Thunder and Ashes Read online

  The door that led to the roof burst open, propelled outward by a swift kick from Krueger. He and Trev were the first two through the breach, weapons at the ready. The roof was covered in obstacles, making it difficult to get a clear view of the area. Krueger noted in the back of his mind that the obstacles he was passing by were large solar panels covering most of the roof.

  Trev ducked down, looking under the panels. He spotted the booted feet of the guards near the corner of the roof and let a quiet whistle escape his lips. Krueger looked over, and Trev pointed out the enemy guards. Rebecca and Mbutu came up behind the pair carefully, scoping out the opposition.

  Both guards were facing away from the survivors. They were peering over the edge of the roof with their rifles. Next to them lay a dead comrade, blood pooling around a nasty head wound. Krueger allowed himself a quick sense of self-satisfaction. That had been his shot.

  All four of the survivors advanced slowly on the rooftop guards, stepping heel-to-toe on the tarred surface. They moved silently. Once they were close enough, they looked back and forth at one another, and Krueger nodded.

  All four sprung up, pointing their weapons at the two remaining guards.

  “Freeze! Freeze! Weapons down!” Krueger screamed.

  The two guards were caught completely unaware. They jumped, startled, and spun to face the sudden new threat. One of them immediately threw up his hands. The second went for his pistol, but froze the moment his hand rested on the grip when he realized he was staring down the barrel of Mbutu’s rifle. He slowly released his grip and raised his hands.

  “Up! Get up!” Krueger screamed again.

  The guards took their time complying, slowly raising themselves to their feet. Krueger grimaced, raised the barrel of his rifle slightly, and fired a shot over the heads of the two guards.

  “I said get the fuck up!” Krueger yelled.

  They picked up the pace, and stood before their captors with raised hands.

  Still staring down the barrel of his rifle, Krueger tossed orders to his comrades.

  “Trev, Mbutu, disarm them.”

  The two men approached, pulled the pistols from the guard’s holsters and unbuckled their ammunition belts and webgear, tossing it a safe distance away.

  “Hey, Krueger,” Trev said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Look what I found,” Trev said, holding up a small bundle of zip-ties. “Looks like we’ve got handcuffs.”

  “The jailors become the jailed,” Krueger said, grinning. “Tie ’em up. Let’s take ’em down to Sherman. He can decide what we’re going to do with ‘em.”

  Thomas heard his targets before he saw them. As his group moved down the dimly lit hall he and the others began to hear growled commands and the sound of shuffling feet and shifting equipment. Thomas slowed as he approached the next intersection, peered around the corner, and spotted his objective.

  About twenty feet down the hall stood three uniformed guards in front of an open door. They were busy shoving a pair of females into the room, not caring too much about whether their prisoners entered comfortably or not. As Thomas watched, one of the guards planted a booted foot on the lower back of a young woman and kicked her into the room.

  Thomas didn’t need a written invitation. With both of the prisoners safely in their makeshift cell, the hall was free of friendly targets. He leaned out from the corner and opened fire with his rifle. His first three-round burst caught one of the guards full in the chest, tossing him backwards into his two comrades. The remaining two had enough sense to fall back, slamming the door to their makeshift prison shut in the process. Denton and Jack stepped out from behind their cover, pouring fire down the corridor. Bullets ricocheted off of the concrete walls in both directions as the guards returned fire.

  The four survivors pelted the guards’ position with rounds, chipping away at the concrete walls. Return fire was brisk at first, causing Thomas and the others to take care, but as the firefight wore on, the guards’ fire slowed. They were beginning to run low on ammunition.

  Even as Thomas watched, one of the enemy guards stuck his head out from behind his cover and eyed the corpse of his former companion, with its full ammunition belt and rifle. The corpse lay in the middle of the hallway, smack-dab in the center of no-man’s land.

  He can’t be stupid enough to be thinking of going for that guy’s ammo, Thomas thought to himself.

  Just as Thomas finished the thought, the man burst out from behind his cover, firing his last few rounds as he ran for his dead comrade’s body.

  Well, I guess I was wrong, Thomas thought. He can be that stupid.

