Zompoc Survivor: Inferno (13 page)

“I’ll grab one of the Humvees,” Kaplan added.

I turned to Amy. “When the other group gets back, I need you to lead everyone down and keep folks out of harm’s way if there’s any shooting going on, okay?” She nodded and I gave her a quick hug before we took off down the stairs under the blue glow of my flashlight. Two flights down, and we were at the door. I slowly pushed it open and we slipped out into the underground parking garage. I killed the light and followed them as we crouched low and made our way to the Strykers and Humvees. Low voices drifted toward us from the red door Amy and I had been led through when we first arrived. I peeked over the trunk of a car to see five men standing in front of the door, bathed in the yellow glow of a kerosene lantern. Someone tapped my shoulder, and I turned to see Kaplan pointing toward the row of green vehicles that were parked forty feet away from the group of sentries. I nodded and we stalked forward. When we reached the first Humvee conversation stopped for a moment, and we froze in place. A moment or two later someone said something, and we started moving, using their laughter to cover our sound. We split off there, with the Marines going to the vehicles while I crept still closer and unslung the M39.

A low slung red sports car was parked next to the Stryker closest to the door, and I kneeled down so I could see the sentries through the windows. If I kept still, they wouldn’t even know I was there. I took a slow breath in through my nose and let it out through my mouth. With each breath, I let my muscles relax a little and imagined myself melting a little into my surroundings. I let my eyes drift to the right of the men at the door and closed my right eye to let it adjust to darkness again. My grandfather had taught me a hundred little tricks like that as a kid, taking me out for weekend hunting trips, camping trips over the summers, and the occasional road trip. It was only when I got older that I realized those trips also coincided with my father’s unexplained absences. It was on one of those early trips that he’d taught me how to be still. Not to just sit there, but to become part of the landscape. Gramps just called it thinking like a bush. Later, I figured out something else Gramps had been teaching me: how to listen. Eventually, I’d learned how to tell when animals were approaching, and over time, I could tell by the sounds they made what I was hearing. More importantly, it taught me to listen to my instincts. As I sat there listening to the guards muttering about how they should have been drinking and screwing Sinner chicks, my hackles went up and I felt the hair on my arms stand on end. As the chill passed over me and faded, I was left with the sense of something out in the night, waiting in the darkness. For a moment, it was like the angel of death had just passed my door, like everything men ever feared in the darkness was lurking at the edge of the light. I forced myself to keep breathing slowly, to keep my attention focused on the men at the door, but each breath felt like a sigh of relief.

Finally, I heard the soft tread of feet, and I slowly turned my head. Amy came around the rear of the Stryker and put a hand on my arm. I got to my feet and opened my right eye once I was looking away from the light as I followed her. The group of refugees was gathered behind the Humvee that Kaplan had chosen. Hernandez was crouched beside the Stryker’s rear door, and Kaplan was between the two vehicles.

“We’re almost ready,” he whispered to me. “But loading up is going to make too much noise to hide. And once we start the engines…” he let the sentence trail off. I nodded.

“I’ll keep them busy,” I said. “Just save a seat for me.” I turned and padded back to the sports car, crouching behind the rear wheel this time. I brought the rifle up and trained it on the tallest of the men at the door. As I waited for the first tell-tale sound to alert them, I hoped the scope hadn’t been knocked out of whack.

It was the squeak of a vehicle door that first got their attention. As they unlimbered their guns, I took a deep breath and let out a low moan, hoping I sounded at least a little like one of the zombies. It had the desired effect, as they huddled closer to the lantern. One of them pulled a flashlight from his belt and shined it into the darkness. He aimed it at the open space in front of the vehicles, and of course came up empty. Then Hernandez started the Stryker’s engine.

Their reaction was quick, and as well thought out as most hasty decisions tended to be. They shot at the armored vehicle. As their rounds bounced off the Stryker’s armor, I put the scope on the chest of a guy at the rear and stroked the trigger. The M39 kicked and my target was knocked back against the wall. The blackshirts dove for cover then, and Hernandez pulled the Stryker out into the middle of the drive. Bullets pinged into the car I was behind as the guards fired into the darkness, so I ducked down and moved to the front of the car. When I popped back up I saw one of the guards trying to get closer to my position, so I sent a round his way. He dove for cover between two other cars. I turned and put another couple shots into the wall nearest the other three guards to let them know I still cared, then ducked down and slipped behind the Stryker behind me. I heard the Humvee roar to life, and the squeal of rubber as Kaplan got it moving. There was a crash as he plowed through the barrier they’d erected in front of the ramp, and then I heard the Stryker’s engine rev.

