Rocky collected his walkie-talkie. “This is Fox Alpha One, come in, Tango Fox One. Over. Say again, this is Fox Alpha One, over.”
The sergeant’s voice came over the air. “This is Tango Fox One. Where are you, Maldonado? Over.”
“We’re on Ruffin Street heading west. Traffic is blocking us. We’ve commandeered a bus. We have one casualty and will need a medic standing by, over.”
“Proceed as you are. You’ll see our company in a few blocks. Look for the big white cross. We’ve established a base here, over.”
“Copy that. Over and out.”
Rocky nearly jumped when the woman’s voice came from directly behind him. “They’re at the church. See?”
A gleaming white cross came into view, towering above the surrounding buildings and stretching six stories into the sky. Clusters of people hurried along the sidewalks, all headed in the same direction as the bus. Some of them tried to flag a ride, but the driver didn’t slow.
“Where are they going?” Grabowski said.
“Word must’ve got out that Promiseland is an emergency shelter,” the woman said.
“I wasn’t talking to you.”
“Look, we’re on the same team. And we’re headed to the same place. We don’t need to be looking for a fight.”
“She’s with the government,” Rocky said to Grabowski.
“If you know so much,” Grabowski said to her, “why don’t you tell us what’s going on?”
“I don’t know much more than you do. A sudden infection, possibly caused by a biological agent, worldwide outbreak, state of emergency. It might be the work of hostile elements.”
“Basically shit hitting the fan?”
“Diarrhea in a hurricane,” she coolly replied. “The government’s still functioning, at least for the moment. But that’s only good as long as the infrastructure and communication holds.”
“Which is where this megachurch comes in,” Rocky said.
“Exactly. The plan is to establish centers of operation in every major city. If things fall apart, each center can act independently to defend itself until such time we can reconnect.”
“But why a church? Why not the university or a state government facility?”
“Politics. But once you see the church, it’ll make more sense.” She extended a hand. “Sonia Thorpe, Department of Public Safety.”
“Should I salute?”
“You saved my life. I guess you know more about safety than I do.”
The bus rumbled with a deep vibration. “Jets flying low,” the driver side, peering up at the clouds.
A trio of F-16s zoomed out of the horizon and overhead in a tight V formation, followed seconds later by an ear-splitting series of explosions. Tiny chunks of debris rained down on the shell of the bus. Smoke and dust roiled out in the direction from which they’d come.
“What the hell are they bombing?” Grabowski said.
Rocky swallowed a dry, hard knot. “The capital district. They blew it all to hell.”
“But why?”
“Maybe they don’t want anybody to know the governor’s a zombie.” He raised an eyebrow at the woman as if she might know something about the mission.
She shook her head in dismay. “The governor? No way. He just messaged us with orders.”
“That wasn’t the governor. Somebody’s jerking your chain.”
“We’d better reach base before somebody decides we’re the next expendables,” Grabowski said, urging the driver to accelerate. The bus collided with a stalled SUV, screeched to a halt, and the engine groaned and rattled. The driver changed gears and reversed, shedding the wreckage. The noise drew the attention of a cluster of deaders in a nearby parking lot. As they plodded toward the bus, the driver attempted to squeeze through a pile-up.
“No good,” the driver said.
Sonia pulled a smartphone from her pocket and scrolled the screen with nimble fingers. “According to Google maps, you can go through this parking lot and hit a one-lane side street.”
“That’s a gamble,” Grabowski said. “If we get stuck, we’ll have to fight our way on foot.”
“At least you have both your shoes.”
“Do it!” Rocky said.
The driver swung the bus into the parking lot, bouncing up on the curb and mowing over a parking meter and two street signs. Behind them, a handful of people abandoned their cars and sprinted toward the bus.
Grabowski shook his head at Rocky. “Don’t even think about it.”
“At least we can give them some support.” Rocky returned to the back of the bus and opened the rear door again. He held it in place with one boot while he fired at the zombies in pursuit. Grabowski couldn’t resist joining in, as did the third soldier, Larsen.
