The third symptom was photosensitivity and since it was after midnight and she kept herself slunk down in the back row next to the old geezer, she was fine.
The fourth symptom—eye color change—went unnoticed for a good stretch of road. Because of all the weed she was barely cracking her lids to begin with and it was only when she rubbed her eyes with the palm of her hand that she noticed the black smear. It was then that felt the first rush of fear.
Despite the terrible ache in her head, she sat up quickly and tried to see her reflection in the rearview mirror. No matter how much she squinted, her face seemed small and far away.
Mr. Crenshaw, who was at the wheel, saw her craning her head back and forth. “You okay?”
“Yes,” she answered, too quickly. “I-I was just trying to see what time it is.” This seemed to satisfy him and she sat back, her paranoia rising. She had the disease, but it wasn’t so bad. The headache was nasty and yet she wasn’t clamoring for human blood. Making a concerted effort to be cool, she told herself that she only had a minor case and that it would probably clear up in a few days.
Until then she would find out who had done this to her. Yes, one of them had done this to her and when she found who it was, she was going to make him pay. She tried to spy on them from the corner of her black eyes to see which one of them had turned.
It should have been obvious except they were all sleeping. “Or pretending to,” she hissed, feeling the anger rise in her like a black wave. Quickly, she took another hit from the joint, sucking it down until it burned her fingers; she barely noticed the blisters.
She gave Darren a shove. “I need another.”
He was sitting in the seat in front of her and he groused, “Not cool, man. I was trying to sleep.”
“Just give me some, damn it,” she snapped. The shards of glass in her head were going deeper now.
He fumbled a baggie from his pocket and flipped it to her, accidentally tossing it on Grizz’s face. Groggily, the old man batted at it as if it were a large butterfly. It fell on his coat and the next thing he knew claws were ripping at him.
“What the hell?” he demanded, raising his hands to protect his face and getting scratched in the process.
“Nothing!” Elizabeth barked as she yanked the baggie open. “Nothing’s the hell. Go back to sleep and shut up!”
Grizz leaned back from her. “Your eyes,” he gasped, pointing at her face. “Everyone! Look at her eyes!”
Before Elizabeth knew it, the entire van-load of people was gaping at her. A few were too high to realize the problem and those that did were too far away to stop her as she suddenly attacked Grizz. She went for the pistol at his hip. The weapon was unfamiliar and heavy, and yet her thumb almost magically found the safety and switched it to fire.
“No one move,” she hissed, waving the gun around. “Except you, Darren. Get me a smoke, damn it.” She badly needed something to calm her down, because all of a sudden she had the near overwhelming desire to start shooting.
It wasn’t just one of them who had done this to her; it was all of them. She could tell by their wicked eyes. They all had the same wicked, wicked eyes.
No one knew what to do. Mr. Crenshaw kept driving, while next to him, Mrs. Crenshaw slipped her shirt up to cover her mouth and nose. He gave her the smallest of nods as in front of them brake lights flared for the millionth time. She nodded back and when he came to a complete stop, they both leapt out of the van, she with a piercing shriek.
For a reason Elizabeth couldn’t name, at the commotion, she shot Darren in the back of the head and then turned her gun on Grizz. He was fast for an older man, but she was fiendishly strong and although he had both hands on the pistol, she slowly forced the gun toward him.
“Don’t,” he begged.
She pulled the trigger three times, killing him. The gunshots were so loud that she thought she would go insane from the pain. In a fury, she crawled over the bodies and stepped out into the night. The three people she didn’t know were foolishly racing down the lane between the lines of cars. She almost didn’t need to aim as she emptied her magazine. Two of them were hit and their cries brought a smile to her face.
“That’s what they get,” she snarled before jumping back into the van. She needed more ammo and more weed. With fumbling hands, she rolled a joint as thick as her thumb, and with it cocked into the corner of her mouth, and the pistol in her lap, she crossed the median and drove down the wrong lane towards the Ohio border. A mere thirty minutes later, she died in a gun battle with a dozen Ohio State Troopers.
But the damage was done. The Crenshaws, both of whom were infected, slipped across the border on foot two hours later, each with a raging headache.
The infection was now heading towards middle America.
Chapter 2
1-1:13 a.m.
New Rochelle, New York
Thuy had been pulled aboard the helicopter, shuffling like a living manikin. She stared out the door as someone, or maybe more than one someone, coated her in bleach. It was only then that she began to cry. The fumes kicked the tears off and they wouldn’t stop after that.
Regardless of the tears, and the people around her demanding answers, she didn’t stop staring—or hoping—until the research facility had disappeared from sight.
Impossibly, Ryan Deckard had saved her…again. Somehow, he had battled through hundreds of zombies to shoot Eng. But there had only been that one final shot and nothing more. Why hadn’t he fought his way out of the building? Why hadn’t they seen him running out the front doors, waving his arms?
Almost in answer, Special Agent in Charge, Katherine Pennock reached over and squeezed her hand. They locked eyes for all of a second before the FBI agent dropped her chin and began shaking her head. The simple movement was a code that was easily translated: No one could have gotten out of there alive.
