Plague of the Dead

by Z. A. Recht

  “Maybe they’re just delayed,” Thomas growled over his shoulder. He glanced down at his watch. “Let’s give ‘em a couple minutes.”

  Sherman nodded, then reached up a hand to his epaulette and the radio that hung there. Franklin had given them twelve, enough to outfit the soldiers who were left as well as Denton.

  “Ghost Lead to any personnel, respond, over.”

  There was no answer. Only static issued forth from the radio.

  “I say again, Ghost Lead to any personnel, please respond. If you can’t talk, click the handset twice.”

  They waited. A minute passed, then two. Each felt like a granite hour. Every second that passed without the trucks appearing behind them weighed down on Sherman’s shoulders like the Earth must have done to Atlas.

  “No, something’s very wrong,” Sherman said after five minutes had passed with no sign. He spun on his heel suddenly and walked back around the truck, clambering up into the passenger doorway and looking over at Thomas with resignation on his face. “We have to go back.”

  “Sir, that place is crawling with infected,” Thomas said.

  “I know it.”

  “Are you willing to risk more lives to rescue people that might already be dead?” Thomas asked quietly.

  Sherman looked over at him with an icy expression. He gritted, “Yes. We don’t leave anyone behind.”

  Thomas grimaced and tossed his cigarette to the concrete and snuffed it out with a worn boot heel. He suggested, “Try the radio again.”

  Sherman nodded, reaching his hand up to the radio once more.

  “Ghost Lead to any personnel, anyone left in there, over?”

  Moments passed in silence as they waited for a response. Sherman frowned, then shook his head at Thomas.

  “It’s a no-go. Either they can’t answer or they aren’t getting my signal.”

  “You’re well in-range,” said Thomas. “Battery power up?”

  Sherman held the radio out so he could look down into its tiny LCD screen. The battery meter showed two of four bars.

  “Half-power left. Should be plenty,” Sherman replied.

  Suddenly, the little radio squawked, catching both Thomas and Sherman by surprise.

  “ . . . Can’t tell if . . . thing on?” came a female voice.

  “Say again, over?” Sherman asked through the radio.

  “ . . . push the button to talk, like this. Hello? Hello?” came a second voice, this one male.

  “This is Ghost Lead. Identify yourselves, over,” Sherman replied.

  “You with the guys in the truck?” came the male voice again.

  Sherman hesitated a moment before he realized the man on the other end was finished speaking.

  “Yes, I am. Identify yourself, please. And for God’s sake, man, say ‘over’ when you’re through so I know you’re done talking, over,” Sherman said, shaking his head at Thomas. He lifted his finger off the handset so it would stop transmitting and said to the Sergeant Major, “Gotta be civilians.”

  “Name’s Ron, Ron Taggart, here with Katie Dawson in the old theater. One of your trucks took out the infected outside, but they wrecked pretty big in the process. Who’s this? Uh, over.”

  Sherman looked over at Thomas with dread on his face.

  “Crashed,” Sherman uttered.

  Thomas nodded. “I heard.”

  “Never mind who I am. How are my people, over?” Sherman asked.

  A sound like a heavy sigh drifted over the radio before Ron spoke again.

  “Well, we counted eleven. Four survived. The truck ran right up against the building! Just smashed—totally smashed. We saved who we could and got back inside before those things showed up again. Think they were following you from wherever you were running from. Oh, yeah—over.”

  Sherman slumped against the roof of the cab. Seven more dead. He’d lost more people in one morning than he had since the Battle of Suez. He’d underestimated the strength of the infection, that was for sure.

  “What shape are the four in, over?” Sherman asked after a few seconds.

  “Banged-up, but decent. Got three people and a soldier. Two of ’em are awake; got thrown out of the bed before the truck hit the wall. Cuts and bruises on them. We pulled two more out of the cab who lived, but they’re both out cold. One’s got a broken arm. You want to pick ‘em up? Because it’ll be tricky business right now. There’s about twenty of those things out in the street, over.”

  “Think we can handle twenty?” Sherman asked Thomas over the roof of the truck.

