Rise (25 page)

I sent Todd and Eric and Kim to clear the house, and the rest of us went to check the yard and barn. It was a nice little farm they had here, with a BBQ set out behind the house on a big wooden deck, trees placed for shade, and a horse corral. The barn was empty, but as we were returning we all heard a shot from inside the house. Eric was on the radio a second later telling us not to worry; Kim had destroyed an undead that was trapped in the bathroom upstairs. We went in to see what was up, and found the body of a farmer, I presumed, lying in a pool of blackened blood and brain matter on the bathroom floor. Kim said he had started banging around in there when they had called out, so Eric had opened the door while she waited, and she shot him when he exited. We went out to check the area again, and seeing nothing cannibalistic approaching, we took the place over.

Sentries were set, food was cooked, the body hauled outside and wrapped in sheets, then placed in the barn. A careful check of the house revealed a lot of canned and preserved foods, two rifles (a .22 and a nice .308 hunting rifle with a scope) with ammo, and a set of car keys. There was a truck parked outside, and the keys fit, but it didn’t start. Laura took a look at it, and said the battery was dead, the hydraulics had leaked everywhere, and it had no oil. Other than that it was fine, she said.

So, we stayed the night, each taking turns on sentry duty. In the morning we worked out a plan to get back into Vegreville and search it. It should be a piece of cake.

Damn it! Well, I’m an idiot. I broke the laptop, and it took until now to fix it. What happened was I was sitting in the kitchen on a chair typing away, and it slipped right off my lap onto the floor when I went and tried to reach my cup of hot chocolate. After that it wouldn’t start.

We’ve been using this place as a base of operations, scouting out the area for 50 km around. So far we’ve seen hundreds of the walking dead, but they are pretty thin on the ground in most areas. No survivors so far, but I bet there are some holed up nearby. I assume this because we found a grocery store in Mundare that had been cleared out and nearly emptied, but neatly. Not by looters. Whoever did it left a locked door behind to keep the undead out, then taped the key onto the door with duct tape. There were a few cases of food left inside, and some water. We left it alone, but also left a note with detailed instructions on how to contact either Cold Lake or us, and dated it the 10th of October, hoping they’d come back, or the next group along would call us.

We’ve so far identified several gas tankers, medical supplies, and about a full trailer load of groceries (including the half trailer we found earlier). There are many cars and trucks in dealerships that we have found to be salvageable too, if we can get them to Cold Lake. We haven’t seen a car transport trailer anyplace yet, but we are looking.

We also noticed the animal life around here is thriving. There are wild dogs and cats, many birds, and horses. A lot of horses. People must have let them out, I guess. Though we did see one still saddled a few days ago. It took off as soon as we tried to get near it. Poor thing looked starved and crazy. We should probably have shot it.

So, no close calls with the undead. No survivors, yet. We have another three days here, then we head back to Cold Lake with the trailer of groceries and other supplies. We managed to find a supply of diesel in Mundare as well, and transferred enough to the 18-wheeler to get it up north. We have flagged a lot of other things for retrieval later. We have left notes and directions for any survivors, in obvious places and wherever we thought they’d be found.

I managed to fix the computer by taking out the battery, flattening out the bent pin inside, and plugging it back in. It was kind of loopy for the first boot after that, and didn’t like the defrag I did on the hard drive, but it runs fine now. I’ll start looking for a replacement for this one. Maybe I can find a nice 1 GHz machine! They had a few of those out when this all started, so I might find one.

We’ve changed our plans. We are leaving today to bring this stuff back to Cold Lake. We got the diesel running, and we’ll take it back with us, along with all the other supplies we transferred to the trailer. Eric will drive it, and one of our vehicles will precede him, the other following. We are going today because we got a call from the base. They want us to come in and fly to Calgary! Apparently there is a group of survivors in a building downtown who managed to contact the military a day ago. We’re going in with a bunch of soldiers to see if we can pull off a rescue. That’s all I know right now. I have some thoughts already how this’ll work, but the potential for a disaster is enormous. Caution, oh caution.

We made it back with no major problems. At the gates we had to go through the screening again for bites and contaminated stuff, and after that we delivered the truck full of goodies to the base. Then, and only then, did I get to go home. Jess was really happy to see me, and I was equally enthusiastic. After I had a shower (she insisted) we retired to our room. The kids were asleep already since we got in pretty late, so we spent the evening ‘catching up’. This morning I made a big pancake breakfast for the kids before they got up, and Michael was up first. When he saw me he shrieked and ran up and jumped on me. Kid got bigger since I left. It’s amazing how that happens.

This morning after breakfast I went over to the base and handed in my reports and intel. Captain Couper wants to see me about the Calgary mission this evening. Looks like we are going to fly out tomorrow or the next day. I’ll write more once I get the situation briefing.

I haven’t had the time to update until right now. I am inbound to Calgary with the team, CLST107, onboard a great big damned cargo plane. There are 30 people onboard, a load of gear and supplies, and an Air Force Major named Peterson. The mission is simple. There are about 75 people in three buildings in downtown Calgary, and we’re going to go help with the rescue effort. The CO of Cold Lake wants a foothold in Calgary, and sent ahead a few teams to drive in and see if they could secure the airport. Fifteen men and women were sent in, and have secured the largest landing strip. They lost three people doing it, but have managed to secure the fence around the airport, and have managed to get three fuel trucks ready and waiting for us. The terminal itself is inhabited by a few hundred undead, and they haven’t even tried going in there.

