Necrophobia - 02 Read online

  “It’s almost ritualistic,” I said.

  “Don’t let your imagination run away on you,” Tuck said. But I could hear it under his gruff voice: his imagination already had.

  Sabelia was scanning around with her light. She looked puzzled. Finally, she turned back to us and those big dark eyes of hers looked even larger. “Where’s the blood?” she asked. “Should be everywhere.”

  Of course, she was right and we had all been thinking it, but in the case of Tuck and probably myself as well, it was easier to just pretend it wasn’t so and not dirty up our already confused, desperate lives with questions that would haunt us for weeks and months.

  “It’s on the floor,” Tuck told her with some defiance.

  “It’s not, and you know it,” she said, her Latin blood getting warm again because she was a girl who did not like bullshit in any form. She wanted very badly for us to get out of there, but that did not mean she was going to gloss over what we were seeing. “It should be everywhere. Seven men with slit throats? We should be ankle deep in it and you know it.”

  “We don’t have time to worry about that,” Tuck said.

  “Maybe we better take the time,” she told him.

  She was right. That’s one thing I knew about Sabelia: she was very often right. Her instincts were very good. While Tuck and she debated the facts, I thought it all over. Okay. First off, whether they were soldiers or not, was not important. Whoever they were, they had been kicked around quite a bit. They had been shot in the head either as a method of execution or to keep them from rising up again. I voted for the latter. Then they had been strung up like cattle, throats slit. The blood should have been everywhere, but it wasn’t. I didn’t believe they had been killed somewhere else, bled out and then dragged in here. The brain matter on the floor was contrary to that scenario. Again, no blood. Now, who would take their blood away, collect it? Vampires? That was the first thing that leaped into my mind. The idea didn’t seem so crazy as it should have; with the walking dead in the streets, anything was possible.

  What I was thinking is exactly what Sabelia and Tuck were arguing about.

  “Vampires,” he said. “That’s goofy.”

  “Oh yeah? What about zombies? Is that goofy, too?”

  That silenced him.

  “I didn’t say they slept in coffins and turned into bats, you bullet-head,” she said to him. “But the blood is gone and it didn’t just evaporate on its own. Somebody collected it and took it with them. There’s more than one kind of vampire, you know. The kind I’m thinking about is either a deviant or a cult that uses blood in some kind of ceremony.”

  “Satanism, now?” Tuck said. “Shit.”

  “No, Tuck. It’s not shit,” I said. “What I think we’ve stumbled onto here is something we better keep in mind. We’ve got every stripe of crazy out there. We’ve got zombies, we’ve got psychotic survivalists, we’ve got ARM…and now I think we’ve got something else.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe a cult. Whatever it is, it’s pretty scary shit.”

  We could have debated it all night, I suppose. Bottom line was that Tuck didn’t like what Sabelia and I were hinting at. It sat on him wrong, so he was dismissing it. Maybe it was easier that way for him and I understood. There were a lot of things now with civilization in ruins that you did not want to contemplate. This was just another one. The fall of worldwide law and order had given many individuals carte blanche to do whatever they pleased, to kick their somewhat vague sense of ethics and morality to the curb and act out their twisted dark fantasies. Some of them were trigger-happy survivalists and half-ass Rambo types. But there were others out there, I suspected, whose motives were not so black-and-white. Diseased minds controlling deranged sects. And they were the ones that scared me the worst.

  Pandora’s Box was wide open.

  Of course, as we stood there trying to make sense of it all, and Riley was on the box wondering what was taking us so long, the zombies were hardly dormant. They must have battered the desk out of the way that held the door to the infirmary closed and tracked us down. Because, now they were crashing into the barracks, three or four fighting through the door and what looked to be dozens more behind them.

  “GET MOVING!” Tuck shouted at us. “GET OUT THE WINDOW!”

  We didn’t need anymore encouragement.

