by Jack Wallen
“Jamal, I have to let her know where we are. If she…”
Before I could take in a breath to complete my next thought, Jamal had a microphone in his hand and was broadcasting a message.
“Echo and Morgan, will you please make your way to the recording studio as quickly as possible.”
Jamal sat the mic down and looked to me for some sign of approval. “Hopefully the zombies haven’t also evolved such that they can understand the English language. If so, well, we’re fucked. If not – we celebrate the little things. What’s the next move Cap’n?”
Next move? Was he serious? I had no next move. My next move was cowering in the corner until this all went away. Or at least it would have been – had the world not been counting on me to save its ass. So instead of doing what I’d really like to do, I had to come up with some sort of bad ass way to keep the monsters neatly swept under the bed. Unfortunately, the underneath portion of the bed was already jam packed with horror.
On the screen, both Echo and Morgan were clearing out of the room they were occupying. As they moved, I did my best to cycle through the monitors to track them.
“They’re coming our way. It worked!”
And then it happened. Just as Echo and Morgan were about to turn the final corner that lead the home stretch of their journey to safety, irony pimp-slapped them across the face and planted a screamer in their way.
“Oh fuck!” My voice leaped from my mouth and was sucked dry by the soundproofing on the walls.
I reached for the microphone to shout out some random, probably worthless, command to Echo, when the girl went Ninja-style commando. She dropped to a crouch and, when the zombie was near enough, leaped up and scissor kicked the undead monster’s head into the crook of her right knee. When Echo went down, so too did the zombie; only when the zombie went down it was to the tune of a broken neck and severed spine. The screamer lay, motionless, on the ground.
“How in the name of Kick Ass did she – ” Jamal questioned anyone or anything that cared to hear.
“Homeless Ninjas.” I muttered, knowing Jamal wouldn’t understand the reference.
Both Echo and Morgan ran off again. I continued cycling through the monitors until the two of them were right outside our door. I swung the gateway to freedom open and gestured for the two ladies to enter. As soon as they were beyond the threshold, I had the door closed and locked.
“Where’s Josh? Have you seen Josh?” Morgan was near hysterics.
I ran back to the monitors and started cycling through the cameras. The only moving bodies to be found belonged to the undead.
“Wait! Who’s that?” Echo screamed and pointed over my shoulder at the fourth window in the second monitor.
There was a man walking slowly through the hallway. He didn’t have the gate of a zombie, but wasn’t in panic mode like any rational human would be, given the circumstances. None of us, not even Jamal, recognized the man. When a pack of screamers zoomed past the man, completely ignoring him, everyone in the room gasped
“Did anyone else see…” Morgan whispered the very thought that was clanging and banging around in my skull.
The strange scene moved outside of the camera range, so I continued cycling through the camera feeds. No Josh. Morgan was visibly shaking. Tears welled in her lower eyelids. I knew that look and I knew the emotions behind that look.
Loss.
It had become my closest bedfellow over the last year. Loss seemed the only constant in my life and always reminded me how fleeting life and humanity were.
“What do we do if they find us?” Echo was crying. Crying was good, it meant the girl did know fear after all. Fear was, at least, some assurance the girl was alive, aware, and human.
She raised a good question. I had assumed the walking dead wouldn’t be capable of finding something they couldn’t possibly hear. That assumption was based on how much the standard zombie relied upon hearing. But if there was one thing the Mengele Virus taught me was that nothing could be counted upon. Now that zombies could sprout bone-hard armor, who’s to say they couldn’t regain their sense of sight back in full force?
Like a bolt of lightning, an idea hit me.
“Jamal, tell me this underground city has a public address system.”
Judging from Jamal’s grin, he knew exactly what I was planning and his answer to my question was a solid yes. He didn’t even bother to grill me on my plan. Instead, Jamal simply walked over to a console, typed in a few commands, turned to me, and grinned.
