“Woo-ee,” Steven managed. “Don’t see many of them anymore.”
“Yeah,” said Kesha, easing her way around the side of the enormous automobile. “It looks about a hundred years old. Like something from a museum.”
“Clean it up, and it could look mighty fine,” Steven said. “Run a sponge over it. Shine up that chrome. It’d look better’n hell.”
Kesha only nodded.
Steven tried the passenger’s side door. The great metal beast was amusingly ancient. Steven had to depress the handle hard just to get it unlatched, and when he pulled the door it was so heavy he thought for a moment that it might be rusted shut.
“Don’t make ’em like this anymore,” he pronounced, sliding into the long, shared front seat.
Moments later, Steven had located a set of keys from the glove box. He scooted over behind the driver’s seat. Kesha didn’t expect anything at all to happen when Steven turned the key. When—against, it seemed, all reason and experience—the great machine roared to life, Kesha jumped an inch and fled from the small barn with her fingers in her ears. Steven put the Chevrolet into reverse and eased it out of the barn, its ancient brakes and rotors squealing all the way. The engine sounded more like a lawnmower than something you’d drive around on the street.
Steven was grinning. Kesha smiled back, but kept her fingers in her ears.
Then something. A sound even above the antediluvian sputter from this relic of old Detroit. A piercing shriek that Kesha heard loud and clear, even with her index fingers stuck deep inside her ear canals. It came once, then came again.
Kesha looked back toward the house. The first thing she saw was that a cellar door at the side of the house had been opened wide. A bloody trail led up to it and through the door. Then a window at the side of the farmhouse abruptly shattered as the stoneware cookie jar Kesha had been holding just minutes before went flying through it.
Without a second thought, Kesha grabbed a rusty rake from just inside the barn and took off. She bounded up the steps—almost losing her balance on the blood underfoot—and careened through the farmhouse door and into the twilight maze of rooms inside. She heard movement and high-pitched shrieks of alarm. Pottery and plates had been shattered on the floor.
Kesha moved with the rake held high like a medieval weapon, tines out.
“Madison?” she called. “Guys?”
Kesha rounded a corner and stopped. She could now see into the kitchen. Sara and Tara were both slumped face down into the linoleum. There were three other figures in the kitchen with them. One was a giant, hulking man in dirty jeans and a work shirt with sleeves rolled up over enormous arms. The other two figures were smaller, female, and wore short-sleeved dresses that went almost to the ground. All three of them had the look of the undead upon them—colorless skin, milky white eyes, and bodies that moved like horrible automatons rather than humans. Two of the things were bent over the bodies of Sara and Tara, ripping long strips of flesh from the girls’ necks and faces. The third thing—the larger one—was sniffing the air like a canine wandering after a far-off scent.
Kesha retreated back into the hallway.
Then a cry came from a different part of the house. It was followed by an: “Oh, shit!” The voice was quite distinctly that of Madison Burleson.
“Madison!” Kesha cried. “Madison, where are you?”
She was answered by approaching footsteps scrambling toward her. Kesha heard something glass fall over and break as Madison bumped into it. The approaching gait had the familiar clump-step, clump-step of someone with an injured ankle. The broken gait got closer, and suddenly Madison burst around the corner of the hallway. She smashed up against Kesha, almost knocking her over.
“For god’s sake, run!” Madison shouted.
They ran.
Halfway down the hallway, Kesha detected another set of footsteps behind them, small and scuttling. When they reached the door, Kesha looked back and saw a toddler with pigtails nipping at Madison’s heels. Because of Madison’s injury, the two seemed almost evenly matched. The child was clearly undead—its face twisted with a bloodthirsty anger no child could muster in life. Blood dripped from its mouth. Human flesh was already under its nails.