  As we ran off down the aisle between the rows of beds, Tuck pulled another WP grenade from his sack and let it fly as he dove for cover. There was not just the handful that had come through the doorway now, but at least a dozen with more pushing their way in all the time. The grenade went with a blinding flash, fire and phosphorus smoke engulfing the zombies. If screaming was part of their lexicon, I imagined they would have. Most were reduced to writhing, burning things, but a few came stumbling out of the inferno with their clothes and hair burning. One of them—the one that got nearest to Tuck—had his entire face flaming.

  But that was the nature of the reanimated dead.

  They saw nothing, knew nothing, understood nothing but the dominating instinct to feed and keep feeding. You couldn’t frighten or intimidate them with firepower or destruction. As long as there was some shred of life in them, they would keep coming at you, keep trying to eat you. Their absolute mindless aggression was frightening…like ants, I had always thought, driver ants cutting a swath of destruction through the jungle; relentless, savage, primal.

  Anyway, the WP grenade was an excellent diversion that not only cut their numbers down, but also disoriented them by and by. By then Sabelia had reached the window, which was the only mode of egress from the barracks. She didn’t bother trying to kick it out or anything so crude, she opened up with her CAR-15 and took it right out of its frame.

  She climbed out, I came right behind her, and then Tuck was coming through.

  I heard the Stryker roar into life and its lights hit us as Riley came to get us.

  “LET’S GO!” Tuck called out.

  But I wasn’t really listening.

  Inside, more zombies had pushed into the room, right through the flames and the burning husks of their confederates. They didn’t come after us. They found the hanging bodies and that’s all they were interested in. They crowded in like puppies fighting to get at their mother’s teats. They went after the corpses, gutting them like hogs, and fighting over shanks of meat and loops of internals. They kept tearing and biting into them, rendering them down to skeletons.

  I turned away, sick in the pit of my belly and the Stryker was there.

  Riley dropped the ramp and we ran for it.

  I kept wondering if we were stepping into some kind of trap. I was waiting for rounds to come flying out of the darkness at us. But I saw nothing out there, just a few zombies moving around, undirected, mindless. Nothing but walking jaws looking for something to bite.

  I backed my way toward the ramp as Tuck and Sabelia jogged up it. This was the way it had to be done. Somebody had to provide security and it fell in my lap. I saw no movement. I saw nothing. As I turned, something came out of the shadows and I heard Sabelia cry out.

  I squeezed off a few rounds with my rifle but the zombies attacked me in numbers…so silent, so deathly.

  There were three or four of them and they took hold of me. I couldn’t use my CAR-15. After the first few shots, it was stripped from my hands. As I tussled with the living dead, I saw Sabelia come running down the ramp out of the corner of my eye.

  “Steve!” she cried out.

  “Get back!” I remember saying. “Get the fuck back!”

  Was I being a hero embracing a hero’s death? Good old Steve. He died with his boots on. They got him all right, but he took three of them with him. No, I don’t recall anything heroic in what I said. Maybe I figured I was done for and I didn’t want something happening to her, too. I don’t know. It happened very fast. They took me and I fought, God how I fought.

  I remember hearing the sound of my fatigue shirt ripping as they t
ried to get at me. About the only thing that saved me from being bitten, was the sheer greed of those damn things. They were fighting over me, pulling me in every direction at the same time.

  I was caught right in the middle of them so Sabelia and Tuck did not fire.

  I heard them shouting.

  I heard Tuck swearing.

  Somewhere during the process—and probably bare seconds into it—I got my Gerber fighting knife out and just started slashing. It was pure instinct. There was no strategy involved, but then again in my experience, there never was when it came to the close-in stuff. I slashed. I hacked. I slit open the eyeballs of one of them and took some fingers off another. I kicked out, dropped one, and buried the Gerber in the throat of another.

  Somehow, I got free.

  I was on the ground, smeared with their gore, but I was free.

  When they came again, Tuck and Sabelia opened up and zombies skulls were blasted apart, brain matter and skull goo splashing in every direction.

