The Undead World (Book 6): The Apocalypse Exile (War of The Undead) (30 page)

Grey paused long enough to catch Deanna’s eye. There was a moment between them where their connection flared up.  As usual it made him uncomfortable and he was quick to make an excuse to leave. “I’ve got to go check on Becca and Marybeth,” he said. “You should get something to eat and scrounge up a weapon if you’re coming out with us tonight.”

“Sure.”

Food was easy—if one liked corn. Two of the renegades, Travis and Veronica, had roasted about a hundred ears; there was plenty to go around. It needed butter, badly, though Deanna wasn’t going to complain, she was famished. When the corn was gone she drew two quarts of water from their dwindling supply.

She drank one quart and bathed herself with the other. After that she went to her mattress and decided to wait for Grey to return. She did not wait long. Not because he returned quickly but because, as she sat there in the lowering light, all she could think about was Eve and Jillybean and Kay...and her own baby.

“Emily,” she whispered, rubbing her stomach which felt strangely stiff and a little sore
.
She remembered Grey saying
that’s to be expected
. “That’s weird,” she whispered to herself. “I’ve never been stiff before. I wonder what...”

She looked down at herself. She had noticed that she was wearing an unfamiliar baggy dress and had assumed that someone had changed her clothes at one point when she was out cold. She looked around for her jeans and then she remembered the blood. There had been blood on her jeans! “Was that a dream?” she asked, feeling her belly, low down.

The last thing she recalled before her drug-induced coma was having dinner with the Duke and then leaving and feeling sick and woozy. Vaguely, she remembered there had been blood on her jeans. It had seemed like a lot.

“Oh no!” Gingerly, she began prodding her stomach; something was definitely different. Something very bad. 

Across from her, Sadie stood and slung her pack over one shoulder. She was leaving. Deanna jumped up and ran to her but only took a few steps before Sadie spun with a Glock speeding into her hand.

“It’s just me,” Deanna said, stopping with the barrel a foot from her nose.

“Sorry,” was all Sadie said, before holstering the gun. “You need something?”

Deanna looked around, suddenly embarrassed and shy by what she was about to ask. No one had known she was pregnant—no one except the Duke, that is. “I need to ask you a question about...about the other night. When I, uh, was drugged.” Sadie’s eyes darted away telling Deanna all she needed to know.

“My baby?” she asked.

Sadie looked confused. “You don’t remember? It was the Duke. You should never have told him you were pregnant.” Deanna wanted to ask how she knew anything about the conversation, but Sadie cut her off. “Jillybean was in the room that night. She saw almost everything...only it wasn’t really Jillybean, if you know what I mean.”

Deanna didn’t have a clue what she meant. Just like those moments after she had left the Duke, her mind began to swim. Strange images flashed in front of her: the blood, the way everyone whispered and pointed, Neil rushing around, Captain Grey kissing her and whispering:
It’ll be alright
.

“But it won’t be alright,” Deanna said. Her hands clutched the lower part of her abdomen where Emily should have been growing. She was empty, hollow. She was no longer a mother. Her child had been killed before she had a chance to take her first breath. Deanna began to cry. She wept huge, fat tears and a wail of despair began to build within her.

Sadie cut it off. The teen grabbed the taller woman by the shoulders and shook her fiercely. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she demanded. The angry tone and the hard fingers digging into her arms stifled the wail before it started. “Do you think crying is going to do anyone any good?”

“I...I...”

“The answer is no. Look around you, damn it. Now is not the time to be acting like you’re the only one who’s lost someone. Marybeth is about to die. Becca is probably going to lose that leg if we don’t find antibiotics. Travis had a three month old child who was killed. Neil’s parents and his wife and daughter are dead. We’ve all lost people close to us. You’re not the first and you won’t be the last, so you can either wallow in pity and bring down the group or you can grow a pair.”

Deanna was shocked at the girl’s tone but was even more so when Sadie pulled out her Glock again. She turned it to the side and said: “You know what I like about the Glock? There’s no safety. There’s no dicking around with this baby once you pull it. I suggest you get one and if you find yourself in the same room as the Duke, you put a bullet in his eye.”

