War of the Undead Day 5

by Peter Meredith

  His looks, just like her own, had faded over the course of the long day. His dark hair was no longer as wavy as it had been and his penetrating eyes had blue/black circles beneath them. He sat in the same nondescript conference room that the President took his meals in. It was quiet in the room, wonderfully quiet.

  In front of him was a garden salad that was half-drowned in ranch dressing. “Where have you been for fuck’s sake? I’ve had the Veep cooling his heels for an hour now. In case you didn’t know, that’s a mistake in my line of work. You never want to give them a moment of rest. If they gather their…”

  “Will you shut up!” she whispered, her eyes darting to the door, then to the ceiling, looking for cameras. She didn’t see any, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. Trista moved in so close to Kazakoff that she could smell the day of sweat under his suit jacket. “I need to talk to you about something important.”

  “Sure, you can talk to me. Your secrets are my secrets.”

  It was his idea of a joke and yet it set off warning bells inside her head. She had to ignore them; time was getting away from her. “I need your help. We, everyone needs your help. The President…” Her throat clamped good and shut. She took a swig from his water bottle so she could go on, “He has authorized the release of nuclear weapons.”

  David sighed, forked a mouthful of salad into his mouth, and then shrugged. It was his entire rebuttal.

  She shoved his plate away so that it skittered across the table and came dangerously close to sliding right off the edge. “He’s bombing Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania.” She ticked off the states holding up her fingers with each, finishing with Virginia, even though the “Line” only passed close to the state.

  “I know what you’re going to say: maybe he has to, but he doesn’t!” Trista had grown loud, and he put a finger to his lips in warning. She hunched forward again. “He doesn’t have to. We’re winning! The lines have barely shifted all day, and that’s with him hogging all the airpower to bomb Baltimore into pieces of nothing. There have been over four-thousand sorties against the city today alone.”

  Trista wasn’t exactly sure what a sortie was, which didn’t slow her outrage in the least. “If the war was fought in the right way, we wouldn’t need nukes. Or if we did, we wouldn’t need to bomb cities that are completely fine. Pittsburg, Canton, Akron. Look at this.”

  She slid out her laptop and showed him the day’s fighting in a fifty-second encapsulated video. “See? They’ve reached their peak, but we haven’t. Look how close those units from Texas and Oklahoma are. And these from Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida; there are over sixty-thousand of them. And there are more coming. Enough to stop them without destroying everything.”

  Her pleading did nothing to persuade him; the maps did, however. He had assumed, like everyone else in the DC echo chamber, that their doom was a foregone conclusion. The press echoed the President, the cable news shows echoed the press, and the President used the cable shows to cement his positions. It was a circular, incestuous relationship.

  “You see?” Trista insisted. “You do, don’t you. We can win if someone has the guts to do something. If not, he’ll be dropping nuke after nuke, and when those run out, he’ll start using dirty bombs. And it won’t ever end.”

  For a long time, Kazakoff sat back, staring at the map. “And you want to kill him?” Actually, Trista wanted Kazakoff to kill him. She nodded and he asked, “Who would take his place?”

  “The Vice President, I guess. He’s next in line and he’s shown he’s got some backbone.”

  “Mmm, the Vice President? Pick someone else.”

  She looked shocked. “I don’t get to pick people. It’s not up to me, it’s up to the Constitution. People will only follow that, not some dictator chosen by a nobody. The VP is next in line and then after that it’s the Speaker of the House and she’s as bad as the President. She has basically ceded all control to him and has run back to California.”

  “Then I can’t help you.” He stood, hesitating, not looking at her. “You seem to forget that I just tortured that guy for hours. Trust me, he’s not likely going to forgive and forget.”

  He started to leave and she grabbed his arm, fiercely. “David, I need you. Your country needs you. Please, I’m begging you. We-we can make his release conditional. We’ll make sure you’ll get a pardon…and one for me, too. I’ve done bad things, too.”

