The Apocalypse Crusade 2 (12 page)

“Yes, but…” Courtney began but then a little dot caught her eye. It represented the trooper station she was seated in. It looked exceptionally isolated, sitting in the middle of nowhere—sitting in the middle of The Zone. “This is crazy,” she hissed. “You have a line outside a line. It makes no sense and neither does the Governor’s idea of the perimeter. Are you looking at a map? Your perimeter includes Kingston! There are fifty thousand people in and around that city. And it also contains Newburg. That’s another twenty nine thousand people. They aren’t going to sit still and let you cage them up. Have you heard what happened at the barricade south of Wappinger?”

“Yes, and we are working on contingencies in case that sort of thing comes up again. Now, if you don’t mind I have work to do.”

“You call what you’re doing work?” Courtney demanded. “Haven’t you noticed a complete lack of zombies or refugees coming your way? It’s because we’re already doing the job, damn it! Move your men up so we can contain this properly.”

“I can’t,” the colonel replied. “And besides we have had incidences, so whatever you think you’re doing it isn’t a hundred percent effective.”

“That’s because I need more men, damn it!”

Winthrop was quiet for a moment and seemed sad when he replied. “I can’t. I have my orders.”

“They’re going to change,” Courtney began, “Mark my word, I’m going to see…to…that…what the hell?” The map on her screen suddenly clicked off.

She shook her mouse as Winthrop said, “Like I said, I have to go.” He hung up, but she wasn’t really paying attention. Her stomach was going suddenly squirrely. First, she was told by the army that she’s
in
The Zone and now her internet goes on the fritz? She didn’t think it was a coincidence.

“My internet is down,” Renee said, wearing a look that Courtney was sure was matched by her own puzzled features. The other women all nodded along: a choir to the preacher. Renee tried her Smart phone next and her eyes went huge. “And my phone, it ain’t working!”

The station phone lines were out as well.
We’re officially in The Zone
, Courtney thought to herself and then shivered, feeling suddenly abandoned by the world. “Just calm down,” she said as the women looked ready to bolt. “Let me contact the general. It’s almost for sure nothing.”

Easier said than done. The radio call was picked up by some colonel who let her know that the general was in another meeting and that all calls from the governor’s office were to be handled by the division communication officer, Colonel Herald Winthrop. “Hold on, Ma’am, I’ll get that frequency.”

“Never mind,” she whispered and thumbed off the radio. “What the hell’s going on?” The only answer she could come up with was that the army was gearing up, putting its pieces in place, meaning that Courtney’s ability to make a difference was over. She felt useless, and worse, trapped. She looked out the window at the gloomy day and felt hedged in as if there was nowhere to run. The one question was: did she tell the others what was happening? Not just the other dispatchers, but did she tell the troopers who were putting their lives on the line for nothing? What about that trooper’s family in Milton? Or the entire city of Kingston. They were all fucked.

“Wait…uh, wait here,” she said to the now quiet room. “I’m going to go talk to Pemberton. Maybe everyone should take a break.” She left the call center and stopped just outside the door, feeling her heart pound and her breath like a rabbit’s, speeding in and out so quickly that it didn’t feel as though any of the oxygen was catching in her lungs. It was as though she were breathing out faster than she was breathing in, or that perhaps there was a fire of fear eating the air inside her. She couldn’t seem to catch her breath.

She was beyond afraid. She was straight-up petrified. She was trapped. Death on one hand from the guns of the military. Death on the other from the diseased teeth of the zombies. Standing in the hallway seemed the best thing she could do. It was the safest thing to do, that was for sure, and it was the easiest. She was running on fumes.

A huge yawn gaped her mouth but a sudden roar caused her to gulp it back. A squadron of Blackhawks cruised overhead, each crammed with soldiers and supplies. From the direction of the sound, she knew that they were going to Poughquag. They were adding men to the wrong perimeter. The trap was closing.

“Pemberton!” she shouted as she marched down the hall to his office. She found him clicking his keyboard and wearing a look of complete befuddlement. “We’re trapped,” she told him. It just came blurting out and she had to fight her eyes to keep tears from doing the same. “The army has a new line twelve miles east of here. It’s…it’s crazy! They act like they don’t care about us or the troopers or even their own men. Hell, they’re not even using natural barriers. They’ve given up the Hudson! I can’t...Pemberton? Are you listening?”

“My computer…the internet’s not working at all,” he said, still with his face squinched and his eyes blinking slowly in a dull manner. He looked as though ten years had been splashed across his face in the last day.

