Plague Nation

by Dana Fredsti

  That has to hurt, I thought vaguely.

  But it would heal fast. Kai was a wild card.

  My mind refused to process any possibility beyond serious injury. He’d been wearing his Kevlar vest so depending on the type of round fired, maybe he was just badly bruised, maybe a few ribs broken. At the worst some internal injury that could be dealt with, given his accelerated healing abilities. As for the second shot, head injuries bleed a lot. He’d probably just been grazed. At any moment he’d pop up and say something like “I’m fine, Ashley, I ran it under a cold tap!”

  Yeah, I was in serious denial right up to the point I looked down at his corpse. His eyes were open, staring lifelessly up at the sky, the top of his head a mangled mess. Not even a wild card could recover from the wounds he’d received.

  “Oh, no.”

  I turned to find Mack standing next to me, his eyes reflecting my own feelings. He put a hand on my shoulder and I clutched it like a lifeline.

  Handsome, cocky, irritating... good-natured Kai.

  Gone in the space of a few seconds.

  I heard more commotion on the porch as Gabriel and Gentry thudded up the stairs into the trailer. A shotgun lay across the threshold of the trailer door, its blood-spattered stock facing outward. Tony continued to curse up a blue streak. Someone else wailed incoherently—it was a woman.

  Lil. Is she hurt too?

  No, it wasn’t Lil. The voice was too deep.

  “Stand down!” Gabriel’s voice rose above the cursing and the wailing. “Tony, stand down!”

  Sounds of more scuffling and cursing.

  I looked up to see Gentry pulling Tony out of the trailer, one arm locked around his neck, the other gripping the back of his collar. Gentry spun him around so he faced the yard, away from the door, still holding on to him. The precaution was unnecessary, though, because Tony looked down and saw his friend. He pushed away from Gentry and stared at the mangled mess of shattered skull and brains, blood pooling where the top of the head should have been.

  I’ve always made fun of characters in movies who raise their fists to the sky and scream “Nooooo!” after some tragic event. But I wasn’t laughing as Tony fell to his knees and gave a primal scream that combined raw grief, devastation, and rage. It rang in my ears, and pierced my heart.

  I clutched Mack’s hand even tighter, tears spilling down my checks as I willed time to run backward so Kai would still be alive, and all the stupid carelessness would be erased. Time, however, callously stayed just where it was.

  Lil emerged from the trailer, the light of battle in her eyes. It was extinguished when she saw Tony. She walked slowly to the edge of the porch, locking gazes with me.

  “Kai?”

  I shook my head, and Mack held out his other arm. Lil let out a strangled sob and stumbled down the steps into his comforting embrace.

  Gentry reached down to help Tony to his feet, but Tony slapped his hands away and stumbled up on his own, hanging onto the section of railing next to the broken gap left by Kai’s fall. His breath came in harsh gasps as he gripped the wood so hard I could see his knuckles go white.

  Gabriel came out of the trailer, half leading, half supporting a short, skinny person dressed in grungy jeans, and an oversized and equally filthy plum-colored down jacket, the hood totally obscuring the face. The person barely came up to Gabriel’s chest. I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman.

  A low growl was the only warning Tony gave before lunging for them. Gabriel immediately shoved the stranger behind him, inserting his bulk as a protective barrier just as Tony slammed into him. The force knocked Gabriel to the ground. The person gave a high-pitched scream and lurched back against the trailer wall, curling up into a small ball. Tony reached out, murder on his face, but Gentry—always Johnny on the spot—grabbed him just before his clenched fists connected.

  Mack, Lil, and I ran up the stairs, Mack heading straight for the shooter, although for what purpose, I wasn’t sure.

  Still Tony fought, swearing and screaming as tears rolled unheeded down his face. It took the rest of us— Lil and me hanging onto his arms, Gabriel tackling him around the legs, while Gentry got him in a chokehold— to subdue him to the point where he finally stopped fighting. His muscles still quivered with unspent fury.

  Gentry loosened the chokehold enough to let him catch a breath.

  “You gonna stand down?”

