Labor and Delivery

by Jamie Davis

  When Marci reached the door to the bank, she shouted a triumphant “Yes” as she pulled the door open.

  It was unlocked.

  She turned and laid down covering fire. The zombies were fast and gaining on Kurt.

  He dove through the door.

  Marci backed in behind him, firing from the hip at the remainder of the initial group of zombies. They’d almost caught up to Kurt and were only a few meters away.

  Kurt slammed the reinforced wooden door closed and slid the metal crossbar in place, locking the door closed.

  The zombies piled up against the outside of the door, banging and scratching at it, trying to get inside. Kurt breathed a sigh of relief. They were safe, for now.

  Kurt and Marci moved inside and checked for what to do next. He pointed at the long teller counter in front of the vault entrance. They could take cover there and shoot down any zombies that got through the front door. It looked like the door was going to hold, but if it didn’t, they at least had a defensible position.

  “Who the hell activated that siren?” Kurt asked.

  “It had to be Brent,” Marci said. “He was inside the police building. Maybe he triggered an alarm switch by accident?”

  “Or, it wasn’t an accident at all.”

  Marci looked at Kurt aghast. “You think he brought those zombies down on us on purpose?”

  “It’s the only thing that makes sense. He’s been acting cagey since he caught up to us that first day. We know he lied about Helen and he’s argued against every opportunity to find more food for Allie. It’s like he doesn’t want her to survive. I can’t imagine why. She holds the key to the virus antidote.”

  “It’s got to be something to do with that security team we found,” Marci proposed. “We need to figure out why they were here.”

  She set her pack down on the floor behind the teller counter and looked around the bank.

  Kurt pointed to a door in the room opposite the front door. “You go check those back offices. We should make sure there isn’t a rear door.” He glanced towards the front of the building. “Those zombies won’t take long to surround the building. There must be at least a hundred of them out there now.”

  Marci nodded. “Got it. Then we need to figure some way out.”

  “Agreed. While you check the back, I’m going to go over to the front windows and see if I can spot Brent over at the police building. He might be trying to signal us if this was all an accident.”

  “Sounds good. Be right back.”

  While Marci checked the bank’s rear entrance, Kurt moved over to the front windows. They were reinforced with iron bars on the outside. The zombies snarled and banged at the barrier when they saw him through the bars.

  He pulled a chair over and climbed up on it because he couldn’t see over the heads of the zombies pressing against the window outside. The bars over the window held.

  The infected were starting to beat at the glass behind the bars, though. It was cracking in some places. Even though it was reinforced, he wasn’t sure it would hold up forever.

  Standing on the chair, he had a clear view of the police building across the street. The siren had stopped, but it had drawn every infected person from the entire area to this part of town.

  They all now mobbed around the outside of the bank now. Clearly, they knew there was prey inside. Kurt judged the numbers outside to be in the area of two or three hundred at this point.

  Across the street, the front door to the police station opened and Brent slid out through the entryway. He turned and crouched by the entrance, looking over his shoulder once towards the bank building. Then he headed down the street away from them with baby Allie in his arms.

  Kurt growled under his breath. He was going to catch that guy somehow, someway. He had a lot to answer for and Kurt was going to get answers to those questions.

  Marci came back and smiled. “Do you want to good news or the bad news, K.C.?”

  “How about the bad news first.”

  “There’s no rear door in this building. That means we can’t sneak out the back way.”

  “Great. And the good news?”

  “The water in the bathroom still seems to be working. The water tower at the other end of town must still be full. The gravity-fed pressure system is still working. We won’t die of dehydration if we’re stuck in here for an extended period of time.”

  “We’re not going to be here that long. We’ve got to find a way out. I just saw Brent leave the police building and head west down the street. He had to have done all this on purpose. I can’t think of any other reason he’d leave us behind. That means we’ve got to figure out a way out of here and catch up with him before he does anything to the baby.”

  “Marci glanced towards the hordes of zombies banging on the doors and windows out front. She shook her head. “I’m with you if you can figure out a way to get us out of here. Any thoughts?”

  Kurt shook his head. He and Marci moved back behind the teller’s counter and dragged some chairs over to sit on.

  They would figure a way out. For now, they needed to settle down and take stock of what they had. They might be in here for longer than they wanted to be and they needed to be prepared. As Kurt and Marci went through their packs to inventory what they had left in the way of food, his mind shifted back to Brent and the baby.

  If he could only figure out what was going on there, he might be able to figure out why Brent had betrayed them. Kurt worked at the problem as he sorted through the items in his pack.

  Chapter 15

  The zombies outside the bank settled down some when they couldn’t see the two of them seated inside behind the counter. The activity level ramped up as soon as they moved into view again.

  Kurt and Marci moved to one of the rear offices to see if the infected would disperse after not seeing them for a while. They trusted they would hear the noise of anyone breaching the front doors in time to go out and defend their position.

  As they settled into the new location, Marci took out the wrist comps they’d pulled off the security team a few days before. She hadn’t had much chance to examine them. Brent had been around most of the time.

