Deadside in Bug City (2 page)

Draven looked over his shoulder at Todd. “And if the woman resists being brought out?”

“Then you bring her out by force,” Todd said. “But we don’t want her injured. You’ll be driving an ambulance. You’ll secure her to the stretcher and simply drive out. Drugging her isn’t an option, since she has no functioning biological systems.”

“I don’t get it,” said Draven. “These freaks don’t eat or drink, their organs don’t work, so what keeps them moving? I’m no biologist, but I know muscles and nerves have to burn energy to move.”

“We don’t know yet,” said Todd. “The CDC has some of the victims in an isolation wing and they’ve done all sorts of testing on them, but so far they’ve found no answers. They
have
discovered unexplained electrical activity in the nerves and muscles, but they have no idea what causes it.”

“Finding her will be the hardest part of the job,” said Fisher. “But she’s revisited her wall painting three times that we know of, so she might show up there again. That’s the area you should focus on. We’ve marked it on the map for you.”

Draven stood. He looked down at Melanie Fisher, then back at Dr. Todd. “All right. I’ll do it.”

“Excellent,” said Todd, suddenly ebullient. “Melanie, let’s go ahead and inoculate him.”

“What?” Draven stiffened.

“Just as a precaution,” said the doctor. “We want to immunize you against things like cholera, typhoid fever. We’re treating this as we would a visit to a primitive third-world country.”

“I’ll be gentle,” Fisher said, smiling as she touched his arm. She left the room and came back a few minutes later with a pressure-gun injector. Draven took off his jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeve. She put the barrel to his bare upper arm and fired. When she pulled it away, a trickle of blood ran down his arm and she wiped it away with a sterile swab.

“There,” she said. “In three days you’ll be good to go.”

* * *

Just after dawn on the fourth day after his initial meeting with Todd and Fisher, Draven climbed into the driver’s seat of the ambulance and slammed the door. Dr. Todd signaled him to roll the window down. Melanie Fisher stood behind the dapper doctor, smoking a cigarette.

“One more thing,” said Todd. “Try not to run over any Rotties. Passions are already high over this whole situation. We don’t want to do anything to set off more rioting.”

Draven nodded. He put the ambulance in gear and drove off in the direction of the fenced-in derelict housing projects known as Bug City. On the seat next to him was a folder with a color photograph of “Raven” paper-clipped to its cover. Her real name was unknown. Before the undead victims of the Lazarus Bug had been deposited in the condemned projects, they each had been photographed for future reference. The raven-haired woman in the photo had striking features death hadn’t erased, not yet. Her heavy-lidded dark eyes appeared unfocused, and her slack-jawed expression suggested a woman coming off a drunk, but Draven easily imagined how she must’ve looked with the spark of life animating her features.
She must’ve been a real knock-out when she had a heartbeat.

As he rolled to a stop in front of the gated entrance, a national guardsman in full combat gear approached the ambulance, his rifle hanging by a canvas strap from his shoulder. Draven flashed his bogus orange security pass in the soldier’s face.

“You bringing one out?” asked the young man.

Draven nodded.

“Be careful in there. The Rotties are restless.”

The soldier opened the gate and Draven drove through the temporary break in the electrified fence. The gate slammed shut behind him as he drove slowly along a narrow street of cracked asphalt that led into the cramped huddle of ugly brick buildings. The mixed aromas of disinfectant and human rot drifted in through the vents. He closed them and turned the air-conditioner on low.

A flash of yellow caught his eye. A dark-skinned man in a soiled yellow jumpsuit shambled along a walkway in front of the first building on the right. Two more Rotties appeared in the doorway of the same building, a woman with a child hanging on to her leg. The undead woman seemed oblivious to the fact that the child was even there.

Draven stopped to consult the map. By his reckoning, the building with the woman’s wall-painting was two streets over, on the backside of the project’s west-end. Something thumped against the side of the vehicle. He glanced at the mirror on the driver’s door and saw a tall ashen-skinned black man hammer his fist against the ambulance in a second blow. The man was bare-chested, the empty arms of his jumpsuit hanging from his waist to the ground.

