Plague World (Ashley Parker Novel)

by Dana Fredsti

  “What—”

  Nancy shook her head. “No time!”

  A guttural sound of agony ripped through the air.

  Eric and Nancy skidded to a stop.

  Johan squirmed on the ground next to the 4X4, three badly emaciated figures in ragged native garb kneeling next to him. They were ripping pieces out of his body with fingers that looked more like bony talons. Talons dripping with blood and pieces of Johan’s flesh.

  Johan howled as one of the creatures—they couldn’t be human, could they?—dug a hand deep into his stomach. All Eric could think as he watched their driver’s intestines being pulled out inch by agonizing inch was that special effects had nothing on real life.

  A puff of wind brought a rich, foul smell of fecal matter and blood wafting on the air. Eric gagged, trying not to throw up. Then the sound of slow, relentless footsteps behind them made it easier for him to keep his gorge down.

  Two more of the rotting figures approached them, eyes filmed over a milky white—corpse eyes, mouths opening and closing with never-ending hunger.

  “Run,” Nancy said.

  She yanked on his arm and headed straight for the 4X4, evading one of the kneeling corpses as it reached for her, and dodging around the rear of the vehicle to the passenger’s side. Several other walking horrors approached from the opposite side of the road, their gait slow and implacable.

  Nancy threw open the front door and scrambled across the passenger’s seat to the driver’s side, slamming the locks shut on the door as one of the corpses, blood and gore dripping from its mouth, staggered to its feet and splatted its hands against the window.

  Eric leaped into the shotgun seat, closing the door and hitting the lock as Nancy turned the keys that were dangling in the ignition. She revved the motor, and hit the gas. The 4X4 fishtailed briefly before its tires gripped the road.

  “What the fuck!” Eric said. He looked back at the rapidly receding village, where some of the figures still clustered around Johan while others staggered to the road and began following their vehicle.

  “We’ll go to the game preserve,” Nancy said with almost unnatural calm. “The diamond mine. They’ll have good security. We can ride this out.”

  “Ride what out?” Eric slammed his fist against the dashboard in frustration and horror. “What the fuck is going on?”

  Nancy just kept driving.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Whupwhupwhupwhup…

  Ugh, I hated that noise. It meant I was in the air, enclosed in a small, noisy, flying metal coffin that could malfunction at any moment. Planes were bad enough, but helicopters just sucked. Carl was a good pilot, but being in one made my stomach unhappy, and I so did not wanna barf again this month.

  Seriously, right before the zombie plague hit I’d had a horrible case of food poisoning caused by bad sushi, then been hit with Walker’s flu. Got chomped by a couple of zombies, and then topped it off by wading into all manner of blood, viscera, and tragedy. And, oh yeah, a helicopter crash.

  Maybe I should buy stock in Dramamine.

  I snuck a glance at Lil, sitting quietly next to a window and staring out at the passing landscape as the sun rose. It was a stark contrast to her almost manic excitement on the helicopter trip from Redwood grove to San Francisco. The circles under her eyes weren’t quite as extreme as they’d been yesterday, though. Just being up and active seemed to have helped her.

  At least this was a larger helicopter than the one we’d taken coming in. It had to be, in order to hold the ten of us plus the flight crew. A female mechanic had replaced poor Red. I didn’t know her name, and had to stop myself from thinking of her as our token red shirt.

  When we got to the roof the sky was clear, and there were two helicopters. But we all crammed into one. Both choppers took off and headed south. All smoke and mirrors.

  It’s not paranoia when someone’s trying to kill you.

  We were all in our matching SWAT chic of black BDUs, long-sleeved fire-retardant shirts, lace-up boots, and assorted Kevlar pieces to cover our vulnerable bits, although JT had made some modifications to accommodate the mobility he needed for his particular skills. He had shoes with flexible soles and a good grip on the bottom, and nothing that restricted his joints.

  We also toted our weapons of choice, the trusty M4s plus the new “squirrel rifles” as Tony called them. The AM15s were stubby green autos similar to the M4, but they fired much smaller rounds—a shitload of ’em, too, courtesy of that big spinning drum thingee on the top. It was an interesting weapon, quiet as a pellet gun, no recoil or over-penetration. Yet if you had it on full auto, a tight string could cut a zombie in half like a laser.

