Zombies vs Polar Bears: Sirens of the Zombie Apocalypse, Book 5

by E. E. Isherwood

  “Yeah, we can see all the way back there on these tracks. It can't sneak up on us,” Victoria added.

  But the sick-smelling aroma hung in his nostrils as they walked. It could be above them on the bluffs—

  How could it have climbed that high?

  Or below them hiding in the woods below the railroad grade—

  How could it have kept up with the boat going thirty miles per hour?

  Or, mystery of mysteries, maybe it was already in front of them—

  Now you're being crazy.

  Liam didn't know.

  “I just want to get somewhere we have four walls around us.” The alpha zombie had deeply affected him. Its ability to project, and then combine skills of other zombies he'd had the misfortune to encounter, well, it made him appreciate how stupid zombies really were. Often in the books they were slow, plodding creatures. Sometimes they were fast, but still pretty dumb. The one behind them—he was sure it was still pursuing them—had displayed climbing skills and swimming skills along with whatever aromatic concoction it emitted. What if there were others who could run? Hell, maybe that one could, but never had the chance.

  No, it couldn't run he decided. That's why it didn't march directly for them. It was smart enough to recognize the weakness was above. If it could have run, the whole thing would already be over and he himself would now be walking around looking for the blood of more victims.

  “Here lies the great historian, Liam Peters—only recorded the first five minutes of the Zombie Apocalypse,” his epitaph would say.

  One more look behind.

  “This is something new. We have to tell someone. These Arizonas—they're going to get the drop on everyone.”

  “Arizonas?” Jason asked.

  “Yeah, Alpha Zombies. A-Z. It's shorthand.”

  Victoria laughed, perhaps remembering his effort to label zombies as “zuellas” early in the crisis. That conversation seemed like it happened last year. Each day of the apocalypse was like a month in the Old World. He put his hand on his head, imagining the gray hairs sprouting even now.

  “Liam, is this what you do on your adventures?” his mom wondered. “Is this for your book?”

  “Uh, no. I just think someone needs to name these things, so that when my book does get written, I can...I mean historians can put the proper names to the beasts we've run into.”

  “He wants to name them,” Jason offered.

  Feeling cornered, he tried to retreat in another direction.

  “What was it with the captain? How did you two get working together?”

  “The Patriots are everywhere, Liam. And nowhere. We actually met before the Ebola Squared virus busted out. His partner, Peter, was in my softball league. We got to talking one night after a game and learned we both had the same sympathies in the political realm. I never would have imagined in a million years he and I would end up working together like this. The zombies have made each survivor infinitely more valuable for the skills they possess. We needed a way to transport supplies on the river. And there he was. He survived.”

  Until now. Until he met me.

  He kept that to himself.

  “So he brings in guns from Cairo?”

  “I never asked him where they came from. But think about it. All those barges floating down the river. There's no telling what could have been in all those containers. I've watched them float by for weeks. He said they captured them down there. If you think about it, Cairo is possibly the richest town in America right now.”

  Liam had thought nothing about money since the sirens ended society. But his hunger told him that at some point someone was going to have to start growing food or slaughtering cattle, and for anyone to buy that food they are going to need money or other goods for trade. In that light, Cairo actually could be one of the most wealthy towns in America. That assumes the upriver towns don't go looking for their missing barges and cargo.

  “So there are Polar Bears in Cairo?” It seemed obvious, but it opened new avenues. If he had friends there, besides the captain, maybe he could get messages to Grandma.

  “Liam, let me ask you an important question. It's what I ask every person who claims to want to join with da Bears.” He'd said it funny, though Liam couldn't guess why.

  “In the Twentieth Century there was one institution that towered above all others in the sheer number of people it exterminated from the earth. Can you guess what it was?”

  Liam knew the answer.

  “The Nazis.”

  “Nope. They were efficient killers, for sure. And they worked over the Jews to the breaking point. But they by themselves pale in comparison to this institution. You have to think bigger.”

  He only had a vague recollection, even with his Polar Bear father, about the big events in history. He was familiar with the important dates in American History—1776, 1865, 1945—but he'd never had to know about the number of deaths per century. Who would even teach such a thing?

  They continued to walk the tracks, but Jason let him off the hook.

  “The institution is government. 250 million killed in the Twentieth Century alone. I'm talking about Democide, Liam.”

  The word was foreign. Jason expected as much because he continued right along.

  “We all complain about political parties and we think America is broken and all that, but the real enemy is the very institution of government. It has the capacity for some good, but when it goes off the rails,” he kicked a rail, “it goes big. It's the single biggest killer in the twentieth century. The Nazis were bad, but they weren't as bad as the Communists in the Soviet Union or China. The statists use the apparatus of government to punish those that won't say the correct thing or think the correct way.”

  “But we've moved beyond all that. We've evolved,” said Victoria.

  Liam wasn't going to argue with his girlfriend. It made sense. No big genocides had happened recently, that he could remember.