Kesha let Madison lope past, then held out the rake in a fixed position like a pikeman facing a cavalry charge. The tiny zombie raced forward with no hesitation, its pigtails flopping wildly. The tines of Kesha’s rake curved slightly at the end so the zombie was not impaled, but Kesha hit it in the chest and pushed as hard as she could. The thing went careening back down the hallway on its bottom. Kesha dropped the rake and ran.
Outside the house, Steven was standing next to the idling Chevrolet.
“What’s happened?” Steven was asking.
“Get in and drive!” Kesha called.
Steven was confused, but obeyed. Kesha helped Madison into the backseat of the ancient Chevy. She closed the heavy metal door behind them with a loud clunk.
“What about Sara and Tara?” Steven asked, looking into the backseat.
Kesha just shook her head no.
“I don’t know what happened,” Madison said. “Those people, they came out of nowhere.”
Kesha looked through the Chevrolet window at the storm cellar. In the dying light, she saw twine on the inside handles of the cellar door. They had locked themselves in, Kesha realized. Perhaps for protection from the roving undead. Or perhaps they were already bitten—already infected—and they had sought to protect others from the monsters they knew they would become. (In either case, they had failed.)
“Jesus Christ,” Steven cried. A small girl with a bloody face had opened the door of the house and was charging toward the Chevrolet.
“Drive, Steven,” Kesha said.
“Where?” he asked, turning on the ancient headlights. Only one of them worked, and it was very dim.
“North,” Kesha told him. “Just go north.”
Steven put the car into drive and they bounced across the farmyard on rusted, squeaking shocks. A driveway took them out across the field, running like a rut through tall rows of corn beyond. Eventually, it intersected with a gravel drive. Steven stepped on the gas. After two minutes, the gravel road intersected with Indiana State Road 57.
There was just enough sunlight left for Steven to tell which way was north.
That was the way he went.
***
The ancient Chevrolet felt like it might die at any moment.
Steven drove slowly, never edging much beyond thirty miles an hour. They pressed deeper into the all-encompassing blackness, feeling like a lighthouse on some ancient, lonely shore. The countryside was completely without power. At one point, Kesha thought she glimpsed two bright flashlights bobbing in different directions atop a distant hill. They disappeared as quickly as they had come into view.
Nobody said anything for a long time.
Madison took a cell phone out of her pocket and tried to make a call. It was obvious right away that it was still broken. Even the date and time were no longer functional. After a few moments of frustration, she put the thing away. Madison dug in her pocket and pulled out the prescription pill bottle. She shook out two oblong, white pills and swallowed them without water.
“Where do you think we’re headed?” Kesha wondered.
“We have to go to Indianapolis,” Madison said. “We have to reach my father. He’ll still be at the capitol, probably. With all the horrible people he works with. That fuckslime chief of staff, and his kiss-ass secretaries . . . and that basketball-playing policeman he sends to do his dirty work . . . and—”
“James Nolan?” Kesha interjected.
“That’s right,” Madison answered. “How do you know about him?”
Kesha slowly realized that in recalling her adventures to Madison—and the late Sara and Tara—she had not described her rescuer beyond saying he was a police officer.
“Umm, everybody knows he works for your dad,” Kesha lied. “He’s James Nolan.
He’s famous.”
“I guess,” Madison said distantly.
Then a thought appeared to occur to the governor’s daughter. She perked up a bit.
“Do you want to know a secret about James Nolan?” Madison asked. “Something that only, like, three people and my dad know?”
“Um, okay,” Kesha said. “But how do you know it?”
Madison frowned as if this quibble was off-putting.
“Look, do you want to know the secret or not?” Madison asked.
Kesha nodded.
Madison looked up to the front seat where Steven sat behind the wheel. Then she leaned into Kesha’s ear and whispered, placing her fingers over her mouth to eliminate even the chance of Steven reading her lips. As Madison spoke, Kesha’s jaw dropped.
“No way . . .” Kesha found herself saying as Madison withdrew back to her side of the seat.