  I preferred the M4, probably because it was familiar, but the squirrel rifles were great when you had to worry about infectious splatter, or a round going through a rotting skull and into an innocent bystander.

  Tony had his BAS (Big Ass Shotgun), which spent most of its time in a holster slung across his back. It was a special weapon for special occasions. Somewhat surprisingly, Tony used it wisely.

  Our helicopter veered southwest toward the ocean and the Outer Sunset neighborhood. I watched through the window as zombies lurched their way up and down the streets. Outer Sunset was laid out pretty much in a grid, with numerical streets running north-south and alphabetical streets running east-west. There were no Victorian Painted Ladies out here. The neighborhood once called the Outside Lands—and didn’t that just smack of Lovecraft—had been one of the last to be built on top of what were mainly sand dunes. The houses and apartments were, for the most part, painted in pastel colors, eschewing the gilt-edged purples, greens, and blues. I remembered reading somewhere that a paint job for one of the Victorians could cost upward of a hundred thousand dollars.

  If I lived near the beach I’d opt for pastels too.

  We headed toward 40th and Taravel. There was a Walgreen’s on one of the corners that would have Lil’s meds. All part of Simone and Nathan’s plan to further befuddle anyone who might be aiming to sabotage us on our way to San Diego. It was a good plan, other than the fact that we couldn’t let Lil know why we were there.

  She’d go ballistic. Luckily we had a need-to-know cover story for our cover story.

  Can you say “convoluted,” children?

  I thought you could.

  * * *

  As we flew further west, the clear weather vanished, starting with wisps of flog floating through the air before the helicopter hit a wall of gray mist. Unfortunately it wasn’t quite thick enough to block the view below so I could still see that the streets were crawling with the undead. I saw a few people on rooftops, too, huddled together for warmth.

  Some of them saw the helicopter flying above and waved frantically, hoping for rescue. It sucked that we couldn’t help them. But if I thought about all the people we couldn’t save, it would paralyze me.

  So I shut my eyes, and tried not to think.

  Fingers squeezed my hand. I opened my eyes and looked over at Lil, who’d crept next to me and took my hand in hers. She looked up with a shy smile.

  “Hi,” I said softly as she rested her head against my arm.

  “Hi.”

  “You okay?” I asked.

  She nodded. “Yeah. Are you?”

  I thought about the people down below, hoping for help that wouldn’t be forthcoming.

  And then I lied.

  “Yeah, I’m okay.”

  Lil shook her head. “No, you’re not. But you will be, once we get Gabriel back.”

  I gave her a one-armed hug. “You are wise beyond your years, Padawan.”

  She sat quietly for a moment, still leaning against me. I felt like I had a feral kitten curled up next to me—one that wanted affection, but any false move would send it skittering away.

  “It’s like the animals,” Lil said. “We can’t save all of them, can we?”

  “No,” I said, giving a heartfelt sigh. “We can’t.”

  Lil gave me a sudden squeeze and
looked up at me, her expression fierce.

  “You helped me get Binkey and Doodle back. I’ll help you get Gabriel back.”

  “Hopefully he won’t make as much noise as they did,” Nathan commented from two seats over. He had to raise his voice to be heard over the sounds of the helicopter.

  Damn. He had good hearing even for a wild card. He was right, though. Binkey and Doodle had howled enough to wake the dead when we’d tried to quietly smuggle them out of Lil’s old apartment.

  Lil grinned. “If he does, then it’s a good thing we have you here to help us again.”

  “Just no more cats,” Nathan said firmly. He winked at me before shutting his eyes and feigning sleep.

  “Do you think G will take good care of them?” Lil bit her bottom lip and frowned. “He seems awfully…” She paused, looking for the right word.

  “Anal-retentive, obsessive-compulsive, and a neat freak?”

  Lil grinned. “Uh-huh.”

  “I think he’ll be on the job,” I said, and I meant it. G seemed like a man of his word, and he’d promised Simone he would look after Binkey and Doodle during our absence. That made it even more of a certainty.

