Rise (18 page)

She turned back and I stepped away a few paces. She raised the gun and aimed, and I heard the shot.

We buried Master Corporal Chambers today in a field under a huge tree. I don’t know what kind it was. We took his weapon, a C7A1 Assault Rifle and four clips, which was on his horse. We took his tags and notebook, and I took his military ID as well to turn in. Sarah made notes on his condition when we found him, his final requests, and his body’s location in his book, and gave it back to me. I put it in the glove box in the Odyssey, in a plastic bag. There wasn’t much else on the horse. He must have left a lot of stuff behind when he fled. Christie has taken to looking after General Veers. We have him tied behind the F350 on a long rope so he can walk with us. If we find a horse trailer we’ll grab that, since we can make better time that way.

We have been talking about heading up to Swan Hills to see if we can intercept the Army unit there. We’ve decided against it, because we have no idea if they’ll even still be there by the time we arrive, and we didn’t think to ask what CB channel they might be listening to. We are going to head for Cold Lake. The prospect of several
thousand
survivors there is a comforting one.

We found a horse trailer at the first farm we approached, but it took some work to get it. It was mired in mud, and it took about an hour for us to work it free. We cleaned it out, washed it with some water from the nearby pond, and led General Veers inside it. He took it well. We hooked it up to the F350, and just as we were getting back into the vehicles we heard a motorcycle running. We looked over and saw someone on a road rocket flash by. I had a brief image of a red helmet, leather jacket, and black jeans. The bike was blue, and was doing about 140 kph. By the time we had run to the road the person was long gone. He or she had come from the same direction we had, from Hinton.

I wonder who it was. Has he been following us through BC? Did he come up from southern Alberta? I really want to know who it is and why he was alone, how he’s survived.

The undead are slightly thicker in this area. We haven’t seen any at this particular farm, but there are more than we were used to on the roads. Quite often they are in or near cars, or standing in ditches or fields. They’ll see us and start lurching towards us, some running a few steps before they fall and got up to do it all over again. They seem a little more weathered here too, a little more rotten. We saw some that had bone showing through the rotting flesh. And yet they still move, still want to devour us and tear us apart. Well, maybe that’s not correct. Maybe it’s an instinct; maybe they don’t actually
want
anything?

The few we have seen we have driven past. We saw no sign of the soldiers’ camp anywhere, but we weren’t looking very hard either. Just up the road is Westlock and we‘ll try to get through it or go around it, as needed. Hopefully there won’t be any trouble.

It was raining and I was in the leading vehicle, the Odyssey, with Darren (I can drive fine, just can’t shoot the carbine two-handed), Jess, and Michael. We were approaching Westlock from the west, and from a few thousand feet away on the highway we could see that there was a barricade up across the road. Our best guess was that the town had tried to seal itself off when all the shit hit the fan. We stopped a few hundred feet from the barricade, and looked at it through scopes and binoculars. All across the highway there was a chest high barrier of earth and wood. We could see an earthmover behind it, and several other vehicles, mostly trucks and quads. There was a second barrier as well, concrete highway dividers, and a pile of sandbags. And there were a lot of corpses. In front of the barrier were several dozen bloated bodies, none moving. Cars were parked to either side of the road, leaving a long empty run towards the barricade. We couldn’t see anyone moving on the other side of the barrier, and there was a hole through it wide enough for a car to drive in. Something was bothering me about the scene, though I had no idea why until I handed the binoculars to Sanji. He took a good long look, and then said that it looked like the barrier had been blown in from the outside. I asked what he meant, and he said it looked like someone outside had used a big vehicle like a plough to breach the barricade.

What did this mean? Would we be finding groups of raiders out here, who moved from town to town taking things by force? Or was it the military, getting into the town
after
it had been overwhelmed? We didn’t know. What we did know was we needed to replenish our water supply, and the hospital here in town was likely to have some supplies we’d really like to get our hands on.

