The Sword of Saint Michael Read online

  “No, I’m at the police station.” Kevin sounded scared.

  “Even better. Coordinate with them. We have to cut off the resort.” Marty thought for a few seconds. “Deploy one-fourth of your force at the office, barricading the intersection of the Southern end of Airport Road and North Park. Deploy another fourth at the gondola. Deploy another fourth at Ski Hill Road and North Park, and the final fourth at Shattered Sword and Main. That should keep them from the rest of the town. Keep yourself, the police chief, and a skeleton crew there.”

  “Yes, sir. Anything else?”

  “Yes. Jamie is at Gerald’s house. You know the place?”

  “Yes, I know where that is.”

  “Could you send someone to walk over there and make sure they get into a safe place, like the basement?”

  “Wouldn’t he be safe here? In the police station?”

  “Sure,” Marty answered, “but I can’t have the sheriff’s son and his friend’s family being underfoot. Now get a move on. I’ll contact Mohit. He’ll take care of the governor and whatnot.” Mohit Patel was the Colorado Department of Homeland Security liaison.

  “Okay.”

  “And give the men a little pep talk. They’ve trained for this, just remind them.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “All right, get movin’.”

  “Sir, what are you gonna do?”

  “I’ll be at the Northern roadblock.” Marty hung up the phone.

  He turned to Karen—she had woken up, staring at him, wide-eyed. “Call Gerald.” Gerald was Jimmy’s father. “Tell him we may have a possible terrorist attack in Beaver Park. Tell him to lock the doors and windows and bring his family and Jamie to a safe place, like the basement. Do you understand?” Marty struggled to be as calm as he needed to be. He thought he was mostly succeeding.

  She nodded and with shaking hands pulled her phone out of her purse.

  “I sent someone over there, but I want to make sure they get the message.”

  Marty walked into the dining room to call Mohit, who said he’d contact the governor. Mohit suspected the governor would want to give Marty a call soon.

  Outside the side of the hotel, Alexander ran on the road that led to the gondola connecting the resort to the city of Beaver Park. His wrist started buzzing a random pattern, startling him. Then he realized his smart watch was congratulating him on his ten-thousandth step.

  So, it was working, at least partially.

  As he reached the gondola, looking over his shoulder, he saw that a figure—face covered in blood and sores—stared at him blankly but was fast approaching. He entered a gondola car, shutting the door with his good hand right as the zombie smashed the window of the door. By now, the car was traveling across the platform, and the zombie who wasn’t paying attention to the platform fell off the edge down onto the grass. He lay still for a short time and then got up and ran down the mountainside alongside the towers holding up the cables.

  Alexander looked behind him. A few zombies entered the next gondola car. Later, many more zombies crammed into the car behind that one. All told, he counted at least fourteen.

  Meanwhile, the zombie down below was well ahead of him.

  The ride took an excruciating amount of time, longer than the ski lift. He guessed the zombie was six minutes ahead of him and expected several zombies to greet him when he got off the platform.

  He tried his wife again. A fast busy signal.

  As he drove home from the gun show, Vin Scoggins was confident he had made some good Facebook friends that thought like he did—that the new president, a woman no less, wanted nothing more than to take the guns away from good, law-abiding citizens. That a few bad people with guns ruined it for everybody else—well, that was collateral damage though he would never say that publicly. The right to own a gun was paramount. The Second Amendment guaranteed it, although he could do without much of the Constitution. He was in favor of a Constitutional Convention, which they almost got recently, but they fell short by three states. It wasn’t the criminals that were ruining everything, it was the snowflake liberals that ran this country. Especially that woman, a limousine liberal from New York.

  And the citizens of Colorado who voted for her. In fact, they habitually voted Democrat for president. These transplants from liberal states like New York, California, Washington, Maryland, Virginia, and the entire New England region, ruined the great state of Colorado. However, despite a brief period ten years ago, when the snowflakes got all loopy about the issue, the natives had managed at least to hold their own on gun laws.

