The Coalition: Part II The Lord Of The Living (COALITON OF THE LIVING Book 2) (14 page)

“Oh, baby,” Jean crooned to him. She slid from her chair and kneeled beside him, holding him in her arms. “It’s okay to cry. I feel like crying myself.” And she hugged him, patting his back and running her hands through his hair, kissing his brow. “It’s okay.”

In a moment he stopped crying and a smile etched his face again.

“Go ahead,” Ron told him. “Dig in, son.”

**

Later, after they’d all eaten and the dishes were cleared away, the Colonel drew Ron aside as Jean and Oliver were led off to see what other amazing things were being preserved in this museum of what used to be.

The two men stood in a big office overlooking the city. The view was to the west and southwest. Ron could see more of the city from this spot than he had been able to observe from any other point he’d been, since the zombies had come to ruin the place. The fire was still raging in Wilmore. From there, Ron could see houses going up like dry sticks, sparks and smoke spilling high as the places collapsed. He pointed toward the conflagration that was raging not so far away.

“I had good safe houses over there,” he said. The accusation was in the air and he did not really have to elaborate.

“I know you did,” Dale replied, his accent clipped. The image of Field Marshall Montgomery from the movie
Patton
came to Cutter as he looked over at the man standing stiffly at attention beside him. The soldier’s eyes were on the fire. “It couldn’t be helped,” he admitted. “These old neighborhoods have to go. You know what it’s like in them. The brush has run amuck.” He raised his left hand, his index finger pointing skyward. “The trees and flowers are sucking up all of that carbon we’ve belched into the atmosphere the past 100 years or so. That’s why everything’s so overgrown. And after the past two growing seasons…well, it was all just a tinderbox waiting to go up. Those houses are nothing but mounds of firewood waiting for spontaneous combustion.”

“Is that why you’ve been burning down half the city?” Ron asked. His mind was on the supplies he’d stashed in the safe rooms he’d gone to so much trouble to create.
Food, water, batteries, and guns, medicines and ammunition. It was all burned up, now.

Dale turned to his guest and nodded at him. “I know you don’t like to see it, but you know I’m right when I sa
y those neighborhoods were just waiting to go up. It’s better to do it in a controlled way so that it doesn’t get out of hand when Mother Nature decides to do it herself.”

Ron bit off his reply. “Okay,” he said.
“All right. Whatever you say.” He looked behind to see if anyone had entered the office with them or if any of Dale’s armed company was standing in the hallway as guards.

“Don’t be so nervous,” the Colonel said. “Have we made you feel unwelcome? Has anyone threatened you in any way?”

Ron shook his head. “No.” He had to admit it. “I just don’t understand.” He swept his arm to indicate the fires below and the building around him. “What is all this? What’s going on?”

“I told you before. 
Weeks ago. I thought that you and your family would come and join us.” Dale waited for a reply that didn’t come, and then continued. “But I noticed that you did listen to my advice to take the initiative with the dead folk.” The man smiled at Ron. “Best way to handle them, all things said. They’re not much upstairs, but they do seem to understand what’s going on when the zombies around them start having their heads blown to pieces. Frankly, they’re not much of an issue these days. I predict that in another couple of years, they won’t figure into the equation at all.”

“At all?
What are you saying? People have stopped rising?” Ron knew that wasn’t true, but he wanted to hear the Colonel say it.

“Well, I exaggerate a little,” the Brit said. “
The dead still rise, but it’s more of a control issue now. And only the very newest of them show the aggression we used to see constantly in dealing with them. They’ll still follow you, and they’ll still kill and eat you, if you’re stupid. But stand and fight and they generally turn and flee. You know I’m right. You’ve seen it.”

Cutter nodded.

“All I’m saying is that in a year, maybe two, things will be closer to normal. To the way things once were. We can regain some of the things we’ve lost. We can stop the losses that are occurring even now.” He strode over to the window and put his face almost to the glass, staring out at the city. His eyes were locked on something off in the distance, just beyond one of the older burned neighborhoods.

“But what is this?” Ron asked him, coming to stand beside the soldier, to look out on the world and try to see what Dale was seeing. “What’s this building all about? It doesn’t make any sense. I’ve watched it for days on end. No one is ever he
re, except for the bastard who used to fire that .50 caliber from time to time.” He was silent for just a second. “Did you and your men kill him? Take this place?”

For a long time the Colonel did not answer Ron. He stood, his nose almost to the window, staring at that point in the distance.

And following that steely gaze, Ron saw what it was: the Charlotte-Douglas International Airport. Or what was left of it. Cutter could see the flight towers and the runways. And looking, he realized that the runways had been cleared, were lying pale and gleaming in the sunlight. This much was evident even from miles away.

“I’ve told you before, Mr. Cutter,” Dale said to him. “But I’ll be more specific, now.” He turned and walked to a desk and settled down in a chair in front of it. “Please,” he said, pointing toward the seat beside him. Ron sat and faced the soldier.

“So.”

“
All right, then. It’s like this:

“When things were falling apart and it was almost too late to save anything at all,
I was ordered here. To this city. I was working in DC and they ordered me here. Why? Because of two things that are in this building. And those things are the computer systems and its servers, and a man who was still here maintaining it all.”

“What man?”

Dale cleared his throat to speak. But before he could stay anything, Ron blurted it out.

“
The asshole with the .50 calibers? That guy?” His hands gripped the arms on his padded chair, digging into the black leather. He could smell the material—the real stuff and not some fake vinyl creation.

“He’s the last we had. He was in this place at just the right time to save himself. He’s the only thing that stands between us and losing about 100 years of digital technology,” Dale said. “A couple of times…well, he snapped. From the stress or the loneliness or the insanity of what happened. I don’t know and I don’t pretend to know.

