by JJ Zep
He found cover in the shadows, scanned the room quickly, looking for Scolfield’s rucksack. He saw nothing. He worked his way into a crouch and looked out through the glass and saw that Scolfield had the bag slung over his shoulder. He briefly considered going out and confronting Scolfield on the walkway, but decided against it. That might spark panic in the crowd. Who knew what might happen if they stampeded.
Scolfield seemed to be almost done with his epistle anyway. He raised his arms now like some messiah. Chris dropped back into the shadows. In the next moment he heard the door handle rattle and Scolfield stepped back into the gallery.
Chris waited until he heard the door click shut and then stepped from cover, raising his rifle.
“Scolfield!”
Scolfield spun towards him, bringing up his hand as he did. For a moment Chris thought that he was holding a gun, but he quickly realized that it was something far more lethal than that. It was one of his Z controllers. Scolfield recovered quickly, his face splitting into a broad smile.
“Well, Well, Chris Collins,” he said. “You’re an enterprising feller, aren’t you? Thought I’d seen the last of you back in Hackensack.”
“Give me the I-Pod,” Chris said, holding the gun on him. “And that rucksack you’re carrying too.”
“I’d rather not,” Scolfield said chirpily.
“Fine,” Chris said. “Then I’ll just have to shoot you.”
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Because my thumb is hovering over the controller, one little push and the folks downstairs become a buffet. Oh, and just in case you think you can stop this thing after you’ve shot me, you can’t. Just an extra little failsafe I’ve built in over the last few days.”
“You’re bluffing.”
“Am I? Care to try me?”
From below came the sound of the door scraping open, of footsteps pounding on the steel staircase.
“I see you’ve brought company,” Scolfield said. “Is Ruby here? Tell me you’ve brought Ruby.”
“Ruby’s not with me,” Chris said.
“You’re lying,” Scolfield chuckled. “I can always tell. Come on out then Ruby. Come and say hello to your uncle Marin.”
thirty
Whoever was climbing the stairs was doing so in a hurry, their footfalls echoing back off the walls in the confined space. Chris had no idea who it might be. Justine perhaps? No, Justine would be more furtive than that. Who then? He’d just had that thought when the footsteps stopped.
“Come on out, Ruby,” Scolfield repeated. “Come on out and say hello.”
Chris heard movement in the stairway as Ruby climbed the last few steps and appeared on the landing, sword in hand.
“Ruby!” Scolfield said, as though greeting a long lost child. “What a wonderful surprise! You wouldn’t believe how much I’ve…” His voice trailed off as Joe and Hooley stepped into the gallery. “There’s more? Well, come on up. The party is just getting started.” He ran his gaze from one to the other, eyes darting, night vision goggles pushed to his forehead. If he hadn’t known it before, Chris realized now that Scolfield was insane, certifiably so.
“You gentlemen have me at a bit of a disadvantage,” Scolfield giggled. “Armed to the teeth, and me carrying nothing more than a mp-3 device.”
“Hand over the controller, Scolfield,” Chris said.
“I told you before, Chris, the controller won’t do you any good. I’ve added some extra features you see, coded access, locked commands, that sort of thing.” He backed towards the door. “If you’d care to come out onto the walkway, I’d be happy to give you a little demonstration.”
“Step away from the door,” Joe barked. But Scolfield had already turned the handle. The door swung open, letting in a gust of frozen air. Scolfield took a backward step out onto the walkway then stopped, half in and half out of the room. His eyes widened suddenly in surprise. He looked beyond Chris to the staircase, eyes transfixed.
“Alex,” he whispered, his voice hoarse.
Chris felt a rash of gooseflesh that had nothing to do with the cold breeze coming through the doorway. He turned his head in an arc that felt as though it were completed in slow motion. Dr. Alex Payne stood on the landing. Only, it was plain to see that this wasn’t Dr. Payne anymore. Her face and the front of her hospital smock were drenched in dried blood and there was a deadness to her eyes, a predatory inclination to her gape-mouthed grin. She stepped into the room and turned towards Scolfield.
“Alex…I…” Scolfield said. “I didn’t…”
It was all he managed. Alex was suddenly in motion, moving with a speed that was unlike any Z Chris had ever seen. She crossed the room, her hands flying to Scolfield’s throat as she reached him, forcing him through the door and across the walkway. His buttocks collided with the guardrail. For the briefest of moments the two of them teetered there, entwined in a deadly embrace. Then they overbalanced and plunged into darkness.
