Zed's World (Book 2): Roads Less Traveled Read online

Kyle sees Ben and Robert carrying Toni, who has passed out. He notices the blood with alarm and says, “Is she bit?”

  Ben is taken aback. “Bit? What? No, Dad, she’s been shot. You won’t believe the night we’ve had.”

  “Oh, shit!” Kyle says. “Bring her inside. All of you, get in here, hurry!”

  They file in, and Keith, Natalie, Andy, and Annie make a quick second trip to grab the rest of their gear from the truck.

  Inside, a group of older adults is gathered. Keith sees his father, Marc Wallace.

  “Dad!” he exclaims and runs to his father and hugs him hard. Marc hugs his son back, relief visible on his face.

  Naomi Puckett comes out of the master bedroom, momentarily startled by the group filling her family room—a room that had been empty when she went into the bedroom moments before. Then she spots her son. “Ben! Oh my God, what happened?” she asks as she runs to him.

  Danny Harris and his wife Elaine are in the kitchen. They each have a pistol on their hip, and a short-barreled AR15 slung over their shoulders.

  Over the din of the kids’ and parents’ joy at seeing each other, Robert nods at the girl he and Ben hold and says, “We need to get her some medical attention or I’m afraid she’s going to die. Can we get her to the hospital?”

  “Not a good idea,” Danny says from the kitchen. “If anyone is still alive there, they’re not in a position to offer us any help.” He walks over to the black dining table and clears the centerpiece. “Get her over here and tell me what happened.”

  They bring Toni over and lay her on the table while the other kids start telling them about their flight from Fort Collins, but Danny cuts them off. “Just tell me about the wounds.”

  Before they can explain what happened, the house shakes and a thunderous boom rattles the windows. Keith and Andy rush to the back door and peer outside. In the distance, back toward the gas station in front of the Safeway, a massive fireball billows into the sky.

  “This is the end,” Danielle says.

  Stephenie signs and Annie translates. “No, it’s just beginning.”

  Danielle covers her mouth so Stephenie can’t read her lips and murmurs to Natalie, “I fucking hate her.”

  Fifteen

  Denver, Colorado

  D-Day has recruited more help to police the dead bodies throughout the building. Wearing Tyvek suits and rubber gloves—found in the maintenance room—they’ve pulled the flatbed carts (also from maintenance) and loaded the corpses on them. Once they bring them to the roof, they swing them in one-two-three fashion, heaving them over the roof’s edge on three. There were forty-eight in all, including Carmen’s husband Bill, the family of four from the third floor, Cortez, and Tamara from ten.

  He stares at the body on the cart. It’s the last one, and D-Day told the others he’d take care of it, so he sent them below to clean up and see if they can help people relocate to higher floors. He stares at the body of Cortez, who had lived his final moments in an act of sacrifice that helped save the lives of perhaps everyone in the building. D-Day can only imagine the pain he was going through, and the fear, the terror, that had to be going through his mind, knowing what was going to happen to him. He’s as brave a man as D-Day has known, and he didn’t know him well at all. He wonders if Cortez was that selfless all the time, if he was one of those people who would be there for you, no matter what. He pulls back the sheet and fishes through the dead man’s pockets. He finds his wallet and opens it.

  According to his driver’s license, Cortez’s first name was Michael. He was an organ donor and had his motorcycle and commercial truck endorsements. He has three photos in his wallet; one of a woman D-Day assumes to be his mother, another of a pretty young woman who has to be the girlfriend he mentioned, and the third is a ’68 Camaro RS. D-Day doesn’t know the particulars of the car, but he can appreciate the classic lines, the black stripes over the gray body. His mom, his girlfriend, and his car. D-Day smiles.

  “You had your priorities right, my friend,” he says. “And you have real pictures, not just data on a cell phone screen. These three were very important to you.”

  He sighs. It’s sad to dump the body like this, but they don’t have any other options. It’s not like the coroner, or a funeral home is going to get them. D-Day feels like he should say something. He doesn’t know why; it just feels like the right thing to do.

