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

  “Check it out,” Keith says, pointing to the parking lot. “They’re swarming the cop cars.”

  They can see what he’s talking about. There’s about thirty of them surrounding and climbing on one of the empty cruisers that sits with its overhead lights still running. As they watch, the horde pulls the light bar off of the car and the lights go dark. With no lights flashing, the undead begin wandering away.

  “They’re attracted to the lights!” Keith exclaims.

  “So? What does that matter?” Natalie asks.

  “Well, it’s probably good to know what draws them, so we know how NOT to draw them,” he replies.

  “Like it matters in the world’s loudest vehicle,” Natalie says. She’s scared and tense, and Andy gives him a subtle head shake, so Keith holds his tongue.

  Ben turns off the headlights in response to Keith’s observation. Natalie’s right too; the FJ is loud. The street starts to slope downhill, so Ben pushes in the clutch and lets the big vehicle coast, letting the engine idle. For the next quarter mile, they pick up speed. He coasts through the intersection with only a handful of the horrible creatures taking notice. They give chase for a few seconds, but lose sight of the vehicle and turn their attention to other things. The slope begins to lessen, and when the FJ starts to slow, Ben lets the clutch out and gives it gas.

  South of Horsetooth the population thins out, with a long stretch of open fields on the west side of the road and mostly churches and businesses giving way to single-family homes on the east side. While they still see the occasional zombie, they don’t see the hordes like they did back in the center of town, so he keeps his foot on the gas. Toni, from the passenger seat, sees people peeking out of their windows then closing the blinds or curtains after they had their curiosity satisfied.

  They cross Harmony Road, which marks the edge of town. Only one subdivision remains, and then there’s only open space for a few miles until they’ll hit the north end of Loveland; which, according to the last news reports has not been affected by the violence yet. With no street lights illuminating the road, Ben turns the headlights on again.

  The mood in the car lightens as they see the lights of the city fading away behind them.

  “Yeah, buddy!” Keith reaches up and grabs Ben’s shoulder, giving him a shake. “We made it out of crazy town!”

  Even Danielle smiles now, the weight of the horrors she’s witnessed left behind them with the zombies.

  “What the hell …” Ben says, trailing off at the end of his question as he tries to decipher what lies in the road ahead of them. There’s a massive shape in the middle of the road, just out of reach of their headlights. Everyone squints into the darkness ahead, trying to see what it is. It looks like a huge rock, Ben thinks. No, it’s—

  A second later, the interior of the Toyota is awash in light and Ben is blinded by a spotlight blasting them in the face. He hits the brakes and brings the beast to a lurching stop in front of a pair of vehicles, one a full-sized Humvee and the other an MRAP, though Ben doesn’t know that acronym. He’s just focused on the huge gun in the turret on top, which is pointing its barrel at them. The hole in the end of the barrel looks massive, and Ben can only imagine the damage the bullets coming out of that thing would do to them.

  Several figures rush up to the car on both sides with rifles trained on different spots on the vehicle. One of them raises his M4 and points it at Ben.

  “Out of the car, NOW!” the man yells. Either the light has dimmed, or Ben’s eyes have adjusted to it because now he can see that the man is wearing Army fatigues. He can’t read the patches on the man’s shirt, but with the muzzle of the gun trained on his face, Ben isn’t going to ask a lot of questions.

  “NOW!” the soldier repeats.

  Ben pulls the door handle and pushes it open.

  “Hands where I can see them!” the man shouts as he takes a step back from the opening door.

  Ben raises his hands in the air and pivots in the seat. He glances back at a terrified Toni and smiles at her, trying to be reassuring, then hops out of the SUV. His feet touch down on the pavement, and a trio of gunshots rip through the night.

  Toni screams but cuts it short when she realizes that Ben has not been shot.

  “It was hanging onto the ladder on the back door,” says the soldier who fired his gun. The name patch on his uniform reads “Bentley.”

  Ben opens his eyes, which he involuntarily shut when the shots rang out. Lying on the ground by the rear tire is a dead (again) woman. She’s leaking black ooze from holes in her neck and head.

