The Hungry (Book 6): The Rule of Three (The Sheriff Penny Miller Zombie Series)

by Booth, Steven W.

  The sound came closer. It was a familiar sound, a voice. Miller tried to place it, but she couldn’t. A woman’s voice? Wow, maybe it was her mother’s. She hadn’t thought about her mother in years. They hadn’t gotten along from the time that Miller was fourteen or fifteen, but maybe they would spend eternity in Hell together. At least then Miller wouldn’t be bored.

  The voice—for that was what it was—became very sharp and loud, like a stereo turned up to eleven. It broke through her reverie.

  “Sheriff Miller?”

  It was loud and annoying and hurt her ears. Miller tried to shy away from the grating sound, but she couldn’t move, or run, or cover her head. That sharp-edged sound was the first pain she’d felt since finding herself in this place of light.

  “Sheriff Miller?” The sound was directly in her ear now, and it seared through her brain. Her mind hurt, and slowly so did her body.

  “I don’t have time for this,” the irritating voice declared. “Wake her up.”

  And then the whole of the damn universe was filled with nothing but extreme physical pain. Miller took a deep, difficult breath, and coughed as she let it out. Her chest rattled and her body went into a spasm in response to the agony. She moaned. She blinked a couple of times. So much for death. The white light was gone. In its place was a small examining room, complete with monitoring equipment, intravenous tubes, and a very bright examining light. Miller felt a twinge of regret. Death hadn’t been all that bad compared to living like this.

  Miller tried to sit up, but she was too weak, and she fell back down onto the hospital bed. She could hear a faint beeping sound. The air smelled of disinfectant and something else. Her own blood.

  “What the fuck…?” Miller coughed again. Even breathing hurt like a motherfucker, but at least now she knew she had a pair of lungs.

  “Relax,” said a female medical technician who stood close by. “You’ll pull out the stitches.” Not the same voice she’d heard moments ago. This was someone else. Her eyes were warm with professional concern. Miller struggled to focus on the woman. She wore no name tag.

  Miller licked dry lips and asked, “Can I have some water?”

  The nurse turned to a small sink and drew a cup of water. She gave Miller a taste of it from a straw. The cool liquid washed down her parched throat, but the nurse only allowed her a single sip. She’d been in hospitals before, but she never really understood why she could only get a sip. The irritation of it frustrated her.

  The woman left the room. The door swung closed.

  “Where the fuck am I?”

  “That’s a very good question, Sheriff.” Someone else was in the room with her. The other voice. The woman who had commanded that she be woken up. “Where you are is under my control, and the reason you’re alive is because I want you to live. You breathe because I allow it. Do we understand each other?”

  “Williams?” Miller slurred. “Is that you?”

  “Doctor Williams,” said the woman, “Over here.”

  Miller turned her head, her neck muscles complaining as they stretched. Williams was sitting in a comfortable chair near the bed, and Miller could see that this was the same person she had last encountered in the corridor, barking orders and preparing to kill Miller and her friends. Williams was now wearing the same impeccable business suit, grey with pinstripes. She looked very angular and very in control of the situation. She crossed her legs as if on camera. “You don’t remember anything, do you Sheriff?”

  “What…? What happened?”

  “What happened is your hero instinct kicked in at the wrong moment and it almost got you killed. If you hadn’t had enough sense to be wearing body armor, you’d be lying on a metal slab, and I’d be having my medical technicians take you apart. But you’re more valuable to me alive, so here you are.” Williams smiled warmly, like a friend who had stopped by for coffee on a late winter morning. The incongruous effect was absolutely chilling.

  “Where’s Scratch?” Miller tried to sit up again. Something beeped and the door opened. The technician whooshed in and pushed a button and the head of the hospital bed was electronically raised up. The nurse stayed near the bed, just out of sight, behind a curtain, as obedient as a servant in a palace.

