Well Fed - 05 (54 page)

Allowing any undead to walk out of Whitecap made sense, so Shovel’s forces could gun down the lot while they stumbled down the ramp, blasting every last ravenous monster and pushing their carcasses over the side into garbage bins—much better than shooting them inside a pitch-dark tunnel and dragging their asses all the way out for disposal.

“By the way, I’ve doubled the guards as a precaution,” Giovanni said. “Seems some of them newbies been talking. They say Pine Cove had a pair of guardian angels. Real military types.”

“Huh. They didn’t mention that before.”

“They mentioned it now,” Giovanni said. “Anyway, I’ve taken care of things. Countermeasures, just in case.”

“They didn’t try anything while we were on the road.”

Giovanni shrugged. “Probably too many of you.”

“All right,” Shovel said, filing that mystery away for later. “Good move. See if anything happens.”

Silence settled then, a morning quietness wherein Shovel slipped into his usual post-waking stare out the window.

“Still one or two things to resolve…” Giovanni began in a somber tone.

“Yeah? What are those?”

Giovanni didn’t dignify that with an answer, and Shovel didn’t press him on it.

“What kind of person have I become,” Shovel asked slowly, steam issuing from his coffee, “to wake up, on a sunny morning––”

“Near afternoon now.”

“All right, afternoon—wake up at almost afternoon, and give the okay to put down my own brother. My last living brother. What kind of person would that make me?”

Giovanni looked up from his boots, eyes as cold as a week-dead rattlesnake stuffed into a freezer. “Slick told me about the dust injection. The dust don’t let people lie. Just brings out what they’re thinking—really thinking—deep, deep down. And I’m thinking he’ll be trouble, potentially a fuckin’ handful before he’ll be a help. With that train of thought, I’m thinking… it’s best to believe that your brothers––both of them––died a long time ago. In the past. This is the now, and that guy in the meat locker is a problem best solved with a bullet.”

Shovel locked gazes with his right-hand man and had another mouthful of coffee, sinister in its silence. The sounds of Whitecap permeated the walls. Motors growled. Someone shouted to another and got an answer. Shovel brooded, sipped again, and leaned back in his chair, making it squeal. He turned his gaze toward the base of the mountain, his eyes dark and contemplative.

“Make it painless, then.”

Giovanni waited for a moment before turning and opening the door.

There stood Sick, masked in black.

“Do it,” Giovanni ordered.

Sick lurched as he turned away, a golem of skin and bone set into motion. Giovanni closed the door and waited for Shovel to say something.

But Shovel had returned to gazing out his window, drinking his coffee, lost in a morning stare.

The beams of rechargeable flashlights poked and prodded at the wrecked darkness of the tunnel, illuminating debris consisting of rock, jagged slabs of concrete, steel pipes, and beams, all coated with a thick film of dust. The soldiers moved forward first, guns leveled and ready. They crept past makeshift struts and nailed sections of chain-link fence that kept the walls and ceiling from collapsing. Things creaked, disconcerting sounds of straining metal that made people pause and vacillate between running or staying. Dry decay wafted throughout, the smell of composted earth, and the air was warm, warm enough to make Slick Pick perspire underneath his work overalls. He fiddled with the rifle’s strap on his shoulder, adjusted the respirator mask on his face, and wished they had full helmets and proper gear for that shit. Who knew what chemicals might be in the air? He wasn’t for this work, having been a house DJ in a previous life. But as a team leader, he had to take his turn in the hole with the rest of them, as much as he despised it.

He swished his light about, scanning for movement, revealing a corridor wide enough for the backhoe to fit into. The original tunnel, before it was collapsed, had been much wider, enough for three lanes of traffic once cleared of all the debris. The diggers kept to the wall as they worked forward in a cone, where the tip was no more than the shoulder width of two people. Ten paces behind the lead digger, the tunnel widened into the space of the backhoe’s bucket. Pebbly fragments crunched underneath Slick Pick’s work boots, and he scuffed them toward a wall, not wanting anyone to slip on the jagged little marbles.

The rear of the armored truck came into view, its violated rear hatchway pried open and plundered.
Thank fuck.
Slick Pick waved the guys behind him to move ahead. Six workers squeezed by, dragging lengths of heavy chains ending in hooks.

“Get in there,” Slick Pick ordered.