The driver rammed a chain-link fence at the edge of the lot. A steel pole flew up and lanced through a side window, shattering it and showering glass all over the injured soldier. Grabowski ran forward to take up a position at the opening, firing wildly. The bus shivered on its shock absorbers, the muffler breaking free on a low concrete barrier, but the vehicle managed to reach the side street intact.
“All clear, more or less,” the driver said. Although a number of cars and service vehicles were parked along the street, a bike lane was just wide enough for the bus to pass. All it cost was some sheet metal and paint.
“Three blocks ahead,” Sonia said.
With the street relatively quiet, Rocky secured the door and rejoined the others in the front. If anyone lived or worked in this section of town, they must’ve been scared by either the news or the bombs and were staying indoors. Assuming anyone was left who hadn’t turned.
The large white cross came into view again, larger now and glinting in the sun, and then Promiseland was visible on a slight rise before them. Rocky saw why it had been chosen as a shelter and base. The facility itself was four stories high, built of burnt-orange brick with plenty of windows. A ten-foot-tall brick wall surrounded the property, and the gate they approached was constructed of thick wrought-iron bars. Rocky imagined all the entrances were similarly sturdy.
Rocky activated his walkie-talkie. “Command, this is Fox Alpha One, we’re in visual contact, over.”
“This is Tango Fox One. You must be in the bus, over.”
“Affirmative. Approaching from…” Rocky shot Sonia a quizzical look.
“Mebane Lane.”
He repeated the name to Sgt. Jackson, who told him the guards were waiting to open the gate. A few bodies lay along the surrounding sidewalks, apparently taken out by the platoon, but Rocky couldn’t tell whether they were infected or not.
Two guards opened the gate for them, and as the bus rolled into the compound, Grabowski let out a whistle of admiration. “Day-yum, boys, it looks like the entire Seventh Division’s here.”
Rocky barely had time to register the cluster of armored military vehicles before the injured soldier let out a raspy growl and rose up in his seat. What Rocky at first took for a miraculous recovery was actually the exact opposite of a miracle.
The deader showed its teeth.
CHAPTER TWENTY
“Your call cannot be completed at this time.”
Meg wanted to hurl the phone against the dashboard after hearing the recorded message for the tenth time. The system was already collapsing, and they were barely into the second day of the outbreak. Ramona was worse, alternating between fitful drowsiness and eye-fluttering delirium. At one point, she mumbled that she was thirsty but faded again before Meg could get the water bottle to her lips.
Jacob kept surveillance from the rear seat, announcing each time he saw a zombie in one of the storefronts or on the sidewalk. A few people left their cars and fled for the safety of the surrounding buildings, but Meg didn’t know what lay inside them. For all she knew, zombies might be trapped and waiting for someone to open the door for them.
She scouted the options anyway, just in case: a tire store with its bay doors closed, a floral shop that th
ree people had already entered, an Italian restaurant with its red checkered curtains drawn tight, and what looked like a set of walk-up apartments above it. On the side of the street farthest from their car, a hair salon, a law office, a wealth-management firm, and a sandwich shop all looked closed and dark. Beyond the businesses stood a row of four-story apartments, probably rented by university students, and although occasional faces appeared at the windows, Meg had no way to know if they were infected or not.
“What’s everybody waiting for?” Jacob asked.
“Authority,” Meg answered. “Somebody who knows what’s going on. Your dad will find out something.”
“We can’t just sit here,” Jacob said. “It’s burning up.”
Despite the April weather, the sun’s glare trapped heat in the car. Meg was afraid to crack the windows, partly from an irrational fear that the infection would carry through the air. The notion was silly because all three of them were already exposed, and so was Ian. Her heart skipped a beat when she thought of Ian turning into a zombie after leaving the car. She forced away a vision of her husband staggering after people drooling with hunger.
