Damo peered around, momentarily phased, fearful the demon in the barn had escaped. He’d only been in the barn a short period, despite the eternity it felt.
Jack helped Damo to his feet. “What happened in there? Did Old Man Marley catch you?”
“Yes,” Damo said. He didn’t dust himself off, so Jack did it for him. “No. I mean, I’m not sure. I think something else caught him first.”
“Like what?”
Damo watched the door as it swung back and forth. It might have been a mouth laughing.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said.
“We ought to fix the wall panel first, don’t you think? Best for there not to be any evidence of our being here. It’ll only take a second.”
He peered around for a rock or something else he could use to hammer the nails back in. He happened to glance up and notice a plain hammer with a wooden handle sitting on the shelf that ran along the inside of the barn.
“Huh,” he said. “Sometimes the universe works in mysterious ways.”
He reached through the hole.
“Jack, no!” Damo said.
The old man’s face swam from the darkness. Jack was slow to turn and look at what had arrested Damo. When he locked eyes on the beast, he was incapacitated. A large wet stain blossomed on the front of his pants.
Old Man Marley’s crooked teeth sank into the soft plump flesh of Jack’s forearm.
Jack screamed and wrenched his arm back to get it free. The old man maintained his grip. Together, they tore a hunk of flesh from his wrist.
As Jack turned, his blood sprayed the barn’s wall. He stumbled and fell into the puddle rapidly forming beneath him.
“Damo!” Jack screamed. “Help. . . me!”
The word “me” dropped an octave and elongated into a low groan, forming a duet with the old man. Marley reached through the gap in the wall, stretching for the crumpled figure on the ground.
Jack lay unmoving, dead or dying on the patch of ground most feared in the entire town. The threshold of Old Man Marley’s barn. Now they had good reason to fear it.
“Jack. . .” Damo said, edging toward his fallen friend. Two steps forward for every one step back.
He backtracked to his car and threw the door open. He picked up his old cell and keyed in the number for the emergency services. It rang.
He stood up and paced, running his hands in his hair.
“Which city, please?” the calm female voice on the end of the line said.
“Dustbowl,” Damo said. “It’s not a city. I live in Dustbowl.”
“What’s your emergency?”
“Police. And an ambulance. My friend’s been hurt. He was bitten. He needs help! I think he’s dead—”
Damo heard the voice speaking on the other end of the line but none of the words registered or made sense.
He was standing before the large crimson puddle Jack’s injured forearm had made. Jack’s final resting place. Jack was no longer there.
Jack got to his feet on the other side of the car, legs weak and unsteady.
The wind howled and the barn door banged. The hissing and growling from the old man had ceased.
“Jack?” Damo said. His voice didn’t sound like his own.
Jack heard him. He paused and turned in a slow, tight circle. His head was bowed and his shoulders curved. And that look in his eye, a dark sense of motivation and drive that Jack had never possessed in life.
Damo dropped his phone. He got in his car and slammed the door. He turned the keys in the ignition. It took several attempts before the engine caught.
Jack pressed against the glass, streaking blood over the window.
Damo braced his arm on the passenger seat headrest, looked out the back. He slammed his foot on the gas. The car launched forward, into the barn, forming a large hole.
Inside, the shelving units grated and groaned as they fell across one another, smashing like dominoes. In his panic, he’d shifted into the wrong gear. He switched into reverse. The car bunny hopped backward. He didn’t care. He turned the wheel and reversed down the road. He didn’t stop until he reached the nearest junction.
Ahead, the zombies—and that’s what they were, damn it! He wasn’t imagining this shit!—two of them, stumbled into the road, heading in his direction.
Damo slid the stick into drive, hit the gas, and steered onto Main Street. The road was long and didn’t deviate from its straight and direct course. Damo wouldn’t deviate from it. Bunnyhop or no, he was getting out of Dustbowl. It was about to suffer the worst storm in its history.
He’d always said the town was doomed. Today its moment of reckoning had come.
16.
DUSTBOWL HAD not been one of the towns they were keeping a close eye on. The population was too small and they’d assumed Michael wouldn’t have taken that particular route to reach Houston. It barely even featured on their maps.
The chopper carried them over the small town. Spit, and you’d clear it. Soldiers were already filtering through its narrow streets, moving from building to building. They extracted the locals and escorted them to a safe space outside town. There was no gunfire. With any luck, there wouldn’t be.
“I want a ten-mile perimeter around the town,” Tommy said into his radio. “Set up roadblocks. Every road in or out. We don’t know how many of these things there are or where they went.”
“Order received, over.”
The chopper set them down on the outskirts of town, near a large barn that looked out of place amongst the low row of cheap houses. As they shuffled out of the chopper and toward the barn, Emin filled Tommy in on everything she knew.
“This was where the first zombies were seen,” she said. “We can’t be certain it was where the exposure originated. The good news is, few people live in this area. The chances of it occurring elsewhere are remote. There was some kind of accident inside the barn that caused the huge shelves inside to collapse. We’re searching it now.”
“Any idea what caused the virus to begin with?” Tommy said.
