The Apocalypse Crusade Day 4: War of the Undead

by Peter Meredith

  This was definitely an emergency. Two officers were running at them from the bakery, both holding pistols. “Get in!” she shouted, jumping in and reaching for the ignition. The keys were right there, as was the police scanner, which was the real reason she had wanted the Corvette. She didn’t wait for John to shut his door before she peeled out of the parking lot.

  Chapter 21

  1– 7:28 p.m.

  —Hartford, Connecticut

  She hadn’t wanted to come all the way back to where it all started, all the way back to the lonely hospital. She had wanted to get through the battle and be with everyone else, only the fighting had been too fierce and, in her mind, she was just a little girl, easily hurt, easily broken, easily killed.

  In reality, she wasn’t easily killed. And if she was ever hurt, she healed quickly. And she wasn’t exactly little anymore, either. Unlike her father, Jaimee Lynn Burke had grown in the last couple of days. She had eaten very well. There had been so many soft, fat, mouth breathers who had screamed while she fed that she couldn’t remember them all. She just remembered the taste of the blood. She had practically swum in it and she had drunk so much blood that her belly would swell as if she were pregnant.

  The idea of being pregnant appealed to the girl. Babies were the tastiest of all and she would happily eat any baby that came from her. The thought made her hungry, then again, she was always, always hungry.

  Ever since losing Dr. Lee’s scent the night before, Jaimee Lynn had followed the sound of battle and the smell of blood. Her bare feet stepped on rocks and sticks and glass, so that she left a trail of black feet-shaped splotches as she headed north to the Massachusetts border; it was where all the people were.

  She couldn’t get to them, however.

  Although she was far from the big battle at Webster, the border was guarded by deep ditches and rolls of sharp wire. In the sky were brilliant lights floating down on little parachutes, and there were loud planes with fire coming from them. There were also angry men and women with guns.

  The smell of their tasty blood was wonderful, however the smell of the guns was not. The guns gave off a rich stink whenever the people shot at the strange, black-eyed monsters that swarmed to kill them. Jaimee didn’t like the guns. She knew what they could do to her, still she wasn’t exactly afraid of them since she could no longer comprehend fear, at least not as it pertained to herself.

  Other than the guns and the wires and the ditches keeping her from feeding, there were also explosions which bothered Jaimee Lynn more than anything. When they went off too closely, her mind would go utterly blank and she would be frozen for half a minute or more as her brain “rebooted,” and she was able to think once again.

  Like a stalking jackal, she had gone up and down the lines, looking for a way past all the violence so that she could feed. At one point, she had almost given in to her hunger and had charged with the rest of the zombies. She would have been mowed down as they were, but a mortar round had gone off nearby. She was thrown from her feet with what felt like needles etching all along her right side and arm. The pain was nothing, not even a nuisance, but she was wet and that meant bleeding. She had a notion that bleeding was bad. She tried to lift an arm to see the wound, only her arm refused to budge. She tried to sit up and her body just laid there.

  For half a minute, she found herself staring up at the night sky as tracers zipped overhead and rock and dirt rained down on her. She had a vague notion of being hit here and there by fragments from nearby blasts, but it barely registered.

  Smoke from a grass fire rolled down to cover her and the flames came very close before her brain “clicked” and she was able to feel her feet and toes again. Sitting up, she gazed around in disappointment. The defensive line held firm.

  There were pieces and parts of monsters everywhere, and there were more fires and thick smoke sowing confusion among the few hundred that were still alive. Those with working legs got up and went every which way. Jaimee Lynn needed them to head back toward the line of humans and she tried to shove them in that direction, but they were stupid and did not understand.

  If she had her pack of feral children with her, she could have figured out something to get at all that wonderful blood, but somewhere along the way she had lost them, only she couldn’t remember where. In an attempt to find them, she began retracing her steps, which was a fine plan, except she couldn’t remember exactly where she had been.

