Plague of the Dead

by Z. A. Recht

  “Nice place, Hal,” he said. “How’s the cost of living?”

  Denton almost chucked. He had barely seen Thomas utter three amiable words since he’d known him, and there were two full sentences, just like that. The truck cleared a short turn and brought Hal’s house into Denton’s view, cutting his reply short. The retired mechanic lived in what was simultaneously paradise and hell, it seemed.

  The house sat up off the ground on supports to keep it dry in stormy weather, and the beach sat behind it through a narrow line of trees. Denton could see a well-worn path meandering off through the forest leading in the direction of the sand. The house itself was picturesque, built of seasoned timber without glass in the wide windows, and skylights dotted the thatched roof.

  If one ignored the house and scenery, however, the setting was quite different. Disassembled machinery dotted the yard, and contraptions the likes of which Denton had never even imagined seemed to have been cobbled from the scrapped parts.

  “Lord, it looks like the room where rejected props from Tim Burton films go to die,” Denton breathed.

  “Don’t knock my babies before you try them,” Hal said, parking the truck and stopping the engine, which breathed a shuddering sigh of relief as it ground to a halt.

  “Try what? I don’t even know what I’m looking at,” Denton said, scratching his head. Something that looked like a cross between a dinosaur and a weed whacker sat in the tall grass by the side of the truck. It was propped up on flat tires from a scuttled wagon whose butchered hide lay in a pile not far away. Denton guessed some of the chopped-up pieces had found their way onto the truck’s frame in the patchwork Hal had done.

  Hal followed Denton’s gaze. “That’s my lawnmower. Ain’t she a beaut’? Made her from aluminum sheets I twisted around some pipes I got a hold of when they pulled the old plumbing out of a condemned building in town.”

  “Yeah,” Denton said, surveying the waist-high tropical grass that sprouted around Hal’s house. “Looks like it does a real good job of things.”

  “Oh, it works,” Hal said. “I just don’t use it. What’s the use of being retired in paradise if you spend it mowing your lawn? Besides, I’d dent up the blades on all the stuff lying around here I can’t even see anymore.”

  “Yeah,” Thomas drawled. “Couldn’t be bothered to iron your trousers in the service, can’t be expected to mow your lawn now.”

  “Exactly,” Hal said, jumping out of the truck and slamming the door behind him. “Come on. Workshop’s around the back.”

  Hal led them around the overgrown house, down a loose dirt slope and into his backyard—which, after a quick look-over, seemed to be much better kept than the front. Here, the junk seemed almost organized the closer one got to the rinky-dink work shed that butted up against the thin tree line. From the sheer diversity of the things that littered the yard, Denton guessed Hal had been supplementing his pension by doing handyman’s work for most, if not all, of the island.

  As they walked, Hal pointed out various odds and ends and tried to explain them.

  “That’s a conveyor system I started to install in the shed to move my tools along with me as I worked. Couldn’t figure out a way to power it efficiently. Over there’s my garboat—that’s a golf cart boat, I mean. I think garboat works better. Anyway, stopped using it when I lost the last plastic golf ball I had that would float. All the fun went out of it. Right there by the door to the shed is the EM-15; worked on that for almost twelve years, on and off. Finally gave up not long ago. Moved on to bigger things.”

  Thomas perked up and showed some interest, running his eyes over the cylindrical piece of metal propped against the side of the work shed. He asked, “Is that the same bastard spawn of science that you stole those car batteries for back in Desert Storm?”

  Hal looked impressed. “Hell yes. I can’t believe you remembered that. And she still runs on car batteries, too. Sort of.”

  “What is it?” Denton asked, scrunching up his face as he peered at it.

  “It’s the Electro-Magnet Fifteen!” Hal said, as if expounding on the acronym explained everything.

  “ . . . Eh?”

  “It’s a gun,” Thomas grunted with folded arms. “A very, very stupid gun.”

  “It is not,” Hal said, managing to sound both condescending and indignant at the same time. He turned to Denton to explain. “It uses a system of electromagnets to accelerate projectiles down the barrel.”

  “At about the same speed as you could toss a rock, yeah,” Thomas said. “The only thing you’d ever kill with that is a bird, and that’s only if you got off a lucky shot.”

