Z-Day (Book 3): A Place For War

by Humphreys, Daniel

  The infected that rounded the corner was in rougher shape than most. The fact the pitiful thing could still walk amazed Miles. Most of the flesh on its emaciated frame had wasted away, consumed by the virus over the years. There was just enough stringy muscle to propel the skeletal figure forward, its blood-stained pajamas threatening to slide off of its reduced frame.

  The solid gray orbs of its eyes locked onto Miles, and it spread its jaw open wide as it reached out, lurching past Vir. The other man came out of his crouch and rolled his eyes at Miles before sticking a boot between the zombie’s stumbling feet. It toppled face-first to the ground. Vir stepped forward, held its body down with his other foot and shattered the rotten skull with a single, surgical chop.

  Miles listened, then shrugged. “I guess that’s it.” He waited for Vir to step around the fallen corpse, then the two of them joined the Marines at the front of the house. An unpaved dirt lane ran along the front, but he could make out the north-south paved road they were aiming for through the trees. Nothing moved—if anything else had heard the explosion of noise from the bird, it wasn’t moving.

  Byers scratched the scars on his cheek. “I’m thinking when we get to the road we stick to it for maximum speed, rather than creeping through the trees at the edge. Thoughts?”

  Lawrence didn’t say anything, so it was obvious that he’d addressed the question to Miles and Vir. “Stop and pop. A brisk walk isn’t all that loud, but we pause and listen every so often.”

  The Marine nodded with a smirk. “You read my mind.”

  “Question,” Vir interjected. “We know the infection is on the island for certain now. Why not find a high place to hole up and start making noise?”

  For the first time, Lawrence’s stoic mask slipped, and Byers’ face flushed. “I’m going to pretend you’re joking, Singh.”

  Miles stared at the ground and tried to hide his smile.

  “I’m bloody well not. All this prancing about makes all the sense in the world on the mainland. There were less than five hundred residents here before Z-Day. Between the four of us, we’ve got enough ammunition to take down the entire population three times over. So why are we tiptoeing around?”

  Byers sighed and gave Lawrence a look. The junior man shrugged and said, “It’s your call, Sergeant.”

  The senior man glanced around, but Miles got the sense he was trying to gauge their position more than anything else. “Last week, we found records when we checked out a couple of Indiana Army National Guard depots. Before everything went tits-up, they combined forces with the Ohio and Michigan Guard detachments to set up a secure staging area.”

  “You’re talking about Fairland,” Miles said. The IANG helicopter base sat near I-74 less than fifteen minutes from Indianapolis. It wasn’t the most populous part of the state, but it was right on the outskirts of it. “I bet that was fun.”

  “An experience made even more so when we realized all the helicopters were gone.”

  “So, where’d they go—” Miles started, then shook his head. Of course. “They’re here, right?”

  “We hope so,” Byers said. “We had to settle for drone reconnaissance because Fleet is saving everything else that’s still flying for medevac and other high-priority missions. Long shots don’t count. But they’re enough to send a couple of gyrenes and civilian volunteers.” He winked. “So, to answer your question, Mr. Singh, I’d like to quietly secure the airfield before stirring up a horde that might overrun and damage priceless resources. You with me?”

  Miles took a look at Vir, but he needn’t have bothered. The other man gave him a tight nod, and Miles turned back to Byers. “We’re in.”

  Chapter Three

  October 19, 2017

  Ironton, Missouri

  Z-Day + 1

  The screaming and sporadic gunfire ended sometime in the middle of the night. By dawn the next morning, yesterday’s chaos turned into a tense silence. Distant screams sounded every so often, but none of those cries lasted for long.

  The sun crept over the edge of the roof and took Molly full-on in the face. It was an unforgiving way to awaken, and the aching tightness of her extremities didn’t help matters. She rolled up onto her butt and rubbed her cold legs. The light jacket she’d worn to school yesterday had been adequate against the chill of the night, but her khaki shorts ended at mid-thigh. She’d fallen asleep shivering, and despite the blaze of the sunlight, the morning was a cool one. She rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand and nudged Claire. “Hey. Wake up.”

