The Down Home Zombie Blues (33 page)

Jorie sagged down into a kitchen chair and rested her forehead against her fingertips.

There was the scrape of wood against tile, and Theo sat down next to her. “Why would Prow keep that feeder after all these years?”

“I doubt it’s mine.” The thing was still on the floor. Hers or not, she wouldn’t pick it up. Could barely look at it. “There’s likely a matter replicator on board his ship. Or ship’s supply has some feeders and engraved it with the prison compound’s name.”

He pulled her hands away from her face and held them in his. “We can take it out in the backyard and fry it with your Hazer, if that will make you feel better.”

Star’s end, but he had a very good face and an even better heart. “No. You’re right. The vomit-brained bastard is playing games. He can’t win unless I let him. I’m not going to let him.” She drew a long breath. “He wants me to remember. I will remember. And I’ll make him pay because I will not forget.”

Jorie pulled her hands out of Theo’s, strode to where the feeder lay on its side, and snatched it off the tile floor. Her stomach spasmed as her fingers touched the cool, slick metal, but she didn’t drop it. Instead, she marched to Theo’s bedroom and placed the feeder on the corner of his wooden dresser.

She would not forget.

Then cross-legged and teeth clenched, she went back to analyzing the reprogramming dart.

22

At some point during the late-evening hours, Theo dropped one of his light-green long-sleeved pullover shirts in her lap along with a pair of gray drawstring shorts, with the admonishment to “get comfortable.”

And at some point even later that evening, Theo tugged her away from her screen and her worries and back into his arms—and his bed.

“Last night,” she told him hesitantly as his hands slipped under the green shirt and massaged the aches along her spine, “we probably shouldn’t have—”

His breath was soft in her ear. “Last night was wonderful. Perfect. Don’t change that. Not everything happens according to plan.”

“My only plan is reprogramming the C-Prime. Beyond that, I cannot even begin to speculate.”

“Then don’t speculate,” he said, his voice husky with emotion. “I told you. Take what’s here and now.”

Jorie turned in his embrace and saw the undisguised heat in his gaze. She couldn’t remember Lorik ever looking at her like that. It thrilled her—and frightened her. There was so much at risk, so much at stake. So many unknowns.

And then there was Theo. Infuriating, obstinate, intelligent, compassionate, loyal, brave Theo. So she sought the heat of his skin as she had the night before, focusing everything on this one man right now, knowing full well this one man would haunt her dreams forever.

The next spate of bad news hit at about nine-fifteen local time the next morning. Significantly after sunwake and significantly after a morning meal of coffee—which Jorie was slowly acquiring a taste for when it was heavily sweetened—and peanut butter on toasted bread.

The scanner riding her hip under Theo’s borrowed shirt screeched out a terrifying high–low warning that sent her careening out of the kitchen and into his bedroom. Structure shield failure. Her MOD-tech was gasping its last breath but still trying to run the calculations on the zombie reprogramming dart and still attempting to send signals to any Guardian ship that might be sweeping the sector.

She now understood Theo’s panic at nakedness.

They were naked, exposed, vulnerable. If the Tresh saw the structure’s energy pattern suddenly flattening, they were dead—and the terror the feeder cup symbolized would become real.

She grabbed her Hazers from under Theo’s bed and tossed him the spare. “Hard-terminate!” She couldn’t take any chances. A team of Devastators or a dozen zombies could appear at any moment.

“What happened?” Theo slung the strap over his shoulder, his projectile weapon already in hand.

“Shields are gone,” she told him in English, then switched to Alarsh, forcing her MOD-tech units through a series of resets and reinstallations through commands given tersely into her mouth mike.

“Tresh?”

“My fault.” She kept watch on her scanner. Anything could happen. In a way, she almost wished for another attack by the Tresh. She wanted this damned thing settled! “Overloaded the system.”

He started for the door.

“Stay here. They’ll zero in on the tech. I can’t program and watch for them.”

