The Dead Series (Book 3): Dead Weight (29 page)

Randal made a muffled reply, so
Hawkins waved Tru forward and said, “Take his gag off and tape his head to the back of the chair, I have some questions for the Lieutenant. Make sure you stretch the skin on his forehead and his eyebrows upward so he has trouble closing his eyes.”

When this was done, Hawkins stood behind the bound man so he couldn’t spit on him and said, “Tru here, or as you know him, Sergeant Cain, followed you to your little tryst with Major Cage and the
Staff Sergeant. I need to know what you told them.”

“Nothing,” Randal replied in a rasping voice. “They’re just friends.
We drink and play cards together sometimes. I ran into them and they asked me if I wanted to walk the perimeter with them.”

“But you told
them about the people at the processing plant,” Hawkins said in a harsh voice.

“I told him they were there,” Randal admitted. “But I said we ran across them on a patrol and that the
re were too many for us to evacuate. Major Cage told me he went to evacuate them with his men since it was his duty.”

“What did you tell him about our experiments in the field and here at the farmhouse?” Hawkins asked.

“Nothing,” Randal said, “I adhere to my oath as an officer and stand by it.”

“I think you’re lying,” Hawkins said, and then nodded at Tru to give him a jolt.

The phone was cranked up slowly. As the current rose, Randal’s body tightened and shook against its bindings. A gurgling noise came from his throat and saliva ran from the corners of his mouth.

Hawkins made a cutting motion with his hand and the crank stopped.

After giving him a moment to recover, Hawkins said, “That was only a taste of what you’ll get if you lie to me again. Every time you lie, or if I even think you’re lying, the length of the shock gets longer and the voltage goes up”

“I’m not lying,” Randal said weakly.

Smiling benevolently, Hawkins said, “I guess we just need to find out if that’s true.”

Lieutenant
Randal lasted two hours before his heart gave out.

He told them nothing.

***

Major Cage woke to a knock at the door of his trailer. Shaking off his grogginess, he looked at the wind up clock on his bed stand and bolted out of
his cot. He hadn’t slept past eight in the morning in over twenty years, and here it was almost ten.

As he reached
the door, he asked, “Who is it?”

“Lieutenant Tanner, sir,” came the reply.

“Come in,” he told his aide, then returned to his room to get ready for the day.

Upon e
xiting the bathroom, he found Tanner holding a mug of coffee for him. Upset that the aide had let him oversleep, he said, “We are not the Navy or the Air Force, Lieutenant. We don’t sleep past zero six hundred. Why didn’t you wake me when I ordered you to?”

Taken aback, Tanner said, “But it was the doctor’s orders that you get some rest to help you get over the cold you’re coming down with, sir.”

“Cold?” Cage said as he started to get angry. “Do I sound like I’m sick?”

“No, sir,” Tanner answered in a quiet voice. “You sound like you’re getting pissed though, sir.”

Still groggy, it took Cage a few seconds for all of what Tanner had said to register. When it did, he asked, “Which doctor?”

Hoping his aide would say
Connors; his heart sank when the man replied, “Doctor Hawkins, sir. He came to me early this morning and said that you were coming down with a cold. He told me that you needed rest and not to disturb you, sir.”

“And where is the doctor?” Cage asked, already knowing.

“He and his people left this morning at 0630 through the main gate, sir.”

Knowing it was too late to do
anything; Cage took the offered mug of coffee and sipped from it.

***

Two of the people at the schoolhouse hoisted the last box of MRE’s up to the second story as the rest leaned out the windows and cheered the soldiers who delivered it. As the huge, four-wheel drive truck pulled away, some of the survivors felt a sense of loss, but this was quickly replaced by the knowledge that they would be rescued within the next few days.

The group’s leader,
Capp Williams, distributed the food packs and water before gathering everyone in a circle to say grace. When they finished, they sat down where they were and tore into what they all decided was the best meal of their lives.

Over forty
teenagers had taken refuge in the school when the dead started to walk the earth. Between losing some to the dead when they went out foraging, an attack by a gang of raiders and the occasional suicide, from these original survivors there were now only twenty-two left.

Capp had lived alone before D-Day and worked at the local hardware store as a clerk.
He’d been watching the stories on the nightly news about the HWNW virus, but decided they didn’t concern him since it was something going on in the big cities and not rural Arkansas. His first encounter with the dead happened when he was coming home to his trailer after grocery shopping. The number of shelves that were empty had surprised him, but he managed to find everything on his list.

After parking in front of his trailer
, he grabbed as many plastic bags off the seat as he could handle. With five in his left and one in his right, so he could still use his keys to unlock his double-wide, he turned from his truck to find a drunken woman suddenly stagger out from between his place and his neighbor's. Stumbling along, it appeared she’d been at it hard for at least a few days straight. She seemed to be searching for something when she stopped and looked around in a daze.

Capp s
hook his head in disgust then turned to go inside, but his attention was grabbed as the woman let out a whining noise. As he looked closer at the woman, he could see that her face was a bluish-green color and she had black puss leaking from what looked liked bite wounds on her neck. His first thought was alcohol poisoning and rough sex, but then he looked at her eyes. Wild and feral, they stared out of her face like two pieces of coal.

Feeling a jolt of fear, since he knew drunks to be unpredictable, Capp
slowly edged for the door of his trailer so he could call the police. Johnson County was a dry county, so at the very least she was facing a charge of public intoxication.

He made it to the bottom of the steps before the woman noticed him.

