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One NIght in Paris, Texas	By : TheByronicMan Category: M through R > Newsflesh (trilogy) > Newsflesh (trilogy) Views: 1163 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own the Newsflesh Trilogy or any of the related published works. I do not make any money from this story. Any resemblance to persons living, dead, or living dead is coincidental.

Chapter List
- 6
- 7
- 8
“Lance?” I said.
“We should check out the storage place first. On the satellite view it looks like the fence is down in a couple of places. Large area, short sight lines, probably took them all day to search it, and raising all those doors would make a lot of noise. Most likely place for them to get jumped by a pack.”
“Sounds like a plan. Okay, silencers on.”
Most gun laws were relaxed after the Rising, but suppressors were still heavily restricted. A few years earlier, one my competitors barely survived an epic battle against a huge pack of zombies that killed most of his team. He claimed that the sounds of their gunshots attracted several smaller packs to his position, and had some evidence to back it up. As a retired and decorated Texas Ranger his word carried a lot of weight and, after he testified before Congress, zombie trackers became one of the few civilian professions authorized to carry suppressors. We weren't allowed to use them in inhabited areas, and an embedded chip recorded the time and GPS location of every shot fired through them.
As we were screwing the suppressors into place on our carbines, I called for a com check. All of our radios were working fine, and Ashley confirmed she was getting clear video from our cameras. As usual, she would stay at base camp while the rest of us went out searching. Ash was a good backup in an emergency, but she didn't have the temperament for routine field work. She did the job I hired her for, and that was plenty.
Once we were sure everything was operational, we settled our gear into place and mounted the ATVs. Dan and Gil drove, while Lance and I rode behind. We both would have preferred driving, but we were the best shots so we had to be free to fire. We headed south back into town, taking a different route in case our previous passage had attracted some unwelcome attention. Ten minutes later we were outside the storage facility.
Lance had been right, the fence was down in places. Looked like it had been driven through from the inside, probably people retrieving motor homes when Paris was evacuated. We drove in through one of the gaps and parked behind the office. We got off of the ATVs and looked the place over.
“Looks like someone has been here recently,” Gil said, indicating a pile of five bodies stacked against the wall.
“Dan, check 'em out,” I said.
Dan went in for a closer look while I kept him covered. “They were put down around ten days ago, blunt force to the skull. Professional work,” he added, indicating a pair of hooks dug into the ribcages of two of the corpses.
Cleanup crews used hooks mounted on long poles to drag bodies around, when they weren't using bulldozers instead. To reduce the risk of infection, the hooks can be detached from the shafts and left behind after use. Our information indicated that Castillo's team used them as well. The fact that they were killed without using guns also suggested people with experience in zombie country. I motioned for Dan to keep watch while I pulled out my tablet and went through the pictures of our targets. These didn't look like our guys, but I snapped pics of their faces for later comparison. In the meantime, they weren't going anywhere.
“Right, let's look around.”
I led the way, with Lance bringing up the rear and Gil and Dan to either side. There were about eighty units, and the rear lot held half a dozen boats and one small RV with a missing radiator. About a quarter of the storage rooms were open, and looked like they'd been that way for years. They showed signs of having been disturbed recently, and the locks on all of the closed doors had been cut open. Judging by how bright the metal in the cuts was, that had been done in the last few weeks. Just before we left, we took a risk and opened one of the units. The dust on the floor inside showed fresh shoe prints, and the boxes had clearly been moved around not long before. We closed it and left the premises before the noise could attract any zombies. There was this pesky little regulation that gives zombie trackers the power to enter untenanted private property but requires us to leave it as close as possible to the condition in which we found it.
It looked like Castillo had finished his business at the storage place, so we went to check out his other official destination. It was a Victorian-style home a short way east of what passed for downtown. The neighborhood was in almost perfect shape, showing no sign of the damage usually caused by holdouts, looting, and zombie sweeps. A few days of work by a lawn care crew and the place would be livable. The house we were looking for was equally untouched. All of the doors and windows that we could see were intact. We parked in the driveway, and I covered Lance while he checked the front door.
“Deadbolt is locked.”
“Right,” I said. “Let's check the back.”
The back door had a simple latch, which was open. It led to what I only recognized as a mud room because Dad was an architect. He used to draw up plans for converting them to secure entry and decon chambers. The door from there to the kitchen was more substantial and had a deadbolt. This time Gil tried the door, finding it unlocked.
“It's been picked recently,” he said.
“The lady said one of her father's men was a locksmith,” Dan pointed out.
