The Down Home Zombie Blues (20 page)

Ah. A bay. Small body of water. She risked a moment to change screens, bring up the map downloaded from seeker ’droids’ data, and integrate that with the current data. She saw the water and where they were in relation to it. Then she flipped immediately back to her tracker screen. She couldn’t afford to lose this trail, couldn’t afford to make a mistake. Not if the Tresh were here.

“The water,” she said, her voice taut but professional. She was back in combat mode. “Direct me to the water, and I should be able to answer your question.”

She threw an extra scrambling filter over her scanner. If the Tresh were dirtside, she didn’t want their tech picking up hers. Though they’d have to have seen the
Sakanah,
she realized with chilling clarity. But her ship would have seen theirs, and alarms would have immediately been sent to her scanner, her team….

And she’d received nothing.

So were the Tresh here, or was the information scrolling down her screen some aberration—hell’s wrath, she hated nil-tech environments—caused by Petrakos’s world?

A small trickle of apprehension slithered again up her spine. She flipped her mouth mike down, about to open contact with the
Sakanah,
then stopped, fear of looking like a fool holding her back once more. If she was wrong, the mission would end for her now.

Equally, if she was right, contacting the
Sakanah
could lead the Tresh directly to her and Petrakos.

Wait. Assess. Then act.
It was only a little farther.

“This is as far as I can go.”

She jerked her head up. A short grassy area and a wooden walkway met her gaze. Then a small sandy beach and, beyond that, a short expanse of dark-blue water. She could see the spiky outlines of buildings on a distant opposite shore.

She needed to be over that water, hovering, picking up scent trails and PMaT trails captured in the rising water vapors…but this was as far as Petrakos could go.

She saw the confusion and frustration on his face. Her own frustration and helplessness roiled like an angry storm inside her. She snatched the Hazer from the floor behind her seat, then shoved open the vehicle’s door.

“Jorie, wait!” Theo’s cry ended abruptly as she slammed the door behind her.

She couldn’t wait. If the Tresh were here, every second’s delay meant they were all that much closer to death.

No, not death. A slow, painful, torturous descent into a hell she was far too familiar with. One she could not, would not, face again.

God
damn
her!
Theo bolted after Jorie, hitting the remote lock on the key chain as he ran. His one-woman war machine was heading like a bat out of hell for the bayfront beach, an obvious weapon in one hand and—if her long sweater hiked up any more—two more obvious weapons on her hip.

“Jorie!” Damn, she could run. Thank God it was Christmas Eve and only a few people were in the park. And none close enough to see the weapon she carried or the Glock on his hip under his T-shirt. Still, if one of the fishermen on the pier turned…

He gave an extra push and—lungs burning—came up inches behind her. He grabbed the rifle’s strap. “Jorie!” Her name came out as a harsh rasp.

She tried to wrench away from him, but he locked his hand on her arm. “Damn it, stop! You can’t…have weapons…here.” He was sucking in air. She twisted again. “Stop it,” he hissed. “You want every police—security department here asking questions?”

She faced him, eyes wide, face flushed, mouth slightly parted as if both questions and answers were finally coming to her now.

So was unwanted attention. Running after her and shouting had not been the best idea, but he’d had no choice. Now two men in baseballs caps and dark T-shirts with faded logos watched him turn Jorie in a slow, dancelike movement as he tried to get control of this situation—and her—and hide her weapons. He yanked her arm and the rifle between them, and knew the only way he could legitimize their stance would be to be extremely stupid and kiss her again.

They had to look like lovers, perhaps lovers having a fight. He had to divert suspicion.

Their kiss was brief, intense, and far too pleasurable. Even the small taste of her made him want more. Which was very stupid. Useless. Downright dangerous. Some kind of outer-space bad guys had evidently arrived, and all Theo could think about were all the other places on her body he wanted to put his mouth. He was definitely, as Zeke was prone to say, thinking with his little head and not his big one.

He rested his face against hers, the hard length of her rifle between them. “Listen to me,” he whispered, his fingers threading their way into the softness of her hair. “You can’t walk around with pistols here. People over there,” and he raised his face and jerked his chin to his right, “are watching you, watching
us.
I don’t know what’s wrong, but you have to go back to my car now or we’re going to have a lot more trouble than just these Thresh things. Understand?”

