The engines stopped, their roar replaced with the screechy sound of metal-on-metal as the cargo ramp lowered and sunlight illuminated the top of it. The general grabbed his gear and made his way through the dozens of salvaged jeeps, cars and small trucks as he headed towards the bright daylight. It’s good to be back, he thought. But Willow was right … I needed to go home and help bury Mama. He sighed, but a smile danced around the corners of his mouth. Now I have to steel myself for all the “I-told-you-so’s.”
He almost hadn’t gone, but his aide-de-camp, Major Willow Dobson, reminded him that the “shambler season” had been quiet—only fifteen of them had scraped their way out of the snowpack this spring. The seven men and five women who made up his staff sat around the meeting room.
“I know, Major, but I also have the visit to the Academy in Vancouver and then the big NPP powwow in Seattle. Oh, the memorial in Portland, too. I have to be on the road two weeks from today.”
Major Dobson waved her hand to the staff assembled in the room. “General, we will have everything in order so all you’ll have to do is walk off the plane and hop in a jeep.” She turned to her colleagues. “Am I right?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Lieutenant Hoover, Major Dobson’s assistant. The rest of them nodded enthusiastically.
“I’ll have to think about it.”
“General, the plane’s leaving in forty minutes.” She turned to the staff. “You can all get back to work.” They got up and filed out of the meeting room.
“Your father and Anastasia need you to go, Nik,” she’d said. Then she smiled and said, “C’mon, General. The end of the world already happened. Get your ass on that plane and go see your family.
You’re damn lucky to actually have any family left. Not only that,” she’d added, brown eyes dancing, “You have access to a shamblin’ plane, for gob’s out loud, and that only happens every couple of weeks. Don’t worry—we’ll see you when the plane comes back with the junkers.”
The two weeks flew by and now he emerged into the bright sun and there she was, waiting for him at the bottom of the ramp. She saluted.
“At ease, Major. I trust everything was in order here at Comox in my absence?”
She smiled. “Yes, sir.”
“And we’re all set to head to Vancouver?”
“Yes, sir. You have a rucksack packed with clean clothes and all the paperwork is in order.” Her face softened. “Did everything go all right in Winnipeg?”
“Yes, Major. My father and sister were glad to have me there, and after all was said and done, I’m very glad I went.”
“Are they doing okay?”
Two guards opened the double doors to the administrative building adjacent to the airstrip and General Drabanoff and Major Dobson entered.
“Yes. They are doing okay. Pop is lonely, but that’s only to be expected.” He unlocked his office door, and they went in. He closed the door behind him, and took Major Dobson in his arms.
“Two weeks is a long enough time to be away from you, Willow,” he said after a long and passionate kiss. “Pop and Ana both say ‘hello,’ by the way.”
“Did you give them the card I made?” she asked.
“Heck, yeah. They both cried, and Ana tucked it behind Mama’s image of Saint Herman of Alaska in the family icon corner.” He let her go. “Enough about Pop and Ana … I have something for you.”
He knelt down on one knee. She was stunned; her face flushed and tears welled up in her eyes.
“Willow Dobson, will you marry me?” he said as he pulled an ornately-set, princess-cut diamond ring from his pocket.
She sucked in her breath and stared at the ring as it flashed and refracted the noonday sun streaming through the window.
“Yes, Nik,” she whispered, hands trembling. “Yes. I will.”
He put the ring on the fourth finger of her left hand. It was loose, but she didn’t seem to care.
She stared at the ring on her finger and moved her hand as the diamond caught the light and sparkled.
She looked up at Nik. Her golden-flecked brown eyes took his breath away. “It’s … it’s beautiful … was it your mother’s?”
“Yes. Pop gave it to me the minute I got off the plane in Winnipeg. He told me that the last thing
Mama ever did was to take this ring off her finger.” Nik held Willow’s newly-embellished left hand.
“Pop asked her if she wanted Ana to have it and Mama shook her head, ‘no.’ Then he asked if she wanted me to have it and she shook her head ‘no’ again.”
Nik got up off his knee and dropped Willow’s hand, put his arms around her and drew her in close. He whispered, “And then Pop asked ‘Is this for Nik to give Willow when he asks her to marry him?’ and Mama just looked at him and smiled.”
He paused, grinning, and noted with satisfaction the quizzical looks on the faces of the twelve people standing in front of him. The itinerary had been posted for over a week—most of them had had a hand in planning it. Willow took his arm.
“—where Major Dobson and I will be married.”
The staff burst into applause and Willow extended her hand to show off the engagement ring. She did it a little too enthusiastically and the ring almost flew off her finger, but she repositioned it and squeezed her fingers together to keep it in place so the men and women of the Protectorate Command could admire it.
