Dead Surge (7 page)

Crossing the river brought a few memories back, some good, and some bad. We were officially in Iowa when we reached the other side, and I have to admit my apprehension level went a little higher. We were that much closer to whatever it was that was out there, and it wasn’t a comforting thought.

Cruising down the I-74 highway, we got a good look at our previous handiwork. Our containment policy walled in dozens of subdivisions, and we could see hundreds of zombies milling about in the evening sun. Cars lined the edges of the highway, providing an additional layer of protection. For every zombie we saw, we knew there were ten inside the buildings. Something had evolved in the virus, and the zombies were staying away from the elements, hiding out indoors to keep from falling apart. They came out when they spotted you, or figured you could be eaten, and it was a nasty surprise when you thought a town was clear and suddenly a horde was chasing you down the street.

Just past the debris berms was the hotel I was looking for. It actually was the only one left outside the zone, so our choices were limited. I didn’t feel like spending the night in the truck, and a secure location was a welcome sight. We had made several of these over the years as places for people to stop. I can’t tell you how important it was to the psychological well-being of people to know they could travel and still feel safe.

The Abbey Hotel was a big brick building situated high on a hill. It actually used to be an abbey, but it had been renovated into a hotel/museum before the Upheaval. During the dark times, it had been used as a fortress against the zombies, and now it served as a resting spot on the main road.

We pulled into the parking lot just as the sun was settling into its evening descent. Long shadows played out over the landscape, and the frustrated groans of the zombies on the other side of the zones mingled with the calls of the hunting cats and dogs.

Duncan looked up at the Abbey and grimaced. “Creepy place. Are you sure there isn’t a better hotel around here?”

I shook my head. “You burned them, remember? Back when you and Tommy took the river to the south?”

Duncan’s shoulders slumped. “Oh, yeah.” He brightened quickly. “Dibs on the corner room!” He grabbed his pack and scampered towards the hotel.

Sarah and I laughed, while Tommy managed a face palm holding two bags. Charlie just shook his head and Rebecca laughed.

We moved into the hotel, dropping our bags at the front door and joined Duncan in a quick sweep of the building. Everything checked out so we took the stairs to the rooms on the third floor. The fourth floor was the attic, and there wasn’t anything up there.

As the sun slowly set, the light in the building turned from white to yellow to orange, changing the color of the walls from bright to melancholy. I left Sarah up in our room while I explored a little, finding a small room at the end of the hall blocked off by a piece of Plexiglas. The room contained a cot, a bedside table, a chair, and a tiny locker by the foot of the cot. A plaque informed me that this was a cell used by the nuns of the abbey. They each had their own room, and this one was preserved as part of the museum. A single homespun dress hung on a peg in the corner.

I wandered downstairs and passed by the lobby, moving my way into the dining area. The chairs and tables were long gone, probably used as firewood during the Upheaval. In the back of the dining room was a big door, and it was slightly ajar.

Curious, I went over and peeked inside. There was just enough light for me to see the small chapel contained within, with a tiny alter and several rows of pews. I stepped in and walked over to pews when the back door suddenly opened. I jumped at the intrusion, but relaxed when I saw it was Charlie.

Chapter 15

I awoke in the middle of the night to see Sarah sitting up in bed. The moonlight coming in through the window provided enough light for me to see she was staring at the ceiling, her hands gripping the blanket tightly. I reached out and touched her hand, and she nearly leaped out of bed.

“Jesus!” she cried, holding a hand to her chest and breathing heavily. I had never seen Sarah this scared before, and I was instantly wide awake.

“What’s going on?” My threat level suddenly jumped and I was in battle mode instantly. I grabbed my pistol from the nightstand and got out of bed, the night sites on my gun oddly reassuring.

Sarah pointed at the ceiling. “Someone’s walking around up there,” she said.

I stood completely still and waited. After a minute, I could hear it plainly, too. The floor creaked in a rhythmic pattern, going around the edge of our room, and then stopping directly overhead. I aimed my gun at the ceiling, although I had no real reason to do so, and felt a distinct chill creep down my back.

The steps retreated and disappeared, and I looked at Sarah. She looked back at me and we both shrugged at the same time. I started towards the bed when I heard a footstep in the hallway. It wasn’t overly loud, but loud enough that I wanted to investigate.

I reached the door and I could see a small band of moonlight under the door as the hallway was lit by a big window on the end of the hall. Just as I was starting to reach for the doorway, I froze. Two shadows, like someone’s feet, blocked the moonlight and stopped in front of my door. The shadows then positioned themselves outside my door, like there was a person waiting to be let in.

For whatever reason, I could not open that door. I couldn’t even put my hand on the doorknob. I just stood there with my gun ready and my hand outstretched. In the dim light, I could still see the shadow of someone standing outside my doorway. I brought my gun up but I knew instinctively it was only a comfort to me, and useless against whatever was in the hallway. I couldn’t even bring myself to look through the peephole. I didn’t want to see what was on the other side. Something was stopping me from looking, and I just stood there, staring at the door and the shadows.