  “I beg to differ,” Hal retorted. “You haven’t seen the EM-15 in almost a decade. I’ve made improvements.”

  “So it works, then—like all your other little projects?” Thomas inquired, sweeping a hand around the yard in an all-encompassing gesture.

  “Well,” Hal murmured, “Not quite. I’m having a few problems getting the magnets to . . . work in tandem. I can’t get the ammo feed to work properly. So it’s a single-shot heavy-ass rifle at this point and I’m too old and drunk to be hoisting that son of a bitch everywhere I go. Here she rots.”

  “You said it works, though—one shot at a time. How?” Denton asked. Thomas scowled. It was plain he wanted to get on with it, but Hal enjoyed the excuse to ramble on about his hobby a bit more, and secretly relished the chance to toss a little discomfort Thomas’ way after all the old sergeant had put him through over the years.

  “The magnets fire up and push a projectile—basically any piece of metal that fits in the barrel—forward at what I’ve gotten to be a pretty high speed. She’s almost completely silent except for a whistling noise, but plenty inaccurate since there’s no standardized ammunition. In short, I have no clue what anyone would ever actually use this model for even if I got it working right, except as a base to work on better ones with. But she’s damn fun to play with when I’m drunk and bored. Here, watch this!”

  Hal strode over to the EM-15 and pulled it upright with a grunt. What Denton had thought was one irregularly shaped cylinder was actually a folded tripod with the actual weapon welded to the top. Hal snapped out the legs and straightened the barrel, swiveling the weapon towards the tree line. Upon closer inspection, Denton noticed the barrel was absolutely colossal, about as big around a bore as he could form with his thumb and forefinger. Hal stooped and picked up a pair of jumper cables, blew on the contacts, and snapped one pair to the weapon and another pair to a battery lying half-obscured in the grass. The weapon began to emit a dull hum.

  “She’s warming up,” Hal said. “Takes a moment. Here, let’s use this.”

  He reached down into the dirt at his feet and withdrew a bent scrap of iron, reached into a recess in the bottom of the weapon and pushed the piece of metal into what served as the chamber.

  “If I had these damn magnets working the way they’re supposed to, it’d feed that up there automatically,” Hal said. “Alright. She should be ready now. See if this don’t tickle your socks.”

  Hal pushed a button that rested on the back of the weapon. It seemed to jump a tiny bit, and belched almost silently with a rapidly-fading whistle. A small tree, far off across the meadow of Hal’s home, suddenly sprang apart, the top half somersaulting into the air while the bottom half stood quivering in the ground.

  Hal chuckled out loud as he disconnected the cables from the weapon.

  “What was that you were saying about barely being able to kill a bird, Sarge?” Hal said.

  Thomas said nothing, and Denton stood with a slightly slack jaw.

  “That’s amazing.”

  “Not really. Just my peashooter, when it’s all said and done. But what the hell are we doing?” Hal said, shouting the last at a much higher volume and startling Denton out of his reverie. “We’re here to get engine parts. They’re just inside.”

  “About goddamned time,” Thomas grumbled.

  1210 hrs_

  Reb
ecca Hall leaned over the side rail of the USS Ramage and stared down into the clear waters below. She could see fish darting in and out of the ship’s shadow, where the bulk blocked out the sun and turned a bit of the ocean to twilight purple. Far and away she could hear the shouts and laughter of a group of children on the beach as they ran up and down the sand chasing one another, and closer to her ears were the gentle lapping of tiny waves against the hull. Closer still were the near and dear voices of her comrades.

  “Fuck that and fuck you, ass-hat. I’m not doing it.”

  “Come on, you pussy—what are they going to do? Court-martial you? Out here, now? Just do it. Jump. Double-flip gets you a hundred.”

  “Yeah, come on, man! Who’s going to know? Say you looked over and fell.”

  “Yeah! Vertigo. Happens all the time.”

  “I don’t know, . . .”

  “One hundred dollars. In your hands. Jump. Do it. You know you want to.”

  “I don’t even know if I can spend that now . . .”

  “Then for glory and honor, bro. And the hundred bucks.”

