Oliver went back to the scroll and looked over the words he’d just read. He knew he’d need to start again; timing was also part of the equation. But had he just pronounced any of those words correctly? The scroll was nearly a page long. How many possible combinations of sounds were there? He’d been through it more than a dozen times already with no success. There was no way to know which word or words he was getting wrong. He wouldn’t be able to tell until he finished reciting them one of these times and the zombies stopped.
“Read it again!” Mike squealed. He raised his gun toward the door and pulled the trigger, but the hammer dropped on a spent shell, just as Oliver had known it would. Mike pulled the trigger two more times anyway. It wouldn’t have made much difference if Mike had any bullets left, Oliver thought. He hadn’t managed to actually hit any of the zombies he’d aimed at even when he’d been flush with ammunition.
The church doors were beginning to come apart. Tyler kept lopping at encroaching limbs but there was little doubt he’d be overwhelmed soon. “I’m out of time!” he yelled to Oliver. “I’ve got to do it now!”
“Do it!” Oliver yelled back.
Tyler took a quick step away from the door and closed his eyes to concentrate. His body began to tremble. This part was always difficult for Oliver to watch, and he knew it hurt Tyler tremendously. The transformation was something he only did voluntarily during emergencies. The occasions when something happened to trigger an involuntary transformation were worse. Tyler tended to lose control of himself for a short time afterward.
Oliver turned back to the scroll as he heard Tyler’s bones begin to snap, and then Mike screamed. Of course, he realized. Mike hadn’t seen this happen before. He’d just met Tyler for the first time last night. He didn’t know…
Looking up, Oliver saw that Tyler’s transformation was complete. The lanky man in the Hawaiian shirt was gone. Standing in his place was a seven-foot-tall werewolf. The werewolf raised his head and roared as the first of the zombies forced their way through the door, and then he laid into them with his massive claws. Body parts went flying as if they’d gotten stuck on the wrong side of a lawnmower.
“Is there a reason you haven’t read that stupid scroll yet?” a voice called down to Oliver. He looked up. Jeffrey, his cat, had taken refuge in the church’s rafters and was peering down at him. “I mean,” the cat said, “it seems like this would be a really good time, what with the living dead coming in here. If my job was reading the scroll, I’d be done by now.”
“What are you doing up there?” Oliver asked. He hadn’t seen the cat since they’d blasted open the stone crypt that had previously held the scroll. The zombies had caught up with them shortly afterward and the cat had bolted.
“I’m not getting eaten by any damn zombies is what I’m doing,” said Jeffrey. “If you’d read that scroll that’s what you’d be doing, too.”
Oliver held up the scroll so the cat could see it. “Look at this damn thing! It’s a full page long and I don’t know how to pronounce any of these words. I’m just guessing.” He turned his head as something suddenly rushed past him. Mike was running for the door that led to the back of the church. They hadn’t had a chance to search the place when they’d taken refuge here and Oliver didn’t know the layout. There were probably offices and bathrooms and…did this place have a back door? If it did, opening it would be suicide. The zombies were all around them.
“Read the scroll!” Jeffrey shouted.
Oliver started again but heard a tearing noise. He looked up. The front doors of the church were gone now and zombies were coming through the hole like water through a floodgate. Tyler was putting up a good fight, thrashing left and right with his powerful body, but he couldn’t possibly hold them off forever. Oliver didn’t know if werewolves could be turned into zombies. He was pretty sure he could be, but he doubted there would be enough of his body left to reanimate once the zombies were done having him for their breakfast.
Mike screamed from somewhere in the back of the church, a short, terrified wail, and then he was silent. Oliver grimaced. The odds were that the other man had found a back door. If that was the case…Oliver didn’t want to think about what was happening back there now.
He turned back to the scroll. It was now or never. “Kowalu zed…”
“No,” Jeffrey interrupted. “That’s not right.”
Oliver frowned. “Which part? The zed? Does it rhyme with dead, or does it rhyme with deed?”
“Neither. It rhymes with food.”
Oliver took another look at the letters. “That’s an e. Where are you getting zood out of that when…” he stopped suddenly and looked up. “How would you even know that?”
