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

  “Dude, what’s up? What is it?” Keith asks. In the back seat, Andy pops his head out of his sweatshirt and looks around the darkness in vain.

  “No one do anything,” Ben says. He’s looking around with his night vision goggles. “No sudden moves, just sit still.”

  “What’s the deal? I can’t see anything!” Toni says.

  “We’re surrounded,” Ben says.

  Toni gulps out loud. “By zombies?”

  “Not exactly.”

  Seven

  Denver, Colorado

  Cortez and D-Day look at the monitor, watching the recorded replay of the people from Apartment 103 getting their door shut a second before the dead reach it. With the outer emergency door blocked open by the wrecked motorcycle, nothing stops the zombies from getting into the building. A steady stream of them comes in, so the inner door never has a chance to close, and now about forty of the creatures occupy the first-floor hallway. Several pound on the door to 103, trying to get to the people they’ve just seen disappear behind the rectangular barrier.

  The other people who were peeking out of their apartments have withdrawn, but not before a couple of zombies spotted them, so they’re now pounding on their doors as well. In the stairwell, more zombies come in, and with the inner door proving to be a bottleneck of the undead, many of them stumble up the stairs like water following the path of least resistance, rather than waiting to gain access to the first-floor hallway. Once in the stairwell, they only need to lean against the push bar to get the doors on each floor to open. There’s nothing stopping the zombies from overrunning the building.

  Cortez turns on the camera to the second-floor west stairwell and sees zombies already walking around on the landing. It’s clear that they need to secure the entrances to the west stairs.

  “Cortez, I need you to get to the intercoms for the apartments on the first floor. Tell the people to stay inside, keep quiet and we’ll get to them. Make a note on which apartments answer and which ones don’t. Then start on the second floor—be sure to tell them the west stairs are closed—certain death if they try to get out that way. They should stay put, and we’ll let them know when we’ve got it secured. Every ten minutes radio me so we can sync statuses and plan our next steps,” D-Day says.

  “Where are you going?” Cortez asks.

  “As soon as you show me where the maintenance room is, I’m going to secure the west stairs,” D-Day replies as he grabs one of the security team’s walkie-talkies.

  Cortez shows him the way to the maintenance room, which thankfully isn’t behind the lobby doors where the undead are roaming free in the hallway. He goes back to the security console, grabs a notepad, and goes out to the front desk, where he starts working on contacting the first-floor residents.

  In the maintenance room, D-Day looks over the supplies. He’s lucky; the maintenance crew is well organized. The toolboxes have all the drawers labeled. The cordless tools are lined up under a bank of batteries that are on their chargers. This will make things a lot easier.

  D-Day grabs a canvas tool bag and puts in two cordless drills and four batteries. He locates drill bits and grabs several 3/32” diamond drill bits and loads one into one of the cordless drills. He grabs several Philips head screwdriver bits, loading one into the other cordless drill. He throws a couple of boxes of three-inch screws into the bag as well. Looking around, he spots a couple of large rubber doorstops and a pair of wooden ones; he adds them to his kit. He grabs some rope and, of course, duct tape for good measure and heads for the east stairwell.

  D-Day opens the second-floor door a crack and peeks through the gap. No one is visible; most important, there are no zombies.

  He trots down the hall to the west stairs. On the other side of the door, he can hear the zombies grumbling and stumbling on the stairs. He takes one of the wooden doorstops and wedges it under the door on the side that opens, giving it a kick to ensure it’s wedged in there good and tight. Then he pulls out the cordless drills and starts to work.

  He starts drilling a hole through the metal door jamb into the steel door at eye level. Right away he can hear the zombies on the other side get more active and start vocalizing more. It’s a terrifying sound, but not as bad as when he hears the push bar get depressed from the other side of the door. The latch is released, and the upper half of the door moves about a half inch inward, but the wedge at the bottom holds the door shut. D-Day switches to the drill with the screwdriver bit in it. He pushes against the door with all his might and manages to get the screw started with his free hand. The door buckles inward again, and again D-Day pushes it back.

