Plagued: The Battle Creek Zombie Rectification Experiment

by Better Hero Army

  “Those are our rides,” Chico said smoothly as he cut the engine and they slid to a stop in front of the open hangar.

  Nineteen

  Wendy stood beside the two Priuses. They were the larger four-door models, both silver, and each with oversized, fat tires and a lift kit that raised the vehicles an extra foot off the ground. A redneck conversion kit, complete with studded snow tires and spider claws to give them traction.

  “This is ridiculous,” Wendy said to herself.

  She heard the clink of Keith’s lighter echo in the hangar and smelled the smoke of his freshly lit cigarette wafting toward her. He stood at the mouth of the hangar, tugging at a circular chain which loudly ratcheted the roll-up door down.

  “All electric,” the blond said proudly as he carried Larissa to the lead vehicle. He opened the back door with the hand he used to hold the girl’s legs, and managed to get it open without Wendy’s help. She wasn’t about to assist any of them anyway, at least not now that she had no idea who they were or what their intent was. “They’re quiet, and they don’t attract biters.”

  Wendy snorted a laugh. Although not as acute as a dog’s sense of smell, zombies could detect blood in the air a hundred feet away. They could hear and distinguish sound better than a blind person, so it didn’t matter if the cars didn’t have engines. They still made noise, and she doubted a Prius was a match for even one zombie, much less a horde.

  “Chico, you’re with Keith,” the blond said with a nod.

  “Why do I have to ride with him?” Chico argued.

  “Quit your bellyaching,” Keith snapped, exhaling cigarette fumes through his teeth. “I’ll roll down the window.”

  “Fuck you. Quit smoking.”

  “Quit collecting uranium.”

  “Shut up, both of you! Let’s get going. Time’s a wasting.”

  The blond walked around the front of the lead Prius and climbed up into the driver’s seat. The vehicle began to hum softly and there was a muted echo of its fans inside the cabin. A heater. Chico grumbled to himself as he marched over and got into the driver’s seat of the second Prius.

  “And don’t you go leaving me here, neither,” Keith snarled before Chico could get the door shut.

  The blond rolled the passenger window down and leaned across the center console to stare at Wendy. With the ridiculous lift kit on the Prius they were almost eye-to-eye. She turned her back on him and looked across the airport at the tree line, trying to gauge if there was any last chance of escape. Would they shoot her, or just let her go?

  “What’s it going to be, Doctor?” the blond asked through the open window.

  She looked over her shoulder at him, then back at the air strip. She knew she wouldn’t last the day if she went on her own. For as much as she was an expert on zombie behavior, she wasn’t trained in survival.

  “The plane’s your best bet,” the blond told her. “It’s nearly out of gas, though. I know you don’t have a pilot’s license, but if for some strange reason you know how to fly one, keep in mind it’ll be dark before you get back. Ever flown with your eyes closed, or over the ocean with nothing but the moon and stars as reference, because out there, when the lights go out, the world is black.”

  Keith stood at the rolling door with a stupid grin on his face. He held up the GPS unit he had taken out of the plane and gave it a little shake. Wendy shook her head in frustration, scowling, but she kept her back to the Prius. She didn’t want the blond seeing the anger she knew was plainly visible on her face. She hoped it gave the impression that she wasn’t afraid of the dark, or the zombies. Let him think she considered death over his company.

  Keith took a drag and exhaled, raising an eyebrow.

  She heard the window of the Prius sliding shut and growled at herself. He might actually leave her. She stomped and turned around, glowering at the blond hunter, who sat behind the wheel with his bare hands in front of the heater vents. She rolled her eyes at hearing Keith’s irritating snigger echoing through the hangar.

  A few seconds later, the car jolted forward with her in it, gaining momentum before plowing into the snow. Its wheels spun freely for a moment, hissing to a repetitive thud-thud-thud of the spider claw legs groping for traction. They grabbed hold suddenly, lurching the vehicle forward again.