  “I wish I knew you better,” he says. “But those last minutes where I did get to know you, you lived them well and you died a noble death. In my opinion, no one can ask for more than that.” He pauses for a minute, and with more sadness than he expected to feel, he rolls the body over the edge. He takes the driver’s license and the three pictures out of the wallet and tosses it after the body then starts pulling the cart back to the maintenance building.

  While he’s on the maintenance path, he sees a pair of planes coming from the southeast. He recognizes them from his time in Afghanistan. The stealth drones, called the X47-B, are known to the public, having been featured on various TV programs spotlighting military technology. They’ve been billed as “experimental,” supposedly with only two test models having been built. D-Day knows from experience that they’re not experimental, and the Air Force has, at least, a dozen of them in service. Like most things in the military, whatever is released to the public is well behind current technology—unless it’s released to as propaganda to scare the enemy.

  The fighter-jet-sized drone looks like a miniature stealth bomber, though at sixty feet across and with a payload of forty-five hundred pounds, there’s nothing miniature about these unmanned aircraft.

  D-Day lifts his binoculars and sees throngs of people in the downtown streets. As far as he can tell, the police have completely stopped any attempt to contain the crowds. The drones circle the Denver metro area in a loop several miles wide. D-Day has seen this before. The drones are lining up a bombing run. The pilots, probably in a dark room in Nevada, will fly the drones around the area to see where they can have the greatest effect with the least amount of damage.

  He watches as they pass over downtown on the opposite side of the skyscrapers from D-Day’s vantage point, the bombs leaving the drones well before they pass over the target. D-Day glimpses massive walls of flame erupt in between the tall buildings of downtown. He hears the concussion, louder than a gunshot even though the bombs hit more than a mile away. A few seconds later, a shockwave rolls over the building, rattling glass and vibrating D-Day’s guts. He guesses that they’re using a five-hundred-pound incendiary bomb. In all likelihood, it’s filled with a jellied petroleum containing white phosphorus. The explosive fuel is similar to napalm, but the fire it produces is harder to put out. D-Day is encouraged that the military is coming in with the drones. It tells him that they’re trying to clear a path for the ground forces to come in, and it also tells him they’re not ready to start leveling entire cities to halt the spread of the infection, whatever it is.

  The drones fly west, turn in a tight loop and come back along the same path, this time from the opposite direction. Another wall of fire erupts, and another shock wave passes over D-Day. One thing he’s certain of, whatever was in the path of those drones isn’t there anymore. There’s nothing there right now but a quarter mile of fire devouring everything it touches. Fry, you bastards! he thinks to himself.

  Through the binoculars, he sees dozens of the reanimated dead staggering in the fire. A few walk out of the conflagration engulfed in flames but do not seem to notice their flesh burning away from their bodies. They walk until the muscles of their legs burn away, and they collapse. Eventually, they are just piles of smoldering black stuff. A few walk into store fronts, catching the displays on fire where the windows or doors have been broken. One building, in particular, begins pouring thick, black smoke from the ground floor.

  The drones do another several-mile-wide loop around the Denver metro area, and then soar upward, gaining altitude and banking away from the downtown area. D-Day watches as they hea
d south. Maybe they’re going to do the same thing in Colorado Springs, he thinks. He wonders about Martha Cowher and whether or not she made it through the night. He pushes the thought from his mind and pulls the empty cart back on the maintenance path toward the elevator building.

  Before he gets to the elevator, he hears the staccato sound of gunfire. He leaves the cart in the shelter of the maintenance building and walks on another of the defined paths to the south edge of the building. The numbers of the undead in the streets below D-Day’s building have been in the hundreds—maybe in the thousands—but after the firebombing at the opposite end of downtown the dead are moving like moths to a literal flame. They’re running, limping, or crawling toward the flames. Like lemmings, as some of the undead turn and begin moving toward the conflagration, others follow. Soon vast numbers are heading toward the inferno, leaving only a few dozen in the immediate area.

