Plague Town

by Dana Fredsti

  Pushing the door open again, slowly this time, I found Gabriel standing there, looking pissed.

  “Jeez friggin’ Louise,” I growled. “What were you trying to do, scare the crap out of me?”

  “Just checking to make sure you’re okay.” Now he looked both pissed off and embarrassed.

  What the hell was going on?

  “Well, next time see if you can do it without giving me a heart attack.” I’d have said more, but I was hit by another hot flash, spiking my temperature a couple of degrees and leaving me flushed and dizzy.

  I shut my eyes and swayed on my feet.

  “Watch it,” Gabriel said, reaching out and steadying me with both hands.

  “Yeah. Just...” I just started babbling, without knowing what I was saying. “Y’know, I think I should have stopped after one glass of wine.” I opened my eyes to find him peering intently at me. “Seriously, I’m okay. Other than whatever years were taken off my lifespan from the shock.” But there was no anger now. The hot flash seemed to have burned all of it away.

  “Were you...” I started, but I wasn’t sure how to ask. “Were you looking for me?”

  “You didn’t look too good when you left the table,” he said, and he was still holding my arms. “I wanted to check on you. The scaring you to death bit wasn’t part of the plan.”

  “Just a little bonus, huh?”

  “Something like that.”

  An awkward silence fell between us, the tension palpable.

  “Is this about the whole tofu thing?” I asked, trying to lighten the mood.

  “I could have lived without it.” There was an edge to his voice that surprised me.

  “Well, you know what they s—”

  I gasped in shock. Without warning, his hands tightened painfully on my upper arms and he pushed me up against the wall, his body pressed against mine. His eyes darkened so much I thought I must be imagining it.

  My breathing quickened as his hand shifted from my arms up to my face, fingers twining through my hair. Anger and desire warred in his gaze. Heat coiled in my stomach even as fear shuddered up my spine.

  I tried to shake my head, but his fingers held it in place as he muffled any protests by covering my mouth with his.

  Fingers massaging my scalp, he slowly increased the intensity of the kiss, his tongue entering into play as he tilted my head back and slid it in.

  I felt like I was following along in a dance, being led by someone who knew the steps much better than I did. I discovered that I was content to follow, matching the pressure of his lips with mine, letting my tongue play with his as he pressed his body into me, emphasizing the move with with a low, throaty sound.

  He was definitely packing heat, and it wasn’t his sidearm.

  I gasped and arched against him, arms going around his body to pull him closer. He made another sound—one that was half low laugh, half growl—and took a quick step back out of the circle of my arms, only to seize my wrists with one hand and pin them against the wall above my head. I pulled against his hand, testing his strength, but he restrained me without even trying.

  It was kind of scary... and incredibly sexy.

  He insinuated a knee between my thighs, then kissed me again, all gentleness out the window, tongue exploring my mouth as his knee rubbed back and forth against my most sensitive areas. His free hand crept up beneath my shirt and he rubbed his palm over the peak of one nipple, pinching it.

  I gasped in a combination of pain and ecstasy. My breath came short and fast as I rocked my hips against his knee, my tongue doing some exploring of its own, teeth biting his lower lip. He moved his mouth from mine, down my jaw to my arched neck. He bit it, teeth on either side of the pulse that throbbed there, hard enough to hurt in the most pleasurable way possible.

  Maybe it was the adrenaline-filled experiences of the day, but I wanted Gabriel like I’d never wanted anything before. I wanted him even more than I’d wanted that steak dinner. And that was saying something.

  We were both close to the point of tugging off each other’s clothes and doing the nasty right there against the wall when a door slammed somewhere down the hallway. The effect on Gabriel was instantaneous.

  His hand slid away from my breast and the other let go of my wrists as he stepped away from me so suddenly I would have fallen over if I hadn’t been leaning against the wall. My breathing ragged, I stared at him.

  His breathing was a little choppy, too, as he spoke.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “That shouldn’t have happened.”

