Zombies Ever After: Sirens of the Zombie Apocalypse, Book 6 (14 page)

That was his cue. He got to his knees, then aimed at the tank
drone. It looked twice as large as he remembered it, now that it was
only a few feet away. The gun was unable to aim down at the injured
man below it, so it was trying to back itself up to find the angle it
needed to hit its target.

He fired several wild shots, then ducked back into the tub. The
gun on the tank could hit him at that level.

A shot did hit the side of the tub, but the heavy steel deflected
it with a dull thud. He felt it hit, but there was no penetration.

He was ready to declare a stalemate, but then he saw the return of
one of the green lasers.

6

The first round impacted the Marine—he yelped—but the
following four or five seemed to have missed.

The drone’s tracks came back into the room. They slid on the
broken glass and debris as the tank approached the tub. With a final
clank of steel on steel, it stopped. From the bottom of the tub, he
could see the edge of the thing’s superstructure and the big
gun on top, though it couldn’t possibly aim down at him as it
was now too close. In a way, it was a classic standoff. He considered
shooting the pistol, but there was no obvious point he could hit
which would shut the whole thing down like you see in the movies.

“Liam Peters?” A distant metallic female voice called
to him.

“Umm.”

One of the small drones hovered in through the broken windows. The
force of the air from the fans filled the tub with turbulence. When
it was over him, he saw both the black orb and a speaker in the
plastic casing around it.

“Mr. Peters?”

“Yes. You got me.” There was no possible way they
didn’t know it was him. He had twenty-two tags embedded in him
which said as much.

“You’ve been a hard gentleman to find—”

Someone interrupted the woman in the speaker.

“Are you f’ing kidding me? She got out?” the
voice said quietly in response. After a pause, she continued.

“I said, you are a hard person to find. I had to move drones
all over the city to get to you.”

“Why?”

“Why, huh? Do you remember Agent Duchesne? I’m sure
you do. You left him to die on that shipwreck.”

“Yes.”

“Let’s just say this is for him.”

“But he tried to kill me. I didn’t want him to die.”

He didn’t think the truth would help. He was happy to see
the man die because he was responsible for infecting Grandma. Then he
tried to kill them all in the river. That he died was a bonus, by his
reckoning.

“The reasons are unimportant. We all do bad things in the
service of our country. He was a big piece of my own future. So,
thanks for that, you little shit.” The words were vicious, but
the tinny speaker didn’t do them justice. He considered telling
her, but his life was on the line. Humor usually backfired on him
when the stakes were high.

“Well, aren’t you going to tell me who you are? My
money’s on this being that dirtbag’s mom. You sound like
an angry mom.”

Dammit, Liam. You said no humor.

“Mom? Are you really that stupid? No, I don’t guess
you are. You’ve survived trips back and forth to Cairo, and I’m
guessing you’re responsible for walking off with two of our
tanks. Not the activities of an innocent child. Who are you with?
Tell me that, and I might let you go, for now.”

He took a chance.

“Elsa? Is this Elsa? I have a note for you.”

Silence for a long pause.

“OK, it doesn’t matter. Who has a message for me?”

He didn’t know the who. Only the what. “It said, Dear
Elsa. You lose. Then a bomb exploded and blew up the home of Hans
Grubmeyer.”

The woman began to cuss but keyed off her microphone before she
completed her first word.

She came back with serenity. “It doesn’t matter, Mr.
Peters. It gives me great pleasure to tell you your Grandma Marty is
now dying with the miserable town of Cairo, Illinois. You left her
here, and I finished her off. Her life isn’t worth a tenth of
Michael’s, but it's a start. I have a list here with several
more of your family members. It will provide a fun diversion from my
more pressing duties, like rebuilding the world.”

Liam was crestfallen. He knew about the list but wanted to believe
Hayes had been telling the truth when he said that list had been
stopped.

His options were to grovel to this tinny-voiced drone or remain
defiant until the end.

A violent series of explosions erupted inside the tiny bathroom.
He figured the drone was self-destructing or something. It would be a
sure way to eliminate him. For twenty seconds the room was a smoky
echo chamber of ear-splitting bangs and the sound of bullets
impacting heavy metal.

