So It Begins Page 9

  “Blow them away and load survivors in the truck,” Kline said.

  “The truck I like, but a firefight is only going to attract any more deaders nearby and we have limited ammo. I think we need something quieter,” said Shaker.

  “Too bad I didn’t have time to head back to the station and get my aftershave. They’d never smell me then,” said Lao.

  “I’ve smelled it. They’d get one whiff and they’d leave you alone rather than endure the stench,” said Dorna.

  “That’s it,” said Shaker.

  “Lao’s aftershave?” said Dorna.

  “Better,” said Shaker. “And worse. Lao, you up for something crazy?”

  “Depends,” said Lao.

  “Follow me back to that farm. The rest of you watch the factory. If you see any humans before we get back, don’t let the deaders get them,” said Shaker.

  “We won’t,” said Hastings.

  It was twenty minutes before the pair returned and their comrades smelled them long before they saw their now browned uniforms and skin.

  “What did you do to yourselves?” said Dorna, pulling her face filter back up and goggles down. Hastings and Kline followed suit. “Cover yourselves in shit?”

  “Yep,” said Shaker.

  Dorna paled. “Any body fluid or solid contains the virus. You may have just infected yourselves.”

  “Nah, we used pig and cow shit,” said Lao.

  “How can you tell the difference?” she asked.

  “I was raised a farm boy. Trust me, I know,” said Lao. “Besides, the zombies left the animals alone. Shaker figures we don’t smell like people any more so we should be able to walk past the deaders without them coming after us.”

  “What do you think?” said Shaker.

  “That you are both nuts,” said Kline.

  “Actually, it makes sense. It could work,” said Dorna.

  “Could?” said Shaker.

  Dorna smiled. “The only way you’re going to know is to go down there and find out.”

  “No, I forbid it. We can’t afford to risk forty percent of our manpower this deep in enemy territory without knowing for sure if there are people still in there,” said Hastings.

  “Ma’am, right now I’m in command, so it is my call. Trust me, I’m not going to die. Any deader comes near me, I’m going to blow him to pieces. If this works, we get one great big advantage over the deaders,” said Shaker. “Kline, I want you to move around and take up position on the opposite side of the factory. Dorna and Hastings, watch our backs as we go in, but hold your fire unless I tell you otherwise or we’re about to buy it.”

  Kline was given a head start and once he commed that he was in position Shaker and Lao slowly made their way down the hill, imitating the side-to-side gait of the zombies. Despite the odd way of walking, deaders could move faster than the living for short distances and almost as fast as a trained soldier over the long haul. The only advantage they had was that zombies moved by instinct, so planning could help the living get away, but not always.

  The heads of the unfettered deaders and stationary stemmers turned to assess them, but none made a move as the fecally covered soldiers approached, lumbering toward the factory door. It was open to allow the loaders access. Shaker and Lao waited until the loaders passed outside, before going in. In a standard search pattern they moved through each section of the ground floor using hand signals.

  “No deaders on the ground floor,” whispered Shaker into his comm. So far his olfactory camouflage was working. Zombies didn’t talk, so he didn’t want to push their luck by risking one overhearing him speak.

  The pair moved up to the second floor, secured the door they came in and repeated the process before comming the info. When they made it to the third floor, it too was clear, but there was one locked door.

  “Lock the stairwell door,” whisper Shaker. Lao complied and Shaker knocked on the door. “Is there anyone in there? We’re here on behalf of the 142nd Starborne to evacuate the living.”

  There was a click and the door cracked open. An emaciated girl on the verge of her second decade looked out. “You’ve come to rescue me?”

  “Yes, miss. I’m Shaker, this is Lao. What’s your name?”

  “Gail. You’re soldiers?” The men’s eyes darted to each other and they nodded. “Why are you covered in poop?”

  “The manure is camouflage from the deaders so they can’t smell us,” said Shaker.

