The Down Home Zombie Blues

by Linnea Sinclair

  “It’s a shopping center,” he told her, and she could hear the tension in his voice. “We call it a mall. Everything under one roof—stores, restaurants, all inside.”

  “I understand. An enclosed plaza with many establishments offering items for purchase.”

  “Good. Across the street, there’s a movie theater and another shopping plaza. All together, hundreds, thousands of people.”

  “It will be near sunset,” she told him, because the dismay she heard in his voice unsettled her. “The people will return to their structures to celebrate the evening meal—”

  “You don’t understand.” He suddenly leaned forward, hands fisted. “This is the biggest shopping time of the year. Everyone will be there. Not only the store workers but families, children. There is no way you’re going to be able to keep the zombies’ existence or the Guardians’ existence a secret.” He uncurled his fingers and pointed to her screen. “Not there. You’re going to have to deal with the zombies openly.”

  Herryck, Trenat, and Rordan had all turned from their duties and were watching her. She knew Trenat understood none of Petrakos’s words, but Herryck had a working knowledge of Vekran, and Rordan spoke even more. But even if they hadn’t, they couldn’t miss the anguish in Petrakos’s voice.

  She translated into Alarsh a summary of what Petrakos had told her. “If this wasn’t a nil world, we could bring down two gravrippers. For their speed, if nothing else.” A cloaking device for the craft would be ideal, though the Guardians had yet to perfect one.

  “We’d still have to jam this planet’s sensors,” Trenat pointed out. “They’re just advanced enough to track us on descent. We can’t permit that.”

  No, they couldn’t. Above all else, their presence here must remain undetected.

  “Then we wait,” Rordan said.

  Herryck’s face jerked toward Kip Rordan. “Wait?” she asked, before Jorie could.

  “Wait,” Rordan repeated. “These are only juveniles. They’ll most likely cease after fifty, one hundred kills. We go to the portal site, put a full sensor sweep out on them, pull all the data we can, but don’t try to stop them. Their scent trails when they return to the C-Prime will be strong. That will heighten the craving, force the C-Prime out in the open more quickly. Then,” and Rordan smiled harshly, “then we move.”

  Trenat bobbed his head in agreement. “I reviewed Dr. Alclar’s case studies on juveniles before this mission. He states that R-Five levels on juveniles in megaherds are too weak for us to learn anything overly useful from their capture.”

  Trenat was reading Lorik Alclar’s research? “The R-Five levels aren’t the only thing we’re looking at here,” Jorie put in firmly.

  Petrakos touched her arm, frowning. She shook her head in response. She wasn’t about to explain something she knew he definitely wouldn’t want to hear.

  “Killing those juveniles is a waste of our resources and we risk exposure,” Rordan said. “General Procedure Six permits—”

  “I’m familiar with Gen Pro Six,” Jorie snapped. “But letting ten juveniles feed on dozens of locals—”

  “Nils,” Rordan said.

  “—is not acceptable.”

  “Exposure of our mission here is a violation of our orders.” Rordan’s voice was hard.

  “Our orders,” Jorie countered, “are to stop the zombies.”

  “Our orders are also to determine how this herd managed to get so large without fracturing,” Rordan said, and Jorie clearly heard echoes of Captain Pietr in his words. “You know Lorik’s research shows that we need to let the juveniles feed to do that.”

  Yes, she did, but no, they didn’t. There were other ways to obtain that data, but those were ways that also violated several orders and more than a handful of gen-pro regulations. She’d never discussed those particular methods with Lorik, and, hell’s wrath, she wasn’t about to reveal them to Rordan.

  She rose. “I will consider your suggestions, Commander.”

  “There’s nothing to consider, Jorie. Lorik’s data clearly indicates that two or three of the weaker juveniles should die off in the first throes of the feeding, giving their scent trails to the remaining ones. This will increase their R-Five levels, giving us a stronger lock on their C-Prime. We bag their C-Prime and we save this wretched planet. Plus we can analyze the mutations in the C-Prime’s codes. Surely that’s worth a hundred or so dead nils?” His eyes narrowed. “Captain Pietr thinks it is.”