“I saw the scroll when you held it up,” Jeffrey said. “It’s in old Dionic.”
Oliver stared at the cat. “Dionic? And you can read it?”
“Sure. None of the rest of you have any sense, apparently.”
A noise came from the back of the church. The first of the zombies from the rear of the church had managed to find the door Mike had tried to escape through earlier and was stepping through now. It raised its arms toward Oliver and took a step forward. Oliver looked back into the rafters. “Then get your ass down here and read it!” He stood up.
“I’m not coming down there,” Jeffrey said. “Don’t you see all the zombies?”
Oliver raised his Beretta and put a bullet in the head of the zombie coming toward him, making its decomposing skull nearly disintegrate. He’d put a lot of time in at the firing range in the last few months, their team no longer having anyone who was particularly skilled with a gun. “Come down here and read the scroll or we’re all dead!” he yelled at Jeffrey.
The cat grumbled something unintelligible as Oliver took a step away from the scroll and took out another zombie. They were coming through the back door one by one, and while there were far less here than Tyler had to deal with up front, it wouldn’t take them long to overwhelm him. There was also the matter of ammunition. Oliver fired again, taking out another zombie, then pulled the trigger after aiming at another. This time the gun’s slide locked to the rear as the magazine emptied. He didn’t have another magazine on him. There would be no more shooting at the zombies from a safe distance.
“Crap,” Oliver said.
The nearest zombie, a man who might have looked like a kindly old grandfather if most of the skin on his face wasn’t missing, seized Oliver by the shoulders. Oliver bashed him twice in the skull with the Beretta until he let go and crumpled to the ground. Behind him he could hear Jeffrey reading a series of unintelligible words. They didn’t sound at all like anything Oliver had been saying when he’d tried. He hoped the cat knew what he was doing. This was all going to be over very quickly, one way or the other.
Dead hands grasped at Oliver and he quickly found himself flailing against a small mob. He’d learned a reasonable amount about fighting since he’d left his pedestrian life as a stock analyst, but he’d never actually become good at it. He could throw a decent punch and take one if he had to, but in a fistfight against more than one average-sized person he knew he’d likely get his butt kicked. Up against a roomful of the living dead, who had given no sign so far they cared in the least about pain or injury or anything beyond consuming his delicious brains, he didn’t have a chance.
Behind him he heard Tyler roaring and the impacts of his claws against dead flesh and bones. Jeffrey was still reading aloud. Oliver took a quick moment to look around and then felt hands grasping him from the rear. The zombies had gotten past Tyler. There had to be fifty of them in the church now. It was all over.
And then Jeffrey stopped reading. For a moment nothing happened, and then Oliver heard the sound of rushing water, a noise he had come to associate with some kind of great power being used. He saw a flash of red light all around him, as if someone had just taken a photo while using a strangely broken camera, and then the zombies simply stopped moving. Then they began to drop to the floor.
> “And that’s how you do it,” said Jeffrey.
Oliver turned around and looked at the cat in amazement. Only he and Tyler were standing now. The zombies had resumed being ordinary corpses. Being surrounded by the dead wasn’t much less disturbing than it had been before, but they’d probably live longer now. “You did it. The scroll worked.”
Jeffrey looked back at him impassively. “Of course it worked. I kept telling you to read it, but you didn’t read it, so I had to read it for you.” The cat stretched and looked over at Tyler, still in werewolf form. “I saved you and your little dog, too.”
Tyler looked around at the fallen zombies and his tongue lolled out of his mouth as he panted. Oliver couldn’t recall having seen a werewolf do that before, but then again, it wasn’t as if he knew any other werewolves. But then Tyler spotted something, raised one massive, hairy paw to point at Oliver, and whined nervously.
Oliver looked around. None of the bodies had begun to stir. He looked back at Tyler and shrugged. “What?” The fact that Tyler couldn’t speak while in werewolf form was occasionally a problem.
Then Jeffrey took a step closer to him, his eyes wide. “Um…boss?”
“What’s wrong?”
“One of them got you there.”