  Her friend groaned and squinted at her. “Damn it. I was half hoping it was a bad dream.”

  Molly rolled her eyes. “Sorry to disappoint. How’s your ankle?”

  Claire winced and pulled her knee up into her chest. She’d left her left foot bare overnight, and her swollen ankle was a bright, angry purple with red streaks trailing up her calf.

  “Maybe you should have kept your shoe on,” Molly said. “Can you get it back on, now?” Yesterday, when they’d been running for their lives, the other girl had stepped into a pothole in the diner parking lot. Even immediately after, she’d barely been able to walk on it. They two of them would never have made it to the roof if Gram—Molly shuddered and shook the thought off. She didn’t want to think about that, or what lay in a ditch on the other side of the building.

  Her friend twisted her foot and bit back a whimper. “I don’t think so, Mol. I can’t walk on it. What are we going to do?”

  Not knowing what to say, Molly put her nose on top of the knee wall and stared at the devastation of her little town.

  The worst part was how normal most of it seemed. Other than a few cars wrecked or left abandoned in the street, everything looked fine. It was only after you looked closer that you saw the blood and the torn pieces of what had been people. Pieces because none of the folks who died stayed down for long. Shortly after—whatever they were—attacked them, the victims got back up and joined the growing horde.

  The word kept floating around in the back of her head, but she tried not to focus on it. Admitting that the people of her hometown had turned into horror movie monsters seemed crazy. Hell, when Mr. Foist, her math teacher, started bleeding from the eyes and collapsed, most the class had thought it was an early Halloween prank. Until he bounced back up and ripped Jenny Hoffman’s throat out.

  The memory of it was enough to make her queasy, but she didn’t have anything in her to throw up. She and Claire had split her brown bag lunch late yesterday afternoon. By that point, the gnawing in their stomachs had overcome the slow-burning apocalypse around them. They’d spent the rest of their evening making phone calls and sending texts to any and every number they could think of. On the rare occasion that the calls went through—more often than not they got the ‘all circuits are busy’ message—no one else answered. The texts seemed to go through fine, but test messages the two sent to each other never appeared.

  “What are we going to do, Molly?” There was a hint of a whine in Claire’s voice as she repeated herself.

  Molly gritted her teeth and tried to remain calm as she turned back to the other girl. “We can’t stay up here,” she said. “No food, no water—we won’t last long. Get out of town, maybe.”

  “How are we going to manage that?”

  Molly sighed. “Well, I was thinking about running over and seeing if your brother left his keys in the squad car.”

  Claire crawled over to her side and looked out over the parking lot. Mike Wischmeier’s car sat at an angle across both lanes of traffic on Pine Street. The driver’s door hung open, but the deputy was nowhere to be found. During their run through the woods from the high school, they’d heard a storm of gunfire from this direction. When they’d sprinted across Main Street toward the diner, they’d found a handful of fallen bodies lying in a halo around the vehicle.

  Molly half-hoped he was hiding out somewhere, but somehow, she knew that to be a stupid dream. He was gone, just like Gram, and like Jenny Hoffman and all the other
students back at Arcadia Valley High.

  The sound of shoes scuffing across the parking lot drew their eyes down, and they watched as Julio, the diner’s short-order cook, limped by. A burly guy in jeans and a plaid shirt followed close behind. They weren’t looking up, which was good, but they hadn’t left, either.

  Do they know we’re up here? She pulled back from the edge and swallowed.

  “I won’t make it,” Claire said.

  “I’ll do it,” Molly whispered. “You go to the opposite side of the roof and start yelling. I’ll climb down the ladder and run for the car. I get it started, you pull back and stay quiet. I’ll see if I can draw them off, then I’ll turn around and come back. Pick and roll.”

  Her friend stared at her, face pale. “Sounds easy.”

  Molly tried not to laugh. “It sounds insane. But we have to do something.”

