A Place Called Hope (Z-Day Book 2)

by Daniel Humphreys

  After less than a week, Charlie was not only accustomed to the now-familiar noises of the ship, he was falling into his rack every night in a state of near-exhaustion. Back home, exercise hadn’t been a big deal. He’d spent most of his time out in the Wild, hauling salvage back to the community. That in and of itself kept him in shape. On the sub, though, he had to look for something to keep him busy and burn off the extra calories he was putting away in the mess. He hadn’t decided if the food was good, or if it was the fact that there was a variety there that he hadn’t seen in a long time. Fish had been a rare thing for the last eight years, but the sailors on the Georgia had eaten it a few times since he and the others had come aboard. And no scrap catch, either. They’d had blackened salmon, lobster, and crab on alternate nights. The sailors and Marines weren’t as excited as Charlie, and he supposed that the excess of fish was something they were long accustomed to. Fair enough—the chili mac had been a big hit with everyone else on board, even if he’d found it a waste of good beef.

  Charlie, Foraker, and a few of the Marines were hanging out in the crew lounge watching a movie on the flat screen hung on one wall when one of the seamen stuck his head in the hatch.

  “Mister Maddox? Major Matthews requests you in his quarters.”

  Charlie bid his farewells and followed the other man until they reached the section of the ship set aside for officer’s quarters. Pete straightened up from the bulkhead he’d been leaning against and nodded to the sailor.

  “Thank you, Petty Officer. That will be all.”

  “Sirs.”

  “What’s up?” Charlie wondered. “I was starting to get into Deadpool.”

  Pete snorted and pulled open the door to what Charlie assumed were his quarters—this was his first time in this part of the ship. “I wanted to take some time to address a situation.”

  He stepped into the room and froze on the threshold. Pete’s room only had two beds, and Michael Eberman sat on one of them. Charlie turned to his friend with a scowl.

  Pete held up both hands to forestall any outburst. “Look. The equipment is not here to do the testing that he would like to do. It is, from what I understand, going to be on the ship we transfer to for the final leg. Before you bite my head off or go after the doctor here, do me a favor. Try and talk to each other like human beings. Lord knows there ain’t a whole lot of us left.”

  Charlie took a breath to retort, then held it. Pete was right, of course. He’d been so consumed with worries of what the military, and by extension, Doctor Eberman, could do to him, he’d overlooked the fact that they were letting him move about. If the situation were as bad as he’d worried, they’d have locked him up and never let him get one inch closer to potential danger than was necessary. “Okay,” he agreed with a sigh. “Okay.”

  “I’m breaking into my stash to lubricate things for you knuckleheads.” Pete reached into a cubbyhole under one bunk and pulled out a sealed bottle of scotch. “Don’t have any mixers or ice, so you two are going to have to rough it.” Another search produced a pair of plastic cups. Pete tossed them onto the blanket next to the bottle. “I’m out of here. I expect the two of you to come out of here alive and cordial at the very least. If one bottle isn’t enough, too bad. I’ll lock your asses in here for the rest of the cruise.” And with that, Pete stepped past and closed the hatch.

  Charlie sat down across from Eberman with an amused eye roll.

  The doctor shook his head. “That’s one of the more interesting arbitrations I’ve ever seen.”

  “Pete’s something, all right. Held the community together by sheer force of will until it was ready to stand on its own, then spent his days and nights making sure we were safe.”

  “You knew him before?”

  Charlie flexed his hand, watching the scars writhe. “No. I met him after. My family and I were passing through. Got caught up in an accident on the highway and flipped our car. Blacked out, and woke up to my wife gnawing on my hand.” He considered the bottle, then snatched it up and broke the seal. What the hell. Charlie poured a generous slug into one of the cups, handed it to the doctor, then poured a drink for himself. He held the cup up in his undamaged hand and said, “To life.”

  “Life,” the doctor echoed. They drank.

  Pete’s room was cool enough that the scotch was about right. Charlie could have used some ice, but he’d gotten used to taking his drinks neat.

