by Jack Wallen
Rip Vanity entered just in time to hear Sharx. “That’s a fucking brilliant idea, mate! We could do ‘God Bless Fuck’ from our latest recording.”
Vanity’s idea was met with an awkward silence. After a moment, Kaizen broke the spell.
“I was thinking more along the lines of something by Priest or Sabbath—you know, the forefathers of metal.”
“Oh my fucking God!” Pea jumped in. “‘War Pigs.’ It’s the perfect anthem for the post-apocalyptic generation.”
Everyone glanced around the room at one another. Eventually, in an almost eerie moment of synchronicity, every head nodded in agreement.
Seconds after the curtain call was set, Aya approached Vanity about stage security.
“Love,” Vanity grinned, “do you honestly think I would place your gorgeous face in harm’s way? Between the stage and the crowd will be a full row of security guards armed with every zombie-killing device imaginable. If a member of the undead nation dares to cross the neutral zone, they’ll be shredded and bedded before they can cry out for your brains. Besides, with the traps and troops we have set, no one without a pulse will get anywhere near the crowd, let alone the stage. You have nothing, absolutely nothing, to worry about.” Vanity stepped back and took in the group. “So, everyone have their setlists together? It’s getting close to showtime.”
And with that, Vanity vanished from the room.
“I don’t like that man.” Mauser’s deep voice broke the silent spell. “And I don’t know if I trust him.”
Kaizen Sharx’s laughter took over the spotlight. “You think that drunk has enough wits to be in league with the devil? And by devil, I don’t mean the Dark Lord everyone assumes we all worship; I mean the ZDC.”
Silence.
“Oh, come on. How fucking cliché would that be?”
Again, Sharx was met with silence.
“Okay, the dude is flaky as hell, but he’s on our team. The man has been cranking out recordings since before I was conceived. There’s no way he’d sell his soul to the corporate machine.”
“He’s right,” Aya chimed in. “We have been given no reason to not trust Rip Vanity. It’s hard to trust anyone now, but we can’t turn our backs on each other…not now. We are at war against those who started this. I for one will not give up on Vanity or any of you. We rock together, we survive together.”
“‘War Pigs’ it is,” Kaizen shouted, and pumped his fist in the air.
chapter 26 | be chuck norris
“Why are we here, Jamal? Shouldn’t we be with Vanity preparing for possible disaster?”
“I don’t feel comfortable leaving Franklin and the others alone without a way to defend themselves. Since we don’t have enough weapons of our own to go around, I figured you and I could use the alone time to gather a few weapon-esque items for them to use as protection.”
“Weapon-esque? Really?”
“Do you want to hand guns to those strangers?”
I didn’t have to think about the answer.
“Hell no. I’m still not sure how far we can trust them. Actually, I’m not one hundred percent certain just how alive they are.”
Jamal led us into a two-story house as we spoke. Beams of light broke through the ragged curtains to create rays of dust-filled eeriness.
“Damn, B, do you know how many horror movies I’ve seen shot in this very room?”
I stopped. “You’re kidding, right? You haven’t actually—”
“It was a metaphor. Wow, Nitshimi, you’ve lost your sense of humor—or at least your sense of irony. I’m going to have to revoke your hipster card if you’re not careful.”
“Revoke away, my dear. Revoke away.”
Just as we were about to ascend the stairs, a sound shot across the stale air.
“Jamal…”
“Yes, Bethany, I heard it.”
“Where did it come from?”
Silence.
Jamal was waiting to hear the sound again so he could pinpoint the location. Unfortunately, he heard it. Even worse, it came from multiple locations.
“Shit,” Jamal whispered, and pointed.
My eyes followed his finger and landed on the slack-jawed face of a Moaner. The creature stared blankly into the room and tilted its head from left to right.
Another moan caressed the backs of our heads. I could feel Jamal turn.
“Oh shit, Bethany, we’re surrounded.”
