War of the Undead Day 5 Page 11

  “Yes, I’m sorry. It has to be fresh. Even a delay of twenty minutes may be enough to change too many variables. I would have said something sooner, but I wanted to make sure the base composition of the Com-cells was still viable.”

  “And are they?” It was a stupid question, Katherine would readily admit to that. Her mind was flailing because it made sense that whoever was going outside couldn’t be mission critical. That ruled out Thuy and Anna—they were the only ones who knew anything about the Com-cells. It also ruled out all the bigwigs on the tenth floor—they were trying to save the 7th Army. Warrant Officer Bryan and Sergeant Carlton were needed to fly the helicopter.

  That left Katherine, Courtney Shaw and Specialist Hoskins. It felt like she was going to be leading the “D” squad on a suicide mission. “I’ll get the blood for you.” She tried to put a little confidence into her voice but neither of them believed it.

  “Sorry,” Thuy said again.

  “It’ll be fine,” Katherine said with a smile that failed as soon as she turned away. Dreading the prospect of going back out into the world, she went back to the stairs and started climbing with only the soft glow of the exit signs to light her way.

  At the top, she could hear the murmur of voices even before she opened the door. The murmur grew louder with every step, until she found General Axelrod’s group in a huge and quite beautiful office. Everyone seemed to be yammering into a phone—except for Courtney, who had two phones going at once.

  “You!” Axelrod shouted. “I need you to check on the status of the cure and get back to me.”

  “I just came from the labs. Dr. Lee needs…” Katherine cast a disappointed look Courtney’s way. It was clear that she was needed here; now the “D” team would be down to two people. “She needs time.”

  Axelrod’s muddy eyes swung nervously to one of his two majors before coming back. “How much time? Wait. Hold on.” He hurried her out of the room, shutting the door behind him.

  “I’m not sure,” Katherine answered honestly. “She’s going to try something but it’s going to take a few hours at least. Why?”

  He looked like he had been punched in the gut. “A few hours? Is there any way she could hurry it along?” The question was ludicrous and he knew it. To begin with, a cure was a long shot, and to try to rush it would almost certainly render the whole exercise pointless. He waved away the question as stupid.

  “Here’s the thing, we’ve been sniffed out. We’ve managed to issue so many contradicting orders that someone caught on. Now we have a cyber unit all over us. Luckily, on the President’s orders, they had been deemed nonessential and most of them were sent to the front lines. Still, they have the systems in place to find us eventually.”

  “I can help,” Katherine said, jumping at the chance to avoid a trip outside and a confrontation with the dead. “I worked for the cyber criminal unit in the FBI. I know my way around computers.”

  “Good. Get with Major Palmburg. Right now, keeping one step ahead of cyber command is almost as important as getting the cure.”

  The word “almost” killed the sudden rush of relief. He was right, saving the world was more important than saving her hide. “I have to do something for Dr. Lee, first. Then I’ll be back to help.”

  Axelrod gave her a sharp piercing eye, as if looking for cowardice. “Whatever you’re doing for her had better be important,” he said, lowering his voice. “The others have been kept out of the loop on this, but Major Palmburg doesn’t know how long he can keep us hidden. He thinks for only a few hours.”

  “I’ll be quick,” she replied.

  “You better be. If they find us, the only warning we’ll have is when a cruise missile plants itself right here.” He tapped the wall.

  “A missile?”

  He grunted a laugh while at the same time looking miserably over the top of her head and out the window. “Probably not one. Knowing this President, he’ll send a dozen of them. He’s all about overkill.”

  Chapter 8

  1-7:00 a.m.

  The White House, Washington D.C.

  Perhaps the only person east of the Mississippi who could claim to have gotten a full night’s sleep was the President. Before going to bed, he had rattled off a string of orders: arrest this person, move these troops, bomb this strip of Baltimore into oblivion.

