War of the Undead (Day One): The Apocalypse Crusade (A Zombie Tale) (32 page)

“That’s not what we’re here about, ma’am,” Chuck said. “We wanted to know about John. Why he didn’t get sick like the rest?”

“And iffin I’ll get it in the future,” John put in. “I don’t wanna wake up some morn wantin' to be eatin' my baby girl.”

Thuy grimaced slightly, and answered, “After what happened today, I can’t say, unequivocally what will happen to you in regards to the Com-cells. I simply don’t have enough information. What we know is that your body’s immune system destroyed them so thoroughly that it is rather amazing.” She paused for a deep breath and added, “I believe that there is a strong genetic component at play.”

“Playin’ how?” John demanded. He wasn’t the smartest of men, but he was shrewd enough to see when someone was hedging. Amy Lynn’s doctors used to act the same way whenever they had bad news to impart. They’d get all cagey with their words, hiding behind science when they didn’t want to speak plain.

Thuy took another deep breath, confirming John’s suspicion. “We should speak in private,” she said.

The air seemed to up and leave John’s body. It was just like when he’d heard Amy Lynn’s terminal diagnosis—he felt like he’d been hit over the head with a two-by-four. “Naw, I’d ruther y’all jes tell me plain.”

“It’s about your daughter.”

Suddenly, John lost all sensation in his extremities. It felt like his body was a loosely held cloud which was in the process of dissolving around him and that a stiff wind would finish the job. “What ‘bout Jaimee? She get bit?”

“No, however she did come in contact with the Com-cells. She’s stable at the moment, with her…”

John’s legs gave out. Chuck said, “Whoa, big fella,” and grabbed him on the way down. He helped John down to the soft carpet.

“Not my baby, not my baby,” John said, over and over again. Tears leaked out of both eyes, dribbling into his thin hair.

Stephanie took his hand and squeezed, but she might as well have been holding her own hand for all the comfort it did for John. She looked up at Thuy. “Is his daughter like him, immune? You said there was a strong genetic component at play.”

“Jaimee Burke is not completely immune to the effects of the Com-cells,” Thuy replied. “It’s been four hours and so far she is remarkably healthy in…”

John was well behind in the conversation. He heard the words as if they were coming through in Morse code. Each word seemed separate from the others; sentences had to be pieced together. “Four hours!” John raged. “It’s been four hours and y'all didn’t tell me?” he tried to get up; Chuck thought it prudent that he didn’t and so held him down.

“If you don’t recall,” Thuy said, “you had run off, so you can hardly blame me for not telling you right off the bat. Then there were the attacks to deal with and Anna and…I’m sorry, I had a lot on my plate.”

“Right, right, but how is she now?”

Thuy glanced at her notes on Jaimee Burke. “Stable. Temperature, blood pressure, pulse are all within normal parameters for a child of her age. Her eyesight has been dimming with the advancement of the spore production…”

“And her mind?” John asked, interrupting.

“Again, she’s remarkably whole. She has suffered a slight impairment, mostly memory loss and certain higher functions. Math seems beyond her ability, all except simple counting, and reading comprehension is lower than her grade level. We don’t know if this is going to be a permanent loss. These things she’s lost might just come back on their own or she might be able to be re-taught. ”

“And her appetite?” John asked, nervously. “She be gettin’ a hankerin’ for people? You know, like all them zombie
whatchamacallem
’s.”

“Not yet,” Thuy said. “They say she likes proper human fare…I mean normal food.” She added this last when John’s eyes took on a vague look as he considered the word ‘fare’. “Would you like to talk to her?”

John jumped at the chance.

In the big house, eighty yards away, Jaimee spoke to her father quietly, in a dull manner, not at all as she usually would. The phone was a tedious method of communication for her. She knew her daddy’s voice and could remember his face and she remembered she loved him, but while she was on the phone, she couldn’t put the three things together. So, one moment she would be basically talking to a stranger as she remembered how her father used to push her on the swings and the next moment she could hear her daddy, but didn’t know what he was talking about.

She knew she wasn’t coming across well because her daddy kept asking “You alright?”