“John?” Sarah whispered. “John? What is it?”

That broke the spell. The shadows disappeared from the doorway, and I found I could move again. I turned to Sarah and moved quickly back to the bed, placing my gun back on the nightstand. Sarah jumped in after me and held on tight.

“What was out there?” She asked.

I thought for a second. “If I had to guess, the nuns were making sure we stayed in bed.”

In the morning, I awoke to a hammering on our door. Opening it, I found Charlie standing there with his bags in hand, nearly vibrating with energy.

“Ready to go? We’re ready. We’ll meet you down at the cars.” With that, he was gone, moving quickly down the hall to the stairs.

Rebecca came after him and threw me a shrug, following Charlie to the parking lot. I shook my head and got dressed; throwing a wink to Sarah that put a blush on her beautiful cheeks as she dressed.

Downstairs I bumped into Tommy and Duncan, and after a quick conference confirmed that they had no strange things happen to them. They were curious about my experience, and I gave them the short version of it, leaving out the part of me being scared stiff.

Chapter 16

We moved away from Bettendorf and back onto the main highway. I was anxious to get to the source of the problem and report back as soon as I could. If something was headed towards the population centers of Illinois, I wanted to get ahead of it, especially since my children might be right in its path. Jake had come with us on the campaign against the zombies, and Aaron had been born in the middle of the fights, but I didn’t want to think about my family being in harm’s way while I was away.

I-80 was still very quiet in the early hours, but we would likely see some trucks as the day progressed. There was a lot more movement these days than there had been in the past, but it was still limited. People stayed close to where they were safe, and only idiots like us wandered off the reservation on a regular basis.

While I drove, Sarah looked over the maps, trying to get some sort of read on what we were facing, and trying to predict where the best insertion point might be.

“If this mess is moving towards the center of the state, maybe we should just wait for it? No, then we might be weeks out here, and for all we know we might be passed by.” She spoke out loud to herself when she was musing, and it was hard to follow when I wasn’t sure when she was talking to me.

“Talk to me, we’re about six hours out of where we need to turn south,” I said, checking my rear view for the van. It was steady behind me about ten car lengths back, and Charlie looked as bored as I was. While Iowa was pretty, it was monotonous.

“Well, I’m looking at the map, and we have some possibilities. The first town not reporting in is here, and the last one is here. Given the distance, I’d have to say the problem is on foot, moving roughly faster than a walk, but not fast enough for a car.” Sarah squinted at the map. “What I don’t get is the lack of response. How can something like this happen and no one report it? I mean no one.”

I shrugged, causing the truck to swerve slightly. “Couldn’t say. But here’s my thought. I want to go to the first town that go hit, and check things out. If it’s something that changes the war, then we bug out and prepare our defenses. If it’s something we can fight, we can follow it and take it unawares. If we wait for it, like you mumbled back there, then it might pass us by and we’re out here when we should be elsewhere.”

Sarah smacked me on the arm for my comment, but nodded to herself. “Makes a kind of sense. If we follow it, at least we know we’re on the right track and can deal with it for sure, then guessing when it might come by.” She frowned at her maps. “Looking at these towns, I wonder what happened to the people who came before us.”

I thought about the man I had shot in that army / navy store. “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

Chapter 17

About noon, we pulled off the road at the little town of Adair. According to the map, the road headed down towards where we wanted to go. In normal times, we would have travelled to Interstate 29, but that road was closed to us. When we decided to clear the roads, some had to be bypassed, and that was one of them. So we were on side roads until we reached our destination.

That was fine with me. I was always a country traveler anyway. I always wanted to see the land I passed through, not just catch glimpses out of the corner of my eye as I blew past.

This also served the purpose of checking out the lay of the land before we faced whatever it was that was causing the problem out here. I hoped we could find out from a distance, but in my heart of hearts, I knew we were going to hit it head on, and we weren’t going to like it.

At the town of Anita, we stopped to talk to some locals and filled them in on the situation. They said they hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary, but they would check in more frequently now. They were well situated for defense, being near a large lake and forest preserve. All they had to do was get in one of the numerous boats that lined the shore and they were safe.

At Wiota, we ran into much of the same, a community that had weathered the storm fairly well. Wiota was a small farming town that was used to being self-reliant, so the end of the world wasn’t much of a concern. They promised to send out a contact report and let the powers that be know we had been in the area and still hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary.

We turned further south after skirting the town of Atlantic. That particular town had managed to survive the initial Upheaval, but an errant traveler had started a fire in a fake fireplace and scorched three quarters of the town. The people who had lived there scattered to the other towns and left Atlantic to ruin.

At Lewis, we turned to Route 6 and followed that to Oakland. In Oakland, you would never have known anything had ever happened to their world. The streets were clear, the homes were tidy, and people were everywhere going about their daily duties. It was a very nice place, and I almost felt out of place when I stopped at the sheriff’s office to let him know what we were up to.