  Still, there were no guns for sale in Ella, where he lived—not enough business for the gun stores. So, he drove forty-five minutes south to buy his guns, and this gun show was almost three hours away in Mesa.

  With no one else on the road, he glanced at his beauty lying on the passenger seat—a brand-new slide-action 12-gauge Feinberg 670 shotgun, with a chamber capacity of twelve, an 18.5-inch barrel, and laser-guided. This was not his father’s shotgun. Looking at it gave him immense pride. He always liked to go to the gun range right before he went out on a date, or to a bar to pick up a girl. It got him in the right frame of mind to shoot his own gun. The shotgun’s official range was 40 yards, but, up close, it would stop any attacker. And almost anyone could fire it with one hand. It would be perfect for when the Arab terrorists the Madame President allowed in the country attacked his home.

  Shotguns had one purpose and one purpose only—to kill, or, at least, to stop an opponent dead in his tracks without regard for the opponent’s safety. The gun lobby pretended all guns were for target shooting at a gun range, but shotguns blew such a wide hole in a target that accuracy was not essential. And at close range, such force would stop any assailant. Another gun might not do that right away. A charging assailant might still manage to reach you in the few precious moments after being shot.

  So, the shotgun was the perfect self-defense weapon.

  Anyone who trespassed on Vin’s property would not live to see the inside of his house.

  He was married to his guns, although he had a girlfriend. They weren’t serious, him and his girlfriend, and they both fucked other people. He didn’t particularly like her screwing around on him, but such were the times. Living in a snowflake area meant he couldn’t control women the way his father had. On the other hand, he could spread his buckshot all over the county.

  He hoped he had no children he didn’t know about. He didn’t want any children in his life, and as an only child, he had no nieces or nephews, which was just fine with him.

  Two and a half hours into his drive, traffic came to a standstill three miles south of Beaver Park. Several minutes later, with still no signs of movement of vehicles, he glanced at his watch. Every two minutes or so, he looked again. When it progressed to ten minutes, he started to get pissed. Where was a cop directing his line of traffic into the other lane? Then he realized he hadn’t noticed a single car coming the other way. Both lanes of traffic were stopped. Lovely.

  Chapter Five

  Day Zero

  Jize Chen pumped gas. His hands were insured for ten million dollars—and he pumped gas. He always worried about his hands when he performed even the smallest of tasks. What if he pinched a finger? How many concerts would he miss before he healed? And what if—God forbid—he broke one getting it caught in a door?

  But he didn’t want to appear like a prima donna in front of his grandchildren. A passenger’s proper role is to pump gas. He preferred to pay cash for gas rather than use his credit card, preferring to conduct his transactions in person. Buying gas without interacting with a person seemed wrong. He took every opportunity to interact with what others that possessed his kind of money would call “common people.” Hmm. Might as well call them “peasants,” which would be a more honest description of their feelings. As long as it wasn’t a high-crime area, Jize enjoyed interacting with those less wealthy. So they didn’t have his gift, so what? He himself came from modest means, a
lmost poverty. That they had less wealth than him was as it should be, considering, but it didn’t make them any less worthy of interaction. He drew the line at the risk of crime though, and at those unpleasant because of mental imbalance. To him, a cashier at a gas station was as entitled to a polite exchange of words as someone who paid five hundred dollars to see him in concert. Of course, he was so talented he didn’t need to worry about networking with the wealthy and connected. So what harm was there in talking with someone who worked for a living? Besides, he loved the feel of money, whether crisp or wrinkled and worn. He cherished the smell of U.S. greenbacks.

  Jize went into the convenience store to pay, and recognition flashed in the cashier’s eyes. A fan, and a cashier no less! Pleased, he hoped she had the wherewithal to attend one of his performances, at least from the cheap seats. She appeared to be early fifties, white, with straight dirty-dish blonde hair, and thin. He engaged the cashier in small chit-chat (they seemed to like that sort of thing, fans especially) while waiting for her to place some small bills into the register. And she was too good to be true—she didn’t once mention who he was, didn’t fawn over him in the slightest. Maybe he had misinterpreted the gleam in her eyes, but he doubted that. He smiled at her, and, as if on cue, she looked up at him and smiled back.

