Carlie Simmons (Book 3): The Way Back (9 page)

Chapter 22

Twenty-Four Days after
Departing White Sands Military Base

In the morning, after they had eaten
breakfast together at the antique oaken table in the dining room, Eliza was
cleaning off the utensils with a paper towel. She paused for a minute as she
put a steak knife away in the drawer and turned towards Willis, who was still
sitting at the table finishing a glass of water.

“How do you turn it on and off?”

“You mean my desire for you? It appears I
can’t.”

“No, I mean your ability to, you know,
take someone’s life, and then go back to eating a sandwich or playing cards the
next day.”

“It’s different for everyone. For me, it’s
always been about self-importance. I don’t mean that in an egotistic way. More
like, too many people in my life rely on me and me on them.” He paused and
looked out the window then back at Eliza. “In the beginning of my training, I
used to recite to myself, ‘I must win this battle,’ over and over again while
doing my moves. And then I remember the first real-world firefight I was in
after joining the Secret Service. I had all this training in firearms and combatives
and I just got pissed.” He leaned both his arms on the table and interlaced his
fingers. “I remember thinking, in between the bullets whizzing past my head,
‘how dare you come into my world and threaten everything that I love—my friends
fighting beside me, my president, my country. I will fucking destroy you.’ When
you’re that angry, your fear gets squashed and your adrenaline can be channeled
into a powerful tool for getting the job done and prevailing against
overwhelming odds.”

Eliza paused in her work again. “Wow, I
didn’t know all you Secret Service types were so in touch with your inner
Yoda.”

Willis laughed and leaned back. “Believe
me, this isn’t a mental space you want to dwell in for long. It’s a brief split
in your psyche where you unleash the animalistic part of the brain to quell a
violent confrontation. Like having a shotgun under your jacket that you blast
away with when things turn to shit on the street. Afterwards, you pack it
neatly back into its storage box until you need it again.”

“It sure isn’t like I ever imagined it
would be, you know, from all the movie gunfights and zombie flicks I saw
growing up. I just hope that on this trip, we…that we…” She paused, searching
for the words. “I hope that we can just avoid any more encounters along the way
and get to Fort Lewis without having to use these skills,” she said, looking
down at the pistol on the counter beside her.

“Me, too,” he said, standing up and
arching his back in a stretch. “But just remember those five words: ‘I must win
this battle.’”

“Hmm, I like the other five words better: ‘I
will fucking destroy you.’”

Willis chuckled and shook his head. “With
that fiery look in your eyes, I’d hate to be facing you when you’re really
unhinged.”

“So what ever made you get into personal
protection work? You seem like the kind of driven, capable person who could
have pursued anything in life—why the Secret Service?”

Willis tilted his head to the right,
pondering the question. “You know many of us agents have had this conversation
between ourselves and most of us found that we all have in common the fact that
we are the oldest amongst our siblings and it was nearly unanimous that we got
our noses broken more than once as kids fighting off the schoolyard bully. I certainly
did, sticking up for my little brothers back in Houston. My dad abandoned us
when I was six and after that life was about pure endurance and trying to watch
out for my siblings. Sometimes just walking to school was a daily survival
ordeal given the shitty neighborhood we lived in.” He rested both arms on the
table, interlacing his fingers. “Later, after I got out of the military, I
wanted to continuing serving my country here at home—protecting the presidency
and all it stood for, that was a cause worth fighting for, even dying for if
necessary—though I can’t say I had that sentiment about every politician I’ve
worked with over the years.” He leaned back in his chair, looking at Eliza. “I
certainly wouldn’t have hesitated for a second to step between the Grim Reaper
and your father—or his daughter.”

Eliza was silent for a moment, letting out
a faint smile while trying to hold back tears for her father. Willis stood up
and moved alongside her, placing his hand over hers. “We’ll get through this,
Eliza. We’ve got enough supplies to hole up here for a while longer and that’ll
give you some time to round out your training.”

“Then what?” she said, squeezing his hand
back.

 “Then we’ll keep heading north by
whatever means possible until we’re brushing past the guards at the entrance to
Fort Lewis—unless you want to stay here in this cozy little farmhouse on the
prairie.”

She pulled back, frowning while looking through
the window at the bleak rural landscape. “Northward it is, then—just say the
word.”

Chapter 23

Thirty-Three Days after
Departing White Sands Military Base

Willis was crouching beside a cluster of
bushes near a narrow bridge, scanning the surrounding streets in the small town
of La Grande, Oregon. The Ford Taurus they had hotwired a few miles from the
farmhouse the day before had enough fuel to make it nearly 87 miles. During the
past day of walking, Willis only had to dispatch a few zombies at a derelict
rest area along the highway. The small towns dotting the route were either
cleaned out of supplies or burned to the ground.

