Survival Instinct: A Zombie Novel (48 page)

“Yes, sir,” Danny snapped off another salute and headed for the kitchen.

“Oh!  And the stuff that doesn’t need cooking takes priority!” Alec quickly called after him.

* * *

Alec waited a moment until he heard Danny rummaging in the kitchen, then he wheeled into the garage.  He kept his back to the bloodstain in the corner and dumped out the contents of both the backpack and his duffel bag.  He needed to go through everything and decide what to bring and what to leave.  Although his M110 SASS, his sniper rifle, was about fourteen lbs. and likely more powerful than anything they would need, he put it and its ammo in a keep pile immediately.  His dress uniform, which was kept pristine and folded within a box, he tossed aside.  He never liked the thing anyway.  The same went for his medals.  He shot somebody and was rewarded; he got shot and was rewarded.  Just didn’t seem right to him.  Next, he put aside his pistol and its ammo.  The revolver he had been given by his dad, he tossed.  Although there was sentimental value attached to it and it was reliable, it just wasn’t as practical as the semi-automatic.  Not to mention he didn’t have extra rounds for the thing.  His helmet he put into a third pile he mentally labelled as maybe, same with his flak jacket,
kneepads, and boots.  His field pants, he tossed, because they weren’t much better than the pair he was already wearing.

He was sifting through the medical supplies when Danny came into the garage.  The boy was using his shirt like a basket to carry the cans and bottles.

“Do you have any allergies or asthma?  Any health conditions I should know of?”  Alec himself had none.  Other than the chair.

“None that I know of,” Danny shrugged.

“All right.  I’ll pack a pair of epipens just in case, but I’m going to leave the inhaler and other specialized medical stuff here.”  He sorted out the things that were likely to be useless.  He had to read a lot of labels carefully to learn what some of them were.  If he didn’t know, he put it in the abandon pile.  No use in carrying around something if you didn’t know what it did.

Danny looked at the stuff on the floor.  He eyed the sniper rifle for a moment, then bent down and picked out some dog tags.

“You can keep those if you want,” Alec told him.

“No, I couldn’t.”  Danny held them out to him.

“Seriously, take them.  They’re lucky.  Maybe they’ll bring some to you.”

Danny eyed the chair.

Alec chuckled a bit; he knew he didn’t look lucky.  “It could’ve been a lot worse.  I could be dead.”

“What happened?”  Alec wondered how long Danny had wanted to ask that question.  People always wondered, even if they didn’t say so.

“The short version is an enemy helicopter. My spotter and I were sent somewhere we’re not supposed to talk about, illegal infiltration and all that.  Not that I think that matters anymore.  We had just managed to take out our target,” Alec retold his story with no emotion in his voice.  He was rather detached from it.  The therapists hadn’t yet decided if that was a good thing or not.  “Someone must have ratted us out because, next thing we knew, there was an enemy attack chopper bearing down on us.  Even if someone had spotted the muzzle flash, they couldn’t have gotten that bird there that fast.  We were extremely well camouflaged though, in a fairly large field, and the pilot didn’t seem to know our exact location.  He opted to look for us with bullets.  He passed over us several times, streams of bullets raining down around us.  One of the passes shredded into my legs, but I managed not to move.  If either of us moved, we would both be torn to pieces.  Eventually, the chopper ran out of bullets, decided we weren’t there, or assumed we were dead.  Whatever the reason, he left.  My buddy must have had a horseshoe shoved up his ass that day because somehow, he didn’t get hit.  At least not badly, just a handful of grazes that we both got.”  Alec held up his arm and showed Danny a mark across the back of his bicep.  “So anyway, after we were sure the chopper was gone, my buddy picks me up and hauls me all the way back to the drop point.  I should have died out there but he wouldn’t let me.  Now I’m in this chair, and apparently could make a full recovery.  Minus the scarring of course.”  He rubbed his thigh unconsciously.

