Zombie Squad Read online

  Nick opened his mouth to speak but had no idea what would come out, so he closed it and tried to sort out his thoughts. The idea itself seemed ridiculous and made to fail. On the other hand, there was some very shaky logic to it. If they had indeed created a vaccine, this seemed like a plausible way to use and test it while a plan for mass production was set into place.

  “Will you do it?” Griffith asked.

  Nick stood up and faced away from Griffith. He looked back to the shore where he had watched ramblers look hungrily out at him far too many times

  “Will I be filled in on every bit of information there is to be known about the ramblers?”

  “Yes,” Griffith said. “There is a contract waiting for you at Langley. Should you agree to this, you will be given the highest level of security there is. That includes the nature of the ramblers, the status of the destruction of the country, and all communications with the crew out at Edwards Air Force Base and the scant communications we have with military officials in that untouched area of Japan.”

  The Sig Sauer in Nick’s hand suddenly felt foolish. He looked at it sadly and then out to the lake.

  “No,” he said finally.

  Griffith looked as if he had been slapped. He had clearly not been expecting this answer.

  “But Mr. Blackburn, I don’t—”

  “If I’m going to die at the hands of the ramblers, I want it to be here, on my terms, where I’m at least at peace.”

  “I understand that,” Griffith said, “but—”

  “No. Now take my raft and get the hell out of here.”

  “Is there anything I can do to change your mind?”

  Nick shook his head and then kicked the raft into the water. Griffith looked to him with disdain and then looked away, out to the water. He climbed down the ladder and climbed into the raft. A look of genuine sadness enveloped his face.

  “Thank you for your time,” he said softly, not bothering to look back at Nick.

  Nick watched him go, wondering how he’d gotten here. Had he driven some type of military vehicle and parked it further up the trail that led to the secondary road? The idea of such convenient travel made Nick start to feel nostalgic in a detached sort of way.

  He then thought of the trips that he and Valerie had taken down that road for weekends alone on the lake. They’d shared the same small bed that Nick had been occupying for the last twenty-two months. Actually, if Valerie’s calculations had been correct, they had likely even conceived their daughter on that bed.

  In the end, he’d failed his wife and daughter. They’d met the same fate as the President, falling victim to the sick people that Nick had come to think of as monsters.

  “Wait,” Nick said.

  It wasn’t until a moment had passed that he realized that the word had come out as nothing more than a whisper. As he formed the word again, he started to put something together in his head…something that made sense and, more importantly, planted the smallest seed of hope inside of him.

  “Wait,” he said again, louder this time.

  Griffith halted the oar in the water and spun around in the raft. Even from the distance of twenty yards or so, Nick could see the hope on the sergeant’s face.

  “Yeah?” Griffith said.

  “If I agree to do this, will I have complete freedom and control of how I get things done?”

  “Yes,” Griffith called out from across the water. “Within reason. But if I’m being honest with you, I feel like you could basically get away with anything.”

  “Who would I be answering to?”

  “Colonel Ogden.”

  Nick thought it over, the plan still being knit together in his head. He’d heard of Richard Ogden before but had never had any dealings with the man.

  “I’ll come on one condition,” Nick said.

  “Name it.”

  “We go on a mission of my own first.”

  Griffith thought about this for a moment and then started paddling back towards the boat.

  “What mission is that?” Griffith asked.

  Nick smiled thinly. “I’m not quite sure yet but if it works out right, I think I can be of more help to you than you think.”

  4

  Nick had been correct in assuming that Griffith had come out to the lake on a military-grade vehicle. It was parked at the start of the woodland trail that led down to the lake. There was a roll bar on the front, as well as some sort of razor sharp grill. It was the shape and size of a Humvee but looked sleeker—like it could take off like a rocket if need be.

  There were a few dings in the hood and the rear view mirror on the driver’s side was askew. Otherwise, it looked like something straight out of an action movie.

  Griffith opened the passenger door for Nick and tossed in the single bag of personal belongings that Nick had packed before leaving the houseboat. Nick climbed into the truck and when his rear end touched the cushion, the comfort of it was almost unreal.

  “It looks a little banged up on the outside,” Nick commented as Griffith got behind the wheel. “Did you have any trouble coming out here?”

  “I ran up on a cluster of ramblers on I-95 just outside of Richmond,” Griffith said. “There were thirty or so of them, blocking the whole road. I plowed through them.”

  “Sounds like fun,” Nick said.

  Griffith shrugged, cranked the truck, and backed the it on the trail towards the secondary road. “I shouldn’t have. It threw the truck out of alignment.”

  They fell into silence as the secondary road led them to the main highway. The ruined town of Clarksville came into view like a bad reel of film. Two years before, the streets had been quaint, as if pulled directly from a drugstore calendar from the 50s or 60s.

  Now it was mostly in ruins. Buildings had been burned and looted. There were police barricades that had fallen over, pushed to the side of the road. The dusty remains of corpses lay scattered along the streets.

