LZR-1143: Redemption (19 page)

TWENTY-EIGHT

Seattle was dead.

It sat, perched as a rotting sentinel over the bay, the lonely, untouched spire of the Space Needle a memory of times when such impressive architecture mattered. Tall buildings stretched into the sky, and the mountains watched from afar, as the remnants of a once proud symbol of American and human pride stood, lonely on the coast of a nearly forgotten shoreline.

We approached the city from the east, and the skyline was clear as the sun rose from behind the mountain, flooding the space west of the large range with the early morning glow of daybreak. Those, like us, who sat silently in the dining car, sipping coffee or tea, awake with nervous energy, enjoyed the bleak view as the city unfurled before us, a sobering reminder that the wilderness was untouched by this devastation, but that the cities didn’t enjoy that same seeming immunity.

“I was here recently,” I said softly to Kate, who held my hand in the seat next to me. We had our sunglasses, but were trying to hold out until the last possible second to have to don our other gear. The sun was not yet bright enough to cause severe discomfort.

“Vacation?”

“No, connection. I was coming back from,” I paused, intending to say Vancouver, but just filled it in with something else. “Portland. I stayed near the hotel, at a place with a horrible breakfast.”

“You remember the breakfast?”

“Of course. It’s how you judge a hotel.”

“Not the beds?”

“Beds? Who the hell cares about beds. I care who’s
in
the bed, but not whether it was comfortable. But food. That’s important.”

“What made the breakfast so good?”

“Cinnamon French Toast.”

She was quiet for a minute.

“What are you, ten?”

I was offended. I had a childlike love for sweet breakfast treats. That didn’t make me childish. It made me lovable.

I told her this.

“Whatever. I think it makes you a child.”

She smiled broadly.

“But I love you anyway.”

I felt as if I had missed something.

“Did you leave the hotel?”

“I had an overnight and felt motivated. I took one of those tours that the hotel advertises on the front desk.”

“Didn’t your adoring public bother you when you ventured into the sunlight?”

“I wore a hat.”

She shot me a sideways look.

“A hat? And they couldn’t tell it was you?”

“I wore sunglasses too.”

“Genius.”

“Not my fault, nobody figured it out.”

“Less a commentary on your disguise skills and more a commentary on their sentience, I think.”

I shrugged.

“Whatever, I still got to do the tourist thing.”

“Downtown?”

I smiled.

“Sure, if you wanna have a go.”

She groaned, pulling her hand back and rolling her eyes.

“Did you go downtown? What did you do?”

“Oh,” I said, feigning disappointment. “Kind of. I did one of those tours of underground Seattle.”

“Seriously?”

“Sure, why not?”

“It’s just very… touristy.”

“Oh,” I said, not really understanding. I guess she was one of those bed and breakfast, off the beaten track kind of travelers. Well, then this would impress her.

“I also did the duck boat.”

She laughed outright.

“What?”

I was offended now. Maybe she didn’t understand how cool the duck boat was.

“It’s a boat with ducks painted on it. But it’s also a truck.” I was sure this would be impressive.

She laughed harder.

This was total bullshit.

“It’s a world war two amphibious truck that they do tours of the lake in. It’s awesome.”

“I’m sure,” she said, seeing that I was offended and swallowing her laughter. “Sounds fun.”

This conversation was going nowhere. I exhaled and stared out the window.

Ky’s voice was excited as she approached behind us, and Romeo’s nose was suddenly under my hand.

“Did you see?” she said excitedly. “Look!”

I followed her hand, and saw that she was pointing at the Space Needle. I smiled at the reaction, allowing myself to remember a time when seeing new sights and taking in new places was a novelty instead of a dangerous way to spend your time.

“Never been here, I take it?”

She shot me a look.

“You kidding? My family never left Maryland, unless you count the beach. My dad hated airplanes, and my mom was just lazy.” Her voice was less excited in remembering her family, and I felt bad.

“You wouldn’t believe the view from up there. And did you know there’s an entire city buried beneath the streets of Seattle? A burned out relic of an old city from the 19th century?”

Her voice rose again and I smiled triumphantly at Kate.

“What? No way! Can we see it?”

Kate rolled her eyes.

“You bet. As soon as this is all settled, we’ll find a way.”

“Awesome!”

Kate groaned.

“There’s also a truck that drives in the water. What do you think about that?”

She hit me on the back of the head, hard.

“Shut. Up.”

