Dead Air (Book One of The Dead Series) (45 page)

Tick-Tock had volunteered to go to the
First Gulf War to try and break this cycle but ended up serving his entire tour in Saudi Arabia and not seeing one minute of action. When he came back home and wore his dress uniform with all its badges and awards, he was almost embarrassed by the Been There ribbon that signified he had been in the FGW.

He
had been seriously contemplating moving to Alaska in search of excitement, but then he heard of the first outbreak of the HWNW virus in Little Rock. Even though the media played the story down, he had a feeling that this was it, a life-changing event that would test his survival skills. He had been right.

The action energized him and made him feel as if he finally had a purpose in life. He was all set to barricade himself inside his house in Largo when Steve proposed that he throw in with him.
It took Tick-Tock less than half a second to weigh the options and decide that it would be an even greater challenge to hold an entire building as opposed to his own little house.

Although
the situation in the bank building had now stabilized, Tick-Tock had not grown bored yet. He knew that eventually he would move on and was using the down time to consider his options when he went forth to explore the new world. He had the MRAP to use for transportation if he decided to take it but didn't feel right leaving all the people in the bank building with only whatever cars and trucks they could scrounge up to use when they had to go out in search of food and diesel fuel. They needed the heavy armored car to get around in more than he did, and besides, with all the abandoned military equipment lying around out there waiting to be picked up, the MRAP paled in comparison to what he knew he could find.

Putting out his cigarette, Tick-Tock picked up the book he had been reading on sailing and turned to the chapter on tacking into the wind.

Besides, he had another form of transportation in mind.

***

Brain turned the .45 caliber pistol over in his hands before pulling the slide back and letting it slam forward. Pointing the Colt toward the corner of his office, he squeezed the trigger like Heather had taught him to and heard the sharp click as the firing pin shot home. Smiling at the sound, he couldn't believe his luck at coming into possession of the weapon. He knew it wasn't good to dry fire his pistol but couldn’t resist doing it this once. Until that morning, he had been relegated to having to borrow a rifle or a pistol from one of the others whenever he needed one, but that had come to an end due to his new best friend, Tick-Tock.

That morning, Brain had gone down to the MRAP to cover
Tick-Tock as he ran up the engine and cleaned the .50 caliber machine gun. Standing atop the walkway to keep a lookout for any of the dead that ventured too close, Brain watched with interest as Tick-Tock field stripped the weapon and reassembled the heavy machine gun.

Brain could grasp how most anything mechanical or electrical worked
, so when Tick-Tock was finished, he stated proudly, "I could do that."

To which Tick-Tock instantly replied, "Then switch places and show
me."

Brain only fumbled once when setting the barrel in place
but Tick-Tock talked him through it. When the weapon was reassembled, Tick-Tock showed Brain how to load it and then let him fire it. Swinging the machine gun around in the gunner’s hatch to point back over the rear of the MRAP, Brain could see two of the walking dead heading toward them from the open air dining area where a large crowd of the dead usually gathered. Drawing a bead on the two Z’s, he squeezed the firing lever and was startled by the jarring of the weapon against his hands.

"Too high,"
Tick-Tock called out to him. "Adjust your aim and try again. Just use Kentucky windage for now and I'll show you how to adjust the traverse another time."

Re-aiming, Brain squeezed the lever again
. This time, he saw the heavy bullets smash into the two dead bodies shambling towards them. Pieces flew off both targets. To Brain's amazement, one of the zombies was literally cut in half.

His ears ringing from the noise of the .50, Brain could barely hear Tick-Tock coaching him, "Good
shot, but always keep in mind what's beyond your target. That thing will blow right through a concrete block wall."

Brain looked past the motionless dead bodies and could see where his burst had travelled across the parking lot behind the bank building and smashed into an office building. This .50 is no joke, he thought as he looked at the destruction he had wrought. This is too cool.

Happily, he called out, "What next?"

"You fired the weapon," Tick-Tock said with a laugh. "Now you get to clean it."

After Brain had finished, he closed up the MRAP and joined his mentor on the walkway. Tick-Tock looked at him speculatively and said, "You know Brain, I always used to think that you were kind of a shit bird, but you're all right." Holding out a Colt .45 he added, "Here, I found this under one of the seats the other day. I guess we missed it when we went through the hog the first time. Take care of it and keep your eyes open when you fire it."

Brain took the pistol reverently and stood there staring at it. For most of his adult life he had found his heroes in comic books and fantasy movies, never really learning how to relate to real people. Since being included in the lock down of the bank building though, he
’d felt a change come over him. He saw in the people around him some of the qualities that he most admired in his fictitious super heroes and discovered that he wanted to be just like them. He realized that he no longer had to put on the air of false superiority to mask his own low self-esteem, all he had to do was try to be the best person he could be and work with the others instead of finding ways to hinder them.

Giving Tick-Tock a sincere thank you, Brain checked the safety as he had been taught
, and then slid the pistol into his waistband. For a second, he fumbled with it as it tried to drop through down his pants leg. Rescuing the weapon, he tightened his belt two notches and slid it home.

Tick-Tock noted this and asked, "Losing a little weight?"

"I've been dieting since this thing started," Brain confessed. "But this is the first I've seen that it's worked."

"You
oughta find yourself a scale," Tick-Tock suggested. "There's got to be one in one of the offices somewhere in this building. Just be careful when you go poking around."

"I will," Brain assured him. Patting the pistol
, he added confidently, "And if I run into anything, now I can handle it."

