Zombie Squad Page 8

  “Are you for real?” Griffith asked.

  “There were countless little splinter groups like that,” Nick said. “I am not at all trying to insult you, but no one within the military knew about these groups unless they were high ranking and absolutely needed to know.”

  “So who hired you?” Griffith asked.

  “A man named Corey Stills,” James said. “He was—”

  “I know who he is,” Griffith said. “He was a prime suspect in an undercover sting operation to uncover terrorist cells working in the US a few years ago.” He then cut his eyes towards Nick and added, “I seem to remember your friend Katherine Laslo being targeted as a suspect, too.”

  “I still find that hilarious,” James said from the back. “Katherine being arrested on terrorist charges.”

  “How’s that funny?” Griffith asked.

  “You have to know her,” James said.

  “He’s right,” Nick said. “I’d be willing to bet money that Katherine is more of a patriot to the US than anyone you have back at Langley.”

  “But the charges that were brought against her—”

  “—were dropped,” Nick interrupted. “No evidence. You know that. It was the same reason Corey Stills was never detained. The government’s counter terrorism units went on a witch-hunt and found none. But they had no problem slapping a witch’s hat and broom onto people to make it look like they were getting results.”

  “Anyway,” James said, as if annoyed that the conversation had taken such a detour, “to further prove that your undercover operations were bullshit, the Night Hawks hired us as part of a team to stop a terrorist plot. And we did.”

  “That’s not on your file,” Griffith said, looking over to Nick.

  Nick said nothing at first. He didn’t like how this was quickly becoming a heated debate. They were supposed to be working together here, not rehashing the past to point out their flaws and differences.

  “There’s a lot that’s not in my file,” Nick said.

  “Yeah,” James added. “I bet your Colonel didn’t tell you about Nick putting a bullet between the eyes of a suicide bomber that was three minutes away from hijacking a city bus in New York. In fact, I bet you never even knew that little plot was going on. You were too busy trying to land undesirables like myself and Katherine Laslo in prison because of lame-ass privacy laws.”

  “Wait,” Nick said. “Can we not do this? Yeah, we don’t trust each other. That’s clear. But we still have a long drive ahead of us and—”

  Nick saw what was in front of them at the same moment Griffith stomped on the brakes. All three men surged forward and then slammed back into their seats.

  “Oh, my God,” James said from the back, leaning forward so that his head was between Nick and Griffith. “I’ve never seen this many of them together.”

  In front of the truck, there was a large herd of ramblers blocking the road. They weren’t packed as tightly together as the group that Nick and Griffith had seen in the field earlier, but walked slightly apart from one another. Many of them were facing directly towards the truck, their vacant eyes not bothering to squint against the glare of the headlights. From what Nick could see, they were not intentionally blocking the road; they were simply crossing, wandering aimlessly as they tended to do.

  “There’s got to be fifty of them,” James said.

  “Easily,” Griffith agreed. “We have satellite pictures that show groups of as many as one thousand in the more heavily populated areas of California.”

  “But based on what you told me about how they operate,” James said, “these things lived near here. Within twenty miles, right?”

  “Give or take. And that’s just a theory, mind you.”

  “So how do we get past them?” Nick asked.

  The moment the question was out of his mouth, five of the ramblers in the front of the group started to walk forward. One of them—a woman in a torn red blouse and jeans caked in mud, grime and God only knew what else—cocked her head and bared her teeth. Several of them were missing.

  “Kill the lights,” Nick said.

  “No, don’t,” James said. “They see better than we do in the night. The lights are probably confusing them.”

  Griffith inched the truck closer to the group. A few of the ramblers moaned loud enough to be heard inside the truck.

  “So what the hell do we do?” Nick said.

  “Just plow through them,” James said. “This truck has more armor than all of King Arthur’s court.

  “Too risky,” Griffith said. “If this truck is damaged in any way in terms of mechanics, we could potentially be stranded out here. I almost messed it up earlier by rolling over a few on my way out to pick up Nick.”

  More of the ramblers were coming closer now as several more slow heads turned their way.

  “Try laying down on the horn,” James said. “I’m not positive, but I’m pretty sure loud noises drive them crazy.”

  “That’s right,” Griffith said. “Some of our own studies have shown that the ones we held in captivity went timid whenever an alarm went off.”

  Nick watched Griffith smile as some of the research he had been neck-deep in over the last two years was finally paying off in a real work situation.

  In front of them, one of the ramblers reached the hood of the truck. It raised a hand and slammed it down hard on the hood. In the headlights, the rambler’s eyes were vacant and milk white. There were signs of rot along the left side of his face. And although the rambler—clearly a male—seemed incredibly distant and harmless, there was a spiteful violence in its face.

  Behind him, a small sea of pale faces wore a similar expression.

  Griffith pressed both hands down on the steering wheel’s horn. Although he’d been expecting it, the noise made Nick jump a bit in his seat.