“Tresh,” she corrected, her voice soft against his neck, her rapid breathing starting to slow. “Regrets, The—Petrakos. I have to—”

Theo saw the taller of the two men put down his fishing pole and stride off the pier just as—judging from her halted explanation—Jorie did. The man headed directly for them, his intention to find out what was going on clear from the frown on his face.

“Hell’s wrath,” Jorie said harshly. Then she kissed him. She
kissed
him, arms going around his neck, pulling his face down to hers, bodies merging, rifle pressing painfully into his chest. Jorie had more padding in that area, padding he was very acutely aware of as her tongue toyed with his and her hands stroked his shoulders.

Theo broke the kiss with undisguised reluctance and peered over the top of her head to see the fisherman slow, then, with an amused shrug, turn. The fisherman no doubt inferred from Jorie’s actions that she was a willing participant in kiss-and-make-up. His role as rescuer wasn’t required.

“Regrets,” Jorie said again, turning her face as Theo did to watch the man clamber back onto the fishing pier. “But I must get to the water to take a sample. I didn’t think—I forgot the rules on your world.”

He shoved away thoughts of how pleasant her body felt against his—rifle and all. “Are we in any immediate danger from these Tresh things?”

A quick glance down at the gizmo in her hand. “Immediate?”

“Are they attacking us?”

“At this point, no. But until I take readings from the water vapor, I can’t tell anything more.”

Water vapor. Well, Native Americans had used smoke to send signals. He guessed the Guardians or maybe the Tresh could use water vapor.

He shifted her rifle between them and, holding her close against his side, urged her back to the SUV. “There’s an old boatyard a block or so from here. We can go out on the dock, but, for Christ’s sake, don’t take that rifle out where people can see it.”

Theo unlocked the doors with the remote. When he cranked the engine, the two fishermen didn’t even turn to watch. Good. He cut through one of the back alleys that crisscrossed the small town, then turned down the short, rutted road that led to the ramshackle marina. The newer waterfront condos, complete with private boat slips, had put a hurt on the small boatyard business in the area. This one had closed a few months back, the large yellow-and-white signs nailed to the fence proclaiming its transformation into an
enclave of luxury waterfront town houses
next year.

Jorie was quiet but clearly tense as he drove past the fence, her concentration on her scanner, the seat belt he insisted she wear pulled taut as she leaned forward. She was going to bolt again as soon as he stopped the car.

He exited as she did, hit the remote lock, and sprinted around the front of the SUV to catch up to her. He grabbed her arm. It was time to push for more information. “What are you looking for in the water?”

“Proof that someone is using zombie scent-trail energies to mask his PMaTs,” she said, striding forward in spite of his hold on her, the parking-lot gravel crunching under her boots. The marina might be abandoned, but the smells of paint, pitch, and varnish still lingered, mixing with the slight fishy tang of salt in the air.

It took him a moment to remember that
peemat
was actually an acronym for her ship’s transporter. “These Tresh don’t want you to know they’re here?”

“That is my estimation, yes.”

“Are they like the zombies or are they human?” Only after he asked did he wonder if Jorie was human or even used that term. “Like you, me, Tammy, and Rordan?”

“They’re soft-fleshed, bipedal sentients,” she said, mounting the steps to the wooden dock. He released his hold on her elbow but stayed close to her side. “In physical appearance, I could be one and you’d not know. But they’re not like us.” She glanced up at him, golden eyes narrowing. “They’re not like us at all.”

Something in the tone of her voice made his skin crawl. And Sergeant Theo Petrakos didn’t spook easily.

“What happens if you find proof they’re here?” he asked.

“It will change this whole mission,” she said, the dock creaking as she picked up her pace. “It may well change your whole world.”

A warm breeze buffeted his skin as they neared the end of the long dock. Sunlight dappled the water in silver-blue patches that reflected a bright blue sky and white cottony clouds. Had Theo not spent almost two decades as a cop, the threat implied in Jorie’s words could seem almost out of place on this picture-perfect Florida day. But evil was often the very definition of equal opportunity.

