Countdown to Zero (Patient Zero Book 2)

by Adrianne Lemke

  Shanti tilted her head thoughtfully. “What happened to your parents?”

  He shook his head. “They died. I don’t know…”

  “I think… I think you may have blocked out the truth, Mike,” I suggested. “How did they die?”

  Jake interrupted. “Maybe a better question is when did they die? And… just curious, what did they do for a living?”

  “They died about a year ago. And they were, I don’t know, researchers or something. I never cared about what they did for a living.” he answered with all the wistfulness of a child who wanted nothing more than to see his parents again.

  Alex tapped my shoulder. “Zero? You still wanted us to tell you when we feel something, right? Well, I’m feeling a lot of creatures now.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Alex was right. We’d come up on the horde a bit faster than I’d anticipated. Now that he’d brought it up, I realized how much my mind was buzzing with the warning to get away. “Kate?”

  “Yeah, I’m seeing them. There are a lot, and they’re moving quickly,” she answered tersely.

  How could we handle this? “I’m going to connect,” I said. “You guys help however you can. Shanti, focus on making us less noticeable.”

  “Got it, boss,” she said softly.

  Kate kept moving slowly along the road, ready to gun it at any time. I followed the thin web of thought that connected me to the web.

  The horde was starving. They could smell fresh meat, but their prey had been protected. They now smelled a potentially easier prey, and knew they could break through the thin barrier of protection offered by the vehicle.

  Nothing here. More prey beyond. Nothing in metal box.

  “Kate,” I whispered. “Stop the van. Turn off the engine. The noise is attracting them. Weapons ready, but stay quiet.”

  Without a word she turned off the van, and I went back to convincing the horde to move on. Part of my mind was aware of Shanti pushing the horde to ignore us, and Alex and Ali joining forces with me to help convince them to move on. There was also another, unrecognized influence. I couldn’t read exactly what it was doing, but I knew I hadn’t felt it before.

  “Z? Not to alarm you, but they seem a bit interested in us.” Rex’s voice was tight. But now, it sounded distant, as if I was hearing it through water.

  My mind was somewhere else. Despite eating that morning, hunger pangs cut deep into my gut. The smell of blood and flesh had me salivating. Cries from outside seemed to mimic my sudden feeling of rage. I shifted toward the other beings in the space with me, frustrated by some strap that held me in place.

  Then there were arms holding me from behind. A voice whispered in my ear. The hunger intensified, but these were not food. No. I remembered. The food was far away. With my link-mates, I shared the knowledge. Food was beyond. They should go.

  Here was peace. Not hunger.

  “Zero?”—a pause—“Come on, Zero. You need to talk to me.”

  “Rex? Jake?” I whispered. I looked down at the arms holding me from behind. “What happened?”

  The arms loosened, and Mike leaned forward. “You back with us?”

  I nodded, and he sat back. “Good. I think they’re moving on now, but stay quiet, okay?”

  They were leaving. Not in any kind of hurry, but several dozen zombies ambled along the road. None gave our van even a passing glance. Whatever had happened, the plan had eventually worked. The enemy was ignoring us and moving on.

  It took about ten minutes for the last of the horde to pass the van. Then we waited another ten for them to get a better distance away before Kate started the engine and began to drive again. Her face was strained, and no one was looking at me.

  “Okay, trouble is over for now. So someone tell me, what happened?”

  What I intended as a demand came out as more of a question. I almost didn’t want to know, but the last I remembered, there was a new person influencing the horde.

  “You lost focus,” Shanti answered. “In order to stay in control of yourself and the horde, you need to stay focused!” Her voice grew louder as she spoke. “You should know that by now!”

  “Shanti!” Rex reprimanded sharply. “I know you were worried, but you don’t need to yell.”

  He sighed and turned to me. “She’s right though. You lost focus, and instead of you controlling them, they controlled you.”

