“Roger, Falcon. Any ETA on the aviation units? Over.”
“Terminator, this is Falcon. Units are en route from Pennsylvania, and it’s about a hundred and fifty mile trip, so they won’t arrive for another hour. After that, refuel, preflight, and then whatever’s on the air tasking order. You’re on the list, but I don’t know where you fall in order of importance, sorry. Over.”
“Roger, Falcon. It would be advisable to try and extract us during daylight if possible. Like I said, I have a special needs child with me, and he’s going to get super-stressed with things in daylight, much less at night. Over.”
“Terminator, Falcon-roger all.”
“Falcon, this is Terminator. Can you give me a rundown on current events, please? What’s the troop disposition? Over.”
“Very quickly, Terminator. We have units who made it into the subway system, as you recommended. Radio contact with them is extremely sporadic, and it seems they can only make contact when they’re at a station…I guess because that’s where the ground is broken by the entrances to the stations or something like that. Contact with zed has been minimal, and so far, ninety-five percent of all the engagements have gone our way. Zed is definitely in the subway system, but not in great numbers, and like you said they’re not that great at nocturnal operations. Over.”
“Falcon, Terminator. Glad to be of help. What else do you have for me? Over.”
“Terminator, Falcon…not much else right now. We’ll talk again in sixty minutes, over.”
Gartrell sighed. “Roger, Falcon. I’ll be back with you in sixty minutes. Terminator, out.”
“What did they say?” Jolie asked.
Gartrell pulled his headset off his ears and let it hang around the back of his neck. He reached for one of the plastic bottles of water on the small bureau and took a long pull from it before answering.
“Helicopters haven’t arrived yet. Some light infantry units are pushing into the city through the subway tunnels, but there’s no way they can move any heavy equipment through the streets-everything’s blocked, by abandoned vehicles if not the stenches themselves.”
“The ones coming through the subway tunnels…will they-”
“I get the idea they’re on zed hunts. The Army probably wants to close down the tunnels as an escape point for the zombies. I doubt they’ll come up to the surface streets. And if they do, they won’t be doing it for us, it’ll be because they got chased out of the tunnels by a couple of thousand zeds. And then they’ll be in pretty much the same position we are.” Gartrell drank more water, then looked over his shoulder at the closet at the foot of the bed. He scooted over and pulled it open. A few boxes were inside, stacked against the wall. Gartrell pulled them out and tossed them on the bed, then knocked on the wall.
“So you’re sure the apartment next door is empty?” he asked.
“Yeah. The Skinners, they’re gone, like I said.”
“Fantastic.” Gartrell rose and pushed past her. He walked into the living room and picked up the backpack with the tools inside, then headed back to the bedroom. Jolie followed him, a puzzled expression on her face.
“What are you going to do, Dave?”
Gartrell dumped the tools on the bed and picked out a small sledgehammer and several chisels. He then emptied the closet completely, tossing old men’s clothes on the floor.
“I’m going to make us a place to fall back to in case the shit hits the fan.” He knocked on the wall several times, in different places. It felt solid to him, and he imagined he was faced with plaster over brick, or maybe cinderblock. That didn’t make things any easier, but he hadn’t expected it to be sheetrock. He picked up the sledgehammer and tapped it against the wall, and plaster fractured and fell away. Sure enough, there was red brick behind it. He looked over at Jolie.
“You’re going to knock a hole through the wall?”
“Like I said, we might need a place to fall back to. It won’t be much, but it’ll buy us some time. I’ll try to be as quiet as I can, but you might want to close the door behind you. Try and make sure Jaden doesn’t get too upset if he wakes up. All right?”
“All right.” She stepped out of the small bedroom and slowly closed the door behind her.
###
It took well over two hours since he had to keep the noise to a minimum, but Gartrell finally cut through the back of the closet and into the apartment next door. Jolie checked on him from time to time, and even Jaden showed up, watching Gartrell hack away at the wall with hammers and chisels. The plaster was gone within minutes; it took almost two hours to chisel through the mortar holding the bricks together, and then he had to pull those out one by one. He took a break to call Falcon on the hour, but there was still no news. Gartrell figured the public affairs officer on the other end of the radio really wasn’t plugged in to anything much at all, but there was nothing he could do about that other than continually plead his case and beg for information.
Of course, the only thing that mattered were the helicopters, and they either hadn’t arrived or the 10th Mountain Division had more pressing priorities for them to attend to.
Finally, Gartrell punched through the plaster on the other side of the wall, and he peered through the small hole he had made. Half the view was blocked by a table leg, but room beyond was sunlit. He surmised the apartment on the other side of the wall was a mirror image of Jolie’s, and that he had cut through to another small bedroom. He pulled more bricks away, sneezing from the dust, until the hole was big enough for him to squeeze through. Jaden was delighted by the sudden change in the back bedroom, and he pranced about on his toes, hooting a bit. Gartrell shushed him, but he still had to smile. There was something so innocent about the boy’s delight that Gartrell couldn’t help himself. Jolie picked Jaden up and hugged him tight as Gartrell unholstered his sidearm and pushed himself through the hole in the closet wall.