The cop with almost two decades’ experience felt hampered by the fact he still knew very little about the zombies and nothing of this evil called the Tresh. “Jorie—”

She held up her free hand, halting his words. In the other hand she waved her scanner in a slow, wide arc. Water slapped softly against the dock’s piling. Her scanner was humming, pinging, beeping.

She was frowning. Then she stopped, frozen in place like a statute for two, three heartbeats before she spun quickly toward him. “Here.” Her voice was a harsh rasp. “They’re here.”

“Who?”

She flipped the curved mouth mike up, her foreign-sounding Alarsh words short and intense. Then she stopped, looked at her scanner, and tapped at it.

“What’s going on?” Theo could almost sense her adrenaline racing. His had started to, and he didn’t even know what in hell was going on.

She ignored him, flipped up her mike again. More words. Another pause. Then she smacked her scanner against her thigh, her eyes sparking in anger. “Dead zone! You understand these words?” She was marching down the dock, back toward his SUV.

He trotted hurriedly after her. “You can’t transmit, can’t receive.”

“It happened before. At the residence where Danjay was killed. I discounted it then. Stupid! It’s not a dead zone.”

“Then what is it?”

“I’ll know more when I find it.” She stopped at the top of the dock stairs and made a small half circle with her scanner. “The Tresh have appropriated a structure somewhere near here, just as I use yours. It’s…good. There.” She shoved the scanner back under her sweater and bounded back to the SUV.

Theo was on her heels.

“I need the Hazer,” she called out over her shoulder.

“Jorie—”

“Petrakos, now!” She’d reached the vehicle and yanked on the passenger-door handle.

He palmed the remote but didn’t unlock it. “You can’t go charging around with a rifle in plain sight. Tell me what needs to be done. I’ll find a way to do it.”

She faced him, eyes narrowed. A gust of wind from the bay blew strands of her hair across her face. “I need the Hazer.”

“Not until you—”

A series of chimes he’d not heard before sounded from under her sweater. She spat out a short harsh word, shoved him aside, and took off at a dead run for the street. Again.

“Fuck.” The woman was a goddamned gazelle. Theo hit the unlock button, grabbed her Hazer, and pounded after her.

14

Theo caught up with her in one of the unpaved narrow alleys that ran behind most houses in Gulfview, only too aware that a Bahia Vista cop had no jurisdiction in this town and no business running around it with a rifle in his hand. If the local cops didn’t shoot him, the residents might. Florida was a gun-friendly state.

Jorie slowed just as they came to a ramshackle-looking detached garage with some kind of flowering vine growing in wild abandon over one side. Theo was sucking air in great gulps but had enough energy to grab her arm and jerk her back against him. Not for the first time, he thought of taking her down to the ground, knee in her back, hands locked behind her, until she told him exactly what the hell was going on here. He was getting goddamned tired of this, in more ways than one, and told her so.

“You run from me one more time like that and I’m cuffing you to the fucking car.” Which probably would have sounded a lot more threatening had he not still been wheezing as he said it.

She shot a dismissive look at his hand clamped around her upper arm. “This way.” Her voice was hushed. She lifted her chin in the direction of a house barely visible beyond the garage. “Where’s your G-One?”

It took him a moment to remember she meant the laser pistol. “I have it.” He kept his voice low as well. “But we just can’t go running into a house shooting—”

“Agreed.” She grabbed the Hazer from him, looped the strap over her shoulder, then pulled the scanner out again. He watched her gaze dart back and forth from it to the thick foliage in the backyard ahead of them. The screen appeared mostly blank to him, save for a few squiggles. She’d said there was some kind of dead zone.

“How do you know who’s in there if you can’t get a reading on that?” He pointed to the scanner.

“Because I can’t get a reading on that, that’s why,” she answered softly.

“You could also have an equipment malfunction.”

“I had a memory malfunction. I forgot the last time I saw something like this. But I remember now.”

She tugged him toward the side of the garage. “Quiet. Covert, yes?”

Covert, yeah. And if this turned out to be some kind of computer glitch, he swore he would throw her over his shoulder, take her back to his house, and handcuff her, once and for all, to his bed.

Could be fun…

Shit, Petrakos, pay attention.

