Scavengers (20 page)

David looked up with shock, his left hand dripping blood. The man was gone, but the woman guard, Kathryn, was pushing through the crowd toward him, yelling.

She gripped him, reaching an arm around his shoulders, and urged him into an area away from the throng. They stood beneath a light on the concrete portico, between two stone columns near one of the glass doors. Kathryn studied the wound.

Her eyes were dark brown, pupils and irises almost the same color. They reflected fear for him, concern. She looked around, and David did the same as truth dawned.  That man had stabbed him…intentionally…
where did that son of a bitch go?
 

“We’ve got to get you to Doc Ward.”

David nodded. He was suddenly lightheaded. He took a deep breath and let her plow a way through to the glass doors to the commons. Heat began to emanate from the wound, and bending even the slightest hurt like hell.

Once inside, they hurried across the room of tables and chairs, past a gathering on the couches that paused in their prayers to observe the commotion. He leaned on Kathryn as they mounted the stairs. Every footstep caused an explosion of ripping pain in his stomach muscles. It seemed a long way back to the med room where Doc Ward was.

“What the hell happened?” said the doc. He noticed David clutching his side. There was enough blood now that it coated David’s hand and made a good mess of his shirt cuff and left pant leg.

“Stabbed,” said Kathryn.

“Get him over here.” Doc Ward hurried to a cot and cleared off the wadded sheets.  David groaned as Kathryn and the old doctor helped him onto it. Pain ripped through his abdomen as he used his stomach muscles to lie onto the bed. He growled with pain.

A few of the sick folks in the room were startled.

The doc returned from the counter with a medical kit and ripped away David’s shirt. David tried to gauge how bad the injury was based on the doctor’s reaction, but the old man was better than that. He tentatively probed the wound.

“Ah, shit!” David hissed between clenched teeth.

“I’m going to give you a local anesthetic,” the doctor said, reaching into his kit, extracting a syringe of Lidocaine. “Just hang on.”

David squeezed his eyes closed at the small needle bite as the anesthetic was injected near the wound. The area went numb, leaving a dull ache, a sensation of something awry. And he couldn’t shake the feeling of wanting to vomit. He breathed deep, slow, trying to keep himself calm. He felt the doctor clean the wound.

When David opened his eyes again. Doc Ward had slipped on a mask, and was probing the wound gently with hemostats and a retractor. The doctor looked into the wound from different angles. He made a humming sound. David felt a slight tugging, but nothing more. Still he remained as still as possible.

“Well?” David grunted.

“Shh,” Doc Ward said.

Kathryn hovered over him. Her face had gone white and she turned away to watch the door.

That’s not good
, David thought. He had an image of his belly laid open, raw meat and globules of fat, severed muscle granting a deep hole into his guts.

Finally, the doctor pressed gauze against his wound and looked up. “Well, good news and bad news. The bad news is, your obliques and transversus and rectus abdominus muscles were severed. The good news: the transversalis fascia’s still intact. So the blade didn’t penetrate to the hollow viscera. All that means you’ll survive – it doesn’t mean that what I’ve got to do now won’t hurt like hell.”

David willed himself to relax just a bit. It was enough to know he wasn’t going to die.  Pain could be dealt with. But facing death…he only now realized how much he’d been looking forward to helping Dejah and Shaun get the hell out of here. To finding what else was left out there in the world, hoping this wasn’t it. Hoping his life hadn’t boiled down to hiding in a commune of flakes and people who had no other choice.

“I wish I could put you under, but I’m sorry to say I just don’t have the stuff for it.  Optimally, I’d repair the muscle layers with absorbable sutures, but I don’t have any.”

“Okay.” David’s voice was a groan. Pain ebbed deeper inside him. The Lidocaine only helped with the surface of the wound.

“Still, I think you’ll heal okay if you take it easy for about a week.  I’m going to douse this with some saline and close the wound. The cut is long, but not deep … if he came straight at you, you must have turned before he could do you in.”

David nodded. Sweat beaded on his forehead, gathered and rolled over his face. Kathryn dabbed it away with a cloth. Doc Ward went to the sink and washed before he came back to start the stitches. David felt the tugging and focused on Kathryn to keep his mind off what was happening. He regarded her face. She was a thick woman, but not fat. She didn’t wear any makeup, and her hair was dark. Thick eyebrows rose over dark brown eyes. She wasn’t unattractive, but she wasn’t a beauty. She had a sense of power about her. Strength.