  Thomas’ next three-round burst caught the guard before he made it halfway to the body of his comrade.

  A silence fell over the corridor as the guard fell. The smell of cordite and a pall of smoke permeated the hall. The single remaining guard, still behind cover at the far end of the hall, made a judgment call.

  “Hold your fire! Hold your fire!” he called out. His empty hands appeared around the corner, followed by his head and shoulders. “I surrender!”

  “Step out and keep your hands up!” Thomas ordered. He gestured for his companions to join him in the hall, and they advanced on the surrendering man. Denton and Jack shoved the guard up against a wall, checked him for weapons, and kept him pinned while Thomas and Mitsui searched the bodies of the two dead men.

  Thomas came up with a small keyring after a few moments and stepped up to the locked door in the middle of the hall. The first two keys didn’t fit in the lock, but the third did the trick, and he heard the deadbolt sliding back as he twisted the key. He pulled open the door.

  Inside sat Anna Demilio and Juni Koji, hands bound with duct tape across their mouths. They looked up at Thomas with fear at first. Anna’s look of trepidation vanished almost immediately. She recognized the old Sergeant Major from her dealings with General Sherman, and she struggled to her feet, grinning behind the duct tape.

  “Sorry it took so long to get here, Doc,” Thomas grumbled, stepping toward Anna. He reached up a hand and grapped the edge of the duct tape on her mouth. “This’ll hurt.”

  Before she had a chance to protest, he ripped the tape off with one swift motion.

  “Ow,” Anna managed, working her mouth to throw off the sticky feeling of the tape. “Good to see you, Thomas.”

  “Likewise,” Thomas said. He plucked a knife from his belt and held it up. “Mind if I untie you?”

  “Please do,” Anna said, turning around and allowing Thomas to cut through the zipties that held her.

  Juni was likewise freed from her restraints by Mitsui.

  With the prisoners freed and the one remaining guard under control, Thomas deemed his situation under control.

  “What do we do with this guy?” Denton asked, still pinning the living guard to the wall.

  “Same thing he did with the Doc,” growled Thomas, holding up a ziptie and the piece of duct tape he’d ripped from Anna’s mouth. “Bind him and throw him in the room. We’ll figure out a use for him later.”

  Mason heard the chatter of gunfire echoing throughout the facility as he did his best to drag himself toward the main corridor. He didn’t know who was doing the shooting—or the dying, for that matter—but he hoped it was someone who wasn’t going to finish him off when they stumbled upon him.

  He could feel a numbness in his chest, and it was rapidly spreading. Each breath was getting harder and harder to draw. From what he knew about battlefield wounds, he knew that his chest cavity was filling with air from his punctured lung, putting pressure on both organs. Soon he wouldn’t be able to breathe at all.

  One step at a time, Mason reminded himself, and stretched out a hand to pull himself another six inches closer to the main corridor. Behind him he left a trail of blood: some from his bruised and battered face, still more from his two gunshot wounds.

  Even as he moved, he knew he wasn’t going to make it much further. His vision swam in and out of focus, and he f
ought to stay conscious. Elsewhere in the facility, the gunfire had died down. Mason wondered who had won the firefight.

  At the far end of the corridor, a small group of blurry shapes took form. Mason knew they were people, but he couldn’t tell who they were or even if they had seen him.

  He managed to croak the word “help” before he spiraled down into darkness.

  Mason opened his eyes slowly, carefully. Bright light shone down into them, and he squinted against it. He tried to swallow and found his throat bone-dry. Nearby he could hear the steady beep-beep-beep of a heart monitor, and with some effort he turned his head to the left and surveyed his surroundings.

  Mason lay in a hospital room. It differed from the other rooms he’d been in before in that it lacked a window and anything in the way of aesthetics, but it was a hospital room nonetheless. Monitors were clipped to his chest and head and ran along narrow wires to banks of machinery, all working to ensure he remained alive.

  For a moment, Mason wondered about his situation. His memory was foggy. What had happened? Where was he? Had the whole pandemic been nothing more than a dream? Perhaps he had been wounded on the job and had been in a coma for a few weeks.

