Ashes to Fire: Daily Reflections From Ash Wednesday to Pentecost
Author: Beacon Hill Press Of Kansas City
Date: 2011-03-15 01:25:55+00:00
Keywords: Religion; Christian Living; Devotional
Description: This 14-week devotional book includes daily scripture readings from the Old Testament and New Testament, prayers, and each Sunday, a small sermon with journaling space. This book is specifically designed to be used, either individually or for small groups, from Ash Wednesday to Pentecost. Ashes to Fire allows adults and youth to reflect on what God is teaching them instead of just feeding them another video clip or media outlet. It includes essays by multiple pastors. The book will create an intentional and intensive fellowship with Jesus by guiding readers through personal Bible study, daily
Publisher: BEACON HILL Press

Crawlerz

Book 4

“From the Ashes”

R S Merritt

Text Copyright © 2021 Randall Scott Merritt

All Rights Reserved

This series is dedicated to my beautiful wife and family.

Cover Design By:

Harry Lamb

Table of Contents

Chapter 1:  Apology Accepted

Chapter 2:  Live Bait

Chapter 3:  Waking Up to a Nightmare

Chapter 4:  Into the Breach Once More

Chapter 5:  Fortress of the Forlorn

Chapter 6:  The Best Laid Plans

Chapter 7:  The Red Kool-Aid

Chapter 8:  Documenting the Damned

Chapter 9:  Out of the Frying Pan…

Chapter 10:  Desperate Times

Chapter 11:  Last Ditch Effort

Chapter 12:  Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?

Chapter 13:  Witchy Woman

Chapter 14:  Witchy Woman

Chapter 15:  Square One

Chapter 16:  Going a Little Cray Cray

Chapter 17:  Hobo Warriors

Chapter 18:  Learning by Doing

Chapter 19:  City of Brotherly Love?

Chapter 20:  In the Darkest Depths of Mordor

Chapter 21:  I’ve Got This

Chapter 22:  The End of the Line

Chapter 23:  The Only Easy Day was Yesterday

Chapter 24:  One Step Forward

Chapter 25:  Always Ready

Chapter 26:  Attention on Deck

Chapter 27:  Quarantined

Chapter 28:  One Bite at a Time

Chapter 29:  Don’t Forget to Bring Snacks

Chapter 30:  Inspiration Leads to Perspiration

Chapter 31:  There and Back Again

Chapter 32:  Spelunking with Demons

Chapter 33:  Better late than Never

Chapter 34:  Way Worse than Ants

Chapter 35:  Send out the Clowns

Chapter 36:  On a Train Bound for Nowhere

Epilogue:  An Apocalyptic Shift in Paradigm

Author’s Note

Other Books by RS Merritt

Chapter 1:  Apology Accepted

The train slowed as they approached what they hoped was their stop in Fayetteville.  None of them were super excited about spending the night in the cargo car. If they didn’t make the city in time, then that’s what they’d be doing though.  Yue smiled as she looked over at the seats where Drew and Lisa were casually pouring on the PDA.  Lisa must’ve forgiven Drew for being an idiot back at the train station.  If a little jealousy was going to get in their way, then they were going to have a ‘hard row to hoe’ considering the state of the world today.

The train came to a stop with a jolt that rocked everyone forward in their seats.  Various train noises ensued culminating in the sound they’d all been waiting for.  The doors were opened.  A soldier came aboard ordering them to grab their stuff and muster out on the train platform.  Wondering why the soldier had felt compelled to say ‘muster’ instead of just asking them to meet up on the train platform Yue gathered her things together.  At least they’d gotten the majority of their gear back.  Yue was thankful for the comforting weight of the AK-47 across her shoulder.

“Time to go lovebirds!”  Yue called out to Lisa and Drew.  The two were so busy gazing into each other’s eyes that they hadn’t even noticed that the train had stopped.

Having reeled Drew and Lisa back to reality Yue turned to follow LeBron out the door.  LeBron was fussing around trying to get the straps on his pack loosened up enough to allow him to sling the heavy pack over both shoulders.  He was fully ok with Drew making fun of him for not wearing his pack over one shoulder like all the cool kids.  The sound of a scuffle from the platform captured everyone’s attention.  Looking out the door LeBron and Yue saw Harley slam a Marine to the ground and leap forward.

With no idea what was going on the two of them sprang forward to help Harley.  Lisa poked Drew with her finger and pointed.  Charging after LeBron and Yue they knocked a few other refugees out of the way as they rushed forward to see what was going on.  Out on the platform Yue struggled to grasp what she was seeing.  A soldier was straddling LeBron.  The soldier was throwing punches while her brother did his best to get up off his back.  Harley was throwing a man in a camouflage uniform into the air.  Standing directly behind that unfortunate soldier was her tall nerdly hunk of burning love himself.

Her hunk of burning love’s mouth was hanging wide open as Harley reached out for him.  Yue rushed forward taking just enough time to plant a solid kick in the groin of the man beating up on her little brother.  Leaving LeBron to take it from there she rushed forward to keep Jeff from being murdered.  Behind her Drew and Lisa came out the door and immediately jumped into the fray.  The guy who’d been beating up on LeBron caught Drew’s combat boot to the side of his face.  There were a couple of Marines who’d been tasked with checking for crawlerz underneath the train. They came charging up on the platform with rifles aimed in the general vicinity of all the havoc.

Hoping she wasn’t about to get shot in the back Yue ignored the newcomers and focused on what was happening with Harley and Jeff.  Harley had his back to the wall and a pistol shoved into Jeff’s waist.  He had his other massive arm wrapped around Jeff’s neck.  For his part Jeff hadn’t made any sort of move to defend himself.  Yue found that odd since it wasn’t like her man didn’t know how to scrap.  She’d seen him fearlessly wade into groups of crawlerz with his rifle pouring out a steady stream of death.  Realizing he hadn’t done anything to defend himself she stood still to see what was going to happen.

“I’m sorry about Marguerite.  That’s on me.  Do what you need to do.”  Jeff said clearly so that Harley and everyone else could hear him.

Harley shoved the barrel of the gun deeper into Jeff’s side.  Yue whimpered softly in fear. She involuntarily took a step forward.  The armed Marines who’d shown up were pointing their rifles at Harley.  Neither of them had a clear shot with him using their boss as a human shield.  Drew and Lisa came up behind Yue.  For his part Harley stood there like a statue.  His face blank except for the rage burning in his eyes.  That fire burnt out on the platform.  Harley slid his pistol back into his waistband and let Jeff go.  Jeff ordered the Marines to stand down.  He waited for them to acknowledge his order before he moved.  He was making sure they didn’t waste Harley as soon as they had a clear line of fire.

Jeff turned to say something to Harley, but Harley was already walking away from him.  The big man made the extra tall Jeff seem small.  Crisis averted Yue ran to hug Jeff.  One of the two Marines misread the situation horribly.  He thought she was another assassin coming at their leader. He stepped in with a hard jab from the butt of his rifle right into her stomach.  Yue collapsed to the ground gasping for breath.  The confused Marine was knocked out of the way by an irate Jeff jumping in to see if Yue was hurt.

“Sir?”  Asked the other Marine.  He was probably thinking he needed to take Harley into custody.  Instead of just rushing forward and doing it he was asking permission. There was obviously something going on here that he wasn’t aware of.

“Stand down.  These are friends.  Mostly anyway.  The big guy isn’t to be harmed.”  Jeff said.

“Hey babe.  You gonna punch the guy who took the cheap shot?”  Yue asked in between trying to breathe.  She was smiling while she said it though.  It was going to take more than this little brawl to ruin her good mood.  She’d actually found Jeff!  He was alive!  Harley hadn’t murdered him in cold blood!

Jeff may not be trying to punch the frazzled Marine, but Drew took one look at his sister and was in the guy’s face.  To his credit the frazzled Marine stood stock still and took the abuse being hurled at him.  Well, he did for like thirty seconds.  Then he shoved Drew hard enough to bowl him over backwards and turned to leave.  He didn’t turn fast enough to avoid an enraged LeBron who came out of nowhere and knocked him to the ground.

“Everybody chill!  Stand the hell down!”  Jeff yelled at the top of his lungs.

It was a good thing he decided to intervene.  Drew had a knife in his hand and the Marine was slipping on a pair of brass knuckles that he kept in his pocket.  It was questionable if shooting someone would be forgiven. A little slap fighting between friends shouldn’t be that big a deal.  The shouted order from Jeff made the Marine decide to back off. He settled for flipping Drew off and throwing LeBron a pissed off look.  Lisa grabbed Drew’s shoulder to keep him from going after the guy.  Harley was at the end of the station with his face pressed into his arm.  He was sobbing like he’d just seen Old Yeller for the first time.

“Hey Jeff.  Glad you’re not dead.”  Drew said sticking his hand out.  Jeff smiled at Drew’s typical bluntness.  He grabbed Drew’s hand and pumped it a few times with enthusiasm.

“Right back at you.  What took you guys so long?”  Jeff asked turning to help Yue to her feet.  He shared a quick awkward kiss with her since she couldn’t stand up straight.  She was still trying to recover from the rifle butt to the gut.  It didn’t help that Jeff was over a foot taller than she was.

“We took the scenic route.”  LeBron said moving in for a back smacking hug from Jeff.

“This is my girl Lisa.”  Drew said walking over to put his arm around her.  She smiled and gave Jeff a half wave.  She was just as used to blood and violence as the rest of them. She’d hoped they could be civilized when there weren’t any of the infected around though.  The immediate escalation to a street brawl as they stepped off the train was a little much.  She was so sidetracked by all that she hadn’t even noticed it’d taken Yue giving Drew a pointed look to remind him to introduce her.

A small group of men gathered around as they greeted Jeff.  The other refugees had shut the train door and were refusing to come out.  The Marines they’d struck were glowering at them.  They were obviously harboring hopes of running into them in a dark alley at some point in the near future.  It wasn’t a pleasant situation for a chat.  Jeff hated to send them on their way.  He especially hated separating from Yue so quickly after reuniting with her.  A lot of people were standing around staring and more were starting to show up. Jeff needed to deal with all of this before he could relax.

“Ok.  I need to get this mess all squared away and have a few things to knock out before I can call it a day.  I’m going to have one of the men you didn’t injure escort you all to Cape Fear High.  That’s where you’ll be spending the night.  I’ll be over there in an hour or so to hook back up with you.”  Jeff kissed Yue and turned to a senior NCO to give him his orders.

“Well that was fun.”  Drew said once they were all settled into the back of the truck that was running them over to the school.  They’d gotten to board first leaving the bulk of the refugees behind to wait for the next truck.  It was only supposed to be a ten minute drive.  Their escort had been intent on getting them out of there quickly before they could cause any more havoc.

“You ok Harley?”  Yue asked.  Harley hadn’t said a word since everything went down.  He looked up now with eyes reddened from the tears he’d shed.  Although to be fair his eyes were always pretty red anyway.  Especially early in the morning.

“I was going to talk to him like I did with Gus.  He’s not an evil man.  I saw him and I just snapped though.  When I had my gun in his ribs, I almost pulled the trigger.  Not because I thought killing him would make me feel better.  I knew if I put him down those jarheads behind him would’ve put me down right afterwards.  I failed Marguerite.  She trusted me and she’s dead.  I didn’t even stick around to take care of the kids.”  Harley put his head back in his arms as Yue and Lisa rushed over to console him.

Everyone else continued to sit around staring at one another.  This was a lot to digest in a short amount of time.  There were a couple of refugees staring at Harley like he was an alien.  They were probably wishing they’d waited for the next truck instead of crowding onboard this one before their escort had stopped everyone from jumping on.  Seeing a massive man who’d just ripped through a bunch of armed Marines like a hot knife through butter bawling his eyes out and admitting loudly that he wanted to die was a little much.

Thankfully for the refugees the ride ended quickly.  Before they knew it, they were standing in a high school gym being asked which parties needed to stay together.  Once they’d been separated accordingly, they were guided to their temporary sleeping quarters.  The school itself was dark and creepy.  All of the windows had been covered with solid metal plates.  They had to stop and open gates in chain link fences that stretched from floor to ceiling to keep moving down the hall.  Light was provided by long lines of LED bulbs that’d been strung along the hallway.

“How many people live here?”  Yue asked the man they’d been handed off to.  Their new escort was responsible for getting refugees settled in and organized.  He also was one of the people who did the orientations they’d put together for the newcomers.  He’d been introduced as Private Malone.  Everyone in the group who liked country music was now stuck with that song in their head for the rest of the day.

“There’s normally between a hundred to two hundred people.  It just depends on how many show up to join the force or seek shelter.”  Malone answered.

“Isn’t that a lot of people to have in one place?”  Yue asked him.

“It is.  I’ll go ahead and answer your next question.  It does attract a large number of the infected.”  Malone said.

“You mind answering the obvious next question too?”  LeBron asked.  No one in the group liked hearing they were spending the night in a gigantic crawler magnet.

“You’re wondering why you’re being shoved in this building with a hundred other people when everybody knows that large groups attract the infected.  You may even be wondering why you’re being spread out instead of having everyone stick to one location like the gym or something.”  Malone stopped talking to open the next gate and let them through.  He nodded at the guard sitting at a desk by the gate watching them.

“You going to keep us in suspense or what?”  Drew asked as Malone opened the door to the stairwell and motioned for them to follow him up.

“This is the part people don’t like.  It’s the part I think convinced the higher ups to start taking in groups like yours.”  Malone stopped talking again to lead them up the stairs.  Drew was considering kicking him in the back of the head if he didn’t stop with the suspenseful pauses. He needed the man to stop being annoying and just tell them what the hell was going on.

They stopped on the third floor.  It was much better illuminated than the lower floors.  The windows had been covered with chain link inside and out instead of sheets of metal.  Bright rays of sunlight filtered into the hallways making everything feel less like a dungeon.  The strands of LED lights on the lower floors had just added to the creepy vibe.  The door to each classroom was solid wood and there were still fences blocking the hallway to slow down the infected if they did get inside.

“Not taking any chances here are you?”  Drew said admiringly.  Malone nodded and opened the door to one of the classrooms after consulting the scrap of paper he had with him.  It was the same piece of paper Jeff had handed to their escort when they’d left the train station earlier.

“We try not to.  If you have a chink in your armor those things find a way to walk right through it.  I guess you guys already know that though since you’re still alive.”  Malone stepped into the empty classroom and waved them in.

The room they walked into had been converted to barracks style housing.  Lots of cots and stacks of boxes with supplies in them.  There were a couple of windows they could see out of through multiple layers of fencing.  The late afternoon sunlight was painting the room a dull gold color.

“What’s the part most people don’t like?”  LeBron asked looking around.  This all seemed pretty fine to him.

“You guys came here to join the force, right?  You look more like hunters than gatherers anyway.  We’re always looking for ways to kill large numbers of crawlerz without wasting too much ammo.  Instead of hunting them down individually we’ve been luring them to a central spot and killing them all there.  What’s the best way to draw the infected to a spot?”  Private Malone asked with yet another dramatic pause.  They were getting a bad feeling about where this was heading.

“Put a bunch of people somewhere.  The crawlerz sense them and come running.”  Yue said softly.

“Do you guys make a bunch of noise to get even more to come?”  LeBron asked.

“Fireworks start an hour after sundown.”  Malone answered seriously.

“Where do the shooters hide?”  Drew asked.  This wasn’t a subtle approach to taking out the crawlerz. It kind of sounded exactly like the type of plan Drew would’ve come up with.

“We build them secure nests to shoot from.  Too high for the crawlerz to reach.  They spend the whole night up there raining down death.  Then we spend the next morning scraping up the remains.”  Malone said with a slightly pained smile.

“So we’re bait?”  Yue clarified.

“Not just you.  Everyone in this building.  If you came here to fight, then get used to it.  This is how we’re doing it.”  Malone said before tossing out some final instructions and leaving them for the night.

“Now what?”  Yue asked plopping down on a cot.

“I’m sure they’ll be serving dinner soon.”  Lisa said.  It was a running gag between the two of them.  The base in Weathertop had delivered breakfast, lunch and dinner as reliably as Old Faithful.

Yue didn’t say anything, but food was the last thing on her mind.  She needed Jeff to hurry up and get her.  He had a whole lot of explaining to do.

Chapter 2:  Live Bait

Jeff brought dinner with him when he showed up later that afternoon.  Dinner included a few bottles of champagne that’d been nicely chilled in one of the few working refrigerators in the city.  Sitting around a makeshift table the group caught Jeff up on how they’d managed to track him down.  He was suitably moved that they’d kept looking for him.  Especially once they admitted there’d been plenty of times that they assumed he was either dead or locked up in a cell somewhere.  They danced around the reason for Harley to have come along.  That chapter had hopefully been closed with Harley’s public forgiveness of Jeff.

“Last time we saw you they were putting a black bag over your head and shoving you in the back of a car.”  Drew said looking Jeff up and down.  The man looked healthy and wealthy by apocalypse standards.  He’d walked into the room with chilled bottles of champagne.  The food he’d brought for them hadn’t been room temperature gunk out of a can.  He looked like he might have even recently shaved and showered.  How much all of that was normal and how much was due to the love of his life showing back up on his doorstep was anyone’s guess.

“I’m with Drew.  How’d you go from a black bag over your head to being in charge of the city?”  LeBron asked curiously.

“Well I’m not in charge of the city.  I’m in charge of planning the overall effort to rebuild as it pertains to the non-military survivors.  The President finally saw the light as far as utilizing the refugees to help with the effort.”  Jeff answered.

“So you’re not in charge of the military?”  Drew asked.

“No they have a separate chain of command.  They report up through the secretary of defense.  My old job gave me the tools to be very useful in this phase of the event though.”  Jeff answered.

“So that makes you in charge of what exactly?”  Drew asked.  If Jeff wasn’t in the chain of the command on the military side, then how was he in charge of anything?  It wasn’t like the ragtag groups of refugees out there were going to spontaneously become a single cohesive fighting force and follow his orders.  Most refugees were harboring a well-deserved deep distrust of the government.  You couldn’t really blame anyone for not following the commands of a government that’d purposefully deserted them when this all started.

“I’m in command of strategy for the force and the military directly supporting that effort.”  Jeff said.

“And that is…”  Drew said rolling his hand to indicate Jeff should keep going.  For the first time Jeff saw that all of them looked completely lost.  Jeff must not have realized how anti-social his friends were.  They hadn’t talked much to any of the other refugees on the train.  They’d heard the force mentioned by soldiers, but the military men had made it sound like a joke.

“Is it the new name for the military all being combined together?”  Yue asked.  That’s what she’d inferred from her aggressive eavesdropping.

“Not really.  It’s more like the refugee army.  Kind of like an apocalyptic militia.  We accept volunteers then give them jobs to help with carving out crawler free zones.  I’m in charge of developing the plans we’re using for that effort.”  Jeff answered.  LeBron picked up on something in the way he said it.

“You’re in charge of the strategy but do you have direct reports? Are you more like a consultant?”  LeBron asked trying to drill down into what exactly it was that Jeff did.  Yue looked almost as uncomfortable as Jeff with all the probing questions.  Even though if this had been anyone besides Jeff, she’d have been the one asking all the questions.

“A couple of you were on the bridge of the Ford with me. You saw how well I get along with President Thompson.  A lot of the officers who were there when the President demoted me made it to Weathertop.  I wasn’t given this job to be in charge of anybody or to have any real power.  I’m alive to appease certain people and prevent a possible coup.  I’m here to make the military feel better about using refugees as cannon fodder.”  Jeff said.  He was trying to explain decades of political maneuvering in as few words as possible.

He thought Yue and LeBron may have gotten it.  Drew and Lisa were completely confused.  Harley had climbed on one of the cots to crack open a book.  He’d pointedly turned his back on them to pretend to read.  Jeff would bet a box of spam that the man currently testing the maximum weight limit of that cot was actively listening to everything they said.  Being big didn’t mean being stupid.  Like the professional wrestlers he resembled Harley seemed to be putting on an act most of the time.

“When you say using refugees as cannon fodder?”  Drew asked picking out the one part of all of Jeff’s ramblings that truly concerned him.  It also happened to be the phrase that’d stood out to everyone else as well.  The rest of it was noise.  A game being played on a stage in a theatre they couldn’t even afford tickets to.  Jeff smiled ruefully at the question.  He was regretting his choice of words.  Attempting to be as honest and direct as possible he answered Drew’s question.

“The building we’re in right now will have a massive mosh pit of crawlerz bouncing all around it in a couple of hours.  Just in case the cannon fodder doesn’t get them here we’ll be shooting up fireworks to get their attention.  The area around here’s pretty open. We built towers for our snipers to spend the night in.  They’ll stay up all night bagging as many crawlerz as they can.  We have other guys on the roof taking shots as well.  In the morning we bulldoze the dead bodies over a few blocks and burn them.  The refugees get to help out by scraping up the pieces and parts that break off when they’re getting bulldozed.  It’s pretty gross.”  Jeff said.  Most what he’d just said merely corroborated what they’d already been told by Private Malone.

“Cannon fodder’s a pretty harsh term.  This place looks like its built pretty solid.  I’d be more worried if I was one of those snipers out there.”  Drew said.  He wasn’t really seeing a downside to this.  Jeff may be overreacting or just trying to blow off steam.  All the high level political stuff could just be Jeff showing off for Yue.  They needed the actual truth.  Jeff had evidently been spending too much time with politicians lately.

“We should be safe here.”  Jeff admitted.  “They’ve done the same thing before in other places where the buildings weren’t as secure.  I’ve heard some horror stories about what happened to those refugees. Not to mention the soldiers who went in to try and save them.  I’m trying to come up with ways to deploy the force so that their value is more than just bait for the crawlerz.”  That made sense.  Being considered bait when you had a nice solid fortress to pass the time in was one thing.  You didn’t want to be the pig who was told to sit in the straw house when the wolf was going to come howling that night.

Jeff was playing in a different league than the rest of them.  He’d been a high ranking government bureaucrat in an obscure department when this all started.  He’d risen rapidly through the ranks once it turned out his department had been the only one to have plans for an eventuality like the crawlerz.  Jeff was accustomed to playing politics and working with the bigwigs.  Yue was very much aware that she’d been a waitress at IHOP when this all started.  Her brothers and Lisa had been in high school and for all she knew Harley had been serving time somewhere.

The apocalypse had pretty much leveled the playing field though.  Jeff’s world might have been way out of their reach before. Now they kept finding themselves being pulled right into its orbit.  The man was sitting there confiding everything to them.  There was no way they were cleared to be hearing what they were hearing.  Not that clearances and such really mattered anymore.  It still wouldn’t do for the cannon fodder refugees to find out that’s what they were seen as.  Then it dawned on her that of course the refugees already knew that.  They knew it and accepted it.

Talk turned to the other methods the force was working on to try and massacre as many of the infected masses as possible.  The concept of creating crawler free zones was really only practical for islands.  Otherwise you had to build thirty footy walls around whatever you were trying to protect to have any hope of keeping them out.  Even with those massive walls in place you could never be sure one of them wouldn’t come along who could skip right over it.

“Why not just build a lot of buildings like this one for people to live in?”  Lisa asked Jeff.  The answer immediately rolled off Jeff’s lips.  It was something he’d already put a good deal of thought into.

“That could be the solution once the infected population has been cut way down.  Right now a soldier needs to be able to shoot and endure the mental part also.  The mind games those things play when big groups of them are attacking.  Those are way more dangerous than their teeth.  We have suicides on almost a daily basis here.   You guys know what it feels like to hide in a stairwell and have those things creeping into your thoughts.  Now imagine you have to do that every night for forever.”  Jeff explained.

“Valium.”  Harley said from his cot.

“What about it?”  Jeff asked curiously.

“Give people half a pill before they go to bed.  It’s what I’ve figured out works the best for me so far.  Those things still get in my head, but it’s not even a tenth as bad.”  Harley answered.

“Thanks Harley.  I’ll check and see what we have as far as a Valium supply goes.”  Jeff said.  His eyes had a faraway look indicating he was mentally checking the inventory as he spoke.

“All this thinking and strategy and stuff and you’re still just shooting them to kill them?  What about traps or fire or people shaped balloons full of poison?”  Drew asked.  He was visualizing a cross between a gatling gun and a crossbow.  You could just pick the darts out of the dead bodies and reuse them the next night.  Why he thought that idea wasn’t worth mentioning while the balloon shaped people filled with poison tactic had come right out was one of those things that he hoped he never had to explain.

“We’re doing other things as well.  It’s baby steps though.  Like the towers we built are basically reinforced port a potties sitting on top of utility poles.  Our guys use spiked boots and a pulley system to climb up and down.  We thought it’d be a good idea to put spikes all over the poles to impale the crawlerz who try to jump up and climb the pole.  The crawlerz jumped up and got impaled just as planned.  The problem was the next wave of crawlerz used those bodies to boost themselves up and attack the sniper position at the top.  We lost all six snipers that night.  Watched it happen over and over again with nothing we could do about it.  Even when we focused our fire to try and save them.”  Jeff said.

“You couldn’t lay down enough fire to save any of them?”  Drew said disbelievingly.

“No.  Once the crawlerz got to the top of the towers they started jumping for the roof.  Kind of like the top of that medical office building we got stuck on top of.  Most of them didn’t make it but enough did to keep us from being able to focus.  It was a complete cluster.”  Jeff said.

“Any other stuff we should know about?”  LeBron asked.  He was beginning to see the wisdom in having someone like Jeff dedicated to determining the best strategy for making it through this.

“I haven’t been here that much longer than you guys.  At least not in real world time.  In apocalypse time it feels like I’ve been here forever.”  Jeff said.  The small group of people around him nodded.  They knew exactly what he was talking about.  It wasn’t a matter of killing time to make it to the weekend anymore.  It was literally waking up and fighting for your life until it was time to go to bed.  When you do that every single day time takes on a whole new meaning.  You appreciate every single morning you wake up alive.  Once Jeff saw he didn’t need to explain that concept he fed them a few more anecdotes about the Fayetteville base and the force in general.

Originally the military was seeking out refugees who were supersensitive to the psychic vibes being put off by the infected.  Whichever scientist, soldier or politician had been in charge of that effort decided that people with those skills were kind of like Jedi Knights with the mind control thing. Hence the reason they named the group of people they gathered together the force.  It was a stupid comparison and the psychic warrior thing never really panned out, but the name stuck.  From a recruiting perspective getting people to join the force was much easier than asking if they minded being bait.

From an ammunition perspective they were going to be ok for a little while at least.  There were reserves of bullets stored in massive government warehouses.  Senator’s cousins making millions off manufacturing more bullets than the military would ever be able to shoot no matter how many wars that same Senator started.  Fort Bragg being right next door offered all kinds of options as far as gear and ammunition went.  The problem wasn’t the ammunition so much as how difficult it was to actually bring down a crawler.

The snipers on the roof started shooting once the crawlerz came into view every night.  The infected moved so fast that it was pretty common to expend a magazine just trying to kill one of them.  The guys up in the towers had more luck with their shots.  Once the crawlerz ran into the wall of the school they tended to stay in one place trying to beat their way in.  That was a much easier target than the ones hauling ass towards the building.

Powerful search lights were used to illuminate the killing fields.  They’d rigged up ultra-bright lights on the ground in multiple places.  Those would attract some of the infected.  A portion of those would stop and stare at the bright light until a sniper had the opportunity to pump a bullet through their heart.  They had multiple diesel generators up on the roof to power everything.  They’d run out of diesel before they ran out of bullets.

“Sounds like a well-oiled killing machine except for the psychic attack piece of it.  Maybe the Valium will help with that. Maybe we can find out if there’s a stockpile somewhere.”  Yue said once Jeff had finished laying out his ideas for the group.  He’d put pretty much everything out there on the table.  Yue was hoping the bond between the two of them was strong enough that he’d tell her the rest of it later.  The parts he wasn’t saying now were the ones she really wanted to know more about.

“I wish it was as well-oiled as it seems on paper.  You’ll see what it’s really like tonight.  It’s a freakin nightmare.  I’m going to go check on the Valium and see the duty officer to make sure everything’s ready.  You guys won’t need to do anything tonight.  I’d stay away from the walls.  Random bullets have been known to come through them.  If all’s well, I’ll come grab you to show you the view from the roof a little later.  Otherwise try and get some sleep.”  Jeff gave Yue one more quick kiss then rushed from the room.  He was checking his watch as he did.  It must be a lot of work preparing for an unwinnable battle every single day.

Chapter 3:  Waking Up to a Nightmare

To absolutely no one’s surprise Drew fell asleep almost immediately.  Lisa shoved a cot over so she could sleep beside her snoring beau.  Yue sat down on a cot next to LeBron.  He had his face shoved into a book about medicinal herbs.

“I don’t think the fight to legalize it really matters anymore.”  Yue said pointing at the book.  LeBron laughed and put the book down.

“I’ve been trying to shove my head full of useful info whenever we’re not actively fighting for our lives.”  LeBron answered.

“Probably a good idea.  Good luck finding any wild herbs in this landscape though.”  Yue said.

“It’s making me sleepy at least.  Another couple of pages about the best soil types and I’ll be snoozing like a baby.”  LeBron said making himself comfortable on the hard military style cot.

Taking the hint Yue patted her brother on the head and slid her cot over by the wall. She wanted to sit up and think for a few minutes before trying to go to sleep herself.  She had so many ideas and questions tumbling around in her head that she doubted she’d be able to fall asleep anyway.  Not unless she washed down an Ambien with some Nyquil.  Lacking the necessary drugs to knock herself out she stared out the window while she tried to work through the laundry list in her head.

The windows on the third level weren’t thin sheets of steel.  The people who secured the building had bolted chain link on the outside of the window then also put a layer of chain link on the inside wall covering the windows.  They were on the third floor of the school so only the extra special crawler should be able to jump this high anyway.  If they did manage to get up that high, they’d be stuck hanging on the fencing while the men on the roof shot them at point blank range.

Yue wondered why Jeff had to leave and why he hadn’t brought her with him.  She’d pictured them getting their own private room somewhere in the school.  A private area where they could play the apocalyptic version of house.  Instead he’d ditched her up here to go take care of god knew what.  She was a little pissed that they’d traipsed across multiple states to try and save Jeff only to be brushed off when they finally found him.  Hopefully he had a really good reason to leave them here.  Still wondering what that reason might be she nodded off.

Yue woke up to the sound of gunfire.  The room was much darker than when she’d drifted off.  The only illumination coming from the dim light given off by the string of small LED bulbs running down the side of the room.  There were sporadic flashes of light coming in through the windows.  Everyone else was already sitting up and strapping on their gear.  Even Drew was awake which meant it must be serious.  Either that or Lisa had poked and prodded him until he had no choice but to get up.  That was the much more likely answer.

There was a quick knock on the door and then it swung open. Jeff appeared flanked by a fully armed Marine in the black Kevlar suit that was all the rage among military types.  Jeff was wearing his normal assortment of random weaponry and body armor.  All the way down to the weightlifting gloves he liked to wear. He wore those so that if he punched a crawler in the mouth the tough leather would keep him from cutting open his skin on its teeth.  Breaking your skin on their teeth would have the same result as getting bit.  The saliva would flow into your bloodstream.  At that point you had about three minutes to tell your loved ones goodbye before you started trying to eat them.

A reserved Yue sat on her cot waiting to hear what Jeff had to say.  He headed directly over to where she was sitting and immediately apologized for not spending more time with her.  He sat there saying he was sorry until Drew started making whipping noises behind his back to shut him up.  Yue gave him a kiss in the way of temporary forgiveness. He turned around to face the room with a grin on his face.  He took the time to flip off Drew before telling them why he was there.

“I tried to give you guys a good overview of what we’re doing here earlier today.  What I want to do now is take you all up to the roof.  I don’t expect any of you to do anything heroic.  I just want your feedback and ideas.  Kind of a fresh perspective sort of thing.”  Jeff said looking around to see if anyone had any questions.  Other than logistical stuff like where they could grab extra bullets none of them had any questions.

Jeff took them up the final flight of stairs onto the roof.  The access door was locked. An armed guard was standing by who was responsible for opening and closing the door.  There was more chain link fencing with more secured gates in the stairwell.  If the crawlerz did manage to break in somewhere they wouldn’t be traipsing through the high school anywhere near as quickly as they normally would.  Jeff had told them that during the days the men just kept bolting more crap to the school in an attempt to make themselves safer.

“Ok.  Once we go out on the roof, I want you to stick together.  You’ll follow me and Lance Corporal Merle here as we do a perimeter inspection.  The fireworks should be going off fairly soon.  Once they do it’ll get even more intense out there.  I know you guys have been through a lot but honestly, it’s a horror show out there.  Like something out of a movie.  You ready?”  Jeff concluded his pep talk and made ready to lead them out onto the roof.

“If this whole strategy commander force thing doesn’t work out you should consider a career in motivational speaking.”  Drew said sarcastically.  He hadn’t been nervous about going on the roof until Jeff had launched into his spiel.  Now he found himself looking at the access door like it was the gates of hell.

The guard opened up the access door and they followed Jeff out into the little slice of rooftop hell he was so intent on showing off.  The roof was covered with cables, generators, solar cells, crates of ammunition and explosives, different kinds of lights and a guy launching fireworks.  The man had three tubes setup which he was feeding with mortars.  The ones like you could buy at the state line depending on which state you were leaving.  You’d have a hard time convincing the local police that the ones this guy was shooting off were just for scaring birds away from your crops.

The mortars soared in an arc high into the sky before blossoming into multicolored fire flowers.  They were the type that exploded multiple times in the air which lent them a fairly professional looking display.  The fireworks were easily as good as the ones you might see any decent sized city in the USA put in the air for the fourth of July.  The end of the world show Jeff was sponsoring only lasted for a few rounds though.  The fireworks were a little more difficult to come by than the crates of ammunition they’d procured from Fort Bragg.  Before their eyes had even recovered from the bright fireworks lighting up the night sky an overwhelming feeling of despair hit them.

Drew had thought Jeff was exaggerating the impact of the crawlerz on the mental state of the high school defenders.  If anything he’d downplayed it.  The terror hit with a palpable force.  It was like getting kicked in the balls and submerged in ice water all at the same time.  Submerged and not being able to find your way out.  The sudden focus of thousands of crawlerz on the building they were standing on was almost too much to bear.  Lisa went to her hands and knees to spew her dinner all over the rooftop.  Drew was too weak to do much more than dispassionately watch her puke.  He idly wondered if it made her feel any better.  If so, he’d shove his finger down his own throat in a heartbeat.

Then it was bearable again.  LeBron and Drew helped Lisa to her feet.  They got themselves situated then followed Jeff over to the edge to look down at the ground below.  The earlier comparison to a massive mosh pit from hell was a pretty solid description of the insanity they were witnessing.  Crawlerz were moving at a breakneck pace around the school.  Their grimy nude bodies illuminated by the spotlights setup by the men guarding the base.  The crack of the defenders rifles firing easily audible over the eerie silence in which the crawlers circled the high school.

LeBron stopped beside the waist high concrete barrier around the top of the roof to look down at the unnaturally fast infected streaming past their position.  One of the crawlerz leaped high and LeBron felt its eyes staring into his.  His knees went watery as fear suddenly enveloped him.  After that initial shock of feeling the mass psychic energy coming off the mob below the strength of it all had ebbed somewhat.  It all came back in a rush as that one crawler locked in on him.  LeBron saw himself jumping off the side of the roof to join with the infected below.

“Grab LeBron!”  Yue screamed seeing her younger brother scrambling to leap over the low barrier.  Drew’s head snapped around and he hit LeBron with a flying tackle that would’ve landed him a full ride scholarship to a decent school if any scouts had been around.

“You crazy!  What the hell!”  Drew yelled into LeBron’s face.  LeBron was shaking his head in confusion.  He’d been looking off the roof then Drew had slammed him into the ground so hard he was seeing spots dancing in the air in front of him.  He couldn’t remember what’d happened in between looking down and Drew smashing into him.  Looking up at Yue’s face and hearing Drew yelling at him he wondered if he even wanted to know.

“We should send him inside.”  Yue said to Jeff.  Jeff was staring down at LeBron with understanding in his eyes.  He’d seen the same thing happen to plenty of men and women on the roof.  Especially when they came up for the first time.  He’d fallen over backwards and cracked his head on the side of a generator the first time he’d ventured out the door after the fireworks went off.

Harley knelt down beside LeBron and rummaged around in his pockets.  Giving Yue a look he pulled out a pill bottle that he’d somehow kept hidden from her.  He tapped out a pill into his palm then quickly made the pill bottle disappear again.  He examined it for a second before handing it to LeBron.  LeBron glanced at Yue for approval before dry swallowing the tiny tablet.

“You want to stay up here or go back down?”  Yue asked LeBron.  She’d walked over to squat down beside him so she could make sure he was ok.  LeBron lay there quietly.  He was terrified of the idea of looking back over the edge of the roof again.  He wanted to crawl on his belly to the door and slither down the stairs with his eyes closed until he could find a small space to hide in.

“Yo man.  Give that pill about fifteen minutes to kick in and you’ll feel a lot better.  You can chill right there while you wait if you want.”  Harley said standing up and leaning against a stack of crates.

“Valium?”  Jeff asked looking at Harley inquisitively.  Harley nodded.

“How about we all go back over by the door while we wait for LeBron’s medicine to kick in.”  Lisa said.  Her voice was sounding pretty shaky.  Without even having to be prodded Harley shook out another pill and handed it to her.  She smiled at him and took it quickly.  Her hand shaking so hard she almost dropped the pill trying to get it in her moth.

“This isn’t sustainable.”  Yue said once they were all back over by the access door.  That psychic crush was still beating on all of them.  It was a hundred times harder than normal.  You got used to it after that initial rush, but it still wasn’t comfortable.  Kind of like diving into a pool full of ice cold water.  You kind of get used to it after that initial shock.  As long as you’re actively moving around you may even forget that you’re cold.  As soon as you stop though you’ll realize that noise you’ve been hearing is your own teeth chattering.

“We haven’t even tried to shoot any of them yet.”  Drew said.

“Like fish in a barrel.”  Harley said calmly.  Considering everything going on he was bizarrely calm.  At least until you remembered he was probably on like five different drugs.  Only two or three of which he could even identify.

“Yeah, if those fish are swimming at like a hundred miles an hour and can hypnotize you from a hundred yards away.”  Yue chipped in.  She was happier now that LeBron seemed like he was recovering.  There was still an overwhelming amount of forced depression and primal fear weighing on them, but it was at a manageable level back by the door.  Yue had no idea how those snipers out in the towers were staying sane.

“Does it get any better?”  Lisa asked Jeff.

“You get used to it when you’re exposed to it constantly.  The ones who can’t take it just refuse to come out here on the roof.  No shame in it.  They just get jobs in the building instead.  We’ve had some suicides.  A few have jumped like LeBron tried to do.”  Jeff said.  His eyes going far away as he relived some recent trauma.

“I tried to do what?”  LeBron asked sitting straight up.

“Don’t worry about it.  I think you should stay here while we try and walk the perimeter again though.  Lisa can you watch him and make sure he’s ok?”  Yue asked.  Lisa was all too eager to stay behind to watch LeBron.  The alternative was walking around the roof again.  Walking the perimeter was like walking along the edge of a cliff that had a sheer drop straight into the fires of hell.  She’d much rather sit there with a stoned LeBron.  Poor kid couldn’t handle demonic possession or Valium.

Jeff once again set off towards the edge of the large roof with the group minus LeBron and Lisa.  Nervous sweat trickled down Yue’s back as they went to look over the edge again.  She purposefully avoided looking at the swirling mass of inhumanity below them.  She had no desire to lock eyes with a psychotic psychic.  Her desire to avoid looking was tossed away when Jeff asked them if they wanted to try shooting some to see the difficulties there.  Drew immediately snapped his rifle to his shoulder and started sending rounds down range.

Jeff asked Harley to watch Drew and he stepped over to keep an eye on Yue.  The battle buddy was a very real thing when the enemy wielded the ability to shoot back with suicidal impulses.  Not to be outdone by Drew Yue put her rifle to her shoulder and began lining up shots.  She immediately saw what Jeff was trying to show them.  Just trying to pick out a target was almost impossible.  It was just a sea of shadows that she was too scared to really let herself focus in on.  An almost impossible shot during normal times. The current environment made it freakishly difficult.

Beside her Drew took his own approach to the problem.  She smiled when she heard him go fully automatic.  If aiming is too hard then sling a ton of bullets in the general direction of what you wanted dead.  It was a very valid approach as far as she was concerned.  She flicked her rifle over to the same mode and let out a few controlled bursts at the places where she saw the crawlerz had bunched up.  Unable to tell if she’d actually hit anything or not, she stepped back to watch the Marine standing about thirty feet away from them take his shots.

The Marine was lying on a mattress with his rifle propped up on a tripod.  The mattress was on some sort of scaffolding setup by the edge of the roof.  He was staring at the ground through an expensive looking scope as he methodically lined up shots.  In the few minutes she watched him he only pulled the trigger twice.  She wondered if that was the norm or if the guy on the scaffolding was just ultra-methodical.

“He has his ankles tied to that platform to stop himself from jumping.”  Jeff whispered to Yue in a lull between rifles firing.

Looking closely she saw the rope that Jeff was referring to.  What kind of commitment must that take?  He had literally tied himself to the scaffold to help ride out the rogue suicide waves when they broke over the top of the wall.  With that big ass scope the Marine was making eye contact with the beasts below way too much for his own good.  No one should spend that much time staring into those dark soulless depths.  Yue was struck once again by how unsustainable this all was.  She couldn’t believe Jeff and the others couldn’t see it.  She really didn’t see how they were doing enough damage for it to even be accomplishing anything.

“We checkin’ out the rest of the roof?”  Harley asked.  He’d walked over after running through two magazines himself.  He’d left Drew standing over by the wall still taking shots.  Yue nervously watched Drew standing alone firing round after round into that hellish crowd below.  She wanted to yell at Harley for leaving him there like that like that, but she didn’t think it’d do any good.  Harley was in the midst of some serious scientific research into the impacts of multiple drugs on curbing the crawlerz ability to mind screw you.

They waited patiently for Drew to wrap up and slap in a fresh magazine. Once he signaled that he was ready Jeff took them on a tour of the rest of the roof.  He warned them at the beginning of the tour that the rest of the roof looked pretty much the same as where they were starting at.  His description proved to be very accurate.

The roof of the high school was covered with generators, lights and cables.  All of which was humming along to illuminate the invaders trying to scale the walls and kill them all.  Armed men were setup in various poses around the roof.  There were snipers around the edges lying on the same type of scaffolding Jeff had pointed out earlier.  For the first time Yue noticed under each bit of scaffolding was a long metal box about the size of a person.  She assumed that was where they kept their supplies.  They were definitely running through a ton of ammunition.  Every single one of them had secured themselves to the scaffolding in one way or the other.  That suicide impulse must be pretty rampant.

Chapter 4:  Into the Breach Once More

“Well that was fun!”  LeBron shouted once they were in the stairwell.  His overly loud voice echoing off the walls in the enclosed space.  Hearing his own voice echoing back at him put him back into his uncontrollable laughing mode.  He started giggling so badly that huge tears rolled out of his eyes.  He couldn’t even stand up straight.  A combination of relief at being off the roof and the Valium coursing through his blood.

“I’ll have some of whatever he took.”  The soldier guarding the door joked.

“I catch you acting like that on duty and you won’t like the consequences.”  A tall man in a black uniform said loudly.  He’d just turned the corner on the stairs below.  Everyone had been so busy watching LeBron losing his marbles that no one had noticed his sudden appearance.  The guard on the door immediately snapped to attention and did his best not to make eye contact with anybody.

“Good evening major.  Anything exciting going on?”  Jeff asked.

“Not really.  Just the fight to save humanity from extinction.  We’ll keep working on that while you give your friends a tour of the base.  Don’t forget to run them through the gift shop when you’re done.”  The major said.  The sarcasm dripping off the words was belied by the twinkle of humor in the salt and pepper haired fit looking officer.

“Sorry Tom.  I should’ve introduced you earlier.”  Jeff said stepping around them all on the crowded stairs to shake hands with the base commander.

“Major Tom?”  Harley said open mouthed as he processed the man’s name and title.  A big grin spread across his face.

“I really need to get promoted.”  Tom joked.  He rattled the line off quickly.  He’d probably said it a few million times since reaching the rank of major.  Not that many people were able to call such exalted figures by their first name.

“These are close friends of mine.  I met these two on the Ford and the rest of them once we ended up on shore.  They’ve all got serious skills.  They’re looking to join up to help us get rid of the crawlerz.  We’re lucky to have them.”  Jeff said.

“I’m a super close friend.”  Yue said quietly.  Realizing his error Jeff rushed to correct it.

“Yue and I have grown very close.”  Jeff tried again.  Seeing the pitying look in Tom’s eyes he knew that probably hadn’t done the trick either.  He really hoped someone changed the subject soon.

“Which one of you guys decided to beat up on my Marines at the train station?”   Tom asked in full on major mode.  Jeff was happy to see the conversation shift to something besides him trying to come up with the words to describe his apocalyptic ‘age is just a number’ affair with Yue.  No one immediately answered as no one was sure how they should answer.  In the absence of a good response what they got was Drew.

“When I came out of the train it looked like the Marines had started it.  I tried to explain the situation, but you know how Marines are.”  Drew said with his hands held out wide.  The expression on his face was a picture of innocence.  This was someone who’d spent a lot of time in the principal’s office.  Unfortunately they weren’t in high school anymore.  Even though they were literally in a high school at the moment.  Tom gave Drew the same kind of look many principal’s had given him before he responded.

“I guess Jeff hasn’t finished explaining all the different ways we’re trying to gather data on the crawlerz here to you guys yet.  We’re trying to figure out what they do when they’re not trying to kill us.  The more we know about them the better prepared we are to wipe them off the planet.  To gather that information we use this amazing new technology called video cameras.  We have them hooked up to solar, so they charge and record all day then record most of the night.  One of our techs worked with some electricians and they setup a pretty cool little network system to gather the files and everything.”  Tom explained.

“That’s actually some really cool data.  I’d love the chance to check some of that out.”  LeBron said.  Tom held up a finger to indicate they could discuss that later.

“As a central transportation station the train platform is pretty strategic.  It’s also a place that attracts a lot of crawlerz at night for whatever reason.  We think they’re following the sounds of the trains pulling in during the day.  Regardless, we have the whole platform pretty well covered with video.”  Tom paused to let that sink in.  “Having shared that information I’m going to give you another chance to answer my question.  Now, would you like to tell me what happened on the platform earlier?”

“It’s personal.  This man lost a loved one needlessly and it was at least partly my fault.  When he saw me, he reacted the way I hoped he’d react.”  Jeff said.

“You wanted him to attack you?”  Tom asked with an arched eyebrow.  Jeff shook his head slowly then answered the major’s question.

“I hoped he’d forgive me.  He did.  I have no problem vouching for each of these people. They’re some of the finest men and women I’ve ever worked with.  That kid trying to grow a mustache is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met.  If he wants to look at the video data, I say we let him get some sleep then plug him into everything first thing tomorrow.  This group is smart and resilient.  They’re a huge addition to the force.”  Jeff wished he’d left that last bit out about the force when LeBron stated cracking up again.  He could see Tom was having a hard time believing LeBron may be the smartest person around when he was currently laughing like an idiot.

“You’re going to want to give LeBron a little time to sleep it off before showing him your videos.”  Yue said affectionately putting her hand on her little brothers back.  She made a mental note to never let anyone give LeBron drugs ever again unless absolutely necessary.  Although since he’d been attempting to jump off a roof into a sea of the infected, she guessed that’d counted as extremely necessary.

“Major can you listen to your radio sir!  Sounds like we have crawlerz on the roof again.”  The guard up top yelled down nervously to Tom.  Tom pressed a button on the side of his radio so he could hear the transmission through the ear bud he was wearing.  He’d turned it off momentarily to talk to them without being distracted by the constant radio chatter.

“What’s going on?”  Drew asked.  He looked like he was going to snatch the earbud out of Jeff’s ear to try and hear for himself what was going on.

“The infected got up on the roof.  The men out there have gone secure.  They’ve all locked themselves inside reinforced metal caskets to try and survive the night.  We’re getting reports from the snipers in the surrounding towers.  They’re working on clearing out the ones crawling around on the roof now.”  Jeff continued to give them a play by play of the action on the roof.

The snipers were reporting that there were at least four of the infected wandering around.  They’d taken out one of them already.  The things were sniffing around the metal caskets under the scaffolding arrangements.  Yue realizing now those big metal boxes she’d seen earlier under each of the shooters wasn’t full of gear.  It was their safety net if the enemy made it up on the roof.  They weren’t going to be allowed to make a dash for the door to the inside of the building with the infected hot on their heels.

The second the snipers had noticed the crawlerz on the roof they’d signaled a lockdown.  The men on the roof immediately ducked into the assortment of overlarge trunks, tool kits and actual coffins that’d been secured to the roof near each station.  The guard at the top of the staircase had verified the door was secure.  The guard wouldn’t let anyone in or out until the signal that the roof was clear was provided.  That’d happen once the snipers verified that they’d killed all the crawlerz on the roof or the sun came up.  If the sun came up first, they’d go out in force in case they had to deal with any surgers.

The boxes were lined with metal to try and keep the overly sensitive crawlerz from figuring out people were inside them.  Once they guessed a person was inside the box, they grouped up around the box and beat the holy hell out of it.  Sometimes the box would collapse under the onslaught before the tower snipers could kill all of the monsters trying to break into the box.  At that point it was up to the person inside the box to kill the things trying to eat him before the crawlerz cracked open their casket to find the gooey center.

The boxes were each secured to the roof with chains that were anchored deeply into the concrete.  The rooftop defenders had learned the hard way that otherwise the crawlerz tended to pick up the boxes and start tossing them around.  A few men had died when their boxes were hurled off the roof with them in it.  They died without any warning.  The metal they wrapped their boxes in to try and keep the crawlerz from sensing them also kept them from using their radios.

“If a crawler had gotten on the roof while we were up there what would we have done?”  Yue asked.  It’d just occurred to her Jeff may have risked all their lives by giving them that tour.  If a lockdown event had occurred, the door to the stairs would’ve been secured. and They’d have been stuck on the roof fighting for their lives.  Not the first time but it still seemed like he may have put them in needless danger.  Not cool.

“There’s two concrete sheds up there.  We’d have all had to cram into whichever one we were closest to and lock ourselves in.  Or we’d have just had to fight our way out.  The shooters are spread out, so we just have them shelter in place.  All of us in one place we could’ve handled a few of the infected ourselves.”  Jeff answered immediately.  The quickness of the response was reassuring.  It indicated Jeff had considered how exposed they were on the roof and had a contingency plan in mind in case they’d needed it.

“How’d they get up there?”  Drew asked.

“The last ones got their hands on the bottom of the chain link covering the third floor windows and yanked themselves up.  If you watch the video it’s pretty unbelievable how powerful they are.  Luckily just a few of them seem strong enough to do it.”  Jeff answered.  He held up his hand to let them know he was listening to the radio before anyone else could ask any questions.

“Tower snipers think it’s clear.  They’re requesting a team to check it out before everyone pops up out of their coffins.  I just volunteered us.  You ready?”  Jeff asked.  He could feel Tom’s eyes boring into him.

“Yeah.  We’re going to leave LeBron in here for now though.”  Yue said helping LeBron sit down.  She looked over at Lisa who nodded that she was good to go.  Hopefully she didn’t start puking again as soon as they went out the door this time.  Leaving a giggling LeBron behind they turned to walk up the stairs.

“You know we do have a building filled with actual military units that are trained to carry out this kind of clearing task.”  Major Tom announced loudly from behind them.

“Yeah, but they’re all pretty beat up right now.  A lot of them are scared to death of going out on this roof.  Even if they do still force themselves to do it.  We can give them a break.  Come with us.  See for yourself that these guys are the real deal and not just a tour group.”  Jeff responded.

“You think I’m going out on the roof for amateur hour when the snipers aren’t sure if any more infected are wandering around?”  Tom asked with a disbelieving look on his face.  Jeff shrugged and continued up the stairs followed by the rest of them.  LeBron was left to rock back and forth on a stair while he tried to rush the medicine out of his system.  He was starting to wonder if Harley had given him something a little more appropriate for a rave than for trying to remain functional around mobs of insane cannibals.

At the top of the stairs the guard looked at Jeff then looked down the stairs at the major.  The major must’ve approved because the guard reached over to unlatch the door.  Jeff and the guard were both on the radio advising the tower snipers to hold their fire.  Jeff took point and the rest of them stacked up behind him.  They’d all been trained how to carry out this kind of operation by the Marines they’d been traveling with before.  Friends who’d fallen along the way.

Drew was last in the line to go out.  He was surprised when he felt a hand grip his shoulder and squeeze.  Looking back he saw Major Tom and LeBron lined up behind him with weapons in hand.  LeBron gave Drew a tight little smile to indicate he’d regained control of himself.  Drew stared at LeBron for a second then decided he was happy to have even a stoned LeBron guarding his back.  He turned around and got ready to pile out of the narrow access door.

“Remember there are men in the caskets.  Random shots could hit one of them so take only aimed shots.  There will not be any spray and pray.  Those things like to hide sometimes so be careful.”  Tom called out.  Jeff gave the major a thumbs up and the guard swung the door open.  Knowing the major it didn’t surprise Jeff at all that he’d opted to go out with them after all.  The major absolutely belonged out in the field with the men.  He wasn’t the type to ever be happy sitting behind a desk.  He was the kind of leader people write books about and give medals too.

That same wave of fear hit them the second they left the confines of the stairwell for the open air of the rooftop.  The big difference this time was that they were expecting it.  It still hit them hard enough to cripple them right out of the gate.  They just recovered a lot faster.  Luckily there wasn’t a crawler outside the door, or they’d have been thrown right back into the stairwell.  Not a good thing since the guard in charge of the door was standing by to shoot anyone who tried to get back in.  That was part of the protocol they’d worked out for keeping the people in the building safe from the infected.

Ignoring the irrational fear he’d been filled with from his first step out on the rooftop Jeff drove forwards.  He couldn’t say he was used to it.  He’d just gotten used to functioning in spite of it.  The people who couldn’t do that were either stuck in the building, provided with a one way train trip to somewhere else or burnt alongside the piles of the infected they killed every night.  This brave new world wasn’t very hospitable for those who couldn’t containerize their fear.

Jeff went out the door and immediately cut to the right to circle around the generator that was sitting there.  He had no doubt that Yue and the others would hit their marks behind him.  The fear would hit them again, but they’d beat their way through it.  The night was silent as they explored the roof.  The tower snipers had stopped shooting at the targets below.  They were now focusing their energies on scanning the rooftop to try and give the clearing party advanced warning if they saw anything.

They cleared the entire roof.  They stopped at each casket to gather the rooftop snipers as they went.  As a group they went for one final sweep to make sure none of the infected had managed to squeeze into a hiding spot they hadn’t noticed at first.  The men on the rooftop called the infected that hid to jump out at you later ‘stalkers’.  Once they finished the final sweep the major ordered the snipers back to their positions to resume normal nighttime operations.