  As though agreeing with her, Claire’s stomach growled. “Fine,” the other girl sighed. “Give me a hand?”

  Bent over on her friend’s left side, Molly got low enough for Claire to throw an arm up over her shoulders. With that support, the injured girl was able to hop-walk to the other end of the roof in short order.

  Molly looked around for anything that her friend could use as a crutch, but the roof of the diner was depressingly clean. “You’re going to have to crawl back.”

  Claire eyed the distance to the ladder and winced. “It won’t be fast.”

  “I’ll give you plenty of time. Keep the noise up until you hear the engine start, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Scuttling back to the head of the ladder, Molly waved a hand at Claire to signal that she was ready. The other girl nodded, gulped, and started screaming.

  If Molly had thought Julio and the other guy were slow-moving before, Claire’s inarticulate scream dissuaded her of that notion. They jerked out of their slow shuffle and pivoted as one. She ducked down, afraid they might see her and fixate on the ladder, but she shouldn’t have worried. They disappeared around the side corner of the diner, heading toward Claire.

  She swung one leg over the roof, seeking out the top rung of the ladder. Her friend shifted from a scream of terror to a shout. “You better come back for me, Molly!”

  She was too scared to react, but she managed a jerky nod as she forced herself to descend the ladder. It was a narrow affair, metal-framed and secured to the side of the diner with heavy bolts. It seemed solid enough, though she supposed her weight wasn’t enough to strain it.

  Stepping onto the sidewalk, she hunched over and did a quick survey of the parking lot. Many of the spaces were empty, with a mere scattering of cars throughout. There’d been no real lunch-hour rush yesterday. As best as she’d been able to tell before they ran for their lives, less than a dozen people had been in the diner when it happened.

  Staying low, Molly darted between the cars, trying to use them as cover as much as she could. Distance muted Claire’s cries, but she could still make out the words well enough. “Holy shit, Molly, they’re coming out of the woodwork here!”

  “Shut up, then,” she whispered under her breath. A quick flash of guilt passed through her, but she shook it off. She didn’t have time for the emotion. Back down on the ground, she’d stepped into something she’d never before experienced. A part of her marveled at the strange dichotomy of her life, before and after, even as she scanned the area around her for potential threats. I used to think I’d die of embarrassment at school. Never thought I’d be running for my actual life.

  She reached the end of the parking lot. A grassy ditch separated the pavement from the street. Molly took one last look around, steeled her nerves, and hurdled the ditch. She landed in an awkward fashion, and for one heart-stopping moment she had a vision of spraining her ankle like Claire, but she recovered. She backslid through the dew-damp grass but forced herself onto the pavement through sheer force of will.

  Deputy Wischmeier’s patrol car waited, and she slid into the driver’s seat and slammed the door. Molly half-laughed and half-whimpered in relief as she reached for the ignition. The nasty little voice in the back of her head muttered that the keys wouldn’t be there, but her hand closed over a no-shit rabbit’s foot keychain. Terror had kept her silent before, but she screamed in elation now, pumping her fist as though she’d nailed a half-court heave at the buzzer.

  “Come on, come on,” she muttered to herself, twisting the key. The engine roared to life, and her elation surged.

  Then the siren and lights came on, and fear reclaimed her.

  For a long moment, she froze, fixated by the swirling reflection of red and blue on the hood and the warble of the siren. She shook out of it, forcing herself to study the controls. There had to be a switch somewhere. But the interior was a mess. Between the laptop computer mount and the other banks of controls attached to the dashboard, the patrol car looked like a space station compared to everything she’d ever driven. Some of the switches had labels underneath them, but most of them didn’t. Worn or fallen off, she guessed, and more likely than not Mike used the siren and lights often enough that those labels had been some of the first to go.

  She reached out with an uncertain hand to experiment with the rows of switches. Before she could make the first attempt, the squad car rocked with an impact.

  Squeaking in surprise, she turned to look out the window in time to see Julio’s companion attempt to gnaw through the driver’s side window. The sound of teeth on glass wasn’t as bad as nails on a chalkboard, but it was close. Now that she’d turned her focus to outside, she could see a literal crowd staggering her way through the parking lot, and still more from all around.

