Zombie Rules (Book 4): Destiny

by Achord, David

  “It was necessary for us to draw blood samples,” he said defensively. “I told you that.” I suppressed the impulse to throw my coffee in his face and instead stared at him coldly.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” he continued, “but humanity depends on us finding a cure. I had orders.” I didn’t respond and instead continued staring at him while I drank.

  “What are you going to do to me?” he finally asked. I let the silence linger while I finished the coffee and poured some more in the plastic cup.

  It was a good question. Part of me wanted to take a knife to him and work on him nice and slow while he screamed in agony, but another part of me was indecisive. I pushed the thoughts aside for a moment and changed the subject.

  “Do my kids have the same, what did you call it, antibodies? Do my kids have the same antibodies as I do?” His face brightened and he moved closer.

  “Yes they do, sort of. Do you know what an antibody is?” he asked.

  “Sort of,” I answered.

  “I’ll give a simple explanation. An antibody is a y-shaped protein molecule produced by B cells. They’re the body’s primary immune defense. All humans have them, well most do. Now, an antigen is a foreign substance introduced into the human system that induces an immune response from the antibodies. Follow?” I nodded. “Yes, good. In your case, you and your kids have a unique antibody which is resistant to the virus. In addition, you have an antigen in your system which appears to make you completely immune.”

  “But my kids don’t have the antigen.” He shook his head.

  “It was our belief that you were exposed somehow and your immune system responded accordingly. Your children apparently have not been exposed.”

  I thought about what he said and decided to tease him with a little information. I tapped the cage with my hand and told him the story about my encounter and the subsequent quarantine. He listened in fascination.

  “So, you were exposed?” he asked.

  “I got a little scratch on my finger and some of that damned black goo got in my mouth.” I pointed at the scar on my finger. “I cauterized it as soon as I was able and then forced myself to vomit. Even so, within the next few hours I got sick.”

  “Could you tell me what your symptoms were, please?” he asked.

  “Well, let’s see. During the night, perhaps three hours after I was exposed, my pulse rate skyrocketed and I began running a high fever. I was feeling really anxious, antsy. At some point, I was in a delirium and was convinced spiders were crawling all over my skin. That lasted most of the night, but the fever broke at some point. My wife sat with me throughout the night and tended to me.” She also took a lot of detailed notes that night. Some of the stuff she wrote was a little intimate, so I doubted I’d ever let him read them.

  “Fascinating,” he said.

  "But I still got sick."

  "Yes, that was to be expected, but you didn't turn." He frowned and shook his head before looking at me. “Are you certain this is the only time you were ever exposed?”

  “I don’t recall any other incidents,” I answered. “But it could have happened unknowingly somehow.” I thought about the time I was shot. I was out of sorts when that happened and it was several hours before I was rescued by Julie and Fred. I wondered if anything else had happened to me during that incident.

  “I need to expose myself in order to test it,” he muttered to himself.

  “What was that, Major?” I asked. He was lost in thought for a moment before realizing I had asked him a question.

  “Zach,” he said in the tone of a question. I stared at him unemotionally. “We should go back to the CDC. You and me. The research team I was working with are a group of very intelligent doctors and scientists. With your help, we can create a vaccine and inoculate all survivors. We’d make history, Zach.” I continued staring at him and didn’t respond.

  “Are you at least going to let me out of this cage?” he asked. I ignored his question and walked out. After shutting the barn door, I walked over to the old homestead. The two Marines were standing at the doorway watching me.

  “How was your night? I imagine with all of those bullet holes and broken windows it was pretty cold.”

  “We had sleeping bags, and got a fire going,” Sergeant Smithson answered. “But we had to keep watch since we had no weapons to defend ourselves. We didn’t get much sleep.”

  “It was a nice home, once,” I said quietly. He gestured toward the barn.

  “How long do you intend on keeping him locked up in there?”

  “How long would you keep him locked up?” I responded. They glanced at each other without answering. “You two look like shit. When’s the last time you had a decent meal?”

