White Flag of the Dead (35 page)

I turned around and Sarah turned towards the garage, but not before I could see her eyes were moist. I smiled to myself and noticed that my step was a bit lighter and I actually felt better than I had for a while.

27

Sarah was in the passenger seat and I went to the garage door. Opening it, I got a shock when I saw 6 people standing in my driveway. I recovered quickly and swiftly drew my SIG, taking a bead on the closest male. He was carrying a pump shotgun, and though it was pointed downward, I was taking no chances.

His eyes got wide and he threw up hand, the people behind him putting up their hands as well. Sarah had seen me throw down in the mirror and was out of the truck in a flash, drawing her gun and aiming at the group as well.

“Whoa! Whoa! We’re friendly! Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” he cried, stepping back and getting in front of the woman next to him. The family behind him tucked their children away and looked fearfully at Sarah and I.

I have to admit, we probably looked pretty fearsome in our gear, with knives and guns and backpacks with blunt weapons. I held my gun on the man with the shotgun, and looked him over. He looked to be about five ten, roughly forty-five or fifty, with a lean look about him and asked “Who are you and what do you want?”

The man with the shotgun swung it down so it was hanging by his side. “My name is Mark Wells, and this is my wife Teri.” His wife smiled weakly. “The family behind me is Bill and Sally Kowalski, and those two youngsters are Jenny and Tim.” Bill looked like he had held a desk job all his life, with a slight paunch and balding head. His wife was thin and haggard, like she carried the weight of the world on her shoulders. Their kids were thin and scared, and their clothes looked like they had been salvaged from a person two sizes bigger than they.

I lowered my SIG but kept it at the ready, Sarah following my lead. “I’m John Talon, and next to me is Sarah Greer. You’re not from around here, are you?”

Mark looked at me and said. “No, we’re from Chicago, and we’ve been on the run for a while. The cold weather seems to have slowed down our little friends, so we were going to be heading out again, but our vehicle died. We’ve were looking for another when you drove in.”

“Chicago, hey? Well, Mr. Wells, you and I have a lot to talk about, but now is not the time.” To accent the point, the wind picked up a bit and more snow swirled around. “Sarah and I need to get back to our base, but I will send a couple of vehicles to pick you up immediately. Good enough?”

Mark shrugged. “Don’t have much choice, do we?”

I shrugged back. “You could refuse and I could leave you here to fend for yourself.”

Mark smiled ruefully. “Getting a little tired of that. What cars do we look for?”

“It’ll be a couple of SUV’s. The lead driver’s name will be Duncan Fries. Don’t be offended by anything he says, he’s just a goofball.” I said climbing into the truck and firing it up. “Get out of the wind but stay visible. If anything besides an SUV shows up, it’s not us.”

The group waved as we pulled away, and I drove as quickly as I could back to the compound. The snow was coming down thickly, and I was more than glad we had made the effort to secure a snow plow. I was even happier about the generators we had found. God knows we needed them.

I pulled into the compound and saw the big plow parked underneath the building. I pulled the truck up and honked several times. Tommy, Jason, Duncan, Pamela, and Charlie all came out to help with the load. Charlie’s eyes lit up when he saw the generator, and he and Tommy wrestled it upstairs. We would figure out where we would put the things later. Jason and I pulled the other off the truck and Sarah began taking the personal items up to the condo. I waved Duncan and Pamela over.

“We found six more survivors in the subdivision. Apparently they’re from Chicago and have managed to live this long. They’re two couples and two kids. I need you and Pamela to take the Honda and the Ford and go pick them up.” Duncan nodded and to my surprise, Pamela nodded as well. I gave them directions and told them what to look for. “You’ve got about thirty minutes before things get really ugly.” I said looking at the sky and watching the flakes coming down. Off to the northwest, I could see a small glow where Charlie had been at work getting rid of homes and zombies.

