“Actually, I was thinking of having my people send something along the lines of, ‘Grab some sunscreen, because I’m about to bring twenty-five megatons of good ol’ American sunshine.’”
Panic seized him like a flash freeze down his spine. He would’ve ordered the major to terminate the thing on the spot, but the threat of what its “people” would do, with all those prisoners around it, told him it had someone else on the outside; likely TERAN hackers.
“I imagine he’s got a good place to hide there,” it teased, which he knew full well referred to the Presidential bunker in D.C. “I know you don’t care about the survivors up here, but you don’t want to waste your arsenal on him just to miss. Right … Pete?”
Peter’s head flushed with impotent rage.
The Death Doll smiled at the camera again. “You know, my hacker friend may be dying to stick it to the government—no pun intended—but all I want is some friendly dialogue to clear up this whole mess and save every life I can. Oh, and make sure you bring Cynthia’s smiling face with you.” The Death Doll grinned like it had the edge, and it was right.
After a deep breath, Peter ordered his soldiers to, “Escort the prisoners into the tunnel, but leave their leadership … and the doctor.”
The TERAN nodded with a grateful grin and stared expectantly at the troops that reluctantly obeyed his command.
After he watched all but the eight he had ordered to remain get placed in the tunnel, he faced his senior agent. “Bring her,” he ordered with a nod at the girl.
“What about the launch, sir?” Gil pressed, flashing the key in his hand. “And the precedent? If you go up there, you’ll be negotiating with terrorists.”
Peter glanced down at his own launch key, feeling the heavy weight of its light body in his hand, almost glad he didn’t use it … yet. He sadly laughed. “They said they wanted to talk. That’s all I’m doing for now.”
*****
Paula smiled so widely, her cheeks hurt almost as much as her chest. While she had seen the Death Doll accomplish some impressive feats, nothing could ever top demanding an audience with the President of the United States in such a fashion, which almost made the cold of Lavon’s vault worth enduring. Dead or alive, Didi proved the power of a woman should never be underestimated.
“Damn, girl,” Gilda said with a smirk. “You get him!”
Paula chuckled as softly as she could to avoid aggravating her wound. She would’ve squeezed her husband’s hand if he hadn’t gone to find her more blankets. Then she smiled when footsteps entered the bay.
Until she saw who walked in. How?
CHAPTER 33
TÊTE-À-TÊTE
Didi stood in the center of the lab with her hands behind her back, grinning at the guns trained on her head while her weapons lay on a pile behind two more soldiers aiming at her. She was sure the troops hoped for an excuse to plug her—just like their leader—but they needed to understand what was at stake. Despite the threat they posed to her and her people, she found their stalwart loyalty admirable.
Her friends had it pretty rough, too. Despite soldiers covering them like they were Bonnie and Clyde, Cody and Heather kept glancing back and forth at each other. Rachelle kept looking every which way, silently assessing how best to attack her nearest guards while Isaac stared at the floor to avoid drawing attention. Craig held Jerri close, which seemed to comfort both of them just enough not to quiver where they sat. Hashim kept a restraining hand on Bob, who stared daggers at the closest troops.
In walked the disputed President of the United States, accompanied by what Didi figured was four Secret Service Agents, a general in a nice blue uniform, and a unharmed but surly Cynthia. Everyone seated stood up—some with assistance—as the Commander-in-Question stopped a few feet shy of Didi with a glare he had probably hoped would burn her down where she stood. She held her ground well enough with a smile, even if she was scared for her friends. Another benefit of being dead: the world’s best poker face.
The staring contest finally ended when he said, “You’re not taking this place.”
She cocked a brow at that. “Qué?”
The Second Man pursed his lips tightly. “Our medical staff examined all your people down here. I found it strange that you kept them alive. Are they decoys, or does Saul have some other purpose for them?”
Didi shook her head as if it would release the confusion, but all it did was tickle her incessant headache a little. “What are you talking about?”
“Don’t play with me,” he snapped. “How many more tearin’s with you?”
