Zed's World (Book 1): The Gathering Horde

by Rich Baker

  He picks up his keys as The Scientist looks up at him.

  “I have final preparations to make,” Maloof says.

  “Of course, you should go. You’ve done well, Almahdi,” The Scientist replies.

  Maloof thanks him for the praise, takes his leave, and is almost running by the time he reaches the parking lot.

  The Scientist looks at the folder on the desk in Maloof’s office. In it are tickets for Maloof, his wife, and their two children to fly to Minneapolis in the morning. The Scientist would have found it curious that Maloof left them behind had he not been observing the way he’d behaved over the last two weeks. He needed Maloof’s store for cover, or he would have addressed his commitment level before now. At this stage, however, Maloof is no longer needed and has become a liability to the plan.

  He glances out the window and watches Maloof make the left turn out of the parking lot, aiming the blue van west, toward the mountains, toward his home. The Scientist picks up the phone and dials a local number.

  “Hello?” says a female voice on the other end of the line.

  “He is on his way. I fear he has lost his resolve,” The Scientist says.

  “I know. I’ve seen it in his eyes. I will take care of it.”

  “Excellent. I’ll follow up in the morning. This does not change the plan. We must proceed as—”

  “I said I will take care of it,” she says in a more hostile tone, cutting him short.

  “I know you will,” he says, his voice kind. “You’ve never let me down. See you tomorrow,” The Scientist says, and he hangs up.

  On the other end of the call, Almahdi Maloof’s wife A’ishah presses “end” on her burner phone and waits for her husband to arrive home.

  Chapter 4: …Must Come to an End

  Friday, May 17, 2013 – Z-poc minus 6 hours

  A’ishah Maloof watches the van leave with her son and daughter. They’re going to an encampment in Minnesota before the larger group of young Muslim children will be travelling to Mecca, where a safe zone has been established for the faithful. She has no illusion about her fate and knows she’ll never see the safe zone, but it comforts her to know she’s helping to leave a better world for her children.

  She turns and walks out to the two-car garage, where her husband is sedated and restrained in a wheelchair.

  When she ended her call with The Scientist the evening before, she knew she had to act quickly to subdue her husband, so she loaded her CO2-powered tranquilizer gun. The dart was loaded with fentanyl in a dose high enough to incapacitate Maloof within a few seconds. She was lucky that it was not enough to kill, as she had a use in mind for him.

  He pulled the blue minivan into the garage and as he got out, A’ishah came out of the house. Maloof looked at her; she could tell he was struggling internally. He managed an attempt at a smile, and she smiled back.

  As he took a step toward her, she drew the gun from under her tunic. Before Maloof could react, she pulled the trigger. The dart struck him in the chest and he stopped where he was for a moment. His eyes widened and she could see the recognition of her betrayal in them. He took a step toward her as his pupils began to dilate. Another step and he dropped his phone, which sent several plastic shards flying when it struck the concrete.

  A’ishah took a couple of steps sideways to keep some distance between them. He took another stumbling step and dropped to one knee. He looked at her with pleading eyes. “Aye. Ish. Please. Don’t,” he managed to say before he collapsed unconscious to the garage floor.

  She retrieved the wheelchair from the basement and lifted his dead weight into it. She got a nylon strap and secured his chest to the chair so he was in a quasi-sitting position, though his arms hung limply and his head lolled forward. She tied his legs to the metal supports and then lashed his arms to the armrests, one strap at the elbow and one at the wrist.

  She wheeled him over to the wall and retrieved an IV bag from the house, which she hung from a nail on the wall, and put the IV needle into the vein on the back of his right hand. She hoped her calculations were correct so the dosage wouldn’t kill him.

  Now, fifteen hours later, as she goes into the garage, Maloof is awake but groggy.

  “A’ishah, why? Why are you doing this? It’s madness!”

  “Please be quiet, Almahdi. Your part in this is still coming. You’re weak, and I’ve known that for a long time. This is something I had planned for,” she says. She’s completely calm.

