The Down Home Zombie Blues (21 page)

“The Tresh will not destroy your residence without provocation. When I jammed their tech back there, they knew someone had found them. With the dead zone they created, I needed to force them to reveal themselves. But at your residence, if they can attack my team successfully, they will do so and leave. Quietly.”

He noticed her hand move up to touch her collar, something he’d seen before when she mentioned the Tresh. That made him curious, but this wasn’t the time to ask.

“But thank you for attempting contact,” she added.

He flipped his cell phone closed and used it to point to his radio. “That’s my security force’s central communication. If there was any disturbance at my address, we’d hear about it.” For a moment he considered calling Sophie Goldstein but quickly opted not to. If there was some kind of problem at his house, he didn’t want Sophie to go charging into the middle of it. “Any more weaponry in all the extra equipment in my bedroom?”

She huffed out a short sigh. “Two standard Hazers and the double-stack,” she motioned to the cargo hatch, “which is my personal rifle. But I didn’t tell Tam I transported the Hazers or the MOD-tech down.”

Because Jorie wouldn’t risk her friend’s career. Unfortunately, it didn’t escape her that she might have risked her friend’s life, and she was probably berating herself about it. “The minute I suspected the Tresh were here, I should have had Tam lock down all the tech in your structure on heavy scramble. We automatically shield against zombie detection. But after the war we ceased to consider the Tresh a major threat. Plus we had no reason to believe they’d be interested in a system as remote as yours.”

Scenes from movies like
Independence Day
and
War of the Worlds
filled Theo’s mind, with ovoid ships and helmeted outer-space aliens decimating what was left of his oleanders and scaring the hell out of Sophie Goldstein.

He crossed U.S. 19, siren wailing, and headed for the northbound ramp of the interstate. He’d seen zombies. He was very sure that these Tresh could do a hell of a lot more than just scare people. “You could have ignored the whole Tresh angle, like your captain and that other guy wanted you to. You didn’t. You told your theories to Tammy. You beamed down that extra stuff. You’re still ahead of the game.” He glanced at her. “Rordan’s a big boy. Tammy’s no slouch.” Then, because he knew she knew that—even if she didn’t quite understand his expressions—he added what he knew she really wanted to hear: “We’ll get there in time.”

She nodded, then went back to tapping commands into the screen on her scanner, her voice tight with tension as she repeated the ship’s name into her mouth mike. In front of him, a knot of cars refused to move, ignoring his lights and siren. He was forced to pull to the right, squeezing the SUV past on the shoulder and clipping the curb more than once on his way to the ramp.

Traffic on the interstate was blessedly light. He cut the siren but kept the lights flashing. Fifteen minutes, max, and they’d be home.

They’d just passed the baseball dome and the second downtown exit when she pulled her mouth mike down. She closed her eyes briefly, and when she opened them, her expression was grim.

“What is it?” he asked, not liking at all what he saw on her face.

She didn’t answer for a moment, and when she did, he could hear a slight tremor in her voice. “My ship is gone.”

“What do you mean, gone?” He stopped himself from asking if it had been destroyed. This was a ship she’d said she’d spent years on. He was sure she had friends, and, experienced zombie hunter or not, contemplating the destruction of everyone she’d known for the past several years had to be horrifying. “Maybe it’s in a different orbit?” he added lamely.

There was a bleakness in her eyes when she faced him. “My tech no longer picks up evidence of its existence in any orbit around your world. If they had to flash out, I’d have received an emergency notification, even with the transcomm inoperative. We have seeker ’droids for that purpose. You don’t abandon a team—regulations define our emergency procedures.” She held up her scanner. “The only thing I show now is this.” She touched a pulsing teardrop shape on her screen. “It’s a Tresh—a
possible
Tresh—resonance within range of where my ship was. Until I synchronize with the MOD-tech back at your structure, I won’t know more.”

Two more exits and they’d be almost home. A dozen insistent thoughts whirled through Theo’s mind as he pushed the SUV’s speed up over eighty, not the least of which was the possibility that Jorie Mikkalah might be spending the rest of her life on his planet. In Bahia Vista, Florida. As much as that oddly pleased him—logistical problems of her lack of verifiable citizenship aside—it had to terrify her.

