Black Tide Rising - eARC (9 page)

Bennett waited until the nearest zombies were only a few yards away and then drove slowly under Cline Avenue, approaching the entrance to I-90.

The zombies went after him. Andy realized what he was planning to do. He’d lead them onto the interstate and then, moving slowly ahead of the mob, take them either toward Ohio or the Illinois state line. Once he got a few miles down the highway, he could speed up and escape them easily and come back to the tank farm after getting off on one of the exits.

Assuming he didn’t collapse from being sick.

“Come here, Sam,” said Tom.

He laid the Remington down on the shooting bench and backed his wheelchair away. “Pull up a chair,” he said. “It’s time for you to get some live target practice.”

Sam stared at him. Tom pointed at the receding mob of zombies. “Hurry up, girl! They’re getting away!”

* * *

Sam missed her first two shots. Then, took out a zombie’s leg with the third. From then on, she didn’t miss any more shots—seven, in all—until the last zombie was out of sight.

She hadn’t killed all of them, of course. So now Tom had her shoot the ones she’d wounded until he was sure they were all dead.

It was a grim exercise. But the nineteen-year-old former waitress seemed to take a fierce satisfaction in the work, and, in any event, Andy knew what her husband was thinking. Between his age and health problems, Tom Kaminski had reached that point in life when a person could die on any given day. Maybe not for years to come, sure—but it could be tomorrow, too.

However short the rest of his life might be, though, he wouldn’t be leaving his people unprotected. The guardian angel was training his replacement.

* * *

By nightfall, the TV news people were set up on Phi Tower—and were starting to film again.

“We’re doing a documentary now,” explained Karen Wakefield. “I figure we’ll title it
How to Survive a Zombie Apocalypse.
Smile, everyone. Young man, if you carry through with that threat to moon us, just remember you’ll be on video foreeeeeeeeeeeeeeevvvvver.”

Turning, Andy saw that her rambunctious grandson was hastily rebuckling his pants.

“Jack!” she chided him.

“I didn’t do anything!”

* * *

By then, Jerome Bennett was back. It took him five minutes to climb back onto his tower after he parked the patrol car, but he made it. Without saying a word, he rolled into his tent and was out of sight.

Ceyonne had to be restrained again. By now, her boyfriend was starting to show bruises. He didn’t seem to mind too much, though.

Andy wasn’t surprised. Eddie was a happy camper, these days. Once Ceyonne’s father had set himself up in splendid isolation on Beta Tower, she and Eddie started sharing a tent—after she came to Andy and got a supply of condoms. The girl might be headstrong but she wasn’t foolish.

* * *

The next day, another caravan entered the tank farm. It was the largest one yet, at least in terms of people. There were only three vehicles, but one of them was a bus, whose distinctive red-white-blue paint stripes and
CTA
logo announced that it was—or had been, anyway—the property of the Chicago Transit Authority. It turned out that one of the members of the group was the bus driver and he’d seen no point in returning the vehicle to the compound once the catastrophe started getting completely out of hand. Instead, he picked up his family in the bus along with the supplies he and his wife had put together. Then, after adding two of the neighboring families, he’d driven to his church and more-or-less shanghaied the two priests who’d been there along with the dozen or so people who’d come for sanctuary. Those who couldn’t fit into the bus after they loaded everything in the church that might be of use crammed into the priests’ two cars.

Being an enthusiastic gambler, the bus driver—Harry O’Malley, he was called, and he looked the spitting image of a red-headed Irishman—led everyone out of Chicago, across the Skyway, and into the enormous parking structure of one of the big casinos by the lake. O’Malley figured the parking structure would be ignored by zombies since there was no food source in it, and it was so big that as long as they stayed in a far corner in one of the upper floors, they’d go unnoticed.

His plan worked for a few days. But then a car full of gangbangers showed up and tried to rob the bus. O’Malley was an ex-Marine as well as a hunter and three of the other men in their party were also well-armed. The gangbangers were too arrogant—or too desperate, after being on the run from zombies—to plan their assault. They just came swaggering up to the bus, brandishing their pistols, before two of them got cut down by the ensuing hail of gunfire and the other three ran off into the casino.

Which…turned out to be full of zombies. So, back they came into the parking lot—two of them; apparently the third had become a zombie snack—and exchanged more gunfire with the people in the bus.