  He gets the cordless drill working and drives the screw home. The door doesn’t move again. He repeats the process on the lower half of the door, and a final time just below the latch in the middle. Satisfied the door isn’t going to budge, he puts the tools back in the bag and heads for the east stairs again. He thinks about using the elevator to save time, but he’s still concerned about an untimely power outage, and he doesn’t know if the third floor has been breached. It would be bad to have to doors open to a dozen man-eaters, so he makes the trek all the way down the hall to the stairwell and advances to the third floor.

  He sees two zombies at the far end of the hall, but the door to the stairwell is shut. D-Day shifts the canvass bag around to his back and brings the AR15 up, thankful he remembered to secure the suppressor to it before leaving his apartment, and sights in on the first zombie. He pulls the trigger and sees a puff of oily blood mist through the air behind the zombie’s head. It drops in its tracks like someone cut the strings on a marionette. Even suppressed, an AR15 still makes a fair bit of noise—about as loud as a car door shutting—and the other zombie, a woman, or rather it used to be a woman, keys in on the source of the sound. It locks eyes on D-Day and starts sprinting toward him.

  He squeezes the trigger again. A spray of black fluid jets from the creature’s left shoulder just above the collar bone. It doesn’t even notice; it just keeps coming. D-Day drops to one knee and exhales. He squeezes the trigger again, and the dead woman goes down, sporting a new hole in her forehead.

  He gets up and runs toward the west door. As he does so, he hears the walkie-talkie crackle but can’t understand what Cortez is saying. His primary concern is to get a wooden wedge under the door so no additional undead can get into the hallway from the stairwell.

  “Not from … tairs …” the walkie-talkie crackles. Cortez’s voice sounds stressed. “Apart … oh-four!”

  As D-Day passes Apartment 304, he puts together what Cortez is saying, but not before a zombie hits him full force as it sprints from the open doorway of Apartment 304.

  The zombie knocks D-Day off balance but doesn’t take him to the ground. The dead child only reaches about four feet tall, and D-Day gets his AR15 between himself and the little zombie’s mouth. The creature bites down hard on the magazine, damaging it but at the same time breaking several teeth. D-Day gives the kid a hard shove, knocking it a couple of feet backward. He pivots the rifle and puts a round right through the kid’s head. The pint-sized monster goes down in a heap.

  The latch on the door to the east stairwell clicks, and D-Day can see the door start to open. He sprints the final twenty-five feet down the hall, slams into the door and smashes a female zombie between the door and the door jamb. He can hear her ribs break, and she vomits a stream of black bile onto the carpet. The odor makes D-Day retch.

  On the other side of the door, he hears several zombies clattering on the staircase. He must have knocked them backward when he slammed the door shut on the woman. His AR failed to cycle a round because of the damage the kid caused to the magazine, so he draws his pistol and lets the door loose for a second. The woman starts to fall inward, so he grabs her and throws her into the hallway then leans his back against the door and closes it all the way this time.

  The zombie gets back to her feet, her torso caved in on one side. She’s unable to draw fully upright but still manages t
o turn toward him, her hands reaching out in anticipation, teeth clacking together. Unlucky for her, he’s ready with his pistol and fires two rounds. The first one passes through her cheeks and hits an apartment door behind her. The second hits her just under her left eye, the bullet penetrating her skull and flipping the off switch. The force of impact pushes her left eye out of the socket, and her forward momentum brings her to rest at D-Day’s feet.

  The undead pound at the door again. D-Day can hear the push bar getting depressed over and over as the dead are pressing themselves against the door. Each time it clicks, the door buckles inward before he pushes it back. His tool bag lies on its side, too far down the hall for him to reach before the door will spring open.

