by Chris Lowry
The television only showed news and education programs, per her father and the Council, she knew.
But there were DVD’s galore, and she had even turned back to reading, starting on the classics she had read in middle school and working forward.
It was a way to pass the time, listening to music, watching programs and waiting.
Only Pam wasn’t sure what she was waiting for.
She wasn’t sure the rest of the world knew either.
Were they waiting for another outbreak?
For a scream in the night that indicated a death squad needed to come in and remove a Z from someone who had died a natural death?
Or were they waiting for a cure?
“The CDC was lost,” she said out loud and on accident.
She didn’t mean to say it, but her thoughts had slipped the veil of conversation, that fine line where a person is thinking along one track and discussing another with someone else, the two cross streams.
“They were working on a cure?”
It sounded more like a statement than a question.
“I don’t know.”
“That’s what one faction thinks. I don’t like the names, but they’re called Z-tards or Z-flakes by the others.”
“Drawn on old party lines,” she said.
Jacob nodded.
“How we like our tribes. It’s human nature, but that’s part of the problem. People think humans are benevolent or kind because they witness acts of kindness and think that’s who everyone is. Or should be.”
“You don’t believe in kindness?”
“Let’s just say I believe in pragmatic acts, and sometimes those can be construed as a kindness. Right now, in this place, my job is to convince everyone to believe in survival.”
“What do you do to those who don’t?”
“A lot of hippies survived. There was an off-grid commune not too far from here and we took them in because we needed their skills. A lot of survivalists lived up to their namesake. We took them in to help protect us. We needed their skills also. But this city is a house divided.”
“This country is divided. Literally. Two walls and a great expanse of the middle.”
“Do you have zombie agitators in the cities? People who protest that the Z are people and deserve rights?”
“We’ve had a lot of demonstrations,” she chose her words carefully.
Those demonstrations had turned to riots, and every single time, someone was killed and turned Z.
Her father instructed the Governor of New York to declare martial law and did the same in Los Angeles. She assumed it was like that in every city.
People were scared.
They were hungry.
They were heartbroken, because a lot of them lost a loved one, or loved ones when the outbreak happened.
It was easy to blame the Z-sympathizers, but no amount of flower power was going to bring back the dead, or save them.
“I try to keep it simple in here,” Jacob explained. “No Z pets. No harboring family until they find a cure. All Zombies are persona non-gratis in the compound.”
“You’ve had people try to break those rules?”
“They aren’t rules. They’re law. Written in stone like the ten commandments and thou shall not break them upon penalty of expulsion. I’m serious about keeping people safe. Even if it’s from themselves.”
“I think you’d like my father,” she chuckled.
“I don’t know why I said that. You’d hate him. Everyone hates him. But you would respect his position on keeping people safe.”
“People often hate those in power, or who wield it. Speaking of,” Jacob nodded to a shadow moving across the yard.
A short round woman stopped at the bottom of the stairs and fought to catch her breath.
“Jacob,” she wheezed. “We’ve got a problem.”
11
Jacob and Pam ran after the rotund woman as she led them toward the city gate.
A crowd gathered on the walkways that looked down at the road outside, and a smaller group ringed the twelve-foot metal doors.
Pam saw lots of black hoodies and tie-dyed shirts.
She also saw guns aimed at the crowd and holding them back.
Jacob pushed to the front of the group.
“Hey Mike,” he said in his calm soothing voice.
“Jacob,” the gray-haired man who seemed to be leading the hoodie and tie dyed group answered.
“What’s going on?”
“Michael’s out there. I’m going to get him.”
Jacob sighed.
“I can’t let you do that Mike.”
“He’s my son.”
“I know,” Jacob hung his head. “But we’re not letting any Zombies inside the gate.”
“Laura’s with him.”
He was almost sobbing. Jacob reached out to put a hand on his shoulder, but Mike jerked out of the way.
“I’m bringing them inside.”
Mike moved for the gate. Jacob reached out to grab him, but a long haired freaky person shoved a rifle into his chest and pushed him back.
