Plague of the Dead (33 page)

    He turned the wheel, bringing the truck around the corner and right into-

    “Jesus! Look out!” Denton yelled.

    Brewster had time to catch a glimpse of a group of a half-dozen infected that had wandered away from the entrance to a nearby building in pursuit of Thomas’ truck before he slammed into them going forty-five. The bodies collided with the trunk and bounced up onto the windshield. A skull smashed into the glass, taking a chunk out of it. The steering wheel jerked out of Brewster’s hands, and the truck spun sideways.

    Brewster felt the world twist as the truck rolled end-over-end before slamming into the side of a building. He felt his face smash into the driver’s side window, and his vision went bright white for a moment before everything crashed into nothingness.

Edge of Hyattsburg

0912 hrs_

    Sherman braced himself as Thomas took them around their third turn, exhaling in relief as he saw open road ahead. They’d cleared the town. The truck passed the last brick store and apartment building and rolled off into the countryside. Sherman sat back as Thomas slowed the truck to a cruising pace, loosening his seat belt as he did so.

    “Jesus,” Sherman muttered. “I really screwed the pooch on that one.”

    “How do you mean, sir?” asked Thomas, taking a long drag on the cigarette that had sat, forgotten, between his lips during the entire flight through the town. Ashes tumbled off the end and onto his lap, but he either didn’t notice or didn’t care.

    “Did you hear Mbutu before we even went in there? He smelled that ambush. Should’ve listened to him. Got good people killed.”

    “First of all, sir, this is war. People die. Secondly, you really think these pus-bags have the foresight to plan an ambush? Nah, they were just lying in the shade until some food walked by-then they came at us.”

    Sherman grunted, but after a moment looked over at Thomas with a curious expression. “They waited until we were in the middle of town and then jumped us all at once. I’d call that an ambush, Thomas.”

    “They jumped us when Brewster and Krueger started yellin’ like retards in heat while running down Main Street, sir,” Thomas replied.

    Sherman took a moment to consider, but before he could offer his opinion, Thomas swore loudly and slammed on the brakes. Sherman braced a hand against the dash as the truck slid to a stop on the pavement.

    “What is it?” Sherman asked.

    “The other trucks aren’t behind us,” Thomas said, concern on his face. He opened his door and dropped out of the cab, looking back in the direction of Hyattsburg.

    Sherman snapped his head around to the side-view mirror. All he saw was the off-white paneling of the truck and open road behind them, the little town off in the distance through the leafless trees.

    “Where are they?” Sherman asked, incredulous, taking off his own seat belt and jumping down out of the truck. He circled around the hood to where Thomas was standing, peering off down the road, scratching his chin with one hand.

    “Maybe they’re just delayed,” Thomas growled over his shoulder. He glanced down at his watch. “Let’s give ‘em a couple minutes.”

    Sherman nodded, then reached up a hand to his epaulette and the radio that hung there. Franklin had given them twelve, enough to outfit the soldiers who were left as well as Denton.

    “Ghost Lead to any personnel, respond, over.”

    There was no answer. Only static issued forth from the radio.

    “I say again, Ghost Lead to any personnel, please respond. If you can’t talk, click the handset twice.”

    They waited. A minute passed, then two. Each felt like a granite hour. Every second that passed without the trucks appearing behind them weighed down on Sherman’s shoulders like the Earth must have done to Atlas.

    “No, something’s very wrong,” Sherman said after five minutes had passed with no sign. He spun on his heel suddenly and walked back around the truck, clambering up into the passenger doorway and looking over at Thomas with resignation on his face. “We have to go back.”

    “Sir, that place is crawling with infected,” Thomas said.

    “I know it.”

    “Are you willing to risk more lives to rescue people that might already be dead?” Thomas asked quietly.

    Sherman looked over at him with an icy expression. He gritted, “
Yes
. We don’t leave anyone behind.”

    Thomas grimaced and tossed his cigarette to the concrete and snuffed it out with a worn boot heel. He suggested, “Try the radio again.”

    Sherman nodded, reaching his hand up to the radio once more.

    “Ghost Lead to any personnel, anyone left in there, over?”

