Riley found her hand on her belly again. She had told Cameron it was a problem they could deal with later, yet she found it constantly invading her mind. She needed to talk to Mathias about this. No matter what happened, it would affect him. The decision was ultimately hers to make, but he should be allowed to have some say. She also wanted to know what he thought because she had no idea what to think. Being a mother had never crossed her mind.
Curled in her sleeping bag with her rifle, Riley tried to sort things out. Ultimately, she couldn’t and always ended up back at square one. The big I don’t know. Rarely did Riley not know what to do, so this frightened her badly. She looked over at her sleeping sister; at least they were together. Now if only she could get back to the rest of them.
With her mind racing in circles, Riley sat through her shift.
***
The next morning, everybody got up with the sun. Except for Shaidi, who had been up even earlier, taking the last shift of the night. They ate a light breakfast with the haze of sleep still clinging to them. Riley felt especially exhausted as she had been tossing and turning all night. She had even gotten up and taken another pregnancy test at one point; it read positive as well. She knew it would, but had done it anyway.
Brunt confirmed the position they would be heading toward next, marking it on a map for all to see. He then packed the laptop and the mini-dish back into the hard-shell backpack he carried them in. The look of the backpack was like the carapace of a beetle, and Brunt had assured them that no matter how rough and tumble things got, the equipment inside would be perfectly safe. Cameron expressed an interest in owning a suit like that.
When they loaded up into the truck, it was Riley and Cameron’s turn to ride in the back. Nobody liked being back there, which meant they had to do it in shifts, just like guard duty. Although it was an awful thing to think, Riley was glad that the doctor woman and the snake man were gone; it meant the shifts in the back of the truck were much shorter, having to ride for only one stop before being rotated to the front.
“I still can’t believe it,” Cameron said the moment the rear doors were closed.
“Can we drop it, please? Talk about something else?” Riley sprawled out on one of the benches.
“Sorry,” Cameron apologized, knowing this must be wearing on Riley. In fact, if it weren’t for Cameron, they wouldn’t even have known. She had just ended her period the day before heading out, and had mentioned to Riley that was lucky, because travelling around and having to find time to change tampons and pads would be a pain. Riley had totally forgotten about that herself. She and her sister had incredibly rigid and regular cycles that matched up perfectly, even when they were apart. At first, Riley had chalked it up to stress throwing her off, but Cameron had probably been even more stressed out with what she had gone through, and she had stayed on the clock. When Riley noticed the pharmacy, she had suggested they stop for supplies, and they ended up spending the night there as well. When the little plus sign appeared in the window, Riley had to tell her sister everything.
“So what do you think of the boat?” Cameron had decided on a different topic.
During their travels the previous day, Riley had been told about the plan.
“I think travelling to Toronto is a stupid and dangerous idea,” she replied.
“I didn’t ask you about travelling to Toronto. I asked what you thought of the boat.”
“I don’t know. I think it sounds good. Sounds nice.”
“I want to go there.”
Riley looked over at her sister and determined that she wasn’t lying.
“I want to go there instead of to the cabin,” she continued.
“We can’t. I have friends back at the cabin. Mathias is there.”
“I know. I’m just thinking out loud is all. If there wasn’t anyone there waiting, would you go to the boat?”
Riley thought about it for a moment. “Yeah, I probably would.”
“Maybe we can pick up your friends, and all of us can go meet them in Halifax.”
“That’s something we’d have to discuss with them. It’s not a bad idea though.” Having more people around did seem nice, even if a bunch of them were Marble Keystone mercs. Brunt was all right, and not every mercenary would be a bad guy. Sailing to warmer climates where they wouldn’t have to worry about the freezing cold winters was very tempting. Not to mention the lack of polar bears. Riley had had quite a few bad dreams about white monsters since that incident. The worst involved zombie polar bears. Nobody knew if the hulking mammals could be infected by the zombie virus or not.
“You know what I was just thinking? We need a name for the hybrid virus,” Riley decided.
“A name?”
“Yeah. I’ve been thinking of it as the zombie virus this whole time.”
“There’s nothing wrong with that.”
“Do you like calling it the zombie virus?”
“Not really. I don’t like the word zombie. It’s so…”
“Fictitious?”
“Yeah. Hybrid virus isn’t bad, where’d you get that one?”
“Mathias calls it that. It’s apparently a combination of a virus and prion.”
Cameron nodded. Having worked with cows, she had to learn all about mad cow disease and therefore knew what prions were.
“That’s more its class though. Not its name. I want a name for it.” Everything else had a name. In fact, several diseases had several names. A lot of personal biographies were likely to be written in the near future and new history text books. Having a universal name was unlikely, but getting some people to start using the same thing was a start.
“Walker syndrome,” Cameron suggested.
“The Zed death,” Riley came back with.
“Decomp disease.”
“Green fever.”
“Influenzomb.”
“The-hybrid-virus-that-makes-you-eat-people.”
Both women started laughing. If either of them had been the research type, then maybe they could have come up with a real and proper name, but they weren’t, and so amused each other with silly things.
