Carlie Simmons (Book 5): One Final Mission (10 page)

Chapter 25

Jared’s attempt to jumpstart a speedboat
had failed, the engines being too fouled. He had instead secured a small
sailboat near the edge of the pier and set it adrift while Eliza swam over and
climbed on board. As he unfurled the sail of the twenty-one-foot boat, Eliza
kept watch on the waters around them. She could see the hungry hordes of
rotting creatures massing near the shoreline, a hundred yards off. Some had
even jumped into the frothy waters only to be swept back by the incoming tide into
the metal embankment where their heads were quickly pulverized like soft
melons. Most of the zombies were well past surface decay due to the humidity
and saltwater-laden winds which had intensified over the summer. Their skin, if
they had any, hung like strips of peeled bark, revealing their wiry
musculature, bone, and sinew. The most disturbing feature was their eyes, which
were creamy white and bulbous but still intact, rimmed by sunken cheeks and
pronounced bone like donuts encapsulating golf balls.

I hope Carlie, Shane, and the others made
it out of that plane.
Eliza’s mind bristled and a cold chill ran down her
back as the horrific images of Air Force One plummeting into the ground in
Idaho last fall came to press upon her. The pain of losing her father and
Lewis, the agent she had fallen in love with—she couldn’t bear the thought of
that happening to her friends.
They must have made it out! They’re probably
already at the hospital wondering where the hell we are and planning for their
extract.
She grit her teeth and glanced over her shoulder at Jared, who had
moved up to the helm.

Eliza saw a creature flailing in the water
a few feet from the boat. At least she thought it was a creature as her vision
kept going from blurry to clear in spurts as her head still throbbed. She
squinted and saw that it was an immense zombie wearing only a tightly-wrapped white
loincloth and resembling a sumo.
How is that thing even floating?
It was
bobbing closer to the rear boarding ladder below the rim of the boat. Not
wanting to waste any bullets, she slung her rifle and removed her machete. She
squatted down near the ladder, hoping the rotund rotting beast would be pushed
out to sea but instead the waves kept moving it closer. The salty water was washing
over its swollen purple lips, causing its hungry moans to sound like a
sputtering engine. As it crested the rear plank by the ladder, the creature
managed to grab hold of a low rung and pull itself up. Eliza’s machete cleaved
through the skull, blasting right through the mushy cartilage of the pancaked
nose and into the upper gumline. She put her boot on the massive chest and
shoved it back into the water while holding onto the brass railing to her left.
The creature cannonballed into the waves and floated away into the whitecaps.

Jared had moved up behind her. “Damn,
that’s a fat bastard. He’s so big it’d take two dogs to bark at him.”

“How much longer?” she said, resheathing
her blade.

“Why—don’t you wanna keep playin’ Marco
Polo with the floaters?”

“Ha ha.”

“Almost there,” said Jared, craning his
head up at the sail and then walking back over to the wood console. “You know,
all these months of fighting and training together, this is the first time
we’ve ever really worked alone, you and I.”

“There’s a reason for that.”

“I was kind of expecting you to be like,
‘Well, Carlie says this,’ or ‘Here’s what Carlie would do,’ or ‘Wait until I
tell Carlie what happened.’ But you’re OK, kid.”

Eliza moved beside him and turned to stand
face to face with him, sending him a cold glare. “For all the talk there is
about you, I’ve never heard it said that you were known for being very
courteous.”

“Ooh—yeah, you’re a live wire at times
alright. I can see why the guys on the other teams have a thing for you.”

Eliza shook her head and folded her arms. “Lord,
all I can say is that Amy is even more of a saint than I thought.” Eliza had to
lean back on the console. She saw Jared’s face harden as he turned away at the
mention of Amy.

“Yeah, I’m worried about everyone too,”
Eliza said, patting him with her fist on his shoulder. “We have to keep
focusing on the fact that we will see them at the hospital and then be out of
this hellhole.”