“Incoming.  South wall center.  Hanging on the fence on the third floor window.”  Those words hit the receivers of all the men on the roof with radios.  They immediately relayed it to the others.  The tower hadn’t called for a lockdown which meant they weren’t in any immediate danger of being overrun. They formed up and headed for the south wall to check it out.  The snipers all remained at their posts.  None of them had any desire to lock themselves back inside those boxes if they could help it.  It was horrifying lying in that claustrophobic metal box wondering if you were going to be tossed to your death at any second.

Drew walked between Tom and Lisa.  None of the newcomers knew what to expect.  Were they supposed to look over the side to kill it or would the crawler hop on up to join them?  They were almost to the edge of the roof when Jeff held up his hand and hissed for them to halt.  He took one step in the direction of the wall after ordering them to cover him.  He wished he could just order the tower sniper to take out whatever he’d seen.  They tried to avoid sending rounds through the third floor though.  That was a rule they probably needed to readdress.

A flurry of motion and the crawler was in the air rocketing towards them.  Taken aback by the insane speed the thing was moving at they all put wild rounds in the air.  Lisa and Drew both sprayed the fast moving shadow with their weapons on full auto.  LeBron went over backwards with the blood covered crawler trying to bite his chest through the thick jacket he was wearing.  Yue jumped down to help him.  She grabbed the crawler by its greasy hair and held its face away from LeBron as well as she could.  Harley showed up next plunging a gigantic knife into the side of the crawler over and over again.

Already having caught a few of the bullets shot at it the crawler finally did the sensible thing and died.  Harley picked up the body and tossed it off the roof.  A thoroughly freaked out LeBron scrambled backwards away from the side of the roof.  Tom and Jeff suddenly stopped and pressed their hands to their ear as they received a radio broadcast.

“Lockdown!  Follow me!”  Tom shouted before Jeff had the chance to relay the news.  Tom turned and jogged towards a metal shed made of rebar and bolted on car parts.  The walls were primarily made out of the hoods of cars.  A thin piece of sheet metal was screwed into the front door that’d been mounted on the front of the structure.  It looked like it was built to hold a max of four people if they were willing to get a little snuggly.

Drew let the rest of the team run past him until Jeff arrived.  The two of them walked backwards to provide cover.  A shadowy figure darted towards them from in between the stacks of assorted gear and equipment.  They gave the shadowy figure the welcome it deserved.  The tower snipers were also helping as much as they could.  The shadowy figure tumbled to a stop.  Drew continued moving methodically towards the shelter along with Jeff.

Drew spun on his heel with his M-16 at the ready at the sound of gunfire behind him.  He saw Yue, Lisa, LeBron, Tom and Harley standing around the front of the bolted together shed.  They were all facing a different direction sending shots into the areas they were covering.  Considering how frequently they were shooting there must be a lot more crawlerz on the roof than Drew had thought could get on the roof at one time.  He wondered whose brilliant idea it’d been to string up the chain link on the third floor.  That barrier was basically a stepladder the crawlerz were leveraging to get up on the roof.

“Get in!  We’ll go to the other shed!”  Jeff yelled over the sound of everyone firing at the demons descending on them.  Drew watched as Tom ushered everyone into the shed.  He noted Lisa looked like she was going to rebel and come with the two of them.

“You don’t think we’d fit?”  Drew asked.

“No time to find out.  Follow me.  Fast!”  Jeff shouted the command before taking off towards the other side of the rooftop.

Chapter 5:  Fortress of the Forlorn

Spending the night standing up in a small shed wasn’t great.  Yue, Lisa and Lebron were all on the smaller side which should’ve helped but Harley basically counted as two people.  Two and a half with that massive coat on he wore everywhere.  With weapons dangling off each of them the available square footage inside the small structure had been reduced to next to nothing.  There’d been a terrifying few moments when they’d struggled to even get the door to shut.

They spent the night subjected to the psychic abuse from the crawlerz.  On top of the mental abuse there was the added fear that the walls were going to collapse under the unceasing assault.  To add to the fun the snipers were taking shots from atop their utility pole perches at the milling crowd of overexcited infected infesting the roof.  That should’ve been a good thing. The problem was that occasional rounds were slamming into the outside of the shed they were in.  After one very near miss they went from standing to indiscriminately popping each other’s personal bubbles by getting as low to the ground as possible.

They couldn’t even tell the tower snipers to stop as they needed them to keep shooting. The shed they were in was on the verge of being demolished by the crawlerz slamming into it.  Over the radio the snipers informed them that the roof top had turned into a patio party.  The crawlerz were leaping for the fences covering the windows and then swinging themselves up at a rate they’d never seen before.  It seemed the demons had learned a new trick.  In between trying to breathe and hoping he wasn’t about to die LeBron mused that the infected probably communicated psychically with each other.  His out loud musings were cut short by everyone hissing at him to shut up.

LeBron shut his mouth so as not to get the infected within hearing distance even more stirred up. He lay there uncomfortably considering for the first time that the psychic torture inflicted on them by the crawlerz wasn’t really intended to torture them.  As soon as he thought about it, he knew he was right.  The kind of things that popped in their heads were obviously crude images being used to communicate with the other crawlerz.  The horrific images in their heads of people being ripped apart were the thoughts of the infected who saw them.  The way they could taste the hot blood being sucked from their own bodies was what the infected saw when they sensed they were near.  The way they saw themselves from the crawlerz viewpoint on the tops of buildings was the way the crawlerz communicated to one another where the prey was.

None of it was necessarily a conscious effort by the infected victims of the Cairo contagion.  It was a side effect of the massive influx of adrenaline and psychotropic chemicals into the infected peoples brains.  LeBron wondered if he’d have caught a vision of jumping up and clinging to a fence before jumping higher to get to victims if they hadn’t killed the crawler broadcasting how to get on the roof.  It’d taken a few minutes, but that thought had resonated with the mass of the infected below enough that a mob of them followed the actions of the first.  Why it’d happened this night instead of the others could be because the crawler who’d got onto the roof tonight had seen a bigger group of normal humans than on previous nights.

Trying to ignore the bony butt of his sister painfully grinding into his leg LeBron considered the suicide waves.  The crowd of the infected down below were able to look up and occasionally catch a glimpse of a normal human on the roof.  At that point there’d a few hundred infected focused on either getting on the roof or somehow getting the normal to come to them.  The focused thoughts of so many psychic transmitters could override the soldier’s ability to think for themselves sometimes.  Hence the need to secure their ankles to the scaffolding they were on.

Now that he’d figured out what all the mind babbling was LeBron forced himself to open up to it.  Instead of doing his best to block out the crawlerz he consciously let them it into his head.  Their thoughts slithered in like he was French kissing the slime covered tongue of a long dead corpse.  He bathed in the ecstasy of warm blood and flesh swishing together in his mouth.  He felt the powerful muscles in his legs propelling him high up the wall to grab the chain link fence.  He could see the shed they were in and knew they were in it.  He hammered at it with all his might.

The flashes of psychic imagery they were getting were basically the remnants of the crawler party line hitting them.  The fear they felt was part of what the crawlerz felt.  It was the insane certainty that they’d feel unknowable pain if they didn’t devour the uninfected humans in front of them.  The crawlerz were broadcasting the same pain and terror that drove them forward to their intended victims.  The images and thoughts that corrupted them once they were infected.  LeBron closed his mind back off after a brief struggle and tried to think of how exactly they could use his epiphany to their advantage.

Not everyone spent the night in deep introspection coming to scientific conclusions about their common enemy.  Pretty much everyone else spent the night terrorized by the ‘psychic party line’ LeBron had finally figured out.  That meant night terrors and lots of bolting upright.  Waking up absolutely positive you were about to die.  The hammering on the walls of the small shed didn’t help with the morale inside the space.  The crawlerz were doing their best to get in.  Drew took it on himself to saw off the fingers of the infected who poked them in through the bullet holes.

Lisa had not been thrilled that one of those fingers had landed on her head.  She’d jumped up each time certain the wall had finally given in to the relentless beating it was receiving.  Her jumping up inevitably meant someone was getting stepped on.  She was a skinny waif of a girl given their dystopian diet. Covered in weapons and gear while wearing combat boots though she still could inflict some serious pain by not looking where she was stomping.  Not that there was anywhere she could step where she wouldn’t be hurting someone in the cramped space.

No one was happier than Harley to see the beam of sun piercing the shed through that singular bullet hole.  As the biggest person in the shed he’d ended up at the bottom of the pig pile.  Every time Yue had a bad dream or Lisa had a finger fall into her hair, he got to feel the repercussions.  He was cruising on a massive medley of medications, but he still could tell that he was going to have bruises in the morning.  The second he saw that the shed was slightly less dark he started brushing people off him like they were dandruff before a first date.  Ignoring their pissed off comments at being dumped on the ground with no warning he stood to his full height.  Not caring that his head was pressed into the ceiling he stretched until he heard a series of satisfying cracks.

“Good god that night lasted forever.”  A rumpled looking Major Tom said as he got to his feet beside Harley.

“Do we just open the door?”  Lisa asked.  She was impatient to go make sure Drew was still alive.  Jeff had sent out a quick broadcast that they were good to go the previous night, but it hadn’t been enough to satisfy either Yue or Lisa.  Jeff and Tom both flatly refused to send any more broadcasts saying that Drew and Jeff were either safe or they weren’t.  The only thing another broadcast might do is reveal them if they did happen to be hiding out waiting for an opportunity to get into the shed.

“Give me a minute.”  Tom said grumpily.  Being the second largest person in the group he’d spent the evening in a similar state to Harley.  Lisa had stepped directly onto his face the second time a severed finger fell into her hair.  Unable to scream in complete disgust like she wanted to she’d flung a quick tantrum instead.  That tantrum had included a lot of stomping. Tom had a nice sized shiner going in one eye and was pretty sure his nose was broken.  He couldn’t bring himself to yell at her though. He wasn’t sure how he’d personally react if body parts started raining down on him in the dark.

The tower snipers radioed over to standby while they confirmed all was clear.  The guys out in the towers had a hard life too.  Spending the night in a renovated port a potty bolted onto the top of a telephone pole then wrapped in aluminum foil wasn’t all roses and caviar.  It didn’t help that the enclosures still smelled strongly of their former purpose.  Even worse than the smell was the relentless psychic babbling the tower snipers were exposed to.  Aluminum foil wrapped hut or not they got more than their fair share of the madness broadcast by the huge group of infected swirling around below them.

It wasn’t actually tin foil they were covering most of the structures with.  Cars had been cannibalized all around town to build out these facilities.  The hoods and roofs were cut out to to cover windows and bolt onto two by fours to create crawler resistant structures.  The activities of the night before had shown that nothing was truly crawler proof.  They’d keep scratching away at any building with humans inside until they found a way in.  Once one of them found a way they all knew about it thanks to that psychic party line.  Assuming all the other infected humans out there actually paid strict attention to the images.

“Ok.  Open the doors.  Everybody be ready just in case.”  Tom ordered.

Lisa shrugged and worked with Harley to get the door open.  They were crammed into the structure so tightly it was difficult to get it to unlatch.  Lisa finally just told Harley and Tom they needed to suck it in.  How they were managing to maintain stomach fat with everything going on was beyond Lisa.  Most people looked like underwear models when they took their shirts off now a days.  Which happened a lot in public since communal living and bathing were much more common now.

Lisa stepped out of the shed with her rifle held at the ready.  Luckily there was nothing outside the shed needing to be shot.  They once again worked on clearing the roof.  This time moving excruciatingly slowly since it was very likely there might be a crawler or two hanging out in a dark corner somewhere.  The monsters weren’t able to handle being out in the sun.  They could do a lot of damage in the second or two they had before the sun took their full attention though.

They moved forward releasing the soldiers from their caskets as they did so.  The more men they released the larger the area they could clear as they moved forward.  It was killing Lisa and Yue not to know for certain if their respective significant others had survived the night.  They were within twenty feet of the shed when automatic rifle fire kicked in from a section of roof about ten yards from where Yue and Lisa were standing.  They both ducked instinctively looking around wildly to see what was going on.

When nothing immediately attacked them, they began moving in the direction the rifle fire had come from.  A dead body lay on the ground between a generator and a stack of ammunition boxes.  The body was obviously one of the infected.  A gaunt hair and dirt covered nude man lay sprawled out in a pool of blood.  He also had blood around his mouth.  Yue noticed the bloody mouth first and immediately pointed it out to Lisa.  They dropped into low crouches scanning the area around them.

Harley and LeBron came up behind them.  They’d moved that way as soon as they’d heard the shots fired.  Lisa was pointing at the dead man’s mouth when one of the roof snipers appeared on the top of the generator before diving straight down for Yue.  It all happened so fast that Yue would’ve been infected if she hadn’t jumped forward at just the right time. Whether it was a brilliant move based on her finely honed combat instincts or just complete paranoia that drove her to leap forward the quick reaction saved her life.

The surger went face first into the concrete rooftop where it was pinned down by automatic fire from LeBron, Harley and Yue.  None of them could figure out how the damned thing was still alive when it suddenly shot past them to leap onto a wide eyed rooftop sniper who’d been trying to find his battle buddy.  He’d found him.

They carefully shot the back of the surger as it mounted the flailing sniper.  They did all they could to kill the surger before it could infect the unlucky soldier it’d grabbed.  Harley ran up to the surger and shoved his tactical shotgun barrel against the side of its head.  He literally blew the things brains out.  That did the trick.  The surger tumbled to the side as the soldier it’d been on top of scrambled back to his feet.  The major came running over to see what was going on.  He glanced down at the soldier missing most of his head then looked up at Harley.

“He was infected?”  Tom asked.  The question was rhetorical but given the adrenaline and the drugs he was on Harley answered anyway.

“He was.”  Harley said emphasizing the second word in that sentence.

“What’s wrong with your ear?”  Lisa asked after pointing her rifle at the man who’d stood up after Harley dispatched his attacker.

“It’s nothing.”  The soldier said fearfully stepping away from them.

“Put your hand down soldier!”  Tom barked stepping forward.

The man turned and ran.  Tom shot him in the back twice.  The man climbed jerkily back to his feet and turned to face them.  The eyes no longer that of the frightened soldier who’d just tried to run away.  The face now twisted into the grotesque bestial expression of a surger on the hunt.  Their former brother in arms lunged for them.  He fell to the ground a split second later when the major drilled him right between the eyes with a well-placed shot from his nine millimeter sidearm.

“Kevlar vest.”  Lisa suddenly spouted out.  She’d been wondering how the surger had survived the rounds fired into its back.  Then she remembered how many times they’d shot the other surger before Harley had finally killed it up close and personal with his shotgun.  All of the rooftop soldiers were wearing as much kevlar as possible.  Mostly to protect themselves from friendly fire.  The tower snipers could get a little sloppy after shooting the whole night without a break.

A hard breathing Major Tom fixed her with a hard stare.  Two of his men were dead.  He wasn’t happy.  They continued moving forward.  The other shed doors opening before they could get there.  Jeff still trying to explain to Drew the procedure was for them to wait for someone to tell them it was ok to come out of the shed before they opened the door.  The look on Drew’s face indicating he could care less about ‘procedure’.  Not when his sister, his girl and his brother were most likely already out on the roof and he could hear shots ringing out.

Lisa threw professionalism and procedure to the breeze as she ran up and leaped into Drew’s open arms.  A grinning Yue walked over and chastely kissed Jeff on the lips as she simultaneously tried to pull Lisa off of Drew.  Tom finally accomplished that by loudly pointing out there could still be infected on the roof.  With that announcement everyone calmed down and the sweep began anew.  A curious Lisa looked into the shed Drew and Jeff had spent the night in.

“What the hell?”  She asked loudly.

“What do you mean babe?”  Drew asked turning around.

“You had blankets?”  Lisa asked with fire shooting out of her eyes.

“Well yeah.  I know we were less cramped than you guys, but it still sucked.  We just had those foam pads, the blankets and one pillow that we had to play paper, rock, scissors for.  It was pretty rough.”  Drew answered without thinking.  Which was the standard way he answered most questions.  A pissed off Lisa vanished into the stacks of boxes to help with sweeping the roof.  A confused looking Drew trailing along behind her.

“He’s never going to learn, is he?”  Jeff asked with a bemused expression on his face.  He had Yue’s hand in his.

“Did you know about the blankets and pillows before you left us to go to this shed?”  Yue asked.

“Of course not.”  Jeff lied.  His lie must not have been good enough because he was immediately holding no one’s hand.  He ended up trailing after Yue in much the same way he’d just made fun of Drew for traipsing along behind Lisa.

Chapter 6:  The Best Laid Plans

Given that they were new and that they’d spent the bulk of the night up on the roof in fear for their lives they were given the next day off.  Jeff kind of ruined that by telling them they’d be meeting at lunch to debrief.  Jeff was doing his best to look sleepy and miserable like the rest of the group.  Not an easy trick given the extreme difference in sleeping conditions over the night.  Jeff and Drew had enjoyed a cozy little slumber party compared to the others.  At least that’s the way the rest of them saw it.

“What time should we be ready for lunch?”  Yue yawned.  She may be sleepy but there was no mistaking that evil glint in her eye.  Jeff noticed it too.  He was being punished for having fought his way over to the more comfortable sleeping arrangements the previous night.

“Early afternoon work for you guys?  I’ll swing by first and check to see if you’re awake.”  Jeff said carefully.  He was attempting to be as flexible as possible with them.  Having to wait was frustrating for him as he really wanted to get their perspective on all of this.  They may not be a team of highly educated scientists, but they were subject matter experts in surviving.  There weren’t any other people in the world he trusted the opinions of more than the members of this tight little team.

“Works for me.  Right now I just want to stretch out on the cot and close my eyes.  It’ll be nice to do that without worrying about something breaking through the wall and trying to eat me.  I came up with some stuff last night on the mind games the crawlerz play that I want to run by everybody.”  LeBron said making a beeline for his cot.

“You going to stay in here or do you want to come with me?”  Jeff asked Yue without thinking.  Everyone in the room turned to hear the answer.  Everyone except Harley who was already face down in his pillow.

“I think I’ll stay here.  If you have somewhere more comfortable you could always take Drew with you.”  Yue said with a sarcastic smile.  Jeff shook his head and left to go do whatever it was that he did during the day.

Everyone else lay down after downing copious amounts of ibuprofen.  A flask was passed around and blankets thrown over the windows.  Easy enough to do with the fences bolted to the wall.  That had to be a fire code violation.

LeBron was exhausted.  He felt like he’d gone multiple rounds with a pissed off gorilla.  One of those huge, angry ones you see beating their chests on the discovery channel.  Despite that he didn’t think he’d be able to fall asleep.  His mind was spinning a mile a minute.  It wasn’t just the way he’d pieced together the communication method for the crawlerz either.  It was a million other things he’d noted during their brief stay.  He pulled out the iPhone he normally just used for taking pictures and started taking notes. He wanted to make sure he didn’t forget anything.  A page and half into it he felt his eyelids rebelling against him.  Happy to be somewhere he felt safe for once he let his eyelids win the battle.

That much needed nap was interrupted at around one in the afternoon when Jeff returned with food and coffee.  Drew was going around waking everyone up.  He’d already taken the blankets off the windows to let the light into the room.  If Jeff hadn’t been lugging a big jumbo sized container of coffee the situation could’ve gone downhill very quickly.  Between the Little Debbie Oatmeal Pies and the fresh meat platter though he was quickly forgiven.  Drew made it known to one and all that he’d gotten up and helped Jeff hump all this stuff up the three flights of stairs to their room.

“My hero.”  Lisa said giving him a kiss before dunking the jumbo sized cookie into her steaming hot mug of coffee.  She was hoping the black coffee would absorb some of the cream flavor from the snack cake.

Once the food was gone Drew left to return the containers to the kitchen.  The plate of freshly cooked meat had been especially well received.  One thing the country didn’t have a shortage of now that the human population had been drastically reduced was game animals.  Deer, turkey, wild pigs, bears and pretty much anything else you could think of could now be found wandering down the middle of overgrown city streets in broad daylight.  LeBron had always wondered if the infected consumed those animals as well or if their hunger was reserved for uninfected humans only.

“Hey Jeff.  When do you think I might be able to check out those videos we talked about?”  LeBron asked.

“You can go as soon as we’re done here if you want.  I’ve told them to give you full access to everything.  They also have a highlights reel they’ve been working on with some of the key observations.  I’d start with that one if I was you.”  Jeff answered.

“Excellent.  I can’t wait to see that stuff.  There’s just so many questions.”  LeBron said.  He got up and walked over to the cot he’d slept on to grab the iPhone he’d put his notes on.  He wanted to make sure he didn’t forget anything.  Especially if he’d be leaving immediately afterwards to go check out the videos.

“I have a question while we’re waiting on Drew to get back.”  Yue said.  She paused to wait for Jeff’s full attention.  “What happened to us having the day off?  This kind of seems like working.”  She said once her boyfriend had focused on her.

“You got the day off from any of the thousand manual labor kind of tasks everyone chips in on around here.  The big one being scraping body parts off the ground outside and taking them to be burnt.  As to what we’re doing now you can look at it more as a dinner party with lots of interesting conversation around your observations so far.  There really isn’t a ton of time to mess around.  We lost two men last night in a way that we should’ve been able to prevent.  If we can come up with ways to save lives, then the sooner the better.”  Jeff said.  There was no real arguing with that.

LeBron began the conversation by walking them through the ideas he’d had since getting there.  The very first subject he broached was his theory on the nightmare images that radiated out from the crawlerz.  Once he’d said it out loud there was a collective sigh of understanding.  It may only be a theory, but it felt like the right answer to everyone.  They were all at a loss as to how the information could help them in their fight against the infected though.  Hopefully by understanding where the images being forced into their brains were coming from it would make them a little less terrifying.

Encouraged by how well his first point had been taken LeBron launched into his next bullet.  Attempting to kill millions of crawlerz by having snipers shooting at them one at a time was stupid.  Ground level armored machine gun nests would be a much better idea.  If they needed to conserve ammunition, then they should be rigging up claymores to set off throughout the night whenever the crawler party started getting heated.  The main issue with explosives was that the bait for the crawlerz was people.  It was easier to be surgical with a sniper rifle than with a bunch of C-4.

Snaring crawlerz and trapping them to be dispatched once the sun came up were two more ideas Lebron was mulling over.  Jeff filled him in that they were doing that in certain areas.  They’d setup places the infected could crawl into when the sun was coming up.  They swept those places every morning and killed whatever they caught.  It was still hideously slow going.  A long and dangerous war where the enemy could suffer a thousand casualties to every one of theirs and still come out ahead.

LeBron’s final notes were mostly just brainstormed ideas on how to protect humanity while killing as many of the infected as possible. Jeff stopped him when he started talking about digging massive pits and putting land mines and spikes in them.  Once he’d verified that was the last bit LeBron had to say he looked around to get impressions and ideas from everyone else.

“Why don’t we all just go live on an island?  Maybe take over Australia or Cuba or something?”  Lisa asked.

“That sounds good to me mon.  Hammocks and Ganja on a Jamaican beach versus getting ripped into pieces and eaten.”  Harley said.  It was his first contribution to the conversation since asking if there were any more cookies anywhere.

“Sounds good to me too but it’s not the mission.”  Jeff said.

“Why do we care about the mission exactly?”  Lisa asked.  She didn’t say it in a confrontational way.  She was genuinely curious.  It’s not like she felt bound by her elementary school pledge of allegiance recitations.  The star spangled banner belonged to another time and place as far as she was concerned.

Jeff opened his mouth to speak then shut it again.  It was hard to argue with the two punch combo he’d just received.  To be honest why shouldn’t they be trying to find an island somewhere to live on?  Why should they risk killing themselves to reclaim the United States?  For that matter why should he.  He knew for a fact the POTUS would be happy to hear he’d died.  The only reason he hadn’t already been killed was because he had some powerful friends in the military who thought he had some good ideas.  That could all change at any time though so why weren’t they reading up on how to operate a sailboat?

“I feel responsible.  My job was to come up with ways to avoid the massive mess we’re in.  I failed.  I’m going to stay and make it right.  That’s why I care about the mission.  None of you carry that kind of weight.  I wouldn’t blame you if you took off.  It’s probably the smart thing to do in your cases.  We’re most likely going to die trying to do the impossible.”  Jeff said thoughtfully.  It was the first time he’d ever put it all out there like that.

“I’m not going anywhere unless you pull that shed crap again.”  Yue said. She got up and embraced Jeff.  She’d seen how he started to tear up when he admitted to having failed more people than he could ever atone for.  He was a good man.  It didn’t surprise her that he felt the weight of all those lives lost.  She saw how one way for him to make up for it was to succeed at protecting those who’d survived.

“I’m with Yue.”  LeBron stated simply.  Drew looked at Lisa who nodded.

“Same here.  We’re staying for now.”  Drew said.  Everyone turned their heads to look at Harley.

“I get sick on boats and I’m way too big for a hammock.”  Harley said.

“Ok.  So what next?”  Drew asked rubbing his hands together.

“We come up with better ways to kill more of the crawlerz.  We come up with solid designs for secure places to live.  We figure out how to safely grow food and salvage building supplies.  We take our country back.”  Jeff said.  He must’ve realized he was being borderline melodramatic since he coughed and spun around to ‘go find something to drink’.

The ideas they came up with had their own sets of hurdles.  They needed someone who understood explosives.  They needed people who could build stuff.  They needed supplies and time.  Jeff filled up a notebook with all the ideas and needs and wants they came up with.  By the time they’d exhausted their creativity it was beginning to get dark.  They’d already agreed that no soldiers should be put on the roof that night.  If they were correct about the crawlerz then the roof was just going to get overrun again anyway.

Jeff left to set things in motion on the ideas they’d come up with.  He took LeBron with him since he was still adamant about wanting to watch the videos.  Everyone else was looking forward to a crawler free night.  Drew was busy pushing his cot and Lisa’s over into a corner so they could have some privacy.  Harley pulled out a book to read and Yue inventoried her gear while waiting for Jeff to come back.  She’d agreed she’d hang out with him for the evening once he was done for the day.  She thought it was pretty cool that if any of those ideas worked then the world would owe it’s survival to her little brother.  LeBron hadn’t had all the ideas, but he’d had the best ones.  He’d also thought to ask questions that hadn’t even occurred to the rest of them.

She was wondering what LeBron was seeing in the videos as she walked over to look out the window.  It was definitely dark out now.  The lights that normally lit up the area outside had not been turned on.  There were no tower snipers deployed for the evening.  No firework shows to attract the attention of the indigent infected.  The goal for the evening was to rest.  To do their best not to attract any attention.  To that end they’d pulled everyone inside.  The third floor was lights out at dusk.  Yue had to pull a blanket out of the way to even look outside.

She leaned against the section of chain link fences bolted to the wall inside the classroom.  It was mirrored by another section of chain link fence that’d been bolted to the outside of the window.  The fence had been what’d given the crawlerz the ability to get to the roof the previous night.  It was why they weren’t putting men on the roof tonight.  The following day they were going to replace the chain link on the outside with bolted on sheet metal instead.  Something strong enough to keep the crawlerz out that wouldn’t allow them to get a good grip like the fence gave them.

Yue turned to walk back to her cot.  She was thinking she’d go find a place to brush her teeth before Jeff came back when there was a smashing sound from the window behind her.  It was followed a few seconds later by another smashing sound against the other window in the room.  Yue forced herself to breathe.  The crawlerz had come back after all.  They were recreating the tactic that’d gotten them to the roof the previous night.  Only this time when they got up there, they’d find there weren’t any more victims to be had.

She sat down on her cot making sure her weapons were all nearby.  Louder, more abrasive noises drifted to them from outside.  The next sound was that of one of their windows shattering.  She heard a man screaming in pain out in the hallway.  She turned around to look that way then flipped her head back to the windows in their room when she heard a shotgun go off behind her.  Harley was standing in front of one of the windows where the blanket had started bouncing around.  He was racking another shell and moving towards the other window.

Chapter 7:  The Red Kool-Aid

The blanket covering the window fell off revealing an enraged crawler silhouetted against the night sky.  The crawler was doing its best to rip the chain link fence apart so it could get at the people it sensed in the room.  Yue shot it in the forehead before Harley could make it back over to that window.  He’d been running in between the two large windows playing whack-a-zombie with his tactical shotgun.

“You stay on that window!  Drew, go figure out what the hell is going on in the hallway!  Lisa watch our backs!”  Yue ordered moving forward to cover the other window.  As if by magic a crawler drifted into the window frame.  It balanced on the tiny ledge and began ripping away at the fence.  Before it could do any real damage, Yue gave the beast a nine millimeter lobotomy.

“We need to go!”  Drew came running back into the room.  Behind him came the sound of automatic weapons ripping up the hallway.  There was no need to ask them twice.  There was nothing for them to pack.  They all lived out of their backpacks.  Slinging their gear across their shoulders they followed Drew out into the hallway.

Then they spun around and ran right back into the classroom.  The hallway was filled with bullets and blood.  Silent crawlerz charged from one end of the hallway into the rifle volleys coming from the men standing further down the hallway.  Drew had seen a mix of refugees and soldiers rushing past when he went out.  In the thirty seconds he’d spent back in the room waiting for them to be ready to follow him the hallway had gone from traversable to a death trap.  It wasn’t like they could nicely ask the people in the hall to stop shooting so they could get out.  Not in the darkness and confusion.

“What a cluster.”  Yue said.  A shotgun blast from behind her a stark reminder that they still had two big entrances for crawlerz to attack them from.  This time she ordered Drew to take the other window.  She yelled for them to try not to shoot the actual chain part of the chain link fence.  Any weakness in that barrier would only allow the crawlerz to get in quicker.  Harley and Drew both nodded with very limited enthusiasm.  Standing that close to the fence to shoot wasn’t going to be fun.  They reluctantly moved to within an arm’s reach of the barriers to save the fences.

“No way we go out this way anytime soon.”  Lisa called out to Yue.  Lisa was down on one knee near the door.  She’d cracked it open to peek out and then slammed it shut again immediately.  The hallway was turning into a meat grinder.

“Options!”  A frustrated Yue yelled out.  She had nothing personally.  She hoped someone was able to come up with something.  She was fully prepared to kick Drew right between the legs if he dared say something along the lines of teleportation, miracles, or made any sort of superhero references.  He must have sensed her frustration because he made a quick gesture instead of answering verbally.

It was way too noisy for using words anyway.  He’d simply pointed at the tiled ceiling overhead.  It was way overhead.  It might very well be their only option though.  She wanted to give him a big hug and ruffle his hair or something. Instead she found herself trying to figure out how to access the ceiling that soared an additional nine feet over her head.  The obvious solution was currently playing tug of war with his rifle against an infected woman with straggly hair down to her dirt covered thighs.  Framed against the glow of the nighttime sky the crawler looked like Cousin It.

Harley had stuck the barrel of his shotgun through the chain link to avoid breaking any more pieces of the barrier off when he shot.  The fence on his side was already looking pretty rough.  When Cousin It jumped onto the ledge, he’d blown off a big chunk of her thigh with his first shot.  The hippie haired freak hadn’t even flinched.  She’d just grabbed the barrel of his shotgun and started whacking it around like a hyperactive toddler with a sparkler.  Harley lost his grip on the shotgun when Yue put the barrel of her pistol near the top of the mound of hair and pulled the trigger a few times.

“Too close!”  He yelled hopping back with his hand clapped over his ear.  In retrospect Yue supposed putting the gun right next to him like that may have been a little callous.  She had neither the time nor the inclination to apologize to him though.

“You’re supposed to kill them not hand them your gun!  I need you to go get on the desk and see if you can get up into the ceiling.  We need a way out.”  Yue shouted the order to be heard over all the background noise.  She was wondering if she’d maybe made Harley deaf by shooting so close.  The big guy still had his hand firmly clasped over his ringing ear.  She started to yell out what she wanted him to do again.  He stopped her by nodding and walking quickly towards the big desk in the front of the room.

Yue positioned herself in front of the window Harley had been guarding.  She was half looking at the window and half trying to make out what Harley was doing.  The beam from his little flashlight was jerking around like he was trying to get a rave started.  Made sense considering the drugs he’d probably taken when he thought he had a full night free.  He was barely sober during the days when he did know he was going to have to focus.

Drew fired a couple times out his window while roaring out a challenge to whatever beastie had hopped up and managed to freak him out.  All that sudden noise and motion from that direction while Yue was already looking in two other directions freaked her out.  She glanced over in the direction of Drew to make sure he was ok.  While checking on Drew she completely missed the shadowy form that suddenly filled her own window frame.

She jerked her head back around as the creature in the frame hurled itself hard against the fence.  The fence that’d already been subjected to some serious abuse.  The muscular crawler smashed through the fence onto Yue.  She went over backwards with her pistol in the monster’s stomach.  She pulled the trigger multiple times as she was slammed hard into the floor.  Her last conscious thought being that she was never going to live it down if she‘d just gotten yet another concussion.

Lisa rushed forward to slam a serrated six inch blade into the side of the monster’s neck.  She prayed she’d gotten there before it’d had the opportunity to sink its teeth into any part of her friend and potential sister in law.  She ripped the blade out and buried it in the broad back spread out in front of her.  She started shoving the disgustingly warm bloody carcass off of Yue.  Before she’d gotten a good enough purchase to push it off, she felt something blocking the moonlight.  Looking up she saw another of the merciless enemy in the window.  It leapt for her.

She had no time to get to her other weapons so she ripped the knife out of the corpses back and thrust it in the air as hard as she could.  She aimed for where she thought the things face was going to be.  Luckily Drew had already started moving towards her when he saw the fence get ripped apart by the crawler lying in a pile on top of Yue.  He glimpsed the shadowy form in midleap and promptly sprayed a burst of three rounds in the space between Lisa and the flying freak.  In this kind of combat there was no time to think.  Only to act.

The knife was torn out of Lisa’s hand hard enough to sprain her wrist.  One of Drew’s bullets having connected with the hardened steel Rambo knife he’d enjoyed teasing her for carrying.  His other two rounds hit the crawler in the head and neck respectively.  Lisa was knocked to the side as the crawler smashed into the floor in a heap.

“You ok?”  Drew asked with concern in his eyes.  Lisa nodded.  She tried to hold her pistol with her sprained hand and winced.  She was going to have to use her off hand to defend the window instead.

“Get that thing off your sister and get back to your window.”  Lisa ordered Drew.  She snapped her eyes away from him and stood ready to blast away at the next shape that dared fill her window.  She wasn’t going to have the luxury of the fence to slow it down.

Drew dragged the body of the oversized crawler off of Yue and made sure she was alive.  He didn’t bother waking her up or checking her too thoroughly.  He could feel a heartbeat and she appeared to be breathing.  That was good enough for now.  He dragged her back a little further from the window.  That task completed he then jogged back to his own window just in time to put a few rounds into yet another crawler.  He’d managed to make it back before they lost the protection of the fence inside his window as well.

“There’s a big open space up here!”  Harley yelled over to Drew.

Drew took his eyes off the window to look back behind him at Harley standing on the teachers desk.  He was standing on top of two chairs he’d sat on top of the desk.  None of it looked very sturdy.  Turning back around to guard his window Drew waited for the cussing and sound of the chairs falling off the desk.  When he didn’t hear any of that he yelled back at Harley.

“Can we get up there?  Yue’s knocked out again!”

Drew had no sooner asked that question than they all heard something slamming into the door leading out into the hallway.  Drew hoped that the threat of shooters wandering through high schools would’ve forced educators to go for the premium doors and locks.  Premium or not the crawlerz would eventually beat their way through.  The pounding from outside meant that the hallway was no longer a viable escape route.  Suddenly the ceiling sounded a lot more appealing.

“Yo Drew!  Grab your sister and bring her over here.  I’ll boost you up then hand her to you.  Lisa, get ready to haul ass over here once Drew pulls Yue up!”  Harley yelled.

Not bothering to try and diagram the plan Harley was laying out Drew ran over and picked up Yue.  He sprinted over to the desk and draped his sister over the side opposite Harley and his two chairs worth of support.  Harley hopped down off the chairs with an agility that was surprising in someone his size.  He helped Drew get up on the chairs then made a step with his hands to complete boosting Drew up into the rafters.  Drew didn’t bother looking around too much.  He got himself in a secure place and reached down with both hands for Yue.

Over by the far window Lisa wasted the next crawler who popped into her window and then stepped back so she could cover both windows.  She hated having her back to the classroom door.  There was no telling when it might give out.  If that happened while she was focused on the windows, then she was done.  Taking a deep breath she focused on killing anything that popped into the windows.  As fast as the infected were if they escaped out of that framed in area, they’d be almost impossible to kill.

A loud bang to her left made her spin in that direction.  Expecting the worst what she saw was surprisingly predictable.  Yue’s lower half was hanging out of the ceiling.  Her legs disappeared into the ceiling while Lisa watched.  The loud bang had been the chairs Harley had put together so he could get a boost up into the attic.  He’d knocked them both off the desk.  Probably while trying to help Drew manhandle his sister up.  The result of losing the chairs had been Harley bouncing off the desk and landing on the floor.

Praying that Harley hadn’t hurt himself Lisa ran over to help him up.  On the way over she blasted a few shots at yet another crawler who’d bounced up to say hello.  She was ecstatic to see the infected jumper fall backwards off the windowsill.  It was an easy target, but she was shooting with her off hand while running across the room in the dark.  By the time she got to Harley he was already stacking the chairs up again.  Instead of her helping him up he bent down and easily scooped her up.

As much as she wanted to close her eyes in that brief journey from the floor to Harley’s arms to Harley stepping on a desk then stepping precariously onto the two chairs, she kept them both wide open.  She was scanning the room ready to blast away at any infected that managed to luck into jumping up into the room while the defenders were at their weakest.  She barely even heard Drew yelling for her to help pull herself up.  Harley must not be trying to fall off the desk again by boosting her into the ceiling like he’d been forced to do with Yue.

As soon as Harley felt Lisa able to pull herself up, he let go of her and pulled his shotgun around.  Nothing jumped up while he waited.  Whoever was at the door to the classroom kept right on hammering away.  The thick wooden door easily shrugged off the assault for now.  Then Lisa was up into the space above the tiles.  Dropping his shotgun to hang from its strap Harley leapt up off the chairs.  He grabbed ahold of the two rafters he’d tested earlier and pulled himself up into the ceiling.  For a second he actually saw himself disappearing up.  He blinked to clear his head from the white hot anger he’d felt at seeing his own legs disappearing into the tiled ceiling.

“Did you guys see that?”  Lisa asked.

“See what?”  Drew asked.

“Harley’s legs going up into the ceiling.”  Lisa said softly.  Harley almost missed what she said.  Then he put two and two together with what LeBron had been going on and on about today.

“Oh hell.”  Harley said pulling himself over to the boards that made up a floor down the center of the huge attic space.

A crawler burst through the tile right next to where they were all gathered.  Drew had broken open a glow stick and thrown it on the floor to help them see in the pitch dark space.  The crawler must have still been in three story jumping mode.  It sailed past them through the jumble of wires and pipes to smash headfirst into the bottom of the actual roof.  The impact snapped its neck.  They listened as the lifeless body tumbled back down through the maze of overhead infrastructure.

“Maybe they’ll all do that?”  Drew said hopefully.

“I wouldn’t bet on it.”  Yue muttered sitting up and rubbing her head.  She must be getting better at concussions.  The last one had put her out for hours.  This time she’d barely been out for fifteen minutes.  It was telling that everyone took it in stride that she was back up.  They were all relieved that now they didn’t have to carry her.  At least they’d die unencumbered.  Drew was actually a little sad for Yue.  If you were going to be eaten alive by monsters in an attic, then being in a concussion when it happened was really the way to go.

“When did they get so good at jumping anyway?”  Drew asked.  The damned things were getting a little ridiculous.  With the numbers advantage they had did they really need to also get Superman jumping abilities?

As if in answer to his question the floorboards underneath him erupted upwards.  Drew fell over backwards into the tiles next to him.  He got tangled up in a rat’s nest of cables that kept him from falling through the roof.  He was freaking out about tumbling down into a room full of the infected while he was tied up in a big ball of cables.

They quickly got Drew pulled up and ran for the other end of the building.  Crawlerz were popping up into the attic all around them.  Smashing through cables and pipes as they sought out their prey.  Drew turned around and blindly emptied his magazine into the darkness behind them.  He ejected it and slammed in another one.  He felt Lisa sliding up next to him.  She joined in on the random spray and pray approach to fighting off the infected in the darkness.  It wasn’t going to work but it was better than running until you felt their teeth on the back of your neck.

They’d talked about this before in hushed tones.  What to do when it all went to hell?  What to do in an Alamo situation like this one?  None of them wanted to be eaten alive.  None of them wanted to be trapped in a prison of flesh with their will stripped away from them by some ancient moldy virus.  It was unanimous that if they were infected, they wanted to be shot in the face.  It got to be a slippery slope when they talked about hopeless situations like this one.  What most people called hopeless situations were what they called a Tuesday.

Drew was snapped out of his thoughts by the feeling of a hand clamping down on his shoulder.  He spun around ready to kill whoever or whatever it was.  Beside him Lisa was still blasting away.  Harley was reaching over to get her attention as well.

“Follow me!”  Harley yelled.  He didn’t wait to see if they did or not.  He turned and sprinted into the darkness.  His flashlight bobbing around wildly as he ran.  Not having any other more pressing appointments on their calendars Drew and Lisa hauled ass after him.

Up ahead Yue was holding open a door to a staircase.  She waved at them to hurry.  Sucking up their last reserves of energy they poured on the speed and basically flew through the open doorway.  Yue slammed it shut behind them.  Less than a second later there was the muffled sound of flesh pounding on the door.

“That was close.”  Lisa said in between her loud and ragged breathing.

“Yeah.  I was wondering if we were going to end up having to shoot each other or something.”  Drew said.  The others nodded.  They knew exactly what he meant.

“The nights young and we’re stuck in the dark in a staircase surrounded by demons.  I wouldn’t write off the shooting each other plan quite yet.”  Harley said.  As if to prove his point the lights suddenly popped on.  In the distance they heard a door open and slam shut.

“You had to say something.”  Lisa said accusingly to Harley who just grinned and pretended to knock on the wooden bannister of the staircase.

Chapter 8:  Documenting the Damned

Jeff dropped LeBron off with a beer bellied man with enormous arms.  The man was named Charlie.  He was in charge of the videography operation.  He referred to his work as a documentary of the damned.  He’d been part of the IT staff at Weathertop in charge of physical security.  He had the necessary clearances and education you’d expect from someone at that level despite looking like a dive bar bouncer.  He laughed a lot and continuously self-medicated.  LeBron’s first thought was that he really needed to introduce this guy to Harley.  His second thought was that he hoped Harley and this guy never met.  Neither one of them would survive the exponential increase in partying that’d happen if they did.

Charlie got LeBron situated in a corner of the classroom turned mad scientist AV lab.  There were televisions and network equipment setup all over the place.  The network switches humming along as the battery backups they were hooked up to were continuously charged from the rooftop solar cells.  Charlie walked over to a computer and started clicking through files.

“I suppose you’re here for the greatest hits, right?”  Charlie said double clicking on a QuickTime file.  LeBron walked over and sat down in the seat Charlie pointed at.

“I want to know how to kill them better.  How to avoid them killing us.  Whatever we can learn.”  LeBron said excitedly.  He was looking forward to this.

The screen came on with the date listed first.  The camera was in night mode inside a very dark room.  There wasn’t anything visible other than a green tinted floor and walls.  LeBron looked up at Charlie to see if maybe he was missing something.  Charlie nodded down at him and told him to wait for it.  A few seconds later the camera caught an influx of the infected pouring into the building.  They crawled all over each other as they fought to get as far from the windows as possible.  A bunch of them ended up in a big drift up against the interior wall.  The video stopped and displayed a date two days later.

“Do we know where that is?  We could take out a ton of them during the day when they’re weak.”  LeBron said.

“Great minds and all that.  Check this out.”  Charlie said.

The video came back on showing the bodies piled along the floor.  Many of them seemed to be sleeping while others were just kind of crawling around.  Then there were bright flashes of light on the screen.  Crawlerz were shredded to pieces.  The floor ran with their blood.  The remaining infected seemed to not even notice they were now sleeping in a mass grave for their kind.  They simply rearranged themselves and either went back to sleep or continued slithering around the slaughterhouse.

“Claymores?”  LeBron asked.  He wanted to be excited about it but that was quite a bit of death and maiming to take in.  The hardest part was seeing the little forms darting around through it all.  The infected children always broke his heart when he saw them.  He really hated it when he was forced to shoot one of them.

“Yep.  We had the men who set them do their best to aim away from the camera.  I think this is probably one of the best clearing methods we’re going to have.  Most of the ones in there still crawling around died the next day from their wounds.”  Charlie said.

“Do they go back there again?  The crawlerz?”  LeBron asked.

“No.  That’s the weird thing.  We rewired the place the next day hoping we could get another batch of them but only a few wandered back in.  The night after that not a single one showed up.”  Charlie answered.  He was obviously perplexed.  LeBron filled him in on his psychic party line theory.  By the time he was done talking Charlie was shifting from foot to foot with excitement.  He looked like a kid in elementary school trying to get the teachers attention to ask to go to the bathroom.

“This ringing a bell for you?”  LeBron asked amused.  Here he was explaining a theory he’d come up with on his own to this highly technical middle aged dude.  The guy wasn’t dumb.  Based on what he knew Charlie had accomplished and just how he talked in general LeBron could tell he was smart.  He was evidently smart enough to get really excited and start connecting dots as soon as he heard something that clicked for him.

“Yeah.  Looking at it that way makes a lot of sense.  It’s also really freakin scary.”  Charlie finally said.  LeBron could tell the man’s wheels were spinning.  He didn’t say anything else though.

The next video segment showed a street on the edge of town.  Charlie told him to watch as this one was time lapsed to get to when the fireworks first went off.  They’d setup cameras to try and capture the crawlerz running towards the high school once the show got going.  Capture them they did.  The crawlerz came up the street so fast that they were blur in a few scenes.  LeBron had to check with Charlie to make sure the time lapse hadn’t accidentally been left on.

“That’s why if you get caught out in the open you can pretty much give up.”  LeBron said.  He was watching in awe as the night vision on the cameras caught the crawlerz rushing by unbelievably fast.

“We need to get one of those radar guns that capture how fast something moves.  I’d love to see how fast they’re really moving.”  Charlie commented.

“Maybe we could get one of those big LED signs the cops leave beside the road to show people how fast they’re driving.”  LeBron said.

“Owning the apocalypse one ‘Office’ reference at a time.”  Charlie said waiting to see if LeBron got it.

“Nice.”  LeBron said appreciatively after reaching back into his memory to dredge up that obscure reference.

The videos kept coming.  The only real conclusion to draw was that the regular human race was screwed.  They were no longer the apex predator.  The worst part of observing the infected like this was that LeBron had to admit to himself the monsters weren’t getting any weaker.  If anything they appeared to be getting stronger. They were also acquiring new skills at a ridiculous pace.  The psychic communications appeared to be getting more narrowed and purposeful.  The damned things were jumping around like giant fleas.  Making leaps that should be impossible.  Running at speeds that shouldn’t be biologically possible.

There was only so much potential energy stored in the muscles of the human body.  No amount of crazy mold or weird mummy virus should be able to alter that.  Everyone always used the reference of a mother picking up a car to save her child to explain how the infected were so strong.  Well that mother didn’t pick up that car and then run around the block with it before leaping a three story building for fun.  There was only so much that adrenaline bursts and psychic powers should be able to explain.

“You’re wondering how what they’re doing is even possible right?”  Charlie asked knowingly.  “The first few times I sat down and watched these clips I was the same way.  It’s one thing to be in the heat of it.  They’re jumping everywhere while you blast away at them.  It’s another to actually catalogue how many of them are able to easily hop on top of a three story high school.  All that adrenaline crap everybody talks about sort of explains it to the lay man.  To the scientist it just opens up a lot more questions.  Questions I don’t have the answers for.  I don’t think we’re going to find the answers watching videos either.”  Charlie said.  He was really opening up.  He must feel like they’d really bonded over the shared ‘Office’ humor.

“Then why do you keep filming them?”  LeBron asked.

“Because we need all the intel we can get.  I can’t tell you how the hell they haul ass across a parking lot then hop up onto the windowsill of a third floor window without breaking a sweat, but I can tell you they can do that.  We don’t really need to know how they do stuff to kill them.  We just need to know what they can do.”  Charlie explained.

They continued watching videos until LeBron decided he’d had enough.  It was fascinating but he wasn’t really learning anything new.  He pressed Charlie to see if there was anything else unique that’d been captured.  Charlie thought about it for a minute before shaking his head slowly.  He was about to tell LeBron that he thought the infected already had quite enough powers when Jeff burst through the door.  A frantic look on his face as he scanned the room until he saw them sitting in the corner.

“The building’s been breached.  The third floor’s sealed off now.  I can’t find your sister or brother or anybody else.  They must still be up there.”  Jeff told LeBron with zero preamble.  There wasn’t time to screw around.  If Yue and the others were still alive upstairs, then they were living on borrowed time.

“What do you mean sealed off?”  LeBron asked jumping to his feet.  His hands were already making sure his weapons were where he needed them to be.  His feet were already taking him towards the door.

“In case of something like this happening the first thing they do is seal off the stairs.  That means the second and third floors are now cutoff from us.  Kind of the same way they dog down the hatches on a sinking ship to keep the water from spreading.”   Jeff answered.

“It saves the ship but screws everybody inside the section that’s flooding.  How do they secure the doors?  Can we get through them?”  LeBron asked.  He noticed for the first time that someone was switching the lights off and on in the hallway.  It must be the code for general quarters in the building.  You didn’t want to announce it out loud and attract any unwanted attention.

“Every floor has clasps bolted to the outside of the doors.  We have long steel pipes we use to reinforce the doors.  That’s on top of the doors being locked.  They’re already pretty heavy duty doors.”  Jeff said hustling to catch up to LeBron.  They’d reached the first chain link barrier across the hallway.  LeBron opened it and went through.  Jeff followed behind securing the gate behind him once he was through it.

“Guards on the doors?”  LeBron asked.

“There should be someone guarding it.  The guy in the cage around the door isn’t supposed to desert his post.  If I were him, I’d slide over outside the chain link surrounding the door and guard it from there.  Before you ask there’s another staircase.  It’s already been locked down.  It’s not opening anytime soon though.  They sealed it with concrete.”  Jeff answered in short bursts as they hustled towards the middle of the hallway.

“Coming with me?”  LeBron asked.

Jeff didn’t bother answering.  They’d made it to the last gate before the sealed doors going up.  Two men were standing inside the small area outside the sealed doors.  LeBron recognized one of them as the base commander.  Hopefully the guy wasn’t too much of a stickler for enforcing life or death rules on his base.  Otherwise this could get messy.  Jeff opened the final gate and walked in with LeBron behind him.  Major Tom and the soldier with him turned to face them.

“We’re going up.”  Jeff said simply.

“I figured as much when I saw you stomping this way with your little sidekick.”  Tom said casually.  He was looking them both up and down appraisingly.

“We need the door open now!”  LeBron said loudly stepping out from behind Jeff to get in front of Tom.  He hadn’t quite screamed it, but he hadn’t left any room for interpretation either.  To emphasize his point he had his pistol gripped tightly in his hand already.  He wasn’t quite threatening them, but he also wasn’t not threatening them.

“Cool.  Help me grab these pipes.  I’m only letting you in because nothing is slamming up against the doors yet.  I don’t see anything through the peepholes yet either.  Once we open these, I expect you to slip through immediately and get the hell out of the way so I can seal them back up.  You come running back down here with a bunch of those freaks in hot pursuit I’m not opening this door back up.  You understand?”  The major asked calmly.

“Yes sir.  Makes sense to me sir.”  LeBron said.  The major tried looking through a peephole again then asked the soldier to turn the lights on.  The soldier went over to a tangled mess of extension cords and started messing around.  He must have found the right one because the major told him to stop.

“Alright.  Good luck.  If you don’t make it back, I’ll see both of you morons in hell.”  Tom said before pulling out the last pipe and firmly pressing the latch to open the solid wooden door.  Without another word Jeff and LeBron dove through the opening and crouched in the bottom of the eerily lit stairwell.

“They better not be sitting around in a safe room on the first or second floor.”  LeBron muttered.  Jeff nodded his head in agreement.  Weapons pointed upwards they slowly ascended the staircase.  The string of lights running up along the bannisters warped their shadows into those of giants.  They moved upwards a flight or two before hearing a challenge.

“Is that you Drew?”  LeBron yelled back.

Drew came around the corner after yelling back it was him and they were coming down.  Excellent communication skills really help avoid dying from friendly fire.  Directly behind Drew was Harley and Lisa walking with Yue in the middle of them.  She had an arm thrown across each of their shoulders.  Even in the subpar lighting you could tell she didn’t look good.

“Are you ok?”  Jeff asked jogging up the last few stairs to swap positions with Lisa.  Yue threw her arm around Jeff once Lisa walked away.  Yue even managed to laugh when she told Jeff she’d gotten herself concussed again.

“We need to hurry if we don’t want to spend the night on the stairs again.”  LeBron announced.  He turned around and began walking briskly down towards the first floor.  He was hoping the major would see them through the peephole and let them back in without any issues.

Chapter 9:  Out of the Frying Pan…

They filed out the door leading to the first floor and then waited while Tom and the soldier sealed it back up.  Tom slammed in the last steel pipe then stepped out of the way so the soldier assisting him could doublecheck all the pipes were in place.

“Well that worked out pretty well for you guys.  What’s the third floor like?”  Tom asked.

“Looks like hell.  Those things jumped up the wall like giant frogs on crank.  It was like a demonic Cirque show.  We barely made it out.  More luck than anything else.”  Yue answered.  She looked groggy and pale, but she held the major’s eyes as she spoke.  She was pretty happy not to have puked all over herself this time.  She made herself find the silver linings.  It was a mental game that got her through days like this one.  Which were pretty much most days now it seemed like.  She’d really hoped this place would be different.

How could it really be different though.  These people had setup a nice secure base then dared the crawlerz to break in.  Their defense against thousands of screaming zombie like assailants was throwing a few guys up on telephone poles with sniper rifles.  All of this technology at their disposal and they’d covered the third floor windows up with sections of chain link fences.  When you took a step back to consider it rationally, it was amazing they’d survived this long.  Once that one crawler figured out a way in it’d been all over.  The infected psychic party line kicked in and the high school turned sanctuary was doomed.

“Somehow I don’t think you can keep calling the way you guys survive luck.  This far into it you’ve got skills.  You all look like you could use a place to rest up from all the excitement.  We’ve got an open room that way.  I think it’s about five doors down.  Should have cots and pillows and all that.”  Major Tom said by way of dismissal.

Recognizing that they were being given the night off the small group headed in the direction Tom had pointed.  Yue was looking forward to putting her head down and resting.  She may not have puked yet, but she was feeling all the normal symptoms.  As an added bonus her neck was killing her this time too.  She was going to have to raid the stash of pain killers and muscle relaxers she’d taken off of Harley when he’d been passed out.  She wished she could ask him which pills were which.  That’d be awkward though after insisting multiple times that she’d never seen the Ziploc bags full of pills he kept looking for.

It seemed to Yue like they walked forever to get down to the room they’d been pointed at.  Everything was always further when you were fighting off waves of nausea and dizziness.  Once in the room they realized that when Tom had told them it was a barracks room what he’d really meant to say was it was a room that was intended to be turned into a barracks room.  At present it was still very much a classroom with a bunch of boxes and assorted junk stacked haphazardly against one of the walls.

