Book 24 - An Imperfect Utopia, page 30
As soon as Sholto saw Heppy limping towards the excavator, he stopped the engine. He’d already seen the undead, and it was a sight he hoped he’d never have to see again. Hundreds. Maybe a thousand, perhaps more, all hemmed in by the cars, now moving towards the excavator. Even having turned the engine off had made no difference. Blocked in by the road, they would just keep on coming. It would take an army to stop them.
Sholto jumped down and ran between the fallen cars, clambering over some, scraping flesh on others. Tom caught up with Heppy, picked her up with little ceremony, and then began to jog. Sholto stopped, waiting for him, watching Jay and watching the undead stagger and fall as they neared their prey. Some were trampled but there were so many, too many, it made no difference.
Tom threw Heppy across the hood of the car between them. Inelegantly, and with a yelp of pain from Heppy, Sholto caught her and carried her back to the relative shelter of the excavator. There, he unslung his carbine. Waiting for the other two, he raised the gun, scanning the rooftops for a target. He saw one. A giant of a man standing with his peavey hook held high: Etienne. The sniper was dead, but it wasn’t over yet.
Chapter 37 - Thirteen Bedrolls
Olympia
Sholto paced around the garage-compound from which the attack had come. His bones still vibrated after his jaunt in the excavator. John was up on the garage’s roof, watching the undead. So far, the jumble of cars blocking the road were keeping the zombies contained, but it was only a matter of minutes before they broke out. Heppy was sitting in a blue Toyota Landcruiser, picking glass out of Jay’s face. The wounds were shallow, the damage superficial, but the kid was lucky not to have lost an eye, or worse. Tom was slumped in an old kitchen chair not far away, lost in the misery of pain for which there was no medicine except time. That left only Etienne to help him gather intel and make sense of what had just happened.
Three cars, four ambushers, thirteen bedrolls. Where were the other nine? Jay had shot one of the ambushers through the cars, nearly ripping him apart. John had taken out two more, both of whom might have been trying to flee. Etienne had killed the sniper, impaling him through the heart. Four ambushers. Like there’d been at Bangor Base. Thirteen bedrolls was three squads of four plus a leader. Where were the other two squads? Where was their leader?
The cars worked, so they’d be driving out of here, and within the next few minutes. Anything they didn’t take with them would be left for the undead.
The small sliver of parking lot inside the fence held three trucks, two chemical toilets and a curtained shower area. They’d swept the area clean, but there were none of the homely touches he associated with a refuge used for more than one night. If he’d been camped here, there’d be a few benches, some sunshades, and a barbecue for the comfort of a fire even if they’d not been successful at hunting. He’d have repotted some wildflowers to add a spot of colour to the mornings, and if he was here for more than a day, then a basketball hoop would have definitely gone up above the loading bay door. On the other hand, someone had moved that fence from around the parking lot to simply encase the garage. They’d stacked tyres outside, swept up, and, of course, built the trap.
He checked his bodycam was still recording and went back inside. They’d turned the showroom into a communal dorm and living space. It would have been creepy even without the giant black cross painted on the wall. It was the same style as they’d found in Bangor Base, the same as Jay said they’d found in a house a few miles away. Had Tippy created a cult?
The only book to be found was the Bible, though there were a few hundred CDs and a lot of Bluetooth headphones. The music was mostly country, with a few musical soundtracks and a smattering of now-forgotten pop anthems, none more recent than a decade ago. There were a dozen boardgames, too. Entertainment wasn’t banned in Tippy’s cult, but was it regulated? Was the thirteenth member of this group something of a commissar, or had they collectively agreed there was only one book worth reading?
The workshop had become their storeroom, containing water, a generator, fuel cans, and crates of food. MREs, all of them. Enough food and water for a month for all thirteen, assuming a water ration of eight litres per day. He hadn’t seen a shower, but he had seen a lot of body spray. Cleanliness wasn’t next to godliness for these folk. The fuel was gasoline, about a thousand gallons, depending on how much was left in each barrel. Was this another fuel stash or a potential bomb? Either way, it was far too much to have been brought here in three cars. No, they were missing at least one car and one van, along with nine people.
