Ghosts: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (7 page)

“Hold it. Right there ...” said Jimmy Foley, who was
standing on the top rung of a teetering twenty-foot ladder, biting his lip in
concentration, his upper body contorted into a shape rarely found outside of a
yoga studio. Fighting gravity and his forty-one-year-old joints that were
clearly not used to this kind of manual labor, he strained mightily at full
extension and finally succeeded in threading the nut onto the galvanized bolt.

“Third times the charm,” said Tran, smiling and looking up
at Foley. “Glad that’s the last one. I was getting tired of holding this ladder
and having to find all of your fumbles.”

Sweat dripping off the tip of his nose, Foley looked down
and said sharply, “Give me a break, Tran. I’m an IT guy,
not
a building superintendent.
If I had my druthers, I’d take troubleshooting and rebuilding a roached office network
over this kind of work ...
any day
.”

“Yeah, but once this array is up and running we will only
have to rely on the generator when it’s
really
needed. That means fewer
gas runs. And without the constant mechanical noise all of those rotting demons
out there will leave us alone. Duncan promised as much.”

Foley said nothing. He descended a few rungs, took the socket
wrench from Tran, and looked closely for the first time in at least a week at
the slight Asian man’s face. Save for the puffiness in Tran’s left ear (
cauliflower
was what he’d heard Brook call it), the rest of the swelling had left his face
entirely. The deep scratches on his cheek and neck had healed, leaving behind a
roadmap of white scars. When Foley had first met Tran three weeks ago his eyes
were still mostly swollen shut from a beating suffered at the hands of Bishop’s
henchmen. And a week ago the whites were still bloodshot and jaundiced. Now they
were nearly wide open and harbored a knowing twinkle. A spark, is what first
came to Foley’s mind. Embarrassed at the realization he’d been staring, Foley grabbed
the tool and climbed back up the ladder. He called down, “How tight do the
bolts have to be?”

“Duncan said a quarter turn past real tight,” answered Tran,
still bracing the ladder two-handed.

“Figures,” muttered Foley, his bald pate an angry shade of
red. “That guy wouldn’t know specific if it bit him on the butt.”

“Says the scatterbrained IT guy,” quipped Tran, suppressing
a chuckle.

***

Ten minutes later the unlikely duo stood back to admire
their handiwork. There were eight gleaming black three by five-foot rectangles
bolted securely in two rows. The solar array, thought to produce roughly two
and a half kilowatts per hour, sat atop a jury-rigged metal frame that
resembled scaffolding put together by a team of blind men. The entire setup,
liberated from the quarry compound, would provide enough juice during the day to
power the lights and closed circuit system while charging the reserve batteries
sufficiently to last throughout the night. A given during the summer when the
sun was prominent in a cloudless sky most of the day—an entirely different
proposition during the late fall and winter months when the sun could stay away
for weeks on end.

But that was not this IT guy’s department
.
Besides,
thought Foley as his foot touched the soft earthen forest floor,
by the time
the clouds roll in permanently, Daymon will have finished blocking the road at
points both east and west and using the high output generator taken from the
quarry will be a non-issue.

“I’m done up here. What do you say we take a break and get us
a beer?” Foley said.

Shaking his head, Tran sighed and said, “I
still
don’t drink. My religion frowns upon it.”

“Doesn’t hurt to ask. I just hate to drink alone.” Foley
pocketed the wrench and asked, “So the Dalai Lama doesn’t ever hoist a cold
one?”

In an unusual display of humor, Tran quipped, “Not anymore.”

“I meant
didn’t,
past tense ... before everything
went to shit and all of this became necessary,” Foley said, gesturing toward
the giant wood and metal housing that, despite its cobbled-together nature,
somehow remained standing.

“Help me with the ladder,” Tran said, ignoring the question.
“Only the easy part remains.”

“Yep,” agreed Foley. “Wiring up the invertor.
That
this IT guy can handle.”