Being in land vehicles, they haven’t attracted all that much attention from the walking corpses, but all that will change when this jet arrives. Major Peterson will establish a local HQ in Calgary somewhere, and the majority of the people there will be responsible for holding the area against the waves of undead they expect to be attracted to the noise. Weather conditions might help us out here. It’s overcast and cold. Snow has fallen here in the last few days, and it’s below freezing on the ground. The weather delayed us a few days. The pilots didn’t want to try to fly through a snowstorm, so we used the time to prepare. Eric and I went over plans of the terminal and parkade, and I spent as much time with Jess and Michael and Megan as I could. Darren introduced us to his girlfriend, a shy 17 year old named Mandy. She’s from Ontario, and was out here in May with her dad visiting friends in Edmonton when the dead got up. Her dad died of a bite three weeks later, while they were on the road, but she made it to Cold Lake with some infantry she met. She’s a sweet girl, and like all of us has the thousand yard stare.

Our mission in Calgary is to recon the parkade and surrounding area, find vehicles in good order, and gather in supplies. We won’t be alone in this. The next flight in tomorrow will be bringing in another 30 people, and 30 more the next day. We’ll also have to find a lot of jet fuel, but there are ideas that we can probably recover some from the planes sitting on the ground.

The Major just announced we’re coming up on the city. I’m going to take a look out one of the small windows.

Sweet holy hell! I just came back from up front. There aren’t many windows on this bird. We came in over the northeast, and a great deal of what I could see was burned. With no fire department running, vast areas of housing have been on fire. Not the majority, by any means, but a lot. There are cars crashed and parked all over the place, and clusters of what I assume are bodies walking about. The undead seemed to be congregating in groups here, walking slowly about, and searching for food. With the aircraft going overhead they were all looking up at us, waving arms and trying to reach up the few thousand feet of freezing air to reach us. I saw what must have been a few thousand scattered about. We could see downtown as we banked to come into the main landing strip. There was a light flashing at us from one of the towers, the Petro-Canada Center, I think. As for the rest of the area… several of the towers had burned… the Saddledome was intact from our view… east of downtown was a huge wasteland of destruction that looked like someone had bombed it. The Trans-Canada bridge over Deerfoot trail was down, and there was a three-hundred car pileup all over the place there. We were turning by this point, but the east of the city that I could see was in pretty much the same state. I could see to the far west the ski jumps from the ’88 Olympics were still standing and intact, but I could only see them for a few seconds as we passed the cloud layer.

We’ll be landing in three minutes. Time to buckle up and get ready. It’s going to be an interesting day.

What a nightmare. We got off the plane after it landed and found them waiting, the dozen survivors of the advance teams. They had cleared the landing strip and used flares to give the pilots something better than overcast sky to see by. Planes were parked all over the place, some on the other landing strips, some waiting at the terminal.

My team set out immediately after the supplies and gear were all off the plane. Eric and Darren went off towards the terminal to see how bad things were there, and the rest of us followed at a walk. All of us have been to Calgary before except Darren. I used to live here so I have the most experience with the city, and both Laura and Todd have visited relatives here. It was similar stories for Eric and Kim, and it turned out Jim lived here too about 10 years ago. I’d been to the airport pretty frequently, flying off to Vancouver, Toronto, or Winnipeg for work about three times a year. The airport is pretty big. No comparison to LAX or other huge American terminals, but it is an international airport, and the attached hotel is proof enough of that.

Behind us was a hustle of activity as the plane made ready to fly back to Cold Lake tonight. We spotted the odd corpse, unmoving and frozen on the snow covered tarmac, and saw the blood spatters from the headshots that had brought them down. The advanced team had done a great job securing the grounds, but I didn’t believe for a second that they had killed every single undead in a position to be a threat. There were simply too many ways into an area this size, so I advised everyone to be on guard. They already were, guns loaded and held ready. So it was that we approached the terminal buildings and jets parked near them.

Kim pointed up at the windows of a nearby passenger jet, a 737 parked right on the edge of the tarmac. There were faces watching us from the windows, rotted, bloated zombie faces with patches of missing tissue and blackened limbs. The glass was smeared in dried blood and gore where they had tried to get out of the aircraft. None of us spoke.

One thing we noticed after so long away was the odor. The stench of decay was probably less than it might have been due to the freezing temperatures, but it still reeked. Nobody gagged, but the first time we came into close contact someone was going to throw up. Might even be me.

Ground level has a few entrances to the main terminal, but we were not interested in those. Our primary objective right now was to make sure all the doors were closed and either locked or blocked off so nothing could come out of there tonight. Yes, the advanced team had done this already, and yes we were doing it again. Caution pays off, and it only takes one of those dead bastards to ruin a perfectly good day.

We moved in a southern direction down the entire length of the structure, always at ground level, slowly and with stealth so we didn’t attract too much attention from the windows overhead. We got to the edge of the building and found a 10 foot high chain link fence. A few undead were standing still and quiet outside it, watching the men and women around the plane. They were unusually still, and I found this unsettling. We hid behind a cargo container and watched them for a few minutes, and they didn’t move very much. Maybe the activity was too far away for them to get really excited? One way of testing that would be to step out where they could see us, but I wasn’t about to let anyone do that. There were only seventeen of them on the other side of the fence, but I wasn’t willing to risk if there were more nearby. So we turned back and I made a mental note to always have a sentry on the ends of the terminal. We went north then along the western edge of the terminal and sealed doors as we went. I looked over at the tower, a separate structure, and could see men and women around it. I assumed they were securing it as the HQ and clearing any undead from inside it.