  “Seems like they smell you coming sooner. Does it work?” asked Gail.

  “We got in here to you with the deaders leaving us alone,” said Lao.

  Gail pinched her nose with her fingers. “Can’t blame them for that.” The girl scrutinized their emblemless uniforms. “What are your ranks?”

  “We were lieutenants, but that’s not important. That was very smart of you to hang the towel out the window. It helped us find you. Are you alone?” said Shaker.

  “Yes. When the deaders came for us there wasn’t enough time to get away. My daddy told me to lock myself up here and he tried to hold them off. That was ten days ago. I think they got him.”

  “Your father sounds like a very brave man and I’m sure he would be glad you survived. Is there anybody else in the building or nearby?”

  “No. I was helping Daddy. As soon as the stemmers finished loading the truck, he was going to put them to bed and close up for the night. Everyone else went home. The sink still worked so I had water and we had a snack cabinet so I had a little to eat. Are you going to take me up to the battlestation?”

  “Yes, but not right away. We need to gather more people first. Did you go to school?” asked Shaker. The girl nodded. “Did they teach you drills for disasters?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where did they tell you to go?” asked Shaker.

  “The basement of the school,” said Gail.

  “Even if you weren’t at school at the time?”

  Gail nodded.

  “Then that’s our next stop,” said Shaker, looking out a window. “Those three stemmers are still loading the truck. We’ll have to get it away from them. Maybe we can lock them in the factory and jump from the second floor onto the roof of the vehicle.”

  “I could just turn them off,” said Gail.

  “How?” asked Lao.

  “The remote for their controllers is right below us on the second floor,” said Gail. “I know the access code.”

  “Gail, that’s an excellent idea. I want you to stay close to Lao while I check to make sure that floor is still secure.”

  “You have all the fun,” said Lao.

  “Not like I tried to give your blood away. Besides you’re welcome to go outside to the truck first if you like,” said Shaker.

  “Thanks, you’re a real pal,” said Lao.

  Letting the barrel of his plasma rifle lead the way, Shaker went down the stairs, scrutinizing every shadow. Only darkness looked back so he whispered into his comm. “Second floor still secured.”

  “We’re coming down now,” said Lao.

  Despite the two soldiers as protection, the girl looked around nervously, as if to double check there were no zombies lurking. She opened a closet door, revealing a rectangular metal box about the half the size of a full military pack. The top was a standard computer keypad with another twenty buttons for preprogrammed actions. There was a view screen and a touch pad that tied into satellite GPS to make large-scale movements easier to program.

  The girl tapped in the access code as both men watched. “It’s easy to remember. Gail is the best.” Her eyes teared up. “Do you think my Dad is out there as a deader?”

  “Depends how hungry—” Lao said, but Shaker elbowed him in the gut.

  “If he is, it’s only his body. The part of him that was your father has gone to a better place,” said Shaker.

  The girl hit the first preprogrammed button. It had the word bed written on it. She held a long yellow bar with her thumb as she did it. A dial allowed a single stemmer or
a programmed group to be singled out. The bar ensured the commands were transmitted to all the dead workers. A glance out the window showed all the stemmers stopping their previous activities and walking into the ground floor. Shaker and Lao opened the landing door and watched as each walked into a bed, which looked like a cross between an upright coffin and an old-fashioned phone booth. The chambers leaned back at a thirty-degree angle and each stemmer climbed in and pulled the door closed behind them. A click was heard as each door self-locked.

  Gail sighed as the last one closed. “The stemmers have all been put to bed.”

  “Why does each bed have a window by the face? So you can monitor them?” asked Shaker.

  “Sure, so we know that none are wandering around with a damaged controller, but also some of the stemmers freak out if we don’t leave them a way to see. The beds hold them, but given time they could break out and damage them. They’re expensive, which is why not all the factories use them,” said Gail.

  “What do they do with their stemmers?” asked Lao.

