by Jack Wallen
With a purposeful fire under my ass, I hopped over to the desk, slid my now-defunct laptop to the side (the laptop that helped me break the Mengele Virus code – it belongs in a museum) and secure shell’d into the server running the script.
“B, I know that look. What kind of no-good are you up to?” Jamal nearly hopped across the room and landed at my side. Although he could be smooth as chocolate milk some times, grace was not his thing. So, when he landed, he nearly knocked me out of my chair.
“The phone call. It had to have been tracked by our script. If it was, we might find the source location of the call. I get that, I get Jacob back.”
My fingers danced across the keyboard faster than they had in a long time. In seconds I had the console of the server up and was running the grep command on the dump files. It took no time for the search to come up with the location of the source call. Longitude 61.17 and latitude 150.02. Anchorage, Alaska.
“Jamal, what’s special about Anchorage, Alaska?”
Jamal stared hard at me, as if he thought this was some sort of trick.
“It’s the sixty-fourth largest city in the US as well as the northernmost major US city.”
The dream machine was revving up. He’d start spewing facts faster than the human ear could comprehend any moment. Jamal was funny that way.
“Anchorage makes up almost forty percent of Alaska’s entire population, has been named the All American City four times, and in 1867 a deal was brokered by William H. Seward to purchase Alaska from the Russians for seven point two million dollars.”
Jamal was just winding up for the good stuff. He’d hit upon something useful any second.
“The city’s seacoast is mostly treacherous mud flats, the average summer temperature is fifty-five to seventy-eight degrees and the average temperature is five to thirty degrees. The 2010 census estimated the population of Anchorage at over two hundred and ninety thousand people. Anchorage is home to one of the few Centers for Disease Control… oh shit.”
We had a winner. A big, fat, scary winner.
“You don’t think?” Jamal’s eyes were as big as pies when he stared deep into my soul in search of some hope that his train of thought was way off.
“I don’t know. Those fuckers could be up to anything. We can’t assume, we can only act.”
When I turned to Morgan and Josh, they immediately saw the seriousness in my eyes. Their Hallmark moment was officially destroyed and they were both all business.
“Tell me you have a Zombie Response Team in Alaska.”
Morgan stood up straight and furrowed her brow. “We do. It’s a small one, but we do.”
“Contact them. Inform them the Zero Day Collective has arrived on their turf and they are to do everything in their power to hold them there.”
Everyone stopped and looked at me as if I had just sprouted a pink Fu Manchu.
“We’re going to Alaska.” The words dribbled out of my mouth. And then it hit me. Like a sucker punch to the heart, I realized what was happening. My baby was really and truly gone. Before I knew it, the gravitational pull of the Earth tripled and I was on my knees weeping and wailing like…
Like a mother who’d just lost her son.
The whole world seemed to collapse in on me. Justice kicked me in the back, truth smacked me across the face, and righteousness took a leave of absence. All of this coalesced together in my gut and forced out the sound of despair.
My baby was gone.
My baby.
Chapter 27
November 26, 2016 3:05 AM
Seattle, Washington Underground City
I was swimming in a sea of blood. Floating within the murky, thick liquid were doll parts – like any given horror film of the early twenty first century. It was a Rob Zombie inbred cannibal fest and I was surely to become the main course. But before any toothless, backwoods, prophet could drag me out of the bloody milk, the sound of crying babies bombarded the air around me. The sound was as deafening as it was heartbreaking.
My legs and arms were exhausted. I wanted so badly to give in and let the dark depths below take me under for my final moment. The sounds of the baby refused to let me go. As I spun in circles, my head barely above water, the heads of the ruined dolls started to change. One by one the faces on the doll heads transformed into Jacob’s. My baby. The cries mutated to the voice of Jacob and grew to ear-splitting levels. It seemed imminent that my very skull was going to shatter from the noise.
The mouths of the inanimate heads all opened freakishly wide and blood began spraying from the gaping hole. The fountains of blood raised the level of the ocean. Slowly the bloody water made its way over my head until I was completely under water.
Drowning in the blood of my baby.
The crushing pressure of the bloody water threatened to cave in the bones of my skull.
When I woke from the nightmare I was alone, swimming in an ocean of darkness. There was no comfort, no hope. After a moment of cold sweat and heart palpitation, I managed to somehow calm down enough to not feel as if I were going to rip off my skin and set myself on fire.
“I’ll find you Jacob.” My voice whispered over and over until my brain was too tired to remain among the conscious.
Chapter 28
November 26, 2016 9:17 AM
Seattle, Washington Underground City
“Bethany! You okay babe?” Jamal greeted me with a wide grin and wider open arms. When those arms wrapped around me, every bit of horror briefly eased away.
“Bad news B.” Echo ruined the moment.
“I can’t take any more bad news. Please tell me this isn’t about Jacob? Is he okay?”
When I looked around the room, it was instantly clear the bad news had nothing to do with Jacob.
“We’re surrounded by boners.” Morgan spit out the phrase before Josh could poke her in the ribs and start giggling like a school boy.
