It worked. The reality of this moment overshadowed what had happened in another place in time.
The truck coasted into an intersection, swerving to avoid a clutch of entangled vehicles.
She held her breath and looked out the passenger-side window. Only regret would come from being this close and not seeing the duck. It would mean being stuck with all the wrong memories. Seeing the damned train every day did exactly that, etching an image of Mason into her psyche she wished she could forget: him lying on the floor of the train’s engine room with wet, bloody stains soaking through his black shirt. The warmth of his lips—gone when she tried to breathe life into him—his cheeks drained of the defiance and rigidity she expected to feel between her hands. Instead, she held his limp head, stared into dull and empty eyes. He had grown cold so quickly.
She didn’t want that haunting memory. She wanted his warmth back. She wanted to remember something good, anything.
For that, she needed the duck to still be there.
She leaned against the side window to see, under a thin veil of new snow, that the duck leaned toward a missing wheel, its axle supported by a stack of wood. Fat bullet holes riddled the sides and front cab, leaving quarter-sized, paint-shattering divots everywhere up and down its prow. It was simply amazing that the thing survived such punishment, and still managed to travel four days through the worst parts of the Quarantine Zone to get them here in one piece.
She felt her chin quivering, but refused to look away. Her sight became blurry from the tears forming in her eyes.
Come here. Mason’s words rattled in her memories.
I’m right here.
So am I.
His warm lips pressed against hers. They kissed and she worried. She worried, but felt safe and secure in his strong arms. She put her own arms around him and listened to his heart. As long as she held him, she was safe.
The truck veered around the obstruction in the middle of the road and growled as it picked up speed again. Buildings blocked her sight of the duck and Wendy closed her eyes. She didn’t want to forget the sight. She didn’t want to forget Mason.
Eight
The truck cruised slowly along the east-west road, following a fresh trail in the snow that had probably brought her abductors to the EPS in the first place. Wendy didn’t pay attention to the world outside the cab, though. She sat sideways on the rear bench seat with Larissa’s head in her lap, stroking the girl’s bald head, blinking at her own welling tears, trying to hold them back so none of her abductors would see how upset she was. She didn’t want them thinking she cried for herself.
The groaning of the diesel engine and constant shaking from the slow-moving truck reminded her of the days on the road in the duck. All the roads in the Quarantine Zone were overgrown with encroaching trees, creeping vines, weeds sprouting from the cracks and potholes. Things seemed darker because of it, even in the middle of the day.
Mason Jones had made the journey tolerable, though. She would have gone crazy without him. Maybe that was part of why she fell for him so easily. Of course, he was good looking, too. Brick hard arms and legs, flat abs, and a square chin. Dark hair, cut so short she’d never know if it was curly or straight. Smarter than he was gorgeous—an essential trait by Wendy’s standards. And he had a dry sense of humor and playful aura. Always willing to make light of any situation, which could get on her nerves at times, but only because his cavalier attitude about serious things frustrated her.
A perfect example was when he first woke after their escape. He’d slept most of the day while Hank drove them deeper into the Quarantine Zone. When Hank stopped to repair the duck, she sat next to Mason and marveled at him while Hank lay sprawled flat on his belly, his head and arm down in a compartment as he meted out another layer of duct tape to hold the flotation system in place. Mason groaned and put a hand to his head.
“You’re awake,” Wendy gasped. “He’s awake!”
Hank jolted, hitting the back of his head. “Shit!”
“Jones,” Wendy said, crawling closer to him. “Jones, how do you feel?”
“Hank pretty much summed it up,” Mason had replied, waving a hand in Hank’s general direction even though he couldn’t see him.
Hank rolled on his side, smirking while rubbing the back of his head.
Wendy sighed, relieved that Mason still knew who Hank was just by the sound of his voice. “Do you remember me? Do you know who I am?”
“You’re unmarried,” he said, opening his eyes wide and blinking as though he were trying to wake after losing a drunken brawl. He rolled forward onto his elbows and looked around.
