Z-Day (Book 3): A Place For War

by Humphreys, Daniel

  The second MP and Guglik led them to a plain cinder-block building with a flat roof. Glittering solar panels rested on angled mounts. Miles pointed that out with a frown.

  “I thought fleet took all the tech out?”

  Guglik answered, this time, as she pushed ahead and punched a long code into a keypad set into the blocks to the right of a heavy steel door. “Sometimes it’s handy to have a reminder of what they once had. This used to be the power relay building for the whole island. We cleaned out most of the equipment and use the interior as needed.”

  She led them inside. The interior of the building was cool and dry, which was a nice change from the intensity of the early-morning tropical sun. Sandy felt a faint brush of air against his skin as he stepped inside.

  “Watch your step,” Guglik said as she hit the lights. Periodic bolt holes marked the bare concrete floors where equipment racks were once secured. Rows of fluorescent light fixtures lined the ceiling, but every other one was dark. The room was still well lit, illuminating a metal table and chairs at the center of the back wall. Ring bolts standing up from the rear half of the table supported two sets of handcuffs, an open ring on each one lying on the table while the other end latched around the ring of steel.

  “Pretty spartan,” Pete observed. Guglik shrugged.

  “It’s better to haul whatever we need in each time than risk that they might bypass the door. Personally, I wish we’d stuck a weapons locker in here but command shot that idea down.”

  “How do we want to play this?” Miles wondered aloud.

  “I’ll take lead. Guglik, you and Melanie have, uh, spoken before, right?”

  The former CIA agent grinned. “Oh, we’re acquainted.”

  “Perfect. I want you in the back corner. Stay quiet and try to look scary. Miles, I don’t want you or Sandy to talk unless I prompt you. I’ll guide the conversation as much as possible.” He turned to the MP. “Sergeant, as soon as the prisoner is secure, I’d like you to provide additional security to the medical team. Just in case. Sandy being here is a wild card, and it’s hard to predict what sort of reaction that will prompt from the rest of the islanders.”

  Miles glanced back and forth between Guglik and Pete. “Unc, what are you ready to do here, exactly? I didn’t sign up for—”

  A meek knock sounded at the open door. The group turned as Gerald led a tall, slender woman inside the block building.

  The incongruity in her appearance struck Sandy, and for a moment, he wasn’t sure he was seeing the right person. His Melanie had been athletic and curvy. She’d kept her hair in a short, low-maintenance bob. This woman was rail-thin, almost skeletal, and streaks of gray and white shot through the braid that reached between her shoulder blades.

  And then she smiled, and he knew.

  “And here I thought that Gerald had gone off his rocker. Hello, dear. Fancy seeing you again.”

  Sandy gritted his teeth. “No thanks to you.”

  “I gave you every opportunity, Alexandros. You could have been with me, in the lap of—” Her confident air crumbled a bit. “Well, luxury is pushing it, I guess.”

  Without prompting, she eased around the table and took a seat facing them. The MP hurried over and secured the handcuffs around her wrists, which elicited a throaty laugh.

  “My, my, five of you and one of me, you don’t see me as such a threat, do you?”

  “That’ll be all for now, Sergeant. Escort the professor out as we discussed.”

  “Aye, Major,” the MP said, pushing Gerald out in front of him and closing the door behind him. The click of the lock re-engaging was surprisingly loud, and Sandy flinched.

  “I’ve not had the pleasure, Major …?”

  “Pete Matthews, United States Marine Corps. And I’m here to ask you a few questions. Whether it’s a pleasure or not is up to you.”

  “Well, by all means, let’s get started.”

  “You’ll have to excuse my ignorance—I’ve only recently rejoined the Corps. For the past eight years I’ve been keeping my people alive, out there in the world you helped make. And I always wondered—what was the point? Especially now. Surely you didn’t plan on staying here forever. You had to intend on heading back to the mainland at some point. Which means you have a vaccine or some sort of cure.”

