Mom just looked at me, waiting.
“Chuck, when I asked you how Sonatta managed to make potatoes deliver all that protein, you didn’t answer me. Maybe you need to tell me now.”
He swallowed hard. “They modified the DNA.”
“Yeah, I got that. In what way?”
Lifting his head, he looked me in the eye. “They added the DNA of an insect. High in protein, otherwise harmless, to modify the potatoes. These chips are the most nutritious, protein rich things you could imagine.”
“Obviously. Aside from the fact that they turn you into a freaking zombie, they’re a dream come true.”
“You don’t know it was the chips.”
“All right, let’s investigate further. What kind of insect?”
“What difference can that possibly–”
“What. Kind. Of. Bug.”
“I don’t know, some kind of a mantis.”
“A mantis.”
He looked up slowly. “Yes, a mantis.”
“An insatiable carnivore.”
He blinked, lowered his head. “Yes. Not an idea I’d have backed, by the way.”
“I’d just like to know how these chips got into the food supply,” the chief asked. “If they were still awaiting FDA approval on the GMO potatoes, then how could they–?”
“It’s voluntary,” Chuck said, sinking into a chair. “Technically, the FDA doesn’t have to approve genetically modified vegetables. Just meats. The company asked them to vet the potatoes just to be sure, but they were under no obligation to wait. I guess Mr. Reynolds got impatient.”
He’d wet his hands and scrubbed them through his hair, and he hadn’t shaved since yesterday morning. A shadow of whiskers covered his jawline. He looked sexier than I’d ever seen him look. “I’d feel better if I had a weapon,” he said. “You have anything I can borrow, Chief?”
“Townsfolk raided the place,” he said, going to a cabinet with its door hanging by a hinge. “Said they were going to fight their way out. Took everything but this.” He handed Chuck a big black rifle.
Chuck made a face. “This is an air gun.”
“It’s all I’ve got left, besides my own.”
Chuck nodded. “Any chance you have a tool kit around here?”
“Back room. Been remodeling it to make me an office, leaving room out here for a receptionist and a full time officer.”
Chuck got up and walked into the back room, which used to be just for storage. When he came back, he had a huge tool box and carton of large nails. He sat back down and started taking the air gun apart.
“Did you find any wounds on you, son?” Chief Mallory asked.
“Not a one. I’m clean.”
Mom had made coffee. That was my mother. Maybe the zombie apocalypse was in progress, but she wasn’t going to face it without a fresh pot of coffee. She knew her way around the office, too. Obviously, she’d been spending a lot of time here. She got out cups, filled them, handed them around, and put powdered creamer and sugar on the table. “You really think he’d change, if he’d been bitten, John?” she asked.
John said, “The guy in Cell B did.”
“Everyone at the party did, too. But they died first. Then changed.”
“He didn’t.” John sat on the edge of his desk. “I told you, I got the third guy out of the cell. He had a few bites. Nothing too serious, though. I put him in the empty cell, even though it’s not finished yet, and gave him the first aid kit and told him to clean himself up.” He shook his head. “Paramedics never arrived. I couldn’t call out again. Nothing I could do for the guy. He started feeling odd, he said, then just laid on his cot, uneasy, but alive. It took about an hour before it got real bad. Started thrashing around, fell on the floor and had some kinda seizure, Then...his eyes went red. His skin started turning blue. He...turned. And he didn’t die first. He just...turned.”
I turned to Chuck, blinking slowly. “I’m really sorry about this, Chuck. But...I’m gonna need you to take that shirt back off.”
He held my eyes for a long moment, then nodded, got up and started unbuttoning.
Chapter Five
Chuck didn’t have a scratch on him, thank God. I checked him over, front and back, up and down, reminding myself the whole time that he’d chosen seven figures over me.
It didn’t help one bit. I got all turned on anyway. Damn him.
If we survived this mess, I was going to make him tell me what he’d been doing, ‘cause I loved the results.