Kate laughed. I cringed, unsure of what that meant.

“Yes?”

“Seriously?”

“Yes?”

“Awesome!”

Kate shook her head.

“So what you’ve proven is that you have the same taste as a prepubescent girl.”

I smiled.

“Fine by me. She and I will hang out, and you can be serious somewhere with the adults.”

Kate stood up and turned around.

“I’m going to go back to the room. You two have fun.”

Ky flopped down in the chair.

“You seen Major Gaffney?” I asked her, tossing her an energy bar.

She made a face at the protein bar but opened it and tore off a bite anyway.

“Nope. Why?”

I shook my head, dismissing the question. I tossed Romeo a chunk of my own energy bar, frowning at the sawdust taste.

“No reason.”

I wasn’t sure why, but I had an uncomfortable feeling about the entry into the SeaTac fort. The way it was described—it seemed like a strategy designed for loading and unloading cargo. Not humans. The more they gathered together, the hungrier they seemed to be. After the herd we saw, and how close it was to Seattle, and another converging on the fort from the south, the city had less and less to recommend it.

I reached into my cargo pocket and drew out the map that we had been given before we left the Pentagon. Laminated and folded neatly into quarters, it was a series of possible routes plotted by the folks in the intelligence sector in the Pentagon. Red, blue and yellow lines plotted out possible low-infestation pathways to the laboratory, and I had to chuckle when I saw the marks along the routes indicating possible hiding places.

The intelligence guys appeared to think they could plan themselves out of getting bitten. An interesting thought.

Stupid. But interesting.

“McKnight, you want to join us in five?” my ever-present ear bud crackled.

Speak of the devil, and he shall appear.

I sighed, and stood up.

“Where you going?” asked Ky, standing up as well. She had resented being left behind when we went into the town in Idaho, and I figured it couldn’t hurt to have her along now.

“Come on, we’re going to go find out how well chain link fence holds up against a million zombies.”

She smiled. Inappropriately, I thought.

“Sweet.”

Sweet, indeed.

The train was moving through the suburbs as we made our way to Gaffney’s makeshift command center. The overgrown lawns and uniformly abandoned and shattered storefronts were interspersed with the now familiar abandoned cars. Society was now showing the effects of months of degradation and the lack of public works and management.

With no one to feed them, household pets were dying on the streets, their carcasses left to rot unless a pack of zombies roamed by. With no one left to tend them, stray wires fell from electric and telephone poles, swinging in the breeze.

Sewage and drainage lines backed up, and streets were randomly inundated with water and months old feces that had been trapped in the system by the unmanned release valves.

Fires burned, as they slowly made their way from house to house.

Deer roamed through the long grass of formerly manicured lawns.

Birds’ nests sat forlornly perched in the exhaust pipes of large trucks. I even saw a small bear wander slowly past the open doors of a large bowling alley with a picture of a man on the sign holding the Space Needle, appropriately titled ‘Pins and Needle.’ I had to chuckle.

Gaffney was talking on a radio, and he waved as we walked in. He put the unit down as we sat, and I squinted behind the sunglasses. My face was feeling warm from the sunlight now coming through the UV filtered windows, and he gestured to his men to pull the shades.

“You’re getting special priority to go inside, of course,” he began, looking at his watch. “We’re about twenty minutes out. The way this works is that the train slows as it goes into the backstops. The teams outside clear the flanks, we shut the doors, they clear again, brush them back from the fence, lather, rinse, repeat. Standard stuff. Then, when we get to the station, you go through the last backstop, and you’re in. You’ll be the first to disembark, and you’ll exit from the lead car.”

I nodded, but didn’t rise.

“Major, just out of curiosity, have you ever tried to disembark this many people? I mean, it seems like the system is built for cargo, and I know that you’d normally have people out unloading the cargo, but hundreds or thousands of people milling around, kids talking and playing—seems like it’s just catnip for those things.”

He leaned back, eyes hard, and I was surprised. He was adapting quickly to command, to treat a question with such stubbornness. Maybe he was officer material after all.

“Our assessment of the situation is that it’s safe. We have extra machine gunners on the roof to cover the egress, and we estimate about six to seven minutes total time on the ground for civvies. Additionally, the two herds—the one we passed through and the one approaching from the south—are not expected in the city until tomorrow. Before that, we have only stragglers to deal with. We’ve never encountered any resistance in large numbers at the fence line. We should be fine.”

