Winchester: Over (Winchester Undead) (5 page)

Farmersville, T
exas

In the small, north Texas town of Farmersville, Malachi found the morning of December 27th bitterly cold, and the lightly insulated metal building didn’t help. He and Amber huddled together, quietly discussing what their next steps should be; specifically, what their plan should be to exit the building safely. They decided on a plan that would see Malachi sneaking through the building to the outside, checking that the coast was clear, and then signaling Amber to roll up the big door.

Amber took her station at the roll
up door and waited for Malachi. Two light taps on the door was her cue, and as she pulled on the chain the door began its noisy ascent. Malachi ran in a combat crouch towards the gate at the front of the property that they needed to open to drive off. Nearing the gate, Malachi heard the Scout’s motor turn over, followed by a loud moan to his right. Turning and driving the muzzle of his rifle towards the threat, Malachi saw a dead person shuffling towards him, arms up, mouth open, and uttering a deep moan that shook Malachi to his core.

With a little bit of
distance comes a little bit of time, so he was able to flip the level from the gate and pull it open before raising the muzzle of his rifle. Amber pulled up just as Malachi pulled the trigger to the rear and ended the dead man’s shambling afterlife.

Mexia, Texas

Bexar and his family made the short drive from the airport into the center of the little central Texas town in very little time. They found the town burning and overrun by the undead. It was amazing how quickly the dead had taken over the living. The drive through town took longer than Bexar had wanted, spending much of his time in second gear, dodging the shuffling hordes. Each gaping mouth they passed would turn and stumble in the direction of their vehicle, blindly looking to feed. Bexar didn’t know how far or how long they could follow his Jeep, but he hoped they gave up soon.

Mansfield, Texas

Cold MREs with instant coffee was the breakfast of choice for Jack, Sandra, and Will. After breakfast, they reloaded the FJ and prepped to leave.

Jack
walked out of the “smoker’s door” and into the cold north Texas morning to scout their exit route. He brought his AR up and slid along the side of the metal building towards the roadway, stopping short of the building’s corner, then slowly sidestepping while slicing the pie to check the blind spots behind the building’s corner. Seeing movement, Jack stopped and dropped to a kneeling shooter’s position.

Across the road
, aimlessly milling about, were twenty or so undead. If he began engaging the threats, he knew Sandra would burst through the door and assist, but he felt their best bet would be to get the truck out, take care of the immediate threats, and flee in the vehicle. Slowly sliding back the way he came, Jack went inside and outlined a quick operational plan to Sandra.

Pulling on the chain and opening the large overhead door seemed to take forever; it also made an incredible amount of noise.
Will was in the back seat of the truck with his seatbelt on and both doors were locked. Jack knelt next to the open driver’s door, rifle up, ready to engage any immediate threats. Sandra worked the chains, pulling the door up. Once the door was high enough to clear their vehicle, she ran to the passenger door, climbed in, and slammed the door shut, locking it. Jack waited until his wife was secure before he broke cover and climbed into the driver’s seat of the running truck.

Pulling out of the bay and around the front of the building,
he saw that, predictably, the undead had been drawn towards the sound of the opening door and the running vehicle, and were lurching towards them in the hopes of a fresh meal. He was able to miss most of them, but struck the last straggler with the front right corner of the brush guard on the FJ. Jack didn’t slow down, didn’t even look back, he just kept driving.

Driving
from Mansfield to Maypearl would normally take just under an hour, but today Jack wasn’t sure how long the trip would take. Luckily, the small Texas back roads provided them with some security. There were very few disabled cars on the roads, and since their encounter that morning, he hadn’t seen another undead. In fact, they hadn’t seen anyone living or dead since leaving their temporary shelter. Jack kept the speedometer at forty miles per hour the entire way until they came to the outskirts of Venus.

The old downtown of Venus looked like every small town in north Texas
: a couple of open shops and a few abandoned buildings. It was easy to forget that the world had drastically changed the day before. When Sandra suddenly yelled “STOP!” Jack slammed on the brakes, nearly catching another undead in the brush guard on his truck.

Moaning loudly, the
creature began clawing at the passenger window, making Sandra scream. The lost soul pounded on the side of the FJ, slowly following the truck as it pulled forward. Neither Jack nor Sandra saw the forty or so undead that came stumbling out from the side streets, crossing into the center of Main Street and directly into the FJ’s path. Their attention was quickly brought forward again when the first of the undead swarm collided with the center of the brush guard and landed on the hood of the truck.