  “What the fuck?” Or not, as it seemed. Frustration made me blunt. “What the hell should have happened?”

  “I lost control,” he said. “It’s not... I can’t allow it.”

  What, and I can? I thought angrily.

  “So it’s not okay for Mister ‘I’m better than everyone else,’ but it’s something you’d expect from the slut,” I countered. Hurt wrestled with anger. “Thanks, but no thanks, Gabriel.” No way I was crying in front of him.

  He looked as though I’d slapped him. Then his expression went unreadable.

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Then what did you mean by ‘this is wrong?’ What, are they gonna court-martial you for making out with a recruit?”

  “No, but—”

  “Then maybe you’re allowed to screw anyone below your rank.”

  “That’s not it at—”

  “Then near as I can figure, this was all just some kind of sick joke. Wasn’t it?”

  He stopped trying to speak, and just stared at me.

  “What, did you make a bet with the rest of the guys? Tony owe you a twenty?”

  “That’s enough!” Gabriel was getting angry, too. I knew I was pushing him, but I didn’t care.

  “Gee, let’s see how fast can I get Ashley all hot and bothered, and then dump her ass and—”

  Gabriel grabbed my shoulders and shook me once, then twice before slamming me up against the wall.

  “Stop it,” he gritted.

  I shut up. Something in his tone scared me enough to cut through the rage.

  Another door slammed shut, someone coming or going. He let go of me, and I steadied myself again.

  “That’s enough,” he repeated, and he took a deep breath. “This isn’t about you.”

  I shut my eyes, fighting the urge to punch him. When I thought I had myself under control, I opened my eyes again.

  “Then as usual, it’s all about you,” I said.

  “Yes.” For some reason, I didn’t think he was taking it the way I’d meant it. “It has nothing to do with you at all.”

  Another deep breath.

  Then I punched him hard, right in the solar plexus, catching him by surprise. He doubled over with a grunt and I shoved past him, moving to a safe distance down the hall. Then I stopped, and turned back to him.

  “You know what’s funny, Gabriel?” He slowly straightened up, hands on his knees as he regained his wind. “For a moment there, I could have sworn it was about both of us. I thought I’d been wrong about you.” I paused before adding, “I won’t make that mistake again.”

  With that, I turned and walked away quickly, heading for my room.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  * * *

  I wasn’t hung-over the next day, unless you count an emotional hangover, in which case I had a doozy. No time to nurse it, though, either physically or emotionally. There was work to do.

  We spent two days clearing the buildings on the Redwood Grove campus, one by one. After the zombies were eliminated in each building, hazmat-suited teams would come in and take away the corpses for disposal. Any survivors were taken to Patterson Hall.

  The entire time I was luring zombies out of buildings, killing them, sweeping the buildings for the ghouls too clueless to answer the dinner bell, and locating survivors too terrified to answer our calls, I was going through my own personal hell.

  I was doing it all under orders from the guy who had
humiliated me.

  Worse, there wasn’t anyone I could talk to about it.

  I’m here to tell you, it sucked.

  But I did it all. I can’t say I had a smile on my face, but I gritted my teeth, determined to do my job and kick ass. Though I wished it was Gabriel’s.

  “Yo, Tofu!” Kai hollered from the front door of the Poly Sci building, mid-afternoon on the second day. “You’ve got zoms on their way out the front door.”

  “Roger that, Lando.”

  “Ashley,” he added, “You’ll be on the front door after we dispatch the zoms.” He used nicknames for Kai and Lily, but for me it was all formal.

  Whatever.

  I hated the fact that he made me feel like a high school kid with a crush. Somehow he managed to tap into every insecurity still lurking in my psyche.

  Faint moans grew louder as Kai—“Lando,” that is—dashed through the doors, clearing the stairs in one jump. He whirled around and opened fire as the hungry zombies staggered outside, looking for food.

  At least thirty of them poured out and down the stairs, most of them looking to be former students with maybe a couple of teachers thrown in for good measure. I didn’t recognize any of them, for which I was thankful. Anonymity made it easier to put bullets in their heads. Something in those flat, freaky pale irises and bloody corneas made it easy to forget these things had once been human.

