A Place Called Hope (Z-Day Book 2)

by Daniel Humphreys

  “Am I okay? You bastard! You lying piece of shit!”

  “I never lied!” Sandy shouted back. “I never lied, not once. I didn’t tell you everything, but I was always honest with you.”

  “That’s—” A scream from out in the yard cut her off.

  “Time’s up,” he whispered.

  There was nothing like the possibility of immediate death to bring clarity to a situation. Kendra’s eyes narrowed, and she hissed. “How many shots do you have left?”

  He stared at her as he counted off in his head. “Five,” he said.

  “You plow the way to the road. If I see something on the ground, I’ll grab it. But we don’t have the firepower for a stand-up fight. We’ve got to run for it.” Her tone turned disapproving. “Most of these people weren’t in Lee’s crew. Some of them were prisoners, or regular folks trying to survive.”

  He stared at her, and a dozen possible responses ran through his head. He shoved them down and settled for, “Let’s go.”

  Sandy pushed himself to his feet. In the minutes since he’d driven onto the property, the lawn had become a charnel house. Some of the wounded were still down—permanently killed by brain injury, or incapable of walking—while others stumbled in search of fresh meat. Those who’d been lucky enough to avoid infection either fought off attacks from all directions, froze, or attempted to run. None of them, living or infected, paid any mind to the two of them.

  There was a gap in the crowd, and Kendra shoved Sandy in the small of the back. “Go! Run!”

  He stumbled forward at first, but his footing got more confident as he forgot about planning his moves and reacted. The situation was too chaotic to make for any sort of logical path through it. He pushed down the urge to freeze and forced himself to fight.

  An infected veered toward him, closing in on their path through the lawn. Fingers brushed his shirt as he shoved out with the barrel of the shotgun, tipping the unsteady thing over. He sidestepped its reach from the ground, moving ever onward. A screaming raider toppled to his knees in front of him, braced by infected on either side. One of them lifted a blood-smeared chin and mauled the shouting man. Any other time, it could have been an affectionate, open-mouthed kiss, but the sudden spray of blood and the gurgling screams put the lie to that image. Sandy put the barrel on a centerline between the two skulls and pulled the trigger. Blood and bone sprayed, and two-thirds of the unholy communion sagged to the side.

  The second infected tore a dripping chunk away from the dead raider’s neck, and its eyes met Sandy’s. Even now, the sight of the gray expanse filling the sockets chilled him to the bone, even though he knew that it was a side-effect of the nanomachinery infesting existing sensory structure to drive the host. There was no sinister purpose for it, beyond the overall meaning of the infection itself, but he still wondered. Had Melanie wanted it that way? Had she known the effect it would have on those lucky enough to avoid the first-wave spread of the outbreak?

  He pumped the shotgun and fired. The infected toppled.

  Three rounds left.

  They had attention now, though, and he was vaguely aware of survivors from the lawn sprinting past, toward the front door of the house. Some of the infected swarmed in that direction, but plenty more were homing in on the booming report of Sandy’s shotgun.

  Kendra tugged a blood-smeared pistol from the dead raider’s hand and checked the magazine. “Go, go, go!”

  He hopped over the trio of corpses. His left foot came down on an outstretched hand, and his ankle rocked painfully to one side with a pop that reverberated up his knee, chased by fire.

  Of all the reasons to not make it! Sandy stayed on his feet only through sheer force of will, the hammering impact of each step sending waves of fresh agony up his leg.

  Kendra fired, three quick shots, and he had the vague sense of an infected closing in from one side tumbling to the ground. Another stepped around the ruined tailgate of the pickup as he approached with arms wide. One of the ones he’d decided not to waste ammo on, but he didn’t make that same mistake this time. He slammed the barrel of the shotgun up under its chin and squeezed the trigger. At such close range, the infected was decapitated, and he thanked his lucky stars the wind wasn’t blowing in his face, else he might have gotten a share of the chunks.

