by JJ Zep
eight
Dr. Payne strode purposefully through the airport terminal building, a waft of cigarette smoke trailing in her wake. Chris followed with Strangler, carrying the stretcher between them. Lying under blankets with only her face and a spray of dark hair showing, Kelly looked impossibly pale. She still hadn’t woken, which was concerning in itself. Chris wasn’t even sure if she was breathing. He chastised himself for having that thought. Kelly was going to be okay, she had to be.
They made the turn into the main concourse. A fierce battle had taken place here. Dozens of Z corpses, along with the mutilated remains of several Corporation troopers littered the floor. Blood of both the red and black varieties was liberally spattered on walls and floors. Bullet and shrapnel holes pocked every surface. One of the large windowpanes that gave a view over the runway was blown out. An icy breeze crept through that window. Chris barely noticed it.
A couple of single shots sounded from one on the enclaves that led off from the main hall. “Clear!” Julie called out. She stepped into the concourse. Now Joe appeared, now Carlito and Paulie.
“You chuckleheads cleared your sectors?” Joe’s voice echoed across the space.
“All done boss,” Carlito said.
“Then let me hear you call it.”
“Clear!” Carlito and Paulie echoed in near unison.
“Good,” Joe said. “Now, go outside and relieve Hooley. And pay attention boys, Justine escapes and it will be your asses.”
“This way,” Dr. Payne said, impatiently nudging Chris. She walked towards a door marked ‘Business Class Lounge.’ “In here.”
“Hold up there, doc,” Joe said, reaching them. “I’m going to have to clear that room first.”
“Do it then,” Payne said. “And make it quick, unless you want this woman to die.”
“Her name’s Kelly,” Joe said.
“Whatever.” Payne shook out another cigarette from her pack and lit up as Joe slipped past her into the room.
“What’s your wife’s blood type?” Payne said without looking at Chris.
“O positive.”
“What blood type are you?”
“O positive.”
“Good. Standby to make a donation if I need it, which I will if the generator went on the fritz when this place got hit.”
From inside the room came a number of evenly spaced pops. Chris tensed, adjusted his grip on the stretcher, focused his full attention on the door.
“Maybe I should take a look,” Julie started to say and then the door swung open and Joe stepped through. “All clear in there,” he said. “But the place is a mess, doc. You may want to find another –”
Payne ignored him. “Hold the door. You two bring her in here.” She stepped past Joe into the room. Chris followed with the stretcher. He could see immediately what Joe meant. The lounge had been turned into a temporary hospital ward. There were six beds, three of them currently occupied by mutilated corpses, the other three disheveled, blood spattered, two with their occupants spilled to the floor. There was blood on the tile, a few dead Z’s, all of them with recently applied bullet wounds to the forehead.
Dr Payne did a scan of the surroundings and did not seem overly perturbed. “You, you,” she said pointing to Joe and Julie. “Bring me that table, put it in the middle and then wash it down.”
Without waiting for a reply, she strode across the room towards a refrigerator. Chris saw a light go on as she opened the door. “Good,” Payne said. She rooted around, examined some blister packs of dark liquid and placed two on a sideboard together with another containing saline.
“How’s my operating table coming?” she said.
Joe and Julie had just maneuvered the table into position. “Put her on the table,” Payne said. “Then get these stiffs out of here and get a bucket and mop and disinfect this place. That is, unless you want the patient infected with Z blood.” She walked to a cabinet, slid out a drawer and started selecting from the stainless steel instruments stored there. She placed those into a sterilizing unit and flicked a switch. Now she turned to face the room.
“You. Chris, right?”
Chris was standing beside Kelly, holding her hand. He looked up and nodded.
“Here’s the deal. I’ll do what I can to save your wife, but there’s a price we need to agree on before I get started.”
“What makes you think you’re in a position to make deals?” Joe said.
Chris stilled him with a hand. “What’s your price?” he said.
“A Humvee, fuelled up and ready to roll. Once I’m done I ride out of here.”
“Done,” Chris said immediately.
“Hear me out first,” Payne said. “I’ll give your wife my best attention, do what I can to save her and the baby. But there’s no guarantee either of them will pull through. Chances are they won’t, but beyond doing my best that’s not my concern. They live or they die, I drive away. We got a deal?”
“Yes,” Chris said without hesitation.
Payne turned towards Joe and raised her eyebrows.
“Okay,” Joe said. “Let’s just do this.”
“Good,” Payne said. “I’ll take the two of you at your word. Now I’m going to scrub up. You too, sweetheart.” She pointed at Julie. “You’ll be assisting me.”
“I want to help, too,” Chris said.
“You can help by getting out of here. I don’t need you sobbing over my shoulder if things don’t go as planned.”
