Zombie Fallout 16 Read online

  “As much as you might think otherwise, Mike, the world does not revolve around you,” BT said breathlessly.

  “Shouldn’t you be passed out or something?” I asked. “What the hell else happened in there I didn’t know about?”

  “Sir, I don’t mean any disrespect,” Walde started. “But you’re only a captain, and a newly appointed one, and of the raiders. There would have been no need for you to know.”

  “Oh, Mike would never believe that.”

  “Seriously, BT?” I looked sharply at him. He shrugged. If he could have cared less, it wouldn’t have been by much. “Great. We have Ebola gas. What the hell are we going to do with it?” I asked. What I actually wanted to know, though it had zero pertinence to the mission, was where in the hell did we get it to begin with.

  “We deploy it,” Walde replied.

  “Okay, couple of problems as far as I can see. Um, first—and this is a biggie—pretty sure we’re not immune. As much as I want to get rid of the zombies, I have no desire to have my pancreas leak out my eyes. And second, number one stands, even if, by some strange twist of fate, I was okay with my liver dripping from my ass.”

  “Eww,” Rose said.

  “Sorry,” I told her. “But even if we had signed up for this suicide mission and agreed to deploy the weapons, I’ve got to imagine we can’t just toss them on the deck and hope for the best.”

  “Into the belly of the beast,” BT sighed.

  “Again,” I added.

  “We brought five hazmat suits with us.” Walde looked away.

  “Four for your team and a fifth for who? A lucky lottery winner? That’s just spiffy,” I said.

  “Spiffy?” BT questioned.

  “If it’ll make it better, I’ll go on a swear-filled rant for the next few minutes.”

  “Sir, the plan was for the army team to obtain the nuclear device then get you and your team off the ship.”

  “If it was expedient.” She didn’t meet my gaze when I said that.

  “I realize in the higher-ups’ view, we’re all expendable, but why not bring more suits?” I asked.

  BT had stood up. Anger was giving him some energy. “So the SEALs are tasked with Ebola, the Army gets the nuke, and our squad is what? Shields?” The big guy was pissed.

  “There were only the five,” Reed said. “Our original orders were to deploy as soon as possible. Major Overland was adamant with us that we were to get all of your personnel off the ship or onto the bridge first.”

  “I know all of this sucks, sir, but we have the gas and we have the suits. It makes sense to follow through. Every minute our people stay out in the open on the beach is a danger to all of them,” Walde said.

  “Five suits. Great. Let’s figure out who is going to play the horsemen of the apocalypse,” I said.

  “Baggelli has to go, as he is trained in deployment. Reed’s not going anywhere, and, well, I’m playing admiral.”

  I was looking around. “Wow, this gets more perfecter all the time. First you didn’t want us, and now we’re the only ones left playing.” I was feeling pretty sour about the whole thing. It was like my brain was lactose intolerant and someone had removed part of my skull to drench it in heavy cream.

  “I’ll go,” BT volunteered.

  “Not a chance. That suit will look like a banana with an extra small condom on it,” I told him. He looked as if he were going to protest. “Top…BT, you’re wiped. You’re not going on this mission.”

  “I’ll go,” Tommy said. I nodded curtly.

  “I’ll go too,” Stenzel said.

  “As will I,” I said. “That’s it, I’m not risking more people.”

  “I was about to raise my hand,” Rose said. She was sincere.

  “There are five suits,” Walde said.

  “Was I in some way ambiguous, Sergeant?” I asked. The gaze I directed at Walde burned like cordite. “Just because everyone else considered my squad disposable doesn’t mean I do. That clear?”

  “Crystal, sir,” she replied.

  “And what about the rest of you up here? Is it safe?”

  “This ship is designed to withstand a biological attack. We can put positive pressure in the room, and it will be completely sealed. And in the off-chance something were to get through, the air filters can immediately scrub the bridge,” she replied.

  “Jesus.” I wasn’t a devout Catholic, but I still hated using the Lord’s name in vain. It made it so personal, seemed much worse than a traditional swear, but in this case, needed. “Now we have to figure out how we’re going to get past those still on the deck.”

