Chapter 74

"I thought you were going to help us," Dr. Gruber said to me as I prepared to return to Game World.

It was a week later and it was time for me to leave and contrary to what Dr. Gruber had just said to me, I had been helping her and her people, although I knew that I hadn't helped them the way she wanted me to help them.

Dr. Gruber and her people wanted me to help evacuate them to one of her government's safe-zones and I hadn't done that yet. My reason was Nimue. The good doctor and the other doctors and medical specialist in the facility had kept their part of the deal. They had taken Nimue in hand and after conducting a number of annoying tests on my little elf, they had decided it was possible to use their medical science to clone a new arm for my mate. That procedure started on the third day of our occupation of the medical facility.

The procedure was complicated. Felicity had taken the time to explain it to my people, rather than having Dr, Gruber or one of her people do it. As Felicity pointed out to us when she did explain the process to us, it had been complicated even for her to understand and she came from an Earth that used cloning techniques to help replace damaged organs. What the medical profession did on this Earth was light years beyond what her Earth was capable of. The important thing was that she was able to explain it to me and to Nimue and to the rest of our mates and friends. One issue with the whole process was that it was time consuming and that was why I wasn't in a hurry to help the good doctor and her people relocate. While the good doctor had been tolerant of us, it was clear that most of the people in the facility looked upon my people and in particular, Nimue, Felicity, and Dork as being genetic freaks and inferior creatures. I wasn't going to expose my people to that kind of bigotry on a much larger scale.

"I have helped you," I told the woman bluntly, "and I'm continuing to help you even if I'm not going to be here. As I've explained things to you, I have concerns elsewhere that need to be dealt with. While you work here healing Nimue, I'm going to be moving between Earths addressing problems that have come up that my people in situ can't deal with. I will however be reachable by Felicity and Dork if my presence is needed here."

"Why can't you just transfer the non-essential people out of here?" the woman asked for the fourth or fifth time. "The patients that have been healed could be sent off so they could rejoin their families if any still exist and removing them from this facility would allow us to restructure the hospital staff to be more efficient."

"That might be," I acknowledged, "but it won't be happening until Nimue is out of bed and she has an arm that works. Besides, my people are making use of your healed patients. All of them are doing jobs here in the hospital that need to be done, thus freeing up your hospital staff to do other jobs, and some of them have proved helpful in clearing out the zombies down in town."

That had been a fun job in itself. Once my strike team had secured the hospital our attention had moved from getting in to the building to making it secure. Dork's blasting of the large picture window near the entrance to the hospital had left a glaring contradiction to our idea of a secure building. While the locals trusted their force field to keep the zombies out, my people didn't. After a quick chat with my team leaders it was agreed that when we went down into the town below the facility that we'd look for a glass installation company at the same time as we were looking for supplies for the people in the facility.

While we'd killed a fair number of the zombies on the day of our arrival we hadn't killed them all. The majority who were still bumping around and gnashing their teeth at the living were trapped in buildings and for the most part they weren't a real threat to us. It was only when we had to go into a building, like the glass installation company that I'd mentioned above, that things got interesting. I sent Dork in on that job since he had been the one to blast out the window. Of course he took a squad with him and one of the Crabs as transport for him and his men.

The company was on the far side of town towards the stretch of road that headed towards the nearest highway. Dork and his team found the place without too many problems. They did have to roll over a few cars that had been parked across the entrance of the company's gated compound, but when you're driving a vehicle that weighs in at over twenty-five tons a few cars aren't much of a problem. The big pain in the ass came later when they wanted to leave.

The company consisted of a combination main office and showroom and a large warehouse behind it. The warehouse included a vehicle park that had several forklifts parked in it and a couple of five ton stake trucks with cranes mounted on them. Luckily I'd sent a second driver with Dork knowing that he'd probably need him to help bring the glass and installation kit back to the facility. There was no way he was going to do that in a Crab.

Dork start things off by first sweeping the interior of the compound for any zombies. He quickly found a couple and dealt with them himself. His height, strength, armour, and weapons made him a match for any of the undead. Once the compound was clear, he had one of his men force the door on the office/showroom. The moment the door disappeared due to a couple of well placed 10-mm HEAP rounds the zombies came shuffling out. Dork let them come out one at the time and he dealt with them using his warhammer. In seconds five more zombies were destroyed. Once he was done doing that he and his team swept the office/showroom to make certain that they had gotten everyone. They had. Following that little exercise, Dork led his team into the warehouse.