“Their ears are yours. Take up the mic again and speak your commands. This feed is everywhere, not just the rooms.”
He could read my mind. What more could a woman want?
I grabbed my trusty microphone, turned the volume to eleven, cleared my throat, and began speaking. At first I spoke little more than gibberish and non-sequiturs. Eventually, however, for whatever reason, I started reciting the Preamble to the US Constitution.
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
The sound spilled out from everywhere and shook the walls. The glass of the room vibrated and nearly anything that wasn’t bolted down rumbled to the floor in a massive collection of chaos. The monitors told a similar story, only instead of pencils, trinkets, and various implements of work, it was the undead that collected together to form a union with chaos and loss.
“Bethany, what’s happening?” Echo was by my side, staring at the monitors.
“They follow the sound of my voice, but the sound just leads them to the next room with a loudspeaker.”
I couldn’t believe it was still so easy to confound the beasts. It was just like Munich and France – a simple sound to lead the monsters away and astray. But unlike Munich, Father Time and Mother Nature had a few tricks up their sleeves to help even the odds. Just as I thought my little plan a resounding hit, the hideous sight of the next phase of zombie evolution appeared on the monitor.
“Oh my God. Bethany, are you seeing what I’m seeing?” Jamal’s whisper-thin voice surprised me from behind.
On monitor number three was the single most bizarre sight the apocalypse had yet to offer. The unknown man we’d spotted on the monitors earlier was standing in the center of a room, holding up a hand. Behind the man was a small collection of boners – stopped and staring directly at the man’s upheld hand. The mutant zombies seemed to be waiting for some sign to continue on. The be-suited man looked around, spoke into a phone, lowered his hand, and continued moving forward. As soon as the stranger began moving, the boners followed suit.
“Is he…” Jamal started.
“Controlling them?” I continued. “It looks so.”
There was no way. The undead couldn’t be controlled. Chaos wasn’t made into anyone’s bitch. Not the undead, not the Zero Day Collective, not even me. Chaos answered to no one.
“I don’t like this. I don’t like this one bit.”
Before I could continue on, a phone chirped. It was Morgan’s. With lightning-quick reaction, she answered.
“Josh? Oh my God! Are you okay? Please tell me you’re okay. Where are you?” Morgan pulled the phone away from her mouth and looked our way. “He’s still here. He said he’s hiding in what looks like a laundry facility. We’re in Bethany’s recording studio. Can you make it here? Why not? Okay, just wait where you are. If you get a chance, try to make a break for us.”
Morgan continued filling Josh in on our situation. It was becoming quite clear the two of them had much more than just a working relationship. By the time I realized that, I had a greater appreciation for the need to get Josh to us in one, uninfected piece. Besides, the man was large and we could use all the muscle we could get.
Problem. How in the Hell do we guide someone to us, when we seem t
o be little more than caged animals.
A raging hell storm of sound jerked me out of my thought. I had experienced a seemingly infinite chorus of screamers and legions of moaners; but nothing could compare to the soul-suffering sounds of what was running free in the halls of the underground city. At that moment, I would have given anything to be surrounded only by zombie 1.0. I could look the original in the sour-milk eye and know, with a certain level of authority, that I could survive the ordeal. What was waiting on the other side of sanity this time, I wasn’t so sure.
“Oh my God!” Echo’s voice pierced through my skin and straight to my nervous system. When I looked up, I realized why her voice threatened to crack the cloud and make it rain glass shards. Standing on the other side of the studio windows were three of the bone-armored zombies. The low rumble of rage shook the glass.
It was clear they knew we were inside the room, but the boners made no effort to crash our secret party. Not a single rock-hard hand was raised in an effort to break down the barriers separating the us from the them.
Jamal’s sweaty palm grabbed my forearm. “What are they doing Bethany?”
How could I answer that? I knew the world seemed to look to me as the single-most scholar on the zombie race. But I was not the zombie whisperer. I couldn’t put my hand to the glass and mind-meld with the undead.
