Winchester: Over (Winchester Undead) (18 page)

January 2
nd

Groom Lake, Nevada

It was two o’clock in the morning and Cliff was soaked with sweat, hanging from a pipe in the ceiling above the drop-ceiling tiles. The last four hours had been an utter disaster. Cliff had run out of ammo for his FNP90 and resorted to using his pistol, which wasn’t suppressed. Then he ran out of ammo for his pistol, and was running for his life with nothing but his Emerson folder in his sweaty hands. He had missed the stairs, and was now hiding in the ceiling above a janitor’s closet on the second level below ground—the levels were numbered in descending order.

After opening the manhole above ground it took Cliff about ten minutes to climb down to the first level. In the first few minutes in the facility he had seen no signs of life, dead or alive. The facility had electricity and the lights were on, but it looked deserted. How wrong he had been.

On the first floor he had encountered only two undead security personnel. The security guards’ pistols and ammo were still on them; Cliff hadn’t taken them in order to save weight, but now he wished he had.
Another bad choice in this series of fuckups.

He had to either make it to the fifth level to the storage area, or back up to the first level to the re-killed security guards to get their pistols and ammo. Regardless, he had to first get past the hurdle of the undead below him, on the other side of the ceiling he was hiding in.

Immediately after running his rifle dry of ammo, Cliff had transitioned to his pistol, letting the rifle hang by the sling. He lost count but estimated that he had taken down around seventy undead so far in the facility, and he was still in the primary underground facility. After he reached the fifth level to resupply, he had to make it to the seventh level to pull the hard drives from the labs used in the Kali Project. From there he could reach one of the tunnels that connected the primary facility to the hardened bunker.

He hoped that some of the people involved with the project had fled to the bunker when everything had started to go wrong, and that some of the people needed for the continuity of government were still alive and well in the bunker. However, at this point, he had his doubts that he would find anything other than what he had found so far—a large underground tomb of
undeath.

The shuffling and moans below the ceiling were getting quieter, which was a good sign. He was confident he could take a single undead with his knife, even two, but the eight that had chased him into hiding would have taken him down without a doubt.

Still grasping the hanging pipe, Cliff reached down to the ceiling below and gently pulled up on a dislodged tile. A sliver of light broke the darkness, and he could see only a single zombie, facing away from him and beginning to shamble away from the janitor’s closet he was hiding above.

Too bad the building had correctly built firebreaks between the rooms, or he could have simply worked his way to his destination while above the ceiling tiles. Cliff pushed the dislodged tile out of the way and, hanging from his hands before dropping to the floor, landed quietly on the balls of his feet. He quickly pulled the Emerson knife and drove it into the side of the zombie’s head. He wasn’t sure where the other seven zombies had gone, and quite frankly didn’t care, as long as he could get to the stairwell.

Reaching the double doors at the end of the hall, he took a moment to listen against the doors for movement in the room. He couldn’t hear anything, and he tried to visualize the space from his visit here about ten years ago. He remembered the room being about one hundred feet across, with the doors he needed to access at the far end, and a large number of cubicles and offices throughout the room.

He pulled his keycard out from under his sweat-soaked shirt and touched the radio frequency (RF) pad on the right side of the door. The door clicked unlocked, and he pushed it open quietly. He had no ammo, so wanted to sneak into the room and through it. There were about thirty undead standing motionless towards his left.

At his right stood a desk, and on the desk was an old government-issue desk stapler that looked like it was fifty years old, and weighed nearly as much. Cliff picked up the stapler and threw it over the heads of the undead, crashing it against the far wall. They snapped out of their trance and began lurching towards the new noise. Cliff ducked behind a cubicle wall and moved quickly and quietly in a crouch towards the doors at the far wall. About halfway across the room the undead lost interest in the stapler, and Cliff broke out in a sprint for the doors.

Reaching the doors, the moans growing louder behind him, he slapped his keycard against the RF panel and the doors opened with a satisfying click. He burst through the doors and leaned against them until he heard the click of the lock re-engaging. Standing in the dimly lit concrete stairwell, Cliff tried to slow his breathing. He was almost there, he thought. Maybe his chances were starting to look up.

