Zombie Squad Read online

  “How we doing?” Nick called out to James.

  “Good. They’re stupid. They just keep coming and I’ve damn near blocked off the doorway with their bodies.”

  Nick finished with his response and stared at the computer, anxiously waiting for a reply.

  Long story, he had written. Came looking for you. James McAllister is here too. Need your help.

  Her response came back quickly. Ha. Not up to helping you.

  Can we at least talk? Nick typed. I think you need to hear what I have to say.

  There was no immediate response this time. As Nick and Griffith waited, they watched as James reloaded the A4 and took aim again. He fired a few shots, waited, and then fired a few more.

  Finally, Katherine started to type. OK. I’m about an hour away. Be there as fast as I can. Be careful. Zombies everywhere.

  “Zombies,” Nick said with a laugh. “Katherine would be the one to skip convention and call a spade a spade.”

  Yeah, Nick replied. Found out the hard way.

  Go to the roof, she typed back. They can’t get you there. Take the maintenance elevator at the end of the hallway. Guns hidden under old flowerbed if you need them. See you in a bit.

  “Thanks,” Nick said offhandedly as he handed the computer back to Griffith.

  He ran over to where James was still crouched just outside the doorway, firing into the halls. It was the perfect situation, really. The moment one of the ramblers came through the door after managing to push past the bodies of those that had fallen before it, James would take it out and add another body to the pile. And from what Nick could tell, the ramblers had no idea that they were playing right into it.

  “Target practice is over,” Nick said. “Katherine said that if we go to the roof, we’re safe. No need to shoot.”

  “You’re no fun,” James said, taking another shot that took off the top of a rambler’s head in a spray of red.

  “So I’ve been told,” Nick said. He then turned back into Katherine’s old HQ where Griffith was returning his computer to his bag.

  “Ready to roll?” Nick asked.

  “Yeah.”

  It was apparent that Griffith was upset. Nick assumed it was because he, Nick, had purposefully let a hacker into a government computer. Worse things could have happened and, quite frankly, Nick could care less about whatever closely guarded secrets were stored on Griffith’s computer.

  They joined James at the doorway, watching as James took down yet another rambler. It fell backwards into the growing pile of rambler bodies that were nearly blocking the entire doorway to the stairs.

  They walked to the end of the hallway where the maintenance elevator sat beside the primary elevator. Both looked useless, like relics from a time long ago. Nick slid open the manual door to the maintenance elevator and stepped inside. James and Griffith fell in behind him.

  As Nick slid the door closed, he heard the frustrated cries of several ramblers from the other end of the hallway, trapped in the stairwell. He then flipped the switch on the wall and listened to the gears start working as the elevator took them up.

  16

  The building was four stories tall and while it did not give them a fully unobstructed view of the Houston skyline, it gave a very good glimpse of what the city had become. There was no mass destruction to be seen, but the sense of desolation was absolute.

  There were the remnants of looting and fires. In some cases, the only thing left behind were the charred corners of buildings and lumps of black shapes that could have been street side debris or human beings. The streets were empty in some places and packed with frozen chaos in others.

  The only thing that remained were the ramblers. From four stories up, they could be seen easily. They wandered across empty streets in pairs, trios, or in groups of up to twenty or so. They looked like they were sleepwalking, being pushed to move by nothing more than instinct.

  They were also milling around the sides of Katherine’s building. A few had climbed the steps and wandered inside. Others simply stood by the building, scratching at the bricks or moaning pointlessly. It almost seemed as if those around the building were starting to forget what had drawn them there in the first place.

  Nick wandered back and forth along the western edge of the building, looking out onto the city. The sky was brightening as they morning trudged on. The eerie silence and stillness of everything almost made it beautiful. For the second time in the last handful of hours, he found himself thinking of the lake. The mornings on the water were always gorgeous, even when it was stormy or overcast.

  But here, on the land, there was nothing the weather or the sun could do to erase the death that lingered everywhere.

  “What the hell sort of connections does she have?” Griffith asked.

  Nick snapped his gaze away from the cityscape and found Griffith looking beneath the old flowerbed that Katherine had mentioned on the computer. Nick joined him and was equally impressed with the stockpile she had.

  There were two Uzis, three hunting rifles, a Mossberg carbine rifle, two .09 millimeters, and most impressively, a half a dozen hand grenades.

  “She just has connections,” Nick said.

  “I know,” Griffith said. “From what I understand, they’re all terrorist connections.”

  “Are you shitting me?” James asked, coming over to have a look. “You really believe that crap they spoon-fed you boys about Katherine Laslo?”

  “I wasn’t spoon-fed anything,” Griffith said. “I know what my superiors told me and they would have no reason to lie to me.”

  “What the hell is your background anyway?” James asked.

  “What’s yours?” Griffith yelled back.

  The two men were in each other’s faces and Nick knew that James wouldn’t back down. He hadn’t yet figured out Griffith’s personality yet, but he didn’t want to test the man in a situation like this.