  “Yeah! Honor. Jump, man!”

  For a moment there was no response from whomever the peer-pressured party was, and Rebecca turned back to the tranquil scene in front of her, feeling drowsy with the warm sun on her neck—and then a blurred shape shot past her with a yell of “Banzai!” and she let out a yelp, jumping back from the rail and then rushing forward again just in time to see one of the soldiers cannonballing into the water below.

  “He did it!”

  “Fuck yeah!”

  A more faded call of, “Where’s my hundred bucks, mother-fucker?” from down below drifted up.

  Rebecca shook her head and walked away from the railing. So much for tranquility.

  She wondered what Mbutu was doing. It had been a couple of days since she’d last managed to talk with him. She found him interesting and a bit on the mysterious side, sort of like Sherman. Interesting people were one of the few reasons she enjoyed waking up in the morning. Mbutu seemed to have an objective, global view of things, and reminded her of the wise old men in Indiana Jones movies who popped up and said prophetic things then faded away—though Mbutu was certainly not old and probably didn’t consider himself wise. Sherman’s constitution seemed more attuned to simple worldly pleasures, Rebecca thought. His cigar smoking, the reading of literature, his studying of history. Mbutu seemed to understand the world, and Sherman seemed to know it.

  Thinking of them reminded her of a rapidly fading person in her memory—Decker. Sure, he was just fine and in good health below, and almost certainly still interested. Maybe it was the work she was kept occupied with on the ship, or the thought of the virus’ spread, or the revealing way he had tried to order her—no, successfully ordered her, she reminded herself—to stay, nice and safe, up on the deck when the virus had broken out below. Rebecca knew she would honestly prefer to treat wounds and not cause them, but the incident on the ship had caused her to consider acquiring a weapon at the next possible chance. There were M-16s lying all around the deck and in compartments below, but ammunition for them was very low. Sherman had already ordered the collection and redistribution of rounds to the most proficient marksmen remaining, which reduced most of the soldiers to sidearms and what few sub-machine guns the Ramage had onboard.

  Rebecca had chuckled when Sherman had explained to her, in civilian’s terms, what their weapons situation was like.

  “We have enough munitions on this ship to level a metropolis. We have Tomahawk cruise missiles, two 20-millimeter auto-tracking FLIR cannons, anti-air SM-2’s, anti-ship Harpoons, sub killers, and six torpedo tubes. But we barely have enough rifle ammunition to fight a platoon to a standstill.”

  If she were home in the States, Rebecca could go to her uncle’s house. The man had four gun cabinets full to bursting with every model of small arms humanity had designed since 1911. She had always laughed at him—sometimes to his face—and chided him for taking his Constitutional rights too far. Now she wasn’t so sure she had it right. She bet her uncle was holed up in his house in the woods right now, sipping whiskey and chuckling about the plight of the unprepared world.

  Despite her dwindling feelings for Decker and the pressing concerns of the work ahead of her, she found herself wondering how the soldiers in quarantine were doing. She wasn’t allowed access to them, of course, and as one of the few trained medics left on the ship, that concerned her. Maybe they couldn’t do anything for a soldier even if they somehow diagnosed him as being infected, but they could at least get the uninfected ones out of there to safety. She had bargained, cajoled, begged, and finally simply asked to be let in to the quarantine area, but was rebuffed. Finally she told the soldiers guarding the door that in the very least they could slip a weapon inside to the quarantined men so they could defend themselves if one fell ill. This had been vetoed by the corporal in charge.

  “I was an MP for three years,” he had said. “I’ve seen what desperate men will do with a weapon if they think it’ll get ’em somewhere—like out of that room and off this ship. No, ma’am, they’re unarmed and staying that way.”

  All that was left for her to do was wait and see what would happen. Keeping busy kept her mind off other things—like the world falling to shit around her—and she hated having to tick time away instead of being proactive.

  “Oh, well,” Rebecca sighed to herself. At least she’d been hearing murmurs about being allowed access to the town. Maybe she could find a strong drink somewhere.

  Washington, D.C.

