Sabre Dancing with the Dead Ch 28
Tokonosu, April 22 20xx
Day 12.
0920
With a final shove, accompanied by the sound of crashing furniture, Kohta forced the roof top door enough to squeeze through. The first thing he saw was a man in a business suit, lying beside the pile of desks, filing cabinets and other junk used to block the door. As he came round the pile, the man managed to lever himself up on one elbow, and croaked something. Kohta had to crouch down to hear him repeat it. His eyes widened as the man told him there were 11 others there as well. Then he asked for water before falling back on his back.
Kohta moved away from the door as the rest of his team exited the stairwell, and he told them to go check out the others he could now see lying down in various spots. That done, he pulled his canteen from his battle harness and handed it to the man lying before him. The man drank so fast he choked and coughed before he could drink again. He drained half of Kohtas' two liter canteen in one go.
Around him, Kohta's team went from body to body checking for life signs. Of the eleven on the roof, only seven were still alive, and they were comatose. Littered around them were a few dozen empty water bottles, empty packets of snack foods and some empty bento boxes. Kohta's team started pulling out their canteens and dribbling water onto the lips of those still alive. As they were doing so, Takashi's group managed to bust through the other stairwell door. Kohta immediately hollered for them to assist.
Gradually, the other six returned to consciousness, and they too sucked back the water. Meanwhile, the man at Kohta's side asked how many of the others were alive. He seemed to collapse in on himself when Kohta told him.
"And my wife?" he asked.
Kohta asked round, and found that of the other six, two were women who both managed to whisper their names as their dried out throats responded to the life giving water. As the names passed back to Kohta, the man sagged down on his back in relief. Apparently, one of them was his wife. Luck was with him and her.
"May I ask who you are sir?" Kohta asked him.
"My name is Miyamoto Tadashi.
"Oh my god, you're Rei's parents, right?" Kohta exclaimed.
"Yes we are. You know Rei? Is she OK?" Tadashi asked.
"Yes sir. She is just outside the building with our other team. I'll get her up here as soon as I can. Rest easy, we have the place secured. I'll have them bring up more water and rations too." the chubby teen said as he moved away to use his radio.
As he walked over to the front of the building so he could look down on the APCs, Takashi walked over to speak to the older man.
"Rei will be so happy to see you, sir."
"Takashi, she is really OK? I had no way to reach her. Things here went to hell almost immediately. If she called, I never heard her, the phone services went nuts, calls were breaking up, and when I tried to call her, I wasn't able to get a signal. Thankfully, my wife was here in the station doing some paper work when it all came apart but we both feared for our daughter. We didn't know if she was dead or alive." the man explained.
"I know sir, Rei tried to call you an hour or so after it all started. She could hear you but you couldn't hear her. We were stuck up on the school roof by the astronomy lab. All we could hear were sirens all around and screams from people being torn apart." Takashi acknowledged. "My friend was bitten. I had to put him down when he turned." His head dropped as he relived that moment. Then he snapped out of it and continued. "But never mind that for now, we will take you back to our base. You will all be safe there."
Very shortly they heard a female voice hollering "Mama…Papa!" as Rei came charging up the stairs. She burst through the door and stood for a moment searching. When she saw her mother and father she rushed over, dumping the canteens and food she was carrying, and dropped to her knees, crying and hugging them both. Everyone else grinned and high fived each other. One part of the mission was a success.
Kohta stood back, watching the joyful reunion when his radio squawked. Shinji was calling him to tell him that they all needed to be a lot quieter, and that he was turning the nixies back on for a bit as the deaders must have heard them and were making their way back to the station.
"Yokai." the newly minted squad leader replied, and then turned and quietly told everyone to stop making noise as it was drawing the walking corpses again. Then he took Takashi and Saeko aside, and told them to keep an eye on the survivors, while he went down to talk to Shinji about their next step. He was sure he already knew what their next step would be, it was the how to do it that concerned him.