  Coughing, Tony nodded, but his body and voice still vibrated with barely contained anger as he spat out, “Why are you stopping me? This motherfucker killed Kai. Shot his head off.” He glared in the direction of the huddled figure, now hidden behind Mack. “We were here to rescue you. What the fuck, asshole?” His voice broke.

  “It’s a woman, Tony,” Mack said softly. He very gently pulled back the hood of the killer’s down jacket, revealing a matt of filthy, snarled hair that might be blonde when clean. Hard to tell under the grease and dirt.

  Gabriel nodded, still holding onto Tony’s legs.

  “I was trying to tell you, X-Box.”

  Tony flinched at the nickname.

  I don’t know why this took us all by surprise, but it did. Mack pushed some of the matted hair back, revealing a softly rounded profile, skin as filthy as the hair, but definitely a woman somewhere in her mid-to-late thirties. She flinched away from his careful touch. The one eye we could see was puffed shut, the flesh purpled and bruised around it. Blood ran from her nose, which looked broken.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “I’m not going to hurt you. None of us are going to hurt you.”

  She continued to whimper, shaking inside the oversized coat.

  “Oh, jeez...” I felt all the fight go out of Tony in that instant, as if someone had pressed the “purge” button on his adrenaline. He stared at the bruised and battered face, then at his hands. I could see it the moment it truly hit him that he’d caused the damage to her face and god knows what to the rest of her body.

  “Oh, man.”

  He shook his head, his tone bewildered and anguished as he asked, “Why did you kill him? I... We were here to rescue you. He was gonna help you. Why would you kill him?”

  The woman didn’t respond, giving no sign that she even had heard him. Mack continued to try and reassure her, but she didn’t look at him either, just cringed and whimpered. She had to be crazy or deaf or—

  I looked sharply at the woman’s right ear, poking through hanks of greasy hair. “Earplugs. She’s wearing earplugs. She can’t hear us. Probably didn’t hear Kai, just saw the door opening and freaked.”

  Mack gingerly removed the right earplug, grimacing as he tossed the nasty little wax-encrusted piece of yellow foam away. “Can you hear me, ma’am?”

  Clapping her hands over her ears, the woman shrieked, the sound like a siren that rose and blended into the howls of the wind. Startled, Mack stumbled backward.

  “Dontwannahearthemdontwannahearthemdont-wanna hearthem...” she chanted, running the words together in a non-stop stream. It was an invocation to keep the horrors at bay.

  “She couldn’t hear us.” Mack knelt back beside her and put an arm around the woman. “You don’t have to hear them, it’s okay. Shhh, it’s okay.”

  Tony took another look at the woman’s battered face, stepped off the porch to kneel next to his friend’s corpse, put his hands over his face and started to cry.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  * * *

  Gentry and Lil comforted Tony while Mack stayed with the woman, who finally stopped chanting when Mack retrieved her filthy earplug and let her put it back in.

  I did a quick check of the interior of the trailer, finding a shitload of paperback romance novels, a pile of mail telling me the woman’s name was Judy Thomas, and the corpse of a young boy, head partially missing, lying on the floor of what had been her office.

  So much for happily ever after.

  Sorrow for Kai’s loss mixed with an unwanted compassion for his murderer and the sad story that corpse told. I didn’t wan
t to feel sorry for her, but it was hard not to.

  I walked outside where Mack still sat with her.

  “Her name is Judy,” I said flatly.

  Gabriel and Lil returned with the SUV. Kai’s body was put in the back, and Gentry guided Tony into the back seat. Lil sat in the front passenger seat, staring out at nothing. Gabriel saw me and got out of the driver’s seat, coming around the front of the truck to meet me as I came down the steps.

  “Did you tell Simone—” I stopped, swallowed the lump in my throat and continued, “Did you tell her about Kai?”

  “Yeah.” He ran a hand through his hair, causing it to stick up in places. I suppressed the urge to smooth it back down, knowing it wasn’t appropriate and that it wouldn’t be appreciated. “Nathan’s on his way here to pick me up to handle the other situation. Can you drive the Hummer back to Big Red?”