  “You got tangled in your seatbelt, then Mike grabbed you to hold you in place. While we were distracted, somehow the horde suddenly calmed and started to move on,” Alex finished. His face twisted with confusion. “I’m not sure how that happened.”

  “With you out of commission and the others distracted…” Mike’s voice trailed. “I tried to whisper to you, Zero. Told you to settle, that there was no food here. Maybe it got through to you enough that you pushed it to the horde?”

  Shanti huffed. “Or maybe it’s time to stop living in the land of denial, and admit you’re one of us, Mikey-poo. Own it. Live it. Love it. Because, believe it or not, this is your life.”

  Mike’s eyes were wide with shock, and he leaned back in his seat. “You guys really think I’m one of you?”

  “So do you,” Shanti said. “Just think about it. Your parents were researchers? Part of the group who started all this, would be my guess.”

  I snuck a peek to the back seat and saw Mike start to nod. “You might be right. I don’t know anything for sure. My parents did something that made the guards turn against them.”

  He looked out the window, as if not looking at us would protect him from the story he was about to tell. “I wasn’t supposed to know. Mom and dad worked with some official looking guy for a while before the outbreak. I saw them arguing with him outside the house once. Only a couple days later, the outbreak began, and my parents were nowhere to be seen. I was told they were killed by some of the newly turned, but the way the guards treated me after… Well, let’s just say I’m not convinced.”

  “You think the guards killed them?” I asked him. Another idea began to form in my mind, but his thought did seem to make sense.

  He shrugged. “Maybe? I don’t know.”

  Mike’s face was downcast, and I regretted that we’d dredged up the bad memories. Even if we did need to know.

  “I’m sorry, Mike. I know this is hard. The rest of us have some time unaccounted for. Do you remember anything out of the ordinary before the outbreak? It would have only been a day or two before. About the same time as the fight you just mentioned,” I said.

  He shrugged. “Just some shots I had to have for before school. And a new energy shake my mom wanted me to try. She was always making weird foods and stuff.”

  Mike spoke fondly of the time before, but I frowned. Shots and a different kind of drink. Not the same experience as the rest of us, but still with the potential to change him.

  Would his parents really have experimented on their own son? “Were the shots before or after the fight?” Rex asked suspiciously.

  His thoughts were clearly running along the same lines as mine. Rex watched Mike carefully.

  Mike whipped his head toward Rex sharply. “You think…! No. My parents did not experiment on me. Why would any parent do that?”

  I frowned. His question had the hint of anger I would expect, but the way his voice lilted at the end… he suspected it.

  “It was after, right?” I asked gently. “You think they fought with the guards and lost. That they added you to the experiment list for some reason, based on whatever the fight was about. And that’s why you now have a connection to the outbreak.”

  The van started to slow, and I looked up at Kate. “We’re coming up on a barricade,” the woman answered my unspoken question. “Do we try to go through it, or find a way around?”

  “I don’t think we need any trouble with the locals,” I told her. “We should probably back up and try to find an alternate route.”

  She nodded. “Next problem. We’re running out of gas, and I have only seen
a handful of cars the entire time we’ve been out.”

  “We’re running out already? I thought for sure it would last longer than this,” I said.

  Kate shrugged. “Yeah, me too. Unfortunately, this van is a bit of a gas guzzler.”

  “Well, I guess we’ll take it around and stop as soon as we see another vehicle. We may be able to find at least a little more gas. If nothing else, I guess we start to walk again. How far did we get?”

  She glanced at the dashboard. “Maybe about one hundred miles? Maybe less? I don’t know exactly. I didn’t check it before we left.”

  We’d been on the road just under two hours. The van had already paid off. “How much longer to the guard station?”

  “As the crow flies, it’s not too far from Ground Zero. However, with how we’ll have to travel, it will take us significantly longer to get there.” she said.