  Kai, Lil, and I did pretty damned well, without wasting time or ammo on body shots unless totally necessary. I couldn’t help but be proud, though, that out of the three of us, I was the best shot.

  Once we had taken care of the crowd that had followed Kai outside, he, Gabriel, and Lil went inside to finish the job while I kept an eye out for stragglers. As I waited I thought about Lily... Lil, that is. She insisted on being called that now. I suspected it was more than an affectation to her, more than Tony’s geeky need for movie-type labels.

  For Lil, the new name was a way to differentiate between the girl she’d been and who she’d become. She’d seen more horror in a very short time than most people see in a lifetime, and had gone from an almost neurotically introverted student to a member of a killing team. All of the wild cards could say much the same thing, but from what little that Lil had told us, it was obvious she’d led a particularly sheltered life before the attack.

  She still worried about her cats. And her mom, too, who may or may not have returned from her trip to San Francisco. But it was easier to focus on the killing than think about what might have happened to them, so she’d thrown herself with gusto into zombie killing. Only time would tell what this was doing to her on a deeper level.

  Hands clutching at my shoulders pulled me from my thoughts and I turned to find a male zombie in chef’s whites, arms outstretched by way of the standard zombie greeting.

  I stumbled backward, nearly falling on my ass as I narrowly avoided the bloodied teeth snapping at my neck. Regaining my balance, I unsheathed my long blade. I suddenly felt the need for a more visceral activity than just putting a bullet in its brain.

  As the zombie Chef Ramsay lurched toward me, I slipped to its left and sliced through the back of its knees. The razor-sharp blade cut the rotting flesh and tendons as if going through butter. Zombie chef fell forward.

  I pulled the blade to my right and used the momentum of the body and hips to put all my strength into a parallel cut that took its head right off the neck. A final—and unnecessarily vicious—thrust through one eye finished the job.

  I paid more attention after that, keeping my thoughts to the task at hand. A couple more ghouls stumbled around the far corner of the Political Science building. I dispatched them each with a bullet to the brain, thus satisfying the need for target practice.

  The rest of the team emerged from the building about twenty minutes later, a trio of trembling co-eds and an equally shaken male teacher’s assistant in tow. All four hung on Gabriel’s heels like a paddle of ducklings following their mommy.

  “Any trouble, Ashley?” Gabriel’s gaze flickered somewhere between my left ear and the middle of my forehead.

  Asshole.

  “Nope,” I said, all business. “Six stragglers, six shots.” I remembered the one I’d sliced and diced. “Oops, seven stragglers.”

  “Not too bad.” Gabriel nodded. “We’re definitely making headway. That’s half again what we had at the drama building.”

  “And nothing compared to what we found at the dorms.” Kai shuddered at the memory even as he spoke.

  The dorms had been slaughterhouses, walls and floors slick with blood, both congealed and fresh. There were very few bodies, however, since most of the corpses had gotten up and joined in the feeding frenzy. Plenty of pieces of bodies though, some recognizable and others reduced to unidentifiable lumps of raw, bloody meat.

  What few students had survived the massacre were nearly catatonic, given over to Dr. Albert and the medical team.

  Gabriel radioed our status to the Powers That Be and we waited for the hazmat team to arrive so they could clear the corpses for incineration and take the survivors back to safety... or the med ward. Kai sat with them in a huddle, softly sweet-talking the girls to set them at ease.

  “When are we going to start on the town?” Lil asked, taking a sip of water from her canteen as we waited.

  “Hopefully in the next couple of days.” Gabriel took off his helmet and wiped sweat from his forehead. Lil offered him her canteen. He took it with a nod of thanks and drank some water.

  “We have that much more to do here?” she said.

  “It’s going to be far more dangerous out there than it’s been in here, you know,” he said. “We’re talking plenty of businesses and hundreds of personal residences, including several apartment complexes. And we’re not going to be able to contain the town the way we have the campus.

