The Apocalypse Crusade Day 4: War of the Undead

by Peter Meredith

  “Dr. Lee, perhaps? Maybe…maybe.”

  Katherine clicked on another folder, this one dedicated to Dr. Thuy Lee. Thuy Heather Lee: age thirty-seven; Vietnamese/American. She had been born in Saigon in the closing days of the Vietnam War and smuggled out of the country in a cardboard box by her mother when Saigon fell.

  With another click, Katherine opened up the very thin file on Dr. Lee’s mother. Heather Lee—real name, Hue Le. She changed her name in ‘75 when she emigrated to the U.S by way of the Philippines. Other than twenty-eight poorly filled out IRS forms, there wasn’t anything else on her besides a death certificate. Heather Lee had died of breast cancer in 2003. She had just turned fifty.

  “Hmm,” Katherine said and then closed out the file so that Dr. Lee’s was once again front and center. Katherine went back to reading about a woman who had lived what seemed to be a happy American life. Thuy had ridden academic scholarships to a Bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Yale University and a Doctorate in Molecular Microbiology and Immunology from Johns Hopkins. Among her many credits, she had published thirteen papers, all of which had lengthy titles and might as well have been written in Greek for all Katherine could make out of them.

  It was a given that there was another team going through each of these papers, line by line, looking for anything un-American.

  Although Dr. Lee was number one on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List, Katherine didn’t think they would find much of anything in her research papers. Only in the movies did people write secret messages into papers that were subject to strenuous peer review. If there were messages they would be out in the open.

  Katherine’s lips pursed as she flipped back and forth from the handwritten letter to some of Dr. Lee’s work. “Not her,” she decided. Dr. Lee was far too precise to only capitalize two of the five words in the greeting. The sort of meticulous verbiage and attention to detail found in her papers was ingrained. She closed the folder and opened a second and then a third until she had seven open, each a thin file on the female doctors associated with the Com-cell project.

  Anna Holloway, a lowly research assistant, one of dozens, wasn’t among them. Katherine paid more attention to the foreign born researchers and when she finished with the women, she went right to Shuang Eng’s folder. Her gut told her that he was involved up to his squinty eyes. China had let him come to the US with so little fuss that it was suspicious.

  Had he been the second person on the Apache? The description of the two had been exceedingly vague: one had a female voice and the other male.

  “And there was the term comrade.” It just jumped off the page and yet the prevailing theory was that this was the work of two American soldiers, which did make sense and was the most likely scenario. The kidnapping of a soldier right from the lines could not have been easy except by another soldier.

  That was the most likely scenario, especially since Dr. Lee was last reported to be in Hartford, Connecticut, a city that had been overrun only a few hours before the soldier on Long Island had been kidnapped. In Katherine’s mind it would have been nearly impossible to travel through so much zombie-infested land in such a short timeframe.

  Of Eng there had been no reports whatsoever. As far as anyone knew, he had died in the R&K facility along with practically everyone else on the first day. But, once more, her gut told her otherwise. Chinese agents were notoriously tough and well trained. If Eng had something to do with the outbreak, he would have made plans for escape—“If so, why hadn’t he flown the coop in the beginning?” Katherine leaned away from the laptop and stared up at the projected map without seeing any of its lines. “Did it all go to shit faster than he expected? It sure exploded in China and that probably wasn’t on the cards. So, if Eng is our guy, who was the woman? A nobody? One of the scientists?”

  As the overhead lights went on and the other agents began to head for the exits, Katherine went back to the letter and started reading it once again. The woman who had written the letter used the words held, hold, lock and locked, and then used safe twice, safety and release once each. In Katherine’s eight years of experience, it wasn’t suggestive of a code, however it could be inferred to mean the woman had been held against her will.

  “And a combination of fear of the zombies and Stockholm Syndrome would account for the murders and the blood vials. Okay, I have a possible motive for her actions, at least, but I don’t have a name. I should call…”

  “Agent Pennock?”

