Winchester Undead (Book 2): Winchester: Prey (4 page)

CHAPTER 6

Near Corsicana, Texas

February 13, Year 1

The situation continued to deteriorate. Low gray clouds blocked the early morning sun, the start to another flat day of barely surviving. Clint Smith stood on the roof of the 1972 GMC van and surveyed the road ahead of them through his binoculars. Amanda stood at the rear of the van, Johnson’s former M4 rifle in her hands, watching for any undead to catch up that were following the van as it passed. Clint climbed down from the roof and thumbed through a much-worn DeLorme Texas atlas. The atlas was an absolute godsend; they’d found it after the first large folding atlas was destroyed.

Only the day before they’d found the ancient but still-running van outside of the town of Athens. The fight they’d endured to clear that town was staggering, but they were beginning to get close to their destination. In the forty-nine days since the attack, Amanda estimated they’d traveled just over three hundred miles, and twenty-five of those days were spent covering short distances on foot.

Originally the plan had been to travel north out of Little Rock and to I-40 towards Colorado, but the fighting was so intense that they were forced to travel south. The first few days after the attack and the oily chemical sprayed by the large flight of aircraft that passed overhead, the number of the undead grew exponentially. On the small highways found in the piney woods of east Texas, the number of undead seemed manageable, but near the Dallas/Fort Worth area the number of abandoned vehicles on the road and the shambling corpses increased starkly, sapping any positive outlook Amanda had still clung to.

Clint pointed east. “If we take that road to the right we should be able to skirt around Corsicana, but I don’t think we’ll be able to skip having to travel on I-45. How much ammo do you have left?”

Amanda looked at the M4 magazines in the carrier around her midsection, Johnson’s own armor carrier that was given to her just before Clint shot him. “About two hundred rounds.”

“Shit. We’re probably going to need every last one of them.”

Clint climbed into the driver’s seat, quickly joined in the passenger seat by Amanda. With the windshield missing, both of them were quickly soaked by the cold rain. Farm-to Market 1128, thankfully, was devoid of undead in the road, as was FM 3041—that is, until they reached the feeder road for I-45. Clint stopped the van, engine still running, and climbed onto the roof again with his binoculars.

“Southbound is a damn parking lot. Looks like there was a wreck south of us, probably before the EMP hit. Northbound isn’t too bad, but I can see movement between the vehicles.”

Amanda grimaced. Movement on the highway could only be the undead. Returning to the driver’s seat, Clint turned the van right, drove down the feeder road and onto the Interstate. They were able to drive around the disabled vehicles and the small groups of undead, but the driving was slow, about fifteen miles per hour, as they weaved from shoulder to shoulder to pass all the vehicles and walking corpses. Three vertical strands of cable separated the northbound and southbound lanes. Even though the cable was in place to prevent a vehicle from crossing the median and causing a head-on collision, it wasn’t effective at stopping the undead, but it did cause the walking corpses to fall face forward into the grass as they tried to walk through the median to follow the passing van.

After the weeks of incredible hardship, Amanda giggled at the bodies tripping over the wire and no longer retaining the cognitive ability to even attempt to catch their fall. Each of the corpses broke its fall by planting its face into the dirt. Clint looked at Amanda suspiciously, believing—and rightly so—that she was beginning to have a bit of a mental breakdown.

Thirty minutes of slow driving passed before Clint took the exit for FM 1126. The north Texas farmland, sparsely populated, left few people to be killed. Some of the homes they passed looked like they had wisps of smoke coming out of the chimneys. Amanda assumed survivors probably lived there, but after their last run-in with a survivor group, she simply did not trust them to be benign. Clint swerved the van around another group of undead as they turned onto Highway 287. Those were the last shambling undead that Amanda saw before they turned onto TX-34 and drove across a bridge spanning a small lake.

Clint turned after the lake and followed the small road through the countryside. Neither of them spoke. Amanda curled up in her seat, shivering from the cold rain coming through the windshield. Clint stopped the van at a gate, blocking the road next to a small guard shack with a sign reading “Waxahachie Creek Park.”

“Here? This is where we’re going?”

A half-dozen undead shuffled towards the van from inside the park.

“This is a backup facility. It’s fairly new and hopefully it’s still intact.”