He sidled along the garage with her, praying the gray clapboard house with the rusted metal awnings was vacant of innocent civilians, which at this point included kids smoking dope or some drunk sleeping off the morning’s binge. Zombies he could handle. But she said these Tresh looked like people. They—

A loud hum flashed by his ear just as Jorie’s boot kicked his leg. His vision hazed blue-white, and the next thing he knew he was facedown in the grass and gravel, an answering hum sounding over his head.

“Theo!” Jorie’s voice was strained.

He came up on his hands. She was kneeling next to him, her Hazer against her shoulder, her left hand blindly grabbing the back of his shirt.

“I’m okay,” he said as she fired the rifle again.

Small starbursts erupted at them from a broken picture window.

She was swearing, scrambling backward. Light flashed overhead.

He levered up, fired his laser pistol where he’d seen the last flash, then punched off a few more shots to the right of that, assuming whoever, whatever, was in there was moving.

A barrage of starbursts exploded in answer, showering him and Jorie with chunks of leafy branches and palm fronds from the trees above them.

All this was happening with nothing more than a barely audible hum and hiss. He could be sitting in the yard next door and think nothing more was going on than a couple of birds fluttering and fighting in the trees.

One thing he knew for sure: whoever, whatever, was in there was no Florida resident he’d sworn to protect and to serve. He had a feeling he’d just met the Tresh. He also wished he’d brought his tac vest.

There was a tug on his waistband.

“This way!” Jorie rasped.

She was backing up again.

Nothing wrong with fighting in the opposite direction,
he could hear Uncle Stavros say. He scurried back, staying low, trying to watch his six and her.

They rounded the garage and came into the alley again. He squatted down next to her, his back against the wooden garage door. He hoped those starburst weapons couldn’t cut through the garage. If they could, he hoped the garage was full of enough junk to stop them. “Tresh?” he breathed.

“Tresh.” She nodded. “Three. I want to try going down this side.” She motioned behind her to her left. “Find a doorway in. There are some small structures we could use as cover.”

He’d noticed the shed and the stack of old siding about four feet high.

“Risky. They could come up on either side of us.”

She glanced at him. “No.” She angled the barrel of her rifle up. “Sunlight. They’re deep-space adapted. They can see in direct light for only a minute or so and can’t tolerate the sun’s rays on their skin unless they use special apparatus and a protective suit. But after moonrise…” She nodded. “Trouble.”

Cristos.
First zombies. Now vampires. He was about to ask her if they sucked blood too, when her scanner chimed out in warning.

She swore, shoving herself to her feet. He rose at the same time. She was tapping furiously at her scanner, squiggles racing across the screen. Then the screen went blank.

She let out a strangled cry of frustration, spun, and kicked the garage door. It rattled, creaking.

He guessed. “They’re gone.”

“I jammed them!” She shook the scanner in his face. “Exactly what they did to my tech, I did to theirs. But they—” And she let out a string of Alarsh curse words.

He made a mental note to have her teach him some, if and when their lives ever calmed down. They sounded as good as the ones he knew in Greek.

He motioned back toward the house. “Maybe they left something behind. We can—”

An explosion burst through the air behind them, shaking the garage and the alley under his boots. Theo shoved Jorie to the ground, covering her body with his. Dust and debris flew past them, and he could hear things—big things—bouncing off the garage’s roof.

“The only things the Tresh like to leave behind,” Jorie said harshly as he pulled her to her feet, “are death traps.”

A siren wailed in the distance. He tucked the rifle between them and, arm over her shoulders, held her against his side. Neighbors would be pouring out into the alley at any moment. They needed to get out of there quickly and without raising suspicion.

“Walk, don’t run. Yet,” he told her. And when a bare-chested balding man in cutoff blue jeans almost bumped into them at the back of a house two doors down, Theo grabbed the man’s arm, bringing his attention to himself, not Jorie. And not the barely visible rifle.

“Could be a gas leak, man. Get back! Keep away!”

“Shit!” The man’s eyes went wide, then he whipped around. “Serena! Don’t light that grill!”

Keying the remote, Theo popped the rear hatch as they reached the SUV in the marina parking lot, then quickly took the rifle from Jorie. He stowed it in the cargo compartment beneath the floor. “In case we get stopped and questioned,” he told her. “Pistols. G-One,” he said, remembering the term and listening to the sirens grow closer. She handed them to him without question.

