Sirens of the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 2): Siren Songs (37 page)

She stood up again. She felt good. Getting up from a chair was
normally a laborious process. Even her back wasn't bothering her at
the moment.

“Al, am I dreaming right now?”

Her late husband/guardian angel did not respond.

“OK, I'm not dreaming.”

She found a mirror over the sink in her room, and was happy to see
herself for a change. Rather than the usual drooping eye sockets, her
eyes looked bright. Even her skin seemed to sit a little firmer on
her face.

Maybe it was all that exercise.

She laughed out loud at the notion. She hadn't had so much
exertion in decades.

“Hmmm, exercise really is the best medicine.”

She winked at herself in the mirror, then moved back to the
window. The world outside was as dark as pitch on the ground and in
the sky. No other lights were visible now. The entire city seemed
devoid of light. She had an inspiration to turn off the lights in her
own room, so she could get a better look at the stars. Once she
returned to her window, she allowed some time for her eyes to adjust,
and was rewarded with a sky full of stars. The smoke in the air
obscured some of them, but the entire sky in front of her could not
be covered by the smoke.

She put her hand into the pockets of her pants, fighting a chill.
Her hand ran across something foreign. Small, boxy, smooth, about the
length of her hand. Pulling it out, she was able to get a good look
at it in the glow of the stars.

She inadvertently hit a button which turned it on.

Marty didn't know what a lock screen was, but she could appreciate
the picture on it. Staring up at her, with a conspiratorial grin on
his face—and a few tears in his eyes—was Liam. He had one
hand in front of his mouth, with one finger up in the traditional
“shush” symbol. Behind him she could just make out part
of her own head, and the rotors of the helicopter. After a few
seconds the screen went blank and she pocketed the device without
comment.

He must have snapped the picture while giving me that big hug.
Clever boy indeed.

Marty lay back down in her bed. Content for the time being.
Somewhere out there people were thinking about her. Trying to get to
her. Drawn by her siren song. A song she continually tried to mute.

Normally she prayed for others. Health for the sick. Luck for the
out-of-work. Help passing a school test. Some prayers were epic in
scale, others a simple show of affection. Always for someone else.
But in a rare moment of spiritual weakness she requested something
for herself.

Lord, if they come to save me—

Liam couldn't help himself. He would find a way. It was already
written.

—
please, I don't want anyone to die.

She admitted that wasn't how siren songs end...

8 days since the sirens

Fifteen-year-old Liam Peters looked up from the muddy water. He
and several of his companions had escaped the big bombs dropped on
his neighborhood by tossing themselves into a shallow creek running
next to the shopping center parking lot they'd just sprinted across.
First the A-10's swept his block of modest ranch-style homes—their
deadly Gatling guns announcing themselves like the horns of the Four
Horsemen the Apocalypse. Quite appropriate for the actual apocalypse.
And then something came down from high in the sky—the Colonel
he'd met at the government medical camp called them bunker
busters—and moved the Earth just as they'd tossed themselves
down into the creek for cover. Then more bombs came. He wasn't brave
enough to look up over the little lip of the creek to see the remains
of his neighborhood yet. For now it was enough he was alive.

He looked down the line for his parents, his friends, and his
recently-mistaken-for-dead girlfriend. He saw most of them from his
patch of mud. He definitely saw
her
. Victoria! She was—he
was 99% sure—his girlfriend. An older woman too! She was
seventeen.

They'd met less than a week ago, but they'd been through a
lifetime's worth of adventures in that time. They'd been up in the
Gateway Arch to watch for looters below and help the St. Louis City
Police Department spy on them. She went back up alone a second time
as a diversion to save him and his grandmother. That was the first
time he thought she was as good as dead. After that they teamed up
for the impossible task of helping Liam's 104-year-old grandma escape
the collapsing city of St. Louis and get her to Liam's home in the
suburbs. They pushed her in a wheelchair to escape zombies. They rode
a freight train through hordes of the undead. They broke a blockade
across a river set up by the Arnold, Missouri police department. Then
they teamed up with an officer of the same department as they all
watched the little town implode with the arrival of the refugees from
the metropolis next door. And if that wasn't enough excitement, they
reached Liam's home only to find his parents had left to go to
retrieve Liam at grandma's house. He had made it all the way home
only to find out they had switched houses. It was enough stress to
drive anyone crazy.