  He shoved the corpse into the infected that followed close behind the first, tripping it up. Kendra was at his side now, and he felt himself beginning to fall back. He got the sense that she was holding back from running full-out, and a small, shameful part of him wanted to scream out for her to help him. The part of him that was not only resigned to his fate but eagerly anticipating it won out, and he remained silent.

  Kendra jumped the hood of one of the inner line of cars, sliding over the hood and landing on the ground opposite. The outer trucks were still pulled away, so while she was still technically on the lawn, it should be out of reach for the moment.

  Step, agony. Step, agony. Sandy slowed, and began to turn to face the front of his house. It was time to call the infected—to finish the job that he’d been too much of a coward to do, these past months. It was time to—

  Strong hands seized his shirt, and a roaring, almost incoherent voice blasted his ears. “You don’t get off that easy!”

  The same hands lifted him, then threw him over the inner line. He slammed into the Kendra, and both of them hit the lawn. Safe, for the moment, but he had the sense that wouldn’t last. He sat up, searching for the shotgun, but heavy feet slammed into the hood of the car, and he glanced up.

  It was a miracle Carver was still standing. A wicked looking gash in one cheek had taken out his eye and his ear. Blood sheeted down the side of his face, soaking his collar. He had at least one bite mark. Sandy could see a chunk of missing flesh on his hand, the exclamation point on the spiderweb-trace of gray veins beginning to climb up his thick forearm. Carver was pissed and alive, but neither situation looked to be a long-term one.

  He jumped off the hood of the car and landed on the ground next to Sandy. He rolled off Kendra, hoping she’d take the opportunity to run, and threw himself at Carver’s legs.

  It was no contest. The other man had to outweigh Sandy by fifty pounds, and every bit of it was muscle.

  He hit the dying raider and bounced. And then his head bounced again as Carver slammed a fist roughly the size and density of a canned ham into his temple. If the lawn hadn’t been so soft, Sandy guessed that the blow might have been a fatal one. As it was, he saw stars and felt little more than the urge to throw up.

  “Made it all this time, built up all this, to get taken down by a little pissant like you? No—” Punch. “Way—” Punch. “In—” Punch. “Hell!”

  Sandy looked up through bleary eyes. Carver shook his hand in pain, distracted.

  I got that going for me—head’s so hard the guy’s breaking his hand on it.

  Then Carver staggered backward, a new bloom of red on his chest. The pop of the gunshot seemed almost polite after the roaring boom of the shotgun he’d lost, but then there was another and another. The last shot hit Carver in his already-ruined eye, and with a final, terrible groan, the raider collapsed to the ground next to Sandy.

  Guidestone could do a lot, but his attacker wasn’t getting back up from that.

  Kendra pulled him to his feet, and Sandy groaned in protest. She was having none of it. “Move your ass!” He got his good foot under him, and together they moved to the side of one of the stolen Humvees. She opened the back door and threw him inside, then jumped into the driver’s seat.

  As the engine rumbled to life, Sandy closed his eyes and drifted off into blissful unconsciousness.

  April 2, 2026

  Aboard the USS Jack Lucas

  Z-Day + 3,088

  If Charlie hadn’t been familiar with the term ‘hurry up and wait’ before, he understood it now. After reaching their destination, a whirlwind of activity consumed the ship. For several days in a row, he’d woken up and wondered if it would finall
y be the morning they received the word to gear up and get rolling.

  The joke was on him. After spending all day helping the Marines check and clean weapons he was pretty sure they’d examined a few days ago, the announcement came over the ship’s loudspeakers while he worked through dinner with Del Arroz and his fire team.

  “Lucas, this is Captain Wilhite. At 0600 we will begin the final stage of our mission. Let’s kill us some zulus, people. Wilhite, out.”

  As the speakers crackled into silence, the sudden whoops of the dining Marines and sailors filled the mess. As their cries died down, Charlie heard the echoes of cheers and hollers chorus throughout the ship.

  “Time to get our game faces on,” Del Arroz said to Charlie with a wink. “The easy stuff is over. The hardest part is going to be getting to sleep tonight. Your gear good to go?”

  “What I’ve got, yeah. Never been much of a pack mule.”