  “You think so, huh? But until this conversation you weren't even aware the word existed, or that nearly the equivalent of the population of the United States was rounded up and exterminated in the last hundred years. How can you say something can't happen, if you don't even know it exists?”

  No one had any retort.

  Jason continued. “How many people do you think have been killed by this plague? Millions? Billions? Almost everyone?”

  Liam stopped. “Wait just a damn minute. Are you saying that governments put out this plague to kill their own citizens? How does that even make sense?”

  “I'll answer your question with a question. How does it make sense that the Soviet Union killed almost seventy million of its own people? Who do you think makes the decisions of government?”

  “Politicians?”

  “Wrong. Bureaucrats. The true engine of the state. It took people to drive the Jews in cattle cars to the ovens. It took people to march the walking dead into the gulag archipelago of Russia. And it took people to create and disperse the bug that killed us all.”

  He gave Liam a serious look.

  “This was no accident, Liam. You have to know that. And the people who did it are in our own government. And they want you dead, you dead, you dead, and me dead.”

  “But why,” asked Victoria in almost a whisper.

  “That's what the Patriot Snowball was all about. We wanted to expose the faceless bureaucrats. Who were the anonymous political action committees, corporate shills, and lobbyists behind all the decisions made at the highest levels of government? Who was really in control of the most powerful and potentially destructive force in modern history? And these days, we want to know what they knew about the virus.”

  “An NIS agent spilled the beans. He said it was the President who released it.”

  “Partial credit, my friend. Partial credit.”

  Jason looked to the path up the side of the escarpment.

  “We're almost back to my people. We'll have to continue this later.”

  “Wait,”
Victoria cried. “Are you some kind of secret agent? How did you learn all this stuff?”

  “Agent? No,” he said with a chortle, “I was a lowly college professor. Educators are popular with our group.” He pointed at his temple, then tapped it with a smile. “We know where the bodies are buried.”

  Chapter 4: Jason Hawkes

  When the group reached the top of the bluff overlooking the Mississippi River, Liam was reacquainted with the desperate group of survivors huddled in the woods up there. On his last pass through, the people were patiently waiting for their opportunity to cross to Illinois. He figured some of them had made the trip, but he also guessed there were more today than there were two days ago.

  Jason walked them right into a circle of serious-looking men and women in various types of camouflage clothing, tending radios.

  “This is the heart of our network. Old-school shortwave radios.”

  Liam whispered to Jason. “Won't they track you here?”

  “We only listen, up here. We move around if we need to broadcast. We, uh, have a central leadership team that feeds us news and orders.”

  Liam wondered if his dad had been a part of that leadership team. If his note was true, he almost certainly was. He kept that to himself, for now, and showed genuine appreciation for the people listening to the radios. They played their part to keep people alive.

  “Excuse me. I need to check in. You can make yourselves comfortable in the waiting room.” He pointed to a clump of trees with a smile. “We also have some bottles of water.”

  Bottled water was ubiquitous. It was almost as if someone para-dropped pallets of plastic water bottles into St. Louis because everyone carried one. Those sitting in the dry leaves where Jason had pointed were still sealed, which was good. He dodged a bullet when he drank the creek water the other day; an activity he wanted to avoid doing again.

  His mom excused herself to talk to Jason, leaving him and Victoria on their own.

  “Just like old times,” Victoria said with a sad smile as they sat down under the leafy canopy. “You and me against the world.”

  He looked back to his mom. “But now we have to take care of my mom. I thought I'd lost you both when that Arizona jumped for the boat.”

  She laughed. “That's what you're going with?”

  “What?”

  “Arizona?” We're calling it an Arizona zombie?” Her head was cocked sideways, daring him to agree.

  “Well technically it's an alpha zombie, but yes. Whoever discovers new species of animals gets to name it.” Once again he felt his science teacher would be proud he was putting her guidance to good use. He felt an inner tension start to let go. Things were getting back to normal with Victoria, his rock. Getting out of dangerous scrapes was preferable to dwelling on the death of his father. The only thing that made it seem less shocking was that so many other people were also dead. It broke his heart, as it would for any child, but it did not break his soul. He couldn't take time off to grieve when the forest could reach out and grab him at any second…

  He looked around, wondering if he imagined that as part of an elaborate sixth-sense. But all he saw were the hungry faces of young and old spread among the trees.

  “It was scary, whatever we're going to call it. If every zombie was as smart as that one, we'd all be dead already. You and I wouldn't have ever made it out of the tank room. Normal zombies suddenly seem pretty stupid, don't ya think?”

  He tried to remember Ms. Bunting's science class. He wasn't a model student, but she made things interesting, so he listened more than he might have otherwise. They had a unit on crossbreeding of pea plants by some geneticist who figured out that certain characteristics are passed on to successive generations. The Arizona had displayed several characteristics in one package, like it had accumulated them from somewhere. But without breeding…

  “Ugg.”

  “What?” Victoria answered.

  “I just had a horrible thought.” He shook his head. “Do you think the zombies can...breed?”

