Seventeen
The library was six blocks over, not four. Lousy clerk.
But it was warm.
Hank kicked the cold off his boots as he stepped inside, looking at the racks for a sign of where to find the magazine section. Non-fiction was upstairs. Fiction ahead of him, a wall of romance to his right. Movies on his left.
He asked at the counter for the magazine section and was told to go upstairs. They were hidden as far back, and in as small a place as he could imagine, and they hardly had any titles to speak of. Mostly thick women’s stuff, the kind filled with ads and smells. No damned Car & Driver.
A young man sat behind the information desk, arranging and sorting a stack of books as he checked their bindings. He was in his late twenties, had dark hair and dark skin, possibly Mexican.
“Excuse me,” Hank said. “I’m looking for the latest issue of Car & Driver.”
“Got it right here,” the young man said, reaching to his side to hold it up. “It’s on hold for Tom, though.”
Hank straightened. “Yeah, well, I just want to look at it a second.”
“Great,” he said. “Do you have his library card number?”
Hank raised an eyebrow. The young man raised an eyebrow back. “Oh,” Hank said, fumbling in his pockets. He sure as hell hoped this guy was Sayad. “Yeah, right here.” He pulled out the piece of paper he had written down the numbers Tom had given him. He handed the paper over.
The young man looked at it, then leaned into the terminal in front of him and clicked his mouse a few times before typing the numbers in. “Oh yes, I see it’s all here. Excellent,” he said, then lowered his voice as he handed the paper back to Hank. “So, here’s the deal. I’ll drop him at the rendezvous point at 4:20. The drone cycle only gives us a couple minutes either way, so be ready.”
“Be ready?” Hank asked. “For what?”
“Well, you’re fishing them out, right?”
Hank shook his head, a little confused. Tom hadn’t mentioned anything more than delivering the note to Sayad and parking the Jeep at the longitude/latitude written on the piece of paper. He figured he’d wait for Tom and hitch a ride to the next town, but beyond that, he was assuming that was it for him. Tom was a good kid and all, but staying mixed up with him and Penelope was going to get him in a world of trouble. Besides, Hank needed to sort out his own life.
“Look,” Sayad went on in his hushed tone. “I can’t land on the rocks, and you’ve only got a couple minutes once I make the run. I recommend a long rope.” Sayad’s eyes darted to the side, then back to Hank. “Here’s your magazine, sir. You can bring it back when you’re done, or just put it on the rack with the others.” He put the copy of Car & Driver on the counter between them as another librarian approached the counter.
“Sayad, can you handle the afternoon returns?” the woman said. Her badge had Perkins, L. on it. “My back’s killing me today.”
“Sure, Laura,” Sayad said as he clicked at the terminal in front of him to clear whatever was on it. He got up. “Why don’t you sit down here for a bit. I’ll take care of it.”
“Oh, thank you,” she said with relief.
Hank backed away with the copy of Car & Driver in his hand. Sayad pulled a phone out of his pocket as he went downstairs, tapping at it with his fingers and not paying any attention to where he was going. Damned modern world seemed ridiculous.
Hank sat down to thumb through the magazine, ignoring most of it. Cars had changed in the past eight years, but not by much. Ads were slicker. It didn’t matter, though. Dumb kids were more interested in their phones than the world around them. It made Hank wonder if Sayad might even botch the job. Fishing Tom’s and Penelope’s dead bodies from the channel didn’t sound like a good end to the day, either.
Hank finally put the magazine away and checked his watch. He had plenty of time to kill. Plenty of time to get the Jeep.
Eighteen
Tom’s Jeep was in the parking garage attached to the pier where the tug to the EPS moored. He knew the color, the year, and even the license plate number, but he walked past it and around the garage twice to see if anyone was watching him. The whole time he couldn’t help but wonder if he should already be calling Captain Palmer’s mother. Was it too soon? Had he already waited too long? Palmer’s kiss still warmed his cheek against the frigid air. It made him feel so goddamned stupid, too. Like a school kid trying to make his first date, overthinking everything instead of just picking up the phone.