  “Like threatening to rape his wife and children?” He gave her a brief, painful smile before his eyes slid away. “No. We both know he won’t forgive me. You’re on your own. I won’t try to stop you, but I won’t help you either.”

  Without a look back, he ghosted from the room. Trista fell into the still warm chair. She wanted to lash out at him for being such a coward. “Aren’t I being just as bad?” A part of her wanted to hide behind the shield of being ‘just a girl.’ After all, the President was surrounded by armed Secret Service agents, metal detectors and cameras.

  She would have to kill him with her bare hands, which meant she had no chance whatsoever.

  “Excuse me?” It was a black woman in a black pantsuit with wide flaring white lapels; it was one of the housekeeping staff. She gave the discarded salad plate a nervous glance. “Was there a problem with Mr. Kazakoff’s salad? I can fetch another.” Word had spread about what sort of man he was, and she was afraid of him. A funny thing occurred to Trista: she was probably the only one in the White House who was not afraid of David Kazakoff.

  “No,” she said, perhaps a little too sharply, as she stood up. She noted that the small woman edged back from her. Is she afraid of me, as well? Trista wondered. To test the idea, she narrowed her blue eyes and took a quick step towards the woman—she took a sharp breath and lowered her eyes.

  Suddenly, Trista understood. People had seen her and David together, and they had heard about her executing Haider, Phillips, and Marty Aleman. They were probably also aware how the President seemed to rely on her more and more. Yes, they had to be afraid of her.

  It was a strange sensation. “Could you do me a favor? Any chance I can get something to eat sent down here? I don’t want to deal with people just now.”

  “Of course, ma’am. Anything you want. I should warn you that the President has asked for this room for his snack. But that’s not for another forty minutes.”

  “A snack? What sort of snack?”

  “Ice cream, ma’am. He’s particular about eating alone now, so maybe I can find another room for you?”

  Trista suddenly had an idea. “No, I want to eat here. And no ice cream for me. I want a steak. Well done.” She would eat, make a joke, drop her knife, and come up with it in the President’s soft throat.

  The housekeeper was no fool. She’d been on staff for eighteen years and had seen all sorts of craziness in her time. She knew something wasn’t right with the pretty young thing in front of her, and it wasn’t hard to guess what she was thinking.

  “We’ll have Gerard slice it for you before serving, if that’s alright. Trust me, it’ll be hot and delicious. And easier to eat.” The two locked eyes and Trista’s flickered, giving away what she wanted concealed.

  “Yeah, sure,” she whispered and dropped her head.

  2-10:17 p.m.

  New Rochelle, New York

  Doctor Thuy Lee had been living without hope for the last twenty-two hours, ever since the man she loved had given his life for hers. She could admit now that it had been a terrible trade. He was the sort of rugged, take no prisoners kind of man who could have adapted to this new world. Adapted and prospered.

  She was not like that. She was too small, too soft, too delicate. “I should’ve died,” she whispered as she gazed at the host of grey bodies surrounding the building.

  “Stop that!” Special Agent Katherine Pennock barked. “Come on. We’ll try the back. Maybe it’s clear.” She didn’t believe that it would be. Not for a second. From the moment she had crossed into the Quarantine Zone, her luck had been crap. She gr
abbed Thuy’s tiny wrist and hauled her around the corner, racing for the admin section.

  There were more cubicles here, all perfectly aligned, each with identical rolling chairs, each with twenty-inch monitors, staplers, whiteboards and all the rest. There were minor touches of personal flare in each cubicle: pictures of children, plants, little dolls, a double-strand of gold Mardi Gras beads, and in one case, a bikini calendar hidden behind a calendar of frolicking kittens.

  The cubicles showed a sterilized version of humanity, which was still better than the malformed Salvador Dali versions that came charging out of the stairwell seconds later. To hear them sniffing the air like dogs sent Thuy and Katherine hurtling through the cubicles.

  At the end of the main row was the staff break-room, where a seldom-used coat rack stood like a thin metal soldier. Katherine grabbed it and held it awkwardly as if it was a spear. Thuy thought it might be the silliest weapon ever, but she didn’t say anything. It was good that Katherine hadn’t given up hope yet.

