Zombie D.O.A. Series Four: The Complete Series Four

by JJ Zep

  “I’ll do my best, Dave.”

  “Good man,” Bamber said. “Go on now, let me do what I have to do.”

  Chris lingered a while longer. He and Bamber hadn’t been what you might call close friends, but he’d liked Bamber, respected the man and the soldier. “You take care, Dave,” he said and turned away.

  “Chris?” Bamber said. Chris turned back towards him. “You tell that son of a bitch, Thursday, he still owes me five bucks from our last poker night.”

  Chris was half way down the corridor when he heard the shot. Ruby came running from the other end, sword at the ready. He stopped her with a shake of his head just as a cry went up.

  “Ruby!”

  Chris looked down the corridor towards the parking lot. Chico was charging towards them, running as though every Z on Staten Island was on his tail.

  “Ruby!” he shouted as he entered the building. He flew past Chris and threw his arms around Ruby, catching her by surprise and almost knocking her over. “Are you okay? Are you hurt?”

  “Let me go!” Ruby commanded wriggling out of his grip.

  “Oh thank God,” Chico said, casting his eyes towards the heavens as though thanking God personally for answering his prayers. “Thank God you’re okay.”

  Chris gave Ruby a quizzical look. All she could do was shrug.

  twenty four

  Over their usual morning poker game, Joe told Hooley what he’d seen the previous evening.

  “You sure it was her?” Hooley said.

  “Yeah I’m sure,” Joe said. “Nothing wrong with my eyesight.”

  Hooley blew through his teeth and picked up a card. “No accounting for folk,” he said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean? That some kind of homespun Hillbilly wisdom?”

  “All I’m saying is, anyone out walking in the kind of weather we had last night must be halfway down the hall to crazy. That’s all I’m saying.”

  Joe looked at his friend with exasperation. “So that’s what you think, is it? That she was out for a walk, at four in the morning, in the middle of a snow storm.”

  “Raise,” Hooley said, throwing a couple of chips onto the pile. “Why not. I’ve seen Chris go running in all weathers.”

  “See you,” Joe said, adding his own chips. “Believe me, not even that crazy Mick would have been out in that. No, I think our new neighbor is up to something.”

  “What do you think that might be?” Hooley said vaguely, his attention on his cards.

  “Well, if I knew that, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, now would we? You going to show your hand or what?”

  “If you’re so convinced she’s up to something, why don’t you just follow her.” He produced his hand, a straight flush.

  “That’s it!” Joe said. “Hooley, you must be some kind of idiot savant. That’s it! We’ll follow her.”

  “We?” Hooley said. “Just when did I become involved in this?”

  “Of course you’re involved. You can’t expect me to go hobbling around Manhattan, not on this ankle.”

  “You could just leave well enough alone,” Hooley said. “What you got?”

  “Huh?”

  “Your hand. I got a flush. What you got?”

  “Never mind the hand,” Joe said. “You going to follow her or not.”

  “I couldn’t do that, Joe.”

  “Why the hell not, Hoolihan?”

  “I’m a respectable, married man. I can’t be seen around town chasing after some hussy.”

  twenty five

  “Amboy?” Paulie di Santo said. “That’s one hell of a walk. That’s ten miles, then all the way up the turnpike, another twenty. That’s a long hike in this shit.”

  “We don’t have a choice,” Chris said. “Amboy and the Narrows were the only two bridges still standing, the Narrows is down, that leaves Amboy.”

  “What about the ferry?” Paulie suggested.

  Julie chuckled.

  “What? I say something funny?”

  “The Staten Island fleet was destroyed in a fire years back, remember?”

  “Oh yeah,” Paulie said disconsolately. “I forgot about that.”

  “Actually,” Chris said. “The Molinari survived the fire but I doubt it’s seaworthy. Besides, it’s docked at Battery Park. So it’s Amboy or bust folks and I suggest we get moving while we have a break in the weather.”

  “Aah man,” Paulie said. “Can’t we just hang out here until they come for us?”

