Rise (34 page)

I talked to Kim about going with us on our farmstead plan. She’s interested, and wants to bring along someone. She’s apparently found herself a boyfriend amongst the population here, and wants to bring him too. Jess was instantly all over her for details. I left them to the girl-talk and took Michael and Megan out for a walk around the area. The people I passed said hello, and I have gotten to know them fairly well. Everyone but the children was armed. It’s become so commonplace we don’t even notice anymore.

Once the weather clears and warms a little we are going to take a vehicle and go look around. I think east is the direction to go. There are plenty of good houses along the road east, and some of them have access to forested areas for hunting. A lot of our meat these days comes from hunting. I have eaten more moose and deer meat recently than ever in my life.

It’s brutally cold today. Darren and I and a bush pilot named Reggie are in Athabasca. We flew up with a load of supplies, mostly medical stuff that the town here desperately needed. We were called last second to go as escorts, due to a lack of able bodies. Too much going on, with the burning and the large numbers of undead near Cold Lake right now. So Darren and I volunteered, and took our gear and weapons. We are along purely to safeguard Reggie, since he’s one of the best small plane pilots we have left. Once we arrived at Athabasca, landing in a field leveled and cleared for small planes, we helped unload medical supplies and then got a ride into town. I went to see Amanda, and met up with her at the hospital here. She was excited to see us, and was even more excited when I gave her the CD Darren and I found. Apparently she hadn’t known that
Broken Faith
had even been released before the undead rose up. I guess this one was just off the shelf when the shit hit the fan, and she was ecstatic to have a copy. She’s doing well, and asked about Sarah and Megan and Jess, and asked me how I was liking married life. She gave me some lollipops for Michael and Megan, but then had to get back to work. She promised she and Adam would be coming to Cold Lake eventually, and we’d be able to get together then and catch up. She hugged us both as we left, and we went outside to find the guy who was supposed to show us where we were sleeping tonight.

The Calgary mission was still ongoing, I discovered. Talking to Reggie on the way to Athabasca, he told us he’d been down there after we had gone missing. The airport is secured now and a staging area for local missions. More survivors had been found inside the city, and three major “attacks” by the undead repulsed. Apparently they seem to come in waves. No one knows why. One thing they are trying to do is get a safe zone at the University of Calgary. There are important things there, Reggie told us, but he didn’t know what they were. Research maybe? Or chemicals and medicines? I don’t know. The population up at the airport is around 500 now. Living population, that is. The zombies number in the tens of thousands still.

We fly back tomorrow with a passenger. I don’t know who yet, Captain Grant from the force here will tell us in the morning. Probably a doctor or an engineer or something. If one of those comes in they seem to get rapid transit to Cold Lake right away. They are in short demand, after all.

After five days of bodyguarding VIP’s back and forth between here and Athabasca, we finally have free time. Today the group of us took a few vehicles out to look for an empty house to take over outside town. My sister was watching the children, so Jess, Kim, Darren, Eric, Mandy (newly checked out on the Browning and certified to drive too) and I drove out east, signing out as we went, and well stocked with food, water, weapons and ammo, fuel, and various other supplies. We have a claim marker to leave at whatever farm we decide to take over, and a list of the ones that belong to someone in town who might want it back one day.

We drove south first, to the road which turned east into the town of Cherry Grove. It had been cleared out a few weeks ago, and we saw no undead along the route. There were a few people out and about, waving to us as we passed from the vehicles they drove. We saw a few horsemen, armed with rifles, patrolling a forested area. We passed through Cherry Grove and saw evidence of the recent clearing of the town. Bulldozers and fire had been used to good effect, but the town was badly damaged and in need of a lot of work. Fortunately people were now living there, taking care of the place. The fences around the town were strong and the checkpoint well manned.