“Thanks,” David said to her.

“Sshh. Don’t talk,” said the doctor, muffled by his mask.

“Don’t mention it.”

After Ward was done, they sat David up on the cot.

“Did you see who did this?” David said.

“It was one of the reverend’s guards. A man named Orville. He was a hunter from the local hunt club in Balch Springs. I knew him in passing when we went to church here.”  Kathryn looked between the doctor and David before she spoke again. “Did you and him get into some kind of tiff?”

David shook his head. “Never seen the son of a bitch before he was sliding a blade across my gut.”

Kathryn nodded and looked at the ground.

“Somethin’ heavy on your mind, Kathryn?” Ward asked.

“I’m willing to bet that was an order from above.”

“From the reverend?” asked David. “Why on Earth?”

But then he knew. As the vision of Dejah coming to the room that morning struck him, so too did the memory of two men in fatigues standing in the hallway beyond as she’d left, after their discussion.

Kathryn lowered her voice. “It’s not safe to talk in here.”

They nodded. The doc and Kathryn helped David to the room he shared with the others.  No one was there, except for Shaun on his cot. He sat up in concern when he saw David limping in. He demanded to know what happened and they filled him in. The tone of the discussion assured them of Kathryn’s change of heart. She saw Keller for what he was, and didn’t want any further part of it. Especially after what she’d witnessed tonight. Between the ritualistic feeding of Zanine to the children of Hell, and the presumed “hit” on David, there wasn’t much else needed to convince her that Keller had gone way over the deep end of sanity.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” Shaun insisted.

David groaned as he adjusted himself on the cot. “I couldn’t see a good way to the chopper from the lawn. The only way I know is right through the front doors. And the way things are going around here, I’d expect that would garner a pretty unfriendly response. Especially when they realize I intend to take the helicopter and fly Dejah out of here with us.”

“You can fly that copter?” Kathryn asked. Some of the deep trouble had eased from her face, lightened with hope at the prospect of using the helicopter to escape. She seemed to understand as well as they did that driving wasn’t an option.

“I flew it in here; I can sure as hell fly it out. We just need to get there. And now that I’m wounded ... well, I’m not going to be winning any races any time soon. But I’ll do what I have to do.”

Kathryn went across the room and peered out a high window. Night had fully overtaken the land. There were lights on around the church complex. She stared outside for a few moments and then came back to sit. The cot creaked beneath her. “Take me with you.”

Shaun and David exchanged looks. They had room. With Dejah, there would be four, and that would be the maximum number of people the helicopter could hold. An extra person would make things more complex in terms of coordination, but her knowledge of the guard duty rotation would give them resources and information they needed. She knew the best way to get Dejah out of her room, and how to get to the chopper without being detected or at least detected by as few people as possible at the most vulnerable time in the church’s defense.

Not to mention, she had access to guns.

They discussed it. Early morning was the best time to mount the attempt. Only two guards were posted at the front doors with others on standby in nearby rooms. Even if an alert was sent out, those guards would have to run from rooms on the other side of the sanctuary, giving them a good head start to the chopper. There was always someone in the camera room upstairs, in the reverend’s wing, but interior camera coverage was isolated to hallways in the school wings. As soon as they went outside, they’d be visible on security cameras all the way around the building.

The longer their conversation went on, the more Kathryn’s eyes drifted nervously to the door.  After the evening’s event, most had presumably gone to dinner, or spent time elsewhere. People were growing restless spending time in the dorm rooms. As security became a more organized force, people had begun to relax somewhat and socialize. But the later it grew in the evening, more people would be making their way back to the rooms. Kathryn didn’t want to be seen like this, with them; it could ruin everything.

“Getting Dejah out of the reverend’s rooms is really going to be the trickiest part,” Kathryn said.

“What about the gas,” Shaun said.

“What gas?” Kathryn looked at David.

“When Carson and the others pulled Dejah and I out of the truck, they launched some kind of gas canisters that knocked out the zombies and us. Could we use that gas in the reverend’s rooms?”