That’s what eight years in the Quarantine Zone had done to him. Being honest with himself, though, this had been going on long before that. The last date he’d been on was years before the shooting incident, and most everyone his own age he knew had been married for at least a decade, or was strapped down with an ex-wife or two. Cory must have been going on nearly thirty years of marriage.
When was the last time he talked to Cory?
Hank wondered if he should call him, too. After running into Frankie, it seemed like a good idea. Maybe find out what Frankie had been up to all these years. This wasn’t just happenstance, after all. Frankie even said he’d seen Hank scan out. He may have been rattled by Frankie this morning, but he hadn’t let that little nugget slip past without notice.
The Jeep wasn’t being watched, and neither was he. He hit the keyless remote and the Jeep beeped and blinked to let him know it was okay to open the doors. He slid into the driver seat, stuffed the key into the ignition, and turned it over before he had the door shut. It idled hard, like it had been sitting a while. There was a backpack on the seat beside him with a note on it for Tom. Hank ignored it as he tried to figure out all the controls on the dashboard. The damned thing was worse than Tom’s Subaru with its big screen and dozens of knobs and buttons everywhere.
Once the engine warmed up, Hank drove it to the corner convenience store. Same one as before. He took off the sunglasses he’d bought earlier and shoved them into his coat pocket as he walked in. The things probably made him look like a tool. The punk behind the counter looked up, recognized Hank with a nod, and went back to rolling his thumb up and down the screen of his phone.
“Is there a pay phone around here?”
The clerk frowned in thought as he looked up. “Pay phone?” It was like the words were foreign to him. “You mean pre-paid phones? We’ve got them right there.” The clerk pointed at the nearest endcap.
Round and square clear, plastic containers hung from hooks, each with the picture of a sleek black phone with a glass front filled with gizmo buttons of every color.
“No, I mean like a pay phone. A phone booth?”
“Oh, no, man,” the clerk said, grinning foolishly. “They got rid of those, like, forever ago.”
“Jesus Christ, how does anyone make a call then?” Hank muttered to himself.
“Dude, you from the other side, or something?”
“Yeah,” Hank grumbled. “Yeah, something like that.”
The punk clerk slid his phone into his pocket. “Cool,” he said, nodding his head with a measure of respect. “So, like, did you, like, survive the explosion?”
“Yeah,” Hank replied, softening.
“Cool. Did you hunt zombies?”
Hank didn’t want to answer that question. He’d be here all day. “So how does this work? I mean, the phone? What do you do?”
“Oh, well, usually you get a plan, man. Then you get your phone for free, but you need a credit card and—”
“I don’t have my credit card,” Hank replied. He was a long way from his safe deposit box in Boston. “I just want to make a damned call. I’ve got cash.”
“Yeah, cool. You should get one of those burners, then. Prepaid minutes. Just turn it on and go.”
“Huh,” Hank said as he approached the end cap.
“Just don’t get the one on the bottom there. It’s a Microsoft phone.”
“What’s the difference?”
The clerk laughed. “The other one’s work.”
&nb
sp; “Good to know,” Hank said with a nod. He looked at the price on every one and picked the cheapest. It was a damned phone, after all. Punch in a number, talk, listen, what else was there? The clerk helped him open it—plastic packaging was harder to break through than a barricade—and get it set up, and even showed him how to plug it in to charge it and turn it on and off.
He wasn’t such a bad kid after all.
Hank didn’t want to seem like a complete idiot, though, so he left once he had the thing turned on and “on the network,” as the clerk put it. He stood beside the Jeep with a chocolate bar in one hand and the phone in the other. Smart phone? What was so damned smart about it? Couldn’t even figure out how to make a damned call.
“Shit, how does this goddamn contraption—?” He tapped and poked at the different icons on the screen with his hand wrapped around the candy bar, causing windows to appear and switch and send him in all different directions. “I don’t want…how the hell am I supposed…calculator?...I just want to make a goddamned phone call.”