He flung the wooden steering wheel to the
right as the sailboat veered into the center of the bay, heading towards the
mouth of the river a mile away. “Righto, my good lady. Righto.”

Chapter 26

Duncan was tapping a pencil on his desk as
his eyes floated over the red highlighted images on the wall map ahead. Each
red circle indicated an intact region in the world that had secured its borders
and dug in during the past year. Some of these circles had an “X” through them.
These represented communities that had fallen to the undead and outnumbered the
others that remained on the map. None of these marked areas were in large
cities, those having completely collapsed and never recovered. Instead, the
last remaining outposts of survivors around the globe were situated in
fortified makeshift towns in areas that were less populated to begin with even
before the pandemic.

The communities who fared the best and had
the largest numbers were those located in temperate coastal regions. This
provided them with a good year-round climate for growing crops along with the
bounties of both the forest and the ocean. With the exception of large pockets
of survivors in remote regions in Sweden, Malaysia, Brazil, and Puerto Rico,
the rest of the human population dwelled in frontier-style fortress villages in
the countryside. These operated on a medley of blended technologies from solar
and wind generation to pioneer-type handcrafts. Farming, hunting, fishing,
trapping, and occasional bartering had returned in full force along with
frequent salvage runs to larger cities to scavenge for first-aid supplies, clothing,
and spare parts.

As Duncan stared at the map, he could hear
the radio chatter in the operations center across from his office. There were more
frenzied voices from outside of the Pacific Northwest pouring over the airwaves
inquiring about the vaccine. He anxiously waited for the drone of noise to be
interrupted by the triumphant voice of Shane radioing back in from the
submarine in a few hours. He looked down at his watch.
They should all be on
the ground by now and inbound on a speedboat to the hospital. Sure as shit hope
they got there without a hitch.
Duncan leaned his head forward and rubbed a
knot in his shoulder. He should’ve been there with them, running point. The
office he sat in was more akin to a prison and he longed to be running
alongside his fellow warriors again in the field. Though he had taken the reins
of command at Fort Lewis and turned it into a highly efficient base of
operations for the remaining U.S. military forces, he had no desire to live out
his life under the ceiling of the operations center or his office.

He resumed studying the map then snapped
the pencil in his fingers and flung it against the wall. He got up and moved
over to retrieve the splintered objects, tossing them into a receptacle with a
dozen other similar fragments. A knock on the door penetrated his thinking and
he walked over and opened it to see Pavel’s face.

“May I have a few moments of your time?”
said the older man.

Duncan waved him in and closed the door.
He returned to his desk and pulled out a bottle from a lower drawer. Pouring
some whiskey into two shot glasses, he handed one to Pavel and then both men
moved to the large window overlooking the airfield.

Duncan swigged his down. Pavel sipped his
amber elixir while squinting into the western horizon.

“Any word yet?” said the scientist, whose
other hand remained firmly tucked in his armpit, his fingers twitching at the
fabric of his cotton shirt.

“You’ll be the first to know if I hear
anything.”

“Hard to believe that we’ve come this far—surviving
for so long, making our stand here, and then finally arriving at an antidote
only to be left hanging in the wind because of a piece of machinery that, in
previous days, would have been easily obtained or manufactured.”

“You don’t have to remind me what hangs in
the balance here.”

Pavel threw back the rest of the whiskey
then set the glass down on the windowsill. “Not my intention at all. Just
marveling at how, in one year, we’ve gone from being an apex species to being
at the mercy of nature’s whims like a single-celled organism swimming in the
ocean all over again.”

“We’re still an apex predator and we will
defeat this virus and destroy those drooling freaks. Next year at this time, I
plan to be sipping a toast with you, Carlie, Shane, and the others when we celebrate
the anniversary of when we kicked nature’s whimsical ass.”

Duncan folded both his arms across his
chest. “Was there anything else you wanted to see me about, because I’ve got to
head down to C-Wing and check on the results of a little experiment of my own?”

