DUSK 2
“What the hell?” Sam said as he gaped at the opened gate.
Jack remained silent. His eyes were wide, and Jack did not seem to know if he should take the development with shock, terror, sadness, or anger. His face showed all four.
Helen wondered how in the hell this could have happened. The cultists had not sent any patrols much further than a few miles away from the latest conquest, where a cure for the epidemic had been developed.
It was imposable that the cultists had been responsible for this, but that tower had been hit by munitions. The undead did not use guns, let alone artillery. This had been the work of live humans.
“I’m going to circle the base and see if there are any other holes in the perimeter,” Sam said.
“Sam, can you think of anyone in your colony who would want to do this?” Helen asked.
“None of our people would do this. It would be suicide!” Jack blurted.
“That’s enough Private,” Sam said. “We don’t know who did this, but this…” Sam waved his hand at the gate, “was clearly an organized attack.”
Sam turned to Helen.
“Do you think they did this?” he asked.
“No, they didn’t send anyone out this far.”
“Are you sure?”
“Certain. There were no plans to migrate, at least not for another half a year or so.”
“So it wasn’t an inside job, and it wasn’t the cultists.”
Sam stopped speaking and rubbed his chin.
“What are the fucking chances?” Sam said. “We can’t rule out the possibility that there’s another hostile group out there.”
Sam shifted the Mustang out of park and cranked the wheel to the left. The car began to circle the compound.
“I want to see how much damage they did. Maybe we can patch the place up and close the gates so nothing else gets in,” Sam said.
“You’re not thinking of staying here are you?” Helen asked.
“No. If anyone survived, they’re not here,” Sam said. “We do have to refill the gas tank. Hopefully whoever did this did not take the fuel reserves.”
That was easy for him to say now, but what about when he went inside? There were likely to be roaming corpses of Jack and Sam’s friends inside. They had both had to deal with the corpses of loved ones, and they would surely be able to handle themselves in the same manor. The problem was the shear numbers of loved ones whose dead bodies could be walking around within the walls.
“Are you sure you wan to do this?” Helen asked.
“Yeah,” Sam said. “We have to do this.”
“There,” Jack said.
He was pointing to a ten feet wide gap in the masonry. The metallic fencing that was supposed to seal the gap had been blasted away.
Parts of the fence remained attached to the walls, but they ended, mangled and broken. The blast had struck from the outside, knocking the chain linked fence inward. The part of the fence which had been knocked over was lying on the ground about ten feet inside of the compound walls.
Around the hole, there were five corpses lying on the ground in shambles. They had been torn apart by heavy machinegun fire. One of the corpses had been torn clean in half, and the others were missing limbs. All of them had taken head shots. Three were missing their heads entirely, and the other two were only missing half of their skulls.
The contents of the skulls were splattered on the ground around the corpses, and on the walls with what seemed like gallons of blood. The corpses had likely been dead for twenty-two years, but they were amazingly preserved and had not dried up at all.
All around the compound, Helen noticed corpses in the same condition.
Around the perimeter, they found three more ten foot sections of fencing blown away. Every guard tower at the walls had been attacked with explosives, and there were bullet holes in the masonry.
Whoever attacked the base used some heavy firepower.
“We might be able to patch this place up, but I think it’s a lost cause,” Sam said. “Until we know who attacked us and how many there were, we’d better not give them any sign that we were here.”
“Do you think they made it out okay?” Jack asked.
“I hope so,” Sam said.
When the completed the circle, and reached the gate again, Sam cranked the steering wheel. The car entered the compound.
The insides of the walls were charred in a few places and there was broken glass and shrapnel scattered all over the asphalt. The ground was littered with corpses which had been put to rest after twenty years of wandering. They were everywhere.
“Looks like they must have lost interest and left,” Sam said.
For all the dead corpses on the ground, there were no corpses walking around on the inside. Usually, when the dead made their way into a compound, at least a few of them lingered. Something was very off.
