Plagued States of America (Book 3): Plagued: The Ironville Zombie Quarantine Retraction Experiment

by Better Hero Army

  “Get a noose, kid,” Hank said, yanking open the closet door. Inside were several noose poles as well as padded sleeves and neck guards to go over jackets and vests. Hank assessed a couple and tossed a pair to the soldier, then another to Tom. “Put those on.”

  “I know how to handle biters,” Jones complained.

  “The doctor doesn’t have another hit of that curative if you get bit again,” Hank said to Jones. “Put the sleeves on and let’s go. You too, kid,” Hank said to Tom. He dragged out four poles and started for the door. “Come on, time’s a wasting.” Hank thrust a pole into the soldier’s hands. He put another noose pole by the door and pushed his way out into the cold again.

  Tom sighed and plucked his jacket off the chair.

  “You two stay here,” Jones ordered the women as he slid on the pair of padded arm guards.

  “I want to see this,” O’Farrell replied, slipping the strap of the camera over her head.

  “Like hell,” the soldier said. “Stay here where it’s safe.”

  “Like hell,” she told him.

  Tom yanked the arm guards over his own jacket and strapped the neck guard in place. Penelope tugged on his arm and he looked her way.

  Zombies near. Danger.

  “How can you smell that from in here?” Tom asked. She pointed to her head. “Oh, you just know. Well, I don’t disagree. Do you want to stay here?”

  Penelope shook her head.

  “Then I’ll bring a little extra protection with us, just in case,” Tom said, picking up the shotgun from where he had left it on the floor.

  Eight

  The frigid air didn’t bite as hard as Penelope expected when Tom opened the coach door. He led her out and down the ladder onto the gravel embankment on which the whole train rested. Penelope saw the grayness of the outside world through a small window in the darkness behind them. Everything surrounding that window was black stone hidden by the shadows of the cave. Ahead of the train was bright light that shone yellow over a deep, long expanse. The others stood at the edge of the light.

  The air wavered in temperature, and with the warmer pockets came the smell of diesel choking out every other scent. The slow and unpredictable breeze pushed hot exhaust over them from the top of the train. Even the chirping, grinding sound of the engine at idle wavered with the winds.

  Penelope caught brief echoes of the childrens’ chorus between the lulls of the growling engine. She understood their tone; wails of terror and confusion.

  “I’m not running over any children,” Houston said to Jones. His breath didn’t fog as he spoke. Only the wind brought the cold. Penelope held her hand out to feel warmth emanating from the walls themselves.

  “They’re zombies,” Jones replied.

  “They’re still people. They’re children.”

  “You make a magazine with naked zombie women on the cover,” Jones pointed out.

  “They’re not naked,” Houston snapped. “They’ve got clothes, and they’re models.”

  “Zombie models,” Jones replied.

  “They were models before they were bit.”

  “Huh?”

  “That’s how I got the idea in the first place. I brought one of them in and the registrar told me she was that model Shyla, you remember her? Bah, before your time, but that’s when I got the idea. I had her disinfected professionally. No scars. And she’s trained—not slab trained—she knows the difference between people and a meal.”

  “If she can string three words together, she sounds like the perfect date,” Jones said.

  “Ah, stuff it, soldier boy. I’m not running over any children, and if you shoot one, you’re walking home.”

  Tom put a hand up to fend off anymore banter. “How many more tunnels will we be going through?”

  Houston continued to glare at Jones, who stared back with steady stoicism.

  “How many tunnels?” Tom asked, stepping between the two.

  “This is the only one we’ll have trouble with,” Houston said.

  “I asked how many,” Tom told him. “They’re all trouble.”

  “A few more, but this is the Duncan Tunnel.”

  Tom shrugged and shook his head.

  “It’s the Duncan Tunnel. A mile long with vent shafts for limited light and aeration. All the other tunnels are short. They don’t make good hiding places. I always have trouble coming through here because it’s warm in the winter and cool in the summer. Funny, though. It used to be only adults. A few hits of the air horn ran them off.”

  “A few hits of the shotgun will do the same,” Jones interjected.