  “So you’re part of this? Why would you hide it from me? How long have you known what was going to happen?”

  “From the very beginning. The hydra has a thousand heads, Almahdi. I’m sorry it’s turned out this way, but this is how it has to be.”

  “A’ishah, this is madness. The Scientist I’ve been working with, he is insane, this whole thing is insane! We have to stop him! This is not moral, it is not the righteous path!”

  Her voice gains a hard edge. “The Scientist, the man you say is insane, is my father. He is a great man, and this plan will go forward as Allah intends.”

  Maloof is in a state of shock. She told him her parents had died in 1997, seven years before their marriage. Now A’ishah is telling him she’s daughter of the man who is releasing the plague of living death upon the world? He struggles against the restraints (where did these come from anyway?) but can only watch as A’ishah replaces the IV bag and inserts a syringe into the injection port just below the bag.

  “Good night, Almahdi,” A’ishah says, her voice filled with pity. “May Allah forgive your weakness and grant you passage!”

  He feels the heat of the drug, whatever it is, as it hits his veins, and very quickly everything goes dark. The last thing he sees, the last thing he will ever see, is A’ishah’s stern face looking down at him. She looks evil, and his last conscious thought is that he unknowingly married a demon.

  * * *

  Friday, May 17, 2013 – Z-poc minus 2 hours

  Ben Puckett drops off a bowl of breadsticks at table five and heads back to the kitchen of Johnny Rissetti’s Italian Restaurant. His phone rings for the fourth time in the last few minutes and he finally pulls it from his pocket. He sees his friend’s picture on the screen and answers it.

  “Keith, dude, I’m working. What’s up?” he says as he answers.

  “Are you coming to the party after your shift, or what?”

  “Which one is that? Finals are over and some people are graduating tonight. There’s about a thousand parties,” Ben says.

  “The one on Whitcomb,” Keith replies. “That guy from my chem lab is throwing it, remember?”

  “Um, yeah, I remember. I think I can make it, yeah,” Ben says.

  “Dude, that’s about as pussified an answer as you can give me. You gonna be here or not?”

  Ben waves at Toni Glass. She comes over to him and he covers the mic on his phone. “You wanna go to that party on Whitcomb after work?”

  “Only if I can stay at your place tonight,” she says and gives him her devilish smile.

  Ben turns back to his phone. “Dude, we’re in. See you after work,” he says and presses end before Keith can give him any grief about responding with “we,” then he grabs his order from the ready station and takes it out to table four.

  * * *

  Friday, May 17, 2013 – Z-poc minus 30 minutes

  The soldiers have been loaded into cages similar to shark cages, and forklifts are loading them into the back of the furniture shop’s delivery vans. There are twenty-four soldiers in all, and they’ve divided them into groups of eight. One van is going to go through old town (the bar district) and release the “payload” among the partiers. Another one is going to the hospital and releasing them there. The final one is releasing them in random neighborhoods where there are large parties. The driver of this van watches his younger partner as he scrolls through a Facebook feed on his tablet and cross-references a map.

  “Ok, Saji, where are we going?” he says to the young man.


  “Um … I say we go in a semi-circle. First, we go to the apartment complex at the corner of Horsetooth and Shields. There’s a big party going on there … next let’s hit Valley Forge off of Taft Hill. Up in Ramblewood Apartments there is a HUGE party. They’ve already started posting pictures. We can probably drop two there. Then there is one on Whitcomb that looks like it’s a good one. Then …”

  The driver interrupts him. “Enough, that’s more than needed to heat things up. We’ll have the police chasing their tails and the end will be on them before they know what’s happening!”

  The younger man agrees and puts his tablet on the passenger seat, then heads to the restroom.

  A fourth van idles by the warehouse doors. A’ishah Maloof stands next to it talking to her father, The Scientist.

  “You’re ready?” he asks.