“I’m going to park by the main motor pool.”
As they moved deeper into the base, Helen noticed that the buildings had not been damaged. As she thought back further, Helen remembered that the only structures that were damaged were the guard towers.
“This isn’t right,” Helen said.
“What?” Sam asked.
“There’s no artillery fire, not many bullet holes. It doesn’t look like anyone came inside of the base.”
“Or if they did, it was after the colonists were gone,” Sam said.
“So they might not have entered at all?” Jack asked. “If they weren’t here to take anything what was the point?”
“Who knows?” Sam said. “This world is no longer a place for the sane.”
They passed four buildings which had been redecorated and labeled with four letter digits.
“Those are just some of the dormitories we have,” Sam explained. “Most of the housing is on this side of the base. The industrial zone is on the other side. Between you’ll find the military zone. That’s in the center of the base so we can respond quickly to any situation anywhere inside.”
Helen nodded but said nothing. She was still unsettled by the lack of undead. Even if the ghouls who invaded the base had left, there were surely corpses of colonists who had escaped being torn apart only to die from the fatal bite of the undead. They would have turned into roaming ghouls and would have probably escaped from their hiding places.
As they passed more buildings Sam pointed them out as restaurants, a night club, dorms, the church, and the main auditorium. The buildings were different than anything Helen had seen since she had been abducted and indoctrinated into the cult. Unlike the ruins outside, and the buildings infested by fanatical killers, these were well kept. They had hardly been touched by time. It was quite obvious that the residents put a lot of work into their home.
For them, this was not just a temporary place to stay and worship, but a permanent home. This was a community with roots. This land was a sanctuary from the danger outside, and sacred, but in a different way than the land the cultists inhabited.
Helen had only met two people who lived here, but she liked the feel of the place. She hoped the others were still alive.
“Here we are,” Sam said.
There was a massive garage ahead. He explained that the building had been constructed after the base had been sealed off.
“There’s a fuel pump right next to it. If they were here to raid the base, the gas will be gone,” Sam said.
He pulled in front of a colossal steel gate, which had been left open. When the colonists left, they left in a hurry.
Sam paused to look at the gate, then eased the car over to the gas pump, and parked.
Everyone got out of the car. Sam moved over to the gas pump and removed the nozzle. He removed the gas cap from the Mustang and began to filled the tank.
Helen was not surprised when gas poured from the pump.
“I want you both to keep frosty,” he said as he squeezed the handle.
Jack looked toward the military zone.
Helen moved to his side and put her hand on his shoulder. He looked back at her and tried to smile. He didn’t pull it off.
“I’m so sorry,” was all Helen could think to say. It was trite, but appropriate.
“They probably made it out okay,” he said.
Helen did not think he believed it.
“We’ll find them,” she said.
“Okay,” Sam said, “we’re moving to that building across the street. If they left any weapons or ammunition behind, that’s where it is.”
They started walking.
“If they left any behind, we pack what we can carry. We’ll need torches, guns, and ammo. If there’s any left I’m sure they’ll need it too.”
“What do you mean?” Helen asked.
“If they’re still alive, I know a few places where they might be,” Sam said. “We’ve been toying with the notion of expanding the colony. If we pulled it off, we wouldn’t have go as far from the base for food, because the walls would stretch further. We would have the old wall as an inner barrier to fall back in case we were overrun. We’d even have more room for crops. The problem is that such a project would have taken up so many resources as far as manpower and materials went that we had no clue how we were going to do it.”
“Okay,” Helen said.
“Well, incase we did decide to expand, we’ve prepared some of the larger buildings a few miles from here. They were meant to house any construction workers and guards who were working on the project. There are five of them, and I have been to all of them,” Sam said. “They’re sealed tight with steel bars we took from older buildings and spare doors are barricaded shut. It would be imposable for the undead to compromise the safe houses.”
“So they could be alive,” Helen said. This bit of knowledge had improved her mood. “What kinds of buildings are these?”