He closed his eyes, not because he was scared, but because he
imagined debris dropping in his eyes from all the shrapnel raining on
him. The drone bumped into the tub several times but soon stopped
altogether. If the voice was still speaking, he couldn’t hear
it.

A deep hum and vibration came from outside the house, rattling the
glass on the floor. Then a hand touched him.

“Come on, sleeping beauty. Time to run.” It was
Brandyweis.

He jumped out and followed. Three other Marines hovered outside
the bathroom door, aiming their weapons up and down the hallway.

“Go! Go! Go! We’ll be out in thirty seconds.”

The other end of the hallway was a mangled mess. Where the grenade
had gone off, it stripped the paint off the wall and punched holes
through them in several places. The glass window at the end was blown
out.

The stairwell was once the model of moneyed beauty. The fancy
carpet and ornate wooden banister had been ruined as the drone bumped
and climbed its way to the upper floor.

All of them were on the ground floor in moments. Brandyweis
continued out the front door without stopping. Liam followed.

When he exited the remains of the front door—

Hey, this reminds me of my house!

—he was rewarded with a sight that thrilled him.

The V-22 Osprey landed on the wide avenue between the row of
mansions and the large municipal park beyond. It was bouncing lightly
as if it had only just landed and wanted to get back off the ground.

“Run!” Someone shouted.

He wasn’t going to wait for an invitation. He crossed the
lawn, easily pacing the larger, gear-clad Marines. As he approached,
a woman in a small window near the front gave a thumbs up sign and
then adjusted a huge gun on her door. The gun barrel began to spin
and soon rounds tore into the mansion behind them as she traded fire
with multiple drones pushing rounds the opposite way.

Zzzzzzzzzzzz.

A Gatling gun. The similarity to the destruction of his parents'
house was uncanny.

While the gun screamed up front, they ran up the ramp on the rear.
It was already going up as he reached the central cargo space. He
also noticed people from the park had begun to run toward the
plane...but he tried to keep that in perspective. If he successfully
found a cure, all those people would be saved. More than could ever
make it on one flight out.

Once they realized someone was shooting guns in their
direction—the overshots of the drones—the whole
procession stopped and dropped.

He was just able to reach a tie-down strap to hold on as the plane
cleared the trees.

My God, that was close.

7

When he could take a breath, he appreciated how close he'd come to
getting crossed off the list. His luck held, though as the big bird
morphed from a helicopter into an airplane, he cussed into the rotor
noise: he'd forgotten the handgun back in the tub.

He needed a list to keep track of all the expensive weapons he'd
misplaced recently.

The Marines plugged him into the comm system so he could
communicate with the Lt. Colonel without shouting. They discussed the
assault, Elsa’s role, and what it could mean for their next
mission. Liam remained focused on the one thing he could understand
from all the new problems of the day.

“I need to find Victoria. We can't leave her.” He
wondered if they were flying high above her, or if she was far away,
or...dead.

He had to know.

On a whim, he said the first thing that came into his mind. “Hey,
sir, do you think that machine will tell me where Victoria is? Is she
in the tracking system?”

“I sincerely doubt it. It might know her name and
information, but not her locale. She would have had to have been
tagged, like you were. And if she was in Forest Park before you, the
drones hadn’t made it that far west.”

“But they did make it. You just saw them.”

He thought it was so obvious it didn’t need saying, but he
was determined to get them to use the computer to answer for certain.

In minutes, the Marine named Thomas—his name plate said
Zinsky—brought the laptop-thing. He punched in a few keys, then
took a minute to look at the screen. Liam couldn’t see what he
was looking at.

After too long, Brandyweis asked him for a report.

“Well, sir. The kid said she was in Forest Park, but this is
showing her several screens away. It shows her near Cairo, Illinois.”

“That’s not possible!”

She promised she wouldn’t leave me.

“Sir, I’ve checked the data. She's definitely there.
But it also has her account flagged. You better see this.” He
motioned for his superior to come to him.