I jerked my eyes back to his again, and caught him watching me, looking at him. And I think he knew exactly what I’d been feeling because he looked a little bit smug, if you asked me.
After that, he covered himself up again, crying shame that it was, and we sat there and drank our coffee and discussed what we should do next. The Chief was for staying put until help arrived. He’d called 911. So had we. So, probably, had half the town when the creatures had come slogging and biting their way down Main Street. So help was going to arrive, sooner or later. The state police. The national freaking guard. Someone.
I didn’t spend too much time wondering why the hell they weren’t here yet. I didn’t want to think too long on that.
The goons in the cells were getting noisier, I noticed. Maybe they were picking up on the increasing amount of fresh meat (a.k.a. us) in the room. But maybe not. They were agitated now, leaning on the bars with their arms stretching through toward us and moaning a lot.
“What’s wrong with them, John?” Mom asked.
“Last time they did that was when the freaks sacked the town.” He looked toward the windows. “There were too many. Nothing I could do. I shot a few, but they just got up again. And the sounds of the shots I fired seemed to be drawing ‘em right too me. I saved whoever I could. The rest....” Lowering his head, he shook it slow.
“What do you mean you saved whoever you could?” I asked him. “There’s no one here but you.”
“They’re holed up in the diner, the few who made it that far anyway. I just came back for the rest of the ammo,” he parted the blanket to look out the window. “And that’s right where those bastards are heading.”
Chuck looked outside too, and I crammed in close to see over his shoulder. Walking corpses, shuffling their feet and staring dully at nothing, filled Main Street, moving as if they had a mission. And there were far more of them than I’d seen back in my neighborhood, more than had been at the campsite. Way more. Hundreds. Where the hell had they come from?
“How many survivors are in the diner?” Chuck asked softly. The guys in the cage were getting damn riled up. They must sense the others outside.
“Bill and Tam Reynolds and their little boy, Curtiss. Mrs. Applegate. A pair of teenage girls named Maria and Sasha.”
Bill Reynolds was the head of the local Sonatta food processing plant-slash-research facility. I’d just as soon have left him to the damned. But Mrs. Applegate was the town librarian and I’d loved her since Kindergarten. And the others were innocents. “We’ve got to get them out of there.” I looked where Chuck was looking. The zombie horde was veering off the road, heading right for the diner. It was like they could smell a meal. Or hear it. Maybe the survivors had made some noise.
“How the hell are we gonna get over there?” Mom asked.
Chief Mallory took a walkie-talkie from his belt and keyed it. “Bill, you reading me?”
“Right here. Are you seeing what we’re seeing?”
“I am. Take all the weapons you can carry and head for the roof. Be fast. There’s access through the kitchen in back, a set of those drop down stairs. Make sure to pull them up behind you. Don’t shoot unless you have to. They’re drawn to noise.” Then he turned to us. “Come on, this way.”
We followed the chief into the back, where he paused in front of a door, opened it very slightly and peered out into the alley between the sheriff’s office and the building next door, which was a bank, and the only thing between us and the diner. Then he closed t
he door again. “There’s a fire escape on the outside of the building. Only way to the roof.
Every building in our town of two or more stories had a fire escape, not to mention a fire hose connected directly to the town’s emergency water reservoir, and an axe on every floor, roof included. There’d been a fire that had wiped out the entire village before I was born and they’d taken precautions when they’d rebuilt. You couldn’t take access to water lightly when you lived in the desert.
“We need to go out there and climb the fire escape ladder,” The chief went on. “And we need to do it silently, without being seen or heard.”
“Or smelled,” I muttered.
“Two at a time, all right?” We all nodded. “Chuck, how you coming with that air gun?”
Chuck snapped the final piece into place, picked up the rifle and got to his feet, holding it like he was ready and able to use it. “It’ll shoot anything from railroad spikes to sheetrock screws, Chief.”
“Holy shit,” I muttered.
