Under a Graveyard Sky

by John Ringo

  “Drop this in one of your cargo pockets,” he whispered. “And if you do get in trouble, give me a call on the cell and I’ll call a few buddies . . .”

  “Thanks,” she whispered back.

  “Sorry, miss, but as I said, all this stuff is illegal for carry in New York without a permit,” he said loudly. He handed the tote with her weapons to Durante. “Mr. Durante will hold onto it for you.”

  “I understand,” she said loudly. “Let’s go, Gravy.”

  * * *

  “Oh, my God,” Sophia said. She was in jeans and a T-shirt after working in the lab. She was starting to wonder if body armor wouldn’t have been the best call.

  As they walked out of the building to the waiting car, a photographer ran up and started taking pictures. Of Sophia.

  “Ow!” Sophia said, turning away. He was using a heavy-duty flash, and between her eyes not yet being adjusted and the descending sun, it was like looking into a nuke.

  “Hey,” Durante said, stepping between them. “Back off!”

  “Miss, can we get your name?” a guy with a hand-recorder asked. “Are you the thirteen-year-old who fought off a zombie with a pair of nunchuks?”

  “What?” Faith said.

  “Out of the way,” Durante said, pushing the guy back. But there were a dozen or more coming around the corner from the main entrance. He keyed his microphone. “Unit fourteen. I’ve got a security issue at Entrance Six. Request support. Just keep moving, girls. To the car!”

  “Move, you idiot!” Faith said, bodychecking one of the mike-wielding reporters out of the way. “Follow me, Soph!”

  “Watch out, rentacop!” the reporter said, pushing back. “I can get you charged with assault!”

  “You want assault!” Faith said, pulling out her baton. “Move or I’ll show you assault!”

  “Just keep moving, Faith,” Durante said, giving her a shove.

  “Can you tell us what you were doing in the building . . . ?”

  “No,” Sophia said, holding her hand up to shield her face from the flashes.

  “What is your relationship to BotA . . . ?”

  “Say ‘no comment,’” Durante said.

  “No comment . . .”

  “Can we get your name . . . ?

  “No.”

  “Was the afflicted hostile . . . ?”

  “You’ve got the wrong person . . .”

  “Damned straight,” Faith muttered.

  More security poured out of the building, and with their assistance Durante managed to get the girls to the car without actually injuring anyone in the crowd. Which had grown to include the usual gawkers. New Yorkers would ignore anything except paparazzi, which generally meant celebrities.

  “Is that Lindsay Lohan . . . ? Did she get arrested again?”

  “No!” Sophia screamed as the door closed.

  “Oh, crap,” Durante said. “Move it. To the condo. If we’ve got trailers, see if you can lose them, but don’t do a Princess Di.”

  “Rentacop?” Faith said, buckling her seatbelt. “Rentacop?”

  “They thought you were part of her security detail,” Durante said, chuckling.

  “Son of a bitch!” Faith snarled. “I make the tabloids but I don’t?”

  “You might want to remember what we’re actually doing here,” Sophia said, her face tight.

  Durante waved his hand to indicate it was not a subject for discussion.

  “New York,” Faith said, looking around at the unusually light afternoon traffic. “I don’t get the attraction. It stinks. It’s crowded. The people are rude. And there’s barely a scrap of green in the whole place.”

  “You wanted to come,” Sophia said.

  “Because it was better than being stuck on a sailboat,” Faith said. “But not much.”

  “The food’s good,” Durante said. He really didn’t like New York much, either, but he felt he had to come up with some virtues. “And the girls are— There’s a lot of . . . art and culture . . .”

  “The girls are hot?” Faith finished. “Or easy?”

  “I’m not going to have this conversation with my boss’s teenage nieces,” Durante said. “It’s got its attractions. Of course . . . a lot of them are closed right now.”

  “Hang on,” the driver said, swerving. A naked woman was running through traffic, hitting the cars as she ran as if trying to push the traffic onto the sidewalk.

  “Zombie?” Sophia asked.

  “Could be,” Durante said. “Probably. But this is New York. She could just be high. You don’t know until you run a blood test.”