  1225 hrs_

  Dr. Anna Demilio prowled her cell nervously, pacing back and forth, casting sideways glances at the heavy door. The facility she was in was modern, but not well insulated enough to keep the sound of gunfire from her ears. It had been going on for almost two hours now, on and off, starting up in a rapid crescendo, then tapering off to nothing—only to repeat minutes later. At first it was the staccato clack of pistols, and now she could hear the basic chatter of automatic fire.

  There had been no build-up to this, nothing in Sawyer’s face to suggest that the situation was so bad it was at the doors of the facility. Demilio didn’t believe—or didn’t want to believe—that the plague had spread throughout the city. It was, more likely, a small outbreak within the facility itself.

  But she couldn’t be sure, and that was what made her nervous.

  If this was the plague out there now, beating down the doors of the stronghold and holding the surrounding area with infected ranks, the agents wouldn’t be able to hold out for long, and she’d wind up dying alone of starvation in a locked cell. That thought scared her more than the idea of being infected did.

  Footsteps in the hallway sent her scurrying back to the far end of her cell. If Sawyer was back, she certainly wasn’t planning on being helpful. She listened—the steps were lighter than Sawyers, and quicker. It sounded like someone was darting sneakily around the hall, moving in short bursts. She could hear heavy breaths being drawn outside, and the clinking sound of a weapon being slung.

  The metal panel in the doorway shot open and a face came into view. It wasn’t Sawyer.

  Agent Mason reached a hand into the cell, holding a pistol. Anna shrank away, thinking for a moment Sawyer had sent his subordinate to kill their prisoner now that the last stand had come—but it was not to be. The pistol was being handed in, handle-first.

  “Come on,” Mason said, sweat beading on his forehead. “Take it! Now’s our chance!”

  “Chance?” Anna asked suspiciously, narrowing her eyes. “What chance?”

  “Our chance to escape, you idiot! Take the pistol! We’re getting out of here!”

  “My God,” Anna breathed. “The shit is really hitting the fan out there, isn’t it?”

  “Take the damn pistol!” shouted Mason, glancing cautiously over his shoulder as he shook the weapon in her face. “We don’t have much time!”

  Anna grabbed the weapon from the agent, the weight
of it pressing comfortably into her hands.

  “About time,” Mason remarked.

  The agent disappeared from the window and a moment later, with the heavy sound of grinding metal, the cell door unlocked and slid back into the wall. Mason stood in front of the newly-freed scientist, clutching a sub-machine gun to his chest. He looked bedraggled and battle-weary, with sweat staining the collar of his shirt. He had a Kevlar vest strapped around his torso. He beckoned for Anna to step out of the cell, scanning the hall in both directions as he did.

  “Let me guess,” Anna said, racking a round into the chamber of the pistol, “You’re expecting company.”

  “Yeah,” Mason replied. “They’ll miss me in a couple minutes, if they haven’t already. We’ve got to move fast. Follow me. We’ll take the catacombs.”

  Mason took off at a brisk trot, hugging the wall of the hallway, sub-machine gun held to his shoulder in the ready position.

  “Wait up,” Anna said, running after him. “Catacombs?”

  “Network of service tunnels and back entrances that interconnect every major facility in the city, with seven routes that come out beyond the beltway. They built it in the sixties. We call ’em the catacombs. Been expanding construction ever since. Checkpoint! Stop here.”

  Mason came to a stop at an intersection and knelt down, peering around the corner as Anna caught her breath behind him. Three uniformed guards blocked their exit from the detention block, all armed and armored.

  “Fuck,” Mason sighed. “We have to get past this checkpoint if we’re getting out. Nothing for it—we’re going to have to run and gun. Ready?”

  “Wait,” Anna said suddenly, grabbing Mason’s shoulder. “What about Julie?”

  “Ortiz? The reporter?” Mason asked. A moment later his face fell, remembering the other captive in the dungeon below. “Oh, damn. I forgot about her—they took me off that detail three days ago.”

  “We can’t leave her here!”

  “I know! I know!” Mason said, grumbling. He glanced back in the direction of the checkpoint, then back towards the detention and interrogation cells, trying to make up his mind. “If we go back to get her, we might be doing ourselves more harm than good.”