Cryonic (18 page)

“Just calm down, buddy. I'm going to help you out with that,” I said while treading water beside him. “Just keep your head up, and I'll get it off you.”

I swam around behind him and started working on the straps. I tried to work quickly as we were still drifting
downstream and losing valuable time. I almost had the weapon off when I felt a hand grab hold of my hair. I turned. A bloated naked zombie floated in the water. It was on its back and didn't seem to have swimming figured out. I kicked it a few feet away from us. This kept it at bay long enough for me to finish removing Alex's weapon.

“Get going, buddy,” I said. “I'll catch up to you in a minute. Remember, head down and stay calm, OK?”

Alex started swimming toward Celeste and Dr. Trowbridge. I swam over to the zombie and stuck Alex's bayonet deep into the skull. The zombie stopped moving and floated downstream behind me, the rifle sticking up into the air. I chuckled at the sight, raised my head high out of the water to see if I could spot any more trouble, and continued swimming.

I caught up to Alex and was crawling alongside him when I heard Celeste scream ahead of us. I caught a glimpse of her arms in the air before she was pulled under. I put my head down and sprinted as fast as I could. When I got there, Dr. Trowbridge was treading water.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I don't know. I think she got caught on something.”

Celeste popped up a few feet from us, screamed again, and then disappeared back under the water. I dove straight under and swam in the direction of where she had surfaced. I couldn't see a thing in the murky water, but kept swimming deeper until I felt her hand hit my arm. I grabbed it and pulled my way down her body until I felt the fleshy hands clutching her ankles. I could see the zombie's face. It was fresh (not bloated and decomposing like the one I'd seen floating), and it was holding her tight as it gradually sank to the bottom. I kicked the zombie repeatedly in the
face, which had no effect upon its grasp. When we reached the bottom, I searched desperately for something to hit the zombie with but found nothing. I pulled on its fingers until I'd released its grasp. It grabbed me by the arms. I put my feet on its shoulders and pushed myself free. I was desperate for air as I swam upward, and I gasped loudly as soon as my face broke the surface.

“Are you all right?” I asked Celeste, who was treading water.

“I'm fine . . .” she said before coughing up water. “Really, I'm fine.”

“Go, you two! Go, go, swim for shore. They don't know how to swim, but it's floating with the current right underneath us. Just get away from here, and I'll go for Alex.”

Celeste and Dr. Trowbridge did as I told them. Alex was just ten yards behind us. As I turned to swim toward him, the ghoul beneath me swiped at my ankle.

“Hey, buddy,” I said, treading water alongside Alex, “we need to change our course a little bit. There's a freak up there, and he's drifting along underneath the surface—right where you're headed. They can't swim so we need to just adjust course to avoid him. We're going to swim against the current for a little while, okay?”

Alex nodded and spit out water.

“Just count thirty strokes with me against the current, and then we'll head for shore. That'll keep us away from him.”

Alex did as I told him. By the time we were within eyeshot of the sandbar, Celeste and Dr. Trowbridge were already standing on it. We were too far away from shore to join them. We watched desperately as we drifted downriver past the sandbar.

“All right, Al, it's time to dig deep. We need to make one last push toward shore before the river gets much wider. Can you do it?” I asked.

“I can do it,” he said.

The river opened up quickly, which added a good hundred yards to our swim. By the time we reached the rocky riverbank, we were well past the sandbar and good and scraped up from our rough exit.

“You did good,” I said, patting Alex on the back. We sat on the edge of the riverbank, trying to catch our breath.

“But my gun . . . it's gone.”

“Aw, don't worry about that. Here, you can take mine.”

I took the gun off my back and handed it to Alex. Once we'd had a moment to rest, we walked up a grassy hill near the edge of the shoreline to look for Celeste and Dr. Trowbridge. We could see them in the distance walking toward us. I looked the other way, to see how far we needed to walk to the vehicles. I noticed a bunker hidden in the back of the hillside about fifty yards away.

“Hey, Al, you see that?”

“Yes, yes, I do. Looks like a bunker. Maybe there are some more guns in there. You want to go have a look?”

“Sure, why not.”

The bunker had been built with large stones. There was a short, narrow doorway on the right and a tiny window on the left. It was dark, and we couldn't see inside. We crept carefully toward the doorway and stopped about fifteen feet away.

“Careful,” I said. “There might be some freaks in there. Better turn on your laser.”

“OK.”

Alex pushed on the button to retract the bayonet. Nothing happened. He turned the gun sideways and held the button closer to his face, pushing on it repeatedly.

“It's not working,” he said.

Zombies in camouflage army uniforms burst out of the door.

“It's not working, it's not working!” he screamed.

“Shoot them!” I yelled.

The zombies were just a few feet away. Alex pointed the gun at them and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.

“The safety!” I yelled, surveying our surroundings for something to defend myself with.

Alex struggled to find it. I reached over and clicked the safety off. Alex sprayed the front line of attackers with a wild burst of gunfire. It ran across the chests of two before going up into the head of a third and off into the horizon. The head shot took care of that one, but the other two kept coming. I pushed one down, and Alex drove his bayonet into the other's skull. There were more right behind them, and two tackled me to the ground. I pushed one off with my left hand and held the other at bay by the throat. I looked over at Alex. His bayonet was still lodged in the zombie's skull. He tried desperately to pull it out, but it was stuck. As he stood there struggling, three more zombies lumbered around their impaled comrade and took Alex down.

