The Living and the Dead Read online

  Still, she could get her hands on a gun and then what? She was determined and he could tell that. She had a lot to fight for.

  “I can’t have you attacking my men,” Kinsler said looking directly at her.

  Kinsler and Jo stared down each other for several seconds until Jones cleared his throat and they both looked to him.

  “Listen, we don’t know how this will go,” Jones said, breaking the stalemate. “I don’t want to attack our men. I will do everything in my power to avoid that, but we can’t let Kilgore and Lodwick wipe out these people.” He paused and stared off into the darkness for a moment, then turned back to them. “We can always try to convince our guys to take our side and let these people go instead of wiping them out.”

  Both Jo and Kinsler raised skeptical eyebrows at Jones’ comment.

  Henry pushed the stairwell door open a crack and peered into a long dark hallway. Nothing moved there, but there was an intersecting hallway at the north end about fifty feet away and he had no idea what was around the corners at that end. To the south, there was an intersection just thirty feet away. A short distance, but a long one if you considered that that they had no guns.

  “What do you see?” Steve Hampton asked.

  “Shhhh,” Henry said.

  “Listen, kid, you don’t get to shush me,” Hampton said. “I don’t…”

  Del whacked Hampton in the shoulder and hissed out, “Shut the hell up.”

  Hampton got the message.

  Henry pulled the door shut quietly and turned back to the group. “There’s no one out there, but we have a short run down the hall. We need to get to a south exit.”

  “How do we know any of those doors are open?” Mrs. Hatcher asked.

  “We don’t, but we have to try,” Henry said.

  Doc Wilson chimed in and said, “I agree with Henry. There is no turning back.”

  A series of shots sounded overhead and Mrs. Hatcher jumped into Steve Hampton who almost fell over from the impact, but he caught himself by reaching out for the wall. The gunshots came in a long series, then ended. There was a short series of return shots and then silence.

  “I say we stay in here and wait it out,” Steve Hampton said.

  “The war is already started,” Henry said. “There won’t be any hiding from it and if Lodwick and his soldiers find us, they will probably shoot us.”

  “But we haven’t done anything,” Mrs. Hatcher said and her voice cracked.

  Del broke in, “It won’t matter. We are on the wrong side of what has started.”

  “I don’t like this,” Hampton said. “I don’t like it at all. We should have left well enough alone. The soldiers weren’t that bad.”

  “You can stay and make kissy face with the soldiers if you want, but I’m outta of here,” Del said.

  Stanley, who had been silent up to then, said, “I’m in.”

  “I’m thinking it would be best if we all went,” Doc Wilson added.

  “Doc, you should stay in the middle in case something happens and someone needs your help,” Del said.

  “That sounds prudent,” Doc Wilson replied.

  Mrs. Hatcher went conspicuously quiet, but Henry didn’t say anything. Instead, he cracked the door and looked out. The hallway was still clear. He figured there was no time like the present and opened the door wide.

  “Wait,” Hampton said, but Henry ignored him and stepped into the hallway. Del followed. The rest of the group followed tentatively with Steve Hampton taking up the rear. Each person walked as quietly as possible, but moving a small group stealthily down a hallway was a real challenge. The only thing they had going for them was the chaos happening elsewhere, drawing the attention of the soldiers. Of course, Henry knew that attention could fall back on them at any moment.

  They made it ten feet when the overhead lights came on, filling the hall with a flickering white light. It took a few moments to become a steady and full illumination. Everyone in the small party felt vulnerable as the light bathed over them. Darkness had been their friend, cloaking them, but the lights felt like a curtain had been raised, leaving them exposed.

  What they heard after that made them feel terror. The sound of rushing footsteps came from the intersecting hallway to the north, followed by shouted commands.

  “Run!” Henry shouted.

  Chapter 27

  A View from the Woods

  Schultzy watched as lights blinked on around the complex, making the building stand out like a giant lighted billboard against the darkness. He couldn’t tell whether this was a good thing or not, but his gut told him that it didn’t bode well for the people inside. Darkness was their friend. Light was their enemy.

  There was nothing he could do for them. Until they were outside, they were on their own.

  He had heard the reports of weapons fire from inside the complex, but couldn’t pinpoint the source. Deep down, he hoped it wasn’t the sound of executions, but of battle. Battle meant his friends were fighting back, instead of being slaughtered.

  The waiting was killing him, but there was nothing to do, but wait. Wait and watch.

  The other thing the light did was to illuminate the field. He could see forms silhouetted against the lights coming from the first floor. There were only a handful of these unmistakable shambling forms, but the light grabbed their attention immediately like the dazzling lights of the Las Vegas strip.

  The shots had drawn them in, but the lights fully captivated them. They tottered back and forth for a few moments, looking mesmerized by the brilliance of the lights, then started toward their irresistible brightness like moths to the flames. Lights meant humans and humans were food. The lights were on in the restaurant and that meant it was open for business.

