by Jack Wallen
“Are you saying—?” Joshua’s engines started to rev.
“I’m not saying anything. I just want to make sure our little enclave is as secure and trustworthy as possible. You have with you two of the best hackers on the planet. You might want to consider that any time it comes to tech.”
Joshua glanced between Jamal and me. “Look, I promise you, once help arrives I’ll give you access to my transponder. Whatever you need to do to modify the system, make it Bethany-approved, do it. But only after the ZRT arrives with a full can or two of gas. We get free and clear of this tragedy, and the system is all yours.” Josh stuck out his right hand. “Deal?”
How could I pass up the opportunity to illustrate how pathetic the minds and plans are of most other people on the planet? Thankfully, that thought didn’t escape my lips or I’d be tagged “douchebag” for the rest of my life. I had to stop myself. For the briefest of moments, I felt like I was turning into one of those people. Of all the things the apocalypse could do, I couldn’t allow it to turn me into an elitist. That train of thought would only serve to cut me off from the majority of the remaining thinking population. I had to remain connected to the people. If mankind had any hope for salvation from the Zero Day Collective, I had to always remain a part of those in need of saving.
I finally thrust my hand at Joshua. He nearly crushed the bones in my fingers as we shook. His oversized grin was a perfect counterpoint to his death-inducing grip. As our hands separated, all went to silence and then to hell.
“What happened to the noise?” Jamal’s voice trembled. “B, the noise went away. Funk the silence and bring back the noise.”
A quick glance at the laptop gave me every piece of intel I needed. “No. No, no, no, no! The laptop died. It must not have been fully charged.”
The chorus of moans began anew. Morgan wasted no time before she revved up the armaments. The rhythmic beat of the massive gun was soon punctuated by the wet slop of dead meat hitting the ground.
Jamal grabbed my arm. “Please tell me you have a spare battery.”
The second our eyes made contact, Jamal knew the answer was a post-apocalyptic tragedy. I shook my head to add clarity to the moment.
“AC,” Jamal shouted. “Joshua, does this freighter have a twelve to one hundred and twenty volt AC converter on board?”
The gentle giant stared at Jamal as if he’d been rambling in Cantonese. “I have no idea what you’re—”
“An AC outlet. We need to plug her laptop in to get the Obliterator to work again.”
The Hummer started rocking again. From a distance, a new sound cut through the wall of moans. My stomach dropped to the floor of the truck.
“Bethany.” Echo grabbed my hand as she spoke. “Did you hear that?”
“I did.”
Screamers. There was no doubt they were heading for us.
“Here!” Joshua screamed. “I found an outlet. Hand me the power cord.”
I scrambled to get the cord from my bag. Jamal grabbed the outlet end and handed it over to Joshua as my fingers danced around awkwardly to get the adapter plugged into the laptop. As soon as I saw the green dot on the power brick, I hit the on/off button of the laptop. The screams were closing in.
“Come on, come on!” I sealed my lips and held my breath—waiting for the first sign of life from the laptop. Finally…
“We have BIOS! The boot sequence posted.”
Another round of screams pierced the fragile veil of safety we had. They were close enough that their battle cry shook the glass of the Hummer. Morgan continued firing, zombies continued dropping. It wasn’t enough.
It was never enough.
“Bethany, if those Screamers reach the truck before the Obliterator sings its unholy song, we’re done for.”
I looked at Jamal; shock had to have been smeared across my face.
“You think I don’t know that? I’ve been facing these bastards down for a very long time. I know what they are capable of. There’s nothing I can do to make this laptop boot any faster.”
What I really wanted to do was wrap my arms around Jamal and let him know everything would be fine. There was one problem with that wish—I didn’t know if it would come true. Everything was rotting from the inside out. Every plan, every connection, every hope—it all had gone to shit since Jacob was taken from me; Jacob my lover and now Jacob my baby. If I really dug deep into the viscera of my emotions, I’d discover the truth was…I needed someone to reassure me that everything was going to be fine.