  The two men sat in a not-uncomfortable silence for a time. The doctor finished his first drink, accepted a refill, then broke the silence. “I’m sorry,” Eberman blurted. “I haven’t got the best bedside manner. Working in a research lab, you don’t have to worry so much about interpersonal elements. I’ve always been a little standoffish.” He shook his head and barked a short little self-mocking laugh. “Damn miracle I ever met my wife.” The word must have elicited bad memories because he winced and fell silent.

  Charlie could relate. He had a few of those bad memories himself.

  “It was ‘take your daughter to work day,’ you know.” Eberman threw back the rest of his drink and stared mournfully into the base of the empty cup. “Not that it matters, I suppose. The wave was everywhere. There was no escaping it.” He glanced up at Charlie. “It would have been the same if she’d been at school or with me. But at least I wouldn’t have had to watch it.” He refilled his glass and sipped this time. “That’s all I was good for. Watching. I’m not strong, I’m not fast. Hell, the only reason I made it out in one piece was one of the security guards.”

  Charlie took a sip of his own drink before taking up the bottle and topping the other man off. He didn’t know where Pete had found it. For all he knew, his friend was bribing him with a bottle that he’d brought back himself. Knowing Pete, it wouldn’t have surprised him. He raised his eyes and lifted his cup into the air. “To my son. To your daughter.”

  “I can’t say no to that.” The doctor raised his shot and intoned, “To the next generation, Charlie. May they give their children a better world than we did our own.”

  They drank in silence for a time, the quiet becoming comfortable as each man relaxed in the other’s presence. With a third of the bottle gone, Charlie was starting to feel fuzzy, and he wondered, “What have you been able to figure out? Why am I special?”

  “I don’t know why you’re different. If I did, I could solve this thing. The nanos are in your bloodstream, just like every other infected, but they don’t act the same way. If I introduce zulu nanos into the same environment, it’s quite amazing. Your boys tear them apart.” Eberman snorted. “The hell of it is, I don’t know if you were like this before you got the dose of enhanced nanos or not. Guessing not, since you’ve undergone your own changes, but it’s driving me batty. You leave anything off your medical history?”

  Charlie had to think back for a moment before he remembered the document he’d filled out before Eberman and his team started taking blood. “No, pretty straightforward. Normal childhood stuff, doc was getting on me about my cholesterol a bit, before Z-Day. Joke’s on him, I guess.” He refilled their drinks. “No prescriptions. I heard about the island. Where you found the GenPharm people. Nobody there knows how it works?”

  “The majority of the people there claim they worked in planning or production. They say the people responsible for development didn’t make it out in time.”

  “You believe them?”

  Eberman gave Charlie a sober look. “I was along on the insertion team. To assess if there was any equipment in their labs that we could use for a vaccine. I saw them, heard what they had to say. They’re monsters, Charlie. They planned the wholesale slaughter of the human race and implemented it for what they believed was the greater good.” He shook his head. “Their greater good included life in paradise, with every possible creature comfort they could pack into the place. If any of the higher-ups had any remorse for what they did, I never saw it. We had them cuffed, on their knees, at gunpoint, and some of the sick bastards were smiling. They were braggin
g about what they’d done!

  “And I’ll say this. When I was in college, I looked down on the military. Nothing major, you know. Last bastion of those who couldn’t do better. But God as my witness, not a single one of those SEALs broke that day. Some of them wept, standing over those eugenicist pieces of shit, but they never so much as laid a hand on them.” Eberman stared at the deck. “I think if I’d have had a gun, that I wouldn’t have had that same discipline. I would have shot some of them. Just to shut them up.”

  At first, Charlie thought that he might have pulled the trigger as well, but it hit him. All these years, he’d never had to kill another living, uninfected person. More shamblers or zulus than he could count, but he’d never had to take that step. He wondered if it would be as easy as the doctor made it out to be, and decided he didn’t like the line of thinking. “What happened after that?”

