“What government?”
“Our government.”
“We’re already slaves to China. I guess it figures we’d get their disease.”
“I’m still researching the story.”
“This is nuts!”
“I flew here to find my brother. He was run over in a car accident. I couldn’t find him at the UCLA medical center. I don’t know where he is.”
“My clothing store burned down. I own a dress store.” She started sobbing. “I used to own a dress store. It burned to the ground in the riots.”
“I heard looting was going around. Maybe riots as well. But everything is being caused by the plague. The plague’s at the bottom of this catastrophe.”
She brought her hand down over her forehead and eyelids. “I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going on. I can’t contact anybody on my cell phone.”
He nodded. “Everything’s out. Nothing works. There’s no power.”
He took out his cell phone. He tried to turn it on.
She eyed his phone. “That’s a fancy mobile. What kind of phone is that?”
“It’s a satellite phone. An Iridium 9575.”
“Even satellite phones don’t work?” she said in disbelief.
He shrugged. “The battery’s dead.”
She removed her cell phone from her purse. “My battery works, but it doesn’t matter. I can’t get through to anyone.”
“I know.”
“Maybe you could use my battery in your cell. I can’t believe the satellites are knocked out as well as the cell towers.” She tried to prize her cell apart to get to the battery.
“Don’t bother. This phone takes a special battery. It needs a lithium-ion battery.”
“Maybe that’s what my cell has. Don’t they all use the same battery?”
“No. This satphone uses Low Earth Orbit Satellite technology for worldwide coverage.”
She shook her head in bafflement. “So?”
“So it needs a more powerful battery than yours does to transmit to a satellite. Your cell only transmits to a nearby cell tower. Yours can’t reach a satellite.”
“How did you get such a fancy phone?”
There was no way he could tell her the truth—that he was a black ops agent for the National Clandestine Service arm of the CIA.
“I told you,” he said. “I’m a journalist. I file reports from all over the world. I need to be able to contact the office at the paper no matter where I’m stationed.”
“No need to chew my head off about it.” She looked offended.
“We need to get out of here. We need to find out what’s really going on.”
“What’s really going on is my job’s gone. My company’s destroyed.” She started sobbing again.
“I think it’s even worse than that. The whole country may be devastated by this plague.” He shook his satphone in his hand in frustration. “If I can get a battery for this thing, I might be able to contact someone and find out what’s going on in the rest of the country.”
“What do you want me to do about it?”
“I’m not blaming you. I’m just telling you what’s going on.”
“You just said you don’t know what’s going on.”
He hung fire. He gathered his thoughts. “We need to find out what’s happening in this country. Then we can figure out what to do. Right now we need information.”
She threw up her hands in futility. “Nothing works. No phones. No Internet. No TV. How are we supposed to find out what’s happening? I don’t even care about that. All I care about is finding my daughter. How am I supposed to get in touch with her?”
She looked too supple to have stretch marks, decided Halverson. It was hard to believe she had a child.
“I know what you’re going through,” he said. “I’m trying to contact my kid brother Dan.” He paused. “I’m Chad Halverson, by the way.”
“I’m Victoria Brady.” She offered no further details about herself.
She still looked like she didn’t trust him all that much, decided Halverson.
The three plague victims had entered the graveyard and were closing in on them, he noticed. Where there was one, there were usually more nearby.
He looked at Victoria. It would behoove them to beat it from this place, he knew.
“We need to get out of here and we need weapons,” he told her.
He wondered if she knew those creatures fed on living human flesh. If she believed they were merely rioters, maybe she didn’t know yet. In any case, she would find out none too soon.
CHAPTER TWO
“Where are you headed?” Halverson asked.
“To the UCLA medical center,” answered Victoria. “I heard there was an emergency shelter set up there.”
“Don’t bother.”
“What do you mean?” She studied his face.
“I just came from there. I was looking for my brother. It’s infested with creatures.”
“Creatures? What are these creatures you’re talking about?”
He nodded at the creatures approaching through the graveyard. “The plague causes them to reanimate after they die.”
She surveyed the area around them. “What about all those dead bodies on the streets and on the sidewalks? Why haven’t they reanimated? What you’re saying makes no sense.”
“They haven’t reanimated yet.”
“OK. Suppose they do reanimate, like you said. So what?”
“So they develop an appetite for living human flesh.”
She shook her head in disbelief. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”
“You don’t want to see it. If we dawdle around here any longer, those creatures will catch up to us and make examples of us.”
He watched the three grimacing creatures shuffling through the cemetery toward them past isolated charred palm trees that jutted out of the grounds with burned fronds on their crowns. Already the place reeked of putrescent flesh, noticed Halverson. It was only a matter of time, he knew, before the corpses on the sidewalks and in the roads reanimated and went foraging for human victims.
“Where should we go?” Victoria asked. “We need to find more people.”
“I think west is our best bet. Toward the ocean.”