“What? I’m sorry, it’s funny. Boners! We’re calling them boners.” All of a sudden, Josh looked like he belonged in some Hollywood bromance film. “Isn’t there some strange irony to be found in calling a zombie a boner?”
Everyone shook their head.
“You guys are no damn fun.” Josh was instantly deflated.
For the briefest of moments, the drowning nightmare came back to me. It wasn’t the blood or the sight of Jacob’s ripping mouth that tugged at my conscience, but the noise.
“I have an idea.” Before I realized it, the sentence escaped from between my lips. All eyes were on me. “Ultra Sonic Weapon.”
Thankfully, Jamal and I always thought on some parallel wavelength. Like some too-close couple that always finished one another’s thoughts, Jamal and I bore into one another’s heads and knew the very thought process that ebbed and flowed within.
“Bethany, that is brilliant.” Jamal grinned.
Everyone else stared on in confusion.
Morgan raised her hand. “Mind filling the rest of us in on the brilliance?”
I let Jamal have the floor.
“An Ultra Sonic Weapon uses sound waves to injure, incapacitate, or kill a target. Bethany created one as the first line of defense against the undead.”
“The Obliterator?” Echo chimed in.
“Exactly. Bethany’s new idea, I believe, is to take this one step further and use sound to break through the exoskeletons of the zombies surrounding us. We already have the hardware in place. All we have to do is figure out the right decibel, frequency, and oscillation to ruin that dead man’s party.”
It was Josh’s turn to question. “Can you do that? I mean, won’t a sound that loud damage everything in the area?”
Josh had a point. But really, who cared? Nothing was safe from ruin now. The entire planet was little more than a massive heap of rubble. Wasteland was the new urban sprawl. Who gave two shits if Seattle fell to dust. I voiced that opinion and no one in the room seemed to object.
“So long as we are within the confines of the underground city,
I don’t think the sound will have any effect on us. Twenty feet of concrete and Earth has some fairly impressive sound dampening qualities.” Jamal cleared up anyone’s lingering fear that a sonic blast loud enough to crack through inch-thick bone armor would have any effect on those of us below ground.
“But what about survivors up top?” Echo’s question ground us to a halt. “We can’t just go blasting noise loud enough to kill without giving them fair warning. Right?”
The likelihood of there being survivors in the area was minuscule, but Echo was right. Since the Mengele Virus hit, I was in the business of saving the lives of the innocent. But this situation… this was a bowl full of tricky. I had a son to save and the only thing in my way of giving chase was a horde of bone-armored zombies. Instinct was tugging hard at my trigger finger.
“Simple. Before we blast the sound, we broadcast a warning. Duck and cover your ears bitches!” Jamal to the rescue.
Everyone agreed the plan was our only option. That meant one thing – Jamal and I had to get to work fast to geek out the numbers necessary to break through the undead barrier. We sent everyone else off on a search and recover mission. We had no way of knowing if there were other survivors here in the underground. There was also a need to gather provisions – food, water, weapons. Always prepared! Was the new motto of the undead nation.
Caught up in the restored silence of the room, Jamal and I could do what we did best – think.
“We’re looking at anywhere from seven hundred kilohertz to three point six megahertz” Jamal looked up from his keyboard. “B…I think we can do this.”
A sigh escaped my lips. It wasn’t intentional. “We don’t really have a choice.”
My reply brought the room to an uncomfortable silence. I didn’t mean for my words to seem so harsh, but there it was.
“I’m sorry Jamal. I didn’t…”
Jamal smiled back at me. “No need to apologize Bethany. I understand. We’re all on edge…you especially. But don’t worry, we’ll find Jacob and kick the shit out of the Zero Day Collective. Remember, you did it once before and that was when they were at full strength.”
Hearing Jacob’s name again put my heart in a vise and wrenched out every ounce of blood and sorrow that remained. I wanted to cry and die simultaneously. But if I was to succeed in returning Jacob into my arms, I had to refrain from falling apart. I was certain the Zero Day Collective was depending upon me donning my finest straight jacket fashion and living my remaining days drooling in a padded and stained corner of some forgotten lab. To that notion I would have but one thing to say:
Fuck you!
Flowing thick through my veins was the stuff of motherhood. And like a Brechtian Mother Courage, I would have my child back at any and all costs.
“You know what we need?” Jamal’s voice yanked me out of my inner turmoil.
“Jamal, if you say we need to run tests on one of the dead boners, I’ll kiss you on the face.”
When Jamal’s face lit up like a metal halide light, I instantly pulled him to me and laid the kiss that we’d both been patiently waiting for on his lips. I figured, what the hell. It was only a matter of time before I moved on from my recent tragedy, so why not take my present back to my past and march it all, hand in hand, into the future.
I pulled back. Jamal’s eyes remained closed, the glow on his face was palpable. It was the first time, since we were all raped by Mengele, that I’d seen another human truly happy. All from a single kiss.
“I’ve been waiting for that kiss since school.” Jamal smiled. “You can’t imagine what that means to me.”
Truth be told, I could.
“Seriously, I’d love to sit here and fawn all over you, but maybe we’d be better served dragging a dead zombie in here and shattering the armor plating off his body with a little night music?”
