Gnash (29 page)

Not bothering with whispering anymore, Carrie yelled out, “Defensive perimeter!” to her team.  As Grayson moved into line in the semicircle around the open bay doors, he was impressed with the level of competence in the group.  Sure, it wasn’t up to military standards, but it was even more impressive since they’d only been doing this a couple of weeks.

The first of the zombies emerged from an aisle less than ten feet from the group.  If he hadn’t been a biologically engineered killing machine, it would have been a pathetic sight.  His skin was a grayish-blue that looked like it was sagging off of him.  Several sores festered along the exposed skin of his face and arms.  The sores leaked some type of milky yellowish fluid, which looked to Grayson like it would smell awful.  He moved remarkably well for a dead guy.  A little stiff, but he’d probably be able to keep up with someone walking at a brisk pace.  Shots rang out in the warehouse as several of the men shot at it, most rounds impacting in the body or in the shelf behind it, until one round finally hit it in the brain and it collapsed. 

Another one, a female in a green apron walked into the open with part of her jaw dangling.  Grayson hesitated at shooting a woman, but beside him, Carrie aimed and shot her in the head.  A large chunk flew off down the aisle and another zombie stepped onto it and slipped to its knees.  It slowly got up and started coming towards them.  Again, this one was dispatched quickly.  All three of them were dead before Grayson even fired a shot.

The group waited a full minute before Carrie issued the order to clear the building.  She turned towards Grayson, “You better get comfortable shooting these things, even those that used to be women and children, otherwise you and your girlfriend aren’t gonna last too long.”

“I…You’re right,” he stammered.  “Besides the up close fight with the two in our neighborhood, these are the first ones I’ve seen.  I’ll be ready next time another one of those things shows up.”

“You’d better be.  With all the noise we just made, we’re sure to attract more of them.”  Then she yelled out, “Alright, our timetable just got increased, if you’re not clearing the building, start hauling equipment from back here in the warehouse to the trucks!”

Grayson turned to Jamie, who’d been behind him during the engagement.  “You alright?” he asked.

“Yeah, I wasn’t expecting that.  I thought we’d come over here and get some seeds, then go back to our neighborhood.”  She looked him in the eyes and smiled, “I can’t make that mistake again.  This is really a different world now and I have to be prepared for anything.  I won’t hold you up, I promise.”

“Hey, no worries.  We’ll get through this together,” he said.  He really liked the crinkles at the corners of her eyes when she smiled at him…

The next twenty minutes was a flurry of activity as they basically cleaned the place out.  The sniper rifle rang out twice during that time.  Each time Carrie ran to the truck and asked the woman what she’d seen.  Both times she’d fired, there had been a lone zombie out beyond the highway and she was confident that she’d hit them in the head.  Each time there was a shot, the scavengers redoubled their efforts.  The general feeling was that it was only a matter of time before more of them were attracted to the sounds of the trucks and the gunfire.             

While they were emptying the inside of the store, Grayson found a great weapon for Jamie.  It was a 4-foot long gardening tool called a culti-hoe.  It had a virtually indestructible composite plastic handle and a metal head with a 3-prong cultivator on one side and an elongated hoe blade on the other.  It gave her standoff range and also had the ability to do some damage.  Since it wouldn’t be of use in a confined space, like in the aisles of the gardening center, she kept her fireplace poker and used a pilfered D-ring to attach it to her belt loop.

After the inside of the store was picked clean, Carrie decided to try to load as much of the fencing, posts and masonry as they could carry.  Even though they felt the clock was ticking, the group acknowledged the value of having additional building supplies that could be used for everything from fences to keep out the wildlife to elaborate semi-permanent barriers that could tangle up their enemies long enough for them to be dispatched at a distance. 

They’d loaded all the bales of wire fencing and fence posts that they could find and were halfway through loading the cinder blocks when the two men watching the front of the store began firing wildly.  Carrie began to raise the walkie talkie to her mouth, but stopped as the men rounded the corner firing over their shoulders.

“We gotta go!” one of them shouted. 