Kathryn’s right eyebrow arched.  “Hmm. Well, it would kill two birds with one stone, if we could get it in the air ducts. But then Dejah will be knocked out too, slowing us down even more. And, the Kolokol-1 … sometimes people who don’t get treated with oxygen after breathing it can die.”

“They have gas masks, though, don’t they? For us?”

“Yes, in the armory. Or, what they’ve made into the armory. It’s a big storage closet used to hold folding chairs for events, but now everything’s there. All the stuff that Carson had stashed for the end of the world. God only knows where he got it all. Hook-ups from the military, I guess, his crazy paramilitary buddies or black market. Him and some friends of his, Reeves and a handful of others, were looking to form a local militia. Word is he had a shelter on some land not too far from here that looked like a SWAT team weapons depot. Guns, ammo, launchers. Crazy stuff.”

“We can get a small oxygen canister from Doc Ward and use it on Dejah after we fly out of here,” Shaun said.  He was getting excited and his voice rose a few octaves.

“Okay, okay,” David said, quieting them. His mental gears were turning. He saw how it could work. He and Kathryn exchanged a few more ideas before she hurried away at risk of being seen. David spent the night in pain, and he could sense Shaun’s excitement in the cot next to him as the dorm refilled. He lay still, on his side, in the event any of the guards happened to look in to see if he’d survived. Perhaps they’d think he came in to die. He closed his eyes against the pain and dared to hope their plan would work.

Tomorrow, come hell, high water, or the devil himself, they were flying out of here in one piece.

Just before dawn on Thursday, the dorm rooms were quiet but for the occasional snore, a sleep talking murmur, or the stirring of sheets. Kathryn had been to David and Shaun’s room with a maintenance walkie-talkie, two gas masks, and two semi-automatic pistols with extra magazines an hour ago. Sunrise was thirty minutes off. Kathryn was preparing the gas for release into the air ducts.

It was time to move.

Shaun and David crept from the dorm wing staying in the shadows. Knowing guards were only posted at the main front doors didn’t ease their anxiety at being discovered. It would be awfully hard explaining why they had gas masks dangling from their shoulders, pistols in their pants, and a walkie-talkie in-hand. David had taken three Tylenol to help with the pain. He moved gingerly, but the urgency of the occasion helped him overcome the residual pain of the knife wound.

As they neared the main entry of the church, soft hues of pre-sunrise lavender brushed the marble floors. Heavy silence rested in the high-ceiling area. Daybreak lit the skies beyond the massive wall of glass. There were supposed to be two guards posted there. David hugged the wall of the main hall. As it curved, they would come into view if anyone watching the front doors happened to turn their way.

David signaled to Shaun to quiet his step and slow down. Nervous intensity coursed between them. He held his breath as they came into view of the massive entry hall. The guards were nowhere to be seen. David didn’t bother to look around or puzzle out where they went. He urged Shaun to quietly but swiftly follow him to the right, into the corridor branching off the main hall, headed toward the Sunday school rooms and the elevator.

They made it undetected.

Even out of the main hall, David wouldn’t allow himself to relax. He could see from the frown on Shaun’s face that the boy had the same fears. 
Where the hell were those guards?

That was when they heard laughter. David looked quickly to Shaun. Shaun’s eyes grew wide. The sounds came from the front hall, so perhaps the guards had slipped away for coffee or a restroom break, only now returning to their posts. If so, David thanked God for small favors. They’d been absent at just the right time.

They crept downstairs into an alcove for the elevator. Shaun pressed the button and waited for it to arrive. The light came on quickly, signaling the car’s arrival. The muted ding made them anxious, as did the roaring of the doors that closed as they boarded.

They pressed the button for level two. David took a deep breath. Air shuddered in his lungs, contributing slightly to the dull ebbing pain of his wound. Shaun exhaled as if he’d been holding his breath from the moment they’d embarked on their escape. With a gentle lurch, they began the short trip in the elevator that would take them to the upper Sunday school classrooms, and the wing in which the reverend’s rooms were located. Shaun and David exchanged looks. David pressed the button on the walkie-talkie three times.

In a moment, Kathryn’s voice whispered through the speaker. “Are you in position?”

“In the elevator.  Ready to disembark in seconds.”

“10-4.”

David put on his gas mask. Shaun followed suit. The lights on the control panel indicated they’d reached the second floor. The
bing
signaled the opening doors. David’s fingers tightened on the grip of the 9 mm Beretta Kathryn provided. The doors slid open on an empty hall.  They stepped out.