  “It’s been a few days,” Ruth answered. I nodded and took my backpack off. They both gasped when I pulled out a Tupperware container holding almost a dozen hard boiled eggs.

  “Eat up,” I said. I watched as Ruth hurriedly retrieved a container of salt from her rucksack and the two of them began eating. Ruth suddenly stopped and looked up.

  “Would you mind if I gave some of these to Major Parsons?” she asked. I shrugged indifferently. She took that as a yes, grabbed a few and jogged into the barn.

  “How are your kids?” Sergeant Smithson asked.

  “They’re doing okay. My son finally recognized me, but my daughter still has no idea who I am.” I had been standing, in case they decided to bum rush me or something, but I slowly realized they weren’t a threat, so I pulled up one of the chairs and sat.

  “Do you have any kids?” I asked him. He shook his head.

  “My teenage sweetheart dumped me back when I was in basic training. Since then I wasn’t interested in getting serious with anyone. I’d been playing the field, figured when I turned thirty I’d find a woman and settle down, have kids, all that shit.” I nodded in understanding. He had supplemented his eggs with some kind of packaged crackers and washed it all down with his canteen of water. I didn’t tell him we had some fresh milk back at the house.

  “If I’m reading your rank insignia correctly, you’re a gunnery sergeant, right?” He nodded. “You seem a little young for that rank.”

  “Attrition,” he replied with a shrug.

  “How was the food supply down in Atlanta?” I asked.

  “Lots of freeze dried food, MREs, the usual stuff,” he replied. “They had some garden plots, but with the influx of people, they didn’t produce near enough to keep up with demand, so fresh produce was a rare luxury.” He pointed at the crumbled eggshells sitting on the floor of the porch. “So, you guys obviously have chickens.” I nodded and pointed at the chicken coop I’d built a couple of years ago.

  “After the house got shot up, we moved everything to our current location. We’ve got chickens, cattle, goats, rabbits, horses, jackasses, garden plots, a smokehouse, and a greenhouse. At one time we had three of them, but your buddies destroyed them for some reason.”

  “For what it’s worth, I have no idea why he did it,” he said while making a brief gesture at all of the bullet holes riddling the house. “Well, they were fired upon and Lamance was shot, which caused the Colonel to order them to open fire, but…” he struggled to find the right words. “It probably could have been handled differently.”

  “Yeah,” I replied. “They shot up both houses, killed my friends, killed two of my horses, and our dogs,” I said irately. “It could have been handled differently.” I had some more to say about it, but I suddenly thought of what he said about Lamance.

  “By the way, what’d you guys do with Lamance’s body?”

  “Ruth told me the Colonel said to leave it. When I found out, I wanted to come back down here and at least bury him, but the Colonel wouldn’t allow it.”

  I suddenly got goose bumps. The bodies were burnt beyond recognition, so I relied only on a count, which, at the time, confirmed to me all of my friends and family had been murdered. But, if what he was saying was true? There should ha
ve been one extra body on that pile of burnt corpses. Three of the bodies were smaller, feminine, I assumed they were Julie, Jessica, and Andie. I cleared my throat.

  “What size was Lamance?” I asked.

  “He was about six foot, on the lean side, maybe one-seventy. Why?”

  “Just wondering,” I replied evasively. My brain was churning, trying to remember the exact details of when I found the bodies and when I finally worked up the strength to bury them. Kelly said she’d watched Terry die and saw Konya get shot. And Konya was missing his left thumb, but I was too distraught at the time I buried them, never thinking to pay attention to such a detail. But, nobody actually saw Fred get shot. Was he possibly still alive out there somewhere?

  Smithson was looking at me curiously. I’m sure my body language was all over the place. I tried to relax.

  “I want to know about you and Solonowski, what happened?” he suddenly asked. I told him the story of how I goaded the hotheaded Marine into attacking me. I also told him of Ruth’s involvement. By the look on his face, I guessed Ruth had already told him.