He let out his breath in frustration, closed his eyes, and tried to picture what he’d seen Tom do a dozen times. There was an icon that looked like a telephone somewhere. Tom always swiped with his thumb. Hank held the phone in front of him and swiped. Sure enough, the screen showed him a different collection of iconic, thumb-sized buttons. None of them looked right. He swiped again.
“Oh, thank God,” he said when he saw the icon of a phone receiver. He tapped it and a dial pad appeared. “Now we’re talking.”
He punched in the number and pressed the call button, holding his breath as he held the phone to his ear. When he heard a ringing on the other end, he let out his breath. Things still worked the same there.
“—lo?” a woman’s voice cut in, her tone distrustful.
“Yeah, hi,” Hank said, relieved that the thing worked. “Is this Tess?”
“Who? Sorry, wrong number.”
“Wait, I’m trying to get ahold of Cory Smith.”
“Wrong number,” the woman replied and the line went dead.
“Dammit,” Hank whispered, stuffing the phone in his pocket. It was a lot to ask that people would keep their old numbers, even people like Cory who hardly ever changed anything. His was about the only phone number Hank knew by heart.
Nineteen
Hank sat in the Jeep with his eyes closed, trying to relax. The noise echoing from the channel access road reminded him that he wasn’t in the middle of the Quarantine Zone, that it was safe to catch a few minutes of shut-eye, but his nerves were all wonky. He hadn’t put out tripwires. He was alone—you were never alone in biter territory unless you couldn’t help it. Even though he had done a cursory sweep of the area—well, he walked through the woods to the edge of the channel to get a feel for things—nothing about the place felt familiar, or safe.
Two hours.
It had already been two damned, boring hours just sitting here.
Even a copy of Car & Driver would have been a godsend right now, and it wasn’t like he could inspect and clean the pistol he had taken out of the pack again. The thing was spotless. Damned near new, maybe only fired a dozen times…literally only one clip’s worth, at most.
Hank glanced at the pack on the seat beside him. It was one of those stupid zombie survival kits they sold on the Internet. He remembered Tom wearing one when they plucked him out of the channel after the explosions destroyed Biter’s Hill. Its buoyancy had probably been the reason Tom hadn’t drowned. He’d been in the water a while by the time they were able to reach him.
This wasn’t the same pack. For one thing, it had that pistol, and it was new, with an envelope taped to it with TOM in big, bold handwritten letters. Hank rifled through it just the same. He needed rope, and these stupid packs, although quaint and ignorantly stocked, did come with 100 feet of nylon rope, which was laying over the top of the pack with a hunk of soggy wood tied to the end of it that he hoped would float. If he could have found a preserver, he would have used it instead. Anything that floated and had some weight would do when the time came.
Hank looked at his watch. Another hour and a half.
Damn, he wished he could sleep.
Twenty
The alarm began its incessant chime. Hank straightened in his seat, suddenly awake, astounded he had fallen asleep in the first place. Trying to sort out the hands on his wristwatch through sleepy eyes, he read 4:10. Enough time to stretch, piss, and tromp through the woods to the shoreline before the drop.
He wondered if Sayad would be on time. Missing the window could mean being spotted by a drone. After spending a week on the EPS, Hank had seen his fill of drones making their aerial sweeps along the banks of the channel. They had an eerie, malevolent whir, an almost Orwellian presence that gave him the creeps worse than the first zombies he had ever faced.
In reality, the zombies were worse, but eight years had given him a lot of time to forget how green he had been when he first arrived on Biter’s Hill. Back in the day, the EPS wasn’t a trading zone. It started out as an evacuation control point, so when they started issuing hunting licenses, Hank went to the only place hunters were needed—Biter’s Hill.
He crossed the channel in the middle of summer. The ferry in those days was just a tug boat, and it only carried people twice a week. The rest of the time it was busy hauling supplies for the inhabitants and the construction of the prison, which they built by filling in an old rock quarry.