  As they made it halfway through town, Griffith pointed ahead. Nick followed his finger and saw a group of eight ramblers walking aimlessly along the street. They were shuffling around in front of the pizzeria that he and Valerie had eaten at several times during their weekend retreats.

  It sent a chill through him and, seeing that pizzeria defaced in such a way, made him miss Valerie more than ever.

  “Want to tell me about this personal mission?” Griffith asked.

  Thinking of Valerie, Nick was pretty sure that there were two personal missions that he’d want to mention at some point. But first, there was something else he needed to do. He still felt that the task that Griffith had mentioned was a suicide mission, but he also thought that that there was a way to make it easier.

  “What you’re describing sounds next to impossible,” Nick said.

  “I know.”

  “Do you have some way to locate the people you want found?”

  “We do, but you’ll have to talk to the surveillance guys to get the information on that. There’s a whole crew of guys back in Langley waiting to debrief you.”

  “And you said that I can probably get damn near anything I want to complete my missions, right?”

  “Correct.”

  Now that they were in Griffith’s truck, the former sergeant seemed a little more confident. Nick didn’t like this. He didn’t want Griffith to feel that he was in charge. The mechanics of the situation simply weren’t set up that way. Sure, Griffith had saved him from what would have eventually become a choice between starvation or death-by-ramblers, but at the root of it, Nick knew that he had the control here.

  “I’m going to need help,” Nick said.

  “Of course. We have selected ten of the best remaining soldiers to assist you. Five are from the National Guard, two are marines, and the other three are—”

  “No good,” Nick interrupted. “I want to handpick my help.”

  Griffith nodded. “I don’t think that will be a problem.”

  “Good.”

  “And w
hat about this mission?” Griffith asked.

  “I need to think on it some more.”

  Griffith said nothing. He kept driving, guiding the truck through the road out of Clarksville. They were on a four-lane highway fifteen minutes later and then picked up the interstate within forty-five minutes.

  Griffith did eighty miles per hour the entire way, burning down the miles. As they sped down the interstate, Richmond came into view alarmingly fast. Nick took in the devastated scene. There wasn’t much destruction that he could see, but he felt like he was looking through an old history book at buildings that had existed a long time ago. They stood like relics, like shards of bone from an archeological dig that had turned up giants.

  “I guess you missed the aftermath of it all while out on the lake,” Griffith said. “It was depressing…especially to see it all as the broadcasting systems went out. The footage they showed of Los Angeles two days before everything went black was beyond nightmarish. There were fires and explosions. People that hadn’t even been infected were killing themselves. There were hordes of ramblers in the streets, clogging the highways in groups of up to fifty thousand.”

  Nick had seen some of the carnage on the news feeds before he had made his retreat to the lake, but nothing like what Nick was describing. The worst he had seen was a large group of ramblers getting into a high school gymnasium that had been converted into a safe house for a small community in Arkansas.

  Looking out at the dwindling Richmond skyline was much like looking at a crime scene where the perpetrator was long gone.

  “You said there were those four towns in Japan that were untouched,” Nick said. “Was there nowhere in America that got so lucky?”

  “From the best we can tell, there were some places in Nebraska and Nevada that went basically untouched. But those are flat stretches of fields and desert. The towns that are out there are insignificant. There were HAZMAT and CDC teams sent out to locales like that to give the residents the option of evacuating. The majority did but for the most part, it seems like the parasite spread everywhere around the US.”

  “Did anyone ever find out where it came from?”

  “There are some educated guesses but nothing concrete. There’s lots of information available that I’m not well-versed on. But like I said, you’ll be filled in right away when we get to Langley.”

  Nick nodded as Richmond slid away behind them. He looked ahead at the mostly deserted interstate highway. There were abandoned cars scattered here and there and the remains of bodies, long ago dried out. It was hard to tell if the shells he saw were from the uninfected having died in the carnage or of the ramblers that had been put down as they had started to grow drastically in numbers.

  The afternoon sky was blue and unblemished, and the drone of the truck’s wheels on the highway was hypnotic. At some point, Nick fell asleep to the noise, his head thudding softly against the window.

  His last thought as he drifted off was that the sound of the truck’s engine sounded like a promise that had been fulfilled—the sound of a human invention that he had expected to never use or hear ever again.

  5

  Nick woke up to Griffith nudging him. He opened his eyes and saw the road beyond the windshield. There were white marks on the pavement, forming letters that said something he couldn’t read from his place propped against the window.

  “We’re here,” Griffith said.

  Nick sat up and rubbed at his eyes. There was a tall chain-link fence straight ahead, easily twenty feet tall. The fence was topped with spools of razor wire. There were six concrete towers spaced along the fence with gun turrets at the top. One of the shooters waved to the truck as they approached.

  Beyond the fence, Nick could see a series of buildings that looked boring and uniform. Several vehicles very similar to the one he was currently in were parked in a large parking lot along the right side if the property. Other than those vehicles and a single army tank, the parking lot looked just as dead as the rest of the world.

