Here We Stand (Book 2): Divided (Surviving The Evacuation) (7 page)

Chapter 5 - Brothers and Sisters

Mifflin County, Pennsylvania

Ten minutes later, the truck stopped at an intersection. Tom jumped down, shaking the stiffness out of his wrists.

“Never done that before,” Helena said. “Not sure I’d have been able to hold on for much longer.”

“I know what you mean,” he said, but that minor discomfort was forgotten when he looked back the way they’d come. The intersection was on a slight rise that offered a clear view of the inferno engulfing the airfield. Dirty-grey smoke enveloped the runway. Flames had spread to the control tower, licking upward and out.

“They’re not alive,” Helena said. “They’re not, are they? No. They can’t be.”

He turned his attention to the figures drifting in and out of the gaps in the fence, heedless of fumes and flames alike. There was a lack of urgency to their movement that confirmed Helena was right. They were undead.

The truck door slammed closed as the driver climbed out. She had a gun holstered at her belt, a blue scarf tucked into a black leather jacket, and an expression of tightly controlled anxiety on her face.

“Kaitlin,” she said, half raising her hand. She let it fall before properly offering it.

“Helena.”

“Tom.” It was hard to know what to say next. “Um… The guy who ran the airfield, Julio, do you know if… if…” He wasn’t sure how to finish, but Kaitlin knew what he was asking.

“Don’t know,” she said. “He was a pilot, right?”

“He owned that place,” Tom said.

“Then he might have been on one of the planes which got out,” Kaitlin said. “I’m not sure. We only arrived last night. We were the last in, so we were going to be the last out on the last plane to leave.” There was a muffled explosion from the airfield. “Maybe he got out. Was that why you came here?”

“Kind of,” Helena said.

The door to the cab opened. A tousle-haired girl stuck her head out. “Is this the crossroads, Katie?”

“Close the door! Go back inside,” Kaitlin snapped.

“They said we had to go to the crossroads. Is this it?” the girl asked.

“Yes. Look,” Kaitlin waved her arms to take in the intersecting roads. As she did, her sleeve rolled up, and Tom caught sight of the edge of a regimental tattoo.

“There was a plan in case the airfield got overrun?” Helena asked.

“Yeah.” Kaitlin turned back to the cab. “Close the door. Now!” The door reluctantly closed. “Yeah, there was a plan. Kind of. If the airfield was overrun, get in the cars and trucks, and drive away. Stop here and wait for everyone else.”

Tom looked back at the airfield, at the flames, the wreckage, and the distant specks shambling up the road.

“No one’s coming,” he said, voicing what the woman must be thinking, knowing that the sooner she accepted it, the sooner they could all continue an escape that was only half done. Helena, he noticed, wasn’t looking at the airfield, but at the cab, and with a thoughtful expression.

“Give it five minutes,” Kaitlin said. “We can wait that long.”

The cab’s door opened. This time it was a boy in the doorway. He was a little younger than the girl, perhaps eight or nine, but like the girl, he bore no resemblance to the soldier.

“Katie,” the boy said, “after the crossroads, we have to go to the farm, remember? Do you remember what they said? The farm with the red water tower, that’s where we have to go. Do you remember?”

“I know,” Kaitlin said. “Close the door, we’ll be going in a moment.”

“The red water tower,” the boy said, closing the door with no sense of urgency.

“They your kids?” Tom asked, though the woman looked too young, perhaps in her early-to mid twenties, and the children too dissimilar to each other and her.

“No. I mean, yeah. Sort of,” Kaitlin said. She turned her eyes back to the airfield.

He understood. She’d offered them a ride out of immediate danger, but was trying to find a way for them not to travel together any further. A dozen persuasive lines jumped to the forefront of his brain, swiftly followed by just as many lies, any one of which he was sure she’d believe. That was how he’d have secured a ride a few weeks before, but the world had changed and so had he. He opted for honesty instead.