  The blond let the vehicle plow along at a constant, albeit snail’s pace. He looked at the rearview mirror the whole time, and it made Wendy curious enough to snatch a glimpse through the side mirror on her side. She saw the hangar door closing as the other Prius waited outside, then a side door opened and Keith trudged through the snow to get into the second Prius, and once it looked like Chico had it moving again, the blond began to give their car a little more gas.

  “We converted them to four-wheel drive, too,” the blond told her, patting the dash board as the vehicle gained speed. The snow scraped and hissed along the side and underbelly of the car as they plowed along. “Eats the batteries up a little, and they’re not independent traction control, but they do the job.”

  Wendy sighed. She didn’t want to discuss cars.

  The blond cruised toward the terminal building where Wendy spotted movement around an open door. Five figures shambled their direction along the side of the building, irregularly spaced, trudging in single file toward them.

  “Well, they must really be hungry to come out in this.”

  The blond veered away from the zombies and followed a side road around the building. After her experience at Midamerica, she expected to find an enormous horde waiting for them there, but as they cruised through an opening in the chain link fence and into what was probably a parking lot, the emptiness of the world resumed again.

  The Prius pushed on through the undisturbed snow, following a road by its suggestion of order compared to the pillowed mounds and sagging gulches surrounding them. A sign with weathered letters stood to her right, facing the direction they were heading. Wendy examined it as they passed, making out the words “Kellog” and “port”.

  Welcome to another abandoned airport.

  They drove along a stretch of straight road after that. A highway, she ventured to guess. The blond hunter turned down the heater to a slower speed. He glanced at her repeatedly as they cruised along, but she stared out the side window to avoid eye contact. They were in the midst of another overgrown forest, trees leaning toward them from the other side of deep gullies, blotting out most of the daylight.

  The monotony of the spider claw arms hooked to the tires going bump, thump, whump, pummeling the hard ice beneath the loose powder, irritated her as much as the situation as a whole.

  “We’ll be there in a few minutes,” he said.

  Wendy couldn’t help herself. “Where? And who the hell are you?”

  He looked between her and the road several times as though he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “You don’t remember me,” he said with a sheepish grin. “And I thought you were just mad at me for all of this.”

  “I am mad at you. Why the hell did you abduct me?”

  “Rescue,” he corrected, holding a finger up. “We rescued you. Trust me.”

  “Rescue,” she said, mocking him with air quotes.

  He half-laughed, shaking his head. “You’re not going to believe me, so never mind.”

  “No, I want to know. Tell my why you had to ‘rescue’ me.”

  “Alright,” the blond said. “Do you remember high school?”

  She shot him an incredulous glare.

  “AP Biology? Holcomb’s class?”

  Great. Yet another reason to hate high school.

  “I’m Troy Orrick.”

  The name didn’t register, but high school was a long time ago. Being the mousy girl who nobody looked at much didn’t help with her memory of him, either. She shied away from pretty much everyone, walking with her head down, her red hair covering her eyes as much a possible so no one saw how frightened she got around other people. There were a few boys and girls in her clique, and ther
e were the popular boys she dreamed about, but she couldn’t place Troy Orrick anywhere in between.

  “When I saw your name in the reports, I convinced everyone we had to get you out of there. We were taking Larissa anyway, and as it turns out, we kind of need someone with your…skills.”

  “My skills? What are you even talking about?”

  “Your research. The cure?”

  Wendy threw her head back, staring up at the ceiling. “You kidnapped me because of the cure?”

  “Kind of. Well, yeah. That’s what I told them.”

  “Them who?”

  “Everyone,” Troy said, shrugging again. “You’ll see in a minute. Look,” he added, pointing over the steering wheel. “We’re almost there.”

  The forest fell away and they emerged into a wide-open expanse, the raised road carving through its center in a slowly curving, southward bend. Across the open, snow-covered field was another massive range of forested land, with a few thin columns of smoke rising hundreds of feet straight into the sky before being washed away in a sheering wind.

