The Zombie Virus (Book 2): The Children of the Damned (29 page)

He had hoped to find them at the Annex, holed
up and okay. If the team had had a problem, the Annex was where
they would have headed. Now the mystery was deepening. He hoped
that on Statler he would find a trail of breadcrumbs consisting of
dead crazies that would point him in the direction that the Stryker
had traveled after they had drawn the remaining mob off of the
HEMTT. They drove around to the shopping center, encountering a
handful of straggling crazies that Shavers immediately dispatched
with the big crushing tires of the armored troop carrier. He turned
onto Statler Boulevard and at once saw the missing Stryker sitting
four hundred meters up the road. He felt his stomach drop as they
got closer, and McCully called down that the deck hatches were
open. The bodies of the crazies were so thick on the road that he
was sure his wheels never touched pavement. They rolled past the
Kroger and approached the abandoned eight-wheeler. The Stryker
crunched over the dead bodies and pulled up adjacent to its sister
vehicle.

“Murchison, check it out.”

The pretty, long-legged woman easily jumped
between the two decks and with her rifle shouldered and ready, she
looked in each open hatch. After checking each opening she promptly
dropped from view through the last hatch into the abandoned
Stryker.

“It’s empty,” her voice came across the radio
before her head appeared above the deck again. It looked like they
had got out in a hurry. However, the lack of blood or bodies
indicated that they had indeed escaped the vehicle. She swiped a
strand of her auburn hair out of her eyes and examined the carnage
around the Stryker. She didn’t see any Army ACU uniforms on the
mostly naked bodies packed around the troop carrier’s chassis. They
had to have escaped. She glanced over at McCully on the other
Stryker and shrugged her shoulders, pulled herself up onto the
deck, searching further out from the two vehicles, and saw two
trails of dead bodies. Up Statler the bodies lay like scattered
toothpicks until they were lost from sight around the far bend. To
the east a scattering of bodies blazed a trail to a large building
that looked like it had once been a Walmart or Lowes. The setting
sun reflected off of something yellow blocking the shattered
double-doors on the front of the building, and she could see a
mound of bodies piled in front of and around it.

As effortlessly as a deer bounding over a
stream, Murchison leaped back onto her Stryker.

“Over there,” she said to McCully, pointing
toward the building. McCully squinted his eyes in that direction,
then nodded his head.

“Look at our two o’clock,” she said over the
radio.

“Roger. I see it,” Shavers responded. “Looks
like they fortressed up.” They all could hear the relief in his
voice.

Sarah and Jeremy poked their heads out of the
rear hatches while the First Sergeant steered the vehicle toward
the building. Murchison sat down on the deck next to the big
machine gun and smiled at McCully.

“It looks like we might be able to salvage
today after all,” she said to him in her silky voice.

McCully smiled back at the older woman. “I’ll
have to show you my appreciation for spotting them later.”

She smiled back at him and winked.

Shavers pulled the Stryker up to the front of
the long, single story building facing the blocked opening. A
yellow industrial-sized diesel forklift had been parked across the
opening from the inside. Bodies littered the ground around it;
their blood had spread into large, drying pools beneath them.

He again left the engine idling and vacated
his seat, climbed out of the front hatch, and surveyed the
barricade. There was plenty of room to scramble over the top of the
machine, which meant that the crazies had probably made it
inside.

“Ferguson, are you well enough to join me on
a Sunday walk?” he asked Sarah when her bandaged head again popped
up through an open hatch.

She nodded.

“Okay. Ferguson and Murchison on me. McCully,
stay with the fifty.”

“I’m going too,” Jeremy announced.

Shavers shook his head. “I need you here
guarding our backs.”

“I’m going with Sarah,” Jeremy said,
preparing to follow her out the hatch.

“Boy, you’re staying here. That’s an order!”
the big First Sergeant growled. He had no time for insubordination
from this kid.

Jeremy glared defiantly at the man, however,
he made no move to follow. Shavers climbed down from the Stryker
after the two women.