  That almost made sense; there was no power anymore, no more hospitals, and no way he could have survived the fight with Derrick that was, even then, coming back to him in bits and pieces. Nothing he saw around him seemed to make much sense.

  Hell, he thought, there was even a vase of fake flowers next to his bed.

  Suddenly the door to his room was pushed open and in came a young woman pushing a stainless steel tray before her. She looked to be in her early twenties and had dirty blond hair tied back in a ponytail. Mason thought if he was fifteen years younger he’d probably try to flirt with her. Before he could ask a single question, however, she noticed he was awake and launched into an explanation, using the same tone a doctor might use with a confused patient.

  “Well, you’re finally awake,” said the girl, checking over the equipment on the tray she’d wheeled in. “My name’s Rebecca, and I’ll be your nurse while you stay here. You were in pretty sorry shape when we found you. You’re lucky Dr. Demilio was around.”

  “The Doc lived?” Mason croaked around his throat. It felt like sandpaper.

  “Yes,” Rebecca said. “And she managed to get you fixed up pretty well. If this had happened anywhere else you’d have been a goner. It’s lucky this building has medical facilities.”

  “So what happened? Who are you? I mean, where did you come from?” Mason asked. “And can I please have a drink of water?”

  “Sure,” Rebecca said, turning to a sink and filling a plastic cup halfway with cold water. “I came in with General Sherman’s group. We had really good timing—we showed up right as those uniformed shooters started to take the upper hand. We managed to take a few prisoners, killed the rest, and secured the facility.”

  “Sherman? That’s the guy Anna wanted to meet up with,” Mason said, gratefully accepting the cup of water and draining it in one gulp.

  “The same,” Rebecca said. “Anyway, I need to give you a couple of shots before I get back to work.”

  “Work?” Mason asked.

  Rebecca took a moment before answering, busy filling a syringe with antibiotics.

  “Well, we’re here to stay, at least for a while,” she answered, jabbing the needle into Mason’s arm. He took the shot without so much as a grimace. “So we’ve been going around and buttoning up, you know, making sure the windows are covered, fortifying.”

  “How do we have power?” Mason asked.

  Again Rebecca took a moment to answer as she filled a second syringe from a new bottle.

  “Solar panels on the roof. They pull in enough to keep this place running comfortably. We’ve even got air conditioning if we want it. Hell of a place, this research facility.”

  “Sure is,” Mason said as Rebecca administered the second injection. Almost immediately, his head felt fuzzy and his body went slightly numb, dulling the pain in his chest. “What was that?”

  “Demerol,” Rebecca said. “I gave you enough to put you back to sleep for a few hours. You need rest.”

  “We all need rest,” Mason said, head swimming as the narcotic took effect.

  Rebecca was already wheeling the cart back toward the door. She stopped, looked over her shoulder at Mason, and grinned.

  “Mr. Mason, we’ve got this building sealed up as tight as Fort Knox. We can all rest for a while.”

  With that, she pushed her way out the door and was gone. Mason lay back, resting his head on his pillow and enjoying the sensation of the painkiller. He closed his eyes and exhaled a long breath, feeling the stress of the past few weeks melting away as he drifted off to sleep.

  “Just going to rest for a little while,” he whispered to himself in the last moments before consciousness escaped him.

  Mason slept, safe and secure, in the research facility in Omaha, Nebraska. The two groups that had spent weeks—months—trying to reach one another had finally succeeded. Mission accomplished.

  All that was left to do was find the vaccine.

  If it even existed.

  Hyattsburg, Oregon

  March 17, 2007

  1354 hrs_

  COMMANDER HARRIS HALTED HIS MEN at the edge of town after passing a sign warning them that trespassers would be shot on sight. The sign looked faded and hung loosely, one of the nails holding it to its post having worked its way free. He proceeded cautiously, having his men scan the buildings from afar with their binoculars and spread out into a skirmish line, looking for any sign of activity, either human or infected.

  After twenty minutes of silent observation, Harris and his men hadn’t seen so much as a rat in a gutter. The town looked utterly deserted.