“All right, then,” said Nik when the congratulations had subsided. “Colonel Crenshaw has just arrived from the Idaho Frontier and will be in command until our return. Any questions, comments, concerns?”
“Yes,” said Lieutenant Hoover, a recent graduate of the Academy. In spite of her diminuative size, abundant freckles and red hair, she also happened to be the most ruthless Guard the Academy had produced in its five years of existence. Willow secretly referred to her as “Pippi the Hun.”
Lieutenant Hoover jutted her little chin out and said, “Major Dobson, will you still be Major Dobson or will you be Major Drabanoff? Or Major Dobson-Drabanoff? Or Major Drabanoff-Dob…”
Willow smiled at the younger woman. “Dobson, Lieutenant. I will still be called ‘Major Dobson.’”
Ten minutes later Nik and Willow were on their way to Vancouver, speeding towards Nainamo and the ferry that would take them across Horseshoe Bay. Nik had the ring back in his pocket. It was too loose for her to wear; it had already come off her finger once and had almost come off several other times in the course of little over an hour. “We’ll go to the jeweler in Vancouver tomorrow.” he said.
“Are you sure you don’t want to keep it in your pocket?”
“No, Nik. When it’s resized, I want you to do the proposal thing all over again, just the way you did it back at the base.”
Forty years old, he thought. Forty years old, twenty years a soldier, ten years of the I&O, and I always wondered what the point of anything was. He watched Willow adjust the rear-view mirror of the sturdy batt-jeep. Now I know.
Willow drove and Nik divided his attention between the scenery unfolding before them and his bride-to-be’s lovely profile. What is it about the curve of her cheek? he thought, mesmerized by such a simple physical characteristic. It’s perfect.
She took her eyes off the road for a second and glanced at him. “Nik … you’re staring.”
“Yup. Beautiful stuff to see everywhere I look.”
Willow had only met Nik’s family once, two years ago when Mama, Pop and Ana had flown out to the base at Comox for a rare visit. They had loved Willow and Willow thought they were wonderful. Mom would be so happy. I wish I could get Pop and Ana out here for this. He sighed. A finger of gloom reached up into his thoughts.
Spattering gobsacks … nothing is going to ruin this day! Willow and I will go see Pop and Ana in the fall on one of the late transports; before the weather gets bad.
“So, Pippi the Hun was her usual self at the meeting today, huh?” Willow said. “I should have told her to call me ‘Major Dob-Drab.’”
“How about ‘Major Drab-Son’? Or ‘Noff-Dob?’”
Willow laughed. “Or Noff-a-Dob-a-Drab! Dead knuckles, Nik … we could both go by that!”
They were still laughing when they came around a corner on Route 19 at Fanny Bay, the corner around which waited a horror that hadn’t been seen south of Cariboo, British Columbia for almost a decade; shamblers. Clawing, moaning shamblers. They wore collars around their necks, collars that trailed chains fastened to bolts which had been welded onto a shipping container. The container sat on the trailer of a dark, stinking semi. The semi’s engine rumbled and filled the air with filthy exhaust from sooty pipes bristling atop and behind it and just beyond the truck were two small cars which blocked the road; they had been overturned, but both cars appeared to be empty.
General Nikolai Drabanoff and Major Willow Dobson knew what to do; there were only twelve shamblers—not even a shmob—and they were restrained. They had an odd, dusky pall and the rags they wore looked like they used to be anoraks and snowpants; their feet were encased in the remnants of boots.
But first Nik had to find who did this. It didn’t take finely-honed training to ascertain that whoever was behind this had bad intentions, and one person with bad intentions was more dangerous than three dozen of the slow-moving flesh rippers. Nik and Willow crouched behind the batt-jeep angled across the northbound lane, their guns drawn. Four heavily armed men appeared from behind the semi, crouched, and scrambled for cover, firing their weapons as they rolled to safety.
Nik and Willow got off a couple of shots in the direction of the living threat when they realized another kind of threat approached them from behind—four shamblers emerged from the pine scrub at the edge of the road. These shamblers were not like the grayish, parka-clad teeth-gnashers chained to the truck, nor were they anything like the rotting, crumbling, feeble, barely-biting wraiths that most shamblers had become by the end of the I&O. No, these nightmarish things emerging from the brush were vicious … freshly-bitten … newly-reanimated. Their summer clothes, though blood soaked, were un-tattered. They’re … they’re the victims from the car wrecks! thought Nik, horrified. Black guts … where did that damn truck come from? How did the those people get infected?