“But it became my job to preserve this place as best I could and to ensure that he did his job.”

“And what job would that be?” Ron asked.

“Among many things, but one of the most important, is to maintain our global positioning system. Yes. The GPS. You know it still works because you keep one of the portable devices on you. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen you refer to it. The only reason it still works is because of this building and the man who this building preserves.”

“I don’t understand. What are you saying? I thought that stuff was operated from NASA.
From places like Canaveral, Houston, and Vandenberg. Are you telling me that all the satellites that run GPS are preserved from this place?” His arms went out to indicate the building around them.

“As I said…it was all a matter of what was left at the time when everything fell to bits.” He nodded, his eyelids drooping as he thought of the odds. “On the roof are state-of-the-art satellite dishes. This was once the
hq for one of the biggest banks on Earth. They had more in their system than just numbers representing cash deposits. The men who worked here had to transfer that wealth in an instant. They had access to information you wouldn’t dream of.

“And that’s why and how this ended up being the last place on Earth from which we could operate those systems.” The Colonel crossed his arms and waited for the barrage of questions.

“What happened to those other places? Florida and Houston. Vandenberg?”

“Gone,” Dale told him.
“Gone like just about everything else.” His eyelids went wide. “Oh, there are still some facilities. I told you before that far more people survive than you think. If anything, I was lowballing the number of people just here in the city. We might have 20,000 now, I suspect. More come in from the wilderness every day. You’ve seen them trickling in. I’ve heard stories of how your little safe houses with the combinations posted on doors have saved a hundred lives or more. There are people in this city who owe you their lives and would like to thank you if they only knew who to thank.”

“What places are left? Military bases?”

“Yes. Mainly Air Force bases. Ironically, they ended up being the ones who weathered it best.” He considered. “Of course you can’t keep modern aircraft flying when the parts are so precious and so impossible to reproduce. Once again, it’s what I’ve been saying all along about what we’ve lost and what we need to preserve and regain.”

“There are still aircraft? I haven’t heard a plane or copter in the sky in almost two years,” Ron said.

The Colonel nodded to him. “They’re still there. Not many of them, but they are around. Fuel is precious, but we even still pump oil. It’s just almost impossible to convert it to high quality fuel, now. We have to husband what we have.”

“That why you cleared the runways at Douglas?”

“You noticed that. I thought you did.”

“When are they coming?” Ron asked.

Dale sighed and rubbed at his eyes. “Not for a while, yet. Maybe before the year is out. If not then, then next year. Everything depends on what goes on here, in this building. And it all depends on that one man on whom so much depends. And I’m not talking about me. If something happens to me, it’s no big deal. But if anything happens to Stan Lieber, the whole plan is ruined.”

“And what plan would that be?”

The fans in the vents above them sighed sweet air.

“The plan to recover the world,” Dale said.

**

Out on the street again, the sun had warmed the air and the chilly edge was gone. It almost seemed like summer was back. Bugs flashed on the wind and there was a clatter of wings as some dragonflies blasted past them on their way to feast on gnats or mosquitoes somewhere else.

“That was great,” Oliver said. “I was just a kid the last time I had ice cream.”

“Seems like I was too,” Jean told him. She wanted to rub the top of his head, but the boy already had a cap pulled tightly down. Instead
, she made do with patting him on the back. “I wonder if we can go back there some time,” she said.

“I wouldn’t count on it,” Ron told them. He looked back to see the disappointed reaction on Oliver’s face. “They just let us in there to show us that they’re trying to get things back to the way they used to be,” Ron continued. “Maybe we’ll have electric power again and refrigerators and cows and farms, the works. If that ever happens, then we can have ice cream any time we want it.”

“Yeah, I guess so,” Oliver said. He was still thinking of the meal, of the comfort he had experienced in the great tower. The people he and Jean had gone with had taken them to a room that had a television and a DVD player. “It was weird, though,” he continued.

“What was weird?” Ron asked, taking his eyes from the boy and scanning the streets. These days the
deaders weren’t the problem they’d once been, but other things had begun to crop up. Wild dogs and coyotes were bolder than ever, and he was pretty sure he’d spotted a mountain lion from the roof one day. It had moved off quickly before he could get a good look through his scope, but he was certain that he’d glimpsed the form of a very big cat moving through an alleyway. It had probably come in to stalk one of the almost endless herds of white-tail deer that moved in and out of the city every few days.

“One of the ladies—her name was Wilhelmina—let me watch cartoons on a DVD player.
Spongebob and Bugs Bunny. But I wasn’t interested. I thought I wanted to see that stuff, but when it started, it just made me sad,” he admitted. “I guess I’m too old for that stuff now.”

“I reckon you are,” Ron told him. In fact, the kid was more interested in how to apply flux to molten lead when they were making bullets than in looking at the comic books Ron had found in a dry closet on a scrounging run. He’d brought the big sack of old comics home with him for Oliver and initially the boy had enjoyed them. But in the past few weeks
, things like that didn’t interest him so much. In a year or so, Ron was hoping, maybe things would be so close to right that there would be schools again. And girls for Oliver to meet. He would be hitting that age in a year or two.

“Eyes front.”
It was Jean. A line of figures was moving down a side street and coming in their general direction.

As soon as she’d said the words
, Ron and Oliver had gone into a crouch, their hands on weapons.

“Don’t do anything rash,” Jean continued. “They’re not
deaders.”

Almost as if to prove her words
, a group of five people came out into the street. They immediately noticed Ron and company and they stopped, waving a greeting, and then moved on.