Generation Dead Book 2: What You Fear (6 page)

“What do you want us to do?” I asked.

“I need you to buy the capital some time.  I don’t have the men I need here to do the job that needs to be done.  They’re scattered all over, but they’ll come if I call them.  Right now, though, you’re the best suited for the problem.”  The president looked at each of us.  “Will you protect us?”

Chapter 11

Well, when he put it that way, I figured we didn’t have a whole lot of
choice, but to accept.  I can’t imagine even Jake in his darkest hours would refuse a request like that.  Julia nodded right away, a small fire burning in her eyes.  I nodded second, and Jake was right behind me.

“Good!  You have the thanks of the President, and that will get you a drink somewhere, I’m sure.  Take this.” He scribbled a note on a piece of paper. “And bring it to the medical center.  They’ll take that piece of evil off of your hands and get an analysis running.  And this,” the president wrote another note. “Take this to the armory and get what you need.” 

President Jackson stood up and shook our hands.  We left the porch feeling pretty good, and headed towards the medical center.  It was a big building on the outskirts of town, and was probably better equipped than most hospitals from the old days.  State of the art equipment had been moved here, and the lab was second to none.  It was where we needed to go.

On the way, Jake spoke up. “Well, I have to say that little speech made more sense than just about any other explanation.”

I had to agree.  “Yeah, at least we have a kind of purpose, but I can’t help but wonder what we do now?  Do we go home, waiting for another outbreak?  Do we drive around, hoping to head one off?  I didn’t see an answer for that in the speech.”

Julia held my
hand and gave it a squeeze.  “Don’t be silly.  We’ll stay the night, check over some maps, and figure out where the next attack might be.  Easy.”

Jake and I looked over her head at each other.  Easy wasn’t a thing that
came to us very often.

We walked in silence over to the medical facility, and it was a rather simple looking building.  A lot of effort had gone into making the place look as unimposing as possible, but everyone knew there was strange stuff going on in that place.  All of the rumors could fill a large book if someone bothered to write them all down.  I had heard they were working on making the zombies smarter and able to be trained.  Another rumor went that there was some success in making the zombies not hungry any more.  The best to me was the rumor that they were combining the Enillo Virus with DNA to create a person who never died. 

All of it was crap, of course.  The truth was that the place was where they worked on diseases as they had always done, finding cures for things and reviving cures for others.  When the end had come, a lot of very smart people suddenly had become very dumb zombies.  The pickup over the years had been slow, but the knowledge from previous years had thankfully been saved and restored.  There were accidents and the like, but nothing serious.

The outside of the building was a simple white washed affair, with a single floor that ran well over three acres.  The place had once been an envelope factory, but it now saw better days.

At the front, a single person greeted us at the main desk.  She was a young brunette with big dimples, and Julia made sure to have a grip on my hand as we walked in.  It didn’t really matter, since the girl only had eyes for Jake.

“How may I help you?” She asked in a sweet voice.

“Hi, I need to speak to one of your Enillo researchers, please?” Jake asked.  He handed the note over to the girl, who read it quickly.  Her expression went from innocent to serious in a heartbeat, and she was on the phone during the second heartbeat.

“Jerry?  It’s Samantha.  Drop everything and get up here, now.”  Samantha put the phone down and smiled again at Jake.  “What are we going to help you with?”

Jake pulled out the canning jar and placed it on the desk.  The lights of the office gave the liquid a purple cast, but it was a deep, malignant purple, the kind you’d use to decorate a lair for something wicked.

“Huh.  And what might that be?”  Samantha asked.  She looked suspicious, since it wasn’t every day that someone showed up with a note from the president and a jar with a syringe in it.

Jake smiled.  “Let’s let Jerry get here, that way, I don’t have to repeat myself.” 

Samantha shrugged and looked over at me, but I just gave a half smile.  It made sense, so we would just stand here in an uncomfortable silence until this Jerry, whoever he was, decided to make an appearance.

Julia rubbed my back, and I gave her a small hug which pulled her into me.  We must have looked like a weird couple.  I was over six feet tall, weighing in easily at two hundred and twenty pounds, most of which was packed on my chest and arms.  Julia was petite and small, disappearing into my bulk.

A minute later, a short fat man rolled his way into the reception area.  He was about five feet tall, with stubble on his chin and on his head.  I think his beard was longer than his hair.  He was wearing a lab coat and glasses, and looked to be somewhat put out to be summoned as he was.

“Hello.  I’m Jerry Grossman, Chief Virologist and head of this facility.  What can I do for you?”  He extended a hand which Jake dutifully shook.

“Well, Jerry, you can take this,” Jake handed him the note from the President, “and this.”  Jake handed the man the
Mason jar.

Dr. Grossman looked the note over, his eyes widening a little.  He then looked at the syringe.  “What is it?”

Jake took a deep breath, and stepped back a space.  I did the same and shielded Julia.

“We’re pretty sure that’s a syringe full of Enillo Virus.”

“
Jesus
!”  Dr. Grossman nearly dropped the jar in his haste to put it back on Samantha’s desk, who clearly did not want to be anywhere near it. “Get the team up here now, full bio gear, move it!”  Jerry stepped further away, wiping his hands furiously on his jacket.

Things got interesting after that.  We stepped back into the shadows as several men in white hazard suits came running in.  They took the
Mason jar with its deadly cargo, placed it in a fish tank like container on wheels, and carefully whisked it away.  Dr. Grossman wiped his forehead and came over to us.

“You could have warned me
,” he admonished us. 

Jake smiled.  “And miss the fun?  No way.  Besides, we could all be wrong and that’s just grape preserves stuffed in that syringe.”

Dr. Grossman laughed.  “With my luck, that’s what it will be.  Where are you staying?  Are you staying in town?”  He changed the subject.