  “Oh, Jesus, that stinks,” Bentley says, wrinkling his nose in disgust. “These things are disgusting.”

  “Stow that, Bentley, and get that thing off the road,” the man who ordered Ben to get out of the car says. He turns back to Ben, and as he does, Ben can see his name is Ordonez. “What the hell are you doing out and about, kid? Don’t you know martial law has been declared? We could have just mowed you down and not thought twice about it!”

  “Thanks for … um, not doing that. Mister … Ordonez,” Ben stammers.

  “Stow that ‘Mister Ordonez’ bullshit. It’s Lieutenant Ordonez, but don’t get used to that either. There’s a mandatory curfew in effect, or had you not heard? We have very strict instructions. No one gets past this point. No one leaves the city. Now, get back in your vehicle, turn around and go back home or where ever you came from.”

  “Lieutenant, you can’t make us do that,” Ben pleads. They were so close to getting out! He can’t drag the group back through all that carnage. Danielle is barely holding it together, and the others aren’t doing much better. Except for Keith, who seems to be taking it all in stride. “You haven’t seen what we went through to get here. You can’t ask us to go back through that. We won’t make it. You have to let us through!”

  “What’s your name, son?” Ordonez asks.

  “Ben.”

  “I have orders, Ben,” Ordonez says with a heavy inflection on “Ben.” “These orders are very specific: Do. Not. Let. Anyone. Leave. Fort. Collins. Can you guess what I’m not going to do?”

  “Let anyone leave Fort Collins?” Ben says with more than a trace of sarcasm, his patience wearing thin as the man condescends to him.

  “You’re smarter than you look, Ben. Get back in your vehicle, turn around and go back the way you came. Do it now, before I lose my patience with you and your frat pack.” Ordonez gestures at the group looking through the windshield at them.

  “Please,” Ben says. “You’re sending us back to die!”

  “NO MORE DISCUSSION!” Ordonez points a finger at the Toyota while he yells. “Get in your vehicle, NOW. I need to see taillights fading in thirty seconds or Sullivan gets to let the fifty take over the conversation!” Ordonez retracts his finger and jerks his thumb over his shoulder.

  Ben follows the thumb to the soldier standing in the turret of the MRAP with the .50-caliber machine gun trained on the Toyota. Ben turns, gets back in the FJ Cruiser, starts the engine, and pulls the old SUV into a Y-turn. Without looking back, he starts heading north on Shields, back toward the mouths of the monsters.

  Bentley approaches Ordonez. “Sir, we could have let them through. The kid was right, we just sent them back to their deaths.”

  “I didn’t ask your opinion, Bentley. You know our orders. If one of them were bit, we’d be unleashing this on the next city. I don’t want that on my head. Do you want it on yours?”

  “No sir, it’s just …” Bentley hesitates. As a National Guardsman he’s not used to blindly following orders outside of his two-weeks-a-year, one-weekend-a-month duties with the guard. “We could have inspected them, only let the ones through without bites. They made it through all that crap in town …”

  “Are you a medical expert, Bentley? Because I’m not. I don’t know the difference between a scratch from an infected versus a scratch from a rusty nail. Do you? Do they need a tetanus shot or bullet to the brain, Bentley? If one of them was i
njured, would you know whether they were infected? Maybe in some people, it takes a while. Maybe they make it to Loveland, or Longview before they go gray, and then we’ve lost the only uninfected cities on the front range.”

  Bentley looks unconvinced.

  “Look, I get it, Bentley,” Ordonez continues dressing him down. “This is a fucked-up situation. Neither of us,” he gestures to the other men watching them, “and none of them ever imagined this is what we’d be called up to do. But here we are, so let me make it simple. We have orders. No one leaves Fort Collins. The orders are clear, the orders are simple, and we will follow those orders until we’re dead, the orders change, or we are relieved. If you can’t do that, you’ll end up next to your friend there.” Ordonez points to the dead woman Bentley has pushed off the road. “You got me, Bentley?”

  “Yes, sir!” Bentley replies.

