Dearly, Beloved (3 page)

“No. Dr. Salvez said the press has been alerted. We can’t keep secrets any longer. It would hurt us more in the long run.”

Great
. I set my things aside. “Then what
are
we going to do, Dr. Chase?”

She didn’t respond right away. When she did, her voice was still halting, but ultimately controlled. “All we
can
do is work
through it. Dr. Salvez said the vaccine still seems to be effective against the original strain.” She looked uneasily at me. “We can’t meditate on the two people who were infected. We have to try to think, instead, of the thousands of people out there who are safe because of your father’s work.”

“But we don’t know if they’re safe,” I said. “That’s the thing. There haven’t been any large-scale zombie attacks. We don’t really
know
if the vaccine works—they had to rush it out so quickly. And if the living don’t feel safe …” I trailed off. I didn’t want to think about it.

“But there are thousands of families out there with dead relatives, Nora,” Bram said. “And I haven’t heard of a single casual infection, so that’s promising. Dr. Chase is right. We need to try and keep things like that in mind.”

“What if there are others, though?” Dr. Chase asked. “Other strains? Other zombies with this new strain, wandering around?” Her questions seemed to ring out like gongs. Neither Bram nor I answered.

I couldn’t think of any answers. I didn’t want to.

“Let’s not worry about that now,” Bram reiterated. “Let’s deal with what we do know. Let me get the boys together—you worry about Doc Sam.”

I rose. “Are you leaving, then?”

“For the ships, yeah.” The ships, the NVS
Erika
and the NVS
Christine
, were where the majority of Company Z’s doctors still worked—either on zombie-related research or on caring medically for the undead. “Once this news gets around, the city is going to explode. We’ll need manpower there. I’d take you with me, but …”

“Papa,” I said, irritated. He was on the
Erika
.

Bram nodded. “And in case something goes wrong, we’ll need people here at the house to execute DHE. I’ll leave Chas and Ren behind, too.”

“I know.” The Dearly House Exit was his new contingency plan. Still, I was disappointed—and worried. “Go.”

Bram touched my chin, then ran up the stairs to fetch the boys. I helped Dr. Chase up and saw her into the kitchen, where I put on the kettle for tea. She sagged against the wall, and I knew that even in this small thing, I was doing my bit.

Still, after everything I’d done in December, it wasn’t the same.

I hated New London, but I tried to deal with it. That’s what everyone needed to do right now—just
deal
.

Of course, that was easier said than done.

I’d told Nora the truth—I wasn’t completely pessimistic. At one time I had been in total agreement with my superiors that the majority of living society couldn’t handle knowing about the existence of zombies, so the fact that so many living people rushed to the defense of their dead was both humbling and heartening. Now that everything was out in the open, I truly hoped some sort of living–dead compromise could be reached. We wouldn’t be around very long, after all. Even with preservation and medical care, all zombies were doomed to rot. If we could keep anyone else from being infected, the living wouldn’t have to put up with us forever.

But I was born of a poor, hardworking family and put through my paces as an army captain, and the “okay, but” instinct was genetically embedded in me. And seeing things as they actually stood in the city—that always made me question my judgment.

Aside from the EF, the west end of New London had suffered the most from the Siege, and cleanup was still under way. There
were few people on the streets as yet, and we traveled past boarded-up shops and smoke-stained houses, basket-bearing servants and municipal trucks loaded with construction supplies. Eventually we took a detour to avoid a bit of road reconstruction, and neared the center of the city. Flat screen advertising boards mounted on the sides of buildings and the zeppelins floating overhead reminded people not to expose themselves to zombie bodily fluids; notices about new vaccine shipments were mixed in with the usual digital ads for fabrics, teas, and “health corsets.” There were a few military men and cops on patrol, but not half as many as there should have been. As usual.

“We’re going to have to go past the Morgue,” I announced. We had to drive through the city to get to the port on the eastern side.

“Great,” John Gates grumbled from the passenger seat of Nora’s aunt’s Model V. “Coalhouse,” as he preferred to be called, was a tall, muscular black guy, the right side of his face skeletal, the rotting eye loose in its bony socket. He compulsively fingered it and its piece of supportive foam, as well as his hearing aid, making sure everything was still there. “This morning is awesome. Not only do I get to work with the people who tried to kill us, I get to tour the zombie ghetto.”

“Don’t even start. We’re not helping the army, we’re helping Dearly,” Tom Todd said from the backseat. The partition between the front and back parts of the carriage was lowered, and I could see him fiddling with the flat screen in-cab computer. “How do I adjust the volume on this thing? God, why does everything in the Territories have to be so
complicated
?”

“Hell if I know.” We were all Punk-born, all similarly wary of anything too high-tech, even if we’d gotten used to using such devices in the NV army. Computerized equipment never felt … authentic, though. Honest. Even if it was occasionally helpful.

“There it goes.” Tom was a short, broad, bald young man
with strong arms and a patch of smooth gray skin sewn over the hole where his nose should have been. He wore a metal leg brace around his left knee, atop his pin-striped pants. It squeaked as he settled back to watch video clips.

“This is bad,” Coalhouse said, looking at me with his good eye. “What are we going to do?”

“Help out where we’re needed, first of all. See what happens.”

“It’s on the news,” Tom said. “And these clips are preloaded, right? This isn’t live. So word’s gone out.”

My back tensed. “Hooray.”

Tom’s head waved back and forth as the news announcer nattered on. At one point the gent on the screen sniffed and referred to zombies as “overgrown leeches,” to which Tom countered, “So says the
mummy
? Better cold than old, pal.”

“Leave it be,” I counseled. “There it is.”