  “We’re going to rappel past them. We’ll use the chain.” Baggelli grabbed a manual and spread it out on a workstation. “See this? It’s a motor launch. We get the chain out past the side of the ship and we can climb down and back in below them.”

  “How many decks below them?” I asked.

  “One,” he replied.

  It was as good a plan as any, especially since I didn’t have one. “Stealth is going to be our friend. We’re going to go at night and hope they don’t see or hear us. Walde, I’ll need you to cut the lights on this side and blast something through the speakers to cover us.” I was rolling with what we had.

  “I can do that.”

  “Tommy, can you heave the chain that far?” I asked. The parapet overhang and the edge of the deck was somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty feet; not an overly far distance to toss something out, but the chain was heavy. It would take a monumental throw.

  “I’ll help him. Just give me a minute.” BT was shoveling some food into his mouth.

  No matter what we did, the chain was going to make a racket, and that was why I wanted to get that done now. Let the zombies be curious. When nothing else happened, hopefully they would forget about it by the time dark descended.

  The rest of us got out of the way as BT and Tommy prepped the chain. Tommy, myself and BT all knew that BT was there mainly for show. I wasn’t sure who we were still kidding at this point, but like the old adage, the show must go on. Surprisingly, it took two takes, and the noise was everything expected; my guess is they heard it on land. For better or worse, it did attract the zombies, some even coming out onto the deck from wherever they had been hiding. We shot as many as we could before they decided the losses far exceeded any gains, especially with no flesh in sight.

  “Mike, what if there are still prisoners in the hold? What are you going to do about them?” BT asked.

  I’d been thinking the same thing. It was suspected there were still prisoners. That was an attempted justification on my part. I went further with that dubious thought, that even if there were survivors, what kind of shape were they in, both mentally and physically? Would there be anything even remotely human within them worth salvaging? Then, if it was even possible to rescue them, which was highly in doubt, there was no way we could know if they were infected time bombs. I voiced everything to him. His face became progressively grimmer as he realized where I was headed. Not that he hadn’t followed, just that he had hoped that maybe I’d found a way to jump that particular track and onto something more easily digestible.

  “Sergeant Walde, is there any way to seal off where the prisoners are most likely being held?” I asked.

  Her lips were pressed tightly together as she shook her head. “The safeties are for where personnel would traditionally be.”

  The decision was mine and mine alone to make. Either way I went, there was bound to be a lot of disagreement, and it was likely that no matter what, the final outcome would be unpopular. It was abundantly possible to hate both sides, like the flipped coin had fallen into an overflowing, shit-ridden toilet and nobody was going to stick their hand in it to fish it out, no matter who’d won the toss.

  “We’ll be doing them a favor,” Tommy told me, seeing the internal struggle I was wading through. I nodded, not knowing how else to respond. I was condemning those prisoners to death; didn’t matter the state they were in, no
w none would ever come back.

  “God help us all,” I said softly, then to the group, “We’ll proceed with the deployment of the gas tonight.” I was expecting, maybe even hoping for BT to protest, to pull my moral compass over from where it had gone. When he didn’t, I didn’t know if I was relieved or angry. Being forced to do something horrible only because the alternatives are hideous does not make the choice made any easier.

  We were a solemn group for the rest of the day. Walde kept busy, learning everything she could about the ship. Rose shadowed her at my direction; it could never hurt to have more than one person able to fulfill a mission. Winters was just as busy, tending to the injured. BT had found a corner of the bridge to call his own and had fallen asleep. For the most part, I stayed alone and looked back toward land. I vacillated on whether this whole thing was worth it. I willed the sun to stay up; it chose not to listen. It would be back tomorrow, but by then, the damage would be done. I was convinced it would never shine quite so brightly upon me ever again.

  “It’s time,” Walde said as she approached me with a suit and a roll of tape. I’d seen enough pandemic movies to know that the cuffs were taped. I was as okay with that as one can be. I, however, began to lose confidence when, after I donned the suit, Walde got behind me and ripped a few strips off and applied them to my back.

  “Um, Sergeant, could you tell me what you’re doing?”

  “There’s a hole.”

  “There’s a hole in my protective suit which is the only shield between me and the Ebola virus?”

  “That’s correct, sir.”

  “I realize the government bought these suits from the lowest bidder, but are these perhaps factory rejects?” I asked.

