"Cut it out!" he said, jerking his hands away. Stewart laughed and looked up as Bill came out and sat next to them.
Looking them over he asked, "Why's he blushing?"
"He was thinking about the examination." said Stewart.
"She was, ah, 'thorough', like you told her to be Stewart." said Bill, "I think she saw parts of me that I haven't even thought about in years."
"Too much information there, Bill." Stewart said, raising her hands to her ears.
"Seriously though, where are we going to go from here?" asked Bill, looking at Max.
"Florida." Stewart answered, cutting Max off. "We've decided to go to Florida and sort this Sentry fellow out. Then we are heading back to Iowa to live with you and the missus."
Bill looked at them, letting his gaze shift from one to the other, "Like, together-together?"
"Sure, why not? We make a good team." Stewart said.
Shrugging Bill said, "First thing though, how are we going to get to Florida?"
The group was chatting about it when Ruben and Javier were finished being processed and the other two had a few ideas to chime in as well. The groups of them were still talking when Draper came in fifteen minutes later. The galley was open again and the colonel got himself a cup of coffee and came over to stand by their table.
"Yes?" asked Stewart.
"You planning on leaving?"
"What do you think about that?"
"Going after that guy in Florida?"
" We've got nothing more worthwhile to do." answered Stewart. "You want to come along for the ride? Or maybe you could drop us off, saying you were going to help, and then bug out on a mission of your own at the last minute?"
"Ouch. You make it sound like I wasn't following orders, or that what I did wasn't important."
"Was it?"
"We can fly again can't we? My boys took care of the anti-aircraft battery, captured it intact. You took care of the other thing. It seems to me that everything that needed to be accomplished was and we are all the better for it."
Stewart nodded to that, "I supposed it was, when you look at it that way."
"I do look at it that way. But to answer your question, no, I won't be going along to Florida with you."
Max sighed, he had been hoping that Draper could get them closer to where they needed to be, hopefully by flying them there. Noticing his reaction Draper raised an eyebrow, "Now why would you look disappointed, we had a bit of a falling out and I don't seem to have made it up to you, not even by saving your life…twice now, unless I am miss counting."
"Says the man with the helicopter." Stewart added.
"That's true."
"I've been meaning to ask where you came up with that helicopter a couple days ago in Chicago. The last time we saw you guys you had a couple of armored cars and motorcycles."
Draper paused for a moment, as if thinking of his response, he shrugged, "It doesn't matter now. We took out the air defenses, not too far from the RTC, but they were expecting an attack from that direction, we hit them from an angle they weren't expecting and got the base back. Losses were light for my team and heavy for the zombies. We called in for pickup to circle back and extract the rest of my team."
"Weren't they dead?"
"We didn't know that. Lucky for you though, wasn't it? Hey do you guys want coffee? You'd better get it now; I have the feeling it is going to be hard to come by in the next few years."
The group took him up on his offer and though they were expecting Draper to leave, he was still waiting for them after they had cups in their hands.
"I hope you don't mind my asking Draper, but why are you here? You don't seem like the type to make social calls, especially so far below rank." Stewart said.
"Social calls? This isn't a social call little lady. This is all business. I spoke to the doc, you know what she told me?"
"Your case of the clap is all cleared up?" guessed Stewart.
"Not just that, she said you three." Draper pointed at Max, Stewart and Ruben, "were in perfect health. No bandages, no open wounds, no bites. Just a little bruising." Draper looked pointedly at the bloodstain on Stewart's shirt, "That is why you were cleared. I didn't mention that your head was bashed in two days ago. Or that I saw an x-ray of your skull fracture then, and that I saw another one last night, which showed a past fracture that had healed up. Not to mention that blood on your shirt there. And you." Draper said, pointed at Ruben, "Lemme see your hand gramps." Draper extended his hand and tentatively Ruben held his left hand out. The black man's skin made a sharp contrast with Rubens as he turned it over in his own. "Not a fucking mark on it. Now, I may be just a Colonel, but I don't know how an old man who gets fourteen stitches in his hand less than two days ago can show me the same hand without even a scar on it now. Pretty goddamn nice trick if you ask me."
Ruben slowly took his hand back, "So what do you want us for?"
Draper's ivory teeth gleamed white as he looked at them with a huge smile on his face.
Chapter 10 — Katie
'Head south east. Yeah that was a good idea.' The problem was the map. Katie had gotten familiar with the streets of Chicago on the lake shore for her original mission as a sniper with Randy. She had only a vague notion of where the highways went outside of the city and had ended up on highway fifty seven heading almost due south out of Chicago. Now the sports utility vehicle was dead.
'Out of gas. Dead as a three day old zed.' Katie was good at many things, she could knock the eye out of a sparrow at five hundred yards, she could take most people she ran into out in close combat, she could field strip and make minor repairs on her weapons, however, she knew next to nothing about cars and less about how to get electricity to work at a gas station when the power was out. And the power was out everywhere.
The only good news was that once she made it into the outskirts of Chicago there were no zombies to be seen anywhere. Now she was in a small city named "Kankakee" and the place was a literal ghost town.
"Just add in a few tumble weeds blowing across the street and I will get really creeped out." she said to herself. Her car had died near exit three fifteen, where the services offered were 'Gas — Food — Shopping' and a large billboard listed it as the exit for the Northfield Square Mall. Other shopping included a 'Farm and Fleet', where Katie thought she might have luck with getting some supplies.
Looking at the car one last time she decided there was nothing else she could scavenge from it. Reluctantly she shut the door, remembering what Heath had done, she left the door unlocked and set the key in plain sight on the seat. 'Maybe someone can fuel it up and still use it. Maybe I will be back with some fuel myself.'
Katie made a beeline directly to the mall, the place had a cleaned out feel to it, nothing was moving and the glass doors she was heading towards were propped open or broken out all along the entrance she could see. She held her shotgun in a ready position and she was wearing the oversized shoes to protect her feet from the glass littering the ground. There was a corpse holding one door open. By the look of him, he had been a zombie, his skull was blasted open.
'What did that? Probably a shotgun.' His body was decayed, with flesh slumping off of him to sag to the ground, giving the impression that he was melting. Moving inside she darted to one edge of the door and ducked down beneath a large planter full of wilting vegetation. Giving her eyes a moment to adjust, she scanned the area inside for movement. 'Nothing.'
There was a store directory not too far from the entrance and she approached it, looking for a place to pick up better shoes, then a woman's clothing store. Katie found both just around the corner from where she was standing and didn't waste any time moving out. She paused in the four way atrium looking at the upper level and down as much of the vast mall as she could. There was movement on the upper level. And bodies, so many bodies, spread out in the south hallway.