  “We’ll scrounge you up an assault ruck. You want to bring water and a few MREs in case things go to hell. That’s a long damn walk.” Del Arroz and the other enlisted had gotten their own look at the drone images. Their reactions had contained a bit more audible cursing than the first briefing Charlie had sat in on. “Before we do that, though, we’ve got a pre-mission tradition. Care to join in?”

  “As long as it’s not some sort of Marine hazing ritual you haven’t told me about, sure, I’m in,” Charlie agreed. Del Arroz laughed and slapped him on the back.

  They cleared their trays and cleaned up after themselves. Once that task was complete, Charlie found himself following Del Arroz and a few of the other Marines down familiar territory. When they entered the meeting room, its configuration had changed yet again. The folding tables sat against the walls with the chairs arranged in a semicircle in front of a podium. They sat, while Charlie looked around curiously. “Another briefing?”

  “Nah,” the Marine said. “Most of the ships have an officer or enlisted that doubles as a chaplain.” He shrugged. “Not like we’re on any sort of regular sort of schedule, but it’s nice to take the opportunity between missions. You cool with that? It’s non-denominational, but I didn’t even think to ask if you were a Christian.”

  “Never went to church, before,” Charlie admitted, “but I suppose there’s no better time than the real-deal end of the world, huh?”

  The door to the meeting room opened and a dark-haired man in a Navy uniform stuck his head inside to scan the room. As though he’d decided it was safe, the youngish-looking boatswain closed the door behind him. “Gentleman. Apologies for being late.” He grinned, and Charlie dropped his assessment of his age down a decade or so. He was young enough to have been high-school aged on Z-Day, so he must have enlisted afterward.

  A couple of weeks ago, the thought of attending church would have made Charlie nervous and, being honest, a little panicky. He’d stumbled into services more than once in his years living in Hope, and he’d ended up leaving every time. The stories of a loving God fell on deaf ears and tasted like ashes in his mouth after what he’d watched happen to his family—after what had happened to the world.

  But things had changed. On a scouting run, he’d spotted what he’d feared was a shambler. He’d waited for it to make its move, but to his surprise, it never did, because what he thought was another infected was, in fact, a young girl—Tasha. He’d left a crate of supplies behind, intending to return and see if she would come back to Hope, rather than continue to hide out in long-abandoned houses. His good intentions were temporarily derailed by the failure of the wall and the near-death of the community, but he kept the promise he’d made. He came back to find the supplies gone, his awkward, stilting prayers for the survival of the child answered.

  Even then, Tasha—and her brother— had doubted his good intentions upon his return. The spear wound he’d suffered in the Battle of Hope had failed to infect him, but it had come with an unexpected side benefit—his damaged vocal cords had healed. With his old voice, he’d never have persuaded them to join the community. He’d spent years sounding like a monster, after all.

  Call it a coincidence. But some weight in Charlie’s heart had lifted when Tasha and her brother allowed him to rescue them, and he couldn’t help but wonder.

  As a result, he greeted this new situation with curiosity, an eagerness to listen, and not a little hope.

  The boatswain stepped to the podium and laid down a Bible that Charlie didn’t realize he’d been carrying. “I don’t recognize some of you. I’m Petty Officer Third Class Kyle Austin. Tomorrow, you Marines go into battle. This fine ship, this mighty vessel, will be here to support you. I know there’s a bit of a rivalry between Navy and Marines, but we’re all brothers and sisters. While you fight on land tomorrow, we’ll be doing everything in our considerable power to fight for you on the sea.” Austin glanced down. “The first scripture I have for you tonight comes from the book of Psalms, chapter 27. ‘Though a mighty army surrounds me, my heart will not be afraid. Even if I am attacked, I will remain confident.’ We don’t know for sure when David wrote these verses, though some historians believe that the early portion, including the verse I just quoted, was written not in a time of war, but in a time of peace. This scripture is an expression of David’s faith in the Lord, that if things go wrong, all will be well. Perhaps you’re sitting there thinking, why are you wasting my time with this, then, Chaplain? The man who wrote that verse couldn’t know what I’m going into. But David did know times of war, as he knew times of peace. He fought, in point of fact, in one of the more famous battles of the Bible, versus a much larger and better-equipped foe.” Petty Officer Austin paused. “Somehow, I think Marines can get behind that sort of fight.”