“Dave!” I heard Amy shout. I fired at the car I’d last seen the sneaky guard hiding behind, then turned to look her way. She had the rear door of the Stryker open and was gesturing for me to get in. I ran for the front of the Stryker I was using for cover, then stopped and poked my head around its nose. The sneaky guard popped up and took aim at me, so I took the chance and sprinted for the open crew door. I heard a burst of gunfire and the whiz of rounds passing all too close to my tender hide, then the clang and whine of copper jacketed bullets ricocheting off armor plating as I dove through the opening.

“He’s in!” someone yelled. “Go!” The armored behemoth lurched under me, then I was bounced off the floor as it hit the barrier. The floor tilted and then I was thrown to my left. I was way too familiar with this ride. As soon as she hit level ground, I handed Amy the M39 and made my way forward to the command seat. I heard the ping of the occasional round bouncing off the Stryker’s impervious hide as we made another right, then a left, and relative silence fell.

Then it struck me: I had no idea what to do next.

Chapter 7

A Voice In the Darkness

~ Faith means living with uncertainty - feeling your way through life, letting your heart guide you like a lantern in the dark.
~ Dan Millman

We were back to plan A: get the hell out of the city. All that had changed was the way we were doing it. We had the vehicles, and with the Stryker, we could probably push our way past any of the road blocks on the bridges. Hernandez followed Kaplan back to the neighborhood we’d been captured in and filled me in along the way.

“The lieutenant saw the trucks roll up on you two, and he figured you’d either talk your way out of it or get your ass shot. Either way, he figured they’d come looking, so we grabbed all our gear and hid it. Then we tried to follow one of the patrols back so we could figure out how to get you out.” Amy was crouched behind the driver’s seat, her face half-illuminated by the screens and instrument lights. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail and she’d shucked her armor. I was listening to Hernandez over the vehicle’s comm system in the crew helmets.

“Did you plan ahead to use the classic ruse of letting yourselves get captured as your way in, or were you improvising,” I asked.

“We saw how well it worked for you,” she shot back.

“I’m a professional. Don’t try this at home.” She laughed and pulled the Stryker into a left turn, then I felt the vehicle come to a stop. A few moments later, someone tapped at the rear door. One of our passengers, an Asian man in slacks and a pale colored dress shirt, opened the door to reveal Kaplan and the man who’d taken the pistol back at New Eden.

“Supply stop,” Kaplan said. I started to pull myself out of the gunner’s seat, but he stopped me with a raised palm. “I need you on the radio,” he said, then pointed to one of the other well-dressed people, a blond woman in a grey business skirt and blouse and the man who’d opened the door. They followed him, and I let myself relax back into the seat, grateful for the break. As my overworked muscles started to relax a little, I switched the headset over to the radio feed and set it to scan.

“Sentries said they headed east,” Mickey’s voice came over the radio after a few seconds. “Ya’ll head for that house we found with the cars in front of it. They might go back to it. And remember, you kill them Marines, and you can even rough that sumbitch Stewart up some, so long as he survives the trip back, but you don’t hurt the girl. She belongs to the Prophet.” I switched back over to the internal system.

“They’re heading this way, we might want to get moving.” I pulled the headset off and went to the rear door. The man Kaplan had commandeered was trotting back from an old garage that opened onto the alley we were parked in, hustling back to the Stryker with my cache tube and one of the boxes of food, with the woman right behind him carrying a backpack and a box of her own. I grabbed the pack and tossed it through the opening then held my hands out for the box. She was all too ready to rid herself of her burden.

“Company?” Kaplan asked.

I nodded. “Yeah, headed straight for the house. Set your radio output to level one. We’ll try to stay within fifty meters of you.”