I reached back and felt for Jamal. I found his hand and grabbed on tight.
“Tell me you brought a gun,” I said.
Silence.
The Moaner in front of me sniffed the air. I grabbed Jamal again and turned him so his back was up against mine. We both stared out at the approaching undead.
“Be Chuck Norris,” I whispered the one mantra that had saved me before.
“What?” Jamal questioned.
“I said—”
“I know what you said, B, I wanted to know why.”
“Channeling a badass. I can’t explain it, just follow my lead.”
“Be Stephen Hawking.” Jamal returned the whisper.
“No, Jamal, you have to channel someone bad enough to help get us out of here.”
“And you don’t think the smartest man on the planet would have any luck figuring out how to escape a couple of brain-munching undead?”
“You make a good point. Well, what does your inner Hawking say?”
“He says…run!”
Before we could take our first step, another zombie stomped its way into the scene. Every exit was blocked. My eyes took in the room from a different viewpoint: that of an assassin. I had to find a weapon, so it was time to start thinking like someone who made a living taking people out of equations. Finally I spotted an open toolbox. In the top section of the box was a hammer.
“Jamal, five o’clock. There’s a toolbox with a hammer. Grab it and prepare to start swinging.”
Alongside the toolbox was a set of knives. The previous inhabitants had been prepping for battle or escape. Their failure was our good fortune.
The first of the Moaners let out a deep moan. Almost instantly, the other two zombies joined the cry. The sound set my skin on fire with the crawling creeps.
Before I could begin the countdown to combat, the Moaners all stepped forward until they were within reaching distance of Jamal and me. I ducked the first grasping hand and dove for the counter. My hand wrapped around the hammer and sent it sailing to Jamal. Like a ninja, he attempted to pull the hammer from mid-air. He failed. The hammer went sailing by and embedded itself into the cheap drywall behind him. Without hesitation, Jamal rushed to the hammer, yanked it from the wall, turned and swung out wildly. He missed. Again he swung and again he missed. On the third swing the metal struck home and caved in the skull of the first zombie.
“By the power of Hawking!” Jamal shouted, as he yanked the hammer from the crushed skull.
I managed to get a knife in hand before one of the remaining zombies turned on me. I slashed out with the blade and cut deep into the rotted breast of what was once a porn-endowed woman. Clear liquid poured out and down onto the blade. The zombie jerked my way. I stepped backward, lost my footing, and went down. Before I had a chance to move, the bitch pounced on me and wrapped bony fingers around my head.
“Fuck,” I shouted. The first crack of my skull on the floorboards sent stars of pain shooting around the internal radius of my skull. “Jamal!” Another crack, another light show. With the third smack down, the pain started multiplying.
“Get off her, bitch!”
First I heard Jamal’s war cry, then I heard the crack of bone and felt the lukewarm rain of thick blood and bits of brain. The Moaner dropped, limp, to the floor.
As I was about to ask the whereabouts of the third and final zombie, the bastard tackled Jamal and began the same slam dance with his skull. Fortunately for Jamal, the thing only managed to get one crunch to the floor before I jammed the blade of the knife into the base of its sk
ull. A single twist of the handle was enough to fully sever the spinal cord and drop the beast like a sack of pus.
With all three Moaners motionless on the floor, Jamal and I remained silent—save for our gasping—to ensure undead backup wasn’t on the way.
“Where did they come from? I thought this place was safe.”
Jamal looked up at me and held out his hand. I took the proffered appendage and helped him to his feet.
“I’m sure they were holdovers,” Jamal started. “Who knows, we might run into a few more, but I doubt there’ll be significant numbers.”
Jamal turned me to face him and he looked deep into the wells of my eyes. “What’s going on, Bethany? It’s not like you to be scared.”
“Funny thing, fear,” I said, and turned to go. Jamal stopped me and turned me back to face him.
“What’s going on?”