I will never forget Alex's screams. They were so high-pitched, so bloodcurdling that they tore my focus away from the zombie on my left, which bit hard into my rib cage. The rush of pain and my friend's plight made my adrenaline surge. I rolled the zombie laying on top of me into the other and stumbled to my feet. Three zombies crouched over Alex. One tugged morsels of flesh from his neck with its teeth. The other two dug deep into his abdomen, pulled out his intestines, and pushed them clumsily into their mouths.

I stood there in shock watching those horrible creatures devour my closest friend. Alex was silent and no longer
moving. He was gone. The two zombies hunting me lunged. I broke free from their outstretched arms. I didn't even look at them; survival no longer mattered. All I wanted was to help my friend, but I couldn't. I stormed over and yanked the rifle from the dead zombie's skull. I blasted a flurry of rounds into the temple of the zombie on my side of Alex's abdomen and another burst into the face of the zombie on the other side. Then I turned to the ghoul eating his neck and drove the bayonet deep into the back of its skull. I put my foot on its back and pulled the bayonet out, then held the gun high above my head and swung it down again. I yelled at the top of my lungs as I repeated this over and over until the head was in so many pieces that I didn't know where to strike. My tunnel vision was so consuming that I didn't realize Celeste and Dr. Trowbridge had run up behind me and killed the two remaining attackers.

“Oh my God . . . oh my God. Alex!” Celeste cried. She knelt beside him and placed her hand gently against his bloodstained face. One by one, her tears splashed onto his forehead.

I fell down into a heap and wept for my fallen friend. He had saved my life so many times, and I was crushed by the realization that I couldn't do the same for him.

Dr. Trowbridge searched the bunker but found only several clips of ammunition. We walked from the bunker to the vehicles in a heavy silence. Celeste and I were devastated, and only moved at Trowbridge's insistence. Through the binoculars, I saw more zombies milling about in the distance. We shambled along in our underwear, our hair still dripping wet. My side ached and bled, but the wound wasn't life-threatening, as my rib cage prevented the bite from going deep.

My companions' lasers had also been ruined by the river. We were broken and vulnerable, moving out in the open with nothing but bayonets and a few clips of ammunition between us and untold numbers of walking dead.

“What a hunk of junk! And no keys, either,” Dr. Trowbridge said, slamming the door shut on a Humvee. “They must have retreated as soon as the plague reached this side of the river.”

“How do you know that?” I asked.

“Well, first off, there's hardly any of them here, minus the infected we saw back in the city, and second, they left nothing behind but the junk.”

To me, the vehicles looked like modern, military-grade Humvees, but I suppose that's because they were built during my lifetime.

“Why would they even have these things?” I asked. “They're old as dirt.”

“This war changed everything,” he explained. “The military put anything they could get their hands on along the front . . . anything to keep the Chinese from moving west.”

“Well, they aren't going west anymore.”

“Not alive they aren't,” Celeste added.

Her comment was a stark reminder of our duty and the challenge before us. I opened the driver's side door on another Humvee and was relieved to find the key in the ignition. I climbed inside, pushed the gas, and turned the key. The engine rocked and choked before roaring to life.

“Now
this
is my kind of car,” I said, leaning my head out the window. “She runs like a champ and has almost a full tank of gas to boot.”

“That's good,” Dr. Trowbridge said, “because we won't be able to refill the tank.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“No gas stations. Just charging stations. Nobody uses fuel anymore except the military and aviators.”

“We'll find an airport then. I bet this thing will run on AVGAS.”

“Once we make it to Kansas City, maybe. They moved everybody away from the front when the war started so there won't be anything between here and there. Of course, once we get to KC we can probably just get another car. That's assuming . . .”

“The city is overrun?”

“Yes, and if it is, we'll just keep on going.”

“Do you think they'll listen to us once we find them?” Celeste asked.

“Who, the military?”

“Whoever.”

“We need to find the military, and if we do, they'll listen to me. Somebody there ought to be able to verify my credentials. I worked for them long enough.”

“You were in the military?”

“No, just a consultant, but I worked for them exclusively for several years before the war. The Chinese sought me out because of that.”

“They trusted you?”

“They had to. I knew our bioterrorism tactics better than anyone. Plus, they threatened me with reeducation if I mislead them. I figured I wasn't going to be any use to our boys back home if that happened, so I played along all these years in the hope that one day I might be able to help the cause. Now with you two . . . that day is here.”

“That's heavy, doc. I hope we can find them soon. The longer we take, the more it seems like we're going to find freaks instead of people.”

We drove southwest through fallow fields until we found a road that linked up to I-70. We could get there more easily through the city, but we didn't want to go anywhere near it after the bombing. The Humvee was loud and it vibrated wildly, but it felt safe, and it tore right through the uneven terrain.

We barreled down the highway, raising our voices over the road noise.

“I don't know about you two, but this drive will be a lot more comfortable if we can find some clothes,” I said. “I'm getting tired of looking at you two in your underwear.”

“You're not so hot yourself,” Dr. Trowbridge joked.

“How about there?” Celeste asked. She pointed toward fallen soldiers at an abandoned checkpoint.

I stopped the vehicle. “You want to wear their uniforms?”

“Might be all we can find,” Dr. Trowbridge said. “Very little between here and KC.”

“But we found all kinds of stuff in Weston.”

“This wasn't that kind of evacuation. It was a relocation. People had time to collect their belongings. Besides, we don't have enough gas to go around searching for clothes.”