“Right. We’ll head south before we cut west and try to cross the river.” I gave him a thumbs up and headed back to the Stryker. Once I closed the rear hatch, I went back to the gunner’s seat and switched back to the radio. Trying to coordinate a search with radios was a doomed attempt so long as I had a working receiver. I turned the Stryker’s SINGCARs to its lowest power output setting, which gave us a transmission range measured in meters instead of kilometers. The vehicle lurched into motion, and after a little experimentation, I figured out how to turn the screen in front of me on so I could use the vehicle’s night vision capabilities. The world outside was displayed in monochrome, and the dead were all over the place. Both vehicles were moving without their headlights on, and the Humvee knocked the occasional infected out of its path as we went along, only the sound of our vehicles giving our position away as we headed down the residential street. Movement behind me and a sound of protest from Amy got my attention, and I looked back over my shoulder. Amy was braced against the bulkhead with her free hand in front of someone else.

“Don’t shush me young lady,” the blond in the business skirt said as she shoved her way past Amy. “I deserve an answer. I didn’t get an MBA from a top rated business school so I could haul his luggage around. I don’t do manual labor. So you answer me right now!” I turned in the seat so that I was facing her.

“You haven’t asked a question yet,” I said evenly.

“Why in the hell was I forced out of this vehicle at gunpoint and ordered to be your fucking packmule? What makes you too good to carry your own shit? I’m a vice president of a major corporation; people like you carry my luggage, not the other way around.” I looked at her for a long moment, unsure how to even respond to how aggressively out of place she suddenly was in the world I’d been living in for the past four days.

“He’s the guy who went out of his way to pull your worthless ass out of that place when he could have left you behind,” Amy said. “He didn’t have to come rescue you, but he did. He’s the guy who got shot at trying to cover our escape, and he’s the guy who made sure every guard in that compound was somewhere else while we did it. What the fuck did you and your top rated MBA do to help? Not a god damn thing, that’s what. So sit down and shut the fuck up.”

“Someone needs to teach you some manners, bitch,” another man said as he got to his feet. He reached for Amy with one hand and had his other balled into a fist. He stopped when he found himself face to barrel with my Colt. I looked down the barrel at him and scowled. A few days ago, with some gel in his hair, he might have been handsome. But several days without decent food or a shower had added years and no small amount of ugly to his looks. His indignation withered under the barrel of the Colt, and I was betting he remembered what I’d said earlier about pulling the trigger.

“Hernandez, stop the truck, please,” I said over the intercom. The Stryker slowed and then lurched a little as it came to a stop. I turned back to the two standing people. “Both of you either shut up or get out.”

“This is an outrage!” Miss MBA said. “You can’t do this!”

“I can, and if you lay a hand on my kid, I’ll shoot you first and
then
throw you out,” I growled at her. “You need to get one thing straight. You are at square one right now. Everything that made you somebody important a week ago means exactly dick today. ‘People like me’ are the only thing keeping people like
you
alive and free. If you can’t wrap your head around that, then you’re a threat to everyone around you and you have no place in this vehicle. So decide right now: shut up or get out.” They sat down and I turned back to my seat. Hernandez got the vehicle in motion again before I could say a word.

“Your daughter’s got a mouth like a sailor,” the grubby man said. “I bet you’re real proud of her.”

“I’ll take her mouth over your attitude any day,” I said wearily. “And if you don’t shut up, I won’t wait for the truck to stop before I toss you out the back.” I put the crew headset back on and switched over to the radio in time to hear Kaplan’s voice come over the wire.

“…ndez, what the hell is going on? Is everything okay over there?”

“We’re good, LT. Just had to sort out the chain of command. I’ll brief you on it later.”

“Copy that,” he said. I switched the radio back to scan and heard the Disciples lighting up the airwaves while they searched for us.

“They ain’t at that house,” one reported.

“This is Patrol Two. We’re heading south on Gillham past 31
st
Street,” another man said. His voice and the way he laid out where he was said cop to me. I looked at the night vision display, scanning for a street sign.

“Mobile Three, the hospital’s wall to wall zombies. No way they came this way.” We approached a corner, and I saw 28
th
Street.

“Kaplan, turn west on 30
th
,” I said. “That’ll put us behind one of their patrols.” I switched to the intercom and warned Hernandez that we were going to be turning soon, then switched back to the radio scan. I listened with half an ear as I turned on the overhead lamps and pulled the rolled up map from my vest pocket. “Amy, help me find a route across the river.” She laid the map down and bent her head over it.