And there it was—the question to end all questions. What was going on? I took in a deep breath—one that should have cleansed the palate of my soul. It failed.
“Fear has become our default. We live in a state of shock and awe, and there’s nowhere to hide from this new reality forged in the bowels of hell. Jamal, I tell you this because I trust you, but I’m frightened all the time now. I go to sleep afraid, I dream afraid, I wake up afraid; I go about my day in complete fear. It’s all around us, in three hundred and sixty degrees.”
I was starting to get angry. Having to confess what had become my new natural state was enough to make me want to slip into a straitjacket and curl up in a corner to wait out my time on this newly forsaken planet of doom.
Jamal stepped in front of me, his huge brown eyes open wide and ready to drink me into his special flavor of reality.
“If there’s one thing I’ve learned since we reconnected, it’s that you’re the one to be feared. You’re Ripley to the zombies’ Alien, kryptonite to the ZDC’s Superman, a silver bullet to—”
I placed my hand over Jamal’s mouth. “I love you, Jamal. Thank you for the nerd-tastic pep talk. Let’s find what we’re looking for and get the hell back to the church.”
We stepped out of the house, but not before Jamal had packed the toolbox with anything and everything that could amount to a weapon.
“By the way…the next time you need to channel ‘bad ass,’ please find someone other than Hawking. No offense, but the man is in a wheelchair and his brain could feed a zombie family of five for weeks.”
“Well then, Madam Pop Culture, who exactly should I channel the next time we are attacked by a group of Moaners?”
“Why not a red shirt Starfleet cadet?”
Jamal snickered. “Very funny. Oh wait, I know who I could channel…Robocop. Is that badass enough for ya? I’m fairly certain Robocop could take down Chuck Norris.”
We continued on toward the church, arguing the strengths and weaknesses of Chuck and Robo. Neither of us gave ground.
*
Back at our newly ordained headquarters, Jamal passed out weapons to Franklin and his crew while I informed everyone it was time to make our move to the stage.
“Bethany.” Morgan approached me, her voice a mere whisper. She motioned for me to step away from untrustworthy ears. We moved into the pastor’s office. “Both Zombie Response Teams are in place. Once you give the go, they will attack. But I don’t feel safe letting the new people in on this. I don’t trust them.”
I nodded.
“I think as soon as the concert begins, the teams should attack. Get the ZDC when they’re least expecting it. If they are planning anything we’ll know it.”
Morgan pulled a smartphone from her back pocket and tapped a number out. Shortly after she held the device to her head, someone answered.
“José, yes, it’s Morgan. Get your men ready. As soon as the concert begins I will send the go signal. Once you receive that, your goal is to get in, get the baby, and get out. You are not to engage the Zero Day Collective unless it is the only way to ensure your escape. Yes, eliminate them if you have to, but your primary target is baby Jacob. Do you understand?”
“Roger that.”
Morgan hung up and gave me a simple, curt nod. Like dominoes, everything was falling into place. It all seemed easy…too easy. Nothing was too easy now. Something was bound to go wrong.
I hated the apocalypse for that.
*
It was twelve or so hours until what could possibly be the beginning or the end of hope. If Vanity had his way, music would be the food of life as well as its saving grace. If entropy had its way, the devil would dance among the crowd and life would finally come to a close for what could be millions of innocent people.
Either way, I had to prepare—and for me, preparation meant my fingers dancing across the keys of an all-too-familiar laptop.
I managed to find a room in the church that was isolated from everyone. The room was furnished with child-size desks, stuffed animals, and Legos. I had to resist every temptation known to geekdom to avoid cobbling together a Lego Death Star. Thankfully, a certain piece of digital brilliance called for me.
The second I sat, crossed-legged on the floor, it dawned on me how long it had been since I’d enjoyed a moment to myself. The stillness washed over me like a hot shower after an afternoon run in the winter. I took it in, basked in its beauty.