  She found a road and started walking and eventually, she saw a sign for Hartford and that sparked a memory of ambushing a woman. It was a wonderful memory, so wonderful in fact that it was almost like a dream. She remembered that the woman had been so full of blood that it had spurted out of her when Jaimee Lynn had chomped into her throat. It was like biting into a ripe tomato. The memory spurred her on and Jaimee walked like a little naked drunk all the way to Hartford.

  She didn’t notice her nudity or the layers of old blood caking her body. Her entire focus was on her destination and the hope of finally sating her hunger.

  When dawn of the fourth day broke, she walked into the city of Hartford and the hope died in her. The city was alive with flies and rats and crows feasting on the remains of thousands of bodies. There were also packs of dogs roaming around—these shied away from Jaimee. And there were cats that hissed at her. But there was almost nothing else alive. To her the few zombies still dragging themselves around didn’t count as being alive. Most of the ones that remained were missing at least a leg, but usually it was both legs and an arm, and an eye and a nose.

  She walked past them as if they weren’t even there.

  Jaimee Lynn was halfway through the city when she heard a scream, high and piercing. Her stomach rumbled and she began scurrying toward the sound. Seconds later the scream came again, exactly like the first.

  “Oh, fer shit’s sake,” she whispered, repeating something her daddy had said on many occasions. For some reason when she said it, it made her feel strange and wrong. “Fer goodness sake, then,” she amended and that seemed okay to say.

  It didn’t make her much happier about the screams, however. The screams had been too much alike to be from a person. They had been made by a zombie-child, one who was hunting.

  There were six of the little beasts. Jaimee Lynn found them trying their best to hide. The scream had been the bait for a trap; they were hoping that some good samaritan would come by to investigate the scream and they would jump out and eat them. Their hiding spots, under cars or behind trees, were pathetic.

  “This was a stoopid plan,” she said, berating them, her hands on her skinny hips. She lined them up so she could appraise them. Three of the six looked as though they had been mauled by bears and were missing huge chunks of themselves. One girl didn’t have a belly. She had been eaten clear to her spine.

  “Look at y’all. Y’alls all gross an all. Who’s gonna wanna rescue you? No one that’s who. I shoulda done the screamin’ iffin anyone should.” Five of the kid zombies just stood there like lumps, but the sixth pointed a finger at Jaimee Lynn

  “Wut?” Jaimee Lynn asked. In answer, the zombie, a straggly thing in bloody rags of flesh and denim, jabbed its finger a second time at Jaimee Lynn. She looked down at herself and saw the black and red blood that covered her. And she saw there was a piece of wood poking right out of her side as if she had a tree growing inside of her that was trying to get out.

  “Huh,” she said, pulling the stick out and flinging it aside. “I’s scarier than a striped haint. Maybe even look like one, too. Ya know wut? It might could be that screamin’ ain’t gonna work no how.”

  She couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to come to the rescue of the seven of them. Then again, as far as she knew, no one had tried. “Maybe they ain’t no one around here. Maybe they all runned away.” As she stared about her at the city, she decided that it was possibly the ugliest place she had ever been. No one would want to stay here if they could.

  “We should git, too,” she told her new pack
. They nodded except for one that made a glugging sound. Jaimee Lynn ignored it and him. She set them lurching west. A few hours later, they fed on a man in some dinky town she had never heard of. He had been hiding in a laundromat and had been diligent about putting down bleach to keep from being infected. The bleach had also masked his scent and for the last few days he hadn’t been bothered by the roaming zombies. Unfortunately, the town’s water pump had broken and he could no longer use his toilet. He took to urinating in a bucket he kept in the back alley. The urine was concentrated and pungent; Jaimee Lynn had caught the scent from a block away.

  She went right to the alley, saw the bucket and the reinforced steel door and in seconds, a plan hatched in her cunning mind. It was simple, she knocked on the door. “Excuse me?” she said in her best “Yankee” accent. “Hello. My name is Jaimee. I have food.”

  She could smell the man on the other side of the door. She could smell his blood and his fear. Her body tensed in excitement as he hesitated, neither answering nor moving away. He wanted to open the door, Jaimee Lynn knew it. “What’s y’alls name?” she asked, forgetting her fake accent in her hunger.