Not being seen as smart or as one of them bothered her. She had hoped her daddy would be just like her. That would have made it better because he used to understand her meanings just fine. Now he was whining and his thinking wasn’t right. His mind was clearly all catawampus and askew. That’s what also made the call such a bother.

“Sorry, Daidy, I gotta do more tests for the doctors, so bye.”

“Love you, pumpkin.”

Half her mind was in an uproar about how awful and weak and puny he sounded, while the other half recalled what she was supposed to say back. “Love you too, Daidy.”

Jaimee squinted at the phone, trying to see where the danged “off” button was hiding. It was there among all the other buttons but they was just so small. After a few seconds of searching, she decided to give up. She plunked the phone on her bed and promptly forgot all about it.

“Why did you tell your father you had more tests to do?” Dr. McGrady asked. His voice came through a speaker and Jaimee had long since forgotten the face that went along with it. She had begun to think of him as some sort of robot living in the house, or as part of the house. “You don’t have any more tests scheduled for another hour.”

“I jes didn’t wanna talk, I reckon.” She didn’t like the robot voice of Dr. McGrady’s none too much, neither. She moved away from her bed and began walking about the room she shared with the body. The body was still alive but just sleeping. At one time she’d known who it was, but now it was just a body to Jaimee, one that didn’t smell none too good. It smelled like poopy.

She walked around the room because she knew there was a spot where the robot couldn’t see her. She forgot where it was, but she knew it was marked in some fashion. On the wall next to the bed there was a stainless steel cabinet that, like all the rest of the furnishings in the room, looked to have been pilfered from a hospital.

The cabinet had a red line across its front—the mark! She remembered leaving it with a crayon; she glanced down to see if she was still carrying it. No. The crayon was gone. She’d eaten it and then looked in one of the windows at her reflection to see if her mouth had looked bloody. It hadn’t, which was a might bit disappointing.

“Jaimee,” the robot voice of Dr. McGrady said. “Can you get away from there? You know I can’t see you when you go over there.”

What was it he didn’t want Jaimee to see? There had to be something. She began opening drawers and found all sorts of things that in her old life she would’ve found interesting: bandages, little bottles full of strange medicines, gauze, medical tape, needles, clamps, scalpels, and fine string with what looked like little fishhooks at the end.

“Jaimee, please get away from there.”

“I’m jes lookin’ and there ain’t no crime in that,” she mumbled to the robot voice. Most everything was in plastic. Some of the things she opened so as to get a better look at ‘em. The scalpel was sharp enough to draw blood—hers was a very deep red. She glanced over at the body and wondered what color blood she’d have. Jaimee didn’t want to find out. She was sure that if she cut open the body a whole mess of black poopy would come gushing up like a geyser and that was just gross.

She turned away from the body. It wasn’t interesting. For all the time she’d been in there, the body had just lain there with its monitors making little mechanical noises every few minutes, either a beep or a boop or some such. Jaimee barely paid it no mind, not even to wonder who it was. She had once known. Sometime long ago she had known the name that went with the body. It felt like that had been in a dim past, years before.

“Jaimee, you are trying my patience,” the voice said. “For the last time, move away from the cabinet.”

“Why, whatchu got in it?” So far what she’d discovered hadn’t been all that interesting.

“Boring stuff that doesn’t concern you. Now go back to the center of the room where I can see you. Keep going; a little further, there. Is there anything I can get you? Something to drink or eat? A game or something?”

She had needs and wants but, like her memory, they were vague and impossible to form into words, and, at least for the time being, they weren’t urgent. “Naw. I jes wanna git gone.” That was something her daddy always used to say. Now that she wasn’t trying to think on his words, her memory of him was perfectly intact. Gittin' gone was what she wanted. There was more to her life than the room. She went to the window and looked out, the dark was easier on her eyes.

A person appeared out of the rain and headed right for her. His skin was nearly dark as the night, his eyes darker. It was Earl Johnston. He came to stand right beneath the glass and stared up at her with his mouth hanging open; it looked huge like that of a gargoyles. There was blood on the tatters of his clothes and ugly open wounds across his throat and face. Jaimee wasn’t afraid.

