Black Tide Rising - eARC

by John Ringo

  “Jesus, they’re making a racket,” said Tom. “Everybody keep an eye out! These idiots will draw every zombie within miles. And they won’t all be at the refinery.”

  The helicopter was now hovering over the tank farm. Freddy was practically hopping up and down, he was so agitated. He kept making gestures at the ground and running his finger across his throat. The meaning of which should have been obvious to anyone:

  Land the goddam thing and TURN IT OFF.

  It took a couple of minutes, but finally the helicopter set down on the open area between Alpha and Kappa towers. Unfortunately, the pilot kept the rotors turning while someone hopped down onto the ground.

  It was a young woman, and as she approached the tower Andy recognized her.

  “That’s Karen…What’s-her-name,” said Tom. “You know, the TV news announcer on Channel…whatever-it-is.”

  “Karen Wakefield,” Rochelle supplied. “What in God’s name is she doing here?”

  Remembering the last broadcast they’d watched, Andy said, “I bet she stayed on the job until the power grid went down. Gutsy lady.”

  A man got out of the helicopter and came after her, carrying a big video camera. By then, Wakefield had gotten close enough to the base of the tower that Andy shouted down at her.

  “Welcome to the White Towers, Ms. Wakefield! But please don’t come any closer. We’re maintaining strict quarantine measures.”

  Wakefield stopped and looked up at her. Then, cupping her hands around her mouth, shouted back up, “Can we join you? We don’t know where else to go and we’re running short of fuel.”

  Andy pointed to a nearby vacant tower. “You’re welcome to use that one, but—”

  “That’s Phi Tower!” shouted Jack.

  Andy waved at him to be silent. “But we haven’t got much to offer you. We’ve got some extra blankets and food we can send down, and some water. We’re using all of our tents and sheds, though. It’s plenty warm at night, but it’s supposed to rain in a couple of days. I don’t know what you’ll do for shelter.”

  By then, the AME people had gathered at the edge of their tower. “We can spare a tent,” called down Pastor Collins. “It’s just a two-person tent, though. How many of you are there?”

  “Three,” replied Wakefield. “Me and Ken”—she nodded toward the approaching cameraman—“and our pilot, Fred Vecchio. It’ll be tight but we’ll manage, and thank you all very much.”

  “Okay, then. Stand over by your tower,” Andy instructed her. “We’ll bring down the supplies and put them somewhere in the middle. We’ll do our best to sanitize the stuff with disinfectant spray, but…I’m afraid you’ll just have to take your chances.”

  Freddy now chimed in, very loudly, “And tell the pilot to shut down the damn helicopter engine! You’ll draw zombies!”

  “Too late,” said Sam. The young woman pointed at something in the distance, coming down Chicago Avenue.

  Andy looked. “Well, shit,” she said. A small mob of zombies was approaching them from the east. As they emerged from below the Cline Avenue overpass, she saw that it wasn’t that small a mob, either. There were at least fifty of them, with more appearing every second.

  The crack of the rifle jarred her. Tom was already in position and starting to fire. But even if he didn’t miss a single shot, the zombies would start swarming over the fence very soon—or, still worse, might head down the access road toward the open gate. Tom wouldn’t be able to shoot at them for most of that stretch, because other storage tanks and part of the asphalt plant would be in the way.

  This was exactly what Andy had always feared the most. Once a mob of zombies got attracted, the sound of gunfire would simply draw more zombies. Soon enough, they’d be buried under a swarm of the monsters.

  “Dad!” shouted Ceyonne. “What are you doing?”

  Turning, Andy saw that Jerome Bennett was coming down the staircase of the tower he’d been perched on. They hadn’t seen anything of him for a day and a half, although he’d occasionally spoken to his daughter over the walkie-talkie. He was still very sick—he looked it, too—but at least so far he hadn’t turned into a zombie.

  Somewhat unsteadily but with obvious determination, Bennett made it to the bottom of the staircase and then started toward his patrol car, which was parked about thirty yards from the tower.