I could, however, pull one last trick out of my hat.
Very slowly I stood and backed over to the main console and sat in front of my laptop. With just a few keystrokes I was logged onto the machine that contained a sampled copy of the Obliterator sound. Using the secure copy command I had the MP3 file on my laptop and queued up for blast off. With every loudspeaker cranked up to levels that would make Motorhead proud, I spun up the file and forced it into playback mode on the broadcast console.
The beautiful hatred of the Obliterator poured out of every speaker in the underground city. As soon as the noise tunneled its way through the ear canals of the boners, the beasts dropped to their knees to worship the great God pain. With the zombies mid-supplication, we could easily open the door and skip our way to freedom.
We could. But walking through a hallway filled with monsters born of nightmares wasn’t exactly the easiest task for those not washed in the waters of heroics. During my time with Jacob Plummer, I pulled off such bravery. Jamal? Echo? Morgan? I wasn’t sure if they were made from the same stuff.
“It’s working Bethany!” Echo hurrayed.
“What happens next?” Jamal didn’t surprise me with his questioning nature. “Does the noise eventually kill them? I mean… more than they already have been… killed?”
The awkward sentence had an equally awkward answer – awkward in the fact that it wouldn’t ease the situation in the slightest. Before I could voice said answer, a moment more bizarre than any I had witnessed to date occurred. The strange man we’d seen in the video feed walked through the madness in the hall and right up to the door to the broadcast room. It seemed everything just stopped – time, sound, the universe.
And then, he knocked on the door.
Knock, knock, knock.
As if he were nothing more than our next door neighbor coming to ask for a cup of sugar or invite us to a barbecue.
Everyone in the room exchanged looks.
Knock, knock, knock.
Before my brain could wrap itself around the situation and form any sort of conclusion, the door splintered at the handle and was forced open. The stranger stood in the doorway, his right arm extended out towards me.
“Phone for you Bethany Nitshimi.” The voice from the stranger wasn’t quite right. The words that spilled from the mouth were a chorus of various discordant monotones, but seemed without life. When my eyes finally focused on the face of the man, it became clear that nothing about him was right. He was dead – or, rather, undead. But unlike every member of the undead nation I had encountered, this one seemed to be sentient.
Great. Now evolution had handed us ‘thinking zombies’. Within the breath of a moment, the tide shifted away from the humanity. The Zero Day Collective had my baby and the undead could think and speak.
We. Are. Fucked.
“Phone for you Bethany Nitshimi. This is your last warning.” The stranger pulled out a gun and shot the laptop that was feeding the broadcast. The sound of the Obliterator was silenced. The boners in the hall released a terrifying roar and stood. When they walked toward the room, the stranger held up a hand the zombies froze in place.
“Take the phone or I release them.” The monotone drone spoke slowly and pointedly.
I had no choice. Someone was obviously desperate to speak with me. I had a pretty good idea who that someone was… or at least who that someone was with. I very carefully stood and crossed to the stranger. There was really no way of knowing exactly what I was dealing with, so caution wasn’t something to be mocked.
When I grabbed the phone, the first thing I noticed was how cold the stranger’s hand was; the second, how he smelled of ozone and fetid meat. With the phone in hand, I backed slowly away. The collection of armored death soldiers behind the stranger sent a flood of chills through my system. If this monster released his dogs of war, we’d be human tartar in seconds.
Once I’d returned to the opposite side of the room, I put the phone to my ear and spoke one simple phrase based on nothing but assumption.
“What have you done with Jacob?”
I was met with a brief moment of silence. That silence was a clear indicator of calculation. The party on the other end of the line was weighing their options, trying to decide which hand played best in this game.
“The rumors of your brilliance were not exaggerated Miss Nitshimi.” The voice had an accent – maybe Pakistani or Iraqi. I didn’t remember any members of the Zero Day Collective baring any resemblance to that portion of Asia. “I wonder, Miss Nitshimi, would Jacob grow up to be more like his mother or his father?”