The gangbangers got the worst of that exchange, as well. The one uninjured survivor raced off to parts unknown while his now-lamed companion got swarmed by the zombies who’d followed them out of the casino into the parking structure.

Got swarmed by
some
of the zombies. Most of them came toward the bus—which had to make its own hurried departure, trailed by the two priests’ cars.

They’d then spent a day trying to get out of the area, which was made especially difficult by the refinery burning nearby. They’d just happened to be coming down Chicago Avenue when one of their number spotted the people perched on the oil storage tanks.

They set themselves up on Sigma and Pi Towers. Which put Jack’s back against the wall because that exhausted his knowledge of the Greek alphabet and if anybody else showed up…

6

The following day, two more family groups showed up. Jack threw in the towel and announced that their towers would be Tango and Foxtrot.

“Since when do you know how to dance?” Ceyonne demanded. “And if we’re gonna start naming towers after dances, why are you picking ones from the Stone Age?”

Jack spent the next several minutes in a long-winded and convoluted explanation that basically came down to “Because.” But Ceyonne let it go. Her dad was finally starting to move around and said he was feeling better—and still wasn’t a zombie.

* * *

The next day, defying any and all to stop her, Ceyonne moved from Alpha Tower to join her father on Beta Tower. She insisted that by now he couldn’t still be contagious and he obviously wasn’t going to turn into a zombie, but he was still a sick man and needed help from his family—which meant her.

Eddie was not thrilled, to put it mildly. He offered to accompany her, but…

“Do I have this straight?” asked Ceyonne. “You want to keep sharing a tent with me right next to my cop dad? Well, you may be crazy but I’m not.”

She patted her boyfriend on the cheek. “Don’t sweat it. A week or two from now if I’m not sick either, I can come back over here for a visit, every other day or so.”

She looked around. By now, the hodgepodge of tents and tool sheds that provided shelter for all the people on Alpha Tower had been melded together by a crazy-quilt of plastic sheeting and table cloths from the diner held down by what looked to be a couple of tons of duct tape and designed to simultaneously shed rainfall and collect it in drinking containers. Ceyonne had seen a photograph once of slums in one of the big cities in Brazil—
favelas,
they were called, if she remembered right—and the housing on top of the storage tank sort of reminded her of that. Gamma, Sigma and Phi Towers were even more extreme.

“In this rabbit warren,” she said cheerfully, “we can get laid without my dad being any the wiser. But not over on Beta. I’m not even sure where I’m going to sleep over there myself, since we’ve run out of tents.”

* * *

Rochelle provided the solution to that problem. As did every adult in their group, she’d spent time looking out for zombies with the binoculars. In the course of doing so, she’d noticed a wooden shed on the grounds of the asphalt plant that formed much of the southern boundary of the tank farm.

“We’ll use that,” she announced. “Freddy, Jack, Eddie—get the truck and let’s move the shed up on Beta Tower. If we have to, we’ll dismantle it first.”

“Ceyonne doesn’t need anything that big,” Jack protested. “That shed looks
heavy.
And it’s probably full of tools.”

“Good, we can use more tools,” Rochelle said, in the same tone of voice which in times past had quelled incipient unrest on the part of waitresses, cooks and dishwashers alike. “And it won’t just be Ceyonne because I’m going with her. She and I can share the shed.”

“Why are
you
going?” asked Andy.

Rochelle spent the next several minutes in a long-winded and convoluted explanation that basically came down to “Because.” But Andy was sure the real reason was that Rochelle was looking to the future—which they were all starting to do, at least a little. Now that it seemed fairly certain that Jerome Bennett was going to survive the flu and remain human, she’d figured out that he’d make a nice partner for a single woman about the same age. If she didn’t dilly-dally.

Andy wasn’t concerned. Rochelle Lewis was nothing if not sensible. Should something start to develop, she’d come to Andy for a supply of condoms before any problems arose.

And wasn’t that something of a wonder? Here she was, Andrea Kaminski, sixty-eight years old and one of the tough old biddies who more or less ran the White Towers settlement. (Harry O’Malley had brought his mother, his aunt, and his grandmother in the bus and not one of them wasn’t up to snuff.) And she was worrying about having to deliver babies before they were ready to handle the problem.