  Captain Kort Pietr. She was no longer sure she liked him. Because he’d done more than just offer her refreshments and a chance at a captaincy. She was sure—very sure—he’d made the same offer to Rordan as well.

  Rordan’s placement on her team was no chance suggestion. Now she not only had to fight the zombies but she had to contend with Kip Rordan.

  But Kip Rordan also had to contend with her.

  “Work out the specifics for a scent-trail grid,” she told Trenat, ignoring the flash of alarm in Herryck’s eyes at her stated capitulation to Rordan’s plans. “I need to get familiar with the land vehicle Sergeant Petrakos brought us.”

  At the sound of his name, Petrakos looked up at her, suspicion playing over his very good face. She switched to Vekran. “We go outside. Now.”

  “And your team?” he asked, rising.

  “Yet has work to do. Come.” She turned brusquely away from him and headed for the door, her mind already sorting through a dozen scenarios and rejecting two dozen more.

  Sergeant Theo Petrakos was not going to like what she had to tell him.

  But Commander Jorie Mikkalah—who fully intended to make captain—wasn’t going to give him any choice.

  She just hoped she wasn’t making a mistake in trusting him.

  9

  “We cannot go to your shopping plaza.” Jorie faced Theo Petrakos on the wide back porch just as the mesh door clanked closed behind him.

  “What do you mean?” There was a tightness in his voice and a corresponding tension in his face. His dark brows were drawn down, his eyes narrowed.

  “I mean,” she said, motioning him toward the land vehicle, wanting to put more space between their conversation and Kip Rordan’s eyes and ears, “what I said. We cannot risk exposure among your people. It is an edict we cannot ever violate.”

  “Did it ever occur to you,” he asked, his words clipped and terse, “that my people will be paying more attention to the zombies than to you?”

  She walked the few steps to the front of the land vehicle and stopped. He was still on the porch, arms rigid at his side. There was so much he didn’t understand. He knew it. She knew it. But this was not the place or time. “Petrakos,” she said. “Come.” She met his narrow-eyed gaze with one of her own. “Please,” she added, barely under her breath.

  He walked slowly down the steps, her command clearly not infusing him with bliss, even with her soft addendum.

  Jorie caught a flicker of something in one of his structure’s aft viewports. Rordan? Trenat? Rordan, she decided. The shadow was too tall for Trenat.

  “Workable size,” she said, running one hand over the vehicle’s front cowling. “Take the helm, activate the engine so I can assess its power.”

  He stopped in front of her, his body mere minmeters from hers. The line of his lips was tight; the set of his shoulders stiff. “Don’t bail on me now, damn you. I will not have thousands of innocent people die just because some bullshit regulation states you can’t be seen here.”

  She understood his tone more than his words. She raised one hand, pushing her hair back from her face as if she were irritated. “Covert,” she said quietly, when the angle of her arm blocked her face from whoever was looking out his structure’s viewport. “Vehicle. Now.”

  His shoulders relaxed only slightly, then, with a shake of his head, he turned and stalked toward the pilot’s door. She opened the copilot’s door and pulled herself in. Warm air, almost stuffy, enveloped her. No automatic enviro. In spite of that lack, she liked the vehicle’s
added height and interior expanse immediately.

  Petrakos slammed his door shut and looked at her expectantly, brows still down.

  “Activate the engine,” she told him.

  He grasped the helm and twisted a knobbed protrusion. A rumbling growl sounded from under the cowling. A puff, then a stream of air, slightly cooler, brushed over her face from rough-looking holes flanking the control panel.

  She leaned one elbow on the console, angling her body toward him, her back almost to the structure. “This vehicle has many added functions, yes? Act as if you were demonstrating them for me.”

  He flicked at a lever. “Windshield wipers.”

  Two thin rods moved rapidly back and forth over the viewport. Petrakos touched something else and water sprayed. The rods made a squeaking sound against the glass as the water evaporated. Odd that nils would waste something so precious on a vehicle. She nodded. “Very good.”