A boiling rage shook me from my core. “I swear, if you so much as drain a single molecule from a single vein in my child’s body you will regret the day you learned my name.”
“Such unwavering confidence. I must say, Miss Nitshimi, you have never failed to impress me or the entire collective. When we set in motion the events of the Cleansing…”
“Do not hand me this bull shit about The Great Cleansing! You know damn good and well that was nothing more than a dog and pony show for your financial backers. You had much grander schemes in mind that would earn you financial returns no one dared dream about.”
A light, low laugh spilled out of the phone’s speaker.
“My, but you have done your research. But then, I would have expected nothing less.”
The mockery undercutting the voice made me want to hurl the phone across the room and obliterate anything remotely connected to the Zero Day Collective.
“Why am I talking to you? What in the fuck do you want?”
“Miss Nitshimi, I have what I want. Your son. It’s what you want that I am concerned about.”
If ever I was confused, now was that time. The ZDC cared about one thing and only one thing – their Endgame. It seemed I had been a part of that game from the beginning – or at least since Jacob and I conceived our son. The idea that this man actually cared about what I wanted was laughable.
“My guess is this – you want your son to remain alive. Am I correct?”
I couldn’t answer. Of course I wanted my son alive; but I wanted him alive and in my care. How could I possibly say ‘yes’ to having my son alive when ‘alive’ meant being under the crushing grip of the ZDC?
“The question was not rhetorical Miss Nitshimi. Either you want your son alive or you do not. It’s a simple question I would imagine any mother would have no qualm or quarrel answering.”
“Of course I want my fucking son alive you son of a bitch!” My voice cracked with hatred. I so badly wanted the anger to carry through the phone and strangle the man at the other end.
“The
n we can come to a very simple understanding. You do not attempt to rescue your son and he will remain alive. You do make such an attempt and I will be forced to tear your son apart, molecule by molecule, in the name of research. Do you understand Miss Nitshimi?”
A ten ton straw fell from the sky and crushed the camel’s back. If there was one thing I knew, it was that the Zero Day Collective had to keep Jacob alive. Dead, my son was no good to them. The ZDC scientists had to know what made the boy special, what it was in his blood that made him immune. Alive he was a self-sustaining factory of Mengele Cure. Dead he was but a few doses. It was time to call the bluff.
“Listen to me. The first thing I am going to do is wipe my ass with the little army you sent for me. Once I’ve done that I am going to find you and I am going to kill you in ways your sick, perverted mind could never possibly dream up. When I am done with you, I will make sure nothing of the Zero Day Collective remains. We took you down in Munich, France, and New York. That was just me and a handful of survivors. I now have a small nation of soldiers and followers on my side.”
Just as I was about to drop a few more bombs on my new best friend, I heard the crack and ping of bullets and witnessed, one after another, as the boners dropped to their final death. When Josh’s over-stuffed body engulfed the doorway to the broadcast room, he smiled.
“To protect and sever!”
And with a couple of well-placed shots, the creeping stranger fell to the floor – his head to one side of the room and his body to another.
Morgan leaped up and ran to Josh. With her arms wrapped around his thick neck, she planted a kiss on his lips, putting to rest one of the questions I had filed in the back of my mind.
“I think the Underground is clean now. Unfortunately that includes living humans. We’re all that’s left.” Josh spoke over Morgan’s head.
I put the phone back to my ear, a sense of strength driving my words. “Did you hear that? Your undead goon is down, along with his bone-covered body guards.”
The line was dead. The ZDC had disconnected the call. Immediately I started paging through the phones interface to find some record of the call. There was nothing. The phone had no log and no record of either an outgoing or incoming call. A flurry of explicatives spewed from my mouth before I remembered the program I had running. The call contained enough of the search strings to be easily tracked.