  The reaction from the crowd of ramblers was immediate. The one in front screamed—only to call it a scream didn’t do it justice. It was more like an agonized moan…what a man might sound like if giving birth to a child. He backed away, colliding with two ramblers behind him. A few of them fell down in a tangle of limbs; even their falling seemed slow.

  Others behind this commotion started to shake their heads from side to side and walked off towards either side of the road. A few others glared at the truck and gave intimidating howls. These few seemed to know what the men in the truck were doing—that they were intentionally making the noise to clear them out of the road. These few stubborn ramblers stayed in the center of the road, taking tentative steps forward only to end up retreating with the others.

  It took less than two minutes for all of the ramblers to give up their stand. A few determined stragglers remained in the road, as if daring Griffith to drive on further. One woman had sat down in the center of the road, looking dazed into the headlights. She looked like she was nodding off.

  “Shouldn’t we be killing these things every chance we get?” James asked.

  “If they attack us, yes,” Griffith said. “But wasting the ammo when we don’t have to would have been foolish. God only knows how the remainder of this little trip is going to go.”

  With the road mostly cleared, Griffith rolled forward. As he neared the female rambler sitting in the road in the last clothes she had worn as a normal human being, Nick watched a tightened look of determination spread across Griffith’s face.

  “You okay?” Nick asked him.

  Griffith nodded and then floored the gas. The truck rocketed forward, the woman directly ahead of them. Nick was unable to look away. The last thing he saw before the woman’s body was overtaken by the truck was her halfway open eyes. The whites were all that showed, and as the truck bore down on her, Nick thought he saw her give the briefest of smiles.

  She nearly looked grateful.

  Then she was gone. The only proof that she had been there at all was a sickening thump and jolt from beneath the truck.

  Nick saw that James was just as surprised as he was that Griffith had tak
en such an action. But neither of them said anything. They sat in silence as Griffith picked up speed, not easing off the gas until the needle hit one hundred.

  Nick looked at Griffith out of the corner of his eye and realized for the first time that although he had his own horrific story of how he had come to be here, the same was true of Griffith. Hell, it was true of every single person he had met at Langley today.

  Nick wondered what Griffith had endured. What had he forced himself through in order to survive?

  Seeing that look on his face moments after driving down the woman rambler, Nick wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

  They drove in a southwestern direction as midnight neared. The sky above was black and speckled with stars. Nick looked at those pinpoints of light and tried to remember the last time he had looked up at them, marveling, when the world had made sense.

  13

  It was two hours later when Griffith finally gave in. He slowed the truck and pulled over to the side of the road. He said nothing, just stared ahead into the darkness.

  “What is it?” Nick asked.

  “I need a few hours of sleep. We should be in Houston within five hours if we can keep up our speed. Can you make it the rest of the way?”

  “Sure.”

  “James, can you put a few gallons of gas in?”

  “Yeah.”

  As Nick and Griffith switched positions, Nick was once again struck by how Griffith’s demeanor had shifted after running down the rambler. The man had not said a word. He no longer seemed to care much about the history that Nick and James had shared. Even his subtle suspicions about Nick’s abilities and history seemed to have died down.

  Nick sat behind the wheel and waited for James to empty one of the gas containers from the back into the truck’s twenty gallon tank.

  When they were back on the road, Nick was amazed at how alien it felt to be back behind the wheel of a vehicle. To move unhindered with such ease was like a weird sort of dream where you thought you we flying.

  For the first hour of his turn at the wheel, he noticed James nodding off in the back and then instantly stirring himself awake. He watched this several times before James finally gave in and fell asleep.

  Nick was certain that James had been fighting sleep because he didn’t trust his travelling companions. As he wound his way through the night, Nick started to think about trust and whether or not it held any real influence in a world that had been all but destroyed by creatures that were human at their core, but worked under some primitive savagery and intellect.

  For instance, Nick didn’t trust Griffith. While he thought Griffith was a competent soldier and had his shit together, he also didn’t see Griffith having any issue with killing either of them if Ogden gave the order to do so.

  As for James, Nick was not at all surprised that he had no trust for either of them. James had never been one to hand his trust over easily. He had given it to Nick several years ago and had paid for it dearly. It was a part of his history that Nick had long ago come to accept but didn’t like to look back on. It was surprisingly easy to keep it buried even now that James was sleeping in the back seat.

  Nick let his thoughts wander, always making sure to check Griffith’s driving directions whenever they passed an exit. Ogden had given Griffith the instructions when Griffith had called to give a status update after leaving James’s cabin. From what Ogden’s men had come up with, there were entire portions of the US interstate highway system that was clogged with traffic from the several weeks of violence and mass panic that had occurred during and immediately following the outbreak. The route that Ogden’s men had come up with sat on the console. Nick found it eerie to be looking at a mapped-out route across a country that was, for all intents and purposes, dead.

  It was a surreal couple of hours as Nick drove through the night, holding steady at eighty for a while and then getting comfortable enough with the truck to reach ninety-five.

