War of the Undead Day 5

by Peter Meredith

  Katherine frowned. “She’s probably right. Crap.”

  “Crap?” Thuy asked.

  “It’s all pretty much too late for me and I was hoping to go easy. A bullet in the brain and then a long nap. But now…she’s right. We can’t just do nothing. I bet you could figure out something. Maybe we can rig a catapult on the roof. We can hurl some homemade bombs across the parking lot and get most of the zombies to chase them. Once clear, we haul ass for where Courtney is.”

  Anna grew excited and began to jabber on about what chemicals they could scrounge from different labs and how hot they would burn. Thuy tuned her out. The whole idea was preposterous in the short time they had left, especially since they still had to deal with Jaimee Lynn, her pack of diseased mongrels, and Eng. Where were they? What were they up to? What sort of plot were they hatching? Thuy could count on it to be both crude and effective.

  “Could we take them head on?” Thuy wondered. “Anna, how many bullets do we have left?”

  “We?” Anna stepped back, gripping the M4 tighter. “I’m not giving up my guns. I know what you two would do if I did.”

  Katherine was suddenly so furious that she appeared to swell in size, her blue eyes flashing. “What I would do? That’s rich coming from you.” Anna glared right back, holding the rifle—her equalizer—easily, perfectly prepared to blow holes in the FBI agent.

  Three feet away, Thuy stood with an odd expression on her beautiful face. The vague beginning of an idea was stirring inside of her, looking to catch hold of something and gain traction.

  “It’s okay,” Thuy said, softly without direction, so that neither of the two was certain who she was talking to. “We’re all enemies, or at least we’ve all been enemies at one time. And we’ve all been allies. Circumstances have changed and twisted, so that the needles on our moral compasses are no longer as straight as we wish they were. They’re like corkscrews.”

  “Do you have a point?” Anna asked, in her usual disagreeable manner.

  The point almost drifted away and Thuy had to have silence to get it back. She snapped her fingers at Anna like she would at a cat that was nibbling on a fern. “Yes. Yes, the point is we’ve been acting out Lord Palmerston’s vision of statesmanship. To wit: ‘Nations have no permanent friends or allies, they only have permanent interests.’ Is it the same among the zombies? Yes, of course! Anna, you allied yourself with Von Braun. What’s there stopping us from doing the same with Jaimee Lynn and Eng?”

  “The fact that they want to eat us?” Katherine suggested. “That and the fact Anna here tried to murder Eng.”

  “To save you two!” Anna cried.

  “You are quite the hero,” Thuy said as she began walking towards the central stairwell. “Who were you trying to save when you sucker punched Katherine? Hmm?”

  Behind her Anna made a face as she pushed Katherine to follow. “Okay, that was a mistake and I’m sorry…” Katherine snorted. Anna ignored her. “Either way, what do you think they’ll want? Eng’s gonna want me, but there’s no way I’m just going to give up. We all know that.”

  Thuy knew that all too well. “He may be after something else entirely. The cure perhaps? And I know that there’s one thing that Jaimee Lynn wants as much as eating us and that’s finding her father.” She was at the main stairs. Low, crashing sounds echoed up at them. The stairs were being blocked; the traps were being set.

  “Jaimee Lynn! This is Doctor Lee. We need to talk.” Giggles floated out of the depths of the building, then nothing. “I have blood. Fresh, clean bloooood!” The giggles became whispers. There was a series of crashes, and then silence.

  A minute later, Eng called from very close beneath them, “Well, well, well, Doctor Lee. You must be getting nervous if you want to talk to that little runt. I’m in charge, Thuy. Me. So, who are you giving up? Anna or the spook? It doesn’t matter. I came here for the cure and if I don’t get it, I’m going to personally tear off your head and suck you dry.”

  “I…” Thuy’s chest hitched as deep in her subconscious she pictured, with dreadful clarity, the threat Eng had made. “I have the cure, but you…”

  “Already?” Eng said, cutting across her. “I printed off the results in progress and there was nothing promising.”

