The Coalition: Part 1 The State of Extinction (Zombie Series) (10 page)

“The rebuilding stuff. The starting over.”

“If you want to put it that way, yes.”

“I’ll tell you the same thing I have before,” Cutter said. “I’ll let you know.”

“Very good. I guess I can’t ask for more than that these days.”
Without
another word
,
the Colonel pivoted on his heel and leaped out of the shattered window through which
he had
entered. Cutter did the same, moving off in the opposite direction. Neither man looked back.

**

Two hours after leaving the good Colonel had brought Cutter no closer to his goal. He needed a new tank of propane. It was the only fuel that got the metals hot enough to cast new bullets. There was always charcoal to melt lead, but he was into other materials to make
ammunition that was more lethal
. It had to be propane and he needed to get it back to his place as soon as possible. It wasn’t that he was completely out. He still had a good forty gallons untapped, plus some of the smaller canisters he’d been lucky enough to find stashed in a house he explored. That little adventure hadn’t cost him more than the sweat it took to beat a couple of deads into mush, so the payoff had been good
,
when compared to the effort.

What he really wanted was another forty-gallon container
, or
at least a
twenty-gallon
tank. The large holding tanks in the big box stores and U-Haul centers had all been bled dry months before. His only good bet these days was to luck into the smaller tanks in garages and storage buildings around abandoned homes.
However,
even
then
it was just pure luck to find one. The first thing that people had fallen back on was cooking on grills when the power went down.

He
figured
it
was possible
that the area was completely tapped out.
Nevertheless,
he was going to spend at least another week looking before he gave up on his own neighborhood and ventured
further
afield. He had safe houses scattered as far as four miles from his favorite pad, so
if it came to that,
one of those could be his base of operations for a while.

Cutter was standing in the overgrown
backyard
of what had been a really nice four-bedroom executive’s home
at one
time
. The place had been posh in its day, but now the weeds and the rats had taken it over. Some rats were so bold that they trotted along in plain view of him
,
as he stood and surveyed the half-acre of formerly green grass surrounding an in-ground concrete swimming pool. The pool was almost full, but
a mat of green slime
covered
it
. Even where the algae was broken
the water
was dark and green. A sulfurous stench burped out of the water from time to time.

On the cracked patio with a new forest of sweet gums and poplar seedlings reaching through the gaps in the cement, he had found a very nice stainless steel grill. The kind that was many BTUs and which went through propane like nobody’s business when it was running. There were three tanks sitting in the bin beneath the burners, but each of them was quite empty. He’d picked them up, one by one, feeling the light heft in his gloved hands, holding them up and shaking them just to make sure there wasn’t a gallon or two sloshing around inside, still under pressure. No such luck.

The only place left there for him to search was a shed at the very back of the lot, built tight up against the tall stucco security wall that was now
covered
with English ivy that had spread like a mottled disease over the brown surface of the stucco. Slowly
,
he headed back to the building.
He figured, it
was probably 200 square feet. There was a good possibility that he might find something useful in there. Peering around, making sure nothing was hiding in the tall weeds around the pool, he made it over to the storage shed.

The door had a stout lock on it. A pretty good one, he saw
.
It
wasn’t even rusted, even though it was crusted over a bit in the residue of dozens of rain storms and the fall of dirt and dust over the months. It had been a long time since anyone had been there. Probably more than a year. It had been obvious to Cutter that the original owners had tried to make a stand there.
They had
probably
thought
that the brick and stucco security wall would hold back the shamblers.
If
that was all there was to it, they might have been right.
Of
course,
they hadn’t been able to properly fortify the front of the house
,
through which they came and went. From the state of the
place,
they’d tried to put up a good fight before they’d ended up losing. Having searched through the mess, he couldn’t tell if anyone had made it out alive or not. It was hard to tell when there were so many rotting arms and legs lying almost everywhere you looked.

So, he thought
,
what
to do about the lock. He certainly wasn’t going to shoot it, and he didn’t want to hammer at it. That would make far too much noise and bring on unwanted visitors, zombie or otherwise.
However,
this little space had not been opened in probably as much as a year. There could be a hoard of needed materials in there. He had to know.

Cutter unslung the .220 and propped it carefully against the wall. Then he
took off
the pack and opened it up, immediately pulling out exactly what he needed
;
his crowbar.

Without
hesitation,
he shoved the crowbar in the loop of the
padlock, placed the end of the shaft against the door,
and pulled back, drawing the tool toward him with great force. It wasn’t the lock he wanted to break, but the hinge. With a brief
shriek,
the metal tore free of the solid wood and Cutter reached out quickly to catch the lump of steel before it could hit the cement and make any more noise. He glanced over his shoulder to make sure that no zombie had come through the house, curious about any movement or noise he had made.

Because
he’d been so careful to turn to look back, he didn’t notice the pair of shadows that came out of the depths of the shed, hands like claws, arms reaching for him.