Jack
slammed his right foot back down on the brake while his left foot pushed the clutch to the floor. Shifting into reverse, he backed up as fast as he could, swerving around the first undead he had missed, then stopping and turning onto a small side street to carve a path around the swarm. After three more blocks, the living dead man on the hood, who looked to be about twenty, was still beating on the windshield, trying to get at fresh prey. Jack stopped the FJ, leaned out of the driver’s door to get the right angle, and fired a single shot into its head. He then grabbed the man by his blood-soaked jeans and pulled him off the hood of the truck, leaving a sticky blood smear.

They were getting close to the cache site and the safety of like-minded friends
. Jack feverishly hoped they all made it to the rendezvous.

South of Farmersville
, Texas

After turning onto Highway 78, Malachi decided they were going to be in a lot of trouble, pretty much screwed, whichever route they took. They should just make a run for it with the fastest and most direct route. The biggest problem would be traffic, he figured, but he also felt that as long as they didn’t stop for too long, they should be able to outpace any zombies they came across.

After all
of the bad movies, the books, and the jokes, it had actually happened—the dead had risen to hunt the living. He couldn’t believe it. He even had a couple of boxes of the zombie killer Hornady ammo that had come out a while back, but now the joke just wasn’t funny anymore.

The trip to Rockwall was quick and effortless, but
he was feeling nauseous from the stress. The handful of small towns they drove through were eerily quiet, with no signs of anyone living, dead, or undead. They finally made it to the I-30; the westbound lanes appeared to be relatively clear, but the eastbound side was a parking lot of disabled cars. So many new cars laid to waste, left to forever rot on the asphalt in Texas. The only vehicles Malachi had seen on the road that were still running were at least thirty years old, mainly old CJ Jeeps and K-series Blazers. Someone might have taken steps to protect the electronics on their more modern vehicle with some sort of large Faraday cage, but he knew that was absurd. If you were willing to take the steps to EMP-proof a modern vehicle, you might as well just build and maintain an older vehicle that would be more robust after an EMP event anyway.

Maypearl, Texas

Jack pulled off the small highway into the ditch where he, Malachi, and Bexar had constructed a semi-hidden gate onto the property. They had split a cedar fence post, lashing the two together but leaving one side unsecured so it could be moved like a gate, but wouldn’t be obvious. Jack opened the gate and stood over watch with his AR while Sandra pulled the FJ through. After securing the gate behind them, they drove the quarter mile through the property to their big blue water tank. The tank held no water and had hopefully remained unmolested; it held the group’s cached supplies.

State Highway 171, Texas

Bexar and Jessie encountered few problems in the back country of central Texas after making it out of Mexia, but their luck changed as they approached the south side of Hubbard, Texas. It was obvious that several large fires burned uncontrolled in the town. Bexar needed to get to a Farm-to-Market road on the other side of the town, but before driving into a potential threat, he grabbed the binoculars and climbed onto the roof of the Jeep. In his magnified view he could see a jackknifed semi-truck across the center of the roadway, and it looked like someone had been in one hell of a firefight. The truck was riddled with bullet holes, and shell casings littered the roadway. Then Bexar finally realized what he was looking at—an ambush point.

With his family in the vehicle and no backup
available, the last thing he wanted to do was engage in some sort of prolonged gun battle, but after watching the roadblock for nearly fifteen minutes and not being able to think of an alternate route, Bexar decided to chance it.

Keeley lay down
on the floorboards of the back seat with Bexar’s Kevlar vest spread over her. Although it wouldn’t stop a direct hit from a rifle round, it would hopefully be enough to protect her from rounds slowed down by coming through the truck. Jessie hung out of the passenger window with the AR as Bexar inched the Jeep forward. Getting closer, Bexar saw that he could drive into the ditch to the left of the roadblock, turn right, and hopefully make it across the road to the other side of the ambush point. He saw no one; it was possible that the roadblock was abandoned, that they had been overrun, or that the undead had triumphed.

Abruptly t
he Jeep’s windshield shattered with a pop; the rifle report was heard immediately after. Keeley began screaming and Bexar put his right foot to the floor, shifting through third gear. Jessie was yelling something, but he was too focused on evading the threat to hear what she was saying.

They cleared downtown at
sixty miles per hour and didn’t stop until a couple of miles north of the town.

“Holy shit, everyone okay?” he finally managed.

Jessie said
, “Bexar, you’re bleeding, but I’m okay, and Keeley’s just scared.”