  Melanie’s tone of voice was syrup-sweet. The smile on her face was anything but. “Vaccine? That would be pointless. The organic shell of the nanovirus is long-dead. The only thing remaining in the current infected are the nanomachines, and alas, those are quite resistant to any sort of modern medicine. The closest thing we had to a cure were the nano-neutralizer injectors we used during development. And, I’m sorry to say, you can’t reproduce those without a working fab.” She folded her hands in front of her, stretching the chain of the cuffs to their limit. “We didn’t happen to bring one of those along.”

  Sandy clenched his fists but pushed past the urge to lose his cool again. Pete cocked his head to one side, then turned away from Melanie to look at him. “Cincinnati?”

  “Yeah,” Sandy confirmed. “And it’s not exactly portable. You’d have to power it up on site. That’s if everything works after sitting this long. It was temperamental at the best of times.”

  Miles rubbed his temples with his forefingers. “Yeah, not going to happen. There’s way too much activity. We barely made it out last time. Plus, you’re not talking about the office tower—there are more external points of access into the production facility, and there aren’t a ton of floors to use as a buffer space.”

  Melanie mock-yawned. “It’s delightful chatting with you all, but really, if you want to ask me for the impossible, can we get this over with already?”

  Pete’s nostrils flared. The hair on the back of Sandy’s neck stood up as the old Marine nodded and said in an icy voice, “Miles, Sandy? Why don’t you step outside? I think our friend has a bit too much to focus on with all these faces.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  May 21, 2026

  Genesis Cay, Caribbean Sea

  Z-Day + 3,137

  Following one of the corpsmen, Tish studied their surroundings as they moved through the rough village. The GenPharm refugees had arranged the collection of huts around a circular open area. A blackened iron pot hung over the central fire pit, smoldering down to the ashes even in the midday heat. The fishy aroma emanating from the pot made sense. She supposed seafood was the extent of the protein the islanders had access to, as she hadn’t seen any signs of livestock.

  “How do you usually set up?” The corpsman stopped and turned. Tish took the opportunity to glance at the name tape on his chest. “Mr. Nunez.”

  “Pretty much right here, Doctor. This is their common area. If it works for you, we’ll triage the patients so you’re not wasting your time with paper cuts.”

  She adjusted the medical kit on her shoulder. “What sort of things do you usually see?”

  “Sprains, scrapes, that sort of thing. They don’t get much sugar in their diet, so not a whole lot of cavities. Not that we could do much about teeth. Dentists, we ain’t.”

  Tish shrugged. “We’ve got one back home. We need to set up some sort of school so we can start cross-training.”

  “Outstanding,” Nunez exclaimed. “We’ve been doing what we can, over the years, and we’ve all expanded our horizons a bit beyond the job description, but more is always better.”

  The islanders had hauled larger rocks up from the beach and arranged them in the clearing. The flatter stones served as seats. Others supported weather-beaten boards, making for impromptu tables. Tish took a seat and settled in to watch as people in ragged clothing hesitantly emerged before presenting themselves to the corpsman. For the most part, she wasn’t needed. As Nunez had said, the injuries presented were simple ones, easily treated. The lack of cloth forced the former GenPharm employees to leave most of their wounds open. She idly wondered if they were taking advantage of the sea water to irrigate the wounds and prevent infection. Th
e lack of antibiotics back home had been frustrating, but at least they’d had the ability to go out and scavenge some.

  It was hard to reconcile the frail appearance of these tattered scarecrows with the knowledge that these people had coordinated to kill billions of people. She’d worried that her anger would overcome her ability to treat these people, but all she felt was a great sense of pity.

  Nunez and one of the other corpsmen hovered over a teenage boy for a few moments before turning and indicating Tish. The boy was skinny as a rail and tanned beechnut brown. If not for his shaggy, unkempt hair, he could have been any one of Val’s kids back on the island. He walked slowly, holding his right leg up off the ground, leaning on the shoulder of a woman. They looked enough alike that Tish assumed she was his mother.

  She did the math in her head. The boy would have been four, maybe five years old on Z-Day. Would he have seen any of the chaos around him, or would he have been more excited about the boat ride than the world falling apart all around him?

  The two reached Tish, and she held back a wince as she took in the swollen knee of his injured leg. “Go ahead and have a seat, son. What’s your name?”