  He stepped in between them, placing a hand on their chests and softly shoving them apart. “Not now, guys. You really want to start throwing punches while all those ramblers are down there waiting for us?”

  James stepped away first, although Nick could tell it pained him to do so.

  “If you work as deeply within the government as you say you do,” James said, pointing to Griffith, “then you know my background. Ex-Navy Seal, promoted to Commander of Special Ops faster than any Seal in history. Less than a year after that promotion, I was tapped by Homeland Security to manage one of their fusion centers. I did all of that before I was thirty-five. How about you, smartass?”

  Nick fully expected Griffith to launch into James about the several years that had come after his stint with Homeland Security—the years that he’d spent allegedly helping underground organizations with government data leaks. It had also been during those years that James had essentially gone off the grid. He’d written a few articles that had become huge in the prepper community, those people that fully expected the total devastation of the country to come at the hands of the government on any given day.

  But Griffith remained quiet, although Nick was pretty sure he knew all of the skeletons in James’s history. He probably knew everything there was to know about Katherine, too.

  Well, maybe not everything.

  After all, there were a few pretty big secrets that Griffith didn’t know about him. Ogden didn’t know those secrets, either. Nick held tightly to those secrets, making sure he had at least a few cards to play if tempers flared and situations grew tense in the future.

  “What is your background?” Nick asked Griffith. “I’m not questioning you at all, but you’ve been sort of vague about it ever since you recruited me. And I figure it has to be pretty unique if Ogden tasked you with babysitting me.”

  Griffith set the side of the old wooden flowerbed back down, covering up the small crate that contained Katherine Laslo’s modest armory.

  “I was a basic grunt in the Marines,” Griffith said. “I happened to be in the wrong place in the wron
g time and overheard classified information between my commanding officer and a source that was later revealed to be someone working undercover for Al Qaeda. I was convinced to be silent with a better positon. I’ve known Colonel Ogden for several years now, working closely with men like him.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Intel duties, spying, undercover work.”

  “Dirty work, in other words,” James said. “So you’re not too dissimilar to us.”

  “Oh, you and I are nothing alike,” Griffith said.

  “Whatever helps you sleep at night,” James replied.

  Griffith said nothing. He turned away from the two other men and headed to the closest edge of the building. He looked down onto the city thoughtfully, as if he has just exorcised a demon and now needed to consider what it meant.

  Nick had been in stand-offs before (none of them quite as tense as the one he’d endured in the President’s armored truck two years ago) and the situation on the roof had the same sort of feel. Honestly, he was indifferent to the skirmish that was unfolding between Griffith and James. He would not choose a side and refused to get caught up in it. But at the same time, he felt that it was necessary that they work well together if they planned on getting back to Langley in one piece.

  Looking down at the street around the building, the thought of an easy escape was dashed. The ramblers remained down there, as determined as ever. Some seemed to have given up, ambling slowly away as if they no longer cared about the potential of a meal. But more came in place of them. Nick figured there were at least one hundred and fifty of them down there, pawing at the door and angrily slapping at the building.

  He had no idea how they would get away without engaging that huge crowd of ramblers, but he figured they would cross that bridge when they got to it.

  Slowly, he walked over to James. He leaned in close and spoke quietly, not wanting Griffith to hear him.

  “I think he really is a good man,” Nick said. “Ogden has him jumping at everything, though. From what I can gather, he’s not one of the sorts we spent all those years trying to stop.”

  “I find that hard to believe,” James said. “If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck…”

  Nick shrugged. “All I’m saying is that you maybe shouldn’t write him off so quickly. They came for me not only because of the legit time I worked for the government. Ogden wouldn’t admit as much, but it was my time as a rogue that I think they find more valuable. When I asked to have you and Katherine on my team, there was very little resistance.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “My point is that even though there’s uncertainty, Griffith is on our side too. And for now, I think Ogden is, too.”

  “You trust Ogden?”

  “Not totally, no. And the plan he has to save the President had whoever else he believes to be important is ridiculous. But there’s a bigger picture here…,”

  “Katherine’s bigger picture, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  They looked at one another like men sharing a secret across some darkened hallway. James then looked over Nick’s shoulder, staring down Griffith’s back as the man looked out over the city.

  “Just cool it for a while,” Nick said. “Try to be a good boy until we get back to Langley. Let’s see how this all plays out before you make a decision about Griffith or the operation he’s been tasked with.”

  Before James could give a reply, they were interrupted by Griffith.

  “Over here,” he said, pointing further out into the city.

  Nick and James made their way over, Nick following the trail along Griffith’s finger. He saw only scattered ramblers and the ghost of Houston at first. Then he saw the movement about a dozen blocks out.

  He watched as a large black truck came speeding through an intersection, moving quickly. Soon after that, he could hear the purr of its engine, creeping through the quiet of the city and finding them on the roof.