About 10 km past Cherry Grove we came to the rural road we had selected to check out. It wound north towards the forest and the actual lake called Cold Lake, and we had marked several likely plots on it. This whole area was considered ‘infested’ by the military at the base, so we were on our own. We had to deal with any trouble ourselves, unless we found something that warranted an extraction, like survivors, a fuel truck, or a few tons of food. So we proceeded with extreme caution. Looking around as we began the trek up the road, I was struck with deja-vu. Jess had been sitting in the passenger seat, in an almost identical pose, back when we had first approached Prince George back in BC. Our clothes were different, and our weapons and gear too, but still I was struck by it. She caught me looking, and smiled at me.

We ran into the first zombie about ten minutes later. It was a well-preserved male, though its age was hard to tell. It was standing in the road, and hadn’t moved for some time. We could tell this due to the lack of footprints in the snow. It happened to be facing us, and as we slowed down it started towards us, arms moving for probably the first time in weeks. We had decided earlier that we didn’t want any of these bastards left near us once we’d established ourselves. So that meant taking them out as they appeared. We had brought a supply of body bags and orange triangle markers for just this purpose. I stopped the truck about 100 feet from the slowly approaching corpse, and got out. I took out the special weapon I had requisitioned, and leaned across the hood, loading carefully. I aimed and pulled the trigger when the walking flesh-eater was about 30 feet away, and the crossbow bolt
twanged
forth like a bullet. My aim was pretty good. It struck the zombie firmly in the forehead, and the special head we had loaded onto the bolt blew up once inside the brain, scrambling everything into a fine goo. Some bright boy in the R&D section at the base had come up with this as a sniper weapon that was quiet and effective, and I loved it. The zombie fell forward, and that was that. We loaded him into a body bag, stuck a triangle onto the bag for visibility, and tossed him into the ditch. Ten minutes after that we approached the first house we wanted to check out.

In practiced formation we approached quietly. It looked abandoned, but undead inside wouldn’t make a noise unless they spotted us. Jess was on my left, then Kim, and to my right it was Darren and then Eric. Mandy stayed in the lead truck at the wheel in case we needed her there. We spread out a little as we approached, and Jess and Eric were far enough apart to be able to see around the corners of the house. It was a single floor ranch-style house, probably six bedrooms. The front drive was crowded with vehicles, but as we passed them we saw that all the tires were flat, and the vehicles were in bad shape. We each had silencers on our Brownings, and all of us but Eric and Jess had them drawn. Jess was holding a 12 gauge, and Eric had his C7. The plan was that if any undead came at us from the house we could destroy them quickly with silenced weapons, but if we were attacked from the flanks the heavy firepower would be more useful there. The property had once been cleared all the way back from the house to the tree line, probably about a hundred feet away. Over the summer this had overgrown with tall grass and weeds, and now the snow had buried it all in a huge pile. I was busy scanning the overgrown lawn as we passed the cars in the driveway, and so nearly missed the undead in the car nearest to me. It didn’t miss me though, and it lunged at me from the seat it was trapped in. I saw the motion, and whirled around as Kim yelled out a warning. The window was open, and its dead fingers clutched at me as I back-pedaled. It made a gargling noise, and I could see its left eye, but there was a cavernous hole where the right one should have been. Male or female, I didn’t care and couldn’t tell. It stank horribly and made further disgusting noises as it flopped and writhed, trying to get out of the car. The seatbelt was my savior. I checked the others, and they were all watching the area like professionals, so I stepped a little closer and put a bullet through the undead skull. I got a brief sight of a suit and a nametag on the breast over the heart. I leaned closer, holding my breath. It read
Elder Simmons
. Huh, a Mormon zombie. We resumed our approach, and I had an odd thought. I had two kills on this trip so far. I wondered how many I’d have before we got back to Cold Lake.

The house turned out to be empty of living or undead people, but we had a few nervous moments when we heard something rustling inside. Feral cats that we had disturbed took off into the brush. They had gotten in the back door, which was knocked off the hinges. Snow and leaves had been blown in across the floor, giving the place a desolate look that was tinged with the smell of cat shit. We decided to look elsewhere.

