Liam couldn't tell if that was a joke.
The colonel stood up and moved to a row of silent computers against a side wall. Instead of taking a seat at one of them, he grabbed a few sheets of paper from a printer tray and handed them to Liam. The topmost appeared to be a satellite photograph of the city of St. Louis. There were a few red blotches in the middle of the photo, and some near the top.
“This is unclassified by the way. I think everyone knows what you're about to see, even if they can't visualize the world from space. The first sheet shows the areas of the initial outbreaks in your city as best we can tell. Things moved so quickly we may never know for sure how the disease spread in those first few days. The second sheet is more in line with what we all know today.”
The second printout was the same view of the city, but the coverage of red was absolute.
“A bit dramatic perhaps, but true. The disease is now everywhere. If I had a globe it would pretty much be a red orb. There are holdouts of course, places like this, but anywhere man can walk, the disease will be walking there.”
Liam handed the papers back, and looked at the colonel as if ready for more impressive information.
“You know most people see that second sheet and practically wet their pants. You seem unconcerned by what I'm telling you.”
“I escaped the city with my grandma—no thanks to you military jerks who killed a lot of my friends when you bombed the Arch—and I've seen the zombies up close for six days now. I'm scared as hell around them, but I'm more scared around Hayes—he killed my girlfriend thankyouverymuch—and I'm scared silly standing here in your office waiting to learn what you are going to do to my grandma.”
The colonel walked back to his chair and sat heavily in it. He motioned for Liam to sit in one of the chairs in front of his desk. “You call them zombies, huh? I'm hearing that more and more, and from unexpected places. I've seen what these things become, so I guess I could see why you'd use that word.” He seemed to chew on his lip as he thought about something, but he continued on a different tact, “Normally I'd give a dog and pony show about saving the world and my audience would be willing to step into an acid bath if they thought it would help further the research of this disease. I don't think you or your grandma will be so easily swayed.”
“Thanks?”
He studied the boy intently while sitting behind his desk. Liam felt very uncomfortable, as if he was under a bright light in front of a large audience. He couldn't help but squirm in his chair. The man's gaze was iron, but he looked down to his desk and seemed to dwell on some picture frames sitting off to the side.
In a quiet voice, the colonel began speaking again. “I'm very sorry about your girlfriend. I won't try to give you any excuses, but Hayes does what needs to be done in this crisis. There just isn't any time for pleasantries such as inquiries, criminal investigations, and so on. But that doesn't mean I have to like it.” He was looking down at his desk as he spoke, suggesting he might really be sorry. Or maybe he was pushing a red button somewhere to have the guards take him away?
“Let's go for a walk.” He stood up, motioning Liam to follow. They exited through a gap in the back flap. The day was overcast, but it was still a bright shock after the dim tent. Liam followed the soldier as he waved to a guard and then headed down a wide, well-worn double track path into the woods. When they were clear of the camp, he continued talking. “I’m glad to be with a young person again. I've seen a lot of old timers come through here, and frankly I'm sick of them. They all seem resigned to die. Welcome it. It's not natural. Very much a downer.”
Liam could only agree. Many of the old people he'd seen were very morose in their outlook. Zachary summed it up nicely by stating most of the elderly had already died because they had no one to care for them, or they lost power, ran out of meds, or whatever. It shouldn't surprise anyone when the surviving oldsters resign themselves to die. His grandma had largely avoided such talk because he was there to take care of her. While the other survivors were arriving here with boosted spirits at doing something useful with their remaining time, she would undoubtedly view this camp as the complete downer it really was. She wasn't plucked from a sinking ship either. She was kidnapped at gunpoint.
“I couldn't help but notice you rescued a lot of these folks from their failing nursing homes, but you kidnapped my grandma.”
They were walking at a good clip, deeper into the woods, but the colonel slowed at that. “That was Hayes' call. He said he met your grandma days ago on the run out of St. Louis and he said she was a prime candidate for our research. She's a survivor of a remarkable age, and we need her.”
“So you can kill her?”
“So we can study her.”
“But you're going to kill her eventually, right?” Liam was leafing his books in his mind. He was hard-pressed to think of any stories where the experiments were happy and friendly, leaving the patient in better shape than when they walked in. He was disinclined to believe an organization run by people like Hayes would have the best interest of the test subjects, no matter how much they plead otherwise.
“Damn kid, you're a downer, too. I brought you out here to show you why we need your grandma, but now I'm wishing I hadn't.”
“Sorry sir. My mouth runs away when I'm nervous.”
He looked around and saw nothing but woods in all directions, getting an inspiration. And a genuine chill. “And I'm being walked into the woods by a man with a gun on his hip. There are no witnesses. Hayes said he could have me killed at any time.”
The colonel gave a tart laugh. “Well, maybe you have cause to be a boat anchor. Look, I promise you I'm not here to kill you. I'll go ahead and show you what I came out here to show you.”