No one was there. To their right lay a catwalk edging a long balcony leading to stairs.  To their left was a corridor curving toward the reverend’s room.

David’s breath echoed in the mask, a muffled Vader-esque sound. Shaun had his mask attached, eyeholes fogging briefly with each exhalation. They took cautious steps into the hallway leading left. It was the door at the end of the hall in which they were interested. Shaun hurried forward but David reached out, holding him back.

Dropping to all fours, David crept along the curve. Shaun followed suit. Just as the end of the corridor came into view, he put his head close to the ground, keeping Shaun behind him. He just had a feeling in his gut that something wasn’t right.

Two guards were posted outside Dejah’s door. A good thing and a bad thing: good because they knew they had the right door, but bad because they might have to kill those men. David hoped to get out without any loss of life, but the bottom line was he’d do what he had to do. He only hoped the range of the Kolokol gas would encompass the hall as well as the bedchamber. Kathryn would target the bedroom ducts, but any spill-over might be to their advantage.

David crept from the line of sight. Shaun tugged on David’s shirt with an apparent question, but David shook his head no. He jabbed a finger around the corner and then held up two fingers: two guards.

Shaun’s eyes asked:
What now
? 

David set his jaw.
Calm. Think about this. Wait to see if the gas takes effect, or rush in now
? The decision was made for him a moment later. A large bearded man with dark eyebrows stepped through a nearby door, chuckling. A thin, ugly woman walked out behind him, buttoning her shirt and tossing her hair. They stood five steps away.

Shaun froze. David caught his breath, not only because he was surprised, but because he recognized the man; he was the one who stabbed him last night.

The fat man reached for the woman intending to pull her into an embrace when he saw David and Shaun. “What are you doing here?” He pushed the woman away. When she saw them, she screamed.

In one smooth action, David raised the 9 mm, firing a shot just left of dead center through the bearded man’s head. The hole in his forehead welled with blood, neat, the size of a pinky finger. The back of his head, however, exploded in a gushing mess of scarlet and gray matter. As the fat man fell to the floor, the woman ran away screaming.

The door swung open. It was the security room full of cameras and monitors.

David rushed inside and began smashing the monitors that showed the exterior of the church. Shaun helped. It took a minute. David located the camera monitoring the interior of the reverend’s makeshift harem and spotted Dejah on a canopied bed.

“David!” Shaun yelled, voice muffled through the mask.

One of the guards from the end of the hall came round the corner from the catwalk, a thin man with a rifle on his back, a pistol in his hand. The man seized with fear when he spied them. Perhaps it was the gas masks that caught him off guard. Whatever the case, it was just the lapse they needed. When the man paused, David fired into his leg. The man cried out and collapsed.

“Drop the gun,” Shaun yelled. He ran over and loomed above the thin man, menacing and deliberate in his stance. David had no doubt Shaun would pull the trigger if necessary. It filled him with both relief and sadness.
What have we become?

No time for this shit, just move
.

The man tossed his pistol free. Shaun picked it up, backing toward David.

“Let’s get Dejah and get the hell out of here,” David said.

“Why isn’t the gas—?” Shaun was interrupted by gunfire from the end of the hall.

The door to the Reverend Keller’s room was open, and a rifle poked between the door and the jamb. The second guard. Another shot echoed, taking out a chunk of drywall near David’s head.

“In here!” David pulled Shaun into the monitor room. David hid behind the door.  He squeezed off a shot, aimed more or less down the hall, to make sure no one felt brave enough to come after them.

Another rifle shot ripped through the walls. Chalky white dust fell around them in the bullet’s wake. Shaun hunkered under the counter with all the monitors.

“Why isn’t the gas working?” Shaun demanded. There was panic in his voice.

David shook his head, frustrated, high on adrenalin. He reminded himself to stay calm, to think. His battle instincts returned to him. He zeroed in on the monitor they’d left intact – the one showing the reverend’s room. He realized he could see the gunman hunkered beyond the threshold. There was one man and two women in the room: a young woman and Dejah. With the gunfight, the younger woman had gone to Dejah, clinging to her. David planned a trajectory for his own shot using the camera. He had to keep from injuring either of the women.