  Definitely a fan.

  He heard a crashing sound from outside and glanced back out toward his son-in-law’s rental car.

  He saw a horrific display: people attacking people hand-to-hand on the street, biting their necks, knocking them down, jumping on top of them, beating them senseless. They pulled people out of cars, and a few older cars moved and crashed into other cars—as well as a building, a light post, and in one case, a fire hydrant—creating traffic barricades.

  The perpetrators—dozens of them—were men, women, children, blondes, brunettes, black-haired, red-headed, you name it, and while most of them were white, Jize noticed a black person. They all wore different styles of clothing, but they all had pale, pasty skin. Even the black person was ashen. Pustules were scattered over their bodies. They had blank expressions and vacant eyes.

  They had appeared out of nowhere in less than a minute.

  Jize couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “Holy shit!” was all he could say. He glanced at the woman behind the counter. She was busy counting out one-dollar bills, and if she heard him, she ignored him.

  “Ma’am, look outside!” Jize screamed.

  The cashier, whose name tag read “Janice,” sighed. “I have to keep looking at the money at all times when it’s out.”

  “Then shut the register and look!”

  Three seconds later, “Holy shit!” Janice exclaimed.

  “That’s what I said.”

  “What do we do?”

  From inside the store, it looked to Jize like a horror movie playing out in front of him.

  “Oh my god, are those people dead!” he exclaimed.

  “Wait . . . Are they eating their brains?” she said incredulously.

  “Oh my god . . . zombies.” This, Jize said, in just above a whisper.

  “Huh?”

  “Zombies eat brains. But they are not supposed to be real!”

  Three zombies that had finished off their victims came together and rushed toward the gas station, running faster than anyone Jize had ever seen.

  Jize could not see his family’s faces because they had turned around, watching the events unfold. His son-in-law turned back to face Jize and expressed terror. There was no escape from the scene as traffic was jammed.

  Jize had no weapon—nothing to fight them with. These people appeared to be too strong and too many for him to fight. He felt like a coward as he did the only thing he could; he fished out his cell phone from his jeans pocket and dialed 911. Then he and Janice crouched down behind the counter, hoping not to be seen.

  Jize also hoped that these zombies—or whatever they were—would pass by his relatives. That might mean heading into the gas station, but he would gladly trade his life for theirs. It horrified him to think that way.

  Jize waited for an answer on his phone, but the line kept on ringing.

  Anxious, he took a peek over the counter to discover a horrific sight: each of the four zombies were smashing the windows of the rental. Instinctively, he jumped up to go and fight the zombies off when his legs suddenly gave out, and he fell to the linoleum floor.

  Janice had tackled him.

  With a moment to think, he realized he was being stupid, but if there was a chance . . .

  “Let me go!” he protested, but she clung on to his legs.

  “You can’t help them,” Janice said, “unless you’ve got a powerful gun in your pants.”

  “You have no right! What if I do have a gun? I have to do something!”

  He continued to struggle, kicking furiously. She let go of his legs. He stood up and looked at the scene.

  “Dammit, we have to stay hidden!” Janice said.

  The car’s windows were shattered, and each of his three family members were outside the car, prone on the ground. Zombies feasted on their brains.

  They were dead—Billy, Jeffrey, and their father, David. It had happened so fast.

  And that woman, that cashier, that bitch, had kept him from helping.

  Jize turned around, and with his back to the counter, slid down onto his butt, holding his knees to his chest. Anger had given way to angst. He found himself in tears, breathing short, labored breaths, stifling a scream.

  Maybe it was a satanic cult. Maybe it was a terrorist attack . . . Maybe it was a zombie apocalypse. All Jize knew was that his son-in-law and two grandchildren were dead—and he was hiding, cowering like a dog. But then, with a new rush of adrenaline, his survival instincts kicked in, and he knew that his only chance was to stay put and hope no attacker found him.