“Okay, this is the store, right?” she said as she pointed to a red circle drawn in pen on the map. Her fingertip traced a line along the map, then she laid another finger on the river. Her two index fingers slowly traced their way toward each other. “Got it!” she said. I reached over and grabbed another headset for her.

“Okay, you navigate for Hernandez,” I told her, then hit the transmit switch. “LT, we have a route to the river. You mind if we take the lead?”

“Get out in front,” Kaplan said with the first hints of a smile in his voice. I watched as the Humvee pulled to the right and slowed until we passed it. Hernandez took the right when we hit 30
th
Street, and Amy had her stay on it as we got to the end of the road. Ten feet of grass separated us from Gilham Road, the street the other Stryker patrol had been on. Hernandez drove over the curb, over a couple of unfortunate zombies, across Gilham and onto the brick road that 30
th
became. As we went up the hill, we passed rows of brick townhouses on our right and older homes on our left, with only a half dozen infected to knock out of our way. The further up the hill we went, the fewer zombies we saw. By the time the street leveled off, I only saw a couple of them down side roads. Then we found ourselves going back downhill, and Hernandez pasted a couple across the Stryker’s front end before we hit another big road. The street sign said Main Street, and it was filled with zombies. An easy forty or fifty of them were wandering north. Across the way I could see a street sign that said “Street Ends No Outlet.” I turned the NVG unit left and right.

“Go right,” I said as I saw an opening between buildings. “And let’s go off road.”

“Oohrah,” Hernandez said as she pulled us out onto Main and flattened a couple more infected. She took the left turn on her own, and seconds later we were tearing up turf as she headed up another hill. We passed a pair of condominiums on our left, complete with a horde of hip looking infected that were on the wrong side of the gated community to get at us. We rolled down toward another street.

“Keep going,” Amy said with a grin. “If they’re watching the streets, they’ll never see us.” We hit the asphalt and kept going straight, bumping over the curb and onto the grass. It might have been just me, but I thought Hernandez aimed for the sign that said “No vehicles” and she certainly didn’t slow down when she plowed through the metal fence.

“Jogger, eleven o’clock,” I said as we sped across the open park. The Stryker swerved and the undead man in sweats and a hoodie disappeared under our wheels.

“Got him,” she said over the intercom. Our swath of cross country mayhem led us through open fields, then across several acres of wooded park until we crashed through one last hedge and hit another four lane road. Two barriers faced us there: a solid line of cars and concrete dividers in the middle of the road.

“Go left,” Amy said as she looked at her map. “I think this is Summit. Either way, it should take us to 31
st
Street, and we can follow that almost all the way to the bridge.” Hernandez stayed on the shoulder, and I did my best to not see the occasional body in the car sit up and watch us go by. Eventually, we hit an intersection that was dominated by a bullet riddled police cruiser, and Amy had us head back to the west. The road we ended up on was tree lined for the first half mile or so, which would have probably been beautiful during an autumn day, but at oh-dark-thirty in a burning city during the zombie apocalypse, it was just creepy as hell.

Maybe it was my surroundings or maybe it was just me, but I got a chill down my spine when I heard a familiar voice over the radio.

“This is Director Aaron Keyes, vice president in charge of security for Monos, Incorporated. I have a message for the Prophet of the Disciples of the Anointed. I know you’re broadcasting on this channel, and I know you can hear me. I understand you’re looking for a man by the name of Dave Stewart. I’d like to offer you my assistance in finding him. You have five minutes to respond.”

“This is Daniel, Prophet of the Lord. Make your offer, I’m listening,” Hall said a few seconds later. He sounded much calmer than he had earlier. I imagined him preening before picking up the mic like a man about to interview for a job.

“I take it our mutual pain in the ass Dave Stewart has recently been your guest,” Keyes said. “And I’d wager a truly ridiculous amount of worthless money that, despite your best efforts, he is no longer enjoying your hospitality, and did a little damage when he left.”

“I caught him and his daughter looting, and instead of shooting him on sight, I gave him shelter and aid. In return, he killed several of my men, stole from me and kidnapped members of my flock. I’d like him returned so he can face the Lord’s justice. How do you intend to help me make that happen?”

“Well, if I know Stewart, he’s heading west. There’s a bridge south and west of your location, one of three that cross the Missouri River that are still intact. Watch the skies.” Hernandez turned onto a larger road, and I switched the intercom on.