  “Sir, I doubt we can handle ten with our ammunition situation. Not to mention—there’s probably five pistols between everyone in this truck. Most of us would just be bait.”

  Something tickled at the back of Sherman’s mind, an idea, perhaps, that struggled to rise to the surface of his thoughts, but before it developed, it faded away. Sherman shook his head a little to clear the sensation that he’d just missed an important bit of data.

  “I hope you’re not thinking of charging back in there the way we are now, sir,” Thomas went on. “We still need you to lead us away from here when the day’s done.”

  There it was again, thought Sherman. That prickling sensation was back.

  “Hello? Still there?” came Ron’s voice through the radio.

  “Yes, we’re here. Hold a moment, over,” Sherman said. “Thomas, what did you just say?”

  “I said, ‘We still need you to lead us away from here when the day’s done.’ ”

  “No, before that,” Sherman said, making a tape-winding motion with one finger.

  “Uh, I think I was saying most of us would just be snack food at this point in the engagement, sir.”

  That was it, Sherman thought. That’s what I was missing.

  “Ron, if I was able to get those infected out of the way, would you like to get out of there, over?” Sherman asked.

  Thomas fixed the General with an inquisitive stare.

  “Would I?” came the reply over the radio. “ ‘Course, you’d have to get rid of them first, and I’d like to see that happen, over.”

  “Sit tight, son. I’ve got an idea.”

  Old Theater

  1845 hrs_

  Brewster awoke with a start, sitting up in a burst of motion, gasping at a half-memory lodged in his brain. He immediately regretted it, hissing in pain and holding a hand to the side of his head. Instead of a wound, his fingers touched the soft fabric of a bandage.

  “It’s not that bad of a cut. Wish I could say the same for some of those other people out there,” came a voice.

  Brewster looked up into the friendly face of a man a year or two older than himself. He was perched on the edge of a desk in a dim room, sipping on a flask. There were a couple of large projectors set up, and a far wall held a rack of thick reels. Brewster noticed a box of canned vegetables lying half-empty in the corner, surrounded by several empty cans.

  “What do you mean about the others? And where am I?” Brewster asked, voice scratchy. He cleared his throat, wincing at the pain it caused in his head.

  “You’re in the old theater. We pulled you and a couple others in after you crashed. The rest we couldn’t help.”

  “Who are you?” Brewster asked next, pulling himself to his feet, using the cinder-block wall as a support.

  “Good question. Name’s Ron. You are . . . ?”

  “Brewster’s fine.”

  “I see. Well, Brewster, sorry about your uniform—we tossed it in the furnace downstairs. There was blood on it—figured we’d better not take the chance any of it was infected,” Ron said, standing up off the desktop and pocketing his flask. Brewster noticed he wore a heavy machete on his belt.

  “Don’t worry about it. You saved my ass, I guess. I’m not going to sweat a uniform,” Brewster said. He glanced down at the nearly-new pair of jeans and plain t-shirt he’d woken up in, and asked, “Where’d you get these clothes?”

  “Theater joins with the thrift store next door in
back. We ducked across a while ago and brought over some things. Haven’t been any infected in the alley yet, but the only way out of it is straight through the mob in the street outside.”

  “Well—thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it,” Ron said. “Come on, you’re the last one to wake up. The rest are downstairs in the lobby.”

  Ron led the way down a narrow staircase, resting a hand on the hilt of his machete and talking all the way.

  “This place was built back in 1934. Lots of old architecture in it, but it’s solid. No windows on the lower level, and the doors have nice old iron bolts, and they’re solid oak. We’re safe enough inside. Hell, we’ve been safe here since the virus hit.”

  “When?” Brewster interrupted. “I mean, when did you start getting sprinters popping up? We really didn’t expect the infection to have spread this far or we’d’ve been a lot more careful before we came in here.”