“I’m not one of his soldiers to order
around,” he said out loud to no one.

“Little man,” McCully said, “when you
volunteer for a mission with the big man you’ll do well to
understand that for all intents and purposes that he is God and his
word is law.”

Jeremy climbed up through the hatch onto the
deck and sat down with his rifle across his lap, facing the
building’s opening to watch the group’s approach. “I can fight as
good as either of those girls.”

The private laughed. “Yeah, but you also
still got a lot to learn, son.”

The trio quietly approached the blocked doors
of the warehouse from the side, avoiding the piles of bodies
leading up to it. There was no getting around the large, heavy
vehicle, and trying to get over the top of it would leave them
vulnerable to an attack from the inside, not to mention having to
crawl across the infected pools of blood that covered the machine.
Shavers climbed carefully up on the pile of stiff, dead bodies that
were heaped practically to the door of the forklift, nearly losing
his balance as his boots slipped on the slick, blood-soaked naked
corpses. He pulled the latch on the machine’s Plexiglas covered
door and was rewarded with the latch releasing and the door pulling
open.

He climbed up into the cab of the forklift,
leaning across the seat with his rifle pointed out into the
building’s interior. Whoever had parked the machine had left in a
hurry, leaving the port-side door wide open. The building was dark
and quiet. He signaled for the two women to follow him and crawled
across the seat, silently dropping down the other side onto the
cool concrete floor. He assumed a knee and had his rifle ready and
shouldered when Ferguson and Murchison dropped through the open
door beside him.

They moved into an isosceles formation with
the First Sergeant on point, and headed deeper into the building.
Every step they took echoed loudly through the vast space, inviting
trouble from anyone or anything that heard them.

“Radio check,” Shavers whispered, keying his
mic.

“Five by five, First Sergeant,” McCully
replied in his earpiece.

He had hoped that if Heinlich or any of his
squad were within range he would have received a reply from one of
them.

Somewhere in the depths of the rows of
stacked merchandise they detected a murmuring sound, almost like
low voices in a never-ending conversation. It was a sound all three
had heard before—the babbling gibberish of the crazies.

This wasn’t a sound the First Sergeant had
wanted to hear. If his men were alive and well in the building, the
only crazies in here should be dead crazies.

The sound seemed to be emanating from
somewhere to the rear of the building, which stretched easily
another one hundred meters ahead of them. He led them deeper along
the dimly lit and cluttered rows. The concrete floor was covered
with a thick layering of dirty discarded clothing and blankets.
They cautiously moved between the tall rows of shelves, until the
First Sergeant signaled a stop. Up ahead a bright light illuminated
the back of the warehouse, allowing them to see a small group of
crazies pacing around the far wall, as if searching for something.
Shavers made sure the two women had eyes on the tangoes before
proceeding.

The light was from an open loading dock door
and the crazies were meandering in and out of it. He signaled
another halt thirty yards short of the creatures and they all
assumed a knee on the floor amongst the piles of cloth that they
could see had been formed into piles of bedding. This was where the
swarm of crazies slept.

Behind him Ferguson let out a muffled gasp.
She nudged at a small bundle with the muzzle of her rifle. At first
he thought he was looking at the naked form of a discarded plastic
doll, and then he saw the blood soaking its skull and realized he
was staring at a dead baby. A dead crazy baby.

He’d seen enough. His men weren’t here.

Shavers signaled a retreat and the three
hurried from the aisle undetected. They climbed back through the
forklift and into the late afternoon sunshine.

Ferguson broke formation and ran back to the
Stryker, tears coursing down her cheeks.

“Why are there dead babies in there?” she
cried when Shavers and Murchison caught up to her.

“It’s their offspring,” Camilla remarked
coldly. “Someone did us a service by killing them.”

“Are you okay?” Jeremy called down from the
Stryker, concern evident in his voice when he saw the distressed
look on Sarah’s face.

