Now she tapped on glass. Did she want him to open his window and look out at her?
He’d kept the curtains drawn since his first good look at the insanity below. He’d seen half a dozen mutilated corpses, and some of the deaders prowled the streets, jerking and wobbling as if unsure of their destination. He supposed they had no destination. If they were already dead, where else was there to go?
The tapping on the glass came again, louder.
Then he heard her yelling. She’d opened her window.
He debated his options. Stay indoors, play it safe, keep hiding until things settled down. Alone.
Or literally stick his neck out.
“Hey, Arjun!” Sydney yelled.
She was taking a risk, drawing attention to herself. And she remembered his name.
Damn it.
He snugged the bandanna more securely into place over his nose and mouth, slid open his window, and removed the screen. The faint odor of acrid, chemical smoke drifted in, evident even through his mask. He glanced down onto the street below. The number of bodies didn’t appear appreciably greater, and none of the deaders were in sight. A police cruiser crawled along the street, where cars were parked haphazardly, but otherwise traffic was non-existent. Maybe everyone was as afraid as Arjun to leave their homes or else had obeyed the government mandate to stay indoors.
“Hey!” Sydney yelled.
Arjun stuck his head out the window and turned toward her. He tried to keep his breath shallow in the hope of not inhaling any floating diseases. “Hello,” he said.
“What?”
“Hello!”
“I can’t hear you with that stupid piece of cloth over your mouth.”
He shook his head, took a gulp of air, and peeled down the bandanna long enough to say, “It’s protection.”
“Dude, it’s already inside you.”
This shook him. He’d never been much of a science nerd, but in researching various doomsday scenarios for video games, he discovered a contagious outbreak always took some time to spread. But this was obviously unlike anything that had ever been unleashed before. Who knew how long the Klondike Flu had been cooking up and mutating, just waiting for its chance to descend upon the human race?
“How do you know?” he shouted through the bandanna.
“You got the chills? Feel a little shaky?”
“Maybe. I can’t tell. I thought that was just anxiety.”
A deader appeared from a scraggly boxwood hedge at the perimeter of the complex parking lot. At first, Arjun thought it was somebody heading for their car, because the man was dressed in a business suit. But the shuffling gait wasn’t that of the executive class at all. It was more like the meandering of a homeless wino.
The police car had already turned the corner and disappeared from view. Arjun turned to see if Sydney had spotted the deader. She was looking down at it trekking across the parking lot, slowly dodging between cars. It came upon a body, paused, and appeared to sniff the air. Then it continued on its way to nowhere.
“They don’t want dead meat,” Sydney observed.
“This is silly,” Arjun replied, pulling down his bandanna. “Want to come over?”
“Do you have food or a gun?”
“I’ve got some leftover pizza in the fridge.”
“I’ll bring some beer.”
“I don’t drink.” He hoped he didn’t come off as a prude. He just didn’t care for having a cloudy head. And at the moment, he had bigger concerns.
“What about pot?”
“Do we have to have this conversation now?”
She shrugged, or at least as much as she could, considering her awkward posture from leaning out the window. “Meet me at your door in case there’s trouble.”
Arjun ducked inside and looked around for a makeshift weapon. He didn’t golf or play softball, and a butcher knife would require close contact. He picked up his skateboard and tested its heft. The wheels spun as he swung it through the air. It was a little clumsy, but it would have to do.
Seconds later, Sydney banged on the door. Arjun opened it before she finished knocking, and she pushed past him, carrying a six-pack as if it were a football and she were a fullback crossing the goal line. “He’s coming!”
A middle-aged man teetered toward them from an open apartment three doors down. Even though he was dark-skinned, his face bore a flushed, twisted aspect that marked him as infected. He stumbled over a recycling bin and fell, scattering plastic soda bottles and beer cans across the concrete landing. Arjun recognized him, but as with his other neighbors, he didn’t know the man’s name.
A deader. He’s a deader. He has no name anymore.
As the man clambered to regain his footing, Arjun slammed his door and threw the deadbolt. He turned and leaned against it, panting.
Sydney nodded at the skateboard. “What were you going to do? Take him for a ride?”
Arjun held it up with both hands. “It works as a shield, a club, and an ax. And, yeah, if it comes to that, I can make a fast getaway.”
“You’re the expert, Arjun.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I’ve seen all those packages at your door. Ubisoft, Konami, EA, Sony. You’re a hardcore gamer. Why do you think I came to you for help?”
He wanted to tell her there was a big difference between survival horror as a game and as real life. But was there, really? The major difference was that in reality, you didn’t get any extra lives.
Arjun shrugged. “Maybe if we work together, we can figure out what to do.”
She tugged one of the beers from its plastic ring and popped the top. “Now you’re talking.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Rocky Maldonado figured out you had to shoot them in the head before anyone told him.
Most of their Army basic training focused on center mass shots for the kill, but with the increasing use of body armor by militaries around the world, it never hurt to make sure. Even better was to use a grenade launcher to take down a target. And if all else failed, you could resort to calling in a drone strike. The U.S. Army had taught him two dozen different ways to kill a man, but nothing in the manual had prepared them for zombies.