“We’ll be here for a couple of days.  We need to make a few stops and get some supplies.  We also need to figure a few things out as well.”

“Okay, well, I’ll leave a note up here for you in a couple of days if you want to bring it to the president yourselves.”

“Thanks, we appreciate that.”  Jake shook the man’s hand and we headed back out into the capitol.

Chapter 12

A short walk towards the main part of town and we found ourselves in front of a restaurant.  Julia gripped my hand tightly and I took that as a sign we needed to get ourselves fed.  I was feeling a bit peckish, myself, now that I thought about it.

Inside the restaurant, a few people looked our way, but no one really gave us too much eyeballing.  The waitress was friendly and in a short
time, we were eating some really good sandwiches.

“So what’s our next move?” I asked Jake around a mouthful of bacon, lettuce, and tomato.

“I’m thinking we hunker down around here and see what might be in that vial.  After that I’m afraid we have nothing else to do but wait for the next outbreak.”  Jake said, munching on a pickle.

“That seems so strange
,” Julia said.  “We have to wait for some idiot to go and cause death, rush to fight it, and hope we can find some clues to take us to the source.”

When she put it that way, I had to admit it didn’t make much sense. 
However, I really couldn’t think of an alternative, and said so.

“What choice do we have?  If someone out there is causing infections, the only thing we can do is put out the fires, map the outbreak, and triangulate on the source.  Can’t do that if we don’t wait for them to happen.  No one around here is going to know what’s going on and there would be panic if they did
,” I said.

Sometimes, I think I have a gift for trouble.  Every time I open my stupid mouth, exactly what I was talking about seems to happen.  I was just finishing my sandwich when a teenage boy poked his head into the restaurant, spied us, and ran over to the table.

“Jake! Aaron! Julia!  The president needs to see you right now!” The boy panted.

“All right, son, catch your breath, we’re coming
,” Jake said, standing up, his hands automatically doing a quick check of his weapons.

I did the same and Julia put a couple of coins on the table to pay for our meal.  We left the restaurant and followed the boy back to the president’s home.  President Jackson was on the porch, talking into a phone.

We waited a respectful distance away, but even at that range, we could hear words like “Okay, how many? When do you think it happened?  Okay, I’m sending someone up right now.”

The president hung up and waved us over.  He had a map in front of him, and we could see he had drawn circles

“No time to waste. There’s been an outbreak in Freeport.  I need you up there now.”  President Jackson didn’t waste time with pleasantries.

“On our way.  We’ll hit the armory and be gone within the hour
,” I said.

“Did you drop off the syringe?” Jackson asked.

“We did.  Freaked out a few people over there.” I chuckled at the memory.

“No doubt.  They’ll send their report to me and I’ll let you know when I see you again.  Stop at these three towns on your way to Freeport.” He indicated the towns on the map.  “Go to their comm centers and if I have a message for you, it’ll be there.”

Jake nodded.  “We’re gone.”

We moved quickly back through the city
. I wanted to head over to the armory but Jake said no.

“Why the hell not?” I asked, perturbed.

“You want to just take what we can carry, or would you like to back the truck up and load it there?” Julia asked.

I felt stupid.  “Okay, let’s get the truck.”

We retrieved our vehicle and made our way to the armory.  A centrally located building that had a small office in the front, and a big warehouse in the back.  If rumors were true, there was some serious firepower in there.  One quarter of the warehouse was devoted to making ammo, and there were people whose job it was just to crank out round after round after round.  No one knew why we needed to keep making bullets, but we did.

The man behind the desk was a pleasant,
middle-aged man who took our note from the president in stride.  Apparently, we weren’t the only ones who were given access by the chief executive.

We told the man what we wanted, and in a short amount of
time, we had over three thousand handgun rounds sitting in the bed of our truck.  A thousand rifle rounds joined in, and we were as good to go as we ever were.

“You guys want automatic weapons?  You’re authorized for them.”  The man raised a quizzical eyebrow.

Jake looked at me and I shook my head.  He turned back to the man. “We’re good.  Besides, if things get bad for us, you’re going to needing them more than we are.”

We left the man with his mouth open, and boarded the truck.  We had a good trip ahead of us, and I hoped we wouldn’t be too late.  It was a hundred mile trip to Freeport, and under the best conditions, it would take us about an hour and half.  Under present conditions, it would take us about three hours.  We stopped at a communication center and had a message relayed to our aunts and uncles about what we were doing, and a request to look in on the lodge for us. 

“Let’s get this rolling,” Jake said.

“Question for you
,” I said as we pulled out of the capital and headed north to pick up the highway.

“Go for it.”

“Ever miss being a collector?” 

“Only lately, old son.  Only lately.”

Chapter 13

We stopped at two of the towns the president had mentioned, but we didn’t have any news.  At the third town, there was a message that another outbreak had occurred in the town of Homer Glen.  We were too far to do anything about it, so we sent a message to our cousins Trey and Kayla, and asked them to look at things for us.  They had been
trained, as we had been, their parents having spent years fighting alongside ours.  If there was anyone out there we could trust to have our backs in a fight, it was those two.  Trey was Uncle Tommy’s son, and he was a dead shot with rifle or pistol.  His favorite mêlée weapon was a curved piece of metal about three feet long with a small wedge welded to the end.  The last sixteen inches of the metal was sharpened, and it could take your leg off at the knee.  Kayla was Uncle Duncan and Aunt Janna’s daughter, and she was a blonde knockout.  She was also lethal with any bladed weapon, be it a knife, sword, or pair of scissors.  It didn’t help she was a constant flirt, and several would-be boyfriends found themselves staring at the business end of something pointy when they tried to push their luck.  They’d come with us on a couple of collections, but never got into it as seriously as we had.