  “It’s a new idea,” Thuy said, thinking fast. “I’m basing it off the-the-the structure and chemical composition of a child’s brain as compared to an adults. As evidenced by Jaimee Lynn and others, children are less affected by the Com-cells. So…”

  Although she had mentioned both structural and chemical differences, she had to choose one to present to Eng—structurally, children possess an amazing number of synapses that are slowly weeded out over time. These extra synapses could be physical ways in which the infected child’s brain was re-routing mental functions around areas that were saturated by Com-cells. This wouldn’t help Eng.

  “So, I looked into the chemical differences and what jumped out at me was the fact that children’s nerves cells have not completed the process of myelination. Myelin is the fatty sheath that covers each nerve cell and increases the speed at which information, encoded as an electrical signal, travels from one nerve cell body to another.”

  “I know what fucking myelin is! What’s the cure?”

  Half a dozen ideas popped into her head and she went with the one she felt would be the easiest for Eng to understand. “I believe injections of glycolipids in the cerebroside family will attract replicating Com-cells, thereby preventing them from attaching to cranial nerve cells as they would have.”

  For a few moments, she paused in amazement. She had struck on a perfectly plausible method for delaying, if not outright halting the spread of the Com-cells. And if it wasn’t the lipid that attracted the Com-cells, it could only be one of the glycoproteins.

  A smile spread across her face and she whispered to Katherine, “It could work.”

  Eng had crept closer than she thought and he had heard. “Could? Could? You haven’t tried it? Of course, you haven’t. Where would you get glycolipids on such short notice? So, you lied. You fucking lied!” His voice boomed through the stairwell.

  “Eng, listen to me. The possibilities are there. And they wouldn’t be hard…”

  “You liar!” he shrieked.

  After the echoes died, there was silence in the stairwell. “They’re firing nukes, Eng,” Thuy said, hoping to get his mind refocused.

  “Liar! That little shit you call president would never bomb his own country. No, you are a liar and you are going to pay right here, right now!”

  The sound of his feet charging up the stairs came out of the dark. Thuy pushed Anna and Katherine through the door and slammed it shut. Seconds later, it shook as Eng crashed into it.

  “What are we going to do?” Anna said, a quiver in her voice. She shrieked a second later when Eng fired through the door. The bullet passed an inch over Thuy’s left shoulder and just beneath Anna’s jaw. Anna fired her rifle, while at the same time falling into and onto Katherine. Again, Thuy was nearly struck. She dropped, putting her back to the door as Eng knocked into it once more.

  “Go!” Thuy hissed to the two women as they untangled themselves and the door slid open a few inches. “Get between floors where it’s safe.”

  Another gunshot, this time through the crack of the door. Katherine was almost hit as she floundered back. Because the door opened toward the two women, they had no choice but to flee with bullets following them. Thuy jumped up and ran the other way, speeding leopard-like around the corner and racing for the north stairwell.

  She made it safely and stepped into the darkness, to where all safety ended.

  “I cun smell y’all, Doctor Lee.” The words drifted up low and surly.

  3- 11:28 p.m.

  New Rochelle, New York

  Courtney Shaw had seen enough video clips and movies to know that when the nukes hit, what was left of the building was going to be vaporized and blasted away into dust. She’d be exposed like a bug after it
s rock had been pulled up. Fire would roll over the land in a great wave, incinerating the crust of the earth and turning it black.

  Then the fallout would come raining down like brilliant orange sparks, searing anything left alive, and leaving the land glowing and shimmering, and at the same time grey and forever dead. It was a bleak outlook that had been both subtly slipped into her mind as well as bashed into her since childhood—she thought she was going to be sick.

  “How long do we have?” Colonel Taylor asked, his eyes sharp once more, his heavy features crowding together in a deep scowl.

  “Maybe a little over half an hour? He didn’t know for certain. The rockets can go super-fast, but they may not have been programmed to. It might be that the sub captains are giving the President as much time as possible to change his mind.”