“I got your six, babe. Do your work.”

She did, but there was no way she could resurrect full residence shields. Bliss luck it was daylight, the Tresh less likely to move easily then. But less likely hadn’t helped Tam, Kip, or Jacare. Of course, she was the instigator, tracking down the Tresh first that day.

The zombies appeared in daylight or dark.

She worked feverishly to get the shield program to resurrect, aware of Theo pacing behind her, aware of every other noise in the residence, every land vehicle passing on the street, waiting for that cold draft that preceded a PMaT transit—or the green glow of a zombie portal forming.

None of her patches held. The unit was overtaxed. She was asking too much of it: shield the residence, design the zombie dart, parse the skies with a Guardian distress signal. Something had to go.

She gritted her teeth and deleted the distress signal, her heart sinking as she did so. The one chance, the only chance she’d have of being found, of going home again, lay in that signal. Even a seeker ’droid on mapping duties would have seen and reported it.

Now there was nothing.

With the deletion of that program, tech resources restructured, energy usage leveled. She had something to work with. She might not get home, but she could protect where she was.

She resurrected the roof shield first. “Overhead in place,” she told Theo. Out of the corner of her eye she saw him glance up, and if she hadn’t been so scared, aggravated, and under pressure, she might have grinned. So typical.

But the next datastream gave her nothing to smile about. There was insufficient power to re-create the wall shields. A core processor must have burned out in the shutdown. Capacity was under seventy percent of what she’d had last night. And she couldn’t reduce functions any more. She couldn’t stop the dart-program computations.

“Ass-faced demon’s whore!” She hated no-choice situations.

Only when she caught Theo’s raised eyebrow did she realize she’d sworm out loud and in Vekran. Alarsh epithets never translated well. “I can’t shield your entire structure anymore. My tech took damage. I don’t have time to chase down the problem, and even if I did, I’ve nothing to repair it with. So…” She keyed in changes to the shield program, shaking her head in frustration.

“What can you shield?”

“One room. This room, including your bathroom. That’s all.” She locked the shields in place, then flipped her oc-set over her right eye and glanced quickly around. Everything looked good. She pulled the band back down around her neck. “Perimeter secure. But anytime you go through that door, especially at night, you have to assume something you’re not going to want to meet might be out there.”

“You’re sure the Tresh didn’t cause this?”

“I checked once and am running a secondary check now.” Best she could, with her tech’s reduced capacity. “But I don’t think so. It’s just a basic overload on a unit that was never meant to do as much as it’s been doing.”

“I thought it was maintaining the shields and designing the zombie dart. Your scanners track the zombies and the Tresh, right?”

She’d never told him about the wide-beam distress signal. She’d convinced herself it was because there hadn’t been time to discuss such things, but she knew it was really because of what she felt and what had happened the past two nights. Hesitantly, she told him now and saw the fleeting expression of disappointment on his face. Then it was gone, his features relaxing. She remembered his ability to subvert his emotions when they were in the cabin assigned to him on the
Sakanah.

“We should be able to make a move on that C-Prime in a couple of days. Once that’s done, you can put all your tech into contacting another Guardian ship.” He reached down and tugged on a lock of her hair. “I know you want to go home, Jorie.”

She also saw the darkening of his eyes every time he realized that.

“It’s my duty to report what I’ve found out about the Tresh.”

He hunkered down next to her, shoving his gun in his holster as he did so. “We had this conversation three days ago. Only I was telling you about my duty to be here. Do you remember what you told me? That you try to take what’s bad and make it into bliss. Well, I’ve been trying to do that for you. Trying to let you know you’re welcome here. More than welcome here. With me.” He chucked her gently under the chin with two fingers. “It’s not that I don’t understand, babe. I do. I just don’t know how to make things perfect for you.”

He rose, then strode to the large viewport and stared out it without further comment.

