The Coalition: Part II The Lord Of The Living (COALITON OF THE LIVING Book 2) (7 page)

He had to catch his hacker
’s limp body to keep the man from sliding to the floor of the balcony.

**

From their perch in the shadows, Ron and his new family had watched in horror as the gunfire and screaming had erupted from the Trust Tower. It had started not long after the Colonel had vanished into that place. The voice coming through the bullhorn was obviously not that of the man with whom Ron had conversed so warmly only days before. And the name being used was one he’d never encountered. ‘Stan Lieber’. He had no idea who that was, but the three of them were stunned when it became obvious the shooter was targeting the herd of elephants.

The animals had appeared shortly before, suddenly standing in the middle of the adjacent intersection. There had been no warning at all that the enormous creatures were approaching. They were just there, as if by magic, padding
up the street to stand in the center of the meeting of old avenues.

It
had amazed all three of them that the enormous beasts had been able to surprise them. There had been no sound at all to warn them that the herd was coming, and then there they were. A dozen of the giants were standing amidst the ruins of automobile husks and testing the shrubbery with their questing trunks.

“Look, Ron.” Oliver had noticed them first and had pointed in excitement, going so far as to lean forward to peer out of the window where they were watching the building.

“I’ll be damned,” Jean had answered.

And soon after that the shots had come, muffled from 30 floors above, the elephant calf
went down in a spray of red. Ron realized that the same awful weapon that had destroyed Lund and which had almost taken him apart was responsible. It had only taken a single shot to kill the calf, but several more had spattered their ways through the corpse of the baby elephant.

The rest of the herd had gone wild at that point, most of them scattering to flee into the concrete canyons of Charlotte, but a great bull and two cows had remained behind, the bull roaring up at the building.
Then the voice on the bullhorn, taunting the remaining beasts.

Worst of all had been Oliver’s reaction. He’d rushed over to Ron, burying his face in the man’s chest, his boy’s arms wrapping tightly around his waist. But the boy had not cried out. He’d just crushed his face to Ron’s ribcage to hide the sight. The little boy had emerged from the shell of a person that had survived alone for so long, and this increased the guilt Ron felt for not having taken in the boy long before. How had he allowed a child to exist like that?

While Ron and Jean had put their arms around the boy, the firing stopped and even that hideous scratching voice over the bullhorn had stopped as suddenly as it had come.

The bull elephant remained in place, shaking that monstrous head, roaring at something he could not reach. Ron Cutter knew the feeling, and he also knew that the elephants would now be out for blood. They would have to tread carefully when they went back to the streets to return to the home they now shared.

It was possible they’d even have to lay low and make their way to one of Ron’s safe houses. He had one nearby, closer than his preferred home, and had all but decided that they would move there for at least a day or so.

“Why did he do that?” Oliver’s voice broke the silence. “Why did he shoot the baby elephant?”

Patting the boy’s shoulders, thinking of the daughter he’d lost the day society had finally crumbled, Ron answered. “I don’t know, Oliver. I swear to God I have no idea.”

Jean’s hands were at the boy’s hair, brushing those locks back, out of his eyes. “Sometimes people do horrible things. Sometimes there’s no explanation at all.” She was looking into Ron’s face, their gazes locking.

“We should probably hit one of my other places instead of heading back,” he told her. “I don’t want to be walking around the streets in that direction. Not with a herd of agitated beasts like those looking to kill someone.” He tossed his brow toward the elephants. The bull was standing his ground, and the two cows were caressing the bloody corpse of the little one. He wondered if one had been the baby’s mother. Probably so. One was rocking back and forth on its pillar legs. Was that elephant grief? He wondered.

“You have one of your safe houses close
by?” She asked.

“It’s more like a safe room,” he admitted. “But it’s only half a block from here. We can go out the west side of this building and trot through one alley and we’re there. It
ain’t the most luxurious place, but it’s safe and sound. We can crash there for a day or so.”

“I know where it is,” the kid said, finally breaking his grip on his foster father. “You showed it to me once.”

“That’s right,” he replied, smiling. “I did. I remember that.”

“Then we’d better go
now, while it’s still bright outside. All of this commotion will stir up the walkers, you know.” Jean was peering out of the broken window. “I can see a couple of them now.” She pointed.

Ron looked out. There were indeed some of the things emerging from hiding. It probably hadn’t been the gunshots that had drawn them in—those had been hard to hear, having been fired from such a great height—but the voice on that damned bullhorn. That had been plenty plain and loud enough to draw out the
deaders. Even as he looked out on the pair that Jean had first spotted, he noticed more of them piling out of the buildings, like workers emerging from offices to head home after a long day at work. In spite of trying to hide his emotions, he sneered. God, he hated the damned things. If only he could kill them all, put them each and every one down for the count at last.

“Yeah, we’d better move,” he agreed. And as the trio moved back into the building to find their way to the opposite side, he could hear the moaning calls of the zombies, that sound of
mourning, rage, and unquenched hunger.

**

Stan Lieber opened his eyes.

He couldn’t move. He was not tied
or dead—he could feel his arms and legs and body, but he just couldn’t move. It was as if in one of those dreams people talk about where they can see and hear everything and need to run, but they can’t.

He blinked his eyes and looked around. The room was familiar—one of the offices that his employers had transformed into a bedroom.
Lieber never used it because the bed in it was a hospital bed—the kind that is motorized and can be adjusted. The hacker had always avoided that room. It had bothered him and made him suspicious, and now those suspicions were confirmed.