  “Father, yes. I have this under control.”

  “I know. You do a great thing tonight. You honor our family’s name.” He smiles at her with a tenderness she has not seen since she was much younger, before her brother and other members of her family were killed in a ‘friendly fire’ incident by American artillery.

  “WE are doing a great thing,” she says. “This plan would not have happened without you guiding it.”

  “There are hundreds of people doing what I have done. Planning is easy. The execution is the crucial part. The people who have the resolve to see this through to the end are the people who do the great works. Allah be praised, A’ishah. You are living up to your name tonight.” He kisses her on the cheek, turns, and walks away before she can see the tear running down his cheek.

  A’ishah gets behind the wheel and presses the button on the remote that is attached to the visor. She knows she was named for the Prophet’s wife but never has she felt that connection more strongly than she does right now. She drives through the doorway before the door rolls all the way up. She presses the button again and the door drops down behind her.

  She heads west on Horsetooth to Shields, an intersection that very soon will be consumed by chaos, where she turns north for a half mile. She pulls into the parking lot at Colorado State University’s Moby Gymnasium and parks in a handicap space. She checks that the tranquilizer gun and the black case with the syringes and darts are hidden under her tunic. She goes around to the passenger side of the van, opens the sliding door, and steps in to get Maloof out in his wheelchair. She’s outfit him in a special salwar kameez that she’s modified to hide his restraints.

  She presses the button for the lift and the electronic shelf slides them sideways and lowers them to the ground. After rolling him off of the lift, she presses the button to retract it and closes the side door. She pushes him on the sidewalk and follows the signs to the graduation ceremony. The big ceremony for the larger schools and majors is in the morning, but there are enough people here at the early ceremony for the specialty majors to suit her purposes.

  The security guards merely nod at her as she rolls her immobilized husband through the doors. College campuses are so consumed with multi-culturalism she knows the campus employees dare not look twice at her or her supposedly invalid companion. She finds the handicapped seating area in the rear of the first section, where folding stadium seats have been removed to accommodate wheelchairs and motorized scooters, and parks the wheelchair, taking care to set the brakes. She bends down and undoes the restraints on his legs, letting his feet sit on the folding footrests. People around her try not to look as she fusses with him. Another thing she knows will work to her advantage is that Americans consider it rude to stare at handicapped people, so they consciously try to avoid watching what she’s doing. She carefully loosens the restraints on his arms and unclips the plastic clasp on the strap holding his torso tight to the chair. His limp body lists to the left. Finally, she takes the black pouch from under her tunic and withdraws a syringe containing a green serum. She inserts the needle into Almahdi’s neck and presses the plunger.

  The effect is immediate. His body jerks in the chair, but the loose restraints on his arms keep him from tumbling forward. The vessels in his neck begin to turn black and every few seconds, he suffers a spasm. Even though he’s unconscious, his body still registers the pain.

  Now people are starting to look at them, so A’ishah turns and walks out. She can hear people murmuring as she leaves. “Is he having a seizure?” and “Is she leaving him? Where the hell is she going?” These comments register in her ears as she exits the area. After a few seconds’ hesitation, one person gets up and follows her. She’s trying to remain calm as the nosy Good Samaritan sees her heading toward the exit and flags down a security guard.

  After a moment of discussion with the Samaritan, the guard calls out, “Ma’am!” as he quicksteps toward her.

  She spins and shoots him with a dart from her CO2 pistol. The green fluid it injects into him instantly makes his skin burn. He looks at the dart sticking from his chest, pulls it out, and a tremendous wave of pain almost brings him to his knees. A’ishah is now nearly outside. Behind her, the Samaritan dials 911; the security guard radios for help, and people have started screaming back in the section of the arena where she left Maloof. She smiles at the sound and exits the arena.