“It was the video, I bet,” Courtney said. “The one on YouTube; that thing is poison. It’s going to turn people against everyone in uniform. It was that or all the news people shooting off their mouths about stuff they don’t know…not that the truth is any better.”

“Did you say we’re trapped?” he asked.

He pulled out a Rand McNally Road Atlas and flipped its wide pages to New York. She pointed out Poughquag to the east, halfway to the Connecticut state line. “They’re setting up the new line here and if I had a guess they’re running it up highway 55.”

The lieutenant stared at the map long after Courtney lost interest. He looked as though he were trying to find meaning in it. “We should try to get out of here,” Courtney said. The lieutenant’s staring continued for another minute as another flight of helicopters thumped overhead. Courtney tried again, “I mean we’re not doing anyone any good here, and if we stay, they’ll get us eventually, the zombies I mean. That or we’ll run out of food. I say we gather up as many troopers as we can and get out of here before the Army’s perimeter is fully closed. I know a few ways out of…”

Pemberton interrupted: “No.” He wiped gently at the map as if clearing away nonexistent crumbs; he smoothed it at the edges. “No,” he repeated. “Our duty is to the people we helped trap. We should stay and fight.”

“We can fight once we get clear of the edge of The Zone!” she cried.

“And who would we fight? Our troopers on the other side of the line? Our soldiers? Don’t you see we’ll be just like all those other people? They killed to get out and just made things worse. We know better, Courtney.”

She wanted to pull her hair out. “Staying means dying. You know you can’t fight all the zombies; even if we could get all the troopers in The Zone here, it still wouldn’t be enough. We will die!”

Pemberton pushed the map away and then went to the window. He knocked it hard with his knuckle. “We’ll fortify the station. The walls are brick and the glass is thick. I don’t think zombies can get in here. We can hold out a long time here, maybe long enough for the government to straighten things out.” He went to his desk and pulled out a short-barreled Glock, and checked the load.

“I think I want to leave,” she said. “Now, before it’s too late.”

He grinned in a fashion that suggested mental instability rather than mirth. “All morning I was thinking the same thing, but about a half hour back I saw that.” He pointed across the parking lot where a run of woods was shading the edge of the asphalt. A zombie stood there, swaying. Because of the shade, Courtney couldn’t make out its features beyond the fact that one of its arms looked to be dangling longer than the other, but she knew it was one of them.

She shrank back from the glass and now Pemberton’s smile was a bit more lively. “She can’t see you because of the glass. You want to know something strange? I know her. She was a waitress over at the Roadside Inn off of Vassar Road. I used to think she was so cute and now I should go over there and shoot her in the head.”

“You’d be doing her a favor,” Courtney said, and then repeated, “I think I want to leave.”

Pemberton checked the load of the Glock a second time. “I won’t stop you, just do me a favor first, call back the boys. What they’re doing is a waste of…of everything.” He left to kill the waitress and Courtney ran back to the call center where she explained the situation. A single gunshot was the exclamation to her story.

“Don’t worry, it was just a zombie. Now, recall everyone! Pemberton wants to make a stand here. He thinks the doors will hold.” She didn’t leave yet, she joined the others working the radios and telling the troopers the bad news. When she had gone through her list, she tried to locate General Collins, reaching him in the Governor’s office. She lied her ass off in order to speak to him.

“General? This is Courtney Shaw, I need your help.”

“Courtney, you are out of line!” he snapped. “I’m in a meeting with the…”

She interrupted: “I-I know but I think I’m trapped. I think we’re all trapped. Someone authorized a shift in the lines and no one told us.”

Collins heard the fear in her voice and despite the fact he had a host of dignitaries staring at him, including the Governor, he asked: “Where are you, exactly?” When she told him, his eyes went to the map on the wall and he felt his heart sink. “I’m sorry, Courtney, I didn’t know. If I had…” What? What would he have done? Zombies had gotten through the porous initial line on the eastern edge of The Zone—the line had to be shifted. It was pure, painful logic and there had been nothing he could have or would have done to change it. War was hell and a war against zombies was even worse than that. There was no way he could help her. He didn’t have the time or the man power. “Try to hold on as long as you can, we’ll figure out something.”

He hung up and Courtney sat staring at the satellite phone much as Pemberton had stared at the map. Finally, she decided not to bet on the army. She whispered to Renee: “I’m taking off, now before it’s too late. I think I can get through the new lines. Will you come with me? You’re the only one I trust here.” Renee was thirty—the same age as Courtney, and both went to the gym, sometimes together and chatted as they walked a few imaginary miles on the treadmill; the other six ladies were older and most were shaped like soft bowling pins.