Eleven miles later on foot, they had
entered the outskirts of the small ranching community of La Grande, population
13,752 according to the bent highway sign on I-84.

“The only way into town is over this
bridge or a bone-chilling swim across the river below,” said Willis. “Looks
like six of those things are between us and our destination so I opt for
staying dry. I’ll take the lead and you follow up behind me taking any strays,
OK? We’ll stick to our blades as I don’t want to draw down a whole town full of
these things.”

She nodded, clutching her large serrated
knife and feeling her heart punching through her chest. Most of the zombies
were clad in cowboy clothing except for the first one which was a leprous
creature dressed in a red hockey jersey. She could smell the rotting corpses
and see the black crust of accumulated tissue under their fingernails. She felt
her stomach clench up and she tasted a hint of bile in her mouth. Panic wasn’t
far away and she forced herself to pace her breathing as Willis had showed her.

“OK, now,” said Willis as he sprang
forward with his knife, slamming it into the left temple of the hockey player
and then shoving it over the guardrail into the waters below. Eliza wanted to
run the other way but she pushed off from her crouching position. It seemed as if
she was watching someone else for a moment as she saw her blade hand go into
position just as it had so many times in training. The creature to her right
was wearing a pink-striped apron and looked like a coffee barista. Its muted
groan turned into a bellow as it lunged for Eliza. She sidestepped and thrust
the blade forward, aiming for the eyes, but miscalculated the distance and
buried it into the upper lip, splitting it down the center and shattering the
front teeth. She yanked it out and delivered another fast jab, this time
hitting her target and dropping the beast onto the yellow centerline on the
road.

She instinctively recoiled, unprepared for
the blood splatter and the sickening noise of the blade hacking through bone,
neither of which she had thought about during training drills on a padded post.
Eliza staggered back a step, gulping down air, and then forced herself to move
forward.

Willis had already dropped two more
creatures when she moved up to his right, attacking a stout zombie clad in
greasy mechanic’s coveralls. Eliza grit her teeth and slammed the hefty blade
down on the cranium with all her might. The pulpy head split apart, spraying
fragments onto the bridge with a wet slap.

The last creature had moved in fast and
was nearly upon her. She pivoted and sliced it across the neck, causing it to
totter momentarily. The milky eyes of the long-limbed beast zoomed in on her,
its mouth widening as a stream of black drool spilled out. Before it could
regain its momentum, she closed the distance and punched the blade in an
uppercut motion through the lower jaw. The lanky creature collapsed in a heap.
She stood looking at the lifeless thing, her adrenaline-induced tunnel vision
preventing her from seeing anything around her. She felt something grab her
right arm and turned with her blade ready only to see Willis stepping back with
his hands up.

“Come on, we gotta go,” he said, nodding
over his shoulder to the cluster of buildings near Main Street. 

She pulled herself away from the slumped
body, looking at the other nearly headless figures along the road and then down
at her dripping blade. She took a deep breath and then sprinted after Willis,
following on his heels.

They darted in and out of derelict
vehicles to a large cluster of rosebushes near a daycare center.

“I don’t get it, everything looks so
normal, except for all the bullet-riddled walls on most of the buildings. The
streets look good and there are numerous cars still parked in an orderly
fashion.”

“The whole town looks like it was quickly
abandoned,” said Eliza. “I don’t see any evidence that people even tried to
hole up here.”

“But something
did
happen here,”
Willis said, pointing to all of the spent brass on the streets and sidewalks in
every direction. “Looks like a small army traipsed through the place. Maybe
they wiped out most of the undead here as there are only a handful.”

“Army is right,” said Eliza, pointing to
an olive-drab jeep with a flat tire parked near a bank. A white star adorned
the passenger’s side.

“And we’ve only seen a few bodies that
looked like they were chomped on. The other towns had way more carnage than
this,” said Willis.

Two tumbleweeds blew across the street and
lodged against a chain-link fence in front of the Chamber of Commerce. Eliza
could hear a door flapping against its wooden frame and saw the entrance to the
daycare center was open.

“That might be a place that has some
supplies. It’s worth checking out. Looks like the only building in town without
any bullet holes in the walls.”

Eliza scanned the streets around the
one-story structure and searched for escape routes and areas that would provide
cover as Willis had taught her. She looked at him also studying the layout and
then he nodded at her in approval.

“I’ll go first and sweep the front
entrance while you watch our six as we move in tandem,” said Willis.