“Office buildings, small hotels, whatever we could secure,” Sam said.
“How may can live in one?”
“Depends on which one, they went to,” Sam said. “They weren’t meant to hold the whole colony, but any two or three could.”
They were not standing in front of the armory.
“This is how we enter buildings around here,” Sam said.
He opened the front door, and stepped back. After getting a look inside, he entered the building and flipped on a light switch.
“See,” he said, “no fire escapes.”
Helen followed Sam and Jack took the rear.
The building was a large warehouse, which could store tons of supplies. The floor was concrete, and the ceiling was metal, with skylights.
“This building was used to store extra stock for a furniture store,” Jack said.
There were two dead corpses in the room. One was lying face down. The other on its side. They both had gaping holes in their heads from a high caliber pistol. Flies buzzed around both of the bodies. The stench was awful, but Helen had spent her entire life growing accustomed to it.
The door squeaked and clicked shut. Helen looked back and saw Jack with his hand on the knob. If there were any ghouls walking around outside, the closed door would make Helen, Jack, and Sam harder to spot.
“This way,” Sam said.
Sam led the troops through walls of empty shelves, which had probably held everything from spare food to ammunition.
“They did a pretty good job of clearing this place out, but I doubt they could carry everything,” Sam said. “I guess all we’ll need are some boxes of food and ammunition.”
They followed Sam past possibly another twenty shelves.
“There they are,” Sam said. “Looks like they either took all the spare food with them or hid it. Let’s just take one crate of ammo.”
The crate was about two feet by three feet, and getting the ammunition into the Mustang was going to be hell. But it would fit.
Sam and Jack picked up the box, and Helen simply walked back with them. When they reached the door, Helen opened it, and went out first to make sure there was no sign of trouble.
When Helen said it was okay, Jack and Sam moved outside, and crossed the street to the Mustang.
They had to move most of the canned food from the rear passenger seat to the trunk, but fitting the box of ammunition into the Mustang was not as hard as Helen expected it would be. It only took about five minutes.
“There are a couple of places I want to check before we get out of here,” Sam said, and began walking in the direction of the military zone.
On the way, the ground was sparsely covered in corpses. In some places, the multiple zombies had been exterminated in one spot. In areas like that it was impossible to tell how many were clumped together. They had been exterminated with heavy fire power, and it was hard to tell which splatters were which parts.
Several corpses had been incinerated. Their charred remains had dropped on the ground where they could no longer flee, and were alone in the spots they had dropped. Because the ghouls were afraid of fire, they had avoided their burning kin.
There was dried blood on the asphalt, no doubt from both the undead and the colonists. Some of the blood was splattered on the ground, like it had sprayed from an exit wound or gash. Some of the blood was in trails, which had probably been formed when severed limbs were dragged away from screaming victims. Other blood formed dried puddles, which had been made when a victim was torn open by the greedy hands of the undead.
Accompanying the blood and corpses were hundreds, maybe even thousands of shell casings, spent bullets, magazines, a few guns, and other hardware.
The buildings around the three soldiers looked as though they had only suffered minor damages from bullets that had either missed or punched through their targets. There were no signs of mortar fire used on the buildings.
There were still no signs of pillaging, and Helen did not expect to find any.
The remnants of the battle suggested that the fighting grew more intense as they moved deeper into the military zone. It also appeared that the fighters were moving into the military zone and not out of it.
“Why would they fight their way deeper into the base? The motor pool’s over there,” Helen said.
“They were probably going to burn documents,” Sam said.
“Maybe they wanted to tell us exactly where they went,” Jack added.
“We’re about to find out,” Sam said.
Sam pointed out the main barracks, which was a three story building, with a fenced off courtyard. Sam said that was the training zone. Apparently, the colonists captured ghoul from the outside, and used them for training fodder for recruits who had passed all of the hand to hand, fire, and weapons training.