“Why?”
“If we can’t find more people there, we might be able to find a boat and head out to sea. At this point, maybe the ocean is the only safe place to be.”
The three creatures were coming uncomfortably close, Halverson realized. Just looking at the creatures made his hair stand on end. He heard them moaning as they stumbled toward him.
He angled away from them. Not knowing what else to do Victoria followed him.
“She’s only seven years old,” she said.
“What?”
“My daughter Shawna. She’s only seven. She was at school when the riots or whatever happened.”
“Where were you?”
“I was at work. Someone told me Shawna’s school had been evacuated and the students were sent to the shelter at UCLA.” She faced him. “Are you sure there’s no shelter there?”
“Not now. Maybe before. I don’t know. All I know is that it’s overrun with creatures now.”
She started sobbing again. “God, I hope they didn’t get Shawna.” She paused a beat. “She must be in this area somewhere.”
“Why?”
“The people in the UCLA shelter must have gone somewhere nearby.”
“We can’t count on that. We don’t even know for sure if it was a shelter in the first place. Who told you it was, anyway?”
“A friend of mine. Her daughter goes to school with Shawna.”
“Did your friend go to the shelter?”
“I don’t know. She told me over the phone that she was going there. I don’t know if she ever made it. That was just before my phone went dead.”
“All I can tell you is there’s no shelter there now. We need to find a reliable source of information.”
Halverson peered through the sooty air at the devastation around him. Everywhere he looked were crashed cars and dead bodies. Smoking black ruins of buildings stood in stark relief against the hazy blue afternoon sky.
He felt ashes falling on his head.
“What is this stuff?” asked Victoria, brushing the ashes off her hair and shoulder.
“Ashes.”
“It reminds me of snow flurries back in Connecticut.”
“That where you’re originally from?”
“Once upon a time.” She squinted at the goggles dangling on his chest from a strap around his neck. “What is that around your neck?”
He glanced down at the goggles. “NVGs.”
“Huh?”
“Night-vision goggles.”
“Where did you get them?”
“It’s a long story.”
“They look military. Are you in the military?”
He wasn’t about to tell her about his CIA connection. “I got them at LAX when I landed there in an airliner.”
“Do they sell them there or something? I never heard of such a thing.”
“No. I told you, the airport was infested with plague victims. Nobody else was there. I took these goggles out of the Homeland Security office.”
“I hope you know how to use them. Too bad you didn’t get a gun, too.”
“I had one,” he muttered.
“What?”
Halverson didn’t elaborate. He continued surveying the environs. “It looks like pictures of bombed-out Berlin at the end of World War II.”
“The rioters must’ve burned the whole city down.”
Halverson heard a rattling sound near the chain-link fence. He scoped out the source of the jangling. Two more creatures were shambling outside the perimeter of the cemetery’s fence. Each was dragging one of its hands, which looked more like claws to Halverson, along the fence, rattling it, creating an unnerving, jarring clinking.
“Why are they doing that?” asked Victoria, following the direction of his gaze.
“They’re dead,” he said. “They don’t know what they’re doing.”
“How can they be dead? They’re walking. They’re just a couple of ugly creeps.”
“Look at their eyes.”
Victoria took in the milky white eyes of the two figures. “Real ugly.”
The two creatures returned her gaze with chilling glares.
Meanwhile, the three creatures already inside the graveyard with Halverson and Victoria continued lumbering slowly but surely after them.
“We need to shut that gate,” said Halverson. “Those two things are heading here.”
“Then we’ll be locked inside with these three already here,” said Victoria with disgust.
“Better to have three than five. And there may be more of them out there wanting to come in.”
“I don’t see any more.”
He broke into a jog toward the ajar gate.
Not wanting to be left behind with the three shuffling ghouls, she took off after him.
Halverson noticed one of the creatures on the outside of the fence had but one hand. Where the other hand had once been was now a festering shredded wrist with the frayed ends of a shattered radius and ulna protruding from it.
“Now do you believe me?” he asked Victoria.
“What?”
“Look at that thing’s wrist. It’s rotten with decay.”
She checked the figure’s wrist out. She pulled a face. On closer inspection she saw that the creature was also missing an ear. In lieu of an ear a maggot was writhing out of the black putrefying hole in the side of the creature’s head.
Halverson watched Victoria retch.
As he neared the gateway, out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of movement in a black stretch limo that was crashed on the road the better part of twenty feet from the fence.
The limo’s back door opened. A groggy middle-aged man with grizzled sideburns and tousled black hair stuck his head through the opening. Wearing a rumpled navy blue suit and a russet silk tie he blinked his eyes as if coming to after being in a state of unconsciousness.
He stumbled out of the limo.
The way the man was staggering Halverson pegged the guy for a creature. On the other hand, Halverson could not make out the guy’s eyes to see if they had a milky film on them on account of the chichi shades he was sporting.
Victoria caught up with Halverson.
