Isaac aimed his bat at the Arab. “We ain’t fallin’ for no traps. You come out here and—”
“Hurry up,” Nick urged them all. “They’re gonna see us!”
“Who?” Aaron blurted like an idiot.
“Just get in,” Rachelle said as she hopped up into the rail car. Isaac reluctantly followed.
Alan jumped in as the big door started sliding closed. He had to help Aaron up before it shut.
Black lights glowed until small spotlights on the ceiling faded on, revealing plush furniture and a few old appliances that looked like they once cost a great deal. Maps and posters littered the walls with no rhyme or reason Alan could understand; just connections between cities. Several boxes marked “SPAM” took up one tenth of the car. It was surreal.
“Where are you getting your power?” Alan asked.
“I buried a generator a quarter mile away,” Nick said as he leaned back in his chair and stared at one of his monitors. “I rigged it to run on methane. A lot of animals still roaming around.”
Alan found the idea of a shit-powered generator like in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome fascinating, but he didn’t really care to see it. He refrained from offering what was left on his shoe. “You thought we might be Feds. You’re aware everybody’s pretty much dead, right?”
The Arab rolled his eyes. “I’m quite aware of the zombie plague, thank you very much. Like that’s going to stop them from taking over the world. They’ve had plenty of time to prepare for their little pandemic.” The skinny prick paused to frown at them. “How did you find me?”
“Your signal messed wit’ our radios,” Isaac replied. “What’choo mean their pandemic?”
Nick snorted and resumed typing. “Who else could’ve started this mess? Ah, yeah, I see you,” he said to the screen, which now showed an overhead view of the bus and the tanker on the side of the highway. “Motor coach. Nice. Where’d you come from?”
“Sibley, Iowa,” Rachelle said as she rushed to Nick’s side. “You use the satellites, too?”
Nick looked insulted. “They have their own power sources up there, you know. One just entered range of this train yard, which is why I had you come in.” Then he gawked at her incredulously. “How are you piped in up there?”
“A friend of ours hooked us up,” Isaac said solemnly with a flash of the tablet.
The skinny Arab regarded the thug curiously, breathed out a simple, “Huh,” and went back to typing. A window popped up on his screen with a bunch of data Alan couldn’t begin to understand, but Nick nodded at it. “Yeah, that explains the signals I saw around that area. Definitely not Fed.”
“Why are you so worried about Feds?” Rachelle asked. “Are they looking for you?”
Nick scoffed. “I’ve been in their networks enough times, trying to expose their secrets. This zombie plague’s the whopper, though. It wasn’t enough they killed J.F.K. Now they’re after everyone else.”
Isaac rolled his eyes and headed for the door. “Man, this dude’s battier than a cave. Let’s get outta here.” He yanked at the door, but it wouldn’t budge.
“Don’t bother,” the oddball explained, which earned a pissed off glare from the big man. “It’s on a timer. It’ll unlock after the satellite passes.”
Isaac raised his fist, but he waved off the weirdo and plopped into a plush sofa.
“Why would the government do this to us?” Rachelle asked.
“Population control, resource pooling, set up their rich friends. So many possibilities.”
Rachelle glared at him. “You don’t know? Don’t you have any proof?”
Nick suddenly looked embarrassed. “I haven’t found anything to back that up yet, but this whole thing stinks of them. I know it!”
Isaac shook his head. Aaron scoffed.
“You scared the shit out of me,” the girl groused.
“All those zombies out there and that’s what scares you?” Asshole Aaron snapped.
She flipped him off. The asshole probably thought it was hot. If only two and a half years of solitude really was to blame, but he had always been a pervert.
Alan played along a little further. “How do you know it’s Feds out there talking to each other? What are they saying?”
Nick snorted while typing. Scrawls of code littered two of the monitors, making Alan feel like he was seeing The Matrix in its pure form. “They communicate in short bursts like clockwork. One asks the other what they see; the other usually says it’s all the same. Some of it even comes from D.C.”
