“He’s not here, Liam. Hayes.”
“Where'd he go?”
“He got out of the helicopter somewhere on the way. A big concrete factory.”
She noted he was unarmed. Debbie carried a double-barreled shotgun, though. It stoked her curiosity, but first, she had to resolve the present crisis.
“Liam, listen. I don’t know what’s going on here, but I think we—Jane and Doug included—are being hunted.”
“I came here because you have a tracking device on you. Maybe, in you.” He pointed to her chest.
“Liam, I’m scared,” she said it quietly, hoping only he would hear.
“Me too. I have so much I want to tell you.”
“I do, too. But you can’t touch me.” She stepped back once, to emphasize her point. Her voice cracked at the final two words.
Liam stepped forward one step. “I don’t know what to say. You don’t look like a zombie,” he said with a smile.
“No, it’s not like that. Hayes said there are carriers of the disease who don’t know they have it. They go out and infect others...”
“Hayes,” he said angrily. “How did he find you? What's his deal?”
“I don’t know how to explain it. Hayes saved my life, the same as Jane did.”
She saw the dissension on his face.
“You can’t trust him. I don’t trust him. I don’t think you can possibly be infected. You’ve been with me...”
She assumed he meant to end that with “the whole time,” but both knew that wasn’t true. Even when they were together on their adventures, there were periods when they were separated. Like when she was shot.
He changed his line of reasoning. “Victoria. I love you. We’ve been together, uh, in close proximity, that if you had any sickness, I’m sure I would have caught it.” He winked at her.
She wanted to believe his words. But if he was wrong, she’d kill him just as surely as if she was a zombie.
“I can’t be certain. I would never want to risk your life. Not like this.”
Before she knew what was happening, he had rushed in and wrapped his arms around her. She melted into him with an emotional sob.
“Liam, no…”
“Silly girl,” he whispered, “where you go, I go. There’s no way you can be infected.”
“You can touch me, but we shouldn’t—”
He kissed her. She tasted the salt of her own tears, and she embraced him. In front of the sick in the beds, Jane, Debbie, and numerous drone operators sitting who-knows-where, she finally allowed herself to risk her feelings, and her life, with Liam.
Her belief that she was infected receded into an inconsequential corner of her mind. The incident with the zombie girl in the red dress was just a coincidence. Hayes was the liar he'd always been.
The rest of her brain embraced the soul of her Zombie Apocalypse partner.
Thank you, Liam, for accepting me.
2
“We’re in this together, and I don’t believe for a second you’re infected,” Liam assured her.
Debbie interrupted. “Excuse me, um, Liam. Hi, Victoria. Can you help me get these women to their beds?”
His face looked as confused as her own. “I don’t know,” he said in a whisper. Was she pointing the shotgun at Liam?
Debbie walked a few feet away, then turned back when she saw Liam hadn't moved. “Liam. Help me,” she said with a touch of anger.
“OK, right.” He smiled at Victoria, gripped her arms tightly as a reassurance, then walked off. He eyed her rifle with a deliberate glance.
The instant he was gone, Jane sidled up to her. “I can’t figure out what this place is supposed to be. There are no doctors or nurses.”
Victoria scanned the room—it was like the experiment back at Washington University in some ways—but she couldn’t solve it, either. Debbie guided Liam and the two women to the closest beds.
“We should go,” Jane whispered, almost in her ear, “while we still can.”
“Those drones could shoot us if they wanted us dead. I’ve seen them,” she whispered back.
“We have to try. I can’t...we can’t get trapped, like this.”
She looked at Jane anew. Her red hair had become messed up from her headphones, and windblown from the air whipping through their helicopter. Her face remained unemotional, even as she sounded scared. It was impossible to read her.
“Did you know this would happen? That we would get trapped?” Victoria had learned enough over the weeks to never underestimate anyone.
“No. You were supposed to take us to Marty, remember? Now we're in some laboratory from Hell.”
Victoria looked around. “It doesn't look that bad.”
Jane firmly gripped her arm. “Haven't you been paying attention? Someone wants us dead. They want Douglas and me to die—”
“Because of Duchesne.”
“Bah. That's the easy answer. Revenge. You've been part of this almost since the beginning. This can't be a coincidence. It just can't be.” She ran her hand through her sweaty hair, apparently not pretending at being worried. “Duchesne came for Marty. He could have killed us on the spot. You were there.”
The NIS agent had them dead to rights. That was true. But he left Hayes and Jane in what might be billed as an overly elaborate plan to kill them later. Why not just put bullets in their heads?
“And how is this girl involved?” she indicated Debbie, now helping settle in one of the old ladies. The woman wore a light green pantsuit, reminding her of Grandma Marty when they'd first met. She seemed docile in the face of so many guns.
Liam's charge, perhaps because he had no gun, was much more vocal. She yelled for a nurse over and over as he guided her to a bed.
“Nurse, I don't want to be here!”
Liam said something, but Victoria was out of earshot. He was probably trying to say something funny to her, though it wasn't working. Debbie put an end to her complaints when she came over brandishing her shotgun. Liam stepped back from the bed, surely thinking of whether to overpower the girl.