  “When we left, it took Scout and the rest of us several weeks to work our way as far as we did. Of course, we felt paranoid at the time and traveled quite slowly. Often holing up for a couple days if we caught wind of any guards in the area,” Kate continued. “In theory, we should be able to get there within the time limit, but…”

  “We need a better way to travel,” I interrupted. “Got it. New plan. We need to find either another vehicle or some horses.”

  “Horses?” Rex asked. His eyebrow raised.

  I nodded. “Yeah. We can either ride them, or use them to pull a cart. If we’re riding we can go cross-country and hopefully avoid the little towns that might slow us down.” I looked toward Kate. “We can travel more ‘as the crow flies,’ and it should help.”

  A look at Jake had me rethinking. “Or, we can try to find a wagon or something for a couple horses to pull. We wouldn’t be able to cut through as much, but we’d have a way for Jake to travel more comfortably.”

  “Our current route takes us through some farmland, so there should be some horses around.” As Kate spoke, the van shuddered.

  Jake groaned, and Kate quickly stopped the vehicle before it could do any more shaking. “Sorry, Jake. Are you okay?”

  He took a few deep breaths, then nodded. “I’m good. But the van isn’t, I think.” Jake gestured to the smoke now coming from the hood. “Not only a gas guzzler, I guess. Apparently, it had a few other issues as well.”

  Kate snorted, unbuckled, and climbed out. “We might as well have a bathroom break while we get stuff sorted out for our walk.”

  I shrugged, unbuckled, and started to climb out. Mike grabbed my arm before I could.

  “You might be right, Zero,” he whispered. Still apparently hesitant to accept what we all now believed. “Because earlier I could feel your connection to the horde.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  One positive of a long walk: plenty of time to consider our options. One negative: too much time to think. They may seem like the same thing, but in this case they weren’t. I could consider what might be our best way to proceed, but I couldn’t keep my mind off how broken Mike seemed when he admitted his parents may have treated him like a demented science experiment.

  May have—more like, probably did. The way he’d said it… that he’d felt my connection to the horde. That’s not how it worked with the rest of us. We all either felt the creatures or were able to affect them. With Mike… well, it almost seemed as if he affected the way I affected the horde. He convinced me. I convinced them.

  On a totally different note, I finally had the opportunity to ask what Ali’s full name was. Of course, she didn’t answer, but Alex told me it was Aliya. When I explained our Ali-Aly problem, he conversed with her for a moment, and she agreed to go by Lia to avoid confusion.

  “We’re nearing another so-called ‘safe-zone’ Zero,” Kate warned. “There will probably be guards around. We definitely want to avoid them.”

  Did we? We had less than two weeks for me to turn myself in and save my friends. Wouldn’t it save us time if I turned myself in sooner?

  “There’s a farm! Finally!” Shanti’s voice cut through my considerations. “I thought we’d run into one a lot sooner than this. It’s been hours!”

  It had. We’d been walking for probably around three hours by now. To be fair, there had been plenty of houses along the way, but some still appeared to be occupied. We couldn’t risk another confrontation slowing us down.

  My growling stomach reminded me I hadn’t eaten since breakfast that morning. “It’s past time for lunch too,” I said. “We’ll stop here and see what we can find that might make our trip smoother.”

  “And figure out how to avoid the guards,” Jake said from his spot in the wagon.

  His wagon perch wasn’t exactly ideal. He was too big to fit comfortably, but having him ride still seemed better than making him walk. The dogs enjoyed having someone down at face level. Siren spent some time walking close enough to Jake that he could run his hands over her silky coat. King would run up to him and lick his face before running back to walk by Mike.

  Despite our efforts, traveling seemed to take quite a bit out of Jake. His hand remained clenched over his side, and his face was pale. Dark circles ringed his eyes. Seeing him so weak was difficult for me. At this stop I hoped to find a more comfortable way for him to travel.

  Rex and I broke off from the group to scout ahead. The farm appeared abandoned. I didn’t sense any creatures nearby, but I did hear a couple of nickers from the pasture next to the house. “Horses,” I said. “They look pretty healthy. We’ll throw some hay for them while we eat, and see what else is available.”