The kid and the thug locked eyes dubiously.
Alan scanned the maps that supported Nick’s claims, tracing all kinds of lines from Washington D.C. to specific points throughout the country. The nearest intrigued him. “Looks like they do a good bit of talking to Colorado.”
Isaac flinched. “So, who in D.C.’s talkin’ to who in Colorado?”
Nick rolled his eyes and huffed. “I only have email hash codes and I.P. addresses. I haven’t found a government key yet, so I don’t know who’s who with this software.”
“How much you seein’ in Denver?” Isaac demanded. “We headin’ dat way, and we don’t—”
“Oooh, can I come?” the skinny Arab asked as he shot up to his feet and got in Isaac’s face with a gleam in his eye. “We can get them to tell us who they report to in D.C.”
Isaac regarded Rachelle incredulously. “Is he serious?”
The girl looked nervously at Nick, who bounced like a kid in a toy store. “You’ll have to talk to our leader,” she said.
Nick ran past Isaac and grabbed Rachelle by the arms, startling the girl into drawing her sword. “Please?” he pled, totally oblivious to the sword tip docked right on his stomach. “Put in a good word for me. Better yet, let me talk him.”
“Her,” Rachelle corrected, looking rather unsure about whether or not to skewer their host.
“Fine, her, whatever.”
The girl glanced at the thug, who shrugged. She backed away with her sword still aimed at Nick. “We have to isolate you for a few days. Then you’ll have to pull your weight in camp.”
Nick raspberried his lips at her with a wave of his hand. “Please. I can trace any signal anywhere. I’ve got communication equipment and—”
“We already have some,” the girl said with a wave of her cell phone.
The man snatched her phone right out of her hands and examined it, flipping it all around like a Rubik’s cube. “Old model. I can upgrade it,” he said, then rambled off a bunch of tech skills he had that even Alan couldn’t keep up with, all ending in, “So, she’d be a fool not to bring me.”
Again, the girl looked to the thug for guidance.
This time, it was he who spoke up. “Maybe we should tell you about her first.”
*****
The Pashtun beheld Didi like a golden fem-bot with big tits. He looked up and down her so much, it sent phantom shivers down her reinforced spine, bringing her back to the old days of leering horn-dogs undressing her with their eyes. Fortunately, this one wasn’t touching her, but she still felt uncomfortable in his train car.
“Incredible,” he said. “Are you wired throughout your whole body or just in certain parts?”
“Unit in the brain,” she answered, “battery in the bod.”
“Our other leader helped develop the technology by accident,” Hashim told him.
“Yeah, that’s nice,” Nick said to blow off Hashim, his focus squarely on Didi. “Do you use copper wiring? That could account for any interference from my equipment. You should go fiber optic.”
“Your equipment isn’t messing with me, only our radios,” she corrected him as she crossed her arms, even if she was glad he stopped his transmissions to accommodate her, “and that was my friend you just blew off.”
The glare she fixed on Nick seemed to do the job as he offered Hashim an apology.
“Are you sure you want to come with us?” Gilda asked him. “It hasn’t exactly been—”
“Absolutely,” he replied. “I want to know where this plague came from and expose the bastards who did it.”
“Expose them to who?” Craig asked incredulously. Good question.
Nick deflated, then came back with, “I just have to know, or else I’ll never have hope for an end. What if whoever did it is still out there making it happen, even when it seems to be over?”
Didi exchanged glances with Hashim, Gilda, Craig, Isaac, and Rachelle. Their faces only revealed dread. This guy weirded them out as much as he did her; she didn’t even want to eat him. She wished Cody wasn’t still passed out, but she knew what he would say. “The fact is we lost our electrician, and, while he left us good equipment, you’ve proven it can be thwarted. Fix our problem, you can come. Deal?” she added with her hand out to shake.
He regarded her hand as if searching for tripwires, took and shook it like a robot learning a human gesture, and smiled at her. “Deal.”
“We do have a few rules.”