The place was dark. Thankfully Dork's race had great night vision. While his men covered him at the vehicle entrance to the warehouse, Dork stepped in and he started swinging. He quickly dropped three more zombies within seconds of entering the building. They'd been attracted to the noise Dork and his men had made entering the office/showroom. After that it took another half hour to secure the place. There was no power going to the building so there were no lights and what light that came from the open doors to the building didn't reach in that far. Being the only one who could wander around safely in the gloom of the interior, it took a little time before Dork was satisfied that the place was safe. Only when he was certain, did he let people in with flashlights to start looking for the pane of glass they needed. That took another hour of hunting and looking and then loading it onto the back of a five ton stake.

As I said above leaving was a bit of a problem. The first problem was easily solved. A few zombies that hadn't gotten chewed up the day before with the flail had shown up outside the company's compound. Dork just told his men to destroy them with their swords and axes and that was what his men did. The real problem in leaving was the wrecked cars that Dork's Crab had rolled over on the way into the compound. There were four of them parked across the gateway and while the Crab could easily go over them again, the five ton stake couldn't without potentially damaging the truck or the pane of glass they were carrying. Of course it was only a problem for a minute or two. Dork solved the problem by driving the Crab through the chain-link fence that surrounded the compound. Once he had done that the five ton stake had no problems getting out. By the end of the day, Dork and his people were back at the facility and they had replaced the window with the new glass. After that my people started to relax.

While Dork had been busy doing that, I had led another team grocery shopping. I left Rory and Caitlin behind to take care of Felicity and Nimue and to watch over things for me. I also left Talbot and Danvers behind as well. I made certain that I needn't worry about anything going wrong at the medical facility. With me I took a Crab, another driver, and a four man team.

There was a standalone grocery store situated at the base of the hill below the facility on the outskirts of the town. It wasn't huge by the standards of the megastores that I was familiar with back on my Earth and in many ways it looked a lot like the kind of store I used to visit with my mother when I was a child and I knew instinctively that the contents of the store would be mostly basics like canned goods or sacks of flour. Still that was the kind of stuff that we were looking for and I was certain that the place contained everything that people up at the hospital needed to survive and possibly more. Because of its location it didn't take long for us to get there.

On the way down I ended up taking care of a few shufflers who'd made it through the town during the night and who were now trying to get up the hill. Those on the road we drove over with the Crab while those off on the surrounding hillside were taken care of with a carefully placed shot.

We used a different tack once we got down to the store and I was ready to enter it. I decided that what had worked yesterday would probably work today. I made certain that everyone was buttoned up in the Crab and then I got the driver to engage the flail. Once that was spinning about faster than a chainsaw blade, I ordered the driver to advance the Crab towards the building. In seconds the flails tore down the doors that led into the building. Once they were gone, I ordered the driver to back up a few feet and to park the Crab. Then we waited. Of course we didn't have to wait long. The destruction of the doors and the noise of the flails attracted every one of the zombies who were still in the grocery store. The bloody things just shuffled out through the torn up doorway and then they shuffled right into the path of the flails. In minutes they were all turned to pulp. It proved as easy as that. A half hour later I had the Crab power down and I led my team into the building.

Not every zombie had made it to the door so we still had to be careful moving through the interior of the grocery store and since there were no lights in the building except for a couple of emergency lights situated over exits, I ended up taking the point. The first thing I noticed was the smell. The place stank. Whatever had been fresh when the pandemic had hit was now rotting. The air was heavy with the smell. I just tried to ignore it.

I found three more zombies on the main floor and two in an office in the back. The worst one was the child zombie. While I had no problems using my sword on any of the adults that were now zombies, I just couldn't when I found the child. He had to have been six or seven years old when he'd turned. I just shot him with a round from my sidearm.

After that I found a truck and a forklift and then stood guard while my men bent their backs loading stuff. We found a partially loaded eighteen-wheeler parked at the loading dock with a tractor connected to it. We had to empty the trailer first because what had been loaded there had gone bad, but once that was done we filled the trailer up the best we could with dry goods and canned food. It took a number of hours because we were being selective and we weren't just grabbing pallets of stuff. I had actually been given a shopping list by the cook up at the hospital and I tried my best to fill it.