A few minutes later, both of them were
moving silently through the lobby and into the main hallway, performing smooth,
two-man entry techniques. Rows of finger-painted murals hung on the walls to
the right while rows of knee-high cubbies lined the left side. With each room
they cleared, they found no evidence of any struggle and an absence of zombies.

“Damn strange,” Willis whispered as they
moved in unison to the kitchen area at the rear of the hall.

He pushed open the swinging door of the
kitchen and swiftly entered, sweeping his rifle along either side. This room
was also clear of any signs of struggle. Clean coffee cups were still hanging
on their j-hooks from the cupboard and a neatly folded pile of towels was stacked
along the edge of the stainless-steel sink. Eliza saw Willis look back with his
eyebrows scrunched together.

She walked up to the cabinets and opened
them. Most were empty but the last two on the far right had a box of instant
oatmeal, Cheerios, and a dozen bottles of assorted baby food.

“Well, dinner’s on me tonight,” Eliza said
with a crooked smile. “Question is—where should we have it? Not sure I want to
linger here. There’s something off about this whole town.”

“Agreed. I saw a weather-service relay
station on a distant hilltop to the northeast, maybe two miles out from here.
That would provide us with some distance and tactical high ground for tonight.”

“Alright. Sounds like a plan. I’m going to
gather up as many blankets as I can sling over my shoulder first.”

“I’ll tank up on water jugs and anything
else of value. Hopefully we can find some toothbrushes and hygiene stuff as our
supplies are running low.”

Chapter 24

Carlie walked down to the beach where
Matias was inspecting the helicopter. Jared and Amy were sitting under the
shade of a nearby palm tree twenty yards away providing overwatch. There hadn’t
been any zombies or footprints on the beach in several days but Carlie had
instructed everyone venturing out to maintain their former protocols and have
at least one other person with them for safety.

Matias was sitting on a tree stump to the
right side of the helicopter, inspecting the engine, whose rear quarter panel
was aloft. Spread out below him was a tarp with an array of wrenches,
screwdrivers, and other tools.

As Carlie approached, Matias leaned back
to wipe his greasy hands on a rag.

“Hola, mi amiga, como te va?

“Not bad, thanks—you?”

“Can’t complain. I always enjoyed working
on these things as much as flying ’em.” He tossed the soiled rag onto the sand
and picked up a wrench. “Everything looks good with the engine, hydraulics, and
rotors. Once I’m done here, I’ll do a diagnostic on the interior instruments
and control console and that oughta do it.”

She leaned her tan arm on the fuselage. “So,
how long are we looking at before we can depart?”

“Barring any issues, we should be ready to
lift off the day after tomorrow.”

Carlie dragged her left toes through the
sand, making a half-moon shape, then sighed. “Alright, looks like two days
hence it is then.”

“Or I could drag this on for another week
if you want to stay longer,” he said.

Carlie looked at him and then out at the
ocean, losing her thoughts in the waves for a moment. She reflected on how
everyone was looking and feeling better again. Their figures had filled out from
proper nourishment and rest. Smiles had emerged on their faces and now she was
going to have to pull them away from the private paradise they had stumbled
upon. “No…no…it’s time to push on. It’s just been nice having a few weeks of
living without day-to-day uncertainty and always looking over my shoulder. Now,
it seems like we’re headed back into the storm.”

“There’s nothing that says we have to
follow a rigid schedule. The sun will still rise tomorrow. We can be airborne
whenever you want.”

She wiped the sand pattern clear and
tamped it down with her foot. “Two days from now it is, amigo. I’ll have
everyone ready and then you can fly us back to the land of the free.”

“You got it, mi Hermana,” said Matias.

Carlie felt heart-warmed to be referred to
as a sister and it lightened her movement as she stepped away.

Matias called to her. “Hey.”

“Yeah.”

“You’ve done well to keep our heads above
water for so long. You’ve gotten us far, Carlie. Muchas Gracias.”

She smiled and bowed her head slightly at
him. “It’s been a team effort and I’m sure glad you’re on mine.”

****

The next evening, after a steambaked
dinner of sea bass and crab cooked up by Alejandro, Carlie went over the route
and plan one more time with the group. Shane and Matias re-iterated their
familiarity with the north-central region of Mexico and their plan to locate
one of the federale airstrips for refueling.

The rest of the time was spent doing
weapons inspection, loading magazines, and stocking their packs with food,
water, and medical supplies. When they had finished everyone relaxed around the
upper level of the lookout, sipping on their wineglasses in between recounting
stories from the past seven weeks followed by an awkward silence, gazing out
into the inky black night as the cacophony of cicadas kept match with their own
internal dialogue of what was to come. Before retreating to their sleeping
areas, each person bade Alejandro farewell with hearty embraces and the promise
of a brighter future when their trails might cross again.