One man got down on his knees and rolled onto his back. The other fed him the hooks and chains, and his torso disappeared underneath the truck. Slick stood and watched, sweeping his light over the work and the dark ceiling above. Tons of rock and steel and cement hung suspended from… what? It could all come down anytime. On cue, a wisp of gravel trickled from an overhead crack, spooking Slick Pick.

“You guys almost done?” he asked nervously.

“Hold on.”

“Jesus Christ, how long does it take to hook an axle?”

The feet under the truck wormed about as the nearest worker looked into Slick Pick’s light and said, “Takes time to do right, man. Do it right the first time, and we don’t have to do it a second.”

“This is a fucking waste of time,” Slick Pick muttered and sighed heavily, his eyes darting about, looking for signs of an inevitable cave-in. In Slick Pick’s mind, what they were attempting was Giovanni’s plan, so
he
should have to oversee hooking up the truck and pulling its armored ass out. There would be a minor collapse, but they could clear up that loose debris and be that much closer to the final entrance to the bunker—at least in theory. Slick Pick didn’t think a backhoe had the power to pull that squared turnip out of the ground—a bulldozer, maybe, but not a backhoe. The concrete and steel beams overhead had probably harpooned the front of the truck enough to keep it in place, anyway, but Giovanni had Shovel’s ear, and he thought using the backhoe would save time. Slick Pick wished they could’ve found a certified engineer in one of those little towns they’d captured—or even a handful of experienced miners, anyone who knew tunnels and could offer guidance instead of letting the blind follow the blind.

The guy on his back wiggled out from underneath the truck. “All set. Let’s get clear.”

Slick Pick was all for that. He backed away from the truck, a dark hatch yawning open in a wall of rubble, and signaled his crew to pull out. They regrouped far behind the backhoe, placing a respectable distance between themselves and the truck, far enough to escape any potential danger from a bigger-than-expected collapse.

“Eddie,” Slick Pick yelled to the backhoe operator, wearing a yellow toque, “yank on that fucker.”

Showing only his back in the reinforced glass cab, Eddie answered with a thumbs-up, and the backhoe’s mighty engine roared to life. Chains rattled and snapped taut. The backhoe huffed with power, and Slick Pick watched the spinning yellow and red warning lights atop the cab, waiting for the rumble.

The backhoe’s engine growled loudly and pulled. The acrid smell of exhaust filled the tunnel, spewing back toward the opening two hundred meters distant. Giovanni had already assured him there wasn’t any risk of carbon monoxide poisoning as the tunnel was big enough for air currents, but Slick Pick firmly believed old Gio often talked out of his asshole.

The backhoe strained and spun its tires, sending up a drizzle of dust and pebbles. The ceiling shuddered and creaked loud enough to make Slick Pick raise his head in trepidation. The armored vehicle lurched a startling inch then stopped as if Whitecap refused to give up its chew toy. Warning lights flashed in a psychedelic rave, swirling within the tunnel confines.

Eddie stepped on the backhoe’s pedal, making the beast snarl. Its massive tires spun and squealed. The lengths of chains quivered from the force.

Whitecap protested, shivering with a metallic gasp and a belch of debris, and the backhoe stumbled back, pulling the truck with it. Chunks of ceiling clattered off the truck’s hood, falling in flashes through dust clouds swirling in miasmic patterns. The ground jumped. A gust of bad air flushed the darkness like a whiff of decomposing meat clogged in a throat for far too long. It buffeted the figures standing behind the reversing backhoe, an expulsion of foulness terrible enough to cause even Slick Pick to stagger in retreat. People coughed. Some retched. Slick Pick covered his nose and mouth, feeling as if he’d been forever contaminated. A spinning, tea-saucer-sized slab of concrete with edges as fine as a machete’s
swish
ed by Slick Pick’s face, close enough for him to damn near fudge his shorts. It crash-landed behind him, shattering like a valuable vase.

Warning lights swirling hypnotically, the backhoe dragged the truck’s crumpled shape back, toward the mouth of the tunnel. Slick Pick and his people got out of its way, avoiding any deconstructive mishap.

Once the truck had been cleared, Slick Pick coughed, grimaced, and aimed his flashlight into the resulting hole, reluctant to go anywhere near it. More beams joined his, all failing to penetrate the snaking, swirling embankment of dust.