Draven cursed. Either his employers had lied to him, or they had been wrong about the Rotties’ physical capabilities. Pounding a fist against a vehicle required intent and—at the least—a rudimentary understanding of cause and effect. It was a violent act of will. Draven touched the butt of the pistol snugged in the shoulder rig inside his jacket. He had no idea what effect a .45 slug would have on the walking dead, but he wouldn’t hesitate to find out if things got too hairy.

He gunned the engine and sped away as the Rottie delivered a parting blow. He turned right at the next narrow street and had to come to a complete stop to avoid running over a skin-and-bone zombie crawling across the asphalt, head down and long, dirty hair dragging the street. Much of the dead flesh of the crawler’s hands had sloughed off, exposing bare bones. Draven was filled with revulsion as he watched the crawler encounter the curb and crawl in place, unable to clear the raised concrete.

“These poor bastards need to be destroyed,” he said to himself. Pro-lifers be damned, he thought, this isn’t life.

He drove slowly on. A Rottie fell from a third-story window and hit head-first on the ground below. It lay unmoving a moment, then pushed to its feet and staggered forward, its neck obviously broken, head hanging obscenely to one side. Draven was tempted to get out of the vehicle and shoot the thing in the head to put it out of its undying misery, but he was beginning to suspect a bullet in the brain wouldn’t lay these abominations to rest. Probably nothing short of cremation would stop them. Saturation bombing with napalm might do it, but crematoriums would be much tidier.

His cell phone rang. He flipped it open and answered. It was Melanie Fisher.

“Bad news,” she said. “There are reports of men with guns trying to get to Bug City. The police intercepted a convoy of pickup trucks and turned them back, but there may be more on the way. They call themselves The Exterminators and say they are going to eliminate the Rotties once and for all.”

“Great,” said Draven, lighting a cigarette.

“Draven…?”

“Yeah?”

“Be careful.”

“Bet your sweet ass,” he said, then shut the cell and accelerated to the next corner, where a naked Rottie walked in place, forehead against a streetlamp pole, going nowhere.

He stopped at the curb fronting Raven’s spray-painted wall. He put on the breathing apparatus (a mask connected to a canister of oxygen worn in a canvas sling on his back), shut off the engine and stepped out of the vehicle. He pulled a digital camera from his jacket pocket and approached the brick wall. The nearest Rotties were milling about in the street twenty meters from him, oblivious to his presence. In the distance behind them, another scattered handful wandered a grassy area near the electrified fence.

Draven stared at the woman’s handiwork. Beneath a shapeless blob of red paint were three crude but unmistakable letters: G O D. Below the letters was a misshapen arrow pointing downward. He raised the camera to his eye and snapped off six shots. He looked around to make sure his flank was still secure, then took four more shots.

He wasn’t a religious man, so he was somewhat surprised by his reaction to Raven’s “GOD” graffiti. Chills prickled his arms and scalp, and he felt a falling sensation in his gut as if he were in an elevator suddenly lurching to a stop. He stared at the wall, trying to fathom the meaning of the down-pointing arrow under God. Did it mean the woman thought God was here? Was it a distress signal to the Almighty, the arrow intended to direct Him here from Heaven? Did it mean God was buried here, entombed beneath the arrow? Did it mean anything at all, or was it only a religious delusion of a decaying brain?

He shot one last picture, stuck the camera in his jacket and walked toward the building across the street—the direction from which Raven originally had come to spray her message on the wall. He didn’t relish going into any of these buildings, but he had to begin his search somewhere, and it seemed a logical choice. If there were 1,400 Rotties within these fences, then most of them had to be inside the buildings; there weren’t that many wandering about outside. Maybe a shred of primitive instinct to seek shelter drove them indoors.

He stopped in the doorway of building F, pulled his Mag-Lite from his back pocket and stepped inside. There was no electricity in any of the buildings and Draven felt as if he were entering a shadowy cave—or a giant tomb. He heard nothing but the rhythmic hiss of his breath in his oxygen mask. In front of him was a stairway to the two floors of apartments above. He clicked on the flashlight and started on the ground floor, going from unit to unit, but to his surprise he found the ramshackle apartments empty. Where the hell were the Rotties?

