Everyone gawked at her until the reanimate spoke to the wall at its side. “Nick, tell me she’s wrong.”
“I can’t find it,” a curt voice replied through Cody’s smartphone. “I could if I had a bug on it.”
“Good,” the corpse said with a proud grin, “because I sent one down there.”
Heather frowned at the Death Doll’s meaning.
*****
The lab coat was a little big for Cynthia, but she managed to step off the elevator without raising a suspicious eye. She followed the hallways Nick had described right up to the door she needed, which was guarded by two soldiers. She threw back her shoulders and strolled up to the door with conviction.
“Hi,” she brightly greeted, steeling herself for the use of the nickname she always hated. “I’m Cindy from I.T. I’m here to help restore the connection.”
The taller one—and thicker of neck and shoulder and arm and—name-tagged HENDERSON looked down her coat and asked, “Where’s your badge?”
She pretended to pat herself down and give an aw-shucks reaction. “Damn it. I always leave it in my office. You can call Doctor Stilton. She’ll vouch for me.”
“Doctor Sitton?” the deliciously muscled Henderson corrected.
“Right, Sitton, sorry,” she said with as cute a laugh as she could muster.
“Can’t call,” the skinnier one labeled BURGOS said. “Phones are out.”
“Well, we’re still working on that,” she improvised, wanting to kick herself. She pulled her new iPhone and handed it to Burgos. “Use mine.”
Burgos frowned at the light blue phone. “I thought the tunnels couldn’t carry the signals. How did you get a cell phone to work down here?”
Shit! She kept cool and smiled at the skeptical guard. “That’s why I’m I.T.”
“Whatever,” Burgos said as he brought up the phone function. “What’s the number?”
She almost didn’t hear him amid the mutually pleasurable stare-down with Henderson. “Hm? Oh, I’ll dial.”
She took the phone back, pretended to dial before hitting REDIAL, and handed it back to Burgos. When he got an answer, he had a little chat about I.T. and procedures.
“I’ve never seen you before,” Henderson said. “You look really young.”
“Back at’cha, but here we are.”
The hunky guard nodded with a hopeful gleam in his eye. “I’ll get relieved in twenty minutes if this whole thing passes. Think we can meet up at the Mall when you’re done?”
Her body tingled at the idea, even if it wasn’t happening. “I’ll work fast,” she flirted.
Henderson smiled, and Cynthia’s knees grew weak, but the playful mood was interrupted when Burgos hung up the iPhone and placed it on his desk. “Alright, go on in. We’ll hang onto this for you.”
“I’ll need that,” she insisted. “My instructions are on it.”
“Sorry,” Henderson offered smoothly as he placed his big, warm hand on her shoulder and smiled. “We can’t let any mobile devices in a secured area. You understand, right?”
Resorting to what was working, she put up her flirtiest grin. “Only if you’ll hold it for me.”
Henderson gave a flattered laugh, then reached for the phone. “I can do that.”
She blocked his hand. “No,” she said softly, which caught him by surprise. “Let me.”
He smiled and nodded.
She pressed herself against him and slipped the phone into his pocket, lingering in his eyes for a moment. “How’s that?”
He smiled wider. “Perfect. See you soon.”
“I look forward to it,” she flirted back, then grazed against him one her way to the command center entrance … with her phone under her hand, thinking she might’ve considered the hunky Henderson’s offer if he had been a little smarter.
*****
“She’s in,” Nick reported from his own little undisclosed location, which made Didi smile in the relative safety of the lab. Now, all she had to do was wait.
“What else is she going to do down there?” the doctor asked glumly while hanging onto the back of a stool like she had a hangover, clearly troubled by her part in their little insurrection.
“Hopefully no more than she has to. She is kind of psychotic,” Didi replied, which visibly unnerved the doctor in an oddly pleasing way.
“You’re sure about her?” Cody asked from a nearby chair.
“Call it faith,” Didi said, trying to be reassuring despite watching the boneheads dissolve in the security office cell. Their remaining skin sported so many boils, she might’ve thought they had just picked on Moses. It would’ve made her ill if she still had a stomach. “You should be proud, Doc,” she said more sadly than she meant to. “Your test worked like a charm.”
Heather glanced behind herself, her jaw dropped, and she ran toward the melting dead’s cell. Cody labored to follow. Together, they beheld the fate of the boneheads Frenching the glass. She squeaked into her hand excitedly, and she had every right. She had successfully engineered the end of the zombie pandemic, and Cody looked upon her with a sense of pride.
“You did it,” he said as he hugged her with a big old grin, all of which the cute doctor welcomed in her glee. It was like no time had passed at all for them.
Seeing them hug it out was certainly illuminating, and the possibilities overwhelmed Didi like the moment of her own death. A sweet, sensible romance could rekindle between those two, and it encouraged as much as it ached. That woman could give him a future; kill the plague, create new lives, and perhaps give and take great pleasure with that tiny, healthy body. Heather was the one he was always meant to find.
Not Didi.
“It worked,” Cody said excitedly to everyone else, who cheered or high-fived him before he locked eyes with Didi again. “The poison works. If we show the President, he’ll have to … ”
She smiled for him. It was all she could do at the moment.