They stared at each other until Earl figured out she wasn’t what he needed. He turned away at the sound of a car door opening. There was a man leaning into the driver’s side of a Buick, digging around in the console. That’s what Earl hungered for: someone clean.

Off he went to feed and Jaimee only watched without expression.

Even with his wife dying of cancer, Andy O’Brian couldn’t quit. The cigs had a death grip on him. It’s what drove him out into the rain to find a lighter, that and his mother–in-law’s nagging ass, voice. He didn’t need to hear it every time he went for a smoke.

“You have a four-year old daughter for goodness sakes,” Alice Wepperman hissed, not wanting to wake her granddaughter. “If you get the cancer, too, who’s going to take care of her? Not me.”

Andy knew that was a frigging lie. First off, Alice loved Samantha more than she loved her own daughter, and second, if he died, Samantha would come with the proceeds from two life insurance policies. That alone would have cemented her position as permanent caregiver. Alice was a coupon clipper simply because she had a sharp aversion to work.

“It’s one cigarette,” he grouched, looking through his suitcase for his lighter. He’d had it earlier and he always kept it with his smokes, but it was plum gone. “Have you seen my lighter?”

“No,” she lied, easily. She had his lighter stashed beneath the couch cushion. In a fit of anger, she’d taken it after his last cigarette. For the life of her she couldn’t understand how a man could smoke around his children. It was easily the worst habit she could imagine. And her daughter! Barb had been just as bad right up until she got the news. “And good riddance I say,” Alice finished with a flourish.

Andy felt the muscles in his jaw clench; they were hard, like chestnuts in his cheeks. “You know what, Alice?” he growled. “Today is not the day and now is not the time.” The quarantine was absolutely fucking him over. He had traded delivery routes just so he could stop by Walton to be with his wife for a few hours while she went through what was supposed to have been the miracle process of destroying her tumors. Instead the quarantine had descended on them like an iron curtain, trapping him on the wrong side. She was confined up in the hospital and he hadn’t heard a peep from her all day. What was almost as bad, he and his truck were also stuck. Over a quarter million dollars’ worth of whiskey was just sitting out in the parking lot.

It would be a friggin’ Christmas miracle if he wasn’t fired.

That’s why he needed his cigs
and
his friggin’ lighter. He popped up out of the suitcase and looked around the strange bungalow, hoping it had fallen beneath one of the poufy chairs. The O’Brian’s were one of eight hardship cases among the forty-two patients, who had been given free housing for the week. It was a smart little cottage with three bedrooms and two baths. Everything was perfect about it except for the damned missing lighter.

“It’s never the day to quit in your book,” Alice nagged, shaking her fat face. “While I think now is the best time. No lighter equals no cigarettes.”

Andy snapped his fingers under her bulb of a nose. “Barb has one in her car, and if not, there’s always the car lighter.” She looked at him smugly and five minutes later he found out why: there wasn’t a lighter in her car, not even the factory-installed push lighter.

“Son of a bitch!” he hissed. Not finding a lighter really got his goat, but seeing his mother-in-law gloating through the screen door nearly pushed him over the edge into rage. He held his temper in, letting the cool rain wash away his anger. As he was sitting there, half in and half out of his wife’s car, a man came staggering up. He looked like he was walking a floor that wasn’t just crooked but angled as well.

Drunk by eight, sheesh
, Andy thought. “Hey, buddy, you got a light? I can’t seem to…find…” Andy’s voice trailed off as he got a better view of the man. He looked like his head had been near torn off, yet he was still walking. “Are you ok? Do you want me to call…hey!”

Earl Johnston attacked Andy, not as a man would with swinging arms and kicking feet, but as an animal, teeth first. In the first second, Andy actually thought Earl was falling and went to catch him and the next thing he knew teeth were tearing at his neck. He fought back but he did so against a foe imbued with great strength and an intolerance of pain. Andy was dead in minutes.