  “These suits were used in training exercises; some of them have a bit of wear.”

  “A bit of wear is a scuff mark. A hole is unacceptable.”

  “It’ll be fine with the tape.”

  “Would you risk your life on a piece of tape, Walde?”

  “We’re all risking our lives on this piece of tape, sir.”

  I got what she meant, in theory. If we failed, they were all doomed. But she wasn’t going to have brain matter dripping down her nose and across her lips. That was a very big difference. I would have preferred she wrapped a piece completely around my back and chest, making it that much more difficult to come loose, but when I asked her, she told me that was the only roll they had, as they lost two when Overland had been attacked.

  “How long do we have?” I asked as she began to affix the breathing apparatus and the tank.

  “It says two hours. So…hour and a half max.”

  “What else aren’t you telling me?”

  She looked tense. “Your time to deploy is much less because you still need to get as far away from the propellant as possible. We will not be able to allow you on the bridge for at least twelve hours. The virus has a short life span out of a host, just a few hours.”

  “But a lot longer than we have oxygen.”

  “As long as you don’t get any on you—”

  “My wife used to say that when she would paint.”

  “Sir?”

  “When I saw her with a small can of paint, doing whatever project she was about to, I would ask her if she was going to change and she would, without fail, tell me she wasn’t going to get any on her. Not once, Walde, not fucking once did she not get paint on her shirt, sweater, pants, and usually her hair. I swear it was all a ploy so that she would have to get new clothes, though she would deny that vehemently.”

  “I’m not sure the point, sir,” Walde said.

  “For the most part, she really was trying to stay clean and was very aware of her surroundings and the project at hand and still she got it on her clothes. We are going into a hot zone with a deadly bio-agent, dressed in suits that have ‘a bit of wear.’ What do you think the odds are no one gets any on themselves?”

  “There are cleaning closets throughout the ship; we’ll hit one of those,” Baggelli said as he suited up. “Bleach kills the virus. We grab a few gallons, just in case, douse the shit out of ourselves, and we’ll be good to go.”

  “Great.”

  Twenty minutes later, we were suited up and ready to go. Hadn’t even started and I was already sweating up a storm.

  “What’s your oxygen say?” Walde asked. There was a small readout on the side of the faceplate.

  “Seven green bars,” I told her.

  “I’ve got eight green,” Baggelli said.

  “I suppose I win; I have ten,” Stenzel added.

  “I have three orange,” Tommy said.

  Walde fumbled around with the tank and the valve. “What about now?”

  “Two.”

  “All right, Tommy, you’re out,” I told him.

  “I’ll just get the other suit.”

  “Can’t. Sleeve is ripped to the elbow. Whole thing looks like it has dry rot,” Walde said, holding it up for inspection.

  “Strap the extra O2 tanks to me.”

  Baggelli was carrying the Ebola canisters.

  “Testing.” I was checking the comms.

  Walde gave a thumbs up and spoke back.

  “Okay, Sergeant, hit the lights and give me some good old rock and roll,” I said. I should have known she was going to pull a song from Gary’s playlist. Something about being a jukebox hero blared throughout the ship’s intercom system. Somewhere, an admiral was rolling over in his grave. I could only hope that was the case and not that he was in some hold, half-starved and about to get a whole lot worse, wondering what the fuck was happening to his beloved ship.

  I went down the chain first. Grabbing hold with the thick rubber was not an easy endeavor. I was completely unsure as to how we were going to climb back up with the gloves on. I would have slid down if I wasn’t afraid that they would crumble from the friction. By the time I got into the motor housing area, I was down to six bars. Had a pretty good feeling that the majority of my time was going to be spent watching that little gauge. Like I predicted, I split my time between scoping out the room and looking at the gauge. I guess that was more of a self-fulfilling prophecy than a prediction, but whatever. Baggelli was down next, followed quickly by Harley.

  “Now what?” I asked.

  “Now we find the densest concentration of zombies,” Bags replied. I already knew this; I was hoping there had been a new plan developed on the way down.