  “Nobody’s coming, you putz,” Strangler said. “Ain’t you been listening to a word the man’s been saying?”

  The thing was, Chris understood Paulie’s concerns. The Outerbridge, running to Perth Amboy, New Jersey, was right at the southwestern tip of Staten Island, not ten miles as Paulie had suggested, but seven at least. And he was right about the northward trek they’d have to make thereafter, twenty miles across the frozen wilds of New Jersey. Still, there was no choice. They might be able to track down some of the others, find a couple of vehicles, but nothing was going to move in this.

  “There might be another way,” Sphinx said. For someone who generally spoke only when questioned directly, Sphinx had been downright talkative during these last twenty-four hours. “We could cross the Kill.”

  “The Kill? What the hell is that?” Paulie said.

  “He means Arthur Kill,” Chris said, “the waterway separating Staten Island from New Jersey. How, Bob?”

  “Likely to be iced over,” Sphinx said.

  “Would it ice up, though? That’s a shipping channel, dredged deep.”

  “It hasn’t been dredged in fifteen years. It will have filled in.”

  Chris thought about that for a while. Crossing the Kill would cut their journey in half. Even if it proved impassable, going there wouldn’t be much of a detour. He’d been planning on heading east to look for survivors of the other teams before turning south, anyway.

  “Worth a shot,” Paulie prompted.

  “Okay,” Chris said. “Kit up, ammo, rat-packs, eye-goggles, whatever else you can find. We’re out of here in twenty.”

  twenty six

  Scolfield looked over the six Z’s that the soldiers had shepherded into the small enclosure behind the clinic. As with the last two batches the idiot G.I.’s had rounded up, these were unfit for purpose, dried out, mummified husks that looked like beef jerky on legs.

  “Where did you dig these up? Cairo? Under some pyramid? I need fresh kills, people, fresh kills. I thought I was quite specific in that regard.”

  “This is all my men could find,” Benson said. “Can you work with them or not?”

  Scolfield let out a deep sigh, slumped his shoulders theatrically, spoke slowly and deliberately, as though addressing an imbecile. “Now, I don’t expect you to understand this, Bobo.” He knew that Colonel Robert Benson hated the nickname so he used it deliberately. “But no, I can’t use these. My formula only works on the recently deceased, twelve hours recent, eighteen, tops. These look like they died during the Eisenhower administration.”

  “Is it really that difficult to find what Dr. Scolfield wants, Colonel?” Dr. Payne said. She was standing near some liquid oxygen canisters, smoking, despite Benson’s instruction that she shouldn’t.

  “Doctor Scolfield?” Benson chuckled. “He’s no more a doctor than I’m starting quarterback for the 49ers.”

  “Just answer the question.”

  “Yes, seen as you ask, it is that difficult. The town’s been abandoned for years. The only Z’s in the vicinity are like these, desiccated husks, as Doctor Scolfield puts it.”

  “Further afield?” Scolfield suggested.

  “Further afield is under three feet of snow. I’m not sending my men out in that, running some fool’s errand so that the two of you can play Dr. Frankenstein. Besides, we don’t need your ‘super-Z’s’ anymore.” He drew parenthesis in the air around the phrase ‘super-Z’s’ a gesture that looked quite comical on such a giant of a man. Scolfield wasn’
t laughing though, not when his life’s work was being ridiculed.

  “What do you mean, you don’t need them any more?” Dr. Payne snapped. “The mission plan –”

  “Has changed,” Benson cut her off.

  “Changed? Changed how?’ The doctor’s face was flushed with anger, accentuating the pockmarks on her skin. “Why wasn’t I informed?”

  “This is a military operation, doctor. Until you’re wearing some bird shit on your shoulders, I don’t have to tell you anything.”

  “Marcus is going to hear about this,” Dr. Payne spat. She dropped her cigarette butt into the snow, ground it out violently.

  “Marcus already knows,” Benson said. “The new orders came directly from him.”