  “Casey,” he said through the door. “Is there anyone with you?” She told him that there wasn’t and he breathed a sigh of relief. When the door came open, Jaimee Lynn launched herself at Casey Rienhold, a florist with a pockmarked face and nervous little fingers. There was blood in the beds of his nails where he had bitten them down to the quick.

  She bit them down to nothing but nubs before she burrowed into his stomach. The others joined in and ate Casey in an orgy of pain. Casey lived for a very long time, but eventually he stopped screaming and what was left of his blood and meat turned cold.

  Jaimee Lynn stood and ran the back of a bloody hand across her bloody lips. She was a vile little demon. The old blood of her past victims was crusted and cracking. It had dried black, but now she glistened red. She fairly shined with it in an unholy way.

  “We’re done,” she said to the other kid zombies and gave one of them a kick in the ear. He was bigger than her, however she was smarter, more present, and he stood, sucking gristle from his teeth, waiting for her to think for him.

  At the moment, she really wasn’t thinking of much. She was comfortably full, but not in the stuporous way she got when she was full to the gills. When she got that full, the evil contents of her belly would slosh around and when she’d burp, bubbles of blood and little chunks of whatnot would come up her throat. When she got that full, she was seized with a need for sleep.

  No, just then she was contentedly full. She didn’t need sleep or even to feed, though she wouldn’t have been able to stop herself if a tasty morsel walked by. For her the moment was perfect and about the only thing that would make it more so was if her daddy were there.

  He was about the only thing Jaimee Lynn could remember from the past. She had a mommy, but she was a blur. And she’d been in school, only when she thought about that, all she could picture were delicate little calves and big tasty eyes.

  It bothered her that she couldn’t remember. It made her think that there was something wrong in her head. Well, she knew there was something wrong with the world, just looking around told her that. And she knew there was something wrong with all the people. What made her nervous was that there might be something wrong with her. She couldn’t put a finger on it, but she had the feeling that she had changed in some way.

  Her daddy would know what to do, of that she was so certain that she marshaled her little pack and started walking west once more, heading to the last place she had seen him alive: the Walton facility.

  2—7:58 p.m.

  Although the President had signed the pardon with his usual flourish and it had been delivered personally by the Attorney General of the United States, who had marched off a marine helicopter in a head-to-toe blue bio-suit, it wasn’t good enough for Anna and Eng.

  Anna gave the pardon a long read before asking the Attorney General, “What’s to stop them from shooting us in the head when all this is over? They could rip up this piece of paper and take us out back and put two in our heads and burn our bodies and there wouldn’t be anything we could do.”

  “But we wouldn’t do that,” the Attorney General replied, trying his best to appear reassuring from behind the face-plate of the bio-suit.

  “I would,” Eng said.

  Ann nodded in agreement. “Yeah, me too.”

  “But…but we’re the good guys,” the Attorney General stammered. “We wouldn’t do that.” The two terrorists had laughed at this and then issued new demands. They wanted a video tape of the President signing the pardon and they wanted a copy sent to the Chinese, Russian, Iranian, and North Korean embassies. Of course, the copying and the deliveries had to be video-taped as well.

  Special Agent Katherine Pennock had not watched any of this bullshit. She had entrusted Jennifer Jackson with guarding the prisoners, something the soldier was only too happy to do, lugging the M240 over to the barn and sitting behind it with a “please do something stupid so I can blow you back to hell,” look on her face.

  With that taken care of, Katherine had found a spot deep in the belly of the Blackhawk to sleep. The lulling patter of rain combined with her sheer exhaustion sent her into dreamland in seconds. She slept hard, as if her body knew that a lot more was going to be asked of her.

  The pilot of the Blackhawk, Joe Swan woke her. “There’s a big shot FBI guy asking about you.” Feeling woolly-headed, she sat up and the first thing she could comprehend was that it had become dark out. She told Swan this and he chuckled. “That’s what happens when the sun the goes bye-bye. Come on, get up.”