He took the thin concrete-and-steel steps to the second floor. He kicked a door open and his beam of light fell on a naked corpse standing in front of a TV with a shattered screen. In profile, her partially decayed breasts sagged to her enormous belly. The woman must’ve been pregnant when she succumbed to the virus, and Draven willed himself not to think of the never-to-be-born infant slowly rotting in her womb. She turned sluggishly toward the source of the light beam, her eyes holding the light like cloudy mirrors. Her pregnant belly was unnaturally low-slung, the dark purple head of the dead baby protruding from her vagina. Draven guessed that the walls of her womb had yielded to rot and gravity had brought the infant to its obscene impasse. He left them there and went on to the next unit. Fifteen minutes later he’d completed his sweep of F building, having found only six Rotties—none of them Raven. He decided to go back to Building G, marked by the inexplicable graffiti.

As soon as he went through the doorway he knew he’d hit undead pay-dirt. Rotties congregated at the foot of the stairs, on the stairs and in the doorways of apartment units. Some of them turned in his direction and looked at him with dead eyes. Unlike the living-dead in countless zombie movies, these walking corpses didn’t grunt, growl or shriek “More brains.” With no air in the lungs, they couldn’t vocalize at all. There was only the low murmur of shuffling bare feet.

Draven played his light in their faces, looking for Raven. Some of them backed away from the light, others moved toward it. Remembering the man who’d pounded the ambulance, he warily advanced into the huddle of zombies. The stench found its way into his mask. He ignored it and weaved his way through them and toward the first apartment.

A mummified hand knocked his oxygen mask askew, and he lashed out with the Mag-Lite in a moment of panic. The heavy flashlight thumped into a wide, putrefied face and dislodged the dead man’s nose and caved in his cheek. Another hand latched onto the back of Draven’s jacket and yanked him off balance. He swung around with the club-like Mag-Lite and cracked it against the aggressive Rottie’s skull. The light didn’t go out.

As with one mind, the undead crowd washed over Draven like a relentless ocean wave and took him under.

The dead sea of yellow-clad corpses suddenly parted above him. He was on his back, looking up into the face of the woman he’d been sent to find. Raven had found him.

* * *

She extended her slender hand to him, but he couldn’t bring himself to touch her and stood up on his own. His mask hung below his chin. He left it there so he could speak clearly to her. “My name is Draven,” he said in a loud, clear voice. “I’ve come to take you out of here. Do you understand me?”

Though her eyes were death-clouded, he perceived intelligence behind them. She silently mouthed his name.

Your name is on the lips of the dead
.

The other Rotties stood motionless around them, leaning in expectantly. Draven sensed they were watching this meeting with great reverence, as if he were an envoy from the world of the living, here to impart a message of profound import to their leader.

“Will you come with me?” he asked.

Her face didn’t appear any worse for the wear than it had when her photo was taken. The eggheads were apparently right about the unnatural rate of decay. And yet, most of the other Rotties seemed more rotten than Raven, their flesh slowly yielding to the ravages of decomposition, while her skin remained fairly smooth, though deathly pallid. What, Draven wondered, made her different?

He stared into her unblinking eyes, waiting for an answer, a nod, any sign that she understood his question. “Come with me,” he said. “Please.”

A helicopter’s rotors thumped the air above the building. The Rotties stirred, reacting to the sound. A ripple ran through the herd. Raven raised her hands and immediately calmed them. Draven was astounded by her easy control over her dead fellows.

As he was about to reach for her arm to regain her attention, gunfire erupted outside. Draven pushed through the stinking bodies and looked out the nearest window. Outside the rear fence three men with rifles were shooting at the scattered handful of Rotties in front of them. One of the targets spun around and fell to the weed-choked ground, bits of decayed flesh flying from its face.

“Son of a bitch,” Draven spat. He rushed outside, drawing his .45 from his shoulder rig.

The wounded corpse was on hands and knees, trying to get up. The police helicopter hovered over the armed Exterminators, its loud-speaker ordering them to drop their weapons, but the three riflemen continued to fire at the walking dead.

Draven stood in the middle of the narrow street, assumed a two-handed firing stance and snapped off four shots through the chain-link fence. He didn’t expect to score hits with his handgun at this distance. His intention was to scare the shooters off. But they continued to fire. And now they were firing at him.