  She jerked and looked up to see the agent who had been handing out assignments. He looked her over once and gave her a curt nod of satisfaction. “I was told to have you wait here. Keep your phone handy.”

  He was already out the door before she could leap up, asking, “Do we have the analysis on the letter yet? Any prints?”

  “No, it was clean; a dead end. And, at the moment, it’s none of your concern. Just be ready when the Director needs you.”

  Only when he was out of the room did she dare to roll her eyes. “Maybe I should get a freaking mini-skirt,” she grumbled as she went back to her laptop. She didn’t sit. She was tired of sitting. She was tired of doing nothing. “It’s Eng,” she stated. There were dozens of possible suspects from the Walton facility alone, but she went with her gut.

  “So, if I’m a Chinese national, where would I go? What’s in Baltimore? Any connections? Any family?” Feeling the churn of excitement within her at the prospect of the hunt, she leaned over her laptop and started searching. First Facebook, then Instagram, then on down the list of social websites. There was nothing. Eng was a ghost. His banking statements weren’t much better. He was a creature of very dull habits: grocery store once a week, McDonalds three times a week, the gas station every eight days.

  Eng was the essence of dull, which made her all the more suspicious. She dug deeper, ignoring the bounds of legality and still there was nothing—he had no friends, no family; his phone records were virtually nonexistent and his email was the height of banality. It was almost as if he had been living his life expecting or perhaps knowing that he was being spied on. It was how spies lived.

  The excitement in her grew. Normally, she would have gone to her immediate supervisor with her suspicions and her findings, only he was fast asleep three hundred miles away in Charlotte, North Carolina.

  Katherine went to the hallway and paused at the doorway, afraid to take a step out, afraid to disobey a direct order. Stern-faced agents hurried past. A few would nod, even fewer would smile. She caught the eye of one who had not only smiled but had given her body a quick peek.

  “Excuse me. Hi, do you know who is looking into the researchers from the Walton Facility?” For the FBI, there was only one case, so the question wasn’t completely out of the blue.

  “Ummm, there’s an analysis team on the fourth floor, I think.”

  Her heart sunk. The fourth floor was out of reach. She couldn’t wander up there pretending to have gotten lost looking for a bathroom. “Do you happen to know…” She paused as the agent in front of her became distracted for a moment with something behind Katherine. It had only been a quick look on his part, but she knew exactly what he had seen: a woman. Katherine turned as well and her breath caught in her throat. This woman was strikingly beautiful.

  Her hair was a Nordic blonde, her eyes the color of blue denim, and she was young, even younger than Katherine. “Are you an agent?” Katherine asked.

  Perhaps because of the odd look on Katherine’s face, the woman answered with a guarded, “Yes, I’m with the Cincinnati office. We just got in and I’m…”

  “Excellent. I’m going to need you to debrief the President.”

  “The President of the United States?”

  “The one and only. You’ll be getting a call from the Director on this phone. Don’t worry, he’ll inform you of your duties as liaison to the White House.” Katherine saw the confusion and the suspicion in the woman’s eyes. “I know this is a little strange,” Katherine said, “but the Director wanted the pret
tiest agent we have, possibly because there could be some camera time. He’s looking for someone beautiful and smart. You are smart, correct?”

  The blonde blinked at the question. “Yes, I have a Master’s from…”

  “That’s great. Look, this is going to be a great opportunity for you so don’t screw it up. Keep the phone handy and don’t leave this room. They’ll be sending a car for you very soon. If it’s a limo, just roll with it and pretend it’s not your first time.”

  “I’ve been in limos before.”

  Katherine gave her a smile. “Not like this you haven’t. Good luck.” She then swept out of the room, heading for the fourth floor. Even if everything she had said turned out to be true, she didn’t care. She didn’t want to be an FBI spokesperson; she didn’t want to be on television. She had joined the FBI to catch bad guys and to right wrongs. That wasn’t going to happen when she was sipping tea with the President and pretending not to notice his eyes roving all over her.