Chris rushed to the rail and looked down at the two broken figures lying on the path fifty feet below. The crowd had backed away leaving them in a circle of open space. Scolfield’s rucksack lay a few feet away. Miraculously, he still clutched the I-Pod in his hand. Now someone broke away from the crowd and moved in quickly towards him.
thirty one
Justine had been waiting her moment, her eyes fixed on the door. She’d seen Chris go through it with Joe, Ruby and Hooley. A short while later, she’d seen Dr. Payne approach the door and enter. The doc looked somewhat the worse for wear, and appeared to have lost quite a lot of blood. Still, that wasn’t Justine’s concern, there wasn’t much love lost between her and Alex Payne anyhow. All she had to do was wait until they came out and then relieve them of their booty. Then she’d head to one of the Corporation forward bases and from there back to California. Or, she might not do that at all. With those Z controllers in her hands she’d wield a lot of power. Why hand that over to the Corporation? Maybe she’d go into business for herself.
She was just exploring that option (and finding it to her liking) when there was some commotion from the top of the lighthouse. In the next moment two figures plunged over the guardrail and hurtled earthward. As the crowd scattered in panic, Justine pushed through them until she was right at the front of the circle that had formed around the two bodies. She recognized Alex immediately. The other she assumed to be Scolfield. And what was that clutched in his hand?
Justine’s heart gave a little skip. This day may have started badly, but it just kept getting better and better. She turned her eyes to the top of the lighthouse and saw Chris standing at the rail. Now Ruby appeared, now Joe. Tough luck on them, she decided, as she scurried across the space towards the two corpses.
To her left she detected movement, the Z’s beginning to stir. She fell to her knees beside Scolfield’s body and started prying back his fingers from the I-Pod. A hand closed on her wrist like a vice. Justine felt pain, sharp and intense, accompanied by a sound not unlike kindling being snapped. Dr. Payne lurched suddenly into a sitting position and turned towards her, her mouth gaping open to reveal overlarge, gore-stained teeth.
epilogue
It was morning again, a gray dawn with a chill breeze coming off the ocean and the promise of rain later on. The sea would be choppy on the crossing, but that was a good thing, Charlie decided. Perhaps it would give his colleagues the wake-up jolt they needed. They had a mission today and here they’d sat up for the third night running, telling stories.
But still the listeners were not sated.
“So the Z’s attacked?” someone asked.
Charlie nodded. “The Z’s attacked. My dad, Uncle Joe, Ruby and Hooley were up in the tower. Fifteen thousand people were torn apart in front of their eyes and there wasn’t a thing they could do about it.”
“Jesus!”
“Uncle Joe and Hooley used some grenades to blow out the second landing on the staircase, so the zombies couldn’t g
et to them. Then they hung out in the lighthouse for two days until the Z’s had dissipated and then made their way off the island, north from Queens, back to White Plains.”
“Ana had, of course, started moving everyone north by then, but they had some trouble with one of the Humvees and were stalled just outside of Poughkeepsie when my dad and the others caught up with them.”
“And from there you went to Toronto. So how did you end up back here in California?”
“We never made it to Toronto,” Jojo said. “My dad and Uncle Joe decided it was time to go back to Pendleton, to confront Marcus Pendragon, so that what happened in New York would never happen again. They decided that unless we stopped fighting amongst ourselves, unless we stood together, the human race was on a one way ticket to extinction.”
“Seems to me like there’s a whole lot you’re leaving out of the story,” Brad Grissom said. “How you got back to California for starters, how Joe Thursday challenged Pendragon for the leadership of the Corporation –”
“And won,” someone else chimed in.
“And won,” Grissom continued. “How the Corporation boffins managed to reverse engineer the I-Pods your dad brought back with him. How the super Z’s, the one’s descended from Alex Payne, started to show up.”
“I don’t know a lot of that stuff,” Charlie said. “Tell you what though, you all make it alive through to next furlong, I’ll take you up to my folk’s place at Big Bear. My dad doesn’t like talking about it much, but you bring along a bottle of Wild Turkey and Uncle Joe and Hooley will bend your ear about the old days until you beg them to stop.”
In the distance came the sound of the launch that would take them from the base on Catalina across the channel to the mainland.
“Look alive, Rangers,” Charlie said getting to his feet. “I hear our ride approaching. Let’s go kill us some Z’s.”
The Zombie D.O.A. Series continues with…The Never Dead
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Zombie D.O.A. Series by J.J. Zep
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