“There’s that word again,” she mused, though growing frustrated with his word games. “What does that mean? Who’s tearing what?”
“You know exactly what I’m saying,” he said with a fierce glare. “How many more of your kind are here?”
Her brows flew up so fast, she almost felt them. “There’s more like me?”
President Du Jour’s eyes narrowed. “You asked for this audience. Why don’t you just get to the point and tell me what Saul is planning?”
Didi put up her hands like a wall, which garnered a few rifle cocks and hammer pulls still aimed at her head for emphasis. “As much as I’d like to keep playing this game—not really—I have no idea what you’re talking about. I’ve never met the old Prez, sat in his lap, or anything. So, let’s pretend for just a moment that I’m a complete idiot and start at the beginning. Then, maybe we’ll have a chance of getting somewhere.”
Pete’s cold glare shifted sideways. “Suppose, instead, I put your friends over there in with the test subjects,” he dared to say, “just to prove whether or not they’re like you.”
“Then I’ll bite off a chunk of your face before any of these gorgeous young troops can pull a single trigger,” she warned him. “Then you become the next casualty of your little poison.”
Pete mildly flinched before looking at Doctor Cuteness, who looked surprised to be noticed before admitting, “It’s true, sir. The subjects are disintegrating. The pulse worked.”
Pete smiled faintly at her. “It works?” he asked, probably to confirm.
“Almost,” Didi busted his bubble, which drew his Presidential confusion back at her. “She also confirmed that it didn’t infect me, and I was out there with those sorry sacks.”
The Man Kind of in Charge glanced aside, likely at the boneheads still tonguing their cell wall.
“Now, if I caught your drift correctly, you seem to believe I’m not the only conscious corpse. Since such a thing is news to me, why don’t you fill in the blanks for me?”
“I don’t answer to you.”
“Then you’ll answer to me,” Bob shouted, his voice dripping with scorn as he shot up to his feet, held back by a petrified Hashim and at least six guns pointed at him. “I am Winter Bear, last of the Santee Sioux Reservation, where we found all of my people so badly rotted out that they didn’t even move. Your government failed to protect them—again!”
“That wasn’t my—”
“You think you saved one city and you’ve done enough? Why weren’t my people worth saving? Or even warning? What have we ever done to you to deserve such disrespect?”
Pete gazed blankly at the angry Sioux for a long time before he started pacing, rubbing his face. Whatever he was deliberating, Didi hoped it would mean her friends would be safe when all this posturing ended.
Then he looked at Didi with a forced grin, grabbed a chair, and sat down. He waved toward a chair next to her, which she almost considered forsaking until she realized it would be better to meet the mountain’s current head honcho on even ground.
She slowly grabbed the proffered chair and sat down, crossing her legs for the fun of it.
“You said you weren’t aware of others like you,” he stated calmly. “Let’s start there. If you didn’t know about them, and you never met Saul, then why would you threaten to tell him what I’m going to do?” He grinned smugly like he had caught her in a lie or something. It was cute.
&n
bsp; “My hacker found your emails,” she replied haughtily. “The Prez called you a traitor.”
“He’s the traitor,” he said more heatedly. “You have the emails. You saw what he did to himself, what he’s planning.”
Her curiosity piqued, but she kept her composure. “Assume I didn’t get that far.”
A harried breath of laughter escaped him as he nodded. “Then you were bluffing.”
“Hey, you get a bad hand, you play it how you can. Besides, my hacker’s the one who saw them. He strikes me as a staunch conspiracy theorist, but I convinced him to wait for my word. I’d rather not give it if we can come to an understanding, and that would be a whole lot easier to achieve if you would kindly tell me what the hell has been going on all these years.”
His gaze measured her carefully, searching every part of her for a lie that wasn’t there. All it did was make her more curious. He nodded again and sat back. “Okay, from the beginning.”
“Complete idiot,” she reminded him.