  “Thomas,” the boy said through gritted teeth. She reached down and took hold of his ankle.

  “I’m Doctor Matthews, Thomas. I’m going to straighten your leg out. Try not to tense up.”

  “Okay,” the boy said. He whimpered a bit as she pulled on his lower leg. She worked her way up. It didn’t look broken, which probably meant—

  “You don’t look like a soldier,” the mother said. There was no anger in her voice, but when Tish looked up to meet her eyes, she saw a face heavy with exhaustion.

  “I’m not,” Tish said. “I’m a doctor. I came along to help out.” She looked back at the boy. “I’m going to put some pressure on your knee. Try to relax.”

  “You’re young,” the woman muttered. “Have they opened up medical schools, or?”

  “I was a second-year resident on Z-Day,” Tish said, distracted as she pushed on either side of the knee joint to determine if it was stable. So far so good, but when she pulled up on the thigh while steadying the calf, there was more give than there should have been. Thomas hissed through his teeth. There. “How’d you hurt yourself, son?”

  “Diving for oysters,” he said, sounding relieved as she released his leg. “Started getting some heavy waves, but I caught my foot between a couple of rocks. Bent me the wrong way.”

  “You felt a pop, yes? And it hurts on the back of your knee, correct?”

  “Yeah, to both.”

  “Unfortunately, based on a stability test and the overall swelling, I’d say you tore your ACL—your anterior cruciate ligament. Did you ever watch—” She caught herself. “No, you wouldn’t have. You’ll need to take it easy until the swelling goes down. After that, you’ll need to exercise your leg to build up the muscles. Without surgery, I’d recommend a hinged knee brace for support—your knee will sometimes feel as though it’s going to give out, otherwise.” She cocked her head to one side. “To be honest, I don’t know that we have any on hand. I’ll have to ask around.”

  “That’s—that’s it?” The mother sounded flabbergasted. “You need to fix him!”

  Tish pushed herself to her feet and tried to keep her voice calm. “I can’t, ma’am. No one can. I’m just a general practitioner, not an orthopedic surgeon. So far as I know, you and your friends killed them all off eight years ago!”

  The mother blanched, leaning over to help her son back to her feet, but Nunez stepped up beside her and took a firm hold of her arm. “You’re Elizabeth, right?”

  She tried to pull her arm away, but he had it in an iron grip. “You know it is!”

  “Hold still and listen, Elizabeth. I seem to remember you spitting in my face, not too long ago. I think you called me a bloodsucking mercenary, wasn’t that it?”

  “What, do you want me to apologize?”

  “Nah, I want you to ask the doctor here a question. It occurs to me that the only people you folk have dealt with since we found you are the military. I don’t think you have any sort of idea what your little science experiment was like for the average person on the street.” He squeezed harder, eliciting a yelp of pain, and leaned in closer to her ear. “Ask her.”

  Elizabeth swallowed, then stammered, “What was … what was it like, Doctor?”

  Tish blinked, then looked at Nunez. His once-friendly face had turned hard, but he gave her an encouraging nod.

  “The precursor flu hit the hospitals hard. At one point I think I’d worked over a hundred hours in less than a week.” She folded her arms and stared at the ground, trying to order her thoughts. “Things actually slowed down a bit, late that morning. Frannie and I grabbed some lunch and brought it back to the break room. Have you ever been so exhausted that it’s too hard to even eat? I never did finish that meal. We just sat there, not even talking. Enjoying what would turn out to be the last moment of peace we’d have for a good long while.

  “The screaming was the first sign that things were going sideways. I don’t think either one of us took the first one all that seriously. Working in a hospital back then, you saw all sorts of crazy stuff. Drug reactions, psych patients—but then it was more than one person screaming, and we knew something was wrong.