“I guess we’ve still got work to do.”  LeBron said shining his flashlight around the room.  He walked over to a stack of boxes and poked around until he found one with two cots folded up inside it.  He enlisted Drew’s aid to help him get the cots unboxed and opened it.  Once assembled they let Yue lie down while the rest of them searched the other boxes to see what else they had to work with.

Thirty minutes later they’d moved the desks and chairs to the side and were settling down in a ring of cots.  They’d found a box full of the scratchy green blankets as well as a couple of big fluffy comforters still in the plastic bags they came in.  Yue and Lisa immediately claimed the comforters.  Lying down on his cot with his thin, scratchy military issue blanket LeBron found himself wishing chivalry would hurry up and die the hell off.

Jeff had volunteered to stay awake and watch over everyone.  He needed to be out in the hallway talking to Major Tom and helping get everything organized anyway.  There was still a lot of night ahead of them.  The crawlerz had already taken the third floor and the roof which had both been considered ultra-safe by everyone until now.  The third floor and that mysterious space between the third floor and the roof were going to be packed with crawlerz come morning.  There were plenty of shadows in both for the infected to hide from the sun for the day.

Wham!  A massive smashing sound from the wall in the classroom they were sleeping in.  They all sat up quickly scanning the room with flashlights in one hand and pistols in the other.  Most of them trying to emulate the way they’d seen cops on TV doing it.  Wham!  All of their flashlight beams zoomed over to the wall with the windows on it.  The patchwork window covering made from the hoods of cars and reinforced with two by fours had just moved.  If that one on the inside had moved, then the more solidly constructed one on the outside wall must’ve also just moved.

“Everybody up!”  Jeff had gone out into the hallway a minute before the sound of the first crawler smashing into the metal covers of the windows outside.  He’d come hustling back in after the pandemonium had started outside.

“They can’t get in, right?”  Lisa said sitting up with her hair going in every direction and a tiny bit of drool pooled up on her chin.  It sounded like another night of sheer terror that they’d have to spend fighting for their lives.  She’d really hoped to spend the night with the fluffy yellow comforter she had wrapped around herself.  She pushed the comforter down and swung her legs off the cot.  Sitting up with her pistol in her hand she wondered if it was too late for them to go back to that Weathertop base.  She was good with being locked into a tiny hotel room where they brought you three meals a day and you were protected by concrete walls three feet thick. That sounded so much better than having your life depend on salvaged car parts screwed to the wall.

As if in answer to Lisa’s question the lights in the hallway started flashing on and off.  To punctuate that silent alarm gunfire rang out from one of the classrooms down the hallway.  The crawlerz throwing themselves at the various windows tripled their efforts.  Nonchalantly breaking most of the bones in their bodies as they used themselves as high speed battering rams to get into the building.  Adrenaline fueled muscles that could propel them to the third floor now focused on smashing them into the thin metal window coverings as hard as possible.  Whatever it took to get inside the school.  Their psychic party line buzzing with the success of one group that was battling their way into a classroom right now.

“They’re inside the first floor.”  Yue said calmly.  She was letting herself focus on the brief flashes of terror inducing visions ripping at her conscience.  She let herself mind meld with the group of psychotic things outside ramming themselves into the walls of this hardened high school.

“Where do we go?”  Drew asked Jeff.  Jeff knew this school and its defenses.  He’d been studying the layout and design for the past month.  It’d been his main focus while separated from the rest of the group.  If he didn’t have an idea where to run to then they were screwed.

“We could try and make it to the second floor.”  Jeff said after a brief pause.  Jeff saw that everyone had noticed the hesitation.  It was hard to hide things from people you’d grown so close to.  It didn’t matter if they saw it or not though.  It was the only idea that made sense.  The other thing he was thinking about was suicide.  He decided to not even mention it unless he had to.

“Wham!”  The sound of tortured metal behind them as the blue hood of a Hyundai bolted to the wall outside their window ripped loose.  One of the infected had collided with it at just the right angle.  The dirt covered mockery of what once had been a man ripped a massive patch of the skin off the side of his body in the process.  Bleeding profusely he stood back up to throw himself at the wall again.  He could sense the humans nearby.  Red hot rage incensed him to slam his broken body into the next barrier separating him from the humanity he hated.  He’d claw at the wall until he died from blood loss.  His mind filled with the vision of sinking his teeth into the uninfected veins of the humans cowering inside.

No one needed Yue to let them know they needed to get the hell out of the room.  All of them were getting the flashes of hate.  None of them were opening themselves up like Yue was though.  She did it out of love for the group.  She hoped getting those quick insights into the monsters mentality would help her guide them to safety.  The thought of biting into a big bloody raw steak had started sounded pretty appetizing too her.  She gagged every time she reconciled that sudden craving with the visions that she kept receiving of biting into human flesh.

Jeff ran back out into the hall.  He stopped himself before colliding with Tom.  The major and a handful of his men were facing towards the stairway to the second floor blasting away at the shadowy crush of demons trying to break through the fence to get at them.  It looked like the stairs were no longer an option.  He saw a look of desperation spreading across everyone’s faces as they exited the classroom to join him in the suddenly crowded hallway.  If they couldn’t get to the second floor, then they were trapped on the first.  Trapped on a floor where the crawlerz were breaking through walls of metal and two by fours like they were made of paper machete.

There were two chain link barriers still standing between them and the steadily increasing mob that wanted their blood.  The air was thick with the smell of body odor and gunpowder.  Drew and Harley automatically snapped their weapons to their shoulders and joined the firing line.  Lisa hung back with Yue and LeBron who were looking in the opposite direction down the hall.

“We have to go somewhere!  Before we’re cutoff by the infected getting into the classroom behind us!”  LeBron yelled over to Jeff who was standing immediately behind the men firing away at the invaders.  Jeff looked paralyzed.  He was hesitant as to what to do next.  He looked over at LeBron yelling at him and blurted out the first thing that came to his mind.

“We can fall back to the cafeteria!”  Jeff yelled out tentatively.

“It has more windows than any of the classrooms.  How about we lock ourselves in the men’s room?  Use it like a safe room.”  Tom suggested loudly.

“We’ll be stuck there.  No way out even when the sun comes up.”  Jeff said as one of the fences between them and the horde of crawlerz coming down the hallway crumpled and gave in.  It was to be expected.  The fences on the inside had been installed to slow down the infected if they got in.  No one was naïve enough to think they’d hold the crawlerz off forever.  If the things could beat their way through solid metal barriers, then a chain link fence wasn’t going to fend them off for very long.

The flesh eaters swarmed over the twisted remains of the fence they’d just torn down to slam up against the fence directly in front of them.  From inside the classroom they’d just left the sound of splintering boards and twisting metal overrode the sound of gunfire.  It was time to fall back.

Yue and Lisa whipped open the gate and everyone went back through it.  The men who were covering them walking slowly backwards.  They were attempting precision shots to put crawlerz down.  They were doing their best not to help the hellish crowd by shooting parts of the actual fence.  Not that they could guarantee that in this situation.  The adrenaline and fear levels were pretty high up there on the pucker factor meter.  Even for seasoned fighters who’d been on the front lines of this impossible battle since the beginning.

The fence protecting them went down before they’d all made it backwards through the next gate.  The agitated pack of crawlerz had hit the fence hard.  They were shrugging off bullets right up until they collapsed to the floor to die.  The infection blocked out the sensation of any pain.  They cared about nothing but ripping down the barriers between them and the source of all of their frustration.  They could make their long nightmare end by ripping apart the mortal enemy holding weapons and firing at them.

Having opened herself up to the visions the crawlerz shared Yue was finding it impossible now to shut it down.  She didn’t feel like she was more sensitive than the others anymore.  Now she felt like she’d just lacked whatever survival traits the others had buried in them that made them block and ignore the visions as much as they were able.  This close to the large group of monsters she was overwhelmed by their hate.  She fell to her knees whimpering.  It was all too much.

Harley noticed Yue hit the floor and saw Lisa trying to get his attention.  He strode right through the press of defenders he was part of to bend down and gently pluck Yue up off the floor.  He turned back around still holding Yue across his shoulder to continue firing at the infected every opportunity he got.  His large shotgun held in the hand not securing Yue to his shoulder.  Even shooting it one handed he made the weapon look like a kid’s toy.

Lisa didn’t want to wait to die.  She went ahead and opened the next gate and ran through it yelling for the rest of them to hurry up.  She was doing her best to remember where the hell the cafeteria was.  She’d even settle for a bathroom at this point.  Sure they might be stuck there until they starved to death in a building infested with the infected but at least they could choose their own manner of death.  Plus the toilets should have water in them so they wouldn’t die thirsty.

On the fence closest to the invading infected one soldier who didn’t make it through the gate died.  Another one got in a shoving match with the gate and a tiny tot of a crawler.  As small as it was it slowed down the soldier enough so that one of the adult sized infected could post itself up against the gate.  The soldier stared into its insane eyes while continuing to shove on the gate as hard as he could.

Drew walked over and blew a hole in the thing’s head.  The soldier pushed hard on the gate with a relieved smile.  The gate clicked shut.  The soldier suddenly cussing loudly and dancing backwards from the gate cradling his hand.  Drew saw that the man had blood dripping down his arm from where that infected toddler had reached up and bit his hand.  The man stepped up to Drew and pressed his bandolier into Drew’s hands.

“The rest of my ammunition.  You’re going to need it man.  Leave me here until I turn.  Then shoot me in the head.”  The man said it all quickly to Drew.  He then turned around and ended the life of the worst example of the terrible two’s ever with two quick shots.  Drew decided not to take any chances and shot the soldier in the back of his head immediately.  That whole waiting for someone to turn thing never really worked out.

Drew followed the others through the next fence helping shut the gate behind them.  One more fence later they were at the cafeteria doors.  They were doors like you’d find at the entrance to a gym.  They could be closed and locked and should be a lot more solid than the hallway fences were proving to be.  A collective sigh of relief when the doors were opened, and the cafeteria looked empty.  Tom and his remaining men quickly moved in.  The small fire team walked the perimeter with flashlights to make sure.  The metal over the windows was already starting to buckle from the renewed assault on the space by the crawlerz outside.

They slammed and locked down all the doors.  Breathing hard they gathered about twenty feet back from the entrance to regroup.  The crashing of the crawlerz outside against the metal bolted over the numerous windows was so loud it was difficult to think.  The noise made conversation almost impossible.  Timing it to be said during a brief lull Major Tom threw out the question that’d been bothering him.  The gym was only a little bit further away on the other side of the hall.  Why had they gone to the cafeteria instead?  Why not to the gym which didn’t have any windows down low?

Jeff’s answer didn’t seem to thrill the major.  At least not if you based it on the expression that flitted across Tom’s face.  He turned around cussing and stormed off to check on the integrity of the windows.  He was hoping he could reinforce them somehow.  Jeff’s plan was just going to get them all killed if they couldn’t keep the damned demons out until morning.

Chapter 10:  Desperate Times

“Why the cafeteria instead of the gym?”  Drew asked Jeff with his normal lack of subtlety.  In Drew’s case it wasn’t super aggressive.  Unlike Tom he was operating off the assumption that Jeff knew what he was doing.  Tom thought the pressure had gotten to Jeff and he’d cracked.  Making the wrong call under fire like that happens.  Tom was probably kicking himself because he hadn’t challenged it.  Not that there’d been time to setup a judge and tables and have a formal debate out in the hallway.  If anyone should’ve taken control and insisted that they go to the gym instead it was definitely Tom though.

“The loading dock’s here.”  Jeff said.  The answer was beyond vague.  When he didn’t appear to be interested in adding anything else LeBron felt the need to goad him along.

“The loading dock being here is important because…”  LeBron asked.

“If it’s because we have vehicles parked out back you should probably consider the minor fact that there’s like a thousand crawlerz outside right now too.  No way we make it alive to those trucks.  No way this place holds until morning.  Too many windows.  The only thing holding the crawlerz back before must’ve been that they didn’t know they could break in.  Now that they do, they’re not stopping for anything.”  Tom said.  He’d completed his anger fueled jaunt around the cafeteria.  Hearing they were in here because of the close proximity to the loading dock made him want to do another lap or two.

“We’ll need a distraction.  We’ll need to go out fast and hard.  We probably won’t all make it.”  Jeff confirmed the serious suckiness of his plan.

The sound of wood cracking coming from one of the windows under attack made them all care less if the plan sucked or not.  A terrible plan well executed could still have a good result.  Worried about just how much the plan was going to suck LeBron asked Jeff to lay it out for them.  Jeff led them back into the windowless kitchen.  They spent a minute shutting all the doors between the dining area and the serving area.  This included a large garage door type section that covered the areas the students would’ve formed lines in to get their rectangular slabs of overcooked dough with industrial strength pizza sauce smeared on top.

With those doors all closed and latched the noise level fell to an acceptable number of decibels.  The windowless kitchen giving them all some hope that maybe they could spend the night in here.  The place was designed to keep students from breaking in to do whatever it was the cafeteria management thought students might do if allowed to run amuck in the kitchen unsupervised.  The heavy door they’d pulled down and latched seemed solid enough to all of them.

“They’ll work their fingers under it and rip it out of the wall.  Nothings going to keep them out of here.”  Yue said.  On top of sensing what the crawlerz would do to get at them she also knew what her own people were thinking.  That just required a quick scan of the faces of the people in the room.  No phone call to the psychic hot line needed on that one.

“There’s two up armored Humvees and some modified troop carriers all within about twenty yards of that door over there.”  Tom said pointing in the general direction the vehicles were parked in.  “We’ll just have to shoot our way through a marching band worth of the infected to get to them.  Once we get to them good luck driving out of here with them pressing down on you.  If you don’t think that solid metal door over there’s going to keep them out, then do you really think a windshield will do it?”  His voice was sounding a little less calm.  This was a guy they’d all thought of as pretty unflappable.  A senior officer who’d spent plenty of time in the field.  If he was freaking out that was a really bad sign.

“The windshields are armored right?”  Drew asked.  He was remembering the delta force operators who’d come at them outside the Fontana dam.  In that case a blanket had done what bullets couldn’t accomplish.  A prime example of improvising to overcome.

“Sure.  They’ll stop some rounds and even provide some protection from an IED blast on a good day.  They’re bad ass machines but those things out there don’t care.  They’ll crawl all over it until they find a weak spot.  You won’t be able to see to drive.  You’ll be stuck sitting in the parking lot wondering if the Humvee will protect you until sunup or not.  Assuming you make it into the Humvee in the first place.”  Tom answered.

“Got it.  We wait until the crawlerz get in the cafeteria.  Once they start tearing into this door, we make the run to the Humvee.  Like the major’s saying every single second counts.  The longer we sit in here the less time the Humvee has to survive a thousand crawler curb stomp.”  LeBron said.

“When those things get in here how the hell do you think you’re gonna get from that door into the Humvees?”  One of the soldiers asked.  He must be taking his cue from his boss.  He sounded frazzled.  LeBron looked over at Drew and nodded.  Drew looked lost for a second then a big grin appeared on his face.  He pulled his pack off and rummaged around in it for a second.  Once he’d found what he was looking for he held up two of them.

“Grenades?”  The soldier asked.  He tried to say it sarcastically, but Drew’s grin was highly contagious.  Plus what soldier doesn’t enjoy destroying his or her enemy with a well tossed grenade?

“They’ve helped us out of tough spots plenty of times.”  LeBron said joining in on the grinning.

“We’re all going to die.”  Lisa said looking back and forth between the soldiers and her boyfriend and his brother.  She was especially disappointed in LeBron.  He was supposed to be the smart one.  Encouraging Drew to use grenades was a definite indication that LeBron’s IQ had dipped a bunch of points recently.

They talked through who was going to do what when the crawlerz made it in.  They inspected all of the doors and tried to figure out ways to make them even more difficult to break down.  The garage doors being the only ones they were really worried would go down fast.  The problem being the door slid down to the floor where it was secured with a latch you could open from the inside but not the outside.  It wasn’t overly difficult to slide a hand under the door on the far edges of it.  Once the crawlerz started assaulting the door they’d be pulling up on it with all of their strength.  That little latch wasn’t going to last very long.

Even if they didn’t figure out to pull up on it just smashing into the door was eventually going to break that latch.  Encouraged that it was taking the crawlerz a long time to make it into the dining area proper Drew decided to booby trap the cafeteria.  His idea was to take out the first wave of crawlerz when they came in.  That might keep them from figuring out to put their fingers under the door.  If nothing else the more that they killed the better in his mind.

LeBron immediately supported the idea for a completely different reason.  He wanted to take the time to explain his idea but worried if they waited much longer it’d be a moot point.  Drew, Harley, Tom and another one of the soldiers lined up on the door to the dining area.  When they were ready Jeff opened the door for them and they calmly filed out.  The men then took the time to rig three grenades to blow once the tables inside the dining room started shifting around.

Once they were done Drew had them help him stack some of the tables up against the metal roller doors as well.  Whatever they could think of to slow the monsters from forcing them to make that dangerous run for the Humvees.  Ideally, they’d just sit in the cafeteria until morning came then saunter out to the vehicles for a joy ride.  They’d just wrapped up the placement of the tables where they wanted them when Drew saw the hunk of metal covering one of the windows fall off the wall.  The loud noise alerted the other men, and they made a run for the door to the serving area.

Jeff slammed and locked the door as soon as they made it inside.  Seconds later the door they came through emitted a loud groan as the crawler on the other side threw all its weight against it.  Then came the sounds of more and more of the infected smashing themselves into the outside walls and doors.  They were trying to get in at the frustratingly close team of people they could sense on the other side of the cafeteria wall.

A loud boom signaled at least one of the booby traps had been detonated.  The explosion had hopefully fragged a bunch of the bastards.  LeBron still hadn’t told anyone what he was hoping happened yet.  He’d been thinking about the video Charlie had shown him earlier.  The video showing what happened to the warehouse the day after a bunch of the crawlerz got blown apart in it.  Maybe they could use the crawlerz weird communication method against them.  If enough of the infected got to see how the others were dying in a fiery explosion inside the cafeteria without actually seeing any uninfected humans they might stay away.

Another explosion made the rolling metal door ripple from the concussive force being unleashed in the enclosed space.  A few frags struck the metal sounding like the angriest hailstorm ever.  LeBron was thinking that was two out of the three when they all heard the third go off.  The third one that must have been tossed around in the room by the blast from the second explosion.  That was the easiest way to explain why it went off so much closer to them than the other two.

Unlike the first two this one rocked the metal roller door with frags and concussion.  When the noise died down, they all opened their eyes to see what’d just happened.  One of the roller doors was hanging crookedly from its mounting location.  With his ears ringing from the explosion Drew walked towards the door to see if he could fix it.  Not the sanest idea ever but he was pretty rattled from the explosion.  They all were.

The door fell completely down off its mounting brackets.  Standing in front of it Drew could see clearly into the trashed dining area.  Chairs and tables had been tossed everywhere.  Dead crawlerz and body parts littered the dining area like the trash after an outdoor rock concert.  It was the life size version of dropping three dozen Barbie dolls into a blender with some ketchup then scattering the remains around.  Unfortunately not all of those body parts had lost full functionality yet.

A perfectly capable pair of eyes inside the head of a barely alive crawler saw Drew standing there staring out at the carnage.  Since the crawler saw it so did all of the other crawlerz surrounding the school.  It flashed through all of their minds and was sorted so that it rose to prominence.  Almost as one the collective of insane cannibals with super strength set their sights on getting to the cafeteria and ripping into Drew’s fresh flesh.  It was pretty much the exact opposite of what LeBron had hoped would happen.

Drew didn’t need Yue to use her magical insightfulness to tell him they were screwed.  He felt the sudden attention immediately.  As did most of the other people in the room.  At least the people who’d accepted it was a real phenomenon.  It was time to execute on their piss poor plan and hope it worked out for the best.

Jeff ran to the door leading to the loading dock and waited for the soldier assigned to assist him to jog over.  That man made it over with two live grenades squeezed in his fists.  Jeff nodded at LeBron who was standing in front of the door with his rifle up to his shoulder.  Jeff turned the knob and pushed the door outwards to open it.  He immediately ducked back in once the door was open.  A crawler who’d been outside on the dock sprinted for the open door.  LeBron took it out then shot the one behind it as well .

The soldier waited until LeBron blinked his eyes twice then he spun and tossed the grenades out the door.  The door which Jeff was struggling to pull shut.  A pair of pale white hands with hideously long fingernails wrapped around the outside of the door pulling it open.  They’d thought this might happen.  LeBron had actually thought there’d be a lot more of the crawlerz standing around outside when they opened the door.  He was kind of wondering now if the grenades were overkill.

Overkill or not if they didn’t get out of the open doorway they were going to get fragged for their efforts.  LeBron moved backwards smoothly keeping his focus on the open doorway.  Jeff and the soldier lunged out of the open doorway throwing themselves on the ground.  LeBron waited with his pistol ready until the infected who’d been trying to get in the door came around the doorway to run in.  The tall female crawler stood victoriously silhouetted in the doorway.  He drilled her right in the face before he leapt to the side to avoid getting killed by one of their own grenades.

Flashlights shining ahead of them while two of the soldiers dropped to the rear to provide cover, they rushed out the door into loading dock area.  The soldiers behind them opened fire on the crawlerz flooding into the torn up dining area space.  Everything was darkness and flashlights and fear.  Yue kept fading in and out as her mind felt like it was being turned into a relay station for the infected.  When she stumbled Jeff reached down and scooped her up this time.

They were in the open.  That meant the crawlerz had a huge advantage.  The only thing going for them at this point was there didn’t seem to be many of the infected hanging out on the loading dock.  That may be because they’d all run around to join the crowd beating their way in through the windows on the other side of the cafeteria.  It showed a more complex ability to communicate than any of them wanted to give the crawlerz credit for, but it looked like it may work out for them this time.

Shooting at any shadow they saw the group quickly split up and ran for their designated vehicles.  They’d gone through who was sitting where and everything else while inside the service area of the cafeteria.  They’d known that seconds were going to make the difference between living or dying once they opened that door.  Jeff had even planned on Yue fainting again just in case.

That’s why LeBron was standing with the back door to the first Humvee wide open.  Jeff hopped the four feet down from the loading dock to the asphalt and tossed Yue in the backseat.  He jumped in with her followed by LeBron.  In the front seat Lisa was taking the driver’s seat with Drew standing watch over her until she got her door shut.  Randomly pulling the trigger at anything that freaked him out Drew ran around to the other side and jumped in.

Harley had been the one to open Drew’s door for him.  Once Drew was in his seat Harley hopped into the back seat of the Humvee parked next to them.  Harley didn’t shut his door though.  He slid over and waited for the soldiers who’d stayed behind to slow down the crawlerz in the dining area.  Tom was in the driver’s seat of that vehicle.  One of his other men was already settled into the passenger side seat.

Neither of the two soldiers covering their retreat in the dining room made it out.  Staring at the door leading into the cafeteria they saw a string of crawlerz start emerging.  Harley slammed his back door shut and Lisa reversed her Humvee out of the area it’d been parked in. They needed to get to the service road that wrapped around the back of the school to get out to the main road.  Major Tom whipped his vehicle around to follow Lisa.  The crawlerz coming out of the cafeteria were already trying to hitch rides on both Humvees.

Gunning the engines they flew around the back of the school at completely unsafe speeds.  Jeff might have had some trepidation about sitting Lisa in the driver’s seat.  All that went out the window when she started driving.  The skinny girl rocked the Humvee off the main road and tore through the overgrown football field to get around a big clump of crawlerz that suddenly appeared in her high beams.  She ended up doing a donut at the fifty yard line to shake off a few who’d managed to cling to the front of the vehicle blocking her view.

Completely ignoring the fact that she was driving a Humvee and not a helicopter she took them over the top of a massive drainage ditch to make it back to the service road looping away from the football field.  Smashing the grill of the Humvee through a couple of crawlerz she executed a hard turn to the right when they ran into the main road.  Gunning the engine once again she accelerated at what everyone in the vehicle thought was a fairly suicidal speed to get them away from any crawlerz who might be lingering in their wake.

“You guys out there?”  Harveys voice crackled out of the radio on the dash.  Drew reached forward and picked it up.

“Got you loud and clear Harley.  Where are you guys at?”  Drew asked looking behind them for headlights.

“You know that ditch you guys jumped all the way over?”  Harley asked.

“Yeah.”  Drew transmitted quickly dreading what he knew he was fixing to hear.

“We jumped most of it too.  Tom and the dude up front are both out.  They should’ve buckled up.  We’ve got crawlerz all over the vehicle and we also appear to be sinking somehow?  I guess this ditch is a swamp on the bottom.  Anyway there’s water pouring in so we’re pretty much screwed.  Just wanted to tell you guys not to wait up for us.  I’ll see you on the other side.  Harley out.”  The radio went silent as Harley let go of the transmit button.

Lisa sighed and hit the brakes without saying a word.  They squealed to a stop.  She did a quick one eighty and gunned the engine once more.  This time they were driving straight for the danger instead of trying to get away from it.

“Hey Harley.  You guys sit tight and listen for the radio.  Don’t do anything stupid until we get there.  Which the way my girl drives won’t be too long.”  Drew transmitted.  Even as he said it, he already knew the next thing he was going to hear.

“You’re driving back to rescue a bunch of dudes drowning in a ditch covered by man eating demons and you’re telling me not to do anything stupid?”  Harley transmitted.  He was so predictable.

Chapter 11:  Last Ditch Effort

Harley put the mic down on the console where he could reach it.  He was kicking himself for grabbing it in the first place.  He should’ve known those guys wouldn’t be able to just drive away and leave him here to drown.  Now because he’d been his usual dumb self his friends were all going to die.  They may be dead already.  Driving like a bat out of hell straight into a massive crawler festival like this one wasn’t conducive to a long life.  He started to pick the mic up to wave them off then stopped realizing it’d be a waste of time.

Instead of trying to stop the inevitable he decided to do what’d served him so well throughout his life.  He’d go with the flow.  He was pretty sure he was going to flow right down the river Styx, but he wasn’t going to go out blubbering in a car like a baby.  He wasn’t going to risk getting his friends killed trying to come to him.  Not while he still had two legs that worked anyway.  As long as he was at it, he might as well bring the others in the car along for the ride.

“Wake up!”  He roared slapping Major Tom across the face.  He went ahead and smacked the other soldier to for the hell of it.  Both of them had gone face first into the dashboard when they’d unsuccessfully tried to replicate Lisa’s trick of jumping the ditch.  Thinking back to the completely reckless driving she’d executed Harley felt proud just to know the girl.  It’d been a straight up awesome display of sheer ‘ballsiness’.  He didn’t know another way to describe the way she’d made that Humvee an extension of herself.

“What the hell man?”  Tom said coming to from the slap to his face.  The other soldier still wasn’t moving.  He was out cold.  Harley gave Tom a couple of moments to realize they were completely screwed.  It was almost funny watching the panic ratchet up in the man’s eyes.  Or at least it would’ve been funny if Harley wasn’t pretty sure his own eyes were a perfect reflection.  Tom did some sort of trick with his face and he suddenly looked calm again.

“Cool trick.”  Harley said looking the man in the eyes.

“Yeah.  Not the first time I’ve been about to die.  I’m hoping it won’t be the last.”  Tom said straight faced.  Authority figure or not Harley decided right then and there that he really liked Tom.  It sucked that they were most likely both about to die.

“They’re coming back for us.  If we sit in here, we’re going to end up dead.  You up for making a run for it?”  Harley asked.

“I’m not leaving Lipsey.”  Tom said.  It took a second for Harley to figure out what the hell a Lipsey was.  He finally realized it must be the unconscious solider in the other seat.  He liked Tom a little more for saying it out loud.  Even as he felt a little insulted that the man had thought Harley was saying they should leave Sleeping Beauty in the passenger seat to be ripped apart.

“Cool.  I’ll carry him.”  Harley said.  They weren’t going to make it much more than three steps before ripped apart anyway.  It was already almost impossible to hear one another over the hands hammering away on every part of their gigantic mobile military grade sarcophagus.  At least by carrying the guy they could be eaten alive feeling better about themselves.

“He‘s my responsibility.  I’ll carry him.  Maybe you can make it out of here while these things are snacking on the two of us.”  Tom said seriously.  It made sense.  If Tom went out one side and let those things jump him then it was possible Harley could sneak out the other side and make a run for it.  Another option was to shove Lipsey out like a big pile of dog treats. Once the pack of wolves pounced on him then he and Tom could both try the sneaking away plan.  It probably wouldn’t work but it was worth a shot.

“Screw it.  I‘ll distract them.  You try and get your guy out and away.”  Harley said.  He figured he could open the door and start shooting then run like hell through the swampy ditch until he was pulled down and eaten.  The sound of glass cracking somewhere under all the pressure wasn’t super reassuring.  Whatever they were going to do they needed to do it soon.  Or they were just going to be eaten alive sitting inside the car like a couple of idiots.

Assuming he was going to die in a lot of pain really soon Harley shoved a random handful of pills into his mouth and dry swallowed them.  One got stuck in his throat and he had to grope around for his flask.  Once he found it, he gave himself a very generous hit of a very expensive scotch.  Feeling generous he handed the flask to Tom who had his hand stuck out in expectation.  The major took a very healthy hit then handed the container back to Harley.

“Don’t leave your vehicle.  Unless those things are crawling in through the windows stay inside.  Wait for our word.”  Drew’s voice boomed out of the radio.  Harley and Tom looked at each other wondering how to respond.  Drew’s voice boomed back out asking them if they copied.

“We copy.  No one in this car wants you morons getting killed trying to save us though.”  Harley transmitted.

“Good.  None of us morons want to die trying to save your stupid ass either.  Standby and wait for our signal.  When we say run you fight your way out of the ditch and run for the road as fast as you can.  Make sure you’re waving your flashlights around.  We’ll be opening our door so please try not to shoot us.  Over and out.”  Drew said.

In the silence that followed the two conscious people in the slowly settling vehicle listened to the soothing drumbeat of dozens of killers hands smacking the vehicle all around them.  Occasionally they’d hear a crack or snap as some joint broke or another piece of glass lost a little more of its integrity.  They’d addressed those noises by making a drinking game out of them.  Every time they heard a noise like that and didn’t die Harley unscrewed the lid of the flask.  At this rate they’d both be too drunk to climb out of the ditch if they ever got ‘the word’.

They’d been assaulted by the singular sense of fear they always felt when close to a large group of the crawlerz.  Gruesome images popping unbidden into their heads ever since they’d been pinned down in the ditch.  Both men had learned to live with the images.  They blocked them out when awake and ran from them in the throes of their nightmares.  It made it odd now when they both suddenly sat up in fear.  They’d seen Yue and the others being dragged down to the ground and ripped apart.  They’d seen others running unprotected into the tall weeds beside a truck parked by the loading dock.

The demons crawling all over the Humvee saw it too.  There was unprotected prey close by.  The bulk of them sprang off the Humvee they’d been working on getting into.  Turning away they galloped up the side of the ditch with that unnatural crawling motion that’d given them their namesake.  They disappeared over the top and kept on going.

“Did you see…”  Tom couldn’t finish the sentence.  He looked over at Lipsey who was still passed out in the passenger’s seat.  In the seat behind him a stunned Harley was fighting back tears.  He’d told them not to come back.

“The word is now.  Haul your asses up the ditch.  We need to see some light.  I think we see where you are.  Flick your high beams if you can.  You have like thirty seconds to be in our Humvee or we’re all going to die.”  Drew’s voice surprised the holy hell out of both men.  They felt like they’d been stranded on a deserted island for years and the Coast Guard had just landed, and they’d brought beer.

Without wasting time talking the two of them jumped out of the Humvee.  The water at the bottom of the drainage ditch was about waist deep.  They met on the side with Lipsey and dragged him out of the Humvee.  Harley ended up carrying the man just because Harley could handle that kind of dead weight while climbing up a ditch and brandishing an assault weapon all at the same time.  Tom may be a licensed Green Beret or whatever but there’s some things some people can just do better than others.

Not all of the crawlerz had gone away.  A few were still outside the Humvee.  Harley and Tom took them down in a flurry of fast shooting augmented by Drew and LeBron who came sliding down the side of the ditch to help them up.  Together they stumble sprinted their way up through the thorny underbrush out of the wide ditch.  At the top of the ditch they threw themselves into the Humvee.  Before they’d even gotten the doors closed Lisa was already going sixty miles an hour down the narrow service road.

A crawler slammed into the door Harley was still trying to pull himself through.  The crawler spun off into the darkness with multiple broken bones.  The door snapped all the way open then slammed shut right on Harley’s foot.  He squealed in pain and pulled his foot up to make sure it hadn’t been snapped off or anything.  It hurt that bad.  Up in the front seat Lisa was working her magic with the massive Humvee she was driving.  The pain in his foot reminded him that Lisa was nursing a sprained wrist herself.  You’d never be able to tell by the stunt driver moves she was pulling off though.

Jeff and Yue were crammed into the passenger seat.  Harley immediately teared up on seeing Yue alive and well.  The vision of her being ripped apart by the crawlerz had been so vivid.  It’d felt so real.  Looking up at her now he saw that she was passed out.  Jeff was holding her in his arms with one hand rubbing the hair back off her forehead over and over.

“Is she ok?”  Harley asked timidly.  He wasn’t used to being timid about anything, but he felt there was something going on here that he just wasn’t privy to.  Something that was important that he was missing.

“I think she’s fine.  Just really tired.”  Jeff answered as they careened around a corner.  A crawler faceplanted in the windshield then slid off leaving a trail of blood and grime.  If you looked closely, you could tell the little hunks of ivory stuck in the windshield were teeth.  Lisa hit the windshield wiper fluid to knock the mess off.  They all watched the wiper blades and cleaning fluid fight the blood smears for a few mesmerizing minutes.  Everyone’s thoughts preoccupied with the weirdness that’d managed to get them out of this situation alive.  Assuming Lisa didn’t end up killing them all with her crazy driving.

“I thought I saw you guys losing a fight up here?  Like in one of the crawler visions.  I think Harley saw it too?”  Tom asked.  His tone the same level of timid Harley’s had been a few minutes prior.  The tone standing out as yet another component of a super surreal night.  Neither Harley not Major Tom were known for being shy.

“We all saw what Yue wanted us to see.  We saw what she broadcast to the crawlerz to get them to leave you alone.”  Jeff answered.

“She did what now?”  Harley asked incredulously.  It was one thing for humans infected with an ancient Egyptian mummy curse to have supernatural powers.  It was quite another for a former IHOP waitress to be warping time and space out of the blue.  He was freaked out but thankful that she’d just managed to save them with her psychic shenanigans.

“She’s attuned to them more than the rest of us.  I think that means she’s opened herself up more to their visions.  She’s opened herself up to the point that she’s almost like one of them as far as broadcasting the mind waves goes.  Kind of like a repeater that makes radio broadcasts go further from the station they’re being broadcast from.”  LeBron explained.  He stopped to see if anyone had any questions.  Not that he had any answers, but he thought it was polite to wait.  It also gave him a second to gather his own thoughts.  This was new territory for all of them.  The one person who could be considered an expert on what’d just happened was passed out in the front seat.

“She didn’t just repeat their thoughts though.  Did she?”  Harley asked.

“Nope.  We all saw what went out.  She got the idea when she saw a crawler in front of us on the road.  She had Lisa speed up to hit it then told her to stop.  We got out of the car and beat that crawler until it’s bones were all broken.  Then we dragged it into the Humvee with us.  It was thrashing around everywhere.  I swear we beat it hard enough to paralyze it, but the damned thing was still flopping around like a fish out of water.  It’s mouth was going a mile a minute.  I saw white flecks shoot out when it breathed.  The little pieces of teeth that were chipping off it was slamming it’s gums together so hard.  We could all feel its thoughts.  This close it was easy.”  LeBron said.  The memory of those thoughts made him pause again.  A feeling of coldness washing over him as he remembered what he’d looked like in the crawler’s eyes.

“I think Yue took those thoughts and used them.  She twisted what that thing wanted to do to us to make it look like it was doing those things to us.  She twisted the thoughts into what we needed for a diversion and she broadcast it hard.  The second she was done she pulled her pistol and put a bullet into each eye socket to shut that thing up.  We’re all probably sitting in brain goop from that poor freak.”  LeBron finished up his story.

They were all silent for a short time after that as they drove.  Each of them lost in their own thoughts.  They all knew what it was like to catch the little glimpses of the crawlerz warped world view.  To feel the blood rush into your mouth through that vicarious connection with the infected minds around them.  Those instants of connection with those otherworldly inhuman thoughts were enough to give them nightmares.  They were all traumatized from the extremely short interactions they had.  To think Yue was knowingly submerging herself in that world for long periods of time to save them.  There was no way to say thank you enough to a person who would do that for them.

“Don’t go too far.”  Tom finally broke the silence.

“How come?”  Lisa asked.  She was driving down a country road now into the middle of nowhere.  She liked the middle of nowhere personally.  Canada was also sounding like a good idea to her.

“We’ve got to go back.  We’ve got to rebuild and try again.”  Tom said.

“With whom exactly?”  LeBron said in an exasperated tone of voice.

“With whomever is still alive.  We might not have been the only ones who survived.  The whole second floor might have made it actually.  If they’re all dead, I’ll ring up Weathertop and request more troops be sent by rail.  We can’t afford to just give up.  The stakes are too high.  We give up here and it could be the end of the human race in a few generations.”  Tom said enthusiastically.  If he was expecting that enthusiasm to be echoed back at him, he was playing to the wrong crowd.

“It’s not like we have anything better to do.”  LeBron said breaking the awkward silence.

“I get one of those fancy comforters this time.  Those green army blankets suck.  Why does the military even buy blankets that suck that much?  What’s the point?””  Drew asked.  He sounded genuinely pissed off about it.

Chapter 12:  Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results.  LeBron wasn’t sure where he’d read that at, but it seemed apt to their situation.  Here they were the morning after barely surviving one night in the school headed back to rebuild it.  Like this time would be any different.  He highly doubted there was a magic formula of materials and elevation and defenses that’d actually make a place crawler proof.

If they were to use the three little pigs analogy that kept circulating in LeBron’s mind, the wolf won unless you built your house out of massive concrete walls.  You basically needed to move into a cold war era bomb shelter if you wanted to survive without moving around.  The places like the base in Cheyenne or the one at Weathertop they’d been at before taking President Thompson up on a one way ticket to Fayetteville.  Anything less than that and the wolves would huff and puff and blow it right on down.  Then they’d be inside gnawing on the stupid pork chops who thought they could staple car hoods to the wall and be safe.

They parked the Humvee in the school parking lot and carefully got out.  There’d been thousands of the monsters here the previous night prowling the space they were parking in now.  Out of those thousands maybe one in a hundred had been able to leap to the third floor.  Different ones seemed to have developed different skills.  Maybe some were just better at channeling the adrenaline rush than the others.  Or maybe it had more do with the mind mumbo jumbo than with any physical elements.  Regardless of the ‘why’ they needed to deal with the ‘what’ like Charlie had explained to LeBron the day before.

With thousands of monsters descending on the school any victims had probably been devoured before they turned.  That lowered the risk of surgers.  It didn’t eliminate it altogether though.  Say ten crawlerz come in through the window and the first one takes a hunk out of your leg right as you’re slamming the door on a flimsy closet to hide in.  It only takes the beasties a few moments to rip that closet door off but in that time the infection has spread enough so that they recognize one of their own.  That little psychic connection forms that tells them not to eat you.

On the other hand if all ten of them jump on the person before he gets to the closet then that person isn’t going to get a chance to turn.  Instead of having to survive one big bite now whoever it is in the room has ten of those things chomping on different body parts.  That person is most likely not going to survive.  Even if they do turn into a surger they’ll most likely bleed out before they’ve made it more than a few steps.

The group in the Humvee were all focused on that first scenario.  It may be unlikely a surger was going to come springing out of the school to attack them, but it wasn’t impossible.  The fact that each of them was on high alert was an indicator of why each of them was still breathing this far into the event.  People who took things for granted didn’t survive very long in the new normal.  Not unless they were camped out in one of those cold war era military bases with the rest of the fortunate privileged.

Nothing came at them from the bottom floor.  They all hit the dirt when someone let loose a burst of machine gun fire from the building.  Looking up at the building they watched as one of the covered windows was blown out.  Whoever was inside wanted out and they wanted out now.  The machine gun fire stopped and then a whole section of the wall blew out with a loud boom!  Bricks and metal rained down on the small group desperately crawling backwards away from the explosions.  Each of them wanting nothing more than to get back in the Humvee and be shielded from the heavy objects smashing into the ground all around them.

When the smoke and dust cleared, they’d all survived the rain of random building parts.  Harley was nursing a bleeding scalp from being smacked by a brick.  Drew was prying a piece of metal out of his thigh.  Other than that they were all good.  Lisa was once again struck by how they took things in stride now that back in the old days would’ve required insurance forms and a trip to the emergency room.  Now they pulled stuff out of their bodies, poured some whiskey on whatever part had been gashed open and wrapped it up with duct tape and a maxi pad.

“Stop blowing shit up!”  Harley had stood up holding the back of his bleeding head.  He looked pretty pissed.  He was yelling out a challenge to the building in general.  Lisa wondered if the person who’d blown up the wall would have the guts to actually admit it.  A pissed off Harley was quite a sight to behold.

“Sorry!  We didn’t know anybody was down there.  We need to get out of this death trap.  Don’t suppose any of you know where a ladder is?”  A soldier up on the second floor asked the question hopefully.  If they didn’t, he was more than willing to jump for it.  He wanted nothing more than to put some serious distance between himself and the hell hole he’d barely survived.

“Plenty of ladders and building stuff on the first floor.  We have a whole classroom full of them.”  Tom said.

“The first floor’s crawling with them.  They’re slithering over each other hoping the food will come to them.  They feel us out here.  They sense the people alive on the second floor.  They’ve got someone trapped in a tiny space on the first floor.”  Yue said coming out of the car.  Her eyes had a haunted faraway look.  Her lips were slightly blue making her look like she had a mild case of hypothermia.

“Are you ok?”  Lisa asked her with concern.  Yue did not look ok.

“I don’t know.  It’s all slimy in my head.”  Yue answered.  The group all looked at one another.  The answer was as weird as it was creepy.

“Do you want to get back in the car and rest?”  LeBron asked her.  Yue shook her head and looked over at Harley.  He’d gone from angry face to concerned face now that he’d seen Yue.  The big man had a big heart buried under all that macho gypsy nonchalance he liked to front.

“Do you want something to help keep them out?”  Harley asked softly.  He wasn’t sure what all pills he had left but Yue looked like she needed them way more than he did.  It was a measure of how concerned he was that he was even willing to entertain giving up the rest of his stash.  Yue realized that as well.  She hadn’t been worried about how bad off she might be until Harley had made that offer.  She’d seen him ignore people’s broken bones when he had painkillers on him.  If he didn’t think they were in enough pain he wasn’t going to dig into his limited stock.

“Thanks.  I’ll take you up on that once we save the people in this building.  I think I can help with that.”  Yue said.  On the inside she was screaming out for something to block the pain.  Some way to expel the monsters from her head.  She was worried she’d become like them.  Maybe it didn’t take a physical transfer of saliva.  What if they could infect her with a psychic sneeze?  An exchange of bodily images instead of fluids?  She was pretty sure the horror movie in her head was what drove the crawlerz onwards.

“Ok.  What do you see?”  Asked Tom.

Yue began walking along the bottom of the school.  She was watching her memories of images.  The memory of paths taken.  She was sensing the prey huddled behind a frustratingly smooth and strong door.  She stopped in front of a hood covering a window into one of the classrooms.

“He’s in here.  There’s also a wriggling nest of worms.  We want him.  It’s too strong.  We’ll wait.”  Yue said.  She was so lost in trying to help rescue the man trapped inside that she had no idea how weird she sounded.  When she finally looked up to see why they weren’t breaking into the room she was shocked to see them staring at her like she was crazy.  She didn’t blame them for thinking that.  She was willing to bet donuts to dollars that she was at least at the cat lady mark on the crazy scale.  If for no other reason than no one but a cat lady understood what the ‘donuts to dollars’ thing meant.

“Do you see anybody else besides the people up on the second floor?”  Tom asked her.  Yue focused for a minute.

“No.  I think that’s it.  They’re in the stairwell but not the second floor yet.  Hurry though.  They never quit trying.”  Yue said.

“Ok.  Lisa can you take Yue to the Humvee and get her comfortable.  Harley if you have a couple of Valium or something for her, I think she could use a rest.  Feel free to drive her as far from this building as she needs to go.”  Tom ordered.

Jeff took the pills from Harley once he’d sorted them out and started to follow Lisa back to the Humvee.  The major stopped him and motioned him over to the side to have a private conversation.  Jeff walked over impatiently.  He really wanted to go check on Yue and make sure she was ok.  She needed people around her right now.  She was in a walking nightmare.

“Your girl’s the most important thing we’ve discovered so far.  She might make this whole experiment worthwhile.  We need to make sure she’s well-guarded and taken care of.”  Tom told Jeff in a whisper once they were out of hearing distance of the rest of them.

“Agreed.  We also need to make sure her mind doesn’t explode.  She’s my girl and I’m going to protect her.”  Jeff said wondering where Tom was going with all of this.

“I get that but with her mental skills she just became a huge weapon in this battle.  A weapon we need to study so we can replicate her if possible.  She could’ve been killed last night.  I’m happy as hell to be alive but she’s just too important to be out here with us.  I think we need to send her somewhere like Weathertop.”  Tom said.

“Hopefully you’re also thankful to be alive.”  Jeff said emphasizing the word thankful.

“Of course I’m thankful.  She saved my life.  She saved Lipsey’s life.  Assuming he ever wakes up anyway.  She’s a freakin hero.  Which is why she should be shared around versus stuck out her on this experimental outpost where we’re all going to wind up dead.  Do you want her dead too?  You see how useful those skills of hers are right?”  Tom argued.

“I’m willing to do whatever it takes to save the country.  It’s up to her what she wants to do though.  I’m telling you right now I put her first.  You try and ship her off somewhere she doesn’t want to go or make her do anything she doesn’t want to do.  I’ll be in your face.  She’s got a whole crew who loves her.  Don’t forget that.”  Jeff threatened.

This wasn’t the time to tiptoe around the tulips.  This was the time to drop the hammer and be extremely transparent.  Otherwise Yue would be on the first train back to Weathertop. They’d have a gilded cage waiting for her.  She’d be poked and prodded while they paraded captured crawlerz in front of her.  She’d be forced to try and read their minds.  He had a mental image of that scene from Ghostbusters where Bill Murphy holds up the card to let the girl try and guess what it is.  Only in his vision Bill Murphy was a chained up crawler drooling blood and Yue was a pale zonked out version of herself.  That intelligent light in her eyes replaced with a manic evil glow.  He wasn’t going to let that happen.

“Hey man.  Just trying to save the world here.  She saved my life.  I owe her.  You were in that Humvee with her too.  I don’t forget things like that.  I’m not the bad guy ok?”  Tom said.

Jeff liked the words he was hearing.  He still wasn’t convinced he could trust the man though.  This guy was truly committed to the mission.  He was an officer who’d progressed up through the ranks by making the hard calls.  This wasn’t a man who backed down because someone like Jeff got in his face.

“Sounds good.  I’m going to get these pills over to Yue.  Hopefully they help her block the crap out she’s sensing so she can rest.  We can talk about that other stuff later once she’s able.”  Jeff said.  He held out his hand.  Tom shook it looking him straight in the eyes.

Chapter 13:  Town Hall

The inside of the cargo car was hot and stuffy.  There was minimal ventilation for obvious reasons.  The Fayetteville train yard had plenty of the cars sitting around.  They’d all been outfitted previously to support the people living here.  The move to the high school hadn’t happened until they’d all felt like the place was secure enough to keep them alive.  The whole point of the Fayetteville force was to come up with ways to survive in a crawler covered America after all.

At this point Jeff doubted anyone would want to move out of the stuffy train cars again anytime soon.  Sweating in your sleep was a lot better than dying in your sleep.  The train cars might not be as secure as Weathertop, but they were the next best thing.  A solid steel car with massive latches to open and shut the doors.  Similar to the concept of driving around in an eighteen wheeler and using the trailer as your safe sleeping space.  The main difference being you could only go where the tracks went.

Jeff sat on his cot gently stroking Yue’s long dark hair.  She’d shoved the pills in her mouth earlier without even looking at them.  He was thinking they were a mix of anti-depressants and Oxycodone but there was no way to tell for sure.  Harley had been collecting random pills for forever now.  Whatever they were the pills seemed to have done the trick.  Before they’d all loaded up in the trailers at dusk Tom had come by and presented Jeff with a few different bottles full of different pills.

As a peace offering between the two men it was very much appreciated.  The little bottles with pills rattling around inside them may very well be the answer to helping Yue keep her sanity.  They’d have to experiment with the dosages to see what worked the best for her.  Knowing her she may even refuse to take them.  She might feel obliged to continue to serve as an early warning system against the crawlerz.  Even if it eventually cost her sanity.

There was no need for psychic powers to tell them that there were infected all over the cargo car they were in.  You could hear them beating away on the outside of the car.  If you wanted to walk up to the front of the car you could also watch them on a live video feed courtesy of Charlie.  He’d been very appreciative of Yue’s powers.  Appreciative enough to have setup the live feed in their car after setting it up in the command car.  They also had a generic little phone system running between the cars.  Charlie had explained that it was all pretty solid as long as the infected didn’t decide to start yanking on wires while they were out there.

So far none of the crawlerz had been cable guys during their previous uninfected lives.  Everything was still up and working and providing an amazing level of detail.  If you were interested in watching the demons crawl all over the car you were going to be sleeping in it was there for you to see.  Jeff had gone up to look earlier and decided he’d rather not know what was on the outside of the car.  What was interesting from a scientific point of view was a skid mark inducer from a personal point of view.

You could barely even see the train cars on the camera feeds.  They were literally covered with the infected.  They were like candy bars on the ground covered in ants.  In this case they were more like fire ants than your regular picnic ruining black ants.  They crawled around randomly punching at the hard metal walls.  Anytime they found something that was an irregular part of the car they pushed and pulled and hit it.  If there were a way for the throngs of madmen outside to break in, then they were determined to find it.

If Yue had been awake, she could’ve told them about the overwhelming feelings of frustration bubbling through the monsters outside.  Their minds filled with an addiction a million times more powerful than the pull of heroin for an addict.  They didn’t just want it.  They didn’t just physically and mentally crave the flesh of the uninfected.  They had to have it.  The demons in them drove them to it.  The parts of their brains opened and warped by the ancient curse pushed on them relentlessly.  Their own personal tortured thoughts shared and twisted with the thousands of other infected around them.  A madhouse of murderous impulses flogging them all forward.

As bad as the march to mayhem the monsters outside were fixated on the worse part was the inevitability of it for those inside.  Jeff sat beside Yue carefully guarding the flame on the top of his candle.  He made a game of it in his own mind.  The candle was hope and he had to make sure the fire didn’t get taken out of the wick.  Having your hope burn out when you’re in a fight like they were in was life threatening.  There was no way to keep going if you couldn’t make yourself see a better future.

Looking around he saw everyone else was sleeping.  Or at least pretending to sleep.  He smiled when he noticed pretty much everyone had managed to claim a comforter for themselves.  To have grabbed those they would’ve had to fight their way into the dark classroom they were stored in.  They’d risked their lives for those king sized comforters.  It was the small things that meant everything.

Jeff lay down on his cot and threw his arm over Yue.  He personally was sporting the military cover, but LeBron had snagged a comforter for Yue to use.  Most likely because LeBron had been smart enough to know if he didn’t get one for Yue then he’d lose the one he’d grabbed for himself.  Jeff was thankful for that thick comforter now as it was about a million times better to sleep with than the blanket that he’d grabbed for himself.  He rested his head on his arm and fell asleep.

He woke up to the sound of screaming.  Yue was flipping out in her sleep.  Her eyes were wide open which was freaking out Jeff and LeBron and Lisa as they all stared over at her.  She suddenly sat straight up and screamed shrilly one more time before collapsing back into her comforter cocoon.  The three of them looked at each other with concern.  Something was obviously not right.  None of them wanted to talk about it while there were crawlerz all around them though.

The next morning they carefully got off the train.  The bottoms of the cars had been lined with fencing and metal poles to make it less likely the infected would crawl underneath them to pass the day away.  It also served to make it harder for them to come flying out from under the car and attack the people on the platform.  A precaution against the occasional crawler who’d force himself under the car during the night then get stuck there like a lobster in a trap.  Vicious killers with psychic powers they may be but all of them would lose a game of tic tac toe to a drunk toddler.  At least everyone hoped there weren’t any smart ones out there.

They met up on the platform.  Harley and Drew happily reminiscing about how they’d whacked around a handful of the Marines stationed here when they’d arrived.  LeBron wondered if the two of them knew that a few of those Marines were listening to them right now.  They were of course still stationed here and had been lucky enough to be assigned sleeping quarters on the second floor of the high school.  The only person who’d survived from the first floor had been Charlie.

He’d survived because watching all those movies of the crawlerz had made him completely paranoid.  He’d see over and over again how the freaks did things that should be impossible.  They jumped to the tops of buildings that should have been way out of their reach.  They beat through walls that no one would’ve expected to come down.  He’d even watched them contort their bodies to get into spaces they thought might have prey in them.  He had one clip he’d shown LeBron where a crawler literally broke every bone in its body squeezing itself through a tiny gap between the bottom of a garage door and the floor.  The pile of skin and broken bones had then still inched its way across the floor to the door behind which the uninfected had been sleeping.

Charlie had sent soldiers to warn the people in that building to wait before they opened the door.  The pile of skin and bones had reared up like something out of a late night horror film to try and attack the two Marines who’d been sent to finish it off.  It was that incident Charlie was thinking of now as everyone gathered on the platform to discuss what to do moving forward.  He didn’t know if it was going to be a town hall type meeting or if Tom and Jeff were just going to start barking out orders, but it should be interesting.  No matter what they said Charlie was still going to make sure wherever he was sent that he made sure he had his own private panic room if it all went to hell.

Tom looked out over the small crowd assembled on the platform.  If they’d done this same sort of assembly on the day prior there would’ve been four times more people.  Even accounting for the men he had standing guard this was still a tiny congregation.  Tiny or not he still had to climb up on the pulpit and let them know where he planned on guiding his flock.  Assuming they still trusted him to keep the wolves at bay that is.  He stepped up on one of the benches and waited until the hum of conversation died down.  It didn’t take too long since mostly everyone kept their mouths shut unless they had something important to say now a days.  It was important when the sound of your voice could bring a surger flying at you.

“Alright.  You all know what our main mission here is.  We do intake for the refugees who show up and make sure they’re sent where they can be safe and useful.  Most of you also know our secondary mission is to field trial ideas on how to survive and thrive in an infected world.  Our attempt to live at the high school didn’t work out.  We’re not going to stop because of a setback though.  We’re doing this so that others can follow in our footsteps.  We’re the first step towards taking the country back from these monsters.  Today I want to get your feedback and ideas.  Then tonight senior leadership will meet.  We’ll review the ideas we’ve heard and set a course of action for how we rebuild.  Make sense?”  Tom asked pausing for the sake of taking a breath as much as to listen.  He didn’t really want any feedback on their mission.  He was pretty sure it wouldn’t be super constructive.