Fighting Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan was difficult enough, since it was nearly impossible to tell the terrorists from the locals. These zombies—what the upper echelon referred to as “the enemy threat”—looked very much like people, and from a distance only their erratic gaits and behavior gave them away. Even then, a number of innocent bystanders had been taken down by his squad. He might’ve even engaged in a little friendly fire himself.
But who could blame them?
Their reserve unit with the 81st Infantry had been mobilized last night and still wasn’t at full strength, but they’d been rolled into active duty anyway. By dawn, they were in position and had been given a briefing on the threat, but Rocky still wasn’t sure what the hell these things were. Sgt. Marcus Jackson, a fierce, dark-eyed man with a war record dating back to Desert Storm, had ordered the twelve-man squad to shoot to kill once an infected case had been verified.
They’d been assigned a twelve-block perimeter in downtown Raleigh defending the state government buildings. Much of their immediate territory consisted of the Bicentennial Plaza, an open space of green lawns, concrete walks, and bricked pavilions between two museums. From his position behind a parked Hummer, Maldonado could see the United States and North Carolina flags fluttering on each side of the capitol rotunda. He supposed that was what they were fighting for, although the battle lines were ephemeral. Didn’t these flush-faced, flesh-eating creeps belong to the same country as him?
“Maldonado, get your head out of four points of contact!” Sgt. Jackson bellowed from the rear of the Hummer.
Rocky realized he’d been staring at the dull blue sky with its feathery haze of high, white cirrus clouds. The gunfire around him was like a hot-air popcorn maker in action, a dull, distant staccato that had nothing to do with him. He checke
d the safety on his M-16—the rifle was hot, as expected—and swung it into firing position. Grabowski, perched by the front tire, squeezed off a series of three-round bursts, even though Rocky spied no targets.
“What are you shooting at?” he asked.
“Whatever,” Grabowski said, squinting at him beneath a jet-black unibrow. “Thought I saw something.”
“What if they’re civilians?”
“It’s martial law, Rocko. You go out in the street, all bets are off.”
“They all look alike.”
“I just aim for the dark ones,” Grabowski said.
That didn’t comfort Rocky at all, considering he was of Uruguayan descent. He could pass for a well-tanned Caucasian if you weren’t worldly enough to make the connection with his last name. Grabowski probably skipped high school history for weightlifting in the gym with his jock buddies. Now he had an automatic weapon and the power to decide who lived or died.
Sgt. Jackson was on the radio, talking with the tactical operations center. Rocky peeked through the Hummer’s windows but the surrounding streets were populated only by corpses. A few vehicles crawled through the massive traffic jam, but Jackson had ordered the unit not to fire on drivers. Based on observation, deaders couldn’t operate machinery. Even Grabowski understood the panic that would lead people to flee the city.
Rocky had been summoned to active duty the previous evening just after supper. He lived in Smithfield, a small town known for its barbecue that was about an hour from Raleigh. He’d kissed his wife, given her the Glock and two magazines, and assured his five-year-old son Nicholas that everything was okay, Daddy just had to go help with a “big-city problem.” After his tour of Afghanistan, he’d been reluctant to have a kid, but Lucia’s reproductive drive proved too powerful to resist. Now he couldn’t even focus on his duty because he wondered if the same hell was erupting back home.
They’d mobilized so rapidly that few of them were in regulation shape. Rocky wore Army green ACU bottoms to go with his brown-patterned camouflage jacket. Grabowski wore tennis shoes instead of combat boots, and even Sgt. Jackson had on an older uniform that failed to properly denote his rank of Master Sergeant. They’d gathered at the armory in Raleigh’s western suburbs and collected weapons and intel. Rocky couldn’t tell if the brief was intentionally vague or if nobody really knew what the hell was going on.
Sgt. Jackson signed off on the radio and made a hand gesture to the three soldiers deployed farther down the street. They jogged toward him, crouching as if rounds were flying over their heads, although Rocky had seen no one with weapons besides the police and army. The deaders themselves exhibited no coordinated strategy besides chasing the closest fleeing person.
The three men convened by the Hummer, and Jackson crept over to Rocky and Grabowski. “Our orders are to clear and secure the legislative building,” he said. “Move out on my command.”
“What good will that do?” Grabowski ran a nervous finger under his twitching nose. He’d never been deployed and didn’t know that objectives didn’t matter to grunts.
“Make politicians feel better,” Sgt. Jackson said. “Just like in every war.”
“We’ll be exposed,” Rocky said.
“It’s only a block. I’ll gather the rest of the squad. Rocky, you take the others and clear the first floor. We’ll join you as soon ASAP.”
Rocky didn’t like the responsibility, even though he had the most combat experience. “Hey, Sarge. What are the rules of engagement? Who do we shoot?”
“Anybody that doesn’t belong.”
“So everybody except the suits?”
“Use your discretion. We’re all pissing up a rope here.” Sgt. Jackson gave a curt nod and took off down the block to gather the rest of the unit.
“So, Boss Man,” Grabowski said. “What’s the plan?”