  Of course, he had added a threat to the end of the orders. Threats were his new thing. He liked them. He liked the way people grew suddenly meek around him. This was true power. It wasn’t the mincing, wishy-washy, smile nice for the cameras crap that Marty Aleman had always tried to push on him. No. True power stemmed from an inner strength that the President had never known he’d had.

  This was the source of his power, but what made him actually powerful was his will to wield it.

  Just then, the most powerful man in the world was fast asleep, snoring lightly. As if the day was like any other—as if General Phillips wasn’t sitting slumped over in a torture room, grinding his teeth together so he wouldn’t scream—Emanuel Geometti, the President’s butler, strode with silver coffee tray in hand through the West Sitting Hall of the Executive Residence and stopped precisely a foot from the President’s bedroom.

  And as always, a pair of Secret Service agents gave him a dull look as he tapped with a genteel knuckle on the door; the President didn’t care for loud, incessant knocking, even if the world was on the verge of collapse. It made him high-strung and snappish.

  Slowly, the President struggled up out of the warmth of a dream. At the same time, twenty-three miles north of the White House, eight-year old Jaiden was being shaken awake by her mother. The shake started softly but grew until her head slung back and forth. A great thundering ripple of explosions had woken Kimberly Calhoun seconds before. It had been the closest yet, maybe not even a mile away.

  “Jai. Jaiden! Open your eyes! Mike, she’s not…” The little girl’s dark brown eyes cracked open. “There you are, Jai. Wake up. It’s time to get up. Oh, Mike I don’t like how she’s acting.”

  “Sshe’s jusst cold,” he answered, sounding drunk. “She’ll rev up. Trust me.”

  Kimberly didn’t know if she trusted him, not anymore, at least not like she used to. Before all this, she had trusted him in what she had thought were important matters: she trusted him to hold down a job, and not run around on her, and to pick up his socks with a minimum of nagging on her part. Now, she needed an entirely different level of trust.

  She had to trust him with their lives. Would he be able protect her and Jaiden from the dead? What about from the roving gangs that were sweeping through the refugees? Would he be strong enough to steal food when theirs ran out? Would he slit someone’s throat to keep Jaiden from freezing to death?

  They had been on the road for the last three days, Heading south from their upper middle-class home in Paramus, New Jersey. The traffic had been horrible; bumper to bumper, creeping along for more hours than they could count. Looking back, it was laughable how much bitching she had done. At one point, she had griped that it would be faster to get out and walk.

  Ten hours later, their overloaded Expedition ran out of gas just outside of Philadelphia. “What do we do?” she had asked. “Do we stay with the car?” It was a grossly stupid question. Kimberly knew that now. The gas stations had been sucked dry and they had passed untold thousands of people, begging for even a drop of fuel. Those with gas also had guns, which they weren’t afraid to point at anyone who looked at them cross-eyed.

  Some of the people they passed sat on the top of their cars, holding cardboard signs with the word “HELP” written in marker. Some arrogantly claimed that walking was stupid, and that the government would never abandon them—they were tax-payers after all.

  Yes, Kimberly knew better than to stay with the car and yet, it killed her to leave the last of their possessions behind. Her little three-person family packed all they could carry on their backs and walked through half the night until they were stumbling with exhaustion. A
t one in the morning, Jaiden was failing, her normally dark skin had turned dusky grey and she complained she couldn’t feel her feet. Kimberly couldn’t either.

  They needed to stop, but they had never been campers. Unlike so many others, they were without sleeping bags or tents, and they only had one blanket between them. For miles around the highway, the houses were crowded with temporary squatters and every abandoned car had been broken into and was now crammed with sleepers.

  Mike went from tent to tent begging for a spot for Jaiden. That night they had been lucky, and the little girl was allowed to crawl into a sleeping bag with another frail little child. Kimberly and her husband shivered under the single blanket. They started walking again at dawn with the world burning behind them. Hours dragged by; blisters formed, their muscles broke down, and their minds grew slow. It became an agony to force themselves on.

