The Zombie Letters (22 page)

              A low rumble announced itself off in the distance. For a second, it sounded like thunder. Christian pointed his head up to the sky. He was visually trying to confirm what his wife was thinking. Not a cloud in the sky.

              “What is that?”

IV

              Once again, Sergeant Major Alexander Powers sat in the APV while the General and his fuckards were having all the fun outside. This was their sixteenth mission out in just under the space of a year. They only stayed out about a week-and-a-half at a time. Alexander knew damn well that wasn’t nearly enough time for an all-out active search. Doctor Miles will never be found this way. The M1126 Stryker armored personnel vehicle was a forty-nine billion dollar home away from home. The Sergeant Major just saw it as another sixteen-wheeled sardine can with a thirteen year-old CAT engine. Only a couple six-man teams were sent out this time. The President was sure they’d find Miles at the Locke facility. They had set up remote surveillance equipment at the lab, should anyone show up. The possibility of anybody, especially Darin Miles, was more than a long shot. By some miracle, the plan paid off. One day, the motion-detection cameras lit up like fucking Christmas trees back at the underground Greenbriar bunker in West Virginia. Just out of nowhere. All the monitors just switched on. Everyone held their breath waiting to see who had entered. Powers and Teel hated each other’s guts, but they agreed on one thing . . . that any previous Locke employee showing up was practically an impossibility. It seemed that the Commander-in-Chief was correct in setting up those cameras. Miles
had
survived the initial invasion and also had another survivor with him. A woman. It was him that entered the university lab. One could hear a pin drop in that room when the video feed that ran directly into the bunker showed his face. Thank Christ for auxiliary power. At first, no one had any idea how he could have made it at all, but he did. No use questioning it until he was located. General Teel believed that he had developed either some kind of cure or some way to repel the dead that had taken over. Cure or repellent, that knowledge was absolutely imperative. When he left the university, Darin Miles simply walked past the walking corpses that surrounded the facility like he paid them no mind. The creatures didn’t even look his way. It couldn’t be the plants, though. They were too dangerous. All the buds were now back at the bunker, locked up with four armed guards at that door working in shifts twenty-four hours a day. How Doctor Miles achieved his ability to walk among the dead without being torn apart was placed first on the need-to-know.

              This was the latest mission out and it wouldn’t be the last. Not until they found Doctor Miles. On the video footage, Darin Miles and his companion explained their plans in detail. The doctor was looking for the General too. He was scouring everywhere . . . just like the General and Alexander Powers were. Sooner or later, they would cross paths. All the Sergeant Major and his team would have to do was go to every government facility no matter how large, small or obscure . . .
any
facility that Darin would seek out and place surveillance equipment there, too. They had to find him.

              But . . . the President must have said something to the General.

              Powers, there’s no way in hell you’re setting foot out of that APV, soldier. You die and it is my ass. I’d like to keep it attached, if I could.

              Yes, General.

             
The search team had arrived at the Cheyanne Mountain Air Force Station that morning. It was a short distance from Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs. The complex served as a NORAD and USNORTHCOM’s alternate command center. Cheyanne Base was a hardened facility built right into the side of a mountain. Everybody inside was dead or roaming around dead. The scattered radio transmissions from the guys, their flamethrowers and anti-tank grenades came through here and there as Sergeant Major Alexander Powers sat in the vehicle, waiting for the team to finish up a sweep-and-clear of the area. They shouted orders when the noise would break. Alexander could hear his fellow soldiers fighting. It sounded like all-out war. The booms of the grenades, the deep rumbling swooshes of the incinerator units. This is bullshit. Alexander needed to be out there, not being kept inside. His stomach was in knots. Every time, the thought of them not coming back plagued him. Fearing the absolute worst was not an option when one is sitting all by himself and listening to them fight for their lives on a small radio. They’d lost four men already. That was only on
this
trip out. The only thing that worked were the beefed-up incendiary flamethrowers that were nearly as dangerous and violently unpredictable as the infected themselves. A Captain Jacqueline Bishop went with them on the first mission to collect the Archies in DC. All three APV’s were loaded and ready to go when the zeds came running out from fucking everywhere. Ten of the search party were armed with the flamethrowers – and they were working. The team for two of their APV’s was ready to go when Captain Bishop’s weapon malfunctioned. The flamethrower exploded and killed seven souls inside her own APV. She had attempted to use the weapon and it jammed. With the hordes running toward them, she leapt into the vehicle and tried to fire it off one more time before it sped away and her life with it. Another incident was when, during that same week, a Master Gunnery Sergeant Marine fired his flamethrower in a strong wind that caused it to backdraft and melt his goddamn arms. The man set the gas pressure too low. The flame sputtered, bounced back and melted the arms right off of his body. The flame was so hot that the wounds cauterized themselves. The arms themselves were incinerated instantly and had become nothing more than scattered ash at his feet. He was back at the bunker now. The poor man still refuses to eat.

              The flamethrowers were just modified M202 A-1 incendiary grenade launchers. With the modification, they got a flame that could spray from the front end hot enough to melt steel if the conditions were right. The units were hurriedly rushed out and redesigned from old Vietnam-era throwers with parts Frankensteined from new models. Those fuckers were dangerous, but they worked. The sweep and clears they did looking for Doctor Miles weren’t really sweep and clears in the truest sense. They just stuck around to see if anyone was there. In and out. No stopping to smell the roses. When the dead came, they came in hard. They came in hungry.

