Only The Dead Don't Die (Book 3): Last State

by Popovich, A. D.

  Dean swiped his lucky Benjamin; it was worth the cheap gag. He scuttled to the register’s counter for the mason jar of wheat pennies he had won over the past few weeks.

  “Dealer picks.” Bates Junior—who was the spittin’ image of his red-headed, lanky father, only about twenty years younger—slapped the deck down in front of Dean.

  “Seven Card Stud, down and dirty,” Dean announced. He sniffed the highball. “Wow,” he husked. “I detect undertones of—diesel fuel.”

  “It’s the low-octane variety.” Bates Senior guzzled down a glass.

  Dean sipped at it. He needed to calm down a notch. The “Dean for Sheriff” posters plastered over Boom Town had been the kicker. He was getting sick and tired of the place. After Last State’s Enforcers had closed up shop, their fairly peaceful settlement had turned into a free-for-all. Some greenhorn gunslinger showed up every other day, threatening to shoot up the place if Boom Town didn’t cave into his demands.

  Dean and Luther had trained everyone on firearms safety, not that they were official experts. The way he figured it; some training was better than none. It should cut down on any mishaps. Every permanent member of their scanty township carried a piece. All visitors were treated with suspicion and questioned outside the fortress gate. Not that their interrogation did much good. They couldn’t keep everyone out. Their town needed guests and traders to survive.

  Dean had gone so far as to organize a security detail consisting of rotating shifts of five-men teams on duty 24-7. He wasn’t afraid to be a stickler about it either, always checking who was on duty, and who was sloughing off. He was more worried about marauders than hordes. Word had spread like wildfire that Enforcers had deserted the settlement. Who knew what was in store for their small town nestled east of Santa Fe and butted next to Last State’s encroaching border?

  “Why not run for sheriff?” Bates Junior egged.

  “Zip it.” Dean gave his warning glare. “Besides, I’m too old.” Truth was, after his stent operation, and months of stress-free days without dead-heads, he felt better than he had in years. A spring in his step and a new vitality for life. That was before the Enforcers had left them high and dry without any protection whatsoever. At least they’d had the common decency to supply them with weapons and enough ammo to fight an army. Had the Enforcers known something he hadn’t?

  “You’re younger than Winston,” Bates Senior commented as he flipped over the Ace of Spades.

  “The bet’s to you,” Luther said to the younger Bate’s boy.

  The church bells tolled. The warning signal! Chairs scraped across the hardwood floors. The four men automatically patted themselves down for weapons and ammo.

  The bakery’s front door opened. Winston poked his head inside. “Horde!”

  Dean supposed it was better than marauders. “Fellas, time for some target practice.”

  The plan was to head the hordes off at the pass, snaring as many as possible in the razor wire contraption in front of the entrance. This contraption was much larger than the ones he had devised in Vacaville and Reno. They let the razor wire snag as many as it could. Then they would pick off the bastards one by one.

  Dean darted across Main Street’s dirt road. He caught a glimpse of Peters at the gate’s tower, the fellow in charge of the shift. “How many?” Dean shouted.

  “Three to four dozen left,” Peters shouted back.

  “Send in the first wave of sharpshooters,” Dean yelled.

  “Ain’t no big. We got it covered,” Peters shouted.

  Dean wanted to see it for himself. He scrambled to the fort’s front gate tower. “Hell’s bells!” The horde staggered around the razor wire contraption and eagerly lurched toward the gate. Still, the men would make fast work of them. Through the scope of the M4, compliments of the Enforcers, Dean caught a dead-head in the crosshairs. He nailed it in the skull. Luther yelled at him from the opposite gate tower and pointed to the north and south.

  “Where the hell did those suckers come from?” Dean yelled. The two hordes joined the horde approaching from the west. It was a one-two-three punch. He was going to need more ammo. He wished he had a radio to call for a runner. Radios and Runners, not a bad idea. He would add them to his to-do list. The lousy shots could be runners. He would arrange it in their next meeting. With all the smuggler traffic, they ought to be able to barter for several two-way radios.