Brandyweis got up from his seat and bent over to read the
computer.

“You're sure about this?”

Liam could hear the colonel talk on the comm system.

Thomas nodded.

Brandyweis turned to him. “Son, this is saying your
girlfriend was tagged before the disaster. The notes say she was
admitted to a routine exam when she started working at Barnes
Hospital. While she was there, this tag was inserted underneath her
skin.

His mind spun. Duchesne said they tracked her by her phone. That
was an easy lie for him to make. If he knew the tracking was more
insidious, it didn’t cost him anything to blame it on the
phone. But that would also mean he knew people were being tracked
before the sirens got things started.

Would Victoria have any idea?

They can find us both, at any time.

Staying with Marines suddenly seemed the reasonable course of
action. “Sir, I’ll follow you to the end of time if you
can get me to Victoria in Cairo. If she left this park without
telling me, I think she's in a lot of danger. The cure has to wait
for this one thing.”

The plane rattled as the colonel stood nearby, studying him. He
felt the harsh stare of the man now dictating the next phase of his
life, but he met his eyes. There was no weakness when Victoria’s
safety was on the line.

He needed the colonel. Desperately.

While Liam was asleep in the basement nearby.

Victoria was in the video control room of the Whitaker building on
the Washington University campus of St. Louis. She’d just seen
herself on a video recording set in her dorm room—someone had
been spying on her.

“Vicky,” said a man’s voice behind her.

She was startled, but not afraid. She knew who it was and settled
herself so as not to give him power over her.

“Hayes,” she said without emotion as she turned on her
heels.

“Oh, I thought I’d surprise you. You look like you
expected to find me here.”

“When I saw the elderly on the monitors, I thought of you. I
had a feeling we’d see you again. I’m sorry it happened
so soon.” Left unsaid was that Hayes had her shot in a previous
meeting, though their most recent meeting was complicated—he’d
helped her and Liam escape from the Riverside Hotel.

“Believe me; I wish this meet up didn’t need to
happen, either. But the situation outside is dire, and it turns out I
need your help.”

She turned her hip toward him. “You want to shoot me again?
Here you go. I'm still healing, so it will
really
hurt.”

Hayes shook his head emphatically. “No, no, we have to get
past that. I’ve said I was sorry, and I am.”

His contrition seemed genuine, as it did the last time, but she
could never fully trust a man who had shot a gun at her, no matter
the stakes.

“You need Grandma Marty. That’s why you're here.”

A long stare. “I don’t fault you for doubting me—”

“You need her. Just say it.”

He was a middle-aged man, now dressed in khaki pants and a light
blue crisscrossed button-down shirt. He often seemed jovial in their
prior encounters. Like he somehow enjoyed the chaos.

He rolled his eyes. “Fine. I need her.”

“A ha! Knew it.”

“I need her, but so do you. We all do.”

“Yes, great. Not surprising. But before we get to that, why
were you spying on my room? Are you a sick pervert, in addition to
being an attempted murder—oh, I’m sorry,
we’ve
moved beyond that incident
,” she said with mock conviction.

Now he started to look like he was off balance. “No, it
isn’t like that. I swear.” He pointed to the video screen
now frozen on a still image of her old dorm room. “I don't have
access to my old, um, tracking tools. That room is the only link I
had to find you again. If you hadn’t come back, I might never
have figured out where you’d taken Marty.”

“And nothing I did there was of any interest to you, other
than finding me?”

“Why? What happened there?” he said with too-obvious
curiosity.

She couldn’t tell if he knew, but he’d watched part of
the tape because he’d used the name “Vicky” which
she yelled out when she thought she was totally alone in the room.
That was bad enough. But her real fear was that he’d watched
the entire tape.

Earlier in the day she and Liam had gotten involved romantically
in her room, after several weeks together out in the wild. They both
assumed they had the place to themselves and made good on that time
alone. It was nobody’s business what they did, but standing in
front of this video screen made something innocent seem tawdry and
dirty. After her prior relationship disaster—summed up in that
single word "Vicky," the intrusion hurt deeply.