Chapter Fifteen
Friend turned enemy, Enemy returned friend
“I’ll find another way! Don’t do this!” Logan was screaming down the radio but Abe had gone. He had turned his off completely. Logan was flooded with visions of his friend being torn apart by a small army of blood thirsty zombies only a few yards away over the frozen lake.
Once he realized there was no one on the other side he slammed the radio off the glass beside him in a fit of rage. The zombies had been trying to break into the fire engine for a few minutes now but they hadn’t even made a dent. With one hit Logan cracked the first layer of re-enforced glass.
Jack and the two brothers wanted to protest but didn’t have the nerve. Logan had one Hell of a temper, or so they were only just discovering. He breathed hard and flared at the nostrils. He felt so powerless and was so frustrated by the knowledge that he could do nothing. He couldn’t fight through a small army of zombies and find his friend with no ammo.
‘Logan?’ Jack turned around in his seat and had a comforting smile stretched across his jaw. He couldn’t even look at him. The radio was on loud. That meant the three men in the front had heard the whole argument and knew what was going on.
‘You could be angry at him. You can even hate him if you want. You could look at it like that. Or you can see it for what it is. Your friend, Abraham, just sacrificed himself so you can save your buddy dying in that seat beside you. You can be as furious with him as you like. But I think you should be grateful to him and remember him for that. Whatever I see in you, that you might actually be able to save this decimated planet, he sees too.’
His words oozed wisdom and they somehow penetrated Logan’s hardened and angry heart. He calmed his breathing and began to relax his tensed shoulder muscles. His new friend was right. Abraham deserved gratitude and he deserved the right to have made the choice for himself. Just like everyone else left in the world did.
‘How do either of you suppose we get out of this then?’ Jake turned around and looked desperately at Lizzie’s seemingly lifeless body on the seat behind. She was tucked up in a ball beside Logan, pale faced, sweating and with matted hair.
He wanted her to make it. But he was afraid she might turn. In time Logan might be able to forgive him for what he was about to say.
‘We should shoot her. Like she asked.’ Logan’s eyes narrowed and he screamed back at the young kid.
‘What?’ He went to grab Jake by the neck but Jack put up a hand to stop him. Jake tried his hardest to protest and justify what he had said.
‘I don’t like it either! But what if she does turn? What if she wakes up and starts biting you and the rest of us? I’m not afraid to do it myself if you don’t want to…’ Logan didn’t let him finish.
He raised a balled fist and punched the back of the head rest behind him. It bounced back and forth after slamming into the back of Jake’s skull. It hurt but didn’t knock him out. Logan snarled with anger, drooling and foaming at the mouth, he shouted the young man down a few pegs.
‘If there is even a small chance we can save her then we will be taking that chance!’ Logan shouted at him, bearing his teeth like a wild, threatened, animal. ‘You even look at your gun and I swear I’ll rip your heart out!’ He gritted his teeth and slowly slumped back into the seat.
He glanced for a moment out of the window. The number of zombies was growing but they hadn’t been able to break through the truck’s enforced windows yet. They had the fire engine surrounded and thumped and slapped as hard as they could on the polished metal.
Jake was suitably subdued. He was blinking fast and heavily. As though he were fighting back tears. No way was this kid going to make it to find his brother’s girlfriend! Logan thought to himself still controlled by his bubbling rage. Jack glared at him too. He held him in his long accusatory stare until it felt like the atmosphere in the truck had cooled enough for them to continue.
‘How are we getting out of here though Logan?’ Jack left Jake almost tearful next to him and turned back to address the General.
‘Ammo count.’ Logan demanded and stroked Lizzie’s face one final time before shuffling as close to the window as he could get.
‘Three magazines for the rifles. Two handguns with six shots each. You?’ Jack had the information ready.
He might have been a little lackadaisical with his attitude to drinking on the job but his professionalism as a soldier was still admirable.
‘Out.’ Logan remembered the Desert Eagle’s click when he tried to shoot that one last time. He was perched up against the glass and was looking down at the side of the fire truck. He could barely see anything past the mass of zombies.
He was enraged but focused. That feeling you sometimes get when controlled by rage, that you can tear away anything in your path, anything so stupid as to stand in your way. He was going to rip the heads off of every last drooling zombie if he had to. He was going to make sure Abe hadn’t died for nothing and he was going to save Lizzie if it killed them all to try.
He continued. His voice had dropped to a low pitched, rasping growl, like it did when he was at his most pissed off.