  “Usually lock them in a storeroom in default mode,” said Gail.

  “Gail, we’re going to take you out to the truck, but I’d like to cover you with this shi . . . manure first,” said Shaker, toning down his language in front of the girl, who made a face at the idea. “I know it’s pretty disgusting, but it seems to work. We don’t want any deader to catch your scent and follow us.”

  Gail reluctantly agreed and each man scraped some fecal matter off himself to spread on the girl. They instructed her to copy the deader walk. This time Lao took the lead. The zombie victims were on the far side of the lot and they were able to get to the truck unaccosted.

  Unfortunately, the olfactory camouflage only worked to a limited degree. The sound of the motor turning over was enough to cause every deader in the area to make a beeline for them. Fortunately the truck turned over on the second try and they were able to drive to the road before any deader reached them. One came close to cutting the truck off near the exit, but Lao swerved and avoided him.

  The sight made Gail gasp and freeze up. Realizing what had happened Shaker opened his arms and the girl collapsed on his chest sobbing. “Oh Daddy . . .”

  “Just one?” whispered Kline. Gail was ten feet away, chowing down on some rations they had given her.

  “We have to start somewhere,” said Lao.

  “And I think that somewhere is the Knob Lick school. It is big and includes the town hall,” said Shaker. “But the truck is a bad idea.”

  Deaders from all over the countryside had swarmed toward the sound of the engine. They ended up having to speed up, jam the gas pedal on a straightaway, and jump out to lose the walking corpses.

  “I do, however, have another brilliant idea,” said Shaker.

  “Your last one was a dozy, but it worked,” said Hastings. “What’s this one?”

  “That factory has ten stemmers and a remote. It weighs about twenty pounds,” said Shaker.

  “We don’t need the extra ballast and it won’t do a thing to the deaders,” said Hastings.

  “True, but you were complaining about our lack of manpower. What if we used the stemmer workforce as cannon fodder?” said Shaker.

  “Explain,” said Hastings.

  “They don’t have military-grade stems, but we can program in some basic martial moves and send them in ahead of us to distract and hurt the infected deaders,” said Shaker.

  “You think we can get them to do enough damage to destroy deaders?” said Hastings.

  “Maybe. The reanimated are almost three times stronger that they were when they were living. If we move them in formation, who knows?” said Shaker.

  “It gives us a long-distance weapon that doesn’t make noise. I like it Lieuten . . . Shaker,” said Hastings, correcting herself. “If Benedict doesn’t reinstate you as an officer for this idea, I’ll kick his ass myself.”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” Shaker said with a smile, some of their old comaraderie reasserting itself.

  “I have an idea to make it even better,” said Dorna. “We use our spare surface-to-orbit antenna to boost the signal and send out a general command for any other stemmers to follow us.”

  “We could end up with our own army,” said Lao.

  “Of course, this will take some special programming and there’s one of us with a better shot that the rest,” said Shaker, looking at Dorna.

  “I assumed I’d do it,” said Dorna.

  “But we have to go get it and you’d have come along to make sure we take everything we need the first time,” said Shaker.

  “Fine, I’ll go,” said Dorna, confused about why he was re-stating the obvious.

  “Unfortunately, you haven’t been properly camouflaged yet,” said Shaker.

  “Oh, no,” said Dorna, realization dawning.

  “And we didn’t bring back any extra manure . . .”

  Dorna saw the evil smile on Shaker’s face and spun to run, bumping into Lao.

  “But we’re willing to share,” said Lao, two handfuls already scraped off himself.

  The two men playfully caught the woman between them and bounced her back and forth, covering her in the manure as they did so.

  Again against Hastings’s protests, they spilt up again, Shaker and Dorna returning to the factory, Lao going back to the farm to get more manure, leaving Hastings and Kline to protect the girl. Hastings took Gail aside and made her strip down, out of sight of Kline, to check for any wounds that might indicate deader infection. The girl was clean.

