Under a Graveyard Sky btr-1

by John Ringo

  “I understand and comply, Uncle Tom,” Faith said. “But… What you’re asking me to do is creep around the, frankly, creepy bowels of a building with, you know, people turning into zombies without any warning. This is not, exactly, ‘keeping me safe.’ Sir.”

  “You have a point there,” Tom said. “I’d planned on keeping you up on the executive level. Where we have posted security.”

  “Just a couple of weapons?” Faith asked.

  “The problem is what,” Tom said. “Almost anything useful is illegal for carry by a minor in New York.”

  “I hate this place,” Faith snarled, then got ahold of herself. “Sorry. But…”

  “I’ll get you an issue K-ll,” Tom said. “But that’s it.”

  “Better than nothing,” Faith said, saluting. “Reporting for duty, sir!”

  “Just… Don’t get yourself turned into a zombie,” Tom said. “Your mother would kill me…”

  * * *

  “I had no idea these buildings were so complicated,” Faith said as they were walking down another seemingly interminable service corridor.

  “Every one of these buildings is basically a self contained city,” Dave said, proudly. He’d found he enjoyed the girl’s company. She might be a little firebrand but she was a smart one. And willing to pitch in no matter what the weight. Strong as hell, too. She’d carried a sixty pound circuit breaker up two flights of stairs without a single bitch. “More like a space ship. Air has to be pulled in and pumped to everywhere in the building. Then there’s water and sewage. Movement of materials. It’s a dance really. A great one.”

  “What are those?” Faith asked, pointing to some huge…thingies.

  “Air handlers again,” Dave said. “Currently they’re not running since the portion of the building they supply isn’t in use. No need for them. Nobody’s using the air.”

  “And that is…” Faith stopped and tilted her head to the side. “What’s that sound?”

  “Fluid flow?” Dave said, cocking his head. “Air flow? There’s an electrical hum…”

  “I was thinking of the…” She stopped at the shriek.

  The zombie had been behind one of the idle air handlers. It was covered in blood, not its own. Faith really didn’t want to see what it had been feeding on behind the box.

  “Charlie?” Dave said, stepping forward. “Charlie, it’s me, Dave…”

  “Don’t,” Faith said, putting out her hand. “It’s not going to…”

  The zombie charged the twosome, keening.

  It was the first time Faith had heard the zombie wail and it sent shivers down her spine. That was the sound early man had heard in the forests. It was the thing in the corner at night. The monster under the bed. In the closet. It was fear curled up into a ball and distilled. For just a moment she froze.

  “No!” Dave shouted, backing up. “Charlie! No, no, no, NO!”

  The zombie was fixated on the engineer. Which gave Faith her chance.

  She whipped the K-ll into the zombie’s shin as it passed. She could hear the bones snap from the blow. But it turned on her nonetheless. She captured one grasping hand in a come-along, lifted the arm and spun under, tucking it up and back.

  The strength of the zombie surprised her as did it’s complete disregard for pain. Any normal human would have been down on the ground with a broken leg and a nearly dislocated arm. The zombie just continued until it was fully dislocated, its teeth snapping to reach its tormentor.

  Faith drove the butt of the K-ll into the zombie’s kidneys and was mildly unsurprised to get no result. It just didn’t notice pain at all. With that understanding, she flipped the club out and up, then across, hard, on the upper part of the zombie’s neck. There was a sickening crunch and the thing dropped to the ground.

  “Oops,” she said, trying not to throw up. “I think we’re going to have to report this to Uncle Tom…”

  * * *

  “I didn’t mean to kill him,” Faith said, miserably. “I’d just tried everything I could to subdue him and nothing was working. I know you’re not supposed to use a baton on bone or the neck but…I couldn’t think of anything else to do…” she started sobbing.

  “I’m surprised you could,” the NYPD officer said, shaking her head. “You gonna be okay, Miss?”

  BoA security and the coroner’s overworked office had already cleared the bodies away. As Faith had feared, the zombie had been feeding on a previous victim. Both of them had been support engineers working in the area.

  Faith was meeting with NYPD under the gaze of BoA’s General Manager for Security and Emergency Response as well as the Chief Legal Advisor. The experienced attorney was more used to contract law but he could dance the tune of criminal law. Juvie was, admittedly, not his expertise.