  Now, from the east, multiple mine-resistant ambush-protected, or MRAP, vehicles are heading into the neighborhood. D-Day is well familiar with the vehicles, but he’s used to seeing them in desert-sand color, not the flat black of the Department of Homeland Security vehicles he sees now. Through his binoculars, he watches as the vehicles work in groups of four. Each vehicle is manned by a driver, a man in the turret with a belt-fed rifle that D-Day is sure is an M249 light machine gun and a five-man fire team. The four trucks and teams move in a diamond formation, keeping fire on all points of the compass. Each five-man team has four people shooting and one functioning as the reloader, providing full magazines to the other three once the magazines they carry in their vests have been emptied. A sixth man emerges from the MRAP and replaces the reloader when his supplies run low, and the reloader steps into rear-facing firing position. The men rotate positions toward the vehicle, with the man closest to the MRAP jumping in the back and getting a rest. The man in the turret fires only when there’s an immediate threat to the team that they haven’t been able to deal with. Surrounding these fire teams, the bodies of the undead are piling up.

  D-Day thinks about all the conspiracy stories he’s read about the “militarization” of DHS and the American police forces, with different departments buying the military vehicles like those on the streets below, and the massive quantities of ammunition DHS has supposedly been buying. D-Day’s Facebook feed has been thick with these stories. As he watches this ballet of action below him play out, he can’t help but think that the theories weren’t the stuff of conspiracies. Either the government got lucky—if you can call this luck—and an event came along to justify their stockpile of equipment they were getting ready “just in case,” or they knew something like this was coming. If this event was the reason behind a big so-secret-it’s-not-secret domestic military build-up, that also means that DHS and the larger Department of Defense organization had to have advance knowledge that this was coming. That’s a troubling thought for D-Day.

  The diamond formation works well for a while. D-Day watches as the group of four MRAPs, and their teams advance down the street. He can see at least three other teams advancing down the next three streets to the east. With the firebombs having drawn the majority of the zombies in the vicinity to the south, the persistent firing, while effective, begins to draw a significant number of the undead from the north, west, and east.

  The group of DHS operatives in front of D-Day’s building has advanced three hundred feet down the road toward downtown Denver. The strategy seems to be effective; the gunfire is constant now, and there are hundreds of dispatched zombie bodies lining the street and sidewalks on either side of the procession, with more coming from all directions now.

  Things start going sideways when the glass on the second floor of the apartment building across the street shatters. A few zombies fall out, and then a few more, and then a steady stream of undead erupt from the building, falling to the ground or on top of other zombies. The first few are hurt in the fall, breaking legs and sustaining other injuries, but increasingly the remainder of them land on the pile, get up, and sprint after the black-clad DHS teams.

  Faced with more than a hundred zombies tightly grouped, in addition to the existing hordes descending from the rear and sides, the team on the right side, closest to the building, quickly realizes they’re about to be overrun. They start firing with less control, missing the headshots and simply wasting ammo. With the right side collapsing, the other teams are going to get overrun in short order.

  The unit’s commander must have called for retreat because all the teams return to the MRAPs while the men in the turrets using the automatic rifles provide cover fire. Once safely inside the MRAPs, the teams begin firing through the gun ports on the sides of the vehicles. D-Day looks around and sees the undead now coming in rivers from the areas behind and to the sides of the apartment building.

  When he turns his attention back to the MRAPs, something else catches his eye. Flickering shadows are coming at the formation of vehicles from the south. He trains his binoculars on the distant movement and sees that the masses of undead that were drawn by the fire are returning. They’re leading a new army—charred, smoldering undead follow in droves. This group of revenants is moving much slower than the others, owing to the damage the bodies’ muscles have sustained from the fires.

  The powerful MRAPs should have no problem muscling over a few, or even a few dozen, undead bodies. But the several thousand bearing down on them from all directions pose a problem. The MRAP is not an easy vehicle to maneuver in a tight, urban street. With four of them so close together, it’s going to take some skillful driving to get out of there.