  He thought of a book series which involved zombies doing “it” with their victims, but something that terrible couldn't possibly be real. It was an unlikely possibility...but one he had to admit he couldn't discount out of hand.

  She gave him the “did you hit your head in the shallow end of the pool again” look.

  “I know, right. It's horrible. But how do you think that one zombie got all those skills? It could climb, jump, swim, and...whatever that smell trick is called. It had to get those from somewhere. But...”

  “But zombies don't have baby zombies.”

  They sat together, side by side, until Victoria snapped her fingers. “What if it wasn't a zombie at all? What if it was a human disguised as a zombie? That would explain how it did all those things. Maybe when it fell in the water all his makeup washed off and that's why he had to disappear.”

  “Hmm.” Liam thought about it. It did make a lot of sense. Then he thought about another zombie book he'd read a long time ago. There was something about it that applied to this situation…

  “Or, I read about people who went crazy in a zombie plague and started to act like zombies, even though they were still human. They gnawed on other humans, behaved like zombies and even mingled with them. I forget what they were called, but they basically took pretending to a whole new level.”

  “That would make more sense than thinking a human put on a zombie costume to attack us for no good reason. He may have really thought he was a zombie, and we just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  He wondered about that. It was more frightening to think that something as cunning as an Arizona in how it approached, could also be cunning in how it selected its prey in the first place. If it had been successful in killing them all, it would have eliminated a Snowball leader, a patriot gun-running captain, and a tight family unit who had the inside track on the NIS.

  The implications were too terrible to share with Victoria.

  What are the implications? For real.

  He wasn't sure he believed it. Could it be real? Could zombies be programmed to seek out specific targets and attack them?

  No, that's got to be something I read in the fiction section.

  He was on a roll thinking about his books, and the examples within, but he couldn't remember ever reading about programmable zombies. That was a relief, though he reluctantly admitted it still didn't mean it was false.

  He only smiled at Victoria, hoping she wasn't a mind reader.

  2

  Lana returned to Liam and Victoria, providing the needed distraction for Liam. He didn't want to put any more fear into the girls than was necessary. Zombies were terrifying enough without thinking they could sniff out specific enemies. Early in the disaster, while on the train out of St. Louis, he imagined the zombies were following them with a purpose, but they were also on an obnoxiously loud train leaving the city in the dead of night. What else were they going to follow? But the idea formed they could follow him...and now this.

  “Hey guys. Cairo is still intact. I knew you'd be concerned about Grandma. So am I. One of the radio operators said the town is being deluged by zombies from the north, but they have strong defenses in place.”

  “Liam and I walked on their levees and saw the huge ditch they built. They had tanks and other weapons pointed in that direction, too. They can handle them.”

  Liam wanted to point out the futility of defending any refuge in the long run, but he was already thinking negative thoughts and didn't want to compound them. He nodded to let his mom know he'd heard.

  “But there are problems.” She took a seat against a small tree across from them, then looked around. There were people nearby, but not within quiet-voice range.

  “I heard Jason talking with his people. They gave him a bunch of bad news. Something about that big convoy. About the Army across the river. Boats. They were feeding it all too him. He walked away with one of them, so I came over here to not be too nos
y.” She smiled.

  Liam wondered if she thought of his dad at times like this. He would have been at home in a bank of shortwave radios sitting in a random forest somewhere. Was this up her alley, too?

  “Mom, do you like this kind of stuff?”

  She looked surprised. “What? You mean smelling like sweat, looking like I always just woke up, and crying eight hours of the day?” She softened. “I'm sorry. What do you mean, exactly.”

  “No, I just meant doing the stuff that dad liked to do. Shoot guns. Run around in the woods. Collect ammo.” He thought of his dad's secret stash of guns and ammo in their basement. Most of it had been destroyed, he knew, though they each held the distinctive AK-47 rifles which his dad had horded. They pulled extra 7.62x39 ammo from Lucy's Football. “Or did you do it because you, um, loved him.”

  “Oh Liam. I loved him because he did all that stuff. He was too stoic to tell you how much he loved you in that note, but he would have done anything to protect you and I. He did do something to protect us. He got all those guns together, all those camping supplies, all that gear. He was prepared for anything. It was only bad luck that took it all away, and bad luck that took him away, before he could properly tell you why he did everything he did.” She paused. “He did it for you. So you would be prepared and could survive the hard times—these hard times. It's why we both did what we did.”

  She laughed.

  “Do I love spending my nights with ten thousand other campers, cleaning weapons, and sneaking through forests? Not really. But I'm here because this is how I can best show my love for you—and for you Victoria.” Lana teared up a little. Liam bit his tongue to prevent his own sadness from leaking out. He worried that her tone made it sound like she was going away. She was at the end of her contribution…

  “I love you, too.” Victoria made her way over to his mom and crouched to give her a big hug.

  Why does this feel like goodbye?

  “Your father would have divorced me if he thought for a second I would abandon you when things got really tough. Of course that was never an issue with us, as we both knew I was committed to his...cause. But we both knew what it could mean.”