“Nothing yet.”
As if on cue, someone shouted from the barn: “I got something!”
Tommy and Emin weren’t the only ones to crowd around and get a better look. A dozen men and women crouched over the debris and collapsed shelving units wearing white suits with stunted helmets.
The person who’d shouted stood at the top of the room. The crap that’d spilled across the floor was a miasma of useless garbage.
The discoverer placed something in a plastic bag and sealed the top. No one needed to get closer to see it. They could have seen it from across the room. Or the town, for that matter.
The ball emitted a bright glowing light, flickering across the faces of those gathered. They stood watching it, mesmerized like moths about a bright flame.
Drawing closer, Tommy saw it originated from a metal shell, about the size of an adult’s hand. A piece on the side was missing. It was from this gap that the light spilled, revealing the molten core at its heart.
“What is this thing?” Tommy said.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Emin said. “Whatever it is, it makes my lava lamp look like a boring candle.”
It was placed in a box and covered over with a thick lid. The world turned cold and dark again. They handed it to Tommy. He, in turn, handed it to Emin.
“We’ll take it back to the base,” he said. “I want Samantha to conduct experiments on it.”
A soldier approached, pushing a trolley loaded with a crate. He stopped before Tommy and whipped a sheet off, revealing a zombie inside a tight box.
“We managed to take him alive, sir,” the soldier said. “The locals told us he used to live in this house. This is his barn.”
The old man’s spindly fingers wove through the small squares of his cage. His white hair hung limply over his eyes. He licked his lips and peered at the delicious morsels gathered around him, watery blue eyes flickering from one uniform to another.
&nbs
p; Tommy crouched before him.
“Patient Zero,” Tommy said. “Your discovery, sir, might well save the country. Maybe even the world. What do you think about that, old-timer?”
He evidently didn’t think anything about it. He pushed his fingers through the little squares but came nowhere near reaching him.
“Take him back to the military base at Austin,” Tommy said, getting to his feet. “Run some tests and see if they can uncover anything unusual about him. Other than the fact he’s dead. Take the ball too.”
The soldier replaced the sheet and wheeled the box around. Half a dozen soldiers trailed him. One approached and took the box containing the ball.
“Be careful with that,” Emin said. “It’s very, very important.”
The soldier nodded. His hands were big and strong. He didn’t look like he would drop it anytime soon.
“What do you think?” Guy said, turning to the others.
“I think we caught a lucky break,” Tommy said.
“You think it was an accident?” Emin said.
“Must be,” Tommy said. “You saw the old guy’s barn. He’d collect dust if it didn’t already collect itself. He was probably tinkering with it and accidentally set it off.”
“So what if it happens here?” Guy said. “There’s no one here. It’s no threat to us.”
“That doesn’t matter,” Tommy said. “Imagine how far these things could wander before they stumble upon another town. Dozens of miles? Hundreds? And what if a car pulled over to help him, thinking he was a lone wanderer? Then they get infected too. Add dozens or hundreds of miles onto that. And it only takes one of these things to reach a city and we’re doomed.”
“If Michael wanted to create maximum disruption, he would have set these orb things off at the same time,” Emin said. “Maybe they carry the virus. That’s why they turned here. They weren’t meant to yet, but that was what the orb was going to do to them anyway. It just went off early.”
“Spread the orbs, and then activate them at the same time,” Tommy said, nodding. “That way, we couldn’t stop the virus from spreading.”
“It’s a pretty big problem, isn’t it?” Guy said. “Who knows how many of these things Michael has put out there already. We found one, but there could be hundreds of them out there, just waiting for the right moment to pop open and infect people.”
“Guy’s right,” Emin said. “We’ll never find all these things by ourselves.”
“If we catch Michael, maybe we won’t need to,” Tommy said. “He can tell us where he put them.”
“This outbreak happened because someone got curious and started poking around one of the balls,” Emin said. “Do you think it will only happen here? Even if we catch Michael, there’s no guarantee he’ll tell us. My money would be on him not spilling the beans. They might still activate in years to come. And they could be anywhere.”
“What do you suggest we do?” Tommy said.
Emin sighed. She didn’t want to give voice to the words already forming on her lips.
“Inform the media,” she said.
Tommy shook his head at the same time Guy said, “No way.”
Emin pushed on.
“Tell them about the balls and how dangerous they are,” she said. “Tell them what they look like and not to go anywhere near them.”
“Telling people not to touch them is a guarantee they will,” Guy said.
“Then tell them all their friends and family will die horribly if they come anywhere near it,” Emin said. “I know I wouldn’t touch it if I knew that.”
Tommy was silent, listening to both sides of the argument. They waited patiently to hear his decision.
“Leak it,” he said. “Only the barest details. One photo. Not of the inside. We need to locate all these things. If we don’t, we’re doomed.”
17.
DAMO’S CAR bunny hopped the entire thirty miles on the motorway. He put his hazard lights on and pressed his foot to the floor. He ignored the cars that honked at him as they overtook. He kept his eyes firmly locked on the road ahead. He’d escaped the clutches of Dustbowl and Old Man Marley’s barn, though the images he’d suffered would haunt him for the rest of his days.
