Dead Air (Book One of The Dead Series) (40 page)

"You'll fit in fine," Steve assured her. "We need you
, and I'm glad you're here."

Now's the moment of truth, Heather thought. Everything was being brought out in the open
so why not clear the slate.

"About us,"
she started out. "I need to know if there is an us. Do you need me or are you just glad I'm here?''

Quietly
, Steve said, "I need you and want you. I think I've wanted to say that since last week, but I didn't realize it for sure until I saw you on that roof last night."

She leaned across the couch and kissed him.

When they came up for air, Steve said, "You handled that fairly well. Blunt and to the point, but fairly well."

"Shut up," Heather said and kissed him again.

Tick-Tock came back a while later and interrupted with a discrete knock. He offered to come back later, but Steve insisted he stay and eat with them.

"We need to go over a few things and I'd like to do it now."
They both nodded, so Steve continued, "We should search the building to make sure that there aren't any more dead lurking around. After the incident with Donna...” He left the rest unsaid.

"Good idea," Tick-Toc
k chimed in. "We can do a floor by floor search. Between us three we should be able to check the whole building in no time." Motioning to Heather’s CAR-15 in the corner by the end of the couch, he added, "That'll add to our firepower too."

"The problem is that the ammunition I have for it got wet. I cleaned the rifle but I can't say whether or not
they’ll fire." Heather pointed out. "The bullets might be fine, but I wouldn't want to have a misfire at the wrong time."

"Which brings me to a solution to that problem," Steve said. "We need weapons and ammunition and we've got them nearby, we just need to get them."

"Where?" Tick-Tock asked.

"The MRAP," Steve replied. Motioning them toward the window, they looked down at the vehicle still parked in the center of the street while he explained, "I can see two of the M4's the National Guard guys were carrying from here
. One's laying on the hood of the MRAP and the other is looped over the hatch on top where the gunner sits. All we need to do is grab them and then get into that armored car. They're bound to have more ammunition, and who knows what else inside."

Pointing slightly to the left
, Steve continued, "See the rope Heather came over on last night? All we need to do is move it to the right so it hangs directly across the top of the armored car. Tie off another line to it over the MRAP and we can drop down and get inside."

"I've seen those dead things climb up on vehicles," Heather said. "It's not fast or pretty
, but they can." Looking over the street, she continued, "There must by a couple hundred down there. What's to keep them from swarming all over you?"

"Yeah, Steve," Tick-Tock added. "You must have missed it last night when your girlfriend here was coming across that rope
, but she had the attention of every zombie on the block. They were all looking up drooling."

"I have that affect on men,"
Heather said. "But I never knew it crossed over to the undead."

Steve smiled and said, "I'm going to give them something to distract them."

"What?" They both asked.

''Me."

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Clearwater, Florida:

Steve tested the gate leading into the parking ramp by giving it a few hard, rapid tugs. He had reinforced it with lengths of chain and rope from the maintenance office
but it still seemed like a flimsy barrier for what he was about to attempt.

His actions attracted the attention of a few of the walking dead
. They approached and hung on the fence while hungrily watching him. Steve stared back at them without expression. At one time they might have been people from the neighborhood whom he passed on the sidewalk with a friendly nod, but now they were dead, animated sacks of meat. He felt no real hatred toward them, disgust at their appearance but no hatred. He saw them only as an obstacle to his survival that needed to be dealt with.

Steve watched more
zombies gather and wrap their fingers through the fencing of the gate as they moaned at him in hunger. Turning to gauge the distance to the safety of the stairwell in case they broke through, he lifted a small gong he had gotten from Meat and waited for the signal. Meat had used the gong in a radio spoof he called Jap Slap Theatre but had found it was too loud. Steve hoped it would be loud enough.

A gunshot rang out from the front of the bank building, signaling him to begin
, so Steve started banging a large screwdriver against the gong while screaming at the top of his lungs. Instantly, he wished he’d brought earplugs. The sound of the wooden handle hitting the two-foot wide metal disc created a noise that seemed to drive into the center of his brain.

They had experimented with various noisemakers to see if any specific sound attracted the dead
. After blowing whistles and banging on various objects, they found the gong worked best. Steve could see it was having the desired effect as the zombies at the gate were starting to get agitated at the noise, echoing out from the parking ramp into the street. Attracted by this, more of the dead shuffled toward him and soon he had a crowd of over five hundred clustered on the street in front of him with more on the way.

Walking further to his right, Steve kept up the banging while watching to see if his plan was going to work. He saw those walking dead clustered at the side of the pack move toward him
, while more came to fill their ranks. Soon, he had a mass of animated dead flesh that seemed to roll along and follow his movements outside the chain link fencing that secured the first level of the parking ramp. To keep them interested, he would walk back and forth in front of the throng first, before moving further along. Eventually, he led them around the outside corner of the building and down the side of the ramp almost to its back wall. When he was sure he had succeeded in getting most of the dead to follow him, he stopped hitting the gong.

Without the noise deafening him, Steve was suddenly aware of the shrieking, whining sound coming from hundreds of dead throats. He shivered slightly at the eerie noise before
he turned and ran up the slope of the ramp to the second level.

Now we'll find out if this works, he thought to himself.
Even if it doesn't, I just hope nobody gets fucked up.

Rounding the
corner on the second level, he could see where Heather waited on the elevated walkway. She spotted him and smiled. Then came a noise, which caused her smile to turn into an ear-to-ear grin. In the silence of the dead city, the sound of the diesel engine of the MRAP roaring to life echoed between the buildings, which told them that Tick-Tock had started the second part of the plan.