  “Cats are clean,” he’d said, clutching a bottle of hand sanitizer. “They wash a lot.” I just hoped he could handle cat box duty. Both Binkey and Doodle laid down some major paint-peelers.

  My stomach gave a lurch as the helicopter suddenly dipped down toward the ground. I looked out the window and saw the Walgreen’s sign. We’d reached our destination.

  Like the rest of the city, the streets below were clogged with unmoving vehicles, some of them smashed in an interlocking metal mess, and others abandoned all helter-skelter. Two Muni streetcars had become jammed at opposite ends of Taravel in the block between 40th and 41st. Cars had sheared into them, creating a roadblock at either end while leaving a sizable clear space in the middle—large enough for our whirlybird to set down.

  “Why are we landing?” Griff sat up from his seat in the back.

  “I have an errand to run,” I said coolly, ignoring the churning in my gut as the helicopter swooped in to land.

  “What errand?” Lil asked. She hadn’t been in on it either, for obvious reasons.

  “Simone needs some… er… stuff for Gabriel’s antiserum.” Stuff. Yeah. That’s the ticket. “We didn’t want the bad guys to know. We’ll meet you at a rendezvous point up the road.”

  Someday I’d get a vocabulary worthy of the situations I now found myself in. Even so, it worked. Lil nodded, and Griff shut up, at least for the moment. He kept on staring at me suspiciously, though, right up to the moment the pilot set the helicopter down.

  Whatever, I didn’t care what he thought.

  Once we hit ground and stabilized, I scrambled for the door, determined not to spew. My stomach thought about it for a brief moment, but thankfully everything stayed put. Tony leaped out after me, hefting Thor’s Wee Hammer. Nathan and JT followed swiftly. I saw Lil staring at me in confusion through one of the windows, so I gave her a reassuring wave and blew a kiss.

  She grinned and waved back.

  Zombies appeared from both ends of the street and began stumbling toward the helicopter, drawn by the noise. I heard cries for help from a building across the street and my heart dropped. I looked up to see a middle-aged man leaning out of a second-story window, waving frantically. Zombies in the street below immediately zeroed in on him, moving toward the entrance to the building and fresh meat. The man’s eyes widened and he vanished inside, hopefully to fortify the front door of his apartment.

  Sorry, dude. And I really was. I wanted to charge in and save the day, the Mighty Mouse of zombie killing. But… I couldn’t. Instead I dashed over to the entrance of the Walgreen’s, along with Nathan, Tony, and JT.

  Whupwhupwhupwhup…

  The helicopter, in the meantime took off again, ascending to just above the grasping hands of the hungry crowd gathering below. Our ride headed off to its next destination and it was up to the four of us to accomplish our respective goals and meet them there.

  Nathan looked at us. “You all clear on the plan?”

  “I go get the supplies,” I said.

  “And I back her up.” Tony gave Thor’s Wee Hammer a swing.

  JT grinned. “I create a distraction and lead as many zombies away from here as I can so you three have a semi-clear shot to the beach when you’re finished.”

  “Excellent.” Nathan nodded approvingly. “I’ll clear whatever stragglers don’t follow JT.” He clapped a hand on JT’s shoulder. “We’ll see you at the Great Highway and Vicente when you’re finished.”

  “That you will,” JT said. He grinned at me. “I’ll race you.”

  Then, with a whoop and a holler and no sign of fear whatsoever, he took off at a run, east on Taravel, using any and every available surface to keep his momentum going and avoid the clutching hands of hungry undead pedestrians.

  “He really is crazy,” I observed, watching in bemused admiration as he leapt without pause up a brick wall and onto the roof of a residential garage. He stopped there, hunkering down on the edge, and gave another ear-splitting rebel yell to attract the attention of the neighborhood zombies.

  “Come on dowwwwn,” he hollered gleefully. “Get your share of the tastiest piece of ass in San Francisco!” He turned and twerked with a dexterity that would have made Miley Cyrus jealous. And the crowd loved it, judging from the increased volume of moans and the outstretched hands.

  Ever the showman, JT turned to one side in a classic “The Thinker” pose, flexing his biceps.

