“If this plan, if that’s what you want to call it, goes south, we’re dead,” Jones said, and his voice had none of the command and control he usually conveyed. Instead, it was papery thin.
“It’s going to work,” Jo said.
“Wanting it to work and it working are two different things,” Jones said as he rolled with the pain of the multiple wounds in his side as a result of the RPG blast.
“You gotta have faith, Sergeant Jones,” she said, and she paused for a long moment. It seemed as if she were more afraid of what she was about to say than she was of the real danger they were in.
“Do you mind if you call you, Nate?” She asked.
“I guess that’s okay,” he said, then added, “since we might die here together and you’re not under my command.”
“And we have been through a lot together,” she said as she put a hand on his shoulder.
“We certainly have,” he said, and coughed. The motion sent pain rippling through his body.
Not knowing what to do, Jo placed both of her hands on his shoulders as if the mere act might siphon away some of his pain. They both rode the coughing fit until it played out. A shiver rippled through his body when it was done.
She leaned close to the side of his face and asked, “Are you alright?”
His eyes watered from the pain, but he said. “I’ve been better, but I’m holding my own.”
They remained in silence for a few more seconds and he asked, “What is Jo short for? Josephine?”
She smiled and said, “If you want to know the truth, it’s not short for anything. My parents wanted a boy they could call Joe, but they got me. So, Jo it was.”
“Well, it fits you,” he said, and this time, he smiled as he rallied some.
“I hope it does,” she said. “It’s my damn name and I’m not planning on changing it.”
Jones almost chuckled, but he knew better. Everything hurt. Even blinking his eyes hurt.
“So, you don’t think this plan will work?” Jo asked, not looking in his direction.
“I don’t think that at all,” Jones said. “I just think it’s a long shot.”
She moved her hand to his neck and gave him a gentle squeeze, then caressed his neck with her fingertips. “We’ve had bad odds before and we’ve made it.”
“Yes, we have,” he said.
Jo cleared her throat then said. “Nate, I have a question for you.”
“Shoot,” he said, enjoying her touch as it soothed some of his pain.
“If we make it through this,” she said, “I’d like to get to know you better.”
He risked turning his head and looked up at her because he wanted her to see his face. “Yes, I would like that. I’d like that a lot.”
“Well, then we have to live through this,” she said as she leaned down and brought her lips to his. It wasn’t a hot passionate kiss, but it was sweet. While it didn’t cure his ills or remove the danger, it made them forget most of it. At least for a few seconds.
Chapter 112
Face-Off
Zombies filtered in and around the smart zombie holding the rocket-propelled grenade launcher as she had it aimed directly at the cluster of people around Henry. That cluster consisted of Doc Wilson, Molly, and a distant Bonds.
Molly whispered, “Henry, what are we doing?”
Henry wasn’t sure what the next move was, and he cursed aloud, not able to think of what to do. His father would know. His damn dead father would know, but Henry was lost.
He moved his aim back and forth, trying to catch the smart zombies, but the damned zombies kept shambling in his way. If he shot and missed, he was one hundred percent certain that the smart one would fire. Then a lot of people would die.
His dilemma was that he was sure that she would fire, anyway.
He felt the futility of it all. His plan depended on him leading the people to the dormitory. All those people’s lives depended on what he did, and he was failing them. Utterly and completely.
Doc Wilson put a hand on Henry’s shoulder. Henry slowly turned toward the doctor with a puzzled expression.
“Don’t worry, son,” Doc Wilson said. “Let me try something.”
“She could shoot you, Doc,” Henry said.
“She could have shot as soon as she spotted us,” Doc Wilson said.
“She still could,” Henry said.
“Maybe, but she wants something. Maybe we have something she needs.”
Molly slid in next to Henry and Doc Wilson and said, “That’s a lot of maybes.”
The zombies seemed to get excited by the three humans and pressed against the fence, clawing at it with the hope they could somehow get through. That hope was mostly unfounded as the chain links were strong, and the zombies lacked the mental capacity or dexterity to climb over it.
Doc Wilson lifted his medical bag and unsnapped the clasps.
“Doc, what the hell could you have in there that could stop that deader?” Molly asked.
“Wait and see,” Doc Wilson said as he pulled a metal canister free and let the bag fall to the ground. He stepped away from Henry and Molly, cutting the distance to the fence and exciting the zombies even more.
Doc Wilson raised his voice and said, “I knew your friend, Grayson.”
The rocket launcher wavered in the smart zombie’s hand for just a moment, but she steadied it and took a step forward. She adjusted her aim to focus on the doctor.
In reaction, Doc Wilson stepped nearly against the fence.
“What is the hold-up?” Clayton asked with no small amount of annoyance in his tone. He leaned to the left and craned his neck upward to see if he could see anything at the head of the line, but all he saw were the backs of people.
He and Kent were still at the back of the long line of people between the two sports fields. Their forward progress had come to a stop three minutes ago and hadn’t moved.