Oliver looked down at his arm. He wasn’t entirely surprised to see that one of the zombies had managed to take a large, bite-sized piece out of his forearm. It was bleeding freely. Oliver winced, even though he couldn’t feel any pain from the wound. He knew he soon would, as soon as the adrenaline running through his veins wore off.
“Well, shit,” Oliver said. “How far do you think we wound up from the car? There’s a first-aid kit on the jet…”
Tyler dropped to his knees and the bone-snapping routine began again. Oliver looked away until the transformation was over. A moment later Tyler stood up in human form again, naked as a baby. Or at least as naked as a baby covered in blood and zombie guts, anyway. He was still panting; the transformation was an exhausting process. “You…better…fire…” he managed to get out.
“What?” Oliver asked.
“Start a fire,” Tyler said once he regained his breath. “Cauterize it before the infection spreads.”
Oliver looked back at his arm. The thought of infection hadn’t occurred to him. To be fair, though, he didn’t really know how zombie infections spread. Not in real life, anyway. In the movies people got it from being bitten, but he’d learned that while some things he’d seen in the movies were true, others were just absurd. Many vampires enjoyed garlic, for example. How to stop a possible zombie infection was just one more piece of information Artemis hadn’t given them. But now that he thought about it, she had told them all to avoid being bitten. The thing about Artemis was that she nearly always spoke in a flat monotone, making it difficult to tell which parts of what she was telling you were important, and which parts were very important.
But now Oliver noticed he was beginning to feel warm, as if he had developed a sudden fever. He knew it hadn’t come from the exertion the came from smashing zombies in the head. It felt like a flu, but it was coming on much too fast. “I think it’s too late,” he said.
“Oh, no!” Jeffrey cried. He ran forward and began rubbing his body against Oliver’s legs. “I don’t want you to be a zombie, boss!”
Tyler took a step forward. He looked stricken. “God, Oliver, I’m so sorry. If I could have kept them off you just a minute longer…”
“Forget it,” Oliver said. “It is what it is.” Beads of sweat were forming on his forehead now. What was happening to him was happening fast.
Oliver watched his arm bleed while Tyler looked around. “Was Mike out of bullets, too? I ran out back near the crypt.”
“Yeah,” Oliver said. “He’s either…” he nodded at the door Mike had gone through. “He’s either back there in a couple pieces, or he managed to get through them and got away. I’ll go look. You guys don’t need to see that.”
“I mean…” Tyler shook his head. “That’s not what I meant. If you turn on us, a bullet would be a lot cleaner when we have to…” He looked at Oliver meaningfully.
It took Oliver a second to catch up. “When you have to put me down?” he asked. He looked at his arm again. “I guess it would beat an axe in the head. How long do you think it takes? We don’t even know how the outbreak started in the first place.”
“I don’t know,” Tyler said. “A few hours? A day?” He looked at Jeffrey questioningly, but the cat just glared at him. “Maybe it doesn’t turn everyone, though. Maybe some people can fight it off, like chicken pox or something.”
“Chicken pox?” Oliver asked.
“I don’t know,” Tyler said. “We can get you out of here, get you some place safe and isolated, and try to wait it out. Maybe you won’t change.”
As hopeful as Tyler sounded, Oliver knew the other man didn’t really believe what he was saying. Fighting off a zombie infection with vitamins and bed rest didn’t sound like something people did. Even now Oliver’s vision was starting to blur and he felt dizzy. In half an hour’s time he’d probably be delirious, if he wasn’t already dead.
Oliver sighed as he looked at his arm. Of all the ways he’d thought he might die, this certainly hadn’t made the list. Shot dead by cyborgs, sure. Maybe he’d get on a vampire’s bad side and wind up torn to pieces. Even a car accident seemed more probable than zombies. His arm was starting to throb in the place he’d been bitten and he felt a new wave of heat wash over him. This heat was different, though. It wasn’t the fever he’d been experiencing a few moments before. It was a sensation he was familiar with. Something that only happened when…
Oliver held his bitten arm up so that his eyes could focus on the wound. The bleeding had stopped, and tendrils of smoke were rising from the places his skin had been torn away.
