Death Plague Omnibus [Four Zombie Novels] (66 page)

Of course the creep hadn’t bothered to reply, but he had let some of the anaesthetic wear off before performing the simple operation. One of these days, Kenny would find out his name and pay the bastard a visit.

After a minute, he began to believe that the patch would stay on.

“It only lasts a few hours before dissolving so we had better make good of our time.” Diane pointed to the huge steel gate in the distance before unzipping the overalls and stepping out of them. She passed them to him. “I made sure they were too big for me so you’d be able to wear them. Even with the patch, you’d never pass as a worker. You really do look bad, Kenny.”

It took him a few minutes to climb into the overalls. He could smell her perfume on in the fabric. “What about the gun? It’s going to be hard disguising that.”

Diane just shrugged. “Don’t worry about it. We’ve just done some essential maintenance to one of the transmission towers close to the old dockyard. At least, you have. I’m just your bodyguard. As for the gun, we’re hardly likely to leave the safety of the innerzones without protection, now are we? There’s no telling what the locals would do to us.”

He couldn’t find fault with her story. Kenny just hoped that the guards wouldn’t decide to question it any further. Then again, considering the color of her uniform, they wouldn’t dare. “When were you promoted, Diane?”

She turned around. “Fat chance of that ever happening, Kenny. It isn’t my uniform. It belongs to the woman who lives across from my apartment. I just happen to have the key to her door and she works the nightshift.” Diane suddenly hushed and hurried across the empty street.

Kenny frowned. He couldn’t see anyone near the checkpoint. His sister stopped by the barrier, looked back at him and shrugged. He watched her manually open it and pull down on the gate while looking around. Kenny rushed over and squeezed through the gap. “This is not right,” he murmured. “I’ve never known this to happen.”

Diane pulled him through and let the barrier drop. “Let’s not question providence, Kenny. To be honest, I wasn’t entirely sure that the guard would fall for my bullshit story anyway. Come on, we’re not far from the medi-center now. I think we should move before that guard does come back.”

His sister had a good point; he already knew that his fate would be sealed if he was caught on this side of the city. The volunteers at the medi-center used to make that perfectly clear when he still went there for his injections .Kenny had a feeling that Diane would probably end up next to him against the execution wall as well. He couldn’t allow that to happen.

Both he and Diane raced down the road. At the moment, the streets were devoid of people, but Kenny knew that wouldn’t last long. He remembered his last visit to the place. The other people like him weren’t too keen on showing their faces either, at least not until they reached the center. Kenny then noticed several moving shadows on both sides of the road; the morning light couldn’t penetrate the overhanging stone roofs. He nodded to himself. They weren’t alone after all. His ex-fellow sufferers were already making their way, no doubt desperate for their next injection.

Diane had seen the shadows too. He’d already seen her stiffen. Kenny didn’t blame her reaction; even with her enlightened attitude, coupled with the fact that her brother was one of the ‘deviants’, it must be almost impossible to totally dispense of all the bias that the authorities shoved down their throats every minute of the day. He slowed down when the building came into view.

A cold shiver travelled down his spine. He had hoped that he’d never set eyes on that vile place ever again. It wasn’t the sight of it that had set off the shiver; the building just felt wrong somehow. He just couldn’t put his finger on it.

“Right,” Diane whispered. “This is going so easy, watch.”

Kenny had no idea what he was supposed to be keeping an eye on, but he did as she asked. The moving shadows all ended up in the same spot, queuing up in front, patiently waiting for the door to open. Not that long ago, he would have been in that line, wanting nothing else but to experience the high after he had pushed that needle into his vein. Kenny wished that he could share what his sister had told him. Then again, would any of them really believe him? He certainly didn’t, not at first, not until she had shown him the evidence. They used to say that the camera never lies. It took a smuggled portable television to show him exactly why the government was ‘helping’ the unfortunate members of the community. The bastards were using the medi-centers as recruitment places for their vile television shows.

He’d sat there, rigid with shock, watching some show called In the Dead House. From what he could work out, the dozen contestants had to complete challenges in order to stop the audience from throwing them out of the house. The last one remaining was the winner. Not that the idea was new. Kenny remembered crap like this polluting the TV long before The Turning. It was the challenges that made him sick. While he watched, he saw two giggling teenage blonde girls taking turns to try and hit this chained-up zombie with baseball bats. The one that managed to stop it from moving was declared the winner. What made him nauseous that that the dead thing used to be one of his mates from the medi-center. He’d just stopped coming a couple of weeks ago. Kenny had assumed that he’d gone to another medi-center; after all, there were hundreds of them scattered across the city.