  “Dad!” Ceyonne shouted again, now sounding a little hysterical. Her father looked back, waved his hand in a gesture making clear he did not want her coming after him, and kept going toward the patrol car.

  Ceyonne ignored the gesture and headed toward the staircase of Alpha Tower. She was intercepted before she got there by her boyfriend Eddie, who tried to restrain her.

  She wrestled with him for a moment and then started yelling incoherently and punching him. Ceyonne was a big girl and the punches were powerful, but Eddie just got a determined look on his face and kept clinching with her while ignoring the blows as best he could.

  Andy looked back at Bennett. The policeman had reached his patrol car and started the engine. Slowly, he drove toward the open gate leading out onto Gary Avenue. By now, just as Andy had feared, the mob of zombies had come down the access road instead of trying to climb the face. They’d reach the gate within a minute.

  But as soon as Bennett pulled out of the tank farm and onto Gary Avenue, he turned on his siren and lights. The racket that produced—not to mention the red-and-blue light show—completely distracted the zombies from the sound of the helicopter. Which, Andy saw when she looked, had finally been shut down by the pilot so it wasn’t making any more noise anyway.

  Bennett waited until the nearest zombies were only a few yards away and then drove slowly under Cline Avenue, approaching the entrance to I-90.

  The zombies went after him. Andy realized what he was planning to do. He’d lead them onto the interstate and then, moving slowly ahead of the mob, take them either toward Ohio or the Illinois state line. Once he got a few miles down the highway, he could speed up and escape them easily and come back to the tank farm after getting off on one of the exits.

  Assuming he didn’t collapse from being sick.

  “Come here, Sam,” said Tom.

  He laid the Remington down on the shooting bench and backed his wheelchair away. “Pull up a chair,” he said. “It’s time for you to get some live target practice.”

  Sam stared at him. Tom pointed at the receding mob of zombies. “Hurry up, girl! They’re getting away!”

  * * *

  Sam missed her first two shots. Then, took out a zombie’s leg with the third. From then on, she didn’t miss any more shots—seven, in all—until the last zombie was out of sight.

  She hadn’t killed all of them, of course. So now Tom had her shoot the ones she’d wounded until he was sure they were all dead.

  It was a grim exercise. But the nineteen-year-old former waitress seemed to take a fierce satisfaction in the work, and, in any event, Andy knew what her husband was thinking. Between his age and health problems, Tom Kaminski had reached that point in life when a person could die on any given day. Maybe not for years to come, sure—but it could be tomorrow, too.

  However short the rest of his life might be, though, he wouldn’t be leaving his people unprotected. The guardian angel was training his replacement.

  * * *

  By nightfall, the TV news people were set up on Phi Tower—and were starting to film again.

  “We’re doing a documentary now,” explained Karen Wakefield. “I figure we’ll title it How to Survive a Zombie Apocalypse. Smile, everyone. Young man, if you carry through with that threat to moon us, just remember you’ll be on video foreeeeeeeeeeeeeeevvvvver.”

  Turning, Andy saw that her rambunctious grandson was hastily rebuckling his pants.

  “Jack!” she chided him.

  “I didn’t do anything!”

  * * *

  By then, Jerome Bennett was back. It took him five minutes to climb back onto his tower after he parked the
patrol car, but he made it. Without saying a word, he rolled into his tent and was out of sight.

  Ceyonne had to be restrained again. By now, her boyfriend was starting to show bruises. He didn’t seem to mind too much, though.

  Andy wasn’t surprised. Eddie was a happy camper, these days. Once Ceyonne’s father had set himself up in splendid isolation on Beta Tower, she and Eddie started sharing a tent—after she came to Andy and got a supply of condoms. The girl might be headstrong but she wasn’t foolish.

  * * *

  The next day, another caravan entered the tank farm. It was the largest one yet, at least in terms of people. There were only three vehicles, but one of them was a bus, whose distinctive red-white-blue paint stripes and CTA logo announced that it was—or had been, anyway—the property of the Chicago Transit Authority. It turned out that one of the members of the group was the bus driver and he’d seen no point in returning the vehicle to the compound once the catastrophe started getting completely out of hand. Instead, he picked up his family in the bus along with the supplies he and his wife had put together. Then, after adding two of the neighboring families, he’d driven to his church and more-or-less shanghaied the two priests who’d been there along with the dozen or so people who’d come for sanctuary. Those who couldn’t fit into the bus after they loaded everything in the church that might be of use crammed into the priests’ two cars.