“I fought my way here from the mountains because the radio said this was the best place to go.  That recorded broadcast didn’t mention anything about us being guinea pigs.”  A tall man in the middle of the audience called out loudly.  All around him people were nodding.  The military men may have volunteered for this assignment but most of the civilians were clueless.

“How come some people got sent away somewhere safe and some of us got chosen to stay here?”  A lean deadly looking woman asked.  On top of all the normal weapons she was also sporting a samurai sword.

“No one gets chosen to stay here instead of sent somewhere safe.  For those of you who are hearing this for the first time I apologize.  All of you would’ve been given the choice in time.  We were working on how many people we thought we may need and where we thought we may need them.  We didn’t want to bring more people in than we needed.  We’ve got plenty of refugees here who’ve made the choice to stay and fight.  We just didn’t think it was a great idea to tell refugees as soon as they got here that they were part of a base that was trying to lure crawlerz to it to figure out better ways of killing them.”  Tom explained.

“My brother came with me.  He was twelve.  We were supposed to be on the next train out of here to go to the coast.  He didn’t make it.  If we’d known how dangerous this place was, we’d have just gone to the coast ourselves.”  A young woman spoke up from the center of the crowd.  Tom realized he needed to push on.  This was turning out to be just as unconstructive as he’d thought it might be.

“There’s nothing else to be said.  It was a mistake not to make everyone who showed up here looking for safety aware of the other purpose for this unit to be here.  I will not repeat that mistake.  The mission stands though.  What should we try next?  What we tried before obviously didn’t work.”  Tom stated clearly.

Thus began a freewheeling brainstorming session on the platform of a dilapidated train station.  The ideas ranged from staying in the train cars for good to building cities in the clouds.  The city in the clouds idea was interesting.  There were a few buildings in Fayetteville where they might be able to take over higher levels than the high school had.  As far as killing the crawlerz went it was all a variation of luring large groups of them somewhere then killing them with either poison, fire or the expenditure of large amounts of ammunition.  One thing shone through bright and clear.  In order for them to be safe the crawlerz had to be killed.  Everyone had seen how those things came at them.  They had no mercy.  They were never going to stop.  The only solution was to kill them all.

Tom cut off the session before it could get too far off the rails.  He promised everyone he’d share what leadership decided on the next day as to the proposed course of action.  For now they needed to gather supplies and continue living their lives.  The refugees who were going to the coast would be picked up the next day.  Until then they were to report to their assigned coordinator to get their jobs for the day.  Tom had rattled off that last part primarily to give the refugees something to do other than bother him.  Unfortunately he’d forgotten that all the coordinators had been housed on the first floor of the high school and were now dead.

“Are we going to talk about the witch?”  A tall refugee said loudly after someone else had reminded Tom all the coordinators were dead.  That statement seemingly giving this other person the courage to publicly ask about a witch.

“What are you talking about?”  Tom asked good humoredly.  He was half expecting to hear a lame joke.  Something along the lines of it being time for a sandwich.

“The woman who can talk to the crawlerz.”  The man said.  A few people around him nodded.  Everyone now intently focusing on Tom to see what he had to say to that very popular rumor.

“News to me.  Sergeant set some of your men as coordinators.  They’ll work with the refugees not on the force to assign tasks for the day.  All you refugees listen up.  After last night we have a lot of openings that need to be filled.  I don’t need to tell you how dangerous the work is.  I also don’t need to tell you how important it is.  If you’d like to come aboard, please let your coordinator know and they can get you setup.  Otherwise I wish you the best of luck on the coast.”  Tom hopped down off the bench before anyone could ask him any more questions.

Chapter 14:  Witchy Woman

“I’m sorry.”  Yue said pulling away from Jeff.

“It’s ok.  What’s the matter?”  Jeff said reaching out to hold her hand.

“Don’t touch me!”  Yue hissed slapping at his hand and jumping backwards.  Her face contorted into an expression of pure disgust.

Jeff froze.  He didn’t know what to do.  Yue had asked him to follow her out to this little copse of trees.  He’d assumed it was so they could be alone together for a few precious minutes.  They rarely got any alone time otherwise.  At night they were crammed into a train car with her two brothers and a contingent of soldiers and refugees.  While some of the couples in the car chose not to care neither Yue nor Jeff were those kind of people.  When they were alone though they normally couldn’t keep their hands off each other.  At least in the past it’d been that way.

“What’s wrong?”  Jeff asked.  He’d frozen in place.  He was scared if he moved towards her, she’d bolt off into the woods.  Yue looked up at him with tears dripping down her face.  She started sobbing.

“When you kiss me.”  She stopped.  Her shoulders heaving with sobs.  Jeff wanted nothing more than to move forward and hold her, but he sensed that was the wrong thing to do.  Instead he just stayed silent and tried to radiate the love he felt for her.

“Yes.  You can tell me.  I only want to help.”  Jeff finally said after the silence had stretched out for way too long.

“I can feel what it’d be like to bite into your face.  I can taste the blood.  It tastes so good.  That feeling of biting into your flesh.  I dream about it now.  It’s all I want to do.  You have to stay away from me.  When your skin gets too close, I have to bite my own tongue.  I’m missing a big chunk of it now.  I swallowed it and I wanted more.  I’m losing my mind.”  Yue spouted out the confession in one long diatribe.  When she was done, she turned away from him in shame.

“I love you.  We’ll get through this.  Just keep talking to me.  Tell me how you feel.  This connection you’ve got could be a game changer.  If not, then we head for the Alps or somewhere.  We’ll do what it takes so you don’t have to be drowned in crawler weirdness anymore ok?”  Jeff said.  He fought back the urge to go in for a hug.  It was a little bit easier knowing that she might bite off a big chunk of his face if he tried it.

“You’re scared of me now.”  She said moving further away.  She was refusing to let him see her face.

“This whole thing scares me.  The way you can see inside their heads.  That’s scary as hell.  I can’t even imagine how messed up it is for you.  I can barely live with myself after the random snippets of nightmares and visions I get from them.  You’re just extra sensitive to it.  Not your fault.  I love you.  I’m here for you.  No matter how messed up our lives get I’ve always got your back.”  Jeff pleaded with Yue to understand.  He was freaked out by what she was going through.  He was not freaked out by her.  He didn’t know how to say it any clearer.

“I scare you and you’re dumping me.  I get it.  Bye.”  Yue said and sprinted off into the woods.  Jeff considered following her then decided that’d only make it worse.  Instead he tromped his way with a heavy heart out of the overgrown park back into the city proper.  He was trying to piece together what’d just happened when he looked up and saw Drew, Lisa and LeBron staring at him.

“Where’s Yue?”  Drew asked.

“She went for a walk.”  Jeff answered sharply.  He wasn’t anywhere near being in the mood for this.

“You let her go for a walk?  When she’s had like two concussions in the last week and passes out every time a crawler walks by?”  Lisa asked with a look of disgust on her face.  Jeff wondered if he deserved the looks that he kept getting.  These people were going to give him a complex.  Lisa didn’t wait for him to answer.  She just took off in the general direction Jeff had indicated earlier when he said Yue went for walk.  Drew immediately followed her.

“You coming?”  LeBron asked.

“No.  I don’t think she wants to see me right now.  Tell her I’m not going anywhere though.”  Jeff said.  LeBron said he would and disappeared after his brother.  When they were out of sight, Jeff said a silent prayer they’d find Yue and talk some sense into her.  He struggled briefly with an urge to join them in the search.  Winning the fight he spun on his heel and set off in search of Major Tom instead.  He could help more by making sure the major didn’t open his mouth to the spooks at Weathertop.  That seemed like a better use of his time than chasing Yue around the park potentially making her even more angry.

He found Jeff at the high school supervising the removal of all the gear they’d stored there.  They had to clear each room carefully before they could go in and fetch the gear that’d been left there.  To do that they were using crowbars to pry the hoods off the windows then sledgehammers to knock off the internal supports and second layer of metal.  Between the noise and the sunlight that poured in most of the crawlerz took off before the men moved in to clear the space.

Most didn’t mean all.  More than enough of the crawlerz stayed to make life interesting.  Even when faced with the hypnotizing light beams and the visions that they had of the other crawlerz in the building being shot multiple times they stayed.  Their lust for flesh overrode everything else.  Their need to spread the infection was greater than their need to live.  Many were easily dispatched once the sunlight filtered in through the windows.  A quick headshot took care of the killers hypnotized by the dusty beams of light.

Far more exciting were the ones they couldn’t see.  The ones that jammed themselves under couches and into closets.  The ones hiding above the ceiling panels waiting to drop down on them when they entered the room.  After losing a man to a crawler who’d been hiding behind an open door like a kid playing hide and seek Tom called the operation off.  There was nothing in those rooms worth losing men over.  Instead of continuing the search for supplies he grabbed a notebook and started making a looting list.  He planned to send men to grab supplies from somewhere that was hopefully much safer.

Jeff showed up on a golfcart right as Tom was wrapping up the list.  Jeff parked the golf cart and walked over to stand by Tom.

“How’s Yue doing?”  Tom asked.

“She’s good.  A little weirded out by everything but good.  What are you working on?”  Jeff asked to change the subject.  Tom wouldn’t be happy to hear that the person he’d labeled as the most valuable asset they had was currently running upset through the forest with no one guarding her.

“Making up a looting list.  We need supplies.  Without your girlfriend helping us out pulling the supplies out of the school’s way too dangerous.  It was so much easier when she was here the other day.”  The major said.  He was obviously alluding to having her come back and help them again.  She was able to sit outside a room and tell them how many of the monsters were in the room.  On top of that she could also pinpoint where in the room they were hiding.  That made it a million times safer to clear a room.  Instead of looking behind all of the bookshelves they just blasted a few rounds through the ones Yue told them to.

“She’s working on controlling what she sees.  Most of it’s the kind of stuff we only see in our nightmares.  Too much of that and she’ll lose her mind.  Moderation’s the key to successfully using her talent.  I wouldn’t be surprised if there weren’t a lot more like her out there.  People who’ve become more attuned.  People who’ve learned how to open themselves up.”  Jeff said.

“I hear you man.  I still think she’s special though.  She’s the only I’ve seen do it in a way that’s controlled and useful.  I think she needs to be protected and studied.  There’s a train coming tomorrow with more men to reinforce us.  I’d love to put her on it and send her back to Weathertop.”  Tom said.

“Her brother and sister and that whole group would want to go with her.”  Jeff reminded Tom.  Tom shrugged.

“I doubt that’d be a problem once I tell them what she can do.  You know she’ll be way safer there, right?  Out here you could die at any second.  Back at Weathertop the biggest problem you’ll have is trying not to get fat.  I’m assuming you’d want to go with her right?”  Tom asked slyly.

“I’ll talk to her about it tonight and see what she wants to do.  I’ll most likely be staying no matter what she chooses.  I like being out here seeing the plans we make being executed on as we make them.  Otherwise I’ll have to wait for feedback over the radio every day.  I’d rather see it with my own eyes.”  Jeff answered.  He didn’t mention the fact that he doubted he’d be allowed to go back to Weathertop regardless.  If Yue opted to go back, she’d be going back without him.

“Alright.  Let me know what she says.  I’ve got to report it, but I’ll swing it whichever way you want me to.”  Tom said.

“Ok.  Hopefully I’ll know something soon.  I’m going to go track them down now and see what they want to do.  Leadership meeting at five in the conductor’s office, right?”  Jeff asked.  More for something to say than because he needed to confirm it.

“That’s right.  Bring some good ideas.  We need them.”  Tom went back to working on the looting list.  He needed to get some men on it while there was still plenty of daylight left.  He hoped Jeff could get Yue to commit to some course of action before too long.  He was going to need to report what’d happened and what they’d discovered about Yue pretty soon.  If not when he checked in tonight, then by tomorrow morning at the latest.  It wasn’t the kind of information he could sit on for very long if he wanted to maintain his post.

Jeff drove the golf cart as fast as it would go back in the direction he’d come from.  He was so preoccupied thinking of how to tell Yue about Weathertop that he almost missed seeing the group he was looking for waving at him from a nearby porch.  If he hadn’t happened to look up, they’d have been forced to shout to get his attention.  No one liked shouting anymore.  Silence had been ingrained in all of them at this point.

Jeff swung the golf cart around and went over to where the little group was waiting.  Before he’d gotten completely off the golf cart Yue was telling him she was sorry.  Even as she was apologizing and telling him she loved him she was still being careful to keep her distance.  He wanted to reach out and grab her but held himself back.  LeBron helped him control himself by standing behind Yue and shaking his head fiercely back and forth.  Jeff took that to mean he should keep his hands to himself.

After the awkward greeting Yue directed him to sit with the others on the opposite side of the porch.  Jeff sat down wondering what was going on.  He started to ask and was once again stopped by LeBron shaking his head.  Yue must have seriously freaked out her siblings for them to be acting this cagey.  Jeff wanted to ask what was going on but waited for Yue to talk first since that was what LeBron kept indicating he should do.

“It’s not just you I can’t stand being around anymore.  Sorry, that came out wrong.  When I’m part of them I’m riding that same current of hate.  I can fight it because I’m not actually infected but it’s still pretty strong.  Anytime we’re near one of them I’m connected.  It’s like they’re a wireless network that I connect to anytime I get close enough to pick up the signal.  That’s wrong but I don’t know how else to explain it.”  Yue said.  It sounded like she was rambling.  Everyone got that she was trying to explain a concept that was alien to all of them.

“How do you kill the connection?”  Jeff asked simply.

“I don’t know.  I don’t know if it’s even possible now that I’ve connected.  Plus, those things are everywhere.  I don’t know how we missed them before.  There’s one dug into the dirt underneath this porch.  It knows we’re here.  I’m keeping it calm right now so it won’t attack us.  Evidently I can do that now.”  Yue started laughing.  She laughed until she was crying.  Jeff took a step up to go to her.

“No!  Get back from me!”  Yue shrieked jumping to her feet.  Jeff stopped and took a few steps back holding his hands up in surrender.  It broke his heart to see her like this.

“What can we do to help?”  He asked.  Then he remembered what he had in his pockets.  He searched around for a second trying to remember where he’d shoved them.  He couldn’t believe he hadn’t already given them to her.  Finally finding what he was looking for he tossed the big bag of pill bottles to Yue.  She snagged it out of the air eagerly.  She started to take the lid off one of the bottles then she stopped.

“Let’s put this one out of its misery first.  It’s just a kid.”  Yue said softly.  Drew and LeBron stood up.  Drew took a machete out of his pack and LeBron hefted a thick staff he’d taken to using as a walking stick.  Yue had been watching to make sure they were ready.  Seeing that they were good to go she turned to face the street and went into a trance.  Jeff was so busy staring at Yue that he almost missed the tween boy who crawled out from under the porch.

The boy was naked and covered in dirt.  His hair was long and greasy.  His nails were long and jagged.  He didn’t have the aura of a crawler though.  He had the look of a boy who maybe snuck a couple of his dad’s beers.  A lost and stumbling attitude.  His eyes were open and confused.  His mouth wasn’t snapping at the air over and over again like it should be.  The infected boy should have been losing his mind in this close proximity to the group of uninfected on the porch.  Instead he just looked like a dirty, naked, confused kid standing in the dirt.

LeBron smacked him in the head with his staff hard enough to knock the ten year old backwards onto the ground.  The boy lay there staring up at the sky.  A small smile spreading out on his lips.  Drew knelt down beside the boy with his machete in his hand.  He lifted up the machete but couldn’t make himself bring it down.

“Give him peace.”  Yue said in a sing song voice from the porch.  Drew still couldn’t do it.  Jeff walked quickly down the porch stairs and over to the boy.  He took the machete from Drew and had him move out of the way.  Up on the stairs Yue’s eyes rolled back in her head and she collapsed.

The boys eyes instantly turned red with hate.  The peaceful persona was ripped away like it’d never existed.  A demon lay there now staring up at the blue sky.  It lunged for Jeff who brought the machete down hard.  The blade smashed into the kid’s mouth and sank deeply into his jaw.  Tooth fragments and blood flew out of the boy’s mouth.  The demon inside the boy caught sight of the sun and withdrew.  The boy fell to the ground staring sightlessly up into the sky once more.  This time with a machete embedded deeply into his palette.

“Is he dead?”  Drew asked.  He was shaking and white faced.  It was always so much harder when it was a child.

“I don’t think so.”  Jeff answered looking down.  The tiny chest was still rising and falling regularly.  The eyes were unblinking.  Blood was flowing in a steady stream out of the boy’s mouth.  Jeff reached down with his foot and nudged the boy’s head so that it was straight up and down.  The blood coming out of his mouth now had nowhere to go.  It pooled up in his mouth and gradually drowned the poor little bastard.  Jeff held the boy’s head straight with his boot until the bubbles stopped coming up.

Drew turned around and puked.  Jeff decided not to ask him if he wanted his machete back.

Chapter 15:  Square One

“Sorry I’m late.  Got held up.”  Jeff said walking into the breakroom they’d setup as a conference area in the train depot.  He’d walked silently along with the rest of the group back to the train car after beating the infected child to death.  It somehow made it a thousand times worse the way Yue had gotten the little crawler to walk out from under the porch and just stand there.  The little verse she’d sang about giving him peace had been creepy as hell.  They’d waited for Yue to wake up before walking back.  They’d been worried she wouldn’t deal well with waking up in any of their arms.  It’d taken her a while to come around hence Jeff’s tardiness.

“Understood.  You’ve still got blood all over your sleeve by the way.”  Tom said.  It was funny how murdering people had become such an everyday occurrence that the biggest concern about being covered in blood was having to find new clothes.  Tom had mentioned the blood staining Jeff’s sleeve in the same manner he’d have mentioned it if Jeff had a mustard stain on his shirt.

Jeff sat down.  He didn’t really trust himself to speak.  He knew his eyes were red rimmed from the tears he’d shed while they waited for Yue to wake up.  He’d leaned out over the bannister and imagined the dead child below running around in the backyard of the nice house they were at playing soccer or catch.  He’d pictured playing football with the kid.  He’d tried to remember what the world was like before casually murdering a tween became socially acceptable.  He knew the others at the table would notice the state he was in.

They wouldn’t say anything though.  Among the warrior class Jeff was hanging out with these days depression was as common as jock itch.  Everyone seemed to have different triggers.  One of the men who’d died when the high school went down had been assigned to Jeff as a driver and research assistant.  The man helped with tasks like setting up the claymores to clear out crawler nests once Charlie pinpointed where they were.  He was one of those larger than life guys who seem to have it all under control.

They’d been driving to a quarry to see what size rocks they might be able to easily take.  Jeff had been on a kick to try and see how they could save ammunition.  Since the infected liked to run in circles around the bottom of the building he’d thought they may just be able to drop rocks off the roof and crush them.  His escort had thought he’d watched to many road runner cartoons as a kid but gamely started up the Humvee to drive him out to the quarry.  About halfway there the man had noticed a McDonalds on the side of the road.  The sign overhead still advertising the last Happy Meal toys from the last Pixar movie.

The hard core operator driving the Humvee had stopped the car and put his head down in his hands.  He’d bawled his brains out for like five minutes straight.  Then he’d found an old t-shirt in the center compartment and blown his nose into it.  He’d thrown the used t-shirt out the window and continued driving like nothing had happened.  That was the kind of internalized pain people were carrying around inside them in the apocalypse.  Jeff and Tom had actually spent some time in their previous planning sessions outlining how important it was to embed therapists and counselors into the groups who’d be holding the front lines.  The groups taking the fight to the crawlerz were going to need serious mental help.

“Well you didn’t miss too much.  This has become an idea free zone.  Before you got here, we were trying to remember scenes from different end of the world type movies to get the juices flowing.  How’s Yue doing?”  Tom asked.  He’d asked the question casually but both he and the other two men in the room leaned forward eagerly waiting for his response.

“Speaking of stealing ideas from zombie movies.  I know you guys were talking about trying to build up into the sky.  That might work, but I’m thinking of an option Drew always wanted to try out.  Any nice sized prisons around here?”  Jeff asked.  He’d purposefully ignored the question about Yue.  He hoped she’d have recovered from the events of the day by the time he got back to the train.  Even if she hadn’t, he knew he was still going to have to talk to her.

“I saw that show too.  I don’t see much difference between living in a prison and living in the train cars like we’re doing now.”  One of the other officers at the table answered.  That appeared to be the general consensus.  Jeff had always thought it was kind of a moldy nasty death trap idea himself, so he didn’t have any real arguments.  He mostly just wanted to avoid talking about Yue.  He knew they’d all freak out if he told them Yue had gone from being a crawler divining rod to being able to steer the infected around like they were remote control cars.

“What if we just lived in the trains full time?  We could go around the country massacring the monsters without giving them the option to figure out our weak spots and kill us.  If we stay in one place the crawlerz eventually figure out how to get in, then they share that weakness with the thousands of other crawlerz trying to get in.  That’s why the high school finally fell.  If we roll up in a new city every couple of days, then we may have a better chance at surviving this.”  Jeff said excitedly.  They were already using the train system to transport people around the country.  Why not shift the fight around the same way?

“The train cars are big enough to let us haul around all the ammunition and supplies we’d need.  We could figure out how many men per car were needed.  The cars themselves are pretty solid.  Sounds like a good idea to me.  Not really sure why we weren’t doing something similar to begin with.”  Tom said getting excited about the idea.

“We weren’t doing this to begin with because it doesn’t meet the requirements of the mission sir.  Our priority is to establish a beachhead that’s safe and allows us to expand outward.  The original vision was a walled city with room to grow crops.  Kind of like the fortress that survived over in the UK.”  The other officer at the table commented.  He was right of course.  The mission wasn’t to ride around the country trying to kill as many crawlerz as they could.  The mission was to create safe zones and begin to rebuild.

“You guys know that place in Britain collapsed right?  It eventually got overrun.  I wonder if we aren’t approaching this all wrong.  Maybe our settlements need to constantly be on the move.”  Jeff said.  He was thinking out loud.  He could see that Tom was struggling not to tell him that a moving settlement was an oxymoron.

“There’s no reason we need to stay in one place.  Staying in one place is how we keep losing.  Every time you bunch people up in one location and try to make it secure, you’re actually doing the opposite. The crawlerz keep attacking that one position until they find a way in.  Either a way they make themselves or some kind of screwup the people staying in that place make.  Forgetting to lock a door, leaving a window open, getting back to base just a minute or two late one day.  It doesn’t take much.”  Jeff continued.  He was warming to the ideas coming to him now.  It looked like Tom might be getting it as well.

“So we stop doing the thing that’s not working and try something different.  Instead of large groups in fixed fortifications you’re saying small groups that are mobile.  What about crops then?  We can’t keep eating expired SpaghettiOs forever.”  Tom asked.

“Plenty of wild game you can kill during the day.  We can plant crops during the day too.  It’s not like the crawlerz care if we plant a bunch of corn and leave it there for a month or two.  I have no idea how long it takes for corn to grow.  We come back and pick it when it’s time to pick it.”  Jeff answered excitedly.  He was really liking this new concept.

“Fuel’s not going to last forever.  I don’t see how we rebuild civilization riding around in trains for forever.”  One of the other officers at the table commented.

“It’s not forever.  Just until we kill enough of the crawlerz to make staying in one place safe again.  I see what you mean about fuel though.  We may have to dig up some of the coal burning engines and setup people to be coal miners again.  I don’t think we’re going to have the expertise and manpower to refine gasoline again for a generation or two.  We can charge batteries with solar or dams or even windmills.  We’re not trying to power a city.  We just need enough to make a train move during the day and maybe cars and trucks.”  Jeff said.

“I think it might end up being a hybrid model.  You’ve got people in places like Weathertop then you have all the field guys out there constantly moving like you’re talking about.  Sounds like something we should be exploring at least.”  Tom said

“Agreed.”  Jeff said.  The other men around the table nodded as well.  It made a lot more sense than repeating the same mistakes they’d already made trying to fortify existing structures.

The major dismissed the other men but asked Jeff to stay behind.  Jeff moved a couple of chairs over closer to Tom.  He knew where this was headed.  It was a conversation he’d hoped to avoid.  Tom pulled out a report that’d been stapled together and handed it to Jeff.  Jeff took a couple of minutes to scan through it then put it back on the table.  He sat there with his arms crossed wondering what to say.

“Well what do you think of the report?”  Tom finally asked.  They didn’t have long to screw around.  Nobody wanted to get caught outside the train cars once it started getting dark.

“It’s pretty much spot on.  Planning on sending it in the morning?”  Jeff asked.  The report was a detailed accounting of what’d happened to the base.  It included the mind tricks Yue had performed to rescue Harley, Tom and the other soldier out of the Humvee.  It also detailed how Yue had been able to locate the crawlerz inside the wreckage of the high school the next day making the search and rescue operation much safer for all involved.

“I am.  I wanted your feedback on the recommendations section first.  How about you take it and talk to Yue then get it back to me with your markups first thing in the morning.  I want to send it back with the train whenever it gets here.”  Tom said.

Jeff appreciated the gesture.  Tom was giving him the chance to talk to Yue and phrase the recommendations however they wanted to.  The more he thought about it the more Jeff was sure that the field was the best place for Yue.  At least from a military standpoint when it came to developing her skills.  She’d languish back at Weathertop.  No way they were letting a crawler get anywhere near the base.  The people in charge there knew what’d happened on board the Ford.  If an aircraft carrier in the middle of the ocean with watertight compartments and Marines guarding it could go down, then so could Weathertop.

Jeff sighed as he entered the train car.  The Marine standing at the door saluted him and asked if anyone else was coming aboard.  Jeff told him he was good to secure the car for the night.  The Marine did so quickly.  The sky was starting to get a little too dark for the man’s comfort.  Not that anyone would think any less of him for that. You had to be an idiot to be caught outside after dark.  It wasn’t a bad thing to have someone a little paranoid in charge of securing the doors for the night.

The reason he’d sighed when he came onboard was because he’d seen that Yue had isolated herself in a corner.  She’d picked a location by the backdoor and was sitting facing the wall.  She also looked like she’d hit the pill bottles he’d given her pretty hard.  Despite the early hour she was slumped over in a chair looking like she didn’t plan on waking up any time soon.  Jeff went and sat down at a chair next to her.

He jumped up and let out an involuntary yelp when Yue suddenly jerked her head upright to stare at him.  Her eyes were wide open, but she didn’t really seem to be looking at him.  She sat like that for a few seconds with her neck stuck way out staring straight at him.  Gradually her face dipped back down, and she appeared to drift back off into dreamland.  Jeff didn’t move until she seemed to really be asleep again.  Once the coast was clear he got up and walked over to where LeBron, Drew and Lisa had all been looking over in his direction.

“That scary waking up thing is new.”  Jeff said sitting down on the other end of the cot LeBron had claimed.

“Considering how many pills she took I’m surprised she can lift her head.”  Harley said walking over and standing beside them.  He’d spent a good part of the day helping out with clearing buildings.  He’d missed a lot of the new tricks that Yue had developed.  Jeff and the others quickly caught him up to speed.

Harley was comically horrified at the description of the infected boy walking out to be slaughtered.  His mouth hung open for that entire part of the story.  When Jeff was done telling it he let them all know what was going on with Yue and Tom wanting her to go to Weathertop.  He told them they might be able to influence the decision if they thought it was better that Yue go back to Weathertop.

“Why wouldn’t we go back there?  Massive walls and unlimited food.  TV and video games.  I say we push it that way.  Maybe if Yue gets away from the crawlerz long enough she’ll snap back to being herself.”  Lisa said.

Jeff let them know he was having a hard time with the decision because he knew he wasn’t welcome back to the base.  He’d been as good as told that by the President himself so probably no way around it.  If Yue went back, then there was a good chance he’d never see her again.  He told them he was totally ok with that if it was going to save her sanity.  He just wanted to get it out there so they could help him pick the option that was best for Yue.  He didn’t trust himself to be impartial.

“So we need to make a decision about Yue’s future without letting her in on it.  I get that she’s out cold and everything but if she ever finds out we did this she’ll still beat the crap out of us.”  Drew said matter of factly.  He wasn’t wrong.  Yue wasn’t the type to let other people make her decisions for her.

“Honestly I don’t know that it’s going to matter anyway.  For her to hone her skills she’s going to need to be out in the field or have infected people brought to her.  No matter what we decide I think as soon as the people back at Weathertop understand that then they’re not going to want to touch her.  They’ll want lots of updates and want to control her from afar, but I really doubt it’ll be more than that.”  Jeff added to the hopelessness of them figuring out what they should do.

“Then why are you even asking us about this?”  Lisa said pissed off.  She’d made the connection as soon as Jeff explained why Yue wouldn’t be welcomed back to Weathertop.  Drew had told her all about how the Ford had gone down because someone thought it’d be safe to import a couple of crawlerz for studying.  She still felt like there was a little bit more to that story than Drew was letting on, but the basic premise was valid.  If you want a place to stay safe, then don’t voluntarily invite the infection into it.

“I’m asking you guys because with Yue out of it there’s no one else I trust.  If we word it just right maybe they’d still take her.  Do you think I push it that way or do we just accept she’ll be more useful out in the field and write it up that way?”  Jeff asked.

“If you can get someone you love into a safe place then why not do it?  Weathertop may be one of the last places around where she can go and not pick up on the crawler vibes that’re tweaking her out.  Right now her choices are to stay stoned or be gone.”  Harley said.  That pretty much summed it up no more how oddly worded.

“Thanks.”  Jeff said.  He knew what he had to do.  He had to give her a chance to get her mind reset.  A chance to go to a place that could function as a detox center for her brain.  If she could get off-line from the crawler net for long enough maybe she could stay unplugged.  The only way for them to have a future together may be to give her up now.  Otherwise she might not have a future at all.

Chapter 16:  Going a Little Cray Cray

Yue slept the whole night through.  Jeff knew that because he stayed up most of the night watching her sleep.  He found himself thankful for Harleys serious drug issues.  If it wasn’t for their large friends recreational medicinal pursuits, they wouldn’t have known which drug cocktail was the best at blocking out the crawlerz.  It was a really nice to have for most of them.  It was a literal life saver for Yue.

The drug Jeff found himself most needing as the sun began working its way past the horizon was caffeine.  The aroma of fresh coffee was the one thing that was able to pry him away from watching over Yue.  It was also the only thing capable of pulling Yue out of that drug induced slumber she’d been in.  Jeff was worried she’d wake up as freaked out as she’d gone to bed.  There’d been multiple times she was afraid she’d hurt anyone who stood close to her.  Jeff imagined it was similar to the people who’d jumped off roofs when hit by the mind waves thrown off by the crawlerz.  Similar but a million times worse for someone as dialed in to the crawler frequency as Yue was.

“Can you get me a cup?”  Yue asked shyly.  Jeff did a bit of a doubletake.  Yue wasn’t the type to ask him anything shyly.  She must be extremely upset about the events of the day before.  He hated that she’d do anything shyly around him.  She had absolutely no reason to ever feel like she needed to be anything less than her true self around him.  He struggled with a way to express all of that.

“No problem babe.  I’ll be right back.”  Jeff forgave himself for wimping out.  He’d be better off talking to her about serious stuff after she’d had coffee.  Any conversation before she got coffee in her system, she’d declare null and void anyway.  He walked over and filled up two of the large Styrofoam cups with coffee and copious amounts of Splenda.  It was the only sweetener they both liked.  It was hard waking up every morning to a cup of something you loved knowing that those little yellow packets wouldn’t be available forever.

Jeff handed Yue her cup of coffee and the recommendations section of the report he’d edited the night before.  Yue read it in between sips of coffee.  She didn’t seem super concerned one way or the other.  When she was done, she simply reached over and held Jeff’s hand in her own.

“I like feeling normal like this.  I know I’m anti-depressed as hell with all the pills I keep popping but it’s so much better than the alternative.  If I go back to Weathertop, do I lose you again?”  Yue asked looking him in the eyes.  Jeff knew better than to try and lie.  Yue had told him plenty of times that he should never bother playing poker.

“You don’t lose me ever.  I probably won’t be welcome back at Weathertop though.  I’m not sure you will be either if they think you’ll need crawlerz around you to experiment.”  Jeff answered honestly.

“The report doesn’t say I can sometimes control them, does it?”  Yue asked.

“Nope.  We haven’t told anybody that part.”  Jeff answered simply.  Yue was a smart girl.  She understood politics and relationships and unspoken power dynamics better than anyone else Jeff knew.  She’d know why they’d left that out without any of them having to say anything.  None of them wanted her locked up in a cage being poked and prodded.  Scientists would tie her down and try to figure out how she was doing what she was doing.  They’d seek to weaponize her.

“If what I can do can help then I should be willing to submit and be studied.”  Yue said.

“Do you want to submit, or do you want to figure out what you’re able to do on your own and help in the fight directly?  Once you’re in Weathertop they own you.”  Jeff felt bad about being so blunt, but they didn’t have much time left.  He needed to know what Yue wanted.  With her acting normal again he felt like he had the moral high ground to ask instead of just working hard to get her shipped somewhere safe no matter the personal cost.

“I have no desire to submit.  I’d rather do what we talked about all along.  Fight to make the world safe for everybody again.  I guess we won the rebellion against the government.  As far as I can tell now refugees are welcomed and allowed to fight right alongside the soldier boys.  Mr. President must have done the math and realized he needed some help.”  Yue said.

“Something like that.  I need to know what you want me to tell Major Tom.”  Jeff said with a half-smile.  President Thompson could care less about the refugees.  He did care about the support of the military though and the military cared about the refugees.

“First he needs to get a promotion or change his name.  I’ve had that song stuck in my head since you first introduced him.  I want to stay here with you.  I want to fight the good fight.  I want to put the infected to rest and carve off a safe little corner to raise kids and live as much of the apocalyptic American dream as possible.”  Yue answered leaning forward to give Jeff a quick kiss.  What a change from the day before.  She’d confessed to him then that when he kissed her all she could think about was sinking her teeth into this lips and ripping them off.

“Raise kids?”  Jeff asked raising an eyebrow.

“Not yours.  I’m hoping there’s better options out there.”  Yue teased before turning serious as something occurred to her.  “Don’t tell Lisa we’re trying to stay here.  I imagine she’s already got her bags packed and can’t wait to get back to the citadel of safety.”

“Pretty much nailed it.  Ok.  I’m going to go talk to Mr. Thomas and then I’ll be right back.”  Jeff said.  Yue nodded her appreciation at him avoiding saying Tom with this title again.  She kissed him one more time before he left.  This time she did it with the passion turned up quite a bit.  By the way he kissed her back he wasn’t too worried about her biting off his lips.  Jeff walked out of the car with a goofy look on his face.  He gave a quick wave to the four other people from their group who’d appeared out of nowhere to check on Yue.

Lisa in particular had been eyeing the kissing couple suspiciously.  It didn’t look like a ‘goodbye I’m never going to see you again’ kind of kiss to her.  It looked more like an ‘I’m really happy we have this secret to share that’s going to screw Lisa out of a nice safe place to live’ kiss.  She really wished Jeff wasn’t leaving.  She’d be able to get the truth out of him in like five seconds.  Yue was a much harder nut to crack even if she was in the process of going nuts.

“Think we’ll be heading back to Weathertop anytime soon?”  Jeff heard Lisa asking Yue right as he walked out of earshot.  He smiled to himself knowing Yue would expertly parry the question.  If he’d been standing there Lisa would’ve known what was up immediately.  He’d made it out in the nick of time.  He headed towards the offices in the train station to find the major. He needed to let him know what him and Yue had discussed.

The major was drinking a cup of coffee and talking to his man Lipsey by the entrance to the train depot.  A few Marines were walking around shining lights into all the dark nooks and crannies to make sure nothing was hiding in them.  Tom saw Jeff walking his way and met him a few steps from the wall.

“Did you get the chance to talk to Yue?”  Tom asked skipping the standard pleasantries.

“Good morning to you too.  Yeah.  We talked this morning.  She wasn’t feeling great last night.  The Valium seems to be doing the trick though.  She’s going to be more useful to the effort here.  At Weathertop she’d be locked away safely underground but it’s not like they’re going to bring crawlerz in the base for her to practice on.  Here she’s in the thick of it with men all working towards the same goal.”  Jeff kept it short and sweet.  There were way too many tangents that could come up if he talked any longer.

“Ok.  Sounds good.  Let me review how you wrote up the recommendation and I’ll package that up to send back to the train.  I’ll answer the same way in radio communications.”  Tom said.

Jeff was an equal to Tom.  The case could be made that Jeff ranked higher than Tom actually.  Jeff had been given a cabinet position by the former President.  The current President had reinstated him, but it was arguable if the intention had been for him to resume his cabinet position.  That all made it awkward to end conversations in the very tradition oriented military.  At the end of every conversation Tom expected either to be saluted or to have to salute.  He either dismissed someone or was dismissed himself.  Since he was a major now, he did most of the dismissing.  Jeff being as socially awkward as he was didn’t help.

After a muttered goodbye Jeff turned and walked back towards the train.  There was an eventful day lined up.  A train full of reinforcements would be arriving in the afternoon to replace those lost in the high school fiasco.  When that train was sent back it’d have the report on Yue riding on it.  Hopefully the recipient would agree with their assessment and let Yue stay in Fayetteville.  The report also had some preliminary conceptual planning around the ‘mobility campaign’ Jeff had outlined the previous night.  Tom had taken it to heart and turned it into a homework assignment for himself to write up that piece the previous night.  Jeff would be meeting with Tom before the train arrived to review and add ideas to it over lunch.

Yue walked out of the train with her brothers on either side of her.  Both of them were being super watchful considering how many times they’d seen her faint lately.  Jeff was happy to see Yue still looked alert and happy.  The happy part may be due to the Valium smirk she couldn’t seem to wipe off her face.  Jeff nodded at her and she smiled back to indicate message received.  Lisa watched the exchange between the two of them suspiciously.

Their attention was violently grabbed by the sound of shots being fired right behind them.  Spinning around they were in time to see a Marine emptying his weapon into a formerly obese infected man who’d launched himself at the Marine from underneath a pile of rotting lumber.  The crawler walked through the cloud of bullets being spewed at him until he finally collapsed.  The man must’ve weighed over three hundred pounds at one time based on the big folds of nasty looking skin hanging off his frame.

“Nasty.”  Lisa said shuddering.  They all watched as the Marine left to get wood and lighter fluid to burn the monster where it lay.  Cremations had gotten super cheap as everyone learned how to do them.  Not that burning a body removed the bones and thick piles of gunk that were let behind.  You only needed to step in one of those biohazard landmines once to understand why sandals and flip flops had no place in the apocalypse.

Seeing the Marine had it under control Jeff turned his attention back to Yue.  She looked like someone had just punched a baby in front of her.  Like she’d just suffered some cataclysmic epiphany that she was ashamed of.

“I can’t keep taking the pills.”  Yue said.  Everyone turned around to look at her.

“Why not?  They block out all that crap and let you lead your life.”  Drew said.  Lisa and Harley nodded in agreement.  Neither of them could imagine having to deal with what Yue had been dealing with.  Harley was already popping anti-depressants like skittles.  He had zero desire to be on the same wavelength as the infected.  LeBron was the one who got it first.

“You didn’t sense that crawler rushing the Marine, did you?”  LeBron asked her softly.

“No.  The drugs are blocking it.”  Yue said in frustration.  A frustration that confused everyone else since the whole point of the drugs was to block the infected from using her head as a relay station.

“If that’d been us walking around down there instead of the Marine...”  LeBron said.  The silence that greeted that statement bespoke everyone’s sudden understanding of the dilemma Yue was facing.

“I can’t walk around blind during the day.  Not when I can protect you all.  If one of you got killed or turned and I could’ve prevented it.  That Marine down there would’ve gone down if he hadn’t been lucky enough to be looking the right way at the right time.  I could’ve warned him or maybe even stopped that skin bag attacking him.  I’m going to need to be up on the crawler net every day.  As long as we’re sleeping in train cars I can dose up at night for relief.”  Yue said with finality.

“Understood babe.  I’m hoping once we go mobile, you’ll get relief during the day too.  We should be spending a lot of our time in the middle of nowhere.  We can kill whatever random ones you sniff out for us.”  Jeff said.  He realized after saying it that he hadn’t told them all the updated status on the plan for mobile living.  Jeff spent the next few minutes filling them in on what he’d talked to Tom and crew about the night before.

“What’s her face we picked up on the island and dropped at the dam would be a good one to talk to on the renewable energy piece.”  Harley said.  Despite being such a big man he was often so quiet that you could forget he was standing there.

“Good call.  Amita’s a pain in the ass but she’s super sharp.  Carl might have some good ideas too.  We’ll see if we can pick her brain over the radio.  I don’t know that we need to actually go see her.  Every time someone goes out to the dam, they risk dragging the infected along with them.”  Jeff said.

They ended up discussing the mobile strategy out on the train platform for so long Jeff almost missed his meeting with Tom.  They were talking about how they could leverage the fancy electric bikes that’d been stored at some of the depots when Jeff realized what time it was.  He gave Yue a quick kiss noting that her Valium smile was starting to slip off her face.  Thanking them all for giving him a ton of ideas to bring to Tom he walked purposefully towards the administrative offices of the train station for his meeting.

Chapter 17:  Hobo Warriors

The engine was the best place to spend the day as far as Yue was concerned.  The other options were hanging onto the roof of the cars or stuck inside.  They’d started with a pretty slimmed down crew since this was more of an experimental run.  The engine was pulling two cars behind it.  One of which was filled with supplies and the other with bunk beds.  The one with bunk beds also had extra supplies in it.  This after LeBron had asked what they were going to eat if they got surrounded by a bunch of surgers and couldn’t leave the freight car.

He’d brought it up as more of an academic point, but Jeff had taken him seriously.  It was true that there weren’t really many surgers around today.  To LeBron’s point that didn’t mean they could just assume that was going to always be the case.  For all they knew the crawlerz would decide that sunlight didn’t suck as much as they thought it did and start prowling the day as well as the night.  To be on the safe side Jeff had jammed in even more supplies for them to transport.

Jeff’s plan for a more mobile approach to rebuilding had been well received by the leadership at Weathertop.  They’d approved a trial to determine the feasibility of the ‘armored rail caravan’.  To support the trial they’d allowed Jeff to pick a team.  On top of the people Jeff chose they also assigned a train engineer.  Yue, Drew, Harley, Lisa and LeBron were all along for the ride as were a mixed squad of five handpicked military men.

The leadership at Weathertop had agreed Yue should stay in the field. They requested she be observed to see if the psychic link she was developing may be useful in the fight against the crawlerz.  Reading between the lines the people back at headquarters didn’t actually believe she could do the things they were reading about in the report.  Even if they did believe the report there was no way they were letting any of the infected anywhere close to their own base to test out the theories.  They were more than happy to let the freak wander around the battlefield doing her thing.  There was more than enough weirdness to go around without adding to it.

Yue had looked pretty freaky during the day back in Fayetteville.  She’d take a couple of Valium once everyone was tucked safely in the freight car for the night.  Until then she considered it her responsibility to be on the lookout for infected that may ambush them.  That meant she had to keep her mind open to images of depraved insanity all day.  She had to constantly fight back the urge to rip into the flesh of those around her.  She floated through the day on a dark wave of lusty despair.  It was a darkness that was slowly poisoning her soul.  There was only so long you could spend looking at the uninfected as hated prey before it twisted your whole perspective.

A weaker person would’ve crumbled by now.  It was possible that a lot of people had begun developing this power Yue had and then just not been able to cope with it.  Yue was handling it with the use of the drugs at night.  They did their best to keep the area around them cleared out and crawler free.  The less infected around the weaker the network of psychic communications that plagued Yue.  It also just made sense to kill as many of the monsters as possible.  That was what their mission was all about anyway.

Looking out the window as they rolled down the tracks Yue was struck by how little the countryside really cared that humanity was close to being completely obliterated.  Her favorite parts of this trip so far had been the vast spaces where there simply weren’t any crawlerz.  At least not enough for her to feel their presence as they traveled the tracks.  She could feel the cities approaching when they got close.  An angry hum in the air that hit her right in the chest.  The crawlerz never really slept.

She’d been happy to find out that her sensitivity to the psychic communications blasts didn’t make her fear the sun.  She’d worried she’d become as nocturnal as they were.  So far that hadn’t been the case at all.  She couldn’t even explain to the others really why the crawlerz feared the sunlight so much.  As far as she could tell all it really did was relax them.  Maybe it relaxed them enough that their real selves crept out and were broken by what they’d become.

Their new mission was to see how far they could ride the rails northwards.  The track between Fayetteville and Weathertop was well used at this point so that was a known quantity.  What wasn’t known was what’d happened to some of the larger cities up north.  New York City specifically was almost impossible to find out anything about.  The bulk of what was generally known came from a few scouting missions pilots had flown to see what could be seen.  Much more detailed information had been gathered on New York City and the rest of the country by the Air Force satellite observation teams that the United States Government didn’t want to admit still existed.

Since they didn’t want to admit the existence of the satellites, they needed to send people out to ‘discover’ what was already known.  Who better to send on such an important seeming task than the director for the continuation of the United States government?  If pressed to explain why they were practicing all this subterfuge no one really had a great answer.  Old habits just died hard.

A trip that would’ve taken half a day back before the apocalypse was going to take a lot longer  now.  Especially once they got past the part of the tracks that’d been used for the Fayetteville to Weathertop run.  The engineer would keep them steaming along at a steady thirty miles per hour while he scanned the tracks ahead for anything that looked abnormal.  For every abnormality they had to slow the train to a crawl while they pulled up to it to investigate.

Most of the time the obstacles turned out to be minor things.  Garbage that’d made its way onto the tracks or trees that’d fallen across the rails and needed to be cleared.  So far there’d been no sign of any people still living along the tracks.  Not a big surprise to Yue as she was seeing for the first time how big the country really was.  It was giving her hope that someday they could find their own corner to live happily ever after in.  She was constantly checking the map against the chart the engineer was using to keep track of where they were.

They’d been provided with a map from Weathertop of where possible groups of survivors may be.  If they were able to make contact with them, they were to inform them of the efforts of the government to retake the country.  Anyone they found could either choose to continue where they were or come with them back to Fayetteville to be processed and shipped off to one of the secure refugee facilities.  The government had gone from treating the survivors like garbage to understanding that to rebuild the country they needed people. To fight hundreds of millions of the infected they needed people.

Every military specialist on board the train knew immediately the locations had most likely been surmised via satellite data.  That was the easiest way to be able to find groups of people in a messed up world like this.  Weathertop had the processing power to sort through the video feeds it received to sift away the ones that weren’t relevant.  In this case the search would’ve been pretty easy. The obvious variable would’ve been people moving around outside during the day.

They planned on coming back through the same way on their return trip.  Since they were coming back, they left a note on each of the train platforms they passed.  The note explained who they were and what the options were for any survivors who wanted to meet up with them.  Yue and everyone had agreed that sounded like a much better idea than wandering around strange cities looking for survivors.  Those survivors may very well not want to be found.  Least of all by representatives of the President who’d come into their living rooms via all the major networks at the beginning and told them they were on their own.  A government that’d abandoned them when they needed it the most.

No one really expected large groups of survivors to meet them on the way back.  There was zero anticipation of being greeted with flowers by people who’d been waiting to be liberated into the arms of a loving government.  What they hoped for was that there’d be some refugees who saw the flares and came to investigate who’d like what they read.  People who were sick of living in fear.  If they could save some of them then the trip was worthwhile.

They stopped well before dusk to get ready for the evening.  The engine was securely locked up.  No one would be sleeping in that car.  The windows were tempered but a group of crawlerz could bash through it in no time.  Everyone would be sleeping in the freight car in the middle.  The car hauling the supplies was open.  They’d wanted to save a little bit of weight to use less diesel.  That car was just a flat car with crates of supplies strapped to it.  There were way more supplies than they’d ever need.  The plan was to gain some goodwill by providing supplies to survivors they met along the way who needed them.

They spread out nets around the bottoms of the train cars taking care to spike them to the ground at close intervals.  Harley teaching them a couple of hilarious circus songs as they hammered in the long stakes they’d brought.  The idea was that the fencing would dissuade any of the infected from crawling under the cars to spend the night.  It was one of those ideas that Jeff had already commented might not survive testing in the field.  The concept wasn’t bad.  The problem was going to occur when collecting the nets in the morning.  It would mean walking along super close to the bottom of the train pulling up the stakes.  If a crawler had slipped through it’d be stalking anyone pulling up the stakes from under the train.  If you were that close to a crawler coming full speed the net wasn’t going to stop it.

“Pull the net back out.”  Jeff ordered when they were about seventy percent done.  He’d imagined himself having to wake up in the morning and being responsible for pulling up the net.

“You don’t want to try it out for the night and see how it works?”  Yue asked.  She’d been one of the people who’d loved the idea.  They’d come up with it back in a brainstorming session in Fayetteville.  They’d also come up with pouring instant drink mix into a vodka bottle to make shots for a brainstorming game Drew made up.  That whole night had been one horrible idea after the other.

“It’ll suck to pull it up in the morning.  I don’t think the risk is worth the reward on this one.”  Jeff answered her honestly.  He saw her stare at the net then nod as she saw what he was getting at.  She’d been so excited about the idea that she’d missed the possible repercussions of removing it in the morning.

“I’m all about not getting yanked underneath again if one of those things wants to play Hungry Hippo.”  Yue said smiling back at Jeff.  Yue had been dragged under a truck before and had to fight her way out.  Jeff could see how she’d want to avoid reliving that particular experience.  He called out to everyone else to start taking the nets out then bent down to help Yue gather all the stakes.

“How are you feeling?”  He asked her carefully.  He’d been worried about her ever since the psychic phenome the crawlerz radiated had started overwhelming her.  She’d be fine one minute then they’d drive past a building with a nest in it and she’d suddenly lose her mind.  It embarrassed the hell out of her to lose control like that.  No matter how many times everyone around her told her they understood.  No one could really understand unless they’d experienced the feelings full on like she had.

“I’m good.  I love being out here in the middle of nowhere.  This net probably wouldn’t have even been tested.  I don’t sense anything anywhere. Unless they hit the tracks and start running for us as soon as the sun goes down, I think we’re good for the night.”  Yue announced.

“Should we sleep under the stars?  Maybe whip up some s’mores?”  Jeff joked with her.

“Yeah, I don’t trust these feelings enough for any of that.  If you’ve got the stuff to make s’mores and haven’t pulled it out until now though I may have to kill you.”  Yue paused to throw a wink his way.  “Immediately after you make me s’mores of course.”

Jeff kissed her.  Immediate cat calls and people advising the two of them to get a room followed.  It wasn’t easy trying to date during the apocalypse.  Especially not in a train car with her two brothers and a bunch of soldiers.  It didn’t help that he was over a decade her senior either.  He was about ready to smack Drew around some if he came at him with anymore of those robbing the cradle jokes.  With nothing else to do they all piled into their armored car to pass the time until morning.

“When do you think it’ll be safe to watch a sunset again?”  Lisa asked idly.  None of them were really tired.  They had games to play, books to read and dinner to put together but none of them were in the mood for any of that yet.  It was the time of day the infected typically showed up.  A time of day they all dreaded.

“Once we’ve killed all the crawlerz.  If you want to sooner, we can always watch it from a boat or an island.  Your wish is my command and so on and so forth”  Drew said sidling up close to Lisa.  His performance earning him a ‘get a room’ comment from Jeff.  LeBron suggested they could put on full suits of armor and stand outside.  They ripped that idea apart for a few minutes.

There was a monitor on each end of the car that showed the camera views from the four cameras mounted outside.  The views automatically switched to night view when it got dark outside.  They’d talked about using cameras mounted under the cars as an early warning system instead of using the nets to keep the crawlerz out.  If you could just pan, tilt and zoom a camera mounted on the bottom of the trailer then you could be confident you weren’t going to die getting out to take a whiz.  At least not from a stalker lurking under the car waiting for someone to come out.

Harley watched the monitor like it was the playoffs.  As of now all four views were indicating Yue’s earlier prediction was coming true.  There was no sign of the infected so far.  Just an empty track heading through the woods in either direction.  Hoping their luck would hold they settled in for a gloriously mundane night of beautiful boredom.

Chapter 18:  Learning by Doing

It started getting sketchy as they went further north.  They passed the spot the engineer told them was the farthest north he’d gone on the line since everything happened.  Stops to drag stuff off the tracks and check out bridges before going over them were much more frequent.  They’d been steaming along at a decent speed before.  Now that they were riding on track that no one had been maintaining they traveled at a snail’s pace.  The engineer had zero desire to smash into a broken piece of rail leaving them all stranded in the middle of nowhere.

“Next time we should bring some of those electric bikes.”  Drew said out of the blue.  They were taking their turn sitting up in the engine room staring out the windows.  They were driving through what was either a big town or a small city.  None of them cared enough to check the chart and see where they were.  It’d gotten depressing marking their progress when they were going so slow.

“I honestly can’t believe we didn’t think of that earlier.  If this train wrecks, we’ll have to find a vehicle to get home.  We could’ve just towed them with us like on those Amtrak car trains.”  LeBron said.

“Excellent point.  I’m adding that to the list.  We’ll need them to explore and try to find survivors too.”  Jeff said.

“We’re going to be wanting some ultra-bright lights too.”  The engineer said.  The old man didn’t really talk much.  No one even remembered what he’d mumbled his name was when they first met him.  He was like a lot of others.  Beating his way through the apocalypse with no real zest for life since he’d lost the love of his life.  He’d beat her and one of their grandkids to death after they’d turned.  He’d been sitting on a couch with a bottle of bourbon and every pill bottle he could find when the special forces had crashed into his home and saved him.  They’d needed people who could drive trains.

“How come?”  Lisa asked the man curiously.  He reminded her of her own grandfather.  Or what her own grandfather would be like if you sucked all of the fun out of him.

“We’re going to be going through more and more tunnels the further north we go.  Subway tunnels and the like.  It’s going to be darker than night in those now.”  The old man was tugging on his beard thoughtfully.  He may have lost the zest for life but, he’d decided to hang on to it a little while longer at least.  Thinking about those tunnels coming up was scaring the hell out of him.

Tunnels.  That was a word to strike fear in the heart of anyone living in this new normal.  It was something someone from a big city would’ve thought of instantly.  It hadn’t really occurred to Jeff or the others as something they’d be dealing with.  Tunnels were up in the mountains as far as trains went.  Now that they were thinking about it though subways were just trains that went underground.  None of them had ever been commuters either.  They’d never gone down to the train station for the ride into work.

“Tell me we’re not going through tunnels.”  Yue said breathlessly.  The place they were riding through was well populated by crawlerz.  She could feel them in the buildings they passed.  She caught flashes of their sudden rage at hearing a train pass by.  Some small part of their brains still able to connect the sounds of a train passing by to their hated prey.  Tunnels would be suicidal as far as Yue was concerned.  She asked the engineer how long before they started hitting the bigger ones.  She wanted to make sure she swallowed a couple of pills before that happened.

“We should be good until we hit Philly.”  The man said.  His big bushy Santa Claus looking beard bouncing around as he talked.  He had a big wad of chew in his mouth too.  He kept swapping it out since all the tobacco products were pretty old at this point.  The pinch he put in between his gum and lip reminding him of how dried out and flavorless he himself was now.  A joyless husk left over from before the world died.