  “No guns,” Houston snapped. “Those are people in there. Children!”

  “They’re biters,” Jones replied.

  “Not by choice,” Houston said slowly.

  “Then what are you proposing?” Tom asked. “Drag them out behind us? They’ll just come up behind us when we’re not looking.”

  “No,” Houston said. “We’ll put them in the cargo holds like I was saying.” Houston pointed toward the middle car, the one with the berths Tom and Penelope saw the other zombies in.

  “Up in those nice living quarters? With your cover models?”

  “What the hell were you doing in there?” Houston growled at Tom.

  “We were heading for the kitchen, but ran into your harem.”

  “You didn’t hurt them, did you?” Houston asked. He was angrily concerned, stepping closer to Tom.

  Penelope growled by Tom’s side.

  “They’re in their rooms,” Tom replied evenly. “What are you carrying biters on board for, anyway?”

  “You work at the kennels,” Houston snapped. “Would you put my girls in there?”

  “Can we stop arguing and get this over with?” Hank yelled. “Catch and contain.”

  “Fine,” Jones said.

  “And don’t worry about room,” Houston added. “There are eight deep cargo bays on each side. Two can fit in each compartment. I’m going to go move the train up closer to the first clutch. You boys do the rest.”

  No one argued. Houston nodded and started back toward the engine.

  “Why do I get the feeling he forgot to mention something is going to be inside one of those cages?” Jones asked.

  “Seriously,” Tom agreed.

  “No one works alone,” Hank put in. “We all catch and carry back down the same side, together. Ladies, we’ll need your eyes both ways while we do it. Come on, let’s get this over with.”

  A light on the engine came on, enough for them to see the length of the train front to back. Hank led them all out in front of the snowblower. With its headlights on, its mouth appeared even more sinister, as though it were alive, and craving for them to step in its way. The children stood clustered together a few hundred feet further into the tunnel, at the edge of the train’s light. It looked like a small clutch of only five or six, but they were so close together Penelope couldn’t tell. They did that when they were frightened or cold, clutching each other for comfort and warmth.

  O’Farrell knelt down to take photographs of their advance. Penelope stood behind her, watching front and back as the train began to creep up the tunnel behind them.

  “Here,” Tom said, handing the shotgun to Penelope. “Shoot it in the air if anything comes sneaking up behind us.”

  They nodded to one another and Tom followed Hank and Jones.

  “Just grab one and pull it out,” Hank yelled. “They’re blind in the headlights.”

  “Yeah, well so am I,” Jones shouted.

  The train chirped and lurched forward behind Penelope and O’Farrell. They began moving forward with the men to stay ahead of the ominous snowblower. As the train pushed its way further into the tunnel, it felt as though the walls narrowed, becoming only wide enough for the train to slip by if Penelope leaned her back against them. She nudged O’Farrell’s shoulder to get her attention. O’Farrell looked back with alarm and got up to walk deeper into the tunnel and to stay ahead of the slo
wly trundling train. The growling diesel drowned out the wailing of the children, and the scent of zombie was everywhere in the tunnel now that she was ahead of the diesel fumes. Penelope could only rely on her sight. It worried her because she knew it was her worst sense. In the stretching and shrinking shadows cast by the moving train, everything came alive.

  The men reached the clutch of children and Hank made the first catch. He stepped to the edge of the group, swung a noose over a child’s head, and pulled it gently back with its hands clutching at its neck. Penelope touched her own neck. Peske used to throw a noose over her, too, every time he let her out of a cage. A noose in the morning to go from the duck to her cage on Biter’s Hill so that everyone could gawk at her. A noose in the afternoon to go with him for lunch. He liked using her to keep people away from the hot dog stand while he ordered a half dozen for them to share. Even veteran hunters kept a respectful distance as he casually held the pole over his shoulder and placed their order, not paying attention to Penelope as she growled at anyone getting too close. Then another noose in the evening on the way back to the duck, where he would put her away for the night. Even a noose when she went to the bathroom or washed at the river’s edge. Sometimes he would let her noose go to help her with the shampoo, or to give her some ketchup for the hot dog, but it was always around her neck outside.