  He pushed against the middle of the helm and a claxon blared. “Horn,” he said, watching her closely now.

  “Excellent. And these?” A wide console full of switches, buttons, and what she guessed to be power ports ran between the two front seats.

  “Siren, lights, PA system—loudspeaker. Laptop, like your T-MOD, goes here,” he said, pointing to an elevated stand. Then he closed his fingers into a fist. “Explain covert and the shopping mall.”

  She played with the empty swivel stand between them, as if that were her sole concern and not the additional work it would take to circumvent Rordan’s presence. She damned the fact that she still needed his expertise. “We are forbidden to disclose our presence to your people.”

  “I know that.”

  “So does Commander Rordan.” She fought the urge to turn and see if they were still being watched. But that would reveal that she knew. Rordan had to believe she didn’t. “Therefore, if I order my team to your shopping plaza, Rordan will act to prevent that.”

  “But you’re the mission commander.”

  “I am—unless Rordan finds reason to take that from me. Violation of the general procedures’ primary edict would guarantee him that chance.”

  “Fine.” The anger was back in his tone and his face. “Then give me a couple of your rifles, those Hazards—”

  “Hazers,” she corrected him as she pulled out her scanner—holding it out of sight below the console—and accessed the data from her T-MOD, still running and recording inside the structure.

  “—and I’ll go myself.”

  “Not required.” She tapped three key codes into her scanner, watched the new data crawl across the screen, then turned the unit toward him. “Because the zombies will not be at your shopping plaza when you get there.”

  “Where—”

  “That large vacant region.” She changed the screen to the map image supplied by the seeker ’droids. “Vegetation. No structures. Just these two open areas. You know them?”

  He studied it in silence, then: “That’s a baseball field. The other is the tennis courts.”

  “Structures?” His last word puzzled her. She knew what a court was but had no knowledge of a tennis as part of a legal system.

  “No. A place for outdoor games, exercise.”

  She shrugged off yet another misinterpretation. “Probable population at risk?”

  He was quiet for a moment, frowning again, but the tension had left his shoulders. “A lot less. There’s a school across the street, but it’s closed for the holidays.”

  “How many people might be there for outdoor games?”

  “No way to know for sure, but we can assume ten, twenty. Most out walking for exercise.”

  She nodded. “You’re security in your locale. You have the authority to make them leave. They won’t question. Correct?”

  Petrakos started to answer her, lips parting, then he stopped. “Possibly.”

  “Possibly?”

  “If I could involve others in my security force, it would be more effective. But I can’t—won’t—have them face this.” He touched his shoulder where the restrainer implant had been inserted.

  The restrainer implant wasn’t the impediment. Involving more nils was. She’d already pushed several regulations to the limit with Petrakos. She wasn’t going to push even more—especially not with Rordan on the scene. But she couldn’t tell Petrakos any more about Rordan and Guardian regs and Captain Pietr’s possible machinations than she already had. She’d reached the boundary of her trust with him for now. She had a feeling that if he sensed a weak link in the Guardians, he’d try to exploit it.

  If their positions were reversed, she would.

  So she nodded. “Then we must be satisfied with what you can accomplish.”

  A sigh of frustration blew through Petrakos’s lips as he leaned back in the seat. The vehicle’s engine chose that moment to give an odd little shudder, and the cooler air that had brushed against her face turned hot and stale-smelling. With a harsh, murmured word she didn’t understand, he twisted the knob on the helm and disengaged the engine. “All right,” he said finally. “I’ll clear the park. But we’re going to have to get there at least forty minutes beforehand for me to do that.”

  Forty minutes before the scheduled time she and her team would normally arrive to counter a zombie portal would work out like blissful perfection. “Understood. Now we go back to your structure so Commander Rordan can show me how wrong my data was and that his new and better data shows that the zombies will not be visiting your shopping plaza after all. They are going to the tennis law.”

  She reached for the door lever, but his hand on her arm stopped her.

  “Tennis court.” The small, odd smile that played over his lips faded. “And you did something to the zombies, didn’t you?”