The laptop was still in the boot process, the kernel rushing through its processes. For the first time in my life I hated technology; hated it for the fact that without it, we’d be dead. I wasn’t ready to die. Not now, not when I was unmade, un-whole. Out of nowhere, a song slammed into the core of my memory, the lyrics far too apt.
Awake and lift the blindness from your eyes
Stumble forth in this land of newborn irony
Our lives are past, our deaths ahead
Give rise to question
Give alms to the poor masses
Bring to the blinding, apocalyptic sun
A greeting of need and want
The smash of fist and bone on glass yanked me from my musical nostalgia. The Screamers had arrived. The Hummer thrashed about as if it would rock and roll over and give up the ghost.
“Bethany!” Echo’s fear-induced shriek slashed through the air and assaulted my eardrums.
The laptop bounced out of my grasp and landed on the floor of the truck. I placed my feet down and pressed the palm of my right hand against the ceiling. My left hand snaked down to reach for the precious cargo. I could feel the device on my left foot, but my hand wouldn’t reach. I released my right hand from the ceiling, knowing my balance would be shot to hell, and reached down until my fingers grasped the familiar carbon shell of the laptop.
As soon as I had the PC on my lap, the login screen appeared.
“I swear, Jamal, I’m switching to Slackware after this.”
“B, if I weren’t scared for my life I’d crack some serious wise on you for threatening to quit on Ubuntu. But at the moment, there are machines of death and destruction mere feet away and only a sheet of quarter-inch-thick glass keeping them from ripping my neck off my shoulders and sucking my brain from my skull. So you’ll have to excuse me for going lame on you.”
A broken and rotted fist cracked through one of the rear windows of the Hummer. One of the Screamers smashed his head against the now-ruined glass pane and forced his way through the hole. The sound of gnashing teeth and the smell of fetid breath filled the interior of the truck. A thick, glistening string of brown slop fell from the mouth of the zombie and landed on Echo’s shoulder. Her face went immediately pale and her eyes maddening-wide.
“Apology accepted,” I said, as my finger hit the key combination to fire off the Obliterator. The undead symphony immediately returned in full. The Screamer who’d crossed the glass boundary between the living and the dead panicked at the sound of undead-death and flailed about until the glass sliced through the meat of his neck. For reasons I could not explain, Echo turned and dug her fingers into the hair of the zombie as it continued to thrash. The glass bit deeper into its rotten flesh. Once the spinal cord had been severed, the undead bastard dropped lifeless to the ground. The head fell between Echo’s legs and landed on the floorboard of the back seat. Survival immediately kicked in and Echo grabbed the severed head and tossed it through the hole in the glass.
“Don’t mess with me, you undead prick!” Echo shouted after the head.
The remaining members of the horror-fueled horde once again scrambled to get clear of the zombie-crushing sound.
I held my breath, waiting for some other tragic twist of fate to befall our little band of brothers and sisters.
“What do we do now?” Echo’s voice was barely audible over the angry sounds of the Obliterator.
“We wait,” was my simple reply.
Joshua released
a heavy sigh. “It’s going to be a long-ass wait if we have to listen to this same song on repeat. Don’t you have any Avenged Sevenfold? Makes me bash my head every time.” Josh braved a smile and a wink.
The passenger door opened and Morgan lowered herself to the seat.
“Wow. That was crazy.” She smiled at Josh. “How long before the crew arrives with gas?”
“Shouldn’t be long now. Just sit back and enjoy the show.”
An odd quiet befell the inside of the Hummer as we watched the theatre of the macabre play out on the streets with no names. We were lost in so many ways.
chapter 2 | a dark and twisted plan
The radio crackled to life, breaking a too-long silence. The commander stood from behind his desk and glided to the communications station to grab the handset.
“This is Faddig.”
“Sir.” The voice belonged to Thomas Webber, lead biologist for the Zero Day Collective. “I have something you’ll want to see. Yes, you will definitely want to see this. Yes.”