“But –”
“Out!” Dr. Payne said.
nine
The door to the makeshift operating theater had been closed for three hours. Three hours that had passed as slowly as a millennium. Chris had spent the time hunched over in one of the blue plastic chairs or pacing the halls. For a time Joe sat beside him, until Carlito came in and called him outside to deal with some issue. Then Janet came in with Hooley. She wanted to know if the kids could wait in the concourse but Chris said no. He didn’t want his kids, especially Samantha, in here amongst the blood and bodies. Hooley said that he’d put them to work setting up a camp in one of the maintenance hangers, with Ana watching over them. That was good. The kids were as worried about their mother as he was. He felt guilty about not spending time with them. Right now, though, he felt he needed to be right here. He needed to be close at hand for when news came from the doctor, whatever that news might be.
Eventually, Hooley left to help with the clearing up operation outside, leaving just Chris and Janet. She made a few attempts at conversation, reminiscing about Kelly’s childhood, talking about the time Kelly had gone missing, how Babs had gone looking for her, how she’d thought Kelly had been lost to her. More than once, she broke down and cried. Eventually, she took to pacing, chain-smoking as she did. Chris hadn’t seen his mother-in-law smoke since she’d married Hooley.
He looked across at the door for the tenth time in as many minutes and for the tenth time decided that he was going in there. He lifted his butt from the seat just as he’d done before. Then he sat again. Going in there wasn’t going to help the situation, and he realized that the doctor had been right to make him wait out here. He’d just have been fretting and getting in everyone’s way.
He’d just had that thought when the door swung open and the doctor stepped out. Chris was on his feet immediately. He saw Janet rushing across from the other side of the room. He opened his mouth to speak but Dr. Payne raised a hand, stilling him. The amount of blood spattered across her green hospital scrubs set alarm bells jangling. She reached into her pocket for a pack of cigarettes, not even bothering to strip off her bloody surgical gloves as she lit up.
“Is she okay?” Janet blubbered, reaching them. “Is my little girl okay?”
Dr. Payne said nothing, but something in her expression got Janet crying even louder. “She’s dead isn’t she? Oh, my God, oh my God…Keeeeellllyyyy!” Janet’s wails reverberated through the hall, rising to an animalistic screech that brought running footfalls from outsid
e.
Chris cut out the sound of those cries. His entire attention was focused on the doctor. What she said next would determine the path that his life took from here on. Still Payne said nothing, drew deeply on the cigarette, savoring it. To Chris it seemed that she was savoring the moment too, a barely discernable smile curling the corners of her mouth. Was she waiting for him to ask the question? If so, he wasn’t going to. Somehow that felt like tempting fate.
Hooley had appeared now and was holding Janet, stilling her. Now Joe was beside him, his hand on Chris’s shoulder. The kids were clustered around him, Samantha and Ferret clinging on, Jojo on the verge of tears, Charlie scouring the room in nervous sweeps.
Payne allowed her half-smoked cigarette to fall to the floor and stood on it. “Geez,” she said. “Have a little faith. She’s going to make it.”
ten
“Kel?” Chris brushed a tuft of hair aside and mopped the sweat from her brow with his fingertips. For a moment he thought that she was asleep, but then her eyes fluttered open and he felt her grip tighten on his hand. He looked down at his wife with a feeling of elation that seemed inappropriate given the circumstances. He felt tears well in his eyes and he let them, felt them spill over and track down his cheeks and didn’t bother to swipe them away.
“You’re here,” Kelly whispered, a faint smile forming on her lips.
“I’ve always been here.”
“I thought…I dreamt you were gone.”
“I’m not going anywhere, Kel.”
“I dreamt they took me away from you.”
“Ain’t going to happen, babe.”
“But don’t you remember.” Kelly’s voice was harsh, her eyes slightly glazed. “They did take me away from you. Don’t you remember?”
“Don’t try to talk, Kel. You need to rest.” He was certain that Kelly was delirious.
“The man and the woman. You tried to help them and they took me away, drove me away from you in the car we got from Hooley. I looked back and saw you standing in the road. I thought I’d never see you again. But then Luigi…”
He realized what she was talking about now, the man and woman who had tried to abduct her from that abandoned diner in Arizona. He hadn’t thought about that incident in ages. It seemed like it had happened in another lifetime.
“It wasn’t Luigi, Kel, it was Giuseppe, Lou’s father, remember?”
Kelly nodded. “He saved my life.”
“That he did. Saved my hide a few times too. He was some dog, G.”
“But the baby,” Kelly said. “Oh God, the baby.”
Chris remembered that now. The woman had lured him into the diner on the pretext of helping her with a sick child. But the child was already dead and when he’d emerged from the diner and seen the man with the knife to Kelly’s throat, he’d realized that it had been a ruse.
“That was a long time ago, Kelly. You need to rest now.”
“They took my baby.”
“You should rest, Kel. You’re safe now. It was only a dream.”
“No!” Kelly shouted. “They took my baby. The man and the woman took my baby. You’ve got to get her back, Chris. Please, you’ve got to get her back.”
She grabbed a handful of his shirt and pulled herself upright and Chris took her in his arms and held her while she sobbed. He stood that way for a long time with Kelly’s frail figure cradled to his chest. Eventually, her cries subsided and she drifted into sleep. He laid her down on the bed and tucked in the blankets around her. Then he called Janet in to sit with her. He had to talk to his children, had to tell them that their mother was going to be okay. Then he had to make arrangements for the burial of the daughter he would never know.
eleven
“My sister’s name would have been Natalie,” Charlie said. “After Nate Coleman, who my dad knew back in Pagan.”