  Taylor spat. “That weenie? No, that would take moral courage that is far beyond him.” The colonel groaned as he shifted to all fours. “Come on, Bryan. Hey, wake up! We’re about to get nuked. We have to find a way out of here.” Bryan moaned as he rolled over; his leg flopped sickeningly and he went ghost-white. Courtney started to shift as well, but Taylor stopped her. “No. Stay. You need to warn as many people as you can. Don’t worry, we’ll come back for you.”

  He said this so earnestly that Courtney decided to believe him even though there was no way they would have time to dig their way out, get to the helicopter, fly it back and pick her up. There was no possible way and yet she gave him a fat-lipped smile and picked up her phone.

  Barely a hundred miles away, the man who had started the day as a buck sergeant glanced at his sat-phone and decided against picking it up. He was now “General” Troy Ross, a position that was both easier and far more difficult than he had imagined it would be. It was easier once he had pinned the four gold stars to his collar. From then on, everyone had acknowledged him as commander of the army. There hadn’t been a single gripe, and that even included Colonel Noah Halsey, the Marine battalion commander who had been sent to arrest him an hour before.

  “Someone had to take those political dipshits down,” Halsey growled. “I hated them. I begged on my fucking knees to get my men on the line, but they kept telling me that a revolt could happen any second. Talk about a fucking self-inflicted prophecy.”

  Ross hoped his relief wasn’t too obvious. For the last hour, he had been dreading the sound of approaching tanks. There was no possibility of winning a battle against them and he wouldn’t have tried. Needless suffering was not his aim. Defeating the zombies in battle was what he was after and, so far, he had been succeeding where others had failed.

  But Lordy, it was difficult. The last line of defense guarding Boston had been hanging by a thread—in some places fewer than twenty men, women and children held great stretches of open land and it was only by a miracle that the undead hordes passed them by. In another place, a thousand men were clumped on top of each other guarding a bridge that could have been held by seven men and two machine guns. Of course, this was one of the approaches to the headquarters.

  The supply situation was worse. Generally, large numbers of soldiers could not be hidden, however bullets could be and they were greedily hoarded by everyone right down to the squad level.

  Because of his administration background, Ross chose Clarren to untangle the logistical nightmare. He in turn had sent out brave little Rita McCormick and other girls like her to act as both spies and informants. Sergeants, lieutenants and even colonels could lie to Ross with a straight face, but none would turn away a desperate girl who was just looking for a few magazines to help the cause.

  In this way, great stashes of ammunition were unearthed, literally so in a number of cases.

  Colonel Halsey had just left when the sat-phone rang again. Ross snapped it up, his stress and heart rate dropping now that he wasn’t in danger of facing an angry M1 Abrams, something few people lived through. “Hey!” he said with a grin when he realized who it was. “Let me just say that for the first time since this all started, I’m doing pretty well. Though I wouldn’t say no to a few B2s. The horde is swelling again to about seven-hundred thousand and…”

  “You’re going to have to run,” Courtney told him, her voice flat and tired. “Pull out and run, now. The President…”

  “Run? Sorry, it’s hard to hear you. It sounds like you’re in a tunnel or something. I think you might have misunderstood. We can still hold for a while longer. Those seven-hundred thousand probably won’t hit all at once. That’s how it’s been since…”

  “I said run!” Courtney screamed. “The President is going nuclear. He says he’s gonna protect Boston by laying down a string of nukes right on top of you guys. Do you hear me?”

  Ross felt a flash of adrenaline followed by a strange numbness in his hands and a burning in his ears. “Nukes?” He wanted to ask why? He wanted to scream it; however, his mind and body seemed to be coming detached.

  “Ross? Ross! Can you hear me?”

  “Yeah,” he heard himself say. Physically, he could sense that his eyes were blinking, his knees were buckling and there was a rushing noise in his ears. He saw the world give a spinning lurch, but he didn’t realize that he had fainted for some time. Gradually, he came to possess his physical form once again. A moment of embarrassment gave way to a chest-rattling fear.

