No More Fear: Part Thirteen (Yeah, I'm not done yet!)

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I watched Gomez struggle to stand up and then begin his long task of disposing of the remaining beer. And there was a lot of it. Several pallets stacked at least five feet high. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him. He’d hardly spoken since he’d gotten here. He probably hadn’t even been a soldier for a month before being thrown into this mess. I’m sure he was many hundreds of miles from home and probably hadn’t heard from friends or family since this had started. He was probably feeling quite alone and hopeless. Still, it was no excuse for his actions. He was lucky he didn’t get his head blown off instead.
I slowly made my way back to the warehouse. I needed to talk to Mark about this. It was clear to me that we just couldn’t stay cooped up like this forever, and from what Mark said about needing everyone to get out, I guessed he didn’t think so either. I had a new respect for the man, after seeing how effortlessly he handled Gomez; almost like a child’s ragdoll. For a man I was sure had long since waved good-bye to his fiftieth birthday, he was still in tremendous shape.
As I approached the area where we had laid out the gear, Skinner briefly looked up from the clipboard he was studying, nodded and then returned to his work. Mark was stooped over the M249, which lay in several large pieces on a white towel in front of him. He had the bolt in his hands and was wiping it with another towel, giving it a much needed cleaning. I stood back and watched him work for a minute or so as he gave each essential part of the weapon the attention it needed, and then slid it back into place when it was clean. The light machine gun slowly took shape as he finished with each piece, until it was whole again. Mark’s movements were swift and confident, as if he had done them a hundred times. I glanced at Skinner as he tried to hide the fact that he, too, was watching and studying Mark. Skinner hadn’t said a word of instruction to Mark since I returned. Either he was very, very good at taking things apart or he had actually done this before. Mark worked the bolt of the machine gun several times, letting it slide back to its natural position each time. Then he set the weapon down and looked up at me.
“Need something?” he asked, somewhat abruptly.
“Um, yeah. I’d like to talk to you about something,” I replied, with slightly less confidence than I had hoped to muster. Was I letting this intimidating man intimidate me? “Privately, if that’s all right.”
“Sure,” Mark said as he grabbed a towel and began to wipe the grime from his large hands and joked with a smirk, “Let’s go for a walk.”
He stood up and we headed out towards the store again. My hand rested on the butt of the Glock which had practically become a part of my body.
“So. What’s on your mind, Vic?”
“What exactly is your plan? To get out of here? I know you’ve been thinking about it. I’m sure we all have. But everything I’ve come up with is pretty much a crap shoot.” Mark smiled a tired smile.
“Well, you’re right, I have been thinkin’ about it quite a bit, ever since we got here. Now it’s true we’ve put a lot of work into this place, but I think deep down we all knew this was only a temporary solution. We can’t stay here. You’ve seen what it’s doing to us already. Everyone is on edge. That’s most of the reason I’ve been giving everyone something to do. It keeps them busy and keeps their mind off of what is inevitably waiting for us out there.”
“But there’s no doubt about it,” I said, “We will have to face it at some point.”
“And the sooner, the better. As time drags on here, we’re going to get slow and sloppy. Our minds will fatigue. Our reflexes will dull. I will admit, before you and your brother showed up, I thought Ellie and me were SOL up on that roof. You two were a God-send with all the gear you brought and I thought that with you two we might have a chance to get out of here. But with these two soldiers and the Hummer and all the ordnance they have, I’d say our chances of living to tell the tale should be pretty good, don’t you?”
“I have to agree with you there.”
“You and Zach are pretty good, you know? Not the best I’ve seen, but pretty good. With a little training you’d both be very good.” I laughed.
“Yeah, well we hunt a little and shoot a lot and we both stay in shape. I’ve never had any interest in becoming a soldier though. I think Zach thought about it for a while, but he never signed up.”
“I don’t blame him.” Mark grew quiet for a few moments, and my impatience got the best of me.
“So what’s your plan?” I asked.
“My plan?”
“I know you have a plan!”
“You’re right,” Mark finally admitted with a chuckle, “Well, we can’t all fit in the Hummer, not with enough supplies or fuel to get us very far, so obviously we need another vehicle.”
“How are we going to get one? The parking lot is one big zombie convention.”