“You don’t have to believe me,” she said with a self-satisfied smile. “But it’s still true.”
“Jesus,” said Kesha. “That’s just horrible.”
“Now do you see why we have to get to Indianapolis?” Madison asked her. “Now do you see why I have to stop my father?”
“Yeah,” Kesha said, dumbstruck, staring into the back of the seat in front of her. “I think I do.”
22
Inside his tiny office in a dark corner of the capitol building, Doug Huggins read by candlelight. He had discovered a cache of taper candles in a back dining room. Though certainly a fire risk—especially in the cramped confines of his paper-filled office—Huggins thought them preferable to running down the power on his remaining flashlights. Since the generators had failed, the damn things had become like gold. So had batteries.
Turning each page as quietly as he could, Huggins pored through the document from Burundi Petroleum that he had found in the governor’s waste basket. (“Document” was hardly adequate, thought Huggins. The damn thing was close to War and Peace.) Huggins’s flipping of pages was frequent, because his policy as a reader was to skip ahead whenever he didn’t understand something. It was increasingly clear that most of the massive document was going to fall into that category.
Still, between the scientific jargon he did not understand, and the lawyerly posturing he also did not understand, Huggins began to get a deep and horrible gist.
And it was so, so much worse than he had expected.
Sure, Huggins knew about the governor’s deals with BP. Every Hoosier governor made them. Yet Huggins had been under the impression that in his dialogues with BP, Burleson had chosen to err on the side of protecting his state. The side of caution. Burleson had spoken of special protocols that could eliminate contamination if it ever occurred. If a disaster resulted in the release of pollutants into Hoosiers’ drinking water.
Yet the thick document in his hands postulated another reality entirely.
What had happened was not complicated. With Hank Burleson’s blessing, BP had begun intentionally introducing a new chemical in their refineries up in Whiting. Trace elements of the chemical would make their way into the drinking water that flowed down through the rest of the state. BP didn’t want to say what it was—or even give it a name—and the amount that showed up when you turned on the tap was very small. Parts per trillion. Tiny, tiny bits. What were the side effects of these tiny bits? BP thought probably nothing. So did their lawyers. However, even if there were to be negative effects—to Indiana’s flora or fauna or, God forbid, populace—BP had a contingency plan. Lab tests had shown that the introduction of a few natural phytochemicals could categorically make the new compound inert. Flooding Indiana’s waterways with a few truckloads of phytochemicals would erase all traces of this new mystery compound almost instantly. However, it would also render the state’s water supply practically useless to BP for refining purposes.
Burundi Petroleum’s case to Burleson had been simple. In a few years, our scientists will know exactly what this stuff is and how it works. They’ll also know about all the possible side effects . . . which will probably be nothing. But what we know now is that it does work in our refining process—boosting productivity and profits—and we want to keep using it. What we’ll do is keep trucks full of these phytochemicals at the ready just in case anything happens. Does that sound good to you? Because if it doesn’t, we can always move our refineries over to Michigan or to any number of states down on the Gulf Coast that are hurting for jobs and investment right now. And you can be the governor who built a state’s entire persona around being friendly to business, and then couldn’t hold on to the biggest company he had.
So Burleson had said yes. By all means, yes. Keep using your new chemical. To his way of thinking, Indiana was just being an early adopter. BP knew what it was doing. It had lots of smart scientists in charge of this. There weren’t going to be cows giving green milk and babies born with three heads. Maybe a few people who were gonna get cancer anyway would get it a little faster. (They were probably smokers, anyhow.) Besides, in five or ten years, every refinery in the country was going to be using this new chemical. Hell, getting refineries in Indiana to use it first would be a feather in the governor’s cap, especially when he was evaluated at a national level. It showed he talked the talk and walked the walk when it came to letting businesses grow in an unfettered marketplace, and so on.