The fact that his planet might now have little in the way of defenses against not only the zombies but the Tresh came pretty close to terrifying him.

“It’s time you told me everything, Jorie. And I mean everything.” He shot her a determined glance as, slowing, he flicked on the SUV’s turn signal. The Thirty-eighth Avenue North ramp was up ahead. “We have to work on the assumption your people can’t help you at this point. Not with the zombies. Not with the Tresh. But my people can. You’re going to have to ditch regulations, change the structure of this mission, and make us all part of your team.”

Or all of us,
Theo feared, reading all too well the expression on her face,
are going to die.

“There is nothing your governments can do,” she said, after a long moment of silence. “If the Tresh want to take your world, your cities, you don’t have the weaponry to stop them. Regrets. I know that’s not what you want me to say, but it’s fact. We—the Chalvash Interplanetary Concord—were barely able to defeat them ten years ago. If they start a war against you, you will lose.”

Theo hit the siren again as they came to the end of the ramp, anger supplanting the fear he’d felt moments before. Traffic moved out of his way as if it sensed the coming explosion. “God damn it, I refuse to give up and do nothing!”

“The Tresh hold no belief in deities. And I’m not advocating surrender. I do, however, want you to fully understand the situation. I’m the only one with any direct experience with the Tresh. I spent six years flying combat during the Border Wars. Both Kip Rordan and Tam are career Guardians. They know a lot about zombies, but they’ve never fought the Tresh.”

Any more bad news?
Theo turned onto his street and was slightly relieved by the lack of emergency vehicles. He had feared another scene like the one they’d left behind in Gulfview. “But they know how to shoot. I know how to shoot. And I can get you a lot more people who are trained, who know how to shoot.”

“Petrakos, you do
not
hear my words! If Tresh ships are here and the
Sakanah
is gone, we cannot stop them by shooting handfuls of their people here and there. The only way we can stop them is by
thinking.
We must be smarter than they are. We must be more devious—you understand
devious
?”

“Completely. We have to find out their plans and use that against them.” Finding out the Tresh’s plans was something he believed Jorie could handle. Using everything his world had to offer to stop the Tresh was his area of expertise. Galactic baddies or not, starburst weapons or not, they were on his turf now.

His mind played with a few scenarios: Jorie locating Tresh hideouts like she’d done in Gulfview, Theo sending a SWAT team armed with Hazers in after them. More jamming scanners so they couldn’t beam up and escape. Of course, Jorie would have to be the one to explain how to do that. But, hell, there had to be some special ops geek at MacDill AFB who could duplicate her scanner gizmo.

And what a coup Guardian tech would be for his country! Maybe he and Jorie would even get an invitation to the White House….

But there was a downside to his daydream. He sensed that but couldn’t quite grasp what it was, and then they were approaching his house. He shifted his mind back to real time, daydreams and downsides forgotten.

He slowed. All appeared normal, but then, he honestly didn’t know what to look for: an X-wing fighter parked on his front lawn? No starbursts appeared in his windows.

“Continue on,” Jorie told him. “We—”

“Can’t risk that the Tresh are inside and see us coming. We’ll leave the car at the park and double back.”

He backed the SUV into a parking space under a large oak tree, turned off the ignition, then hit the remote to open the rear door. Shaded from view by the tree and adjacent shrubbery, he retrieved her rifle and the G-Is from the cargo hatch, handing her weapons to her.

Jorie plucked his G-1 from his hand and touched two buttons on the side. “Now it’s set back to stun,” she said. “If the Tresh are there, we try to take them alive. We need to know what they know. But if there are serious problems,” she pointed to the power buttons, “change settings to hard-terminate by pressing both.”

He tapped his index finger on the buttons above the trigger and watched the power lights go from yellow to blue. It was an easy move. “Got it.”

She held his gaze for a long moment. “You’re very good at what you do, Sergeant Theo Petrakos. There may have been things I’ve said to make you feel I don’t value you. That I don’t respect your experience. I want you to know that’s not the truth. I value you more than you realize. And I am honored to have you not only on my team but,” and she hesitated slightly, “I hope, as a friend.”

