Zombie Squad Read online

  He was escorted to his vehicle by Colonel Ogden, Griffith, a nameless grunt who was carrying the bags Nick had packed, and an armed guard. Nick took the presence of the guard to mean that Ogden didn’t trust him, and that was fine with Nick. He rather liked the fact that he seemed to rile up the colonel.

  They led him through the first floor of the main building, the only floor that was above ground. He was led to the back of the building and through a security door. This door led to a large parking lot that Nick had not spotted when Griffith had first brought him through the gates. It looked like something straight out of a military magazine. As they walked across the lot, Nick counted a dozen jeeps, about twenty of the armored trucks, three vans that resembled SWAT vans, and one helicopter.

  As they neared the row of black armored trucks, Ogden seemed anxious—whether to be rid of Nick or to finally be one step closer to beginning his missions, Nick wasn’t sure. He walked in a prim manner, his legs taking long strides. It was the walk of a rooster than had full control of the hen house.

  “Just so you know,” Ogden said, almost proudly, “I spoke with Sergeant Griffith while you were selecting your supplies. He’ll be accompanying you on this mission.”

  Nick actually laughed at this, casting Griffith an amused grin. “I thought you were sending me out to save lives,” he said. “Sending him out with me just puts him in danger.”

  “I trust that you will assist Sergeant Griffith without question,” Ogden said. “He has been instructed to do the same for you.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure he has.”

  “He is one of my best men and I expect you to treat him as such.”

  Nick shrugged. He didn’t dare say so, but he was glad that Ogden was sending Griffith along. Having a government presence along for the ride would be proof that his story was legit. He had a pretty strong feeling that neither Katherine nor James would believe his story at face value.

  “Sergeant Griffith has also been instructed to inform us of any significant occurrences along the way,” Ogden went on. “He will let us know when you arrive at each destination. We have our satellite techs working on the best route to take as we speak. We believe that traveling to Alabama for James McAllister should be fairly simple. There was no major road damage between here and there. We should have the best course of action planned for your trip to Texas for Ms. Laslo soon.”

  Nick only nodded. He gave Griffith another stare, noticing right away that the sergeant didn’t seem at all comfortable with the responsibilities that Ogden had laid on him.

  The grunt that had been bringing Nick’s supplies threw them into the back seat. He then placed three guns and an emergency medical kit in the floorboard. The guns consisted of two military issue A4 rifles, a shotgun and a three Sig Sauers that were identical to the one Nick preferred. The shotgun had been specifically requested by Nick. It had always been his weapon of choice for close-up combat, and he assumed that any conflicts with the ramblers would be up close and personal.

  Four large containers of gasoline had also been placed into the back of the truck. According to Ogden, there was no need to assume that all of the gas stations they passed would be non-operational but he knew for a fact that some were. There was no sense in taking any chances of getting out on the road only to run out of gas.

  The last item that was placed into the truck was in a small steel cooler: two vials of the vaccine, just in case it was needed…in case James and Katherine hadn’t survived the outbreak as Nick had assumed.

  Nick started for the driver’s side door but he was intercepted by Griffith. They shared an uneasy stare as Griffith shook his head. “I’ll drive,” he said.

  Nick wanted to argue but didn’t see the point. If little ploys like this were the only way Ogden and his men could manage to feel in control, Nick would let them have it. He shrugged and walked back to the passenger door. He slid inside and closed the door without a word.

  He watched as Griffith and Ogden had a brief conversation. He couldn’t hear their hushed tones through the doors and he really didn’t care to. He could easily imagine what was being said. Ogden was no doubt telling Griffith to babysit him…to make sure he played by the rules and didn’t do anything that wasn’t by the book.

  But as far as Nick was concerned, “the book” had gone the way of the dinosaurs as soon as the ramblers had overtaken the major cities. Hell…if Katherine Laslo’s hunches had been one hundred percent correct, that fabled book had been thrown out the window long before the ramblers had even been part of the picture.

  Ogden and Griffith finished up with a handshake and salute. Ogden then took a few steps back and watched as Griffith got in behind the wheel.

  “You know,” Nick said, “he doesn’t trust one of us. And I think you might be in the clear.”

  “He’s very rigid,” Griffith said, starting the engine. “And based on your line of work for the five years leading up to the outbreak, I think he has enough reason to not trust you.”

  “But he trusts me enough to administer the vaccine. I find that funny.”

  “You were the best man for the job.”

  “Expendable is the word you’re looking for.”

  “No. The best man for the job,” Griffith said again, but there wasn’t much enthusiasm there.

  “That says some pretty miserable things about you and the company you’ve been keeping underground for the last two years, then.”

  Griffith didn’t reply to this. He drove the truck across the parking lot, towards the gates. Nick looked at the digital clock on the truck’s dashboard and saw that he had been underground in the center of operations for just over four hours. He’d been told everything he needed to know (or, Nick thought, what Ogden thought he needed to know) and then ushered out like some cardboard cutout nine-to-five worker.

