover several frequencies had become operational. He announced himself on them using his mission call sign, but he received no response on the first two frequencies he tried.

The third time was the charm, however. On another frequency, he captured someone’s attention.

“Call sign Terminator Five, this is Summit Three-Seven. Say again, over.”

“Summit Three-Seven, this is Terminator Five. I’m solo in New York City after a busted mission on the Upper East Side. What’s the situation in the world? Over.”

“Terminator Five, this is Summit Three-Seven, a command and control element with the two-eight-seven infantry. This is an operational frequency for the Summit battalion. You sure you’re in the right place? Over.”

“Summit Three-Seven, Terminator Five. I was part of an alpha detachment that went tango uniform about twenty-four hours ago. My frequencies are dead, because there are no other SOF units in the zone. Looks like you lightfighters are all I’ve got. If you have another frequency I can roll to, give it to me and I’ll give it a shot, over.”

Another voice came over the radio. “Terminator, this is Summit Six. Give me your name and unit, over.”

Gartrell’s spirits rose slightly. He was now speaking to the commander of the Summit Battalion, which he knew to be the Second Battalion, 87th Infantry, a tenant unit of Fort Drum and part of the 10th Mountain Division. The infantry battalion CO would be lieutenant colonel, maybe someone with enough horsepower to get something done about his situation.