  He scrambled for the phone and found it dead. “No!” he cried, glancing up at the stars. They blinked placidly down on him, just as they always had. “It was a joke. A bad joke. It had to be.” He dialed the number to the woman people called the Angel of the Airways. She didn’t answer; Courtney was busy calling every unit on her very long list and was currently telling Colonel Knowles of the 3rd Infantry Division the bad news.

  Ross had taken the call a little ways from the middle-school, and now he staggered toward it, veering slightly to his left where he had a moonlit view of what had once been a pretty little stream. After a day of fighting, it was a fetid ooze-filled bog that stretched away, glistening with a hellish sheen.

  “That was her,” he told himself. “That means it’s gotta be true. Right?” The night was silent, giving him no hint to the truth. It just didn’t make sense. They had been winning for a change. “We could’ve held the line!” That’s what didn’t make sense and it was why he was second-guessing what his gut knew to be true. He turned from the bog, knowing that the stakes were too high to rely only on his gut.

  If he pulled his men and there weren’t nukes heading his way, he would doom not just his men, but also all of Boston. Millions of people were dependent on him making this one decision.

  “Do I stay and maybe die in a great big fucking ball of fire? Do I run and maybe let the line fall for no reason?” He felt like flipping a coin and reached into his pocket. All he found was a small lollipop that he had scrounged from a bank the day before. He cursed and dialed the number again. It was busy. A string of curses burst out of him followed by a whispered, “I can’t do this!”

  More than anything, he wanted to rip off the golden stars. They mocked him and his inability to make a decision.

  He was half-panicked and on the way to fainting once more. He dialed the number a third time. She picked up and his fear spiked so badly that his intestines suddenly knotted themselves. “Is it true?” he asked, in a rush.

  She was as frantic as he was, and blurted out, “Yeah. You have to hurry, please. You don’t have much time, maybe a half an hour at the most. I have to go.”

  Half an hour. So little time. Mad fury roiled up inside him at the insanity of sending nuclear bombs, but only for a second and then his stomach unknotted and he felt the stress roll off of him. His brief time as general was over, and maybe the war was as well. He would give the order to retreat and let the chips fall where they would. “Wait. What’s your name?”

  A pause before she answered softly, “Courtney.”

  “Okay, I trust you, Courtney.” She hung up and a second later he was running for the school, glancing upwards as went. For now
, the sky was clear.

  The headquarters for the entire Army of Southern New England consisted of sixty-three people, most of whom were regular army. He hoped he could count on them. “We are about to be nuked!” he bellowed over the din of twenty conversations. Everyone gaped at him.

  “Yes, I said nuked. We have thirty minutes, so we don’t have time for anything fancy. Give out just two orders. The first is for the men to leave the lines immediately and head east at a run. The second: no vehicle will leave unless it is as packed with as many people as possible. Any questions?”

  “Nuked? For real? How do you know?”

  “It came from the White House. This is it people. I want every fucking company notified before we leave. Start with the Marines. I want a tank on every road stopping any vehicle that isn’t full. Go! Make your calls.”

  The alarm was sounded and in seconds he could hear cries and a few gunshots. Not a minute later, a nearly empty deuce-and-a-half tried to rumble past. Ross and two MPs stopped it and, without recrimination, he ordered it detained. The driver was over thirty and Ross let him stay with the truck; however, the two men with him were young and hale. He sent them running east.

  Despite the fact that his army consisted almost exclusively of ragged, exhausted untrained militia men, there were surprisingly few incidents like this. These were men who had already volunteered to fight and die. Their mettle had been tested and it didn’t matter what they had been like in their previous lives, they had found an unexpected chivalry within themselves.

  In most instances, orders were not even needed and the trucks were filled, with preferences given to the many frightened teens who had volunteered, men and women of a certain age, and the injured. Everyone else jogged along after them.

  Clarren was old enough to have snagged a spot on a Humvee. In fact, when he heard the news of the inbound missiles, he felt as though he had aged twenty years, and was hit by such intense weariness that he collapsed onto a stump. People rushed about and the zombies grew eager and slogged through the bog, but he just sat there, those years weighing him down. Finally, he struggled up and went to find Ross.