Zombie Fallout 8: An Old Beginning (31 page)

“Whoa, how does she keep doing that?” Trip was now standing. “Yeah. Ponch, Stomach, the Butcher’s son and a Yeti made it out.”

“Oh for the love of…” BT threw his hands up in the air and stormed off.

“Mom?” Travis asked.

“I don’t know, but we’re going to find out.”

Tracy
, and the rest, headed for the roadway. They hadn’t gone more than a few hundred yards when they heard the approach of trucks. They stopped when they reached the group.

“Hop on,” Joseph said from the passenger seat of one of those trucks.

Tracy couldn’t decide if she wanted to swear at him or thank him so she did neither as she went to the rear and climbed in, followed shortly by the rest. Nobody said much as the truck was already half filled with Illuminati soldiers; plus, the noise of the large diesel engine made communication difficult anyway. The truck hadn’t even completely stopped when Tracy jumped out.

“Mom, you’re going to hurt yourself that way,” Travis said as he followed.

“She’ll be fine, apparently she practices this a lot,” BT said as he exited.

Tracy ran to the lip of a hole that plunged more than a hundred feet down. Smoke still smoldered in a dozen places along the hundred-yard expanse. A man with a Geiger counter walked around the edge holding his sensor over the lip.

“There was the potential for this to have been caused by some sort of nuclear explosion, and you didn’t bother to tell us?” Dennis was livid.

“The probability was low,” Joseph said evenly.

“Why the test then?”

“Can never be too careful.”

“Yes you can, we could have slept further away.”

“We’ve been monitoring throughout the night. There is no fallout that we can detect.”

“Does that mean there is fallout you can’t detect?” BT asked. “And if my little friend here is concerned, so am I!”

“We’re friends now?” Dennis asked. “And I’m not little.”

“United front,” BT told him.

“Be with your friend’s wife. I think she needs the both of you more than I need to be questioned right now.”

BT and Dennis turned to see Tracy had tears falling from her face. Joseph was ordering his men to make sure none of the zombies had survived. Not that it could even be possible. Twisted steel and chunks of concrete larger than a semi were at the bottom of that pit of despair. Tracy walked around the entire outer lip looking for anything that resembled a place where someone could have escaped. Then she did it again.

“We need to go down there,” she said when she got back from her second go around.

“You’re kidding, right?” Justin asked.

“I mostly certainly am
not,” she said indignantly.

“Tracy, the walls are nearly vertical, and there are things you can impale yourself on the entire way down.” BT was trying to talk some sense into her.

Just then, she saw Joseph approaching. “What do you want?” Tracy lashed out. “Haven’t you already done enough?”

“I couldn’t help but hear you talking,” he said, trying to be as polite as possible.

“This is awesome. I didn’t think sound could travel on the moon…without atmosphere, I mean,” Trip declared.

“And, yet, we
can talk,” Travis said sarcastically.

“That’s weird too,” Trip answered.

Stephanie looked embarrassed as she led Trip away to a different area.

“I’d just like to offer my sincerest condolences for your loss. I cannot, however, allow you to go down there. It is entirely too dangerous. I’m sending some men down on ropes in a few minutes. I have told them to let me know if they hear anything.”

BT watched as Tracy’s eyes narrowed and her lips clamped tight. She’d seen Mike do enough boneheaded things to earn that look. Carnage was immediately about to follow. “Justin, Travis, help me with your mom.” The boys hesitated moving in, when they saw the look she was directing at Joseph.

“I don’t want to get involved,” Travis said as he prepared to bolt.

“Get your ass over here, boy!”

Travis was weighing his options on who was scarier
; BT or his mom. “Sorry, BT. You and Justin are on your own.” With that, he left to seek out his uncle, who he hoped could shield him from the coming storm.

Three of Joseph’s men got into special safety harnesses that attached to heavy climbing rope
s. These were tied off to a trailer hitch on three separate trucks. The men cautiously made their way down the side, slowly crawling among the wreckage.

“What’s taking them so long?” Tracy was pacing around nervously.

“It’s dangerous, Mom,” Justin told her.

She hurrumphed and crossed her arms. “I could have done it faster,” she said as the men touched down on the bottom.

She’d apparently said it loud enough that they heard her as one of them looked up. He didn’t do it, but BT was pretty sure he wanted to flip her the bird or tell her ass to give it a try.

If Tracy thought their descent down was slow, then the pace they were walking across the debris was about to set her over the figurative edge. “I’ve seen sloths riding turtles move faster!”

“Listen, lady, you have no idea how dangerous it is down here. Every time you step, something moves! So…me and my team would appreciate it if you would keep your thoughts to yourself!”

“That will be enough, Wilkins,” Joseph told his man.

“Yes, sir,” he answered, glowering a little longer at Tracy before he turned away.

For over half an hour, the trio scoured the bottom. BT wasn’t certain what they were looking for; surely not for the grieving widow’s husband. He was saddened for the loss of his friend until he caught sight of Henry who had not come within twenty feet of the rim. He was staring off in a completely different direction, his tail wagging furiously. He would have gone over to the dog to try and see what he saw if not for the next few events.

“Sir, there’s nothing here. Definitely nothing living.” Wilkins made sure to direct that last comment Tracy’s way.

The words had no sooner echoed off the walls of the crater than the earth began to shake as if in protest of his callousness. The ground shook for a solid ten seconds as the unstable pile fell in on itself another five feet.

“Wilkins, let’s go. Get you and your men out of there!” Joseph was urging the team.

The importance that the men needed to move faster was not lost on them, but to do so risked injury by slipping and falling on any number of
matter both organic and inorganic. The ground shook again, followed by a squelching sound that was similar to two pieces of dry rubber rubbing against each other under high pressure.