There was a wild-west vibe to the Hill, a feeling of danger that kept his mind from wandering or thinking of the past. Hank liked the idea of being part of rebuilding things, too. It gave him a sense of purpose, even when the work he was doing seemed mundane. One of his first jobs was as night watchman, walking along the creaking scaffolding behind the fort-like wall surrounding the outpost. His shift was spent scanning the cutbacks with night-vision binoculars for anything that stumbled out. Zombies were drawn to the place because of the smells and the light and noise.
Things started going sideways one night when the alarm bell rang at the far wall first, near the shore of the channel. Zombies didn’t usually come through down there. He swung his binoculars in that direction.
“See anything?” Butch had asked quietly, squinting through his own pair of binoculars.
Hank brought his down and looked around at the other watchmen, trying to figure where the threat was coming from. A chorus of groaning and pounding like a heavy rain echoed in the distance.
“What the—?” Hank asked, lifting his binoculars again. Movement broke through the far tree line. One monstrously huge beast after another burst from the shadows, charging recklessly into the open on a collision course with the countermeasures out in mid-field.
More alarm bells rang, one after another, as the beasts swelled in number. Their bawling and bellowing moos sang above the thunder of their hooves beating over the uneven ruts in the field. They moved like a swarm, turning away from the high walls to run parallel with them. One after another of the countermeasures fell to the stampede as the bulls thrashed their horns against the metallic frames of the Tenderizers, knocking them aside as they charged through.
The Tenderizer was the nickname everyone gave the countermeasure of choice at the Hill. The thing was made up of twenty or thirty high-powered, pneumatic blowguns on a welded pipe-rack set up at ground level, with a long air hose hooked up to a pump on top of the wall to control and fire it. It shot six-inch crossbow darts that were razor sharp. After each firing, the thing would even self-reload using a pneumatic-powered wheel. All you had to do was start the generator, the pump would prime, and whack, whack, whack, whack, whack. Down would go the front line of zombies. The next wave would stop to gobble them all up, and if any got up, whack, whack, whack again. Some twisted, idiot, genius came up with that.
“Goddammit, mother—!” Butch cried, clutching his hair as the cattle roared through their range of field, toppling the frame of their assigned Tenderizer. “They’re destroying it!”
>
Hank stared, dumbstruck. The cows danced and weaved around the rack as best they could, but several slammed into the thing, knocking it about, forcing other animals to run headlong into it, or navigate through it with clumsy jumps and dodges.
The herd charged back into the tree line right in front of Hank’s watch point, avoiding the next section’s Tenderizer completely. Both Hank and Butch glowered at the other watchmen, resenting their luck.
The thunder faded into the distance.
The alarm bells were quiet.
“Over the wall, boys,” the watch captain called out, cupping his hands so everyone could hear. “Get those Tenderizers up and running.”
Every night before their shift, each man drew straws to see who was responsible for repairs and reloads. On his section of the wall, Hank had drawn the short stick with Butch as cover. Marcus, the other watchman, rolled the rope ladder over the top and secured it so Hank and Butch could shimmy down to the field.
The air on the ground was thick with dust and the shaggy odor of the cattle.
Hank flicked on his flashlight and started toward the wrecked Tenderizer frame, which lay on its side, looking awkwardly bent. With his flashlight waving this way and that, Hank careened over the uneven ground—that was another thing. Zombies had trouble on loose, turned soil, just like anybody else. It slowed them down, knocked them over. Hank nearly fell once or twice himself.
“Goddamned cattle,” Butch said, short of breath already. “I mean…what the hell?”
Hank turned his ear toward the trees, wondering if the retreating moos were really fading. It almost sounded as though the herd was still hanging around in the darkness, or maybe even coming back.
“They didn’t even touch Thompson’s Tenderizer,” Butch added, waving his flashlight in the direction of their neighbor’s unscathed machine. Butch nearly fell on his next step. “Shit,” he growled, pointing his flashlight at a huge boulder jutting out of the ground. It had nearly tripped him. He swung his flashlight back at their neighbor’s field. “Thompson’s got all the luck, I swear.”
The Angel Rise Zombie Retribution Experiment Page 7