  “Your friend Scratch is alive. At least, he was when I left him. Much has happened while you were out.”

  “If you’ve hurt him…”

  “If I’ve hurt him? Then what, Sheriff? I hurt you, didn’t I, and you haven’t rained down any heavenly punishment on my head, have you? Really, there’s no reason for us to be having such a useless conversation.” Williams rose to her feet, and pulled the chair closer to the bed. Sitting, she turned to the technician and waved her out of the room again. The door opened and closed silently. They were alone again. “We have more important things to discuss. We’re both professionals. There’s no reason we can’t assist each other. I’m not your enemy. I want to help you.”

  “You want to help me?” asked Miller, a bit surprised. “Then let me and my friends go.” She thought about asking her to stop producing and experimenting on more and more zombies, but that seemed like a bridge too far, under the circumstances. Like any megalomaniac corrupted by power, Williams probably had way too much yardage between the goal posts to be logical and humane.

  “Very good, Sheriff Miller. The negotiations have begun. Would you like to know what I want?”

  “Not really,” Miller murmured. “But I’m what you’d call a captive audience.”

  “I would like a world where there is no hunger, no poverty, no suffering. Do you think that’s too much to ask for?”

  Miller turned to look at her, and gaped openly. “You sure got a funny way of ending suffering, you know that?”

  “Well, the transition between the miserable existence you know and so pathetically love and the paradise my colleagues and I envision is bound to be a bit rocky, but I firmly believe that Eden once existed and that it can be recovered.”

  “‘Bound to be a bit rocky?’ You call turning the population of three states into the walking undead a rocky transition? Williams, give me a break. You’re out of your fucking mind, you know that?” The effort caused Miller to cough again and the water almost came back up. She composed herself and took some slow, deep breaths.

  Williams watched her with dark, emotionless eyes completely devoid of compassion. She fidgeted impatiently.

  “Hear me out, Sheriff. I think you’ll understand why I’ve kept you alive—a gesture I hope you’ll better appreciate by the end of this conversation.” Williams gave a vain little head flip, as if to move a piece of her short hair off her face. “Why do you think there is suffering in the world?”

  Miller waited for Williams to continue but she said nothing further. Without a clue to where this was going, Miller took a stab. “Because it helps us appreciate happiness?”

  Williams stood suddenly. The chair squealed backwards. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Sheriff, this isn’t Sunday School. This is real life. We are adults here. I’m not asking you how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. If that’s the level of your intellectual ability, then I have severely overestimated you.”

  Miller gauged the reaction with interest. Williams was impatient, narcissistic, and subject to fits of rage when challenged. Clearly she could be manipulated. If Miller could manage to stay alive long enough find the strength to stand, that could work to her own advantage. “I’m sorry if I have offended you, Dr. Williams. This conversation will go a lot faster if you’d just cut to the chase.”

  Williams sat down again. She picked imaginary lint from her blouse. “There is suffering in the world because there is scarcity. Unlimited wants chasing limited resources. But there’s no need for those resources to be limited. We can have abundance in every corner of the world. We can do this if we have the will to make some tough choices. Don’t you see? Hunger, poverty, suffering; they are all unnecessary.”

  Miller became alarmed. She was beginning to see where th
is was going. “They have always been a part of life.”

  “They won’t be going forward, not in the world I envision.”

  “Okay, I’ll bite. How does turning people into zombies somehow end all those things?”

  Williams stared at Miller this time, her mouth slightly open. “This is stunning. You don’t understand anything, do you? I’m terribly disappointed.” Williams sat back with her hands folded in her lap. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have kept you alive after all.”

  Now who’s manipulating whom, Miller thought. “Hey, I’m sorry. So turning people into zombies doesn’t solve world hunger. Got it.”

  “I’m not sure you do,” said Williams, but she didn’t threaten Miller again, and that gave her something to work with. Williams wanted immediate obedience and the time to hold forth. “But let’s see what you do know.”

