“I don’t understand. We made this synthetic disease and infected ourselves with it?” Halverson shook his head in confusion.
“The US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity told the Erasmus center not to publicize the results of their findings lest terrorists might create the disease in their own labs and use it in biological warfare against the US.”
“What happened? Did Erasmus publish their results and a terrorist concocted the disease in a homemade lab and contaminated America?”
“No. The Erasmus results are still classified.”
“Then what happened?” Halverson couldn’t get his head around Coogan’s intel.
“The unthinkable happened. An equipment malfunction. The highly toxic man-made so-called zombie virus escaped into the atmosphere.”
“We did it to ourselves!” exclaimed Halverson, unable to keep his voice down.
Victoria turned to look at him with puzzlement.
“That’s why our boss Mellors and DCI Slocum don’t want anyone to know about this,” said Coogan. “Absolutely nobody must know. I shouldn’t even have told you, but I had to tell someone. It’s just too ghastly to keep bottled up inside me.”
“Does the president know about this?”
“I don’t know. Only a handful of people know about it.”
Floored, Halverson said, “I can’t believe this is really happening.”
“We—”
Halverson heard a commotion over the line. People were shouting in the background. Shots rang out. Halverson heard a loud bang as though Coogan’s phone had hit something hard like a table or the floor.
“Coogan?” said Halverson.
“Who’s he talking to?” asked someone in the background.
Halverson thought he could hear Coogan groaning something into his phone’s transmitter. Halverson strained his ears to make out what Coogan was saying. No soap. Two more shots rang out. Coogan stopped groaning.
“Who is this?” somebody said into Coogan’s handset.
It wasn’t Coogan, Halverson realized.
It sounded like the NCS deputy director’s voice, decided Halverson. Scot Mellors himself. But it was hard to tell from just a couple of words. Halverson was torn between deciding to reply or remain silent.
On the one hand, this might be his boss he was talking to, figured Halverson. On the other, this was definitely the guy who had either shot or was complicit in the shooting of Coogan.
Halverson didn’t answer. Whoever had killed Coogan would obviously do the same to anybody who knew what Coogan had known—and that now included Halverson.
Halverson ended the transmission.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
“Who were you talking to?” asked Victoria.
“My source,” answered Halverson, still shaken, putting away the satphone.
“Did you find anything out?”
“It’s not just California. The whole world’s infected with plague.”
Victoria stopped the motor cart. “Then where are we gonna go if no place is safe?”
Reba, Mannering, and Becker pulled to a halt behind Victoria.
“What now?” said Becker.
“He says the whole world’s got plague,” said Victoria.
All eyes turned to Halverson.
“Who says?” asked Becker.
“My source,” answered Halverson guardedly.
He had to watch how much he told them. What Coogan had just told him was eyes-only intel. Only a person with the highest clearance could gain access to it. Not only that, what Coogan had just revealed over the phone had got him murdered. If Halverson informed anybody of the intel, he would be putting that person’s life as much at risk as was his own already.
“I heard you say something about the president on the phone,” said Victoria.
“The president is apparently safe.”
“At least we have some government left,” said Becker. “That’s encouraging.”
Not if they’re out to kill you, thought Halverson, the idea of Coogan’s murder at the hands of Agency personnel fresh in his mind.
“Who told you this?” Reba asked Halverson.
“I have a source in the government.”
“Yeah, but who?”
“Journalists aren’t allowed to reveal their sources.”
“But this is an emergency. We need to know if we can trust this source.”
“She’s got a point,” agreed Becker.
“Why can’t you tell us?” asked Mannering.
“There’s an unwritten rule between journalists and their sources,” answered Halverson. “Journalists don’t ID their sources unless those sources want to be ID’d.”
“If we don’t know the ID of this source, how can we know if what you’re telling us isn’t bullshit?” said Reba.
“You have to trust me.”
“Famous last words,” said Becker.
“I went to the Columbia School of Journalism. I know about the ethical rights of journalists.”
Halverson did actually attend Columbia on a scholarship to their renowned School of Journalism. That was also where the CIA had recruited him.
“Balderdash,” huffed Becker. “I always get ticked off when I hear reporters talking about ethics. You people have the mores of snakes. You overstep the bounds of privacy every day in your jobs as high-paid hacks and then you have the gall to say you’re ethical.”
“The people have the right to know the truth.”
“They don’t have the right to inspect my anus.”
“I think I’m gonna be sick,” said Reba, forming a mental image of Becker’s words.
“You’re a public figure,” Halverson told Becker. “You must have known when you got into that line of work that you would lead a fishbowl life that would be scrutinized, publicized, and dissected, whether you liked it or not.”
“Not to the point where you reporters trump up charges against me just to sell copy.”
“Whatever,” said Reba. “The fact is, if we don’t know the ID of this source, why should we put any stock in what he says?”
“I’m just relating to you what I was told,” said Halverson. “You can believe whatever you want.”
