Chapter 30
Thirty minutes after the battle, Matias
circled back around and landed the helo. Carlie, Jared, and Shane had already
gone through the vehicles and the contents of the men’s pockets for any
tactical goods.
Matias walked over and stared at the
bullet-ridden corpses. “Not who we’d hoped they were, eh?”
“Nope,” said Jared. “Looks like flesh-eaters
aren’t found just among the undead.”
“They mentioned having a building nearby
they were holed up in,” said Carlie. “Did you see anything that was intact we
might have missed on our arrival?”
“No, but I did locate an aerial tower at a
radio station a few miles from here. We may be able to use that for boosting
the signal on our comms in the helo.”
“Alright, why don’t you head there and
we’ll follow behind in one of the Humvees just in case we end up needing a
vehicle.”
****
Twenty minutes later, they had cleared the
tiny radio station and Matias had gone to work on the radio transceiver.
Meanwhile, Carlie and the others set up a perimeter around the cinderblock building
and did an inventory of their weapons and ammo count.
The rest of the group waited outside as
Matias went to work on jerry-rigging the various radio devices to try and
connect with any military frequencies along the west coast.
Carlie was sitting cross-legged on the
dirt, eating from a can of pork and beans, still pondering what had become of
her brother.
I know Matt would have gotten out of the city early with his
family when things started falling apart. He would have beelined for our cabin
in the mountains
—
question is, did he make it there in time before the
highway was gridlocked from everyone else fleeing? God, a person’s soul could
be torn apart just trying to fathom where their loved ones ended up when all
this went down in the world.
She stopped eating and leaned her head back
against the warm concrete wall, closing her eyes.
I can’t give up hope
—
he
has to be up in the mountains and I’ll find him
—
somehow I’ll find him.
Carlie opened her eyes as she heard Jared
sit down in the shade beside her, and he looked at her with a crooked smile as
he spoke. “So, I’ve been curious about something—something that’s of real
concern but that no one has brought up yet.”
She stared at him, forgetting her worries
for a moment, and responded in a monotone voice. “Go on—I’m sure this is going
to be life-altering.”
Amy smirked. “Or make you want to end his
life to be free of his humor.”
“So, we’re hopefully headed to Fort Lewis
in the Pacific Northwest, right?” said Jared. “Do you think that our missing
link pals have been affected by the virus? I’m talking about Bigfoot of course.
Washington State is supposed to be the epi-center of the Bigfoot population in
the world and we’re going there. Doesn’t that worry any of you?” he said with a
serious face. “What if they have also mutated and are now Sasquatch zombies?”
he continued, raising his hands and clawing at the air while snapping his teeth
together.
“This fucking guy—how does he even have
the energy to think up such shit?” said Shane, tossing a pinecone at Jared’s
head.
“You joke now, amigo, but when we run
across one of those nine-foot, shaggy undead freaks, you’re not gonna be
laughing.”
“Got that right,” Shane said. “I’ll be
shooting you in the leg and then running so I get a head start on my escape.”
Pavel stopped eating and nudged Jared with
his elbow. “My friend, everyone knows that Bigfoot was created by Russian scientists
to spy upon you Americans. Surely they must all be dead by now.” The older man
looked at the others and grinned.
“If you run into one, Jared, I think
you’ll be safe because Sasquatch don’t eat junk food,” chuckled Amy.
Carlie was laughing so hard she had to put
her can of food down. “Damn, I’m going to miss these wilderness therapy sessions
that I’ve had to endure these many months. You guys kill me,” she said, holding
her sides as everyone joined in the laughter.
****
Three hours later, after many attempts at
improvising with the radio console and antenna, Matias made contact with a
repeater tower in central California that brought in a garbled transmission from
an Air National Guard base near Klamath Falls, Oregon, south of Portland.
Matias then used the unlock codes Carlie provided to access the secure channel
at Fort Lewis, allowing him to connect to his intended location.
