He held her and shielded her body from the intense heat and the Com-cells covered his chest.
They were blasted by the heat for what felt like an eternity, but in truth was less than a minute and when they managed to survive the third floor, the temperature dropped so fast that Deckard, who was half-naked, actually got the shivers.
Thuy stood swaying and blinking until the elevator doors opened to the second floor; she then took the wall in hand and used it to guide her to the nurse's station. “There’s a chance. I just need the right stuff.” She started throwing open drawers and cabinet doors searching for what, Deckard didn't know.
"Here it is!" she cried when she found a shelf stacked with brown bottles.
“Hydrogen-peroxide?” Deckard asked.
“Among its many uses is that it actually kills molds of all types,” she answered before dumping a full bottle all over her face. “Ahhh,” she hissed; whether she was in pain or not he couldn’t tell. What was obvious was how quickly she was reviving.
Even if it didn't kill the Com-cells, Deckard thought it looked wonderfully cool. He poured a bottle over himself as well and then took a second and began washing every inch of his exposed skin. When he was done he watched her for a few seconds as she worked the fizzing liquid into her shallow wounds.
Even after what had to be the worst day of her life, she was delicate, beautiful, and softly feminine. Underneath she was brilliant, determined and hard. She was the only woman he ever felt completely inadequate in comparison to.
“I, uh, I should do your hair,” he said.
“And I should do your back,” she replied. She reached out for him touching his side, feeling the heat radiate off of him. The touch was soft and meaningful and…her world shook. Not in any romantic way. Something in the building fell in with a thunderous crash. “We should hurry,” she said.
He grabbed two of the brown bottles and dumped them unceremoniously over her long black hair. The peroxide began to froth as he worked it through her scalp. As he went at her hair, she splashed some on her hands and then reached around to clean his back.
“You’re burned,” she said, feeling the hundreds of small blisters that had formed across his shoulders.
“Yeah, and I don’t want it to get worse so let’s get out of here.”
With the building shuddering around them, they decided to take the stairs and, thankfully, found them free of zombies. Then it was a matter of crossing through the lobby and in seconds they were outside. Thuy stopped just beyond the door, struck speechless as she surveyed the death all around her.
The Walton facility was supposed to have been her pride and joy. She was supposed to have made history here. In a sense she had. How many dead? How many infected? How far did the quarantine zone stretch now? Judging by the dozens of cold police cruisers, looking like the corpses of a herd of metallic beasts, she had to guess the edge of the quarantine zone was far away now.
Deckard urged her to move. “We’re attracting attention. We should get out of here.” There weren’t many zombies in evidence. Most had given chase to Wilson’s Lexus, leaving only the feeders and the very gimpy behind. There were also the five who had treed Chuck and Stephanie.
Stephanie saw Thuy and Deck. She wasn’t shy about screaming across the fifty yards of open ground for help. With the cold and the rain, Stephanie figured that she and Chuck would have to add pneumonia to their list of worries if they weren’t rescued soon.
“Do something,” Thuy said. It was very much an order. She felt personally responsible for every death that had occurred that day and she wasn’t going to add to the count if there was anything she could do.
“No problem,” Deckard answered. “Come on.” They jogged to the black Shelby Mustang that sat like a sinister shadow in the lot. In the glove compartment was a Sig Sauer P229. With a feeling of relief, he checked the load: fourteen fat .45 ACP rounds in the mag and one in the chamber.
“Is that a good gun?” Thuy asked. She was relatively clueless about guns.
“
It’s not the gun, it’s the shooter,” he answered. When she frowned a bit at this non-answer he added, “Yeah, it’s a good gun. Lots of stopping power.” He keyed the ignition, revved the throaty engine for a second and then took them to the edge of the parking lot closest to the cherry tree. “Cover your ears,” he suggested, before firing five times, notching five headshots and five dead zombies.
Chuck and Stephanie climbed down and hurried to the Shelby. When they were squished into the back, Deckard shocked Chuck by handing him the warm pistol. “We might be infected,” he explained. "And I don't want to be one of them."
“We might all be infected,” Stephanie said, lightly. Despite the zombies and the corpses and the horror of the night, she felt almost giddy. She had lived. Not only that, she had Chuck holding her hand. “So where are we going?”