“We don’t need to go to the parking lot. We hardly need to go outside. That middle loading dock has a tractor-trailer backed up to it already. All we need to do is get it up to the door, load it with supplies and pray it has enough fuel to get us out of the city where we can safely top off the tanks. There’s quite a bit of fuel in the generator room, so we can fill up the Hummer before we leave. The trailer will have plenty of room for supplies and then some.”
“But who’s gonna drive that thing? I have no idea how.”
“Well, I can,” Mark said in a tone that made it sound like I should have known all along, “It’s not really that hard. I can teach you guys as soon as we get on some open road. I’ll take care of all the tricky stuff. The tractor should be powerful enough to plow right though that crowd of slouchers outside.”
“Okay, that all sounds fine and dandy, but how are we going to even get inside the thing? The back of the building is almost as bad as the front since the Hummer led them all back there.”
“Easy. We climb down from the roof. I’ll cut a hole in the roof of the truck and back it up to the door. I bet you a hundred bucks the keys are still in it. When I used to drive years and years ago no one ever took the keys out of their ignition if they weren’t leaving the truck for more than a few minutes. We can use the hole as a shooting station for the M249.”
“Okay, well this is definitely better than any plan I’ve come up with. Have you talked this over with anyone else?”
“No, I was still working out the details until recently, but I’m sure we’ll figure everything out as we go.”
“Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to get the heck outta this prison. I’m sure everyone else will agree.”
“Well, let’s finish taking inventory and we’ll talk about it at dinner. How’s that?”
“Sounds good.”
And it did sound good. I had high hopes about this new plan. It would still be risky, I wasn’t going to lie to myself and say it would be a cakewalk, but the way I saw it, the key would be to keep the vehicles moving as long as possible. As long as we were inside, we would basically be out of harms way. We could rotate drivers and keep moving pretty steadily. But where to? Where was there to go? I suppose we’d head back to where the soldiers came from. Back to Camp Saint Theresa. It sounded like if there was one place on earth that was prepared for this, it was that place.

By the time dinner rolled around, the rain had stopped and we returned to the roof to eat and breathe some more or less fresh air. Emerging from the stairwell, I could smell the rotting flesh that surrounded our little island of life. After a few minutes though, I got used to the smell and it didn’t bother me again until I would go inside, where the air smelled mustier, and then reemerge.
The night was chilly and we built a fire with whatever was plentiful and would burn. Furniture mostly. The bright fire warmed me inside and out as I clasped a warm mug of coffee, sipping at it to wash down my dinner. We sat in a circle around the fire and chit chatted. Well, all of us except Gomez who was already in his sleeping bag, waiting for the effects of his intoxication to pass. I looked across the fire at Mark, who hadn’t yet mentioned his plan of escape, and shrugged as if to say, well, what are you waiting for? He shrugged in response. When the conversation died down shortly after, he presented his idea to the others, who received it with a sense of hope and apprehension.
“You really think it’s a good idea to go back out there?” Skinner asked.
“Do you really think it’s a good idea to stay in here?” Mark replied, “That horde out there is getting bigger every day; the longer we wait to make our move, the riskier it becomes. We don’t know that help is coming. Ever. It’s up to us to get ourselves out of this mess.”
“Well you got me there,” Skinner admitted, “I never heard anyone talking about rescue missions. Just reconnaissance and probing and fortifying what we had.” He mulled something over in his head for a moment, “Okay, I’m in.”
“Me too,” Zach chimed in.
“Ellie?” Mark asked, “How ‘bout you?”
Ellie nodded, “I’ve had enough of this place.”
“Well, count on Gomez too,” Skinner added, “I don’t think he’ll want to stay here alone.”
“Good, we’ll all need to stick together to get this to work,” Mark chuckled, “We’re probably outnumbered a million to one as it is.”
We stayed up late that night, planning. We made lists of supplies we’d need to gather and plans for organizing them in the semi-trailer were drawn up. Maps were found, routes planned. Weapons were cleaned, checked and double checked and magazines were loaded. When I finally found myself in my sleeping bag, I could not sleep. I was filled with excitement at the thought of getting out of here, regardless of whatever dangers I might face on the other side of the walls.