Danny looked at the dog tags.  “These say Nicolas Kessington.”

“I never said they were mine,” Alec laughed.  “They were my spotter’s.  I told you they were lucky.”

“Where are yours?”

“With him.”

“Shouldn’t he have his?” Danny frowned.

“It makes no difference to him.  He got to come home a few months after I did.  Apparently, smoking every second from the day you could stand gives you lung cancer.  He died about two weeks ago.”

Danny’s face fell and he held the tags out to Alec again.

“When I said keep them, kid, I meant it.”  Alec gently pushed his hand back toward him.  “Besides, you’re my spotter now, right?”

Danny looked at the tags.  He ran his fingers over them a few times, as if revering them, and then slid them on over his head.

“Let’s see what food you got.”  Alec gestured to the cans Danny had put on the ground.

Danny read off the labels to Alec and then put them in the keep pile.  Except for one can.  It had no label and had been in the house longer than Alec.  It wasn’t trustworthy.  Danny then added the water to the pile.

“Just a few more things to grab and I think we can head out.”  Alec didn’t like the size of the pile, but when travelling for an unknown period of time over hostile ground, you needed to be prepared.  “Do you mind grabbing a pair of tarps from over there?”

Danny went to get the tarps that Alec pointed out under a
workbench.

Alec rolled over to another
workbench that sat next to the bloodstain.  He grabbed a pair of wrenches, a pair of screwdrivers, and a plastic jar filled with various nuts and bolts.  If his chair or braces decided to crap out on him, he wanted to be able to try to fix them.  He also grabbed some rope, several rolls of duct tape, and a hammer, just in case.  He brought his stuff over to the pile where Danny had put down the tarps.  He had apparently found Alec’s hunting knife and was looking at it.  It still had blood on the blade.

“You used this to kill that man out there, didn’t you?”  Danny gestured to the garage door but didn’t look at it.  The arm with its ghostly white flesh could still be seen.

“I did.”  Alec took the knife from him and put it back into its sheaf.  He then hooked it and the pistol’s holster to his belt.

“Was it quick?”  Danny handed things to Alec as he asked for them, which Alec packed into the two bags.

“No, it wasn’t.”  Alec wasn’t going to lie.  “Because of him, zombies don’t seem unlikely to me anymore.”

“What do you mean?”

“I stabbed him in the heart first but it didn’t do a thing.  He just kept fighting me.  I thought maybe he could be one of those extremely rare people with their organs mirrored, but he wasn’t.  He didn’t stop until I took out the brain stem.”  Alec pointed to the back of his own head.

“So it’s possible he was already dead?”

“I guess.  Hand me that map there, would you?”  Alec suddenly remembered a piece of equipment from his army days that he didn’t keep with the rest.  “Hold on.”

He went over to his brother’s car and opened the passenger door.  He reached for the centre console, but couldn’t quite make it.  He sighed and backed away from the car.  “Could you help me?”

“What is it you’re trying to get?”  Danny climbed into the car with ease.  Alec had to admit it made him a little jealous.  He really did wish he had his legs back, but he knew there was no magic cure-all and he’d just have to suck it up.  Despite how much he hated them, the help groups did get him to understand that fact.

“That black, boxy thing with the screen.”  Alec pointed.

“This?”  Danny found it and held it up.

“That’s the one.”  Alec took it from Danny as he climbed back out of the car.

“What is it?”  Danny hovered over his shoulder while Alec turned it on.

“A GPS.”  He grabbed up the maps and flipped through them, finding the information he needed.  “We won’t need to carry these around if we program the locations we need into this.”

“Cool.”

Alec programmed the device then turned it off and put it in a pocket.  He thought about maybe grabbing some spare batteries but decided against it.  The thing had a solar cell so if the batteries did die, they would just be limited to using it in daylight.  “I’ll finish packing, but I want you to run to the kitchen
quickly and find a handful of power bars.  You’re going to put some in your pockets but not eat them.  They’re in case we somehow lose these cans, got it?”