They walked for another five minutes or so, almost entirely in silence. There was no break in the woods along the trail until they reached the destination. The trail split at a junction. To the left was some kind of wooden enclosure. To the right the path went up a sharp little hill, and then over. Liam couldn't see over the hill, but he could see a lack of trees in that direction. There was some kind of clearing, or maybe a lake.
The colonel walked toward the enclosure, indicating Liam should follow.
“We call this place 'the back forty.'” He thought it was funny, but Liam had no idea why. “This enclosure was originally a round corral built to hold animals, but we've modified it to hold some of our infected friends. Then we built this walkway over the top. It allows us to study them up close, and this particular pen is useful for one important experiment I'd like to show you.”
“You're not going to toss me in are you?”
The colonel didn't even reply. He just walked up the flight of steps to the platform above the corral. Liam couldn't see any of the infected inside because large sheets of plywood had been strung around the outside of the pen. It made it look like a wooden coliseum, with a large wooden arch built across the middle. Exactly the kind of place victims would be tossed to the lions.
Liam climbed the stairs. He couldn't make a run for it and risk leaving Grandma to her fate, and he admitted he could have already been killed a hundred times by this man. And he was terminally curious.
I'm going to regret this.
3
When he reached the top he could hear the moans and cries of the zombies below. One side of the walkway had a railing and a very fine metallic mesh wiring between the top rail and the floor, but was otherwise open to zombies 10 feet below. The other side of the walkway was lined with more of the plywood sheeting, so Liam couldn't see what was on that side of the pen.
“On this side we have infected taken from the vicinity of St. Louis. These are the fellas you've been avoiding since the sirens went off almost a week ago. On the other side, behind these sheets, are infected from the Chicagoland area.”
He pointed straight down.
“You see this wire mesh hanging down from this walkway? Not the stuff up top, but the stuff below the walk and down to the ground. T
here's an identical one hanging on the other side of this walkway. We did that so the two sides couldn't touch each other beneath us.”
Liam was looking straight down. A handful of zombies were in the pen, and they were all grasping for him while pressed up against the wire mesh. Fortunately they were well below the walkway and no immediate threat.
“Do you think you could climb up that mesh?”
Liam suddenly panicked. He took a quick step back from the railing.
“I'm not going to push you in! I'm just asking a question. Move away from me. Stay away from me. I don't care.”
Nervous laughter. “Sorry. Now I have you and zombies to worry about.” After stepping back to the rail, he conceded the mesh was spaced so a man could climb out of the pen easily, much like climbing a chain link fence.
“You'll notice in a moment what makes this experiment so interesting. I want you to look on this side.”
As he pointed Liam to the closed-off side, he slid a piece of plywood along the walkway so they could both get a look at the subjects below. There were only two. They were both middle-aged men dressed in business suits. Well-bloodied with horribly mutilated necks. Liam wondered how their heads didn’t just fall off. They immediately became agitated. With visible targets, they moved directly below Liam and the colonel, much as the ones on the other side had done.
The zombies seemed to notice the wire mesh in front of them. They saw it going up to their prey. So they grabbed on. After some initial fumbling, one of the zombies started to climb the fence.
“Oh shit!”
The other zombie took a cue from his friend. Soon both were on the wire mesh, climbing directly below Liam.
The colonel slammed his hand on Liam's back, not violently, but in a sportsmanlike-manner. “Oh shit indeed!”
Liam froze again. How easy would it be to toss him in now? He tried to push back at the fear, but he was frozen solid in anticipation of what would happen next. If he had to pee he might have had wet drawers just then.
The colonel continued while keeping his arm draped over his neck. “These two saps had just come from Chicago, probably on some kind of business trip, dontchya think? Or maybe they just liked to dress nice? Maybe they knew they had the disease. Doesn't matter now. We tracked their route back to Chicago using credit card data from the plastic in their wallets. We know they arrived here just after the bridges were closed across the Mississippi. Not many people were driving into St. Louis. My team found them at the baseball stadium downtown of all places. They were caught up in the nets above home plate. Several men and women had climbed the nets to try to flee these guys. They were relieved to see us, though not for long. We weren't there to save them, only acquire samples. Hayes' team was instrumental in bringing these samples to us.”
Is that why Hayes was downtown when I met him?
The two zombies had been climbing steadily to the top of the wire mesh below the walkway. Out of instinct, Liam took a step back, breaking the loose hold of the colonel's arm. He made no effort to force Liam to stand there.
When the first zombie reached the transition between the wide mesh and the narrow mesh above it, he was stymied. With no means of putting its fingers into the tiny wire mesh, it was unable to climb all the way to the top. It simply pawed away at its prey, unable to continue. Someone had really thought through this contraption.
“I don't get it. Why are these guys climbing? What's different about them?”
“BINGO! That's what we're trying to figure out. Normally the sick are dumber than a box of hammers, but these guys seem to have the intelligence of very stupid apes. That doesn’t do justice to apes because apes could outsmart these two in a hundred different ways.”