‘Do you suppose, beneath that shutter, there might be the controls for the hoses?’ Jack peered out of the mirror to his side to locate what Logan was talking about on the side of the truck. He had already displayed a good level of prudence in that he checked long ago that the engine’s keys were in the ignition. He turned them to see the lights on the dash board light up.
‘I guess it might be. But I’ll give good odds that the water left in the tank is frozen solid.’ He turned the key one more click and the enormous engine rattled into life. He gunned the accelerator pedal hard and listened as the revs built up and the sizeable truck’s engine fired into life.
He pressed it again and then one more time. He sat forward like an old man driving a Volvo. He peered into the gauges and tried to make sense of them. He sensed what Logan was suggesting so didn’t ask. Those hoses would be powerful enough to blast a zombie clean off its feet. It was a sort of non-lethal solution. One that would save a lot of ammo too.
‘Looks like we are half full of water. Full tank of diesel. I think this blinking warning light is telling me the hydraulics are frozen shut.’ He tapped an orange blinking light on the center console.
‘Gun the engine some more.’ Logan leaned forward and, without asking, took Jake’s rifle from his lap. He needed a gun since his handguns were empty and he didn’t trust him anymore either. ‘That might help defrost it.’ Jack revved it again and again. He glanced at the two brothers, both sat to the right side of him.
‘Buckle up.’ He reached over his shoulder to pull his own seatbelt on too. Logan pulled a seatbelt over Lizzie the best he could but didn’t want to move her too much. She was obviously weak and any little movement might hurt her more.
Jack jammed hard against the gear selector, a grinding crunch confirmed he had found first, and he revved the truck some more.
He was going for the metal shutters. Rather than slam the truck against the firm metal and risk breaking the windows, he lurched it slowly and gently forward. Once the front of the truck was pressed right up against the metal he started gunning the rev counter again. The tires at the back slipped and slid against the bare concrete as they struggled to find any grip.
The garage was instantly filled with the glorious, intoxicating, exciting and exhilarating smell of burning rubber. It was enough to make any man’s adrenaline surge. The truck was heavy and Jack was a naturally gifted driver.
He slackened off the power with every small slide and held the truck firmly in one place. The metal frame started to buckle and groan. It was working. With a few more aggressive blasts of the gas pedal the shutter gave way, splitting like a torn piece of paper. It buckled in half and scraped insensitively down the side of the truck as Jack eased it out of the garage and out into the dark street beyond.
It looked like every singl
e refugee, of the three hundred or more that made it out of the blast radius, had since turned into a zombie. They were crowded outside of the fire station like a swarm of lifeless cockroaches. The truck’s powerful lights were swamped by the mass of the dead.
Jack didn’t slow his resolve or the truck‘s speed. He kept it at an easy pace like a creeping death and crushed them all under the wheels of the machine one by one. Even over the enormous and deafening rumble of the diesel engine, they could hear bones snap, skulls cave in and the monsters shriek together collectively as one.
The headlights of the truck lit up the darkened and dust filled sky. Red misty blood sprayed up into the cold atmosphere and hung there in the coldness of the air. Long streaks of white, brilliant light tore through the dark and reflected disturbingly across the milky white eyes of every single zombie.
The snow beneath gradually turned from virgin white to sickening red as more and more blood drained from the squashed corpses. The truck swayed from side to side as the bodies mounded up under the wheels. Jack drove well on instinct and kept the wheels turning to avoid getting bogged down in the wet and spongy flesh of the freshly turned zombies.
Logan needed to get out and on top of the fire engine to try to get that hose working. He slung Jake’s rifle over his shoulder and steadied himself by his palm against the inside of the door.
‘You ready for this?’ Jack asked him without turning around. He held a cold stare at the road in front. He was heading back towards the lake as slowly as he could.
He wouldn’t risk the weight of the truck on the ice but he needed to keep the vehicle moving to not get stuck or overwhelmed by the monsters.
‘I got it.’ Logan gathered his strength and exploded out of the door. He slammed it into the face of a zombie that had clambered up onto the wheel arch of the truck. Its face exploded in a vapor of blood and it fell to its second death below the creeping wheels of the truck. Logan scurried out and climbed with all of his strength up and onto the roof of the fire engine.
He held on tight with both hands to the ladder that stretched across the top of the truck. A few zombies scraped for his legs but without too much of a struggle he managed to kick them off. He pulled himself up with his arms and swung his legs high to wrap them around the ladder too.