Duncan and Pamela went off to the vehicles and I watched them roll away. I grabbed the rifle case, ammo, and headed upstairs myself. I had been away from Jakey too long and needed to spend some quality time with him. I needed to make another trip for his clothes, but I wanted to get in quickly.

After the clothes and everything we had pulled from the house had been brought into the condo, I stoked the fire and helped Jake walk around. He was shaky, but he was getting better, although when I let go of his hands, he would stand for a second, then plop back down on his butt. He was very happy, since in addition to his clothes I had grabbed a container full of baby toys that we were waiting to give him. When I originally left the house, there was no way I could have taken them with, so they waited there. I was just glad he could play with them.

Sarah watched me play with Jake for a while, then asked “What do you have in the cases?”

I looked up from Jake and said “The brown case has my old Winchester, and the tan case has a gun for you.”

Sarah’s eyes lit up and she went into my bedroom. Coming back out, she was cradling the GSG-5 like a kid at Christmas. Checking the action, she swung the gun up to the window to sight the red-dot scope I had mounted on it once upon a time. Smiling at me, she took it into her bedroom and I could hear her loading the magazine.

Coming back out into the living room, she bent down and kissed me on the cheek. “Thank you very much.” She said

“You’re welcome very much.” I said, picking up Jake and bringing him over to the window to watch the snow come down. What I could see was already blanketed in snow, and I thought about all the zombies we might miss under the snow that we may have to deal with in the spring. I had no hopes that the virus would die in the cold. Viruses are so resilient it wasn’t funny. But I was getting the feeling we were actually getting a handle on things and could move soon to a much more permanent place.

Sarah sidled up next to me and watched the snow with us. Jakey noticed her and leaned over, wanting to be held by her. She took him with a grin and we all watched the snow for a bit.

Sarah broke the silence. “My husband and I were in the process of separating when the virus hit. We got married so young and we had a lot of dreams that over time became burdens. I would have left a while ago except for the children. Sometimes I think maybe the girls would have lived had I divorced him. Who knows? All I know is I’m alive when a lot of people aren’t, and maybe I can make up for that mistake by saving a few here and there.”

I didn’t say anything. I knew the need for release.

“You know what’s funny?” she asked

“What?”

“I didn’t like guns a year ago.”

We stood in silence for a while, then Jake started to fuss. We smiled at each other and went to feed the baby and ourselves. Today had been a decent day.

Outside, the snow continued to fall.

28

The next morning, I met with Mark Wills and Bill Kowalski. There hadn’t been time to talk yesterday with getting them in and prepared. The ground was covered in about 6 inches of snow, and the sun was amazingly bright on the white ground. The world seemed so fresh and new it was easy to forget what we were about or how we got there. The conversation with the two men from Chicago reminded me soon enough. We used a conference room in one of the offices.

“I was on a call for the north side when things suddenly turned over.” Mark started. “We had been listening to the reports and such for a week, but we weren’t getting much information. The mayor had been on television a couple of times telling us to go about our lives as usual, but you could see the strain on his face. It was like he knew something was up but couldn’t talk about it. I guess it made sense. If he came out and said the dead were walking, we would have had anarchy sooner than we did. There was stuff all over the internet, so people were pretty well informed, but all of a sudden it came to a head.” Mark paused to collect his thoughts. “I got a call from my supervisor that a transformer had blown in Wilmette, and I needed to get up there. No big deal, standard stuff, thinks I. Well, I get there and there’s this weird silence, like the world had paused to take a breath before it screamed. I changed the transformer and got back in the truck. I radioed my dispatcher and got no response. Heading back, I see swarms of cars trying to get out of the city. There’s smoke everywhere and I could see lots of fires. Sirens are going off, and over it all I could hear screams and moans. Screams and moans.”

I nodded and urged him to continue.