  “I guess now’s as good a time as any to figure out what these things might be able to tell us,” Marci said.

  “Let me know if you need any help.”

  “I’m not sure if I can get in at all. We need to figure out the passcode for each individual and that’s going to be tricky. Each unlock code is unique to the user.”

  “See what you can do, Marci. I have faith in you.”

  Marci sat down behind the desk and begin digging into what she could do. Kurt tried to think of anything he’d learned during his special-ops service that might help her out. Nothing came to mind, so he devoted his energy to focusing on how to escape the building. The zombies might lose interest and move away but that could take days. That was time they didn’t have.

  Marci continued tinkering with the wrist comps for the rest of the day until nightfall. They each ate one of their few remaining MRE’s and then settled down for the night.

  Kurt set up guard shifts for them when dinner was finished. Marci offered to take the first one and sat down by the office door so she could listen to any noise from the central bank area.

  She conjured a small ball of soft blue-white light about the size of an orange. It hovered in the air before her so it would allow her to continue tinkering with the small wrist comps. She’d almost wholly disassembled one to see if there was some way to bypass the security protocols on the chip. So far, she’d been unsuccessful.

  Kurt fell asleep to the pleasant sound of her humming a song as she worked at her task.

  Kurt had the late shift from midnight until dawn. Marci woke him, telling him everything had been quiet so far. He settled in by the door to let her sleep, bringing up his own magic ball of light to provide a dim glow illuminating the room.

  The rest of the night was quiet, too. Kurt was hopeful a
s the sun rose outside. He checked to see if they still had company around the building. Maybe the infected had dispersed in the night.

  They had not.

  If anything, the number of zombies outside the building had increased. The snarling, growling mass of infected undead only served to draw more of their kind to the area around the bank building. He and Marci needed to come up with some solution to getting out of here. The infected weren’t going anywhere soon. He headed back into the rear office just as Marci woke up.

  She sat up and looked his way. “Any change?”

  “Nope, they appear to have gotten some additional friends overnight.”

  “Really?”

  Kurt nodded. “I’m afraid we are stuck here for a while unless we can figure a way past them. We don’t have enough ammo or explosives to kill them all. How did things go with the text stuff last night? Any luck bypassing the security measures?”

  “I had an idea as I fell asleep, but I wanted to run it past you first because, well, it’s kind of creepy.”

  “What do you mean ‘creepy?’”

  Marci shifted where she sat, uncomfortable with what she proposed. “So, how do you feel about necromancy?”

  “You can do that? I didn’t think anyone short of a Voodoo practitioner or similar black arts could do that kind of stuff. I’ve always been taught that type of magic was inherently evil.”

  “There are some who might say that. My mother’s background as a tribal shaman has given me some abilities that lean in that direction, though. I think I might be able to utilize it to figure out a workaround on the security system. It’s a little dicey, though, and might not go as planned.”

  “What did you have in mind?” Kurt asked.

  “I want to try and contact one of the dead security team members. There is blood on several of these comps and that might be enough for me to tie into their spirits in the netherworld. If I can bring them back, I might be able to force one of them to turn over their security password. All we need is that eight-digit code and we will be able to unlock the system for that person’s wrist comp.”

  Kurt pursed his lips in thought. “I don’t know about summoning spirits like that. Everything I’ve heard about it tells me that they don’t always do what you want them to do and they don’t always leave when you want them to leave.”

  “That’s with freestanding spirits and summonings. I’m thinking more of an opening where the spirit is brought into another vessel.”

  “Vessel?” Kurt asked. Then it dawned on him. “No, you’re not going to allow one of those dead security guards to inhabit you.”

  “I’ll limit them to control over my voice and eyes. They won’t take over my whole body. I’m stronger than that.”

  “You don’t know that,” Kurt said. “There’s no way you could know if the other person had their own unique abilities or not. If one of them was a magic-user themselves, they might be able to overpower you. Then I’d have a possessed partner who isn’t on my side anymore.”

  Marci scowled at him. “Look, I’m not asking your permission. I’m telling you my thoughts and plan.”

  “I don’t want to argue with you, Marci. Why don’t you spend some time and think of something else? There’s got to be another way.”

  “Not one that I can think of. We need this information, K.C., especially now that Brent has Allie and is off on his own. There’s got to be an answer as to why he betrayed us and ran off with the baby like that.”

  Kurt thought about the baby spending the night with Brent. Would he kill her outright or just leave her abandoned in the woods to die alone? Maybe he planned to take her with him and be the hero when he arrived at the settlement with the cure? There was no good answer and it was all speculation anyway.

  “Fine, Marci. Do what you have to do, but let’s take some precautions.”

  “OK, we can situate me inside a pentagram. That should help keep the spirit contained even if it somehow manages to take me over completely.”

  “That’s what I was thinking, too.”

  Kurt opened up his back and pulled out a permanent marker from his med kit. “We can use this. It’s a little something Jonesey gave me for a mission a year or so ago. I never ended up using it.”