  There was nothing threatening about the large fingers draped over her wrist, but the warmth of their skin-to-skin contact unsettled her. Perhaps because there was nothing threatening. She knew he was still angry, yet his touch was one of unexpected gentleness.

  “Tampering with MOD-tech to affect a craving is not only dangerous, it’s against Guardian regulations, Petrakos.” She met his questioning gaze levelly, pulling her thoughts back to the situation. The zombies. Rordan. Not Sergeant Theo Petrakos with his very good face and his very real concerns.

  Yes, she’d taken a risk, a calculated risk, but she didn’t want his questions and she didn’t want his gratitude. She was just doing her job—a job she was very good at. One that could lead her to a captaincy.

  Moreover, Rordan and Lorik Alclar were wrong. Based on research the Interplanetary Marines were doing—research Danjay Wain had been aware of—there was every reason to believe that low R-5 levels limited only the information that could be gained on the C-Prime. It didn’t affect what Jorie might be able to learn about the zombies themselves—and their increasingly disturbing abilities.

  Granted, bagging a juvenile—alive—was risky. But no one on the Sakanah had captured a juvenile in the past ten missions or more. A juvenile taken from this rapidly mutating herd could be compared to older captured zombies. Any changes found would be apparent and significant.

  It was a risk, but it was a valid one.

  So she didn’t need Petrakos’s thanks. She wasn’t doing it for him or his nils, or because his unwavering concern for his people touched something inside her, she assured herself. She pushed open the land vehicle’s door, then stepped out. She was doing it because of her oath as a Guardian and to make sure Danjay’s death hadn’t been in vain. She was doing it for her chance at a captaincy.

  She was doing it because she knew she could.

  And if it proved Rordan—and Lorik—were wrong, she’d blissfully pour herself an extra glass of ice water just to celebrate.

  She might even be persuaded to pour one for Petrakos too.

  Theo had spent the last several years of his BVPD career interrogating people who lied—either by accident or design, out of fear, greed, or stupidity. It was one of the first rules he’d learned
as a rookie: Out here, everybody lies. Yet Theo wasn’t ready to brand Jorie Mikkalah a liar. At least, not quite.

  She just wasn’t telling him the complete truth. Which fit in exactly with the corollary from Rookie Rule Number 1: Always know that you are never, ever being told the whole story.

  He wasn’t. Not about the implant in his shoulder, not about the zombies, and not about her plans. And especially not about whatever was going on with her team of space commandos.

  He thought of that as he drove west on Twenty-second Avenue toward the mall. Jorie, still clad in her oversize sweater, was perched in the front passenger seat.

  It was almost three forty-five in the afternoon. The ETA for the zombies was now less than an hour. A surge of adrenaline shot through him every time he thought about that. He tamped it down. Be calm. Think. He’d handled a zombie before, with far less preparation. He could do it again. His Glock was secured on his right hip, his zip-front sweatshirt keeping it and his gun belt with extra ammo hidden from sight. He’d also donned his black tac vest, very aware that something that could so easily trash a car wouldn’t be hampered by it. But he had to wear it—and his smaller Glock in the ankle holster. For extra protection, his assault rifle was racked in its usual place.

  By comparison, the weapons the space commandos wore seemed strangely small and light. Jorie was decked out in much the same manner as when he first saw her: headset with its eyepiece (swiveled down for the moment), dual laser pistols, and various gizmos attached to a belt (all hidden by the sweater). Her high-tech rifle rested on the floor.

  Oddly, it wasn’t their weaponry that was foremost in his mind at the moment. Their camaraderie—or lack of it—was.

  He glanced at the passengers in his backseat through the SUV’s rearview mirror. There was a power struggle under way. He’d been with BVPD too long not to recognize one. But this one centered on him and the lives of everyone he knew.

  A detective’s sixth sense told him he’d been off the mark in his initial appraisal of Commander Mikkalah. She was responsible for his kidnapping and that damned thing in his shoulder, but, despite that, he began to see that Jorie did take people’s lives into consideration. That same sixth sense told him Rordan didn’t.