Now there was a lot more interest in the chart up on the wall that the engineer had been meticulously marking off their progress on.  The red sharpie marks up the plastic covering the route map showed them approaching Washington DC.  That explained the cities they’d been riding through now.  This whole train thing was starting to seem like a really bad idea.

“How many tunnels in Washington?”  LeBron asked.  He was looking a little pale as well.  The thought of voluntarily going into a long dark tunnel underground in a big city seeming more suicidal by the second.

“The route we’re on is the express route.  It’s the one that everyone was supposed to keep clear for critical transport back in the days when people were still transporting supplies around.  We shouldn’t hit too many of them.  Most of the underground stuff was on the passenger routes.  The different stations people got on and off at in the city proper.  There might be some though.  Can’t say that I remember for sure.”  The crusty old Kris Kringle of cabooses ended his explanation with that last bit of unwelcome ambiguity.

“I’m not going in any long tunnels.  I’m not letting you guys go in any long tunnels either.”  Yue said putting her foot down.  She literally stamped her foot down hard on the floor to make her point.  There was a chorus of nods and murmurs of agreement.

“Ok.  We’ll just have to figure out a way to clear the tunnels or work around them.”  Jeff said.  Yue gave him a shrewd look.  He’d just joined the Kris Kringle ambiguity club with his last statement.  She hadn’t heard a definitive answer from him on bypassing the tunnels.

They went over another long bridge.  The engineer insisting they get out and walk it first to make sure he didn’t see any damaged parts.  After wasting a few hours inspecting the long bridge he pronounced it ‘probably ok’ and took them across.  That’d been a real butt clencher.  Nothing like taking a zillion ton locomotive over the top of a rickety looking bridge that the engineer hadn’t seemed super confident would actually hold them.

“We get to go back over the same one on the way back.”  Yue said teasing Drew.  She was kind of irritated.  At a time when she should’ve felt good because there were no crawlerz around to fry her brain they had to go over a bridge that scared her almost as bad.  She could see another small city looming on the horizon as well.  The thought of enduring the ride through another city had her considering crushing up some Valium and doing a quick line or two.

The endless train ride continued.  They passed tall buildings and warehouses.  A lot of it desolate and abandoned while some was teeming with the negative energy the crawlerz gave off.  The energy Yue was entirely too sensitive to.  She stuck to her guns on not doing any drugs during the day, but she did sneak a few hits out of the pint bottle Harley kept in his coat pocket.  He let her pluck it out, slug down a few shots and slide it back in his pocket without saying a word.

The burning liquor helped a little bit.  Harley being Harley the liquor he drank was chosen for alcohol content versus flavor.  She supposed she was lucky after doing a few snorts that she hadn’t gone blind.  They were scrounging around to put together lunch when the engineer announced there was a yard up ahead.  Wondering why he was bothering to tell them that when he hadn’t bothered to tell them much else the whole trip everyone glanced up ahead.

The reason became clearer by the second.  The trainyard up ahead was covered.  Deep shadows underneath it an obvious haunt for the infected if they’d decided to hang out in this general area.  Yue focused as much as she could on the structure but didn’t sense anything major.  Nothing stronger than the idle thought threads she’d been ignoring since they rode across the bridge anyway.  Her intense stare attracted the attention of the other occupants of the car.

“It feels like there’s a few under there.  They’re getting stirred up by the sound of the train coming.  I think the message travels as long as there are enough of them to keep it going.  They know we’re coming.  I don’t think there’s enough of them to do much about it though.  We should be ok assuming this is just a few seconds undercover then we pop out the other side.”  Yue said in answer to all of their unspoken questions.

The engineer nodded and sped the train back up.  He’d been slowing it down expecting them to want to get out and investigate.  They were still only going about ten miles per hour.  The track was supposed to be cleared but for all he knew there was a car parked on it directly ahead of them.  It was impossible to tell for sure looking into the inky darkness under the large, covered section of track.

When they got closer the engineer flicked on the lights.  The powerful beams reached out and illuminated a small section of the space they were entering.  Shadows danced and jumped around in the darkness.

“They see us now.”  Yue said in the background.  Her tone was cold and flat.  The liquor had settled her nerves, but it did nothing to block what she was seeing now.  She immediately started fighting down the urge to throw herself screaming at the others in the car.  The others all moved away from her with concerned looks.  She’d beat it into them enough now that trying to get close to her only made it worse.

“Should we stop and get in the middle car?”  Lisa asked.

“Who’s going to drive the train then?”  LeBron asked her.

“Can’t we just let it go by itself?”  Lisa asked.  It made sense to her.  Put it on autopilot for a few minutes to get through the darkness then they could pile out and hop back in the engine compartment.

“If we hit something, I can stop the train and back us up pretty easy.  If I’m not up here we could get derailed or we could slam into another train that has it’s brakes locked.”  The engineer said.  He was leaning forward to stare into the murky darkness.  He’d been briefed by the military guys over a year ago that all the tracks had been ordered cleared.  Plane flybys didn’t show any blockages and all the infrastructure seemed to mostly still be in place.  He assumed they’d used satellites as well as planes and just didn’t want to talk about those too much.  Whatever they’d used couldn’t have seen too much of the tunnels or under the roofs of covered spaces like the one they were headed through though.

“Keep going?”  Jeff turned the order into a question as he stared back at Yue.  She seemed like she was still in control of herself.  She nodded implying she still thought her original summary was pretty accurate.

“Incoming.”  A Marine standing up front called out.  He’d seen a crawler loping though the darkness in that weird guerilla looking way they ran.  They all saw it as it smashed against the window clawing and biting at the glass before falling off.

Harley had been leaning against that particular wall where the window was when the crawler hit it.  He jumped backwards knocking Lisa and Drew both off balance.  Everyone slid their game faces on.  Pistols were pulled out of holsters and safeties were undone.  Seconds would matter if one of those things busted through a window.

“More coming.”  Yue gasped out behind them.  She’d told them that when the infected approached as a pack it was like getting hit by the viewpoint of a bee.  You’d see the same thing from multiple angles and viewpoints.  Right now her brain was processing the impressions being thrown out by a solid dozen of the monsters.  On top of the visuals was the insane hunger.  The addicts need to feed on their blood.  They needed to bite into uninfected flesh and taste the sweet, salty, hot, coppery, bloody flesh.  Yue was subjected to all that including the uncontrollable urge desire to sink her own face into some warm skin and start chowing down.  She was disgusted with herself.

It was like driving into a flock of humongous bats.  The windows were all covered in crawlerz within a few seconds of Yue saying they were coming.  Most of them slid off the train after striking the windows a few times.  At least two of the windows had made some very ominous cracking sounds.  There was no way to know if the window had broken or if it was just the piece that held the window to the wall.  Either way it wasn’t good.

“Light ahead.”  The Marine who’d seen the first crawler barked out.  He was standing all the way forward staring out one of the windows.  He was trying to see past the infected hanging off every part of the train.  There was a collective sigh of relief.  All they had to do was make the light and they were golden.

The window the Marine was standing beside smashed inwards sending shards of glass flying all over the place.  The crawler who’d smashed through instantly closing its mouth around the arm of the struggling Marine.  In her head Yue saw the window shattering and then she tasted the Marines hot blood flowing into her throat.  She could feel the skin and gristle in her mouth as the crawler chomped down.  She felt the orgasmic pleasure waves that went out psychically to the tortured insane on the other side of the train windows.

“Guard the hole!”  Yue screamed knowing what was coming.  Once one of the pack got a taste the rest of them would turn the crazy knob all the way to the right.

In the seconds after the first one got in three more crawlerz came in through the same window and another window was knocked out.  The air was thick with gun smoke and screaming.  Then they hit the light and the remaining crawler inside the engine with them paused in place to stare out the windows.  While it was standing still Drew put a pistol to its head and blew out its brains.  The engineer hit the brakes to bring them to a stop in the bright sunlight.  He stumbled past the bodies and people to get to the door leading outside.

The engineer threw the door open.  Harley grabbed the old man before he fell down to the ground.  The white whiskered engineer turned to say something to Harley then just spewed a massive amount of vomit all over him instead.  To his credit Harley didn’t pitch the old dude out the door.  He took the warm nastiness right in the face and waited until the man had recovered.  Once it looked like the puking was over Harley squatted down next to the old man.

“It’s not safe out there yet.  These things could be hitching a ride on the outside.  We need to clear it before you jump down there.”  Harley said.  The engineer nodded weakly.  He was an old man.  This was a lot.

On the side of the car that the bodies were lying on the original Marine who’d gone down jumped to his feet.  With that familiar insanity in his eyes he rushed one of the soldiers who’d been heading that way to start dragging bodies to the door.  Before anyone could help him the newly turned surger had his teeth in the face of the soldier.  He started whipping his head back and forth.  He looked like a rabid pit bull going to town on a burglar.  The soldier screamed then fell backwards.  The surger stood triumphant with a huge swath of skin hanging out of his mouth.

Harley, Drew and one of the other Marines finished off the newly turned surger and the now infected faceless soldier with a barrage of bullets.  Most of the bullets settled into the bodies they were aimed at. A couple of them ricocheted around in the tight confines of the engine car causing a few more minor injuries.  The engineer got pinged by one right in his shoulder blade inspiring quite a bit of impressively descriptive train yard profanity.

Harley tried to help him up to tend to the wound.  The man pushed Harley away and worked himself to his feet on his own power.  Then with a rebellious look at Harley he swung the door open and turned to climb the ladder down to the ground.  Harley moved to stop him from climbing down.  Jeff called out to let him go.

“We do need to get some boots on the ground with him though to keep him safe.  We also need to get these bodies out of here and get the engine room cleaned up some.”  Jeff said.

“Not it.”  Drew said immediately after Jeff was finished.  He found out very quickly that yelling ‘not it’ wasn’t as well honored a tradition as calling ‘shot gun’ to get the best car seat.  He got stuck working with a couple of the other guys dragging the bodies out.  Once they had them out, they worked on cleaning up the engine room.  All while the others walked around outside getting tans and generally enjoying the lack of disgusting smells.

Once the engine room had been scrubbed down everyone climbed back aboard.  Harley showed up last in a brand new set of clothes.  He’d tossed all of his puke covered ones.  They held a brief pow wow to talk about whether they wanted to continue or not.  The decision was made to keep going.  They weren’t going to go into any dark spaces again.  The next time they reached one would be time to turn around and go home.  There wasn’t much further they’d be able to go anyway according to the engineer.  No one was in a hurry to rerun that gauntlet they’d just been through though so why not check out another hundred miles of track or so?

Chapter 19:  City of Brotherly Love?

The tracks had been switched to run by major warehouses and distribution centers to assist with the rapid distribution of supplies up and down the coast.  There’d been well planned routes for the distribution of goods in the event of an emergency.  It was amazing how well planning for climate change, nuclear war, or an incoming asteroid strike translated into defending against a zombie apocalypse.  The CDC had even setup webpages that were zombie apocalypse themed to get people to prep for major storms and other catastrophic events.

For the millionth time Jeff thought of the wild series of random events that’d led to the situation that they were in now.  The irony of things like the CDC website.  The complete hypocrisy of the US government’s response to the rapid spread of the infection.  A hypocrisy he’d been very much complicit in.  He was glad now the government was back on the right side of the fight.  Back to supporting the citizens stuck out there holding on for dear life.  Even though he knew the initial government response had been the only sustainable course of action he still felt the need to atone for what they’d done.  The hard decisions that had to be made.  The enormous amount of innocent blood they’d bathed in so that the country could have some hope of coming out of this.

They stopped in a deserted area outside of Philly for the night.  They’d gone the long way around riding the rails, but it’d gotten them this far without anymore tunnels.  The engineer had already told them there was no way they were avoiding tunnels if they wanted to keep going north on the rails.  The idea was to wake up and make it the rest of the way to Philly and mark exactly how far they could make it.  They were still stopping at every major station to drop off flyers and shoot up a flare.  The flyers changed based on what state they were in.  There were different destinations for refugees based on where they were starting out at.

They continued on the route to Philly once they’d checked the train and everyone had snagged their preferred spot for the day.  Another long bridge and they rolled into the city proper.  They rode next to a river for a while then crossed yet another bridge.  When they spotted a tunnel opening up ahead that was an immediate braking action.

“I guess that’s the end of the line for us.  Lunch then head back?”  The engineer asked.  He normally ate standing up staring out the front window.  Since they were stopped anyway, he figured he could enjoy a plate of whatever without being focused on the tracks up ahead.  Not that focusing on the kind of food they’d be eating was a really great idea either.  Jeff nodded and they broke out the rations.

They ate a leisurely lunch talking through what they’d learned so far.  LeBron brought up the idea of staying the night where they were at to give the survivors time to check out the flyers they’d left.  Yue nixed that idea by telling them there was no way they should spend the night anywhere near that tunnel up ahead.  She could feel the crawlerz inside writhing all over one another in excitement at how close the train was sitting to them.  She suggested maybe just heading back to the last place they’d dropped off the flyers and everyone agreed that was a solid idea.

Chris put the train in reverse, and they headed back the way they’d come.  Yue had finally asked the engineer to repeat his name while they’d been eating lunch.  Everyone had half-smiled when it turned out to be Chris.  They’d all been calling him Kris Kringle behind his back already.  Not that he hadn’t heard them given the small confines they were living in.

They went slowly over the first bridge.  No one said a word about the snail’s pace since they were going backwards.  They couldn’t see with anywhere close to the same clarity as they had before.  Chris was checking the charts to see where the next turnabout was.  He knew there was one at the covered train yard they’d gone through that could be switched manually.  None of them wanted to deal with that place again any longer than they had to though.  He was checking on an alternative when the Marine they’d sat on the cargo car with Drew and Lisa radioed back that there was something on the track up ahead.

“Are you able to confirm what it is?”  Jeff asked a few seconds later.  Chris was slowing them down as they drove with the water on one side and a row of warehouses on the other.

“It’s a big truck.  Woah!”  The Marine’s voice came over the radio.

“Please advise on what you’re seeing.”  Jeff transmitted.

“Ambush.  They just set the truck on fire.  We’re taking fire now.  Advise we get the hell out of here.”  The Marine shot back.

Looking in the mirrors and hanging out the windows the passengers in the engine car could make out the burning truck approaching them now.  The sound of weapons firing was coming from the warehouses off to the side.  Windows started being shot out as Jeff yelled needlessly for Chris to get them going the other direction.  Chris had already guessed what they needed to do and gotten started on that.

The sound of explosions behind them as Drew started tossing grenades.  Even with everything else going on LeBron still grinned at that.  There was no problem that Drew thought couldn’t be solved with a well thrown explosive device.  They ducked down below the windows in the train car.  Sticking your head up in the opening where the guys in the warehouses with scopes were focusing on was suicide.  The thick metal wall of the train should keep them safe but what about the people riding on the back car?  There was nothing back there but boxes and crates.

Back on that back car Drew was nursing a bloody ear behind a stack of crates.  The three of them had put their backs to the river and as much stuff between them and the people shooting at them as possible.  Drew was tossing random grenades to make sure no one ran up and hopped in the car with them.  Despite the gravity of the situation Lisa and the Marine they were in the back with were pretty amused by how many grenades Drew carried around with him.  Those things weren’t light.

The train shuddered to a stop then started moving the other direction.  The Marine stood up beside them and popped off a couple of shots.  A ton of return fire came back at them and the Marine tumbled backwards off the car.  Drew and Lisa clung to one another as the sky continued to rain bullets down all around them.  The Marine looked like he might have survived the first bullet but as soon as the car was no longer shielding him another salvo of bullets ripped into his body.

Lisa was crying.  Drew wasn’t sure if it was from fear or out of sadness for the Marine.  He hadn’t been a very talkative guy.  He’d mostly sat around reading.  They’d teased him about it pretty mercilessly.  Everything from asking if he needed to borrow crayons to asking him why he’d joined the Marines if he could read.  The guy had taken it all in good humor.  Now he’d died.  Another warrior who’d fallen beside them.  He’d died and they were leaving him behind for the vultures and bugs.

Drew was more focused on making sure they didn’t join the Marine than feeling sad for him. There’d be time to feel sad later.  Right now bullets were bouncing off pretty much everything.  He was scared to move.  If they didn’t move then as the train kept going, they might give the shooters a better angle at them.  He thought about making a run for the roof of the middle car.  If they could get on top of that they’d be difficult for anyone at ground level to engage.  He wouldn’t be surprised if the men shooting at them were up on the roofs though.

The train was rolling faster.  Drew imagined a sniper just waiting for them to come into his scope.  He wasn’t used to indecision but there didn’t seem to be any good moves here.  He kissed Lisa who kissed him back hard then pulled back and smiled at him.

“We hang on and hope they don’t hit us.”  She said finally.

“Works for me.”  Drew said looking into her eyes.  He loved that girl.  He remembered that the Marine had been talking to Jeff.  He fished his radio out of his pocket.

“This is Drew over.”  Drew said once he’d fished the little radio out of his jacket pocket.  He’d been scared for a second that he’d left it in the engine room.  Having a zillion pockets was awesome for carrying around everything you needed.  It sucked for finding things quickly when you needed them though.  He told himself daily to start putting things in the same pocket every time.

“What’s your status over?”  Jeff came back over the radio interrupting Drew’s silent contemplation of organizational issues with clothes that had way too many pockets.

“Lionel’s down.  Lisa and I are fine.  Over.”  Drew said.  Lionel being the name of the Marine who’d been shot.  He’d started to give more details about where they were pinned down at.  He’d stopped himself when he remembered they were communicating over a walkie talkie set they’d found at a Wal Mart.  If the ambushers had a radio, he didn’t want to announce exactly where they were sitting.  He realized suddenly he might have been better off just staying silent.  Now the enemy might know how many were in the back.

He picked up his rifle as the train car went around a corner and fired some random shots into the windows of the warehouses behind them.  Two SUVs with sunroofs pulled out of an alley and start following them.  A man with a rifle popped out of each sunroof and started lobbing shots in their direction.  Drew started tossing grenades without counting to three.  He was hoping they’d blow up closer to the trucks with that bit of a delay.

They got lucky.  A grenade went off and pelted the lead truck with frags.  The window blew out and it looked like they scored a tire or two as well.  The other truck stopped too.  Men with rifles got out and started lighting up the back of the cargo car where Drew and Lisa were.

“Let’s get on the top of the middle car!”  Drew yelled doing his best to shield Lisa with his own body as they worked their way perilously around the strapped down crates.  He looked down between the cars when they finally made it to the part where they connected.  He noticed they’d slowed down again as they were now going over the bridge for the third time.

“No!”  Lisa shouted at him.  Drew had to admit she made a really good point.  He totally agreed now that he was looking at it that this was a stupid idea.  Instead of jumping he turned and took a couple of pot shots at the SUVs in the distance.  He just wanted to remind them who was boss.  He heard Jeff’s voice coming from somewhere.  After struggling for a few minutes he found the radio in a different pocket than before.

“Hang on!  Be ready to dismount and get in the middle car on my signal!”  Jeff’s voice came through shrilly.

“Copied.  Over.”  Drew said back.  For some reason he’d finally decided to try and use proper radio lingo.

“Brace for impact!”  Came Jeff’s shouted voice over the radio.  A second later the whole train shuddered.  Pieces of burning metal filled the air.  Men on either side of the train were shooting at them.  The train wasn’t slowing down any.  They left the second group of ambushers behind in an explosive exchange of fire.  Drew and Lisa were shooting as fast as they could reload.  They’d been joined by everyone in the engine room.  They’d realized that keeping their heads down would mean Drew and Lisa fighting on their own.

The train shot sparks up on both sides as the wheels locked up.  If they hadn’t already been braced for impact  Drew and Lisa would’ve been thrown right off.  As it was, they were both dangling by the straps they’d wrapped around themselves.  It was pretty painful. If they hadn’t pulled some muscles or overextended some joints, then it was a miracle.  The more exciting part was they hadn’t been shot dead yet.

“Get to the middle car!”  Jeff’s voice again.

Drew and Lisa unwrapped themselves and jumped off the still moving car.  It was moving slow but definitely still moving.  They ran as fast as they could to where the others were piling out of the engine room into the middle car.  Bullets were pinging off the metal all around them.  Harley and LeBron both stopped for long enough to let loose on the men running towards them.  Those men all hit the ground to avoid being shot.

Drew couldn’t figure out what the plan was until he looked up ahead and saw how close they were to the entrance to the tunnel.  The tunnel Yue had referred to so eloquently as a ‘death hole’.  Pushing Lisa ahead of him Drew ran and climbed into the middle car along with everyone else.  Bullets were pelting the sides of the train sounding like the worst hailstorm ever.  Then the attack stopped.  The noise abated.

“I guess we’re in the death hole now.”  Drew announced.  Realizing what he’d just said he joined everyone else in the car in wishing he’d learn when to keep his mouth shut.

Chapter 20:  In the Darkest Depths of Mordor

The pelting of the bullets against the train was replaced by the sound of flesh smacking the sides and top.  Yue was curled into a ball shivering.  She was lying in one of the beds they’d installed in the train.  Lisa was sitting next to her rubbing her hair.  The interior of the car was lit by the lights they’d installed prior to leaving.  Normally they turned those from white to red at night to help with night vision.  It was just a matter of sliding these red plastic pieces over the long lights they’d bolted to the roof.

The car was a heavy duty one.  They’d picked it out specifically to outfit to spend the nights in on this expedition.  They weren’t sure what all they might face so they’d selected one that was heavy duty enough to guarantee the infected mobs couldn’t beat their way through it.  That had the added bonus of making it almost bullet proof.  You’d need a super high caliber rifle or a rocket to do any damage.  It was basically a tank on wheels.  A tank without any sort of gun sticking out of a turret on top.

A massive gun of some sort would be a comforting thing to have.  The situation was bad. It was to the point that everyone was wondering if they wouldn’t have been better off just surrendering to the people who’d ambushed them.

“Maybe the flyers weren’t such a great idea.”  Jeff said reflectively.

“You think?”  LeBron retorted sharply.  He turned away and went to sit beside Yue.

“You thinking we managed to piss off a bunch of antigovernment anarchist types?”  Drew asked.

It made sense.  They’d been leaving flyers and shooting flares in the air for people to come find them.  Flyers that said the United States government was here to help.  The same United States government that’d told them they were on their own back when everything started.  Drew picked up one of the flyers and scanned through it.  He handed it to LeBron when he was done.

“Yeah.  I guess those guys out there with the guns and the bad attitudes couldn’t figure out in all these months how to turn on the radio.  If they had they’d already know where to go for the government to help.  Hmmm.  I wonder if they maybe don’t trust the government anymore.  What do you think Jeff?  Do they have a reason not to trust the government anymore?”  LeBron asked testily.  He was in a rare mood.  Seeing Yue’s state and knowing they were basically buried underground in a metal tube with the infected crawling all over it was freaking him out.

The two remaining soldiers were both listening raptly wondering what the hell they’d gotten themselves into.  Chris the engineer was only partially paying attention.  He was much more focused on the motion of the train beneath their feet.  As long as they kept moving forward, they were ok.  If they stopped then they were screwed.  The train engine had all kinds of automated safety measures built into it.  None of them were a big deal as long as he was up front.  Sitting here in the back though he was worried one of those safety measures would kick in and they’d be stuck sitting here until the diesel ran out.

A lot of those safety protocols required an up and running network.  The digital age had wrapped itself around the train industry promising better safety and more efficient utilization of the rails.  Chris had retired right as a lot of that was being implemented.  He’d setup the train already to bypass the standard safety features.  There were switches built in for just that purpose.  The older safety features kicked in if there wasn’t a network available.

One of those included a manual check on trains to make sure drivers were alert and paying attention.  They were typically used in tunnels to make sure a driver didn’t come flying out going way too fast.  Homeland security and other three letter agencies had gotten involved as well and added other mandatory safeguards.  After all you wouldn’t want someone to load up a train with explosives then set it to speed down the track like a rail bound rocket.  One of those systems kicked off in the middle of the tunnel.  It’d been specifically designed to utilize manual means in the event of an EMP blast or other attack.

“Are we slowing down?”  Drew asked abruptly.  His voice accompanied by the drumbeat of a hundred crawlerz on the train car they were all sealed up in.

“Feels like it.”  Chris answered.  He didn’t want to say anymore until he knew for sure.

“What do you mean it feels like it?”  Lisa asked.  Harley had come to stand beside her.  He was staring down at the concerned conductor.  Everyone was turning to the man as the train continued to slow.

“There are safety mechanisms on every train.  Some I could disable, and I did.  I hoped this wouldn’t happen.  We must have run into some other safeguard.”  Chris said.

“What about crawlerz?  Could there be so many crushed crawlerz on the track ahead of us that it’s slowing the train down?”  LeBron asked.  He was hoping for some alternative.  An option where they weren’t stuck in a stationary metal tube underground in a tunnel filled with demons who wanted to eat them alive.

“Could be but I doubt it.  We’re going pretty slow and the tunnel here’s pretty wide.  The cow catcher on the front should do a pretty good job of diverting them off to either side.”  Chris answered crushing LeBron’s hopes.

They sat in nail biting silence willing the train to continue its forward momentum.  Their collective prayers weren’t enough to do the trick.  The train surged forward one last time before coming to a total standstill.  The shocked passengers stared in horror at one another.  The beating of hands against the walls of the train took on a frantic pace.  Yue screamed and sat upright before collapsing back into bed with the whites of her eyes showing.  They busied themselves fussing over her for a few minutes before they found themselves once again faced with an impossible dilemma.

“Is there a way to control the train from back here?”  Jeff asked.  He knew it was a stupid question, but he wanted to get everyone’s creative juices flowing.  Plus, maybe there was a remote control hidden by one of the monitors.  At the thought of the monitors he walked up and flipped them on.  They hadn’t been on earlier as it was still daylight outside.

“We’re so screwed.”  Harley announced after one glance at the monitors.  Jeff couldn’t think of anything else to add.  Harley had summed it up pretty well.

The monitors were each divided into four sections to show the views from the four cameras mounted to the outside of the train cars.  Only two of them were showing anything useful.  The other two were covered by the bodies of the infected.  The two that were showing the outside of the cars utilizing a mix of night vision and the trains running lights were jaw dropping.  It looked like someone had taken a toy train and shoved it into a fire ant pile.  They were covered and smothered like a waffle house omelet from hell.

It was too much.  Drew started laughing and crying at the same time.  Lisa started hitting Drew.  Harley collapsed onto the closest bed and curled up like Yue.  Jeff sat down on a bed and put his face in his hands.  He’d screwed up this mission beyond belief.  Now not only would he suffer his friends would as well.  Yue was going to die, and it was all on him.

“You guys ain’t quitting, are you?”  One of the soldiers had stood up and walked into the middle of all of them.  He was a special ops guy with a big bushy beard and hair that he’d let get way too long.

“You have an idea on how to get out of this?”  LeBron asked.

“I sure do.  The specifics may escape me at the moment, but we will get out of this.  We will not go out like a bunch of pussies.  I got on this train with you people because I respected you.  I’m kind of disappointed that a minor inconvenience like this has thrown you all off your game.”  The man speaking was Chief Petty Officer Haywood.  He’d been a SEAL for ten of the twelve years he’d been enlisted.  His family had been infected while he’d been deployed in Africa trying to track down the source of the infection.  He now lived to kill the infected.  He didn’t fear death.  In death he’d be reunited with his beautiful wife and his five year old princess.

“Specifics are kind of what we need.”  LeBron said.  He appreciated Haywood making the effort to motivate them, but it was hard.  The crushing weight of the crawlerz was bearing down on all of them in multiple ways.  Yue may be the most sensitive but all of them were fighting off the mental mayhem radiating towards them from the crawlerz.  They were all getting glimpses of the frustration the attackers felt.  They were all getting hit with how much pleasure ripping their bodies open would bring to their attackers.

“We could be close.”  Chris said.  The old man’s voice was weak.  He was in no way used to these kinds of conditions.  He’d basically spent the entire apocalypse at Weathertop eating three squares a day in between driving the train to Fayetteville and back.

“Close to what?”  Jeff asked looking up.

“The exit to the tunnel.  I’ve kind of lost track but what if it’s just dark now.  I’ve been trying to tell from the monitors, but you really can’t.  We may be close enough to make a run for the exit.  We’d been in the tunnel for a while before we stopped.”  Chris explained.  His voice cracking with every other word he spoke.

“How do we find out?”  Jeff asked.  He liked the way Chris was thinking.  He liked the way Haywood was keeping them pumped up.  They needed something to counteract the overwhelming despair they were getting from the infected crawling all over them.  Jeff wasn’t ready to give up either.  He had too much to live for.

A big part of what he wanted to live for was currently incoherent due to the massive psychic burden she was under.  To get out of this situation Jeff was thinking they might need to leverage her ability to exert some manner of control over the crawlerz.  The first step to that was to bring her back to the world of the sane.  Ironically enough that was going to require a large dose of mood altering drugs.

Jeff searched around in Yue’s stuff until he found a bottle of the pills that he’d gifted her previously.  He pulled out two of the pills and crushed them up.  He dumped the smashed pills into a cup then poured in some water.  He handed the cup to Lisa and told her to make sure Yue drank every bit of it.

Knowing it’d be a little bit of time before Yue was able to talk, he turned his attention to Chris and asked him to explain exactly how they could get the train moving again.  It turned out that the train had a pretty flexible safety system that was going to require someone who knew what they hell they were doing to unlock.  Jeff told Chris thanks and handed him a Valium for his efforts.  Sucking down one himself he started handing out the little pills like they were tic tacs.

“Hey man.  You’re doing awesome.  This crew is bad ass even if half of them are still kids.  Let’s chill for the next few hours unless you have some ideas.  We’ve got a good ten hours before we’ll be able to tell if the sun is coming up on the cameras.”  Haywood said taking a Valium from him.

The night turned into a crushing assault on all of their senses.  The massive waves of hatred radiating through the train walls inflated the desperation everyone was already feeling.  The  crawlerz beat on the walls while the people inside the train passed around bottles of booze and swallowed whatever pills they could find.  Jeff tried to keep watch at first to make sure no one was overdoing it but pretty soon he himself was too wasted to know what was going on.  In the end everyone was wrecked.  One last hurrah before they needed to do something.  They didn’t know what that something was, but they assumed it’d probably end in a painful death.

Chief Haywood nursed a bottle of bourbon over the next ten hours watching over his flock.  Jeff had put him on the shortlist not excepting to actually be allowed to take such a seasoned professional along with him.  Little did he know that Haywood had requested to go along with the group.  Haywood was here because he wanted to be on the front lines.  He wanted to be in the thick of the fight.  He wanted to win but he recognized that on the other side of that fight there was nothing there for him.  Not with his family already dead.  Luckily, he didn’t think it was very likely he’d survive the fight.  Especially not when he pushed to go on missions like this one.

Checking his watch he stared at the monitors willing them to display some damned light.  There was nothing.  He gave it another hour then woke up Jeff.  The whole crew had hit the bottle and drugs hard the night before.  Jeff woke up after only a few taps of Haywood’s boot on his head though.  He stumbled up off the floor where he’d ended up sleeping.

“You look like ass.”  Haywood told him.

“Good morning to you too.  I kind of feel like ass.  Is it morning?”  Jeff asked excitedly glancing over at the monitors.  The excitement dying almost immediately when he saw the same thing Haywood had seen.  There was no indication of any light at all.

“You need to pull it together.  I’d love to get out of this tunnel alive today.”  Haywood told him.

“You’re the SEAL what do you propose?”  Jeff asked.  He was wondering if it was safe to take more drugs to fix the hangover that he was pretty sure was caused by the previous night’s abuse of drugs.  He should’ve asked the sailor about that.  Hangovers the man knew how to deal with.  The situation they were in now he only had vague ideas and they weren’t pretty.  He pitched them to Jeff regardless.  There might not be a clean way out of this mess but there was a way.  There was always a way.  You just had to want it bad enough.

Jeff walked to the front of the train and made coffee thinking through what the SEAL had suggested.  It was by no means a sure proof way out of this mess.  It pretty much guaranteed the death of at least one of the men under his command.  It could very easily kill them all.  It was a Hail Mary as far as plans went.  He thought about what the SEAL had said.  The way he positioned this was important.  Not necessarily for the plan to work but for how they’d feel about it if it worked.  If it failed, they’d all be too dead to care.

Sipping his coffee Jeff beat through his hangover to put together a plan for how he was going to address what they needed to do once everyone woke up.  To help a little with the pressure he went ahead and cut a Valium in half and dry swallowed it.  He handed the other half to Haywood who downed it without even looking to see what Jeff had handed him.

Jeff sipped on his coffee for another five minutes then went around waking everyone up.  It was time to do this thing.  Assuming everyone agreed to their part in the thing.  Some of them had way better parts than others.

Chapter 21:  I’ve Got This

Valium and coffee were truly the breakfast of champions.  Jeff stood leaning against the wall watching as everyone returned to the land of the living.  He’d wondered how long it may take based on the number of grunts and middle fingers he’d received when trying to get them to wake up.  They’d all come through like troopers though in the end.  Except for Yue.  She was the one person Jeff wasn’t willing to toss a Valium quite yet.  He’d given her coffee mixed with whiskey though.

“Good morning.  We’re still pretty screwed as far as we can tell.  No light visible on the monitors.  That indicates we’re still pretty far from the entrance.  There’s still a zillion infected crawling all over the train.  Haywood and I talked it through.  I think we may have an idea.  We need to flesh it out with you guys though.  It may require some sacrifice to make it happen.  It’s not without risk for everyone in here.”  Jeff said.

“Well what’s the plan then?”  LeBron asked.  He wasn’t used to the level of partying required for a last night on earth kind of bash.  He’d woken up so sick that he almost wished he hadn’t made it through the night.  He was struggling even now to hold down each sip of coffee he took.

Jeff just looked at them.  Now that it came down to it, he didn’t know how to ask them to do what needed to be done.  He looked at them.  Sitting around on beds or leaning against the walls.  Harley looming over them all nursing a steaming hot cup of coffee.  All of them trusting in him to come up with a way to lead them out of this impossibility.  It was a situation where it was perfectly acceptable for them to whip up a big pitcher of poisoned Kool-Aid and pass it around.

They weren’t a red Kool-Aid kind of crew though.  If they died it’d be with guns blazing and blasphemies booming off their lips.  They weren’t the type to go quietly into the night.  Thinking of all that Jeff decided to just put it out there.  People would have to make impossible choices.  They didn’t have any options.  It was what it was.

Jeff laid it out.  They needed someone to get up into the engine and get the train moving again.  That person was going to need someone to watch their back.  Considering the massive number of crawlerz surrounding them they’d have to fight like hell to keep them out of the cabin once they opened the door.  That didn’t even count clearing a path for someone to get up to the engine room and get the train moving.

“I’m the only one who can figure out why the train stopped and get it going again.”  Chris said shakily.

“I know.”  Jeff said.

“I’m not a fighter.  I’m not even very brave.  I don’t care if I die but I don’t want to end up as one of those things.  I don’t want it to hurt too much either.  Is that too much to ask?”  Chris asked.  His voice was resigned.  At some level he’d already known that he’d be a key figure in any possible chance they had to escape.  He’d already come to terms with dying. It was how he was going to die that had him worried.

“I’ve got you brother.”  Haywood said.

Jeff nodded at him.  Haywood knew better than anyone else in the car what that meant.  He most likely wasn’t coming back if he went out the door with Chris.  Like the Santa Claus cosplayer he’d be watching over this was a one way ticket.

“I guess I’m expected to provide the magic sauce.  That’s why you’re boozing me up instead of giving me the good stuff right?”  Yue asked.

“Yeah babe.  That’s the idea.”  Jeff answered.

“That’s cool and I’m totally willing to do whatever to get us out of here.  Just please tell me exactly what I’m supposed to do to get all these infected to make a hole for Chris and Haywood?”  Yue asked.  She’d already added more whiskey to her coffee.  The Valium had worn off for her.  She was close to being swept up in the crawler net again.  Close to lying back down and drifting away in a haze of cannibalism and rage.  Close to a stream of consciousness where her love for everyone in this car was perverted into a deep loathing of their uninfected selves.

“I don’t get it.  How’s this supposed to work?”  Harley asked.  He hadn’t been around to see some of Yue’s more exciting crawler control moments.  The others who hadn’t been there were also looking confused.  They knew that Yue could do things like find where the crawlerz were and see what they were seeing.  How did those parlor tricks get someone up into the engine room through the mob piling up on them now?

“We’ve got one chance for it to work.  We’re going to be basing a lot of it on people doing things they’ve never done before.  When we try it some of us are going to die.  Otherwise we sit in here and stare at each other until we all die.  Now let’s dive into the details unless someone has an objection.”  Haywood said.

“When do we do it?”  Drew asked.

“Once we’re ready.  We’ve got plenty of supplies in here to keep us fed and watered for a few days.  I say we take every bit of that time to drill and talk through the plan.  We need to be ready for any kind of contingency.  This is an all or nothing play.”  Haywood answered.  Jeff let the chief take the lead.  This kind of operation was much more in the SEAL team leader’s wheel house than it was his.

“Have you actually told us the plan yet?  Or are you just going to keep talking in circles around it?”  Harley asked.  All this talk of dying on top of their current situation was getting to him as much as it was everyone else.  He normally just went with the flow, but he was getting worried for his friends.  Not so much for himself.  He’d slam a bottle of booze and jump out the door with a machine gun in each hand.  It’d be neat to see how far he could get.  He would like nothing more than to kill the monsters feeding him all the weird mind game crap.  Haywood smiled back at Harley.  He liked the way the big man cut right through the BS.

“Yue is going to use her mind control powers to clear the way for us to get Chris safely into the engine room.  Once he gets there, he’ll get the train moving again.  We drive out of the tunnel and have a nice picnic somewhere.”  Haywood responded.

“Mind control powers?”  Harley asked.  Yue looked just as lost.

“I’m wondering the same thing.  I’ve swayed a handful of crawlerz to go one way or the other on occasion.  I can even control one of them at a time if they’re weak.  Getting hundreds of them to stand aside while Chris figures out what’s wrong with the train?  That seems a little far-fetched.  I’d have to send out some really enticing images.  Way more than I’ve done before.  It could get pretty bad.”  Yue said.

The conversation began to turn around the logistics of it all.  They decided to give themselves a full two days to hash it out.  It wasn’t like they were in any kind of hurry to get anywhere.  Two days should be enough to convince the people who’d tried to kill them that they were dead.  The last thing they wanted was to make it out of the tunnel only to be bushwhacked by those bozos again.

Riding out of the tunnel also presented a timing challenge.  They needed to do whatever they were going to do at the best time of day to do it.  Yue found herself being addressed more and more like she was an expert on crawler behavior.  It was even more annoying to her that she did have the answers to a lot of the questions everyone was asking.  She could feel the gulf between her and her friends widening as more and more of her weirdness was exposed.  A weirdness that stemmed from being able to open her mind up to hop on zombie radio.  Being able to hop on and strong enough to stay sane.

As for the timing they obviously wanted to ride out during the daylight.  It gave whoever got stuck in the engine room the greatest chance of survival.  They all knew that job was most likely one ending in a messy death, but it’d be nice to give the men who were going to make the short trip some hope of survival.  LeBron brought up the fact that if they left at night more of the crawlerz may have ventured out of the tunnel giving them a better chance of making it.  They finally agreed to record the number of monsters they could see on video over a twenty four hour period and try to figure out the best time based off that.

When not being asked to tell them how the infected thought Yue was huddled in the corner letting her mind roam.  She was prodding and poking at the huddled mass of monsters outside the train.  The more of them there were together the stronger the network that bound them telepathically.  The faster the viewpoints flashed around.  To capture the attention of that many she’d need to do more than just plant an image in her head and share it.  She thought about it until she knew what she was going to have to do.  It was going to require some serious sacrifice.  She gave it a fifty percent chance of working.  That was a lot better than the one percent chance she’d given this plan to start with.  Like Haywood told her though anything was better than just sitting around waiting to die.

They’d decided to go for it at first light.  They hadn’t been able to tell based on the monitors if the crawlerz thinned out overnight or not.  They’d also sped up the timetable once Yue told them that none of the infected outside the train were leaving but more were constantly showing up.  They were being attracted by those shared images of the people trapped in the train.  If they waited too long the tunnel might fill up with the beasts.  If they packed in too much, they might stop the locomotive from even being able to move forward.

Haywood and a Marine named Salvador were stacked up on the door leading out to the engine room.  Harley was standing in line behind them. In the red light of the interior he looked like he was either super constipated or had to puke or possibly both.  Harley was standing by the door.  His job was to open it until the three men were out then shut it.  He’d been given that job because he was the strongest guy in the car.  He might very well be playing tug of war with the hellish infected trying to get in.

Drew and Lisa were covering the door as well.  Drew had volunteered immediately to be the one to escort Chris to the engine room.  He’d been shot down from all sides as too young and inexperienced.  Lisa had been smashing the hell out of his foot to keep him from trying too hard to jump in on the suicide sprint.  Inexperienced or not he’d be covering the backs of the men as they sprinted for the engine room.  Lisa was helping with that as well, but everyone knew she was also there to keep her dumbass boyfriend from hopping out the door the second Haywood’s team came under attack.  She loved him and hated him for his loyalty and bravery.

Yue sat near the center of the enclosed gigantic metal coffin they were stuck in with Jeff and LeBron.  Both of them had removed their shirts and had knives in their hands.  Jeff was looking pale but determined.  LeBron looked queasy as well even though he was just a backup.  His primary job was to watch the monitors and yell “go”.  Yue was pale and shaking.  She was holding herself together by the thinnest of margins.  She was fully immersed in the crawler world now while struggling to keep her grip on reality as well.  When she was ready, she looked up at Jeff and gave him a little half smile.

“I love you babe.”  Jeff said then brought the knife down across his palm making a bloody gash.

Yue gabbed his arm and plunged her face into this palm.  She bit and slurped at the hot blood there.  She let the grotesque images she’d been bombarded with by the crawlerz take over.  She ripped into Jeff while sending images of the back of the train with all her might.  Where there‘d been hundreds of competing viewpoints on the network of minds outside the train now there was just hers.  Every crawler within reach of her mind moved as one towards the rear of the train.  Yue grabbed Jeff’s other arm.  He’d slashed it as well to give her more blood.

She tore into the flesh of his arm.  She let every sensation from every bite be transmitted to the hive mind outside.  She felt their pleasure and frustration peeking.  Their mouths watering with the images she was sending.  It hurt them to feel those and not participate.  None of them wanted to be left out of the feast.  Yue grabbed LeBron’s arm and bit into it. His blood a slightly different tang to it from the sweat on his skin.  Yue shot images out combined with this new taste.  There were other victims down the tunnel.  Run that way she screamed inside of her head.

LeBron waved to Drew with a mix of excitement and pain.  His sister was busy chowing down on his arm.  It hurt like hell, but it looked like it was working.  Flashes were hitting all of their minds of the imagery Yue was putting out there.  None of them were able to broadcast like she could but they could all receive.  Her deepest depravities were laid bare for them all to see.  Somewhere inside herself she felt shame.  The other feelings were controlling her now though.  She was riding them to help them all.  Riding them into a pool of inky dark madness that she was too far gone to even wonder if she’d ever be able to come back from.

Haywood and Salvador went out the front door.  They’d discussed maybe just keeping it to knives to avoid attracting attention.  Thinking about it though neither of them thought they’d make it far against even a few of the crawlerz if all they had were knives.  The beasts didn’t know how to die when they were supposed to.  Instead of knives they went out the door with guns blazing.  Their bullets blasting a corridor of death for Chris to follow them through.

Images of the two of them moving in the dim light started to circulate amidst the intoxicating imagery Yue was sharing.  A shift in momentum could be felt.  LeBron yelled for Drew to come back.  Drew left his post and ran over to Yue.  They’d talked about the possibility of needing to do this.  He’d pulled out a box cutter and slashed the top of his forearm before he even made it to them.  A blood covered Yue grabbed his arm with the ferocity of an alligator snapping down on its prey.  She bit deep into his arm sucking his blood and grinding the gristle.  It was enough.  The rush was back on for the rear of the train.

“Go!  We’re all going to die!  Go!”  Lisa was screaming at the grandfatherly Chris.  He was too petrified to even move.  Harley reached over and shoved him out the door.  Lisa standing right behind him to cover him.

From nowhere a crawler latched onto Chris and took him down to the ground.  She shot the crawler and Chris multiple times before ducking back in the doorway.  Her only thought to get everyone back inside.  They could spend a few days eating the rest of the supplies before the train car really did become their coffin.  She started screaming for Haywood and Salvador to come back.  Harley was trying to knock her out of the way so he could get the door shut.  Drew came forward and helped her keep Harley from shutting the door.  His arm pouring blood down onto the ground.

The train jerked forward throwing them all off of their feet.  Salvador was yelling for them to shut the door.  Harley was happy to oblige while Lisa tried to figure out why he’d want the door shut on him.  The instant the door was closed they all heard the bullets start pinging off the exterior door and walls.  The Marine had wanted to blast away without worrying about hitting any of them.  In trying to save the man’s life Lisa had almost killed them all.

The train kept picking up speed.  They felt it going around turns so fast that it felt like they had to be about to tip over.  Somehow, they didn’t though.  The train shot out of the tunnel going way too fast.  At the next turn it derailed sending crawler bodies, supplies and all kinds of other junk flying everywhere.

Chapter 22:  The End of the Line

“Ah hell that hurt.”  Harley said pulling himself to his feet.  The train was sideways, and everything was everywhere.  He’d come to with a mattress on top of him.  If only the mattress had been underneath him, he probably wouldn’t hurt so bad right now.  He’d shoved it off him with a shake of his head at how the universe was treating him lately.

“Oh you were under there?”  Lisa asked.  She’d woke up on top of the mattress.  She was currently standing hip deep in supplies and bedding trying to figure out how to open the door to see if they’d made it out of the tunnel.  She’d already logged some time bandaging Drew, LeBron and Jeff’s arms.  They were all still recovering from the crash.  Yue had done a serious number on them.  They’d be wearing long sleeves for a while.  Otherwise anybody they met would think they were immune or something.  Explaining the truth would be way too much trouble.

Lisa had ground up two pills that looked like the ones Yue was taking.  She’d mixed it in with water and a precious pack of Crystal Lite.  Later on she wondered why she’d bothered flavoring the water since Yue hadn’t even woken up while being forced to drink it.  Lisa had been rushing through those first aid tasks so that she could get to the door and check.  She wasn’t hearing any hands slapping on the walls.  She didn’t feel like a bunch of slithering demons were trying to mind rape her from ten feet away.  Both of those were very positive indicators that they’d actually made it out.

“Yeah.  Where’s everybody else?”  Harley asked.

“Recovering still.  I’m not sure if they’re recovering from the train crashing or Yue munching on their arms like they were all filets.  They’re all breathing and moving around though.  Yue’s super whacked out.”  Lisa said.  She tossed out the information nonchalantly but the concern and care in her voice for their shared set of friends was very much evident.

“Ok.  Watch out and let me open the door.”  Harley gently moved Lisa aside and then wrenched up the lever that allowed the door to open.  The door handle moved up but the door itself wouldn’t budge.  That made even Harley a little nervous since there was only this door and the one in the back.  If that one wasn’t working because of the way the train had settled, then the other one might not be either.

“It won’t open?”  Lisa asked.  She didn’t sound too thrilled either.

“No.  Let’s go try the one on the other end.”  Harley said.  He started wading through the piles of garbage towards the other end of the car.  On the way there they stopped to check on everyone.  Harley saw that Lisa had taken her time and done the bandages up right on everyone.

“Hey.  That door not opening?”  Drew asked sitting up.  Lisa started to tell him to lay back down again then realized they were all basically walking wounded at this point.

“Nope.  We’re trying the back door.  If that doesn’t work, we may need to borrow one of your grenades.”  Lisa joked.  Drew smiled at that and stood up to go with them.  He was limping some from how he’d landed when the train went over but otherwise looked ok.

Harley made sure his weapons were in easy reach then went through the same motions with the door in the back of the train.  This door swung open with a loud groan.  Harley had to physically push it up and hold it in place.  He worked with Drew to wriggle out so he could find something to prop the door open with.  All of them had been ecstatic to see the sunlight stream in when the door swung open.

A few minutes later they’d rigged a dozen concrete blocks and a broken stop sign to hold open the door.  It didn’t look super safe.  Chore complete they stopped to take a breather and look around.  Harley and Drew were both upset they hadn’t thought of doing that before.  Just because it was sunny outside didn’t mean there was no danger.  Lapses like that were what got people killed.

“Is this the way out or are you trying to make a trap?”  LeBron asked as he carefully crawled through the open door.  He was extremely careful not to touch the concrete blocks or the signpost.

“Is Yue up yet?”  Lisa asked him.  She’d crawled out right after Drew and Harley had gotten the door propped open.

“She’s still out.  Jeff is up and sitting with her.  He looks like a corpse.  Yue tore into my arm too but she like devoured both of his arms.  That reminds me.  We’re going to need antibiotics.  Human bites are some of the most likely to get infected.”  LeBron said.

“At least you won’t be getting infected, infected.”  Drew said.  LeBron nodded.  That was a very true point.  He asked if they’d checked out the engine room yet and Harley shook his head.  Not really holding out much hope for the men who’d saved their lives by willingly risking theirs to get the train going they limped slowly in that direction.

The broken bodies of a dozen crawlerz were strewn all around the back of the engine room.  The monsters had held on long enough to finish the wild ride out of the tunnels.  The ones who hadn’t scattered into dark places or been killed in the crash were staring up into the sun.

“Hey LeBron.  You and Lisa go guard the other car entrance.  We don’t want one of these things running in there.  If they survive the door trap that we made it could be bad for Yue and Jeff.”  Harley said.  Lisa and LeBron rushed back to check on the other car.  None of them had thought to leave a guard there.

“You really worried about that?”  Drew asked.

“Yeah.  It’s sloppy not to post someone to guard that door.  I also think it’s probably best that me and you end these ones that are staring up into the sky.  It’s just creepy.”  Harley said.  Drew agreed so they spent the next few minutes shoving combat knives into the exposed throats of the sun light mesmerized crawlerz.

“Think we need to go in there?”  Drew asked when they were done.  Salvador and Haywood must’ve gone through a year’s worth of ammunition in a few minutes based on the level of carnage visible from outside the overturned car.

“I’m not going in there.”  Harley stated emphatically.  He was looking at Drew like he was an idiot for even asking.  They stood there staring at the car for a few more minutes trying to get a sense if either Salvador or Haywood might still be inside.  They skipped back a few steps when the sounds of a pistol being fired sounded from inside the car.

Not bothering to check if Harley was coming or not Drew climbed through the wide open back door to the engine room.  He dropped back down when more bullets bounced off the walls around him.

“You need help in there?”  Harley yelled from the other side of the entrance.  He really hoped whoever was inside didn’t need any help.

Haywood dove through the door in between them.  Drew and Harley both willing their fingers to freeze on the trigger as their instinct was to shoot anything that did that.  Immediately behind Haywood came Salvador.  It took both Harley and Drew a second to realize Salvador had been transformed into a surger.  At least they hoped that was the reason that Haywood had his knife shoved deep in Salvador’s gut.  Haywood was struggling to keep Salvador’s snapping teeth away from him until Drew ended the deadly dispute with a well-placed pistol shot.

“Glad to see you made it.”  Harley said helping Haywood to his feet.  Once he was standing Harley wiped his hands off on his pants.  Haywood was literally covered in blood.  It was dripping from his hair.

“Yeah, that was a rough ride.  Everybody else good?”  Haywood asked.  He was looking around at the bodies of the crawlerz with their throats sawed out.

“It’s messy doing it that way I agree.  For me the blade goes in easier though.  As long as you stand to the side you avoid most of the blood.  I go for the heart then five times out of ten I get stuck on a rib bone or it glances off.”  Harley explained the technique him and Drew had developed to use on crawlerz stuck in that dazed and confused state.  Haywood gave him an odd look at the unsolicited throat slashing advice.

“I was actually thinking about something someone told me a while back.  We were talking about why they feared the sun and he mentioned when they did get stuck in it, they stared at it like they were worshiping it.  Then he dropped a thought bomb on me.  The main god where the virus or mold or infection or whatever came from.  The thing all those pyramid building bastards worshiped was Ra the sun god.  Makes you think doesn’t it?  Anyway I’m going to go hit the middle car and find a change of clothes and a gallon of hand sanitizer.”  Haywood slapped each of them on the back before heading towards his stated goal.  He left a trail of bloody footprints behind him.

“That dude’s badass.”  Harley said admiringly.

“He just wormed his way out through the dead bodies of a massive pile of monsters he killed.  It looked like he swam through a river of blood to get here.  I’m going with badass not being enough to cover it.”  Drew said with respect.

“Agreed.  Let’s heads back and get cleaned up ourselves.  We need to be far away from here before night falls or all this work will have been for nothing.”  Harley said.

Drew nodded and they took one more quick tour around the main engine for the train before turning and walking past the middle car.  Drew had mentioned they should check out what was left of the supply car.  It looked like it’d flipped a few times before coming to rest.  The crates that’d been neatly strapped to the top of it were now strewn all over the street.  A bunch of them had busted open when tossed onto the hard concrete.

Rations, water and loose ammunition were scattered all over the road.  Drew and Harley were trying to get a handle on what they’d want to take with them when Jeff and LeBron walked out to meet them.  After a brief conversation about what a miracle it was that Haywood had survived Jeff told them they needed to be loaded up and rolling out in the next ten minutes.  The sound of the trains crashing off the track would’ve been heard throughout the silent city of brotherly love.  Jeff wasn’t sure if it was the men who’d ambushed them or the crawlerz they needed to be more afraid of.

“If it’s the crawlerz we could camp out right here and spend the day sorting through what we need and making plans.  We can crash in the same train car we’ve been sleeping in.  If it’s those guys who attacked us the other day, I don’t know that hiding in the car is going to keep them from hurting us.  Although honestly unless they have explosives what are they going to do?”  LeBron asked.

“We don’t know that they don’t have explosives.  Just pouring the diesel from the main engine all over the top of the car we’d be in and setting it on fire would probably do the trick.  We’d either burn to death or suffocate.  The train’s just been slammed hard into the ground on its side.  I’m not really wanting to bet our lives on its structural integrity after all that.”  Jeff said.  That made total sense to Drew.  It did bring up some questions though.

“Where are we going and how do we get there?”  Drew asked.

“We’re going to head to Cape May.  It’s the closest operational base to here.  We can figure out the how on the way there.  Go ahead and grab everything you can carry.  Food and water for three days then the rest is weapons and ammo.”  Jeff said before he left to tell everyone else to get moving.

The how turned out to be a few blocks to the west.  The Schuylkill River ran down to the Delaware river which dumped out into Delaware Bay.  Yue was in some weird fugue state and the rest of them were nursing various bruises, sprains and broken things.  On top of lugging Yue with them on a stretcher they were also carrying as much ammunition as they could shove in pockets and backpacks.  Jeff flashed back to the conversation about how they should have a spare vehicle on the train with them.  Hindsight was twenty-twenty.  All they could do was use the experience to plan better next time.

They climbed down off the tracks to walk along a dirty concrete walking trail that ran parallel to the river.  They did find wheels of a sort.  A grocery cart had been abandoned in the weeds.  They stopped and messed around with it for a few minutes until they had Yue stretched out across it.  It didn’t work great, but it now only took one person to drag her along instead of two.