“I know firsthand how you hacks devoid of ethics operate,” said Becker. “You’ll turn over every rock to see what crawls out in the name of ‘truth’ and the people’s supposed ‘right to know.’”
“I’m not telling you what to think.”
“If JFK was alive today, I can’t imagine what kind of dreck about him you guys would be digging up and exposing in the name of ‘truth.’ You guys weren’t so self-serving and full of yourselves back in the day.”
“I don’t care about any of this,” burst Victoria. “I just want to find Shawna.”
“But if the whole world’s infected, where do we go?” said Reba.
“If this, if that,” said Mannering. “I’m tired of ifs. We gotta go somewhere, no matter what.”
“There’s one of those things in the alley,” said Reba.
Halverson scoped out a narrow alley on his left. Skirted by apartment house garages, green Dumpsters, and blue recycling bins, the pothole-pocked alley was uneven and sorely in need of new asphalt.
A thirtysomething shirtless reedy male was opening a blue plastic recycling bin, tipping it to one side, poking his head inside it, and rooting through its contents twenty-odd feet from Halverson.
Clad in scruffy jeans, the male had a hirsute face and scraggly, dirty hair.
“We should split,” said Mannering. “There’s probably more of those things in the alley.”
“He isn’t one of them,” said Halverson. “He’s a homeless guy.”
“Look at him,” said Reba. “He’s a filthy mess. Worms are probably eating his dead body right now.”
“If he was one of them, he wouldn’t be Dumpster diving.”
“There you go with the ifs again,” said Mannering. “No more ifs, ands, and buts.”
�
�Hello!” Halverson hailed the man.
The man pulled his head out of the recycling bin. He looked toward Halverson.
The guy looked out of it, decided Halverson. His spaced-out brown eyes took in Halverson. Then they took in the sight of the grotesque head impaled on a stick protruding from the back of Mannering’s cart. The guy freaked out.
“I tell you, he’s one of them,” said Reba. “Look at those staring, whacked-out eyes of his.”
“There are a lot of infected creatures in this neighborhood,” Halverson warned the guy. “You need to watch out.”
“Just another day in paradise,” said the vagabond. He bowed his head and clutched his grizzled, ragged, begrimed black hair with one hand.
“They carry the plague.”
“It’s always something.” The man resumed pawing through the refuse in the recycling bin.
“There’s no point in recycling,” said Reba. “You won’t get paid.”
“So what else is new?” The man plunged his head back into the blue bin.
“Do you want to join up with us?” asked Halverson.
“I don’t want that stinking bum sitting next to me,” said Becker. “He’s probably covered with lice and bugs.”
“No!” said the man into the bin, his voice echoing in the plastic chamber.
“Thank goodness.” Becker heaved a sigh of relief.
“He’s totally out of it,” said Reba, gazing at the transient.
“Let’s beat it,” said Mannering.
Something fell out of the sky and thudded on the sidewalk in front of Halverson. He started.
The six-foot-four blonde creature now sprawled on the sidewalk in a yellow and green, flowered print dress had broken at least one of its legs when it landed and was encountering difficulty trying to stand up, it looked like to Halverson.
Halverson craned his neck upward.
A three-story avocado stucco apartment house bordered the sprung sidewalk. Another creature was preparing to take a hike off a third-story balcony.
A black fortysomething male in an ill-fitting off-the-rack suit, this creature was even taller than the blonde. The creature’s black jacket hung open and its glossy gold lining was torn and dangling over the creature’s trousers. The bespectacled creature had black hair and a black mustache, both tinged with white. The ghoul was climbing over the wrought iron balustrade that bordered the balcony.
Mannering didn’t wait for the thing to jump. He drove his cart to the blonde creature on the sidewalk, snapped up his cleaver from the footwell, and whacked off the blonde’s grimacing head.
Driving forward he narrowly missed being crushed by the second creature, which chose to take a dive off the balcony at that moment.
Halverson and the others rode back to Wilshire.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
When they reached Wilshire they saw two teenagers bashing in the display window of a computer store with two metal wastebaskets they had procured from the sidewalk.
The window shattered. The teenagers banged out the remaining glass jags that protruded from the window stiles, tossed away the wastebaskets, and bolted into the store.
“Looks like looters up ahead,” said Victoria.
“At least they’re not creatures,” said Becker.
“I suppose I should bust the punks,” said Mannering.
“Aren’t you forgetting something?”
“What?”
“What are you gonna do with them after you bust them? The creatures control the jailhouse.”
“I could shoot the punks. I’m within my rights as a police officer to shoot looters.”
“They’re just kids,” said Reba. “And besides, we did the same thing.”
“What do you mean?” Mannering asked suspiciously.
Reba hemmed and hawed, wary of informing him about the money in the sacks they were carrying. “When we stole the phone battery from the phone store.”
Mannering pooh-poohed the notion. “That was just petty theft. Those boys are jacking laptops, it looks like.”
“What about the food we stole?”
“That was petty theft, too.”
Reba rolled her eyes. “You’re blind to your own faults.”