A laugh escaped his skeptical face. “The pandemic took us by surprise like it did everybody else. When containment efforts failed, and it just kept spreading, Saul initiated emergency evacuation for me, the Cabinet, and the Joint Chiefs. Instead of coming here like he should’ve, he hid out in the White House bunker while the military sorted it all out. The man was a Harvard grad and still couldn’t see the writing on the wall. He kept sending waves of soldiers and Secret Service agents to clean up the city and rescue civilians. Funny thing is,” he added with another sad laugh, “the damned fool managed to make it happen.”
“Sounds like a hero,” she said.
He scoffed. “Maybe at the time; I’ll give him that. Hell, Gil over there,” pointing to his balding, surly-looking general, “wanted him to nuke Chicago when it all started, but Saul held out the hope of rescuing people.”
Didi wanted to laugh in the dour general’s face, but she wanted to see where this was all going more.
Pete’s face grew cold and distant, melancholy. “When the military told him of some tech that awakened the reanimates’ minds, that’s when things went south.”
Didi traded sagely awkward glances with Cody, whose jaw wagged.
The supposed President noticed. “Something to say, Sergeant?”
Cody slowly placed his hands behind his back like the good soldier he was, still struggling to stay on his feet. “As I said, sir, I was in Chicago visiting Twentieth Group. We were examining the reanimates. I was the one who discovered what electricity could do to the zombie brain.”
A fresh coat of skepticism painted Pete’s face.
“When we reported our findings, we were told to create and test devices that could make zombie troops to clean up the streets. We were overrun before we could succeed.”
“You worked for Saul?” Pete asked as if betrayed.
Cody shook his head. “No, sir. I never even met him. After the base fell, I was on my own,” he nodded at Didi, “until I met her.”
“He’s the one who made me what I am today,” she spelled out for the debated President, “and, for the last two years, I thought I was unique. Now you’re saying I’m not the only one … and that I never have been. Tell me about that. Please.”
Ol’ Pete scoffed again. “Most of our troops got wiped out trying to clean up D.C. at first. If it wasn’t zombies, it was armed looters, rioters, and protesters. You remember that Life Over Death group that picketed the White House right before the outbreak in June of Eighteen?”
“Media blackout,” Didi and Cody said together, which made her want to laugh. She elaborated. “We lost T.V. in Chicago two days after the outbreak. All we got for a couple of weeks after was somebody’s ham radio.”
Pete regarded them strangely. “Well, they were fanatics who were convinced the plague was just a passing disease, like Avian Flu. They kept protesting our efforts to neutralize their dead family members, blocking military and police traffic into outbreak zones right up until they got eaten. If they knew about tearin’ tech,” he added with a sad laugh.
Ugh, that word again! “What does that mean? Tearing what?”
“TE-RAN,” he snapped. “Technologically-enhanced reanimate.”
“Ooooh,” she said as all the odd comments suddenly made sense. “Cute.”
His glower didn’t think so.
“So, you guys started your own Build-a-Zombie Workshop. Go on.”
He snorted. “As if it was that easy. Initial tests were deva-stating. We couldn’t get them to cooperate unless we fed them, which—” an uneasy laugh escaped him, “no. We tried everything else: bribes, drugs, threats, patriotism. Nothing worked.”
“The pain is no easy thing to endure.”
“How do you?” he asked earnestly.
She gave him a courtesy grin. “Tell me yours, I’ll tell you mine.”
The President chortled, but he quickly frowned, troubled. “Still, Saul made it work. His TERANs cleaned up D.C., restored order, and eventually corralled survivors all up and down the eastern seaboard. He wanted me to do the same over here, but all of our tests failed, especially when our most promising team tried to take over and turn this place into their lunchbox.”
That made her laugh, and he gruffly asked why that was funny. “My people thought the same of me when they found out what I was.”
He nodded. “Well, we scrapped the project and focused on vaccines, then poisons.”
“Congratulations, by the way.”
He didn’t look too pleased; more like disturbed. “Then the Summer of Nineteen came, and he started talking crazy. He claimed the plague was God’s will.”
Didi glared. “No way God would do this, or He would’ve had it written in His book!”