    Moments passed in silence as they waited for a response. Sherman frowned, then shook his head at Thomas.

    “It’s a no-go. Either they can’t answer or they aren’t getting my signal.”

    “You’re well in-range,” said Thomas. “Battery power up?”

    Sherman held the radio out so he could look down into its tiny LCD screen. The battery meter showed two of four bars.

    “Half-power left. Should be plenty,” Sherman replied.

    Suddenly, the little radio squawked, catching both Thomas and Sherman by surprise.

    “… Can’t tell if… thing on?” came a female voice.

    “Say again, over?” Sherman asked through the radio.

    “… push the button to talk, like this. Hello? Hello?” came a second voice, this one male.

    “This is Ghost Lead. Identify yourselves, over,” Sherman replied.

    “You with the guys in the truck?” came the male voice again.

    Sherman hesitated a moment before he realized the man on the other end was finished speaking.

    “Yes, I am. Identify yourself, please. And for God’s sake, man, say ‘
over
’ when you’re through so I know you’re done talking, over,” Sherman said, shaking his head at Thomas. He lifted his finger off the handset so it would stop transmitting and said to the Sergeant Major, “Gotta be civilians.”

    “Name’s
Ron
, Ron Taggart, here with Katie Dawson in the old theater. One of your trucks took out the infected outside, but they wrecked pretty big in the process. Who’s this? Uh, over.”

    Sherman looked over at Thomas with dread on his face.

    “
Crashed
,” Sherman uttered.

    Thomas nodded. “I heard.”

    “Never mind who I am. How are my people, over?” Sherman asked.

    A sound like a heavy sigh drifted over the radio before Ron spoke again.

    “Well, we counted eleven. Four survived. The truck ran right up against the building! Just smashed-totally smashed. We saved who we could and got back inside before those things showed up again. Think they were following you from wherever you were running from. Oh, yeah-over.”

    Sherman slumped against the roof of the cab. Seven more dead. He’d lost more people in one morning than he had since the Battle of Suez. He’d underestimated the strength of the infection, that was for sure.

    “What shape are the four in, over?” Sherman asked after a few seconds.

    “Banged-up, but decent. Got three people and a soldier. Two of ’em are awake; got thrown out of the bed before the truck hit the wall. Cuts and bruises on them. We pulled two more out of the cab who lived, but they’re both out cold. One’s got a broken arm. You want to pick ‘em up? Because it’ll be tricky business right now. There’s about twenty of those things out in the street, over.”

    “Think we can handle twenty?” Sherman asked Thomas over the roof of the truck.

    “Sir, I doubt we can handle ten with our ammunition situation. Not to mention-there’s probably five pistols between everyone in this truck. Most of us would just be bait.”

    Something tickled at the back of Sherman’s mind, an idea, perhaps, that struggled to rise to the surface of his thoughts, but before it developed, it faded away. Sherman shook his head a little to clear the sensation that he’d just missed an important bit of data.

    “I hope you’re not thinking of charging back in there the way we are now, sir,” Thomas went on. “We still need you to lead us away from here when the day’s done.”

    
There it was again,
thought Sherman. That prickling sensation was back.

    “Hello? Still there?” came Ron’s voice through the radio.

    “Yes, we’re here. Hold a moment, over,” Sherman said. “Thomas, what did you just say?”

    “I said, ‘
We still need you to lead us away from here when the day’s done
.’”

    “No, before that,” Sherman said, making a tape-winding motion with one finger.

    “Uh, I think I was saying most of us would just be snack food at this point in the engagement, sir.”

    
That was it
, Sherman thought.
That’s what I was missing.

    “Ron, if I was able to get those infected out of the way, would you like to get out of there, over?” Sherman asked.

    Thomas fixed the General with an inquisitive stare.

    “
Would I?
” came the reply over the radio. “‘Course, you’d have to get rid of them first, and I’d like to see that happen, over.”

    “Sit tight, son. I’ve got an idea.”

Old Theater

1845 hrs_

    Brewster awoke with a start, sitting up in a burst of motion, gasping at a half-memory lodged in his brain. He immediately regretted it, hissing in pain and holding a hand to the side of his head. Instead of a wound, his fingers touched the soft fabric of a bandage.