Not even Deckard. And yet that last shot had told Thuy that maybe he could have if he had wanted to. Deckard had been trapped in a staircase on the other side of the building. Instead of escaping, he had fought through what had been a kind of hell on earth and had given up his life for hers.
He had loved her to the very end.
Finally, she pulled her eyes from the night blurring beneath her and cried from deep within her soul. Her chest ached and her breath caught in her constricted throat. She grieved for a hero of a man whom she had loved…she grieved for all of ten minutes before a hand shook her on the shoulder.
It was one of the officers; he was pointing toward the floor of the chopper. He mouthed: We’re setting down.
A glance out the door showed Thuy that they weren’t over the R&K research facility in New Rochelle. Instead, they were dropping down on what looked like a golf course. She knew there were two or three golf courses near the facility; “near” being a flexible term in the middle of an apocalypse. Without a car, two miles felt like an impossible distance.
She wanted to question the wisdom of this, but without a helmet and microphone, no one would hear a thing she said. They dropped down like a rock and landed with a surprisingly heavy, jarring thump. Before Thuy could even blink, the power to the engines was cut and someone was pushing her back out the door and into the darkest night Thuy could ever remember. It was as if the utter blackness of space was pressing down on the Earth, trying to swallow it whole.
“You’re going to have to carry these,” the same officer half-whispered into her ear, shoving two heavy briefcases into her arms. “And this” he said, adding a camouflaged backpack to her load.
There was no use complaining, especially as she seemed to be carrying the least amount of equipment. The officers, including Major General Mark Axelrod, were draped with green bags and camouflaged rucks. They also carried rifles. One wasn’t offered to her, which made her feel decidedly vulnerable. Her only consolation was that Anna Holloway had been stripped of her weapons and was weighted down with so much gear that she looked like a small blonde pack-mule.
Alt
ogether, there were fourteen of them: seven greying officers, three Blackhawk crew members, Anna, Courtney Shaw, Agent Katherine and Thuy.
Without Deckard, Thuy didn’t like their chances. He had been something of a force of nature and she had thought he was virtually un-killable. A sigh escaped her. It didn’t seem to matter to her what their chances were; she couldn’t summon the energy to care. For the time being, she was past fear. She had one job left to her: find a cure.
It would be an impossible task in the time frame she was being given. At the rate the zombies were spreading, she had only days before a critical mass was reached. At that point a cure would be too late, at least as far as North America was concerned.
Had she known what was happening in China, she might have given up altogether.
“Keep it tight people,” General Axelrod said to the little crowd standing around him. “We have a mile and a half to go. Hopefully, we’ll only have sporadic resistance. Try to keep the shooting to a minimum, it’ll only attract more of them, so if you have to fire a weapon, make it count.”
Two of the crew members took point, while the pilot and a major walked at the rear of the formation. Thuy found herself somewhere in the middle. On one side of her strode Katherine Pennock, her M4 held easily. On the other was Anna, looking left and right, and jumping at every sound.
“Why the hell did we land way out here?” Anna demanded. “We’re still in the goddamned zone for Christ’s sake! I have a pardon and I’m supposed to be…”
“Someone shut her up,” a colonel hissed from behind them.
Anna turned and glared. The colonel was a buffalo of a man, his large head thrust haughtily out as he glared right back, not realizing just how dangerous the slip of a woman was.
Since Katherine was equally clueless as to why they had landed in the middle of nowhere, and Thuy refused to even look at Anna, Courtney jogged up and whispered, “We didn’t want to lead the President right to us. There’s a good chance his men are tracking us.”
“So? That’s a good thing,” Anna said, coming to a halt. “The President is the one that sent us!”
“He might have sent you,” Courtney explained, taking her by the arm and marching her forward, “but he didn’t send the rest of us. And if we get caught…” She had to stop as the repercussions hit her hard. “He’ll kill us all.”
Anna stopped again and stared hard at Courtney, finally realizing that they had met before and not under good circumstances—she and Eng had left her and Thuy, as well as dozens of others, to die in a state trooper’s station that was surrounded by thousands of zombies. She guessed that it was too late to apologize now.
“The President wouldn’t kill me,” Anna said, arrogantly. “Not only do I have a pardon from him, I was also sent by him personally to find the cure. He might not kill you either, Thuy.” She was lucky that Thuy wasn’t armed. The petite scientist dropped the heavy briefcases and threw a punch into Anna’s face.
Punching was not something she was particularly efficient at; the blow glanced off Anna’s cheek. The looping left hook that followed would have landed flush had it not been for Katherine, who caught Thuy’s arm.
“Stop it, Dr. Lee. This is not the time or place. There are zombies nearby.” Everyone took their eyes from the minor tiff and stared out into the dark, their guns up, waiting for an attack. Having never been in actual contact with the dead, the men were more frightened than the women, and when a moan wafted out of a line of trees that separated the fairway they were on from the next, they all jumped.
The moan ended the fight. Axelrod let out the smallest whistle and made a chopping motion with his hand, his fingers pointing south. As one, the group headed in that direction walking in a strange hunch that made them all look like beggars on a winter day. They crossed out of the golf course and slipped into an upscale neighborhood that appeared so completely normal that it looked as though the apocalypse had skipped right over it.