What they needed was a boat.  It didn’t have to be a great boat.  It just needed to float and have some way of controlling it.  A couple of canoes would work if there wasn’t a regular boat floating around waiting for someone to take.  As long as they could get it in the middle of the river and not sink until they made it to Cape May.  Haywood had snagged a bunch of flares from the wreckage of the train so even if they overshot Cape May they’d be able to signal the base.

“Easy for you to say.  You could probably just jump in the river and swim to Cape May.”  Jeff said when Haywood told them that accidentally drifting out into the ocean wouldn’t be a big deal.  SEALs were meant for operations like this.  He had to be loving this versus the stuck in a train underground scenario.  If they could finish off the mission by blowing something up, Haywood would be in SEAL heaven.

Up ahead there was a major overpass.  It passed right over the tracks they were on.  Underneath the overpass it was dark as night.  They had to abandon the shopping cart to climb up and over the overpass.  None of them were willing to risk going underneath the bridge and getting attacked by the crawlerz that may be lurking in the shadows.  LeBron tried to engage them all in a conversation about this being where the legend of trolls living under bridges came from.  He was ignored by everyone who didn’t tell him to shut up.

It wasn’t that they were worried about talking attracting the infected.  It was just that they didn’t have time to get sidetracked.  They were all focused on finding a boat before it got dark so that they didn’t get ripped apart by hordes of the infected.  That focus turned into frustration as the day wore on without any boats they could commandeer turning up.  They’d seen plenty of docks with empty moorings.  Each time they saw one coming up they all quickened their pace hoping this one would be it.

The tracks swerved inland so they started walking through overgrown parking lots as they tried to see through the trees growing beside the river.  Stopping to climb up and over the highways casting shadows down on them took up a lot of time.  They had to take long inland detours on most of them to get to a place they could actually climb up and over.  The shadows were starting to get way too long when Jeff spotted a warehouse parking lot filled with tractor trailers.

He made the call for them to head for the trailers for the night. They could continue the search for a boat in the morning.  Harley had lugged along a pair of the cutters that were the skeleton keys of the apocalypse.  They found a sturdy looking trailer and broke into it for the night.  Yue finally woke up once they were all inside and settled in for the night.

Jeff was happy for that at least.  He loved her and she didn’t weigh hardly anything. When you had to carry her on top of everything else that they were each carrying it was a bit excessive though.  He’d be happy to let her walk the next day.  If she was doing ok, he’d even offload her gear back to her.  He’d been lugging along her weapons as well as his.  Thankful to finally be off his feet he slid down the wall to do his best to relax while he could.  They didn’t have much longer until the demons came.

Chapter 23:  The Only Easy Day was Yesterday

The trailer they’d chosen kept the monsters at bay while they fitfully slept for varying periods of time.  It was dented to hell and some of the supports had broken but it’d served it’s purpose.  They stood outside near the body of a young crawler who’d snapped her neck on the trailer.  She lay paralyzed on the dirty asphalt.  Her eyes glazed over in a very unwholesome ecstasy as she focused with unblinking intensity on the cloudless blue sky.

Harley ended her with his patented neck hack.  Yue had been standing close by staring at the poor girl.  She hopped backwards to avoid the blood splattering everywhere courtesy of Harley’s butchery.  They performed a halfhearted search for the keys to the trucks.  Haywood told them for the tenth time that he doubted he could hotwire one of the big rigs.  They did happen to notice something across the lot that made them all much happier.

By the loading dock there was a small section carved off for a fleet of gas powered golf carts.  They were the tough looking off road ones. They were meant to be used to drive over the tracks between all the different warehouses.  All they needed now were the keys to the carts.  There was a door at the top of the loading dock.  Most likely the keys were right inside that door.  Harley could almost picture the lockbox on the wall above a little logbook where you were supposed to sign out whichever cart you took.  It was just a regular door, but it took on the aspects of the entrance to a dragons cave in their collective minds.

“There’s a few of them in there.  They can sense we’re out here.  They’re salivating for us.  Pitiful how they cry.”  Yue said with her eyes half closed in that meditative state she went in to try and do her psychic scouting thing.  No one could pinpoint exactly when she’d started talking like Yoda and a Gypsy Fortune Teller had a baby.

“I’d rather fight than walk beside that river another day.  Aren’t we supposed to be killing as many of them as we can anyway?”  Lisa asked fiercely.  Drew smiled at her.  That was his girl.

“Works for me.  Maybe if we pop the door open, they’ll all wander out into the sun.”  Haywood said walking towards the door.  Harley joined him. Everyone else hung back ready to back them up if needed.  They hung back to avoid creating a big clump of people right by the door that the infected could come boiling out of at any second.  Harley and Haywood probably wouldn’t want to hang out for very long if that happened.  The more people up on the loading dock the harder it’d be to scatter.

Haywood tried opening the door the easy way first.  Once he’d verified it really was locked, he sighed and worked on getting the small crowbar out of his pack.  Drew was carrying one as well.  He stepped forward and handed it up to Harley.  Together Harley and Haywood worked on the door with the short metal rods until it started making cracking sounds.  It was then that the first crawler slammed into it from inside the building.

The door was bashed off its hinges by an old lady in a seriously stained yellow dress.  The woman’s white hair floated around her skeletal face as she rode the door like a sled off the edge of the loading dock.  Her eyes had gone from rabid to empty as she transitioned from the inside to the outside.  She slid down off the door and lay on the ground at their feet in a pathetic pile of skin, hair and faded yellow fabric.  Drew gave everyone a courtesy warning to step back before he slashed the grandma’s throat.  Her eyes never lost that empty look as she died.  Her lifeblood forming a steamy little stream that trickled down a drain close to her corpse.

Drew tore his eyes away from that whole scene to see what was going on at the top of the dock.  He hated looking at the infected after they were killed.  When that mad look left their eyes, it was easy to mistake them for regular people.  Assuming you ignored the effects on their bodies of running around mostly naked as an insane cannibal for a year or so.  That tended to give them a malnourished glow that was the exact opposite of healthy.

At the top of the dock there wasn’t much going on.  Light filtered into the first few feet of the large open warehouse environment.  Yue was staring at the open doorway and shaking her head from side to side indicating walking in would be a bad idea.  Drew poked Yue in the back and pantomimed tossing a grenade into the room.  Everyone in the small group watched as Yue considered the idea.  She finally shrugged with a small smile playing at her lips that this was the plan Drew had immediately come up with.

At the top of the ramp Haywood waved everyone back and pulled out a grenade.  He pulled the pin and rolled it in hoping there weren’t any super genius infected inside who might figure out how to toss it back out.  Or just a really lucky crawler who happened to step forward at the exact right time to kick the explosive little bundle of destruction back out on the loading dock.  Luckily neither proved to be the case.  Haywood easily made it around the corner before the muffled whoomph noise of the grenade going off in the warehouse.

Once the noise had died down the small group reformed at the base of the loading dock.  They all looked to Yue for a quick damage report on the infected inside.  She closed her eyes and scrunched up her face for a minute before shrugging again.  She sensed a couple of them still inside, but these things didn’t really register pain.  They might be sitting inside waiting to pounce or laying on the floor bleeding out.  All she could really tell was that there were a couple in their still strong enough to be broadcasting their thoughts.

“I’m tired of carrying all this ammo anyway.”  Haywood said walking aggressively towards the entrance.

“If we can find the keys to these golf carts, we won’t be carrying around anything much longer.”  Drew said falling in behind Haywood.  Harley lined up on him and the whole team stacked up behind them.  Flashlights and pistols were pulled out and positioned while Haywood waited for the signal to move forward.  Once everyone was set Jeff gave the order and they moved in.

Flashlight beams illuminated the damage done by the grenade Haywood had tossed in.  A pile of bodies was laid out around the perimeter of where the sunlight filtered into the room.  They’d gathered there to wait for the group of uninfected outside to come in.  A couple of the crawlerz were still breathing.  One was able to lunge towards Haywood and grab his boot.  Haywood kicked the beast in the face then put a round through it’s head.  Haywood, Harley, and Drew quickly double tapped all the other crawlerz lying on the ground.  Better to waste some ammunition then get bit by one you thought was dead already.

Jeff stood in the back covering those three while Lisa and LeBron were in charge of looking for the box with the keys in it.  There was no box on the wall but there was a desk inside a cubicle by the door.  It looked like where the shift supervisor or foreman for the shop sat at to do paperwork.  Lisa tried the drawers but couldn’t get one of them to open.  She waved Drew over.  He used his miniature crowbar to pry open the stuck drawer.  Turned out it was a locked drawer that contained a whole mess of keys with different numbers on them.  Drew started to look at the keys more closely when gunshots rang out behind them.

Haywood and Harley had opened up on a shadow bouncing towards them.  It moved with an impossibly fluid grace that marked it as a crawler coming on at full speed.  Jeff shouted to watch out and started shooting towards another corner.  Drew ripped the whole drawer out and held the loose keys down with his hand.  He yelled that he had the keys and ran out the door.  As soon as he was outside, he tossed the drawer with the keys down on the ground and turned around to cover the door.

Yue was already standing outside.  She’d shouted the warning into the warehouse that’d alerted Harley to the bouncing crawler in the first place.  Lisa and LeBron were hot on Drew’s heels followed closely by Jeff then Harley.  Haywood took one step out the door and a pair of hands appeared out of nowhere to grab him by the shoulders.  Drew leapt to his feet and shoved his pistol beside Haywood’s face and started pulling the trigger as fast as he could.  The monster that had ahold of Haywood slammed him down to the ground and leapt for Drew.

Drew kept blasting away at the psycho until his pistol went dry.  He was laying on the ground pounding the dead man’s head with the butt of his gun when LeBron pulled him away  and got him calmed down.  Once he was feeling coherent again, he looked over to where Lisa and Harley had hauled Haywood to check him out.

“How’s he doing?”  Drew called out.  The time to worry about making too much noise was long past.

“He may be trying to to pull a Yue.”  Lisa said.

“I’m not unconscious.  Just give me a second to lay here.  I really want to focus on not moving and especially not puking.”  Haywood said.

“How’d you know that ‘pulling a Yue’ meant getting knocked unconscious?”  Yue asked.  It wasn’t the kind of thing she wanted to be her legacy.  When LeBron and Drew both started giggling like a couple of ten year-olds, she just kept staring straight ahead.  To say anything to them about it would only encourage them.  She wondered how long they’d been waiting for this to work its way back around to her.  She really needed to see if she could find the two of them some sort of a hobby.

“I’m just going to lay here for a few more minutes if no one minds.  You guys can go ahead and try the keys.  I’m happy to walk my dizzy ass over there once I hear those bad boys start up.”  Haywood said.  Then he closed his eyes and lay there quietly.  Lisa squatted down to watch over him and signaled for the rest of the group to go try the carts.

It took about thirty minutes of opening hoods and screwing around with batteries, but they eventually got two of the carts to start up.  Walking around the building they were able to find a water hose.  They cut off a section of it and used it to siphon gas out of the other carts into the ones they had running.  They started poking through garbage cans looking for containers to put more gas in.  They stopped when Harley figured out that they probably had enough gas to get to Cape May and back three times over.  They settled on taking the hose with them in case they needed to suck any more gas out of cars.

The golf carts were four seaters with a place on the back to shove their gear.  They got everything loaded up then grabbed Haywood to pitch him in as well.  When they picked him up off the loading dock, they saw the blood stain where his scalp had gotten cut when the crawler tossed him to the ground.  He was going to have a serious headache later.  He didn’t say a word about it as they helped him to the car though.  He just took a seat and made sure his weapons were within reach should they be needed.

Once everyone was seated, they took off for Cape May.  They passed by a large, deserted shipyard along the way.  Most of the docks were empty except for a few derelicts.  Jeff was staring out in the direction of the yards hopefully but didn’t see anything exciting.  He knew that for salvage operations they’d still moor up here during the day.  At night they tended to want to put some distance between themselves and the infested shoreline.  Driving past it most of them were wondering how many of the ships out there had gone out to join the fleets slowly circling North America.

The only one of them who had a good idea how many of those ships might still be haze, grey and underway was Jeff.  His guess was they had more people living at sea now than they had scattered across the country.  Unless you counted the infected which he most certainly did not.  Between the cruise ships and the various navies they’d sent a lot of people out to sea.  He’d guess half those people had ended up dead.  They’d tried to go ashore at one point or another and been swarmed by the infected.

Unless they were nuclear or sail powered, they were out of fuel by this point.  They’d been forced into whatever port they could find or ended up adrift.  That’d been the case with more than a few civilian vessels when told they weren’t allowed to come ashore at whatever island they’d set a course for.  A few of the islands that’d managed to avoid the infection had found themselves fighting to hold onto their very scarce resources when mobs of people from the fuel-deprived ships descended on them.

The golf carts made life a breeze.  They talked about going back to where the train had crashed and collecting some more of their supplies.  They decided against it since they didn’t know who else might have shown up to sift through the wreckage by now.  Instead they put the pedal to the metal on the zippy little golf carts.  All of them enjoying the sensation of the sun in their faces and the wind in their hair.  They turned on the interstate and started following the signs to get to the Cape May USCG base.

Chapter 24:  One Step Forward

“Well that sucks.”  Drew said looking at the twisted rebar sticking out from the crumbling concrete where the bridge from the mainland to Cape May had once stood.

“There are some boats over there.”  Lisa said pointing at a nearby marina.  There were some boats in the direction she pointed.  They were upside down and battered but they were boats.  From this distance they couldn’t tell if the boats were floating or just sitting on top of other wrecked boats in a big pile.

“I’ll take my chances with swimming.”  LeBron said after a quick glance over at the marina.

“How about we try to jump the bridge.  We could build a ramp.”  Drew said with a grin on his face.

“How about you two dweebs both shut up and let the grownups think.”  An irritable Yue said.

“You’d think somebody sucking down Valium all the time would be more fun to be around.”  Drew said.

“I’m with Yue on both of you guys shutting up. We need to figure out how we get to the other side.  The side with the base that has rooms with beds and possibly even working showers.”  Jeff said.  Yue seemed to cheer up some at the thought of working showers.  Drew started to say something that was probably better left unsaid.  Before he could provide his latest insight though Haywood interrupted him with a pretty relevant observation.

“We could just ask these guys coming up the inlet in the boat to give us a ride.”  Haywood said dryly.  He was staring past the bridge at a boat coming up the inlet towards them. He was absent mindedly rubbing the gigantic goose egg forming on the back of his head.  That crawler had really done a number on him.  If it hadn’t been for Drew, it would’ve been a lot worse.  The kid may be a loudmouth, but he had the heart of a warrior.  His sister and brother did to for that matter.  They might not be related by blood, but they were family in every way that mattered.

“You might want to cover up your hands.”  Harley said.  He was referring to the bandage covered skin that Yue had mauled to get them out of the scrape in the tunnel.  Drew, LeBron and Jeff were all taking heavy doses of antibiotics to try and keep from getting infected.  Lisa had bandaged them all up pretty well but given the environment they were living in infection was a constant danger.  Those bandages had already been through a gunfight.  One where every shot he fired had caused Jeff to recoil in pain.

“Yeah, it might get awkward trying to explain why we have bite marks all over our arms and hands.”  Drew said needlessly.  He caught a few of the glances he was getting and realized it was a pretty douchebag thing to say.  Yue couldn’t be feeling good about it.  Considering she’d done it to save their lives Drew knew he should be doing everything he could to support her instead of putting her down.  He opened his mouth to apologize but for once no words came out.  He decided that was probably ok since he no doubt would’ve just said something stupid anyway.

Yue hugged him.  She knew what it meant when Drew sat there flapping his mouth open and closed like a fish out of water.  Drew told her he was sorry and for some reason that tore Yue up.  She started crying while he awkwardly held her and patted her on the back.

“You trying to burp her or make her feel better?”  LeBron asked.  He was hoping to get a laugh out of Yue, but she just started crying harder.

“The boats getting pretty close.”  Harley said.  He was hoping to get Yue to focus on that.  He recognized the symptoms of someone coming down.  She must’ve skipped her morning dose in the hopes that they’d be on a crawler free island before night fall.  She’d been trying to stay clear headed during the day.  She wanted to be an early warning system in case something happened.  That’d just been too much for her to handle in the city.  There were too many of the infected in the buildings and under the bridges.

Yue got control of herself. She wiped her nose on Drew’s shoulder, dried her eyes and went to stand beside Jeff.  The three with bite marks made sure their bandages were covered.  They pulled on gloves and worked their shirt and jacket sleeves down as low as they’d go.  It shouldn’t be a huge deal if the guys in the boat saw that they had some bloody bandages.  You didn’t stroll around a city filled with the infected and not end up with a few scratches.  Especially not the way they did it.

The boat that pulled up was the kind that the Coast Guard would use to perform raids in the harbor on suspected drug traffickers.  A .50-caliber machine gun was mounted in the front of the assault style raft.   Three men were aboard the small vessel.  The one they couldn’t help focusing on was the guy in the bow of the boat with his hands on that big ass machine gun.  He had it pointed directly up the bank in their direction.

“We’ve also got a guy with a sniper rifle.  He’s pretty awesome.  He sits over on the other end of the bridge at night killing them things.  He uses a starlight scope or some shit to bang holes through crawler skulls all night long.”  The man speaking hopped off the boat into the knee deep water and waded ashore.

He was wearing a standard pair of camouflage BDUs.  He had a holstered pistol hanging off a webbed belt.  Other than a big knife on the other side he didn’t seem to be carrying any other weapons.  Not that he really needed to with a machine gun and a sniper backing him up.  He was about medium height with salt and pepper hair that was neatly trimmed.  He had black anchors pinned on his lapels indicating his rank of senior chief.

“How’s it going senior chief?”  Jeff asked when the man had huffed his way up the steep muddy incline.

“Well I was having a pretty pleasant day until I had to ride over here and climb up that muddy hill.  Who the hell are you and what are you doing here?”  The senior chief asked.

“We’re a unit out of North Carolina that was sent to see how far the rail tracks could take us.  We got ambushed in Philadelphia and ended up crashing the train.  Now we’re looking to get back and report what we’ve discovered.”  Jeff answered.  The senior chief didn’t look impressed.

“What kind of unit?  Only real soldier here’s the one who keeps rubbing the back of his head.  You have a title or a unit designation?  Who do you report to?  Maybe try and give me some information that doesn’t make me want to shoot you.  Don’t take all day either.  I want to get back to the galley before they run out of the cheese that we just got in.”  The senior chief responded.

“I’m the director for the department for the continuation of the United States government.  These men were all detailed to me for this mission.  I report directly to the President.”  Jeff answered.

“What happened to your hands?”  The senior chief asked.  The man didn’t miss much.  Jeff hurriedly changed the subject.  Ignoring the question about his hands he asked if they were going to be allowed on the base or not.  He told them they could contact Weathertop to validate he was who he said he was.  Mumbling something about wishing he’d just thought they were surgers and shot them the chief turned around and trudged back down the steep incline.

“I’ve got an expired can of raviolis that says he won’t be the one to climb back up.”  Haywood said.

“Cheese or meat-filled?”  Drew asked.  Before Haywood could answer the third man in the boat started schlepping his way up to them.  The senior chief was sitting on a box in the back talking on the radio.

“I’m supposed to search you for weapons.”  The guardsmen said when he made it to the top of the hill.  He was a skinny kid with freckles and a sunburnt noise.

“I’ll save you some time kid.  We’re covered in ‘em.  I’m not planning on giving mine up.  Once the senior confirms we are who we say we are it shouldn’t matter anymore anyway.”  Haywood said without moving.  The guardsmen looked around at the ragtag crew.  They had weapons hanging off them in every direction.  The golf carts in the background were stacked with weapons and ammunition.  Bristly beards, scarred faces and blood stained clothes were the norm.  Yue had a weird witchy aura around her that made people want to look anywhere but directly into her eyes.

“Yeah.  I’ll wait and see what he says.”  The man said.  He’d spent most of the apocalypse right there in Cape May.  He was honestly horrified of the mainland.  He’d patrolled the shoreline at night and seen dense crowds of the infected on the other side of the inlet.  He knew they shouldn’t be able to see them but somehow, he sensed them watching him.  It was like he could feel how bad they wanted to get at him.  One time he’d been struggling to stay awake patrolling the beach.  He’d closed his eyes for a second and then woken up in the middle of a horrible nightmare standing in ankle deep water.  He’d been leaning forward like he was about to try swimming across the inlet.  He was careful to get plenty of rest between shifts after that.

“They’re sending a bigger boat around to pick you up.  Wait here.”  The senior chief yelled the directions up over the fifty feet of space separating them.  He waved for his man to come back down.

“We’re supposed to just stand out here in the open?”  Lisa asked the intimidated guardsman.  The guy just stood there with his mouth open.

“We have the sniper watching over us.”  Drew said.  He was with Lisa on not liking the idea of hanging out in the open.

“Sniper?”  The guardsman asked.  He was clearly taken by surprise.  He started looking around to see if he could see a sniper.

“Never mind.  We’ll be fine.  Go on down and tell the senior chief we appreciate him calling us a bigger boat.”  Jeff said.

“That guy really sold the sniper idea.  The starlight scope was a nice touch.”  LeBron said.  They gathered around the golf carts to shift their gear back onto their bodies.  The senior chiefs boat heading away up the inlet.

“They had me with the mounted fifty caliber.  Those bullets can do all kinds of things to a man’s body.”  Haywood said.  It came out kind of creepy sounding.

Haywood’s comment effectively killed off the conversation until Harley finally spotted another boat headed their way.  He pointed it out and Drew started climbing down to the water’s edge.  He stopped when he realized no one else was coming with him.  It took him a second, but he finally realized a bigger boat wouldn’t be able to pull in the same place that an attack raft could.  He walked back up through the mud and weeds ignoring Lisa shaking her head sadly at him.

They drove the carts off the bridge and over towards the marina.  That seemed like the logical place for a larger boat to pull in and pick them up at.  They saw a couple of older looking boats in the backlots.  Yue had them hurry right on past without stopping.  There must be a few crawlerz that’d stowed away in the land bound vessels to ride out the light of day.  No one else felt anything but they weren’t stupid enough to challenge Yue on it.

By the time they drove up to a large dock that jutted out into the inlet a Coast Guard response boat was passing them to pull up at the end of the dock.  Not trusting the dock to hold the weight of the golf carts they got out and humped all their gear down to the end of the dock where the 45-foot boat was waiting for them.  There were a few crew members on board driving the boat as well as two guys in camouflage BDUs responsible for guarding the boat.  Other than a few words of greeting no other information was exchanged.  They were shown where to put their gear and where to sit.  When they were close to being settled in the crew cast off and they started working their way up the inlet.

Chapter 25:  Always Ready

One of the men in BDUs came into the hold and sat down with them.  He introduced himself and told them they’d be reaching the base shortly.  Once he’d given them that information, he offered them some water out of a gallon jug like milk comes in.  No one jumped forward to grab one of the cups he was offering to pour water in, so he excused himself and left the way he’d come in.  He left the jug of water and the cups behind in case they changed their minds.

LeBron asked if anyone knew anything about Cape May.  Haywood said that it was the Coast Guard boot camp.  It was where anyone who wanted to join the Coast Guard went to get their basic training.  Jeff was able to supply a little more applicable information.  The base had sent all recruits home when the outbreak started.  Their training had been put off indefinitely.  They’d then set about securing the point the base was located on.  Jeff remembered working to make sure the base was well stocked to survive the coming emergency.

To secure the base they’d erected large fences with guard towers placed along them.  Machine guns had been installed along with gigantic spotlights.  They’d destroyed the bridges leading to the island after advising anyone who wanted to leave to go ahead and do so.  They’d been very proactive about sending patrols out into the civilian parts of the island to immediately put down anyone who showed signs of infection.  Another thing that’d helped immensely was enlisting the aid of the civilians who remained.

A large portion of the people living on the island who chose to stay were in some way associated with the Coast Guard.  They were either retired or had family who were retired or actively serving.  The people who didn’t have weapons were issued weapons.  People who had their own hunting rifles and such were issued better weapons.  With all of that preparation they came very close to avoiding the mess the rest of the country went through.

All it’d taken was one crawler who’d jumped off the bridge towards the island full of people to end up dragging them down though.  Dead crawlerz washed up on the beach constantly.  The patrols were used to seeing them.  They’d stop long enough when they found one to pile driftwood on top of it.  Once they had a decent pile of wood, they’d dump some gas on the kindling and set the body ablaze.   Some mornings they’d be stopping every twenty feet while others they wouldn’t find a single body.

The one crawler that made it just got lucky.  It washed up on the beach only mostly dead.  It crawled into the dunes and buried itself in the sand where it slowly recovered over the course of the day.  By the time night came around it’d been ready to wreak havoc.  Which was exactly what it did.  The crawler had slipped right through the patrols that roamed the neighborhoods and ended up in the backyard of a woman with a couple of yorkies and a golden doodle.  She’d let them out to pee thinking it hadn’t been dark for long enough for it to be dangerous outside yet.

Her lapse in judgement ended in a ravaged forearm.  The crawler had left her and jumped the fence to look for more victims once it felt the change coming over the woman.  The woman’s husband had come out of the house to check on her when he heard the dogs barking.  He got outside just in time to see what his wife looked like fully turned.  He only got to see her for a second before she was chewing on his face.

The crawler had continued around the neighborhood stealthily locating people who should’ve known better.  People who had a false sense of security.  They thought the inlet and their weapons kept them safe.  It was a big community of ex-military types.  There were a lot of people who smoked.  They’d either cut way back at night or started smoking in their houses.  The ones who smoked in their houses were fine as long as they had a spouse who was ok with that.  The night the crawler came to visit you didn’t need the surgeon general to tell you that smoking was bad for your health.

It was a good hour from the time the first victim was turned until an alarm was raised.  Gunshots were heard from a home where a woman had barricaded herself in a closet.  She’d hidden in there to escape her husband.  He’d tried to break in and kill her after a smoke break.  She’d tearfully opened up on him with the shotgun they kept in the closet.  Shooting through the door she’d managed to miss him with her first four shots.  She got him with the fifth as he ripped open the door.  She got him but he got her right on her pudgy white ankle when she walked over to see if he was still alive or not.

People heard the gunshots and jumped on their radios to spread the alarm.  The trucks full of the fast response teams immediately scrambled in the direction of the woman’s home.  One of the trucks never even got there.  The original crawler jumped right into its windshield causing the driver to swerve right into a group of people who were gathering in the street for a ride to the base.  The rest of the night and much of the next day was pandemonium.  Most of the survivors of that night had migrated to the base after all of that.  The suburban homes were now oversized mausoleums housing the dead.  They were a reminder of all that’d been lost.

To get away from that reminder a lot of the civilians had opted to go with the Navy ships when they pulled in and requested volunteers.  The rest either stayed to help with the base or joined the scavenging crews that would go out into the cities and neighboring areas looking for supplies.  Good scavengers could literally scrape by a really good living.  Bad scavengers were the cowards who wouldn’t take chances or the ones who were unlucky enough to try and snag loot from somewhere a crawler happened to be hanging out.

The boat they were in drifted in to tie off on the large dock jutting out into the water from the training center. The same guy who’d brought down water earlier offered to escort them to see the duty officer.  It wasn’t really an option to follow him or not.  He waited impatiently on the dock while they gathered all their gear.  Seeing how much they had to carry he told them to walk down to the edge of the dock and wait.  He jogged off ahead.

By the time they’d gotten to the end of the dock they could see him coming back.  He’d run ahead to grab a pickup truck.  The truck would’ve easily fit on the large dock.  Drew shifted the heavy pack around on his back and looked at the truck.  Then he looked at the dock and back at the truck.

“What the hell man.  This idiot couldn’t have told us to wait by the boat?”  Drew asked.  He looked like he was puffing himself up to tell the guy what he thought of him.  Haywood moved over next to him.  The truck pulled up next to them.

“Hey sorry I made you walk to the end of the dock.  We fish a lot and even with policing the dock when we’re done, we still seem to get hooks in tires left and right.  Rule is no one drives on the docks anymore.  The chief said it seemed easier to enforce than not letting kids fish anymore.”  The man bellowed out of the truck before putting it in park.  The man got out of the medium sized white pickup and walked past a speechless Drew.  Lisa was once again shaking her head at him with a little grin playing on her lips.

Their escort drove them around a couple of streets then parked beside a few other cars in front of a large government building.  It looked like it’d been a nice building back in the 1970’s maybe.  The guardsmen had put some time into crawler proofing it.  Plywood covered all of the windows.  Each piece of plywood had nails sticking out of it.  Any crawler deciding to ram face first into that window covering was going to get the point really quick.

“You know they can beat right through the plywood, right?”  LeBron asked their driver.

“For every window we did the nails on the outside with the plywood, then there’s a piece of sheet metal, then on the inside of the window we have a section of chain link fencing.  We know those things can still get in, but it slows them down big time.  Slows them down and makes a whole lot of noise.  Gives us time to make sure we’re standing in the room waiting for them when they do finally make it.”  The man said proudly.

“What if a bunch of them come through that window?  Do you have a fallback place in every building?”  LeBron asked.

“Yeah.  Something like that.  The OD might give you a tour if you ask nice.  You’ll get one at some point if you’re staying here for very long.  We like to run drills to make sure everybody knows what to do if it hits the fan you know.”  The guard had such a thick Jersey accent it was hard to follow what he was saying but they all got the gist of it.

They stopped in front of a set of doors labeled officer’s mess.  Their escort knocked a couple of times then saluted when an older man opened the door.  The older man dismissed their escort but told him not to go too far.  He then opened the door a little wider so they could all enter the mess.

Inside a couple of men were sitting around with cups of coffee talking.  A radio in the corner periodically went off as patrols reported in on their rounds.  The uniformed men in the corner wound down their conversations and turned their heads to acknowledge the newcomers.  One of them asked if they’d like some coffee.  Jeff had obviously been waiting for them to ask.  He took off like someone had been holding him back in a slingshot.

“You’re Jeff, right?  The director for continuation?”  One of the officers over at the table asked.

“Yes sir.  That’d be me.”  Jeff answered.  The officer got up and walked over towards him with his hand extended to shake.

“Good to see you made it.  I’m Commander Scott.  I’m the XO for Cape May.  Captain Kate’s been notified you’re here.  She plans on swinging by once she’s dealt with another issue.”  Commander Scott said as Jeff carefully shook the commander’s hand while trying not to spill his coffee.  For an organization that chugged as much coffee as the Coast Guard did, they had ridiculously dainty mugs in the coffee mess.

“Thank you, commander.  Have we met?”  Jeff asked.

“No.  Kate’s met you though.  She was in on tons of meetings with homeland security when everything was going to hell.  She said you were a calm and steady voice in those times.  A lot of the people alive today owe you a debt of gratitude.  She also shared the plans you’d written for how we come out of a mess like this.  I read them cover to cover.  I bet you never thought any of that stuff would ever see the light of day, did you?”  The commander asked with a grin.

A steward interrupted the conversation by entering and setting places for each of them.  He had them all sit down then busied himself getting their drink orders.  He told them what was available for food and took those orders as well.  He disappeared promising to come back with food.

“The military really loves to eat.”  Lisa said with a grin.

“Armies travel on their stomachs.  That was Alexander the great or somebody.  Known fact since forever.”  LeBron said,

“I think it was Napoleon actually.  Although who’s to say he didn’t get it off Alexander.”  Commander Scott said joining in.  LeBron decided he liked the man even if he had just corrected him.  It wasn’t like he could argue the point either.  With no more Siri on his cell phone he’d have to run down to the local library to do the research.  No one was going to sit around for his ‘I told you so’ if it took him like three days to get back with the answer.

“Well thanks for the compliments.”  Jeff remarked.  “To be honest you’re right that we never expected most of our plans to be taken seriously.  We weren’t sitting around waiting for the world to end you know.  We were sitting around coming up with ways to deal with cataclysmic hypotheticals.  The closest we got to anything real was when FEMA asked us to help them come up with the best places to stash supplies for massive storms and such.  We actually used a lot of that work as the foundation for the supply depots we did end up doing.”

“Having been the recipient of literally tons of those supplies we thank you.  You’re one of the main reasons we’re still here.”  Scott said sitting back down in his original spot.

“Were you able to raise Weathertop and let them know we’re here?”  Jeff asked.

“No.  We haven’t heard from them in a few days which is weird.  We normally talk pretty often.  They like to know which ships have stopped by.”  Scott answered with a slightly winkled brow to show his concern.  Radio communication with Weathertop and monthly visits from the ships sailing up and down the coast were their only real sources of news.

“You guys had any problems with the locals?”  Haywood asked.  He had to hold himself back from asking where the chief’s mess was.  He knew he could get all the info he needed a lot faster there.  He’d wanted to fall asleep while the commander and Jeff sat there talking about Jeff’s essay or whatever it was the government used to pay him to do.  It was wonderful and all, but they needed to work off what was now common knowledge.  It was impressive Jeff had outlined an issue like this and come up with some preventative measures before it even happened but at this point who cared?

Haywood wondered if he was going to get a straight answer from the commander.  He seemed to be deliberately taking his time.  Haywood rubbed the back of his head where the big welt was and wondered if that was what was putting him in such a bad mood.  He was normally a lot easier going.  Of course the world didn’t normally seem like it only existed to spin too fast and make him want to puke.

“We’ve had some issues with people taking pot shots when we’ve sent out scavenging crews.  They came to the other side of the bridge once demanding we give up our supplies and turn the base over to them.  They seemed a bit crazy.  Although living out by the city the way they do would probably drive anybody crazy.  We were willing to help them, but they were overly aggressive.”  Scott finally answered.

“How’d you get rid of them?”  Drew asked.  He didn’t have a pounding headache like Haywood so there was no real reason for him to be so straightforward.  No real reason except that he was Drew and that was just the way he was.

“We have some really big helicopters with really big guns on them.  We whip those out when the big guns on our boats don’t do the trick.  Luckily, they got the hint and took off.  I’d hate to waste ammunition fighting other survivors.  We need it for the millions of crawlerz out there doing their best to kill us all.”  Scott answered to a chorus of nodding and agreement.

Remembering the scumbags who’d attacked them outside of Philly Drew was ok with sending a few bullets their way.  Seriously.  What the hell?  He smiled to himself.  If those morons had known that the guy who wrote up the orders the President had given in the beginning was on the train, he wondered how much harder they’d have tried to kill them.  He agreed with Scott in theory though.  At this point no one should be pulling the trigger unless the gun was aimed at a crawler or something they could eat.  Fighting one another was stupid.

“I’m glad you think so commander.  I’m looking forward to working with you and others to come up with the next set of plans.”  Jeff said.

“Sounds good.  What are these going to be for?”  Scott asked.

“How to take back our world.  We’ve been knocked down but we’re not out.  Weapons, intelligence and being able to operate during the day give us a lot of advantages.  We can and will shift to being on the offensive.  It’s the only way I see us coming out of this thing successfully.”  Jeff said.  Yue smiled fondly at her man.  He was displaying a lot of passion right now.  She agreed completely that this was the kind of topic he should be excited about.  Everyone should.

“Let’s do it.  Semper Paratus.”  Scott said with a grin.

“What’s Semper Paratus mean?”  Drew asked LeBron.  It was one of those times when there was a weird silence in the room. His question hung in the air for everyone to hear.  The short woman with her hair tied back who’d just entered the room answered it for him.

“Always ready son.  It’s the official Coast Guard motto.”  Captain Kate answered.

Chapter 26:  Attention on Deck

“Then what’s the unofficial motto?”  Drew asked.  It’d sounded to him like she wanted someone to ask.  He looked around wondering why everyone in the room was standing.  Haywood kicked him in the shin and gestured at him like he was an idiot.  Realizing he was an idiot he belatedly scrambled to his feet.

“You’ve got to go out, but you don’t have to come back.”  Captain Kate said with a rakish grin.  She waved at everyone to sit back down and made a beeline for the coffeepot.  Jeff noticed all the officers had their own cups instead of trying to deal with the dainty tea party cups.  Drew and Lisa both looked a little lost on what the unofficial slogan meant.  Scott must have noticed as he filled them in while Kate was busy mixing up her coffee.

“Since the Coast Guard was founded a major part of our mission has been search and rescue.  Every moron who decides to go out in the middle of a storm becomes someone we have to rescue.  We’re expected to go out in that storm and rescue them.  Which makes us bigger morons than they are since we know how dangerous the sea can be.  We go anyway though.”  Commander Scott told them.  Drew and Lisa both nodded in understanding.

“Like in that old movie the Guardian.”  Lisa said.

“Close enough.”  Scott said cringing slightly.  It was an involuntary response he had to anyone mentioning that movie.

“Well what did I walk in on?  Good to meet you in person Jeff.  Last time I saw you was on a video call.  You were telling us about how you were going to deliver a ton of gear to us.  You also told us we needed to go hardcore and get ready.  You’re pretty much the reason this base is still here.  In case I didn’t mention it before.  Thank you.”  Kate said in between sips of her coffee.  She made sure to very clearly say thank you while looking directly at Jeff.  She made it obvious she wanted everyone to know the appreciation was completely sincere.

“You’re giving me way too much credit.  Knowing you and your team here I doubt very much that I’m the main reason you’re still here.  I gave that same speech and sent the same supplies to other places.  You guys are still kicking while a few of them aren’t around anymore.  I’m just glad you took it seriously.”  Jeff replied.

“Flattery will get you everywhere.  Now tell us all why you’re here.  I trust every man in this room so feel free to speak freely.”  Kate said sitting down at the head of the table.

Jeff was interrupted by the arrival of their food.  Kate insisted they all eat first.  She kept the conversation light while they were all enjoying the first warm food they’d had in a while.  They were getting some funny looks for keeping their gloves and jackets on.  Trying to explain away bite marks all over their arms and hands could get really weird really fast.  LeBron had no doubt that if they showed off their recently bitten appendages their warm welcome would quickly turn to being kicked the hell out.  How were they supposed to explain that Yue had been chomping on them to enable their escape from the crawlerz.  They’d all been there and none of them could really get their heads around it.  None of them except Yue and she was a complete mental case half the time now anyway.

When the meal was over the steward came out and cleared the table.  He asked if anything else was needed.  Kate requested some bourbon and a bottle or two of wine.  She looked around the room and saw that no one was complaining about introducing booze into the impromptu meeting.  Harley had suddenly gained a lot more interest in what was going on.  He’d looked like he was about to fall asleep at the end of the bench until the captain had brought up bourbon.  Once the booze was delivered and passed around Kate politely asked them if they wanted anything else before once again engaging Jeff.

“OK.  Your stomachs are full, and your glasses are too.  This is a good time for you to tell us your story.  We need to know what’s going on out there.  I would send you all off to your quarters and save the story telling for tomorrow morning.  There are things happening in the world that concern me though.  I’d also love to hear why a couple of you are eating with gloves on.  It also seems a little warm in here for the long sleeves and jackets.  I imagine you’re wearing them has something to do with the bandages poking out the ends of them.”  Kate said.  Jeff laughed a little guiltily at her lead in for story time.

“Thank you.  You’ve been more than gracious.  This fresh cabbage was ridiculously good by the way.”  Jeff said.  Everyone from Jeff’s group nodded and added their own compliments on the cabbage.  Eating fresh food was amazing.  Especially fresh vegetables.

“It’s about the only thing we can get to grow in the cold.  Hoping to put in some more variety come Spring.”  Kate responded.

“That’s one of the things we’re working on as part of a more mobile strategy to take back the country.  Planting fields of corn and cabbage or whatever along the railroad tracks and major interstates.  As groups travel around the country, they’ll have food available so they can focus on their main job.”  Jeff said.  He looked up at Kate to see if she was following along.

“Makes sense.  Between the vegetables and all the game animals making a comeback I could see that working.  I assume the main job would be exterminating the infected?”  Kate asked.  She was leaning back with a generously poured cup of bourbon.  Unlike Harley she was taking the time to enjoy the finely aged liquor instead of guzzling it down like a coed on Spring Break.

“Exactly right.  We’ll have mobile teams roaming the country clearing out the biggest groups of crawlerz they can find.  We were working on figuring out how that would look from a train when we got ambushed outside of Philly.  I’m going with the ambushers not being big fans of the government.  We’d left brochures saying the government was coming to help them.  We had a whole car full of supplies to give away.”  Jeff stopped talking to dig out a couple of the brochures they’d been leaving at the train stations. Once he found them, he showed them to the officers at the table around Kate.

Jeff filled Kate and her team in on everything that’d been going on in the outside world.  The only piece he skirted around was how Yue was able to sense the crawlerz better than anyone else.  He definitely didn’t go into any kind of detail about how they’d gotten out of the tunnel.  As far as the arms went, he said that the three of them wearing gloves and long sleeves had gotten into a fight with some barbed wire while trying to get away from a pack of crawlerz.  The way he worked it into the story didn’t make much sense.  He really needed to up the game on his poker face as well.

“I’m curious how you see us fitting into this mobile strategy?  In your original plan we were supposed to build big walled cities and grow veggies until the threat died out.  We don’t have much in the way of walls, but the inlet seems to be doing the trick for us.  We just get the random crawler who washes up alive.  Why would we leave here to go ride around in trains?”  Kate asked.  It was a very good question.  One that Jeff had already put a lot of thought into an answer for.

“Semper Paratus sums it up.  Especially when you add your unofficial motto onto it.  This country needs a force to start clearing it out.  Those pyramids were old as dirt and those things were still bouncing around inside.  Waiting them out doesn’t really seem like an option.”  Jeff answered her.

“How many other bases are in on this?  We’ll do our part.  We don’t have close to enough people here to do everyone’s part though.  We’ll need to hold back men in reserve just to keep this base up and operational.  Risking our lives to rescue others is part of our ethos.  I’ll give you that.  We don’t need a guarantee we’ll survive the battle.  We do need to know there’s something out there worth saving though.”  Kate said.

“It’s going to come down to either taking back the country or watching all the bases fall one by one.  On top of outnumbering us by thousands to one the enemy also keeps developing new talents.”  Jeff yawned during the last part of that sentence.

“It’s late and you guys have had a long day.  I’ll have the steward show you to your quarters.  I’m going to send a doctor around to check on each of you.  We want to make sure those barbed wire cuts don’t get infected.  Let us know if there’s anything you need.”  Kate said.  She finished up with her goodbyes and left to give the steward her orders.  Seeing the party was over the rest of the officers said their farewells and left the room as well.

They were taken to what had once been a classroom in the large administrative building they were in.  The classroom had been converted to temporary living quarters.  Beds lined the sides of the room and there were boxes of clothes in the middle of the room with the sizes written on them.  Personal hygiene products were also stacked up along the wall.  The room was setup to work as intake for refugees.  Yue walked straight to one of the beds and collapsed on top it.  She was asleep before their escort had even made it out of the room.

“What do we do about the doctors coming?”  Drew asked Jeff.  “They’re going to want to look under the bandages.”

“I don’t know.”  A defeated looking Jeff was struggling against his own exhaustion.  His arms and palms were itching like hell.  He’d actually love to ask a doctor what to do about the bite wounds.  The problem was that the doctor’s first instinct was going to be to back away and call for the guards.  Nobody in their right mind was going to hang out in a room full of people with human bite marks on their bodies.  Jeff looked around the room to see if anyone else had any ideas.

A quick survey of everyone in the room who was awake revealed not a single person had a decent idea.  When put on the spot each of them had tried to come up with something.  The only answer that made any sense was eating as much as they could before getting kicked off the base.  Which may work out fine for them, but it didn’t really help with the big picture.  Jeff was frustrated with the lackluster response.  He was also pissed they didn’t seem to care if they were kicked off the cape or not.

“We need these people to support this!  We need these people and pretty much anyone else we can get.  Without them all this crap we’re doing is useless.  We might as well just go up in the mountains and live like hermits.”  Jeff blurted out.  His outburst got their attention. It looked like Haywood had something he wanted to say to respond.  Before he could though there was a quick knock on the door.  A grandmotherly type walked into the room without waiting for an invitation and introduced herself as the doctor.

A corner of the classroom had been curtained off.  They’d all assumed that was the bathroom bucket area.  It turned out that was where new people on the cape went for their wellness check.  The woman joked about making sure they didn’t have lice.  They all knew what she was looking for was far worse.

The woman asked them to go in the curtained off area one by one and strip.  None of them could think of a way around it.  She was firm as to what they needed to do.  She did a complete physical evaluation of each of them.  She clucked her tongue more than a few times at the state of their bodies.  Harley especially got the third degree from her.  She’d figured out one of his fingers was broken and that he hadn’t even noticed.  He hadn’t noticed because he pretty much lived in a cloud of pain killers and anti-depressants.  They all got to hear her explain to him why he needed to make a choice to either shape up or die soon.

There was finally no one left for her to examine except for LeBron, Drew, Yue and Jeff.  Yue was fast asleep, so the doctor said they’d wait and do her last.  She invited Jeff to come on down when the three of them just stood there staring at her.  Jeff walked in the room thinking he’d just suck it up and tell the woman the truth.  She was a doctor.  She might understand.  At the last second, he thought of a lie that might work and decided to go for it.  He stripped down to his boxers and told her to come on in.

She looked him up and down with more of that tongue clucking.  She stepped forward with some scissors and gingerly worked the bandages covering his hands and arms.  She studied the wounds for a second before gasping and letting go.

“Those are bites from a crawler.”  She said accusingly.

“Nope.  They’re from a guy who was turned and ripped into us the second he did.  The first guy he bit turned.  We had to kill him but the rest of us seem to be ok.  We’re thinking whatever saliva needs to be in the surger’s mouth to turn someone all got used up on the first guy.”  Jeff stopped himself from talking.  He knew he sucked at lying so he was doing his best to be succinct.  The less he talked the less chance he’d screw it up.  At least that’s what he told himself.

“More of you have fresh bite marks like this?”  The doctor asked.  She was now outside the curtains.  She turned to look at Drew and LeBron.  LeBron jumped in before Drew could say anything stupid.

“Yes ma’am.  We were shocked when we didn’t turn.”  LeBron said.  Mostly to just have something to say.

“Yeah, I was about to shoot both of them then eat my own gun.”  Drew added helpfully.  He was getting into the spirit of it.  He enjoyed a good lie and was eager to be part of it.

The doctor got herself under control and woke up Yue to look her over.  Once she determined Yue was bite free, she had everyone leave the room except for LeBron, Drew and Jeff.  The three of them stood in the classroom and listened to the sound of the door being closed on them.  A little bit later they heard the sounds of drilling as locks were put on the outside of the door.  More drilling seemed to indicate even more of a barrier being put up out there to keep them in.

“At least they didn’t just shoot us in the head right away.”  Drew said sitting down on one of the beds.  When no one seemed int the mood to talk he sighed and lay down to get some shuteye.  It seemed to him like they were going to be in this room for a while.  Might as well get some rest.

Chapter 27:  Quarantined

They were able to get plenty of rest.  There wasn’t much else to do, and they all needed it.  After they’d been there a day someone knocked on the door and asked if they were ok.  After they convinced the person on the other side of the door that they were ok they heard the barricades being removed.  They stood there waiting to see what was going to happen.  When the door finally opened, they found themselves staring down the barrels of a couple of shotguns.

“Those barbed wire cuts getting any better?”  Captain Kate asked from behind the armed guards.

“Telling you the truth when we’d already sat down and started eating with you guys just seemed a little awkward.  We’ve seen people turn enough to know how it works.  I apologize for the lying but I still don’t think you’re in any danger from us.”  Jeff said.

“I just wanted to come by to tell you that you’ll be in there another week just to be on the safe side.  Also, I wanted to let you know that we still haven’t been able to raise Weathertop.  Once they answer we’ll let them know you’re here.”  Kate said.

“If you could leave out the details of our current status in your report to them that’d be appreciated.”  Jeff said with a smile.

“Sure.  I’ll just tell them you’re recovering from a nasty barbed wire incident.  The doctor’s going to check on you now.  Then we’re going to seal you in here with some buckets and enough food to last a week.  There’s a guard on your door.  If you need anything just knock.  Try not to need anything.”  Kate waved and walked away.

“At least we each get our own bucket.”  Drew said after the doctor had checked each of them out.  They organized the supplies and went back to bed.

Jeff spent a good portion of the week writing down ideas for reclaiming the countryside.  LeBron and Drew tossed ideas at him as they thought of them.  They came up with plenty of survival ideas but not so much on the massacring the monsters side of the house.  The best they could come up with was rigging claymore style explosives around their train cars each night.  Once they had the explosives setup, they’d use cameras on top of the cars to determine when to pull the trigger.  That should allow them to kill hundreds per night per team.

They went through multiple iterations of making the killing more efficient.  They talked about using bioweapons.  None of them were really comfortable setting off another plague to try to stop the one already killing them though.  Nuclear weapons were ruled out as well.  Those would kill massive numbers of crawlerz, but it’d also render parts of the countryside uninhabitable.  It’s not like they had access to any nuclear devices anyway.  The only way that’d work was if Jeff got the President on board.

By the time the barricades were removed to let them out of quarantine they’d come to the conclusion that getting rid of the infected was going to take a while.  Trying to kill millions of the enemy by luring them into ambushes every night was going to be a long and dangerous process.  LeBron had started doing the math at one point then stopped once he saw how the answer was coming out.  Jeff had seen what he was doing and asked how bad it was.  LeBron had told him they needed to get serious about stepping up their recruitment efforts.  The more trucks and trains working the mobile claymore strategy the better.

Yue rushed in the room to hug Jeff as soon as the barricades came down.  The doctor and the guards tried to stop her, but Yue was a force of nature.  Especially now that she was in a crawler free environment.  Without that constant buzzing in her head she’d almost returned to her normal self.  She’d spent the last week Valium free doing pretty much the same thing that Jeff had been doing.  She’d consumed way too much coffee and tried to come up with ideas on how to take back America.

Lisa came in right behind Yue making a beeline for Drew.  The two of them intertwined in a passionate PDA display that was edging towards a PG-13 rating.  Harley barked out for them to get a room and they finally got the hint.  Haywood and Harley were much more reserved in their greetings.  A handshake and a quick greeting pretty much taking care of them being separated for a week.  Men could be apart for years from their friends and when they met up, they’d just pick up right where they left off.  It was one of the few characteristics that distinguished them from the fairer sex that Yue was jealous of.

Jeff was informed he’d been invited to attend dinner that evening in the officers mess with his plus one.  The rest of the group had been downgraded to eating in the enlisted galley.  Everyone except Haywood anyway. He’d been able to walk right into the chiefs dining room.  It wasn’t as fancy as the officers mess was, but you also didn’t have to wait until after dinner to break open the bourbon.  The seasoned warrior was instantly welcomed by the other chiefs.

Jeff left to go check in with Kate and see if there was any more news on Weathertop.  Haywood and Harley offered to help Drew and LeBron move all their junk into their new room.  While they were packing up a man showed up with a mop bucket and some other cleaning supplies.  When Drew said they’d hurry up and get out of his way the blue flight suit wearing enlisted man smiled and shook his head.  He informed them that the captain herself had told him to drop off these supplies for Drew and LeBron to field day the room before they moved.

Haywood and Harley both suddenly remembered they had urgent business elsewhere and disappeared.  Yue and Lisa hung out right up until Drew asked if they could help with emptying their buckets.  Drew thought it was hilarious.  The girls did not.  Drew and LeBron ended up cleaning the whole room by themselves.  The enlisted man who’d brought the supplies down was helpful enough.  As long as they just needed to be told when something wasn’t clean enough yet.  He was happy to point those items out.

When they’d gotten the room cleaned to the approval of the man who’d been sent to watch them, they were given a shopping cart to get their gear loaded up in.  The man continued to watch them as they did all of the work.  At least he watched them when he wasn’t busy with the little handheld blackjack game he was playing.  Seeing that they were ready to go he shoved the game in his pocket and took them down the hall to an exit.

Outside they piled their gear in the back of a pickup truck for the short ride to the barracks.  The big building coming up had been covered with solar cells to generate power.  Their escort told them they’d gone out on a couple of missions to collect all the wires and piece parts needed to hook up the solar cells.  The original shipment had arrived at the beginning of everything though.

“That would’ve been Jeff or one of the guys under him.  So all the buildings have power now?”  LeBron asked.

The seaman shook his head.  “Just this one barracks has it.  The admin center where you guys were just at has it.  That’s pretty much it.  A couple of the houses have it too.  Those were the ones who had it before everything happened though.”

“Does everyone live in the barracks then?”  Drew asked.

The seaman nodded again as he pulled into the parking lot for the barracks.  There was a good bit of activity going on in the early morning sun.  The strong breeze from the ocean not doing anything to slow down a game of kickball in the field adjacent to the barracks.  There were adults playing along with a handful of kids.  The seaman noticed them looking over at the kickball game.

“Yeah.  Everybody from the cape who’s alive lives here now.  That includes the civilians and their families who decided to stay.  We do outdoor stuff during the day to keep everybody active.  There’s still a guard or two around on a just in case basis.  Plus even the kids are carrying these days.”  The seaman said with a disbelieving grin.

This time the seaman helped them carry their gear.  They were assigned racks in a long row of bunks.  While some of the bunks were definitely in use a lot of them were empty.  Lisa and Yue were waiting for them when they showed up.  They told them that Haywood and Harley were on bike patrol.

Bike patrol was how they kept up regular patrols of the island without using up all their gas.  During the day there were always at least three groups of at least three armed men apiece riding bikes around the island.  They were in charge of checking the beach for any signs of the infected.  Yue and Lisa both seemed amused by something as they told them what they knew about the bike patrol.  LeBron asked what it was.  A very giggly Lisa told them to watch Harley and Haywood when they came back.

Unable to get any more information than that out of them they busied themselves with stowing their gear.  That exercise mainly consisted of shoving all their extra weapons and ammunition into the footlockers at the bottom of the racks.  A few people came by and introduced themselves as they were doing that.  It was mostly a collection of refugees and military guys who swung by.  One of the refugees had a really strong accent.  He turned out to be a merchant marine who’d ended up in Cape May when his ship left him in port.

“I take it the people here aren’t like the ones who ambushed us.”  Drew remarked once the short stream of well-wishers had ended.

Yue shrugged and told them her thoughts.  “Most of them seem happy to be somewhere safe like this.  Even if they do occasionally have to go out on scavenging missions. It’s not like anywhere is really safe now a days.  They seem to get that though.”

“There’s a bar here.”  Lisa said.

“Really?”  Drew asked.

“So we’ve been told.  We were waiting on you guys to get out before we went over to check it out.  This place is way too testosterone heavy for me to want to walk into somewhere with alcohol flowing without an escort.”  Yue answered.

Lisa smiled.  “Want to go check it out?”  She asked.  She was fairly bouncing with enthusiasm.  She was thrilled to have Drew back out of quarantine.  If they could spend the day doing something fun like bar games, then that’d be the cherry on top for her.  It was only a matter of time before they’d all be given jobs if they hung around long enough.  She was ok with that.  A little manual labor was a fair trade to stay in a nice safe place like this.  It was what everyone wanted in this new normal.  She was planning to enjoy the hell out of it while it lasted.  There was no doubt in her mind that they’d be back out on the road risking their lives again in no time.