His exuberance quickly gave way to shock and sympathy, but it was Jerri who voiced the horror. “You got hit, didn’t you?”
Didi shrugged. “We all got to go sometime.”
Everyone just gaped at her.
The pretty doctor looked confused. “If that’s true, you should be as far along as the others, but you don’t look at all degraded.” She faced Cody. “How did you make her like this?”
“He just shoved a diode into my head,” Didi answered for him while nodding at him, then at Craig, “and this taxidermist stuffed me.”
The doctor rushed to one of the tables full of chemicals and returned with a scalpel. “May I have a sample of your skin?”
Didi recoiled, but it didn’t take long to understand what the doctor was getting at. It wasn’t like she had anything to lose but a strip of flesh she could easily replace. She took off one of her gloves and presented her quilt-looking gray palm. “Have at it, Doc.”
CHAPTER 32
OVER A BARREL
Peter rubbed his head with his free hand as he sat in his office, staring at the primary nuclear launch key in his hand with nothing to do but wait. He had heard that the I.T. guru was on the scene, but even his power couldn’t speed those guys up. What was taking Gil so damn long?
He glanced through the glass walls into the dark, chaotic command center in hopes of seeing his senior general on his way, but he noticed something—or, rather, someone—under the missile launch terminal. He exited his office and marched right up to that someone.
“What are you doing, Miss?” he asked, startling the young woman … the very young woman.
The petite redhead held her chest as she caught her breath. “Geez, you shouldn’t sneak up on people like that,” she said with a laugh before returning to her work.
“Miss!” he insisted.
The woman stood and huffed. “Excuse me, sir, but I have work to do.”
“Not at this terminal, you don’t. Where’s your badge? Who are you?”
“I’m Cindy from I.T.,” she sassed, �
��and, unless you want to piss off the President, you’d better let me get back to work.”
She turned again, but he snatched her arm to look her dead in the eye. “I am the President,” he barked, which garnered a lot of attention around the command center.
The redhead froze like a pond outside the mountain.
“Secure that woman,” Gil shouted from his office, pointing at her with one hand while holding the secondary launch key in the other.
Peter’s senior agent quickly restrained the girl. She struggled until he drew his pistol and warned her not to move. She froze in his grasp.
One of the two door guards rushed up to Gil with a man in a gray jumpsuit. “Sir, we’ve got another guy here claiming to be from I … T.,” Sergeant Burgos said before pausing to regard the girl with confusion. “What happened?”
“She was digging around in the launch platform,” Gil replied gruffly, then pointed the gray jumpsuit at the terminal. “Find out what she did to it.”
The girl yanked the agent to no avail as the real I.T. searched the terminal’s guts.
“Who are you?” Peter asked the girl, but she just sneered at him.
The I.T. returned with a small metal device in his hand that resembled the prongs of a diamond ring. “I can’t be sure, Mister President, but this might be a bug.”
“There’s probably another one somewhere up there,” Peter proposed.
“Get her out of here,” Gil ordered the agents, who handed the girl to Sergeant Burgos.
“No, wait,” Peter snapped before they could leave. “I’ve got a better idea.”
*****
Cody was accustomed to waiting. It was the number two soft skill any soldier would have to master—number one being the development of thick skin. Embracing the suck, his old buddies used to call it. Regardless, he never could handle waiting for any medical test result for someone he cared about. The anxiety hurt worse than his side wound.
Despite that, he couldn’t help noticing what time had done to his former fiancée. Her near pale complexion glowed brighter than the laboratory light sconces, and the faintest crinkle had developed beside each eye. Her neck had sunk in a little, highlighting her angular jaw like she had either lost weight or kept eating like a rabbit. Her smooth hands told him she still moisturized, which he had always enjoyed when they were together … in every—
He shook the thought from his head, owing to more important things to think about. What was taking so long?
Heather slowly rose from the microscope eyepiece and looked at Didi with dread. “No sign.”
Didi’s brow creased. “You mean I’m not poisoned?”
“Not from what I can see,” Heather replied, though looking conflicted, “I don’t understand, though. The poison works just like the plague. In addition to breaking down the necrotic tissues, it also penetrates the brain and deteriorates all functions.”
Didi successfully moved all her limbs, then shrugged. “All good here.”
“Is there a way to be sure?” Cody asked.
Heather’s jaw wagged. “A sample of her brain tissue might be more conclusive, but I can’t—”
“Then take it,” Didi said as she turned and knelt, placing her hands on the edge of the desk like she was being arrested … or bracing herself.
Her head fell to present access, which was when Cody noticed newer, less careful stitching peaking through the shoddy makeup job along her neck. He took a deep breath, grabbed the scalpel from the counter where Heather left it, and approached Didi, softly saying, “Hold still.”
Didi nodded stiffly, the panic in her eyes aimed ahead instead of at him.
He gulped away the bulk of his apprehension and carefully eased the scalpel into the old N.S.U. hole like a deathly serious game of Operation. He scraped off a piece of cerebellum, which made Didi grunt and twitch. “Sorry.”