The door he left by was flapping around in the wind and by the sway of the truck. He needed to get it closed. He reached down and slammed it shut on his second attempt after trapping a zombie’s head in it with his first try. That would keep Lizzie and the rest of the team safe for now.
He steadied himself on the ladder atop the slowly moving truck and reached for the rifle he had stolen from Jake. He took aim, while leaning out over the top, and fired at the metal shutter on the side of the truck. It was locked at the bottom and they didn’t have the key.
It recoiled open to reveal a basic control panel. He must have been right. That would be the controls for the fire hose. Now he just had to reach the hose itself.
The hose was located half way up the truck, on the same side as the newly discovered control panel, and was wrapped tight along a reel that was itself bolted securely to the side. He stood up tall on the rocking ladder and walked carefully, from one rung to the next, to reach the reel.
He only had to walk a few steps and managed it with ease despite the constant swaying motion. He dropped to his hands and knees and took tight hold of either side of the frozen ladder. He gasped for breath as the truck rolled over another mound of zombies. A sickening snap confirmed Jack managed to roll over them, squashing most of their bones and organs.
The zombies wailed a consistent chorus of hungry moans as a backing soundtrack. He reached over the side of the truck and tugged on the hose as hard as he could. The nozzle was held in place with a clip that he could just about reach. He stretched forward to the limit of his reach and tapped at the clip looking for how to release it. He must have hit something because it clunked and swung free.
He reached once more and pulled the nozzle as hard as he could. He tugged again and again and unraveled as much as he could. He wrapped it quickly around the frame of the ladder and made sure that it was secure. He banged on the roof of the truck as hard as he could with his balled fist. He was trying to signal to Jack that he was managing his seemingly mammoth task.
Now for the controls again. He spun on the spot and shimmied back across the ladder to the back of the truck. This would be the more difficult part. He retrieved the rifle from his shoulder again and put down a few of the zombies that were a little too close to the panel for comfort. They were starting to thin out in numbers.
By the aggression of Jack’s driving it seemed like he had mown most of them over and popped their skulls under the wheels of the fire truck. The truck slowly crept down the road that hugged the side of the frozen lake. There were a few trees blocking clear vision but Logan could just about make out the white outline of the temporary lab.
There weren’t many zombies lurking on the frozen lake. Maybe only three. He could just about make out a white lab coat stained in blood. Stay focused!
The sight of his friend re-animated as a zombie had loosened his grip and he almost fell. What was done was done. He needed to make Abraham’s sacrifice count.
He climbed back down the side of the truck, making sure to keep tight hold of the ladder on the top, and started kicking at the controls below.
He couldn’t reach them with his hands from that position and he didn’t want to make a foolish decision and end up getting dragged under the truck’s wheels if he fell. A few more crunches echoed under the truck from the front wheels. He connected on a big lever with the big toe of his right foot. The hose burst into life and spluttered the first sprays icy of water out of the hose further down the ladder.
He pulled his body back onto the freezing cold ladder and carefully crept back to the other end of the truck. The lever on the nozzle itself controlled the ferocity of the gushing water. He pulled it back as hard as he could so he could start unwrapping it and use it as a weapon as he had intended. That killed the spray dead.
He quickly tugged at it to unravel the inch thick hose. He banged on the roof one last time and Jack slowed the truck to a halt. He must have gotten the message. Logan slammed the lever to half way open. It took all of the power left in his tired arm muscles to hold onto the hose and start spraying the remaining bloodied zombies with a consistent jet of icy water.
The tank of water had mostly thawed but icicles and ice blocks still spluttered out like hard projectiles from the end of the nozzle. The jet of water knocked the zombies clean off their feet but the icicles tore into them like bullets. They ripped through the cold dead flesh and tore whole limbs clean off their joints!
Logan started growling as his arms began to burn and throb under the pressure.
‘You alright?’ Jack shouted as his head appeared out of the rolled down window below.
‘Yeah!’ Logan yelled back. The splash back from the hose had almost soaked him through. His thick jacket took the brunt of most of it so he wasn’t going to freeze at least.
Jack quickly jumped out of the truck and climbed onto the roof along with Logan. There weren’t many of them left. Just the odd shuffling and dazed zombie in a never ending stretch of flattened monsters.