As Steve joined Heather at the walkway, he heard the armored car
’s engine change pitch as it was put in gear. The original plan to salvage material from the MRAP had been expanded by Tick-Tock in their earlier planning session. He reasoned that it made more sense to try and take the whole vehicle and pull it into the parking garage so that they could pick over its contents at their leisure. Steve agreed. This was better than his original idea where they would divert the attention of the dead and then drop down and grab what they could from the armored car before retreating back up the rope and into the safety of the building.

They were considering what problems they might face, no charge in the battery to start the MRAP being the worst case, when Heather brought up a hitch in the plan. The armored vehicle
’s clearance was too high to be able to enter the ramp. Steve and Tick-Tock hadn't considered this and realized it was a good thing Heather was sitting in on the war council. It would have been a mess if they took the MRAP and drove to the entrance, only to find out it wouldn't fit. Together they came up with the alternate plan they were using.

Steve heard the MRAP's engine fade as it went around the opposite side of the Garnett
Building. Moving to the low concrete wall of the walkway that faced the rear of the building, he listened intently for the crescendo of the diesel engine to reach his ears, telling him that Tick-Tock was on his way.

A
sudden rising whine from the super-charged engine was followed a few minutes later by a series of crashes. Steve estimated that Tick-Tock was now driving through the outdoor eating area at the back of the building, just around the corner from where he now stood. Heather also heard the sound of umbrella-covered tables and metal chairs being shunted aside and crushed by the steel behemoth and shouldered her CAR-15.

"Any second now," Steve said.

Even as the words left his mouth, the nose of the MRAP appeared around the corner of the bank building, a metal table wedged into its front bumper. But this wasn't the only adornment TickTock had picked up, clinging to various sections of the armored car were a half dozen zombies. Heather fired the first burst, which knocked one of the dead from its perch on the hood. Steve only had his pistol, so he had to wait for Tick-Tock to turn into the grass strip between the bank building and the parking ramp before he would be in range.

Heather kept up a steady stream of
well-spaced single shots, punching holes in dead craniums and sending the creatures to hell where they belonged.

With only one
zombie left clinging to the MRAP when it finally came into pistol range, Steve said, "Show off," to Heather out of the corner of his mouth before dispatching the last attacker. Heather paused and gave him a smile, saying, "I'm hell on wheels with this thing, baby, so look out."

To prove her point, she focused toward the gap between the structures where more of the dead now appeared in pursuit of
Tick-Tock. Firing five rounds, she dropped five zombies.

Steve said, "Good shooting, I'm impressed. Now you're elected to teach Meat how to shoot.
But make sure to wear your Kevlar."

Steve picked up an aluminum extension ladder and readied it as the MRAP slowly pulled below the walkway. After the armored car stopped with its nose underneath the concrete bridge, Steve leaned over and let the ladder down on to its roof while Heather covered him with her CAR-15. The engine revved twice and then stopped
. Steve climbed onto the low wall and gingerly tested the ladder to make sure it was secure on top of the driver's compartment. Satisfied, he quickly made it down onto the roof of the MRAP before leaning around the heavy machine gun to rap his knuckles on the armored flaps set into its steel skin.

A muffled voice singing,
knock three times on the ceiling if you want me, reached Steve's ears as Tick-Tock opened the gunner’s hatch on the roof of the MRAP. He grinned at Steve and then looked up at Heather who was leaning over the rail.

"You're hell on hitchhiker's
, girl," he said to her.

"Ass, gas, or grass, no one rides for free,"
she shot back.

Flushed by his success, Tick-Tock laughed and asked Steve, "Do you want to check this hog out now
, or do you want to wait until the neighbors calm down?" He looked to the rear and indicated with a wave of his hand that there were only a few dead in view, "We got Annie Oakley covering the high ground so we should be all right."

Steve looked questioningly up at Heather who said,
"Haven't had any misfires but that's not to say I won't."

Reaching down, Tick-Tock came up with an M4 assault rifle
, which he handed to Steve, "Run that up to her. It's got a full clip in it. It's the one that was on top, hanging off the flap. The one on the hood slid off."

Steve climbed the ladder and presented the rifle to Heather with a slight bow, "For the girl who has everything," he said.

Quickly checking the weapon, she aimed and fired one round at a small tree a hundred feet away. Its branches shook with the impact against its trunk.

Slinging her CAR-15 over her shoulder, she held up the M4 and said, "You'll have a hard time out-doing this
. You better think hard because Christmas is coming."

Descending to the MRAP, Steve called out, "I'll se
e if I can find you a rocket launcher."

Steve and Tick-Tock couldn't find one
, but among the equipment in the MRAP they did collect two more M4's, a .45 caliber pistol and case and a half of ammunition for the rifles. They debated taking two Kevlar vests that they found hanging from the driver's seat until Tick-Tock suggested that they might come in handy when they went from office to office to clear the bank building. Slipping them on, they began searching the rest of the crew compartment.

As they picked through the vehicle, the two men cached everything they found on the bench seats that stretched along both sides of the rear of the MRAP. They had amassed a small pile of additional items they wanted to take when they heard a series of rifle shots from outside.

Poking his head out of the gunner's hatch, Steve saw that a group of about thirty dead had gathered at the end of the space between the building and the parking ramp. He heard Heather fire two shots and watched two of the dead drop as if their bodies had suddenly become boneless. Flowers of black pus erupted from their heads from the impacts of the assault rifle rounds.