“Hey, isn’t that what’s his name?” she said, picking up on the limo.
Halverson suddenly recognized him. The senator’s dark glasses and overall unkempt appearance had thrown Halverson off at first blush.
“Yeah. It looks like him,” said Halverson.
“Oliver Becker. Isn’t that his name? The politician who had to resign because of a sex scandal.”
“The senator from New Jersey,” said Halverson, recalling.
How could he forget Oliver Becker? Becker had been on the Senate Intelligence Committee and had been one of the harshest critics of Halverson’s employer the CIA. Becker had been a rising star in politics before the scandal had besmirched his image and sabotaged his career.
Two teenage girls on Facebook had ratted him out for e-mailing them nude pictures of him. Becker denied the charges, of course. He claimed his Facebook page had been hacked, that hackers had sent the smutty pictures to the girls. Furthermore, he claimed he had no idea where these dirty photos had come from. He speculated that paparazzi had snapped them without his permission. Nobody bought his explanation.
Becker was tarred with the reputation of being a pervert. He had tried to weather the storm and stick it out till the end of his term. To no avail. He became the laughing stock of late night talk shows. In the end, the media and his colleagues in congress exerted so much pressure on him that he was forced to resign in disgrace.
“What’s he doing here?” asked Victoria.
“Probably trying to sell his story to Hollywood.”
Catching sight of Halverson and Victoria, Becker lurched toward them.
“He’s coming over here,” said Victoria. “Let’s help him. He can barely walk.”
Warily, Halverson latched onto her arm and held her back. “He may be one of them. Look how he’s walking.”
“He’s probably staggering because he got knocked out in a car accident.”
Becker waved at the two of them. “Help me.”
“Let’s help him,” said Victoria. She started toward Becker.
Grudgingly, Halverson followed her. Even if Becker had not morphed into a plague victim, Halverson was not one of his fans.
Some thirty feet behind Halverson, the three creatures traipsed after him.
Halverson figured Becker wasn’t infected because Becker could talk. The creatures couldn’t talk. They could only moan.
Still woozy, Becker stumbled toward Halverson and Victoria.
Victoria caught up to Becker and guided him through the mishmash of crashed cars on the road.
“The world’s gone mad,” said Becker.
CHAPTER THREE
“The whole city’s burned down, we think,” said Victoria.
“I saw people killing each other,” Becker said, consternated.
“It’s the plague,” said Halverson.
“Plague?” Becker looked confused.
“An outbreak of plague decimated the city.”
“I know it sounds insane,” said Victoria. “I had my doubts, too. But look at all these dead everywhere. They couldn’t all have died from the fire.”
“I don’t know the exact mechanics of it,” said Halverson, “but the plague infects people, kills them, then brings them back to ‘life,’ if you can call it that.”
Becker shook his head. “Impossible. You mean to tell me that all these dead people around us are going to come back to life.”
“They’ll come back to life with only one thing on their minds—to eat living human flesh. Any living flesh, for that matter.”<
br />
“How come the three of us aren’t dead then?”
“Yeah,” said Victoria, facing Halverson.
“I don’t know. As for myself, I was on a plane when the plague struck here. Maybe that prevented me from contracting it.”
“But what about us? I wasn’t on any plane. I was here on the ground.”
“Me, too,” said Becker.
“I told you, I don’t know,” said Halverson. “Maybe some people are immune to it.” Halverson doubted that. From what he had learned at the CIA about the disease, he didn’t think anyone was immune. “Or maybe you weren’t exposed to the pathogen that transmits the plague.”
“How is this plague transmitted?”
“I don’t know that either. All I know for sure is, if one of those plague-infected creatures bites you, you’ll contract it. You’ll die and turn into one of them when you reanimate.”
“This is fantastic,” said Becker, overwhelmed.
“We’re doomed,” said Victoria.
“Not necessarily,” said Halverson. “These creatures can be destroyed.”
“With what?” asked Becker. He held his hands open. “I don’t have a gun on me.”
Victoria looked at Becker. “I don’t understand why we don’t have this plague stuff.”
“Maybe we can figure it out,” said Halverson. “Where were you when you first noticed the city was burning down?” he asked Victoria.
“Let me see.” She paused in thought. “I was in my store’s walk-in safe.”
“All property is theft,” chimed in Becker.
Fists balled at her sides, Victoria confronted him. “I saved up my earnings from my dressmaking job and bought that store. Nobody stole anything.”
Taken aback, Becker said, “Don’t get all huffy. I was quoting Proudhon.”
“That’s another politician I won’t ever vote for—along with you.”
Becker pooh-poohed her remark. “You’re not in my district.”
“You don’t even have a district the last I heard.”
“Can we get back to the subject?” said Halverson, peeved at both of them.
“You have no authority over me,” said Becker. “That woman insulted me. Nobody gets away with that.”
“You started it,” countered Victoria.
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