Big Bend National Park, Texas

Sandra stood security watch, and as the sun began to rise she put their trusty blue enamel kettle on the Coleman stove for the morning coffee. It was bitterly cold in the desert this morning, but it still felt better than the last few mornings. She had come to terms with the terror of the previous afternoon, and felt that the group had reached a point where they could take hold, stake a claim, and survive for their future. As light dawned across the clear winter sky, she knew the kids wouldn’t be asleep much longer. Even at the end of the world, toddlers slept in for no one. She dug through the food stored in the FJ, taking out what she needed for Will and Keeley’s breakfast. Milk for both kids was reconstituted from powdered milk.

Just as the water for the coffee began to boil, Jessie emerged from her and Bexar’s tent, yawning. Jessie had sat the first night watch and had therefore had the longest uninterrupted sleep, but she still felt like she needed to sleep for a couple of days just to catch up.

“Hey Jess, if you don’t mind taking care of the coffee, I want to dig through some of the books we took yesterday. Maybe I can find something useful to help us out here,” Sandra greeted her.

Jessie nodded silently, and Sandra walked to the Scout to the pile of books that had spilled across the backseat. She pulled them out one-by-one, making stacks of books on the trailer, separating the non-fiction from the novels. She was hoping to find something that would make identifying edible plants easier, or something similar. Most of the books were coffee table-type books with photography and local area art, which was interesting but of little survival value for the group. She hoped one day that she would once again have a coffee table to place books on.

She stopped when she found a book titled “The ARRL Handbook for Radio Amateurs,” and set that apart from the others. They had found a handheld amateur ham radio in Malachi’s cache in
Maypearl, but hadn’t used it yet since none of them knew how to operate it, nor had they had the chance to try and figure it out.

By now the boys were awake and up, as were the children. Leaving the rest of the books piled around the Scout, Sandra brought the amateur radio book over to the group. Holding it up, she asked, “Don’t we have a ham radio from Malachi’s cache? If anyone else still has one working, maybe we could find them?”

A huge grin spread across Jack’s face. “That’s exactly what I need! Malachi was the commo expert, I never did more than just dabble with some two-meter radios a long time ago. I hadn’t planned on losing him, so I never really spent any time learning about it.”

Jack spent the entire breakfast with the book in his lap, reading as he ate. The mood in the group was much higher than it had been for days. Sandra took Jack’s finished plate from him, and he went to the FJ and turned on the
Yaesu radio. He switched the radio over to the 70cm band and began slowly cycling through the channels. After nearly five minutes, everyone held their breath as a weak voice came through the radio’s speaker.

“…
yeah, well, Marfa’s pretty much burned to the ground, and Terlingua is once again a ghost town, but I think there are a few families scattered out on their ranches that are still surviving … no ... rumor … biker gang … Odessa … south
…”

They never heard the other side of the conversation, and the transmission they were receiving kept garbling in and out, but now they knew for a fact that there were other survivors in the area. They weren’t all alone in the desert.

Bexar looked up, realizing he was staring at the radio speaker, and found everyone else doing the same. “Well, the good news is that there are at least two other people out there who are surviving, but the bad news is that it sort of sounded like the bikers might be near Odessa and heading south from I-20. That might mean they’re headed towards El Paso, but that could also mean they’re headed towards Fort Stockton.”

“Do you think they’re headed here? How could they have followed us?” Jessie said.

“I don’t know Jess, besides the lone biker scout we shot at, I’m not sure they knew we were there, much less where we were headed. I mean, we drove across a lot of Texas to make it here, and if they were really following us, why did they go up to Odessa instead of down the road following us?”

“What do you think we should do?” Sandra asked Bexar.

“Well, I’d love to get somewhere we can get better reception and see if we can communicate with the people we heard on the radio today. Then we can decide if we want to stay here, or keep running. If we stay, we’ll need to decide if we try to lay low and hide, or if we should build up and fortify our position.”

Jessie asked, “So where can we get better reception?”

“I’m not sure, babe,” he replied.

“What about Emory Peak?” said
Jack. “That’s the highest ground we have.”

“Sure Jack, but we’d have to go through the Basin first to get to the trailhead, and we just got run out of the Basin by a bunch of hungry zombies.”