Jeffrey had noticed, as well. “That doesn’t seem right,” the cat said. “Are you okay, boss?”
“I’m…” Oliver began. “I’m not sure, but I’m pretty sure I’m going to be fine.” And then the damaged skin on his arm burst into flames.
“Holy shit!” Tyler yelled, taking a step backward. Oliver jerked his arm in the air reflexively; having one’s arm ignite even when you’re expecting it was disconcerting, but the pain was gone. The fire, as hot as it looked, wasn’t actually burning him. The flames burned for twenty seconds and then vanished, and all that was left in their place was perfectly healthy, undamaged skin. It was maybe slightly redder than the rest of the skin of his arm, but the bite mark was gone.
Jeffrey clawed his way up Oliver’s leg and torso so he could get a better look. Ordinarily, Oliver would have shaken him off and said a harsh word at being treated like a mountain, but he was too entranced by what had just happened to his arm to care. “What the heck was that?” Jeffrey asked. “Did you put the whammy on your arm?”
“Don’t say whammy,” Oliver said, rubbing the skin where the bite mark had been only moments earlier. The blood around it had dried up and brushed away easily when he ran his thumb over it. Oliver didn’t feel warm anymore, either, and his vision had gone back to normal. The zombie bite might as well have never existed.
“Well,” he said. “I guess I’m not going to be eating brains, after all.”
Chapter 2
Oliver might have expected they’d have a great deal of cleaning up to do after the zombie uprising, but the once again fully-dead corpses began to decompose at an accelerated rate almost immediately. Within a few hours they had all been reduced to dust. It was just as well, Oliver thought. He wouldn’t have known what to do with dead zombies, anyway. How did you make sure they couldn’t rise for a second time? Burn them? Dismember them? Smash their heads to bits? There had been a few hundred of them, and that would have made for a long, grisly day.
As they drove to the airport Oliver saw a small team of men wearing military uniforms moving in with flamethrowers and bulldozers. Artemis had arranged it. The entire incident would be written of
f as a natural disaster. An unknown deposit of natural gas underneath Millford had somehow exploded. Thank god the town was abandoned and nobody was hurt! Even if the incident was noticed by the general public at all, it would be quickly forgotten in the cycle of 24-hour cable news.
There would have been a time Oliver wouldn’t have believed Artemis had the resources to pull such a thing off. This wasn’t the first time he’d seen her arrange such a cover-up, though. Compared to some, this one wasn’t even all that big. It would have been trickier if there had been casualties, but the way Artemis did things, that was just one more box to check on a form, and probably a bit more money to transfer into a few bank accounts to keep things quiet.
The military team hadn’t spoken to him other than to say “yes, sir,” and “no, sir.” In his youth, Oliver had once considered applying to work for the FBI. He’d been a fan of The X-Files and thought that would be a fine job to have. He eventually grew out of that idea. Surely the government didn’t really cover up things like alien conspiracies and supernatural events. Looking back on that now, he realized his naiveté had been in thinking that none of those things could be real, and not that maybe they were.
Oliver didn’t know whether the team razing what was left of Millford were real military personnel or not. It didn’t matter that much. They almost certainly worked for someone who owed Artemis a favor, and only the powerful ever owed Artemis favors. That gave her impunity to get away with a great deal. She was practically her own branch of government, just one that nobody knew about.
Oliver had an identification that did say FBI on it. He also had one that said NSA. Another identified him as a three-star general in the U.S. Army. He was none of those things, of course, except that would be a very difficult thing to prove. If his FBI identification, the one he used the most, were run through any government database, it would come back as valid. If he called any FBI office in the country and read them his badge number, they’d ask what they could do for him. He knew this because he’d done it. Whether that was because Artemis had arranged it by making a few calls, or whether Seven, their resident technology genius and hacker, had done it himself, Oliver didn’t know. He really didn’t care at this point, either. Oliver had been doing this job for well over a year and he was beginning to feel run-down. Things hadn’t been good at work in quite a while. He’d actually been thinking about quitting and going back to stock analysis.
Interesting People (Interesting Times #3) Page 2