We went inside, carefully checking the corners and investigating any blind spots. Nothing in the kitchen seemed disturbed, although there was writing on the walls that looked recent. Each mark was a large X with a measurement written beside it in black marker.
I took a closer look at one. The distance printed next to it was right for the width of the room. “Someone's been drawing up a floor plan of the house. I remember Dad using this method a few times on houses that didn't have any drawings on file.”
“What for?” Lance asked.
Gil said, “The client said this house was supposed to have a secret room. That would be one way to find it. Map out the house and look for any missing space.”
We cautiously made our way through the house. In the living room we found a neat square cut out of the sheetrock wall, exposing a solid steel plate on the other side. We followed that wall around several corners, finding three more holes exposing metal plates enclosing a roughly ten foot square space. There were no apparent entrances.
“Upstairs?” Lance asked.
“Yep,” I said, “easier to hide a trap door in the floor than in the ceiling.”
We went upstairs and headed for the room directly above the secret vault. It turned out to be the master bedroom, and the trap door was under the bed. There was only one entrance to the room, so Dan watched that while the rest of us checked the closets and bathroom for any squatters, living or otherwise.
Once the room was cleared, Dan continued standing guard while we examined the bed and what it was hiding. The headboard was securely bolted to the wall, and the side rails were connected to it by concealed hinges. That allowed the rest of the bed to be tilted nearly upright, where it was held by a padded hook attached to chain dangling from a hole in the ceiling. An area rug that had been underneath the bed was pulled aside to reveal a removable section of the room's hardwood floor. Beneath that had been a heavy steel door, held open by a steel cable originating from the same hole as the chain. When not in use, the hole was apparently covered by a smoke detector. Looking up through the hole, I could see a winch attached to a massive ceiling beam.
“Hmm, wonder how they powered the winch? The electricity has been off for a few decades.”
Lance moved next to me and followed my gaze. “That's a twelve volt winch, they could have rigged it with a car battery and set of jumper cables.”
Gil, meanwhile, had been examining the vault door. “Castillo's safecracker knows his business. Did a professional job getting this open.”
I went to look down into the vault. A set of rungs welded across the angle of one corner gave access. It contained several wooden cabinets and a massive gun safe, all standing open, and one wall held a set of shelves. From the looks of things, Castillo's crew had taken everything that was portable.
“Don't guess they'll be coming back here,” Lance said. “Where next?”
I checked the time. “We have enough daylight left to do a sweep of the lake and see if there is anything we want to take a closer look at tomorrow.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
We quickly checked the rest of the house before heading back to the ATVs. I turned on the GPS and picked out a route that would take us to the upstream end of the former lake and guide us to where the dam used to be. It would only take us about half an hour to get there. Coming back would be even faster, from that end we could take the old highway. That gave us a bit over an hour to cover the lake bed itself, plenty of time.
The ride out to the lake was uneventful, other than having to swerve abruptly to avoid some live deer wandering across the road. I wasn't sure if the fact that they couldn't hear our electric motors approaching made them more or less dangerous. Upon reaching the lake bed, we took a few minutes to look it over. The old water line was clearly visible, but over the spring the plants had made a good start on reclaiming the valley. No trees, but a solid carpet of grasses and small bushes. The stream that had once fed the lake had cut a channel through the soil that had accumulated over the decades. We determined that traversing the lake bed would be faster and easier than following the old shoreline, so long as we didn't stray too close to the new stream bank.
After about thirty minutes, Dan and Lance crested a small rise and suddenly turned to the right and stopped. Gil and I, following behind them, did the same when we caught up. I immediately saw why they had halted. A few hundred feet ahead a pack of infected humans, deer, and dogs were making their way uphill from the stream. Even zombies need water, and it looked like they had a well-worn trail. We backed the ATVs down below the crest of the rise. I motioned for Dan and Gil to keep watch around us while Lance and I switched out the Glaser rounds in our carbines for jacketed hollowpoints.
We went prone and crept up to where we could just see the line of infected, using a couple of small bushes for concealment. A head shot with a carbine would be pure luck at this range, but the rifles would be loud enough to draw them all down on us at once. Luckily, head shots aren't the only way to bring down a zombie, just the most reliable. Enough damage to the heart and lungs would kill them eventually, it just takes a lot longer than with a live person, and Lance and I were good enough shots to get center of mass hits at this distance. Unfortunately, they all looked to be well-fed, which meant they would be more interested in finding and infecting us than chowing down on their fallen comrades.