“Ok, but not yet,” Renee said. “Let’s wait until some of the troopers get back. You know some will want to take off. We’ll go with them.”

Courtney glanced around quickly before saying: “If a trooper is going to go AWOL they aren’t coming back here first. The ones that comeback are the ones who are going to stay.” Renee took one look outside at the parking lot where Lieutenant Pemberton stood a few feet from the body of the waitress, and quailed. She wouldn’t go no matter how much Courtney pleaded.

With Renee huddled at her desk, Courtney asked the other women if they wanted to chance going out and was turned down by everyone. “Then I’ll go alone,” she said, to the quiet room. No one said a word.

Before leaving, Courtney went to the armory; all the shotguns were gone and the three M16A1s were as well. She picked out a Glock, much like Pemberton’s and added four full clips. She would’ve taken more but the lieutenant stood watching her.

“This is a mistake,” he told her. “We can hold out.”

Her gut told her they wouldn’t be able to. Maybe there was a chance they could live for a day or two, but what would happen when the food ran out or the water? What would happen if there was the tiniest mistake? What if they let in someone with the disease? It had happened at Walton and she was sure it would happen again.

“Sorry,” she said. “When I find the army, I’ll let them know you’re still here and alive, Ok?” She scurried out of the station with a scarf wrapped around her face to keep out any stray germs, the Glock in her left hand and the keys to her Volkswagen Beetle in the other. The bright red Beetle may have been the worst car ever to attempt to take through the hills and forests on the edge of the Catskills. In fact, it barely made it out of the zombie engulfed town of Hillside Lake.

The undead were everywhere, in numbers which shook Courtney to her core. And they were faster and stronger than she had anticipated. She was forced, over and over again, to turn away from the direction she wanted to go and was soon lost in a thick forest that seemed to go on forever in every direction. Without thinking, she pulled out her Smart phone to Google her position, however the screen was blank.

“This might have been a mistake,” she whispered.

Escaping The Zone was practically an impossibility for everyone. At first, Eng drove the Nissan one handed while he kept his other sweaty hand on the blue/black handle of his .38. Driving this way was fine in the motel parking lot and on the side street, but things in The Zone were deteriorating fast and, eventually, he gave Anna a hard look and stuffed the gun in his pocket. “Don’t try anything,” he hissed. “Or I swear you’ll go down with me.”

“What would I try?” she asked, innocently. They both knew she would try
something
; that something being wholly dependent on the timing and the circumstance they found themselves in. That something would also depend on how she could benefit from the situation. As Eng drove, she kept her eyes open for the least chance. Soon she found that escaping from Eng wouldn’t increase her chance of living.

The morning was filled with the undead. They came out of the fog, lurching and moaning in obvious hunger. Some were like Von Braun had been, black-eyed and hating everything, even the very air they breathed, and some were brain dead but otherwise whole. These were very fast, like sprinters. Most however were bloody and missing chunks of their body, sometimes very large chunks. It didn’t seem to weaken them in the least but it did slow them down.

They attacked cars on sight.

It was all Eng could do to keep them off the Nissan. He swerved all over the highway and sometimes drove on the shoulder or the median. There were other cars on the road but not many and they drove in the same wild manner Eng did. They flashed their lights and honked but what they were trying to get across wasn’t obvious until Eng came to the first roadblock.

It was mobbed by hundreds of cars. They were crushed in so close to the barricade that no one could move. “Stay back. Don’t get too close,” Anna said, laying a hand gently on his arm. She pulled the rear-view mirror around to check her face. A sigh escaped her at what she saw; she was scratched and bruised and the circles under her eyes were pronounced. She tried on a winning smile. Hoped it would be enough and then she ran her fingers through her hair.

“What are you doing?” Eng asked. 

“You want to get through the road block? This may be the only way.” With her hair done as well as it could be, she reached for the door handle but Eng stopped her.

His eyes were slitted but the suspicion shone right through. “This may be the only way you get through but how do you plan on getting me through? Are you going to tell them I’m your adopted brother? Or your servant?”

The truth was neither. She had actually planned on using tears and a declaration: “That man raped me!” She would show her scabs and the rope burns on her wrists. She would also tell about his gun and he would either pull it out and get shot by real warriors or he would skulk back into the crowd, while she would use her looks and a faked timid persona to get in close. She was sure, that given time, she would be able to sweet talk her way across. “I’ll think of something,” she assured Eng. “Don’t worry.”