“Great. That’s how you remember me?”
“You’re Doctor Wendy O’Farrell, lead neurobiologist at the Rock Island defense facility for Eloran, a wholly owned subsidiary of Breckenrock Corporation. You work under Doctor Danielle Kennedy. You were born and raised in Brainerd, Minnesota, you went to Ohio State for your undergraduate studies, and Johns Hopkins for your doctorate, then UCSD for your residency. You’re thirty-three years old, you have A-positive blood, and a whole bunch of other statistics that really don’t matter.” The way Mason had said the last part while inspecting his left arm and the dressing covering the bite wound made her wonder what was really in that head of his. He’d said he knew things about the Rock Island facility, but she hadn’t given it much credence when he first told her about it. But then again, they were in the middle of a horde of zombies at the time.
“Well, that’s freaky,” Hank said, sitting up.
“How did you know all that?” Wendy whispered.
He shrugged.
“No, I mean it. How do you know so much about me?”
“I can read minds,” he told her as he looked over his shoulder at the overgrown forest around them. He inspected it with a soldier’s eye, looking for danger. “It’s one of my new zombie powers.”
Wendy smiled and laughed lightly. “Are you always this funny?”
“I don’t know,” he said with another shrug. “I don’t remember.” The calm with which he accepted it gnawed at her heart and her smile turned sour.
Nine
The truck squealed to a stop, and now nothing looked familiar outside.
“Get the gear out,” the blond told the smoker.
Larissa moaned loudly, her eyes wide open, staring at Wendy with fearful need. How long had Wendy been neglecting the girl, lost in her own thoughts?
“It’s okay,” Wendy said, leaning forward. She began to hum, but it only made her cough. She cleared her throat and tried again, using her body to block Larissa’s sight of everything else. “It’s alright, Larissa.”
The driver cut the engine and kicked open the door, holding it with his boot. Cold wind poured in. Larissa recoiled.
Wendy put both hands on Larissa’s bald head, her eyes softening to counter the fright and confusion in Larissa’s, but the girl didn’t respond. She wasn’t like normal girls. She didn’t know what was happening to her. She didn’t recognize basic facial emotional cues.
She had yet to be loved.
Wendy cooed and stroked the girl’s forehead. Larissa stiffened, jerking away. “No, no, no,” Wendy said softly. “It’s okay.” She slid her hand around to the side of Larissa’s head, away from her eyes. She put her face in front of Larissa’s again, gathering in the girl’s darting eyes. She shushed her, smoothing the bald skin of her head with her fingers. “That’s it, we’re okay.”
“No alarms yet,” the blond said as he jumped over the seatback in front of Wendy. Larissa cowered, pulling her legs up and curling into a ball. The blond stepped past them toward the open door. “We’re making good time.”
The cold air from outside sent shivers down Wendy’s spine. She slid closer to Larissa, leaning over her to block the chill. She lifted Larissa by the neck and cupped her against her chest to keep her calm.
“It’s alright,” she murmured, trying to sound assured herself.
The smoker chuckled as he cl
imbed over the seatback, side-stepping past Wendy. He stopped and leaned toward her, his yellowed teeth bared in a wide grin. The stale smell of cigarettes lingered in the air between them. “Hope you’re not afraid of heights.” He giggled and climbed out of the cab.
The driver shook his head at the smoker, then looked back at Wendy. He yanked the keys out of the ignition as he stood up and leaned out the open door. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll get the girl. You need to get changed.”
Wendy switched with the driver and slid down to the step bar of the truck with her hand holding the door. They had stopped in the middle of the road in the middle of nowhere. She looked ahead of them, down a long stretch of snow-covered highway shrouded under a canopy of trees leaning in on them. She looked behind them at pretty much the same thing. They were parked at the only break for miles with a long clearing to hold back the trees.
Perfect for an air extraction.
These had to be the Senator’s men.
The smoker flung clothes out of an open trunk secured to the back deck of the rig. Items fell to the ground; jackets, pants, hats, gloves, and other assorted gear. “I can’t find the tarps.”