I sighed.

“Major, no offense, but that’s the kind of thinking that gets people killed out there. These things might be slow and stupid, but if we’re slow and stupid too, they win. One bite. They win.”

I stood up.

“You’ve done a good thing here, getting these people to safety. You’ve managed more than you had any right to expect, and you should be proud. But I’ve been out there for a while. This kid,” I gestured to Ky, whose arms were crossed over her chest. “She’s been out there a while. And if there’s one thing we know, it’s…”

“Don’t be a dipshit,” Ky spat.

I paused, turning and looking at her.

She had ruined my diatribe.

I turned back to him and smiled.

“Just don’t be complacent, Major. Just because they haven’t done it before, doesn’t mean they won’t do it.”

“I may not have survived in as harrowing circumstances as you, Mr. McKnight, but this isn’t my first rodeo. But I appreciate the advice.” He nodded once and turned away as we headed back down to gather our things.

“Don’t be a dipshit?” I asked under my breath as we walked into the next car.

“Where’d you learn that?”

“Uh, television? Remember that, old man?”

I did remember that. I used to watch a lot of A-Team.

I missed that show.

TWENTY-NINE

The gravel crunched under my feet as I dropped to the ground, reflexively holding a hand up for Kate before realizing she could probably do a forward flip off the last step and land on her feet.

But she smiled, and took my hand.

“A lady always appreciates a gentleman’s offer,” she said, as if reading my mind.

Nearly a hundred creatures lined the long expanse of fencing that enclosed the final backstop, and they moved slowly toward one another as if drawn together by an invisible cord. They didn’t look at each other, or show any other indication that the others existed. But they drifted closer along the fence line slowly.

I hoped that Gaffney had his shit straight, even as the others started to stream out of the train, moving quickly after us.

Romeo was bolting ahead, rocks and dirt flying out from underneath his churning paws. Ky followed, eager to get inside the large fortress.

It was a massive undertaking, made even more impressive by the fact that it had been constructed so well so fast. Stacked three containers high, the multi-colored walls of the massive base rose into the morning sky, the dark forms of patrols on the top visible against the sky.

The varying lengths of the containers, 20 and 40 foot models, each with a different color, made the wall an almost comical reconstruction of a LEGO castle, complete with vertical tower components regularly set every hundred feet. Machine gun emplacements topped each tower, and improvised flamethrowers—fire hoses with modified attachments at each nozzle—were arrayed every fifty feet.

The train sat perpendicular to the walls, where the track didn’t just end. Instead, it was turned up and to the side on a gentle angle, so that a runaway train wouldn’t punch into the wall, but would be diverted up and to the side. Several containers, all filled with cement and sand, were stacked up in front of the tracks for nearly a hundred yards, all designed with the same purpose in mind.

I spared another glance behind us, and was surprised to see hundreds more creatures surging toward the fence line. Flamethrower teams were now walking the walls, inserting the flamethrower nozzles between the links of the fence and pushing them back with bursts of fire.

The rapid popping of the machine guns began, wiping up after the fire teams. The civilians from the train moved quickly, pulling luggage and children behind them toward the ramp.

The building we walked toward now was really just one more container. Inside, a man sat with a simple clipboard, taking down names. He had been alerted to our identities, so we simply walked past. Past the men with German Shepherds, and past the man standing idly next to a box full of ammunition, with a flamethrower on his back. We turned right, angling up a steep ramp—also made out of solid-sided twenty-foot containers on thick wooden pylons surrounded by more fencing and barbed wire—for more than a hundred yards. At the end of the ramp, a small six-inch gap, open to the air and the ground below, nearly three stories down, separated the backstop ramp from the entrance door, which was only seven feet tall and approximately eight feet wide. Large enough for pallets of supplies.

The gap between the ramp and the entrance was another fallback measure, designed to allow the entire ramp assembly to be dropped, cutting off access to the entrance as a failsafe measure.

The door itself was simply a four-inch thick steel plate that rolled into position and was locked closed or open by two-inch thick steel rods. Not as secure as the large containers they used at the vehicle entrance, but it still did the job.

I glanced down again at the operation below, where hundreds more creatures were massing. They were pushing against the fencing now, and the flamethrowers were moving faster. The machine guns were spitting quickly, no pausing, a constant flow of metal into the corpses. A woman screamed as the fence bowed in several feet before a team of flamethrowers converged on the location. Kate joined me as we looked back.