  “I didn’t want you talking back at the EPS because I thought you recognized me.” He glanced at her repeatedly as he drove. “I didn’t want you saying my name in front of Keith or Chico. They would have wondered.”

  “Wondered what?”

  “Well, about us.”

  “Us? What us?”

  “I mean, it’s better if they don’t know we know each other.”

  “We don’t know each other, Troy. And better for who? You?”

  “No. You. For sure, you.” He stared at her longer than Wendy thought safe given that they were driving down a snow-covered road in the middle of nowhere. The hiss of the vehicle carving through the snow, coupled with the bumping of the claws mounted to the tires filled the silence. “I thought you were pissed at me for doing this. That’s why you’ve been so bitchy.”

  “Bitchy?!”

  “I meant—”

  “Bitchy?! You want to see bitchy? Fine. Who the fuck do you think you are abducting me? Did you think that because we went to the same high school I’d forgive you?”

  He sighed.

  “You did, didn’t you? Are you some kind of an idiot? Oh, no, you’re mentally retarded, aren’t you? You were in the Special Needs class, like that boy we made fun of all the time because he always wore tight shorts and walked around with a hard-on. What was his name?”

  “Boner,” Troy said dejectedly. “I’m not Boner.”

  “Oh, then, wait, now I remember you. You were the dumb shit who went cow tipping and tried to push over a bull, except, hang on…you’ve got both of your ass cheeks as far as I can tell.”

  “That was Eric Carlson.”

  “Well I’m still drawing a blank, Troy. Who the fuck are you?”

  “I’m the retarded dumb shit who saved your sister from drowning at the quarry the summer before our senior year.”

  Twenty

  Wendy stared at the blond hunter in shock, recognition morphing his features into an amalgamation of the past and present. Where was the long, wavy hair that he once hid behind? Skinny arms and a long neck peeking out of an overbig, black shirt or hidden under heavy jackets that draped far below his waist were gone. He had grown broader, not just in his shoulders, but everywhere, transformed from a bony teenager into a strong, confident man.

  Maybe that confidence first blossomed the day he saved Wendy’s sister. Aged memories being what they were, Wendy struggled to piece together disjointed fragments of the event. Funny that she could recall every nook and cranny of the lake and surrounding rock quarry, but only snippets of what happened came to mind. The shirtless boy, his long, drenched hair hanging over Sarah’s face as he breathed life into her lungs because Wendy didn’t know CPR. Silly how she berated herself even now for not knowing it then, but until the day Sarah almost died Wendy didn’t want to go into medicine. Then there was her frantic turning of the key in the ignition, the old Chevy’s starter chirping over and over like the hand-me-down car always did. Sarah moaning in the seat beside her. How had they got to the car? The boy. He carried Sarah up the trail, running the whole way. He stood slumped over, gasping for air, hands on his knees as Wendy sped away, kicking up rocks and dust.

  Please don’t die. Please don’t die.

  That was what ran through her head as she told her sister she would be alright. And Sarah calling out from the top of the rock before it happened, asking Wendy to watch her jump again. Even before she jumped, she knew her sister was in trouble, but there had been nothing Wendy could do to stop her; just yell for help as she ran into the water.

  It’s what made her decide to become a doctor. She hadn’t been able to stop her sister from getting hurt, and she hated herself for it, but worse was the helplessness she felt in the aftermath, relying on the boy to save them both. If he hadn’t been there, Sarah would be dead today. The boy who sat two seats behind her in class….

  “T,” she whispered, her memories finally falling into place.

  “Yeah, you remember,” he said with an awkward grin. “Everyone called me T. They still do, actually.”

  “I didn’t know your name was Troy.”

  Troy shrugged as the Prius slowed. A cross road split the open field. He turned the wheel and the Prius slid sideways, but as he accelerated, the wheels grabbed again and they straightened out.

  “How’s your sister, anyway?”