  He drove in silence, looking out into the night and thinking of the lake. While he didn’t miss the houseboat, he did find himself missing the slight rocking of the water—a reminder that he was isolated from land and safe out in the boat.

  At 3:45, he took an exit that had been called out in the directions. Nick left the interstate and started down a long stretch of two-lane road that took him through the night-shrouded countryside of Louisiana.

  He half expected to see a group of ramblers at any moment, perhaps forming another weak roadblock. But there were none to be seen.

  It was almost as if they had given up on this world and had gone off in search of better things.

  14

  James woke up thirty miles outside their destination. The sun was just beginning to come up as Nick drew closer to Houston. The dawn sketched a line of gold across the horizon that eventually woke Griffith up as well.

  Griffith saw the dim sunlight and checked the clock.

  “How close?” he asked.

  “Maybe forty-five minutes.”

  “We made great time,” Griffith said, as if he were on a normal road trip.

  They were still on a two-lane road, which Nick had been steadily chewing up for the past hour and a half. There had been stranded cars here and there along the road, but nothing that had slowed their progress. Seeing each car had reminded Nick that they were indeed still on Earth and had not been transported to some barren land. The rusted and often burned out shells of those cars had kept him grounded while driving, bringing the memories of the outbreak and the harrowing weeks that had followed to the center of his brain.

  “Are you two certain you know where she will be?” Griffith asked.

  “Pretty sure,” Nick said. “Houston didn’t get it too bad, right?”

  “In terms of infection and attacks, it was the same as everywhere else,” Griffith said. “But as far as property damages, if that’s what you’re talking about, no…not too bad.”

  “Then yes, I think we’ll find her.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Katherine is a creature of habit,” James explained sleepily from the back. “I don’t even think the end of the world would have made her change her ways.”

  “I assume you have both worked with her, too?” Griffith asked.

  “More or less,” Nick said.

  As they closed in on the location that both Nick and James assumed Katherine would be found, Griffith retrieved a knapsack from the back seat and divvied out food for the morning. The three men had a breakfast of peanut butter crackers and dry imitation Frosted Flakes, which they washed down with small plastic bottles of water.

  They rode into Houston twenty minutes later. Nick was surprised how unnatural the skyline looked as they came in from the downtown route that Ogden’s men mapped out for them. He was also surprised that, for the most part, the streets seemed to be open and undisturbed.

  The worst of it was the decaying remains of countless people strewn about with the wrecked vehicles and the aftermath of lootings. Many of the dead had been decimated, reduced to nothing more than bones. Others lay in dried pools of black and crimson, their bodies looking to have been turned inside out and left to rot.

  Several blocks further in, the streets started to get congested. Cars started to block the road and were packed in bumper to bumper. Some still held their occupants, slumped over steering wheels in various forms of decay or stretched out over back seats.

  Nick maneuvered the truck in as far as he could but eventually had to come to a stop. He looked ahead at the sea of cars, their dusty bodies glittering in the morning light. He wondered how these people had met their end. Had they come to this space in the road, unable to go any further and just given up? The number of empty cars around them suggested that many had tried escaping on foot. However, the mangled and rotted corpses to all sides showed the results of what happened in those scenarios.

  It made him wonder, not for the first time, if the ramblers had any rhyme or reason in how they chose to attack for purposes of infect
ion or to simply feed and kill.

  “Looks like we’re walking,” Nick said.

  “Are you crazy?” Griffith asked.

  “If we’re right about where she’s staying, it’s less than ten blocks ahead,” Nick said.

  “Besides,” James added, “I’ve killed at least thirty ramblers with my piss-poor Winchester rifle. With the kind of fire power we’re packing, I think we’ll be okay.”

  Griffith looked unconvinced but didn’t bother arguing. Nick parked the truck, killed the engine, and stepped out. James followed right along behind him. After a moment’s hesitation, Griffith finally did the same.

  They walked to the back of the truck where Griffith climbed into the bed and stepped over the remaining gas cans. He untied the tension cables that were holding down the bags and then unzipped one of the large duffel bags.

  Nick had never been a big weapons guy; you aim, you pull the trigger, and someone died. But this was not a normal situation and he wanted to be as prepared as possible. He was glad to have the small stockpile that had been loaded up in Langley. He took the shotgun he had requested while James and Griffith each took a rifle. Nick also took some additional ammunition for his Sig, which he shoved into the single pack he slung over his shoulder.

  As he looked to the streets ahead, he couldn’t help but think of the day where he had walked with the President and Steven, the President’s driver, into Bethesda to rescue his family. It seemed to be coming back around, time like some lopsided wheel, each pivotal point being worn down and repeating itself.

  He gave Griffith a moment to gather his pack. It contained ammo, some food, and, Nick was pretty sure, a laptop he had brought from Langley.

  James and Griffith joined him, looking to the streets ahead. It looked chaotic and dead all at once. It was like a bad POV shooter game where you just knew that some bad guy was hiding behind one of those cars or in one of the waiting alleyways.