  Still feeling slow, Katherine climbed out of the chopper. The rain helped to clear her head and she was basically fully functioning by the time she made it to the edge of the taped off quarantine zone where John Alexander, Assistant Director for National Security was waiting for her, standing warm and dry under an umbrella.

  As he wasn’t exactly crowding the tape, she couldn’t share the umbrella. “Any sign of infection?” he asked. She shook her head, but he didn’t get any closer. “Good, I’m glad to hear it. Look, we’re going to be sending you into the Zone. You’ll be accompanying the two perps to Walton. The President thinks you can handle it. He mentioned you personally.”

  Katherine felt a momentary stab of fear in her belly, but then her ballooning ego swept it aside. “The President? That’s, that’s awesome,” she gushed. Yes, she thought he was a man who was far out of his depth, but he was still the President. “What sized team will I be leading?” Before Alexander could answer, she went on, speaking out loud, “At least twenty agents for security, and another three, no, make that four agents from Cyber Command. I want some people who know their way around computers. If Eng thinks he’s going to…”

  Alexander held up a hand. “It’s going to be just you. Well, not just you. There’ll be the pilot and the lady gunner, and Anna and Eng, of course.”

  “What?” Katherine asked, completely baffled. She brought a wet hand up to wipe the rain from her eyes. If she wasn’t so cold and miserable, she would have thought she was still dreaming. “Me? And those two? And Anna and Eng? Y-You know Swan is a pilot. He hasn’t moved ten feet from his chopper, not even to take a leak. He pees on the damned wheels!”

  She swung an arm back to indicate the black machine. It looked like some sort of lurking beast. Joe Swan was sitting in the cabin door easting a sandwich. For Katherine, this only made her point for her. But she wasn’t done.

  “And the girl? Sir, she’s just a girl. She’s nice and all, but she’s not trained for what you’re asking of her.”

  “But you are.”

  “Damn right I am, but that doesn’t make a bit of difference. Is…is the President not taking this seriously?”

  Alexander took a deep breath before taking one small step closer to the yellow tape. “He is taking it very seriously, however, he also has his concerns. He’s afraid of wha
t you might bring out of the Zone. He’s worried that too many people going in might mean there’s more of a chance that someone comes out infected. And he’s worried that Eng might have something worse hiding in the lab. Some sort of super-infection, I don’t know. Let’s just say that he’s…he’s conflicted.”

  Katherine’s eyes flared wide. “He’s a chickenshit is what he is.” Without realizing it, she had strode forward and now the tape was tight across her chest. Alexander stepped back, a hand slipping into his coat. Katherine rolled her eyes and said, “Please, don’t you start. It’s unwarranted aggression that’s a symptom of the disease. This? This is very warranted. We are looking at finding a possible cure or a vaccination. Doesn’t he understand that? Do any of you?”

  “Of course we do. There will be precautions taken. We’ve had a UAV overhead for some time and the zombie numbers are not bad. They are…they are manageable. Your Blackhawk will be fully fueled and fully armed. You and the girl, what’s her name? Jackson? You’ll both be given whatever weapons you want. You’ll all have bio-suits and lights and the whole works.”

  “What I need are three Blackhawks and thirty agents,” Katherine shot back. “I’ll take thirty soldiers if I can’t get the agents. I’ll even settle for twenty-five.”

  He smiled, sadly. “I’m sorry, but this isn’t a negotiation. The President will be watching everything.”

  She turned from him and gazed past Swan as he munched away on his sandwich. Three people to fight off who knew how many zombies and to control two of the most dangerous people she had ever met? It was ridiculous and stupid—and at the same time it was a career move.

  “The President will be watching?” she asked, him. “Then I’ll need to be taken seriously. I’ll be going in as a Special Agent in Charge.” Alexander opened his mouth, but she put up a finger. “And not on a temporary basis, either.”

  “That’s a jump of four pay grades.”

  Of course, she knew that. “And that’s not open to negotiations, either,” she informed him.