Last Fight of the Valkyries (36 page)

“But my people aren't soldiers. I can't have this town
filled with guns. We'd have mass murder!”

John physically pushed back the sneer he knew was fighting for air
time on his face. The mayor of Cairo was an elderly and chronically
sweat-soaked black man who insisted on dressing like a preacher—black
pants, white shirt, and a ridiculous black suit jacket. It was next
to 100 degrees outside, the humidity was an eternal 100 percent, and
the meeting room doubled both. Yet he never took off his suit coat.

“And he gets everything wrong,” John thought. He was
wearing his multicam field uniform and was sweating profusely too,
but he was proud he didn't sweat like the other man. It was one small
victory that reinforced the superiority he felt over all the men in
the room, especially the mayor who seemed to not understand it was
guns keeping him alive.

“General, can you re-deploy some of your men to work inside
the town with those volunteers?”

And then there was
her
.

He looked down at his notepad. Ms. Elsa Cantwell. Homeland
Security.

Homeland my ass.

Generals have access to some of the best intelligence in the
military. He knew the oxymoron was there, but he wasn't talking about
satellites and spy planes. Most of his best intelligence came from
what would once have been called the water cooler. These days
everything was done over water bottles. The government seemed to have
an endless supply of them. Everywhere he went, people were anxious to
share what they knew with him. No matter the branch. No matter the
government bureaucracy. Everyone was searching for answers. He was
just better at coaxing information from people as opposed to giving
it.

And everyone said Homeland Security had been compromised. The
problem was the department was so massive no one could pin down quite
what part of it was broken. But he knew. If the woman sitting across
the table from him was a drone from some backwater government
department, he'd eat his Iraqi-sand-filled boots.

“As I've said over and over, I only have enough men and
women to defend the trench up north of town. I've had problems
with...”

Though his face was a mask, he had to work twice as hard as he
finished his thought.

“soldiers walking off their posts.”

“General, I'm showing,” she looked down at her own
notes, “approximately sixty five of your men have abandoned us.
Do you have any means to acquire replacements?”

It drove him insane at how secretive everyone had become once the
disaster broke out in America. He couldn't get a straight answer from
his superiors—when they answered the phones—nor could any
of his peers in the other branches. Cairo was swimming with one-stars
right now, including an admiral of all the crazy things. And here was
this civilian telling him how many men he'd lost.

The part that slaughtered his goat was that she was right. Dammit,
he wasn't going to admit it.

“Ma'am, we shouldn't be talking about numbers here. The
point is I don't have enough men to dig the trench, man the AFV's,
and
go beating the bushes with sticks.”

“General, I understand your situation. But maybe I can give
you some news that will help with your allocation choices.” She
pushed out her chair and stood up. She had the attention of the ten
men at the table, plus the numerous aides and hangers-on hovering on
the fringes of the ancient conference room.

He took a mental snapshot of her. Not because she was an
attractive blonde—though she was a model of a woman—but
because she was a threat. He watched as she moved from her chair to
the whiteboard on the wall. She moved with the grace of a lioness.
She wore dark business slacks and a short-sleeved white shirt, both
well-fitting and clean. Most people wore ill-fitting and dirty
clothes they had to pull from the piles of refugee clothing. It had
been two weeks since the emergency started—only someone with
lots of resources could get clean clothes these days. Or she knew
this was coming, and was prepared.

With a black marker, she drew on the white board. In moments she
had drawn a map of the states of Illinois and Missouri, along with
the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers.

“This is us.” She drew a circle at Cairo. Which sat at
the very southern tip of her rendition of Illinois. “Up the
river is St. Louis.” She drew another dot on the left side of
her map. “And up here is Chicago.” A third dot went in
the northern part of Illinois. She then drew some other dots in
various parts of the map, followed by some arrows from those dots
down to Cairo, which sat at the bottom of a V bracketed by the two
big rivers.

“Does anyone know what this means?”

The mayor had been preaching about this since they'd met. “Yeah.
The zombies are coming
here
,” he repeated from his
previous warnings.

Elsa nodded. “Yes, Mayor Cartright, our GIS guys have
determined that as these, uh, zombies, leave the cities they
naturally follow the contours of the land and the boundaries of the
rivers. Since most of the big bridges over both these rivers have
been blown, they will gravitate southward to this point.” Her
pen made an emphatic squeal on their position.

“The zombies are coming here,” she reaffirmed. “But
that's the bad news. The good news is this: the government is
re-establishing itself in St. Louis.”

She seemed to wait for a reaction.

“Why St. Louis?” John probed.

“An excellent question, General. For the same reason this
little town has kept you safe—St. Louis is surrounded on three
sides by major rivers. The zombies have been migrating out of that
city into the open countryside beyond. What's left is safe to reclaim
and re-use. The fact that it's in the middle of the country was also
valued by government planners.”

He wanted to ask why he wasn't informed of such plans. As one of
the ranking military men defending the civilian population in the
Midwest, he should have been the first to know about a potential new
base of operations. He also wanted to ask what would become of Cairo.
Currently it was as safe a place as any for hundreds of miles. But he
hated appearing out of the loop.

No one said anything.

“This is good news, people. The government is coming to
rebuild and restore some semblance of peace after these weeks of
chaos and uncertainty. The worst is over.”

Her eyes met his. She was unflinching. Challenging him to say
something contrary. He held hers until they were both interrupted by
a man standing along the wall behind him. When he spun around to see
who was talking he truly was surprised.

“Miss. I don't believe we've met. I'm Rear Admiral Ray. I
was on special assignment with the Joint Chiefs in the Pentagon
before things got bad. My sources say that St. Louis is not clear of
infected, and in fact it has a higher than normal concentration of
them. Also, are you aware of the activities of the Patriot Snowball
group in that city?”