The apartment was empty, as Jolie had said it would be. Gartrell walked through it and checked every room. He found evidence the occupants had left in a hurry-a carton of milk sat spoiling on the counter, magazines and books had been knocked from some shelves, and clothes lay scattered about on the floor in front of the closets. There was no luggage to speak of; the family had obviously taken that with them. He found a bowl of Hershey’s Kisses and unwrapped one of the chocolates and popped it into his mouth, then placed the bowl on top of the refrigerator so Jaden wouldn’t find it. The last thing he needed was a four-year-old autistic boy hopped up on sugar.
“Dave? Jaden wants to come through,” Jolie called through the hole in the wall.
“Put his shoes on first. And wait for me to close the curtains, some of them are still open.” Gartrell sidled up to a window and peeked out, keeping as close to the wall as possible. They were still out there, the legions of the dead…but something was different. They were no longer just milling about, shambling aimlessly to and fro. Somehow, some way, they had oriented themselves toward the north. As Gartrell watched, the ghoulish monstrosities lurched and stumbled up Second Avenue.
In the far, far distance, he thought he heard the crackle of small arms fire.
They’re on the hunt for food. They know there are people up north, so they’re moving out, looking to get the a la carte special.
He watched the bizarre migration for a moment, and started counting stenches. He stopped at a hundred and three, which he had counted in less than forty seconds. There were hundreds right outside the apartment building, and thousands more walking up the avenue behind them.
Unreal.
Gartrell closed the curtains in the apartment as inconspicuously as he could. A scuffling sound attracted his attention, and he hurried back to the small bedroom just as Jaden walked through the hole in the wall. He looked at Gartrell and smiled, his previous aloofness forgotten. He kicked a brick across the wood floor and giggled.
“Easy now,” Gartrell said. “Not too much noise, okay?”
Jaden babbled something and walked on his toes toward the bedroom door, flapping his hands in the air. Gartrell reached out and restrained him gently. Jaden pushed against his hand, not because he didn’t want to be touched, but because the adventure of exploring a new and different apartment beckoned to him like a siren’s song. Gartrell looked back at the hole in the wall and watched as Jolie pushed herself through. She stood up straight and brushed dust from her shoulders.
“Nice job,” she said to Gartrell.
“Thanks. But I usually do my best work with explosives.”
Jolie smiled and took Jaden’s hand. He pulled her along behind him as he surged out of the small bedroom and into the Skinners’ apartment. Gartrell hung back for a moment, and pulled on his radio headset.
“Falcon Four, this is Terminator Five, over.” He waited. “Falcon Four, Terminator Five with a SITREP for you, over.” SITREP was military shorthand for situation report, the circumstances where one unit or individual passed on tactical information. He didn’t know if what he had witnessed outside was a localized phenomenon, but he felt the lightfighters should know about it. He repeated the call twice more and was about to give up when Falcon came on the line.
“Terminator, this is Falcon…what’ve you got? Over.”
“Falcon, Terminator. Don’t know how it happened, but these things look kind of organized now. They’re all moving in the same direction at the same time, heading northerly at a slow but steady pace.” As he spoke, Gartrell moved to the skinny window in the bedroom and peeked around the curtain. Sure enough, the great stench migration continued, with all corpses ambulating north up Second Avenue. Gartrell noticed for the first time that there was a subway station right across the street, on the far corner. He remembered that another one was on his side of the avenue, just outside the Starbucks.
“I thought you guys would want to know that, Falcon. Over.”
“Roger, Terminator. We’re getting some aerial surveillance pictures from our UAVs. It’s not just your neighborhood, it’s everywhere in the city. The zeds are picking up and marching north. Over.”
“It’s the zombie chow line, Falcon. Get ready for it. Over.”
“Roger that, Terminator. By the way, news for you. First Chinook unit is setting down right now. We’re using the parking lots outside of Yankee Stadium as an assembly area. We already have HEMT-T tankers there,” Falcon reported. He pronounced HEMT-T as “hemmit”, and Gartrell knew they were huge, multi-wheeled trucks that could be configured for a variety of missions, in this case transporting aviation fuel. “Summit Six is lobbying to get a bird out to you directly. He wants you here, as a source of intel. Over.”
“Falcon, this is Terminator. Tell Six I’ll even fetch his coffee and give him foot rubs if he can get us out of here-though do pass on that I’m hardly an expert at either. Over.”
Falcon laughed over the radio. “Good one, Terminator. I’ll pass that on. If you-”