  “Drive, idiot,” she said to herself. She’d wanted to attract attention. This was a lousy way to do it, but it seemed to be working. She didn’t know if the reanimated people were strong enough to break their way inside, but she felt pretty confident that they couldn’t keep up with her if she drove away. Molly took a deep breath and dropped the car into gear.

  The problem, of course, was staying close enough to keep drawing them away from the diner. This is going to take longer than I thought.

  Molly straightened the squad car out and turned south on Main Street. She glanced up, just able to make out Claire’s open mouth on top of the diner. “Hang on, girl,” she said, but she didn’t know if she intended the words for herself or for her friend.

  Every instinct screamed for her to floor it, to get out of town as fast as she could. But that would mean leaving her friend behind, and she wasn’t so overcome by fear to stoop to doing something like that. She eased off, shifting her eyes back and forth between the rear-view mirror and the windshield. The warbling wail of the siren grated on her nerves. While she could force herself to keep the car at a panic-inducing twenty miles an hour, she couldn’t bring herself to come to a halt long enough to give herself time to figure out the series of switches. Even worse, who knew what else the switches controlled? Let it be, for now.

  Scenes of devastation mixed with everyday normality trailed by as she guided the car out of town. A mile south of the diner, Main Street was already turning residential. Molly didn’t have her own car and drove only occasionally. In her experience, walking or biking everywhere meant you paid more attention to the things around you. She knew this area, though the dichotomy of new wreckage and her memories was jarring. Ahead, the road curved and the area turned rural. Time to shake them off.

  She took her eyes off of the scene behind her in time to realize that the intersection of Main and Orchard street was almost entirely blocked by a milling crowd. Blinking, Molly prayed that they were okay, friends and neighbors coming to save the day, but all were coated with blood and viscera. Many bore wounds that should have sent them to the hospital or morgue.

  “Zombies,” she said, finally uttering the word. “There are zombies in my hometown.”

  Her lip trembled and tears spilled down her cheeks. As the crowd wheeled and surged toward her in response to the siren, she sla
mmed her foot down, shocked at the eager responsiveness of the patrol car’s massive engine. She steered to one side, trying to avoid the thickest part of the crowd—horde? —bodies flying as they slammed into the reinforced bumper. One flipped up onto the hood and clawed toward the windshield, but slid off as she cleared the cluster and jerked the wheel over to avoid a car that had crashed into a streetlight.

  And then, all at once, she was clear. She zoomed past the senior center. As she braked to turn, she put the signal on out of instinct. Molly laughed at the flickering light on the console, but it sounded half-hysterical in her ears. Making another turn, she pulled onto MO-21. After her creeping pace through town, 55 felt like light speed, and she missed the first turn leading to the diner. She turned left past Arcadia Sporting Goods and considered the store for a wistful moment. She hadn’t been the first to think of it. The parking lot overflowed, and while she seemed to have drawn any ambulatory people—zombies, damn it—away, more than a few crippled forms writhed on the ground. The quick glimpse she got of the wrecked interior through the shattered windows was not an encouraging one.

  She cut the corner onto Pine Street, heart leaping as she saw the road ahead was clear. The squealing of the patrol car’s tires highlighted the ever-present howl of the siren as she pulled into the parking lot of the diner and around to the side of the building with the ladder.

  Molly slammed on the brakes and tried to hold back her scream.

  The wail of the siren roused the cluster of zombies from their feast on the crumpled form on the sidewalk. She didn’t know if Claire had panicked and tried to run for it or simply fallen, but it didn’t matter. The group surrounding her fallen form had torn great chunks of flesh her body. Her blood painted the side of the diner.

  Presented with fresh prey, the zombies rose and staggered toward the car. Molly froze, then all at once let loose the scream she’d been holding in. She slammed her foot on the accelerator, and the way the shattered bodies of the beasts who’d murdered her best friend went flying made her feel a little bit better.