    “It’s not that bad of a cut. Wish I could say the same for some of those other people out there,” came a voice.

    Brewster looked up into the friendly face of a man a year or two older than himself. He was perched on the edge of a desk in a dim room, sipping on a flask. There were a couple of large projectors set up, and a far wall held a rack of thick reels. Brewster noticed a box of canned vegetables lying half-empty in the corner, surrounded by several empty cans.

    “What do you mean about the others? And where am I?” Brewster asked, voice scratchy. He cleared his throat, wincing at the pain it caused in his head.

    “You’re in the old theater. We pulled you and a couple others in after you crashed. The rest we couldn’t help.”

    “Who are you?” Brewster asked next, pulling himself to his feet, using the cinder-block wall as a support.

    “Good question. Name’s Ron. You are…?”

    “Brewster’s fine.”

    “I see. Well, Brewster, sorry about your uniform-we tossed it in the furnace downstairs. There was blood on it-figured we’d better not take the chance any of it was infected,” Ron said, standing up off the desktop and pocketing his flask. Brewster noticed he wore a heavy machete on his belt.

    “Don’t worry about it. You saved my ass, I guess. I’m not going to sweat a uniform,” Brewster said. He glanced down at the nearly-new pair of jeans and plain t-shirt he’d woken up in, and asked, “Where’d you get these clothes?”

    “Theater joins with the thrift store next door in back. We ducked across a while ago and brought over some things. Haven’t been any infected in the alley yet, but the only way out of it is straight through the mob in the street outside.”

    “Well-thanks.”

    “Don’t mention it,” Ron said. “Come on, you’re the last one to wake up. The rest are downstairs in the lobby.”

    Ron led the way down a narrow staircase, resting a hand on the hilt of his machete and talking all the way.

    “This place was built back in 1934. Lots of old architecture in it, but it’s solid. No windows on the lower level, and the doors have nice old iron bolts, and they’re solid oak. We’re safe enough inside. Hell, we’ve been safe here since the virus hit.”

    “When?” Brewster interrupted. “I mean, when did you start getting sprinters popping up? We really didn’t expect the infection to have spread this far or we’d’ve been a lot more careful before we came in here.”

    “About a week, maybe a week and a half ago,” Ron said, shaking his head. He and Brewster came to the bottom of the staircase and headed through the theater past rows of seats toward the lobby. He continued, “It was…
terrifying
. It spread so fast we barely knew what hit us. The first infected was a cop who’d gone to Portland to volunteer with the relief and refugee effort there. He came back with it. I’d say twelve hours after he turned the city was pretty much up shit creek with no paddle. You’ve got to understand, it’s not that we couldn’t defend ourselves, it’s that we didn’t get together to wipe out the things early, before they got a foothold. We boarded up our houses to wait it out, and they picked us off pretty quick, house-by-house.”

    “You guys made it through alright,” Brewster commented.

    “Yes, but there’s only two of us.”

    “There’s another guy boarded up in a warehouse on the other side of town, too.”

    “I’m sure there are others who fended them off, but the truth is, we’re fighting a losing battle. We can’t live holed up in a theater for the rest of our lives. We’ve got to try to bust out. That’s where your friends outside come in. They’re cooking up some sort of a plan. We’re still waiting for them to get back to us.”

    “Who? Sherman?”

    “Sounded like an older guy on the radio. Oh, yeah, sorry, I took it off of you when he started transmitting. Here it is,” Ron said, reaching into a pocket and withdrawing the small radio. He handed it to Brewster.

    “So we’re going to run? Where’s my gun?” Brewster asked. “We might need some firepower.”

    “You weren’t carrying one when we brought you in,” Ron told him, shrugging.

    Brewster cursed. He’d left it lying out on the seat of the truck. It was probably sitting out in the wreckage somewhere.

    “Is that all you’re packing?” Brewster asked, nodding at Ron’s blade.

    “Yeah,” Ron replied. “We’ve been wanting to get into the sporting goods store a street over, but it’s too dangerous. Besides, it’s probably been picked clean by now. Anyway, the machete works.”