Kenny had started to ask Diane to turn it off when the camera switched to show more contestants running through a mocked-up version of some city street, carrying crossbows and shooting at more moving dead people. Like the poor bastard having his body bashed in by the two girls, Kenny had seen most of those zombies at the medi-center at one time or another.

“So what am I supposed to be looking for?”

Diane pointed to the alleyway that led to the back of the building. “The employees are currently processing the first batch of addicts. There’s a truck parked at the back that’ll take them through to the broadcasting house. Right now, the place where we want to go will be empty.” She produced a small key from her uniform. “And this unlocks that gate over there.”

She ran across to the huge fence that stopped anyone from going around the back and hurried over to the gate. Kenny ran after her, noticing that a couple of the ones in the queue had spotted them. He didn’t find it too surprising that the ones who had seen them turned away. He remembered what it was like waiting in that queue. The last thing you wanted to happen was to lose your place. It was common knowledge that the ones turning up later were likely to miss out on getting any of the precious drug.

“So, they always process the first batch?” hissed Kenny when he caught up to his sister.

Diane pushed the key in the padlock, twisted and opened it. She pulled him through and locked it behind them. “Yes, for them it makes sense. They want the most active for their show so they go for the ones who were able to get here at first light.”

It was weird, his sister’s statement felt so detached, so cold and clinical to the casual listener, but he could tell straight away that she was seething at the injustice of it. Hell, there weren’t that many humans left on the planet, and yet it still didn’t stop the privileged from exploiting the ones right at the bottom.

Diane looked down both ends of the low-lit passageway before reaching for the door handle. Kenny saw the keyhole and also saw that his sister didn’t possess a key for this door. He wasn’t too sure how he’d react if this door was locked as well. She looked back at him and winked before turning the handle. The door silently swung inwards. He smiled and followed her inside, sighing with pleasure. This room was so warm.

“This way,” she said, making her way through the two piles of cardboard boxes stacked up against both sides of the wall. Kenny gasped when he saw the storeroom right in front of them. Through the glass door, he saw metal shelves overflowing with glass vials full of light blue liquid. There was enough in there to cure him of the stage one infection and cure just about every other person just like him. “What the fuck?” He didn’t doubt that all the other medi-centers would be just like this one too.

“Just look at it all,” he growled. “Why should I be surprised at this?”

“It surprises me that you two are the first ones to ever get this close.”

He spun around and groaned at the sight of Rossini and four other large men standing behind him. They all carried shotguns. Rossini had a syringe in his other hand.

“Kenny, it’s time for your next shot. Oh boy, I’m so excited. I can’t wait to get you on my show. Oh, don’t worry, I’m not going to let them Turn you. I think you’re just lovely the way you are.” He turned his attention to Diane. “There’s so much love shown between you two. What a unique angle. My viewers won’t know whether to love you, Diane, or to call you a traitor to the species.” He grinned. “I’m so glad that I’ve found you two, you’re going to make our TV station very, very rich.”

Chapter Five

It felt as though he had forced a wire coat hanger into his mouth. Patrick Dawson closed the door that led to the inner habitation block and locked it. All of the house guests had finally left. He ran his thumb and forefinger down the side of his face. It still felt as though the permanent smile was affixed to his face. Patrick had to wait until the shift change arrived before he could get the hell out of there. The wall clock above the main door had decided that it would be hilarious to mock him. That could not be the correct time. The stupid boy was already five minutes late. He needed to get home; of all the times that child decided to sleep in, why the heck did he have to choose today of all days?

Patrick ran over to the main doors, jerked them open and looked both ways. All he saw was some old woman on the other side of the street, heading towards Government House. He was seriously going to kill the bastard for doing this to him. He couldn’t stay here any longer, his family needed him. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” he moaned. “What am I going to do now?”

He knew that the longer he spent here, the more chance that he’d have no family left to go home to. Despite that, his sense of loyalty to the job wouldn’t allow him to leave his post. Family did not come before duty. Young Karl obviously didn’t care about his given role, and for that lethargic attitude, Patrick knew deep down that the kid was destined to lose his job. If that happened, the brat would be on the injections. It couldn’t come soon enough for Patrick. Shits like him didn’t deserve the pill privilege.

“I’m so sorry, Justine,” he said, watching the old woman a little longer. Patrick looked down both directions one more time before he shut the doors and came back inside to get warm. He walked over to his desk and slumped in the hard plastic seat, trying not to think about how his wife and daughter were coping right now. He had promised that he’d be home as soon as he could.

Patrick picked up his scanner and turned it around in his shaking fingers before he aimed the gun sight at his face. Did he possess the guts to press that trigger? He thought back to how it had gone off when the gentleman from the second floor had tried to get through the gate. Patrick had been as shocked as him, but his training had kicked in and Patrick had assumed the correct posture and reeled off the appropriate words. Watching Tony’s face had told him that the man hadn’t expected the scanner to go off. It also reinforced a very worrying suspicion that had been lingering at the back of Patrick’s mind for the past couple of days.

