“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