  * * *

  Across town, a van has just pulled into the emergency room entrance of Poudre Valley Hospital. The passenger gets out, opens the back doors, and pulls a cable that releases the door to the cage housing the undead cargo. He runs back around to the front of the van and gets back in the passenger seat. Eight gray-fleshed, bloody bodies with varying degrees of injuries exit the rear of the van, falling out rather than jumping. As the van speeds away, ER staff rush out and are immediately attacked by the undead creatures.

  * * *

  South of the college campus, a pair of similar undead creatures are released in the parking lot of an apartment complex. The spring-loaded door to the cage is pulled shut with another cable from the front of the van, and it speeds away while the pair of revenants rush into a crowd of partygoers and begin tearing and biting at whomever they can get their gray fingers on.

  The final stop this van plans to make is on Whitcomb Street, where Ben Puckett and his girlfriend, Toni Glass, who just ended their shifts at Johnny Rissetti’s, are meeting Keith Wallace and a few other friends eager to get their summer started.

  * * *

  Northwest of campus, the last van stops at the north end of Old Town Square. An open-air pedestrian mall, Old Town Square is home to a multitude of bars and restaurants, most with patio seating. The square is full of people celebrating the end of the school year. The passenger again gets out and opens the rear doors, springs the latch on the cage, and sprints to the cab. As soon as the door shuts, the driver hits the gas and jumps the curb, driving onto the pedestrian mall as the first creature falls from the back of the van. He hits the gas for a second, and a second creature falls out. Every surge of gas, another vessel of death hits the brick courtyard. The driver honks the horn as people look to see what is happening in the square. Moments later, screams fill the air.

  * * *

  Back on campus, A’ishah Maloof has left her van in its parking space to avoid the security guards who have gotten in her way and is running into the center of the campus. The guards have called the campus police to report her actions, and 911 calls are flooding from the arena where her husband has risen from his wheelchair and has begun attacking people. The security guard she shot with the dart has collapsed, and in moments, he too will wake and start attacking the people who are trying to help him.

  A campus police car drives hops the curb and drives onto the grassy field where A’ishah is running. It gets in front of her, stops, and two officers, a man and a woman, get out with weapons drawn and call for her to stop where she is. A’ishah raises the CO2 gun and keeps running. The police hesitate, and she pulls the trigger.

  The female officer takes the dart in the abdomen and cries out in pain. The male officer fires his pistol, and A’ishah is kno
cked to the turf by the .40-caliber round, blood spilling from a chest wound. While the man checks on his female partner, A’ishah presses the CO2 gun against her neck, pulls the trigger, and sends the last dart into her flesh, the serum burning in her carotid artery and hitting her brain within seconds. She feels pain, the worst pain she’s ever felt, as if every nerve in her body has been set on fire, and then she’s gone.

  Chapter 5: Too Little, Too Late

  Friday, May 17, 2013 – Z-poc plus 20 minutes.

  Outside Moby Gymnasium, the Ft. Collins police are struggling to maintain control. There were maybe 2000 people in the gym for the graduation ceremony, and now dozens of them are wounded and bleeding both inside and outside the building. The police have only been on the scene for about ten minutes, but the situation has gotten much worse in that time. A massive triage area has been set up in the grass at the northwest corner of the arena, where the Colorado State Rams play their home basketball and volleyball games and where, tonight, a riot erupted in the middle of the early graduation ceremony.

  Standing behind his cruiser parked outside the big arena, Sergeant Bob Foster adjusts his tactical vest for the hundredth time. All members of the Ft. Collins Police Department were issued this gear in late 2009 when the government’s stimulus money was being spent freely, but they have had rare occasions to use it, and Bob has added a few pounds since then. The vest is adjustable, but he’s having a hard time getting comfortable, especially with the five 30-round magazines for his Windham short-barreled M4 stuffed in their pouches. The other officers are similarly equipped, except anyone under the rank of sergeant has a Windham semi-automatic AR-15 rather than the select fire rifle Foster has.

  An EMT approaches him from the triage area. “Sergeant Foster?” he inquires.