We drove up to the barricade and into the gap. Inside were more bodies, and we stopped to check them out. Many had head wounds, but quite a few did not. Several had obviously been alive when they were shot down by bullets. Living men had killed each other here. This only raised our fears of raiders. We moved in with extreme caution. There were no walking dead in sight, so we moved slowly down the streets, coming to a large grocery store in a mall. The IGA was being renovated when the disaster struck, and was unfinished. The doors were shattered, blown in by a vehicle, in all probability. Bodies were everywhere. They littered the streets closest to the barricades, and gradually dwindled as the distance increased. By the time we had reached the high school there were very few to be seen, and the school itself looked intact. Only one broken window was visible. It was big, solid looking, and had steel doors. Across the street was a museum, with a sign saying “Visitor Information”, but I doubted anyone was going to be in there to help us.

We reached the center of the town, an unlikely intersection of 100th Street and 104th Avenue, and according to the map there was a hospital to our south. To the northeast a water tower was looming up, behind several rows of houses. Only a few unmoving bodies could be seen here, lying on the curbs or sidewalks like they’d been pushed out of the way of vehicles. Abandoned cars were everywhere, and the front doors of the nearby gas station were shattered and lying next to the cash register on the pavement. The entire town was silent, an eerie quiet that made our skin crawl. We couldn’t hear birds or animals above the rain, but I imagined there must be none here. Most animals we’d seen were freaked out by the undead.

Turning south we went only a few blocks to 93rd Street when we saw the hospital. It was small, only one floor and probably less than fifty beds in the whole thing, but it had an Emergency Room, an ambulance door, and probably a trauma unit. There was a helipad outside too, but no helicopter. It was right at the south end of the town, and there was a barricade here across the south-bound road. It was the same as the one to the west, earth and wood.

The front doors were closed and appeared undamaged. The rain had washed the dust off the cars and trucks still parked in the lot, making them look almost new. It actually stopped raining as we arrived at the hospital, and we parked our vehicles facing back the way we had come, just in case. Darren took a picture of the front of the hospital with a digital camera he’d grabbed someplace. We decided that Darren and Adam and Jay would stay outside and watch the vehicles, and call us on the radios we’d salvaged from the farm earlier if anything happened, or if walking corpses showed up. They’d guard Michael and Megan, who would be in the Odyssey. Their job was to make sure the kids got away if the undead showed up. The rest of us were going inside, in search of whatever treasures the place could offer.

We approached as a group, but spread out when we got before the doors. They pushed open easily, and we looked into the darkness, lit only sporadically by the dim light filtering in through windows and skylights. We could smell the rot even before we took a step inside. Bandanas soaked in water with a tiny bit of bleach went over our faces, and we all had guns and flashlights ready, as well as backpacks to carry whatever we found. Sarah also told me that if she could find stuff for a proper cast, she’d make me one on the spot, so my arm wouldn’t heal wrong. She was worried the bones would heal curled, and I’d lose a lot of mobility.

In we went, myself and Sanji first with the Glocks out, followed by Sarah and Christie with shotguns, and Jess and Amanda bringing up the rear with the rifles. This wasn’t some sexist “manly men go first” bullshit either. Sanji was leading because he was a former cop, and I couldn’t hold the damned carbine with two hands. That happy gun and the assault rifle were outside with Darren and Adam. We had all single shot and lever action guns inside.

We all searched. First and foremost we looked for people, alive or dead or undead. It was potential suicide searching a building for gear before searching for zombies. We
had
to clear it before we could relax. With a building like this, with lockable fire doors at various points, we could clear a section at a time, search for goodies, and then move on. It gave us breathing room to do it this way.