  Scolfield watched this exchange like a spectator at a tennis match. Right now he had the giant soldier thirty to love over the robo-bitch. For once in her life Dr. Alex Payne seemed to be short of a snappy riposte. The doc recovered quickly though, her mouth forming into a sneer.

  “And how do you plan on taking Manhattan without Z soldiers?”

  “We’ll have our Z’s.”

  “But how?” Dr. Payne blustered. Advantage Bobo.

  Colonel Benson gave her a little self-satisfied smile and tapped at the side of his broad nose with his forefinger. “Need to know,” he said and then turned and walked from the yard with his soldiers close behind.

  “God, I could kill that son-of-a-bitch!” Dr. Payne screamed when he was gone. She slammed her foot down like a petulant child, balled her hands into fists. “I’ve got a good mind to spike his fucking BH-17!”

  Scolfield had been enjoying the doc’s hissy fit. She was kind of cute when she was angry. Now he came to rapt attention.

  “What did you just say?”

  “I said I’ve got a good mind to spike his…Oh, you don’t know, do you? The great Bobo Benson got a drop of Z blood in his eye while on a mission in Burbank. He’s as much of a Z as these fucking things.” She indicated the emaciated zombies on the other side of the fence. Scolfield looked towards them and felt a smile begin to tug at the corners of his mouth. The beginnings of an idea were forming in his brain. A genius idea, if he said so himself.

  twenty seven

  Chris adjusted his snow goggles and looked across the frozen expanse of Forest Avenue, fading into the distance. It wasn’t snowing. That was the good news. The bad news was that they had a five-mile trudge through three-foot deep powder, in temperatures that were hovering below zero. The bad news was that the wind was picking up.

  They’d been walking for almost an hour and had covered just over a mile. He knew this because they’d just crossed Clove Avenue, the easterly border of their initial area of operation. If any of the other teams were still out here they should have seen them by now. They saw nothing but the white expanse.

  A sudden gust lifted a slew of snow and drifted it across the road in a solid pane. The hood on Chris’s snowsuit fluttered. Frigid air scoured at his face like a handful of nettles. He came out of his crouch and signaled to his team, strung out in single file behind him. Strangler was bringing up the rear. Now he disappeared from view as the next snow swell was buffeted across the road. Then he seemed to materialize again as it passed him by. It was time to move.

  The wind shifted direction as they set off again. It was now blowing directly in their faces, slowing them even further. Chris put his head down and trudged, stepping high, pushing on. He thought about Kelly and the kids. Had they heard yet about the disaster that had befallen the troops on Staten Island? He guessed not. Not unless someone had gotten out, or gotten a message through. In these conditions, neither was likely.

  With these thoughts to distract him, he kept going, placing one foot in front of the other in mindless repetition, stopping here and there to look back, to make sure that his team was following.

  It was on one of these breaks that he spotted the Z’s, a mob of them on the other side of the road, maybe thirty yards back. The creatures staggered along, barefooted, their putrid rags flapping as they fought the stiff breeze. Chris dropped into a crouch, signaled for his team to do the same. He raised his rifle and sighted along it, lining up on the lead Z, a skeletal female in a tattered, plaid dress. There was no need to fire though, the Z’s passed them by without even a sideways glance.

  They found the first of the soldiers soon after, literally tripping over the frozen corpse. The man had no visible wounds. It seemed the cold had done for him. The next soldier they encountered was sitting with his back up against a tree, only his head and shoulders protruding from the snow. After that the bodies appeared at regular intervals along the road, like beacons guiding them to their destination.

  By the time Forest Avenue merged with the Staten Island Expressway it was clear to Chris that they needed to find cover, probably should have done so a while ago. Their destination, the place where the collapsed Goethals Bridge crossed Arthur Kill, was now just over a mile away, but they weren’t going to get there. Not today. Not with this wind ripping into them, cutting up sheets of snow, reducing visibility to no more than a few feet. Crossing the Kill in these conditions, with zero visibility of what was underfoot, would be madness.