“I can do that,” Deanna said, stiffly. Her face was an angry red and now the tears were purest fury. Sadie was right. Tears for the dead were a waste. The dead deserved loving memories and sweet revenge.

In the hour before they left, Grey drilled the twenty seven renegades. They were broken down into nine teams of three, each with their own destination and each with their own objectives.

Some were going to the homes of veterinarians in search of antibiotics, surgical supplies and pain killers, while others were going to strip-malls that had been home to electronic stores. These groups were looking for two-way radios and all the batteries they could carry. Neil’s group which included Sadie and Connie had one of the harder jobs. They were going to Town East Square, a mall that was billed as the largest shopping district in Kansas. Again radios and electronic supplies were what they were after.

“I don’t get it,” Randy said. “You want me to go to a vet’s house? Wouldn’t it be smarter to go to a normal doctor’s office or to a hospital?”

Neil shook his head. “No. All those places were inundated with patients when the virus broke out. They were mad houses and if they had anything left when things calmed down, you can bet the Azael raided them later. Few people remember that vets made house calls, especially out here in farm country.”

“I think it’s a genius idea,” Veronica said.

Normally, Neil would have blushed at the compliment, however he surprised Grey by agreeing instead. “Yes, it is a genius idea, so naturally it wasn’t mine. Jillybean thought of it.”

“Jillybean,” William spat. “Good riddance.”

Neil glared at him. “What happened to Marybeth wasn’t her fault. If you don’t have the wit to blame the Duke, then blame me. Jillybean was the way she was because of me.”

“No one’s blaming anyone,” Grey said, coming between the two men. He stared them both down and then gave the others a once-over. “Veronica, you look too...well you still look like a woman. Stow the cleavage and add more ash to your face. This isn’t a beauty contest for zombies.” She pouted but without much conviction. Grey guessed that the cleavage had been exposed quite purposefully.

He turned to Deanna, last. She was in a quiet mood and he hoped that it was only the morphine wearing off. “You ok?” he asked. Her eyes were red and there was an angry cast to them. She replied with only a nod.

When everyone had passed inspection, Grey nodded to Neil who clapped his hands to get their attention. “Ok, we all have our maps, our routes planned, and our contingency plans. Remember, if you run into any of the Duke’s men you run and hide. You should all be confident enough now to be able to slip into any zombie horde. Now, let’s mount up.”

Grey’s group, consisting of himself, Deanna and Travis, had the most dangerous job. They were going to make an attempt on McConnell Air Force base which was located in the southeast quadrant of the city. The group was low on ammo and they were too lightly armed for any major confrontation with the Duke’s men. He could only hope they were going to get as lucky as they had at Fort Campbell.

They took the first truck in line and as soon as he had two of the teams in the back, he rumbled the engine to life. When he heard the other trucks turn over, he flicked his light at the main set of doors where Joe Gates was waiting. Immediately the boy began hauling on the chain and the door slowly began to slide upward.

When there was enough clearance, Grey pulled out of the warehouse. Next to him, as always, was Deanna. She had a red cover over her flash light to minimize its light output. It was enough to see a map by. “Take your third right,” she told him.

“You sure you’re ok?” Grey asked. “You don’t seem yourself.”

Her mouth came open and hung there for a few moments before she shook her head. “It’s nothing.” Her hand stole to her belly. He reached for it and brushed her fingers, lightly. Hers was small and cool, his was rough and scarred.

Travis made a point of looking out the window until Deanna politely pushed Grey’s hand away. “Sorry, but it feels like you’re jinxing us,” she said in a husky voice. “Everything I love dies.”

“I understand, but when I get you to Colorado...” he left off and was gratified by her smile. “Ok, no more jinxes. Which turn is it?”

Their first stop was a hundred yards down from a strip mall. The first team, led by William Gates, slid out of the back of the bed and began to shamble to the side of the road. Their zombie technique was perfect.