Things were looking up, sure enough. All they had to do now was last another three or four months until winter arrived.

That would be a
Chicago
winter, with temperatures regularly below freezing and sometimes dropping down to zero—even below it, on occasion—and the wind cutting like a saber. She didn’t think the naked monsters would last very long under those conditions.

Zombie apocalypse, wimps and whiners called it. No wonder the archangels weren’t bothering to show up. Let the junior varsity handle it.

Staying Human

Jody Lynn Nye

Nora Fulton lay on the cold dirt and leaned over the sight of her rifle.
Turn, you bastard! Turn!

She had spotted the gaunt naked man through the thick trees while he was hunting the squirrel he now gnawed. He was the right size and shape, and his pasty white ass and reddish hair fit the colors of the man she wanted to kill.

Turn!

She raised her head to glance around for her partner, Lou Hammond. She spotted his broad, dark forehead, and wide black eyes as dark as hers just peering over a fallen log. He caught her glance, and nodded. If she didn’t take him with the first shot, he would finish the job.

A crack, as if of a branch that had broken off in the wind, made all of them jump. The zombie turned, squirrel guts hanging from his jaws, and stared wild-eyed in the direction of the noise. Nora moaned, but she squeezed her finger on the trigger. The man dropped.

Lou scrambled out from his hiding place and came to stand beside her and looked down at the corpse with its shattered skull leaking brilliant red blood and corrupted gray and purple brains.

“You got him?” he asked.

Nora shook her head. Her stomach felt like it had crept up her throat. It took her a minute to get her voice back.

“It’s not him. It’s just some other poor soul.”

“Well, waste not, want not,” Lou said. He unfolded a body bag from his backpack and laid it on the ground, then pulled on a bright yellow temporary hazmat suit. “C’mon. We don’t have a bunch of time before other alphas hear the shot and come running.”

“I know.” Nora put her gun down and put on her own protective gear. She wound her long dark braid up into the cap before she brought the hood down and settled the clear panel in front of her face. They checked each other’s fastenings to make sure there was no chance of exposure to the stinking body. Taking the time to yank the spine would leave them exposed too long in the woods without backup. Better let the team back at the lab dissect it out. She sent up an apology to the spirits for this man’s soul, and thanked God that he would be able to help a lot of people with his earthly remains.

She passed by a tree whose upper branches were heavy with fruit just about ripe. It was September the fifth. That had been her wedding anniversary, her and Troy’s. Eight years. She had hoped she could give him a memorial that day by killing the bastard who had killed him. Not yet, though. Not yet.

They set out down the crest for the Foresight Genetics compound. Nora kept a dozen paces behind Lou’s comforting yellow bulk, her shotgun cocked and leveled, scanning the woods as they went. With the coming of dusk, the zombies were moving around again, looking for food. Every so often they found a few unlucky people who thought by holding out in the hills above Nashville that they’d be safe. Most of the time, the zombies caught deer and rabbits. She’d seen the corpses of the ones that had taken on raccoons or coyotes. The claw marks and bites were deeper than anything that a human being could inflict on one another. Nora hated to think it served them right, but it did. Her Choctaw grandmother had told her that harboring feelings of revenge did more harm to her spirit than to her enemies, but Nora refused to let go. Not until that zombie was dead.

The arrival that morning of the government helicopter to pick up the weekly load of vaccine had brought the alphas out of hiding. A whole group of zombies had tried to batter their way in through the compound gate, using rocks and sticks as bludgeons. The electric fence took care of a couple of them. The volunteers and Homeland Security people shot as many of the rest as they could and drove off the remainder. Management sent teams out to clean up survivors. When the cameras had picked up this man, with his red hair, Nora insisted that he would be their quarry.

Rustling in the bushes put her on higher alert. She and Lou had been vaccinated, once, but the immunologist on staff reminded them that they still needed another shot in a couple of days. Nora dreaded the effects of a bite, but she was determined to take down that red-headed zombie.