Tick-Tock smiled and slapped the heavy man on the shoulder. "If you're not too serious about your diet, I'll buy you breakfast."

Brain accepted and followed his new best friend into the building, walking with a bounce in his step that had never been there before.

***

Steve looked over the parapet wall that surrounded the roof and down to the street below. After studying the scene, he raised a pair of binoculars to his eyes and checked out different parts of the city at one-block intervals away from the building.

He estimated that the area directly around the bank building contained about
two thousand zombies, while just two blocks away the streets were deserted. The only spot in their immediate vicinity that the dead seemed to avoid was the area between the building and the parking ramp where the MRAP was parked. Steve found it interesting and had to assume that while the dead were dead, they weren't stupid. They seemed to know to keep away from the armored car, as Tick-Tock usually fired a burst at them with the .50 caliber whenever he went down to run up the hog's engine. That they didn't swarm the vehicle when Tick-Tock wasn't around, proved they couldn’t distinguish that it was a human doing this. In Steve's mind, it would be great if they could train the dead to stay away from any person carrying a weapon, but it didn't look like that was going to happen. He decided that the dead had learned to stay away from the thing that destroyed them, but still saw humans as food. They weren't avoiding Tick-Tock so much as they were avoiding the MRAP.

Steve decided that
, in a way this would help when they had to make their first run into the Dead Zone, as the city around them was now being called. Steve had talked with Tick-Tock, and after some research using maps and the Yellow Pages, they decided that their first priority would be to hit a fuel storage depot they located in Largo. Although the underground tank supplying the station was still a quarter full, he would feel better knowing that he had a couple of tanker trucks full of diesel fuel parked nearby ready to replenish their supply. Since the zombies gave the MRAP a wide berth, it would make it easier when he, Tick-Tock and Meat left on the first expedition into the city.

Meat was included in the plan because he had worked as a long haul trucker years before and could handle one of the big rigs needed to haul the tankers. Heather had wanted to go
, but it was decided that she should stay behind in case the mission failed. Steve wanted someone who could keep things going in the building in case he and Tick-Tock didn't make it back.

Seeing how low the sun had dropped in the sky, Steve checked his watch and sighed.
It never seemed like he had enough hours in the day to accomplish everything he wanted to get done. Although things were moving along at a steady pace, and there hadn’t been any major emergencies in the past few weeks, there were still dozens of things that needed to be taken care of on a daily basis to keep their small community operating. Everyone had assigned duties and usually followed through with them, but Steve felt responsible for everything that went on in the building since it was he that initiated its takeover.

Before the dead walked the
Earth to feed on the living, he had been active in his chosen career. Despite the world grinding to a halt, it seemed like he was just as busy now, if not more. One tangible difference was in the results of his activities. Before, if he made a mistake he could be fired, now he might end up dead or undead. Or even worse, he could cause one of his fellow survivors to end up that way. Every day he wondered if he was up to the new challenges that faced him.

Shaking off
his doubts, he turned his thoughts to the one good thing to come out of all of this.

Heather.

Steve had never been more content with another person in his entire life. If it all fell apart tomorrow, he knew he would die a happy man. He and Heather seemed to be tuned into each other’s thoughts and actions as if they had been together for decades, instead of just a few months. For the first time in any relationship, when Steve exchanged an ‘I love you’, he really meant it and knew that she did too. He found that Heather had an insight into things, and he trusted her opinion completely on matters dealing with their survival. And even his personal life.

Steve remembered earlier in the week when Heather had found him sitting in the game room with all the
lights turned off. She seemed to know exactly what was troubling him.

"It's Ginny, isn't it?" She asked
, as she leaned against the pool table.

Feeling unfaithful for thinking about Ginny while he was with
her, he didn't answer.

"Men are so dumb," Heather stated
with a slightly amused voice.

"What do you mean?'' Steve asked.

"Well, I don't know how much weight you put in your new girlfriend talking about your old girlfriend, but here goes nothing," Heather said. "If Ginny's alive, and I certainly hope she is, you can bet that wherever she's hunkered down she's already hooked up with whoever the leader of the group is. She's one of those women who latches onto the big man and rides it until the wheels fall off. I only met her once, but in that short period of time I knew she was attracted to Steve Wendell the station manager, not Steve Wendell the man. You're not old enough to be called a sugar daddy, but add twenty years to your age and that's what you were."

Heather paused to let Steve deny it, and when he said nothing
, she continued, "You talked about her enough before we got together that I know a lot of the things that you did for her. Bailed her out of financial jams, and even bailed her out of jail."

Steve looked up in surprise that Heather knew about hi
s putting up Ginny's bond.

"My training sergeant was the arresting officer,"
she explained. "The only reason I even found out about it was because he was telling some of the other guys about this real drunk chick that he stopped on suspicion of DUI. They were laughing about what she said when the sergeant was giving her a field sobriety test. He commented that Ginny was so drunk she could barely stand up. She told him that you don’t have to stand to drive a car. When Sarge mentioned her name, I recognized it. This was after you had brought her to Seminole Lanes."

"Guilty as charged," Steve replied
. "Both her and me."

"You got used, Steve," Heather pointed out. "It's that simple. You did your best to try and save her
, but she made it impossible by going to Tampa that night. Now, you can sit here and mope around or you can come out into the living room and we'll invite Jonny and Marcia up for drinks and a movie. It's your choice."

Heather left, and after reflecting on the reality of his relationship with Ginny for a short time, Steve got up and turned on the lights. He couldn't feel anger at Ginny for being
who and what she was, but he was definitely done feeling self-pity toward himself for not being able to save her.