But she’d recovered from her exposure to the Klondike Flu. Jacob might prove immune, too. Maybe a natural resistance ran in families, so that even Ramona might dodge the most terrible symptom. She checked the driver of the car behind them in the rearview mirror. The elderly man with the wisps of cottony hair at his temples gripped the steering wheel with all his strength, eyes bulging behind wire-rimmed glasses. He grimaced and his dark skin was dotted with sweat.
His body convulsed and he pitched forward, slamming face-first against the steering wheel. The impact triggered his horn, and the blare disrupted the uneasy silence that had befallen the traffic jam. When the man drew upright again, his pink tongue curled out to lap at the blood pouring from his nose.
“He turned!” Jacob said, elbows perched on the headrest of the back seat.
“He can’t get us,” Meg said. “He’s buckled in and he probably won’t know how to work a seat belt or a door handle.”
“What if he’s a smart zombie?”
“We haven’t seen any reason to think that,” Meg said, resorting to the cool demeanor of scientific analysis. “Remember the ones we’ve observed. They have little awareness of their surroundings, exhibit no personal identity, and operate on some primal instinct that causes them to seek out living humans.”
“Hunger,” Jacob said. “You always say facts are important. And the fact is they want to eat us.”
“That’s the working theory. We just need to survive long enough to figure out how to stop it.”
The driver behind them struggled against his restraints, banging his head and shoulder against the door. Although they couldn’t hear him, his lips peeled back in a growl or scream. Suddenly he stopped flailing about and seemed to focus on the movement in the car in front of him. He reached out a brown hand until it struck the windshield, where the fingers raked at the glass as if seeking escape.
“Don’t move,” Meg said. “He’s seen us.”
“You said he was stuck.”
“We don’t know how strong these things are. The virus might cause some sort of mutation that temporarily enhances strength, or at least minimizes fatigue. A flood of adrenalin or endorphins in conjunction with the corruption of hormones in the hypothalamus. So as the hunger grows, the creature is more suited to capturing the prey it needs.”
Meg was so intent on studying the specimen in the car behind them that she didn’t notice the light tapping at first. When she turned at the sound, a drooling, distorted face pressed against the window inches from her. The rheumy, red-veined eyes peered right into hers, as if it had noted her theory and found it frivolous. She gave a gasp of surprise but managed to stop herself from screaming.
“It wants in!” Jacob said. “It’s smart.”
Meg checked to make sure she’d locked the doors. So far, so good. But the zombie butted its head against the glass, soft and then harder.
Thump thump thump. Let me in.
Meg gripped the pistol and slid into the passenger seat, ordering Jacob to move away as well. The zombie slapped and clawed at the window. It had been a woman before the infection changed her, but now it was nearly sexless, a haggard, frenetic thing trying to dig its way to them. It unleashed a guttural moan, leaving a faint mist of slobber and blood on the glass.
That wasn’t breath; that was some sort of diseased excretion.
Meg pointed the pistol at the creature.
“Don’t shoot,” Jacob said. “If the glass breaks, it will get us. Or the next one will.”
But the zombie seemed a step ahead of them. It drew back a gnarled fist and hammered it against the window. Bone crunched and the hand lost some of its integrity, meat splitting away from the knuckles, but the thing showed no sign of pain. It delivered another blow, with strength far too unnatural for a woman who might’ve weighed a hundred and ten pounds at most. This one sent a faint spider web of cracks along the window.
“It’s going to give,” Jacob said, more in awe than fright.
“Listen to me,” Meg said, as the zombie drew back its broken hand for another go. “Unlock your door and jump out when I count three. I’ll get Ramona.”
“Where are we headed?”
“The florist’s. The one where the people went earlier. Ready? One…two…”
Before she could say “three,” the glass shattered and the clear safety lining folded in, a few shards raining down onto the front seat with a musical tinkle. Jacob was already out of the car and yanking on Meg’s door handle. She shied away from the zombie’s probing arm, searching behind her for the door lock. At the moment she clicked it, Jacob pulled open the door and she nearly tumbled to the pavement.