* * *

If it hadn’t been for footage on their security system that Sid had insisted on installing in their house up in the hills, she would never have known what had happened to him and their son. Nora still cursed the day that she had had to stay overnight to monitor an experiment. It was common practice for any of the scientists, but her timing had been fateful. When she had called down to see how things were going, a neighbor had answered the phone, weeping. Nora had downloaded the contents of the security cameras off the web, before they went down for good. The zombie that had attacked Sid and Charlie on their own doorstep had been their longtime mailman. The bastard had even grinned up at the camera as if he knew she would see it.

The news reports were way behind the pace of the zombie epidemic. It had spread so fast that whole communities were wiped out in a matter of weeks. The police, what was left of them, advised her to stay where she was.

Foresight Genetics had always been a leader in research. They had several facilities in Tennessee, mostly centered in Nashville, but that had become a no-go area fairly early on. To her horror, Nora had watched an otherwise dignified corporate executive and scientist strip out of her clothes and go crazy while on an internet conference call.

Luckily, Nora’s facility had been situated on the edge of the city, not in the center of town, where everyone at the Grand Old Opry or any of the tourist sites became infected or died in a matter of days. The management of Foresight Genetics lived up to their name and moved their electron microscopes and centrifuges, along with the scientists and technicians to run them, and anyone else who had remained uninfected, out of the city, up to a small factory on the ridge northwest of Nashville that was powered by a dynamo in the river below. When the grid went down, they could still keep running. Foresight was one of the facilities tapped by the government from the Hole to stop every other project and work on a cure. Along with her fellow technicians, Nora had junked all her precious experiments and started to work on isolating and eradicating the bloodborne pathogen.

Lou had a similar horror story to tell. His wife and kids were returning from visiting her parents Denver on a Greyhound bus. They came back infected. Lou had been lucky to escape a few days later with his life when all of them turned at once. He had set up a cot behind his desk in Receiving and refused to talk with anyone for days.

As a result, all of them had cringed when they got on the heavily guarded bus to take them up to the new facility, cleaned out and secured by grim-faced soldiers who wouldn’t talk about their experiences, either. They collected as many family members and stragglers as they could who showed no signs of bites or symptoms. Only a couple disappeared in the first few days. No one talked about what had happened to them. Denesa Campbell, head of Human Services, took over organizing child care and housing. People who had lost loved ones paired off or created ad hoc family groups. Someone brought in a few chickens, five cats, nine dogs and a goat.

* * *

Using human spinal tissue for the vaccine weighed heavily on everyone’s conscience. The management did their best to deal with the ethics, offering counseling and advice to the researchers and other staff. In the end, they established a parallel research track. Half the facility would keep on with vaccine manufacture, but Foresight would begin working to develop a treatments to give humans immunity against the microorganism that didn’t require anyone to die for their manufacture. In the meantime, the zombies, unaware anyone cared that they used to be human, kept on hammering at the perimeter, trying to get at Foresight’s employees to turn them or eat them.

Nora had been squeamish at first about the formula for the vaccine, but came to terms with it in short order. She thought it was hypocritical of the others to wail on and on about the source of tissue, when each of them going through high school and college biology, not to mention previous research programs, had sacrificed dozens, if not hundreds, of rats, guinea pigs, hamsters, even chimpanzees, in the name of science. This wasn’t just science; it was survival. On a personal and spiritual level, she had been horrified beyond belief to have to kill people. An eye for an eye was a bad idea and bad practice. Wiping out a predator was not. When management had asked for volunteers to help defend the compound and bring in more “samples,” Nora sucked it up and stepped forward. She had brought down her first buck at eleven. Mild-tempered Lou, from the middle of Indianapolis, turned out to have hunted rabbits with his granddaddy from the time he had been a tot. He couldn’t kill the person who had caused his family’s deaths, but he had volunteered to help wipe out the zombies around the compound.

They’d eyed each other askance when management teamed them up, the skinny little half-Choctaw woman and the big African-American man, but they turned out to be a good team. Her small, lithe figure allowed her to slip in between trees and rocks to take tricky shots. Lou never ran out of energy, and he was strong enough to haul a body on his shoulder for miles. They never talked about their mutual losses. It was just too painful. At least, they could do something to avenge them.

* * *

When they were a couple hundred yards out, they were in range for the radios to work. Nora clicked on her walkie-talkie and spoke against the hiss.

“Nora and Lou with a delivery.”

“Gotcha.”