  Lao was back long before the other two. He had commandeered a wheelbarrow and filled it to capacity. With more than a little reluctance, Hastings and Kline put on their stinking camouflage.

  “We’re coming in and we have company, so hold your fire,” came Shaker over the comm.

  The soldiers watched as ten reanimated corpses came over the distant ridge in a formation that would never pass muster in the Host, but was impressive for a group of corpses. They stopped far enough away from the soldiers and their ward so as not to traumatize the girl.

  “It worked?” said Kline.

  Dorna was smiles ear to ear, like a kid with a new toy. “It took a while to reprogram the controller. I was limited in how many new movement patterns I could add in, so I had to see what was already programmed and what I could do with those. I’ve got them ready to engage the enemy and provide distractions.” She gave everyone a crash course in how to use the controls, as well as the emergency stop button she had programmed just in case.

  “Gail, please show us where the school is,” said Shaker.

  Bringing the wheelbarrow and the zombie brigade with them, the quintet plus one moved slowly toward the town proper. They would have been able to find the town’s survivors without the girl’s help. Upwards of seventy deaders had surrounded one of the buildings. It was not a military siege in the traditional sense of continual bombardment or attack, but it had cut off all supplies to the living, so the end result would be the same. Most of the deaders milled around, with one occasionally attacking the building near the air vents. When one started, the rest followed. Eventually they ceased when the walls did not fall and returned to milling, but it was obvious they had done a lot of structural damage. There were more reanimated here. This group appeared more focused on finding a way in and it showed. This building was in far worse shape than the factory. Whole sections of wall had started to crumble.

  “I don’t think we have enough manure,” whispered Lao.

  “Or ammo,” said Dorna.

  “That’s enough talk about what we don’t have,” barked Hastings. “What we do have is frightened people who are going to die of starvation if we don’t get them out. We need to drive a wedge through the deaders’ ranks and gain an access to the building that we can secure behind us. We use Dorna’s stemmers to march in and push them back, trying to hurt as many as they can, or at least make a wide enough hole for us to get through. Then we have to get inside the building a
nd secure the entrance behind us.” Hastings stole a glance at the girl, who was sitting nearby. “And keep the girl safe.”

  “Suggestions?” said Shaker.

  “We find a place to hide and secure the girl and come back for her,” said Hastings.

  “I don’t like the idea of leaving her behind,” said Shaker.

  “You think I do? For all we know, she’s the only survivor in Knob Lick,” whispered Hastings.

  “And Benedict won’t let us back if we don’t get at least fifty people,” said Kline.

  “Fuck Benedict. If she’s all we can find, he’ll damn well come pick her up. He can leave us, but he won’t punish a child for my sins,” said Hastings, for the first time admitting out loud that she had made a mistake in not rescuing the citizens of Ozark. “Or anybody else. We comm for evac no matter how many survivors we find inside. We risk their lives the longer they’re dirtside.”

  Shaker hesitated, then said, “Ma’am . . . would you like to assume command of the assault? You’re the only one of us with battlefield command experience.”

  “Which was not long after the lot of you were out of diapers. No, you were right to take command of this team. I’ve screwed up these people’s lives. I’ll do what I can, but I’m not going to take your first command away from you. Especially when you are doing such a good job of it.”

  “Thank you, ma’am. It means a lot,” said Shaker.

  Hastings nodded at him. “I will offer some advice, however. If we can enter through one of the windows on an upper floor, we will have a better chance of keeping the deaders out.”

  “I was thinking the same thing,” said Shaker.

  “I can rig a grappling hook to our belt lines and we can scale the wall,” said Lao.

  “Or we can search for an extension ladder,” said Dorna.

  “Well, if you want to do things the easy way,” replied Lao with a smile.

  “They keep the ladders in the tool shed,” said Gail, who had walked over to hear better. “Do you think you can get everyone out?”

  “We’re going to try . . .” started Shaker.