Clint didn’t worry about how to raise the pole acting as a gate across the road. He simply drove through it, breaking the fiberglass arm from its base. Amanda drew her pistol and shot the two undead closest to the van through the gap left by the missing windshield. The van turned right and Clint drove quickly onto a gravel drive, stopping by a large metal shed. More undead began approaching the van from the darkness of the woods in the park.

“And here we are, Madam Secretary.”

“You’re back to calling me Madam Secretary now, baby?”

Clint smiled.

“A metal shed. Really? The new secret government facility is a metal shed?”

A rare smile spread across Clint’s face and he gave Amanda a wink. “Do me a favor and keep the welcoming party off me. It will take me a little bit of time to get the shed open.”

Amanda had no choice but to believe him, even after his confession three weeks prior that he and his dead partner Chuck Johnson weren’t really with the FBI but were in actuality highly trained agents working for another government agency that he would only refer to as “another government agency.” She really was Alice, and this new world was her rabbit hole.

She climbed over the dash and onto the roof of the van, quickly scanned the approaching threats, and laid two full M4 magazines on the roof in front of her. Then Amanda lay down on the top of the van in a prone firing position. Taking aim at the closest walking corpse, she concentrated on slowing her breathing and gently pressed the trigger to the rear. For a woman who had never had any sort of formal training in firearms, she was thankful that Smith and Johnson did at least take the time to teach her how to handle an M4, which she’d put to more practice than she ever could have guessed.

Clint walked to the side of the metal shed and opened the electrical fuse panel. He flipped a few of the breakers and the whole box lifted up from the building to reveal a keypad like that of an old telephone. Between shots engaging the approaching dead, Amanda tried to steal glances as to what Clint was doing. Clint tapped in a long series of numbers quickly from memory, like he would punch in his PIN at an ATM.

Clint lowered the box and closed the cover before taking a firing position, leaning across the short hood of the van. Amanda felt like she missed with every other shot, but Clint was quickly thinning the approaching undead to a manageable level when Amanda was startled by the sound of water erupting into the air in the lake like a geyser two hundred yards away. The water being blown into the air was visible over the top of the thick trees. A full minute later the geyser stopped, and with a loud hiss the metal shed slid backwards on its foundation to reveal a concrete ramp leading to a large well-lit area that looked a bit like a parking garage.

“You have got to be shitting me.”

Clint smiled again. “Nope. Get in the van. We should drive in before we attract any more welcoming committee friends.”

The van easily cleared the concrete roof as it drove underground, following a series of ramps back and forth, continuing deeper underground before leveling out in a large flat open area. The area was staggeringly cavernous. Clint stopped the van at the bottom of the last ramp, rolled down his window, and punched another series of numbers into a keypad. High above them and with a loud hiss, the metal shed slid back into place, sealing the entrance.

“Welcome to Osiris, the new land of the living.”

Amanda looked side to side in awe. The open area they were in appeared to be at least two hundred yards long and at least as wide, all of it well lit with overhead lighting. Clint drove to a large metal door with another keypad. After entering another series of numbers, the large metal blast door slowly swung outward.

“The geyser of water in the lake was from this place,” said Clint. “The interior was sealed with pure nitrogen to preserve everything, to keep any contaminants out and to prevent any organisms from taking home.”

“OK, fine, but why here? Why this part of Texas? I don’t understand.”

“Do you remember the Superconductor Super Collider that was canceled back in the early 1990s?”

“Yeah, vaguely.”

“OK, this is the result of that project. From the beginning, the entire project was a front to build this facility. The scientists didn’t know that, the workers didn’t know that, no one knew it except a small number of people cleared into this black project. The SSC was never intended to be completed, so cost overruns and some skillful manipulation of the media helped push public pressure to cancel the project, just as we planned. The tunnel-boring machine continued with a new series of contractors past the publicly known fourteen miles of tunnel to here, which is under the lake we drove across. Just a bit over two hundred feet below the lake, actually.”

“Is there anyone else here?”

“Can’t be. When the startup sequence started, the geyser you saw was the nitrogen being purged and replaced by air we can breathe. Before that happened, the air inside would have killed anyone trying to breathe it.”

“What do we do now?”

“We go inside, take hot showers, put on new clothes, have a hot meal and try to figure out if any of my other teammates from my project survived. We have a mission to complete.”

“What project is that?”

“Project Lazarus.”