Other than the block being dark and deserted, there wasn’t any sign that the end of the world was imminent.
The ranking crew member, Sergeant Dave Carlton paused behind a hedge before scampering across the empty street as if he was expecting someone to start shooting at him. He looked silly in Thuy’s opinion. The dead had terrible eyesight but could still track movement. When they were near, it was better to be low and slow—and at least one of the creatures was near. She could hear a thumping from up the street that suggested one was stuck in a house.
Without waiting for her turn, she followed after the next crewmen. “We’ll be at it all night this way,” she said over her shoulder. “We’re going to run into some of them. We might as well get used to the idea.” The rest followed her in a clump, some of them cursing under their breath. Thuy didn’t care.
As she expected, they ran into zombies and no amount of sneaking could have prevented it. They were creeping through a neighborhood when Sergeant Carlton practically stepped on a half-eaten creature that had been lying in the dark shadow of a bush. It seemed impossibly alive. Its face was near featureless and looked like raw hamburger that had been left out for a week. One of its legs was straight up missing and the other had its foot chewed off.
Although it barely possessed enough of a throat to shunt blood back and forth to its brain, it still retained an unholy strength. One blackened hand clamped down on Carlton’s ankle, sending him face first into the grass.
His reaction was one of hysterics. At first, he tried to kick away from the creature, but the thing’s grip was too strong. Next, he tried to use his M4. He brought it around and very well might have shot his own foot off if Katherine hadn’t acted. Seeing the poor state of the zombie, she leapt forward and stepped down on the gun before he could shoot.
“No!” she cried in a harsh whisper. “Hold on.” Although the zombie, even wrecked as it was, had the strength of three men, the bones of its wrist were still thin and relatively brittle. Katherine stomped her black combat boot down on it, hearing a crunch with each strike.
With his heart racing, Carlton jumped to his feet the moment he was free. “Son of a fucking bitch! It just grabbed me and I…” His face froze, locked on something behind Katherine. Too late he started to warn her, “Zom…”
Something huge crashed into her, throwing her off her feet and crushing the side of her face into the finely manicured lawn of a two-million dollar mansion. It felt as though she had been hit by a car, when in reality it was only two-hundred and fifty pounds of ex-housewife with hellish black eyes, grey flesh, and a terrible thirst for clean blood. The thing’s gaping jaws came down on her shoulder with a frightful crunch.
“Shoot…it,” Katherine gasped.
Sergeant Carlton was too afraid to. Too much could go wrong; he could miss and hit her or she could get showered in zombie blood or he could bring an entire mob of them down on the little group. Instead of shooting, he lunged forward and slammed his own boot into the side of thing’s head. He connected with a sickening thud, and it would have been lights out for any normal person. The beast only turned and snarled at him.
“Jesus!”
He dropped to one knee and shot it through its wide expanse of forehead. There was no exit wound and, for a moment, as the monster knelt on the FBI agent with a stunned expression on its grey face, Carlton worried that the worst of the rumors—that the beasts were ultimately immortal—were true.
Finally, it fell to the side and Katherine lay gasping, staring up at the night sky, where the stars seemed oddly small, mere dots of light that didn’t sparkle at all. She didn’t have time to wonder why they looked so strange. The sight was replaced by the black bore of a rifle, a little feather of smoke coming from the opening. Katherine couldn’t comprehend why it was there. It made no sense.
Carlton stared down the sights and was just a bit out of his mind. He thought he had been ready for this, but he obviously wasn’t. “You’re going to die,” he stated.
“Get that away from her,” Axelrod barked, strid
ing through his stunned, huddled officers. He didn’t want to push the barrel of the gun away, afraid that touching it would make Carlton jerk. “Look at her. She has armor on. She might be okay; let’s see if you’re hurt, Agent.” Katherine rolled over and everyone leaned in and saw that there were grooves in the fabric of her ballistic vest. Otherwise she hadn’t been touched.
“I’m alright. It…it didn’t get me.” But it had been close. She could still smell the horrible rotting stench that had come from the creature’s dank mouth. Her stomach rolled, rebelling. “S-Someone spray me.”
The big bull of a colonel doused her with bleach, enough to cause her to gag, and now she was nearly puking for a separate reason. She needed a minute to recover, only they didn’t have a minute, or even half of one. The gun shot had woken the sleepy neighborhood and now the sounds of hungry moans and the awful scraping of bone being dragged across cement filled the air around them.
The colonel reached down and picked Katherine up with one hand and hurled her forward as the group ran, again in that unnecessary hunch. They sprinted for only fifty yards before either their age or the heavy loads they were carrying became too much. After that, they staggered on for a few blocks before they had to stop; in front of them was a ragged line of the dead marching across their path.
Like children, they quickly hid behind anything they could. All of them were gasping from their sprint and their fear, but when the dead got close, they covered their mouths or breathed into their shirts, all except for Katherine. She had never stopped gagging on the bleach. She tried to hold back the sound coming from her heaving throat, but the more she did, the more her body fought her.
War of the Undead Day 5 Page 3