“No. I want a plan,” he replied. They were two scorpions in a bottle and neither was going to trust the other. “We cannot take a chance on you winging it. Look.” He pointed toward her window. Zombies were crossing a field of wild grass coming toward the cars. For now, their numbers were manageable, below a dozen, and people were already taking aim with rifles. “We passed hundreds on the road. They’re going to hear the guns and they’ll come running.”

“Son of a bitch,” Anna said. In order to run her sweet talking mouth, she needed time. “Turn the car around.” Guns were already popping off as he swung around and turned back east.

Both of them were without their cellphones, having lost them back at Walton, and so they drove in a meandering path, looking for one of the hidden ways out of The Zone. As far as Anna could tell, there weren’t any and, to make matters worse, the number of zombies continued to grow as the morning progressed. Three hours passed under the running tires. Sometimes they trundled along at walking speed hoping that a thin parting of the trees would mean they were coming up on an old logging road, other times they raced among the forest trails or on narrow roads with zombies converging on them from all sides.

During all this, Anna watched Eng, looking for the perfect opportunity to escape. All she needed was a moment where he grew tired and let his attention lapse. It never came and finally she slumped in the passenger seat. “So what do we do?” she asked. “You’re the super spy. What does your training say we do?”

“My training never covered zombies,” Eng replied; there was a pause and then he smiled; it wasn’t something he was all that good at. It made him look ill. “We never covered any of this.”

“Then what do we do?” she asked again. “We can’t just drive around in circles until we run out of gas.” When Eng shrugged, she almost rolled her eyes, but only just remembered the gun and the fact the man was a lunatic, an ass and a sociopath. She almost discounted him as she was mentally ticking off her very dubious assets: her looks, one vial of deadly serum, a car with half a tank of fuel, and a Chinese spy. His potential was limited since he really didn’t understand Americans—but then again neither did the vial of Com-cells or the Nissan, she realized. They were just tools.

So far, they had counted on getting lucky to find a way out, now she analyzed the problem from a purely scientific point of view. First was to formulate a hypothesis, a guess based on her understanding of the variables before her. The variables being tens of thousands of zombies, a few thousand survivors clamoring to get out of The Zone and some hundreds of soldiers and law enforcement officers tasked with keeping the other two in.

She understood zombies perhaps better than anyone. By using a combination of drugs and channeled hate, they could be controlled to an extent. She had proved that with Von Braun, however he was, in all likelihood, dead, and she was out of drugs. The cops and the soldiers could be controlled as well, again to an extent, but she was limited with this variable as well because of the urgency of time. This left the survivors, the citizens.

She smirked. “They aren’t normal citizens, they’re Americans.” Just as many academics did, Anna felt herself above concepts of nationalism and she tended to look down her nose at Americans, and at the same time, she somehow found honor or purity in cultures other than her own no matter their level of abject poverty, or their lack of freedom or the societal rot that had them fleeing to America. She saw Americans as fear-filled, gun-toting hicks, and had, among their other lesser qualities, a deep-seated phobia of the very government they voted for year after year. She could use that just like any other tool.

Cody Cullin, the YouTube star, had guessed about the accidental circumstances that led to bloodshed, Anna was planning a purposeful massacre. “Let’s go back to the road block at I-55. I have a plan.” She wasn’t about to get eaten alive, even if she had to cross out of The Zone tramping over a thousand bodies.

She chose the roadblock at I-55 for one specific reason. Yes, it had looked like all the rest: cars squished together with barely any room to open a car door. And of course, there was also a slew of angry citizens, guns, cops and zombies. The lucky difference was the deep brook on The Zone side of the barricade. This strip of water thirty feet wide more or less held back the zombies. For her plan to work Anna was going to have mingle with the people and there was no way she was getting out of the Nissan with zombies about.

“Wait until I scream,” she said to Eng, after explaining her plan.

“Yes,” he said curtly. She was glad to see his face was set and she hoped she looked as cool and calm. Out of habit, she checked her look in the glass of the passenger side window and then started picking her way through the cars. Most were jammed with either people or belongings as though entire homes had been condensed and crushed down to fit through a car door. The people inside, with their laps overflowing with useless electronics or dogs or even other people, stared as Anna strode past.

Men stood outside the cars. All were armed, many chain-smoked. They too stared at Anna. No one seemed to notice Eng following after with his right hand stuffed into his jacket pocket.