  Sabelia pulled me up the ramp.

  When it was closed, Tuck was just staring at me, smiling. “Nice scuffling, Booky. Real nice,” he said.

  I ignored the sarcasm and let Sabelia tend to me. Most times, I avoided getting too close to her so that I didn’t give her the wrong—or maybe right—idea, but this time I let her take care of me. I wasn’t about to fight her.

  ANG PELHAM

  Two days after the armory fiasco, I was still bone-tired. I just dragged around and tried to get my bearings. I don’t think I was so much physically tired, as mentally exhausted. The world we had all known—the one with civilization, cellphones, and greasy cheeseburgers—had gone belly-up, but that didn’t mean the world had stopped turning. In some ways, it seemed like it was moving faster than ever. The bloodless bodies we found hanging in the armory barracks were testament to that. Four months ago, nobody could have foreseen something like this. Now it happened and we were living through it. Nevertheless, one thing I knew is that I couldn’t expect things to remain static. The zombies, I feared, would be a constant until nature figured out how to defeat the virus, but that didn’t mean the zombies themselves might not change as the virus itself evolved or that there weren’t other things out there stirring in the ashes. Dark, horrible things equal to the walking dead.

  This is what I feared.

  Every hour of every day, I knew fear. And, yes, judging by the awful nightmares I had, even in my sleep there was terror.

  I worried about our group.

  I worried about Paul, my son.

  I worried about us all.

  I worried about the tenuous, fragile threads that held us together, knowing full well how easily they could be severed…and especially when there were countless bad people and things out there that wanted to kill us.

  When we rolled in that night, everyone was waiting for us.

  I remember scooping up Paul in my arms and giving him a big hug. He acted as if he didn’t care for it (he was ten, after all) but he didn’t fight much against it. Maria and Jilly were there. They had both been through the shit like everyone else and their families were dead. Maria clung to Tuck as she always did, and Jilly would not unwrap herself from Riley, who was pretty much of a mother to her by that point.

  Jimmy LaRue shook my hand, patted me on the back. “Kind of late, ain’t ya?” he said, pretending like none of it bothered him, but I could see that it did. His eyes were moist and he kept running his hands through his white hair as he did when he felt emotional and was uncomfortable with it.

  Diane, my wife’s sister, was there and she was a bright spot for me because she loved Paul to death and I knew if anything happened to me that she would take care of him and raise him right as her own…or as right as you could hope with the mess the world was in.

  Sabelia and Riley were both glad to be reunited with the other ladies—Carrie and Ginny, Susan and Mia, Dorothy and Kasey and Brittany. The male-to-female ratio was a little unbalanced in our tribe, but there was a very good reason for it and I’ll touch upon that later. Just understand one thing. Those women were soldiers. They had gone through hell, survived it, and then came out the other side fighting. We—Jimmy and I—tended to refer to them as “Tuck’s Army” and not without good cause: though they were fighters all on their own, Tuck had been training them into a hardcore mercenary army.

  And with the way things were, we needed every gun we could get.

  ANG Pelham was a deserted Air National Guard airbase. It was on the small size as far as military airbases go, but at one time, I knew, it had been a focal point in the New York ANG with elements of the 168th Fighter Wing and the 103rd Rescue Wing being based out of there. Pilots had flown F-16 Falcon fighter-bombers and Pave Hawk search-and-rescue choppers out of there as well as big birds like the C-130 Hercules and the C-5 Galaxy. After Zombpox got rolling and people were dying by the thousands, the cities and streets congested by hordes of the living dead and assorted militias engaging each other and the police in blood wars, F-16 pilots had flown out of Pelham to rain down airstrikes on them.

  The planes were all gone now.

  Just about everything was.