But now that Huggins could read the details for himself, it was clear that the oil company had made several notable omissions in their initial dialogue with the governor. First of all, it was clear that the side effects were not unknown. They were known. And they were horrible. Skin cells coming back to life in labs. Bits of flesh on Petri dishes twitching or even crawling out of the dish. Unexplainable movement in all sorts of dead tissue. (It had been concealed beneath layers and layers of doublespeak and lawyering, but there were some things that you just couldn’t hide with a technical term. Dead skin strips inching around like inchworms was one of them.)
The only real unknown for BP involved the consistency of the “events” in question. Most of the time, dead tissue did not reanimate, even if you soaked it in gallons of this new compound for months. The reanimation was only taking place in very rare cases, and usually just for a few seconds. Out of nowhere, a tiny pocket of human skin cells in a huge sample cluster would start doing the Electric Slide for no discernible reason. Then, as soon as the researchers rushed over to take a look, it would stop as quickly as it had started.
All of this did not give Huggins confidence that the phytochemicals would do anything at all to render the mystery compound inert. What if it just made it take longer for the effects to show up? Conclusive tests had never been performed. Huggins couldn’t believe that BP thought their ER-19 protocol could definitively make things okay again.
Or, more accurately, like things had never happened at all.
For, as Huggins wound his way toward the end of the document, it seemed clearer and clearer that the document said nothing existed. No agreements. No compound. No nothing. It was as if the heavy manuscript Huggins clutched in his arms insisted that, legally speaking, he felt no weight at all. In the eyes of the law, any release of phytochemicals—while authorized 100 percent by the governor—would not be connected to the new, unnamed compound that had just been described for hundreds of pages. The governor was giving BP the right to flood the water supply at points all around the state with truckloads of these antidotes, without acknowledging that they were an antidote for anything. BP was held liable for nothing. And yet the state had authorized them to do everything. (Really, “everything” was the word. The phytochemicals were the tip of the iceberg. The document seemed to say that if BP found it necessary to do anything else to the waterways, it could now do so. Total freedom. Zero accountability.)
Suddenly, the door to Huggins’s office was thrown open. The resulting breeze blew out the desk of candles quite entirely. Instinctively, Huggins covered the purloined manuscript with his hands.
The figure in the doorway was not the gove
rnor. It was a police officer with bags under his eyes whom Huggins had never seen before. The man was young. Probably. (As the crisis wore on, it was harder and harder to determine anybody’s age. Being up for days could add years to your timeline.)
“Mister Huggins?” said the sleepy officer.
“Yes?” Huggins said, still covering the pages on his desk like a teenager caught with a Playboy.
“Some of the security team said I should get you,” the young man said. “There’s something going on outside that you need to see.”
After locking the manuscript in his desk, Huggins followed the young officer down the hallway and out the front entrance of the capitol building. The moment Huggins sucked in his first breath of early-evening air, he could tell something was wrong.
“The fires . . . have they gotten closer?” Huggins asked the officer.
They smelled like they were just down the block. Huggins thought that maybe—despite the already warm night—he could feel their added heat in the atmosphere.
“I think so, yes,” the officer said, unsure of himself.
Huggins looked around for someone who could give solid answers.
There were police, military, and other staffers standing on the street directly in front of the capitol building. All of them were looking south. Huggins joined them.
Although the darkness of the buildings around them was utter and complete, Huggins saw great ripples of red-orange fire glinting off the polished windows of structures to the south. There was also a constant roar. A long, low bass note like the noise before a game in a football stadium. A full football stadium.
“Are those . . . zombies down there?” Huggins asked in mounting terror.
The officer shook his head.
“Mostly no,” he said. “Mostly, it’s just people.”
“People?” Huggins said, as if it made no sense. “What on earth are people doing here?”
The young policeman shrugged.
Huggins took another look south down Capitol Avenue, toward the fires and the distant roar. People. That sound was people. Why had they gathered here? What were they hoping for?
Zombie, Indiana Page 22