Eager, yet reluctant, to see what surprise Nash had in
store, Cade strode purposefully across the clearing, the dried grass swishing
against his smartly bloused MultiCam pants. The sun was warm on his face and
the breeze present earlier had tapered off. Tilting his head back as he walked,
he drew in a deep breath through his nose.
Nothing.
The carrion stench
present earlier had gone along with the bodies. From somewhere west of him,
deep into the property and well away from the State Route, he heard the soft
chug of the excavator working hard digging a grave for them. He imagined Seth
at the controls, with nobody to talk to, the engine noise drowning out his
thoughts.

“All in the name of survival,” he said to himself, halting
near the phony crop circle. After depositing the heavy gear box on the matted-down
grass, he knelt and popped the latches. The inside was mostly thick black foam
with each component of the small satellite dish snugged into its own form-fitting
compartment.

He extricated the parts for the stand first and quickly
assembled them. The dish went together rather easily and when he placed it on
the stand the whole thing came up to just above his kneecap.

The low whine of a straining gearbox got his attention.
Looking west towards the noise he saw a Chevy pick-up driven by Daymon,
branches scraping its side and whipping the air as it emerge from the tree line.
From the passenger seat, Duncan waved a greeting as the rig nosed in near the
other vehicles.

Cade waved back then shifted his focus to the task at hand.
Using the compass feature on his Suunto, he found due south and fixed his gaze
on one gnarled tree in particular, a victim of a past lightning strike, and
rotated the dish until its center post was aimed at the blue sky about twenty
degrees above its pointy top.

The rest of the setup took but a few seconds. However,
booting up the laptop and getting it to recognize the connected dish was a test
in patience, of which Cade had vast stores.

Still waiting, he looked up and saw Lev and Chief trudge
from the forest to the east. Each man had a black rifle slung over one
shoulder, and perched on the other was a hewn length of lodge pole pine
supporting a field dressed deer carcass. With each step the buck’s head jerked
and lolled, the four-point rack carving a meandering path through the knee-high
grass.

Waving a greeting to them both, Cade heard and felt his
stomach growl. Clearly, he thought, the reptile part of his brain was now aware
of the prospect of fresh meat. And in his mind’s eye he could already see the
fire-braised flesh and hear the white noise of the venison sizzling on the
spit.

Shielding the laptop screen with one hand, Cade squinted
against the sun, waiting to see the pixelated wheel stop spinning and the
cartoonish clasped hands replace it showing him the Panasonic was ready to
receive the coded transmission from the satellite orbiting somewhere high above
him. Through technology he didn’t entirely understand, nor care to, a message
from Nash containing what might be a life-altering proposition began downloading
onto the laptop.

A short while later an audible chime told him the download
was complete, but the glare from the sun prevented him from seeing the file
name let alone read it, so he disconnected the cable and hinged the screen
closed. Leaving the dish and cables on the grass, he rose and set off to find a
patch of shade.

Nearing the motor pool, Cade noticed Duncan puttering around
under the open hood of his newly acquired Dodge Ram. When he got within earshot
he couldn’t help but throw a quip at the master of all quipsters. “What ...
Jiffy Lube closed?”

After pushing off of the truck’s fender, Duncan sauntered
over and squared up with Cade. “What’s with the toys?” he asked, nodding
towards the crushed grass where only the top of the gray dish was visible.
“Trying to pick up DirecTV? Cause if you are, I hate to break it to ya ...
there ain’t no more Sunday Ticket.”

“Breaks my heart,” said Cade, which happened to be a lie.
Save for his beloved Portland Trailblazers—the only game in town—he could take or
leave professional sports. College games, he conceded after a second’s thought,
he would most definitely miss. The large scale choreography between the
cheerleaders and marching bands were a sight to see in person. Yet one more
thing stolen from Raven’s future by Omega.

“Not a big sports fan?”

“Not so much.”

Nodding at the laptop, Duncan asked, “What’s with the
computer?”

Ignoring the question, but thinking ahead, Cade asked, “The
Black Hawk ... how much fuel is she holding?”

“She’s sittin' almost half full.”