My proclamation deflated Jamal just a bit. But we both knew the human race couldn’t wait for a little hormone tête-à-tête. So we both exited the room in search of a boner.
Had that thought passed through the space between our minds and infiltrated Jamal’s inner circle of thought, we’d be incapacitated with laughter.
“Over there!” Jamal pointed to one of the armor-clad zombies laying face-down in the hallway. Even dead the things were disturbing to behold. They were much larger than standard zombie fare – in both height and musculature.
“These things seem like they came straight out of Hell. How do you think they evolved so quickly?” I knew there was no way to answer the question, but I asked anyway.
“If I had to guess, I’d say it was similar to severe eczema. The skin cells mutated and reproduced at a rate so fast they built up a hard crust. Because of the mutation, the crust continued to build up and harden, until it formed the exoskeleton.” Oddly enough, Jamal’s explanation was as disturbing as anything I’d seen. It was also, most likely, dead on.
“You grab the head, I’ll get the feet.” I directed Jamal, hoping to distract him from lecture mode. The last thing I needed at the moment was information on zombie skin care.
We positioned ourselves at the polar ends of the stilled monster and each wrapped hands around the extremities. On a count of three we heaved, but didn’t ho.
“This thing weighs a ton! And no, Jamal, I don’t need you to tell me how much of an exaggeration that was.”
“But…”
“A ton. Leave it at that. How in the Hell are we going to move this thing?”
Jamal raised a finger, as if to point to the light bulb that had just gone off over his head. He excused himself and stepped away for a moment, leaving me alone with the undead. How many times had I been face to face with this plague? I wanted to put my foot through the lead-like skull of the zombie. This thing that I stared down upon was the evolution of the death of man. There was some poetry in the moment that I didn’t want to acknowledge.
Before my brain could send the order to my foot to crush, Jamal returned, wheeling a dolly in front of him. “Ta da!”
“Really? You want us to strap this thing to that and then wheel it to the lab? Seriously? Wouldn’t it just be easier to bring the lab here? Besides, how are we going to test an ultra sonic weapon down here without blowing out our eardrums, our bowels, and possibly our brains?”
That stopped Jamal in his tracks.
“Well shit. I hadn’t thought of that. Wait. We have the sound studio. The STC rating of those walls is seventy-five plus. You could fly an airplane through these halls and that broadcasting room would remain absolutely silent. We set up the testing area in the hall outside the room and you and I will be safe and sound within. I just have to repair the door.”
And there was Jamal’s pat me on the back grin. I had to hand it to the man – he was adorable when he was brilliant. And he was always brilliant.
“Shall we strap on a zombie?”
*
After Jamal had replaced the door to the studio, we grabbed the nearest boner to be used for the experiment. The boner we picked out was heavy. Really heavy. Clearly, the bulk was in the armor plating. Even when the thing’s arm swung down, the shift in mass nearly took both me and Jamal down to the floor. We did eventually get the zombie strapped to the dolly and wheeled to our makeshift hallway laboratory. Jamal was finishing up the experiment as I went off in search of the others. There was no way we could set off this USW with the rest of our gang wandering around the underground city. The second the sonic waves reset the pressure in the air around their bodies, they’d be deaf, blind, and who knew what else.
So, it was best to locate everyone and wrangle them back into the broadcast booth. That is, if everyone would fit. Who knew how many survivors were hanging out with us in the underground. The only fact I had in my back pocket related to those small groups that went off in search of supplies. I had to be okay with the idea that they would be the only ones that would return with me. Of course if anyone else were to get picked up in the march back, I wouldn’t complain – so long as th
ey weren’t either zombie or ZDC.
The underground city was a ghost town. The cold, hard floor was lined with the dead undead. Moaners, screamers, and boners alike covered the cracked floor. At times it was hard to get any semblance of footing. The idea of slipping and falling on top of one of the undead made me want to will myself into superhero status and fly out of this rotten existence.
Supergirl I was not.
Chapter 29
November 26, 2016 12:12 PM
Zombie Response Team: Anchorage Alaska Unit
The snow fell silently. The heavy blanket of beauty made it nearly impossible to see beyond three feet. It was impossible to use hand signals to the team that surrounded the Center for Disease Control. Since radio chatter was nothing more than a death sentence, the team had to stay as close together as possible.
Breaking into the CDC was impossible – or would have been. Thankfully, one of the Anchorage police officers had not bought into the bribe offered up by the strange group that came in and took over. The bribe was little more than a handful of dollars and a bottle of whiskey. The purpose of the whiskey was obvious. But with nothing resembling commerce remaining on the planet, the dollars seemed a hollow, if not romantic, gesture. That same officer happily helped the Zombie Response Team into the CDC.
“Once inside, we go stealth and split into two-man teams.” Captain Jeremy Stinson whispered. His rank was honorary – he never served a second in the military. Even without the training, leadership came naturally and his men followed him, rank and file.
A wind raked bitter cold against exposed skin. The Anchorage Zombie Response Team was tough. Alaska winter was tougher. The soldiers knew they had to get inside. The temperature was plummeting and would soon be below zero.