  But there was no stopping. They were chased south all day, and not just by the sound of guns and bombs; the dead were coming on like a steamroller, destroying everything in their path.

  Again, they drove themselves past the brink of exhaustion, and while the President slept in a bed that had been warmed by electric blankets to the exact temperature that he liked it, the three were begging once more for a place to sleep, this time in vain. The temperature dropped into the low forties and the one blanket wasn’t enough. Jaiden’s lips were now frighteningly pale.

  “Get her up and moving,” Rick said, as a fireball rose into the sky. Cold or not, they had to move. He pushed himself to his feet with a groan. “Where are we?”

  The shoulders of the highway were strewn with refugees. One was just poking his head out of a tiny two-person tent. “Towson. We want to go…” A pair of F-18s roared by, four-hundred feet overhead. They were so loud that the sound seemed to crush Mike down and the earth shook. When the noise followed the jets north, the man went on, “We want to find 695 and go west.”

  The rumor had swept up the haggard line the night before that the FBI had closed off Baltimore. It was a bitter disappointment, made worse because they had struggled to within eyesight of the city.

  “Come on, Jai,” Kimberly whispered, standing the girl up and rubbing down her skinny legs. She would have to be carried soon, and that meant giving up some supplies. Food probably. Kimberly didn’t want to think about that. “Where’s this 695?”

  2-7:30 a.m.

  The White House, Washington D.C.

  A dozen generals with three-hundred years of combined military experience, held their breath as the President eyed the monitors. They were hard-faced, formidable men, brought to bay by a man who hadn’t wielded anything more fearsome than a steak knife in his entire life.

  The silence in the Situation Room went on and on as little wisps of steam wafted up from the bone-china coffee cup sitting next to his right hand.

  “I don’t understand,” he said at last. “Are my orders once more optional?”

  “No, sir,” the new Secretary of Defense answered. Up until the night before, he had been the President’s National Economic Council Director. He knew nothing about the military, but he had been told that his was more of a go-between position. “There’ve been a few mix-ups and we believe that someone hacked into our computer systems. General Murphy?”

  The hot potato had been passed. The National Security Advisor stood. “Our communications are in something of a disarray. We’ve undergone so many catastrophic changes in many of our leadership positions that there are some questions as to who outranks whom. We are striving to unravel the…”

  “You’re going to blame all of this on communication errors?” the President asked, his voice like silken ice.

  “No sir. We’re definitely being hacked. Someone who knows our codes and our systems are playing havoc with our chain of command. We strongly suspect it’s General Mark Axelrod and we have two Predator drones in the air for when we find his position.”

  “Find him and kill him. That is a direct order.” The President returned his gaze to the screen, shaking his head. The 3rd Infantry Division was completely out of position. Half of the division was already crossing the Potomac, but all the way to the west at Harper’s Ferry. Even worse, from the President’s point of view, the 1st and 2nd Armored Brigades were twenty miles northwest of that, crossing at Williamsport.

  “Can anyone tell me why the hell the 3rd ID is spread out like a bunch of idiots?”

  Every eye in the room switched back to the SECDEF, whose face began to twitch. “Um, sir, that was me. I authorized it, but only because someone in the Air Force…” He paused to shoot the Secretary of the Air Force a nasty look. “…screwed up and bombed these bridges.” He went to the main screen and jabbed a finger at the bridges connecting Washington D.C. to Virginia.

  “We considered sending the division around to the Woodrow Wilson Bridge, but the streets in that part of the city are jammed. It would take them days to get through. We thought this was smarter.”

  “Sit,” the President ordered, softly. “I don’t care what sort of hacking is going on. I want the pilots responsible for this arrested. They should have known better. In the meantime, get the 3rd ID here as fast as humanly possible.”

  The SECDEF sucked in his breath and then held it instead of speaking out. Next to him, the new Secretary of the Army, General Renee Smith muttered, “Say something.” She was the first woman to ever hold this position and really wished she wasn’t. She was pretty sure that she wouldn’t last out the day.