  She was at the elevators in seconds and quickly found that even at four in the morning, the fourth floor was a place of mayhem. “Who’s looking into the Walton scientists?” she asked, popping her head into the first office she came to. There were seven people clicking like mad on keyboards.

  “End of the hall on the right,” one of them said without looking up. She thanked him and he grunted.

  “Is this Walton?” she asked, when she came to end of the hall. The room was divided, eleven cubicles for eleven analysts. Each of the cubicles was so overly stacked with files that it looked as though the analysts had built little forts out of the reams. None of them answered and none looked up. Katherine was about to repeat herself a second time but then saw the handwritten signs on the sides of the cubicles: Patients, Security, Family, Hospital Staff, Security, Cleaning Crew, Research A, Research B, R&K, R&K BoD.

  She went to the cubicle marked Research B and paused, waiting for a mousey looking woman to glance up from her computer. She was doing the thankless and very tedious job of cataloguing data from a full work-up. Under this sort of scrutiny, any single mention of a person’s name was captured, organized, and filed. Even the dullest, most stay-at-home person, such as Eng, would have thousands of data points and each had to be taken into consideration.

  “Hi, I’m Special Agent Pennock. What do you have on an assistant researcher named Eng?” she finally asked when the analyst wouldn’t look up.

  “Other than him being dead, not much,” she said, her fingers going at her keyboard without let up.

  She had warts on her fingers. Not big ones but many small ones. Katherine tried not to stare, but she was drawn to them. “Do we have a body? Or an eyewitness to his death?”

  “It’s assumed.”

  Katherine struggled to keep a pleasant smile on her face. “And you base this on what?”

  Finally, the warty fingers ceased their clicking dance across the keyboard. The analyst placed her hand on one of the stacks of folders. “Do you see these files? Do you? I have another thirty stacks that are just as high. My job is to put this stack of information into the computer so that someone else can condense it further, and then someone else can turn it into a pithy little report for all to see.”

  “Wrong. That’s not your job,” Katherine replied, matching her stare for stare. “Your job is to catch bad guys, just like me. And you can help me by giving me anything you have on Eng, starting with any information on his death.”

  The mousey analyst steepled her fingers beneath her chin. Katherine tried not to react seeing all those warts sitting so close to the woman’s face. “Wow,” the woman said. “You act like I don’t know my own job. Do you think that just because you have a gun and the word ‘special’ in your title that you are, in fact, special? You’re not. There are over thirty thous…”

  Katherine cut her off. “So, you have time to give me a speech, but not time to show me the raw data on Eng? Maybe I was wrong, maybe you are just a typist.”

  The two stared at each other in a frosty silence until the woman shrugged and dug through one of the stacks, pulling from it a small file. “Knock yourself out, but only four people got out of the facility. Lee, Deckard, Glowitz, and Singleton. Everyone else got eaten or turned.”

  “That may not be true,” someone in the next cubicle said. “Didn’t you see the note on Wilson and Burke in the Meeks report?”

  “No, they weren’t mine,” the mousey analyst said, giving Katherine a very neutral glance that suggested she couldn’t be held responsible for every line of every report. “I have Research B. Just the junior research assistants.”

  “Who’s got a copy of that report,” Katherine demanded. A minute later, a stapled report was passed over the top of the cubicle wall. She snatched it and immediately started reading. It was a preliminary report concerning the capture, quarantining, and initial interview of six people who had escaped from the Walton facility. It was barely a page long and at the bottom was an almost throwaway line: Two others who escaped the Zone were added to the quarantine tent; Dr. Lee in particular seems to have some animosity toward them, which will undoubtedly help during my next interviews.

  “It’s Eng, I’m sure of it,” Katherine whispered.

  The analyst heard and, not quite understanding, shook her head. “My money is on Anna Holloway. She was getting a little something extra from a competing research company. As far as I can tell from the money being moved, it was low level espionage stuff, but it’s not that far of a leap to actual sabotage.”