  ***

  By the time dusk took over the November desert skyline with oranges and pinks, they had eliminated the hella-horde. The turkey vultures circling overhead reminded it was time to dispose of the bodies. He wasn’t on the god-awful detail; he had made sure of that. Once the bulldozer team shoved the remains to the designated area adjacent to Zoat, the bodies were burned in the bone-pit and then buried. The yellow bulldozer brought flashbacks of the volatile Stockton Boys. At least he didn’t have to worry about those evil bastards any longer. One less problem to deal with.

  After Dean had checked in with everyone, he lumbered up the stairs to the bakery’s upstairs apartment. He flopped into his favorite recliner. Luther had a way of knowing when to keep the peace and didn’t say a word as he poured two generous rounds of the good stuff. Crown Royal. It was the only way Dean managed to get any sleep after a gruesome horde attack. He was sure fed-up with this gory business.

  Halfway through the highball, he got to thinking how odd to have three separate hordes join up like that. Like it had been a planned attack. And why hadn’t the lookouts seen them coming? Hmm, he rubbed at his chin. The dead-heads had carefully avoided the razor wire. Naw, don’t tell me. Had those things learned to problem-solve? If the horde had attacked at night, they would have been fighting it most the night, wasting ammo in the dark. It was a disturbing turn of events.

  He might have to send a team of volunteers to Interstate 40 to commandeer a few of those portable lights used for roadwork—just in case there was a next time. Why not, Last State’s footin’ the electric bill.

  An unsettling thought spooked the “bejesus” out of him: What if the horde had been testing their defenses?

  Chapter 7

  Justin Chen paced the men’s restroom. “Holy shit!” He focused on slowing his heart rate. Would a security guard burst into the restroom, thinking he was about to flatline? He had an awesome excuse ready for his abnormal heartbeat. He would say he was stressed from the shitty news he had just received. The Big Data Think Tank had extended his contract for another two months, but that wasn’t the reason he was freaking.

  Ten minutes ago, lurking around the deep web, he had come across a High-Security file titled Post-pandemic Pregnancies. Curious, he had snooped around. After all, snooping around the Intranet was part of his new job. Disturbing news. No pregnancies had ever gone to term in Last State. Every single documented pregnancy (less than a hundred) had resulted in a miscarriage during the first trimester. What had really upset him were the gruesome photos and videos documenting doctors harvesting fetuses during the first trimester.

  He didn’t understand the medical lingo. From what he had read, scientists had compiled plenty of data for the first trimester. They were desperate to collect stem cell data in the second trimester. When he had read the part about a scientific breakthrough, and that a Fountain of Youth elixir had been discovered using the fetus . . . That’s when he had puked into his trash can. He hadn’t been able to read another word. What the hell had happened to society’s morals?

  A knock at the restroom door. “Agent Chen?” One of the building’s security guards entered.

  His heart fluttered to his throat. “That’s me.” Justin splashed his face with cold water.

  “You all right?” The guard scanned him. “Received an Irregular Heartbeat Alert,” the guard said without compassion, hand twitching over his gun holster.

  “Dude, I think I’m gonna puke again. They denied my weekend pass. And, and—” Don’t say you have the flu. He might get stuck in a thirty-day quarantine capsule.

  “Let
’s get you to the medical lab upstairs, A-S-A-P. Walk quickly to the elevators. I’ll follow you.”

  “No problem.” Justin played along, hoping they would assume he was homesick for his wife. After his contract had been extended, he had asked for a weekend off. After all, he had recently found out Ella was pregnant. His Hardship Time Off Request had been denied this morning. They wouldn’t even let him leave for one measly weekend. He was stuck in the Big Data Think Tank from Hell. He couldn’t back out of his contract without dire consequences. Citizens who refused to comply with Last State’s wishes were banished to Zhetto. That wasn’t the life he wanted for Ella.

  Meanwhile, Ella was nearly three months pregnant and had refused to leave her zone to look for a new apartment. Why wasn’t she excited? She was probably freaking out with no friends and family to hang with or worried about Infected Incidents. They had been occurring more frequently.