“What the hell was that?” one of Wilkins’ men asked.

The answer came soon enough as brownish red ooze began to seep up from the ground the men found themselves on.

“What the hell?” Wilkins asked.

At first it was slow and merely making the ground wet. Then, from whatever underground pool this was coming from, the dam had burst, the ground losing definition as the sludge rose.

Gary vomited as a wave of heated air tainted with zombie guts blew up from the pit and over everybody. He was not the only one to fall victim to the stench. The juice from twenty thousand pulverized zombies was resurfacing. Wilkins and his men were in serious danger of drowning in the material.

“Start the trucks!” Joseph yelled. “If it gets over their heads I want you to drive.”

“Sir, I can’t pull them over this stuff, they’ll be shredded,” one of the drivers said.

Wilkins stopped to help one of his men who had fallen over. “My leg is stuck!” The man was wrenching at his knee, the inner workings of zombies already splashing above his calf.  “Help me!” he begged Wilkins. “I don’t want to die like this!”

“Nobody does,” Wilkins answered. “Shut up for a second, and I’ll make sure you don’t have to.”

“Wilkins? Can you get him out?” Joseph asked. The question was clear enough, if you knew what to look for. If he couldn’t get the man out, Joseph didn’t want Wilkins to die pointlessly in a failed rescue.

“Get out of there,” Tracy was saying to herself.

As more slush was coming up, the accumulated weight was pushing the precarious pile down. This was compounded by the emptying space where the zombie guts were coming from and gave the illusion that the liquid was rising much faster than it was. What was a minute before at the men’s calves was now over their knees.

“Wilkins, let’s go!” Joseph shouted.

“Sir, I can’t get Heller free!”

“Stand aside, we’re going to have to pull him out. Now, Wilkins!”

Joseph directed the driver to move slowly. Heller was at an angle to the truck so that, when the vehicle pulled up, it twisted the upper half of his body. He screamed in pain. There was not a man or a woman in the area not looking down on the events playing out. While Wilkins was seeing how Heller would make out, the third man of the group was about halfway up the lip as three men pulled on his rope to aid his climb.

“A little more,” Joseph told the truck driver. Heller’s torso was twisted almost a full ninety degrees from his lower half.

Heller screamed again, and Tracy wasn’t sure if she could watch much longer. It was clear to her that the man was going to be pulled apart soon, much like those who were drawn and quartered centuries ago. The truck engine revved, Heller’s next scream was a high-pitched one, followed by the distinctive sound of bone cracking.

“He’s free!” Wilkins shouted, rushing forward to keep a passed-out Heller’s head above the muck line.

“I want men on both their lines, slow but steady pulling!” Joseph commanded.

By the time they came to the crater wall, the zombie slush was mid-chest and Wilkins was doing all he could to keep Heller from drowning. The man’s head kept lolling back and forth as he slid down into shock.

Fifteen more minutes and both were back on the perimeter. Heller was going to be on light duty for a while, his left leg broken in two places along with a bad case of bruised ribs. Wilkins had suffered some cuts and scrapes, but was immediately cleaned up and pumped with enough antibiotics to flush out an elephant.

Tracy could only stare down at the miasma. Mike’s fate lay within the swirling browns, reds and blacks down there. If, by some chance, he had survived the zombies, found a safe sanctuary away from their bites, and then his refuge was somehow strong enough to withstand the bombing, there was very little chance it would be airtight and not allow the
pressed zombies inside. Even if by some miracle it was, he would be running out of air by now. She would mourn when she got home. All she hoped for now was that his death had been swift and merciful; something that was not in abundance these days. Even Trip, whose grasp on reality was tenuous at best, seemed to realize the solemnity of the event.

The only one who seemed wholly unaffected by the destruction and loss was
again Henry, who had rolled over and was now wriggling around with his legs airborne in a desperate bid to sate the itch he had on his back.

“Are you going to be alright?” Joseph asked Tracy as he came up to her. Travis and Justin kept a close eye on the man and their mom, not really sure which way this was going to play out.

BT had walked away, too distraught to even comfort his friend’s wife. Dennis had no such compunction about displaying his heartache in public. He sat down hard on the lip of the hole, his head in his hands as he grieved for his friend.

“I’m going to need a truck,” Tracy said, pulling her gaze away from the scene below. “I’m ready to get my boys home,” she told Joseph evenly. Her eyes were red-rimmed, and her lip may have held the slightest quiver, but she stood strong.

“I have no trucks I can spare, but we will give you a ride until such time as I can secure you a vehicle,” he told her.

Tracy nodded.

Within ten minutes they were heading out. Tracy felt it was unnaturally quiet, although that could have been attributed to the rhythm of her heart, which had been broken.

“A BMW lot? Now we’re talking,” BT said as they pulled up. It was the only blip of sunshine on an otherwise abysmal day.

Joseph ordered his men to get two SUVs running and siphoned other tanks to make sure the fuel tanks were full. “Ma’am,” Joseph told Tracy when she got behind the seat.

“Thank you for saving us. I will, however,
never forget that you did not at least try to save my husband.”

“I understand, and I am sorry for your loss. Good luck, and I wish you nothing but the best.” He spun his finger in the air and pointed back toward the truck. His men jumped on board and left in a black plume of exhaust. The parking lot was much quieter with the heavier diesel engines gone
; the purring of the two BMWs not much louder than a person whispering.

Justin helped Henry into one of the SUVs. The dog immediately stretched and took the majority of the second row. Travis got in beside him.

Gary came to Tracy’s side. “Do you mind if I ride with Steph and Trip? I don’t think I can take any more smell,” he said, pointing to Henry who sneezed in response.