That man had been sure that he’d taken his pills. In fact, Patrick would stake his life on it. No medical officer would be so sloppy as to forget to take the one thing that stopped him from being dead. The drugs were losing their potency. He’d suspected this troubling idea for a few weeks now. Now it looked like even the pure pills that only the elite took were not working as well as they should. He remembered how the woman had casually handed Tony that metal foil through the gap in the wire.

Did she have any idea just how much those were worth? Patrick knew people that would pay handsomely for quality pills like that. It took much effort to stop himself from reaching out to snatch those pills out of her manicured fingers. He could have done the deed and gotten away with it too. Patrick could have just as easily said that they were contraband or something equally valid. He doubted that the loss would have made much difference to their privileged lives, apart from seeing it as a minor inconvenience. He was sure that they’d have plenty more in their apartment.

Grabbing those pills could have meant the difference between living and dying for his family though. Patrick reached into his pocket and pulled out another foil packet.

He glared at the things in revulsion. To think that their lives depended on these things made him sick to the stomach. What annoyed him more than anything was the obvious difference with these. Unlike the pills that Tony had rammed into his mouth, these pills were grey.

Sure, the TV adverts all categorically stated that all the pills were of the same potency and it didn’t matter about the color. What utter bullshit. Everyone knew that the white pills were purer.

The ones in his hand looked and tasted like grey chalk. He doubted that they had very little of the precious Beldazine in any of them. He looked at the clock again, dismayed that another five minutes had passed. Patrick stood up and raced over to the doors. The boy was now sixteen minutes late. His gut feeling told Patrick that the slacker had decided not to show up for his shift.

“I can’t stay any longer,” he murmured. “They need me.” The pills probably were next to useless, but they were all he could get. He had no other option. Patrick pulled open the doors; as he suspected, there was still no sign of the boy. “You’re so fucking dead,” he growled. Patrick couldn’t wait any longer. He ran back into the foyer, grabbed his coat, and ran out of the building. He closed the doors but left them unlocked in case that boy did decide to show up.

It only took Patrick a couple of minutes to pass through the normally busy pedestrian walkways that linked the several habitation blocks in this sector. He thought that, for once, luck was in his favor, until Patrick reminded himself that the lack of fast-moving human traffic was probably linked to the boy’s absence and to what was happening to his family. It was quite simple really; their bodies must have become immune to whatever chemical they had put in the pills.

He stopped and leaned over the railing, watching two huge black armored trucks thunder past, heading towards Government House. Each one would be full of exhausted soldiers, fighting the good fight to help clear those walking corpses from around the capitol’s high walls.

The bright blue sky and hot sun currently burning Patrick’s shoulders could not stop a shiver from travelling down his spine. There was just too much evidence around him for Patrick to remain blindly optimistic.

Pretty soon, those trucks would be travelling from Government House, full of soldiers, all fresh and ready for action. This time though, the truck wouldn’t be heading out of the city. They’d be fighting the good fight with freshly-turned city dwellers.

He spun away, trying to hold back the tears. There was no way that he’d let anyone hurt his family, no matter what happened to them. Patrick bolted along the walkway, just hoping that he’d be able to get home before they did turn.

It had been the irritating dog who lived with the Osmond family that had given Patrick the first clue. Just like every other morning, Jack Osmond had let out the ball of greasy black fur before the man left for work. As their block didn’t have access to any recreation area, the bastard thought that it was perfectly acceptable to let the mutt do its business anywhere it liked, which usually meant in the communal hallway.

All the residents knew, especially the Osmonds, that pets were strictly forbidden. Then again, the fact that they had a dog at all was unusual. Everyone knew that anything with four legs didn’t last long in the city.

Patrick lived in a block that, before The Turning, was due to be demolished. Most of the residents had already moved out. Patrick’s family had been promised a new apartment on the other side of the city. Now, they had no choice but to stay in their decrepit apartment; it was falling down around them, and they were surrounded by scummy neighbors with no sign that any of this was going to get any better. Unlike the elite block where he worked, or any of the perimeter blocks that separated the three zones, the people in his block were generally left to fend for themselves.

Just like the many hundreds of grey concrete buildings surrounding their block, they had one family who were supposed to liaise with a central habitat maintenance official to help keep the place running smoothly. It sounded great in theory, but most of the time the families ended up running the blocks like it was their own private fiefdom. The Osmonds were no exception. If their dog crapped outside your door, you picked it up and kept quiet. It was the only way to avoid any trouble.