The blond stared at the smoker with a dumbfounded expression. “So, you have to throw everything on the ground?”
“I can’t find the tarps!”
“Hey, Keith,” the driver called out the open door, startling Wendy so much she nearly fell. “I put the tarps in the other trunk. You were covering all my gear.”
So, the yellow-toothed smoker had a name. He didn’t look like a Keith, but at least she could stop thinking of him as just the asshole of the bunch.
Wendy climbed down off the truck as Keith tossed two folded-up tarps over the side. He hopped down after them and unwrapped one of the tarps quickly, throwing it out like a blanket. It settled to the ground as the blond hunter led Wendy toward it, his feet crunching in the snow.
“Let me get that cuff off,” he offered, waving for Wendy to come closer.
She kept her distance, pulling the Velcro strap herself and tossed the thing to him, glad to be rid of its constricting grip. She rubbed at her upper arm as her fingers began to tingle with the renewed blood flow.
A moment later she smelled the cigarette smoke again.
“Here,” Keith said to the blond, eyeing Wendy as he walked past her, a freshly lit cigarette dangling from his lips. She sneered at him, but he didn’t seem bothered by her demeanor. He handed a device to the blond, something with a big screen. She recognized it to be a car-mounted GPS unit. “Fully charged.”
“Great,” the blond said flatly. “Pick everything up and get changed.”
“I’m gettin’, I’m gettin’.”
Keith started picking up the clothes he’d thrown out haphazardly, tossing everything onto the open tarp. Wendy hadn’t even noticed the driver climbing down with Larissa, but the crunching of his feet through the snow behind her and the girl’s moaning caused her to turn around. The driver nodded as he marched by, Larissa bent over his shoulder. She craned her head, lifting her whole body to look at Wendy, her eyes wincing against the light as she groaned in protest. Her arms and legs were still bound by the blanket.
“Put her in a hat, Chico,” the blond said to the driver. “And get some socks on her feet.”
The driver waved without looking back. Now Wendy knew his name, too, for what good it would do her. Chico laid Larissa on the tarp gently. Keith tossed clothes into a pile next to him and Chico rummaged through it, complaining how Keith was making a mess.
“You need to put on layers, doctor,” the blond hunter said.
“For what?”
“So you don’t freeze to death. This is as far as we go in the truck.”
Wendy looked around again, but only saw the truck and tree line. She crouched down to look beneath the truck at the clearing, but it appeared empty. “You got a chopper coming, or something?”
Keith chuckled at this, working around her as he picked up pieces of heavy, cold weather clothing to toss onto the tarp.
“I recommend layers,” the blond replied.
Wendy approached the tarp but didn’t step onto it. Keith walked past her and knelt down next to one of the piles of clothes he’d made. He grabbed a pair of ski pants with overalls.
“She’s gonna slow us down,” Keith said to the blond hunter as if they had been arguing the point for a while.
“Just get suited up and get the engines started.”
“Where did you put the goddamn tights, Keith?” Chico asked, stepping off the tarp and walking toward the storage bin on the back of the truck. He climbed up the back, leaving Larissa on the tarp where Keith lay on his back, struggling into his ski pants.
“Same place you put my tarps,” Keith grunted.
Larissa rolled on her side and curled her body to conserve warmth, letting out a wailing zombie-like moan. She wasn’t a zombie anymore, though. She felt pain, and freezing cold was a sensation she had yet to experience since being cured. At least Chico put her in a wool hat and socks before abandoning her.
“Damn it,” Wendy cursed under her breath. She stepped onto the tarp and knelt next to Larissa, putting a hand on the girl’s cheek and leaning over her to coo soothingly. “You’re alright, Larissa. It’s okay.” She coughed into her elbow, angry at Keith and Chico for leaving Larissa alone, and angry at herself for giving a damn.
The blond hunter tossed a pair of long johns onto the tarp beside her. Larissa shuddered at the fright, squealing in Wendy’s ear.