“Should one of us go up there?” Kent asked, looking as nervous as Clayton.
There weren’t enough walkie-talkies to go around, so they were totally in the dark. All they knew was that Henry had halted the line.
“No,” Clayton replied. “As soon as they get things back in motion, we have places to go and people to see.”
Clayton was referring to the next step in Henry’s crazy plan. He thought it was the weakest link in a long chain of links, but he saw no other course of action. In for an inch, in for a mile, he thought.
That was countered with, you can always do what you’re good at, which is running.
He literally shook his head back and forth. No more running. These were good people. They were worth fighting for.
And dying for? The voice in the back of his head asked.
“But they aren’t moving,” Kent said.
“They will get moving soon,” Clayton said, trying to be reassuring.
Sure enough, the line of people did start moving, but it was in the wrong direction as they pushed back towards Clayton and Kent. It wasn’t a panicked escape, but he could tell from the body language of the people toward the front of the line that there was more than a small amount of fear coursing through them.
“What the hell?” Clayton asked as he started back up.
Both he and Kent were caught in a bad spot. They could wait for the crowd to pass and move forward, or they could go with them. Neither of which was a part of the plan, but Clayton knew from years of soldiering that plans sometimes went bottoms up.
“Stay with the people,” he said as he let the group rush by him.
Kent did as he was told and stayed with the crowd as they rushed back into the parking lot they had just left only minutes ago.
Clayton went up to different people in the group and started asking what they had seen.
A gray hair lady with a shotgun in her hands said, “There was somebody on the softball field. I could see zombies at the fence. That kid, Henry, told us to get back. So, that’s what we did.”
“Was there somet
hing else there that I should be worried about?” Clayton asked.
“We couldn’t see,” the woman said. “The fence blocked us from being able to see.”
“Well, shit,” Clayton said. He looked to Kent and said, “Hold here. I need to see what’s going on.”
“What about what we have to do?” Kent asked.
“I just need to see if they need help,” Clayton said. “Two minutes, tops.”
Clayton started up the pathway that the others had just vacated, cursing himself for listening to his better angels and trying to do something brave.
“What do you know about Grayson?” Audrey asked, her voice sounding like a cross between a robot and a woman, deep, vacant, and gravely.
“I’m a doctor,” he said. I was treating Grayson and was with him when he died.”
She had relaxed her aim up until that moment, but she jerked it back up and locked in on Doc Wilson.
“Did you kill him?” She asked.
A zombie passed in front of her, and she whipped the rocket launcher out in a vicious arc, smashing it into the back of the dead thing's head, cracking its skull like an eggshell. It fell unceremoniously onto the first baseline, kicking up a small dust cloud.
Doc Wilson hesitated for a moment, weighing his answer. He finally said, “Yes.”
Audrey’s gray complexion darkened, and Doc Wilson was sure she was getting ready to blast him into the next world.
“He asked me to do it,” Doc Wilson said.
“Why?” She asked.
“Because he was going to die anyway,” Doc Wilson said.
“We can’t die,” she said, her eyes narrowed to slits. “Not like you.”
“He wasn’t like your kind anymore,” Doc Wilson said.
She stepped closer to him, and he could see both hatred and curiosity in her eyes. He knew the latter was the only reason he was still alive.
“What do you mean?” She asked.
Doc Wilson held up the canister and said, “What is in this canister turned your friend back into a human.”
She tilted her head and said, “But that must have killed him, too.”
“No, no,” Doc Wilson said. “Before what was in this turned your friend human again, he had suffered some horric injuries. I did what I could, but he wasn’t going to make it. He wanted me to...to release him.”
She took another step closer to him, and asked, “What the hell is in that thing?”
“It’s a highly toxic nerve gas,” Doc Wilson said. “But it reverts your kind to human form?”
“But it kills your kind,” she said.
Doc Wilson nodded his head.
“So you can’t release that gas,” she said.
“Not if I don’t have to,” Doc Wilson said. “If I do, you revert back to human, and then those zombies around you, well, they will take you down.”
“Then I should just kill all of you right now,” she said.
Doc Wilson asked, “Then why haven’t you?”
Chapter 113
The Day the Music Died
When Lassiter powered up the public address system with its enormous speakers, he fully expected the batteries that energized it to be fully charged. In a world like what they were living in, checking and double-checking systems were of critical importance, but systems were only as good as their weakest link.
This system’s weakest link was a person. That person was Boyd Bonds himself. In his typical fashion, he had jobbed the maintenance and review of the system to another person who promptly let it slip to their hundred and first priority.
If maintained and checked, the battery system could last for several years. If left alone, anything could happen. A cell could die in a battery. A wire could corrode. A circuit in the speaker system could go wrong. All of these were fixable problems -- if people knew about it.
But no one knew about the dead cell in one of the batteries. It happened to be the first cell in the first battery in the chain of batteries. That single cell degraded the battery’s ability to charge and hold a charge. In turn, that affected all of the battery's ability to function.