  “About a week, maybe a week and a half ago,” Ron said, shaking his head. He and Brewster came to the bottom of the staircase and headed through the theater past rows of seats toward the lobby. He continued, “It was . . . terrifying. It spread so fast we barely knew what hit us. The first infected was a cop who’d gone to Portland to volunteer with the relief and refugee effort there. He came back with it. I’d say twelve hours after he turned the city was pretty much up shit creek with no paddle. You’ve got to understand, it’s not that we couldn’t defend ourselves, it’s that we didn’t get together to wipe out the things early, before they got a foothold. We boarded up our houses to wait it out, and they picked us off pretty quick, house-by-house.”

  “You guys made it through alright,” Brewster commented.

  “Yes, but there’s only two of us.”

  “There’s another guy boarded up in a warehouse on the other side of town, too.”

  “I’m sure there are others who fended them off, but the truth is, we’re fighting a losing battle. We can’t live holed up in a theater for the rest of our lives. We’ve got to try to bust out. That’s where your friends outside come in. They’re cooking up some sort of a plan. We’re still waiting for them to get back to us.”

  “Who? Sherman?”

  “Sounded like an older guy on the radio. Oh, yeah, sorry, I took it off of you when he started transmitting. Here it is,” Ron said, reaching into a pocket and withdrawing the small radio. He handed it to Brewster.

  “So we’re going to run? Where’s my gun?” Brewster asked. “We might need some firepower.”

  “You weren’t carrying one when we brought you in,” Ron told him, shrugging.

  Brewster cursed. He’d left it lying out on the seat of the truck. It was probably sitting out in the wreckage somewhere.

  “Is that all you’re packing?” Brewster asked, nodding at Ron’s blade.

  “Yeah,” Ron replied. “We’ve been wanting to get into the sporting goods store a street over, but it’s too dangerous. Besides, it’s probably been picked clean by now. Anyway, the machete works.”

  Ron demonstrated by unsheathing the blade in one quick motion and holding it under the dim light in the theater. Brewster saw brown, dried bloodstains coating the steel. Brewster nodded in silent appreciation, and Ron sheathed the machete as they approached the doors that led to the lobby. He reached out a hand and pushed the squeaking door outward. Though there were no windows on the lower floor, the lobby’s ceiling extended far above to the top of the building, and an overlarge picture window centered in the building’s facade was letting in the light of the evening sun. Brewster held his hand up to his brow to shield his eyes.

  “Hey. Welcome back,” came Denton’s voice.

  Squinting, Brewster took a few steps forward until he was out of the sun’s rays. He saw Denton leaning against the far wall, and nodded at him before letting his gaze sweep the lobby.

  The theater was certainly old—the paint on the walls was beginning to chip and crack, and some of the posters were nearly twenty years out of date. It appeared functional—right up until the Morningstar Strain hit, naturally. The concessions stand was stocked full, the walls were solid brick, and the main door was thick, heavy wood, barred with iron bolts. Brewster was beginning to see why Ron had run into this particular building when he’d had to hole up.

  Beyond the secure door, however, came the sound of blows raining down on the wood, accompanied here and there by a guttural growl of frustration as the infected in the street tried in vain to break through.

  Ron explained, “We’ve been under siege here basically since the virus hit the town.”

  “But we’re doing a lot better than most,” added a young woman as she walked from around the back of the concessions stand. She held out a bottle of water to Brewster, who accepted it gratefully, downing half in a few quick gulps to soothe his dry throat.

  “This is Katie Dawson, my girlfriend,” Ron said. “Aside from a few others, we’re pretty much all that’s left of this town.”

  “Pleasure,” Brewster said. “Hey, didn’t you say there were four of us you pulled in? There’s two here.”

  “They’re up on the roof doing a little recon on the street,” Denton answered, pointing up at the ceiling.

  “Who is it?” Brewster asked, wincing a little bit as his head throbbed.

  “Shephard and Mitsui, the contractor.”

  Shephard was an aid worker who had been cooking meals for refugees when the Suez line had fallen. Mitsui was a general contractor from Japan who had been on hire in the Middle East. He’d hitched a ride when the retreating convoys had come through the small town he’d been working in.