Etienne clumped down the stairs, carrying a large storage box, and with a duffel bag over his shoulder.
“You find something?” Sholto asked.
“Oh, yes. Plastic explosives and detonators,” Etienne said, putting the box on the counter. “They have some interesting triggers. Remote detonators, of course, but there are some motion-detecting lasers I cannot see a purpose for, and some vibration-sensitive triggers.”
“So we’ve got ourselves a bomb maker?” Sholto asked.
“A hobbyist rather than a professional, I think. There is a lot of wire and tools upstairs, and another box containing claymores, and another with fragmentation grenades.”
“I’m guessing, and hoping, explosives didn’t come up much during your working life. You learned this from John?”
“Not entirely,” Etienne said. “A substation can also be described as a remote high-value target to which it would take hours to deploy a bomb disposal team. We were given training to identify various different devices. I felt the government courses were a little lacking. John filled in the gaps in my knowledge, so I’d know when it was safe to remove a detonator. There’s something else you should see.” He opened the duffel bag and took out a sat-phone. “This was upstairs, with the sniper.”
“Any messages on it?” Sholto asked as he took it.
“No, they’d been deleted.”
Sholto put it back in the bag. “Get Jay. Collect all the explosives and any ammo. We’re taking two cars with us. Make sure they’re fuelled up. Fill any remaining space with MREs. Everything else will have to be left behind.”
“The missing people will return,” Etienne said. “With three cars, we could take most of it.”
“Heppy can’t drive. I’m not sure Tom can, either. Nor can we rely on them to fight. No, it has to be two cars.”
“John could leave a gift for them,” Etienne said. “This gasoline would make an excellent bomb.”
“And maybe start a fire that would take out the city and spread far beyond. If the missing nine return, they’ll have the zoms to contend with. Maybe they won’t, and when we return, we’ll have some food and fuel waiting for us. And those damned zombies.”
Etienne nodded and headed for the exit. Sholto went upstairs. Tippy’s cultists had turned the rooftop extension into a chapel. A black cross was painted on one wall in front of a simple altar consisting of a table, a white cloth, a wooden cross, freshly carved from the look of it. They’d used folding chairs rather than pews. Twelve of them, with a chair at the side for their preacher. Was it twelve disciples? Perhaps he was reading too much into it.
John was outside, watching the undead.
“How many are there, do you think?” Sholto asked.
“I’ve counted two hundred,” John said. “Based on density, I’d estimate well over a thousand. They’re spilling around the beginning of the wall, or they’ve found a way through it. There’s a few just on the edge of the parking lot now. We’ve got about fifteen minutes, at most. Right now, they’re heading southward. If we start shooting, and they start angling towards us, we’ll be in real trouble.”
“Time we left,” Sholto said. “You drive one car, with your cousin and Tom. I’ll take Jay and Heppy. Once we’re clear of the city, we’ll stop to regroup.”
“I liked Minnie. You knew where you stood with her. No duplicity. Yep, a real shame.”
“It is. Go help your cousin get everyone into the cars. I’ll keep watch. Two minutes and I’ll be down and we’ll leave.”
Alone, Sholto watched the undead. From what Jay and Heppy had said, it seemed that the zombies been trapped inside a walled compound just up the road. How had they been gathered there? He’d guess it was a quarantine camp, except every one of these ghouls looked like they were dressed for bed. Was it a fortress which had been besieged at night and in which the infection had spread? That didn’t seem right. They’d been sealed in there until the walls came down. And who had built the car wall along that road? It would take more than four. More than thirteen. Add in the four at Bangor Base, and it still wouldn’t be enough.
Jay had mentioned an unlit bonfire near the wall. That would have brought any scavenger or scout in to investigate, but it hadn’t been lit. Jay had said they’d been lured near by music. If anything, it seemed like they’d triggered the trap before Tippy’s people were ready.