  “Frannie was the brave one. She stuck her head out into the hallway, and just as quick, she pulled back inside and slammed the break room door. ‘My God, Tish,’ she said to me. ‘They’re eating each other.’ I didn’t believe her, of course—who would? I thought she was so tired she was hallucinating. I tried to open the door to get a look myself, but Frannie fought me. She was crying and screaming, doing everything she could to keep me from opening that door.” Tish looked up from the ground and stared at Elizabeth. “It’s the little moments like that, that we all have in common. Survivors, I mean. I survived the end of the world because I ate lunch with my friend that day. If it had been me alone, I might have tried to help, or stepped out into that hallway—and I wouldn’t be standing here today.” She tried to smile, but she couldn’t find it in herself to pull off the expression. “And they’re attracted to noise, of course. But while Frannie was saving my life, she was also ringing the dinner bell. We used to bitch about the break room door. It was just this massive slab of wood, old and beat up. It would stick, sometimes—you could see a little line of light at the top where it was sagging into the door frame.

  “When the first zombie slammed into that door and bounced off, I thanked God the hospital never budgeted to replace it. Because it held, for a little bit. We knew it wasn’t going to last forever—the third or fourth time something slammed into it on the other side, it started to crack. We knew then that we couldn’t stay there. But we had nowhere to go. That door was the only way in or out. So, we hid. We climbed up on the table, pushed aside one of the suspended tiles, and got up above. Even that wasn’t an escape—you might not remember, Thomas, but in the movies, they used to show characters moving from room to room over a ceiling like that. There, though, the firewall went from floor to the true ceiling. We had maybe two feet of space between the floor above us and the tiles. And the tile grid is held up by wire—it won’t take much weight. Certainly not the weight of two adult women. The plumbing saved our asses—a big, eight-inch iron drain. We laid on top of that pipe, held on for dear life and tried not to make a sound.

  “I don’t know how long we waited up there. Long enough for them to break the door down looking for us, and more than long enough for them to clear out of the room, still hunting. With the door open, we heard the rest of the hospital die around us.” Tish reached up and wiped at the tears welling in her eyes. “Almost nine years and I still remember it like yesterday. You know what the worst part was, Elizabeth?”

  The other woman had gone pale, and she shook her head and shrugged, not knowing what to say.

  “The worst part was hanging onto that pipe for dear life and listening as they busted through th
e door into the maternity ward. I heard those babies screaming in my dreams for years, you entitled bitch. I’m a doctor—I’ll help your son because he needs it, not you. Get the hell out of my face.”

  May 21, 2026

  Genesis Cay, Caribbean Sea

  Z-Day + 3,137

  Pete waited for the door to shut behind Miles and Sandy before he turned back to Melanie. He gave her the grin that he’d once reserved for wayward NCOs. From the shift of her expression, she’d picked up on the fact that it was in no way, shape, or form a nice smile.

  “My nephew’s a bit uncomfortable with this whole setup.” He made a pyramid of his forearms and rested his chin on his clasped hands. “He’s more of a believer in redemption than I am.”

  Melanie scoffed. “What, are you going to tell me about all the people you lost that you blame me for? Don’t you think I’ve heard all that before?” She lifted her chin in defiance.

  His grin this time was more genuine. “Oh, you misunderstand me. I’m luckier than most. My family made it through. Besides—I may be willing to bend the rules a bit, but I’d have a hard time smacking a woman around, in all honesty.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder at Guglik. “She’s the one you have to worry about.”

  Melanie glanced at the former CIA agent and went a little pale.

  “You’re acquainted? That’s nice. I’d like you to keep that in mind while we talk.”

  “What are you going to ask that they haven’t already asked a hundred times before?” She rolled her eyes. “Put a bullet in the back of my head and get it over with. Or get on with the water-boarding. I don’t give a shit.”

  “Nah. That’s too easy. I’ve got a few other things in mind.” Her brow wrinkled. “I’m sorry—you thought I was the good cop because I said I wasn’t going to hit you?” He laughed. “That’s cute. See, I think command has been going about things all the wrong way with you and your friends.” Pete waved a hand. “I mean, get a load of this place. You’ve got your own island. Sure, we took away your refrigerators and your electric lights and air conditioners, but hell, it’s not like you’re stuck in Siberia, right?” Pete leaned back in his chair. “You ever watch reality TV, before?”