  “Goddamn it,” Brewster said, scowling. “And everyone else was lost?”

  Ron nodded.

  Brewster shook his head slowly.

  Denton, as if trying to read his mind, spoke up: “It wasn’t your fault. Those infected came right out in the street, and that was a blind turn.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Brewster said.

  “I mean it—”

  “So do I!” Brewster shouted, then lowered his voice. “Sorry. It’s just—look. I’m starting to think maybe we’re fucked.”

  Denton raised an eyebrow and said, “What, and how many times—precisely—have we been in imminent peril just as badly as this in the past month or so? Can’t count it up on two hands, that’s for sure.”

  “Just being aware of the situation,” Brewster replied, gesturing around them at the walls as he spoke. “This place can’t hold out forever. Now, Ron says that Sherman’s out there getting a plan into action to move us out of here, but that’d mean going outside, which brings us to the next problem—we don’t have any guns, man! We’d be going out into that war zone with one big-ass knife and a couple of sporks to fight with.”

  “Sherman and whoever’s with him will have weapons.”

  “Man, didn’t you hear all those rounds popping off at that car lot this morning? I bet they’ve all got half a mag’ apiece, and only half of the people with him will even have a weapon to begin with. Damn it all—we clusterfucked ourselves this morning. And I have a really fucking bad headache.”

  “Jesus, you’re dour when you’ve got a concussion. Just have faith. Sherman’s got a sound head on his shoulders. I’m sure whatever he’s cooking up will be worthwhile,” Denton said.

  Ron and Katie were hanging back, letting the two go over their options and listening in silence.

  “Come on. Tell me what I’ve said isn’t true,” Brewster said, shoving his hands in his jean pockets and waiting. Denton sighed and shrugged. “See? I knew I was making a valid point. Besides, look, even if we make it out of here, how long are we going to last with nothing more than pointy sticks to defend ourselves with?”

  “I’d be more worried about having enough food to last, but you know, to each their own,” Denton said. “I guess you do make a decent point, though.”

  “Hold it, hold it,” Ron interrupted, face impassive, stepping forward with his hands held up as a gesture of truce.
“Brewster, we can kill those things with blades. It’ll be tough, buy there’s a chance we can—”

  “—And if you get the blood on you? On your face? In a cut? What then? You going to turn that blade on yourself before you go apeshit?” Brewster retorted, arching an eyebrow at Ron. “No thanks, man, I’ll stand back a good ten feet—at least—when I’m killing infected. That or be wearing a MOPP suit.”

  “MOPP?” Katie asked, quirking her mouth. “I think you’re losing us.”

  Denton and Brewster looked at each other and sighed. Both were used to military jargon and explaining it all got old quickly.

  “Like a space suit,” Denton said dryly.

  His explanation was blunt and to the point. He gave it no further thought, and turned his efforts back to thinking of a way to guarantee their escape.

  Brewster leaned against the concessions stand and rubbed his chin. He then said, “Maybe we could . . . I dunno . . . throw rocks off the roof into the alley. Maybe that’d distract them, make ‘em go check out the noise and leave the front clear, or mostly clear.”

  “Won’t work. We tried something like that earlier with a tape recorded voice. Somehow they know it’s not a real living person. It gets their attention—for about five seconds. They just sort of looked in that direction, then went back to banging on the door. I guess they still hear like uninfected—you know, you hear a rock hit concrete, and you know it’s a rock hitting concrete and not a person. Guess they’ve got enough brain left to figure out stuff like that.”

  “Hell, animals can do that,” Brewster said scornfully.

  “But it does show thought, whether it’s conscious or not,” Denton countered. “Well, that might not help us, but it’s info we might be able to use.”

  “How?” Ron, incredulous, asked from beside the popcorn popper.

  “I don’t know,” said Denton. “But remember that inventor you Americans had . . . don’t remember his name. Anyway, he tried to make something work about a thousand times. None of the prototypes worked. So people called him a failure, right? All he said was ‘I didn’t fail, I found hundreds of ways not to go about this.’ Maybe in the future it’ll come in handy to know that.”