  9

  Mike Journal Entry 9

  There is nothing good about being in a hazmat suit. I mean, besides not catching a deadly virus or breathing in poisonous gas, yeah, other than that. You crinkle along like a walking bag of potato chips, sightlines are obstructed, and it’s hot as hell. Did I mention the part about having to worry about running out of air? That’s worse than being at an all-you-can-eat buffet, shuffling along the food line, just hoping there will be some steak tips left when you get there.

  Baggelli was in the lead. I ended up in the middle somehow, with Stenzel bringing up the rear. I didn’t like at all how difficult it was to check out what was behind me. It was not as easy as just looking over a shoulder; I had to turn completely around, which was awkward, time-consuming, and added an element of danger that I didn’t care for.

  Bags raised a fist to halt us as he came to a set of stairs. He was looking around—I forgot to mention wearing the suits also robbed us of our sense of smell, something that came in handy when dealing with an enemy that smelled of shit-wrapped garbage. Upon further reflection, this aspect was more of a mixed bag. He gave the motion to follow. It took Stenzel tapping me on my shoulder to get me moving. I berated myself for taking a mini braincation, here, of all places; I was having a hard time getting steak tips out of my mind.

  Unlike the hallway, the stairwell was dark. The lights had been broken out; hard to tell if it was on purpose. Either way, it had been a while ago, as pieces of glass were embedded within pools of dried blood like prehistoric mosquitos entombed in amber. The soles of our suits were
made from thick rubber, but I could not help but be concerned about a puncture. Even if my condition protected me, I still had Stenzel and Baggelli and the rest onboard to be concerned with. And there were decent odds if the zombies couldn’t overcome the virus, then my system would be overwhelmed by it, as well. We’d gone down five flights. Baggelli had not so much as peeked onto another deck level.

  “You know where we’re going, don’t you?” I asked.

  His next step down may or may not have had the slightest hesitation to it. He answered quickly enough; it was like he’d been living with the secret information the rest of us had recently found out about, and he wasn’t yet comfortable sharing more details. “It would appear that they’re one level up from the bottommost deck. Main machinery room.”

  I thought about asking him how he knew but couldn’t figure out what good that would do except sate my curiosity and distract him from what he was doing. And using more oxygen to speak was not a great idea, either. The sixth bar was blinking, meaning it was getting ready to go away, much like my speech filter had when I became a teenager.

  “Lights out from here,” Baggelli announced. I’d never turned mine on. It was a pain in the ass trying to find the switch with my gloves. I didn’t like how easy the going was. Anything worth getting took struggle. And usually, anything obtained too easily was an illusion, like a free lunch. Tough to complain in this instance, though, as the struggle would be true life and death. Still, if traps came with signs signifying where they were, this one was a glowing neon one with a pointing arrow, Die Here, blinking in bright hues of hunter red. We went down another five flights; I couldn’t help but think we were descending into hell, or a spin-off version anyway. Which is usually worse than the original, by the way. At the tenth level, Baggelli quickly ducked his head into the entrance and just as quickly came back, though, this time, he had a parasitic attachment. It happened as fast as the face-huggers from the Alien franchise.

  Bags was pinwheeling backwards. The rifle he held was of no use as the zombie had grabbed hold and was pulling him close, looking to bite through the rubber and get to the fleshy goodness inside. I turned my rifle and delivered two hard buttstock thrusts to the head. I stunned the fucker and also scraped a swath of hair and skin away, exposing the skull, which I’d yet to fracture. Even as I was hitting the zombie, I could not get the image of some jackhole in a crowded movie theater, during an intense scene, fighting with his cellophane-wrapped snacks because of the crinkling noises we were making. Why is there always one that screws up the viewing experience for everyone? Are they cognizant of this and don’t give a fuck? A theater troll, perhaps? Or are they just oblivious humans who have no concept of how their actions affect others around them? Like did he learn from his mother, who would park her shopping cart smack dab in the middle of the most crowded grocery aisle? Usually at a canted angle while she bent over to take a more than usual time to look at the different kinds of soup. I’ve been known to push the offending carts out of my way with mine, and, as long as I’m being honest, if the opportunity presents itself, I will wing the person, too. Sometimes they will be embarrassed and apologize for being inconsiderate, but a lot of times they will give a how dare you fuck with my need for negative attention stare. Fuck you, and you’re welcome.