Helen supposed that was not a bad practice. If the soldiers could not handle one or two flesh eaters under controlled circumstances, how would they react in the wild? It was no worse than any of the training practices the cultists put their recruits through.
And these colonists’ only agenda was survival.
Three buildings past the main barracks, Sam pointed out the military head quarters. The headquarters had once been a books store, but the old exterior remained. A sign was mounted above the door which read F&R BOOKS AND CARDS. Though the paint had withered with age, the lettering on the glass doors was still visible. It displayed the hours of business. The store had been opened from ten in the morning until eight at night on week days, and noon until six on week ends. There was a sign on the door which said the store was closed.
The old book store guise gave the place a covert feel.
“They kept the buildings original looks in a lot of places so any raiders wouldn’t know which were important,” Sam said. “In the early days, looters caused a lot of problems. Back then we had a plan for everything. In the past twenty-two years, our world view shrank and look, just look where it’s gotten us. We never dreamed we’d be fighting people again.”
They entered the book store.
Inside, there were no signs of battle. The fighting had managed to stay outside of the building.
There were several desks inside, which Sam said belonged to secretaries and planners. This was where most of the details to every snatch and grab food run were sketched out. They processed the landmarks of the area, reviewed the last census gathered before the dead began to rise, so they could get a rough estimate of how many ghouls might hold residence. All of those figures were gathered. Basic plans were sometimes formed.
All of the raw data would be taken down stairs, where the strategic minds worked.
Sam opened the basement door and stepped through. Jack and Helen followed.
Down stairs, the space seemed to be stuck in two different worlds at the same time. The planning room still had a water cooler, and a few file cabinets, and other pieces of furniture which would be found in either an office or employee’s lounge. There was a large table in the center of the room, which could have been where book store employees had ate their lunches had the book store been larger. The room below had most likely been used for storage.
Now, the furniture was arranged to accommodate meetings. There was a large bulletin board in the wall.
Sam pointed to the wall across the room and said: “There used to be a map there. It had all of the places we’ve been marked off.”
In the corner of the room, there was a desk and a type writer, where a secretary would take notes of the meetings. Every detail would be recorded, including every success and failure, so new strategies could be formed and old ones could be improved.
The desk and file cabinets had all been ransacked.
“Take a look at this,” Jack said.
He was standing over a trash can, which had been filled to the brim with ashes.
“It’s a good thing they didn’t burn down the building,” Jack said.
“I don’t think they were too worried about it,” Sam said.
The colonists had burned every document in their archive, including every map and mission summary they had every taken so the information would not fall into the hands of an unknown enemy.
Sam moved toward the corner of the room where the desk was, but stopped short and headed to the wall. There was a green file cabinet there, with it’s doors still opened.
“Jack,” Sam said, “give me a hand with this file cabinet.”
Jack moved to Sam and grabbed the file cabinet. The two men slid the metallic box three feet away from the wall.
“That should be enough,” Sam said.
He stooped down the floor and wrapped the floor boards with his knuckles in a few different places.
Helen leaned over to Jack.
“What the hell’s he looking for?” she asked.
“Beats the hell out of me,” Jack answered.
Sam knocked on the ground with his knuckles one more time, the exclaimed: “Found it!”
“What is it?” Jack asked.
Sam seemed oblivious to the question. He simply lifted the floor board and fished out a piece of paper.
“Does it say where the others went?” Jack asked.
“The radio room. We’re going to the radio room,” Sam said and slipped the paper into his belt line.
He walked out of the room and up the stairs. Jack and Helen followed.
On the way out, Jack turned the lights off.
The trio moved up the stairs, through the office, and out the door. When they got outside, Sam turned right and moved deeper into the base.
“Come on, I want to hurry up and get out of here so we can find the others,” Sam said. “Then maybe we can find out what happened.”
They walked past several other buildings, and saw much of the same: remnants of battle. Once they passed the book store, the fighting seemed to stay constant in intensity. There were the same relative amount of corpses, blood, and ammunition on the ground as there had been around the book store.