“Very large group…Came out from between the buildings…Almost on top of us,” the other panted.

Carrie didn’t waste any time.  “Drop what you’ve got, everyone get in the trucks, we’re leaving now!” she yelled.

Grayson let the two blocks he was carrying fall on either side of his legs.  “Jamie!” he shouted.  He turned completely around, frantically searching for his companion.  He saw her auburn hair peek up over a pallet of mulch and she scrambled up off her knees. 

“I’m coming,” she said as she hurried over to his side.  “That damn fireplace poker got caught on those bags of mulch and tripped me up,” she explained as he gently propelled her from behind.

Before they could reach their SUV, the woman on the top of PLS cab began firing rapidly into the field behind the store.  “We’ve got a lot of company coming from this way too,” she called out more calmly than Grayson would have if he’d been in her place.

Carrie got a thumbs up from both trucks that everyone was accounted for and ordered everyone to begin driving.  As the large trucks lurched forward behind the lead SUV, the sniper slid down into the trailer and received several high-fives from her companions. 

The SUV turned around the corner that the lookouts had taken when they retreated and less than halfway down the side of the building, a large mob of shambling creatures blocked the way.  “Fuck! Back up,” Carrie screamed from the passenger seat.  Into her walkie, she said, “We can’t get the SUV through that group.  I need truck two to take the lead, we’ll follow behind you.”

The driver of SUV slammed it into reverse and backed further into the parking lot as the PLS edged by and took the lead of the small convoy.  Behind them, another several hundred creatures began to emerge from the field.  The group from the front of the store had advanced another several feet and Grayson was worried that the truck wouldn’t have enough speed to get through them.  It barely reached twenty miles per hour before it slammed into the first of the group.  Corpses were flung sideways and crushed under the huge tires.  The shooters in the back fired blindly over the side of the trailer’s panels and the big 600-horsepower engine revved higher while it pushed through the writhing mass of flesh.  Slowly, inexorably, the truck gained speed as it neared the back of the group and the space between bodies began to spread out and not be so tightly packed.

Grayson’s SUV followed within a few feet of the first truck.  It bounced and jumped while the tires slowly churned through the pieces of the zombie horde that had been crushed under the massive weight of the PLS.  Jamie buried her face in Grayson’s shoulders as the windows became smeared in blood and gore.  Teeth gnashed at the glass and dead hands beat at the vehicle as it passed by them.  He tried, but couldn’t decide if the men and women in the back of the trailer were better off than those in the SUV.  At least they could defend themselves, unlike the four panicked people sitting on the nutmeg brown leather seats in the luxury truck listening to a country music CD.

Finally, after what seemed like hours, but in reality was less than thirty seconds, they too burst out through the rear of the mob.  Grayson turned and saw third truck barrel out of the group as well.  The desert tan vehicle looked as if it had been painted red halfway up the cab of the semi.  Remains of former Hoosiers dangled from the every surface.

Jamie leaned violently away from Grayson and covered her mouth.  With her opposite hand she punched the button for the power window and half stood to throw up out the window.  Carrie made a disgusted noise from the front seat.  Jamie sat slowly and wiped her mouth with her shirt sleeve after she’d expelled the entire contents of her stomach. 

“I’m sorry,” she muttered.  Grayson wrapped her in his arms and assured her that it was alright while he told himself that she wasn’t cut out to be on missions outside of the wire and it was stupid of him to have allowed her to come with him.

The convoy stopped less than a ¼ mile from the garden center in the middle of the highway.  “Hey, what’s going on?” Grayson asked.

Carrie turned around in her seat and said, “Standard operating procedure for us.  Even though this group is a whole lot bigger than anything we’ve seen before, what we do is get clear of the zombies, then, when we’re in an open area, we set up and kill the ones that are following us.”

“Another Vietnam lesson?”

“Yup.  My dad used to tell me all about it.  It also makes sense for us for two reasons, same as it did back then.  One,” she said holding up her index finger, “They don’t follow us home.  And two, we kill more of these things.  There were more than two million people the city and the surrounding suburbs.  The more zombies we take out, the more people we can save.”

