LZR-1143 (Book 4): Desolation (43 page)

We didn’t waste any time. Jogging quickly to the office building, we peered in cautiously at first, ensuring that we were alone. Eli located the boxes jammed into a corner in a large crate, and I began the laborious process of hauling them to the door.
 

When the heavy pallets were accessible from outside, I took a deep breath, following the child without pause to the two large trucks. They were definitely not typical Fords, but these I probably could have managed without the kid’s encyclopedic knowledge. Still, his ability to hot-wire a large piece of construction machinery was, I will admit, rather impressive.
 

Plus, it kept me from having to ransack the office for keys, wasting precious time.

The huge engine, blessed by an industrial grade, long life battery, roared to life with a bare hiccup of confusion as we pulled in front of the office and I manipulated the small loading arm to the straps on the pallet. The explosives were pre-packaged, and easy to load—even for someone with no prior heavy equipment experience.
 

I did, however, manage to slam one of the wooden pallets against the metal bed. It creaked and groaned, but didn’t explode in a fiery maelstrom of certain, painful death. Under my breath—and away from Eli’s judging eyes—I called that a win.

The two pallets of Blastex were crooked and loose on the bed, but I didn’t care. It wasn’t a long trip. The engine continued to idle as we got back inside and started back toward where we had last … hung out.

God, I kill me sometimes.

In the distance behind us, to the south and to the east, two roaring, flaming volcanoes exploded in a renewed bid to spit anger into the sky, giving the appearance of an early dawn. I could clearly see spouts of magma shooting into the air, and the constant rumble and explosive force of the eruption was loud in our ears. Like constant thunder from a storm just off the horizon.

As I watched their renewed fury light up the sky, a nagging sensation flickered at the corner of my mind. I felt like I was missing something important. Something keyed to the volcanoes and the noise and light. But nothing came, and I didn’t have time to chase down the mental rabbit hole.
 

The truck came to a stop at the center of the large structure, and I noticed the widening cracks beneath us. It wasn’t going to take much to bring this down. I hoped.
 

But my mind continued to wander. Something was missing, but what? Everything had gone mostly to plan. Exit the building, check. Clear the zombies, check. Get the explosives, check. Make sure the exit was clear …

Slowly, my head rotated to the east again.
 

Where the massive light and sound show was making a GnR reunion tour look like a baby’s lullaby.
 

Then I looked down, to the town below. To where thousands of creatures were slowly starting to mill in one direction.
 

Up.
 

Toward the sound and light.

Toward the dam.

“Out of the truck, kid. We have to light these candles and we have to do it now,” I said hurriedly. We were on a tighter clock than we had believed. We had to open this dam before the bulk of those things could get out of the way of the water. The roadway up was steep, and it was long.
 

But once they climbed more than two hundred feet up, by my rough estimate, they’d be out of the range of our waterfall of zombie destruction.

So we had about ten minutes to light this candle.

I checked my watch. Assuming they had followed our plans to the second, the group should be reaching the outer door now. Which means they would make their way to the road in five minutes, and would be out of harm’s way.

Shit, this was going to be close.
 

Eli didn’t question the order, he just hopped out, pulling his pack around and yanking his book free. I jumped to the top of the truck bed and pulled the lid from the top of the pallet. Inside were several different boxes, with names I didn’t recognize.

“Forget it,” he said. “Just open the other box and find something marked primer cord. Then stretch a long length between the two boxes.”
 

His nose was in the book now, confirming what he already knew. Then the book slammed shut and he was peering over the edge of the pallets, pulling hard plastic pieces and cords out with two hands.
 

The Blastex was in a large box inside each crate and he didn’t bother trying to remove it. The primer and the cord were placed, and he pulled the detonator box along with him as he moved to the other side and linked the two boxes together with one string.