The other three soldiers, who were all in their early twenties, stared at Rocky and fidgeted. Their eyes were wide with fear, knuckles white from the tight grip on their rifles. Rocky wasn’t so sure he wanted to be point man. These kids were just as likely to shoot him in the back as protect him from an ambush.
“We cross the street, dodging between those cars,” Rocky said, waving in the general direction of the building’s entrance. “Grabowski, bring up the rear, but don’t slow down to take potshots. Only fire if engaged.”
“What if the front doors are locked?” asked one of the pale recruits.
“We work our way around the lawn to the left and try the side. And then on to the rear if we have to.”
Someone unleashed a short burst down the street, probably from the group Jackson was gathering. Intel suggested the infected people were sensitive to sound, so Rocky figured this was as good a time as any. “Lock and load! Let’s move out!”
He sprinted from the cover of the Hummer, feeling a little sheepish for keeping low, but he reasoned that friendly fire was his biggest danger. He’d gone a hundred feet when he glanced behind him and saw the rest of the squad still hunkered down in their original position. He furiously waved at them to follow, crouching beside a Dodge sedan with some kind of official emblem on the flank. The three recruits emerged onto the street, as gawky as newborn foals, while Grabowski trailed after them, swiveling the barrel of his M-16 back and forth.
Rocky left the street and hit the broad sidewalk leading to the legislative building, running between the large concrete planters that had been erected to keep maniacs from driving into the lobby. He hopped over a series of steps and reached the portico, peering through the tinted glass for movement inside the building. The rest of the squad closed the distance as he conducted recon. Grabowski took up his post at a planter, squeezing off a shot at a target Rocky couldn’t see.
Rocky tried the double doors to the right and found them unlocked. He held a door open and motioned for the others. Before they could reach him, a blur of movement on the lawn caught Rocky’s attention. Judging by the uniform, Rocky guessed it was a landscaper or service technician, but when he saw the face, such distinctions no longer mattered.
The man’s skin bore the telltale flushing and his eyes were ringed with red blotches. He was already reaching toward them even though he was forty yards away, fingers curled like talons scooping for fresh meat. Rocky dropped to one knee and steadied his aim, sighting center mass on the man’s chest. He gently squeezed off a round and a blossom of blood erupted inches above his heart.
The man staggered and spun, flinging gouts of blood along the sidewalk. But the kill shot barely even slowed him. He wobbled and turned toward them, listing heavily to port as he staggered forward. The recruits froze in panic, but Grabowski flipped his safety to full auto and sprayed half a clip at the infected man. Bullets spanged around his feet and stitched their way up his body, eventually drilling his skull.
As the man collapsed, Grabowski shouted, “Head shots! Didn’t you listen to the Intel brief?”
Rocky couldn’t believe he’d forgotten. What if his life had been on the line, or the lives of one of the other men?
Rocky didn’t respond to Grabowski, entering the lobby with his ears ringing from gunfire. The lobby branched off into hallways, with a wide row of steps leading up to a gallery. They’d have to clear the offices one by one, but first Rocky planned a sweep of the entire building. He figured the gallery would give him a quick overview. He jogged up the steps as the others entered the lobby, his nerves as taut as mandolin strings. When he reached the gallery, the chamber of the House of Representatives’ opened up below him.
Assembly was in emergency session, and it looked like they were all infected.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“We need to get her to the hospital,” Meg said.
“We can’t risk it,” Ian said. “The governor’s advisory said to stay indoors. The streets are jammed. We can’t even get through on 911. Why do you think the hospitals will be functioning when nothing else is?”
They’d put Ramona to bed and now stood outside the door
to her room, talking in suppressed half-whispers that threatened to boil into an argument. Meg didn’t want Jacob to overhear, so he was currently sequestered with Zelda on his Wii U in his own room. The vague bells and whistles of his video game leaked through the walls, a sound that provided an odd domestic reassurance where once the greatest worry was whether too much gaming was bad for children.
First World problems.
Now they were facing Last World problems, because the infection had spread rapidly across the globe. They were all in it together. Yet she felt like they were on their own, imprisoned by the loss of everything they had known.
“We have to try,” Meg said.
Ian grabbed her gently by the shoulders to stop her restless pacing. “Look. You had it, and you got better.”
“We don’t know anything. We can’t even be sure I was a carrier.”
“If the Klondike Flu started at Toolik, then you brought it home with you. Whatever it is.”
“It looks like the most rapidly mutating virus ever unleashed. Maybe I got lucky because I was exposed early, before it had time to leap.” Meg didn’t believe her own impromptu theory, but she was grasping at any straws she could find.
“Or maybe you’ve got good genes,’ Ian said. “A natural immunity. And you gave Ramona half of her genes.”
“So we’re supposed to just sit and wait until…until she turns?”
Ian flung an angry hand toward the world outside their windows and walls. “Going out there where people’s faces are getting eaten is somehow better? And dealing with idiots like Ken Dobbins running around with high-powered weapons?”
“It’s not just Ramona,” Meg said, near tears. “I can help. I just feel responsible somehow.”
“You’ve tried. You can’t get through to Toolik, the CDC, or even the local health department. Until things settle down a little, we’re better off just waiting it out here.”
Arize (Book 1): Resurrection Page 7