  There were assorted barracks and supply Quonsets, hangars and maintenance facilities, but they were all empty. We had taken up residence in the command structure with the traffic control tower. It met our needs, because concrete steel-reinforced berms surrounded the entire thing. So no one could make a run at the structure, with say, a car bomb (strictly Homeland Security knee-jerk after 9/11), and it had an underground storage of fresh water and food, metal shutters that bolted over the windows, and massive steel fire doors that you would have needed a tank to breach. We had set up housekeeping downstairs in the offices and bunkrooms and by night a couple of us worked in shifts up in the tower watching for any incursions into our territory. We kept our vehicles parked out in one of the hangars and there were belowground access tunnels that connected everything together.

  If the shit hit the fan, we could evacuate pretty quickly and be in our armored fighting vehicles within a matter of minutes.

  We all felt pretty safe there.

  Still, though, I worried.

  I mentioned all the whackos out there. The zombies were the greatest threat, of course. They were driven to feed, but they were not cunning in any sense no more than, say, piranhas were. Just eating machines. Creatures of opportunity. With proper security measures, we were safe from them. The only risk we ran was when we left our hidey-hole to work outside or scavenge in the countryside and cities. The zombies worried me, yes, as did Necrovirus. It was out there. It had burned through most of the human race, and my guess was that it was still seeding itself out there, just waiting to harvest what was left, maybe even mutating into something far worse.

  We had water and food, plenty of ammo except for the .50 cal ammo that was getting thin. The base had huge tanks of diesel fuel and gasoline. We had four Stryker assault vehicles and one Jeep. One of the Strykers was down, because the electrical system had gone toes-up, but other than that, we were in very good shape, I thought.

  Still, I worried.

  It wasn’t so much about the zombies or the virus, but about the survivors out there. I knew a lot of them were people like us that still had ethics and were good at heart, but some of them were of a different variety. Survivalists, militias, groups like ARM. They were the ones I worried about. Given the chance, they would come after us. They would kill us not so much for the sheer joy of it—though there were plenty that would, I guessed—but to get what we had. Because they were scavengers, too. They would kill us for our food, our weapons, the Strykers, and, I hate to admit it, the women.

  That’s what kept me up thinking some nights.

  We held a war council the second night after the armory incident and we put everything on the table, telling the others about those bodies we found hanging and what it could mean. There was a good chance it was an isolated incident, but we all knew better, I think, than to dismiss any of it.
It didn’t pay to dismiss anything and we had learned that again and again.

  What we discussed mostly was what we were going to do.

  All of us, myself included, wanted to go to war to kill the zombies, to take the fight to them and clean them out. It was probably an unrealistic ambition, but just existing, just defending ourselves against them, was not enough. It was like living in a cage. We had all lived in the old world. We all knew how good life could be when the wheels were turning and order was a given. Without it, it was the jungle, and we were not the sort of animals that wanted to live in it.

  We wanted the old world back, and we were willing to fight to bring that about.

  That meant not just exterminating the zombies, but kicking ass on the whackos out there; doing them before they did us or other innocent people. We had been stockpiling quite a few weapons, but, as I said, we needed more .50 cal ammo and we had to get it before we could start our push. Then it would be town-by-town and city by city. There was no other way. But getting ammo for the fifty was going to be tricky. We discussed it in detail. The only place to get the ammo we needed would be military bases and National Guard armories. Our best bet would be the latter. Tuck and I knew the location of all the Guard armories in the City and Westchester County. I suspected most would be completely looted like the one we’d just visited, but we had to try and I knew it.

  What bothered me the most were the ones in the City.

  All the boroughs had armories, of course, and they would be hot targets for any militias and paramilitary groups. They would be hotly contested, I figured, and a good place to get in a nasty slug-fest with some of the bigger outfits like ARM who I knew for a fact had not only armored vehicles but helicopters. Tuck’s thoughts on the matter were that our only real concern would be these groups, as the smaller survivalist sects were not big into heavy weapons, preferring automatic weapons and small arms by their very nature. They were scavengers and were on the move nearly constantly. Our chances of grabbing boxes of .50 cal ammo were probably pretty good, he figured.