I watched in nervous anticipation. Nervous that he’d plug wire A into slot F, and we’d be annihilated in a millisecond; nervous that a herd of zombies would soon crest the ridge ahead of us before we could destroy a dam and flood the valley below; and oddly, slightly nervous about the male pattern baldness that ran in my family.
 

I have somewhat exotic fears, okay?
 

“Okay,” Eli said, a tinge of doubt in his voice, checking the set up the third time. “I think that does it.”

“Think? You’re inspiring huge dollops of confidence here, kid. Can’t you be sure?”
 

He looked at me with a large frown.

“I’m doing this from memory, for the first time, in the dark, while a herd of zombies is trying to come eat me. Oh, and I’m just a kid. ‘Think’ is the best you’re getting.” He nodded to the large, heavy detonator and said “Grab that, it’s too heavy for me.”

We ran to the other side, dodging large cracks and uneven pavement. Ahead, we couldn’t make out any forms—human or zombie—in the resolving distance between us and the curve in the road.
 

We took a position about fifty yards back from the edge of the dam, behind a low cement barrier with the cliff wall to our left and the road to our right. A fallen tree blocked us from behind, so we were safe from view if we lay prone.
 

I checked my watch. They were due up now.

Shit. They were late.

But I was sure the zeds wouldn’t be.
 

“New plan. You stay here and you blow that dam in exactly …” I checked my watch. “Three minutes, if I don’t come back. Got it?”
 

He nodded, resting against the rock wall and looking in both directions.

“If they’re still in there …” he trailed off.
 

“They aren’t,” I said, projecting a certainty I didn’t feel. The quake could have knocked out a tunnel. They could have been swarmed by the zombies we left behind. The door could be blocked by rubble.

Anything could have happened.

“We have to blow that dam before those things get up here. If we don’t, no one has a chance. You read me? There’s no way away from these things if we can’t take them out with one blow. They’re going to make it, I promise.” I put my hand on his shoulder briefly, then turned away, running toward the edge of the woods, where the walkway to the pump room emerged from the hillside.

But even as I turned the first corner, angling downhill, I heard the rapid fire of an automatic weapon and skidded to a halt. Bullets tore into the trees and dirt around me as I dove into the underbrush.

“Friendly, friendly!” I yelled, wincing as I removed a pine cone from my neck.
 

“Mike?”
 

It was Ethan’s voice, and I rose slowly, peering down the path, allowing a smile to split my face.

“You’re late!” I yelled, watching as the rest of the group made their way up the steep incline. “We’ve got some fireworks all set that the kids should really enjoy!”
 

I allowed myself a short laugh of joy as a fifty pound blur of wet, red fur barreled into my leg and I crouched quickly to scratch the top of Romeo’s head before he shook loudly and ranged ahead of the group, nose to the ground.
 

“I doubt that,” said Rhi, following closely behind her husband’s slow, limping form, rifle up and ready. “They were freaked out enough by our slog through the shaking tunnels and our fight with those freaks in the hall. That your doing?” Her tone was accusing and I held my hands up before moving past her to help carry Margaret, nodding once as Reggie thanked me for the help.

“Nope, you can thank Eli and Rosy for that,” I said.

“Are they …” This was from Susan, who clutched her son Tommy tightly to her chest.
 

Ahead of me, Ethan and Rhi had reached the road, and I checked my watch. Two minutes left.

“Rosy didn’t make it, I’m sorry. But I have Eli with me. He’s waiting up the road …” I trailed off, as my eyes caught movement to our left, down the road coming from town.
 

Time’s up.

“Ethan, Rhi, can you hold back a minute? Reggie, can you see that cement barrier up there on the left? That’s where Eli is. Get the kids behind that barrier and you guys button up, okay?”
 

Reggie nodded, and ushered the children away as I handed Margaret back to him.

No one else could see as well in the dark, so they hadn’t made out the approaching forms. But Rhi could hear it in my voice as we stepped away.

“Where?” she asked simply.

I pointed, raising my gun.