  “We secured them, started interrogating them alone, trying to dig at their story. They stuck to their guns. But everyone has pressure points.” His hand shook, and he had to steady his drink with both of them to keep from spilling it as he drained it dry. “They were telling the truth. For a little while, you see, we became monsters ourselves.” He shook his head, then slurred, “We never hurt their children. Say what you will about what we did to make them talk, we didn’t hurt their children. One day, when I’m standing in judgment, I pray to God that that’s enough.”

  Charlie tried to imagine believing in something so fervently that you’d be willing to push your own species to the brink of extinction. They’d had the ability to create science light-years beyond anything anyone else was doing at the time, but instead of using it to better mankind, they’d set it to destroy. It was a mindset he had no basis to understand. Call it Nazism, call it Communism—in one fell swoop, the scientists had rendered the Holocaust and Holodomor mere footnotes. And he, Charlie Maddox, could stick his wrench in the gears of their plans. Looking at it that way, how in the world could he decline the research? “Doc,” Charlie said. “When we get the chance, I’ll gladly let you do the marrow biopsy. And I promise to try and not get my fool-ass killed, so you can keep poking and prodding until you figure this thing out.” He grinned. “And when you do figure it out, I want you to parade me in front of those smug assholes and tell them that you and I stopped their plague in its tracks.”

  Eberman grinned. “I’ll shake on that. And then we drink.”

  They shook, and then they drank. Charlie laughed at the absurdity of it. “I’ve had a bit too much.” He rose to his feet. “I’m going to go outside and see if Pete will help me back to my cabin so I can pass out.”

  “Before you go, you should know.” Eberman pitched his voice low, as though they might be overheard. “The nanos, they do some weird shit.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like—the more of them you get together, the smarter they get. It doesn’t scale very fast, thank God, but if you get twenty of them in a room, you might as well be looking at a pride of lions. You see them watching you, and you know they’re thinking about the best way to get to you.”

  Charlie thought about the swarm that had come so close to overwhelming Hope’s defenders. He fingered the healed wound at his side and remembered how the shambler that stabbed him had looked almost surprised when he hadn’t turned. “How many people in that part of the country?”

  Eberman snorted a humorless laugh. “Millions, Charlie. Millions.”

  April 7, 2018

  Just outside of Louisiana, Missouri

  Z-Day + 171

  Early the next morning, Richard and Sandy checked the area around the pawnshop from the upper fork of the tree the former had used the night before. Despite the failure of the radio, Sandy couldn’t make out the walls of the building through the crowd of gray-skinned figures milling around in the parking lot.

  Back down on the ground, Sandy whispered excitedly to Richard. “I’ve seen this before, in the city. They get riled up by something and chase it down. If they lose it, and there’s nothing else to garner their attention, they kind of zone out and mill around like they’re waiting for something.”

  “What the hell are they doing? Talking to each other?”

  “I don’t think they can,” Sandy insisted. “It might look like communing, but I don’t think they have any real capacity for it. Maybe it’s some base instinct in human DNA. Hell, maybe they think they’re waiting in line. If we keep quiet, we should have a free window to get in and out of the pharmacy without having to deal with them.”

  Richard made a face. “Yeah but as soon as I fire up the engine and come over the hill, they’re all going to snap-to.” He cursed. “I knew I should have taken us further out, but this was too good a location to pass up.”

  Sandy pointed to a gap between the trees on their end of the pasture. “What if we take the fence down here, can’t the truck run off-road for a while? The hill should block most of the sound, and without a visual or trackable sound signature, they’re liable to go off in all directions, if at all.”

  Richard considered the fence and gnawed on his lower lip. “Let’s try and take it down so we can put it back up. This would make a handy refuge if we have to come back over here.”

  “Makes sense to me.”

  They headed back to the Humvee. Sandy filled Jason and Kendra in on the plan while Richard collected some tools and headed back down to the fence line.