“My name’s Tom Clemens. I worked for the president. We were trying to get to Washington to give him some information he really needed to know.”

“About the zombies?” Kaitlin asked, giving him a more considered examination.

“Sort of. There’s a conspiracy at the heart of all of this, and I was trying to stop it. Did you hear about his address to the nation? After the broadcast, we decided to come here. I thought I could enlist the help of the Air Force personnel stationed at the airfield to hunt down the conspirators.”

“Oh? What agency are you two with?” Kaitlin asked.

“Oh no,” Helena said. “I’m a teacher from New York. I… We sort of ended up traveling together.”

“You have any I.D.?” she asked Tom.

“No, and I didn’t work for an agency. I do have proof.” He took out the tablet. “But the battery’s dead. The journey to this farm with the red water-tower should be long enough to charge it.”

There was another muffled explosion from the airfield.

“The zombies are getting nearer,” Helena said. “They’ll be here in another twenty minutes. We should get moving.”

“Yeah.” Kaitlin gave them both another brief but thorough inspection before reaching some internal decision. “Yeah, we should. Get in.”

When Tom reached the door to the cab, he saw why this woman was so reluctant to offer assistance to two people who’d helped her escape the airfield. The back of the cab was filled with children.

Helena paused in the doorway, making eye contact with each child in turn. “You know,” she said brightly as she climbed in, “this will be the third time I’ve ridden in a fire truck. The other two times were when they brought one to the school where I teach, to show my pupils what a firefighter does. Now, let me see, my students are about… your age. What’s your name?”

“Soanna,” the girl who’d opened the door said. “What’s yours?”

As the truck begin to move, Tom closed his eyes and allowed himself to relax. Helena chattered on with the children in a way that could almost,
almost
, make him believe the world was back to normal.

There were eight children. Four boys and four girls. Soanna did most of the talking, with occasional corrections from Luke, the boy who’d opened the cab door. At eleven, Soanna was the oldest. Ramon, at seven, was the youngest. The other boys, Caleb and Tyler, were too terrified to talk. The other girls were introduced by Soanna as Emerald, Amber, and Jade.

“Are you sisters?” Helena asked.

“We all are,” Soanna said firmly. “We’re all brothers and sisters now.”

“They’re from a foster home,” Kaitlin said. “Emerald, Amber, and Jade lived next door. There, a red painted water tower. That must be it.” She stopped the truck by a closed five-bar gate and turned around to face the children. “You stay inside. I mean it this time.”

Tom got out and walked a little way down the road, checking in either direction. He saw no zombies, but he saw no vehicles either.

“What was the rest of the escape plan after you got here?” Helena asked after Kaitlin had closed the door to the cab.

“There wasn’t one,” Kaitlin said. “We got to the airfield last night, and by that time there were already too many people for the planes. The seats were going to be for children and pilots, and no one else. There was a farmer there, he said he owned this place, and if the airfield was overrun, everyone should come here. He said he had a well, and a store of agricultural diesel behind the barn. If you want to call that a plan, then that’s the extent of it.”

“You mean it was only children on the plane?” Helena asked. “So that plane that crashed, it was… God!”

Kaitlin walked out into the road. “The real plan was to hold on for as long as possible, not to flee,” she said. “Certainly not to flee before they found somewhere to land. The pilots were flying sorties every day, looking for a landing field. They hadn’t found one. This guy, he had grey hair, a jet-black goatee, he was impeccably dressed—”

“Complete with mirror-polished shoes? That’s Julio,” Tom said.

“Right, he said he didn’t know of anywhere. I guess the pilots who’d landed their planes on his airfield didn’t know of anywhere either. Their passengers must have thought the airfield was just a stepping-stone to somewhere else. Somewhere safe. There was a nearly a riot last night. A group tried to storm a plane. It’s why I kept the kids in the fire truck. Good thing, too. I might be wrong, but I think the fence was broken when people decided to break out. Around dawn, there was more shooting, and the planes started to take off. I think Julio and the captain had decided it was time to go. Or maybe they made that decision when the fence broke and the zombies got inside. I guess when people were told there was no seat on a plane, they stopped helping kill the zombies. I’m not sure. It all fell apart so quickly. I kept the kids in the truck, waiting to get them onto the plane, but then… you saw the rest.”