“Perfect,” replied Cade. “That’s more than enough to get us
to Morgan.”

Duncan nudged his oversized orange-framed glasses back to
their proper resting place. “Whatever’s on the computer is need to know. I get
it.”

“I don’t even know what’s on it,” Cade said. He passed in
front of Duncan’s truck and climbed inside the F-650 sitting beside it and
locked the door to ward off any and all distractions for the near future.

Cracking open the computer, he said aloud, “Alright, Freda,
this better be what I think it is.”

***

And it had been—sort of. In the file labeled
FUBAR
he
discovered more than thirty minutes worth of footage shot mostly from very high
altitude and, since jet fuel was in very short supply last he’d heard, Cade
assumed it was captured by the sensitive optics aboard one of Nash’s Keyhole satellites.
Every city the bird passed over—of which there were many during the
compilation’s run time—had one thing in common: all of the freeways and arterials
leading away from their downtown cores, where skyscrapers cast their shadows, commerce
took place, and thousands upon thousands of people lived cheek to jowl, were
choked with static vehicles. No matter the size of the city, he saw rivers of multicolored
sheet metal, the sun glittering off glass and chrome. People’s worldly possessions:
colorful jumbles of furniture and art and suitcases heaped high in the beds of
pickups or lashed atop passenger cars. And judging by the roving herds, those
same unfortunate people, who had either sheltered in place initially or were
trying to escape the outbreak via those vehicles, now roamed the jams and
concrete jungles in search of living prey.

New York was exceptionally bad. From altitude the streets
were mostly taxi cab yellow with a smattering of other colors breaking up the
solid hue here and there. And when Manhattan Island slid by and the optics
zoomed in Cade got a closer look and saw that a gridlock of biblical
proportions had taken place when panicked residents fled the security of their
three thousand dollar a square foot digs for the already overrun safe zones
authorized by the DHS and set up and run by massively overwhelmed FEMA workers.

Strangely, the streets of downtown Chicago were mostly free
of vehicles. However, there were roadblocks made of stacked sandbags all up and
down the famous Magnificent Mile from the Chicago River to Oak Street. All were
now unmanned, but clearly whoever had been there had retreated in a hurry,
leaving behind heavy machine guns, ammo boxes, and dozens of their fallen, chewed
on bodies in MultiCam fatigues, and all, Cade presumed, head shot in order to
keep them from reanimating and joining the burgeoning ranks of the walking dead.

Throughout the grim documentary, Nash narrated in a voice
bereft of emotion, calling out each city by name followed by the estimated casualties
suffered there, which were nothing short of staggering.

After twenty minutes of this, when Cade had seen more of the
destruction wrought by this Extinction Level Event than he cared to, Nash’s voice
abruptly changed and a measure of empathy crept in as she said:
Cade, your
hometown is next. I’m pleased to announce that it has fared better than most
,
and then sure enough, Portland, Oregon, the Rose City, known for its bridges
and quirky citizenry, got its sixty seconds of fame. And though the brief flyby
was shorter than most Super Bowl commercials, the information he gleaned from
it was priceless. The once vibrant city, home to nearly one million, now
resembled the pictures he’d seen of Detroit before the Omega outbreak.

The main difference between Portland and the previous two
dozen cities was the flotilla of watercraft anchored dead center in the slow-moving
river. There were small pleasure craft with Bimini tops deployed. A few dozen gleaming
yachts, likely in the forty-to fifty-foot range, strained against their anchor
chains in what used to be the shipping channel. The RiverPlace Marina on the west
side of the Willamette River was deserted, the empty slips now useless pickets
of rust streaked I-beams resembling mechanical fingers reaching from the
depths. Up on the west bank rows of million dollar condominiums seemed battened
down against the dead, their windows darkened and uninviting.

In stark contrast, on the opposite bank of the Willamette River
nearly all of the recently renovated warehouses constructed of old growth timber
around the turn of the last century had completely burned to the ground, taking
with them dozens of restaurants and bars and coffee shops. South of the scorched
concrete pads and blackened rubble, sitting in the shadow of the Marquam Bridge
where Interstate 5 crossed the river, Cade recognized the block-long Oregon
Museum of Science and Industry building—one of Raven’s favorite places.