  “Are you planning on charging my client?” the attorney asked. “She has cooperated fully.”

  “Given the situation and everything else going on?” the cop said. “It’s up to the DA’s office but I don’t think so. I’d find it unlikely. Thirteen-year-old girl is defends herself and another person from an H7 EDP and the EDP is killed in the process? With a stick? I’d say the Post would want to interview her but not the DA.”

  “I think we’ll try to avoid that,” Tom said. “If there’s nothing else?”

  “We’d appreciate it if you’d keep her somewhere safer than the steam tunnels,” the cop said, standing up. “And she’s going to need counseling.”

  “We’ll get her the best available,” Tom said. “Chad, could you walk the officer out while I talk to my niece?”

  “Of course,” Chad said. “Officer?”

  “Are you going to be okay?” Tom said. “And feel free to say ‘I told you so.’”

  Faith grunted a laugh, then shrugged.

  “I’d like to say the crying for the cop was all an act,” she said, tonelessly. “And some of it was. But, no, not really what you’d call okay. On the ‘told you so’ cause among other things I had to use a MELEE WEAPON. I’d planned on killing my first zombie at at least twenty-five yards! Not where I could hear the bones crack and get blood all over myself! So, no, not okay. Okay?” She sniffed again and grimaced. “God, I HATE that I cry. It’s so…girly!”

  “Think soldiers don’t cry?” Tom said. “Think your father never cried? You cry. You cry, usually, when nobody is watching. You cry in the shower. Or only when friends are there. People who know. Who understand. And you didn’t cry in the crunch.”

  “Go me,” Faith said.

  “I don’t think there are really words for this,” Tom said, shrugging. “I can get you all the counseling in the City. But it boils down to you did what you had to when you had to. If you hadn’t, then two more lives would have been lost…”

  “One,” Faith said. “If worse came to worse I was going to break Dave’s leg and run for it.”

  “That’s the spirit,” Tom said, his hand over his mouth trying not to laugh.

  “I mean, even a twenty-two!” Faith said, throwing her hands up. “That way I could have shot his leg out at a distance!”

  “Dave’s or the zombies?” Tom asked.

  “Yes! Either! Both!”

  “Well, you won’t have to worry about it again,” Tom said, shaking his head. “I should have been smart and kept you up here in the first place. I’ll…find some paperwork for you to do or something.”

  “Great,” Faith said, crossing her arms.

  “For now it’s back to the apartment,” Tom said. “I’ve already called Dr. Curry and told him that Sophia’s done for the day. And you definitely are. I’ll have someone run you over.”

  “I…” Faith said, then frowned. “That’s the only thing that makes sense. But…I am not going to the apartment without my gear.”

  “Faith…”

  “Uncle Tom,” she said, reasonably. “The next time I might not be able to say ‘I told you so.’ I know you’re running us over with executive protection. Are they staying on the door til you get there?” />
  “Uhm…” Tom said. He had had a hard enough time finding the personnel to run them home. There were a million tasks.

  “There are still criminals,” Faith pointed out. “And unknown threats. You’re not going to leave us alone in the apartment without so much as a taser. Not this time.”

  “Agreed,” Tom said, sighing. “I’ll have the security detail transport it. But no going zombie hunting!”

  “Been there, done that,” Faith said. “All I really want right now is a bath.”

  “And tomorrow we’ll…find something else for you to do.”

  “Filing. It’s going to be filing, isn’t it?”

  * * *

  “Miss, I’m really sorry about having to disarm you when you came in…”

  It was the same security guard and he really did look sorry. The story was already all over the building.

  “You were just doing your job,” Faith said, thumbing at Durante. “He’s supposed to tote all my stuff for me. Is there anything in there I can carry in New York?”

  She’d had to turn over the baton to NYPD “for examination.” But Tom had helpfully issued her a new one.

  The guard leaned over and slid a taser across the table under the cover of his body.

  “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, body checking 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 BoA…?”

  “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 them 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 telemerase 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, 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 thi
ng 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 long term. Probably why it never evolved in microorganisms. There’s some fundamental problems with it chemically. And flues 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.”