  “So, about the food thing,” Faith said, her stomach rumbling.

  “We’ll get you delivery,” Durante said. “One other benefit to New York. You can get any kind of food in the world delivered.”

  “I’m not really hungry,” Sophia said.

  “I am,” Faith replied. “I need food. And after an almost continuous diet of Mountain House, I need good food. Is there Italian?”

  “Best Italian in the world,” Durante said. “Better than Italy. Although mostly it’s mom-and-pop places. But we can get some delivered.”

  “I just want a shower,” Sophia said, looking out at the city. “’Nother zombie.”

  “That’s a zombie,” Durante agreed. Two NYPD officers had the zombie restrained, but it was clear that he’d bitten a passerby. The passerby was a punk with a gigantic pink mohawk who was crying and holding his arm and appeared to be begging the officers about something. The officers didn’t seem to be listening.

  “And another one on the way,” Faith said.

  “Indications are that if you clean the affected bite quickly the chances are reduced,” Durante said. “And they’re saying now that if you get the flu, the secondary virus is reduced if you take potassium supplements.”

  “Yeah, the separation at the b phase telomerase site is inhibited by potassium,” Sophia said. “But it’s not an either-or thing. If you take enough potassium to totally inhibit expression, it’s a lethal dose. But if you have a strong immune system, then having any inhibition of the expression gives your immune system a chance to beat the beta expressor. If you have a strong immune system. And bites are tough. The beta expressor is aggressive and resistant. It’s a matter of how much viral load you get through any source—”

  “I take it you were listening at work,” Durante said.

  “Dr. Curry has every channel that’s working on this running continuously in both the hot and the cold zones,” Sophia said, shrugging. “So, yeah, I picked up a little. More than I can talk about in the car. He’s got the updated spread graph, for one thing. The one that’s way ahead of the news.”

  “Can I ask . . .” the driver said, then paused.

  “It’s getting worse,” Sophia said after a glance at Durante. “Lots worse. The thing is . . . This virus is, molecularly, ‘spit and baling wire’ is the way that Dr. Curry described it. After a while it’s just going to burn itself out.”

  “Soon?” Durante asked. This was more than he’d been getting.

  “Not soon enough,” Sophia said with a sigh. “Look, it’s . . . The virus, the influenza one, is really complicated. It’s a dualistic expression. That right there is waaay out there. And two centers, UCLA and College of Rome, have both come back with pretty good models showing that dualistic is impossible to support over the long term. Probably why it never evolved in microorganisms. There’s some fundamental problems with it chemically. And flus mutate. But the way that they mutate . . . they just mutate. They can get more lethal, more infective, or less lethal, less infective, stop being infective or lethal at all or any combination. This one, the real killer is the beta expressor, the zombie virus embedded in the flu. CDC and Pasteur both ran models of it over multiple replications and it just . . . breaks pretty quick. It doesn’t mutate to be more lethal or more infective; it stops working at all except as a mild flu bug. It stops being able to express the zombie part.”

  “So the plague�
�s just going to . . . stop?” the driver asked.

  “Yes,” Sophia said. “But it’s not going to be soon enough. Look, you buy a new computer. And you don’t know it, but there’s something wrong with it. Every time you turn it on, one little random bit of software goes wrong. Now a computer can go a long time like that. Or it can break the first time you turn it on. It’s random. That’s what’s happening with all the flu viruses. As they replicate, sometimes they break. Or get closer to breaking. As more and more break, the flu will burn out. The question is if it will burn out before it kills the world.”

  “And the zombie part?” Durante asked. “We’re getting a lot of transmission from bites now.”

  “Yeah,” Sophia said, grimly. “They’ve broken out the transmission graphs by bite or flu and bite, or at least blood transmission, is starting to pull ahead of flu. There was one case in South Carolina where a husband apparently gave it to his wife through, well, fooling around. Then he zombied but didn’t bite her. She hid in the bathroom. And she had no flu antibodies. So they think it was sexually transmitted. And then she zombied.”

  “Ouch,” Faith said, shuddering.