Something in his chest tightened at her words and the emotion he heard underlying them. He pulled the rear hatch shut, then, before she could step away, reached over and cupped his hand around the side of her face. “I’m the one who’s honored,” he said, and didn’t even try to hide the emotion in his voice. Then something about the way they were standing facing each other—facing danger, facing death—made him think of a line from a movie, even though this was a shady park in Bahia Vista and not the smoky interior of a bar in Casablanca. “Of all the crime scenes in all the towns in all the world, you had to walk into mine.”

“Crime scenes?”

He sighed and patted her cheek gently. “Give me the rifle. My neighbors won’t question my carrying it.”

She hesitated for a moment, then, with a nod, handed it to him.

He locked the SUV and guided her on the grassy area along the curb and onto the brick-paved street. A little more than a day ago they’d walked this same path: he, fresh from his meeting with Doc White Braids, and she, having pulled some trickery to get him his laptop with the evidence tag.

It startled him to realize how much his life had changed in that short period of time. And how much a total stranger—an alien one-woman war machine—had come to mean to him.

She was, for all intents and purposes, alone on his world. Even if Tammy and Rordan were alive—and Theo had to work on the premise they might not be—Jorie could give the order to abandon the mission. There was no ship to report to, no captain to question her decision. He suspected—because they had set up Wayne in the rental—that they had some resources here. She could walk away and leave Theo and his world to fend for themselves.

Yet he knew in his gut she wouldn’t. Even if she was the sole Guardian on his world, she would never stop fighting to protect his people. The very essence of Commander Jorie Mikkalah was a sense of honor and duty.

When everyone else would be running away from a crazed, worm-covered, razor-armed zombie, Theo knew Jorie would be running toward it.

Theo also knew he’d be at her side.

The brick-paved street that circled the park ended after half a block.

“We’ll cut through my neighbors’ yard, stay hidden by the bushes,” he told her as they walked at a brisk clip. “Greg and Stacey are up north visiting relatives this week. Then we approach my house from the west, use that big tree”—
the one that the zombie shaved a fair chunk out of
—“as cover. If we come through the back door, the kitchen window is our only problem. But we can duck under that.” Plus, his front screen door—his homemade intruder alarm—squealed like a cage full of screaming monkeys. But then, he never thought he’d be breaking into his own house.

For a moment he thought of the broken lock on his bathroom window. But that would mean the two of them climbing through one by one. It would restrict access to their weapons if they needed them quickly. Not the best idea.

“Can you tell if the Tresh are already there?” he asked as Jorie hiked up the edge of her sweater and darted a glance at her scanner screen again. He thought for a moment about the implant in his shoulder. He suspected her gizmo controlled that too. But he no longer viewed her or that device as a threat, and not just because her ship was gone.

“If you hear the hum of laser fire, then they’re there,” she said grimly. “But at this distance, unless they’re running a dead zone or some tech I can positively identify as Tresh, I can’t. That’s what I’m watching for, what I saw earlier—something that shouldn’t be there. But they wouldn’t be here to appropriate your residence. They’d kill or kidnap my team, take the data from my MOD-tech, and leave.”

It had been at least forty minutes since Jorie had last heard from Tammy. Chances were good they were either going to walk into the middle of a firefight or a morgue. Great.

A blue Chevy minivan loaded with kids in the back and two women in the front seat breezed by. Theo recognized the driver as he casually put his arm around Jorie, shielding their weapons: a young legal secretary who lived with her schoolteacher husband and their twin boys a block away. He’d seen them many times rollerblading together. Now the mom and boys were out with a friend and her kids, probably heading for the mall to see Santa. The normality of their activity made his own seem that much more bizarre.

Dear Santa, All I want for Christmas is a container of double-stack Hazer rifles so I can kill all the zombies, and a couple of intergalactic starships to blow holes in the Tresh fleet.

It wasn’t a fleet they’d face in his house, though, but a Tresh team who looked human, according to what Jorie had told him. And if her ship had realized the Tresh were here, they might have sent down reinforcements. He hoped. “If we come into the middle of a fight, how will I know a Tresh from one of your people?” he asked, stepping back from her again as the minivan passed. “I couldn’t see them at that house. Do they wear specific uniforms?”
Or have fangs like vampires?
He remembered her remark about their sensitivity to light.