Jack steadied the hose and took the brunt of the kickback. That steadied Logan’s tired aim and helped him take out the last of them. The ice fired through their weak skin and ripped into their chest cavities, exposing bare bone and organ.
‘Go turn it off!’ Logan ordered in desperation as he struggled against the powerful gush of water.
Jack broke off, located the control panel, and quickly pulled the lever back to kill the spray completely. Logan fell back onto the ladder, panting for breath, arms spread wide.
‘We got most of them I think.’ Jack climbed back onto the top of the truck. He lowered his hand down to Logan and pulled him to his feet. He was sapped of all his stren
gth.
‘Lizzie?’ He asked sharply before Jack could say anything more.
‘She stirred a little but she’s fine. Don’t worry about Jake either. He’s a young kid. Full of shit too.’ Logan nodded but kept his lips tight and gritted his teeth as he remembered what Jake had suggested.
He cast his eyes back down the blood filled road behind. Jack had squashed a lot of them but not killed all of them. Some were dragging broken bodies behind them with arms stretched up in the direction of the fire truck. They groaned still but with mush less ferocity.
Could Abe have gotten it right? Had he figured it out? The virus, according to Abe, had sent its victims into a waking coma, killed off most of the brain and left only the more primitive, instinct driven parts of it alive. Could he have been right about that experimental drug? And if he was, how the Hell were they going to get their hands on enough of it, and then weaponise it? Logan had an idea. But not one he was prepared to share yet.
‘Do you want me to do it?’ Jack stood tall atop the horizontal ladder and looked over to the frozen lake. He was watching a lone zombie stumble across the ice. He could barely make out its figure, dressed in a white lab coat, against the white cast background of ice and snow.
The whole place was lit only by the powerful lights of the truck. He had left the engine running.
‘No.’ Logan snapped out of it and turned back to face his new friend. ‘It needs to be me.’ The two of them started shuffling across the rooftop of the truck and jumped off the back into the reasonably deep snow behind. Every inch of the white road had at least one splash of blood from a run over zombie.
The pools were starting to freeze over in the intense cold. The blood clotted and coagulated together into messy and sticky freezing puddles. The door of the truck opened slowly and Sid stepped out first. Jake got out the other side and stood there by the door. He didn’t come over. Didn’t have the balls.
‘Here.’ Jack dug into his pocket and threw Sid the keys to the helicopter. Logan hadn’t realized that one of the brothers was a pilot too. He caught them.
‘Thanks. And thanks for everything Jack.’ He held out his hand at arm’s length. Jack took it, shook warmly, and smiled that gleaming smile of his. He patted him on the back gently and wished him the best of luck. Logan smiled, shook his hand, and told him that he really hoped they found the girl.
‘Take care Jack, General, and I’m sorry about Jake. I hope she makes it.’ The young man turned to walk back down the bloodied road with his brother. Jack told him there were no hard feelings and waved goodbye to a sheepish looking Jake.
Logan couldn’t bring himself to lie and say the same. He wasn’t really the type to hold a grudge, but he cared about that girl too much to let what he said slide. He had to be honest to himself. He was glad Jake was leaving.
That made Lizzie a little safer in his eyes. Even though the kid was probably all talk and wouldn’t have done it, Logan didn’t trust him anymore and was glad to see the back of him. But he did hope Sid found his girlfriend. There wasn’t much else to live for in the world.
Jack reached to his belt and un-holstered a 9 millimeter handgun, the same sort Lizzie had been carrying around, and handed it to Logan. He remembered that he was out of ammo. Magazines for Desert Eagle’s weren’t exactly easy to come by.
‘Keep an eye on her?’ Logan pulled the catch back the same way he always did. To check there was already one in the chamber. Jack went back to the truck and got in the back with Lizzie.
Logan trusted him for some reason. He could always tell about people and had been consistently a good judge of character. He and Jack were chiseled from the same stone. Logan closed his eyes and took a deep breath, turned, and started walking out on the ice.
With each step he took he could see Abraham, or the zombie that used to be him, more clearly. He hardened his heart and steadied himself with deep breaths. He was the only one left out on the ice. He would have been the last one to turn and would have been left there, mauled and alone, while the others turned their attention to the fire station and further victims.
Logan found himself at a loss of control. He prided himself usually on his ability to control his own thoughts but the memories started racing. Those young kids back in the north of England that he let go without a hope. Jenny and her mother. The first two zombies known anywhere on the face of the Earth. Then about the victim he didn’t even try to save out on the road back to the air strip.