“I drove my truck into the city and I could see them everywhere, attacking and eating, breaking into houses, tearing people apart. I felt like I was moving in slow motion. I ran into a couple of them and they got right back up after they bounced off the fenders. I saw cars smashed in, and people just running. One woman was on the twentieth floor of an apartment building and I saw her hold her baby as she jumped to her death. A second later, about five of those things were at the window, reaching for the meals that chose to die instead.” He shook his head at the memory. “I managed to get home and told my wife we had to get the hell out of there. I didn’t know where to go, or how we would live, but I knew if we stayed, we were dead. It just happened so fast. I guess so many people were infected at the same time, and turned all at once. There was no preparation, no nothing. I could see my neighbor trying to protect his wife from his turned teenage children, and get killed for his trouble. I watched a police officer empty his gun at a group of those things and they ripped him to pieces in seconds. There was nothing left to reanimate.”

Mark paused and Bill started talking. “My story is pretty much the same. But I think I was lucky in that I hadn’t gone to work in several days due to a round of the stomach flu rolling through my house. I think that may have saved my kids, too.” He stared off into space, thinking about what might have been. Bill continued. “I wanted to run, but I didn’t know how. I didn’t know what I was going to do with my family. I could hear the sounds of death all around our apartment as the infected fed on the living. The old woman living upstairs had her head ripped off her shoulders, and two toddlers hiding on the fire escape screamed for a long time before they died at their parents’ hands.”

Mark nodded and continued his story. “Teri and I grabbed what we could and headed for the lake. I figured our best bet was to try and get a boat and at least sail away from the mess. We made it about a block and a half before we were spotted and had to run for it. We made it four blocks to an apartment building and hid there. That happened to be where we hooked up with Bill and Sally and the kids.”

Bill took up the story. “We had abandoned our apartment after the neighbor was attacked. We went down the emergency stairs and luckily no one was there. We were hiding in the maintenance room when the door crashed in and Mark and his wife tumbled in.”

Mark smiled. “We had three of them sniffing for us, and we just managed to fall in out of sight. Luckily the smell of chemicals masked our scent and they left us alone. Of course, back then, we didn’t know how good their sense of smell had become. Sometimes I wonder how many hiding places were discovered by the smell of fear?”

I remember thinking the same thing when I was trying to figure out how the enemy operated and their strengths and weaknesses.

“Anyway,” Mark said, “We found ourselves stuck in a basement with nowhere to go. But we got lucky. Bill’s son found an access panel behind an old mattress to the electric tunnels under the city. We had a way out, but if any of those things were down there, we were dead for sure. We moved as best as we could, checking every place we came to for a way to get out and to find food and such. We had a close moment when we were discovered at a business, but we gave them the slip in the tunnels. We headed south as best as we could, and then we ran out of tunnels.”

Bill and Mark looked at each other, then Mark continued. “We spent a lot of time moving from place to place, avoiding not only zombies but other predators as well. I picked up the shotgun from a home we broke into, but it wasn’t good for much against the dead. Everywhere it was the same. People dead or dying, walking dead trying to eat the living, fires, looting. I saw a man running down the street from a pack of zombies carrying a plasma TV. Dumbass.”

Bill picked up again. “We managed to find a car and we headed south, but the roads were choked with cars and dead people. We heard the announcements about the state centers, but we had no way to get to them. In hindsight, I’m glad we didn’t, when we heard they had been overrun with infected. Anyway, we moved as quietly as we could, at one point floating down the canal to escape zombies. We found a car in what used to be Westchester, and headed south again. Everywhere was death.”

Mark started again. “It took us 9 months to get that far, hiding and scrounging and living in fear. We were at the end of our string when we saw your truck pull up to that house. I was scared stupid when you pulled that gun on me.” indicating my SIG.

“Why?” I asked. “You had a shotgun. You could have nailed me when I opened the garage door.”

Mark looked sheepish. “I was out of shells. I had been out for a month.”

I shook my head. “Good way to get killed.”

Bill smiled. “Looks like you have things under better control out here.”

I smiled back. “You have no idea. This is a small group. To the south, there’s another community of over a hundred people.” I enjoyed the look that showed up on both their faces. “We’re making a push to the river, then we’ll hook up and the real work begins.”