  Being an enthusiastic gambler, the bus driver—Harry O’Malley, he was called, and he looked the spitting image of a red-headed Irishman—led everyone out of Chicago, across the Skyway, and into the enormous parking structure of one of the big casinos by the lake. O’Malley figured the parking structure would be ignored by zombies since there was no food source in it, and it was so big that as long as they stayed in a far corner in one of the upper floors, they’d go unnoticed.

  His plan worked for a few days. But then a car full of gangbangers showed up and tried to rob the bus. O’Malley was an ex-Marine as well as a hunter and three of the other men in their party were also well-armed. The gangbangers were too arrogant—or too desperate, after being on the run from zombies—to plan their assault. They just came swaggering up to the bus, brandishing their pistols, before two of them got cut down by the ensuing hail of gunfire and the other three ran off into the casino.

  Which…turned out to be full of zombies. So, back they came into the parking lot—two of them; apparently the third had become a zombie snack—and exchanged more gunfire with the people in the bus.

  The gangbangers got the worst of that exchange, as well. The one uninjured survivor raced off to parts unknown while his now-lamed companion got swarmed by the zombies who’d followed them out of the casino into the parking structure.

  Got swarmed by some of the zombies. Most of them came toward the bus—which had to make its own hurried departure, trailed by the two priests’ cars.

  They’d then spent a day trying to get out of the area, which was made especially difficult by the refinery burning nearby. They’d just happened to be coming down Chicago Avenue when one of their number spotted the people perched on the oil storage tanks.

  They set themselves up on Sigma and Pi Towers. Which put Jack’s back against the wall because that exhausted his knowledge of the Greek alphabet and if anybody else showed up…

  6

  The following day, two more family groups showed up. Jack threw in the towel and announced that their towers would be Tango and Foxtrot.

  “Since when do you know how to dance?” Ceyonne demanded. “And if we’re gonna start naming towers after dances, why are you picking ones from the Stone Age?”

  Jack spent the next several minutes in a long-winded and convoluted explanation that basically came down to “Because.” But Ceyonne let it go. Her dad was finally starting to move around and said he was feeling better—and still wasn’t a zombie.

  * * *

  The next day, defying any and all to stop her, Ceyonne moved from Alpha Tower to join her father on Beta Tower. She insisted that by now he couldn’t still be contagious and he obviously wasn’t going to turn into a zombie, but he was still a sick man and needed help from his family—which meant her.

  Eddie was not thrilled, to put it mildly. He offered to accompany her, but…

  “Do I have this straight?” asked Ceyonne. “You want to keep sharing a tent with me right next to my cop dad? Well, you may be crazy but I’m not.”

  She patted her boyfriend on the cheek. “Don’t sweat it. A week or two from now if I’m not sick either, I can come back over here for a visit, every other day or so.”

  She looked around. By now, the hodgepodge of tents and tool sheds that provided shelter for all the people on Alpha Tower had been melded together by a crazy-quilt of plastic sheeting and table cloths from the diner held down by what looked to be a couple of tons of duct tape and designed to simultaneously shed rainfall and collect it in drinking containers. Ceyonne had seen a photograph once of slums in one of the big cities in Brazil—favelas, they were called, if she remembered right—and the housing on top of the storage tank sort of reminded her of that. Gamma, Sigma and Phi Towers were even more extreme.

  “In this rabbit warren,” she said cheerfully, “we can get laid without my dad being any the wiser. But not over on Beta. I’m not even sure where I’m going to sleep over there myself, since we’ve run out of tents.”

  * * *

  Rochelle provided the solution to that problem. As did every adult in their group, she’d spent time looking out for zombies with the binoculars. In the course of doing so, she’d noticed a wooden shed on the grounds of the asphalt plant that formed much of the southern boundary of the tank farm.