“What if we took a few days and cleared them out systematically, with a better plan and better tactics than before,” Jack replied. “Then we can still relocate up to the cabins like we wanted to in the first place. I know I’d feel safer surrounded by the mountains than out here in the desert. Besides, it would be a shorter hike to Emory Peak from the cabins than from here.”

It was a lively discussion that lasted for the better part of an hour, but in the end they agreed to continue using their current camp near Cattail Falls as their base, but to start clearing the Basin. They weren’t going to run any longer; this was going to be their home.

Groom Lake, Nevada

Cliff glanced at his watch and saw that it was now seven o’clock in the morning, nearly five hours since he had clung to the pipe in the ceiling for his life, which included nearly an hour of hide-and-seek with the undead quartermaster in the storage area before he was finally able to get some more ammo for his rifle and pistol. Cliff had finally beaten the zombie to death with a heavy-duty government desk chair that looked like it had been made before FDR was president. Cliff giggled, remembering his chair-bludgeon, and realized that his mind was slipping due to stress, lack of food, and lack of sleep.

He topped off the magazines for his pistol and his rifle, and switched out the batteries for his weapon lights, night vision scope, and flashlight, all of which used CR123A batteries, by design. He then put two more twelve-count boxes of batteries in his go-bag, and since he was alone and the quartermaster was really dead this time, Cliff took the luxury of digging through a case of MREs to find the meal he liked best, the Chicken Fajita entrée. Normally, you got to eat what you got to eat and that was it, but he felt he deserved an extra perk for his morning’s efforts.

February 2
nd

Groom Lake, Nevada

One month had passed since Cliff had first entered the underground facility at Groom Lake. At the time he hadn’t realized that the entire complex was a death zone; not a single person was left alive; instead, several hundred undead wandered around the secret facility.

The food supply had been cached with the intent of keeping approximately two hundred people alive and fed for over a year. There was no way Cliff could ever consume that much food before it started to go bad. Checking the date stamps, he estimated that he had about five years left on the MREs. Beyond that, there were enough weapons and ammunition to start a convincing religious cult, and there were even crates of the old woodland battle dress uniforms, or “BDUs,” so he was also set for clothing.

Even with all the time and effort he’d spent over the past month
fighting and killing the undead trapped in the halls, rooms, and passageways in the facility, he still hadn’t been able to access the Kali Project labs four levels below him. Nor had he made it out to the full communications room, the “hut,” that was near the aerials above ground. The hut was accessed through a tunnel from the third level and was nearly a half-mile long. There was limited communications access in the bunker, but full access could only be found in the hut, and full access was the only way to contact any of the other facilities, that is, if they were still operational. Because he knew from first-hand experience that the two premier and best-equipped facilities, Denver and Groom Lake, were both dead zones, Cliff didn’t hold out much hope for the others. NORAD wasn’t even a hardened facility anymore and it was close to Denver—he’d barely made it out of Denver alive.

Taking an educated guess as to the number of people who would normally man the facility, he thought he was getting close to having the place completely clear of the undead, but he still wouldn’t completely let his guard down. Today he thought he might finally have a chance to access the Kali Project labs and hopefully find the Yama Strain
information. If anyone else was still alive, and if there was any hope of overcoming this, the information in the labs would be the key.

Before opening the door, Cliff prepared with the room-clearing tactics he’d developed over the past month. He would open the door slowly and check for any undead at the door. If it was clear, he would wedge a big yellow doorstop under the door to hold it open and bang on the door loudly. Backing away from the open door, he would wait for any undead to come to him, while he stood on the “safe” side of the door. If there was a large group of undead, they would bottleneck at the doorway, slowing their approach, and preventing a swarm.

Cliff carefully opened the outer lab door, and as he wasn’t immediately greeted by any undead, and with doorstop in place, he began banging on the door and yelling before taking ten steps away from the doorway. A chorus of moans erupted from the darkness on the other side of the doorframe. He raised his M4 and peered through the EoTech sight. With a near-unlimited supply of .223 and a large cache of SOPMOD M4 rifles, Cliff had built out an AR platform with the tools he needed for his mission, including the optic and a suppressor. He had even found a set of Peltor electronic hearing protectors, but as long as the suppressor lasted he wouldn’t need the hearing protection.