  “I took economics in college too, you know,” Miller said defensively. Her body ached less. Adrenaline was her best friend at the moment. “Limited resources are a reality of life. If you move to the desert, water’s going to be scarce. If you move to a mountain top, you probably won’t be eating swordfish every night.”

  Williams nodded but now with an appreciative look on her face. Miller took that as permission to continue.

  “I’m still not sure how your actions match up with your goals,” Miller said. She flexed her muscles under the sheet. She was weak but gaining strength steadily. She continued, buying time. “Here is how I see it. The only way for there to be abundant water in the desert is if it is taken from someone else who might also want the water. So you pay for it, an exchange of value. But you’re not in the value-exchange business, are you, Dr. Williams? You’re in the ‘taking whatever the hell you damned-well please’ business. Hence the super soldiers, hence the zombies. Am I getting warmer?”

  “Not bad, Sheriff, but not precisely correct. We don’t take whatever we please, as you put it. Instead, we simply secure access to what is ours.”

  Miller wanted to comment on Williams’s switch from I to we, but that could have been bait for another takedown, and she didn’t want to seem that gullible. She decided to wait. She wiggled her fingers and toes and winced at the pain in her thigh.

  “All right, Dr. Williams. So you’re securing what’s yours. I can live with that. But where does that leave the rest of us? Someone is going to go to bed hungry if we all went around ‘securing what’s ours.’”

  Williams smiled. “I said the transition would be rocky.”

  With her head clearing, she started to connect the dots. She couldn’t be sure, so she chose to test Williams. “What if I am lower class and I have something you want? Are you going to secure that, too? Take from me what’s mine? Then I can no longer function, produce, and be useful. That seems short-sighted, if you ask me. Kind of like killing the goose that lays the golden egg. What would make more sense is to keep me happy so that I keep giving you 14-karat omelets.”

  Now Williams was smiling. “Very good Sheriff. Yes, if you have something I want that I can’t get anywhere else, I would be highly inclined to ‘keep you happy.’”

  “But most people don’t have things you want, or things you can’t get elsewhere, right? Is that what all of this boils down to?”

  A small nod of Williams’ head let Miller know she was on the right track. Williams seemed to be enjoying the debate. “Let’s see what else you know.”

  “Well, it seems your vision of a paradise is where only the people who own the resources and those who supply irreplaceable goodies are, what? Permitted to survive? Sort of like what you’re doing with me?”

  “That’s certainly one way of putting it.” Williams stood again, this time quite calmly. She tugged at her business coat, and took a professorial stance above Miller’s bed. She preened constantly, like a woman who always dreamed of being on camera. “Allow me to change direction here. Do you know why the South lost the Civil War, Sheriff?”

  Oh, God, thought Miller. Please tell me she’s not about to defend slavery.

  “History was never my strong subject. I was always better at criminal justice. Why don’t you just tell me what you’re thinking?”

  Williams seemed a bit disappointed. “Because the South was agrarian, and the North was industrial. Technology, you see, multiplies the power of the few. The South, which had more people, more guns, and more money, nevertheless couldn’t sustain the war because when they ran out of things like bullets and boots, they didn’t have the means to reproduce them quickly and cheaply, and they were dependent on foreign powers to supply the necessities. Northern shipping blockades put a stop to that option, and the South was thus starved of needed supplies and resources. And this despite controlling one of the most resource-rich geographic areas the world has ever known.”

  “Okay, so technology multiplies the power of the few. Is that what you want me to understand?”

  “That is just the beginning, Sheriff, not the end.”

  Miller was sore and hungry and getting tired of this game. “Let me get this straight. Your goal is to ‘secure what resources are yours,’ and to ‘feed the golden goose,’—assuming that you can’t get your eggs elsewhere—and you’re using technology to ‘multiply the power of the few.’” Miller closed her eyes and pondered. Those were the pieces, like fragments of a big, convoluted jigsaw puzzle. Now she just had to find the corners and start filling in the middle. This woman had taken some logical political theories and gone off a cliff with them, all the way to…

  And then it occurred to her.