  “Did you really have to kill him?”

  “Yes,” I replied. “He wasn’t going to simply allow me to walk out of there, now was he? The tests that s0-called doctor was performing on me were becoming more and more invasive. It was only a matter of time before he started doing things that were going to be irreversible.” He was silent, mulling over what I said, but it was obvious he didn’t like the fact that I killed one of his own, I could see it all over his face.

  “Let me ask you something, big tough Marine, if you had been in my shoes wouldn’t you have done everything you could to escape?” He looked at me somberly. After a moment, he responded.

  “Alright, I guess I can see your point.”

  “But you don’t like it I killed one of your soldiers.”

  “No, I don’t.” He was silent for a few minutes now. I waited until it got to the point where it was becoming a little awkward.

  “Well, I’ve got a lot of work to do before sundown. Is there anything else you want to ask?”

  “I’ve got a few, but right now the only thing I’m going to ask is for you to let the major go.” I thought a moment, nodded, pulled the keys out of my pocket and tossed them over.

  “Leave the keys in the barn,” I said. He nodded curtly and I stood, causing him to stand as well.

  “I have work to do,” I said. “We generally eat dinner at six. You and Ruth are invited, not the major.”

  “Woothie!” Frederick shouted in baby talk and ran over to her as fast as his little legs would carry him. Ruth picked him up and hugged him before she realized I was glaring at her and put him down quickly. Macie was also making noises, but Ruth wisely did not go over to the couch where she was sitting. I directed them toward the kitchen and scooped Macie up in my arms.

  “It’s a shame that my own children are more excited to see you than me, don’t you think?” They didn’t answer. I had a few more remarks on the matter, held them back, and sat down at the head of the table. I sat with Macie on my lap, but she kept squirming and I finally relented and handed her off to Ruth. Thankfully, Frederick still liked me and had no problem sitting with me.

  “Janet and I took turns with them. I cared for them the best that I could,” she said defensively.

  “Yeah,” I retorted. “But you never told me they’d been taken.” Ruth avoided eye contact and didn’t respond. Kelly gave me a subtle look.

  “Alright, I didn’t invite you guys here just to interrogate you. Let’s change the subject.”

  “Okay,” the sergeant replied warily.

  “I’d like to hear more about the CDC, if you don’t mind.” His expression changed then to a more thoughtful expression.

  “I can tell you what we were told,” he said.

  “Sure.”

  “When the outbreak first started, the CDC personnel were caught with their pants down,” Sergeant Smithson said. “They had protocols for almost every type of contingency, but they were overwhelmed by how quickly it spread and how violent the infected were. It was assumed all of their field teams either became infected or were wiped out.”

  “So, what’d they do?” I asked.

  “Fortunately for them, their security staff were mostly retired military people and they reacted quickly. They locked down the facility and waited. They figured out, like everyone eventually did, the cold weather slows them down considerably. So, during the first winter, Atlanta had about a month and a half of freezing cold weather. They worked their asses off building fortifications.” He gave a short, humorless chuckle.

  “It worked, more or less, until those infected things organized and launched an offensive.”

  “Yeah,” I said as I grabbed a notepad. “Can you be more specific about that?”

  “Sure,” he replied. “It started around sunset. Guard post three, which was on the east side, reported there was a large number massing together. The OIC…”

  “OIC?” Kelly asked. Sergeant Smithson explained.

  “The military uses acronyms for everything. The OIC is the officer in charge. He was manning the TOC. Oh, I’m sorry. The TOC is short for the Tactical Operations Center. So, the OIC, a REMF Captain…”

  “REMF?”

  “I’m sorry, Kelly. I’m too used to talking to fellow soldiers. A REMF is a derogatory term,” he paused.

  “It means Rear Echelon Mother Fucker,” I said. “Someone that doesn’t know anything about real soldiering.”