So, right in the middle of a Rick James disco-funk song Super Freak, the music died as the power to the player, amplifier, and speakers went down.
Four floors below, the zombies that had been clawing to get inside the building stopped their efforts and stood silent. Granted, this didn’t happen immediately, but over about a minute's time. That left the zombies without a sound to attract them. To give them their groove. Without that attraction, they were going to get restless.
That said, their intellect was quite limited. It would take them a while to decide to disperse in search of food. They were also unpredictable. That decision-making process could take minutes or hours, but they would eventually break away from the building. When that happened, then all bets were off on Henry’s plan.
A block away from the four-story building with the public address system, Howie leaned his head out the window and peered down the street. He saw the zombies milling around the building, seeming confused by the lack of sound.
He pulled himself back in the window, picked up his walkie-talkie, and said, “Houston, we may have a problem.”
Chapter 114
Final Negotiations
Henry stared down at his walkie-talkie after hearing Howie’s message. Things weren’t supposed to go this way.
Molly asked, “Henry, what are we going to do?”
Henry raised his rifle again and tried to get his aim locked on the smart zombie, but other deaders in the area flowed in and around her, keeping him from getting a clear shot. If he timed his shot just right, he might be able to pull it off. Might was the operative word. He knew if he missed, she would be able to fire back on them to deadly effect.
“Doc, I might have a shot,” Henry said from behind Doc Wilson.
But the doctor shot up a hand and said, “No. Don’t.” He realized the words had come out sharply. In a calmer tone, he said, “I have this handled.” He dropped his hand and returned his full focus to the smart zombie. “We don’t need this to get out of control, now do we?
“I have all the control,” she said in her raspy voice.
As she spoke, Henry could see Doc Wilson’s hands fiddle with the canister. There was a metallic click that caught Henry’s attention immediately.
“No, you don’t,” Doc Wilson said. “If you shoot us, my hands come off the release of this canister, and the gas is released. At this distance, it will get to you, and it will change you. Then they will get to you.” Doc Wilson used his free hand to wave across the cluster of the undead filtering around her.
“Then you all will die,” she said.
“But so will you,” Doc Wilson replied. “But it doesn’t have to go that way. Does it?” He let the question hang in the air for a moment and changed his tack. “Grayson told me your name was Audrey. Is that right?”
For a moment, she seemed disarmed that Grayson had shared her name, but then she must have realized that it didn’t matter because she said, “Yes.”
“Grayson told me about the voice that spoke to him at night. You hear that voice, too, don’t you?”
Even from the distance he was away, Henry saw something shift in the smart zombie’s face. Maybe it was doubt? Maybe it was the resolve to fire?
“That voice manipulated his mind,” Doc Wilson said. “Twisted it. Made him do things he might not want to do. That’s what Grayson told me. When he spoke with me, he said he was free from the voice. Do you want to be free from it, too?”
Audrey lowered the launcher a few inches, and Henry could see that it was neither doubt or anger, but anguish in her face.
“Yes, I can see that you do,” Doc Wilson said. “What’s in this canister can free you. I can give it to you, but you need to drop your weapon.”
She yanked the weapon back up and said, “I drop this weapon, and your people will shoot me. I won’t fall for that.”
“No, please,” Doc W
ilson said. “I’ll get them to move further back.”
“You do that, and I lose my bargaining power,” she said. “It will just be you that dies.”
Doc Wilson put his index finger in the air and said, “You feel that breeze? It’s strong enough to blow this gas for a long way. It will probably reach the people back that way, and certainly my two friends here. I care deeply about them. I don’t want any of them harmed.”
She looked on, and again, her aim fell a little. “I don’t want to die either. No matter what I am.”
“Don’t you want to be human again?” Doc Wilson asked.
She closed her eyes, and Henry considered getting a shot off, but a voice in the back of his mind told him to hold off. In that instant, he could swear it was his father’s voice saying, be patient, boy.
Henry wasn’t sure if he should listen to it, but decided that he had to.
“I’m strong like this,” Audrey said. “I can’t be hurt by these dead things.” She waved the launcher in the air in a semi-arc to encompass the dead clustered around her.
“Grayson told me he wanted more than that,” Doc Wilson said. “Even when he knew he would die, he said he was glad to have reverted back.” He paused and let the words sink in. “I think you want to be human again, too.”
The only sounds were the low groans of the zombies and the clinking of the fence. Henry felt like this situation could go either way, but he decided to let the doctor play his hand out. He had lowered his rifle to show that he wasn’t an aggressive threat, but he was ready to whip it up in a second if things went south. He was just worried that he wouldn’t be able to do anything if she decided to fire on them. He guessed that he wouldn’t.
“How could we do this?” She asked.
Henry let out a long breath he didn’t know he was holding.
“You would need to drop your weapon,” Doc Wilson said.
“Not while you have the canister,” she said. “I may be half dead, but I’m not stupid.”
The Deadland Chronicles | Book 4 | Siege of the Dead: Page 47