  “The beta expressor isn’t really robust, either,” Sophia said. “There are four different models that people are arguing over but it looks as if it’s going to slowly degrade back to basically rabies or just fall apart. Like I said, spit and baling wire.”

  “And with that, we’re at the condo . . .” Durante said as the driver pulled up to the entrance. “Don’t wait for me. I’ll find my own way back.”

  “Yes, sir,” the driver said.

  “Dibs on the shower,” Faith said.

  “Age before incompetence,” Sophia replied.

  “This is going to be sooo much fun,” Durante said.

  CHAPTER 10

  “So I see you made the news,” Dr. Curry said, moving his cursor to highlight particular points of the virus. His voice was muffled by the moon suit.

  “I didn’t really have a way to avoid them,” Sophia said, carefully squirting prepared attenuated virus into vaccine bottles. “Well, if I’d known they were going to be out there, we could have taken a back way, I suppose.”

  “This isn’t something we want to end up on the nightly news,” Dr. Curry pointed out.

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Although it already has.” Curry gestured to one of the plasma screens. The YouTube video was of a reporter outside a warehouse. The caption said “vaccine chop shop found by NYPD.”

  “I hope like hell that’s not us,” Sophia said. The sound was turned down.

  “Drug dealers,” Curry said with a snort.

  “So we’re in competition with drug dealers?” Sophia said. “How’d drug dealers get involved, anyway?”

  “People want the vaccine,” Curry said, looking around at the laboratory he’d been provided. “Drug dealers fulfill economic needs that others can’t or won’t.”

  “I don’t know that I’d want to get vaccine from drug dealers,” Sophia said. “Not knowing what I know about how it’s produced. And that’s here.”

  “In which you are wise,” Curry said with a snort. “Over two hundred people have become infected due to bad vaccine. If it’s not properly attenuated: Instant zombie.”

  “You’re sure this is attenuated?” Sophia said, holding up one of the vials.

  “That’s what I’m checking,” Curry said, gesturing at the screen he was using. “The binding sites are still there but the RNA is well and thoroughly trashed. I’d say that this RNA has less coherence than rabies but the binding sites are about as robust. That’s good for vaccine. Not sure what it says about the organism long-term. What is worse, most of the ‘vaccine’ that’s being bandied around in the City is nothing but colored water.”

  “Why colored?” Sophia asked. She held up one of her completed vaccine bottles to the light. “This is clear.”

  “Because they’re drug dealers?” Curry said, shrugging. “People want to see something for their money. Who’s going to believe a drug dealer who gives them a shot of clear liquid.”

  “Who’s going to believe a drug dealer, period?”

  “I take it you’ve never gotten into illegal drugs,” Dr. Curry said.

  “I’m not an idiot,” Sophia said. “Drugs can seriously screw up your life. Of course, so can the zombie apocalypse but I didn’t have any control over that. So, no, I don’t do drugs. I drink a little but my parents are okay with it in moderation. Faith doesn’t even do that. She only drinks water and fruit juice.”

  “I suppose I should be impressed,” Curry said. “I’ve dabbled in drugs from time to time. Heck, I dealt when I was in grad school. If you have a biochemistry lab at your disposal, cranking out a little LSD is no problem and it’s one way to pay for grad school.”

  “Seriously?”

  “You might notice what we’re making here, miss,” Curry said mirthlessly.

  “Point.”

  “One shot of zombie vaccine is going for fifty dollars on the street,” Curry said. “Which is a good price. The question being whether you’re getting vaccine or not. Or ‘good’ vaccine. Some of them even have mild drugs in them to give a feeling that something is happening. Which, even if the dealers get the right attenuation, can cause the vaccine to be nonfunctional.”

  “Seriously,” Sophia said. “People who get their vaccine from a source like a drug dealer are getting what they deserve. Speaking of which, I’m done.”

  “Let me do a cross-check and then we’ll get it over to Dr. Simmons,” Curry said. “Quality control is the best control . . .”

  * * *

  It had been filing.