He looked at me. I looked away, giving my head a shake. It was bad enough my town had turned into zombie central, but it was really starting to look like my geek of a high school sweetheart had turned into an action hero as well.
At least the timing on that was good.
Chief Mallory looked at Mom. “You got your weapons, hon?”
“I’ve got the .32,” she said, pulling it out of her jeans and holding it up. “Suzy’s got the Glock.”
Yeah, Mom had changed too. I guess I shouldn’t have expected my hometown and everyone in my life to go into some kind of stasis, just waiting for me to return again. But this was a bit much.
I heard a gunshot in the distance. Apparently the folks in the diner had found it absolutely necessary.
“We’ve got to go now,” Chuck said, taking me by the arm.
So we did.
The distance from the rear exit, to the end of the alley where the metal ladder was attached to the side of the building was only about forty feet, but it felt like a thousand. Chuck insisted Mom and I go first. I told him to go suck an egg and sent the chief with Mom, leaving Chuck and I to watch their backs. The chief didn’t argue. I knew he wanted to be the protector and all, but I’d seen the way he looked at my mother. Nothing was going to pry him away from her side until this thing was over.
I got a little warm and fuzzy over that. Far as I knew, she hadn’t had a relationship with a man since my father had left. If her new confidence was anything to go by, Chief Mallory was good for her.
But I was still kinda pissed she hadn’t told me.
We followed the two of them down the alley, then I watched one direction with the “Glock” (Yesterday, I wouldn’t have known a Glock from a cannon and found it disturbing that, now, I did) raised and ready. Chuck took the dangerous end, the end of the alley where it spilled out into the street. He was within sight of the creepers, should they look in his direction. Him with his modified nail shooting air gun. Hell.
As soon as mom and the chief were halfway up, he jerked his head at me, indicating I should follow. There was no point in arguing with him. I went up next.
Moving rapidly, but silently, up a metal ladder in black pleather boots, while carrying a handgun, is no easy task. I made it to the top in time to see Chuck mounting the ladder and starting up himself, moving slower because of the rifle.
Something moved at the end of the alley, and from the top I looked that way. The damn creatures were shuffling past the open end in droves. All they had to do was hear that gun clang against a ladder rung, or catch movement in the alley, or a whiff of us, or however they operated, and Chuck would be an appetizer. Dammit.
I was near the front, so I could look into the street as the sun rose slowly over the distant red rock formations and sprawling desert. Dawn spilled blood red over Main Street, illuminating the freak show. “Jeeze, there are dozens of them. Where the hell are they all coming from?”
“They’re our neighbors, Suzy.” Mom was beside me, but her attention was back on that ladder. Chuck had reached the top, and he and the chief were bending over it, doing something. I don’t know what, I couldn’t see, and couldn’t spend much time looking. I was mesmerized by the throngs of them in the street, all of them moving north, toward the edge of town. And now that Mom had said what she had, I started recognizing people. My high school gym teacher. A teller I recognized from the bank. The local veterinarian.
A lot of them were blood and goo smattered. Not rotting, the way you see them in zombie flicks. Why would they be rotting when they’d only been dead, if you could call it that, for a matter hours? A lot of them had chunks bitten out of them or limbs missing or their insides spilling out through gaping holes in their bellies. They were blue. Purple in places. Their hands, especially. The ones who had hands. Their eyes were dull, unfocused, and bloodshot, and since they were sloppy eaters, they were mostly dripping with gore. I figured they must feast on us living type folks until we turned, and then move on to someone else. So almost none of them were intact. Probably the only intact ones, were the ones who’d changed from eating those mutant potatoes, in chip form.
Then a couple of them looked our way, right at Chuck and the chief leaning over that ladder.
“You’ve been spotted, boys,” I said, moving to Chuck’s side, gun drawn. Okay, maybe he had ditched me for seven figures, but he’d also laid down his handy nail rifle, and I was going to watch his back. I’d think about why I cared so much later.
Or maybe not, because what I saw when I looked down the ladder scared me so freaking bad I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to think about anything else again. “Jesus, Chuck, they can climb.”