“I don’t see why they’re ripping off the laptops,” said Halverson. “What do they plan on doing with them? The Internet’s down.”
“They’re not gonna use them,” said Mannering. “They’re gonna sell them.”
“So who’s gonna want to buy them with the Internet down?”
“The fact of the matter is they’re robbing the store. That’s all I know.”
“The owner of the store is probably dead by now.”
“That may be. That’s not my call. I don’t make the law, I enforce it. Looting is illegal.”
“Those kids can’t buy the laptops legally. How can they if there’s nobody here to buy the laptops from?” asked Reba.
“That’s true.” Mannering scratched his bald pate. “I never thought of that.”
“We need to save our ammunition for the creatures,” said Halverson.
“Maybe the kids want to join up with us,” said Reba.
The two teenagers burst out of the store. Each of them cradled a foot-high stack of laptops in his arms. They took one look at Halverson and the others and bailed out in the opposite direction.
“I guess not,” said Halverson.
“Are you going after them?” Becker asked Mannering.
“If this was any other time, I would, but not the way things are now,” answered Mannering. “We’re just like those kids. No different.”
“You finally realized that?” said Reba.
Mannering turned on her. “I’ve been wondering. Where’d you guys get those sacks you’ve been carrying around with you?”
Halverson, Reba, Victoria, and Becker said nothing.
“Maybe you guys did a little shoplifting yourselves, huh?” said Mannering.
He shifted around in his seat and pulled the nearest moneybag in the back of the cart toward him.
Her eyes wide, Reba exchanged looks with Halverson.
Mannering unfastened the rope tied around the neck of the moneybag. He peeked inside.
“Lookee, lookee what I found,” he said. “Whose money is this?”
“Ours,” said Becker.
“What are you gonna do?” Reba asked Mannering timidly. “Bust us?”
“If it really is your money, why would I bust you?” answered Mannering. He dug around in the sack with his hand. He withdrew a stack of hundred-dollar bills secured by a rubber band and flipped through them. “This ain’t exactly chump change.”
He stuffed the stack of C-notes back into the sack.
“I suppose you want in,” said Becker.
“Being a police officer isn’t the highest paid job in the world.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“You can have Felix’s share,” Reba told Mannering.
“You’re all forgetting one thing,” said Halverson.
The others looked at him.
“That money’s useless if nobody’s left alive,” he went on.
“We’re seeing people here and there,” said Mannering. “I’m sure we’ll find more.”
“In any case, it’s better to have money than not to have it,” said Becker.
“Who said that?” asked Victoria. “Shaw?”
“It was Hemingway in To Have and Have Not,” answered Mannering.
“It wasn’t either of them,” said Becker. “It was me. You never know when we’re gonna need money.”
“We always need money,” said Mannering.
“You’re not gonna bust us?” asked Reba.
“For what? For guarding our money?” Mannering shook his head. “No.”
“Hank, I like the way you think,” said Becker.
“Times they are a-changing.”
“The more they change, the more they stay the same, like the French say.”
“Th
is calls for a celebration.” Mannering popped open a can of beer.
“How can you fight those things if you get soused?” said Halverson.
“You mean, how can I fight those things if I stay sober?”
“He’s got a point,” Becker told Halverson. “It’s hard enough on the eyes just looking at those monsters when you’re sober.”
Mannering shotgunned warm beer. He pulled a face and wiped suds off his mouth with the back of his hand.
“This stuff’s getting warmer by the minute,” he said. “Oh, well. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.” Belching, he crumpled and tossed away the empty beer can.
“I hope you’re wrong about that,” said Becker.
“Do you really think we’ve got much longer to live, Senator?”
Mannering’s words put a chill in the air. An uneasy silence followed.
“That reminds me,” said Becker. “I need to catch some z’s. I’m beat.”
“I thought you were hungry,” said Halverson.
Becker scooped up an open plastic bag of Fritos from the rear of the motor cart. “I’ve been eating these things. They’re not very filling, though.”
Halverson gazed up at the sky. It was still hazy with smoke borne by the offshore breeze.
“We’re not gonna be able to sneak in any rack time,” he said. “It looks like it’s getting lighter. Dawn must be right around the corner.”
Becker looked up.
Two seagulls gyred and cried overhead on the lookout for food, gliding in the currents of gusting Santa Ana winds.
“At least there’s some sort of life still left on this planet,” said Becker, watching the swooping gulls.
“The plague must not affect all living things,” said Halverson.
“Maybe it doesn’t spread between species.”
“I don’t have any problem sleeping in the daytime,” said Mannering. “You get used to it when you work a lot of graveyard shifts like I do.”
“We don’t have time to sleep,” said Victoria. “I have to find my child before it’s too late.”
Reba yawned and stretched her arms over her head. “I’m beat, too.”
Halverson picked up on a herd of the living dead massing about a block away to the east.
“We can’t sleep here,” he said. “We’ve got guests.”
Zombie Apocalypse: The Chad Halverson Series Page 46