  “What is it? I don’t remember her giving you anything like that.”

  “It was before you and I started working together all the time. There was a mission that involved some magical summonings and she gave me this pen. The permanent ink is mixed with demon blood. The mixture makes it easy to scribe a pentagram in a hurry that is powerful enough to contain most spirits. I decided to hang onto it afterward. Now I’m glad I did.”

  Marci smiled and reached out for the pen. Kurt handed it to her and watched as she drew a careful pentagram symbol on the floor behind the desk. She put the chair right in the middle of it and sat down. She tossed the pen back to Kurt.

  He put the pen back in his pack and turned back to her. “What do you need me to do while you cast the summoning?”

  “Just lend moral support I guess. This isn’t something I’ve ever done before. I only remember hearing my mother and grandmother talk about it once when I was very young. They were talking about summoning the spirit of a dead tribesman. He’d been killed under suspicious circumstances and my grandmother wanted to find out who killed him.”

  “Well, that’s not much different than what you’re doing here, I guess. All right, go ahead and do your thing.”

  Marci took one of the wrist comps off the desk beside her. It was the one with the most dried blood crusted on the casing. Hopefully, it was mostly the blood belonging to its owner. They’d find out soon enough if this worked.

  Marci closed her eyes and held the wrist comp in her hands. It was a plain band of steel alloy with electrical components inside and was about 6 cm wide. It was very similar to the one Kurt wore.

  As she concentrated on her spell, Kurt felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise up. There was a lot of magical energy being drawn into the room and it wasn’t him. He looked at Marci and saw a faint golden glow emanating from her palms where they touched the metal cuff.

  She mumbled something and Kurt thought at first she was talking to him. He leaned forward to ask her what she said and then realized she wasn’t speaking English. She spoke in the language of her native tribe.

  Marci was the daughter of Trent and a tribal shaman. Her mother had taught her a lot as she grew up before sending Marci north to live with her father at the age of twelve. Now it was time to see if the lessons her mother taught her had stuck.

  She continued mumbling the unintelligible words under her breath as the golden glow in her palms increased. She was drawing a great deal of energy into herself and still hadn’t achieved anything Kurt could see.

  That worried him.

  It was possible for a person using magic to burn themselves out. They could draw in so much energy that they essentially canceled out their ability to hold onto it any longer.

  It was often fatal, too. Kurt considered stopping the spell but shook his head. There was too much riding on this. He had to trust Marci and her strong abilities.

  Marci’s voice changed in tone. She lifted her head and opened her eyes. Kurt noticed the change in her right away. She didn’t carry herself the same way anymore. Her shoulders and the way she sat was different.

  “Where am I?” Marci said in a deep voice.

  “You’re on a world consumed by a viral infection. Do you remember coming here?”

  Marci moved her eyes, scanning the room as if seeing it for the first time. Her head never turned and she remained facing forward.

  She turned her gaze back to Kurt. “I do. Who are you and where is the rest of my team?”

  “You and your team are all dead at the hands of the infected.”

  “No,” the spirit said. “That can’t be. We had a mission to accomplish.”

  “That’s why my partner and I summoned you back. We need to find out what your mission
was.“

  “I’m not sure I should tell you. Who are you?”

  “I am Kurt Carter. I was sent here to follow up after your mission didn’t succeed. There are things though that the corporate folks at Aranis failed to tell me about. They didn’t tell me your team had come through first. I think they may have abandoned you to your fate to see what would happen to you.”

  “That is entirely possible.” The spirit sounded both sad and angry at once. “We got here and nothing was the way they told us it would be. We were expecting only a few pockets of infected people. Instead, we found whole towns had succumbed to the infection. I remember being chased by a huge mob of them into a small storehouse with my team. It wasn’t the best place to hide out, but it was the closest and most defensible position we had at the time. What happened?”

  Kurt shook his head. “We found you and your team all dead in that storage shed. If it’s any consolation, it appears you took most of the infected with you when you died.“

  “Well, I guess that something,” the spirit said. A sad smile appeared on Marci’s face. “What is it you want to know?”

  “What were your instructions when you were sent here?”

  “We were tasked with bringing medical data from Earth Prime to a secret lab the company had set up here.”

  “What was in that data?”

  “I’m not sure. It was encoded on each of our wrist comps. The science geeks were supposed to download it when we reached them.”

  “We are unable to access your wrist computer. Do you think you could help us unlock yours so that we could access that data? It might help us complete the mission for you.”

  “I suppose it doesn’t matter now. I’m dead anyway. At least I didn’t turn into one of those infected bastards.”

  “That is a good thing.”

  Marci’s eyes looked down at the metal band in her hands. The Goldenglow surrounded the metal as she held it.

  “I don’t seem to have the use of my hands anymore.”

  “That might be because she is retaining control over most of her body,” Kurt said. “Maybe you can just tell me what your unlock code is and I can access it myself.”