  “Is there a way out on this side of the building?” the FBI agent asked.

  “I really don’t know,” Thuy answered. She had worked in the building for five years and had only ever used the front doors. Had she ever bothered to take part in the bi-annual fire drills, she might have known where the other exits were, but she had been too busy to waste minutes tromping up and down stairs just to prove she could be as mindlessly sheep-like as the next person.

  Katherine, who couldn’t understand the concept of not following the rules, gave her a sharp look, wondering whether Thuy was being honest or was still uselessly wallowing in depression. “There probably is one,” Katherine declared. “It only makes sense.”

  The layout of the building was indeed sensible and they came within a few feet of actually seeing the exit; however, a thing that was only just humanoid in appearance blocked their way, stumbling from the foyer. Its flesh hung from it in grey tatters, even the flesh of its face. Bones and teeth, and something black and pulsing showed through where a face should have been.

  Fearlessly, it charged and just as fearlessly Katherine attacked it with the base of the coat rack, smashing it in its partially eaten face. It stumbled from the blow and, as it struggled to stand, Katherine crushed its head. More zombies were coming, slowly pushing through a hole in an office window.

  “This way.” Once again, Katherine took Thuy by the wrist and ran down a different corridor, this one dim and unlit. On their left were offices with little plaques bearing the names of the people who had once spent eighty hours a week in them. On their right was a solid wall with scenic pictures of waterfalls and meadows hanging every few feet, a painful reminder to the workers of what they were missing.

  They were only a quarter of the way down the hall when they were stopped by the appearance of a grubby, naked child with only half a face and a letter opener sticking out of the side of her neck. She hissed an angry something, causing black bubbles to dribble around the point of the letter opener.

  She charged. “We should…” Thuy began, only once more Katherine charged as well. Her face was ordered fury and her hands gripped the coat rack in front of her, somewhat like a pole vaulter might. The two came together with a muted crash; the girl taking the rack in the chest and was smashed to the ground. Katherine raised the rack, thumped it loudly off the ceiling and then crushed the girl’s head.

  “Over here! I heard something,” a small voice piped from around the corner of the hall.

  Once again, Thuy found herself between two fires. She darted to the side, opened an office door and pulled Katherine in, a second before the first little zombie rushed around the corner.

  “Shit!” Katherine whispered as she gazed around the small twelve-foot by twelve-foot office. It was lit by a single lamp and showed the awful truth: there were no doors and no windows. There was no dropdown ceiling that could be climbed through and the air vent was barely ten-inches high. They were trapped.

  Thuy stuck a finger to her lips as the sound of feet rushed up to the door. “Look-it what happened to her,” a child whispered.

  “It was Dr. Lee,” Eng said. “She’s around here somewhere. We’re going to find you, Thuy!”

  “Will y’all hush-up, ya stupid Chinaman!” Jaimee Lynn hissed. “We don’t wanna have to share. Go push them zombie-monsters back on outside. Ever-one else, check these doors.” Just as the doorknob twitched, Thuy reached over and thumbed the lock. The two women waited in silence as the knob rattled. They expected the door to be attacked, but the zombie moved on.

  Katherine spun, taking in the office: nice desk, soft, leather chair, a fake plant, a set of golf clubs, a family portrait. There was nothing that would help them to escape. She went to the golf bag, picked out a 9-iron for Thuy and a pitching wedge for herself, which she thrust down into a belt loop like sword.

  “Maybe they’ll leave,” Katherine remarked, somewhat flippantly.

  Thuy, who was gasping behind her mask, pulled it up on her head. “Not likely. We should come up with a plan B.”

  “I already have one. I lead the way with the coat rack. I smash a few down and then make a run for the back door. When they come after me, you make your escape. We’ll meet at the helicopter.”

  “Katherine, look, I think it’s time you stopped protecting me. The chance at a cure is gone. There’s nothing left at Walton and soon, what we have here will be ruined. I think it’s time I took the lead.”