He had newfound respect for the navy man. He actually asked some
salient questions. He was unaware of the patriot threat there, though
he knew of the Snowballers.

“Yes. My advance team is there right now. I should have a
report soon on the precise status on the ground. We are aware of the
threats.” She put down her marker and looked around at
everyone. “This is going to happen, folks. The government in
Washington is gone. Washington D.C. is gone. Most of what's left has
to set up shop somewhere, and St. Louis is it. Your job is to support
that effort.”

She looked at John. “Can I count on you, sir, to help these
people survive until we can all get safely to St. Louis when the time
is right?”

His head swam with competing directives. Dig the trench. Properly
position the tanks. Plan the killboxes. And now, be ready to abandon
it all, cross hostile territory, and end up in a bigger town with
bigger problems. Though he swore an oath to protect the country, he
wavered on what that actually meant here on the ground.

For now, he would play along.

“I can provide five humvees, each with two-man crews to
patrol on top of the levees.” Keeping them on the levees would
give them instant access back to the main effort in the north, should
they be needed.

“All right. See guys, we're getting somewhere now.”
She smiled a fake smile. “We just have to play nice and help
each other until the government gets back on its feet. You take care
of it, and it will take care of you.”

The poison in her eyes reinforced his doubts about her motives.
Cairo was safe. It was on a peninsula and was easily defensible
thanks to his efforts digging fortifications on the landward-facing
side. Only an idiot would abandon prime defensive real estate like
this.

He wasn't going to let her, or anyone, ruin all that he had built.

Homeland Security may be in charge, but he controlled the
firepower.

###

Thank you for reading
Last Fight of the Valkyries
! I'll be
working on book 5,
Zombies vs. Polar Bears
, by the time you're
reading this message.

If you've read this far, I think it's safe to say you qualify as a
“superfan” of my books. Seriously, whether you loved them
or merely survived them, I want to take this opportunity to shake
your hand in appreciation. The series has taken on a life of its own
and brought me to places I never imagined just a few short months
ago.

For one, I had no idea these books would sell beyond a few copies
to my mom. I wrote them mainly for my own enjoyment and even a few
weeks after I hit the publish button on book 1 in December, 2015, I
still wasn't thinking of them in terms of making money. I just wasn't
wired that way.

However, about a month after the launch of book 1, I put the
finishing touches on book 2 and hit the publish button again in
January, 2016. Suddenly I had two books in the marketplace and a few
people started to notice. A trickle of people read through book 2 and
had pre-ordered book 3. It was slated to come out in the middle of
February, 2016. As the weeks went by, more readers pre-ordered book 3
and it dawned on me they were buying all three books in quick order.
One of those early people was probably you. Yes, you—reading
this, right now.

Because of
you
, I decided to write a book 4. I spent the
month of March doing almost nothing but writing
Last Fight of the
Valkyries
, and I loved the directions it took me. I don't want to
give anything away on the off chance you're reading this before
reading the story, but there were things in the ending that even I
didn't know were going to happen until they took place far into the
writing process. It has truly set things up for an exciting book 5!

Now, as I release book 4, and as I'm talking to my best and most
endurance-oriented fans, I'm going to look back on some of the
reviews for my first book and add commentary in the form of replies.
You see, as an author, I don't feel it's right for me to comment on
reviews directly on the site where they appear, because reviews are a
way for readers to talk directly to other readers. I don't like to
get in the middle of that natural process.

However, in my own book, I feel free to highlight some of the
reviews which interest me, and, if you'll indulge me, show my thought
process as I read and respond to some of them.

First, I'd like to take a minute to address, in bulk, the several
people critical of one key aspect of my books that honestly caught me
by surprise. It seems obvious in retrospect, and shows my lack of
experience as an author, but I had no idea Grandma Marty's religion
would be seen so negatively by some reviewers. I've touched on this
in some of the “acknowledgments” sections. Marty was
based on my own grandmother. It's hard for me to visualize my own
grandma in those situations, because although she was far more
religious than Marty, she wasn't one to proselytize. So, while it's
safe to say my grandma was very religious, she was not a
Bible-thumping, in-your-face, follow my religion or go-to-hell type
of woman. She was a Christian, and thus I wanted to write Marty in
the same spirit. See what I did there? Haha.

They say you can't please everyone, and that's reasonable.
However, I take reviews seriously. I re-read my own books looking for
places where I made religion in-your-face or otherwise out of place
with the story. Anything that would cause such negative reviews. I
really couldn't find anything that I, as a reader, felt was pushy or
showy about religion. I describe Grandma's prayers, her belief she
was seeing an angel in her visions, and Victoria's cross necklace and
her desire to find a Bible in various places throughout the book. Any
of those could have been substituted for non-religious counterparts.
Grandma could have been meditating. She could have thought Al was a
ghost. Victoria could have been wearing an Ankh. I could have then
pleased those who gave me a negative review and been on my way to
author greatness.

But that's not how I heard the story. Part of being an author is
writing from the heart. I listen to my characters, and when I'm
really lucky, I can see them. I imagined Victoria when Liam first met
her. He was nervous because she was a cute, older girl in a pretty
dress. But, and who knows where such things come from, I saw her with
that cross necklace. As the author, it gave me comfort that here was
a girl who might bring something to the table. I felt she had some
gravitas, despite her age, because she sees something larger than the
current catastrophe surrounding her. Liam took comfort from that, and
was one facet of his later attraction to her. Could I have used an
Ankh? Absolutely. But it would have been fake. A cop out. It wasn't
what I saw. Besides, at the time, I only considered my own writer's
voice, not the voice of dissenting reviewers.