We searched and found the source of the rotting smell. There were no bodies at first, but it looked like the place had been ransacked some time earlier. Sarah looked around a room and said whoever looted were amateurs, and didn’t know what they were doing. Too much valuable gear and medicine had been left behind. Eventually, about three hallways down and four rooms to the left, we found bodies. Sanji went in first, and then waved us all out. He looked pale when he came back, but said it was safe, there were no zombies inside the room. I asked him what it was, and he just shook his head and didn’t reply. I went inside, and I really wish I hadn’t. There were four women’s bodies inside. They were all naked, all looked like they were young and pretty in life, and all had been shot through the chest and head at close range. The bodies were all tied down. I turned to a corner and threw up all the lunch I had eaten a few hours before. The wreckage in the hospital, and now this, pretty much confirmed the worst scenario I had in mind. From the talking and swearing I could hear out in the hall, Sanji must have told them what he had seen. Sarah burst in and grabbed me, hauling me out of there, and then Jess and Amanda were in there too. Christie looked even more scared than usual, and stayed out in the hallway until the others came back. Sarah, after a minute, said she thought they’d been dead a few weeks, but she wasn’t sure. Jess just looked pissed. I think if she’d had one of the men who did this there right now he wouldn’t have lived another five seconds. This gave us something new and more terrifying to worry about than just the living dead. The undead weren’t deliberately evil, so far as we could tell. Living people preying on other survivors pretty much defined evil for all of us now.

An hour later we had cleared the building completely. There were a few more bodies, three men and another woman, all executed in another area, and possibly tortured as well. It was very hard to tell, they were so decomposed. There were no zombies. We spent the next forty-five minutes taking the bodies into the morgue and wrapping them all up in bags. It was the best we could do for them under the circumstances. Then we spent some time getting me a new cast, sorting medicines into bottles for transport, and loading a few essentials into the vans. I was on my last trip through the building when I heard shooting from outside. Jess was with me, and we dropped what we were holding and sprinted for the doors. On the way I grabbed the radio and asked what was going on. Darren replied that a large pack of dogs had appeared, and had started circling Jay, looking like they wanted to attack. Darren fired a few shots to scare them off, but they were still there. We got to the doors just in time to see Sanji and Christie come up from another hall, and Sarah and Amanda were already there. Outside the others were all inside the vehicles, and a pack of nine dogs, all looking shaggy and thin, were circling the vans and sniffing around. Jess leveled her rifle and told me to open the door. I pushed it open and she aimed and fired. One of the dogs fell, a Doberman, with a large hole through its chest. She wasn’t kidding around, and she aimed at another one and pulled the trigger. A collie fell, and the rest scattered, retreating from the vans and running when she shot another one in the hindquarters as it fled. Of course, any undead within earshot of those shots would be attracted here now. Hopefully there weren’t too many in the area, but we definitely had to go.

We loaded what we could, painkillers and bandages and all kinds of gear and medicines. Really I have no idea what half of the things Sarah told us to grab do. She said we needed them, so here they are. It took about 20 minutes to get everything stowed away safely, and we are really starting to get crowded in the vehicles. Darren let out the alarm that he could see some undead approaching from the south. We all looked, and sure enough four of them were making their slow, persistent way towards us. We had plenty of time, but we still hurried and got out of there as quickly as we could. No use tempting fate.

We drove back towards the main intersection, and it was our intention to go east again, then veer north down the highway towards Athabasca. When we looked down that road we could see an approaching mass of walking dead. Thirty or so of the hungry fiends were shambling towards us, and some broke into a jog when they saw us. We accelerated through the intersection northbound, just as the first of them reached out to grab at the windows. It did them no good, and many fell. Looking back I saw at least three crushed by the tanker truck. We were then clear of them and accelerating north along the road out of town. This would have been great if the road wasn’t also blocked by an earth and wood barricade, nine or ten trucks and cars, and three school buses. Damnit! We couldn’t stop, the undead were behind us and relentless. We turned instead, a left onto a residential street. I saw a sign that said 104th Street. How big was this town anyways? It didn’t look that big. The street led back to a point north of the high school.