  Griffith approached the gates and waited for the man in the tower to open it. The man in the tower gave a wave as they rolled through and headed out onto the road beyond.

  “You know what I find interesting?” Nick said.

  “What’s that?” Griffith replied.

  “Ogden never bothered asking me for my version of the events that took place on the day the President went missing. Not once. Neither did you or anyone else on his staff.”

  “So?”

  “So that tells me that everyone’s mind is made up. Everyone assumes that I had something to do with the President’s fate.”

  “Let’s say you didn’t,” Griffith said. “Are you denying that you held him at gunpoint?”

  “Not a bit. But you conveniently left out the part where I singlehandedly saved him from about a dozen ramblers. There’s so much about that day that no one will ever know.

  “Do you want to tell me what happened?” Griffith asked.

  “No.”

  “Well, if these missions go as planned, maybe we can get his side of the story soon.”

  “Maybe,” Nick said skeptically.

  Griffith drove on, the afternoon slowly winding down into evening and the night that waited beyond that. The idea of driving through the dark in this new and unpredictable world did not sit well with Nick, but a large part of him welcomed the adventure.

  He looked into the rearview and watched the gates and the guard towers disappear over the horizon. They headed south, the road unspooling its empty surface and endless secrets ahead of them.

  10

  Nick was surprised to find that he liked Griffith quite a bit. The longer they were on the road together, the more defined Griffith seemed to become. The further they got away from Langley, the less like a military sycophant he seemed to be. There was an actual human being without a stick up his ass under the military façade that he tried so hard to keep composed for Ogden.

  It was three hours into the trip, Griffith pushing ninety on a four-lane highway that was eerily vacant, when Griffith stepped over a line that Nick had not been expecting. It took Nick by surprise, but he was beyond glad that the topic had been breached. It
was further proof that Griffith was more than just a cut-out of what men like Ogden had come to expect from those beneath them.

  “I didn’t tell you before,” Griffith said, “but I know about your history. I know about the things you did before you went dark. It’s pretty damn impressive.”

  “I never went dark,” Nick said. “I went freelance.”

  “That’s a nice way to put it,” Griffith said. “All I know is that no one could find you unless you wanted to be found for a little more than five years. To me, that’s going dark.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Anyway, I bring that up because I also want you to know that if we’re working together in this capacity, you can trust me. I don’t know the full story about what happened with you and President Ames on that last day, and I really don’t care. The same is true of most of the freelance jobs you took and were nearly brought in for. All I know is that if Colonel Ogden and his people wanted you this badly, all of the stories I heard about you from before must have been true.”

  “They might have been embellished a bit,” Nick said. “You can’t believe everything you hear.”

  “People talk about you like you used to be some sort of heroic GI Joe-type guy,” Griffith said. “What made you stop?”

  “I never stopped,” Nick said. “I kept working in the same capacity, just for different people. When I saw that people in Washington were no longer concerned about the interests of the citizens that had elected them, I decided to go elsewhere for work. That was when I was serving as secret service for Ames under his first term. The stooges in Washington…they were people that I had helped protect and whose agendas I was helping to build before laying low as secret service. So in a way, I felt like I was part of the problem. I wanted to rectify that.”

  Griffith opened his mouth to say something but then snapped it closed. He bit at his lip and was visibly agitated. It was clear that he wasn’t sure if he should say what was on his mind.

  “We’re on the same side here,” Nick said. “If you have something to say, say it.”

  “I was never a big conspiracy guy,” Griffith said. “I don’t understand what sort of underhanded deals you thought you knew about that could cause you to alter your stellar record within the government.”

  “There’s plenty,” Nick said. He then chuckled and added, “You know, I’m glad Ogden sent you along, Griffith. If we can get to James and Katherine and you hear everything they have to say—everything they’ve been through—I think we might be delivering you back to Langley a changed man.”

  “You said that Katherine Laslo knew that all of this would happen,” Griffith said. “How?”

  “She got wind of one of those conspiracies that you don’t buy into. She knew about it years in advance.”

  “And I assume you didn’t believe her?”

  “I thought there was something brewing behind the scenes, but nothing like this. Katherine always sort of overshot things. She tried to tell me bits and pieces, but I didn’t believe her.”

  For the first time, Griffith looked unmistakably angry. “You honestly think the government would allow something like the outbreak to happen on purpose?” he asked.

  “No, but I do think that there are lots of incompetent people in positions of power. And I think somewhere along the line, someone made a mistake that resulted in everything that happened.”

  Griffith stopped himself from responding again, but not because of his own hesitation. His eyes locked on something outside and his jaw dropped slightly. He pointed to the left, but Nick had already seen it, too.

  A large open field sat along the side of the interstate, the grass having grown wild due to two years of neglect from state maintenance. It stood thick, as much as four three feet tall in some places. Near the center of the field, a huge group of ramblers walked together, heading back the way Nick and Griffith had come from.

  There were at least three hundred of them, walking in a pack. A few were separated from the herd, straggling along the outskirts of the pack. They walked slower, dragging their feet rather than lifting them and marching forward. Seeing them in such light, it was easy for Nick to see them as the monsters he had always assumed them to be.