  He looks at the magazine the child zombie bit. The bottom plate is gone, and the plastic is smashed together. He releases the magazine from the receiver and drops it to the floor. With one foot, he moves it over to the edge of the door on the latch side and pushes the smashed end under the door. It just fits, and he gives it two good solid kicks, wedging it in place. He checks the rifle to ensure it’s clear of any jams, puts a fresh magazine in it, and cycles the charging handle. He releases his pressure on the door and takes a cautious step back. It holds. He sprints to the tool bag, and when he gets back to the door he puts one of the wood wedges in place for good measure. It takes him less than three minutes to get two screws in place. He decides not to bother with a third one; he’d rather get to the fourth floor and secure it before any zombies can get in up there.

  After he retrieves the wedge and the broken magazine from the bottom of the door, he radios Cortez to find out how he’s coming on reaching the residents of the building, but he gets no answer. As he turns to head back toward the east stairwell, he sees several of the doors are cracked open, curious residents peeking into the hall.

  “We’re secure out here for now,” he says loud enough so the people can hear him. “Please do not try to go outside tonight. You won’t last long. Right now your best defense is to stay in your apartments.”

  The door to 305 opens and a middle-aged woman stands in the doorway. “Who are you?” she asks, eying his AR with caution.

  “Name’s Jason, but I go by D-Day. I live on ten,” he says. “The west stairwell’s overrun with these”—he pauses for a second, unsure if he should use the word or not, then decides he might as well get used to it—“zombies. I’m trying to get the stairwell doors locked, so the rest of the building doesn’t get overrun too.”

  He sees her looking at the open door to 304 and the four bodies in the hallway. He notices for the first time that there’s blood on the door and a real crime scene inside the apartment. He’s expecting the woman to introduce herself, but she doesn’t. She just stares at the open doorway.

  “Did you see what happened?” he asks, breaking her out of her reverie.

  “I heard him come in a while ago. Jim. Jim was his name, the father.” She’s already using the past tense. “Hanson was his last name. He was shouting and pounding on the door. He was frantic. A few minutes before you came, I heard screaming again and the door opened. By the time I got to the peephole, the screaming was over and I didn’t see anyone, just that open door. I thought about poking my head out to call out to them, but the TV told us not to open the door for anyone. I just kept looking out there and then Jim came walking down from the end of the hall. If I had opened the door …” she trails off. After a couple of seconds, she says, “There were four of them.”

  “What do you mean there were four of them?” D-Day asks.

  “In the apartment. There were four of them living there.”

  He turns to the open door. He could just shut it and seal the fourth resident in the apartment, but they would try to get out if they turned. Maybe whoever it was hadn’t been bitten. Maybe they weren’t even home. He turns back to the woman.

  “Ma’am, do you know if all four of them were home?” he asks.

  “I think so. It’s Jim, his wife, his daughter from another marriage, and the son they have together. Jim, Betty and John, you’ve … taken care of,” she says, choosing her words carefully. “But I heard two different women screaming, so I think Nancy is home.”

  Overall, this gal is taking things pretty well, he thinks. Out loud he says, “The daughter. How old?”

  “I’m not sure. Fourteen or fifteen, I think.”

  “You should go back into your apartment. I’ll take care of this,” he says.

  He turns and enters Apartment 304. He hears a moaning sound coming from the bathroom, so he knows what waits for him. Taking care not to slip in the pool of blood in the hallway, he moves forward to clear the threat.

  Eight

  Somewhere south of Fort Collins

  “What do you mean ‘not really’?” Toni asks.

  “I can only see so well with these goggles, but there’s a bunch of armed people outside the car,” Ben says.

  “Oh shit, is it the Army?” Natalie asks from the back seat.

  “No, it’s not the Army,” he says.

  Ben reaches for the window handle and starts turning it.

  “What are you doing?” Toni asks.

  “They want to talk to us,” Ben replies.

  Outside, one of the armed people is making the “roll down your window” sign. Ben rolls the window down the rest of the way. He can see the man has night vision goggles on as well, but his look like the real deal. He approaches the side of the car as another person, also wearing night vision, moves so they can keep their rifle trained on Ben.