One of the gate guards jacked a shell into his shotgun and aimed into the tie-dyed crowd.
More weapons were drawn, cocked and aimed, but no one shot.
“Don’t!” Jacob yelled. “Wait!”
He tried to calm them down, tried to get the crowd to focus on him instead of shooting each other.
Mike took advantage of the distraction. He wormed through the shoulders and people, reached the gate and cracked it open.
He dashed through the narrow slot and whooped as he ran down the road toward the shuffling remains of his family.
His yell caught the attention of other Z and they all started moving toward him.
Mike picked up a discarded branch, almost as long as he was and used it to fend off the zombies.
He didn’t hit them, just herded and pushed them back.
Jacob shoved between the crowd and reached the walkway.
“Get that gate closed!”
Several of the men bullied their way past the guns to hit the gates and shoulder them closed.
“They don’t know what they’re doing Jacob, they’re sick,” Mike called in a sob.
He used the pole to push the teenage boy back form him, a gentle shove that kept the zombie from biting his face.
“We can’t kill them, and I won’t let them stay out here to rot. I want them inside where I can care for them.”
“Get back in here Mike,” Jacob called down from the walk. “We can talk about it inside.”
“No!” Mike shouted up at him. “We’re done talking. All you riflethumpers want to do is talk. The time for talk is over. It’s time for action.”
“Your people have rifles, Mike.”
“You forced our hand. You made us do this. And now we know the world is still out there, that people are still alive, we know they’re working on a cure. They can save our families.”
Jacob cast a sideways glance at Pam and motioned her up to join him.
“Tell them.”
“What?”
“Tell them there is no cure.”
Mike grunted as he pushed the zombie formerly known as his wife away and shoved back two others.
“The CDC didn’t survive,” Pam yelled.
“How do you know? Did you know we were here?”
He was right. She didn’t know. Not for sure. And she wasn’t sure if anyone knew, really.
“I don’t,” she told him. “This happened so fast and we were trying to keep people safe. Even while we fought the Z ourselves.”
“They’re our family,” Mike screamed. “Why can’t you see that? Just say it. You know they are people.”
“Zombies are not people,” she raged back.
“They’re dead.”
“Open the gate!”
“No!” Jacob yelled.
The hippies at the gate grabbed Jacob’s men and pulled them away. They cracked it open.
They used the tips of their stolen weapons to shove the crowd further back, buying space and room to pull the gates in and open the road to the zombie swarm.
Mike cheered as he saw the crack in the wall.
He cheered again at the sight of his comrades welcoming him through, waving their arms to invite him back inside.
The boy Z, the one that had been Mike’s son slipped under the stick he was using to hold them back.
The Z grabbed him by the collar and yanked his father off balance. They both fell to the ground, one moaning, one screaming.
The Z swarmed the gates.
There were too many of them for the untrained crowd to handle.
The guards were too far back, held in check by hippie guns, and now those same guns were silent, shocked and frozen by speed and tenacity of the herd.
It was an overwhelming thing, a powerful relentless mass of arms, teeth and moaning maws.
Mike screamed for help, screamed for mercy as his son gnawed a hole in his neck.
The boy’s head exploded.
Then another.
Bullets ripped out of the darkness and shattered the zombie assault.
Soldiers advanced in a two by two formation, rifles held to shoulders as they sent single shots into the brainpans of zombies.
Bodies splatted on the ground.
They approached from the side, rather than the back, a finely drilled point that cut a path through the swarming bodies, leaving a pile of twitching half rotten corpses in their wake.
The soldiers moved to the gate.
Sharp switched his aim inside and cleared the first row of Z from behind.
The second row spread out, and the sudden appearance of the fighting force moved the guards inside to action.
They knocked the hippie insurrection aside, ripped the weapons from their hands and began shooting zombies too, taking back the town.
Georgie planted his back against a corner hinge on the gate, switched to full auto and lay down a line of fire that decimated the zombie front.
Doc joined him from the opposite gate and thirty seconds later, the road was clear for twenty yards.
The squad moved through and forced the gate closed from the inside.