“Yeah, she explained them to me,” Nick rattled off eagerly with a quick wave at Rachelle.
Didi smirked at her pupil, who looked no less put-off by this guy. Nice work, kid. “In that case, grab whatever you need and put it in the truck.”
Nick wasted no more words. He ran around his car and started unplugging all sorts of things.
Craig leaned closer to Didi. “Are you sure about this guy?” he asked quietly. “His chili does seem to be missing some beans.”
Didi watched the young man shove his computer components into his bags like a burglar on Christmas. “So he’s a little spirited. We could use some of that right now.”
“Spirit or not,” Isaac chimed in, “this Arab freak’s a little—”
“Pashtun,” Nick and Didi corrected, which garnered the former’s surprise. “You can tell?”
Rather than explaining that she had screwed a couple while shooting Raiding Assghanistan, she settled on, “I learned.”
Nick regarded her for a moment and resumed packing.
“Let’s help him load his equipment so we can get moving,” Didi suggested.
They all slowly turned and looked for something to help with.
She felt bad for them, but she wanted to believe this was a blessing. Maybe he was a little quirky, but she could easily relate. She prayed it would work out.
CHAPTER 5
COLD BODIES
Chun, Danny, and April slept soundly while the iPad passed the ninety minute mark of their two-hour lullaby. Now that the bus was still and most of the other adults hunkered down in the two-story restaurant for the night, Jerri’s lovely, clingy ones were finally at peace. A miracle, considering the near constant rumble of thunder and all the rain and hail pelting the bus roof like someone was tap-dancing on it.
She eased herself into the nearest seat and let out a quiet sigh, happy to have a few moments free of screaming. She massaged her scalp through her unkempt hair, its brittle roots begging for a shower as much as her pungent body. She couldn’t bear to be away from her babies for a minute, so she would just have to dry out and stink for a while. She would’ve considered doing like Cody used to do in a combat zone by baby-wiping herself clean if the camp’s children weren’t trying to sleep throughout the rest of the bus.
Up front, Clarissa snoozed near her baby, while Bob sulked in the driver seat without the slightest reaction to all the lightning flashing outside. While he had driven flawlessly through the day, he hadn’t spoken a single word.
Jerri made sure the babies’ slumber actually took, then crept toward the front of the bus and sat in the front center seat where their young prisoner had been bound.
Bob’s mildly sagging face didn’t move a muscle. His eyes didn’t even flicker, almost as still as Didi’s. The once upbeat farmer would’ve looked dead if he hadn’t been steadily breathing.
Jerri touched his arm. “Hey, you okay?”
Bob said nothing. His eyes didn’t even register her presence.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
Again, no response.
She nodded, though more for her own resolution. “Well, I’m here if you want.”
Nothing.
She sighed as she stood and headed back to her seat.
“Jerri?”
She froze, her nerves instantly grated at the sound of Paula’s voice. She had to force herself to breathe calmly.
“Can we talk?”
Her body quaked with anger. She wanted so much to scream, but she had spent too much of herself getting her babies to sleep. Her only course of action was to turn and face her colleague.
Paula’s lip quivered on her rueful face, her wavy brown updo partly collapsed from the rain. Her eyes glistened with tears ready to break away. “Jerri, I wanted to—”
Jerri shushed Paula and whispered with as much restraint as she could muster, “I don’t want to talk to you right now, especially after finally getting my babies to sleep.”
Paula glanced behind Jerri and her mouth fell open. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, then quickly rattled off, “All I want to do is say how sorry I am about—”
Jerri threw her hand up to Paula’s face so quickly, she was surprised she didn’t make contact, which was painfully tempting. “You brought that chain into our compound, and you left it there for that bastard to find.” Dead or not, the memory of the odious Pat Williams still gutted her. “Your little oversight got my husband killed.”
“I didn’t mean to—”
“However it happened, it was because of you,” Jerri hissed.
Paula deflated, those tears growing.