  “Is there a vet around here,” he yelled, “because these pythons are sick!”

  “Dude needs help,” Tony agreed.

  “Or not,” I commented as JT bounded across the length of the garage rooftop, where he nimbly scaled a balcony and hoisted himself up a trellis to gain access to the second story of the house. He vanished from our eyesight shortly after that, his war whoops still clearly audible.

  I really hoped he’d be okay. He was on the lighter side of nuts, for sure, but he was risking his life even more than the rest of us because one scratch or bite, and he’d be screwed. I couldn’t remember the exact percentage of people immune to the zombie pathogen, but the odds of becoming a wild card were only slightly more favorable than winning the lottery.

  There was a muffled pop as Nathan put a round in the skull of an Asian teenage boy who hadn’t been entranced by JT’s award-worthy performance. It reminded me that we needed to get our asses in gear.

  Minus the twerking.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The door to the Walgreen’s was ajar. A body clad in baggy khakis and a flannel shirt lay face down and prevented it from closing. I think it was a man, but the amount of flesh that had been ripped away, coupled with a neutral short haircut, made it hard to tell.

  The smell was horrific, rot and blood and shit blended together in a rich bouquet of gross. Moaning sounded from inside the store, and I could hear more approaching from the streets all around. I pushed the door open and went inside.

  Oh, shit.

  The Walgreen’s was full of the walking dead. There were at least two-dozen lurching up and down the aisles, still finishing up whatever last-minute shopping had been important enough to convince them to go out in a crisis. There were Chinese grandmas and grandpas, surfers in their flip-flops, and an assortment of the diverse population of the neighborhood. Whatever they had come here looking for, now they all craved the same meal.

  In that moment, I was it.

  I pulled out my swords and waded in, relatively secure in the knowledge that Tony was right behind me. Several employees wearing blue staff shirts stumbled toward me. I carved up one and left Tony to finish the cleanup in aisle two as I dashed down the cosmetics aisle toward the back of the store, heading for the sign that said “PHARMACY.”

  A slender female zombie in yoga pants and a form-fitting black top lurched into my path. I cut into its head with my katana,
feeling the reverberation through my arms as the blade sliced through bone and brains. As I pulled the blade from its skull, hands grasped my shoulders from behind, the smell announcing another zombie looking for an easy meal. I whirled around and drove my tanto into its skull, taking out a teenage boy in a Giants hoodie, its face shredded by equal parts teeth, nails, and acne.

  I hated this.

  I was sick of putting down these poor dead things. They had no more control over their actions than sharks, turned into relentless eating machines. Still, I hacked, slashed, and thrust my way past the vitamin and sleep-aid aisle to the consultation window of the pharmacy. A sleepy-eyed zombie pharmacist stood at the window, reaching out for me as an older male zombie with a shock of steel gray hair lurched toward me from the cold medication aisle.

  Hopping up onto the shelf of the window, I kicked the pharmacist backward, then jumped down into the pharmacy proper where I landed on my feet with flexed knees, tanto in hand. It would have been a perfect landing if I hadn’t hit a patch of something nasty and slippery on the Formica floor. My right foot slid out from under me, depositing me on my ass and pulling muscles in my thigh and groin at the same time.

  “Shit!” I didn’t bother lowering my voice.

  “You okay, Ash?” Tony poked his head over the counter.

  I got to my feet, wincing as the pulled muscle let it be known it did not approve.

  “Kindasorta,” I said. I glanced down to see what I’d slipped in.

  Blood and black vomit. Lovely. And it also meant I probably wasn’t alone back there. And sure enough…

  A low moan sounded from the other side of the nearest row of shelves. I sheathed my katana, transferring my tanto to my right hand as I slowly and cautiously moved toward the sound.

  Something dragged along the floor, a nasty squishing noise followed by a thumping sound.

  I thought of an old slumber party standard, a story called “Thump Squish,” where the heroine hears something coming closer, a thump followed by a squish and drag… and it turns out to be her friend who’s had her legs and arms chopped off by the psycho from the nearby insane asylum… and she’s dragging herself along, the thump being the stumps of her arms as they hit the ground and the squish being the sound of her legs dragging behind.