Where had these zombies come from? Who had they been? Slaves brought up from Louisiana? All of this had taken time to organise, time to build. Could it have been done in December? Could these be the missing farmers? Surely not. Why would Tippy be building traps here back then? Of course, he’d been assuming that his band of proto-democratists were her only foes. What of the Cheyenne Mountain people Maggs had mentioned in her letter? What of Maggs? Could this trap be for them? Could these zombies be them?
The answer lay before him, among the ragged undead, creeping ever closer. Labels might tell them where the clothes came from. Dog tags would indicate the percentage of military. Some might even have a diary left in their dressing gown pocket explaining the how and why in minute detail. But he couldn’t search one without killing them all, and for that, he would need an army of his own.
He wanted to scream and shout, to draw his gun and fire into the pack, to go down there and hack and hew until his rage was spent. Damn that woman. Yes, they’d have to bring an army here. By the time they did, the zombies would be dispersed, perhaps even beyond the city limits. Any settlers would have to sleep behind walls. Every farmer, every morning, would have to inspect the fences. More time spent. More labour wasted. More fear created. For what?
And then there were the bombs, of course. Olympia was lost to them; that was the truth of it. It would take a brigade of bomb techs to guarantee the city was safe. That wasn’t going to happen. So there’d be no salvage taken from Benton Aerospace and no repairs to the airport. Yes, it was enough to make him scream, but there were other airports and other cities. Tippy couldn’t have known about their debt to Australia, so why had she done this? To buy herself time? He’d lost the day it had taken to come down here, but that was the point of having scouts. They’d lived behind walls and fences before, so it was a frustration rather than a challenge, so what had they really lost? What had Tippy gained?
He couldn’t see Minnie’s body from here, just a slim sliver of the far side of the walled road, and it was packed with the undead. By now she would have been trampled beyond recognition; there was no way of retrieving her for burial. He’d never been one for graves. No one’s last resting place was in the ground; it was in the heads of those whose lives they’d touched. Minnie had helped keep hundreds alive through her work at the trading post, and through her work on the final evacuation. She was dead, but she wouldn’t be forgotten, unlike these four lunatics who’d brought her journey to a premature end.
He turned away from the undead, and went downstairs. It was time to leave. Time to return to Union. Time to plan a counterattack.
Part 6
Water, Shelter, Food
Kim
Belfair and Bremerton
Chapter 38 - Food in the Darkness
Belfair
“Water, shelter, food, but that’s what humans need,” Kim said as she closed the office door. She walked back to the stairs leading down into the public area of the Belfair Chamber of Commerce. It was a spectacular building, at least from the outside and especially in comparison to the prefab box-stores that dominated the commercial district. Golden yellow brick, a tasteful portico, and giant windows that went from waist height almost to the ceiling of the second floor. From the moment she’d seen it, she’d thought it would make an ideal greenhouse. There were only a few trees and barely any grass in this town of parking lots, but an indoor garden would give a garrison at least the opportunity to practice a little planting. Unfortunately, the building had been claimed. Not by people, nor plants or animals, but fungi.
“There should be too much light for them, no,” Cerys said from the bottom of the stairs, where she’d been tracing a line of mushrooms from the door to the photocopier.
“That’s what I’d have thought,” Kim said. “The offices are absolutely full of them. There must be a leak in the roof, though I don’t know how they still have water in a tank up there. Still, food is food. When John gets back, we’ll see if he can identify which of these are safe to eat.”
“You want to eat these?” Lee asked, stepping back from a cluster of wispy fungi that had erupted behind an antique wall-map of the town.
“Sure. They’re very nutritious,” Kim said. “Eggs, mushrooms, tomatoes, we’re getting close to a proper fried breakfast.”
“No, Lee’s right, we shouldn’t eat them,” Cerys said. “What you’re looking at here is the beginning of a new civilisation. One day, the mushroom people will rule the Earth.”
“Can we get out of here?” Lee asked. “I feel like I’m covered in spores already.”