But Victoria was there. She provided a quality he couldn't
describe. A stability. A peace. Liam knew he tried harder when she
was around, and because she was as smart as any girl he'd ever known,
she was able to see things from a different perspective and give him
ideas he otherwise would never have considered. He was actually
beginning to feel things were going to be OK, even with a zombie
plague unloading itself all over the world.

But then she was shot.

Throughout all their adventures they were being watched, and then
pursued by a guy named Douglas Hayes. He said he was a truck driver
for the CDC—a man with no job once the medical unit effectively
ceased to exist—but it became clear he was more than that. He
actually showed up at Liam's parents' house to collect Grandma. He
requested Liam bring her to his military truck, but when he
refused—well, Victoria got shot. That was the second time Liam
thought she was as good as dead. By all rights she probably would
have been, but the single gunshot hit the small but durable travel
Bible Liam had procured for her earlier in their travels. The force
of the bullet knocked her back and she hit her head on the ground
when she fell, but she emerged relatively unscathed. Liam and Grandma
were whisked away before they knew her fate, so Liam had several days
to lament her passing.

Now, in this brackish creek, she was very much alive. Minutes
earlier she had been wearing a clean and bright white shirt and blue
jeans, with her brown hair tight in a ponytail. She reminded him of a
perfect angel, returned from the dead. That angel was now covered in
muddy slime. Her shirt was ruined. Her hair soaked and sprinkled with
debris. And her face...

Her face was a wreck. In the last week she'd been beat up
violently at the top of the Arch. Her face was graced with two black
eyes, and more abrasions than Liam could count. Her nose might have
been broken, though he couldn't say. Neither would she. In short, her
face had seen some rough treatment of late. The water had washed off
the heavy makeup she'd applied to hide her wounds, and now he could
see her face as it really was. He could only think of how much pain
she suffered, and how it made him angry someone would have done that
to her. It made his thoughts turn dark.

Until he saw her emerald green eyes looking at him with a twinkle
of mirth. Her demeanor suggested she was happy. He guessed she had a
big smile on her face too, though her hand was over her mouth. Was
she laughing?

“What's so funny?”

She moved—sloshed—to be closer to him before she
answered. “I think I broke a tooth jumping in here.” She
removed her hand, and sure enough blood was dribbling down her lower
lip. Mixing with the muddy water already there. A large cut was on
her top lip. She removed her hand completely and gave Liam a genuine
smile, a big one. She had lost one of the sharp top teeth. The visage
was both horrible and comical. Liam couldn't help but laugh.

“Good Lord Victoria, you need to start wearing a face mask.”

His parents chose that moment to slither along into the
conversation. Victoria took the opportunity to smile for them as
well. Their faces reflected a more serious analysis than Liam's. But
Liam's sense of humor tended to activate under high stress
situations. He'd had an irrational fear of how he would bring this
girl home to his parents. He had no experience introducing new
girlfriends.

“Mom, Dad, I'd like to take this opportunity to introduce
you to my wonderful and elegant girlfriend, Victoria. Victoria, this
is my mom Lana, and my dad Jerry.”

She played along, even though she'd already spent time with them.
“Very pleased to meet you. Forgive me for not curtseying.”
They looked at her like she was crazy, but noticed Liam was laughing
hysterically and decided it was just too silly not to laugh.

Above them and across the parking lot, their entire lives were
burning to cinders in the aftermath of the bombing.

Laughing helped take the edge off.

2

The group crawled out of the water, but stayed along the slope of
the creek bank so they could observe the fires in front of them, and
remain protected if more bombs fell. It had been twenty minutes since
the big one went off, and no more A-10's had been by since the
beginning. It was looking as if it was over.