As Carlie and the others were snoozing in
the late afternoon sun beside the ashen-gray concrete building, Matias yelled
from the inside, “You’re going to wanna hear this.”
Everyone gave sideways glances and then
sprung to their feet as they rushed into the back room. There in the small
chamber, coming over the ceiling speakers, was the gravelly sound of a man’s
voice. “Go ahead, Coronado Island. This is Fort Lewis, over. We have you loud
and clear.”
Chapter 31
The morning after her attack on the
riverside encampment, Eliza gathered with the four other survivors she had
freed and they quickly departed in a truck, heading northwest along country
roads that one of the women knew. They had secured a few dozen rifles, ammo,
food, and supplies from the camp before setting off as an approaching herd of
zombies was moving in on the smoldering wreckage. They made one stop a few
miles from the camp so Eliza could retrieve her pack with the laptop, which she
had stowed in a hollow sycamore tree.
Darcy, a gray-haired woman in her early
fifties, sat in the middle beside Eliza, who was in the passenger’s seat. The
wispy man driving was Mitch and had grown up in Yakima, where they were headed.
The other two survivors, Candice and Josh, a couple in their mid-twenties, sat
in the rear seat in the Ford F-250, wrapped in blankets, asleep.
Eliza was exhausted, having spent much of
the night awake, tending to the survivors, who were severely dehydrated and
malnourished. Mitch spoke with them about heading to Yakima, Washington where
he, Darcy and a few dozen others had an off-grid Forest Service logging camp
they had been using. Eliza had told them that she was traveling with some
friends enroute to Fort Lewis when they were attacked. She kept her answers
vague and always diverted their questions so she wouldn’t have to reveal who
she had been in her previous life.
As they barreled down the two-lane road
through the forest, Darcy kept looking at the gauze on Eliza’s forearm, which
had soaked through again. “You gonna be OK? That one looks like a doozy.”
“Not as bad as my back. That’s the one
that keeps reminding me I’m still alive. Besides, I can’t complain compared to
what I’m sure you’ve all been through.”
Mitch just clenched his jaw and gripped
the steering wheel, staring at the road ahead. Darcy threw her head back and
forced out a breath then wiped her forearm along her misty eyes. “Those
bastards are dead and gone—that’s all that matters.” She placed her hand on top
of Eliza’s. “You’re a savior, you know that, right?”
Eliza didn’t know what to say and found
herself struggling for words. She just squeezed the woman’s hand back and
looked out at the trees lining the road to her right. Twenty-four hours ago she
was driving in a car with Willis, talking about all the food they were going to
eat back at Fort Lewis and how they were going to enjoy a romantic dinner. Now,
he was gone and she was adrift, surrounded by strangers. Life no longer held
any certainties, no predictable outcome despite all of one’s planning and
desires. Now life was a daily battle against those hellish creatures, the
elements, and even other human beings bent on savagery. The fire of revenge
from the day before had burned itself out, leaving a chasm in her soul.
I
should feel some guilt over what I did, executing those men, but instead I feel
nothing. What’s wrong with me? I could have driven on, away from that camp and
made my way alone.
She glanced around the truck at the others.
But now,
these people are free
—
imagine what would have happened to them if they
had remained prisoners.
The images of the exploding vehicle, the deafening hail
of gunfire, and the lingering odor of smoldering wood—all of it unspooling in
her head like a reel from an old movie with someone else playing the lead character.
Eliza thought back to her previous life in D.C. when she was involved in her
parents’ fundraisers for humanitarian causes. Now she was this person who had
pre-meditated a murderous attack on others, however much her logical mind tried
to justify their ending. She thought of a Sunday School saying she used to hear
when she was little and uttered the words to herself:
‘He who lives by the
sword dies by the sword.’
Eliza thought of Willis and Carlie and other
agents she had known, reflecting on their mental fortitude and prowess.