“They’re already too high for the water to get to them,” I said, checking my watch. Less than a minute until Eli blew the dam. There were at least thirty of them in the front ranks, above what I estimated to be the danger line for the rushing water.

“Okay, we take a knee here, let them come slowly. They don’t see us yet, and if we start shooting now, it’ll draw more of them faster. The water might distract them and we take them down when they’re cut off. Agreed?”
 

I nodded and watched Ethan spit in the ground before doing the same. Rhi found a large fallen tree to hide behind and I jogged across the road, finding a piece of rotting fence post and a snarl of wire fencing against the rock wall. Ethan took a position behind me and to the left.
 

The night was quiet, now that we had settled. I even heard the chirp of a single bird, underneath the distant rumble of the volcanoes. The light still split the sky in uneven waves of diffuse oranges, reds and yellows. As I put my hand on Romeo’s flank for comfort—he had just returned from pointing diligently at the approaching herd before a quick low whistle brought him back to me—I wondered again about Kate and Ky, hoping against hope that they were safe and we could find each other. I hadn’t yet resolved the question of how, but knew that there was only one place to start: back at the bridge.
 

If I could follow their trail, I could know they were still moving north. I vaguely remember a conversation that Kate and I had before we left the cabin. She mentioned a rest stop that she had used once, right outside the city, maybe twenty miles to the east. A large moose outside.
 

That was it.

She would go there, I knew it. And I could find her there.
 

With a small smile of satisfaction on my face, I bent my head to look at my watch, and the world exploded.

***

Before the apocalypse, the city of Vancouver, British Columbia, was home to roughly 2.4 million people. The city, combined with its suburbs and surrounding areas, was a thriving metropolis. A vibrant, glowing jewel in the Canadian crown, full of outdoorsy, laid back people with a real zest for life. Thriving trade and commercial ventures. It was even a popular spot for television filming, due to lenient overtime laws and the ability to avoid U.S. labor unions in a variety of different occupations.

Now, it was the home of the dead.

Well, the undead, at least. And that was who Liz was trying so very hard to avoid.
 

She had made good progress in her trek through the building, managing to come across her entire floor until she found a vertical shaft that she could safely crawl down. She had made it several floors down before hearing her first moan.

They had congregated in a hallway, and it was one she needed to cross over. Unfortunately, the ceiling had caved in during the quake, and while her passage was clear, she needed to step across three feet of gaping air, underneath of which were several dozen undead mouths.

She could smell them almost as soon as she could hear them, their moans echoing in the tin and steel enclosure, and their rotten odor seeming to fill every space of the ducts. She wrinkled her nose and pressed ahead, her hands and legs shaking in fear as she crawled slowly, careful not to allow herself to make divots in the tin, knowing that as they popped back into place, they would announce her presence.

Reaching the gap above the hallway, she noted the barricaded doors on either end of the hallway between a dentist’s office and a solar energy distributor.
 

The people here must have tried to defend themselves. To keep the monsters out, she thought. Another shiver ran up her spine as she realized how dreadfully lucky she had been to be in the U.S. Consulate when this had happened. Thick walls, armed guards, and a top of the line security system.
 

Without those, she knew she would be just one of the walking dead below.

She poked her head out into the gap, feeling like she had never before been so scared. The smell was awful. Like when they put the manure in the flower beds at school, combined with the smell of her mom’s compost heap in Jersey. Rotten and foul—something never meant to be endured by human nostrils.
 

The dead below were somewhat comatose, simply swaying in place, moaning in some horrid sequence of rhythmic intonations. One every five or six seconds, almost like they were speaking to one another, or assuring the rest of the group that those collected there were all still dead.
 

No, definitely not that, she concluded. They were dead. Dead and stupid. They couldn’t communicate.

But she didn’t intend to take that for granted. She was a survivor for a reason. She was careful, and she was cautious. She would tiptoe over that gap and not think for one instant it would be easy.