  Old Man Schultz didn’t know if it was a good thing or a bad thing. It could bring some added chaos to the landscape and provide some cover. He knew it also meant that his friends (if they did get outside) would have to run a gauntlet of the undead.

  He considered shooting them, but that would give up position. His muzzle flashes would stand out against the dark backdrop of the woods.

  There was nothing to do but play the waiting game.

  Chapter 28

  Flight of the Valkyries

  To say I was in a deep pit of despair would have been a devastating understatement. My imagination was in overdrive, envisioning every manner of things that Marlow was doing to Kara. None of it was pretty, and it seemed to go on forever.

  I’m not sure how long I spent like that, but a distant voice spoke something I couldn’t make out. It was words, but they seemed like they were spoken by someone far off in a cave. They echoed off the walls in my addled brain and made it to me after the words had turned into nothing but garbled mumbling that I ignored.

  It wasn’t until I felt the touch of someone’s hand on my shoulder that I ebbed out of my dark trance and her the voice.

  “There’s something coming,” the voice spoke.

  I responded with, “Wha?” I couldn’t get out the whole word, but instead, spoke like a lost and frightened child.

  “Something’s coming,” the voice said again. “Can’t you hear it?”

  My head felt like it weighed a thousand pounds, but I gave it my all and turned toward the source of the voice and saw Naveen’s face only inches from mine.

  “I think it’s a helicopter,” she said.

  The whomp, whomp of helicopter blades beating on the air filtered through the haze in my brain and I whipped backed fully into reality. The transition was so abrupt that I felt a sense of mental whiplash for a few seconds, but I shook it off.

  “They’re coming,” I said.

  “Who’s coming?” Brent asked from across the room. His face was etched with creases of concern.

  “The calvary,” I said.

  “Who?” Brent asked.

  “The Army,” I said.

  “They are coming to rescue you?” he asked.

  “Not exactly,” I replied.
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br />   “What the hell does that mean?”

  Shakily, I stood up and went toward the outer wall where Brent sat with his family. There was nothing to see through the opaque glass blocks positioned at ceiling level, so I just listened. It was there -- the unmistakable sound of an engine and its blades cutting through the air and it was moving in quickly.

  “Move away from the walls,” I said.

  Brent asked, “Why? What’s going to happen?”

  “I don’t know, but getting away from the walls would be a good idea for now.”

  No one listened to me, but they soon wished they had.

  “What do your instruments tell you, Meinke?” Colonel Kilgore asked, looking intently out at the dark terrain as the helicopter flew along in the night sky. It was a clear, almost cloudless night, the moon hanging in the sky like a bright silver plate.

  Meinke cleared his throat, paused, then said, “We’re just under a half mile out from the signal. He gave out the coordinates and told the Colonel that it was to the northwest of their current heading.

  “Is it moving?” Kilgore asked.

  “No, sir.”

  “The son of a bitch may have turned it on and pitched it,” Kilgore spat out. “There’s nothing to do but to check it out.”

  “Airman Soto, get us there.”

  “Yes, sir,” Soto responded, but he didn’t feel confident. The Iroquois was an entirely new experience for him. It handled like a school bus in the air with none of the precision of the attack choppers he was used to, but it was getting them there and he was getting used to it. If he had had a day with it, he would have felt a whole lot better about this adventure, but there was no time. He was learning on the job and doing it in the dark. There was nothing ideal about that, but few things were ideal about this mission.

  The helicopter ate up the skies as they sped toward their destination. They passed over the freeway and then over dark structures broken up by a grid of streets. Flickering yellow and orange lights shone ahead of them on the ground.

  “What is that down there?” Kilgore asked.

  “It looks like fires, sir,” Soto responded. “We’re in an urban area.”

  “What the hell?” Kilgore said. “Give us a flyover first. We need to make sure this isn’t some sort of ambush.”

  “It just passed over us,” I said, knowing that I was just speaking the obvious and everybody already knew it.

  I listened intently as the noise from the helicopter swooped over top our position and the sound dissipated a little. I could only guess that it moved away from us. I pulled the satellite phone out of my pocket and checked to make sure it was still on. The screen was on, but dim. A small icon that looked like a battery blinked away, telling me that the battery was dying. Blink, blink, blink, it went on for several seconds, then the screen went dead. The battery was kaput.

  A small voice in me panicked, telling me that I needed the phone on and transmitting, but a more rational voice spoke up and trumped the frightened voice. It told me that the phone had done its job. It had brought the Army to us. That wasn’t a good thing in most cases, but we were in a worst-case scenario. Even having an enemy wanting us dead show up was better than what was happening to Kara.

  The harsh whipping of the blades came closer again and seemed to become stationary. I had no visual cues, but had only auditory information. It could have been hovering over top of us for all I knew, my untrained ears seemed to say that it was in our general vicinity.

  “The signal just disappeared,” Meinke said, sounding guilty as if he had something to do with the missing signal.

  “Dammit!” Kilgore cursed.

  “What should I do, Colonel?” Soto asked as he circled the helicopter around what looked like a small compound of buildings from their vantage point in the sky. The fires down below burned brightly against the dark terrain, illuminating the buildings and parking lot around them.