  “Good. End of discussion. Man. Your. Post.” Ordonez turns to the man running the spotlight. “Sweep the fields, check for movement.”

  Bentley sighs and goes back to his assigned position while the spotlight searches around the fields on either side of the road, looking for anyone—living or dead—trying to sneak past their position.

  In the Toyota, Toni is furious.

  “These guys work for us, dammit! How can they refuse to allow us to leave?” she asks.

  Ben can’t tell if the question is rhetorical or not, so he answers.

  “All I can tell you is that if I pushed him any further, he was going to have the guy in the huge truck-thing open up on us with that giant gun. No way was I going to see if he was bluffing.”

  “But this means that all the other exits out of town are gonna be blocked too,” Keith says.

  “The main ones, yeah, probably. But the side roads, maybe not. I don’t know how many Army guys they have up here. Andy, did you bring that night vision thing you used in the paintball free-for-all-in March?” Ben inquires.

  “Yeah, but it’s super cheap, dude. You can only see about thirty, maybe fifty feet with it at the most,” Andy replies.

  “That will have to be enough. Get it out,” Ben says. They’re getting back into zombie territory. He notices that the larger crowds of the dead have moved a few blocks farther south, so either the population of undead is getting larger or, like mice following the Pied Piper, they followed their earlier path south on Shields. Or a combination of both.

  “Everyone hang on,” he says. “This is going to get bumpy.”

  Five

  D-Day’s Building, Denver

  There are now hundreds of zombies in the street below D-Day’s apartment window. The waning light makes it hard to see everything clearly, and given the nature of what he’s observing, that’s probably for the best. Even the street lights, activated by their photo sensors, don’t afford him perfect visibility, but he can see enough. He’s learning a lot about their behavior by watching them. For instance, he notices that they’re attracted to lights—particularly lights changing, as the stop lights, or turning on, like in most of the buildings around the area.

  Second, they have a herd mindset. When the traffic light at the intersection changes, some of them head toward the green light, and some toward the red. Each faction draws a dozen or so followers. These few dozen zombies have spent fifteen minutes going back and forth in the intersection as the number of victims out and about to draw their attention has dwindled. Occasionally a car plows through the horde; sometimes it makes it through and keeps going toward the interstate. As more cars have crashed and the road has become more clogged with both vehicles and bodies, Park Avenue has become more impassible. Now most cars are getting stuck, and in these cases, the zombies don’t take long to get to the human cargo inside.

  D-Day watches as a couple of the zombies run after one car, and at first a couple of others follow; then a few more, and then several dozen are on their trail in a stampede. Definite herd behavior. The car is headed west in the eastbound lane. It jumps the curb and rides the sidewalk for a few hundred feet, takes out a handful of the undead, drops back onto the roadway and disappears around behind the next building over. Twenty zombies are still chasing it.

  The police presence is mostly concentrated in lower downtown, but there have been occasional squad cars that have come through the area. One had three officers in it. They fired into the crowd of zombies as it converged on their car, then sped off to get clear of the horde, then fired on a few more. Through his binoculars, he notices that only head shots put down the creatures permanently. Anything else just slows them down, or in some cases, cripples them. The police car continued this pattern all the way down Twentieth Avenue until it disappeared, leaving a few dead zombies in the road, a few wounded, but mostly just drawing more in with their gunfire. The next car was not so lucky. It used this same engage-and-evade tactic, but this time, the horde was either too large or too fast, and the car was swarmed. No one made it out alive.

  He also notices that several of the zombies, aside from the ones who have been shot, have already begun to slow down. One sprints after a man who has escaped from his car after crashing. Like all the other runners he’s seen, this one seems to be impossibly fast. They seem to have no medium speed; if they’re running, it’s all-out with no regard for what they hit or what they’re doing to their bodies. The zombie is in full stride when his—its?—left leg gives out, and it tumbles onto the street. It gets back to its feet and now has a severe limp; instead of running, it moves at a fast walk, the left leg dragging behind. Jason surmises that it has torn a muscle, and though it doesn’t look like it feels pain, physically it’s incapable of moving the way it had before it fell. He’s reminded of a line from The Terminator Two. In response to being asked if it hurts to get shot, the T100 says, “I sense injuries. The data could be called pain.”