The civilians were mostly out of the train, now, and the military was following tightly, supplies in hand and weapons hot, firing into the fence line freely and frequently.

The numbers were fading outside the fence, and the teams picked up the pace and the intensity, pushing the creatures back, and finally ushering the remaining civvies inside and toward where we stood watching.

I glanced at Kate and she lifted her eyebrows.

Close. Very close.

We were escorted around the ramparts to a narrow stairwell—no ramps or wide staircases on this side. In the case of a breach they wanted narrow firing lanes.

It was an amazing, and inspiring, collection of humanity on this side of the wall.

Large cargo planes lined the runway, beside fighter-bombers, helicopters of all shapes and sizes, several commercial airliners, and even a large refueling plane. One runway was completely dedicated to vehicle parking and maintenance, and the remainder of the space—the strip of grass between the runways, the tarmac closest to the terminal, and the grass and green space on the edges of the runways, was devoted to a humongous tent city. Army tents, camping tents, Red Cross tents, even a massive big-top circus tent. All lined up neatly and in predictable rows. Large fire pits surrounded by cleared space was set in intervals along the tidy avenues, and larger tents were spaced out as messes, latrines and gathering spaces.

The soldier from the train that was escorting us down into the camp gestured when we reached the ground, pointing down a long avenue lined with tents on one side and large cargo containers full of supplies on the other.

“Command tent is at the end, right hand side. You can’t miss it. Big flag out front and two guards near the door.” He turned and moved quickly back to the exit.

I shifted the protective balaclava on my face, hating it for the fiftieth time. Knowing that it was necessary didn’t help. I couldn’t stand the fabric against my skin, and I hated always having to shelter my eyes from actual sunlight. I felt like a goddamned vampire.

Plus, it didn’t help with maintaining anonymity. We were garnering stares, our motley crew. Kate and I with our masks and our medieval looking weapons, Ky with her crossbow and her crazy dog.

The people going about their business, carrying water and food, cooking, cleaning, doing laundry; oiling guns or caring for children; all of them were curious. New people had probably stopped coming in with any frequency the longer they were here.

In the distance, I heard the familiar drone of a turboprop engine, and I looked up in time to see the large form of a C-130 touching down in a squeal of wheels and a roar of displaced air and burning fuel.

Behind the tents somewhere, a dull but consistent popping sound testified to the conduct of target practice, and I watched, bemused and impressed as a large Abrams tank thundered across the next avenue up, followed by a tired-looking squad of men in uniforms like ours, some with scarred plating and large tears apparent on the fabric.

We reached the end of the avenue, staring at the camouflage brown material and the two infantrymen in full battle rattle standing on either side of the door. Neither was at full attention, but they were scanning the area as we approached, and they locked on us as soon as we made it clear we were coming to the tent. One of them disappeared into the doorway and reappeared moments later with a smaller man in tow.

His close-cropped gray hair sat on an angular head, and sharp but friendly eyes moved over each of us quickly, a slim gray mustache twitching over his thin lips in a small smile.

“Well now. We weren’t sure you’d make it. Heard all sorts of nasty about you folks on your way over.” He stuck out his hand and pumped my gloved arm furiously, with anxious energy.

“Good to see you folks,” he said, going to Kate, then to Ky, who made a face at me when he looked away.

“Name’s Rod Finnigan, welcome to Camp SeaTac. Can we get you anything?” He motioned to us to follow him inside, and we leapt at the chance, still feeling the glares of the other camp dwellers and desperately wanting to lose the face covering.

“I’m sorry, no rank?” I asked, curious.

He laughed, somewhat self-deprecatingly.

“Well, yes. I’m a colonel, but I’m also an engineer. I was called up the day all this started. My men here have lost several other commanders since this all started, and it fell to me when they ran out of other colonels. But I’m an engineer. I don’t identify as a military man first. I’ll wear the bird,” he reached up to his chest and pointed at the sewn insignia that almost blended in with the camouflage. “But the way I see it, it’s my engineering that is saving lives right now, not my soldiering. That’s why I have Lieutenant Colonel Garcia, here” he pointed at a man in his mid-forties who nodded seriously from behind a desk piled with paperwork, a carbine leaned obviously near his right hand, “and some damn good majors and captains as well. Anyway, enough about me,” he waved his hand and sat down in a simple camp chair, gesturing for us to do the same.