It was a decent walk to the rec hall they were talking about.  The place was opened up for four hours per day to allow people time to swing by and enjoy the activities if they weren’t on duty.  There was plenty of alcohol available from the scavenging missions that’d been sent out.  No one was allowed to get too drunk anyway so that helped with keeping up on the inventory.  There were pool tables, a dart board and all the standard bar type games.  All of them had been configured so that you didn’t have to put in money to play.  The place was lit up with some battery powered lanterns hung in strategic locations along with the windows being left wide open.

“Pool?  Boys against the girls?”  Lisa asked.

“Should be fun.  They both suck.”  Yue said following Lisa over to an empty table.  There weren’t that many people actually in the center.  Even if it was opened and theoretically allowed it wasn’t like getting drunk in the middle of the week was highly encouraged.  Most people just came by on the weekends when they were excused from normal duties.

Drew worked on getting the balls racked up.  He was thinking how surreal all of this was.  He was loving that it kind of felt like him and Lisa were on an actual date.  True they were on the date with his brother and sister but whatever.  If their first date had to be a double date, he couldn’t think of two people he’d rather have along with them.  He stood back to watch Yue break and groaned when she got a ball in right off the break.

He was reconsidering letting Yue come on any more dates as they played.  She was basically a pool shark.  He wasn’t sure when she’d gotten so good, but she was pretty ridiculous.  A few of the men from the table next to them had stopped and were commenting on how good she was doing.  It took Drew a minute to realize the compliments had transitioned from how good she was doing to how good she was looking.  Yue just laughed it off and kept playing.

One of the men who was slurring his words started asking them all kinds of personal questions.  He was also getting a little handsy.  Yue asked his friends to get the guy to back off and they just laughed.  LeBron looked around to see if there was a guard of some sort in the room.  He had a bad feeling about where this was going.  The drunk men harassing them had about ten years on them and at least fifty pounds.  Not that it mattered when everyone was covered in weapons.

The men weren’t military.  They let on that they’d been truck drivers and still knew where tons of supplies were.  Only one of them was being truly obnoxious.  The other two just weren’t doing anything to try and stop him.  He got too close to Lisa and she turned around and pushed him off of her.  The man stepped back laughing and acting like it was no big deal.  LeBron had his arms solidly locked around Drew and was telling him it wasn’t worth it.  By the way Drew was shifting around LeBron was worried that Drew was starting to absolutely think that it was worth it.

“What’s not worth it boy?”  The drunk man slurred over at Drew.

“It’s cool.  We’re leaving.  You guys can have the place.”  Yue said trying to stop what looked like was about to happen.

One of the men with the drunk guy laughed.  It wasn’t like the other two weren’t drinking heavily either.  This wasn’t going to end well.  The drunk guy who’d tried to rub up on Lisa and appeared to be the ringleader decided to answer.

“Oh no.  We don’t want you and the other little hottie here to leave.  Just these two little boys you brought in with you.”  The man took a threatening step towards Lisa.  She backed away from him with her hand going to her belt to rest on her pistol.  One of the men must’ve realized this was going too far.

“Hey!  We’re sorry.  You guys keep playing.  We’ll go back to our side.  We don’t get out much and we haven’t been around any single ladies lately.”  The man said.

“They’re not single you asshole.”  Drew said throwing LeBron’s arms off of him.  He walked up to the main guy and got right in his face.  It looked like a David and Goliath kind of fight was about to happen.  The man towered over Drew.

“Wait!”  Yue shouted.  Everyone looked over at her.

“Yeah gorgeous?”  The man Drew was facing off with asked.

“No weapons.  Drop them on the table over there.  You win we’ll play a game with you.  You lose the three of you walk out of here.”  Yue said.  The big man laughed and agreed with a glance at the kid he towered over.  Drew and the man both stripped off their obvious weapons and turned to face each other.  Anyone who didn’t know Drew would’ve thought Yue had lost her mind.

The truck driver was six foot something with biceps he was showing off in all their red neck glory.  What he didn’t know was Drew had been winning state tournaments in wrestling before any of this happened.  He’d spent a good part of his life in foster homes getting the hell beat out of him before he learned to fight back.  Since the first infected had shown up Drew had woken up every day and fought for his life.  Mr. Tall Guy was about to learn a lesson in humility.

The man stood there smirking.  Normally his size made it where he didn’t actually have to fight.  Most people took one look at him and let him have his way.  Drew stood directly in front of him and shot him the bird.  Looking to end this quickly the man lunged forward and swung a hay maker.  If that powerful swing had connected, then Drew would’ve most likely woken up in the hospital.  After fighting crawlerz in the field though the truck driver was pathetically slow.

Drew felt like he was fighting in slow motion.  He ducked the punch with ease and came up with a powerful punch right into the dude’s groin.  Before the pain had even had time to set in Drew spun around behind the man and put him in a sleeper hold.  The big guy bucked around a bit but eventually Drew was able to just leave him unconscious on the floor.  He didn’t say a word.  He wasn’t even breathing hard.  He walked over to the table and started putting his weapons back on.

“Why are you still here?”  Yue asked the unconscious man’s friends.

Mouths hanging open they quickly collected their friend’s gear and exited the bar carrying their slowly recovering companion.  Yue waited until they were out the door before she started laughing.  Lisa ran over and gave Drew a big hug calling him her hero.  She was proud of him.  He’d held his jealously in check until it was appropriate.  Even then he’d let the guy off with a warning.  Lisa had been worried when Drew got in the man’s face.  She’d known he’d win the fight.  She’d just been scared he’d kill the guy by accident.

Chapter 28:  One Bite at a Time

Yue woke up with a massive headache.  Her mouth tasted like a crawler had puked in her mouth then licked it out then puked in it again before stuffing it with cotton balls.  Thinking about what her mouth tasted like made her sit upright and make a run for the bathroom.  It was a race against the sudden surge of hot mess she felt coming up her throat.  It was a race she lost before it even really began.  She crumpled down to the floor and lay there sweating.  The world spun and she kind of just wished she was dead.

“I don’t think bourbon’s your thing babe.”  Jeff said passing her a wet washcloth and a plastic cup filled with water.

“Was I an idiot?”  She asked miserably.  The last thing she remembered was slurping down some pasta while Kate was explaining the differences between the different types of bourbon.  At the thought of the explanation of how bourbon worked Yue had to put her hand over her mouth.

“No.  You were perfectly – “  Jeff started to lie and say she’d acted perfectly civilized.  If acting civilized meant professing her love for Jeff in a song she decided to make up on the spot, then she’d been very civilized.  Part of the civilized piece may have fallen away when she’d decided to switch to her own rendition of the Sir Mixalot classic “Baby Got Back” for an impromptu dance number.  Luckily for everyone concerned she’d found a couch soon afterwards to pass out on.

“You hesitated.”  Yue said looking at Jeff accusingly.

Jeff smiled at his miserable looking plus one.  “You were the life of the party babe.  In the future you may just want to pace yourself a little better.  I understand you want to become a connoisseur of the finer things, but you’ve got plenty of time.  If you want to party like a rock star, I’m down with that too.”

“Shut up I hate you.”  Yue said.  She used the towel to wipe her mouth off then climbed back into bed.  She was in the room Jeff had been given due to his rank.  She was thinking she might just go to her own bed in the barracks instead.  Jeff’s room reeked of puke now.  Getting all that out of her system seemed to have helped some.  She fell back asleep sideways on the bed.  Jeff pulled a cover over her and got to work on cleaning up the bourbon scented vomit that was pretty much everywhere.

The next time Yue woke up she felt a little more human.  Her mouth still tasted so bad that she wished she could throw it away and get another one.  Other than her mouth tasting bad and a pounding headache she felt ok though.  She sat up and looked over at Jeff.  He’d fallen asleep in the chair at the desk in the corner of the room.  He must’ve sense her looking.  His eyes snapped open as he gave her a worried grin.

“How are you feeling?”  He asked her in a gentle, soft voice.

“Like crap.  Why am I naked?”  Yue asked suddenly realizing she was in fact without clothes.

“You decided you wanted to take a shower at one point last night.”  Jeff said smiling.  Yue didn’t like the way he was smiling.

“You don’t have a bathroom in here though, right?  It’s down the hall?”  Yue asked completely confused.  She was worried she’d been walking around in the hallway naked.  She stared at Jeff waiting for him to tell her what’d happened.

“Nope.  You stripped down and passed out in the closet.”  Jeff said laughing.

“I.  What?  How did I get back in?”  Yue stumbled all over her words.  She was completely mortified.  She was going to need to dig a hole somewhere to hide in.  No way she was ever going to leave this room again.

“Don’t worry.  I wrapped you up in a sheet and put you back in bed.  I was a perfect gentlemen.”  Jeff said.  He didn’t mention that she’d been covered in her own puke at the time.  It’d made being a perfect gentlemen a lot easier.  The shower hadn’t been the only bathroom fixture she’d gotten confused about the night before either.  He’d take that secret to the grave.

Yue leaned back against the wall and shut her eyes.  She didn’t even know the words to say how sorry she was.  All she wanted at this point was a toothbrush, a bottle of aspirin and a rocket ship that’d take her to the dark side of the moon.  She was wondering how to slip out of his room and find somewhere to hide in shame when someone knocked on the door.  She immediately opened her eyes and started shaking her aching head.  No way in hell did she want anyone to see her like this.

Jeff got up and went to the door.  He cracked it open enough to see that it was Captain Kate herself standing outside.  Her nostrils flared at the pungent odor of cleaners mixed with vomit.  She didn’t try and push her way into the room.  Rather she handed him a plastic bag and let him know to come find her once Yue was feeling better.  She wanted to continue the planning session they’d started the night before.

She left after a final goodbye and Jeff closed the door.  He opened up the bag and was happy to see there was a bottle of aspirin, one of those hot water bags and an actual orange Gatorade still in the original container.  As hungover as she was Yue still appreciated the gesture.  The Gatorade was valuable currency in today’s world.  It touched Yue that the captain had been willing to drop it off herself as well.  All in all it made her feel about a thousand times worse.

“You heard the captain.”  Jeff said.  “Chug that Gatorade and take some pills.  Once you feel better, we’re going to go meet up with her to do some more planning.  The sooner we get people out there killing crawlerz the better.”

A few hours later Yue was ready to face the music.  She’d sent Jeff out to get her food.  He’d brought her back a stack of pancakes which almost made Yue cry.  He was so good to her even after she’d embarrassed the hell out of him the night before.  It made it worse that he was so nonchalant about it.  She almost wished he’d get pissed off at her.  If he’d yell at her then she’d have someone to yell at.  That sounded better than sitting in bed being mad at herself for whatever shenanigans she’d pulled the night before.

“I’m ready.”  Yue said in a shaky voice.  Her headache was mostly under control now.  She didn’t want to go but she didn’t want to be left out either.  She wasn’t ready to live in a world where the men folk got to decide what they were going to do.  It occurred to her that wasn’t really a fair thought since Jeff was going to go meet with a woman to figure out next steps.  The woman who was in charge of the whole base.  It was more about deciding her own fate than pure feminism evidently.  She basically just wanted to hurry up and get past whatever idiocy had happened the night before.

They found Kate in her office drinking coffee.  Commander Scott was also in the room with her.  She signaled them to come in and grab a seat.  Once they were sitting down, she asked them if they wanted any coffee or anything.  It being a hungover Yue and your everyday Jeff they absolutely did.  Scott left and came back with a seaman carrying a tray with a coffee thermos and two mugs on it.  They each started putting together their drinks while making small talk.

“As part of this plan to reclaim North America I think we need to capture at least a couple of cows and bring them back here.  I know most people just drink it black now or use the dried creamer, but I miss milk.  I’d kill for a latte.”  Kate said with a grin.

Yue smiled and told Kate how they’d talked about what they’d do once the coffee supplies started running out.  The four of them agreed that’d be a solid reason to get in a big boat and head south.  Yue was feeling better every second.  It occurred to her that with everything else going on in the world her getting drunk and acting like an idiot wasn’t going to be front page news.  Jeff wasn’t big on idle chit chat, so he went ahead and kicked off the real reason they were there.

“I think at this point we’ve hashed out the plan pretty well.  The numbers suck but it seems doable.  We could always do something else if someone eventually figures out something better.”  Jeff said.  He was referring to putting teams in trains and trucks and training them on how to setup explosives to kill off the crawlerz who’d come for them at night.  It really was going to take forever but if they never got started then it’d never get done.

“Yeah.  I agree.  At some point we need to start eating the elephant.  For it to have any chance of working though we’re going to need teams of people to go out and do it.  We still haven’t been able to raise Weathertop.  Everyone else we’ve reached out to is in the same boat.”  Commander Scott said.

“Weathertop’s not that far from here.  We should send a team to check it out.”  Jeff said.  The looks he got back from Kate and Scott pretty clearly indicated what they thought of that plan.  They were ok with sending scavenging missions out but sending people any further than that required volunteers.  They were pretty sure they could recruit some volunteers for the country clearing mission they were putting together.  Sending people to a secret base that’d suddenly stopped communicating?  That sounded like a one way ticket to everyone in the room.

The most likely reason Weathertop had gone offline was because it’d been overrun by the infected.  It seemed extremely unlikely but so had losing an aircraft carrier in the middle of the ocean.  They all knew that if a group of people stayed in a single place for too long that eventually the demons would find a way in.  Typically that way in was handed to them on a silver platter by the frustration people felt at being locked away underground for months at a time.  The crawlerz were fully capable of digging into the dirt like moles then finding a weakness somewhere to exploit but they mostly didn’t have to get that fancy.

“We could go.  It’s not far.  We could make it there and back in a day if we had to.”  Yue said.

“The sooner we get there the sooner we can talk them into lending us some troops to get the party started.  Weathertop is also the only place left on the continent with a decent computer system.  We should be able to pull a half accurate inventory of where the military has all their explosives stored.”  Jeff said.

Commander Scott nodded thoughtfully.  “You might want to look and see if they kept records on fertilizer and dynamite and other stuff that could be used to make bombs.  Homeland security should’ve been tracking all of that.  You don’t necessarily need claymores if you have sticks of dynamite and bags of ball bearings.”

Kate stood up and announced she had someplace else to be.  She left Commander Scott to work with them on the logistics piece.  He let them know she was meeting a ship with some wounded on it who were going to stay on land while they healed.  The ship they were on had caught on fire.  They’d put the fire out but not before it raged through part of the berthing area.

“How are the people out on the ships doing?”  Yue asked.

Scott held his hand out and seesawed it back and forth before answering.  “The ones on the nuclear powered ships are cruising around doing pretty good.  Everyone else has either found a place to weigh anchor or ended up dead. There was a fleet of cruise ships that went south looking for a place to land and start a new life.  They were loaded down with people.  The last we heard from them they were almost out of fuel and still trying to find somewhere safe to land.  They wanted somewhere that wasn’t crawling with the infected or defended by men with big guns.  It’s not like anybody wanted tens of thousands of people suddenly coming ashore to join them.”

“What about sailboats?”  Yue asked Scott.  She’d heard repetitively about the ships powered by nuclear reactors being able to keep on cruising.  She’d been curious why people weren’t just using sailboats.  It wasn’t like the apocalypse had gotten rid of the wind.

“Sure.  The Eagle is actually anchored off Block Island right now.  She’s a three hundred foot beast with three masts.  She’s gone from being the antique training ship to being our most modern vessel.  There’s plenty of others out there as well.  It kind of boils down to where are they able to actually go?”  Scott answered.

“I’m thinking for the trip to Weathertop we just need a couple of trucks gassed up and ready to go in the morning.”  Jeff interrupted the tangent that Scott and Yue had gotten off on.  He was hoping to steer them back on course.  It was too late in the day for them to leave now but he’d like to have everything ready to take off first thing in the morning.  The sooner they got done organizing the mass murder of millions of crawlerz the better.  He was hoping that as they did it, they’d come up with ways to speed up the process.

He eventually wanted a normal life with Yue.  A life that didn’t involve nightly discharges of hundreds of ball bearings into the walls of flesh that’d be trying to get at them.  Commander Scott realized he’d let himself get way off track.  He coughed and mentally pulled back from the conversation him and Yue had been having.  It was almost comical the way his face lost some of its animation as he turned to focus on the task at hand.

Chapter 29:  Don’t Forget the Snacks

“Go away.”  Drew slapped at the hand that’d dared poke him in the shoulder while he was trying to sleep.  There was the annoying trilling sound of an alarm going off on a smart phone somewhere.  He finally figured out it was his.

“We’ve got to go bro.”  LeBron poked the bear one more time then jumped backwards when Drew took a swing at him.  LeBron watched until Drew dragged himself out of bed and started pulling all his crap together.  If the other side of the barracks was on fire Drew would hit snooze to try and get a few more minutes of sleep before the fire spread to their side.  You had to make sure he was completely out of bed or it was almost guaranteed he’d fall back asleep.

Drew started to ask why they had to leave so early.  Then he remembered it hadn’t sounded bad at all the night before.  When that four in the morning wakeup call was still ten hours away the plan had made a lot of sense.  Lisa and LeBron and the other smart people who’d gone to bed early were probably still fine with it.  Drew had stayed up late with Harley and a couple of other guys playing cards.  At least he hadn’t been drinking like a fish.  Harley may have an even harder time getting out of bed than Drew had.

They were leaving early so they had time to get all their gear together and get down to the docks before sunrise.  They’d be taken by boat over to where Commander Scott had two trucks waiting for them.  He’d sent men over the day before to make sure the trucks were gassed up and ready to go.  From there it should be about a four hour drive to Weathertop.  That’s about how long it would’ve taken in the old days with minimal traffic anyway.

Once they started driving it was going to be a Weathertop or bust kind of situation.  They weren’t taking a big rig with a nice safe trailer to sleep in.  They were taking a couple of Ford trucks.  They were nice trucks, but they were in no way, shape, or form crawler resistant.  If they made it to Weathertop and the place had been overrun, then the plan was to turn around and haul ass back to Cape May.  They were all hoping it’d turn out to be something less dramatic.  A generator failure or something along those lines.

It wasn’t just the Cape May folks who were waiting to see what they found out.  All up and down the coast people would be tuning in to see what was discovered.  Weathertop had been the hub of communication flow between all the facilities up until now.  Having them drop off the air like that had a lot of people wondering if there even was a government anymore. If all the leaders were dead, then they really were on their own.  They may have all thought the orders coming out of Weathertop were idiotic at times but at least there’d been someone somewhere trying to get them all organized.  Someone speaking from a position of legitimate power keeping them all bound together.

Drew helped Lisa carry her stuff outside to the truck.  It felt horribly wrong to be traipsing around outside in the dark.  Every bit of his sleepiness had melted away when he realized he was going to be walking out of the barracks into the yard at nighttime.  Even after Yue had walked over and told him she didn’t sense anything he’d still kept a pistol in his hand.  Not that he’d be able to defend himself if a stalker came out of nowhere at lightspeed to sink its teeth into him.

The crawlerz owned the night now.  That was a truth anyone who’d spent time out in the field thoroughly believed.  The men helping them get loaded up were walking around shining flashlights all over the place.  They even had the gall to be talking and laughing to one another.  These guys would make it about five seconds on the other side of the inlet.  Hell they better hope like crazy that no crawlerz managed to swim across.  They’d hear that conversation from miles away.

They got the truck loaded up and made the short trip over to the dock.  The chief who was taking them across shook hands with Haywood when he boarded.  The two NCOs had bonded over a shared love of expensive bourbon and fishing.  Fishing now being a little more stressful than the old days. In Cape May it was the only fresh food you were getting unless you liked cabbage.  Some people like the two bromancing chiefs loved the simplicity of it.  You fished, you caught fish, you ate them, then you went to bed.  You woke up and started all over again.

They turned on the spotlights as they cruised for the dock.  They’d timed it to get there a little before sunrise to make sure they didn’t waste a single second once the sun came over the horizon.  That may have been a little too ambitious.  The bosuns mate steering the boat was keeping them as far to the left of the center of the inlet as he could without risking running aground.  The reason being the fast moving shadows on shore that were pacing them.  There was the occasional loud splash as one of the infected decided to hell with it and leapt for them.

“You want to see something messed up?”  The chief asked.  When no one responded he took that as a yes.  He went forward and turned on the powerful spotlight that was used in search and rescue missions.  The beam cut a hole through the darkness that seemed to extend forever.  The chief spun the light so that it was pointed towards the shore of the mainland.  It was immediately apparent what he was talking about.

“Holy hell.  There’s a zillion of the bastards.”  Harley said staring into the darkness at the far shore where it was illuminated by the powerful beam of light.  The shoreline looked like the front row at a Metallica concert if the band was throwing pogo sticks out into the crowd.  The crawlerz were bouncing all over the place.  They began to get that familiar dirty sensation of psychic tendrils slipping into their minds.  Yue was rocking back and forth and rubbing her temples.  She’d refused any drugs so that she could be fully functional when they arrived at Weathertop.  She had a feeling her sensitivity was going to be very useful there.

“Yeah, I’m just going to keep us on this side of the inlet for a few…”  The guy driving the boat was staring in awe at the massive numbers of infected crawling all over one another.  It was obvious he wasn’t going to be sleeping well after seeing that display.

“Are they like that every night?”  LeBron asked.

The chief shrugged.  “More or less.  They’ve been getting worse as time wears on.  I imagine at some point a derelict ship or something may float through the inlet and they’ll storm the cape.  Or maybe an ultra-low tide hits us and they’re able to make it across.  Those ones jumping for it now.  They might not be able to swim but that doesn’t mean the current can’t carry them to the shore if they land in the right place.”

“The chief here’s just full of happy thoughts.  Sprinkle some Pixie dust on him he could probably just fly to the other side.”  Haywood joked.  All of them were feeling that itchy sensation in their brains.  They’d spent too long on the cape.  They were going to have to get reacclimated to being miserable and terrified all the time again.

“Look.  They’re starting to scatter.  They feel the sun coming.”  Yue said in an odd sing song.  The boat crew all gave her weird looks.  Her travel companions tried to act like it was normal for people to talk like that.  They were doing their best not to draw attention to her weirdness.

Weird or not her description was accurate.  Where five minutes before you could barely see the shoreline through the mob of crawlerz now it was hard to locate even a single one of the infected.  The sun rose revealing a shoreline that was devoid of life.  It was impossible to tell from this distance that there’d been at least a thousand crawlerz across the water less than fifteen minutes prior.  Their driver turned the wheel and headed towards the dock.

“Where’d they all go?  It’s like they just vanish.”  The chief asked.  It was a rhetorical question he was asking while looking at the dock they were slowly approaching.  To everyone’s discomfort Yue answered him anyway.

“The earth, under the leaves, into the homey darkness above and below the basements, into the ground with the wriggling worms, under the wrecks, anywhere and everywhere the light can’t reach.  The stalker ones hang back in the darkness waiting.  They’re looking and feeling for us.  They know we may come by.”  Yue did that sing song thing again.  They were going to need to force feed her some anti-depressants if she couldn’t get that under control.

Everyone shifted around awkwardly when Yue was done with her eerie little monologue.  Luckily there was just a few seconds of that before they were all jumping into action as they ran up on the dock.  There was no tying the boat to the pier.  They wanted to be able to bury the throttle and get out of there if something started happening.  They formed a quick line and hustled everyone off the boat onto the dock.  Everyone’s gear was handed over and the boat immediately shoved off.

“They’re not taking any chances, are they?”  Drew said a little spitefully.  He thought it was a little lame to leave people standing on a dock while you got away from it as fast as possible instead of hanging out to help them if they needed it.

“Yeah.  Let’s follow their lead.  No more talking until we’re in the trucks.”  Jeff announced.  It was amazing how quickly they’d gotten out of practice.  Based on the activity they’d just seen from the infected on the ground they were standing on it made sense to keep their mouths shut.  If they were close enough to a buried crawler who heard them chit chatting, then the sun being out might not be enough to stop it before it was able to get its teeth into one of them.

They walked through the mist of the early dawn up to the road where the trucks were neatly parked side by side.  Each of the trucks had a big crew cab so they could all fit.  There were extra containers of gas in the truck beds along with other supplies.  Before they got too close to the trucks, they paused and let Yue do her thing to make sure it was safe.  Even after she gave them the nod that it was all clear they still approached with caution.  Yue would be the first one to say not to trust the oddball sixth sense she’d somehow ended up developing.  It didn’t hurt her feelings at all when Harley and Drew used flashlights to do a quick scan under each of the trucks before getting too close.

“It seriously took an apocalypse to make it so you could drive more than five minutes in Jersey without having to stop and pay a toll.”  Haywood commented from the driver’s seat of the little kids truck as LeBron was calling it.

They’d split up with Jeff, Yue and Harley in one truck while Drew, LeBron, Lisa and Haywood were in the other.  Haywood’s attempt at a joke was pretty much lost on the three southerners in the truck with him.  They were familiar enough with toll roads from Florida to know that it was a thing though.  The toll roads had been opened in Florida once a national emergency had been declared around the virus.  For hurricanes and zombie apocalypses they stopped charging tolls.  Unlike hurricanes in the event of a zombie apocalypse you could evidently drive either north, or south was the only major difference.

They could’ve all crammed into a single truck.  The reason to have the two of them was for simple redundancy.  If one truck broke down, they could just hop in the other one.  This had become especially important now that most people weren’t regularly taking their vehicles to Jiffy Lube.  Unless you happened to have a mechanic in your group then anything you drove around for long enough was eventually going to blow up on you.  Especially when the answer to fueling vehicles was to shake the gas can to try and get the gas to work the way it was supposed to.

Diesel had a much longer shelf life which is why most people were driving diesel trucks now.  Cars that used regular gasoline had been the first ones they’d turned into window coverings in Fayetteville.  Jeff had long had it on his list to find engineers who knew how refineries worked.  Even if they couldn’t get them up and running a solid chemical engineer should at least be able to come up with ways to keep the gas they had good for a little bit longer.  For about the hundredth time that day Jeff found himself longing for the days of being able to google something.  There was probably a YouTube video on extending the longevity of gasoline.  If the internet ever started working again that was one of the ones that’d be going viral real fast.

They hopped on the Atlantic City Expressway and took that to the interstate.  That took them through the heart of Philadelphia which was a major soul crusher for Yue.  In such a huge city there were just so many lost infected souls going mad.  With her sensitivity she got to experience it all vicariously as they sped past the slowly dying city.  The infected squatters milling about inside the useless piles of quietly crumbling concrete like gigantic cockroaches.

They made decent time, but it was getting pretty obvious that four hours was a very optimistic estimate.  The interstate was mostly clear.  Clearing operations had been sent to ensure that it was.  Jeff had been worried the antigovernment guerilla types they’d been ambushed by may have spent some time blockading the roads.  They must have also realized how important being able to drive quickly without the fear of crashing headlong into something was in this new normal.  Or maybe they were just lazy.  Who the hell knew?

They’d been in the trucks driving by seven that morning.  They’d bypassed Baltimore but mostly stayed on major roads headed south towards Weathertop.  It was already almost one in the afternoon by the time they made it to Virginia.  Everyone was nervously checking the little digital clocks on the dashes of the trucks while doing the mental math on how fast they’d need to drive to make it back to Cape May if this mission turned out to be a bust.  At this point it’d be really nice to roll up on a fully functional Weathertop base.  Hopefully they’d just run out of batteries for their radio or whatever.

When they finally made it to the access road leading up to the base it didn’t appear that was going to be the situation though.  They drove along the road slowly with dust clouds spinning up around them.  They passed the buildings that were used for refugee intake and then drove past some fields.  The entrance to the site was up ahead.  Something looked off about the huge doors.

“Look over there.”  Yue said loudly over the radio so everyone could hear in both trucks.  She’d rolled her window down and was pointing towards a field with a couple of trees in it.  There were a few rotting corpses scattered around.  There was some random other junk including a knocked over soccer goal with the netting hanging off just one post.

Jeff and Harley took it all in slowly to digest what it probably meant.  By the time they pulled up to the large doors that opened into the complex they were pretty sure they knew what they were going to find.  The doors were plenty big enough to drive a couple of big rigs through them. They weren’t super surprised to find a few more bodies lying in the dirt.  Even more horrifying than the discarded dead was the fact that the unguarded doors were standing wide open.  Jeff stopped the truck and they all got out to take a closer look.  Yue only took a few steps before stopping.  Her face had turned that pale color they all now associated with her being sober in a crawler zone.

It didn’t take someone with Yue’s unique skills to see what was going on here.  Jeff asked her anyway though.  “What are you getting out of there babe?”

“They’re in there.  They’re in there and they have people cornered.  There are still survivors.  We should leave though.  We don’t want to be in the open once it gets dark.”  Yue answered.

That seemed like a pretty solid idea to everyone.  The question now was where could they go?  They couldn’t just drive back to Cape May and leave people trapped inside Weathertop.

“I’ve got an idea on a safe place to sleep.”  Jeff said.  He looked around the group.  “Let’s go get settled in. Hopefully inspiration strikes as to what the hell we’re supposed to do next.”

Chapter 30:  Inspiration Leads to Perspiration

The train yard they’d driven to was the same one they’d been driven to a million years ago to be taken down to Fayetteville.  The train car they busted into was actually one of the cars used for transporting people from the massive underground military base at Weathertop to the other locations.  Yue thought it might even be the same car they’d been in before, but she couldn’t really tell.  She took a seat and reflected that this time at least Drew and Lisa weren’t fighting.

Although she wasn’t really sure if the PDA or the fighting was worse.  They seemed to spend an equal amount of time doing both.  Young love and all of that.  She looked over at the horse a decade her senior whom she’d hitched her cart to.  Jeff was busy organizing the gear from the truck that they’d brought on board.  They were lucky to have found such a nice place to spend the night.  There were even blankets and pillows piled neatly in one corner for them to use.  They were the thin itchy ass green wool blankets the military liked inflicting on its soldiers, but they’d keep you warm at least.

It was still light outside, so they had the door open to let the air circulate.  They’d close it up before it got too late.  No one saw any reason to take any chances.  It wasn’t like they weren’t used to living in miserable situations.  Jeff gave them all time to settle in and wolf down some dinner.  Once that was wrapping up, he decided it was time to sit down and figure out what they were going to do.  He asked if anyone needed to go outside for anything else.  When no one did he shut the door and locked it with a loud finality that got everyone’s attention.

“Ok.”  Jeff said loudly standing at the front of the train car.  “We all saw the state of Weathertop.  We can’t just turn around and head home though.  Yue thinks there are still survivors inside.  We need to discuss what we’re going to do about it.  I think maybe Yue should go first and let us know what she saw.  Sound good babe?”

“I don’t have to stand up do I?”  Yue asked to the general laughter of everyone.  A red faced Jeff shook his head.  Yue took a deep breath and continued talking.  “Good.  After the day we’ve had I didn’t really feel like it.  All I can tell you is I saw flashes of people behind doors.  Living uninfected people.  I sensed what the crawlers are sensing.  It’s hard to describe but there’s definitely still uninfected people trapped in the base.”

“Any sense of where at in the base?”  Haywood asked.  Yue shook her head.

“Any ideas on how many?”  Jeff asked.

“No.  Like I said I just sensed what the crawlerz were seeing or maybe what they’d already seen.  This isn’t science I’m doing.”  Yue answered in a frustrated tone of voice before trying once more to explain what she’d sensed.  “There are still uninfected in the base.  There could be a dozen, or it could be a hundred.  They could be right by the front doors or down five levels for all I know.  They’re trapped in rooms they’ve barricaded.  They’re hiding in the dark.  There’s a ton of crawlerz in that hole.  No one’s getting out alive if we don’t figure out a way to help them.”

“Can we even help them?  It’s kind of like when everyone got buried back at the warehouse.  LeBron said then there were probably people down below.”  Harley said.

“Yeah, and I gave the order to drive away.  If there were men stuck down there, then we left them to die.  The same as we did to the people on the carrier.  The same way I’ve done a million times it seems like.  I always justify it in my head but then it comes back and haunts me.”  Jeff said.  His eyes had gone far away while he talked.  Everyone there could relate.  They’d all left people behind to save themselves.  Compassion was not something you could afford to give into in the new normal.

“So you want to make up for it by rescuing some skeazy politicians hiding in some closet deep inside a secret base?  You think their lives are worth risking ours for?”  Lisa asked.  Her and Jeff were not on the same page.  She wasn’t even in the same section of the library as he was on this one.

“There’s nobody on this planet that I’d trade for any of you.  You guys are my family.  You’re right.  Let’s not let my guilt decide what we should do.  What do you guys think?”  Jeff asked the group.

“I think the President and a bunch of senators and most of our military leadership might be stuck down in that hole.  If we want to keep pretending that there’s still a United States left, we should probably go in after them.”  Haywood said.  His noncommittal shrug told them all where he stood.

“If we can rescue them without us all dying then we should try.  I don’t really care what their titles are.”  Harley said.

“I didn’t like driving away from the warehouse or jumping off the carrier.  If we can save some people let’s do it.”  LeBron said.

“If we can do it without dying then I’m down too.  There’s no way to guarantee that through.  It’s dangerous enough just driving around like we’re doing.  You guys really want to go down into a scary dark hole we know is full of those things?  You want to do that when Yue is basically telling us we won’t come back out?”  Lisa asked.  She was staring at them all like they were crazy.

Drew had been about to say he was down with a little search and rescue.  He wisely kept his mouth shut after hearing Lisa say her piece.  He had no desire to get in between his girlfriend and everyone else.  He leaned back in his chair and pretended to be trying to get his pillow to stay where he wanted it at.  The train was silent.  Drew glanced up and realized the train was silent because everyone was staring at them.  They were all waiting to hear what he had to say.

“I’ve got to take a leak.”  Drew said.  He hopped up out of his chair and headed for the door to go outside.

“It’s getting dark.”  Jeff reminded him.  Drew spun on his heel and headed for the opposite corner of the train car.  He said something about it being “bucket time” as he walked by.

“He just doesn’t want to piss you off.”  Harley said to Lisa.  If Drew had been hoping to avoid further enflaming Lisa, he should’ve held off on heading for the pee bucket.  She immediately got what Harley was saying.  Drew was immediately placed in the doghouse as far as she was concerned.

“Cool.  You guys go get yourselves killed to save a bunch of idiots who let the crawlerz into a secure fortress.  I’ll be happy to watch the trucks until you come out.  I’ll be leaving by noon though and I won’t be going in after any of you.”  Lisa said in a voice filled with venom.  She was coiled up and ready to strike.

“So maybe we figure out a way to do it where we don’t die?”  LeBron said trying to break through the sudden tension in the air.  “Maybe we lure the crawlerz out into the sun somehow.  Maybe Yue can pull off some kind of trick to help us get in and out without getting ripped apart…”

Drew started talking as he walked back over to where they were.  He’d evidently finished his bucket business.  “Yeah.  I think if we can come up with something to try that has some chance of actually working, we should try it.  If not, then we say screw it and head back to Cape May or maybe just drive on down to Fayetteville.”

What Drew thought was a brilliant compromise Lisa thought of as a complete betrayal.  She got up and stomped off to the other end of the car.  She hurled a couple of tearful threats at them as she left.  Drew nodded apologetically to everyone then raced after her.  They could all make out Lisa letting him have it.  LeBron heard something about how Drew always took everyone’s side over Lisa’s before he tuned them out.  They were used to the drama constantly swirling around Lisa and Drew at this point.

“Do we just hop in the trucks in the morning and hope for divine inspiration on the way over?  I’ve got nothing honestly.  I just don’t feel good about driving away.”  Jeff said into the awkwardness.

That seemed to be the general consensus.  They broke up the meeting to go to their own corners with the hope that maybe it would come to them while they slept.  It was a pretty impossible problem.  A gigantic underground base filled with lightning fast monsters they needed to get through to rescue people who may or may not actually be there.  The people in the base should still have power.  It’s not like the crawlerz would intentionally go around unplugging cords or flipping breakers.  The people in the base should still be able to use their communications equipment to let the rest of the world know they needed help.

LeBron was trying to get his pillow to stay still on an arm rest as he thought about the problem.  He was wondering why the base hadn’t called for reinforcements to come help them when he realized something super obvious.  It was too late now to do anything about it but that didn’t stop him from hopping off the chair and going over to where Jeff and Yue were sitting beside one another reading books.  Yue was reading a regular looking book while Jeff was leafing through a manual on cleaning up toxic spills.

“That looks riveting.”  LeBron joked pointing at the plain white cover of the instructional manual.

“Well you never know when some random knowledge may come in handy.”  Jeff said with a grin.  He’d put the book down into his lap with a relieved sigh when LeBron interrupted his reading.  Cleaning chemical spills wasn’t half as interesting as he thought it’d be.

“I’m taking a break from manuals and medical books for a while.”  Yue said putting hers down as well.  “The apocalypse is definitely a bad thing for horror writers trying to get new fans.  All their stories seem tame compared to what we do on a daily basis.”

“I’m not really sure I’d call ‘Odd Thomas’ a horror novel.”  LeBron said trying to see which of the series his sister was reading.  He recognized the book since it was one that he’d recently finished and left lying around.  Yue must’ve snagged it for a rainy day.

“You came over here with something in mind other than critiquing our reading material I’m thinking.”  Jeff said.  He didn’t seem in any hurry to pick his manual back up, but he was curious what’d caused LeBron to rush over to talk to them.  Thankful for the reminder LeBron immediately dove into what he’d come over to talk about.

“Well I was wondering how come the people in the communications room at Weathertop hadn’t called for help.  It’s a secure room and the people inside should’ve had some advanced warning of what was going on.  Anyway I was trying to picture what may have happened when it occurred to me that we could just go get some reinforcements.  If we pulled another hundred men over here, then going down into the base wouldn’t seem quite so much like suicide anymore.”  LeBron said with a flourish.  He was a little disappointed at the lack of enthusiasm in Jeff’s or Yue’s faces at his idea.

“How would we get ahold of people?  We’d need to drive back to Cape May to use their radio.”  Jeff said.  He was thinking hard.  Beside him Yue was washing down a couple of little pills to get ready for the evening.  The crawlerz would be showing up to spread their good cheer  at any time now.  LeBron thought for a second about the point Jeff had just brought up.

“I was actually thinking Fayetteville.  Weathertop may be closer but the people there can’t fight like we can.  The people in Fayetteville are used to living this life.  They’ll be good to wade into that giant crawler filled hole with us and drag out the survivors.  The more of us there are the less likely we die.”  LeBron said.  When your enemy moved so fast you could barely see them then putting up a solid wall of bullets was a great option to have in your back pocket.

“The people in Weathertop could just call the people in Fayetteville on the radio.”  Yue said.

Jeff considered that idea for a minute.  He shook his head before laying out why he agreed with LeBron on this one.  “Whichever base we show up at will be the one we’re able to get the most resources from.  Fayetteville is the closest one with the best resources for this kind of mission.  They’re also tied in pretty tight with Weathertop.  If anyone’s going to be willing to send men into the base to see what happened its going to be them.”

“Ok then.”  LeBron said.  He really didn’t have anything to add.  He’d shared his epiphany so quickly with Jeff that he really hadn’t had time to think it through.  He said good night and walked back to the seat he’d just sprung out of. His thoughts were spinning in a million different directions.  Would the men actually come to Weathertop to try and help?  If they did come, would they be able to do any good?  Even if a hundred men showed up would they just get overwhelmed by the supernaturally gifted silent killers lurking in the cavernous fortress they were hoping to rescue people from?

The crawlerz arrival to beat on the train car they were going to sleep in actually helped quiet his nerves.  The familiar cold, wet spike of terror ran from his bladder up through his spine into his brain.  He fumbled out a nighttime cocktail he’d grown fond of.  It was one he took when he didn’t think he was going to have to wake up.  It kept the nightmares at bay enough so that he could get some sleep.  When they ran out of the pills that kept the crawlerz out of their heads at night that was going to suck.  They really needed to get Weathertop back up and running.  It was well past time to start on the cross country mass murdering the monsters mission. They needed to get all the crawlerz nice and dead so they could start figuring out what the future of humanity was going to look like.

Chapter 31:  There and Back Again

“Why do we do everything so early?”  Drew whined.

“Why do you and Harley stay up all night playing cards?”  Lisa asked him back with a scowl.  She hadn’t slept well at all.  She’d woken up in the middle of a panic attack. In her nightmares something made her think the crawlerz were coming through the floor.  She’d hopped wildly up on her chair with her pistol drawn.  It’d taken Drew a good twenty minutes to get her calmed down and back to sleep.  It wasn’t helping Lisa’s mood that she knew within a day or two they’d be expected to march down into a giant hole filled with the infected to save people who were most likely already dead.

Everyone gathered their gear and went to stand by the door for the morning door opening ritual.  The train car did have the monitors and external cameras installed.  The engine wasn’t connected though so they had no electricity.  They utilized the less technologically advanced peepholes cut into the wall instead.  Jeff was looking to see if there were any surgers standing outside ready to pounce.  Declaring the coast clear he opened the door and they proceeded carefully over to the platform.

The trucks were parked in the lot on the other side of the train platform.  Yue was urging them all to move quickly.  She’d caught more than one vision of them walking from the mind of a crawler hidden in the shadows around them.  This train yard had never been as well maintained as the one in Fayetteville.  Now it’d really been overrun.  Probably a result of not having a bunch of jarheads running around shooting everything they saw moving underneath the trains.

They made Fayetteville by noon with minimal drama.  The roads were pretty clear between the two bases.  Other than the standard apocalyptic garbage, abandoned cars and the random decaying corpses scattered along the cracked asphalt highways.  It’d occurred to LeBron on the way to Fayetteville that the crumbling asphalt would never be resurfaced.  If he happened to somehow survive long enough to have kids it was very likely they’d be riding around in horse drawn carriages on dirt roads.  LeBron was totally fine with using up the remaining modern resources like gas and bullets to rid the countryside of the infected.

If they weren’t able to kill all the crawlerz it wouldn’t really matter what happened to the roads.  They’d all be too dead to care.  That included LeBron’s mythical horse drawn carriage driving son.  The poor figment would never even get the chance to wonder what it was like to ride in a convertible and eat microwaved popcorn.  LeBron shook off his daydreams as they pulled in at the Fayetteville train depot.  They piled out of the trucks and headed towards the administrative offices in the train station.

Major Tom and a couple of other men including their old pal Lipsey met them halfway there.  The major looked like he’d aged about ten years in the weeks since they’d left.  His hair was unkempt and appeared a little more salt than pepper.  Even more telling he looked like he was trying to smuggle something through customs using the bags under his bloodshot eyes.  A dirty bandage tied around his head to cover one of his ears completed the ensemble of a wrung out warrior.

“Oh good.  You’re alive.”  Tom said by way of greeting.  He looked like he knew he should say something nicer but was too tired to care.  Everyone on both sides of the conversation could totally relate to that level of exhaustion.  Jeff’s group were all pretty stoked that they’d made it all the way past noon without having to fight for their lives yet.

“Lucky to be standing here honestly.  We did lose a couple of good men along the way.”  Jeff responded.  They were all quiet for a moment as they remembered the men who hadn’t made it.

“Are you back for good?”  The major finally asked after a respectful amount of time had passed.  There was so much death these days.  Fayetteville was a well patrolled base where everyone was armed and weary but one or two people a week were still going to be slaughtered.  It was just the way of the world now.

Jeff hesitated a second to organize his thoughts.  They could’ve called ahead on the radios in the trucks to say why they were coming back.  They’d actually made contact to let the people at the base know they were on the way.  Jeff had just felt like the rest of the conversation would be better in person.  He doubted they’d be able to get back to Weathertop in the same day with reinforcements anyway.  When he felt like he had everything situated in his mind the way he wanted to present it he started talking.

“We came here straight from Weathertop.  There’re a few bodies outside and the main doors are standing wide open.  The base fell but there’s most likely survivors still inside.  We came back here to collect some more men to help us out. We’re going try and make the push into the base to rescue anyone we can.”  Jeff said.  He liked the way it’d come out. Concise and to the point.  Now he stood there waiting for Tom to rip the statements apart.

“Sounds about right.  Roll out in the morning?”  Tom asked.

“Yeah.  I don’t think we’d make it back in time to do anything tonight and there’s just the one train car to sleep in.”  Jeff answered.

“What if we used the train that’s here?”  Drew asked.  He’d walked around the corner to look out into the train yard.  To his mind if they were going to do this then they needed to hurry up and do it.  The longer they waited to rescue people the more people were going to die.  All he had to do was close his eyes and imagine he was trapped in the dark with no food or water surrounded by those monsters.  That was enough to make him work to push everyone along.  If they were going to do this then they might as well do it when they had the greatest chance to save the greatest number of people.

Using the train that was there sparked some conversation around logistics.  If they all hopped on the train to get over to Weathertop then in the morning they’d be walking from the train depot to the base.  That’d take the entire day.  Even if they could find a car or truck or something and get it working, they still would’ve been better off waiting until the next morning and just driving there.  Unsurprisingly it was LeBron who figured out the approach that solved that problem and made the most sense.

“Why don’t we get the train moving now with all the men you want to send and then we turn around and drive back?  We’ll meet the train when it gets there, and we’ll all have a safe place to sleep tonight.  First thing in the morning we head for Weathertop.  Once we get there, we send a couple of men back with some of the vehicles from there.  Those guys can taxi everybody back and forth between the train depot and the base.”  LeBron said.  It seemed super simple to him.

It was so simple most everyone in the little circle of people who’d formed to talk it over opened their mouths to say what was wrong with it.  Yue thought they looked like a bunch of fish standing around with their mouths open.  She’d known better.  LeBron wouldn’t have opened his mouth in front of all these people if he didn’t have a solid plan.  A few more logistical details and a time check and it was agreed.

Jeff waved the people in his group back to their trucks.  They moved quickly past the Fayetteville based soldiers who were rushing around now to grab their gear and get on the train.  In theory it should take them longer to make the trip in the trucks than it’d take the train.  The one scary thing about this plan was how close they were cutting it.  There’d only be about an hour of sunlight left when they rolled into the train depot.

The good news was that they’d just driven the route to get there.  They knew it was relatively crawler free with no major obstructions they’d have to go around.  They had plenty of gas and two trucks for redundancy.  It wasn’t until they were already about thirty minutes away that they got the radio broadcast that the train had left the station.  Up until then the radio chatter had been primarily around rounding up the troops and getting them to the station.

Not all the cars were being taken.  Two cars were being left behind for the refugees and other support personnel currently housed at the base.  A handful of men had been left behind to function as guards for the non-combatants as well.  That left three train cars full of heavily armed men to head in the direction of Weathertop.  In addition to men they’d also loaded up explosives, ammunition and the other supplies they thought they might need.  All of the planning thus far had centered around getting everyone to the site.  They’d tried to drag along whatever might be needed to support whatever plan they ended up coming up with.

Haywood was convinced that as long as they had a bunch of skilled men to go along with the piles of ordinance that they’d be able to figure out something.  Drew had agreed whole heartedly and asked how many crates full of grenades they were bringing along for the ride.  They were talking through options for the assault in the morning when a deer leapt out of the overgrown ditch and smashed into the windshield.

Haywood slammed on the brakes causing them to skid sideways into a wrecked minivan that was sitting on the side of the road.  They hit that and Drew and Lisa both flew across the back seat to slam into the window on that side of the truck.  LeBron and Haywood in the front seats had both been wearing their seatbelts.  More out of habit than for any other reason.  Haywood fought down a wave of black dizziness to put the truck in park and step outside.  He waved at Jeff who’d already turned around and was heading back in their direction.

LeBron was checking on Drew and Lisa in the back of the truck when a crawler erupted from out of the dark confines of the minivan the truck had slammed into.  The crawler flew across the pavement and latched its teeth into Haywood’s throat.  Disoriented from the crash Haywood never even saw the attack coming.  He was saved the indignity of turning into a surger since he died before he could become infected.  His blood pumped out in hot juicy spurts around the mouth of the crawler.  It happened so fast LeBron and the dazed couple in the back of the truck didn’t even see it happen.

A horrified Jeff and Harley got to see it up close and personal since it happened as they were driving back down the road to make sure everyone was ok.  One second Haywood was waving at them and the next Yue was screaming for Haywood to watch out.  Jeff hadn’t known what to do since Haywood was just standing there in the middle of the road.  Harley had rolled his window down to yell out a warning when the crawler had appeared out of nowhere and taken down their hardcore friend.

They cautiously pulled their truck up to where Haywood’s truck was idling in park.  Harley leapt out of the seat with his tactical shotgun in hand.  With his long black jacket flapping around behind him the big man walked over to where Haywood was lying dead in a massive puddle of hot bubbly blood.  The wiry demon lying beside him had a look of ecstasy about it.  It was so covered in blood that Harley couldn’t tell if it was male or female.  It was on its stomach so he couldn’t even tell by looking down at the genitalia.

Not that it mattered if it was a male or a female.  It was a crawler that’d just wasted his friend.  The patriotic military man was on the opposite side of a lot of issues from the super-sized gypsy roughneck but they’d both shared a common warrior spirit.  Haywood was obviously dead.  Harley went ahead and put one in his head and one in his heart anyway after blowing the head off the infected.

When he was done making sure his friend and the crawler were both dead, he walked past the shell shocked trio of Lisa, Lebron and Drew to the bed of the truck.  He pulled out one of the jugs of gasoline sitting in the back.  He then walked back over and dumped a liberal amount of the gas all over Haywood and his murderer.  Drew came around with his mouth hanging open in shock.  Harley asked him to get in the truck and drive it up the road past the spot he was about to set on fire.

They were going to be cutting their arrival at the train depot pretty close at this point.  Despite that the six of them took the time to say a few words before Harley threw a match on the gas soaked body of their good friend and protector.  They hadn’t known him a long time calendar wise.  It didn’t take very long to form bonds when you’re living the lives they were living though.  With the fire still burning in their rearview mirrors they got back on the road for the train depot.

There was no fooling around now.  Harley took over driving the truck Haywood had been driving.  It needed some body work but was still ok to drive.  Jeff put the hammer down on the lead truck.  Within a few minutes they were blowing down the interstate past the flotsam and jetsam of a sunken civilization.  The world flashing by outside the window seemed darker than normal now.  Any sense of safety they’d felt being out on the road in the middle of the day had now dissipated.

LeBron had moved up into the truck with Jeff and Yue.  He was sitting in the backseat now trying to help Yue get herself under control.  She couldn’t stop fidgeting and moving back and forth.  Her face had a permanent snarly look on it.  She hated herself for feeling the emotions that crawler had felt when it bit into Haywood’s throat.  She’d felt the energy pouring into her own body as the warm blood spurted out of his neck.  She’d tasted the salty coppery goodness pouring out.  She’d loved it.  It’d turned her on like nothing else did to feel the hot blood gushing all over her face.

Now she was disgusted with herself.  She’d cried like a crazy person while they’d all taken turns saying empty words about Haywood.  She’d looked down on the body and remembered what that blood on the concrete had tasted like.  She’d lived that whole viscous assault vicariously through a strong psychic link with the crawler who’d attacked Haywood.  She couldn’t remember now if she’d known the crawler was in the car when they passed it or not.  She was getting so used to seeing themselves through the eyes of their enemies that it didn’t necessarily even register anymore unless she was focusing on it.

She appreciated LeBron’s attempts at some level but mostly she was inconsolable at this point.  He tried to feed her a Valium and that set her off again.  What if she missed another crawler and it killed her lover or one of her brothers?  She told herself for the millionth time that she’d figure out a way to master these impulses she got.  She’d teach herself to control the shared visions with the enemy.  She’d use them as a weapon against them.  She just hoped that weapon didn’t destroy her before she mastered how best to use it.

The sensitivity she’d developed may very well be a double edged blade that cut her every time she used it.  She was ok with that.  She’d just have to make sure she was strong enough to keep getting cut.  Whatever it took too to protect her family.  Watching the road as they turned off at the exit that would take them to the train depot, she saw that she may be putting those powers back to work sooner than she’d have liked.  The shadows all around them were starting to get pretty long.

By the time they made it to the train depot they were all getting nervous.  From the backseat Yue had told Jeff they were only going to have a few minutes to get out of the trucks and into the train.  Jeff whipped the truck into the train station and slammed on the brakes.  Harley pulled in right behind them.  They all sprinted for the door to the station.  They ran through the station to the platform where the trains would pull in to load and unload passengers.  No one needed Yue to tell them to hurry at this point.

The train from Fayetteville was nowhere to be seen.

Chapter 32:  Spelunking with Demons

“Coffee?”  Major Tom asked Jeff once he and the rest of the crew had emerged from the non-electrified train car that they’d been forced to spend the night in.  The major’s train had been slowed down by some fallen trees and a small herd of cattle that’d refused to move until automatic weapons had been fired over their heads.  They’d toyed with the idea of killing one of them to have a steak dinner, but they didn’t have the time.  It was a definite consideration for the way back though.

“Oh god yes.”  Jeff said quickly.  He’d been up most of the night trying to get Yue to take a Valium so she could sleep.  She was so torn up about Haywood’s death that she hadn’t wanted to take anything.  She was worried that what’d happened to Haywood would happen to someone else she cared about if she wasn’t able monitor the crawlerz.  The crawlerz who’d been beating away on the walls of the train car they were in.  With no medicine Yue had been exposed to their raw hatred as they tried to get in the car.  Whether she was trying to atone for what’d happened with Haywood or whatever she did eventually pass out.

The second she’d fallen fitfully asleep Jeff had crushed up half a Valium and slowly worked the powder onto her lips.  She needed to be somewhat immunized against the seriously demonic vibes she was having forcefully injected into her head.  Otherwise she was going to go insane.  Jeff didn’t see how she was taking as much of the abuse as she already let herself take.  Anyone without her strength would’ve gone mad months ago.

“How close were you?”  Jeff asked.

“We almost made it.  We were only about a mile out.  It got too dark for the engineer though and he shut it down.  We knew you had this car to crash in for the night.  Sorry you couldn’t make ice cubes or anything.”  Tom joked.

Tom waited for Jeff to pour himself a cup of coffee then expressed how sorry he was to hear about Haywood.  Jeff nodded along.  Everyone had liked and respected the chief.  Losing him to such a random accident really sucked.

“We’re going to miss the man.  I think today especially we’re going to miss the warrior that he was.  I was thinking he’d be the best one to lead today’s op.”  Jeff said sipping on the piping hot mug of coffee he’d claimed.  Yue was still sleeping.  He’d decided not to wake her up until absolutely necessary.  Drew and Harley had already left with some of Tom’s guys to go to the base and pirate away some of the vehicles parked over there.  Once they got back, they could start taxiing everyone over to the base to prep the assault.

For now there wasn’t much else to do besides carry their gear through the train station over to the parking lot and wait for the guys to get back with transport.  In the meanwhile they talked briefly about tactics.  It became pretty obvious there was an elephant in the room around how they should tackle what was otherwise a suicide mission.

“How many of them do you think Yue could get to walk the other way?”  Tom asked casually.  He’d purposefully steered Jeff away from everyone else so they could talk in private.  Jeff unconsciously rubbed his scarred hands together.  He was wearing gloves daily now to hide the bandages and lotion he coated his hands and arms in every morning.

“When we were trapped in that tunnel that I told you about she was able to shift about a hundred of them, but it took some major sacrifices.”  Jeff answered finally.

“What kind of sacrifices?”  Tom asked curiously.  He was expecting the answer to be around Yue’s mental state.  He was willing to risk Yue’s mental state to save the lives of five dozen men.  Not to mention however many others they may be able to rescue.  The whole point of this exercise was to save whoever was trapped down below.