  Next to her, the SECDEF sat stony-faced. “You chicken-shit,” she hissed before she stood up and announced, “That may be a mistake, sir. The danger to Washington is minimal, relatively speaking. However, the same can’t be said for the western perimeter of the Zone.”

  She went to the main screen. And pointed out the obvious. “We lost Harrisburg at about three this morning. It means the entire right flank of the 2nd Corps is lost to Gettysburg, and that won’t hold for long. Our only chance is to reinforce and try to stop the beasts here, in the Cumberland Valley. It’s open enough for our tanks to be effective.”

  The President’s initial response was to turn to one of his Secret Service agents. “I’ll have my breakfast now.” He then drummed his fingers, staring at the screen, his face twisted in disgust. “And we still have those three companies just sitting up there guarding nothing but Canada’s back door. Another communications mishap?”

  Although they were regiments and not companies, he received solemn nods in answer. “And look here. I asked for this entire area to be leveled.” A wave of his hand traced I-695 on an arc across the suburbs of northern Baltimore.

  “There were still refugees on it,” the Secretary of the Air Force said in a small voice.

  “And how many of them are infected!” the President screamed, slapping the table with the flat of his hand, making the coffee in his bone-china cup dance. “They are in the Quarantine Zone, Berry. Does the word have any fucking meaning to you? Listen, all of you. This is how things started yesterday. Insubordination, stupid excuses, lies and finally treason. And where did all of that get us? We lost practically the entire northeast. I won’t have it. We are trying to protect America. All of it, or at least all that we can. To do that will mean making difficult decisions.”

  General Berrymore began nodding, and even went so far as to whisper, “Yes, sir,” but he couldn’t seem to be able bring himself to pick up the phone and give the order. The room was silent, waiting to see what he would do.

  Twenty-three miles away, the Calhoun family began limping along the curve of the road in the direction of the outer beltway—I-695. They had walked fifty-five miles in the last two days, each carrying packs as heavy as they could possibly manage. Mike’s was especially heavy and the straps bit cruelly into his shoulders.

  Still, he took Jaiden’s little pack as well as his own. “For just a little while,” he told her and trudged toward the onramp, ignoring the new rumble of jets. All he could think about was getting close enough to se
e the next sign. It beckoned him, and it gave him hope.

  There, just past the onramp—Washington D.C. 22 Miles—Mike breathed a sigh of relief. They’d be safe in Washington. In fact, he couldn’t imagine anywhere safer in the country. And certainly, they would have refugee tents set up, with showers and food and cots. FEMA would be there and the Red Cross. Maybe even the Goodwill.

  He paused, wondering if he could jettison some of the stuff he was carrying. Surely, they would get there by midafternoon and surely, they would have blankets and extra clothes.

  “What are you doing, Mike,” Kimberly asked as she came up to him. “We might need that stuff.”

  He pointed at the sign. “Naw. We’re almost to the promised land.”

  The veritable king of Mike’s promised land, the man both he and Kimberly had voted for, turned his back on his uneaten breakfast, the monitors and the Air Force general, who looked shattered as he hung up the phone. The President walked from the room saying, “Burn it down and you can move those armored companies anywhere you want to.”

  3-7:58 a.m.

  New Rochelle, New York

  The pair left the building from the loading docks, sneaking out like mice. They both wore body armor and they both thought it was useless weight. Their faces were uncovered, and the zombies always seemed to go for the eyes with their terrible claws.

  Still, neither Katherine pennock nor Specialist Hoskins considered ditching the gear for even a second.

  Katherine already felt vulnerable enough just leaving the protection of the glass-walled building. It felt as though a thousand eyes were on her. Were there zombies lurking in the shadows, their stomachs grumbling at the prospect of another bloody meal? Was a satellite training its telescope down on her and was the President sitting back, laughing at her feeble attempts to blend in with the brick wall and the side of the dumpster? Was there a stealth drone orbiting high overhead and feeding coordinates to an incoming missile?