Tom glanced down the road, then at the gate to the farm. “Here.” He held out the rifle to Kaitlin. She frowned. “You’re military, aren’t you? You know how to use it, probably better than me.”

She took it, though with an air of reluctant suspicion. Tom walked over to the lockers on the side of the fire truck. He slid open one, and then the next until he found the tools. He took out a fire-axe. Short-handled, with a reinforced blade and comfortable grip, it felt far more like a real weapon than the machete had.

“What are you going to do with that?” Kaitlin asked.

“Don’t you hear it?” Tom asked. “It’s coming from behind the house. A living person would have come to investigate the sound of the engines.” He hefted the axe. “And we need to save ammunition.”

The creature wasn’t behind the house, but inside. Its arms waved through the broken kitchen window. Skin caught and tore on jagged shards of glass as it thrashed more violently when it saw him approach. Tom shook his head, gesturing with his axe toward the door.

“There’s an open door not five feet away, and you didn’t have the sense to use it. Maybe there is hope for us.”

Air hissed from the zombie’s snarling mouth. Tom waited until it threw an arm forward, and its head was jutting out. He swung the axe down. The blade sliced neatly through scalp and bone and brain, and came free. The creature sagged, motionless, on the window frame.

“It’s dead,” he called, watching brown-red gore drip from the creature’s fingers down onto a plastic tray of blue-petaled bedding plants. The flowerbed under the window had been dug over, but the plants were still in their pots. That must have been what someone was planning to do, the day of the outbreak. With the edge of the axe, he nudged the plants away from the slowly dripping blood.

“Nothing on the road,” Helena called back. Tom hadn’t been waiting for her reply, but listening for a response from any other undead inside the house.

“I’m checking inside,” he called, again listening for a response from the interior of the house. When none came, he pushed the door wide open. It led into a utility room, on the floor of which was a dead zombie dressed like the creature he’d just killed. From the clothing, the crowbar on the ground, and the pair of half-filled bags, he took them as looters rather than friends or family of the farmer who’d owned the property. It took another five minutes to confirm the farmhouse was truly empty, and that the scavengers’ bags contained the best of the meager loot to be found in the house.

“Two zombies,” he said when he got back to the truck. “One already dead. I killed the other. Looked like looters, or, hell, I guess they’re survivors like us. Not sure how the first one got infected, but I think the other killed him before succumbing to the virus.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Kaitlin said. “This place is too close to the airfield. We can’t stay here.”

“Where were you heading before you found the airfield?” Helena asked. “I mean, I take it that wasn’t your original destination.”

“No, we stumbled across it,” Kaitlin said. “We were heading west. Just trying to get away. What about you? Where are you two going now?”

“I… I don’t know,” Helena said. “Tom?”

“You said there was diesel here?” Tom asked.

“Behind the barn,” Kaitlin said.

“We’ll need it. Fuel is hard to find. I said I’d show you some proof.” He took out the tablet and sat-phone. “By the time we’ve found the fuel and any food left in the house, they’ll have charged. While we’re looking, I’ll tell you what happened, and how we came to be here.”

Leaving Helena to watch over the children, he and Kaitlin headed toward house. The food left in the kitchen, or that portion of it not now contaminated by the two zombies, fit into a very small box. By the time it was filled, Tom had explained about Project Archangel. The diesel was in a large storage tank behind the barn. By the time they’d confirmed there was enough to fill the fire truck a dozen times over, he’d told her about Farley, the election, and Powell. When they got back to the truck, there was enough charge on the tablet to show her the video of the journalist’s murder, and a handful of documents that he hoped proved his case.