Before the moment had me completely under its spell, I opened the laptop, booted it up, and turned on the wireless device. The card immediately picked up a signal and I went to work. The first order of business—kick off the search script that would locate any network transmission from or about the Zero Day Collective. As the script began to collect data, it was time to sift through my inbox. As usual, there were thousands of unread missives—most of which were from stalkers looking to “Catch a ride on the Nitshimi train,” and sent directly to the trash.
One particular email caught my attention. The subject read, simply:
“On my way.”
I recognized the phrase from Zombie Radio. I clicked to open the email and read:
Bethany,
In accordance with your great desire for privacy (and the fear of too much information getting into the wrong hands), I will keep this brief. The cure has been discovered. I have spent the better part of the last year in an isolated lab perfecting the work I began during the filming of T-Minus Zero. So confident am I of my work, I infected myself with the Mengele Virus and then followed that infection with the cure. I am still very much alive.
As I know you are very skilled in the ways of nefarious computing, I will let you know I have secreted my notes for the final cure on a server you can trace to the origins of this email. I do this in the likelihood I do not make it to your side.
I do believe, however, the hope of man rests on our meeting.
Until then…
Dr. Richard Gerand.
My instincts begged me to check the headers of the email and begin the tracing process back to the server Gerand mentioned. Reason, however, got the best of me and demanded I hold off. If the ZDC was listening in and traced my trace, I would never forgive myself.
Instead, I opened up the script dump file to see what, if anything, it had found. It didn’t take long. The second I read it, I shouted.
“Jamal, I need you now!”
He wasted no time in joining me.
“What is it?”
I read the text, captured by the script bot, out loud.
“Are you sure this is what you want?”
“Yes.”
“Once the generator is unleashed, there will be no going back. Every reanimated corpse will be…”
“At my command. This is what we’ve been working toward. Any resistance the Zero Day Collective meets will be crushed. As soon as the army is released upon the crowd they will be given a moment to spread the virus. Once I give the order, the gas will be released and the generator ignited. The effects of the Cradle should be seen immediately.”
“And the world will be yours.”
�
��Under the rule of the ZDC.”
“This is bad,” Jamal whispered. “This is very bad. What did it mean by ‘gas’ and ‘generator ignited’? This doesn’t have anything to do with Mengele and the Third Reich? Are we looking at the return of the gas chambers? I’ll be damned if I’m going to stand back and watch that genocidal cruelty make a comeback.”
I sent my mind whirring back into banks of memory in an attempt to glean some meaning from the string of conversation.
“Oh God,” I said. “They are planning on igniting the Quantum Fusion Generator again.”
“You mean the Godwin Device?”
“Yes.”
“Why? It would serve no purpose now.”
“Jamal, the first time it was unleashed was to magnify the effects of the amplification. My only guess is that not enough of the population has turned and the Zero Day Collective plans on reenacting the initial blast and finishing off the job.”
“What did they mean by ‘effects of the Cradle’? What is the Cradle?”
“I have no idea. Jacob or Godwin never mentioned it. I can only assume it’s what they are calling the QFG effect.”
“Maybe,” Jamal said, picking up my thought, “it’s a reference to Newton’s Cradle…the conservation of motion and energy. Is it possible they’ve developed a more efficient means of spreading the virus?”
I reread the message.
“Jamal, they’re going to unleash an army of darkness into the crowd tomorrow. Once they’ve done that, they’ll ignite the generator to amplify the infection. We can’t let this happen.”
“Does this mean we’re going to stop the concert?”
I stared deep into the hollow of Jamal’s eyes. “No, it means we’re going to stop the Zero Day Collective’s plan.”
“How, Bethany?”
“I don’t know. But somehow, by morning, we have to come up with the means to stop another release of the Mengele Virus.”
Without giving Jamal a warning, I jumped up and took off at a sprinter’s pace. My mind was flying faster than my feet, in a desperate search for an endgame that could possibly come out in our favor. Before I reached my goal, only one solution presented itself.