“Make yourself useful,” the blond said to Wendy. “Put those on her.”
Wendy glared at the hunter, but he turned his back on her to sort through the clothes on the tarp. Keith grinned and giggled through his yellow teeth, smoke rising from the cigarette pinched between his lips. He lay on his back, tugging on the pants of a ski suit, his feet in the air.
Wendy started to reach for the long johns, but froze. The faint echo of a wailing alarm horn breached the morning birdsong and clicking of the diesel engine as it cooled in the frigid air. The EPS perimeter alarms were going off. Lock-down. Wendy knew it meant the zombies they let go inside the fence had finally been discovered. She wondered how much longer it would take the soldiers at the EPS to get into the kennels and realize she and Larissa were gone.
58 minutes. She looked at the blond hunter, who was looking at his wrist watch. It was an actual watch, not some digital communications device like most people wore, with a big round face that looked rugged enough to survive anything.
“Shit,” Keith hissed as he rolled to sit up and look at the blond hunter.
“Back on schedule, boys,” the blond hunter said, clapping once. “Go on, Keith, get the engines started. I want to be airborne in five minutes.”
Ten
By the time Larissa was bundled up, Wendy was freezing, thanks in no small part to the wind coming under the truck. It sounded like several small airplanes idling on the other side, their propellers blowing powder and icy wind at her. It picked up the edges of the tarp to harass her the whole time she fought her way into a pink ski suit. Pink! It was the only thing they had in her size. She hated pink.
Wendy lay on her back, struggling to get her left foot into a boot, the small lump—a vial of curative—in her front pocket pressing against her hip where her leg bent, forcing her to hold her leg awkwardly wide. No one knew she had it, not the Senator nor anyone on the EPS…except Tom. He was the one who gave it to her in the first place. It was supposed to be her ace in the hole, her proof if things got out of hand.
Chico picked Larissa up and swung her against his chest in one motion, cupping her little body so she could hide her head against her own knees.
“Hey,” Wendy said as he marched off with her. “Hey, wait a second.”
The blond stepped in front of Chico. “Don’t worry,” the blond told her, but he didn’t say it with much conviction. He was too interested in inspecting Larissa.
Wendy struggled into her boot,
sitting up to put pressure on the heel. She tried to stand, watching the blond and Chico warily. The blond removed something from a jacket pocket and hunched over Larissa.
“Hey,” Wendy shouted. “What are you doing to her?” She pushed her heel down hard and her foot slipped into the boot.
“Just another sedative,” the blond said, concentrating on pressing the plunger of a needle into Larissa’s hand.
Wendy reached down and grabbed the gloves they had given her. “What do you mean another sedative?!”
The blond removed the needle and nodded for Chico to keep moving. As the Mexican carried Larissa off around the front of the truck, the blond stepped in front of Wendy.
“What the hell did you give her?”
“Look, we don’t want her freaking out in the air.”
Wendy stepped past the blond and followed Chico. She wanted to make sure Larissa was alright. What if there were drug-drug interactions, or they accidentally gave her an overdose?
“Doctor,” the blond said, catching up to her. “She’ll be fine. It’s a low dose—”
“You can’t just—” She stopped in her tracks, looking at the aircraft in the clearing. Up until now she thought they had one or two small planes, but she couldn’t have imagined this. “You’ve got to be joking,” she said, almost laughing.
She had never seen anything like it, at least not up close. In the clearing were three lightweight frames with wheels, each having two small side-by-side seats. They didn’t have wings, just an engine mounted above the headrests with an enclosed propeller facing backwards. Each engine was running, the propellers blowing wind and loose powder at the truck.
Given that they had no wings, she thought at first that they were wind-powered sleds, like swamp boats, but the long clearing was completely enclosed by dense layers of trees and snow covered shrubs. Even snowmobiles would get bogged down trying to get through. And if they meant to follow the road, they probably should have stayed in the truck.
“Do they fly?”
Plagued: The Battle Creek Zombie Rectification Experiment Page 4