CHAPTER 7

Cortez, CO

February 13, Year 1

Jake stood on a table in the middle of the cafeteria, addressing his group of survivors. As of this morning, with the birth of a healthy baby girl, the number of souls in the school-turned-survivor-commune had grown to forty-two. Scavenging operations were planned in detail and now had the added needs for a newborn. They were carried out by rotating teams of men. While one team held the operations slot for three days, another team provided compound security for a day shift, and the third held the security job for a night shift. A fourth team stood down for three days of rest and family time. The three day rotation seemed to work well now that there were enough people to man the teams and keep the rotation running. Perhaps as more people arrived and became a part of the survivor group, the rotations could be spread out with more down time. That would be a welcome logistical problem to overcome, but the other side to that coin was with more people came the need for more supplies. For the past nine days the scavenging teams had been harassed by The Tribe. So far the religious fanatics hadn’t attacked the middle school, but they were laying ambushes for the scavenging team while they were outside of the fence.

From the roof of the middle school the security teams could see the highway west of the football stadium and had a clear view of approach, but the scattering of homes to the east gave The Tribe cover to move for an attack. During the past four weeks special scavenging trips had been completed for supplies and a chain-link fence was now erected surrounding the school grounds from Maple Street down to Second Street and Pine to tie into the fence already standing around the athletic complex. So far the fence has been successful in keeping the walkers out of the school building and off the property, although there had been an increase in the number of walkers coming to the fence line.

For Jake, Sara, and the others in their group, life was going as well as it could be given their current situation—that is, until the religious nuts showed up. Not a single person in their group had heard of The Tribe before the attack and theories abounded as to their origin. Some said they were in town but lived in secret; others said that their proclaimed prophet organized his cult after everything went to hell.

Jake looked at the people gathered in the cafeteria. The only members missing were the ones currently assigned to the security patrol. Jake had briefed each of them personally an hour before while they stood their post.

“As all of you know, the mounting attacks continue to hamper our scavenging teams. Supplies are exceptionally low and starting tonight we are reducing rations in an attempt to make what we have last.”

Moans rumbled through the group.

“We have to decide what our plan of action will be. After much thought, the only options I could come up with were we hunker down and let The Tribe try to lay siege to our compound, we go on the attack against them, or we flee and relocate away from their area.”

Jake looked at the men, women, and older children standing around him. He considered each of them his family. “We’ll raise a vote if no one has any other suggestions.”

“All in favor of relocating?”

None of the members raised their hands.

“All in favor of going on the offensive against The Tribe?”

Some of the men and a few of the older children raised their hands, seven in total.

“All in favor of hunkering down and trying to ride them out?”

The rest of the group raised their hands, winning the vote.

“OK, well, the group has spoken, so if each team leader would confer with their member families about further suggestions for our chosen plan of action, please report to me by sundown. We have a lot of work to do.”

CHAPTER 8

El Paso, Texas

February 13, Year 1

Odin crossed over the low concrete barrier of the Cesar E. Chavez Border Highway before helping Chivo pull Zennie’s body across and onto his own shoulders. Blood continued to drain out of Zennie’s mangled body and Odin was quickly soaked in his blood. The vehicles on the highway were sparse, but after the running gun fight and Chivo’s experience on the Mexican highway, the three of them gave each vehicle a wide berth as they crossed the four-lane highway. Reaching the sandy road shoulder, Chivo took out his bolt cutters and began cutting the chain-link fence separating the neighborhood of smaller houses ahead of them from the highway behind them. Not concerned about a horde of zombies in pursuit, Chivo took the time to cut the entire fence from top to bottom to make it easier to carry Zennie’s body through.

Apollo climbed through the fence first and squatted on the small residential street, rifle up, scanning for any potential threats, living or dead. Odin quickly joined his teammate, still carrying Zennie’s body. Joined by Chivo, Apollo whispered, “OK, which one?”

“Mano, that brown one on the right has a Marine Corps flag on the porch. I choose that one.”

Odin quickly agreed. “Maybe that Marine has supplies or ammo or who knows what. You never know with those crazy fuckers.”

