Winchester: Over (Winchester Undead) (22 page)

Groom Lake, Nevada

Cliff usually wasn’t impressed very easily, but the systems that Wright had brought with him from Colorado were impressive. The
SeeMe system now gave them the capability to track the large herds of undead while also looking for signs of survivors, all in near-real time. Although it seemed like using satellite imagery to find survivors was akin to trying to figure out which haystack in all of Oklahoma had a needle in it, it seemed like the SeeMe system could do exactly that.

Big Bend National Park, Texas

The sun hung low across the desert as Bexar finished wiring the first water pump from the holding tank near the bottom of The Window, along with a small battery bank. He held his breath while flipping over the breaker, hoping that his “McGyvered” solution would work. It did, and he could hear the pump humming and the sound of water moving up the pipe. Tomorrow, if he could repeat his success with two more water tanks and pumps, the cabins would have running water.

February 10
th

Groom Lake, Nevada

Lance and the airmen he had selected as assi
stants had not been seen in nearly five days. Cliff rode the elevator down to the laboratory level and found Lance asleep on the couch in the lounge. He kicked his foot to wake him up.

“Dude, seriously, WTF?” Lance mumbled sleepily.

“Haven’t seen or heard from you in a few days,” Cliff replied. “Everyone still alive down here?”

“Yeah, but I’m not very confident we’ll be able to do this,” Lance said. “Yama is much more complicated than we thought.”

“How’s that?” said Cliff.

“Well, we know the general history of the virus, that it came from spores recovered near Tibet by the Nazis, that the Soviets took it at the end of the Second World War and tried to modify it but were unsuccessful, and that then the Chinese took control of it when the Soviet Union collapsed and completed a lot of bio-engineering on the little SOB. I can only imagine how many people they killed getting the virus to this point.”

“Okay, so what does that mean for us?” Cliff asked.

“It’s like this,” said Lance, sitting up and lacing his fingers behind his head, “in the initial attack with the spray planes, the virus didn’t actually kill you, it was just that if you died you would reanimate. But then the virus mutated, and now if you contract the new strain of the virus through bites or deep scratches, it will kill you, and you’ll still reanimate. From what I can tell, it can take anywhere from about thirty minutes to a few hours for the new strain to kill you after infection.”

“Bites or deep cuts only?”

“That and other fluid transfer. I recommend wearing protection if you’re going to fuck one of those things, and if you have any open wounds, fluid spray from gunshots, for in
stance, could infect you as well.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah, shit is right,” Lance continued, “and I’m not sure how we’re going to be able to stop this in time to save anyone, if we can stop it at all. Some of the models we’ve run in the past couple of days have made it look like nearly a ninety-nine percent mortality rate,
globally
. This is a mass extinction event.”

“Okay, where do you think we’re at right now?”

“My best guess, a bit over a month into it, is probably about ninety percent mortality. If we actually find any survivors out there, we’re going to need to quarantine them for at least two days after a physical search for bite marks, just to keep ourselves safe.”

“Got it.
Anything else you could use down here?” Cliff said.

“Yeah, let me take my nap and leave us alone to work,” Lance replied.

“Roger that. Let me know if you need anything else. I have some airmen to train in tactics and marksmanship, a facility to run, and we still need to clear the dorms in the sister facility next to this one.”

Chisos
Basin Campground, Big Bend National Park, Texas

It took more time than he’d anticipated, but Bexar finished getting the other two water pumps online and the cabins now had running potable water. The hot water heaters were still on his list, but he simply didn’t have enough electrical power to run a hot water heater without running a generator. If the group needed hot water they could heat it on the fire. As of late, in an effort to conserve the limited Coleman fuel for their lanterns, they were cooking with fire rather than on their old Coleman stoves.

Bexar didn’t expect Sandra and Jack to come back down the mountain until tomorrow, but he wouldn’t be surprised if they came down early if they had news, or if they missed their little boy too much. Regardless, he was excited to hear what they’d found on the mountain top, and if they had made contact with anyone or heard any updates on the shortwave.

Emory Peak

“Roger Texas, we read you five-by-five, how are you set for provisions?”

“Copy Groom Lake, we’re set for now and surviving fine. Do you have any news outside of Texas, or any news of anything at all?”

“Texas, we have information that most of the people between the Appalachian and the Rocky Mountains are either dead or infected. We are currently tracking three large herds of undead swarming in three different sectors. The closest herd to you is in Texas and moving away from the Dallas area.”

Jack and Sandra looked at each other, mouthing the word “herds?” at almost the same time, then Sandra shrugged and said, “Copy that, Groom Lake, where are they now and which way are they traveling?”

“The last track showed a herd of about 200,000 undead approximately fifty miles southwest of the Dallas area, following I-20 west.”

Sandra, mic in hand, looked at Jack. “If they’re going south they’re basically headed towards us. Two hundred thousand? We’ll never be able to defend against that many.”

Jack nodded, reached for the
mic, and keyed, “Groom Lake, if we’re in the path of the moving horde, what do you advise?”

Across the country, in a dark room illuminated only by the harsh light from electronic screens and computer monitors,
Arcuni looked at the airman sitting at the radio and shrugged. The airman keyed the radio. “Texas, we can only advise you flee a herd, but if you’re unable to, get hidden, get secure, be quiet, and hope they pass around you.”

“Clear, thank you Groom Lake, station Texas is out for now.
Will check back in two hours if you continue to monitor.”

“
Wilco, two hours.”

Jack looked at his wife. “What do you think? If we bug out again, I feel like it’ll never end, and we’ll always be on the run.”

“Can we secure the camp? There’s only the one road into the Basin, unless you think the undead can travel over the mountains.”