First time. Amazing. If they weren’t so obviously where they shouldn’t be, he would have kissed her, just to say thank you for finally listening to him.

It wasn’t until they were on the road, heading away from the sirens, that he asked her what had happened. How did she know the Tresh were in the house, but more important, how did the Tresh know Jorie and Theo were there?

She held one hand up. Her headset ringed her hair again, the mike over her lips. She hadn’t said anything but had been tapping at her scanner since, he realized now, they’d pulled out of the parking lot.

“Sakanah,”
she said hurriedly.
“Sakanah.”
Then a few short Alarsh words, her name, and more Alarsh words. Short. Tense.

When she repeated the name of her ship again, more insistently, Theo knew something was wrong. Very wrong.

He glanced at her. “What’s the matter?”

“I cannot contact my team.” Her voice was a harsh rasp.

“Another dead zone.”

“No.” She held the scanner up. He glanced away from the line of traffic and saw lots of squiggles, which he assumed meant it was working.

“Maybe they’re busy talking to your ship.”

“You don’t understand. I cannot contact my team
or
my ship. I cannot warn them about the Tresh. The transcomm streams are all dead.” She clasped his arm. “We must get back to your residence. The Tresh may have found my team!”

Her panic flowed into him. Her team. Who were in his house, protected from sunlight. But not from an attack.

Theo went Code 3 and, with strobe flashing and siren screaming, headed down Twenty-second South Avenue, out of Gulfview. Watching cars—and for anything else that didn’t—move out of his way. Listening to the chatter on his police radio for any problems occurring not from the explosion behind them but in his neighborhood. He crossed the intersections with extra care and tried like hell not to let the panic in Jorie’s voice affect the driving skills he’d learned years ago on patrol.

“We have six normal communication streams for surface to ship—three emergency and two other high-priority command private. Our transcomms, what I use to contact my team, can synchronize through any of them,” she explained in between her continued attempts to reach her ship. “None is responding.”

“You’re sure it’s not a hardware malfunction on your end?”

“I have triple-checked that. Plus my scanner functions as a backup transcomm. It’s sensing the ship, but it’s showing no Guardian communication traffic of any kind.”

“When’s the last time you talked to someone back at my house?”

“I sent the preliminary data on the possible Tresh emissions to Tam,” she glanced at her scanner, “thirty-seven minutes ago. She confirmed receipt.”

That had to be while they were at the beach park and not in the firefight with the Tresh.

“I thought she was going back up to the ship.”

Jorie shook her head. “She agreed with my theory on the Tresh and opted to take Trenat’s shift.”

Because Tammy had to know Jorie trusted her more than she trusted Jack.

“So she doesn’t know what happened at that house?”

Jorie was shaking her head. “It was another dead zone. The dock. The residence. That whole area. I started transmitting to her as soon as we cleared its perimeter. No response.”

“But you took readings of the Tresh in the house. You jammed their signal.”

“Readings, barely. And only because I knew how to counterprogram for a short-range scan. But scans, readings, aren’t transmissions.” She shook her head. “I can’t explain our tech now.” She was clearly frustrated. And for the first time, she sounded frightened. “You simply have to accept I know what I’m talking about. We have a problem.”

Theo pulled out his cell phone and flipped it open. He punched in his home number. He doubted Tammy would answer—she’d been specifically told not to. But if his answering machine picked up, that at least meant the Tresh hadn’t beamed a dozen zombies into his living room and trashed his house. “Who else should be at my house?”

“Kip Rordan. Trenat comes on duty in four sweeps. But only Kip would have a Hazer,” she added, as if reading his mind and his concerns. “Tam just has her pistols. Under nil-world regulations, all other weapons must stay on the ship until we see another craving spike forming.”

The phone rang in his ear, then his answering machine kicked on, and he listened to his own not-home-leave-a-message. “Remember the telephone I showed you in my kitchen? The one I told you never to touch?”

She nodded. He held the cell phone out toward her. “I’m calling,
contacting,
my house. My answering machine picked up, which means there’s a good chance there’s no major damage there.”