  “I’d feel a lot better if I could see some hands,” the man says. “I’d be a lot less jumpy with the iron, if you understand me.”

  Ben raises both of his hands so the man can see them. Everyone else in the car follows suit.

  “We’re unarmed,” Ben says.

  “Well, maybe you are and maybe you aren’t. I don’t know you enough to take your word for anything. In fact, I don’t know you at all, except that you’re on my property on a night all hell is breaking loose. The National Guard is locking down the countryside, and here you are creeping along in the dark with your car full of people looking to do Lord knows what,” the man says.

  “We’re just trying to get to Longview, to my parents’ house,” Ben says. “I’m sorry about the trespassing, but we can’t take the main roads, and the longer we stay in Fort Collins the worse it gets. We’re afraid if we don’t get out now, we’ll never get out.”

  The man regards Ben for a minute. “Can you see well enough to get this old beast into that shed down there?” The man points to a building too big to be just a shed and too small to be a barn. It lies ahead just to the right of the trail that he believes Andy wanted them to take.

  “Yes, I can,” Ben says.

  “Put her in gear and ease down there. Try to take off and you’ll have trouble.” The man taps his rifle for emphasis.

  Ben pulls the FJ into the big shed as the man and three other figures follow them and shut the doors to the building after they’ve entered.

  “Watch your eyes!” the man says to them. Ben takes the night vision off and a second later overhead lights illuminate the space.

  The man opens the rear doors on the FJ, with two other people behind him, guns trained on the passengers.

  “You all come out slowly, please. Keep your hands where we can see ’em. March yourselves up to the front of the car,” the man directs them.

  They all file out and move to the open area in front of the SUV.

  “Now you, driver and passenger, join your friends. Same drill, move slow, keep your hands where I can see ’em and we’ll all be happy.”

  The man looks at them for a long couple of moments.

  “Well,” he finally says, “you don’t seem like a bunch of desperadoes. You mind telling me who you are and what you was planning on doing?”

  They look at each other for a few seconds, and then Ben starts talking. He introduces everyone in his group and proceeds to tell th
e man about their experience at the party, the horrors of driving back to their apartment, and the newscasts they saw. He tells him about their attempt to leave town via Shields, the encounter with the Army, Ben’s idea to take the power company’s access road, Andy’s navigation with his iPad and phone, and their eventual arrival at their host’s property.

  “That’s not bad, kids, not bad at all. Right up until you crossed the boundary of my property and broke the infrared sensors I have set across the road. It rings a buzzer up at the house, lets us know someone’s coming up the drive. You’re on the right track keeping to the back roads. What you all ran into was Army National Guard, not regular Army. On the news, they’ve said that the Guard is stretched pretty thin, but they’ve got the major intersections covered. Denver is a mess, and most of the Guard units have been called there to support the police. Colorado Springs is having a hell of a time of it too. The Army units in the Springs out of Fort Carson are fighting in the streets but from what we’ve seen, they’re not faring too well. If you can keep away from the big intersections, you’re likely to be okay.”

  “Have you heard anything about Longview?” Keith asks.

  “No mention of it, other than from the maps they’ve been showing on TV. It looks pretty clear. Most of the focus is on Denver; that’s where most of the people are. Colorado Springs, Boulder, Fort Collins have all been hit hard. Grand Junction over on the Western Slope has taken a beating. Whatever this thing is, it’s worldwide, and it’s spreading. They’ve said that if you come in contact with the body fluids of these people, you become like them. Violent beyond control. I don’t think the police are asking too many questions now. They’re just shooting if someone doesn’t look right. It’s bad, kids.

  “Now, all this considered, Longview probably ain’t a bad place to be right now. I know it pretty well, had a cousin that lived there for a bit in the nineties. You have access to any number of side roads to get out of town, close to the mountains, several connections to major highways within ten miles of the town, assuming they’re passable within the next few days. I expect once this settles a bit you won’t have a problem getting out of town, if that’s what you want to do.”