***
Riley stood guard at the door while the others searched the Walmart behind her. Already, the undead were making their way toward the truck and the front of the store. Riley’s breathing issued loudly through the respirator of the gas mask she wore. When outside, Brunt made them mandatory. There was no telling what gases might be in the air, and they didn’t bother to test them with a device that Brunt carried unless they were spending the night there.
“Hurry up,” Riley called as loudly as she dared over her shoulder, her voice muffled by the mask. She had noticed that most of the zombies they had been running into were the slow kind, which she found odd considering all the fast ones she had seen on the Day.
“Okay, we can go.” Brunt jogged past her and out the door, taking point. The others hurried out behind him, climbing quickly into the truck. This time it was Shaidi and Brewster’s turn in the trailer. After Thomas got into the front, Riley and Cameron climbed into the back behind him. Brunt was the last one to get in, starting up the engine and driving them out of there.
“Any sign?” Riley asked, pulling the full face mask off. The truck had a warning device if the air inside became toxic.
“We think a few people raided that place even before Orson and Hank got there,” Cameron filled her in. “We think they slept in the truck though, after searching the place for any meagre supplies that were left. You know some people stole TVs from there?”
“Must have been on the first day.” Nobody knew what was going on then, so it was more than likely a few thieves had taken things that would have no real value anymore.
“Anyway, we have another reading from the satellite. We think they were moving at the time though; the location was a little vague.” Cameron retrieved a map from Thomas and pointed out the general location for Riley.
As they drove, Riley looked out the windows. Again, she wa
s struck by how many slow zombies there were.
“Where are all the fast ones?” she finally wondered aloud.
“The what?” Cameron was confused for a moment. Then she picked up on what Riley was looking at. “Oh, I don’t know. I didn’t really notice their absence, although I’ve got to say I’m grateful for it.”
“They’re mostly outside the city,” Thomas said.
“How do you know?” Both Cameron and Riley asked in unison.
“Well, it makes sense, doesn’t it? Like, ninety-five percent of the still living population fled the city. The fast ones ran after them. These slow ones were just left behind because they couldn’t keep up with the things stimulating them to leave.”
“Huh.” Riley looked back out at the zombies. That actually seemed to make sense to her. “What made you come up with that?”
“I was just about to start my second year studying behavioural science at the university when this happened. Since then, I’ve been trying to apply what I know to them. When we entered the city, I noticed right away the lack of fast ones, and so far, that’s the most logical explanation I can come up with.”
“How old are you?” Cameron wondered.
“Seventeen.”
“And you were about to start your second year of university?” Brunt raised an eyebrow at him.
Thomas just shrugged. “I’ve always been smarter than I look.”
They rounded a corner and came across a massive cloud of ground level fog.
“What the hell?” Cameron frowned, leaning between the front seats to get a better look at the cloud.
“Masks on!” Brunt cried out, then repeated the message through a microphone to the back compartment.
Riley quickly grabbed her full face mask and strapped it back on. The others did the same.
“What is that?” Riley asked Brunt.
“A chemical cloud,” he replied.
“But it’s huge!” Looking out the windows, they saw it was three to four stories tall. They could also see only a few feet into it before it appeared as a solid white mass.
“A wind funnel brought it here and trapped it.” Brunt began moving them toward the cloud. “I’ll bet Orson and Hank went around it; cutting through may allow us to catch up.”
“Wouldn’t the rain have dissipated it?” Thomas asked as they drew closer.
“Not here.” Brunt shook his head. “That’s the museum there.” He pointed to their right. As they entered the cloud, they couldn’t actually see what he was pointing at. “In the other direction, there’s a chemical plant outside the city. When it released its pressure, the wind must have picked it up and funnelled it down between the tall buildings to here, where the street ends at the museum. It would have gotten blown straight into the dinosaur park and become trapped there.”
Riley had forgotten all about the dinosaur park. On one side of the museum, a massive square had been taken out of the building. It was filled with replica plants and dinosaur bones. Although the one side of the square had been left open to the street, allowing the breeze to rustle the fake plants, the top had been covered in glass to protect the fake scenery from the rain. A lot of kids loved the dinosaur park. Riley had had a number of patients tell her about it. It was the perfect place for a swirling cloud of poison to collect. After the storm, it must have started to spill back out into the street.
Within the cloud, it was nearly impossible to make out anything. An alarm had started going off in the truck, presumably about the air quality, but Brunt flicked it off. They inched their way through it as they would a thick fog. Cars, street lamps, and litter loomed out of the white as they got close, then disappeared as they passed. Riley couldn’t even see the back end of the truck at times, it got so thick. Zombies occasionally loomed out of the white as well. Shuffling, staggering, or standing still, they were impervious to the foul air. Brunt directed the big truck onto the sidewalk, and they passed near the iron fence alongside the park. As Riley stared into it, she saw the replica of a giant, clawed foot appear. The rest of the beast, which she suspected was a T-Rex, disappeared into the murk. Upon the foot, however, was the still form of a small child.