Liam's dad called out, “Who are we missing?”

Everyone looked around, taking stock of the survivors. Liam saw
all the people in his core group, including his parents. He saw Phil,
the ex-police officer way down on the end. There was Melissa, a shoe
saleswoman and apparently a military veteran of some kind. Liam
didn't really know her at all.

The only person he didn't see was Drew, the boy who helped him get
Grandma from the Boy Scout camp to his house. He was last seen laying
on the street after Hayes had punched him to commandeer his bike—with
Grandma trapped in the bike trailer behind. Liam looked at where Drew
was last seen, and was disappointed to see it was well within the
impact zone.

In the end they accepted many of their neighbors were undoubtedly
dead. When this group ran after Hayes and Grandma as the thief took
her to his waiting helicopter, they all took themselves out of the
blast zone. The neighbors had remained in their homes or on their
lawns, celebrating the fact they had defeated a small contingent of
Hayes' soldiers in their Humvee's. That celebration lead to their
deaths.

The humor of the situation ebbed away as everyone realized the
gravity of the loss.

“What do we do now Dad?”

Liam had been waiting eight hellish days to ask that question.
Ever since he and Grandma left her house in the city, he'd been
trying to get home and find his parents. Yes, he wanted to be sure
they were safe, but he also wanted to effectively hand over the
responsibility of caring for Grandma so he didn't have to worry about
her. Mom and Dad were always there when he needed them, even if he
didn't agree with all their methods—such as sending him to
Grandma's for the summer after a particularly trying period of
conflict with them. Now, his question rang hollow. Mom and Dad, he
realized, didn't have all the answers. They couldn't wrap up all his
problems into neat solutions for him. Grandma had been taken by Hayes
to do medical testing on her, despite his best efforts to protect
her. Even his father wasn't going to have an answer to counterbalance
that loss.

His dad was laying face down in the weeds. His arms were spread
out in front of him, and his hands were tucked back so they were on
his face, as if he were using them as pillows. His mom was laying
next to him, on her back, looking straight up at the sky. They had
just lost their house—well it was lost days ago when the big
military truck tore the whole thing to shreds with its top-mounted
Gatling gun—but Liam wasn't bothering with the details. That
was a previous run-in with Hayes. But now even the perforated frame
of the house was gone. Every possession, every memory, wiped off the
Earth forever.

But it was more than that. Liam's dad had spent years diligently
stockpiling supplies he would need in the event there were
catastrophes—man-made or natural. Liam knew about the secret
room in their basement where Dad stored all his goodies, including
lots of guns. Liam suspected that was what really had him upset,
above and beyond the loss of friends and neighbors. That was supposed
to be their life raft in these chaotic times.

Jerry popped his head up to look at him. “I don't know Liam.
I guess we wait for the fires to die out and then see if there is
anything we can salvage. I'm sure our house is wrecked, but from here
I can't see if our house is now a crater. We'll see.”

Liam knew it was their only viable option right now. Wait and see.
So they waited. The morning slid by. By about noon everyone was
getting antsy. Melissa and Phil had been talking, and now Melissa
came over to Liam's group.

“We should wait a little longer. I have a bad feeling about
going back to the scene of a crime, if you catch my drift. What if
they are watching for us to return? It's what I'd do if I were
running this operation.”

Melissa was a forty-something woman Liam had met several nights
before as she walked up the street toward Liam's house as a refugee.
By almost any definition Liam figured she would be described as
physically pretty. A little taller than most women, but shapely and
well-proportioned. She kept her long blond hair in a ponytail, though
now her hair was a mess, just like Victoria's. Initially reluctant to
accept the hospitality of Phil and Liam, she was convinced by
Victoria to give up some of her fears. By her own account she had
been sexually assaulted by her former boss, then harassed by the
sickos of the refugee crowds as they all fled the city. She was in no
mood to accept the hospitality of a couple men.