The Dead Series (Book 3): Dead Weight (34 page)

Thinking that the worst was
over, the Captain smiled and said in an upbeat voice, “I prefer a cooler temperature, sir.”

“Good, then you’ll like it in Minneapolis on Dead Duty,” Eastridge told
him. “You’re dismissed, Captain.”

After the man slinked out the door, the Commandant picked up his phone and told his aide to
put in a satellite call to the communications center in Fort Polk and patch it through to his office. It took twenty minutes for it to go through, in which time the General filled out the Captain’s transfer orders.

Picking up
the phone when his aide told him they were connected, Eastridge asked, “Who am I speaking with?”

“This is Lieutenant Dwight, sir,” came the reply. “Your aide explained the reason for the call and I already have
the information you’re requesting. I’m sorry to report that the radio transmitting the call dropped off line about thirty minutes ago. It wasn’t abrupt, like they’d been overrun, and the operator even signed off after saying that they were changing their location, sir.”

“Can you triangulate the
ir position?” Eastridge asked.

“We’ve already done it, sir,” Dwight told him. “
We put them roughly ten to fifteen miles to the west of Jasper, Texas. In a previous conversation we monitored that they had with another group of survivors, they stated that their position was further to the south, but we surmise that they said this so they wouldn’t give away their exact location to any marauders in the area.”

Eastridge mentally ran over the assets they had in east Texas and Louisiana
while at the same time taking into consideration the need to keep the operation low key. He could dispatch a search and rescue helicopter, but how would he explain his actions if they came to the attention of the Joint Chiefs? He was already pushing his luck by using his contact in the NSA. On top of that, orders had come down a few days ago stating that no military assets were to be used in rescuing or contacting any civilians. The rationale behind this being that the military needed everything at their disposal in their fight against the dead. This was the reason Polk hadn’t responded to the distress call in the first place. Additionally, the people they were trying to find were now on the move. He knew they were heading south, but with all the back roads in the area, it would be like looking for a needle in a haystack.

Deciding that he wouldn’t make a move until he found out exactly where these people were, General Eastridge said,
“Lieutenant, I want you to continue to monitor the radio for this particular group. If you hear from them again, you have my permission to contact them. Get their exact location and then call me directly. I don’t care if it’s four in the morning, as soon as you hear from them, you need to call me.”

“Yes, sir,” Dwight replied.

“Now hold on the line, I’m going to transfer you back to my aide. He’s going to give you the direct number to my office as well as another number where you can reach me at night.”

After hanging up, Eastridge leaned back in his chair and stared up at the ceiling. He wanted to do more
, but his hands were tied. Ever since the Joint Chiefs had received the report on the latest successful test of the Malectron, it was full steam ahead on that project, and to hell with everything else. The Chairman himself had ordered that all testing at their other facilities be suspended, and that their personnel and equipment be transferred to Doctor Hawkins if he needed it.

This
, coupled with the order to abandon any and all civilians, made Eastridge feel as if he’d made the right decision. He knew for a fact they had refugee centers that were only at half capacity, and his suspicions were that the Chairman had an ulterior motive. In fact, the man had almost come right out and said so when he told the Joint Chiefs at their last gathering that he wanted the military to be the only armed force in America. He explained that if all the gun-toting survivalists were wiped out, it would make it so much the easier once order was restored.

Leaning forward, Eastridge picked up a file and went back to work, his attention often wandering to the phone on his desk as he willed it to ring.

***

Staff Sergeant Fagan stood in front of Major Cage’s desk and
asked, “Do you believe that shit they said about Lieutenant Randal going AWOL, sir?”

With a grimace, Cage said, “About as much as I believe
in the Easter bunny.”

“So what happened to him?” Fagan asked.

“They probably transferred him to one of the Dead Cities,” Cage replied. “The resupply chopper came in that morning before Hawkins went out, so my guess is that they put him on it to get him out of the way. They must have seen us together and gotten suspicious after we rescued those people at the processing plant.”

“Do you think they’d
really go that far?” Fagan asked.

Cage shrugged and said, “It’s not like they
killed him or anything.”

“Think he told them about us
helping him trying to delay Hawkins?” Fagan asked.

“We have to assume he did,” Cage said
with a grimace. “I hate to think that way, but we can’t take any chances. That means we’ve got to lay low for awhile. We need to concentrate more on finding someone who’s immune, rather than slowing Hawkins down.”

Fagan shook his head and said, “I haven’t heard anything from General Eastridge since we talked to him that first time, sir.”

“Do you think he’ll come through?” Cage asked.

“He said he would, sir.” Fagan replied and then asked, “So what do we do in the mean time?”

“We wait,” Cage replied.

CHAPTER TWENTY

The Happy Hallow Insane Asylum:

After Heather pulled
through the gate and stopped, she siphoned the last of the gas from her truck and split it between the four vehicles they would be taking. Once she was done with this, she helped Steve load the others into the minivans and Brain’s truck. Steve told them to leave their doors open in case they had to retreat to the house, and asked one last time if any of them wanted a weapon.

They all declined.

Once everyone was situated in their seats, Steve went to stand by Tick-Tock at the .50. They had decided to use it outside of the fence because if they fired it from inside, they might tear the uprights in half if one of the heavy rounds hit them. They might be leaving, but Grimm and the raggedy twins would still be here and would need all the protection they could get.