Remarkably, the dome over the IMAX theater was intact. As was
OMSI’s forty-foot-tall pyramid that sat atop a huge cube-shaped entry, both
constructed from hundreds of panes of tinted glass secured to a vast metal
framework. Looking closer, he realized there were very few dead wandering the
walk near the seawall and the parking lots bordering on the north and west were
mostly deserted. All in all, OMSI looked to be untouched. Nothing good to loot
in a museum, he concluded. Then, recalling a news article that mentioned how the
place had been built around a decommissioned steam plant with a sprawling upper
level complete with multiple exits and dozens of rooms, he realized it would
make for a good compound. Furthermore, with a couple of boats moored next to
the static submarine on display, emergency egress could be accomplished from land
or sea.

Movement at the far edge of the clearing disrupted his train
of thought. Pausing the image, he shifted his gaze just as Jamie stepped from
the tree line and into the sun. He watched her walking slowly in his general
direction, a long rifle slung over one shoulder, a pistol riding low on her
right hip.

Her black hair, worn short since she’d returned from her
kidnapping ordeal, gleamed like patent leather. Lev, who was sweet on the
girl—and not very good at hiding it—had mistakenly taken to calling it a pixie
cut.

But Cade thought nothing of the sort. This new close-cropped
do was all Demi Moore a la
G.I. Jane
. High speed, low drag, and ready
for war. And that’s what this woman had waged on the dead since coming back.
She lived to man the overwatch. Said she appreciated the solitude it provided.

Lev had no chance, Cade thought as he watched her stalk
through the clearing. Jamie was never going to forgive herself for Jordan’s
death. And she sure as hell wasn’t getting over losing Logan any time soon. The
former he knew from the brief conversation he’d had with her aboard the Black
Hawk three weeks ago. A revelation he didn’t intend on sharing with anyone. The
latter, however, was common knowledge since her and Logan’s budding relationship
had been cut short by an act of brutality that blindsided everybody.

The wicked-looking tomahawk strapped to her hip beat a
steady silent cadence on her thigh as she strode by seemingly unaware she was
being watched.

Cade shifted his gaze back to the laptop and started the
image moving again, while a dozen feet in front of the F-650’s massive front
end Jamie’s playful one-fingered salute skimmed above the grill just like a
shark’s dorsal.

Inside the cab, oblivious to the fact that he’d been made by
Jamie, Cade stared at the screen. He saw the satellite trace a laser-straight
trajectory over Portland and noticed the lens pan slowly aft; he felt a spark
of emotion as he recognized his inner east side neighborhood hugging the
natural contour of the land and rising gradually away from the river.

Once again he paused the playback and zoomed in on the image
with repeated taps of the + key until single family homes leapt out at him.
Instantly he recognized Creston Park by the grove of firs that grew noticeably taller
than anything else in his old neighborhood. In the center of the park he saw
the sun-splashed waters of the pool of the same name where Raven had just
completed swimming lessons, earning herself a bump up from Seal to Polar
Bear—an achievement she couldn’t stop talking about until that fateful Saturday
when he’d dropped her and Brook off at the airport. A little triumph over her
fear of water she hadn’t said one word about since.

While savoring the pleasant mental image of Raven’s wide smile
as she thrust the certificate excitedly in his face, he traced a finger
diagonally right from the pool until he located the alley running east/west behind
the house he’d been forced to abandon what seemed like a lifetime ago.

He stopped his finger moving and let it hover over the
middle of the dirt track near the fence he’d hoisted his mountain bike over at
the onset of this madness forty-some-odd days ago. And to his amazement, right
of his finger, still standing—multi-pitched roof and all—was the craftsman-style
home he’d grown up in. The same home where thirteen years prior he had carried
Brook as a new bride across the threshold. And the same place they’d brought a
newborn Raven home to barely a year later.