It had taken them longer to cycle the twenty miles from Union to Belfair than she’d expected. Just as Gethin and Lee had found their wheel-legs, they’d stopped at a house with a closed garage. She’d thought they might strike it lucky and find an old car. Instead, they’d struck gold and found a small sailing boat. It was only fifteen feet long, with a three-horsepower engine, a detachable mast, and no cabin, but with a sail neatly stored in an airtight storage unit. The boat looked homemade, and the sail definitely was. The workbench contained a neat row of traditional tools that only Gethin recognised, though everyone could identify the pedal-powered sewing machine in the far corner.
There were no woodworking tools in the garage-workshop, so it seemed reasonable to assume that this home belonged to the sailmaker. In which case, the carpenter might well be a neighbour, and wouldn’t they have made a boat for themselves? They’d searched every likely-looking house on their way to Belfair, but they’d found no sign of the boatbuilder. On arriving in the town, they’d split up, with Ranesh and Gethin going on a scouting tour of the surrounding streets while she’d taken Lee and Cerys to hunt for more detailed local maps.
Kim led Lee and Cerys over to an abandoned Corolla, the only vehicle in the parking lot. The tyres were flat, and the windows were broken, but the bonnet was the closest thing to a table in sight. She swept aside some of the dust and debris. “What maps did you find, Lee?”
“They’re an odd mix,” he said. “We’ve got some here for a new development, a few that show the hiking trails, and this one seems to be zoning changes. Here you go, this is the Old Belfair Highway. That’s got to be the road up there with the barricade across it.”
“That road doesn’t lead to the mountains,” Cerys said, tracing the curling highway. “Only back to the main road, to the new highway, I suppose. So why did they barricade it?”
“Because that’s where they lived,” Lee said.
“But there’s no side roads or turnings leading up Green Mountain,” Kim said. “More importantly, there are no roads leading through the mountain to Bangor Base.”
“You’ve got this hiking trail,” Lee said, pointing at a jagged line on the zoning map of the pompously named Northern Development Mountain District.
“Tippy’s people would have stuck to the roads,” Kim said. “No, look, we’ve got Green Mountain to the north, and a small state park to the northwest. It’s all quite hilly here, isn’t it? There’s no farmland in that direction, and none along the shoreline. No farms means only recent development for people who want the view, so building an unessential bit of road is a cut in the developers’ profit.”
“It’d be good sheep country if it weren’t for all these trees,” Cerys said. “What did the aerial footage show?”
“Well, trees,” Kim said. “There is a swathe of farmland on the bulge of land to the southeast facing Seattle. We’d marked that down as a potential area for growth, but we were worried that the fallout might have been dumped there by the winds. No, I suppose we’ll need a garrison of five or ten here, but only until we’ve dealt with Tippy. After that, we’ll leave Belfair for the wolves. With this being the major highway, we can’t even use it as a dump.”
“You mean for trash?” Lee asked.
“Sure. It’s got to go somewhere. Water, shelter, food; it sounds straightforward until you break it down. Part of any viable shelter is the midden. Most of our waste can be incinerated. Aluminium can be recycled. Maybe steel, too. Everything else has to be dumped, from every house we want to use, or any we have to bulldoze.”
“But you can’t dump refrigerators and cars in the fishing ground,” Cerys said. “They’ve got to go somewhere. And a million years from now, they’ll be excavated by the mushroom people, and probably end up in their mushroom museums.”
Kim began folding up the maps. “It’ll be sooner than that. When I was in school, I saw an exhibit on the Beaker People that was full of things they’d thrown away, and that was only five thousand years ago.”
“Ah, so there’s a chance our descendants will be co-existing with the mushroom people, just like our ancestors did with the Neanderthals?” Cerys said.
“Oh, I was reading about the Neanderthals a few weeks ago,” Kim said. “The best theory now is that they weren’t wiped out but absorbed into homo sapiens through breeding. I imagine that, one day, there’ll be a wedding where the groom’s side is entirely mushrooms.”