  Five horses were in the pasture, now moving toward the gate as they all noticed our approach. There was no way to tell their level of training, or whether any would be able to pull. I wished we had either Aly or Tony along. They were the only two in my group who had experience with horses. Caring for them, anyway. I’d ridden before, although it wasn’t something I thrived at.

  Five horses. If we had to ride, three would be doubled up. It would be a bit awkward.

  “Z, I think this was an Amish house,” Rex said. “There are no power lines, and no vehicles of any kind. Just the type of equipment either used by hand, or pulled by horses.”

  Amish. So there could be a wagon. And, if they used the horses for farm work, they had to have the training to pull. A wagon would definitely help. Depending on the size, anyway.

  “Let the others know the place is clear,” I told Rex. “I’m going to check the outbuildings for anything we can use.”

  He shot me a two fingered salute with a grin, and ran back to where the others waited for an all-clear. I entered the largest outbuilding. There. A wagon that could hold up to four people inside, and one or two people in front to… steer? Drive? I wasn’t sure about the actual terminology.

  Next to it hung what seemed like an impossible tangle of leather straps and big leather arches with metal buckles. My heart sank. I had no clue how any of this stuff worked. Maybe it would become more obvious once we got everything out?

  I moved on to the smaller outbuilding near the horse pasture and saw everyone else walking toward the house. There were piles of hay and saddles nearby. I took a few trips and tossed several armfulls of hay to the horses. As I worked, Siren watched the horses warily. Despite her time on the farm, she didn’t seem overly sure of larger animals.

  All of the horses ran up to the food eagerly, and I hesitantly reached out to touch one silky nose. “You’re a big guy, aren’t you? I think we might have you pull the wagon. Do you think you can do that? I’ll try not to overload it for you.”

  The horse tossed its head as if in agreement, and I laughed. “Z! Time to eat,” Rex called from the house. Apparently, feeding the horses had taken longer than I realized. Looking down at myself, I laughed when I saw hay stuck to my clothes from my neck down. The breeze had blown some into my hair as well.

  “Coming!” I called back. I gave the large brown horse another pat on the nose. “We’ll be back for you guys in a little bit. Enjoy your
meal.”

  Our meal consisted of some jars of fruit, and some kind of soupy stuff Rex had found in canning jars in the pantry. He’d heated it up on our camping stove. It was creamy and tasted great; he’d even found some crusty bread to sop it up with. It was dry, but clear of any mold.

  As we ate, we discussed our plan to deal with the nearby safe zone. “It will cost us some time to go around,” Kate offered. “But if we get delayed by the guards, it would cost us even more.”

  “We go around then,” Jake said. “We have to avoid getting captured, and we absolutely need to keep Z out of their hands. With her connection to the zombies… who knows what they’d use her for.”

  Always worried about me. Jake’s concern made me feel warm inside. But the thought of being too late to save the others froze that feeling as fast as it came.

  I had to consider the alternative. Turning myself in could potentially save my friends. Then again, what kind of guarantee was there that they would honor their word? These people had been behind the whole outbreak, after all. They clearly had no concern for innocent bystanders. Or the lives of children.

  “We definitely go around,” I decided. “We’ll lose a bit of time, but I think we’ll be okay. In the meantime, everyone needs to wrack their brains for some way to rescue our friends without risking capture. When we find a place to stop for the night, we’ll all share our ideas.”

  Jake smiled and nodded his approval. The ice in my veins began to thaw once more. It was time to look into the more immediate issues.

  “I found what we’ll need to hook a horse to the carriage in the big barn,” I said. “I’ll need a bit of help with it though. The stuff looks like it’s going to be hard to handle.”

  Kate finished her meal and used a cloth to wipe out the bowl. “Ali—sorry, Lia, right?—Lia, Shanti, and Alex can get our stuff packed up into the wagon,” she suggested. “I think Rex, Mike, and I should be able to help with the horses.”