The only person in the entire block who didn’t despise that vile little animal was Patrick’s little girl. What surprised Patrick was that the feeling was mutual. The dog doted on Lucy. Although his wife hated the family, she had explained to Patrick a few times that this would be the closest their daughter would get to having a childhood similar to the ones they’d had.

That friendship had been severed just three days ago. Patrick had been noticing just how slow and lethargic his daughter had been recently, and suggested that she ought to go get some fresh air. Of course, her response to this suggestion had been noncommittal so Patrick had lost his temper, dragged the girl out of the chair and pushed her outside.

The first thing he saw was the Osmond dog, chewing on the rubber tree that their next door neighbour kept outside. The dog had suddenly stopped and backed away from Lucy, growling.

A hard lump had appeared in the pit of Patrick’s stomach and he’d dragged the unresponsive girl back inside. He’d dug out his portable scanner to check her out, cursing himself for not seeing the signs earlier after the device confirmed what he’d suspected.

Patrick slipped through the open gate that separated the walkway from the rest of the habitation zone. The fact that the gate was even open gave him more of a scare than not witnessing anybody around him. That gate had never been left open. The elite don’t enjoy sharing their breathing space with normal people.

His own block was only a couple of minutes away. He increased his pace when the hard edge of his building came into view. Patrick raced towards the main doors, noticing, for the first time, a couple of young boys playing on top of an abandoned school bus. They both suddenly stood up and started to jeer at him. They were too far away for Patrick to pick out individual words. It didn’t matter to him though. The fact that some part of normality was still going on wiped away some of the heaviness that had settled on his heart.

The familiar and cloying odor of unwashed flesh slammed into his nostrils as soon as he entered the building. He held his nose and ran over to the stairwell, totally bypassing the lift. That hadn’t worked for over a decade. The smell lessened the further he climbed. He knew the reason for the stink. It meant that the building’s air con had packed up yet again. As he passed the Osmonds’ door, he wondered if anybody had bothered to report it.

”Keep calm,” he murmured, when his own door came into view. “Keep thinking of triviality.” He reached his door and took out his key, noticing just how much he was shaking. As he turned the key, Patrick reminded himself that until this morning, the worry of the air con breaking down would have overshadowed everything else. It certainly wouldn’t have been a trivial matter.

Patrick pushed open the door and rushed through the hallway and into the living room, his heart thudding hard against his chest. He saw his beautiful Veronica slumped in the armchair and dropped to his knees. Patrick didn’t need to get any closer to know that his darling wife had passed away. “Oh God,” he said. “I’m too late.” Through the flowing tears, he could see the shell of his now dead wife turn its head.

The thing leaned forward and tried to raise its body out of the chair. Patrick scrambled backwards, his numb mind refusing to take in that he’d lost the only woman he’d ever loved. Despite the endless training and preparation that every citizen was required to do, he couldn’t even find the strength to raise his arms. Patrick watched her stand up and take one tentative step forward. Somewhere, deep beneath his conscious mind, a tiny voice calmly informed him that he was watching it take its first steps. Although the sounds of Patrick’s voice had given the thing the motivation to move, it still didn’t know Patrick was in the room. There was still time for him to get out of there.

He rested the back of his head against the wall, noticing that his dead wife had yet to open her eyes. He decided there and then that this was his time. If Veronica had turned, then his daughter must have gone the same way as well; his wife had only started to show the same symptoms yesterday. There was nothing else for him to live for. The dead woman’s foot was now inches away from his body.

The pain would only last for a few seconds and then it would be all over for him. Sure, his body would still be moving, but his soul would have left this miserable fucking existence to be with the rest of his family.

The corpse had seen him. It groaned in excitement and stumbled forward, its arms reaching out.

“Come on then, Veronica!” he yelled. “Get it over and done with.”

“Daddy?”

He jerked his head towards to the front room door. “Lucy?!” Oh God, he didn’t believe it, his daughter was still alive. Patrick rolled away from the zombie and jumped to his feet. There was a long sword and a small fire axe hanging on the wall but there was no way that he’d be able to use either weapon on his dead wife. He ran over to her, avoiding the woman’s flailing arms. He grabbed her waist and spun her around, then pushed her hard before running out of the room and slamming the door shut.

“Hold on, honey. I’m coming!” he shouted, running up the stairs, taking them two at a time. When he reached the landing, Patrick saw that her door was wide open. There were clothes strewn about everywhere. As he neared her room, Patrick caught sight of something moving near the girl’s feet.

The dog jumped off the bed. It padded over to Patrick and yelped just once before returning to the bed. His daughter was sitting on the floor, surrounded by every piece of clothing that she owned. He then saw that Lucy had raided his wardrobe as well as Veronica’s drawers.