“That’s so incredibly sad,” Cecilia van Houten said.
“Nothing to be done,” Charlie said. He felt his voice choking up and cleared his throat. “Time’s we live in, it’s a wonder any of us is still alive.”
“It must have been hard on your mom.”
Charlie nodded. “I don’t think she ever got over it. My dad neither.” He stared into the flames, raised his eyes slightly and saw Jojo seated on the other side of the fire. Ferret was sitting beside him, her head resting on his shoulder. Charlie felt a pang of jealousy, but he was also happy for Jojo. Joe had a bad case of puppy love for Ferret. It was good that they’d found each other.
“Charlie?”
He realized that he’d probably been wool gathering, brought his attention back to the telling of his story, to the part he didn’t really want to remember too closely.
“We buried Natalie near the lake under a big elm tree. It’s really beautiful down there, peaceful. The day of the funeral was cold, with the wind cutting in off the water and a sky that was almost white. Hooley said a few words that had everyone crying and Julie started up singing Amazing Grace and we all joined in. I remember thinking about how beautiful that lake must look in the fall, all golds and browns and reds. I still think about that sometimes.”
He sat for a while not saying anything, knowing there was more to tell, wondering if he should tell it. The moment seemed to stretch into eternity, broken only when someone spoke.
“So after that, you traveled cross country to California?”
Charlie thought hard about his answer. It was close to midnight on the last night of their three-day pass. Tomorrow they’d be going out on their first mission. They could all use some sleep. If he started telling them the rest of the story now they’d be up all night.
“Not directly to California, no,” he said eventually. “We were planning on going north to Toronto, but…”
“But?”
“But something happened.”
“What happened?”
“My dad and Uncle Joe had a disagreement.”
PART THREE
one
“I won’t let you do it, Joe. What you’re talking about is insane.”
“I expect you’re right,” Joe said. “But I’m doing it anyway. It needs to be done, compadre, and whatever happens, I’m ready. I realized that when I was stranded up on that rooftop with the Z’s closing in and the sound of the chopper fading away into the distance. I’m ready.”
“Ready for what? Ready to die?”
Joe seemed to consider a moment before making his answer. “If need be, although that won’t be my intention going in. Yeah, I’m ready to die if that’s what it takes.”
Now it was Chris’s turn to contemplate. He got up from his chair and walked across to the observation window of the control tower. The view from up here, taking in the runways with the forest and lakes beyond, was quite spectacular. Still he veered his vision away from it. The idea of his daughter, buried in the cold earth beneath those trees still felt too raw. And now this, Joe Thursday, his best friend – more brother than friend, if truth be told - talking about suicide. Because that’s what it would be if Chris let him go back to Manhattan – suicide. He turned towards Joe. “Why can’t we just go up north to Toronto like we agreed?”
“I think you know the answer to that, Chris.”
The thing was, he did know the answer. Marin Scolfield was about as close to crazy as you could get without your head exploding. He now had a device that allowed him to bend the Z’s to his will. Not just move them around as the Corporation had done with their crude radio signals, but actually control them. When you added to that the monstrous creatures that Scolfield had created in that prison fortress of his, it didn’t take a great deal of imagination to realize he wasn’t going to stop at New York City.
“Scolfield’s got to be stopped, Chris. And it has to be now, before he has time to gain a foothold. Otherwise nowhere will be safe, not Toronto, not L.A., not even Alaska. Someone has to stop him.”
“And by someone, you mean us?”
“By someone, I mean me.”
“On
your own?”
“Hell no!” Joe chuckled. “I intend taking a rifle, as much ammo as I can carry, plus whatever ordinance I can hustle up. I’m going to be running a little one-man guerilla war. It’ll be like old times.”
Up until that moment, Chris had entertained at least some hope of dissuading Joe. Now he saw the determined look in Joe’s eyes and realized that that had never been a realistic hope. Joe was going to do this. It was just a case of whether Chris was going to let him do it alone.
“I’m going with you,” he said, not even fully contemplating the consequences of his words until they were out there.
“The hell you are,” Joe said instantly. “You’re getting your family up the road to Canada is what you’re doing.”
“Yeah? And what then, we wait a few months until Marin Scolfield arrives at the head of his zombie army?”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Joe said.
“You know what I mean. I’m going with you.”
“The fuck you are.”
“The fuck I’m not. Do you think Ruby’s going to let you go in alone? Do you think I’m going to let my daughter go in without me? We do this together or you come with us to Toronto and we just hope and pray that we’re wrong about our friend Scolfield. Those are the choices.”
They glared at each other across the room, neither prepared to give ground. Eventually it was Joe who spoke. “Knew I should have just snuck out and left you a note,” he said.
“I would have come after you.”
“What’s Kelly going to say?”
“Kelly will understand.”