  Miller opened her eyes. “Wait. You’re suggesting that those who own stuff and make stuff can multiply their power through technology, and… what? Get rid of everyone else who doesn’t own stuff or make the stuff you want? Is that what you’re saying? That is your brave new world?”

  Williams smiled eerily. “When Adam and Eve walked the Garden of Eden, there were no hobos asking for handouts, no illegal aliens clogging hospitals, no terrorists blowing up buildings. Everything was good because of abundance and the right to rule being in the correct hands. And it will all be good once again.”

  “I’m getting hungry,” Miller said. “Am I useful enough to you to deserve a protein shake or something?”

  “I’ll let you know when I decide,” Williams said. She didn’t seem to be joking.

  “Okay,” Miller said. “What’s up with Adam and Eve? I thought you said this wasn’t Sunday School, Doc.”

  Williams was becoming agitated. She got up and began to pace. “The time has come for those who have fought and struggled to earn a place in society to rise up against the tyranny of those who have nothing and want everything. That’s what the Enhanced Bioweapons project was all about to those of us in the know. We would have an unstoppable army. We planned nothing less than to reshape the world and the entire human race.”

  “How very humble of you, Doc,” Miller said.

  Williams ignored the irony. Miller wondered if she even noticed. “We had it all so carefully worked out. But of course no battle plan ever survives first contact with the enemy, does it? So instead of enhanced soldiers, we inadvertently produced a plague of the living dead. That was a very unfortunate outcome. Still, a truly creative person finds a way to use their mistake, you see? We work with what we have.”

  “So you rewrote the plan on the fly.”

  “We had to,” Williams said. “The idea is still valid, the methodology still workable. This way is a little less precise, perhaps, than we had hoped for, and a little more autonomous than we would have preferred, certainly, but in the end, we can still achieve the same effect.”

  Miller caught herself before she said what she was really thinking. This freak was out of her Goddamned mind. She tested her restraints, looked for IV needles. She studied anything that would prevent her from leaping out of the bed and strangling the crazy bitch, because that’s what she really wanted to do. The urge would have to wait. Miller did not move. She just said, “The tyranny of those who want?
Are you saying the rich are an oppressed minority?”

  “Yes,” said Williams brightly. “Exactly. As absurd as it sounds, that is what has happened over time. It was probably inevitable, really. The majority has turned on those who created their prosperity. The wealthy and the powerful are virtually an endangered species, crushed under wave after wave of the poor, most of whom aren’t even American, who want to take from us what we rightly own. It is happening all over the world, not just here in the United States. It’s terrifying. But that threat is well on its way to being eradicated, thanks to our work here. There’s only one piece that is missing. Do you know what that piece is?”

  Miller’s heart sank. Whatever this lunatic was thinking of, she apparently thought Miller had access it. What the hell did she have that Williams would want? In a flash of insight, Miller knew. She sagged back into the hospital bed.

  “The metabolite.”

  “The metabolite, yes,” Williams said. She smiled warmly. “Sheriff, it appears you are bright after all. Very good. I know Captain Sheppard has it, and I know you know where he can be found.” Williams stopped her pacing and came to stand by the bed. “There are two ways I can handle this, Sheriff, and I want you to understand both options. I could simply secure what I should rightly possess, or I can go to the one who can produce that thing, and acquire it with value exchanged, as you so rightly pointed out earlier. Now, which method would you prefer that I chose?”

  “I reckon I’d prefer a trade rather than having you just rob me and mine of what we possess.” Is that what this whole lecture was all about? Was Williams showing Miller some kind of respect as an equal? Did she really think that way? Probably not. But there was no reason not to take advantage of the gesture, be it authentic or otherwise. “What are you offering?”