We did find a bonus in the process. The warehouse of the store had emergency power provided by an independent generating unit. It was almost dry of fuel but it was still running when we got there so it meant that the freezer units in the warehouse were still up and running. That meant there was frozen meat and other products there that we could take and transfer up to the hospital's kitchen freezer. That I left until the next day. The van trailer we were loading didn't have a refrigeration unit and I didn't want anything thawing while we loaded and unloaded the unit. If necessary we'd make special trips for the frozen goods.

In fact we did come back later that day and we cleaned out the place of much of its frozen meats. When I'd told the hospital cook about it, she'd begged me to go back and get it for her. She promised me a feast and I decided it was worth the trip. With the help of Rory and my crew from that day we got the freezer emptied in an hour and everything transferred half an hour later and while my men worked I spent my time killing a few more zombies just to pass the time.

Those weren't the only times we went out. I sent a Crab and a squad of men out every morning and every evening in order to deal with any zombies we hadn't killed in the first sweep through town. There was always a couple shuffling around. Some even came in from the direction of the highway. I sent a Crab down in that direction midweek but it didn't get too far. The road was congested with vehicles that had been heading away from Evanston. Most were filled with zombies who were just sitting there rotting away. The presence of the Crab set them off and Talbot who was commanding the vehicle decided that it was better to let them be. By now we knew that without food that the zombies' metabolism would slowly digest their own flesh and internal organs in an effort to sustain them. Eventually their bodies would cross a tipping point and after that the zombies would begin to die. It would take time, but with the majority of the zombies confined to vehicles or trapped in buildings with no way out, it would happen sooner than later. It was safer to just leave them alone.

So that had been my week at the facility while the good doctor had started the treatment on Nimue and now I was heading off and she wasn't happy about it. Unfortunately for her, I didn't care. Regrettably for them, our stay here hadn't been that amiable. As I'd noted above, while Dr. Gruber had proved to be cooperative and even pliable in her thinking, a couple of the other doctors had not been like minded. Their intolerance had caused some bad feelings.

"Look," I said to the good doctor, "I understand your reluctance to stay here any longer. If I was in your shoes, I'd want to be with my own people; especially if they were numerically stronger than my group. I can understand the concept of safety in numbers. However the fact is I cannot risk sending my mate to one of your safe-zones. The moment they got a look at her or Felicity there would be trouble. Your colleagues have proven that to me. I promise you that once my mate is healed I'll get you within walking distance of a safe-zone. After that, it'll be up to you."

"But you can't just drop us off without weapons and the people who know how to use them," Dr. Gruber protested. "We'll all end up dead."

"It's not my problem Doctor," I told her coldly. "I made an offer and your security people rejected it. Now they're dead and you're on your own. Of course you could take me up on my other offer. You could come with me back to Game World. It isn't that technologically advanced but truthfully you'd be safer there than here. As I've told you, from the intelligence that I've gathered, while those contaminated are beginning to rot and decay and more importantly, you still have more than nine billion of them shuffling about and I'll tell you that none of your safe-zones are equipped to whittle those numbers down. It means that sooner or later either your people will be starved out by the zombies or your people are going to have to go on the offensive and that will prove risky. Your chances are better coming with me."

That was something I had offered the good doctor once she started onto me about moving her people to a safer location. I'd suggest that they come to Game World. I was certain that most of them would eventually fit in and I was certain that the knowledge they had would benefit my people sometime in the future once we'd started down the road towards an industrial era. Just being a doctor would have made integrating them into our community worth the effort. Dr. Gruber had said no to that idea. I felt that I should try offering it again.

"No," the good doctor replied with an exasperated sigh. "My people just couldn't do that. I'm sorry but the thought of travelling from one Earth to another is just beyond our ability to accept. Most of my people still think that you belong to one of the 'free species' resistance groups like the Slav Liberation Army regardless of what I had told them to make them understand that you do not."

I was forced to leave matters at that. I needed to get back to the alternate Earth and then to Game World and continuing my conversation with Dr. Gruber was a waste of time. I bid the woman good-bye and then I walked out of the hospital and back out through the force field. Once away from the force field, Hope grabbed me and teleported me out.