“Get ready,” he called out. “Guns up.”

Weapons came up on either side of him, and Slick Pick stepped behind them.

Then they waited.

Seconds passed. The dust clouds settled, and the ceiling whined, but nothing came forth from that whitened gloom. Slabs of concrete fell to the pavement in rude, crackling slaps, startling the men at first, but even that slowed and stopped.

But a whining from above, of fabricated sinews under great strain, grew in eerie pitch.

“I don’t think we should be here,” the man nearest to Slick Pick muttered, the unease in his voice thick enough to choke him.

His attention focused on the ceiling, Slick Pick agreed with him and drew breath, intent on ordering everyone back to the tunnel mouth, when the squeals of metal culminated in a final, heart-stopping spanking of metal onto pavement. Another gout of dust blasted the people in the passageway, forcing more than a few to cringe away from the unexpected air current.

“The hell was that?” someone choked out.

Slick Pick shook his head. “The ceiling over the truck. Partially caved in when we moved the rig, but the shit that had piled onto
that
ceiling finally pushed it all down. Like the second layer of a flat cake.”

“You think?”

“I guess.”

“So we’re okay now?”

Slick Pick hesitated before answering, “Ask me that again once we get some light in there and see how much garbage fell… and how much we’ll have to clear.”

“Slick.” One of the people gestured with his rifle, pointing to the tunnel.

Slick Pick looked, hearing the scuffling of crushed stone, a carpet of pebbles being sifted through. He squinted, gasping at a renewed bubble of noxious air assaulting his person and making his eyes water, his sensibilities involuntarily revolting.
Air!
The mask he wore protected him from the worst of it, and he hated to imagine what he’d be sucking down without it. He composed himself until he could function and then squinted at the darkness.

More crackling. Pieces of debris fell to the floor.

Then––
there
––illuminated in a billowing fog of dust, staggered forth a shadow, and a woman stepped into sight.

A topless woman, her skin a septic gray, she oozed into the light with all the curiosity of a wary deer.

The trouble was the woman was missing both of her arms… and her left breast, which in the flashlight beams converging upon her, permitted a glimpse of a kicked-in rib cage. Splintered bones staked a lung—not that it bothered her. She came forward almost daintily, muddy eyes searching, head raised as if catching a pleasing scent.

Behind her, like dogs on their master’s heels, other shapes materialized like ghosts in a wafting haze—some hunched over, some tall and imposing, some crawling.

All were moaning.

It had been a year and change since Slick Pick had laid eyes on a zombie, let alone anything resembling the pack filtering out of the dark. His breath and heartbeat skipped from an anxious beat to a fearsome taiko-drum chorus.

Slick Pick gasped and forgot the plan. “Firefirefire
fire
!” he roared.

The guns thundered.

With Collie gone, Wallace mentally sighed and took stock of his inventory: one high-powered assault rifle with a scope, a nearly empty magazine, and five remaining full ones. With professional ease, he swapped out the magazine in his rifle and slapped in a full one. He scanned the brush, having a clear field of sight from the main gate all the way along the southern curve of the perimeter, noting the naked kill zone of about thirty meters from the tree line to the heavy coils of wire. He noticed the gaps missing in the chain-link fence about a half a kilometer away from the main gate and checkpoint. He couldn’t fathom why they’d removed those fence sections, but he did see makeshift barricades about ten meters back from the gaps and a pickup truck with three armed shitheads in the box. Another shithead sat behind the wheel.

That wasn’t the way he’d have done things, but then again, he didn’t expect much from a bunch of goddamn civvies with guns.

Knees and other assorted joints had cracked ominously when he dropped to the ground next to Collie. He thought he’d have to get all that checked out when everything was over, which brought on a short but grim chuckle.

All over.

A dire certainty had flooded him when Collie left him and descended the hill, that he was watching her walk away for the final time.

His life was nearly done. Flashbacks blurred through his head, from his childhood dreams of serving his country, to proving himself in basic training and graduating a punishing weeding-out program for the JTF-2, to conducting covert operations in some of the most deplorable and dangerous cesspools of the world, rescuing, combating enemies and genuine evil wearing human disguises. Losing friends and companions, carrying on in their memory. Right through to the end of the world and the zombie threat.