His dying screams alerted Alice, who ran to the door, thinking Andy had dropped a tire jack onto his toe or some such nonsense. She took one look at Earl chewing through Andy’s throat and screamed herself raw. Foolishly, she reached for the screen door, jerked it closed, and locked it before shutting the main door. Losing those precious seconds doomed her. The main door was stout, solid wood and would have held Earl at bay for some time.

Earl was off of Andy’s corpse in an instant. Unthinkingly, he went after Alice, rushing for her with a mad hunger driving him. He launched himself through the screen door just before the main door clicked shut. His weight and momentum sent it flying back on its hinges to bang square into Alice’s round face, knocking her to the ground where she spent ten seconds just trying to focus her eyes.

Three feet away, Earl growled in rage and frustration. He was caught up in the screen door and a younger, more spry woman could’ve jumped up and run out of there. Alice was five years past fifty and had moved beyond chubby and into portly. Her head was spinning from the whack it had received from the door and in her heart she knew she’d never get up in time.

“Samantha hide! Hide!” she screamed. “Samanthaaaa…”

Earl bent the screen door in half with his bare hands and then he was on her. His right hand had her by hair, his left hand pinned her down. She was absolutely helpless as Earl stared down at her, trickling fresh blood from his glistening jaws. It wet her face and dripped into her open mouth. She screamed long and loud. Earl watched her spasms of fear through the black of his eyes trying to see the white flesh of her neck where the body’s fluid was hottest. He was eager and his mouth kept opening wider and wider until he couldn’t wait any longer and he ripped into her.

The blood gurgled and bubbled up like a hell-fed spring. It was scalding to his lips, it was liquid copper, it was like living fire, but it didn’t last and his hunger was on him again just as soon as Alice’s heart died in her chest.

He stood, breathing in great gulps. His mind was utterly blank. He was not capable of thought, he could only react. He reacted when he heard four-year-old Samantha say, “Ga-ma?” Her father’s scream had woken her and she sat up bleary-eyed, confused and afraid. The room was strange to her and the crash and the growly noises had her stomach hurting and when her Ga-ma screamed for her to hide, she didn’t hide, she just sat holding her blanket to her chest and staring at the door.

Instinct is the weakest of human drives. Learning is a thousand times stronger and she had learned to trust that her daddy and mommy would always make thing right, would always be there when things were scary.

Earl only had instinct. He hungered to drink the freshest blood no matter what and the sound of the little girl’s voice triggered his instinct as if his gullet were barren instead of sloshing with the blood of his previous victims. He charged the bedroom door and struck it square. The walls shook.

Samantha screamed, inadvertently egging Earl on to greater efforts. The door rattled in its frame and with each blow the striker gave way a millimeter at a time. In a minute the door blasted inwards and Earl rushed in. He was starving.

The CDC arrived for the second time that night. Leading the team of six agents was Gerald Brunson wearing his trademark
Braves
baseball cap. It never went with anything he ever wore, especially his tweed suits, but that didn’t matter much to him. He loved his team more than he did fashion and was senior enough in rank that people rarely said anything.

In the hour and a half since Foster’s reconnaissance had turned deadly, a large tent had been set up to act as command post. It was green and smelled like it had been sitting in someone’s basement for thirty years, but it was large enough to hold a dozen desks and it kept the rain off.

Gerald swept in. “First, I need coffee,” he barked. “Second, I need to know who
was
in charge and third, someone has to catch me up.” He always made sure to let everyone know their place in his world the minute he walked onto any scene. For all intents and purposes, at least in his mind, he was the federal government.

The agents were pointed to the folding table where Sergeant Foster sat moodily staring at a map of the grounds. His head had begun aching thirty minutes before. “It’s nothing,” he’d told himself. “It’s just stress.” After all, who wouldn’t be stressed after what he’d gone through? And who wouldn’t be stressed considering what he was going to go through? Someone would have to pay. Eight officers had died that night, which meant someone was going to pay big time.