  “Probably,” I said doubtfully. “But shouldn’t Gentry do it? He’s clocked time behind the wheel, and I haven’t.”

  “I want Gentry with Tony, just in case...” Gabriel nodded toward Judy. “Last thing we want is him going batshit on her in a moving vehicle.”

  “I think he’ll be okay,” Mack said as he came down the steps, arm around the stricken woman. “I saw his face when he realized what he’d done to her already. He’s not going to do anything else. He knows she didn’t mean to do what she did.”

  I thought he was right. Tony didn’t even register when Mack loaded Judy into the SUV and climbed in next to her.

  Gabriel reached out and touched my shoulder.

  “Are you okay?”

  I shook my head.

  “No. You?”

  “Not even close.”

  We looked at each other for a moment, so much needing to be said without the time or the place to say it. I satisfied myself with a quick touch to his face as he gave my shoulder a squeeze.

  “Did you—”

  He nodded.

  “Took them when I radioed Simone.” He paused, then added, “It’s helping.”

  A very small weight lifted off the collection that was hanging out in my chest.

  At that moment Nathan’s monster truck came barreling down the road, his face impassive behind the windshield. I wondered how many friends he’d seen buried in his lifetime, and if it still hurt him now.

  Gabriel gave my shoulder another squeeze, this one so hard it almost hurt.

  “Get them back safely.”

  “Where are you and Nathan going?”

  A shadow passed over his expression.

  “A weekend home up on Ridge Crest, one of the expensive ones. One of the other teams found a survivor, but there’s something wrong with him.” He looked at me. “It might be Jake.”

  A vision flashed into my mind—a man sobbing as he chewed pieces of flesh from his wife’s face. Then a quick fast-forward to him ripping a chunk out of Kaitlyn’s shoulder as she tried to help him.

  “I want to go with you,” I said suddenly.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I need you to drive the Hummer back, make sure they make it safely.”

  “Gentry can drive,” I said again.

  Gabriel scowled and turned away. I grabbed his arm.

  “I was there when we found Jake the first time. I know what he looks like. You only got a glimpse of him, and Nathan hasn’t seen him at all. I got a good close-up when he was—” I stopped myself before adding “— ripping his wife’s lips off with his teeth.”

  I could see Gabriel fighting with himself, wanting to say no, but knowing I was right.

  “I need to do this,” I said. “Please. Otherwise I’m going to think about all the ways I could have stopped what happened to Kai from happening.”

  “If that was anyone’s fault, it was mine,” he said.

  “No.” I shook my head. “That’s bullshit, and you know it. Tony and Kai were my team, under my command. You were right about what you said yesterday. We weren’t taking things seriously, and it got Kai killed.”

  “Ash...”

  I held up a hand.

  “I don’t want to hear it right now. If you really want to make me feel better, let me go with you now.”

  * * *

  I sat between Gabriel and Nathan in the front seat of Nathan’s black monster truck, grateful for a chance to be near Gabriel without having to do more than shut my eyes and enjoy the warmth of his body. I would probably have drifted off to sleep, except for Nathan’s uncanny ability to ram the gearshift into my left thigh every time I started to go under.

  Nathan didn’t say much. I guess he already knew what went down with Kai. Gabriel didn’t say much either. It was a silent thirty-minute drive to our location.

  We pulled into yet another cedar chip-paved driveway that led to a small yet expensive looking vacation “cabin” up in the mountains. Another military Hummer and an ambulance were parked in the expansive driveway, four armed soldiers standing guard out front. A carved wooden sign reading “Mountain Haven” decorated the lintel above the front door. Clumsily carved grapevines decorated the wooden posts at the foot of the stairs.

  I nudged Nathan on the arm.

  “Isn’t this near your place?”

  “Other side of the summit,” Nathan replied. “This is the popular side. One of those microclimates perfect for growing Pinot or Cabernet or some other winey shit. Mine’s on the side that gets the worst of the wind. Keeps the amateur winemakers and the tourists out of my hair.”

  I almost smiled at the thought of unsuspecting tourists, intent on wine-tasting, showing up at Nathan’s uninviting compound and demanding his best “winey shit.” The smile didn’t make it past a mental snapshot of Kai.