The “Morgue” was actually the southern end of Dahlia Park, a large, gated plot of grass and trees in the middle of New London. Two weeks ago Captain James Wolfe, my former company commander, had been executed there for high treason—selling out tribal secrets to a Punk, Major Dorian Averne, and working with him to kidnap both Dearlys in a twisted bid for redemption. Convinced that Dr. Dearly had engineered the Laz as a form of biological warfare against the Punks, Averne had gone along with Wolfe, all the while plotting Nora’s death as “punishment” for the imagined sins of her father. Him, I’d taken care of. In a way. He was dead and gone, at any rate.

I didn’t like to think about it. Even though everything traced back to them, I still felt partially responsible for the Siege. If we’d caught and killed all of the Grays—the mindless dead pawns Averne and Wolfe had managed to smuggle into New London to do their bidding—the illness wouldn’t have spread. None of this would’ve happened.

The Morgue wouldn’t have happened.

Over the last month or so, the place had slowly become occupied by hundreds of zombies. The pro-zombie minority was, although vocal, still a minority. The streets weren’t safe for a dead man at night, and quite a few had become homeless—either because they were ostracized by their living families, or because they’d drawn the short reanimation straw and forgotten who they were or where they were supposed to be. In addition, zombies had trickled into the heart of the city from its outlying suburbs and from small towns to the near north and south, where the flight of individuals from New London before the threat was fully understood led to minor outbreaks. After months of disorganization, they finally started to band together and form a sort of unofficial camp—one that citizens decried and politicians railed against. But they had nowhere else to go.

The Morgue was one of the reasons I kept hanging around the ships, doing my part, even though Company Z was no more. Months ago the army had honorably discharged us, breaking up their secret zombie-only Lazarus eradication unit as a publicity move—their last insult. I should’ve walked away then, like I meant to, but … in the end, I couldn’t. And I wasn’t alone. Tom and Coalhouse and a few other former members of Z-Comp also routinely swallowed their pride and showed up to help out the doctors and soldiers. None of us was getting money or governmental brownie points for it. We wouldn’t have taken them. We did it because helping Dr. Dearly was still the best way we knew to serve the zombie community.

Didn’t mean we had to like how close it put us to the feds, though.

The camp looked uneasy. It was overwhelmingly gray—the color of the stained canvas tents and rough wooden lean-tos, the worn protest signs propped up against tarp-draped generators, the trampled grass. The zombies gathered within. I wondered if they knew about the new strain yet. I wondered if I ought to say
something to someone, spread word that they should lie low. There were so many of them—more than I could ever hope to help. Hundreds of intelligent zombies, the result of thousands of infections. Only a few of us made it to the other side mentally intact. The rest became flesh-hungry killers.

Killers it’d been my job to take care of.

“It’s not your fault,” Tom said suddenly. “It’s not any of our faults. We were on that mission, too.” His voice stiffened—but not with accusation. For emphasis. “You blame us?”

Did I look that obvious? Clearing my throat, I tamped down the accelerator. “No. Never.”

I did blame myself, though.

When we arrived at the port it was to find that although news about the new strain had just gotten out, it was already shoveling proverbial coal into a raging fire. The
Erika
and the
Christine
were each moored at a long stone dock, and the wooden barricade spanning both appeared shockingly undermanned. The area in front of it was thick with press and protestors, most of them attempting to get access to the
Erika
. The government researchers there were the natural target for torches and pitchforks. It was exactly as I’d feared.

So, having already armed ourselves back at the house, we threw ourselves into the fray—same as always. Shoving my way through the crowd, I prepared to deal with Commander Norton, the living soldier who’d been assigned dock security. He was a jowly, hangdog man we’d nicknamed the Barricade Beast. He didn’t like letting us through, he didn’t like us pitching in—we were no longer officially soldiers, and we had no clearance. He didn’t like us in
general
.

Today, though, upon catching sight of us, the man nodded and pointed to a portion of the barricade. I saw a few other
Z-Compers there. “Thanks for showing up, boys. Could use you there. This is gonna get worse before it gets better.”

“Right,” I said. Exchanging greetings with the red-coated living troops and our old friends, we settled in for the long haul.

Which ended up being hours. Hours during which the crowd multiplied, my stress level crept steadily up, and I wondered what I might’ve gotten us into.

“You need to get
back
,” Tom told one of the roughly five billion reporters swarming on the docks a short time later, his teeth clenched.

“And
you
need to talk to me!” The reporter was a young man with spiky black hair, probably close to our age. Somehow he kept popping up at the front of the crowd, no matter how many times we physically chased him off. “Why are they trying to keep us away from the doctors? I want to interview a doctor!”

“The only good zombie is a zombie dead for good!” screamed a sign-laden living protestor located behind him.

“Oh, I’ll give you an interview. How’re you with four-letter words?”

“Give it up,” I told Tom, before turning my rifle around and using the butt of it to once more prod Mr. Curious into the pen with his fellow media people. “No comment! We’re dead, remember? Dumb as a box of rocks?”

“Yeah right!” Before the young reporter could get anything else out, he was swallowed up by the crowd. Those who found themselves newly at the front started badgering us instead.

“We’re running out of room down here!” Coalhouse yelled from farther down the line. I turned to look at him and saw him pause, shoving his wobbling eyeball in yet again.

“Dude, take out your bloody eye!” Tom shouted. “You’re going to lose it!”

“We’re not in a battle!” Coalhouse countered.

Tom gestured widely. “Does this not look like action to you?”

“Tom,” I said. “Bigger fish.”

“
Exactly
. God, he is such a child. I told him to leave it behind in the carriage.”