Riley’s heart dropped into her stomach. She wanted to cry out for Brunt to stop, but it would do no good. Even if the cloud had just appeared the moment they saw it, a child couldn’t live that long in such a toxic environment. Without turning away from the window, Riley reached over and grabbed her twin’s hand. Considering the way she squeezed back, Cameron had seen the child as well. The child had probably run to the fierce dinosaur, hoping it would protect him from the other monsters. Riley’s other hand found its way to her belly.
It was then that Riley decided she wanted to keep her baby. In spite of all the horrible things she had seen, that’s what she decided. The world could be a cruel place, especially to the innocent, but they had to be given a chance. In a way, the dinosaur had protected that child from the monsters. He wasn’t up and walking with the rest of them so he mustn’t have been infected. If it weren’t for the gas cloud, he might still be alive. Riley wanted to give her baby a chance. She would protect him or her as best she could, so that he might one day grow up and get to see something like the dinosaur bones. Imagining the hope and wonder that would be in her unborn child’s eyes, filled Riley with an unexpected and overwhelming emotion. She didn’t even know what to call it, but it brought tears to her eyes. Behind the Plexiglas of her mask, she wept.
Without seeing her, Cameron knew, and clasped her hand in both of hers, squeezing it reassuringly.
***
They stopped a few more times, but each time, the surroundings didn’t look like the kind of area where they expected Orson and Hank to have stopped. They didn’t spend long cruising the area to look for them, but would consult the satellite and drive to the next location. They also swapped who had to sit in the trailer section each time.
Riley and Cameron were in the trailer when they stopped for the last time. Once they were let out, they were surprised to see that everyone in the front section had gotten out as well. They were in a relatively safe location for the moment, and it was clear they were going to discuss something.
“I think I know where they’re going,” Brunt told the group, holding a map out for them to see. He had marked Xs on it in the areas they had searched. “Today, they’ve been driving with more purpose, more direction. Judging by their route, I think they’re going to the White Box. I think Nicky is directing them there.”
“White Box? That’s what Mathias calls the big underground facility.” Riley frowned.
Brunt nodded. “That’s its unofficial name.”
“Why would she lead them there?” Shaidi asked.
Brunt sighed. “Something we’ve been keeping from the public is that the White Box is overrun.”
“What?” Brewster frowned more than Riley.
“Marble Keystone is run mostly by a large family. One family tree. Now some branches of that tree really don’t get along with others. They were going to make a break for it, run off with us when we head for the ship. Something went wrong though. They were found out, and the others tried to stop them. One of the members on our side was Jeffrey Taggart. He was head of security at that place. When the shit hit the fan, communications became garbled, not a lot of messages got out. What we did get though, was that Jeffrey’s wife fell victim to them. Nobody knows if anyone got out, but Jeffery locked all the outer doors and unlocked all the inner doors, including those to the cages.”
“What cages?” Brewster asked, although Riley could guess.
“They had zombies down there that they were experimenting on,” Brunt confirmed. “Most of that family was made up of assholes who were fine with ending the rest of the world, but several of them didn’t think this was the way to do it. They also didn’t know that some of them were continuing the experiments within the facility until some kid stumbled upon them. Rumour is that one of the zombies was even one of the scientists that created t
he damn virus. That she had betrayed them in some way and so they made her part of the experiment. Jeffery decided to let that literally bite them in the ass.”
“That whole family is sick,” Cameron said what Riley was thinking, “not to mention ruthless.”
“You don’t even know the half of it.” Brunt turned to her. “They didn’t even tell some members of their own family what was going to happen simply because they didn’t like them.”
“Kara Taggart,” Riley suddenly remembered the name Alec had told her. She was an old woman he had travelled with, and who had died before meeting Riley.
“Yeah, she’s one.” Brunt nodded.
“So wait,” Shaidi lifted her hands, trying to get them back on course. “Does Nicky know that the facility is full of zombies?”
“Yeah, she does,” Brunt told them. “She’s one of the few that James told.”
“She’s leading them into a trap,” Brewster said.
“One she’s not likely to get out of,” Thomas added. “Those guys don’t sound like the kind to go in there on their own.”
“So why are we standing around gossiping then?” Brewster turned to the truck. “Let’s get our asses over there and stop her.”
“I just wanted to make sure you all know what we’re stepping into.” Nobody argued with Brunt about going. “All right then, let’s go.”
Everybody piled into the truck, Riley and Cameron volunteering to get into the back again. Riley had looked at her watch when they had gotten out and saw that it was almost one o’clock. She nearly missed her call window. Good thing the trailer had reception, and she was able to place her call.
The phone rang and rang. Riley was beginning to think she had dialled the wrong number or that something awful had happened, when a breathless Mathias answered.
“Riley?” he panted. He was breathing heavily as if he had been running.
“Mathias? Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Just had to make sure I was far enough away.”
Survival Instinct (Book 2): Adaptive Instinct Page 38