  “Langley was pretty heavily populated at the end,” Nick said. “Do you have issues with the ramblers trying to get in?”

  “No, not really,” Griffith said. “We did at first, but after a while, they wised up. We put down more than a thousand of them in the first week or so that we got ourselves established here. They started to see these grounds as a threat and stopped coming.”

  “Sounds like learned behavior,” Nick said.

  “Indeed. We’ve learned a lot about them in the last two years. All of which you will be filled in on shortly.”

  Griffith drove them to the gate and waited. He gave a single beep of the truck’s horn and a gate within the fence was slowly opened. As the gate opened, two armed guards stepped out of the nearest tower, their eyes trained out towards the road.

  “You guys aren’t taking any chances, are you?” Nick asked.

  “We can’t afford to.”

  Griffith pulled his truck in beside one of the other military-grade vehicles that were parked in front of a large brick building. To the left, there were three smaller buildings. One of these was a long two story building that looked very much like a cheap motel. A few people milled around outside of this building on a thin stretch of lawn. He even saw a child sitting on a sidewalk, playing with action hero toys. A small playground sat at the far end but no one was using it. It looked severely out of place.

  “What’s over there?” Nick asked as they stepped out of the truck. He pointed to the strip of lawn and the long two story building.

  “Housing for about one hundred and sixty people,” he said. “Those are the civilians that live here. The residences for those of us that work here are inside here,” he finished, pointing to the building in front of them.

  They both walked to the building that Griffith had just mentioned. They came to the front door and walked inside. It was the first building Nick had been inside within two years that wasn’t abandoned or ruined.

  An empty foyer awaited them. To Nick, it looked like the sort of room that many people had once waited in to speak to someone of importance, or for job interviews. An old generic painting of a countryside scene was on the far wall, hung over a dozen empty chairs.

  Nick followed Griffith through the foyer, past an empty receptionist-type desk, and down a hall. At the end of the hall, a single solider stood motionlessly with an assault rifle, guarding an elevator.

  “Welcome back, Sergeant Griffith,” the man said.

  Griffith nodded and hit the DOWN button on the elevator. Nick eyed the guard for a moment, finding it peculiar that any old traditions of the army were still holding firm after everything that had happened. He wondered if these types of things were being done for legitimate safety or to preserve some sort of normalcy and, therefore, a sense of purpose.

  The elevator arrived with a ding and they took it down. Nick took the moment to gather his thoughts. Being inside of a building, and hearing the mechanical hum of the elevator car was a bit too much. They were sensations he never thought he would experience again.

  “You okay?” Griffith asked.

  “Fine.”

  “I’ll take you to Colonel Ogden first. He’ll want to get you filled in right away. While you’re speaking to him, I’ll have someone bring you something to eat. You look like you haven’t eaten anything of substance for quite some time.”

  Nick nodded, thinking of the stale crackers and cheese spread he had for breakfast. He pictured that box of crackers, forever trapped in his houseboat from this point on, and found something profoundly sad about it.

  Before the tears could come, the elevator stopped and dinged again. The doors slid open to reveal a room that was dimly lit. It was covered in desks and low cubicle walls. A series of large screens hung on the far wall. On one, Nick saw what was clearly an image from a satellite revealing a roadway that was cluttered with a large group of ramblers.

  As Nick stepped out behind Griffith, he saw several people milling around. Some had papers i
n their hands while others stood or sat around laptops. The idea of working with such fluidity and strategy was baffling to Nick.

  “Just follow me,” Griffith said.

  Nick did as he was asked. He noticed that a few people were pausing for a moment to look at him. They were all dressed in clothes that look reasonably clean—plain tee shirts and jeans. Some even wore what looked like the bare basics of military garb.

  He wondered if they all knew about his past. Did they know everything about him that Griffith knew? And if so, did they trust him being here in their little safe haven?

  Nick honestly didn’t care. Let them look, he thought. Maybe it will make them uncomfortable to see how the other half has been living for the last two years.

  Griffith led him to the back of the room where a large office was closed off from the rest of the room. Griffith knocked on the door and waited for the barely audible response from the other side.

  “Yeah, come in,” said a male voice.

  Griffith opened the door and ushered Nick inside. A man sat at a large desk that was messy with piles of paper and folders. A laptop sat in the center of it all. A large screen was mounted to the back wall, showing several things that made no sense to Nick: numbers, charts, coordinates, and small screens that showed still shots of the grounds above their heads.

  “Nick Blackburn,” Griffith said, “this is Colonel Ogden.”

  Ogden stood up, revealing that he was a tall and well-built man that looked to be in his late fifties. He wore a thick moustache that was mostly gray. His brown eyes looked flat and tired behind the glasses that he wore. He was dressed in military fatigues that looked as if they had been through the ringer a few times.

  “Mr. Blackburn,” Ogden said, coming around the desk to offer his hand. “It’s damn nice to meet you.”

  “Likewise,” Nick said.

  “Thank you for agreeing to help us,” Ogden said.