“I think I recognize her from the house where Grandma and I waited for Liam to get better after our escape from...Duchesne. There were lots of other teens in the house, and I'm pretty sure she was there.” She couldn't be positive as it was hard to identify people from always seeing the tops of their heads as they leaned down to their tablets and smartphones. She wished she would have taken the time to get to know them. Make allies. Identify enemies.
Debbie and Liam returned, and the four of them formed a tight knot in between two rows of beds, about twenty or thirty feet from the wide stairwell—and the hovering drones.
“Debbie. Why are you bringing people to this boat?” Jane asked with innocence.
The girl stood very close to Liam, and her gun was pointed directly at the floor. Any one of them could overpower her in a second, yet no one did. Behind Debbie, the drones remaining menacingly stationary.
“I'm, like, an assistant to the Mayor of the town. He asked me to keep watch on any elderly people I could find while things were nice. But, um, when the town, like, um, got zombie-fied, and stuff, he told me I could be a big help by evacuating these—” she waved around the room “—million-year-old people.”
Victoria was about to reply, but Debbie continued.
“He said that, um...I could, like, have any car I wanted. I could get away,” she said with seriousness. “It was easy, until, like, now. Most people wanted to get out of the town before those, um, things, ate them.”
“But what happened to these people?” Jane interjected.
“What do you mean?”
Jane huffed in frustration. “They aren't awake! Can't you see that? This whole thing—it isn't normal.”
“How am I supposed to know? I'm, like, just the delivery girl.”
She spoke with an annoying uptalk. Victoria thought she sounded like she'd spent her life watching her tablet, instead of paying attention in school.
“But, like, the owne
r of this boat is almost here,” she said evenly.
Liam, this might be it.
She tried to talk to him using her mind. Willing him to know how she felt.
I love you, no matter how this ends.
Chapter 20: John Wayne
John watched as the Blackhawk maneuvered over the river. He was positive it didn't belong. Whatever it was doing, he had to know. Though not a gambling man, he'd bet Elsa was in that chopper. The ropes hung down, and someone at the top had come to the door...waiting.
From where he was, it might be possible to walk to hundreds of the interlocking barges sitting on the waterway. But the one under the helicopter was his destination.
He hunched over and pretended he was forty years older.
This is nuts.
He figured he had two cards to play. Either he could charge in, bullets flying, or he could labor in as if he were a disoriented old man. And what better way to play the old man than to wander the barges as if he were lost? To him, it made sense.
It pained him to do it, but he placed the rifle in a cranny behind some spools of metallic wire. No old timer would wander around with a gun slung over his shoulder. He still had his pistol and had no intention of throwing that down.
He rubbed his sunburned head. His scalp and thinning hair yelled at him for losing his hat. If he'd been forty years younger, the prospect of sneaking up on a mysterious situation might even have thrilled him. Now, his legs felt heavy as he jumped the short way from the first boat to the second. No one bothered to put ramps between them other than the direct route to the helicopter.
For many minutes he bounced from barge to barge, but always he moved closer to the one he wanted. There was some concern he would be mistaken for a zombie—he could see scores of them on the shore—so he stopped frequently to rub his back or tie his shoes. Things no zombie would do.
“I need some luck,” he said to his shoes on one stoppage.
Luck isn't a tactic, John.
As he neared the action, he lost faith in himself. Any second he would get noticed. Or shot. Or worse—captured.
His zig-zag path took him to an open-topped barge parked diagonally upriver from his target. The pile of bodies inside made him stop. The container was mostly empty, but near one corner a hundred bodies lay in a heap like they'd been tossed down from the top deck.
He'd seen plenty of corpses the last few weeks. Enough to last a lifetime. But these made him consider stopping his charade and run back to his tanks and forget this little side trip. They were all elderly. Most he recognized by their skin color as local townsfolk—a good portion were ancient black women. They were dressed in a colorful, but macabre heap—hands, heads, and shoes poked out the edges. One mixed group of gray-haired men was dressed in orange jumpsuits like they'd been taken from a prison. In fact…
He looked closer. They were chained together.
My God. What is this?
The ship stank. The bodies had been in the hot sun for too long.
Unwilling to give up on his mission, he closed the distance to the towboat. The tinted windows of the bridge wrapped around the superstructure, and he assumed he was being watched. Surely, the men in the helicopter had seen him, though somewhere along the line the people up there had roped down. His situational awareness was a disaster.
He pressed forward and got onto the deck of the all-white towboat. It was designed to push the flat cargo containers up and down the river and was the width of one barge. It happened to be paired to just one of those vessels. The ropes of the helicopter hung above it, confirming he had gone about this the right way.
The door into the crew space was marked with a series of imposing warnings stenciled onto the paint.
“Property of Ste. Genevieve Cement Fabrika.”
“MOPP 4 required beyond this point.”
A pair of logos—one for nuclear and one for biohazard—rounded out the advertising on the door.
No, at the very bottom, a comparatively gentle warning advised that hardhats are also required.
“I don't even have that,” he said to himself.