  “Good,” Wendy replied. “She’s fine. She’s married.”

  “You?”

  “I thought you’ve read my files.”

  Troy smiled. “It wasn’t in there.”

  Wendy was about to say something about her relationship with Mason, but the idea of talking about him with anyone didn’t sit well with her. She couldn’t say she was in mourning because she hadn’t been with Mason long enough to say they had a relationship. Hell, they only had sex once! It was fantastic, but it wasn’t enough to be the basis of…anything.

  “You need to know a few things before we get in there.”

  Wendy swallowed. “Like what?”

  “We don’t know each other, okay? It’s better for you.”

  “Alright.” That was easy enough. She hardly knew him anyway, and yet here was the very boy—the man—who had driven her to become a doctor, the instrument of her life-long work of trying to save people from themselves, which as it turned out culminated in her personal desire to research and discover a cure to something that affected millions of innocent lives. Even Larissa.

  “Also, they don’t want you for the same reason they want Larissa, but don’t worry. I’ll make sure you’re okay.”

  Wendy nodded. The way he said it, though, gave her reason to worry. “What about Larissa?”

  “Let’s just say she’s probably more valuable than you right now, so don’t worry about her, either.”

  “You’re not making a lot of sense here.”

  “Sorry. If I tell you too much, then you won’t be surprised, and Momma kind of has a sixth sense for things that aren’t right, you know what I mean?”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head in bewilderment. “No, I don’t.”

  “Just…relax a little for now, and we’ll talk later, okay?”

  It wasn’t okay, at least not from her perspective.

  Troy leaned forward and pointed at a sign hanging across the road ahead. “We’re here.”

  The faded lettering on the sign was hard to read from a distance, but one word stood out clearly: Zoo. It fit. Given everything else that had happened in Wendy’s life recently, why shouldn’t it be a zoo? The lettering on the sign became easy to read by the time they were sloshing through the snow directly beneath it.

  Binder Park Zoo.

  Of course.

  Twenty-One

  Troy angled the nose of the Prius into a charging station and powered down the car. Wendy immediately yearned for the heater to be restored. Days of fending off an impending cold, the outdoor travel, and the freezing northern
air left her fatigued. They hid beneath a row of shiny black solar panels that filled the wide parking lot, giving shelter to dozens of other small vehicles parked near the ticketing entrance, almost all of them plugged in as well.

  Troy slid out of the Prius, letting a draft of cold air in before throwing the door shut. It didn’t fully latch, but he left it and trudged to the charging station to plug in the car. The other Prius ground to a halt beside them, the thud, thud, thud of its spider clawed wheels and the whine of the electric motor the only other sound.

  Chico and Keith slid out of their vehicle and stretched. They were still arguing about something as Keith slammed his car door shut with his butt and lit another cigarette. They recharge faster in winter. They do not.

  A soft moan from the back seat gave Wendy a start. God, she’d completely forgotten about the girl. She spun and stared at Larissa. She was still fast asleep, but her face had a look of concern, and she moaned again as though she were in pain. Wendy climbed halfway into the back, tapping Larissa’s cheek to test her reaction.

  “It’s alright, Larissa. It’s me, Wendy. You’re dreaming.”

  The back door opened. Wendy stiffened. Cold air rushed in.

  Troy stuck his head in. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” Wendy gasped. “I think she’s waking up.”

  “Oh, good. Then we timed it right. Come on, get out. Let’s get her inside.”

  Troy led the group toward the gates, Larissa in his arms, his boots crunching on the loose snow under the rows of solar panels. “They put the panels in the year before the outbreak.” Troy nodded generally above them. “They don’t show up as abnormal in air recon, so we get free power with none the wiser.”

  The gate to the zoo was closed. It was the kind of tall, wide double-door that had to be opened from the inside. It had a flat plate of steel painted green and pocked with thousands of tiny holes to let you see through and for wind to pass, but not big enough for fingers or hands.