“Do what you’ve got to do,” she grunted quietly like she was trying not to cry.
He finished taking the sample as quickly as he could, cringing with each of his friend’s squeaks and whimpers. When he finished his intrusion, he extended the damp, sickly gray sample as far away from himself as possible.
Heather clamped the sample between two glass strips and placed it under the microscope, which she observed in another tense silence.
So, Cody waited some more, lamenting the damage he had done to his best friend despite the fact that she no longer showed any sign of agony; just the hard gleam of hope in her static eyes.
Fortunately, it wasn’t long before Heather again recoiled, faced Didi, and said with great surprise, “Nothing.”
Didi smirked at the ceiling—well, God, really—as Rachelle hugged her. “You tease, you,” the zombie quipped before she noticed the embrace and returned it with a warm smile.
“Thank God and Craig for that thick hide of yours,” Hashim said while patting Didi’s back.
Everyone else in the office looked relieved …
… except for Heather, whose petrified gaze at Didi shook Cody to the core.
“What’s wrong?” he quietly asked her. “This should be good news.”
Heather locked eyes with him in the most terrified way yet. “If she’s immune, then—”
The room fell into sudden darkness. Confused muttering filled the space until spinning yellow lights illuminated parts of the office in turns and revealed a lot of nervous people.
“What the fuck just happened?” Isaac snapped.
Cody hobbled around the lab and found the rest of his people huddling together in the center. All accounted for, minus the young they had yet to rescue.
“Nick, talk to me,” Didi said as she approached Cody. “What’s going on?”
“I’m locked out,” the frustrated hacker said through Cody’s speakerphone. “They must’ve found my bug and back-traced. They have total control.”
“Then they have Cynthia,” Cody figured aloud. “Any second, they’re going to flood this tunnel with troops, and the President will have us—”
“He’s not the President,” Nick blurted like a snarky kid.
Cody frowned at the brusque hacker’s tone. “He was sworn in a year ago, after President Simpson died from the plague.”
“Then why is President Simpson still emailing this station?” Nick snidely challenged.
Cody locked eyes with Didi, then Heather. “Can you show us?”
“With what? I told you: I’m locked out!”
Cody rolled his eyes, but the shock running through his body dulled the need to shout at the rude hacker. “Can you at least tell us what they were talking about?”
“The last one says, ‘I’m coming for you, Pete.’ The one before that called him a traitor.”
“The V.P. staged a coup,” Cody uttered in terror.
Heather shook her head. “No. No, that’s impossible.”
Didi looked as terrified as he did. “Do you think he infe—”
The grinding of the tunnel doors opening stifled all conversation, followed by the roar of engines, bootfalls, and shouted commands filling the tunnel.
“Nick, new plan,” Didi said, which stunned Cody as much as the danger heading their way.
*****
Despite the vindication he watched unfold before him on all the restored screens, Peter seethed at the sight of his chief pandemic advisor aiding the insurgents. The soldiers flooding into the lab surrounded her along with the TERAN and the staff sergeant he had welcomed into his domain, and the doctor actually had the nerve to tell the troops not to harm the so-called Death Doll.
“She’s a controlled reanimate,” she told them. “We need to keep her for testing.”
While she may have had a point, Peter was long past caring. He even considered allowing the convoy commander to follow through on his threat to splatter their brains all over this lab, even if these rogues got on their knees as ordered.
“I want to speak to Vice President Ramsey,” the TERAN demanded, its entitled hubris laughable.
&
nbsp; “That’s President Ramsey,” Major Washington loyally corrected while aiming at its head, “and I said get on your knees, TERAN.”
The Death Doll faced the ceiling camera with an impish grin. “We both know that’s not true, don’t we, Pete?”
“Last chance, bitch!” the major barked, starting to lose his professionalism. Peter would allow it this once.
The TERAN glared at the major. “I talk to the second banana or my people tell President Simpson everything he’s about to do.”
The air suddenly left Peter’s body, chilling him to the bone as he watched the major aim his pistol right between the Death Doll’s eyes.
“Stop him,” he ordered Major Dam, who shouted the command to stand by into the mic.
The convoy commander glanced up at the nearest camera with a puzzled frown.
Peter glared at the lethal thing’s smug visage, which stared back at him through the camera like she had won this contest. There was no doubt in his mind that its brain fully functioned, because it was damned resourceful … just as he feared.
He motioned for the mic, which the major placed in his hand, and flipped the switch to keep it on. “I’m not going to let Saul endanger these people anymore than he already has.”
“You’re the one threatening to blow it all up,” it snapped at him, its cleaner-looking face burning with fury, “and you’re not even the President. What did you do? Steal the nuke codes?”
“President Simpson died from the plague, just as I said. What he did from there is not legally binding.”
Now it was the Death Doll’s turn to look puzzled, its immediate companions regarding it anxiously.
Then it grinned at the camera. “We don’t want to have this conversation here, do we?”
“There’s no way I’m letting you down here,” he insisted, “so you can tell Saul that he’s wasting his time … if I let you out of here.”
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