“The army doesn’t have a plan for us,” Anna said to a group of men who stood behind an SUV thirty feet from the wire and the felled trees across the road. They’d been talking in quiet voices, casting hard looks at the handful of soldiers blocking their path. They raised their eyebrows at the woman in the stained lab coat. “There is no cure,” she added and then moved on to the next group.

“I just came from Albany. The Governor just agreed to fire-bomb Poughkeepsie and we’re next,” she said to them.

One of the men said: “They said they’re working on a cure.”

“I’m sure they are but it won’t come in time to save us. These things take years.”

“How do you know?”

She flapped her singed white lapel at the man. He had a faded cap on his head and wore a checkered shirt stuffed into dirty jeans. In his hand was a gleaming rifle that had obviously been better cared for than any of his other possessions, likely even better than his wife and kids. If he had graduated high school, she would’ve been surprised. “I have a doctorate in microbiology. I worked on the project that started this. Take it from me, you and everyone here will die if we don’t get through that barricade.”

Another man pushed through the group. With his suit shiny at the knees and his shoes scuffed, he looked to Anna like an insurance agent and perhaps it was his white-collar garb that allowed him to command the others. “No. Don’t listen to her. They said the army is on the way.”

“They are, but not to rescue us. Listen. We’re in a status A quarantine. No one gets out. Period!” The group began to grow angry, but Anna knew it would take more than words to stir these people to violence. They were moronic patriots who put God and country over the value of their own lives. “If you don’t believe me maybe you’ll believe this.” She pulled the sleeves back on her lab coat showing the ugly red marks where Eng had tied her to the bed.

“What is it?” the man with the checkered shirt asked.

The insurance agent knew. “She’s been tied up,” he said with a growing realization in his eyes.

“They tried to keep me from getting out to warn you,” she said. “But now that you know, your lives are in even greater danger. They won’t let you live no matter…Oh my God!” It wasn’t exactly a scream, however Eng caught on that now was the time. He fired the pistol from inside his coat.

The stubby .38 was a dreadfully inaccurate weapon at ranges beyond fifteen feet and only three of his bullets hit anything other than air. Luckily, for Anna a bullet went through one of the cruiser’s windows, shattering it. In a second, the soldiers and the troopers returned fire and, keyed up as they were, the citizens began shooting as well. Many were killed, but their rifles were deadly and there were so many more of them.

Four of the six soldiers guarding the barricade died in the first flash of gunfire, another was holed through the neck and would slowly bleed to death over the course of the afternoon. The last fell on his face and cowered as lead flew all around; glass flew like shrapnel and tires blew.

Then there was silence. The citizens came out from behind their cars to see what they had done. It wasn’t pretty, death never was. A few looked at Anna, none did so with blame in their eyes. They blamed themselves or tried to believe they had missed, that the expensive scopes on their rifles were lying, deceiving their eyes.

“I’m getting out of here,” the man with the checkered shirt said. He hurried for his truck, bringing on an exodus that bordered on panic. Barricades were plowed over and at least two of the corpses were mangled to a point where recognition was impossible.

Anna started scanning the vehicles, looking for one which might have room for her, but most looked to be filled to over-flowing, and the few that appeared to have room shied away from her and her lab coat. Everyone knew lab coats meant germs.

Eng wouldn’t have let her go anyway. He came sidling up to her, his hand coming out of his pocket with the hunk of hot metal. “Let’s go,” he said, threatening with the pistol.

“Aren’t you going to thank me?” she asked, unable to take her eyes from the weapon.

“No. You did what you did to save yourself, not to save me. Come on.” He started escorting her to the Nissan parked at the back of the mass of cars, only the rush to leave made it too dangerous. Cars were thumping into each other and scraping paint in their owner’s haste to get out of there. Anna and Eng were forced to wait on the side of the road until the last few cars shot by before they could get to their Nissan. Eng didn’t zip out of there like the others. He drove slowly until he came up near to the barricade.

He’s going for the guns
, Anna thought. On his side, there was a black assault rifle sticking out from underneath one of the sagging cruisers. On her side, still in the grip of a dead trooper was a 9mm Glock. She decided she would go for it if he stopped the car.

I’ll be quick. I’ll be quick. I’ll be quicker than he is,
she thought to herself, trying to psyche herself up. It was a life or death decision. She would dive for the gun and come up firing and he would die because the rifle was long and would be slow to bring to bear on her. He would die and her problems would be….mostly over.