Thuy answered when no one else would. “As far as we can. To the edge of the quarantine zone. I don’t want to be anywhere near Walton.”
This was agreed upon by everyone and Deckard drove south, fully expecting to come across a police checkpoint at every turn. An hour passed and there was nothing but open road before them.
“This doesn’t make any sense,” Thuy said. “They have to have a quarantine.”
“Not if they’re incompetent,” Deckard said.
Chuck gave a little laugh. “We got a saying back home: dumb-shits do dumb shit, ma’am. Maybe they’re thinking about reasoning with the zombies. I wouldn’t put it past the government.”
“Then I’m going home,” Thuy said, tiredly. She’d been renting a room ten miles outside Walton, but where she called home was a townhouse just north of New York City. “You two are welcome to stay, I have a guest bedroom,” she said to Chuck and Stephanie.
“You have a couch for me?” Deckard asked. “I don’t need much more than that.”
She cast her dark eyes toward him and then shrugged as if embarrassed. “No, you can’t stay on the couch. You, uh need to be observed for signs of the disease. You should stay with me to be on the safe side.”
It had been over an hour since their escape and he felt fine, while she looked stunning as always with the only difference being a touch of shyness in the way she was now having trouble looking him in the eye. “So what you’re saying is that I should stay with you for the sake of all mankind?”
Thuy grinned at this and touched his arm. “Sure, let’s say that’s the reason.
Epilogue—After Midnight
As it streaked east, the boxy ambulance swayed, causing Jaimee’s feet to kick off the underside of the metal bench, making a small thump-thump sound every other second.
“Could you stop that, dear?” Edmund asked.
She shot him a look. Through the filters of her black eyes he looked even older than usual and that was something. Behind his bio-suit mask, his bushy brows drooped and his wrinkled face sagged. He was grey with sorrow and looked close to death, as though he was right on the edge and that a little push would send him over….where he belonged.
He belonged with the dead.
What a strange thought, she said to herself. Why would she think he belonged with the dead and why was she even thinking about the old coot’s death in the first place? It was a minute before she came up with the answer: “Because he deserves to die,” she whispered. The old man was supposed to have saved her father, but he killed him instead. He had been part of all of it: the strange looking people walking around in the night, the screams, the fire, the fact that Jaimee no longer felt like herself. The fact that now she had strange urges. That was all his fault. He had started this whole business.
A mind reader might have noticed that she had put the cart before the horse. A dark part of her wanted Edmund to die and so she looked for a reason. And she didn’t just want him to die, she wanted to kill him. It was such a natural feeling that she didn’t question it.
“Did you say something, dear?” Edmund asked, turning towar
ds her. “I can’t hear well in this suit. It crinkles every time I move.”
Jaimee hadn’t realized she’d spoken aloud and didn’t know which part of her sordid thinking had escaped her mouth. She only knew for certain it had to do with death. Her mind was crawling with thoughts of death. “I…I was just wonnerin’ iffin y’all be goin’ ta heaven when y’all die?”
Edmund’s wrinkled face went sour. “Before today I would have said yes. Now, I feel like I deserve hell.”
His words and her perception of them did not correspond. In the underworld of her mind where evil covered itself with rationality she heard a vindication of her thoughts. Her father was dead and here was the only authority figure in her life, practically giving her permission to kill him.
In her pocket was his cure. She had found it where they didn’t want her to look. She took it out into the light where it gleamed brightly. It was a scalpel and it was wickedly sharp. It was one of the few things that she could see clearly, that and the aura of death surrounding Edmund.
The blade sat in her hand but he didn’t see it. The plastic suit blocked his vision and his age clouded his judgment. For some reason he was completely at his ease around her, which made no sense. She may have been small, but she was still infected and that meant she was dangerous. And the fact that her mind still operated meant she was doubly dangerous.
The scalpel could attest to that. Without warning she stabbed Edmund. The blade slid through the plastic suit and into his chest, gliding easily between two of his brittle ribs and puncturing his right lung.
Shocked, he turned to see her grinning face leering into his mask. All up her arm flowed a malignant electricity. It was as if she was feeding on his soul as he slowly died. And his death was indeed slow. The punctured lung deflated like a balloon and he had to fight to suck in the smallest amount of air. Gradually, his arms and legs went numb, feeling as though they were no longer attached to his torso and then slowly, ever so slowly he slid to the floor of the rocking ambulance and died a temporary death.