  Tom made an awkward lunge and missed his first target. Hank called him back and traded poles, giving Tom the child Hank already caught, then Hank went in for his second catch.

  The train crept closer to Penelope and she looked back to see it only a few yards behind. O’Farrell kept walking, leaving Penelope alone with her memories. The closeness of the train startled Penelope and she jumped ahead, landing on uneven stones. Her ankle turned and she pitched forward.

  She had been carrying the shotgun in both hands the way Tom taught her, one hand near the trigger, one hand on the stalk. The extra weight of the weapon helped pull her down. She turned slightly in an effort to free her hands, but the ground came up at her too fast.

  The shotgun erupted as the butt hit the gravel, her finger still trapped over the trigger. Boom! The noise echoed like nearby thunder, rumbling through the tunnel even over the sound of the closing engine. Beneath her she saw the wooden cross ties that held the tracks together. Penelope turned her head to see the snowblower coming close. It loomed with a menacing intent to grab up her legs and scoop her into its maw.

  She screamed. Her own voice scared her, it came so loudly. She rolled away from the tracks just as the train clanked and screeched to a stop only a foot away. Her heart raced, pounding harder than any time in her life that she could remember, which dislodged a memory of a time more frightening, and for a moment the barrage of activity played itself out in her mind with no regard to her frazzled emotions. Being near death had a way of bringing back buried things, and for Penelope it was the vision of a black woman in a white lab coat hovering above her, a white mask over her nose and mouth, and her hazel eyes staring down on her through clear plastic glasses.

  “Okay twenty-two, let’s see what you do,” Doctor Kennedy said as she turned a needle toward Penelope’s chest. Penelope felt fire burning through her body, an acid that washed through her veins until her heart stopped beating and everything went dark.

  Nine

  “What’s her name again?” Kennedy asked as she rolled across the floor on her stool. She wore a white lab coat, her face masked behind white cloth and a clear plastic shield. Her hands were covered in black, nitrile gloves.

  “Twenty-two,” a man said from across the room. He stood next to a long counter, measuring out a liquid into several vials. It was the blood they had just drawn from a needle still protruding from Penelope’s chest.

  “No, no, no,” Kennedy told him, picking up a folder from a tray next to the table that Penelope was strapped to. “She has a name. I saw it in here. Oh, here it is. Hope. That’s right. Well, I sure as hell hope this one works. You probably do too, huh?” Kennedy asked Penelope as she slid next to Penelope’s legs again.

  The tool Kennedy held in her hand began to buzz again and she put it against the front of Penelope’s ankle. It was cold and biting, like icy teeth that gnawed at her skin. Penelope began to moan again, a wail of distress, the kind that usually brought others to her. None came. None could hear her.

  “Do you have any tattoos?” Kennedy asked over her shoulder to the man.

  “You asked me last time, ma’am. No. None.”

  “Well, I do. I had this one done on my ankle, and it hurt like hell, but look at this biter. I’ll bet you five dollars she doesn’t even realize I’m doing this. The damned disease blocks most of their pain receptors.”

  “Most, but not all, right, ma’am?” the man asked.

  Doctor Kennedy was silent, but the buzzing continued, and so did the gnawing on the front of Penelope’s ankle. She tried to squirm, but her feet were secured in some kind of metal box that kept her from wiggling anything more than her toes.

  “Are you sure she’s not feeling this?” the man said as he put the vials down on the tray next to the table. Penelope was rigidly secured from head to toe, tilted slightly on her side so that she faced both Kennedy and the man.

  “Not pain, no,” Kennedy said, letting the buzzing stop. Penelope took a deep breath and let it out, relieved that the tingling subsided a little. She didn’t like that thing the doctor used. “Can you read these?”

  “Twenty-two, twenty-two. Yeah, nice work, ma’am. Once this virus is put down, you’ve got a career ahead of you in a tattoo parlor.”

  “Once this virus is put down, I’ve got a lifetime of research just figuring out how it happened in the first place. Look at her. She looks younger than the day she was infected. There’s got to be something useful in all of this, don’t you think?”

