"How would I know?"
"You gonna let me out of here?"
Max held the key to her cell up and nodded, "Sure thing."
Stewart had been in quarantine the last two days since Colonel Draper had dropped them off at the Great Lakes Naval Training station, or as the military personal called it, RTC, which stood for Recruit Training Command. Their wounded included a younger man named Chen, who had come in with a gunshot wound to the leg and Stewart, who had a fractured skull and many cuts and gashes. Both had been confined to the infirmary for possibly contaminated personal since they arrived. Preliminary testing of blood from both of them had indicated they were probably not contaminated by whatever it was that caused the zombies to be zombies. It was the 'probably' that kept both of them locked up in individual cells that the training station used for a brig. Nominally it was for everyone's safety, but Stewart felt singled out by the accommodations. Chen had been released to general quarters the night before, Stewart had not. Coming out of her cell Stewart continued to glare at Max, who was making every effort not to smile at all, when a military police officer bellowed at them from the end of the hallway.
"We're being attacked! Get to your stations!" Then she disappeared down the hallway.
"We have stations?" asked Stewart.
"Not that I know of. We better go see what is going on."
"Can you, ah, sense anything close by?"
Max looked at Stewart for a moment, then nodded and closed his eyes; a moment later he opened them wide and softly said, "Fuck. C'mon!" then he went running off down the corridor after the military police officer, hoping the woman had not locked them into brig by shutting the outer door. Fortunately, the woman had left the sliding door open and Max slithered through and ran towards the front of the building.
"Max! Slow down! Max!" Stewart called. Her words finally penetrated Max's brain and he slowed so she could catch up. "We don't have any weapons and you don't know where we need to go."
"I…we gotta get out of here! We need to find Bill."
"Okay, we can do that. Calm down. Where was Bill last at?"
"He was on watch until four, then went to the barracks…he should be there or close to it."
"You lead, I'll follow. How many zombies are we dealing with here Max?"
Looking over his shoulder before he opened the front door Max said, "All of them!"
"Thousands?"
"Or more. I can't sense anything farther out than maybe a mile, but the whole area is covered with the dead, and Stewart too many of them are smart ones." The sound of gunfire reached a crescendo to the east of their position. "Most of the attacking zombies are hitting the east side of the facility, but there are a ton waiting to the west, not moving up yet. We gotta tell someone."
"Draper? He should still be around."
"If we can, he would believe me. I think."
"Yeah, Bill first, then Draper."
The two of them ran across the open grounds to the building Bill was supposed to be housed in. The RTC trained up to fifty thousand recruits a year, so they were used to large numbers of people, even if the barracks were sparse. There were also maps everywhere pointing the way to the common areas recruits would need to get to. Max had only been wandering around the place for two days and he still didn't know how to get everywhere, but he knew how to get back to the barracks. Running up to the building the two of them saw a couple of men coming outside hastily, a third trailed behind them. The first two were Ruben and Javier, men from Iowa who were unlucky enough to be in Bill's platoon when he volunteered to help Max and Stewart get to Chicago. The third was Bill.
"Bill!" Max yelled, bring all three of the men to a halt.
"Max. What's going on?" Bill asked, fatigue lined the three men's faces.
"Zombies are attacking from the east, thousands of them, but there are more being held back to the west, way more than are attacking us now. We gotta get out of here! Even with a thousand soldiers we won't be able to hold out."
"We'll see what the military decides Max, guys with guns can hold off a lot of zombies."
Shaking his head Max said, "Not this many."
The group of them was standing near an open field used by the recruits for physical training, as Max finished speaking an explosion threw dirt up into the air, followed by another one closer to them, then a third.
"Let's go!" yelled Bill running east as the line of explosions grew closer. They made it to the edge of the buildings when the barracks Bill had been sleeping in blew apart. "When did the zeds get mortars?"
"When the soldiers that came back from the dead showed them how to use the damned, things." said Ruben with a scowl on his face. The old man had seen action before, in Vietnam, and was well past his prime, but he had been pressed into service alongside of thirteen year olds back when the governor of Iowa issued a general call to service. He was not the fastest of Bill's soldiers, but the man knew tricks that the others had not had time to learn.
"What now?"
"We get the fuck out of here before some bright boy drops more shells on our heads." Ruben said.
"Seems smart." Turning to Max and Stewart Bill said, "You guys don't have your weapons."
"I was just going to unlock Stewart…didn't think I needed them."
"You always gotta keep a gun with you Max." Pausing he asked, "Why were you still locked up Jane?"
Stewart shrugged, "The blood tests, something was wrong and they took another sample, they said it didn't appear that I was infected, but they wanted to be sure, so I got to spend another night on the hard bed."
"Dang. Are you feeling okay?"
"I am not infected Bill!"
"Didn't say you were. I was thinking maybe…."
No one said anything for a moment and the screams of the living carried back to them from several blocks away where the fighting was going on.
"You ain't going like that one bird in the Art Center are you?" asked Ruben bluntly.
He was referring to a living woman, Stella, who had been encouraged to kill zombies, by her handlers, the woman had become an abomination, fast, strong and remorseless….and a killer of the living. Stella had eaten living flesh of the uninfected and seemed to grow stronger for doing so, she had also been stunned into inaction when Ruben shoved his cut hand into her mouth, which resulted, ultimately, in her death.
"No, nothing like that. I've killed a lot of zombies, but not that many Ruben."
Javier had been quiet so far, now he chose to speak up, his voice completely without accent he said, "What about Chen? He is in the hospital."
"As good a place as any, lead the way Javier." Bill said. They trotted along quickly towards the hospital, trying not to listen to the sounds of young men and women being overrun to the east.
The hospital was a hive of activity, with men carrying stretchers into the hospital and wounded lying on the sidewalk in front of the place. Technically it wasn't even a hospital, just an infirmary, but the Navy had changed its designation after the extent of the crisis had been realized.
To the east a roar sounded about the same time that more mortar shells dropped near the west end of the campus. One, by chance or intent, landed at the corner of the hospital, sending shards of metal fragments through the air and literally obliterating those unfortunate enough to have been on the sidewalk next to where it landed. Stewart was thrown into Max and both of them tumbled to the ground in a heap. Ruben didn't break stride, he picked up Stewart and hauled her into the building, leaving Bill to do the same with Max. In the lobby the stretcher bearers were cringing on the ground afraid to move from the lucrative cover they found in the lobby of the building.
"You men, move! Pick up the stretcher and carry him in further, get away from the glass doors!" Bill bellowed with authority. The men hastened to obey and Max's group took shelter in a hallway away from the front, where Ruben stood Stewart up and leaned her against the wall to assess her injuries.