  They needed to hole up somewhere. The thing was, where? Any building, commercial or residential, was a potential deathtrap. If they chose wrong they’d walk into a hive of Z’s, and if that happened, there’d be no escape. On the other hand, staying out in the open was certain death too. They’d seen enough bodies to confirm that.

  Chris stood on the overpass, buffeted by the wind. He shifted his snow goggles from his eyes, fished a pair of binoculars from his pack and brought them up, peering into the distance, not quite sure what he expected to see. What he did see was a uniform whiteness so bright that it hurt him to look at it. He withdrew the glasses, wiped at his face with the back of his sleeve. In that moment, the wind suddenly dropped off, leaving behind a vacuum where its demon screech had been.

  Chris lifted the binoculars quickly, scanned the vista, left to right. With the sudden break in the weather he had a clear view all the way to Jersey. He could see the frozen expanse of the Kill, which did indeed look to be iced over. He could see the skeletal remains of the Goethals and Arthur Kill Bridges, both of them collapsed. At the right of his arc he could see the container terminal, most of its cranes standing askew, its container boxes stacked like a giant infant’s building blocks, some of the piles collapsed, most still occupying the space they’d been allocated sixteen years ago.

  A gust warned him of the gale’s imminent return. Before it did so, he had time to catch Julie’s distressed cry. “Chris! We’ve lost Strangler.”

  twenty eight

  Chris Collins had never considered himself leadership material. At school, he’d never captained a sports team or run for class president. As an adult he’d once held political office but had accepted that post reluctantly. Now, he’d been given command of a small military team and had to make a leadership decision that was going to cost a man his life.

  After fifteen minutes of searching, and with the storm kicking up to a homicidal fury, he made the call to abandon the search for Strangler. It was a decision forced on him by concern for the lives of the rest of his team, but he knew that, if they made it out of here, he’d revisit this moment again and again. He drew Julie towards him and shouted in her ear. “We have to leave him!”

  Julie looked at him and nodded, just that, a faint inclination of her head that said she understood. Then Chris called the remaining members of Fox Team together and instructed them to stay close and they set off again, seven now, rather than eight, walking into the teeth of the storm. He led them off the overpass, veered them right. He knew where they had to go now. They were going to see out the storm at the container terminal.

  ***

  Fifteen miles away, in an apartment on Columbus Avenue, Kelly Collins sat at her kitchen table and nursed a cup of herbal tea. She’d given up on standing at the window, what she saw out there
only fueled her anxiety, projecting pictures on her mental screen that she didn’t want to see. There’d been no word from Chris, from anyone on Staten Island, in forty-eight hours.

  “He’ll be okay,” Justine said, reaching across the table and patting Kelly’s hand. “I’m sure they’re holed up to see out the storm. It will be fine, you’ll see.”

  Kelly gave her a wan smile. At times like these it was good to have a friend to lean on. She was sure that she’d have gone crazy without Justine’s reassuring presence. Her mother certainly wasn’t being any help.

  “You should never have let him go, Kel,” Janet said. “I’d have put my foot down.”

  “You did put your foot down,” Kelly said. She wondered, at times, how Hooley put up with her mother.

  “Of course, I did. Hooley’s not a young man anymore, and neither is Chris. If he’d been my husband…”

  … he’d probably have walked across the bay to get to Staten Island, Kelly wanted to say. Instead, she said. “Chris makes his own decisions.”

  “His own decisions?” Janet said incredulously. “He’s a married man with three children and another on the way. He has no business playing soldiers out in the snow. If he were my husband –”

  “He’s not your husband.”

  “I know that, but if he were my husband.”

  “He’s not.”

  Janet was quiet for as long as it took to draw a breath.

  “I’m just saying, Kel. If he were my husband, I’d have –”

  “Give it a rest mom.”

  ***

  By the time they reached the container terminal, Chris was colder than he’d ever been in his life. His face felt as though the skin had been flayed from it in a thousand tiny cuts, his nose as though it was no longer there. He remembered reading somewhere about prisoners in Soviet gulags having their frostbitten fingers amputated with garden shears and not feeling a thing. His fingers felt that way now.