  Someone small went running past the door, causing the two women to go stiff. Katherine held her breath until the sound retreated. “I wish I could let you, but I’m younger and stronger, and I have this fancy vest to protect me. Also,” she paused, feeling the pain radiate up from her hip, “I was bitten a little while ago.”

  Afraid to actually see the wound, she twisted slightly, reluctantly and lifted the edge of her shirt with nervous, stiff hands. Her hip was bruised purple and black, and the teeth marks within them were clear and defined. She gasped, not from the pain, but from a spurt of excited relief that filled her, lifting her like she had become lighter than air. Her flesh was bruised but intact! Laughter suddenly bubbled up in her throat only to come out in a choking cough as she caught sight of something else.

  Running across her ankle above her boot were three long, bloody gashes. Seeing them pulled up a flash of memory: the tumble down the stairs, the flailing arms, the kicking. She had fought to her feet and one of the little zombies had grabbed her. Instinctively, she had wrenched her foot away and hadn’t noticed the quick burn as the thing’s ragged infected nails had clawed her.

  The marks were unnaturally inflamed and red and she knew they’d smell like the worst combination of fungus and shit. Thuy wanted to look at the bite, but Katherine pulled her shirt down, went behind the desk and plopped down into the chair.

  “You can’t change anything, Thuy. My life is on a timer now.” The laughter she had choked on before came out now, rueful and harsh. “Hell, maybe all of ours have been from the beginning.”

  Guilt washed over Thuy. Katherine’s was one more death adding to her burden, and the weight of it was tremendous, greater than anyone could realize. It made it hard to breathe. In fact, it made it hard to even care about breathing. Before this moment, she had the possibility of a cure to keep her going. Now, she had nothing.

  “It wasn’t fate that did this to you,” she said in a low mutter.

  “And it wasn’t you, either, Thuy. Look, we need a way out of here and if you don’t like my plan, then come up with your own.”

  Thuy glanced around as a door slammed down the hall. A chirpy little voice let out a string of curses that would have made a sailor blush. “China! Gimme a gun, now git where y’all suppose-ed to be. We gotta find her.” Thuy and Katherine locked eyes for a second; Jaimee Lynn with a gun was a scary thought to both of them.

  Another door banged open, this one was closer. The zombie children were racing back and forth. The door knob to their room jiggled again. If they went out, they�
��d be attacked and Katherine would die, her bravery unable to overcome her foolishness. Thuy’s first thought was that it would be a waste of a life; her second was cold and unjust: Katherine was going to die one way or the other and so would she.

  “But not yet and not like this,” Thuy told herself. She might have given up hope, it didn’t mean she was going to allow herself to be somebody’s dinner. A quick look around showed Thuy that they didn’t have much to work with in the way of tools, and that any escape attempt would be loud.

  “Defense first,” she stated and pointed at the desk. “Help me with this, please.” When Thuy gave orders, manners were always perfunctory. The “please” might as well have been a period to end the sentence with. “When they hear us, they’ll come through the door in short order, and we have to slow them down.”

  Katherine went to Thuy’s side and together they began pushing. “You know…” she said, between grunts and gasps, “this will…give us…only a minute.” Katherine didn’t think she had to remind Thuy that the child zombies were shockingly strong.

  “I’m only getting us out of the room, Agent and for that, we should not require more than a minute.” The desk thumped lightly against the door. “This is good enough. Now, grab your coat rack. We’re going to make a hole in the far wall.”

  Now Katherine understood what Thuy had meant when she said, When they hear us. Knocking a hole in wall big enough to get through would make all sorts of noise, maybe enough noise to draw more zombies in from outside, which was about the last thing she wanted. How on earth would they be able to escape the building with the first floor flooded with the undead? “Wouldn’t a fire or some sort of muffled explosion be better?”

  “In a cramped room? You forget that we are far more fragile than they are. A good deal more fragile. Besides, a fire wouldn’t get us out of the room and what do we have on hand to create an explosion?”