  “All the ones in town should be cleared out,” Jason murmured as they finished policing the area. Most of it was trash. They’d neglected to bring blankets or sleeping bags, so they’d slept on the ground in the case of Jason, or in the indescribably uncomfortable seats for the other three. Sandy’s back was finally starting to loosen up. He’d woken up with a horrible cramp from the awkward position he’d taken.

  Richard trotted back and handed the bag of tools off to Jason. “Everybody in, I won’t want to leave that fence down any longer than I have to.”

  Once they had the doors closed, Richard started the engine with a wince and steered the big truck toward the opening he’d created. “Once we’re through, I’ll stop. You guys hop up and pull the fence section back into place.”

  “Roger that,” Sandy murmured. He had his forehead pressed to the passenger window, staring holes into the horizon. So far, the engine noise didn’t seem to have raised any attention.

  Richard guided the truck through the missing fence panel and pulled a bit forward into the copse. As one, Jason and Sandy hopped out. The fence was a big, tubular-steel livestock barricade, but despite the bulk, it wasn’t all that heavy. Each took an end and walked it back into place. Richard had left the twists of wire at the top, middle, and bottom of each side support that held the section in place. Sandy unwrapped the three on his side and secured them to the fence section. In all, the operation took no more than a few minutes, and they climbed back into the Humvee without incident.

  Richard muttered under his breath as he steered the vehicle through the trees. They thinned out into another field—this one unfenced, thankfully—and the uncomfortable seats became even more annoying as they bounced over the ruts in the field. The field ended at a gravel road, and after a moment of consideration, Richard took a right turn. The ride smoothed and their speed increased.

  “Still clear,” Jason muttered. Sandy nodded in silent agreement. The countryside seemed to be devoid of any presence, living or undead. Maybe the radio trick had worked. Now they had to get in and out of the pharmacy before their engine noise attracted more attention.

  A couple of turns later and they were back onto paved roads. Sandy, for one, had no clue where they were — all the farmhouses and overgrown fields tended to run together — but he could see taller buildings looming ahead as they approached the town.

  Richard slowed a bit as they entered the outskirts, and all four of them studied the surrounding area with the air of frightened rabbits. Here and there, gray figures stared out at them from behind closed windows, but that was something that
Sandy had seen before. Far too many people had died and reanimated in their own sickbeds. If they lacked a simple exit out of their home, they were doomed to wait out the rest of their undead lives as mere observers.

  He shook off the melancholy and forced himself to focus on the streets. The infected inside the homes were of no concern unless and until they had to start doing house-to-house searches. He hoped the pharmacy would have enough stock of what they needed so that would never have to happen. Sandy’s skin crawled at the mere thought of it.

  The homes faded away, replaced by more tightly-packed buildings as they drew closer to the center of town. Here, in tighter quarters, the feeling was less that of abandonment and more of having stepped into a war zone. The empty cars, shattered windows, and skeletal remains lying in the street bore testament to the multitude of last stands in small-town America. Richard slowed the Humvee and cut onto the curb to get around a county sheriff’s car that had plowed into a cell phone store. Sandy turned to look as they passed by and took note of the corona of fallen infected around the open driver’s door. A uniformed body slumped against the stricken vehicle, locked-open pistol still in hand. All the corpses had rotted over the fall and winter—equal partners now, in the brotherhood of bone.

  Richard slowed and turned left, stopping in the middle of the intersection. The red-painted logo of the pharmacy was still bright, though streaked with dirt. The flattened-off corner of the building closest to the street boasted a pair of sliding doors, in a larger, glass-framed area. Sandy leaned closer to the driver’s side and cursed under his breath.

  Richard turned to glance at him. “What?”

  Sandy pointed. “Look at the doors.”

  The sliding doors were tall and rectangular shaped. Metal bisected the frame at the center and stabilized the upper and lower panes of glass that made up the rest of the assembly. Something or someone had punched ragged holes into the lower, inner corners of the top panes and snaked a metal chain through and around several times. Blood and filth stained the rest of the entry glass—some it, Sandy noted, streaked as though from pawing hands.