Faddig rolled his eyes. It seemed every time the biologists or chemists rearranged a few molecules they felt it necessary for their commander to come to them immediately.
“I don’t really—”
“Sir, please pardon this insubordination, but get down here now. Without a doubt, you need to be in this location at this precious moment. Now.”
With that, the radio went silent.
Faddig huffed, straightened his tie, and opened the door to his office. The cooler air danced across his caramel skin like a familiar lover. He welcomed it. The stifling heat of his office never failed to lull him into a false sense of comfort he once felt in his homeland.
“They have such horrible timing,” Faddig sighed.
Since the Zero Day Collective had managed to get their hands on baby Jacob, it was a twenty-four seven circus of experiments, meetings, security threats, and monstrous evolutionary changes for the undead.
They had the cure in their hands. The only way they could ensure the Great Cleansing succeeded was to make sure the Mengele Virus evolved in such a way that any attempt at a cure would never succeed. It was all such dark, necessary work—work that had become the single greatest challenge the ZDC had ever faced. Somehow, the blood flowing through the child was able to predictively evolve as if it knew exactly what the Zero Day biologists would do to alter the virus, as if the very chemistry within Jacob had a sentience of its own. But how? That was the sixty-four million dollar question that would, inevitably, have no worth should the Great Cleansing fail.
As Faddig marched through the halls of the mobile headquarters, soldiers turned and snapped to attention. The commander made no effort to acknowledge the existence of anyone around him; he simply marched forward with a singular anxious purpose. The fear his authority and power instilled drove him onward, into the belly of the beast. The deeper he went into the heart of the biological car, the more frightening the reality became. Inhuman screams tore from the throats of creatures within the surrounding rooms. Should any one of the monsters escape, no one in the headquarters would survive.
Monsters.
A shudder chased its way around Faddig’s back. He stopped at one of the isolation chambers and turned to glance through the three-inch Plexiglas portal. Standing in the center of the room was what looked at first blush like a tall, gaunt male. The figure stood in absolute stillness. No breath entered its useless lungs, no heart beat within its rotting torso. The meat covering its skeleton did everything it could to fend off decomposition. The thing appeared harmless.
Until your scent danced over its tongue.
The beast’s hands were large and strong enough to palm and crush a human skull. With an overlong proboscis for a tongue, the raging, rotting creature could suck brains through the ear canal. The creature, commonly referred to as Evo4, had been stored in the room for weeks. It had been so long since its last feeding (a grievous and gruesome error on the part of a careless lab technician) that its motor functions had drastically slowed to conserve energy.
“Why we keep these calamities I will never know.” Faddig whispered to himself, as he turned to continue onward.
He finally reached his destination and made to knock on the door.
“Who am I kidding?”
Faddig grabbed the handle, and opened the door with a single swift motion. The room was the antechamber of the holding cell for baby Jacob. Getting into the actual room with the infant was another task that required multiple security clearances even the leader of the Zero Day Collective mobile unit didn’t have. Instead, he stood within the outer room and glanced around.
“I don’t suppose you actually have something to show me this time? Or am I to stand here until you grow tired of this game?”
A door hissed open and Webber slunk out. He was short and rail-thin; his hands and eyes fluttered like nervous butterflies.
“I assure you, Commander Faddig, this is no game. What I have to show you might well change the very nature of how we proceed.” Thomas Webber stood and smiled at Faddig.
“Well? Get on with the dog and pony show. I have work to do.”
Webber took the hint and stepped up to the glass plate separating the adults from the infant messiah.
“What am I looking at? The baby?”
Webber sidled up next to Faddig and nodded toward the center of the inner room.
“Next to the baby. On the surgical tray.”
Faddig turned to Webber and wrapped his fingers around the biologist’s bow tie-clad neck.
“I don’t have time for your nonsense, scientist. Either you have a miraculous development to reveal to me, or you have wasted my time. I think you know what happened to the last man to waste my time.”