Touching his head
, looking in the rearview mirror, Bexar realized that glass from the windshield had cut his face. He could also see daylight filtering through the small hole left by the bullet’s path through the roof of the Jeep.

“
Damn, that was close.” He dabbed at the blood with his shirt sleeve. “We’ve got to get to Maypearl and hope the others make it safely. I’m not sure we can do this on our own, and we really can’t keep traveling much longer.”

Denver International Airport
(DIA), Colorado

Ever since they’d started building the airport, so many conspiracy theorists had made so many different claims about it that most of America had written off the conspiracies as crazy, but Cliff was amazed at how right some had been. The simple fact was, the facility actually existed.

Some
theorized that the facility was the size of a ten-story building but built underground. Others claimed that “the grays” were housed in the facility: the little gray aliens that made contact in New Mexico in 1947 after their craft had malfunctioned.

Some said it was
“the greens,” a race of shapeshifting reptilian aliens, and even that the Bush family were a part of that race of otherworldly people. From there the claims grew even wilder, but what really set off the first round of theories was one of the murals painted in the airport right before it first opened. The infamous “Children of the World Dream of Peace” mural had an imperialistic-looking soldier with a sword, machine gun, and gas mask; to the conspiracy theorists this alluded to what really lay beneath DIA, except that it wasn’t a New World Order launching pad with aliens, it was simply a facility to replace the Greenbrier bunker in West Virginia that had been exposed by the media in 1992. Regardless, Cliff still found it ironic that he was currently one hundred feet below the Great Hall at DIA, on the run, and hiding in the super-secret facility from a super-secret government experiment that had gone wrong.

Cliff crawled through a service corridor between the isolated interior walls of the facility and the cut
-rock face underground. This was not the fight that Cliff had trained for when he had been recruited as a college athlete in ROTC at St. Olaf University. After graduating with a degree in Business Administration and a minor in German Studies, Cliff was whisked away to the secret training facility in Virginia known simply as “The Farm.”

After two years of intense training that rivaled what Tier-1 military special forces operators
endured, Cliff then spent another two years learning specific spy tradecraft to operate sans diplomatic cover in foreign lands. Cliff was a seasoned tactical operator, but he was primarily a spy who had spent the last two years undercover as a Canadian-based clothing manufacturer in mainland China.

During
his two years in China, Cliff had been trying to gather information about a possible secret Chinese facility that housed ancient artifacts from Tibet. The intelligence that his department had received was that the Chinese military had taken possession of an ancient technology, possibly alien in origin, from the Soviet Union during the collapse of the communist government. The Soviet Union had stolen the technology from Nazi Germany in 1945, who had found the artifacts during the Himmler and Hess expeditions to Tibet. The Nazi plan for a super-human army had hinged on the mythology surrounding the Tibetan artifacts, which to Himmler were sacred to his occult beliefs.

The
artifacts contained spores that could bring dead primates back to life, but nothing over twenty pounds. They weren’t sure if this was due to the actual weight of the monkey, or the species of monkey. During the fall of Nazi Germany, the Russians had learned about the expedition and the experiments on the Jews, and feared that Hitler had gone through treatments so as to be unkillable. Therefore, when the Russians found Hitler’s bunker, they had taken him alive and kept him imprisoned for five years outside of Leningrad. Eventually, the Soviets realized that the Nazi scientists had not been able to solve the weight barrier.

Regardless,
not wanting to take chances, they had shot Hitler in the head and burned his body before dumping his ashes into the sea. For the next forty years, the Soviets decoded the spores, learning that they contained a complex virus, but they too were unable to successfully pass the weight barrier. They did discover that other mammals were not affected by the virus, only primates.

In the
thirty years since, the Chinese had gotten it right and solved the weight barrier. This much Cliff had been able to learn, but the location of the facility was still a mystery, although he had begun to believe it may be in the caves and caverns of North Korea.

Having confirmed the existence of the virus, Cliff’s organization had
arranged for a group of scientists contracted with the Defense Intelligence Agency to work on this new threat. Cliff had been able to secure a reanimated dead chimpanzee for the group, who believed they were only about six months away from being able to counteract the ancient virus that had been modified to reanimate the dead. If there was any chance for the future, it lay with this group of scientists at their facility in Groom Lake, Nevada. Cliff hoped they were still safe. He needed to get to them, but first he had to get out of Denver, and to do that, he had to make it out of the damned airport.