  “It looks like a school or something. Take us around a couple more times,” Kilgore said. He looked below as a few people entered the open area, moving tentatively, looking up at the night sky and the silhouette of the helicopter as it passed by the stars. He couldn’t get much detail of the people, but one thing he could tell was that they were carrying weapons and there were more than a few of them.

  Questions whirled through his mind. Had this guy moved to another enclave of folks ready to defend him or was this another group altogether? If they were the latter, then how did they get the satellite phone? And why did they turn it on?

  Maybe this was a wild goose chase, and they had discarded the satellite phone and these people had found it? Maybe it was a trap?

  There was only one way to find out. He didn’t like the idea of landing down among these buildings to find out if Jason Carter was hidden somewhere in them. He weighed his options and conceded that no one had shot at them yet. The operative word was ‘yet.’

  “Let’s set her down,” Kilgore said to Soto, pointing at a spot away from the main congregation of buildings. “Make sure you have the 20mm point in towards the buildings. I want maximum firepower ready to bring to bear on these people if they try to fuck with us.” He turned back to the two gunners and said, “Be ready for anything. If anyone of these people tries anything -- whether I’m in here or out there, you light them up. Understood?”

  Both of the men nodded their heads in the affirmative. Soto circled the area one more time, flipped on the lights on the bottom of the helicopter and slowly settled the big flying beast down. It was his first landing of an Iroquois and it was a little rough, but tolerable. One of the gunners bit his lip when the helicopter thudded down and he cursed loudly.

  “Be ready for anything,” Kilgore said, “and remember what I said. If one of these people even gets an evil glint in their eyes, you start firing.” He paused and looked as even more people began to gather, but all of them had defensive postures. From his new perspective on the ground, he could tell that most of the people coming into the parking lot were men and, yes, they were well armed. He saw shotguns, rifles, and a few M-16s.

  A queasy feeling settled into his stomach and he wondered what the hell he was doing? He should just leave Jason Carter alone, take this bird and fly back to the Manor, or even better, back to Wright Patterson Air Base. He could order his men back at the Manor to leave that night and they could just go on with what they were doing.

  But he knew better. His night visitor would never leave him alone. He knew, somewhere deep down, that the visitor had really only been playing with him. That had he wanted to, the night visitor could unleash a whole new level of hellish nightmares on Kilgore that made what he had done up to then look like child’s play. Kilgore knew this just as he knew that it was dark as pitch out.

  There was no walking away. If one of these people shot him dead, they’d be doing him a favor.

  Then he wondered if death was really an escape from the night visitor and a chill went down his spine.

  “What now, sir?” Soto asked, his eyes darting all over the landscape, watching the well-armed crowd start to take up defensive positions. They moved behind cars and trucks parked around the parking lot. All these movements sent chills up Soto’s spine. The last thing he wanted was to be a shoot-war while he was flying an aircraft he knew too little about.

  “Give me the mic and flip on the PA system,” Kilgore said.

  Soto did what he was told and handed over the microphone and flipped a toggle switch on the console.

  Kilgore clicked a switch on the microphone and spoke, “We are with the government. We are on a mission to find an escapee that the U.S. military needs to recapture. If you have any information regarding his whereabouts or if he is here, then your country would be greatly appreciative if you helped us out.” His voice boomed off the brick walls, filling the space with the sound of his voice.

  The people approaching the helicopter halted their progress as if waiting for some cue.

  “Is there someone here I can speak with?�
�� Kilgore asked.

  Nothing happened for several seconds. Kilgore heard the gunners behind him shift their positions and saw movements in the shadows outside the chopper.

  “We would appreciate your cooperation,” he said and his words filled the area again, reverberating off the walls of the buildings.

  Again, nothing happened. There was more shifting in the shadows as people moved around, but no one responded to Kilgore’s requests. He wondered if there was a chance that those people might mount some sort of attack?

  In his opinion, that would be a mistake. They had more than enough firepower to inflict serious damage on any potential attack, but he had little idea of what these people’s capabilities were. He doubted whether they had more than basic rifles. Still, he knew their chopper was vulnerable, even to small arms fire. He comforted himself with the knowledge that he would rain holy hell down on them if they did attack.

  “What should we do, Colonel?” Soto asked, fidgeting with the helicopter’s controls, ready to take off at any moment.

  “We’ll give them some more time,” Kilgore responded, still holding the microphone in his hand. Just a few seconds later, he clicked it on again and said, “We just need to talk with someone. We have reason to believe this individual might be in the vicinity.”

  A voice spoke loudly out of the dark, “Who are you looking for?”

  “Who am I speaking to?” Kilgore asked.

  “That’s for me to know and you to find out,” the voice responded.

  “If that’s how you want to play it, that’s okay,” Kilgore said. “We don’t want any trouble, we just want to recover this person.”

  “Why do you want this guy?” the voice spoke.

  “He might be important for some scientific research we are conducting into the reason behind the zombie virus.”