  Low chuckles filled the room. Austin continued.

  “Before he slew Goliath with a mere sling and a stone, David prayed to the Lord. And, as with many of his other prayers, he kept a record of it. Also in the book of Psalms, but chapter 144. ‘Praise the Lord, who is my rock. He trains my hands for war and gives my fingers skill for battle.’ You won’t face Goliath tomorrow, perhaps. You may very well be surrounded. Your hands have been trained for war, and the Lord is your rock. And the Marine to your left and right will be there for you, as you will be for them. And as Jesus told his disciples, ‘there is no greater love than to lay down one's life for one's friends.’ Must it come to that? I can’t say. You’d know better than I. But have faith. In the Lord, in your fellow Marines, in the men and women of this ship. We might not be standing shoulder to shoulder with you against Goliath, but you can rest assured that we’ll be throwing stones of our own.”

  Chapter 25

  April 8, 2018

  Southwestern Illinois

  Z-Day + 172

  He sputtered awake under a torrent of water.

  As he cracked his eyes open, he realized that what he’d perceived as a torrent was really just a small canteen, but it had felt like a lot. The water was lukewarm, but the shock of it hitting his face was more than enough to clear the cobwebs away, at least for the moment. The dull throb on the side of his head promised to only get worse as time passed.

  He pushed himself up a bit in the seat, then froze as he realized that Kendra had her pistol pointed at him.

  “We’re safe now. As safe as we’re going to get. So, it’s time for you talk. And what you tell me is going to decide whether I let you live, or whether I put a bullet in your head for the good of mankind.”

  Sandy wiped his face with shaking hands. “I didn’t know what they—we—were doing until it was too late, all right? That’s damn sure no excuse, and I’ve gone over it in my head a hundred times, but I didn’t know. After she got her doctorate, Melanie changed. One of her academic advisers had a research grant from a pharmaceutical company, and he got her in on the ground floor of one of the start-ups. I thought it was weird—she always had a pet cause, you know. When war protests went out of style, it was animal rights, or a higher minimum wage. I never figured she’d sell out, but I didn’t have
time to put too much thought into it—I was trying to finish up, myself. Between classes and trying to work enough to offset tuition, I barely had time to eat, much less think about the girlfriend who moved away.” He lowered his head and stared at the floor. “I thought maybe she’d found someone else. Then I graduated, and all of a sudden, she had time for me again. We got back together, and she got me a job working on her team in Cincinnati.” He met Kendra’s eyes. “You have to understand, what we were working on, it was revolutionary. It was a—merging, I guess you’d say, of conventional virology with miniaturized electronics. The applications were staggering, but if you’d asked me last October, I’d have told you we were years from clinical trials, much less widespread implementation.”

  Tears brimmed in Kendra’s eyes, and he couldn’t be sure if that was a good sign or a bad one. “You helped kill the world, Sandy. And that’s all you have to say for yourself? That you didn’t know?”

  “I didn’t know, okay? Sure, some of the tech guys called the hybrid virus ‘Terminator’, but I thought it was just a joke, a movie reference. It was called Project Guidestone. We were killing cancer in monkeys, for God’s sake! We could spur tissue regeneration!” He ran his fingers through his hair and laughed hysterically. “We surgically removed a kidney in a rhesus and it grew a new one in twelve hours. I thought we were up for a Nobel.”

  “When did you know? And what did you do?”

  “Wednesday, October 18th—like everyone else,” he spat. “Just a normal day, or so I thought. I’m in my lab, like usual. I was so focused that I didn’t even realize I was the only one in there until she came in.” Sandy stared off into space for a moment, visualizing the moment. The rest of his team had to have been in on it at some level—why else would they have made themselves scarce? Earlier that morning they probably flew out to parts unknown, marveling at what they were about to do and laughing about the idiot they left behind. To this day, he still couldn’t understand why Melanie had come to see him.