  Last State was quick to neutralize Infected Incidents, but it came with collateral damage. All those daily banners bragging of no horde attacks in over four-hundred days had turned out to be spammy propaganda. His new security clearance made him privy to the horde attack stats. There were attacks every month. Last week there had been one in a movie theater in U-zone. Only no one had lived to tell. And if they had, there was no place to talk about it.

  Shit! Shit! Shit! Justin’s heart thudded harder. Stop thinking about it! If they knew—he knew what he knew—he’d disappear into Zhetto. Or, end up in one of those unmarked mass graves outside of Last State’s borders. Unfortunately, he knew where those were, too.

  When they reached the elevators, the guard ordered in a hurried tone, “Put your hands behind your back. Sorry, man, I have to cuff you. Your heart rate is jumping all over the place.”

  “Dude, for real?” Justin quickly shut up and put his hands behind his back. The guard slapped a pair of cuffs on his wrist.

  The elevator stopped on the tenth floor. The office used to be a dating service based on all the pictures of good-looking couples hanging on the walls. Justin walked boldly through the middle of the lobby’s corridor with his head held high while employees hugged the walls, staring at him like he was about to turn zombie on them. It would have been super funny if he hadn’t been so upset.

  The security guard unlocked a door. “Inside. Step into the cage.”

  Justin rolled his eyes and stepped inside what looked like a cage for large animals.

  “Take a seat. The doctor will be with you A-S-A-P.” The guard left.

  A part of him worried they were about to off him. He knew too much after tweaking the Human Factor emotions from the big data dumps compiled from the bazillion CitChat posts. The problem was, Last State had added their own biases based on age, race, health status, political views, religion, and sexual preference.

  Once he had rewritten the code based on Last State’s biases, the A.I. analyzed each CitChat post for every happy to sad emoticon. Keywords were tracked as well. The A.I. learned from its own constantly changing algorithms, and cits’ risk categories updated every hour based on every freaking tap of their MeDevices.

  Last State was definitely crossing the creepy line, invading citizens’ privacy in the name of homeland security. The risk categories identified citizens who fell out of the established safety-norm range. Meaning, citizens on the verge of losing it. Cits who couldn’t handle the stress. Cits who hated it there. The Think Tank had turned his work into a machine-learning algorithm to profile and predict the probability of potential domestic terrorists.

  Only it was totally flawed. The A.I. wasn’t human, it only searched for patterns in the data set. Most cits had modified their outward behavior based on Last State’s oppression. So, either a cit was totally frustrated and made too many negative posts or made too many positive posts. Either way, it profiled them as a high-risk. Justin had tried to explain that the data was not accurate since few cits revealed their true feelings in the oppressive environment. His supervisor had merely nodded and said he was doing excellent work.

  The A.I. had labeled more than fifty percent of cits as possible terrorists. That wasn’t possible. Sure, a lot of cits hated the Elites’ dictatorship, but they weren’t planning a coup. He felt like such an ass, for he was responsible for screwing every cit in Last State. His brilliant idea to include the whole Human Factor had backfired. Big time.

  Justin was relieved he had finished the icky job of ratting out his fellow citizens. His new gig was kind of cool, hacking the dark underbelly of the Intranet in pursuit of a rumored rebel leader’s chatroom. The black-masked hacktivist was notorious for hijacking CitChat and CitNews and was gaining in popularity. Last State had several ex-CIA analysts searching for him.

  Meanwhile, his department had figured the best way to catch the rebel leader was by inventing their own rebel hacktivist. The A.I. bot they had created was similar to the pre-pandemic hacktivist known as Anonymous. Bots hacked the CitChat groups. If cits didn’t report the rebel’s hacked post, they were considered a threat.

  Justin had thought the deepfake videos hacking CitChat Groups with the simulated hero’s misinformation had been a lame idea until he realized how ingenious it was. First, it gave discontented cits false hope, keeping them distracted. Second, cits who didn’t report the hacks were closely monitored for anti-Last State activities. Meanwhile, the names on the high-risk category increased with every tap on the screen.

  That was when Justin realized the plot to control modern society had been going on since the invention of the Internet of Things. It made him question everything, especially the actual cause of the Super Summer flu: genetically engineered or a fluke in nature?

