Sergeant Keal looked at Carl and nodded at him.
“We’re leaving.” Carl said over the communications network as he pushed down on the accelerator toward the DDC exit.
“Thank God…” Someone’s voice came back.
The convoy followed Carl’s lead and passed into the exit. The inner bus drove forward to seal off the DDC behind them, and Carl’s sense of relief was matched only by his sorrow. He empathized with many of those people. A nagging sense of impending doom — day in, day out, for months — was enough to drive anyone to madness. The DDC was dying in more ways than one, and it wouldn’t take long for the situation there to dissolve beyond any hope of repair.
The second outer-most bus drove forward to reveal the ruins of San Diego. With the desolate suburbs before him, Carl was met with an odd sensation. The simplicity of the city, the road, and the dead, were strangely comforting over the complex social breakdown of the Spring Valley DDC.
Carl led his team away into the suburbs. Children sobbed. The soldiers were silent. The rear car fired some shots at a nearby band of walking corpses, and Carl pressed his communications link. “We need to conserve our ammo. Do not fire unless absolutely necessary.”
Pam opened her laptop, began checking her reports and maps, and paused with a concerned look on her face.
“What is it?” Carl knew Pam well enough to sense when something was wrong.
“Take this next left.” Pam replied.
Carl was confused, but he did as his communications specialist instructed. “What’s up?”
“The WD tracking report just updated and there’s a STOG in the area.” Pam replied. STOG was a military acronym for Significant Threat or Gathering — a designation reserved for dangerous areas typically occupied by an extremely large number of living dead. A STOG was characterized by a mass of over a thousand, and in some cases, tens of thousands of roving undead monsters. Convoys were advised to give them an extremely wide berth. There were always one or two STOGs in or around the city. Their movements were monitored by air and fed into the software that communications specialists used to plot the safest course. Because they were continuously moving, STOGs were notoriously difficult to track, particularly at night. There was the additional danger that a completely new and un-tracked STOG could spring up from nowhere, as hundreds of wandering ghouls spontaneously clumped together for no discernible reason.
Unofficially, the acronym stood for Shit Ton of Ghouls.
“How close are we?” Carl asked.
Pam turned her laptop monitor to face Carl. A map of the city was overlaid with color-coded regions reminiscent of a weather map. Blue stood for mostly clear, green for somewhat infested, yellow for heavily overrun. Red indicated a densely packed mosh pit of teeth, claws, and death. They were in a yellow zone on the edge of a red zone.
Carl glanced down briefly. “Is that right? This doesn’t seem any worse than when we came through.”
“Contact!” Private Richard’s voice came over the communications network.
“Contact!” Private Barona’s voice followed.
“Holy fuck! Contact!” Miguel’s voice finished.
The wail of corpses rose up like a tidal wave. Thousands of wild dead washed forth from between building like a flood converging upon Convoy 19 from every direction.
Chapter 15
Suffocating blackness filled the soundproof room. The night’s havoc had knocked out power to the music store. Twice, Private Stenson had cracked the door for a little light and the undead had come. Each time he had been forced to close the door and thrust the room back into darkness. He dared not crack the door again. The studio was nigh impenetrable, but the area around the door would need to be relatively clear if they were going to escape.
When the truck had smashed through the music store wall, zombies had poured through the hole, and guards from every corner of the DDC converged to hold them back. Private Stenson had tried to help the situation initially, but he had been forced to retreat when his ammunition ran low. In the darkness, soldiers could not tell the undead from civilian or fellow soldier from flesh-hungry ghoul. The confusion was lethal, and it took less than fifteen minutes for chaos to deliver the DDC into the hungry jaws of the undead.
“Is he dead?” Vanessa asked. The teenage girl had reacted quickly when the dead began to pour into the DDC. Unlike the many civilians who woke in a confusion that cost them their lives, Vanessa’s sense of self-preservation was in control the second she awoke. She had bolted directly toward the back offices.
“No, he’s sleeping,” Private Stenson answered. It had been his duty to ensure that the terminally ill Liam would not rise as a ghoul, but Liam had not yet passed. His breathing was shallow, his pulse was weak, but he was alive. The prospect of being trapped in pitch blackness with someone who was certain to transform into a flesh-eating monster was unsettling, and Private Stenson had been tempted to take matters into his own hands. However, he had thus far decided against it. Doomed as Liam was, he was still alive.
“Private?” Kelly Damico’s voice came over his radio.
“I’m here, Dr. D. What’s up?” Stenson answered.
“It’s morning. Are you ready?” Kelly asked.
There was no sense of time within the soundproof studio. Mere minutes felt like hours. Other senses began to compensate for the lack of vision, and the mind began to play tricks. Was that Liam’s pulse or his own? Was there a fourth person breathing somewhere in the small room? Was that Vanessa moving or something else?
“I don’t think I can do this,” Vanessa confessed nervously.
“You can. Come here, I’ll show you one more time.” Vanessa had never shot a gun, but Stenson had tried to teach her through touch. He was not confident in her ability by any stretch of the imagination, but he had chosen to keep his doubts to himself. With any luck, she wouldn’t have to fire the pistol at all, and he would be able to keep the undead at bay long enough to cover their escape.
“Give us a minute, Dr. D,” Stenson answered back over the radio. “Here, give me your hands…”
Over the course of the evening, he had given Vanessa six identical lessons in how to shoot a pistol by guiding her hands along its contours. It had amazed him that, in the midst of an undead apocalypse, he had managed to become trapped with the one person on earth who still had no idea how to use a firearm. She was terrified of guns, and her fear had not diminished with his lessons.
When the training was complete, Private Stenson left the pistol in Vanessa’s hands to reinforce the idea that, in the coming minutes, she might have to use the weapon to protect herself.
Private Stenson shook Liam until he awoke.
“Wa… what? What is it?” Liam asked, as unconsciousness threatened to retake him.
“Do you know what’s happening?” Private Stenson asked. “Do you know where we are?”
Liam paused for a second, sifting through his thoughts. His mind swam through mud, and it took him a moment to arrive at an answer. “We’re trapped. We’re going to try to escape.”
“That’s right. Vanessa and I can’t carry you in your cot, so you’re going to have to hold onto my back. Are you ready?” Private Stenson crouched down to hoist the feeble man onto his shoulders, but Liam did not move.
“No, I don’t think so,” Liam replied weakly.
Stenson sighed. He had been through this three times already, and he had hoped he wouldn’t have to go through it again. “Listen, Liam…”