  “Even though the military established a perimeter around the infected area,” he continued, “we’re talking a hundred square miles of mountainous woods, rocky terrain, and a lot of houses and homesteads tucked away off the beaten path. That’s a lot of places for the zoms to hide, and we are desperately short of manpower.”

  “Oh.” Lil’s voice was very small. I glanced sharply at her. Something was going on that she wasn’t saying.

  Gabriel handed her back her canteen. She offered it to me. I shook my head ‘no.’ Call me immature, but I didn’t want to take a drink after he had touched it with his lips.

  The hazmat team showed up and began piling bodies in the back of their big old garbage truck. A jeep with a similarly protected driver pulled up right behind them. We loaded the three co-eds and the teacher’s aid onto it for their trip to Patterson. All four looked to Gabriel as the jeep drove off.

  Was no one immune to his manliness?

  Feh. Screw him.

  We met up with Team B on our way back to HQ. Gentry and Tony were supporting a heavily limping and deeply chagrined Mack. Kaitlyn lagged a few feet behind, sullen as ever.

  “Mack, you okay?” I hurried over to them.

  “You weren’t bitten or anything?” Lil joined me, green eyes wide with concern. Lil liked me, but she loved the Postman.

  “Nah, no bites,” Mack said, looking embarrassed. “I just took a bad step and torqued my ankle a little.”

  “Tripped on a dead zombie,” Tony explained helpfully.

  “It’s true,” Mack said. He shook his head and looked disgusted. I patted him on the shoulder.

  “At least you didn’t step in it,” I said. “That would have been gross.”

  Mack laughed.

  “Thanks for the silver lining, Ash.”

  “Bad news is that he sprained it pretty thoroughly,” Gentry said. “Good news is it’ll heal up pretty quick if he elevates it and ices it for a day. Wild card perk number twelve.”

  “What are the first eleven?” Kai asked.

  Gentry grinned and shrugged.

  “Heck if I know. Maybe we should start a list.”

  After din
ner we had another session of training by watching zombie movies. The night’s selection included Lucio Fulci’s Zombie and the rest of the remake of Dawn of the Dead—the movie that started the trend of sprinting zombies.

  Zombie was notable both for its ‘zombie vs. shark’ action and the propensity of the women to throw their heads back and scream when attacked.

  “This is totally unrealistic,” I grumbled. “It’s like they want to get eaten.”

  “The point,” Gabriel said in his “lecturing” tone, “Is that everyone reacts differently under stress. You might not panic like that, but most people do. And you’ll need to deal with the results. That’s your take-away.”

  “That, and don’t make out in a graveyard,” I said with open disgust. “I mean, seriously. When you’re on the run from zombies, who thinks it’s a good idea to rest and make out? In a cemetery!”

  “Don’t take it all too seriously.” Simone sat in the front row next to Gabriel. Jamie was in her usual place next to the DVD player. “We may be able to glean some discussion points from these movies—” Somehow, I had the feeling she didn’t really think so. “—but you should also take the opportunity to kick back and relax.”

  “In that case,” Tony offered, “we need to watch Zombie Strippers. It’s a classic!”

  That earned him dirty looks from all of the women in the room—especially Kaitlyn.

  “Wouldn’t it be nice if once in a while it was a man who froze?” Kaitlyn snapped. I agreed, but wasn’t about to say so. Not and give her a shot at me with those claws.

  “Now that would be unrealistic,” Kai replied with a distinct lack of self-preservation. Kaitlyn looked as if she was about to respond, but she just crossed her arms and glared. If I was Kai, I’d sleep with one eye open for a couple of days.

  We finished Zombie and moved on to Dawn of the Dead, picking it up from the scene where they first arrive at the mall. Gabriel hit pause after the young ingénue put everyone in danger by trying to rescue her dog.

  “We call this Ripley’s Syndrome,” he said. “After the scene in Alien.”

  You’ve got to be kidding me...