He even thought about his wife. Something he hadn’t done for so long that it hurt. He was so glad she didn’t live to see all of this. As much as that though alone hurt, and as sick it was to realize he was glad she was dead, he was glad to know she was safe in death.
He felt the shame of those thoughts build up and promised himself over and over he wouldn’t screw up with Lizzie. He would save her no matter what it took!
Abe was a mess. He shuffled closer, snarling and shrieking, on a broken and blood stained leg. His foot hung to one side by nothing more than a tendon. His white coat was torn and blood stained. A chunk of flesh was missing from his side, right beneath his exposed ribs.
His hair had been ripped away from his scalp and blood from his skull had trickled down and matted his beard hair to his face. His pony tail had been ripped off leaving a bald patch of blood soaked skin. He still had his glasses on, hung off one ear, and balanced tenuously at the end of his pointy nose.
A zombie had eaten into the skin on his face, a hole in his cheek revealed his jaw bone and Logan could see right through into his mouth. There was no way he didn’t suffer an agonizing death. He didn’t want to think about how he must have felt. Both during the attack, and before it, when he knew what he was about to do and what was going to happen to him.
Logan slowly drew his borrowed gun to eye level to his old, deceased, friend. It felt light when compared to his usual choice of gun. He narrowed his eyes and breathed one last deep breath and held it out to steady his aim.
More zombies started spilling out of the temporary lab and onto the snow covered lake. There were easily a few dozen of them already out and more coming. Some of them had been nurses or soldiers but most were turned refugees. They were far enough away to not have to worry about them.
He lowered his gun with a resentful sigh and released the magazine. He kept stepping back to avoid Abe’s thrashing swings. There were only six bullets left. It wouldn’t have been enough to have saved him from that number of the things.
He had to check though. He had killed a lot of them under the wheels of the truck and by the icy spray of the hose. The niggling, immature and naive thought occurred to him, that he might just have been able to save Abe had he only held on a few more minutes.
That horrifying and guilty thought demanded him to check how much ammo he had. He breathed a little easier in knowing that the stray thought had been wrong. It was wrong. He had managed to kill a lot of them with the sheer weight of the truck and by the power of the fire hose but he had to admit they had done so on dumb luck. There was no way he could have used that tactic to kill over a hundred refugees and save a lone, lost, man. He raised the gun one more time.
‘I’m sorry Abe.’ Logan paced back as the zombie that used to be his friend stumbled one more lurch further forward with another snarl. ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t save you.’ Logan said calmly so his voice didn’t carry.
He fired. And watched the bullet tear through Abe’s head. As much as he wanted to close them, he kept his eyes glued open, and watched the blood gush through the back of his gaping skull.
Abe fell lifeless to the ice below. There were three things around his neck. Each on a separate boot string that he had hastily tied himself. One was the injection shot Lizzie needed to survive. The other was a detonator to blast the temporary lab into the freezing lake below. And the last was a blood stained, handwritten, page long note.
He took all three, stuffed them into his pockets, and turned away. He could bare
the sight of it no longer. He jogged at a brisk and tiring pace back to the fire engine. They needed to move out before the next wave of zombies attacked.
As soon as he made it back he hit the switch on the detonator. The explosion rocked the ice beneath his feet but it was quick and brutal. It cracked the ice instantly and the temporary, inflatable, lab sunk under the surface and into an impossible grave. It would probably never be found. Neither would the corpses of the zombies that had been caught in the blast.
He jumped into the back of the truck and Jack climbed over the seats until he was back behind the wheel. Logan took the syringe and jabbed it without a moment’s hesitation into Lizzie’s neck. He pressed down on the stalk and administered the whole dose of clear liquid right into her blood stream. He quietly preyed to a God he didn’t quite believe in that she was going to be ok.
‘Where to boss?’ Jack asked softly and turned back. Logan’s cold stare protected him from any emotion but he wasn’t easy to look at.
‘Washington.’ He dropped his eyes to Lizzie’s pale and clammy face but said nothing more.
‘Time to kill that mother fucker, General Cygan.’ Jack turned around, cranked the engine, and revved it hard.
‘No.’ Logan corrected him. ‘If Abe is right about needing a weaponised form of Zolpidem, then Cygan is the only man left on Earth who has the resources to make it happen. We don’t need to kill him. We need to recruit him.’
He took the note back out from his pocket and straightened it out. Jack didn’t see him read it by the dim light in the back.