The gunmen were quick. Nik tried to cover the peril coming at them from the dark, hulking truck while Willow took aim at the quickest shambler staggering towards them from behind. Years of training and experience kicked in and she pulled the trigger. Most of the shambler fell into the brush while its head flew off in pieces. One down, three to go. She fired again—another shambler was separated from its head as it fell partly in the brush, partly on the shoulder of the road, just feet away from their position.
Nik was not having the same results. These guys are trained, he thought, right before a shot rang out and a bullet shattered Willow’s left arm. She screamed. Nik was able to get off a shot before the gunman took cover, but he missed and two shamblers were still bearing down on them so Nik turned and leveled his weapon at the closest one. He squeezed the trigger and the shuffling, snarling wretch’s horrifying progress was abruptly interrupted as the top of its head exploded and its body fell across the feet of the last shambler Willow had neutralized.
The remaining shambler was within five or six feet of Willow. He took aim at it, but one of the attackers shot the pistol from his hand. The pistol discharged, but hit nothing and his hand was useless and bloody with a bullet hole through the back, right below the knuckle under his third finger. Something else slammed his lower left leg. What the shmob was that? he thought as he fell and the sensation from the projectile burned up to his buttocks; and then oh, God, Willow! and the shambler half-lunged, half-stumbled the last foot, jaws gnashing, and ripped off her left hand and forearm.
She screamed again. The gunmen were now closing in and the one closest to Willow dispatched the shambler that was mauling her with an expert shot to its head, but this was not a rescue. Not even close—he turned the weapon and shot Willow in the heart.
She was on her feet in seconds.
The attackers had not counted on her almost immediate reanimation. They were caught off guard and the-shambler-that-used-to-be-Willow grabbed the gunman who’d killed her and ripped out his throat.
He gurgled while her bloody, grinding jaws made short work of his trachea.
The others didn’t neutralize her, though … two of them watched her consume the man who’d shot her while the fourth gunman, leading a tiny, ghastly-pale shambler on a chain, approached Nik. It felt like slow-motion as Nik tried to reach for his gun with his left hand, but his fingers only brushed the butt; he could not grasp it. The gunman grabbed his right arm and yanked him to his feet and the pain in his wounded hand was so intense that he barely felt it when the small shambler bit him on the wrist.
But when her handler pulled her off, a web of needle-like torment began to radiate out from the bite. It’s like if bees had acid in their stingers and a hundred of them all stung in the same spot, he thought with curious detachment as the metathanatosperipatos microbes entered his bloodstream. He felt like an observer at the scene; he noted the sensations in his body—why doesn’t this freezing … heat … hurt? he thought—and then he turned his head and saw Willow on her knees feeding on what was left of her killer while the shamblers chained to the truck along the south-bound lane snarled and moaned and stretched towards the living. He watched the man and the tiny-shambler-on-a-chain return to the truck and then he watched the man come back with a collar. It, too, had a length of chain dangling from it; the man put the collar on Willow while she mindlessly gorged.
Nik felt through a thick padding of what-should-have-been-pain-but-wasn’t one of the assailants rummage through the pouch sewn to the inside of his vest and take the official seal of his office as Protector of the Pacific Northwest. The man grinned and held the seal up to Nik’s face.
Nik could not move.
After the man pocketed the seal, he rummaged through Nik’s pockets and took the sparkling diamond, the diamond that had been his mother’s, the diamond that was supposed to be resized to fit the fourth finger of Willow’s now-missing left hand.
He heard snarling and moved his eyes enough to see a man yank Willow off her grisly meal and drag her, flailing and moaning, in the direction of the truck. The same man came back with a shovel and tossed the unrecognizable remains of his comrade into the brush beyond the shoulder of the northbound lane and when he finished, he threw dirt on the bloodstains. Another man joined him, and they picked up each shambler corpse and one … two … three … tossed them into the undergrowth.
The last thing they did was kick what was left of the shamblers’ heads off the road.
Then Nik watched himself being lifted up and carried into the box at the end of the container. The men shut the opening of the box and put a padlock on it, and soon the sounds of clanking, shuffling, snarling and moaning filled the container as the “cargo” was jerked up the ramp. Nik heard the echoed “click” of each carabiner ring to its welded “eye” as the shamblers, one-by-one, were secured to the inside of the container. A grinding noise that was probably the ramp reverberated inside the metal cavern. Nik heard the unmistakable sound of a metal garage-door as the back of the rig was closed and the pinholes of light that had been filtering into the box were extinguished. The men did not speak to each other. None of them have said a word, he thought. Not one word. The shamblers all moved as close as they could to the box, snarling for living flesh, his living flesh, and the thought flooded his mind that one of them had once had warm brown eyes with golden specks and perfect angles to her face and he tried to scream because there was no point to anything, after all … but no sound came out.
Finally the truck shuddered and rumbled and the living, the barely living, and the dead, were underway.
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