He pulled onto the gas station forecourt, drawing alongside a gas pump. His car performed a final hop that took him further than necessary. He reversed back a few yards so he was better lined up.
He got out, filled his car to the brim, paid, and took the car around the back of the station. A pair of large delivery trucks were parked up. Two drivers sat at a picnic table munching on their meals and having a chat.
Damo sat in his car a moment, looking at himself in the mirror. He shut his eyes and breathed in deeply. It’s okay, he told himself. Everything was going to be okay.
Tapping on the window made him jump. He turned to see a police officer standing at the passenger window. Damo’s heart fell to the soles of his feet. He turned the key in the ignition a single click and pressed the button to wind the window down.
“What’s the problem, officer?” Damo said through chapped lips.
“You’ve got blood on the side of your vehicle. Care to explain?”
Blood? Of course. Jack had smeared it over the side when he’d turned. Damo licked his lips.
“I, uh, hit a deer,” he said. “It leaped out of nowhere.”
“Slammed into the side of your car, did it?” the officer said suspiciously.
“Yes, sir. I got a call on my phone and pulled over so I could answer it. I was talking when the damn thing came out of the bushes and hit me. I guess it was running from something.”
The officer’s one-way reflective sunglasses gave little away. All Damo could make out was his own bulbous head reflected in them.
“Please step from the vehicle, sir,” the officer said.
“Now?” Damo said dumbly.
The officer looked at him. Damo climbed out and stood waiting for the officer as he walked around the car to meet him.
“License and registration.”
Damo handed the documents over. The officer checked them and handed them back.
“Where are you heading?” he said.
“Chicago.”
The officer looked up. “Chicago’s the other way.”
“I needed to fill up on gas and this is the only station I know for miles,” Damo said, surprised at his ingenuity. “I thought it best to fill up before I hit the road.”
“Where are you from?”
“A tiny town by the name of—”
“Calling all units, calling all units,” the officer’s radio hissed. “Possible double homicide. All units to assist.”
The officer was moving before details of the warning even came.
“Get that blood washed off your vehicle and fix your engine before you go on any long journeys, understood?” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
The officer climbed onto his motorbike and took off, joining the motorway traffic flow. He turned on his siren and weaved between the cars and trucks.
Damo leaned against his car and turned his head to look up at the sky. Thank you, God. Then again, No thanks for setting him on me in the first place. He let out a deep breath.
“That was close, huh?”
A figure drew up to him. He was tall and wore a black hat and sunglasses. His skin was very pale. He was eating a burger.
“Yeah,” Damo said. “Very close. That’s all my life has been lately.”
“What did he want?” the man asked, nodding to the rapidly departing police officer.
“A deer ran into my car. He wanted to know what the blood was.”
“You don’t say. I noticed your car had a little problem when you pulled onto the forecourt. A little bunnyhop action going on.”
“I’ve got the part I need in the trunk. I haven’t had the time to install it until now.”
“Want a hand?”
Damo could have hugged the man. That was exactly what he needed right ab
out now. Help.
“If you don’t mind,” he said.
The man swallowed the last of his burger and mashed up the paper. He tossed it on the forecourt. Damo resisted the urge to inform the man the trashcan was only a few yards away. The man wants to help you, asshole. Don’t start berating him. The juice from the burger ran down his chin.
“You’ve got a little something here,” Damo said brushing at his own chin.
The man wiped it off, looked at it, and then licked it off his fingers. It was red. Too watery to be ketchup. If Damo didn’t know any better, he’d have guessed it was blood. Who cares? Plenty of people liked their burgers bloody.
“You get the part out of your trunk while I clean the blood off the door,” the man said. “Sound good?”
“Sure.”
He had a hop in his step as he moved to the trunk. He picked up the part and his toolbag. That’s when he noticed the bottle of water he kept in case of emergencies. He picked it up and leaned around to the front of the car where the man was kneeling.
“You’ll want some water,” Damo said. “I’ve got some here.”
As he rounded the car, the man got to his feet. He wiped his lips with his fingers, sucking them off as he had the burger. He was chuckling to himself, the kind of chuckle Damo used to share with Jack when they got high. A chuckle of euphoria.
“I don’t think this was the blood of a deer,” the man said.
“Oh? What makes you say that?”
“Experience.”
He looked at Damo with a curious eye. Then he took the water from his hand, removed the cap, and upended it so it sloshed over the front wing. What little blood there was splattered on the forecourt. The water wasn’t tinted pink at all. How could the cop see blood when there was so little of it?
Damo shook his head. His mind was so scrambled with recent events that he’d see a demon in a flashlight. He ignored the worrisome burning sensation at the back of his throat and moved to the front of the car.
He sat his tools down and moved to the driver’s side. He pulled the lever to pop the hood. The man slid his finger under the hood to push the little catch aside and lifted it. He fixed the hood in place.
Death Squad (Book 2): Zombie State Page 6