  He found he still held the phone. He listened to it. It still rang.

  The gondola landed across the road from the strip mall containing the local supermarket, Beaver Park Market. This was Alexander’s destination. He needed to cross the intersection, but on the Northbound side, zombies were attacking several stopped cars. Some cars had doors open, while some had windows shattered, or both. Alexander weaved in and out of the vehicles, careful to avoid the otherwise occupied zombies.

  Knowing it would take a few minutes for the posse to arrive and barricade the terrorists inside the city, Marty took the time to change into his uniform.

  His phone rang again. In his underwear, Marty answered it.

  “Marty.” It was Kevin’s voice, out of breath. “The terrorists came off the gondola before we could defend it.” Kevin was loud, and he spoke quicker than normal for him. “They’re now at the mall across the road.” That was the strip mall anchored by Beaver Park Market, across from the police station.

  “Can you defend yourselves? How many are there?”

  “A lot. A whole lot. Hundreds. But I think we can, if we shoot to kill.”

  There was a pregnant pause. Marty realized Kevin waited for him to say something.

  “You do what you have to do.”

  “Engage!” Kevin’s voice was now in the background. “Fire at will, but don’t fire unless you can get a clean shot without hitting any innocents. Got that?” A short pause. “Okay, fan out.”

  “Marty, there’s more.” Kevin was now talking into the phone. “We’ve got calls coming in. And we can see it, too. Marty, it’s happening all over Beaver Park! They’re attacking everyone they can get their hands on! Everyone! And then . . . oh my god, Marty, you’re not going to believe it . . . “

  Another pause. “Out with it!”

  “They’re stopping to eat people’s brains!” The deputy’s voice shook as he said that. “You know, like they’re zombies or something. Or like a cult who think they’re zombies.”

  Jamie. His son was over at Gerald’s house in Beaver Park. He hoped that Gerald could keep him safe until Marty had an opportunity to retrieve him, but Gerald hadn’
t answered Karen’s call. He wanted to rush out and go now, but he had a duty to his county.

  What if this were a national cult? What if this was starting all over the country? Or the entire world?

  “Karen!” He called out, still in his underwear, phone still on his ear. “Karen, get in here now!”

  Karen opened the door. “What is it?”

  “Take a shotgun. Load it up and bring Amanda into the basement. Lock yourselves in the bathroom.”

  “Jesus! What the hell’s going on—”

  But Kevin had started talking again. Marty put up his hand to silence his wife.

  “Oh, my god, Marty! The victims seem to be coming back—holy shit, they’ve broken through, they’re heading straight for us!”

  Marty faintly heard what happened next. Kevin said, “Fire at will. Repeat, fire at will!” Then gunfire. Marty hoped there wouldn’t be any collateral damage.

  “Marty! The guns are having no effect! No effect!” Horrified, Marty thought again about zombies. Was this really happening?

  “They’re unarmed, but they’re coming for us!” Kevin said, clearly in pants-crapping mode. “Oh, shit, they’ve broken down the doors! They’re right—”

  Marty heard a crackle on the line and then heard Kevin scream.

  Chapter Six

  Day Six

  Jocelyn woke up several times, sometimes during daylight, other times at night, sometimes hot and sweaty under the blankets, other times cold and shivering on top. Vivid, fevered dreams plagued her, though she didn’t remember them. When she awakened, the odor in the room was hideous. Panicking, she sat up and looked around. She had been so disoriented that she had never disposed of George’s now decayed body and severed head. Maggots had taken over. She dry-heaved a few times.

  Outside, the snow had melted.

  Despite the stink, she discovered she was starving. Rummaging around the house, she found some pop-tarts in the kitchen. Unable to eat with the putrescent smell in the house, she took the box outside and ate one while draped in one of her blankets. Still hungry, she ate one more and sat down on the porch steps to think about her predicament.