  As the truck came closer, Nick watched as a few ramblers started giving chase…if you could call what they did chasing. With their slow speed, there was no way they would ever catch up to the truck that continued to close in towards the building at a speed of what Nick guessed to be sixty miles per hour or so.

  When the truck closed in to within three blocks, something on the roof started to beep in a rhythmic sort of way. They all jumped at the noise. It was a chime that reminded Nick a bit of what his last smartphone had sounded like when he received a text message.

  While Nick started to look around the roof for the source, he noticed that Griffith was slowly reaching into the bag he had been carrying—the same one that contained his laptop.

  He pulled a large square-shaped satellite phone out of the bag and looked at it like it had bitten him. He pushed a button and held it to his ear.

  “Hello?” he asked.

  His face went through a series of changes while the person on the other end of the phone spoke. He settled on confusion as he slowly held the phone away from his head and handed it to Nick.

  “It’s for you,” he said.

  Just as confused, Nick took the phone and placed it to the side of his head. “Yeah?”

  “Hey, Nick. It’s Katherine.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Hi.”

  He did not like how much relief swept through him at the sound of her voice. It was more than familiarity. It came down to a series of events in a life that to him seemed to be fading away memory by memory.

  “I’m two blocks away,” he said. “I see the ramblers around the building. I’m going to draw them away, so when you see them scatter, head down the side of the building, using the fire escape on the southern side. I’ll meet you on the street in five minutes. Can you handle that?”

  Nick couldn’t help but smile. Even though the world had changed, Katherine Laslo sure as hell hadn’t.

  “Got it,” he said. “See you then.”

  He handed the phone back to Griffith. He still looked perplexed, staring at the phone as if he had never seen it before.

  “That was her, right?” Griffith asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “This is a private line. We worked hard to get it set up. How the hell did she call it?”

  “Was it set up with satellites?”

  “Yes,” Griffith said. “It’s all we have to use for communications like these.”

  “That’s child’s play to Katherine,” Nick said.

  “Oh, man, I missed her,” James said with a manic laugh.

  “Well, we’ll be seeing her in about five minutes,” Nick said.

  He told them Katherine’s plan as he added ammunition to his Sig. James reloaded his A4, never taking his eyes off of the ramblers that were surrounding the building.

  “You guys good to go?” Nick asked.

  James nodded, but Griffith looked hesitant.

  “You’ll be fine,” Nick said. “The ramblers are stupid. They’ll follow the truck. Katherine’s much smarter than you know.”

  “And you trust her?” Griffith asked.

  Nick gripped his gun and started for the southern wall, looking down to the fire escape. “I wouldn’t say that,” he said with a thin smile.

  “You people are insane,” Griffith said.

  “Yet we managed to survive the end of the world,” James said. “Go figure.”

  Again, Griffith had no comeback. They stood at the edge of the roof and looked down as Katherine sped the black truck onto their block.

  “Here we go,” Nick said. “Get ready.”

  17

  The ramblers, as expected, turned their attention to the truck as it passed by the building. To make sure they knew what was behind the wheel, Katherine even had the windows rolled down. When she passed by, Nick heard her yelling. It sounded mousy and faint on the roof but it did the job down below.

  “Dinner’s here, assholes!”

  Nick snickered and James let out that nearly lunatic laugh of his as they heard this.

  “Is
she crazy?” Griffith asked.

  “That’s a loaded question,” Nick said as he watched the truck sped by.

  James kept laughing as they watched her go. Nick wasn’t quite sure how well James knew Katherine, but he doubted his partnership with her had been as intense as his own. He knew that Katherine was not crazy—not in the way that Griffith was speculating on anyway. If anything, she was a scary sort of genius that always seemed to be able to think seven or eight steps ahead, no matter what the situation or topic might be. He could imagine her formulating this very plan even before their weird little computer conversation had been over.

  They watched as she slowed a bit, making the ramblers think they had a chance. She took a hard left turn and made sure to give them a sporting chance.

  “If she runs into one of those blocked streets, she’s screwed,” James said.

  “I feel pretty certain she’s already thought of that,” Nick said. In saying that, he realized that he did trust Katherine. Before the ramblers had taken over the world, he likely wouldn’t have been able to say that. But the thought of soon being in her company made him feel safer and more secure than he had ever since he had retreated to his houseboat.

  Nick watched, his hands resting anxiously on the edge of the roof. The last of the ramblers broke away from the building, leaving only a few confused members of the group to stare longingly at the building.

  “Let’s go,” Nick said.

  He didn’t wait for agreement or confirmation before leaping over the edge and landing on the black grating of the fire escape below. He ran to the end of the first level, took the steps to the next level quickly, and continued on that way, looking behind him only once to make sure James and Griffith were following.

  He reached the end of the final level and stopped short. He looked down to the street and panicked for the briefest of moments. He was going to have to kick the ladder down, giving the few remaining ramblers access to their airborne retreat. Nevertheless, he figured the three of them could dispatch any straggling ramblers while they waited for Katherine to wheel back around to pick them up.