Meg rolled to her feet and collected the bundled Ramona in her arms, careful to keep the pistol free in case she needed it. Mister Grizz fell from Ramona’s frail clutches but Jacob was right there to retrieve it like a good big brother. The zombie wriggled through the opening on the driver’s side, and Meg was relieved it wasn’t smart enough to give faster pursuit around the outside of the vehicle. One fact seemed important: when a zombie wanted to eat you, it didn’t seem to be able to think of anything else.
Jacob led the way, cutting in front of a neighboring car whose driver and passengers ducked out of sight when the zombie snaked its way out of the passenger side of the Subaru. Meg didn’t blame them, but she wouldn’t have minded a little help. Just like she was, they were putting their own family first.
They reached the sidewalk before the zombie regained its footing and staggered after them, emitting a low chuffing wheeze. Meg made for the florist’s shop—BEST WAY TO SAY YOU CARE—where white carnations, pink and red roses, ochre daisies, and lavender chrysanthemums filled the windows. To Meg, they were like floral arrangements for a final funeral, one where the past was dead and buried and a nightmare was resurrected in its place.
Jacob reached the door first, but it didn’t yield when he pushed against it. He tucked Mister Grizz in his armpit and drove his shoulder against the glass door, but it didn’t budge. He gave Meg a distraught look. “I know they’re in there.”
Meg tried the door herself to confirm it was locked. She pounded on it like the zombie had pounded on her car window, just as desperate and driven. “Let us in!”
A face appeared behind the shadowed, tinted glass—young, lean, and scared. The man shook his head and pointed behind her.
The zombie was barely twenty yards away. Meg considered shooting it, but she would have to set down Ramona. Plus, despite her assured statements to Jacob, she wasn’t certain she could aim well enough to hit it, especially in the head.
“Next door,” Meg yelled at Jacob, who had already found the restaurant locked. But before they could work their way down the street, a second zombie emerged from the traffic jam. This one had the stain of a fresh kill coating a business suit, a tendril of intestine dangling alongside
the gore-sodden necktie. Jacob sprinted past her in the opposite direction, telling her to follow.
Weighed down by Ramona, Meg knew she couldn’t outrun her infected pursuers for long. Jacob turned the corner ahead and Meg followed him into a narrow alleyway that held a row of garbage cans, a fire escape whose metal steps were just out of reach, and several HVAC units and propane tanks. A mutilated body lay in their path and they hopped over it without looking too closely. They ran the obstacle course through the dark urban canyon to the clearing beyond. At the end of the alleyway, Meg glanced back to see a third zombie had joined the chase.
They were now in a parking lot crowded with cars, but unlike many of the vehicles on the street, these were unoccupied. Jacob tried a couple of doors, hoping to find a temporary refuge, but they only lost some of their lead. “Over there,” Jacob said, pointing to an apartment building across the street. They would have to cross another parking lot, leaving themselves exposed, but Meg figured it was a better bet than trying any more doors.
“Somebody’s bound to let us in,” Meg said, hoping she sounded more confident than she felt. If the people in the florist’s shop were too scared to let her in despite carrying a sick child, she wondered if anyone would be brave, heroic, or foolish enough to help them.
“The stairs,” Jacob said. He was thinking strategically—if they were trapped, the zombies would be slower climbing the stairs and Meg had a better chance of shooting them. On the other hand, if zombies were on the second floor—
Meg didn’t want to think about the other hand.
But before they could test the plan, a motorcycle rumbled out of an apartment alcove. Its lone, leather-clad rider gunned straight for the three zombies, a shotgun barrel resting between the handlebars. The stocky-figured rider bounced over the curb at the sidewalk, rattling the shotgun and causing the bike to wobble, but regained balance just before reaching the deaders. The shotgun erupted, shredding their lower legs, and the three fell like soft timber.
Arize (Book 1): Resurrection Page 12