              The large metal door slammed open and the men piled in. Marine Corps First Lieutenant Russo plopped in last, joining the General and his men to sit inside the APV covered in sweat, panting like dogs and looking like they were expecting to wake up from a nightmare any second. “How’d it go in here, Powers?” Navy Chief Petty Officer Sims said with a shit-eating grin. “Have fun whacking off in here while the men were working?”

              Sergeant Major Powers stared the man down and nodded with a smile. “Eat shit, Sims.”

              Arnold Sims stood up. All six-feet-two and E-7 rank of him stood over the seated Sergeant Major who already had his hand around the Bowie strapped to his ankle. “What did you say, fucker?”

              “Sit down before you embarrass yourself,” Alexander said. The men looked on, staring at the spectacle in front of them and each other.

              “I wish I could ask your babysitter for permission to re-arrange your face, but precious-boy here . . .” he pointed at Powers with a smirk of defiance on his face. “God forbid he comes back with even a bruise.”

              “Sit down, bud,” Teel spoke in nearly a whisper as he casually loaded his 9mm sidearm and pointed it to the Sims’ head. “You got all this backwards if you think I will let him go back on this shit detail we landed ourselves in. Powers is already
in
hell. He’s with us. I am sure we are the last people he wants to be around. Wanna punish his ass? Do nothing. Stand down, Sims. You have orders from the President himself. I will not hesitate to make you walk home with a bullet in your kneecap. You’ve done well today, Petty Officer. Well done. Enjoy that. So sit the hell down. Right now.”

              “You actually sticking up for me?” Powers leaned over and whispered to the General. “I think hell just froze over.”

              Teel smiled and whispered back. His fiery, stern eyes were locked on Sims the whole time. “Powers . . . oh, what I wouldn’t give to slow dance with you just once. If we find Miles and we part our ways, you had better watch your ass. I’m sick and tired of babysitting your worthless butt. You have orders too. Your orders are to stay safe and come back in one piece. You need to learn to deal with that and not be so . . . reactionary.”

              “General, have you ever thought just once that you’re not the only one babysitting? Maybe I’m the one sent to make sure
you
don’t fuck up. I believe the President needed someone a little more even-tempered than you and your . . .
men
.”

              “I pray for the day I can tango with you, you little shit. Until then, you stay seated just like Sims . . . right here and out of everybody’s way. Orders are orders.” Teel glanced back over his shoulder at the monitors that showed the cockpit. The rear cargo area was closed off completely, and the only way anyone could see the driver was on-camera. Teel leaned into the monitor and pushed a button to talk to the driver. “Corporal Ballard, hit it. Let’s scoot. The place is empty. I’m sorry, son. I know you have a brother that works here. I hope that he’s okay.” The other men leaned out of the small, bullet-proof windows and looked out. There didn’t appear to have been any visitation from Darin Miles. Like with usual places, they set up the video surveillance equipment, silent proximity alarms and shit of the like to monitor back at the bunker. Power plants no longer worked, but the government had their ways. If anyone entered the bases they’d hit so far, the equipment will automatically switch on and feed directly into the bunker back at White Sulphur Springs. Just a couple weeks ago, what was left of the United States government had no idea Darin Miles and Victoria Rains were going to military installations looking for the Archie’s new owners. They would have never known that Doctor Miles was looking for
them.
They would have never thought to watch the surveillance videos from the Locke lab. All would be lost . . . without a woman named Paula Grantham.

              Paula Grantham, all eighty-one years of her, survived the invasion and had been found with others inside an office lounge at Nellis Air Force Base in central Nevada. She didn’t talk about how she made it out of Vegas. It seemed to upset her. She knew about the base located in the middle of nowhere from her late husband, Colonel Hans Allen. He was in charge of the propulsion laboratory and trained the welders in the engine manufacturing area. Nellis Air Force Base was so closed off, that the zeds who
did
take it over had wandered away in a matter of hours. No food source. Miss Grantham and two of her great-grandkids hauled ass out of Las Vegas during the outbreak and ran into the desert. She hotwired a car that had been left on the side of the road and made it to a military base that more than eighty percent of Americans couldn’t find on a map. A woman in her eighties and children both under eight years old. She stayed at that ba
se for
months. She said that one day, she had a couple visitors. A man and a woman. They wanted Grantham and the kids to travel with them, but Miss Grantham refused. She felt safer at the base. The man said he was a doctor and that he was looking for anyone military. Preferably an officer.

              “He kept trying to give me this horrible-smelling stuff in a little baggie.” She told every high-up after she had been rescued and transferred to the bunker in Virginia what happened. Grantham was the seventeenth person the President’s scouting teams took in. Teel couldn’t believe his ears when the old woman mentioned that ‘odd young man with the stuff he
claimed
kept the infected away.’ “I kept saying no, but he insisted I take that little baggie with me. What a strange character he was. I agreed to take it. When he and his lady left, I tossed it. You never know about people.”

              “What did he look like?” Teel asked her. “Did he have a plant with him?”

              “Not sure . . . but he kept talking about one to his lady friend. I asked him about it. Said it s like a Venus flytrap. But bigger.”

              At that point, talks were done . . . all but giving up the search for anyone having to do with Locke. That was, until Grantham said that the young doctor mentioned to her that he was visiting military bases. The man said that he needed to find someone who could help him create a cure for what was going on. That re-ignited the search for anyone on the original team Nathaniel Winters employed. Teams were sent out for weeks at a time to place surveillance equipment at military sites. They had all the Archies back at the bunker, so Miles was still searching. They would cross paths eventually. That was a guarantee. If that ancient woman hadn’t been hiding out at an Air Force base, or if she simply didn’t survive the outbreak at all, the search efforts now would have never happened. At least, not as quickly.