Liam knew the climbers were important. Different at the very least. He’d seen hundreds, probably thousands of individual zombies of late up close and personal, and none of them were climbing like this. But the zombies he did see must have also had a special skill, unless they were just the plain old average zombie—as if such a beast could exist.
“So, does that mean the rest of the zombies around here also have a special skill?”
“That’s a good question, son. Maybe their skill is being effective killers. That's something we know for certain right?” He laughed just a little too readily for Liam.
“You mean you really don't know?” His dad was the conspiracy theorist, but those stories about government coverups, government corruption, and government incompetence did wear off just a little bit on the son. “Didn't you guys cause this plague in the first place?”
The colonel looked at Liam with real surprise. “Why would you say that? You think your government is so evil it would create a plague that would condemn every man, woman, and child on Earth to a horrible and endless death? That would include my own wife and son by the by.”
Liam kept a blank look on his face.
“As God as my witness, I have no knowledge of anyone in our government being a part of the creation of this plague. Imagine how far ahead we'd be if we knew how it was created.”
“OK, so who made it? Where did it come from?”
But the colonel seemed put out. He slid the plywood back in place on the walkway so the climbers were out of view. Then he walked back down the stairway and off the corral. He stood not far away and lit a cigarette.
Liam looked back into the pit where the terrestrial zombies were still pawing uselessly up at him. He'd seen plenty of these over the past six days, but up close and from the safety of this platform he realized how unnatural they appeared. The area around their eyes was caked with blood, as was their noses, ears, and mouths. Their necks had malicious wounds, with that side of their body coated with dried blood. They must have had torrents of the stuff pouring out. What was it that made them bleed profusely—beyond the obvious chunk of flesh missing where they were initially infected. His stomach was always unsettled at the sight of blood, and now was no exception.
He looked up to give himself a break. From his perch, he could see over the small rise he'd seen earlier. He could now see the small cart path go over the top and into a small clearing. A small yellow construction tractor was next to a big pile of dirt. He could see something else. Something unmistakable.
I think I know why he brought me out here.
He began walking toward the steps, but paused just before he reached them. He did something spur-of-the-moment he couldn't remember doing since he was a small child. He took a knee, made the sign of the cross, and said a quick prayer asking forgiveness for any wrongs he may have done in his life. He admitted he wasn't sure if he really believed in God, but he needed the help of someone now, and Grandma's God was good enough for him. Prayer always seemed to work for her.
“Really, Liam? You still think I'm going to kill you out here?”
“I know what's over the hill, sir.”
“Ah. That.” He took a heavy drag on his cigarette, then tossed it down.
Liam's most pressing thought was that he felt the colonel should know better than to drop a lit cigarette in a forest. He'd been programmed by society since birth to “help prevent forest fires.”
“Let's go take a look, son.”
He began walking back to the path, then turned left on the mysterious spur, leaving Liam to follow or not.
Liam considered making a run for it once again, but he was still afraid what they'd do to Grandma without him as her advocate. Paralyzed with many conflicting options and emotions, he defaulted to the easiest. He followed him over the rise.
4
The bodies were tossed into a shallow hole. The attendant tractor was too small to excavate a proper burial plot, but it made a noble effort to gather dirt and pile it nearby. Many bodies were still exposed, awaiting proper covering.
The colonel began talking as Liam caught up. “We've been out here for weeks. Testing. Examining. Hoping. These brave people gave their lives so my team could try to make headway against this thing. It pains me to say this, but there's no
other way to do what we've been doing. I just wish it didn't always end up with the subject laying out here in this grave.”
They both stood there for a long time. Many of the bodies were partially covered by dirt, or had a white powder covering them, but the pit still stank. The bloody signature of the infection was present on the bodies lying in front of them. They'd been infected.
Then it hit him. Weeks! They'd been researching the plague even before the sirens went off. He filed it away...
“Even the animals won't touch them. We think it’s because the sickness scares them off, but we can't be sure. Maybe we should run some tests.” But he said it without heart.
The colonel got out another cigarette.
“These are all old people? Is this what you mean by 'experiment' on them? What in God's name are you doing with them?”
“Liam, you have no idea how lucky you are. Do you think I give tours to every doe-eyed teen who comes through here? The answer you're looking for is no, this isn't the outcome we hope for. I brought you back here so you'd know the riddles we're trying to solve. You weren't supposed to see this, but I respect your inquisitiveness. We believe your grandma has qualities that will advance our research a long way toward answering those riddles.”
“And then she ends up on the pile?”
The man took a long drag before answering. “I don't want anyone to end up on this pile. Really, I don't. I won't tell you it could never happen, but I will tell you your grandma is different. If the medical team's theory is correct, she may in fact be practically unique. That uniqueness is why I'm even talking to you. It's vital she be protected and comforted until we can get her to a proper medical facility. I want you to help me with that.”
“And then you are going to kill me when I've served my purpose?”
The colonel looked at Liam with a hard gaze. “Son, are you trying to get me to off you? You seem awful anxious to remind me I should be out here killing you.”
Sirens of the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 2): Siren Songs Page 15