The National Guardswoman on duty at the gate saw them coming and put out the call to the others. As soon as they got inside, two technicians with a gurney were waiting to take their kill. Gratefully, Lou and Nora stripped off their plastic suits and tossed them into the incinerator pit on top of a pile of yellow already there. That part of the lot was fenced off to keep the facility’s flock of chickens from falling in or getting contaminated. Eggs and the occasional stewing hen were important sources of healthy protein for the inhabitants.

“Everyone else come back already?” Nora asked Brenda Hatton, one of her fellow lab rats, as they followed the wheeled table into the main building.

“Most of ’em are still out,” the heavy-set young woman said. “Courtland Jones got bit. He’s in isolation.”

“How bad?”

“Dunno,” Brenda said, her hazel eyes welling with tears. “He’s only had the same one inoculation that the rest of us have. I hope he makes it.” Nora squeezed the young woman’s shoulder with sympathy. Brenda nodded. Everyone knew the risks.

She tossed her short blond braids in the direction of the side door. “There’s some chicken stew in the cafeteria, and fresh sweet tea. Y’all can go get some, but management wants to see you right after.”

Nora exchanged a glance with Lou. “Anything wrong?”

“Not wrong,” Brenda said. She grinned, an expression few of them saw those days. “Maybe right. Lincoln’s got a breakthrough, he thinks. Go on and eat. Management will bring you up to speed soon’s you finish.”

“Hey, come and sit down!” Management, in the person of Lincoln Fairbrun, had held the whole group together for the last months. He was a tall man, with weather-beaten, creased red skin, a high forehead and a little fringe of brown hair mixed with gray on top. For the first time, Nora saw how the strain all of them had been carrying was telling on their boss. His little sleeping room, the only real office he had any more, smelled of stale tobacco. It was a polite fiction that nobody smoked any more. Cigarettes from abandoned houses were almost as prized as untainted food. He played with a burned-out, crushed stub at the melamine table. A raft of folded metal chairs leaned against the wall. Only three were unfolded, including the one he sat in. He wasn’t expecting anybody else.

“What’s up, sir?” Lou asked, holding one of the chairs for Nora, then sliding into the last.

Management’s gray eyes, swallowed up in nests of wrinkles, held a light. “Paul and Sarah are pretty sure they’ve got a working bacteriophage. It’s one that normally goes after blood parasites. They’ve adapted some that seem to attack the microorganism. They’re working to develop enough for ongoing therapy. If this works out, it can reverse the zombie plague.”

Nora felt hope rising in her soul. “That’s great news, sir! Do you need us to help them?”

Management waved his hand. “Not much you can do. I’ve got volunteers already to staff every shift and watch its development. If this was happier times, we’d be waiting to get approval from the FDA for animal testing. But it isn’t.”

“No, sir,” Nora said. She narrowed her eyes at Fairbrun. “What do you need from us?”

Management sighed. “These are desperate times, Nora. We’ve got a couple of hunters who have been bit, and we’ll try the therapy on them. We need subjects for testing. Live subjects.”

“Bullshit, man,” Lou said, his eyes burning with fury. “You want us to bring zombies into the only place maybe in the state where there aren’t any?”

Fairbrun threw up his hands. “We have to be able to observe them, Lou. If we treat and release, we can’t track their progress. They could get eaten by other zombies. They could go into spontaneous remission that has nothing to do with the treatment. We need to know.”

“These people are murderers,” Nora said. “You know—” She stopped talking as tears filled her eyes and throat. Fairbrun reached over and took her hand.

“I know what I’m asking. We might be able to save a lot more people, reverse this plague. Six of the others have agreed to try and bring back live, er, specimens. You’re the best team we’ve got out there. Will you help?”

Nora turned to look into Lou’s eyes. He was torn. So was she. But to be able to go home, or to what was left of home, was something she ached for. She nodded. Her heart was full of anger and resentment, but it was a way forward.

“Good. Julian is leading the pack. Get some sleep. We’ll start out at dawn, when the alphas are still out.”

* * *

“Did you sleep?” she asked Lou the next morning, as they gathered in the predawn chill. The eight hunters and volunteers from among the non-employees stood in the front lot near the gate, along with the six hunting hounds who had been among the dogs brought in. At least the dogs looked eager.