Scanning the room
, he was aware that someone else was with him, and of course he knew who that was: Lord Dale. Oh, yes. He knew who the man really was. Not just an officer, not just a British citizen, but a member of the Royal Family, albeit of a distant branch and not at all in any kind of line of succession. Lieber had unearthed all sorts of bits of information along with everything else he was doing. He was, after all, the finest living computer hacker remaining on Earth.

He laughed, and that brought the Colonel to his side. For the first time since he’d been
spotting the elephants far below, he saw the officer’s face. It was hovering over him and the expression on those fine, chiseled features was one of concern. Stan had to give the fellow that much. He really was worried about him.

But how had he gotten there?
In that room? In that bed?

Peering up
, he noticed for the first time that there was an IV drip hanging to his right. He looked down and could see the tube and needle leading down to the taped binding in the flesh below his biceps. And at that point, he realized that he was fully awake, he could sit up, and that he could speak.

“What the hell happened to me?” Stan
Lieber asked.

Dale, standing beside the bed, stared with that same concern. It was a genuine exhibition and not at all feigned. “You had another attack, Stan. You’ve been in…well…quite the state for the past week or so. I tried earlier to get to you
and administer some medication. But,” he paused. “I couldn’t quite do it.”

“I didn’t shoot at you, did I?”

The Colonel shook his finely manicured skull, his hair well cut and brushed, and his skin clean and gleaming. “No. Nothing like that. I just realized that it wasn’t the right time to try to talk with you. Or deal with…well…the situation.”

Finally,
Lieber did sit up. He felt dizzy, but fairly alert. His arms and legs were going to do what he told them to do. “I hurt someone again, didn’t I?”

Dale nodded. “Lund,” was all he said.

“And Mrs. Lund? The rest of their children?”

The Colonel reached up and adjusted the IV bag, gave it a tap
, and smiled as he saw that the drip was flowing perfectly. “She’s in safe hands. The children, too.”

Lieber
nodded. His dark face was pudgy, and one would not have known looking at him that most of the world had been suffering severe privation for most of the past two years. His height was just less than six feet and his weight was 220 pounds. He was a good forty pounds overweight and not likely to get any thinner, as long as the great freezer and pantries from which he fed were all for his benefit. To date, it hardly looked as if either had been nicked, although he went to them at least twice a day to retrieve foods that were only memories for most of the rest of the world.

Dale moved in close again and took
Lieber’s head in his strong hands. He leaned in close and peered into the sick man’s eyes, examining the pupils for dilation, the whites for signs of irritation and burst vessels. They appeared clear, fine. The Colonel knew almost nothing of medicine, but the doctors he’d slowly assembled to man the hospital in the western section of the city had told him what to do and what to look for.

Pointing to the IV bag,
Lieber asked about it. “What is that? Last few times you brought me pills. Don’t tell me I’m too far gone for capsules.” He thought about what he had done, and how things had been going. His mind was regaining its old clarity and the memories of what he’d experienced the past few days both horrified and frightened him. His mind was surely going. What would become of him?

“Frankly, it’s something like Valium,” Dale admitted. “We have you on a steady drip
, and when it’s gone you should be feeling completely back to normal.”

The programmer shifted in the bed and ran a hand through his very black, very thick hair. The tops of his ears had vanished under the raven stuff and it was down at his collar in back. Dale, he knew, would agree to cut it for him. There were barber shears back in his living quarters.

“When you’re feeling better, I want to see how you’ve done. How things are proceeding.”

“Sure,” he replied. “I think things are okay. It should all be ready for when they arrive.”

“Well, of course,” the soldier said, his comment almost a snap. “They can’t come until you finish what I need you to do.” There was a look of something—not quite disgust, but perhaps of anxiety. Lieber saw it before it vanished.

“The GPS was working perfectly last time I checked. Is that doing all right?”

“Oh, yes. Good job there. No problems. I did checks with some of my own units here and we spoke to military installations in both New York and Seattle. You’ve got every damned satellite working in perfect synchronicity and boosted to their correct positions.” Finally Dale stood away and pulled up a chair and sat in it, looking on at his charge.

As he liked to tell everyone who would listen, they were losing things every day. And the longer it went on like this, the harder it would be to regain what was lost.
He didn’t like what he was about to do, but Dr. Huntsman had told him it was best.

“What do you remember about the last few days, Stan?”

Lieber lay there for a few seconds. He didn’t move and just breathed deeply, in and then out. He lifted his left hand and scratched at the flesh around the IV needle. Finally, he spoke.

“I remember seeing the
Lunds. Several times. They thought that if they moved on the other side of the Tower that I couldn’t see them.” He considered the high-quality telescopes he had mounted around the building. Some of the lenses had allowed him to see the Lund woman’s face as clearly as if she were sitting beside him, as close as Dale was just then.

“I let them pass by a few times. To let them feel secure. And when they’d gone, I used a few places where they’d stood as targets, to get the range. There was a parking meter where they stopped to readjust
their packs once. I’d made a note of it and a day or so later, I used it for practice, to calibrate the scope I was going to use. Took me a couple of shots, but I hit the thing. Blew it completely to scrap. I’m surprised they didn’t notice; or maybe they did and just figured it for just something weird.”

He sighed, knowing that his mind had gone bad. But now, with the Colonel’s help, he would be all right. He would do his best not to do anything like that ever again.

“Continue,” Dale ordered him. He knew that Lieber was going to try to leave it at that. Huntsman had told him that’s probably what the patient would do. Best thing for it would be to bring the psychiatrist there. But of course he wanted to keep the hacker as isolated as possible. At least until the man had completed his job.