Then it was a simple mop up exercise to eliminate the rest of the intruders.
“Georgie, Spec, up top and keep me
apprised,” Sharp ordered.
The two men scrambled up the walkway and set up watch on either side of the closed gate.
Sharp stepped over a twitching body and eyed the crowd.
“Good thing we got here when we did,” he pulled a Kbar from a sheath and stabbed the dead hippie in the brain before it could turn Z.
There were a dozen civilian casualties.
He noted the other armed men moving through the injured and deceased, dispatching them in a manner similar to the one he used.
“I’m looking for Pam Ballantine,” Sharp called out. “Who’s in charge of this clusterfuck?”
Jacob stepped forward and motioned with one hand.
“I’d object to your calling it a cluster because it only just happened, but whatever you name it, I’m in charge of it.”
“Outstanding,” said Sharp.
He eyed the woman who stood beside Jacob.
“I’m Pam Ballantine.”
“Captain Sharp, Ma ’me. We’re here to rescue you.”
12
He wasn’t used to them telling him no.
He wasn’t used to anyone saying no except as a bargaining tactic.
No meant offer more money.
No meant use a different tactic.
No meant whisper a threat.
Then no would change to yes.
But the Council didn’t budge.
The Chambers were eighteen floors below his office and he seethed every step back up.
His assistant could barely keep pace, and he noted that she at least wore flats instead of wobbly heels this time.
Good.
The woman learned.
He liked it when people learned from him without them pointing it out.
His seething served a purpose.
Ballantine knew that anger held in check could be made useful, but he also knew that his personality type was prone to violent outbursts.
The exertion on the stairs curbed that aggression, and let him wallow in self-pity, rage and anger for the time it took to make it back to his office.
He grabbed a linen cloth off from the top drawer of the desk and wiped his sweaty brow.
“Water,” he ordered.
His assistant hopped to comply.
Now that he was spent, he could still feel the anger percolate in his gut, but his mind was clear.
The Council didn’t want to send another group of military men after his daughter.
The lost radio contact with her plane and now the rescue squad had them afraid.
They feared the worst.
But Ballantine refused to accept that his Pam was dead.
She couldn’t be dead.
It was inconceivable.
She was his progeny, wily and smart.
Even if everyone else died in the crash, he had heard her voice on the radio.
She had kept her head enough to call for help.
Her next step would be go to ground and wait.
She knew her message would reach her father and that he would move the earth to send help to her.
So she would wait.
Since the military failed, and the Council wouldn’t send more, he would have to seek alternative measures.
He fell into the leather seat as his assistant poured a glass of Evian across filtered ice cubes into a crystal glass and set it beside him.
He reached up without looking and moved it to a coaster on the desktop to prevent a moisture ring.
“I need a street person,” he mused. “Do I know anyone from the mean streets of Los Angeles?”
He didn’t look at her.
He didn’t even really realize she was there, he was just thinking out loud.
“My brother,” she squeaked.
Ballantine glanced up in surprise.
“Who?”
“My brother is- or he knows,” she stumbled.
He turned around and glared at her.
“What is it?” he barked.
She jumped.
“My brother knows certain people,” she
squirmed. “he’s in the black market.”
The black market.
That’s what he needed.
Ballantine knew it existed, and he allowed it at his leisure knowing there were things he could not control about human nature.
Ban a book, and that’s all people wanted.
The black market was for things he could not provide, certain food stuffs, drugs, items that once came from the middle of America too, but were now in limited supply.
“What does your brother do for this black market?”
She shrugged. It was maddening.
“I don’t know.”
Ballantine sighed.
“Alright, tell me what you do know.”
She started to speak and he cut her off.
“Better yet, get him up here.”
“Sir?”
“You heard me. Get his ass up here now.”
She nodded and flinched through the door.
Ballantine sat behind his desk and sipped the water.
A plan had percolated up through the rage and now that he had a target and direction, he knew where to aim it for the most effective use.
13
The woman turned to a tall black man next to her and smirked.
“Told you my Dad would take care of it.”