  “What do you think?” Harris asked, standing next to the crooked sign.

  “Don’t know,” Hal replied. He’d walked up behind the commander and was surveying the town with a look of suspicion on his face. “Sherman told me about a place out in the desert called Sharm something-or-other that looked just as deserted. He said that they jumped by infected once they were in.”

  “Sharm el-Sheikh,” Harris said, nodding. “Heard the same story once he came onboard.”

  “So should we circle it?” Hal asked, raising his eyebrows. “Might be the same kind of situation.”

  Harris looked conflicted for a moment. His men were running dangerously low on food and potable water, and the town offered them a shot at finding something new to fill out their packs with. At the same time, what good is food if you’re dead?

  Harris sighed and made his decision. He turned to a Chief Petty Officer standing nearby and began to issue his orders.

  “All right, we’ll go through. Our sub-machinegunners will be on the flanks—tell them to keep a close eye on the doors and windows of the houses we pass. We’ll go right down main street and through to the other side of town. Tell everyone to keep an eye out for any store or warehouse that might have food or bottled water we can take.”

  “Aye, sir,” came the reply. The CPO jogged off to relay the orders, and the sailors assembled in short order, checking their weapons.

  “I don’t know about this,” Hal murmured, but otherwise kept his mouth shut.

  The sailors, Harris and Hal moved into Hyattsburg at a slow pace. They took their time, checking corners and darkened doorways. They made it three blocks before they came upon the first of the bodies.

  “Sir,” called out the CPO to Harris, “I’ve got a body in U.S. Army gear, here.”

  Harris jogged over to the sailor and knelt down next to the body to take a look. It was as the man had said: a corpse lay on the street, long dead. Its flesh was dessicated and drawn, but even months of decomposition couldn’t hide the man’s death wound: a self-inflicted gunshot to the chest. Torn, dried skin on the man’s arms and face hinted at an attack by infected. The man had likely shot himself before the infection could take hold.
/>   Harris’ CPO reached down and gently retrieved the pistol from the dead man’s grasp, the fingers cracking as he bent them out of shape. He reached around his back and jammed the weapon into the top of his pack.

  Harris noted the unit patch on the man’s arm, a silhouetted black bird with flames in the background, and grimaced. This had indeed been one of Sherman’s men.

  “Let’s keep moving,” Harris said, groaning as he stood up. “Whatever caught this poor bastard I don’t want to catch us.”

  As the group continued through the town, they began to come upon more bodies. Most looked civilian, and had been put down with multiple shots. Those, Hal guessed, would have been the infected bearing down on Sherman’s group. Others wore the uniforms of U.S. Army soldiers. In a few places, Hal spotted the dark, nearly black stains of long-dried blood on the ground, but no body to accompany them.

  “Harris,” Hal said, beckoning over the naval officer and pointing down at the bloodstains. “Looks like we’ll have a couple shamblers in the area.”

  Harris nodded by way of agreement. The pools of blood had come from victims of the infected, most likely, and since the infected had never been known to carry off their victims, Harris and Hal concluded that whoever had been dropped on that spot had gotten back up a while later and ambled off.

  The group continued on in silence. They passed a used car lot where several more bodies lay, all grouped around the outside of the chainlink fence that surrounded the lot. The main gates had been burst outward, with bodies and twisted steel scattered across the road.

  “What the hell happened here?” Harris murmured, looking over at the lot as they passed it by.

  “Looks like a pitched battle,” Hal said, nodding in the direction of the corpses. “Whoever it was probably got a couple of cars from the lot and busted their way out. Look down at your feet.”

  Harris glanced down at the asphalt and saw skid marks leading away from the lot, deeper into the town. He heard a rustling coming from an alleyway behind him and spun, pistol upheld, but relaxed when he saw it was nothing more than a sheet of yellowed newspaper being blown up against a wall. The headline, which read MORNINGSTAR CASES CONFIRMED IN NEW YORK, was visible for a moment before the paper fluttered away. Hyattsburg was beginning to wear on Harris’ nerves.