He would later come back just as Bobby Dern would, though it would take Bobby a few more hours because his injuries were much more severe.
Jaimee opened the little door between the cab and the crew space. Before Bobby even knew who it was she had poked the scalpel in his side. She had no way of knowing that she had stuck him in the liver; she didn’t even know what a liver was.
The pain was immediate and galvanizing. He slammed on the brakes so that his scream mingled with the screech of the tires as they drew two long black lines down the roadway. Jaimee was thrown forward and if she was hurt she didn’t know. Nothing could really hurt her now.
She picked herself up and while Bobby was still trying to comprehend what was going on she laid into him with the blade. The first stab went into his neck and blood sprayed out. The second sunk into his cringing face just below the eye. The third went into his open mouth sliding through his tongue and coming out beneath his chin.
After that she didn’t know where she stabbed or how many times. Bobby's blood, pure clean blood shot into her mouth and from that moment on she didn’t know anything beyond a ravaging hunger. Only when his blood had pooled and wasn’t so wonderfully warm did she finally climb out of the ambulance. She stood in front of a sign that read Hartford 14 Miles.
She began walking and within minutes she was hungry again.
So it was that as General Collins was sitting with the Governor of New York explaining the need to shoot the zombies on sight and why he needed such a huge quarantine zone, Jaimee was already fifty miles east of its furthest edge and heading toward a brightly lit city where over a million people lived and worked and would eventually die over the next few weeks.
Jaimee smiled at all the lights and her tummy rumbled.
The End of the First Day
Author's note:
Thank you for reading The Apocalypse Crusade, War of the Undead Day One. I sincerely hope that you enjoyed it. If so, I’d like to ask a favor: the review is the most practical and inexpensive form of advertisement an independent author has available in order to get his work known. If you could put a kind review on Amazon and your Facebook page, I would greatly appreciate it.
Peter Meredith
If you are in the mood for more zombies, a ton more bullets and a whole lot more blood(and just a bit of sex thrown in), please check out my other ghoulish series: The Undead World.
Greed, terrorism, and simple bad luck conspire to bring mankind to its knees as a viral infection spreads out of control, reducing those infected to undead horrors that feed upon the rest.
It's a time of misery and death for most, however there are some who are lucky, some who are ruthless, and some who are just too damned tough to go down without a fight. This is their story.
Fictional works by Peter Meredith:
A Perfect America
The Sacrificial Daughter
The Apocalypse Crusade War of the Undead Day One
The Horror of the Shade Trilogy of the Void 1
An Illusion of Hell Trilogy of the Void 2
Hell Blade Trilogy of the Void 3
The Punished
Sprite
The Feylands: A Hidden Lands Novel
The Sun King: A Hidden Lands Novel
The Sun Queen: A Hidden Lands Novel
The Apocalypse: The Undead World Novel 1
The Apocalypse Survivors: The Undead World Novel 2
The Apocalypse Outcasts: The Undead World Novel 3
The Apocalypse Fugitives: The Undead World Novel 4
Pen(Novella)
A Sliver of Perfection (Novella)
The Haunting At Red Feathers(Short Story)
The Haunting On Colonel's Row(Short Story)
The Drawer(Short Story)
The Eyes in the Storm(Short Story)
Table of Contents
Chapter 1The Staff R&K Research Center 1
Chapter 2 The Patients1Erik Von Braun, Sing Sing Prison, New York
Chapter 3Opportunities1 Edmund RothchildManhattan, New York
Chapter 4
Chapter 5Trial Inception Day//6:14 AM//1
Chapter 6 //11:39 AM//1
Chapter 7 //3:15 PM//1
Chapter 8//4:07 PM//1
Chapter 9//4:51 PM//1
Chapter 10//6:39 PM//1
Chapter 11//7:14PM//1
Chapter 12//7:26 PM//1
Chapter 13//8:09PM//1
Chapter 14//9:16 PM//1
Chapter 15//11:40 PM//1
Chapter 16//11:59 PM//1
Epilogue—After Midnight
The Apocalypse Crusade (Book 1): War of the Undead Day One Page 38