He stopped at the front door of the station and had a good look round before moving into the open. Quickly he moved to Shinji's vehicle and climbed up on the deck. Shinji handed him a canteen, and he took a good long drink before giving the Sergeant a SITREP. Shinji was quietly pleased with the way Kohta was working out. He had the makings for a good soldier and a good leader.
"So Kohta, what do you think we should do next, and how should we do it?" he asked the young man.
Kohta thought for a moment and then spoke. "We have 7 more people to transport, all of whom are not in great shape. I think we should scrub the second half of the mission and return them to our base. The only question is how to do that. The APCs don't have that much space as they are fully crewed and the survivors are too weak to sit up anyway. We will likely have to carry them down to the units as it is."
"Agreed. We can't split up and send your team back, we'd have no support if things went to hell at the school. Therefore, we'll RTB and either go out later today to the school or first thing in the morning. Now, how do we get the survivors back? Suggestions?"
Kohta nodded. "I had a look into the parking compound while I was up there. There is an ambulance in the compound. It has it's hood up, so it likely was left behind because it wouldn't start. I suggest we hook it up to one of our APCs with cables and pull it back to base. One of us can drive it, and work the brakes."
"Sounds like a plan Kohta. Let's see about getting it set up."
"Shinji, there is also another Police vehicle in there. It looks like one that a special weapons and tactics group might use. Maybe we should check it too. Who knows what useful things might be in it? If it's worth it, we do have two APCs to tow with." Kohta pointed out.
"Alright, you head back upstairs, and get them ready to move. I'll have a couple of my people handle the compound. The nixies are doing a great job; the little bastards are still way off there. If we keep it quiet getting set up, we should have no problems getting the survivors and drivers into the trucks and dragging them. I think we'll put a couple of gunners in each of them just in case. You and I will keep top sentry and make sure the dead stay away. Before we go I'll give you a quick briefing on the M-2.
Plan settled on, Kohta headed back into the building to get the survivors read to move. He also had to tell Takashi that his part of the mission would be on hold for the time being. He hoped his friend would understand.
In the meantime, Shinji briefed a couple of his team members, who quietly got into the car park by entering the station and then exiting via a steel fire door leading to the parking lot. They carefully checked out the entire lot for deaders trapped when the gates were close. They found two, both civilians, and dispatched them with solid blows to the skull.
They first checked out the ambulance and found it to be fully stocked. Apparently, the sortie from the station at the onset of the disaster had been so chaotic no one had bothered to take anything from it. Little had the people known what they were walking into. They checked the ignition, and lucked out. The key was still in it. They would be able to unlock the steering with ease this way.
Moving on to the boxy vehicle that Kohta had thought might be a SWAT vehicle, they found it stripped bare. Too bad, but as a people mover it would do the job. This one didn't have a key. They would have to find it or bust the steering lock. Time to speak to the survivors to see if they knew where the key might be. The two headed back into the station and upstairs just in time to assist in getting the first of the survivors down.
All of them were in rough shape, but they were able to come down the stairs with help. Kosaku mentioned the missing key to Kohta, who was assisting Rei's father down the stairs. Tadashi immediately had them take him to the radio room, where the keys hung on a wallboard. The ground floor was trashed, and there were blood smears everywhere. The survivors visibly shuddered as they once again saw the area where so many of their friends and colleagues had died. The keys were quickly found and Kosaku took off to get the big panel van unlocked so they could load the survivors.
Kohta had taken Takashi aside on the roof, and told him that the last half of the mission would have to wait. Takashi was torn between wanting to continue, going himself alone if necessary (although Kohta figured hell would freeze over before Saeko would let him go alone) and knowing it was the logical and safest thing to do. In the end, he nodded his head and went to help Rei's mother down the stairs.
Out in the parking compound, Kosaku and his buddy had got the truck and ambulance ready to roll, and had brought the tow cables in from the APCs, hooked them up and were ready to load and then hook up when the APCs came.