Webber swallowed hard. The last of his team to have trifled with Faddig now stood in one of the evolutionary holding cells—a victim of one of the more vicious experiments. A bead of sweat collected at the nape of the biologist’s neck.
“On the tray next to baby Jacob is a Petri dish. Within that Petri dish is a growing colony of cells that will be used for the clone.”
Faddig released Webber.
“You did it?”
Webber nodded with enthusiasm.
“We did it. The cells are growing at an exponentially fast rate. We should see full development within a matter of days. Once the clone is within the target parameters, the DNA from Subject 001 will be introduced.”
“And we will have complete control over the clone?”
Webber nodded as a smile crept across his lips. “That is correct, sir.”
Faddig smacked his biologist on the shoulder as he turned to go.
“Brilliant. She won’t stand a chance against this.”
Faddig left the room, his step lighter than when he’d entered.
*
Webber wiped his brow, relieved he’d survived another encounter with the power suits.
A faint cry sifted through the monitors in the room.
“Must be feeding time.”
Webber stepped into the attached kitchenette to prepare Jacob’s bottle. Although the child’s DNA held answers to questions yet to be asked, he was still a baby and had to be treated as such. To that end, Webber was not only the single most powerful biologist on the planet, but a nursemaid to the messiah.
When he entered the room that held Jacob, a flood of energy washed over him. It was always the same and never failed to take him by surprise.
Jacob’s big blue eyes and grinning, toothless mouth looked up from the bassinet. Tiny hands reached upward to grasp at comfort.
“Here you go, little man,” Webber whispered, in an almost reverential tone.
The baby Jacob grabbed the bottle, pulled the nipple to his pink lips, and drank deeply of the life-giving formula.
chapter 3 | exit light, enter rizzo
“Oh my God, turn that fucking thing off!” Joshua shouted over the Obliterator.
“What’s the matter, tough guy?” Morgan
chided.
Jamal leaned forward, his head between the front seats, to address Josh and Morgan. “Tell me you have an ETA on your unit.”
“Aren’t you having fun? It’s like Camp of the Damned.” Joshua laughed at his attempted humor.
“Yeah, I’ve seen that film; it doesn’t end well—at least not for us.”
Morgan leaned over and smacked the back of Joshua’s head. “Stop being such a goofball, Josh. Tell the poor man how soon the cavalry will arrive.”
Josh laughed and glanced at his watch. “They should be here any minute.”
The distant sound of moans wafted up from the darkening sky.
“Please don’t get dark yet,” Echo whispered, as if to hide her plea. I wrapped my arms around her tiny frame and pulled her into me.
“Don’t worry, I won’t let anything hurt you.”
The words took me back to broken promises from the past. Susan—another young girl I’d promised to protect. That failure would eat at my heart for eternity. The only thing to be done was to finally make good on a similar promise and ensure nothing happened to Echo.
So far, so good.
“By the way, what’s the plan once we’re gassed up and on the road?” Jamal spoke softly. I loved that about him, how he always knew when to effect peace in a room—one of his many gifts.
“The plan hasn’t changed,” I started. “We hunt down and kill the Zero Day Collective and reclaim Jacob.”
Echo shuddered. “Jesus, when you put it that way it makes Jacob seem more property than prophet.”
The sentiment cut sharply. The thought that Jacob would ever be seen as a commodity to be tossed back and forth between enemy lines was insane. He was my baby, my joy, my hope for life. The idea threatened to spiral me down into emotional withdrawal. I had to change the subject before I reached critical psychological mass.
“Speaking of which,” I added, as I focused my attention back to the laptop, “I need to see if the tracker has any hits.”
It has always been rumored that technology would eventually be the ultimate demise of man. The singularity would occur and machines would take over. The tiniest fragment of my intelligence begged me to consider it possible the singularity had finally arrived—in human form. The lowest common denominator had won out and would overtake the planet with predictable stupidity and greed. Ignorance and power were the new currency.