  The MRAP in the rear begins to back up, knocking aside dozens of the hungry dead and running over many more. Crippled, broken creatures reach with mangled arms and hands in vain for the big black truck. The driver spins the wheel and gets the beast turned partially around. He turns the wheel the opposite direction and shifts it into gear to complete the turn. As it begins to accelerate away from the other MRAPs, the tires kick up a spray of the oily, black fluid that oozes from the corpses.

  The MRAP on the right side of the diamond is backing up as the spray of zombie juice hits the side of it, including the gun ports. It does the same Y-turn as the first MRAP and begins heading back to the east, now going upstream against a steady tide of undead bodies. The driver goes slow but doesn’t try to avoid any of the zombies, not that he could if he tried.

  The third MRAP, from the left side of the diamond, is completing its Y-turn as the smoldering horde reaches the lead MRAP. At the intersection, the second MRAP swerves and hits a parked car, spinning it halfway around and sending it up onto the sidewalk. The turret opens, and one of the DHS operatives scrambles out and onto the roof. He shoves the barrel of his rifle into the opening and fires several rounds back inside the armored vehicle. Someone inside must have gotten infected, D-Day thinks. How? That spray of fluid that hit the gun ports? Is this THAT contagious? The big vehicle hits another car, then veers onto the sidewalk and clips the corner of the check cashing place at the three-way confluence of Park Avenue, Twentieth Avenue, and Washington Street.

  The DHS operative is thrown from the top of the MRAP. He lands awkwardly, and several undead are on him before he’s able to bring his rifle to bear. D-Day can see him through the binoculars, and as blood is flowing from the wounds being ripped open, he’s screaming loud enough that even at this distance, D-Day can hear him, his screams just out of sync with the image in the binoculars. The screams die down, and D-Day sees him hold out a small object and start laughing. He takes his eyes away from the binoculars and looks at the street corner with unaided eyes. He recognized the apple-sized object immediately, and when the grenade goes off, D-Day doesn’t want to see it up close. There’s a few seconds’ pause, and then the explosion is large enough that D-Day feels the pulse of a shockwave from one hundred and fifty yards away.

  He pulls the binoculars up and scans the corner again. Nothing there but bloody tissue and black zombie juice. Scattered away from the c
enter of the blast, body parts are mixed together. An intact torso, arms, and head are trying to crawl into the street. A few arms and legs are jumbled. A severed head lies on its side, the eyes darting back and forth, the mouth opening and closing.

  D-Day has seen enough. The MRAP has stopped a few hundred feet away in the middle of Twentieth Avenue. Through the binoculars, D-Day can see it move from side to side as something inside the armored box moves around. The rest of the big vehicles are driving away, headed east, back the way they came, so they’ve written off the occupants of the marooned MRAP. As they head east, D-Day only counts ten of the big vehicles, when there were sixteen to start. He wonders if the other five met a similar fate. If so, there’s a potential bounty of ammo inside them. He files that bit of information away for later. After a minute, the sound of the vehicles fades and the streets once again belong to the teeming dead.

  D-Day returns to the cart and pulls it into the elevator. He pushes the button to the twelfth floor and holds his breath—again—while the car makes its descent. The power holds for another ride, and he stashes the cart down the hall by the east stairwell near the twelfth-floor maintenance closet, and then he heads to the common area that serves as the building’s recreation room. Residents can reserve it for parties and meetings, and the building management hosts big shin-digs here for things like the Super Bowl or title fights.

  Carmen is in the room, separating food. She’s lining up canned foods into similar piles; canned corn in one stack, green beans in another, soups in another. She looks up at D-Day as he walks in.

  “I saw all that from here,” she says. “It didn’t go well, did it?”

  D-Day walks over to the windows and looks out. He sees piles of dead—actually dead—bodies on the ground. It’s impossible to count them. Maybe a thousand? Twenty-eight men, five minutes. Five minutes to kill thirty-five undead each. Five minutes for a force of twenty-eight men in four light armored vehicles to become overwhelmed and lose a quarter of the armor and maybe as much of their manpower.