  “Yeah, exactly. So, this captain decided the guard was being overly dramatic and didn’t put out an alert. By the time we realized something was up, they were attacking.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “In human waves, or I’d guess you’d say in zombie waves,” he replied. “It was so simplistic it was ingenious. Our defensive fortifications consisted of the fence, sandbags, concertina wire, and guards posted in armored vehicles. Everyone, me included, thought that was enough. After all, those things couldn’t climb, use weapons or drive, or anything like that, which was true, but they thought up something entirely different. They simply walked up to the twelve foot tall fence and made a zombie ramp.” I furrowed my brow as the sergeant explained.

  “The front ranks would fall to the ground, the second rank followed, and so on. They effectively created a ramp for their companions to walk up and clear the fencing.” I paused in my writing and looked at him skeptically.

  “I’m not exaggerating, Zach. It was both scary and amazing to watch. Once they cleared the fence, they’d fall to the ground and start the process again. The inner perimeter between the fences and the building was only about twenty feet wide. They simply repeated the ramp building process, and within no time they were up to the third floor windows, which as I said, were totally unprotected. We killed thousands of them, but killing them only aided in the ramp building process.” He shook his head ruefully.

  “We never in a million years would have guessed this strategy. Think about it. They sacrificed maybe a couple thousand of them so the other forty-eight thousand could get to us. Oh, and they used their heads as battering rams to break out the windows.” I continued writing long after they had finished telling of the incident. When I finally stopped, I saw them staring at me intently.

  “The major believes they instinctively knew what the CDC was and that was their reason for attacking it.”

  “I can’t say I disagree.” It made absolutely no sense how they knew, and yet they did. I changed the subject.

  “Two questions: is the President really alive and did he really order me taken prisoner?”

  “He’s still alive,” Smithson replied. “The colonel wasn’t bullshitting about that. He’s supposedly tucked away in one of those super-secret underground bunkers. As far as him giving the order to have you imprisoned, I have no idea, but there were daily radio communications with him.” He pointed at Ruth and himself. “We weren’t privy to what was discussed though. The major may
know.”

  “Alright,” I said, “fair enough. What about the research? What were they doing exactly?” Sergeant Smithson shrugged.

  “You’d have to ask Major Parsons about all of that,” Ruth replied. “All of their testing and research was done in the labs, and only a few people had access.”

  “Yeah,” Sergeant Smithson replied levelly. “But, we went on a few missions where if we saw an infected person wandering around by itself, we’d go out and snatch it. I assume they were being used for their experiments. I don’t have any idea what they did to them.”

  “So, were any of them cured?” The two of them continued staring at me, although I could see a hint of confusion now. I continued. “The infected subjects, were any of them cured?”

  “I don’t know,” he answered. “Again, you’d have to ask the major.” I kept my silence and sipped some coffee. The major had just told me they thought they had a cure, but he didn’t inform these two. It seemed suspicious.

  “The meal was awesome, Kelly,” Sergeant Smithson said. Kelly smiled and thanked him. “And I must admit I’ve really enjoyed spending time with you guys, but I think we should be heading back.”

  “Yeah,” Ruth added. “We really appreciate it.” She then looked a little worried. “Would it be possible to fix a plate for Major Parsons?”

  “Of course,” Kelly said before I had a chance to respond. She got up and fixed a large plate, much more than I would have given him, especially considering how low our food supplies were.

  “Where’re you three going to go?” Kelly asked when she handed the plate to Ruth. Ruth looked at her worriedly.

  “We have no idea,” she replied.

  “They’re going to go wherever Major Parsons orders them to go,” I said with a chuckle. “Isn’t that right, Sergeant? I mean, the man may be a doctor, but he outranks you. If I had one, I’d bet a dollar he orders them to return to Atlanta and they’ll foolishly obey him, right Sergeant?”

  “I don’t know about that,” he replied with a disapproving stare. “If we go back to Atlanta, we’re likely to be tried as deserters and shot.”