Danny nodded, then ran out of the garage.

Alec packed up the rest of the gear, and then headed up the ramp into the house.  He mentally ticked through everything they had, and every situation he could think of that might occur.  Alec didn’t think they were going to make it through this, but he would try for the kid.  He should’ve died once already, but the kid still had a lot of years left in him.  Maybe that’s why Nick saved him that day, so that one day he could repay the favour to this boy.

That was a lot of sentimental bullshit.

As Alec reached the front door, Danny ran up to him and handed him a bunch of power bars.  He was eating a banana he had found as well.  Alec put the power bars into his remaining pockets.

“Think you can carry this?”  He held out the backpack to Danny.

Danny picked it up and tested its weight, then shrugged his shoulders into it.  “Sure, it’s no heavier than when I have to bring all my books home from school.”

“Take these as well.”  Alec plunked his army helmet onto Danny’s head, the goggles strapped to it.  It was a little big, but when he pushed it back a bit, he could see while it stayed balanced.  He also hung his flak jacket off the backpack.  Danny didn’t argue about either of these things.  “You ready?”

Danny nodded, the helmet bobbling slightly.

Alec opened the front door and looked out into the street.  Nothing really looked the same.  Things were broken on houses, lawns, and cars and it was all so very still.  Alec thought of it as the calm before the storm although he wasn’t sure how things could get worse.  Then again, how they were going to find someone to drive them was going to be a challenge.  He rolled out of the house with Danny following closely behind.

“Should I close the door?” Danny had dropped his voice to a whisper.

Alec thought about it a moment.  “Yes.”  He finally decided.  His brother-in-law may be alive, and although an open door may warn him of the bad things that had occurred inside, it was better to try to keep more things out.  Of course, they might just break through the windows but, hopefully, his brother would notice something like that.

“Which way do you think we should look first?” Alec whispered to Danny.

Danny looked both up and down the street.  He shrugged, “I have no idea.  Which way will we be heading anyway?”

Alec pointed.

“Then we’ll go that way.”

Without another word, they headed off.  It wasn’t long before Alec could tell that Danny was holding onto his handles again.  He felt like a living security blanket.

The Older Woman

Kara stroked Alice’s soft and curly blond
e hair.  The girl had somehow managed to fall asleep.  Probably from fear and exhaustion.  The dog on the other hand was restless.  It roamed the wine cellar, sniffing at this and that.  It kept stopping in front of the man who looked like either a plumber or an electrician.  It would lie down and woof at the man several times, then whine and start its wandering again.  Alice had said that the dog was a cadaver dog, and that was his signal for when he found a dead body.  This man looked alive though.  Deranged, but alive.

She looked at her hand.  She still hadn’t pulled the sliver of glass out, so she started to do so now.  It stung fiercely but she managed to get it out and tossed it into the corner.  The dog might prick its nose or paw on it, but that wasn’t really Kara’s concern.  She had never really been too fond of animals.  Most of them had an odour that was unpleasant.  The only animals she would tolerate the smell of
were horses, but that was only because she greatly loved to ride them.

“He’s still here,” Alice mumbled.  Kara hadn’t even noticed that she had awoken.  “Why won’t he go away?”

“I don’t know,” Kara told her as she began to stoke her hair again.

“Go away!” Alice yelled at the man.  This elicited no response from him.  He continued to press himself up against the cage door, reaching in at them.

“I’ve had enough of this,” Kara finally decided.  She lifted Alice off of her lap and placed her on the cellar steps.  She rose to her feet and walked over to the man, but kept just out of arm’s reach.  “You will cease this instant,” she commanded.  Of course, this also did nothing.  “If you do not, I will be forced to use violence.”

Kara had adequately warned the man.  She went over to one of the shelves holding wine and picked out the cheapest bottle there.  There was no point in wasting good wine.  She then walked back over to the man and showed him the bottle.