Grey drove another two miles and stopped just down the street from a mall. Michael Gates, his nephew John and Veronica climbed down. Grey noted that Veronica was only iffy as a zombie, while Michael was little better. Worry for them began to creep up his throat.

“Damn, Michael, you’re going too straight,” he whispered to himself. “And Veronica, oh my Lord...”

Now it was Deanna’s turn to take his hand. “They’ll be fine. Trust them.”

As he was out of options he had no choice except to follow her advice, He watched them stump away for a few seconds and then he drove through the cluttered streets to his final destination: McConnell Air Force base.

He had never been there before, however it had that same feel to it as all military bases seemed to possess. Even dead as it was there was a quality to the air, as if he was coming home.

They parked in a low-rent neighborhood across from the airstrips and almost immediately ran into trouble. Zombies came piling out from the nearby houses. They were too close to pretend that they were zombies, and there were too many to fight. Grey drove in a big circle around the block and, when he got back to his beginning point, the zombies were far down the street and only just realizing their prey was now behind them.

By the time they reached the truck, Grey, Deanna, and Travis had slipped out of the neighborhood and were limping in the field toward the perimeter fencing. There weren’t just holes in the fencing, there were places where it had been ripped out of the ground and twisted as if by a giant.

“Tornado what prolly did this,” Travis said.

Grey grunted. He really didn’t care what had torn up the fence, he was just happy to have gotten through so easily. He had not relished a mile long ‘walk’ down to one of the gates; zombie walking wasn’t an easy thing to do.

They still had half a mile to go across the tarmac. “Spread out. Deanna in the middle. Travis on the right.” Slowly they trudged toward the nearest buildings which grey knew to be airplane hangars. On the way they passed a pair of A10 Thunderbolts. Affectionately known as the Warthog, they were the ugliest planes in the American arsenal. They were also tank killers and right handy when things were tough.

Grey paused next to one, considering the possibility of somehow removing the 30MM rotary cannon in the nose of the plane. It was a fantastic piece of weaponry that fired depleted uranium armor-piercing shells. With it, he could turn one of the five-ton trucks into scrap metal in a few seconds.

“But how would I stabilize it?” he asked himself, slapping the gun with his bare hand. It was a pipedream under the circumstances. What he really needed were some crew-serviced, heavy machine guns and maybe a few mortars and perhaps a TOW missile system thrown in for fun.

It was not to be. Four hours of searching through the ruins of the base left him nearly empty-handed. It appeared to have been plundered on more than one occasion and even the moldering corpses strewn here and there among the buildings had their pockets turned inside out.

The one item of interest came from a walking corpse that attacked Deanna, who was carrying what she thought was a particularly useful looking piece of equipment to Grey for inspection. The beast, in its camouflage, and under the cover of darkness surprised her by appearing suddenly at her side. She cursed and shoved the ‘weapon’—what turned out only to be a water cannon used to clean the planes—at the zombie, fending it off until Grey came up from behind and kicked its legs out from beneath it. He would have used his Ka-bar and sliced its spinal column where the skull sat on the vertebrae, however it was ‘wearing’ a helmet.

The helmet had slid back and was being held on by the chin strap which was tight across its throat. To kill it, Grey stepped on the thing’s head, pinning it to the perfectly flat cement of the hangar floor and punching the Ka-bar into its temple.

“Holy-moly that was close,” Deanna said in a frightened whisper.

“Maybe you should keep a better...” Grey stopped in mid-sentence. Something about the zombie had caught his eye. He knelt and turned the thing’s head to the side so that the front of the helmet was revealed. “That’s what I’m talking about,” he said.

Deanna put her hands on her hips and said: “Talking about what? That thing nearly killed me.”

“Yeah,” Grey answered, though he did so more out of habit. He was too busy pulling a hunk of technology from the zombie’s helmet to really pay attention.

“What is it?” Deanna asked, no longer in the strident tones she’d been using.