Further down the road were more homes we had decided to look at. We got back in the vehicles and set out, driving along slowly in case there were fallen trees or unexpected blockages on the road. Something was tickling my brain about the road here, but I couldn’t determine what it was, since we had passed a turnoff a kilometer back. I looked at Jess and asked her if there was anything funny about the road here. She looked, and told me to stop the truck. I pulled up, and we got out to take a look. The others got out too, and soon all of us were looking at the road ahead of us, unbroken snow marred only by animal tracks and wind-blown leaves. It was Eric that spotted it. He knelt down and pointed out two parallel lines in the snow, about car-tire width apart. They were under the snow of the last fall, and nearly completely hidden now. A car had passed here within a few weeks. We couldn’t tell what direction it had gone, or anything else. There had been no activity in this area from the base, as far as I knew.

The possibility of more survivors in the area excited us, and we decided to try to follow the tracks back to whatever house they had come from, or been going to. The trail was very faint, and we had to stop a few times to see the tracks again, and at one point they faded to nothing. We elected to keep going, and sure enough, about another kilometer down the road, we picked the tracks up again. Another three driveways were passed, and then we saw the snow-covered vehicle in the ditch. It was a big SUV, one of the big Toyota Sequoias, faded green, and half buried in snow and ice. The tracks ended here.

We pulled up well back from it, and scanned the area before we got out. The SUV looked like it had been driven in slowly, and hadn’t crashed. It was undamaged as far as we could see. Eric and I approached it slowly, while the others spread out and covered us. He came up on the passenger side, and I approached the driver’s side, both of us with Brownings drawn and held ready in front of us. We checked under the SUV as well, and it was clear. Eric reached the rear door and looked in carefully. It was empty, and I moved up to the driver’s door and had a look as well. The glove box on his side was open, and there was some debris on the seat, candy bar wrappers and wadded up newsprint, badly faded. A plastic bag was on the floor by the gas pedal. I tried the door, and it was open. The light didn’t come on inside, so the battery was probably well and truly expired. I reached in around the steering column and found keys in the ignition. I’d be willing to bet there was no gas at all left in the tank. We searched the vehicle, and all we found was a spent .303 casing in the back seat, some trash, and some old insurance papers in the glove box. Otherwise, it was totally empty. It was in good shape though, and probably worth salvaging once we were secure in the area.

Eric and I stepped back up from the ditch and looked around. There was no way to tell with any certainty how many people had been in the SUV, how long it had been abandoned, or where any occupants had gone. We were talking to the others about it when I distant shot rang out. There was only one, and from the way it echoed we couldn’t tell direction, but it meant there were people around us somewhere. We’d have to go looking for them.

We backed the vehicles up and turned around, heading back to check out some more houses. The second one we checked was the one we decided to keep. A two level house with a three car garage, it had eight bedrooms, a large kitchen, and a generator in a shed. There were trees all around it, though cleared back a good seventy feet, and it had a large garden that we could plant in. Nearby there were fields that with a little work we could fence in. The house was not empty though. There was a group of three undead in the yard, standing there until we pulled up in their line of sight. Two of them were children, and they had real trouble pushing through the snow towards us. The adult sized walking corpse made better attempts to close in on us, but the crossbow took care of it before it got too close. The zombie children were a simple matter once they got close enough. Eric took out one, Jess took out the other. I got three body bags out, and we carefully moved the bodies away from the road.

Inside the house was a mess. Dirty, cold, and trash everywhere. Unwashed dishes were covered in frozen food, overflowing trash containers were stacked near the back door, and filthy blankets were laid about the living room. What a mess. I was glad it was so cold. This place would stink in the warmth. We took an hour and cleared out most of the crap, while Mandy and Jess stood guard outside. There was lots to salvage here, it just needed some cleaning and some work. We traded off each hour, and by the time sundown came, we had cleaned and cleared the living room and kitchen well enough that we could use them. Eric and Darren went to see about the generator, and Kim and Jess took a look around the property. Mandy and I started cooking some food in the kitchen with our portable propane stove, and made hot tea for everyone. We bedded down and set guards, and talked about tomorrow.