  Justin’s butt was sore from sitting on the rock-hard stool inside the cage. Finally, the doctor entered the room. Justin was tempted to start snarling just to freak the doctor as much as they had freaked him. Then, two Enforcers entered the room. The indifferent look in their eyes told him they wouldn’t hesitate to neutralize him. Had they been waiting for him to turn?

  ***

  After a barrage of urine, blood, and heart tests, the doctor had ordered Justin to take the rest of the day off and prescribed him an extra hour of MeTime, saying he needed to socialize more. The long-term isolation of his job was making him ill. Huh, that’s one way of putting it. The good news, the doctor had allotted him ten minutes of CitChatLive to talk to his wife. CitChatLive was expensive. It required platinum social credits. Which meant, only the ABC Zones had access to it.

  Still nauseous, Justin stopped by his supervisor’s office to explain. Luckily, his supervisor was in a do-not-disturb meeting. He slipped a printout of the doctor’s note under the door even though the doctor had notified his supe by email. He walked like a sick puppy to the elevator corridor. Once in the elevator, he sighed and over-acted his semi-mental breakdown all the way to his one-room dorm on the thirty-third floor of the Think Tank’s skyscraper.

  The elevators and corridors were monitored. It made him wonder what else the Think Tank conspired in. He knew a lot, and he was a peon, not a bioengineer, or some neo-Nazi gene-splicer attempting to rewire DNA. Heck, they were probably tampering with DNA in one of the secret laboratories he had stumbled upon.

  Afraid his dorm had eyes, Justin faked taking the Xanax the doctor had prescribed. His eyes shifted from corner to corner; was there a camera in the fake flowers sitting on the ugly coffee table, in the light fixture? Of course, there was one on the MeDevice.

  Their devices didn’t have a settings option to turn off the microphone. In the pre-pandemic days, Justin had always turned off his cell’s microphone since technology giants had kept tabs on everything one said. As it was, he always secured their MeDevices in the microwave during romantic evenings, and when they had heart-to-heart talks about their old lives in California.

  As far as he knew, Last State didn’t have microphones in their CitChips. It was probably next on their agenda. They were constantly sending Navy SEAL teams to salvage high-tech gadgets from the
Japanese and Chinese ghost freighters haunting the oceans, which was how the MeDevices had been obtained. The oceans were full of cargo waiting to be looted. But, a lot of their planes had been shot down.

  Last State made all those YouTube conspiracy theorists look like lame stream-media speculators. He had watched them as a goof while super stoned. Now he was considered a collaborator of the elaborate deep state collusion. He also understood all too well how neurotic people went cray-cray, knowing everything they did was monitored. He was one step closer to going crazy himself. It was Ella who kept him sane. Happy.

  Still, he had survived a world of Zs. He could handle this. As his father had always preached: there was always a simple solution to everything. Mind over matter was one. And it had been working for him. He had learned to control his often-volatile reactions with his superiors after several mandatory MeTherapy webinars. Thanks, Dad.

  Justin flopped onto the couch, pretending to rest while he came up with a clever way to warn Ella since all MeTexts and CitChat posts were monitored. What he needed was a double-dose of caffeine. The rush had always inspired his creative juices. Teas were the norm. Coffee had gone extinct. Although, he was sure the Elites still had it. They probably flew SEAL teams into Columbia, risking the lives of dozens so they could maintain the lifestyle they felt entitled to.

  Finally, he was ready to call Ella. He keyed in the ten-minute CitChatLive passcode.

  “Hi Ella,” Justin croaked. He cleared his throat and kept his face emotionless.

  “Justin, you surprised me! How did you get CitChatLive?” She blew him kisses.

  He pretended to catch one on the cheek.

  “Ugh, you don’t look so good.” Her brows crossed in concern.

  “I’m super tired. Miss you.” He yawned loudly. The last time the doctor had prescribed Xanax, it had made him crazy tired. He played the part.

  “Only six more days!” Ella exclaimed. She looked pale. Stressed.

  He dreaded telling her the gig had been extended. “You look great. How is the baby?” He forced a smile.