The tent flap closed behind us, and I sighed heavily, stripping the cover from my face. Kate did the same.

On the far side of the tent, Romeo was making friends with an enlisted man sitting near a complex pile of electronics. The man was trying not to smile in the presence of his officers, but Romeo leaned back on his back legs and put his front paws on the man’s shoulders, licking him quickly before he could react. Despite himself, the sergeant chuckled. I smiled.

“Shit, it’s hard to believe,” said the colonel, staring at my face.

“They tell you all about it, then we’re expecting you, but I’ll be if it’s not a shock to see your face under these circumstances. I think the last time I saw you, not counting the tabloid crap on the television, was in Death Mission 5. Remember that one?”

I nodded, smiling slightly. It was one of my favorites. So campy, so over the top, that it was hilarious.

“Yes, Colonel, I remember it well. My wife thought it was the worst movie I ever made. She objected, I think, to the numerous fart jokes and gratuitous violence.”

“Yes, well,” his smile faded slightly at the mention of my wife, and I simply took a deep breath.

“Go figure,” said Kate softly, and I caught a humorous glimmer in her eye.

“Well, we have been expecting you. We have made two attempts so far to reconnoiter, and retrieve anyone alive if possible, over at the university. Both teams have been forced to turn back. We’ve struck out with special ops and helicopter support on foot once, and we really struck out with an attempt to drop a team into the campus by chopper. These things are like white on rice when they hear heavy machinery. We lost a few on that one. The most we can tell is that the campus is still thick with those things—they all seem to group together and move from building to building, but stay on the grounds. It’s the damnedest thing. We have moderate infestation in the city itself, but most of the large numbers have joined with one of the herds.”

“We had a big one in the city for a long time. Over at the east wall near the terminal, where our vehicle entrance is located, we almost had an issue. They got into the second backstop, and were at the gates. We burned a good number of them, but there were so many. We were able to get them moving using some drones and sonic buoys, but they eventually came back. Then, one night, they all started to move out together, to the south.”

“And now they’re coming back?” I asked, remembering Gaffney’s intel from the train.

He nodded gravely.

“Seems that way. One group coming north, a helluva lot bigger than it was when it headed south, and one more coming from the west. Also pretty big.”

“Massive, actually,” said Ky, mouth full with an apple she had been offered on her way into the tent. Bits of fruit shot onto the ground, where Romeo snapped them up. “Lots of those bastards wandering around out there.”

“Ky, damn it, what have I told you about cursing?”

“Only when we talk about the zombies?”

Actually, that sounded appropriate.

Finnigan continued.

“We think the walls can take it. We’re sinking extra pylons in the bottom supports just to make sure, and we’ve started moving the women and children to Bremerton, where they have a small secure area over the sub pens. We have a few Coasties in the bay that can take stragglers, and one ice breaker out there just working as a hospital ship, but this camp still has more than thirty thousand people, mostly Army, but a good number of civilian survivors. We’re well armed and decently equipped, but by the recent estimates, each of these herds has nearly a million shamblers. We’ve never dealt with that before. Their ETA is similar—the one from the east is due in 36 hours. The ones from the south and the north in roughly 40 to 42, depending on speed.”

I just breathed out heavily. Three million.

That was three million times the number of zombies I ever wanted to deal with again.

“That brings us to you,” he said, leaning back in his chair and grabbing two folded, laminated charts and tossing one to each of us. They looked like the maps we had been given, but with different pathways and more specific notations on them.

“As you know, your target is the laboratory at the university. On the off chance Doctor Kopland is still alive and able to carry out his research, that’s where he needs you. If we had the ability, we’d extract him and his team and try to get their lab set up here. Among the many problems with that course of action, however, is that we don’t know if they’re alive down there, and since we lack the ability to communicate with them, we don’t know if we even could set up their lab here. My guess is that we can’t. So, we’re back to yours being either a suicide mission, or a ‘save the world’ kind of thing. The engineer in me gives you a 50/50 chance. The person in me gives you better odds. That being said,” he smiled and pointed at the maps.

“The stuff they gave you in D.C. was crap,” he said, and I chuckled. “We have more specific intel here, but the fact is, no one can tell where the problems are going to spring up. We’ve marked out the locations of the herds we’ve seen—again, much smaller than the ones approaching the city—and the last spot time. Some of them stay in their areas—like the one at the university. Some of them move around. Your fastest route is marked in green, but you’ll see that it’s not a great option.”