The Coalition: Part II The Lord Of The Living (COALITON OF THE LIVING Book 2) (6 page)

Dale knew where the computer programmer liked to linger on days when he went out to fire the weapons the Colonel had been so unwise to install. There were windows and balconies up there between the 27
th
and 31
st
floors where the crazy man lived and worked. That was where the danger lurked, but Alastair knew to watch for movement there and make sure there was no obvious danger. Too bad Mr. Lund hadn’t had that information. All the Colonel had been able to impart to the dead man was that he needed to stay away from the place. The loss of his oldest son had obviously not been enough to keep him from the most dangerous locations around the building. What else could Dale have done?

Peering up, he saw that
Lieber was visible on the northwest balcony on the 30
th
floor. It was, after all, the man’s favorite spot from which to shoot. The mound of deaders lying below at the intersection was impressive, even as Dale watched the shooting commence and a zombie stumbling dumbly across that intersection went to pieces. The part with the heads and arms still attached was crawling along, and Lieber continued his fire, doing his best to turn the moving half of the deader into bits.

The Colonel took that moment to scoot across the street, running a gauntlet of brush, of newly grown shrubs, passing by the withering husks of abandoned autos and pocked concrete barriers placed here and there.

At the building, he made his way to the solid steel door inset just at street level, and he inserted a key into the lock, opened the door, and vanished inside. There was work to be done.

**

From their hiding spot in the window two floors above the very spot where Colonel Dale had paused to scan the street with his periscope, Ron, Jean, and Oliver looked down as Dale vanished into the mysterious building across the way.

“See?” Cutter said to his family. “I told you that guy was up to something.”

Jean and Oliver just nodded in the shadows.

**

Once inside the Trust Building, Dale locked the door securely behind him. The door was unbelievably stout. Solid steel with a triple lock that could likely not be breached with anything less than a couple of pounds of high explosive. And if there was anything the Colonel knew well, it was high explosives. He’d been initially trained as a sapper; his knowledge of the basics of engineering were considerable, and his expertise in how to knock that stuff down with explosives was even more vast.

He paused, peering up the staircase that loomed steeply before him. This access to the building had always been considered for emergency use only, despite the solid door. Anyone wishing to use it would have been in possession of the keys necessary to get in or out. These days the only person with such a key was the Colonel himself. He’d made it a point not to allow
Lieber to have a set, even though the programmer had asked for them on several occasions. Because of this, he never expected to encounter the hacker at this entrance or even on the long climb to the floors above. But because of the other man’s mental state, he never knew exactly what to find when entering the place.

Dale also
wondered what the other denizens of the city would think should they encounter what he was now experiencing at this moment: air conditioning. He couldn’t hear the compressors or even sense the rumble of the huge generators that were supplying power to several floors of the Trust Building, but he could certainly feel it as the air descended upon him from the heights. It was an almost forgotten pleasure that he never tired of finding. It was one more thing that would soon be lost for a very long time if things didn’t change for the better; and soon.

This stairwell ascended at such an extreme angle that the steps were all but in the face of anyone using them to go up. It was something almost more akin to a ladder t
han a stairway. He went up slowly, the way lighted by dim panels that kept him well out of total darkness, but did little more than that. He could see where he was going, but he couldn’t make out any details in the subdued illumination. And that was all right with Alastair Dale. He counted his way up the tower, heading toward the haven preserved for the man most precious on Earth to the officer: Stan Lieber.

Saving his energy, he proceeded slowly, in a calculating way. Now and again
, he stopped to catch his breath and to listen. There were actually only four landings on the way up—access spots where one could move from the stairwell onto various floors. But until you hit the 30
th
floor, those places were dead spots, open to the elements, their contents long succumbed to water and heat, ice and cold. Nothing on those floors was worth a second glance. Still, he paused at each of them, putting his ear to the steel doors to listen, sometimes hearing scrabbling from the opposite sides. He supposed that there were dead on some of those floors, people perhaps trapped there since the last days and wandering the halls and rooms in search of flesh. Or maybe he heard only the stirrings of the wind, or the going and coming of buzzards, hawks, and rodents. He didn’t know, and he really didn’t care. All that was important to him was the preservation of a vision for the future, and that vision was Colonel Alastair Conway Dale’s vision.

Alastair C
onway Dale, fourth Earl Conway of Darnesbury, House of Lords.

**

At the 30
th
Floor, he stopped to catch not only his breath, but to pause and gather both his strength and his nerve. The last time he’d made such a trip for this purpose, he’d had quite the physical struggle on his hands. And it had not been the kind of thing to which one had become accustomed over the preceding two years. This was not a battle with a dead thing that you could destroy with a round from a pistol or a blow from a truncheon. He didn’t want to kill this particular possible adversary. In fact, he wanted nothing more than to preserve the man’s life so that he might complete the task to which he’d been assigned. And it was Dale’s mission to see to that end.

And the Colonel was a man of determination.

Waiting, hearing only the very slight and very low whine of cool air whistling barely through the rubber seals of the doorway, he steeled himself and put his shoulder to the door. He would disengage the lock and push that door open swiftly, using it to shield himself somewhat before he stepped through. He’d never known Lieber to move about the hallways with one of the .50 caliber sniper rifles, but if he had descended to that level of insanity, the door would not really do him any good. Still, he would use whatever tools were at his disposal.

Silently, on hinges oiled and maintained by the Colonel himself, he pushed the door open, encountering only silence. But the images that met his eyes these days
were like something from a fairy tale.