The first of the survivors were assisted into the SWAT van and made as comfortable as possible in the stark steel interior. A couple of Kohta's squaddies stayed with them, one of them at the wheel. The others were loaded into the ambulance, again, two of Kohta's men stayed with it. Outside the compound, the nixies were blaring, and the deaders had no interest in anything but the horns blowing just out of reach over their heads. Seeing that all was ready, Kohta radioed Shinji to get the two APCs into position to tow. Shinji signaled "Wind em up" and the two diesels fired up.
Watching the deaders, Shinji made sure that they were not moving back to the station. Satisfied that they were still out of earshot of the diesels, he signaled his replacement driver and Saya to back into the compound and position themselves in front of the two dead trucks. After a bit of backing and filling, the two of them lined up close to the trucks and the cables were shackled to the tow points. Moments later, the last of the rescue crew had boarded their vehicles and Shinji motioned for them to head out slowly.
He had left the nixie switches mounted to a fence post, and they were still blaring as the APCs moved towards the ones to the south. The northern ones were of no concern but the crowd to the south was getting pretty thick. As the APCs closed on the crowd, those deaders farther away from the nixie heard the diesels and turned towards the new sound.
Shinji spoke quietly over the radio, calming his people. "Ok, we are going to do this nice and slow. Ease into them, and they will be shunted aside. On the other hand, they end up under the wheels. You have all been on the driving course and know that they are not an impediment to movement. The only thing we have to watch is that the towed vehicles don't bounce around too much. We keep moving at a steady pace, until we are clear of them."
"Yokai."
The APCs looked like tugboats pushing up a bow wave as they slowly advanced towards and into the crowd of walking corpses. As Shinji had said, they either disappeared under the nose of the carrier or bounced off the sides. Some of them managed to get in between the APC and the towed unit. Those also ended up under the wheels but here it was a tad scarier as the trucks didn't have the weight of the armored beasts and shimmied and wobbled as they slowly move through and past the crowd.
After a tense few minutes, they were clear of the major mass of deaders and were able to boost speed for the trip home. The most difficult part was for the two drivers of the towed trucks. Judging when to step on the brakes to keep the cable from becoming too slack took some concentration. It would not do to have the brakes burn out before they got home.
It took just about 3 hours to get back to the yacht club, taking their time so as not to burn out the truck brakes. After a while, the drivers got used to it and nursed the brakes, only using them to take up what slack might develop. They never kept a steady drag on the cable, but since the ground was sloping down towards the water they did use them a good bit. Thankfully, they lasted long enough to make it to the club.
The gate watch saw them coming and started up a nixie at the far end of the compound. The APCs came up to the gate and made a hard turn along the tsunami wall. This allowed the trucks to stop close to the gate. Once they were in position, everyone shut down, and waited while the nixie pulled the deaders away. Half an hour later, everyone was inside the compound, and Shizuka and the dentist were looking at the survivors. Their biggest issue was dehydration, and that was handled quickly.
Shinji went off to debrief Saburo and Wolf, while a crew went back out to strip the ambulance of everything. Shizuka was ecstatic at this find. The survivors recovered gradually and by the time dinner was ready they'd started to move about under their own steam. Rei stuck close to her mother and father, telling them of her experiences trying to escape from Fujimi.
After a time she approached Saburo and asked about getting a spot for her parents to live. One big enough for the three of them together. She was tired of being alone. Saburo walked out onto the docks with her, and together they picked a nice cruiser that would do nicely. That done, Rei went back to the small boat she'd been staying on, and tidied it up. Taking her personal effects, she shut the cabin hatch and carried them to the new boat.
After dinner, Tadashi and the other survivors detailed their experiences. Shinji and Kohta then told the others of what they'd seen, and how their mission had gone. What had worked, what needed changing before the next mission. All things considered, this one was a success. Incomplete but a success nevertheless. Tomorrow they'd head out to see about Takashi's mother.