  They’re just like the Terminator, D-Day thinks. Physically, injuries impact the zombies, but they don’t acknowledge the pain. It’s just data that causes them to change their method of attack. But they will not stop. Ever … unless their CPU (the brain) is destroyed. I guess that makes the rest of us John Connor.

  D-Day decides he needs to check the security of the building. The ground floor is an open design, with a security guard behind a central desk. The front entrance consists of a set of four doors, the first two of which are open to the public. They open outward, so you have to pull them to open them. Nothing D-Day has observed indicates that the undead have the mental capacity to do so. Smash car windows, yes. Smash the ballistic glass of which the doors are made? Probably not, but enough of them in a mob could break them off of the hinges.

  The second, inner, set of doors is only accessible with the access all residents have that replaces a physical key, or by being buzzed in by a resident. In short, no one can get in unless they live in the building or know someone who does. In addition to the doors, the panel windows are made of ballistic glass, so the odds of a zombie breaking them is remote, but in sufficient numbers—100, 500, 1000 zombies pressing against them—it’s not out of the realm of possibility they could push them out of their sealed frames. Jason dons his tactical vest and puts four magazines for the AR in the pouches. He holsters his .40 pistol and pockets two extra mags for it too, then grabs his rifle, and after checking the peephole, he heads out into the hallway.

  The hallway is quiet but well lit. There are only two windows, one at either end, by the entrances to the stairwells. The elevator is in the middle of the hallway, but Jason decides not to use it in case the power goes out. He hasn’t seen so much as a flicker yet, but all it takes is one car hitting a pole with a transformer and the electricity is gone. Instead, he goes for the stairs at the east end of the hallway.

  He opens the door and listens for a minute, but hears nothing. He enters the stairwell, taking the time to close the door quietly. He goes down to the ninth floor and cracks open the door to the hallway. Everything looks quiet. He works his way down floor by floor until he reaches the ground floor. He peeks out into the lob
by, but aside from the green EXIT sign over the main entrance, the lobby is dark. He curses himself for leaving his night vision goggles in his room. Nothing I can do about that now, he thinks. He slips into the lobby and lets the door ease closed behind him.

  There’s no sign of life in the lobby, which is unusual for this time of night on a Friday. Of course, no lights is unusual too, but it’s a good sign. There are no hordes of undead clamoring to get in, but D-Day can see the street teeming with them beyond the wide windows and glass doors.

  The hairs on the back of his neck stand up. He wheels around to see what has set off his internal alarm and finds himself staring into the barrel of a gun.

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  The security guard’s question hangs in the air a moment, somewhere between the gun he’s pointing at D-Day and the spot on D-Day’s forehead that would be concaved by the bullet fired from that gun.

  “Cortez, I’m just checking the security of the lobby. Put the gun down, or least point it somewhere other than my head. Please,” D-Day says, silently cursing himself for being too focused on the monsters outside to notice Cortez was behind him.

  “You’re going to open the doors and let them know we’re in here! I can’t let that happen,” Cortez replies.

  “Cortez, listen to me,” D-Day says. “I can see you’ve got the lobby handled. I just wanted to be sure that we weren’t getting overrun down here. Believe me, the last thing I want to do is let those things know we’re here. Come on, man, lower the gun.”

  Cortez the security guard wavers for a second, lowering the barrel of his gun just a bit, then raising it again. D-Day sees the indecision and knows he’ll lower it for good, and when he does …

  BLAM! The noise startles them both, and it’s a miracle that Cortez doesn’t pull the trigger. Instead, he pivots the gun toward the window to the left of the entry. D-Day turns, dropping down to a knee, raising his rifle, and sighting it in all in one motion. A zombie has slammed into the glass and is peering around the lobby. The reflective glass in front of the darkened lobby probably doesn’t afford much of a view inside. Cortez was smart to turn the lights out.