  If the herd was aware of the large truck zooming down the road less than one hundred yards away from them, not a single one of them showed any sign.

  “Have you ever seen a group that large?” Nick asked.

  “Not since the last days of the outbreak. We’ve seen much larger on satellite images, but never up close.”

  Griffith slowed the truck (whether on purpose or subconsciously, Nick wasn’t sure) as both men looked at the horde crossing the field. It was like watching some weird migration of a species that had just been discovered. No one yet knew their habits or mannerisms, making them unpredictable.

  Once they had passed the horde and the ramblers were nothing more than specks in the rearview, the truck was filled with silence again. Any blooming hostility between them had been forgotten. Seeing the large group of ramblers had reminded them that none of their previous talk mattered. It had reminded them of how things were different now.

  All that really mattered now was coming to terms with their new place on the food chain—a few rungs lower than where they had clung two years before—and how they could find new ways not to fall off completely.

  11

  Nick had been to James’s home on two occasions during what Griffith had started referring to as his “dark years.” While both visits had been brief, it was the sort of place that stuck with you, mainly because of James McAllister’s near-obsession with being fully prepared for an all-out government takeover. James had been warning about such a takeover for nearly ten years before the outbreak occurred.

  In terms of a distrust of the government, James had Katherine Laslo beat.

  But only by a little.

  Even in the waning light of the late afternoon, Nick recognized the property. It was on a secondary road that wound deep into the Alabama woods where every foot of scenery looked exactly the same: trees, trailer parks, trees, and more trees. Nick recognized the thin dirt track that wound into the forests, a busty little smudge on the blacktop giving away the entrance.

  The road was in worse shape that it had been three years ago when Nick had last visited, but it was unmistakable.

  “Here,” Nick said, pointing to the dirt road.

  “This?” Griffith said. “You sure?”

  “Positive.”

  Griffith turned onto the dirt road with a concerned expression on his face. The overhang of trees was so thick that it shifted the late afternoon’s lack of light into a fake dusk. Griffith flipped the headlights on and continued down the road.

  They saw the first fallen ramblers a quarter of a mile further down. There were eight of them, all taken down with a shot to the head. Gauging from the extent of the damage, they had been killed with a high powered weapon.

  Several thousand feet further down, the road meandered down a bumpy hill and was blocked by a heavy-duty fence that looked to be made of some sort of wire. Several rambler bodies lay motionless at the foot of it.

  Griffith brought the truck to a stop and both men stepped out onto the edges of the road.

  “This wasn’t here before,” Nick said.

  They eyed the fence suspiciously and approached it on foot. Something about it didn’t seem right. Nick could almost feel something wrong about the scene.

  “You hear that?” Griffith asked as he slowly approached the fence.

  Nick fell quiet and listened. Within a few seconds, he did hear something—a low pitched humming noise that seemed to touch something ever so lightly within his head. The hairs on his arms also responded to it.

  “It’s an electric fence,” Nick said. It perfectly explained the feeling of something wrong he had felt moments ago.

  He looked to the right and saw that the fence extended for several yards before cutting further back into the forest. He looked to the lef
t and saw that Griffith was doing the same. The fence went back the same distance to the left as well. There were several bodies—presumably ramblers—scattered along the bottom of it. He recalled Ogden saying that the ramblers could be killed by electricity. Apparently, James had known this, too.

  “He must have put this up when everything started going to hell,” Nick said.

  “It’s put together pretty well from the looks of it,” Griffith said.

  “When it comes to paranoid prepper-type stuff, James doesn’t mess around,” Nick said.

  “That’s obvious. But how in the hell do we get in?”

  “His cabin isn’t too much farther down this road. If we lay down on the horn, I’m pretty sure he could hear us.”

  “Yes, and attract every rambler within earshot,” Griffith argued.

  “We could shoot through it,” Nick said. “God knows Ogden sent us out with enough firepower. It would—”

  Nick stopped here, going silent and concentrating hard on something.

  “What is it?” Griffith asked, his hand instantly going to the Glock on his hip.

  Nick nodded his head towards the other side of the electric fence. “You hear that?”

  Griffith was quiet for a few seconds longer but then he nodded. “An engine.”

  Nick nodded, looking through the metal lattice pattern of the fence. He wondered how many volts were going through it to be giving off a charge strong enough to affect the hairs on his arms from two feet away. However much it was, it was apparently enough to kill a rambler.

  As the engine noise grew louder, a small pickup truck came into view around a grove of trees, slowly headed their way.

  “Is that McAllister’s truck?” Griffith asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  Griffith settled his hand on the butt of this gun. “Can we trust him?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  But in all honesty, Nick wasn’t sure. James had been on the verge of being psychotically paranoid before the outbreak. He wondered how the last two years had affected James. Nick felt that everyone that survived had likely changed in some way over the last two years. Chances were good that the man driving the truck towards them was now a complete stranger that would easily gun them down for their supplies.