  “I think we’re all ready, ma’am. Have I missed anything?”

  “What are the oximeter readings? Turn the screen toward me. That’s good. Oh, she’s looking really good. Let me get these mixed and we’ll start. Bring me the...yeah, that.”

  The man carried a small, sealed jar to Doctor Kennedy and handed it to her. She put it down and switched gloves before picking it up again. She carefully stuck a small needle into it and measured out one dose after another, squirting it into the vials and capping them to shake them.

  Penelope wailed again, but still, no one could hear her.

  “Did you ever see that movie, The Thing?” the man asked. “Every time you mix, I always think of that scene, you know the one with the needle in the blood.”

  “It was a wire.”

  “Oh yeah, that’s right. He heats it with a flame thrower. That was so scary when I was a kid.”

  “Are you scared?” Kennedy asked, squirting another plunger full of amber liquid into Penelope’s crimson blood.

  Penelope moaned.

  “Yeah, it’s a little freaky.”

  “You’ve got a gun. If anything goes wrong, I’ll give you the signal, and you shoot her in head. As long as her saliva doesn’t get in your blood stream, you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

  Kennedy put down the last of the vials and the needle.

  “Are you OK? You ready?”

  “As ready as I’ll ever be.”

  “Alright,” Kennedy said, rubbing her hands together. “Looks like we’ve got everything lined up and ready.”

  “Ma’am, I’ve been wondering about the tattoos. Why do we do it?”

  “We had a setback early on. One of the specimens didn’t take, so they put him back, and then three trips later caught him again. They couldn’t tell it was the same man, so we started marking them with permanent ink.”

  “Why the ankles?”

  “Because when you grab a leg to look at their ankle, their feet don’t try to grab you back,” Kennedy said somberly. She picked up a small square device from the tray and held it in front of her mask. She opened the file again and stared at it as she talked into the device.
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  “Doctor Danielle Kennedy, Rock Island lab facility, December sixteen, specimen notes for Hope, Penelope, female subject, age at time of missing persons report: nineteen, current age: twenty-four, citizen of the US, weight: one hundred nineteen pounds, height: sixty-seven inches, blood type: AB—I wish we could find a specimen with O-negative, but that’s like asking for lightning to strike where you want it. What else do we have here? Resident of St. Louis, obtained by standard aerial reconnaissance and capture, designation: specimen twenty-two of forty on December 13 after all blood work found no significant medical conditions that might impede result analysis.

  “Procedure today will be a series of ten DHT-16 intracardiac injections, consisting of scaled doses starting at 5 CCs DHT-16, 5 CCs adrenalin mixed with 40 CCs of specimen’s own oxygenated blood, with regular increases of 5 CCs DHT-16 in each subsequent injection with final dose of 50 CCs DHT-16, 5 CCs adrenalin. For this procedure we’ve already prepared specimen with a 24-gauge, long spinal needle into the ventricular chamber, inserted between the fourth intercostal space between the ribs.”

  Penelope moaned as Doctor Kennedy wiggled the needle sticking out of her chest.

  “Specimen shows mild blood stasis with low oxygenation and cardiac function normal for post-infection subjects, albeit higher than average.”

  Kennedy took a deep breath and put down the file and recording device.

  “Go ahead and prep the first needle,” Kennedy said. She held out a hand, waiting for the man to suck Penelope’s own blood back out of the first vial. Kennedy stared into Penelope’s eyes, her head slightly turned to match her angle.

  “I always wonder what they’re thinking.”

  “Ready,” the man said, placing the needle into Kennedy’s hand.

  “First intracardiac injection at time 11:36 A.M.,” Kennedy said, placing the long needle into the tube. Penelope watched as it slid down the tube into her chest.

  “Okay twenty-two, let’s see what you do.”

  Fire surged through her body, coursing from her chest and up her neck, out to her shoulders, down toward her legs. Her whole body seized, rigid as stone, her teeth gnashing against the bite guard and muzzle. Her flesh seared as though crisping against an open flame, or melting from the lava that her blood had become. As the pain increased, her vision faded until there was nothing but the white of the room. Nothing but solid white and tremendous pain.