We didn't have to discuss which targets to hit first. Lance and I were both taught by my brother, so we knew that four-legged critters were the priority. They were faster, and even seemed to be a bit smarter, than human infected. Having their higher brain functions out of order was less of a handicap for animals. And, also following my brother's advice, we would start from the extreme ends and work our way towards the center. This pack was big enough to have the collective intelligence to learn, so we first teach them to clump together for safety and then later give them a hopefully fatal lesson in why that was really a bad idea.
It was mostly deer at the ends, some dim remnant of animal instinct telling them not to get too close to the humans and dogs. I sighted on a magnificent buck at the downhill end of the pack and squeezed the trigger. Blood blossomed on his side and he staggered. He stopped and looked around, giving me an easier target for my next shot. He toppled to his side with that hit. I put three more rounds into his chest before he stopped trying to get up, but he was still thrashing weakly and coughing up blood. I switched to the doe just ahead of him. She started to turn my way, so the first shot caught her in the shoulder instead of the chest. She fell over towards me, so I put two rounds into her back. One of them must have severed her spine, her rear legs stopped moving. With her immobilized, I emptied the rest of the magazine into the last deer on that end of the pack and reloaded.
Lance finished off his last deer about then, and we went to work on the dogs. They were much smaller targets, so we settled for putting a couple of shots into each one to slow them down a bit. Absent a lucky shot, that was the best we could do.
Then we started on the former humans. There were fifteen of them, and by then a few had spotted us and were leading the rest our way, while the first moans echoed across the lake bed. We went to work on the fringes of the pack, and two by two our targets fell behind the rest. We had gotten over half of them by the time they got close enough for us to try head shots, and the remaining ones fell quickly after that. Then with the rest of the field clear, we finished off the dogs that were still mobile. Lance and I switched back to Glasers, and the four of us advanced cautiously, giving grace rounds to the infected that weren't quite dead yet and taking pictures of the humans.
Dan said, “I don't think any of these are our guys, they've been infected too long.
I nodded in agreement. Zombies don't decay while they're walking around, but their clothes do. Add that to the cuts and scrapes they pick up from shambling into things, and someone with an experienced eye can estimate how long it's been since they amplified. Still, I emailed the pics to Ash with instructions to run them through Gil's facial recognition program.
With that done, we now faced the tedious chore of cleanup. One of the regulations on licensed zombie trackers prohibits us from leaving corpses strewn about the landscape. I wasn't responsible for the ones back in town, because we didn't put them down, but these were all mine.
I bent down and pulled up a handful of grass. “This is pretty dry, probably hasn't been any rain for weeks. If we torch the bodies, we might set the whole place on fire. Drop a beacon and let State Health Services decide whether or not to send a cleanup crew.”
Unfortunately, that didn't absolve me of the need to gather all the bodies in one place. We worked in teams of two, dragging all the more distant corpses to pile them on top of the greatest concentration of dead meat. Since the hooks that most disposal teams used were too bulky for us to carry, we kept several coils of rope on the ATVs. Rather than untie the ropes after dragging, we just cut the ends loose and tied new loops. That was especially important in this case, because all of bullet holes in the torsos meant the rope ends were thoroughly contaminated. All of the nice, neat head-shot corpses were, of course, already at the spot we were dragging the bodies to.
About an hour and nearly two hundred feet of rope later, we were done. I pulled out a beacon and entered the species and number of bodies before activating it and tossing it into the center of the pile. That information, along with the GPS coordinates, would be transmitted to the nearest DSHS regional office.
I looked back behind us at the setting sun. “Damn, almost out of daylight.”
“The moon should be almost full tonight,” Gil said, “and if we weren't down in this valley we'd probably be able to see it already.”
“Right, put the red filters on the headlights.” That would let the drivers see where they were going without spoiling the night vision of the two of us riding behind. My best friend back in high school had retinal K-A, and at times like this I almost envied her ability to see at night.
We mounted the ATVs and continued our trip. Going back wouldn't be any faster from that point, and taking the highway from the dam end of the lake would be safer than the country roads we used to get out here. After about a quarter hour we came around a bend and spotted lights up ahead. There was a cluster of work lights around some kind of trench that was being dug out by a backhoe mounted on what looked an awful lot like Castillo's truck.
They apparently noticed us at the same time we spotted them, because a flurry of shots rang out and the ATV carrying Dan and Lance rolled over on top of them.
- 6
- 7
- 8
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One NIght in Paris, Texas