“I doubt they could do it without the road.” Jack looked at the horizon and up to the sun. “It’s about noon, let’s wait and check back in with Groom Lake in two hours, then we can get back down the mountain and discuss it with Jessie and Bexar. I bet we could make some sort of roadblock and secure
ourselves in the Basin.”

“So, we’ve got two hours then?” Sandra smiled at Jack and began unbuttoning her jeans.

Groom Lake, Nevada

Arcuni
handed the mic to the airman in the radio hut with him. “Okay, keep monitoring, I’m going to let Cliff know what we found out about our new friends in Texas.”

Twenty minutes later,
Arcuni found Cliff topside, leading five airmen from NORAD with him in immediate action drills with M-16s. Arcuni walked up to the group and waited until the drill was done, then caught Cliff’s attention. After the last series, Cliff let the class relax with a water break and walked over to Arcuni. “Hey Technical Sergeant Arcuni, how’s life out there in Radioville?”

“Sparse,” replied
Arcuni, “but we did make contact with a small group of survivors in rural Texas on a ham frequency.”

“Yeah?
That’s great!” said Cliff. “Where are they, and how many are there? Are they well set?”

“They said they were very well-provisioned,
there’s four adults and two children. Best I can figure is that they’re in a wildlife area or a state park or something, but out in the desert.”

“Right, well, there’s a lot of west Texas, could be Big Bend, or could be some random area out there in the Lone Star State.”

“They sounded like they were well prepared. I told them about the herd outside of Dallas and they were very concerned about that, but I didn’t really have any advice to give them. They’re supposed to check back in on the radio in two hours.”

“Great, okay
Arcuni, let me know if you make contact with anyone else.”

Arcuni
nodded and climbed back underground, grabbing two cups of coffee to share with the airman in the radio hut.

Chisos Basin Campground, Big Bend National Park, Texas

Two hours later Jack made contact with Groom Lake again and had a brief conversation with the man who said his name was Arcuni. Arcuni was very inquisitive about their position, and Jack assured him that although it might be a few days until another from his group could check in on the radio, they would be in touch.

Jack and Sandra made their way down the mountain, arriving at the camp earlier than Bexar and Jessie had expected. Dinner was slow-cooking on the smoldering coals of their fire.

“Hey you two, welcome back!” cried Jessie. “We didn’t expect you back so early, but we have something neat to show you.”

“Yeah, well, we have something to tell you too,” said Jack. “Why don’t you go first?”

Three hours later the sun had sunk below the desert mountains, turning the cold sky purple and red. The children were in bed, fighting their bedtime but falling asleep almost immediately after being read a story from one of the books stolen from their stop in Marathon.

“Well sure, Bexar,” Jack said, “we could barricade the road, but how would we bug out if we started to get overrun?”

Bexar said, “We’d take the Window trail and take the split to end up down at the Cattail Falls trailhead. We stashed the pull-behind RV there along with the Wagoneer. It would take a few hours to get over the trail, but once we reached the Jeep and RV, we could take one of two routes out of the Park. Hell, we could even drive to Boquelles and down into Mexico; if Mexico’s in the same shape as the U.S., I’m sure the Federales wouldn’t notice.”

“Sure, but how are we going to barricade the road and still leave it open for us to travel in the meantime?”

“I don’t know,” said Bexar. “Maybe we could pull more RVs back up here and block the road?”

Jack thought for a moment. “Well, we have the actual gate that the National Parks Service uses to close the road to the Basin and that’s a start, but what if we also drag a couple of dumpsters onto the road from the tent camping area? We could offset them so we can drive around them, but we could also push them together using the front bumper of one of our rigs if we needed to.”

“I like it Jack, that could work,” Bexar said, “but I think we should also fill the dumpsters with rocks or dirt or something so they’re really heavy. If they’re empty you could probably push one by yourself, and a shitload of undead could easily brush it out of their way.”

“Yeah alright, we’ll do it first thing in the morning. We also still have a few of the shotgun blanks trip alarms. I think we should put some across the road high enough that a
javelina won’t trip it, but a person would, dead or not.”

“Good idea,” Bexar said. “In the morning we’ll also rig the traps.” He continued, “Listen Jack, this is great stuff, but we need to have a Plan C in case Plan A and Plan B don’t work.”

“You’re right,” Jack agreed, “we have to assume that the zombie horde will come through here at some point; we can’t rely on just two plans.”

February 11
th

Chisos
Basin Campground, Big Bend National Park, Texas

Bexar and the rest of the group were up before sunrise. One would think that with the end of the world, and the resulting loss of routines and timekeeping, it would be easy to sleep in until sunrise. But children have a way of ruining sleep regardless of what the rest of world is doing. By the time the group’s typical breakfast was eaten and cleaned up and the other morning routines completed, the sun was over the mountains. Bexar and Jack set out to put their new security plan in motion. The regular National Park Services gate that was used to close the Basin was already secured, locked with a metal clasp; it had been set that way for the past week, but that was no longer enough security for the group. Due to the size and weight of the dumpsters with their heavy bear-proof lids, it took Bexar and Jack until shortly after noon to drag the dumpsters out of the tent camping area with the Scout and up the road to the gate.

Moving the dumpsters and then filling
them with dirt and rocks proved to be hard, slow work, but as the sun began to set on another day, the two fathers and husbands were finishing the work needed to protect their families. The dumpsters rested with about a ten-foot gap between them so the group’s vehicles could traverse the opening, but the opening could also be quickly closed by pushing the rear dumpster forward with one of their vehicles.

Early tomorrow, Jessie and Bexar would hike up to Emory Peak, excited by the possibility of reestablishing contact with their new friends at Groom Lake.