After his near-death adventure by running out of ammo shortly after arriving at the facility, he now carried nearly three hundred rounds of .223 on his chest rig and belt, plus what was in the rifle. All that ammo was heavy, but heavy was better than dead. He was happy he wasn’t humping a full combat load through the mountains of Afghani
stan anymore; this was easy work compared to some of his previous missions.

The first zombie made it to the door; it was another former security officer. After a previous hard-learned lesson about the undead piling up in the doorway when you shot them, Cliff now let the first handful through the door before putting them down.

Four undead security officers and eight undead scientists later, the stream of zombies coming through the door had stopped. Cliff banged on the door a few more times and waited for a response, but there was none. Shining the rifle-mounted Surefire light through the doorway into the darkness, he didn’t see any movement or any other undead. Slowly entering the doorway, he reached out with his left hand and flipped on the light switch. With the nuclear reactors, the facility should have an ample supply of electricity for at least another twenty years, and in moments like this he truly appreciated what a luxury electric lights were. If the power was out here like it had been in the Denver facility, this would have been an impossible task born in hell.

Ten minutes later the front sections of the lab were clear, and all the lights turned on. He came to a heavy door that was locked with an actual physical lock, instead of the RF chip-encoded electronic locks in the rest of the facility. Cliff tried the door, but it was secure. Banging on the door with his fist did nothing—the door was solid like a concrete wall. Grabbing a metal trashcan from the front room, he loudly banged the can on the door, which rung like a heavy gong. Laughing, he yelled, “AMWAY, YOU WANT TO BUY SOME WORTHLESS SHIT?” He dropped the trashcan and had started towards the other rooms to look for keys that might work on the door when he heard a heavy latch turn over on the other side of the door.

As the door slowly cracked open, Cliff spun around and dropped to one knee behind a desk, M4 up and pointed towards the opening door.

“Amway?
Down here? Bullshit. They don’t have clearance. At least you didn’t try to tempt me with some Girl Scout cookies … holy shit man, relax! I’m not a zombie.”

Inching through the opening doorway was a scruffy-looking dark-haired kid, about in his twenties. Surprised to find another living person, Cliff lowered his rifle to the SUL position and stood. “Hey!” he blurted. “I’m Cliff, and I’m OGA. I’ve been sent here to retrieve any remaining scientists, secure this facility, and help facilitate their research with the hope of restarting our country.”

“Well, Mr. Other Government Agency operator,” the kid said, “I’m Lance Weisinger, and I’m an overqualified lab technician recruited about nine months ago after completing my doctorate in molecular biology. I’ve been underground ever since, and I’ve been trapped back in that lab for nearly six weeks—what took you guys so long?”

“Bad news, Lance,” replied Cliff. “There aren’t any other guys, it’s just me, and I’ve been underground here for a month fighting my way down to you. You’re the first living person I’ve found. Is there anyone else with you?”

“No, just me,” Lance replied. “There were two others in the secure lab with me, but they reanimated so I locked them in one of the other bio-labs. I’ve been in the front lab trying to survive ever since. I did try to leave the lab a few weeks ago, but there were about a dozen reanimates between me and the door over there, so I stayed put and hoped for a rescue. What helped is that we kept a couple cases of MREs down here because many of the researchers would spend days at a time in the lab, so I’ve been able to ration out my food and survive. Since I was trapped, I kept working on the project.”

“Did you find how to stop this madness?” Cliff asked.

“No, not yet, but I think we have a chance. It’s going to take a lot more time, and it’s really slow with only me to take care of all the work.”

“What about the other two reanimates you locked up? Show me where they are and I’ll put ‘em down for you.”

“No, no,” said Lance, “they’re locked up, and I need them for my research. Without them, I wouldn’t have fresh infected tissue to experiment on.”

“Okay Lance, for now though,
come with me to where I’ve set up shop. We’ll get you some fresh clothes, and see if we can contact anyone else that could help.”

Lance nodded.
“Oh good. I’ve developed a bad rash from these clothes. I tried washing them in the sink but it hasn’t helped. Who are we going to contact? I thought you said everyone here was dead.”

“Yeah, everyone here is, but with your help we can take control of the
commo-hut and see if there’s anyone on the other side of the radio.”