He saw the CDC people arrive, which only made his head hurt worse. In his pocket was a bottle of Tylenol. Six of the pills went into his mouth to go along with the six he’d already taken. His water bottle was empty so he dry swallowed them—a part of him wanted to the chew the pills, to grind them up in his teeth so he could taste in their bitterness that the medicine was working. It was a weird feeling

“Gerald Brunson, CDC,” Gerald said, coming up. He didn’t offer to shake Foster’s hand. The CDC wasn’t a place for shaking hands. “Give me a sit rep.”

“Sit rep?” Foster replied, looking up at Gerald with dull eyes and wondering: who the hell talks like that?
Officious assholes, that’s who
, he answered himself. “How ‘bout I just give you a briefing?”

Gerald smiled through clenched teeth. “Go ahead then. Be thorough.”

Foster pointed out through the tent flap. “That’s the Walton facility. They were supposed to be finding a cure for cancer in there, but something went wrong and instead they’ve created…” he choked back the word ‘zombie’ and went with, “They created a disease.”

“They created a disease?” Gerald asked with raised eyebrows. “I highly doubt that. We’re probably looking at a reaction to a previously unknown mycotoxin. The study of fungal agents is…”

“Do mycotoxins turn you into a fucking cannibal? Because that’s what’s happening up there. They’re fucking eating each other.”

A put-upon sigh escaped Gerald and he said, “Side effects vary.”

Foster laughed without humor. “Spoken like a true bureaucrat. Thank God the CDC is here!” Gerald glared from beneath the brim of his baseball cap; Foster ignored the look and went on in a strident voice, “What about coming back from the dead? Is that a side effect, too?”

A little, nervous smile cracked Gerald’s lips; he was pretty sure that this guy was slipping over the edge. “Maybe you should start at the beginning," he said as reasonably as possible.

The trooper was slow to begin. The Com-cells he'd breathed in were collecting in his cerebellum making it difficult to remember the smaller details. “It started this morning. At…at…around ten, I think, but I'm not sure. You guys, the CDC issued a quarantine order. It was just a precautionary thing, but that was wrong. That was stupid. They should’ve known they couldn’t control this. Not with so many.”

“Many?” Gerald asked. “How many people are we talking about? Just the ones who are infected.”

Numbers began clicking by the meter in his head. It started with the number eight, only that wasn't the right number. Foster shook his head and said, not quite under his breath “Not them.”

Gerald glanced back at his fellow CDC officers and raised an eyebrow. Foster didn’t notice, he was digging through his paperwork. “Ah, here it is. Forty…forty-two, I think, but there were more, later. Lots more.”

“Let’s just concentrate on the numbers when this started. How many people were on the grounds when this started?”

Again Foster looked at his notes. Everything on the pages seemed so miserably buggy that he wanted to swipe at the paper or crush it in his sweaty hands. Instead he turned the pages at an angle, squinted, and read, “Two hundred and fifty-seven give or take. That’s how many people were at the facility as of nine this morning. That was the count of the desk guards.”

“And who did that include?” one of the CDC agents behind Gerald asked.

That was a much harder question and Foster wanted to ask what difference did it make? Actually he wanted to scream the question in the man's face; Foster's head wasn’t feeling better with all the stupid questions. “I don’t know. Hold on,” he said as he brought out the Tylenol again. This time it was a handful that he ate, chewing the bitter pills until nothing was left in his mouth but a nasty white slime.

“Here it is," he said, smacking his lips loudly. "Twenty four medical staff, sixty one family members, twelve security personnel…uh, there’s also the patients…I said those. Uh, and the cleaning and cafeteria workers and, uh, like thirty construction workers. Then there were the admin workers but they’re all dead…sort of. At least they’re not really dead. They’re like me. I-I mean…”

He stopped abruptly and looked up at Gerald with as guilty a look on his face as any criminal ever wore. “I mean…I mean…”

Gerald stepped back; he could feel his pulse in his ears. “Were you in the building?”

Guilt didn’t sit well with Foster’s frame of mind; it was like blood and water. No, that wasn’t right. It was like blood and…more blood. “No,” he said aloud. The CDC people were staring at him like he was some sort of freak; that wasn't right either. “No, I mean yes, but I was geared up. And it wasn’t just me. Trooper Paul was there, too, and he’s just fine. Just fine.”