Jerri took another breath and proceeded calmly. “You also saved my baby’s life, so that kind of evens things out, but it’s all still too fresh for me. I need time and space to mourn, and I don’t need you in it. So, please,” she forced herself to say, “stay away from me for a while. Okay?”
Paula looked like she wanted to speak, but she smartly didn’t. She reluctantly nodded, making those tears in her eyes finally fall before she ran off the bus.
Jerri sighed and trudged toward the back.
“You can’t blame her forever,” came from behind. She turned to find Clarissa looking up at her. “I know it’s none of my business. She’s just … a little messed up.”
“That’s why I’m not tearing her head off,” Jerri replied before rejoining her babies, hoping for at least two hours of uninterrupted sleep.
*****
The storm raged wildly without end. The sky crashed and flashed while the rain pulverized the roof, all competing for the loudest noise to keep Gilda from sleeping. She may have gotten a few hours in Rock Rapids last night, but tending everyone’s physical and emotional boo-boos since the moment she woke up deserved a break. Too bad her backup was her most critical patient and their intern was still green. The frosty gusts through a broken window didn’t help, and her head still throbbed from the shiner on her right eye given by the brat prisoner.
The twins kept bickering like children across both heads of the long table, a futile stop-gap measure which only made their fighting louder. Their bound floor-mate’s youthful face shared Gilda’s disgust. The skinny computer geek hacked away at his laptop like he was in a quiet library. Even across a banquet room, they were unbearable.
This was going to be a long night.
“Why are we bothering with them?” Otis asked, to which is brother Max shook his head.
Good question, Gilda thought, and she naturally looked to her bosses for an answer.
Didi lingered beside Cody, watching him with the loving concern of a soldier’s wife. No indication either heard or had an answer.
Next to them, Pepe dodged slaps and barbs while redressing Roy’s scalded eyes. It was almost like watching an old Three Stooges flick. Gilda had endured worse in her four decades of medicine, but she still sympathized for her new nurse-in-training.
“I need a drink,” the sourpuss demanded, leaving the poor young man dumbstruck.
; Gilda rolled her eyes, grabbed the orange juice she had been saving for herself, and stabbed the straw into the port like she was tempted to do with Roy’s forehead. She shoved the box into his waiting hand. “There. Suck on that.”
“Great bedside manner,” he groused before putting the straw to his cracked lips, which made her notice his saline bag was low.
“You could be nicer, too,” she reminded him as she headed for the stairs to fetch another bag.
He harrumphed. “I could be seeing, too.”
“You could be dinner, too,” Didi said without facing him, her dark tone making him shrink behind the juice box.
Gilda silently chuckled and headed downstairs.
The Pepper Pod Restaurant & Grille was a decent find for the night, given that whatever had happened here during the breakout barely left a stain on any of its wooden furnishings, plush booths, or blue carpeting. The smell of fresh steaks grilling somewhere in the kitchen—the last of it, according to Hashim—filled the air in a way she wished the heat from his grill did.
The teens and grownups loitered all around, most nuzzling into the sleeping bags they had found in the nearby campground, a couple reading their printed books.
Sean stared out one of the many front windows, the reflected water drops on the glass falling down his sullen face like they were his own tears. She wanted to cheer him up, but she had a job to do. Plenty of available people down here.
After her brief stop on the bus to grab a couple of saline bags, she returned to the banquet room and laid the bags next to Pepe, who went right to work replacing his sour patient’s fluids.
Didi hadn’t moved an inch.
Gilda sat with her leader. She almost reached for the zombie’s shoulder, but she settled on some reassurance. “He’ll be fine. I’m giving him my level best care.”
“Ahem,” Roy said with his mouth in his straw. Gilda just rolled her eyes.
“I appreciate it,” Didi said softly. “I don’t know what I’d do without him.”
Gilda dared to grasp Didi’s free hand, even if for the satisfaction of knowing she was doing her best for the dead worry-wart. “Your best, like always. You’ve got a good heart, so to speak,” she added, knowing a correction would be coming.
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