One of those things was clambering up the ladder, one flailing arm following the other, grabbing a rung, pulling itself up. Slow, but steady.
I pointed the gun.
“Don’t!” Mom snapped, grabbing my wrist. “You’ll bring them all back here. Put the gun down and help them.”
Chuck and Chief Mallory, I finally realized, were pushing and pulling the ladder where it was attached to the roof, working the bolts looser and looser with every shove. I joined them and so did Mom.
There were three of the creeps on the ladder now, crowding each other, knocking each other down, falling, then climbing again. And they were making progress, dammit.
I pushed and pulled harder. The first set of grasping, purple tinted hands gripped the edge of the roof. I stomped them with my boots, but it didn’t even flinch. Mom let go of the ladder and pulled her handgun, while Chuck gave one last mighty push. The ladder gave, and crashed to the alley below. A bunch of them crashed with it.
I leaned over, braced my hands on my knees, and fought to calm my racing heart. Chuck put his hands on my shoulders. “You okay, Suz?”
“I’ve never been so scared in my life,” I told him.
“Neither have I.”
I lifted my head to look him in the eyes. “You’d never know it to watch you. Jeeze, Chuck, when did you turn into Jack Bauer, anyway?”
He smiled a little, probably flattered. Okay, he should be. Let him have that one. I had to look away, because if I didn’t I was going to end up falling into his arms like some swooning lovesick female. Two buildings down, I saw people on a rooftop, waving at us.
Chief Mallory was on the walkie again. “Knock the ladder down, Bill, they can climb. Hurry, before they figure out you’re up there.”
I watched, saw the group, one man (the detestable Mr. Reynolds, a.k.a. Chuck’s new boss,) and four women, two of whom must’ve been the teenage girls the chief had mentioned, spring into action two roofs over, while a little boy cowered near an air vent.
“We’ve gotta help them,” Chuck said. “They can’t knock the ladder down. That buliding’s newer. The bolts won’t be all rusted out like these ones were.”
I looked at the building between us and them. There was a ten foot gap between one roof and the next, and they were pretty much the same height. A long ways t
o jump, especially over the horde of undead cannibals in the alley below, clamoring for a meal. What the hell were we going to do?
Chapter Six
Chuck spun in a slow circle, looking for something, anything. Maybe some stray boards we could use to make a bridge or–
“The ladder,” he said at length, looking down into the alley where the ladder we’d stupidly sent crashing to the ground lay amid the dead. They were snapping their teeth and pawing at the sides of the building. “Dammit, it would have made the perfect bridge, if we hadn’t dropped it,” he said.
“Yeah, well we did drop it, so think of something else, Chuck.”
“There is nothing else.”
I shook my head. “Then we’re going to stay up here until help arrives, and hope it’s in time to save us. All of us,” I added with a look toward the roof of the diner. They were all still working on their fire escape, while the little boy and the aging librarian stood arm in arm, looking on.
“One of us has to go down there and get that ladder.”
“And by one of us, you mean you,” I interpreted for him, and I shook my head. “There’s no way down. And even if there was, you’d be zombie meat in two seconds. And even if we could avert those two scenarios, the ladder would be too heavy to carry back up.”
“Jeeze, Suz. Negative much?”
I shot Chuck a scowl, but he just winked at me and looked around. Then he pointed at a big glass case mounted to the inside of the adobe facade on the front of the building. Behind the glass case were a fire alarm and a heavy duty hose, rolled up neatly on a wheel. A small axe hung beside it. Chuck walked over to it, grabbed the axe and smashed the glass. Then he yanked the fire hose out and carried it to the roof’s edge, unrolling it behind him as he went.
“I can climb down the fire hose, tie it around the ladder, and climb back up. Then we pull the ladder up here.”
I stared at him like he’d grown a second head. “Who the hell are you and what have you done with my favorite science geek?”
Three Witches and a Zombie Page 26