  We got out of the truck and all four soldiers immediately saluted. Gabriel returned the salute.

  “Where is he?”

  “Inside, sir.” The private nodded. “He’s been subdued and contained.”

  “Any other civilians?”

  The soldier swallowed.

  “Yes, sir. One still alive.”

  “That’s good, right?” I asked, but got no answer.

  We went inside.

  I recoiled as the smell hit—an olfactory assault made up of blood, meat, and yet more rotting flesh. Whatever happened here had been beyond bad.

  Unlike the trailers, this vacation getaway was decorated in what I thought of as Mountain Man chic, furniture made of logs, lots of dark plaid fabrics, and trophy heads on the wall. A giant flatscreen TV took up most of one wall, a pile of DVDs was scattered on the table and floor below. Someone had been having a Lord of the Rings marathon. What didn’t fit the decor were the smears and puddles of blood—dried, gelatinous, and fresh—on the walls, furniture, and hardwood floors. A man sat on the couch, hands cuffed behind his back, head hanging forward. Three soldiers surrounded him, two on either side and one holding a gun on him from behind the couch. All three looked as green in the gills as the two out front.

  I couldn’t blame them. Even after the trailer park cleanup, the smell in the cabin was enough to make my stomach churn.

  “Ashley, can you verify the identity of the prisoner?” Gabriel nodded toward the man on the couch.

  I stepped forward, already certain I knew who he was.

  “Jake?”

  The man raised his head and smiled at me, bloodstained lips, gums, and teeth even more disturbing because the smile was genuine.

  “Hi there,” he said. “Do I know you? I must if you know my name, right?”

  I nodded, trying to hide my revulsion.

  “Yeah. We met at Big Foot’s Revenge a few days or so ago.” I didn’t mention that he’d been sobbing over the remains of his wife and kid at the time, even as he’d been nibbling on them. It looked like he still had on the same pair of gore-encrusted jeans and blue flannel shirt he’d been wearing when we’d found him.

  Recognition lit his face, a face that had no doubt been pleasantly handsome before he’d been bitten by a zombie and turned i
nto a half-deader, thanks to another mutation of the zombie virus. He had to eat human flesh, preferably still living, in order to stop his own body from rotting. The plus side? His brain still functioned, memories intact.

  Which wasn’t such a plus if you couldn’t stop yourself from eating your family and friends. Unlike Gabriel, Jake didn’t have a handy dandy antiserum keeping the contagion at bay, so he’d turned on his wife and son after they’d taken refuge in a cabin. I’d have felt sorry for the guy if he hadn’t been at least partially responsible for Kaitlyn’s death.

  This is getting to be a nasty habit.

  I shoved the morbid thought away.

  “That’s right,” he said. “You were going to take my wife and son to a doctor, right?”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” I said.

  “But you left me there.” He looked confused. “Why did you leave me?”

  “You hurt our friend, Jake.” I hunkered down in front of him. “Remember? You bit her.”

  “Oh, that.” He shrugged. “I was hungry. Can’t blame a man for being hungry, can you?”

  I saw the soldier behind him tighten his grip on his firearm, index finger itching to pull that trigger. I shook my head “no” and he glared at me.

  “Begging your pardon, Ma’am,” he said, “but you haven’t seen what this crazy bastard did here. We have every cause to put him down like a mad dog.”

  “He’s right, you know.” Nathan came back out of the kitchen. He looked ill, an expression totally out of place considering his normal unflappable—if cranky— personality.

  “He kept them alive while he was eating them, one piece at a time,” the soldier continued. “Stopped them from bleeding out with tourniquets, but didn’t do anything about infection. Nothing to stop the pain. Just... sliced pieces off like they were shawarma on a spit.”

  “Shawarma.” Jake nodded in agreement. “I’ve always wanted to try shawarma.” He giggled. “Guess I have to wait till the end of the movie.”

  Two people in Hazmat suits came out, carrying a body bag that looked only partially filled. I swallowed, willing myself not to throw up.