The impact of the weight surprised him and slapped him backward. One hit him low at the knees, and the other came at him higher, with arms gripping his waist.

“Damn!” he said. He almost fell
,
but
he
kept his balance and looked down. The figure tearing at his knees had been a small girl, no older than seven or so before the plague had taken her. What hair that remained on her patchy skull was strawberry blond. There was even a ribbon tied in one strand of the stringy muck.

The other, heavier zombie had probably been her big brother
; ten
or eleven years old
, and maybe
a hundred pounds.
He was a
big, strapping boy
,
who had probably been on his way to being a high school football star. They
groaned, snarled,
and snapped at him, trying to bite. In fact, they weren’t
trying
to
bite
, but actually
were
biting. It was only the tough layers of fabric that he wore that had saved him from being wounded. Still, if he didn’t stop them, one or the other was going to find a chink in his armor and put end to his story of survival.

Whenever Cutter found himself hand to hand with these bastards, he rarely spoke to them. Human voices only seemed to make them even more savage. So all he did was suck in a breath of air, lift the crowbar high and brought it down with as much force as his position would allow.

The boy crumpled to the ground, his brains oozing out of a huge gap in the dark brown hair that had covered his blue, oxygen-starved scalp.

With the single-minded ferocity that marked them all, the smaller of the two attackers just kept at him, holding on and gnawing at his thigh, trying to eat its way through the thicknesses. Cutter placed the gloved heel of his left hand to her forehead, and although a section of her scalp peeled away under the pressure, he succeeded in moving her back a bit. Without hesitating, he drew back his right leg and kicked up, as if the thing were a football and his steel-toed boot met her chin with a wet snapping sound. The thing went down, but almost immediately brought itself back up to a standing position.
However,
by then the crowbar was in the downswing of a killing arc, and soon she was lying there as dead as the form that had been her brother.

“Shit,” Cutter said, accusing himself. “That was stupid. That was rookie shit,” he whispered. Scanning the yard, he saw that the activity had brought nothing to the spot, but he wasn’t going to waste any time. He stepped back over to the shed and looked inside.

The little building had been outfitted in a hurry to serve as a refuge for the two kids. There was a table, some cans of food, two small wooden chairs, a mattress,
and empty
water bottles. It was obvious to Cutter that someone had locked them inside to keep them safe.
However,
that someone had never come back for them. A breeze blew the door slightly, sending it toward him, and Cutter could see how the kids had scratched and hammered at the barrier toward the end, trying to get out.
They had
probably both died of thirst in there. Or maybe one died of thirst and the other…he didn’t want to think about it.

However,
he had
opened the damn door for a reason and he needed to take a closer look.
They had obviously used a bucket
as a toilet. The stench rising out of where it stood was stale
,
but still offensive. Probably all just a bust, he was thinking as he turned and saw the canister sitting solidly and white there in the corner under a small shelf. Cutter went to it and reached down, knowing that it was probably empty. He lifted it. It was heavy with gas. It was only a twenty-pound tank, but it would do.

In
seconds,
he had his pack on his back; his rifle shouldered, and was dodging back through the streets, on his way home. Preferably, he would rather have lashed the canister to his pack, but for
now,
he would
just carry it over his shoulder. Worst case he would use it to bash in the head of anything that might attack him.
Of
course,
he wasn’t going to make it back in one uninterrupted run. The thing was just too heavy and
he would
have to stop somewhere and rest.

Trotting down the streets, he weaved through the remains of abandoned cars and trucks, some of them burned out wrecks.
He
was reminded that he should visit his stashed trucks to make sure that they were still in running condition. He had a pair of four-wheel drive pickups locked up in separate garages. Once every couple of weeks
,
he would stop and check on them, start them up, let the engines run for a brief time, and make sure that they were in good shape.
He hoped that someday
, the time would come when he and the others could start clearing the streets. If such a time arrived,
they would
need some vehicles that had been kept in running condition. Or maybe he might be able to open up enough of a route through the city to see if he could drive one of the trucks out beyond the horizon. Maybe there were some passable highways still waiting out there. Who knew?

Cutter had moved out of the upscale townhomes and executive houses and was once more in the concrete canyons of what had once been a great banking center. There had been a time, before the big financial crunch of 2008 when three of the biggest banks on
earth
had called the area home. But by the time the dead had started rising the three had been cut down to size, two of them gobbled up by competitors, in a kind of zombie tableau written in different terms.
Many
of the office buildings now haunted by the undead had been
,
all but abandoned toward the end.

He stopped at a familiar corner in the shade at the entrance of a high-end women’s clothing store. He put the canister down; it made a slight clink as it met the gritty concrete. Slowly, he peeled his cap back, undid a few buttons at his collar, and used the kerchief around his neck to mop at the sweat that was streaming. When he got
back,
he would
strip down and take a shower. It would be good.

Something slapped the window
where
he had been all but leaning. It was thick, and virtually shatterproof, but the sudden movement surprised him and caused him to flinch back.