Pavel shook his head in the negative and
continued staring at the sky as if hoping for some sign.

“Why don’t you walk over with me? I could
use a scientific opinion on this new food-harvesting method we’re trying out on
a few lakes in the outlying areas.”

They exited Duncan’s office and walked
downstairs through A-Wing, passing between the secure perimeter that kept each
wing compartmentalized, then strode into an immense storage warehouse in
C-Wing. Duncan and Pavel walked up to a ten-ton army truck that had just
returned.

At the sight of Duncan approaching, the
driver flung open the rear canvas cover. Inside was a glistening pile of assorted
fish that was three feet deep by twelve feet long and spanned the width between
the wheel wells.

He looked at the young driver whose blond
hair shone beneath his boonie hat. “How much C4 was required on the river for
this batch?” said Duncan.

“Less than expected, Sergeant Major. We
did like you said and blew the two narrowest passages of the gorge in the river
which created a temporary dam on two sides. We followed that with small charges
of C4 in the pool to harvest this catch. Then we had two teams in boats string
up nets and motor across the river scooping up as much as we could get.”

“You used dynamite on the river?” said
Pavel. “Won’t that wipe out everything in it?”

“C4 actually,” said Duncan. “And, no, we
can selectively hit small patches of rivers and lakes to take what we need then
leave the rest of that water source to recover, hopefully. With the absence of
large-scale angling operations like we had before the pandemic, we’re kind of
assuming there are going to be more of our scaly pals in the water than before.
With this in mind, one of my biologists calculated the potential fish
population for the regions we are targeting and then came up with some rough
parameters to use so we don’t decimate the entire body of water.”

“Ah, these things always sound so good on
the whiteboard with the numbers and flowcharts but the natural world has her
own parameters, remember,” said Pavel.

Duncan rested a hand on the tailgate and
studied the pungent mass of glistening bodies. “For now, we’ll have to trust
that this method will deliver while keeping some reserve in place for the
future. I’ll worry about being environmentalist of the year in another
lifetime.”

Chapter 27

Carlie was running into the char-black
innards of the dark tunnel, the smell of mold and decaying meat filling her
nostrils. She turned on the tactical flashlight mounted on her suppressed M4, scanning
the tiled walls of the round passageway while she heard the footfalls of the
remaining team behind her.

“I’ve got at least twenty tangos behind me
that squeezed in through the opening,” yelled Matias from behind her as he
struggled to keep up.

Ahead of her were the remains of six
derailed subway cars, the pale decaying occupants inside pawing at the runners
as they sped by.

Carlie tapped on her earmic and shouted
out in between breaths, “This is Team Leader Two. We are headed northeast
through the subway tunnels, making our way to the hospital, over.” She only
heard static in between her own breaths and the nervous huffing of those on her
heels. Carlie paused and checked on Matias, who was at the rear, his gait
slowing as his labored breathing overtook him. The scraping of footwear on the
pavement behind her caused her to spin to her left. She saw two gaunt,
pus-oozing zombies lunging for her. She shot the first one in the head but the
other moved too fast. She swung the butt of her M4 into its head, shattering
bone fragments onto the wall, then stomp-kicked it in the chest, sending it over
the guardrail to the tracks below. Beyond the mangled corpse, she saw a gray
utility door. Carlie waved to the others to head down while she sniped a zombie
that had moved in too close behind Matias. She ran forward and put her arm
under his to help him along but felt his weight pressing down on her shoulder
wound, causing her to cry out. The two limp-trotted towards the railing as the
growing crowd of flesh-eaters poured into the tunnel.

By the time they arrived at the utility
door, Amy was inside. Carlie handed off Matias to her then she yanked a grenade
off her vest and flung it into the tunnel. “Fire in the hole.” As she swung the
door closed and covered her ears, a shower of concrete chunks impacted the
door, sealing it off from the hungry mob.