The hallway was covered in rust colored carpet that lay below walls of cream-colored paint. The acoustic ceiling tiles were pale and bright, electric panels showering the spaces with illumination that was adequate without being irritating to the eye. And cool air, set to an ambient 72 degrees no matter the conditions outside
, greeted the Colonel. He felt that cool air caress and surround him. It was indeed a kind of Heaven.

Other than that, there was nothing. This world was preserved like some kind of miraculous bug in amber, and in total quiet. He couldn’t even hear those generators that he knew were laboring away in the depths, fed by
what could only be described as a sea of diesel fuel. Those generators, that fuel, these floors, all were for the sole purpose of providing the last great living hacker access to the tools his species needed to conduct a final task. Now it was up to Colonel Dale to make sure that the programmer could recall why he was there, and to make certain that he was sane enough to do it.

Although he had a pair of pistols—both .45s—he kept them holstered. He was there to save the man, not kill him. Instead, he unzipped the belt pack on his right hip and fingered what was inside. It was safe, the seal unbroken. Clenching his jaw, he straightened his posture and set off. He couldn’t even be certain that
Lieber was on the 30
th
Floor, but he suspected that he would be there. It was where he generally resided, preferring those quiet spaces to where the servers were kept on the two floors above. Keyboard and screens were the man’s tools—great memory banks and whirring hard drives seemed only to frustrate the man.

Methodically
, the Colonel began to move down the central corridor. If the hacker was on that floor, he’d almost certainly have noted the change in air pressure when Dale had opened the door. It would have been hard for anyone—even someone suffering from psychosis—to miss something like that. But the other man could be anywhere. The Trust Building was enormous, and even a single floor such as this one contained dozens of rooms. The officer had familiarized himself with the place over the months, but that didn’t mean he could assume where Lieber would be. Especially now that his…episodes…were increasing in severity and occurrence. He walked on, stopping at each room to peer inside.

The latest event had been the worst for quite some time. He’d locked onto the Lund Family for obvious reasons
, when you knew how to read the pitiful bastard. Lieber had been sitting up there in his protected tower looking down on the folk who scrabbled about below, eking out a bare existence while he lived in luxury. Somehow, spying Mrs. Lund through one of his half-dozen spy-scopes, the programmer had decided that he would take her for his own and all he had to do was kill off her family. First it had been her eldest son who’d been killed. That was when Dale had first taken more severe action. He’d actually come to the tower with one of the physicians in tow, to find Stan quite agitated and completely without reason, almost raving. The doctor—Watson Jordan—had helped to find a decent combination of medicines to get the hacker back on something resembling a sane footing.

But the medicines that had done the best work had dwindled. They’d moved to other combinations and compounds that either had lesser results or were ineffective. And the last time
the Colonel had seen his most valuable of wards, the fellow was about as close to stark, raving mad as that tired epithet could describe. That had been just before he’d rushed back down to the street to rescue whatever was remaining of the Lund Family. Fortunately, they were already under the competent protection of that fellow in the little penthouse: Ron Cutter.

The Colonel rather liked Cutter. The man had proven resourceful beyond expectations. He’d not only survived this undead apocalypse, he was thriving in it. Such a man could be quite helpful in the coming months, to achieve what Dale hoped to see done before he took his leave of this mortal coil. In fact, the Colonel knew precisely how he wanted Cutter to help him and just where to put him to do the maximum…

He froze when he heard the shot.

It was that goddamned .50 caliber sniper rifle again. The Colonel cursed the day he’d thought to bring those guns into the tower. It had seemed like a good idea at the time. But the sound was coming, he knew, from the balcony on the northwest corner of the floor. So that meant that
Lieber wasn’t lurking somewhere about to ambush the good soldier, and he was at least feeling competent enough to operate the gun. Also, he wasn’t firing at the Lunds, who were now safely inhabiting protected space in the west of town, where Colonel Dale ruled with a velvet glove.

There was a second shot and the soldier picked up the pace, all but running to get to the other side of the building before the shooting came to a halt. As long as the crazy man was shooting his gun, then he wasn’t going to be paying attention to the arrival of his only friend.

Halfway to the balcony, Dale heard something that all but brought him to a halt.

It was
Lieber’s voice, but expanded dozens of times. The idiot was using a bullhorn! What the Hell? As he continued to trot, he focused on the oversized voice:

“I see you down there! You fucking giant! You fucking giant I’ll kill your babies so you can’t get in! I see you down there!” And then the voice stopped and there was a pause followed by another of the monstrous reports of the .50 caliber. Even now
, Dale could see in his mind’s eye the jolting of Lieber’s shoulder as the weapon kicked.

What was he doing? To whom was he talking?
Giants? Babies?

And then it hit him, just as he emerged at the great sliding doors that led out to the balcony. Stan
Lieber’s back was to Dale as the officer stepped out onto the wide, shelter space. He could see over the madman’s shoulder and to the street very far below where the elephant herd had once again wandered into town. Lying on the street was the shattered, bloody remains of one of the elephant calves. And roaring back up at the tower was the lead bull, his head shaking in rage, his ears flapping as he torqued that massive skull, roaring at the tormenting murderer he could hear but not see.

Lieber
had the bullhorn to his lips again. “Yeah, that’s right! Stan Lieber will kill you! He’ll  destroy you all! Fucking spawn of the devil!”

Reaching into the belt pack
, Dale produced the hypodermic he’d placed there that morning; the needle loaded and prepared by the physicians with whom he’d spoken. And without giving his charge time to so much as lower the bullhorn to retrieve that dangerous firearm again, the Colonel uncapped the business end of the needle and jammed it into Lieber’s neck, depressing the plunger.