He grinned, his white teeth glowing in the dim light. “If I’m not mistaken these are AN-20/PSQ enhanced night vision goggles.” He dug out his flashlight and, after cupping his hands around it, turned it on and studied the helmet-mounted device. “Oh yes, these are the dash twenties!”

Deanna shrugged. “Meaning what?”

He almost felt like a kid at Christmas. Excitedly, he blurted: “Meaning it’s a passive intensification and thermal imaging device! It uses both I2 and long wave infrared sensors. Oh, I hope the batteries haven’t started to corrode it.”

He began to work the old double A batteries out of the back of the device. As he did, Deanna pointed at what she’d been carrying. “I found that.”

Grey swung his flashlight at it. “That sprays water. They probably use it to clean the equipment.”

“Oh.”

“It’s fine,” he said quickly. “Keep looking. We’re bound to turn up more.” It turned out that this was an incorrect statement. All told they found six MREs, all Chicken-ala-King, twenty-tree rounds of ammo, the front end of the pressure washer and the AN/PSQ enhanced night vision goggles for which they did not have batteries.

And, they were late! They should’ve been back at the truck thirty minutes ago, but there had been too many stiffs about to move at anything more than a limp. Discouraged, they set off back across the tarmac which Grey saw had already begun to spring long cracks. In a few places weeds had sprung up and were flourishing. Before the apocalypse the airstrips had been immaculate, every inch of it being examined and cleaned on a daily basis

Now there are weeds
, Grey thought to himself. It was depressing to realize that there was precious little remaining of the United States military. It had been, during his entire lifetime, the greatest force for good the world had ever known. With it, any country could’ve been conquered and subjugated, its people slain wholesale or sold into slavery; its riches plundered.

Only that had never happened. No gold was ever stolen, not one drop of oil misappropriated, no women were ever raped as a matter of policy. And when evil was done by individuals wearing the uniform of the United States, the perpetrators were severely dealt with. 

This desire for righteousness was the ideal that Grey had served...and now it was crumbling away just as surely as the tarmac was being split by the power of time and weather.

Breaking his zombie-lurch, Grey knelt down and began pulling the offending weeds. Travis watched with a smirk on his face, however Deanna came down beside Grey and helped. This little gesture had his heart stirring all the more.

“Tell me you plan on smoking all that,” Travis said. “I mean, why else are you wasting time with...”

Suddenly a sharp light cut across the night. It was a beam zipping out across the tarmac coming from almost directly in front of them!

Travis stared at it as it slowly swept the field from right to left, heading right for him. Grey jumped up and tackled him, pushing his face down into the tarmac. “No one move,” the captain ordered in a hiss, as the light swept over them. They were concealed by the tall grass that bordered the airstrip, but only barely. The light was inches above them.

The light went back and forth for a minute and then they heard voices talking and what was the unmistakable sound of a gun being dropped on the ground. This was followed by a low curse and then a whispered order to: “Shut up!”

With the light pointed away, Grey raised his head and scanned over the tips of the grass. He could see the dim shapes of men squatting just beyond the torn-up fence. There were possibly a dozen of them, spread out in a long line.

“Go back,” Grey whispered. He crawled backwards, keeping his head and ass as low to the ground as possible. Deanna tried to replicate the motion but could only scrape herself back, awkward and slow. Travis spun on his belly and low-crawled off the tarmac and into the deeper grass.

Grey led them down a steep grade and into a concrete drainage ditch. From there he lifted himself in a hunched position and scurried as fast as he could along the ditch. It was dry and sandy with little in it save the occasional jumble of bones of some poor long-dead airman.

They had left the men working the searchlight a hundred yards back, when there was a sudden crack of rifle fire. All three threw themselves down on the embankment; Grey was the only one who had his weapon up and pointed outward. His eyes were black but sharp. A single gunshot made no sense unless...

“They’re trying to make us give away our position,” he told them. “Don’t move.” He scrambled up the embankment and again raised up just high enough to see only it was too dark to see much of anything in any direction. A breeze shifted in his direction bringing with it the rich smell of lilac and the rumble of a truck’s engine.