He went for the handle, but it was locked.
Sensing he was running out of time, he followed some steps up to a narrow deck which ran along the outside window of the bridge on the second level. From up there he could see the length of the barge. A satellite dish was on the near end. At the far end, there was a hole in the outer covering and some steps going down.
He put his face up against the window of the bridge—right at the corner. He hoped he could get some intel on who was running the boat, but he was disappointed. He could see nothing. Next to the window, a nearby door had a small porthole window, but he didn't see anything through there, either.
“OK, we'll do it the hard way,” he said in a normal voice as he pulled out his pistol.
He raised his arm, intending to strike at the window where he'd just been peeking in.
That's when the mechanical lock of the door cycled, and it swung open a few inches.
“Please don't,” said an emotional male voice.
“Identify yourself,” John replied. Part of him laughed at the thought there were a dozen armed men inside, just waiting for him to come through the door. His ruse got him this far, but wouldn't work a second longer.
“I...I just work here. I can't risk the equipment.”
“That doesn't tell me who you are.”
“I'm Bill Dredsel. I keep the Elma Jean running. Who the hell are you?”
John made a decision. If there were twelve men with guns, he'd have no chance. He decided to be bold. He pushed through the door, gun in hand.
A skinny old-timer in dirty overalls skittered backward into the bridge compartment.
John almost dropped his gun when he saw the place. After weeks of primitive living, blood 'n guts fighting hand-to-hand, and the rickety town of Cairo—he felt like he'd walked onto the space shuttle. The wrap-around windows showed the barge sitting in front of them, but it was filled with computer data, as if it were also a giant computer screen.
The area where he'd planned to smash the glass had a running string of data falling like snow from top to bottom. It became clear why the man didn't want him to break the window. It was more than mere glass.
Bill had his hands up, though he kept stepping backward. John was happy to see the proper amount of fear on the man's face.
“All right, mister,” he said in his best cowboy-movie voice, “I want to know everything that's going on. And we'll start right here.” He pointed to one corner of the carnival display of information—it showed four people standing in an area that looked like the ward of a hospital.
They were surrounded by several armed figures dressed in black.
Chapter 21: Threat Level 5
Liam had seen the helicopter hovering when they came into the hold of the barge, so he wasn't too surprised to see drones or more people come down the steps. After settling the two old women—the one endlessly called out for a nurse—he stood talking to the three younger women as the intruders dropped in.
He held Victoria by the waist. He wanted to keep her close until he could think of a way to get out of what was turning out to be a multi-layered prison.
Debbie with her shotgun.
The drones.
Whoever was in charge of the creepy hospital.
The helicopter.
And, should he make it outside again, the town was surely overrun with zombies.
Debbie seemed to anger at the sight of him holding Victoria. Even as the new men approached, she raised her shotgun toward him.
“Liam. I thought we had something. I, like, saved all these—” she started to laugh. “Oh, my. This has been fun, but I can't keep up this silly charade. Who talks like that?”
She stepped back toward the approaching dark-clad figures.
“I'm done talking like that. My mom is here—finally,” she shouted back to the new arrivals.
One of the men walked up to D
ebbie with a DNA sniffer.
“This is her.”
Debbie smiled wickedly while she pointed her shotgun at Liam, but her face cringed when the newcomer reached to her and injected something in her neck. A second later, she dropped to the floor with a hard thunk.
The shotgun fell to the metal hull and clanged loudly. Though it was impossible, he waited for the gun to fire itself.
Dad would scold me for thinking such nonsense.
There were three men, each dressed in black tactical gear and wearing face masks.
“Drop your weapons!”
Victoria set her rifle down, as did Jane.
Two of the men grabbed Debbie and pulled her toward the steps.
“Wait,” Jane cried out. “What do you want with her?”
“Elsa Cantwell is wanted for conspiracy to commit genocide. That's all you need to know.”
“You want a teenager for genocide?” Liam blurted out.
That seemed to take the man by surprise. Even from behind his mask, Liam saw the indecision. The man turned around, crouched next to Debbie, and whisked away her hair. It had covered her face as she went down.
“Oh shit. He's right. Check this. Fast,” he said to an assistant.
The machine was pointed to Debbie again. It only took a few seconds.
“Sir, this says it is Ms. Cantwell. The DNA checks out.”
“We've been played.” The man ripped off his face mask. He was middle aged, about the same as his dad, but he wore cropped hair and had the chiseled features of a movie superstar. He looked around the room, settling on Liam and his friends since they were the only ones on their feet.
“Sir, the drones?” Victoria asked as he approached.
“Ours. Well, they became ours. Look, I don't have much time. What's going on here? Who are you people? Why the beds?”
“You mean you don't know?” Liam asked with disbelief.
The man laughed.
His partner came up beside him, using the machine on the three of them. He only needed to get close before the thing bleeped.
“Holy shit! These three are Priority Level 5 targets.”
The weapons of the men came up in unison.
Liam tightened his grip on Victoria's soft midsection.
Zombies Ever After: Sirens of the Zombie Apocalypse, Book 6 Page 28