“Nothing’s ever perfect, Theo,” she said after a while. Such were the problems of living in the here and now, she wanted to add but didn’t. They were both adults. They both knew that.

He turned, shaking his head. “Ain’t that the damned truth.” He motioned to the door. “I need coffee. Drop the sizzle shields so I can go to the kitchen.”

“I’ll leave that door unshielded when you’re here. Any PMaT transits in the area, or portal formations, will set off the alarms on my scanner. But at night or when I’m alone, we should keep all shields up.” She keyed in the change and nodded at him.

Then she went back to her programs, very aware of the silver feeder cup off to her left. The threat still existed; there was still a lot of work to do. She brought up the log on the zombie dart and a cry strangled her throat. Her tech’s failure had done more than crash the shield program. It had corrupted all her work to date on the dart. Almost twelve sweeps’ worth, useless.

Heavy footsteps hurried her way. “Jorie?”

She waved one hand at her blinking screen with an abrupt motion, not bothering to hide her frustration. “Gone. All gone. I have to start all over again on the dart.”

“Christ. Well.” He huffed out a short sigh. “Just start over. It’s the only thing we can do.”

She thrust her hands through her hair and leaned forward for a moment, wondering if that was true. She straightened. “We need another plan. We’re losing too much ground, Theo. I’m a tracker. I know survival programming and a bit more because I’ve made it my business to learn it. But I’m not part of a tech team. And this,” she motioned to her T-MOD and its auxiliary units, “may not hold together long enough, even if I figure out exactly what to do. We may have to just try to terminate the C-Prime without the dart and hope the herd collapses in on itself from there. And that the Tresh don’t take countermeasures.”

The more she thought about it, the more she was convinced the feeder cup was a private message from Prow. The Devastator team might well be unaware he sent it. It didn’t fit their normal method of attack.

So that meant the Devastators had yet to make another move against her. She was sure they would before the next zombie germination cycle completed.

“Right now all we have is you, me, and Zeke.” Theo didn’t sound blissful. “A couple guys I talked to earlier this morning aren’t interested or available to go on a private hunting expedition. I’m still waiting on callbacks from a few others.”

A couple more people? With herself as the only experienced tracker, even ten people would be a tough fight. “What if I met with your security chief, your regional leaders?” She tried to remember the terms from Danjay’s reports: major…mayor? And then some political figure over the larger populace. Meeting with a nil world’s heads of state was forbidden by gen-pro regs. She no longer cared about genpro regs.

“It would have to go up through the chain of command, which could take weeks. And after that?” He shrugged. “You told me the horror stories, the governments fighting over access to the Guardians. It would all happen here. And you’d be at the center of it.”

“We may not have a choice.”

Theo’s eyes narrowed. “I’m not opting for that as long as we still have some options.” He pulled his cell phone—she’d finally learned the terminology for that thing—out of his pocket. “Let me try David Gray again.” He wandered back to the main room.

Jorie returned to her programming, rebuilding the dart, very aware how outnumbered and ill-prepared they were. And even more aware there was nothing that could be done about it.

A few minutes later Theo returned, hunkering down again with a glimpse of that feral grin on his lips. “David’s interested. I’ll need to get him to Suzanne’s to let him see the zombie. He knows—not what’s going on, not yet, but FDLE has reports on mummified bodies—zombie attacks—that my department wasn’t told about. The data wasn’t considered relevant to our queries because the attacks weren’t on people but on a whole herd of cows, up in Pasco County. Fifty or so.”

“Cows.” She ran the word though her mind. “Ah. Cattle?” When he nodded, she continued. “Juveniles in a feeding frenzy will often attack anything warm-blooded. And this Pasco is a location?” Another nod. “How far?”

“Twenty, thirty miles north—Wait, I’ll show you.” He left then returned with a fat paperbound book that had printed maps in the front.

“Where exactly in the region?”

“I don’t know. I’ll get the complete story from David when I meet with him at about three o’clock.”

“He’ll accept what you tell him is true?”