She opened her door and stepped outside to take part in the massacre.  There was an undeniable logic to the tactic that Grayson couldn’t argue with.  Keeping them away from the neighborhoods was the whole reason they’d stayed longer to get the building supplies.  Shots began ringing out from the trucks.  The shooters were using the side panels of the trailer to rest their arms on and picking their targets, taking head shots.

As the firing volume began to decrease Carrie yelled something to her troops and jumped back into the SUV.  The firing from the back of the trucks stopped and the column drove another few hundred feet and repeated the process.  This time, Grayson exited the vehicle as well and fired his rifle into the crowd.  It took him a few tries because he couldn’t get the thought out of his head that these people would do the same to him in a heartbeat if he turned into a zombie.  He lined up his sights and shot one of the creatures in the head.  Two weeks ago, the guy he’d just killed was probably a normal guy, going to work and making a living for his family, now he was just another target. 
Kill or be killed
, he thought.   

The subject of his second execution was only half as tall as the others.  It was probably the remains of a kid, but he couldn’t let himself think about that.  His third and fourth kills were easier and by the time he had to change magazines, he’d already stopped wondering how the zombies felt about being killed and concentrated on destroying the horde that wanted to attack his new friends.  Finally, they were out of targets in the immediate area and the trucks began the trek back towards Pecan Valley.

***

13 May, 2025 hrs local

Military Decontamination and Infection Control Site #7

Fauquier County, Virginia

Doctor Jeremy Collins leaned back from his computer screen and typed some commands to manipulate the 3D rendering of the infected blood that was in the electron microscope.  Finally, he believed that he’d identified a portion of what made the disease so lethal and spread so quickly.  They’d known all along that it was some mixture of Avian and Swine Flu, which was nowhere near as fatal by themselves as this engineered virus, but the unique characteristics of those two components of the disease did allow it to spread extremely quickly with only a minor bite.  The men and women fighting on the front lines had also learned the hard way that besides the bite, if any of the zombie’s bodily fluids found their way into any open wounds, then that was a death sentence as well. 

There were other compounds present in the zombie blood that were simply too complex to easily identify so he had several computers that were tied into the World Health Organization’s database running non-stop.  The computer had finally identified a very rare plague virus that was only intermittently present along the entire DNA chain.  The genetic markers of Septicemic Plague, a bacterium, were spliced into seemingly random portions of the double helix.  No wonder he’d had such a hard time even identifying the damn thing.  It was extremely difficult to link bacteria and viruses together. 
The biologists that developed this disease must be brilliant
, he thought. 

The Septicemic Plague was almost extinct in the modern world, although it did pop up occasionally and was part of the many plagues that affected the Old World of Europe and Asia.  The more widely known Bubonic and Pneumonic Plagues had wiped out more than a third of Europe’s population in the so-called Middle Ages and still popped up in some third world countries today, but if there were to be a large outbreak of just the Septicemic Plague alone, he doubted that anyone would survive the devastation.

The plague caused a type of blood poisoning that was almost always 100% fatal.  It was typically carried by rodents and transmitted to humans by flea bites after they’d bitten an infected rodent, which may explain how the saliva transfer played into the zombie infection’s transfer.  He scanned the lab notes that were listed along the margin of his computer screen.  The original plague, by itself had a 2-5 day incubation period with the typical flu-like symptoms of chills, fever, cough and headache, what set this apart from other plagues, besides the lethality, was the presence of black and purple splotches under the skin of the infected.  That could also explain the coloration of the Type Two zombies, those that were infected as a result of the Type One, Pentagon zombie’s, bite.

He tapped the button on the side of his headset microphone and began dictating this newfound information into the system, which would automatically be backed up and saved on the server in case of power failure.  He’d barely spoken three sentences and just began to explain about the type of plague he’d found before the research facility alarms blared to life.  They were only supposed to go off in the event of a perimeter breach or if one of his stable of test subjects escaped from the holding cell.