Steve
still had one hope, and it was slim at best. The woods were too thick for the dead to make it through, so they had to come down the road. The lane that led to the asylum from the highway was a quarter mile long, meaning the dead would have to actually come looking for them. They had discussed this possibility constantly, but in the end, it came down to whether the Z’s would sense them and come after them or continue on and join the mob to the east.

It was a tossup.

The coin landed wrong and the first of the dead appeared forty minutes after Heather pulled inside the compound. Because the trees grew so close to its sides, a light fog still hung on the road. It made the dead appear as shadowy figures at first, but there was no mistaking them by their lurching walk. Steve counted five, so he told Tick-Tock to hold his fire. They might be stragglers who just happened to turn while the rest of the dead herd continued on. They would take these silently, so they didn’t attract any attention.

Waving to where Grimm was standing
by the gate, Steve hefted his baseball bat and said, “We’re up.”

Like a wraith, Grimm seemed to float across the ground as she moved forward.
Within seconds, she was at his side and they both stepped forward.

“You take the two on the left and I’ll take the three on the right,” Steve told her.

Grimm laughed and said, “How about I take the three on the left and you take the two on the right?”

“However you want to do it as long as we do it quietly,” Steve told her.

The Z’s picked up speed and started whining when they saw Grimm and Steve. Completely naked, except for one still dressed in a fireman’s jacket and helmet, they carried a variety of wounds leaking black puss. One was missing an arm and another a hand, while a third moved on stumps, its legs gone below the knees. Surprised, Steve could see that the double amputee moved faster than the others, so he concentrated on taking that one out first.

Readying himself to swing for the nosebleed seats as soon as it came
within range, he saw motion out of the corner of his eye. He turned to take a quick look and saw Grimm move forward with her scythe at the ready. In awe, he watched as she sidestepped the charge of the legless thing while reaching back with her scythe and hooking her blade under its chin. With a sharp tug, she took its head off before swinging around in an arc that cut another zombie in half at the waist. She jumped out of the way of the two dead sections while she reversed the blade and swung in the other direction. This connected with the third Z and sliced through both of its outstretched arms.

Steve took
a step forward but suddenly realized that it was too late for him to get into the fight. Grimm was like a whirlwind as she leapt between the two remaining Z’s and spun in a full circle. Her blade hummed as it cut through the air before taking off the tops of both heads. Before their bodies even hit the ground, she had reversed direction and buried the tip of her blade in the top of the head of the Z she had cut the arms off of. Moving slower now, she almost sauntered as she approached the Z she had cut in half.

The dead
creature squealed as it tried to reach out at her. Grimm stopped and rested her scythe against the ground. Steve watched as she waited until it had crawled to within range, and then, almost too fast to follow, she cut off its head with one swing.

Grimm turned
to him and said with a laugh, “Or maybe I’ll take all five and you can watch.”

“I’ve never seen anything like that in my life,” Steve
said in awe.

“That’s how we roll here at
the Happy Hallow,” she told him.

***

Standing outside the passenger door of the minivan she would be riding in, Mary looked at Sean sitting in the middle of the front bench seat and said, “So far, I’ve only seen a couple of Z’s and Grimm took care of them.”

“So they might have missed us,” Sean said hopefully as he leaned over
, trying to see around the truck in front of them. “I heard you all saying that they might miss us completely.”

“Don’t hold your breath,” Mary told him. “Those things seem to be able to smell
us.”

Sean shifted nervously in his seat and said, “If they do miss us, we need to stay here. That was the recommendation of the committee.”

Mary shook her head and said, “No matter what happens, we leave here today, and that was the recommendation of our committee.”

Looking at her in shock, Sean asked, “You have your own committee?”

She pointed to where Steve was heading toward them and said, “Yeah, and here he comes.”

They watched as he stopped at the lead truck and talked to Denise for a moment before
he turned and headed back toward the gate.

Denise got out of her truck and came back to relay his message. “Steve said that they took the first few out
, but to get ready because they can hear the main group moving down the highway.”

“Hear them?” Sean asked.

Denise held up her hand for silence, “Listen.”

They all paused, and t
he faint noise of a thousand dead voices whining and hissing could be heard. Sean’s eyes got wide and he started visibly shaking. Reaching for the driver’s side door, he tried to open it.

“Sit your ass down,” Mary told him.

Sean keep pawing at the door lever, so Mary pulled out her pistol, grabbed it by the barrel, leaned in and rapped its butt against the back of his head like she’d seen people do in the movies. This shocked him into immobility, but then he started hyperventilating. The people in the back of the van yelled in outrage at the treatment of their leader, so Mary reversed the pistol and pointed it over the seat at them, slowly tracking it back and forth.

Excited and horrified by the fact that she had
just hit someone for the first time in her life, her voice was high-pitched as she said, “You need to shut up and listen. Stay in your seats and you’ll be fine.”

Everyone in the back of the van
froze as they looked down the huge bore of the handgun.

Surprised that they obeyed her, and not realizing it was the gun that caused them to shut up
and not what she said, she stuck the pistol back in the waistband of her pants and said, “Now, don’t worry. Everything is going to be all right.”

Her
words turned into a lie when the noise of a rifle firing, and then the hammering of the .50 caliber heavy machine gun, split the quiet Texas morning.

***

Steve was only halfway across the field when he saw the mass of Z’s coming down the road. Jumping forward into a sprint, he was at Tick-Tock’s side in seconds.