  “Is she alive? Are you getting any banking hits, any credit card transactions? Phone calls?”

  “Nope. There’s nothing on any of them and that area where Meeks had been was overrun within minutes of him sending his prelim. Dr. Lee was the only known survivor. She might have made it to Hartford, but even if she did, she didn’t make it out again. I’m pretty sure they’re all dead.”

  Katherine didn’t believe it. If three stage-four cancer victims and an overweight, over-the-hill doctor could make it out of Walton, then Anna and Eng, who were both young and strong, could have as well. Especially if one was a spy and another a saboteur. People like that, people who were ruthless enough to infect total strangers, would have found a way to survive.

  “I’m going to need a copy of these files,” Katherine told the mousey analyst, holding up the dossier on Anna Holloway and Shuang Eng.

  Chapter 5

  1– 4:12 a.m.

  —Taconic Hills Central High School, New York

  Trapped in a school that was surrounded by hundreds of zombies and pinned against a door by a hulking, half-drunk wannabe rapist, Thuy did the only thing she could, she drew in a deep breath and screamed at the top of her lungs. At five-foot four inches tall and a hundred and five pounds, the scream was practically her only defense. It was so loud that it bounced around the walls of the principal’s office and sent a zing along the glass surface of her fancy diploma. The scream echoed down the corridors of the empty school, penetrated the windows and raced out into the night where the zombies waited.

  The undead creatures turned their black eyes towards the school. They knew only hunger and hatred, and with a communal roar they came on.

  Jerry Weir slammed a beefy, tobacco-smelling hand across Thuy’s mouth, cutting off the scream. He wasn’t gentle. Thuy’s lips were crushed against her teeth as the back of her head hit the door with enough force that a thousand points of lights shot across her vision.

  “Shhh!” he hissed, cranking his head around to stare at the windows. Outside the principal’s office was a bank of rhododendrons; their long, shiny leaves began to shimmy and shake as the creatures pushed into them. “Fuck! Look what you did. Come on.”

  He reached past her for the door knob. She almost fell when the door opened, but he caught her by the back of the ugly sport coat and propelled her through the admin area. He stopped in the main hall as glass started to break behind them. They were coming in through the windows, uncaring that shards of glass were tea
ring their flesh to ribbons.

  “My bat,” he said. “I forgot it.” Jerry was just drunk enough to think that the bat was a big deal, but not drunk enough to want to go back for it. “You get it,” he said, pushing Thuy back towards the office. “You’re the one who called them. ‘Sides, we’ll need it to get through all them.” He pointed towards the front doors to where a small mob was closing on the school.

  Thuy wanted to argue against the sheer stupidity of both suggestions, however this was a fine excuse to get away from this fat janitor. She darted back to the principal’s office just as the first zombie fell through the glass and landed in a black-blooded mess on the carpet. Another followed a second later.

  When she paused, Jerry pointed. “It’s right there, you dumb bitch.”

  As much as she liked the idea of watching Jerry die swinging the bat around, she wasn’t about to die alongside him. She climbed up onto Principal Steven’s desk and from there leapt to the top of his filing cabinet, knocking over a plant that was so green she assumed, incorrectly to be fake. Its black soil mingled with the black blood of the first zombie which was beginning to stand. It gazed up at her just as she pulled down one of the acoustic tiles that made up the ceiling. The tile landed on the zombie’s face and broke in half. With the dust adding to its already blurred vision, it took a moment to realize that Thuy was a human and in that moment, she climbed up into the cramped space between the faux ceiling and the real one.

  Below her, more zombies congregated, staring upwards, their near-useless brains unable to grasp the simple concept of climbing. Around her was near complete darkness. It made the prospect of moving in any direction frightening. One false move and she would fall through the tiles and they would be on her in a flash.

  She did have a five-inch wide safe space which ran along the top of the wall that divided the principal’s office from a counselor’s office next door. Thuy started crawling along it, moving like a frightened cat so that at least she was out of sight of the zombies.