“Look!”  Shaun pointed at the monitor.

David saw it too. He grinned.

The gunman swayed, then collapsed, falling onto his side. The women fell into a drugged embrace. David realized the air conditioning had kicked on, and the gas was being expelled through the vents.

They didn’t wait another moment. Dashing from the security room, David and Shaun ran to the end of the hall and pushed open the door, shoving the sleeping guard’s limp body to the side. David took in the details of the chamber before going to help Shaun heave Dejah onto his shoulders. Her head lolled. She wore a flowing white gown which dragged against the floor. David unceremoniously ripped away the lower half of the gown’s skirt. 

They bore her weight between them. As they began their journey through the hall, back to the elevator, David grimaced against the pain from his wound.

In the elevator, they punched the button to the lower level. David leaned against the wall, panting, resting his side, while Shaun extracted the portable oxygen tank and mask provided by Doc Ward. He strapped the clear plastic mask over Dejah’s face.

David activated the walkie-talkie. Kathryn was waiting downstairs, in a remote corner of the entry hall with an M-16, ready to provide cover for their escape. David pressed the communication button four times, followed by three times, and finally twice. He waited.

The elevator car lurched as they reached the main floor.

Come on, Kathryn.
 

And then she replied: three clicks.

David nodded toward Shaun. Suspending Dejah between them, they made their way out into the cavernous entry hall. David’s heart thundered as he prayed to all the gods who’d listen that Kathryn would cover them well.

They left the shadowy solitude of the corridor. The front hall opened before them, wide and vast. The area was brighter than before, shedding more light as they made a direct run for the front doors. David saw the guards.

“Stop right there!” a guard yelled. It was Reeves.

“Go, go, go!” David panted. Shaun kept up with him, lugging Dejah’s weight between them.

As David looked up, Reeves was shouldering his weapon. He cursed. There was no way Reeves would miss at this range. He’d been a soldier, not just some whack job with a rifle. If he squeezed off a round, one of them was going down.

The front door was ten paces away. He gritted his teeth against the pain and heaved Dejah onto his back, running. Shaun turned, aiming his pistol at Reeves.

A shot rang out. David winced. He didn’t feel a bullet hit him. He looked over with dread at Shaun and saw he had neither fired, nor sustained a wound. Across the hall, at the edge of shadow where light through the stained glass windows painted the marble, Reeves fell dead to the floor.

“Yes,” David hissed.

“Yeah! You got that sucker!” Shaun shouted.

Kathryn stirred, hiding in the lower branches of a fifteen-foot indoor tree. She fired another round from her M-16, felling the second guard. Lugging a massive pack of equipment, including what looked like one of the grenade launchers strapped to her back, Kathryn scrambled across the final distance of polished marble floor to meet them at the front door. She rattled the chains securing the doors as she worked to open the lock with a key.

“Go!” she yelled as chains clattered to the floor. 

David, weighed down with Dejah across his back, ran across the open expanse in front of the church. His knife wound throbbed as though the blade had been reinserted, digging at him with each step. His thigh muscles burned with inner heat at the exertion. He forged ahead.

They veered toward the parking lot where he landed his chopper a lifetime ago. 

Over the far horizon, beyond the black silhouette of a tree-lined hilltop, the sun broke in a blaze of auburn light washing over the cockpit’s front windows. It was the most beautiful damn thing he’d ever seen. There was the white Eurocopter EC-145 with IBC4 News emblazoned on the side. It was no Apache, no Huey, but it was salvation … and they were almost there.

The run to the helicopter took them from the portico of the massive front drive of the church. Its center was composed of a pebble-set concrete walk and a fountain in which stood a fifteen-foot white statue of Jesus. He looked upon them with serenity and outstretched arms. 

They traversed a grassy rise between the driveway and the parking lot. Just as they hopped over the curb twenty yards from the copter, the distant crack of gunshots behind them echoed in the morning air. Now that they’d reached the plateau of the lot, they could see across it to the edge of forest. At the far edge of the parking lot was a group of twelve zombies, stirred to movement by the commotion.

David chanced a final glance behind. Several paramilitants emerged from the front doors of the church and joined the firing line. David heard a shot wing through the air very close to them. Other bullets ricocheted off curbs or tore into the asphalt. He suddenly feared the gunshots would damage the copter.