  By afternoon of the next day, Faith had had enough. She’d had enough of the questions about her experiences in the tunnels. She’d had enough of the gossip. She’d found out, quickly, that her uncle’s big “secret” was anything but. The rumors were all over the place that The Bank, capital letters, was producing vaccine. And just as many rumors about how, most of them more or less dead on. She’d gotten tired of the sidelong glances and the vaguely worded questions about where her uncle was gone to all day. People even referred to the “BERT” van in the sort of hushed tones reserved for nuclear secrets. And then there were the subtle questions about “how do I get the vaccine?”

  And she’d had it with filing. It was boring and pointless since most of this was going to be relics of a bygone age in no time.

  She’d paid attention when she’d had to turn in her stuff the first day. All of her stuff was back in the apartment. That didn’t mean there wasn’t “stuff.” The locker room had everything she’d need to go zombie hunting.

  * * *

  Faith stepped out of cover, aimed carefully and zapped the zombie in the back with the taser.

  “Nice,” she said as the zombie dropped to the floor. She darted forward and slammed the narcotic injector into the back of its thigh, holding it as she thought the instructions indicated.

  She was rewarded by the two-and-a-half-inch needle driving through her thumb and a gush of tranquilizer squirting onto her facemask.

  “Shit!” she screamed, hopping around and shaking her hand. The needle steadfastly refused to exit her thumb. “Cock-suck . . . Fuck! Rat turds! Ow!”

  She grabbed the injector and pulled it from her thumb, tossing it across the corridor.

  “Well,” she said, shaking her hand. “At least it’s num . . . b. Mum . . . Oh cap . . . No . . . No . . . bad . . .”

  The zombie was getting to its feet, which was the bad part. Besides being slightly stoned by the small dose of tranquilizer that had gotten into her system. And her right hand flopping uselessly.

  “Very bad,” she said, drawing another taser left-handed. She couldn’t get her usual dead-on targeting since she was getting a bit of double vision. “I think he’s about . . .”

  Which was where he was. The zombie let out a screech and dropped to the floor, spasming. Again.

  “Perfect,” she
said, then wondered why there was blood dripping on the zombie’s back. She looked at her hand and thought it through. There was blood. Dripping. From her thumb.

  “Blood pathogen,” she said, drunkenly. “Not good.”

  She pulled off the tactical glove, and the rubber glove under it, and looked at her thumb. It was swollen, bleeding and discolored.

  “Is that normal if you AD yourself with an injector?” she asked the empty corridor.

  The answer was another zombie howl from the south.

  And the zombie was getting up. Again.

  She pulled out her last taser and fired, hitting it in the groin.

  “I said stay down!” she said to the hissing and whimpering zombie.

  “This is soooo not good,” she said, finally injecting the zombie and then fumbling in a taser reload with one hand flopping useless. She could hear zombies heading her way by the flop-flop of their bare feet on the concrete. “I really, really need to start allowing adult supervision. . . . And reading the directions more carefully. And eating all my vegetables. . . . They need these in semiautomatic . . . With a magazine . . .”

  She turned and fired the reloaded taser just in time to stop the zombie coming from the north. There were two more in the other direction. . . .

  * * *

  “Durante,” Kaplan said, holding up the office phone. “Your girlfriend’s calling.”

  “I don’t have a girlfriend,” Durante said, working on paperwork. Turned out that even in serial killing there was paperwork. Time sheets, materials . . . It just glossed over a lot of stuff.

  “That would be the boss’s niece,” Kaplan said, grinning. “She wants to talk to you.”

  “What now?” Durante said, picking up the phone.

  “Line two.”

  “Hey, Faith, how’s the filing going . . . ? Uh-huh. How’d you get an injector stuck in your thumb . . . ?”

  Kaplan spun around in his chair and quirked a “Spock” eyebrow.

  “And how’d you run into a zombie . . . ? And you got the taser where . . . ? And you ran into this zombie . . . ? Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Okay . . . Okay . . . Sure. You just stay right there, okay? We’ll be down in a jiffy. Yeah. That would probably be best. . . . Uh-huh. Bubye now.”