Apollo took point, M4 at the ready, scanning. Odin, the least able to fight, stayed in the middle while he carried Zennie’s body, and Chivo brought up the rear of their loose column. The small one-story home was surrounded by a low chain-link fence, but the gate across the driveway was unlocked. Once entering the yard, Chivo was careful to quietly reset the gate’s latch. Odin leaned Zennie’s body against a newer Chrysler four-door car that sat in the driveway. Apollo checked around the corner of the backyard and found an old, rusted brown pickup behind the home. Chivo checked the small shed in the backyard and found a small riding lawn mower, a full gas can, and a line trimmer. Odin slowly turned the knob of the side door for the home and was relieved to find it unlocked. Their hopes of a death-free home were quickly dashed when Chivo pointed to a window. “Flies, lots of damn flies on the inside of the window.”

“Fuck, Chivo. What do you think?”

Chivo shrugged and loudly tapped on the glass of the window before stacking with his teammates at the door for a fast entry.

Chivo squeezed Apollo’s shoulder. Apollo leaned forward to Odin and whispered, “Lots of flies, probably a dead body.”

“Sure, but nothing reacted to the knocking, so maybe we’ll be lucky. Slow and steady on this one.”

Odin gently pushed the door open and the smell of weeks-old death immediately overwhelmed the three. Apollo shook his head, flipped the NODs on the front of his helmet down, and pulled the shemagh around his neck up to cover his mouth and nose. M4 raised, Odin slowly walked into the house. Apollo and Chivo followed. Once inside they found the house neat and well-kept. The three small bedrooms were quickly cleared and the reason for the smell and the flies was also found. A bloated corpse, skin rippling from the insects underneath, lay dead in the blood-splattered bathtub. Most of the man’s skull was missing and a blood-covered chrome revolver lay on the floor next to the tub. Odin shut the door to the bathroom.

Chivo went outside and returned with Zennie’s body, carried him to the master bedroom and lay his brother-in-arms on the bed while he searched the dresser in the room for any supplies. A box of .38 +P ammo was found in a sock drawer, presumably for the revolver lying on the floor of the bathroom. Chivo set the box of ammo on the dresser and figured that no one would want to take the revolver and they didn’t need ammo for a gun they didn’t have.

Odin stood in the living room looking at a shadow box sitting on the shelf above the TV. He pointed to it. “Guys, check this out. Looks like this guy was a staff sergeant in the Marines and was a Vietnam Vet. Guess after all of that, this new world was too much of a fight for him.”

Apollo pointed to the case next to the shadow box. “Hand me that American flag.”

Oden opened the wooden flag case, removed the American flag, and handed it to Apollo. The three of them walked to the master bedroom with the flag. Chivo and Odin unfolded the flag and draped it over Zennie’s body. The three of them stood silently over their fallen teammate’s body before leaving the room and shutting the door behind them.

Searching the rest of the house for supplies took very little time as the home wasn’t very big. The cupboards were completely bare of any non-perishable food; in fact, no food was to be found at all. Odin shrugged. “Well, I guess we know one of the reasons why the old guy decided to check out.”

“I’m going to check that old truck in the backyard. Maybe we’ll get lucky. It’s old enough that it should have survived the EMP.” With that, Apollo made for the door, but stopped.

Even from inside the house the three of them stiffened at the sound of the moaning undead. Chivo gently pushed the curtain across the front window aside. “Amigos, there’s probably two dozen walking corpses out there.”

“Is the fence still up and closed?” Apollo asked.

“Yeah, looks like it.”

“Good. I’m still going to check the truck.”

Apollo walked out of the side door and returned about ten minutes later. Chivo still stood by the front window with the curtain pulled aside.

“Hey, it’s an old Ford Ranger back when that was a full-sized truck. The battery seems to be good and I poured the lawn mower gas into the tank. The dash lit up and the gauge showed half a tank, but who knows if that’s right or if that gauge still works. I think we now have wheels, but the Chrysler is in the way and we’ve got to do something about the walkers at the fence.”

Odin spoke first. “If we clear out the walkers, we can push the car out of the way.”

Chivo turned away from the window. “Sure, but there are more of those fuckers shuffling our direction. We don’t have the ammo for this. We need a distraction. But we don’t have a plan yet. Once we leave here, where do we go?”

Apollo answered, “Fort Bliss. We hit a couple of supply shops, get some MREs, some ammo, and maybe we can get some commo gear. Then we get out in the open desert, get safe, regroup, and try to find out who is left in charge. If there is anyone maybe they already have a plan in action. I think we should wait for sunrise to save our NODs, and besides, it’ll give us a chance to rest for a minute. I don’t think we’re going to get to rest again for a while.”