‘He
who lives by the sword lives one day longer’; that’s how it has to be now.
The truck came to a halt at a rural
intersection. An abandoned feed store was on the right corner with an antique
wagon sitting on its wooden wheels in front. A faded sign in the front window
read, “Fresh hay.”
“How far to Yakima from here?” Eliza said.
“Mmm…about another seventy miles or so.
Our camp isn’t exactly in Yakima. It’s on the outskirts in the mountains, about
eighteen miles from town.”
“How did you end up getting captured so
far south?”
“Me and a few others were doing a run for
medical supplies, sweeping through some cities in the tristate area when we ran
across those inbred bastards on the highway. That was two weeks ago.”
“Where were those guys from?”
“Walla Walla,” said Darcy. “They were
convicts.”
“Why were you…” Eliza motioned with her
hand around her neck, “chained up like that?”
“They used us as bait to lure the
flesh-eaters towards us. Then they’d move us a half-mile back in the truck and
keep luring those creatures until they had hundreds of them heading in one
direction, usually towards a town they wanted to sweep through,” she said,
hanging her head in her hands, trying to calm her voice. “Once they had the
locals on the run, their guys would descend upon those fleeing, taking who and
what they wanted. There used to be ten of us—now we’re all that’s left.”
“God, I’m so sorry,” Eliza said, turning
to look at them both. “I came across a dead zombie, one of those super-fast
ones, a few weeks back. It had a collar on its neck too.” She swallowed hard,
recalling the adrenaline of that incident.
Darcy looked at Mitch as they both exchanged
grim looks. Mitch leaned his body forward on the steering wheel. “I never saw
any of those things but one of the thugs at the camp was talking about how his
boss in Walla Walla had captured a few of the fast ones using nets and Tasers.
He’d take them to small towns and turn ’em loose, then come back the following
day and kill the thing once it had wiped out all of the locals.”
“Someone is using these creatures as
weapons. That’s sick—who could think of such a thing?” said Eliza.
“The guys out of Walla Walla were
survivors from the military penitentiary up there. They’re some scary
bastards,” said Darcy.
“And your place in Yakima—how far is that
from those dudes?” said Eliza.
“It’s tucked away back in the William
Douglas Wilderness Area west of town,” said Darcy. “There’s only one road going
in and plenty of game trails through the mountains out back that only a few of
us know. It’s a paradise, with a trout stream and freshwater springs.”
Mitch looked at the pistols on her hips.
“And trust me, with your skills, you’ll be more than welcome, not to mention
that you saved our asses and we owe you big time over the next ten lifetimes.”
Eliza never figured that someone would be
thanking her for saving their life. All of those years of being annoyed by the
constant hovering of Secret Service agents and now she just wanted to go back
in time and thank them all. Eliza looked down at the pack between her legs on
the floor and thought of the laptop inside. They were still several hundred
miles away from Ft. Lewis and she needed to keep the contents of her pack as
well as her background hidden for now. She just wanted to forget what was at
stake, forget about the world as it was, and just crawl into a corner somewhere
and be left alone. Everything she knew was gone and returning to Fort Lewis
would only bring endless questions about her ordeal, reminding her of what she
no longer had. No one in this group knew who she was and it felt good to be
anonymous for once in her life.
As they continued north, Eliza beheld
miles of open country ahead of them, surrounded by coniferous trees and rugged
wilderness. She was at once excited and intimidated, having spent most of her
life in urban areas. Then she realized that it was the first inkling of actual
emotion she had felt since she was with Willis, training with him, laughing on
occasion, and being wrapped in his arms at night.
One day she swore that she would return to
the scene of his final resting place to let him know that she had made it.
Until then she would persevere, she would adapt, and she would prevail in this
new world no matter what befell her or how difficult the road ahead was. Eliza
looked up at the snow-capped peaks of Mt. Rainier looming in the distance and
took in a deep breath, relaxing her balled fists and easing back into the seat.