Sarah nodded without looking up at him. “How
do we know that the babies are crazy like the adults?” she
asked.

“It wouldn’t be too hard to tell,” Shavers
answered, then climbed aboard the Stryker.

The First Sergeant told McCully and Jeremy
what they had found, and his assumption that the squad had vacated
the building through the rear loading dock doors. As far as Shavers
was concerned, the rescue mission was a wash. They weren’t going to
find the missing squad now, not if they were on foot in the
sprawling city. It was time to get back to Gypsy Hill and let the
lost squad make the next move.

They took a circuitous route back to the
armory; it was a safe route that led them through the remote roads
cutting through the surrounding farmland and dense woods. In under
an hour they were pulling through the gate and into the relative
safety of the Thomas Howie Memorial National Guard Armory on Gypsy
Hill.

An hour after First Sergeant Shavers pulled
the lumbering Stryker into the compound, Sergeant Heinlich appeared
leading the ragged remains of his squad through the gate. There
they collapsed in exhaustion against the side of the building with
the loss of Benton heavy on their hearts.

They failed to see either the two dark shapes
shadowing them in the deepening dusk, or the mad, bloodshot eyes
that followed their every movement behind the fence until darkness
fell heavily across the compound. The two creatures faded back into
the gloom of the trees and the night swallowed them whole.

Chapter Ten

The convoy of trucks and cars snaked down Route 81
past cars and semis long abandoned and left to the eternal
elements. Lamar slowed his SUV down as he approached the group of
refugees. The group of eight, four women, two men, and two small
children, were paused in the southbound lanes watching the
cavalcade of vehicles approach with hopeful expressions spreading
across their faces. They had been pushing shopping carts full of
supplies, two of them with the children seated in the baskets. They
were dressed in an assortment of heavy winter clothes against the
cold, biting wind which had been blowing out of the north all day.
They stood gaunt and tired as the vehicles pulled to a stop around
them, whatever trials and tribulations they had endured on the road
weighing very visibly on all their shoulders.

Lamar glared at their expectant white faces
as he approached and felt nothing except contempt mixed with
hatred. It had been beat into his head since his first coherent
thoughts as a child born into poverty in the ‘hood that these
motherfucking crackers were the cause of all his people’s problems.
They had repressed the black race since first tearing them away
from their native tribes in Africa and subjecting them to the
horrors of the Atlantic passage only to have the survivors be sold
into the hardships of slavery in a country far from their homeland.
That repression at the hands of the whites had never ceased. The
latest atrocity had kept them bottled up and in deprivation in the
ghettos of every city of the nation. Now that the crackers’ world
had collapsed, it was the black man’s turn. The only restitution
now to be extracted from their pale ugly hides would be their blood
running in the gutters.

We
gon
be
havin’
sum
fun
with
dem
white
-
ass
bitches
first
! he said to
himself as they crept up on the group and shut down their engines.
He stuck his piece in the back of his pants and looked at Roshawna,
who now sat in the passenger seat.

“We gonna smoke all dere asses ‘cept dem
women.”

She smiled knowingly at him and pulled the
charging handle on her AK. There was no need to tell anyone else in
the crew what to do. This wasn’t the first group of these
honkey-ass motherfuckers they had encountered. On the first
occasion they had spent some considerable time making the
snow-white assholes suffer, and they had died slow and painfully.
As much as his crew had enjoyed the sport in giving back some of
the pain that each of them had had to deal with all their lives,
the men were simply too dangerous to hold onto. This time they
would take the bitches for stress relief and quickly kill the
rest.

He stepped out of the Escalade and walked
casually up to the group, his hands empty and visible and a smile
creasing his dark face. Roshawna stepped out next but stayed hidden
behind the door. The rest of his crew approached on either side of
their vehicles, their weapons out of sight, although within easy
reach.

The two white men stared at the approaching
man with suspicion, their hands on the sidearms strapped to their
belts. Lamar felt his anger build when he saw the distrust in their
faces.