  “We’ll use that,” she announced. “Freddy, Jack, Eddie—get the truck and let’s move the shed up on Beta Tower. If we have to, we’ll dismantle it first.”

  “Ceyonne doesn’t need anything that big,” Jack protested. “That shed looks heavy. And it’s probably full of tools.”

  “Good, we can use more tools,” Rochelle said, in the same tone of voice which in times past had quelled incipient unrest on the part of waitresses, cooks and dishwashers alike. “And it won’t just be Ceyonne because I’m going with her. She and I can share the shed.”

  “Why are you going?” asked Andy.

  Rochelle spent the next several minutes in a long-winded and convoluted explanation that basically came down to “Because.” But Andy was sure the real reason was that Rochelle was looking to the future—which they were all starting to do, at least a little. Now that it seemed fairly certain that Jerome Bennett was going to survive the flu and remain human, she’d figured out that he’d make a nice partner for a single woman about the same age. If she didn’t dilly-dally.

  Andy wasn’t concerned. Rochelle Lewis was nothing if not sensible. Should something start to develop, she’d come to Andy for a supply of condoms before any problems arose.

  And wasn’t that something of a wonder? Here she was, Andrea Kaminski, sixty-eight years old and one of the tough old biddies who more or less ran the White Towers settlement. (Harry O’Malley had brought his mother, his aunt, and his grandmother in the bus and not one of them wasn’t up to snuff.) And she was worrying about having to deliver babies before they were ready to handle the problem.

  Things were looking up, sure enough. All they had to do now was last another three or four months until winter arrived.

  That would be a Chicago winter, with temperatures regularly below freezing and sometimes dropping down to zero—even below it, on occasion—and the wind cutting like a saber. She didn’t think the naked monsters would last very long under those conditions.

  Zombie apocalypse, wimps and whiners called it. No wonder the archangels weren’t bothering to show up. Let the junior varsity handle it.

  Staying Human

  Jody Lynn Nye

  Nora Fulton lay on the cold dirt and leaned over the sight of her rifle. Turn, you bastard! Turn!

  She had spotted the
gaunt naked man through the thick trees while he was hunting the squirrel he now gnawed. He was the right size and shape, and his pasty white ass and reddish hair fit the colors of the man she wanted to kill.

  Turn!

  She raised her head to glance around for her partner, Lou Hammond. She spotted his broad, dark forehead, and wide black eyes as dark as hers just peering over a fallen log. He caught her glance, and nodded. If she didn’t take him with the first shot, he would finish the job.

  A crack, as if of a branch that had broken off in the wind, made all of them jump. The zombie turned, squirrel guts hanging from his jaws, and stared wild-eyed in the direction of the noise. Nora moaned, but she squeezed her finger on the trigger. The man dropped.

  Lou scrambled out from his hiding place and came to stand beside her and looked down at the corpse with its shattered skull leaking brilliant red blood and corrupted gray and purple brains.

  “You got him?” he asked.

  Nora shook her head. Her stomach felt like it had crept up her throat. It took her a minute to get her voice back.

  “It’s not him. It’s just some other poor soul.”

  “Well, waste not, want not,” Lou said. He unfolded a body bag from his backpack and laid it on the ground, then pulled on a bright yellow temporary hazmat suit. “C’mon. We don’t have a bunch of time before other alphas hear the shot and come running.”

  “I know.” Nora put her gun down and put on her own protective gear. She wound her long dark braid up into the cap before she brought the hood down and settled the clear panel in front of her face. They checked each other’s fastenings to make sure there was no chance of exposure to the stinking body. Taking the time to yank the spine would leave them exposed too long in the woods without backup. Better let the team back at the lab dissect it out. She sent up an apology to the spirits for this man’s soul, and thanked God that he would be able to help a lot of people with his earthly remains.

  She passed by a tree whose upper branches were heavy with fruit just about ripe. It was September the fifth. That had been her wedding anniversary, her and Troy’s. Eight years. She had hoped she could give him a memorial that day by killing the bastard who had killed him. Not yet, though. Not yet.