“She has to put strong images in their heads to get them interested in going somewhere.  To do that she has to be able to perfectly picture biting into someone and then share that with them.  I don’t think any of us really understand it.  I don’t know that Yue even really gets it.  It‘s painful though and requires sacrifice.”  Jeff said pointedly rubbing his hands together.  He wasn’t going to agree to Yue doing something like that again without asking her first.

Tom stared at Tom’s glove covered hands for a minute while he worked on putting two and two together.  He must’ve finally figured it out as he grimaced and turned his eyes away from Jeff.  He looked down the street to see if he saw any sign of their rides coming back.  It just so happened that the convoy from Weathertop arrived right then.  Jeff was glad for that since it meant they could get moving.  As an added bonus it meant that the conversation that they were currently engaged in was over.  It was over for now at least.  Something told him that before the day ended, they’d be having the same conversation again.  This time Yue would need to be involved as well.

Thinking of Yue reminded Jeff that he’d left her and LeBron sleeping back in the train car.  He’d left Lisa watching over the two of them on a just in case basis.  Excusing himself he jogged back through the train station to grab them.  He was on the platform when he sensed something was wrong.  With an image of Haywood’s dead body flashing in his mind he didn’t question his gut.  He dug his heels in and dropped to his knees while pulling his pistol.  The clicking sound he heard was the infected kids teeth clicking together as he sailed over the top of him.

One of the kids feet caught Jeff in the back of the head spinning him down on the ground.  His gun got knocked out of his grasp.  He ended up lying on his side on the platform.  He turned over to look around and found himself face to face with the crawler who’d knocked him over.  The emaciated face of a teenager was right next to him.  The eyes looking far away as the sunlight played on the platform.  The infected boy who should’ve been going to get his driver’s license in a few weeks was instead casually dispatched with a nine millimeter round.  Jeff jumping up in disgust when sharp pieces of skull and warm blood splattered back into his own face.

“Thank god.  I thought we were too late.”  Yue said behind him.

Jeff turned around and saw Yue, LeBron and Lisa all standing over him.  The whole scenario must have looked pretty crazy to them.  Jeff ducking for no apparent reason only to blast way at the possessed teenager who’d ended up right beside him on the ground.  Yue must’ve seen Jeff through the eyes of the infected teen and rushed out to warn him.  In his hyper-adrenalized state Jeff came close to screaming at her.  If she’d moved faster maybe he wouldn’t have had to trust this own instincts and duck like that.

“Nice moves for an old dude.  You went matrix on that crawler.”  LeBron joked.  He was talking about the way Jeff had dropped to his knees then cleaned out the teen’s ear canal with a blast of hot lead.  He supposed it might have looked kind of matrix style if you didn’t know that he’d just been scared out of his mind.

“Keanu can keep all that crap.  It’s time to roll out if you guys want to grab your gear. We need to make sure no one forgot anything important.”  Jeff said in response.  His heart was pumping so hard that it was strange to hear his voice come out sounding so normal.  It felt like he was outside himself hearing himself speak.  That run in with the teen stalker must have messed him up more than he’d realized.

By the time they collected everything and made it back to the parking lot there was just a single lone vehicle waiting for them.  Drew grinned and ran around the truck to open the door for Lisa.  His grin faded as he saw the expression on the faces of the group trudging towards him.  He started to ask what happened then saw Lisa shaking her head at him.  Putting a cork back in his curiosity he helped them load up.  The second they were good to go he started the drive back to the base for the second time that morning.

“We going to just run in with guns blazing?”  Lisa asked snarkily.  She couldn’t decide if everyone else was suicidal or if they were just a bunch of idiots.  There was no need for them to do what they were about to do.  No one would’ve even looked at them twice if they’d just driven back to Cape May.

“They all think I can do something again.”  Yue said quietly.

“Can you?”  Jeff asked.  He was looking at her hopefully.  He didn’t really see a lot of other ways to pull this off.  The more he thought about it the more he wondered if they should just turn around and figure out somewhere else to go.  He could stand to live on a Caribbean beach with Yue for the rest of his life.  That sounded a hell of a lot better than what they were doing now.  Even if what they were doing now somehow managed to actually work that beach idea still sounded like it’d trump it.

“I don’t know.  In the train I had no choice.  We had to get out.  It’s not hard for me to do it.  I can slip right into their minds.  The hard part is slipping out.  If it’s the only way to rescue those people though we should try.”  Yue answered.  She sounded tired and scared.  Not at all like the normally energetic fearless Yue they were used to.  The timidity in her voice scared them all.

“I take it you’d need us to help again.”  Drew said.  It was his turn to sound timid and tired.  The idea of letting her munch on his arms again wasn’t an exciting one.  He was still itchy and hurting from the last time.

“We could find some different people maybe?”  Lisa asked.  She really hoped they didn’t expect her to step up.  She didn’t even like getting shots.

“I don’t really like the idea of biting into strangers.  On top of being gross it sounds like a whole lot of biohazard to me.  I don’t want to end up with syphilis or aids or whatever you get from eating strangers.”  Yue said smiling once more.

“Did I mention ever since sitting on that toilet seat in the train yard yesterday that I’ve felt pretty syphilitic?”  Drew joked.  He was over it already.  If it came down to it, he’d melt some butter on his arm and let Yue go to town again.  This time he absolutely wasn’t watching though.  That mad look on her face had been what freaked him out last time.  The hunger in her eyes was what was going to haunt his nightmares long after the bites had turned into scar tissue.

The conversation and jokes continued until they pulled in next to the other trucks at the base.  Yue had been joking along with the rest of them right up until Jeff parked the truck and opened his door to get out.  Her face got noticeably paler.  If anyone had looked closely, they’d have seen her hands trembling slightly.  She suddenly found herself choking down a whole lot of saliva.  She tried not to think too much about why she was drooling at the prospect of what may be about to happen.

They followed Jeff to over where Major Tom was poised behind the other pickup truck.  He had the tailgate down with a big erasable whiteboard sitting on it.  Other men were unloading the gear they’d brought and sorting the munitions into different piles.  You only mistake a flash bang for a fragmentation grenade one time before you start getting really anal about organizing your explosives.  Jeff walked over and looked down at the white board.

“We still cranking the doors open as wide as they’ll go and cranking in a bunch of flashbangs and frags to get this party started?”  Jeff asked.

“Yeah.  I’ve got another idea too.  I’m pretty sure I saw it in like a Dracula movie or something.”  Tom said.  He sounded slightly embarrassed to be bringing it up.  Everyone else was intrigued.  Especially when Tom pointed to the large rectangular shaped packages that’d been covered with moving blankets taped all over them to protect them.

“We’re going to ask them for help moving and then they’ll suddenly have other plans?”  Drew joked before he could stop himself.  Not even a courtesy laugh.  Tough crowd.

Ignoring Drew Tom called out for the men to start stripping the blankets off of the objects.  Wondering what kind of gamma ray laser beams Tom had brought to the fight they all watched as the blankets were removed.  A large antique mirror stood leaning against the concrete wall once the soldiers had it unwrapped.  They were already starting in on the next one.  There were about fifteen in all.

“Reflecting the light around like in the Mummy movie?”  LeBron asked.

“I think I was thinking of Indiana Jones but yes.”  Major Tom answered.

“Huh.  We can give it a whirl.  Be pretty sweet if it actually works.”  Lisa said glancing over at Yue.  Yue being the acknowledged expert on how the crawlerz would react to something.

Yue was already looking into the space revealed behind the fully open doors.  The doors opened up into a large warehouse used to store goods.  You could easily drive two big rigs fully loaded through the doors side by side.  Inside the cavernous space was lit by the red night lighting the military liked to use.  Considering the base still had power they could presumably find the light switches in each of these rooms and make life a lot easier.

Regular fluorescent lights wouldn’t deter the crawlerz from attacking them.  It might disorient them some though.  They were going to need any edge they could get.  Yue could see them approaching the gates through the eyes of hundreds of crawlerz.  They were scattered around in the giant warehouse.  Some had been resting while others paced endlessly in the darkness.  Now that the images were circulating around, they were all up and on the move.  They wouldn’t linger in the background too long with prey approaching.

“They’re waiting for us.”  Yue said.  She didn’t really need to say it.  Every person standing in the concrete corridor leading into the warehouse could feel the hatred radiating out of the door.  You didn’t need Yue’s hypersensitivity to know that they were only about twenty yards from dozens of monsters that wanted to rend them to bloody little pieces.

Major Tom ordered his men to use the mirrors to try and shine light inside the space.  They fussed and fumbled with the mirrors until they had some beams of light reflected inside.  Crawlerz scattered away from the bright light beaming though the dusty red glow they were used to.  Yue let her mind travel out to feel what they felt.  The visions of the light coming through the door bubbled to the top of the hundreds of things she was seeing at once.  The light was an annoyance.  It caught her attention but then she moved on.  The pull of the uninfected soldiers standing outside was a million times greater than a reflected beam of light.

“It’s not doing much.”  Yue whispered to Jeff.  He casually walked over and let Tom know that the mirrors were a bust.  Tom nodded and ordered the mirrors to be put to the side.  He told Jeff they were going to try a few flash bangs next.  He said it loud enough so that Yue heard him.  He was obviously looking for her feedback on how those worked compared to the mirror idea.  Yue settled into a trance to ‘listen in’ on the crawler mind network.

Yue was yanked out of her trance by LeBron poking her in the side.  Annoyed she looked up in the air where he was pointing.  A trio of large military style helicopters were coming in for a landing out by where they’d left their vehicles parked.

“Who the hell’s that?”  Jeff asked.  His mind was racing as he considered where the men in the helicopters might have flown in from.

“I put out the word before we left on what we were doing and got a couple of confirmations that we’d get some reinforcements today.  They said they’d be here at first light which is why I’d kind of given up on them already.   Better late than never though.”  Tom said turning to stomp back up the concrete roadway and see what kind of reinforcements they’d been sent.  He hoped they hadn’t wasted space in those birds on anything stupid like giant mirrors.

Chapter 33:  Better late than Never

A bomb went off in her head.  She was assaulted by a rampage of colors she’d never known existed.  A raw note of power hit her.  Yue crumpled to the ground with blood pouring out of her nose.  Jeff and Lisa were on their knees beside her helping to pat back the flow of blood.  Drew pulled a t-shirt out of his pack and handed it to them to use.  Yue’s eyes slowly blinked back open as she gasped for air and flung her arms around blindly.

When she was finally able to see she saw that Major Tom was standing a little back from their group.  He was staring at her questioningly.  Despite her suddenly pounding headache she smiled and gave him a thumbs up.  They’d experimented by flinging a single flash bang into the warehouse.  The grenade was mean to blind and disorient opponents.  It was commonly used by SWAT teams or other infiltrating forces who were trying to rescue or take hostages.

It turned out they were a great tool for disorienting a gigantic room full of crawlerz.  If the flash bangs hadn’t worked, they‘d talked about flinging in fragmentation grenades.  The problem with that was they were actually trying to rescue whoever might still be stuck in the massive warehouse.  Flinging explosives into a base stockpiled with explosives might not end well.  When even Drew thought that grenades might not be the right answer then you knew you needed to spend some time thinking through your options.

Three helicopters had been launched from an offshore carrier to assist in clearing out the warehouse.  The reinforcements hadn’t brought much more than themselves and boxes full of ammunition.  They expected to go in hard and clear the place out.  It was kind of their thing.  The same strike force had been sent all over North America to rescue important people and gather critical supplies.  The unit consisted of a ragtag collection of various specialties from multiple branches of the military.  They’d enlisted the printing department on the carrier to come up with a new patch for them.  ‘Suicide Squad’ with a picture of Harley Quinn’s face seemed pretty dead on for what they did.

The men lined up now to take the warehouse.  The suicide squad members had brought their own flash bangs.  It turned out they were the best thing since sliced brains when it came to distracting the infected.  Having done these sorts of operations hundreds of times at this point the officers accompanying the squad took command of the overall operation.  There was no jockeying for politics or credit or any of that.  Neither Jeff nor Tom cared who got credit as long as the operation was successful.  They both recognized the expertise of the men who’d shown up.

The capabilities this force brought were obvious.  The creepiness factor was something else entirely.  The members of the squad had fully embraced their suicidal persona.  Joker grins were tattooed onto more than one face.  In the spirit of esprits de corps the men were allowed to get away with blatant violations of military dress code.  Their weapons went well beyond the standard as well.  On top of the normal assortment of handguns, knives, shotguns and long guns they also carried things like spiked baseball bats and samurai swords.  The majority of them sported some kind of body armor. Almost all of them preferred to have bite resistant leather covering their entire body.  One of them lined up to be the second man into the warehouse was sporting a hockey mask ala Jason Voorhees.

“These dudes are bad ass.”  Drew said in awe.

“There’s a few dudettes in there too.”  Lisa said.  She wasn’t so much standing up for feminism as she was in awe of the women who could hang with those kind of men.  Looking at them in line they seemed like they could carry their share of the burden if not more.

“I always thought dude could mean a girl or guy?”  Drew whispered.

Jeff tuned out the Lisa and Drew show to focus on the assault.  The squad was going in first.  Tom’s men would follow on their heels to help secure the warehouse space.  Hopefully in the next three minutes they’d see a warehouse full of dead crawlerz.  They should be able to see them easily as soon as the lights were flicked on.  Once they’d secured that first space there were still multiple levels and spaces to repeat the process in.  Hopefully a lot of those were sealed off so that the crawlerz couldn’t have accessed them.

Loud bangs and flashes of light from the entrance to the warehouse signaled the start of the assault.  The suicide squad members went in immediately after the flashbangs went off.  They didn’t want to waste a single second of the crawlerz being in a bewildered state.  Tom’s men waited for the second set of flash bangs to go off then they entered as well.  The roar of automatic weapons sounded like rolling thunder.  It was actually a little less than three minutes later when the ‘warehouse cleared’ message was piped out.

Warehouse cleared did not mean warehouse secured.  Men would still be poking in every corner of the massive space to see if they could locate any more of the monsters in hiding.  Yue saw an opportunity to be useful and took it.  She slipped into a trance again as she combed through the scattered visions she was still seeing.  She relayed what she saw to Jeff.  Jeff told Tom who had the info passed to the squad leaders.  The remaining stalkers and lurkers in the warehouse were hunted down and dispatched based on Yue’s insight.

The group moved into the newly formed beachhead of the warehouse space at the entrance to the massive underground complex.  The doors from the warehouse space to the rest of the base had been closed.  They could all hear the sporadic smacking of hands against those doors now as crawlerz fought to get out.  Yue was about to let her mind wander to see what she could find out when a tall woman walked up and said hello.

“Hi.”  Yue said uncomfortably.  Jeff had gone off to check on the supplies that were in the warehouse and help plan the next phase of the assault with Tom.  That left Yue with Lisa, LeBron and Drew.  Harley had jumped in feet first with the squad to hold down the warehouse.

“You’re a psychic right?  I didn’t know they had one with this group.”  The woman said.  It wasn’t really a question.

Yue started paying attention.  The woman addressing her was almost six feet tall.  In her combat boots she towered over Yue.  Being tall for a girl Yue wasn’t used to another female towering over her like that.  Long brunette hair was clamped down in a braid that went halfway down the woman’s back.  She had leather and body armor up to her throat with a walkie talkie built into the helmet resting on her head.  She also had a black heart tattooed onto her cheek which immediately identified what unit she was with.  The captain’s epaulets told Yue this was most likely the leader of the unit that’d just taken out a warehouse full of crawlerz quicker than most people take out the trash.

“It’s good to meet you captain.  I’m Yue.  This is my brother Drew and my other brother LeBron.  My future sister in law here is Lisa.”  Yue said extending her hand to the Amazonian warrior in front of her.

“Good to meet you.  I’m Captain Lindsey Glenn.  I take it you’ve worked it out already that I‘m in charge of these guys.  Sorry for not introducing myself sooner.”  Lindsey said.

“No worries.  You had crawlerz to kill.”  Yue said smiling.

“You’re their psychic right?”  Lindsey asked again.

“What do you mean by that?”  Yue asked in return.  Drew, LeBron and Lisa were watching the discussion between the two strong women like it was a tennis match.  Their heads moving back and forth as they watched the two of them volley words back and forth.  Lindsey smiled crookedly at Yue’s evasiveness.

“We’ve been sent in to pick up people like you before.  Three of them to be exact.  Two of them killed themselves and the third one refuses to leave the ship now.  We’ve worked with people like you who can get in their heads and stay there.  We’ve just never worked with somebody who can do it and not go crazy.  If you help out with the rest of this sweep, you’ll most likely save some lives.  You down?”  Lindsey asked challengingly.

“Yeah.  I was planning to help anyway.  I just haven’t really told the whole world about what I can do.”  Yue answered.

“No problem keeping it on the down low.  Hell we may both die in the next five minutes anyway.  Let’s do this.”  Lindsey gave an awkward high five to each of them before turning to direct her people on getting ready for the next stage of the assault.  Standing in one of the lines was Harley.  In his oversized duster with a shotgun dangling out of each hand he fit right in with the military misfits he was going to be fighting beside.

Tom and his men didn’t seem to quite know what to make of the unique force that’d shown up to reinforce them.  The squad was a colorful group of men and women who’d fully embraced their role as special ops in a war against the demons of hell.  Most men in the military get tattoos that aren’t visible when they’re wearing dress uniforms.  That’s pretty much the unofficial rule in the military to avoid being disciplined.  The CO for this unit had a facial tattoo.  The black heart on her cheek was actually on the conservative side compared to a lot of her people.

After the first assault where they’d quickly and efficiently taken the warehouse back no one appeared to care anymore that some of the newcomers had gigantic joker smiles tattooed on their faces.  These tattooed warriors were true professionals.  Watching them work you could easily tell that they’d been there and done that.  They keyed all of their actions off those flashbangs.  They’d toss them with their own eyes covered with special goggles built for this sort of operation.  As soon as they went off, they went to work.

Yue and Drew watched from about fifty yards away as the squad opened the doors to the corridor that went deeper into the fortress.  The corridor that was bursting at the seams with the infected.  The crawlerz poured through the door like the water from a fire hose.  Lindsey had lined everyone up so that the crawlerz were running a gauntlet from their first step into the warehouse.  From about twenty feet away three men were working the incoming crawlerz with .50 caliber machine guns they’d mounted on top of boxes they’d dragged over.  Trip wires had been rigged to literally trip the crawlerz to prevent them from doing any of their spooky fast stuff and flanking them.

In case the machine guns chewing them up wasn’t enough there were men with rifles guarding the gunners.  They were taking shots at anything that looked like it might be moving too fast.  Any of the infected who looked a little too sure of themselves were provided with special treatment.  More men were lined up on the same side as the other gunners.  They were shining spotlights into the crawlerz faces to further disorient them.  Still others were covering the men with the spotlights.

The air was thick with the sharp odor of gunpowder.  Everyone had given up on ever being able to hear clearly again after this.  The crawlerz just kept on coming.  Lindsey had a man standing by with a truck with a snowplow on the front of it in case they needed to push the bodies out of the way.

Yue surfed the thoughts she was picking up in rapid fire succession.  She didn’t get a sense of fear at all from the crawlerz being shredded in the grinder.  All she felt was their excitement at seeing so many potential uninfected victims standing around.  The bullets ripping their bodies apart didn’t even register as important enough to broadcast.  They were seen as nothing other than an obstacle to get to the flesh they craved.  Having seen enough Yue snapped her thoughts back and meditated to try and clear her mind.  It was her new way of fighting a dependency on anti-depressants.

Her hope was to learn how to dial her sensitivity up and down without having to rely on drugs.  She may still need a little something at night to get some sleep.  Hopefully she could get away from competing with Harley for who could take the most drugs every day.  Although with the steady pounding of the guns in the enclosed warehouse she felt like she’d be slamming Advil along with everyone else for the next few days.  She also made a note to try and find some of those little orange things you could shove in your ears.  Her dad used to take a plastic jar of them to the range when they all went.

The crawlerz kept coming until there were so many dead ones lined up on the floor in front of the door that they had to squirm and push their way through.  A lake of blood was spreading across the warehouse floor.  The barrel on one of the machine guns melted down and had to be replaced.  Luckily the crawlerz were coming out so slowly now that wasn’t a problem.  Yue gazed in awe at the pile of bloody corpses and body parts.  A lot of it looking like hamburger after the constant pounding of the high caliber bullets at such close range.

Lindsey was circulating around checking on everyone.  She got up close to Yue and stared at the side of her head for a second.  Yue stepped back uncomfortably looking at the warrior woman.  Lindsey smiled which brought her intimidation level down a few notches and handed Yue a set of ear plugs.  Yue smiled back and yelled out her thanks.  Not that anyone would be able to hear it.  She hoped the ringing in her ears would go away eventually.  The ear plugs were very welcome even if they were a little late.

It was weird standing around with nothing to do while there was a full scale battle happening less than forty yards away.  At one point Jeff came by and invited them all to walk outside for a bit.  They blinked in the bright sunlight and took a quick break.  All of them expressing their thoughts on the newcomers who’d stepped up and right into the middle of the action without skipping a beat.  They were sharing a lemonade from an instant drink packet that’d been in the warehouse when a soldier came jogging out to tell them Captain Lindsey thought it was time to take the corridor.  She was requesting Yue come and give her a second opinion.

Jeff looked over at Yue who simply shrugged.  The captain had figured it out and was now looking to leverage her abilities to save the lives of her soldiers.  They watched Yue follow the soldier back inside then followed along behind her.  LeBron cast one last look over his shoulder as they reentered the warehouse.  It felt like they’d been fighting for days but it wasn’t even noon yet.

Chapter 34:  Way Worse than Ants

They fought and cleared two more levels before they were at the giant locked doors to the area Yue and the others remembered being quarantined in when they’d first arrived at Weathertop.  The corridors they’d come down to get to this point were paved with brass shell casings that glittered in the light as they floated around in shallow pools of blood.  The corridors were illuminated by harsh overhead fluorescent lights.  The walls painted a horrible green color where they weren’t pockmarked with bullet holes or stained with the blood of the dead.

The newcomers hadn’t done all the fighting.  Tom’s men had cycled in and out as they slowly progressed through clearing different areas of the base.  Crates of ammunition were being dragged along behind them.  The amount of ammunition it’d taken to get them to this point was staggering.  Even with all that lead flying they’d suffered some losses.  The crawlerz were just too inhumanly fast to get them all.  Bright lights and a wall of bullets worked for most of them though.  The narrow confines of the corridors really helped by limiting the usefulness of the crawlerz insane maneuverability.

Drew had been standing next to one of them who’d gone down.  They’d stormed into yet another hallway only to be met by a group of stalkers.  The dozen or so crawlerz had broken off in multiple directions when a road flare was tossed near them. The men in the lead opened fire immediately but it was like they’d kicked over a bucket full of vipers.  The crawlerz were unbelievably fast.  They struck out faster than the men in the hallway could even see them.

The battles to get to where they were had turned into that after they killed all the infected lemmings.  Not every one of the demons was willing to just happily run into their hail of bullets.  Plenty of them hung back lurking waiting for the right time.  Yue could sense them containing their hunger as they stalked their prey.  The mindset a complete one eighty from that of the ones who charged forward blindly.  The stalkers were much scarier.

They’d lost people but thanks to Yue they’d lost a lot less than they would’ve otherwise.  She directed them to where those stalkers were watching from dark corners.  She warned them when she saw a fast approaching crawler about to strike.  Yue acted as their early warning system on top of telling them where to go.  Lindsey ordered four of her squad to guard Yue with their lives.  She told them if Yue died, and they weren’t already also dead then she’d shoot them herself.  Based on the serious expressions on their faces the threat was neither lightly received nor idly spoken.

It was a lot.  They were all blood splattered and worn out.  As the day wore on, they’d made the decision to keep fighting no matter how long it took.  They’d sealed off the doors behind them so no more crawlerz could get in.  Eventually silence fell in the corridor that they were in.  The doors on the ends of it were all sealed tight.  The only possible place for more of the infected to be lurking was behind the large metal doors leading to the storage space that included the 1970 time capsules that quarantined refugees were put up in.

“There’s no crawlerz behind that door.”  Yue said when Lindsey looked over at her questioningly.

Lindsey looked slightly more ferocious than she had at the beginning of all of this.  Her ponytail was dripping with blood where a crawler had leapt over about ten other people to tackle her to the ground.  She’d somehow landed with the barrel of her shotgun in the jumpers mouth.  It’d gone off when she slammed into the floor blowing a gigantic hole in the back of the things head.  It’s face had slid off the skull and she’d been covered in a variety of bodily juices.  All of which had harmlessly dripped onto the goggles she wore over her face mask into battle.  She’d landed in a pretty deep puddle of blood though.  Her dry cleaning bill was going to suck.

Lindsey flipped her shot gun around and beat on the door a few times to see if maybe someone would respond.  A second or two later the bottom of the door rolled up a few inches and a man called out for them to identify themselves.

“We’d be the people who just mass murdered enough of the infected to fill a small city to save your sorry asses.  Open the damned door before I huff and puff.  Also, are the showers working still?”  Lindsey asked as the doors were rolled up.

A group of armed men stood in a loose group on the other side of the garage door. They were a mix of secret service and regular military.  A few of them were sporting air force work uniforms.  To a man they were all gawking at the blood covered military misfits who made up the suicide squad.  Despite the lack of facial art Tom’s men were fitting right in at this point.  They’d waded the Styx together to save these people.  You didn’t need props or jail house face tattoos to be a certain kind of crazy.

“The showers actually do work.”  One of the men said.  He was staring at the blood dripping off their rescuers.

“That’s good cause I’m a walking biohazard right now.  I love this coat, but I may have to burn it.”  Harley’s voice boomed out from up front. Everyone was still just sort of standing around the now open door.  Harley had been in the forefront of the fight for almost the entire time.  Yue suspected his energy level had been drug fueled.  It’d worked though so who really cared?

“Is that you Harley?”  A blast from the recent past called out from the overcrowded room that’d just been opened up.

“Shaun?”  Yue asked looking over at Jeff.  Jeff shrugged and watched as Shaun cut through the crowd to shake Harley’s hand.  One of the steely eyed men on the other side of the open door frame asked for them to make room for President Thompson.  Jeff hadn’t really been looking forward to this specific moment.  He’d known it was a real possibility though.  He kind of hated that he’d risked all their lives to save the prick.  He started looking around for Thompson.  The only person he could see moving around was Shaun.

Shaun heard Jeff and made a beeline for him and Yue.  He continued to shake everyone’s hands and thank them.  By the time he got to Jeff his hand was covered in blood.  That didn’t stop him from coming in to give Jeff and the rest of them hugs.

“Now you’re going to need a shower.”  Yue said looking at him.

“I thought I was going to need a hole to bury myself in.  A shower doesn’t sound too bad compared to that.  Thank you.  I don’t even know how to thank you for saving our lives.”  Shaun said graciously.

“Where’s your uncle hiding at?”  Jeff asked to change the subject.  None of them were really great at accepting the level of gratitude Shaun was hurling at them.

“He didn’t make it.”  Shaun answered succinctly.  Jeff smacked himself internally on changing the subject to something that was now even more awkward.  He tried to think of the right thing to say.

“Mr. President we should pull them all back into the warehouse and seal off the doors for the night.  We need to verify the area is secure.”  A very competent looking man was tugging on Shaun’s sleeve to get him to go back in the open space behind him.  Shaun told the man to stand by. Turning his attention back to Jeff he smiled at the bewildered looks on the faces of his former traveling companions.

“You ever see that old Kiefer Sutherland show on Netflix?  The Designated Survivor one?”  Shaun asked.

“The one where most of the government gets blown up and he ends up being President even though he was like the secretary of housing or something?”  LeBron supplied.

“That’s the one.  Basically it’s that scenario with some nepotism sprinkled into the mix.”  Shaun said with a wry grin on his face.  Lindsey and Tom were both struggling to figure out what was going on.  Having known Shaun’s’ uncle everyone in Jeff’s party pretty much got how this could’ve happened.  The man had been a paranoid power hungry selfish type with major dictator tendencies.

“How many men do you have shoved in here?”  Jeff asked peering over the crowd separating them from the open warehouse.  The people who’d been rescued were mostly standing a little back from their tattoo and blood covered saviors.

“We’ve got around a hundred.  Pretty much everyone who’s left alive would be my guess.  We tried to get outside to save everyone but ended up jammed up in here.  Not that it’s been horrible with electricity, running water and plenty of food.  We were almost ready to make a break for it when you guys showed up.  The secret service guys kept saying to stay put until someone came to rescue us.  I guess they were right after all.”  Shaun said.

“So you’re like the legal President now?”  Drew asked.  He was playing catch up having had his attention diverted by trying to help Lisa unjam her rifle.  It’d stopped working when she beat a crawler in the head with it a few times.  She’d been reloading and thought she saw it twitch.

“Pretty much.  The appointment was even approved by the senate.  Or, at least by everyone in the senate that was still alive.  About a dozen governors approved it to.  I think they mostly did it because their wives wanted to spend a day outside having a picnic.”  Shaun answered.

“A picnic?”  It was Lisa’s turn to look baffled by the rapidly evolving conversation with Shaun.  Shaun shrugged and explained.

“Yeah.  About the stupidest idea possible.  All the bigwigs and their wives and kids got cases of cabin fever.  My uncle got them to agree to put me in a cabinet position in exchange for them getting an afternoon outside.  It sounds stupid but he told me political deals had been done for way less.  Anyway, they got their picnic.  Booze and hamburgers and loud music and just the whole freakin’ deal.  Got so damned drunk one of the senators forgot one of his kids.  He ordered the guard to open the doors so they could go out and find him.  It’d only just started getting dark, so the guard did it.  Crawlerz must’ve been attracted by the party noise during the day.  It all went to hell faster than you could believe.”  Shaun realized he’d been talking for a long time while blood literally dripped off parts of his rescuers bodies.

“Mr. President if you can come back in here until we’ve determined the hallway is secure.”  The secret service agent tried again.  The guy must be feeling pretty bad since it was his job to protect important members of the government.  All the important members of the government had recently been turned into zombie chow per Shaun.  Picturing the murderous monsters rampaging through the picnic it was doubtful that getting to play some volleyball and eat some hamburgers had been worth it.  There’d be time to get back to normal if they won this war.  That time had not yet come.

Chapter 35:  Send out the Clowns

Clearing and cleaning the base was a dirty dangerous chore that took them a little over a week to complete.  It would’ve been done much sooner if not for the emphasis on separating the fallen from the damned.  It also took a good bit of effort to patch up and fix the massive holes ripped in the walls, floors, ceiling and pretty much everything else shot up by the assault force.  The joke becoming that next time they got in a fight they’d try to aim away from anything they may have to fix or clean later.

More survivors were found scattered around different parts of the base.  A handful were found in the storeroom of the galley.  When the crawlerz had gotten in the first wave of people turned had kept right on running for cover.  They ran with their access cards out so they could run right through doors.  Doors which they left open for the crawlerz behind them.  Inside those sections they accessed more people were turned.  Those people then ran deeper into the base with their access cards in front of them.  People had survived in a lot of cases because there was a mechanical locking mechanism in place where they hid.  Shaun hadn’t realized until they figured that out that he was lucky to have run for the oldest part of the base.  It was the part that hadn’t been upgraded to the fancy new access control system yet.

Plenty of the turned were still locked up in their little sealed off sections of the base.  Access badges still swinging off the necks of many of them.  Yue was sent scurrying around the base with her guards like some kind of demon divining rod.  No one wanted to open a door until she’d told them what to expect on the other side.  She wasn’t a hundred percent accurate.  It definitely wasn’t an exact science.  She was right enough times that it was stupid not to ask her first though.

Despite the hard work it was a good week for everyone.  The base had electricity and plenty of stockpiled provisions.  Lindsey had told them that the rations on the ship had been getting scarce.  Pretty much everyone who could be offloaded had been off loaded.  As the primary fighting men of the ship the squad had been spared until the end.  The helicopters they’d landed in were out of fuel and the captain had made it clear they weren’t expected back.  This battle had been a one way trip for them one way or the other.  Just another day in the lives of the infamous squad.

They avoided talking about future plans for the first few days.  If for no other reason than it was hard to address the President of the United Stated when he was mopping blood and guts off the floor along with the rest of them.  Shaun insisted he could spend a few hours a day helping to clean up since he had all the smart people sitting up in the communications and operations rooms working up briefs for him to review when he wasn’t doing custodial work.  No matter how much Shaun tried to hide it everyone knew he was doing the manual labor because it was cathartic.

They knew it was cathartic because they were all doing it too.  When you scrubbed and got all the blood out of a hallway it gave you something rare in the apocalypse.  A sense of completion.  A feeling like you’d accomplished something.  They spent so much time running in place just trying to survive that they never seemed to get anywhere.  It was also kind of meditative to just sit on the floor for an hour scrubbing away at the stubborn red stains that coated the corridors.

As fun as scrubbing up blood and guts was though they knew it had to end sometime.  That sometime was marked by an airman asking them to join the President for lunch in the Presidential dining room.  Idly wondering if Shaun would still have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with oyster crackers while eating off fine china, they washed up and headed in the direction the airman had told them to go.  They ignored the available golf carts in favor of stretching out their legs.  They had plenty of time to get there and they’d been squatting or bending over most of the morning.  It felt good to work the kinks out.

“We should go loot a Sherwin Williams or something.  This paint is gross.”  Lisa said pointing at the freshly painted lime green walls.  It was her, Drew, Yue, LeBron and Jeff strolling along.  Harley had been a little scarce lately.  They’d all been wondering if he’d hooked up with one of the squad girls or if he was just sitting in a corner somewhere huffing paint.  This lime green stuff could probably get you high enough that you’d be looking down at the moon.

“We’d have to bring a generator to get the paint mixing machine to work.”  Yue said.  She was right there with Lisa though in this color being atrocious.  She’d never actually said the word ‘atrocious’ out loud but was thinking it might be time to give it a whirl.  If anything deserved the use of that particularly pretentious word, it was the leprechaun puke color of the paint they were being forced to smear on the walls.

“It’s either this lovely baby poop color or we leave the blood spatter stains uncovered.”  Drew said.  He didn’t personally see a problem with the color.  It seemed very military to him.

“Yeah.  The blood spatters lent some class to the place at least.  Like works of modern art.  Probably worth millions of dollars if we’d framed them instead of scraping the clumpy parts off and painting over the rest.”  LeBron said.  The banter helping make the long walk seem to go by much faster.  They were already there by the time Lisa started to say that blood spatters were pretty much the new normal modern art.

Entering the dining room they were immediately reassured that they hadn’t needed to dress fancy for the occasion.  This was definitely going to be a working lunch.  Captain Lindsey and Major Tom were both in attendance as were a couple of their lieutenants.   Shaun had a few of the leaders from his team present as well.  He thanked everyone for coming and got a round of drinks started for those who requested them.  It was only noon but after a few days’ worth of cleaning unidentifiable globs of bloody bio gunk out of the nooks and crannies of the huge base everyone was feeling pretty entitled.

Conversation remained light for the beginning of the meal.  One of Shaun’s men gave an overview on the status of cleaning out the base.  He also let everyone know that the communications room was back to being fully operational.  There’d only been a couple of people with knowledge of how those systems worked who’d survived.  They were busy training others now so that the radios could go back to being manned around the clock.

One of the principal pieces of news the radio men had been broadcasting was the fact that a large portion of the United States government hadn’t survived.  They’d had to spend a good amount of time explaining how the nephew of the late President was now the new President.  It sounded a little too much like the way power was passed in dictatorships to suit most patriotic Americans.  Once it was explained in detail how it’d come to occur most of them seemed to accept it.  It wasn’t like there was really another option.  No one was going to be sporting an “I Voted” sticker anytime soon.

The state of the bases and ships that responded to the broadcasts was really the most troubling news.  They were all in similar positions to the ship the suicide squad had flown off of.  They were low on supplies and looking to just find a place to anchor and work on trying to survive.  One thing they weren’t short on was mouths to feed.

Those mouths to feed were a subject Jeff wanted to explore more fully.  A lot of them were the mouths of highly trained soldiers who were currently floating around in the ocean not doing anyone any good.  In Jeff’s opinion they needed to marshal those forces and get them turned on the enemy. The sooner they exterminated the plague of infected the sooner they could start reclaiming their country.  Hiding in underground bases behind thick walls wasn’t going to do it.  Going on the defensive was a losing strategy here.

As the lunch wound on Jeff got more and more animated discussing the plans that they’d made for clearing the country.  He described their train trip up to Philadelphia to everyone.  No one was surprised to hear that there were groups of survivors who were resentful of the way the government had handled the crisis.  It was a little concerning that those groups were coming together to do things like ambush trains on government business.  Trains that’d been trying to give out supplies to the same survivors who’d shot at them.

Shaun agreed that they should get the countrywide crawler cleansing operation started as soon as possible.  No one was safe while a single infected roamed the country.  There was going to be the issue of venturing into South America and people traveling from other countries.  They all agreed those were problems for another day.  Right now they needed to focus on building out secure locations for noncombatants and get their own combatants out into the field.  They needed to continue to work on how to kill the most infected with the smallest risk.  That’s when Captain Lindsey spoke up.  Until that moment she’d been mainly listening and adding quick relevant insights when she had them.

“This mission to experiment with ways to crush the crawlerz.  That’s got my unit written all over it.  Mr. President and Mr. Jeff we do hereby volunteer to lead that effort.”  Lindsey said.

“It does seem like a good fit.  I’m assuming you know it’s going to be dangerous as hell.  You’re good with that?”  Shaun asked in his best Presidential voice.

“My guys and I are meant to be out in the field killing those things sir.  That’s what we do.”  Lindsey answered.  She was munching on a bowl full of noodles while she answered.  Her whole attitude portraying that the prospect of riding a train car filled with explosives around the country to fight off hordes of insane super powered freaks didn’t bother her in the slightest.

“You’d be reporting to Jeff for this operation.  I’m putting him in charge of it.  Or, keeping him in charge of it anyway.  Jeff, on this one I’d rather you lead from the rear.  I need you here to work on some more logistical tasks on top of this one.”  Shaun said firmly once again practicing his Presidential tone.  No one bothered to tell him he sounded slightly Australian every time he tried to sound official.  No one told him but Lisa and Drew giggled every time Shaun talked now and they were rapidly dragging LeBron into it too.

Jeff had no problem staying behind.  He understood the need for him to be there.  It made sense for him to be working through the logistical pieces.  Those were the pieces he was really good at anyway.  He already knew what was going on with most of the country. After all, he’d been the one who set up what most of the country had to work with in the first place.  He had no problem with that.  He had a major problem with the next thing Captain Lindsey had to say.

“Yue should come with us too.”  The captain said.  Yue merely nodded and continued eating while everyone else waited for an explanation.  Everyone except for Jeff anyway.

“Yeah, no that’s not happening.”  Jeff stated emphatically.  Yue continued chewing without making eye contact with anyone.  She was happy to let them fight over her.  She knew who was going to end up winning though.

“She knows she’s not doing anyone any good sitting in this hole.  She belongs out in the field.  She’ll save lives and help us accomplish the mission.  Not just this first mission either.  The more she understands about how the enemy ticks the better she can help come up with tactics for wiping them off the planet.”  Lindsey argued.  You didn’t get to be the leader of a hardcore military group that called itself the suicide squad by being the type to back down from authority.

“I’m not letting her go out their alone.”  Jeff said simply.  He sat back with his arms crossed and his face turning a deep shade of angry red.  Lindsey didn’t seem overly impressed.

“She’s not going to be alone.  I’ve already got four guys dedicated to just her safety.  I’ll double that and use somebody you trust to lead them.  Plus don’t you think her brothers would come along?”  Lindsey said intently.  She was in full on sales mode.  The President of the United States had just told her Jeff was her new boss and she was already doing her best to piss him off.  It was just the way she was wired she supposed.

“I need LeBron here to help with the planning.”  Jeff shot back.

“Really?  He’s like twelve and you want him doing the planning when you have all these grownups around here to help?”  Lindsey was starting to get a bit heated.  If there was one thing that she hated it was bureaucracy.  Which was why it’d taken the apocalypse to see her get promoted.

“It’s ok for you to drag a twelve year old off to fight an army of the infected though?”  Jeff asked back.  He was leaning forward now with both hands on the table.  LeBron wanted to say that he wasn’t a twelve year old.  He was worried that trying to say anything about that would only make him look like a twelve year old though.  He just couldn’t think of a non-whiny way to say it.

“You’re ok with me boarding the death train though?”  Drew had finally picked up on the fact that no one was fighting for him to stay behind.  He’d rather roll out with the crazies to hunt the infected anyway, so he wasn’t overly upset.  Shaun was watching the argument evolve and wondering if he should’ve left off the alcoholic beverage options for the lunch meeting.

“I tell you what sir.  Have a conversation with Yue and LeBron about what makes the most sense and how they feel they can help the most.  I’ll abide by their decisions.”  Lindsey said with a sickeningly sweet smile.

“Great ideas.  Let’s keep this briefing moving forward.  On top of the ships out there we’ve also reached out to all the bases to let them know about the change in leadership and get a status from them.”  Shaun said deftly changing the subject.  There was hope for him to be a decent politician yet.  The conversation continued centered around numbers and projections.  Jeff and LeBron were both animated and asking questions as the man presenting the information provided the summaries.  Everyone else looked like they desperately wanted to ask for much more alcohol than was appropriate for a working lunch.

Chapter 36:  On a Train Bound for Nowhere

The trainyard was a disaster area.  They’d been using it all week to practice the techniques they were planning on using to eradicate large numbers of crawlerz.  It was going to take forever to do it this way, but they had to start somewhere.  Once someone came up with a better plan they’d happily jump on board.  Until then they’d kill the man eating bastards one at a time if they had to.

It took three large trucks multiple trips to get them all loaded up and ready to go.  In the end it was agreed that Yue and Drew would be going with the train.  Lisa was also going to be tagging along as she refused to be separated from Drew.  No matter how stupid she thought leaving the base full of modern conveniences for a life on the road was.  Everyone had tried to convince her to stay but she’d been dead set on going.  Her argument for going was actually pretty solid.  Drew was an idiot.  Yue was going to be too busy doing her witchy psychic thing to make sure he didn’t do anything dumb.

Jeff and LeBron were staying behind.  LeBron hated letting them leave without him on such a dangerous mission, but he got that he could be extremely valuable to Jeff on the strategic planning side.  Plenty of people thought that Jeff and the others telling LeBron he’d be more useful at the base was just talk.  Just a way to make the kid feel good about staying behind while his brother and sister took off on the death train for a ride straight into the mouth of hell.

The people who knew LeBron knew that wasn’t true at all.  Jeff had already set him up with the office next to his in the suite that Shaun had provided him to run the operation from.  The only thing Jeff was struggling with around LeBron was which project to put him in charge of first.  All of the people who were assigned to work with them could tell within an hour or two that first impressions couldn’t be trusted.  The kid was like some kind of logistical savant.  LeBron was excited about the work he’d be doing but was at war with himself over not going with his siblings.

Yue was ok with leaving LeBron behind.  The work they were doing was soul destroying.  Walking out of a train every morning to kill whatever horribly maimed crawlerz were lying around after the shrapnel ripped through them.  Every foreseeable morning was going to involve awakening to a scene from a human slaughterhouse.  Every night was going to be spent crushed under the weight of hundreds of the infected trying to get at them.  If she could spare LeBron some of that then she was happy to do it.

Of the three siblings LeBron was the most fragile.  He was tough as nails physically and there was no one either Drew or Yue would rather have backing them up in a fight.  They both still recognized the fragility around LeBron though.  Whether it was because he was so smart or just because he was slightly younger than them, he had an innocence still about him. Even after all the atrocities they’d committed to survive this long he still had that sweet aura Yue loved so much.  She was stoked he’d decided not to make a big deal out of being left behind.  She’d have hated to have had to fight with him about it.

Yue grabbed Jeff’s hand as he gallantly assisted her out of the truck.  He’d come along to see them all off.  He was dreading having to watch the train steam its way out of there.  The analytical part of his brain kept getting in fights with the romantic side of his cranium.  At an intellectual level he knew this was what made the most sense.  At a gut level he was positive that letting Yue ride away to face a world full of monsters without him was the stupidest thing he’d ever done.

“We’ll be back.  We have this pretty much down to a science.  We’re going to be checking in over the radio constantly.  I know you hate this.  Honestly, I love that you hate this.  If you weren’t worried, then I’d be pissed.  It’s going to be ok though.”  Yue said to Jeff.  She’d been saying the same sort of things every day for the last week or so.  Jeff kissed her on the forehead and held her.  After a minute of that he whispered what was on his mind.

“No where’s safe.  The last time we got on a train and took off is when Weathertop went down.  Maybe you’re the safe one. Maybe me and LeBron are the ones who need to be worried.  The world’s full of danger.  I just feel better when we face it together.  I don’t like being apart from you.  I don’t like missing you.”  Jeff said tilting her head back so he could kiss her on the lips instead of the forehead.

Jeff let her go when a familiar figure in a long black coat walked up.  Harley was sporting a fresh new tattoo on his neck.  The joker card fit right into his new gig as a commando in the suicide squad.  To become a full-fledged member you had to show you deserved it.  For most of them that meant jumping into the action when they got somewhere.  For Harley it’d meant that he actually head butted a crawler that was coming hard at Lindsey.  Head butted it hard enough to knock it off its feet where Lindsey had put a couple of rounds into its heart and head.

“You officially in the squad now?”  Jeff asked checking out the tattoo.  Jeff always just called them the ‘squad’ because he thought ‘suicide squad’ was cartoonish and overly pessimistic.

“It was meant to be considering my name.”  Harley answered seriously.

“Plus the fact that you’re half-crazy and fight like some kind of Viking berserker. “  Yue added.

“Well.  Keep Yue safe or don’t come back.”  Jeff said sticking his hand out to shake.  Harley being Harley he ignored the extended hand and went in for a way too intimate backslapping bro hug instead.

“When did you two start dating?”  Drew asked coming around the corner to the sight of Harley throwing out all the rules on personal space.  As always Lisa was right by his side.

“Yeah, also shouldn’t he be keeping us all safe or not coming home?”  Lisa joked.  She looked tired.  She was working hard not to second guess her decision to leave a nice safe place to go out into the field with her man.  It seemed to her she was getting put into this situation way too often.  She needed to find a man who was more interested in libraries and spa packages than killing things.

“You all need to focus on staying safe and getting back here.  Hopefully with some ideas on bumping up our nightly kill quota from the hundreds to the thousands.”  Jeff replied.

“You’re such a romantic.”  Yue said punching him in the arm.

“I wish LeBron had come out.”  Drew said.  He was missing his little brother already.  He was so used to having LeBron at his side that it felt like he’d forgotten to strap on one of his weapons or something.  He kept looking around to see what it was he’d forgotten.  Every time he remembered it was LeBron, he felt a little more guilty about leaving him behind.  He knew how it must be making LeBron feel.  That’s probably why LeBron had chosen to stay at the base and get to work rather than come see them off.

“I wish he’d asked me out instead of you.  I’d be sitting in a nice warm break room sipping a hot coffee right now.  Instead of trying to survive I’d be trying to figure out if we could use dehydrated milk in the ice cream mixer.”  Lisa said.

“There’s an ice cream mixer?”  Yue asked.  She smiled when Lisa nodded.  “That’s it.  We’re not going anywhere until we get an ice cream mixer installed on the train.”

They talked of inconsequential things for a few more minutes.  All of them playfully taking swipes at one another like they did most days.  Yue once again pointing out to Jeff that between the train and the base the base was the one that’d actually most recently been overrun with crawlerz.  Jeff promised not to let anyone schedule a picnic if Yue and crew agreed to the same.  Yue of course refused to limit them on the picnic option.

A mix of heartfelt and lighthearted goodbyes left Jeff standing alone on the train platform.  He found himself facing the moment he’d been dreading ever since he’d lost the argument about Yue being part of this mission.  The train pulling out was taking a big chunk of his heart along with it.  He wasn’t going to feel right again until Yue came back to him.  He wasn’t even willing to consider the alternative.  Trying to distract himself he walked back over to the truck mentally ticking off the list of things he needed to get moving on once they made it back to the base.

On the train Yue had settled into her cramped bunk space to try and get in a cat nap.  None of them had slept well the night before between final preparations and the stress of knowing what they were about to be doing.  None of them except Drew anyway Yue thought with a smile.  The smile faded as she thought of the additional pressure that was going to be on her.

The brutish way they were going about this began with rolling up into areas where they suspected there’d be tons of crawlerz.  Those areas happened to be major cities for the most part.  Which was convenient since the railway system didn’t focus all that much on conveying people to smaller towns unless they happened to be along the route.  Once stopped for the day they’d set up explosives all around the perimeter to take out as many of the infected as showed up.  They were planning on popping off some fireworks right at dusk to attract as many of them as possible.

For absolutely no really good reason that Yue could infer everyone was looking to her to come up with a better method for the mass murdering.  Her sensitivity allowed her to slip into the psychic party line the crawlerz used as a primitive form of communication.  Everybody seemed capable of catching glimpses of it but only a select few like Yue had been able to really master it.  According to Lindsey the others who’d been as sensitive as her were mostly insane or dead now.

Yue didn’t have any additional ideas for better ways to put the infected out of their misery.  She’d spent so much time in their heads that she was really starting to feel sorry for them.  Not sorry in a let them live way.  More like sorry in a let’s hurry up and blow their heads off way.  The people they’d been before becoming infected may still be buried deep inside them, but they weren’t going to be coming back anytime soon.  There was no happy ending for people who’d been driven insane enough to lustily rip into the soft throats of their own parents and children.

It wasn’t long before they pulled into the first stop that they’d be trying this at.  The second place really if you counted the train station by Weathertop where they’d been trying out ideas for a few consecutive nights as well.  The train jerked to a halt.  Yue climbed out of her bunk to be joined by Harley and one of her other assigned guards.  Captain Lindsey was putting a very high value on Yue and her capabilities.

The captain herself met Yue at the door.  They hopped out after the area had been cleared to look for the best place to setup the mines.  They had crates of the claymores ready to be set up.  There wasn’t a real art to it.  At least not that they’d developed yet.  Lindsey suspected they were missing out on maximizing the kill zones.  They’d been working hard on trying to guess where the most crawlerz would mass up overnight to get the biggest bang for their buck.  This was one of those areas where they’d looked to Yue to provide some input.

Yue stood on the train platform looking around.  She had absolutely zero ideas on where the crawlerz would come to hang out in between beating on the walls of the train to try and get at them.  She’d told everyone who would listen that the crawlerz themselves weren’t going to plan where to stand.  They were going to slither and slide in wherever they could.  The captain chose to take that answer as Yue needing more time to figure it out.

The men went around carefully setting the charges.  They were busy making sure the explosive propelled ball bearings would travel away from the trains as much as possible.  They were also trying to avoid destroying the network of webcams being setup around the train.  Another small group was rigging up a series of lights to make it easier to watch the carnage.  The whole point of this mission was to gather the information to share out with hundreds of other groups to do the same kind of work.  It was going to take forever to make a dent in the millions of infected roaming the continent, but operation “Whistle-stop” was now officially under way.

Epilogue:  An Apocalyptic Shift in Paradigm

LeBron stared at the screen in front of him.  The laptop he’d been issued was a fancy, expensive looking one he’d hooked up to multiple monitors on his desk.  The desk was in an office inside a suite of offices typically reserved for high ranking political officials and their staff.  The other men in the offices around him were all now assigned to Jeff as well.  All of them hammering away on the impossible logistics required to resuscitate the country.

There were far too few of them for the task to which they’d been set.  Luckily the ships cruising off the east coast were only too happy to send them reinforcements.  The ship’s crews were down to minimal rations per day at this point.  The difficulty of loading supplies compounded by the nightmare scenario of the infection getting aboard somehow.  Universally the commanders of the state of the art warships were waiting until the last second to attempt supply runs.  The shore was looked at the same way as most four year old’s look at their closet when they hear a funny noise after the lights are turned out.

LeBron wasn’t holding out much hope that there’d be any sort of super savior showing up who could solve all of their problems for them.  No he was taking on that responsibility himself.  He may not be old enough for most adults to take him seriously yet but luckily the handful that did were fairly powerful people.  Shaun had somehow ended up the POTUS and LeBron was close to him.  Jeff had been put in charge of taking back and rebuilding the country.  Presidents kept giving and taking away that power, but it was pretty obvious to everyone Jeff was the best leader for that effort.

LeBron didn’t care who got credit for any of it.  The document in front of him on the computer right now was one he planned on telling Jeff to make his own.  It was a high-level plan sketching out how they could get to the utopia of a crawler free country.  It made some pretty serious assumptions that were bound to be challenged by the political element surrounding the leaders.  LeBron didn’t care who challenged it.  The plan as written was a blueprint for making them all a hundred times safer than they were now.

The problem as LeBron saw it was that all these people were trying to hold on to something that was dead.  They were defining success by going back to a lifestyle that wasn’t going to exist again in the foreseeable future.  Once they shifted their definition of success LeBron knew his plan would start to make a lot more sense.  Now he just needed Yue to figure out the best ways to turn the crawlers into lemmings while he worked on getting Jeff to believe that it was him who came up with this plan in the first place.

He wished Yue was here for the manipulating Jeff part.  That was one thing she was a million times better than either Drew or himself at.  LeBron wasn’t worried about getting it done himself though.  He’d do it because it was necessary.  He’d do it to protect his brother and sister.  If he happened to save the world in the process that was a serious perk.

Author’s Note

I realized the other day that our youngest child was born into a pandemic and still hasn’t seen the end of it.  When we look back at the pictures in a decade, I’m hoping this will all look seriously strange to him.  I’m hoping he asks questions like,  “Why was everyone wearing a mask?”  I’ll be very happy to live in a mask free world again!  A world where your whole family can be there when you have a baby.  Not just the mother and her husband staring at one another.  Although to be honest I’ll always treasure those first few days we had together with the newest miracle in our lives.

The pandemic seems to be turning the corner finally for which I for one am very grateful.  It means a relaxation of all these odd rules we’ve come to accept as the new normal.  I really miss taking the family to the movies.  It costs approximately a zillion dollars and the experience is pretty much always ruined by one of our children being too loud or needing a bathroom break.  Actually I guess I’m good with just sneaking out and watching movies by myself now that I think about it 

Back in our other universe the pandemic hasn’t turned any corners.  The infected are still savagely attacking anyone who isn’t infected yet.  They’re getting stronger every day.  What has changed is how people are reacting to them.  No more hiding in holes behind three feet of concrete or sitting on ships waiting to starve to death.  It’s officially on.  The charge is being led by a witchy Yue and a troop of half-mad warriors.  What could possibly go wrong?

I guess we’ll find out in Book 5!  THANK YOU AGAIN so much for sticking with me on this crazy ride.  If you enjoyed it, please throw some starz my way.  Reviews are also always appreciated!  Until next time….

Thank You!!!!

R S Merritt

April 7th, 2020

Other Books by RS Merritt

Try an excellent 7 Book series built around a Zombie outbreak:

Zombies!

Need more Zombies?  Check out the 6-Book Zournal series:

The Zournal Series

Looking for something a little different?  Try the Son of the Keeper series:

Son of the Keeper