When she did, she let out a whine that chilled Capp’s blood. Then she leapt toward him. The distance was only a dozen feet, so Capp knew he had to react fast. Using the only weapon available, and thanking the Lord that it was full of canned goods instead of eggs, he swung the bag full of groceries in his right hand in a wide arc. It connected with her face and staggered her back enough that she lost her balance and fell on her butt.

Thinking it was over, he was surprised when she shook
her head a few times and slowly started to get up from the ground. Capp wondered if the woman was on PCP, as he hurried to open his door. He barely had it shut and locked before he heard her hit the other side. Fumbling for the phone, he dialed 911. It took over a minute before the operator answered the call, only to tell him it would be at least an hour before they could send someone. Then she asked him a funny question.

She asked if he’d been bitten.

It actually took the police two hours to get there. When they did, he watched as the two cops drove up, got out of their car, and without a word shot the woman in the head, then got back in their car and drove away.

That was when he knew something w
as terribly wrong.

Over the next few days, more and more of his neighbors died
, came back, and had to be put down. By now, the news was out, so Capp decided to find some place a little safer than his trailer. He loaded up as much food as he could carry, grabbed his shotgun and his hunting rifle and headed for the woods until the authorities got it all straightened out.

He’d barely made it two miles when he ran into a group of over twenty of the dead.

Capp zigzagged through the woods and eventually lost them, but he’d been thrown off his original course and wasn’t exactly sure where he was. He could see I40 in the distance, so he decided to parallel it until he found a landmark. Coming across the school, he could see it was already fortified. He knew where he was now, so his first thought was to bypass the school and follow through with his original plan instead of asking for refuge. His idea of survival didn’t include locking himself in somewhere that he couldn’t get out of quickly when those things showed up.

H
e was cutting across the front lawn of the school when he heard a young female voice call out to him. Trying to ignore her pleading tone, he eventually stopped to find out what she wanted.

As he un-wrapped the foil from an MRE brownie and took a bite, Capp
looked at the kids sitting in the circle with him. Aged twelve to seventeen, they had taken refuge in the school and reinforced its first floor to keep the dead out but didn’t know what to do next. They were running out of food and water, and when they saw him passing by, had asked for his help. Unable to let them die, Capp decided to join them. It didn’t take long before he became their leader, and somehow or another they’d managed to survive.

Crumpling up the wrapper from his food pack, Capp watched in satisfaction as they did the same. He was constantly on them about sanitation
since he didn’t want to have to try and treat dysentery if it raised its ugly head.

He pointed
to a girl at the other side of the circle and said, “Jane, relieve Greg on watch and send him down here for something to eat. While you’re on the roof, check the tarps to make sure they don’t have any leaks. I can feel a lot of static electricity in the air, so that might mean it’s going to rain tonight. I want to catch as much water in the tarps as we can. Looks like we’re still going to be here for a few days.”

She immediately jumped up and hurried to the stairs
, knowing what Capp meant about the static. It felt like all the hair on her body was standing on end. Whatever was coming was going to be a real doosey.

Half way up the stairs she was met by Greg coming down. Stopping when he saw her, he said, “We’ve got a couple of shamblers coming our way. Go tell Capp.”

Not frightened in the least at the news, she nonetheless hurried back to the second floor classroom they used as a dining room. Entering, she saw that someone else must have already spotted the dead because
Capp and three of the other kids were readying the swings. Even though they were off the beaten track, they still occasionally got an unwelcome visitor or two, so Capp had come up with the idea on how to deal with them.

The dead would
stand below whatever opening they saw a person in, so a concrete block tied to the end of a rope was slowly lowered out of the window above them as it was swung back and forth. When it had enough of an arc and enough speed, it was dropped level to smash into the side of the shambler’s head.

A few of the kids were calling out to the raggedy creatures staggering across the overgrown front lawn of the school, and Jane was about to join in baiting the dead
thing, when suddenly everyone fell silent. Moving forward to see what had caused this; she pushed one of the younger kids out of the way and looked through the window.

Her hand flew to her mouth and she gasped in horror at the sight of dozens of shamblers coming
out of the woods. The most they had ever dealt with before was six at one time, so she wondered what they would do.

Jane c
almed a bit when she remembered one of Capp’s favorite things to say to them when they were feeling overwhelmed. He would ask them; ‘how do you eat an elephant?’ And they would answer in unison; ‘one bite at a time’.

Jane turned to grab one of the swings when she heard Capp suddenly say, “Oh no, oh
God no.”

Looking back out the window, she now s
aw hundreds of the dead converging on the school from all directions. Frozen in fear and shock at the sight, all her senses died as she stood locked in place and watched as more and more of them appeared. Her vision went black, and by the time she came out of it, the shamblers were pushing up against the front wall of the school.

Her senses came back in a rush
, and she saw the other kids running for the stairs and heard the whining voices of thousands of the dead. Capp had pulled her away from the window and was trying to use a swing, so she picked up one of her own and moved forward to help him.

Readying her rope at
the window to his right, she leaned out and watched as the concrete block Capp was swinging dropped lower and lower toward the mass of dead. The block made its final arc only to smash and shatter dead hands and arms reaching up as they tried to grasp at the food above them. There were so many outstretched arms that they stopped the swinging block before it could reach a single head. Those dead, who were still able to, grabbed onto the rope and pulled violently. The force of the tug was so great; it threw Capp off balance and almost yanked him out the window.