They stopped in front of a small two story building with a metal communications tower behind it. The windows were protected by steel bars. The glass behind the bars had been broken. The outside walls of the building had been riddled with bullets, but the building itself was in tact.
“Cover me,” Sam said.
He moved to the door, and placed his hand on the knob.
“It’s locked.”
Sam stepped back, and kicked the door once. Something groaned inside.
Twice.
Something was clawing on the other side of the doorway.
The third time was a charm. The door swung opened, and a figure stepped out.
It had been a man of maybe sixty years old only two days ago, but now it was drooling and desperate for human flesh. The ghoul had a full head of gray hair, and was out of shape. It was Sam’s height, and had a trimmed beard. If not for the blank look in the creature’s face, it’s jolly visage would have resembled Santa Claus.
The jolly looking ghoul’s pants were torn, and it’s leg was coated in blood. Apparently, it was the radio operator who died at his post.
It took a step out of the door, and Sam planted his foot firmly in the creature’s chest. The creature tried to claw at Sam’s leg, but Sam pulled back. He regained his balance, and kicked the creature again. He pressed his foot against the flesh eater’s chest, pinning it against the wall.
Sam drew his rifle and said: “Rest in piece Walt.”
He fired.
The back of Walt’s head exploded with a thunderous boom, and his blood and grey matter splattered on the wall behind him.
Sam removed his foot from the corpse’s chest and the body slid down the wall, leaving a trail of blood until it hit the ground, landing on its side.
Sam paused for a moment, and turned away from the communications building with his M-16 raised. He examined the buildings around, in silence, for a few seconds. Then when there was no motion or noise in the distance, Sam stepped inside.
“There might be a few others in here so stay frosty,” he said.
When all three of them were inside, Jack closed the door. The interior of the building was dark and gray, but the hallway they had entered was party illuminated by the sunlight outside. There were a few office sized buildings, all with their doors closed on the side of the hallway opposite from the door. There were several windows, which had all been barred on the inside. Some were broken.
On the floor, amidst the broken glass were an array of projectiles, from rocks and bricks, which had been thrown by the undead, to bullets, which had been fired from rifles outside.
“There are three main stations in this building. One’s for communication with units outside of the walls. One’s for communication within the base, using radio frequencies and the intercom system. That’s the one we’re looking for. The third is hardly used at all. It’s for far away communications. Unfortunately, before we build the wall, the equipment was damaged, so we can hear signals from pretty far away, but we can’t send them out nearly as far,” Sam said. “That’s how we heard from the other base as it was attacked.”
There were streaks of red on the floor, and on the walls. As he moved to the doorway, Walt must have left a trail of blood. It led to the communications room they were looking for.
Sam kept his M-16 slung over his shoulder and his thirty-eight caliber pistol drawn as he entered the room, but met no resistance.
“You two just watch the door okay,” Sam said.
“Got it,” Jack answered.
Helen peered into the room, and saw a desk with a microphone and some electronic equipment. She had never worked with stationary communications equipment, so the whole setup just looked like boxes and wires.
There was more equipment behind the work station, and several file cabinets and a trashcan.
The room was claustrophobic enough for one, so it was no wonder Sam wanted to go in alone. Inside, he was looking for another loose floorboard.
Helen looked back out into the hallway. Then she looked to Jack. He was peering down the empty hall in the other direction with his M-16 at his side. The boy looked like he was ready for trouble, but did not expect any.
Though on the outside, Jack looked like he was vigilant and ready for action, Helen wondered if that was the case. He might have really been watching the end of the hallway for motion, but it was just as likely that he did not want anyone to see his face. Helen knew exactly what Jack was going through. He must have been worried about his friends. There was the chance that he had not lost all of them, but the boy had no way of knowing. And there was no way to know which colonists had made it out of there.
Helen kept staring at him until Sam emerged from the communications room with a rolled up peace of paper in his hand.
“I know where they are,” Sam said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”