“Right?” he replied with a sage grin, which almost made her feel like they were bonding. That, of course, quickly died off in him when he shook his head and said in an almost desperate tone, “I tried to reason with him, but he wouldn’t listen. That brilliant pragmatist, the great diplomat; he was just … gone. Then he had himself infected and augmented.”
“Dear God,” Rachelle muttered.
“Why didn’t you tell us?” Cody asked his ex-fiancée, whose jaw wagged ruefully.
“Presidential order,” President Ramsey defended his advisor. “Only a few senior personnel, including Doctor Sitton, were privy to that information.”
Cody’s betrayed glare subsided. Doctor Cuteness still looked sorry about it.
“As a TERAN,” the President continued, “he said the plague was part of our evolution, another test we had to pass. That’s when he turned all the people he saved.”
Didi’s mouth fell open. “All of them?”
“He lost his mind,” he declared, his voice full of pain. “Dead and insane. I couldn’t, in good conscience, let him stay in power, so I convened a Twenty-Fifth Amendment committee to remove him from office. No one opposed. That’s when I was sworn in as President, and from that moment I swore I would end this plague and save our country, no matter what.”
“And that’s why you were gonna nuke ‘em,” Isaac said.
The President nodded, then told Didi, “When you first came, I thought you were one of them, and that he finally showed up, so I thought we ran out of time.”
Didi’s proverbial heart broke for all those people, but something stirred inside of her. Saul Simpson’s dark revelation resulted in devastating consequences, but in doing so he practically created a whole new species … and she was part of it. She wasn’t a freak anymore, and for a sliver of a moment it took all the pain in her brain away. It felt wonderful.
But that wasn’t true. She wasn’t a species; she was an abomination, an excruciating perversion of God’s design that only threatened the rest. Now, so was the late President of the United States, and he wanted to force the agony that returned to her on all remaining life.
Not as long as she was around!
“I’m not one of his, Mister President,” she affirmed, now believing his
claim to power as legitimate. “I’m just a glorified hooker your soldier found rotting in a baseball stadium.”
The President flinched at her self-effacing comment, then at Cody.
“I used to be known as Baby Dahl, porn star extraordinaire,” she continued. “I was trapped in Chicago when the city shut down, captured by a gang soon after, and repeatedly raped until I took my own life. I was revived and given a second chance to do something better with my … existence. Together, Cody and I saved the lives of nearly eighty people—even if we couldn’t keep them all safe from themselves. All we’ve done for the last two years—all we’ve worked for—was to give life a chance to outlast the plague. Kidnapping aside, we would’ve been fine with what you had here if we hadn’t learned about the nukes.”
He stirred in his seat uncomfortably.
She leaned forward to get really serious. “If you want to spread your zombie poison across the world, I’d love to watch you push that button. The problem is whether or not it’ll even work on these TERANs, because it doesn’t work on me. What I’m worried about, though, are survivors, people out there trying to keep living. Americans, Mister President; your constituents. They deserve your protection, too, even if some of them didn’t vote for you.”
He regarded her for a long moment before shaking his head. “I can’t believe I’m being taken to school on ethics by a corpse.”
Didi shrugged. “The Lord works in mysterious ways.”
They shared a good laugh over that, a welcome relief between the two. Every other living being in the lab remained dead silent.
Then, he asked with a mix of interest and skepticism, “So, your ethics come from God?”
“I’m a born again Christian,” she proudly replied, “and, no, the irony is not lost on me.”
“Now, how does that happen?” he asked while crossing his legs like they were on a talk show.
“Cody’s way of helping me cope with my new existence, which gave me purpose,” she said with an appreciative glance his way. “I’ve read the Bible from cover to cover a fair few times since then, and through it I’ve learned how to govern justly … and when to be heavy-handed. I also took plenty of cues from various zombie movies about survivor dynamics, but I found more sense in that little book than any other source. It taught me the value of life, struggle, cleanliness, and mercy. Whether or not anyone else wants to believe it is their business, but mine has become about protecting what God’s created to the best of my ability.”
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